Dirty Secret (13 page)

“But you weren't really trying to smash them. My fingers were right there. If you'd really wanted to, you could have.”

My dad shook his head. “I have to be honest, in spite of how painful it is to admit.”

“I don't believe you,” I said. “And besides, I kicked you in the stomach, so we're even.”

“We're not even. I'm the adult here. I shouldn't have let things escalate like that.” He plucked a pencil from the cup on his desk and twirled it around. I stared at the fingernail that looked like a bird's beak, as I always did. I'd seen him cry only once, at his mother's funeral just a few weeks before he and Sandy got married, but when I looked at my dad's face that night in his office, his eyes were watery.

“Dad, it's okay, really.”

“It's not.” He sighed. “I guess I've just let things build up. And you seem so unhappy. I want you to be happy, honey.”

That's how my dad and I did things: a big blowout, then calm talking, with no hard feelings afterward. Anger was a cancer to be excised, and the way that happened was through verbal venting; you couldn't fault someone for trying to be honest and open, after all.

Unfortunately, this explosion-then-bonding didn't prove to be such a winning strategy with friends and boyfriends later. Shockingly, it turned out that my habit of yelling at the slightest provocation and thinking that what I said in anger didn't carry over into calmer times didn't go over so well with normal people. It took me a long time to realize that regardless of how angry I may feel, some things shouldn't be said. Or done.

But I didn't know that then. After each fight, I felt closer to my dad than I had before. And the nose-piercing fight was no exception. By the end of our talk that night, we were laughing, friends again.

I didn't believe my dad when he said he'd been trying to smash my fingers. If he'd really wanted to, he could have. But that didn't matter. Nor did it matter that after that horrible fight we were friends again. That fight, our worst yet, was the beginning of the end of my days in the yellow house.

LATER THAT YEAR
, I was arrested for underage drinking and my dad forced me to start seeing a shrink. I'd already begun asking my dad and Sandy if I could move out, into an apartment. I made decent money at my job selling magazine subscriptions over the phone. My dad and Sandy said of course I couldn't move out, I was fifteen years old. So I started threatening to run away to New York. I wasn't really going to run away,
and I didn't seriously expect to move out before I graduated from high school. Nobody else I knew had. But I kept bringing it up because I needed things to be different—and at that point I could envision only external change.

I was anxious, I was depressed, I was shy, I was obnoxious. I was intensely unhappy. And a bizarre shift had taken place: Back when I was seven, eight, and nine, during the time I lived with my mom through the week and my dad on the weekends, I was wild at my mother's and calm and respectful at my dad's. Now it was the opposite. I was rude and out of control at my dad and Sandy's and when I went to my mom's house I'd fall immediately into my role of cleaning, organizing, and offering advice on everything from hairstyles to jobs to nutrition.

The change I was craving came a few months after I turned sixteen, on Mother's Day. My dad was furious because I hadn't gotten Sandy a card. “After all Sandy's done for you!” he yelled as I lay sprawled across the brown sectional sofa in the TV room, twirling my nose ring around and around.

“It's just a Hallmark holiday,” I said. “It's total bullshit.”

“Maybe so, but Sandy deserves to know she's appreciated. And do the dishes!”

It was my turn and this was the third time my dad had asked me. I could feel his temper revving up, but I didn't care.

“I'll do them when I'm good and ready,” I said.

My dad grabbed my arm and pulled me up from the couch; I struggled and ended up squished against the wall.

“That's it,” I said and ran past him, up to my room, where I threw a change of clothing into a backpack. I walked out of the house and to the bus stop. It was a Sunday, which meant the buses ran infrequently, and it was late, too. I called my friend Mary from a pay phone in the bus shelter. I'd met Mary recently, at an all-ages Otto's Chemical Lounge show at the 7th Street
Entry. She was eighteen, an art student at the university, and she had her own apartment.

When she answered the phone I asked if I could spend the night. She said yes.

Even before I got on the bus, a familiar guilt began settling over me. I was such a fuckup. A terrible daughter.

