The Ugly Cry Read online

  “Mom, who was that?”

  “Who was who?”

  Parents, don’t try this shit. It’s insulting to your child’s intelligence and makes you look like a straight-up criminal.

  “That man,” Cory chimed in.

  “Oh, that was my friend Tony. He spent the night.” Mom was totally nonchalant. Meanwhile, I felt like someone had tugged a string in my skull and was pulling my brain out through my throat.

  “BUT WHO IS HE.” I demanded answers. You can’t just bring a stranger in here, have him sleep on the foundation of my pillow fort, and not explain who he is or if he’s coming back.

  Mom stopped folding the sheet and threw it on the couch. “Goddammit, I told you—his name is Tony. He’s my friend. That’s all you need to know, so stop asking me questions about it, Jeez O’Flip! I’m allowed to have friends.”

  I was livid for two reasons: First of all, I thought I knew all of Mom’s friends. Uncle Joe and Aunt Jeannie, who she’d been friends with since their drum corps days in high school; Paula, who lived across the driveway in one of the cottages and had recently started working part-time at Pendine with Mom and Grandma as a way to bring in some extra money and stave off boredom; my aunt and uncle. Those were her friends, and Tony never factored in.

  I was also very upset because Cory and I weren’t allowed to have sleepovers, so why the fuck was she breaking her own rule like it was no big deal?

  “Well,” I said, assuming the floodgates were open, “if you can have a sleepover, can I have a sleepover? With Erin?” Not only did she fail to see my logic, Mom thought I was being a smartass. “No, Erin can’t sleep over, and go stand in the corner for talking back to me.”

  So far this Tony guy was making my life a real pain in the ass.

  Cory and I eventually met Tony during daylight hours. He was goofy and funny. Tony had the same skin tone as mine, but his curly hair wasn’t as thick or as coarse. His mustache didn’t cover his acne-scarred cheeks. He looked friendly, like he wouldn’t mind my questions; I didn’t know what acne was at that point, so I asked him if he got his scars from picking scabs. “My grandma always yells at me for picking my knee scabs because of scars. But I like scars!” Without realizing it, I was trying to endear myself to him, to find some similarities. “Well, yeah,” he said, “I guess I got them from picking scabs. Listen to your grandma,” he said with a small laugh.

  Listen to the meanest, craziest person I’d ever met who was intent on scaring the shit out of me as much as possible? He clearly hadn’t met my grandma yet.

  It can’t have been easy for my mom to date. There were slim pickings in Greenwood Lake, and she had the added bonus of having two kids. Most of her friends were people she’d known since high school—not the greatest dating pool, or the best people to set you up with someone outside of your social circle. She must have felt lonely, or at least thought about how she could possibly be alone for the rest of her life. But I wasn’t sorry when Tony stopped coming around one day.

  * * *

  —

  Mom’s flirting was starting to impact my life majorly by the time I was in third grade. My gym teacher, Mr. Folino, was, by her determination, a hunk. Personally I didn’t see the appeal. His brown hair was parted in the middle and feathered around his ears; he never did the buttons on his Le Tigre logo shirts, so there was always a patch of hair sprouting out toward his collar. The gold Italian horn necklace he always wore was plopped right in the middle of that distracting thatch. It looked like a tiny scribble, a wiggly little omen.

  They met when she came to pick me up from school one day, and every time she knew I had gym, she’d ask about him. “How is Mr. Folino? What a hunk.” If there was anything I hated more than gym, it was the word “hunk.” It sounded like an illness. “James can’t come to school today; he’s a hunk.” I knew it had been a while since my mom was in grade school, but there’s no way I would ever know how Mr. Folino was doing. Did she think I was sauntering into class, grabbing the edge of the giant parachute we flapped around and counted as physical education, and having an in-depth conversation with him about his weekend or if he preferred Folgers over Chock full o’ Nuts? I had tried talking to a teacher like a regular human being once, right after Mrs. Puca said she would read me the riot act for poking Neil Scarfuro in the hand with my pencil when he tried to steal one of my Garbage Pail Kids cards. “What’s the riot act?” I asked innocently. “What book is it in? Can I read it myself?” I genuinely thought it was a scrolled text she kept in her desk drawer. She got so angry that she made me stay after school and wash the chalkboards with a giant sponge, and I never asked her another question that wasn’t related to something in our workbooks. As far as I was concerned, when kids emptied the building, all of the teachers folded their arms across their chests as they were locked in Dracula-like storage cabinets for the night. They didn’t exist outside of school, and they certainly weren’t people that my mom should be horny about.

