Rerun: Alana Noel Voth presents ... Night with a Man on the Moon (or. 10/08/08)

I took Janelle’s make up out of a cupboard and then started to apply it to my face, copping the cover of Cosmopolitan, flawless skin, wet lips. Years later, my son would tell me Jessica Alba was “all special effects” in a movie because no one was actually that pretty, but in just a couple years I’d learn about photographers who retouched photos and the angle of light. I could actually appear inhuman. I rushed from Janelle’s bathroom then stood in the doorway to the kitchen again. “How do I look?”

Janelle walked to the doorway then wet her finger before rubbing the tip under my left eye. “Smudge,” she said. Her saliva was warm on my skin.

“What about my other eye?”

“Fine.”

“Oh.”

Janelle was back across the kitchen again. She filled a big pot with water. When I’d lived at home, my father hadn’t let me wear make up or curl my hair. My step mother didn’t wear make up either. For years, my step mother and I were at odds in an oppressed environment. What I mean is we were locked in this battle to have my father; we each wanted this enormous cross to bear; and she won him. I told her later she was an enabler: she’d enabled my father’s dysfunction. Years after that, I’d say I couldn’t believe she’d stayed married to him. I’d tell my father he was lucky. Otherwise, he’d be alone. Actually, he’d be dead. My step mother’s cross to bear, my father’s life.

From his wheelchair Brandon said, “You look beautiful,” and I figured he didn’t really mean that or he did because he was in a wheelchair. Anyway I felt vaporous and selfish. I wished I could scratch paint off the walls, pour milk on the floor, color outside the lines, scream with the radio. Next day, my pupils would look shot out like two man holes, and I'd feel as if my body was evaporating driving to the bus stop to pick up my mother. Ironic I rendered myself into such a weak and vulnerable state the first time I'd meet her. You think I’d want to impress her. You’d think I’d want to show this person who’d chosen something else over me what I’d become. Maybe I did. Under developed. I had no idea what to expect from my biological mother. Some things you can't prevent. By midnight that night, I was so sick I couldn’t get out of bed. I felt like a Barbie doll I used to toss in the air to see how she’d land, twisted, backwards, fucked up. How awful it was when briefly my father came inside my apartment, was in the same room with my mother, and my father said my mother's name; she said his, and then I couldn’t fucking believe they were my parents. Who were these people, how were they ever together? I felt foreign and fractured. My fever peaked. I had to return upstairs to bed.

Later, my father would say my step mother had remained in the car sobbing the brief time he was inside the apartment. He’d say she’d wanted to come inside and take care of me, knowing I was sick. Thing was, neither she nor my father took care of me anymore.

My biological mother made soup that weekend, Ramen noodles with added vegetables. She read a few of my stories and told me they were good. One story had an angel in it, and the angel was named after her. All so ridicules. I’d go on to other “angels,” older or more successful women than myself, more stable, I’d think, women who were capable and beautiful, admirable, and I’d feel for them this boundless speechless love, and yet each one of them would eventually expose how flawed they were, unhappier than me even, sad and tormented their marriages, frustrated and bullied. Took a long time before any of it made any sense to me, why I loved them, how I already knew they were flawed.

Rest of the time my mother stayed that weekend, she smoked pot with my roommate, Regan, and the scent wafted up the stairs, around a corner, and into my room as I lied on my bed shivering. Sometimes I still smell marijuana. I don’t mean because I’m around it, or smoking it either. I mean I smell pot and then inhale it, hold it. Like I covet a ghost.

Sometime that weekend, I drove myself to a doctor's office and barely made it across a parking lot. I felt like I was hobbled. This wasn’t like the time my father had beat me with a leather belt, and then I went to school the next day. It was worse. I couldn’t fall into my mother’s arms. Already I was disillusioned, already I was moving on. I’d done this to myself. Like a test, testing us both.

