The Ugly Cry

by Danielle Henderson

  Our parting was rushed and unceremonious—not even a mild tremor to indicate the tectonic shift that was happening as I rushed into Grandma’s house, thinking only of pizza and Monopoly. I didn’t want to be near Mom; I was furious that she was going to the city. Going with him. But I couldn’t bear her leaving us. I had spent the last three years missing her, even when we were in the same room. Now she was leaving to take care of Luke. It felt like too much, even for a weekend. I was living in a crevasse, pressed between anger and fear.

  A month later, the anger gave way completely to the fear. She hadn’t even called. What if she never came back?

  “I don’t know when she’s coming back, Dani,” Grandma said sharply. “And if I see that motherfucking asshole any time soon, I’m going to fucking kill her.” She was never one to modulate her language around us, but whenever Mom’s name came up now, Grandma launched into a string of expletives so intense I could go to the kitchen, pour a cup of iced tea, and come back before she was finished.

  Now Grandma stopped throwing clothes into piles and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the kitchen table. “Come here,” she said, holding out her arms. I jumped over a jumbled pile of my sweaters and underwear and stood in front of her. She grabbed me into a hug and kissed my cheek, hard.

  “I love you,” she said, her voice shaky. “Grandma’s never going to leave you again, okay, honeychild?”

  When I pulled back from her to nod, she was lifting her glasses with one hand to wipe under her eyes with the other.

  “All right,” she sighed. “We have to go clothes shopping. Let’s just see what we can save here and take it to the laundromat tomorrow. Help me sort these. Whites and colors.”

  I’d never sorted laundry before. As I got to work, something was starting to sink in. “So if all our clothes are here . . . are we staying here?”

  “I don’t know, child.”

  I would never live with Mom again.

  * * *

  —

  When Grandma and Granddad retired to Warwick, they rented a two-bedroom duplex. They might have kept their house in Greenwood Lake if they thought they would be raising kids again. I was allowed to lock my door here, but there was no need for it. Besides, none of the locks worked anyway. The town was safe, the apartment was safe—no one even locked the front door. It would take years for me to adjust to the idea that no one was coming for me in the night.

  The living room had bloodred wall-to-wall carpeting and wood-paneled walls, giving it a simultaneously horrifying and old-fashioned feeling, like you were always about to get murdered in a 1970s John Carpenter movie. Grandma hung heavy cream-colored drapes in the living room; during the day, the sunlight and hanging veil of cigarette smoke gave the whole room a Victorian effect, complemented by the walled-over and painted fireplace against the wall shared with the kitchen. Grandma and Granddad went to Sears in Middletown and bought a new couch when they moved; the new one was dark, with navy and maroon stripes running down the cushions. The same two stylish wooden end tables we had in Greenwood Lake flanked each side, with the same ornate lamps. The only two books in the house sat on one of the end tables: a Bible with a faux leather cover that Grandma used to prop up her hand when she was painting her nails and a first-edition copy of Roots that Sweetie Pie inscribed for Cory when he was born, hastily scrawling my name under his when I was born a year later. Everything in the house screamed ELDERLY PEOPLE LIVE HERE, from the gold curtain sashes to the twenty-year-old Tupperware. I’d never noticed how old my grandparents were until I was around them every day.

  Both of the bedrooms were upstairs—I shared the bigger one with Grandma, and Cory shared with Granddad. There were already twin beds in the small room, carried over the mountain from Greenwood Lake. I slept with Grandma in her big bed for a couple of months, until she could afford two twin beds for our room. She usually fell asleep on the couch watching TV, so I had the whole thing to myself. I liked to stretch my legs as far as I could, pushing my toes toward the cooler parts of the sheet.

  “So you and Granddad won’t sleep in the same bed anymore?”

  “Believe me—we’ve slept next to each other long enough,” Grandma said, rolling her eyes.

  “But you won’t even be in the same room. Husbands and wives are supposed to sleep together.”

