The Dark Side of Innocence

by Terri Cheney

“It hurts.”

  “Do you want an aspirin?”

  “No.” I was afraid it might be bad for the baby.

  “A glass of water?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you expect me to do?”

  “Just let me sleep.”

  “That’s probably best. Everything will look better in the morning.” With that, she leaned down to kiss me on the forehead. I turned away before her lips could touch my skin.

  Everything didn’t look better the next morning—or the next one, or the one after that. It would be weeks before I stopped compulsively examining myself in the full-length mirror. But when the sea horse baby didn’t grow an inch, and my belly didn’t get any rounder, I gradually began to relax. Perhaps it had been a false alarm, or perhaps I had somehow lost the baby. But I stopped going over to Dan O’Leary’s house: I told my mother I’d seen a big cockroach in their kitchen, and she immediately found somewhere else for me to stay. I also gave up climbing trees and poles.

  At the college, I ignored as best I could all displays of carnal affection. I kept my hair in a neat, tight braid whenever I was on campus. And to Professor Tremaine’s great consternation, I refused to give up rhyme. It pained me to disappoint him, but I’d seen what could happen when free verse was given full rein.

  Less sex, more rhyme, and I firmly believed that all would be right with the world. Finally, I thought, I was in control.

  3

  Days circle ever without end despite

  Prayers for the consummate peace of the dead

  And answers to questions undared or unsaid

  Of the subtleties ’twixt black and white.

  —Age thirteen

  Nineteen seventy-three may have ushered in the age of détente, but I was out of tune with the times. A cease-fire had been agreed upon in Vietnam, and Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev was extending a long olive branch. But the feeling I remember most clearly from those days was not one of peace or reconciliation. By the time I was thirteen, I was openly at war with my mother. Adolescence had been declared.

  Everything she did incensed me. Her beauty, which had always been a balm to my soul, was now a constant reminder of my own ungainly looks. I couldn’t stand the way she spoke, her slight French-Canadian accent stressing diphthongs that should have remained silent. Her unconscious habit of inserting “and then he said, and then she said” into every story made me squirm with acute embarrassment in public. The tension between us got so bad that she couldn’t cross the room without my finding fault with the way she swung her arms, the measure of her stride. I was constantly on edge, quivering like a cat’s whiskers at a mouse hole, on alert for her next mistake.

  But these were surface irritants, the sandpaper stuff of adolescence. What really made me seethe was her global view of the universe, her deeply held and sacred belief that life was out to screw you, so you’d better screw it first. Trust no one, believe in nothing. “They,” whoever “they” were, were everywhere, watching and waiting for a moment’s drop in vigilance. In my mother’s sharp-eyed, sharp-edged world, danger lurked like germs: you might not see it, but it was always there, swarming and prolific. No wonder she made such an excellent nurse—she was hell-bent on making life antiseptic. Never rely on anyone else. Never let anyone glimpse your flaws. Never expose a naked emotion. Never, ever run barefoot in summer.

  She hadn’t always been like this, my father told me once. “It wasn’t till after you were born,” he said. “She was different with Zach. We had good times then—I used to be able to make her laugh. But then you came along, and . . .” His voice trailed off. “She never was the same again. She got nervous, and stayed that way.”

  I had no time for “nervous.” I was thirteen, I wanted my wings. I was going places, and everyone knew it. My father insisted that I make handwritten copies of every letter I ever sent out, because he was convinced that I was going to be the first woman president, or at the very least, a Nobel Prize winner. “People will want to see your development,” he said, and so I had stacks and stacks of copied letters stuffed inside my desk. I had pen pals strewn across the globe, and my correspondence ranged from popes to presidents. (When the Black Beast was in a certain kind of mood—glorious, grandiose—I felt no hesitation whatsoever at telling the leaders of the free world how I thought things ought to be run.)

