“Come on, Michael,” my sister says. Her beaded leather bag and her big, thick black hair are smushed under her body, against the door frame, for support. “I want to move in with Artie. I had her all of June and July. You do August.”
“I don’t know what to do with her all day. What am I supposed to do with a kid all day?” my brother says.
“Oh Jesus, you drop her off at the pool in the morning and you pick her up in the afternoon. How hard can it be? You haven’t had her one fucking day since she got here.” I feel like there is blood in my ears, rocks in my throat. Today was not the right day to skip my bike ride. My sister looks up and sees me. She takes me to the kitchen and smashes something up in a spoon with some honey and tells me to eat it.
“What is it?” I ask, as the gritty sweetness slides down.
“It’s a Valium,” she says. “It will make you feel better.”
When I wake up my brother takes me away from the white clapboard house to live with him and two friends from college in an apartment on the other side of town. My sister has already moved in with the singer. The white clapboard house is empty. I feel sorry for the white clapboard house. My brother’s friends are nice to me. They are a couple. They sleep in the same bed like my parents did. They listen to Aerial Ballet and Brewer & Shipley. There is a lot of kissing. A lot of pot. They always have the kind of doughnuts you buy from the supermarket. I really want a chocolate one, but I don’t know if it is okay to eat that kind. Nobody told me what to eat for breakfast. I eat a gross cinnamon one because there is only one left and I think no one will notice it missing. I eat it and clean up all the crumbs and move all the other doughnuts around so it looks like a full box. I check it three times. It looks like nothing is missing. When my brother wakes up at noon he yells at me for eating the last cinnamon doughnut. “How could you do that? The reason there was only one left is because I like them the most. Now I have to eat a chocolate one. I hate chocolate!” He slams the refrigerator door for effect and goes back to bed, mad and doughnutless.
My mother calls long-distance to tell me that in spite of the recession and the fact that apartments cost a fortune she got us a sprawling three-bedroom in a prewar doorman building overlooking Washington Square Park. We are moving downtown. I am changing schools too. I burst into tears. My sister tells me not to worry because even though all the kids from my old school seem important now, one day, she says, I won’t even remember their names. I tell her that’s not true. I tell her I will always remember their names. She smiles at me like I am too young to know what I am saying. But I do know what I am saying. And I feel older than all of them.
I move in with my sister and the singer. The singer is learning to play the harpsichord. I am not allowed to touch the harpsichord. The singer’s house is in the mountains and my sister can’t spend all her time driving me around so I stay inside not touching the harpsichord and climbing up and down the shag-carpeted sunken living room. I play with the ice dispenser on the door of the fridge. I listen to Blue. The singer is impressed that I know all the words. I fly back to New York in August listening to “This Flight Tonight” on headphones. Turn this crazy bird around. I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight, Joni Mitchell sings.
My mother has a boyfriend who wears hiphuggers and is pretentious. I may be eleven but I know an idiot when I meet one. They have a lot of sex. They aren’t trying to hide it either. It is the grossest thing I have ever seen in my life. They look like ferocious little animals. I bring them coffee every morning. I don’t know why. Maybe it is an attempt to make them behave responsibly, to get them to cut down on their morning fornication. I bring it to them on a tray, like a little servant girl. His cup always gets a big shake of Tabasco. They never say anything about it. He is younger than one of my sisters. He is disgusting.
It is freezing cold. We are walking home through Washington Square Park after pretending to say goodbye to him in front of a bunch of people they work with. I would pay money to say goodbye to him for good, forever. But five minutes after we get home the doorbell will ring and they will start humping each other again.
“Why don’t you like Donny?” my mother asks me under the arch.
“Because he’s gross.”
“Well,” she says. “You may not like him, but he’s not gross.”
“Then why are you ashamed of him?” I counter.
“I am not ashamed of him,” she says.
“Oh really? Then how come he has to sneak over? Why are you too embarrassed to walk down the street with him?”
“I am not embarrassed, Cathy. It’s very complicated. There are people I work with who wouldn’t—he knows people that––it’s very complicated. But I certainly don’t have to explain it to you.”
It is clear to me I won the argument. I should be a fucking lawyer.
I rock every day after school. I curl up in a ball and put my head in my hands, tuck my legs under my stomach, and rock back and forth. It’s total bullshit. It is what crazy people do. I read it in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. I am waiting for her to say something about it. My oldest sister calls from Canada all the time to tell me the worst thing you can do to a child is tell them that the way they feel isn’t true. I don’t like our new apartment. I miss Park Avenue. I miss the split-pea-green carpet in the hall, which was ugly but was the same carpet in my room and in my parents’ room and in my sister’s room. I miss the breakfast nook where my parents read The New York Times every morning and where my mother taught me about clothes. “Ach, have you ever seen such an awful dress, who would wear this? Look at this, Cathy, it is hideous.” I miss the kitchen cabinets with the glass doors that went all the way to the ceiling and you could see what was inside and the glass was covered with psychedelic decals my sister stuck on the year before my father died. I miss my father, but I try not to think about that. I have two lives: one with a father, friends, and a nice school; and this one. They have nothing to do with each other. And one of them is over anyway so it doesn’t matter. It was a life that belonged to someone else.
“Do you know I am ashamed to bring people over to this house? You are so rude. You are so sullen. You are always with the long face. Sometimes I just want to flush you down the toilet,” my mother says to me.
“Why does he have to be here all the time?”
“Because he lives with us and I invited him.”
“Well I didn’t.”
“Don’t make me choose, Cathy. I will. And we will both regret it. Don’t make me choose.”
It never occurs to me that she will choose me.
This is my plan: I will leave my mother and her fuck buddy and move to the Plaza. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It’s perfect. I will continue going to school but I will live alone. I hate them. I hate her. How could she have forgotten my father? There is a candlelight vigil in my heart every day. I promise him that even if no one else acts like he mattered I will. Without going into a lot of detail I tell the Plaza that I want to move in. They don’t seem as excited as I am. Plus it turns out to be really expensive. I have money from my father, but not enough to live at the Plaza while I finish eighth grade. And they won’t let me check in as a minor. I’ve got to find an adult to fill out the paperwork. I always thought if you had money you could do anything in this world. But I guess not at the Plaza. I call my brother. He’s not a minor. He repeats my plan back to me.
“I got to say, kid, it sounds like not a bad plan. Although quite expensive.”
“I know. That’s the drawback.”