“Holy shit.” Josh laughed. “It worked.”
I was home.
It was hot and musky, the odor reminiscent of the way it smelled when we arrived home from Nantucket at the end of August. It was as if the air, our air, had been trapped for all these years, waiting for the right moment to be released. I inhaled as much as my lungs could take. Josh strolled ahead of me through the foyer, taking in the high ceilings, crown molding, and arched doorways. I had never noticed those details before. I followed him through the loggia, the marble corridor with a dozen French doors still wrapped in lace curtains that opened up to the limestone balcony and our garden full of weeping willow trees.
“This is where we used to dance with Mom and slide in our feety pajamas,” I told him.
The pink rug still covered the front hall staircase. I walked Josh through the vacant living room and into my father’s library. His entire encyclopedia collection was still in its alphabetical order, abandoned in the mahogany bookshelves to the right of the fireplace, covered in dust. I sat on the floor and opened one of the bottom cabinets along the wall where he kept his BusyBox documents. It was empty. Then I opened the cabinet next to it where he kept our arts and crafts. I peered into the empty cabinets, making sure no memory was left behind. I thought about Kate, my best friend in middle school. I remembered the first time she came over for a playdate.
“Is your dad a judge? Is he in the Mafia?” She was the daughter of two psychiatrists.
“He’s a lawyer,” I told her.
“He sounds like a mystery man.” I had never thought about it before.
Josh walked over and said, “Let’s keep going,” sensing I was on the edge of a spiral. I was putting together the pieces.
“Show me your bedroom.”
It looked exactly the way it did before I left, except empty. The walls a faded yellow, and my blue and white striped rug was still there. I showed Josh where I keyed my name into the edge of my bathroom sink when I was eleven, and the window perpendicular to the window of Mara’s bedroom, where when we got in trouble we’d talk to each other, sometimes throwing CDs back and forth.
I sat down on the floor and crossed my legs. The sun was setting and thunder rumbled in the distance, silencing the cicadas. A summer storm was coming. I closed my eyes and asked myself, what if none of this had happened? What if I was just in a terrible nightmare? I wanted to open my eyes and be sitting on my floral bedspread staring at my dresser against the wall, my bulletin board hanging next to it with my prom corsages and my bumper sticker collection, and I wanted to hear Popsicle, our yellow cockatiel, chirping in the kitchen, and my father banging around the pots and pans preparing for Sunday morning pancakes. There were holes growing inside of me with every passing memory.
Josh wrapped his arms around me and then let go, grazing his hand along my neck, his thumb caressing the bottom of my jaw. He kissed my forehead, then my cheek, my eyes, my nose, my lips. His eyes never left mine after we undressed each other, and I had to remember to breathe, breathe, as he swayed into me, my bare back against the dusty rug, the rain suddenly showering like the pitter-patter of stars falling from the sky. And I held on to him tighter this time, with my eyes open, and our lips loose, exchanging heavy breaths, louder and then softer each time the carpet burned my back. The room grew dark with no electricity, we were sweating and laughing, and he came and I came, relieving me from all of my memory as though each hole in me now was just a blip in time.
Suddenly a loud bang jolted us.
“What was that?” I whispered.
“It sounded like a door slamming.” Josh reached for his boxer shorts.
“Shit, shit, shit!” I grabbed my scattered clothes, getting dressed as fast as possible, using our cell phones as light.
“If we get arrested, it’s all your fault,” Josh grumbled.
“What is your problem?”
“I’m just saying. This was your idea.”
We tiptoed down the hallway and into Chloe’s old room, the windows of which overlooked the street. I saw a familiar car parked out front. A blue Jeep Grand Cherokee.
“Wait, I think I know that car,” I said.
Holding our breath, we tiptoed down the front staircase, when I heard distant laughter coming from the basement.
“This is so fucking scary,” Josh whispered. “We are so going to jail.”
“Shut up!” I whispered back.
