by Lisa Taddeo
MY MOTHER DIDN’T KNOW HOW to use the paltry sound system in the Pocono house—she barely knew how to drive—the only thing she understood was the Vanity Fair circus animals record player that belonged to me, with its fat orange needle in its own little suitcase. And that was the sound I woke up to that night—“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by the Tokens, turned up as loud as the player could go.
I was waking up all the time back then. Usually between three and four in the morning. I’d look at the clock at my bedside and panic, knowing the earliest I could crawl into bed beside my mother was six. I would have two or more hours of waiting, eyes on the ceiling, haunted by shadows against the window.
But this time I heard the player, which was kept in the spare room between my parents’ bedroom and mine. I worried it was my mistake somehow, that I’d left it on, and that one or both of them would yell at me for ruining their sleep. My mother, especially, acted like her sleep was something that could be lost, never to be found again.
I rose and walked to the spare bedroom. The door was open and the record was spinning on its axis. Now I felt with a profound and queasy certainty that my mother knew where I’d gone that day, that she’d seen me in my damp bikini in the cold house of the man who licked me all over.
In any case I felt sure that she was playing my music to lure me out, to wrest the truth from me. She was capable of such a ruse. I thought she could do anything. She was a witch. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. Her breasts were the color of milk, and cold. The rest of her was warm, but her breasts felt refrigerated. I used to love to touch her nipples; several years after I’d stopped suckling from them, I used to reach my small hands down her low-cut blouses, under the tight cheap skin of her bra, and try to hold her nipple between my fingers.
I turned the player off. All that remained was the whirring of the fan in my parents’ bedroom. The door was closed, which was unusual. I figured they could be having sex. I wondered if part of sex was licking someone all over, as the man—Wilt—had done to me. It bothered me to think of what they might be doing behind the door. I also thought it was possible they were discussing where I’d been in the afternoon. I wouldn’t have expected police to be involved, but I did think they were discussing whether or not to send me away to a boarding school. My mother often threatened this when I was being bad. She told me they would ship me off with a small suitcase, to a place up in the mountains, Castelrotto, where you had to drink goat’s milk every morning and suck down raw egg yolks. Once she went so far as to drive me to the train station with my little She-Ra luggage packed haphazardly with shirts and socks and my favorite doll, Marco. I was seven or eight then and didn’t know you couldn’t get to Italy by train. I shivered and sobbed and began to hyperventilate as my mother strode up to the ticket seller. She took out her huge burgundy wallet and I thought I was going to die. I began to scream. Even though my father was at work and would have had no idea of this cruelty, I screamed DADDY! so loud that nearly everyone in the vast hall turned to look. One of my mother’s fears—the disapproval of Americans. She came away from the counter, brought my chin up close with her sharp nails, and hissed, You ere me, if you ever touch my jewelry again without asking, I vill come straight ere with you. I von’t tell your father and he will think you ran away. You ere me!
I don’t think I did anything wrong for the next three years. Nothing of note until that day when I got into the man’s car. And now I was expecting the biggest punishment of all. I couldn’t wait any longer. I rapped the door lightly. Nothing. I knocked again, this time louder. Still nothing. So I turned the knob ever so gently and pushed open the door.
I can’t describe what I saw without going through it all over. I don’t mind as much now. It used to be that even thinking about opening the door, cheap cedar-stained mahogany, would send me retching into the nearest toilet.
It was him, my beloved father, on the bed. The sheets were a tweedy brown, so the blood was merely a dark stain. My mother’s reading light was on and illuminated the room just enough. Later I would learn that there were slashes in other places, but I only saw the knife in his throat. I knew exactly which knife it was. She used it on bread and meat. In wealthy houses in the future, I’d learn there were knives for bread and knives for meat and knives for fruit. All different kinds of knives. My mother would have considered that spoiled. She used one knife for everything, her good knife. She had one good knife in each house, one in New Jersey and one in the Poconos. It had a wooden handle and its blade was smooth and thick. My father’s beautiful blue eyes were open, staring.
Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!
I used to call his name every night. There was a tradition, a routine. I waited near the window in the formal living room we never used, with the antique furniture and the fireplace maned in stucco. I watched through the drapes for his headlights. If they were nine minutes past six, I thought for sure my life would be over. At the same time, I couldn’t conceive of the worst thing in the world—to lose my father. I’d make my way to the garage and begin clapping and calling his name, high-pitched, one clap for Da, one for Dee. Then he would get out of the car with his briefcase and the smell of hospitals and his eyes would flash at me and he would smile the happiest, kindest smile. He would take me into his arms, no matter what he was already carrying.
What I saw then was impossible. But that’s what happened that night. I learned that the impossible was possible. In a way, there can be nothing more liberating.
I ran to the bed and tried to lift his body. Of course he was too heavy. The knife was in very deep. Do you believe that I pulled it out? I would have done anything for him. I’ll never forget that feeling. I believe he came alive for a second when the knife came out. His blood was all over my Rainbow Brite pajamas. I thought my mother would be angry about the mess on me, and that was the first time I thought of her. So I screamed for her. Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!
