I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (10 page)

That’s major fun.

Our dining room is lined with shelves of books on every subject—philosophy, psychology, Eastern religion, art, music, and biographies. There are hardcovers of great contemporary literature: a Philip Roth, say, and Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe. But others are decidedly more grocery-store checkout line: Robin Cook, V. C. Andrews, and Stephen King. (There was even a romance novel phase—which lasted about as long as the vegetarianism.) And when I feel like putting a couple of notches on my “she’s so mature for her age” belt, I can always find a
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
or pick up a
Cosmopolitan
magazine.

Yvonne is wicked smart. Worldly. Sophisticated, even, certainly by Minnesota standards. She is like a Pentium chip in a world of 256 megabytes. Moving in with her is like going to Yvonne School, a cross between a Chinese reeducation camp and one of those reality shows where they take someone from one world, like a Lutheran minister’s family, and drop them smack-dab into another diametrically opposed world. Like a drug dealer’s home. Yvonne talks to me like I’m a grown-up and gives me the full details on all kinds of things I’ve been wondering about—things June would never talk about, if she even knew they existed—and a lot of things I haven’t.

“Liberace is gay as the day is long,” Yvonne says to me one afternoon while watching
The Mike Douglas Show
. Liberace is doing his whole full-frontal piano thing, which I find fascinating, not just because I suspect I was a gay man in one of my past lives, but also because we didn’t do pop culture at the Ericsons’.
The Lawrence Welk Show
doesn’t count.

“Gay?” I ask. “What’s gay?”

“See his outfit?”

“Uh-huh.” I see it. How could I miss it? I love sequins.

“It means he has sex with men.”

This could be shocking, but it isn’t. Probably because I
already know
Liberace is gay. That is obvious, even to an 8.7-year-old. I just didn’t know that there is a whole word dedicated to the concept of gay. And until Yvonne filled in the details for me, I didn’t know what gay actually
did
to qualify it as gay. But the energy of gay—that, I know. Now I have a term for it.

Sometimes, Yvonne helpfully sets me straight on some of the things June and Gene taught me. Like the day I was telling her how Jesus rose up on a cloud and she looked at me, raised one of her long, thin, Bette Davis eyebrows, and said, “Tracy, you mean to tell me you
really
believe Jesus floated up into the sky? On a
cloud
?”

“Not into the sky,” I correct her. “Into heaven.”

Yvonne smiles and shakes her head. “Really?”

Suddenly, I’m not so sure. “Well, um…yeah.”

“So let me get this straight. Jesus is just standing there. Preaching to the masses, people everywhere, listening to him preach. And suddenly he’s hovering above everyone, on a cloud.” Yvonne’s not mocking me; she sounds more like a panelist on
Meet the Press.
“Think about it,” she says. “That cloud sounds more like a magic carpet.”

“But—” I stop.
Hmmmm
. Actually, now that I think about it, she sounds kind of…right.

“Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“I guess not,” I say.

“You’re way too smart for that stuff,” Yvonne declares.

There go four and a half years of intense Christian indoctrination.
Poof!
Yvonne School is very effective.

Other times Yvonne just wants to talk. About random stuff. She only really has one girlfriend that I know of, and they don’t hang out all that often. I think maybe Yvonne is glad to have me around, just to have some company.

“A lot of people mistake this for a Mercedes,” Yvonne tells me one afternoon as we settle into her white Peugot sedan. It’s a nice car—the seats are leather, so it smells good—but until this moment, my thoughts about cars have been limited to
big, small, convertible,
and
stick shift
. Those last two being very rare species not native to the Upper Midwest.

“What’s a Mercedes?” I ask. Whatever it is, I like the sound of the word as it rolls out of my mouth.

“It’s a German luxury car. They’re the ones with the little peace sign on the hood?” Yvonne helpfully jogs my memory. “Rich people drive them.”

I’ve seen those. Not very often, but I’ve seen them. From now on, I’m going to pay special attention. Maybe I’ll start counting them, like the “slug-bug” game Betsy and I play in the car where we punch each other every time we see a Volkswagen bug.

