cliché musings

Before my dad and stepmom got divorced, I had a dream about it. Trying to place it is like trying to find the right word for a language you don’t know. I can see a car, flying down the road, but not on the road, drifting through the sky like that scene at the end of Grease. I can see my stepmom in the dream, a figure bigger than the car, letting us know she was divorcing our father, a godly, echoing voice speaking down to us from the heavens. I’m not sure if either of those pictures were in the dream or were remnants of my brain’s continuation after I woke up. The feeling is what I carry with me most. A sense of dread, not because I was losing my stepmom, but the awkwardness that would come with it. My dad would be moving again and, almost assuredly, dating again and it would be like ten years prior when we first moved to Raleigh and he bought a two-bedroom apartment and me and my brother slept on mattresses on the floor, only this time my younger sister would be me and I’d have to watch her get used to separated parents and the knowledge that your dad is a bit of a player.

I woke up relieved. I never cared about their relationship, but I cared about stability. Or maybe I cared that I had known it was coming for five years. While my dad drove me and my brother back to my mom’s—me sitting in the front seat, my brother in the back—he’d be on the phone for most of the ride. He’d get a call, turn down the radio, and started smiling when he said, “Hello?” I’d be able to hear a woman’s voice on the other end, but I didn’t know who it was, and I didn’t know what she was saying. At eleven years old, I assumed it was my stepmom. At first. It didn’t sound like her. Sometimes, he’d ask if she was at work. Usually it was the weekend, a Sunday evening, and my stepmom didn’t work on the weekends.

When he’d hang up, sometime before we got to my mom’s, he’d say, “I love you.”

I never said anything while I was in the car. I don’t know if my dad noticed how much I looked over, how much I tried to glance at his phone screen before he answered, how much I tried to block out what he was saying when there was nothing else to focus on. I’m not sure why he did it in front of us. I never asked.

Saying nothing only works when everything stays consistent, and then I’d never have to think about it again. Not when what I know is a big crack in the glass of a windshield that keeps spreading and branching and cracking the more it goes ignored.

When I was 19, I started talking to a guy on Bumble. It was part of a pattern that encompassed most of my sophomore year (find a guy, talk for two weeks, establish plans for a relationship, cut me off, wash, rinse, repeat), but he already broke the mold by being half-blind (in his left eye). My friends made fun of me for it. Apparently I could do a lot better. I didn’t think I could, but I also didn’t think it was fair to write him off for a disability.

He did shoot himself in the eye with a Nerf gun in the fifth grade. Beggars can’t be choosers. At least he had a job and his own place.

He worked overnight shifts at a CarMax, power washing and detailing cars. He drove an old Mustang that compromised the entirety of his pictures on Instagram. I don’t remember what year it was; I barely remember its color. I told him I didn’t even know it was a Mustang, that my friends had to tell me after showing them the account. He seemed offended.

“So I’m trying to show off my cool car so you’ll be impressed, and you didn’t even notice?”

“I noticed how loud it was,” I said.

And it was. The engine rattled the metal frame, the doors shaking with vibrations. I had to nearly yell to talk while we were in the car. I would look out the windshield and wonder how solid it was, if it could put up with the constant sound waves. It seemed intact. I sat in the front passenger seat, when he first picked me up from my dorm, while he drove me to the restaurant we were getting lunch at. I usually hated cars that made so much noise, the kind you can hear from two streets away zooming down the road, the kind of guys who drove them that like to push down on the gas and rev the engine when they see you from behind, but he was sweet. I could put up with the love for cars and the rigged-out engine if it meant I was being driven everywhere.

The windshield shattered on my brother’s 14th birthday, two weeks after my dream. I’d be almost 16. We were at an Applebee’s and my dad was there and my stepmom wasn’t. The dread swallowed my chest and guts, but I chose to ignore it. The last time we went out to eat, at an IHOP, she made fun of me for ordering a mocha, anyway. My dad was much more relaxed and let me get churros for a dessert.

My brother had surpassed me in height by then. He was the skinniest in the family, where you could see his ribs when he was shirtless, and he hunched his back over while sitting in the booth. His hair was styled up, gel through the short, dark strands, and he kept his headphones in almost everywhere he went.

