For a second, no one moved. I spoke evenly: “I think I’m bleeding.” Then everything exploded. Someone was shouting, “Oh my God, oh my God!” I couldn’t really see. My mother pulled me toward the kitchen sink and started to throw handfuls of water at my face. “I’ve gotta see if it’s her eyes,” she was saying.
“Someone call a doctor!” my grandmother yelled.
“Call a fucking ambulance!” my mother screamed, wiping at my eyes with paper towels. “Now!”
As they leaned me back into a chair, my head felt dizzy. My mother propped my leg up on another chair, and I caught a glimpse of a gash across my knee. I quickly turned my head away and saw the floor, so much of it now covered with my blood.
Soon the wail of a siren approached. The rain came flooding down. Two men rolled a stretcher toward me, and one of them squatted down beside me.
“Hey, how ya doin’?” he asked, smiling.
“Am I going to die?” Suddenly this seemed like the only question in the world.
“Well, not today,” he said, still grinning. “Not if I can help it.”
At the hospital, my mother stroked my hair while we waited for the doctor. I had four deep lacerations, two on my leg and two on my face, across my forehead and nose. In my small room, loud light beamed into every corner. Though I was drowsy and nauseated from the Demerol they gave me, the comfort of my mother’s hand on my head was a new discovery, and I didn’t want to close my eyes and miss one second of it.
But it didn’t last long. They wheeled me away from her and into a different room, where they injected my wounds with lidocaine. I kicked and punched from the pain, until they finally strapped me down and finished. But when the doctor was about to put in the first suture, my mother broke into the room. “Wait!” she said. “I want a plastic surgeon.”
Four hours and a second round of lidocaine later, I was sewn up neatly with 150 stitches and ready to go home. Outside, the rain came in sheets. The darkness had been settling in for hours and was now immersed in itself, everything immersed in it, so that it was hard to imagine there ever having been a sun. For the ride home, my mother left the radio off. The swish of tires against the road and the rain pelting against the car with the beat of the windshield wipers made their own song.
Maybe because my mother had never formed into a solid enough person, one who believed in her own strength and abilities, she didn’t have much in the way of coping skills. This always made me sad for her, because occasionally I caught glimpses of what she could have been. One of those glimpses had been a costume she’d made for me to wear to school for our second-grade Thanksgiving celebration. With construction paper, string, and crayons, she turned me into an impressive replica of a Native American, and I spent the whole day boasting to everybody, “My mother made this.” My mother could draw, too. I often liked to pull her old boxes of papers from the closet and sift through all the things she’d drawn—mostly faces of long-haired women, beautiful and haunting. “You see the eyes?” she would say. “I like the eyes. It’s as if they’re looking at you.” So I would stare into the eyes of the women my mother made and feel, in a way more immediate and true than most other moments, as if I were seeing her.
But it was when I ran through the plate-glass door that I had the biggest glimpse into my mother’s strength. That one day, she coped. She rose. She threw the water on me, propped up my bleeding leg, insisted on the ambulance. She comforted me in the emergency room. She saved me, at the last second, from having to live the rest of my life with two big scars on my face. I think she knew this was her moment, too, because she never stopped talking about that day, how she’d taken charge from the start, how she’d thought to ask for a plastic surgeon. How she’d been a good mother.
That same year, my father stopped coming home on weekends. Some nights, instead of getting ready for bed, Joanne and I piled into the back of our mother’s car, our pillows and stuffed animals dangling lazily from our hands, and on my mother’s hunch, we took to searching for him. We usually pulled out of our apartment complex just as it was getting dark, when the air had a smoky quality to it, a signal to get a last good look at things before they disappeared for the night. I watched the trees’ charcoal silhouettes against the deepening sky. I pressed my nose to the window and tried to find things hiding in the branches. Then night snapped down like a dome and filled the car with its damp green grasshopper smell.
