Breaking Night

Chapter 2
Middle of Everything

“THEY DON’T LIKE RED. I’M TELLING YOU, IF YOU PUT RED IN YOUR hair, they’ll leave. I swear, Lizzy, it’s how I got rid of mine.”
“Yeah right. . . . Liar!”
For apparently nothing more than to relieve her own boredom, Lisa would torment me in our parents’ absence. When Ma and Daddy disappeared for a full day or when they’d stream in and out of the house, preoccupied with copping drugs, leaving us to ourselves for whole nights, she would dream up new and terrible things to do to me.
“Look, first, I’m going to have to braid your hair, Liz. But, not just any braids—stiff ones that point out in all directions.”
“But why! I know you’re lying. Why would it matter if my hair was braided?” While I believed almost everything Lisa told me, I had, by the time I reached the first grade, been fooled by more than one of her practical jokes, so my instincts were slowly growing sharper. This claim seemed too outrageous, I thought; surely she was up to something.
“All right, Lizzy,” she said, turning to walk away from me. “I’m only trying to help you out here. Isn’t that what you wanted? Well, I know what it takes, but if you don’t want to get rid of your lice, I guess there’s nothing I can do about it.”
But I did want to get rid of my lice. They’d been crawling on my head for weeks. Chasing them with my fingernails, I’d dug burning furrows into my scalp, painful and sensitive to the touch. At night, I could feel them moving around, weaving their way through my hair, biting until I scratched deep to disperse the sensation. I awoke frequently to dreams of angry bugs eating at my scalp, laying eggs in my skin.
At first, it wasn’t this bad. I’d barely noticed them at all. It took the building superintendent’s daughter, Debbie, to come knocking on our door, telling Ma to look out for lice in our hair, before I connected the persistent itching on my scalp with anything specific.
“All those creeps my father has down there,” Debbie said. “I swear, half of them come right out of the gutter, Jeanie. Check your kids out; they’ve spent enough time hanging out in the basement with you to have caught ’em. I know. I just spent the whole damn afternoon scraping those nasty things off of my own scalp.”
A memory of the super’s place from the past weekend flashed back to me. I’d waited in the doorway that divided his apartment from his cellar, watching Ma pass Bob money in exchange for a small, foil package. It was midday; my vanilla ice cream was melting over my hand. People were asleep or just waking up all around me, spread out across the basement floor, over two dirty mattresses. Debbie was there; she’d gotten up to hug me and Ma, and stunk of beer. The place was littered with people, some snoring, some not fully dressed. Fly tape hung from the ceiling, covered with black, lifeless bugs: bare bulbs provided the only light.
Just before Ma took me out of there, a shirtless man had sat up and begun to rub sleep from his eyes. Without noticing me, he shook another sleeping person, a girl, and woke her. I stood there, shifting my weight from foot to foot, uncomfortably, while they kissed, empty beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays at their feet.
When Debbie left, Ma stepped into our living room to ask, lightly, if either of us had caught lice. I didn’t know for sure, so I just said, “My head’s itchy.” Lisa said the same. We were promised a shampoo called Quell, and that was that. It had been roughly a month since then, with no Quell in sight. So this is why I reluctantly gave in to Lisa and allowed her to twist my hair in all directions while my face curled in pain.
“Now, pass me the barrettes.” Each time another braid was finished, Lisa spun me around to note her progress, her face glowing, as if she took some private delight in the sight of me. I grew particularly suspicious when she flat-out laughed.
“Sorry! Sorry, Liz. It just looks funny. I can’t help it. You would have laughed when I did this to my hair, too, believe me. You should have been there, it was such a mess. Don’t worry, it’s all part of the cure.”
I believed Lisa just enough to let her go on, but her giggles made it difficult for me to contain my growing anger. Once I even pulled away when she looked too amused, only to have Lisa make me beg her to finish. After all, she seemed to be my only hope for a remedy. She agreed to continue grudgingly, and warned that I shouldn’t be so doubtful of people’s good intentions. I told myself to concentrate less on her and more on how good it would feel once this was all over.
She grabbed my hair into rigorous twists, sending the tiny bugs into a frenzy. I cringed and watched the clock drag its hands along. Earlier, Ma and Daddy had promised groceries, but they had stayed away for hours. Embarrassed over what they might say if they walked in and this turned out to be another one of Lisa’s pranks, I hoped she would finish quickly.
After what felt like three hours, when my legs had grown sore from kneeling on the thin carpet and I’d fidgeted in every direction in search of comfort, Lisa finally lifted her hands away from my head.
“Okay . . . Done! Now, listen carefully to me, Lizzy. Next we need to find anything red that we can stick in your hair. They’re terrified of red. Let’s get something, and then you’ll see how this works. But you have to move fast, or they’ll catch on.”
“Anything red?”
Lisa slid one of Daddy’s garbage treasure-hunt finds, a red Barbie dress, over my largest braid at the very front of my head. The empty sleeves pointed outward, and the open collar presented a barrette-pinched puff of hair.
“Is that it? Is it working?”
“More! We need more. Hurry, they’re all going to run to one side. That makes it harder. Go!”
With nothing useful in sight, I raced across the apartment and threw open my drawers, tossing trinkets and all kinds of junk around my room. I searched feverishly, but it seemed there was nothing red to be found—until I remembered Ma’s dresser. With one wide sweep of my arm, I grabbed Ma’s bouquet of red plastic roses from her green vase and crashed onto the bed, Lisa cheering me on at my side.
“Hurry, Lizzy! Put them anywhere there’s room, fast!”
One by one, I ripped the heads from the stems’ sockets and began working them into my hair, around the base of each braid. I tried my hardest to cover every last available spot. In the tight zigzags of my braids, they clung nicely. When I was done, my head sported a helmet of bright, red roses and a small red dress emerging from the front, like a unicorn’s horn. I looked at Lisa for confirmation.
She explained that it would take at least twenty minutes for there to be any noticeable difference. The most important part now was to remain as still as possible. So I shut the bathroom door behind me and took a seat in the bathtub. I figured it might be good to send every last horrible bug streaming down the drain as soon as they began to retreat from this red they feared so much.
I decided to remove all of my clothing in case they tried to survive in some fold along my shirt or in one of my pockets. I stripped completely, crouched in the tub, and waited.
Time passed and nothing happened. Lisa knocked and asked to see how things were coming along, but I sent her away. The empty tub became icy under my feet. I began to shiver. Then, without warning, a bug dropped.
A small thrill ran through my body. I shook my head, and another dropped. Time passed, but that was all. The bugs wriggled, dwarfed in the white basin, just the way they did when they had recently caused me trouble in school.
As far back as last year, I’d felt different. The kindergarten teacher assigned us to walk with a buddy then, but I always cried when it was time to pair up because I didn’t want anyone to be close enough to get a good look at my spiky bangs. I knew the kids couldn’t help but stare. Soon I became the crybaby with the weird haircut. With all the name-calling, I’d kept to myself, and that had made me something of an outcast. Now, in the first grade, when I had told and retold myself I would be a perfectly “normal” kid, the lice had ruined everything all over again.
It happened during Mrs. McAdams’s spelling test, when I was seated across from a boy named David at table three. Mrs. Reynolds, the teaching assistant, a heavy, turkey-necked woman with gray tufts of worn-out Velcro for hair, walked around the classroom to make sure we behaved during Mrs. McAdams’s reading aloud of the week’s spelling words.
