No Such Thing as Perfect

by Daltry, Sarah

  I nodded, but it was hard not to cry. He was right, sure, but he didn’t need to call it stupid.

  We ended up going to a movie. I couldn’t focus on it. It was something about a spy and a missing bomb or something. Derek had picked it. It didn’t matter. I sat in the dark theatre and for two hours, I merely tried to keep in the tears.

  Since I’d slept with him, we were a couple, but I’d spent more nights crying and lonely than I had in the years before. Maybe it was just the disappointment of expectation, waiting for him to call only for him to send me a text after 11 telling me he was too busy to chat and he’d call the next day.

  He sat in the movie, shoving popcorn into his mouth and ignoring me completely unless he needed me to hand him the soda, and never thought about what he’d said. He said it, we didn’t discuss it, and it had passed. I knew that if I brought it up, he would tell me to stop being difficult, that it wasn’t a big deal, that I needed to stop holding a grudge. He always said things like that when he was careless with his words. And they were only words after all.

  “Are you parents home?” Derek asked after the movie was over. I think the spy had found the bomb. I knew he’d met some girl spy and they’d had a lot of sex, and then someone drove a car off a bridge, but I didn’t remember the bomb.

  I looked at my watch. It was only 2:30 and they wouldn’t be home until at least six. I shook my head. “Not for a while.”

  “What about Jon? He had said he was doing something today?”

  “No, there’s no one home.”

  He smiled and kissed the top of my head. “So I’m coming over?”

  Although he asked it like a question, I knew that it was a decree. “I guess.”

  “What’s wrong?” He was irritated and he couldn’t hide it. He crushed the cup of soda in his hand and crumbled the popcorn bag. I followed him as he stomped heavily down the cinema stairs into the hallway. When we got to the car, he turned around and looked at me finally. I had to run to catch up.

  “Why do you always make things complicated?” he asked. “You always make a big deal out of dumb things like a campsite and then the whole day is ruined. Why can’t you just be fun? I want a fun girlfriend.”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to. You can come over.” I wanted to tell him that sometimes I wanted more from our relationship. Sometimes I thought a boyfriend would talk to you, would express interest in you as a person. But I knew it was because of me. I wasn’t pretty enough. I wasn’t fun. I didn’t know how to be a girlfriend, because I tried so hard and although he said he loved me, he didn’t understand why the campsite mattered to me. That had to be my fault.

  He opened my car door and when we were inside, he kissed me and ran his hands over my hair, before letting them slide down my body. He reached one between my legs, not doing more than tapping his fingers against my thigh, but he groaned when he did, his kiss becoming more aggressive until I was pushed against the car window and trying not to suffocate.

  “God, Lily. Are you mad because of how you make me feel?”

  “No, I’m not mad.”

  “You should be flattered. I can’t control how attracted to you I am, because you’re just so sexy. Don’t be upset that I love you so much it’s all I think about. I can’t stop thinking about how much I love what we do.”

  “I love you, too,” I whispered.

  “Good. Let’s get going. I need some quality alone time with you badly.”

  My mom still decorated my room and she hadn’t seemed to acknowledge that I was a high school senior and technically an adult. It’s bad enough to lose your virginity when your family is nearby, or for your relationship to exist mainly in a backseat, but there is something damning about a grown man heaving and thrusting on top of you while you try to ignore the fact that your teddy bear is still under your ass and if he doesn’t slow down, he’s going to knock the cartoon cat pictures right down onto his sweaty, red face.

  Derek grunted and made noises and I pressed my hand against the singing Calico above to stop it from falling.

  “You’re so sexy,” he said again when he finished.

  He’d never told me I was beautiful or smart or kind. Just sexy. Always sexy. I didn’t feel sexy. I felt sad and every time I felt sadder, but I didn’t want to feel that way. I loved him. Sex with a boy you love shouldn’t make you empty and sad.

  25.

  Kristen went out with Lyle, so when Jack comes to get me on Saturday morning, I’m rereading Sense and Sensibility. I only have a few more days to get things down for my paper and I’m trying to make sense of Marianne, but her passions and values are so conflicted with everything I know. When Jack knocks loudly, I answer as soon as I hear it, yet he’s already halfway back down the hall when I open the door.

  “Jack?” I call after him.

  He turns, shoving his cell phone in his pocket. “This was a bad idea,” he says. “I wanted to tell you, to explain, but I can’t. I can’t bear it.”

  “No. I said I wanted to go. I want to hear it.”

  “You don’t,” he argues.

  “I do, and I’m arguing with you. Like you asked. Don’t walk away. Wait here. I’m grabbing my coat. We have plans,” I tell him.

  I wonder if he’ll actually wait while I turn off my computer and find a coat and shoes, but he does. He’s still standing in the middle of the hallway while people pass in and out of their rooms around him. The sterile walls and floor are endless white and Jack, in his dark clothes, looks like a bad image from a cheesy horror movie. But when I reach him, he just looks scared.

