Slonim Woods 9, page 12
Larry came in and patted me on the shoulder, nodding as if impressed. “Tal and I like them really wet; that’s the proper way to make them. Good job, Danny,” and he headed back into the living room. When my dad asked how things were going in New York, I said well, fine, you know, actually very good, Larry was taking care of all of us, really helping us all, like for example Isabella, who would be having a really hard time without him, who grew up without really a family at all, as I understood it, and was now being basically saved by him. “He’s helping me, too, even though it’s different,” I told my dad. “He’s helping me figure out things. How to manage my mind so that I can have clarity and how to feel good about the things I do every day, to be really deliberate and live according to principles. You know, I feel like I never really learned principles to live by, and he’s teaching me that. It’s kind of marine-like, the stuff he’s teaching us, like we’re going through a mini boot camp for the mind.”
There was a pause on my phone; I heard my dad take a breath. “It sounds kind of like a cult, Dan. Sometimes, when you talk this way, it sounds like you’re brainwashed or something.”
I tried to turn my cough into a good-natured chuckle as I tipped the glistening eggs onto plates for Larry and Talia. “It’s not,” I said. “It’s not that at all. Anyway I just finished making breakfast for everybody, so I’ve got to go!” I said and hung up. I scrubbed the pan in the sink, then brought Larry and Talia their eggs and told everyone else their food was in the kitchen.
Larry tapped out two orange pills with his coffee. “How was your dad?” he asked, a tiny wet egg curd dotting his lip.
“He’s okay,” I said. “I don’t know, they’re always kind of impossible to talk to.”
Larry took a bite and then put his fork down. He looked around at everyone else. “Notice how he says ‘they’ even though he was just talking to his dad? Isn’t that interesting?” Everyone nodded in unison; it was interesting. “Parenting is difficult. You dad doesn’t know how to relate to you, Danny. Not like me and Tal,” he said. “We’re in sync. Sometimes we think the same thoughts. People can barely believe it. When Talia was born I would just hold her for hours and she would stare into my eyes. Hours. She didn’t do that with anyone else. It was the same with Ava,” he said, and then looked out the window hard, the flesh on the edge of his fist flattening against the glass table. He stood up, said, “I’m sorry, honeygirl,” one hand on Talia’s shoulder, the other holding the half-eaten plate of eggs, and then walked into the kitchen.
“We’re going to get her back, honeyboy,” Talia said. “We’re going to get justice from Bernie and my mother and everyone else who dishonored us.”
She looked at me. “Do you know how rare it is for sisters to be separated in a custody dispute? It’s totally unprecedented. But here we are—the courts were willing to split up our family because with enough power and enough influence and enough corruption you can do anything. You know what’s even more rare than separating sisters? Female child abusers. Mothers who hurt their daughters. Unheard of. That’s why no one will believe us. We’re going to save Ava from that monster. We have to.”
The front door swung open and in came Isabella, trailed by Iban. She sat on the couch in silence as Iban went to confer with Larry about what had happened.
“Of course you will,” I said to Talia, not able to make out what Larry and Iban were saying in the kitchen, but it sounded curt, like a soldier reporting back to a commanding officer. Then silence again, the sound of metal on metal, and Larry came out of the kitchen holding out the pan I’d used to cook the eggs. He didn’t even acknowledge Isabella’s return, the high boil of her sulk on the couch across the room, but instead darted at me, bringing the pan right in front of my face. I jolted back in my chair and it tipped, caught on the carpet, almost fell. The metal disk of the pan’s surface flashed white then silver in the sun from the window. “Danny, why don’t you make this easy and tell everyone what you did?” he said.
“What’s going on? You mean letting Isabella leave earlier? We talked about that, though. I’m sorry, did I—”
“ ‘Did I? Did I?’ ” he asked in an affected voice. “You know what you did. There’s no reason to hide, Danny. No way to hide. I already know.”
Was it a performance? A play I was meant to participate in? I looked around. Santos looked concerned, genuinely worried, but also a little angry at me already, his brow furrowed as he scratched his forehead. Claudia, next to him, leaned forward. “Just tell him, Dan! There’s no reason to waste everyone’s time. You know what it is, so let it out!”
