biscuits and gravy, an ugly bride, and a baseball bat
the recipe
Serves: carnivorous brunch guests
Pair with: lies
Ingredients
99-cent white pepper gravy packet
Meatless soy crumbers
Frozen buttermilk biscuits
The Quick and the Dirty
Bake frozen buttermilk biscuits as per package’s instruction.
Assemble gravy as per packet’s instructions.
Heat fake meat in gravy.
Serve gravy mixture over biscuits.
Tell everyone they’re homemade and shrug vaguely when the carnivore, who has viciously attacked your passive vegetarianism in public on numerous occasions, asks you whether you’ve used choriçe.
the essay
On April 14, 2018, my cousin, Minnie, sent me these two messages:
Oh good, you’ve ignorantly forgotten my presence on Instagram and havent blocked me yet lol. I just wanted to let you know what a rotten spoiled bitch you are, and that i hope you continue to rot in hell. You and your lazy pig mother do not deserve your dad or any relation to the Pettyman family, which I’m sure your cunt self will try to defend, but in reality you have nothing valid to say. You are a disgrace to ignore your aunt’s death, who loved you regardless of your rotting stench of a soul
And to turn your back on your father, who has only dine [sic] everything he could for your ungrateful self your whole life, fuck you Penn!!! Fuck you, you worthless piece of shit trash.
Our aunt, who had refused to speak to me after officiating my wedding other than unceremoniously forwarding mail to me without comment, had died a few weeks earlier. My sister informed me, over text, “In case you haven’t heard, Cleo passed away earlier this week.” She would not tell me anything more.
I was not kind to her in response, but this essay is not about my sister or Aunt Cleo.
***
When I lived up north, and was very small, Minnie was my tether. I was the shadow. From my earliest memories of her, I was terribly jealous. Minnie was an unbelievably cute child. She had beautiful, taupe-colored skin that was perfectly smooth. No freckles. No blemishes. Her brown hair was light and pieces of it sparkled gold in the sunlight. Her brown eyes, too, contained golden flecks. Most enviably, she was slim and well-dressed. She lived in a clean house with no clutter and a small dog who was allowed in her bed. She had a three-story Barbie dream house with an elevator.
Everything seemed so effortless for her. I could not have eloquently stated that at the time, but I still—in the worst parts of myself—hate that everything feels hard for me. I’m messy, inherently. I sweat too much. My eyeliner smudges easily; and, even when it doesn’t, I have a freckle just under my lash line on my left eye that makes it look like my eyeliner has smudged. My black hair is thin and, therefore, becomes greasy easily so I use a dark-colored dry shampoo and, when I sweat, I honestly feel like a melting Rudy Guiliani. I periodically lose massive amounts of hair, and I’ve dabbled—talentlessly—in wigs that never lay well. My weight wildly fluctuates so that my clothes never fit correctly. My skin is very light, covered in freckles and skin damage and acne scars and weird moles and skin tags that my mean dermatologist won’t remove and red marks wherever anything has ever touched me. So, it feels like I have to put in an inordinate amount of time, money, and effort to present as an acceptable human woman, which I know intellectually is a toxic mix of internalized misogyny and a staggering amount of self-hatred. At my best—read: when I am slim—I would describe myself as Gollum in discounted Ann Taylor Loft.
Minnie wasn’t like that. She never needed glasses, so she didn’t have to sleep in them, getting creases on her nose, so that she wouldn’t wake up blind and knocking over everything on the nightstand reaching for them. Her skin looked freshly powdered sans makeup. Her bangs didn’t separate and fuzz in her school pictures. She was a 90s Olsen Twin.
But, she was also stupid and cruel. Inevitably, when she spent the night, we erupted into vicious arguments. This happened so regularly and so intensely that, at some point, my mother decreed that we could not have sleepovers anymore. I don’t remember how any of them started. My memories are simply: mounting irritation with her, wishing fervently that I could go home if we were in her pristine home, and elbowing her in her ribs as hard I could when we had to share the front passenger seat of my dad’s work van. I don’t remember what happened next. Did she cry? Did she stop fussing? Did she tell? Did she hit me back? Did I win? There’s nothing but static and still-pulsating fury.
The volatility of our relationship was another weight I carried. After she would leave, I would feel so guilty for having been so angry. I liked Minnie. I didn’t know why I always lost my temper when we fought. And, the next time I would see her, she would be lovely. I would get swept up in her energy, her bubbly spirit and her effortless style (that I know now was her mother’s doing). I would beg my mom to let us have a sleepover. My mother would purse her lips and ask me why she should allow that when, every time we had a sleepover, it became a nightmare. I would promise that this time that wouldn’t happen. I would swear up and down that this time would be different. I could control myself! And, my mother would give in, much to her regret.
