But my home has changed since my mother started throwing the parties. Coming out of the elevator I can already smell the pot down the hallway. This new phase of drug usage in my home makes me miss the days when my father was just a heroin addict. Things were bad but at least you couldn’t smell it from a mile away.
What I’d like to do when I walk in the front door is cry in my mother’s arms, but I know I can’t, because the minute I admit I’m not safe out there on my own I’ll be forced to stay in on the weekends. So instead I breeze through the living room, where half a dozen men are stretched out, on the rug, on the couch, on a black lounger. They’re graying, bearded, balding, the beginnings of potbellies on some, all this aging in process before me. Are they all a hundred years old? Was my father this old? My mother is sitting on the floor, her back perched up against the couch, and all I see is a head on her lap, a body presumably stretched out next to her, the rest of him hidden behind a long, low table. Here it is, the remains of a dinner party.
They all say my name, delighted, a change of scenery. Youth before them. “How was your night?” asks my mother. She straightens herself. Her blouse is loose. She is not naked but she is certainly not dressed either. Is this your idea of fun is a thing I always want to ask her. Is this what I have to look forward to someday? “Same as always,” I say. I am furious with her. I had been tamping it down all night and now my anger is a brilliant, pulsing red, fully blossomed. “I’m going to bed.” “No, stay up and talk to us,” says one man, some loser. “Tell us what’s going on with the kids today.”
A thing I know now as an adult is this: there is no one cooler than a teenager. Even at our worst, our eyes are so fresh, and we have just enough knowledge to approach the world with a level of sophistication. People who say they didn’t get cool till college or their twenties or whatever are incorrect. After our teenage years the game is over and we’re all just holding on till death. And it is because I am at my peak cool, I know I am better than all these men.
How do I get all of these people out of my house? I decide to clean. Loudly. I clear the table, bowls with limp collards on top of saffron rice, stubbed-out cigarettes and joints in one bowl, the designated ashtray, half an enormous kale and radish salad left—tomorrow’s lunch, I guess—and some sort of tofu bean sauce bullshit, and one whole fish carcass, gutted, picked apart, a limp banana leaf nearby. I clang and clink. I move fast. A few wedges of expensive-looking cheese, melting but not melted, holding on for dear life, lay on a cutting board. I wrap those up and hide them in the crisper. That’s my cheese, I think. There’s not much left that’s appealing to me, but food is food, and the cupboards are often bare in our house, so I box it all up in Tupperware.
When I am done, the fridge looks full. This is a comforting feeling. Before my father died, we did not live abundant lives—public schools, thrift store clothes, no vacations—but we never worried about food. At the worst times, he would bring food home from his shifts as a cook. At the best times, a surprise royalty check would come in for one of his songs and then there would be steak on the table, a simple au poivre, bloody red, so we could taste it.
But it had been a hungry year. Until my mother started throwing these parties. She was doing her best. The guilt stirs in my stomach. Maybe I could help a little bit. I start washing the dishes.
While I scrub the pots, the men wander in and out of the room, taking their shot at me.
Isn’t it past your bedtime?
No hug for an old friend?
Do you need any help with that?
You’re doing it all wrong.
“They’re dishes,” I say.
“You look tired,” says one man, that man, that motherfucker, and I don’t even turn toward him, why bother, he doesn’t deserve my time. “Do you need a massage?” he says, and he doesn’t wait for an answer, just comes up behind me and touches me. That’s what this house is, what it has become. A place where faceless men sneak up on you and touch you. The best part of my mother’s marriage is the worst part of my life.
And also there is that thing between his legs, that thing I am always feeling from these men, and he is pressing it up against me. “Give me a break,” I say. “Your attitude stinks,” the man says. Whiskey breath, the breath of a monster. I can feel his lame goatee on my neck. For the rest of my life I will date clean-shaven men. I elbow him and he catches my arm. His other arm against my wrist, pushing me up against the counter. “This is my house,” I say. And I start to cry and it doesn’t matter to him. Because this is what these men do. This is when they strike. When you’re tired and you’re young and you’re over it and you’ve been putting up with other crap all night long and you’re weak, you’re fragile, and your mother is depressed and your father is dead and your brother lives downtown now and all you want to do is clean your house and go to bed.
Then suddenly there is another man telling him to stop, and there I am in a puddle on the floor, and there is my mother making alarmed noises in the other room—“Everybody out! Everybody out!”—and anyway it’s the last party of its kind, although there are other parties to come in our home, graduation parties, birthday parties, baby showers, but none like this, no hazy parties ever again. Soon after the last one my mother gets a loan from her parents, whom she hates, hates, but these are the choices we have to make sometimes. A few months after that, a royalty check shows up for a song my father did for a 1960s television show, recently revived on basic cable. Then my mother’s friend Betsy leaves her second husband and she gets more alimony than she knows what to do with. Finally my mother gets a new job, and we all throw up our hands in relief, hallelujah, because that means the most to her, that she’s doing it herself.
I don’t know about any of this then, though. While my mother kicks the last man out, I sneak off to my bedroom. There I cry and think about the blocks of cheese I have hidden in the crisper, and how I’m sure they will be the last nice things I will ever eat. And then there my mother is, next to me in bed, apologizing. She has done this before, tried to curl her flesh up next to mine, both as an apology and for her own comfort. There is not a person alive who doesn’t want something from me, I think. There is no action uncalculated. Nothing is free. Nothing is pure.
“This is what I’ve been telling you,” I say to her. “These people are disgusting. These men are disgusting.” “I didn’t know,” she says, and I look in her face to see if she is stupid or a liar and I can’t tell and anyway I don’t know which would be worse.
“Out,” I say. “Get out. For god’s sake let me sleep already.”
There is no sleep of the innocent anymore, I think again as she shuts the door. I fold myself up into a ball and hold myself tightly. My own flesh, my own comfort, mine.
Nina