by Lisa Taddeo
—Nothing cooking, I said, remembering the impeccable way in which Alice had turned away those Ray-Bans at the farmers’ market.
He moved his face frighteningly close to mine. His beard had the stink of meat.
—Yeah? he said.
—We’re having a conversation.
He bit his lower lip.
—You want me to get you some more beers so you can continue your conversation?
—No, thank you. We’re leaving soon.
He rested his hand on Eleanor’s thigh to better balance himself as he squared his leather chest to me.
I used the side of my palm to karate-chop his arm off her leg, and even though he was big, he toppled.
—What the fuck!
He rose quickly, embarrassedly, ragefully.
—Fuckin bitch, he said.
I felt protective of Eleanor, of the secret she’d been telling me, and of the baby inside of me. I grabbed her hand and we began to walk away. He was about to follow, but there were so many men out there, some with their burly women, mullets and studs and dust. Half of them were witnesses. The other half would have egged him on if he’d bent me over and tried to fuck me.
We drove off through the mountains, under the trees that cast a feathered shade on the road.
—That was really… You’re really strong, Eleanor said.
I said nothing. I could feel her eyes on me as I stared at the road. Big Sky once told me I was the best female driver he’d ever known. I’d taken a dumb pride in that.
—I want to tell you something, I wanted to tell you from the beginning. I wanted to tell you that you shouldn’t feel that bad. About all that happened.
—What do you mean?
—You weren’t the first person my dad cheated with.
—What?
—I mean, you were the last. And I guess he liked you the most. But there was also another girl. From his last job. She was, like, twenty. I caught them in the house. They were fucking in my parents’ bed and Robbie was in the crib. He was, like, two months old. And I was fifteen. And. My dad asked me not to tell my mom. He cried and begged me not to tell my mom. And the fucking worst part of it was that I was attracted to the girl. It was the first time I was attracted to anyone ever. I found them when she was on her back and my dad was, you know, eating her out. And I was attracted to her. Her body was perfect. I guess that’s not the worst part. I guess the worst part is that I didn’t tell my mom.
* * *
BACK AT MY HOUSE WE drank a bottle and a half of the good wine on which I’d spent an entire day’s paycheck. I couldn’t get out of my mind the image of Vic’s head between a young girl’s legs. A twenty-year-old girl with a perfect body. I had never been in his house. No matter how many men I fucked in the time I knew him, and no matter how little I wanted to fuck him and how I stopped fucking him very early into knowing him, I could not believe he’d lied to me. That he’d told me I was the first and the only. That I’d believed him.
But there was Eleanor on my couch, a girl who had lived through a scourge brought upon her by her parents, just as I had. Like the mother I would become, I stopped thinking of myself. I looked at her on the couch. Her bare feet pulled up beneath her legs, the little feet I imagined in her mother’s mouth when she was an infant. My mother told me once that she’d put my feet in her mouth when they first passed me to her. Part of her wanted to eat me, she said, and put me back in her tummy.
After the wine hit, Eleanor began to cry. I’d never cried from wine. I didn’t understand why people did. She cried about Robbie, about how much she missed him. I took her in my arms. It was the first time we’d touched that way. Heaving, she moved in to my chest. She placed one hand across my belly. I held her tightly and rocked her like a child. She placed her cheek against my breasts, which were fuller with pregnancy. They were so plump and risen that I hadn’t worn a bra in weeks.
I let her cheek stay there. I let her brush her lips against my nipple, the most imperceptible of touches, but clear all the same. I knew what it was to miss the breast of a mother.
