Chapter 7

The next morning was a reminder of how much I hated not having my own space. A place to be alone, breathe, and scream if need be. I’d grown accustomed to it in college. But now? Being back home? Pure misery. I hated the sound of my mother’s early-morning voice talking to herself. She mumbled about everything—worries and mostly things crumpled up in her head. Things that she wished were said differently in the past. She talked to herself so much, it was loud at times, angry or comical, ending in laughter or a huff and puff. She sounded like an actor practicing a script. It drove me nuts. Insane. Hearing her talk at eight in the morning, to no one, when I’d gone to bed at three after a night of smoking and drinking. When I wanted to sleep in, the breeze from my cracked window blew a slight opening to my bedroom, and I could hear her crashing through cake dishes downstairs, mumbling to her only friend: herself. It made me want a straitjacket.

This particular morning, the one-person conversation was about Aunt Connie and their latest argument. Apparently Mom had tried to call her. Connie replied with a dial tone. The light sleeper in me was awoken by Mom’s mumbling around the kitchen.

“Stupid. She’s so stupid,” I heard her say. “Acting like a damn baby. Always.”

I could hear the slam of the kitchen cabinet. She crashed through pots, looking for something to cook with. Maybe a tin for blueberry muffins.

“She’s just not smart. Dumb. She’s been this way since she was a kid. She’s still the same. Then she’s gonna hang up on me?”

I tossed and turned with each grumbling word.

“Oh my God!” I breathed under the pillow, until I finally sat up in bed. “I mean, really?” I said to myself. “What the fuck. This is some bullshit!”

I stretched for the cell phone and checked my voice mail. There were ten.

Message 1: “Hey, babe, it’s me.” Dexter’s voice was sad and raspy. “I miss you. So does Baby. She’s the best dog ever. Please call me.”

Delete.

Message 2: “Heeeeey, pretty lady. Hope you got my last message,” Dexter said, this time sounding shiny and happy. “It’s a beautiful day. We’re in Virginia. Baby and I are at the beach. She’s chasing seagulls. We wish you were here!”

Delete.

Message 3: “Yo . . . Why are you not calling me back? Something wrong with your phone? You on your period? What the fuck? Hit me back. You said you love me. Show it.”

Messages 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9: Hang-ups.

Message 10: “Hey, girl!” It was Meredith, always the early riser. “Where you at? Hiding from your mom? Yo, I got that good sticky stuff. Straight from Brooklyn. What you doin’ tonight? Call me back . . . beeeyatch!”

I tripped out of bed and slowly sleepwalked down the stairs to make coffee. Mom was still slamming pots around. I breezed past her and grabbed the teakettle. The silence between us was typical. Almost uncomfortably normal. Although I hated mornings and despised talking until I had caffeine, with Mom it was a tiptoeing-on-eggshells relationship that had trained me to speak only when spoken to. I often didn’t know what to say to her or how to word it for fear of being snapped at.

It had been like this since childhood. As I’d sit at home watching HBO, she’d spend late weekend nights out with coworkers, hanging at hotel bars, sipping on Zinfandel. At the time, she was an independent lady with a $40,000 salaried job and health benefits. During the day, she worked as an assistant at a financial management firm, where she answered phones, scheduled meetings, and filed documents. Despite the generous administrative assistant pay for the ’80s, she disliked her job’s tedious duties, resenting the lack of mobility and raise after three years of loyalty. This, combined with hating her single relationship status, loathing the Valentine’s Day advertising weeks in advance, made for an unending depression. She wanted to be in love, hated being alone, and blamed the opposite sex for her misery.

This all made living with my mother difficult. It was like being forced, daily, to play a stressful guessing game of what taboo topic to avoid.

“Jerk!” I remembered my mother slamming the phone down against the kitchen wall mount, opening the cabinet, and reaching for the flour in a sudden urge to make biscuits. “Talkin’ about I need to get a life. And why am I sending mixed signals. And why can’t I wait for him to call me back,” she murmured while taking the milk out of the refrigerator. She emptied a scoop of flour into a bowl, added the other dry ingredients, and poured in the wet ones. A piece of eggshell slipped into the bowl. “Shit!” she said. “They’re all dogs!”

I’d usually be sitting in the next room, trying to watch television, when she’d go off on a cranky tirade. I always thought that if I used the TV to phase out her voice, she would forget I was there and not direct her anger toward me.

“Meena, come here!” she yelled.

“Yes!” I answered, without taking my eyes off the screen.

“I said, come here.”

As I walked to the kitchen, my heart began a gradually more rapid beat.

