The Ugly Cry Read online

  “All of them. Except for me and my brother and my mom and my grandma and granddad,” I said, digging through the pile of tiny clothes.

  Bianca wrinkled her nose. “That sounds bad.”

  I’d never really thought about it much, but through her eyes, I could see that Greenwood Lake left a lot to be desired. I wanted her to think I was cool, so I agreed. “Yeah, it’s bad.”

  As soon as the words left my mouth I felt the first twinges of betrayal. I tried to backtrack—there was a lake, and my teacher Mrs. Dietzel let us make a teepee out of a big roll of brown paper where we could read during quiet time.

  “But you’re the only black people?” Bianca asked.

  I nodded.

  She made the Barbie hop on the carpet. “Well, you look white, so . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence, but I didn’t need her to.

  * * *

  —

  Aunt Rene flew to New York with us at the end of the summer. The plane ride back was much more relaxing; Aunt Rene shut down Cory’s tales of terrorism, so we just played with coloring books and drank as much soda as they would bring us.

  When Cory and I got back to Jersey Avenue, our apartment was totally transformed. Light blue wall-to-wall carpet flowed through the living room under a brand-new couch and TV. My bed had a new comforter, and we both had new curtains. My mom beamed with pride showing us all the new stuff. “I worked overtime all summer,” she said, pointing to the TV. Everything she got was practical; there were no overflowing toy boxes or brand-new video games, but somehow this was better. We had an apartment that was full of stuff that my mom picked out, stuff that wasn’t handed down. For the first time, everything was ours.

  * * *

  —

  Aunt Rene couldn’t believe that Cory and I had never been to the Museum of Natural History, so we took a bus to the city with Grandma and Mom one day in late August to fix that.

  I talked everyone’s ear off the entire two-hour bus ride down to the city, so that by the time we got to the Port Authority, everyone was already exhausted and snappy. Grandma almost broke my hand holding me close as we walked the eight blocks down to Thirty-Fourth Street, dodging men pushing their entire lives in carts, people wearing underwear as pants, and women in skirt suits and white Easy Spirit sneakers charging through the crowds. We’d only been to the city once before this, to visit Sweetie Pie. It had been a hurried trip, and we weren’t there to explore. This visit was vivid from the moment we stepped off the bus.

  Grandma wore the wrong shoes; her feet hurt already, so we went off as a group toward Macy’s so that she could buy some sneakers. I gawked and stared at everything. By the time we traversed the eight blocks to get there, I’d already seen an entire universe of people that were nowhere to be found in Greenwood Lake.

  Grandma was used to Cory and me running around department stores in the mall; she did her usual don’t-act-like-an-idiot shopping speech with added urban flavor. “This is New York City,” she said, leaning in front of me and Cory. “If you run away from me here, someone will snatch you. When they steal kids in the city, they sell them to new families or cut them up into little pieces. We’ll never be able to find you. So if you want to run around today, well, it’s been nice knowing you.” She stood up and craned her neck around to find Mom and Aunt Rene while I considered if the new family I’d be sold into would let me have an Atari.

  We walked through the crowded store to the escalator, one of the most talked-up aspects of this trip. “Oh, I love that old escalator,” Aunt Rene said, beaming, on the bus. “It’s really cool.” As an adult, I can appreciate the beauty of the old, wooden escalator that Macy’s maintains, but as a child, it was a clanking nightmare machine. My entire family hopped on as if it were a ride at Six Flags, but I took one look at the teeth-like way the slats grinded together and hesitated. “Come on, Dani,” Grandma called from a few feet up. As my family started to move away from me, I had two choices: jump on the clanking, growling death machine, or possibly get kidnapped and cut up by a stranger. I hesitated before tentatively stepping on.

  When I got to the top, they were all waiting for me like a firing squad. Mom had effectively taken the day off from parenting, so Grandma was the one to grab my upper arm and pull me so close I could smell the last cigarette she smoked as she spoke through gritted teeth. “What did I just say? You better stay close to us, you hear me?”

