by Amy Gentry
I shook my head. “I came straight here.” I thought I caught a whiff of the braised chicken she used to make sometimes on my weekends home.
“I’ll put the lasagna in the oven.”
Frozen, from Costco. I’d had it before. It was a weeknight, and she was still in her work clothes. As a matter of fact, lasagna was a lot of trouble for a night when she’d most likely have nuked a TV dinner for herself. I squeezed her shoulder. “That sounds great. Thanks, Mom.”
I waved off her attempts to help me get my luggage from the car, holding up my one bag. I’d taken only a few days off work. “I’m sorry it’s going to be so short.”
“That’s okay. You’re a busy lady,” she said. I followed her into the house. She still wore high heels to work, clip-clopping gracefully along in them at breakneck speeds, but when she wiggled her feet out of them at home, peeled off her pantyhose, and eased into a pair of slippers, she walked with a gentle lurching motion, as if her hips were uneven. She rocked her way to the counter, where a disposable aluminum casserole pan with an aluminum cover and a collar of icy rime sat waiting to be put in a preheated oven. When she had set a timer, she said, “Come talk to me while I change,” and, just like I had every weeknight I’d spent at home since my dad left, I followed her through the living room to her bedroom.
The house looked the same as always. Recliner by the television. A sofa patterned with big half-bloomed roses, the subject of fierce prohibitions throughout my childhood. The plastic slipcover had come off once my dad and I were both out of the house, and my mom was finally able to enjoy not sitting on it in peace. Two ficus trees and half a dozen shiny-leaved houseplants sat around the living room in tubs. These, too, were old enough for me to remember their provenance—she had rescued them from the alley behind her office at the helium plant, where they’d been put out for trash because they were infested with tiny black insects. “No need to waste all these just because of a few bugs,” she’d told me when I recoiled from the squirming soil, and she soon got rid of the infestation and nursed the plants back to health. When the industry privatized, those castoffs seemed to me like an omen of her fate. But once again, she’d attacked the problem methodically and wound up snagging a receptionist position at the helicopter company that opened up in town the next year. She was nothing if not resourceful.
In her bedroom, the smell of her hand lotion dominated. She was already unbuttoning her work blouse, her caftan lying in wait on the bed.
“How are you doing, Mama?”
“I’m fine. I keep plenty busy.”
“Would you ever consider moving out to Austin?” It wasn’t the first time I’d asked, though I’d never had the guts to bring up a move to L.A. I knew the answer to that in advance.
“Why would I do that?” she snapped. “This is where I live.”
“But it’s so quiet here,” I said. “You must get lonely sometimes.”
“I miss you, mija,” she said. “But it’s not the same thing as lonely. I have plenty to keep me occupied.” She looked at me shrewdly. “It sounds to me like you’re the lonely one.”
I waited a long time before answering. “I guess so.”
She snorted. “You never used to be lonely. It’s that boy.”
Jason had always been a sore point between us. When I was in high school, she didn’t understand why I would hang around with a boy I wasn’t dating. Her suspicions seemed to be aroused as much by the possibility that we really weren’t as that we secretly were. My contention that we liked working on projects together did not impress her in the slightest; she had, after all, been my father’s secretary at the plant when they met. If you could fall in love with someone in the time it took to go over the phone messages every day, you could damn well fall in love with him watching TV and writing comic strips or whatever it was we were doing. When I moved into the house in L.A. with Jason, it was the last straw. For my mom, living with a man was living in sin. She didn’t care about separate bedrooms, his girlfriends or my boyfriends, what we did or didn’t do at night. “He’s not a gay, right?” she had once pointedly asked, and as I wailed, “Mama,” she’d followed up with “Then it’s not right.” And yet my moving out of our shared abode hadn’t endeared him to her any further.
“What happened to that boy anyway?” she said now, and I detected a note of carefully downplayed concern.
“He’s still in L.A., I think,” I said, adding the qualifier so that she wouldn’t know I’d been keeping track.