Pencils scratching paper and Mrs. Reynolds’s penny loafers dragging along the tiles were the only sounds. I spread my sloppy handwriting across the handout page, struggling to spell Sunday.
From her desk, Mrs. McAdams called out the next word, time. Just as I leaned in to give it a try, I caught a deep itch on my scalp. When I scratched, a tiny gray bug landed with a light click in the center of my worksheet. My heart raced with a sharp pang of fear that shook off my drowsiness. I quickly swatted the insect off my desk. My eyes darted in all directions in search of a witness, but no one had seen.
I would have been in the clear had the itch not persisted. Another scratch, and two more bugs came clicking down. I swatted again. One landed on the ground; the other shot across my desk and landed on David’s side of the table that we shared. Mrs. McAdams called out another word, but I missed it. I was too busy pretending not to notice the bug struggling for firm footing right under David’s nose as he looked up to Mrs. McAdams for further instruction.
My itch persisted and grew, demanding attention. It took all of my will not to scratch again. Suddenly, David raised his hand, bringing the test and the entire class to a dead halt.
“Mrs. Reynolds? There’s a weird bug on my desk.” The creature had stopped for a rest at the top of David’s page, right where he’d spelled out time in neat little letters.
A girl beside him cried out, “Ewwww, that’s disgusting! David, you’re disgusting!”
“I didn’t—it wasn’t me. I don’t know where it came from.” The class broke into whispers. David turned bright red and folded his arms across his chest, holding in tears.
Mrs. Reynolds hurried over to investigate, mistakenly searching for food in all the desks. She was in the middle of delivering a quivery-pitched speech about how sneaking food into the classroom brought roaches, when I had to scratch my head and another bug fell, click, against my page. There was no hiding from the girl seated to the right of me the fact that that creature had fallen from my hair onto my nearly blank, white test sheet.
“Oh my God. They’re coming from her hair,” Tamieka called out.
Shrieks and noises of disgust exploded throughout the room.
Mrs. Reynolds’s cold, bony hand took me by the wrist, through the whooping and hollering, out of the room, and down the hallway. As the secretary watched, she ordered me to sit in an office chair that had been dragged to the center of the room, away from everything else. She ripped two thick Popsicle sticks from a thin package, parted my hair with the tips, and immediately found the lice. But instead of backing away, she dug around and remarked on how my head was “infested,” moving over to allow the secretary a look as she used the popsicle sticks to shake loose a few more lice, which dropped onto the green tiles, both women watching.
Mrs. Reynolds dragged me back into the classroom and ordered me to remain in the doorway. She went to the teacher’s cabinet and rummaged around in search of something.
Looking over at me, Tamieka whispered into another girl’s ear. They giggled, pointed, and stared. Mrs. McAdams slammed her palm down hard on her desk and shouted for them to “be nice,” inadvertently calling the rest of the class’s attention to me. Just then, Mrs. Reynolds lifted a bottle of vinegar into the air and called through the silence, “I’ve got it. Let’s go. Walk ahead of me—those suckers jump.” The children roared behind us. But as much as I was humiliated, I was more worried about what the vinegar was for.
She took me to the front of the school building, where two teachers stood, sharing a cigarette. The street was busy; cars whizzed by and a train rumbled overhead. For a moment, I considered escape.
But hope for freedom vanished with Mrs. Reynolds’s grip on my shoulder. She pushed me into a bent-over position, with my hands pressed against the rough brick wall. She rolled up her sleeves, readying herself.
“Now, this is a home remedy passed down in my family. Don’t fret, it won’t hurt you one bit. All you need to do is close your eyes. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Cold liquid splashed over my head, stinging the spots where I’d scratched. Mrs. Reynolds rubbed my scalp in harsh circles that tangled my hair. I inhaled deep whiffs of vinegar until I felt sick and woozy.
From where I stood, only the splashing of vinegar against cement and our four feet—my sneakers and Mrs. Reynolds’s penny loafers—remained visible. Soon, a small crowd of new feet gathered nearby—the teachers on break.
There was no way I’d ever enter that classroom again. How could I look into their faces, much less reclaim my seat between David and Tamieka? I wished I would die from the fumes, and that Mrs. Reynolds would be blamed for killing me.
When Mrs. Reynolds finally allowed me to stand, she commented, “That’s enough. You don’t want anyone to mistake you for a salad, do ya, kid?” She let out a quick snort of laughter. Then, just as quickly as her smile had come, it was gone. “Let’s go, you. Back to class.”
Crouching in the tub back at home, I watched the bugs float away, helpless in the stream of water I released from the faucet. My scalp throbbed in the grip of the tight braids. I thought of how Mrs. Reynolds’s “home remedy” had done nothing, the way Lisa’s “cure” seemed to be doing the same.
I stood to get a look at myself in the mirror. The image that stared back was startling. When my effort to evenly arrange the roses had failed, Lisa volunteered to help fix it. A perfect headdress of roses was spread all around my hair—a symmetrical sort of bouquet.
A single bug crawled on the hem of Barbie’s dress, walking leisurely along the red cloth. Had Lisa lied? Or was there something she’d forgotten? I slipped my clothing back on, exited the bathroom, and called out for my sister.
“It’s not working. What do I do?”
Lisa tried to muffle her laughter. Then, before I could think to do anything, our parents’ voices sounded in the stairwell. Lisa quaked with laughter, holding her sides, savoring my horror. In that one awful moment, I realized that it had all been a joke at my expense. She’d completely tricked me, again.
Lisa grabbed my arms to prevent me from undoing her work. Her laughter followed me as I broke free and slammed the door to my room. I clamped my hand over the fake petals and tore every last one from my head.
I pulled the doll’s dress off, ran over to the window, and threw it out angrily. The barrettes followed behind, falling noiselessly down to the street. In the next room, my parents rustled in with plastic bags. I slammed my body into my bedroom door to hold it shut. On the other side, Lisa used her weight to combat my resistance. With one hand, I unraveled the braids, while holding the door shut at the same time. Then I moved out of the way at just the right moment so that she fell through the door and flat on her face. I stood, looking down at the bright red roses spilled around my bare feet.
“What’s going on?” Ma poked her head through the door. I burst into tears.
“What happened? Lisa, what did you do?”
“Nothing. I didn’t do anything! Lizzy said she wanted me to do her hair. Now she’s crying. I don’t know why.”
“Get out!” I screamed.
“Lisa, tell me—” Ma started.
“Get out! Idiot!” I snapped even louder.
Lisa picked herself up and left without another effort to torment me.
Crouching down, Ma opened her arms and engulfed me. I dissolved in her warmth.
“What’s wrong with my baby? Tell Mommy what happened.”
She combed her fingers through my hair and wiped my tears away with her thumbs. Ma kissed my cheeks and forehead, her eyes so sympathetic I thought she was going to cry, too. In her arms, my anger evaporated.
“Talk to me. Shhhh. Don’t cry, pumpkin.”
But the crying was what kept her close to me; there was no stopping it.
The world was filled with people who were repulsed by me. Only my mother knew that I deserved to be held. So I let her embrace me and demand over and over to know what was wrong, just so I could hear her voice, feel it vibrating in her chest and humming against my whole body, lulling me into a sense of safety. I buried my face against Ma’s neck, trembling and gripping her shirt each time I suspected she might pull away.
