Chapter Twelve
“Hello to everyone. We are happy here and you be happy there.”
—Rajasthani greeting
I knew immediately that Janite had come home early—you could feel it when someone stepped onto the houseboat dock.
It was as if your personal continent tipped ever so slightly, and there was a slight groaning noise, too, as the floats and chains that kept you anchored shifted.
We were deep in our own planet, us exploring its wonder and beauty.
Everything felt deep, feelings of love, declarations of love, skin against skin, and my body was speaking, right then.
It was saying words without saying words, ones it didn’t ever ordinarily use, words like exquisite, and then—
“Oh, shit!” you cried. You heard our continent shift, too.
“Oh my God!” My heart started to pound in pure panic.
It was all the disasters that go along with abrupt changes involving the body—rising too fast to the surface of the sea, dropping into the Earth’s atmosphere too quickly.
My brain wasn’t working. I could barely breathe.
My legs got tangled in the blue sheet of your bed, and I half fell and then stumbled, trying to get my clothes.
You were hopping on one foot, trying to get your shorts on.
It would have been comical, if it weren’t terrifying.
We were so guilty. Your face was flushed.
My hair was smooshed, and my cheeks all red.
The air in the room was pure sex perfume, unmistakable.
How can we have a record of humanity without smells?
Smells were instant information, present and past, inextricably linked to memory, too.
Ask any dog. But there was no waft of peaches or skin or cow manure or pine trees on the Golden Record.
No cut lawns or new books. No clean sheets or sweaty, twisted ones.
“What. The. Hell.” Janite’s voice was surprisingly calm. But her eyes blazed. They were fixed on me, two lasers of fury. “What are you doing here?”
“Mom, Mom, Mom,” you said. You were a broken record, a malfunctioning player, stuck on repeat.
“What have you done to him? He never used to be like this! He used to be good. Look what you’ve done! Get out of here. Go. Go!”
“Mom, no—”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I said. I couldn’t find my other flip-flop.
I was wearing only one. So powerless, one flip-flop, as you stand there being yelled at.
My mind spun with calculations, whether I should just leave or search under the bed for it, turning my back on my aggressor, never a good idea.
I abandoned it. On my way to the door, Frank gave me an apologetic stare, and I gave one back.
He didn’t deserve this. He’d been through a lot already.
He was someone who worried, too. You could see it every time we swam in the lake, the way he’d stand there at the edge of the dock and watch over us.
I hobbled out of there. Well, not a hobble exactly, but with one flip-flop flapping the back of my heel, and the other foot silent.
Finally, I just took it off and went barefoot.
I couldn’t take it, the way I was half finished, half not.
Half of anything seemed like chaos. I wasn’t so proud of my downfall then.
I reached my car. The triangle pizza was wearing a mostly empty yogurt cup for a hat and looked happy about it.
I flung it off. Stupid pizza, always looking so cheerful while being unknowingly tormented.
I cried on the way home, driving through a blur of tears.
When I arrived, I wiped my eyes and tried to get myself together before I went inside, but my skin was all blotchy.
I took a shower. I was supposed to go to work in an hour anyway. But I didn’t usually take a shower at this hour, and my mom knocked on the bathroom door.
“Honey? Is everything okay?”
“Yep. Fine. Just hot.”
“Super excited about tomorrow!” She waited.
“Me too. Thanks for that!”
“Absolutely! Can’t wait.” I could feel her lingering there, her concern, but then she decided to walk away.
In some ways, I wished she’d pressed, been more decidedly there for me, but it must have been hard, you know.
To tell when you should be there and when you shouldn’t.
Either way could be wrong. I had no way of knowing what it was like to be in her mind, working so hard all the time trying to get things right.
“Bye!” I called when I was leaving. I attempted to sound cheerful, normal.
I felt sick with grief and embarrassment, though.
Grief—I already knew that was the right feeling.
I’d sent you, like, four texts to see if you were okay, but there’d only been silence.
