by Anna Monardo
“No, no,” Ross said in a mean imitation of a congenial voice, “no, asshole, you’re the one who deserves to know exactly what you did. Show him your wrists, Natassia.” With his unhurt hand, Ross was unbuttoning his sleeve, pushing up his cuff, holding out his own exposed wrist. “Show him, Natassia. You see, asshole, what you did to my daughter.”
Natassia’s face showed she was in agony. She was swallowing quick shallow breaths. Her eyes were saying, This isn’t at all how it was supposed to go.
“Show him,” Ross ordered her. “Show your wrists, so he sees what he did to you.”
“We all did it,” Nora said.
And Ross said, “I knew you’d defend him.”
“Did you mean to defend Christopher, Nora?” Heather spoke kindly.
“No,” Nora said, “but we’re running out of time. I just want Natassia to know…”
Natassia was biting her thumbs.
Ross went on: “I’m telling you, Christopher, you’re the first person in my life I’ve ever truly wanted to kill. With my hands. Besides my father, and he’s already dead.”
Heather, of course, doing her job, asked, “Why, Ross? Why would you want to kill him? Your father?”
“And Mary’s father, too. And his wife, that bitch of a bitch. I’d like to kill them both for what they did to my daughter’s mother. Natassia, you were born into a mess of bad people. Real worthless pieces of—”
“You’re not bad, Daddy. Neither is Mom.” Speaking, Natassia kept her thumbs close to her mouth. “You’re just messed up.”
“Yeah. Messed up is right.”
Nora watched Heather, who right on cue asked Natassia, “Messed up, how? Can you say how you feel your mom and dad are messed up?”
“Messed up without getting good love when they were kids. Like Poppy. He was pretty good as a grandfather, except he could get really ugly when he got mad. And the things that made him angriest were Daddy, or sometimes publishing people, but mostly Dad made Poppy mad. All those words Daddy just called Christopher, all that ugly stuff he said? Those are Poppy’s words. The scariest thing about you, Dad, is when you act like Poppy.”
“Why do you think your grandfather got so angry at your father?” Heather asked.
“He’s jealous.” Natassia was keeping her grandfather in the present tense. “He’s the most jealous person in the world.”
“Who?” Ross asked, looking confused.
“Poppy. He’s always jealous. Of everybody.”
“Jealous of what? He always had the world by the balls.”
“Dad, you’re a doctor. Poppy is just an editor—that’s how he sees himself. Get it? Plus, he always hates when people leave him. Like you left New York.”
“It was a job. I had a job. I had to go with the job.” Ross still sat on the floor.
“Yeah, but all Poppy knows is you left. Whenever Grammy has a business trip, Poppy always instigates a fight with her first. She always says, ‘Why are you sending me off angry?’ and he says…you know.”
“What does he say, Natassia?” Heather wouldn’t pass up one opportunity. She never stopped doing her job.
“I don’t know. He’s like, ‘You’re leaving, so goodbye to you.’ I don’t know, Dad. Poppy really loves you, more than anybody, even more than he loves me maybe, but he can never make himself stop saying that ugly stuff.”
“Ross, what do you think about all that, what Natassia just said?”
“My dad was a wicked old fuck, wasn’t he?” Ross turned to Mary. “Why isn’t my mother here? She should be here.”
“Ross,” Mary scolded, “grow up. Your mother’s in her new apartment.”
“I believe,” Heather said, “Natassia prefers that the three of you have the chance to work at things as a family.”
“Tsh.” Ross leaned against the wall. “Freaks. The Munsters. A family of freaks.”
Nora watched Mary, Heather, and Natassia smile a tiny bit, a small crack of relief. “Maybe you’re freaks,” Natassia said, “but I’m not. I’m no freak.”
Speaking very slowly now, pausing to look into each person’s eyes, Heather said, “I think, truly, I don’t think any one of you is a freak, not in any way a freak. What I think, what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling strongly right now, is that you’re all people who have been hurt, you’ve all been hurt to an extreme degree.” Natassia teared up. When Natassia sucked in the corners of her mouth to keep from crying, Mary immediately stood and went to sit next to her. They held hands. Ross tilted his head back against the wall, looked up at the ceiling, closed his eyes. Heather continued, “You’re each, every one of you, everyone in this room, hurt in a different way, but all in serious ways. Some of the worst ways people can be damaged in this world.”