I tried to be a good student. I really did. I wanted to be one of those kids who raised her hand in class, knew the answers, and handed in all my work. Like Michelle—during story time she was the best at reading out loud to the class. Or like Marco, who knew the right answers to math problems. I tried to be a good student like them; tried to get good grades. It just didn’t work out that way. There was too much going on.
Maybe getting more sleep on school nights would have helped. But I wasn’t getting sleep; no one made me. Nearly seven days a week, I bore witness to the endless traffic streaming through our apartment. Ma and Daddy flowed in and out of the house like tireless joggers, all night long. Their need for drugs had become more urgent and out-of-control than ever, and their habits played out in a routine that took up all the space in our apartment. If I wanted to, I could have taken out a calendar, pointed directly at a given day, and guessed ahead of time exactly what would happen, and when. They became that predictable.
Six or seven days into each month, Ma and Daddy blew the SSI check and ran us broke. Then, if there was no money because the check was spent—and it always was—Ma would shake down regulars at the bar for a few dollars, over at the Aqueduct or McGovern’s. There was an assortment of older men from whom she’d get one dollar here, two dollars there, loose change from a broken five or ten spread out across the bar. Sometimes she’d beg for a couple of quarters to play the jukebox and instead she’d pocket them. Other times Ma took the men to the bathroom or out in a back alley, and after a few minutes alone with them she could earn even more.
Ma did this until she gathered just enough for a hit. The minimum was five dollars for a “nick’s worth” of coke, though this was a cheap high, a junkie’s high. Returning from the bars, Ma reported straight to Daddy: “Peter, I got five dollars. Petie, I got five.” Then he’d quietly slip on his coat in their room, before trying to sneak away, in case Lisa was still awake.
Daddy knew he’d never hear the end of it if Lisa caught him leaving to buy drugs while we went hungry. There’d be no way to avoid the insults, curses, tears, and shouting.
“You can’t spend the money! We need food! I’m starving, my stomach burns. We didn’t eat dinner, and you’re going to get high?” she’d scream.
Listening to Lisa fight Daddy and Ma, I knew she made perfect sense. There was no excuse for them to spend our last few dollars on drugs when the fridge contained only a jar of rotten mayonnaise and an old, watery head of lettuce. Lisa had every right to be angry.
But things weren’t always so clear for me, not like they were for Lisa. Ma said she needed drugs to help her forget the bad memories that haunted her, the thoughts of her mom and dad that caused her to suffer all day long. And even though I wasn’t sure what exactly in his past Daddy got high to forget, I knew it must be something very painful, because if Daddy didn’t get high, then he would spend days collapsed on the couch in a withdrawal-induced depression. In that state, he became unrecognizable to me.
Lisa’s request of our parents was simple—all she wanted was a hot meal and for them to do better by us. I wanted the same. Still, I couldn’t help noticing that if we hadn’t eaten a hot meal for the entire day, Ma and Daddy hadn’t eaten a hot meal in two or three days, either. And when I needed a new winter coat, my eyes kept finding Daddy’s sneakers, which were cracked and held together with duct tape. One way or another, Ma and Daddy were always making it clear that they simply couldn’t give me what they didn’t have.
They had no intention to hurt us. It wasn’t as if they were running off during the daytime to be better parents to some other kids and then returning home at night to be awful to us. They simply did not have it in them to be the parents I wanted them to be. So how could I blame them?
I remember one time when Ma stole five dollars from me on my birthday. It had been a gift from my father’s mother, mailed from Long Island. The crisp bill had arrived in the mail taped neatly inside a glittery card right above my grandmother’s signature and her handwritten birthday wishes. I tucked the bill away in my dresser and planned a trip to the candy store. But that never happened. Instead, Ma waited for me to leave my room and then took the money to buy drugs.
When she returned home half an hour later with a nickel bag, I was furious with her. I demanded that she give me my money, and I shouted mean words at her that are hard for me to think about now. Ma said nothing back. She snatched up her works—syringe and cocaine—from the kitchen table and stormed to the bathroom. I trailed behind her, shouting harsh things. I assumed that she was running away from me to get high in privacy, but I was wrong. Instead, from the bathroom doorway, I saw Ma throw something into the toilet. Then I realized she was crying, and what she had flushed down the toilet was her coke. She’d thrown away the entire hit—despite her desperation.
She looked at me with tears in her eyes, “I’m not a monster, Lizzy,” she said. “I can’t stop. Forgive me, pumpkin?”
Then I was crying too; we both were. We ended up on the bathroom floor together, hugging each other, her syringe resting on the surface of the sink, directly in my view, my mother’s arms riddled up and down with aging needle marks. In the softest voice, she kept asking me for that same simple thing: “Forgive me, Lizzy.”
So I did.
She didn’t mean to do it; she would have stopped if she could have. “It’s okay, Ma, I forgive you,” I assured her. I forgave her in that moment, and I forgave her again two months later when she went into the freezer and took the Thanksgiving turkey we’d gotten from the church and sold it to a neighbor so that she could buy another hit. Forgiving her didn’t mean that I wasn’t devastated. I was heartbroken and deeply hurt whenever they left us hungry. I just didn’t blame Ma or Daddy for my hurt. I wasn’t angry at them. If I hated anything at all, I hated drugs and addiction itself, but I did not hate my parents. I loved my parents, and I knew they loved me. I was sure of it.
At night, Ma would take breaks from shooting up to visit my bedside and tuck me in, sing to me, just one verse of “You Are My Sunshine.” She’d smile at me, rubbing her fingers through my hair. She’d kiss my face and tell me her children were the best thing that ever happened to her. “You and Lisa are my angels, my babies,” she’d say, and I knew I was loved. The smell of her Winston cigarettes and the faint, sour smell of coke always lingered—scents that lulled me to sleep.
One winter night, around four a.m. when Daddy was exhausted, he gave in to my demands for a walk around the neighborhood in the virgin snow. The early-morning hour and the new snow, which sparkled like a bed of bright diamonds beneath the glow of Bronx street lamps, insulated us, and made it seem as if the crunching underfoot was the only sound for miles. The more I pressed him, the more we walked. He told me stories of his psychology studies in college; he taught me things he’d learned there, insisting I would need them someday. “I love you, Lizzy,” he told me. We walked for miles that night without seeing another soul in the empty, snow-covered streets, until it felt as if there really was no one else; as if Daddy belonged only to me and the world belonged only to us. And I knew I was loved.
Drugs were like a wrecking ball tearing through our family, and even though Lisa and I were impacted, I couldn’t help but feel that Ma and Daddy were the ones who needed protecting. I felt like it was my job to keep them safe. There was just something so fragile about them; the way their addiction made them barrel out of the house in total disregard of their safety, at all hours of the night, despite the many news reports about neighborhood rapes, muggings, and cab drivers being shot for their earnings within a ten-block radius of our apartment building.
As though she were impervious to harm, and as though she weren’t legally blind, Ma bounded up University Avenue, fearless, throughout the night, even though her vision made it tricky to navigate the darkened Bronx streets. Ma was blind enough to pass someone she knew on the sidewalk—even her family—without recognizing them. But she was familiar enough with shapes and movements to distinguish a moving vehicle from a parked one, or a person approaching her from one walking away, and even a green traffic light from a red one. Still, that did not stop her from encountering dangerous situations.
A handful of times, Ma was attacked in our neighborhood. These incidents horrified me and I pleaded with her to stay home, but nothing could stop Ma when she wanted to get high. One night she was robbed at knifepoint. More than likely, she had been unable to see her attackers targeting her, something an average-sighted person could have spotted. She came home with a black eye, a busted lip, and a story about how the mugger had gotten furious when he found nothing of value on Ma, and had taken it out on her face.
