The Ugly Cry

by Danielle Henderson

  6.

  The hardest thing to convey to my nieces and nephews about growing up is the concept of unadulterated freedom. My childhood had three modes—being at school, being asleep, and being the fuck out of my mom’s way.

  When I was growing up, a successful day was one where I saw my mother for maybe two hours total. Helicopter parents were born in the 1980s, a direct response to their personal experience of being roundly ignored by their own parents. Children were not to be seen or heard and were definitely not to complain about any injuries sustained during the fifteen hours a day we were roaming the streets. The 1980s were a decade of neglect, and I haven’t felt freedom or terror like it since.

  Summers on Jersey Avenue were wild. Not only did Mom avoid scheduling any day camps or babysitting, but she also had no earthly idea how we spent our time once she left for work. The only rule was that we were not allowed in our own house until she came home.

  “Do not run in and out of this house all day with your friends,” Mom said sternly. “I don’t want you in here ruining this house.” It was never clear to me what we could ruin or how we could ruin it since we had to ask her for permission to play with our own toys, but in Mom’s mind, any child left alone in a house for more than three minutes was just looking for an excuse to rip couch cushions apart with their bare teeth.

  I loved being inside. I could fill an entire day reading library books, creating new outfits for my Barbie out of candy wrappers, or practicing crochet chains with the giant ball of yarn my grandma gave me. Inside was full of wonder, mystery, and the life of the mind. Outside was a hellscape of mosquito bites, rusty nails, and scraped knees.

  I once tried listing a slew of lurking emergencies for Mom in an effort to stay inside. Any one of them should have been enough for me to avoid nature, but she had a seemingly rational but ultimately insane response ready for every single question.

  “What if I get thirsty?”

  “There’s a hose on the side of the Garretts’ house.”

  “What if I get hungry?”

  “You shouldn’t be hungry before I come home from work.”

  “What if I have to poop?”

  “Find a tree and a leaf.”

  “What if I break my arm?”

  “Yell for help and someone will take you to the hospital.”

  “What if the person who comes to help me is a stranger? You said we should never go with or talk to strangers.”

  “If you ask me one more question you’re punished for the rest of the night. Go to bed, Dani.”

  I hated being outside, but I loved the freedom that came with the extended parental neglect. With my only company being other children, I quickly became accustomed to a more feral way of life. We learned how to read a clock in school only for it to immediately become completely irrelevant; we rose with the sun, like farmers, and came in for the night when the streetlights turned on. The more ambitious among us laid out their play clothes the night before so they could jump into their outfits like firefighters about to tackle a blaze. The truly epic among us slept in their filthy clothes after a night of fighting with their parents about when it was time to come inside in the first place.

  Even without arranging to meet, we all managed to wander out to the yards and streets of our neighborhoods around the same time, little Raisin Bran–fueled zombies. Sometimes you would hear a kid outside playing before anyone else, and that would be the clarion call to the rest of us to hustle. A cacophony of banging screen doors signaled our mass exodus. We were wild. We were free.

  Mostly we were heathens who pissed outdoors for months.

  Staying outside all day meant we had to find ways to be resourceful almost immediately. The biggest grift was trying to weasel your way into a bathroom. Stay-at-home moms everywhere lived by the same bible—No Child Left Inside.

  Sometimes someone would summon the courage to just knock on a door and ask. The mom would answer and narrow her eyes suspiciously. “Number one or number two?” If it was number one, she’d just shake her head. “Outside,” she’d say, pointing into the distance. “Can’t have you kids running in here all day.” If it was number two, she asked the cruelest question of all: “Can’t you just hold it until you go home?” Even if your guts felt like a freshly wrung T-shirt, you instinctively knew that the answer was yes. It took a real psychopath to ask that question, and a real sociopath to say no.