I was mesmerized by the wispy night clouds, striated like rills in sand, and the flashes of streetlights and the steady thump of the road. Joanne always fell asleep holding her little blue doll with the string in the back that, when you pulled it, made her say I luuuv you. My mother sang along with Eric Clapton: I don’t care if you never come home . . .
We drove and drove, circling restaurants and hotels, getting lost in neighborhoods and turning around while song after song kept the car beating. And then one night, we found it: my father’s Cadillac, unabashedly parked under the drop of a streetlamp—a four-thousand-pound revelation shining in its massiveness.
We pulled in beside it, and Joanne popped up awake, but nobody said anything. We just sat there and gaped. Our windows were down, but the street was quiet, the row of town houses dark inside. There were no crickets, no buzz of the streetlamp, no movement. It was a still life, and it could never be part of our world.
“Bastard,” my mother finally said, putting the car in reverse. As we pulled away, the street’s silence seeped into our car.
We spent weeks repeating our adventure. It turned into a kind of game, all of us on a mission to find my father’s car—scoping out restaurants and hotels when we didn’t find it in front of his mistress’s house. Joanne and I helped by peering intently into parking lots and at other cars passing on the road. “Is that it?” we’d exclaim excitedly. I don’t think Joanne understood why we were searching for his car, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to find it.
We never did anything once we found my father’s car except turn around and go home, but I think my mother just liked knowing she could find it. “I should be a private eye,” she’d say.
My parents finally divorced that same year, viciously, bitterly. Kramer vs. Kramer had nothing on them. My father prepared me for the divorce by keeping me up late when I stayed with him at his girlfriend’s town house, the same one my mother had discovered months earlier. “I know things have been rough for you the past few years. I know your mother and I fought a lot, and we both hurt you.” He wrapped his fingers into gentle fists, as if he were holding bouquets of flowers. “And I’m sorry for that.” His eyes seemed to moisten a little as he scanned my face. He was searching for something.
I clenched my teeth to keep the tears back. I felt like a grown-up sitting there with him, and I didn’t want to ruin it by crying.
“I want you to know that what your mother and I had—our marriage—it was poison. It made me do things I shouldn’t have done. But I also want you to know that things can be different now, here. We could be a real family. We could even get a dog. You like dogs, don’t you?”
I nodded exuberantly, not wanting him to stop talking.
“Okay, picture this: a big house, maybe a swimming pool, nice backyard for tossin’ a ball around or having a barbecue, a puppy chasing a Frisbee, and all the love you could ever imagine. That’s what I’d like to give you—a normal, happy life. No more fighting, no more craziness.”
The thought of a normal life, the kind my friends had, the kind I’d always dreamed of, pushed through me and broke the dam. As I wiped at my eyes, I let his movie play on in my mind. I saw picnics and laughter and dinners together. I saw the shimmering burst of blue water in our very own pool. I saw a yard filled with kickball games and snow igloos and a sweet dog panting in the sun.
My father’s voice brought me back. “There’s just one thing. I’m gonna need your help.”
By help, he meant that I’d have to convinc
e a judge that Joanne and I should live with him and not our mother. We were making a deal—a happy life in exchange for a long list on his yellow pad of everything bad my mother had ever done to me: the bruises and the horrible names and the days she didn’t let me in after school—and we stayed up for hours at the table while everyone else slept and the sky got as black as it could get.
“So there were all the times she slapped you in the face when you wouldn’t finish your dinner, right? And made your lips bleed?”
I nodded, remembering the sharpness of her diamond when she used the back of her hand. “But it wasn’t dinner,” I corrected. “It was the raw eggs and milk she made me drink with my vitamins before bed.”
“And she gave you those vitamins because she didn’t cook for you, right? Because she neglected you.”
I watched his pen darken the page. “I guess.”
He paused then, put his pen down on the pad. “You can’t be wishy-washy about this, Rita. Yes or no?”
I felt my stomach tense. “Yes.”