After we moved to the south, Minnie confessed to me that she was afraid of sleeping over at our house up north because she believed we lived in a dangerous neighborhood. Minnie lived in a beautiful two-story home in the outer, outer suburbs where subdivisions erupted between giant corn fields and everyone was white.
One sleepover, during which she presumably was working through that fear, we were playing with Barbies. Minnie was aggressive with our toys and seemed to genuinely enjoy upsetting me. She used her Barbie to vocalize the meanest things about me. “I didn’t say that,” she then grinned, “she did,” and she shrugged at the doll. I recalled my promise to my mother that I wouldn’t fight with Minnie this time, so I just huffed.
“I have an idea,” I said.
I instructed Minnie to hold the offending doll up as high as she could while she ducked. I lifted my brother’s aluminum baseball bat and swung.
I’ve already told you, reader, that Minnie was not bright. Her intelligence did not lend itself to diligent listening. Even still, I felt so bad for hitting Minnie. I can still feel the thud of her face under the bat. (Relax, she didn’t even bruise.) It wasn’t just that I felt bad for physically hitting her; I felt bad because I worried that everyone, including her, would think I had done it on purpose.
***
My family seems more like a family in the recounting of stories as opposed to how they act in real time. Ever since I first realized that I don’t know—really know—my family, I always thought maybe that was just me. Like, I had glimpsed the wizard behind the curtain and I just couldn’t un-see the strings and pulleys and levers that made everything move the way they did. No one else saw the strings; only I did. If I had faith or grace or love in me, I wouldn’t have seen the strings. Because I did see them and couldn’t stop seeing them, I was broken and unable to participate properly in the show. Nothing made this more apparent to me as when Minnie asked me to be her bridesmaid.
As with the most important things, I had discovered Minnie’s engagement over a widely used social media website invented to sexually harass college women and currently destroying families and the country. Choosing to embrace my role in the family, I offered my performative support by quickly congratulating her in an overly warm and excited comment.
She quickly responded, “The dresses are hot pink! Get excited!”
And, then, I said aloud to my then-new-to-me refurbished laptop, “Am I her bridesmaid?”
Several days passed until she confirmed over direct message that I was, indeed, to be a part of the wedding. It was surreal. Since we were kids, I had only seen her, maybe, four times over extended vacations. We never sent letters or emails to each other. We never spoke on the phone. While I had asked her if she wanted to catch up when I moved back to the Midwest for law school, she had never responded. It felt rude, petty, or mean to point this out (like something someone who hit you in the face with a baseball bat would say), so I said nothing.
I found a magenta dress for 70% off at Ann Taylor. Zippering it was a struggle. I ate only water and egg whites for several days before the wedding, and then I tried to hide my body in every photo. I covered myself up in a black cardigan as soon as I could. Mercifully, Minnie never posted group photos from the wedding, and I never asked why.
I missed Minnie’s bridal shower because I was working in the Deep South. As part of the job, I had been given a $5,000 stipend. I had sublet my apartment in the Midwest so that I only needed to pay rent in the Deep South, but finding a place had been disastrous. I had stayed in an extended stay motel until I could get a room with a local woman, whom my boss knew from church. Finances would have left me enough wiggle room to have gone back up north, except my undergraduate loans went into repayment due to a glitch of sheer and utter incompetency at the financial aid office. The office had informed my undergraduate loan providers that I was no longer a student, which had bumped my loans out of deferment. When I tried to fix this situation, the office informed me that, because it was summer and I was not in classes, I was technically not a student. I had to ask the Dean of Students to intervene on my behalf, but that didn’t happen until almost $2,000 of my stipend was spent on my loans. And, that is how I maxed out two credit cards in one summer.
By the time fall came and I was set to start classes again, the wedding was creeping up. It was set to take place the week after I began classes, which put me in an awkward place financially since my loans didn’t disperse until the first day of class. I didn’t have enough money to pay my rent, which was due before the loans dispersed. Humiliated, I had to ask Able if I could borrow money from him for my share of the rent as well as for my textbooks.
My father came up north for the wedding, but I couldn’t ask either of my parents for money because I knew that they had none. At that time, the house had been for sale for four years, and they were praying for a profit from its sale to settle their debts. My mom, who was then working as a pharmacy technician, had told me that each month she could only either pay the mortgage or my father’s health insurance. But, somehow, my father had managed to scrounge up enough money to drive up north. I tried to remain neutral by not asking how.
He visited the apartment I shared with two other law students. Looking around, he nodded approvingly as it was significantly better than the one-bedroom apartment I had previously lived in alone. “I gave your cousin $300. Do you think that’s enough for a gift?”
I had to take a moment to catch my breath. “Uh, yeah, that’s a lot.” I picked at my nails and scoffed. “I wrote her a check for $25 and asked her not to cash it right away.”
My father rolled his eyes. “Do you need money to give her?”
