The Ugly Cry Read online

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  Cory and I were latchkey kids. Not in the traditional sense—we never locked the front door. I didn’t have a key to any house I lived in throughout my childhood or teens. We didn’t have anything in the apartment worth stealing, and if anything was missing, Greenwood Lake was so tiny that you would invariably see the thief using or wearing it. I was a latchkey kid in the eighties sense—your parents weren’t home by the time you got out of school, so you had to fend for yourself for a few hours, and sometimes they just left you alone while they ran errands.

  We lived on Jersey Avenue, and Pendine Electronics was about five houses down, right before the turn to Amanda Fennick’s house and past Idonia Schermerhorn’s house, where her dad parked his Corvette in the driveway. Jersey Avenue was a deathtrap from day one. The road hugs the twists and turns of the lake on one side, while the other side is littered with people backing out of the driveways of the homes they carved into the face of a tiny mountain that gave them the lake view they desired. Drunk, sweaty men were always hitching boats to trucks parked in the middle of the lane, or trying to load them into the lake from a jerry-rigged ramp at the marina. Pendine may have been close enough for Mom to walk there, but it was far enough along Jersey Avenue that I never wanted to, not even to walk to the pool.

  Greenwood Lake had a history of people coming from the city to party all summer in the 1920s and 1930s, but those days had given way to something a little more woodsy and broken down, more Creepshow than The Great Gatsby. There were a few summer cottages behind Pendine that may have once been the center of summer night life, filled with sparkling headbands and beaded flapper dresses; by the 1980s, the owner had roughly chiseled an in-ground pool in the center where the unemployed men with belly bloat who lived in the cottages year-round floated around on inner tubes all day, blasting Van Halen from boom boxes tipped precariously close to the edge. It was a townie pool; someone had extended an open invitation to us at some point, and I’d frequently see kids walking on the gravelly dirt path on either side of the highway to get there, tubes and floaties hanging from sunburned shoulders. I could see from my bedroom window as cars narrowly avoided turning my classmates into roadkill. Mom wouldn’t let us go because there was no lifeguard on duty. I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want my library books to get wet.

  Mom usually got home around 5:00 p.m., and her single rule was that as long as we finished our homework, we could go outside to play after school. For Cory, play could mean anything from practicing handlebar flips on someone’s BMX bike to finding a dead body in the woods and using it as a bike ramp. For me, it usually meant hanging out with Erin and Maureen, my only two friends in the neighborhood, until I was so irritated by the mucus-infused way Maureen pronounced “milk” (melk) and “bagel” (beg-el) that I went home to read something from my Scholastic book fair haul.

  Occasionally, my after-school life intersected with Cory’s, usually on a day when the social deviants he hung out with were being punished and had to go home directly after school instead of hammering nails through trees or taking turns knifing each other. During the summer we had to stay outside at all costs, but during the school year we were allowed to be in our apartment alone. My mom was tough, but she wasn’t go-to-jail-for-letting-my-children-die-of-exposure tough. The indoor rules were simple: don’t touch anything that wasn’t in your book bag. Did you come home from school, grab a glass, pour yourself some juice, and camp out in front of the TV watching cartoons? Congratulations, Anne of Green Gables, your childhood was fucking rad. We weren’t allowed to touch the glasses anymore after I broke the Hamburglar tumbler from our set of McDonald’s fine china. We didn’t have juice boxes because we were on welfare, and I would rather have chewed tinfoil than recreationally drink powdered milk.

  We tried to watch TV once, turning it off as soon as we heard Mom’s footsteps on the landing, but technology in the eighties was intent on destroying our flimsy excuses. “Were you watching TV?” Cory and I would give each other the knowing glance of liars everywhere and say, “No.” Mom would then go over, touch the TV, and, feeling the warmth emanating from the screen, rip our story apart in three seconds flat. Disobeying her wasn’t the worst offense—we were wasting electricity, and no parent in the country could abide using electricity for the intended purpose if they were not the ones flipping the switch. When Mom was home, you could fire up every light in the house, leave an empty blender running full speed, and overload every outlet until the fuses popped like fireworks. But children alone were unworthy of electricity, so I guess the expectation was we could spend our time weaving brooms out of hay and banging out candle holders on a tin press.

