Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Read online

  “Just don’t start bawling like a dang baby,” I say. But then I start crying out of relief, and once I’m crying, the pain in my arm—it really is hurting now—makes it hard to stop. I move over on the couch and hug my big brother with one arm. I’m not going to ask him why he didn’t return my calls—we’ll just move on from here.

  “I guess it wasn’t any of my business,” I say. “What I said. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “What? I’m trying to think what you said.”

  “About Pinky drinking out of the glasses on the table. I was worried.”

  “Now I remember. You said I was a bad father.”

  “I didn’t say that, did I?” I pull my arm away. “I wouldn’t. You’re a good dad.”

  “As if you know a fucking thing about being a parent.” He shakes his head like he’s getting pissed off again. “Now I remember.”

  “I didn’t mean to say whatever I said. I was just worried.”

  “The Bitch was supposed to take Pinky for the night, but she decided to stay and party.” He raises his voice as he goes on. “I would’ve asked you to watch her, but you were too drunk already. And you getting so drunk and sloppy at the party when Pinky was here didn’t help. I don’t need her seeing that kind of shit.”

  “What shit? She knows people drink,” I say.

  “Do you even remember getting home that night? Roger said you fell on your face right at your front door. He was worried about you.”

  “JC was pissed at me. I know that. I was already fighting with him, and then he finds me on the front doorstep at three a.m.” I lean back on the couch. JC said somebody rang the bell, and by the time he got out there, I was passed out alone, with puke on my shirt.

  “I’m sorry to say this, Janie, but JC’s a dick. He bosses you around like you’re one of his kids. And he’s like a Tea Party member or something, isn’t he?”

  “You don’t really know JC. He’s a good guy. He just—”

  “He’s a dick, Janie. All men are dicks,” Steve says. “Trust me, I am one.”

  “He’s pissed at me now because I don’t want to have sex with him.”

  “Why the hell won’t you have sex with him? Seemed like you were all ready for action at the party.”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t want to.” I’m never going to tell Steve that JC and I usually have sex on a regular schedule twice a week, Friday nights and Sunday mornings. He’d think I’m a freak, but I just like to know what’s going to happen ahead of time. Since the party, though, the thought of sex makes me sick to my stomach.

  “How old is he now, anyway? Forty?” Steve asks.

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “He’s too damned old for you. Pick on somebody your own age. Go with one of those guys you were screwing at my party. Roger’s a good guy. He’s got a decent job.”

  “What do you mean, screwing?” I ask. Through the window of the funhouse, I can see Pinky addressing the stuffed rabbit over some serious issue. When she sees me watching, she closes the shutters.

  “Just what I said. Screwing,” Steve says quietly. He rests his eyes on the TV, but he is weighing his words carefully.

  “I didn’t screw anybody at your party. You know I’m not like that.”

  “You didn’t used to be.” Steve shakes his head, though he’s looking more intently at the TV now, bouncing his leg with a lot of energy. “You seriously don’t remember what happened with Roger? And that friend of his, Mickey?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You were humping your bottle of tequila down by the peonies, and they were out of booze, so I told them to go down and harass you.”

  “Sons of bitches better not have taken my tequila,” I say and force a laugh. I do remember the peonies close to my face. They weren’t pretty anymore, but were splayed on the grass, as though the tired stems couldn’t hold up the big, ragged flowers anymore. I also remember the splintery leg of the picnic table with the paint peeling off. Now that Steve has said it, I remember somebody yanking the tequila bottle out of my hand, though I was holding it tight.

  “That guy Mickey took pictures on his phone,” Steve says. “Don’t worry, when I saw him showing Roger, I took his phone and deleted them all.”

  “Pictures? What pictures?”

  “Not the kind of thing a brother wants to see.”

  “You say Roger took me home? Why didn’t you take me home?”

  “I couldn’t drive you because Pinky was here. Anyway, Roger wasn’t as drunk as I was.”

