Dirty Secret (12 page)

I remember weeding my mother's front garden once while she sat on the steps watching—I was maybe eight or nine—and her best friend Sue walked by across the street. They didn't acknowledge each other.

“Mom,” I said. “There's Sue, right there—aren't you going to say hi?”

“No,” she snapped. “Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because she's a goddamn lunatic, that's why.”

“Since when?” This was a woman my mother had seen at least three times a week for months. I had heard them having conversations about their childhoods, about the fact that they'd both had alcoholic, abusive fathers.

“Since always,” my mother said. “It just took me a while to figure it out.”

I never learned what Sue did, but the aftermath was the same as the others:
It happened again, just like always. I start to trust
someone and she turns on me. She starts putting me down.
My mother crawls into bed for a few days, depressed. She emerges from her chrysalis self-righteous and enraged.
I don't know what I was thinking being friends with her.
And then it's on to the next Wonderful Stranger, who may or may not become an actual friend. And repeat.

When we arrive at the Thai place, because of my mother's nonstop talk about how hard the waitress works, I'm half-expecting to see some broken-backed, hundred-year-old woman hobbling from table to table, maybe blind, or at least deaf. I'm also expecting the place to be semi-nice, since the restaurant is far out in the suburbs and my mother apparently makes the drive regularly. Instead, we're greeted by thin, stained carpeting, frameless prints on the walls, bare lightbulbs hanging from the pockmarked ceiling, and the smell of old grease wafting through the air. Maybe, I think, they spend their budget on fine ingredients rather than décor. I can see my dad and Sandy, who are extremely healthy eaters, eyeing each other; they're skeptical.

The five of us have just walked in the door when a tall Thai woman approaches holding menus. She's maybe thirty-five and is sheathed in a red satin dress.

My mother takes a step toward her and says, “Oh, hello, Lalana,” in a high voice. “It's so good to see you. How are you?”

The World's Hardest Working Waitress doesn't know who my mother is.

She looks baffled by my mother calling her by name. I'm embarrassed for my mom, but she seems not to have noticed. And the waitress quickly recovers and politely answers, “I'm fine thank you, how are you?”

“I'm doing okay,” my mother says, as the waitress leads us to a table and hands us menus. No, you're not, I can't help but think, you have cancer.

When the World's Hardest Working Waitress comes back to take our order, my mother smiles up at her, and, I could swear, even bats her eyelashes.

“Oh, Jessie,” she says, pointing to an item on the menu, “get the fish. The fish is incredible here!”

“I'll have the fish, please,” I say.

“I'll have that, too,” my mom says. “And an order of the chicken wings. Should I get two orders?” She looks over to Sandy at the end of the table.

“That's okay, Helen,” Sandy says. “Rick and I aren't that hungry. One order should be enough.”

“Okay,” my mom says, obviously disappointed.

My dad and Sandy order something with tofu and vegetables and Billy gets a platter of various appetizers.

The food is so greasy that it's almost inedible. Billy is the only one who seems to even mildly enjoy it—and that might be for the novelty of it, since he rarely gets to indulge in such greasiness. My mother is too busy talking about the World's Hardest Working Waitress to notice what she's eating; every time the woman walks by on her way to or from the kitchen, my mother leans forward and says, her voice overflowing with reverence, “Oh, my God. How hard she works.”

Billy starts teasing my mom, though I don't think she realizes it. “So, do you think the waitress here works hard, Helen?” he asks, in his cute, perpetually hoarse voice.

“Like you wouldn't believe,” my mom replies, shaking her head and gnawing at a chicken wing. After a minute she switches topics, back to dying. “Maybe I should donate my body to science,” she says dreamily.

“You haven't even had the surgery yet,” I say. “You don't know what your prognosis will be.”

“I have a feeling, though.”

My dad and Sandy are talking about something else—probably how bad the food is. It takes me a little while to notice that Billy's quietly looking down at his plate, no longer touching his food. He's frowning, just like in the car.

“Mom,” I say. “Let's talk about something else.” I gesture toward Billy.