We finally made it to the front door, when suddenly the back door opposite us swung open, and crashed into the wall.
I spun around. A body stumbled into the hallway, shining a flashlight on my face.
I squinted with my hand above my eyes. “Chloe?” She wore an old bikini top and shorts and held a Miller Lite in her other hand.
“Dude!” she said, just as shocked as I was. Then she took a swig of beer. “What are you doing here?”
Her ex-boyfriend and a group of his friends came around behind her, reeking of cigarettes and pot.
“What am I doing here? What the fuck are you doing here?”
I had forgotten that Chloe would be in DC visiting her best friend from high school and that our trips would overlap a few days. Given the way we hardly communicated, it wasn’t surprising we each forgot.
Chloe pulled out a gold Baldwin key and dangled it in front of me like a carrot. Stumbling forward, she bragged, “I still have my key.”
I paused for a moment. Of course she did. So did I.
Chloe and I sat at the grand piano, pretending to be concert pianists, when my mother turned on the surround sound.
“Walkin’ on, walkin’ on bro-ken glass . . .”
It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I could smell the macaroni and cheese and hot dogs cooking in the kitchen.
My father was off flying his airplane for the afternoon.
Mara was in the family room, wearing her headgear and reading The Baby-Sitters Club.
Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” blared through each room. I could see my mother from where I was sitting, dancing in the kitchen as she grilled our hot dogs.
“Mom! Turn it down!” Mara cried from the couch. My mother didn’t care; she turned it up and kept dancing. Then she ran out into the loggia to find Chloe and me, pretending to pound on the piano keys to the song’s rhythm.
My mother picked up my red feather boa, threw it around her neck, and then pulled me up from the piano bench to dance with her.
We strutted across the marble floor together, doing twists and turns. Chloe slipped into our mother’s red high heels, which we’d stolen from her closet earlier, and as the song crescendoed, my mother grabbed Chloe’s hands and sang at the top of her lungs. Mara came into the loggia, and my mother tossed the book out of her hands and pulled her in to dance with us.
“I’m living in an empty room with all the windows smashed . . .”
Mara let go, and sang, in full headgear and pointing her finger with attitude while I sang at the highest pitch possible. And then the four of us threw our hands up in the air—free, singing, slipping and sliding—like superstars.
-14
Ralph Adler
A few weeks later, I was pulling out of the parking lot at Warner Bros. studios after auditioning for “cheerleader #3” on the TV series Heroes when Ralph Adler called. Why was he calling me? The letters to the creditors didn’t work. I wasn’t using QuickBooks to budget. I was broke; there was nothing to budget. The last time I had seen Ralph Adler was while I was working at La Scala.
“Ralph Adler’s office.”
“Hi, this is Christina Prousalis, I’m returning Ralph Adler’s call.”
“One moment, please.”
When Ralph picked up, he sounded frantic and out of breath. “Hey, hey, how are you?” he asked.
“I’m good! How are you?” I said nervously. I had a terrible feeling it was about my father.
“Good, good.” I could hear a door shutting in the background. His voice quiet and low, he said, “I want t
o ask you something . . .”
“Yes?” I said, my heart pounding.
“So, sometimes, on weekends, I like to do these triple-X video shoots, and I was wondering if you would like to assist me. I’ll pay you five hundred dollars—cash—under the table, because I know you need the money . . .”
I almost lost control of the car. I had trusted him. I had sat in his living room with him, spilling my darkest secrets. He was a man my father’s age—asking me to be in a porno! And not only that, but to have the audacity to offer me only $500? And what did the word assist mean? I imagined a dimly lit studio somewhere deep in the valley of Van Nuys. We’re out in the backyard by the open swimming pool, the brown Burbank Hills in the distance. Ralph’s standing there, wearing an open bathrobe while his flaccid penis dangles free, and I’m on my knees, naked, with a giant feather in my hand, tickling his little penis inches from my nose because his wife won’t fuck him at home. And I can see his face smiling down at me, those clunky braces on his lower and upper teeth reflecting the sun as he opens his mouth to cum, the stretching of the rubber bands lengthening like roaring walrus teeth before he moans with pleasure and calls out my name: “Christina!”
