Don't Wait Up

by Liz Astrof

  A volley of expletives was exchanged in all kinds of tones, culminating in her screaming “I did not ‘take her’!”

  But she did, I wanted to scream even louder. Don’t believe her, Dad, she took me! She stole the salt and pepper shakers at the diner and now she stole me! Come get me! Let’s stop for ice cream on the way home!

  “It’s not kidnapping,” my mother hollered and shoved the phone at me.

  “Sweetheart,” she snapped, menacingly close to my face, “tell your father you want to live with me.”

  For the first time that night, I was afraid. Telling him that would be lying and, even though I was only six, I was keenly aware of how saying it would hurt my father, who had brought home Beautiful Kind Clean Cathy to take this witch’s place. Also, the word sweetheart was at this point officially dead to me.

  Holding the phone to my ear, I could hear my father telling Cathy to get Jeff inside already, that his piece-of-shit mother wasn’t coming back to take him for ice cream. Apparently, my brother was still sitting outside on our stoop waiting for us to take him to Baskin-Robbins.

  My father was back on the line. “. . . Elizabeth?”

  He sounded scared. Which scared me more. “Hi, Daddy,” I said.

  “I’m going to come get you,” he said breathlessly.

  Oh, thank God, I thought. But my mother was glaring at me. It was the cold, dead, dark stare of a woman who never should have had children. A woman who would lie about ice cream. A woman who was really good at pinching and biting and hair-pulling and possibly having Jimmy the ventriloquist dummy kill me, so I did what she told me to.

  “I want to live with Mommy,” I mumbled into the phone, tears streaming down my face, praying my father could tell I was lying.

  “Put her back on the phone,” he said. His voice was tight, his tone the same as it was back when our neighbor Mr. Andretta poured hot turkey grease on our lawn as retaliation for our dog, Schnoodle, peeing on his bush. (Schnoodle hated Mr. A. He also hated my mother and growled whenever she went near him because dogs smell assholes. In every way.)

  I held the receiver out to my mother tentatively. She grabbed it and listened for a moment.

  “You can’t,” she said, in a teasing singsongy voice. “No, you can’t . . . No, you can’t—”

  Suddenly, she screamed.

  “Because you don’t have custody, Lester!”

  She slammed the phone down and stormed down the hall where Grandma Bea had gone.

  I sat on the plastic-covered couch. Unable to get any traction, I slid down to the edge and then to the floor. I did this over and over. Just like at Grandma Ethel’s, but scary instead of fun.

  Eventually my mother returned with a worn plastic shopping bag that was coming apart in places. “I bought you some new things you’ll need for living here,” she said, putting the bag on the couch between us and dumping out the contents. There was a towel covered with tiny sailboats. One of the sailboats had a rust-colored stain on it. Obviously, this was the famous towel she had been talking about in the car, the towel that made her a good mother. There were also some shirts and pants and a package of four pairs of underwear, each of which looked like they’d been worn before.

  There was also a black-and-white marble composition notebook bent at the corners, and a fountain pen that had leaked into one of the shirts. “Those are for school,” she said.

  It was obvious that this dirty, hysterical woman didn’t know or care that I already had a Charlie’s Angels backpack and notebook at home that Beautiful Kind Clean Cathy had gotten me at the beginning of the school year when we did a thing called “school shopping” that normal people did and which were my prized possessions. It was equally clear to me that this mean bitch didn’t care about the purple puffy heart stickers Sandy Kanopka had given me at her birthday party that were safely stored in my pencil case in the front zipper pocket back at home. In my room.

  This was when it hit me that I really wasn’t going home.

  I started to cry. The knot in my stomach came undone, and I cried and cried.

  “Why are you crying?” my mother asked, offended. “I just gave you all of these new things—how can you be so ungrateful?”

  I finally said the words. “I want to go home.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You are home,” she said. “And you belong with your mother.”

  I sobbed. She put her face up close to mine.

  “I’m part of you,” she said, softly putting my hair behind my ear. “I’ll always be part of you, and you can’t deny that.”