“Dad has to tell you something,” he announced, before we got the check and we were forced out by another white middle-class family on their monthly fine-dining excursion. He had been staying with Dad for a while and already told me he had news for us. My sister was somewhere in the restaurant. She was almost 7, with chubby cheeks and cloudy eyes and thin, wavy hair. She might have been at the table, but she also might have been wandering around for a bathroom, trying to get adjusted to her first few moments of independence. She knew, too. The first-born always came last.

Maybe Dad didn’t want to tell, but I wouldn’t have been able to notice. His two facial expressions were nothingness, a straight line for a mouth, and laughter. He laughed when he was mad and laughed when he was uncomfortable. He sat at the booth with his arms folded over the table, back hunched over, and lips that won’t quirk up or down.

“Clearly, you can see Amanda isn’t here,” he eventually said. He laughed, two chuckles that spurted out of his mouth. There it was. “We’ve been having some problems lately and we think it’s best if we separate.”

I’m not a psychic. A prophetic dream was weird, but anxiety dreams were not. My stepmom—ex-stepmom, I guess—used to try to bond with me, but I cut that rope when she told me I shouldn’t believe in climate change because it was invented by the same person that invented the internet. Or maybe it was when we spent the day together for my thirteenth birthday, probably at my dad’s wishes, and we got our hair done and she told me about her life for the first time while I’m sitting in the passenger seat of the car. And then, while we were in the drive-through for our Bojangles meal, she told me I shouldn’t listen to what everyone says about the George Zimmerman case, because Trayvon Martin was carrying a bottle of Arizona and Skittles and he was probably using that to make meth. I said, “Oh,” and nothing else. I thought about how she had known my brother since he was five. He was fourteen now, and she wasn’t here.

“I don’t like how she’s treated you,” Dad said. “I haven’t for a while. You’re my kids.”

I didn’t mention the dream or the past phone calls in the car. I was used to pretending I didn’t care.

My dad would start dating someone new a few months later. Her name was Gina, and she was taller than he was with blonde hair in a bob and a bright smile. She was nice and energetic, wanting to include me and my brother in the things they did together and meeting her kids by us all having dinner together. By the next year, after they’ve moved in together, she’d echo what my dad said, telling us he divorced Amanda because of how she treated us. I didn’t necessarily not believe it. I was only spanked once as a child, and she was the one who did it. One time, when I tried to do my own hair, she said she needed to fix it because I looked homeless. Another time, she complained to my dad that my sister (her daughter) was going to be fat when she was older. Yet another time, after I proclaimed that Duke was the worst basketball team, she asked my dad, “Where did you go wrong with her? She likes Obama and hates Duke.”

One of our last interactions was sometime in the early spring of 2016. My dad’s brother was getting married, but he lived in Michigan, so they were planning on us having a road trip up north in the summer. It would have been five of us—me, my brother, my sister, my dad, and my stepmom—in the new truck my stepmom bought (spoiler alert, we never went on that trip). I think I said, “I don’t want to sit in the back of a truck for that long.”

(I always wound up sitting in the middle, with my elbows pressed against my brother and my sister, neither of which would ever stop moving.)

“Well, if you don’t quit bitching,” my stepmom said, “you can just sit in the back of the Kia. How does that sound?”

I didn’t respond. My dad noticed. I heard him and my stepmom having a hushed argument, and then he asked, “Anna, are you upset?”

I kind of was. I hated voicing that I was upset more than actually being upset. “No,” I said. “Why?”

My stepmom said, “See?”

My dad said, “You don’t usually get quiet when you want to argue something.”

That only applied to my mom, my dad, and brother. I never felt comfortable enough with my stepmom to argue with her.

I wished I hadn’t lied. Sometimes I want to tell Amanda I didn’t like how she treated me, either.

After our one lunch, half-blind guy didn’t text me as much. He had said he wanted to meet the next Friday, but then Thursday night said he was too tired and we could reschedule. I said, i mean sure but we don’t have to if you don’t want to. I was still a little surprised when he said that yeah, he wasn’t feeling it anymore. I could see the glass of my phone screen exploding. I could imagine taking a bat and smashing in the windows of his prized Mustang. One of my friends said I should just beat him with his blind-person cane.

