This other woman was a beauty, even more beautiful than your mother. Black hair, blue eyes, blood-red lips, metronome breasts. And much younger. He drove to her apartment in the middle of the night. This young beauty had something to tell him. She was pregnant. She said her child would not be a bastard, living above an oven. She commanded him to tell my mother, to tell her that he loved her, that this was going to be his child, too.
She had some kind of a hold over him, Gosia said to me in that purple room. I think how it has affected me that the two most important women of my life were heavily accented. Their voices like church bells resounding in my head.
Your father loved women, he loved them too much.
My father came home that next morning, having not slept at all. I wondered, even that day, I wondered if he had sex with his pregnant lover. With her oils on him, he returned to our mountain home and drove me to the Top of the World Pool, where I met Wilt and got assaulted. That this was not the darkest part of my childhood, can you imagine?
While I was at the pool, my father told my mother about the lover, and of course, she’d already suspected he was fucking someone. Now he told her that not only were her worst fears realized but that there was something else she hadn’t even thought to fear. His lover was pregnant, and he would not turn his back on this child.
Gosia told me he was penitent, as much as a man who’d made a grievous mistake could be.
But your mother was dragon, Gosia said. Dragons cannot stand by.
She told me that when my father went to pick me up from the pool, my mother called her. She told Gosia everything. Gosia advised her to leave. To pack me up and return to Italy.
Every day I thought about that. What if my mother and I had been the ones to go back to Italy? What if my mother had chosen me the way Alice’s mother chose her.
I can count on you, she said to Gosia, if anything happens. She will be yours.
Gosia said yes. Of course. Will be my baby. And here Gosia cried to me. She took my hands across the gold table and crushed them. I didn’t believe she was going to do it. Some part of me, yes. I almost drove to here. And then I did not.
My father did not become the bad guy for me. Not yet. That day I hated my mother for killing my father, but also for all the reasons you cannot say. Part of my child brain hated her because she wasn’t young enough or even beautiful enough. Because she wasn’t strong enough. Or because she was too strong. Because she was so complex where my father was not. I hated my mother, in short, for being a woman.
33
IN THE BED BESIDE ME Leonard’s penis had grown rigid alongside my thigh. He was pressing it against me.
—Mmmmm, he said. Over and over. Mmmmm.
I was still hearing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” in my ears. I thought of my father making a child with someone. The selfishness, especially, to come inside another woman. All my life, all the men taking what they wanted and leaving when it was over. Big Sky. The slug in Marfa, my first bad man from the Top of the World. The man who raped my grandmother. What my father did to my mother. What Leonard did to Lenore. What Vic did to his wife and their son and his daughter. What my father did to me. All the men from all the clubs and airplanes and dockside restaurants. All the fingers inside the waistbands of our underwear.
I heard the door open downstairs.
—Go away! I hissed.
—Please, Eleanor called. She sounded like me, trying to get into my mother’s bed.
—Please go away. I need to be alone!
The door closed.
—Who was that? Leonard whispered, as though we were teenagers covertly fucking.
—A woman, a friend. Nobody.
—You’re so wet, Leonard said as he tried to push himself into me. Those words, coming out of an old man’s mouth.
Were women blameless? I didn’t care in that moment. I thought of my son—his thin wet bones, the incorruptible gift of him. I felt close to my mother then, to feel her rage in me. I turned to face the old man, swinging one of my legs over his to pin him. I wrapped my hands around his chicken-skin throat. I looked at the magnificent watch around his gaunt wrist. I would come to find out it was worth an inconceivable amount of money. More than Lenny had alluded to, perhaps even more than he was aware. I could feel Eleanor’s presence outside the door. I would have invited anyone inside to watch. I knew what I was doing was fine and I knew I could legitimize it, even, to God.
As Lenny was dying, he held my face in his hands. I thought he was attempting to strangle me back. He was about to speak and I spat in his eye to make him stop. I would not let him have any more last words. I would never again be the basin in which a wretched man would bob about.
Smiling, I closed my eyes and transferred the force of my whole body and history into my hands. Killing a man felt more glorious than I could ever have imagined.
34
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I began to pack up what little I’d unpacked. I told Eleanor I was going to move out and that I didn’t know where I would go. She was terrified. I knew the feeling. She sat and watched me as I moved around the place, dropping loose eyeliners into big boxes.
I unblocked her mother’s phone number and multiple texts came through, just like that. It was plain that the woman had never stopped, not at all.
Sometimes there were two or so an hour. Half of them asked after her daughter.
Please tell me please is she with you
I showed those to Eleanor. I asked her to please let me tell her mother that she was all right.
The other half I would never show her.
How many times did you fuck my husband did he eat your cunt did he give you orgasms I have never had an orgasm in my life thats why he went to you. men need to know they please. tell me how he came did he come inside u TELL ME
I believe she thought that her daughter killed me. So that her messages were going into the ether. It must have assuaged her pain. That was the least we could do, Eleanor and I. Not responding was the least we could do.
The next day, one came that made me forcibly send Eleanor home in that moment. I was throwing out all my cheap dishware. I passed the full-length mirror and caught sight of myself. I was wearing my mother’s slip dress for what would be the last time. I’d dyed it red with Rit liquid dye in the shower. The shower would be stained forever. Now the color was uniform from top to bottom. I looked like a young girl in the mirror. Perhaps it was a trick of the light. My eyes shone with the absurdity of it all. I felt peace, you see, because I’d embraced the madness. And yet I don’t believe it was madness. I use the word as shorthand. The world will call it madness. You can’t convince normal people otherwise. There’s a simple small line at the mouth of hell. It’s not a big deal when you get there. It’s just another step is all. If you ever cross it, as I did, you will see that black things become the most honest ones of all.
You must remember that most people don’t like to hear when bad things happen. They can tolerate only a little here and there. The bad things must be comestible. If there are too many bad things, they plug their ears and vilify the victim. But a hundred very bad things happened to me. Am I supposed to be quiet? Bear my pain like a good girl? Or shall I be very bad and take it out on the world? Either way I won’t be loved.
That was when my phone dinged. My heart jumped. I thought it might be Alice. But it was Mary.