  I hung close as we made our way to the shoe department. Grandma was picking up sneakers and sucking her teeth at the unbelievable price of every pair. “Fifty dollars? We can get these at Sears for half the price.” Grandma never wanted us to leave the house looking like “ragamuffins,” but the price system on ragamuffosity had a strict limit. “You kids grow so damn fast,” she said, putting the sneaker back on its plastic pedestal. “What’s the point of spending so much? You’re just going to outgrow them in two months.” As she whisked us through the store looking for the cheapest, cleanest pair of sneakers Macy’s had to offer, I noticed my mom and aunt were talking to someone.

  He was very tall, with a short afro and clean-shaven face. I only caught a glimpse of him, but he had a wide smile. Aunt Rene walked away, looking annoyed, as my mom stood there, grinning. Aunt Rene came back over to us, and Grandma launched into her interrogation.

  “Who is that?”

  Aunt Rene rolled her eyes. “No one. Some man. He asked me out.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said no, Ma! Now he’s talking to Robin.” Aunt Rene was disgusted. “See that little old lady next to him? That’s his mother—she’s buying him shoes.”

  Grandma laughed. “Robin doesn’t have the sense the good lord gave her.”

  When Mom finally came back over to us, she was holding his phone number on a tiny piece of paper. “He’s nice,” she insisted when met with Grandma’s and Aunt Rene’s scowls.

  “Robin, a nice man doesn’t pick you up in Macy’s while you’re shopping with your children,” Grandma said.

  “A nice man doesn’t need his elderly mother to buy him shoes, either,” Aunt Rene said under her breath.

  But Mom was happy. She’d met a man. Luke. And it didn’t matter that he’d just hit on her little sister moments before asking for her phone number. Luke was going to call her, and she was elated.

  * * *

  —

  He called.

  He came to visit.

  He never left.

  9.

  Luke just showed up one weekend, all smiles and hugs. Probably took the New Jersey Transit bus right to the corner and got off in front of the library where I once went to preschool. He was huge, the tallest person I’d ever met, with skin the same color as mine, and he was standing in the doorway to our apartment. It had been about two weeks since Macy’s, and Mom didn’t tell us he was coming. He didn’t bring Cory and me anything to show goodwill or even acknowledge that we existed; he just appeared, with an army duffel bag full of clothes.

  As soon as he arrived, he started in on us. “These kids have their own bedrooms? And you sleep on the couch?” He sucked his teeth as if to say, You sucker, like we’d won the rooms from my mom in a poker bet. “Man, these kids are spoiled.” That was his go-to insult for us regarding the few things we owned that we could call ours. “They’re not spoiled,” Mom said lightly.

  “Mm-hmm,” Luke said, eyeing the toy box in Cory’s room.

  It was unsettling, having a man’s presence in our lives. Different from Granddad, who was soft and kind. Luke left the whiff of a threat everywhere.

  Luke slept next to Mom on the pullout couch in the living room and usually stayed in bed after she went to work. Grandma didn’t come over in the mornings anymore; instead, we fumbled around in the dark for our clothes and snuck out as softly as possible, not even wanting the doorknob to make a noise when we turned it.

  We had to be quiet, or else Luk
e yelled at us a lot. Growing up in apartments meant we were always cognizant of our noise levels; I’ve never stomped up a set of stairs a day in my life, and it’s still difficult for me to raise my voice above regular speaking tones when I’m inside. The way Luke reacted to us made it seem like we were holding marching band auditions in our bedrooms instead of playing a game of Trouble.

  One day after school, Cory and I were on the floor in his room playing with a deck of cards. Mom was at work, so we had a couple of hours before she came home and made us do our homework. War was a favorite game, just turning over cards to see who had the highest number; if you both put down the same card, you laid three cards facedown and turned over the fourth to see who won that round. But it didn’t count if you failed to say “I. De. Clare. WAR!” with every card you placed. Winning a War round was intense, because it meant you got to scoop up all the cards.