I laughed a laugh devoid of mirth. “Uh, no, I already spent money on a shower gift and on my dress.” I didn’t list all of my outstanding debts to my dad. I didn’t tell him that my credit cards had pitifully low limits, that my text books were going to cost about a grand, that I was late with my rent, or that my roommates were feeding me. I insinuated instead that Minnie was selfish for having asked me at all to be her bridesmaid, let alone expecting more of me than I was already reluctantly giving.
“Nice,” he rolled his eyes at me, letting me know that I was still very much the petulant, cruel child who hit her pretty cousin with a baseball bat.
Even still, I felt justifiably incensed. “She knew I was poor when she asked me to be her bridesmaid, which I think is gift enough for a wedding since I had to buy a hot pink dress I will never wear again,” I shrugged. (I did wear it again.)
Reader, I did purchase her some Nice Things™ from Kohl’s for her bachelorette, which had been held at another bridesmaid’s home. It was still summer so the event had been in the cleared-out garage and backyard. We were requested to gift underwear to the bride-to-be. I had gone to a nicely landscaped strip mall on the way, finding the most tasteful lingerie set with stockings and pairing it with a sexily-labeled wine that I pilfered from the cache my roommates and I kept on hand. Each gift giver had to be guessed upon the opening of the gift, and Minnie had immediately known this one was mine, “It’s so classy! Look at these stockings,” she rolled her eyes but in a kind way. “Of course, it’s Penny’s!”
I was the only one there in business casual. I had hurriedly put on a dress I knew would not only fit but look good. I’d paired it with comfortable heels because I didn’t know what to expect. The only other things that fit me at the time were leggings, most of which were threadbare or had holes in the seams. When I’d arrived, I immediately realized that leggings would have been far more appropriate. Everyone wore t-shirts and tank tops and shorts. But I hadn’t been able to fit into shorts for two years now and I refused to buy clothes that actually fit because I didn’t want to be the size I was.
Luckily, the heat was momentarily taken off of me when Minnie dropped casually dropped the “n-word,” having forgotten that she had invited her Black friend from work. Crying in the kitchen, she wailed, “I hope she didn’t hear me! Do you think she heard me?”
“Oh,” I said, thinking about her inability to say anything quietly and the proclamatory way in which she had said the racial slur, “I’m sure it’s…” I waved a hand and trailed off and she looked to another friend while I slipped out.
The events leading up to the actual wedding were sheer chaos. I had been mailed an invitation to the rehearsal dinner, but I misjudged how long it would take me to get from the north side of the city to a southern suburb on a Thursday afternoon. So, I completely missed the rehearsal.
I was filled with dread. My heart had started racing as soon as I started my car and turned on the GPS, which tauntingly had informed me that I would not make it. I fought tears as I grew closer, imagining how awful I seemed and how I was living up to a reputation of meanness I knew I had but had not been voiced.
I pulled into the parking lot with tears in my eyes just as they were leaving the church. I apologized repeatedly to anyone who would listen, but Minnie and her mom were busy. My Uncle Min said it didn’t matter and seemed genuinely happy to see me, which I felt like I didn’t deserve.
Uncle Min, Aunt Bonnie, and Minnie were one of my favorite families within my larger, extended family. I liked all of them individually, despite their overt racism; but at the wedding I was reminded of how much I enjoy them simply because of how they seemed to interact with one another. My aunt and uncle took care of Minnie in a way I deeply envied. They knew things about Minnie, things she ate and wouldn’t eat and how she loaded the dishwasher, which I also envied. They didn’t look stiff when they hugged. Aunt Bonnie was enamored with Minnie, and they had the same deep laugh.
The rehearsal dinner was at a pizza parlor, where we took over one entire room. I sat near my aunt because I felt out of place. I didn’t know any of Minnie’s friends and wasn’t close with her sister-in-law, who had married Minnie’s maternal-half-brother, a conservative cousin of mine now living in Texas. He had unfriended me on social media after I posted something insensitive about the Tea Party. I remembered, very clearly, the interaction we’d last had over our computer screens, and I wondered sitting there if he did, too. He had said I was a liberal because I am bad at math; I reminded him that I had taken AP Calculus as a junior and didn’t he, like, work at a gas station? Despite my breathtaking high school accomplishments and general elitism, he and his wife were polite to me. His wife, a Deep South native and high-earning Business Woman, was particularly lovely to me for the entire week.
At the bachelorette party, we’d been gifted semi-sheer, high-neck white shirts with iron-on decals of our nicknames and how long we’d known the bride-to-be. I slipped mine over my head to wear above my sleeveless back dress in an effort to seem more casual. When I’d gone home that night, it fell to my floor and remained there for the rest of the academic year. Apparently, however, we were supposed to bring them to Minnie’s house, where all the bridesmaids were getting ready before the wedding. She wanted photos of us in them. No one had told me this. Since I’d had to leave my apartment by 6am to get there on time, there was no way I could drive the hour and a half to get mine. I was the only one without it, and I felt terrible. But Minnie didn’t seem to care.
