“Where are my clothes?” she accused Girl and stormed down the basement stairs. “Get down here!” she yelled up from the basement, and Girl complied.
“You took my clothes out of the dryer and threw them in a basket! Now they will be all wrinkled!” Stepmother seethed. Girl was confused. It wasn’t like she threw them on the floor or something. This was what Girl had been taught to do with laundry.
“You should have hung up my shirts. You need to iron them, now.”
“I put them in a basket, like I was supposed to,” Girl said, confused but indignant.
“When the clothes are in the dryer they are surrounded by a puff of air that keeps them from wrinkling. They were fine in the dryer, but once you take them out of the dryer they wrinkle!”
“Balled up in the dryer isn’t any different than balled up in a basket,” Girl replied. She had been doing laundry for a few years now, and Girl knew that they got plenty wrinkled in the dryer. They went around and around like this for nearly an hour and Girl still couldn’t understand what she had done wrong. Stepmother couldn’t understand why Girl was such a lazy and difficult child.
“I love you, Stepmother,” Girl finally said, trying to get by Stepmother’s anger and reach that part of her that wasn’t consumed with hatred for Girl and just be rational, Mother’s mantra.
“Yeah, well, you need to iron my clothes!” Stepmother said, and Girl started to cry.
“Don’t you cry over this! Crying won’t get you out of your responsibilities!”
“I’m crying because I said I love you and you didn’t say it back.”
Stepmother punched her in the arm. Girl saw her fist ball up, and she instinctively moved a little bit to avoid her blow. There had been rules before. Spanking only on the bottom. Now there were no rules. Stepmother had never punched anyone before, not even Brother. But when she hit her, Girl had won. She now had proof of how out of control Stepmother was, a story Girl could hold up to match Brother’s. All the years of terror, and all Girl had was this one poorly thrown punch. Stepmother had meant to hurt her more, but Girl had turned at the last minute, or she had aimed badly. Girl knew she hadn’t hit her hard enough to bruise, and that scared her more. If Stepmother knew it didn’t really hurt, she might hit her again. Stepmother never stopped hitting Brother until he cried. Girl made damn sure she cried right away.
Brother jumped to her defense. “Don’t you hit my sister!” he yelled, and Girl exploded with love for him. Brother had promised that if Stepmother ever hit Girl again, he would stand up for her, but Girl hadn’t thought he was brave enough. She knew how hard it was to enter a fight against Stepmother.
“You stay out of this!” Stepmother yelled at him, and Brother backed down. Still, he had tried. The angry woman’s attention switched back to Girl for more yelling about wrinkles and laundry and what an ungrateful child Girl was who did precious little around here. Girl begged Mother to help. “I told Stepmother I loved her and she wouldn’t say it back. I don’t care about the laundry,” Girl said. “I just don’t know why she doesn’t love me anymore.” Finally, Mother got involved, yelling for Stepmother to calm down.
“Honey, she’s not crying over the laundry! She’s crying because you didn’t say I love you back!” It took Mother almost twenty minutes to get the hate to leave Stepmother’s eyes. Girl was so glad that this time Mother didn’t leave when the fight started. For once she stayed and interfered, and she was the only one who could ever get Stepmother to see reason. Eventually Stepmother calmed down. Mother got her to admit that putting clothes in a laundry basket was what Girl had been told to do. The fight sizzled out and everyone cried and said they were sorry and said they loved each other very much. Mother never mentioned the punch, as if it never happened. Stepmother opened a can of generic beer—white with only a black barcode and black letters that spelled BEER—and passed it around the table to Brother and Girl. “Nerd beer,” Girl called it. She took a sip when it was her turn, even though it was warm and bitter. It seemed necessary to Stepmother.
