Look at You Now Page 3

  “Lizzie?” my mother was saying. “I have to go; your sisters are at home alone. I have a lot of people with a lot of questions that I have to somehow figure out a way to answer. And a long drive back.” I sank further and further down to what felt now like the bottom of the black sea.

  “Can you show her to her room and help her set up, Ms. Graham?”

  Ms. Graham nodded as my mom grabbed her purse and her camel hair coat. I followed the click, click of her heels out of the office and into the hall. With her back to me, she pressed the handle of the steel door that led to the outside world, to the snowy night and the long drive home. When she turned to face me I saw her eyes well up.

  “You’ll be okay, sweetheart. I’ll come back this weekend and we’ll go somewhere nice. I feel terrible leaving you here, but I know it’s the right thing. Remember to pray, Liz. Ask God to help us through this.”

  She hugged me close; we stayed like that a long time. I was sobbing hard until she finally backed up and took my face in her hands.

  “I love you, Liz.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry about all of it,” I said. She squeezed me tightly. “You’ll be back Friday?” I asked.

  “Friday it is.”

  The door slammed shut behind her. I stood in her wake for what felt like an eternity, and then made my way back to the woman’s office. Ms. Graham asked me how long I’d been playing the guitar. She was trying to be nice, but I couldn’t answer; I was still crying.

  One hallway led to another, then down a few stairs to another heavy door with a lock on it. Ms. Graham took a ring of keys out and opened the door. We entered a corridor that had an odd odor and flickering lights. She turned to me and said, “You will be fine here; you just have to give it some time.”

  We turned and entered a good-sized room with paneled walls and a thumping ceiling fan going round and round. This must be the lounge. There was another door on the opposite side of the room leading out to what looked like a hall with rooms. The hall in this wing must have made a U shape, and the lounge was in the middle with two doors. There were several young pregnant girls sitting around, most of them smoking cigarettes. The room was thick with smoke. A TV with an antenna held together by tinfoil sat crooked against the main wall. There were two shabby couches, a recliner, and several chairs scattered around. There was one lone window oddly placed in the wall in the back, mostly covered by a dreary-looking curtain.

  As Ms. Graham began trying to get the girls’ attention, I noticed a very young girl with a horrible scar running down the entire side of her pale face. All the girls looked up at me, except for the girl with the scar. Ms. Graham pointed at each girl as she spoke.

  “This is Nellie, Tilly, Amy, Hadley, Marina, Elaine, Doris, Wren, and that over there is Deanna.” A few of the girls waved. “This is Liz; she is a new resident.”

  The white chore board on the wall had my name on it. The other girls had their first initials and last names, but mine was my first name and last initial. One of the girls was sitting in a beaten leather La-Z-Boy chair reclined all the way back, a big girl with dark brown skin wearing huge red hoop earrings that looked like bracelets. Her pregnant belly hung heavy over her jeans. She was eating a bag of Doritos while holding a cigarette and a can of Orange Crush. Ms. Graham stepped away to fix the TV, which the girls were all saying was broken. I took another look at the black girl in the recliner. She caught me and said, “What are you looking at? You stay the fuck away from me.” I nodded and then looked down at the floor.

