After Perfect (19 page)

C
hloe started coming home with tattoos symbolizing a lost past: weeping willows, and Greek letters inked across her back. She dropped out of high school after my mother announced that she was moving in with Richard. My sister didn't want to be anywhere near them when they were together. She had made it clear to my mother that she didn't feel comfortable when Richard was around the house and that she didn't like it when he slept over, but my mother allowed him to do it anyway. My mother would say that Mara and I were lucky, because we were older when my father left. She couldn't control Chloe because of the guilt she felt, because of how young Chloe was when everything was taken from her. What my mother couldn't see was that
everything
wasn't about Chloe needing a big house, needing new clothes, or a car on her sixteenth birthday. The things she felt guilty for not giving her—all of those gifts we wrapped ourselves in to make us feel that we were safe—were not the things that made us safe. They were the things that were keeping us from loving one another and being there for one another, in the right way.

It was the contract and Richard's new house that sparked Chloe's running away. Richard was buying a house in the canyons. And he considered Chloe untrustworthy because of her outbursts. He presented her with a contract of rules to live by while under his roof. With my mother's credit score at a lowly 300 or so, her name wouldn't be going on the house. The house would be Richard's and Richard's alone and Chloe would be his “guest.” This was written to a girl who, just one year prior, was making straight As, was a star athlete, and who used to have more friends than anyone could count. Chloe was gone within days after that. Left with a friend of Spencer's for Santa Barbara and would never look back.

M
ara and I knew it would only be a matter of time before our father would find out about Richard. Every other weekend, my mother and Richard were jetting off to some new location. Mexico. Napa Valley. The Caribbean. I wasn't even sure how they could afford it. Richard had money but not the kind of money my father had once. He worked at a furniture manufacturing company, and before he bought the house in the canyons, he'd lived in an apartment in Redondo Beach. If my mother were in a relationship for safety and security, it would have been a lot more convenient and secure had she married a multimillionaire who had plenty to share. But her instinct to survive would lead her to settle inside a lifeboat; a fantasy with someone she barely knew.

One afternoon, when they were in Mexico, Mara and I drove to Ikea to buy new silverware and plates. I had promised that once I made enough money at the bar, it would be my contribution to the apartment, since they had provided everything else. We were strolling through the plate section together talking about how I had the password to Josh's Facebook account and that I'd been checking it obsessively every hour, when sure enough, my father called looking for my mother.

“It's Dad,” Mara said.

“So pick it up!” I said, not wanting to miss the call. We never knew when he would be able to call us again—three weeks later, maybe four.

She pressed the speaker button so I could hear her. “You have an incoming call. This call is from a federal prison. You will not be charged for this call. This call is from: Tom. To accept the call, dial five now. To decline the call, dial nine.”
Beep!

“Dad?”

“Marsie!” Marsie was Mara's nickname because sometimes we would find her spaced out staring into nothing, like she was on Mars.

“I'm with Christina; we're at Ikea.”

“Christina Bambina!” my father shouted with excitement.

I was happy that he called while Mara and I were together, which almost never happened. For a moment, it felt as though our family was still one nucleus.

“Listen, girls, I don't have a lot of minutes left this month, and I don't want us to get cut off. I've been trying to reach Mom for a few days now, but her cell phone seems to be turned off.”

Mara, panic-stricken, mouthed, “What do I say?” My heart started pounding. Were we really about to be the messengers? Responsible for breaking the news that his wife of nearly thirty years was in Mexico with a man who was buying her a house in the canyons?

I had noticed that my father never mentioned the divorce in his phone calls, which made me wonder if he knew at all that my mother was planning on divorcing him or if he just sensed that I didn't want to talk about it. So when my mother finally admitted that she was dating Richard, I'd asked her if my father knew. “No, it's not the right time to tell him,” she said. But she never said, “Keep this a secret between us, and heads up, he doesn't know about the divorce.” It was left up to me to decide whether or not to bring it up when I spoke to him. It was too overwhelming to think about: Richard, the divorce. I felt paralyzed, my world spinning, bombs dropping, change happening all too fast for me to comprehend any sort of reality. I never thought about the consequences of being put in such a position until it was happening.