That night in Janelle’s house, high on the meth, I’d wanted to say something to her. How are you a mother? You need to clean your shit up. I ground my teeth savagely. Frying pan full of meat, cans of tomato paste on the counter, a pile of olives on a cutting board and mushrooms, a bag of spaghetti noodles, the spices lined up. Janelle flicked her hair over one shoulder and then inhaled more meth while steam rose off the stove, all that boiling water. Her daughter, Jeri, was four years old. Once, Janelle took me to this place, Cahoots. Rough bar. Live band. Shots of tequila. The way Janelle partied, I judged her. I was a hypocrite. People did what they wanted, right? She should have been home. I didn't have any kids. Janelle's mother was taking care of her daughter. The little girl, Jeri, was growing up on a ranch. I’d lived with my grandparents when I was little, after my mother left. My father drove us to Grand Forks North Dakota then left me with his parents. They were nice people, my grandparents; they gave me toys, hugs and kisses, no explanations. I used to dress in my grandmother's nightgowns then stand on the balcony in front of her bedroom and wait. No idea who I wished for more, or if the right person showed up.

When I lived with my father again, he had lots of girlfriends. Sharon, Jacqueline, Patricia. I'd inhale their perfume. Look into their blond hair, covet their turtleneck sweaters. The girlfriends never stayed long. That was OK with me, even if I had told my father, "I want a mother." I didn't know what that meant, to have a mother. I used to crawl into my first-grade teacher’s lap. I had no memory of my biological mother. No idea if I’d asked anyone, let alone my father, “Where is she?” My father was there. Larger than life. I dreamed once a giant man came out the top of a hospital at the end of street where one of my babysitter’s lived. Who knows when my father became the monster who'd chased my mother away? But suddenly, maybe when I was thirteen or fifteen, nineteen, forever and a day, he was the bad guy. He’d made my mother leave me.

Once, I got into the middle of something between Janelle and her boyfriend, Damon. Janelle had been crying, hugging herself in her own arms outside a bar, deep night, cool wind, and I’d put myself in front of her, shielding her from Damon, and he was about to punch me in the face. I froze entirely, like slow motion, this guy's fist above me in the night air, stars, and the concrete beneath me, the bar entrance to the right, and then it burst from my lips. "Remember who my father is." Everyone was afraid of my father. Especially me. I wiped the spittle from my mouth, relishing in the tidal wave of my father washing over me, the entire scene, Damon's face, and then Damon lowered his fist. Janelle left with him that night. Love was a contest I didn’t win.

Here’s another memory. The man I love. Tall, blonde sideburns, denim jacket, a pack of Marblo Red cigarettes in a front pocket. He stands beside the woman he's married to now. They've called me into the garage. The sun reaches only so far. I must be in the sunlight. You know how the sunlight feels? I've been singled out, I'm too warm. They're a few feet away standing together looking at me. And I want to shrink. I want to grow larger than life. My father puts his hand on my step mother's arm and then says, You'll stop doing whatever it is you've done to try and break us up. I've no translation, nothing specific. No words. My father must have described in detail what I'd done to try and break them up. I’m sure I did something. The fights they had for a while, epic. I’d lie in bed and think, "After this one she's bound to leave." Except my step mother came in my room one night and sat on the end of my bed, uninvited. Nothing here was mine anymore. My step mother would come into my room time and time again and find something I'd written, hidden, done, and then show it to my father, who would ground me to my room or use the belt on my ass.

This is what it looks like when you lose, when your father falls out of love with you. My step mother said from the end of my bed "I'm not leaving. So what? I must have thought. Oh, yes, you are. In the garage, standing just out of the light, my father said, "I love Janet.” And so I was wrecked now. He chose her. The moment I just died. I was defined.

In high school, my senior year, a boy told me I looked good in jeans. He said, “You have a great butt.” Sometimes at home my father punished me by telling me to bend over and grab my ankles, and then my ass stuck up in the air, the supreme humiliation, subjectification. My father would stand behind me snapping the strap of his leather belt saying, “Your ankles. Goddammit your ankles. I said grab your ankles.” And it would go on. Him behind me snapping the belt. Me crying, shuddering. Primed to take it in the ass.

