by J. M. Monaco
‘Oh, God, I’m totally wasted now,’ I laugh.
When I finally stop, he says, ‘You know you shouldn’t go putting yourself down. What you said about your legs. You’re a beautiful girl.’
‘Huh. Yeah, right.’ I down more of the drink and then finish it. I close my eyes and let my head fall back.
He shifts closer and touches my cheek, moves my chin to face him. Now his hand slides down to my neck, across my breast, my stomach. He takes my empty cup and sets it on the floor. I feel his mouth on my lips, the tickling sensation of his razor stubble on my chin. I can hardly keep my eyes open now, I am suddenly so, so exhausted. My slightly doubled vision through heavy lids catches glimpses of his older-man face, his dark hair, close to mine. Then I’m blinded by spots of bright sunlight, crystallised white circles flashing and vibrating through the gently swaying tree branches outside. It’s mesmerising, these beautiful moving lights, but now it’s sickening too. I need to get off this rollercoaster and stop this crazy urge to laugh. But I can’t move. I can’t do anything but close my eyes. After a while they stay closed and I drift off into a dream.
Before dropping me off at the end of our road he leaves me with a plea. ‘Keep this between us, OK? No one will understand. They’ll only get the wrong idea.’ He looks at the quiet street.
I look around too and say, with some uncertainty, but knowing he’s right, ‘Yeah, OK. Sure. OK, bye then.’
He says nothing else and watches me open the door. As I step out of the truck I sway with a feeling of leftover drunkenness, or is it more of a hangover? How much time has passed since I got stoned? Since I drank that whisky and Coke? Some seconds pass before he revs the engine and drives off.
When I walk into the house, slightly unsteady, it is empty, dark and cool. My afternoon encounter with Uncle Ron has left me feeling unsure and shaky. I check my reflection in the hallway mirror, picture what I might look like to him, wonder about all the things I might have said. The ice-cream. The joint. The whisky and Coke. All the laughing. Something about my legs. But everything’s fuzzy.
I hold one shaky hand in the other and tell myself to calm down. My mouth is dry, my tongue feels sandpaper-rough, and I remember the strange feeling when my friend’s cat licked my face last week. I drink water, glass after glass.
In my bedroom I undress, feeling an odd soreness between my legs. When I touch myself I see there’s a bit of blood on my finger and it starts to trickle down my thigh. Then I take a shower, the hottest I can stand with lots of soap to rid myself of that overly heated fleshy smell that’s just hit me, scrub away the dirty, hazy web that’s clouding my brain. It must be one of those funny period times, I tell myself it’s a bit of spotting, that’s all. It has to be that, I’ve just finished my cycle a few days ago. But some other part of me, the part that senses it should remain silent, tells me it could be something else. But that can’t be. I dozed off, couldn’t keep my eyes open. And when I opened them again – didn’t I only sleep a few minutes? – I felt different. Aching groin, sick stomach. But weed and whisky, those two things together, can make you feel really weird.
Uncle Ron was driving, all quiet and serious. As we approached my street, he said, ‘Hey there sleeping beauty. Time to wake up.’ I try my hardest to remember more, so hard my head hurts, but nothing comes. If I went to sleep, maybe Uncle Ron did too. Still, I have the strangest end-of-the-world feeling. After I get out of the shower I hover over the toilet and it’s not long before I puke up what remains of the chocolate ice-cream. And jimmies.
I console myself with the comforts of the old couch, a light blanket, my routine of Saturday afternoon TV and fall asleep again.
As the next babysitting night approaches that following week I begin to worry about Uncle Ron. It seems it’s the turning point from which this forty-something relative transitions from the realm of the unnoticed into something else. Something real. Something visceral.
These days my mother works as a nurse assistant while she attends night school to help her get onto a nursing course. The shifts are set around her night classes and vary from 7am-3.30pm and 3.30-11pm, including so many weekends I lose track of when she’ll be around. It’s just my mother and I living in the house. My parents are split, though not divorced, and Dad lives across town with the new girlfriend and a fancy new leather couch and waterbed. My brother, a couple of years older than me, is in the hospital again after another stint of trouble that’s led to long-term treatment for his drug problems and his other mental-health issues. By this time he’s officially a high-school dropout and there’s no sign of return.