“Clean up that sink,” she spit. “A kitchen full of dishes is nasty.”

I quickly turned on the faucet, wet the sponge, put a few drops of detergent on it, and picked up the cup to scrub. One time, not realizing how hard the water was running, when I rinsed off the cup, sudsy water sprayed to the left where my mother was standing. Her back hand moved as fast as a flyswatter.

SMACK!

The side slap knocked me off balance as I grabbed my right cheek and stared at her, teary-eyed, wondering why I’d been hit.

“Turn that water down, stupid! Why you got it running so high? You wet my damn blouse!” She looked at me with a familiar grimace. “Gimme a paper towel!” I grabbed a towel and passed it to her. She snatched it away and smacked me with the opposite hand. “Don’t look at me like that!”

I wasn’t sure how I was looking, especially when I tried so hard not to make eye contact or stand in the way of her notoriously fast hands. But she was a mother. She had this gift of seeing things from the back of her head. Perhaps past my fear, she sensed seething resentment. Maybe she could feel my urge to run away, knowing I had nowhere to go. Maybe she could read my mind, and see the constant countdown of days, months, and years till I was old enough to go far away to college, and be free from her stifling hold over my emotions and my life. Free from the daily bubbling in my stomach that gave way to gas whenever her car pulled into the driveway. Free from being out of breath from rushing around before she got home at six o’clock.

Each evening at five forty-five was the same. I would run through the apartment, quickly cleaning any evidence of after-school playtime. The pleated skirt and ruffled top I’d thrown on the floor after changing into my play clothes would be scooped up and stashed in my bedroom closet. The Pathmark peanut butter jar and sticky knife covered in jelly would be unstuck from the kitchen counter, washed, and put in its proper place. Schoolbooks, shredded paper edges, and pencils rolling across the living room table would be moved and replaced with the fake potted plant that normally occupied my homework spot. Dishes were washed, dried, and neatly stacked by plate and cup size into wooden cabinets. And when I knew I had cleaned every corner, at 5:59, when the engine of her 1985 Ford Escort came rumbling into the driveway, I would wait, tense, my stomach somersaulting with anticipation.

I never knew what mood Mom might be in after work. Was it good? Would she walk into the house with a smile and say, “Hellloooo? I’m hooome. Nobody to say hello to me?”

Or was it dark? Would she open the front door, suck her teeth, and after a long, sad exhale, drop her bags, and observe every stick of furniture as if she were a home health inspector? Moving through the house, she was like an uncontrollable locomotive, steaming from the top, blowing her loud whistle to make things move.

“Why is this mail on the chair? Put my mail on the table. And what’s that piece of tissue on the floor? Meena, come pick this up! Why’s that TV so loud? Are you deaf? And what’s this plate doing in the sink? I told you to clean out the sink before I get home. This place looks like a pigsty!”

I’d curse myself under my breath: “Stupid!” Mad that I’d gotten that cup of apple juice just before Mom pulled into the driveway. But I always remained silent. Sitting like a mannequin, motionless, expressionless, eyes glued to the same spot on the TV screen as I watched my favorite show, Double Dare, on Nickelodeon. Kids ran wildly, smiling and laughing as they were dared to do crazy stunts for dream prizes. I always wished I could be there, with them, away from New Jersey.

“Meena, turn off that crap,” she’d say. “Put the news on.”

I’d hear Mom’s long, tired sighing from the kitchen that was always followed by “I hate my job.” Then she’d add, “I gotta get a new one.”

The loathing was contagious, because I couldn’t stand being home. Especially in the mornings when she’d wake up cranky, grab a leather belt, and beat my butt into a welted rouge, as she cussed at me for not getting up with the alarm clock. Other mornings she’d corner me in the bathroom and pound me with her fists, eyes glazed in a tired rage prompted by a minor infraction, like not reminding her to buy more toothpaste after using the last bit. Or for major fuck-ups, like admitting I’d lost the house keys . . . again. From day to evening, I’d stress to please. Racing to get to school on time, speeding home to fix the house up, aiming to do right and be a good daughter, only to miserably fail and be harshly reminded of my stupidity. I was tired, mentally sore, emotionally worn down to the balls of my feet from tiptoeing room to room, finding a safe space away from the hurricane gust of emotions spewing around 222 Lincoln Street.