  I sobbed harder. Why couldn’t beautiful, kind, clean Cathy be part of me?

  At her order, I followed her to her bedroom—it was that or have her touch me softly again. In stark contrast to the rest of the place, her room was a complete shithole, with blankets in piles and the floor covered in clothes, trash, and empty food containers. Amidst the clutter, I spotted a broken umbrella, a flattened sun visor—but no Jimmy. I scanned the corners, all piled high with dirty laundry and junk, but couldn’t spot her demon dummy. The unclean and slightly rancid smell my mother gave off permeated the space. I breathed in sharp, short breaths to try and see if any of Beautiful Kind Clean Cathy’s fresh smell was left in my nose. It wasn’t.

  As she changed into the same nightgown from the night before, my mother, now angry again, told me that I’d been “brainwashed” by my father and his side of the family. And that Cathy was a “whore.” Another new word. I missed that whore.

  My mother shut the lights and motioned for me to join her in her smelly bed. Against my better judgment, I did, and once next to her she hugged me tight and told me how much fun we were going to have.

  She slept. I lay awake, clinging to the edge of the bed, waiting for Jimmy to emerge from the filth and darkness and kill me. Weirdly, he didn’t try it, which was a shame because if ever there was a day I wished I were dead, this was it.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, in the same clothes I thought I’d be having ice cream in, my mother took me to a nearby public school to enroll me.

  I sat in the principal’s office in a big red leather chair and looked out on the playground. Instead of grass like at my Long Island elementary school, there was a blacktop with two bare swing sets—just cold-looking metal. It was recess, and kids were playing outside, a sea of puffy jackets in different colors. Were these the kids I was going to grow up with, instead of the kids I thought I was going to grow up with? I wondered which of them would be my friends, and what they served for hot lunch, whether pizza day would still be Friday and if their grilled cheese also came with chilled fruit, and if I would have to change in front of other people for gym class.

  I was snapped back to reality by my mother’s signature shrieking, directed this time at the principal, an older-looking guy (he literally looked older than he had looked when we first got there) who was telling her, for what must’ve been the fifth time judging by the fact that he looked like he was on the verge of losing his shit, to send me back to my father. But my mother was resolute in her keeping me, the word custody piercing through the screaming. For all her ranting and raving and shouting and crying and a good amount of spitting, however, the principal wouldn’t let me into the school, and we left.

  It’s all a bit of a blur for a while after that. For my mother, the novelty of taking care of her daughter wore off almost immediately, and my Grandma Bea’s condition made her unable to help and required her to lie down and worry about her furniture a lot. My mom was angry that the clothes she’d bought for me didn’t fit and complained that I was “too tubby” for them. As for the famous towel, it was so old that it was no longer absorbent. It didn’t take long for my mother to revert back to her old self, enraged at the idea of feeding, dressing, bathing, or caring for a child in general and me in particular.

  I wondered if my dad was getting that “custody” thing, even though my mother said that no court in the world would award it to a father over a mother. Maybe they
would give it to Beautiful Kind Clean Cathy. She would fight for me.

  By day we visited schools, with me looking out on a series of urban playgrounds while my mother got into shouting matches with a series of principals, all of whom told her to send me back to my father. By night I would eat Grandma Bea’s high-fiber old-people cereal and look down at the traffic from her high-rise dining room window, wondering if my father’s car was among the headlights. If he was coming to save me, or if he’d given up on trying.

  This was the routine for several weeks, until one afternoon, after we’d driven to the outskirts of Philadelphia in traffic only to face yet another principal—a woman no less—who had taken my father’s side. More screaming, even some crying, and, if I remember correctly, an attempt to pinch the lady.

  We got back to Grandma Bea’s, and my mother told me to go into the bedroom we shared and close the door. I did as I was told, then pressed my ear against my side of the bedroom door and listened to my mother dial the phone; clearly, I’d gotten brave during my sojourn, as hardened as any other POW, daring enough to eavesdrop.

  At first, I couldn’t hear much, but it didn’t take long before she was screaming. Repeated fuck yous (no surprise there) cleared the door, followed by “This isn’t over, Lester,” after which I heard the phone slam and her stomping toward the bedroom.