  Most of the time we just used any tree in any backyard. What did I use to wipe? Nothing at all, thank you very much. I tried to be careful, stretching my legs out as far as they would go, but I would invariably end up with a trickle of urine running down my leg, sometimes pooling in my Jellies. It was easy enough to spray down with a garden hose, even if there was no soap in sight; I just ran around smelling vaguely of piss until someone turned on a sprinkler for us to run through.

  There was no privacy in outdoor pissing, thanks to tree houses, a lack of fences, and kids intent on catching you in the act. We had a song and everything:

  I see your heinie

  So nice and shiny

  You better hide it

  Before I bite it

  Shitting was a nonissue. To my knowledge, there wasn’t a child alive in the 1980s who ever took a shit all summer long.

  My favorite part of summer was eating outside. It happened rarely; grilling wasn’t the culturally trumped-up necessity that it is today, but on the super-hot days, no one wanted to turn on their ovens. If my mom was cooking, she’d sizzle some hot dogs in a frying pan, and then we’d carry them carefully outside and eat on the steps. Sometimes the fireflies would jump out at us, signaling the transition from dusk to night.

  It was more of an affair when Mrs. Garrett was cooking. The Garretts had a yard and a picnic table that had once been a rustic red, now faded and patchy due to time and the elements. There were four kids in the Garrett family: Kerry, who was in high school and never ate with us; Timmy and Tommy, my brother’s friends; and Erin, my best friend. The three boys were always waging a war against me and Erin, so getting us all to sit down together at a table was a mild miracle.

  It was nice to be invited to eat with another family. The Garretts didn’t have a dad either, but I never asked why. I liked the feeling of not having to explain that part of myself to someone else and thought Erin might feel the same way.

  The thing I remember most about our outdoor picnics were Mrs. Garrett’s nails. She never purchased hot dog or hamburger buns and insisted on using the loaf of white bread that was already on hand. She always put ketchup on the hamburgers whether you asked for it or not; her red, lacquered nails matched the ketchup pushing through the bread under the pressure of her hand.

  The most memorable picnic started like any other: Mrs. Garrett flattened all of the food with her fingers, the boys were off on the edge of the yard poking something with a stick, and Erin and I ran around while we waited to eat. Mrs. Garrett brought out the big plate of burgers, and we all crowded around the picnic table, splinters shocking our thighs with every movement. For whatever reason, I was seated next to Tommy that night, something I actively tried to avoid. He smelled like cheese and always had Oreo stuff in his teeth. I found him repulsive. My mom was there, which was a rarity, but her presence probably pushed our assigned seats around a little.

  I heard the swish of the lighter before I felt the fire. One second I was eating a burger, and the next my mom was pushing me to the ground and slapping my head. I started crying; I wasn’t sure what was happening or why I was suddenly getting beat up by my mom, and I was terrified. She pulled me up to a standing position and started looking at my head. Everyone at the table was silent.

  “Why would you let him light your hair on fire like that?” Apparently Tommy had taken a lighter out of his pocket and lit the end of one of my pigtails on fire. My mom saw it from across the table and leapt into action.

  My hair smelle
d like it always did whenever Grandma used the hot comb, but the end of one pigtail was about an inch shorter than the other. It felt crunchy on the end. “How could you let him do that?” She was holding my head against her stomach, like she was smothering flames that weren’t there anymore. I was in a state of disbelief; I didn’t see the flames, and I accepted her version of what happened but couldn’t understand why I was the one in trouble. Mrs. Garrett and the rest of the kids just stood frozen in place, unsure of what they would see when I could finally pull away. No one else even saw Tommy do it.

  Mom was always getting it half right—she came to my rescue when I needed it but still found a way to blame me for needing to be rescued in the first place.

  7.