As a result, after I moved back home, I stayed in my messy room. Dresser drawers open with T-shirts hanging from the sides. Pants scrunched up inside out, thrown across the middle of the floor. Clean clothes piled high inside a laundry basket next to the bed. A mountain of assorted clothes, camouflaging a chair. One wall was spotted with pictures representing memorable moments of my past. A set of black-and-white photo booth pics showed the trip Meredith and I took last summer to Great Adventure. My first-grade class picture had me smiling toothless in the back row. In another, Dexter and I stood on the beach, kissing for the camera. Not sure why I hadn’t taken that one down yet. And one from my eighth-grade graduation of me in a cap and gown. Down at the bottom in the corner was a tattered photo my mother had given me years ago, of me and my father, smiling as I sat on his knee.

When it came to memories of him, recollections grayed the brain like thin clouds of vanishing smoke. My mother would mention him briefly, here and there making passing mentions of her relationship with him and his with me. But it was all in tidbits. Everything else I was forced to make up.

I had one vivid memory, of sitting in my father’s burgundy Cadillac. I remember the white leather seats sticking to my tiny thighs. I wore a yellow dress with sunflowers and bows that ruffled in the warm Brooklyn breeze. The car engulfed me as I sat in the front seat, stretching my neck to see out the window. I was four or five, smiling as we passed stray dogs, peeing and sniffing grimy green garbage bags on street corners.

“Daddy, can I have a dog?” I asked as he steered with his left hand. His right fingers stroked his scruffy goatee. “I wanna doggie.”

“Sure, baby, I’ll get you a dog one day.”

“Okaaay!” I sang happily, smiling, swaying from side to side, doing a little dance as I thought about playing with my puppy. But that day never came. Daddy didn’t get me a thing once his relationship with my mother ended. All he ever gave me were fleeting, insecure memories that made me question his love. Although I did inherit his last name—Butler—his looks, a slight overbite, and all five feet six inches of his height. I had his brown hair, which when under stress tended to fall out at the top of the scalp. I even developed the dry caramel skin that peeled and itched in the summer sun. And a back full of clogged pores and spotted with acne scars.

The stories Mom shared about my father, outside of his physical flaws, always began with “You look so much like him.” She’d stare at me in awe and then speak in the past tense: “He loved you so much. He loved him some Meena.”

She told me we had a wonderful relationship. I was Danny Butler’s little girl, wrapping my arms around his leg as he dragged me from room to room, cooing and giggling. The same couldn’t be said of his relationship with Mom, though. Their tumultuous romance turned dark, somewhere in the street, with fists and fights. There’s one episode she shared that stands out, because I was asleep in the backseat when it took place.

“Who’s that?” my father asked, waiting for an answer. He leaned on the Caddy with arms crossed. Toothpick in mouth, checkered applejack hat to the left, blue collared shirt opened to the chest, and black corduroy bell-bottoms sweeping the ground. He’d stopped to pick Mom up from NYU’s campus and take her to work. But she was always late, running with perspiration. The excuse this day: her missing book.

“Stupid,” Danny huffed. “How do you lose one of those big-ass million-page novels?”

“I told you not to call me stupid.”

“Why, Deena?” he asked as he gunned the gas and sped off, screeching down the block. “Would you rather me use one of those big words you learned in your big college books?”

“No, I’d just rather you pick one up and get some common sense,” she replied, buckling her seat belt. My mother’s sarcasm was legendary. Quick with the comeback, sometimes funny, often insulting, her mouth was her most powerful weapon and biggest downfall.

SMACK!

The sound came from my father’s right hand smashing into Mom’s exposed cheek. He somehow still managed to expertly drive with his left hand, maneuvering the steering wheel down the street.

Violence wasn’t a surprising occurrence between Danny and Deena. Although they’d been together three years, their relationship had moved as fast as a NASCAR race. Celebrating their six-month anniversary, they announced she was pregnant and moved in together. Over the following months, his tantrums escalated into pushes, grabs, and nighttime slaps. By day, he spent hours on the downtown streets of Brooklyn, sitting at a six-foot table, selling bronzed jewelry and mahogany figurines to black power people looking for African scenery. While away from him, my mother would map out an escape route inside her head, calculating. But at the end of each day, she always stayed. Even as the beatings grew more painful and frequent. Her love, entangled and twisted, was rooted in a codependent pity for a man she felt needed her, because he didn’t have the stable funds to rent an apartment alone.

“What now?!” he screamed with an indignant look of self-justification as he made a left onto Gates Avenue. My mother grabbed her throbbing left eye, exploding into a purple mass of swollen skin. “What now?!” he repeated, waiting for an answer, looking for a reason to strike again. “Smart-ass motherfucker.”

Mom cowered in the seat, tears flowing, her sight blurry. When the Caddy screeched to a stop at a red light, she jumped out, pulled off her black platform shoes, and limped down the block. Her Afro crooked, mascara running, she never looked back.

