It turned out, I never cared who won. I got bored. I searched through the desk drawers. Stamps, pens, paper clips, cough drops, Post-its, Mr. Resnick’s death certificate. In her closet, I tried on all of Mrs. Resnick’s shoes and kept the red silk high heels on my feet as I walked toward a brown box on the floor of the closet. It was the kind of box that held secrets: love letters from Mr. Resnick in college, kissing you in the elevator, still taste it on my tongue. A pair of dirty baby shoes, and then bills, tons of unpaid bills. Bills from Stamford Hospital and the psychiatric clinic and checks for thousands of dollars from my father.
In her dresser drawers, Mrs. Resnick’s underwear was mostly nude and cotton like my mother’s, except for a few lace orange and red pairs with bows on the back that didn’t have much ass coverage. I imagined she wore these only when she slept with my father. I picked up one of her bras and wrapped it around my body to see if it fit.
“I’m home, I’m home I’m home, Mom!” Mark shouted loudly, walking into his mother’s room. “Oh,” he said, horrified to see me holding his mother’s bra.
“What the hell is Emily doing here?” Richard asked behind him, eating tuna right out of the can.
“Playing dress-up,” Mark said.
I was so embarrassed I stood there and waited to perish. Richard sat on the bed.
“So if tuna is the chicken of the sea,” Richard said, turning over the tuna can in his hand, “does that mean chicken is the tuna of the earth?”
“Richard, shut the fuck up,” Mark said.
“Jesus,” Richard said.
Mark walked over to Richard and took the vodka. He walked toward the closet. He ran his hands over his father’s pants.
“Remember when my dad would call us up to his room and count his pants, Emily?” Mark asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Mr. Resnick had an unreasonable amount of pants. That was one of the things I remembered most about him. “Look at my pants,” Mr. Resnick would say to us. “That’s an unreasonable amount of pants. I haven’t changed pants size in twenty years. You know how many pants you collect in twenty years? This many pants.” He pointed to all his pants. “That’s an unreasonable amount of pants.” Mark and I would run to his room and laugh until we were sore.
“The night before he killed himself, he called me upstairs to say it again,” Mark said. He took a blue pair off the hanger. He put his feet in the holes and pulled them up to his waist. “He had so many pants!” Mark repeated. He hunched over like his father, shook his arms, one hand holding the vodka, and kicked out his legs as he walked in circles in the closet. “Mark. Son. Look how many pants I have!”
Richard broke out into hysterical laughter from the bed.
“Shit,” Mark said, sitting down on the floor of the closet. “Dad. You were just a collection of fucking pants.”
It sounded cruel, but I knew what he meant. When my mother was volunteering at Stamford Hospital two or three days a week, she put me in charge of handing out the lollipops in the oncology ward when she couldn’t find a babysitter for me. There were always sick children walking by and they’d be bald with illness. It seemed to me, standing there with a strong immune system and a fistful of candy, that illness stripped the youth right out of their bones, and there I was trying to hand it back to them. I was too afraid to approach the sick children, so I waited for them to come to me, these tired little people with bloodless faces and tiny sneakers, Jean or Harriet or Betsy who already seemed dead to me. Jean or Harriet or Betsy would usually smile at me, and ask for one of the lollipops while her mother was talking to one of the doctors. “Blue, please.” Jean or Harriet or Betsy was still alive enough to know what color she always wanted—children, it seemed, were creatures of favorites. I gave out a blue lollipop and she smiled as she tore the plastic off with one hard tug. A few months later, Jean or Harriet or Betsy usually died, and nobody ever announced it or told me, I would just have an abundance of blue lollipops left in my hand at the end of the day and that was how I knew they were dead.
Mark opened the vodka and looked around for a cup. He couldn’t find one, so he just drank out of the bottle. “Want some?” he asked me. He handed the bottle to me.
I looked at them both, smiling at me. These were my childhood friends. Bark and Prickard, captains of the Space Rock, my sledding partners, the boys who buried me in leaves, and tugged on my pigtails, and lent me their water guns when mine had run out of water. I didn’t smile back, but I took the vodka. It was my birthday after all. If everybody was planning on being drunk for it, so was I.
