The legend of Dr. J begins

This nice little game lasted four years, and this was the end of it. My father and I drove up to my house in the ’81 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. I looked up and out the windshield. A thunderous crash shocked me as we passed from light to shadow and pulled into the garage.

The Cutlass came to a halt before his rainbow skiers — he hand-painted them. They dashed downhill across his white cabinets. Their scarves flew freely in the wind. 

Nick clicked the gear over the steering wheel into park. He didn’t appear to hear the crashing. I fell out of the car to a frightful stillness, punched to hell with a jolt — I couldn’t explain it, couldn’t place what it was. It hooked me, even, speechless. I ducked. I froze. It sounded like, not a cup broke, but heaven above me. The air cracked, it was thick. Around his classic cars, I floated through a world I could not see without the ability to think.

I passed Nick’s workshop. He had painted a shade of blue inspired by the Blue Grotto in Naples, Italy. He had it specially mixed.

The angle at which sunlight enters the cave off the island of Capri creates an effect of pure magic. The water glows an otherworldly blue out of a cartoon. It’s impossible, couldn’t be real, just like this story. But we live in a cosmic universe where “anything can happen” where the ingredients can mix just right. I never understood what people believed in.

I don’t know how to talk about it because I absorbed way too much disbelief when I should have suggested that they read a book. Might be a touchy, sharp, but it was the quality to have. I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of the disbelief. Telling this story was an obstacle, so do I erase these lines that weren’t really mine, or do I leave them to communicate the degree to which I absorbed the opinions of others? I suppose I couldn’t believe my parents were real, for real, because they weren’t. But the anger that drove my investigation was an understanding I was not the only one. That there was worse, even…

Into his office, my eyes were wide. An ethereal blue wrapped around the wall and up the flight of stairs towards a gold doorknob as if I really came from a fairytale, but sometimes real life doesn’t feel real, that isn’t exactly novel as a sensation, but people I spoke to still linger in the fabric of this memory as I weave meaning. People told me that I looked like I stepped out of a fairytale. Dr. J most certainly did. My father too —outdated, not the same one, but my schoolmates thought he was the Fonz from the TV show Happy Days. It was unreal to them.

I turned to him as another wave of destruction crashed through his neat office. He just took a seat in his leather chair. He didn’t even look at me.

I crept up the blue/grey carpeted stairs that matched his Mont Blanc pen and Cutlass Supreme. I had no legs, no body, no mind. Nothing had — SMASH—changed in his ancient world. A poster of the Fountain of Trevi. Vincent Van Gogh’s Café at Night, Picasso’s drawing of a woman’s back, and Etruscan figures framed in gold leaf. I stood on the other side of the door, calm and staring. The cracking grew louder. Dr. J got herself a new house. We had to undo all this. The carpet had been vacuumed; the house serene. 

Turning the corner, I faced the corridor where her teacup sets once trailed on their own pedestals towards a glass panel of amber waves of light like the song about America. I saw so much of it in Dr. J: American culture, consumerism, The Society of Spectacle. Even Angelica. She stood there four years earlier and lived to regret it, but not as much as I did. She was from Brazil. She, too, is from America. People could get confused.

I floated down the hall in that same light. The curves of the waves glittered hot white. I couldn’t think, feel. I sailed over clouds. The cracking sent fractures through the air, as if the house were breaking apart on an invisible plane. Around the next staircase, a shattering of glass smacked me across the face. It sounded like a car was getting crunched.

“Filing a tax return can be terrifying…” the LATIMES began.

Once upon a time, the articles published about Dr. J led the way up the stairs to her ghostly greatness, praising her valiant fight in a red wig that a person had the right to fall apart. All that was left of them were frames of dust. The carpet was gold, a dirty shade of it.

“Out of the 10 to 15 new clients she accepts each week…” 

For a while, remembering the cracks on the stairs that I learned to maneuver around, the door opened all day. People rushed up the stairs to see the doctor, but Angelica was the only person who stopped. “She has all the right credentials and something more: a determination to salvage the lives of people she calls ‘tax victims.’”

Dr. J knew “the symptoms” such as depression and paranoia. She called herself in print, the Mother Teresa of the Tax Industry, the Dear Abby of the Tax World, the self-proclaimed “Tax Therapist.” Dr. J was saving the world even ambitiously at 200 an hour in 1988. That’s over 400 dollars today. Not bad.

I remembered the snap of the thread when she got her wigs sewn in upstairs, the curve of her blue eyes the shade of sky a total mystery to me. It sounded like someone took a bat and smashed a wall of glass. I crept up the stairs, blank.

A genius, a prodigy; these were interchangeable terms. She was licensed to practice all the way up to the Supreme Court, taught at USC Graduate School, was a senior agent for twenty years. I couldn’t believe it, at four. I demanded to be taken at once! My little legs ran down the hall at USC, tugged on his pants, to lift me up NOW. No way Dr. J could teach a subject! Nose pressed up against the glass. At USC Graduate School of Accounting? I mean, I saw the back of her head but I did not see the audience, so I cannot confirm factually that they were there. I was blown away at four. If she was a genius, why was she so stupid? She acted like a complete idiot. And it would be imperative that I speak like this, to myself, this woman was a complete idiot! Rage saved me.

