“Mom, you’re killing me!” she yelled. In the middle of the food court, with everyone watching. “Do you really think I can handle trying on loafers? Do you truly think I care about book bags? Do you have a clue what my life has become?”
I felt terrible. But why did she have to make it all so complicated? Why couldn’t she have just settled in and enjoyed her senior year? Was that really so much for any of us to ask?
ZACH FRATEPIETRO: I had flown over with some family and friends to stay for three weeks at Villa Divina, our place in Capri, while Addison was trapped in Rhode Island, spinning in circles. Once she called me, crying.
“Peacedale sucks, my dad’s a drunk, and my mom’s a zombie, and they think I’m staying here for the school year. I’m jumping out the window this minute, Zach. You can’t stop me.”
I hoped that she was doing better than she sounded. Addison liked to be threatening; it was kind of like her little nudge to remind you she’d done it before. “Baby, you need to jump on a plane, not out the window. Come be with me,” I told her. “You know I’d take such good care of you.”
“No, I can’t, I can’t. Lucy’s here, and my brother’s here, and this is also my time with them.”
“Then bring Lucy! She can date Alexandre! Bring Charlie. He’s almost legal; he can chaperone us.”
She laughed. We had a lot of conversations like that over those next weeks, but that’s always as far as it got.
It was a catastrophe. Why would Addison’s parents ever think she’d plant down in Rhode Island again? Sorry, but any delusion that Addison was dealing herself in for another year of that pokey ’burbs life after what she’d been doing in New York—it was pathetic. Addison was blowing up. Come September, she’d be spotlighted in every arts magazine that had a real circulation. Her life was about to become huge, and her parents didn’t get the memo.
LUCY LIM: There’s confusion on this point, right? Some people—cough-cough, Addy’s parents—thought she’d do her senior year at South Kingstown. Other people—cough-cough, Arlene and Bill Fieldbender—thought she was just visiting her folks before moving back to the city for good, and throwing away the keys to Peacedale.
I think the reason it’s all a jumble is because Addy herself didn’t know exactly what she wanted. She was delicate, health-wise. New York meant a lot of late nights, a lot of parties, and a general vibe of extreme living. Personally, I think Addison crept back to Peacedale to get some very needed TLC, with sleep and rest, even while she was acting like Peacedale was the worst place ever. She could have hopped an Amtrak or a Greyhound any time. But she didn’t. She stayed for most of August, and a lot of those hours were spent in relative peace at my house.
“New York eats me up, it loves me so.” That’s a thing me and Addy used to say a lot. It’s from Where the Wild Things Are. The monsters like to say it to Max. “I’ll eat you up, I love you so!” We used that phrase for anything. Jewelry or frozen yogurt or boys, and I knew just what she meant.
In the end, the city did eat her up. Zach, Carine, Gil, Max Berger—they were all Addy-vores, each in a different way. On some level, maybe Addy understood that risk. Lame as Peacedale might be, with our tract homes and fast food and playgrounds, it’s a normal hometown. As broken as Roy and Maureen are, they loved her. At age eighteen, Addison couldn’t really see her own cracks and fault lines, her fatal flaws, the weaknesses that would do her in. But she knew that the boring of Peacedale sealed a lot of vice away from her. And she also knew that New York City opened it right up like a vein.
BILL FIELDBENDER: The truth? I saw an artist locking herself in the same prison cell that had almost killed her. Boring is also dangerous. Idle hands, et cetera. Addison had to get out of Peacedale.
Once again, we got that ball rolling. Stepping in once again in mom and dad roles, when the real parents could not function. Arlene called in a favor and arranged for Addison to take some fall semester courses at Pratt. We also secured her a spot at Professional Children’s School, so that she could finish her core curriculum and graduate from an accredited high school—while also working at her craft in a good facility with talented professors.
The truth is, Maureen and Roy Stone were ridiculously inept. Honestly, Addison would have done better being parented by a pair of sea cucumbers—and you can put that on record. Arlene and I don’t have children of our own, and we saw Addison in some ways as a gift. The child we were meant to have. So it pained us, seeing how often Maureen and Roy took that extraordinary blessing for granted.
84 Court Street, Brooklyn, courtesy of Erickson McAvena.
VI.
ORDERLY GHOSTS
ERICKSON MCAVENA: I stayed way the hell away from my old Kentucky home that summer. I was in New York City almost the whole time, with some little hop-overs to Atlantic City, one trip up to Saratoga, one to The Pines on Fire Island, and that was it.
“You deal with getting yourself back to NYC, honey,” I told Addison, “and I’ll scope out our new sweet apartment.” There was no way I’d live in a dorm again. Addison needed a roommate, and Teddy was a resident advisor that year, so he had a free room at Pratt. A single. I was the one who needed to go.
By the end of July, I’d wrangled us a two-bedroom above an Italian restaurant called Queen in Cobble Hill. It was a great location, between Livingston and Schemmerhorn. Fifth floor walk-up. Okay, it wasn’t the Ritz, but on the top floor, there were skylights, a gas fireplace, plus the kitchen had a new oven and fridge, and we were close to the Borough Hall subway. Doable.
By Labor Day weekend, Addison was on the train back to me. We got Max Berger to co-sign our lease that Tuesday, and later that same afternoon, we were washing the walls and ripping up carpet. We loooved our new place. You could stand on the fire escape and smell the fresh-baked bread and pasta sauces wafting up from Queen’s kitchen. Queen was expensive. Way out of our budget. We’d feast on the smells as we ate French fries from the McDonald’s next door.
“We live on Court Street! We live high above the Queen!” Addison liked to proclaim. “But we are her most neglected subjects!” That’s how we ended up calling our place The Queen’s Shame.
But it was our palace. We gave it some dazzle. Once we’d repainted—every room a different shade of Addison’s favorite purples, from glossy, deep midnight violet to soft blooming hydrangea to English lavender, we spruced it up with treasures from thrift shops and antique shops. We hit Brooklyn Flea and all the church sales. The jewel in our crown was the day we bought a shabby green velvet Victorian nine-foot-long sofa that we’d found at Housing Works.