It wasn’t long after my mom was admitted that I was born, on a balmy June morning at 5:00 a.m. in the middle of 1977. A nurse had knocked on the waiting-room window, and when Grandma and Nana Dar turned around, she had me in her arms. “She was holding you like a football, with your little chin in between her thumb and forefinger,” my grandma says, stifling some laughter. “We couldn’t figure out why it was so strange until we really looked at you, and goddammit, your eyes were wide-open. We couldn’t believe it.” She always takes time here to imitate my newborn head bobbing around, gazing out the window. “You were just dah, dah, dah, looking around, even though you couldn’t see a damn thing. You weren’t crying—just looking. It was the creepiest thing,” she says, laughing. “But my god, you were beautiful. From the minute you came into this world, you wanted to see everything in it.”
Moments later, my mom came cruising by on a stretcher, sitting up cross-legged and smiling. “That was fast!” she said. She was still wearing her socks.
I was a month early, but healthy and ready to go. When Mom and Grandma brought me home a few days later, everyone in the house was excited to meet me. Everyone except Cory.
Up until this point, Cory had been spoiled rotten. He was a cute baby with a teenage aunt and uncle, so someone was always around to play with and dote on him. He had two grandparents all to himself, and toys showed up without provocation. Cory brought a level of doll-like fun to the family; Aunt Rene and Uncle Bobby loved dressing him up in big sunglasses and wigs, while Grandma dragged him all over the house with her while she did household chores. He blended in seamlessly to the rhythm of the house, a tiny reminder of the ways families persist despite all the things left unsaid.
My mom and grandma had just gotten through the door; introductions were being made all over the place, and people were taking turns looking at me. Cory was nowhere to be found, but there was a steady thump coming from the bedroom. My mom called out to him, and he slowly walked into the living room, dragging a yellow plastic wiffleball bat behind him. As people cleared the path to my mom, Cory got closer to the mysterious blob in her arms. She bent over gently and said, “Cory, come meet your baby sister!”
Even now, Grandma can barely tell this part of the story without wheezing herself half to death. “Dani, he looked at you with those beady little hazel eyes, and then all of a sudden, wham!” she says, as she smacks her hands together. The thumping sound coming from the bedroom earlier must have been Cory taking some practice swings, because as soon as he saw me, he hit me in the face with that wiffleball bat as hard as he could.
“Oh, you started crying, he started crying, your mother started crying,” my grandma says, rolling her eyes. “Everyone was crying but me. I couldn’t stop laughing. That little bastard just popped you right in the face. Hilarious.”
From the very beginning I was loved, even if I’m not sure I was ever wanted. Mom was welcomed home, but she was right back where she started, with more baggage than she had when she left. I was conceived on the run, the ballast that brought my mom back to everything she was trying to escape. One baby is manageable, but two babies, two babies when you are unmarried, when your boyfriend is actively cheating on you and seems to have no interest in the children you’ve created, two babies is too many to handle on your own. Of course Mom came home—a small part of her must have seen what was on the horizon, having just been through the late-night feedings and endless diaper changes with my brother, done mostly on her own. She came back, knowing that her bad decisions, her wildness, her recklessness would cover her in a permanent stain. She came back to restriction, to a mother who thought she knew better how to raise us, who made her feel small and stupid. She came back for us, knowing that Cory and I needed some of the family stability she took for granted, some of the structure she rebelled against so vehemently. Mom was home to stay—not by choice but by necessity, tamed only by circumstance. It was the first sacrifice she ever made for me.
2.
In one of my earliest memories, I’m sitting on the floor of Grandma’s living room, the fabric of her mustard yellow couch scratching against my neck while I clutched a McDonald’s apple pie over my eyes with both hands in an effort to block out the world. The gray-green Zenith TV in the corner across the room provided the only light in the pitch-black living room. On the screen, Michael Myers walked through a building on fire. His slow, stumbling amble was only made scarier by the fact that the entire world around him was on fire. Was he alive or dead? I couldn’t tell what was scarier: a living man walking through fire, or an indestructible ghost. I dropped the pie slightly when I heard the room spring to life with gasps and shouts of “Oh hell no,” curiosity nudging me past my limits, as “Mr. Sandman” played over the credits.
