by Cyndy Etler
When I come out of the bathroom, he’s lying on the sofa, propped up on his elbow. He’s patting the cushion in front of him. He “wants” me, which should make me feel great. Instead, it makes me want to sit in his armchair and pick up his remote. Or dig through his mom’s kitchen cabinets. Or go look for that spit can out back.
“C’mere!” Shane says, patting the cushion again.
On my bulletin board, next to Jack Pilgrim’s note from class, I have a note from Shane. He didn’t write it to me, though. It was on his passenger seat one night when we were standing outside Club 12. He told me the story about it and said I could keep it. He wrote the note in red Magic Marker to the girls in the car next to his on the highway.
He and his friends had been driving back from skiing in Vermont. And this girl driver, Shane said, had been totally matching his speed for miles. Her friends were trying to talk to Shane’s friends through the windows with sign language. It wasn’t working. So Shane had his buddy hold the steering wheel while he wrote the note and held it up to the girls.
GANG BANG?
The girls drove away. Which I don’t get. If cute boys who have their own car are saying they like you, how do you drive away?!
Those girls are what I’m thinking about as I sit on the sofa by Shane’s feet. They drove away, so they didn’t get a boyfriend. I got him instead. A real live, sober, Weston boyfriend. For me. Cyndy Etler. It’s impossible, but it’s true. Shane is sitting up. He’s leaning in. He’s kissing me. We’re kissing.
I’m positive I’m doing it wrong. Rich kids know how to do this stuff, but I am so far from rich. Oh my God, do I not belong here.
Shane pulls me down onto the sofa with him. I don’t feel good nervous, the way I did with Grant. I feel scared nervous. Shane’s about to tell me, “You suck at this.” Shane’s about to say, “Get out,” and mean it this time.
We’re lying down. We’re kissing. Shane’s breathing hard through his nose, like a bull.
He tries to put a hand up my shirt, and I block him with the boney part of my arm, between my wrist and elbow. He tries to put a hand on my waistband, and I hip jerk away. When I was in Straight, I had to say I was a druggie whore. But I’m not. I’m not.
Shane grabs my wrist and pushes my hand at his crotch. It takes every muscle I have to whip my hand away.
He moves his lips from my mouth to my ear and says, “If you don’t make me cum, I’m gonna rape you.”
If I could breathe, maybe I’d say the words in my head: “But I don’t know how.”
Shane’s brother picks that moment to come up from the basement. God, maybe he’s the one I love. Shane goes to the bathroom and stays there a long, long time.
19
STILL MAY 1989
TWO YEARS, TWO MONTHS, AND ONE WEEK OUT
I can see her through the giant front window as I’m trudging up the driveway after school—my mother. First thought: Fuck, there goes my nap. Second: Hey, maybe she’ll let me take the car! Third: Wait, why is she home? Then I get closer to the window. Fourth: Fuck, what the fuck?
My mother’s sitting at the kitchen table, staring at nothing. Her mascara is in Clockwork Orange streaks down her face.
I can’t carry this. Whatever it is, it’s too heavy. I can’t even try to sneak in the back door, because I’m the one who locked it. You’ve got to keep doors locked when there’s an ex-stepfather around.
She doesn’t look up when I walk by the window, when I push open the front door. She doesn’t immediately start talking about herself. That’s the red-hot warning: her silence.
“Hey,” I say. I drop my bag so hard it makes an earthquake. Still, she doesn’t move. “What are you doing here?” Not even a sniff. “Are you okay?” That’s her dinner bell. If she doesn’t accept an invitation to complain, she’s got no pulse.
Nothing.
“Ma. What’s wrong?” I put my face at a weird sideways angle, to force her eyes to see mine. That works. She blinks.
“He touches her.”
“What?”
“Your sister. She told me. I was changing her diaper before daycare. She told me.”
“Told you what?”
“She wasn’t crying. She was just talking. She was fine. She just…said it.”
“Said what?”
I see it coming up, her puke. It moves like an elevator. It’s a bump, then a blast, from her chest to her throat to her cheeks. Her eyes bulge and she closes her mouth on the gag.
