by Shayla Black
Over the ice sculpture and through the floral arrangement in the center of the ballroom, I looked at my father and did more math.
I almost laughed at the symmetry of it.
But it wasn’t funny. It took me too long to realize what had gone on, but I told myself I wasn’t going to be like my mother. I didn’t hate her, but I didn’t respect her either. She was from a good family. She was beautiful and smart. But she was nothing. She did nothing. Her life was a vacuum that purpose had fallen into, never to be seen again.
I wasn’t going to be that, but I was already on the way.
Me in my blue dress and little gold hoop earrings, dressed like a prim little miss. A chiffon-and-silk lie I let them believe. I felt sick.
I was thrown off balance by the impact of a small child. Fiona was five, and she had her arms wrapped around my legs. The others followed. Deirdre and Leanne hugged my legs too. Carrie and Sheila, at nine and eleven, stayed close, looking excited. I was only missing Theresa, who was a year old and had started walking two weeks ago. They looked up at me with eyes in varying shades of blue and green, hair from strawberry-blond to dark brown red. That was what happened when a redhead married a redhead, and my insides curdled like milk on the stove.
“Who’s watching you guys?” I was talking about everyone but directed the question at Carrie, the oldest of them and most likely to put together a coherent sentence.
“Everyone’s outside. Are you having cake or not?”
How long had I been staring into the middle distance?
Long enough for everyone to move to the garden, leaving a few clustered stragglers by the French doors. I let my little sisters lead me outside, where sibling hierarchy was determined by proximity to the cake. I’d lost any will of my own and hung behind all of them. I didn’t really want cake. I’d been sick to my stomach for days, fighting a headache, feeling tender everywhere, but I had a compulsion to act as if dessert mattered.
My mother and father stood behind the cake, smiling for the professional photographer. He wore an LA Times press pass. The camera was nowhere near me, but I felt exposed. They’d want a picture with me, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I could stay relatively anonymous in the world, but people read the pages of news about the Reagan presidency, Beirut, Studio 54 closing, and Hollywood celebrities. After those, but before the stock ticker, came the society page. Weddings. Anniversaries. Deaths of monied men.
My father tapped his glass with a spoon. He was over six feet tall and looked every bit the oligarch he was, with a full head of dark-red hair. My mother was more strawberry, and she held her head high when he was nearby. On that night in particular, she beamed a little brighter.
The guests quieted, and even the photographer put his camera down when Daddy raised his whiskey.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, projecting to the back of the room, “thank you for coming. I hope you’re all having a good time celebrating this, my anniversary with my beautiful bride.”
A chorus of tinkling rose as more spoons met glasses.
A great sound, I thought. They should try it in the studio.
My sinuses filled up, and I almost started crying, but my father kissed my mother quickly and went back to his speech.
“We have an announcement!”
Let’s hear it, Declan!
Hear! Hear!
“Eileen is about to make me a father for the eighth time!”
“Get off her, for Chrissakes!”
The shout from the back ended in uproarious laughter and cheers from everyone but the children, who didn’t understand it.
Except me. But I wasn’t a child. Never was, and never would be.
The photographer started snapping again. Dad and Mom indicated we should come behind the table so we could all smile in dot matrix patterns for tomorrow’s paper, and I couldn’t.
I’d hit my limit. I was going a hundred miles an hour, and the brick wall had appeared inches in front of me, without warning.
I’d taken a pregnancy test that morning. I’d put it away without looking at it and decided I wasn’t going to think about it. Not until after the party. Pretending bad things weren’t happening wasn’t like me, but then again, nothing bad had ever happened to me.
I’d bought it as almost a joke because my period wasn’t that regular. But it wasn’t funny.
The compulsion to look at the results weighed like a rock in my chest, exploding in slow motion. I had to hide before the shrapnel shredded me from the inside.
