The Ugly Cry Read online

  Their apartment was huge and seemed to take up the entire floor of the building. Angela shared a bedroom with her younger sister, Anita, but it was big enough to split equitably. “Who’s your dad?”

  “I don’t know. But he’s Black too.”

  “Where’s your mom?” She clanked two doll heads together, making their hair shimmy.

  “The city.”

  “Why don’t you live with her in the city?”

  “I don’t know. We just don’t.”

  She was always incredibly direct, which was both frightening and exhilarating to me. Angela wasn’t a bad kid, but she was a badass—no one seemed to pick on her, and she always had a comeback if anyone attempted it. One day she came to the bus stop, her teeth bared like an animal ready to strike.

  “Look at my caps.”

  I tilted my head closer, and sure enough, Angela had gold caps on two of her teeth.

  “What are those?”

  “I just told you—gold caps. I got them in the city.”

  The only other person I’d seen with gold caps was Slick Rick, in a rap video on MTV. For Angela to saunter through our cow town with the same swagger as a rapper on TV instantly cemented her cool factor forever. She legitimately didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of her; Angela lived on a plane of existence so far above the rest of us that we couldn’t even come close to touching her.

  “That little fast-ass girl is trouble,” Grandma said whenever I mentioned Angela, which was constantly. “I saw her at the bus stop one morning in high heels and a miniskirt. In fourth grade!” Grandma was incensed. “Don’t you dare try to imitate her—what’s really cool is doing your own thing.”

  I rolled my eyes at her after-school-special logic. Grandma wore polyester pants with elastic waistbands and Cosby sweaters—what the fuck did she know about what was cool?

  Angela also changed her mind about people for no discernible reason. “I don’t like Amy anymore,” she said on the way to school one morning. Amy was kind; she was tall like me, played piano, and had a sick mullet to match Meg, her best friend.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. She’s just annoying. Don’t sit with her at lunch anymore, okay?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I liked Amy—she was very funny and really smart. We wrote a book of limericks for a contest, complete with our own illustrations, and we won; our book was “published,” just one slim copy in a hard red cover, with both of our names on the spine. For years we shared ownership and traded it back and forth. But I was scared of not having Angela on my side.

  I had maintained my friendship with Amy since we were both in Ms. Post’s class, but I didn’t talk about her anymore. Every time someone passed by the classroom door while I was talking to Amy and Meg, I was terrified it would be Angela on the way to the bathroom. That she would see me laughing with Amy when we partnered up to review our vocabulary words.

  Angela started hanging out with two new girls, Laurie and Jackie, when we started sixth grade. They weren’t related but may as well have been. They were either from Long Island or the city, earning them instant cool points from everyone—including Angela. We were all starting to experiment with hairspray, but they had already mastered the twelve-inch-high wall of bangs every girl in town was aching to achieve. Both wore thick black eyeliner and bright-colored lipstick. At twelve years old, Laurie and Jackie looked like they had walked right out of a Poison video and into Warwick Valley Middle School.

  I didn’t like Laurie or Jackie. There were rumors that they filled the handles of their hairbrushes with alcohol instead of hairspray, and they hung out with high school boys. They never did their homework and acted up in class a lot. Angela was a different person around them; she was tougher and laughed only when they were all in their tight cluster, making fun of someone. She and I didn’t start out having a lot in common, but now we were hanging on by a thread.

  We didn’t really hang out at her apartment anymore, but sometimes Angela would deign to grace us with her presence for the odd kickball game in the backyard once the spring weather was nice. She showed up with Justin one day as Chucky, Cory, and I were setting up the rocks and sticks that would constitute the bases.

  “I’m pitcher,” Angela said, walking to the mound. Pitching was the most coveted position in kickball. The pitcher was the de facto captain of the field, and I wanted just once to taste that kind of power. I asked all the time and the guys always said no; until Angela, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I could just walk to the mound and declare it for myself.