I used to love sitting as close to that TV as possible on Saturday mornings, Poltergeist-style, right after Grandma turned off Soul Train and Mom started making her grocery list for the week in the lined Mead notepad with the red cover that was always next to the phone. I’d slowly wave my forearms close to the screen until I felt it—the fuzzy buzz of electricity still pulsing through the cathode that made the hairs on my arms stand up. It was a private game, a secret discovery. Grandma would sometimes come in to get the vacuum out of the closet and start her Saturday cleaning during my TV game; without looking, she’d toss out a quick “You’re going to ruin your eyes sitting that close to the television, child,” without even realizing it wasn’t turned on. Sometimes she started vacuuming around me, running over the same spot a few times, trying to contain the ash from her cigarette as it made fresh piles in her wake.
But on this particular night, that television set became my worst enemy.
It was a regular occurrence for Mom and Grandma to invite friends over to hang out. Since Cory and I were still small and neither of them had a car, they were mostly trapped in the house with us all day. By the end of the week we were all on each other’s nerves and at each other’s throats, but a visit from a friend could help break up that tension.
For me, these nights were magical. It was easier to stay up past my bedtime when there were other adults in the house. They were so busy talking to one another that they didn’t notice me sitting under the kitchen table playing with my Holly Hobbie doll or practicing with my Barrel of Monkeys. There was always so much laughter when other people were at Grandma’s house; bottles of beer and booze that I’d never seen in the pantry would suddenly be piled up on the kitchen floor. If they were playing cards, a low, hazy cloud of cigarette smoke would float around their heads like a gauzy satellite. I wanted to know what was making them throw their heads back and howl like that, who they were talking about that made my grandma laugh so hard she threatened to pee her pants.
Occasionally someone would accidentally kick me under the kitchen table, and Mom would slide me out by my underarms and send me back to bed.
I remember being excited the night my grandma decided to scare the innocence out of me. There was always a moment when it was time for bed that Mom could waver—she could send us to bed before everyone started arriving, or, to our delight, she could choose to let us stay up. Cory and I hit peak wildness at bedtime, and it was difficult for Mom to control us—we always ran the risk of pushing her too far, to the point where she would turn out the lights, tell us to shut up, and close the door. Staying up late was an acquiescence for all of us—Cory and I made promises of calmness we could not keep, and Mom got to feel like she could get an hour or two of peace. The rush of adrenaline I used to get when someone told me I could stay up past my bedtime has since been replaced with the wave of euphoria I feel whenever I realize I can go to sleep before 9:00 p.m. But at the time, I was psyched. I imagine my mom was also psyched that there would be other people on hand to take care of us and give her a little bit of a break. If you ever wondered how difficult it is to be a single parent, just keep in mind that scarring your children for life is apparently preferable to reading The Monster at
the End of This Book for the hundredth time in a row.
One of Mom’s friends had brought over McDonald’s apple pies for me and Cory; we curled up on the floor with our treats to enjoy whatever exciting movie we were about to watch with the adults.
The pie was lava-hot, so Mom told us to wait a little while until we ate it. Without the pie as a distraction, I was just straight-up watching a slasher flick at four years old. Every time someone was murdered, I felt the fuzzy-buzz feeling without being anywhere near the TV; I was electrified with fear. I would shout questions in an effort to get this feeling out of my body. “Who was that! Was that the killer!” I’d shout, while a cacophony of adults shushed me into silence. “Eat your apple pie,” Mom said, her eyes in rapt attention on whatever was happening on the TV screen. I started taking the tiniest bites possible, not sure how long I’d have to make this comfort pie last.
