Happy Family

by Tracy Barone

  She was deeply in love. That stupid-and-crazy love that songs are written about. She’d wear Eddie’s wifebeater under her Kevlar because he was her good luck. Was it because she was young, the cliché that the first cut is the deepest? Was it a cop thing? It was true that cops dated other cops or nurses because nobody else could understand the daily trauma that comes from witnessing the depths of human depravity, suffering, and violence. But it was more than that. Eddie Norris had done something for her no man ever had. He’d stood up for her, and he did it when he had a lot to lose and nothing to gain.

  Why, they all asked. Why was the resounding question when Cheri announced she was dumping Yale grad school for the police academy. She knew her choice to join the NYPD would alienate her family and friends. Even though Sol and Cici knew nothing about Near Eastern languages and religion, they had liked being able to say, “My daughter’s going to Yale.” While they’d never come to terms with her appearance—she’d been adding piercings and tattoos steadily since high school—and they hated that she lived in the East Village with all the weirdos, druggies, and Mohawked punks who Sol said made “hate-crime” music—their unconventional daughter was still on track to have a respectable white-collar career. “Why would you throw that all away?” they wailed. To become a cop, of all things.

  Of course, Cici panicked that she’d get killed. Even more typical, she demanded to know why Cheri would agree to wear a uniform and look like a janitor. Sol was convinced it was all for shock value. He said if she followed through he’d never give her another dime. But Cheri had never felt at home in their bubble of privilege and she was certain that wherever her birth parents came from, it was more trailer park than Park Avenue. But there was more to it than that. Festering beneath her bravado was something too painful and complicated for Cheri to acknowledge, even to herself. Cheri’s relationship with her father had always been distant, complicated, and, in the storm of her teenage rebellion, volatile. They’d stumbled along the frayed edges of their imposed family bond until, in her junior year of college, Cheri pulled on the one thread that would unravel it permanently. She’d cemented herself into complicity the day she confronted Sol about his secret, and after that, the thought of ever accepting his money made her feel dirty.

  “What the fuck, CM? A cop?” brayed Taya when Cheri told her the news. “Are you going to start busting your friends, arrest me for smoking weed? There’s a reason they’re called pigs—not to mention they’re all bridge-and-tunnel.” Cheri didn’t expect for it to make sense to anyone except Gusmanov. Her family’s Russian handyman had been her secret-sharer growing up; she owed her expert marksmanship to his tutelage. Gusmanov always smelled of talcum and tobacco. Cheri never cared that he was even older than her father. He showed her how to throw a pocketknife into the trunk of a tree and taught her Russian words. Best of all, Gusmanov had a gun. “Only for protection and sport,” he’d told her when she saw it sticking out of his waistband as he crawled under her sink to fix a pipe. When she pinkie-swore that she wouldn’t say anything to her parents, he let her examine it and explained the parts and how important it was to always keep it safe. Maybe one day he would let her hold it. When he eventually deemed her ready, he patiently taught her how to use it. She was a quick learner and a naturally great shot—at fourteen, she was an NRA double-distinguished marksman. But while Gusmanov acknowledged she’d be a good cop, even he had reservations. “Why you don’t listen to me and go pro sharpshooter? It will make wallet much fatter.”

  But becoming a police officer made sense to her, and, for the first time in her life, she felt she could make a difference. Sol didn’t buy it. “Now you’re going to save the world? The people down there are degenerates and junkies who don’t even try to help themselves. Doctors save lives! If you want to ‘make a difference,’” he said, mimicking her earnest tone, “go volunteer in a hospital near Yale while you get your degree.” There was no way Sol could comprehend that Cheri specifically wanted to help the “people down there.” She’d lived on the Lower East Side during her four years at NYU. The neighborhood was like her—gritty, rebellious, dangerous, and teeming with diversity. She not only didn’t stick out, she belonged. And was deeply affected by random acts of violence that destroyed the lives of people she cared about, like her friend Yure’s grandson who was jumped by a street gang and had to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Yure was one of the Ukrainian immigrants who hustled playing speed chess in the park and he reminded her of Gusmanov. Her parents wouldn’t understand that she missed Sweetie, the post-op tranny who worked the door at Eileen’s Reno Bar and threw out acerbic comments about everyone who walked by. Sweetie had been killed on her way home from work by neo-Nazi skins. It made sense to Cheri and that’s all that mattered. She was making the leap into the thump of a life lived on the outside.

  Of course she didn’t disclose to anyone in the NYPD that she’d come from ritzy Montclair and had a college degree. It wouldn’t have mattered to Eddie Norris. He wouldn’t know a doctorate from a doughnut. He only cared that she was the best shot in her academy class, that she was fast, reliable, and a quick study. Then there was the sex.

