The Ugly Cry Read online

  At bandage-changing times, I cried when Cory cried, convinced that Mom was still trying to kill him. Grandma leaned in the doorway of our bedroom, taking long drags from her Carlton 120’s. “See,” she said, squinting through the smoke to meet my eyes, “I told you to keep your little raggedy Black asses in bed. Now look.” She used the cigarette to point to Cory and my mom, locked in a wrestling move as she tried to pin him down and simultaneously apply ointment to his wound. Grandma stood firm in her smugness, more impressed with how right she was than with how much we were all hurting.

  * * *

  —

  The start of summer was marked not by a calendar but by the day Grandma finally decided to clean out the wading pool. For most of the year, it lived in the small shed in the backyard, propped against the lawn mower. I was afraid of that shed; it smelled too much like the ground after a thunderstorm and was pitch-black, even if you opened the door in the middle of the day. I dared myself to open it once; everything was covered in dust, and a daddy longlegs spider crawled onto my shoulder within seconds. I left the door open and ran toward the house screaming, swatting my shoulder the entire way. “Would you look at the hysterics?” Grandma said as I cried my way into the house. “It’s just a damn spider!” Grandma never understood fear, especially if it was someone else’s.

  I cried every time Grandma had to go back there; I thought the shed would swallow her up and I’d never see her again. She’d already made me watch Swamp Thing at this point, so I knew what it looked like to be consumed by chemicals, fire, and water after watching the titular character run into a swamp and, presumably, die, only to be reborn as a mutant plant man. I kept a safe distance, but my morbid curiosity always got the better of me, so I hoisted myself up to the counter to watch from the kitchen window over the sink as Grandma marched around the house into the backyard. Whenever she was in the shed for more than ten seconds, I imagined her getting Swamp Thing’ed by an avalanche of dust, dirt, spiders, and centipedes. If she came back to life as a monster, I whispered to myself, I would not love her anymore, not even a little bit.

  Instead of being turned into a grotesque, unlovable mutant, Grandma just came out of the shed cursing, swatting dust out of her hair, and rolling our Mickey Mouse wading pool to the side of the house with the hose. She cranked the flower-shaped spigot until drips of water started coming out of the green hose, bleached from a vibrant forest color to practically white after years of being in the sun. When she was done rinsing out the pool, I would run outside to hold the hose while she filled it up. I liked being in charge of something that I’d only ever seen adults do, and I liked it when my grandma said I was smart about something, even something as paltry as filling a wading pool.

  The water was ice-cold, but Grandma always insisted it would warm up in the sun. “What if there are still spiders in here?” I asked nervously. Grandma looked at me over the top of her glasses, raised her eyebrows, and said, “If there are any fucking spiders in here, they’re about to drown.” But what about the bottom of the pool? There could still be spiders underneath. I would often look over the edge of the pool and see worms wriggling around where we had splashed out water, so I knew that this thing was a magnet for disgusting beasts that rose up from the depths of the earth. “I’m not going to sit here all goddamn day checking from here to kingdom come for spiders, child,” she said, squinting to avoid the mist of the homemade spray nozzle she created by placing her thumb over the end of the hose. “If touching a spider kills you, well, I guess you were too delicate for this earth, and it was nice knowing you.” My summers always started with a firm acknowledgment that I might die as a result of trying to enjoy them.

  It turned out that the bat whack Cory gave me when I came home from the hospital wasn’t just a funny story, but a portent of our whole relationship. Cory never forgave me for screwing up his sweet gig, and I never stopped narcing on him every time he tried to kill me. Cory’s next window for murder appeared when I was learning how to walk. I was tottering around in my walker—a white plastic contraption with a wide tray and a little hammock seat with holes cut out for the legs—and Cory decided to jump into the three inches of space behind me. My grandma thought this was adorable and ran to get her camera. She snapped off a few shots before it registered that my face was turning red; Cory was shoving me against the tray with all his might, trying to push me out of the walker but accidentally succeeding in almost choking the life out of me. I cannot remember who swooped in to pick one or both of us up, but the fact that there is photo evidence of this moment says a lot about the people in charge of keeping me alive.

  Now, a year or so later, after Cory had casually tried to drown me by holding his foot on my neck, I got a wading pool of my own, placed right next to his. This was the beginning of a decade-long standoff: Cory and I played near each other but not with each other. Over the years, our combativeness got more intense, until it fizzled out into something colder and more distant in our teens. It would be years into my twenties until I confided in him or felt like we had the kind of sibling relationship you see on TV. We were the polar opposite of each other from the minute we came into the world; our closeness had to be cultivated over time and after years of butting heads.

  There’s a photo of me standing in my pool, my tiny belly protruding over my tiny pink bikini, yelling at Cory while he played in his pool. According to my grandma, I was upset that he was splashing me. “You two couldn’t be left alone for two minutes,” she’d say with a laugh, “before you were trying to kill each other.” Two pools should have been a great compromise; instead, I cried every day because he got the better pool, the one with the giant cartoon Mickey Mouse face on the bottom.

  3.

