Family Law

by Gin Phillips

  I made sure never to be naked in front of her.

  “You did it,” I said. “You cut yourself. Why do you always make it someone else’s fault? Why are you always just sitting there, some poor pitiful thing who has things happen to her?”

  She straightened her knee then, more blood running down her long pale leg, and it was hard not to stare. Her legs were pretty, of course, and you could still see that she’d done ballet all through college, but there was also something beautiful about the blood.

  “I am your mother,” she said, finally tugging her nightgown back into place. “You do not speak to me like that. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes,” I said, raising my voice. “I hear you.”

  “You will not speak to me like that.”

  I thought of what Lucia once said about everyone having a need for conflict. I wondered if when he lived in the house with us, my father had filled my mother’s need for conflict. I wondered if anyone else living in the house might at least spread the conflict around. Because most of the time it felt like Mom was waiting for me to hit a hidden trip wire, like in a war movie, only she’s the one who would explode. Usually my anger couldn’t match hers—no emotion of mine could ever match hers—but at this second I thought it might.

  She picked up the razor again, and I heard it rasp along her thigh, and I hated the sound. I hated the sound of her razor and I hated the smell of her nail polish remover and I hated how her hair spray got in my eyes, and she did all of it right in front of me, no matter what I said, and it turned out that I did have a need for conflict.

  “Well, why?” I asked. “Why do you get to be my mother? I didn’t have any say in it.”

  She stood up in one smooth motion and threw her razor. I felt the wind of it across my cheek before it bounced off the television set and landed in the red basket full of magazines, and it was such a flimsy, tiny thing that it would have been funny, except it wasn’t.

  Her arm hung there in the air, frozen after her throw. She looked like she was casting some terrible spell. I watched her stiff arm, the bulging veins in her hand, and I thought of the last time she’d tried to hit me. I’d been ten years old, and she’d grabbed the hairbrush from the counter and raised it to smack my knuckles, always her favorite spot, but I’d caught the brush instead, jerking it away from her. We’d stared at each other, breathing hard, and she never hit me again, but I could tell she missed it.

  “We can’t pick,” she said. “I love you more than anything in this world, and if something happened to you, it would kill me. You don’t care about that, I know. But I would do anything for you and you know it. I will not let you run around with someone who has an assassin after her. You could die. Do you even understand that? Lucia did. She didn’t even argue with me. Do you understand that you could have gone over there and never come home and laid there bleeding on the floor and I wouldn’t have been there? I wouldn’t have been able to do anything?”

  Her eyes were wet, but her face was dry except for the Pond’s. She stared at me, her arm still reaching, fingers splayed.

  I thought I had seen every possible feeling on her face, but I was slow to recognize this one. Terror. She hadn’t moved her arm yet because she couldn’t. She didn’t look like a magician. She looked like my grandfather after his last stroke, when he was lying in the hospital bed and couldn’t even roll himself over.

  “Mom,” I said.

  She dropped her arm and it slapped against her smooth leg. Now the tears were falling.

  “I would do anything for you,” she said again, her voice shaking. She swallowed. “It doesn’t matter if you think I’m stupid or pathetic. It doesn’t matter.”

  Every time I was close to hating her, she made me hate myself instead.

  I thought about what Mr. Cleary had said about girls thinking their mothers didn’t love them. I hadn’t been lying to him. I knew Mom loved me. She loved me more than anything. She loved me too much.

  She grabbed her lotion and her towel and her plastic tumbler of water, which sloshed all over the carpet. She marched into the kitchen—again, almost funny—and I heard the tumbler land with a clatter in the already full sink. I waited for her to come back into view. I was staring at the kitchen table, cluttered with mail and receipts and boxes of Lipton tea, when something blurred through the air and smashed against the lemon wallpaper. I knew it was glass by the sound of shattering.

  A juice glass, I guessed. Hard to tell, unless I stepped closer to the broken pieces.

  I could hear the air coming through my nose. I’d been having trouble with loud noises. I watched the kitchen and waited to see if there would be more. I was always waiting to see if there would be more. It had been a while since the last explosion—nearly a year ago? A ceramic potted plant that scattered soil and roots all over the patio. Once it had been a gravy boat, and, as Mom swept up the pieces, she’d said that we never used it anyway.

  Now she strode into the den, empty handed, straight backed.

  “Don’t go in the kitchen barefoot,” she said as she brushed past me, keeping her face turned away.

  I watched her walk down the hall, talking under her breath, nightgown slipping off her shoulder again. My head was full of words, and maybe that’s why she talked to herself, because she had to let the words out somehow. But as I whispered there in the middle of the den, the smell of lotion around me, it wasn’t my mother I was talking to. It wasn’t even myself.

  You don’t understand, I said. That’s what I wished I had been able to say to Lucia. You don’t know her at all. You think she’s the person you see in your front yard, but you can’t see her when the moths come. You think she’s scared, and she is, but that doesn’t mean she’s weak. You think she’s powerless, but she’s got all the power in this house and sometimes I think if I don’t get out of here, there won’t be anything left of me.

  I thought of Mom’s face, terrified. Her arm, paralyzed.

