Chapter 15 #2
Maybe every family has its own tensions as each member jockeys for position, especially if money, love, or respect seem scarce.
Maybe our identities are forged by teasing, provoking, resisting—saying, You can’t change me, in the case of a teenager.
I refuse to play second fiddle, in the case of a stepmother.
Maybe it’s natural, in other words. I worried too much, and I knew why I did—because I’d had a front-row seat to the development of a troubled boy into a troubled man.
And at the same time, that perspective warped me.
Confirmation bias, it’s called—the tendency to search for what you already believe, or fear.
Ewan deserved the blame for that. But he didn’t deserve the blame for everything.
Every time I hit a snag in my hair, I remembered Martha just after she’d gotten engaged to my dad, when she was still pretending to care about me, yanking a comb through my hair without patience, then catching herself in time, remembering that this was a performance.
I disliked the gentler combing as much as the rough kind.
After the wedding, photos of my mother were cleared from the living room.
Then Martha started talking about how Ewan had to go, on account of his volatility.
If he was sent somewhere—military school, or any place that would take him—I’d be the only target in the house.
A growing target, painted in even brighter colors by the unstoppable forces of adolescence.
When I needed my first bra, I was too afraid to ask Martha to buy me one, so I kept wearing my inadequate undershirts until the school nurse sent home an embarrassing note to my father.
Martha intercepted it. Then she called me into the bathroom.
She told me to take off my button-down shirt.
Then my cotton undershirt, which I folded nervously and set on the carpet-covered toilet lid.
“Those too,” she said, pointing to my underwear, which I stepped out of, slowly.
She pointed to my nearly hairless crotch. “You let anything or anyone down there?”
I was horrified. Speechless. Anyone? Anything?
I already dreaded getting a first period; I hoped she wasn’t going to try to show me how a tampon fit or worse, where a penis went. When her hand hovered inches from my body, I pushed my knees together, confused.
When her glance moved upward, I felt a moment of relief until she leaned in close to my torso, so that I was looking down onto her head of tight brown curls. Her face was an inch away from the small, barely developed mounds on my chest.
“That’s all you’ve got?” she said, leaning close. “Those are worth sending a letter home? Those?”
I thrust out an arm to grab for my undershirt. She countered with her forearm, blocking me. Then she seized one nipple and twisted hard. I yelped in pain. She clapped a hand over my mouth.
“You don’t even know enough to realize I’m not the one you should be afraid of.” She leaned back and laughed her husky smoker’s laugh. “Oh, yeah. Trouble’s coming.”
I squirmed away and ran from the room. Hours later, I could still feel the painful tingle in that right nipple.
I felt it again, a few years later, the first time a boy snuck his hand up my shirt, even though I wanted him to.
I felt it even now, standing in front of the nearly cleared mirror, amazed to think that two degrading minutes could still take up so much space in my brain, no matter how much I’d tried to cram in there since.
Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s box, Piaget’s stages, Bandura’s observational learning of violent behavior, it was all there, efficiently tucked into the gray folds, but beneath it all, a physical pain still pulsed, and below that, an even deeper humiliation.
I set down the wide-toothed comb and studied my expression in the steamy mirror. Frowning. Tired. Nearly overwhelmed—but that nearly was the key word, and underlying it was a self-pity I couldn’t afford.
Martha was long behind me. I didn’t have to feel this way anymore.
I was the parent, now; I’d survived the sleep deprivation of Benjamin’s babyhood, problems at day care and grade school, the sullen tween years.
I refused to infect my son in the same way Martha and Ewan had both infected me—making me believe that adolescence was, by its very nature, a time when everything went to hell.
“Coming out soon?” Benjamin called from the other side of the door.
“In a minute.”
“Your phone is ringing.”
He handed it through the door to me. “It’s probably your ex-boyfriend. Mister patrol-cop-who-can’t-make-detective.”
“That was six months ago.”
“And he still talks about it.”
It was the most consecutive words Benjamin had said to me in three days. I didn’t care that he was being snide. I was just glad to hear his voice again.
But it wasn’t Robert on the phone. It wasn’t Curtis, either. I closed the bathroom door and took the call.
When I came out to the kitchen, Benjamin was pulling out the coffee carafe, about to fill a ceramic mug on the counter. I reached into the cupboard for a travel mug and held it out to him.
“Are we going somewhere?”
“You don’t have to be mean to Robert,” I said.
“Everyone’s mean, Mom. Some people are mean, live in shit apartments, and lose their jobs because they can’t stand up for themselves. Some people are mean and rich and popular and get people to do what they want.”
Use your words, I’d always told him. And he was.
He was using them to tell me that he was better prepared than I was for the world he’d soon face as an adult—a world in which presidents got away with rape and cops got away with murder, where older men dated young girls and used them up and threw them away.
“Get dressed. We need to go downtown.”
“I need to shower first.”
“No time. Detective Hernández is waiting for us.”