“The Germans make the best cars, you know,” Yvonne says. “And cameras. They’re a very precise and logical people.”

“Oh,” I say. I have no idea why Yvonne’s telling me all this, but I’m always up for some new information, so I listen attentively.

“Best engineers in the world,” she goes on. “It’s even in the language.”

That
I can relate to, since I took sixty-four days of German at that dull school I went to when I was living with the Werners. It was actually one of the more interesting parts of the curriculum.

Yvonne tools down Lyndale Avenue, elbow out the window, cigarette dangling between her fingers. We’re going to Bachman’s, the high-end nursery where Yvonne gets all her houseplants. She’s got a thing for plants, and at least once a week we’re scoping out some new philodendron or other. In fact, our trips to Bachman’s are almost as much fun as our outings to Lake Calhoun. It’s how we’re bonding.

“My dad was German,” she says. There’s a hint of something in her voice. Sadness, maybe? No. It’s more than that. Hurt, anger, and something else I can’t really put my finger on. After a long pause, she adds, “I only met him once.”

“Really?” Even at my age, I know the start of a good story when I hear one. “What happened?”

“He went to the war,” she says matter-of-factly. “And he never came back.”

Yvonne looks at me like
Did you get that? He never came back.
I get it, of course I get it. I had a couple of people never come back on me, too.

“Did he die?”

“Nope.”

“How do you know?”

“Because one day, I was playing on my front steps and a man came walking up. He was tall and had blue eyes like mine. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re mine all right.’ Then he went inside, talked to my mom for a few minutes, and left. I never saw him again.”

I am comforted by hearing this, and though I don’t have words for it yet, I know why. Because Yvonne is telling
my
story. She and I feel the same pain. I know exactly what it feels like to be a little girl wondering if she’s ever going to see her dad again. What’s even more interesting is that we’re working it out
with the same man
! My dad. Okay, so Freddie is her boyfriend, and he’s my father, but here we are, two chicks in the same car, living in the same house, dealing with the same lack of control over a man who can’t or won’t stop doing things we
know
will cause him to leave us. Again.

The only thing is…if we’re both little girls who miss Daddy, which one of us is going to be the grown-up?

A COUPLE OF HOURS AFTER
I get to work, Paul phones again. This makes me terribly happy. Not just because I really like him, but because it means I don’t have to endure an excruciatingly long period of time not knowing if he’s ever going to call me again. And by “excruciatingly long,” I mean anything over two or three hours. I’m enough of an armchair marriage and family therapist to know that this is a classic sign of an attachment wound, but that doesn’t make the fear that the other person will simply
disappear
any less real. Kind of like how statistics about the relative danger of automobiles have never kept me from hyperventilating on a plane.

“Hello, hello!” he crows.

“Hi!” I’m hoping I sound saucy.

“How’s work?”

“Great!” Was that chipper? Casual? Fun?

“When are you done?”

Oh my god, I’m so glad you asked.

Casually: “Ten.”

“You want to come over?”

“Sure.”

“Doo-doo-dooooo!”
He says it like the Imperial Margarine hat just popped onto the top of his head. “I can’t wait.”

“Me neither.”

“When will you be here?”

“About ten twenty.” News people can be excruciatingly exact about times. At least I didn’t say 10:23.

“Perfect.”

“Perfect.”

“Oh,” he says. “One last thing.”

“What?” I say.

“Bring your toothbrush.”

Ooooooh.

BETSY AND I ARE IN THE LIVING ROOM
when the Yvonne school honeymoon ends. We’re playing our homemade version of
The Price Is Right
—we’ve got “prizes” displayed left and right, and I’m pulling double duty as both Bob Barker
and
the legendary spokesmodel Janice. Betsy is the contestant—bidding on a glass and stainless-steel floor lamp. I know that without a proper look at the lamp Betsy’s bid is going to suck, so I drag it a couple of feet across the hardwood floor to give her a better look. What I don’t know, probably because I just moved into this place a couple of months ago, is that the smoked-glass globe containing the oversize halogen bulb is only
cradled
in its metal holder, not attached to it. So the moment it hits a snag on the hardwood floor, it bounces right out of its cradle and—

CRASH!