She spoke of her genius as if it were the ultimate truth, with some vague undertone of having suffered an insurmountable set of obstacles to get here. No one ever thought “Mama,” she’d refer to herself in the third person to me…sort of little girl, showgirl, suggestive. She was never normal, didn’t want to be. “No one ever thought Mama would ever amount to anything…” on the crack of laughter and tears. But she succeeded in the world, by the time I was four, which provoked another set of questions about her… she was not a housewife. She was practically un-house trained. Home was some gross jungle. But, strangely, up the steps, the civilized man turns out to be the most savage…? She was a societal creature, somehow…?

What was her PhD in? Depends.

In an LA Times article, her PhD was in “The History of Tax Law.” On the back of her book about VAT: “Doctorate in the Arts.” Once she said, “Economics.” I cannot help but laugh, because this woman wrapped me up in a sex scandal. Made me wonder, remembering all these articles, or her “achievements” I called them, whether you should believe what you read and hear, and yet, everyone does. I saw Dr. J in everyone and everything. 

It’s not to say that she didn’t have a PhD. She probably did, I don’t know, she had a slippery grasp on words, on solid matter. The truth was a flimsy enterprise, even a joke. It didn’t matter. The more I look around, the truer that feels. We manipulate material, even in taking our work experience and framing to glitter a little. I saw her in everyone and everything.

She had more academic degrees than anyone. 13, 15, 18, 21 degrees. She just kept “going back to school.” She’d list them all, “a special girl,” on her taut fingers… “English, music, law…” I couldn’t help but laugh at Dr. J. She was a ridiculous person. Already, she appeared like the buffoon of our obsession with genius, even. “Genius.” Everyone is saying it. She’s still counting her degrees. “Chinese…”

“Yugoslavian…”

I say that because she claimed to “speak Gallic,” as “an Irish person.” I interrogated her young, early, “do you speak Irish?” I was four, again, I didn’t know what that meant. Of course she did. “Gallic.” “Say something,” I requested at four, in the church bathroom. She said some words…gibberish, I believe. The woman didn’t speak Gallic.

My favorite article was at the top—the last one before a client would turn to face her universe.  I would find it later in my father’s file cabinet downstairs, so I have this one: Executive Style in Neiman Marcus Magazine. It was one of her hotspots in Beverly Hills. An upscale department store. A fashionista, Dr. J. She had a closet of kimonos downstairs. Her white mink coat was a signature piece of hers, the lushest. In a terribly chic emerald green Krizia suit, she was the epitome of “Executive Style.” A professional musician once upon a time, a prodigal pianist and organist, her hands floated over a sleek chrome railing and gingerly held her timeless alligator briefcase. 

“My first client,” she stated, in this magazine, “is typically about to go to jail…”

“Criminals,” my father put it. “They made up the bulk of her clientele.”

With her eyes as blue as the sky, I could picture her assuring a journalist along this wake. “I screen out people who have been dishonest. The only thing I have going for me with the IRS is my credibility, so I won’t go in with a crook.” I could picture her hand pat pat the air. She would wave that away, “no,” she’d say. She was the sincerest human being to the point of performance, mocking it. Pure artifice.

The bathroom door was open. It was pink. It was supposed to be mine. Coca-Cola, milk, and T-Bones, that’s all she ate, a gnarled T-Bone steak on the counter, that’s all she left. Raw garlic cloves were “her candy,” she said. A witch, a real witch, Dr. J. And, once upon a time, in Salem, Massachusetts, my speech would have silenced the ecclesiastic authorities. “Garlic is her candy, hear me, please.” She would have been hanged, quick, real quick. Witchcraft, Satan, paranoia, it’s not exactly uncommon to come up with outrageous, insane ideas in the realm of fantasy. Dr. J belonged here. I saw her everywhere. She was so much more common than people tended to see. I tried to describe her, over the years, a mad king, even, they’ve existed.

I tried to wrap my head around a person who would leave only this behind, as if I were a dog. Men panted and strained and thick glass broke to pieces A shard of mirror flew into the view in the frame, the corner of my eye. It flashed a hot white light before crashing into a bin, clanking against shards. Mirror framed the bathroom door like an arch tucked into the wall with black horizontal stripes. A bit boudoir, my mother, I don’t know. An oriental decorative vase once stood in the corner with some stem shooting from it, maybe peacock. She had that hat. She had many many hats, Dr. J.

I felt like a fool not knowing what the sound was. A real fool.

*

Mirror mirror mirrors on the walls, to begin. Dr. J came out of a fairytale by Jean Baudrillard, even; the most unreal human being that even dazzled in sequins. She covered her tax law office walls in mirrors, and I had seen Snow White already, when I was four, so I made a basic connection—there’s a mirror on the wall, but there’s more than one now. I met the field of psychology in this way, in these mirrors. She was kinda like this. It was a symbol of hers that began in little round suggestions on her wedding ball gown with an antebellum cut, and took over. She said they made the rooms look bigger, which struck a chord when I heard Thomas Huxley’s warning to the USA, that size is not grandeur and territory does not make a nation.