  And I was just like her. Frozen. I looked at the blood on the carpet, and I knew I should go grab a paper towel or maybe a broom, but I only stood there.

  1982

  Rachel

  I.

  I didn’t exactly dislike Tamara Vance, but I avoided her if possible. She was round and soft and big chested, and while I didn’t hold that against her, when the boys asked her to jump up and down, she accommodated them, pretending she didn’t understand why they asked.

  When I saw her at Tina’s party, “Rock Lobster” was playing too loud on the stereo, and there was that down, down, down part where everyone wiggled themselves to the floor. Tamara jumped off the sofa, giggling.

  “What?” she asked, falling onto one knee, her jean miniskirt barely keeping things covered.

  “Going down,” said a boy named Travis, and everyone laughed, including Tamara.

  Several other boys were dancing, holding their noses and swimming down to the floor. One of them jumped off the coffee table.

  “Why did the Auburn fan get fired from the M&M factory?” Travis called out over the music. “Because he kept throwing out all the Ws.”

  Tamara climbed back onto the sofa. It made me angry how hard she tried to please them. Did she think that because the boys liked her boobs, they liked her? Because they didn’t even like her boobs. They just liked the physics of them.

  “Go-o-o-o-iiiiing down,” I heard Tamara say, and I turned away before she jumped.

  “What’s faster than a black guy stealing your television?” Travis said, barely pausing. “His brother with your stereo.”

  I usually reached this stage of disappointment at a party. I started out having a decent time and then everyone got drunker and then some people got naked and some people got stupid and some people got unconscious, and I started regretting going to the trouble of lying to Mom in the first place.

  The lying was a new experiment. No other eleventh grader I knew ha
d a 10:00 p.m. curfew on the weekends, and I was done with it. I was done with plenty of things. The dishonesty had gone well so far: on this particular night, I’d told Mom I was having a sleepover with Tina, and that was true. Granted, Tina was on the patio doing Jell-O shots with a couple of her brother’s college friends, but eventually she would be asleep and so would I.

  I headed down the hallway, careful not to nudge open any doors. You did not want to glance inside a bedroom at this time of night. I was aiming for the end of the hall and the room that belonged to Tina’s oldest brother, the one who’d graduated college last year. He’d moved his old bed and dresser to his new apartment, so his empty bedroom had turned into the place where everyone dumped their purses and jackets.

  The door wasn’t closed. I stepped into the quiet room. The purses were lined up against the wall, and the coats were piled in the corner in a way that made me want to jump into the middle of them. I’d borrowed a black halter top from Tina, which possibly made me look like a stripper, and besides that, I was freezing. I missed sleeves.

  I was studying the coats when John came in. Even from the corner of my eye, I recognized the dark-green shirt he’d been wearing. I wondered if he’d followed me, but that was ridiculous.

  “Do you ever get tired of being the only one who doesn’t drink?” he asked.

  I turned toward him.

  He wasn’t wrong. I’d had a sip of someone else’s beer a couple of times, but nothing more than that. I didn’t drink. I didn’t swear. I didn’t do anything. I’d never let a single boy put his tongue in my mouth or his hand up my shirt, although that was possibly related to the lack of beer. Mom had taught me well. Once you started something, there was no telling where it might go. What if something happened? What if someone saw?

  “Do you?” I asked. He sometimes had a beer or two, but for a guy that was the same as not drinking.

  “It’s more fun to watch everyone else,” he said, leaning against the doorframe. “Why are you staring at the coats?”

  “I’m bored,” I said, and thought about our English teacher’s instructions for writing a college essay. She told us to do more than convey basic information. She said that if we wanted to be chosen, we needed to be distinctive.

  “I was thinking of how they’re like a pile of leaves,” I added. “It would be a soft landing.”

  “Huh,” he said, rubbing his chin. His jaw looked like it could have been drawn onto a cartoon superhero. “I feel like the purses have more potential. We could build something. Like a maze.”

  He picked up a small, neat bag, shiny blue and zipped.

  “A purse maze?” I said. “Not very challenging. You need high walls for a good maze.”

  He did not seem to mind the criticism. We discussed purse pyramids and purse juggling, and we landed on purse bowling. It happened so quickly, the shift from communing with coats to holding up my end of this unexpected weirdness. We arranged the purses into a triangle, and the whole time I had to keep one hand across my chest to make sure I stayed inside my halter.

  Once we had all the purses standing on their sides, precarious, we counted our paces and marked a starting spot with someone’s plaid scarf. We kept the rectangular blue purse for our bowling ball. John waved for me to go first, and I took two steps back and sent the purse tumbling through the air, skimming the carpet before it smacked into a denim, an Esprit, and one massive gold lamé.

  I got a spare.

  He got a split.

  A few throws later, I managed to bounce the blue purse under the one remaining piece of furniture in the room, a small bedside table with a flower-patterned ceramic lamp like something my grandmother might have. I could see why Tina’s brother hadn’t taken it with him.

