Lullabies for Suffering Read online

  Her mother picks up the purse she calls a clutch and points at Ariel. “Be good.” Ariel promises to be good. Her mother doesn’t tell Vince to be good. She just kisses the top of Ariel’s head and click-clacks out the door.

  Vince asks her what she wants to do. She studies his puffy face. He looks like he cries a lot, like he’s alone a lot, like he doesn’t talk out loud enough. She decides right here, right now, that she is the boss of this new episode. She will decide what happens next. This is her house, not his, and he doesn’t know anything about this kitchen, about her dad, about what he used to do when he came into her bedroom late at night. Vince doesn’t know how the sink makes a funny noise if you don’t turn it on hard enough. He is not like one of the girl babysitters either. He doesn’t look at the clock like he wants time to pass so that he can invite a girl over to touch him. She can tell that he has no one who thinks about him. She misses her dad even though she shouldn’t and Vince sticks his hands into his pockets.

  “So, how’s it going, Ariel? Did you have a good year at school?”

  She asks the questions, not him. She tilts her chin. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” he says. “How old are you?”

  Nope. She asks the questions, not him. “Do you like college?”

  He nods. “I just finished my first year. It’s pretty great, yep.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  That question is a fun one. It makes his skin turn red. “Yep,” he says. “She’s back home in Madison.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Rhiannon,” he says, and he turns even redder. Ariel is winning. Nobody in real life is named Rhiannon, except for that one girl at school and there’s no way that Ariel would know two Rhiannons. He’s lying. Already he stopped asking questions. He wants more questions because he wants to tell more stories about things that aren’t true. This is fun, being in charge, and Ariel wishes that her dad could watch this cartoon. And then she feels fire inside because her mother told her not to think about her dad. Ever.

  Vince

  A twelve-year-old girl sits next to you on this green velour couch. Twelve is young. It isn’t even thirteen and she’s sitting like she’s older, but you can’t blame a child for what she does. You are a sick motherfucker. You would never touch a child. You remember what you learned about in Child Psych—projection—and you wonder if that’s what this is. If you’re so hard up that you’re fantasizing that you’re with an older girl, age appropriate, one who’s going through changes of her own and curious about boys, curious about you. Do you call the restaurant? Do you call the non-emergency police number? No. No. There is nothing to say. There is nothing wrong. It’s all in your head, you idiot. You think because your mom is sick that all girls are sick. That’s what this is. Projection.

  You stare at the TV. Maybe you are cursed. Maybe your mother’s sobriety can’t stick because you are a bad curse for all women, all girls. You focus on the objective reality. You take inventory of the decor in the room, the blue shag carpet, a ticking clock and a flickering light bulb. The light bulb surprises you. Mr. Pyle is a Mr. Fix It and you don’t remember a lot about your time in this house, but you do remember everything always functioning, never flickering.

  “Be right back,” she says. “I think I just got my period.”

  That’s not normal. She’s not old enough for that, is she? And what the hell do you know about girls, about periods? Only that it’s not right for her to tell you about it.

  You hear her flush the toilet and she returns and sits even closer. She pulls her hair up and runs her fingers through it. “Nope,” she says. “Just being paranoid.”

  She’s in charge of you and your eyes hurt from the flickering bulb overhead. You would get up and turn it off, but that would be wrong, turning off the lights when you’re alone with a girl. You need that light right now, or else who knows? You might actually touch her. The thought makes you hate yourself because the thought is wrong. You wouldn’t ever do that. But the world would expect that of you, wouldn’t it? Fucked up virgin with a mother in and out of treatment comes onto a twelve year-old girl. Disgusting. Foul. Lock him up in prison and throw away the key.

  “I’m tired,” she says. “Pause the movie.”

