On these cards, he sketches his plans. We will fly west and rent an RV. We will pick up my cousins in Arizona, drive to the Grand Canyon and up through Utah, then the edge of California, to see the national parks. My mother and he compromise: one night in a hotel, the night at the Grand Canyon. Otherwise, yes, the RV. Night after night, my father plans.
* * *
The trip is beautiful, and the trip is a disaster. Looking back now, imagining him in the high pilot-seat window of the cab, the woman he loves beside him and the four children they have made together in the back, I can feel the rush that summer must have been to him. What a triumph that this world was his. That he, who had no father, whose mother struggled always, had America to give us. He’ll show us the brilliant rust colors of Bryce Canyon, the way the sun hits the high red rock at midday, the shadows cast by the cliffs and overhangs. He’ll show us how vast the Grand Canyon is, and the Native trails etched into the rock at its bottom. His wife born of French and Italian immigrants, his own family Polish and Russian, this is his to claim. America. His enthusiasm is boundless.
But as a child I am curled in the back on a thin mattress on the metal frame of the RV, and I watch the country pass by through a dim foot-square window. I am up over twenty aspirin a day now, doctor’s orders, to try to cut the swelling in my joints. The pain that sets in from the air-conditioning starts as a kind of burn in my knees and fingers and spreads into a prickling, nauseating ache. My father keeps the air-conditioning up high, and though I complain to him and to my mother, he either won’t listen or can’t believe me. And what he says makes sense: He is hot and I am hurting, but why should I think that my hurting should outweigh his hot?
This is the logic I will never find an answer to, the way in my family a hurt will always be your hurt or my hurt, one to be set against the other and weighed, never the family’s hurt. Is what happens in a family the problem of the family, or the problem of the one most harmed by it? There is a cost to this kind of adversarial individualism.
But then, I’m the one who’ll grow up to wear cowboy boots and a big belt buckle, even though I live in Massachusetts. I’ll chase after this love he tried to show me.
* * *
Eighth grade begins. Not going to school seems more normal now than going. I spend my days in the slow haunt of the staircase, the room where we played as children, my bedroom. Every week my father drives to Queens and ferries my grandparents back over the bridge to see us. Each Saturday, my sister Nicola plays checkers with my grandfather on the porch like I used to. I can’t anymore. I can’t even watch them play. I’m too aware that I watched him touch her in our bedroom. Too aware that he touched me. The knowledge crawls across my skin. I can’t even use the bathroom without thinking of his hands around himself there, the motion I didn’t understand. But I know I’m not allowed to say that, just like I’m not allowed to tell my friends at school what happened. My mother has said that I will hurt my father’s political career if I do so. My father has said that I will hurt my mother. Both of them forbid me from telling my grandmother, because it would hurt her, and my brother. He’s close to my grandfather and, as the only boy in a house of girls, needs him.
So the hurt feels like it’s just mine to carry. Every Halloween, when ghosts and witches start to appear in decorations around town, I become jumpy and sleepless, as though my subconscious believes what my grandfather used to tell me—that he’s a witch, that someday he’ll get me.
I start to hide. I dye my hair fire-engine red, sometimes purple, once green, and adopt a style of long, loose skirts of bright, clashing colors and oxblood Doc Martens so oversize that when I start high school the other kids call them “clown shoes.” It’s how I can disappear now: by giving people something else to look at, the clothing I wear instead of me. I cut class, missing so many days the high school won’t give me grades. My friends have noticed that I can’t be easily touched. If someone surprises me with a hug my body bucks and they get a swift, automatic elbow to the stomach—or else I am suddenly vacant, my body rigid. On my grandmother’s birthday my family goes to a restaurant in New York and there—my grandmother seated to my left, my grandfather’s hot breath on my right—what is inside me and cannot come out finally becomes unbearable. I go to the bathroom and make myself vomit. To feel empty is delicious relief, and from that day on, I have another secret. My parents must see the empty food wrappers in the kitchen, the mess I sometimes leave in the bathroom. They must see the way their daughter has gone sullen and silent. But we don’t talk about it. The same way we don’t talk about the slash my brother carries on his stomach, the missing sister, the way the phone is turned off sometimes and when it’s on creditors call day and night, nipping at this life my parents have built like the pasts they’ve both run from, now that my father’s rages have gotten so bad even the law firm is in trouble. If we acknowledge only the happy things, maybe that’s all there will be.
