She brought the glasses of orange juice over to the coffee table, and I sat down to join everyone. I took a sip and winced. Something tasted wrong. It was orange juice, but more sour. It tasted like the juice had gone bad. I looked at Cory and whispered, “Does this taste weird to you?”
He took a huge gulp. “Nope.”
I tried another sip and handed the glass to Aunt Connie. “Can you taste this?” My main worry was that Sweetie Pie, in her forgetfulness, was drinking juice past its freshness date.
Aunt Connie took a sip and started laughing. “Gimme that glass!” she said to Cory, reaching out for his half-empty cup. She brought both of our cups into the kitchen and poured them down the sink. “Mother, you can’t serve the children vodka,” she said sternly. Sweetie Pie, apparently a lover of screwdrivers, had mixed a pitcher of them for herself and then forgot.
“Tell me, how old are you again?” Sweetie Pie asked as I sat on the couch.
“I’m fifteen.”
“Ah, lovely. And you’re Robin?” Her eyes were focused on something in the past, never quite coming into view.
“No, Mother, this is Robin’s daughter, Dani,” Aunt Connie chimed in.
I looked at Aunt Connie in the kitchen and laughed a little. Cory was cracking up. We were focused on the hilarious fact that we’d just been served a mixed drink by our great-grandmother. Then I looked at Grandma. She was sitting on the couch, patting Sweetie Pie’s hand, tears streaming down her cheeks.
* * *
—
The shelf above my bed at Aunt Connie’s was loaded down with stuffed animals. The room itself was crammed with fabric, yarn, new and computerized sewing machines, and various craft projects in progress. Aunt Connie was always making things; when we talked on the phone, we talked about patterns and textiles. The way I dressed was the bane of my grandma’s existence, but Aunt Connie thought it was cool that I reconfigured outfits out of thrift store clothes. She was the first person who thought I could make a living as a fashion designer, or that I should at least try.
Aunt Connie’s house was a sleek one-level beauty, filled with things collected during her and Uncle Glen’s years of traveling the world with the military. The sunken living room was home to a sick sound system; there was an old picture of Sweetie Pie sitting in the Eames chair with a pair of headphones and a glass of wine. The garage was strictly Uncle Glen’s domain, crammed with the electronic equipment he tinkered with in retirement. As the kids moved out, they slowly turned the bedrooms into offices and crafts rooms.
The neighborhood was a sleepy subdivision, but I’d watched Gleaming the Cube enough times to know that was where skaters were most likely to be hanging out. I walked out to the kitchen, where Grandma and Aunt Connie were sitting, trading photos from a huge pile spread out on the table.
“Look at this one of your grandmother, Dani,” Aunt Connie said, handing me a black-and-white picture. “Look at the size of that forehead.” She laughed, turning to Grandma. “Look at your big ol’ head, Carole.”
Grandma tilted her head up and looked at the pictures through the bottom of her glasses. “Aw, that was at the park on One Hundred and Thirty-Third Street. Remember taking Colin and Michelle there when they were babies?”
I normally lived for this—sifting through photos and learning about my family through photos. But I was on a mission.
“Aunt Connie, do you have any skate parks here?”
She looked up at me thoughtfully. “I think there’s a park down the street where the kids play?”
Grandma looked at her. “She’s looking for a park where she can stare at white boys on skateboards, Connie.”
My face grew hot with anger. I couldn’t believe she knew or that she would rat me out so quickly.
“Oh, we don’t have any of those,” Aunt Connie said. They both laughed and went back to sorting photos as I stormed out of the room.
* * *
—
Our next stop was Aunt Rene’s house. For the past year or so, Aunt Rene had made her living by running a daycare out of her house, and her husband, Gayland, worked for Sony. Aunt Rene and Gayland had relocated from San Francisco after their son, Jordan, was born, and moved to Davis, a hippie-tinged college town twenty minutes west of Sacramento. Jordan was a curly-haired, almond-eyed toddler, and completely adorable. We’d only been in the house for an hour before we already had a game: he’d ask me to lie down on the couch with my hair hanging over the edge, then he’d sneak up, play nice, and pull my hair as hard as he could, collapsing into a pile of giggles.
“Dani, cut it out—don’t teach him that,” Grandma said. She’d been agitated since the moment we arrived. At the moment she was rooting around for a pot in the kitchen.
“Ma, we’re already making dinner. What do you need another pot for?”
“What does it matter to you?” Grandma sniped.
Aunt Rene left the room, walked down to her bedroom, and closed the door. I could hear her talking to Gayland but couldn’t make out what she said. It had been like this the whole day—Grandma nitpicking Jordan’s nap time, passive-aggressively commenting on the liquid hand soap in the bathroom, making snide comments about how Aunt Rene never learned how to cook. This trip was the first time anyone in our New York family was meeting Gayland and Jordan, and Grandma was deflating that excitement every chance she got.
