Do you remember Chad Lambo, Helen? Does the name ring a bell? He’s been supporting us like we’re part of his own family. He says he went to school with you, that you might know him.
What Chad? I said. I don’t remember a Chad.
You don’t remember Chad Lambo?
I don’t know a Chad, I said, and I don’t care to.
My adoptive father gulped down his tea, got up from the couch and went to the cabinet above the stereo and took out a bottle of gin, which he proceeded to pour into his empty teacup.
So it’s just the three of us, I said, echoing my adoptive father.
They each frowned. I thought they were displeased, but it could have been about anything; there was nothing good in the situation. My adoptive father looked particularly angry. I thought he was going to ask me to leave the house again.
Helen, he said, I think it’s time to go to sleep.
Had it really been five years since we had seen each other? Or was my adoptive father becoming senile?
I’ll put fresh sheets on your bed, said my adoptive mother, and she stood up.
Tears the temperature of near-boiling water sprang out of my eyes for no reason, no reason at all. It was humiliating to cry in front of them as an adult. Ashamed, I ran up the stairs.
7
The first night back in my childhood bedroom, after a five-year-long absence, I sat on the carpeted floor and arranged my clothes and items into neat piles, I distracted myself from the miserable circumstances that brought me back to the fortress. To put my clothes and things into order was better than meditation, I thought, and much more productive. Arrange your room and you can arrange the world, I said to no one. Once I was finished organizing my things on the floor, I made my way into the closet, a walk-in filled with objects in chaos: a poster of silver dolphins swimming peacefully in a neon-green radioactive ocean, several books about crime including the O.J. Simpson trial, JonBenét Ramsey, Jeffrey Dahmer, one acid Western paperback, a photo of ten nude men on a ten-seated bicycle, aviator sunglasses, a fisherman’s hat with the initials BC, a high school yearbook, two Fiona Apple CDs, a poster of Fiona Apple in her underwear crawling out of a couch, a worn Dover edition of The Odyssey, with many lines enthusiastically highlighted in the first few chapters. I set it down and paged through the yearbook until I realized it wasn’t my yearbook, because I couldn’t find a picture of myself; it was my adoptive brother’s, 2003, a couple years after I graduated. I examined the well-meaning end-of-school-year messages from a few friends, I counted five signatures, inscribed with black markers and pens on the inner cover. I remembered one of the friends, Zachary Moon. He wrote: HAVE A GOOD SUMMER YOU FAGGOT. Smiley face. There were crude little drawings of bongs and breasts and vaginas and cars. YOURE MOMS CUNT. YOURE SISTERS TWAT. As I paged through the senior portraits, I became enchanted by all of the mocking and bitter faces. Everyone was broken and ruinous.
I crawled into bed, exhausted from my arranging, and immediately I felt the flower-patterned comforter from my childhood smother my adult female body. It made the skin under my breasts sweat, and the sweat soaked through my nightshirt, a gigantic men’s XXL Hanes V-neck I found wadded into a soiled ball on an empty seat in the F train on St. Patrick’s Day. I took off my shirt and threw it onto one of the piles on the floor. My breasts were the size of small, shrunken apples. The horse-pulling-the-cart image came into my mind as I wiped the sweat onto the comforter, and instead of the smell of apples, the smell of cucumbers wafted into the air, causing me to gag. I expected to find peace in my childhood bedroom, but not even opening the windows to let the room air out for hour after hour would release the stench of death and cucumbers permeating the room, and the house, a house of death.
8
Once upon a time the house was infested with silverfish. They came out of the cupboards and closets in great numbers, they came out of every single crevice of the house, from the cracks in the ceilings to underneath the doors. Some men in hazardous-material outfits drizzled pesticide over the entire house, a pesticide which left a chemical residue that we were forced to inhale for weeks upon weeks because my adoptive father was too cheap to put us up in a hotel while the poison tapered off. Sometimes I thought we might have become brain-damaged from the fumes, each of us sustaining catastrophic brain injuries, it would have explained so much.
9
My face began to itch as I thought of the pesticide. Small hives pimpled up and down my cheeks and clustered at the sides of my nose. To calm myself, I thought of a waterfall, a coping strategy I learned from a coworker who experienced post-traumatic stress syndrome after she saw a person get hit by a truck in Tribeca.
The body exploded into pieces, she said, and the pieces flew all over, and some of it sprayed me in the face. How am I supposed to live with that? Whenever I think about the situation, and I can’t help but think about it, every day, and at night before I fall asleep, if I sleep, I begin to feel the spray hitting my face, so my therapist told me to think of a waterfall, a beautiful, peaceful waterfall.
It was called The Waterfall Coping Strategy. An image flashed in my own mind of a waterfall, even though I had never seen a waterfall in person. I had seen a watermill, so I switched to that image, to make myself more comfortable: a broken-down watermill surrounded by a forest in autumn. My adoptive mother brought us there when we were young, at a time when her hobby was photography. She took black-and-white photos of familiar objects close up, on a micro level, transforming everyday objects into something unrecognizable and monstrous. I hated those photos; I thought they were disgusting, they made me think of pores on a face. As soon as the image of the watermill and her photography phase settled comfortably into my brain, I saw my adoptive mother taking pictures of the oak leaves in various stages of decay. She zoomed in on the pattern of holes that punctured a leaf’s tenuous fabric, while my adoptive brother and I hid behind the watermill. He was nine years old and I about to turn twelve, a repulsive time for me as I was just beginning to menstruate. Together, he and I had invented a game, because our adoptive parents were far too cheap to buy us board games or video games.
