After Perfect

by Christina McDowell

  On a whim, I decided to drive to San Francisco to see my cousin Alex. Her father, my uncle Larry, is my mother’s brother. We didn’t grow up knowing each other. I met Alex for the first time at my grandmother’s funeral the summer before the FBI arrested my father. Alex grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. Far from the life my parents had built, and it created a ripple of resentment and divide between families, keeping my mother and brother apart until grief brought them back together again. Alex and I stayed in touch, and as soon as she “got the hell out of Jacksonville,” we had promised to see each other again.

  Alex and I were slumped over at a karaoke bar after hours called Bow Bow Cocktail Lounge in the heart of Chinatown, dimly lit to a warm color red, dangling Chinese lanterns everywhere. I started thinking about it again: privilege, money, the things that kept Alex and me from growing up together despite being family. I began to wonder if I was a bad person for having grown up with money. Leaning into her, I slurred, “Did you hate me? Did your mom and dad hate us? Tell me the truth.” The bartender, who looked like she’d fallen out of an old newsreel from the Great Depression, set two shots of Patrón in front of us.

  “Put them on my tab,” Alex said, knowing how broke I was. We’d already had three shots of Patrón at Columbus Cafe in North Beach.

  “Come on,” she said, petting my arm, “you know Gayle and Larry are both at fault. My dad had trouble holding down a job, and your mom needed things to be a certain way.” We started calling them Gayle and Larry, as if they were caricatures we could look down upon as our once-beloved parents continued falling off their designated pedestals. Alex took her shot and slammed it on the bar. “I mean . . . we can just blame them. Fuck them for keeping us separated for all these years!”

  I took another shot and changed the subject. “Listen,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “I think I own land in Mexico.”

  Alex laughed so hard that she almost fell off the bar stool. “What?”

  “Two million shares of stock in the Mother of All Tequilas.”

  “Why am I paying for all these shots, then?”

  I took another shot, and my cell phone resting on the bar began to vibrate.

  “Your phone’s vibrating.” Alex pointed to it as she wiped away tears of laughter. She thought I was joking.

  I looked down at the caller ID. It was Chloe.

  “It’s just Chloe.” I pressed Ignore. But then my sister called again.

  “Maybe you should get that.” Alex seemed concerned.

  Annoyed, I picked up. “What? What happened?” Chloe’s tears were sobering. “Mom’s still not home,” she said. “She left the house at six o’clock.”

  I looked at my phone: 3:53 a.m.

  “I’ve called her ten times, and her phone keeps going straight to voice mail,” Chloe cried.

  “Okay, okay, calm down,” I said, trying to gain control and sound responsible. “I’ll try calling her. I’ll call you right back.”

  “What’s going on?” Alex asked as she flagged down the bartender yet again.

  “It’s Gayle. She’s gone missing.” I dialed my mother’s number. “Hi. You’ve reached Gayle Prousalis. Please leave a message.” I dialed again. “Hi. You’ve reached Gayle Prousalis. Please leave a message.” Each time I heard her voice, I imagined her trying to kill herself a different way: driving drunk down Benedict Canyon and wrapping her Jaguar around a tree. Or maybe she’d gone to hang herself in a room at one of those cheap motels below the Santa Monica Freeway. Or maybe she’d gotten a gun and shot herself. The intrusive and morbid thoughts were not uncommon, and I had been having them more frequently. Then—finally—I got a ringtone.

  “Hello?” My mother picked up, out of breath.

  “Mom!” I cried.

  “Oh, hi, honey.” She sounded fake friendly.

  “Where are you?”

  “What?” Pretending not to hear me, she was avoiding my question.

  “Where are you?” I asked again.

  “I’m . . . with my . . . my . . . gay . . . friend.” Gay friend? I heard laughter in the background and her shushing someone.

  “Call Chloe. She thinks you’re dead.” I hung up and threw my phone across the bar and then just stared into space.