29
WHEN I WAS FIVE AND misbehaving, my mother would threaten me. I had this toy stroller for a baby doll and it didn’t matter to me if there was a doll in there or not, I only needed the stroller and I loved to wheel it around and I wanted to go everywhere with it. The seat was soft nylon with little bunnies holding balloons, plus blocks and bows and baby rattles and pacifiers, all the sweet gumdrop stuff of babyhood. And when I was being bad, when I was refusing to put on the correct shoes or refusing to brush my hair or refusing to eat my Swiss chard, my mother would brandish the stroller, she would raise it high up above her head like she was going to bring it crashing down on my crown, and she would thunder, I’m going to give this thing away! I’m going to give it to Rosanna’s daughter! Or she would say she was going to leave it outside on the street for one of the kids who walked down our block with their pit bull to take. The idea was that the baby stroller would go to someone less fortunate, some little girl, unlike me, who was not so lucky to have such a vaunted piece of plastic.
I tried to see the evening that followed my day at the Top of the World without hindsight. I tried for much of my life to isolate it as its own memory, just one night in time, another dinner. But that’s proved impossible. It was the last night of my life. Just as breakfast that morning was my last cereal in milk. Just as the trip to Italy the year before was the last good summer I would ever know.
My mother made pastina. Something we had when there was not enough time for a real dinner. But also the thing that was made when I was sick or when I needed something soothing, like a pacifier.
It was evident that their talk had not gone well. The quiet was colossal. Outside the sun beat down on the sticks and the trampled grass. I could see the rock that I liked to sit on at the end of the gravel drive, gleaming with heat. I wanted the sun to go down. I wanted that day to be over and to fall asleep so I could wake up from the events that had transpired. But the truth is I was so connected to my parents that what was severed between them was a larger weight on my mind than what had happened to me in the tall man’s cold house. I’d been abused, of course. But you couldn’t call it violent. At no point had I been grabbed against my will or shoved into a car. I bore no marks, not even the red marks on a wrist that often showed up when I was younger and my mother yanked me off the floor of a supermarket.
While my mother cooked and washed up, my father sat on a butterfly chair on the patio. He smoked a cigarette with his legs crossed languidly. When my father was on his feet he was always moving, his hands working screwdrivers, doorknobs, polishing the grilles of cars. But when he sat down, he fully sat, his flesh softening into all the ovals of his bones. My mother, on the other hand, barely sat. My memories of dinnertime are of my father and me at the table and my mother rinsing plates before we were even halfway through. I suppose she did sit in restaurants.
That night it was no different. When the pastina was ready, my father and I sat down at the pine dining table. There was a side of chopped spinach with butter. My mother was not good with vegetables. They were always dark and limp. As we ate, she Windexed the shelves of the refrigerator. My father looked at me with a pasted-on smile. He was always smiling at me, even in the wake of misery. Tenderly, he moved some hair off my face. I winced a little, the touch of a man suddenly meaning something other than what it always had. Beyond the screen door the summer evening vibrated with bugs.
We didn’t talk at all that night, my father and I. Talking was something I did with my mother. My father listened to me and smiled and ruffled my hair. He was still and resolute in all ways. A steadfast man. Even his veins were powerful.
—My little princess, he said, went to the pool all by herself today. Did she swim or read?
Flashes of hands and the feeling of a tongue went through my mind. It made sense that my father would have no idea what had happened to me that day, but it was unimaginable to me that my mother woul
dn’t. She’d often told me she was omniscient, a witch, and I believed her. As she bent forward into the mustard-yellow refrigerator, I felt she was trying to trap me with her silence.
—Both, I replied, watching my mother’s body for a clue.
—Why don’t you bring the dishes to the sink, help your mother clean up.
—I don’t need any help, my mother said sharply. Her voice stopped our movements, even our breath. How can I explain her power? It was a magical thing. She was cold but her body was warm; even today, even after everything, I would give both my arms to be held in hers.
After a while my father turned on the television. The Sound of Music was playing. To this day I can’t watch it. I can’t hear the notes of any of the songs without shaking all over. That night we saw the last hour. My father had his arm around my shoulders. Just the day before, his mother had been violently raped, and only a few hours earlier, his daughter had been sexually assaulted. I didn’t know what he would do if he learned of the latter, but I knew he’d gone looking for the man who’d raped his mother. I felt it was possible he’d killed him. My father was one of those men with secrets. I thought that all of his secrets were the honorable kind. Revenge killing. Acts of mercy for maimed animals dying by the side of the road.