Another time, she came home making her typical single-minded dash from the front door to kitchen with her bag of coke, and it actually took a moment for me to notice the foot-long rip down the side of her jeans and her bloody leg. Ma told me she was hit by a car.
“Nothing serious, Lizzy. It wasn’t going that fast, I got right up. Same thing happened when I was a bike messenger. I’m fine,” she said, cutting her story short to ask Daddy for her syringe. Ma was either oblivious to the fact that these moments were brushes with death, or she didn’t care. It was hard to tell. The only thing that was clear was that when Ma was bent on having something, she was willing to do anything for it.
Blind as she was, Ma had spent three weeks in the seventies working as a bike courier on the busy streets of Manhattan. Of course, they didn’t normally hire the near-blind, but Ma needed cash and didn’t tell her employer about her impairment. Instead, she borrowed a friend’s mountain bike, and because they paid her by the package, she plowed into traffic at life-threatening speeds. Ma had given up on the job after her second accident, but only because her friend’s bike was totaled and she had no replacement. That’s just the way Ma was, unstoppable when she was determined to get something; unafraid and seemingly unaware of how fragile her life could be.
Daddy wasn’t much better at taking care of himself. On drug runs, he would race up University Avenue through gang territories, the dangerous streets of Grand Avenue and 183rd. Once, he’d returned home badly injured, fresh blood spilled over his face, down onto his neck and shirt. A man had beaten Daddy’s head into the cement just down the block, and it had taken him almost an hour to stagger home. But by the very next day, Daddy was out of the house again, copping drugs. Like Ma, his addiction was so strong that he gambled with his safety night after night, seeing only the destination ahead of him and not the hazards around him. That destination was the blue door on Grand Avenue, where he climbed the stairs to smooth out Ma’s crinkled dollar bills, giving them over to the drug dealers in exchange for the packages of powder that ruled my parents’ world.
Sleep on school nights was impossible. Somebody had to watch the windows and time how long they took to come back. Somebody had to keep them safe. If not me, then who? Thirty to forty minutes for a drug run was about the average time it took. Too much longer and that meant there was trouble. “9-1-1,” I’d think to myself as I leaned out the window to watch Daddy trek the avenue, shrinking over the curve of University, on his way to another pickup. If he ran into any trouble, I had my plan set. We frequently lost our home phone to unpaid bills, but I could be down at the corner pay phone in moments.
But my responsibilities for the evening did not end there. As Ma and Daddy made their endless drug runs, I passed the hours alongside my parents, searching for other ways that I might be helpful. Ma and Daddy were willing to include me in their activities, and I was thrilled to be a part of them. One way I figured I could be most useful was to help Daddy sneak past Lisa, who was sure to protest if she caught him on his way out. Given that her room was right beside the front door, leaving the house undetected was always tricky for Daddy. That’s where I stepped in.
In the corridor leading out of our apartment, I would be lookout, while he hung back. I felt daring, like a character from Daddy’s favorite cop show, Hill Street Blues; like we were partners in crime.
“Let me know when,” he’d whisper, dressed and ready to go, ducking behind the living room partition, waiting for my signal.
“Now.” On his way out, Daddy always gave a nod of acknowledgment, something that sent a rush of happiness through me. We were a team. “Don’t worry,” I’d whisper down the hall behind him, “you’re covered.”
And how could I go to bed when Ma became giddy setting up their “works” while she waited for Daddy to return with the drugs? There was no way I could pass up these brief moments when she was talkative, a thrill emanating through her bright amber eyes. School could not have been a more distant notion when Ma and I spent our own special time together. We would sit in the living room, talking about her adolescence in the late sixties and early seventies in Greenwich Village.
“You should have seen me, Lizzy. I used to wear thigh-high leather boots with clog heels.”
“Really?” I pretended she hadn’t repeated these stories a hundred times, and instead acted as though each detail was new to me, feigning shock and curiosity.
“Yup, you bet. I had an Afro too. I’ve always had kinky hair; that’s from my Italian side. Everyone did stuff like that, though. Your father had huge sideburns, muttonchops. Seriously!”
Ma talked to me like an old friend on those nights, sparing no detail about her street life, the drug scene, sex with her old boyfriends, and especially her hurt feelings about her childhood. I acted as if there were nothing surprising or vulgar about what Ma shared. Instead, I played it cool and tried to make Ma feel listened to, nodding agreement for things that I hardly understood at all. Ma never noticed. She only continued on, lost in her stories.
The fun part of the night would always come when Ma’s past occurred to her as a positive thing, a sort of adventure. But I knew this was temporary, a side effect of her anticipation of shooting up. Later—on the other side of her high, when she was coming down and the drug had begun to lose its effect—the very same thoughts would depress her. I’d be there for the letdown, too. If I didn’t listen when she needed to confide in someone, then who would? But first, there was this short, wonderful window of time while we waited. I frequently checked the windows for Daddy, as Ma told her stories, full of rare joy.
“Man, I was always trippin’ then! Yeah, acid can really mess with you, Lizzy. Especially when you’re at a concert. Don’t you do acid, okay? It’ll make you think all sorts of things that aren’t real. It’s funky like that.”
Before Daddy’s heavy footsteps sounded in the hallway, Ma laid out spoons to cradle the powder, in which she would later deposit a syringe’s worth of warm water to dissolve it. Old plastic wonton soup bowls held the water. She placed them beside the shoelaces, which were used to draw up veins; they always used separate syringes to shoot up. Our conversation continued as she inspected each needle, holding it up to the pulsing fluorescent light before placing it back down on the black Formica surface of the kitchen table. My watching her set up their “works” was part of the routine.
“Yup, I used to get modeling offers all the time. Most of the agents wanted sex, though. Watch out for guys like that, they’re everywhere. Just a sec”—she’d break away to squirt water out of a syringe to test it. “Yeah, I’m telling you, guys can be scumbags, but I had a lot of fun back then anyway.” As she spoke I followed the dried, spattered blood spots along the wall behind her, from the times they missed veins. If it weren’t for the absence of a sterilization process, the ritual might resemble a doctor’s aide laying out tools for some minor surgery. Soon Daddy would return with the small foil package—the remedy for their ailment.
Every night was like this. While Ma and Daddy injected themselves with cocaine and ran in and out, like a tag team, I stayed close by and shared the night with them. While Lisa slept in her bed, I had them all to myself; I helped keep them safe. And even if they were high, they were still right there, within my reach.
Ma’s and Daddy’s reactions to the powder were always the same: eyes flung wide open, as though in perpetual shock; small, involuntary twitches running over their faces like electrical surges. Ma was moved by some reflexive force to circle the room, sniffling, holding her fingers pinched shut, directing her speech to the ceiling. At this stage of her high, she never made eye contact.
Roughly twenty minutes later, when she began to come down from the pleasurable part of her habit, the broken version of Ma returned. Her shift in storytelling reflected the change.
“He promised—Pop swore he’d get us out of there. He was going to take us to Paris, Lizzy. You know, I was his favorite daughter, I knew it and Lori knew it. Everyone knew it. His favorite. You know, he broke my collarbone when I was a kid, tried to throw me out the window!” she shouted, eyes fixed on the living room ceiling. Ma’s pain about her past broke my heart, everything her parents did to her I wished so badly I could take away. I wanted more than anything to take her pain away from her.