I stumbled over my interactions with the rest of the wedding party. Minnie’s friends all had children. I did not. They were all smokers. I wasn’t. When Minnie made a bowl out of an apple in the garage, I made a big deal about sitting as far away from it as possible because I had been offered a prestigious federal internship for which I’d already failed a background check for having quit a clothing store by simply walking out after being told I’d folded 72 camisoles “like shit,” thereby apparently demonstrating that, four and a half years later, I’d probably be a bad lawyer, too. After the wedding, we were instructed to dance down the aisle as in the viral wedding videos from a few years prior. I was incredibly awkward and mostly just skipped down the aisle as fast as possible. The gentleman to whom I was paired never spoke to me, not even to tell me his name, until that moment, when he said, “Ugh, that was the worst, right?”
I said, “Oh, I’m sure you looked great next to me,” obviously referring to my awkwardness.
“Oh, you think you make me look good? Ok,” he huffed and walked away from me.
At the reception, people asked me when I would finally marry my long-time partner. “Haven’t you been dating since, like, high school?”
“The first weekend of college, actually,” I’d said, “On and off.”
“Wow, so it’ll be your wedding next,” they’d nudge me.
I grimaced. In reality, I had dumped Able the week before. I was exasperated. I was supposed to be looking for jobs after law school, but I refused to go to New England, which I didn’t particularly like, unless we were planning on marriage. After a spate of engagements erupted between couples who had been together for less time than we had, I threw my hands up and told him I would be looking for jobs in New Orleans, my favorite city. “I’m not going to uproot my life and move to where you live if I’m just your girlfriend.”
So, Able had visited the previous week and leant me a bunch of money to pay my rent and buy textbooks and was then subsequently dumped by a very drunk me, who had mixed a broken heart with two bottles of white wine and several glasses of apple cider moonshine. For the next month and a half, he ignored our breakup, which would dissolve into just an extended argument we’d had about legitimate problems. But, at the time, I was adamant. I told my entire family that we had broken up.
My father, who had never liked Able, defended him for the first time. As we stood on the patio outside Minnie’s wedding reception, drinks in hand (a crown and coke for dad and a dirty vodka martini for me) my dad accused me of pushing Able to marry me.
“He doesn’t have to marry me!” I nearly screamed. “I am just not going to move to New England, which I hate, if I’m just his girlfriend. I’m not one of those kinds of people.” I crossed my arms, having emphasized peopleeven though I meant women. I meant I wasn’t a weak woman or a crazy woman or a needy woman or maybe any kind of woman because we’re all terrible in the end.
My father rolled his eyes at me. “Okay,” he sighed. “Just don’t be like your mother,” which was the perfect response in that it clearly showed me that he considered me just like my weak, crazy, needy mom. I was stunned into silence.
And, I was stunned that after years of barely tolerating Able—and me, for that matter—he now identified with Able and painted me as a crazy woman. So, I just didn’t say anything. My father was implying that I was perhaps throwing away several good years with Able rather than trying to figure out where the next several years would go. He was my father, but—like many, many times before that I was ignoring for his convenience and the sake of our relationship—he was unwilling to support me.
Minnie hails from a blended family as well. My Uncle Min was married before he married Bonnie, Minnie’s mom. With his first wife, Uncle Min had two children, Jude and Tamela. Bonnie, as previously mentioned, also had a son, Teabag, whom I’ve previously mentioned. Minnie is their only child together, but her brother Teabag was close enough in age that he essentially grew up with her. Like my maternal half-siblings, his mother had full-time custody of him, which also helped strengthen a bond between Minnie and Teabag. I never met Jude, and if I met Tamela before Minnie’s wedding then it was when I was so young that I have absolutely no memory of her.
“Tammy is upset,” my father told me conspiratorially as he changed the subject.
I had to stop myself from asking, Who? But then I remembered. Tammy had been at my aunt and uncle’s house while we all got ready, and her teenage daughters were the flower girls. “Hm?” I said instead over my martini.
“Minnie didn’t ask her to be a bridesmaid, and she’s her sister,” my father shook his head. “I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, but . . .” he trailed off.
“Oh, yeah, that’s too bad.” I shrugged. “She didn’t really tell me she wanted me to be one either.” The whole event seemed thrown together, and that was Minnie’s personality—everything happened on the fly. But she was such a gregarious (and unintelligent) person that I couldn’t imagine she didn’t ask her half-sister out of spite or intended to hurt her. Tammy was in her mid-forties with three teenaged kids. It probably didn’t even occur to Minnie that Tammy would want to be in the wedding. I would have gladly given up my spot in the wedding so that she could have it. After all, she knew everyone else involved in the wedding far better than I did. And, perhaps, she wouldn’t have wanted to die when she was instructed to “dance” down the aisle like the rest of the wedding party.