Equally panicked, with no answer to give, I mouthed back, “I don't know! Jesus!”

Mara hung up. Pretended to lose the call. It was the only thing she could think to do. Then she flung her cell phone across the linoleum floor toward the kids' bedding section and fell down on her hands and knees, a panic attack coming on, rocking back and forth to the sound of her own inflections. “Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .”

I was sitting next to my mother at the glass octagon-shaped table, pressing my thumb back and forth against the corner. Kids in my fourth-grade science class were talking about the O. J. Simpson murder trial, repeating things their parents had said, and I was curious to know about prison.

“Dad, what do they make you eat in prison?” I stared at my uneaten, now cold and soggy brussels sprouts.

“Bread and water, Bambina. Now eat your brussels sprouts.”

“Every day?”

“Every day,” he said. “Now finish your dinner.” His voice was stern.

The memory was visceral as I stood in front of the mailbox in the lobby of our apartment building.
Children always know things
. It was three in the morning. A wad of uncounted cash bulged from my black knee-high boot, and a new run in my stocking that climbed up toward my thigh let the world know I had not made it out of the bar unscathed.

I flipped through the mail, and my heart skipped a beat when I came across the return address: “Federal Correctional Institute La Tuna.” It was a letter from the Department of Corrections. I ripped it open. Josh and I were cleared to visit.

Within months of Richard's arrival, it seemed that Josh and I would get back together and break up every five days. Filled with confusion about the course my life should take, the trust I once had was slipping away from me: trust in Josh, trust in myself. I was jealous and needy when he gave me space, and when he tried to love me, I became distant and cold. I didn't know how to seep into the gray with him. I didn't know how to love him. I just knew that I needed him now more than ever.

I ran upstairs to call him despite how late it was. Which, before, wasn't uncommon. To check in after work, to fall asleep listening to the sound of his voice on the other line, making me feel like I was safe.

I sobbed, holding the phone tight against my ear. “I'm sorry, Josh.” Below my swollen eyes, I wrapped an old brown scarf around my neck, hiding the black and blue hickey given to me by a man at the bar who offered me a $300 tip if I went with him to the Standard hotel in West Hollywood after work. It was half my rent. I remember walking into the mid-century building and seeing a young female model sleeping inside of a glass cage in the lobby, not far from two clear plastic swings that were in the shape of half bubbles hanging from the ceiling. “I just want to swing in the swings with you, that's all,” the man told me.

“You're pushing me away, Christina,” Josh said, exhausted on the other end of the line. Exhausted from me. Exhausted from it all. “My mom suggested we go see Sheryl together.”

“What?” I said, irritated by the suggestion. Couples therapy in our early twenties?

I had seen Sheryl a few more times but still didn't think she was “working.” After our sessions together, I would crawl back into bed and sleep for the next three hours until I had to show up for work.

“We've been cleared to visit my dad. I just got the letter. That's why I'm calling.”

“Call Sheryl, Christina. I don't want to talk to you until then.” Josh hung up on me. He could see that I needed help; that I was far beyond his reach. I didn't want to hear it; I believed that every problem remained outside of myself. But I knew that if I wanted him with me, I'd have to call the therapist and make the appointment. And my father wasn't going to let me visit him alone. He said it was too dangerous. I was a girl and far too young.

“I
threw up when I got back to the hotel room.” Mara warned me of how it was visiting Dad in prison for the first time. She stood in the doorway of my bedroom, brushing her teeth before bed wearing an old Nirvana T-shirt.

Mara and Brian had driven cross-country from Dallas to Los Angeles after graduation. On their way out west, they had stopped in El Paso to visit Dad. I didn't ask for any details about her trip, maybe because I figured I wouldn't get the whole truth, just as my mother and Chloe didn't want to talk about it. So I began an obsessive internet search. It kept me awake most nights before Josh and I left. Much to my chagrin, we'd seen Sheryl together, and he had agreed to come with me. I wanted to know everything. I needed to outsmart the fear I had about going to prison, and if I knew what to expect, I figured it wouldn't hurt as much. I wanted to know what it looked like beyond the visiting rooms. The cells: Did they sleep in bunk beds? The cafeteria: Were inmates chained to the tables? Did they really shower naked together like in the movies? What did solitary confinement look like? Were they locked in cement dungeons like in medieval times?

