Her: A Memoir (5 page)

Mom and Dad brought us home to 24 Steers Avenue, a modest two-story white Victorian on a quiet street. Mom’s beloved calico cat slept on the front porch beneath a rocking chair when we arrived, one of us in each of our parents’ arms. An impressive weeping willow tree grew in the front yard, framing the house with soft yellow leaves. We played hide-and-seek beneath its ground-sweeping branches. We carved our names into its trunk with the sharp rocks we gathered from Mom’s bed of lilies.

Dad let us eat ice cream whenever we wanted and allowed us to make drawings on the wall with washable markers. He took us to baseball games and bought us adult-size team hats that flopped over our eyes. He told us we knew our stuff. He showed us how to play pitch and catch and hide-and-seek. He ordered us monogrammed T-shirts in blue and red. Dad taught us how to spit in a steady straight line, like all the boys in preschool could; he said all the power was in our cheeks, we just had to blow it fast. I hocked a loogie and imagined it shooting out like Dad spat his angry words.

He gave us his love of music. He played records on his hissing, skipping 45. We held hands and danced through the kitchen and living room to the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Frank Sinatra. Cara and I shook and shimmied through the gauzy cigarette-smoked high afternoon light; it beamed across the room and lit us like singing stars in a cabaret.

But Dad’s moods changed as quickly as traffic lights. Once when we weren’t yet three years old, he shoved both of us twins into his car quick, after a fistfight with a strange man in a mall parking lot; he’d sworn at the man, for what I wasn’t certain, and flashed him the middle finger, what he called “the great big bird.” A scuffle ensued. We drove away after. Dad’s face was full of thrill. He gripped the steering wheel so hard, his chewed-up knuckles turned white. He gunned the gas to the floor. He drove fast and erratically down the narrow avenue. I peed my pants in the backseat. Cara held my hand and stroked my hair. She said we’d be safe in our bedroom. We’d make ourselves as snug as bugs in a rug. I worried over soiling Dad’s blessed blue vinyl interior and put my head in my sister’s lap. She shielded my eyes and watched for us both as our car nearly careened into a ditch. She shushed me and whispered in my ear, telling me everything would be okay when we got home.

*   *   *

The man in the parking lot wasn’t Dad’s only victim. Dad blackened Mom’s eye. He pushed her down the stairs and left her battered and weeping on the basement’s concrete floor. He hit her in the jaw with the butt of his gun, kicked her shins with his heavy black work boots. He stole her photographs of her mother and held them hostage.

*   *   *

Mom and Dad fight.

We are on the porch at Steers Avenue watching Dad through the window. Mom is talking. Mom is silent. Dad hits her. Dad is not hitting Mom. We watch ladybugs crawl on the screen. I count their spots; Sister covers her ears and watches colors. The porch is white. The ladybugs are red. I am wearing a blue sweatshirt. Sister is wearing red all over. Everything is black and white.

We go to Grandma’s house after the police come. Mom comes with us. Dad goes away. Grandma shakes her head. Grandpa taps his foot. Grandma tries to say something. Dad is her son. Grandpa keeps his lips pressed together. “How did we raise this man to be such a boy?” he asks Grandma. She looks down at his tapping foot. He is disappointed that the police have come. His son is not supposed to get caught. His wife is not supposed to call. Real men make their women quiet—that’s what Grandpa’s tapping foot says.

We stay with Grandma at her house. Mom tells Grandma she doesn’t want us to think our life is normal. Mom kisses us good-bye. She’s started looking for a new place for us to live.

*   *   *

She did finally leave him, with little except her life, her girls. She packed us up while Dad was at work. Grandma Josephine came over and helped Mom pack. She gave Mom fifty dollars and told her never to go back to her son.

Dad had broken our mother. And he’d terrorized us so deeply that we later refused him entry into our adult lives, as if closing the door on him kept him from peering into the windows. His abuse raised the bar on what was tolerable. There was nothing we weren’t prepared to take from a man and nothing we didn’t dish out in return.

When Mom left Dad, we moved to a squat redbrick apartment building on Barton Avenue in Schenectady. It was Section 8 housing, but Cara and I were rich because we had our own swing set, which previous tenants had left behind, and a boysenberry tree grew by the fence in our backyard. We shared the tree’s ripe bounty with our neighbors in the summers. Mom made pies. She painted the hallway between her bedroom and ours a homey, dark cornflower blue and our room a grassy sage.

