It is over quickly, and when Johnny rolls off and kisses my shoulder and the air is warm against my skin again, I think maybe sex is not so bad. I will just have to remember to keep my eyes closed.
I want to tell you about it, but we have never spoken of sex, and I think you will be angry or disappointed, maybe even repulsed. When you talk of Ricardo, your face glows with a brightness I recognize as love, but I feel none of this in myself. My mind does not go wild with it, and I do not feel hot or tingly.
For me, love feels the same as fear.
You would never understand this. The summer you fall in love with Ricardo, you are rippling with delight. It is the newness, the possibility. For you, a man means a shining future. It always will, I think, no matter how many times it goes wrong.
Looking back, I should have hated Ricardo. But honestly, I never thought he was that bad. Humorless and dull as a board, but harmless. He was a doctor, after all. I forgot that most dangerous men look innocent, at first.
* * *
It isn’t hard to get drugs at Villa Cabrini Academy, so my school years pass in a blur, marked only by summer.
The next summer, you will be married to Ricardo, and Johnny will have moved away. I will try my first tab of acid with Sandy and become purple dust. For the first time since Cuba, I will feel light and free and beautiful. It will intoxicate me, and I will want to be purple dust forever.
Every summer until we are nineteen years old, Sandy and I will swear a forever friendship in the whispered dark of drunken sleepovers, promising to write all year long and then forgetting.
She and I will last longer than our many boyfriends, but our friendship won’t last forever.
* * *
It is Sandy who calls you when I am curled on the living room rug tripping on LSD. It is August 1965, one year after I graduate from high school. The same year Sandy spent studying biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara while I waitressed at the Pancho Villa Inn. A year in which the US sent 125,000 soldiers to Vietnam and Malcolm X was shot, and all I paid attention to was Sonny and Cher on American Bandstand and The Ed Sullivan Show. I watched a lot of TV, while avoiding news if I could. I did see the Watts riots while snorting cocaine at Tuesday Weld’s pool party, but that’s only because everyone was watching. Sitting on the floor in her living room wearing a bikini, the rug itching the underside of my bare legs, I stared at her TV screen, encased in shiny mahogany. We watched Molotov cocktails being thrown by angry white policeman into crowds of angry Black men who were setting buildings on fire. I didn’t believe it was really happening in Los Angeles. From where I sat, the sky out the window was blue and clear of smoke, and all I cared about was if Tommy Kirk had any more marijuana. He’s a movie actor, five years older than me. Disney fired him for being gay, but he can sure score good dope.
That Thursday morning in August, when I drop a tab of acid, the sun is not shining. Dark clouds have swept in threatening to rain, even though it never rains in August. I ask Sandy if she wants a tab, and she says no. She’s dating a guy at college named Barry, who doesn’t do that sort of thing.
“Well, good for Barry,” I say, tossing my cigarette butt out the sliding glass door onto the patio before placing the tab on my tongue.
When you come home, I am lying on the floor. It seems as if I have been here for hours watching Sandy’s toes—sticking out from her sandals like tiny pigs’ noses—marching back and forth in front of me. Eventually, they are joined by another set of feet, thick ankles and short heels. Grandmother Maria’s shoes alongside your tiny tennis shoes. Did you run here? I wonder. Your voices roll over me hushed and urgent and worried. Then I drop onto my back and smile up at your floating heads. Don’t worry, I want to say. Can’t you see how I sparkle? I am as beautiful as you now, Mom. But then you try and lift me, and I worry that I will fall through your fingers. You can’t lift dust, I want to say. You won’t be able to hold on. You will lose me.
* * *
You do lose me—to the psychiatric ward of The Good Hope Medical Foundation. Or rather, you stick me in here. You say it’s for my own good, which of course I don’t believe, at least not in the beginning.
But after three months in the psych ward, I begin to feel safe for the first time in years.