I swallowed a mouthful. It burned down my throat but it felt surprisingly good. I took another one. “Happy birthday, Shiny Forehead,” Richard said.
Mark kicked off his sneakers, and they hit the wall. This woke Laura up in her crib under the window and she started crying. Richard licked the bottom of the tuna can with his tongue.
“That’s fucking nasty, prickhead,” Mark said. “Do you know how much bacteria is on that shit?”
I walked toward Laura.
“Hey!” Richard said, throwing the tuna can, jumping in my way.
“Don’t be stupid, Richard,” I said. “She’s a baby.”
Richard’s eyes were red. His nose was runny. “Exactly. She’s just a baby.”
Mark laughed.
“To the fucking baby!” Mark shouted. “Cheers!”
Richard took a shot. And then Mark. And then me again.
“Cheers,” Richard said.
“Salud,” I said, something I heard my father say once.
“To god in the highest!” Mark said.
“Hey, your parents have a computer too,” Richard said. It was 1997, and some people in the neighborhood just got their first computers. For about thirty minutes, the novelty of the computer and vodka made us all friends again. Mark sat at his mother’s desk. Richard and I were on the bed thinking of weird things for the computer to say, and Mark typed the phrases on the keyboard, pressing Speak Text.
“Make it say, ‘I ate my fucking parrot.’”
“Make it say, ‘I ate my fucking blasphemous parrot.’”
And we laughed, and typed in more things, and then laughed, and typed in more things, and I was rolling on the bed, getting dizzy from all of the vodka, which was new and corrosive to my stomach, and Mrs. Resnick’s picture frames swirling in my head. My head hurt. I couldn’t tell if the ceiling fan was on or not. Richard was against the headboard watching me, holding on to the heels of Mrs. Resnick’s shoes.
“Make it say, ‘I ate my Mom,’” Richard said.
I closed my eyes, dizzy. I listened to Richard laugh a little, his breath audible, wafting air out his mouth. Mark typed on the keys. The computer spoke and stopped our hearts:
“Muh dad is fuck-een dayed.”
“Muh dad is fuck-een dayed.”
“Muh dad is fuck-een dayed.”
Richard tickled my feet. I was drunk for the first time in my life, and I felt like a semisolid, like I was melting, or just about to harden, and I worried that Richard’s fingerprints would make permanent indents on my ankles, the way I had pressed my thumb into a rose petal at Mr. Resnick’s burial so that my fingerprint would fall with the rose and accompany him underground forever. I kicked at Richard’s face.
“Don’t touch my feet!” I shouted at Richard, and ripped my legs away from him, accidentally kicking over the vodka bottle on the nightstand. It broke and the vodka spilled out the cracks. Mark, who was at the computer, looked at the broken glass and then at me.
“Pick that up!” Mark screamed.
“Jesus,” I exclaimed, reaching over the edge of the bed.
I remember Mark walking over to Laura angrily and me calling out for him and Richard shirtless above me. I remember thinking, why hadn’t I seen this coming? This was always coming. Richard had always been coming for me. Following me. Pulling my hair and poking my armpit and hovering above me. Richard’s skin was smooth and hairless in the abdomen, but his ches
t looked like it was covered in asiago cheese. “Just touch it,” he kept saying, above me.
“Where’s Mark?” I asked, looking around the room. Laura was screaming behind me, louder with every second. It sounded like her throat was cracking down the middle. I worried Mark loved me less every second. I worried that Richard would never get off of me and that somehow I deserved all of this. Richard widely smiled and I was scared. “Get off!” I yelled at him, and he pushed me back down on the bed. I lifted up my knee into his crotch hard.
“You torched my skin,” Richard said. “Feel it.”
Richard lifted up my shirt and lowered himself until our chests pressed together. He moved up and down on me, and I could feel the smooth parts, and then the textured parts. The scar felt like a zipper against my breasts.