  I followed Ms. Graham through the room, out the other door, and down the hallway. Mine was the last room at the end of the hall, on the left. Ms. Graham turned to me. “Remember, your day to see me is Tuesday, Liz. Every Tuesday you will come to my office at one o’clock. But I’d like you to come by tomorrow and we can see how you are getting on. If you need me for anything, you can ask Alice how to get ahold of me; she is your resident supervisor.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you think you’re going to be okay tonight?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She was gone, and I was alone. The room had two beds, two dressers, and a long window along the wall at the head of the beds in the room. The bed frames were steel, the room mostly cement and brick. I couldn’t bring myself to open my suitcase. It would be like opening the doorway to hell, and I knew I wouldn’t survive. Crying had become like breathing. I took off my long winter coat. It was a full-length gray wool cape coat my mother had given me for my birthday the year before when I turned sixteen, which felt like a long time ago. I laid the coat out on the bed and sat on it. The cinder-block walls were painted a dirty cream color, and the floor was gray linoleum. The dressers were built into the wall and had several drawers. I took a long time deciding which side of the room I should use; maybe the side you couldn’t see when the door opened would be the best. My mom had put a jar of peanut butter and a box of Wheat Thins in my tote that morning. I pulled them out and placed them on the dresser on my side of the room. I pushed my suitcase and guitar to the side I’d chosen. I saw my stuffed dog Henry’s ear hanging out of the outside pocket of my suitcase and pulled him out. I’d brought him along at the last second early that morning. Henry had the same goofy look on his face he’d always had. I thought about all the places that silly dog had been with me and wondered if I should put him back in the suitcase to spare him from this place, but instead I placed him on the bed and looked at him. And for just a moment, everything felt like it was going to be okay. Henry was the one reminder of life before this place.

  Maybe it was all a dream, a horrible nightmare, and I was going to wake up in my room at home to see my Madame Alexander dolls on the shelf and hear my little sisters, the twins, fighting in the next room. But you always know it’s not a dream when you find yourself hoping it’s a dream, again and again and again.

  I got sick to my stomach later that night. I threw up several times in the bathroom that was attached to the room. It was clean and sterile-looking, like one in a hospital. It had those steel handles mounted on three walls, the ones you see in homes for old people. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I splashed water on my face; it was hard to look at myself. When I did, the voice in my head reminded me that I was a horrible person, and I could think of nothing to defend that. I was a horrible person.

  I had no idea what time it was, but time was meaningless anyway. My tears wouldn’t stop no matter how hard I tried. I looked out the window at the cold trees in the darkness, and then noticed the lock latch. I unlocked and opened the window about a foot and took a deep breath from the freezing cold outside, as though I’d discovered a secret place from which I could steal oxygen. The cold tore through me and stayed in the room. I curled up like a baby on the bed, looked out at the tree nearest the window, at the way the snow sat so perfectly on each branch, and wondered if anything was ever going to look beautiful again, and finally fell asleep.

  chapter 2

  The morning was trying to trick me into believing a new day could make things better. As the bright sun filled the room, I closed my eyes hard, pulled my coat over my head, and tucked into a small piece of dark. My mind flooded with thoughts, memories, and images of everything I’d just left behind, until it stopped on the familiar face of my father. I remembered only the quiet steady comfort of his voice when I was little, waking me up in the morning at home.

  “Get up, Diz, I’ll meet you in the driveway in four minutes.” My father’s gigantic six-foot frame crunched down into my bottom bunk bed in our house in Winnetka. As I opened my eyes I could smell the shaving cream on his clean-shaven face. He’d been calling me Diz my whole life. That was my name out of his mouth, always. He pulled back the blue-and-white-striped bedspread and put his finger to his lips, reminding me, Don’t wake your sisters.

  I grinned and whispered to him, “I’ll be down in three.”

  Over and over in my head I reminded myself, Quiet as a mouse, as I put on my red tights and my big gr
ay sweater. It was Sunday morning. I never knew where we’d be going, exactly, and I never cared. Sunday morning was always my time with my dad. I ran to the back stairs and then remembered something. I dashed back to my room to feed Bonnie and Clyde; they were my turtles and I fed them every morning. I sprinkled some flakes into the tank and blew them a kiss. I grabbed my shoes and raced to the driveway. I stopped quickly, looked down at the dirt on my shoes, and took them off. No eating, no drinking, and no putting your feet up on the dashboard in dad’s car. My father was a stickler for things being in their place and staying tidy. The smell of the deep, tan leather seats in his car reminded me that everything in the world was going to be okay. I eyed the pack of Beeman’s gum sitting on the shelf beneath the radio, where it always was. My dad leaned over with a smile and offered me a piece.

