by Lisa Unger
I was fifteen and late coming home from the school paper (I was a little bit of a brain, a dork, in high school). Even though I wasn’t supposed to ride with boys in their cars, I had taken a ride from a senior named Frank Alvarez (broad shoulders, long dark hair, kind of a burnout but sexy). When we pulled into my driveway, he’d tried to kiss me. I remember that he had the heat cranking in his car, that Van Halen was playing on the radio, that he exuded a kind of desperate sexual energy and wore way too much cologne. Polo, I think. It wasn’t a scary situation, and although I wasn’t “into him,” as we too-cool adolescents used to say, I was flattered and could barely wait to get out of the car and call my friends.
When I entered the house, my parents were sitting at the kitchen table looking grim. My father held a cup of coffee in his hands and my mother looked as if she’d been crying. It was a bit too early for my father to be home and dinner should have been cooking but the kitchen was cold.
“Oh, Ridley,” my mother said, as if she’d forgotten I was expected home. “What time is it?” My mother was a little bird of a woman, really tiny with small, refined features and lustrous auburn hair. She moved with the grace of a dancer and carried those faded aspirations in her impeccably held posture and jutted chin. She looked ten years younger than the other mothers I knew, though she was actually older than most of them.
“Go on upstairs for a while, will you, lullaby?” said my father, getting up. “We’ll get you some dinner in just a bit.” He was moving into what we would later call his Ernest Hemingway stage, without the drinking. He had a full graying beard and a slight (getting less slight) belly. He stood just over six feet tall and had powerful arms and big hands. He had a way of hugging me that made every childish worry disappear. But he didn’t hug me then, just put a hand on my shoulder and ushered me toward the stairs.
When I’d entered and saw them sitting there, I figured I was in some kind of trouble for being in the car with Frank Alvarez, but I realized quickly that they were too upset for a small transgression like the one I’d committed.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Before my father could answer, Ace was thundering down the stairs, a large backpack over his shoulder.
My brother and I were raised in the same house by the same parents and still managed to have completely different childhoods. He is older than I am by three years. He was willful where I was yielding; rebellious where I was obedient; sad, angry where I was happy. For the longest time he was to me the very embodiment of coolness. He was movie-star handsome with jet-black hair and ice-blue eyes, defined muscles and chiseled jaw. All my friends were in love with him, and if you’d told me he got up five minutes before me and put the sun in the sky, I’d have believed you.
“Where are you going?” I asked him, because more than just the backpack, he had a nearly palpable aura of leaving and not coming back. He’d threatened this a million times, and every time he and my parents fought, I felt a nausea that he’d make good on it. Fear and sadness opened in my belly as he pushed passed me.
“The fuck out of here,” he said, looking at my father.
“Ridley,” my mother said. “Go upstairs.” I heard a kind of desperation in her tone. I headed up slowly, lingering with my hand on the banister and looking at these three people whom I loved, so sad and angry at one another that they were barely recognizable. They all looked gray, faces stiff as stones.
I couldn’t remember a peaceful moment between Ace and my father. When they were in a room together, it was only a matter of time before an argument erupted, and it had been getting worse in the months before Ace left.
“You’re not going anywhere, son,” said my father. “We’re getting you help.”
“I don’t want your help. It’s too late. And you’re not my father, so don’t call me son.”
“Don’t talk like that, Ace,” said my mother, but her voice was small and her eyes filled with tears.
“Ridley,” my father roared. “Get upstairs.”
I ran, my heart beating in my chest like a drum. I lay on my four-poster bed in the dark and listened to the echoes of their yelling. Far on the other end of the house, I couldn’t hear their words and I didn’t want to. When Ace left, he slammed the front door so hard that I felt its vibration in my room. Silence followed and then was broken by the sound of my mother sobbing. Eventually I heard my father’s footsteps on the stairs. Ace never crossed that threshold again, and that’s the night I realized that every ending is not a happy one.
Somewhere along the line I just blocked out what Ace had said. Or made myself believe that it was just his anger, his addiction, or maybe both that had led him to say, “You are not my father.” When I asked my dad about it later, he’d said, “Ace just meant that he wished I wasn’t his father. But I am and there’s no changing that, no matter what passes between us.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re my father, Daddy,” I said, as much to make myself feel better as to comfort him.
As I sat in my apartment with those papers in my hand, I heard Ace’s words again, and this time I could not silence them. They were like a key that unlocked a box containing myriad other questions that had hovered in the periphery of my consciousness over the years, but to which I had never actually entertained answers. They were little things that might have been easily explained…unless they couldn’t be. Things like: Why were there no pictures of my mother pregnant? Why were there no photographs of me before the age of two? Why did I resemble no one in my family even a little? These little questions now tapped on my consciousness like moths at a light.
I started to feel a little panicky, a little dramatic. Then I remembered my conversation with Zack. And all those pictures of you…forget it. You’re going to have psychos crawling out of the woodwork.