  Daddy’s naïve belief in me would have been touching if not for the fact that Daddy trusted everyone. He believed in everything. I’d confide in him my wildest dreams, my deepest hopes, and his eyes would widen with excitement. “Where do we start?” he’d ask, and we’d soar through the stratosphere on fumes of anticipation. He was that way with the whole world, and consequently, the whole world loved to talk to him. He was born to sit on a bar stool, scotch in hand, nodding intently at strangers’ stories. He listened with all of his body, his very elbows somehow alive with interest. I don’t think he ever met a man he didn’t like.

  It’s not surprising that I preferred his way of looking at things, and that the fights between my mother and me grew increasingly frequent and more vicious. They were no longer just about whether I should wear a sweater to school that morning because the clouds threatened rain. They were about whether I was allowed to even believe in the possibility of a sunny day.

  It wasn’t all her fault. The times were indeed a-changin’: money troubles had forced my parents to take Zach and me out of St. Madeleine’s, and Professor Tremaine had moved to the East Coast, ending my intellectual adventures at Pomona College. Change of any kind upset me profoundly, and the transfer to plain old public school was traumatic. Not only was I leaving the familiar, secure embrace of the nuns who loved me, I was forsaking the beauty of the candle-lit, incense-filled church for the austerity of secular concrete.

  Vernon Junior High School was, in a word, ugly. As I’d learned from Dan O’Leary’s penis, the Black Beast didn’t like ugly things—they made him fidget and itch. Just the sight of them could kick off a morose mood that lasted for hours, even days. But despite my discomfort with the aesthetics of my new school, I still somehow managed to thrive. I was, as usual, a cheerleader, and on the Student Council, and I made a respectable number of friends. I became close to one girl in particular: Rhonda, a quick-witted gamine who, like me, was obsessed with the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar and could quote all the lyrics verbatim. We used to take turns playing the different roles after school. She was especially good as Jesus, while I excelled as Mary Magdalene. I felt I understood the part.

  Like the rest of my friends, Rhonda knew nothing about the Black Beast. She attributed my many “eccentricities,” as she called them, to my artistic temperament. She had a great respect for my poetry. “You’ll make a wonderful writer one day,” she kept insisting. I loved her for that, as much as I could love anyone at the time. Love requires a transparency of heart, and mine was clouded with shadows. We were as close as two teenage girls can be, when one of them is harboring a giant secret from the other.

  I often wondered why I was fortunate enough to be one of the chosen few, one of the glorified inner circle of ten or so girls that essentially dictated fashion and feelings for the rest of the school. I was bright, but nowhere near beautiful enough. I wore braces, had small breasts, and was a bit of a klutz, forever banging into things because my head was off in the clouds somewhere. I was, however, insatiably curious, and I suppose there’s no clearer pathway to popularity than genuine curiosity. When I asked someone, “How are you doing today?” it wasn’t a cursory remark. I really meant it. I—or at least the writer in me—wanted to hear the whole story.

  And perhaps because I was so familiar with pain myself, I could sense it in others instinctively. Then, as now, I could take one look into a person’s eyes and know if there was trouble brewing inside, no matter how hard he or she tried to hide it. I had the two traits essential to a born confidante: empathy and the ability to keep a secret. I’d been practicing secrecy my entire life.

  But the balms
of popularity ended at school; they didn’t soothe the increasingly uncomfortable situation at home. I tried to escape into literature, but even my discovery of Jane Austen and her neatly bounded little world couldn’t drown out the discord from our living room. My parents had dropped all pretense of not arguing in front of the kids. Now, as soon as my father got home, it was money this and money that, and how are we going to pay all these goddamned bills?

  Up until then, so far as I could tell, we’d been doing relatively fine. Both my parents had to work hard to support us, but we lived in a nice house at the end of a pretty cul-de-sac, with a big backyard and a swimming pool. Sure, my parents would argue about money sometimes; whose parents didn’t? But it was nothing like this—this snarling, snapping sound of desperation. Something bad had happened to put us in this dire financial state. It would be years before I finally learned what that was, and even then, the details were murky.