  “My mom’s seeing someone,” I said.

  -16-

  Richard

  He reminded me of my father: bushy eyebrows, blue eyes, and thick, wavy hair. But older. And British. Working-class British. Instead of flying airplanes, he rode Harley-Davidsons and sounded like the voice-over guy from The Fabulous Life Of, the old VH1 show about greedy celebrities. I’d met Richard only a few times before my mother declared they were moving in together. It had been only a year and a half since my father left for prison. And we never spoke about the divorce. My mother and all of us living, breathing, and communicating in our own separate stratospheres.

  My mother and Richard met through an online dating website for people from a certain socioeconomic background, which led me to believe she had joined it not long after my father left—when there was still a lot of cash in the Wells Fargo bank account. It wasn’t long before she started wearing cowgirl boots and biker jackets, acting subservient and picking up after him. It was hard to watch, because when I was growing up, it had been the opposite. My father always doted on my mother, bringing her a glass of wine while she lounged on the chaise, or a bowl of ice cream if we were curled up watching an old Audrey Hepburn film. On the weekends, Richard was throwing her on the back of his motorcycle for rides along Mulholland Drive—my father hated motorcycles; each time we drove by one he made sure to comment on how dangerous he thought they were. I could quickly add it to the list of my morbid thoughts—the possibilities of how I thought my mother might die.

  The first time that Mom invited Richard over for dinner, I was surprised to see him sit down at the head of the table, which was our father’s spot. Mara, Chloe, and I looked at one another in mutual disdain as we took our seats. I remember staring at his face, watching it morph in between my father’s and his until I had lost my appetite. I had convinced myself that my mother’s and his relationship was just going to be a fling; that maybe this was just an “arrangement,” and my mother would come to her senses when my father came home from prison. But when I looked at Richard sitting there where my father had sat just a year earlier during his “furlough,” slicing his steak and sipping his red wine, it felt permanent.

  My mother had invited Spencer and his mother, Cindy, too, to serve as buffers and ease the tension. They sat on one side of the table with Chloe, while Mara, Brian, and I sat on the other side, and my mother sat opposite Richard at the other end.

  Richard tried to be polite. He asked me questions about my acting, like, “How does it feel being rejected so much?” I figured his intentions were good, and I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to like him, because I was so afraid of losing my mother to one of my morbid thoughts that I was willing to accept anything that made her happy—for the time being. But dinner took an unpleasant turn when Spencer decided to tell us a story.

  “So this kid, right? This fuckin’ kid . . .” I knew the story was going to be a good one, because whenever Spencer had a good story to tell, he jumped in his seat. “He comes up, and he’s banging on my fuckin’ door, and so—”

  “Excuse me!” Richard interrupted, raising his voice, startling everyone. All heads turned to the head of the table. “I find your language to be disrespectful and offensive, and I will not tolerate it at my dinner table.” (“My” table?) “If you cannot remove the F-word from your story, I’m going to have to ask you to stop talking.” The room fell to utter silence.

  Chloe’s chin quivered as she stared at her barely eaten plate of steak and potatoes. Mara’s mouth hung open from shock. Brian stared at his dinner plate with his hands between his legs. Cindy’s eyebrows were raised, so shocked that this man whom she had never met before had the audacity to reprimand her son right
in front of her. My mother continued chewing quietly, and Spencer turned bright red with embarrassment. I couldn’t stop staring at Richard and his untapped rage.

  The story, of course, was now moot.

  “Would anyone like dessert?” my mother asked, clearing her plate as if nothing had happened. Chloe threw down her fork, the sound of silver scraping china like nails on a chalkboard, humiliated in front of her best friend and his mother, whom she had come to adore as her second family.

  “I think it’s time to go, honey,” Cindy said to Spencer, setting her cloth napkin on the table.

  “I’ll call you later, Chloe,” Spencer said as he glared at Richard, ready for a fight.

