by Sarah Deming
Cockroaches liked it quiet and dark. If you walked right into Gravity’s apartment at night, it looked like a horror movie. If you gave them some advance notice, it just looked like a regular roach convention.
Tyler only grumbled a little as she laid him in bed and took off his sneakers, wrinkling her nose at the smell of his socks. She licked her finger and rubbed a spot of mustard off his shin. How did he get mustard on his shin? Boys were a mystery.
That made her think of D-Minus, and she pulled out her phone and went on Instagram. He had put up a new shot from his Golden Gloves finals win. She smiled and hit Like. D-Minus was in midair, leaping with joy right after the decision was announced.
The caption read: “MAN I’M SO BLESSED THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO SUPPORTED ME THRU IT ALL NO MATTER WHAT I LOVE YOU I LOVE MY TEAM NOW I’M ON MY WAY TO SPOKANE TO WIN MY SPOT IN TRIALS #COPSANDKIDS #PLASMAFUEL #LEGENDARYCOACHTHOMAS #FATSOTHEPADMAN #THEREALDMINUS #FUTUREWORLDCHAMP #THECROWNPRINCE #NODAYSOFF #MYLIFE$TYLE.”
He had tagged pretty much everyone in the gym except for her, which shouldn’t have hurt her feelings at this point but still did. The boys almost never tagged her, even though she always tagged them and liked their posts. It was like she was invisible. They never tagged Svetlana, either, but Svetlana didn’t train as hard as Gravity or love boxing half as much.
She went to do the one thing that always cheered her up: taking her golden gloves off their hook in her trophy case and pressing them to her heart.
Except her necklace was missing. At first she thought it might have fallen off the hook and gotten lodged somewhere, so she took all the trophies out and ran her hand over the ledge behind them, but it was gone. So were the two P.C. Richard gift certificates she had won for Knockout of the Night and for being champion, which she had been saving until she could make up her mind on the perfect thing to buy.
Before she knew what she was doing, she had grabbed the PAL trophy—the one she loved the best—and smashed it into the wall. The little golden boxer broke off the top and the wall broke too, fragments of dust drifting down from the jagged edges of the hole. That was when her mother came home.
Gravity could tell her mother’s condition by the sounds she made when she walked in. The best was the thump when she was so drunk that she just hit the floor. Then all Gravity had to do was drag her to the couch. Worse was the giggling and off-key singing of her goofy-drunk and chatty phase. This might have been cute from Melsy or Svetlana but not from a grown woman who was supposed to be watching out for you and your eight-year-old brother.
In this mood, Mom would cuddle Gravity and tell her stories about all the men she’d had sex with, although she always called it schtupping, which made it sound disgusting and cheap. Afterward, the images were burned into Gravity’s mind. Her mother fucking that creepy man who owned the 7-Eleven. Giving some guy she’d just met a blow job in the bathroom of Applebee’s.
Worst of all was the time she had told Gravity about her abortions. She had gotten two in between Gravity and Tyler and one since. Mom said abortion was a great invention and that it didn’t hurt at all.
It hurt Gravity, though. She tried not to think about whether they had been boys or girls, who the fathers were, or what it would have felt like to be the eldest of five.
Tonight’s loud door slam, jingle of dropped keys, and muffled cursing indicated that Eileen Berman was in the worst stage of her intoxication. This happened when she drank her way past tipsy but not all the way to unconscious and got stuck in the toxic rage in between. Whenever this happened, she would always find a way to pick a fight. Gravity would have liked to just leave, but she was afraid for Tyler, so there was nothing to do but wait it out.
“Graaaa-vity!” her mother shrieked.
Gravity had asked her mother many times why she had given her such an unusual name. Her mother always replied vaguely that she thought it was a pretty word. She never spoke it that way, though. She made it sound like a curse.
“Graaaa-vity! Where the hell are you?”