  All I knew at the time was that my father was commuting back and forth to Ventura, a good four-hour drive each day. He was building a tract of homes on a speculative project he called Wonderland Hill, financed God knows how—mostly by his optimism and charisma, I suspect. One of these homes was going to be our new dream house. It was enormous, and Zach and I got to plan our own rooms from scratch. Mine had a wraparound picture window, with built-in bookcases and a sweeping view of the as-yet-undefiled greens and grays of Aliso Canyon. It was the perfect vista for a budding writer: undiscovered territory. It’s no coincidence that I spent the rest of my life searching for that canyon view, and once I found one that resembled it, I stayed put.

  We were going to be happy there on Wonderland Hill. I knew it in my bones. Zach knew it, my father knew it—even my mother, who never allowed an elated thought to pass through her brain undissected, thought it might be possible. I was only thirteen, but I was already weary of the way things were and was wise enough to realize that life offers you only so many fresh beginnings. On Wonderland Hill, my parents wouldn’t fight. My mother and I would bake oatmeal cookies together, wearing matching aprons. Zach would come out of his room and be eager to play. And the Black Beast wouldn’t bedevil me anymore—he’d be so distracted by the move, he’d forget that I existed.

  It was strange: even though it meant relocating to a brand-new city, starting a new school, and making all new friends, Wonderland Hill didn’t frighten me. It wasn’t change; it was reclamation.

  What I couldn’t foresee, and what I’ll never forget, was the night that my father didn’t come home. We waited at dinner for him—I remember the ice-cold mashed potatoes, and how hard it was to force them down. My mother wasn’t much of a cook, but she made excellent mashed potatoes: dense and smooth and creamy. But that night, there was a lump in my throat, and it was difficult to swallow.

  Traffic on the 101 Freeway could be brutal, so it wasn’t completely unusual that my father would sometimes miss a meal. But he always stopped off at a gas station and called to say he’d be late. That night, though, we heard nothing—just the dial tone when I checked the phone to make sure that it was working.

  By midnight, my mother was frantic. I had an exam the next morning, and she tried to make me go to bed, but no way was I going to close my eyes without knowing that Daddy was safe. My parents hadn’t been fighting any more than usual lately, so I couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t at least called. Zach, bless him, tried to be the man of the house. “I’ll wait up for him,” he told us. “You guys go to bed.” But although I agreed to put on my pajamas, by two in the morning we were all still wide awake and wondering. Zach had called the highway patrol by then: no accidents on the 101. My mother called all the hospitals she could think of between home and Ventura. No one resembling my father’s description had been admitted that night.

  Finally, as a sliver of sunrise shot between the blinds, the telephone rang. I was the first to pounce.

  “Daddy?”

  “Put your mother on.” No “sweetie,” no “baby,” no explanation.

  “I was so worried,” I started to say, but he interrupted me.

  “Now, damn it.”

  It was the first time my father had ever sworn at me, and I was frightened. His voice sounded odd—tight and cold, as if someone had him by the throat and was strangling all the natural warmth out of him.

  I handed my mother the phone.

  “Jack, where on earth—” She stopped, and I watched the blood drain from her face. “Wait, let me get a pen. Okay.” She scribbled something down. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Then she hung up and turned to face Zach and me. Her eyes were as chilly as my father’s voice had been, but there was a strange gleam of satisfaction behind them.

  “Your father had a flat tire,” she said. “I have to go get him. No school today. Zach, you’re in charge.”

  “But why didn’t he—” I tried to ask.

  “Did you hear me? Your brother’s in charge.” With that, she grabbed her purse and was out the door before I could say another word.

  “Zach, what’s going on?” For once, I was glad of his eagle eye. He was closer to my mother than I was. Sometimes he even invited her into his room, and they would talk together for hours. Surely he would know why she was so obviously lying.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said with a self-important look on his face.

  “Oh, balls. You just don’t know.”

  “I know a lot more than you think I do.”

  “Come on, Zach, please. Is something wrong with Daddy?”

  “You’re his pet. Why don’t you ask him?”

