CHAPTER 2
Cate
My father died in a car accident in Nevada when I was three. I was too young to understand, grasping only what my mother told me: that my dad wasn’t coming home and that we were going to live with my grandmother in a place called Hackensack. I remember packing up our apartment in Las Vegas and loading our belongings into the back of my mom’s blue Pinto. I cried saying goodbye to Pepper, my black kitten, who we left with a neighbor because my grandmother was allergic. It later struck me as odd that I felt sadder about Pepper than about my father.
When I got to kindergarten, I noticed that my classmates put dads in their drawings, along with brothers and sisters and dogs. I had a grandmother, but she was mean to my mom, so I left her out of my pictures. Once I drew my father standing on the other side of me, and my grandmother got mad, calling him a loser, making my mom cry.
A short time after that, my mom and I moved into our own apartment. We didn’t see much of my grandmother anymore, which was fine by me. Even better, my mom let me get a new cat, which I named Pepper, Jr. Around that time, she also gave me a photograph of my dad—the only one I’d ever seen. It was black and white, but I could somehow tell that he had blond hair and blue eyes like me. In it, he is leaning on a doorframe, wearing a plaid shirt and cowboy boots. He has long sideburns, and his expression is plain—not happy or sad. It’s not a lot to go on, but from there I filled in the gaps, imagining that he had been the strong, silent type, rugged and intrepid and a bit mysterious. Like the Marlboro Man. My mom didn’t corroborate my vision, but she didn’t contradict it, either. In fact, she didn’t talk about him much at all, and I learned not to ask questions. It made her too sad.
Eventually, my mom began looking for a new husband. She was beautiful—taller and thinner than other mothers, with long blond hair that she set in rollers at night. Wherever she went, men stopped to talk to her. She also met a lot of them at the Manna Diner, where she worked as a waitress. They’d ask for her phone number, and she would pretty much always give it to them, even to the bald, ugly guys, because she said you never could tell if a fellow had money. My mom talked incessantly of money and men, making both seem like prerequisites to happiness.
In my mind, it didn’t add up. I was poor. I was fatherless. But I was still happy. I loved our cozy, cluttered third-floor apartment at Queen’s Court with its shag green carpet and concrete balcony with a bird’s-eye view of the parking lot. I would sit out there for hours, playing with my Barbies while I waited for my mom to get home from work. There was always something exciting happening down below—from a kickball game to a screaming match to a make-out session—and it was almost always more entertaining than whatever Gloria, the old lady who babysat me, was watching on our color television, its small screen distorted with zigzag lines and sometimes a white-out blizzard of fuzz. As far as I was concerned, our television was the only thing that needed an upgrade. Otherwise, I thought our life was just fine.
Until my mom got a new boyfriend, that is. Whenever she did, things got messed up. Either I would get kicked out of the bed my mom and I shared and be forced to sleep on the hard, scratchy sofa, or she would disappear for days at a time, leaving me with Gloria. The worst part, though, was what happened when those men inevitably vanished, and my mom would sleep, drink, and cry all hours of the day. Eventually, she would get over it, but only when another man came along. She didn’t know how to be happy without one and constantly dreamed of our being rescued and taken to a nice house in Montclair. I’d never been, but she said it was a suburb in New Jersey where rich people lived.
In theory, I understood the fairy tale she was after, and I was hopeful she would find it, for her sake and mine. I dreamed of a kind stepfather, imagining Mike Brady: a handsome architect who kissed my mom in the kitchen and helped me with my homework. Even better if he came with three sons, a dog, and an Astroturf backyard complete with a swing set and teeter-totter. In reality, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I also intuitively understood that no man was better than the wrong man. If only my mom had agreed.
When I was ten years old, she met Chip, a cop who came into the diner and charmed her over his sliders and coconut cream pie before leaving a tip bigger than the check. His phone number was written on the back.
“He’s perfect,” my mom said as she got ready for bed that night, slathering Oil of Olay on her face and neck.
“And he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring?” I asked—because that had happened a few times.
“I’m positive,” she said. “I checked his hand the second he sat down.”
“And he had good manners?” I asked.
This was her favorite screening device, though she went out with the rude ones, too.
“Yes,” she said. “Not a crumb left on the table, and he even stacked his dishes and folded his napkin on his plate.”
This seemed a little extreme to me, like a red flag of a different kind. My mom and I were messy and liked it that way, calling our bed a “nest”—which we never made.
When I pointed this out, she interrupted me. “I’m telling you, Cate. He’s dreamy. And I’m going to marry him.”
She sounded so certain that I almost believed her this time, and I was excited when Chip came over a few days later to take my mom out on a date. Without her even asking me, I put on a dress, along with a ribbon in my hair, determined to make a good impression. If things didn’t work out between them, I wasn’t going to be the reason, as I had been in the past, when other men decided they didn’t want the “baggage” of a kid.
When Chip walked into the living room, I stood up from the sofa, where I’d been quietly reading a book, and made eye contact with him. I was shy, so that wasn’t the easiest thing to do. It didn’t help that he was taller and bigger than her usual boyfriends.