“Feel it,” he said, and took my hand to his lower chest. “This part.”
I spit on his face. “I’d rather die.” It was somewhat true.
“Then maybe you will.” Richard took out his lighter from his pocket. “Maybe I’m just going to light you on fire, cunt, see how you like it.” Richard opened my mouth with his finger.
I bit his finger hard.
“Dang!” he said, pulling his finger out.
He started kissing me. Richard’s mouth was heavy on mine, and it was hard to breathe. I put my hand at his throat, and he was ripping at my shirt, his hand cupped around my breast, his saliva acidic and thick.
“What the hell?” Mark said when he stood over us with Laura quiet in his arms. He stood there for a moment and watched Richard jump off me.
“What the hell were you doing?” Mark asked.
Standing there in the dark of Mrs. Resnick’s room, I looked around at my childhood friends, and Laura sitting in Mark’s arms, and that was my question exactly: what the hell were we doing? We weren’t children anymore. Laura was the child. She was the one sitting in Mark’s arms, asking something large and permanent of us. And I was fifteen, drunk and underneath a boy for the first time in my life, and nothing was as I wished it to be. I was drinking vodka while my half sister cried, and the thought never occurred to me that I would have to do more for this girl than just be her neighbor. Before she was born, I imagined Laura as this thing in the corner of our lives that we’d rather not mention, but no; she was alive and breathing. She needed bottles and shoelaces and pumpkins with her name cut out in bubble letters, she would wobble down the need-to-be-gated stairs, she would need moments upon moments of everybody’s happiness, happiness that sometimes didn’t wake up before she did. She was crying and the sodium chloride down her face was real.
Mark was waiting for an answer. “What were you doing?” he said to me. “You like Richard?”
“No!” I shouted. “He forced himself on me. Why didn’t you try to help me?”
Mark looked angry.
“Why didn’t I try to help you?” Mark shouted back. “Why didn’t you try to help my father!”
“What?” I asked, confused.
“You just stood there! How could you just stand there while he was killing himself?”
“I couldn’t do anything! He was too far away!”
“How long were you watching?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know!”
I started breathing heavier. My chest felt tight, my fingertips tingling.
“I dropped my glass,” I finally said. “I’m sorry. I dropped my glass and it broke all around me.”
At first Mark didn’t answer; then he turned away from me and said, “Just leave.”
He put Laura in front of the mirror in an attempt to get her to stop crying. Laura’s face was red and loud and I felt a sudden gush of love for her. I remembered the night of her birth, I had felt her arrival like a bursting capillary in my heart, I could hear her breathing from across the street, and when I looked at Mark in the dark room, holding his, our, sister, I started to see him through her eyes, this sullen teen, this boy with long ratty hair who waited a couple seconds to watch before he yelled at his best friend to get off my body, this boy who would never love either of us the way he was supposed to. And there was Richard by the window, who had spent his life not knowing whether to rip my throat out or fuck me, Richard who ran his hands through his dark hair and sat down on the bed and sighed. Richard who took a long swig of vodka out of the bottle and said, “Your mother is next, you know. My mother says she looks like a ghost around town now. The White Lady. Like we’re going to find her hanging from an electrical wire or something, any day now.”
And there was me, not understanding why they let me leave like that, screaming, “Fuck you both!” and Laura gently making the soft coos of what could someday sound like my name.
We had crab legs for my birthday dinner. I loved my mother again, for opening the cookbook and putting on her THIS IS NO ORDINARY HOUSEWIFE apron and singing loud to the Frankie Valli CD that Janice put in the stereo. My mother had come home from the store just like this: “I got crab legs for your birthday!” She smiled, and then we dropped them into the boiling pot. They hit the water with a plop-plip-plop-plop.
Then while trying to crack them open at the table with our fingers, one of the crab legs slipped out of my mother’s hand and sliced the tip of her thumb. With the blood dripping down her finger and onto the plate of crab, she looked at me and said, “I’m sorry.” Before she even moved to stop the bleeding, I thought, She is not even trying to stop the bleeding. She was just sitting there, bleeding.
