by Holly Brown
We made the arrangements first thing this morning, and then we got the hell out.
I didn’t tell my mother this, but my father’s headstone will be a granite pet marker I ordered online. It saved us a little cash and felt oddly appropriate, like a final in-joke that I’ll share with no one. It’s not like we needed much room on the stone, since it will only have his name and the dates of his birth and death. No “loving husband and father” needed; no listing of his accomplishments. Rob and I also saved money by skipping the embalming. There will be no funeral, no open casket. I’ve seen dear old Dad for the last time, and I’m more than okay with that, too.
It’s the cheapest casket on the cheapest plot of the cheapest cemetery within a twenty-mile radius. Even so, it all came to nearly $3,000. When Rob put down our credit card, I felt like screaming. Of course my mother didn’t offer to chip in. She stood five feet away, sniveling, as if none of it had anything to do with her.
I woke up this morning on the floor of my parents’ apartment, sunlight flooding through the bay windows of the Victorian that’s reminiscent of every residence of my childhood. The houses were always shabby, in deep disrepair, but my mother thought that a turret and a gable could camouflage any ills. We weren’t disadvantaged as long as we lived in a Queen Anne or an Eastlake or a Colonial Revival. Victorian architecture has many subsets, and they’re all represented in Eureka, which has perhaps dozens of historical districts, too many to be maintained. So my mother picked the right locale for perpetual downward mobility.
Eureka is not without its charms. Tourism is one of its top industries, now that lumber has mostly died. Old Town is quaint and cute, and there’s a waterfront boardwalk on Humboldt Bay. Hiking among the nearby redwoods is a pretty spectacular experience. You feel so small, but in the best way.
Growing up, I felt small in the worst ways. It’s stupid to blame Eureka, or anywhere, for that. The first years of your life are all about your parents, and the environment they create. Eureka didn’t render me irrelevant; my parents did.
I wasn’t much to look at through childhood, but early puberty did some heavy lifting. When I was twelve, I underwent a hormonal surge. My hair grew long and glossy, and practically overnight, I was wearing a C-cup bra. The acne didn’t kick in until I was almost fourteen, so looks-wise, it was an enchanted age for me.
Early development has its drawbacks, especially with negligent parents. I didn’t have the brain to go along with my body. I was hungry for attention, and older guys were happy to provide it, for a price. They’d ply me with alcohol, and I’d have sex with them, sometimes with condoms, sometimes bareback. It was all out of my control, and I didn’t necessarily mind. If I kept carrying on like that, I thought an adult would have to step in. My parents would have to save me.
I’d been labeled as a slut the second my tits came in, so in school I felt doomed where female friends were concerned. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious cycle: the more I slept with guys, the more alienated I was from girls, and the more I needed male attention. They were using me, but they were all I had.
That’s the moment when I most needed a parent. I couldn’t find my way out of that conundrum without guidance. But my mother kept talking about how nice it was that I was popular, and that she knew I’d make good decisions. It was a total cop-out, especially since she never asked any questions. I was a thirteen-year-old being picked up by a carful of sixteen-year-old boys, and she’d yell “Have fun” as I sailed out the door.
I was lucky I didn’t get pregnant, or HIV. I remember that painful itching when I was fifteen, the furtive scratching, the fear of looking down, the hope that it would just go away on its own. Herpes turned out to be a wake-up call. I met a sweet gynecologist at Planned Parenthood who realized that I was being taken advantage of, that my body didn’t feel like my own but a commodity that I could barter to stave off loneliness and inconsequence. She set me up with a counselor who gave me the full battery of STD tests and a whole lot of kindness. She told me I was worth something, and I’d been waiting my whole life to hear that from someone with no ulterior motive.
I stopped having indiscriminate sex, and I joined a few clubs (“prosocial activities,” the counselor called it), and I even developed a few friendships with females, but my troubles with men were far from over. My father saw to that.
