Malice

By Delia Santo

What would you expect from a girl named Malice? At twelve, her definition of family is nixed when her father, Rick, reveals that he is gay and leaves home. Ruth, her emotionally distant mother, punishes Rick by delivering Malice at midnight ("like some ding-dong ditch it game") on the doorstep of the house he shares with his lover, Grey. Disillusioned by her parents separation, and her religion, Malice sculpts a private world, out ofof all thingschewed gum. How does Malice deal with becoming a woman in a household of men?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514412862

Delia Santo

Delia Santo grew up in a small town in Western New York. She’s lived abroad a few times, a semester of study in London, and in Thailand for two years as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. When she returned, she went back to graduate school to earn an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and also earned a Montessori Teaching credential from the American Montessori Society. She has been a teacher for nearly twenty years and writing and teaching have been passions of her since as far back as she can remember. She now resides in Westchester county with her two daughters and her husband.

Book preview

I

Ground Zero

M Y FATHER FIT and glued on his hairpiece each morning. As a small child, I’d watch fascinated by his baldness. When I was four, I’d felt compelled to draw my father’s face onto the bust that held his toupee at night. I foraged through my mother’s make-up drawer hoping to find my medium. Lost in artistic bliss, I drew on his dark eyes with her eyebrow pencil and smeared on the thick licorice lips I’d inherited, until my mother grasped my hair and the red lipstick stuck to the floor. She grabbed the Styrofoam head, banged it against the wastebasket so that it broke into two pieces, and produced a new one from the armoire so abruptly, that I’d stopped crying and let salty tears seep into my mouth. I knew he had spares from when he’d get the piece re-done, but I yearned to get a look into that closet and imagined hundreds of them lined up like giant light bulbs.

When I entered the house that day, in dire need of the inhaler I’d left on my dresser, I felt on alert like an internal alarm sounding. The air was different, and I was ultra-aware of each stair, as my breath became shallow and an attack imminent. Outside my parents’ room, I pulled the reserve inhaler from my backpack- too empty to do the trick - and sucked in the last breath. Through slats in the banister, I noticed a discrepancy in a painting I’d come to know like the map of veins on the back of my hands, a canvas I’d had a lifetime to study. In the doorframe of my parents’ bedroom, sheer curtains danced in the window, an angel trying on wings. The enormous willow that had grown to hug the window like a brace held leaves of stark gold and the dresser’s mirror reflected the room back onto itself. I was startled by what was missing. That bust that held my father’s toupee, the one that left a white space in the room as if the artist had forgotten a spot, or left it for future contemplation. That it was gone, and the painting complete as if it had never really belonged, astonished me, enough so that I had to remind myself to take a breath.

**********

A noise, clickety-clack - the methodic walk of a horse - brought me back to the moment and drew me into the room.

Mom, where’s Dad? The logical answer was that he was at work, but it was Thursday, his afternoon off. My mother was at the opposite end of the room attempting to hang a precariously placed curtain rod that kept falling exposing their bedroom to the neighbors.

Your father’s gone. Mascara streamed down her cheeks as if her eyelashes had melted.

What? I held my palm in front of my mouth to prove I was still alive.

He left. The rod came apart and the curtain slid to the floor. My mother motioned to gather the parts but sat down on the window bench. It was the first sign of her giving up, as she placed her hands in her lap and picked at a loose thread on her sweat pants.

What? There was no other word I could think to say.

He’s left you, Malice, and he’s left me. She whimpered, a glimmer of evidence that my mother had ever loved my father. That sounds awful, but children know, and I knew it wasn’t that way between them. I pressed the bruise on my forehead from getting hit at softball earlier that day, and moved my bangs to cover it.

Why? I asked. What did you do? It came out soft, tentative, but the accusation irked her and changed her demeanor.

He’s a faggot. She barked. At that point, she could have said ‘he’s a rabbit’ and it would have meant more. For a minute that seemed like a lifetime, I didn’t move from the space where my toes had gripped the shag carpet. The doomed willow, whose roots had begun to crack the foundation of our house and whose days were numbered, changed its appearance dramatically as clouds drifted to block the sun.

Oh. There were times my mother purposely made me feel stupid, but this wasn’t one of them. First, there wasn’t the required audience, and the way she said it so matter-of-factly, it was like she really believed I should have known what she meant.

