Chapter 7 The Orange Curtains
SEVEN
THE ORANGE CURTAINS
Shit, I think, there’s going to be a fight.
I can just tell by his body language that he is pissed.
Sure enough, when I go in to get him, he blames the entire travel fiasco on me, as though the airlines and the Midwest weather patterns are in my control.
He yells at me in front of the cab driver all the way to my grandmother’s—he loves to berate me in front of people, loves to make me look like an asshole, and there I am, a captive audience for his abuse.
The cab driver keeps looking ahead at the sleet falling, though I think he recognizes me.
I feel the irony of my fame growing as this man is dragging me down, making me feel like a worthless nobody.
I want the world to stop. I want the sleet to become snow and bury us all.
By the time we get to the house, he has turned into a charmer, his anger having blown through like the storm outside, all smiles and warmth the next morning over coffee with my family.
The house is, as ever, lovely for Christmas.
My boyfriend loves the painted photographs my grandfather once created and was so impressed by the artwork he found in the basement that he even starts to suggest he is the reincarnation of my grandfather, which when I think of it now is nothing short of unhinged.
Still, I can’t see him for who he is. To do that, I’d have to see myself more clearly, and when I look at myself, all I see are flaws. Not only do I have sad eyes, I have eyes that are warped, the picture blurred, the perspective askew.
Christmas Eve is also my uncle Harry’s birthday, and we all go out to dinner and have a lovely, sweet time.
When we get back from the restaurant, we gather around to watch a video compilation of films my grandfather made throughout his life, from age nineteen until just before he died.
They are cool home videos, if not exactly earth-shattering—the usual fare of an ordinary life in an ordinary town.
They mean something to us, though, but likely little to anyone outside the family.
Halfway through the screening, however, my boyfriend starts extolling my grandfather as a visionary and an artist, when the truth is that he was abusive, once hitting my grandmother so hard she lost her hearing in one ear.
My boyfriend raises his voice, wanting his praise to be heard above the talking and laughing as the video plays.
No one’s being rude; it’s just the way of a family.
But I can see my boyfriend getting frustrated; it appears he is the only person here who has the full measure of my grandfather, and we’re just heathens and Neanderthals for not giving him his full due.
Eventually, he goes upstairs and starts fiddling with his own 16-millimeter camera in the bedroom in the dark.
When I go up to see what he’s doing, I find him crying. And then from the darkness he explodes.
“Nobody understands about this man,” he wails. “Nobody understands what he was. And your family is just yakking all over it!”
I am flabbergasted. This kind of unhinged, not to mention over-the-top, reaction is beyond anything I’d seen so far, and that’s saying something. I stare at him as the hallway light reflects eerily on his tortured face, and then I finally say it.
“You are such an asshole.” And I close the door on him.
Thinking that was the end of it, and that he’ll probably apologize for his outburst once he’s calmed down, I go to the bathroom next door and pull down my pants to pee. As I’m sitting there, I hear heavy footsteps and tense up.
He comes barging in, grabs me around the neck, and drags me by my legs across the hallway, back to the bedroom, where the lights are still out.
There he pins me to the bed, my pants still around my ankles.
He’s livid, lost to his anger, shaking with rage, fuming and foaming as though his life is on the line.
“What did you call me? The fuck did you call me?” He’s really yelling now. And I realize it’s not his life on the line: it’s mine.
From downstairs I hear my mother’s voice.
“Hey, what’s going on up there?”
I whisper in his ear as he keeps pinning me down, “Please, whatever you do, just pretend we’re making out. I don’t want them to see this.”
My mother, not getting an answer, comes upstairs, strides into the bedroom, turns on the light, and is horrified by what she sees.
“You tell your fucking daughter to shut her fucking mouth,” he says. “She’s being completely out of line.” With that he unpins me and storms downstairs.
My mother, who has seen all too much of this kind of thing in her own life, is shaking.
“What is going on?” she says.
I sit up, pull up my pants, and try to seem okay.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,” I say, though the fear in my eyes and my shaking hands tell a different story.
