I'm Down

by Mishna Wolff

  “I’ll deal with you later,” Dad said, running after her. But I had a feeling that he would put it off until Yvonne reminded him to punish me. I returned to the bedroom, to my Russian prison, and began to do something very white. I got “depressed.”

  Three days later, I was woken up in the middle of the night. Yvonne stood over my bed leering angrily until the searing heat of her rage woke me. I jumped out of the top bunk and followed her.

  “What is it?” my sister asked from the bottom bunk.

  “Go back to sleep,” I said, walking out the door to what felt like my next battle.

  Upstairs in the kitchen, Dad was groggily leaning against the counter. So we’d both been summoned for this 2 A.M. Spanish Inquisition. I could not wait to find out what I did this time. I waved at Dad wearily; then Yvonne put her finger in my face.

  “Where is my shirt?” Yvonne demanded. I stared at her blankly. This was not at all what I’d expected. I was ready for racist or disrespectful, but thieving came from left field.

  “What?” I asked.

  “My white shirt!” Yvonne said. “Don’t act like you don’t know.”

  “Mishna,” Dad said. “Just tell her where the shirt is and we can all go to bed.”

  “I really want to help here—,” I said, but I was interrupted. The shirt was just a jumping-off point.

  “It’s not just the shirt!” Yvonne said. “It’s your entitlement! You think you can just walk around here and get into anything you want. You have no respect for other people’s property.”

  “I don’t even know what shirt you’re talking about! We don’t even like the same clothes.”

  “What are you saying?” Yvonne said. “You know more about fashion than me now ’cause you went to France? You’re French now?”

  “No,” I said. “When are you gonna pay us back, anyway?” It was too much all coming at once. I started to cry again.

  “Stop your crying,” Dad said. “Just tell Yvonne where you put her shirt.”

  “I don’t know where the shirt is.”

  “It’s probably in your room somewhere in some pile. You don’t treat shit right.” She took a pause. “You know, if you had asked me, I’d probably have lent you the shirt. . . . That’s the fucked-up thing.” My tears were useless. I had no idea what this shirt was. I had never worn her shirt, but none of that made a difference. I was supposed to be wrong.

  “I’m sorry about your shirt,” I cried. “You’re right, I stole it. I don’t know why I did it.”

  “Where is it, then?” she asked.

  “I lost it,” I said, causing Dad to throw his hands up.

  “You lost my shirt!” Yvonne said. “See, John.”

  “It’s my fault. I raised her wrong.”

  “I’ll pay you back!” I begged. “Out of my babysitting money . . . I’ll pay you back for the shirt. Just please, forgive me,” I pleaded, but it was just a show now because this was the game the three of us played.

  “It’s not the shirt,” Yvonne said. “It’s the lack of respect. Do you know how hard I work? I’m doing everything I can to make things nice for all of us. And you don’t even care!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I care. I love you, Yvonne! I really love you so much.”

  “You make it very hard for me to love you back,” she said, the tears starting to roll down her face.

  There was a weird tension in the air. Something had broken and it was uncomfortable. “Go to bed, Mishna,” Dad said, trying to act all business, “Tomorrow, I want you to find Yvonne’s shirt.”

  Things felt too weird. For starters, there was no shirt. But I knew now that it wasn’t about that. It wasn’t even about me. It was about them. And whatever it was, it was more than I understood and I had seen too much of both of them. And at that moment I felt like the oldest person in the room.

  Yvonne was still crying. As I walked downstairs, I looked back at her and she no longer looked powerful. She looked really frail. She caught my eye in the stairwell.

  “I’m sorry, Yvonne,” I said, “I’m really, really sorry.” I was apologizing for my father. And as he held her close, while she cried on his chest, I skulked away.

  The next morning at school I was deliriously tired. And during passing period, Lilith found me in the hallway, “Mishna, are you okay?”

  I looked up at her as though I were in a trance.