I called my dad when I got to Mary's apartment. I didn't want him to worry. He had an idea: I had a shrink appointment coming up, and he suggested that he meet me there. I covered the phone and asked Mary if she'd mind if I stayed with her for three days, and she said not at all.

“Okay,” I told my dad. “I'll see you then.”

During those three days, Mary asked me if I wanted to officially move in—an extremely generous offer, because it was a two-room apartment. When I met my dad at the shrink's office, the first thing he said was, “I know you're not happy. What can I do to make you happy?”

“You can let me move in with Mary.”

He agreed. Apparently he'd taken my threats about running away to New York more seriously than I'd meant them; if I moved in with Mary, he'd at least know where I was. We left the appointment and drove back to the yellow house, where I packed up my few belongings and strapped my mattress to the top of his car.

Because I owned almost nothing, moving into Mary's apartment took twenty minutes. When my dad left, he hugged me and shook Mary's hand. I had to restrain myself from following him down the stairs and getting into his car with him. I was too young; I hadn't really meant my juvenile threats. But it seemed too late to back out. And now Mary was counting on me to help with the rent.

The first few nights felt like an extended sleepover with a
fun girlfriend: We ate macaroni and cheese out of the pan, we made prank calls to boys we liked, and in a not-so-wise move we gave each other homemade tattoos with sewing needles and India ink. But despite the fun, I missed my dad and life at the yellow house. I felt awful for the way I'd acted toward my dad and Sandy. Sandy, who I'd wished was my mom, who'd tried so hard to blend our two families and make the new family in the yellow house work. I'd taken her for granted, and worse. And my dad, who'd stepped in and taken me from my mom's house once he realized what was happening there.

A few days after I moved in with Mary, a letter came for me. A letter from my dad. In it, he said that he knew, no matter how dark things got or seemed for me, that I was going to be okay. That I was strong and that I could do anything I wanted. He said I was always welcome at the yellow house. After all I'd put him through, my dad still loved me and still believed in me. I'd been planning to pay my rent with earnings from my magazine subscription job, but in the letter my dad offered to pay it. I only had to pay my food, clothing, and bills.

I started going back to the yellow house every Sunday. I'd bring my laundry and we'd eat lunch—Sandy, Beth, and my brother, too, if they were around—and then we'd go to a movie. Sometimes my dad, who is a relentless audiophile, would take me with him to stereo stores to scout out gear. He'd buy a few pieces of equipment and then back at home he'd test out the sound quality of one turntable cartridge versus another, one set of speakers versus another, one subwoofer versus another. We'd take turns sitting in the prime listening spot in the living room, and judging by the high notes in Mozart's
The Marriage of Figaro,
the mid notes in a Beatles song, and the voice quality on an Emmylou Harris record (later Aimee Mann), we'd decide which pieces could stay and which ones had to be returned.

Afterward, my dad would drive me back to Mary's and in the car I'd tell him about school, or whatever job I happened to be working, or whatever boy I happened to be dating. I could tell my dad anything and I wanted to, because he always gave me the best advice.

I'd wanted to move out, and I should have been thrilled. And in many ways I was. But moving out of the closest thing I'd ever known to a normal house confirmed the suspicion I'd always held: There was something wrong with me. Something had turned in me, gone rotten during those years I lived mostly with my mom, and now I just couldn't fit into a family.

Almost all of my friends were older than I was. One of them helped me get a fake ID with my picture on it, so I could go to bars to see bands with my friends. Though I continued to go to high school, half the time I forgot how old (or really how young) I actually was. I felt both too old and too young at the same time.

I moved constantly: After a few months Mary and I decided two rooms weren't enough, so we found a bigger place. Six months after that, we amicably parted ways, each moving into bigger places with groups of people. I moved seven times in two years.