  There was a sneer in his voice, but something deeper too. I could tell that he’d been wounded. It wasn’t always easy for him that my father and I were so close, and the Black Beast demanded so much attention. For a moment, I felt guilty, but then I shrugged it off. I couldn’t help it if I was Daddy’s little girl. Besides, Zach was clearly my mother’s favorite, and I didn’t let it get to me. Or at least, I didn’t hold it against Zach.

  He turned to go back to his room, but not without a parting shot. “I can tell you one thing,” he said. “You’re not getting that picture window.”

  I grabbed him by the arm and looked up at him, pleading. At sixteen, Zach was already well on his way to his full adult height of six foot two, and I had to crank back my neck to see in his eyes. What I saw there unnerved me. He was scared too. I wanted to wrap both my arms around him and hold him tight, at least until his eyes got back to normal and I felt like I could breathe again. But Zach and I never touched like that. For once, I wished we weren’t brother and sister. I wished that we were friends.

  He shook me off and went down the hall, shutting his door firmly behind him. I wandered around the living room, picking things up and putting them down. I ran my hands over the keys of the organ and tried to coax out a tune: “You Are My Sunshine,” Daddy’s favorite.

  “Stop that!” Zach shouted from inside his room. He was, of course, right. It was my mother’s precious organ, and we weren’t supposed to touch it when she wasn’t home.

  It was a curious thing, that instrument—a monument to my mother’s thrift. Although she lived in abject terror of spending an unexamined cent, that didn’t keep her from spending money. She just spent it in odd, miserly ways. In five years, she’d supposedly hoarded enough nickels, dimes, and quarters under her bed to buy that organ. Why she wanted it, I never knew. She didn’t play; none of us did. And of course, in her opinion, there was never enough money for lessons. So the organ simply sat there: a constant reminder to all of us of the essential importance of pocket change.

  My father needed that reminder. If my mother was a clenched fist when it came to money, Daddy was an open hand. He spent money reflexively, like breathing. It didn’t matter what he was buying—shoelaces, a summer house, a dry gin martini—he always wanted the best, not just for himself but for all of us. And especially for me. All a canny salesman ever had to do was invoke that magic incantation, “It’s the best,” and my father was sold.


  Somehow, despite how broke my mother claimed we were, Daddy always had a nickel for an ice-cream cone. When he was home, he’d treat the whole neighborhood. The instant the Good Humor truck tinkled down our street, he was the first one out the door, pockets overflowing with coins. Every now and then, I’d wonder where he got all that ready change, and if the sacred hoard beneath my mother’s bed had actually been violated. But my parents slept in separate bedrooms, and my mother kept her door securely locked during the day, so plunder seemed unlikely.

  My curiosity about the source of my father’s wealth never lasted much longer than my Fudgsicle. It never really mattered to me if Daddy’s gains were ill-gotten or not. “You deserve the best,” he told me, and who was I to argue with the wisest man I ever knew?

  Where in God’s name could he be?

  It wasn’t until well after three in the afternoon that I finally heard the sound I’d been longing for: the scratch of his key in the lock. I ran to the front door and threw my arms around him, burying my face in his shirt. It took a few moments to register—he didn’t smell like Daddy, crisp and clean and familiar. He smelled musty and dark, like someone who’d been smoking too many cigarettes in too small a room. I wrinkled my nose and looked up at his face. It was a shock: my father was always neat and clean-shaven. He prided himself on the closeness of his shave, as I knew from the many mornings I’d spent watching him wield his old-fashioned straight-edge razor. The man I had my arms around had a day’s worth of stubble on his chin, and there was a dried streak of something across his left cheek.

  But the biggest shock of all was when he looked away. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. All the questions I’d been dying to ask him evaporated in that moment. I knew then what that strange smell was: it was shame, and I was all too familiar with that.

  So I didn’t say a word, just hugged him tighter and tighter, until he finally stepped back. “I’m tired,” he said. “I’m going to go wash up and rest before dinner.”