  I’d watched enough TV to have this whole marriage thing figured out.

  “Go ahead, keep telling me about what husbands and wives are supposed to do. You wanna sleep in the barn? Be my guest.” Grandma tilted her head toward the back of the house and raised her eyebrows.

  The barn was a relic lost to time, not important enough to refurbish but too cumbersome to tear down. It was about thirty feet away from the back of the house and was mostly a haven for wild animals, namely skunks, possums, and raccoons. During the summer, I constantly woke up with the fresh-baked stench of skunk spray wafting into our open windows.

  * * *

  —

  We fell into something that resembled normalcy. We got by with Granddad’s bartending and gambling job and Grandma’s Sears card. I did my homework at the kitchen table after school, sneaking slices of salami out of the refrigerator while Grandma sat in the living room watching TV. The rustling of the plastic bag always gave me away, no matter how quiet I tried to be.

  “You’re going to ruin your appetite!” Grandma shouted one day as I slipped a thin slice between my fingers. “And stop eating it plain—it’s for sandwiches.”

  But I couldn’t help it. It had been a while since we had food available whenever we were hungry.

  “Where’s your brother?” Grandma asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably outside with Chucky and Justin.” Chucky and Justin were neighborhood kids; they were exactly Cory’s age and shared his general disregard for common decency. Cory had developed an after-school routine of his own that largely involved keying cars, riding his bike into oncoming traffic, and other acts of minor delinquency. His life was outside—I rarely saw him, and when I did, we still fought like demons. He kept having fun, as if everything with Mom and Luke didn’t even happen. I didn’t know how to talk to him. Other siblings may have banded together or grown closer in such a traumatic environment, but we became two islands, connected by nothing, sharing only the violent waves beating at our shore.

  Even though the middle school was less than a mile away, everyone took the bus. Warwick was a wealthy village, with the majority of families living in large split-level homes on the outskirts of town; the lack of sidewalks and distance meant most kids couldn’t walk to school even if they wanted to, so we townies got to take the bus by default, a consolation prize meant to make us feel included.

  Grandma woke us up for school every day by slamming into our bedrooms, turning on the overhead lights, and saying, “Get your ass up—I’m not coming in here again.” Cory went to school earlier than me, but I got up anyway, knowing there wouldn’t be another alarm.

  I first met Angela at the bus stop, on the corner right in front of the tire store. I could tell she was cool from the second I saw her. She had big blond curls bouncing against her olive skin, and bright green eyes. She looked like an exotic flower, even wrapped up in her little-kid uniform of a bright, puffy coat. Most importantly, I noticed her L.A. Gear sneakers right away. Poor kids have a way of zooming in on name brands, mesmerized by their inaccessibility.

  “Hi. I’m Angela. What grade are you in?” She spoke with the confidence of someone who didn’t care whether we became friends.

  “Fourth grade.”

  “Me too. Who’s your teacher?”

  “Ms. Post?”

  “I have Mr. Terrell. Ms. Post is tall like you.”

  Our school bus rounded the corner. I turned my head both ways before crossing. When I looked up again, Angela was already halfway across the street. She crossed without even checking to see if a car was
about to veer around the bus and smash into her. I couldn’t tell if it was the coolest or dumbest thing I’d ever seen.

  We sat together on the bus and trudged up the staircase to the top floor, the fourth-grade floor, together. Angela seemed to know everyone, saying hello to most of the girls and sneering at most of the boys. I had only been at this school for a couple of months; we mostly hung out with our class, so there wasn’t much overlap with the other kids. Angela hovered in the doorway of one room and pointed next door to another. “That’s your class, in there,” she said. “See you at recess.” I didn’t tell her that I already knew where my classroom was, that I was only new to Smith Street, not Warwick. She would become a new friend, someone I could hang out with at home. It felt like the first normal thing that had happened since Mom left.

  * * *

  —

  A few months after we arrived, Uncle Bobby moved in. After two years in California with Aunt Rene, she was sending him home.