  There had been strict rules in place about how I was expected to act in public ever since I drifted away from my mom, Grandma, and Patsy at Sears when I was four years old. I thought it would be fun to play in the round rack of coats that I saw near the entrance, so when they weren’t looking, I walked back down the aisle toward it, pushed two coats aside, and slid between them to the pole in the center. I walked around it in compact little circles, feeling all the soft fabric brush against my skin and humming a little song. It was my own private ring-around-the-rosy. I was in heaven until I heard Grandma shouting my name in the abrupt way that always meant I was about to be in big trouble—it was the same voice she used whenever she had to ask me to do anything more than once, like pick up my Legos from the living room, or move my Holly Hobbie doll out of the bathroom sink, where I was constantly dousing her fabric-covered head in water to try to wash it.

  “Danielle Elizabeth Henderson! Get your ass over here!” she shouted. Grandma always used my full name when she was angry. None of the shoppers around her turned a head or lifted a finger to help; in the 1980s, department stores were full of people shouting the names of temporarily lost children, a cacophony of negligent parenting always ringing out like the last act of an opera.

  She caught my eye as soon as I poked my head out from in between the coats, marched over, and dragged me out by the wrist. She was still holding my wrist when she leaned down and got right in my face. “If you run away like that one more time I’m going to let you stay lost. Do you want to live in this Sears?” Of course I wanted to live in Sears. It was full of toys and racks of clothes for me to play in, and my dipshit brother probably wouldn’t be there. What a dumb question.

  Instead of waiting for an answer, she walked me back over to my mom, who was still shopping, oblivious to my disappearance. “You better teach this child how to stay put,” Grandma said, addressing the statement to me as she finally let go of my wrist. My mom, distracted by trying to locate the price tag on a pair of Jordache jeans, looked down at me. “Stand here,” she said, pointing to a spot near her feet, “and if you move an inch I will beat your ass.” That was the new rule, and she would use shorthand to remind me of it every time we were in a store from then on. “Not one inch,” she’d say, the ass-beating part of the rule being implied.

  Since I now had to stand next to my mom wherever we went, I got a closeup look at the way she carried herself in the world. The way she always said hello to strangers first and was prepared to have deeply involved conversations with everyone she met. Whenever she paid for something, I noticed the way she whispered the bill and coin denominations out loud and counted them twice, just to make sure they were accurate. She always knew exactly where everything was in any store and was quick to stop and help people who looked lost. Everywhere we went, people treated her like they were meeting a moon goddess who had floated down to earth just to make their day.

  It was wild to see the effect my mom had on people. She was gorgeous, with her blinding smile and big brown eyes. She had a loud laugh that always petered out to a gentle sigh; her laugh had a way of making you feel like you were the funniest person in the galaxy. It made me proud to see how much people liked her. And since I came directly out of her uterus, I felt like I was beautiful and funny by proximity, even if nothing could be further from the truth. If she let her light shine on someone else for a minute too long, my stomach would tingle, my head started to hurt. My body reacted painfully when it felt like Mom might forget me.

  I tried to remind her that I was there, too. I would try to tug on her jeans, but she always wore them tight; instead of grabbing fabric, I’d end up accidentally pinching her thigh. “Ow, Dani!” She’d look down at me, still smiling but pulling the muscles of her forehead together so tight I could tell by her eyes that she was angry. She’d laugh it off with her stranger, talking about me rather than talking to me. “This one, she’s so impatient. I can’t get a minute to myself! Jeez O’Flip!”

  Both Mom and Grandma used this weird version of Jesus H. Christ, shortening it and, for some reason, making it kind of Irish. I can’t imagine my grandma ever avoiding a chance to curse, but like all complicated women, she seems to have felt a duty to keep it classy in public. When my mom said, “Jeez O’Flip!” it sounded like a cute country phrase, like someone hopped out of an episode of The Andy Griffith Show and straight into upstate New York. When my grandma said it, it looked like that part of Men in Black where the alien is trying on his Vincent D’Onofrio suit for the first time and trying to act normal. She muttered it, like she was trying to keep a load of acrid bile from dribbling out of the corner of her mouth.