I took my two roommates to the reception as my dates. I was so relieved when they offered to accompany me. Miriam and my ex-friend Bertha drove separately and met me at the reception hall. We all sat together with my stray cousins, Trixie and Sophie. Trixie is Cleo’s only daughter and Sophie is her daughter-in-law. Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman, is married to my cousin Harry, a cop and part-time security guard. Harry had to work that night, so Sophie came with just Trixie as her date.
“You have to come to our house for dinner! I would love to cook for you,” she gushed. “I can never cook the things I want to eat for them,” meaning my cousin and their two kids, “They are so picky! They refuse to eat vegetables, which I guess all the Pettymans do, except you!”
I was the only person at the reception to check off the vegetarian meal option. It was a kind of pasta with assorted pickled vegetables. Sophie gave me a recipe for spaghetti squash as we ate.
Trixie and Sophie were exceptionally nice to Miriam and Bertha and sang my praises to them, which made me uncomfortable. I fought the need to tell them they were wrong. “Penn is the nicest, never says anything mean,” Sophie extolled about me.
“Well, she barely talks!” My cousin Trixie accurately chimed in. “But, you are very nice,” she conceded. Trixie has always been level-headed and quiet herself. She leveled a knowing glance at me, as if she saw something of herself in me.
It was nice to hear, especially after the conversations with my dad that still hung over my head like Marlboro smoke. I didn’t feel particularly nice. I was jealous that Minnie was getting married, that her dress was flawless and made her look as beautiful as she seemed happy, even though she wasn’t particularly good-looking anymore by conventional standards, which I was cruel for thinking. And, I had extensively made fun of the color scheme (hot pink and bright blue) in merciless texts to my roommates.
***
Sometimes I get into heated arguments in my head with Minnie. When I think about her—like, on a macro level—I think, Wow, life is so strange. I used to be so jealous of her, and then I pitied her. And, then, I felt nothing. And, now, have I circled?
In 2016, Minnie was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. She lived.
Barbie told me about the diagnosis, again, over text. “I thought you knew. Aren’t you two super close—you were in her wedding,” she wrote it like an accusation.
“No, I had no idea,” I said, pulling her up on social media, and seeing, yes, she was, indeed, #fightingcancer and also, #fuckcancer, for that matter.
Reader, I am not a good person, and I do not suffer from the personality defect that imbues you with the need to tell yourself that you are. So, with an open heart, I will tell you that I was mildly jealous of my cousin’s cancer. I fantasized that if I were sick (not terribly sick, just mildly distressingly ill), my dad would feel bad for disowning me. If I were sick, he would come running into my life with not only a real apology but real love for me.
Minnie is two years older than me, but she has only lived on her own a handful of times. For most of our adult lives, she’s lived with her parents, her boyfriend, their two pit mixes, and their pet snakes. Minnie and her boyfriend have been historically underemployed. None of this should matter, but I always think about it.
My brain digs up these small, just-remembered facts and presents them to me. “Look what I found!” Like an overeager intern who missed the deadline but is unaware. It’s not helpful. The argument has passed. I didn’t point out her hypocrisy; and, anyway, at the time, that wasn’t the route I’d taken. It wasn’t relevant. It would have been cruel, and too easy if I’m to be honest. In an argument of who can be meaner, I would have won. Not because I am meaner naturally, I now think, but because I am more skilled at cruelty. I learned it from my dad. I guess I am his daughter, after all.
I think my brain presents all these facts to me as evidence that Minnie doesn’t deserve her family and their unconditional love, which is—of course—at odds with my spoken, philosophical beliefs.
If I could fight with her—if anyone should be fighting with a cancer survivor (#fuckcancer !)—I know what would hurt her and how to deliver it with maximum effect. Not because I am smarter and better at reading people, even though both are true and both are helpful. But because I had a worse childhood. When I was growing up, all we did was slash at one another emotionally. I was trained in emotional cruelty like an Olympian. So, it would’ve been easy (and maybe even marginally—fleetingly—satisfying) to have destroyed her when she messaged me that day. But I didn’t want to be like her, like my sister, like my father.
I also didn’t want to prove her point. I wanted to deflate her argument.
It took eight months for me to realize there was another, more normal approach than what Minnie did. Even though her approach is not something I’d have considered doing, I still felt like it was normal or what I deserved. I felt as though I not only should have expected the vitriol (it was stupid of me to have been initially excited to see I had a message from her) but it had been miraculous, and overdue really, that I hadn’t gotten such a hateful message from anyone else in all this time.
I try to think what would make me do to someone what she did to me. I think, first, I’d have to feel close enough to the object of my ire to feel entitled to lash out at them because I wouldn’t want to be wrong. I would feel so terrible if I hurled abuse at someone in defense of another and it turned out I was wrong. So, I’d first have to believe the person I want to bleed is capable of doing the things for which I think they should bleed. So, I’d have to know them pretty well to ascertain whether they’d do something really awful like that. (Unless I thought that behavior was normal and then of course it is believable that anyone could do that?)
