Please stop trying to le.., p.11
Please Stop Trying to Leave Me, page 11
In June, the weekend after school got out, Tay’s mom and dad drove us out to their Cape house. Tay was right about everything: the firepits, the bikes, the boys. That summer, every other weekend, she said, we would come to the Cape. We would become women. After all, we were going to high school next year. I was excited. Not just because of Tay’s plan, but because I liked being around her family. Their house was new and didn’t creak. Her parents let us hang out in Tay’s room that had posters plastered on the walls, and they never shouted, only discussed in hushed tones. I remember the first time I saw them do this. I said to Tay:
Are they not yelling just because I’m here?
Yell? No, they never yell. They just do this, like all the time.
My mind couldn’t make sense of it. It was like I was visiting a foreign country on the other side of the world, where gravity worked upside down. In the midst of confusion, I decided I would, when I grew up, be like them, like Tay’s parents.
This is going to be the best summer of our lives.
Tay promised, and, sitting by the firepit, smoke blowing into my hair, I believed her.
* * *
Dear Diary,
Never start a story with fire.
It will burn itself to the ground.
* * *
The first weekend of July, Tay woke me up in the middle of the night. She still smelled like sunscreen from our beach outing earlier. Tay whispered:
Come with me.
I got out of bed in my Fall Out Boy T-shirt and followed Tay out of her room, tiptoeing down into the kitchen. Her mom wasn’t there that weekend, so there were fewer people to worry about waking when Tay emptied a full water bottle into the sink and then opened the last cabinet on the right-hand side of the kitchen.
If you just take a little from each one, they don’t notice.
* * *
My father could fix anything: the leaking sink, the testy garage door, the lopsided desk. He was always running around the house fixing whatever needed his hands for a moment. My sister and I sat at the wooden kitchen table and watched him repair the broken parts of our home. When the list of what needed fixing ran out, he fixed the things that didn’t need to be touched. He took the TV and got a new high-tech remote. He took the kitchen chairs and put sturdier, taller legs on them. He took the thermometer and programmed specific temperatures that coordinated with the levels of the sun. My sister and I were exhausted by the way he ran around from room to room fixing and tweaking our surroundings. My mother was unbothered. She said:
This is why he’s a great doctor, so good at his job.
* * *
Tay never told me all the details, and I didn’t ask. It was, probably, our fifth firepit that summer. Our fifth round of s’mores. I’m making this number up, because, honestly, after our late nights in the kitchen, everything started to blur together: blur into sand and fire igniters and new contacts in our phone labeled by the beach we had met the boys at. Never their names. Just the beach. Tay’s dad was inside in the kitchen. Tay kept watch as I pulled the water bottle out of my pink backpack, a bag that, I had explained to her father, I needed to keep with me at all times because I had my period. Somehow, I always had my period when I spent the weekend with them. Her father was powerless against the lie. Tay took a sip of our favorite brown concoction and told me that her dad and some blond woman had become coworkers a few months ago, and like all men, Tay explained, her dad liked cars. He liked trading in one for another. When I responded, saying:
But they don’t even yell at each other.
All I could think was how Tay’s car metaphor didn’t sound like something she would say. It sounded like something her mom would.
I don’t know. Maybe yelling keeps the passion alive.
* * *
When my mother picked me up from Tay’s that weekend, I told her what had happened. With her eyes glued to the road as if in a trance, she started to rant about how in some countries, people didn’t care about the seemingly greener grass on the other side, because everyone was too busy trying to keep their own grass away from the government.
What do you mean?
My father didn’t cheat on my mother until we came here.
She said there was something about America. Something in the air or the water or the land. In America, she said, it was like there were too many binoculars and too many people who had too much time to waste, and so they stared at their neighbors, waiting to be entertained. Plus, homeowners weren’t building fences anymore, because Americans didn’t care about privacy, didn’t care to keep others out. In fact, they wanted them to come in. As if she could hear my thoughts, or as if we had the same ones brewing, my mother said:
Your dad would never do something like that. He may have come to America before me, but he’s still not American.
But neither was your dad, I wanted to say, he wasn’t American either. But then my mother said:
Besides, I would never let that happen.
* * *
It was our last weekend at the Cape before high school started when I fell off my plastic chair near the firepit. I was laughing so hard the whole chair flipped backward. My body lay in a heap on the grass, the moon shining on my summer skin. Earlier that day, Tay and I had ridden our bikes to the beach. We never usually drank during the day, but Tay was adamant about it that weekend. This time we both had water bottles. Hers was brown. Mine was clear. We learned our parents liked different alcohol, but we liked both, so we took turns sipping each other’s. When an hour had passed, both water bottles were clear as air. Tay approached two guys who were oiled in the sun. They were seventeen and going off to college in a few weeks. We didn’t even bother lying about our age. They didn’t care anyways. When I hopped back on my bike under the Cape Cod sun, sweat and salt lay on my cheeks like a new layer of skin.