  She was coming for me. This was it.

  Head for the bomb shelter, I thought to myself (I wasn’t that brave) and dove under the bed. Or tried to—it was a disaster under there, too. I wedged my way in between the musty boxes and rotten food, only to catch sight of a lifeless blue eye inches from my face.

  The rest of Jimmy was obscured by clothes and shoes and take-out containers, but the demon dummy had found me at last.

  I don’t know what made me scream, Jimmy or the door crashing open and bouncing off the wall. I turned away from the doll and saw my mother’s feet kicking my suitcase, the one Beautiful Kind Clean Cathy had packed for the overnight that seemed to have taken place years before.

  “You’re going back to live with your father,” my mother spat, kicking the suitcase again. Better the suitcase than me (though I knew I could be next). But holy shit, I was going home.

  I’m going home. I kept saying it to myself over and over, with each repetition feeling myself getting stronger and her getting weaker and Jimmy—Jimmy couldn’t hurt me now. I was going home!

  That night, one of the cars on the street below pulled into my Grandma Bea’s building to come and get me. My own personal chariot home. It turned out it wasn’t driven by my father, who was prevented from picking me up by the terms of the “custody” thing. Instead it was my Dad’s friend Chaim, a small and extremely kind man with a head of black hair as big as his red track suit was loud. He came into the bedroom to introduce himself, which was when I finally came out from under the bed. I’d never met Chaim, but from that moment forward I loved him. Chaim was my Prince Charming in nylon.

  My mother wouldn’t say good-bye to me. She stormed up and down the hall shouting that she didn’t deserve this.

  I did say good-bye to Jimmy. The poor bastard didn’t choose his life, and it was a life I wouldn’t even wish on a demon-dummy.

  • • •

  EVENTUALLY I LEARNED why no school in Philadelphia would admit me, leaving my mother with no choice but to send me back home. It turned out that the principal of our school on Long Island, Mr. DeBonis, had taken up my cause. It wasn’t because of me, though—Jeff’s winning the county spelling bee was the first bit of good publicity our white-trash school had gotten in years, which of course made our family’s cause a personal one for our principal and compelled him to withhold my school records and explain my family situation to anyone who asked for them. Mr. DeBonis also called all the schools in the Philadelphia school system for us and told them not only what my mother had done, but how batshit crazy she was.

  So even from two states away, my brother had inadvertently saved me. Kept me safe-safe. His mother left him on a porch waiting for ice cream and fucked him over—and in return, he fucked her back. Talk about “just desserts.”

  Many years later, sitting across from her at the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aged, a mother myself, I was no longer afraid of what she could do to me anymore. But I was still afraid—afraid because I came from a woman capable of kidnapping her daughter and (even worse) not kidnapping her son, too. It’s not like there wasn’t room in the car!

  “I’ll always be part of you, and you can’t deny that,” she said, softly putting my hair behind my ear.

  That curse would inform every decision I made as a person and as a mother. Including the terrible decisions. Like the one I was about to make on my way home from the “home.”

  I called Todd, who was getting Jesse and Phoebe ready for bed, and told him to put me on speaker—which he did, thinking I was saying good night to the kids.

  Instead I announced that I was taking them for ice cream. Jesse and Phoebe were going to get the ice cream Jeff and I never did.

  Todd turned off the speaker, reminding me that it was eight o’clock on a school night and telling me that taking the kids for ice cream was about the dumbest thing I could do at that moment.

  But I’d said it, and they’d heard me. I had to take them. Otherwise, I would be doing what she’d done when she promised ice cream and there was no ice cream. I reminded Todd of the day’s suicide texts and that I’d probably be dead someday soon anyway. Placating me, he relented—but not before telling me I would be in charge of putting the kids to bed. No problem, I told him—I was their mother, and I didn’t need a towel to prove it.

  When we got home from ice cream an hour later, Jesse went to his room, leaving me to get my very hyped-up daughter to go to sleep. Phoebe was five—the same age I was when my mother had first left, and as strong-willed and confident as I had been insecure at that age.