“I’m sorry, I’m just really confused.”
“Okay, you want to do it this way. What is that?” He sat down next to me and held the pan inches away from my face, pointing at its center.
“I don’t see anyth—”
Suddenly his hand was on my thigh, squeezing hard. Through the glass surface of the table I could see his fingers clenching my jeans. It was just a hand, just human grip, but it felt like I’d gotten caught in some kind of industrial machinery, like my leg was being chewed off at the thigh. Blood pulsed at the back of my knee.
“It’s ruined. Do you know how nice this pan is? How much it costs? That is a scratch. Scratches. All over.” He clanked the pan on the table so hard the glass should have smashed, but didn’t. I wondered if he knew, somehow, just how hard to hit the table—hard enough so it would scare me, soft enough that it wouldn’t break. He ran his finger along the metal in a line, saying “Look. LOOK,” each time vising my thigh harder with his hand.
It was me, now. How had it happened? I was on trial, the target of judgment. I’d thought I was somehow better, above the rest of them. When Larry had said people were sabotaging the apartment, it’d seemed absurd to me, something I could never imagine doing—why would Santos or Claudia or Iban do such a thing? But then they’d admit it, I’d watch them say they’d done it, and so it was hard to reject the possibility outright. I looked where Larry was pointing. The surface of the pan still reflected the sun, making the walls shimmer like the bottom of a dock. The surface was covered in tiny, thin scratches that caught the light. Everyone was silent, looking at Larry looking at me looking at the pan. “How’d you do it?” he asked. “Did you use a metal spatula? You scraped it on purpose, as hard as you could? What were you thinking about? Mommy and Daddy?” His hand tightened; snakes of pain shot out from it. I could feel the bone in my thigh. I shook my head. “How did you clean it, then?”
“I used a sponge and dish soap.” From the couch, a disapproving puff of air came from Isabella. Claudia and Santos murmured something between them. Iban stood behind Larry like a mannequin, his thumbs hooked in his pockets. Everything was pain radiating outward from the hand on my thigh.
“You owe me for that pan, Danny,” Larry said. His voice sounded almost sorry for me. “That’s All-Clad from Williams Sonoma. Santos!” he yelled. “Get on your laptop and look up how much that pan costs. Tri-ply stainless steel. Make sure you find it. How much?”
Santos hunched over his computer, furiously looking around the screen, trying to stay out of the line of fire. “It looks like the pan is two hundred dollars.” He was using his serious voice, I could hear it.
“Not the pan, Santos,” Larry was yelling. “How much is the set?”
“Twelve hundred for the full set.”
“From Williams Sonoma?” Larry asked. “That’s not right. When I got them it was eighteen hundred. I don’t forget things, do I, Danny?” I nodded my head like I knew what he was talking about; I had to. It felt difficult even to move my head. His eyes were locked on me. Somehow it felt like they were trapping me, turning my body to concrete. “I bought those pans for Talia. You knew that, didn’t you? I’m trying to make us a home, and what happens, what upsets you so much that you have to ruin it? Why? Because you can’t have what we have? A father who’s trying to look out for you and take care of you?”
“No, I didn’t—”
He grabbed my forearm and turned his hand against the surface of my skin, giving me what kids in grade school called an Indian burn, but worse, somehow, the worst I’d ever received, as if the bone itself was cracking, releasing acid into my bloodstream. He looked straight at me, his eyes crazy, green, the lids fluttering. “You feel that?” he said. “I know you can feel it, Danny. I have you now. You feel it? I don’t use this on many people.”
He twisted the hand more. Fire arced up my arm, got caught in my elbow—it was like every part of me was a funny bone ringing with hollow pain. Everyone else was pulled in toward us, magnetically, jealous of the unique attention I was receiving.