This was one of the times I felt comfortable enough to argue, at least in the form of a paragraph of a text that would never be responded to. I could speak my mind but only when it came to not wanting to accept what I should be able to accept. You seemed so into it before, and now you’ve just blindsided me. Pun-intended. 

The text was responded to, actually, just a month later. I received an essay-long message saying he had been going through things, wondering why he was so afraid of commitment, he just felt insecure and like you wouldn’t accept me. It’s dumb, I know. He wanted to know if I was willing to give things another go. It’s fine if you’re talking to someone else, I understand. 

I got back into his Mustang that same night.

My dad and Gina dated for four years and then broke up. She texted me about it before they told us as a family; the next time I came over, while my dad sat outside drinking a Jack Daniels and Coke, she started telling me a lot of things. That she was sorry we had to go through this again. And then that she was frustrated because she didn’t want to end the relationship. And then that they had bought the house together in her name, specifically constructed with six bedrooms, that was going to be left just for her and her one daughter, and she had lost her job just a few months prior. And then that she caught my dad leaving the house at three in the morning through the Ring alarm system they installed, and she had the videos sent to her phone. And then that she found a receipt for a restaurant in his pockets, dated for a night he had told her he was going to be working late. And then that he had been in contact with the girl he had an affair with during his marriage to Amanda, and that same girl had told her about it in a message on Facebook. Our dad thought they were soulmates. She lived in Missouri now with her husband and kids and had no intention of trying anything again. Gina found out about that two years before.

I remembered when she said our dad had told her why he divorced Amanda. Because of us, me and my brother. I wondered how she felt, finding out about the affair, finding out my dad had tried to talk to this girl while her and Gina had just moved into a house together.

(A few weeks ago, at my dad’s new apartment, I was looking for the paper that had the WiFi password on it. My dad had stuck a pile of papers, bills and brochures and my sister’s discarded homework, into one of the cabinets. I went through the pile, looking for the WiFi sheet, and found an envelope, addressed to my dad, with a Missouri return address. I put the envelope back, stuck the papers back in the cabinet, and never mentioned it.)

The last thing Gina told me was that, while they were discussing ending the relationship, my dad had said he wanted to break off their relationship less than a year in, but held on for the sake of us. Maybe the sake was the instant relief of a pipe bomb placed under the seat of a car. You wouldn’t have to worry about the flames eating away at the paint and metal, the scorched leather seats, the gas continuing to fuel the fire until someone came to put it out. The broken windshield is the least of anyone’s worries when they realize they need to pull a body out.

I had another dream, after my dad and Gina announced their breakup. The details were surrounded by thick fog and the warped, squiggly bodies that make up the physics of dreamland. I saw half-blind guy, a guy I hadn’t seen in months, and his car, and some mall-like building that the car thudded through, wheels speeding on the tiles and curving around the pop-up stalls. He asked me for my number. He wanted to try again. We had already tried twice, but not in dreamland. We were already in a relationship, why was he asking for my number? I was surrounded by chaos in the mall and our interactions were short. I had to move, we were being chased. I was in the car again, crashing around an aesthetically-placed fountain, and he was holding my hand.

When I woke up, it was in my bed at my mom’s house. The fog was gone, the world reshaped back into square lines and dimensions. I almost fell asleep again, forcing myself to relive that reality once more, but I had pushed too far out of the box and questioned the cardboard holding me inside. I couldn’t separate the fact I hadn’t thought about that one guy since March and there was really no logical reason I’d be dreaming about him, and no logical reason why I’d feel so encapsulated in a different type of dread. Disappointment. My phone had no texts and no hand was in mine and I played Animal Crossing until I forgot why I wanted to sleep so badly. 

I told my mom and brother what Gina told me. I had never talked to my brother about those old phone calls before, even though he was in the car and should have heard it, too. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised he was shocked to hear that my dad was cheating, that he didn’t remember the phone calls, so I told him.