  We drove with the windows down, my curly hair swirling all around my face as the wind blew in and out. I loved the windy driving; it made me laugh for no reason. My dad turned on the radio and asked, “How about the bakery?”

  “Yes, the bakery!” I shouted over the noisy wind. We drove until I saw the red-and-white awning over the French bakery in a nearby town. He grabbed the paper from the rack on the wall, and we sat on silver metal ice-cream chairs, me with a warm jelly Bismarck, my dad with his plain croissant.

  “Let me show you something, Diz. You see this? What does it say?” He gestured for me to look at the paper.

  “The Wall Street Journal.”

  “Right, now this is an amazing paper. You know why?”

  “Because it has news?”

  “Yes, but also because it has a great way of covering all the different news. They take the biggest stories and condense each of them into little paragraphs and put them all on the front page, you see? So you can find out just enough information to know what’s going on all over the world right here on the front page.”

  My dad was smart. He was the keeper of all the things I would need to know in order to make my life a place I’d want to be, and he had an incredible ability to make me feel that I was something in this world. Maybe because I fell in the middle of the millions of kids in our family, or maybe because he already knew how much I would need him. He was a man who didn’t just believe his children would go out and tackle the world the right way; he knew they would. His standard for us was in place from the second we arrived on the planet, and his belief that we could meet that standard was so strong it worked. He didn’t pressure, he simply expected—and we delivered. He was a composed, calculated kind of firm. Never lost it, just shot looks, lowered his voice, and commanded respect. The onus was on us to succeed. To disappoint our dad carried the kind of shame none of us ever wanted to feel.

  He had the same name as his father and his grandfather: William Lee Pryor. He was William Lee Pryor III, but people called him Lee. We revered him, not just because he was our dad, but because it was clear how strongly he felt about the lessons he wanted to pass on to us. At our big nightly family dinners, Lee found his opportunity to hold court. Every night he checked in on our lives and shared the things he felt were so important in the world. None of us were overlooked. He made sure that every kid at the table would learn something. You had to be dressed, clean, and on your game before sitting down to eat in our dining room.

  I remember being about ten years old, standing in our kitchen just before a family dinner, staring at the nine pork chops sizzling on our Viking range. I watched the juices ooze out of the fatty parts and run off to the side. The smell was making our dog Toby howl insanely. There was a gigantic bowl of mashed potatoes sitting next to the stove; I wanted to stick my finger in and sample it, but didn’t dare. I waited for my mom to tell me to start carrying the food into the dining room. Finally she grabbed the big old cowbell with the round wooden handle and rang it, the sound echoing loudly through the house. I grabbed the mashed potatoes and the bread and headed into the dining room. Everyone was filing in. I noticed my older brother John come in at the last second, wearing a baseball hat. Then I saw “the look” on my father’s face—the look none of us ever wanted to be on the other end of. John didn’t flinch. He just sat down, rolled his eyes, and put his napkin in his lap.

  John was the bravest person I knew. He was the second child, born about a year and a half after my older brother Bill, and he happened to be the kid who was causing the most friction at the moment. As in, he and my mother couldn’t share the same air without having an argument, and I’m not talking just a regular argument. She’d chase him through the house with frying pans; he’d use the top-of-the-top worst swearwords right to her face. John was consistently able to dissolve the small amount of glue that held Dorothy together on a daily basis. But when our dad was around, things were different. And he was home every night around six-thirty unless he was traveling. As we settled at the table, my father cleared his throat and addressed us.

  “Who can tell me what is most obviously wrong with this table?”

  Several of us chimed in.

  “John is wearing a hat.”

  “A baseball hat on John’s head.”

  “Correct.” My dad went on. “John, remove the hat, wash your hands, and return with respect to this table. Apologize to your mother for holding things up. And you will begin the discussion when you return.” No one ever wanted to begin the discussion. My brother quickly removed his hat, got up from the table, and responded with a quiet “Yes, sir.” When he came back he gave a tired apology to our mom, and my dad continued.