Behind her, Daddy twitched and fidgeted with his set of works, cleaning and re-cleaning them in super-slow motion—spilling things, tripping, fumbling, his mind warped from the effects of his high.
“It was the alcohol that made Pop that way, Lizzy. He was always sorry about that. He loved me. You think he loved me, don’t you?” Ma asked, chugging on her forty-ounce beer. This was the part when she started crying.
Many times Ma pulled down the neck of her T-shirt to expose her uneven collarbones. One bone jutted out, disjoined from its twin after her collision with the wall when she was a toddler. The fear on her face, real each time, told me that she was there again, reliving her memories. She shot up to feel better, to escape, but somehow the drugs always returned her to the trouble, as though it might be happening to her all over again, right there in our living room.
“I love you, Ma. I’m right here with you,” I’d assure her. “We all love you here, Ma.”
“I know, Lizzy.” But I could tell that my words never got through. Her sadness was just too thick; it drew her miles away from everything, from me.
While Ma spoke, I abandoned my needs—sleep, homework, television, and my toys, unused in my darkened bedroom. Her pain blanketed me in its urgency, so that it became difficult to realize that there was any distance—age-wise or responsibility-wise—between us.
So I learned to talk to her like a friend, even if I didn’t really know what I was saying. I insisted, “He must have loved you; he was your daddy. I think the beer made him angry, Ma. If he could have stopped, he would have been a good daddy for you.” If this provided any comfort for Ma, it was short-lived. It took her only a half hour to slip on her beige coat, filthy at its cuffs, so that she could return to the dark streets in search of the next hit, still wiping tears from her flushed face. Inside their bedroom, by the light of the street lamp streaking through our murky windows, Daddy fell into a catatonic slumber, deteriorated by the numerous highs he’d achieved this far into the night, but also jolted awake occasionally by the powder still surging through his system.
I went back to my place at the window, to make sure Ma made it up University Avenue. “9-1-1,” I’d mumble to myself, “9-1-1,” as she shrank down the avenue on her way back to the Aqueduct Bar so that she could set the whole routine in motion, all over again.
When she was out of my view, I counted half-hour chunks of time by the nightly sitcoms I enjoyed, Cheers and The Honeymooners. Television kept me company during all of the breaks in Ma and Daddy’s cycles. I usually rounded off my nights with these shows, then infomercials, and finally morning news announcements, around five a.m. As I got ready to take myself to bed, a faint blue filled the morning sky. By this time, the bars had finally locked their doors, so the only people still out on the street were prostitutes, homeless people, and drug addicts—all as penniless as Ma, and fruitless targets for panhandling. So Ma came home to stay. Safe at last, she collapsed into bed beside Daddy, exhaustion finally overtaking the need to use. Indeed, exhaustion was one of the few things that ever did. When I knew for sure she was in bed, I could finally relax and we could all get some rest.
At dawn, the only noise in our apartment was the upbeat music of early-morning news and Ma’s snoring. I readied myself for sleep, slipping into a long, blue nightgown sent from Long Island, Ma’s and Daddy’s bodies rising and falling as they drew breath, Ma still fully dressed, Daddy in his underwear. Snapping the television off, I settled into bed, knowing that if they didn’t need drugs so much, Ma and Daddy would spend more time with Lisa and me. They would make things better, if they could.
“Liz, get the hell out of bed!” Lisa had lost any patience for my truancy back when I was in kindergarten. By the time I was in first grade, she’d grown downright hostile.
“The same crap every day, get out of bed!” She stripped the blankets off me, sending shivers up my body. Outside the window, children clamored to catch a bus. A woman in a blue raincoat directed them by blowing her whistle. I couldn’t have gotten more than two hours’ sleep.
Each day, by the force of some mysterious strength within her, Lisa rose without prompting to the screech of her alarm, ran water over her face, and took down one of two or three tired shirts from the hook outside her closet. Once dressed, she began our routine battle on her way out the door.
She started off gently, nudging my shoulder and calling out, “Lizzy, it’s time to get up. . . . Liz, it’s morning,” smoothly and encouragingly. But it didn’t take her long to learn that she needed a much firmer approach to get me conscious, let alone dressed.
Months passed with Lisa ripping the sheets off me dozens of times, exposing my legs and arms to the shocking cold of our rarely heated apartment. In defense, I would curl up in a ball and grip my pillow while she jerked at its free corners, fighting to loosen my grip. In those moments, I hated her more than the idea of going to school; more than the faces of the awful, taunting children I kept in mind throughout my entire struggle to stay home. And I especially resented the pleasure that I sensed she took from volunteering to take on the role of my disciplinary figure.
“I’m your older sister,” she’d scream. “You have to listen to me. I’ll dump cold water on your head if you don’t move your ass!”
She meant it too. Lisa splashed a cup of ice cold water right on my head, and I was furious with her. But even being wet and cold couldn’t get me out of bed on some days.
On those mornings after staying up with Ma and Daddy, it felt as though I’d just laid my head down for a moment before Lisa was standing over me, angry and frustrated. On this particular morning, grudgingly, I dressed in whatever clothing I had tossed aside the night before, tiptoeing around cautiously, so as not to wake Ma or Daddy. But Lisa didn’t seem to notice they were sleeping. She shouted out the time of day every five minutes to warn me we’d be late if we didn’t move it. Outside, the cold air hitting my face woke me a little; but the fluorescent lighting and noisy classrooms of P.S. 261 had an adverse effect. They made me sleepy, and this made my head feel fuzzy; and by then all my interest in learning was gone.
Each day, Mrs. McAdams dictated lessons on reading, which I could already somewhat do on my own. Ma had read enough of Horton Hears a Who! at my bedside so that I figured out how to read it on my own, which led to trying to read other things, like Lisa’s third-grade English lessons and little bits of Daddy’s true crime books that he left all over our apartment. This made it easy to ignore the step-by-step explanation of proper spelling and grammar, and let my exhaustion take over. This was when I’d drift, letting my vision sweep the room in rocking motions until my eyes eventually closed shut.
I wondered, half-conscious, if Ma had woken up yet. If so, was she watching The Price Is Right without me? Was she in the mood to go for a walk? If I were home, would she take me out with her?
When Mrs. McAdams finished the reading lesson, she reviewed some math problems that I didn’t, in any way, recognize. Each minute in class felt like an hour. While she spoke, I often killed time dreaming up reasons I’d give the school nurse for needing to be sent home early: stomachache, flu, fever, plague. They were at least half true. Every time Mrs. McAdams looked over the room to randomly call on a student to answer a question, my stomach was racked with sharp pains and I felt so shaky I thought I might puke.
When the bell finally rang, I quickly stuffed the pages into my bag. I always tried to slip out ahead of the rest of the students. They made me nervous. Walking between them as I left class, tension tightened my whole body. At least, I thought, Ma had finally scraped all of the lice off my head, using quell and a comb. Still, I was clearly different from them all. They knew it, and so did I; their stares proved it. My dirty clothing hung heavily off my body. My socks were always weeks old, and I wore my underwear until the crotch dissolved away into nothing. I was aware of the stench I gave off, so I knew they must have been aware, too.
