I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway

by Tracy McMillan

  During the trial, I go to Betsy’s house after school, while Yvonne sits in court. No one in Betsy’s family (not even her boisterous older brother Randy, on whom I have a secret crush) says anything about why I am there, and I don’t bring it up, either. And when Yvonne gets home from a long day listening to testimony, no one asks her how things are looking for my dad. No one really wants to know the answer.

  Anyway, soon it becomes obvious how things are going. Badly. Because one day, it is just me and Yvonne in the house, and the next time I see my dad, I have just left the Cody Hotel.

  Turns out not even Eisenberg could save him. But I’m sure Mrs. Turner is very relieved.

  FIVE-POINT-FIVE WEEKS after I have my epiphany on the freeway, my phone rings. I just miss the call, but I recognize the number. Sort of. I’m certain I know who it belongs to, I’m just not quite sure from where. And even though I don’t usually do this, I call back the number. Someone picks up on the first ring.

  “Hello, hello?”

  Oh, shit. It’s him. That guy Paul. I can’t believe this. And BTW, what took you so long to call me?

  “Hi. You just called me.” I make it a statement, not a question, because even though I already know it’s him, I don’t want him to know that I know. So I pretend I don’t. It’s kind of dishonest, yes, but I’m not sure why he’s calling, and I’m not willing to give him that kind of power over me. Taking back my power was the whole point of my Freeway Epiphany.

  “Hee-hee. I did.” He sounds like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I certainly did.”

  I smile like I do when we’re all sitting around in TV news and someone asks what is, say, the capital of Bulgaria, and I say Sofia, and the other writers are dubious, but I just sit there while they debate (Bucharest! Tallin! Bratislava!), without saying a word. Finally someone will Google it and they look at me and see I’m still smiling that particular smile because I already know I’m right.

  I smile like that.

  Because I knew he would call me again. Those three days we spent together were probably the most powerful I have ever experienced with a man, and though I know there are times when two people can have wildly divergent perceptions of the same experience, I knew those three days weren’t one of those times. If I had to surmise what happened—and I don’t have to—I would say that Paul wasn’t completely ready for what our connection was going to mean to his life, i.e., that it was going to change it completely. But that’s really not my business.

  All I know is I knew he would call me again, even if I didn’t know that I knew. Until right now. So it’s easy to be generous and act casual because mostly I’m just enjoying the confirmation that my intuition is excellent. And if that sounds just slightly bitchy and know-it-all-y, I suppose it’s because it is.

  “How’ve you been?” I say, but not like a know-it-all.

  “Good. I just got done shooting a commercial. In Vancouver.”

  “Vancouver? I heard it’s pretty there,” I lob back.

  “It’s bee-yoo-tiful,” he singsongs in his best Looney Tunes voice before slipping back into his management voice: “I’ll have to take you sometime.”

  Here’s what I want to say: You’ll have to take me sometime? Are you high? You told me we didn’t have any chemistry! But I don’t say that, because if I do, this conversation will be over. And I don’t want it to be over. It just started. Or restarted. So instead, I say, “What made you call me?” I’m a bit salty. Why pretend he hasn’t called me in 5.5 weeks after a conversation where he in no uncertain terms gave me the brush-off? (Even if it was a lie.) My technique for getting straight answers is to ask straight questions.

  “Huh?” Paul’s got a technique, too. When he doesn’t want to answer a direct question, he pretends he didn’t hear it.

  “Out of the blue like this. You called me out of the blue.” I’m pressing, but just slightly.

  “Oh, um, I had a dream about you last night.” He’s not saying it in a particularly suggestive manner, even though telling a girl you dreamed about her last night suggests you were lying in bed, naked or something, maybe even next to someone else, thinking about her.

  “Was it a good dream? What happened?”

  “I don’t remember. I just know I woke up and thought, I have to call you.”

  “Really?” I’m going to allow myself to be flattered, just this once. “Huh.”

