One night I came to on the stairs. It was the pitch of Nicole’s forced scream-laugh. RARRRRRR. I was climbing over her legs like a mini-Godzilla. Really pushing it RAARRRRRRRR. It wasn’t a ten, it was thrill ride. I sat up, a love song a thread of a ghost, because what am I doing? Can they even see us? I walked downstairs and stood there. I planted my feet right in front of the door, to really take in this snapshot. A broken man at a wide-open door in shadow, cast in the unearthly glow of the light on the porch, Angelica standing guard. She turned off the lights? Waking up inside these moments, bizarre, what? There was a light on the stair, I remember, and my memory of the space gets skewed, we moved, they moved houses, but when? Am I smashing different spaces together, I’m confused, wait, this happened over years, right? Maybe she did a little lighting design, stark lights, in a somber atmosphere cloaked in shadow, with spots of lights, illuminating the foyer in twilight. Is that what the moment felt like, or had she really dimmed the lights, was she a real maestro? This woman. In her tennis skirt. A jury would follow, she went temporarily insane. This is a temporary insanity plea. She found herself in an insane situation.

She’s told that he’s a child rapist, molester, just add on the ornaments to the tree here, but THEN, he starts acting in line with that narrative. Requesting to visit.

“Was she going to act well?” She asked.

But she’s not mentioning his behavior at all at the tennis club, she’s not going, “the man acted strangely.” Forget my behavior, my mother’s behavior, what about his? So that omission, what was that about? Is it hard to walk into a house? I mean, imagine? Imagine! She said. He’s knocking on a door, a stranger’s door, requesting to visit his daughter, and he’s just standing there. Angelica is performing, standing guard, at her WIDE OPEN DOOR, it couldn’t have been WIDER, so there’s nothing CLEAR about Angelica’s play here if you’re innocent, not cognitively impaired? Okay, “time to go…?” She’s most definitely performing. She’s SO nice. She didn’t even really talk to him, she’s just going “here she is Nick!” Running like mad, screaming in glee, weeeeee. Why he’s acting like that? I don’t think he ever tried to step a foot into the house. He obeyed, the first time she opened the door, to some roller coaster ride of a couple of girls — she’s opening up the door all the way to the wall, even graciously. And he stands there and watches this. I didn’t see a shocked man, I saw a broken man, who didn’t even try to step…into her house.

In the Cutlass Supreme to and fro the club, I watched him out of the corner of my eye, any question about how school was, I was — snappy, dismissive, an unusual girl, because, for a moment in time, this situation was my preoccupation. I was pensive, on these rides. “Why didn’t you just pick me up?” Acting like it had just dawned on me, the question, because it did, these spectacles vaguely present. I had to tell him that I was his child at eight, nine years old, so why didn’t you just pick me up? “You hated me and I didn’t know why…” He said. You just have to put yourself in his shoes as girls are running and playing like mad! Having picture, a five and seven year old turning to one another suddenly, HAHAHAHAHHAHA.

“They told vicious lies,” he pointed down, “vicious lies,” except he didn’t KNOW that.

“Shush, we’re not going to tell him what we know…”

Now that— that realization. He didn’t know… ever feel like you grabbed onto a real thread, but it kept disappearing, I couldn’t hang onto that, and I had to grab at memories like DISH SOAP, she said, wait, he didn’t — KNOW? KNOW. Shush! Shush, she said, we were going to tell him, so why is he acting like this? That’s what I don’t understand, even with the secret dementia that he supposedly didn’t have…six years later? I couldn’t orient myself, just grabbing onto that thread, HE DIDN’T KNOW. So why is he ACTING like that? As I write this, order, what order, I found myself IN my body, looking out of my eyes, as a four year old, moving my LOGIC, my four-year-old understanding aside, casting it, WAIT. Suddenly, I’m somewhere, where? Kindergarten? Why? She’s coming torwads me, Dr. J? I’m HOME? WAIT? WHY? It’s not that I didn’t REMEMBER, I started REALIZING where I WAS. So first, DISH SOAP — it was like a shamanic journey, in a sense, NO. My mind split, splitting, was it all a lie? I went through WAY too much disbelief — erasure, people wanted to erase me, so — she said—DISH SOAP, this, that, I was flying through space. I’m HERE. So WHY? Am I home? I was HOME a couple of times??????????????????? When she believed that he was a child molester? Where did I sleep? I didn’t have a bed in this house! Once I could handle — a change, like I was home, but she said I lived there, I lived there, okay, so now what?