My room was a good three-minute expedition across the house, and I took it at a run, slipping on the marble and righting myself. I was crying hard by the time I reached my hallway. Somewhere in the journey, I’d let it go. Everything.
Oh god oh god oh god
I was a sensible person. I knew I had options, and the first step to exploring them was to know what was happening. The nausea and headaches. The tender breasts and belly. The feeling at the root of my hips that something was happening. I had to scratch pregnancy off the list so I could move to the next possibility, but I knew I wasn’t scratching shit off any list. I just knew.
And when they’d announced Mom was pregnant (again), I couldn’t wait another second.
When I got to my room, breathless in my pale blue dress, I slapped open the medicine cabinet where I’d left the little plastic jar. If the liquid was one color, I could forget the whole thing. If there was a brown ring at the bottom—
“Are you all right?”
I spun at the voice in the doorway, leaving my back to the open cabinet. My father stood in the doorway, still thrust forward from his run up the stairs.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Your mother thought you’d take it hard. I told her you were made of steel.” His smile was one hundred percent pride.
“I just ate something that didn’t agree with me.”
I spun and snapped the medicine cabinet door closed, but it bounced back, leaving an inch of the inside exposed. I turned back to my dad, hoping I wasn’t disrupting the liquid. Taking the test with eyedroppers and test tubes, I’d felt as if I were in lab class. I didn’t want to do it all again. And I didn’t want Dad to see it. And I didn’t want to be pregnant. And I wanted to rewind the whole thing, so I didn’t stupid my way through life.
“You’ve been so busy with your extracurriculars, your mother is worried.” His eyes left mine and went to the medicine cabinet. He wasn’t looking in the mirror. They traced the edge, moving up and down.
“I’m a little tired. Can I skip the cake?”
“Be back down in half an hour for pictures.”
His sharp expression meant that was an order. I could be green around the gills, and I’d be expected to smile for the camera.
“Okay.” I wanted him to go away.
He looked from behind me to my face, scanning it. I felt made of thin blown glass, hollow and transparent. Too fine. Too delicate. Worth too much to be broken without everyone I cared about getting upset over the loss.
I tilted my head down and went around him, to the doorway, where the promised comfort of my bed waited. He’d have to follow me out and leave me alone for thirty minutes. I could do a lot of calming down in half an hour.
I’d just stepped onto the carpet in my room. It was mauve and grey. And by the second step, the colors became a woolen blur as I was pulled back and spun around.
Dad’s face was beet red. He held a clear plastic vial in his left hand as he gripped my arm with his right. “What is this?”
“You’re hurting me.” I tried to squirm away, but he only gripped me tighter.
“What have you done?”
I was so scared I could barely think. My father had never raised a hand to me, but I’d always known there was an ocean of violent potential under his smooth veneer. A cold, deep sea that remained placid but was ever-threatening.
“It’s negative!” I shouted, not knowing if that was true. I hadn’t gotten a look into the vial before he stepp
ed in.
“This?” He turned the vial toward me, open top to my face.
The yellow liquid had been slipped down. At the bottom, a brown ring of thicker membrane slid down, going elliptical before drooping into a line of accusation.
I didn’t have an answer. Not an excuse or reason. Nothing but an explanation of what I’d been doing with my free time, which I was sure he didn’t want to hear.
“Who is he?” Dad growled.
Wasn’t that the question of the year.
“Let go!”
“Were you raped?”
“What?”
“I’ll kill whoever did it.”
“Dad! No!” I was crying now. I hadn’t had enough time to process what I’d done to myself. I felt the spit and tears as if they were someone else’s. Dad’s face was lost in a wet, grey cloud, and my breath came in hard sobs. I choked out what I thought was a bit of reassurance. “It wasn’t rape.”
He twisted me around until I was facedown over my white footboard, the thin wood painful on my abdomen. While I was trying to navigate around that and the tears that flowed with the force of a storm, I felt a sharp pain on my bottom.
