by Rufi Thorpe
I knew that sometimes people found themselves in a moment. They found themselves pressed up against themselves inside of a claustrophobic moment. And you couldn’t see how it really was from the outside. You could talk all day until you were blue in the face about what Donna Morse should have done to not get murdered, or about what my mother should have done to get us out of there. But sometimes when you are in a moment, it’s so close to your face, reality, it’s pressed up so close to you, that you just flinch, you react, and then your fate is decided, and all you have done was what you couldn’t help doing, and yet your fate is decided. You’ve done something that can’t be taken back. You’ve kissed Mr. Brandon, or inserted the fruit knife into the pectoral muscle, or suddenly woken up on top of a girl whose nose was under her left eye. And there was something about me, but I always seemed to be right next to the kind of people who wound up making such decisions. I always seemed to be right there, loving the wrong person, betting on the wrong dark horse.
I have always loved buses. They carry their own unique enchantment called forth by the pneumatic squeak and whoosh of their doors and the drone of their massive engines as they lumber about the city carrying individuals who are daydreaming, all together, each pretending to be alone. On the bus home from Cedars-Sinai, as I was thinking about Bunny and about violence, I accidentally stumbled into a kind of reverie about my mother. I had not intended, exactly, to think about her, and then suddenly I was plunged into the deepest, darkest part of the water.
I suppose it had been triggered by a selfie my sister, Gabby, had posted. I monitored her Instagram and Facebook accounts much more often than I spoke to her. There was some kind of awkwardness between us, some kind of bad blood that I couldn’t seem to find the source of. When we met up, I would ask her questions about her life or about school and she would roll her eyes at me. The most I knew about her was what our mother told me. She would always give a little recap at the start of our Denny’s dinners. “Well, Gabby got a B in pre-algebra,” or, “Gabby has become obsessed with Lil Wayne and I think I’m about to lose my mind.” My senior year of high school, Gabby was in eighth grade. Is there a darker night of the soul than eighth grade? In the last year or so she had suddenly veered from potentially plump, otherwise known as “Wisconsin Skinny,” to damn-is-that-girl-dying skinny. Her thigh gap was a handbreadth. Her skeleton was iconic. In the particular selfie I was obsessing over, she and my mother were both dressed in weirdly slutty outfits, black bras under white wifebeaters, ripped denim shorts, too much eyeliner, and they were staring at the camera unsmiling and serious as court reporters. It was captioned “Cat got your tongue?”
I should have seen it coming. That my mom and sister would become friends, subtly excluding me the way that my mother and I had always subtly excluded Gabby. It was the age difference really. I had always been the old one, the reasonable one, the one who could be talked to, my mother’s confidant. I had been her bestie. And I had been relieved when she went to prison and this intimacy had ended, so I was unprepared for the flash of intense jealousy that sliced through me when I saw this picture of my mother and sister together. And all sorts of things came flooding back.
I had sat in the courtroom during my mother’s trial, which took two days. There was something about the way the prosecutor spoke to her that alarmed me. He spoke quickly, as though he were trying to trick her or make her look stupid by asking him to repeat himself. He was a white man with brown hair and a brown beard and lips that were very pink and a vein in his forehead that was tremulously violet. In every way he looked at my mother, spoke to my mother, referred to my mother, there was a careful detachment that bespoke visceral disgust. Of course, at ten years old, I had no words for what I was witnessing. But what I knew was that to this man, there were one hundred other things my mother could have done besides stab my father. Why had she been so stupid as to not think of them? It would have been so easy not to stab my father, this man seemed to suggest, that for my mother to have done so indicated some kind of violent fixation on her part. Why hadn’t she called the police, for instance? Why hadn’t she gotten the children into the car and left, even if it was to drive around the block until she could think of what to do? Why hadn’t she locked herself in the bathroom? Why hadn’t she left my father years ago, for that matter?
I was a child, and I had thought that the law would be concerned with doling out moral judgments. Honestly, I had thought we would be deciding whether it was my mother or my father’s fault that all this had happened, and in my estimation, it was mostly my father’s fault, and the idea that my mother would be held accountable for it—as though she wanted to stab him, as though she had put it on her to-do list: maybe stab Aaron for fun on Saturday!—was so absurd to me it bordered on surreal. The entire court scene was, to my eleven-year-old eyes, the Mad Hatter’s tea party. I had no idea they were trying merely to ascertain: Had my mother stabbed my father? Yes, of course she had! But didn’t it matter why she had done it? Wasn’t there any pity for the fact that she had been reduced to this? Why hadn’t she left him months ago? Because she fucking loved him and she loved us and she wanted her family to be okay, and that meant refusing to understand that her family was not going to be okay. Had they never lived life?
I wonder now why my mother didn’t plead guilty and cop some sort of deal. Did they not offer her a deal? Did her lawyer think he could plead self-defense? Didn’t her lawyer know that the only thing harder to win than a rape case is a woman defending herself in a domestic violence dispute?
“And where were your husband’s hands during this exchange?”
“On my throat. He was choking me.”
“With both hands?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Did you believe he would kill you?”
