if she wants, but I don’t have to. For me, Mom is an unreliable narrator of our lives. When she speaks of my childhood it is always of the same three instances. The first is of me as a toddler. With my new grasp of language, she tells me again and again, I waddled into the living room, rolled on the floor, and said, “Tickle me.” “You were such an affectionate child,”
she says wistfully. The next story is how she chose a Montessori school for me at two-and-a-half, and soon after starting I learned to tie my own shoelaces. The teachers often sent the older kids to me to tie their shoes if they were busy with something else. The final anecdote she tells is about when I didn’t want Mom to cut my hair when I was five, so I went up to the bathroom, found the scissors, and cut it myself. Mom says she tried hard not to laugh when I showed up in the kitchen, my hair butchered. “I wanted you to feel competent,” she makes a point of saying.
Her stories are probably true, but they are carefully constructed to build a happy childhood for me, one where I am just fine and she is a caring, considerate mother. One that can make up for the divorce, and for the fact that she left us. What she doesn’t realize is her stories point to my willfulness, the ways I was able to lord my power over the world, and over her. She wanted me to be competent, sure, but I don’t think she accounted for the possibility that I would match her competence at controlling our relationship. She pushes, I pull. She pulls, I push. This has always been our dance. Really, Mom and I both look to stories to gain a sense of control. I believe Mom tells her stories so Tyler and I will accept and forgive who she is; she wants this more than she wants the truth, while I most want the truth. But what if I am wrong? What if Mom believes her memories as fiercely as I do? What if my memories are merely constructions like hers?
I pee, then go back into the living room. Dad’s there, his eyes glued to the TV, some movie we’re watching on HBO. I sit on the couch, too aware of him there, my father, who did this cruel, lascivious thing. He laughs at some funny dialogue, then stands.
“I’m getting a soda. Want one?”
I nod and watch him go to the kitchen. I decide to ignore this ugly thing about him. Who would I have left if I were to hate him the way I hate Mom?
Nora’s apartment is on the Upper East Side, just eight blocks from Dorrian’s, and Amy and I join Dad when he stays there on the weekends. Nora has two kids, a boy Tyler’s age and a girl four years younger than me, and we all get along well. Jack is kind and smart, and sometimes he comes with us to the bar. He doesn’t care about what I do there either, which is a relief from the judgment I feel from Amy.
At Dorrian’s, Amy and I meet more and more guys. One of the regulars in his blue school blazer approaches me one evening, and I spend the night making out with him in a booth. Another night, an older boy brings me flowers, and we go back to his parents’ threestory brownstone to have oral sex. Each time, I give my phone number, embarrassed by the New Jersey prefix. No one ever calls. At first this stings. But over time I adjust. I smirk when a boy says he’ll call. I don’t look at him next time we’re both at Dorrian’s, assuming that’s what he prefers. It’s just how things work in the bar scene. Boys and girls come together, and then they move on to the next. I want a boyfriend, but if I can’t have that, I’ll take this stand-in. It’s satisfying somehow—the hopeful waiting, the flirtatious exchange, and then the rapt, sudden sexual attention. I begin to enjoy the immediacy of gratification. I still feel let down later when it is over and I am left alone, but this doesn’t keep me from going back for more. One night, after we’ve come back to Nora’s apartment, no boys having taken the bait, I sit awake in the living room, watching TV. I can’t sleep, and a John Hughes marathon is on, with The Breakfast Club just starting. I’ve seen all these movies at least four times. Dad and Nora come in. They were out with Nora’s friends. He relies on whatever woman he’s with to provide him with friends. He tells stories of friends from the early days with my mother, like the one about the two friends from Mom’s art school who brought blow-up dolls as dates to a wedding. Or the guy Dad did mescaline with and then they couldn’t eat the spaghetti the friend’s wife served them because chewing felt like the weirdest thing in the world. If it weren’t for the women in his life, I’m not sure Dad would have any friends at all. I don’t know what happened. He used to be so popular, according to his high school stories. Somewhere along the way he must have lost confidence.
Dad wears a stern look on his face, but Nora is happy, her movements loose. She flops down beside me and lights a cigarette. She smokes 100’s but only halfway. There have been times I was craving a cigarette enough that I smoked her crushed-out butts.
“What are you doing awake, honey?” she asks. I smell alcohol on her breath.
“I don’t know. I can’t sleep.”
“Maybe you need to take something.”
“No,” Dad says. He stands at the entranceway. Something is bothering him. “She doesn’t need anything. She just needs to go to bed, and so do you.”
Nora rolls her eyes at me. “What, is he my father too?”
She laughs, but I can tell by the look on Dad’s face that I shouldn’t laugh back.
“He’s right,” I say. “I’m going to bed.”
I get up and head to my room, unsure what to think.
It’s the summer of 1986 and Tyler’s preparing to leave for college. I come home to hear Tyler in Dad’s bathroom. At first I don’t think much about it—maybe she needs something in there we don’t have in our own bathroom—but as the minutes pass, an anxiety starts rustling in my stomach. I go hesitantly to the door and listen.
“Tyler?”
I hear a glass clink, then something falls to the floor. That day years earlier with the Tylenol sits like a shadow in my mind, how I did nothing to save her. I press my lips together, trying to quiet my heart.
“What?” she finally answers.
“You OK in there?”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I’ll be right out.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
I go back to the living room and sit on my hands on the couch to wait. My eyes are on the door to Dad’s room. I think about calling someone, maybe Dad. Nora. If I have to I could always call 911. Finally, she comes out, looking the same as usual, just more tired. Spiky hair, black clothes. Her eyes look sunken beneath her glasses. She moves slowly, like she always does, as though navigating her way carefully through a world of hidden mines.
“Hey,” she says, seeing me watching her. She doesn’t quite meet my eyes.
“Hey,” I say. I think about asking her what she was doing. I think about saying something, something about Mom’s absence, Dad’s preoccupations. Something about how she must feel really alone. Like me. But we don’t talk like that. There’s an unspoken understanding: I am Dad’s and she is Mom’s, and we are not to cross that line.
“I have a bad headache,” she tells me, perhaps seeing my concern. I nod.
“Aspirin wasn’t working, so I thought I’d try something Dad has.”
“You sure you’re all right?” I ask carefully.
“Yeah.” She smiles now, not a genuine smile, but a smile meant to tell me not to worry, a smile that says I should butt out. I bite my lip, unsure whether to believe her. I want to say something, anything that will keep her from going away again to where I can’t reach her. Not that I am reaching her now, but at least we are on the rim, our heads just above the surface. At least we are exchanging words. Seconds pass. She stands, I sit, trying to think of something worthwhile to say.
She raises her eyebrows. “Are we done here?”
I hesitate, and then I nod. I don’t know what else to do. I watch her small body head back down the hallway and into her room. Eventually I hear her music come on—Sonic Youth or the Cult or some other band I can’t relate to. I take a breath and turn on the TV, deciding to believe everything is fine.
At Nora’s, Jack has friends over often. One, his closest friend, tells Jack he thinks I’m cute. His name’s Greg, a nice-looking guy with light eyes and a scar on his face from stitches he got after a fall when he was a child. He smiles often, and he’s nice to me in a simple, straightforward way. I’m not used to it. I expect with boys to have to unpack their comments, read underlying text. I’ve learned at this point not to trust the things they say. Greg’s kindness, though, is uncomplicated.
On nights when nothing else is going on, I fool around with Greg. His kisses are gentle, his hands soft. He