Next to Nora, Christopher was giving off a scent of stale sweat.
“Abuse,” Heather said, “there’s been abuse. Of different types.”
“Fucking Chri—” Ross tried to say, but Heather overrode him. “Verbal abuse,” she said. “There’s been physical abuse. Sexual abuse. There’s been neglect. Many types of neglect. There’s been rejection. Abandonment. And when I say these powerful words, I don’t mean that these acts were committed by the four adults here against the one child. Perhaps. But it sounds as if at least a few of the adults here, as children, were also victims—excuse my use of that overused word, but it’s appropriate here—as Natassia later became a victim.”
Weirdly, suddenly, Nora remembered so clearly an afternoon when she and Mary were kids, around fourteen years old, sunbathing. It was one of the rare times when they were hanging out at the Mudds’ house instead of at Nora’s. Mary, Nora, and another friend were lying on their stomachs on ratty old towels spread on the weedy grass. Mary’s father came out into the yard to dump garbage, then walked over to the girls, who were in bathing suits, stood above them a minute, and said to Mary, “Hey, you still got that mark on your back, how ’bout that.”
“What mark?” Mary had asked. Nora had never mentioned it to Mary, but Nora’s mother had explained to Nora that sometimes Asian babies were born with a sort of birthmark on their back, a patch of discoloration—a “Mongolian spot,” it was called. “What d’you mean I have a mark?” Mary was trying to turn to see it, but, double-jointed as she was, there was no gyration that would give her a clear view of that one spot on her own back.
“Ah, it’s just a mark you always had there, since you were a baby. It’s like a pond right there on your back. You know, when I left Korea with you, I had to get a note from an army medic saying that was normal; otherwise they’d think I tried to bruise you up.”
Suddenly, from out the kitchen window, they heard Mary’s stepmother, Dorie, saying, “A pond? Jerry, it was more like a puddle. A muddy, dirty puddle. And I said, Where’d this baby get this dirty mark?” Dorie laughed. “It was just gross. I tried to scrub it, but it wouldn’t come out.”
Nora remembered Mary asking, “How hard did you scrub?”
But Jerry reached down and tousled Mary’s hair, said, “My little Mudd puddle. Don’t worry, hon, that puddle there makes you a real Mudd, like the rest of us.”
“Jer-ry, really!” Dorie called out from the window. “Like the rest of us have marks on our backs! What if the boys heard you saying that?”
The boys, Mary’s half-brothers, used to sing to Mary about her Asian eyes, “Jeepers, peepers, where’d you get those creepers?”
“Shut up,” Nora yelled at them, defending Mary, who seemed less bothered by her brothers’ insults than Nora was. When had Nora stopped being loyal to Mary? When?
“And now,” Heather was saying, “on top of all these profound wounds, there is a very alive and recent and painful grief among you for the loss of David.”
Nora could not imagine a future in which Mary was irretrievably gone, and she willed Mary to look across the room at her, but Mary had her eyes anchored on the growing patch of sunlight on the apricot-and-baby-blue-colored carpet. Julius yawned. Nora could smell his rottin
g teeth all the way across the room.
“I would guess, I think I’d have to guess, that for each of you, every one of you, this meeting is maybe the most difficult couple of hours in your lives. But what might be even worse, almost unfathomably painful, is to recall, truly feel again, those times when you were being hurt in the ways you’ve begun to describe here today.”
There’s a baby and a widow in Nyack.
“Ross, if you could talk to your father, I imagine you saying to him something like this, something like ‘How dare you! How dare you claim to be my father, claim to love me as a father, and then say to me the things you say, terrible, ugly things that make me feel not good about my strengths, when what I want is approval from you. How dare you get unhappier as I grow smarter and more talented and more accomplished. How dare you take that from me—my own enjoyment of my strengths. How dare you.’ ”
Ross had buried his face in his arms, hidden his face. Nora wondered what he thought of Heather’s speech. Was he crying now? Ross looked up—grinning.