The week I am due to get out, I stand in the doorway of the hospital room, which I share with my roommate Delia Pereira, waiting for your phone call. If I scoot with my toes over the line of green tile that separates my room from the hallway, I can see the phone propped on the nurse’s desk like a black cat I’m waiting to spring to life. Call, I think. You were supposed to call at 4:30 p.m. A large clock on the wall behind the desk says 4:53. Every day since you first brought me here, we’ve spoken at precisely 4:30. No matter how furious I was with you at the beginning, you’ve never missed a single one of our calls.
Nurse Doris, a bottle blonde with rouged cheeks and a stern, pink mouth, sits at the desk filing her nails. She looks like someone from Ohio who arrived fresh out of high school and dreamed of making it in the pictures, then found out she wasn’t so pretty after all. Now she spends her days pinning girls’ arms behind their backs and wiping shit off the walls from the crazy girl down the hall. Technically, we’re all crazy in here, but there’s really only the one, Samantha Padovano, sallow-cheeked with patches of hair missing where she rips it out. The rest of us were just caught with too much time on our hands.
Delia’s father is an attorney who travels and sleeps with other women, and her mother is a drunk who tries to take her own life once a year. Delia is in here because she had a breakdown and smashed every dish in the house. Her little sister stepped on a piece of glass and cut her foot, and her mom said Delia had gone crazy and was a danger to them all.
Delia makes living here almost enjoyable. She doesn’t expect anything of me as a friend. When I don’t want to talk, she doesn’t make me, and when I’m mean, she says, “You go on and freak out, girl. I’ve taken worse,” which usually makes me feel bad and apologize.
Life in a psych ward is life with a routine. I get my blood drawn each morning, eat three meals a day, always at the same time, and see a psychiatrist named Dr. Gataki who asks how I am feeling. “Fine,” I say, always fine. He is long-limbed, dark-haired and skinny, not old or young, married (there’s a ring), and frustratingly calm, even when I swear at him. As long as I stay sober and act respectably sane, everyone is happy. He has gotten me to talk about the past, which I did in a defiant way at first. A Fuck you. You want it? Here you go, but then it started to feel good having someone listen. It was easier to talk about it all with someone who means nothing to me. I admitted to him that I don’t miss the drugs, and that maybe I only did them because I was bored.
“And to numb out the past,” he suggests.
I shrug. “Maybe.”
They’ve given us a small radio in our room, and Delia’s introduced me to a band called The Who. She says when she gets out she’s moving to London because that’s where all the cool bands are. She says I should go with her.
“That sounds fun,” I say, thinking of you. Even at nineteen, I can’t imagine living a continent away. I’ve never had the desire to travel abroad like everyone else my age. Cuba was enough for me. “I’m thinking of going to college,” I say because this is more realistic.
The telephone rings, and I lean anxiously out my door making sure my feet don’t cross the line of tile into the hallway. We’re not allowed out of our rooms during quiet hours unless we have a prearranged phone call which Nurse Doris, and only Nurse Doris, has the power to grant. If I piss her off by stepping over the line unbidden, she might not let me out at all.
She lets the phone ring four times before lifting the receiver, propping it between her ear and shoulder so there’s no pause in her nail filing. “Good Hope psychiatric clinic. Yes, ma’am. She’s right here.” She motions from the desk with a flap of her manicured hand.
My st
ockinged feet slap across the tile as I snatch the phone out of her hand. “Mom?”
“Nina,” your voice sounds funny.
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh,” you say with a breathy laugh, “so much and so little.”
“What do you mean? Why didn’t you call at 4:30?”
“I got tied up, but don’t worry, I promise to call on time tomorrow. Now, tell me about you. How are they treating you?”
“Fine.”
“What did you eat for breakfast?”
“Bacon and eggs.”
“You hate eggs.”
“I know, but I ate them, anyway. If you don’t eat, they assume something’s wrong with you.”
“Well, eggs won’t kill you.”
“No.”
There’s a beat of silence, and then you whisper, “Nina, I’m leaving Ricardo,” as if he’s standing near you, listening.
“Why?” I ask, oblivious to all I missed this past year living under the same roof as the two of you.
