I tried to cry quietly, but clearly Grandma had heard me. If she could hear this, she probably heard me all the other times, too, I thought.
My feet were already hanging over the edge of my bed; I scooted down until they hit the carpet and hoisted myself up to sitting. My T-shirt was plastered to my back with a thick sheen of sweat. It was the middle of the summer and over ninety degrees, but I had all the windows shut, trying to replicate the suffocation I felt inside on the outside.
“Child, if I have to call you down here again . . . Jesus Christ, finally,” Grandma said. She was sitting on the couch, staring at me as I slouched to the chair. My chin was pulled toward my chest, my shoulders shaking with sobs.
“Dani. Look at me.” She sounded as angry as she did when she caught Cory in his bedroom with his girlfriend. I looked up but couldn’t see her; my eyes were puffy to the point of being almost closed. Grandma looked at me. I expected her to launch into her familiar symphony of “Get over it,” but her voice was soft.
“Tell me what’s wrong. No one just cries like this all the time. What is wrong—what is it? Tell Grandma.”
Maybe it was the timing or the way she made her voice sound soothing and comforting, like a normal grandma.
I was exhausted.
It all came rushing out.
I didn’t have a mom, well, I did, but I hated her. I hated her, because Luke used to touch me all the time and she did nothing, nothing, she made me live with him and then she ran away with him, she ran away from us for him, and I ruined your retirement because we had nowhere to go, and she didn’t love me, no one loved me, and I wanted to die. I wished I was dead and I wanted to die and I couldn’t figure out how to die.
A thick strand of snot was hanging from my nose, spit was pooling in the corner of my mouth, my eyes were spitting tears like a loose fire hydrant. Everywhere, pain was leaking out of me.
Grandma interrupted. “What did you say? Did you say that motherfucker touched you?” Her voice was shaking.
“Yes!” I let out a wail that was more like a shout. “He touched me all the time!”
Grandma got up from the couch and came over to me. She put her arm around my shoulder, and I pressed my face into her stomach. I thought about the snot and pulled my head away, but she softly pressed it back into her belly.
“Okay, okay, Dani, calm down. Calm down, you hear?” Her voice was trembling as she ran her hand up and down my back. “I love you. You hear me? I love you.”
She was crying, too, I realized.
“I love you, and your grandfather loves you. Even Cory loves you, that numb nuts. You don’t have to hurt yourself, okay? Please. Don’t hurt yourself.” She released my head and put her hand under my chin. Her voice was suddenly, shockingly firm. “I’m going to kill him, and then I’m going to kill your mother, okay? I’m going to kill them both, you hear me?”
I opened my eyes as far as they would go and nodded. Her threats usually came with a smile or some indication that she was kidding; this time, her mouth was pulled into a tense line, and she was shaking lightly with rage. It was entirely possible in that moment for me to believe that she would actually commit murder.
“Good. Can I give you a hug?”
I nodded. Grandma got on her knees and wrapped herself around me. “It’s okay. I love you.”
I let myself be held in her tenderness. My sobs were fading, but she didn’t stop hugging me.
We were still hugging when Bobby came downstairs with a dirty plate. “What’s going on?” We looked at each other. “Were you the one screaming like that?”
“Jesus Christ, Bobby, mind your fucking business,” Grandma hissed.
“I just asked a question, Ma,” Bobby said loudly as he walked into the kitchen. I could hear him talking to himself as he turned on the sink.
Grandma looked at me. “You don’t have to talk about this with anyone but me if you don’t want to. You hear me?”
I nodded.
“Especially that pain in the ass,” she said, jerking her head toward the kitchen. She leaned on the arm of the chair as she stood up. “I swear to god, I don’t know what’s wrong with him. So nosy.”
I laughed, and felt it radiate through me.
I felt lighter after telling Grandma. A small amount of guilt crept in; in telling her, I just made a bad situation even worse. But for weeks after I told her, she would call me over to the couch, kiss my cheek, and tell me she loved me. I had a different sense of who Grandma was as a human being after experiencing this side of her. It was possible that I could stop assuming that no one could handle the whole mess of me and give them a chance to surprise me instead.