  “Jesus!” she said. Lilith loved drama. “Family stuff?”

  The only picture of Dad’s house. It was taken after I moved out and the “porch” was built, up to the front door. I don’t know who that guy is.”

  I nodded, faced Lilith, and said quite out of the blue. “I need to move out today. I need to go to my mother’s house.” I didn’t know where it came from, but apparently the look on my face was alarming enough to make Lilith say, “Yes, Jesus. I’ll go with you. Just let me get my coat.”

  But I couldn’t wait and walked out of the front two doors of the school and onto the steps with Lilith following me, dumbfounded. I wasn’t going to call my mom, because she would just get all scared about dealing with my dad. I wasn’t gonna talk to my dad, because he would talk me out of it. I was just gonna get my shit and get the hell out.

  On the bus ride to Dad’s house, I must have been a little spaced out because I missed my stop and Lilith kept saying, “Where are you?” I was just maintaining the distance I needed to fend off the horrendous feelings of disloyalty that were threatening to make me get off the bus and go back to school.

  When we walked up my street and approached the house in silence, I looked at it and suddenly realized what a shit hole it was. With the gravel and sand and broken glass in the front yard, the barbed wire in the back, the ten-foot drop from the front door—at that moment I saw the house, not from my perspective, but from Lilith’s. Ours was the worst house on the street—and maybe the neighborhood. We had even managed to out-ghetto the coke dealer who lived down the street.

  Lilith saw that I was paralyzed. “Let’s get your stuff .”

  She pulled me up the steps and I relocated my resolve. Lilith’s perspective of my house fortified me. Even when I saw Andre’s Big Wheel and felt like a horrible sister, I looked over at her and she had a strong look on her face that said, “We gotta get you out of here.” And I pressed on down the unfinished cement stairway into our room. And, as Lilith followed me down the stairs looking a little appalled, I realized that I had never actually had a school friend in my house before.

  We grabbed some garbage bags out of the pantry and started shoving my clothes into them. I was gripped with panic that Dad or Yvonne would come home early, but it took a surprisingly lot less time than I thought to pack up all my stuff.

  “What about this?” Lilith asked, picking up my sister’s Value Village hat, and I lost it for a moment.

  “I can’t do this,” I said.

  Lilith grabbed two bags in one hand and my arm in the other and said, “Yes—you—can! You’ll see your sister when she visits you and your mom.” Lilith put a bag in my hand and hustled me up the stairs. “Now let’s get out of here.”

  I called a cab, and Lilith and I shoved all my clothes into the trunk of the taxi, and as we sped away from the house, I was even more vacant than I had been on the way there. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t angry. I felt hollow, and it was a relief.

  That afternoon when my mom got home she was surprised to see me standing in her kitchen making a sandwich. Lilith had gone home already and when she saw the bags leaning up against the door to my room she said, “What’s going on?” as though she didn’t already know.

  “Can I stay with you?”

  “What about your dad?” she asked, obviously unsure if I was allowed to be there.

  “I don’t want to live with him anymore,” I said. “Can I just live here all the time?”

  Mom looked at me and looked at my stuff . She looked concerned but said reassuringly, “Okay.” Then she paused and asked, “Do they know?”

&
nbsp; “Not yet. But I think they’ll figure it out soon.”

  “Well,” Mom said. “Do you want to call?”

  “No,” I said, feeling unusually self-assured. “What I want to do is eat this sandwich in front of the television.”

  “I think you need to call your dad,” she said as she handed me the phone. “I don’t mind you living here full time, but your dad needs to understand that it’s your decision.”

  “Why? Why can’t you talk to him?” I asked pointedly.

  “Because of our agreement,” she said nervously. “I’ll be up in my room when you’re done if you want me.” And she left the room.

  I looked at the phone for a second and then dialed the number. It rang a few times and then Yvonne answered.

  “Hi, Yvonne. It’s Mishna.”