You each have the faculties to create your own games for fun, they told us. All you need is your imagination.
We made up a game called CONFESSION.
Do you ask for forgiveness of your sins? I said to him.
I played the priest, naturally, because I was older and more mature.
I want to confess my sins, Father. He bowed his head.
Go ahead, young man.
Last week I lied to our parents. I told them I had after-school baseball practice, but I didn’t. It’s not even the season for baseball, and besides, I’m terrible at it.
What did you do instead?
I went to the park with Max and we brought a magnifying glass. The sun was out, shining brightly, and there was a little boy there by himself. We snuck up behind him, grabbed his arms, and held him down against the gravel, Max rolled up the little boy’s shirt, and I burned his back with the glass. He had pale skin. Max and I watched the sunlight laser into it and burn him. I remember he had freckles and moles. We burned his skin with the sun. Before we let him go, I realized he was much younger than I thought, probably four or five years old. I think he wet himself, because he smelled like urine. And for this, Father, I ask for forgiveness.
Do you understand that lying is one of the gravest sins, I said, worse than stealing, worse than kidnapping?
I told him he would have to humiliate his body in some way, in order to atone for his sins and the harm he did to the little boy. He threw himself into a pile of leaves and rolled around, and he suddenly looked old, in the sun-dappled dark, and at that moment it occurred to me that one day we would both be dead, composting like leaves and garbage in the worm-ridden earth. After a few minutes of rolling around in the leaves, he sat up and asked if he was forgiven.
You’re going to die at some point, I said, and it’s over. It’s really over. It doesn’t matter if you
’re forgiven or not. It’s made up, it’s all pretend. Do you understand? It doesn’t matter!
I saw my adoptive mother come up from out of nowhere like a shadow and she began to wipe his face with a brown greasy napkin from a fast-food restaurant.
Why do you have dirt all over your face? she said. What kinds of filthy things have you two been doing?
When she was done wiping my adoptive brother’s face, she strode right up to me and struck me across the face.
No adoptive mother of mine! I cried as a red star spread its points across my cheek.
That morning, she had leaned over eleven-year-old-me to shove the tampon up my vagina, because I was unable to do it on my own, it was always a trial to get the tampon up and into my vagina without the feeling of something being torn. She and my adoptive brother were the people closest to me in life, based on the sheer amount of time we once spent together. That afternoon with them, I skulked in the shadows and ate a heel of stale crusty bread meant for feeding the ducks. I was full of competition; I have always experienced extreme fits of jealousy, the type of jealousy that destroys the peace.
10
Helen, why are you so unhappy? my adoptive mother would ask me over and over throughout the years of my childhood and adulthood. Why do you hate yourself so much? she would ask. It wasn’t true! I argued as a child and adult. I was very happy and always had been. It was true to this day; I even found happiness in the free bagels my organization sometimes provided during work meetings! Would an unhappy and miserable person find perfect peace and contentment in stale bagels with no cream cheese?
It irritated me to be irritated in relation to my adoptive parents.
Your mistake is to isolate yourselves from us, she once said to me, you have an entire system of support at your disposal and you don’t use it.
And not only that, you refuse to use it, my adoptive father said. It’s hurtful to all of us.
I thought it was only a little funny that my adoptive brother seemed to have the final word on their system of support. Underneath my laughing, I was sobbing, and then my sobbing turned quickly into anger. They didn’t even offer me cookies and milk, they were so astonished by my arrival. They didn’t think I would come, I, the most reliable one of them all! There are so many people in the world, I thought, what do they do with themselves everyday? How to live, what to do? Hey Sister Reliability, suck my dick! If you wanted to show your gratitude, you could bake a pie tomorrow, wake up, find a recipe online, make a list of ingredients, go to the grocery store, pay for everything out of your own pocket, bake an apple or cherry pie, even though you have never baked a pie in your life. You never would. Be a better daughter, Helen. I heard my adoptive father’s voice over and over in my head. Where’s your fucking waterfall? I said to no one. You’re not that type of person, a pie-baker, and you never were! My waterfall is a watermill in ruins!
I would need to begin first thing in the morning. I would shower off the dirt and death molecules I had accumulated since entering the house of my childhood, I would burnish my skin clean until my thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell,5 I would dissociate myself from the death stench permeating the house. Hey Sister Reliability, kiss my cunt!
Instead of baking a pie, I search on the internet for old friends of his if he had any, teachers, doctors, therapists, dentists, etc., then scour his bedroom and disgusting closet for clues, I go out the window to examine the roof over his head, to cap off the day I sit down at the kitchen table with my adoptive parents, I could see already the bright overhead light illuminating their grief-stricken ghost-faces, I ask them pointed questions about his mental state the day of his suicide, what did he look like that day, what was he wearing? I interrogate them. Certainly something good would come from that, which would counter the terrible circumstances that produced his suicide.
