I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (13 page)

“Huh?” Paul’s got a technique, too. When he doesn’t want to answer a direct question, he pretends he didn’t hear it.

“Out of the blue like this. You called me out of the blue.” I’m pressing, but just slightly.

“Oh, um, I had a dream about you last night.” He’s not saying it in a particularly suggestive manner, even though telling a girl you dreamed about her last night suggests you were lying in bed, naked or something, maybe even next to someone else, thinking about her.

“Was it a good dream? What happened?”

“I don’t remember. I just know I woke up and thought, I have to call you.”

“Really?” I’m going to allow myself to be flattered, just this once. “Huh.”

Then it’s Paul’s turn to get really direct. “I think I made a mistake,” he says, “and I want to see you again.”

Hearing these words is a little like discovering exactly what you wanted under the Christmas tree. The red bike you almost didn’t dare to hope for but did anyway? When it shows up, you have the sense that there really are forces for good in the universe—that not only does someone up there like you, but what you want for yourself is what it wants for you, too.

Still, I’m going to go slow. Sometimes the roads are icy and I wouldn’t want to break something on this shiny red bike. Like my heart. “Why should I see you?” I ask.

“Because,” he says.

“Because why?”

“Because you should.”

Okay.

ONE NIGHT I AM LAYING
in my canopy bed when Yvonne comes into my room. I should say first that I love every inch of this bed—the faux antiquing, the baroque style, the matching white organdy canopy, bedspread, pillow shams, and flounce. It is the biggest, best consolation prize for having to leave the Ericsons, right after my new pierced ears and the unruly Stanley.

Yvonne obviously has something important to say. “The Hennepin County Welfare people called,” she begins, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“What did they say?” I am aware that the Hennepin County Welfare people do not call for no reason. They’re like the IRS that way.

“Well,” she starts, “since I am not your biological mom, and your dad and I aren’t married, they called to inform me that you can’t just live here indefinitely.”

This is where I should be worried about having to move again, but for some reason I’m not.

“They did give you some options,” she says.

Options? I love options. “What are they?” I ask. I’ve never been given options beyond “vanilla” or “chocolate.” (Which is a cinch: vanilla.)

“Well”—Yvonne sounds very businesslike—“I can either marry your dad so I can formally adopt you, or you can go live at St. Joseph’s.”

St. Joseph’s is an orphanage. Oh, excuse me. It’s a “home for children.”

“You mean St. Joseph’s down past the freeway?” I’ve seen that building; it’s on Forty-sixth Street. It looks like a rather large apart
ment building that got knocked up by a Catholic school. Four floors of red brick filled with kids who, like me, have swiped their metaphorical foster-care subway card to the point that there are no more rides left.

Yvonne nods her head. “That’s the place.” She looks at me, but there’s no real question in her face. She’s not talking about when I would leave, should I decide to leave. Or what life would be like at the orphanage. Or suggesting that we go down there and take a tour.

That’s because there’s no doubt in either one of our minds what my choice will be. I mean, how could there be? Have you seen this bedroom set? It’s nicer than the most expensive one in the Sears catalog.

“Obviously, I am going to stay here,” I declare. I sound a little bit snide, even. Not because I’m trying to be rude, but because if this were a Saturday Night Live skit, it would be hilarious, over-the-top satire to think that I’d even consider trading this bed for a bunk down at St. Joseph’s.

Yvonne smiles. “Great,” she says. Neither of us stops to ask how Yvonne, who can hardly figure out how to sign a permission slip or make a brown-bag lunch, is going to pull off this whole marriage-adoption-etc. thing.

A couple of weekends later, Freddie and Yvonne hightail it out to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and elope.

And shortly after they return, my dad goes back to prison.

PAUL AND I MAKE A PLAN TO MEET
two days later, at his place. It’s good to wait a couple of days, because that gives me the time I need to do what I usually do in this situation—call about a thousand people to talk over the situation.

Historically, I bring my problems with love (if you can have a problem with a guy who’s not actually calling you) to my various girlfriends, looking for answers. Every friend has her own point of view—a point of view for which she has been handpicked—so every
phone call yields a different course of action. And they all sound so right! So right, I never choose. Sometimes I think I don’t really want to make decisions. I just want to think about what decision I
might
make if I
were
going to make one. I’d rather just handicap the race than actually run in it.