He was right, of course. This was New York City; the crazies don’t need much of an excuse to get busy. I held the Polaroid in my hand; maybe the woman didn’t look that much like me, after all.
I did what I always do in times of crisis, small or large. I picked up the cordless phone to call my father. The receiver was in my hand before I was even conscious of reaching for it, the keypad burning, waiting for me to punch in the numbers. But my finger hovered there above the glowing numbers as I hesitated, hearing blood rushing in my ears. I stared at the phone, not quite able to will my fingers to move. It was silly, wasn’t it? To call over such nonsense. In the distance, over the buzzing of the dial tone, I heard an insistent knocking.
The sound brought me out of my head and it took a second to realize that there was someone at my apartment door. I came back to the present and walked across the room, looked through the peephole. The man standing in the hallway was a stranger but I opened the door a crack. I know what you’re thinking. What New Yorker is going to open her door to a strange man, particularly in a moment like this, after receiving a letter like that?
New Yorkers are really no more savvy than anyone else. We’re just more paranoid. And I was too distracted to think about protecting my life. Besides, the guy I saw through the peephole interested me. As in: He was hot. I opened the door and looked at him. He was frowning, hands on his hips.
You feel the chemistry, you know. It’s that little jolt that lets you know the sex would be good, very, very good. You feel it in your lungs and between your legs. It doesn’t really have anything to do with looks, but for the record: dark brown hair, almost black, cropped close to his head, so short it was really little more than stubble, deep brown eyes, candy lips I was already imagining in the little dip between my collarbone and my throat. He felt it, too, I could tell. He looked less angry for a moment.
“Look,” he said, recovering nicely, “if you have a problem with the noise, how about just knocking on the door and letting me know, instead of running to the landlord.”
Everything on him seemed to fit together perfectly into one tight, lean line. But there was meat to him, not bulk, a kind of supple strength. I could see the detail of a tattoo
snaking out from his right shirtsleeve.
“You have the wrong door,” I said, trying not to smile in anticipation of his embarrassment. “I didn’t call the landlord.”
He let the information hang between us for a second and then said the only thing that was appropriate. “Oh.” Awkward silence and a shifting of weight from one leg to the other. “Sorry.”
“No problem,” I answered, and shut the door.
He was hot. But I was distracted by the mail I’d received. Logical Ridley could see clearly that this could be the bizarre antic of a twisted mind. But there was another Ridley, a little scared, a little anxious, thinking, There are too many questions. Check it out.
I watched him walk away through the peephole. I leaned against the wall across from the door and zoned for a minute. Everything around me seemed weightless and I felt a lightness in my head and my stomach. I couldn’t have told you why, maybe it was a mild kind of shock. I’m not sure how long I stood there.
Eventually I returned to the couch and picked up the photos and note again. The interruption had kept me from calling my dad, and now it didn’t seem as urgent as it had a minute earlier. I put the pictures and note back on the table and lay on the plush couch that was too big for the room but that I loved because it was as comfortable as an embrace. A surprising hot, wet sadness overcame me. I cried hard but tried not to sob. The walls and doors were thin and I didn’t want anyone to hear, especially the yummy tattoo man from upstairs.
five
It’s a little-known fact, but parents are like superheroes. With just a few magic words they can make you feel ten feet tall and bulletproof, they can slay the dragons of doubt and worry, they can make problems disappear. But of course, they can only do this as long as you’re a child. When you’ve become an adult, become the master of your own universe, they’re not as powerful as they once were. Maybe that’s why so many of us take our time growing up.
After a restless night and a seriously unproductive Wednesday where my major accomplishments included doing a load of laundry at the Laundromat downstairs and making a tuna fish sandwich, I left my apartment and headed to the PATH station at Christopher Street. Every Wednesday since I’d come to college in the city, I’ve taken the train home for dinner with my parents. I’d often go home on the weekends, too, but Wednesday had just become this thing that we had. Esme and Zack often joined us, but not since the breakup. And I felt bad about that. But a part of me was guiltily glad, too. I liked having my parents to myself.
“Ridley, how are you doing, hon?” Esme had asked earlier that day over the phone. We still talked relatively often, which was nice. She’d been the nurse in my father’s various offices for longer than I’d been alive. She was more like an adored aunt and a close friend than someone who worked for my dad and the mother of my boyfriend. In fact, I’d been almost more concerned about losing my relationship with her than anything else when I ended it with Zack.
“Zack said you seemed a little stressed,” she said in a near whisper, as though she were talking about some kind of embarrassing feminine problem. “He’s worried about you.”
I knew this was well meaning. But I didn’t think I had seemed stressed during my dinner with Zack. Isn’t it weird when someone tells you something about yourself that’s not true? They’re utterly certain of their assumption, and the more you try to convince them otherwise, the more they seem to dig their heels in.
“No, Ez,” I said, trying to sound light. “I’m fine.”
“Really,” she said, as if she were talking to a mental patient. “Good. I’m glad he was wrong.” She didn’t believe me and was letting me off the hook. Then I started thinking, Maybe I am really stressed, and the only one who can’t see it is me.