But Rob doesn’t know that chapter, since I’ve tried to rip it out of the book. He does know that as soon as I graduated high school, I got out of Eureka. Ten miles out, to be precise, to oppressively progressive Arcata, where I spent a few semesters at Humboldt State. It’s the marijuana-growing center of the universe, and had all the harder drugs anyone could ever want, which you could pretty much take in full view of cops without fear. It was free drugs and free love, a hippie utopia. The grassy plaza in the town center reeked of patchouli and the body odor of the homeless. It was bordered by cafés, restaurants, and stores. There were festivals that went by various names but were all paeans to public nudity. In my Intro to Feminism class, I drew the conclusion that the power lay in keeping my clothes on (my professor disagreed, and gave me a C+). I dropped out and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, a place I’d long dreamed of but never actually been.
My bad-boy complex persisted, but I’d grown up some. I knew better how to string them along, how to hold their interest, how to keep any need for love and affection to myself, and how to leave sooner. The first time I knew for sure that they’d cheated or lied, I was done.
Any dime-a-dozen therapist would say that I was playing out my daddy issues. They’d probably be right, much as I hate being a cliché. But we’re all cliché sometimes, or clichés wouldn’t exist.
“Are you sure you’re really okay?” Rob asks.
He’s a good man, and I’ve found my place. Eureka is not going to pull me back into its clutches. I smile at him. “I am now.”
“If you need anything, you know I’m always here for you, right? You know that?”
“It’s the thing I’m surest of.”
We smile at each other, and when he turns back to the road, I suddenly think, I should tell him. But how can I tell him now, when he’s smiling at me like that?
The police have advised me to block you. All further communications should cease.
This morning, I did plenty of online searching, looking up information about harassment, cease and desist orders, anything I could think of, leapfrogging from one site to the next, until I was satisfied that Miranda is full of shit. Again.
But if she isn’t, if she can somehow convince people that I pose a credible threat of violence, or that I’ve annoyed and alarmed her to no purpose . . . I don’t want to even think about what that would do to Rob’s opinion of me, which is already under siege.
I was going to drop it, I really was, but I can’t possibly let it go now. Every time I try to get out, someone pulls me back in. My dead father, my mother, Miranda. It never ends, does it?
I’ll have to be cagier in the future. I can’t go right at Miranda; I’ll have to zigzag. Now that she’s armed me with the statute, I know just what to avoid.
I glance at Rob, who appears to be in his driving zone, and then I know exactly where to go.
His Twitter handle is @theRealThadFeldt. What an asshole. Like anyone would pose as Thad Feldt, like he’s that important. He’s clearly got his mother’s ego.
Four hundred twenty-nine followers. Now he’s got 430.
I’m not sure what I’m looking for, exactly, but I feel like the real Thad Feldt could come in handy. Between every parent and child, there’s something dark and secret. All I have to do is find the chink in Miranda’s armor, and exploit the weakness, untraceably.
He is a weakness, all right. Miranda’s son is a #loser. A twenty-seven-year-old living in Tucson with no job, Instagramming his art, talking about some big break that you can just tell will never happen, and making veiled and not-so-veiled references to drug binges that he says “jump-start his creativity.” He d
ropped out of UC Santa Barbara, and he acts like that gives him street cred or something.
Because—get this—he makes graffiti. He has these enormous canvases and he basically tags them with puffy letters and jacked-up cartoon characters. From his tweets, it sounds like he’s squatting in abandoned buildings, or that could just be where he does his lame art. He might sleep somewhere else, with someone else, because he is actually pretty good-looking, though too skinny for my taste.
I cannot believe that holier-than-thou, pillar-of-the-community Miranda has a son this degenerate. It’s too perfect. I might not even need to punish her for her prissy little attitude; the world’s already doing it for me. Even though I’m just finishing college at thirty, Thad makes me feel like an overachiever.