  I dropped to my knees and reached under the table, and as the carpet nubs came close to my face, I remembered lying on Lucia’s floor with her elbow against my spine, her hair in my face. My cheek had been pressed into the carpet, my hand under the dining-room table. I’d felt only carpet at first, but then I’d latched onto something hard, and it was a pencil, the small eraserless kind you use to score putt-putt, and I’d been thinking, Wait, Lucia and Evan play putt-putt? as more glass fell from the window. I was still holding the pencil in my hand when the shooting stopped. I didn’t let go of it until I got in my car.

  After that first shot, Lucia had reached for me and pushed me down, and her hand curved around my head and her body covered mine.

  It had been nearly three months, and I never thought about Lucia anymore. I didn’t wonder whether she liked the B-52’s or whether she’d ever worn halter tops. I didn’t imagine her response to Travis and his racist jokes. I didn’t construct entire conversations where I told her about my history teacher kissing boys on their birthday or about Aunt Molly setting her kitchen on fire. I didn’t ever replay that afternoon when we’d stood in a laundry room facing a man who could have been a murderer or worse and how she’d looked at me across the linoleum, of how something joyful flashed across her face like Watch this before she forced that man backward through his own kitchen. I didn’t think of how she’d slashed and burned at Oak Park, like I was the only thing that mattered, but how clearly I didn’t matter at all.

  I didn’t think about any of it.

  At first I had thought about it. I had thought, maybe, a phone call. I had thought, maybe, a letter. Some nice words for me to fold up and keep. For weeks I checked the mailbox before Mom got home, but after a while I stopped checking.

  My cheek on the carpet, her hand on my head. I told myself that if she’d been killed, it would have been on the news.

  “You okay?” said John, and I stood up, the blue purse in my hand. I sidestepped to the scarf, lining up my toes.

  “You fouled,” he said. “You don’t get your second shot.”

  “There are no fouls in bowling.”

  “Well, there are in purse bowling, sweetheart,” he said, and I was sure he had never called me sweetheart.

  We wound up sitting on the floor, backs against the wall, sweating. He sat close enough that our elbows touched. Then his knee fell toward me, landing against mine, teepee shaped.

  I felt a sort of carbonation run through me. Happiness, I thought, and I had not felt much of that in a long while. I’d escaped my house—oh, the transformative power of lies—but the parties were not so much better, and everything still felt wrong, and I didn’t fit, quite.

  But this.

  It turned out I had been hoping for his knee against mine. I had hoped for some scene exactly like this, and now it was happening, so what I was feeling was surely excitement, only possibly it was nausea. Mom was always eager for me to procure a boyfriend, but she was emphatic that you did not let boys touch you, that if you did they would think the wrong thing, and what was he thinking and also what was I thinking?

  John leaned toward me, and I had a moment to choose, but was I really choosing? I didn’t move. He put a hand on my thigh.

  His face, close. Stubble I’d never noticed on the hard angles of his chin.

  His hand on my thigh, tightening, and he would think I wanted sex, surely, he would think—he would think—I would have to tell him no, and would he expect it—would he hate me—was this the time to tell him no? Was there a right moment? Had I missed it, like missing that one beat where you can catch the double Dutch jump ropes just right?

  I hadn’t said a word.

  He smiled, and I didn’t even know this boy, did I? But dimples and purses and his hand on my thigh, moving higher, and this was not excitement, this was terror. Paralysis.

  I lifted my hand and grabbed his head, too hard probably. I pulled him closer, and his lips smashed against mine. His mouth opened, so mine did, too. I was a thinking, moving part of this, whatever it was.

  Too much thinking. I was expecting more lips and less tongue and teeth. His tongue felt like an oyster, room te
mperature, wet and thick. Sliding. He turned his head, and I turned my head, and his hand landed on my waist. I liked the heat of that hand, and best of all, it distracted me from his tongue. He leaned over me, pushing me sideways, my elbows digging into the carpet. My head tilted. John latched on to my lip, and then there was less tongue and the angle changed, and the kiss became less oysterish.

  Good. It became good. He made a sound, and I liked it.

  My thoughts turned off, for a while. I enjoyed the weight of him as he settled on me, one leg between mine. His hand slid down my naked back and over my butt, grabbing hold of it and pulling me against him, and I liked that, too. I could hear both of us breathing. I could feel his penis against my thigh. Penis. The word whirled me away into my head again, thinking of synonyms, of other girls who had talked in whispers, and I thought again that this was a language I didn’t know, that I might answer some question the wrong way. I had been led to believe that boys transformed once a penis got involved. They lost control. I imagined werewolves, fingers curving into claws and chins contorting into snouts. John’s hips shifted against me, and I worked my hands between us, pushing at his chest. It took two shoves, but he rolled off me partially, his hip settling on the floor.

  “Okay?” he asked, smiling. He still looked like John.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t want to, you know, do a lot more than—”

  “Bowl?” he asked.

  I laughed. It made a difference.

  “Maybe more bowling?” he said.

  He was a nice boy, and I nodded. He pressed himself against me again, his lips on mine. His hand slid under my silky shirt, up and up, barely grazing the bare underside of my breast, because obviously I couldn’t wear a bra with this thing.