“It's good for him to know about death,” she stage-whispers at me.

“Helen, please,” Sandy says.

I feel bad that I didn't stop my mom sooner, before Billy got upset. But I guess I'm just used to her inappropriateness. It's nothing new. When I was ten years old and already living full-time with my dad and Sandy, my mother invited me over for dinner one night. When I went upstairs, I peeked inside her bedroom. She was living with Sam and their king-size bed took up most of the room. It had no sheets on it. The floor was piled high with clothes—they reached the height of the naked bed, so it was as if the entire room was one level, a few feet above the actual floor. And there was a smell. A strange chemical yet musty scent I didn't recognize. Downstairs, I said something to my mom about the state of her bedroom.

“I'm too busy to clean,” she said.

“And it smells weird.”

“That's from sex,” she said, matter-of-factly. “That's the smell of semen.”

“Gross, Mom,” I said. “Thanks.”

During the meal, Sandy barely touches anything on her plate. My dad, Billy, and I eat a little, and my mother eats heartily, though she admits that the fish isn't so good this time.

“I guess the waitress was working too hard and she left it in the fryer too long,” Billy jokes.

My mother laughs. And while I like that she can laugh at herself—to say she doesn't get offended easily is an extreme understatement—her immunity to criticism makes it difficult to get through to her about her house, her yard, her car, even about the way she dresses. She's so spectacularly unself-aware that I can barely believe she gets by in the world. That's why I was so shocked when she admitted to being a hoarder.

She's still going on about the waitress.

In the meantime, muscles I didn't even know I had ache from the twelve-hour days I've spent hauling bags of garbage out of her house. Sandy and my dad, struggling with their real estate business, work twelve-hour days themselves.

Each time my mother mentions the waitress I can see my dad's jaw clench, his internal motor revving. Even Sandy looks agitated. Their barely touched plates are pushed to the side; only my mom and Billy are still eating.

“We all work hard, Mom,” I say.

She shakes her head. “Not like her. She's just incredible.”

AS HAPPY AS I WAS WHEN MY DAD AND SANDY GOT married, and as relieved as I was when I started living in the yellow house full-time, I was never able to shake the feeling of being too abnormal for a normal family. Not that things were completely normal in the yellow house: Merging the two families proved difficult. Often it felt as if we were two separate families living under one roof—me, my dad, and my brother in one, and Sandy and her daughter Beth in the other. My dad, my brother, and I would go to movies while Sandy and Beth stayed home and sewed together or gardened. It was almost as if the remodeling my dad and Sandy had done to turn the yellow house from a two-family duplex into a single-family home simply hadn't worked.

It wasn't anyone's fault. Sandy made an effort with my brother and me, taking each of us out separately for our own
special days—a picnic at one of the lakes, shopping, or miniature golfing. She even arranged for me to visit a private zoo one of her clients had access to, where I got to pet a bobcat and a timber wolf and sit on the back of a tiger—later I found out a man with an aimed rifle had been standing behind me the whole time, just in case. My dad didn't make as much of an effort with Beth, figuring she'd always gotten plenty of love and affection, whereas my brother and I had a deficit and needed all of his attention.

But it wasn't enough.

My dad and Sandy said later that when I was thirteen, it was as if a switch flipped inside me—I went from being an agreeable kid who liked to help around the house, to a desperately unhappy drama queen.

My dad and I bickered constantly, especially when, around the age of fourteen, I started dressing in a style he didn't like—dyeing my hair bone white or fire engine red (these days not at all wild, but in 1983 it was extreme, especially in Minneapolis), wearing ripped jeans, flannel shirts over T-shirts, and combat boots, and coming home with albums made by bands with names my dad found both nonsensical and repugnant: Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü, JFA, GBH. (“The Dead Kennedys! That is the height of disrespect!”)