“I feared for my life,” my mother had said. I can see now that they coached her to say that. I had not been in the room when this altercation occurred. I had been in my bedroom with Gabby watching American Idol on an old laptop, the screen of which was crusted so that Ryan Seacrest seemed to have a large mole on his face. But I did not doubt my mother. My father often strangled her, although he did not try to crush her windpipe, but simply cut off the blood flow through her carotids until she passed out, and then he would lay her on the floor, where she would splutter, almost instantly, back to life, just as mad as before, and he would say, “Jesus Christ,” like she was just too much for him and why couldn’t she just stay passed out, just for a minute, just for once. Her relentless consciousness was galling.
“Had he ever strangled you before?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes,” she said, sure that this was the right answer. He had been bad, he had been bad two times, he had been bad many times! God, how many times had he strangled her!
“And the times that he strangled you before, had you ever feared for your life?”
“Yes,” my mother said.
“And yet, fearing for your life, you would not call the police or separate from your husband?”
“Well, I’m sure that I did, but—”
“What about this time made you fear for your life so intensely that you picked up that knife?” the prosecutor went on.
But it had already happened. I could see it on my mother’s face, she had lost the thread of her righteousness. She had never believed he would kill her. Not in the past, not in that moment. He would never have let her die. If anything, my father would have killed my mother by accident. But her body did not know he wouldn’t have killed her. Her body was fighting for air and trying to get him to stop, and her body picked up a knife. My poor mother did not have the vocabulary or wherewithal or ability to try to make such a distinction in that courtroom. It was all happening too fast. She was too intimidated by the prosecutor and his glossy brown beard and his purple forehead vein. I still remember he applied cherry ChapStick. The ChapStick brand one. He kept one in his suit pocket and he
applied it at least once an hour. I thought it was so weird. I had never seen a man wear ChapStick before, even though I understood it was normal. I had just never seen it before, and it stirred something in me. It seemed almost lewd, this man constantly bringing attention to his rosy lips.
In the end, my mother did not know why she had stabbed my father. It was her body that had stabbed him, but not her. Even in that courtroom, she still loved him. And after her failure to be able to adequately explain this to anyone, she became withdrawn. She guessed too soon that the trial was already over, and maybe part of why she lost is that she stopped fighting. Her eyes glazed over. She didn’t listen to the testimony. She looked bored, but also ashamed. And she was ashamed. Because she knew what the lawyers and the judge and the police and probably the jury thought she was, and she knew, too, that their thinking she was trash would make her trash. Her future didn’t matter to anyone. Her love for her children was as theoretical and easy to discard as a bitch’s love for her pups. Everyone but her knew what was best. And how could she argue? She loved a man who was bad and bad to her, and that was shameful, shameful the way loving food or drink that is bad for you is shameful. And so she let them. She let the trial happen. She let us move into foster care and then into Aunt Deedee’s house. She let everything happen around her, like events were so many petals falling from a bouquet of flowers left too long in a vase.
The thing Bunny said after she met my mother was: “Wow, I had no idea she would be so much like you.” We looked alike. We talked alike. We had the same blend of morbid and dorky in our jokes. Both of our mouths jutted with slight, uncorrected under bites. We had a joke when she kissed me good night, we would call them “piranha kisses” because of the shape of our mouths. We shared a flair for the dramatic in our language and our looks, pale skin, dark hair. She could get angrier at me than at my sister or even my father because she expected true friendship from me. I was her companion, her comrade.
If my father was too drunk, we would catch each other’s eye. If my sister was being a glutton or a brute, we would tease her together, mercilessly ganging up on her until she cried. Gabby was a brash, fat, and happy baby, uncomplicated and selfish. We both envied her, loved her, coddled her, and hated her. Why couldn’t we be more like her? we wondered. Why couldn’t we be like my father, for that matter, drunk and demanding and happy and charming? Why were we always watching, afraid to speak in the moment, thinking up clever replies days later? Why did we need, so badly, to paint our stubby nails with black nail polish? Why were we so drawn to books and movies about witches? Why were we destined to be neurotic prey, trembling rabbits clamped between the hot jaws of larger, better, more vital animals?
For me, watching my mother give up during her trial and fall into the depression that consumed her throughout her prison sentence was a betrayal of such epic proportions that it became one of the great before-and-afters of my life. I learned something deep about myself, about her, about love, and it was a lesson that could not be unlearned. I remember being a kid and thinking it was kind of fun when someone broke their arm, jealous even that they got to wear a cast and have everyone sign it. And then I remember being with my mom after my dad broke my little sister’s arm, which of course we hid completely (the official story was that she fell jumping off a swing), and standing next to my mom, fingering the sleeve of her sweater as the doctor explained the odds of the fracture healing well, and understanding that Gabby’s arm would never be the same, never be as good as it was before. It was that kind of lesson, the lesson I learned during my mother’s trial. Maybe it would have been easier for me if she and I had not been so much alike.
But we were.