  A number of things factored into my mom’s decision to put me in school early, not least among them my grandmother’s insistence that “that little shit is getting too smart for her own good.” I would be starting before my fifth birthday and had to be tested by my future kindergarten teacher to make sure I’d be ready to take on the rigorous work of naming colors and gluing construction paper hoops together to make a chain. My teacher, Mrs. Cross, was kind. She had soft blond hair permed into loose shoulder-length curls, and crinkles around her blue eyes that stayed on her face even when she wasn’t smiling. At five years old, I was almost her full height, both of us meeting in the middle of her being impossibly tiny and my being freakishly tall.

  The day I took the test, we left the sun-soaked classroom to finish business in the hall. The lights were off despite it being the middle of the day, and the dull green linoleum floor was a too-dark canvas for the shadows cast by the trees outside. Mrs. Cross and my mom stood near the classroom door; a different child may have skipped down the hall or found some chalk-based adventure in another classroom, but I planted myself next to Mom, eager to know if I’d be going to school or not.

  “Danielle passed her test with flying colors!” Mrs. Cross smiled at Mom, then looked over to smile at me. “We’ll see you in class soon.” On the way home, I asked my mom to explain how colors could fly, again and again like a broken record. “It just means you’re smart,” Mom snapped, picking up the pace and trying to outrun any additional questions.

  I loved being in school. The teachers smiled and were happy to see me, unlike the “What do you want?” reaction I got from Grandma every time I walked into a room. It quickly dawned on me that learning was something I could do on my own, something I didn’t have to share with Cory. I liked asking questions and getting real answers instead of being told, “Child, I don’t fucking know,” which was Grandma’s standard response. More than anything, I liked it when people told me I was smart, even if I wasn’t quite sure exactly how I was smart—I just asked a lot of questions, then worked hard to figure out the answers on my own, like I’d always been told to do. But it seemed to matter a lot to Mrs. Cross that I’d been reading since I was three years old; Mom always read to us at night, and we went over the
words together as I started to take an interest in reading on my own. Mrs. Cross noticed that I also had opinions about things, like why there wasn’t really a crayon that matched my skin tone.

  We also did fun things at school, like getting fingerprinted. The police were coming! To our class! Special! Taking time out of their busy jobs to visit us! Two police officers showed up one afternoon, resplendent in their uniforms and not yet a symbol of absolute terror. We were all sitting on the floor, our mouths open and tiny necks bent back in rapt attention. One officer talked to us while the other officer sat at the art table with a stack of postcard-size paper and prepared his kit. We ran through the basics, then lined up for our perp walk.

  Our names were already written out on the cards and kept in alphabetical order, which should have been our first indication that Mrs. Cross was a damn snitch. The desk officer asked us our names, found our card, and made a big production out of placing our fingers on the ink pad, as if permanently taking away our ability to live off the grid was a special prize. He helped us roll each finger on the spots indicated on the card, and then—big finale—the thumbs, which were such an unruly part of the human design they had to be inked and rolled separately. We washed up at the art sink, drying our hands on the scratchy brown bark that passed for paper towels in the school system right up until I graduated high school.

  As an adult, I realized the real reason we were getting inked was much darker: kidnapping was on the rise, and fingerprints probably helped them identify our tiny bodies.

  I loved Mrs. Cross, even when she was fucking up royally.

  We were coloring pictures of our families in kindergarten, practicing letters by writing each family member’s title above their head. My family was easy to fit on the piece of construction paper—Mom, Grandma, Granddad, and Cory. The peach crayon was all wrong for their skin, but it was all that was on offer; Ryan Burke colored his family blue and had to start over again. I added everyone’s names beneath their titles to fill the time. When Mrs. Cross came around to check my work, she praised me for knowing how to spell first names, but her next question confused me.

  “What about your dad?”

  I answered, without missing a beat, “I don’t have a dad.”

  I may have smiled in deference the way I always did when I was talking to an adult, but talking about dads raised no emotion in me at all. I’d never met him, so I never missed him. As I continued to use the black crayon to draw the little swirls that looked most like Cory’s hair, Mrs. Cross persisted.

  “But, Danielle, everyone has a dad,” she said gently.

  “Not me,” I said, without looking up from my drawing.

  “Could you draw him anyway?”

  “I don’t know what he looks like.”

  “Maybe you can try to draw him, and then ask your mom how to spell his name.”

  Mrs. Cross had taught me how to hold a paintbrush and was the first person outside of my family to tell me I was smart without making it sound like an insult. I didn’t want to disappoint her, but what was her fucking problem? All I could convincingly draw in the space of a father was a ghost. She had to have known it was entirely possible for someone to grow up without one or both parents—Charles Dickens had a cottage industry writing about orphans a century before I was even born.

  Occasionally I would overhear my grandma talk about “that man” to my mother, always in harsh and villainous tones. “Why don’t you ask that man for some money to take care of these kids?” Aside from that, he was never discussed.

  Until Mrs. Cross’s weird insistence that I acknowledge him, I had never really questioned the absence of my own father. I realized that other people had them—I knew that my granddad was my mom’s father, that half of her everything came from a man who warmed her bottles on the stove, a man who pushed her on the swings, a man she could recognize on the street. I would hear other kids talking about their dads as disciplinarians, the looming threat their moms leveled at them in an effort to get them to behave. I didn’t get it. My grandma was the scariest person I’d ever met, and I could not imagine any man having the ability to terrify me more than her.