  “He doesn’t even have a driver’s license, does he?” I say. “You’re fucking with me, aren’t you? Stop fucking with me, Steve.” I get up and roll myself a loose, crooked cigarette and sit back down. “I’ve been feeling shitty. I was wondering if maybe we ate some bad meat or something.”

  “You got some meat, all right. Mickey was pissed when I erased the pictures, but I figured you didn’t want them getting back to JC,” he says and glances to make sure Pinky isn’t listening before adding, “And a brother doesn’t want to see his sister with some guy’s dick in her face.”

  “It had to be somebody else.” I look out through the sliding glass door and can only see the patio, but I know the peonies are only about a hundred feet beyond. Anybody could’ve seen me lying there.

  “Oh, it was definitely you. The first picture was Roger licking the Tasmanian Devil tattoo on your boob. No mistaking that.”

  An electric sensation zaps my left breast. Steve gets up and puts something special on the VCR for Pinky and tells her it’s a half hour before bedtime, and Pinky scrunches down in her tiny armchair, a miniature of the chair an old man would use, only pink. Cartoon bears tromp across the screen.

  “Fuck,” I say under my breath. I can’t stop shaking my head. “I couldn’t have.”

  “Don’t rag on yourself. You were drunk. You were fighting with JC. You were finally relaxing, having some fun.”

  “But you said I was passed out down there.”

  “I figured you must’ve woke up when things got interesting.”

  “You’re saying I had my shirt off with a stranger.”

  “Roger’s not a stranger. You’ve seen him plenty of times over here. He’s a good guy.”

  I’ve always been shy about undressing in front of JC and never make love with him unless I’ve taken a shower and brushed my teeth.

  “After I erased the pictures, I went down and put your damned clothes back on you. And you weren’t helping. It was like dressing a damned corpse. Give me a squirming kid any day. At first I felt bad for you, but then I was just pissed. Some money and pot came up missing while I was screwing around trying to get you dressed. Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much, Janie.”

  My arm aches so badly now that I can’t stand it. I should do something, something to change everything. Stand up and scream, make the whining-grinding sound the drill made. Quit drinking, cold turkey, right now. Or maybe tomorrow. Go to the ER and see about this arm. But I don’t like to make a big deal out of nothing, and this has to be nothing. I’m waiting for the punch line that’ll let me know this is just Steve’s joke. When he gets up to put Pinky to bed, I curl up and fall asleep on the couch to the murmurs of him reading her a story.

  I wake up later to lonesome crying that feels like my own, but it’s coming from Pinky’s room. The little house is dark except for the TV with the volume turned way down. My arm is throbbing, and when I stand, pain rushes me in a wave, and I’m smelling grease from those brats again. There’s a note on the counter saying Steve’s gone out to get juice for tomorrow’s breakfast, he’ll be right back. Pinky’s room smells of baby powder, some kind of air freshener, and urine, and I see my way to her by the glow of a pink rabbit-shaped night-light. The girl stops crying as I lift her out of her crib-bed. Thank goodness she clings to my shoulder like a baby chimpanzee, because I can’t muster much strength in the throbbing arm. Gingerly, I shift Pinky to my other hip and carry her into the bathroom, smooth her nigh
tgown under her bottom, and situate her on the sink. When I turn on the light, the fan comes on, and Pinky rubs her eyes. The smallness of her fists makes me feel melancholy. I wonder if Steve will meet another girl or get back together with the Bitch so he can have another baby, give Pinky a brother or sister. He’s said that I ought to come through with a cousin for her to play with so she won’t have to be alone when she’s older. I would have been lost growing up without Steve.

  When I touch the red spot on my arm, I expect blood to gush out, but there’s only a little puffiness. With one arm balancing Pinky on the vanity sink, I rummage through Steve’s medicine cabinet. When I hold a prescription bottle up to the light, I see the two pills inside are Vicodin, though the bottle says prednisone—Steve’s probably hiding them from Pinky’s ma. When I shake a pill, etched with a V, into my hand, Pinky reaches for it, so I hurry and swallow it.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Steve says from the bathroom doorway, his face shiny with sweat. I didn’t hear him coming in. There’s a way that meanness and good humor face off in Steve at certain times, especially when he’s high, and usually I can nudge him toward good humor. Now, though, as the heat and humidity billow from his body into the little tiled room, I don’t feel like I could influence anybody.