Now I think I have assembled something, fragile and piecemeal as it is, that might be called understanding, but when I was seventeen to even think of my mother was to enter a world of memories I could get lost in for hours, and even if I set out to remember or understand just one thing, for instance, I was always trying in those days to conclude whether my mother was a good person or a bad person, I would find myself almost drowning in remembered details: how trash collected in her purse, and how she would have to empty it every few months, the dense mat of receipts and gum wrappers that settled in the bottom, how her face looked as she was listening on the phone, the way her mouth was always slightly open to accommodate her underbite, giving her a look of expectant excitement, her short, bestial-looking thumbnails, her love of overpoweringly sweet perfumes. She was intensely dyslexic and she couldn’t spell anything, would get lost spelling the word “Wednesday,” but she was also a kind of genius. She had an extraordinary memory, though her encyclopedic knowledge was limited to music trivia and pop culture. She knew every nuance of Britney Spears’s life, for instance, and talked about Britney as though she were, if not a close friend, then perhaps a saint, someone whose story could be consulted for guidance as one moved through one’s own life.
And so it came to be that I missed my stop, still staring at the picture of my mother and Gabby (“Cat got your tongue?” Jesus!), and rode on the bus all the way down to Manhattan Beach and then had to wait for another bus to take me back to North Shore, and by the time I got home to Aunt Deedee’s house, I was exhausted and disoriented and so sad it felt like my very being was saturated with it and had begun leaking, causing dark stains on the air around me. Aunt Deedee and Jason were in the living room, and when I opened the door they looked up in unison. There was a plastic tray of Oreos on the coffee table. The TV was on, some kind of sports game show with an obstacle course, but it didn’t seem they’d been watching it. I thought Aunt Deedee was going to be mad at me for being out so late, but instead she looked sad and worried. Oh, I thought. It’s going to be bad.
“Hey, homo,” Jason said.
“Jason!” Aunt Deedee said. He was not going about it in the way she had thought they would. She needed, in order to be able to do this to me, for it to be clean, dressed up as decent.
“What?” Jason said, standing up and then sitting down again. “He’s the one living some secret life!” He took off his hat and began curling the bill in his hands, squeezing and squeezing it, like it was a cow’s udder.
“Come here and sit down,” my aunt said, tucking the escaped wisps of her ponytail behind her ears. She looked very tired and her ponytail was sad and straggly. She was wearing a peach-colored sweatshirt with a large white bleach stain on the shoulder in the shape of a kidney. I had not really thought she would kick me out. It felt like the molecules of my body were dissolving like sugar in a glass of water, nothing was stable, everything was melting. I just had not thought she would really, really do it. But I looked in her face, and I thought: She’s going to do it. She’s already reassured Jason that she will do it, and now she has to carry through, and she’s realizing it is going to be harder than she thought, but she’ll do it. I sat down on the ottoman of the chair by her, trying to take up as little space as possible, trying even to float slightly above the ottoman.
“Michael,” my aunt said, and she said my name with so much love and kindness that I couldn’t stand it. “Jason has heard some really disturbing things from some of the boys on his water polo team, and we were hoping to talk to you.”
I looked at the pink carpet. Pink as the inside of a conch shell. I had always been so embarrassed of the carpet in our house, but what was embarrassing about it? Why shouldn’t carpet be pink?
“You’re moving out,” Jason said.
“Jason!” Aunt Deedee snapped at him.
“What? He is. Better to just put it out there. I’m not fucking sharing a room with him!”
“And I respect that choice,” Aunt Deedee said, “but—”
“How much time do I have?” I asked.
“Back up—hold on, both of you, this is not what I wanted. Just back up, we need to back up a few paces, and start over.”
“Mom,” Jason said, furious now, “I’m sorry, I jus
t don’t want to see two guys kissing in my bedroom. Okay?”
Aunt Deedee got angrier at this than I had ever seen her, and the words seemed to leap right out of her throat. “Oh, Jason, grow a pair! He’s not kissing people in your bedroom, and even if he were, Michael’s had to watch straight couples kiss in every movie ever made, so I think you could probably handle seeing two men kiss each other without the hysterics.” She smoothed the light denim of her jeans on the tops of her thighs, as though that were that, and she appeared to be thinking about something.
“Part of what concerns me about what Ann Marie said, and god, I hope she’s okay, is that she had seen you in a sexual position with a man who was much, much older than you, and—”
“A sexual position?” I said.
“She said they were kissing, Mom,” Jason said, irritated. He was in no way on my side, but even he thought calling kissing a “sexual position” was a little unfair.
“All right, kissing. Can I just ask, how did you meet this man?”
I was not sure what the right answer was. If I said in real life, wouldn’t that insinuate an even more advanced and evolved secret life? What if she thought I was part of secret societies where we had orgies with antlers strapped to our heads and made burnt offerings to the moon? And yet, I dreaded even uttering the word “Grindr”; it seemed so cheap and childishly obscene. “Online,” I said.
“Meeting people on the internet, Michael—it’s just not safe! And you don’t know—older men, they will expect things from you, and they might take advantage of you, and—”
“I’m not a virgin,” I said. “If that’s what you’re talking about.”