Stepmother rarely hit Girl, that’s what was so weird about it. She didn’t even yell at her that often. It was always Brother that was her target. He was Girl’s very own flesh, more so than anyone else in the world. He was the only one who shared all of her childhood—the Alaska part as well as the New York part. He was the only one who knew what school was like for children who didn’t make friends easily and wore the wrong clothes and liked the wrong TV shows and had the wrong kind of parents. Stepmother would hit Brother and Girl would watch silently in the corner, wishing she could take it for him, wishing he would just do enough to get by and not provoke her. The crack of Stepmother’s hand across Brother’s body opened a wound inside her own chest, a chasm filled with hate. Good girls don’t get mad, though, so Girl learned instead to turn her rage inward toward herself, she learned to call the rage fear, and after a while, she no longer knew the difference.
notes from the fourth wall
this is the explanation you hear when your parent is diagnosed with a mental illness
A vacuum, where everything you did was not good enough to keep the family stable, where you were constantly off-balance, waiting for the other shoe to drop, trying to be who your parents wanted, crossing your fingers, please don’t let her notice me. Nothing made sense and you were supposed to pretend everything was okay. The void was filled with your sweaty fear and stubborn rage. But you did not speak of it.
Your parents’ sexuality complicated things. Everyone treated you as a fascinating specimen under a microscope, asking probing questions about being raised by lesbians. You knew gayness was something that must be hidden and lied about and you had been given no other words for what was wrong in your family, so lesbian was the only word left to explain why you never felt safe in your house. Especially when your stepmother’s particular brand of lesbianism was of the man-hating variety, when the rage spewed over the dinner table was often directed at men in general, your brother in particular. It was an easy out, but you knew it wasn’t quite right. Red wool socks are both colorful and scratchy, but the red and the scratch are independent of each other. Other red things are not scratchy; other scratchy things are not red. But as a child you did go through a lesbian-hating phase, though it only lasted a few months, because you only had one word for the two conditions that defined your stepmother. You knew there was something more to what was wrong at home than just same-sex union, but it gave you a target for your impotent rage.
If you write this the wrong way, how will people look at Babs Walker? Your mother’s friend, the one who untied your sneakers to tickle your feet back when you were three or four, who didn’t know that you couldn’t tie your own shoes yet and were sensitive about it. The one who you refused to speak to for two solid years? And how many years did she keep coming over even though you were a total snot? She kept drinking coffee in the kitchen with your mother until one day you let your guard down and forgot that you were punishing her for untying your shoes and instead let her pull you onto her lap and everyone laughed about that resentment you held for so long. Babs painted her house the exact raspberry color of Bubblicious bubble gum, and she gave you your very own paintbrush and bucket even though you were too small to do anything resembling a decent job.
You picture Shirley and Betty giving you little presents every Christmas Eve, and letting you and your brother watch TV in their bedroom as you stayed up for the eleven o’clock service at church. They had cats and lots of books and a big garden. You remember Marty, who always made you feel like what you had to say was important, and who was always smiling. You don’t want your words used against them. You want to show the world how sweet and normal they were.
You remember them and all the other nice lesbian couples who weren’t weird or different or scary and how your stepmother’s mental illness drove them all away. You don’t blame them, but the problem with having a family made up of friends is that once they decided to leave, you didn’t run into them at
weddings and funerals. Once they left, you never saw them again.
flying to new york
When Girl and Brother left Alaska at the end of the summer, they took the red-eye flight at midnight. Father took tongue depressors and a black pen out of the camera/medical bag he called his purse and made stick-puppets for the children to play with while they waited to board the plane. He pulled out rubber gloves and blew them up into balloons with fingers. He turned one into a chicken, the other into a weird head with only one ear. The children pushed and shoved each other to get closest to Father. Girl scratched her cheeks against his rough wool coat as she tried to fill her lungs with his scent.
Father walked the children onto the plane, just like Mother did back in New York, and let them take their balloon-hands on the plane with them, even though they were big and didn’t fit under the seat in front of them. When Father walked down the aisle and off the plane, the children started to cry. He never looked back.