  Then it’s Paul’s turn to get really direct. “I think I made a mistake,” he says, “and I want to see you again.”

  Hearing these words is a little like discovering exactly what you wanted under the Christmas tree. The red bike you almost didn’t dare to hope for but did anyway? When it shows up, you have the sense that there really are forces for good in the universe—that not only does someone up there like you, but what you want for yourself is what it wants for you, too.

  Still, I’m going to go slow. Sometimes the roads are icy and I wouldn’t want to break something on this shiny red bike. Like my heart. “Why should I see you?” I ask.

  “Because,” he says.

  “Because why?”

  “Because you should.”

  Okay.

  ONE NIGHT I AM LAYING in my canopy bed when Yvonne comes into my room. I should say first that I love every inch of this bed—the faux antiquing, the baroque style, the matching white organdy canopy, bedspread, pillow shams, and flounce. It is the biggest, best consolation prize for having to leave the Ericsons, right after my new pierced ears and the unruly Stanley.

  Yvonne obviously has something important to say. “The Hennepin County Welfare people called,” she begins, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “What did they say?” I am aware that the Hennepin County Welfare people do not call for no reason. They’re like the IRS that way.

  “Well,” she starts, “since I am not your biological mom, and your dad and I aren’t married, they called to inform me that you can’t just live here indefinitely.”

  This is where I should be worried about having to move again, but for some reason I’m not.

  “They did give you some options,” she says.

  Options? I love options. “What are they?” I ask. I’ve never been given options beyond “vanilla” or “chocolate.” (Which is a cinch: vanilla.)

  “Well”—Yvonne sounds very businesslike—“I can either marry your dad so I can formally adopt you, or you can go live at St. Joseph’s.”

  St. Joseph’s is an orphanage. Oh, excuse me. It’s a “home for children.”

  “You mean St. Joseph’s down past the freeway?” I’ve seen that building; it’s on Forty-sixth Street. It looks like a rather large apartment building that got knocked up by a Catholic school. Four floors of red brick filled with kids who, like me, have swiped their metaphorical foster-care subway card to the point that there are no more rides left.

  Yvonne nods her head. “That’s the place.” She looks at me, but there’s no real question in her face. She’s not talking about when I would leave, should I decide to leave. Or what life would be like at the orphanage. Or suggesting that we go down there and take a tour.

  That’s because there’s no doubt in either one of our minds what my choice will be. I mean, how could there be? Have you seen this bedroom set? It’s nicer than the most expensive one in the Sears catalog.

  “Obviously, I am going to stay here,” I declare. I sound a little bit snide, even. Not because I’m trying to be rude, but because if this were a Saturday Night Live skit, it would be hilarious, over-the-top satire to think that I’d even consider trading this bed for a bunk down at St. Joseph’s.

  Yvonne smiles. “Great,” she says. Neither of us stops to ask how Yvonne, who can hardly figure out how to sign a permission slip or make a brown-bag lunch, is going to pull off this whole marriage-adoption-etc. thing.

  A couple of weekends later, Freddie and Yvonne hightail it out to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and elope.

  And shortly after they return, my dad goes back to
prison.

  PAUL AND I MAKE A PLAN TO MEET two days later, at his place. It’s good to wait a couple of days, because that gives me the time I need to do what I usually do in this situation—call about a thousand people to talk over the situation.

  Historically, I bring my problems with love (if you can have a problem with a guy who’s not actually calling you) to my various girlfriends, looking for answers. Every friend has her own point of view—a point of view for which she has been handpicked—so every phone call yields a different course of action. And they all sound so right! So right, I never choose. Sometimes I think I don’t really want to make decisions. I just want to think about what decision I might make if I were going to make one. I’d rather just handicap the race than actually run in it.

  I’m a pundit. In my own love life.