I didn’t understand why my mother was being so cold. I figured it was a combination of horror that my father might have killed someone and disgust over what I had done. I was terrified she would stop loving me and terrified my father might go to jail. Up until the following day I wouldn’t have had any of the long conversations with Gosia that would mark the rest of my formative years, but once she had told me that simply going to sleep and seeing the next sun could fix you up. That the new day would be infinitely more survivable. Or at least it would seem to be. So that was what I longed for. I longed for the night to be over. For the new day to dawn. I swore I would never go back to the Top of the World Pool. I would swim exclusively in the pool with the logroll and the tired ducks and the green paddleboats and the mosquitoes. I would be a perfect child.
30
VIC ONCE SAID TO ME, What do you have to fear, kid? You’ve lost so much. What is there left to fear? That was one of his cruelest moments. I’d been with the young boy, Jack, all afternoon. I’d blown off work to go to a Mets game with him. We drank piss-colored beers and cheered and shared a hot dog from opposite ends until our mouths met in the middle. After the game Jack left me to go to Fire Island with his friends; they were off to the gay part of the island, Cherry Grove, where they liked to get drunk as older, mustachioed men hit on them. I called Vic and he came. Out to Queens he came and we ate at a wonderful Thai restaurant with uneven tables and a drop-tile ceiling with water stains.
That night I cried over a bowl of papaya salad and crispy ground catfish. I was crying because of Jack, because I felt stupid. I told Vic it was only fear. The nameless fear that followed me everywhere. But Vic was stung. He had to accept Jack and accept the lie that I was trying to date people my own age or far younger because I needed to feel normal. He brought me into his chest. I was disgusted by the expensive piqué shirt that he doubtless had bought to impress me. He held me but hated me. I could feel it. Pressing my cheek to his chest like he wanted to absorb me. What do you have to fear, kid? he asked as I sobbed. The place was BYOB and he’d gone to the liquor store next door and bought their most expensive bottle of wine, $129.99. He’d left the price on. He laughed, saying, Can you believe that was the most expensive bottle? The wine was spicy and not good; it barely tasted like a twenty-dollar bottle. I hated him for how little he knew about fine things. I hated him for coming all the way to Queens in a black car. For being cruel to me even though I deserved so much worse. What do you have to fear? he said. And I said, You’re right, we both have nothing to fear. Nothing to lose. But I have my daughter, he said. I have my daughter to lose. And I wanted to kill him because he was taunting me with fatherhood, with all that it meant. So I pushed away from his chest and said, You have to go get cash. This place is cash only. And I want to leave.
Vic had been right. I’d had nothing to fear. Now that I had a child inside of me, I finally understood what he meant.
* * *
ON A SUNDAY THE BLOOD came so rapidly and thickly that I felt like I might pass out. And then I did. My sleep was dreamless only when I took pills. There were few times I slept without them, but this was one occasion. And all of my dreams were nightmares about my parents. Even my good dreams were nightmares, as anyone who has lost someone important knows.
After passing out I dreamed of the Atlantic City boardwalk of my youth where my mother liked to play the slot machines and my father and I would pass the time walking the beach, picking shells, digging for sand crabs. On rainy days we would go to the Ocean One Mall, which was shaped like a cruise liner and full of pastel taffy and mosquito-specked skylights. But my favorite place, probably the most magical of my childhood memory, was an indoor midway at one of the casino hotels. I tried many times to remember the name and never could; it lasted only a year or two, shutting its doors around the time I was eight or nine. It was razed to make room for something less gaudy. But right then, like Lenny, I experienced a sudden clarity and remembered the name: Tivoli Pier, in the Tropicana. The name itself was garish, like everything in Atlantic City. There was a Ferris wheel, though I don’t think we ever rode it, and bumper cars, pinball machines, and a theater starring animated characters who looked like big-name entertainers, Dolly Parton and Wayne Newton, droopy faces that kids wouldn’t know. There was a saloon and a simulated space shuttle ride that was always out of order. There were boardwalk-style rolling chairs that slid you through dark tunnels illuminated with fiber-optic lighting. Along the walls were wax reproductions of Atlantic City’s heyday. Women in high-waisted polka-dot bikinis posing on ginger sand, high dives. The part I loved most was a flying-carpet ride. It was a raised dais covered with a Persian rug, and you would sit on the rug and watch a screen in front of you that showed you flying through the night sky. You could choose from a selection of backgrounds. I’d run through them all and my father would watch me and smile.
