Part 9 (1/2)

This was her favorite question. She was on all kinds of committees: drug education in the schools, date-rape awareness, silent auction for the school fair. The drug-education committee had made her paranoid. The truth was that I wasn't on drugs all that often and I definitely wasn't on drugs that night, if you didn't count the fact that I had sucked the nitrous out of the Cohens' whipped cream.

”Get off me.” I pulled my arm away.

By this time my father was on the landing of the staircase. When I yanked my wrist out of my mother's hand it looked to him like I was about to hit her.

My father could move at incredible speeds. He was a short, Humpty Dumpty-shaped guy, but he defied physics with the momentum of his anger. His eyes were bulging and bloodshot. The veins along the side of his neck grew unnaturally large and the visible capillaries along his nose and cheeks darkened with effort as they struggled to accommodate the rush of blood to his face. He was so fast that I hardly saw him coming.

”Don't you ever raise a hand to your mother.”

His hand clutched my throat and he swept me backward until I hit the wall.

”Shameful. f.u.c.king disgusting. Ungrateful little b.i.t.c.h.”

With every punctuation mark my father pulled me forward by my throat and then slammed my head back again. When he let go, I crumpled to the floor and pulled my knees to my chest. I called it my civil-disobedience trick. I closed my eyes and made myself into the tiniest ball. I showed no soft bits.

”Look at me when I talk to you.”

He paced in front of me, clenching and unclenching his fists. The hitting was easy compared to the words. The hitting happened only infrequently but the words happened every day. I knew he was wrong, knew he was inexcusable. But still, the words were the worst part. He stammered as they tumbled out of him. He spoke in tongues, literally foaming at the mouth.

”You're a pig you dress like a f.u.c.king slob and you make yourself ugly you look like an ugly d.y.k.e and you think you'll meet nice people that way you won't you think you'll meet a nice boy that way you won't we are ashamed of you you're nothing but a f.u.c.king disappointment a waste a f.u.c.king waste of a person what happened what happened to you what did I do to deserve this this this piece-of-s.h.i.+t life these f.u.c.king kids you're a joke this is a f.u.c.king joke on me.”

I knew my father's rages and I knew how to stop them. I knew it would get worse for a minute, but it would be over soon. I instigated him.

”Is that the best you can do?”

”What did you say to me in my house?”

He grabbed my hair and pulled me away from the wall.

”Are you on drugs?”

I flicked the off switch. I went limp in all my limbs and dead in the eyes. He straddled my chest and hit me in the face repeatedly, alternating his open palm with his nastier backhand. Every time his hand made contact, he asked me again, ”Are you on drugs?”

My ears rang and the ringing was a thread. I took the edge of the thread and pulled myself, light as air, to the top of the room and out into the deep green suburban night with the cut-gra.s.s smell and the crickets, the lights on behind curtains, the TVs flickering in their living rooms. I sailed past West Orange and Newark and along the Parkway and over the Hudson and never once looked down until I saw New York, the Emerald City, its spires s.h.i.+ning in the moonlight. I knew something about New York. I knew I wouldn't be ugly when I got there.

My mother stood with her arms at her sides by the foot of the stairway across the room. She looked like someone in a movie who had been frozen in time while the other characters kept moving. The spell lifted just long enough for her to call out.

”Enough. Please. Enough.”

I wasn't sure if she was talking to my father or me or G.o.d.

My father stood up and backed off, looking confused and lost. I imagined I knew what he was thinking right then: that his life was so very far from anything he had hoped for, had tried for, had dreamed of when he dreamed of a family. That he was so very far from the man he'd thought he was. I felt sorry for him.

”My children are a curse from G.o.d,” he said, as he turned and walked out the door to the garage.

When my father snapped like this, hours later-or in the worst cases the next day-an entirely different person would sheepishly knock on my door and ask if I wanted to come downstairs and listen to music in front of the fire, or if I wanted to go for ice cream at Baskin-Robbins and rent a movie.

”I have a bad temper,” he likes to say about himself. ”But it's over fast.” As if a quick beating is preferable to a big, long talk.