Who cares what people think? Daddy had said. that’s their hang-up. I tried to tell myself their judgment shouldn’t matter. I was, in one way, going through life much faster than all of them—who else cursed freely in front of their parents, went to bed anytime they wanted, knew about sex, and could demonstrate, crudely, how to mainline drugs when they were just six years old? This knowledge did give me some feeling of maturity around them. Still, in ways that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, the other kids seemed far more together than I was, in the sense that they were actual kids. It was intimidating, the way they mingled so easily with one another and made friends, or raised their hands to answer the teacher’s questions, exuding so much confidence. Maybe I was growing up faster, but I worried that I might be skipping too many steps along the way, taking shortcuts that left me feeling scattered, full of holes. Different.
It was the feeling that I was different that gnawed at me in the classroom, pressing me deeper into my exhaustion, racking my stomach with sharp pains. I was always grateful for the end of the day, when I could finally go.
Soon I was outside again, and then after a quick walk, I was home, the school day blessedly far behind me. I was just glad to be somewhere I could rest. And I did, all through the afternoon and into the evening; I slept on the couch so that I could be in the center of the apartment, in the middle of everything.
The following month, December, after weeks of explaining to Ma about the way school made me feel down, she allowed me, against what she called her better judgment, to stay home much of the time. Together, we watched game shows and ate mayonnaise sandwiches on the couch again. Daddy slept until early afternoon and became angry every time he woke to find me home. “Lizzy! You stayed home again?” he’d shout, as though he was somehow surprised at what was becoming a regular occurrence. “You have to go next time, okay?” he’d say, never following up to wake me in the morning. He’d just see me at home, day after day, and shake his head in disapproval.
One Thursday, three weeks into my time off, a morning when Lisa had already lost a fight to get me dressed and left for school, there was a hard knock at the door. I was the only one awake for it. From the hallway, I heard two people talking: a woman and a man. They knocked again, louder this time, making my heart race. I tiptoed over to Ma and Daddy’s bed. In their sleep, neither of them flinched. Then I heard voices in the hall speaking to each other, something about a bad smell. I knew they were talking about our apartment. Over the last six months or so, Ma and Daddy hadn’t cleaned much. Dirt was collecting on everything. A broken window from one night when Ma lost her temper, slicing open her hand as she punched through it, remained broken. To the best of our ability, we staved off rain and snow from falling into the kitchen with the occasional taped-up plastic bag. But it wasn’t effective, and the kitchen was often wet and the apartment freezing. Lisa and I both got the flu that winter. Also the fridge had broken down, and ever since, Daddy had put quarts of milk and packages of cream cheese on the windowsill. But what the people in the hallway must have smelled was the bathtub.
Somehow the drain had gotten clogged. Lisa took a shower in it anyway by using a bucket to scoop out just enough of the old water, and then turning the bucket over so she could stand on top of it to make a little island within the dirty tub. She did this repeatedly, but the water she used was never emptied and over the months it had turned black. There was equally dark slime collecting around the tub’s edges. If you stirred the water, a swampy smell kicked up.
The knocking subsided momentarily, and the voices slid a piece of paper under the door. After a few minutes, I heard them leave.
At my bedroom window, I peeked out onto the street below. A dark man holding a briefcase and a tan woman in a long coat approached a double-parked car. The man looked up and I ducked back, convinced he’d spotted me. But they just drove off.
Slowly, I tiptoed to the door and lifted the paper up. It ordered the parent(s) or guardian of Elizabeth Murray to hereby phone a Mr. Doumbia regarding her truancy from school. There was a phone number at the bottom, along with a cartoon outline of an adult holding a child’s hand. I didn’t know the exact definition of truancy, but figured it had to do with me never showing up to school.
I double-checked to make sure Ma and Daddy hadn’t heard anything. Then I folded the paper and ripped it, again and again, tucking the small pieces into different parts of the trash, under wet tissues, banana peels, and beer cans, until it was completely invisible.
One night, Ma came home and announced to us that she’d just made a new friend in the neighborhood, a woman named Tara.
“I was just in line at the drug spot to get a nickel bag and I saw this other white lady standing there. That’s rare, ya know? So I started talking to her.” Ma paused, seeming to decide right there in our living room, “I like her.”
They’d hit it off so well that they left and used their coke together, at Tara’s apartment on 233rd Street and Broadway. Soon after, Ma, Lisa, and I were there all the time.
Tara had a limp, blond mullet, and a light facial twitch when she was irritable. With her bulky sweaters and ripped stonewashed jeans, she might have perpetually been on her way to an eighties hair-band rock concert, if not for her age, which had to be in her early forties. Her seven-year-old daughter, Stephanie, was wild, prone to unprovoked tantrums at any random time, which made Lisa and me make fun of her relentlessly, behind her back. With olive skin, small, dark eyes, and relaxed jet-black hair, Stephanie must have looked more like her father, whom Tara didn’t keep in touch with. Ma told me he used to be kind of famous for acting in a seventies sitcom. But for all the money he made, Stephanie, Tara said, got almost nothing.
In Tara’s apartment, Lisa, Stephanie, and I played with toys and watched cartoons while she and Ma got high in her kitchen. The noises they made setting up the drugs in Tara’s place, I noticed, were different from the way Ma and Daddy sounded; Tara kept up conversation the entire time. Before that, I’d assumed there was some technical reason Ma and Daddy were so quiet. Listening to Tara and Ma, I realized this wasn’t so, and it made me wonder whether Ma and Daddy were as close as I assumed they were.
In their time together, Ma and Tara circulated the same three conversation topics: Stephanie’s dad, the quality of their bag, and each other’s chosen method of getting high. Tara sniffed her coke; I found out that this is what most people did with it. Ma and Daddy were different in that way. I’d hear Ma explain herself almost every time Tara had to watch her use the syringe.
“Good God, Jeanie, how do you do that to yourself?”
“Better than letting the powder cut your nose into pieces. You think I wanna be left without cartilage up there by the time I’m fifty?” Ma said.
“Anyway, Jean, he thinks raising a child is as simple as mailing a check whenever you feel like it, which, did I mention, he never does anyway. Well, you know there’s a lot more to it than that.”
I found out that Ma wasn’t a good conversationalist around new people, at least not when she was high.
“I know” was usually all she said back; but that was all Tara needed to keep going.
“Well, his head’s gonna spin when I sue the pants off him. Mr. Big Shot, he ain’t gonna get away with this,” she’d insist, pointing two fingers forward, a cigarette pinched between them.
It turned out that Ma and Tara had a lot in common. They’d both grown up with abusive, absentee fathers, and had kids before they were ready, and they both lived off of government assistance. Above other drugs, they both preferred the rush coke provided them. But they differed in one key respect—the methods they resorted to in order to sustain their habits. Tara gasped dramatically, listening to Ma talk about how much she hated waiting for welfare each month, and how it was almost easier to hustle guys in the bar or to stop people on the street for cash.
“At least I know if I’m out there, I don’t have to wait. I hate to wait,” Ma said.
Tara called Ma’s scrounging “panhandling” and said it was beneath them both. But Ma couldn’t care less about her pride when she wanted to get high.
“Oh no, Jean, we’ve got to get you to cut that out. You should meet Ron,” she told Ma. “He takes care of me. He’ll probably help you out, too. No more begging for you. That’s no good,” she insisted.
We all met Ron, together, the very next Sunday. He was an older man, mid-sixties, very thin, with pale skin and large brown eyes. His jacket was sparrow-brown, with patches covering the elbows. He used a separate voice for speaking to children.
“Well, hello there, you pretty little ladies. And how are we all doing today?” he said as we sat in a row on Tara’s couch, the early-afternoon sun streaking through Tara’s sheer curtains.