These mirrors reflected one another. Space multiplied, fanned out like an accordion. They produced an illusion of depth but, in fact, it was shallow. The imagination appeared like a real place, in a way. Dr. J appeared to have stepped out of it. With her wrist like a flimsy hanky, she tapped, real and reflected, the top of her teacup sets arranged on their own pedestals trailing through this tax law office in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose, naming their country of origin. “England, Japan, China…”

She was an American — that general wash of a word— mythic creature, the accountant at the Mad Hatter tea party in Alice in Wonderland, another cartoon. She acted, seriously, as if she were literally on Mercury. These mirrors reflected the first computers, a fax machine, stacks of black and white tax returns, bright highlighters, and also tea cup sets…this mad fashionista was at the helm, a businesswoman. What a strange development. Was there a white rabbit… I lost track of? Now, the walls cracked at angles deep and dark like a canyon, as if a natural disaster had struck the house, an otherwise peaceful universe.

I stood at the top of the steps facing her main space, the larger of the two, no door. Four were smashing the mirrors off the tax law office walls in two rooms. They kicked their feet up onto the wall, sweating and panting. It took real effort, the kind you can’t fake, to dismantle mirrors. It was physical, difficult, a labor. They dove picks into them — stabbed them, dug behind the eyeball, just trying, muscles bulging, to break them off the walls. An ordeal. Flashing like cameras—broken shards of mirrors reflected the light wildly. It was the TV meets the broken whole on billions of screens. They cracked, broke, smashed. They pulled—with all their might— to dislodge an unspeakable weapon that drew blood in my mind, just the edges. They stepped on them to keep cracking them down, down down. Nothing was solid. Everything was reflective and flashing in broken jagged sheets. Just the sound, the crack in my ear, as if it were breaking. A monster in their hands, reflecting light, they held them over their heads and cast them down against the rim of industrial sized trash cans, crash, and again, they kept breaking them down, down, down, until they could throw them away as if they meant nothing at all. Smash, crack, break, crunch, clanking. The light went dim.

"We're going to play a NICE game, with him, we're going to put on a NICE show for him."

It begins here, if you’d like to read the first scene.

In the most intimate tone, the light streaming through her window, “I could never see my father again,” Angélica said.

Her head hung low, her hair like feathers in a holy glow.

I was four, seated in a chair before her in her bedroom.

“Why?”

Because I would never see my mother again.

I wasn’t seeing her though. I didn’t say that.

“And you’d never see us again, do you want that,” she asked sweetly?

“No,” what else was I supposed to say?

She shushed me, her finger to her lips.

We weren’t going to tell him what we know. We were going to play a nice game with this, she spat on his name, as if to say lowlife, huh? “A nice game,” she assured me like a girlfriend. We weren’t going to do anything, here. We were just going to sit tight, the two of us, on Miracle Mile. Shush.

Angélica had just stopped by my house one day, randomly, less than one month before. I had alerted her, so she had taken me home to play with her youngest daughter one day, which became four years. My mother told her that my father was abusive, so now I was in her custody for my own protection.

When the phone rang, the backyard was framed in the white windowpane like a Jasper Johns, a work of art, an American classic. She picked up. The sprinklers spit, set the beat.

“Oh…” she smiled. Just as she had predicted. She looked down at me. He called. “Look who it is…” she was delighted. “Nick.” He wanted to play nice, just as she had predicted, you see. He didn’t even know her. Two can play that game, she thought.

She paced the kitchen with legs shaped by the Gods seeking his balls. “How nice,” she said. We’re pretending that we don’t know why your daughter is living with me now. That was the subtext. “New Jersey and Italy? How nice…” She didn’t help him, she didn’t mention me, and neither did he.

I never forgot this phone call. Her performance was “out of this world,” my mother’s phrase, but the memory hovered there like a bubble in float across the backyard. It never lost its clear shape, as it was singular, unique. The colors were red, green, yellow, impossible. I began to wake up to that as an adult. What am I looking at? He called her house and acted nice? He didn’t know, though, shush. Why is he acting like this? In his divorce file, he wrote, I came home and Maria was living in another family, but all he had to do was pick me up. He didn’t because “I” hated him and didn’t know why.

She wasn’t in a rush. She had all the time in the world. He really went on and on. Pacing the kitchen, she was loving this, really. She dropped the mask and squatted real low. She stuck her finger in her mouth at me: yuck.

Popping back up to standing, she was the mother hen, her chest puffed out. “How nice…” Suddenly, desperately, she stomped, actually confused. “What?” She needed to hear him, the warmest woman. “I did not hear you…” She needed to, “please, what?!” She was so sorry, just so sorry Nick.

“Maria?!” A revelation. “Is she around?!” I was right here! She was so sorry! She blamed herself; she hadn’t brought me up, right? She laughed, she really did. She skipped over her words as if she were in a fairytale. She always keeps the babies, she said, drawing the line of sight from them to her, right where she can see them. “She’s right here,” as it were, wondrous, obvious.

I fiddled with my fingers.

Her mask dropped a little bit, “Never been safer.” She meant it, you know. She reassured him with her whole heart and soul: “Don’t worry, please Nick, don’t worry…”

Gazing across the grass glistening in the sun, freshly watered, she spoke of wonderful times, “so many children, a dream.”

She was delighted at the invisible babes playing at her feet. “They love me,” she said, “…as a safe person.” Nothing but laughter these years.

“Nah,” she dropped mask, she didn’t think I wanted to go.