After that night, I told my mother I was leaving home. My mother-sender of award-worthy care packages to summer camp, cheerful carpooler, PTA president, tireless volunteer, meticulous writer of thank-you notes, thrower of flawless dinner parties, dedicated caretaker of any sick family and friends-thought it was a good idea. She suggested that I get my GED and apply for college a year early.

I got into NYU and my mother took me to Loehmann's to buy me some new clothes for college. Whenever we went shopping, my mother was generous to a fault. She often suffered the consequences later, when the bill came back and my father ranted about her carelessness, her uselessness. She couldn't even clean the house, he said. All she was good for was shopping. These reckonings happened every time a bill came back, but still she shopped.

”You have to understand men,” she told me. ”You let them say what they need to say and then you do what you want anyway.”

My mother wanted to go to Loehmann's and I wanted to go to the only punk clothing store in all of North Jersey, so we compromised. I was terrified by what I had dubbed the ”Hada.s.sah thighs” on the old Jewish ladies in the Loehmann's communal dressing rooms and she was appalled by the swastikas tattooed on either side of the punk store clerk's Mohawk, but we were gentle with each other that day.

”She shouldn't have a haircut like that with such a fat face,” was all that my mother said about the clerk.

We had lunch together and I can't remember what we talked about. There was a sweetness to the ritual, the final shopping trip before I left home for good. It was as if I was any girl leaving home to go to college. And in some ways it was true. Both realities existed simultaneously. I was a half-broken anorexic teen hiding behind my purple hair and running for my life and I was a precocious girl with theatrical aspirations, an early admission to a good school and a numbered list of dreams and plans that took up ten pages of my diary.

And both mothers existed simultaneously: My mother whose eyes went cloudy, who stared into s.p.a.ce and stood with her hands limp at her sides while her husband berated her kids; my mother who sewed labels onto every last sheet before I left for college. I could hear both mothers on the other end of the phone line that day.

”Ask her if she's still going to come to the Caymans with us this year,” my dad said in the background.

”Honey, are you going to make it home in time to come to the Caymans with us? We'd really like it if you'd come,” my mother translated.

”No, Mom, I don't think so.”

”What did she say?” my dad asked my mother.

”No. She said no. She can't come this year.”

”What? I'm stuck with just her brother? Tell her she's ruining my whole vacation.”

My mother didn't translate this last comment. Instead she said, ”Are you really all right?”

”I'm great. This is a great job. I can't pa.s.s it up.”

By the time I hung up, I was relieved that they knew the sort-of truth and I was also relieved that I didn't have to see them for a while. No one was waiting for the phone, so I called Sean. I called Sean and wept. I missed him. I was homesick. I turned around and watched myself in the mirror as my face turned dough-pale and splotchy. I secretly liked watching myself cry. It was like watching someone else's face. It proved to me I was feeling something. Sometimes I spent so much time acting the part that I forgot how I was really feeling, forgot if I ever even had any real feelings.

”Then come home, Jill. Just come home,” he said, sounding tired. Tired of me. Later he told me he wasn't tired of me, he was sad for me, for what I was becoming, for his inability to change my course.

”I can't.”

”I can't help you.”

I called Penny and she told me the show was proceeding without me, but a.s.sured me there would always be a place for me. We'd write in something new when I got back. Except I didn't know when I was coming back. I regretted not a.s.suaging my mother's worry, not returning to Sean, not being there while Penny was writing our show, but I was compelled to stay in a way I couldn't explain to any of them. I couldn't just walk away. I couldn't leave and let Serena win. I didn't want to be the quitter.

At the parties I sparkled with laughter, but back at the house I was grim and homesick. Serena was relentless. She sent back the food before I got downstairs in the morning. She organized mimosa parties out by the pool and forgot to invite me. She blasted movies in the den, next to my room, when I tried to nap. She told the other girls that I smelled, that I was a hooker with herpes, that I was a drunk, that I was a fat, bulimic slob. Everything she said was overheard by the powers that lurk, that surveil, so that after the herpes comment I was taken on a surprise trip to the doctor.

I knew about Serena's treachery from Taylor, who kept me in the loop because she hated Serena, too, and because I was maybe her only friend in Brunei or New York or anywhere, even though she still tried to charge me commission on the money I made. Taylor and I lay in bed together and looked up at the lights in the stepped ceiling. It was kind of like a sunken living room in reverse.