What were your last words to my adoptive brother? What did you say to him before he went headfirst into the abyss?
11
October 2nd, the first real day of my investigation, it was pitch-black outside, darker than the darkest mornings in Manhattan when the garbage has not yet been collected and the rats are at work. That morning I was only able to wake up because I heard voices from below, loud and emphatic voices joking and laughing, disrupting my peace! I waited until the voices subsided and when I went downstairs to investigate, I was astonished to see a man I had never seen before sitting at the table, wearing a gray suit, reading the newspaper, and sipping coffee as if he had been a lifelong resident or an esteemed guest of my childhood home. All the kindness and generosity I worked so hard to muster up that morning dissipated quickly.
Who are you? I said. What are you doing here?
The man looked at me and removed his round rimless glasses.
I’m Chad, the grief counselor, the man said, you must be Helen.
Helen Moran, I said.
I didn’t extend my hand, because it didn’t seem like that kind of social meeting; it was like meeting an emergency relief services worker, I thought, and you don’t shake those people’s hands.
Chad stood up from the table and extended his hand as toast crumbs fell down the front of his suit.
I touched his hand lightly, the way I would touch a sick person. So how do you know them?
We go to the same church, he said.
He smiled.
Helen, do you remember me?
Without his glasses, he appeared to be around my age.
We went to school together, he said. We were in the same homeroom for sophomore year, Mrs. Kleeb. I sat across from you and your friend.
I searched my memory thoroughly for Chad in high school, but no image came up. Not even one image to tamp down quickly.
You’ve altered your appearance, I said.
Well, I’m older now, he said.
As are you, he said a little less generously.
It horrified me to think a stranger who knew me from sixteen years ago was now sitting in my childhood home, eating his breakfast, and talking to my adoptive parents about the suicide, maybe even consoling them with religion, and offering his own version of support. He probably knows more than I do about the situation, I thought with disgust.
I have been very interested in seeing you again, he said. Your parents have told me a lot about you.
That time of my life was terrible. It was a depressing time. I’ve lost weight since then. Of course my skin is worse than in high school.
I don’t notice it, he said. And your parents do have a lovely house here.
Appalled, I put a piece of bread in the toaster, then I began to empty the dishwasher and I heard him speaking to me. It was just a voice in the background. Meanwhile, it was very pleasant to take things out of the dishwasher and to put them in their correct places, the places I remembered from childhood chores, chores to get one extra dollar a week. My cheapness began in early childhood, because my allowance was so small, it was incredibly disheartening to try to save up for something big, like a bike or a video-game system. It was easier to make do without. Then I noticed Chad was smiling at me and speaking and occasionally gesturing with his hands. I started to actually listen when I detected a bitter note in his voice.
It’s terribly difficult to be a family friend and a therapist. What are you up to these days?
At least he didn’t call me ma’am, I thought. I told him I helped troubled youth and for emphasis, I slammed shut the dishwasher. He put on his rimless glasses and peered at me.
So we’re not that different, he said. We can understand each other.
Contrary to his claim, it was very difficult to understand him that dark, damp morning. It was difficult to locate my attention and to direct it to him. My lack of focus, my isolation. Was that what the poets called solitude? When we become adults, we leave behind the solitude we once enjoyed as children. Perhaps I was overwhelmed by this person from my teenage years, someone who saw fourteen- or fifteen-year-old me, now sitting in my childhood kitchen under the worst p
ossible circumstances. In fact, when he told me he was from my high school, and not just my high school, but from my homeroom, I thought I was hallucinating. He continued to say things, occasionally I discerned the phrases tumor in the mind and immense mental and emotional pain, and threshold of pain and will to live. The will to live! Was he talking about my adoptive brother? I wondered. I felt I had to say something.
But Chad, have you talked suicidal people down from the abyss?
He held up his hand at me like a traffic guard, continued speaking, and let his hand fall smoothly to his side. He was very pleased with himself and his mannerisms. He must have gone to Europe to learn that, I thought, he must have the conscience of a metal beam. Smooth and metal. A smooth, metal beam for the construction of a brand-new sleek and terrible building in a bad part of town.
I saw myself say excuse me and I stood up and wandered over to the kitchen sink and stared out the window above the sink but I was really looking at my own reflection because it was dark out, as if it were the middle of the night, and then right through the reflection of my face I saw a black street that snaked its way into a town where people spoke a dying language, population 666.
It was very simple, this black street that went through my face and through the window. It stretched on forever like an infinite snake. I made myself dizzy staring at my own reflection for too long, the reflection of my blotchy face, and my impossible, thick, coarse, and heavy hair that took up most of the window.
If you want to think of something sad, I said, think about all of the suicides people commit each day, hundreds of them do it, and consider the family members and husbands and wives forced into my position, the investigator! Behind every suicide, there’s a door. If you open the door you might find out things you wish you never knew. Some people never open the door, they prefer not to know anything about the circumstances of the suicide, and they walk away and wash their hands clean.
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace Page 4