Cars blew horns as rubbernecking drivers stretched to see why some barefoot woman was walking down the block in November. My father watched, too, a tiny smirk on his face. He crept along behind her sad stride as she turned onto a quiet, tree-lined block and picked up the pace. Danny expertly parallel parked, pocketed the keys, hopped out, and jogged to catch up.

“Deena, come on. Meena’s in the car. You know I’m sorry,” he yelled after her. “You know I love you!”

“Fuck you, Danny!”

“I love you and Meena,” he said, out of breath. “You two are the family I never had. But you think you can say whatever to me, and my mama don’t even talk to me like that.”

“I’m not your mother. And don’t bring Meena into this,” she said, arms crossed, neck swerving. “Will you love her the way you love me? Look at my fuckin’ eye!”

He walked up and tried to caress her face. She dodged his hand with a swift back bend and body curve that made her lose her balance. She stumbled to catch her footing.

“Come on, Deena! What the fuck? See, that’s your problem, stubborn as shit.”

“You the one with the problem, Danny. Always wanna hit somebody.”

“You know what?” He paused to crack his knuckles, bending each finger slowly. Each bone rattled and unlocked itself into what my mother foresaw as an Ike Turner warm-up. Deena took tiny steps back.

“I gotta go to work,” Danny said, as he turned around to check on his car. “And so do you. You wanna stay out in this cold-ass street looking crazy, you go ahead. I’ll drop Meena with your mom.”

“Go then, bitch!” she screamed with disgust. “I hate you.”

My father stopped in his tracks. His right hand slowly curled into a fist, as he stared at the Caddy for a long, contemplative moment. My mother tiptoed backward, pursing her lips. She jumped for no reason as he headed to the car without a word, hopped in, and pulled away.

The next day, when he left for his daily hustle, Mom moved back into Grandma Fey’s tiny Bed-Stuy home on Putnam Avenue. She dodged Danny’s calls for three weeks. Until one day, the doorbell rang.

“Hey, Deena.”

My father, flashing a broad, toothy smile, stood on the front step with a long-stemmed bouquet of ruby-red roses.

“Hey,” she replied, stomach fluttering.

“You know I miss you and Meena. I’m so sorry, I love you so much. But I understand why you left. And I know. I know. I’m just sorry.” His tear ducts filled as he rambled along. “Can I just see Meena? Please? I miss my baby so much.”

My mother said she remembered taking an eternity to answer that question, staring at his pitiful face. He’d never looked uglier. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “But you got five minutes, ’cause she’s asleep and I’m in the middle of a study group, so you can’t stay long.”

“That’s cool,” he said, nodding his head in agreement, smiling. “That’s okay.”

He stepped inside with a sweet and apologetic grin on his face. The vibe changed when he saw Mom’s classmate sitting on the living room couch.

“Danny, this is Marcus. He’s in my Black Studies class with me and we’re—”

“Where’s Meena?” My father’s cold eyes were frozen on Marcus.

“Upstairs in the bedroom,” Mom answered, voice shaking. “Lemme walk you up.”

When they reached the hallway outside my room, all that my mother remembered were the sudden sharp pains running through her face. They throbbed in patches, over her right cheek, at the tip of her nose, up to the middle of her forehead, piercing between her eyeballs as fists landed on her, punches on a human body bag.

She was laid out across the wooden floor, trying desperately to cover her face. But my father kept hitting her, body shots to the stomach, slaps to the head.

“Stop!” She huffed and puffed, gagging on blood trickling down her throat. “Stop!”

The beating ended when Marcus ran upstairs, grabbed my father from behind, and threw him against the wall. His skinny five-six was like a limp chicken pinned down under Marcus’s six-two, 250-pound frame.

“Get off me, man! Get off me!” Danny screamed. “This ain’t got shit to do with you.”

My cries echoed from the bedroom.

“You don’t hit women!” Marcus said, pushing him farther along the floor. “What’s wrong with you, man?”

“Fuck you,” Danny said, struggling. “Get the fuck off me!”

“I’ll let your pussy ass go when you leave.” Marcus tightened his grip, pulling Danny’s arm behind his back. Mom got up and ran into the bathroom. A bright red imprint of busted lip blood smeared the door handle.

“It’s cool, man. It’s cool,” Danny said, out of breath. “I’m leaving.”

Marcus loosened his grip, letting my father up off the ground.

“Watch out for that bitch,” he said, pointing toward the bathroom door. “She sneaky. I ain’t fuckin’ with her no more.”

And he turned and left. It would be years before I saw him again.