And I thought: but what about Eww the purple house?
The Giant’s the one who made us move here, forcing us to leave our family and LA, where there were wonders around every corner. He made us come to the armpit of California, a suburban Our Town between San Francisco and LA. Beth and I got used to waiting on him hand and foot. He said we had to earn our keep.
In return, he made my sister and me beg. For money, for free time, for a ride to work. He told us we were lucky, we had it easy. “Easy” was him pushing Beth into an eating disorder after she quit playing volleyball. Her body had quickly gone from tomboy to girlish curves and The Giant wasn’t okay with that. She is gorgeous, with long, thick hair and wide hazel eyes. And she has the most beautiful singing voice. And when she laughs, she laughs with her whole body, leaning forward and holding her stomach while she shakes her head. But The Giant only saw a fat girl.
This was a typical dinner:
My sister reaches for the butter.
“You sure you need more of that?” The Giant says with a mocking tone. He gives a pointed look to her stomach.
Beth’s face turns red. My mom laughs uncomfortably and swats at him—it seems playful until I see the desperate sadness in her eyes.
But she doesn’t say a word.
My sister’s hand moves away from the butter and she looks down at her plate. Her long dark hair slips forward, hiding her eyes.
Shame. It works every time.
“Dude, he’s a dick,” I tell Beth after each of these dinners.
“Fuck him,” she says.
“That’s Mom’s job,” I say.
We laugh mean-girl laughs. It’s Us against Them.
But it didn’t matter how much I told Beth to ignore The Giant, how much I made her laugh—his words found a home somewhere deep inside her. First there were the baggy clothes she wore to hide her figure, then there were the skinny limbs, jeans falling off her waist.
Home became a place that wasn’t safe and it’s been like that ever since.
It’s late on a Monday night when the house phone rings. The Giant yells from the living room for me to get it, even though I’m in my bedroom down the hall and he’s a few feet away from the phone. I throw down my AP History book with a huff and head out to where the phone is attached to the dining room wall.
The Giant turns from where he’s watching golf on the couch. He’s maybe the most unattractive man in the world. No, that’s not true. I guess he’s okay-looking, but he’s ugly to me. Thin blond hair, a matching goatee. Give him horns and a pitchfork and he’d be a dead ringer for the devil.
We don’t say a word to each other, just exchange one wary glance before I pass the living room.
I grab the phone and as soon as I say hello, there’s a gravelly, “Hi, honey.”
“Dad.” I can hear the uncertainty in my voice, almost a question. Dad? Is this really you? How many lies are you going to tell me this time?
I wonder what I will tell you about my dad, if you ever ask. The important things first: he joined the Marines after 9/11 and they sent him to Iraq three times and Afghanistan once. By the time he came back from his second tour, he wasn’t my dad anymore. Someone had taken his happy-go-lucky personality and replaced it with a very angry, very sad man. He and Mom got divorced not long after that, when I was about six.
I don’t know what went down during the war, but whatever it was turned my dad into an addict. Whiskey. Cocaine. Heroin. After my dad checked into rehab the first time, I heard the term PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder. The war fucked me up good, he said once, when I was eight or nine.
We don’t see him much.
“How’s it going, hon?”
“Fine.”
I don’t have lots to say to someone who is little more than a shadow on the periphery of my life. Someone who breaks promises as often as he makes them. He lives in another state, just a voice on the phone: nice enough guy one moment, anxious, furious man-child the next. I wish I didn’t love him, but I do. It’s hard to write off your own flesh and blood, even when they take a jackhammer to your heart.
“Well, good, good,” he says. “Got a new job. Construction. Pays shit, but it’s under the table, so that’s cool.”
“Nice.”
But my heart sinks. His words run together, like he has to get them out fast or they’ll scamper away. I can’t tell if he’s drunk or high this time. I think I know why he’s calling.
“Don’t know about nice. I’ve … got some problems,” he says, “but it’ll be okay.” He pauses. “I don’t have the money right now. For that thing. The drama thing. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
The tears come hot and fast, but I hold them in. I knew the summer theatre camp at Interlochen was a total pie-in-the-sky dream but my dad, when he heard about it, insisted he could make it come true. I should have known better than to trust him. To trust that he’d be able to stand on his own two feet for longer than a few weeks at a time—long enough to get me to camp.
“What problems?” I ask, already weary. Here we go, I think.
“Well, you know, my doc at the VA gave me these fuckin’ meds. Fuckin’ doc doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”
This is normal. He gets angry, fast. A switch flips and then you’ve got a US Fuckin’ Marine, motherfucker on your hands. All I can do is listen until I can pass the phone to my mom so they can argue about child support and then he’ll go off on her until she’s screaming back and one of them hangs up the phone.
Twenty minutes into my dad’s rant about the VA, I start daydreaming. I’m in New York, walking through Washington Square Park. I’m a student at NYU and I’m on my way to acting class.… You’re there, holding my hand. You lean down and kiss me, soft, like—
“Making me fall asleep,” Dad’s saying.
Did you mean it when you said you didn’t love Summer anymore, that you aren’t even sure if it was ever real, true love? Because—
“Hello!” Dad yells.
“Sorry,” I say. “What?”
“I said the fuckin’ medicine is making me fall asleep on the fuckin’ job and I—”
“Dad,” I say, serious. “You have to stop taking that medicine. Or at least take it at night, so you can sleep.”
“Yeah, yeah. Maybe. Hey, your mother keeps nagging me for child support.” Dad does this—he’s all over the place when we talk. “Think you can get her off my back?”
I’ve gotten so used to this. One parent says this, one says that. I have to give my mom credit, though: she doesn’t badmouth him or try to put me in the middle. That’s classy. And probably takes a crapload of restraint. I wonder if it’s because a little, very hidden part of her still loves him. Or maybe she just feels bad for him. They got married so young and it’s like she’s the only one of them who ever learned to be an adult.
“We’re kinda broke, Dad. I mean, that’s why she’s asking for it,” I say.
Never mind that a father is supposed to provide for his kids. That ship sailed, like, a million years ago.
“You got a boyfriend?” he asks, out of the blue.
You take my hand and turn it over. Kiss the palm.