  I thought we were going to go to a park or the river or something, so when Jack pulls into the visitor parking lot of the prison, I keep my mouth shut and follow him. It’s sunny even though it’s cold, but around the building, the light feels diluted, short bursts of sunlight trapped in the barbed wire circling the area. There’s a guard tower to the left and I can see someone in there; I don’t know if it’s only in movies where they stand there with loaded guns and keep an eye out for trouble, but either way, it’s intimidating. I can’t imagine being here at all, but when we go through the guard post inside and he knows them all by first name, I realize he’s spent a lot of time here. What kind of life is it to be a regular visitor at a state prison by the time you’re twenty?

  After we get through security, we’re led through another massive door and I’m surprised when Jack takes my hand. I’m sure it’s as much for me as it is for him, but the tension in his grip is heartbreaking. I barely know him, but the pain I feel knowing that this is a part of his secret and his own self-hate doesn’t have to be logical.

  Inside the open room where we’re told to wait, there are three gray tables. Jack chooses the one by the window, although it’s not much of a window. Too high and too small to let in much more than a sliver of light, it’s like a taunt to the men locked up in here – a memory of a world that exists beyond them and has forgotten them.

  “Don’t go feeling bad,” Jack says next to me while we wait. He taps his foot and the anxiety reaches out of him like a creeping plant that suffocates everything in its path. “For me or for anyone in here.”

  “How’d you know?” I ask.

  “I can see it in your eyes. You look sad and sympathetic, but you don’t end up here for small mistakes, Lily. You end up here because you decided the world deserved to suffer.”

  “I still don’t understand why you think-”

  I don’t get to finish. His eyes are drawn towards the door, where a man in his early 40’s is being led towards us by two guards. His hair is too long and he hasn’t shaved in some time. Gaunt and weak, he needs to rely on the guards to bring him to the chair and they stand over him while he sits. He’s still cuffed. As he lifts his head, I see the resemblance immediately. He and Jack have the same eyes. However, where Jack’s are full of light, this man is only darkness. If it were possible for eyes to be totally hollow, his would be.

  “It’s been a while,” the man says to Jack.


  “Two weeks.”

  “I can’t remember the last time you came alone.”

  “For good reason. I changed my mind. We’re going.”

  Jack gets up and knocks over the metal chair. He doesn’t force me up but he waits for me to stand. I want to disappear because this is too intimate and Jack was right; I don’t belong here. Not because I don’t want to be a part of it or because I feel differently about him, but because this is private and I don’t warrant this kind of trust.

  I slide out past Jack, but then wait. He’s not moving, just staring at the man.

  “You can’t hate me forever,” he says to Jack. He looks up at his son, but Jack keeps his gaze on the door.

  “I don’t know. I think maybe I can,” he replies.

  “Someday, you’re going to have to listen.”

  “There is nothing you can say,” Jack spits back and then we’re leaving. He doesn’t take my hand this time, but he does stop once we pass security to make sure I’m with him, and then when we get outside, he collapses back against the prison wall.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have done this. I thought I would be okay. I thought I could tell you and it wouldn’t hurt. I avoid it because it always hurts.”

  I join him, leaning against the wall, and watch the clouds settle over the sun. It’s one of those days when the universe seems to get it.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says. “Want to see where I live?”

  I nod, but in the two hours it takes to get to his house, we don’t speak at all. I know he’s afraid I’m judging him, but I don’t have the right words to tell him that it’s so far from that. I just want to be worthy of a story like Jack’s.

  The small, faded green house is set at the end of a long dirt road with a yard that’s mostly dirt as well, although there are a few patches of overgrown grass where the dirt didn’t win. A rusted tricycle rests against the metal fence that Jack opens, and he leads me up the steps and in to the house. The shingles are falling loose from the roof and the gutters are clogged with leaves. Inside, an old woman is sitting on a broken couch, reading a book. She looks up when we come in.

  “This is Lily,” Jack says. “My grandmother,” he explains to me, but there is no formal introduction. She just nods and goes back to her book and he leads me downstairs into the basement. A small room off the main room appears to be his. It doesn’t look much different from his dorm room, except that there’s more stuff. It’s also somehow more sterile, even though there are posters on the walls and clothes and junk strewn everywhere.

  “So, this is my shit life,” he tells me. “And that’s what I become.”

  “What? What’s what you become?”

  “My dad. A man in prison. Worthless.”

  “You’re right. I saw a man in a prison,” I tell him. “I don’t know why he was there or what you think it means for you. But I definitely don’t think you automatically become anything, regardless.”

  “You know, maybe if he’d robbed a convenience store or sold drugs or something, it would be different. But what he did… it doesn’t go away.”

  “What did he do?” I don’t know if I should ask, but curiosity gets the better of me.

  “He murdered my mother. In front of me.”

  For all of my understanding that people have different stories and backgrounds, everyone I know is basically the same. I don’t come from a world where things like this happen anywhere but in movies or on the nightly news. There is nothing I can say, nothing I can do. My entire sense of reality, of what’s normal, implodes around me; the fragile shards of my ignorance cut me deeply. I tell myself I need to say something – anything – but I can’t find the words. Jack looks at me, though, his eyes so sad, and I want to try. I want desperately to try. I just don’t know how.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I say, “but you can. I’ll listen.”

  “Are you sure? Do you really want to know?”