“Can you what? So many kids around,” none were, “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you?” She meant it, she really wanted to, hear him, that is, she was so sorry. “What did you ask? Talk to her?” She pitched high, the good witch. “Of course!”

She sizzled as she dug her fingers into her eyelids and shook her head — for a while. Her face rose, open, generous. “So sorry.” She was really sorry, she laughed, she was really a bull. “So many kids…” The subtext was: why wouldn’t you be able to talk to her? Not like you did anything, right????? Innocent man???? Laughing, right? She laughed for a while. “She’s right here, one moment.” She couldn’t wait.

She bent down and called me over with her finger.

I was pinned under her beak — her eyes fell out of her face. She couldn’t even believe it, mouth agape, brows raised. He invited me to go on vacation with him. She couldn’t move, couldn’t wipe the shock off her face.

No, she just shook her head no.

“No,” I said — easy. I was four, five.

“I love you Maria…” He reached for me. I didn’t know what to do, her face practically cartoon.

I just started saying it back. “I…”

She grabbed that phone — right there. She brought it to her ear.

“Thank you so much for calling, really,” she said, “thank you so much, for calling…” all the way to the receiver. She hung up on him, nicely, and cursed his existence in Portuguese like a bull.

“And what are you,” she pointed down at me, brightly now, “going to say to the lawyers?”

“I want to live with my mom because…”

I had a script, we rehearsed it, often.

“High five!” I slapped her hand. She clapped; it was time to dance! A spin on the living room dance floor. She had six kids, grandkids, so whether it was a birthday, Wednesday, soccer game, excuse, there was always a party. We switched like that.

Then, he requested to visit.

Now, that. She told me later. She wanted his dick! A chainsaw ripped open the neighborhood. She moved her finger up and down as if that’s what it did, “a dick wow,” she even said it. A landscaper trimmed the hedges out there. She assured me with fire in her eyes. She wanted his dick! And she said it as if it were a REAL idea. This, a child rapist, molester, abuser, struck a match within her, and she danced the lambada regardless. He requested to visit.

“Sure,” she smiled, by the pitcher of Kool-Aid, even, “why not 6:30?”

Nicole and I looked up at the treehouse in the backyard, plastered against the sky side by side. “We’re not supposed to go up there.” She reminded me. Bees had taken over, but me? I saw no bees. The backyard was a picture-perfect, saturated in color, but illness lurked here, possession, invasion, in the real American dream that it was, and you wouldn’t even know it. People lied, this I knew. I snapped at her to follow me, or I would never be her friend again.

In our sparkly slippers, we climbed up the ladder until we reached the top. I could see everything from up here! A map of America in plots, yards, and picket fences disappeared over the horizon under a sky like a blue eraser. My gold slippers sparkled wildly from a hyperreal land.

At the wooden door, kid-sized, we were scared at a portal to a new, unknown world. You do it, no, you do it. Let’s do it together. A nightmarish creak hurt my ears as if it hadn’t been opened in years; we faced the black, the subconscious from which anything could emerge, and from the pit of despair, two bees emerged as if the guardians of the colony and hovered before our faces—

When night fell, the house became the treehouse, child’s play, but the darkest vortex, so it was real and universal though not of this world, and it could lurk inside some house so small in the grand scheme of things that you wouldn’t even believe it possible like the armoire that leads to Narnia where a white witch lures children with sweets. Dr. J was the sweetest, you see, which Angélica reflected back on my father.

Down dark corridors with Dorothy (Nicole), I sought to understand Joy, a woman who put mirror mirror mirrors on her tax law office walls as if she came from a fairytale inspired by Jean Baudrillard. A woman who, ran into the church “every Sunday,” according to an eye-witness I secured, and “accosted” the priest with her rapes right before his performance as a lawsuit was building behind the scenes in the Catholic Church: a billion dollars. Angélica dimmed the lights.

She diffused the play like a stage director meets a sports coach with a vision. “We’re going to put on a nice show, a big big show,” her arm scanned the kingdom. “The house was ours…” We had to act happier than happy, never been happier (without you). We had to be loud, very loud, laughing, screaming, and playing like crazy when she gave us the signal.

“But you have to ignore him,” she said. “Pay attention,” she pointed, the good, snappy witch. Me especially. “Not one look, okay? Not one. He does not exist,” she meant it.

Her arms flew at the front door — go. Nicole and I jumped, laughed, and shrieked in glee. Hand at her ear, she couldn’t hear us, already, you see. “More,” a conductor. We unleashed our voices with nightmarish yet funny faces — ahhh!!! Her hand marked it: level one. She pointed up, we had the stars to reach.

Trick or treattttt, she cracked open the door to our voices laughing and yelping in a forced jubilation. Her bird-like face appeared. She peeked over the threshold — is that you, really you? Opening the door all the way to the wall, there’s nothing to hide here, you see, I dare you even to “visit.” Like she was going to let a child molester into her house…

“Here she is Nick!”

Nicole and I flew by as if we were the roller coaster ride. AHHHHHHHH. Nicole screamed, “IMMA GET YOU!!!” AHHHHHHH. AHHHHHHH. Angélica stood guard in a tennis skirt with her arms crossed. Titling her pelvis, rocking herself on her feet, she relished the sight of babes running crazy, wild, free, but most importantly, “safe.” A little bounce off her heels, oh! She popped down low and waved to us as we ran past on a thrill ride across the house. She requested that we raise our voices with her hand like a conductor and cupped her ear like a master of ceremonies. He didn’t even try to step a foot into her house. He had to watch the happiest show on Earth, an ecstatic nightmare. “YEAH!” Throwing fists.