This is something I really hate about myself. I am influenced by people’s erroneous assumptions about me. Maybe you know what I mean. During my conversation with Esme, I started to feel really stressed out. Another thing I hated was the idea that people were talking about me, deciding how stressed out I was, feeling sorry for me and then telling me about it. It seems very controlling and manipulative. As if they want me to seem weak and frayed so that they can feel strong and together, superior to poor Ridley, who’s under so much stress.
We chitchatted for a while about my latest article, her worsening rheumatoid arthritis, gift ideas for my mother’s approaching birthday. Maybe it was just my guilt, but I still felt, six months after the fact, that we were tiptoeing around the fact that I had broken her son’s heart and laid waste to everyone’s dreams of a wedding and grandchildren.
In Hoboken, I got on another train and took the half-hour ride to the town where I grew up. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from the train station to my parents’ house. Built in 1919, but gutted and made completely modern in the late eighties, it sat nestled among giant oak and elm trees, an absolute bastion of Americana. It was one of those towns. You know. So precious with its general store and original gas lamps, winding tree-lined streets, pretty houses nestled on perfectly manicured lawns, a virtual picture postcard, especially in the fall and at Christmastime. It was about four o’clock when I walked through the front door. I could smell meat loaf.
“Mom,” I called, letting the screen door slam behind me.
“Oh, Ridley,” said my mother, emerging from the kitchen with a smile. “How are you, dear?”
She embraced me lightly, then pushed me back the length of her arms and scrutinized me for any sign of trouble: circles under my eyes, a breakout on my chin, weight gain or loss, who knows.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, with a narrowing of the eyes.
That was generally one of the first questions my mother asked me when I called, or when I came home. As if I didn’t see them all the time. I call my father nearly every day at his office, but to be fair, I talk to my mother more rarely.
“No,” I said, hugging her. “Of course not.” She nodded but gave me that look that reminded me that she knew me better than I knew myself and that lying was futile. Did everyone want something to be wrong with me?
She felt so small to me. Where she was bony and angular through the arms and shoulders, I was muscular and round. Where she was boyish through the hips and chest, I was full. Where the features of her face were small, delicate, fair, mine were softer, slightly rounder. I looked into her face and suddenly thought of the woman in the picture I’d received last night. My mother looked nothing like me; that stranger was my image.
“What is it, Ridley?” she asked, putting her head to the side and inspecting me with her ice-blue eyes.
“When’s Dad coming home?” I answered, walking away from her into the kitchen and opening the oven door. A meat loaf sizzled happily in tomato sauce and the heat warmed my cheeks. I was glad for a reason to look away from my mother.
“Any minute,” she said. When I didn’t say anything else, she changed the subject. “So, have you leaped into traffic to save a toddler, rushed into any burning buildings…anything exciting like that?”
“Nope. Just that one kid.”
“Good. You probably shouldn’t make a habit out of it. Your luck might run out,” she said, giving me an affectionate pat on the ass.
I sat at the kitchen table and she chatted on about her volunteer work at the local elementary school, Dad’s practice and his work at the clinic for underprivileged kids where he donated his time. I didn’t hear a word my mother was saying, not that I wasn’t interested. I was just eager for the sound of my father’s car in the driveway.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Of course, Mom.”
“What did I just say?”
“If it isn’t my little heartbreaker,” boomed my father as he came in through the back door. He’d taken to calling me that after the breakup.
I got up and went to him, eager to feel his familiar embrace, the comfort of my father’s arms.
“How are you, lullaby?” he said, hugging me hard.
“Good,” I
said into his shoulder.
“Good,” he said with a smile and a pat on my cheek. “You look good,” he said. I was glad he didn’t think I looked like there was something wrong.
But I guess there was something wrong, even then. I’d brought the picture and the note with me to the house. I had toyed with the idea of trashing it, just putting it in the bin where it belonged and forgetting it altogether. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I left the apartment without the envelope but halfway down the stairs turned around and went back for it. I guess I wanted to show it to them so they could tell me how ridiculous it was and we could all have a good laugh. Ha-ha.
After dinner, we all sat full and quiet under the glow of the old Tiffany lamp that hung over the table.
“Something weird happened to me yesterday,” I said, filling a conversational lull.
“I knew there was something,” my mother said, satisfied with herself.
“Mom,” I said with that tone that I think expresses perfectly how predictable and annoying I find her sometimes.
“What is it, Rid?” asked my father, his face open and concerned.
I slid the photograph and note over to them. I watched both their faces since I figured the tale would be told in the first millisecond after they processed the information in front of them. But their expressions told me nothing. My father and mother put their heads together and squinted at the photo. My father pulled glasses from his shirt pocket. I could hear the refrigerator humming and the blood rushing in my ears. The teapot came to a boil but my mother didn’t notice and the clock above the sink ticked quietly.
“What’s this?” my father said finally, a confused but benevolent smile on his face. “Some kind of joke?”
“I don’t get it,” said my mother with a quick shake of her head. “Who are these people?”