“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “I’ll get a washcloth.”
We continued the rest of the dinner in peace. There was a pleasant consistency to birthdays, the way we got reminded of our favorite things, as though it was an annual checkup to see what you grew out of that particular year. Favorite meal (Alaskan king crab), favorite cake (boxed), favorite dishware (ours). I got socks, underwear, a sweater, and a book called The Best Book of Your Life, “a collection of very interesting pictures for children.”
“This book is for chill-dren,” I said, emphasizing the space between syllables, which is what, at the time, I thought a French accent was. I was still a little too drunk to hide it.
My mother said nothing. Janice scraped icing off her fork and giggled.
“Chill-dren,” Janice said, following my lead, “are ze worst. Don’t zoo agwee?”
We laughed hard. My mother drank some wine. It started raining outside. Janice looked out the window and said, “It’s raining like five bitches out there.”
My mother didn’t even scold her.
“Which is a lot of rain,” Janice added.
“Are you alive?” I said accusingly to my mother. She ignored me.
Later, Janice whispered, “What’s wrong with your mom?”
After dinner was over, my mother went to take a hot bath, the dishwasher stopped running, and the silence became disenchanting. Frankie Valli was just an asshole who got uncomfortable when little girls cried. Janice was a basket case who lied about sleeping with older men. My mother was a naked woman in the bathtub.
I knocked on the bathroom door. “Mom?” I asked through the wood.
No answer.
“Mom?” I asked again, opening the bathroom door. In the tub, my mother’s eyes were closed. There were tears down her face. Broken glass bobbed in the water like ice cubes.
The bathwater was red.
“Mom!” I screamed. I tugged on her arm, checked for slit wrists.
“Oh, hell,” my mother said, startled, opening her eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Did you slit your wrists or something?” I screamed.
“No, Emily Marie,” she said. “I accidentally broke my wineglass in the tub and I’m a little drunk.”
She laughed wildly to prove this was so. She took a drag of her cigarette hanging over the tub. She had been smoking on and off ever since my father left and she gave up volunteering at the hospital. My mother talked like this was a good thing: too many children walking into a hospital, saying hello w
ith their sweet and sad faces and never coming back. After a while, she said, you start believing children were never meant to be anything but children.
“You aren’t going to get up?” I asked. “You’re going to sit here in the wine? Is that even sanitary?”
“Emily, please, you’re being loud.”
“And you’re smoking! Inside the house. This house. I redesigned this place for you!”
“Honey, I’ve always been a smoker,” she said, and splashed some water on her face.
“No, you weren’t,” I said. “Not always. Did you come out of the womb with a cigarette in your mouth?”
“Don’t be like that, Emily.”
“When you get sick and die, don’t come crying to me,” I told her.
“When I’m dead, I won’t be crying to anyone. I’ll be dead.”
“Good!” I said. I stuck my hand in the tub to drain her filthy bath. “Good. Just smoke and hurry up and die already so we can get on with our lives!”
My mother didn’t even drop her cigarette. She stood up, pale and nude and wet. My mother. The White Lady. I ripped the cigarette from her hand and threw it on the ground, hoping the shower curtain would catch fire and burn this whole neighborhood down. It wasn’t like anybody would be surprised. Emily the Arsonist. Emily the Murderer. Emily the Cunt. Burned Richard and her whole house down. But who cared what people said? I was done with people. I was tired and angry and fed up with people. I couldn’t even sleep anymore, not with the nightmares, not while imagining all the ways my mother might kill herself, at two in the morning, awake with the owls, wondering if she would do it by pills, if she would swallow all the Drano, where I would find her, who I would call first, what I might say.
“Did you even hear me?” I screamed in her face.
She pulled back her wet hand, and at first I couldn’t believe it. My mother was going to hit me. No, she would never hit me. But then she did. She smacked me hard across the cheek, and the saddest part about it was that it felt good. It was my mother’s touch, something I hadn’t felt in so long.
“I am your mother,” she said. “And don’t you ever talk to me like that again.”
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