“Hi, Cate!” he said in a booming voice that matched his stature.
“Hello, Officer Toledano,” I said, as my mom had instructed.
“Call me Chip!”
I glanced at my mom, who nodded her permission.
“Hi, Chip,” I said.
Beaming down at me, he handed me a plastic bag and said, “I brought you a little something.”
I smiled and thanked him, expecting candy or a drugstore trinket, the two most common gifts given to me by my mom’s boyfriends. Instead, I reached into the bag and pulled out a boxed Barbie with a Ken doll. The tanned Malibu couple sported matching teal and purple monogrammed swimsuits. I was sold.
—
I should have known better, of course. It all turned out to be a ruse—a really good act that lasted nearly three months, just long enough for Chip to propose and my mom to say yes. Shortly after that, Chip showed his true colors, and I realized that he was not only a neat freak but also a jerk, putting my mom and me down at every turn. I quickly came to hate and fear him, and did my best to talk my mom out of getting married. But she didn’t listen, making endless excuses for him. Her favorite was all the stress he was under as an “officer of the law”—she’d say that there was no more difficult job in the world.
“Things will be better once we’re married,” she promised me. “Just hang in there and give him a chance.”
I tried to believe her. I wanted to believe her. But Chip’s moods only worsened, along with his verbal assaults and threats. I told myself there was no way he’d physically hurt my mom, no matter how mad he got, because men didn’t hit women, especially policemen, who were the good guys.
One Saturday night in December, Chip invited my mom to the chief of police’s Christmas party. She was excited and spent all afternoon primping in our bathroom as I played the role of her lady-in-waiting, handing her various makeup brushes and bottles of lotion and perfume and advising her on jewelry and shoes. When we were finished, she looked more gorgeous than usual, her blond hair feathered around her face, her fingers and toes lacquered red to match her sparkly sequined dress. When he arrived, I went to the door with her, excited to see Chip’s reaction, expecting him to gush over her. Instead, he looked my mom up and down, made a face, and said, “You’re going for the hooker look tonight, I see?”
My heart sank, and my mom’s face fell.
“Who are you trying to impress anyway?” Chip said, his words slurring like he’d been drinking. “Nick?”
Nick was Chip’s partner—who I’d noticed was a dead ringer for the Six Million Dollar Man. Unfortunately, my mom had made the mistake of sharing my observation with Chip a few weeks earlier; he’d promptly lost his mind, accusing her of wanting to fuck Nick. I’d heard the f-word before, but never as a verb and not in any relation to my mom.
“I got dressed up for you,” my mom explained, desperation in her eyes. “Not Nick.”
“Well, I think it’s a mighty big coincidence,” Chip said. “You look like shit when it’s just the two of us and then you put on that dress when you know Nick’s going to be there.”
My mom stammered that she would change into something else as he continued to berate her, following her down the hall to our bedroom. I stood frozen in the hallway, wondering if I should go with them or escape to Gloria’s apartment. Sensing that my mom might need reinforcements, I decided to stay by her side, and even forced myself to take a deep breath and defend her.
“Chip. Just so you know, she didn’t buy that dress for Nick. She bought it for you. It cost a lot of money, and she thought you would love it.”
I knew it was the wrong thing to say because Chip began shouting at the top of his lungs that I was a rude, spoiled brat. He then turned his wrath back to my mom, questioning the way she had raised me and whether he even wanted to be married to someone with such a disrespectful brat of a kid. By then, my mom’s makeup was ruined, mascara streaming down her face as she sobbed that she was sorry. That we were both sorry.
“What are you sorry for, Jan?” he yelled.
I could tell it was a trick question, and my mom knew it, too.
“For everything,” she whispered, which seemed like a safe response.
“For being a slut?” he said.
My mom opened her mouth to answer, but he cut her off, yelling louder. “For wanting to fuck Nick?”
“I don’t—” she whimpered. “I only want you—”
“For all the guys you’ve fucked in town? Look at you in that slutty dress. The town whore of Hackensack. Jesus, we have to move.”
As he continued to rant, my mom frantically went through her closet, then pulled out a brown polyester pantsuit. “What about this? Do you like this?”
“Are you serious? Wow,” Chip said. He shook his head, then looked at me. “Your mother here has two extremes. She can look like a slut…or she can look like a dyke. Whaddya think, Cate? Would I rather be seen with a slut or a dyke?”
I didn’t know what a dyke was, but I could tell he didn’t consider it a compliment.
“I can’t take you anywhere, can I, Jan?” he yelled. “You’re an embarrassment. A goddamn embarrassment.”
At that point, I felt a surge of hope that he might finally just dump her, like the others had. My mom would be sad for a while, but she would get over it, and we could go on with our lives. Instead, he shoved my mom into the closet door. As she crashed against it, then fell to the floor, he yelled at her to get up and get ready, that they were going to be late. When she didn’t move, he kicked her in the stomach. I watched in horror and wondered if I should call the police.
In the next instant, I remembered, with a fresh wave of terror, that he was the police, and there wasn’t anything anybody could do to stop him.