My dad was embarrassed to be seen with me. When we'd go to the movies he'd require me to cover my hair with a baseball cap. And when, at fifteen, I told him that I wanted to get my nose pierced, he forbade it. By now my dad and I were almost always in some kind of argument. Because my absence meant relative peace at the yellow house, my dad and Sandy never said no when I wanted to spend the night somewhere else. So I spent the weekend at my friend Tara's house, where our friend Jennifer pierced my nose with a brooch and a couple ice cubes.

I was terrified to come home, but eventually I did, bringing
Jennifer and Tara with me. Sandy and my dad were talking at the kitchen table. My friends and I walked past them, and I covered my nose with my palm as we did. Immediately my dad demanded, “You did it anyway, didn't you?”

“Run,” I said to my friends and we bolted up the spiral stairs to my room.

In seconds my dad was pounding on the door. “Goddammit, Jessie. I told you not to do that!”

“Stay here,” I said to my friends, and went out into the hallway, closing the door behind me. My dad walked toward me, but I ran past him, for some reason into his and Sandy's bedroom. I turned around and there he was in the doorway.

“It's my life,” I yelled. “I can do what I want.”

He grabbed my arm and stared at the nose ring for a few seconds. “Jessie! Why?” He shoved me backward and I fell onto his and Sandy's bed.

“What the hell?” My dad had never been physically violent with me before. He was only a few feet away, and without thinking I kicked him in the stomach. I was wearing combat boots, so I know it hurt. But I didn't wait for his reaction—I sprang off the bed and out of the room.

I threw open my bedroom door and told my friends that they should leave.

“No way,” Jennifer said. “We can't leave you.”

In spite of what had just happened, I wasn't afraid. I knew my dad wouldn't really hurt me. And I didn't want my friends to see him like this. I loved my dad and I couldn't bear the thought of my friends thinking badly of him. My dad had saved me from my mother; my dad told me I was a good kid and believed I was good, even though I wasn't. My dad would do anything for me. This raging man wasn't my real dad—this was merely his temper. Besides, it was my fault that he was so angry.

“I'll be fine,” I told my friends. “Really.”

They reluctantly scurried past me, down the stairs, and out of the house. It was summer and the windows were wide open. I could hear Jennifer out on the sidewalk yelling, “You're an asshole! You shouldn't treat your daughter like that!” Her voice faded as she and Tara hurried toward the bus stop.

I was already feeling guilty for kicking my dad. I walked toward his room to apologize, right as he was coming out. When I saw how red and angry his face was, I got scared. My first impulse was to get out of the house, but I was already past the staircase opening. The only way down to the first floor was by scaling the metal bars surrounding the stairs. So I climbed over the top and began working my way down.

I'd gotten over the side and was hanging by my fingertips onto the edge of the floor, which was the ceiling of the living room below, when my dad stomped one of his feet near my fingers. Even though it was only about a six-foot drop, I was reluctant to jump. But the next time his foot came down inches from my hand, I did.

I ran out the front door, looking around for my friends, but they were already gone.

I walked right past my mother's house and didn't even consider going in. Instead, I ended up sitting in the park next to the elementary school, swinging on the swing set until it was dark.

When I got back to the yellow house, my dad had regained control of himself. He asked if we could talk in his office and I followed him into the small room, taking my usual spot in the chair across from his desk. My dad had finally quit his three-pack-a-day smoking habit two years earlier, and though his skin had lost its yellowish hue and he'd repainted the eggshell-colored walls of his office, I could still smell old smoke.

“I owe you a big apology,” my dad began. “I never, ever should have acted like that.”

“I'm sorry, too,” I said. “I shouldn't have gotten my nose pierced.”

“Let me see it, anyway,” my dad said, and leaned forward. “It's not that bad.”

“Do you want me to take it out? I'll take it out if you really want me to.”

“No, honey, it's really not that bad. It's actually kind of cute.”

“Well, it's a good thing we had that blow-out fight then, right?” I said, attempting humor. But I was confused. Why had we fought, anyway?

“Listen, honey. I can't tell you how sorry I am for how I acted. I'm absolutely ashamed of myself. I can't believe I tried to smash your fingers.”

Suddenly my perfectly unhurt fingers ached. I cradled my hands together in my lap.