  We had to make our own fun, so we invented Spiderweb City.

  I say “we,” but the first time we made Spiderweb City, it was completely Cory’s idea. Breaking the rules was the only common denominator between us, siblings with a natural-born rivalry. Cory usually didn’t spare me the time of day, but if I was willing to be his accomplice, there was an automatic truce. I was fine to sit in our room, making He-Man and Skeletor kiss on the parapets of Castle Grayskull until the sun went down, but Cory was antsy.

  “Hey,” he said. “Want to help me make Spiderweb City?”

  It sounded dubious, but my big brother wanted to play with me, so I was all in. “Yeah! What is it?”

  He ran into the living room with me hot on his heels and stopped short in front of my mom’s yarn basket. Mom had always been an avid crocheter, and she made beautiful blankets. It wasn’t uncommon to see her unwinding at the end of the day on the couch, quickly moving her needle all over the place and somehow producing a garment out of a single piece of yarn. It was magical to me. I had asked her to teach me and it took me a month to make a single crochet chain that was approximately forty-five feet long. I was very proud. Mom congratulated me, then ripped it out to finish the edge of a blanket.

  “So we take some yarn,” Cory instructed, pulling out a full skein. “And maybe some thread.” He was making it up on the spot with the confidence of a boy whose only goal was chaos. “Then, we wind it around this,” he said, making a knot around the post on the side of the entertainment center. “And bring it over here,” he said as he ran the skein across the room to the doorknob on our bedroom, making another knot. “And we just keep doing it!”

  I had to hand it to him: Spiderweb City sounded fucking brilliant.

  I grabbed two skeins of yarn and put them under my armpits like footballs. We laughed as we took turns zigzagging across the room, tying yarn to everything that was nailed down and a few things that weren’t, making a maze of string and discord until we couldn’t move. “Let’s do the kitchen!” I shouted like a frat boy with a fresh keg. The refrigerator door handle was proving to be a problem; it kept popping open whenever we tugged the yarn to tie it to the window latch.

  This was the first time we’d really worked together on anything. It felt nice to put the simmering hatred aside for a minute, to drop my shoulders down from around my ears and have fun.

  We had just decided to solve the refrigerator problem by propping a kitchen chair up against it when we heard the front door open.

  Well, try to open. Mom couldn’t get in and started to panic. “What the hell is going on in there? Cory? Dani?” Her face was poking through a crack about two inches wide, which was as far as the door would open. We army crawled to her through the web, giggling, and popped up in the few inches of space we’d accidentally left near the door. Looking behind me, I could see that the living room was a beautiful mess of brightly colored, waist-high yarn. This was so much better than that long piece of crochet chain I made. This was art.

  “Open this fucking door!” Mom yelled. We pulled from the inside while she pushed, destroying some of our art in the process. The look on her face was enough to knock the smiles off of ours. Have you ever seen the gnashing, muscle-tight look of a lion protecting their cubs from predators? My mom
looked like that lion, except we were the predators, and she was gearing up to protect her sanity.

  “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.” There’s nothing funnier than watching your mom try to beat your ass while immobilized by yards of yarn in every direction. She slammed through Spiderweb City like Godzilla, thrashing our experiment apart while we cowered behind the front door. “Cory did it!” I shouted. “No I didn’t!” he shouted back, pushing me. Now all of us were shoving, waving, and screaming while the yarn maze held back our most intense attempts at landing a slap on someone, anyone.