“Making your TV show without you?” She sounded peevish, although she was leaning over to pick up the skirt she had just stepped out of, so I couldn’t see her expression.
“No, Mom,” I said. “He’s probably working on something else. I don’t know, we don’t talk.”
“Any new boyfriends in Austin?”
“The only people who ask me out are other comics, and they’re literally the last people on earth I want to date.”
“Jason was a comic.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Jason and I were just friends!” I exploded, although at the same time I was perversely pleased that she’d been forced to say his name. “Why didn’t you ever like him?”
“He was fine,” she said in a tone that meant the opposite from the depths of the caftan that was descending over her head in a cloud of silk. When her face appeared again, she said, “I just didn’t like you hanging around over there so much.” For the hundredth time I wondered if she had intuited, on some level, what had happened to me at Jason’s place that night. But she was already going on with her spiel. “You didn’t think I knew about that house, with the mom never around and the father out drinking all the time. But I knew. I just wanted you to be happy, mija.” She shook her head. “And now that no-good brother is in Clements. That whole family—”
It hit me a moment late: Clements Unit. “What? Mattie in prison?”
She nodded, eyes wide. “Armed robbery. Maybe drugs were involved, I forget. Anyway, he’s been making trouble around here for years.” She gestured vaguely toward the window, as if the state prison were just on the other side of the abelia hedge. “You can’t blame me for being worried . . .”
All I heard was that after ten years, my rapist was in prison. My mother didn’t know about Mattie, and so I couldn’t put into words what it felt like to know I wouldn’t be bumping into him at Jason’s house or at the corner store or at the Sears where I’d worked for a year after graduating. That night had ruined my senior year, sent me sleepwalking through the halls, dropping off at my desk in the afternoons, sometimes even in the middle of a test. When my GPA plummeted so low that I fell out of the top 10 percent of the class and thus out of the University of Texas’s automatic-admission pile, it was too late to apply anywhere else. I took it as a sign that I was not, after all, intended to leave the Panhandle and go to college. That I belonged with the Matties, not the Jasons.
I would not have said it was Mattie who did all this to me, because there was a fog obscuring what he had done, a vague placeholder for the feeling that I had done something wrong, attracted the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of person. Only now that he was locked away did I know that I had been in prison for ten years. The door had just cracked open, and a sliver of light was shining through.
“You want to know why you never had a boyfriend, mija?” My mother was still talking, and I tuned back in, bracing myself. I must have seemed far away, because she sounded hurt, and she had the determined look of someone shedding her usual reserve to say something she’d been holding back for years. “That Jason boy chased them all away. They could see they never had a chance with you as long as he was around.” She started to say more, then paused and looked suddenly sad. “And he loved it.”
“I had plenty of boyfriends in L.A.,” I said abruptly, not bothering with the finer points of terminology in the Tinder age. She didn’t need to know anything about that. “Besides, I don’t know why you’re so eager for me to date these days. Whe
n I was in high school, you couldn’t keep me far enough away from boys.”
“That was when I was trying to get you off to college,” she said. “I didn’t want you distracted by that boy or anyone else. Now you have plenty of time on your hands. Too much. It’s time to get married.”
“Why don’t you get married, if you’re so hot for it?”
She straightened her caftan with an air of finality. “I’ve been married,” she said. “I know whether I like it or not, and I didn’t like it.”
You didn’t like Dad cheating on you, I thought, but I was not nearly stupid enough to say it. “I probably wouldn’t either.”
“Nonsense. You’re not like me, Dana. You’re needy, like your father. You should always have a man.”
I almost laughed out loud, but something stopped me. It was the thought of Carl’s face, blood gushing from his nose, clotting his hair on his forehead, dripping from a gash on his cheekbone. I needed something, all right.
“Are you okay, mija? You’re not looking well.” The hurt tone had gone out of her voice, and my mother was back to tending to me, a calm hand on my forehead.