  For his part, Mr. Folino rather inappropriately asked about my mom once. We had just spent an entire gym class rolling around on wooden boards with wheels—you sat on the board, then pushed yourself around with your hands and feet. The only goal of this game was, seemingly, to move around for forty minutes, crushing our fingers under the wheels as we whizzed past one another like little maniacs. Once a year we’d be forced outside to do something called the Presidential Fitness Test; since we spent most of the year doing parachutes, wheelie boards, and fuck all that would count as exercise, my classmates and I wheezed our way around the building and tried to pull our malnourished, underdeveloped bodies above pull-up bars in order to prove to the president that our skeletons weren’t going to break from a gust of strong wind. It was mayhem, a bunch of little Benjamin Buttons exhausting ourselves over the kind of exercise we wouldn’t do again for another solid calendar year.

  I was stacking my wheelie board and resetting my cracked knuckles when Mr. Folino asked about my mom. “How’s, uh, how’s your ma doing?” It’s a wonder to me that anyone in the 1980s found a way to procreate with opening lines like this, spoken to your intended’s child.

  “She’s at work,” I said sternly.

  “Tell her I said hi,” Mr. Folino said, jogging backward toward the stage. It’s possible I thwarted one of the great loves of our time, but if either of these chumps thought I was going to pass along messages, they were dead fucking wrong.

  My school did a concert every year, which was a simple way of saying, hey, come to school at night and watch your kids bounce around on the stage for an hour. My class was doing a dance routine set to Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know,” which was as devastatingly uncoordinated as you may imagine. Mom got me a “cute” outfit for the event—white silk shorts with vertical red lines and a matching red shirt—and I did my best to learn the choreography. The bane of my existence is that I have perfect rhythm but no actual moves; I can keep a beat, but I failed to learn how to dance as a way of self-expression. Some people enjoy moving their bodies with precision; I just don’t have that kind of joy in my heart.

  Mr. Folino took one look at my spastic motions and decided I should be front and center. “Your ma will love it,” he said, snapping his gum. I told him that I didn’t want to be in front, but it was nonnegotiable.

  On the night of the concert, it wouldn’t have mattered if I stood on the stage screaming verse in Latin straight to the sky—Mom only had eyes for Mr. Folino. I tripped and stumbled my way through the routine, bumping into my friends Jeannette and Erin every time I tried to turn around. When it was over, I slunk off the stage and found Mom in the crowd.

  “You did great,” she said as she hugged me. But I could tell by the angle of her chin on the top of my head that she was looking at him.

  8.

  The summer I turned seven, we had moved across the hall to the bigger two-bedroom apartment. Mom gave me and Cory our own rooms, and she st
ill slept on the couch. She must have felt like it was time to spruce things up now that we had a new place, so it was decided that Cory and I would go to California for the summer to stay with my aunt Rene. It was pitched to us as an adventure, but I was instantly nervous about the flight for two distinctly uncontrollable reasons: my rapidly growing fear of heights and terrorism.

  There were constant reports of terrorists and plane hijackings on the nightly news; they didn’t go into detail, but Cory did his best to fill in the blanks. “They take barbed wire and run it up and down your bare legs,” he said matter-of-factly. “You know how they always ask for women and children? It’s so they can kill you first.” I tried to argue with his rationale by reminding him that he, too, was a child. “But I’m a boy,” he said. “Even if they tried to get me they’d still torture you first, because you’re a women and a children.” Cory had me so consumed by thoughts of airplane torture that I didn’t even focus on how I was going to spend two months in a different state without my mom.