The bathroom door was open and I didn’t want to leave my father but I did. I ran with the knife in my hand to the bathroom and there was my mother, in the bathtub, with her wrists slit, but she wasn’t dead. She was only almost dead. Her eyes blinked, her mouth moved. And I don’t know, I think about this every day, never less than once a day, though sometimes up to a hundred times a day, I think, If I had called for help right away, she might have been saved. But I didn’t call right away. It wasn’t on purpose. I just didn’t think of it yet. My mother was still alive and she was my authority, she was my god. Her nipples and her hair floated above the line of the rosy water. She didn’t like to get her hair wet. She only washed it every three days or so. She never went into a pool above her shoulders. The ocean, the lake, forget it.
I knelt beside her face, which was blooming with death, barely seeing, but there was something tender in her eyes, holy Jesus, it made me weep in some sort of gratitude. The weeping was coming from so many places that I can’t tell how much of it was gratitude, but yes, I think some of it was. I shrank down below the lip of the tub and took one of her soggy, queenly hands and placed it on the top of my head. And then I rose my head up into the basket of her hand so that it felt like she was grasping me, loving me back; in fact, I’m sure that she was. And I wept and said, Oh, Mommy, oh, Mommy, oh, Mommy, oh, Mommy, until eventually she was gone.
* * *
IT WASN’T UNTIL AN HOUR after I found them that I dialed 911 from the cream phone on my mother’s nightstand. I waited so long, I think, because I could still sense their life forces in the air. As long as I could feel them, I didn’t want to call up the external world. My parents and I had been a unit, a capsule; inviting the outside in was forbidden. That was for families who didn’t know where their children were after ten p.m. It wasn’t until after their deaths that I saw how foolish I was. I had thought I was the one most likely to breach the security of our capsule when in fact the walls were permeable; for years my parents had been waltzing in and out recklessly.
The officers who came thought I did it. For a moment, at least. I w
as carrying the knife when they showed up. It made me feel closer to my father. They asked me who my next of kin was, who they should call. The sun was rising. Daylight made it real. I didn’t have Gosia’s number memorized. I didn’t know any numbers except my house and my father’s office. The only number I had written down was Wilt’s, inside Tropic of Cancer, so I went and got it because I was ashamed not to have anybody else. I read it aloud to the officer who was not dealing with the bodies. It was six a.m. by that time and I could hear a man’s sleepy voice on the other end of the line and the officer introduced himself as Bushkill police and the man said they had the wrong number. I told them I thought it was my uncle, but I guessed it was the wrong number.
Eventually they got ahold of Gosia. She arrived, perfumed and puffy, by ten a.m. That was when it hit me, how alone I was. Gosia, of course, would become my savior, but that morning there was just a black Mercedes, glinting and foreign in our gravel drive. A tall half-stranger emerged, wearing diamonds, face still rouged from the night before. She smelled like sour flowers. My brown wool life was all gone.
* * *
SHE TOLD ME EVERYTHING RIGHT away. She took me out of the house and to the Caesars Pocono Resort. Now it’s renamed something seamier, Palace Stream or Lovers’ Delight, but it was always one of those honeymoon fuck forts with the champagne glass bathtubs and the fruit salad breakfasts. I’ve always wondered who is turned on by that, who wants to fuck in heart-shaped tubs. Men with blond beards, women who love baby’s breath in their bouquets of red roses.
Gosia took me there because it was the first place she saw on the road that was open. My lips were blue and she worried I was dying of shock. The frizzy-haired woman at the front desk said, It’s couples only. Gosia pulled what I imagined was an impressive credit card from her wallet and slapped it on the counter. We walked into a purple dining room with gold tables and casino carpets. She ordered herself a tea and me a coffee. She didn’t try to make me eat. She began to tell me everything. It seemed she knew more than anyone in the world.
The night before, when my father had left to see his raped mother, there had been someone else to see. The woman he’d been fucking. The woman had called his doctor’s answering service all weekend long. She had him paged several times, up in the mountains. He’d been lamentably ignoring her for days and then his mother was raped. He drove to New Jersey, examined his mother, bandaged and consoled her. Gosia was there with my uncle. She saw the whole thing. My father said he’d be back. Everyone thought he was going to go after the rapist. Just be a crazy man in the streets. But he went to his lover’s apartment. An Italian woman living above the restaurant for which she cooked. She was more than the woman he’d been fucking. Gosia told me he loved her. I remember she said this and I felt she was saying it to try to hurt me, to put me in my place. As a second wife herself, she wanted the first wives and first daughters to know they were replaceable. It wasn’t until much later that I realized she had a more noble motive.
This other woman was a beauty, even more beautiful than your mother. Black hair, blue eyes, blood-red lips, metronome breasts. And much younger. He drove to her apartment in the middle of the night. This young beauty had something to tell him. She was pregnant. She said her child would not be a bastard, living above an oven. She commanded him to tell my mother, to tell her that he loved her, that this was going to be his child, too.
She had some kind of a hold over him, Gosia said to me in that purple room. I think how it has affected me that the two most important women of my life were heavily accented. Their voices like church bells resounding in my head.
Your father loved women, he loved them too much.