My depression still came back in waves, poking holes in moments that should have felt happier. But it felt less like I was carrying the weight of a secret and more that I was part of a family. Unburdening myself didn’t cure me, and it would be another five years before I knew that I was suffering from depression or that I would be in a relationship with it for the rest of my life. I didn’t yet know that I would take almost a dozen different antidepressants before I found the combination that worked best. I wouldn’t learn to think about depression as something that occasionally happened to me as a part of my wiring, not a bomb waiting to go off all the time, until I was thirty-nine years old. And it wasn’t until my forties when I learned, in therapy, how to integrate my thoughts in order to avoid sinking to the bottom of the depression well, learned how to notice warning signs and actions I could take before things got too bad. The first time I felt confident and happy again at the same time, I was forty-three years old.
Medicine and therapy were things I would discover long after I left Warwick. I wasn’t cured. But seeing Grandma take care of me in the face of my terrible shame was a step toward loving each other beyond grandmother and granddaughter, as people who really understood each other.
20.
I was the first person to get my license in a house full of people who didn’t drive. With no car to practice with, I mostly relied on the skills I’d used when I played Pole Position in the arcade while also reading the test book obsessively for a few weeks. The only time I’d been behind the wheel of a car before I took the test was when my boss’s husband took me for a drive down the Palisades Parkway, right into Manhattan. The entire drive was terrifying, from the highway speeds to parallel parking in Midtown, but he was convinced that if I could survive that, I would be a great driver for the rest of my life. I borrowed their car for the actual test.
I’d had my license for about three months before Helen asked if I wanted to buy their old car. “It’s just sitting here,” she said one afternoon. I’d gone over to babysit and walked like I normally did. “It’s a good car even if you just drive it around town.”
She was referring to the 1986 navy blue Chevette parked at the end of their driveway. Maple tree branches wept leaves all over the hood and roof. It was a round little thing; some of the silver metal detail that ran down the length of the car at knee height was missing.
“You can have it for two hundred dollars and twenty hours of babysitting.”
That was firmly in my price range.
I was so excited to climb behind the wheel, even though I had to hold my head as tall and straight as possible to keep the unglued ceiling cloth from draping down so far I couldn’t see. Something underneath the car rumbled like a tank when I started it. I didn’t care—this car was all mine.
I was driving it home for the first time when I heard a big clang. I looked back in the rearview mirror; a piece of metal the size of a sheet of loose-leaf paper had fallen out from under my car. I put it in park, ran out to grab it, and threw it in the back seat. I rounded the corner to Smith Street and swung into the parking space in front of our house.
“Is that the car you bought?” Grandma said. “It sounds like a goddamn army tank! Jesus, Dani—you spent your money on
that?”
For someone who had never purchased, financed, or drove a fucking car, Grandma had a lot of opinions about them.
I had to figure out how to register and insure the car on my own. I called the DMV and found out that Helen had to give me a bill of sale, even if it just said that she sold it to me for a dollar. They told me how much money to bring with me for the cost of registration, how to get my plates, and by which date I would need to have the car inspected. Several times over the length of the phone call, the DMV operator asked me if I had a parent who could help me with this. Several times, I had to say no, it was just me.
I couldn’t get the car registered without insurance, so I called the local State Farm office. Yes, I was sixteen. Yes, I would be paying for it myself. No, I could not be added to anyone else’s insurance plan. Due to my age and complete lack of adult supervision in this arena, my insurance for a two-hundred-dollar car was going to be two thousand dollars every six months. I asked if I could make monthly payments; they said yes. I took seven hundred dollars out of the bank and walked it over to the insurance office the next morning. With babysitting and my job at the convent, I thought, I could just about afford to have a car, like everyone else.
