Lisa Unger: Black Out

I nod. “Terrible,” I agree. I pull my eyes away from the screen with effort and leave the kitchen; as I climb the stairs, I hear Esperanza humming to herself.

Upstairs, Victory’s happily playing in her room. She’ll go on like this for a while before she needs some company or attention from me. For now she’s rapt in the world she’s created with her dolls, Claude and Isabel. Her babies, as she calls them.

In my bedroom I can hear her whispering to them on the baby monitor I still keep in her bedroom. The sound of her breathing at night is my sweet lullaby. I wonder when she’ll make me take it out of her room. How old will she be when she doesn’t want me to hear her every breath any longer? Mom, she’ll say, get a life.

When I was sixteen, my mother moved us from government housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to a trailer park in Florida so that she could be closer to a man with whom she’d become involved. They’d been having a white-hot correspondence for a number of months, involving thick letters written in red ink and the occasional collect telephone call where my mother cooed into the phone, holding the receiver to her mouth so intimately that I’d half expected her to start sucking on it. After some tearful proclamations and heartfelt promises between them, my mother and I packed our few belongings into the back of a brown Chevy Citation we bought for seven hundred dollars and headed south to begin our new life.

“We can live much better in Florida,” my mother told me with certainty. “Our money will go a lot farther. And it’s so pretty there.”

I watched the Lower East Side pass outside the car window and wondered how anything could be more beautiful than New York City. Sure, it can be cold and dangerous-a frightening place, a lonely one for all its crowds. But the grand architecture, the street noise, the energy of millions of people living their lives-you can never mistake yourself as being anywhere else when you’re there; there’s no mistaking that heartbeat. It’s unique in all the world. If one considers the great beauties in history-Cleopatra, the Mona Lisa, Ava Gardner-none of them were pretty in that cheap, cookie-cutter way that seems to pass for gorgeous these days. They were beautiful for what was unique about them from the inside out, for features that might have been ugly on anyone else. If you don’t know how to look at her, her hidden alleys and minuscule precious side streets, her aura of mischief, her throbbing nightlife, you might find yourself intimidated by New York City, even repulsed by her odors and sounds, you might even turn away from her because she’s too brash, too haughty. But it would be your loss.

I thought my father would put up more of a fight when my mother wanted to leave with me. But he seemed to agree that the move would do me good. I’d been getting into some trouble in school for insolence, tardiness, and absence. The city offered too much temptation to a young girl with too little parental supervision. In any case, my needs always came last in any decision-making process my parents employed. My mom was motivated only by male attention. My father could never love anything as much as he loved his art. I fit in there somewhere, I think. I’m not saying they didn’t love me.

“Don’t worry about it, kid. Florida’s a hop and a jump. We’ll be back and forth all the time,” my father told me as I sobbed into his chest.

He never once came to Florida to see me, though. And I didn’t see him again until I ran away almost two years later. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So we moved into a trailer park, and my mother got a job as a waitress in a diner that was just a few blocks away, which was good because that Chevy overheated about three times on the drive to Florida and died altogether on our arrival.

“Well, everything happens for a reason,” my mother said with her usual depraved optimism as the car sputtered and went on to a better place. “At least whatever we need is walking distance. If there’s an emergency, we can take a cab. And I can take the bus to see Frank. Meanwhile, we’ll save on gas and insurance.” If there was ever anyone with less reason to look on the bright side, I wouldn’t want to meet her. Nothing ever worked out for my mother. And if there was any reason for the things that happened to her, it has never been made clear to me.

Take the man for whom we moved down to Florida. He was an all right guy, sort of soft-spoken and not unkind to me during visits. But there was one problem: He was a convicted rapist and murderer on death row in the Florida State Prison. My mother had “met” him during a letter-writing campaign initiated by her church. The goal was to spread the word of the Lord to the lost souls on death row, to “save” them before they faced their earthly punishment for the wrongs they’d done. My mother, obviously, took the whole saving thing a little bit too far.

I’ll never forget our first August in Florida. I didn’t even know it could get that hot; the humidity felt like wet gauze on my skin; it crawled into my lungs and expanded. Violent lightning storms lit the sky for hours, and the rain made rivers out of the street in front of our trailer park. And the palmetto bugs-they made New York City roaches look like ladybugs. The only thing that redeemed Florida for me was how the full moon hung over the swaying palm trees and how the air sometimes smelled of orange blossoms. But generally speaking, it was a hellhole. I hated it, and I hated my mother for moving us there.

The Florida I live in now with Gray and Victory is different. This is the wealthy person’s Florida, of shiny convertibles and palatial homes, ocean views and white-sand beaches, margaritas and Jimmy Buffett. This is the Florida of central air and crisp cotton golf shirts over khakis, country-club days and fifty-foot yachts. To be honest, I hate it just as much. It’s so fake, so tacky and nouveau riche, so proud of its silicone-filled and bleached-blond Barbie women.

Give me concrete and street noise any day. Give me Yellow Cabs and hot-dog stands. Give me legless, homeless guys pushing themselves on dollies through the subway cars, shaking their change jars with self-righteous aplomb.

I am thinking about this as I sit on the floor by the bed and reach up under the box spring. I’ve cut out a large hole there. Inside, I keep things that Gray and my doctor would be very unhappy about. They just wouldn’t understand. I reach around and don’t feel anything at first. Maybe Gray found them, I think, panic threatening. Maybe he took them away to see how long it would be before I looked for them again. But then, with a wash of relief, I feel the smooth, cool surface of one of these things.

“Mommy.” It’s Victory, whispering into her baby monitor. I can hear her, but she can’t hear me, and she gets that. “Mommy,” she says, louder. “Come to my room. There’s a strange man on our beach.”

She hasn’t even finished the sentence and I’m already running. In my panic, the hall seems to lengthen and stretch as I make my way to her. But when I finally burst through the door, breathless and afraid, there’s no one on our stretch of sand. Out her window, there’s just the moody black-gray sky, and the green, whitecapped ocean.

We live near the tip of a long beach, right before a state nature preserve. There are about five other houses within walking distance of ours, and three of those are empty for much of the year. They are weekend homes and winter homes. So essentially we’re alone here among the great blue herons and snowy egrets, the wild parrots and nesting sea turtles. It’s silent except for the Gulf and the gulls. People walk along the beach during tourist season, but very few linger here, as all the restaurants, bars, and hotels are a mile south.