She does me that one favor: she doesn’t puke on me. She swallows, instead. For my mother, this is a gift. I move my head away from her. I can’t be looking at her eyes for whatever she says next.
“She said, ‘When—’” My mother gets that far, and I need to fucking bolt. I don’t want her puke, I don’t want her stare, and I really don’t want her words. But she beats me. She says it before I can jet. “‘—when Daddy changes my diaper, he touches my z-z.’”
Then I do. I run. I run like greased lightning. I run out the door and down the driveway and I fall and rip my knees, but I push up and I run and run and run. And it hurts, and thank God, because the hurt is in my knees, my lungs, my sides, but not my z-z. It’s not in my z-z. I run until I reach the woods, and then I fall and stay there.
• • •
It takes me hours to get back home, because I’m carrying this weight. It’s too heavy. I have to put it down.
I call my boyfriend. I call Shane.
“Hey, I gotta… Can you come pick me up? I gotta get out of here. I can’t take this.”
“Take what? You can come down here. My parents aren’t home. Get your mother’s car.”
“I can’t. She’s not talking. I can’t talk to her. Can you—”
“Waddaya mean, ‘She’s not talking’? Don’t be stupid. Use your words. ‘Mother, I’m borrowing your car. Please and thank you.’ Capisce?”
“No, you don’t—you don’t understand.”
“I can understand anything but you not coming to my house when my parents are out. Hit me.”
“No seriously, you don’t—”
“Hit me. Get it out, so we can move on and get you getting your ass down to Weston.”
“Shane, I promise. You don’t want to—”
“Tell me, or I’m breaking up with you.”
“Mybabysistertoldmymotherherfathertouchesher.”
“…”
“When he changes her diaper.”
“…”
“I know. I know! I can’t—I told you!”
“But…that doesn’t mean anything.”
“What?”
“How old is she? She’s in diapers? That’s not even possible. Just because she said that doesn’t mean it happened.”
“No, you don’t—it’s not just her. It happened to—”
“I gotta go. My brother’s calling. B—”
*click*
Okay, I’ll call my sponsor. I’ll just call my sponsor. I’ll break my rule and tell her about my real life. She’ll understand, because this is an emergency.
I’ll tell her what happened last time my sister went for visitation. How I overheard my mother teaching my sister a lesson. How my mother was brushing my sister’s hair and talking about me. I’ll tell my sponsor, and she’ll understand. She’ll get it. She’ll tell me I’m not going crazy.
We had just had a fight, and my mother was pissed. I guess she needed my sister to be pissed at me too. I walked by the door to her room and heard, “Your sister Cyndy is a drug addict. She’s a bad, bad girl. She had to go away to a jail, to make her stop taking drugs. But you’re a good girl, aren’t you?”
My sister didn’t react. I don’t even know if she understood. I held my breath to hear what else my mother would say, but she was quiet. She finished brushing my sister’s hair, put her in the car, and deliver
ed her to my ex-stepfather’s house.
I don’t know why, but I have to tell somebody. About my sister. How she didn’t say anything, like, “I don’t want to go.” How she just got in the car and went, when my mother told her to. How she had no choice.
I call my sponsor, and her mother answers. She calls out her name—Suza-annne!—in a voice like a silver bell. She must have set the phone down with the receiver facing up, because I can totally hear what’s happening in their clean, rich house. There’s classical music going, and more than one person is talking at once. Somebody laughs. Then I hear the cottony kzshwp! of the phone being picked back up.
“Hello?” Suzanne asks.
“Hi…it’s me.”
“Cyndy? Hi… Hang on.” Then a shorter kzshwp, and she’s talking to someone with her hand over the mouthpiece. Then she’s back. “Hi, sorry. What’s going on? I’ve got people over, so…”
I can practically feel the room she’s in—what it smells like, how the light looks. Books on shelves, board games stacked, family friends helping her mom make dinner. Suzanne has the life that skipped me when my father died.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t want to bother you. But something happened. I really need to talk about it.”