“Look into my eyes,” he said. I tried to look away, but he squeezed even harder. “It feels like you could be trapped in them forever, doesn’t it? I could do that if I wanted to. Make you crazy with just my eyes. You believe that? Actually crazy. I could make it so you never think about anything else. So you see these eyes in your sleep. I could come to you in your dreams. Never anything else, but just my eyes. Keep looking, Danny. What do you see in them? Do you see yourself, curled up, lost, alone? Something striking you, over and over? Do you like this feeling? I could make you feel it forever. Feel it. Let the feeling overtake you. That’s where you live forever now, because you won’t tell me. I see you, Danny. I see you everywhere with these eyes, you understand? I know when you say something against me, when you doubt me, when you fear me. I see it. I see your fear. Tell everyone what happened. Why you felt the need to sabotage me.”
I racked my brain. I had said something against him. Everything had been fine, and then suddenly it wasn’t. The only thing that had happened was the phone call with my dad. If I told him, maybe he’d say I’d told my dad something that had led him to believe this was a cult—it couldn’t have come from nowhere. And what if he came after my dad, made us both get on the phone or something? But I was already in trouble. He already knew, he said. So if I was honest, just totally open, then this would be over. “On the phone, my dad said what you were doing with us sounded like a cult. Us all living here and everything. I only told him good things, about how it was going, about how you were helping. He said it sounded like brainwashing. But he wasn’t being serious, not really. I was telling him about you. I was only saying good stuff.”
Larry nodded, but didn’t let go. “I know, Danny. That’s only part of it. What else?”
I felt like I was sprinting around my head, trying to find something that matched, a key that would let me out of this. I was sure that had been it. “I really don’t know! I don’t, I swear.”
“I’ll give you a hint. It has to do with Claudia.”
I looked over at her, and her face was transformed. It was pleading, willing me to say or do something. I didn’t know what.
“Danny, have you had any contact with Bernie Kerik, or the FBI, or been in touch with Teresa?”
“Your ex-wife? What? No, of course not!”
“But you’ve seen Claudia talk to them.”
“I don’t know, no, I mean, I don’t think so. Not recently, that I know of.”
“When did you see them?” I felt the pressure from his hand on my leg and his hand on my arm radiating toward the center of my body, closing in on my chest. The room was vibrating.
“I don’t know…maybe at Slonim.” I didn’t know what I was saying. It was hard to think, to even know how to remember things. I thought this would end when I was open and honest, but now it was still going, and it felt like I’d entered some imaginary space. I could imagine Claudia talking to men in suits, men who could look like police, or FBI, or whatever I thought dirty cops might look like. I could picture her having a conversation outside of Slonim as I walked up the path, then the men leaving, rounding the corner, and her seeming especially awkward when I reached her at the door, squirrelly, trying to talk about anything else. I could just invent the image in my head, and it was as if I’d discovered it instead, lying there, perfectly matching what Larry wanted. And then it was as if it was real; a memory.
Larry looked around at everyone. “See? Danny knew exactly what he was hiding. Claudia, did you talk to them at Slonim?”
She nodded, said yes, she had, looking ashamed. So it was true, then, not imaginary. I had been hiding it, somehow, from myself. As Larry let go of my leg and hand, the blood rushed back to the parts of me that’d been cut off. “Was that so hard, Danny? I had to help you get there, through the door to the memory you were afraid of, that you’d put somewhere inaccessible. This is straightforward stuff, repressed memories, that you can read about in any psychology textbook. I know how to walk around in your head, whether or not you’ll let me. But it’s faster, and better for you, if you let me in. And the stuff with your dad, forget about that. So Dad said something that made you upset. He knows I’m helping you, but he still has some control, right? So how does he endeavor to hold on to that control? He spins you up, tries to undermine me, tries to sow seeds of doubt in your head. He’s been doing that a long time, hasn’t he? Ever since Slonim, even, he’s been speaking against me, right? Did you repress that memory, too? That’s why you didn’t come talk to me earlier. And instead of coming to me about it, you felt trapped, and tried to lash out.”