I was surprised. I figured that Grandma would be happy to see her daughter, the one who didn’t cause her any trouble and actually seemed to be really cool and accomplished. But all of those things seemed to have the opposite effect. Aunt Rene was successfully living life on her own terms, so Grandma whittled her down, chose only to see her through the lens of her biggest sin—she was happy, despite or because of leaving our family behind.
Their bickering persisted, even on the day we all drove to San Francisco. Aunt Rene and Gayland rented a minivan to fit all of us. Despite Grandma’s back-seat driving during the entire hour-and-a-half trip, Aunt Rene remained excited to show us where she used to live, all of the places she worked and loved. Her energy was infectious as she described old apartments she shared in the colorful dollhouses that dotted the city, the building where she saw the Grateful Dead play every New Year’s, the giant rainbow flag that flew over the Castro, the place that had the best burrito in that neighborhood. Looking at San Francisco through her eyes, I saw a city rife with possibility and excitement.
By midday, everyone needed a break from each other, especially Grandma and Aunt Rene. Eager to get some alone time with us, Aunt Rene volunteered to take Cory and me to Haight-Ashbury while Grandma hung back with Jordan and Gayland. I was in the midst of a serious everything-hippie-and-Led Zeppelin phase and couldn’t wait to walk around the famed street I’d read about in so many descriptions of the 1960s.
“Lord, I needed a break,” Aunt Rene said, rubbing her eyes.
“Yeah, Grandma is kind of a pain in the ass,” Cory said, handling a turquoise-flecked glass pipe before catching Aunt Rene’s eye and putting it down.
“Try living with her,” I chimed in.
“I did.” Aunt Rene laughed, and we rounded the corner onto the Haight. “Do you ever talk to your mother?” She was inquisitive but not pushy, and just seemed genuinely curious.
“Yeah,” Cory said, “sometimes.”
“Do you talk to her?” I asked. They were so different; I almost forgot that they were sisters.
“Sometimes. I don’t really have anything nice to say to her after what she did to you kids. Look—we’re here!” It was jarring to think that someone else thought Mom was wrong to leave us behind. Grandma always made her feelings known, so much so that I didn’t feel there was any room for me to have an opinion of my own about what had happened. Aunt Rene really wanted to know what we felt. I felt momentarily cheated—of all the women in my family who could have raised me, why did I have to end up with the mos
t stubborn one?
Years later, Aunt Rene told me that she had considered getting custody and moving us to California with her. I thought about her, in her early thirties, managing record stores, willing to give up Grateful Dead concerts and parties in the park to take care of us. It seemed impossible that someone aside from Grandma, who was always in our lives, could love us enough to even think about such a selfless act.
The Haight was dirtier than I imagined; teenage gutter punks stretched across the sidewalks holding signs and begging for change, their black denim and leather outfits coated with grime, dreadlocked and filthy. Most of the stores we went into looked like they were still being run by the people who originally opened them decades earlier. The tourist trap stores had posters of Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia and blacklight posters of psychedelic mushrooms. Music pumped out of doorways, and people sat in windows smoking in their apartments above. I was in heaven as we dipped into a secondhand store.
As we moved down the aisles, I pulled out dresses with flower designs, old pairs of jeans, shoes with chunky heels. My eyes caught the pattern on a pair of pants. The white spandex was decorated with wavy brown and orange horizontal lines that covered each leg. Huge bell bottoms flared at the hems in floaty circles. They were disgusting, and as soon as I held them in my hands I knew I would be buying them. I showed them to Aunt Rene.
“I’m getting these.”
“Will they even fit? You’re very tall.”
I held them up to my waist. The bell bottoms started at my knees and ended at my calves.
“Yeah. I’ll just put a skirt over them.”
Aunt Rene burst out laughing. “Child, you definitely have a mind of your own.”
She held out her arm as we approached the counter and took out her wallet.
“No, I can pay for them myself—I have a job.”
“I do, too.” Aunt Rene winked at me as she handed the cashier a twenty.
“Thanks,” I said, feeling spoiled for the first time in my life.
* * *
—
We capped off the trip to San Francisco with a drive through Pacific Heights. Gayland was trying to point out all of the big houses overlooking the bay and tell us which ones were used for movie sets, but it was hard to concentrate over Grandma and Aunt Rene’s hushed fight about everything from how Rene was feeding Jordan to Grandma’s discomfort with sitting in the car for so long.
The tension that had been palpable for days finally broke. Jordan was sleeping in his car seat, so they were trying not to be too loud, but it was easy to tell that they were sniping at each other from the clipped way they were talking. Why did Grandma have to be like this, even on vacation? All day she complained—her feet hurt when we got to Fisherman’s Wharf, so she wasn’t able to tour the pier. She only wanted to eat at chain restaurants. She didn’t want to go to Haight-Ashbury. Golden Gate Park was too big and there was nothing to do. It took too long to drive everywhere.
I shrunk down in my seat, unable to bear the sound of them fighting in my vicinity but unable to escape. I kept my ears perked up, though; in all the time I’d spent with her, I’d never heard someone fight back with Grandma . . . and win.