  But as I sit alone with the prospect of getting together again with Paul, I begin to hear a voice that I’ve never really heard before. Or maybe I’ve heard it, but I was at a NASCAR race and couldn’t quite make out what it was saying to me. Anyway, now that I’ve quieted down—maybe because of my age, or maybe because of the events with Paul thus far—I can hear this voice saying two things:

  Seeing Paul is a decision I can never turn back from.

  I know—with more certainty than I’ve ever known anything—that I have to do it.

  Seven

  I Love You, but I’m Sick of Coming Here

  I’M RIDING IN THE BACKSEAT of my Aunt Do’s Mark V Lincoln Continental with my cousins Russell and Ray. We’re on our way to see my dad in his new prison, counting drug money to pass the time.

  “Eight hundred ninety-seven, eight hundred ninety-eight, eight hundred ninety-nine, nine hundred!” I’m hollering, but no one minds. We all love money.

  At age twelve, I have never held this much money in my hand before. It’s a big wad, about as thick as a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia—one of the less popular letters, like maybe “C.” For “cool,” because that’s what money is. Or maybe “F,” for “freedom.”

  After getting out of Leavenworth for a spell so brief it could more accurately be called a vacation (he took me to see A Chorus Line; all I could think was When will this audition part be over and the show start?), my dad got caught doing something or other, I’m not quite sure what. I heard something about a jewelry store, but there were never any details. This time they sent him to a medium-security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, a town that brings to mind absolutely nothing. We should be there in a couple more hours.

  Aunt Do (pronounced “due”) is barely five feet one inch tall, but she deals drugs like a much larger person. DoDo, as we sometimes call her, is a cocaine dealer, who can’t lift her arm above her shoulder because of the time she got shot. Aunt Do is way, and I mean way, fiercer than my dad. He’s never been shot. I doubt he’s even carried that much of a gun. Do did some time in a Texas prison, and since she got out a couple of years ago, she’s been something of a presence in my life, buying me clothes, giving me money, and having me over to her house, where she smokes cigarettes and compulsively drinks Diet Pepsi.

  Aunt Do also takes me to visit my dad, which is the only way I’m going to get there save hitchhiking, since Yvonne is finally over him.

  That happened when Yvonne decided to sell the house, but my dad—who can even hustle from a prison cell—demanded $3,000 to sign the papers. (It’s my fault he can even make such a demand. Minnesota is a community-property state, and they only got married because of me.) Yvonne was livid. She had bought that house herself, it was paid for, and my dad had never contributed, as she said on so many occasions, “one thin dime to it.”

  She held out. Furiously. Which worked, because we had just moved in with Yvonne’s boyfriend—a kindly, older lawyer who used crutches due to a case of childhood polio—and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Stephanie, who took the whole bicentennial craze way too far by painting her bedroom walls red, white, and blue.

  But the lawyer only lasted three months. One day I came home from school and Yvonne was standing in the living room, which was unusual because part of having a boyfriend was that she had gone back to school to finish her bachelor’s degree, in Art History or something useless like that, so she was gone a lot of the time.

  “Get your stuff, we’re leaving,” she said with the economy of a TV news writer. “Just take what you can fit into your suitcase.”

  “Can I take Popcorn?” Popcorn is my Siamese cat. He replaced Stanley, who died of distemper not long after my dad got arrested.

  “Of course,” she says, almost like the question was too stupid to ask. “Popcorn is part of the family.” I guess the lawyer isn’t, and neither is his daughter. We left them—and almost everything else—behind, including my beloved canopy bed.

  Since then, we’ve been living in a twelve-by-fourteen-foot “apartment” in a rooming house with a communal bathroom (upstairs) in the third-worst neighborhood in town while we wait for my dad to drop his demands.

  At school, I am a pigtailed pariah—a biracial late entry in an “integrated” junior high where the student body is made up of white kids from my old neighborhood and black kids from Aunt Do’s neighborhood. All but a couple of the white girls have defriended me, the black girls like to beat me up, and I get a lot of D’s. After school, I mostly shoplift at Sears and contemplate sneaking into the XXX theater at the end of the block. “Sucks” doesn’t go anywhere near far enough in describing my life.