  “She was crying, so I picked her up.”

  “You don’t have to pick her up every time she cries. Sometimes she cries in her sleep.” My brother’s movements feel off-kilter, but it seems unlikely he’d be getting high so late at night, so maybe it’s just something off-kilter about me. His broad shoulders fill the bathroom doorway, and he looms over me and Pinky. One word from him would have stopped those guys by the peonies, whatever they were doing with me. If they were doing anything.

  “I thought she might be afraid,” I say.

  “She must’ve sensed I was gone,” Steve says, softening his tone. “We’ve got a strong bond, me and Pinky. Don’t we, Bright Eyes? You need a new diaper—your aunt should’ve changed you.” While he gets her changed and back into bed, I return to the couch with another loosely rolled cigarette and study the plastic funhouse. We didn’t have anything like this when we were kids, though JC complains my generation is spoiled. I wonder what JC is doing, if he’s worried, if he’s made a checklist of what he wants to talk to me about. In a million years I couldn’t tell him what Steve says happened. He’d just yell at me, and the thought of the photos would make him lose his mind, even if I promised they were erased. When Steve comes out of Pinky’s room, I hold up my arm in the dim light.

  “So you think this is okay, even with the way it’s swelling?”

  “It doesn’t look that bad to me, Janie. It’s just a spot. But it’s your arm, you should know.” Steve rubs his eyes. Nobody should make decisions late at night, I think, not when everybody’s so tired. The Vicodin starts to kick in and the pain lessens.

  “Are you making that up, about the pictures?” I ask.

  “Why would I make something like that up?” he says. “I don’t want to see that shit. A couple of guys giving it to you.”

  “I think I must’ve been asleep.”

  “Come on, Janie, a person doesn’t sleep through something like that.”

  “Was it really sex, like sex?” I ask and close my eyes. “With both of them?”

  He shrugs. “Roger said you were into it.”

  “Damn, Steve. You should’ve stopped them.” I put my fingers into my hair, which feels frizzy, like somebody else’s hair, and yank. “You shouldn’t have told them to harass me.”

  “Don’t put it on me, sister,” Steve says, and something about the way he says it makes me think he’s thought about it plenty and has made up his mind. “You should’ve told them no if you didn’t want it. You should’ve pinched their balls. You said you were fighting with JC. I figured you wanted to teach him a lesson.”

  “But you should’ve protected me.” My voice goes squeaky.

  “Protected you? Hell, if you ever come trying to protect me when I’m in the bushes with two hot babes working on me, I’ll kick your ass.” Now he sounds like his normal self. “You know, I had to take Pinky into her room and read her a story to make sure she didn’t see you down there.”

  “I think maybe they raped me, Steve.” The word raped feels all wrong, and my heart pounds in a sickening way.

  “Roger? Get real. I work with the guy every day. He’s a decent guy, maybe not the brightest bulb, but he’s not a rapist, Janie.” He says rapist as though he might be saying Martian.

  “Or something like rape,” I suggest. The second time I say the word, it feels even more off-kilter, like I really am a drama queen, creating from thin air a victim and perpetrators and accessories.

  “That’s not how it looked to me, that’s all I’m saying.” Steve takes a draw on his cigarette, exhales deliberately, and then crushes it out. “I guess you’re the one who should know, though.”