I had come across an old news article about a prison riot. I read about rival gang members creating weapons called shanks made from pencils and pens, sharpened lids from cans, tied locks to socks; each used to swing, slice, and stab one another until those few not left injured or dead were all facedown and handcuffed along that cafeteria floor. Guards outnumbered by hundreds. And I imagined blood everywhere—the smell of sweat, salt, and copper—grown men moaning and crying for help, crying for medical attention where there was none to give. And I thought about my father. I thought about him being nearly sixty years old, barely five foot ten, never owning a gym membership in his life. He didn't have a violent bone in his body. The fear hadn't dissipated from my research. If anything, it grew, and my heart sank deeper for him.

I
t was the night before Josh and I were scheduled to leave. He was picking me up the following morning for a seven o'clock flight. My father claimed that moving to the minimum-security prison in El Paso, Texas, was for the best. The federal government had set up a program where you could see a psychiatrist, say you're an addict, and complete a series of drug and alcohol classes that would knock off a few years of your sentence. I had never seen my father drunk or known him to use drugs.

Mara took the toothbrush out of her mouth and waved it at me like a conductor, lifting her chin so toothpaste wouldn't spill out. “Luk as ugly as possible. Covu up you entaya body, oh those fuckas will tun you away. Gotta go spit.” She walked across the hall to her bedroom and closed the door behind her.

It felt strange standing in front of my closet, pushing silk shirts and spaghetti-strap tank tops out of the way, searching for something to wear, my empty carry-on bag on the floor next to me. I never thought there would come a night where I could say to someone “I'm packing for prison.” I had no idea what to bring or what to wear. I never knew anyone incarcerated. Prison was just a distant, imaginative hell that belonged only to villains in movies or serial killers on the news. It was never supposed to be connected to me personally; it wasn't supposed to be bound to my life in any way. But here and now it was, and tomorrow—would be forever.

I settled on my baggy “fat” jeans and a baggy sweatshirt that would do a good job of hiding my body. I pulled out my black-and-white Converse shoes and placed them next to the bed. I didn't even bother packing any makeup or a hair dryer. I felt relieved. It didn't matter at all what I looked like, as Mara's words “look as ugly as possible” clung to me for dear life.

“G
irls, over here! Dad wants to get a family photo!” my mother called, waving her arms back and forth in her shell Moschino sunglasses and new Princess Di haircut. We were strolling the sidewalks of Lahaina, shopping for the day. It was spring break, and I had just turned fourteen. We were staying at the Four Seasons Resort on the shores of Wailea Beach in Maui.

I ran over in my red-and-pink skort and my blue Ralph Lauren bikini top my mother had bought me a few weeks earlier. Mara and Chloe followed behind me, all three of us crowned with pink plumeria leis. My father stood in his Tommy Bahama T-shirt photographing five parrots—red, yellow, blue, white, and red—as they squawked, bobbing their heads back and forth while dancing on wooden perches inside a giant green cage. The owner, an old man with weathered skin, wore a straw hat and had an old 1980s oversize boom box on the ground next to him. My father had convinced the owner to let us take the birds out of the cage so we could get a family photo with them. “We've got a cockatiel at home; I assure you my girls won't be scared.”

“No problem,” the kind man said. “Their wings are clipped.”

I
kept thinking about that family vacation while Josh drove, and I sat in the passenger seat with my feet up on the dashboard of our silver 2001 Toyota Corolla rental that smelled of vanilla air freshener and McDonald's french fries. To shut out the memories, I turned on the radio, scanning for a decent station but settling for Christian rock for lack of anything better. We didn't think to bring an iPod or any mix CDs. There was nothing celebratory about this “vacation,” nothing to sing about, nothing to laugh about, nothing to dance about here in El Paso. I looked at the clock, and it was almost noon. Josh and I needed to speed if we wanted to make it in time for the rest of visiting hours.