Victim and Monster was a game we played there: One of us would turn out the light and we’d run to our separate beds and get under the covers. One of us would stand up from bed and make a hideously scary face, stalking slowly over to the bedside of the other. When it was my turn to be the victim, I waited patiently for Cara to arrive. I curled my hands up over my blanket, clenched my fists, and giggled. The goal of the game was to make the scariest face you could and hold it until you got to your sister’s bed. You were to hold your monster face and touch your sister, nose to nose. The twin who broke out in laughter or fright first would lose the game. We’d play a few rounds and laugh and laugh. A night’s play always ended the same way: we’d sleep in the same bed, our backs pressed together.

“Hey?” I’d whisper to Cara from my side of the bedroom. “You there?”

“Yeah?” she’d answer, hushed. “Don’t wake Mom up. She’ll kill us.”

“What are you doing?” I’d ask.

“Trying to go to sleep.”

“I’m scared.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“I don’t know.” The covers muffled my voice. “Can I sleep with you?”

“Fine,” Cara groaned. “Just for tonight though, okay?”

It was never just for the night. Every night the dark frightened me. Every night, we played our game and then slept back to back.

Chapter 4

I
warned
Cara against
moving to Holyoke.

Most graduate students in her program lived in the nearby college towns of Amherst and Northampton, sleepy villages filled with coffee shops and boutiques and craft galleries, where you found handblown glass vases in bright colors and brand-new lamps made to look antique. Both towns had several novelty stores that sold bumper stickers:
THANK GODDESS
,
WE CAN DO IT!
,
FIGHT LIKE A GIRL
.

“Why would you move to that nasty town?” I asked her. “Spend a few hundred dollars more and live in Amherst, where it’s actually safe to go outside.”

“You’re always so paranoid,” she said. “You know I’m not good at making friends. I’d rather live in a big apartment. And I don’t need to hang out at cafés with catty grad students.”

“Those bitchy students will be your peers,” I insisted.

I tried in vain in the fall of 2001 to move Cara to Northampton, even setting up appointments for her to look at pretty rentals in remodeled Victorians (appointments she never showed up for). Maybe I was projecting my needs onto her. These little towns
did
look good to me. I had only a year left in my photography graduate program and had begun to hope that I might leave New York City for a quiet life as a college professor, near Cara.

Once a thriving mill and factory town, Holyoke was, by then, a skeleton of its former self. The impressive brick buildings that must have housed flourishing locally owned businesses were boarded up and tagged with profane graffiti. Bodegas, restaurants, and gas stations were built with security in mind: employees worked behind bulletproof glass panels that ran from serving counter to ceiling; a slot drawer pushed open for the exchange of money was the only point of contact between customer and clerk. I went to Holyoke to visit Cara during the first weekend of October. I saw the benefits of her living choice as soon as she opened her door: the rent
was
cheap and her place
was
expansive. Four hundred and fifty dollars a month bought Cara and Kahlil twelve hundred square feet of shiny hardwood flooring, high ceilings with intricate molding, a dining room with a china cabinet built into the wall, a front porch, and a back porch.

Cara whisked me back to the sitting porch at the rear of the building. “Isn’t this great!” she beamed, pulling me down next to her on a softly pillowed wicker sofa set, her new backyard in perfect view; the porch faced an unpaved lot, where a couple of beat-up cars, caked in dirt and covered in leaves, sat parked alongside an industrial-size Dumpster; they looked as if they hadn’t been driven in years.

A pair of girls—sisters, I presumed—played in the lot. Silky black ponytails hung down their backs, tickling the waistbands of their faded dungarees. They rode Big Wheels, pedaling back and forth through clouds of dust that rose up beneath the little bikes. Rocks crackled against the plastic wheels. Cara and I sat together on the wicker love seat, watching them play through the haze of the porch screen.

“They’re funny girls,” she said. “They’re out here night and day.” Her arm hung limply over the armrest. “Come to think of it, I’ve never seen their mom.” She circled her wrist like a much older, arthritic woman would, as if relieving an ache. The smoke of her cigarette swirled into my face.

