“Why was it hard?” She asked. She could see his body language changing drastically.
He was closing in on himself, shutting down. His eyes stared off into the distance—a thousand yard stare. His arms were crossed, he turned slightly away from her. “My father and mother divorced when I was three and my younger brother was just under a year old. Dad moved about sixty miles away, and we saw him rarely. Weekends at first, then once a month, and soon it was less than once a year.”
She tried to picture Red as a child, needing the care and guidance of a parent. Somehow she couldn’t imagine it, as though he’d always been a capable adult. “So you lived with your mother and brother?”
“Yes. And my mother was…” he paused and searched for adequate words. “She was very strange.”
“Strange,” Nicole repeated. Her stomach felt tense, her shoulders tightened with nervousness as he continued. She picked up her beer and drank a large gulp, feeling some awful revelation was coming her way.
“I didn’t know as a young boy what was wrong. Only when I got older, much older—I started to realize that she wasn’t normal. And when I finally moved out and went to college, really got out in the world, I began to see just how screwed up my childhood was.”
Nicole sipped her beer again. “Did she abuse you?” she asked suddenly.
He shrugged. “I guess. I don’t think of it in those terms.”
“She hit you…or…something else?”
“A lot of it was emotional. Most of it,” he said. “She got in moods. Sometimes good moods, but very often it was bad moods. And they could last weeks, even months. When she was in one of her bad times, every day she would tell me that I was ungrateful, stupid, ugly, a monster who was ruining her life.”
Nicole put a hand over her mouth. “No, Red.”
He shrugged. “It was pretty bad. It would be horrible for months on end and then she’d sort of snap out of it. I would be relieved to have some peace for as long as the good times lasted, but I never knew what would set her off. One day, out of nowhere, it would happen. She’d get angry again, something would rub her the wrong way, and I was back to dealing with the insults and the yelling for weeks and months, until she cycled out of it.”
“What about your brother?” Nicole asked.
Red smiled sadly. “Jeb’s a nice guy. If you met him you’d think he’s a really upstanding guy, a family care practitioner, very smart and logical and polite. But he’s deeply broken, I’m afraid. Never married, barely ever even had a relationship. The one serious girlfriend he had when he was in his early twenties—my mother ordered him to break it off. Jeb said he was going to marry this girl, but eventually he caved to my mom’s demands. They’re very close, Jeb and mom.”
Nicole was watching him closely as he relayed this information. If you didn’t know him, you might think he was just talking about his family in a sort of casual way, like people do sometimes.
But it wasn’t the case.
Something in Red’s demeanor told her that he was deeply troubled by it all—and that telling her these things was incredibly difficult for him, yet he was doing it anyway. Doing it for her.
She knew to tread carefully here. She was no therapist, but Nicole sensed that saying the wrong thing could send him spiraling into a dark place. “That night we were together in your home, did I remind you of her?”
“Of my mother?”
Nicole nodded mutely.
For a moment he just stared at her, as if in total shock. And then he burst into laughter. “No,” he said, still laughing. “No, you are very different. Thank god.”
One or two of the regulars at the bar had turned to see what all the commotion was. They slowly turned back to the TV set and their conversations.
“Well, I don’t understand why you reacted that way to me,” Nicole told him.
He threw up his hands. “I’m trying to explain the best I can. I don’t totally understand it. If I did, I wouldn’t act that way.”
“But you think it’s because of your childhood?”
“My mother was unpredictable and cruel. But the worst part didn’t start until I got into my teen years. Puberty. It’s a tough time for any kid, but she made it into something hellish.” Red’s face grew dark and his expression contorted, as he seemed to fall into the memories of his past. “I remember one day, she found some old tissues in my waste basket in my room. You know, I’d started masturbating like any teenager. Looking at magazines, fantasizing about girls in my class. And my mom found those tissues one day and came into the kitchen where I was eating. She dumped the wastebasket on me from behind.”
“Oh my god,” Nicole uttered.
Red’s hands curled into fists. “She started telling me I was disgusting and perverted. She said I should be locked up for doing that in the apartment with her right in the next room.”