Upended
"Upended" delves into the complexities of love, betrayal, and consequence within a fractured family dynamic. As teenager Amy grapples with her parents' unexpected divorce and her own romantic entanglements, tensions rise to a heartbreaking climax with devastating consequences. Brace yourself for a riveting exploration of familial bonds, unexpected twists, and the profound impact of choices made in the name of love.
This story is fictional. Any resemblance to living people is coincidental.
Amy had always been a bit of a daddy’s girl. As a teenager still living at home with her parents, she took their love for one another so for granted that when the announcement of divorce pistoled through the air after dinner one evening, all the defiant breath blew out of her lungs to scream the word “No!”
“NO!” “NO” “NO!” “NO!” “NO!”
They explained to her very quietly that she and her brother would continue living with their mom, but would see their dad frequently, perhaps even every day; things would seem pretty normal. Yeah, right, thought Amy. She was sixteen years old and immediately assumed the rupture was because of something she’d done.
Her parents had always seemed like everyone else’s parents: hardworking, busy, not particularly interesting. Her father, who was short and stocky, with a receding hairline, was a lawyer who did something with mergers and acquisitions in an office building downtown. Her mother was an event planner for the University of Texas. Neither stood out as good-looking or special. In fact, Hannah, the mother, was quite homely, with a large ungainly body, breasts, derriere and stomach oversized and squishy. For Amy, her mother’s body had always been a haven – that big lap into which she could throw herself when things went wrong, such as her best friend turning on her or someone saying mean words behind her back. Amy loved her father dearly and couldn’t imagine living in a house that didn’t contain him. When she first heard the news about her parents, she wanted to run away, go on a hunger strike, refuse to do homework, leap out a window. Instead, she fought back a constant, brewing anger, wrapping her arms around her chest for comfort, a tall girl who was beginning to develop a stoop.
The split was because of another man.
This was unbelievable to Amy, who could not imagine her mother being attractive to any other man than her father. The man in question, Raoul, was a doctor, an orthopedist who took care of Amy’s little brother, Steven, when he broke his leg doing a fancy maneuver on his skateboard. Raoul was extremely handsome, a few years younger than Amy’s parents, with sun-tinted brown hair slicked back from a high, intelligent forehead, and a chiseled face out of which shone two very warm blue eyes that seemed to kiss everything they landed on. Amy fell in love with him the moment she saw him. But when she realized her mother, who was blushing and stammering, had fallen in love with him, too, Amy felt a sudden squirt of hatred for the man. She saw the whole thing unfold right in front of her: the way the two adults couldn’t stop staring at one another, the almost palpable pull of electricity between them. This wasn’t possible; there should be laws against it because parents weren’t meant to stray, not when there were children involved.
At first they stayed in the same house, the one they’d grown up in, a large rambling structure on the corner of Far West and Mesa with a fenced-in swing set and pool in the backyard. But then their mother announced she was moving into a smaller place. Except for the time he’d set her little brother Steven’s leg in the hospital, Amy had only met Raoul once. He was from Brazil and spoke with a soft, musical accent, asking her about school and grades and boyfriends. This was at dinner about a month after Steven's accident. Hannah told the children she was inviting the doctor to repay his kindness toward the family (he had made himself unusually accessible, opening his office over a weekend to see Steven who was in unbearable pain). At the dinner, Amy watched Raoul, transfixed. He had beautiful hands (which made sense: he was a surgeon). She studied him closely as he unpeeled an orange, not cutting it with a knife, but paring it with his fingers so that the peel came apart in a single unbroken spiral. Was that the moment Amy fell in love with her mother’s new boyfriend? He handed her three sections of orange, popping another three into his own mouth and chewing noiselessly. Between the two of them they finished the orange, and that made Amy feel as if they had a special bond. “Your eyes are very pretty,” he said. “Just like your mother’s.”
Out of loyalty to her father, Amy wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, but she was also thrilled that he had noticed, no less complimented her. Truthfully, she thought her mother’s pale gray eyes were on the small side, so she wasn’t sure if Raoul was being sincere or not. Aside from a generous nature, Hannah didn’t have much to offer, causing Amy to wonder if perhaps Raoul saw something in her mother no one else did … because why on earth would such a handsome man choose such a plain, oversized woman? It made no sense, and every day Amy felt herself grow more incredulous and angry till it seemed her whole being was formed of raw, indignant energy.
At the time, Amy was busy with her own drama.
She had fallen in love with her best friend’s boyfriend, Jake McClosky, who had secretly pushed her into a bathroom at a party and kissed her hard on the lips. She’d kissed him back and pretty soon they were leaning against the sink, hands all over one another’s respective bodies as they tore at clothing and poked their fingers into private places. “I love you,” Jake had breathed into her hair. “What about Melissa,” Amy had whispered nervously. “I love her too, but I love you better,” Jake whispered back. “I’ve always loved you.”