  I started to argue, but Cory and Chucky told me to shut up. I wanted to play more than I wanted to kick them in the nuts, so I did. The game started normally—kick, run, tagged out, technical home run because someone kicked it into Chucky’s backyard. Then, when it was my turn to kick, Angela started changing the rules.

  “If you kick it past the barn that’s an automatic home run,” she said, tossing the soccer ball from hand to hand.

  “No way!” I shouted. The barn was so close it may as well have been a base. And who the fuck did she think she was changing the rules mid-game? Without basic decorum and long-standing rules we might as well be those kids from The Lord of the Flies. “You can’t just change the rules in the middle of the game!”

  “No, that’s good,” Cory said, like the traitor he was. All of the guys could kick it over the barn, so this new rule worked in their favor.

  “Okay, that’s the rule,” Angela said, leaning forward and teeing up for a pitch.

  To this day, when I get angry, it feels like a dozen bees are buzzing just under the skin on my forehead. That day, it felt like the whole colony was doing a rhumba. As I stormed to the mound, Angela stood up straight. The guys groaned.

  “Come on, we want to play!”

  I stopped inches short from her face. “You cannot change the rules!” I was shouting about the game but feeling every devastating emotion I’d had since she casually tossed me aside for the two derelict Long Islanders who were now her best friends. I was mad at her, specifically and in general, for thinking I didn’t matter.

  Angela laughed.

  I didn’t plan to punch her in the face. But before I knew it, my hand was a tight ball of rage, making contact with her nose. Her head snapped back. All of the guys shouted, “Oooooooooh,” their hands held over their mouths in disbelief. When Angela brought her head back to center, there was a thick, oozing line of maroon dripping out of one nostril.

  I burst into tears.

  I ran away, down the short pathway on the side of the house, and slammed through the front door. Grandma was sitting in the living room on a kitchen chair, playing Super Mario Bros. In theory, the Nintendo was a gift for Cory and me, but Grandma racked up more hours on The Legend of Zelda, Marble Madness, and Duck Hunt than Cory and I could collectively match in a lifetime. I heard the wah-wah sound of Mario dying on the TV as I stood in the foyer weeping.

  “Goddammit, I just died,” Grandma said, turning to me. “What the fuck are you crying for?”

  “IpunchedAngelaandhernosestartedblee-hee-heeeeeee-diiiiiiiing,” I said, without taking a breath.

  “Oh, Jesus H. Christ,” Grandma said, getting up. “Why did you punch her?”

  “She was changing the ruuuuuules.”

  “So?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was being nonchalant about the fact that Angela was being a bitch or that I thought violence was the correct way to deal with it, but I stopped crying while I tried to figure it out.

  “Listen—did she hit you back?”

  “No. I ran away.”

  Grandma tilted her head and raised her eyebrows in complete disbelief. “You ran away from a fight?”

  “She was bleeding,” I said, leaving a glistening trail of snot across my forearm as I dragged it under my nose.

  “Get a goddamn tissue.�
� Grandma went to the back door. A minute later, she stomped back in a way that indicated I was in deep shit. I must have hurt Angela more than I thought. I started crying again. She crossed to the foyer and leaned right in my face, pointing her finger under my dripping nose.

  “Shut up, child. She’s fine—they’re out there right now, playing the game without you. Is that what you want? To be left out? To run away like a baby?” She had the habit of stringing so many questions together that I didn’t know how to answer. I shook my head. Then nodded my head. Then shook my head.

  “You never run away from a fight, y’hear me? You start it, you finish it.” Her eyes were wide and wild. Her dentures slipped forward slightly with every hard T sound she hit. “If you don’t go back out there and beat that little girl’s ass, you’re gonna have to come in here and fight me.”

  “I don’t want to finish it.”

  “That’s too fucking bad.”