  We were excited, because we’d had an epic DOUBLE WAR—when we flipped over our fourth cards, they also matched. We shouted at the sky, unable to believe the mathematical odds or cosmic interference that would result in one of us winning a shitload of cards. Then we heard Luke’s footsteps.

  Cory’s bedroom door swung open so hard it hit the wall. Luke’s brown eyes were blazing, his forehead an angry mess of lines. “Shut the fuck. Up.” We were stunned, immobile, as he marched over to our pile of cards and picked them all up. “I’m sick of hearing you two.” He carried the cards out of the room. I started to cry. Quietly.

  “Shut up, you baby,” Cory whispered through his sneer. “If he hears you crying, he’s just going to come back and yell at us again.”

  Grandma yelled at us when she was irritated; she made threats as a way to get us to calm down or get out of her way, but I still never felt like there was actual violence on the horizon. Luke’s threats were more chilling; we weren’t part of him, and he didn’t have to love us. He was a stranger. And if there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that strangers had a bad habit of hurting kids.

  * * *

  —

  We fell into a new routine. We stayed outside for as long as we could after school, while Mom was at work, until the other kids started getting called in to do homework or eat dinner. Sometimes I did homework with Erin and waited until her mom started putting dinner on the table to cut through the yard and go back to the apartment. Mom was usually home by then.

  I never knew what I was going to get when I opened the door. Sometimes Luke was still sleeping, as if he hadn’t moved from the couch all day. Other times he’d be watching TV. The best times were the ones when he wasn’t there at all; I fantasized about the earth swallowing him up, the same way the bed ate that boy in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

  One day I came home and the TV was on. Luke was sitting on the couch, so I tried to scoot by him into my bedroom.

  “Dani, watch this.”

  I didn’t know how to say no to him and didn’t want to make him angry, so I dropped down on the couch as far away from him as possible, pushing my body into the arm so hard the fabric left a pattern on my shoulder.

  The movie on the television didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen. It was quieter than a horror movie and just looked like a bunch of people sitting around a kitchen table. I looked over at Luke; he was grinning, his eyes fixed to the screen. “The good part is coming up.”

  Someone was holding a screeching monkey, and they lowered it into a hole in the middle of the table. It was screaming, its teeth bared and its eyes wildly looking around the room. Then someone took a mallet and hit it on the head. I closed my eyes and pushed my head into my shoulder, but I could hear the monkey being hit on the head again.

  “You’re missing it! They’re eating the brains.” Luke was giddy. Of all the horror movies I’d watched, this felt viscerally different. My stomach lurched like it did when I needed to puke.

  “They’re eating the brains.” He laughed with his whole body; I could feel him bouncing around on the end of the couch. Watching Faces of Death was a sport for him; who knew how many times he’d seen it. His joy was perverse; as much as I feared his anger, his happiness in the face of destruction made me want to crawl out of my skin.

  When it sounded like it was over, I turned to him without looking at the TV. “Can I go to my room now? I have homework.”

  “You’re no fun,” Luke said, frowning.

  I didn’t have a sense of humor when he started coming into my room at night, either, while everyone else was asleep.

  * * *

  —

  We had lived in the apartment for only a few months, but its shiny promise was already tarnished by Luke’s dangerous, demanding body. The couch might have looked the same way it did when Mom first brought it home, the dull turquoise slashes still vibrant against the heathered gray fabric, but Luke had ruined it by draping himself over it like he owned it, his heavy body a constant presence. I longed for our apartment across the hall, where everything had been ours to cover in string, where the only fear of the night was a fictional horror movie character emblazoned a little too brightly in my brain. Luke was becoming a permanent stain on our lives.

  It was normal to be spanked. If you survived the eighties without getting hit, your parents were probably the kind of hippies who referred to your bursts of disobedience as an exploration of your wild spirit and believed that love energy was a powerful way to stop nukes from launching. Mom often lost her patience with us; we were loud and didn’t have enough space to respect each other’s boundaries. Our spankings weren’t prolonged affairs; Mom usually stomped over to wherever we were misbehaving, grabbed an arm to spin us around, and delivered a quick pop of a smack to the fleshy part of an ass. She didn’t pull down our pants or make us get branches from the yard the way some parents did—it was more of a brief, merciful warning of her power, strength, and control. A reminder that we had our place, and she had hers.