But Heather went on, “Natassia, you do have the chance to talk to your parents. What do you want to say to them?”
“And then,” Ross interrupted, “you get to sit back, Heather, and judge us, right?” His voice was loud, and it broke the trance of Heather’s incantations.
“Daddy, that’s mean.”
“Mean.” Ross laughed a hopeless laugh. “Yeah, that was mean. Heather, I’m sorry.”
“I accept your apology.”
“I’m sorry I was a meanie.”
“Dad,” Natassia moaned. “That’s exactly the problem, that’s what I want to say to you, Dad.”
Everyone looked up. “What?” Ross asked.
“If you—”
“What, Natassia, if I what?” Ross stood, went back to a chair. His hand hung loose by his side, his broken finger three times the size of the others.
“If…I just, I don’t know, but if, well, you keep saying you really want to help me, well, if you really do, Dad, you have to promise me you won’t self-destruct. I’m really, really tired of seeing you hurt yourself. You know, like now, you just broke your finger, and this session is supposed to be helping me and now I’m sitting here worrying about your broken finger. I’m always worrying about you.” Natassia started to cry again.
“Oh, honey. Oh, shit.”
“That night when Nora showed up at the cottage to tell us about Poppy—Dad, I thought it was you. I was so scared that Nora was there because something happened to you, like you were drunk and got in a car accident, or you overdosed, or something really bad. Daddy, I don’t want to worry about you anymore.” She was crying with her hands up on her cheeks.
“Oh, Natassia.” Ross walked over and gently pulled her up off her chair so he could sit in it, then he pulled Natassia onto his lap, hugged her, held her. Her face was in his neck, and her back was shaking. “Sweetie,” Ross said.
“I can’t keep you alive anymore, Dad. I don’t want to worry about you all the time. Please, stay alive. Just, please, take care of yourself.”
Ross tightened his hug.
Then Mary walked over to the chair where Natassia and Ross were huddled.
“I promise you, I promise, I promise,” Ross was whispering to Natassia. Mary wrapped her arms around both their heads, buried her face in their hair.
How primitive. The thing has happened, Nora thought, that thing that’s supposed to happen in therapy. The professional constructs had slipped away, and now they were all sitting around an ancient campfire having a pagan exorcism of the bad spirits that had got inside them and brought them bad luck.
Natassia’s voice was muffled, but Nora could hear her: “I love you guys, and I’m so sick of being mad at you. You’ve just always been so, God, you’re so messed up, and you always made me feel like I was the problem.”
“How? No!” Ross whispered.
“Like I was in the way, and I was this big problem to be solved. I mean, I know you love me, I always knew you guys love me, but I just hate the way you act like I’m this big, messy problem. I was just a kid. I didn’t ask to be born.”
“No,” Mary said, “you’re right. We did bad.”
For the first time, Nora spoke. “You haven’t failed her completely, Mary. You’re here now. She sees you’re ready to help her.”
“Nora, shut up,” Mary said, and that was maybe the worst moment of the morning for Nora. “You’re always so—you’re effectless. I don’t know if that’s a word, but that’s what you are. You have no effect. You’re always ready to say the nice thing, with all your training, but you never have a solution. I can’t believe you never told me. In fifteen years, Nora, fifteen frigging years. I was ready to make you guys her legal guardians.”
“I told you, Mary,” Ross said, “but you insisted—”
“Cut it out,” Mary told Ross.
“Maybe this is the solution,” Heather said. “Here, now, what you’re all doing now. Saying things that up until now have been impossible, too painful, to say.”
“You must love this,” Ross said, looking across the room to Christopher. “You’re the one that gets us here. You’re the one who’s the criminal, and you sit there like a dunce.” Again, Natassia rose, left her father’s lap, took a seat next to Heather. Mary, too, walked away. As if he didn’t even notice, Ross continued to rant at Christopher, “I want you in jail for what you did. You should be getting your ass fucked in prison by a gang bang of cocksuckers dripping with AIDS. That’s what should happen to you. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here getting nailed for every stupid, ignorant mistake I ever made.”