  “But why is he coming here?” Grandma and I were cleaning out the walk-in closet at the top of the stairs. I was in the process of dragging a set of old, light blue leather suitcases into the hall when I asked the question that had been bugging me the most.

  “Where the fuck else is he going to go, Dani? Put that little one inside the big one. Save space.” Grandma was hanging a new set of curtains above the singular window. We couldn’t move without bumping into each other.

  “Is he going to have any room?” I was pissed—why had I never been offered this closet space? He wasn’t even here yet, and he already had the best room.

  “He’s going to have whatever space he has,” Grandma said. She finished hanging the curtains and climbed down from the small wooden stool. “Let’s get the bed.”

  I zipped up the suitcase-within-a-suitcase and dragged the whole shebang over to a corner. Grandma was already in the hall, walking the twin mattress from side to side, edging it closer to the door an inch at a time. We had so many twin mattresses in our house by then I wondered if Sears gave my grandparents some kind of punch card.

  By the time Bobby arrived, his room had a small TV, a lamp, and an end table/nightstand that he could put some clothes in. He seemed like the same guy he was in California—short-tempered and instantly resentful of my presence. He sat in his room most of the day and chain-smoked. He didn’t seem to be interested in finding a job, which is apparently why Aunt Rene told him he had to leave in the first place. I try now to imagine being twenty-seven, aimless, living with my parents and two tweenagers. Smoking myself to death in a tiny locked room would seem like a fine alternative to me, too.

  Uncle Bobby didn’t like me, but I couldn’t stand him, either. Our unconventional living situation had worked for the four of us. The addition of another person made it suddenly feel strained, pushed past the capacity of what we could all endure. Plus, he was a complete weirdo.

  Uncle Bobby talked to himself all the time. It wasn’t the same as the loud way Grandma ran down a list of stuff she needed to buy from the Grand Union while looking in the refrigerator—Uncle Bobby talked to himself in a stage whisper, which upped the creep factor considerably. I would be in my room doing homework on my bed, and his door would open. A fog of smoke would drift out, like he had just ended a cracking set at Madison Square Garden and was coming back for an encore. He’d run down the stairs, whispering like he was in full conversation with someone. I could only hear the sibilant S’s and, once he reached the bottom of the stairs, the occasional laugh.

  The laugh freaked me out more than the whisper-talk. Was he laughing at his own jokes? Laughing at an unheard part of a conversation with someone in his head? Both answers were deeply unsettling.

  I mostly resented Uncle Bobby for being able to live a life I could only dream of. Even at ten years old, I had chores and homework and responsibilities. He, on the other hand, waited until everyone left the house, came downstairs, popped the Carrie tape into the VCR, and watched his favorite movie all day long while he chain-smoked and ate us out of house and home. He was a grown-up version of Kevin from Home Alone, if his parents had died on the plane and he was living off the insurance.

  He inherited Grandma’s love of horror movies. Even if he’d seen the same movie a hundred times, he got angry with me and Cory for interrupting. One day we came home from school, rowdy and yelling with the freedom of people who had just spent an entire day being told to shut up. Swamp Thing was playing on the TV when we barreled into the house, throwing our book bags in the corner. I ran to the fridge for a tall glass of sugar-laden iced tea and started fighting with Cory—he got there first, and there wasn’t enough left in the pitcher for two glasses.

  “Will you two shut up? I’m trying to watch something!” Bobby yelled from the living room.

  “You’ve already seen it a million times!” I wasn’t about to let desire supersede logic. “Cory, save some for me!”

  “You can just make more!” Cory was also a student of logic. Touché, asshole.

  “It won’t be cold like it is in the fridge!”

  “You two! Shut up! For Christ’s sake!” Bobby was in the doorway now. The kitchen was filled with a cacophony of screams, all of us working from different scripts.

  “Where are my Ding Dongs!” I gave up on the iced tea, looking instead for the box of Hostess goodies I conned Grandma into letting me buy if I went to the Grand Union for milk.