I get a Facebook friend request, and I’m startled to see that it’s Thad. It’s intrusive, somehow, an unauthorized cross-pollination. I was following him on Twitter, but now he’s followed me to Facebook. For some reason, the migration feels a little menacing. But I’ve never entirely minded that feeling.
I could just ignore him. It’s not like I want to be friends with Miranda’s son. But he could be useful as a “friend.”
I accept. Within seconds, he’s made contact.
Who are you, beautiful? Why are you following me?
I know your mother, unfortunately.
I like your art.
Cool. I like your face.
I’m married.
I can still like your face, can’t I?
What’s the point? I live in California. You’re in Arizona.
I grew up there. In Cali.
Where?
L.A.
I knew he wouldn’t say Beverly Hills. He probably pretends he’s straight outta Compton.
Dawn’s a great name. A new day, every day.
Thanks.
Not like Thad. What’s a Thad?
A phony douche bag, maybe?
You look like dawn. All bright and clean. A fresh start.
Ha ha. If he only knew his mother had accused me of staining her sheets.
I’ve got to go. Good talking to you, Thad.
Talk again?
In your dreams.
“Who was that?” Rob says.
“Salina,” I say. “Another heartbreak.”
We exchange smiles, a brief moment of solidarity built on our presumed superiority. We drive on.
26
Miranda
I’m sorry about how we left things.
I never meant to control you.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes, I know that.
I want the best for you.
How’s your work going? I’d love to see more!
Thank goodness all this is by text. I could choke on my own disingenuousness. Calling his art “work,” using an exclamation point at the end . . . next thing it’ll be smiley-face emojis.
Thad’s ignored my texts for the past day, and I can’t avoid the realization that he doesn’t have to get in touch ever again, now that there’s no money in it. I try to tell myself that he’s consumed by his art. A few hours ago, he Instagrammed a new painting that looked a lot like the last one, only with slightly different colors, but maybe that’s what artists do, that’s why it’s a series. He’s working, that’s all. He’ll be back in touch soon.
Unless I’ve sent him over the edge, and now he’s on a binge. I shouldn’t have delivered the news so callously. I punched him in the gut, and you should never do that to an addict.
If the devil himself had designed a drug, it would be crystal meth. It’s cheap, and Thad can smoke it (he always hated needles), and it’s even more potent when smoked (what a bonus). It increases dopamine, which brings on a pleasure so intense that nothing else in life can compete, and changes his brain so that he’s slower and dumber and less capable of resisting. He’s a hamster on a wheel.
I find myself playing a familiar game. It’s called “Was It Then?” I run through Thad memories and wonder which was the fork in the road, the missed opportunity, the time when he could have become an upstanding citizen, if only I’d made the right choice.
When I chose to use formula rather than to breast-feed because it seemed more sanitary and less invasive . . .
Was it then?
When I let him cry it out in his crib, rather than comforting him. I thought it was a victory that he stopped crying altogether, that I’d made him a little man.
Was it then?
When he started having tantrums that lasted not minutes but hours, screaming and kicking with such ferocity that I sewed a version of a toddler straitjacket so that he couldn’t harm himself, and I’d sit outside his room with a pillow over my head, crying and helpless, and I told Dr. Paolini something’s wrong, it has to be wrong, and even though a mother knows better, I allowed him to pooh-pooh me and say it was just a phase, and I left Thad alone with all those big feelings, all that fury, and that phase went on for not months but years.
Was it then?
When he delighted in art projects, even as a young child, and I bought him all the supplies, and I dutifully hung his creations on the refrigerator, but I was so busy, I made myself so busy with housework and cooking and volunteering and clubs, because even then, he scared me. I didn’t tell anyone that, not even Larry. I was so ashamed. But those were moments when I could have sat down beside him and drawn pictures myself. They would have been awful, I’m no artist, but the time spent . . . the time I failed to spend . . .
Was it then?
