Dirty

  He had to lean in close so I could hear him, and I didn’t bother looking any further. I turned to him and smiled. I raised my beer in his direction, like a toast.

  “They look like they’re having fun,” I said.

  He nodded. The music here was inconsistent, one minute a hip-hop ode to the female posterior and the next a hard-edged rock ballad full of angst and woe. At the moment, the song had softened into a retro-pop tune that seemed to make everyone want to bounce.

  He was cute. I leaned closer. He smelled good, even after a night sweating in smoke. I leaned back. Our eyes met. I let him take me out to the parking lot, where I got in the backseat of his car and he put his hand up my skirt.

  I didn’t ask his name, and he didn’t offer it. I told him my name was Jennifer, and I was twenty-two. He seemed to believe me. He got into my panties with fumbling fingers as he unzipped his pants and put his erection into my hand.

  He understood the etiquette of Hookup Alley and didn’t press for intercourse. He also attempted, at least, to get me off, and it wasn’t quite his fault that he didn’t. I made the appropriate noises and writhed beneath him, though I was as far away from coming as a woman can be without being dead.

  He came after about five minutes of jacking, which was before my wrist started to ache but about four minutes after I’d lost interest. He ejaculated into my fist with a loud cry I hoped no passing cops would seek to investigate and collapsed on top of me like he’d passed out. We stayed that way for a minute or so, until I pushed him to get up.

  We blinked at each other without saying anything for a moment. I wiped my hand on the tails of his shirt. He looked down with a grimace but didn’t complain. I sat back from him and rearranged my clothes.

  “Can I give you a ride home?” He scored points for chivalry, at least.

  “No, thanks.” I smiled. It wasn’t his fault he’d been meant to be a distraction.

  “Are you sure? Because—”

  I got out of the car before he could finish. I didn’t feel drunk anymore. This time, when I hailed a cab, I actually got in.

  Chapter 12

  My role as dutiful daughter might not have extended to visiting my parents’ house, but when my mother called and invited me to meet them for dinner, I could think of no good excuse to refuse, especially when she told me my father was coming, too. My father, in a restaurant? The idea would have been laughable, if it didn’t give me acid reflux.

  It meant canceling an appointment with Dan. He said nothing when I told him I’d have to change our dinner plans. He didn’t have to say anything. I could hear his frown through the phone.“I’ve never met your parents,” he said at last.

  Silence fell between us again. I wished for an old-fashioned phone so I could twirl the cord in my fingers. I had to satisfy myself with tangling my hair.

  “You don’t want to,” I said when I could no longer stand the quiet.

  “Why don’t you just give me a call when you’re free, then.”

  I waited for what seemed an eternity before replying. “I don’t want you to meet my parents.”

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t blame him for sounding affronted. “Because I barely want to go to this dinner, Dan. I can’t subject you to it. Not only that, but it would be very stressful for me to have you there.”

  It was a very honest thing for me to tell him, but he didn’t sound appeased.

  “All families are stressful, Elle. But if you don’t want them to meet me—”

  “I don’t want you to meet them,” I interrupted. “There’s a difference.”

  “Do you think I won’t like you anymore if I meet them?” He sounded teasing. I didn’t laugh. “Elle?”

  “It’s my mother,” I told him. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Never having met her, no. I guess I wouldn’t.”

  I got the sense he was waiting for me to invite him along to dinner. The thought of that was enough to make me shudder. “You don’t want to. Believe me.”

  “Actually,” he said. “I do.”

  “Dan, you don’t. Trust me.”

  “You don’t want me to meet your family. It’s fine. Have a good time.”

  I didn’t want to fight with him about it, but I also couldn’t imagine introducing him to my mother and father.

  “It’s complicated, Dan.”

  “Elle,” Dan said. “It seems that most things with you are.”

  Then he gave me the dial tone and I stared at the phone before I hung it up. This time I didn’t call him back.

  My mother waited alone for me at the table. “Daddy couldn’t make it.”“Why not?”

  “He was busy, Ella. What difference does it make?” She stirred sweetener into her tea.

  “The difference is, you told me he was going to be here, that’s all.”

  She sniffed. “Why? I’m not good enough?”

  “It’s not that.”

  She pursed her lips at me. “If you’re that concerned, you could come over to the house.”

  We stared at each other without speaking until the waiter came over and asked us what we wanted to order. She ordered for us both, food I didn’t want but was grateful not to have to think about, and he went away. She talked on and on about my cousin’s wedding, which I hadn’t attended. I couldn’t have cared less about the details, but it filled the space between us with words so we didn’t have to actually speak.

  She paid for dinner, and I allowed her to. We left the restaurant and I walked her to the parking lot, when it occurred to me I hadn’t asked how she’d gotten there.

  “I drove,” she told me as she dug in her purse for her cigarettes and lighter. She lit up with the ease of a long-term addict. “I’m going to have to get used to it again.”

  For when my father was gone. She didn’t say it, but I heard it. That simple admission revealed more to me about the extent of my father’s illness than anything else she could have said, yet I found myself unable to respond with anything beyond a low murmur.