“I . . . I . . . I . . . No!” I dropped my cell phone, pulled over to the side of the Cahuenga Pass, a narrow road along the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains beside the Hollywood Freeway, swung open the car door, and threw up.
A flood of employees leaving Universal Studios and Warner Bros. slammed on their horns and flipped me off as they screeched by in their black Priuses. I pulled myself back inside the car. There was a two-day-old Coke still in my cup holder. I took a swig and called my mother.
“Ralph Adler is a pedophile!” I screamed in ever-escalating hysteria. My mother scoffed, as if this information was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard.
“Oh, honey, you have to realize he thinks you’re sexy, that’s all. You’re over eighteen now. Get used to it.”
Get used to it?
Where was my mother? The woman who would do anything for her children? Who would kill for them; die in order to protect them.
“You are never allowed to see that man ever again!” I shouted back.
“Well, that’s not going to happen,” she said. Her serenity was unnerving.
“Why?”
“Because he’s dealing with our taxes and helping me find a divorce lawyer.”
Her words were too painful, overloaded with information. I felt too much and understood too little of how the reality around me was cementing itself into a story I didn’t want to tell. I hung up on her. The reality of my parents. The reality of my age and my mother’s implication that because I was legal, I was “up for grabs” by powerful men, so I’d better just accept it. My mother said the word divorce so casually, as though she wanted to quickly erase twenty-five years of a marriage. The possibility had crossed my mind a few times, but like every child wants to believe, I never thought my parents would ever divorce. I was convinced that all of the things they did were the things that happy couples do. They took vacations alone together! My mother wore sexy lingerie to bed! My father squeezed my mother’s ass when he walked in from work each night! This, I thought in all of my naivete, was love and marriage, never having been privy to what was actually inside of it.
My tears turned to rage, with no words for the volcano awakening inside of me. I screamed so hard at the steering wheel that I thought the veins in my neck were going to explode.
I rang the buzzer to Josh’s building, mascara stains across my cheeks—the role of cheerleader #3 gone terribly wrong.
When Josh opened the door, he wrapped his arms around me. “You want me to go over there and beat the shit out of Ralph?”
“Forget it,” I said.
I didn’t insist because I knew that Ralph Adler’s business partner handled Josh’s family’s money and that they had developed a lifelong friendship. When I told Madeline about it, she said, “I’m very surprised, honey; that does not sound like Ralph.” I was up against thirty years of money and friendship. I was not going to win that battle. And when I told Josh that my mother had said she was filing for divorce, he brought up therapy again. His family had started going to therapy together, and he said it was making him feel better. I finally caved and asked for a referral. Josh said he would call his mother and get one for me as soon as possible.
I changed the subject, and then I noticed another letter and a paper airplane from my father on his desk. He and Josh had started corresponding with each other apart from me. He was teaching my boyfriend how to make expert paper airplanes. It started a year earlier, just before Father’s Day, when he started sending paper airplanes with each letter he wrote. I walked over and picked up the letter. “Enclosed is another rendition of N1TP. When I sat down to make it, I had not done so since I was 12, about 27 years ago. As I folded the wings and made the tail, it came back to me like it was yesterday. . . . If the airplane wants to dive, adjust the trailing edge up slightly, which will bring the nose (attitude) up and enable it to fly from LA to Herlong, if you do it right. I will look out on the Southern horizon for it! Best, Tom.”
The paper airplane was made out of yellow legal pad paper. My father had written “N1TP” (Number One, Tom Prousalis) on the side of the tail, which was the tail number on his King Air. Josh and I took the airplane out to the apartment balcony overlooking the courtyard swimming pool. “Would you like to do the honors?” Josh asked, handing me the airplane. Before I took it, I thought about the first time I flew in the copilot’s seat with my father, searching for clues.