  Tears started dripping from my head again, prompted by the bone-deep confusion running through me. I came into the house looking for comfort, having just punched my former best friend directly in the face, but was somehow instead being forced to choose between fighting Angela again or punching my own grandmother.

  “You gonna go back out there?”

  “Nooooo,” I wailed, fully focused now on whether I’d be able to even land a punch on Grandma, let alone win a fight with her. Not only was she stocky and low to the ground, but she apparently had no qualms about getting into a fistfight with a minor. What if I made her nose bleed, too?

  “Go upstairs. Whew, you look ugly when you cry,” she said. This was her go-to whenever we cried in her presence; I used to think she was trying to make us smile, but now that I’m older I think she was just a little bit sadistic and only doing it to make herself laugh. “And get a tissue. Such a baby. It was one punch,” she added, grabbing the Nintendo controller and sitting back down on the kitchen chair.

  I ran upstairs and threw myself on my bed. Moments later, Cory came running in, the front door slamming behind him.

  “You kids better stop running in and out of this house!” I could hear Grandma yell beneath me. Our bedroom was right over the living room, but she was so loud I would have heard her from school.

  “I need a paper towel!” Cory was breathless. “Angela’s nose is bleeding.”

  “I already heard about it. What do you want me to do, sound the fire alarm? My god, you kids act like you’ve never been in a fight before. All I did was fight when I was your age!”

  Cory’s quick footsteps pounded back toward the door before it slammed shut again.

  “If I lose one more goddamn life in this game because of you kids I will come out there and punch all of you in the nose, then we’ll see who’s really crying!” Grandma screamed after him.

  I was bereft. I felt out of control—my anger surprised me, but the fear of losing Angela’s friendship scared the shit out of me. I didn’t understand how I could feel those two things so distinctly—I hated her, was furious with her, but also didn’t want her to know how angry she made me. I was scared to take the risk of being alone, the risk that what I thought was actually true: at some point, everyone is going to abandon me.

  * * *

  —

  Grandma was doing her best to make me tough. Whenever I asked, she would tell me stories about being a kid in Harlem—jumping from one rooftop to another, playing jacks in alleys, her friend getting bitten by a dog—and about all of the people she fought or stood up to. For Grandma, being tough and independent was the only way to survive, so I had to learn how to survive in a new way. I learned a lot from her about how to stand up for myself, to use my voice, how to make up my own mind. She also taught me how to lose.

  In the Henderson household, board games were a competitive sport, with Grandma acting as the Commodus to my Maximus. The suggestion to even play had to come from her; I would occasionally run into the living room, breathless, holding the Parcheesi box while she sat on the couch chain-smoking, and ask if she wanted to play. “Not now. I’m busy,” she would say, taking another drag and staring off into space. I started to notice that if I sat in the living room reading long enough on a Saturday afternoon, she’d throw me a bone: “Want to play Monopoly?” Perhaps the bent, jagged form of an overgrown eleven-year-old with a dowager’s hump reminded her that children need brain-building activities and mental stimulation. Mostly she just loved any chance to show off.

  “Go get your brother.” Everyone knows that playing a board game with two people is a useless endeavor, but it was also rare that the three of us were in the house at the same time. If I wanted to play, the last hurdle was finding and convincing Cory to join in.

  A game of Monopoly paled in comparison to the Evel Knievel lifestyle Cory was fashioning for himself, so I usually had to throw in a bribe.

  “I’ll buy you a slice of pizza!”

  He stopped wailing a branch against the side of the house to throw me a squinty-eyed look.

  “You don’t have any money,” he said, suspicious.

  “Sweetie Pie sent me a check for five dollars for my birthday.”

  “. . . Okay.”

  We always gathered in exactly the same seats around the kitchen table and used exactly the same pieces every time—Grandma was the top hat, Cory was the race car, and I was the dog. Grandma was always the banker. “You’re not good at math,” she said, pointing her cigarette at me. “And you’re a thief,” she said to a wide-eyed Cory. “You think I don’t see you trying to slip hundreds out of the tray?”