When he asked Larry to do father-son activities with him, sometimes Larry would, but not nearly as often as Thad wanted. I didn’t push Larry because, deep down, I was jealous. What about mother-son activities? Those happened all the time. Me chauffeuring him here, and buying for him there, and arranging for him to be with his friends, and eating dinner with him while Larry was still at work, me questioning, Thad giving short answers. It’s a painful thing, being found so uninteresting. I didn’t know what made Larry so intriguing to Thad, except that Larry was unavailable, and I was right there, all the time.
Larry worked longer hours once Thad came along. By necessity or choice? Coincidence or avoidance? Did Larry dislike fatherhood, or did he dislike being Thad’s father? I can’t say, can’t know, because he wouldn’t share that, any more than I’d share my jealousy. Some things can’t be spoken.
Was it then?
When Thad was eleven, he came home smelling of alcohol. I dismissed it. Where would Thad have gotten alcohol? I’d picked him up and dropped him off at a friend’s house, and I knew those parents well. They were home, and they were supervising. There would be no open bar at the Schultzes’. So he went upstairs and went to bed, after he pecked me on the cheek.
He never pecked me on the cheek. He must have been rubbing my nose in his bad behavior. Or the boy who never cried was crying out for help.
Was it then?
He didn’t like to do anything organized. No sports or clubs. Not even art lessons; just art, on his own.
If Thad had played soccer or baseball or basketball, even if he’d been a benchwarmer, or if he’d been on the debate team or the chess team, even third-string, I know Larry would have shown up for the games, the matches, the meets. Larry wanted to be a spectator; he wanted to cheer. That was the father he’d planned to be.
If I’d encouraged Thad—no, insisted—that he participate in some after-school activity, anything to make him feel even temporarily like a winner, or get a job, something to limit his free time, idle hands and all that . . .
Was it then?
I spied without having the backbone to do anything with the information I gathered. I told myself I was monitoring, but I never had the guts to confront. He had condoms when he was thirteen. I counted them so I’d at least know if he was using them. There was a bong in his closet. Over time, it was gathering dust. I never found the paraphernalia of anything more serious, and I told myself that he’d experimented, and he was finished now.
Was it the
n?
After the dentist visit—my first encounter but far from my last with the term “meth mouth”—I returned home full of fear and self-loathing. I’d been in denial, I was a bad mother, and I couldn’t avoid the truth anymore. When I saw Larry, I wept in his arms. I had failed our son.
Larry held me. He said we would get through it, together. What he really meant was that he was taking over, thank you very much, and a big part of me was relieved.
Larry said that Thad didn’t need a drug program; he needed structure. He needed consequences. We could provide that. He felt that the dentist was well-meaning but alarmist in his inpatient recommendation. What does a dentist know about rehab, anyway? We could handle this. I was to be the presiding corporal to Larry’s general.
Larry seemed as sure as the dentist had. And I didn’t live with the dentist. So I went along with Larry’s plan.
I was the one who had to implement the consequences Larry devised. But after hours of Thad’s yowling and diatribes, I’d start to wobble and, eventually, buckle. Not all the time, but enough to encourage Thad. To make him think he could win if he persisted.
There were many little betrayals of Larry along the way, before the big ones. Larry gave a consequence that I thought was too punitive, one that I knew I wouldn’t be able to follow through on, and instead of speaking up, I would invalidate it. I’d sneak Thad his favorite food, or let him out of his grounding early. He would spin such glorious stories, perhaps as a reward, all about the things he was going to do with his future, and what he’d realized about the perils of drug use. “They don’t make me creative,” he would say, “they just trick me into thinking I am. I’m smarter than the drugs now, Mom.”
All the while, what I was really doing was trying to make him love me. If I released him from prison, if I granted him early parole, wouldn’t he have to love me?
I like to think he believed those things while he was saying them, that they were his own hopes for himself. He wanted to be smarter than the drugs, and he knew I wanted that for him, so he said it like it was true. I was the receptacle for all his wishful thinking.