On days I didn’t have to work, James and I would go to parties, or have friends over to James’s house. Otherwise he would come over and hang out with my family at my uncle Jett’s house.
I had met Uncle Jett the previous year, at the same time I’d met my dad, his brother. My mom had recently separated from her husband, Seth, and Jett had recently divorced his wife. It was a match made in incest-joke heaven, and by the time I left for college, my mom was breaking the lease at our house and she and my siblings were moving into the house Jett’s wife and kids had just moved out of.
My friends were careful to avoid asking me too much about this situation, probably for fear of making me feel like a hillbilly, so I had to come up with most of my own incest jokes: “My uncledad and auntmom are picking my siblingcousins up from school”; “I am my own favorite cousin.”
Jett was argumentative, and cunning in that way where you felt as if you were about to be tricked into saying something that would prove his point. I liked these traits at first. It was fun to argue with someone who was so good at it. But it got old quickly. He wanted to argue about everything, and was stubborn and defensive when you didn’t back down. He talked this way with my brother and sister, who were nine and six, and it bothered me.
“Yes,” he would say to them, “you guys can go play on the trampoline, absolutely. But you have to sweep off the deck first. Why? Because you two played on the deck yesterday and leaves have blown onto it since then and you have to help take care of the things you use.”
It was difficult to argue with that. The fact that sweeping the deck hadn’t been mentioned before the minute they wanted to do something else was annoying, but it was his house, they were just kids, and it had a certain kind of logic.
But this deal-making was constant. Oh, they wanted to play video games in the living room? They had to give two reasons Jett should have to listen to video game noises on his day off.
“Mom said we could,” River tried.
“That doesn’t address my issue with the noise.”
“They can play with the sound off,” I offered.
“That’s not the point,” Jett said.
Well, what the fuck is the point, I thought, but I let it go.
I was trying to like Jett. I had hated Seth for so long, had begged my mom to leave him for years. And Seth had left us several times over the years, to stay with his mom or uncle for a few blissful weeks, but it never stuck. He always came back. I wanted so badly for my mom’s relationship with Jett to work so that Seth would never, ever come back. Plus, I didn’t want to be the kind of person who hated everyone my mom dated.
But even when Jett was doing something nice, there was an aggressiveness to his approach.
“I’m going to give you some money when you go back to school,” Jett said to me one day, out of nowhere.
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“If I don’t, then your mom will have to, since I’m guessing you aren’t planning on working during the school year, and you’ll probably need books and supplies, and your mom and I are sharing money anyway, so it’s all the same to me.”
“I’m saving money. And actually I am planning on working during the school year. I worked last semester.”
“You don’t have to argue with me. I’m trying to be nice. I’m doing you a favor. Not everything has to be a debate.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, thank you. That is nice.”
Jett often called me a “man-hater,” and though I saw through it as an offensive tactic to get me to act more amiably towards him, it was a tactic that sort of worked. Being called a man-hater filled me with a frustration that I did not dare express, for fear that the expression of my rage would be turned back towards me and repackaged as more man-hating.
It was true that I hated Seth, and, yes, I was beginning to hate Jett and my dad. But this was such an unfair sample pool! Was I really expected to like everybody my mom had ever been attracted to? Didn’t other men count?
I liked my grandpa. I liked my high school ceramics teacher. I liked James. With them I didn’t feel any of the anxiety or resentment I felt towards Jett or Seth or my dad. But Jett’s words still nagged me. Did I really care about these men I claimed to care about? What had I ever done to indicate that I really cared? Did I ever call my grandpa on the phone, or try to talk to him when we visited, or did I mostly just talk to my grandma and aunts? Had I kept in touch with my high school ceramics teacher who I claimed to be so attached to? Had I bothered to send the thank-you card I wrote for him before graduation, explaining how important he was to me and how much he helped me in my decision to go to college? Or had I forgotten, found the card months later in a stack of old school paper, and never tried to contact him again?
Did I really give a shit about James? Did I? Was I treating him like he was a person I cared about? Or was using him to quell my feelings of inadequacy and loneliness more important to me than being clear about where our relationship stood so that he could decide to move on?
Jett and my mom fought passionately and regularly. It reminded me of my mom’s fights with Seth. There was the same throwing of heavy sentimental objects, the same pushing and slapping of each other. Doors slamming and then doors opening for the sake of dramatic re-slamming. Yelling. But Jett was a lot sharper than Seth had ever been. He berated my mom with crazy nonsense framed as logic that was purposefully designed to misdirect, provoke, and confuse her.
“No, you started the argument,” he would say. “You were yelling at me from the bedroom before I had said anything about the money you owe me. I remember very clearly because I couldn’t hear what you were saying because I was warming up pizza in that piece-of-shit microwave you brought over, and I couldn’t leave it alone to come talk to you because River was in the kitchen and he eats any scrap of food left unattended for more than two minutes. It’s disrespectful and you know it. My son never ate like that.”