I took a staple gun to the ceiling and tacked the cloth in place. I had a long rectangular stencil that I picked up from Michael’s; along with a can of silver spray paint, I used it to fill in the parts of the silver detail that were missing. I filled the back with bumper stickers—the ubiquitous “Mean People Suck,” a Bob Marley sticker, and a host of other things that screamed “HELLO I AM A DIRTBAG TEENAGER PLEASE PULL ME OVER EVERY TIME I LEAVE THE HOUSE.”
When I took it in to a local mechanic for the inspection, he gave me a list of things that needed to be fixed. “Also, your catalytic converter is gone.”
“Um, I have a part that fell off? It’s in the back seat.”
We both peeked in at the rusty metal part resting comfortably on the tan interior.
“Yep. That’s your catalytic converter all right.” The mechanic looked at me with a mix of pity and suspicion. “Look, I’ll give you a replacement for it today, but you eventually have to replace the muffler, the belts, the radiator, the starter, and quite a few hoses. And that’s just what we can see for now.”
“Can I get it registered?” I was on a fucking mission.
“I can get ya registered if you agree to fix a few things right away. Cost you about seven hundred bucks.”
That was almost all the money I had left in the bank.
“Okay.”
* * *
—
We weren’t allowed to park at school until we were seniors, so I didn’t drive to school yet, but I used my car every chance I could. I drove to work, which was only a fifteen-minute walk away. I drove to pick up Alexis, and then we drove to the movies or the mall. I drove to the train station in Jersey City, so that I could take the PATH into New York City and extend my time beyond the last bus back if I needed to. I kept cassette tapes in the glove compartment and under the passenger seat, so that I was always ready for whatever mood struck, but I mostly blasted Metallica and Fugazi while I very carefully followed the speed limit on Main Street.
During the winter, my tank took on a different level of care. I was at the mechanic at least once a month now—something was always falling off, about to fall off, or making a terrible noise right before it fell off. Surely sick of having to deal with my pile of bolts every three weeks, he started giving me small tips for things I could do on my own to keep the car running, like how to tap a starter when the car wouldn’t start on colder days. I kept a kit under the passenger seat that was basically a wrench and a can of starter fluid. The starter looked like a bent, inverted metal seesaw; I pushed it down on one side, sprayed the starter fluid into the crevice, and tapped on the radiator for a few seconds. The engine usually turned over after that, but I always let it run for a couple of minutes. The guys working at the cable company next door used to ask me if I needed help, but after I firmly told them no ten times in a row, they just started pointing and laughing at me every time I had the hood up.
I didn’t care. I had my own car, bought with my own money, and I even knew how to fix it.
I was free.
* * *
—
“I’m getting a tattoo.”
I had been committed to the idea of getting a tattoo ever since I saw my friend Leslie walk into class with one. It was black and red, something tribal on her shoulder. She looked tough and extremely metal. Grandma was going to California for a week to put Sweetie Pie into a nursing home, a decision she and Aunt Connie had finally made a couple of years after our visit to California, and I thought that would be the perfect time for me to announce my intentions. It was the summer before senior year; the absolute worst-case scenario would be Grandma getting so angry she wouldn’t speak to me for a year, but then I would move out anyway.
“That’s a stupid idea. What would you even get? It’s permanent, you know. PERMANENT.” Every once in a while our generational differences became crystal clear; of course she thought tattoos were silly, since she’d only ever seen them on bikers, sailors, and circus folks. It was less punk rock to her, and more of an indication that I was about to ink my way out of the workforce before I was old enough to vote.
“It’s going to be delicate. I just want a needle and thread around my ankle.” I knew that I was going to become a fashion designer; even if that didn’t work out, I loved sewing. The permanence didn’t faze me one bit.
“That’s fucking ridiculous.” Grandma laughed. “Do whatever you’re going to do, child. It’s not my body.”
In my full stance as rebellious teenager, I’d never considered that she just wouldn’t care. It was impossible to rebel against someone so indifferent.