  After Spencer and Cindy walked out, Mara said, “Excuse me,” stood up, locked herself in the bathroom, and sobbed for twenty minutes. Then Chloe ran downstairs to her room and slammed the door shut. I stared at my bloody steak.

  Richard set his napkin on the table, and I felt him look at me, but I kept my eyes steady on my plate. I felt if I opened my mouth, I might burst into laughter or burst into tears. It was a toss-up. He got up and joined my mother in the kitchen, where she’d started doing the dishes.

  “I think it’s best I leave for now,” I heard him whisper to her.

  “No, honey, you don’t have to.”

  “Really, Gayle, it’s going to take some time.”

  I heard them kiss, and then Richard walked out the front door without saying good-bye.

  I sat on the couch in the TV area, waiting for Mara to come out of the bathroom so we could leave. We had taken one car. Brian still sat awkwardly at the dinner table, scrolling through his phone. My mother walked over carrying a glass of Chardonnay and sat down next to me.

  Then Mara stormed out of the bathroom. “Does Dad know about Richard?” she demanded.

  “Well, no, not exactly,” my mother replied.

  “Jesus, Mom! What if Dad calls us? What if he asks about you? Or where you are?”

  “Just tell him . . . you don’t know.” My mother took a sip of wine.

  I could see she was trying not to place us in the center of it, though not realizing that she already had.

  “Someday you girls will understand.” Her voice started to quiver. “Richard really loves me, and I’m trying to make this as smooth as possible. I didn’t want to drag you girls into it. I want you to be able to have a relationship with your dad all on your own.”

  “Who’s paying for the divorce if you don’t have any money?” Mara quipped.

  “Oh, you didn’t know?” I said sarcastically. “Ralph Adler!”

  Mara stood in silence, shocked. The day I called her to tell her about the porn shoot, I had been so upset that I forgot to tell her our mother was using Ralph for the divorce.

  “That’s right. Pro bono!” I stormed off toward the front door.

  “That’s not true,” my mother tried to fire back. “He did my taxes for free, and he’s referred me to a divorce lawyer.” She took another sip of wine.

  Mara followed behind me. “Brian, let’s go.”

  “Where are you going?” my mother pleaded.

  “We’re leaving,” Mara said.

  Before I walked out, I turned around and looked at my mother sitting alone on the rose-colored sofa, a look of fragile desperation across her face. Desperate for a man to be by her side; how incomplete she felt without one. And none of us girls knowing where to turn without our father, without a man to help us—no matter who he was, how imperfect he was—never realizing that the man in and of himself would never be sufficient. Would not make us whole. Would not provide security.

  I wouldn’t understand it until later how the choices I watched my mother make were seeping into my subconscious no matter how hard I tried to fight them, continuing to feed my desire to use my sexuality, to use victimhood, as power to get what I needed: money, protection, love. And how those things would entangle themselves so tightly in me I wouldn’t be able to separate one from the other.

  Chloe started coming home with tattoos symbolizing a lost past: weeping willows, and Greek letters inked across her back. She dropped out of high school after my mother announced that she was moving in with Richard. My sister didn’t want to be anywhere near them when they were together. She had made it clear to my mother that she didn’t feel comfortable when Richard was around the house and that she didn’t like it when he slept over, but my mother allowed him to do it anyway. My mother would say that Mara and I were lucky, because we were older when my father left. She couldn’t control Chloe because of the guilt she felt, because of how young Chloe was when everything was taken from her. What my mother couldn’t see was that everything wasn’t about Chloe needing a big house, needing new clothes, or a car on her sixteenth birthday. The things she felt guilty for not giving her—all of those gifts we wrapped ourselves in to make us feel that we were safe—were not the things that made us safe. They were the things that were keeping us from loving one another and being there for one another, in the right way.

