Down City

by Leah Carroll

  ONE NIGHT, DEREK and I are at the kitchen table playing Uno, when we hear the particular sounds of Dad’s very drunk footsteps coming across the patio to the side door. Dad fumbles a bit with the door while we sit there, and when he comes in, everything seems okay at first. He’s in a suit, upright but a bit wobbly. Then he turns to face us. The entire right side of his head is soaked in blood. It drips from his hair and onto his shoulders. His eye is swollen shut. He stands and looks at us as if daring us to look away. Neither of us do. Then he walks through the kitchen and makes his way to the bedroom. He leaves behind a trail of penny-size drops of blood.

  Just as Ann-Marie comes running into the kitchen, our house lights up in flashes of blue and white and there’s a heavy knock at the door. Outside are half a dozen police officers. Their cars are parked on the street and in our yard and the officers stand solemnly in bright-yellow slickers to protect themselves from the drizzle that has turned to rain. The entire front end of Dad’s car is mangled, into an almost symmetrical U shape. The windshield is bloody but not smashed. Instead there’s a bubble in the glass—an imprint that Dad’s head must have made as it slammed forward.

  Ann-Marie talks to the officers and I grab a kitchen sponge to clean up the splotches of blood. When I squeeze the sponge into the kitchen sink I look out the window and see the neighbors peering at our house from between their blinds and half-open doors.

  Ann-Marie is hysterical. Derek has fled to his room. But I’m angry. I’m angry at the gawkers across the street and all the stupid flashing police cars. One of the officers tells Ann-Marie that if she doesn’t get Dad to come out of the house on his own, they will have to come inside and get him. I stand in the bedroom door as she tries to rouse him from sleep, the bloody half of his face slowly turning his pillow red. Eventually, the police come in and haul him to his feet. “Okay, okay,” he says to them. “Okay, okay.”

  I’m blocking the narrow hallway that leads from the bedroom to the kitchen and one of the cops tells me to get out of the way. It surprises me actually, how angry the officer seems at me. In the kitchen two officers prop Dad up on either side and walk him out the door. Ann-Marie weeps silently next to me. I still have the bloody sponge in my hand. Dad turns to look at us with his monster face. “Thanks a lot, you fucking bitches,” he says so clearly it echoes through the dark house, lit up only by the flashing blue and white of the police cruisers.

  When he gets back the next morning, Dad has a big bandage covering his right eye and goes right to sleep. Derek and I listen as he and Ann-Marie murmur behind the closed bedroom door. His car, which he had wrapped around a telephone pole at the bottom of the street and then somehow extracted and driven home, has been towed away. Later, we sit in the living room and Dad tells us he’s going to the VA hospital for a few weeks. He says he’s going for alcohol detox and to get electroshock therapy for his depression. It all sounds bleak and terrifying to me, but Dad seems excited.

  “Everything will be better after this,” he says.

  “Do you have to go to jail?” I ask. Dad rolls his eyes at me. Why am I such a bitch, I wonder.

  WHEN HE GETS back from the VA hospital, he has a new diagnosis: manic depression. This is why he sleeps so much and disappears for days. He can’t drink now, because he’s on a drug called Antabuse that makes him really sick if he does. For years now, Dad hasn’t had a drink in front of us. We don’t keep alcohol in the house, though once poking around in the basement, I’d opened a case for one of his big telephoto lenses and found a half-empty bottle of Jameson’s inside.

  But now he’s on a cocktail of new medications and some of them make him seem drunk. He shows us his prescriptions lined up on the windowsill above the kitchen sink looking out onto Carpenter Avenue. He shakes the brown prescription bottles, rattling the pills inside, and explains, “These are Klonopin, these are Xanax, this is lithium, this is Prozac. All of these are prescribed for a big two-hundred-pound guy, and if you or Derek tried to take one to see what it was like, you could die.”