By the time we reached Tay’s driveway, I could barely see. Tay said that’s how it was supposed to feel. We showered together in our bathing suits and took pictures on our flip phones. Tay sent one to the guys we had just met: one of her, then one of me, and then one of us together. As I got changed for dinner, Tay was looking out the window with a haze over her slow-blinking eyes.
Your dad’s gonna know we’re drunk.
I don’t care.
I pulled on a pair of Tay’s jeans. Tay yelped and quickly ducked under the window as if a war had just broken out and bullets were coming through the glass.
What are you doing?!
She’s here. She’s here.
I walked to the window, and Tay yanked me down to the floor with her. We peeked our heads slowly over the windowsill, and that’s when we saw the blue Honda. The blond hair.
That’s her.
Tay whispered. Not to me. But to something. Maybe to the Cape house.
Later that night when I fell off my chair in the backyard, we laughed so hard that Tay’s older brother stuck his head out of his bedroom window and told us to shut up. Tay said:
Fuck you!
But really we meant fuck that summer and that Massachusetts house. After she screamed “Fuck you” once, she wouldn’t stop screaming it, which made me laugh even more, which made Tay laugh even more. I had a cramp in my head, but we liked it best when it felt that way. When Tay’s dad came outside with marshmallows and graham crackers, he looked at Tay and said:
Too bad you couldn’t show this fun side to our guest tonight.
Tay stopped laughing and grabbed the bag of marshmallows from her dad’s ringless hands, tearing the plastic open, just as she had torn into the bread at dinner and then into the blond woman:
Why are you even here? You know, we—
Tay pointed to herself and then to me.
—don’t even want you here. You should just leave.
The rest of the night, to the smell of mosquito repellant and burning wood, I toasted sugar that stuck to my fingers, while Tay tried to forget that for the first summer in her life and for the rest of her life, she no longer had a mom and dad.
Now, Tay had a mom, and Tay had a dad.
* * *
Dear Diary,
Fire itself is not loud. It does not make sound.
What makes sound are the things torn apart by fire.
* * *
By the following summer, Tay’s dad was engaged to the blond. So instead of Tay’s beach house, we went to mine in the Hamptons. My parents had bought the ocean-view summer house a few months before. Somehow even with the ocean tempting us, the beach house was quieter. Less screaming. Less door slamming. No creaks. No footsteps. It was carpeted. Something about the house made me feel like we, my family, had evolved to that place where gravity worked the wrong way, though perhaps the right way. Like the house was not only a place, but a home.
My mother knew that nothing she approved of happened on the beach after the sun set and the sand went cold, but she let us go to the water anyway. At sometime past midnight, Tay and I would grab our backpacks and head toward the sliding door. My mom would shout from upstairs:
Don’t let the bugs in. Don’t leave fingerprints on the glass. Lock the door behind you!
It was all old news. And the way we ran up that sandy hill, old habit. It was dark as space as we reached the peak and began to hear the crashing waves.
When Tay and I finally reached the water, we’d lay a towel down and sit side by side, facing the black ocean. We’d listen to the sound of water collapsing onto the sand while the backs of our oversized hoodies stared at the porch-lit houses past the sand dunes. To warm our tanned skin in the chilly summer nights, we’d pull our sleeves down past our wrists and rub our legs. We stayed this way, listening and warming, until our water bottle was empty, until we had no remaining secrets to empty into the restless waves.
Before heading back over the sand dune toward my white-shuttered house, we’d walk up to the edge of the waves and let the frigid Atlantic numb our toes.
* * *
I was visiting a college in Syracuse with Tay when I first found out about my father. We were at a Mexican restaurant drinking margaritas and smelling of stale smoke from cigarettes, which Tay had convinced me to try. Tay raised her glass:
Bottoms up to getting the fuck out of Connecticut.
Like she always had, Tay made me laugh. When my mother called me again an hour later, I was already three drinks in. My mother’s voice boomed through the phone.
Your dad is a fucking liar. I always told you he was a fucking liar.
She said this as if I was the one responsible for him being my father, for him being her husband. I tried to keep up as my mother recounted the details: a woman a little older than me, caught by an email exchange, how long it had been going on for. I sat there listening, one ear to the blaring mariachi music and the other to my mother’s voice giving me a play-by-play of my father’s infidelity.
Wait what’d you say?
I pinched my ear and listed closer to the crackling of the speaker:
I said, he brought her to the Hamptons house.