While he’s on his way down to the basement, my grandmother notices the rage in his eyes and becomes terrified herself, because she’s seen that look before on her own husband’s face, just as my mother has seen it on Lala’s.
Both my mother and my aunt go try to calm the guy down, but when my mother tells Janet what she’s seen upstairs, that is it.
“You son of a bitch,” Janet says, storming upstairs to call the cops.
There has seldom ever been a cop car on Victoria Street.
When they arrive, the neighbors’ jungle telegraph brings folks out of their houses to see what is up.
The cops step in, almost apologetically, and find the guy sitting glumly downstairs.
I’m asked if I want to press charges; I barely look up from the ground when I say no.
“Everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine,” I say a little too eagerly.
Who knows why we don’t have him hauled away, but we don’t—we women were all victims of abuse in one form or another, and it can be almost impossible to break out of a cycle like that, especially in a moment of great duress like this.
One of the cops speaks up. “Well, if we have any more disturbances from this house, we’re going to arrest you, young man.”
“Fine,” he says, “then fucking arrest me…”
I’m terrified at this point, but I manage to haltingly tell him to shut up. My mom is basically holding me up; I can barely put a sentence together because of the coruscating feelings inside me.
Part of me wants him to get arrested so he can get the hell out of my life finally, but part of me doesn’t…
because I love him and because, as ever, I feel like I can save him, and by saving him, save myself from all the dark feelings I carry.
He was creative and interesting. He looked at life through a different lens, and I wanted that.
In my mind, actors were less interesting—I liked the guy who looked at others’ trash and saw the beauty.
I thought that going against the grain of what was expected of me was where I would find comfort.
I was still just a kid rebelling against my surroundings.
Once the cops leave, my aunt Janet takes over.
“Your grandmother’s upstairs and her face is bright red,” she says to me. “She’s terrified. And you know she has a heart condition. I want him out of here. Now.”
It is decided that he’ll be taken to a motel that night. He reluctantly goes to get his stuff, and then we walk out of the house, he and I and my mother.
But I’ve seen this movie before. When he’s angry, even his walk fumes.
When I heard him coming toward the bathroom a few minutes earlier, I knew, I just knew, that it wasn’t going to end well.
His footfall would shake the ground, he would almost stomp, his eyes seemed to fill with rage and evil.
It was a malevolence I’d never witnessed in any other human being; when he lost it, it seemed like he turned into a monster.
This is the version of him that walks out of my grandmother’s house and gets into the back of the car with me as my mother gets into the driver’s seat that night.
As we drive, outside the winter’s unrest rattles the car.
It’s bleak, and freezing, and I’m terrified, though part of me still thinks I can save this man, save myself, save the relationship and get the love I want, a love that is also, and quite perversely, something I feel I don’t deserve.
And then, as we approach the motel, he leans over to me, his breath hot on my ear.
“If you don’t come with me when we get to the motel…,” he whispers, before saying something so evil I can’t bear to repeat it. I know that he will hurt the people I love most if I don’t go.
The air in the car curdles. I can taste the hatred in his mouth, the stale, peevish nastiness frosting the inside of the windows. I’m trapped; my mother hasn’t heard what he’s said. If I say it out loud, what will she do: call the cops again? We had our chance, and now I’m stuck here with him.
Part of me wants to calm him down, and part of me is still that little girl who’s in love with him. The rest of me is pure terror.
There’s no way out. We turn into the motel parking lot. I see that my hands are shaking again, almost imperceptibly, like the ripples of a distant earthquake.
The car stops. My mother waits. He gets out of the car. He looks back at me, and I know I have to go with him. Before he can shut the door, I get out of the car.
Now my mom starts screaming.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she shouts. “What’s wrong with you?” All the years she couldn’t save herself from Lala seem to come to the surface of her voice. She’s screaming for me, and for herself.
“I’m just going to go in there for a little bit and sit there,” I say, shaking.
“You go in there and I’m never fucking talking to you again,” she says.
“I gotta go, I gotta go,” I say.
I am looking at her, back into the low glow of the car, praying she can see the two words my eyes are trying to convey:
Help me.