  Eventually I started to get sad that Mom would be alone all summer, so she did her best to contain her soon-to-be-alone glee by reminding us that she was going to be busy at work. “I’m going to do a lot of overtime and really get this place fixed up,” she’d sing, floating around like Snow White while birds landed on her fingers. She seemed so happy I asked if she would actually miss us. “Yeah, of course I’ll miss you,” she said, gripping a measuring tape in her mouth as she pushed me out of the way.

  We went out to California in style. Since no one drove or had a car, Grandma rented a stretch limo to take us to Newark Airport. Any dreams I had of re-creating a lavish heavy metal video were dashed the minute our bags were loaded in the trunk. “Listen to me—you are not allowed to touch anything in here, do you hear me?” Grandma got right in my face while the driver waited patiently, holding the door open. “If you touch anything we’ll turn this car right back around and you’ll spend the summer on my couch.” I turned myself into a statue. If you had painted me gold or silver I could have stood in Central Park with a bucket, collecting loose change.

  Mom and Grandma walked us right up to the gate and put us on the plane. I remember eyeballing everyone as they boarded to see if I could pick out which one was going to storm the cockpit and slice my legs open, but I don’t actually remember the plane ride out there. It’s possible I passed out from the stress.

  * * *

  —

  My aunt was always a fascinatingly cool woman. After high school, she moved to Middletown with a couple of friends and attended Orange County Community College, about forty minutes away from Greenwood Lake. A year later, she drove cross-country to California with three friends. Of the original group, she was the only one still there, working retail, paying rent, and having fun. She was the manager of a record store, and when we talked to her on the phone she always seemed to be on her way to a concert or out with friends.

  Aunt Rene lived in Fairfield, north of San Francisco, in one of three apartment buildings that formed a U-shape around a rectangular pool. Everything was beige and sun-bleached, including the carpet in her top-floor apartment. The place was bigger than ours—relentless sunshine through the sliding glass door of her small balcony kissed every surface in her large living room, and her galley-style kitchen had an area big enough for a table at the end, near the window facing the pool. Two bedrooms jutted off a small hallway just beyond the living room, and the bathroom was tucked in at the end, across from the bigger bedroom. In less than a week, I’d find out that the storage closet in between the bedroom and bathroom was big enough for two kids to play in all day.

  She loved music; the radio or record player was always going. Photos of friends were framed on the wall in the hallway. Severe-looking Robert Nagel posters hung on the living room walls, and she had rows of records stacked up next to the entertainment system, stretching halfway into the living room. She even let us look at them, which is how I saw my first dick.

  I picked up the one with the purple cover, drawn in by the cartoons splattered across the front. Cartoons instantly meant “this is something for kids,” so I carefully plucked it out of its row and started to see what I could read. “Prince. Who is that?” Aunt Rene pulled the record out of its sleeve and popped it on the turntable, dropping the needle on the song “1999.”

  Over the course of the summer I’d memorize the opening of that song, often entering the room by holding out my arms and saying, “Dearly beloved . . .” I loved the music but was still transfixed by the album cover. Even though the three nines were all done in a crazy style, I recognized them as numbers. The one, though . . . I had no idea what that was. “Hey, Aunt Rene, what is this?” I said, pointing to the stick with the round-helmet shape on top. “It doesn’t look like a number.”

  Cory poked his head over my shoulder and started laughing. “That’s a wiener!” he said, laughing and pointing. “That. Is. A. Wienerrrrr.” Like all little boys, Cory was jazzed by any chance to talk about dicks in polite company. And he wasn’t wrong; staring at me from the flat, purple background, the number one in the 1999 title was a cartoon penis so vibrant that it looked like it was on an acid trip. I’d seen Cory’s wang a couple of years before, when Mom still plopped us in the bathtub together; it didn’t look anything like the dick on Prince’s album.