He nodded smugly. “So, ‘fucking bitch,’ ‘piece of shit’—what other names did she call you, besides the usual?” My father’s fists tightened. “You know it made me sick when I heard her call you—I can hardly stand to say it now—Rita Retard. Just sick.”
I was surprised by my father’s sudden protectiveness, but I relished it all the same. I would have taken almost anything he would have given me. And it was true: she’d called me that, and other names. She reminded me almost daily, in one way or another, that I disgusted her—I was too skinny, too pigeon-toed, too hyper—that I would never be as pretty as my friend Kimberly and that, next to her, I would always just be “Creeperly.” That was her most used name for me, and it alone held all of her loathing, and all of my shame.
Still, I knew what we were doing was unfair—we were telling only half of the story. But I could almost feel it drawing me toward my new life—that particular sun, that particular joy, that particular love. So I sat in the judge’s chambers in an enormous leather chair, and I told him that I didn’t want to live with my mother. I can’t remember what he looked like, probably because my sight bore right through him, through the walls of that courthouse, and into the future my father was promising. “I hate her,” I told the judge. And as I spoke those words, I felt them turn back on me, as if they would devour me. But none of that mattered, because what I was doing there, in front of that man whose face I don’t remember, was fighting for my life. And then I told him the rest. I told him the truth. I just didn’t tell him everything.
During that time, I stopped visiting my mother on weekends, and Joanne started going alone. The last time I’d seen my mother, she’d broken down sobbing. “He’s turning you against me!” she cried. “You think he loves you, that he wants you? He doesn’t. He wants to win. He wants to hurt me. And he doesn’t want to pay child support. That’s why he’s doing all this—for the money.”
“That’s not true,” I protested, feeling doubt rise up like a fever.
“Oh, it’s true all right. It’s all for money,” she kept saying. “Mark my words. He cares about his wallet way more than he’ll ever care about you.”
During their divorce trial, Joanne stayed with friends of my mother, and I spent those summer days sitting on a bench outside the courtroom, filling my notebook with more poems and stories, waiting to see how the judge would decide our lives. I tried not to look at my mother when she walked by—I looked down at my shoes, out the window, anywhere but in her direction—because I didn’t know how to face her. And then one afternoon she tore through those courtroom doors in a bleary-eyed fury and ran right past me, wailing uncontrollably as she disappeared down the corridor. As I watched her go, I felt the same gut-lurching urge I’d felt running after her car when she drove off without me in parking lots. Except now there was nothing left for me to chase. Our fate was in the hands of a stranger, whose face I will never remember.
In the end, my father won. Joanne and I moved to Long Island to live with him and his new wife, Janice, and her son, Bobby. Janice was grand—tall and big-breasted and wafting Halston perfume in every direction. She cooked beef briskets and made a mean Texas sheet cake, and was, from all angles, the opposite of my mother. We all agreed she was beautiful, with her flashy smile and bouncy hair and meticulously applied eye makeup. In the beginning, I followed her around a lot, asking her questions and staring at her pretty red lipstick, but in the way of many mixed families, we never bonded. She wanted my father, and she tolerated Joanne and me.
Bobby split the difference between Joanne’s and my ages. He was a dark-haired, long-lashed beauty of a boy, who was quiet, asthmatic, and slow at math. I liked him for all of these things and felt, very quickly, the same older-sister protectiveness I felt toward Joanne. My father, however, was less enamored of Bobby. He took his shakiness and failure to make eye contact as a weakness, and often berated him for it at the dinner table. “You’re a putz,” my father would say. “Don’t you know how to hold a fork?” The more my father spoke to him, the more Bobby stared into the abyss of his food, his hands trembling, until eventually all of us, except my father, lost our appetites. Janice just rested her knife and fork on her plate without ever saying a word.