It’s in fourteen million pieces, all of them special-ordered from Chicago, on the floor.

Yvonne—who is most likely smoking a Parliament cigarette (possibly while playing solitaire) at the black slate dining table with the matching Naugahyde chairs—calls out from the kitchen.

“What was that?!”
She’s not saying it out of curiosity either.

Betsy and I look at each other. We’ve been kids long enough to know we’re in trouble when we break something, so we’re fully expecting we’re fucked; we just don’t know how bad. When Yvonne comes around the corner, we see how bad.

Really bad.

There’s this look on her face. Something about it is out of control, but in a way that neither Betsy nor I have ever seen before. (I know this because we still talk about it, and it’s been thirty-five years now.) It’s a little like the notes crazy people send to news anchors, where the letters and words are all off-kilter, and the emotional intensity seems way out of proportion to anything you would send to someone you only know on TV.

It’s very scary.

As Yvonne surveys the extent of the damage to the lamp, her face draws dark and heartless in a way that makes you think about wicked stepmothers and wicked witches. And Doberman pinschers.

She turns to Betsy and says, “You better go home now.” Apparently, whatever happens next is too terrible for a little girl from a nice family like Betsy’s to witness.

Betsy and I have only been friends for a little while, but she shoots me a sympathetic look. This look will bond me to her for life. Because she is my only witness, the only living soul who knows what I saw that day in Yvonne’s face, who knows what it really looks like and how indescribable it would be to anyone who has never seen it. She knows that Yvonne is much more than what she seems, that her good side is wonderful and that her dark side is lethal—not literally, but deadening in the sense that it robs you of any feeling that the world is a safe place in which to explore and play and create.

Betsy can corroborate my story.

She knows how important it is for me to watch my step, my words, my eye movement for anything that might provoke this reaction. She knows what I am dealing with.

Betsy quickly takes her long dishwater-blond hair, skinny arms, and Jack Purcelled feet and scurries out the front door, back to the much more sane and predictable benign neglect of her own home two doors down.

I, however, am stuck here.

After Betsy leaves, Yvonne rages on me for the first time.

“You little bitch.” That’s her opener.
You little bitch.
“Clean it up.”

I am terrified. Because I have lived with a lot of people and have had more than a couple of moms, and no one has ever called me a bitch or looked at me in a way that scared me like this.

I go into the kitchen to get the broom. I’m crying. “I’m sorry!” I say.

“Well, that doesn’t matter now, does it?” Yvonne is tracking me ruthlessly as I attempt to operate the broom and the dustpan. I never did much sweeping at the Ericsons’. “You just make sure you get every last piece of it up.”

Or?

Or what?

How
does
someone make you fear for your life when you know they aren’t actually going to kill you? Is it because the things they do and say to you make you want to die?

This is a question that never gets answered. Precisely because there is no belt, no fist, no nothing—just words, a glaring look, and an unsettling energy—I have no way to prove what Yvonne is doing to me. Even to myself. It doesn’t sound “that bad.”
Oh, so she called you a bitch, and now you’re all upset? And she gave you a dirty look—what parent hasn’t?

Yvonne’s violence is more like germ warfare; it happens at a cellular level—you get infected, but you’re still able to walk around, and go to school, and have a paper route, and it’s not until years later that you come to realize that you’ve still got whatever it is she gave you the day you broke the glass lamp. And it might even be killing you, in a way. It’s definitely making you want to drink.

The genius of it is that the germ—the poison—is traceless. It leaves no marks. There are few signs. Which means if you lived next door to us, you wouldn’t think to come and save me. Though a little voice would tell you not to befriend us, either.

After I sweep every single shard of glass into the dustpan and, through my paroxysms of tears, manage to get them into a garbage bag and out to the big trash cans in the driveway (all while being supervised by Goebbels), I am dismissed.

“Go to your room,” Yvonne commands. I am happy to escape and to cry alone.