  Aunt Rene wasn’t the least bit fazed by the sight of her niece holding a semi-filthy record and asking about dicks. She casually walked over to us from the kitchen, looked at the record, and said, “Yeah, that’s a wiener, Dani,” and walked back into the kitchen, laughing.

  Mom, Grandma, and Rene all had the same joy-filled laugh—I just heard it more often at my aunt’s house. I didn’t know what stress was at the time, but looking back, I think she didn’t have much of it. Her apartment was always filled with laughter, and she thought Cory and I were funny. She was patient with my questions and never told me to leave her alone. When her friends came by the apartment, they always greeted her with a strong hug before they all recounted stories about this one night out, or remember that day at the store? Her life was full of more than just family.

  Things were going to be different in California.

  * * *

  —

  Uncle Bobby had moved in with Aunt Rene a few months before we arrived. He wanted to follow in his sister’s footsteps, but he didn’t have a job yet, so he was in charge of watching us all summer since he was home all day. It made sense on paper, but nothing could have made less sense in actuality. Bobby was in his mid-twenties at the time, hoping to come to California to wild out and find himself; instead, he had to spend all day making sure neither Cory nor I drowned in the pool.

  He mostly treated us with malicious neglect. Unlike Mom, he didn’t even pretend to care if we lived or died. “Who cares,” he’d say when I ran to him, whining about something horrible Cory did or said. Everything we did was confusing to him. When we asked him to make us eggs for breakfast, he sincerely asked, “Don’t you know how to make it yourself?” as if we were ever allowed near a stove unsupervised. When we asked if we could go out to play in an unfamiliar city with unfamiliar streets, he’d say, “Yes, go, I don’t care, do what you want.” I was used to being alone at home—I knew the streets, and I knew the people. I had a turf, with built-in boundaries. But I also knew when I was allowed to come home or how to get to Mom if there was a problem. This was different; I didn’t know what to do if I got in trouble or needed someone to help. What if I got lost? The apartment complex was full of strangers—I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t even know what kind of trouble California offered.

  One of the women who worked with my aunt also lived in the same apartment building, and she had a daughter around my age. Bianca seemed tiny; in retrospect, she was probably considered average, but by age seven I already had legs as long as a giraffe. She wore her hair pulled back in the same tight braids and dangling barrettes as I did, and she could make an
actual muscle when she flexed her wiry arms. Her two front teeth were missing, giving an adorably puckish appearance to her already pretty face.

  We were a unit, the two of us. Sometimes we tried to torment Cory, but mostly we played by ourselves. Bianca brought her Barbies up from her place; her mom worked with my aunt at the record store but also had an additional job, so she slept a lot during the day. We weren’t allowed to play at Bianca’s, so we dragged her toys and dolls up to Aunt Rene’s, much to the dismay of my uncle.

  “There’s not enough of your shit here, now you have to bring in hers?” he’d say in a huff, pointing at the Barbies as he walked to the kitchen.

  I had a real deference to adults and authority thanks to my grandma, but Bianca wasn’t raised by her grandparents.

  “I’m only going to be here while we play. GOD.” Bianca rolled her eyes and turned away from him, neither expecting nor waiting for a response.

  My uncle was acting like a petulant teenager, but he never expected a petulant preteen to give him a dose of his own attitude. Uncle Bobby stalked off to his room with his coffee and slammed the door. Bianca made a face behind his back as he passed, sticking her tongue out.

  I worshipped her.

  Bianca was my first black friend. I didn’t have to explain my cornrows to her or talk about how my hair would shrink up if we ever decided to swim in the pool. I didn’t have the language to describe how exciting it was, so instead I described how all the people in my town were white. Other than my brush with the Weiringers, no one in my orbit really talked about race. I knew my family was black, and that other black people existed, but that was about it. As a kid who lived in a relatively diverse midsize city, Bianca couldn’t understand how it was possible to live in a purely white world.

  “All of them?” she asked, waving a Barbie doll back and forth on the floor to mimic footsteps.