And that’s what she was doing. De-gaying me before I went over there. We never talked about it, she never said those words. But that’s what she was doing, and I suspected it was part of why she let me stay. She was protecting me, shielding me in North Shore. When my mother and Gabby moved into a two-bedroom with her new boyfriend, no one even asked if I wanted to go with them. By that time I was in high school, and it was such a good high school, it would have been a shame not to let me finish. Or that was what was said out loud, anyway.
Meanwhile, the older Gabby got, the more pensive and chubby she became. She was, and I say this with love, a total Pokémon-loving, nerdy Trapper Keeper–clutching sad sack. Mopey in a most unsympathetic way. Not only was she not making jokes, she wasn’t laughing at the jokes of others. To me at the time, this was a heinous offense, a grievous wrong. What else were you supposed to do with pain but polish it until it became something pointy and pretty?
Every time I saw Gabby on one of our forced monthly family dates, which usually took place in a Denny’s that was right next door to a Goodwill on Hawthorne Boulevard, at which, over the years, I purchased many a natty men’s shirt, she seemed less alive, more grayed out. Once I cornered her in the hallway outside the bathroom of the Denny’s and asked if Mom’s new boyfriend was molesting her, but this seemed not to be the case. She became so offended she refused to speak to me for months and would sit through our meals silent and bored as my mom gave me the latest gossip from the hair salon where she had gotten a job. The new boyfriend had sent her to cosmetology school. Fancy fancy.
When I brought up to Aunt Deedee the possibility that all was not right in that house, that Gabby was officially failing to thrive, Deedee swatted the air in front of her face as though there were gnats, and said, “Some things you just have to accept.” I did not know if she meant that my little sister should accept my mother’s craving for love alloyed with violence, or if she meant that I should accept that my sister and I were now on separate trains on diverging tracks, experiencing different childhoods that would lead us to different adulthoods, and were helpless to do anything other than wave through the window as we passed each other. “Gabby wanted to move in with her. Viv’s her mother. Can’t do anything about that.”
Latent in this observation was the fact that my mother had a legal right to my sister and was exercising it in a way she had chosen not to exercise it over me. Whatever conversations my aunt had had with my mother I had not been privy to, so I did not know if my aunt had begged for me to stay with her, or if my mother had begged her to keep me.
Regardless, my time in North Shore had not included many excursions to the neighboring towns, and I had rarely been to Manhattan Beach, even though it was only five minutes by car, and I was shocked that a place could be even more visibly affluent than North Shore. The main drag was crowded with boutiques and gastropubs, every house was built up two or three stories, every square inch of the lot covered, and the only cars on the road were BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, Bentleys, Maseratis. Everything glittered. Mr. Lampert’s car smelled of leather and stale french fries as we glided through the dusk. Bunny and I both sat in the back as though he were our chauffeur, but mainly because the front passenger seat was covered in trash, papers, and fast-food containers, and maybe as many as thirty empty Muscle Milk bottles.
Ray kept up a steady patter, talking to Bunny about his business dealings, and asking me questions about myself that I found alarming. In interactions with my own parents and aunt, I had perfected a series of what I thought of as “prey behaviors” that included careful lack of eye contact, silence, and unobtrusiveness bordering on invisibility, but none of this deterred Ray Lampert, who had questions about my shirt (Did I know that he had actually been to a Nirvana concert back in the day?),