It’s difficult to recall how much time I actually spend with my mother at this point in our lives, a time when I’m fifteen and can look after myself. I’m so easy, just leave me in the corner and forget about me. But something about the prospect of Uncle Ron sends me to her door. The one thing I know I can rely on is the regularity of the beloved naps that follow her day shifts.
Late Tuesday afternoon, the day before my Wednesday night babysitting, I go into her bedroom and nudge her shoulder gently, but with persistence, then hear a murmur. I can’t hold it in any longer, so I tell her about some of Uncle Ron’s comments, why haven’t you got a boyfriend, the ice-cream ride. The troubles Uncle Ron and Auntie Peggy are having.
‘He said some weird things, like they weren’t getting along and stuff.’
Ma continues to lie still, turned on her side facing me in the darkened bedroom with her eyes closed, but I know she’s listening to every word.
‘I can just say I’m sick this week then I can stop after that, say I got another part-time job or something.’ It’s a nice, clean way to end it with Uncle Ron. I have it all figured out. There’s only silence and I assume she doesn’t hear what I say, or she’s fallen back to sleep. So I poke her shoulder with my forefinger.
In her groggy voice, eyes still closed, she mumbles, ‘Did something happen?’
I breathe in. If I say what really happened, Auntie Peggy might find out and I’ll get all the blame. ‘He wanted to talk, I guess.’ I say nothing about the joint, the booze. About his hand on my knee, his lips on mine, his fingers squeezing my thigh. About the things I don’t remember. ‘I just don’t want to babysit for Auntie Peggy again.’
She sighs. ‘You know it’s your auntie’s only chance to get out. It’s her bowling night and she doesn’t have anyone else. I’d hate to let her down when she couldn’t find anyone else.’
‘But Ma. Ma… I told you I don’t want to. It’s so boring there.’
‘Boring?’ she says. ‘They’re your cousins.’
I shrug and look at my nails. She waits for me to say more but of course I don’t. I stomp out the room and slam the door instead.
It feels like I’m being tested, placed like a rat in a complicated maze-like structure as an experiment to study problem-solving, patience, and endurance behaviour. Which way will Jo turn? Will she figure out how to get to the other side? How long will it take before she resorts to gnawing at her own tail?
That babysitting night holds no surprises. He makes his next advance in the renovated basement family room where they watch TV, where there’s a bar in the corner all set up and ready for mixing drinks. He smiles as he walks towards me.
I tell him I don’t need to wait for Auntie Peggy to come home, I can walk with it being so close by.
‘No, no. I’ll take you home. Don’t need to go running off so fast. Auntie Peggy’s not coming back for a while.’
Then he moves in fast with a mouth-to-mouth kiss which isn’t wholly unpleasant. As he holds my upper arms firmly in his hands, his body reveals a combination of odours I hadn’t noticed on our Saturday afternoon ice-cream ride. Up close the smell from Uncle Ron’s overalls resembles my father’s work shirts, with their layers of unwashed dirt, car grease and oil. My father’s a mechanic too, one who likes to wheel and deal on weekends when he buys, repairs and sells second-hand cars.
‘There’s no point washing them,’
Dad says. ‘It’ll never come out anyway and they’ll get just as bad again.’
Uncle Ron’s perspiration after a hard day at work creeps through the mask of scented hair cream that makes his straight black hair look shiny and slick. He has, after all, just gone upstairs to clean up. From his breath I catch a hint of the Schlitz beer he opened. I get a taste of that and the Lucky Strikes.
It’s the first stage of my test. I can react by pushing him away. I could shout, Stay away from me. Over time I will re-imagine the catharsis of this scenario, asking myself repeatedly, Why didn’t I do that? What would have happened if I had done that one simple thing? But then nothing more would have happened if I hadn’t babysat that night. Nothing would have happened if I had refused the ride home on Saturday, if I hadn’t worn that short skirt, if I had taken his hand away, if I hadn’t smoked that joint, drank all that whisky and Coke. If I hadn’t laughed. If I hadn’t passed out. None of it is clear in my head. I can’t remember what was done or said next and it doesn’t matter because none of it would have happened if I was someone else. Nothing would have happened if I could have just disappeared.