At the club, I roared into adulthood, if not motherhood. It was imperative.

“We tried to make this work,” my father said once. Imagine? What the fuck are you talking about?

Back then, I didn’t really see him, the figure at the door. I only saw Dr. J. She was a bright light that cast a dark shadow. He didn’t really exist to me as an active party. She was crazy. It was hard not to sense a past. Did this really happen to her? In some real nightmare? Am I seeing a nightmare? A shot of terror in the night. Would no one do anything even if it were real? A question that broke my heart young. Maybe they wouldn’t, wow. Did it even matter if it were true or false? Thinking about my mother’s performance in church—no one helped the priest, though he struggled every Sunday, hid behind this witness I have on speed-dial because he had to dodge my mother. No one confronted it. So could that extend into the real? I figured. In this case, the lie and truth felt razor close, sharp. In the NYTIMES article about Alice Munro’s daughter, it was stated that families often pretend like nothing happened. Was it just a show? I was technically an abused child who had to put on a show for him now, is that what it’s like? Some circus performance? “Very very likely…” Margaret Atwood said, it sounds like a clown move, “very very likely,” like a shamanic demonic play, “very very likely…” Alice Munro was molested as a child, “if only because it’s so common,” so that’s why she ignored what happened to her daughter? So I was there, in other words, in some buffoon play born from that statement. “If only because it is so common.” Is that true? It seems like it’s much more common than you’d think? So maybe I was molested, she was, which is why Angelica Leibowitz has put on a little soiree, a little horror soiree.

And it’s back to “Hungry Eyes.”

The living room dance floor bleeding onto the court, the club.

The ball —into the net. Fantasize… Ad can’t show his defeat, swinging his racket, his fingers, a claw, tweak the stings of his racket as if it were an instrument. He’s gotta swing it out. Adjust the magic weave. He bounces the ball, places it on the sweet spot, prepares for the serve. Deuce swings down low on a jungle vine. We’re on the rise, the tension.

It was hard not to joke around.

I don’t know how to speak about it, I felt…? Like a toy? I was four. I wasn’t on that channel. I wanted a sippy cup, that’s where I was at as a person.. Finally, I got a sippy cup, Jesus, was this hard? Hard to figure out? A goddamn sippy cup. Angelica Leibowitz finally gave me one, I snatched that shit in the back of her red Cadillac, Jesus, finally, and we would practice my script for the lawyers. She popped quizzed me. Look, at four, you don’t want to do this. You don’t want to rehearse scripts.

In the end, once we had our fill, she closed the door from the wall. She took her time—no rush. She thanked him soooo much for coming, soooo much, really. Really really really. With her whole heart and soul, she thanked him, I remember this, actually, for “the memories” that we made. He got the door closed in his face, nicely, for years, I think, as I —

I remember this happened more than once, now that I’m over the hump of — mental and corporeal chaos. Any question that popped up that threatened what I understood was happening split me, I was splitting, my mind. Chaos. Was it all a lie? I would quick fire grab onto memories as if I were swinging off branches—THIS, she said THIS, I remember THIS, to find ground again, it HAPPENED, so now, now that I can grasp it, once I got over that, I could just ask a simple question — how many times did these shows happen? Was it really years? One year? How many times, frequency? I remember the repetition, that it was more than once, but that’s all I know.