Stephanie got up to hug his leg. Lisa and I were a little shyer, so we hung back. He tried to win us over with candy. I snatched three butterscotches from his hand and began unwrapping one, fast. He smiled and rubbed my head.
“That’s a good girl,” he said.
Lisa remained quiet and held her candy in her hand until Ron went back into the kitchen. He winked at her on his way out. She turned to me.
“Don’t eat that crap,” she said, smacking it out of my hand.
“Why?” I whined.
“We don’t know him, that’s why.”
“You ruin everything!” I screamed.
Right from the start, Lisa didn’t like Ron. “He’s a stranger,” she always reminded me. “We don’t know him. Treat him like a stranger.”
But was he a stranger if he was Tara’s friend? And would a stranger take us out to eat? Would he buy us candy and take us for a long ride in his big, red car? And especially, would Ma warm up to a stranger so quickly?
Ron bought Tara most of her drugs, and she assumed, correctly, that he would do the same for Ma.
While Lisa, Stephanie, and I lay on our stomachs on Tara’s plush carpet in front of the TV watching cartoons, Tara introduced Ma to Ron in her kitchen. Soon after, the three of them slipped into Tara’s bedroom, shut the door, and didn’t come out for a long while. Occasionally, we heard a giggle or a thud, but it was impossible to tell what they were doing. Ron was the first to return to the living room.
“Now, which one of my girls is hungry?” he asked, rubbing his hands together.
Ron took us all to eat at International House of Pancakes, not too far from Tara’s apartment, on Broadway. He surprised us by saying we could get anything we wanted—something neither Lisa nor I had ever done before. The notion of limitless food seemed unreal. I ordered a whole stack of pancakes that the two of us could have never finished. So did Lisa. I enjoyed pouring almost the entire syrup bottle onto my unused portion. No one noticed. Stephanie’s habit of ordering eggs grossed out both Lisa and me; we’d had enough eggs to last us a lifetime. Between bites, Stephanie drummed her fork on the table and kicked her legs all around.
Ma, Tara, and Ron spoke in whispers over lunch. Ron did most of the talking, leaning in close so he could speak privately to them while resting his hand on their thighs, something that I saw made Ma fidget.
Our next stop was in a desolate area of the Bronx, near abandoned, burned-down buildings, where men wearing flashy jewelry stood on street corners, dancing beside enormous radios. Ron passed Tara and Ma some cash from his breast pocket, and Ma ordered Lisa and me to stay put in Ron’s car. She walked over with Tara to give the money to the men and I knew they were buying drugs. Ron turned around and talked to us while we all waited.
“How did you girls get so pretty?” he asked. “You look like a car full of supermodels.”
Stephanie squealed with laughter. I concentrated on Ma.
Something about the men she and Tara spoke to made me nervous. I shut my eyes tight and didn’t open them until I could hear Ma entering the car. When we were driving again, Tara told Ron they each got a D-I-M-E B-A-G.
No matter how much Ma told Tara that Lisa and I knew all about drugs, she still tried to be discreet around us, and around Stephanie.
“Dime bag,” Lisa said. “Tara, I know how to spell.”
“Oh, be quiet, Lisa,” she snapped.
Back at Tara’s, with Ron keeping them company, she and Ma got high for hours.
Ron started coming around in his dusty red car every Sunday to pick us up at Tara’s apartment. Our outings became the thing I looked forward to all week long. No matter what else was happening, I’d think of Sunday and count the days. But, taking my cue from Ma, I hid my excitement and never talked about the time we spent with Ron when Daddy was around. More from instinct than thought, I knew that our trips were something Ma didn’t want Daddy to know too much about. As far as he knew, we were just passing time with Ma’s friends.
Ron must have looked forward to Sundays the way I did, because he was never late to Tara’s place. He’d show up at exactly eleven a.m., honking the car horn three times. We’d drive aimlessly, for hours. Tara played the radio loudly from the front seat, so we could all sing along together.
At IHOP again, we feasted on pancakes, sausages, and orange juice, while Ron whispered more mysterious stories close to Tara’s and Ma’s ears, stories that made them laugh with their heads thrown back.
“That’s when you have to up and out if you want to save your own A-S-S,” Tara added to something he’d said, slamming her fist on the table, jingling our forks and knives.
“Tara, you’re a riot. Only you, man,” Ma responded. Always hyper, Stephanie kicked her seat repeatedly. Whenever they weren’t looking, Ron’s eyes skimmed up and down Ma’s and Tara’s T-shirts.
One day, when Tara was busy doing something else, we met up with Ron without her or Stephanie. He suggested that Ma, Lisa, and I go to his house, out in Queens.
“Come on, Jean.” He’d coaxed Ma out in front of our building, tugging on her wrist. “We can pick up a bag. You’ll like my place, it’s real nice.”
The drive there was long; it was the first time I can clearly remember being on a highway. The cars zipping past made the trip seem adventurous to me, but Lisa fell asleep.
Without Tara around, Ma and Ron didn’t seem to know what to say to each other. Ron turned his tape player up, a country-music singer’s whiny voice filling the car. Ma fidgeted in her seat the whole, silent trip there. Once, I thought I saw him reach across and rest his hand on her thigh, but Ma shifted too quickly for me to get a clear view.
Ron’s place was a real house, two stories high, with a front yard and a garage. A thick, glass wall divided into squares separated the living room from the dining room, and viney plants hung from hooks above a large, black piano. Everything was made of gleaming blond wood. Ron and Ma headed straight for the kitchen. Lisa turned on the TV and we watched cartoons from his huge, black leather couch.
Hours later, I woke up to Ron’s rough hand on my shoulder.
“Girls, wake up.”
“Where’s Ma?” Lisa asked.
“She went to the store for a beer. She’ll be back in a little while.”
I’d never seen Ron dressed in shorts before. Why had Ma left us behind?
“The store is far from here, so it will be a bit. She asked me to look after you both; she said you needed a bath,” he told us, clasping his hands together and lowering his chin with a seriousness that seemed insincere.
Given that it wasn’t uncommon for me to go a month or two without washing or brushing my teeth, this struck me as strange. One time, while I was helping to hang up test sheets in class, my teacher noticed a patch of dirt on my neck and told me that when I showered that night, I should make sure to scrub extra-hard there. Though our clogged tub prevented me from showering, I was embarrassed enough to take a washcloth and scrub my neck when I got home. Bits of dirt had rolled off into my hands.
Considering the uselessness of our tub at home, I thought maybe Ma wanted us to take the opportunity to bathe here.
Ron watched us from the toilet, while Lisa and I sat together in the soapy water. Not only had I never seen Ron in shorts, I’d also never seen him without his tweed jacket before. In the steamy bathroom, I saw that underneath it, he was even thinner, in an almost feminine way, with large nipples that showed right through his shirt. I wished he would put his jacket back on and go. The white tiles were shiny clean and the bathroom lemon-scented. As we washed, he kept his eyes just below our necks. Something about that look made me cover myself. I curled into a ball, pulling my knees to my chest. Lisa had a look on her face that bordered somewhere between worry and anger.
“Your mother wants me to make sure that you girls wash every part now,” he said. “I want to see every part get squeaky clean. Let’s see those feet,” he said. “And those legs. Above the water, or else it’s not really clean.”
Under his instruction, Lisa and I lifted our feet, ankles, calves, and thighs above the water to scrub clean.
