A half hour later, Jen and Zach were on his rooftop with a bottle of vinho verde. No longer available from Portugal, this one came from one of the new vineyards in North Dakota, its green color diluted to the verge of nothingness.
Back when they were still getting to know each other, Jennifer had told Zach the basics about her mother—the adjectives, as he had said. But when Zach met her mother, the two of them had hit it off, although she didn’t remember Zach from one monthly visit to the next.
Jen took Zach’s hand, tilted her head, and stared up at the sky. There was too much ambient light to properly see the stars, but one thing was infinitely better than in her childhood: the air was no longer full of smog from car, truck, and bus engines.
Some things do get better, she thought.
“My dad left us when I was five,” she began. “Mother deleted or tore up every photo. He’s only a blurry image in my head.”
Zach was watching her carefully. He had heard this part before.
“Maybe he needed to leave her, I don’t know, but to abandon me like that, it’s … Until then, she was tough to live with, but from that moment on, she dragged me deep into her personal hell. I could never do right. Scolding me. Slapping me. Locking me in the pitch-black bathroom and telling me she was never coming back … Zach, I was only a little girl.”
She held out her glass, and Zach steadied her shaking hand so he could pour her more wine.
“The ice cream thing. I … I’ve never told anyone.”
He gave a kind nod.
“It’s really nothing.”
He waited.
“I don’t mean nothing. Just one of many things she did. The life I lived.”
She started to bring the wine glass to her lips but stopped.
“I was seven years old. We were in a park with her older cousin and her cousin’s husband, Reverend Chin. I was wearing the dress they brought me. It was the most beautiful thing ever, pink and full of lace and frills.”
She caught Zach’s look. “Yes, even I went through a pink stage. They bought me a soft ice cream cone. Chocolate. Mother stooped down, wagged her scary index finger, and hissed, ‘You’ll be sorry, miss, if I catch you getting so much as one drop on your new dress.’”
Jennifer’s wineglass was quivering in her hand. Zach took it from her and set it down on the patio deck.
“I was trying to be so careful, but I was only seven. A huge plop of ice cream fell onto the dress. I tried to wipe it away with my little hand, but that only made it worse.
“Mother noticed and slapped the rest of the cone away and yelled, ‘Look what you’ve done!’ Her cousin tried to speak, but Mother would have none of it. I was bawling by then, and Reverend Chin picked me up to console me, but Mother snatched me away.” She paused. “You heard enough?”
Zach started to answer, but she could not stop.
“We went home, just us two. Mother dragged me into the kitchen. She pointed at the table and barked at me to sit down. She pulled a tub of chocolate ice cream from the freezer, threw it into the sink, and ran hot water over it. I was terrified. I tried to imagine what was coming next. I could feel craziness pouring off her.
“She grabbed the tub, ripped off the lid, and said, ‘You want ice cream? Well, here’s ice cream for you.’ She grabbed a handful of melting ice cream from the tub and crammed it into my mouth. Right away, she grabbed another handful and smeared it onto my mouth and nose. Another handful, she wiped all over my dress.
“I was desperately trying to swallow, but the ice cream was so cold and there was so much. She started to tear at my dress—I mean, just tear it right off me. She was screaming, ‘See what you’ve done! See what you’ve done!’ She stuffed more ice cream into my mouth, and my nose was clogged with it, and I couldn’t breathe. I was suffocating. For seconds, hours, I couldn’t breathe and she was screaming, and I knew I was going to die.”
Zach reached out, but she didn’t even seem to notice that his hand was on her arm.
“Then I hit puberty and the true shaming began. I was too fat, I was too thin. The hair on my body was disgusting. My smell was disgusting. My nipples showed. I was a slut, I was a whore. I …”
Jen tried to keep the tears from coming, but when Zach moved his hand to hers, she gripped it so tightly his fingers bleached white. She started sobbing.
“I … I want to …” She grabbed a soft cushion, crammed it against her mouth, and screamed. Terror collided with anger and she cried, yelled, sweated, and shook as Zach held her tightly.
And then it ended.
She dropped the cushion, pushed him away, hard, and gasped for air. She slipped from her seat and collapsed onto the deck, panting like a spent athlete. With the bottom of her T-shirt, she wiped tears and snot from her face. She snatched up the pillow again and screamed some more, but this time, by the end she was laughing with tremendous joy. Eighteen years of that abuse until she left home; eighteen years, but she had survived.
She reached out to Zach, pulled him back to her, pushed him away, tugged off his clothes and wrestled off her own, wet with sweat, snot, and tears. They threw cushions and pillows onto the deck and made love, feverish love turned gentle and then wild again, until they finally fell asleep, tangled together in the night.