One night, my parents call us to a family meeting around the Formica kitchen table. The room is still wallpapered in bright slashes meant to look like crayon marks that my mother chose when we were children. The clock overhead is made of wooden crayons. Over the table hang three cone lights on pull cords: one red, one blue, and one yellow, the colors bright and friendly. Each cone casts a circumscribed spotlight, like in an interrogation scene.
“Grandma and Grandpa are moving to Tenafly,” my mother announces. “We’ll be able to see them so much more this way.” Writing the memory, I find myself searching for her face, frustrated with the shadows—but she sits outside the cone of light, and the memory is sealed tight. My grandparents move to downtown Tenafly, to the apartment building marked by a magnolia tree that is on the one main road into town and the one main road out. Weeks after the move, my grandmother slips in the bathroom. Recovering in the hospital, she suffers a stroke. Three days later, she dies. He is left, sitting alone in that apartment.
* * *
“Why don’t you ever visit Grandpa?” my brother Andy asks me. We’re sixteen, standing in the hall outside our bedrooms. My younger sister Nicola and I have moved out of the bedroom we shared in the back of the house. Now she’s in the hallway space my baby sister, Elize, was in, and I’ve taken what used to be my parents’ room at the top of the wooden staircase. I’ve gotten rid of my bed—a mattress on the floor seems closer to the dream I have of a New York City loft apartment—and put the stereo on the floor, too. Two big green Papasan chairs for curling up and reading, incense I buy in thick packets even though the smell gives me headaches. On one wall I have a mural going of images I’ve cut from magazines: the splayed limbs of a pinup girl, heavy black text, roses. With a can of black paint I brush whole poems on the other walls. Marianne Moore: your thorns are the best part of you. E. E. Cummings: pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Richard Eberhart’s “Rumination”—death has done this, and he will do this to me, and blow his breath to fire my clay when I am still—I paint on the ceiling over my bed so it’s the last thing I see at night and the first thing I see in the morning. I like roses and images of guns and guitars. I like the Steve Miller Band and Johnny Cougar tapes from the days before he became John Mellencamp and I don’t much care about television or movies. I make friends who go to the Rocky Horror show and once I go onstage and pluck a cherry Life Saver out of a guy’s mouth because it seems like what teenagers like me, in our fishnet stockings and Doc Martens, are supposed to do. Inside, I’m so shy I have trouble speaking sometimes, so shy I feel like someone has sewn tiny fishing weights around my lips, piercing the skin in two neat little rows, and moving my mouth is slow and heavy and painful. Across the hall, my brother’s room is wallpapered in movie posters, the same bright style since he was eight. Every month he tacks up new ones, not removing the old, so that in places the posters bow out from the walls, six and seven and eight years of movies beneath them. He’ll keep doing this until after he’s in college, and by then the room will actually seem smaller, a couple of inches trimmed off on each si
de by the weight of all the posters.
Now we stand opposite each other in the hallway, he outside his door, I outside mine. He’s still the entertainer, still as skinny as when he was a kid. His hair curls out in puffs from beneath his ball cap. The jean jacket he wears is covered almost entirely in souvenir patches from trips to Disney, whales from Nantucket, a breastplate patch from my father’s uncle’s time in the Army. That man became a famous boxer after he came home, and at least once when my brother meets a ballplayer who’s his idol the player will recognize the name on my brother’s patch and grin, and he and my brother will start talking about the boxer’s glory days. Who knows how those in a family find their roles, whether a role is assigned or chosen, whether it’s a function of the way that even siblings—even twins—grow up in different families? Have different pasts. But while I am flinging myself around to escape the past, my brother is papering himself in it. He will grow up to be the family’s keeper, the one who remembers birthdays and anniversaries and organizes the Christmas card list every year, the one who’ll spend hours organizing family photos I can’t look at into albums he has printed into photo books.