  “I’ll get your dad,” she said, and got off abruptly.

  Then there was silence for a few minutes.

  “Hello,” Dad said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at Mom’s.”

  “You need to come home. We can work stuff out with you and your stepmom, but you need to come home.”

  “I’m gonna stay here, Dad. I have all my stuff, and I’m not coming back to live there.” I was terrified. I was worried that Dad was gonna just storm over and show up angry and yelling. And I knew that if he did, I would have no defense against it. But he didn’t get angry. He just slowly and quietly started to cry. I was baffled.

  “Why?” he said. “Why?”

  “I make everyone miserable. I always seem to be making everyone upset.”

  “Why?” he repeated. “I just don’t understand why you’re leaving me.”

  “I’m not leaving you. I’m just moving.”

  “You know,” he said, still sobbing, “you can come home tonight if you change your mind.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “Please, come back. We can work it out!”

  “I’m not going to.”

  “I’m gonna come get you.” He was talking to himself now. “I’m just gonna get in the van and come over there, and we’ll go get some coffee at the place on Fifteenth—”

  “I won’t.”

  “Please,” he begged. “Please.”

  “Dad . . .”

  “Please . . .”

  “Okay, Dad,” I said. “I’m gonna hang up now.” And I set down the phone. I saw my mom in the hallway where she had been listening.

  “Was he upset?” she asked timidly.

  “Yeah. But not angry,” I said. “He was crying.”

  “Whoa,” she said, looking impressed with me. “How did you deal with that?”

  I looked at my mom, disappointed that she couldn’t have made that phone call for me, even after all these years. “I just did.”

  Thirteen

  WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH WHITE PEOPLE?

  “THIS IS LIKE the greatest thing I have ever tasted,” I said to Violet, ignoring my turn on Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! in order to focus on my Hot Pocket.

  “Really?” Violet said. “I think they taste like barf.”

  It occurred to me all of a sudden that she was saying that I liked to eat barf. But the way the hot cheese mingled with the doughy goodness and the tomato sauce, I wasn’t about to succumb to her pickiness and in between boxing rounds I proudly held up my Hot Pocket saying, “Best barf I ever tasted.” And knowing they had a freezer full of them, I added, “How many Hot Pockets do you think I could eat?”

  “I don’t know,” Violet said, coughing. Violet always had a cough. She lived in a huge modern cedar, glass, and steel thing in the woods, and I sorta thought all that glass and metal made her house extra chilly.

  “I bet I could eat all of them,” I said. “Do you dare me?”

  “No,” Violet said impatiently. “I don’t want to dare you to eat all the barf pockets.”

  “What’s your problem?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer—nothing. What could possibly be her problem?

  “I’m a little depressed these days,” she said. “No big deal.” Making me actually want to barf. She had a cool house, a Nintendo, and freezer full of Hot Pockets. What the hell did she have to be depressed about? She even had a family of raccoons that visited the backyard. How could anyone be depressed when they had raccoon friends?

  “Or maybe stressed out,” she added. “I have a lot on my mind.”

  This ought to be good, I thought.

  She continued, “My mom and dad haven’t been getting along that well, and yesterday I heard Dad talking about moving out.”

  I got a weird joy from hearing her say this. It was a bad joy, the kind of joy you wouldn’t want anyone to know about.

  “They’re just always in this weird space with each other, and they act like my sister and I don’t exist.” I really thought she was being a baby, but I needed her to see the upside of all this.

  “It’s a good thing that your parents don’t pay attention to you,” I said. “You can just do your own thing and eat Hot Pockets and stuff.”

  “I want to run away.”

  “Don’t be a retard! You have a great house. . . . Just hide in the family room. No one ever comes down here. Get really good grades and in four years, you can be sooo out of here.” I finally paused the game. “You’re in IPP. You’ll get into an amazing school somewhere in New En gland, and your parents will pay for it.”

  “I don’t think I can make it four years.”