Some horrible dread had filled me. As if we’d gone too far to the edge of the Earth, and we weren’t supposed to enter our own land like that.
“Have a great night, sweetie!” Mom called back.
It seemed impossible that she herself might have ever gone through stuff like this.
It was frustrating, how perfect some people needed to seem.
We heard about sweet Ned Shepherd, and her and Dad meeting at that wedding, and that was it.
We didn’t hear about the bad stuff, the mistakes.
When I got to work, Dad was there. Sometimes he worked the front counter, seating people or handing customers their pickup orders.
Denise, who’d worked at Papa Angelo’s forever, had it handled, but he just liked to do it.
People knew he was Angelo, the Angelo, and they chatted and joked and complimented and asked questions, and it felt great, I’m sure.
Being back there in the kitchen with the heat and the noise, the big crates of tomatoes and produce, the stack of boxes needing to be folded, the heat of the oven, George telling the cooks for the thousandth time not to go so heavy with the salsiccia—you could probably forget the whole point.
You could forget that pizza could make people happy, or, at least, allow them to forget their problems for a slice or two.
“Hey, Bella!” he called, even though I was right there. “What are you looking so happy about?”
Talk about a misread. Then again, I had pasted a big smile on my face, a disguise.
“Being here at work with you!” He loved it.
We had an audience. The scene we’d had with Maurice and me that other night—it went the way of most things.
A tension in the air between us until a gesture of peace was made, some offering of a ride somewhere, or a candy bar, whatever.
You knew it was okay, on his side, anyway.
You breathed a little. You leaned into it, because it was easier than fighting.
You felt so relieved, even if you’d been bought off by a Reese’s.
“Get your butt in there,” he joked. “My daughter,” he told the couple waiting for their table.
The pride in his voice cinched up my throat.
I could cry my eyes out, right there, walking through the doors to the kitchen, the scent of cold cheese and oregano and singed crust, the scent of this particular home, welcoming me in.
“Hey, Momo,” George said.
“Hey, Gogo.” Our nicknames, back from when I was learning to talk and couldn’t say George. Everyone in my family had nicknames. Nicknames were love names.
“You’re all set,” he said. I sometimes wondered, you know, if we didn’t see each other so regularly, whether we’d know each other better. If we actually talked instead of him pointing to my stack of orders as I whisked them away, waving my hand in a goodbye.
It wasn’t until I got back in my car, the windows steaming slightly from warm pizza and my own breath, that her words, Janite’s, began to haunt me.
What have you done to him? He never used to be like this!
He used to be good. The way they made what happened my fault.
Him changing, him growing—it was an accusation.
It struck me, of course it did, how those words echoed my dad’s that late night after the concert.
I was sweet and Mars was good, no longer.
I wondered if good and scared could look a lot alike, too.
If every good person also had a lot of experience with a bully.
It struck me, you know, that bullies didn’t just look one way, the way you think, guys like my dad, or the ones you see in the movies, some big dude with his posse, pushing the smaller guy.
A bully could maybe be weak and vulnerable and sick all the time to get attention.
It didn’t matter how it was achieved—bullies made sure they got their way.
The truth about sweet people was maybe the same for good ones: that no one really knows them, either, and that it’s a secret power.
By the time I got to my first house, a tiny cottage two blocks from Green Lake, I didn’t feel sweet, or good. I felt angry.
“Have a great night!” I sang anyway. Only bullies took their shit out on other people.
After work, when I got back, the restaurant was packed, and the kitchen was in full swing. “Momo!” George shouted. “Dad is on a rampage, watch out. He went home. He got some call—” George didn’t have time to explain, but he didn’t have to.
A kitchen drawer was slammed, a towel tossed down, that was the extent of physical harm—to objects.
But there was yelling. Rage, as my mother stood by, looking down at her hands.
The words were weapons: whoring around, also betray and trust and how could you and if you ever.
There was Get out of my sight! But I was already gone.