As he’s driving me home he says he needs to stop at the liquor store for some cigarettes.
Without hesitation, I say, ‘I’ll walk from there.’
‘I’ll only be a minute,’ he says, a look of concern in his eyes.
‘No. I’ll walk,’ I snap. ‘I want to walk a bit. It’s fine, I want to.’
I move fast out of the truck and as I’m walking my legs begin to weaken. My knees feel like they may buckle and yet I pick up a faster pace, just about breaking into a clumsy run at one point. I turn around and he is still in the truck at the wheel, just watching me. Is he going to follow me? And suddenly I’m crying, a little baby whimper that turns quickly into a full-blown sob. I pass an elderly couple walking arm in arm together. They look at me with suspicion as if to say, What have you done?
‘He kissed me this time,’ I tell Ma that night. ‘Then he drove me home some of the way and I walked from the liquor store.’
‘On the lips?’ Her face is one big exclamation mark. ‘Did he kiss you on the lips?’
‘Yes. On the lips. Please, Ma,’ I beg. ‘Don’t make me babysit again. Tell Auntie I have another job or something. Just tell her anything. I can’t go back.’
Ma looks breathless. ‘Is that everything, Jo? Did he do anything else to you?’
‘No.’ I can’t look her in the eye. ‘But, Ma, I’m not going back.’
Then she makes, for her, an unexpected move. It’s bold, but naive; she hasn’t planned for any of the consequences.
It’s later the next day when I discover she called Uncle Ron at work that morning. ‘I told him to back off,’ she announces to me over supper.
Over the years I’ve considered what this was supposed to mean. What kind of outcome did she imagine? Did she expect me to continue going there to watch his kids if he did as she instructed, so Auntie Peggy wouldn’t lose her bowling night? Was this my mother’s own test to herself, her first experiment with a feminist assertion of late 1970s personal-political power? Was she offering herself up as a figure of strength in defence of her youngest born female child? Or, did she now have a dislike, perhaps even an unspeakable hatred, for Uncle Ron for thinking he could take advantage of her Jo? Was it time to show this no-good brother-in-law? Watch me, Ron. I’ll show you who’s boss.
I learn the hard way about my mother’s phone call when I am stretched out on the couch after school watching my favourite soap, General Hospital. I’m obsessed with the Luke and Laura romance, but I hate the rich-bitch and her sense of entitlement. She doesn’t deserve him.
The phone rings. It’s Auntie Peggy, for me.
She starts the conversation with a soothing voice. She speaks in such a nice way that I remain reclined and keep one eye on my show. ‘Everyone knows he jokes around a lot. That’s Uncle Ron,’ she says. ‘Can you try to tell me everything, Jo? Just think about it, OK?’
In spite of her attempts to limit the damage she asks for more details. I try to find a nice way to recount the oddness around the Saturday ice-cream ride.
‘I don’t know. He offered me a ride home and then we went out for ice-cream and he told me you and him were having some troubles.’
I don’t tell her about the other detours from the nights he drove me home after babysitting. I don’t tell her about the joint, the booze or the way he left his hand on my knee where it shouldn’t have been. But I should have moved it. Why didn’t I move it? No one will understand. There’s no way around it. Too much is now known.
Auntie Peggy’s tone soon grows cold and our conversation doesn’t end on a good note. By the end of the call I’m sitting up, bawling as I make my final, pathetic appeal to be heard. But I didn’t, I didn’t do anything, Auntie. To be believed. I can’t remember. Not everything. It is going nowhere.
Some years later Auntie Peggy will present her ultimatum, the agreement my mother will feel compelled to sign.
Five
‘This is all crazy, Ma. She wants you to sign this...this thing she’s written? She’s out of her mind.’
‘Oh, I know, I know it’s really crazy stuff,’ she says, nodding enthusiastically. ‘And this is just to make her happy, Jo. I don’t believe any of what she said about you. You need to know that, right?’
‘Then why, Ma? Why?’