It terrifies me, speaking to Angelica about it all these years later, as I contacted her after I got out of the hospital, though it took years, because I had questions— about HIM, this, so much. “We had fun,” imagine? That’s what she said to me. Me and Nicole “running around?” I’m sorry? Did you say “fun?” I looked into this phone.

Those nights, those nights we danced, we had fun, that struck a chord, I was underwater, remembering the black, Building up a Mystery, and the dance, the romance, the tensions in it. Am I Cinderella? Please. Was it? Was it fun? Yes, but am I supposed to say that? I couldn’t resolve that word, fun.

That’s what my father said, in the Cutlass, I asked him, one day, “what did you like about her? What did you like about her?” I grained away from the man. He misted, “what do you mean?” Staring out the windshield, over Overland, I had to, I had to take that in. “LIKE?” I snapped. “LIKE? What did you LIKE about her?” I pressed him, he might have threatened to hit me, I looked at him true rejection and disgust. “Like…” I wondered, could he answer the question? Could he answer the question, what did he like about his wife? He couldn’t answer it, like, did she make you a better man, dude, and finally at the tip of my blade, he said, “she was fun,” and the way he said “fun,” I looked out the window… at the steep driveway up to Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles, a joke.. Dr. J arranged that Nicole and I went to school there, I was in first grade, she was in third, I think, and I stayed two years, but we transferred to another school.

Fun.

Picturing Angelica Leibowitz rising from her chair at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club with legs shaped by the Gods, her hair like feathers falling out her flat tennis cap. She threw herself on “every man!” Okay, I thought, you ended up with this guy? Dr. J. I couldn’t investigate her without investigating him, who she ended up with, who was this man? Fun? That was…that left me speechless. Fun.

Angelica gave us a high five, after she closed the door. We, girls, leaped with funny legs, yah! “And what are you going to say to the lawyers?” Just a joke. I would repeat it like a good girl with a play back button built in. “I want to live with my moder…” HIGH FIVE,itt was classical, even, the three of us scurrying away across the foyer, as if we were transitioning to the next scene of a play. Games were afoot.

What were the lawyers going to do? What were we going to do when “D day” came: divorce day? Descend from the wings with the cops confused about the props and expose him on the stage of life? “The lawyers.” Standing in superhero trio in the shadows of the living room— looking up. “The lawyers.” In leather jackets, long, a trench. They have to process the paperwork, it’s just the way it goes. “Oh on your way,” to Enya…why not, it was one of Nicole’s favorites. “Storms of Africa.” I had the license to invent, and it was even spiritual.

Nicole and I — leap like baby gazelles through the house as if it were the plains of Africa… we’re free… running free… to Enya — attendants stacking divorce files. Lil Buck makes a cross, beautiful. The family is jutting their arms through space as we turn on our feet, we’re evoking ballet but our choreography is modern, the dance becomes contemporary, meaningful, with the song, the angular jutting limbs in a formation, Jose Liebowitz the star of these DANCES for the child molester at the door, his gear swishing. Nicole and I then appear in hooded cloaks with baskets… discovering “the market” tossing apples at one another, and Jose Liebowitz throws down the cleaver, the fish mongrel. Enya. He hated Enya. Nicole loved it.

We’re on a real line where it’s real not real. The lawyers.

Enya.

His face “ooooooooooo” on her “ooooooo” Watermark. Jose Leibowitz extending his arm, life is mysterious.

Back at the table, the players deep in, to Enya, their rackets slice through the air to a song that belongs at a spa, but he leaps in slow motion, a reach— they move swiftly now — legs strained, calves tense— in a close match. Sneakers squeaking, a lonely echo.

At seven and ten o-clock at the courtside table, I asked her, why she didn’t call the cops? I meant it. She looked off. She didn’t want to send me to foster care, she said. I didn’t want to go there. We were facing one another head on. The spectacle of it, to Enya, watermark, the song the most memorable as evoking a bubbling brook in the speakers of a spa, her voice in an ethereal wave of ooooo, a woodsy lagoon. The song lifts the squeaking sneaks. Transcendence. The players shot from up above flinging the ball across space.