  It started as a smack-down of passion in his Mazda hatchback, replete with adolescent pawing, fogged-up windows, bra-hook complications, and the discomfort of handguns pressing into sensitive places. They didn’t break lips even when Cheri performed a near-contortionist move to straddle him. He fumbled to get inside her, one hand on his cock, the other on her hip, pushing a little too hard, a little too fast, but once he’d hit the mark, he cupped her face in his hands. “You okay?” he said, looking her right in the eyes. She nodded and started to move her hips, but he held her chin and said, “I want you to tell me if you’re not.” They fucked again in the vestibule of her apartment building, ignoring the persistent stink of urine. Her back was up against the wall next to the mailboxes, her legs were around his waist, his jeans were snaking down around his ankles; a down-and-dirty fuck on all counts. And not. Because while they were fucking they were kissing and while they were kissing their eyes were open. Cheri had never had a man look at her while they made love. Or if he did, she didn’t know about it, because her eyes had been tightly closed.

  If they’d had sex before she’d become his partner, it would have worked out very differently. Everyone would have thought he chose her only because he was fucking her. She might have thought so too. But she and Eddie hadn’t gone “over the side” until well after they’d become partners, and by then they both knew it was going to be more than a onetime thing.

  Just as Cheri starts to lose herself in another memory of Eddie coming up behind her in the precinct’s file room late at night, whispering exactly what he was going to do to her as his hands clasped hers behind her back, the bartender asks if she wants a refill. “Not yet,” she says. How long has it been since she’s had an open-eyed kiss? She remembers the electricity that shot from her groin and lodged itself in her chest whenever she inhaled Eddie Norris’s clean, masculine scent—a mixture of soap on a rope and sweat that lingered in her hair. Another filament of memory floats up and, with it, the phantom weight of a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson handgun against her left hip. Back then, and for a long time afterward, she couldn’t imagine not carrying a gun. And now she’s married to anti-gun Michael, sitting on a bar stool playing what-if. That’s an insidious game, inevitably leading to that night with Red Hood, the look in Eddie Norris’s eyes that sent her running from the NYPD, barricading herself in Cici’s Eighty-first Street apartment in a drug-induced tailspin of heartbreak. You have the right to remain silent. She certainly did that. It’s dark and deep down there, a chasm of shadows and regret.

  Punch-Drunk Love

  You have a house for guest, that is where the guest stay. Your husband does not want me as a guest anymore,” Cici wails into the phone. Three weeks since their last round of pin-the-tail-on-the-birthday, Cheri has been sucked into another. Cheri had been trying to convince herself that she could
get some work done while jammed into the table in their bedroom, but so much for best-laid plans.

  “The guesthouse is Michael’s office, he works in there, at all hours. You complain that the pull-out couch in the den hurts your back and the air conditioner—”

  “The thing in the window makes so much noise and does nothing. I tell you to get the build-in and you do not listen. Why you no spend the money?”

  “I just think you’d be much more comfortable in a hotel,” Cheri says, thinking of her mother’s tendency to mix white wine and Valium and wander around at night in the nude. Cici reacts to this suggestion like she’s Napoleon being forced into exile on Elba. “Besides,” Cheri adds, “we’re not having a party.”

  “Whaaat?” After more back-and-forth, Cici finally gives in. But not without adding, in a wounded voice: “You really want me to make you the birthday wish from a thousand miles away? Like not looking a person in the eye when you make a toast, it is not good luck.” That’s a stretched analogy, even for Cici. But hearing the lingering hope in her voice gives Cheri a pang of guilt as she assures Cici that this is, indeed, what she wants.

  They have this fight every year around Cheri’s birthday. Usually Cheri would say fine, don’t come here, I’ll come to you. Cici lived in their Upper East Side apartment, and despite her penchant for constantly changing interior design, she kept it exactly as it was when Sol died. As if that would somehow cement the happiness of their last few years together and faux over everything that came before. The house in Montclair, Cici complained, was too big for a woman all alone, without company. She kept threatening to sell it, happily ignoring the fact that Sol’s will provided that their holdings transfer to Cheri with Cici as the life beneficiary but with no signing power. It was an unexpected turn of events for Cheri, but it wasn’t the only surprise in Sol’s will.

  After hanging up with her mother, Cheri attempts to get back to work—if she could really call it that. For hours, she’s been fiddling around on Baghdad.com and obsessively checking her e-mail to see if Peter Martins has dispatched the promised photocopies of his fragments to her. Not that she could accomplish any meaningful work on them at this stage, but at least she’d feel close to the actual starting point. Everything she cares about is in plain sight but out of reach, like the toys in one of those claw vending machines. The Tell Muqayyar tablets remained hidden behind a cloud of increasingly hysterical WMD rhetoric, Samuelson has been incommunicado since putting her on suspension, and even Michael, perpetually in crisis mode over his never-to-be-completed documentary, was desperately seeking a shaman. When she walked into the kitchen this morning, he was venting on the phone to Bertrand, his producer, that the shaman he absolutely must shoot was coming to the U.S. but he’d been co-opted by an environmentalist in Sedona. “That guy caters to celebrities and woo-woos,” Michael exclaimed. “His workshops are bullshit. We’re making documentary art.” For someone who had never left the Ecuadoran jungle, the shaman was certainly in demand. After twenty more minutes of aimless clicking, Cheri realizes she needs to leave, having promised Michael she’d meet him at the Biograph. The house feels like an Ecuadoran jungle and she cares more about the theater’s air-conditioning than about the movie itself—all she knows is that it’s by a director with three names, one of the rare Hollywood types Michael has blessed with his seal of approval.