And in the end, just like a show, she closed the door from the wall — in no rush. She thanked him so much for coming… what a time we had, she thanked him for “the memories we made.” It was heartfelt, even. He got the door slammed in his face more than once, nicely. Giving us her hand, we leapt to slap her palm, hard. High five!

“And what are you,” pop quiz, “going to say to the lawyers?”

“I want to live with my moder…” I blurted with fists. Another high five for me — yeah! She clapped, kicked her feet back, did a little sensual move to advance, time to dance! Legs leading the way, we were really going to get that, beeeeeeep, in Portuguese.

I came to on the stairs one night as these “Spectacular Spectacular” performances from the film Moulin Rouge had a good run, something more like years, as this show lasted four. It was the pitch of her scream as I crawled over her legs. I had to do that. Keep touching these moments, like her leg. I was crawling up her legs that night, it happened. I sat up, what am I doing? I walked downstairs and stood there to take in this snapshot: a broken man at the door, that was the message he communicated, encased in the shadows of the porch, and this woman standing guard. Horror.

At the time, all I could do was wonder: was it really like this, Joy? In a way? Would no one do anything even if it were real, was it that unreal? Later, I learned that families typically pretend like it didn’t happen, and that I might not have known that it was happening, so.

She didn’t call the cops, she said, because she didn’t want to send me to foster care, where a child is at a higher risk of being abused, even again, so was this story unbelievable? The spectacle of it? I heard that many times.

“Very very likely,” Margaret Atwood said in the NYTIMES, “Alice Munro was molested if only because it is so common.”

Is everyone being molested in the USA? Is that a genuine excuse for Alice Munro’s response to her daughter’s trauma?

Why not do it to Enya, then, “Sounds of Africa?”

I learned long ago that some things are so true, you have the license to push it over a real edge in a world where nothing is real, but everything is spiritual.

Her voice swells, the door opens, and the Catholic Church sends up the white smoke. Jose Lieberman hits the lights: blue. Nicole and I take off through the fog as gazelles leap in the score, charging through the fog. And male ballet dancers take slow and considered steps in tights. Jose Lieberman passes out the oars so we can row to a new world.

It’s not just about the man at the door; it’s our response.

It’s the PG response bothers me.

I’ll get into that next time.

We’re only at the beginning of this poignant nightmare.

Once Upon a Time on Miracle Mile

The day the stork came to snatch a baby back, me, I was smashing barbie heads framed in the vintage TV from the film Grumpy Old Men. Angélica Liebowitz walked into my house with legs shaped by the Gods coming out of a tennis skirt. She froze upon entry. The glass panel downed her in amber waves of light like the song about America. “I am from BRAZIL,” she said, so if there’s a glacial chill, she’s going to feel it. She turned to my mother, Dr. J, a tax file in her hand, and offered to set up a playdate one day. Joy popped like a Jack in Box with confetti. “Here! Take her!” I had never seen such legs! I stood up and told her, honestly, how amazing they were, wow. Side by side in a hunter green princess dress and tennis skirt, I wondered if everyone in Brazil had legs like her there. We headed for her red Cadillac.

“The time has come for you now to pay attention,” she pointed at me. Hand on the dial, she sang love song after love song all the way back to Miracle Mile. She taught me the value of Barbara Streisand that day with intensity of a pro-coach down Pico. I had to “pay attention,” she bumped up the volume, cracked a sex joke, a driver cut her off. She turned her whole body to confront the blind spot, a dancer, stepped on it. She flipped him off like a pissed off hysterical bird. “I am a woman in love, pay attention,” she got low. “And I’d do anything, are you paying attention?” She turned it up. “Pay attention.” I laughed. She snapped, pointed at me, made a fist. “It’s a righttttt I defend.” I sign the saw: Miracle Mile. “HEY! I’m talking to YOU.”  We pulled up to a brightest patch of green grass, she was wailing, reaching the peak.

I hopped out the door before she turned off her car. I bolted across the grass to “I am a Woman in Love” because there was a world and I was in it. I pushed open her front door, wasn’t locked, not my fault. I twirled under a crystal chandelier; she tripped over her six children’s names as if she were sneezing to get to mine. I left the door open, and she wasn’t looking for a seventh child. Nicole, the youngest, appeared at the railing in ruby slippers, confused.

Angélica combusted somewhere on her lawn, POHA! She cursed at herself in Portuguese like a bull.  “Hey girl!” Green! I saw a yard — but a woman was standing in my way. So I marched right up to her and said it. “Get out of my way.” Her cousin blinked, “excuse me?!” I said it again. “Get out of my way.” Angélica grabbed onto my arm, half-laughing in shock, “what about please, thank you, sorry?” I flipped out. Her sneaks squeaked across the foyer as she backed up, looking at me, like, are you KIDDING ME? She told her cousin to BACK UP! I made a run for it through the kitchen, happier now, and pushed the screen door open.