  It was the contract and Richard’s new house that sparked Chloe’s running away. Richard was buying a house in the canyons. And he considered Chloe untrustworthy because of her outbursts. He presented her with a contract of rules to live by while under his roof. With my mother’s credit score at a lowly 300 or so, her name wouldn’t be going on the house. The house would be Richard’s and Richard’s alone and Chloe would be his “guest.” This was written to a girl who, just one year prior, was making straight As, was a star athlete, and who used to have more friends than anyone could count. Chloe was gone within days after that. Left with a friend of Spencer’s for Santa Barbara and would never look back.

  Mara and I knew it would only be a matter of time before our father would find out about Richard. Every other weekend, my mother and Richard were jetting off to some new location. Mexico. Napa Valley. The Caribbean. I wasn’t even sure how they could afford it. Richard had money but not the kind of money my father had once. He worked at a furniture manufacturing company, and before he bought the house in the canyons, he’d lived in an apartment in Redondo Beach. If my mother were in a relationship for safety and security, it would have been a lot more convenient and secure had she married a multimillionaire who had plenty to share. But her instinct to survive would lead her to settle inside a lifeboat; a fantasy with someone she barely knew.

  One afternoon, when they were in Mexico, Mara and I drove to Ikea to buy new silverware and plates. I had promised that once I made enough money at the bar, it would be my contribution to the apartment, since they had provided everything else. We were strolling through the plate section together talking about how I had the password to Josh’s Facebook account and that I’d been checking it obsessively every hour, when sure enough, my father called looking for my mother.

  “It’s Dad,” Mara said.

  “So pick it up!” I said, not wanting to miss the call. We never knew when he would be able to call us again—three weeks later, maybe four.

  She pressed the speaker button so I could hear her. “You have an incoming call. This call is from a federal prison. You will not be charged for this call. This call is from: Tom. To accept the call, dial five now. To decline the call, dial nine.” Beep!

  “Dad?”

  “Marsie!” Marsie was Mara’s nickname because sometimes we would find her spaced out staring into nothing, like she was on Mars.

  “I’m with Christina; we’re at Ikea.”

  “Christina Bambina!” my father shouted with excitement.

  I was happy that he called while Mara and I were together, which almost never happened. For a moment, it felt as though our family was still one nucleus.

  “Listen, girls, I don’t have a lot of minutes left this month, and I don’t want us to get cut off. I’ve been trying to reach Mom for a few days now, but her cell phone seems to be turned off.”

  Mara, panic-stricken, mouthed, “What do I say?” My heart started pounding. Were we really about to be the mess
engers? Responsible for breaking the news that his wife of nearly thirty years was in Mexico with a man who was buying her a house in the canyons?

  I had noticed that my father never mentioned the divorce in his phone calls, which made me wonder if he knew at all that my mother was planning on divorcing him or if he just sensed that I didn’t want to talk about it. So when my mother finally admitted that she was dating Richard, I’d asked her if my father knew. “No, it’s not the right time to tell him,” she said. But she never said, “Keep this a secret between us, and heads up, he doesn’t know about the divorce.” It was left up to me to decide whether or not to bring it up when I spoke to him. It was too overwhelming to think about: Richard, the divorce. I felt paralyzed, my world spinning, bombs dropping, change happening all too fast for me to comprehend any sort of reality. I never thought about the consequences of being put in such a position until it was happening.

  Equally panicked, with no answer to give, I mouthed back, “I don’t know! Jesus!”

  Mara hung up. Pretended to lose the call. It was the only thing she could think to do. Then she flung her cell phone across the linoleum floor toward the kids’ bedding section and fell down on her hands and knees, a panic attack coming on, rocking back and forth to the sound of her own inflections. “Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .”

  -17-

  Prison

  I was sitting next to my mother at the glass octagon-shaped table, pressing my thumb back and forth against the corner. Kids in my fourth-grade science class were talking about the O. J. Simpson murder trial, repeating things their parents had said, and I was curious to know about prison.