Read Dirty Secret for Free Online Page A

pumping her tiny fists in anger, rocking from side to side; when she turns far enough in one direction she sees, through the spaces between the wooden slats of the deck, the dirt and patchy grass below. Beetles live down there. She doesn’t want to fall down where they are. Helen needs to keep herself from falling. Though she has no words, she cries out for her mother again and again, trying to hold still so she won’t fall. She waits. Finally her mother comes back, lifts Helen up, and brings her inside.
    But it was too late. Helen had been abandoned. She couldn’t forget the feeling, still can’t.
    Rick understood being left behind. His father jumped off a bridge into the Mississippi River when Rick was nine years old, and he instantly became responsible for his younger sister and schizophrenic mother. That’s part of the reason he was already so responsible, able to go anywhere and find work, even though he was just twenty-two and a heavy drinker.
    Over the next few weeks Rick made the decision to stay in New Haven; he found an apartment and a job painting houses. Within a month, he and Helen were engaged.
    But soon Rick began to wonder if he was too young to get married. He was so inexperienced—Helen was his first real girlfriend. Then one night, in New York City, while visiting some college friends of Helen’s, the couple has an argument.
    They’re in the kitchen of an apartment they don’t know. It’s after a party and there are bottles everywhere, full ashtrays, dirty glasses, and wooden bowls with remnants of crackers. Thehosts of the party are asleep; the other guests are gone. Rick mentions the future and says, “If we get married—”
    Helen’s on her feet in seconds.
“If?”
    â€œI mean
when.
”
    But it’s too late. Helen’s grabbed a knife from the counter. She runs at Rick. He tries to block her—at five feet ten he’s almost a foot taller than she is, and he thinks he can hold her back, but she’s strong, stronger than usual because she’s furious. Rick has just done the one thing Helen can’t tolerate: He’s tried to abandon her. She pushes forward at him, her teeth bared, yelling, “You asshole, you fucking asshole—”
    He runs from her, around and around the kitchen table. Helen’s right behind him. He makes a break for it, sprinting through the apartment. Just as he reaches the front door and turns the knob, she stops. She’s gasping for air, her hand on her stomach. She’s just a few yards away and with each breath her face becomes less red, less pinched. Could it all have been a joke? Is there an explanation? Rick searches her face for clues, hoping. Helen’s still holding the knife. She looks at it in her hand, slowly straightens up, and walks into the kitchen where she sets it down on the table. She collapses onto one of the chairs, puts her head in her hands, and starts to cry.
    But Rick is too freaked out. And he’d already been—at least on a subconscious level, which is why he said
if
in the first place—thinking about calling things off.
    So he does.
    They return to New Haven the next morning, both defeated. They remain friendly yet cautious as they see each other a few times over the next week. And as the days pass, Rick convinces himself that her behavior was an overreaction but not worth breaking up about. They’re edging toward getting backtogether, at least he thinks they are, when Helen makes an announcement: She’s pregnant.
    They’re getting married after all.
    MY MOTHER’S PARENTS didn’t attend the wedding, though they were invited and lived just a few hours from New Haven. They’d met my dad once before. Myron, my mother’s father, said to my dad, “You’re Norwegian? Norwegians are all drunks.” As if he were one to talk. And they didn’t like that my dad wasn’t Jewish, even though they weren’t