  No matter what made-up language Mom used, the sentiment wasn’t lost on me—my constant need for her attention was a hindrance. My existence kept Mom from being the breezy, unencumbered twenty-eight-year-old she really wanted to be.

  I craved my mom, even when she was standing right next to me. With her hand in mine and my head resting on her hip, I wondered what I could do to make her feel as light as she seemed to be with everyone else. I wanted her to gently touch my arm and laugh at my knock-knock jokes the way she did when strangers said anything at all. What would it feel like to have my mom all to myself?

  For the rest of my life, I would never know the answer.

  * * *

  —

  Mom treated everyone the same; she was a universal flirt. Women liked her; they could relate to her as a parent or talk about old times at Monroe-Woodbury High School. Everyone in Greenwood Lake pretty much stayed put, so most of the women we ran into had known Mom since she moved there as a kid.

  Men were different when they talked to Mom. They lingered too long, stared too intently. Every once in a while one of them would lean down and try to ask me a question to show that hey, he was cool with kids. “And what grade are you in?”

  Situations like this helped me on my way to perfecting a withering glare. I’d stare at them and through gritted teeth say, “I’m not allowed to talk to strangers.” How was this not universal knowledge, chump? If she was interested in the guy, Mom would nudge my shoulder. “That’s not very nice, Dani,” she’d say, then flash her big teeth at him while I stood next to her, hoping I could burn through him with my eyes the same way the floating people in the glitter jumpsuits did in the second Superman movie.

  I cut my feminist teeth on men who thought they could impress Mom by acknowledging my existence. Men were boring to me at best and threatening at worst. In trying to use me to woo Mom, they often lost the game before they even uttered a word. I didn’t want them to see me; I wanted her, without anyone else around to butt in.

  It was like that for a while. The three of us, Mom, Cory, and me, a cohesive unit. She didn’t have much time for dating, and that was fine with me. So you can imagine my surprise when I woke up one morning to a man in the house.

  It was morning, and our bedroom door was closed. It was never closed, not since Grandma showed us The Blob and I started having panic attacks at bedtime. I needed the door to stay open so that I could make my escape the moment I saw the first drop of pink sludge hanging in the doorway. We had a Tot Finder sticker in our window for firemen, but we didn’t have a Blob Finder stick
er, because no one survived the fucking Blob. Mom didn’t have the time or patience for my Blob-related fears.

  “It’s not coming for you!” she screamed, her voice hitting the high pitch it always did when she was about to lose her patience.

  “Mom, it’s coming for all of us—that’s what it does!” There was no reasoning with her.

  I opened our bedroom door with the full expectation that everything had been consumed during the night.

  Mom was intact. But she wasn’t alone. A man was next to her on the couch, his naked torso visible above the sheet that covered them both. I ran back into the bedroom and woke up Cory.

  “Someone’s here!” I whispered. We both tiptoed out to the living room. I was pointing at the sleeping figure and whispering a little too loudly when suddenly Mom popped up. “Go back to sleep!” she hissed, loud enough to make the guy next to her rustle. As a family, we had a lot to learn about whispering. “And close the door!”

  Cory and I went back to our room, where we spent what seemed like ages trying to figure out what was going on. We’d never met our dad, and my granddad worked all the time, so we weren’t used to seeing two adults sleeping next to each other. Our conspiracies ranged from a burglar (“But she would call the cops”) to a new dad (“Then why can’t we talk to him?”). I was too hungry to keep waiting, so I peeked out the bedroom door.

  The living room was back to normal. Mom was folding her blanket and sheet, and the curtains were open. Sun streamed through the living room; dust motes glinted in the rays. Mom was very casual. “Do you want cereal?”

  One, of course we wanted cereal—I would eat Cap’n Crunch for every single meal if I was allowed, and the fact that Mom constantly told me to stop asking her if I could have a bowl was a clear indication that I wanted cereal all day, every day. Two, was anyone going to address the man we just saw in here?