  She started doing cartwheels around her room. I told her to stop doing cartwheels. She did more cartwheels, then switched to dancing. I told her to stop dancing. She danced more, then jumped on the bed. I told her to stop jumping on her bed or else there would be consequences. She jumped higher. I screamed at her to get into her bed. She refused until, finally succumbing to exhaustion, she crapped out on her own terms and got under her blanket.

  I watched her as she started to fall asleep, her fingers in her mouth. Then, just as she drifted off, I leaned over her and asked a question that couldn’t wait until morning.

  “Phoebe . . .?” I asked. “Why aren’t you afraid of me?”

  She opened her eyes.

  “Because you’re my mommy,” she said, as if it were the silliest question in the world.

  And in that moment, Phoebe let me know that I had not become my mother, but her mother.

  I tucked her blanket around her, smoothed her hair, kissed her softly on her forehead, and whispered, “You can be a little afraid of me.”

  But I’d always keep her safe-safe.

  No More Monsters

  * * *

  My father was seventy-five—youthful, despite, or maybe because of, hanging up his hairpieces—and Cathy was as shiksa-gorgeous as ever at sixty when they moved out of our old house on Long Island. Before leaving, they shipped me what was left there from my childhood: a small leather yearbook from elementary school and the mirror that hung in my bedroom growing up.

  I was never sure why they sent the mirror. It wasn’t anything extraordinary, antique-wise—if anything it was pretty beat up. A wooden frame measuring three feet by two, there are decorative swirls carved into the wood that meet in the middle in a flower, the white paint still sticky from years of humidity. A typical girl’s mirror from a run-of-the-mill kids’ furniture store on Jericho Turnpike, no doubt long out of business.

  It arrived one day like a family member who traveled two thousand miles via UPS ground, unannounced and looking for a place to stay. Todd and I were living in an apartment at the time. I couldn’t hang the mirror up,
because I’d told Todd there wasn’t enough wall space for his framed movie poster for Jaws, which was about the same size. That had clearly been a lie, but I’d used the word aesthetic, so I won. Knowing nothing could be gained by revisiting that particular battle and feeling guilty at even the thought of breaking the mirror in two over my knee and throwing it away—I mean, it had traveled all that way—I settled for leaning the thing up against our bedroom wall, to be dealt with later.

  From its new perch, my mirror served as a lone spectator to our ongoing struggle to conceive a baby. We’d become slaves to my temperature chart prior to its arrival, but the new drugs my fertility doctor had put me on were making me fucking crazy, as did the herbs my fertility acupuncturist had put inside my ears that could not be jostled. Never a huge fan of sex—it’s so naked—the experience was now on a par with a root canal: a necessary task I endured with my sweatpants mostly on. Plus, I wasn’t even sure I liked kids.

  I’d certainly avoided babysitting whenever possible growing up. My chosen after-school profession had been working behind the counter of the clothing store Benetton in the Sunrise Mall, where I’d chain-smoke and moon over Don Jaconi, who wore Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men and worked in the cassette aisle at Sam Goody across the way. I’d blow puffs of smoke in his direction, sort of . . . reaching out to him. At twenty-eight, Don was a man—super-pale, his jet-black hair even hinting at a little premature gray. He had piercing brown(ish) eyes, earrings in both ears, and I was in love with him—so in love that I still remember telling my friend Dina, a greeter at The Gap who had stopped by Benetton to chat, that I wanted to “have all of Don’s babies” while ringing up a rugby sweater through a cloud of smoke.

  I guess I had wanted kids at some point. Though possibly only if they were Don’s.

  But years later, far away from the Sunrise Mall and the smoke-filled merino wool sweaters I sold to Don Jaconi at a massive discount, I was married and living in Los Angeles. Todd and I were spending six nights a month, pre-, mid-, and post-ovulation, trying to get pregnant. One night, I lie on my side in the dark, I was looking through my childhood mirror at Todd, lit by the porn on the TV that allowed him to be attracted to me enough to do the deed and go back to his football game in the other room.