I heard Aunt Rene asking Grandma if she would rather just go back to Aunt Connie’s house, if she could stand to admit that she wasn’t right about everything, if she could back off and let her raise her own child her own way. Usually, when Grandma was done making her point, she just left the room, not giving anyone a chance to chime in or give their perspective. In the car, she was trapped.
Aunt Rene had already taught me about music, cities, and dicks. But she also illuminated all the ways that Grandma was stubborn, all the ways she could be right about her own life and wrong about mine. It was possible to get away and live life on your own terms. It was possible to survive.
19.
Dani, come down here and tell me what’s wrong.”
I couldn’t tell if I’d passed out or just fallen asleep, but I opened my eyes and looked outside, trying to tell the time by the position of the sun. It was dark outside. I’d missed the whole afternoon.
I was supposed to be living my best teenage life—I was turning sixteen soon, had jobs that weren’t too awful, was saving money. But for months, I had been coming home after a day of pretending that I could handle my feelings, going up to my room, and crying for hours. I had been struggling with these feelings since I last saw Mom, but lately they had descended over my whole life. I would lie down on my back and stare at the ceiling as a heavy feeling wrapped itself around my heart, creeping in like a fog the way it always did. I might feel fine one day, but then, out of nowhere, I thought about how ugly I was, or how unintelligent, or uncreative. I thought about Mom. I thought about Luke.
Once school went on summer break, I spent most of my time alone. I went to work and babysat, but I wasn’t reaching out to friends. I don’t remember going to the movies, or the mall, or even meeting anyone for a slice.
When my phone rang, I was a little surprised; for most of the school year, I had stopped having the hours-long conversations with friends that used to fuel my days. I reached over to pick it up without looking at it.
“Danielle! Are you coming?” Alexis was smarter than most of our teachers and crafted every opportunity possible to help the chances of getting out of Warwick, like playing soccer and joining student government. She sounded like she was in a crowd of people, which was odd—she was more likely to be found at home studying on any given night, including weekends. But one of our friends, Vicki, was having a party, she said. Vicki was the kind of friend I sat with at lunch but never called.
“I don’t think so. I have cramps,” I lied.
“Come on. Take an Advil and come to the sleepover.”
“I really can’t.”
“We’ll come pick you up!” Alexis was always the first person to take no for an answer; her insistence was completely out of character.
“No. I can’t.”
“Come on, Danielle!” Vicki shouted in the background.
Alexis sighed into the receiver. “We’re trying to throw a surprise sweet sixteen party for you, you jerk.” She sounded angry. I choked back the golf ball of tears stuck in my throat. Thinking about leaving my bed made me feel queasy, but I’d never had anyone throw me a birthday party before. Their kindness shocked me, and the fact that I couldn’t possibly drag myself out of the house made me feel more depressed. They were right there, showing me how much they cared about me, and I couldn’t stop myself from wallowing enough to accept it.
A few months earlier, instead of just thinking about suicide, I had thought I might actually try it. Movies made it look easy, but suicide was not an easy thing to do.
I didn’t want it to be messy; I thought about Grandma having to clean up brains or puke, and smiled a little thinking that she’d be more upset about the mess I left behind than she would be about the fact that I had killed myself. In the Keanu Reeves movie Permanent Record, his best friend threw himself off a cliff, but Warwick was a mercilessly flat place. People seemed to like taking pills, but which ones? Our medicine cabinet was empty of medication, and the strongest things we had in the house were Tylenol, nail polish remover, and a five-year-old bottle of Care Free Curl.
I hated the sight of blood, but cutting my wrists was the only viable option.
Sitting on my bed, I reached into my book bag and took out my compass. The pointy tip was sharp enough to accidentally stick me a few times; it would be fine for a practice run. I wanted to be sure I could handle hurting myself.
I held the point against my left wrist and paused. Should I stab it in, or draw it over a length of skin until I hit a vein? I pressed down. It didn’t matter how I opened up my skin.
It felt like a wasp sting; then a small bead of blood rose to the surface as I pulled the compass away and dropped it on the floor. I stared at my
wrist. There was no gushing, not even a drip. Just a small maroon dot slowly growing against the pale underside of my wrist.
I licked my thumb and wiped it away. A small dot of blood took its place. I licked and wiped again, then held my thumb against it. When I pulled my thumb away minutes later, there was no blood in sight.
All I wanted to do was die. It felt unfair that I couldn’t figure out how to do it.
In a few years I would go to therapy for the first time and learn about suicidal ideation and depression. But for the time being, it just felt like I didn’t deserve anything good—I didn’t deserve a future, I didn’t deserve happiness, and I didn’t deserve the kind of friends who would throw me a surprise birthday party.
“I’m really sorry, Alexis. I can’t come. I’m sorry.”
“Fine,” Alexis said as she hung up abruptly.
I pressed the button and put the phone back on its cradle. I ruined parties, I ruined friendships. I ruined everything.
I rolled onto my side. Outside, a few cable company employees were laughing as they left work. Life was so easy for everyone else. I was asleep before the tears started soaking through my pillow.
The Ugly Cry Page 20