What would it take for me to send a message that mean? I guess, here is the interesting part, the part where I am like my cousin. I would do this to “protect” someone I love, too. The thing is, to protect is to act in a preventative way. She was lashing out after the fact. She wanted “justice” or “vengeance,” which are more or less the same thing in America. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get that. I based what I thought would be my whole career path off of that emotion. It’s helpful to think about it in that context.
I had to unlearn the idea that this is love. I had to unlearn the idea that if someone does not scream on your behalf, that they don’t love you. It would have felt really good in the moment if my partner had banned my father from our wedding for talking to me the way he did, for assaulting me, for stalking my mom. I still kind of wish that happened because, maybe, I haven’t really unlearned anything.
But to think about it in this way—that she is fighting on behalf of someone she fiercely loves and to whom she is unendingly loyal—presents its own thorns. Why does my dad merit that but not me? He didn’t starve himself to zipper a hot pink silk dress over two pairs of Spanx for her wedding. What makes him worthy of that intensity but not me? The $300 check? He never brought her home drunk but safe when she was sixteen.
Is it because he seems sad, and I am just a ghost? And because she had to witness my dad’s theatrically sad eyes in the flesh, she cannot fathom any other side? Villains have emotions, too, Minnie. People are complex. For example, you’re the villain in this essay, even though you #survivedcancer. I’m sure you feel some kind of way about that.
Logically, I think it is the confluence of a couple of key factors that brings this situation into being. It is that, for whatever reason, Minnie (1) believes that I am capable of heinous things. Not just capable. Likely. Of course, I did something truly abhorrent. I hit her with a baseball bat, once, after all. (2) My dad’s pain is more meritorious than mine, if I have any. This one is tricky because it could be two different realities: A) we both have valid sides but his is more deserving, or B) there is only his side because she spoke to him and not me. When I think about Reality B, it’s disheartening but understandable. People are inherently selfish and short-sighed, so we don’t think about people we cannot see.
Our world is built up of decreasingly-sized concentric circles, and I am just not in any of Minnie’s circles. I’m just highly curated text, and maybe a photo, on a screen. I’m not real. I’m a fading memory, maybe of an angry kid who bruised her rib. In this way, I am easy to forget, maybe not just because I’m inherently forgettable but simply because I am not there.
***
Minnie visited us in the south once when she was sixteen. I was a freshman in high school, and things had profoundly shifted in where we stood in relation to each other.
Puberty had not been kind to Minnie. She had shot up like a weed overnight. Having always been a tall child, this would have been a surmountable “problem,” except she had also suddenly thickened everywhere. All bodies are beautiful, but the early 00s was a shitty time to be a tall, thick teenage girl. She still had all those things I had been jealous of: beach-sand-colored skin with just a smattering of light acne that constituted far less than what marred my ghost white face; manageably thick hair that naturally lightened golden in the sun; princess light eyes. But, she was visibly uncomfortable with her height and weight, and the battle she fought with her body played out in her posture and her attitude.
I immediately noticed it with feverish delight. Finally, I was better than her. Even though I also hated my body, I at least knew it fit more or less into the misogynist, racist conventional beauty standards of the early aughts. I thanked God for my scoliosis and terrible posture that kept me just a half inch over being petite, and for the eating disorder that was keeping me narrow-waisted and slim-armed. Those really balanced out the acne, which I could hide under makeup, and the jet black hair, which I now bleached. I dyed my skin with self-tanner and was reckless in the sun. I couldn’t lighten my black eyes, but I dressed preppily enough to almost never feel like the little girl in a horror movie anymore.
When Minnie came to visit, she kept expressing that she was so excited to meet my friends and party. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t do those things. The parties I had gone to at that time were largely stoner hang-outs to which I had followed my older sister Cory. I think Minnie had watched a lot of the OC and made inferences that I was too embarrassed to correct her on.
While I wasn’t a good kid, I wasn’t “partying” like a 30-year-old teenager on the CW. At that time, I escaped my home life by meeting and “dating” an adult man who worked in IT and taught occasionally at the local community college. For no particular reason, let’s call him Woody. Because I was only fifteen, Woody took me to small, expensive Italian restaurants and the movies late at night, when I told my parents I was sleeping over at a friend’s house. Unsurprisingly, he had a thing for Woody Allen and Louis C.K. (Men are so predictable.). I loved the quiet space I enjoyed with him, even though it came at a trade that gave me a lot of complex issues regarding the definition of consent for a very long time.
When Minnie visited, I felt an enormous pressure to entertain her. I told her we would have a “party” at my rapist’s home. Because I had not let any of my age-appropriate friends meet the adult man who called himself my boyfriend, I knew this wasn’t really possible. Even in 2002, on the Southern Gulf Coast, no one I really liked wanted to spend their time at the cold, spartanly decorated home of a child abuser.