“Why don’t you ever visit him?” he asks again. That’s where he’s going. I study his face for a minute, expecting to see accusation. Or curiosity. But in his brown eyes—a brown inherited from my mother and my grandfather, the brown that links them in the family—there’s neither, only the rote expectation that he will ask this question of me, the one whose role in the family is separation. The one who, confused and swirling and angry, already wants to get away. Are we already who we will always be?
For an instant, maybe there’s a different possibility. A chance. A world in which I tell him everything now and yes there would be fireworks but after the fireworks we would all talk about it. My parents would learn what I’m carrying. My brother would learn what has turned us into strangers, and why I seem so angry at the same family he holds so close.
I look at his face a long moment. Then I turn and click my bedroom door closed behind me.
Fifteen
Louisiana, 1984–1985
The Louisiana mental health clinic intake worker’s notes—notes that will later be entered into the court record—describe the nineteen-year-old, brown-haired man before him as depressed, submissive, “overly compliant.” Ricky Langley is eager to please, the caseworker writes, but he seems to sense that Ricky may not know how. Behind the thick glasses Ricky wears, his brown eyes stay too steady, constant in a way that suggests a fundamental disconnect with life, a fundamental hopelessness. He doesn’t get excited and he doesn’t get mad, he just is. The caseworker gives him a mimeographed sheet listing problems Ricky could be experiencing and asks him to circle which ones he is, right now, experiencing. He circles: nervousness, depression, guilt, unhappiness, worthlessness, restlessness, my thoughts. He does not circle: education, anger, friends, self-control, fears, children. He begins to circle stress but stops. The pen leaves an arc on the page. He begins to circle sexual problems, then stops and crosses that arc out—but then he is rebuked by his mind, by the better part of his knowing, and makes the acknowledging circle. The page becomes evidence of the struggle. The circle around want to hurt someone he draws so tightly that it nearly touches all the letters, so tightly it strangles the idea even as it admits it, as if it wants to be its own undoing.
A year has passed since that tipsy, star-filled night he wanted help. Now he’s been ordered into it. No, he checks on the intake form, he is not a veteran. No, he has no income. He gets no aid. How long has it been since he worked? Two years. Sometimes, he tells the caseworker, he steals down to the bank of the Calcasieu River to sleep. The trees’ boughs shelter him; the creek bubbles and his mind calms there. When he wakes he hunts and fishes to feed himself and pursues what he calls his hobby: “archeological digs.” He looks closely then at the silt of the bank, searching for an arrowhead or a shard of glass, some scrap of the past. The past pulls at him. It can feel more real than the ephemeral present, just as Oscar once did. His head hurts, he tells the caseworker, “all the time.” Only the river settles it, or going into the graveyard to sleep. The dead are peaceful the way the river is.
Drinking settles it, too. Yes, he checks, he often drinks or gets high to deal with stress. But no, not before going out or social situations. He can leave the question about parties blank. No, he hasn’t lost time at work or school because of drugs or drink, because he doesn’t have work or school. His drinking doesn’t cause conflicts with friends, because he doesn’t have friends. How many times does he have to say it? He prefers being alone. What about siblings? the form asks. “To tell you the truth, I ain’t close to nobody.”
I often drink or get high by myself. That, he checks.
“Who raised you, Ricky?” the caseworker asks. Ricky has just written on the forms that he lives alone. The caseworker was the one to correct it: He lives with Bessie and Alcide and Jamie, the four of them in one tight trailer. Medical bills cost Bessie and Alcide the land they built on and the house they built on it, too. I picture the caseworker as a young woman, just out of school in Baton Rouge, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and a photograph of her boyfriend in a plastic silver frame on the desk. She wants to go outside for a smoke; it’s past time. She wants her boyfriend to take her out to dinner this Friday night and she wants a job anywhere but here.