The smile switches off and within a couple of minutes she is weeping quietly through her words. ‘She’s my sister. It’s family. It’s so hard. I go to family get-togethers and we’re all there and things aren’t right. Peggy’s different to me, ignores me. And now she’s saying she’s finished with me if I don’t do this.’
It’s the first time I’ve seen my mother cry so much. But rather than feel sorry for her, I’m seething like a frustrated mother when her teenage kids get into a mess and can’t find a way out of their own stupidity. Except that I don’t want to be kind. All I want to do is thump her. Hard. And what pisses me off the most is the revelation that my mother’s worst fear is not that her daughter might have been assaulted by her uncle, or that her depressed, messed-up son might be found dead one morning. No. Her biggest worry is that one of her sisters or brothers will disown her, throw away their history as though they never breathed the same air.
But I know that nothing I do will ever change my mother’s need for her sister’s approval. Ron’s never going to try this with me again, that’s clear, and signing the stupid disclaimer will somehow make Ma happy. Whatever happens, I know I’m screwed.
‘OK,’ I say finally. ‘Fine. Whatever you want.’
‘Your daughter’s the one who came on to me,’ Uncle Ron had argued in his defence, according to my mother. ‘You won’t have to say anything to your sister because I’m going to tell my wife the truth about your daughter.’
Apparently he told Auntie Peggy I’d been coming on to him for months; when I waited for her return from bowling I approached him, nestled up to him, tried to kiss him. He tried, like a good, caring uncle to talk some sense into me, he said, to guide me like a loving father, offer me the kind of role model I was lacking. It was all my father’s fault, you see, Auntie Peggy said to my mother, for ignoring his responsibilities, and it was my mother’s fault for going off to work, night school, by focusing on a career and not her family, which was in a big mess. After all, look what had happened to my brother David. Where were her priorities? Peggy even accused my mother of not being a good Catholic.
The night after my mother’s lethal phone call to Ron, her other sister came over to our house.
‘It’s funny though,’ I heard Auntie Josie say in the kitchen, when I was upstairs in my room. ‘When I told Phil he said he had always thought Jo was a bit of a flirty type, with all the make-up she wears and those pretty batting eyelashes of hers.’
When I made my way downstairs before going out that evening I saw my father hovering quietly near the stove in his work clothes. On the other sid
e of the room by the fridge stood my mother, seething, pursed lips, jaw clenched. A few years later she would have to wear a mouth-guard at night to stop her from grinding her back teeth down to nothing.
‘He’s just such an asshole,’ my mother said. ‘Bastard.’
I looked in my father’s direction, expecting to catch a sign of anger, some kind of a reaction. When people pissed him off everyone knew about it.
Our small, mouldy basement housed a hanging punching bag in a corner for his use. When he still lived with us you could often hear the far-away, steady thump of his fists hitting the leather. Sometimes I went down there on my own when my mother wasn’t home. I would thwhack the bag hard, build up to a fast whirling momentum that sent sharp electricity through both arms and once broke the skin of my knuckles, drawing blood. My mother’s bedroom door near the kitchen had a large dent from where my father’s frustrated punch landed one night after my brother was arrested for violent, drunken behaviour and possession of marijuana. It wasn’t unusual for both of us to get hit with his back hand or the metal end of Dad’s belt when we misbehaved.
Maybe she hoped Dad would save the day, go over to their house, threaten Uncle Ron with a decent, manly heroic fight. Show him who was boss. But none of that was to come. Dad stood there by the kitchen stove wearing his flattest expression, his empty gaze fixed in the direction of the floor, not once casting a glance my way, the girl who was the start of all the trouble. Sweet little JoJo, the storytelling liar. The tease with those pretty batting eyelashes.
When I leave my mother on the evening she tells me about the agreement she wants to sign, I meet my then-boyfriend Mike and tell him the story about Uncle Ron for the first time, the condensed version.
‘That’s sick, Jo,’ Mike says. ‘A guy that age taking advantage of a young girl?’ Then he adds with a smile, ‘Where’s he live? I’ll mess him up. I can find someone, you know, to mess him up. I don’t like the idea of some creep doing that to you.’