My own memories were hidden from me, and my sense of what memories I had, of what was even true, was unreliable compared with what he told me. I guess my dad had probably made me mistrust Larry, though I couldn’t remember ever talking to my dad about him. I must have scratched the pan, too. The pan was scratched, which meant I must have scratched it. And because everything you did was a decision, as Larry had been saying since the beginning, I must have done it on purpose. He went on. “You know deep down that I’m helping you, but part of you wants to be unhappy—it wants the pain to continue. You feel that part inside you, right?”
I nodded. I did feel it. I had to, or else why was I here?
“That part of you doesn’t want me to help. You have to stop listening to it. That part of you doesn’t want me in there, cutting it out, doesn’t want for you to have clarity. To get you to admit that you did something bad, that you expressed your pain outwardly by acting out, I have to show you something that’s worse, that’s more intense in the moment, to overpower that part of you. Danny, you’re going to go study abroad, which Mommy and Daddy aren’t even helping you with, are they? Right? You’re going to get a job and do this all on your own? Then you’d better recognize how far you have to go. You’re broken, and you need to accept it. Feel your arm. It’s fine, right?”
I hinged my arm up and down at the elbow. It hurt a little. It’s fine. “Yeah, it actually is,” I said.
“You’re all right, Danel. You made progress today. You hear that, Iz?” he said, looking over at her. “I gave him a new nickname. Danel, you like that?”
Isabella rolled it over in her mouth. “Danel. Oh yeah, that’s his name,” she said.
Larry slumped back into his seat as if exhausted from effort, but he was practically beaming. It was like some loose end, or a few of them, had been tied up. Claudia looked stunned, and I knew that she must be in much deeper trouble than I could understand, if she’d been talking to Larry’s ex-wife somehow.
“People are so negative about the word ‘brainwashing,’ ” Larry said. “I don’t see what’s wrong with it. That is what I’m doing. I’m washing your brains. You should tell your dad that, Danel,” he said, laughing, and Isabella laughed with him.
Santos piped up from across the room. “I would welcome some brainwashing!”
I kept looking at the frying pan where it sat on the glass table. My fingers burned and prickled, and my new name resounded in my head: almost the same as my real name, but with the “I” removed.
Don’t cry
Don’t raise your eye
It’s only teenage wasteland
I WOKE UP AHEAD of everyone this time, finally. The bedroom door was still closed with Larry, Talia, and Isabella entombed behind it. I felt covered with grime. My stomach ached. I pulled the socks off my feet—it had begun to get a little cold at night—and leaned forward; there were little specks on the tops of my feet, like freckles. But I didn’t have freckles. I wanted urgently to shower, to take this opportunity while Larry was still asleep. But what if he woke up while I was in the bathroom and wanted to use it, to sit in there and do work, critical, time-sensitive work for the government, and I was taking it up? What if I got out and he said my shower was taking too long—even six minutes was too long—and what if that meant I was intentionally doing something to sabotage him? I wanted permission to shower, I wanted him to come out and say it was okay, but I didn’t know how to ask for something like that. I wanted him to just tell me to shower, so that I could. If I did it without him, he would know. I winced, then, at that thought, which might be negative toward Larry, and I wondered if that meant I would do something to damage his things, to lash out. Maybe I should tell him I’d had that thought, so that I wouldn’t do anything to lash out. But that would mean a long conversation, an interrogation, about why I’d had the thought. And then it would be my fault nothing had gotten done, because I had caused the long conversation. So I wouldn’t tell him, and I wouldn’t shower, and I would try not to think anything else.
I was paralyzed on the couch until Larry came out of the bedroom toting his laptop, as if he had been sitting in there awhile, working. I resented him for not freeing me from this cycle of thought by coming out earlier. I had automatically, when the door began to open, rushed to turn on the morning playlist. Then to the kitchen, to grab the fifty-dollar-a-pound bag of Kona coffee beans Larry had told me to get at the Fairway on Eighty-sixth Street, saying it was the only good coffee, though later he would switch, briefly, to Jamaican Blue Mountain, which was somehow even more expensive. I poured the beans into the grinder and was about to grind them at the table, where Larry was sitting with his laptop, when he put the heavy glove of his hand over mine and said, “I’ll do it.”