  Cory was probably doing something annoying the day that our spankings changed. He was playing in his room, smashing plastic toys against each other and imitating explosions with his mouth. I could hear him from the couch, where I was trying to read a book while Mom did something in the kitchen. Luke, asleep in my bed, stormed into the living room. “Robin,” he yelled, “tell that kid to shut up!” The wall between our bedrooms was distractingly thin; I could hear Cory’s legs shift under crisp sheets when we were trying to fall asleep at night.

  Mom popped her head out of the kitchen. “Luke, it’s the middle of the day. He’s playing.” You could hear the exhaustion in her voice, but this was about as much as she ever challenged him—a wan, monotone sentence with expressionless eyes. Luke always met her exhaustion with bombastic proclamations, ratcheting up his already loud voice to an apartment-shaking boom. “I’m trying to sleep—if you don’t shut that kid up, I will.”

  I kept my face in my book, so afraid to even blink that the words blurred together from the strength of my stare. If I didn’t move, they wouldn’t know I was listening.

  Mom and Luke went back to their corners, boxers taking a break in a round with no clear winner. My tension was knowing that no conversations ever ended this smoothly. Nothing was over until Luke got what he wanted.

  A few minutes later, he stormed back out of my bedroom, this time holding a belt. He crossed the living room in two steps and stood in the doorway, brandishing the limp belt in front of him. “I told you—if you don’t, I will.” I heard some pans clatter as Mom stopped what she was doing. She tried to push past Luke, but he stood in the doorway and refused to move.

  Mom tried to slide past him, ducking her head under his armpit. “I’m not hitting him for playing, Luke,” she said. He grabbed her arm and held it straight out behind her. I peeked over my book, triggered by the small, sharp sound she made as she twisted her body around to face him. They stood close. He was still holding her wrist when he lifted the belt in his other hand and said, “What, you want me
to beat you to show you how it’s done?” His smile was supposed to make her think he was joking, but his peaked eyebrows told another story. He was menacing, a word I wouldn’t learn for another few years.

  Whatever Mom saw in his face made her grab the belt out of his hand. She walked into Cory’s room and closed the door. “Turn around,” she said brusquely, “and pull down your pants.” Cory tried to ask why, and she must have done her patented arm-spinning move to get his backside facing her.

  Mom emphasized certain words with every smack of the belt. “You are TOO LOUD in here. I TOLD you to BE quiet when you’re PLAYING and LUKE is SLEEPING.” Cory screamed with every lick of the leather against his skin. My throat stung, like a hot rock was painfully lodged in there. I felt tears dripping down to my neck. With Luke, I learned how to cry without making a sound.

  Cory was still scream-crying when Mom left his room. She shoved the belt at Luke on her way back to the kitchen. My invisibility shield crumbled when I sniffed back some tear-based snot. Mom snapped her head toward me. Her face was a mix of anger and sadness; her eyebrows were pinched together in the middle, but her mouth was shaking.

  “What are you crying about?” she hissed. “You’re not even the one who got the spanking.”

  The person talking was foreign to me. She looked like Mom, but I’d never heard her so twisted and cruel. She sniffed and wiped her eye as she walked past me. I listened to Cory cry through his bedroom door as Mom walked into the bathroom, and I couldn’t figure out which one scared me more.

  * * *

  —

  Luke and Mom started going to the city a lot. He’d fold his huge body behind the wheel of our car and Mom would climb into the passenger seat. I hated seeing him in the Honda, hated that Mom let him drive. They usually came back before bedtime, and we were pretty okay on our own in the meantime; I liked to read my library books and eat Funyuns that I got from Hanley’s, and Cory would run around with the Garretts until he got hungry. Sometimes Mom would leave us salami-and-cheese sandwiches on white bread for dinner. Sometimes she forgot, and we didn’t eat dinner.