Husband no. 5

After your third husband, I’d joke with people that you were like Elizabeth Taylor. At bars, or at other one-upmanship contests, I’d confess to my in-group-of-the-month that I didn’t know exactly how many husbands you’ve technically had (four? six?), but that I was pretty sure you were now on your last. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

When I was a kid, I’d lie – a lot – to get your attention. It started that day I knew that you and dad were done. It was summer. I was seven or eight years old. You were straddling my dad’s chest and holding a serrated steak knife in a not very friendly way. I remember the purple flush of your bulging forehead. I remember the roped veins of your neck like tightened chords of a stand-up bass. “I’ll kill YOU,” you were bellowing at him, “I’ll fucking kill you!” Lately, I see myself in his place, I’m not sure anymore if this actually happened to him, or to me.

The lies began almost immediately afterward. I found a plastic cup of pure silver quarters that you’d been saving since childhood and I would dip into the cup – the cup seemed bottomless – and run off the diner off the interstate (next to the trailer park) and play pinball alone. Old timey, analog pinball that had metal bells and rotating barrels to show the score. One day, I overheard the diner’s owner telling some customer my story, and a stranger (an adult) offered to trade one dollar for four of my quarters. I declined and shoved them into my machine. I knew he wanted the quarters, I just didn’t understand why.

I didn’t understand a lot back then. Soon afterwards, we were living with your parents on Madison Ave (ed. Note: Madison Ave in Bridgeport, Connecticut AIN’T like the Madison Ave you might be picturing by what the street name evokes). The three of us shared and attic bedroom – you shared a bed with my sister – and the rest of our life was packed into U-haul boxes in the basement. We’d rejoined a household and family dynamic you left when you married my father. But here we were again.

The lies started in earnest when I was caught wedging a pair of scissors under the front tire of a neighbor’s car. I can’t remember their offense, but I jammed those scissors up under that tire as a gesture of revenge. One of those punks two houses down had offended your honor – somehow – and this seemed like the best way for me to exact revenge for you. I was eight or nine. Of course, I was too young to know that the owners of the car were watching me the whole time; they saw me get off the bus, leave the sidewalk, and jam the scissors up under the driver’s side tire. At the time, I couldn’t fathom how they had caught me – the concept of front windows (or, more precisely, people can see me even if I don’t see them), was outside of my consciousness.

Minutes later, I was being dragged by the ear in front of my mortified grandparents, the neighbors, and the parents of the neighbors who had witnessed the whole ordeal. The thing was, I was premeditated. I had stolen the scissors from grandma earlier that morning on the way to school. I thought that by popping that front tire, I was righting a wrong that had been done to you, mom. When I failed to get away with it, I felt that I let you down. That somehow, some injustice was being allowed to move forward without recompense. I failed you. But this would not be my last attempt to bring honor to your name.