A strange clarity cut through my sobs, and my crying stopped as if I’d skidded to a stop at the edge of a cliff while the tears dropped to the bottom.
Dad spanked me again, and the impact turned breaths into grunts. I tried to turn, but he held me and whacked me again. I was confused, pinned. I looked around at him. His hand was raised with fingers flat, and elbow bent to strike me again, and he was looking at his hand as if it had done something he didn’t understand.
Then in that split second, he looked down at me, and we made eye contact. He saw me but didn’t. I didn’t know what he saw. I didn’t know what math he was doing in his head. The violent sea within him didn’t calm. It didn’t drain into a huge funnel and gurgle away, but the tide changed and moved like a lumbering beast, receding over the horizon to a place I couldn’t see.
He let me go. I slumped over the footrail. I took two deep breaths, and only the first one was an incomplete hitch.
I had neither choices nor time. My family, for all their money, was very Catholic, very rigid, very traditional. I had tons of privilege but no rights. So if I was going to abort this baby, it was now or never. Let them disown me.
I had to run away.
Chapter 11
1994
Business had been rough for a few years, but Audio City was still the best music studio in Los Angeles. It had a certain something. Reputation-plus-talent-plus-acoustics-times-equipment-equals-hotter-than-hot. Before my parents’ anniversary party, information like that had mattered to me. But sitting with the head engineer in a soundproof room that smelled of stale sweat and cigarettes, all that mattered was the plan—a ruse to get a settlement—and the client, a cellist who might have been ripped off by a wealthy producer.
“You were the only band in our history who canceled studio dates,” Teddy said.
I vaguely remembered him. Back then, before Bullets and Blood, I’d slinked in with Rowdy Boys. Teddy’d had a full head of hair and a smile full of straight white teeth. When I sat in the booth with him and Drew (née Indy), Teddy was made of comb-over and nicotine stains.
“We got our own place,” Drew answered.
“Still running from what I hear.”
“Yup. Switching over to digital.”
Teddy shook his head and snapped a pack of cigarettes off the mixing board. “Fucking digital.” He pushed open the pack with his thumb and offered me one.
I took it. Then Drew surprised me by taking out his own pack and lighter.
“It’s the future,” Drew said, shaking out a smoke.
“Fuck the future.” Teddy lit mine then his own.
I pulled on it, tasting the dry heat of tar and letting the nicotine run through my blood. I hadn’t smoked in umpteen years, and I’d forgotten how much I liked it.
Teddy picked a little piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “Digital wouldn’t help you with your cello problem.” He flicked the speck of a leaf away. “It’s those pops and hums that make magnetic tape sound warm. It’s what got you here. If we recorded on digital, it wouldn’t mean shit.”
“Yeah,” Drew said.
“Digital’s gonna kill music.”
“Sure.”
“But you don’t care no more.” He flicked his hand at Drew, from his fancy shoes to his conservative haircut. “Lawyer.”
“Douche.”
Teddy surprised me by laughing. “Yeah. Know thyself, right? I got it. Give me that production request or whatever you call it, and I’ll show it to our lawyer. He’ll get back to you.” He held out his hand to shake Drew’s.
Here was the problem. The request for production wasn’t worth shit because the fingerprinting thing was made up. Even a shyster lawyer would figure that out.
“How about a deal?” I said.
Teddy’s hand froze midway up, and he looked at me. Drew looked both surprised and curious.
I swallowed hard. “Let us down into the master archives for a Bullets and Blood record. The debut was recorded here, right?”
“Right.”
“We’ll just peek at the Opus 33 masters. See if it’s worthwhile so you don’t have to blow two hundred an hour on a lawyer. In return, Indy here will show you how they’re going digital. Show you the right equipment. So you can decide for yourself if you can switch.”
Teddy stubbed his cigarette into a half-full ashtray. I glanced at Drew. His head was tilted down and toward me, thumb to forehead to hide his expression. His cigarette burned hot to the filter as he smiled.