I’m a pundit. In my own love life.

But as I sit alone with the prospect of getting together again with Paul, I begin to hear a voice that I’ve never really heard before. Or maybe I’ve heard it, but I was at a NASCAR race and couldn’t quite make out what it was saying to me. Anyway, now that I’ve quieted down—maybe because of my age, or maybe because of the events with Paul thus far—I can hear this voice saying two things:

1. Seeing Paul is a decision I can never turn back from.
   
2. I know—with more certainty than I’ve ever known anything—that I
   have
   to do it.
   

I’M RIDING IN THE BACKSEAT
of my Aunt Do’s Mark V Lincoln Continental with my cousins Russell and Ray. We’re on our way to see my dad in his new prison, counting drug money to pass the time.

“Eight hundred ninety-seven, eight hundred ninety-eight, eight hundred ninety-nine,
nine hundred
!” I’m hollering, but no one minds. We all love money.

At age twelve, I have never held this much money in my hand before. It’s a big wad, about as thick as a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia—one of the less popular letters, like maybe “C.” For “cool,” because that’s what money is. Or maybe “F,” for “freedom.”

After getting out of Leavenworth for a spell so brief it could more accurately be called a vacation (he took me to see
A Chorus Line;
all I could think was
When will this audition part be over and the show start?
), my dad got caught doing something or other, I’m not quite sure what. I heard something about a jewelry store, but there were never any details. This time they sent him to a medium-security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, a town that brings to mind absolutely nothing. We should be there in a couple more hours.

Aunt Do (pronounced “due”) is barely five feet one inch tall, but
she deals drugs like a much larger person. DoDo, as we sometimes call her, is a cocaine dealer, who can’t lift her arm above her shoulder because of the time she got shot. Aunt Do is way, and I mean
way,
fiercer than my dad. He’s never been shot. I doubt he’s even carried that much of a gun. Do did some time in a Texas prison, and since she got out a couple of years ago, she’s been something of a presence in my life, buying me clothes, giving me money, and having me over to her house, where she smokes cigarettes and compulsively drinks Diet Pepsi.

Aunt Do also takes me to visit my dad, which is the only way I’m going to get there save hitchhiking, since Yvonne is finally
over
him.

That happened when Yvonne decided to sell the house, but my dad—who can even hustle from a prison cell—demanded $3,000 to sign the papers. (It’s my fault he can even make such a demand. Minnesota is a community-property state, and they only got married because of me.) Yvonne was livid. She had bought that house herself, it was paid for, and my dad had never contributed, as she said on so many occasions, “one thin dime to it.”

She held out. Furiously. Which worked, because we had just moved in with Yvonne’s boyfriend—a kindly, older lawyer who used crutches due to a case of childhood polio—and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Stephanie, who took the whole bicentennial craze way too far by painting her bedroom walls red, white, and blue.

But the lawyer only lasted three months. One day I came home from school and Yvonne was standing in the living room, which was unusual because part of having a boyfriend was that she had gone back to school to finish her bachelor’s degree, in Art History or something useless like that, so she was gone a lot of the time.

“Get your stuff, we’re leaving,” she said with the economy of a TV news writer. “Just take what you can fit into your suitcase.”

“Can I take Popcorn?” Popcorn is my Siamese cat. He replaced Stanley, who died of distemper not long after my dad got arrested.

“Of
course
,” she says, almost like the question was too stupid to ask. “Popcorn is part of the family.” I guess the lawyer isn’t, and neither is his daughter. We left them—and almost everything else—behind, including my beloved canopy bed.

Since then, we’ve been living in a twelve-by-fourteen-foot “apartment” in a rooming house with a communal bathroom (upstairs) in the third-worst neighborhood in town while we wait for my dad to drop his demands.

At school, I am a pigtailed pariah—a biracial late entry in an “integrated” junior high where the student body is made up of white kids from my old neighborhood and black kids from Aunt Do’s neighborhood. All but a couple of the white girls have defriended me, the black girls like to beat me up, and I get a lot of D’s. After school, I mostly shoplift at Sears and contemplate sneaking into the XXX theater at the end of the block. “Sucks” doesn’t go anywhere near far enough in describing my life.