Heather ignored this last outburst from Ross; weeks later, Nora would wonder if that was Heather’s one big mistake, ignoring Ross’s rage and turning to business, saying, “I need to alert you that we’ve got about ten minutes left in our session. We can continue as we are, or do you want to address the revelation of Christopher’s actions when Natassia was an infant?”
“Yes,” Ross said. “Yes, I do. I want to ask you this, you asshole—”
“Ross, I’m going to ask you, please, to refrain from the abusive language.”
“Abusive language—give me a fucking break, Heather. Okay, Prince Valiant. What d’you want me to call you, Mr. Rogers? Gandhi? I have just one question for you. Why did you do it?”
“Because the baby was beautiful,” Christopher said. “And I was greedy.”
“You were greedy,” Ross repeated. “He was greedy, so he fucked up my kid.”
The room was silent. Time ticked.
“Nora,” Heather said softly, “you look very thoughtful right now. We haven’t heard much from you.”
“I don’t know. I guess I was thinking, yes, we were all greedy back then.”
“I knew you’d defend him,” Mary said.
“Of course she’s defending him,” Ross said.
“Is that true, Nora?” Heather asked. “Did you mean to be defending Christopher when you made that statement?”
“No.” I was defending myself.
“Is there anything more you’d like to add, Nora?”
“Probably. But we don’t have time today.”
“Yes, you’re right, we will have to stop for today, but we must meet again. I would say it is imperative. I realize how complicated it is for all of you to gather here, but—not only for Natassia, for each of you—I’d urge you to find a way to make another meeting possible. I could see you all in one week. Ross, can you be here next week?”
“No, but I will be.” Heather looked at him, puzzled. “I have to be at work that Sunday, but I’ll fly back next weekend.”
“Excellent, and—”
“Yeah,” Christopher said, “Nora and I will be here.” Nora felt Christopher turn to look at her. “Right, Nor?” She nodded.
“Excellent. Now, before you leave. Please, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is that you be gentle with yourselves this week. Do not underestimate the power of what happened here today
. You’re likely to feel quite battered emotionally over the next few days. If any of you—any one of you—feels the need, please call me. I do urge you not to talk with each other. Natassia and her parents, of course, must be in communication. Nora and Christopher, together, with each other. But I urge you, Nora and Christopher, not to be in touch with any of the three members of this family. Is that clear and acceptable to everyone? Nor with the grandmother.” Mary, Christopher, and Nora nodded.
“Now, Ross, I’m concerned. Your hand, will you—”
“My sponsor drove me up here. He’s probably outside waiting.”
“Will you go to a hospital to have your hand treated?”
“No. I’m a doctor. I’ll go home and put ice on it and make a splint and take Advil.”
“These are difficult days for you, Ross. I’m concerned that—”
“Chill, Heather. I go to meetings every day. I’m helping my mother clear out the apartment. We’re almost done. I told you, my sponsor—he’s a retired Columbia professor—he’s got nothing better to do than shadow me all day.”
“Okay,” Heather said, in a jolting, wrap-up kind of voice—the finger-snap that broke the hypnotic trance they’d been in for almost two hours. Julius yawned. “You all worked very hard here today. I’ll look forward to meeting with you again next Saturday.” Everyone stood up. “Nora, Christopher, I suggest you leave before the family leaves. To avoid seeing them in the waiting area.”
“Oh,” Nora said, “yes.” She hated feeling like a rookie.
As they walked toward the door, Heather was asking Natassia, “It’s such a beautiful day—will you be working in the gardens?”
Gardens?
“No, I have homework to do.”
Nora was reaching for the doorknob when, behind her, Christopher stopped. “Natassia,” he said, “I’m sorry for what I did to you. I need to say that.”
Nora looked back, saw Natassia standing so tall, but holding her mother’s hand, just like a little girl, and without thinking, Nora asked, “Natassia, can I hug you goodbye before we leave?”
“No,” Natassia said, looking down at the floor. “I think right now I’d rather not get near you guys.”