  “Oh, I ate those,” Bobby said nonchalantly, taking a drag from his cigarette and sitting back down on the couch.

  “Those were MINE! I hate you!”

  “I don’t really like you, either,” he said as I stomped by, grabbing my bag and heading up to my room. “Don’t you eat at school? Do you have a tapeworm?”

  This was his go-to insult whenever he saw me eating. I had to look up “tapeworms” in our set of World Book encyclopedias; once I knew what they were, I started to worry that I really did have one. I was always hungry and never seemed to gain any weight. I was also five-ten by the time I was twelve, but the transition of energy being used to increase my height was lost on me. Uncle Bobby had planted the tapeworm seed, so that became the most likely possibility in my increasingly anxious brain.

  The truth is that fighting with Uncle Bobby was weirdly comforting. I knew that I could lash out at him without being hit—kids annoyed him, but Bobby moved through the world gently. Grandma got angry at us, but we were too tall and she was too tired to hit us, even though she sometimes threatened us that she still could if she really wanted to. For the first time in three years, I didn’t need the fear that pinballed throughout my body while I lived with Mom and Luke. It didn’t disappear, though; it seemed to have transformed into anxiety. I was afraid of the dark and slept with the curtains in my room pulled back so that the streetlight could illuminate my room. I didn’t like getting changed for gym; any attention or comments about bodies made me feel like my stomach was taking a private trip on a sinking ship.

  I was also furious, at nothing in particular, every day.

  “I don’t have a tapeworm!” I screamed from the balcony. I couldn’t help the tears springing to my eyes; I was living with a parasite that he put there with his thoughts.

  “Yeah, you do. Don’t be a crybaby about it.”

  I slammed myself down on the bed, fuming, happy to have such a deserving target for my rage.

  12.

  Why do you call it a ‘book bag’?” Meg Linkh was staring at me with her ice-blue eyes, her nose wrinkled in confusion. “It’s a tote bag.”

  I’d always called the thing I used to carry my schoolbooks around in a book bag, which seemed logical. I didn’t have a good answer for Meg.

  “I don’t know. That’s just what we called it at home,” I said, flinching a little at the realization that “home” wasn’t the right word anymore.

  “Well, it’s a tote bag,” Meg said, smiling. We had become friends
in elementary school when I was staying with Grandma, and we shared a love of baseball. Grandma would stop anything for baseball, and we watched countless Mets games in the summers before Cory and I moved in permanently. My love for it developed alongside my love for spending time with her.

  Warwick was a lot like Greenwood Lake in one particular way: I was the only Black kid in my class. The interrogation I used to get about not having a father now became a grilling about living with my grandparents in an apartment. These were the kinds of facts that I leaked out on the playground or when we did assignments in groups.

  “Where’s Smith Street?”

  “Why do you live with your grandparents?”

  “Why is your hair like that?”

  “You don’t have a washer and dryer at home?”

  Every time I was asked to account for the weirdness of my family life, I felt shame creeping in like a drop of water on the edge of a page. I couldn’t tell them the truth—no one knew about Mom and Luke, and I wanted to keep it that way. Instead, my answer was always the same: I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

  * * *

  —

  You couldn’t exactly call the street we lived on a neighborhood, with its three houses, the cable building, and a laundromat, but the backyard butted up against a street that had more kids living on it. Cory had his friends Chucky and Justin. Angela was Justin’s sister; ours was a friendship of convenience, and a total disaster.

  We were inseparable for a year after we met at the bus stop. The first time I went to her apartment, I saw how much she looked like her mom, the same bright eyes and curly hair, though Mrs. Allen’s hair was jet-black. “My mom is Italian and my dad is Black,” Angela said matter-of-factly one day, while we were listening to her Minnie Mouse record and playing with her dolls. I was surprised, and momentarily excited, but then I looked at her. We might have had an element of Blackness in common, but I already knew the world would never treat us the same.