My Keds wouldn’t reach the metal pedals and instead were dangling in the air. My father tightened the headset around my head, and I stared at all the buttons and gadgets, and the million little lights, red, yellow, blue, orange in front of me. He said words to the air traffic controllers like “Alpha,” “Bravo,” and “Charlie.” The steering wheel in front of him moved on its own. Left, and then right, up and down, like a ghost playing tricks. I tried to lift myself higher so I could see out the window, but I was too short.
“Dad, go sideways. Go sideways!” I yelled. Even at the age of seven, I was an adrenaline junkie. My father knew I got it from him. He loved it.
“All right, Bambina,” he said, “Better hold on tight to that steering wheel!” I leaned forward to grab hold even though I knew he was in charge. Until he let go.
“Dad!” I shrieked with excitement.
“You’re flying, Bambina!”
“Oh, my, God. Dad, I’m flying!”
Before I knew it, my nose was pressed up against the glass window, my stomach flipped upside down, and I was wide eyed. We were flying sideways, just as I’d asked. The earth below me, like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, with little cars zipping down highways, and suburban houses in cul-de-sacs with swimming pools, when suddenly I felt a wave of nausea. I looked over at him. He was flirting with the female air traffic controller.
“Is N169 out of the question?”
“It is never out of the question.”
“Do you have any restrictions?”
The air traffic controller giggled. Her voice was annoying and robotic and had a slight southern accent.
“You’re putting on a great show.”
“Dad. Dad . . .” I tried to get his attention. “Dad!” I felt my heart pounding louder and the back corners of my mouth getting watery until finally, “Dad, I don’t feel so well—”
I sat and watched what was once my mother’s homemade tuna fish sandwich ooze in between the colorful buttons.
“Roger that. This is N1TP approaching MNZ, I’m going to need a crew of men with buckets, mops, wipes, anything you have down there on the ground. My seven-year-old just barfed all over my control panel.”
I exhaled with relief as the wheels hit the ground. Yellow buckets and mops and crewmen from Manassas Regional Airport stood by ready to clean the mess I’d made. Flushed with embarrassment, I turned to my father. “I’m so
rry, Dad.”
“It’s okay, Bambina. You’re just not ready to be a fighter pilot yet.”
I snatched the paper airplane from Josh’s hands. I pinched the bottom in between my pointer finger and thumb, closed one eye, and thrust the plane out over the balcony. We stood there amazed at how far it soared: twenty feet maybe, before it went careening sideways and plunged into the swimming pool.
A few days later, I was staring at a list of doctors, their metal signs plastered on the wall, one above the other with a button next to each. I was ten minutes early and had been thinking long and hard about what I would say to my mother. She had agreed to a therapy session. I thought about how I would convince her that she was still in love with my father, and that she would need to stop all communication with Ralph Adler; I didn’t care that he was helping her pro bono. I pressed the button and watched the red light turn on.
Sheryl was a friend of Madeline’s, petite with frizzy hair, and she sat on top of a square pillow to make herself higher while she held a yellow legal pad and folder in her lap, to scribble down our insanity as proof. I sat down on the gray couch across from her and waited to the sound of a ticking clock before ten minutes from the start of the hour had gone by.
“Do you know where she might be?” Sheryl asked, concerned.
“She’ll be here. She’s just late for everything,” I explained, even though it wasn’t true. My mother was never late for appointments.
I checked my phone. No messages.
“Would you like a piece of candy?” Sheryl held out a bowl of Jolly Ranchers.
“No thank you.”
The sound of a ticking clock.
Ten more minutes had gone by, and the sun had set. Sheryl stood up to light a scented candle on her desk. I dialed my mother’s cell phone for the third time.
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