  “Bill, remove your knife from the butter dish; it belongs on your own plate. And, Kiley, do not begin without your mother having taken her first bite. And now go ahead and share with the family, John, something you learned today that you feel might be of interest and could teach your sisters something.”

  John, with zero enthusiasm, offered: “I learned today that pigs are actually pretty clean animals. They have a bad rap for being dirty because they like to play in the mud and cover their coats with dirt because it cools them off. But really, they are one of the cleanest animals of all.”

  My dad paused for a moment and went on.

  “Thank you, John. Jennifer, your napkin goes in your lap nicely, not crumpled, and, Diz, get your elbows off the table. Does anyone know what kind of meat comes from a pig?”

  We all chimed in at the same time.

  “Bacon.”

  “Ham.”

  “Pig’s feet.”

  “Pickled pig’s feet.”

  “Bologna.”

  “Headcheese.”

  “Sausage.”

  “Pig’s tongue.”

  “Spam.”

  My dad quietly said to our mom, who was still fussing around the room, “Dorothy, can you please do us the favor of sitting down? These kids cannot eat until you’ve taken your first bite, for Christ’s sake.”

  My mother quickly sat, put her napkin in her lap, and apologized. “Sorry, sorry, kids. Please eat.” She always looked a little defeated, even before we started eating.

  Bill was the oldest child, and our mother saw him as the Second Coming. My sisters and I followed suit and treated him like royalty. Bill was the fourth William Lee Pryor; he had a IV after his name. I thought it was pure fancy and wished I could have a number after my name. He hovered under the radar in the family, more reserved than the rest, and appeared humbly oblivious to the position he held as oldest. He was as tall as my dad and was the only other one in the family with curly hair like mine. What Bill did best was take unabashed advantage of having five little sisters; he referred to us as his own personal servants. He snapped his fingers and we did whatever he asked.

  But that night, Bill cleared his throat at the table and addressed our dad.

  “Dad, why do you think it’s so important for us to know all of these rules surrounding the dinner table and manners? Which forks to use, knives to save, soupspoon out of the bowl, serve from the left, take from the right—seriously, what does it really matter? Who the heck is going to even kn
ow all this stuff you pay so much attention to?”

  The entire table went silent. I felt morbidly excited by Bill’s confrontation. Really, what was the big deal about all of it?

  After a long silence my dad responded. “You want to know, Bill. Do you all want to know?”

  We looked at one another. Some of us shook our heads no, some whispered, but hell yes, we all wanted to know. It did seem so stupid, all of it. My dad continued.

  “You don’t just trust me that I am teaching you things you will value greatly when you’re older? Then I’ll tell you. What I’m teaching you, which you ignorantly claim to be so unnecessary, is the difference between knowing something and knowing nothing. It is my experience that knowledge is power, and it is my job to pass on to all of you the knowledge I have about how to make it in this world. Like it or not, we live in a society of rules, and etiquette and manners prominently exist. Manners are a sign of respect and being polite shows a person has thought and regard for others. This stuff you are questioning is the same stuff that delineates the men in this world from the gentlemen and the women from the ladies. What I am teaching you will enable you to eat dinner at the White House or marry royalty.”

  It probably wasn’t the time to laugh, but a few of us couldn’t help it. He ignored the laughter and carried on.

  “Whether you end up dancing at the White House or dining with royalty is not the point. The point is if you’re invited you’ll know what to do. And knowing what to do gives you confidence, and confidence, kids, is the key to life.”

  My dad had an incredible influence on how I saw myself growing up. He was my dad, and in my eyes he knew everything. As far back as I can remember, he’d talked to me in a way that made me feel I already knew whatever it was he was saying, in a way that made me feel worthy and respected. He never doubted the person I was, and in turn I rarely doubted myself. It was like a language, and I learned it very early.