What to do? Amy knew the wise thing was to avoid Jake and stay loyal to Melissa, whom she’d known since first grade. But she yearned for Jake. Whenever she thought of him, a band of desire tightened like a vise in her stomach and she dreamed of being alone with him and what their lives would look like if they married and had children. In her heart, she knew she was the one Jake preferred and she’d just have to stay quiet and pretend nothing was going on to keep the peace between her and Melissa. This was so painful that she had trouble sleeping at night. All her thoughts were consumed with Jake and the possibly wonderful future they might have once Melissa was out of the picture. The situation colored her feelings for her former best friend whom she began, slowly, to despise. A year remained before the girls went off to college, and Amy wasn’t sure how to negotiate those twelve months since Melissa was the more popular of the two – Amy was really just a sidekick. In the end, she chose Jake, who dropped her within six weeks, leaving Amy high and dry without a single friend to share secrets or link arms with as she strode across playing fields or down noisy corridors or entered the school with a small, wilting smile on her face. She’d never been a loner or unpopular before, so she was miserable.
It was during this time that Hannah took up with Raoul. He didn’t move in with them but he was frequently at their house, turning up at all hours, a dreamboat of a guy whom women turned to stare at wherever he went. Amy’s question was: What’s such a handsome man doing with such an ungainly woman? In Amy’s experience, good looking people were always with good looking people, or at least the woman was better looking – it was okay for the man to be a little weird or a bit of a dud. But Raoul seemed to truly love her mother, his eyes lighting up when she entered a room or when he saw her the first time on any given day. He was genuinely nice to Amy, too, and Amy found herself liking him even though she didn’t want to. Perhaps it was like a Shakespearean play, and Raoul had awakened from a dream, falling in love with the first person he saw, who happened to be Hannah with her horsey face and clumsy body. In any case, he made Amy’s mother happy and hopefully the relationship would continue.
In the meanwhile, Amy’s father, David, had also found someone, a middle-aged, prettyish woman named Claire who was a high school principal, and had a teenage daughter who, it was rumored, smoked a lot of pot and always wore long sleeves because she cut little slashes into her arms in order to keep from being in an eternal freakout. David seemed to really like this woman and, with both parents partnered, Amy felt more on her own than ever. Everyone seemed to have someone but her; and her mother, who was kind of a blob, had the best and handsomest of all.
There was something wrong with this picture.
As the weeks passed, Amy felt as if she were turning into a different person, someone she didn’t entirely know.
She cut her hair short and dyed it blue, began to wear heavy black eyeliner, pierced her nose, lip and eyebrow and began, because it was so forbidden, to vape nicotine. She wanted to punish her parents, make them suffer for what they had done, and so she started cutting classes and letting her grades fall from A’s to C’s and D’s. “You’re the only one you’re hurting with these grades,” her mother told her. “Don’t you want to go to a good college?”
“I can always go to ACC,” Amy snapped.
“Community college isn’t good enough,” her mother snapped back, shaking her head. “Don’t you want to make something of your life?”
“I really don’t care,” huffed Amy.
“Well, you ought to,” fumed Hannah. “Nothing comes for free in this life.”
Amy looked at her mother, who had an M.A. in marketing. Her life wasn’t that great, even if she did have a dreamy boyfriend. Hannah bit her nails to the quick and her hair was so frizzy she had to get three-hundred-dollar haircuts to deal with it. Also she had no style in clothes, wore baggy dresses and big-soled sneakers as well as frumpy white bras and colorless droopy granny panties. Who would want that? But it seemed Raoul did, his hand always at the small of Hannah’s back, or hovering over the tip of her shoulder.
One night Amy went out to dinner with her father, the first time she’d been alone with him since the split. “How’re things going, sweetheart?” he asked.
Amy made a face. “I wish you hadn’t moved out,” she said.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. Life is full of punches. You just have to learn to roll with them.”
So Raoul was a punch? It sure felt that way. “Do you still love mom?” Amy asked, her cheeks coloring a bright, splotchy pink.
“I will always love your mom. It’s just that lives change and people move on. You’re old enough now to understand that, Amy. Change is inevitable.”
If change were inevitable, what was the point of choosing one direction over the other? Amy wondered. She could go to Harvard and be a flop, just as she could go to community college and be brilliant. Perhaps she should just take a gap year and move to Paris where she could work in a boulangerie and learn French. Neither of her parents, busy with their new romances, took much interest in her. Her mother told her if she continued living in the house, she’d have to get a job and pay her way. “You’re an able-bodied person,” Hannah said. “Why don’t you work as a barista or nose around Macy’s and see if they have anything in women’s wear or haberdashery?”