Brother cried all the way to Seattle, and sometimes on the next flight, too. Sometimes he cried all the way back to Rochester. Off and on, of course. He’d cry himself to sleep, wake up and cry some more. Girl cried for the first hour, but after that she just sat quiet in her sadness, letting the sorrow fall down inside her chest like rain down a window.
When Girl was twelve, she stopped crying when Father walked off the plane. When she stopped crying, Brother started yelling.
“You don’t love him at all!” he raged.
“I do, too!” she answered. But she looked at her brother as a naïve boy who didn’t know the first thing about love and parents who didn’t look back when they walked off the plane. When she saw Rochester below the plane window, little houses down below like on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, she felt all mixed up: the warm, glowy love of her mother balanced by Stepmother who was always mad all the time, and the town where the kids at school mocked her and Girl never had a warm enough sweater.
a series of awkward conversations
phone call, 1985
Girl never understood why her father moved so far away. Juli lived in Seattle, and Girl and Brother lived in Rochester, New York. It was like Father was trying to get as far from all of his children as he possibly could. When Girl was twelve, in the seventh grade, he finally offered an explanation.
“Now that you are older, I thought you should know why I had to leave Rochester,” Father said when he called one day.
Girl had been practicing piano in the dining room, and now she sat straddling the dark wood bench. She twisted the yellow telephone cord around her fingers as they talked.
“Well, do you know the class ‘About Your Sexuality’ at church?”
“Yeah. Brother took it this year. I take it next year.” The sex-ed class was offered to eighth graders only and Girl was dying to take it, but she had to wait one more year. Brother got to do everything first.
“Well, I was teaching it back then. And this other doctor, Dr. Wu, had it out for me. He was from Japan, and for some reason he just hated me.”
“The one you said always called you Crinton Rirribridge?” Girl wiggled on the piano bench, rocking it back and forth like she was riding a horse, making it squeak.
“Girl!” Stepmother called from the living room. “Stop doing that to the bench! You are going to break it!”
Girl blew her bangs out of her eyes. Girl hated her perm. It was supposed to be cascading ringlets, but the end result was more poodle. She was trying to grow it out and her bangs were almost to her nose. Girl got off the bench and crawled under the dining room table where Stepmother couldn’t see her. She unwound the phone cord from her fingers so she could make circles with her hand on the pink rug to ball up the dog hair. Girl was supposed to refer to the rug as mauve, not pink. Stepmother hated pink, but a decorator had talked her into mauve—the “it” color of 1985. Girl liked pink though, and she defiantly refused to call it mauve. Girl pulled the spiral telephone cord a little too hard and the phone crashed down off the table above her.
“Girl!” Stepmother was yelling again, but Girl pretended she couldn’t hear her.
“Father? Are you still there?”
“Anyway,” he went on like nothing had happened, “Dr. Wu went through my desk drawers when I wasn’t there. He found some movies I was using to teach the class.”
“Uh-huh.” Girl lay on her back and put her feet on the underneath of the tabletop above her—she sucked at sitting still. The carpet smelled like dog. Girl didn’t know why one dog smelled more than two cats, but it did.
“He said it was pornography and he brought me up on charges. Man, I hate him. I have no idea why he hated me so much. Maybe he was envious, because I was such a good doctor and all the patients loved me.”
“I don’t get it. How could a doctor think educational movies were dirty?” Girl rolled over to her stomach and blew her hair out of her eyes again.
“I don’t know, Girl, he just had to make up something to get rid of me.”
Whatever, Girl thought, though she didn’t dare to say it aloud. This was stupid, and Girl didn’t know why he wanted to talk about it. It wasn’t the truth. It didn’t help anything.
“I gotta go. I gotta help Mother make dinner.” Mother wasn’t actually calling her, but Girl was tired of the pretense of talking.