Janice also didn’t say a word the first time she saw my father hit me. I’d gotten caught attempting to swipe a few quarters from the large watercooler jug my father filled with coins, and was sent to my room. When my father appeared in my doorway a couple of hours later, I knew instantly by the wild look in his eyes that everything I’d dreamed of and fought for was about to come crashing down. Then I saw the gleam of my sister’s twirling baton. He was holding it in his hand. Zapped by a streak of cold fear, I called out for Janice, but was quickly silenced by the first strike of the baton against my head. I let out a howl, and my father raised the baton again. This time, he stopped short of my arm, laughing as I jerked away. After that, he made it a game: sometimes he’d bring the baton up as if he were going to hit me, only to stop midway and watch me flinch. Then he’d mimic the way I was crying by stretching his mouth into a contorted O and making taunting sounds in a horrid falsetto. And on the few times he let the baton connect, I remember feeling grateful that he hadn’t hit me harder, as if that little bit of restraint was still a kind of love. My father ended my punishment by wrecking my room with the baton, then ordering me to clean it up.
True to my father’s word, we had a pool and a barbecue grill and a German shepherd named Lady, whom I loved. But that’s where his promises ended. And life went back to how it had been before, with my father cornering me in various rooms in the house while I begged him to stop. What was different now was that, unlike the way my parents fought when they were married, my father didn’t hit Janice. And he must have known that his cruelty toward Bobby could go no farther than the dinner table, because he never hit him, either. And Joanne, of course, had always been off-limits. So I was the only one; my mistakes (the usual mistakes kids make, like continuing to jump off a ladder after I was told not to, or being mean to my sister, or sneaking cookies before breakfast) were the ones he fixated on. Through it all, Janice said nothing, and if she objected, she never showed it. But sometimes when the air changed and it was clear that my father was getting ready to deliver another round, she sent Joanne and Bobby outside to play, presumably so that they wouldn’t have to watch. Those were the worst of the days, the ones when I felt most alone, the ones when I wondered if my father would finally kill me.
But when it seemed that death had finally come, it wasn’t mine: it was my father’s. He and Janice had been arguing that day, so she took us three kids and Lady for a walk. We meandered for miles, into neighborhoods entirely new to us. Down streets and sidewalks Joanne and I skipped, and Bobby and I raced, and Lady sniffed and sniffed, and Janice walked steadily, her shoulders squared, her steps long.
When we arrived back home hours later, I was first in the
door. A bright spot on the floor caught my eye—a drop of blood. “Dad?” I called. I stepped forward, toward the spot. Why blood? Why the next drop, near it? Once when a kid in our Maryland apartment complex got hit in the nose, he bled a long trail as he walked home, and I followed it, those perfect coin-shaped drops, all the way to the steps in front of his building. I felt queasy the entire time, but the intimacy of it lured me to the end. These drops on the tiles inside our house were bigger, and I followed them, too. “Dad?”
The trail ended at their bedroom doorway. I peered in and found my father in his usual place on the bed. But this time, he wasn’t watching television. He was very still. The blinds were closed. Lying across his chest like a seat belt was a shotgun. A comet of blood trailed across his forehead. The lamp on his night table was on. The TV flickered but was silent. He wasn’t moving. His eyes were closed.
The sound in my head was a million airplanes at once. I spun around to run back out but couldn’t move. I needed desperately to erase my last fifteen steps, to erase my father’s blood, which felt like my own blood, from the floor. “Help!” I called. It came out a whisper. “Help!” Now my voice was behind it; now my legs were moving; now I was running straight into Janice. “Dad killed himself, Dad killed himself!” I cried, running past her to the door. Joanne and Bobby were just coming in. “Dad killed himself!”
Outside I pitched myself onto the lawn. All the fury of my entire life was right there in my fists as I pulled up clumps of grass and screamed and stared accusingly at the sky.
But my father was not dead. Janice explained this to me after she wrestled me from the ground and slapped my face: it had been a joke, a fake; she had gone to him to feel for a pulse, and as she turned to call an ambulance, she heard him move. When she turned back around to face him, his eyes were open, and he was pointing the gun at her.
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