Thing of Beauty Read Online Free PDF

discipline, you want to be told stuff by your parents—just to know that they care and thatthey know what you might be going through. Gia was the youngest, the breakup affected her the worst. And I feel girls need more attention than boys anyhow.”
    Since Joe’s own mother had died in the mid-sixties, some of the tasks of surrogate motherhood for the Carangi children fell on Kathleen’s mother and four sisters. Because of the wide range in their ages, experiences and religious beliefs, the Adamses were a catalog of the incongruities of womanhood—especially since each was so firm in her disparate perspective. “I never met a family with such strong personalities, especially so many strong women,” recalled one family friend.
    Kathleen had been the first in the family to challenge her mother’s strictness. “My mother said she was so
defiant
when she was a child—none of her other girls were like that,” recalled her sister Nancy. “I remember my mother talking about disciplining her children and with Kathleen, she could beat her to death and she wouldn’t move, she wouldn’t bat an eye. She wouldn’t act like it bothered her at all. Kathleen and my oldest sister sort of grew up together, and everything the oldest sister did was wonderful and everything Kathleen did was all wrong.”
    Kathleen’s contentiousness laid the groundwork for her younger sisters, Barbara and Nancy. Barbara was a child of the early sixties and grew up imbued with some of that decade’s spirituality and irresponsibility. She married, had a son, divorced and all but left the child to be raised by her mother, but she was still adored by her siblings in a way that Kathleen never would be. Nancy, considered the most physically attractive of the bunch and a wild child of the late sixties, never made any pretense to adulthood at all. She was the baby even to her siblings—her oldest sister was over twenty years her senior, her mother was old enough to be her grandmother—and she would forever remain a little young for her age.
    Barbara was the sister with whom Kathleen had always been the closest: she had often been the Carangis’ babysitter before the separation. With Kathleen out of the house, Barbara, and occasionally Nancy, tried to fill in as something more than baby-sitters and less than a mother—especially for Gia, who appeared to be taking the breakup the hardest.
    “She was spending a lot of time hanging out with her older brothers and just being lonely,” recalled Nancy, who might have been Gia’s aunt but, with only six years separating them, was young enough to be considered in many ways her peer. “She couldn’t understand why her mother had left, why her parents weren’t together. I don’t think she ever understood it. And she was totally unsupervised. I would go over to see if she had been at school, if she was planning to go the next day, if her father had been at home.
    “And, at the same time, Kathleen was mad at us. I remember my sister Barbara coming home one day crying after baby-sitting for Gia. She said she was sitting on the sofa with Gia and Kathleen came in the house and grabbed Gia, stuck a finger in Barbara’s face and said, ‘You stay away from my daughter, she’s mine!’ She did the same thing to me once: she pulled me out of a car when I was with one of my boyfriends. She treated Gia like her possession. But, it was like a kid with a discarded toy: this is mine and even if I leave it under a sofa it’s still mine and I don’t want anyone else to use it.”
    Kathleen believed that Nancy was more of a corrupting influence than a positive one. “When I left that house, Nancy would bring her boyfriends there and sleep with them in Gia’s bed,” she said. “She would stir up trouble between Gia and I. She could’ve helped Gia and all she did was make things worse. I have a lot of problems with Nancy. I think she was always jealous of me and of what Gia and I had.”
    But the Carangi home