Nicole and I stand in fairy costumes, picking our wedgies, I would, not Nicole, as we receive our bright pink containers of bubbles —

I was an abused child, supposedly, and people found the story so conceptually impossible, but I could have ended up in foster care where a child is at a higher likelihood of being abused— so the spectacle rang so true, didn’t it? Enya. In this world, nothing is real, but everything is spiritual. “Very very likely,” Margaret Atwood said, to an aerial shot of the players.

“Did she know what she was doing?”

Jose Leibowitz’s face appears, black paint, reciting lines. “Did HE?”

Stupid.

People asked me that. Did SHE but not HE. Do people KNOW they’re abusing kids? Do they KNOW what they’re doing? When they are abusing foster care kids who have already been abused? Enya. Enya for all. A famous recluse. Irish. Just like Joy. Or so, she says…

Maybe it was sort of genius, I don’t know, these spectacles, her approach? There’s something satisfying about sticking it to — this disgusting figure, but I don’t know how this spectacular spectacular performance à la Moulin Rouge would affect a child molester —remember the Duke in the film, turning his palm around “the Maharaja…” remember he was speaking through the fictitious play, about the real situation? “Why would the courtesan refuse the MAHARAJA when the MAHARAJA is offering her security…”

He requested a REWRITE. A better ending for the MAHARAJA, his palm circling around.

There’s a little of that feel through her play, like she’s taking it to the dance floor, for sure, she’s Who Run the World Girls Girls about it, which would be a good finale, where Angelica Leibowitz shows us all what she can do, but she’s SPEAKING about what’s really going ON in this way. A Brazilian mother is giving him a little show to watch called “she’s never been happier without you,” and if you step — ONE— she flashed ONE at me at the club — foot in my house I would slice your dick off. Sure, but she THINKS it’s clear to him? And then, he confirmed that it was…? But he’s playing like I don’t know WHY… all she’s doing is standing there and swinging her pelvis, saying “here she is! Safe!” They’re not talking. She’s standing guard at a wide open door, and then shutting it in his face.

In his divorce file, he wrote that he came home from a work trip to find his house redecorated and his daughter living somewhere else… you can’t PICK up your child? Is this WOMAN — who he apparently did not see her as much as SHE forgot —omitted — these spectacles — HIM. How HE acted. HOW SHE acted? She made it seem as if she…was terrible to him? When she’s just ACTING nice on the phone, hanging up in his face, and opening the door wide, so he can watch us play…

Please, I need a father, please, you get home… and you see your house has been changed… and your daughter is not there… now what? Someone help me. Years. Four years.

“You hated me and I didn’t know WHY…”

What do you do with that picture?

And what I ended up going through? I ended up in the hospital.

“You hated me,” my father said, “and I didn’t know WHY…”

What are you even talking about?

Cue Enya again. Nicole and I are gazing right and left, interlocking arms. Skipping freely, Enya’s spouting tune, heehee, fancy free. And then we gather as one, a family in the foyer, they’re in sports gear 24/7, and stomp our foot, one after another, twice now. it’s brilliant, urban, spiritual. Stomp. We’re swinging our torsos, letting it all go, as a family — as if we were at a club — we’re playing AGAINST the beat, finding the grit in the angelic beauty of Enya. Jose Leibowitz running fast fast in place, to suspend in slow motion, and SWOSH away. He’s rushing up the stairs, his gear swishing, untying the backdrop falling off the banister, glitter and leaves, ooooo, a lagoon. Arms shooting up—Louise. We take one definitive step forward — at a diagonal. We reach, hope, we don’t know how to proceed — falling back in wild abandon. Jose descends…the stair. Side action, Jose Leibowitz, sensual— the wheels on the bus go round and round. A Jew that can dance, latin. Powerful.

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