Leslie drove me to her tattoo guy in Middletown. The location and visuals of the shop should have been my first indication that things were about to get a little seedier than I had originally imagined. It was a small building on the side of the freeway, across from the old mall, a Taco Bell, and a dusty florist that hadn’t seen a customer since at least 1982. The large window in the front hinted to a business that was formerly happy to advertise their wares to passersby but was now covered in a black tarp. A rectangular slice was cut out of the middle, just big enough for the red neon sign that read: tattoo. It was the perfect place to ruin your body; I was either going to get a tattoo or get murdered.
We walked in and started looking at the flash art on the wall. The stock tattoos were printed on white sheets that someone had slid into small photo books with clear plastic sleeves. I flipped through images of hearts with blank banners, crosses, and a wide assortment of skulls—with knives going through them, with flames rising out of the empty eye sockets, and, inexplicably, with blood dripping from them. Where was all that blood coming from on a bone-dry skull? I’m all for ruining my body, but let’s at least make it rational.
The tribal tattoo pages were next. I don’t know why they’re given such a regal title as “tribal” when “jagged black lines of nonsense” would do. One looked rather pretty, though; some curved and curly lines surrounding a fleur-de-lys.
When the guy who would be inking me stepped out of the back, I flinched. He was about five-four and wearing a black tank top tucked into black jeans, which ended in square-toed black biker boots. A mix of faded and fresh tattoos traveled up his ropy, muscly arms. His curly blond mullet was impressively long in the back, reaching his midback. He wore a pair of jet-black sunglasses wrapped around his head; I couldn’t see his eyes, only my own petrified reflection in the silvery mirrored lenses after I glanced down and saw that this proto Dog the Bounty Hunter type was carrying a revolver in a holster on his hip.
“Hi!” I said cheerily, eyeing the gun. “I’d like to get a tattoo.”
He stared at me without responding for a solid minute. I smiled
nervously and, after about thirty seconds, looked at Leslie as if to say, “Is this a good idea?” She smiled back, an old pro after her one interaction with this dude.
“You’re in the right place, then,” he finally said, gravel-voiced and still staring.
I didn’t realize I wasn’t breathing until I let out a sigh of relief. I stuck out my right leg and pointed to the floor. “Um, I want to get a needle and thread, like, wrapped around my ankle? In black?” In my nervousness, I had reverted to the kind of Valley Girl upspeak I’d abandoned years before.
He stared at me without speaking again, for longer than was comfortable. “You got a design?”
“Pardon me?” Something about the fear coursing through my veins had turned me into a turn-of-the-century southern belle catching the vapors.
“A design. I’m not gonna just free-stab on your leg.”
It was the phrase “free-stab” that should have sent me running out the door without looking back, but I didn’t come all the way up to Middletown just to go home without some mark of my stupidity in the face of danger permanently etched on my body.
“Oh, uh, no.”
“Come back when you have a design,” he garbled. “Or pick something off the wall.”
I looked at Leslie, who just shrugged. How was I supposed to know that I had to bring in a drawing? And why didn’t she warn me? I knew that if I left, though, I would never come back, and possibly never get a tattoo at all.
“Oh! I saw one that I liked already?” I walked to the tribal pages and flipped to the curvy fleur-de-lys one. “I could put this on my ankle? Maybe?”
The Masked Tattooist grunted, then waved a single arm to indicate that I should follow him back behind the curtain to a dentist chair with leg rests in the center of the sparse room, facing the back windows, while he rustled through a plastic bucket filled with fresh needles. I didn’t expect the transaction to feel so medical, but I sat down. Leslie plopped herself into a plastic chair next to me. The tattoo guy, sunglasses still on, pressed a button on a machine that looked like the copiers in the principal’s office. He pulled a pair of scissors out of a cup as the paper shot out of the tray of the machine. I’d seen enough horror movies to know that this was the part where I died, stabbed in the heart for no reason other than it would bring this maniac joy.
The Ugly Cry Page 21