“Yeah,” Drew said, looking up. “We’ll do a consult. Above board. You can probably go digital without switching completely. I know you get people and lose people because you’re analog. Let’s see if you can’t do both.”
Teddy considered, looking away, then back at us. Shifting his box of smokes, shaking his foot, then nodding to himself.
“Yeah, why the fuck not?” He stuck his hand out again, and Drew grabbed it. “Why the fuck not?”
Chapter 12
1982 – BEFORE THE NIGHT OF THE QUAALUDES
They started getting that studio together almost immediately. They had recording and tour dates to keep. So during the day, the house was filled with workmen, artists, and sound engineers in leather Members Only jackets.
I was confused about Strat and Indy. For the next week or so, I was with them all the freaking time. Like a piece of furniture for the new house. Sometimes they beeped me, and sometimes I E-Y-E-B-R-O-Wed them. I met them wherever they were, and we proceeded to act as though we were all in some kind of relationship.
But they didn’t make a move. Strat had eyes like fingers—they had a way of getting between my skin and my clothes. But he never did anything about it. Not in the week after I told them how to have their house and live in it too.
Once, when we were at a party in Malibu, Indy put his hand on my shoulder and said something in my ear. I don’t even remember what it was, but the music was loud, so he had to talk in my ear if he wanted me to hear him.
Strat came up right after that, like a hawk, and put his finger in Indy’s face, lips tense. Indy shrugged. It was the first time I saw them act like anything but best brothers.
Indy put up his right hand. “Pledge, asshole.”
“Fuck you.” But Strat put up his right hand. I could see the matching snake tattoos inside their forearms. “Pledge open.”
“Nothing,” Indy spat. “Nothing, okay?”
“Closed, dude. I’m sorry.”
They put their hands down and hugged, back-slapping as if they’d had a whole conversation.
“What was that about?” I asked when Strat drifted off.
Indy shrugged, and someone came to talk to him. Male-musician-slash-producer-slash-A and R guy. Thirties. Black plastic sunglasses with red lenses hiding his blued-out dilated pupils. Cartoonishly hip. Guys like that
were always talking to Strat and Indy, and they had a way of making sure I was treated like a life support system for a pussy. It would take three minutes for him to angle his body so that he was between Indy and me, then he’d turn his back to me.
Like clockwork, I was looking at the back of his jacket.
Fuck this. I didn’t understand any of it. I went inside, picking my way through couplings and conversations on my way to the front door. I’d opened it, letting the cool West Side breeze in when Strat caught up.
“Where you going?” he asked, nipples hard from the night air.
I let my hand slip from the doorknob. “To buy you a shirt.”
He gave me that look. The one that made me warm and tingly. The room was full of women wearing strings and little triangles, yet he was looking at me as if he wanted to devour me skin to bone.
Yes, it turned me on, but it also annoyed me.
“What was that about back there? With Indy?” I asked.
“What was what?”
“Fuck this.”
I opened the door, but I didn’t get far. He leaned over and pressed it closed.
“You don’t know?” he asked. “You can’t tell?”
“Since the first day you brought me to this house, you’ve treated me like a little sister—”
I had more to say. Much more. A speech worthy of Ronald Reagan, but he laughed. I just ate those words, chewed and swallowed them, because I’d seriously misread something. He opened the door, still smiling like a fuckhead.
“Beep us,” was all he got to say before I left.
I had an orange button on my beeper. I pressed it, and my driver pulled up. Like magic. His job was to take me to and from whatever activity I had going on. His job wasn’t to tell me where to go or tell my family where I was. I barely made it half a block back toward home before I knew I’d beep six-oh-six E-Y-E-B-R-O-W. Or Indy. It didn’t matter. I was addicted to them the way Lynn was addicted to blues. The excitement of their company was the best drug in the world.
Chapter 13
Here’s a comprehensive list of what it means to be mature for your age.