“Can it wait? Like I said, I’ve got company.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I just I feel like—”
Somebody laughs near the phone; Suzanne goes shh!
“Here, let me take this phone somewhere quieter,” she says. It’s a total verbal hug. There’s a clunk and then quiet. She must be in her dad’s library.
“Thank you. I’m so sorry. It’s just, I got home from school today, and—”
“Cyndy, listen. I have to stop you.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. But I can’t do this. I can’t be your sponsor. It’s too much.”
I can’t hear the ticking of the grandfather clock, but I may as well. It’s counting the seconds till I collapse in a pile of rubble, like those short black-and-white films of a skyscraper getting dynamited.
“Cyndy, are you there? I’m sorry, but I—” she says, before a voice calls out from the background, “Suze! Come on!”
“I’m so sorry, Cyndy. You’ll be okay without me. There’re way better sponsors out there.”
Tick-tick-tick.
“So—Suze! Dinner!—so I’ll see you at the club, k?”
Boom.
20
STILL MAY 1989
TWO YEARS, TWO MONTHS, ONE WEEK, AND THREE DAYS OUT
At first I was saving this outfit for when Grant asked me on a date. Then I was saving it for when Shane wanted to go somewhere other than his house. But now I’m sick of waiting, so fuck it. I’m gonna wear my date outfit today: brown silk pants, black angora sweater, and black suede pumps. When Japanese boyfriend weirdly gave me a business suit, the Macy’s tags were still on it. I just traded the suit for these fancy, New Yorkish clothes. I’m a little sad about giving up my dream of having an actual date, but I really need a pick me up today.
I spent ten months on first phase in Straight. Ten months with an oldcomer watching me shit, with an oldcomer gripping the back of my pants, steering me around every time I stood up. I, like, really wanted to get off first phase. But to do that, I had to confess every single incident from my past to my mother. I had to admit that every bad thing, ever, was 100 percent my fault. So that’s what I did. Every time I earned a five-minute talk with my mother, I told her the details of every ugly, scary, thrilling, risky moment of my life. And then I confessed it was all my fault. But outside of those talks, we’ve never discussed what happens in this house. God. Why would we?
Today, though. I don’t know. I feel a little crazy. There’s something itching my brain, and I have to get it out. This itchy thought is saying, maybe it wasn’t all my fault. Maybe someone else was the bad guy.
When I shuffle downstairs for coffee, my mother is at the kitchen table, reading the back of a cereal box. An invisible Do Not Disturb sign flashes over her head. But I can’t help it. The words are out before I can lock them back in their vault.
“Ma, do you remember Jacque, like, hitting me and stuff? When I was little?”
For a second, I don’t think she heard me. She sips her coffee and keeps her eyes on the Honey Bunches of Oats.
“Ma?”
“I don’t remember that at all, Cyndy. But anything he may have done to you, you deserved it. You brought it on yourself. You were a very difficult child.”
I go back upstairs to put my outfit on, because fuck coffee.
• • •
My brain is still itchy. It’s crazy itchy, on-fire itchy, like it’s crawling with fucking head lice. I’m walking down the hall between first and second period, trying to balance both my heels and my brain. Nobody teaches you how to walk in high heels; you’re supposed to just know. And nobody teaches you how to deal with your mother; you’re supposed to just deal. But I can’t. I can’t deal. I keep hearing her in my head, on repeat. “You deserved it. You deserved it. You brought in on yourself.”
I know I don’t look right, because kids are staring. My date outfit isn’t hiding shit. Plus, I don’t have my Dunkin’ mug to shield me. These kids in the hallway, they see it all. They see my brain lice, crawling and burning. They see Shane hanging up on me and Suzanne kicking me to the curb. They see Jacque touching me and my mother watching and kids spitting in my face at Straight. I don’t know how they see it, but they do. I can tell by how they’re looking at me. They all know all about me.
It’s too much to balance, the itch and the heels and the diapers and the words. I have to scratch it all out. I have to get to a stall and dig my nails in and scratch it all out of my brain. Have to get away from all these eyes. Have to get to a bathroom with a door that closes so I can—schwink. I fucking slip on my fucking high heel. I stumble, I don’t fall, but the cheerleaders—I hear them. They’re always fucking there. Always fucking laughing.