  “Will you ever visit us again, Ella?”

  I looked at her car, the same one they’d had for fifteen years, before meeting her gaze. “No, Mother. I don’t think so.”

  She made a low, disgruntled noise. “Such a selfish, selfish girl you are. I don’t understand it. Your father is sick—”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “You know what?” She asked sharply. “I think it’s time you just got over it. How about that, Ella? Just get over it. It’s been ten years already. I can’t keep bending over backward to apologize to you for things that happened in the past!”

  I could only blink, listening to her tirade. “Mom, it’s not about you, okay?”

  “Then what’s it about? Tell me, please, because I’m so interested to know.” Her tone made that statement a lie. “Because I’d really like to hear how it’s not because of me. I understand how you hate me, but you should at least come to visit your father,” she added, like that made everything sensible. “He’s not well.”

  “That’s not my fault,” I repeated, my voice steadier than I’d thought it could be. “And you’re right. I think maybe I should just ‘get over it.’ But I can’t.”

  She didn’t seem to have much to say to that, but her cigarette got a vicious workout. “You keep holding on to the past like that, and you’ll never have a future. I’m warning you.”

  “Good advice,” I said mildly, “considering the source.”

  She glared. “Why do I bother? Why? When all you do is give me grief? Maybe I should just give up on you, Ella. Let you go your merry way. Forget about trying to have any sort of relationship with you at all. It’s impossible to communicate with you. All you do is hear your own self.”

  What she said was probably true, though I didn’t want to admit it. “Maybe you should just give up on me, then. Like you did with Chad.”

  Deep lines gouged her face as she frowned. “Don’t talk to me about him.”

  “Maybe we need
to talk about Chad.” I said his name on purpose, to force her to hear it. “I think we need to talk about Andrew, too. About what happened. We never talk about it—”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.” Her face smoothed, as if by magic. She blew a dainty stream of smoke from her nostrils.

  I had spent a lot of years trying to forget. Not talking. The urge to stop hiding from the past flooded me there in the parking lot, and I could no longer pretend the past didn’t affect my future.

  “Mom,” I whispered. “Please. I need to talk to you about it. About what happened. I can’t not talk about it anymore. It’s making me sick inside.”

  “You’re sick inside, all right,” she countered, poking at me with her cigarette. “You need to get over it! He’s dead! He’s gone!”

  “That’s not my fault, either!” I cried.

  “It is your fault!” She cried back, then sucked more smoke into her lungs like it was more precious to her than oxygen.

  I stood, stunned, watching her crush out the cigarette and light another in the next moment. Smoking is a dirty habit, bad for the teeth and skin, not to mention the lungs, and though I’d indulged on occasion I had never taken it up as habit. It had always surprised me that she had, considering the ravages cigarettes created on clothes and faces.

  “It’s not my fault he died.” I meant the words to sound strong. I meant to believe them. “Andrew killed himself, Mother, I had nothing to do with it.”

  “You drove him to it,” she snapped. “He was fine before you started working on him.”

  “You don’t believe that.” Yet I didn’t find it hard to believe she did.

  “I should never have stopped you when you tried it,” she said. Smoke hovered in the air between us. It stung my eyes and throat, and I wished for tears to wash it away. “Then he’d be alive and you’d—”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t you dare say it.”

  She looked at me, her face twisted with anger and grief. “You and Chad have been nothing but disappointments to me and your father. I don’t understand what happened. Andrew was such a perfect son.”

  “You don’t believe that, either. Do you? How can you say that?” I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she came back to reality. “Mother, he wasn’t perfect! Nobody is. But him…definitely not.”

  “Bite your tongue, Ella.”

  “Were we both just afterthoughts?” I asked her. “Me and Chad? Parents aren’t supposed to have favorites.”

  “Well, here’s a clue for you,” my mother said, and ground out her second cigarette beneath the toe of her expensive suede pump. “We do.”

  And then she got in her car and drove herself away.

  “You should come home,” I told Chad the next time he called me. “I miss you.”“I miss you, too. Come to visit me. It’s nice here in California.”

  “Mother says Dad’s not doing well at all.”

  “And have you been to see him, sweetie?”

  Bless my brother for always knowing just where to stick me to press the guilt button. He’s more like our mother than he’d like to admit. I had to smile, though, because he was right.

  “No. Come home. We’ll go together.”

  “You know something I don’t?” I heard him scuffling with something. “Pop’s got us both signed up as beneficiaries on some big-time life insurance policy? Because you know if I walk in his door he’ll kick the bucket right away.”

  “He’s dying, Chad. Do you want to let him die without seeing him again?”

  “Don’t.” My baby brother’s normal ebullience was not in evidence today. “Don’t you start with me, Ella. They kicked me out, they told me to never darken their doorsteps again, they called me names.”

  “He didn’t.” I cracked the top on a soda and sipped it.