I hardly ever saw Ricardo. He got up early, and I sleep in. Neither of you were home often: usually out at restaurants or parties or working late. When our paths did cross, Ricardo would be coming home late at night from the hospital, while I’d be up watching TV. We kept our interactions single-syllabled.
I thought very little of him, but now, your silence on the other end of the phone worries me. “What did he do? Are you okay?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.” Your voice is thin.
“What’s going on? What’s wrong?” I’m imagining an affair, a pink-lipped, dully attractive nurse like Doris saddling Ricardo in his office chair. Maybe you walked in on them. “Mom?”
“You get out next week.” Your voice lifts, semicheerful but not convincing.
“I know.”
I’m not sure I want to get out. I’ve only recently come to realize how terrified I am of the world. Dr. Gataki says it’s because of my past, because of Alfonso, and then my father who I couldn’t trust and didn’t know what he’d do next. Then there was the border police and the rebel soldiers and finally Che who was the most terrifying of all. Dr. Gataki told me the drugs weren’t just to numb out the memories but also a way I’d learned to terrify myself.
“Sunday, 9:00 a.m. I’ll pick you up,” you are saying.
“But you’ll call tomorrow?”
“4:30 precisely, I promise.”
“Okay. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I hang up the phone. Doris has opened a bottle of white nail polish and is carefully painting her thumbnail. The smell is worse than the antiseptic hospital scent that lingers on everything. “Back to your room, missy,” she says without looking up.
I sit on my bed and watch Delia take her afternoon nap. The winter sunlight filters through the narrow windows but fails to warm the hospital chill that blankets everything. On the nightstand is Josepha’s gold barrette. It’s the only thing I brought with me besides clothes. Delia asked about it, and I told her the whole truth.
“Wow, man, that’s intense shit,” she’d said, listening with somber respect.
I take the barrette in my hand and lie down, rolling up in my covers, the white ceiling panels overhead like neatly arranged sugar cubes. I find it impossible to sleep in the middle of the afternoon. Usually, I watch the traffic out the window or reread my father’s letters. After Mexico, Chu Chu still visited once a year, but I was only allowed to see him accompanied by a chaperone courtesy of Edward Adelman’s lawyer. My father loves me, I’ve decided. His letters don’t state it directly, but he always says he wishes you had left me in Mexico with him, and on most days, I wish you had too.
I’m jealous of Delia’s ability to sleep. At night, she’s snoring almost the instant her head hits the pillow. I don’t know how she does it. It takes me hours to fall asleep, and when I do, my dreams are colored with violence.
I am worried about you.
Delia says my attachment to you is unnatural. Mothers aren’t supposed to be our best friends. “Take mine,” she says, sitting cross-legged on her chair in the dining hall that first week we met. She takes a bite out of her doughnut, flips her straight hair. “I loathe her. My mom criticizes the music I listen to, my jeans, my hair.” Her self-righteous voice is edgy. “She still thinks I’m a virgin. I swear to God.” She leans toward me. “Can you believe she thinks being a housewife is some kind of honorable profession for a woman?”
I tell her that you are not a housewife. You’re a working mom who buys me jeans, helps me iron my hair and tells me I can be whatever I want. Eating my own doughnut, sugar crumbling into my lap, I tell Delia about the time you took me on a double date with Desi Arnaz and Dean Martin, how you let me pick out a dress that made me feel pretty for the first time in my life.
“You are pretty,” Delia says matter-of-factly, and I think of Josepha saying how ugly we were and wonder if she grew up pretty, too. Delia finishes her doughnut and licks the powdered sugar from her fingers. “I suppose your mother put you in here for your own good, too, and not to get you out of her hair?” she says, and I say, yes, that’s exactly what you did. Delia is not convinced. “If your mom is so goddamn perfect, why are you so fucked up? Why drugs? And why don’t you talk about anyone in your family besides your mom?”