  I have no interest in taking Dad’s pills, but I watch his consumption of them closely. That summer he takes me and a friend to see Batman Returns at the Showcase Cinemas in Seekonk and lingers behind us in the car, shaking a pill from the bottle and swallowing it dry. He jumps triumphantly out of the car and squeezes my shoulders, shaking me back and forth. “Ready?” he asks. “This one won’t be as good as the last one because there’s no Joker in this one.” Then he does his imitation of Jack Nicholson dancing to the Prince song all the way up to the doors of the theater. My friend giggles.

  During the movie, Dad gets up to go to the bathroom twice and takes another pill in the theater. He’s right. The sequel is not as good as the first Batman movie. As we walk back to the car he staggers a bit. From the front seat of the car he does his Joker impression again, but this time it’s in slow motion. I watch the road as we pull onto the Wampanoag Trail, the short freeway that connects Barrington to Seekonk and Providence. Dad swerves to his left and nearly swipes a mini van at one point. I seem to be the only one who notices. Dad turns up the music on the car radio and sings along and my friend laughs in the backseat and puffs on her inhaler. She always has a brown paper bag with at least two inhalers for her chronic asthma, and normally I would be both jealous of her affliction and annoyed by the puffing and the attention it gets her, but I’m too busy keeping track of Dad’s driving. I pretend to listen intently to the radio, all the while aware of Dad’s physical presence in the car, and monitor how close he is to me, where he’s looking, or if he’s looking at all.

  PART TWO

  NINE

  One day in May of 1993, a few months before I turn thirteen, Dad says to me, “Ann-Marie is having a baby.” It isn’t totally unexpected. Months before, Ann-Marie had purchased a home fertility test, and for a while there were a bunch of negative pregnancy test sticks in the bathroom trash, but then we’d heard nothing else about having a baby. I’m excited by the idea of a baby. I think a baby might be able to fix our family.

  We aren’t allowed to tell anyone for another month—until after Ann-Marie has passed her first trimester. It’s possible, she tells us, that she can lose the baby during that time so it’s better to wait. I’m anxious every day, counting down on my wall calendar, terrified to say anything lest I jinx the pregnancy and make Ann-Marie have a miscarriage. Finally, in June, she says it’s safe.

  I call Aunty Sandy, and tell her the news. “Oh,” she says.

  “Isn’t it exciting?” I ask.

  “Mm-hm.”

  Aunty Sandy is married now with a little girl, but she lives just down the street from my grandparents. Her response makes my stomach sink, and I’m worried my grandma will also act like it’s bad news. I don’t want to press Sandy on her real feelings because I’m worried she’ll say something I don’t want to hear. The summer is coming and seventh grade is ending and I am going to have a real family with a baby. I decide that if I can be happy enough about it then it will all work out perfectly. I’ll prove to my grandparents and to Aunty Sandy that I can make everything okay.

  TAYLOR IS BORN in December. Ann-Marie’s water breaks in the middle of the night a few days after Christmas and she and Dad grab the overnight bag she packed a few days before and take off for Women & Infants Hospital in Providence. I pace around the house and go to the basement to try to get Derek to stay up with me.

  “Just wake me up when the baby’s born.” He pulls a pillow over his head.

  I turn the TV off and on and think about calling someone but it’s too late at night. Dad comes back home just as the sun is rising. From my room I hear him come inside and when I walk into the kitchen he’s talking on the cordless phone sitting at the table. He has on sweatpants and shiny leather loafers and I can smell alcohol on him. He looks up at me but continues his conversation.

  “Well,” he says into the phone. “Taylor’s here. The umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck so they had to give Ann-Marie an emergency C-se
ction but everything’s okay now.”

  My eyes widen and Dad winks at me. “Yup,” he says. I can tell he’s trying to wind down the conversation and guess that he’s talking to Ann-Marie’s parents. “We’ll see you in the morning,” he says clicking the OFF button of the phone and putting it down between us on the table.

  “She’s okay?” I ask.

  “They are both okay,” says Dad. His words are thick, not slurred, but slow and laden with a kind of sadness that I hear only when he has been drinking whiskey and not beer. “Taylor is a little peanut. You’re going to love her.” He stops for a moment and looks out the window at the dull gray sky of the early winter morning. There’s something in his mustache, a brown spot, maybe gravy or ketchup, and I stare hard at it. This is not what I’d hoped for. Dad wasn’t supposed to come home drunk with food in his mustache. I wonder if Ann-Marie and Taylor are sleeping or awake in the hospital and wondering where Dad was.