Another big difference between these fights and her fights with Seth was Jett’s excessive drinking and my mom’s moderate (but very new, and therefore somewhat unpredictable) drinking.
One night, my mom either fell or was pushed down a flight of stairs. She and Jett had both been drinking. Scared, not really knowing what to do, I shuffled my mom and my siblings into my mom’s car and drove us around the mostly empty back roads that I usually took when I drove to James’s house, waiting until my mom sobered up or we thought of somewhere we could go.
“Just go to Nana and Papa’s,” my mom yelled from the backseat.
“I can’t. I have work in the morning,” I said. “I don’t have my uniform.”
When the gas light came on, I decided we would go back to Jett’s house to grab my mom’s purse and my work uniform, and then drive the forty-five minutes to Nana’s house. Before we could make it back, though, we were pulled over by a cop who had been looking for us. Jett had called 911, claiming he had been given a black eye. My mom was taken to jail on domestic abuse charges while I was left in her car with my brother and sister. I was never asked, for the record, if I had a driver’s license. (I didn’t.)
I drove us straight to our nana and papa’s house without picking up my uniform or my mom’s purse, hoping that we could make it without stopping for gas, for which I had no money. I called in sick the next day, unable to work without my uniform and unable to get my uniform from Jett’s house without having to face Jett.
“I cannot believe your mom is dating that fucking asshole,” James said when I called him.
“Fucking marry me,” I said.
“What?” he said.
I could see that I was becoming a little overconfident about my ability to manipulate James and was losing my touch for subtlety. That, or he was no longer desperately looking for proof that I loved him.
“I just mean that you’re right. It seems like nobody else gets it. I a
ppreciate you.”
“Don’t say things like that.”
“Okay, I won’t. I won’t say anything at all. I’ll just sit here quietly and behave myself.”
“Come on, Chelsea.”
“No, it’s fine. I have better things to do than give you compliments all day.”
I got an email from my dad saying that if I wanted him to give me money for school I should ask him directly instead of contriving a situation where Jett would have to give me money if my dad didn’t, and that I should be more sensitive about my dad’s relationship with his brother, which, he explained, had historically been tenuous but was now in an even more fragile state, given Jett’s relationship with my mom and my living with them for the summer, which made him feel insecure, not that he didn’t fully support them as a couple, because he did, and I should too.
“Forget it,” I wrote back. “I don’t need money from anyone. I didn’t even ask Jett for money. It was his idea and I said no but he kept insisting and I didn’t want to be rude.”
“Why did you tell your dad you didn’t need money?” Jett asked me. “Why should I pay for your books if your dad is offering to pay for them?”
“I don’t know. You really shouldn’t. I don’t want you to. I’m not asking anybody to pay for school. I don’t understand you people.”
“We’re all just trying to help you. You can at least be gracious.”
James and I convinced his family to let me stay with them for a week. We told them I wasn’t getting along with my family; we possibly even lied and said that Jett had kicked me out. James’s parents didn’t particularly like the idea of us having sleepovers, but because James had two twin beds in his room, they were able to suspend their disbelief in regard to the power of teenage hormones.
Being with James all the time felt good. Time seemed infinite, so there was very little pressure to resolve any of our issues.
James didn’t ask me if I loved him, but I told him I did anyway. I wanted him to know that I cared about him, that he was more than an appendage to me, that I wasn’t a man-hater, that I respected him, that I was tired of being destructive.
James’s friend Cameron began messaging me on Myspace. He said that he had heard about me from James and had seen me around high school the year before and thought we should be friends. I remembered seeing him around school too. He was scruffy and quiet and seemed to be interested only in hanging out with his girlfriend. His Myspace headline was Gimme Minnie, which I thought was clever and adorable. Minnie, I knew, was his longtime girlfriend.
Cameron was an unusually forward friend, suggesting we exchange numbers and “hang out sometime” within the first hour of our communication. He started picking me up after work and taking me to Minnie’s parents’ house, where both he and Minnie were living. We would watch movies, eat macaroni and cheese prepared by Minnie’s mom, and sleep in sleeping bags on the floor. Kraft macaroni and cheese was Cameron’s idea of health food. He ate almost nothing but fast food, primarily from Taco Bell, and it was rumored that he defecated only once per week. This rumor, which was at some point confirmed by Cameron, somehow factored in positively to the crush I was developing on him.
“You need to cut your mom and Jett some slack,” my dad wrote in an email. “I know you think it’s weird that your mom is dating your uncle but it’s actually pretty funny if you think about it. He’s your ‘uncledad.’ Haha. Have a sense of humor, Chelsea.”
I had never made any indication that I had a problem with my mom dating my uncle on the basis that he was my uncle, and I already found both the term and concept uncledad pretty funny. I had made and laughed at that joke months ago—so many times, in fact, that it wasn’t funny anymore.