The phone calls. Hearing him tell this other girl that he loved her. But also the one thing I had blocked out of my mind, that time when it was just me and my sister, her maybe two and me maybe eleven, in the backseat of my dad’s SUV. He was taking us back to his house and told us he needed to stop somewhere. He pulled over into an empty parking lot, behind a building and off a road I didn’t recognize. I didn’t know how long he was gone. I got restless in my seat, feeling like I was burning up inside the car, the familiar smell becoming repugnant and my head aching, a feeling of discomfort I know now I only get from motion sickness or being stuck in a room above 70 degrees, both of which usually occurred on the hour-long drive from my mom’s house to his. I was bored and had no water. I wanted to climb out, but didn’t want to leave my sister inside, and didn’t feel safe stepping outside, and didn’t know how to explain to my dad that I just couldn’t sit in the car for that long if he just so happened to come back when I was outside. My sister maybe started crying, or maybe started making noises like she was about to, and I eventually turned around in my seat, peaking my head over to see through the back window. I had to lean to see around the building, twisting my tiny head as far as I could from inside the car. I saw my dad, laughing, standing in front of a girl I didn’t recognize. I turned back around. The windshield had a small crack in the corner, something for me to focus on, fracturing edges and bumps and a flowering design like a snowflake. I didn’t look back.

When my dad entered the car again, I didn’t say anything. I was silent for the rest of the ride back.

My mom was mad. Mad at me for telling my brother—apparently, despite being eighteen years old, he just couldn’t handle such sensitive information—instead of coming to her first, mad at Gina for telling us things we shouldn’t know about, mad at my dad, maybe a little mad at herself. My brother was just mad at our dad. I wasn’t supposed to say anything to anyone in the first place, but he ended up texting our dad that he wasn’t coming back there and he should work things out with Gina. And then my dad was mad at Gina.

 I wondered if I’ve always known that having a voice was so powerful, that it can change whatever you want if you let it. A new conversation that leads to revelations that leads to actions that leads to someone being mad about what was said, a betrayal like a star burning out and swallowing the solar system that depended on it for billions of years into an abyss of a blackhole. Words are like visualizing the strings of fate right in front of you, different threads you can reach out and touch and know what they mean but not what they do, tightened and pulled off into the infinite space in a million different directions, but somehow you can only see two: say nothing or say something. Nothing happens when you say nothing.

A week went by, and then I had a new text on my phone. A paragraph-long message from the guy I had now gone three days without thinking about. Half-blind guy. His contact name had been changed to a singular red flag emoji months ago. He said he was ashamed about the way things ended and had been thinking a lot himself, and that maybe we could try talking again, even just as friends.

He probably wouldn’t have texted me at all, if I hadn’t sent a text two months prior. I had spent days feeling guilt in the pit of my stomach, like someone had taken their own bat to my organs and mushed them up inside until they were spreading and oozing and tangling with my veins. I was so mad the second time he ended things, I blew up on him for not having any consideration for me and not willing to even try, but the more time I thought about it the more I wondered if I was blaming him for not being into me. 

I had always been a windshield waiting to crack, fragile and in need of replacement, even the bigger and bigger fractures going unnoticeable and transparent the longer you have to stare out on the road, pretending it didn’t exist, so you didn’t spend your drive worrying about a falling rock shattering it completely. It wasn’t his fault he ignored it. 

Two months before, I spent days wondering if I should apologize. If it was worth it, if he even cared or was thinking about me or would just think I was insane for bringing it back up. For my own piece of mind, I sent the text. I was emotional and had a hard time accepting I could be a better person. I’m not looking for anything from this text but I hope you’re doing well.

Two months later, he was telling me he had wanted to respond all along, he just didn’t know how.

I sat on the couch for a while, staring at the wall, the material of my phone limp in my hands. It was the first time in days I wasn’t thinking about my dad or Gina or arguing with my mom or that maybe I had given myself all the more reason to become selectively mute and was trying to convince myself it wasn’t a reason. I texted him back.
The last time I saw him, in his car, driving me back to my dorm, he was quiet. We had been up all night and he was tired and needed to sleep before he went to work. The night before, when he picked me up, he held my hand while he drove. He didn’t hold my hand this time. I didn’t dare to offer up my hand, wiggle my fingers, place a palm on his shoulder or leg or all the other things someone shouldn’t have to think about doing before they do it. I stared out the window and ignored how he shifted his car into the next gear, going even faster down the highway, the engine running so loud I could feel it vibrate from inside my skull. I thought, Are you trying to get rid of me? and didn’t say anything.