  As the year drags on with no money because we can’t sell the house, Yvonne’s somewhat iffy grip on emotional stability is getting even iffier. She moves us into the attic of the rooming house, a groovy loftlike space whose only drawback is that it has no running water, which means we have to do dishes in the bathtub of the communal bathroom. (That is, when the Moonie or the ballet dancer isn’t in there.)

  My insomnia is getting worse, too—every night when I’m trying to fall asleep I am tortured by images from Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a double feature that Stephanie took me to see at the drive-in when we were still living with the lawyer.

  But the real monster is Yvonne’s rage, which is consuming her more regularly than ever. You never know when it’s going to appear either. One minute you’re at Target buying toilet paper, and the next minute she’s accusing you of things your child-mind could never think of, things she thinks you’re doing to her, like trying to make her “look bad” in front of the other people in the checkout line.

  “How dare you do that to me?” she says as we’re walking out of the store.

  I don’t even know what I did. “What did I do?” I didn’t do anything. But I know this tone of voice, and I know where this is going.

  “Don’t you pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” she hisses. We’re still in the parking lot and there are people around, so she keeps her voice low. But it’s still very threatening.

  I have two choices now. I can argue about whether or not I did what she thinks I did, or I can just stop talking. Sometimes it’s not worth trying to defend myself (it’s not possible anyway), so I stare out the window the whole way home from Target, watching the street signs pass in alphabetical order. I comfort myself with the thought that the alphabet is absolutely stable. It never changes order suddenly. It never thinks you did something to it.

  “Just who do you think you are?” Yvonne seethes. It’s not really a question. It’s more of a rhetorical statement that suggests I’m not worth the air I’m breathing. She’s looking at me now, and I know that if I don’t look back at her things will get even worse. But I don’t want to look. Yvonne’s eyes are belt straps with big buckles that she uses to hit you in ways no one will ever see. To look at her is to bleed.

  “I don’t think I’m anyone,” I say weakly. I just want to be okay. “I’m sorry,” I plead. “I didn’t mean to do anything.” I’m not sassy. I truly am sorry if I did something to make her look bad.

  We ride the remaining quarter-mil
e in thick silence. Yvonne’s method of retaliating for my crimes is to cut me off so completely—for a minute, an hour, or a day—that even though technically I am being fed and watered, it is as if I am all alone in a very small, dark room with very little air. Like solitary confinement.

  We get home, the night ruined. It’s hard to believe that just a half hour ago we were singing along to the Captain and Tenille in the music section. “You go think about what you’ve done,” Yvonne says.

  I go to my room. Thank god for Popcorn. He always comes around when the belt-eyes part is over and the banished part begins. At first, I’m scared and sweaty and I want to scream, but I can’t, so instead, I plead silently with god, Help me help me help me help me. How much longer, god, how much longer?

  On my knees, doubled over on the floor, rocking back and forth, I think to myself, There is no way I can endure this much longer, but I can, and I must. It’s when I am left completely alone like this that the weight of my problem hits me: there is no one, no one, who can save me from her.

  After god, I talk to Popcorn, in a whisper, because there are no doors in this attic—You see what she’s doing to me, don’t you, Popcorn?—and Popcorn blinks his blue Siamese eyes, cat Morse code for Yes, I know, and I’m sorry, but hang in there, because this too, shall pass.

  Then I indulge in my recurring fantasy: that this is all a big test, like an episode of Candid Camera, and any minute someone—the host—is going to burst through the door and tell me it is over and I passed. No one ever does, though. And I know they never will.

  But it still makes me feel better to think that they might.

  IT ISN’T LONG BEFORE Yvonne tries to kick me out. The incident is ignited by the usual “fighting”—Yvonne indicts me for some supposed misdeed—but this time, things escalate to physical violence. Perhaps because I am in junior high and not just taking it the way I used to.