Cat Power by Elizabeth Goodman

connected to her drinking. “I don't know if Myra knows she needs help,” Leamon muses. “Don't know if she knows she has a problem. Maybe she does and doesn't want to accept it. There's something there that's obviously bothering her, and she's not a drunk or anything, but when she doeshave a few drinks, a couple of beers, her personality changes—she'd get kind of manic. That brought along a lot of the problems, why they didn't get along. She would holler at them.”
    Chan learned to be submissive in order to survive. By the time she was in middle school, Chan had internalized the idea that she was always wrong, and this notion has haunted her into adulthood. Anyone who has seen Cat Power live, or has had even a five-minute conversation with Chan, has heard her say, “I'm sorry,” or ask, “Are you mad at me?” at least once. She repeats these phrases like mantras, a dubious habit that her critics point to when they argue she's the cynical architect of her own mad image. But Chan's compulsive apologizing is as much a well-honed survival mechanism as it is cunning self-deprecation. Chan needed to be an emotional chameleon in order to get through life in new school after new school, and in order to manage her mother. If joy and effervescence were in order, that's what she would deliver. If absolute quiet and withdrawn submission was required, she would embody it. And when prostrate apology was necessary, that's what she would give.
    Even though Chan was ill equipped as a kid to understand her mother's mental illness, she intuited enough that she began to fear not only her mother's unpredictable mood swings but also the demons that brought them on. “Because my mom was unstable growing up, it's been a fear of mine since I was a little girl—that they were going to take me away,” the singer has said. Growing up with a mentally ill parent taught Chan to be afraid of her own mind.
    In contrast to the instability Chan associated with her mother, Charlie Marshall, the charming almost rock star, was easy to idealize. Chan's perspective on her dad and on her parents' split has evolved since she was a kid, but she spent most of her adolescence and much of her twenties stubbornly worshiping him. Not only was he the cool parent, withthe good taste in music, easy warmth, and relatively mellow personality, but he was also not there—and his absence made him easy to romanticize. “I was so trained as a child to accept him because he was never around,” Chan has remembered. Father and daughter also had a special affinity for each other beyond the usual absentee-parent idealization: Charlie is a musician, and Chan always loved music.
    Seeing their dad was so rare that when Charlie did get time with Miranda and Chan, it was treated like a holiday. “I'd go pick them up and I'd have 'em for the whole day,” Charlie remembers. “We'd go to the mall and Myra would put pretty dresses on them both and they'd have brand-new shoes if we were doing something special, going to the movies or whatever. I'd hold Miranda's hand in my left hand and I'd have Chan's in my right and Chan would be almost like tap-dancing, she'd have so much energy. She's like a little bunny rabbit, and Miranda would be walking with me and we'd be talking, and Chan'd be just like bouncing like a rabbit.” On these outings Charlie would treat the girls to an icecream cone, though Chan couldn't have the real thing because of her food allergies. “She had to have sherbet,” Charlie remembers. “So I would get sherbet too. Miranda would have the ice cream and she'd be gloating right and left. I asked Chan later, I said, ‘You knew all those years that I hated sherbet.’ She said, ‘Yeah, I knew it, Dad—it didn't make it any better!’”
    Very early some weekend mornings, Charlie remembers Myra dropping the girls off unannounced at his house then driving away, leaving them to timidly knock on their father's door, hoping he would wake up and let them in.