My hatred was a steady, unquestionable foundation during years when everything else changed too much and too quickly. My older brother and I were not asked to take sides during the divorce—our mother had already chosen for us; we were on hers. When my brother questioned this, or any other edict, our lives grew volatile. When I was fourteen and he was sixteen, after years of alternately getting kicked out and running away, he officially moved out to live with our father. He was not loyal to my mother the way I was, questioned her stories even before featuring in them as a villain himself.
I was furious with him—not for going, but for leaving me behind. Because everyone else had abandoned my mother, I thought I never could.
But as the years passed, I couldn’t tolerate spending more than a couple of days at a time at her house, either. My senior year of high school, I lived out of a duffel bag and ping-ponged between their houses throughout the week.
By the time it finally arrived, I’d spent years plotting ways to ruin my father’s wedding, had fantasized about dipping my finger into a cake’s thick buttercream frosting and striping it across my cheekbones as war paint before overturning tables, biting guests, slicing the cords of chandeliers to send them crashing to the floor. But when the day came, I wore a sky-blue satin dress and stood calmly next to my father in the sanctuary. I didn’t speak to her that day, didn’t directly acknowledge her presence, but I listened as Jo Ann and my father spoke their vows and poured twin streams of sand into a glass vase. During the reception, my cousins and I danced barefoot to a calypso band beneath bright lights until a hot bulb burst overhead. The glass shards showered the wooden floor and bit into the soles of our feet. I was disappointed when I saw how little mine bled.
After the wedding, my father and Jo Ann moved into a brick colonial-style home in the suburb where I grew up, and I moved into a dorm room at a small liberal arts college in another state. It was an unexpected relief to settle into one place, to wake up in the morning and not have to spend a moment figuring out where and who I was. And when it came time to return home from college for vacation, and I had to encounter my mother afresh, I found myself showing up at my father and Jo Ann’s house instead. I dropped my duffle on their new cream-colored carpet, grabbed a fistful of hard candies from the cut crystal dish in their foyer, and learned where they kept the utensils in their gleaming kitchen. When I encountered Jo Ann, my lips formed a smile, though I avoided eye contact and tried never to be in a room alone with her.