“Oh Mom,” wailed Amy.
“Oh Mom what?”
“I don’t want a job like that.”
“Well, then what do you want? You can’t sit around doing nothing all day,”
“I could drive Uber.”
Amy had a little Fiat, small as a flea. Relegating a stranger to its cramped back seat would be awkward …. and possibly dangerous.
“I forbid that,” said Hannah.
“I’m almost eighteen. You can’t forbid anything.”
“Really missee?” Hannah fixed Amy with a hard stare. “We’ll see about that.”
There wasn’t really anything Hannah could do. Unless – and this was what she proposed to Amy – she changed the locks on the doors.
“You’d do that?” screeched Amy.
Hannah squared her jaw. “Sure I would,” she said. “It’s time you learned a lesson.”
“But where would I live?” whined Amy.
“That’s your problem, isn’t it?”
Amy wasn’t much of a drinker, but she got drunk that night, calling Jake and making a fool of herself in the process. Her tongue was thick and rubbery in her mouth. “Do you really love me more than Melissa” (she pronounced it “Melitha”) “like you said?”
“Oh Amy,” groaned Jake. “That was just rhetoric. You and I are friends and always will be, but I can’t leave Melissa. The point is, we’re growing up and things change.”
In that moment, Amy didn’t want to grow up. It was too painful. She liked things the way they were.
“You’ll regret this,” she said to Jake. “You’ll see.”
The next morning, her brain shot from too much alcohol the night before, Amy got in her little Fiat and drove out to Dripping Springs, twenty-six miles away, to visit a friend. Her thoughts were slow and heavy and didn’t seem to connect well. At one point, on an empty stretch of 290, she closed her eyes experimentally to see what would happen. She expected a collision, but when her eyes flew open there was nothing there, although she had drifted awfully close to the guardrail. She closed her eyes again and this time when she opened them, a car that had shot out of a side street was right in front of her. She jammed on the brakes, but it was too late. There was an enormous jolt and then her entire life flashed before her in slow motion: her mother giving her an ice cream that got all over her face when she was three; the glandular smell of a fat boy named Chi Chi Moreno who sat in front of her in fourth grade; the scratchy feel of her father’s arms as he lifted her in the air so she wouldn’t have to walk in puddles; the mix of pride and embarrassment she felt winning a spelling bee at age ten; the sight of blood in her underpants the first time she got her period; the searing pain in her crotch the first time she had sex; the sweetness of idling away the hours in her bedroom with Melissa, listening to music and making crank phone calls till they both thought they would die laughing; her desire, which she hadn’t told anyone about, to move to New York and become a fashion designer; the fury in her mother’s face when she shouted at Amy that she had to go out and get a job. Amy saw all those things as if they were happening right then, an instantaneous review of a life’s worth of actions and decisions, and she steeled herself against the impact she knew was coming. As the cars collided, she seemed to rise out of her body, feeling quite detached as she told herself, This is it, my life’s over, I’ll never experience anything again, the last thoughts she would recognize before the world – her world – went dark.
***
Amy died instantly; that was what the policeman who knocked on Hannah’s door told her. “Oh no!” screamed Hannah, knowing this was something she would never get over, that because of her own final, angry words to Amy, she might as well have been the one behind the wheel of the Fiat, driving recklessly, not realizing that life didn’t go on forever, that it could be snuffed out in one careless moment.
For the rest of Hannah’s days, this was who she would be, the grieving mother of a seventeen-year-old girl whose existence no one but she herself would remember clearly, if they remembered Amy at all.
The punishment for this, of course, would be to give up Raoul. That would be right and just. But the more Hannah thought about it, the more she knew she couldn’t do it. Why chase bad with bad? She needed someone to wrap her life around, and that person was the handsome doctor who had been the source of all this upheaval. She would never give him up, not even to settle the score of her daughter’s death. But the next time she saw Raoul, she knew her love for him was gone and the rest of her days would be dreary. Overnight, her hair went from dull brown to dull gray and she dropped fifteen pounds, the only benefit of her horrible despair. At forty-six, she was a shell of a woman. She knew that her son, growing up, would never recall the generous, cheerful person his mother had once been. To him, it would seem as if she had always been negative and bitter, a person to avoid.
And it was true. After graduating college, her little boy, Steven, found a skinny, pretty wife and moved into a large rambling house halfway across the country so he wouldn’t have to see much of his mother anymore. Whenever Hannah phoned, he ignored the call, not returning it till the next day and staying on as briefly as possible. Even through the wires he could feel her discontent and shrank from it, not wanting to be cut to shreds by the hollowness of her voice. Better to sever the ties as gently — or, if necessary, as abruptly – as possible if he didn’t want to be beholden to a ghost.