  I saw her tearing up and I looked her in the eye, serious as a heart attack as I said, “You can fucking make it.”

  “You don’t understand. No one cares about me.” I looked at her sitting in her Generra sweater, with the eighty-five-year-old violin that she owned set down sloppily next to her new computer.

  “If no one cares about you, why do they buy you all this stuff ?”

  “Because they feel bad because they’re never around.”

  “Sounds rough.”

  “You don’t get it because you’re poor!” she said. She had never said anything like that, something mean meant to shut me up.

  But I was feeling surprisingly thick-skinned that day. “Thank God I’m poor. . . . You’d never see me whining because my parents bought me cool stuff and then left me alone to do whatever I wanted. And you know why?” I asked, and then answered my own question, “Because it’s awesome.”

  “It’s not as awesome as you’d think,” she said, resigned, but I wasn’t letting it go.

  “Are you kidding? We have just played three violin duets, spent three hours on Nintendo, we have a check for a pizza . . . and I still haven’t seen either of your parents all night.”

  “Okay,” Violet said, cracking a smile. “You have a point.”

  “And it’s almost time for Next Generation. Who has it better than you?”

  “I get it. I get it,” Violet said, and grabbed the controller of the Nintendo. “I guess I was just looking at it the wrong way.” She laughed and coughed at the same time.

  “Man,” I said to Violet, who was back at Nintendo. “You should get that cough checked out.”

  My social life was the best part of living with my mother. When I wasn’t swimming, studying, or carbo-loading, I was spending the night with people richer than me. It was like staying in a hotel. Nice bed, clean sheets, new sights. I seemed to gravitate toward a relatively depressed crowd, because the more depressed my friend was, the more expensive my company was. I liked good dinners, video games, boats, and horses. I liked houses on the water or with wooded acreage if possible. Having both was, of course, ideal. Short of that, having a parent that adored me was a plus, and having a parent who saw me as a charity case and wanted to take me under their wing and improve my station made you my BFF. My friend Eileen’s mom would sit me down and we would talk about music, politics, and how Eileen could improve her grades. Whereas Dana’s dad might talk to me about when they all lived in India, and whether or not his son would ever get his shit together and act more like me.

  As
for my friends themselves, I had a growing irritation with them that was getting harder and harder to hide. I didn’t think they really appreciated their parents, and it was amazing how much love and support they expected for being relatively inert. They took things for granted, they whined about cold and hunger like it was gonna kill them, they went to therapy, and they nursed ridiculous crushes on homosexual celebrities.

  A few weeks after my stay with Violet, I decided to try out staying with Marni Madison. She was the first of my friends to start smoking and in the years since we all had tried to summon the dev il, her verbal skills had improved and now she talked like a third-grader. I had the hardest time with her out of all my friends, because I knew she lived in a beautiful glass house on the sea, and yet she dressed like a homeless person. She woke up every day with what I can only imagine was a direct ambition to look like a wet rat. All she owned were these hideous yet overpriced long gray cotton sweaters that were meant to look “raw.” Once she bought a new one, she’d stretch out the sleeves and have one constantly in her mouth. When she talked to you, she stared into the middle distance. And at this point, spacey didn’t even begin to describe it—she was catatonic without the commitment.

  The impetus for a weekend visit came about when she walked up to me on Thursday in the hallway. She stood next to me vacantly, and I thought she had forgotten why she wanted to talk to me until she took her sweater out of her mouth.

  “What are you doing this weekend?” Marni asked, putting her sweater right back in her mouth when she was done.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think I might get together with some people, or maybe just watch TV. Depends how I feel.”

  “Oh,” she said, but didn’t walk away.

  “Why? What’s up with you?”

  “Well . . . My mom told me I could take the sailboat out on my own this weekend if I wanted to.”

  My ears perked up immediately. Sailing—I like the sound of that.

  “Yeah?” I said casually.