“No,” my father says. He lets up on the gas as if he must slow the car down in order to better explain things to me.
Behind us a pick-up honks and swerves into the fast lane to avoid hitting our bumper. Normally my father would react. Even if it was his fault, he’d still curse the driver out in Greek. He’d motion for the guy to pull over. “You’ve got to get the minara to take the first punch,” my father would say. “Then you beat him good and it still appears like self-defense.” In all my life no driver has ever taken my father up on the challenge. When anybody gets that close to him, it must become all too clear that he truly is one mad Greek.
Shockingly, this time my father blocks out the road rage, impassive to the other driver, riding next to us, his face made ugly by anger.
“I mean show horses,” my father continues as if our conversation was never interrupted. “The kind you earn blue ribbons on. I have a new client who owns a restaurant by the airport. His daughter trains Walking Horses.”
“Walking Horses,” I repeat, a little confused. “Isn’t that what all horses do? Walk?”
My father speeds up, visibly irritated, and I fear he might be having second thoughts about catching up with that driver of the pick-up.
“It’s a breed. They’re popular in the South. From what I hear, they’re a goddamn goldmine.”
Buying my sister this type of a horse doesn’t sound like a cure-all, yet having thought of it, my father appears relieved, at least for now, of some of the pain of knowing his oldest daughter has just tried to end her life.
By the time we reach Long Beach Memorial, he decides to drive right past and onto Ocean Boulevard, where we stop at Tower Records.
“What are we doing here?”
“I want to get your sister something.”
It seems dead wrong buying someone a gift who just botched a suicide attempt—a kind of reward for having second thoughts? But I guess he doesn’t want to show up empty-handed.
Before he gets out, he looks at me hard, for potential cracks, for ways into reading my face, like I imagine he does witnesses on the stand right before he tears into their testimony.
“She doesn’t have a boyfriend?”
I keep my eyes level, feeling like a liar even though I’m telling the truth.
“Not that I know of.”
“She didn’t tell you anything?”
“No, Dad,” I say, opening my door. “Rhea doesn’t exactly like me. Ask Mom. She usually tells her everything.”
Dissatisfied with my answer, my father gets out of the car and walks ahead of me.
I re-snap the barrettes holding the sides of my hair back and slap the dust off my shirt. Impatient, but trying not to show it, my father waits at the entrance, waving a hand toward the wall of cassette tapes.
“Pick out a couple for her.”
Immediately I head over to the New Wave section and grab The Cure’s Japanese Whispers and nearly get her INXS, before settling on Wham!’s latest, Make it Big, in the hopes she’ll let me record a copy of it later.
It still hasn’t sunk in that my sister tried to take her own life, that she stopped wanting to share it with me, with Nicholas, with our mother and father. We’d all watched her withdraw and sleep. Countless times one of us would knock on her door, attempting to coax her out. In a sense, she’d been dying inside for months, starving her body, entombing it in her room as if she were already dead.
None of us knew how to stop her, not even the L.A. shrink. Only Rhea is able to judge how much pain she can endure. At some point, after she woke up this morning, while standing before the open medicine cabinet, she must’ve closed down inside. In all those pill bottles, less than an arm’s length away, were the means of reaching terminal relief.
The gift my father has in mind is a giant boom box. He comes at me with it, holding it the wrong way, by the handle at his side. They’re also known as ghetto blasters, the bigger the better, and are supposed to rest heavy on one shoulder, while you walk everywhere, blaring music. I’m surprised it even has a handle. This one is a Sanyo beauty with dual stereos and tape decks, with a cord, and it also takes double D batteries.
He motions at me from line and on my way over I switch out Wham! for INXS.
“What did you get her?” he asks.
I drop the cassettes in their awkward plastic anti-theft packaging on the counter.
“INXS and The Cure.”
My father shakes his head as he hands over his credit card to the cashier, a young guy in his late teens with spiky punk hair and a silver stud in his bottom lip.
“The excess cure? You’d better watch that smart ass mouth of yours.”
The cashier smiles a little as he punches in the numbers of my father’s credit card.
“I didn’t mean anything, Dad,” I say in my defense. “They’re just her two favorite bands.”
From the inside pocket of my shorts, I cross my fingers. I wish he were paying with cash. It’s always a crapshoot whether my father’s credit card will go through. We’ve been humiliated at the finest restaurants in town—Benihana, The Velvet Turtle, even once in line at Kmart. I don’t see how Tower Records will be any different.
My father keeps track of paying bills the way he balances his checkbook, which is rarely. Having somebody ask for another form of payment never stops him from spending money he doesn’t have. He just reaches in his wallet for another piece of plastic. This time when the cashier frowns at the register, I make my break for it, slipping out through the electric doors.
Rhea is under a seventy-two hour lockdown at the psychiatric unit in Long Beach Memorial Hospital. Why she was taken so far away from Chino, I’m not sure. My father says it was my mother’s idea. Of course I’m too young to see her.
As consolation my father promises he’ll tell her I picked out the music for her new ghetto blaster.
From the parking lot, I can’t see the ocean. But it’s close enough to smell the salty tang of the water, mixed with the car exhaust, and I’m reminded of someplace better. I’m reminded of my favorite water ride, the Log Ride, at Knott’s Berry Farm with Rhea, both of us sharing the same log, holding up our arms, braving the steep drop.
In the lobby Yia Yia sits with Nicholas sleeping in his carrier on the cushion beside her. My father must’ve called her to drive over from nearby Lakewood and watch the baby. I doubt if she came alone. Even though Uncle Gil is pushing forty, he rarely leaves her side.
When Uncle Gil sees us, he taps the glass hard with his pinky ring, letting us, especially my father, know he’s outside on the patio smoking his pipe. With his bouts of rage, with his creepy interest in my family instead of his own, and his inability to get along with anybody other than his mother, he makes me think he belongs in a psychiatric unit more than a teenage girl who got a little depressed and swallowed some Tylenol. Through the thick and darkened glass, he’s already spotted the rip in my shorts. Sometimes he looks at my mother in the exact way when he comes over for dinner. All I know at my age then is that it’s a wrong look because it’s coming from a relative. Today, as a thirty-eight-year-old woman, I know that that expression suggests something far more than sexual attraction. Behind it is a private sexual want that demeans and isolates, making me feel unsafe. Instinctively, defensively, I look out for it in the eyes of all men from the strangers I come across on the street to colleagues at my work and even my husband’s friends. Because of Uncle Gil, my guard is never down.
But