“What do you mean?” my mother asked. “You had money. You had a savings account. I asked you about it.”
“I didn’t have a savings account,” I said. “I was living from paycheck to paycheck. I didn’t make enough money to feed myself sometimes, and I was always late on rent. I worked two jobs until Peter gave me that one, and that wasn’t until we met you and Frank for dinner that night, on my birthday.”
“What?” My mother gaped at me.
I confessed everything. It seemed as if one hard truth had freed up the way for others. It was a catalyst for me to come clean about all of the lying I’d done since moving to New York City, all the false assurances to my mother that everything was, in fact, just fine, when nothing was. I told her about walking dogs, about cocktail waitressing, about the horrible apartment, the things I’d pawned to keep it even if I hated it, the way I’d scrimped and saved only to pay my bills, the utter despair I’d felt that I wasn’t living my dream, that I was barely surviving at all. I told her all of it, absolutely unloaded, and by the time I was done, I was hoarse and exhausted, emptied out.
Seeing my mother’s mouth work wordlessly in disbelief and shock undid me. I had hurt her so badly that suddenly the truth had come pouring out of me: all the lies I’d fed her over the past months about my successes in New York City detangled. I didn’t understand what I was trying to do in this moment, only that I’d confessed to ruining my mother’s wedding and relationship and life and I wanted a completely clean slate while I was at it. It was the only way either of us was going to move forward.
Maybe I was just trying to protect myself. And maybe it was a punishment.
“Gemma, I don’t understand why you thought you had to lie to me about all of this,” she finally said in a small, sad voice. “I’m your mother. You can tell me anything.”
And now I had to say the worst truth of all, the one buried at the heart of the world of lies I’d built.
“I would imagine that I told you those lies to protect you,” I said. “Much like you lied all those years to protect me.”
Chapter 14
Childhood had, overall, been a positive experience for me, but it was only through the intervention — and lies — of my mother. If I had known the truth of the ugliness of that period, I wouldn’t have such an ambivalent attitude toward everything.
It had been as normal as it could’ve been. I had gone to birthday parties my classmates held, played in the park after school in the kinds of quick and fluid friendships that form on monkey bars. From the outside, my little family looked normal. From the inside, from my perspective, anyway, it seemed that everything was normal. Sure, maybe the dads of all of the little girls I played with were more visible presences in their lives, but nothing else really seemed amiss.
And that was exactly what my mother had wanted to do: present the illusion of normalcy. The truth was, our family situation was far from normal. I would never have known if I hadn’t witnessed the truth for myself.
My father was absent often. When he was at home, he liked to exorcise whatever insecurities or frustrations he had inside himself by hitting my mother. I didn’t discover this until I was already in my teens — a child nearly grown — but it had been going on for the duration of their marriage. It was, perhaps, the reason why I played outside so often — if not in the park, then on the front lawn, the driveway. Why I attended sleepovers nearly every weekend but never hosted any of them myself. Why my mother skipped parent-teacher conferences or asked to conduct them by phone. Why she styled her hair to fall romantically over one eye. Why she caked on her makeup and kept the lights low throughout the house.
None of it was strange to me because she had made it canon. My mother had shaped the reality that we needed to embrace. She’d edited out all the ugly parts and put together happiness for me from the footage that remained. She was so careful to protect me that I only saw my father in glimpses and backward glances as I was shooed upstairs at his arrivals. I wouldn’t have been able to pick his face out of a lineup of other tall, dark-haired, mustached men. I didn’t even know, for sure, what he did for a living. Where he stayed when he wasn’t at home. I wasn’t to bother him. My mother made that much clear. And if anyone asked, he was a businessman — one who traveled almost constantly.
“Go up and watch TV,” my mother would tell me. I was the envy of all my friends because I had a television in my room — one that was secondhand and peppered its programs with static snow, but a television nonetheless. It was only there because it was a distraction mechanism. Something I could turn on to drown out the loud music my mother would play as a distraction from her own private hell.
My father would beat her to the tune of soaring gospel, golden oldies, sweeping classical arrangements, and whatever else the radio downstairs could pipe into our lives. She wasn’t picky about her music. He wasn’t picky about where his blows landed.
How did I make it through my childhood without realizing anything was wrong? It was a testament to my mother’s misguided resilience, her careful blocking — sitting on a couch for two straight days as if nothing were wrong when he’d broken a couple of her ribs and she couldn’t walk without limping or crying out in pain, or always standing on my left if her left eye was blackened, or employing a platoon of scarves when he’d left fingermarks on her neck. Or maybe it was a testament of my ability to firmly believe that everything was okay.
I wasn’t a rebellious teen, but I was very busy. My mother’s emphasis on spending as little time at home as possible translated into me signing up for all the extracurricular activities I thought I could handle. Academic teams and debate competitions and writing club deadlines kept me after school almost every afternoon into evening, or at the library nearby. My schedule was unpredictable. I could be home some days directly after school, or I could stay overnight at one of my girlfriends’ houses, preparing for a presentation the next day.
