CHAPTER ONE

I was born in Chicago in 1957. As early as I’d begun to walk, I already developed a most dastardly opinion of myself. The fact that I wore braces for my genetic overbite and never filled my first training bra when all the other girls had didn’t help my emotional cause either. Unfortunately, my folks didn’t have the warm and fuzzy traits of the parents in Father Knows Best (I watched that TV show every week). Nope. My father was distant––nothing like the ever-smiling Robert Young. Jane Wyatt was my fantasy mother––I mean, mine wasn’t exactly girlfriend material if you counted how often she made my sister and me cry. Unlike the show’s affectionately named children––Princess, Bud, and Kitten––Theresa and I were called whores.

At the age of twelve, Theresa, who was three years older than me, had already begun scheming ways to leave home. Lucky for her, she eventually married at nineteen and got away. But that left me alone. So, in a weird way, Red was God-sent to me, even if he was a cross-dressing devil with an affinity for classic movies.

Red visited me more and more, especially after my parents upped the ante and began to quarrel every freaking day. It was always about my dad’s sister and father. My aunt had convinced my dad to move my grandpa into my mom and dad’s bedroom. And he did it without running it by mother first. Short of poisoning my dad’s sauerkraut soup, my mother never forgave him. The two of them fought about it for the rest of their lives in Lithuanian no less. They thought if Theresa and I didn’t understand what they yelled about then perhaps we wouldn’t notice they were fighting. Red was always right there for me during those fights.

“Ji traukia tave už nosies! (She pulls you by the nose!)” My mother wailed.

“Here we go again!” My dad said that so many times, he coined the phrase.

“Ar tu irgi nuvalai jai užpakalį? (Do you wipe her ass too?)”

“Eik Velniop!” He snapped.

“No! You go to hell!” She screamed back at him as she slammed the upstairs door. That’s where she slept. Red would nudge me to give me the all-clear signal. It was safe to resume our organizing or whatever we were doing before the battle broke out.

My parents also drank a lot of cocktails. Originally, I associated the word cocktail with James Bond or Emma Peel––you know, gentlemanly-dressed spies who sipped martinis from frosted glasses garnished with pickled onions. At my house, those were the exact ingredients used to start nuclear incidents.

My dad was the martini drinker. But he wasn’t a spy. He worked for a lumber company. When he came home from work, he was all smiles and friendly, but the effects of the gin gradually sucked the twinkle from his eyes. By dinnertime he was mean.

“No talking at the table,” he said. “Eat everything on your plate.” He pointed his fork at the stuffed cabbage roll on my plate. “No laughing, either. Children are crying for food in China.” My dad squinted.

I couldn’t help but laugh when Red sat across the table from me. That evening he wore a Manchu-style robe with a black Coolie hat and placed two green pimento-stuffed olives in his eye sockets as he flicked his tongue like an alien. But sometimes, what appeared to be laughter was me gagging on some other cabbage-influenced dish I was forced to eat.

My mom’s tableside manner, fueled by the whiskey in her Manhattan, was no better. So, if my dad wasn’t the target that evening, it was me.

“Alexis, sit up at the table.” My mother glared at me. I’d sit up, but before I knew it, my long hair dragged through my sauerkraut soup. “And pull that hair off your face. You look like a hooker or something.”

She wouldn’t leave me alone. I did all she told me, only to have everything––hair, shoulders, pouty expression recoil into their former positions–– like a slinky. Anyway, I didn’t know what a hooker was. But Theresa knew. She later told me it had something to do with that other word my mom often called her.

“You’re a slut.” My mother used that one on Theresa one Sunday at the dinner table. Theresa’s only crime that day was that she’d gone to the movies with her girlfriend and the girl’s parents to see The Wild Bunch. My mother thought wild bunches did other things. “What kind of example are you setting for Alexis on a church day?”

After she was done yelling at Theresa, she started in on my dad again.