My first boyfriend Scott dragged me off my feet from a parking lot into the passenger seat of his friend's car. He'd also locked me in his bathroom because of the way I looked one night I planned to go to a live rock show. You look like a slut. Not so far from how my father used to put it. You look ridicules because I’d used lip gloss. I got so mad at Scott that night I poured all his shampoo down the drain, squeezed all the toothpaste from the tube, flushed a used bar of soap down the toilet, and then counted aspirin out on the counter, twenty-four, one for each year of his life. Even when I'd kicked the bathroom door with the heel of my shoe, it wouldn't budge, and so I'd lined the aspirin up. I could hear him on the phone to someone, a friend, maybe the one, Charles, who’d once hissed in my ear, “You’re not so hot, bitch,” and then felt my breast in a bar between a clammy press of people. "She's not going anywhere,” Scott said. I scooped the aspirin into my hand and then instead of letting them slide into my mouth, I screamed through the door. "I hate you!"Soon as I get out of here, you'll never see me again. I'd yelled like that at my father once, and then he'd held me down by the back of my neck and struck me across my shoulders, back, ass, and legs with a leather belt. It never occurred to me the next day as I limped to gym class that another girl would spy my bruises in the locker room then report me to the school nurse who'd demand, "Who did this to you?" What I was certain of was another girl would see my bruises and know I'd deserved it.

When Scott opened the bathroom door, I felt confused like an animal when its captor has opened its cage and then goads you to go on, just go, what’s the problem? Before I’d even formulated the question or gotten close to an answer, Scott dropped to his knees in front of me and started to sob.

My father used to come into my room then drop to his knees at my bedside and weep into my hand. I'd lie still peering at him through my eyelashes not sure if he was real. I’d want it to be real. The repentance, his sorrow, his need. Scott looked at me from the floor, and I had this sudden sneaking suspicion I was exactly what he'd accused me of. Maybe I would have left him for a guy in a band. Wasn't it always in the back of my head? A rock star. Someone bright and shiny and larger than life and entirely unattainable. Part of me wished I could pop Scott’s head between my hands.

Once, my biological mother threw a statue she'd made of herself pregnant with me at my father, and he'd kept the statue. What I mean is, my father pieced the statue back together so meticulously you could run a finger over the point of a chin, line of an arm, the swell of a gown, maybe, Madonna like, hairline fractures across the Plaster of Paris belly, no real facial features. My father kept the statue on a shelf with a row of books: Shogun, The Human Ape, Flowers for Algernon.

I wonder how often my step mother looked at the statue and hated it more than anything else in the world, that he wouldn’t let go of her, even if it was a statue, my step mother became desperate afraid. And I went to the statue often and held it my hands and tried to conjure a face. I tried to conjure an identity in spite of my life then. I did what I could to never see my step mother crying.

That night at Janelle’s, I never saw how Brandon got in and out of places in his wheelchair. How did he go to the bathroom? I peered at Janelle in the kitchen and grinded my teeth while I rocked back and forth sitting on the floor holding my knees, and then I proclaimed, “My father is an asshole.” Heil, Hitler! I was so fucking high.

Brandon leaned forward in his wheelchair and touched my face. "You OK?"

"Uh-huh, uh-huh."

"You know what I do when I don’t have drugs?” he said.

“No. What do you do?"

I didn't even look at him. I rocked back and forth and stared into the kitchen, and Janelle was in there scrubbing dishes. Why were the dishes all dirty? I couldn't figure it out.

“I drink bottles of cough syrup,” he said.

When Brandon was sixteen, he'd driven his Camero into a ditch and then the car had rolled twice before pinning him underneath it. Weird, how dissociated Janelle was. I went on and on to Brandon, thin air, the gods, about my father, my fatherfuckingfather. It was easy, all consuming, the sheer blistered bliss I discovered in placing the blame on my father: he ruined my childhood, beat and belittled me: I’d been dumped at the age of nine by the love of my life, and thanks to him, I’d had no chance at all at a healthy relationship with anyone. On the floor at the foot of a boy’s wheelchair I gnawed away on my own spiritual paw. Brandon had these gazelle thin legs. My problems were larger.
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