  “ONE OF YOU GO GET ME THE SCISSORS,” Mom shouted. I resumed my belly crawl and scurried along the floor to the yarn basket that caused this destruction in the first place. If I helped her take down Spiderweb City, surely she would be more lenient with the punishment. I handed the scissors to Mom; she started cutting with wild inaccuracy, slicing any piece of yarn in her line of vision. “I have had it, you hear me? I’VE HAD IT!” I got out of the way of her chopping. She punctuated each form of punishment with every cut of the scissors. “You will NOT”—slice—“be allowed to play outside after school until I SAY”—slice—“so,” she growled.

  Our first punishment was to untie, unknot, and gather all of the string parts that now hung from every surface of the living room. The big wooden fork and giant, spade-shaped wicker fan on the living room wall that passed as art in most homes were the worst; I don’t even know how Cory got the string that high. “Cory, will you help me get this?” I asked quietly.

  Cory looked at me. “Do it yourself, idiot,” he whispered.

  I threw the scissors at him. They landed a few inches away from his toes. Mom saw the whole thing, picked me up by my wrist, and spanked me as hard as she could on my ass before sending me to bed. “You could have really hurt him!” Mom screamed, the irony lost on her. Cory stifled a laugh through the whole thing.

  I had enjoyed our fleeting truce. But as I looked at him through tears on my way to the bedroom, something about hating Cory with all my might just felt right.

  * * *

  —

  One morning Mom was already at work, and Grandma had come over to help us get ready for school when she dropped the news that she and Granddad were moving over the mountain to Warwick. They had found a duplex on a dead-end street near the cable company right in the middle of town, which would be convenient since neither of them knew how to drive. They could walk to the Grand Union for groceries. It was the perfect place for their retirement. The only thing that registered for me was that they were moving away.

  When Grandma helped us get ready for school in the winter, we always got dressed in the kitchen. Our apartment had working heat, but Grandma insisted that getting dressed in front of the stove would keep us from getting colds. As soon as she came in, coat still on, she’d crank the oven to four hundred degrees and turn on the radio. After she made a cup of coffee she’d wake us up and march us to the bathroom right off the kitchen for our sponge bath, which consisted of us using a washcloth and a bar of Ivory soap to wash our face and body. While Cory and I were busy washing and fighting over the soap, she’d open the oven door and fill the kitchen with heat, then go get our clothes and set them on the kitchen table, sipping coffee until we ran out in our undershirts and underwear.

  “What’s retirement?” I asked. Grandma was pulling a shirt over Cory’s head, and I was staring at the coils in the wide-open oven.

  “Dani, don’t touch that. Retirement is when you stop working,” she said, wrestling Cory into a pair of jeans. “Put your LEG IN THERE, child, and stop messing around.”

  “But you don’t have a job.” Grandma had worked as a babysitter in the past, but she had been a stay-at-home mom since her kids were born. She had time to get us ready in the morning, but that didn’t mean she needed to take shit from a little kid about her life choices in the process. She gave me a pursed-lip look but didn’t answer. I was wondering if there was anything I could throw into the oven just to watch it burn as the heat turned my cheeks a rosy red. I crouched down closer, mooning the open oven, feeling the heat wrap around my butt and pass over my back. Would my braids burn if I got too close? Could I throw a barrette in there?

  “Get away from the goddamn oven, Dani,” Grandma said, reading my mind. She was trying to loop Cory’s elastic belt through his jeans but gave up. “Here,” she said to him, “you finish this before your sister goes up like a Roman candle. Dani, get over here.”

  I bounced over, my bare feet slapping the warm linoleum. “You don’t have to have a job to retire; you just have to get old.” Grandma was buttoning my shirt. She always buttoned them right to the top, so that I felt like I was being choked by a tuberculosis-ridden Victorian mistress all day.

  “How will we see you?” I asked.

  “You’re seeing me right now.”

  “But what if we want to see you and now you live far away?”

  “Dani, it’s a fifteen-minute ride over the mountain. I’ll take a cab.” She softened a little, cupping my face in her hands. “If you want to see me, just call me.” She planted a kiss on my forehead.

  I knew how to dial the phone and had already memorized two phone numbers: Grandma’s and the Mr. Yuk poison control hotline, thanks to the green-and-black sticker on the handle. I was soothed for the time being.