It got harder for my mother to schedule her own beatings based on when I would be home.
On one of those days when I returned to the house early, immediately after school, I meant to go right back out again. All I’d wanted to do was stop by and get a notebook I’d forgotten that morning that I needed for my activity that afternoon.
It was because of that lapse of organization that my reality was shattered.
I burst into the kitchen to find my father’s arm in the middle of a downward arc that connected to my mother’s face with a crack audible even over the show tune the radio blared. We looked at one another with equal horror — my mother because I’d discovered the ugliness she had worked for so many years to conceal, my father because he probably didn't even know he had offspring, and me because the first time I got a good, long look at my father’s face was while he was in the middle of hitting my mother’s face.
I was a smart girl. I knew that when she played the radio loudly, my mother wanted her privacy and I was to stay away. Now I knew why that privacy was so important to her. She hadn’t wanted me to see her getting hit. And she hadn’t wanted me to see my father doing the hitting.
I couldn’t explain my reaction to the bizarre scene. But all I could think of doing in the heat of the moment was flinging my backpack at my father and running for it as if I were the one getting hit. I didn’t slow down until I was out of breath, panting and sobbing at the same time, at an intersection in town that I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten to. I sat on a park bench until dark, then slowly picked my way home, my feet aching, my muscles sore from my impromptu sprint.
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table without the lights on, the radio deafening in its silence. I flipped the switch at the door and she looked up at me, the welt on her cheek from my father’s hand still visible.
“He won’t be coming back here anymore,” she told me, and I couldn’t tell whether she was happy or sad. It was probably a mixture of feelings too complex for me to understand. I still didn’t understand it, to this day.
“Good,” I’d rep
lied, smelly and disheveled, aware that I’d missed my extracurricular activity, hadn’t had dinner, and still needed to do homework for tomorrow’s classes. I dragged myself upstairs, took a shower, pulled on my pajamas, and put myself to bed.
My mother came to me at some point during the night and woke me up. Her words still seemed like a dream to me, even today.
“Your father did the best he could,” she said in a tone that made me question whether she was actually talking to me for my benefit or hers. “He wasn’t raised by good people. He did things he was taught to be right. He provided for our home, and that’s what kept us here. We wouldn’t have had money otherwise. We wouldn’t have been able to stay in this house, or this town. You would’ve had to go to a different school. And I don’t know what I would’ve done for work.”
“Are you going to tell the police?” I asked, bleary.
“No. Absolutely not. If the police know, everyone will know. People will pity you, Gemma, and that is the worst thing of all. Pity.”
I could’ve argued that getting hit by a person who was supposed to love you and care for you was the worst thing at all, but I slipped back into slumber.
It was the only time we’d talked about what had happened — until now.
My mother had been shocked into silence by my recollections and revelations, staring straight ahead, not even at the television. All of this had happened at this very house, and yet she continued to live in it. That was perhaps what puzzled me most of all. After my father had finally stopped showing up to use her as a punching bag, she’d never even moved on with her life, never tried for a fresh start.
I’d been excited for her when she’d announced that she was dating Frank, thinking that she was finally ready to move on with her life, but I ruined that for her.
“Why didn’t you leave this place?” I asked her, waving my hand around the room. “Doesn’t this house hold all of that drama still for you?”
“Lots of happy memories, too,” she said softly.
“Like what?” I demanded. “What could’ve possibly happened in this house that made a happy memory?”
“When you lost your first tooth,” my mother said, the corners of her mouth quirking upward for a brief second. “How it just popped out that morning when you were brushing your teeth before school, no blood or pain, just surprise. You screamed, and I came running. Had to pick it out of a puddle of toothpaste foam you’d spat in the sink before it went down the drain. I let you take it to school even though it wasn’t your day for show and tell.”
“Mom…” What was I supposed to say to that? It was only a vague memory for me, but it had been the first thing that popped into her head. How could that simple occurrence outweigh all of the other heartache that had taken place here?
My mother looked at me. “All I ever wanted to do was give you a happy life.”
“And you did.” There were tears in my eyes because there were tears in hers. “I would never dispute that.”
“Then why are you telling me all this?” she asked, the television program we’d been watching long since ended, some other story now the background music to our suffering. “Why would you want to rehash such unhappiness?”
“Because it wasn’t fair to you to pretend that nothing was happening,” I said. “Because I have always felt guilty that you tried to protect me from the ugliness that was always present at home.”
“I didn’t protect you well enough,” she murmured.
“You did the best that you could,” I argued. “You went above and beyond. I never knew what was happening until I saw it with my own eyes, and then I realized that you shouldn’t have endured all of that just for me.”
My mother shook her head. “You don’t understand. You are my child. I was afraid for your safety. I would have done anything to protect your physical health, your mental health, your sense of well-being.”
“But you sacrificed your own happiness.”
“And I would do it again in a heartbeat. This is one of those things, Gemma, that you can’t understand until you have a child of your own. It might not make sense to you now, but I would’ve cut my own veins if it meant that you would be okay. I could’ve endured anything — and did — at just the thought of you.”