After several hours and hundreds of tokens we’d meet my mother and go out for a seafood buffet. All-you-could-eat crab legs for $29.99. Coca-Cola with a glistening cherry on top. It was heaven for me. Why, I wondered, wasn’t it enough for him?
The rest of the night in the Poconos, the last night of my life, my mother ran a bath. None of her products were expensive. In the years to come I would go to the houses of friends and shower in their parents’ master baths and I’d be impressed by the expense or the idiosyncrasy of a particular shampoo. A lotion made of white mallow. A massage oil, the color of gasoline, from the woods of Wisconsin. You can tell a lot about a woman by her bath products, by the range or the minimalism. Sometimes the stingiest lady, seemingly unconcerned about her looks, will own a ferny conditioner from Paris and you will question everything you assumed about her.
My mother’s products were mostly mementos from hotels. From our trips to Italy, all of them, from her honeymoon with my father, which was the first time she saw Rome and Venice and even Florence, though she grew up in a town less than a hundred miles away.
She had multiple shower caps, from La Lumiere in Rome and a beach hotel in San Benedetto. She had old yellow lotions from a hot-springs hotel in Castrocaro Terme and conditioner from a little albergo in Como. There was a room fragrance from a cliffside inn in Sorrento, probably the poshest of the hotels she’d ever been to, and from that same place, a satchel of lavender bath salts contained in a small terry pillow. It was this satchel that she dropped into the ugly tub of our Poconos bathroom, and it was the high, bright smell of lavender that brought me away from the She-Ra cartoon I’d been watching and up that carpeted, narrow stairwell to find my mother naked and vacant in the steamy room.
Her breasts were above the water, huge and white, and the rest of her—slim, tan, European—was below.
Many of my b
oxes now, the ones I have moved around and never opened, the ones that were piled on the ground floor of my Topanga home, are filled with her shower caps, with her lotions and sample sizes of perfumes. They have all gone bad, but I have still saved every single one. None of them, however, contain that bath salt satchel from Sorrento. There was only one of those, and she used it on that last night.
—Mommy, I said. I was wearing my Rainbow Brite pajamas. I don’t think my mother ever saw me as a child.
—Please, she said. I knew what she meant: Go away, leave me be.
I began to cry. It was my only recourse. The steam rose around me. How I wanted to be inside that smell, inside her arms in the water, inside her stomach again, where she couldn’t push me from her.
On the Formica sides of the sink, which were so small that things were always slipping off, were the two Q-tips I’d used that morning. My father had taken them out of the trash. He was a doctor and he thought nothing of spending money on lobster dinners and trips to the Amalfi coast, but he recycled my Q-tips. He thought I used them too indulgently. My mother didn’t care; I don’t think she used Q-tips or, for that matter, ever had ear wax or mucus in her nose. I don’t remember her having a cold in all of the ten years I knew her.
I heard my father light a cigarette downstairs. I heard the screen door open and then I heard it close.
—Mommy, please, I cried, tell me what’s wrong.
She shook her head and looked past me. I knelt down on the humid tiles. The shower curtain was the color of processed cheese.
I fished into the hot water, found her hands, and took them in mine. I brought them to my face. Even after soaking in lavender, they still smelled cooked by cigarettes. My whole childhood is contained in that scent. The mothballs, too. I wanted to take care of her and I wanted her to take care of me. She was the only thing in the world I wanted.