“I wish you’d quit those.” I pulled the cigarette from between her fingers, taking a drag. “You like that?” I asked, thinking the only way to demonstrate my worry over her habit was to pick it up myself and show her how terrible it looked.

“You’ve got asthma, stupid.” She grabbed the cigarette and snuffed it out. “What’s okay for me isn’t good for you.”

“I know what’s good for you, lady.”

“Oh yeah?”

“A picture—that’s what good for you.” I brought my hands up to my face as if I were holding a camera and started clicking away.

“You know what I think? I think you know what’s good for
you
.”

I took a photograph of the two of us in Cara’s bathtub that afternoon. A tiny crank window above the tub let in enough light to reveal the iridescent color base of the turquoise paint on the walls. The antique claw-foot tub was freshly cleaned; the shower curtain hanging around it clung to the wall, wet from the last bath. The tub was anchored into the floor and was deep enough to sink into. It was the kind of tub I longed to soak in. The tub in my apartment was shallow and fiberglass, with caulk peeling up under the faucet. I never felt comfortable bathing there—it always seemed there was something floating in the tub with me: grime, scum, and, occasionally, a millipede.

Cara’s neighborhood wasn’t fantastic but she had made a fine home there, a home where I could seek refuge from the hustle of Manhattan. I imagined days filled with me taking photographs and Cara writing. I filled up the tub with warm water and felt at peace with her choices for the first time.

It was time for our picture bath.

Cara set out an array of fruity soaps and soothing salts for our soak. I brought a handful of flower petals into the bath. I hoped they’d help Cara feel pampered and relax her for a better shot.

She sat behind me in the tub and shampooed my hair, twisting it up into a unicorn horn on the top of my head. I laughed, loud and throaty, and went under, holding my breath. Air bubbled out of my nose. Women aren’t allowed to be childish, except for the camera, I thought. Then I got ready for the business of picture making. I said, “Let’s get this show on the road.” I picked up the cable release and set it beside the tub. Cara was a gifted model: comfortable enough that she gave me what I needed: a gesture contrived just for the camera that conveyed who she was. This was masterwork on her part. “Do what you want,” is all I had to tell her. I got ready to pull the trigger. Cara wrapped my hair tight around her palm and yanked back hard.

“I’m ready.” Cara wiggled her shoulders up out of the water, exposing her nakedness. She looked at the camera, confessing. “Go.” Her eyeliner was ruined. It ran in black streams over her cheeks.

We’d run out of hot water by the time I finished taking our picture. The water went cold, but Cara still enjoyed her soak. I got up to warm our bath with water I’d kettle-boiled on the stove. Cara waited. Her left hand dangled over the porcelain rim of the tub. Her engagement ring caught the light, caused a lens flare.

*   *   *

We have four different kinds of fruit soaps, and milk bath, Epsom salts, pomegranate seed shampoo, apricot scrub, brushes, cloths, pillows. Sister washes my feet, rubbing at the arches in small circles with soaped fingers, asking every so often, “Is this okay?”

I sigh. “Yes,” floats from my mouth. I put my head back on the wall of the bath, letting Sister bathe me.

*   *   *

For October, the sun was warm. Light shone down through crimson leaves as I sat and read in their shade. I wasn’t home in the city where I should have been; I was at my mother’s house in Albany. I felt safe there, far from the downtown streets of Manhattan, which I’d fled after September 11. I was embarrassed to have left my husband and taken time off from grad school, but I was afraid to go home. To live in a constant state of worry for my basic safety? I’d done that enough in my life. I was fortunate that Jedediah was patient. Home could wait. Jedediah worked Monday through Friday and my plan was to drive back to the city on Saturday morning and go together to the farmers’ market we so loved to shop. We liked to buy autumn apples there, careful to pass over the bruised ones in the barrel. I haggled with the vendor as Jedediah stood by.

We’d come home from the market at sunset and brew a pot of coffee. I’d open the paper bag filled with fruit and pluck out one apple at a time, arranging them so the shiniest rolled to the front of the metal hanging basket.

*   *   *

The sun was warm for October. The girl had just been to see her therapist and returned weepy and wanting a walk. She was tired of talking, tired of long, drawn-out conversations about why her father never really loved her. Talk was getting her nowhere. Bygones, she thought. I’m a grown woman now.