  As Cheri’s walking out of the door, her phone buzzes. Samuelson’s name flashes on the screen. Cheri takes a deep breath before answering. Shockingly, Samuelson’s voice is buoyant. “Good news. After considerable effort, I’ve prevailed upon Mr. Richards to dismiss his complaint. All you need to do is write a letter of apology, and we can put this matter behind us.”

  “Apologize?” Cheri says, veering from relief to indignation in a second. “For what?”

  “We can craft it along the lines of an acknowledgment. You apologize for your lack of sensitivity regarding his personal and religious beliefs and admit that this may have led you to make an oversight regarding his final grade. You say you’re willing to revisit his grade based on a third party’s review and recommendation.”

  “You want me to admit to something I didn’t do. I don’t take issue with my work being reviewed by a committee. But I do take issue with apologizing for being unprofessional or unethical when I was neither. If a committee finds that I did something wrong, that’s one thing, but right now all we have is the student’s word—and feelings.” Cheri wants to add And I’m not changing his grade but thinks better of it.

  “Don’t let this be your hamartia, Professor Matzner. This letter is informal and not subject to the committee’s review. Yet.”

  Cheri hesitates. He’s backing her into a corner, one she’s been in before. The familiarity is visceral; her fight-or-flight mechanism is in overdrive.

  “I know the Richards family is important to the university. I appreciate this fact puts you in a difficult position. I will cooperate with anyone and everyone. If I made a mistake I’ll admit to it, informally or formally. But I cannot—and will not—apologize for something I did. Not. Do.” She thinks she hears him tsk her.

  “That’s very disappointing. You understand, Professor Matzner, that it’s now out of my hands? Without an apology, I cannot hurry things along. This will be a drawn-out, deliberative process, and I have no influence over the findings. You will hear from the committee chair as soon as one has been appointed.”

  “I understand,” Cheri says with a confidence she no longer feels.

  “As I told you before, academic suspension applies to everything associated with the university, including participation on my translation team.” Cheri feels punctured. All the air is leaking out of her. “If you want to reconsider, I’m telling you: now is the time.”

  It takes a second for Cheri to respond. “I cannot do that, Professor Samuelson. You know where to find me.”

  By the time Cheri walks to the Biograph she’s pressed her nails into her palms so tightly they’ve left angry indentations. She’s being blackmailed. Again. She pictures Eddie Norris’s face, tight, shifty, unable to look her in the eye. Her heart is racing. Michael’s pacing in front of the box office. He throws his hands up. “What the fuck? I texted you three times.”

  “Don’t,” she snaps. “Just fucking don’t.”

  “Now there are only shitty seats left,” Michael grumbles as the lights dim in the theater. They stumble past a dozen knees—“Sorry, excuse me”—to get to the only two seats together. “Evidence, not emotion,” Michael offers after she whispered a rushed recap of her phone call. “Don’t get sidetracked by how fucked up it is or by asking yourself why your boss is listening to a kid over you—stick to the evidence. You didn’t do anything wrong, right?” She is pissed off that he asked. She doesn’t want platitudes. She just wants him to take her side.

  It’s only when Punch-Drunk Love starts that Cheri realizes she’s in for two hours of tedium told through the claustrophobic lens of a typical Adam Sandler man-child. It doesn’t help that the large man on her left is taking up both armrests and that the smell of melted jalapeño cheese mixes with his BO whenever he moves an arm to dip a chip. She starts to ask Michael to switch seats with her, but someone behind her shushes her. She hates being shushed. Suddenly, everything is closing in on her. She’s sweaty and antsy; her mouth is bone-dry. She needs air. It feels like someone is squeezing her heart in a vise. Really bad heartburn? Does she have her Tums? No, this feels different. Get it together. Now. She needs air. Her chest is constricted and her breath is shallow. She leaps to her feet, flails past the dozen knees again, gulping for air, mouth opening and closing like a hooked bass. Somehow she makes it outside and sinks to the pavement. Michael appears beside her, asking questions. “Can’t talk.” She gasps. She’s massaging her chest and someone asks about her arm. Is she having a heart attack? She’s in a Magritte, a forest of pant legs; they threaten to smother her, she’s buried in pants.

  Michael’s holding her shoulders. “Breathe, in an
d out, close one nostril and then the other.” Her chest feels like a buffalo is standing on it. “It must have been the movie, it stunk so bad,” a teenage boy says, walking past her.

  The paramedics arrive. “Who called them?” Cheri rasps when she sees the ambulance. “I don’t need them.” Then, to prove her point, she gets up. “Whoa, not so fast,” says a trained medical professional. Two paramedics sit beside her and start checking her vitals, running through their list of questions. “I just couldn’t breathe,” she repeats over and over, “but I’m better now.” Is she on drugs, under stress, any known medical conditions?

  “It’s likely a panic attack,” one paramedic says. “Nothing cardiac. I suggest you follow up with your physician, and if you haven’t had one recently, get a physical to rule out anything else.” Michael starts to ask questions about panic attacks but Cheri interrupts. “I’m good, so let’s go, okay?”