I take off my pumps and tear down that hallway, past the social studies rooms, past Mrs. Skinner’s room, out that side door nobody ever uses. And I sit—I fucking fall—onto the grass as the ding-ding-ding period two bell goes off. Then silence. All the happy students are tucked safe in their classrooms, clearheaded and eager to learn, as I sit here in a crumple and need to die. Need. I need to be done.
I already know how. It’s totally easy. Middle of the night. Car keys. Garage doors down. Ignition on. Sleep. Done. Bye.
Tonight. Tonight I’ll do it. And finally, finally, I’ll be fucking safe.
Mrs. Skinner is getting her second-block English class going. I can hear her because I’m right underneath her open window. She’s reading aloud. Catcher in the Rye. Thank fucking God nobody is out here, because all of a sudden I’m sobbing. She’s reading in her excellent voice, and she’s making it all make sense. He’s desperate, the narrator. He sees everything; he gets everything. Too much. He gets it all way too much. He loves people, but they can’t love him back. Because all they have is pain. That’s all they have to give. Everywhere he goes, someone’s graffitied “fuck you,” and he can’t take it. He can’t carry everyone’s pain anymore.
But then there’s the donuts. He orders coffee and donuts, but he can’t eat. So the waiter takes the donuts away and doesn’t charge him. That little niceness. Like, thirty cents. The waiter was nice. He didn’t have to be, but he was. That’s what grabs me and shakes.
There’s a counselor. In the guidance office. She said I could talk to her.
But I can’t go back in that school. I can’t go back to my house. I can’t do this anymore.
But the waiter was nice. The counselor is nice. Bitsy is nice. Connie is nice. Mrs. Skinner is nice. I’m nice. There is nice. Maybe there’s not as much nice as pain, but nice is out there. Maybe I could try to find it. Like a treasure hunt.
I have to decide. I’m either going to kill myself, or I’m going into that school and finding that counselor. One or the other. Which is stronger, the nice or the pain? Which one?
• • •
Ms. Grass, the school counselor, is on hold a long, long time while the nursing home receptionist goes to find my mother. We sit and stare at the information card on Ms. Grass’s desk. She taps a finger on the typewritten words PARENT WORK PHONE, highlighted in yellow.
Ms. Grass hugged me when I told her I wanted to die. I think she believed me.
When my mother picks up, she’s so loud that I can hear both sides of the conversation. She’s using her mad voice.
“Recreation Therapy, this is Nadine,” she says.
“Mrs. Etler, hello. This is Ms. Grass, calling you from Masuk High School Guidance. I’ve got your daughter Cyndy here with me.”
“Of course you do. It’s always something. What is she saying today?”
“Mrs. Etler, you need to take your daughter to see someone who can help her. Someone who she can talk to, who can prescribe medication. Sooner is better than later.”
“She needs help! Do you know what she’s done to me? Do you know we had to pull her out of your school and send her to a tough-love facility? She’s a druggie. She’s put me through—”
“Mrs. Etler. Mrs. Etler. I’m sorry to say this to you over the phone—” Ms. Grass looks at me with eyes as kind as the Jesus illustrations in a kids’ Bible. Then she turns away and scoops her hand around the phone and her mouth. I hear her anyway. “Your daughter is suicidal. Deeply. She needs to be taken to a psychiatrist, today. I can give you a few names and—”
“A psychiatrist? Fancy! Do you think I can afford that? You must think—”
“You have to afford that, Mrs. Etler. Or, rather, you have a choice. You can pay for a psychiatrist or you can pay for a funeral.”
I push my fingertips in my ears and tiptoe out of that office, but I don’t go farther than the waiting area. I want Ms. Grass to know I didn’t run away. College brochures are spread across the table like appetizers, shiny with pictures of safe, smiling kids in university sweatshirts. They’re holding suitcases and waving goodbye to their parents. I shuffle them around a little, looking for a sign. If I find a Smith College brochure, that’ll be my answer.