Blades of grass so green they were real flew off my black patent leather Mary Janes. It was a time before filters, when memories impressed themselves on paper, hard to erase. A plum tree towered high into the sky, the color of my mother’s eyes. I snatched a juicy purple bum off the grass. The back door screeched open, her eyes white with terror. “DON’T EAT THAT PLUM!” “IT’S MINE!” “NO!” “YES!” “NO!” “YES it’s MINE! STAY AWAY!” I SCREAMED. “THE TREE IS SICK!!” SHE CRIED TERRIFIED. “NO IT’S NOT!” SHE TAPPED HER TEMPLE, PLEADED WITH ME. “SICK! DIE! YOU WANNA DIE?! DIE,” she said, “DIE! THE TREE IS SICK!” I couldn’t believe it, all these years later. It was almost like parable, I came from a sick tree, so the key if not the question was laid out in the beginning. Did the fruit fall far? Or did it only apply to apples?

In her paradisal backyard, the American Dream, the patch of grass was a perfect snapshot, the blades high-def, as if we really did dream the world into being. In a fit of confetti, Dr. J descended upon the scene as if the world were a stage that was really really fake with eyes the color of the sky, applied with a paint roller, flat. A demon sent from up above, she had skin whiter than snow, she glowed. In a red wig du jour and Krizia suit, she was an American myth, the brightest woman alive who spoke like an operatic tornado, whipping up sticks, sex and nonsense, “one night, 500 bucks, I’m saving a man, you don’t even know, he needs me, you’re my best friend,” scurrying into her limo. “My husband is raping Maria, please, please, protect my baby, not my baby, no, he abused me too you know. Here’s…11,000 dollars.” I convinced it to was true, artifice aside.

Across the house, I stood and watched amazed. My mother was a buffoon, the most theatrical woman in a white mink coat. But a real show unfolded before my eyes. Nicole had lost it, punching her brother with a name you cannot complete with: Jose Lieberman. Her face beet red, her teeth exposed, he winced, laughing, but she didn’t stop, and I saw it. He was about to tip into some other state, lose consciousness of what he was doing, and I wondered about Joy.

At that moment, like magic, Angélica burst onto the scene with legs shaped by the Gods and blew the fight away in Portuguese. They fled from the flames. She turned to me, a dancer. “YOU.” I tore up the house with Jose, the women holding down the perimeter, so I was used to getting a talking to. But she took her chair in her white bedroom and placed it in front of mine, different this time. I wasn’t in trouble.

In the most intimate tones, the light streaming through her window, I could never see my father again, she said. Her head hung low, her hair like feathers in a holy glow, because I wouldn’t ever see my mother again. But I wasn’t seeing her. I didn’t say that. “And you’d never see us again, do you want that,” she asked sweetly?  “No,” what else was I supposed to say? She shushed me, a finger to her lips. We weren’t going to tell him what we knew. We—were going to play a nice game with this son-of-a bitch, she spat on his name, huh? “A nice game,” she assured me like a girlfriend. We would just sit tight, the two of us, on Miracle Mile. Shush.

When the phone rang, the backyard was framed in the white windowpane like a Jasper Johns, a work of art, an American classic. She picked up. The sprinklers spit, set the beat.

“Oh…” she smiled. Just as she had predicted, looking down at me. He called. “Look who it is…” she was delighted. He wanted to play nice. He didn’t even know her.  Two can play that game, she thought. She paced the kitchen with legs shaped by the Gods seeking his balls. “How nice,” we’re pretending that we don’t know why your daughter is living with me now. “New Jersey and Italy? How nice…” She didn’t help him, she didn’t mention me, and neither did he.

I never forgot this phone call. Her performance was “out of this world,” my mother’s phrase, but the memory hovered there like a bubble in float. It never lost its clear shape, as it was singular, unique, I recorded it, even. The colors were red, green, yellow, impossible. I began to wake up to that. What am I looking at? He called her house and acted nice? He didn’t know, though, shush. He didn’t know. Why is he acting like this? In his divorce file, he wrote, I came home and Maria was living in another family, but all he had to do was pick me up. He didn’t because “I” hated him and he didn’t know why.

She wasn’t in a rush. She had all the time in the world. He really went on and on. Continuing to pace the kitchen, back and forth, loving this, really, she dropped the mask and squatted real low. She stuck her finger in her mouth at me: yuck. Popping back up to standing, she was the mother hen, her chest puffed out. “How nice…” Suddenly, desperately, she stomped, actually confused. “What?” She needed to hear to him, the warmest woman. “I did not hear you…” She needed to, “please, what?” She was so sorry, just so sorry. “Maria?!” A revelation. “Is she around?!” I was right here! She was so sorry! She blamed herself, she hadn’t brought me up, right? She laughed, she really did. She skipped over her words as if she were in a fairytale, she always keeps the babies, she said, drawing the line of sight, right where she can see them. “She’s right here,” as it were wondrous. I fiddled with my fingers. The mask dropped a little bit, “never been safer.” She meant it, you know. With her whole heart and soul, she reassured him: “don’t worry, please Nick, don’t worry…” Gazing across the grass glistening in the sun freshly watered, she spoke of wonderful times, “so many children, a dream.” She delighted at the invisible babes playing at her feet. “They love me,” she said, “…as a safe person.” Nothing but laughter these years. “Nah,” she dropped mask, she didn’t think I wanted to go.