“Now, one of the hardest parts to wash is your privates, so we need you girls to stick that way up high in the air and clean every crevice. Come on, I want to see them clean.”
“How?” I asked.
“Come on, use your hands to lift yourself up and push your privates above the water,” he said eagerly.
“I know how to take a bath,” Lisa said, scowling. “You don’t need to watch us.” Ron swallowed and his eyes darted all around the room; it was the first time he’d taken them off our bodies.
I had already lifted my crotch way out of the water and was washing when she’d spoken up. In a way, I wondered why Lisa didn’t say something sooner. I could feel her anger when he first made us get in the tub.
“Now, Lisa, I’m just making sure,” he said cautiously. “Liz knows that, don’t you, Liz?”
I didn’t know anything other than the fact that Lisa was mad, Ma wasn’t back yet, and I was getting nervous about the way he kept staring at me.
“Get out! We’re fine by ourselves!” Lisa suddenly yelled.
“Okay, then. I suppose big sister is going to make sure that everything in here is taken care of, then,” Ron said, backing away.
“Get the hell out!” she screamed.
With that, he closed the door behind him. Together, Lisa and I dressed in complete silence.
Five weeks later, Ma had her first mental lapse in more than six years, and Lisa and I were hauled into family services for examinations, during a night I can recall only in fragments.
Lying flat on my back, I watched the doctor take one latex glove from a box—one, not two. It made a snap when he put it on. I’d never seen anyone do that before, wear just one glove. I was going to tell him he forgot the other one. But before I got a chance, he turned away and went back to talking with a blond woman. I couldn’t see past them to the counter, where they were fidgeting with something. I just saw their white uniforms, the white walls, and the white papers covering the counter that read my name—Elizabeth Murray—and next to it, my birth date, September 23, 1980. I’m six, I thought, proud of how I counted so quickly. Elizabeth, not Lizzy. No, here my name is Elizabeth.
“Elizabeth, are you hungry? Have you eaten anything today? Would you like some soup, a sandwich? Elizabeth, you can tell us, honey, does your father touch you?”
The night had already been so long; the weeks leading up to it even longer. Ma hadn’t been herself. It started with the crying fits. Unprovoked, she’d scream accusations into the air or threats to no one in particular: “Get your hands off! I’ll kill you!”
Then one day she just stopped, wrapped all those shouts and tears into her ankle-length bubble coat where she lived, a single member of some far-off world. If you tried to talk to Ma, she’d snap up the ends of the collar with her skinny fingers. Her eyes became electric, a warning to be heeded. She no longer recognized any of us.
When the police came to load her into the ambulance, she thought they wanted the coat. The struggle was brief, no more than two swift hits, methodically placed—a demonstration of the officer’s academy training. Our building’s hallway filled with her ghostly cries for help. The neighbors’ doors creaked open in succession from nearest to farthest. Soon after, when the chaos moved to the windows, locks snapped shut the same way.
“The doctor’s just going to do a test. Okay, Elizabeth? It won’t hurt; it’s just a little uncomfortable. Hold still and be a brave girl, okay?”
A breakdown, I heard someone call it. Not her first, Daddy reminded me; maybe not her last. Lisa and I were placed in a police car—without Daddy—that followed the ambulance carrying Ma as it drove in silence, its signature red light piercing the night as we made our way up University Avenue.
I kept my eyes shut tight the entire time.
I never told anyone that Ma’s breakdown was my fault, that I had brought it on by telling what happened. When Ma returned to Ron’s house from the store with a six-pack, Lisa called her into the bathroom with us. I thought she would tell, so I did it first, and I watched Ma’s face fill with horror. Ma ran out of the bathroom angrier than I’d ever seen her. I could hear her hit Ron across the face. Then she took us home on a long, long train ride, where Lisa told Ma about one time at Tara’s when Ron had asked to take Polaroids of her. The conversation embarrassed me. My hair still wet from the bath, I remained totally silent and went to sleep on Ma’s lap. For days after that, the questions didn’t cease.
“Lizzy, tell Ma about every time Ron made you feel bad, baby. You can tell me, pumpkin, please.”
The shame was so heavy, I couldn’t look Ma in the eyes, and my throat ached when I told her how afraid I was in the bath, and how worried I was when Ron pinched Stephanie’s chest because she’d misbehaved. Then I told Ma about the time he helped me with my zipper, privately, in Tara’s room, his fingers scraping against my skin. I couldn’t move throughout the whole thing; I froze and could only stare up at the wooden ceiling fan, listening to the click it made on each go-around, counting them as he thrust his fingers inside me painfully. Held firmly in place by Ron’s free hand, my privates burned. I bit ridges into my bottom lip to keep from wailing.
I told Ma all but one detail—the fact that I knew it was wrong. I knew that all I had to do to end it was to call out for her. But I didn’t, because Ron made things better for Ma, for Lisa and me. I didn’t want to ruin that, so I failed to call out. When he’d finished and slipped back into the kitchen with Ma and Tara, I’d used Vaseline from the bathroom cabinet to soothe the pain.
This was how I knew I had driven Ma crazy. I could have stopped Ron before anything worse happened, but I didn’t. Then, later, I told Ma about what Ron had done. It was the last straw. Ma snapped.
Now a voice in the doctor’s office said that she had brought the breakdown on herself with all her “drug abuse”; that she never gave her schizophrenia medicine a fair chance to work. Only I knew they were wrong. “Check the kids,” another woman in clicking heels ordered a nurse. “You should have heard what their mother had to say about their father. Find a doctor and check these kids. We have to find out what’s been going on.”
With two fingers pointed skyward, like a priest’s blessing, the doctor applied a kind of jelly to his glove. The nurse drew metal stirrups out of the table. Each made its own metallic snap when extended.
“Elizabeth, honey, this will be over soon. We just need you to put your feet here for now. Be a good girl and stay still.”
My heels rested, caged in cold metal. My legs frogged open to form a diamond, raising the hospital gown into the air—a paper sail to catch flight above the goose-bump breeze that pricked my skin and cooled my thighs. A chill ran over my naked pelvis as the doctor pulled his chair in close.
Lying there, I wanted Ma, the soft feel of her hair in my fingers, the reassurance of her hand holding mine. As the doctor positioned a warm lamp on me, I longed most for her protection, for things to go back the way they had been. If only I had told her sooner.
A sharp pain shot through me as the doctor began his examination in the place Ma and Daddy told me no one should touch, a place I myself had never touched. A place where, even if no one believed it, Daddy had never touched me.
I felt a metal rod tearing me open. I managed only the faintest whimper as his fingers entered me. The doctor’s intrusion made a dull ache that sent my back arching. The nurse’s press-on nails pinched as she held on to my shins. Tears rolled into my ears.
“That’s all, Elizabeth. We’ll be outside. You can get dressed now, honey.”
A tree of pain throbbed and grew through my abdomen. I descended from the table slowly and carefully, a bright strip of blood coloring my thigh.
Somewhere, in a room nearby, my sister was enduring the same.
I lifted myself back onto the noisy paper to take a look, curling my body into a C. To my horror, the source of the blood was an angry, red gash between my legs. Fear shot through my chest. My eyes raced across the empty room for something to bandage the hole with. I quickly plucked several gauze pads from a blue-and-white medical box. My trembling gave way to panicked sobs.
Tears fell onto the paper gown in spots that expanded on impact. I cried to the ceiling and held the gauze tightly to my wound, unable to imagine ever feeling normal again.