Woody’s best friend, Brett K., happened to get into an argument with his girlfriend, whom he had been dating for several years, the night of this so-called party. The argument allegedly ended in a break-up, due to the girlfriend’s wanting a proposal, which was “lame” and “uncool” and “needy” and, also, probably made her “insane.” I had met her once and did not find her particularly insane. I likely never saw her again due to her discomfort with meeting me, which makes her all the saner.
Woody illegally provided us with cheap liquor, which I did not drink excessively. I felt compelled to watch Minnie and bring her home safely that night, without alerting my parents to our activities. But Minnie had no self-constraint and immediately became so inebriated that she played Ding Dong Ditch at every house on the street. My rapist told me not to bother chasing her and comforted me about my difficult family. At some point, she disappeared with Brett K., whom she had been gushing to me all night about how handsome he was.
As I recount this story, I feel bad at my juvenile irritation with Minnie’s inability to hold her booze and her running off with a grown man who used her and then got back together with his future wife the next day. As an adult, I see that I brought Minnie into a dangerous and gross situation and then mocked her for not coping with it as well as I believed I did. But, also, she was older than me, so, there’s that.
***
Usually when I think of Minnie, I think about all of the other things I could have said in response. All the better ways I could have defended myself or showed her how absurd her position was.
For most of the year after her message, I thought that I could’ve said something that would’ve changed the outcome of our—well, “conversation” seems a bit generous. I’m starting to accept that nothing I could have said would have made a difference. So, today, I am almost amusedly entertaining this epiphany—but, don’t worry, reader, I still feel all the pain and heartbreak even when I smirk! Minnie had everything she wanted—she just couldn’t see it.
When Minnie “reached out” to me, her stated goal was to hurt me like she assumed I had hurt the people she loved. She wanted me to be in pain. She believed I wasn’t, and, so, she took it upon herself to do her best to hurt me.
The thing is: I already was in pain. I had already been hurting since the day my dad saw me as no longer the useful pawn I had been before my mom moved out. When he told me that I was dead to him, it was painful and shocking but also unsurprising. He had been such a monster for the two months preceding his disowning me that I was somewhat relieved. I didn’t want to be subject to his cruelty anymore. I didn’t want to be the one person around, taking all the mean things he had to say and fearing that, instead of hitting a wall or a door, that he would hit me. I felt unsafe around him, and I was embarrassed to be north of twenty-five and afraid of my dad hitting me. Most urgently, and the fear I only ever whispered to Able in the privacy of our cars, I often feared he would murder my mother.
This is unacceptable. I shouldn’t have to say that is unacceptable and that adults are never meant or allowed to behave in this way. There is no excuse for such behavior.
My dad still had guns, and I had witnessed him already stalked my mom. My father made it clear to me that, unless I also hated my mom, then I was no longer his daughter. But, of course, this was totally irrational. My parents’ marriage had been over for years and dying well before then. They had always been a bad match, and my father’s anger that my mom finally moved out after years of living in separate bedrooms and not speaking to each other when not necessary was totally irrational. I had been shocked, and then my father’s sudden heartbreak—and the pity and outrage expressed by his family members—had shamed me out of expressing that shock. The subsequent total disintegration of my family was beyond imagination.
I came from a large, blended family, and like all large families we were complicated. I wouldn’t say I was close to anyone, but I had always comforted myself when I felt alone that, at least at weddings and funerals, I had “People.” Where we lacked real emotional intimacy, based on who we were as our individual selves, we embraced our roles in the family at major events when necessary.
After my dad told me I wasn’t his daughter anymore, I lost that. My aunts, who had half-heartedly spoken to me in the past, told me they didn’t want to be involved in “drama.” Minnie, whom I’d tried to talk to while all the summer stuff was happening, never responded to my messages. Aunt Cleo, the aunt to whom I was closest, took my father’s side. Although I do not fully know, I believe she stoked the flames in him. She stopped speaking to me. Barbie continued a half-hearted and secret relationship with me. This had meant that, when I visited our town, she (smelling of alcohol) met with me at The Stale Bread Company, where I would cry and then she would “forget” to text me back and I would get mad and she would pretend not to understand why I was upset.
How do you explain what it feels like to lose your family but they’re all still alive? How do you explain what it feels like to be hated? I wasn’t even allowed to contact my nieces and nephews, with whom I had been so close that one called me mom for several years.
For the first year, I was in shock. I couldn’t quite grasp it. That whole year feels like it was filmed in black and white. I was on autopilot, quietly self-sabotaging my career and crying a lot in Target.