  You pause Freaky Friday and sit there under the blinking bulb. It’s a torture device, that light bulb. When she comes back, she’s wearing a threadbare nightie. She turns off the light. She sits, but she doesn’t face the TV. She faces you and she hikes up the nightie and she isn’t wearing any panties. You should call them underwear. Not panties. If you tell her to put some on, that means you noticed that she took them off. If you don’t tell her to put some on, then you are sitting alone with a girl wearing no panties. No underwear. You play the movie. You wonder what your mom is doing right now, if she’s in a therapy circle with other adults like her or if she’s telling her roommate that this time, things will be different, that timing is everything. Everything.

  Ariel

  He’s so weird. He’s afraid of her. She’s not scary. He doesn’t tell her to put on panties and he probably doesn’t even like Freaky Friday but he’s watching intensely, like it’s the type of story that’s hard to follow. Ariel’s mind swirls with wishes. She wishes he went to her school and she wishes he could sleep over and she wishes he could live in her house. He’s safe the way most people are dangerous. If bad guys broke in, if her dad showed up to take her away, Vince would make him leave even though her dad is so much bigger, so much stronger.

  She doesn’t like it when her dad pops into her head. It isn’t just because her mom told her not to think about him. It’s her story now and she doesn’t want her dad to be in the story at all anymore. She wants a fresh start, her and Vince. She pulls her legs to her chest and closes the window to her body with her nightgown. His whole body changes, like he’s relieved. He is nice. Good.

  She will let him be in charge now and she reaches for the snacks on the coffee table. “Can I eat a fruit roll-up?”

  He still won’t look at her. “You just ate one, Ariel. You don’t want to get sick.”

  It’s funny how he thinks that two fruit roll-ups will make you sick. Her mom would totally disagree. Her mom says children are resilient, nothing like adults, who can never bounce back from anything.

  “I had a cherry one,” she says. “Now I want a grape one cuz I can’t get the taste out of my mouth. I hate when that happens, you know?”

  He looks at her. He can’t really be eighteen, not inside. He’s like her. He’s twelve. “Or,” he says, all slow like. “You could go and brush your teeth.”

  She rolls her eyes like the girls at school who think her dad still lives here. “Whatever,” she says. “I don’t even care.”

  His voice changes, like he wants to be the adult again. “Does your mother let you eat two?”

  Ariel doesn’t want to talk about her mother. Her mother is the reason her dad was here in the first place, the reason Ariel exists. “My mom doesn’t care what I eat. I mean, I’m twelve. I eat what I want.”

  “Okay,” he says. “One more. But that’s it.”

  She reaches for the box and takes two. She offers him the purple one, the one she doesn’t want. “One for me and one for you.”

  He doesn’t take it at first. She pictures them in the cartoon. His eyes are saucers and hers are smaller, but she is smaller, so it all makes sense, in context. Finally, he takes the fruit roll-up. He eats it like someone who was starving, scarfing it all down in one big bite. He was like that when he was a kid, too. Those were the good days, when she was too little to say all that much, when the carpets were all soft and sometimes Vince was over, and sometimes he wasn’t, and all the time, her bedroom was just hers.

  Vince

  You still don’t know what to do. Something is wrong with her and you know it. It’s like they say about porn. You know it when you see it. You eat another fruit roll-up, as if that will help, as if you don’t know that gorging on D
evil Dogs never helped your mother get clean, stay clean.

  The light bulb doesn’t just flicker. It sizzles. It’s noisy. She exposed herself to you. You know it. You didn’t look, but you saw. Your first vagina in real life and it was a child’s. You should call your girlfriend Rhiannon to ask her for advice but she doesn’t exist, does she? You should call the police, but it’s too late for that now, just like it was too late for you to save your mother with a Slip ‘N Slide. You fuck up everything and you choke on the plastic wrapper that you neglected to tear off the fruit roll-up.

  She’s laughing. “Omigod, are you eating the wrapper?”

  You never grew up. You are a child. You still like to eat this crap and you eat too fast and the movie is growing on you and you reach for the box and she laughs. She’s been watching you all this time, holding her nightgown over her knees. When she laughs, she looks more like her mother, and you can imagine her in six years, on campus, and it would be fun to eat lunch with her and your head is vile. Disgusting. She’s a child and a minute ago you were concerned for her safety.