“I so love you, Girl.” Father was always overly affectionate on the phone, maybe to make up for only calling every couple of months. It made her stomach ball up inside. His words didn’t mean anything.
“Love ya, too.” Girl pulled on the phone cord to bring the base of the phone close enough to hang up. Girl left the phone under the table and went in the kitchen to find her mother. Let the next person follow the cord when the phone rang. Girl didn’t care, though she would catch hell if the call was for Stepmother.
“Off the phone, honey?” Mother asked.
“Yeah.” Girl sat down at the table and fiddled with the salt and pepper shakers, just moving them around.
“What did your father say?”
“He told me some stupid story about why he left Rochester. It was dumb, it didn’t make any sense.”
“I never knew why your father got in trouble,” her mother said. Girl watched her mother’s hands chopping carrots. Her hands were big, her fingernails bitten back. Her engagement ring had a little gold hook that wrapped over the top of her wedding band. Girl knew her mother hated her hands. They looked strong, just like Girl’s.
“My cousin Iris used to work for him back then, in the pediatric clinic. She might know what happened.”
Girl sat at the wood-grained Formica table fiddling with the napkin holder. The paper napkins were always falling out. She took out the stack and lined up all the dimpled paper edges.
“Why did he have to move so far away?” Girl asked. She might have been twelve, but her voice sounded young and whiney even to herself.
“Well, after he left the hospital, he tried to go into private practice. You could ask his old partner, Dr. B, if you want. I could look her up. I always liked her. She was one woman that I knew for sure never slept with your father. She has horses, I bet she’d take you riding.”
“That’s okay.” Girl folded the stack of napkins and slid them back into the plastic holder in the middle of the table. Girl didn’t want to ask anyone about it, not cousin Iris, who Girl barely knew, and not some other pediatrician, even if she had horses.
“Anyway, no one would refer patients to him. He really didn’t have a choice, honey. There was no way he could make it here without referrals.”
Rochester wasn’t that big of a city: four hospitals, a couple colleges, and the world headquarters of both Kodak and Xerox. It wasn’t a small town, but it wasn’t big enough for a professional sports team, either.
“But why did he have to go so far?”
“I don’t know, honey. I wish he hadn’t. Before he left you used to go see him every other weekend. Do you remember?” Girl shook her head. “You would have been so much better o
ff if he stayed. Your father is a truly brilliant doctor. He could have been a leader in the field, if it wasn’t for all his women problems. When I was with him he was on the verge of making an international name for himself—even traveling to speak in Argentina—but he couldn’t keep his pants zipped. Whatever trouble he caused in Rochester was bigger than just an average affair or jealous coworker. It ruined him here. It was too bad, really.”
Mother scraped the carrots off the cutting board with the side of her knife and deftly chopped the celery. Her hands rocked the knife smoothly and it sounded like tiny people knocking on the door. Girl watched the short black hairs at the back of her mother’s head tremble as she cut.
“Did I tell you about the time he fooled around with my cousin’s wife?”
“No.” Girl took off her big, plastic-framed glasses and polished them on her shirt. Mother and Girl had the exact same frames—golden-brown on the sides fading to clear by the nosepiece.
“Hey, will you peel me a couple of potatoes?” Mother asked.
“Sure.”
“When my cousin found out that your dad was sleeping with his wife, my cousin said that he was going to shoot your father. We both had to go into hiding a few days. Then there was the time, after he left, when some woman was throwing rocks through the windows on Mulberry Street.”
“I thought you left him?” Mother was the only woman to ever leave her father, and Girl was proud of that. The rest of his wives put up with his shit until he got tired of them and moved on.
“Well, not exactly. I kicked him out. But that house had been his before I married him. He had lived there when he was married to Sharon and Juli was little. I moved out as quick as I could. It never felt like my house.”
Girl stood over the garbage can peeling a potato with the old rusty peeler. She dropped the potato in the garbage by mistake and reached in quick before Mother noticed.
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