The second year, I felt mostly the same. That year, I started silently chanting this mantra to myself: “I am fundamentally unlikable.” And, “If my own family, which is genetically predisposed to loving me, cannot love me then I am unlovable.” I repeated these things to myself multiple times a day, every day. I still cried in Target(s). And, in Longhorn on Able’s birthday. And on planes. And in my car. And in the public bathroom at the courthouse. And in my office after quietly shutting the door. And during the preview for the movie “Boss Baby,” after a former coworker, who has loving parents, jokingly asked if seeing loving parents “triggered” me. And, once, in Uno’s while I was ordering food. I let the tears fall down my cheeks, and the waiter and I both pretended that wasn’t happening.
I poured myself into new friendships, trying desperately to create a local “Chosen Family,” but I kept choosing the wrong people, who were just conveniently nearby but not truly available or open to the type of friendship I wanted to build. The pain of those errors outweighed my good, but rare, choices; and this reaffirmed my mantras. I collected these painful experiences, not as moments of growth or learning, but as evidence that I was broken—a bag of shattered glass, I often thought—and as proof that I need to be guarded.
In the third year of my disownment, I focused on my isolation. First, I stopped speaking about my disownment because it hurt too much. When I had been going through the trauma, a lot of the people who were present didn’t understand. I spoke to them because I couldn’t help it. I had been shocked.
“Look at this gaping would!” had bubbled out of me.
And everyone nearby had said things like: I’m sure it’s not that bad. It will blow over. Your father (whom I’ve never met) loves you. Or, I don’t really know what happened (and, let me be clear, I am not asking what happened), so please take this platitude and stop making me uncomfortable with your histrionics.
But then, that third year, I went silent. Obviously, the pain of the disownment was worse than my acquaintances’ not believing how bad the situation was; but that didn’t mean I wasn’t hurt. It wasn’t just that these people had no frame of reference to understand what I was going through—it was that they didn’t want to know. They wanted only a version of me, a censored one who would not talk about the wound that cut her in half.
I wasn’t worth the mental exercise, or the risk, of belief. If things had been that bad, surely, then they would have known before now. If things had been that bad, surely, then I couldn’t be as functional as I am—sure, I’m a grown woman who cries when people are nice to her, but I did finish law school after all. Women exaggerate, even daughters, especially daughters. I had made the mistake, often, of showing my most painful, my most infected wounds to people who had good, or at least okay, dads and people who maybe felt like listening to my experience was a betrayal of their own dads. Explaining a narcissist to someone who has never experienced narcissistic abuse is like telling someone Lizard People exist and they do make up the entire grand old party.
I was also silent because I believed that telling other people—not everyone, but some judgmental people with whom I have to associate—would prove that I am trash or unworthy or an unsafe choice for their loved ones to love. After law school, especially, a lot of my academic and professional associations were increasingly with people who, if they did not possess idyllic home lives (at least in comparison to what had been the norm for me) then certainly ones that were presentable in polite conversation. My home life had always required massaging, filtering, censoring, and sometimes full omitting; but my disownment had robbed me of even the minimal information I could disclose before.
After a long time of being afraid that I would look White Trash™, I started to kind of believe it. And, then, I was isolating myself because I didn’t want people I liked to know I wasn’t worth their friendship or time. I have not rectified this. I still very much censor myself and my past to my functional friends.
When Minnie sent me her words, I was just starting to give myself a voice. That doesn’t mean I was healing per se. (Or, is that healing?) Everything still very much hurt. I just had started to talk to those closest to me—despite the fact that I am, in fact, a fundamentally unlikable bag of broken glass—about the pain I have been in. Doing that didn’t draw a lot of my friends closer to me. In fact, it scared some. It made some uncomfortable. It made some say unintentionally cruel things.
And, initially, I collected those as more evidence that I am trash. That I am inherently unstable. That I require professional help that I can’t afford. That everyone leaves in the end, once you let your guard down. And that is why I must never show my true, unlovable self if I want to maintain any relationships.
And then this message came. I was already experiencing the worst pain I had yet endured. I was continuing to flagellate myself several times a day. I would be lying if I said that I never thought of suicide during that time and that it was only my partner and the dogs that kept me from seriously contemplating just “opting out.” Quietly opting out, I would think. But it’d be rude to that as a newlywed.
Anyway, I think now that had Minnie just talked to me, maybe she would’ve seen that she was already granted her wish: I dread all the major holidays. Father’s Day is hard. Christmas is hard. My birthday is hard. Will there be an effort to reach out? Will it be mean or passive aggressive or disappointing? Is nothing a relief or a disappointment? Chitchat is hard. People naturally talk about their families. I have to self-edit. As the years wear on, I call my dad my mom’s second husband. I say things like, my mom has bad taste in men, as if it had nothing to do with me, as if I weren’t in the main cast.
When she sent that message, I was hurt, maybe even mortally wounded as I do think whoever I used to be before all this . . . That girl doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a funny thing, really, that sometimes we don’t even know that what we really, really want is right in front of us.