His implication that I had some kind of superficial, hillbilly-
phobic problem with my mom dating my uncle was unfair. The fact that Jett was my uncle didn’t preclude my having an unfavorable opinion about him as a person. Jett was a dick, a bully, occasionally violent, definitely vindictive, stubborn, arrogant, drank too much, and was as full of shit as my dad was. I had no reason to like Jett.
I didn’t answer the email.
The next day I got another email from my dad. “Are you mad at me? You’re going to have a hard life if you get mad at people this easily. Write back if you care.”
“I’m not mad,” I wrote.
I was beyond mad. I was sick of these grown adult men projecting their problems and insecurities onto me. I was sick of being expected to believe that these strange, fucked-up people were members of my family and therefore deserved my respect, when they had disregarded my existence for my entire childhood. I was sick of being bullied into believing that if I didn’t automatically love and admire every man that was presented to me, that meant that I hated all men.
I wasn’t a man-hater. I was an asshole-hater. I was a shithead-hater. I hated people for who they were. I was a person-hater. This was equal opportunity. It wasn’t my fault that many of the shitheads currently in my life were men. That was not my problem.
Cameron and Minnie broke up. I can’t remember the details, but I don’t think it had anything to do with me. After their breakup, Cameron and I started hanging out more. We would make out, drive around in his car, try to think of things to talk about, eat Taco Bell, and, ultimately, one night in the Taco Bell parking lot with a taco twelve-pack and a Nachos Supreme, we discussed whether or not we should have sex.
“You’re going to have to talk to James,” I said in my infinite wisdom.
“What do you mean?” Cameron said.
“I can’t do it if he’s not okay with it. He’ll hate both of us forever.”
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea to tell him,” he said, probably simultaneously weighing the pros and cons of continuing to engage with my faulty sense of logic.
“He’s going to find out anyway,” I said, fully believing my own phony, manipulative reasoning. “Things will turn out much better if you’re straightforward with him from the outset.”
Cameron told me he would call James the next day.
James called me after Cameron talked to him, wanting to know what exactly was going on, whether I did or did not love him, saying something about betrayal. I yelled at him for being mad at Cameron, for not dealing with his feelings in a mature and rational way, and for telling Cameron he didn’t want him to sleep with me, as I deduced had happened. I was shopping for fabric in Walmart as I quiet-yelled at James on the phone, told him that he was embarrassing me, and that, as an artist, I needed to be able to shop for art supplies without having to counsel my jealous ex-boyfriend.
“You said you loved me,” he said. “You wouldn’t do this if that were true.”
“Both can be true,” I said firmly.
I called Cameron and told him that it didn’t matter what James had said, that I wanted to sleep with him anyway.
We went to Cameron’s mom’s trailer, where she made us fried bologna and cheese sandwiches, and then Cameron and I attempted to have sex in a smaller trailer outside of her regular trailer. Cameron was slim, so I was surprised by how much loose skin he had on his stomach and legs. I thought of all the Taco Bell we had eaten together in the last few weeks, how the fat cells from those meals were accumulating in the skin that was now touching my skin, and all the poop he probably currently had gathered in his body.
I was repulsed, not just by his body, but by myself for thinking that having sex with this strange, unhealthy person that I was only marginally interested in was somehow worth the pain it might cause another person. A person I liked. A person who had always been really great to me. Maybe the only person I had talked to all summer who hadn’t tried to manipulate me or make me feel bad, even though he was the only person who had good reason to.
Cameron and I struggled to guide his penis into my vagina for a little while before I gave up, saying, “I’m bored.” After a
little while, I asked him to drive me home.
•
“I’m coming to Clearlake,” my dad wrote in an email.
The thought of him visiting worried me. But still, despite myself, I thought there was a chance it might go well. That he would finally realize how special and worthy of his attention I was. I wanted to be told that he regretted not being around to watch me grow up. That I deserved to have had a dad and that he was sorry for not giving that to me. That he would give anything to have spent just one day with me as a child. I wanted to hear him say that things were hard between us now because we were both so bull-headed and self-protective and because so much time had passed, but that things would get better, that we would learn to love each other, that we would someday feel like real family.
“Your mom is threatening to throw my coins in the river,” the email went on, “and Jett seems to be backing her up, so expect me in 24–48 hours to pick them up. You can forget about me helping you with school money if your mom destroys those coins.”
Then the email quoted a lengthy email exchange between him and Jett about speakers and storage spaces and how pathetic it was that Jett still lived in Clearlake and how selfish it was for my dad to have lived in France at some point, none of which seemed to involve me in any way. I wasn’t sure why it had been quoted to me.
“What coins?” I asked my mom.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said. “Did your dad call you?”
“He emailed.”
“Jett showed me some coins that your dad gave him for safekeeping a long time ago, and I joked and said I was going to throw them in the lake and Jett got mad at me and now I guess he talked to your dad about it.”
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