She barged into Gravity and Tyler’s bedroom. She must have gone right to the bars after work, because she was still in the scrubs she wore as a home health attendant. There was a greasy stain over one breast; Gravity couldn’t tell if it was food or puke or what.
Somehow, though, she still looked stunning. Her dyed red hair and perfect ivory skin gave the impression of a much younger woman. She stood up very straight and moved through the world like a displaced Disney princess. Gravity would never be as beautiful as her mother. She would have known that herself, even if Mom hadn’t told her so all the time.
“What the fuck did you do to my wall?” her mother yelled, staring at the hole.
“What happened to my golden gloves?” Gravity asked quietly.
The alcohol came off her mother in waves: a thick, slightly sweet odor that made Gravity want to retch.
“Ungrateful parasite!” her mother shouted. “You break everything you touch!”
“My gloves,” Gravity repeated. “They were hanging right here. And two gift certificates. What did you do with them?”
Her mother shook her head like a wet dog. Gravity couldn’t be sure she had even understood. Sometimes when she was this drunk, she mistook Gravity for other people.
“Feeding and growing, feeding and growing, that’s what a parasite does!” As her mother spoke, she worked herself up to a more fevered pitch. “It uses its host! It breaks its host down! Then it moves on to somebody else.”
Gravity dug her fingernails into her palms. She was sixteen now, a grown woman. But somehow her mother always had the power to make her feel small. She could hear her brother stirring on the other side of their bedroom, and she willed him to stay down.
“Did you sell the necklace, Mom? Did you trade it for alcohol?” Gravity knew it was useless to try to get real information from her mother when she was this far gone, but she could not stop herself. “I won that fair and square. You had no right to take it.”
Her mother’s voice turned mocking. “I won this trophy, I won that medal, I’m a boxer, I’m a champion.” She laughed. “You’re not shit.”
Gravity hated the sound of her mother’s laugher. She wondered dimly if there had ever been a time when she had not hated it.
When she heard her mother say, “You’re a selfish pig just like your father,” she turtled up, covering her face and ribs with her arms. The hitting always started after Mom got onto the topic of Dad. Gravity didn’t bother slipping; that only made Mom madder. She just let her mind go quiet and took the beating. It didn’t hurt that much anymore.
There was a man Gravity saw sometimes when she did her morning roadwork. His name was Curtis, and he sold kites on the boardwalk. Once, she had stopped to talk to him, and he had let her hold the string of a red-and-gold dragon. They watched it climb, the spool spinning out and the string pulling against her hands like something alive.
Curtis had told her, “A kite is a form of defense against evil.”
Gravity went there now, floating on a string with the red-and-gold dragon, far from the hands of her mother.
Curtis had said, “The spirit is what keeps you alive. We’re just passing by. This is just a learning experience.”
It took a long time, but finally the blows slowed down and then they stopped. Gravity stayed still and counted to ten. When no more came, she lifted her head.
Her mother was swaying on her feet, her hair disheveled and damp. For a moment, Gravity was scared she was going to vomit, but she didn’t.
“What did you do with the necklace?”
Her mother fixed her with hate-filled eyes and said, “Nobody wanted it, so I threw it in the ocean.”
A funny memory came to Gravity then: her mother, very pregnant with Tyler, tearing up a cable bill and throwing it in the ocean.
D
ad was gone by then, but Mom was still keeping it together. She had declared that TV rotted the brain and they were going to save money by going without it.
Except it was a windy day, and the ragged pieces of paper kept getting blown back onto the sand, and Gravity was running around, snatching all the pieces up and throwing them into the waves. And they were laughing together, she and her mother, so hard it hurt. And when all the paper was gone, Mom put both of Gravity’s hands on her swollen belly and told her, “Being a mother is the most important job in the whole world.”
And they had sung the Shema together, there on the beach with their hands on Tyler. Mom had taught Gravity lots of Hebrew prayers, but she said the Shema was the best one, because most prayers were for special days but the Shema was for every moment of your life.