  “Cory, turn that off,” she said, giving a head nod to the radio.

  “No!” we both protested immediately. David Lee Roth was singing “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” and our favorite part was coming up.

  “Is this that white man that jumps around all over the place?” Usually she would have to be more specific, but I’d already seen a few hours of MTV over at Erin’s house and knew she was talking about Van Halen’s song “Jump,” the pump-up anthem of every kid we knew, the soundtrack to every hyperactive moment, the permission we needed to throw ourselves around the room and leap off of anything in sight.

  “Shhhh, it’s coming up!” I said, tracking the song. Memorizing lyrics was one thing Cory and I would do together without wanting to murder each other. We sat at the playground one day trying to memorize the Vincent Price part of “Thriller”; when we nailed it, he was so excited that he jumped off a swing.

  Now, in our overheated kitchen, with the radio blaring and Grandma frowning, we tipped our heads back in unison and sang along with the white man who couldn’t stop jumping.

  “HUMMILY BABILY ZIBBILY BOOBILY HUMMILY BABILY ZIBBILY BOP!”

  Cory and I immediately fell out laughing.

  “You kids are idiots,” she said, laughing with us. “Come on—turn off the stove. Let’s get to school.”

  It was during one of these walks to school that I decided to tell my grandmother about a major decision I had made.

  “Grandma. I’m never going to college, and I’m never having babies.”

  She stopped dead in her tracks.

  “What on earth would make you say that?” She was trying to stifle her laughter but wasn’t doing a very good job. I don’t blame her—it’s not every day a seven-year-old prophetically announces their future plans with such an adamant approach.

  “College is like jail. And babies are gross.”

  We started walking again. Cory had already zoomed ahead of us to meet his friends on the playground before school started, so I had Grandma’s full attention.

  “Dani, what makes you think college is like jail? You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Aunt Rene went to college. She moved away and wasn’t allowed to come home anymore.”

  Grandma was in full Pillsbury Doughboy laugh now. “What the fuck are you talking about?” she said, wiping away tears. “Rene wanted to move! And of course she can come home!”

  “No. It’s like jail. Jail and school.”

  “Okay, child. And what about babies?” Grandma was humoring me. I started to get angry—this was a serio
us discussion, and I demanded to be heard.

  “No one likes babies. They just poop and pee and scream.”

  Grandma stopped again so that she could hold her stomach while she doubled over laughing. When she was able to regain her composure, she tried to ask me questions with a straight face.

  “I loved having babies. One day you’re going to want a family, too.”

  “I already have a family,” I said. “And Cory is a stupid doo-doo head.”

  No one in the eighties was particularly adept at discussing bodies or sex, but that hadn’t stopped my mom from sitting me and Cory down a few weeks earlier to tell us about reproduction. We had found her tampons in the bathroom, pulled a couple out, and started throwing them around the living room, so she thought it was time.

  I have to give it to her—it was a novel approach. First, she explained it clinically, that Cory had a penis and I had a vagina. We were like, duh, catch up, Mom, we’ve been taking baths together for years now, so that was pretty obvious. Then she explained that when a man and woman love each other, they have sex, which is putting the penis into the vagina. We were both disgusted and took turns sticking out our tongues and making fake puke sounds while Mom tried to get our attention again.

  The real kicker came when she described periods and childbirth using imagery she knew we would understand: Six Flags Great Adventure. “Women have eggs, and they’re like the people in the roller-coaster car,” she said, nary a smile on her face. “And the roller-coaster tracks are the tubes they go through. So the eggs are flushed out every month, like the roller coaster going down the track—you know, the one with the splash at the bottom?—and that’s a period, and that’s why I have tampons. To stop the splash. Except the splash is blood.” She paused. “Tampons are not toys.”

  I didn’t want to know any of this—about my body, or Cory’s body. This sounded like the plot to the horror movies I was already so well-versed in, thanks to my grandmother. But she wasn’t done.