  “He didn’t stop her from doing it, and that’s the same as if he’d done it himself. Just because he was too piss drunk to get off the fucking chair doesn’t give him any excuses. And frankly,” Chad accused, “I’m fucking surprised to hear this from you. You of all people, Ella.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

  “Elle,” he amended. “Sweetie, baby doll. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Chaddie.”

  “Don’t ask me to come home. You know I can’t.”

  “I know.” I sighed and rubbed my forehead against the headache. “I know. But she keeps calling me.”

  I didn’t mention the conversation in the parking lot.

  “Tell her to fuck off,” he said succinctly. “Bitch never did a damn thing for us. Not when we needed her to. Not when she should have. Let her reap what she’s sown.”

  “Do you ever…Chad, do you ever think about…forgiving her?”

  “Do you ever think about forgiving him?”

  A harsh question, but one I’d been seriously pondering lately. “He’s dead. What good would forgiving Andrew do now?”

  “You tell me, baby doll.” Chad made a comforting noise. It didn’t make up for him not being able to hug me, but it was better than nothing.

  “Why are we such awful, fucked-up messes?” I asked with a low chuckle. “Why, Chad. Why can’t we just…get over it?”

  “I don’t know, honey. I wish I did.”

  “We should. We shouldn’t let the past keep us from having lives!” I was angry and glad I’d shut my office door so my raised voice didn’t carry.

  He laughed. “Who are you talking to, here?”

  “It’s been years, Chad. Years of holding on to hurt. I’m tired of it. It doesn’t serve me any longer. But I don’t know how to let it go.”

  “Oh, sweetie.”

  We sniffled together, my brother and I, separated by distance but brought together in mutual misery.

  “I’m seeing someone,” Chad said before I could say anything new. “He’s helping a lot.”

  “What happened to Luke?”

  He laughed. “No, baby doll. Luke is still around. I mean seeing a shrink.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. “Well. Good.”

  “You might think about it, you know. Talk to someone.”

  I shook my head, though he couldn’t see me. “I talk to you.”

  “Do you talk to Dan?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Listen,” I said, annoyed. “Since when do you give me advice on my love life?”

  “Since you finally got one,” Chad replied.

  I sighed. “He’s a nice guy.”

  “So?”

  “So, I just…I just don’t want to get hurt again.”

  “Nobody does, sweetie. You gonna live the rest of your life worrying about it?” He paused. “Are you going to let Andrew do that to you?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  My brother sighed. “Then don’t, Elle.”

  “Is it helping you? The shrink. Does he help?”

  I took a piece of graph paper from my drawer and touched the point of my pencil to each box the blue lines made on the white paper.

  “Yes,” Chad said. “Talking about it helps. Puts things in perspective. Proves I’m not crazy. Our parents are the fucked-up mess, sweetie, not us.”

  “I don’t need a shrink to tell me that.” I laughed a little. “They put the fun in dysfunctional.”

  Chad laughed at my bad joke, too. “You know I’m always here to listen to you, sweetie. But really. I think you should think about talking to someone else. It could help you a lot.”

  “Will you think about coming home?” Silence wound its way through miles of wires to stab my ear. “Please?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  I looked at the clock. “Oh, shit, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later, okay? And Chad, thanks.”

  “Anytime, sweetie. How many?”

  “How many what?”

  “How many whatever you’re counting,” he said, and I laughed.

  “I’m looking at graph p
aper. A lot.”

  “Keep counting, sweetie.”

  “I will, Chad. Love you, bye.”

  I hung up the phone and stared at the graph paper, then pushed it aside. Chad had a boyfriend and a shrink, and I had neither. I had to decide if I wanted one or both. I knew I needed something.

  Knowing what you need doesn’t always mean you know how to get it, though. I’d spent a long time hiding in my cave. No matter how much I might want to come out into the light, I knew it would hurt my eyes. I was a fool.

  A fool, but nevertheless too smart not to know I was the architect of my own demise, that it was time to put my past behind me. It was time to stop allowing the white elephants to stand unspoken of in my living room.

  When I got back from the home improvement store, Dennis’s car had stolen my spot. The inconvenience of parking across the street did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for my new project. I carried buckets of paint, new rollers and trays inside and spread the tarp over my floor.I began painting. Not white this time. Not for this room, the one in the house that had given me such trouble. This room I painted a deep, night-sky blue.

  At the first stripe of it on the white I had to step back and set down the roller. I had to leave the room for a moment and draw a glass of cold water from the kitchen sink. I drank it down. I took a few deep breaths. I chided myself for being ridiculous, and with thumping heart, I went back into the dining room.

  The second stripe of color was easier. The one after that easier still. And after ten minutes, the room had already changed. I painted for an hour without break, then stopped to stand back again and assess what I had done.

  I know I’m a contradiction of clichés. I have always known it and understood my preference for black and white makes for a stark life without gray to cloud it. Looking at my blue wall, I didn’t suddenly decide to throw away everything I’d held around me, or give up the things that gave me comfort. My blue wall was a choice I’d made, an urge toward change. And looking at it, even unfinished, made me smile.

  I answered the knock on the door with paint still on my hands and cheek from where I’d brushed away my hair. “Gavin, hi.”