The only thing I vividly remember about the movie is the end. Michael Myers walking through a room full of flames to try to attack Jamie Lee Curtis. Who knows how he got there or why he was doing it—I’ve blocked out the answers to these questions harder than the memory of the first time I told the boy I liked that I thought he was cute, and I refuse to watch the movie to this day. I only know that while everyone else laughed and shouted at the television in true Black family fashion, I let my apple pie drop to the ground, and I burst into tears as soon as Michael Myers’s mask atop his slow-moving body appeared in the fire. The room got quiet for a second, and on the far end of the couch, my grandmother was looking at me. She doubled in half to lean over and look at my tiny, freckled, four-year-old face. “Are you crying?” she cackled incredulously.
I glanced up at my mom, sitting on the couch cross-legged just above me, the way she did when she pulled my thick, nappy hair into tight cornrow braids every Saturday. Her eyes were fixed on the TV, where we had just watched a deranged lunatic murder fifteen people in a neighborhood that looked strikingly similar to our own. Was I crying? “Ye-he-he-hessss!” I wailed. My grandma’s sudden focus on my emotional state made me cry harder than I expected, and I let it all out in heaving sobs.
Without missing a beat, Grandma let out a huge laugh, which set off a tidal wave of laughter in the room. She quickly caught her breath and told me it was time for bed. “If you’re going to cry, go cry in your room,” my grandma said, taking a long drag from her cigarette and turning her attention back to the TV. “I don’t want to miss what happens next.”
Cory took little pity on my apple-pie-crumb-covered eyes and used the moment as a chance to cement his reputation as a tough kid. “I’m not scared,” he said loudly, like a little snitch, from his position on the couch, where he was wedged between my grandma and Uncle Joe. I couldn’t tell if he actually liked this movie or if he was just happy that I hated it so much. Everyone was already laughing, but this big pronouncement from such a tiny person made them all double over.
I was done with the whole scene—the laughing, Cory’s bravado, and, most of all, Michael Myers. I used the couch for leverage and pushed myself up, then walked toward our bedroom to a chorus of “Awww, come back, Dani!” from some of the more sensitive people in the room. I walked slowly, wanting everyone to see the way my deep, sucking sobs made my whole body shake.
Nobody followed me.
I climbed into bed and pulled the covers over me, still wearing my overalls and a T-shirt. I cried myself to sleep to the sounds of everyone laughing and howling in the living room. By the time I woke up the next morning, I was in my soft, red onesie.
At least someone cared enough to put me in my pajamas.
* * *
—
We were living at my grandparents’ house and sharing a room with my mom, the same room my aunt abandoned a year after my mom came back to New York with a newborn in tow. Aunt Rene had moved in with some friends in a small apartment in Middletown, New York, where she would soon start community college. I guess living with a couple of hapless nineteen-year-olds is far better than sharing a room with three people when two of those people are babies. The bedroom suddenly became all ours, a sort of studio apartment within my grandparents’ house for our entire little family. Each of our beds was pushed against a different wall; when you walked into the room, Mom’s bed was on the right, my bed was on the left, and Cory’s bed was against the back wall. In that tight space, it didn’t take me long to realize that Mom was a total pushover at bedtime. She tried to put us to bed at 7:00 p.m. each night, only to spend the next two hours fighting us as Cory and I took turns jumping out of bed to complain about each other. We were two and three; most of our complaints were just about the fact that the other person existed. Mom would roll her eyes and ratchet up her voice to shrill levels. The funniest was when she tried to persuade us. “Don’t you want to go to sleep so you can wake up tomorrow and have Cap’n Crunch?” Keep your bribes, lady—when you’re three years old, tomorrow never comes. If we kept at it long enough, Mom would eventually give up. “Stay up all night! Who cares! If you’re tired tomorrow, don’t come crying to me!” We’d go wild for a few minutes, blissfully unaware that the hammer was about to drop.