  I sigh. Steve goes off to bed, and I lie down on the couch. Everything is muddled right now, but I can sense the wilting peonies close to my face—or is it skin pressed against my mouth?—and I can smell the cool grass. Remembering these things is like remembering something ancient from before I could talk, like my dead grandfather’s great height—he died when I was Pinky’s age, but I used to hide behind the couch from him, afraid he might step on me and crush me. I have a clear sense of my pants being tugged off in that cool grass, of being dragged by my feet. The weight of a body on my body. I try the word rape once more, and it still doesn’t fit with stupid Roger or anybody at one of Steve’s parties, doesn’t fit with the peonies or picnic table. If only I could see those photos, then I could know what happened. Were my eyes open?

  Steve has music on in his bedroom, so he doesn’t hear me leave. The side door shuts with a sucking sound, and I gently close the storm door. The pink fobs and daylilies nose me, and I get the feeling that if I stand still, the vines are going to slither down the fence and grab me. In my car, I’m having trouble holding my arm up to steer, and I reach across to shift into drive with my left hand.

  After sitting in the hospital parking lot for a long time, I get out and walk past the big-shouldered guard, who turns out to be a hulking woman, who probably knows exactly what happens to her every minute of every day, no matter what. I check in at the ER desk and then take a seat in a chair near the door and watch a dark-skinned woman with gray hair vacuuming. She seems like someone who tolerates no nonsense, so I move to an area she’s already cleaned. Remembering the peonies in my face and the grass and my jeans being tugged off doesn’t prove anything, but now I can’t imagine not knowing those things. After a half hour, a tired-looking triage nurse directs me into a little room with a desk and takes my blood pressure and pulse, listens to my no-insurance lament. Afterward she lifts the arm gently, studies it, and nods. Having someone acknowledge that something is wrong feels like the wind abruptly changing direction.

  “We get a lot of power tool mishaps,” the nurse says after I explain about the drill and the deck screws. “A lot of guys fall off ladders with saws—chain saws, circular saws. Table saws are big trouble, too. Why did you wait to come in?”

  “It’s just hard to know if something’s really wrong,” I say and wonder if I really know any more now than I knew before. “I don’t like to be a drama queen,” I say. “It just looked like a red dot.”

  “Well, good thing you didn’t wait any longer,” she says.

  The nurse’s words give me the relief I feel when I take that first sip of tequila after work, but then I vomit into my lap even before I can ask her for a towel.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I keep doing that lately. Don’t take it personally.”

  “How long have you been vomiting?”

  “For three weeks. Just now and then. It’s worse tonight, though. ”

  She blinks at me, and I feel an opening, a place where she might want to hear how I feel, might want to hear what I think happened, what I fear happened, but I don’t know how to
start. And anyhow she’ll probably think I’m a slut and tell me to join AA.

  “Is there any chance you’re pregnant? We’ll do a test,” the nurse says before I can answer, no, I’m on the pill, which I take at exactly the same time each morning. I had a period two weeks ago, but the world has become a place where anything is possible.

  She walks me farther into the hospital, into a windowless room, and pulls a curtain across the entrance so I feel shrouded and alone, frozen in a moment in time. When the doctor arrives, a small, chubby man with a tag that reads Dr. Sethi, he studies my arm without even introducing himself, asks questions in accented English, adjusts his gold-rimmed glasses, and explains soberly how he will open the wound and release whatever blood and serum is building up inside it. “You have noticed the swelling,” he says.

  “Yes,” I say and feel proud of myself for having noticed. After the X-ray shows no damage to the bone and the pregnancy test comes back negative, Dr. Sethi injects me with a numbing agent. His assistant swabs the area with antiseptic and tapes sterile gauze over my arm to create a window for the procedure, so a rectangle of skin is all the doctor sees when he returns. His voice is soothing as he cuts into my anesthetized arm. When pink fluid is released onto the gauze, my relief is instantaneous. He takes up the hemostats—like the ones Steve and I used to use as roach clips—and slowly removes something from my arm and holds it up. I have to squint to make out a little magenta spiral, more than a quarter-inch long. As I watch, a tiny drop of watery blood slides off the plastic onto the gauze.

  “It’s a party favorite?” Dr. Sethi asks, and we all three study the little corkscrew.