As the year drags on with no money because we can’t sell the house, Yvonne’s somewhat iffy grip on emotional stability is getting even iffier. She moves us into the attic of the rooming house, a groovy loftlike space whose only drawback is that it has no running water, which means we have to do dishes in the bathtub of the communal bathroom. (That is, when the Moonie or the ballet dancer isn’t in there.)

My insomnia is getting worse, too—every night when I’m trying to fall asleep I am tortured by images from
Night of the Living Dead
and
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
, a double feature that Stephanie took me to see at the drive-in when we were still living with the lawyer.

But the real monster is Yvonne’s rage, which is consuming her more regularly than ever. You never know when it’s going to appear either. One minute you’re at Target buying toilet paper, and the next minute she’s accusing you of things your child-mind could never think of, things she thinks you’re doing to her, like
trying to make her “look bad” in front of the other people in the checkout line.

“How dare you do that to me?” she says as we’re walking out of the store.

I don’t even know what I did. “What did I do?” I didn’t do anything. But I know this tone of voice, and I know where this is going.

“Don’t you pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” she hisses. We’re still in the parking lot and there are people around, so she keeps her voice low. But it’s still very threatening.

I have two choices now. I can argue about whether or not I did what she thinks I did, or I can just stop talking. Sometimes it’s not worth trying to defend myself (it’s not possible anyway), so I stare out the window the whole way home from Target, watching the street signs pass in alphabetical order. I comfort myself with the thought that the alphabet is absolutely stable. It never changes order suddenly. It never thinks you did something to it.

“Just
who
do you think you are?” Yvonne seethes. It’s not really a question. It’s more of a rhetorical statement that suggests I’m not worth the air I’m breathing. She’s looking at me now, and I know that if I don’t look back at her things will get even worse. But I don’t want to look. Yvonne’s eyes are belt straps with big buckles that she uses to hit you in ways no one will ever see. To look at her is to bleed.

“I don’t think I’m anyone,” I say weakly. I just want to be okay. “I’m sorry,” I plead. “I didn’t mean to do anything.” I’m not sassy. I truly am sorry if I did something to make her look bad.

We ride the remaining quarter-mile in thick silence. Yvonne’s method of retaliating for my crimes is to cut me off so completely—for a minute, an hour, or a day—that even though technically I am being fed and watered, it is as if I am all alone in a very small, dark room with very little air. Like solitary confinement.

We get home, the night ruined. It’s hard to believe that just a half hour ago we were singing along to the Captain and Tenille in the music section. “You go think about what you’ve done,” Yvonne says.

I go to my room. Thank god for Popcorn. He always comes around when the belt-eyes part is over and the banished part begins. At first, I’m scared and sweaty and I want to scream, but I can’t, so instead, I plead silently with god,
Help me help me help me help me. How much longer, god, how much longer?

On my knees, doubled over on the floor, rocking back and forth, I think to myself,
There is no way I can endure this much longer,
but I can, and I must. It’s when I am left completely alone like this that the weight of my problem hits me: there is no one,
no one,
who can save me from her.

After god, I talk to Popcorn, in a whisper, because there are no doors in this attic—
You see what she’s doing to me, don’t you, Popcorn?
—and Popcorn blinks his blue Siamese eyes, cat Morse code for
Yes, I know, and I’m sorry, but hang in there, because this too, shall pass.

Then I indulge in my recurring fantasy: that this is all a big test, like an episode of
Candid Camera,
and any minute someone—the host—is going to burst through the door and tell me it is over and I passed. No one ever does, though. And I know they never will.

But it still makes me feel better to think that they might.

IT ISN’T LONG BEFORE
Yvonne tries to kick me out. The incident is ignited by the usual “fighting”—Yvonne indicts me for some supposed misdeed—but this time, things escalate to physical violence. Perhaps because I am in junior high and not just taking it the way I used to.

“I didn’t do anything,” I say back, with a hint of
you suck
in my voice.

My smart mouth is making Yvonne’s eyes narrow. “I never should have adopted you,” she sneers. “You ruined my life.”

“Oh really?
I’ve
ruined
your
life?” I don’t know where this is coming from. Puberty, probably. “Is that why you have no friends,
and
your mom
and
your sisters hardly speak to you?”

This is true. Yvonne is pretty hard-pressed to maintain a relationship. We do holidays with her family, but that’s it, and it feels obligatory. Still, I shouldn’t have said this. I know by now that saying the truth is the one unbreakable rule of living with Yvonne.