I swiped at a stray tear that slipped down my cheek. “I wish you hadn’t had to. I wish you could’ve gotten out of it sooner.”
“It was nothing,” my mother said dismissively. “Not when the goal was to make sure you believed that life was good. That life is always supposed to be good. You’re not supposed to struggle and struggle. Good things are supposed to happen to good people.”
“But life doesn’t really work like that,” I said.
“No, it doesn’t.” My mother dabbed at her own eyes. “You should’ve been able to talk to me about it when you were struggling in New York City.”
“I didn’t want you to worry about me,” I said. “Not after everything you did for me.”
“Gemma, you are my life. It is my job to worry about you.”
“I wanted you to believe that my life was good, too.” I sucked in a breath and let it out again. “And you told me, that night, that the reason you couldn’t leave my father was because you didn’t have the money to.” She flinched, but I persisted. “And I knew how important that point was for you to make — that if you don’t have enough money to be independent, you might become dependent on a bad situation.”
“I never wanted to make you feel like you had to lie about your life,” she said. “I know just as well as anyone that there can be some low spots.”
I had to smile inwardly at that. Trust my proud mother to refer to the years-long span of her life in which her husband beat her as a “low spot.”
“Well, it was all high spots for a New York minute,” I mused. “My dreams came true. And then I ruined it for everyone.”
My mother looked crestfallen. “If it wasn’t meant to be, we just have to let it be. We can’t do anything about it now.”
“I’m so sorry it happened like this. You seemed like you were really happy with Frank, and he seemed like he cared about you a lot.”
My mother waved her hand at me as if to dispel further conversation on the matter. She opened her mouth to say something that was probably going to be pithy, but the doorbell rang.
“Who could that be?” she wondered. “Gemma, if you ordered us pizza again, we are going to blow up to irreversible proportions.”
“Pizza helps heal broken hearts,” I said, pushing myself up from the couch and stretching my legs. How long had I been sitting there? I was used to city life, used to walking around everywhere every single day. It was too easy to be sedentary in the suburbs. Maybe there was wisdom to my mother’s words. Without exercise, our scorned women’s diets of pizza and ice cream with a smattering of wine was going to devastate our waistlines.
I threw open the door, reaching for my purse on the coat rack in the entrance, when I realized it wasn’t the pizza delivery at all.
It was Frank.
Chapter 15
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Frank said nothing, seeming not to know what to do or why he was there. He took a step backward, then stood firm, and cleared his throat.
“Is Lydia — that is, to say, your mother — here?” he asked. For all his billions of dollars, he didn’t seem very sure of himself. Maybe that was one of those things money couldn’t buy.
“She is here,” I said carefully, “but I’m not sure that she is available to see any visitors.”
I watched Frank’s Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he swallowed hard. He was nervous. What could he be doing here? I wouldn’t allow him to see my mother if he was only going to make her more upset. Neither of us needed that.
I turned as I heard a noise behind me and saw my mother stop in her way across the foyer to the kitchen, probably going to get some napkins and drinks for the pizza that should’ve been here by now. The pizza that should’ve been here instead of her
former fiancé.
“Lydia…” Her name left his mouth choked, as if the sound of her couldn’t quite make it past that bobbing Adam’s apple.
My mother had been shocked into stillness. She gaped at Frank standing in the open door for so long I worried that she’d lost her power of speech entirely.
“Excuse me? Did someone order pizza?”
Unnoticed by the three of us, a delivery person stepped around Frank bearing a couple of boxes of the thing we’d expected. The pizza jolted us all into movement: Frank stepped aside, my mother continued to the kitchen, and I settled up with the delivery person and stood holding the cardboard boxes whose contents were supposed to lick our wounds for us.
Frank was utterly unexpected. I heard my mother rattling around in the kitchen, and Frank and I both watched the delivery person drive away.
He turned back toward me. “Is it good pizza?”
I shrugged. “It’s pizza.”
“That’s all pizza’s meant to be, really. I don’t like the restaurants that have started reimagining pizza with the vegetable of the moment. Pizza’s meant to be chewy dough with tomato sauce, cheese, and pepperonis. Nothing more, nothing less. None of this cauliflower and kale buggery.”
I smiled and jumped as my mother cleared her throat at my shoulder. “Frank, would you like to join us for lunch?”
“Are you only just now having lunch?” he asked, checking his watch. “Lydia, it’s nearly six o’clock.”
“We’ve had a busy day,” she said. “Are you saying you don’t want to have pizza with us?”
“Have you ever known me to turn down a meal?” he asked, beaming as he slapped his ample stomach. “Pizza it is — as long as it’s got the right toppings.”
“Pepperoni only, apparently,” I informed my mother as she raised her eyebrows in question.
We all busied ourselves with ordinary tasks designed to bring normalcy to an abnormal situation. Frank set plates out while my mother poured drinks. I got some napkins and forks, in case anyone was going to try to be fancy about their pizza. It was funny. My mother and I would’ve just found another television show to watch and eaten the pizza straight from the boxes in the other room.
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