Grandma had a different approach to our nighttime restlessness. “If I see your little Black ass in that doorway after I tuck you in, we’re going to fight—you hear me?” I can only assume that most three-year-olds get a bedtime story and a kiss on the cheek before they drift off into sugarplum fairy dreams; my grandma would get directly in our faces, squaring off with us nose-to-nose the way boxers do at the beginning of a fight, and start leveling threats to let us know she was not fucking around. Mom would try to interject. “C’mon, Ma, I got it.” But Grandma was quick with a cutting remark. “If you’ve ‘got it,’ why are they still awake?” Her house, her rules, her stubbornness.
The only light in the house at bedtime was the pulsing glow of the TV; Grandma would sit in her armchair and laugh her Pillsbury Doughboy laugh, chain-smoking. I recognized Johnny Carson’s voice long before I ever saw his face. Every time Mom or Grandma laughed, I felt like I was missing out on something. My grandma laughs like Nelson Muntz, with a strong, punctuated “ha-HA!” on the end of every cackle, and my mom does more of an inward, high-pitched “HEEE!” that peters out as the breath leaves her body. Both of their laughs are infectious. Nothing made Grandma laugh harder than horror movies, though—watching people get killed in various ways always brought out her deepest guffaw. She considered horror movies training manuals for life; her response to people getting whacked was to laugh, shout to the TV about how stupid the characters were, and then tell them they deserved it. Even though I cowered under the covers at the sound of people screaming, the idea that there was a hilarious, secret part of the adult world that was unavailable to me made me furious. I tried angling my little body so that I could see into the living room, but most nights I just watched the shadows the TV made on Grandma and Granddad’s bedroom door, drifting off to sleep in a haze of smoke.
Cory and I were rambunctious, and every night was a new chance to invite an ass-kicking. When you’re small, there’s nothing more terrifying than hearing the loud thunk and intentionally heavy footsteps of an angry adult coming your way. It’s a portent of punishment, a signal that you’d pushed things too far. My grandma had perfected her stomp long before we were born, and she wielded it with precision. Once, in the middle of a fun game where we threw stuffed animals at each other and shrieked, Grandma stomped into the room and right up to Cory’s face. I was frozen as she calmly told him through tight lips, “If you don’t shut up and go to bed, I’m going to beat that little ass so hard you won’t be able to sit for a week.” I hadn’t taken so much as a breath before she was in my face, the light from the hallway bouncing off her glasses. “You too—I will take you out to the backyard and leave you there.” Her threats got less whimsical and more realistic the angrier we made her.
One night, Cory rolled out of bed to pee. Instead of scooting to
the end of the bed and putting his feet down, he just rolled his little body right to the edge, thinking he would slide to the floor. Instead, he landed torso-first in the large, mint green Tupperware bowl filled with scalding water and Vicks VapoRub that Mom had put next to the bed to combat the drafty house and cure Cory’s oncoming cold. In the seventies, it was perfectly normal for you to put a lava-hot bowl of water underneath your children’s bed in the winter—you were lauded for your efforts at keeping them warm instead of being locked up immediately for putting them in the most obvious path of danger. I woke up when he screamed.
I don’t remember much in the chaos of what happened next. My mom turned on the light and peeled Cory out of the bowl. Grandma stomped in and wanted to know what was the matter. Everyone started leveling blame—you shouldn’t have put the water so close to the bed, you shouldn’t have gotten out of bed, stop crying, call the ambulance. Cory’s mouth was frozen open while fat tears slid down his face in a constant stream. He was in shock.
I didn’t go to the hospital, but I don’t remember who stayed behind with me as my mom and grandma wrapped Cory in a blanket and whisked him away. I cried—not because of the awful, encyclopedia-size red burn that I saw blazed across his stomach but because I was pretty sure Cory was never coming back. In my mind, after telling him one thousand times to stop getting out of bed, my mom finally set a booby trap, and he literally fell for it.
Cory did not die, but he was in excruciating pain for a while. He came home from the hospital, torso wrapped up like a mummy. The next few days were filled with his screams as he ran away from Mom every time she tried to change his bandage. He told me the other day that he can still remember the smell of the burn as if it just happened.
The Ugly Cry Page 2