In the middle of the Mexican restaurant, far away from the ocean, my stomach plummeted into my intestines. My veins wrapped tightly around my lungs, while my heart twisted in my chest, pushing outward against my rib cage. The phone slipped from my hands and landed under the wooden table, and I fell to the ground, hyperventilating. Tay rushed to my side and tried to calm me, but I couldn’t stop the feeling of drowning; saltwater suffocating my esophagus, sand burying me. Panicking, Tay said that she was going to call an ambulance. I grabbed her by the arm and, gasping for air, I said:
I can feel my heart breaking. God! It’s breaking!
* * *
I don’t know if my heart broke that day or if I drowned, the current of the Atlantic finally bringing me to my knees. I don’t know if there’s even a difference. All I know is that the doctor was too busy giving excuses to revive me: something about a thirty-year-old patient at the hospital being broken, poor, needing to be fixed. My mom screamed:
A patient. You fucking pig!
When I got back from Syracuse, the first thing I asked my father was why he did it. When I said “it,” I didn’t mean why he cheated but why he brought her to that house, instead of this one that creaked. My father responded:
A home is made of happy memories. A house is made of every memory.
It didn’t make sense to me, so I responded in the way Tay taught me to:
Fuck you. Fuck you, Dad.
I thought, like Tay’s parents, my father would sleep at the beach house that night, banished alone for eternity. But that night he was back in the same bedroom as my mother. She said that she didn’t trust him so she needed him close. My sister agreed, but I didn’t understand it.
Every night that fall, I could hear my mother crying from my room; she would be yelling not at my father, but at God. I listened for God’s response, but all I ever heard was the sound of my father watching TV downstairs. I took another swig from my water bottle, lay on top of my covers, stared into the light, and made my thoughts go blind.
One November night, my phone rang. I picked up:
Thank god, it’s you.
My mom’s moving.
Moving where?
Tay was slurring her words. I was slurring my words. When she said:
Florida. And my dad’s gunna live at the Cape with the blond.
My eardrums fogged:
What about you? It’s the middle of the school year!
I don’t fucking know. I. Don’t. Fucking. Know.
* * *
They tried. No, my mother, with her loud voice, tried. She tried while my father kept scanning the house for things that needed fixing. He couldn’t comprehend that the problem at hand couldn’t be found in metal pipes or woodwork, couldn’t be fixed with his toolbox or his scalpel or his mind. Every time he spoke, I imagined him breathing into the other woman’s neck; every time I stepped into our house by the sea, I pictured him walking that woman up the stairs, opening the sliding door for her, and letting her sleep in between the sheets that my mother had chosen. My father was a problem solver. He could fix everything except his marriage.
* * *
It was a Thursday night in March. Tay was in Miami, living in an apartment with her mother. My mother had just sold the Hamptons house to newlyweds. Earlier that day, as I packed my bathing suits into cardboard boxes, I thought I heard the beach house creak. Later, staring at my old teddy bear, I lay, breathing, on my bed in Connecticut with all the lights on. From the corner of my eye, I could see my school notebooks popping out of my pink backpack. If I breathed carefully enough, in through the nose, out and up through the mouth, I could inhale the whiskey-vodka mix on my breath. And if I breathed loud enough, I couldn’t hear my mother crying or the TV downstairs. I lay there oscillating between the two methods of breathing.
As the clock was about to strike midnight, announcing my eighteenth birthday, I looked up at the ceiling and saw a fly stuck in my chandelier. The bug was panicking, hitting the frosty boundary over and over again, trying to get out. It banged and banged its body against the glass until finally, right before the clock hit 12:00 a.m., the fly escaped through a narrow crack and flew into the room.
Two days later, I got my college acceptance letters and Tay still hadn’t texted me “happy birthday.”
* * *
Almost a year after my heart broke, I packed my things, got on the train, and moved into a dorm room the size of my parents’ bathroom in Connecticut. On a cold fall afternoon, I stood on an East Village rooftop where a fraternity was throwing a Welcome to New York party. Standing away from the crowd with a Four Loko and cigarette in my hand, I looked down from the roof into the neighbor’s backyard. A child’s bike. Metal chairs. A stone walkway. A firepit that reminded me of how much I missed the sound of the ocean. It was odd for me: to see into a neighbor’s yard without glass in between, with a bird’s-eye view. I thought, this is how God feels, but I didn’t know if God really felt anything. I thought maybe He was unfazed by the things that we did to one another; He just watched us from above with a blank stare. Or maybe, more probably, I thought, He had stopped watching us altogether. Like maybe, God was too busy looking out His own white-shuttered window at a neighbor’s world.