“I’m fine, Mom,” I said. “Just tired out from the drive.”
She tsked distractedly, and I let myself be shepherded into the mint-green master bathroom to soak in the bathtub while the lasagna finished cooking. As I lay naked in the hot water, staring at the tiled wall over the chrome faucet, I imagined the dirt of the past weeks sliding off me onto the soapy surface, evaporating into the steam. Vengeance. That was the game I had been playing with Amanda. It had nothing to do with justice and even less to do with preventing future misdemeanors by petty offenders. It had been vengeance, plain and simple. Of course, it wasn’t just Mattie I’d wanted to destroy. It was every reminder of why he thought he could do it. The gropings and wolf whistles and insults, what Neely had done to me, what Amanda’s ex had done to her. The only way to bear it all was to ignore it, because once you started trying to make someone pay for every reminder that you could be held down and raped by any man who decided you were worth the energy, it was like playing whack-a-mole. The more you hit, the more you saw, and you could hit harder and harder, and faster and faster, but you’d only wear yourself out.
And now Mattie was in prison. Not just any prison, but Clements—notoriously harsh, rife with abuses. If there were ever a place where I could be sure my attacker would be hit over and over, harder than I could ever hit him, it was Clements.
I wasn’t sorry he was there. I was only sorry I hadn’t heard the news months ago, before Amanda had come into my life with her offer of the retribution I didn’t know I was craving. If I’d found out in time, maybe I would never have had to discover my own taste for violence. Carl’s face, my own face in the mirror afterward—more things I could never unsee.
But at least I was free.
Amanda had accused me of running away, but it turned out I had driven straight to the heart of my problem and found it miraculously solved without my intervention. Now Amarillo looked less like a time capsule and more like a crossroads. I could stay here for a few days, then turn around and drive back to Austin, return to my day job and Amanda and being the second-best standup in town. Or I could keep heading west. Moving forward. I could sign with an agent, a manager. Meet Cynthia for lunch.
The hardest part would be telling my mom I was staying for only one night.
I woke up at four o’clock in the morning and was on the road by four thirty. I’d told my mom not to get up and see me off because I would be leaving early, but she had obviously only half acceded to my request; on the counter, under an inverted bowl draped in a towel, was a plate with two hash-brown patties and a pile of eggs scrambled with chorizo. Nearby, an insulated travel cup full of coffee with a sticky note on it: Keep the cup. Safe travels, mija. I took a sip; it was sweetened with condensed milk, my favorite.
The plate was just barely warmer than room temperature. She must have gotten up to cook breakfast in the middle of the night and then slunk back to bed. I stood by her door for a moment, but the light wasn’t on, and I could hear her rhythmic breathing, the deep, heavy gasps of her sleep. I ate as quietly as I could and cursed myself for having parked in the driveway instead of on the street, praying the engine wouldn’t wake her when I started the car.
As I neared the on ramp to I-40 heading west, I passed the street that led to Jason’s dad’s house and my old high school. I felt a strong urge to turn off and drive by, feel the weight of Matt’s menacing presence lifted firsthand. But what would be the point? It was too dark to see anything. Instead, I drove on, farther and farther from my mom’s odd, half-present comfort, her unsittable sofas and silent conversations and the plates full of food that she put herself out to make but did not stick around to watch me eat. It was her way of teaching me to be self-sufficient, I’d once thought, but now I suspected she was simply operating at the very limits of her capacity to live with another person. It had left me with a craving for closeness coupled with a need for infinite space.
Wasn’t that what comedy was? A kind of intimate distance, a way to get a response that you could predict and even, in the best of circumstances, control? When it was working, it was like getting a warm hug and at the same time staying perfectly safe from anyone’s touch, the cone of the spotlight as cozy as a bell jar. I supposed it was that love of half silences and pregnant pauses that had made hanging out with Jason feel so comfortable to me.