I shrug and finish my doughnut. I don’t tell her how, after Cuba, Josepha’s bloody face was all I saw when I closed my eyes. How the sound of my skull hitting the floor ricocheted inexhaustibly in my head. Even now, as I lie rolled like a sausage in a hospital bed—a fully grown woman with years since the child who was snatched and then rescued and then dropped into a war zone—the word family still makes me hear the screams of my grandmother while Che’s hot, fumbling fingers pulled up my skirt.
There are things families don’t talk about.
That’s what Dr. Gataki is for. I pull the covers up over my head and breathe into my hands to warm them. I am afraid if I leave that the silence between you and me, Mom, will be easy again, that I’ll even find comfort in it, like slipping my head under warm bathwater. I’m afraid I won’t be able to come up for air.
The next day I tell Dr. Gataki, “I am afraid when I leave I’ll turn to drugs again, that drowning in them will be easier than living with the memories.”
“Can you live with them in here?” he asks.
“Yes, but it’s safe in here.”
“It’s safe out there, too,” he says.
Only for some of us, I will later think.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
* * *
Shame
Daughter,
During our phone call, Nina, I sit on the kitchen floor in a puddle of water, your voice calming me. I want to tell you the truth, but I cannot. The air smells of burned toast. From where I sit, I can see the perfectly charred black tops poking up out of the toaster.
After we hang up, I drop the receiver and leave it dangling by its twisted cord against the kitchen wall as I turn toward the bedroom. Leaning against the back of my vanity chair, I pull off my sopping skirt and peel my wet underwear down over my scraped knees. I haven’t had scraped knees since I was a child. It’s a funny thing to see on a grown woman. Funny in a disturbing way.
Earlier, I was out by the pool folding laundry and remembering the times in our old house in Sherman Oaks when Mamá hung the laundry to dry on the line and we’d fold it together on the lounge chairs. I machine-dry now, but sometimes I still like to fold the wash outside in the sunshine.
The slider to the living room is open, and deep inside the house I hear the front door slam. Ricardo is never home this early.
“Hello?” I drop a folded towel into the basket and walk toward the glass doors. Sunlight reflects off them, and all I see is my own image before Ricardo steps out so abruptly I let out a small scream, followed by a nervous laugh. “You scare
d the bejesus out of me.”
He stands with one hand on the doorjamb, the other at his side. His white doctor’s coat hangs open above his knees, and beneath it his shirt looks soaked with sweat. He’s pushed his hair up off his forehead, and his face is flushed, his eyes narrow slits against the sun.
“What’s wrong?” I take a step back, my hand already raised in self-defense, a weak, instinctual gesture that never does any good.
“The house is full of smoke.” There is bewildered alarm in his voice, as if I’ve burned the house down.
“Oh, goodness.” My voice shakes. “I must have forgotten about my toast. I’ll air it out.”
It doesn’t matter what I say, the damage is done. He lunges at me, grabs the back of my head and forces me to my knees. I know, burned toast sounds ridiculous, but he has hit me for less.
“I’m sorry,” I cry, another pathetic, instinctual impulse. Did any amount of pleading ever stop an abusive man? I might as well have asked how he was feeling and if there was anything I could do to help.
With a fist around my hair, he drags me across the cement decking. I crawl and slide, unable to get up, my skirt tearing under me, the skin on my knees splitting open. At the edge of the pool, the water is crystal clear and still as glass. He releases my hair long enough for me to hope that dragging me is all he intends to do. And then his small, iron fingers grip the back of my neck. It’s surprising how strong his hands are. On our first date, when he helped me off with my coat, I noticed how thin and delicate his fingers were. I like a man with broad hands, the wide space at the base of a man’s thumb my favorite part. As Ricardo’s hand circles my neck from behind, I think I may never like any part of a man’s hand again. My body is thrust forward, my chest pinned against the edge of the pool. Ricardo’s fingers pinch the top of my spine, and my head plunges into the pool. Water splashes as my arms flail. I try and reach backward, grab his arm or claw his eyes. Anything. The instinct to survive is impressive, how we fight to the end. My eyes are wide-open, stinging from chlorine, my world turned a soft, blurry blue.
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