  “When can we go see her?”

  “Visiting hours start soon,” he says. “You’re going to love her. I know you will.”

  “Of course I will,” I say, my voice unintentionally sharp. Of course I will love my baby sister. I’m a normal person. Dad looks at me, surprised. Though I talk back to all my teachers and pride myself on my smart mouth, I almost never take a tone with Dad, especially if he has been drinking.

  “You know when you were born,” he says, “I was in a fucking locked room in the hospital basement.” He laughs. “I guess I’ve come a long way, huh?”

  I smile at him, despite myself. “You have food on your face,” I tell him. He laughs again and scratches at his mustache with his thumb and forefinger, dislodging what’s crusted there.

  His eyes are bloodshot and tiny red veins creep across his nose and the top of his cheeks where they met his crinkled eyelids. He holds his hand out and I grab it across the table. He squeezes and tells me the story of when I was born and though I’ve heard it before, I listen, because it’s a good story and because I know Dad likes telling it.

  My mother’s doctor, it turns out, was a raging alcoholic, and when my mom went into labor with me, he’d been on a bender for days and the nurses, who were terrified of him, tried to buy some time to sober him up and kept coming up with excuses for why they couldn’t call him. My family, unaware of the doctor’s state, grew increasingly agitated as the hours went by. I was a big baby, almost eight pounds, and my mom was a tiny lady, not just short but built with the same kind of small bones as me.

  “And so your mom is in labor for nine, ten, eleven hours,” Dad says. “And the nurses won’t call the doctor and your grandmother is freaking out and I’m yelling for someone to help her out. And then finally they send in this security guard, this fucking rent-a-cop, who’s telling me ‘calm down, calm down’ and he’s about five foot five and I pick up the chair I’m sitting in and wing it across the room and ask him if I’m calm enough and the next thing there are nine guys wrestling me down and your grandma is screaming and your mom, at this point, probably doesn’t even notice, and then I’m in a locked room when you’re finally born. And my God, you were an ugly baby!” Dad says that by the time the doctor finally came, it was too late for a C-section and they had to pull me out with high forceps and I was covered in bruises, jaundiced, and had a malformed head.

  “But you got better,” says Dad. “Wait till you see her. She’s a little peanut.” He swallows the rest of his glass and kicks off his loafers. “We’ll go in a few hours,” he says. “Just wake me up in a few hours.” He walks out of the kitchen, headed for his bedroom, leaving a trail of clothes in his wake.

  I DO, OF course, love Taylor. Even during the first few months when she does little more than ball her hands into tiny fists and scream, I’m captivated. I hold her in the gliding chair in her nursery and watch as she squeezes her eyes open and closed and tenses all her muscles. I listen carefully as Ann-Marie explains how to change her diaper, how to wipe the folds of her chubby thighs so she doesn’t get a rash, how to walk her around bopping up and down and patting rhythmically at her back until she burps or throws up all over the cloth Ann-Marie places on my shoulder.

  From the start, Taylor is more mine than Dad’s. After her three months of maternity leave are over, Ann-Marie reluctantly goes back to work and Taylor goes to daycare. The first week, Dad says he’ll take care of getting the baby ready and driving her to daycare, because he’s working nights at the Journal. When I go with Ann-Marie that first afternoon to pick Taylor up, Denise, the babysitter, hands over Taylor and her heavily packed diaper bag.

  “Men!” she says and laughs nervously. Dad had dropped Taylor off that morning with poop all over her stomach and legs. He’d seemingly put a new diaper on her but had not bothered to clean any of the mess from the old one before snapping her clothes together. Denise tries to act like Dad is just a typical sitcom male, unaware of how to change a diaper, but we all know better. That same week I’d asked Dad if he could drive Derek and me to school. Ann-Marie had left for work and he sat in the living room, Taylor asleep at his feet in her bassinet.