  You fight a smile. You smile when you are nervous, which you are. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “It’s just neat to see you. It’s weird how we’re the same but we’re not, you know? Like how we change but we don’t.”

  She pulls the nightgown even tighter. It’s not as see-through as you thought. The light bulb was playing tricks on you. Maybe it was all in your head. Maybe she never exposed herself. Maybe you were hallucinating because you want everyone to have problems like you. It’s just a fucking light bulb and Mrs. Pyle did say that everything is great. You are the one who’s fucked up. You. Not her.

  “Hey,” she says. “Is your mom really all better?”

  You won’t burden her. She’s a child. “Yep,” you say. “She’s doing great.”

  “Phew,” she says. “That’s awesome. My mom always said that would never happen. She said it was sad but true that women who use drugs like her never get better.”

  You want to eat the cardboard box and all the plastic wrappers. Mrs. Pyle betrayed you. She betrayed your mom, your mom who always beat herself up about those perfect Pyles, how they always had their ‘shit’ together. And she would get down on herself for swearing in front of you, for using the word ‘shit’, as if you didn’t hear swears at school all the time. Your mom tried so hard to be good like Mrs. Pyle. She sent them thank you notes and wasted money on fruit baskets and now to find out that all along, they didn’t believe in her, not the way you did, do.

  “Well,” you say. “Moms say stuff. But mine’s okay. I bet your mom’s busy with your dad out of town so much.”

  That was mean and you crossed a line and you’re not even sure why but you know you did. She drops her bare feet onto the table. Her legs are open and she pulls up the nightgown and scratches her leg. “It’s okay,” she says. But it isn’t. “He’s making a lot of money and we’re going to Disney later this year.”

  “Cool,” you say, and you’ve never been to Disney. She has more life experience than you, which is degrading because she is six years younger than you. But your mind is stuck on the nature of her experience. What is it exactly?

  “Will your dad go, too?”

  She moves her feet so that they press into the edge of the table. Her nightgown slips over her knees and bunches at her crotch. You said crotch. Not out loud but in your head and again you look at the phone. You should call the non-emergency police. Or child services. Someone.

  “Yeah,” she says. “If he wants to.”

  “Well, of course he wants to.”

  Her eyes are glossy. There’s a new movie on the TV and she watches the two Lindsay Lohans scheme and plot. “He always gets what he wants,” she says. “Always.”

  She picks up the remote control and slides her body into the corner of the sofa. She is done with you. She doesn’t want to talk to you anymore and you failed to save her, to help her, to turn off the TV and say the right things and now the remote is in her lap and you would have to walk over to the TV and shut off the TV if you wanted to confront her. But you can’t do that. You don’t trust your dumb head because how could you? Look at your mom. Never sticking. Look at you, look at your legs—still pillowy in spite of how hard you tried living on celery and Diet Sprite. You’re still soft, like ice cream, and this is the body you are stuck with and it sticks, unlike your mother’s sobriety.

  Eventually she falls asleep. You are afraid to make a noise, to wake her up. You pick up a blanket and lay it on her body. This is when the babysitter calls a girl to come over, to sneak outside and make out in the back yard. But you don’t have a girlfriend. You go to Ariel’s room. You turn on the light. You find her diary under her bed. It’s mostly about boys at school and you go way back to read when you were around but you’re not in there that much. You feel invisible. You turn the diary over and find a drawing on the interior of the hardback cover. It’s a sketch of a girl, a body that’s like a map. She has no eyes, no mouth, no nose. There are dozens of little dots on her anatomy, and all the little dots are in the place where her panties should be. Some are red and some are pink. You can tell when the red pen wore out when the pink pen was brand new, plump with ink, and you can tell when that one ran out, too.

  You return the diary to its proper place. They are not the perfect Pyles. Your mother is a cokehead, but she never crept into your bed and touched you. You never drew pictures of your hurt body. You should have played along with the Slip‘N Slide. You lived in this house on and off for so long and you always thought Mr. Pyle was so great. You are a fucking idiot. A virgin. And for the first time in your life you realize that you are lucky to be a fucking idiot, a virgin. At least you aren’t like Ariel.