I hardly owned anything and I liked it that way. I was writing poetry and snippets of stories in spiral notebooks, and when I got to the end of one, I'd toss it out. I wish I still had the letter my dad sent me the first week I lived at Mary's, but like most things, it wound up in the trash. I even threw away the Polaroids from the day Sandy took me to the private zoo, including one in which I, wearing an emerald green halter top that she had made for me, sat on the back of a tiger and smiled nervously. Throwing things out wasn't a conscious attempt to avoid being like my mother—I just didn't like the thought of being weighed down or tied to one place. I liked to be able to look around wherever
I was living and know that I could be out of there in a matter of hours if I needed to. I'm still like that.

MY MOTHER AND
I saw each other every few weeks or so after I moved out of the yellow house. I'd stop by while I was visiting my dad and Sandy on a Sunday, and my mom would sit at her kitchen table, drinking coffee while I did the dishes or organized the pantry. Sometimes we went shopping together, to Target or one of the thrift shops: Ragstock or Savers or the Salvation Army. Ragstock's main location was downtown, in an enormous warehouse filled with barrels of musty secondhand clothes. You had to practically climb inside the barrels to find the best things and you had to dedicate hours to the hunt. My mother was friends with the manager, Sharon, who was the buyer for all the Ragstock stores. Sharon saw everything as it came in and if something struck her as “very Helen,” she'd put it aside for my mom. She also gave my mother discounts on the already bargain prices. I liked going there with my mom—I hadn't yet begun to see excessive shopping as a link in my mother's mental problems. I liked watching her laughing with Sharon, seeing my mother's natural sense of humor and charm come out. I even liked the look of concentration on her face as she dug through the barrels, the satisfaction when she found a particularly pretty cashmere sweater, maybe one with beads or sequins—“Oh look, Jessie, it's from the 1940s,” she'd exclaim.

My mother had never seen one of my apartments before. None of my friends had ever met her. But one day when I was seventeen and had just started my senior year, I met my mother after school for a late lunch at Peter's Grill downtown. The lunch went well—she was in a good mood, and funny. Her sense of
humor has to be just right: not too repetitive and not too esoteric. After lunch we headed to Target, and her driving didn't even bother me.

At Target she let me buy anything I wanted. I picked up a packet of condoms from the shelf and put them into the cart. I was testing her. Other than the weird semen comment she made when I was ten she'd never talked to me about sex—though Sandy had embarrassed the hell out of me by forcing me to look at
Our Bodies, Ourselves
with her when I was eleven. As we strolled through the wide Target aisles, side by side, my mother glanced down at the condoms in the cart and said, “Oh, Jessie, that's great. Why don't you get another pack, too?” So I walked back to where they were and plucked a second box from the shelf. I felt weirdly close to her—as if we could make up for the fact that we'd never had anything like an intimate conversation by purchasing an item associated with another form of intimacy. During lunch I'd felt a connection to her as well. In fact, that day I felt closer to her than I had in years.

I was living then in a crummy apartment above a crummy liquor store. When my mom and I left Target, I didn't want our good day together to end. So instead of having her drop me off as I usually did (always ducking as we got close to my place so I wouldn't be spotted in her junky car), I invited her to park in the liquor store's lot—momentarily not caring who saw me getting out of her rusty boat—and see my apartment.

“And I have a surprise to show you,” I said. I was in the midst of a short-lived attempt to get over my fear of snakes and had recently purchased a baby one. During my years at the yellow house I'd had a succession of frogs, chameleons, hermit crabs, and fish. I spent hours on aquatic homes for my creatures and became a regular at a pet store in one of the malls. The first time I'd seen the snake in the store, I knew it would be the perfect
way to cure my phobia. It was a rare red rat snake. Only eight or so inches long, its ruby-colored body was barely wider than a pen. Eventually it was supposed to grow to five feet, but I figured that knowing the serpent since it was a baby would neutralize any potential fear before it could even begin. So I spent all the money I had on the snake, using my fake ID to prove I was over eighteen. The first time I held it in my hand, felt its surprisingly not-slimy-at-all skin crawling over mine, watched it uncoil and writhe smoothly across and around my pale wrist, I was proud of myself. I felt brave. Every time I held the snake, stroked its fragile body and tiny triangular head, I'd think, I did this. I could barely believe it.