 “Can you what? So many kids around,” none were, “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you?” She meant it, she really wanted to, hear him that is, she was so sorry. “What did you ask? Talk to her?” She pitched high, the good witch. “Of course!” She sizzled as she dug her fingers into her eyelids and shook her head—for a while. Her face rose, open, generous. “So sorry.” She was really sorry, she laughed, she was really a bull. “So many kids…” The subtext was: why wouldn’t you be able to talk to her? Not like you did anything, right????? Innocent man???? Laughing, right? She laughed for a while. “She’s right here, one moment.” She couldn’t wait.

She bent down real low and called me over with her finger. I was pinned under her beak— her eyes fell out of her face. She couldn’t even believe it, mouth agape, brows raised. He invited me to go on vacation with him. She couldn’t move, couldn’t wipe the shock off her face. No, she just shook her head no. “No,” I said—easy. I was four, five. “I love you Maria…” He reached for me. I didn’t know what to do, her face practically cartoon. I just started saying it back. “I,” she grabbed that phone—right there. She brought it to her ear. “Thank you so much for calling, really,” she said, “thank you so much, for calling…” all the way to the receiver. She hung up on him, nicely, and cursed his existence in Portuguese like a bull. “And what are you,” she pointed down at me, brightly now, “going to say to the lawyers?” “I want to live with my moder because…” I had a script, we rehearsed it, often.

“High five!” I slapped her hand. She clapped; it was time to dance! A spin on the living room dance floor. She had six kids, grandkids, so a birthday, Wednesday, soccer game, excuse, there was always a party. We switched like that. Then, he requested to visit. She wanted his dick! Maria! A chainsaw ripped open the neighborhood. She moved her finger up and down as if that’s what it did, “a dick wow,” she even said it. Up and down, up and down, she watched it full of wonder as if it were magical. A landscaper trimmed the hedges out there. She assured me with fire in her eyes. She wanted his dick! This, a child rapist, molester, abuser, struck a match within her as she danced the lambada regardless. He requested to visit.

“Sure,” she smiled, by the pitcher of Kool-Aid, “why not 8:30?”

Nicole and I looked up at the treehouse plastered against the sky side by side. “We’re not supposed to go up there.” She reminded me. Bees had taken over, but me? I saw no bees. The backyard was a picture-perfect, saturated in color, but illness lurked here, possession, invasion, in the real American dream that it was, and you wouldn’t even know it. People lied, this I knew. I snapped at her to follow me, or I would never be her friend again. In our sparkly slippers, we climbed up the ladder until we reached the top. I could see everything from up here! A map of America in plots, yards, and picket fences disappeared over the horizon under a sky like a blue eraser. My gold slippers sparkled wildly from a hyperreal land.

At the wooden door kid-sized, we were scared at a portal of a new, unknown world. You do it, no, you do it. Let’s do it together. A nightmarish creak hurt my ears as if it hadn’t been opened in years; we faced the black, the subconscious from which anything could emerge— and from the pit of despair two bees emerged as if the guardians of the colony and hovered before our faces about to scream.

When night fell, the house became the treehouse, child’s play, but the darkest vortex, so it was real and universal though not of this world and it could lurk inside some house so small in the grand scheme of things that you wouldn’t even believe it possible like the armoire that leads to Narnia where a white witch lures children with sweets. Dr. J was the sweetest, you see, which Angélica reflected back on my father.

Down dark corridors with Dorothy (Nicole), I sought to understand Joy, a woman who put mirror mirror mirrors on her tax law office walls as if she came from a fairytale inspired by Jean Baudrillard. A woman who, ran into the church “every Sunday,” according to an eye-witness I secured, and “accosted” the priest with her rapes right before his performance as a lawsuit was building behind the scenes in the Catholic Church: a billion dollars. Angélica dimmed the lights.

She diffused the play like a stage director meets sports coach with a vision. “We’re going to put on a nice show, a big big show,” her arm scanned the kingdom. “The house was ours…” We had to act happier than happy, never been happier (without you). The front door was our target. We had to be loud, very loud, laughing, screaming, playing like crazy when she gave give us the signal. “But you have to ignore him,” she said. “Pay attention,” she pointed, the good, snappy witch. Me especially. “Not one look, okay? Not one. He does not exist,” she meant it.

Her arms flew at the front door—go. Nicole and I jumped, laughed, and shrieked in glee. Hand at her ear, she couldn’t hear us, already, you see. “More,” a conductor. We unleashed our voices with nightmarish yet funny faces—ahhh!!! Her hand marked it: level one. She pointed up, we had the stars to reach. Trick or treattttt, she cracked open the door to our voices laughing and yelping in a forced jubilee. Her bird-like face appeared. She peeked over the threshold — is that you, really you? Opening the door all the way to the wall, there’s nothing to hide here, you see, I dare you even to “visit.” Like she was going to let a child molester into her house…

“Here she is Nick!”

Nicole and I flew by as if we were the roller coaster ride. AHHHHHHHH. Nicole screamed “IMMA GET YOU!!!” AHHHHHHH. AHHHHHHH. Angélica stood guard in a tennis skirt with her arms crossed. Titling her pelvis, rocking herself on her feet, she relished the sight of babes running crazy, wild, free, but most importantly, “safe.” A little bounce off her heels, oh! She popped down low and waved to us as we ran past on a thrill ride across the house. She requested that we raise our voices with her hand like a conductor and cupped her ear like a master of ceremonies. He didn’t even try to step foot into her house. He had to watch the happiest show on earth, an ecstatic nightmare. “YEAH!” Throwing fists.

