I, so and so, one of the lowliest,
have probed my heart for ways of grace.
– Abraham Abulafia
She came back for me the first Monday in March, the day that I quit school for good. It had been almost seven years since she’d left. Now she stood on our porch buzz cut, draped in fur, with some middle-aged, square-jawed fuck toy beside her.
‘Long time, bruh,’ she said. ‘This is Christof. From France.’
He was at least fifty, long hair, with grooves in his forehead.
With no hair she looked gaunt, more severe than before.
‘Can’t we come in?’ Her gaze fixed right through me.
Under the light of the porch, her eyes had that same telltale sheen. Tongue-tied, I could not acknowledge either him or her again.
Then the guy took off one glove and held out his hand for me. It had this strange, metallic, free-floating warmth. Then he set that same palm on the back of her neck. Barbra moaned just a little, as if it was hot. Her lips were sun-cracked. My mouth lost its spit. I thought she was back here to mock me again.
‘How’s tricks? How’s your dad?’ Barbra seemed nervous and grinned.
‘Okay and okay.’ I felt myself spin. I half-blocked the doorway, gut roiling. My dad is not the bank machine.
‘What?’ Barbra asked, still smiling right through me. ‘What’d I do? What’d I do?’
I remembered those teeth, light-speckled and ridged. I stepped backwards too fast, discombobulated.
Then, unrestricted, Barbra shifted herself sideways and just pushed in right past me. Her little French fuck toy followed suit. He dragged some duffle bag in, kicked it up against the wall. Air from outside formed a bubble around me. I watched Barbra hand him her matted fur coat. I watched him slide open our mirrored front closet. Cold sweat had flattened the shirt on my back.
My voice came out hoarse. ‘No free hangers in there.’
Barbra laughed for some reason. I smelled like rye bread. The guy dumped both their coats on the slumped duffle bag. He wore army pants and a peasant blouse. Then he bowed at me weirdly before traipsing down our hallway toward the john.
I turned and stared at her, fucking perplexed. ‘You gonna tell me what in God’s name you’re doing here again?’
I sounded just like my father. Why was she back in our house with that middle-aged shyster?
Barbra tried not to keep smiling, sucking in her bottom lip. She stared at Abigail’s drawings in the front hallway, the new ones that had just been framed.
‘These are good,’ she said coyly. ‘She’s gotten really, really good.’
Brazen, avoidant, that same gruff tickling voice. Did she actually think she could just be reinstated?
‘We came from Peru,’ Barbra said. ‘This is just a pit stop, all right?’
My blood pumped too fast. Surprise, no surprise. You already came and you conquered, bitch. Do not come back.
‘Hey. Relax, bruh. Why don’t you chill out a bit?’
I stress-checked my phone. My girlfriend was going to be here too soon. Barbra and Ariane were going to meet. God, there was nothing I could do about this now.
For seven years, I’d been trying to deal with myself in this world. I’d thought that graduate school was going to do that for me. I’d thought that reading book after book and then writing a thesis was going to sweep all my thoughts into actions at the very least. I was wrong. I still lived at home with my father. School had not carved my fucking problems out of me. Because I had this original problem, the origin of all my problems: Barbra, the leghold trap in our basement. Barbra the Israeli who infiltrated our house for eight fucked weeks when I was sixteen.
My fundamental problem: I turned Hebrew, fractious.
My whole entire head: five-fingered, forked.
I sensed the shyster roaming around somewhere behind me. Her breasts were still massive. I smelled her beef-stock armpits. She wore this weird, rose-coloured, silky potatosack dress. Striped stockings. Buzzed hair. I wanted to touch her. That pinkish sack dress made her look like an inmate.
‘This place hasn’t changed one bit, not at all.’
My father was the one who had brought Barbra here. I was the one who made the bitch bloom. Bloom is not the right word, but it’s what I use for a molester.
I was still living at home after seven fucking years when I should’ve been in the US like my sister, who was winning genius awards.
The shyster reappeared at her side. He clamped his hand back on her neck. Her shorn head tipped backwards. She moaned freer and shivered. I know white men think they master the universe like this.
§
There used to be a building near our house where women sat on green-painted benches in a small cement courtyard behind a buckling ten-foot-tall fence. Those women watched their kids play on a set of rusted monkey bars. My mother told me that the building was for victims of domestic abuse.
‘When a man hits the woman he lives with,’ my mother said, ‘it’s called domestic abuse. Being here means that the women have left their abusive situations.’
I remember trying to imagine exactly what the men did to those women who were smoking with each other on the benches behind the fence. Why did their clothes look too big or too tight? Why was the building rundown? Why didn’t their kids go to school? I imagined a knock-kneed kick from a man in a suit and one of those women writhing on a kitchen floor. I imagined her raggedy nightdress and a purple eye socket. God, it was disturbing. All their kids on the monkey bars, screaming. I saw flour bags exploding. Sex by the man in a suit. His belt out and pants down, smothering her.
I would never hit a girl, I promised myself when I was ten.
But when Jessie Yung in Grade 6 said that my breath smelled like cat food, I wanted to punch her in the gut.
And once, in Grade 8, I touched Mia Greenwald through her T-shirt while she was passed out drunk on Joel’s basement couch. I knew that was abuse, domestic abuse.
Sometimes I hated my sister, too, when we were kids. I hated her so-called special needs. I knew there was actually nothing wrong with Abigail when everyone treated her so carefully.
As I grew up, I think this is what happened: there was something that bothered me in general about girls. It was how they sometimes acted dainty and sometimes crude – even in the same sentence – and no one called them on it. They were two-faced, I’m saying, they herded together. Sometimes I wanted to enter their groups and make space for myself so that they couldn’t so flippantly lord their duplicity.
It was not my mother who pinpointed this tendency in me.
The Israeli bitch found it and used it immediately.