He doesn’t answer.
She sighs. “Ricky, who raised you?”
“Luann and Lyle.”
This excising of Bessie and Alcide. It’s easy to read a young man’s anger between the lines. From appointment to appointment, his responses to questions grow shorter and shorter. Easy to imagine his hand cocked into a fist in his lap, his head ducked low, as though if she can’t see his eyes she won’t see him. He won’t have to answer. He tried to molest a seven-year-old boy in Allen Parish. “Attempted molestation,” the charge says. When the boy resisted, Ricky told him he’d shoot him. The boy’s father reported Ricky to the police. That’s why he’s here now.
Just more proof that everyone thinks there’s something wrong with him. He doesn’t know what burns more badly, the shame or the anger. Sometimes he can’t even tell the two apart, just knows what it feels like when his ears prick red and his heart thuds hard in his chest, whooshing inside him. He can’t hear can’t see can’t think. That feeling—not wanting that feeling—is why he doesn’t have a high school degree. There was a misunderstanding over a school car when he was in ninth grade. He’d been told he could use the car to run an errand for the school—Ricky swears it, but there’s no need to take his word, the auto repair teacher backed him up—but someone forgot to tell the school officials, who reported it missing. Ricky was arrested. Grand theft auto. Everything was cleared up before charges were pressed—a mistake, everyone agreed—but it made Ricky burn so badly he never went back.
Because here’s what he realized: They thought he would steal a car. You can bet if one of his sisters had taken the car, they’d have believed his sister.
He dropped out. When the other kids were in school, he’d be down by the river, fishing. He’d never had many friends, but dropping out was the last snip in that thread. It’s like they all went in two different directions after that. Everybody else in one direction. Then him.
The caseworker drums her fingers against the desk. “So you didn’t earn your degree, Ricky. Lots of people don’t. But do you have a job?”
“I done gave up on jobs.”
In these forms from the Lake Charles Mental Health Center in the mid-1980s, Ricky denies ever having been physically abused. He denies ever having been sexually abused. But ten years after these sessions, a social worker will put together a report that is heavily relied on at trial. The report will say his sister Judy said that Lyle and Alcide both beat Ricky. Ricky gave up on Alcide but, either unable or unwilling to give up on his family entirely, kept running back to Lyle. Once, Judy said, when Ricky showed up at Lyle’s door, Lyle beat him so
badly she had to pull a gun on him to make him stop. Judy told the social worker, who wrote it down for the defense, who gave it to the expert, who described it at trial, and the court reporter wrote it down—this is a game of telephone I am playing with the past.
Ricky is scheduled for five appointments in July and comes to every one. Last month, after his arrest, he says, he took forty over-the-counter aspirin and waited to die. The only way to get the bad feelings out was to kill himself. But the pills just gave him a stomachache and made his ears ring. So he’s here. Angry but trying. Sometimes he carves long slashes into his arms and watches himself bleed. He drinks household cleaners and walks into traffic, daring the cars to hit him. Now he tells the caseworker he wants to be hospitalized so he can’t molest anyone. “It seems like the harder I try not to do it, the more I do it.”
But they won’t hospitalize him. He is clean and kempt, the caseworker checks off. He acts appropriately. He is not that sick. Rather than being hospitalized, he is assigned to outpatient therapy.
* * *
So Ricky runs away. He’s not going to keep sitting in a chair and talking about this; they’re not listening to him. He’ll hurt somebody. He needs to be locked up, but they won’t even take him seriously for that. Twitchy in his body, unable to sit still, a failure at holding a job and a failure when he tries to kill himself and a failure at getting treatment, he flees. He hitchhikes his way across the Louisiana swamplands, through the piney woods of Texas and into the dry Arizona desert, where vistas of red rock burn more like the sun than any rock he has seen before. His skin burns crisp red, but he does not care. The blaze of color is beautiful, the dry air light in his lungs. He keeps going west. It is like he needs to find the beginning.
The Fact of a Body Page 12