  Mrs. Pyle

  Yes, Mrs. Suzanne Pyle will have another drink.

  She deserves it. She’s working her tail off at home, at the office, trying to hold things together. She didn’t rat out Monster because she needs Monster’s money if they want to get the sink fixed, go to Disney. That doesn’t make her a bad person. It makes her a practical person. She doesn’t want to take Monster’s money, but she needs Monster’s money, and she’s not an alcoholic either. She has a high tolerance. Her friends are judging her, glancing at her vodka martini, at each other. They’re just like Monster. He threatened to go to the police about Suzanne’s “drinking.” Okay, so Suzanne drinks at lunch and was tipsy a few times she picked Ariel up from school. But nobody found out and nobody died and she’s a damn good drunk driver, even if that’s not the sort of thing that would ever hold up in court.

  Monster is the bad one, not her. She’s good, full of good ideas, like calling poor Vince from up the street to babysit. It was nice, the way he sounded on the phone. It was so obvious that he has a crush on her. Maybe he even thinks about her when he jerks off. It’s a nice thing, thinking that this sweet boy who hasn’t grown into his body enough to become a rotten man would load all of his lust on to her.

  Gloria yawns. “So when is Roger back?”

  “Oh, you know,” she says. “Not anytime soon. This promotion is terrific, but he’s on the road constantly.”

  Suzanne knows that she’s the kind of woman you believe. The cops would have believed her, too, but Ariel’s been through enough. She doesn’t need to play with an anatomically correct doll in front of a two-way mirror and Suzanne certainly isn’t in a rush to tell her friends that she’s getting divorced. (The cause: irreconcilable differences. Normal. Common.) Suzanne likes being thought of as married, as a part of Mr. & Mrs. Pyle. Mrs. Suzanne Pyle is someone who chooses the right man, the right blouse, the right babysitter. It isn’t fair that she has to let go of that because of what Monster did. She hugs her friends. Bye. Bye. They look at each other, at her empty glass. Fuck you, friends.

  She makes it home just fine, thank you. The cops didn’t stop her. And if they had flashed their lights and pulled her over, she would have talked her way out of it. She pops a breath
mint. She doesn’t want Vince to smell the alcohol on her breath. The poor kid has enough to worry about, that cluster-fuck of a mother with her “addiction is a disease” nonsense. It’s bullshit. That first line of coke is a choice, and Vince’s mother is no different from Monster, who tried the same excuse with Suzanne when she caught him in Ariel’s bedroom. I’m not a monster. I’m just sick.

  Bullshit and Suzanne slams the car door. She fluffs her hair and freshens her lipstick. She sacrificed so much already. She turned down a promotion to stay home when Ariel was young. She loved it when Vince’s mother would cave to her “addiction” and lose another dead-end job and go to rehab. What a high it was to sacrifice more of her precious time to care for someone else’s child. She remembers young Vince gorging on her tuna casserole. No one ever taught him to eat with his mouth closed.

  She opens the door. “I’m home!”

  He’s lost a little weight, but he’s not there yet, probably still a virgin, the way he looks at her like he wants to pounce. She’s still got it, she does. She asks him how everything went and she sounds sober. He shoves his hands in his pockets, no doubt willing the erection growing down there to quit. “Could I...Could we talk for a second?”

  She cups his chin in her hand. “Of course, honey. You can always talk to me.”

  She directs him into the kitchen and her movements are deliberate. She doesn’t have an itch on her waist but she scratches anyway, guiding his eyes to her ass. Still got that, too. “Can I get you something to drink? Water? Beer?”

  “I’m okay,” he says. He sits at the table. Awkward. Awkward because his mother never took care of him and he’s completely overwhelmed by Suzanne’s caring ways. Suzanne’s having a beer because Suzanne deserves a beer. She pops the can. Pffss. “Honey,” she says. “I get the feeling your mom’s not doing so great.”