  “I have a granddad!” I said excitedly, trying to smooth over the situation.

  “And what’s his name?” she said expectantly.

  “Jack. But sometimes my grandma calls him Robert? And some people call him Tiny,” I said, having not yet grasped the concept of nicknames.

  I drew a stick figure with a circle for the belly and wrote “Jack” on top of it, then took my anger and confusion home to my mom.

  “Who is my dad?” We’d barely walked a block away from school, but it took traversing that length of the sidewalk for me to work up the courage to ask. When I did, it came out like an accusation instead of a question.

  “Excuse me?” My mom was about to guide us across the street when my question stopped her in her tracks.

  “We drew pictures of family today, and Mrs. Cross asked me to draw my dad, and I told her I didn’t have a dad, and she said everyone has a dad,” I said in that rapid-fire, little-kid way, afraid that all of my breath would leave my body before I could get the thought out of my head. “She told me to ask you my dad’s name.”

  Mom, holding my hand, walked us across the street. “His name is Carlton,” she said distractedly, keeping her eyes on the sidewalk.

  This didn’t help my confusion. She’s known his name this whole time? What else did she know about him?

  “How do you spell it?”

  “C-a-r-l-t-o-n,” she said.

  “Where does he live?”

  “North Carolina.”

  “Where’s North Carolina?”

  “Far away.”

  I could hear the tension rising in her voice, but I pressed my luck. “Why doesn’t he live with us?”

  Mom stopped walking, my hand jerking in hers as I was pulled to a stop next to her. She bent down quickly and pushed her face close to mine the way she did when she pulled me out of hiding in the clothing racks at Sears. “Dani, it doesn’t matter, okay? And Mrs. Cross should mind her fucking business.”

  She stood up, and we started walking again, a little faster than before. We were silent the whole way home.

  * * *

  —

  Getting to know kids around my age who were not Cory was refreshing. None of them tried to kill me, which was clutch. Making friends turned out to be easy—you just found one thing you had in common, like how much you loved the color green, and that was it. Sometimes they talked about things I didn’t understand, like their dads or going to Disney World, but it wasn’t hard to bring the conversation back to cartoons or who in the class could jump the farthest. I got along with all of the kids in my class. All except for one: Lisa Weiringer.

  I’ve changed her name because I truly don’t know what happened to her after kindergarten. Despite our racially motivated argument, she could have become a prominent lawyer for the NAACP for all I know. That’s about as much grace as I’m willing to give her now, forty years later.

  Lisa was a bright-eyed, greasy-haired little fuck. We were in kindergarten together; before the incident, I only remember her as the first kid I ever saw to eat crayons like they were part of her regular afternoon snack. Her crystal blue eyes and long black hair offset the smears of dirt that constantly covered her face and clothes. Her mouth always hung slightly open, like a kitchen cabinet with a bad hinge, showcasing all of her wax-covered teeth. She shoved classmates without provocation during the multiple times each day when the class was forced to line up.

  On the day it happened, Lisa burst out of the heavy double doors first. Her parents were directly outside, sitting in their navy blue Gremlin, a car that looked the way cars did when kids drew them on construction paper—flat roof, long hood, and tires held to the frame with Popsicle sticks. Two white painted stripes wrapped around the windows and down t
oward the headlights. The comic effect of this squashed, ugly car was only accentuated by the fact that Lisa’s parents were very, very big and smeared in dirt similar to Lisa, as if the whole family rolled around in motor oil before starting the day. Her father’s glasses were so thick his eyes looked like pinheads.

  Cory and I usually hung out on the playground until Mom came to get us. I had barely talked to Lisa and definitely didn’t talk to adults or strangers, so the fact that her parents were yelling at me from the car as I walked to the playground caught my attention. I couldn’t understand at first; they were shouting a word that I had never heard. “Hey, that’s that nigger! You little nigger!” Lisa joined in, pointing at me with her filthy little finger. “Nigger nigger nigger!” None of the other parents on the street said anything, even though many turned their heads. Lisa went off to the playground, and her parents sat in the car, glaring at me as I passed.

  I immediately felt angry—not at the word, as I had no idea what that word meant, but at the fact that they were all in on a joke I didn’t understand. I couldn’t stand not knowing things. I turned away and walked toward the playground, too, where Cory was standing on a swing with his friends as they tried to impress one another by seeing who could break their neck first.

  “Cory!” I shouted, trying to make my tiny voice loud. “What is a nigger?”

  He kept pumping his legs until it looked like he was about to wrap the swing around the top bar. “I don’t know! Ask Mom!” He pointed.

  Mom was rounding the corner; she spotted us, too, and yelled at us from across the street. “Cory! Dani! Come on!” she said, waving her bony arm at us. Cory jumped off his swing directly onto the concrete, miraculously not breaking a single bone. I made sure to stop at the corner before crossing, checked for cars, and skipped over to her. “Mom!” I screamed, unable to control my frustration. “What is a nigger!”