Chapter 4
It ashamed me that I couldn’t always take joy in physical love.
I felt it as a failing, something that marked me as damaged.
This was the dark secret I carried: that love and desire were antithetical; to desire, I must be treated with violence and debasement, in my imagination, if not reality.
I knew it was because of my mother. The things I’d seen with her. The lessons I’d learned.
I was five when she left my father for another man, taking me with her to a depressed factory town several hours away from our home in Boston.
Every other weekend, she would drive to the halfway point to exchange me.
Despite my father’s humiliation, the fact that they had fought and broken things and hit one another, he pleaded for her return.
I waited in his station wagon, alone or with his girlfriend, while they argued at the side of the road, their screams occasionally reaching me over the din of passing traffic.
Compared to the mean apartment we’d lived in with my father, our new house was grand, and for the first time, she didn’t need to work.
She spent the days wandering through the drafty rooms, applying and reapplying makeup, changing her clothes.
She taught me to walk myself to kindergarten and back.
I would return at midday to find her posed on the living room sofa, a drink set on the table before her, waiting tensely, though not for me.
She and my new father walked naked through the house, her hair disheveled, her wine-colored birthmark spreading above her pubic hair like a bruise of which she was incomprehensibly proud.
I hated that birthmark. I had a similar one, a tiny echo just above my hip bone.
On evenings and weekends, they played a game with each other, kissing noisily, pressed against door frames, him pinning her arms above her head or behind her back while she laughed low in her throat.
On those occasions, my presence made him uncomfortable, and he began to banish me from certain rooms. He asked my mother to send me away.
“Can’t your mother take her?” he complained, referring to someone I barely knew, a woman who lived on the other side of the country.
Hoping to ingratiate myself, I begged my mother for a pair of pants like his, a clip-on tie—or perhaps I was merely trying to erase my femininity, having already perceived its danger—but these acts only served to harden his dislike.
Some weekends, his twelve-year-old son came to visit, and as the animal sounds of our parents filled the darkness, he would come into my bed, inexpertly touching me with a look that mingled intrigue and disgust. I both wanted and didn’t want these moments, waiting anxiously for him to join me, unable to sleep if he did not.
After two years, my mother and I moved to a decrepit apartment above a family who fought morning and night.
I slept in a small alcove off the kitchen at the top of a narrow reeking staircase, where each night I imagined my head detaching and floating away into a vast nothingness from which I peered down upon my abandoned body.
Because she had returned to work, she got a puppy from the pound to keep me company, black and white with sharp little teeth.
I dragged him, tied to a rope, along the ugly streets of our new neighborhood; spoke to him ceaselessly; shared my food with him.
In the dingy afternoon light, in my mother’s bedroom, I enticed him to lick me and did the same back.
One weekend while I was at my father’s, after it was discovered the dog and I both had worms, the dog disappeared.
By then, my mother no longer drove me halfway.
I rode a Greyhound bus alone the three-hour ride to Boston.
I longed for her to reconcile with the man who had wanted to send me away, the brother who had violated me, my father.
But she had found someone new. She’d begun to roll joints and wear leather boots that laced up over her jeans.
We moved to another apartment in a neighboring town, this one on the side of the highway.
There was a bar I had to pass on my walk to school, and I would dare myself to look inside the door, standing in the shattered glass and dark slush of late winter.
Once, I saw our former landlord there, his head propped sideways in his hands.
“Come here,” he said, “you’ve gotten so pretty.
” It was not an assessment that I shared.
I had no friends in school. I was prone to violence, often awakened by nightmares.
Half asleep, I would run along the still unfamiliar hallway to my mother’s bedroom.
If she was alone, she would make a grudging space beside her, telling me that I was too old to sleep beside her.
I was seven. What I remember most from that time is the mixture of repulsion and longing I felt at her physical proximity—the scent of her skin, the tang of her breath washing over the pillow.
I longed for her to hold me, but when she did, it seemed unnatural, given either resentfully or too ardently.
If I asked her to, she would sometimes rub my back in hard circles.
More often, she lay staring at the ceiling, ensconced in loneliness like a forgotten toy, and I curled away from her, clutching myself into a tight ball, telling myself, There’s no one, there’s only you.
It was a phrase I later repeated to Tom, the first time to appease his worry. We were planning our wedding, and I didn’t want to invite anyone. Wasn’t there anyone in my family, he asked anxiously, any friends from college? “No,” I insisted. “There’s no one. Only you.”
In marriage, I changed my name to his. I followed him to Minneapolis, where I knew no one.
We bought a modest house, and I rearranged and cleaned it tirelessly.
Every weekend, I threw elaborate dinner parties.
“The perfect couple” was how our friends referred to us.
Look at the two of you; it’s disgusting.
In these moments, I would smile at Tom, touch his shoulder, laugh as if to excuse myself; how could we help it if we were still so in love?
When I was pregnant with Ida, out of the blue, a letter arrived.
My mother had heard—she didn’t say how, or where she had gotten my address—that I was having a baby.
She was pleased, she wrote, because once I became a mother, I was sure to feel the kinship that was undeniably between us.
She had only been twenty when she’d become pregnant with me.
It hadn’t been easy. But the bond between a mother and daughter withstands everything.
Soon I would understand. We were actually so alike.
I know you will always love me, she concluded.
I tore the letter into small pieces and carried them outside. It was early autumn, chilly. On the back patio we had recently installed, I set the pieces down and struck a match. I squatted there with my hands cradling my huge belly, utterly remorseless, as I watched them burn.