My dad finished most of his nights, like that one, alone in the basement. He drank beer after beer in complete solitude while his transiter radio played Mitch Miller tunes. When it was time for me to go to bed, I’d descend slowly down the creaky wooden stairs and past the spider webs to him in his workshop.

“Come on, Girlie. You can do it,” Red said, nudging me along.

He was almost like a guide dog. If it weren’t for him, I never would’ve made it down those steps to experience my father’s haunting goodnight kiss––his tightly closed lips touching mine for an extremely long time. It always felt like it was his last kiss in the whole world. I wondered if it was.

“Night, Daddy. I love you.” I broke away awkwardly.

“Love you too,” he said, but he added, “Um, Alexis. Maybe you can talk to your mother in the morning and tell her to stop giving me hell.”

“Okay, Daddy.”

I followed Red back up the stairs, but I never did say anything to my mother because I thought hell was the way we were supposed to live––given I had a red devil friend and all.

Our somewhat puritanical parents never taught Theresa or me the birds and the bees. Theresa, being three years older than me and constantly referred to as a whore by my mother, may have learned quicker. I preferred my little world of naivety with my devil friend who never seemed devilish at all––until one day after school.

“Come here! We found something!”

My best friend in sixth grade shouted to me from the stairs behind the school building. She and another girl were alone since everyone else had gone home. They clutched a page from a magazine with a picture of a naked man in a state of undress splashed all over it.

“Hey, what is that?” I said in dismay.

I pointed to the thang between his legs. My Ken doll didn’t have anything like that.

“It’s a penis,” the two girls giggled in unison.

I stared at the appendage surrounded by a massive cloud of hair with my eyes wide open.

“Yeah, Girlie, it’s a penis,” Red sang devilishly into my ear. “Otherwise known as a boner, a dick, and a one-eyed monster. Aren’t you a wee bit curious about it?”

I sure was! I ran as fast as my gangly legs would take me home. I yanked my Webster’s New World Dictionary from the bookshelf and settled myself underneath the dining room table where I often played with my Barbie dolls. I began my search for the word penis. P… Pe… Penis. I found it. The male organ of sexual intercourse, it read. I wrote the definition down on a piece of paper. Hmm, intercourse, I thought. I looked that up next. And so, the word hunt began. I wrote them all down and with all their definitions––penis, intercourse, vagina, vulva, clitoris, sex––even pubic hair. I was so consumed that I hadn’t realized it was almost dinnertime and well past my mom’s second Manhattan.

“What are you doing under the table?”

I could only see her feet.

“Nothing,” I gulped.

I folded the evidence in half before she could bend down to see. I stuck it between pages 872 and 873––masonry and masturbate.

“Let me look at that,” she demanded.

The paper fell out as I handed the dictionary to her.

“What’s this? You want to be a whore like your sister?”

Unfortunately, I forgot to look up my mother’s favorite pet name for Theresa and me. I scrambled from under the table and ran towards the stairs to my room.

“Where are you going!”

She was behind me like we were tied together.

“No-nowhere.”

I crunched in the turn of the staircase and reacted like a wounded puppy.

“Stop right there you little whore!”

I ran up the stairs as she tried to wallop me. I made it to my bed and tried to squeeze behind it, but she pulled me by my arm.

“Come here!” She yelled.

I tried to make myself smaller. Unfortunately, I was pinned against the wall as she hit me. I held up my arms to ward off the blows.

“Stop, Mommy, stop!”

I pleaded with her until she finally did. The red welts on my skin stung. I knew the blue color wouldn’t appear until the next day.

“You better ask God to forgive you! And stop crying! I expect you to say you’re sorry to me when you do!”

She slammed the door behind her. I couldn’t stop my uncontrollable sobbing. I pushed my face into my pillow so my mother wouldn’t hear me––afraid she’d come back. I was lost in a huge wave of guilt. I felt so stupid. Just then, there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around in agony, but it wasn’t her.

“Don’t cry, Girlie,” Red said softly.

I lifted my face and saw my devil friend turn and sit on an old brown wardrobe trunk at the end of my bed. He was dressed in a red and black sequined showgirl...