deep end. She’s accusing me of having an affair! How crazy is that? I think it’s the menopause. She isn’t sleeping. Hardly eating. I’m so worried about her, and about how all of this is affecting Rory.” The game my father was playing was fucked, and fascinating.
Because my father was having an affair. And in between sharing his deep concern for my mother and her menopause, he was whispering baby talk to his lover. I heard it all, every repulsive, disgusting thing, but I never told a soul. Not my mother. Not even Fee. I didn’t wanna break the spell. I didn’t want Sherman to stop talking beneath my window, even though it sickened me, and I basically stopped eating. I wanted the truth—craved it like a drug.
My mother knew. Or at least she was suspicious enough to search through Sherman’s desk drawers, and coat pockets, and phone and computer while he slept. She discovered the texts and pics and hotel receipts and perfumed notes signed by “Sugar Tits.” I’m still not over that gross nickname. I heard my mom tell her sister, Lilly, on the phone, “My whole life feels like a lie.” When I heard those words, something shifted at my core. If her life was a lie, then mine was too.
One Sunday morning, while the neighborhood was at church, Shelley confronted Sherman, as I eavesdropped from the landing on the stairs. My father’s rage was so hot I thought it’d set the curtains on fire. Even with the evidence spread out over the glass coffee table in front of them, he called my mother crazy. Crazy. That word. Over and over. Shelley was insane and Sherman the indisputable victim of unfair persecution. It went on like that for weeks, as I listened to Shelley’s firm prosecution and Sherman’s flimsy contradictions through the AC vent in my bedroom, which connected to the one in theirs. And night after night, hiding behind the curtains at my window, I held my breath against the smoke from his Cubans and the stench of his lies. Hysterical/dramatic/volatile/bitter. He used all the woman words. “And she’s gotten so hostile. I’m afraid she’s headed for a complete psychotic break.”
Sherman left less than two months after Shelley discovered his non-affair because, as he told everyone and his mother, he couldn’t handle another day of his soul mate’s crazy accusations. He told my mother that her emotional fragility was bad for business and asked her to stop coming to the office. She actually did. Instead of lawyering—doing the thing she loved—she fused with the sofa, day-drinking vodka from a coffee cup, inhaling reruns of Dr. Phil and crying for all the other cheated-on wives. She stopped socializing with the neighbors when she realized she’d been the last to know—another fucking cliché—and saw it in all of their faces. Not to mention that the dads stayed bros with Sherm. He still skulks back onto the cul-de-sac the first Saturday of each month for poker night at Big Mike Leon’s house. I heard my mother asking Aunt Lilly on the phone why one of her friends didn’t tell her. “They are my friends, Lilly. They are.”
My mother didn’t have a psychotic break. She brushed her hair and put on clean clothes most days. She made meals neither of us could eat, asked me about school, and about the Hive, took me shopping, did car pool and groceries. But much of the time I had the urge to snap my fingers to remind her I was there. Or that she was there. She was flustered by everything, and clumsy. She missed steps, missed beats, like her operating system had a bug. She looked like my mother, but when Aunt Lilly came to visit from Vancouver, she noticed it too: the Shelley Miller we knew had been all but extinguished, her light barely a flicker.
A couple of weeks after he left us, Sherman moved in with Sugar Tits—that toothy actress who sucks hairy-ass in those UpTV movies. Soon after that, he shuttered Miller Law and went to work with the actress’s father in a Christian-owned entertainment corporation on Wilshire, one of those companies that make God-themed inspirational movies. My father also, hilariously, converted to Christianity. Atheist Sherman Miller even got baptized at a box church in the OC. They got married in Montecito before the ink was dry on the divorce. When I refused to go to the wedding, Sherman blamed my mother for turning me against him.
Poor Shelley. Her