Gravity came back to the present. She studied her mother’s face. It seemed incredible that she had ever sheltered them inside her body, that they had ever prayed together, that Gravity had ever been young enough to think tearing up a bill would make it go away.
Her mother spun on her heels like a tiny supermodel and fell down. Gravity left her there on the floor.
When she got into bed, she found Tyler there, tears running down his cheeks.
“Hey, shhh,” she said.
She cradled him in her arms, stroking his head and rocking him. After a while, his sobs died down.
“What’s a parasite?” he asked.
“Like a cockroach.”
He sniffled. “Mom’s the cockroach, not you.”
“I know.”
“Can we see the pictures?”
“Yeah.”
She didn’t need to ask what pictures he meant. She reached underneath her mattress for the old composition notebook in which she’d hidden the photographs of their father. She should have put the gift certificates in there too.
There were three pictures, worn out and curling around the edges. She had scanned them so they could look at them on her phone, but Tyler preferred to hold them in his hand. It was the closest he had ever gotten to their father. The first image was of Gravity as a newborn, swaddled in a yellow blanket in the crook of Dad’s arm. She had a full head of dark hair and was red-faced from crying, her mouth open in a wail.
“Why was I crying?” Tyler asked, gazing at the photo in wonder.
“I don’t know,” she said, stroking his cheek. “Babies cry a lot. Maybe you were hungry, or maybe you needed your diaper changed.”
“ ’Cause I pooped!”
She laughed. “Yeah, maybe you pooped.”
He squinted at the picture. “I don’t think I pooped. Because then I would smell bad, but it doesn’t look like I smell. Dad is smiling.”
“He’s smiling because he loves you so much.”
Their father was young in the photo, probably not much older than Gravity was now. He was very handsome, whip-thin, with long hair twisted into curls and a skinny mustache above his grin. He looked delighted by the thought of being a new father. She wondered, as always, what had gone wrong.
“Here you are at the zoo,” she said.
It was a good thing Gravity had been such a tomboy, because the clothes she was wearing in the toddler pictures could easily pass for a boy’s, and her hair was short and curly, just like Ty’s was now. All you could see was her back, but their father was in profile, kneeling next to her, so you could see his laughing eyes again. His hair was buzzed short now and he had gained a little weight, but he had the same skinny mustache. They were looking at turtles. Gravity had always liked turtles.
Tyler yawned. “What was Dad’s favorite animal?”
“The lion. He said it was the king of the jungle.” She smiled, remembering her father’s exact words, not from that zoo trip but from a nature show on Channel Thirteen they had watched together during his brief reappearance after her eighth birthday. “He said the lion had a good hustle, because the lionesses did all the hunting, and all the lion had to do was eat, nap, and make cubs.”
“Did Dad love us both the same?”
She looked at Tyler in surprise. That was a new question. “Yeah, of course. Why?”
He snuggled close to her. “It’s just sad that you’re not in any of the pictures. I thought maybe you and Dad were fighting.”
She smiled. “No, I was just shy. Look, here you guys are on the couch.”
It was the old burgundy couch. This was right before Dad left the first time, so she must have been about two and a half, but she still looked enough like Tyler that you couldn’t tell the difference. She was sitting in Dad’s lap with a video game controller in her hand, and he was bent protectively over her, pointing at the TV, which you couldn’t see. But Gravity wasn’t looking at the television; she was looking up at her father, and her dark eyes—the same eyes as his, the same eyes as Tyler’s—were overflowing with adoration. It almost hurt to look at that photo. She wished she could remember what it had felt like to sit in her father’s lap, to feel so protected.
“What game was I playing?” Tyler asked, as he always did.
She replied, as always, “I can’t remember.”
When Gravity got to the gate at LaGuardia, there were a dozen fighters sprawled in the chairs and over the floor, some wearing warm-up suits identifying them as Metro champions and some still in pajamas. The rest of the airline passengers eyed them with varying degrees of alarm as Boca and the other adults patrolled the perimeters, yelling at kids whose music or trash talk exceeded a certain threshold of volume and vulgarity.