As a teenage girl who’d never had a boyfriend, I’d had a puppy crush on Jason. All those late nights we’d spent side by side on the beanbag chair in his TV room, leaning on each other; how could I not have had a crush on him? But after Mattie, the feeling had deepened, perversely and defiantly. I was not going to let Mattie ruin things between Jason and me. The thought helped me stave off a terror that might otherwise have paralyzed me. In a way, I think I even fell in love with Jason, really in love, on purpose, just to prove I still could. I knew we weren’t going to be together. I knew he didn’t love me, not in that way, anyway. If his failure to make any overtures hadn’t told me that, his parade of blond girlfriends communicated it loud and clear. Each one was a message: You’re not my type. We’re just friends.
I stepped on the accelerator and merged onto the empty freeway heading due west. My knuckles tingled. My thighs tightened. Morning was hours away, but I could feel the sun at my back, waiting just below the horizon to rise and scorch the world.
I occupied myself on the drive by making phone calls. First I called one of the agents I’d spoken to over the phone and told her I’d like to sign with her and that I was heading into town soon. Then I screwed up my courage and called Larry Green, who, though grumpy at being used as a receptionist, agreed to pass on a message to Cynthia that I was in town for a few days and would love to meet her for lunch.
I crossed into California at 3:30 p.m., an hour before I’d anticipated, the magnetic field surrounding L.A. drawing me in. I forced myself to keep checking the speedometer, but despite my efforts, the needle on the dashboard kept creeping up, as if it, too, were elated by the feeling of being in the right state at last, with a purpose, a mission.
A mission. I almost blushed. Out here, suspended in the dazzling desert air between Austin and L.A., I felt a twinge of shame that I had let things go so far with Amanda. It had been childish of us to believe that we could punish people more than they could punish themselves, an overcompensation for a lifetime of denial. What had happened with Mattie had violated my deepest sense of order in the universe. Somehow I had known that if I looked too closely at the trauma, if I accepted that it had happened to me, I would become a grotesque, like neurotic Ruby or hunted-looking Becca. The swap with Amanda had started out as just another way to avoid the truth. I’d thought that by trading attackers, I could get some sense of closure without ever having to face how deep that violation was.
But the infection had passed to me all the same. The night in Carl’s apartment had proven it.
The next few hours passed like a longer kind of minute, and then, far in the distance, I saw the sign along the roadside that I’d been waiting for. I put on my blinker and made my way to the I-15 exit.
There was one last person to contact. I waited until I was stopped in traffic outside L.A. I pulled out my phone and texted two words to the most recent number that came up.
I’m done.
The answer came almost immediately. We have one more X to finish.
I replied, I don’t owe you anything.
Don’t be stupid, D. You have one more name and so do I.
But I didn’t have a name to give her, not anymore. Maybe it should have happened differently—maybe Matt should have been punished for what he’d done to me, not for armed robbery. But he was serving time in a state prison with a rough reputation, worse than anything Amanda and I could have inflicted and, I had to admit, far more just. I was glad it was some state’s attorney and not Amanda who had caught up to him. I wouldn’t want to owe anyone a debt that great.
My phone was ringing now. I didn’t have to look at who it was. I turned it off.
I didn’t have a plan for seeing Jason, but I didn’t have a plan for not seeing him either. In the end, I drove the familiar route to our old house because it was where I knew to go, where I had been last; it was as if I were excavating for memories, and the ones at our old house lay closest to the surface, just under the soil. I pulled up to the familiar bungalow in Palms and saw his car in the driveway and felt that nothing could be more natural than to park on the street in front, walk up the cracked concrete pathway without even stopping to stretch my legs, and ring the doorbell.
The door opened, and Jason was there. Jason—taller than I remembered, his hair shorter, and traces of something sprouting on his chin that could be a beard or could be neglect, I wasn’t sure. Jason, wearing the same T-shirt and jeans, his big smelly feet in flip-flops sticking out under the frayed cuffs. Jason, hands shoved in his pockets, shifting from side to side, opening his mouth to say something.