  “I want to be your friend,” I say. “I want you to let me.”

  He nods, sits back down on the bed, and starts talking. “When I was little, my parents fought like crazy. I didn’t understand drugs when I was a kid. I knew my mom drank, but that was the only thing I saw. Except her arms. I knew about her arms, but I was a kid. None of us knew why she looked like that, although everyone’s parents knew and that made things hard. They didn’t really want a junkie’s kid at Chuck E Cheese with their children.

  “Dad worked a lot. He was never home. He probably had a girlfriend somewhere, but again, these are things you don’t know when you’re younger. But when he came home, it was terrible. I remember one time Mom was strung out or something and she wouldn’t get off the couch. I didn’t know why and I couldn’t get her to get up. Dad kept telling her that she needed to, to do something, to feed me. It was the summer and I’d been wearing the same clothes for days. I ate when my friends’ parents invited me over for lunch, the few who felt bad enough for me that they tried to intervene. At seven and eight, it never occurred to me that they looked at me with pity.

  “I thought it was great when my dad wasn’t around, because when my friends had to go in for dinner or go take a bath, I could just stay out all night playing. I used to hate it when he came home. He would always make me clean up and he would give me a curfew.”

  He pauses, but I don’t speak. I don’t think he wants anything but someone to listen to him right now. His hands knot the bed sheet and he tries to remain stoic.

  “So he’d come home and it was summer and she wouldn’t get up. He kept screaming, but she just wouldn’t move. I offered to help and she ignored me. My dad ignored me and continued to berate her. Eventually, she started to laugh, and he picked her up and threw her out into the driveway. Literally threw her, like trash. She landed on the ground and I thought she had twisted something, but she just sat on the ground, laughing. My dad told her not to come back until she got her shit together and I didn’t see her for the rest of the summer.

  “Eventually, the cops brought her back to us. She didn’t look any different and she didn’t get her shit together, but my father had no idea what to do. Nothing changed. She didn’t even make empty promises that they would. We just went right back into the routine. Dad tried at first to stay home more, but then he almost lost his job. My grandmother offered to help and to look after me when he couldn’t. If it wasn’t for her, who knows what would’ve happened? Dad worked, Mom got high, and I was just in the way.”

  “She’s your dad’s mother?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “My mother’s. But everyone knew what my mom had become. She wanted to help, since she couldn’t help her own daughter. Everyone in town knew, everyone at church knew, everyone at school knew. Everyone except me. Even if they’d tried to explain it to me, I wouldn’t have understood. I still loved her, despite it all. I didn’t know any better. I just knew she was my mom. You have to love your mom, right?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that,” I tell him. “Maybe another day.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “Do you want to tell me about… when it happened?” I ask.

  “You got to understand - that was just one time,” he says. “It was always like that. All my memories are some version of that mess. She did something and ended up high and when he came home, he freaked out and threatened her, but nothing ever changed. I don’t know. Maybe it was inevitable what he did, but she was still my mom. I loved her. I still love her, and he took her away from me. You don’t forgive certain things.”

  “Who said you have to?” I ask.

  He sighs. “Everyone. But it’s easy to say, isn’t it? It’s easy to forgive theoretically, but they weren’t there. If they hated each other, why didn’t he just leave?”

  He gets up and turns on music. It’s not loud and I can’t even make out the song, but I get that he needs to do something, to move, to keep himself grounded in the present while he works through telling me this. I prefer to
keep my own memories to myself, too, but they seem stupid right now.

  “The last time,” Jack says, “I was fourteen. It was the same thing as always. I mean, it wasn’t like that day was somehow worse, until it was. By then, I’d learned to take care of myself so my grandmother wasn’t around as much. Mom still did nothing. Dad came home after being gone for almost a month and she was a mess. They fought, but they always fought. I was sitting in the living room and doing homework and trying not to listen, trying to tune out the screams and the cruelty they flung at each other. I don’t know what changed for him. I don’t know why it was different.

  “Their fight became more violent than normal. Hitting each other had never been out of the question, but this was something else. I don’t even really know who started it, but eventually, he stopped it. I was trying to learn about ions and then he was choking her. She stared at me and I think it was the only time I remember after a certain point when I believed she saw me. She looked at me and her eyes were asking me to help her, but I couldn’t. I was too small, too scrawny, and I screamed and pleaded with him. I begged him to stop, but he just kept holding her down while she faded out, and then he snapped her neck in the middle of the living room. I saw the entire thing and there was nothing I could do. After that, I came to live here with my grandmother for good. I still freak out about ions.”

  “I’m sorry.” It’s a weak thing to say, but it’s true and it’s the only way to express how I feel about what he’s gone through.

  “Yeah. I hear that a lot,” he says.

  I’m about to say something else when he looks at me and his eyes break my heart. In them, I see that little boy – the dirty eight-year-old who didn’t understand why his mommy left him all summer. I see the teenager who couldn’t save his mother, not only from his dad but also from her own destruction. And I see the man he’s becoming. I see this guy who has every reason to be angry, who could have been cruel when we met or at least closed himself off. He’s still hurting inside but he’s kind in a way I have never experienced.