  “I guess so,” he said, and walked to the hook in the kitchen where he hung his car keys. I reached for the sleeping baby, ready to carry her out and buckle her into the car seat myself.

  “Just leave her,” said Dad. “That whole thing with the car seat will take too long.”

  My heart seized up in my chest and beside me Derek stiffened.

  “We’ll just walk then,” I said.

  “I said she’ll be fine,” Dad said. His look was menacing as he loomed over us. “Do you think I’ve never done this before?”

  Derek and I trudged out to the car, with Taylor asleep on the living room floor. As Dad dropped us off and Derek and I walked through the front doors, Derek turned to me and said, “That was really fucked up, right? Like that’s normally not what you do with a baby, right?”

  “Don’t tell Ann-Marie,” I said. Derek shrugged.

  “Seriously,” I said. “You can’t tell her.”

  THAT APRIL, WHEN I’m in eighth grade and Taylor learns how to crawl around the house, Kurt Cobain kills himself. I watch the coverage on MTV obsessively—the footage of his Converse-clad feet seen from the window of the tiny shed in which he’d shot himself, the interviews with friends, acquaintances, and experts who opine about what this means for music, the memorial service in Seattle where Courtney Love reads from sections of his suicide note, her voice cracking with grief over the loudspeakers as she speaks of the “burning, nauseous, pit” inside Kurt’s stomach.

  I collect all the magazines I can get my hands on: Spin, Rolling Stone, even People, and pore over the articles trying to figure out how it could have happened. Everyone talks about how young he was. I can’t get over the pictures of his young daughter with her bright blue eyes, so much like Kurt’s. And the nature of it—shooting yourself in the head with a shotgun. I understand that a person only does that when they truly want out, truly don’t want to live anymore. I think there’s something courageous about it—the finality.

  That year my best friend and I think we’re the only ones in school who really understand Kurt Cobain and his music. I spend hours in the TV room of her split-level house listening to all of his albums and watching videos. We become obsessed with Courtney Love and want to be just like her. We read every interview we can find and cut out every picture, modeling our clothes on hers. We go to Thayer Street, by Brown University, and buy vintage baby-doll dresses and fishnet stockings. I find a pair of deeply discounted Mary Jane-style Doc Martens and beg Dad to buy them for me. I wear them with everything I own.

  We troll the CD stores for the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, and the Sex Pistols, too. We rent Sid and Nancy at the video store because Courtney Love has a bit part and we watch it so many times we know every line. That Christmas, Derek gives it to me on VHS and when I unwrap it, I’m so thrilled by the gift that I hug him. He pushes me away. “Whatever,” he says. “I just know you like the
stupid movie.” I squeeze him again, extra hard.

  In Barrington, the bands of choice are Phish and the Dave Matthews Band, and I set myself in direct opposition to the boat shoes and white baseball hats of the soccer-playing, Grateful Dead–loving popular kids. That summer as eighth grade ends and my friend and I look forward to high school I imagine all the drama that awaits me. We dye our hair pink and talk about how different things will be. Every book and every movie I’ve ever seen about high school says this will be the most important time of my life and I’m sure it will. I plan all my outfits with the notion that Courtney Love will come to my school and pick out the coolest person. If that happens, I want to be that girl.

  That summer I come across an article where someone mentions the book A Clockwork Orange. The next time Dad and I are at the library I check it out. On the drive home he looks at my book and slaps his knee.

  “This is one of the few cases,” he says, “where the movie is just as good as the book. Maybe even better. Your mom and I saw it in the theater when we were first dating.”

  “Really?” I ask. “Can we rent it?”

  I watch the movie as soon as I got home and then start on the book. Dad and I talk about the British ending versus the American ending and at dinner we drive Ann-Marie crazy by calling all of our food eggy-weggs and doing our best Malcolm McDowell impersonations.

  Eventually, she has had enough. “What is it with this movie? It’s just some idiot with a stick!”

  “Ann-Mo,” Dad says, “that is the most salient piece of film criticism I may have ever heard.”

  By the time high school starts in the fall, I’ve worked my way through all the counterculture and dystopian literature I can find, starting, of course, with Brave New World and 1984.