And in the end, just like a show, she closed the door from the wall—in no rush. She thanked him so much for coming… what a time we had, she thanked him for “the memories we made.” It was heartfelt, even. He got the door slammed in his face more than once, nicely. Giving us her hand, we leapt to slap her palm, hard. High five!

“And what are you,” pop quiz, “going to say to the lawyers?”

“I want to live with my moder…” I blurted with fists. Another high five for me—yeah! She clapped, kicked her feet back, did a little sensual move to advance, time to dance! Legs leading the way, we were really going to get that, “asshole,” she hurled in Portuguese.

I came to on the stair one night as these “Spectacular Spectacular” performances straight out of the film Moulin Rouge had a good run, something more like years, as this show lasted four. It was the pitch of her scream. I was crawling over her legs. I had to do that. I had to keep touching these moments, like her leg. I was crawling up her legs that night, it happened. I sat up, what am I doing? I walked downstairs and stood there to take in this snapshot: a broken man at the door, that was the message he communicated, encased in the shadows of the porch and this woman standing guard. Horror.

At the time, all I could do was wonder: was it really like this, Joy? In a way? Would no one do anything even if it were real, was it that unreal? Later, I learned that families typically pretend like it didn’t happen, and that I might not have known that it was happening, so. She didn’t call the cops, she said, because she didn’t want to send me to foster care where a child is at a higher risk of being abused, even again, so was this story unbelievable? The spectacle of it?

And people poured into the house through the very same door, what a show, these sensational nights. They flocked to Miracle Mile for the music, the dancing, her rum cakes rising. The crystal chandelier cast rainbows across the foyer in a curve like the prettiest tears. I could never forget these nights. The living room became a dance floor in 1989, the year that Kaoma’s Lambada took the world by storm with a song that began in heartbreak and became a dance so close to sex it was even scandalous, and we danced it every day. It was the lambada regardless, she was dancing sexy regardless. I kicked my feet back from the hips because they were the center of the universe, to begin, laughing like a kid. I didn’t understand. Now he’s gone away the only one who made me cry. “But this is sad,” I snapped. Everyone was so happy! I didn’t understand! I was in a living room made of goo! In a forest of legs. There was always Nicole. She took my hand. Two little girls in the foyer learning to dance in sparkly slippers, sex became innocent, in a way. And in the center of it all, the sex goddess, Angélica in her kitten heels and jeans taking steps back to advance, calling everyone to dance. I couldn’t believe it, what the words meant. I had never seen such dancing.

Angelica cried under a spellbindingly blue sky. The grass so green it was so real, you know? A time before filters, hard to erase. The sprinklers spit, the beat. The sprinklers cast rainbows. I watched the misty colorful screen as she ripped open the neighborhood like a sheet and macheted it to shreds. Curse words blew like grenades. I suppose I stood there to support her. I was eight. My mother just left, bankrupt, as she paid this woman to “protect her baby.” Now, she found herself a protector. Who hung up on her face. No more money. The story spun in her mind as a woman spins on the living room dance floor in a real jubilee in my mind. “It was all a lie,” but she didn’t even know how my mother handled me, she. The sound of her chair, kicking up her sandals when she said afterward, “it wasn’t true was it?” I remembered that. The grass ripped out from under me like a real carpet. The sprinklers spit, set the beat, the sound expanded the silence, and the universe collapsed. Feeling my way through the dark, was it true? She was dancing regardless.

No matter what, I always find my way back here, these sensational nights, when we danced all night long in the living room. The unbelievable can happen to you. They were Jewish too, just a miracle. People came to watch them, dance, a real show. We honored sorrows in the next room. So one house held everything, the most unspeakable terrors, the most magical feats, an angel of death passing over doors marked in blood, and there she was, in the center of it all wearing a star of David, still lighting her Jesus and Mary candles—dancing sexy regardless. So dance, I thought. I never had an end, only that, because in the end, what was my story in the face of all that? The backyard out the back, black, a mystery. All that can happen to a person. I didn’t understand, the crystal chandelier casting rainbows in a curve. I looked up at crystal teardrops and back. How did it do that? Sweet boozy cakes in the air. Light was real. That moved me. I wasn’t sad, it’s too simple to describe the feeling of being in awe of things. She came a mother hen gawking at me to get dancing. She told me to keep my legs closed, too, at five, so there were many colors, dissonant chords, nothing but love songs. A crowd clapping. So it became about everything. A succession of images, Nicole and I twirling across that grass so green it was real… to be taken away to some magical world called home. A spin on the living room dance floor. Our fists in the air. “Love!” She cried. “The lawyers!” Clapping. “Eh-e-eh-e-ehhh!” Singing. She came to my bedside, “love.” Meaning sex. It was love to her. It’s all she talked about it, how beautiful it was. It was even spiritual. “One day, he’ll remember a love he could not care for,” the lambada predicted long ago. One day, I might be dancing upon these words laughing and crying with joy, my mother’s name.