  Copying Grandma, we slipped the tips of our Crayola-colored money about a quarter of an inch under the board, copying the order of the money in the bank. I get the impression from friends that their family game nights were always a fun and low-key affair—you drank soda, laughed, and delighted in winning a few rounds. The board game boxes themselves advertised smiling white people huddled around game pieces, unable to believe all the fun they are having. A complete lie. My grandma spent her childhood fighting rats in order to carve out enough space to play jacks against the wall in a New York City alley, trying to win money for penny candy. She was a proto Peaky Blinder, and in her world, every game was a blood sport meant to be won at all costs. After rolling to see who went first, the Monopoly carnage began in earnest.

  Grandma sat at the head of the table, looking down her glasses coolly, pausing for an eternity before deciding whether to buy every property she landed on.

  “Come on, Grandma!” I was instantly impatient. I’d been down this road with her before. “You know you’re going to buy it!”

  “I might not,” she said, resting her hands under her chin like a cartoon villain, staring at the board.

  Cory and I would start to flail and sigh in our chairs, not realizing that this interminable wait was part of her strategy to bring us to our knees. After what felt like several hours, she would look up and say, “I’ll take it.” She bought everything. Every railroad. Park Place. Marvin Gardens. She had monopolies before we even passed Go the first time, and hotels erected on her properties just as we were starting to buy whatever was left over. After tucking her property card neatly behind the others, she would smile benevolently at her bounty.

  The same patience was not afforded to me when it was my turn. “Just buy the property, child,” Grandma said, unable to appreciate the ways I was trying to mimic her because she’d moved on to another tool in her arsenal—straight-up bullying.

  “I don’t know if I want Baltic.” I had no real reason for denying any property other than the low rent.

  “Buy it, you’re holding up the whole game.”

  Cory was always inexplicably excited to buy the cheap properties. “Wait until I put hotels up,” he said, barely able to contain his anticipation of impending slumlordship.

  I always caved, eager to own something, anything, that would keep me in t
he game; after Grandma bought anything worth having, the only chance for survival was to have something she needed.

  “I’ll trade you Connecticut if you give me Indiana,” she said calmly, looking down her glasses, the card dangling between her fingertips like a piece of garbage she collected from the street.

  “But that would give you a Monopoly on the reds.”

  “I’ll throw in five hundred dollars.”

  Sometimes Cory and I would try to protect each other from her negotiating tactics. “Don’t sell to her, Dani! She’s gonna make so much money now!” Grandma didn’t even turn her head toward the direction of the interference. “Am I negotiating with him, or with you?” She raised her eyebrows, her stare simultaneously nonchalant and aggressive. I looked at that brightly colored bill and thought how much it would buy.

  “Okay!”

  “Thank you kindly,” Grandma said, properties and money exchanging hands.

  Once we started negotiating, it wasn’t long before I was wiped out. Every game ended the same way: Grandma lorded over her winnings like a queen surveying her kingdom while I tried to pinpoint which horrible decision brought about my downfall.

  It was the loser’s job to clean up. I was organizing bills by color and stuffing them back into the slick plastic tray, putting metal pieces under the cardboard instruction flap, when, deep in my anger, I shouted, “Angela’s mom always lets us win when we play games with her!”

  Grandma flipped her head back so hard I thought she might snap her neck and let out a laugh like a machine-gun blast. “Let you win? Let you? Honey, that’s for white people. In this house, you earn it.”

  13.

  Grandma handed me a ten-dollar bill from the pocket of her black polyester pants, the elastic waistband resting comfortably on her round belly. Shirtless and wearing only a white bra, she leaned toward the mirror over the bathroom sink, angling her tweezers toward an errant chin hair. I casually noticed that one of her tits was as big as my head and was still spilling over the top of her bra. Every part of her body seemed to point extremely forward.