“You little
shit
.” She pushes me to the floor and kicks me. With her Earth shoes. She’s gotten physical with me before—a wooden spoon once, a slapped face here and there, some hair pulling, and once, a bar of
Tone
soap in my mouth—but never like this. Mercifully, she sticks to my midsection and it’s over quickly.

“Get up off that floor and call your Aunt Do. Tell her to come get you right now,” Yvonne spits. “You’re going to live with her.”

I’m scared. I don’t want to have to call Aunt Do, and I don’t want to leave really, and I’m crying, even though I’m also tapping into that place where none of this is even touching me.

“No!”
I shout, refusing to move toward the phone. “I’m not going to call her.”

Yvonne lifts her arm to me.
“You little bitch, you call her right now.”
When Yvonne calls you a little bitch and tells you to do something, you just kind of have to do it. So I pick up the phone and start dialing.

My uncle Jimmie, my dad’s brother and my September 12 birthday twin, picks up on the other end of the line. There are tears and snot in my voice. “My mom says I have to come live with Aunt Do,” I say through the snot.

“Tracy?” Uncle Jimmie can’t quite believe it’s me. I’ve never before called them in a crisis. “Tracy? Are you okay?”

“My mom says I have to leave.” I glance over at Yvonne. I never
ever
call her Mom, though I will refer to her as “my mom” to a third party. Never calling Yvonne Mom is how I preserve my sanity and remind myself,
At least she’s not my mom.
I hold out on her like a POW, which makes sense since she’s kind of like the Vietcong.

Uncle Jimmie says he’ll be right over.

Twenty minutes later, he shows up on our doorstep. Like the
badly written domestic-violence scene that this is shaping up to be, Yvonne is light and matter-of-fact. And she plays down any trouble. “Oh, everything’s okay,” she says, like it was just a big misunderstanding. “I think maybe Tracy was overreacting a little bit. Huh, dear?” She’s nodding at me to let me know that I’m supposed to nod at Uncle Jimmie.

“Right,” I say to Uncle Jimmie. I nod. I know that “telling on” Yvonne is a bell that can never be unrung, and anyway, it’s not my nature to make such a big decision in the heat of the moment. I’m more cautious, more calculated than that. Even at twelve. And then there’s the fact that I don’t think I want to live with Aunt Do. She’s been shot! At least Yvonne is a known quantity.

So I send Uncle Jimmie home.

Yvonne takes a deep breath in victory. It’s not really her win, though. It just comes down to one simple fact: I’d rather manage the devil I know than the devil with a gun and a Diet Pepsi.

THERE ARE STRANGE COINCIDENCES
around Paul from the very beginning that give me the sense that the whole thing is ordained. Meant to be. And even though I know that sounds like something a teenage girl would say, I mean it. There are
signs.

Even before our first meeting, I am dishing with my dear friend (also, crazily, named Tracy Renee) about Paul. “What does he look like?” she wants to know.

“He’s supercute,” I gush. “He has sandy-colored hair, blue eyes, a wide smile. He looks like Beck.” I remember I have a picture of him on my computer. “Here, let me show you.” I bring up the photo.

Tracy looks at him. Her huge green eyes grow even more huge (and more green) than they already are. “No. Way,” she says ominously.

“What?!” I’ve never heard her use that particular tone of voice before. I’d think she slept with him, but he’s just not her type.

“That guy lives in my building!”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“No. I’m not.”

I know, of course, that Tracy lives in a loft downtown. And I know, of course, that Paul lives in a loft downtown. But it never occurred to me that they lived in
the same loft downtown
! Downtown is big. There are thousands of lofts downtown. I’ve never really believed in coincidences, but this is a lot to take in, even for me.

So you mean to tell me that the guy I fell in love with at first sight from a picture online lives in the very same building
—technically, it will turn out to be a different building in the same complex, but still—
as one of my closest girlfriends?

I just can’t argue with that.

I’M SICK OF THIS.
It only takes me two seconds inside the prison to realize it. (Or is it remember?) I’m sick of the guards, the guns, and the electronic doors. I’m sick of the waiting room, the vending machines, and my dad’s perfectly shined shoes. I’m sick of the drive. I’m sick of the crappy hotels with the mossy pools. I’m sick of all of it.