My father came home that next morning, having not slept at all. I wondered, even that day, I wondered if he had sex with his pregnant lover. With her oils on him, he returned to our mountain home and drove me to the Top of the World Pool, where I met Wilt and got assaulted. That this was not the darkest part of my childhood, can you imagine?
While I was at the pool, my father told my mother about the lover, and of course, she’d already suspected he was fucking someone. Now he told her that not only were her worst fears realized but that there was something else she hadn’t even thought to fear. His lover was pregnant, and he would not turn his back on this child.
Gosia told me he was penitent, as much as a man who’d made a grievous mistake could be.
But your mother was dragon, Gosia said. Dragons cannot stand by.
She told me that when my father went to pick me up from the pool, my mother called her. She told Gosia everything. Gosia advised her to leave. To pack me up and return to Italy.
Every day I thought about that. What if my mother and I had been the ones to go back to Italy? What if my mother had chosen me the way Alice’s mother chose her.
I can count on you, she said to Gosia, if anything happens. She will be yours.
Gosia said yes. Of course. Will be my baby. And here Gosia cried to me. She took my hands across the gold table and crushed them. I didn’t believe she was going to do it. Some part of me, yes. I almost drove to here. And then I did not.
My father did not become the bad guy for me. Not yet. That day I hated my mother for killing my father, but also for all the reasons you cannot say. Part of my child brain hated her because she wasn’t young enough or even beautiful enough. Because she wasn’t strong enough. Or because she was too strong. Because she was so complex where my father was not. I hated my mother, in short, for being a woman.
33
IN THE BED BESIDE ME Leonard’s penis had grown rigid alongside my thigh. He was pressing it against me.
—Mmmmm, he said. Over and over. Mmmmm.
I was still hearing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” in my ears. I thought of my father making a child with someone. The selfishness, especially, to come inside another woman. All my life, all the men taking what they wanted and leaving when it was over. Big Sky. The slug in Marfa, my first bad man from the Top of the World. The man who raped my grandmother. What my father did to my mother. What Leonard did to Lenore. What Vic did to his wife and their son and his daughter. What my father did to me. All the men from all the clubs and airplanes and dockside restaurants. All the fingers inside the waistbands of our underwear.
I heard the door open downstairs.
—Go away! I hissed.
—Please, Eleanor called. She sounded like me, trying to get into my mother’s bed.
—Please go away. I need to be alone!
The door closed.
—Who was that? Leonard whispered, as though we were teenagers covertly fucking.
—A woman, a friend. Nobody.
—You’re so wet, Leonard said as he tried to push himself into me. Those words, coming out of an old man’s mouth.
Were women blameless? I didn’t care in that moment. I thought of my son—his thin wet bones, the incorruptible gift of him. I felt close to my mother then, to feel her rage in me. I turned to face the old man, swinging one of my legs over his to pin him. I wrapped my hands around his chicken-skin throat. I looked at the magnificent watch around his gaunt wrist. I would come to find out it was worth an inconceivable amount of money. More than Lenny had alluded to, perhaps even more than he was aware. I could feel Eleanor’s presence outside the door. I would have invited anyone inside to watch. I knew what I was doing was fine and I knew I could legitimize it, even, to God.
As Lenny was dying, he held my face in his hands. I thought he was attempting to strangle me back. He was about to speak and I spat in his eye to make him stop. I would not let him have any more last words. I would never again be the basin in which a wretched man would bob about.
Smiling, I closed my eyes and transferred the force of my whole body and history into my hands. Killing a man felt more glorious than I could ever have imagined.
34
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I began to pack up what little I’d unpacked. I told Eleanor I was going to move out and that I didn’t know where I
would go. She was terrified. I knew the feeling. She sat and watched me as I moved around the place, dropping loose eyeliners into big boxes.
I unblocked her mother’s phone number and multiple texts came through, just like that. It was plain that the woman had never stopped, not at all.
Sometimes there were two or so an hour. Half of them asked after her daughter.
Please tell me please is she with you
I showed those to Eleanor. I asked her to please let me tell her mother that she was all right.
The other half I would never show her.
How many times did you fuck my husband did he eat your cunt did he give you orgasms I have never had an orgasm in my life thats why he went to you. men need to know they please. tell me how he came did he come inside u TELL ME
I believe she thought that her daughter killed me. So that her messages were going into the ether. It must have assuaged her pain. That was the least we could do, Eleanor and I. Not responding was the least we could do.
The next day, one came that made me forcibly send Eleanor home in that moment. I was throwing out all my cheap dishware. I passed the full-length mirror and caught sight of myself. I was wearing my mother’s slip dress for what would be the last time. I’d dyed it red with Rit liquid dye in the shower. The shower would be stained forever. Now the color was uniform from top to bottom. I looked like a young girl in the mirror. Perhaps it was a trick of the light. My eyes shone with the absurdity of it all. I felt peace, you see, because I’d embraced the madness. And yet I don’t believe it was madness. I use the word as shorthand. The world will call it madness. You can’t convince normal people otherwise. There’s a simple small line at the mouth of hell. It’s not a big deal when you get there. It’s just another step is all. If you ever cross it, as I did, you will see that black things become the most honest ones of all.