Gravity settled on the floor in front of Fatso, who was listening to Koranic chanting while leafing through a magazine. As always, Fatso was the best-dressed man in the room. Today he had on a button-down shirt with suspenders, pinstriped slacks, and two-toned alligator shoes. He must have ordered his clothes from special stores to get sizes that big.
“Hey, baby,” he said, pulling out one of his earbuds and holding out a hand. “Book.”
She gave him her USA Boxing passbook. As he tucked it into his trainer’s bag, she glanced at the open magazine. It was an old copy of Black Belt, open to an article about spinning back kicks that Fatso had highlighted and underlined.
“How much you weigh?” he demanded.
“One thirty-two even.” She had gotten up extra early and squeezed in one last run, then eaten a little oatmeal and scrambled egg whites.
“Good girl. Get some rest. We board in half an hour.” He put the earbud back in and kept reading.
Fatso looked a lot like the Notorious B.I.G., except fatter and more athletic. He had been Coach’s fighter back in the day, and now he passed through Cops ’n Kids once in a while to hold focus mitts for the boxers. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he was the best pad man in New York. He made money training rich businessmen, but every so often he flew to Vegas to work with MMA fighters or Hollywood to train movie stars. He always flew first class, because he needed the room.
Since Coach was too old to travel with her and D-Minus, Fatso went to the really important tournaments with them to make sure they had a good chief second. Boca looked out for them too. Despite their differences, Coach trusted Boca to corner for his fighters, but this would be out of the question in Spokane, since Svetlana was competing for the same slot.
Gravity snoozed until it was time to board. There were always a few boxers who were nervous about flying. This time it was Monster, who had not been on a plane before and was asking Lefty if there would be a lot of turbulence.
Lefty said it wouldn’t be that bad, because this was a big plane, unlike the little planes that flew to Vieques, the Puerto Rican island he was from. He told a story about the worst turbulence he had ever experienced, and Monster looked like he was going to cry. Gravity tried to change the subject by telling Monster that there would be cool movies, and if the seat was too small for him, he could walk up
and down the aisle to stretch his legs.
But D-Minus said, “Your heavy ass better stay in that seat. If you move around, you’ll throw off the weight balance. Plus, you’ll scare the stewardesses.”
“Don’t worry,” she told Monster. “Flying is safer than taking a cab. It’s probably even safer than boxing.”
“Not safer than boxing you,” D-Minus said.
She ignored him.
Fortunately, D had a seat in the front of the plane, and she was in back next to Svetlana, which might have been awkward except that Sveta slept all the way to Spokane. Gravity never slept on planes. She lifted up the blind on the window so she could watch the runway speed by and then watch the houses and cars get smaller and smaller as they rose into the air.
Gravity loved to fly. She had always loved it, from the very first trip she took, at age five, with Auntie Rosa and Melsy. They had flown to Santo Domingo for the ninetieth-birthday party of Mamita Grande, her great-grandmother on her father’s side. Soon after, Mom had cut off ties with Dad’s family, but that party was a magical memory, from the beautiful flight attendants who had fussed over Gravity and Melsy to the cousins who greeted them at the airport with fresh-cut sugarcane. Ever since then, she had associated flying with sweetness and adventure.
The Vision Quest was a quick ride in the rental car from the Spokane airport. It was the first time Gravity had ever been in such a fancy hotel. The lobby had a big urn of water with lemons in it and a mural about the history of the Kalispel Tribe, the Native Americans who ran the hotel and casino.
Gravity and Svetlana went to check in at the table that said “Women’s Boxing Olympic Trials.” Paloma Gonzales was leaning against it, laughing theatrically as she chatted with two of the USA Boxing bigwigs. When Gravity and Svetlana approached, she shot them a look and said, “There’s so many novices this year! I feel like I don’t know anybody!”
“We fought before,” Svetlana said.