I had the overwhelming sensation that my bedroom door was approaching me and I was standing still. I grabbed the inhaler from the dresser, sucked in so hard a tingling sensation filled my chest, leaned against the wall, and slid to the floor waiting for the medicine to take full effect. My mother’s muted cries felt as if they were escaping from me and when I realized she was sitting directly against the other side of the wall, I moved away quickly as if I’d gotten too close to the stove.

My mother stopped crying and the sun set. Lying in the dark unsure of the last time I had blinked, I clicked on the lamp. I found ‘faggot’ in the dictionary and discovered that my father had become ‘a pile of sticks usually used for fuel’. Faggot sounded terrible and if my father had left because he had become one, it had to be awful.

I was certain Tina would know. Tina soared above the entire class and most of the school’s female body, nuns included, as if she had been cast from an entirely different mold than the rest of womankind. Though Tina could never answer a question posed by Sister Pat during class, she was sure to know this. I dragged the hall telephone into my bedroom and pinched the cord in the door.

Hello. Tina’s mother, Barb, was apparently not around much because Tina always answered the phone.

What’s a faggot? I said in a voice I didn’t recognize.

Malice?

Yeah.

Josh in first period, he’s one. She answered without missing a beat. The great thing about Tina is that she never asked questions; she didn’t think it was any of her business. I could hear her chewing. He wants to have sex with another boy. Jonah, not now. Tina’s brother was five but had never uttered a word and at that moment I could imagine something happening that could stop me from talking.

How do you know? Tina was street smart in a way I admired but wasn’t sure how to become. There wasn’t a class.

You can tell by the way he dresses and talks like a girl.

He does? I’d never noticed.

I don’t think he knows he’s one. She said.

What do you mean?

Just everybody else does. As I hung up the phone I wondered if the floor would be there when I stood up.

**********

I’m Mary Alice Santo, better known as Malice, and this is my story. I wish the reason I have such a unique nickname was more interesting, but the truth is, it was my very first word. My mother tried with all her might to get me to say my name. At the kitchen table, she mouthed the words Mary Alice while feeding me sweet potatoes that I abhor to this day. After several attempts accompanied by my father’s sighs as he tried to concentrate on reading the newspaper and his proclamation She’s not ready to talk Ruth, give it up, I proved him wrong. Punctuated with a spray of orange that speckled my mother’s jet-black bob, I spat the word Malice. To my mother’s dismay, my father must have told the story to everyone they knew and it spread like wildfire. I’ve been Malice ever since.

I grew up in Saturn, a pinprick in the furthest corner of western New York. The town is along the snow belt so once in a great while we get mentioned on the news. Our claim to fame was the one day scientists discovered new findings about the planet Saturn. Harold Callahan from Channel five National News, with a push pin in hand, scanned New York to pierce the tiny dot we inhabited. Findings: if there were a lake big enough, Saturn could float on it. I pictured a marshmallow floating in a cup of hot chocolate. If I had inhabited the planet rather than this town, I would have to have been cast from a substance that could not only withstand -193 degrees Fahrenheit but windstorms that put tornadoes to shame.

I should get back to my story, the one you are waiting to hear, and hopefully not the only one I have to tell. The next morning I gulped down a black cup of coffee, hoping that it would do what Barb, Tina’s mom, said it would do - get rid of our pre-teen chubbiness and curb our appetites. Neither Tina nor I were fat, but Barb said it could creep up on us when we least expected it. She had a way of convincing people of things that was quite unnerving. Jonah ignored her completely as if Tina’s voice was the only one he could hear, and from what I could see, Barb liked the freedom the exchange of roles gave her.

II

One Sick Day

T HE SUN WOULD rise each day regardless. Even if I hadn’t shut my eyes during the night, it wasn’t willing to wait for me to get the required amount of sleep for sanity preservation. It wasn’t restlessness, but was like untreated shock that left me staring at the ceiling. I waited for my father to call - unable to call him myself - to tell me how he’d become a faggot and what it all meant. There wasn’t a note left or an item left to remember him by, and I never got an explanation. Tiger, my best friend and next door neighbor, had one photo of his father, Tony, smoking a cigar while sitting on a Lawn Boy tractor. Tiger and I scrounged through the garbage for it the day his mother decided to tear Tony out of each family photo.

Get up Malice, don’t make me say it again. My mother – annoyed with nowhere to go herself – made the fourth attempt to get me up for school. I dragged my rag doll self out of bed and into the shower. As the water soaked my skin, the day grew heavier. School was probably, though it felt like pure torture, the best place for me to be - comic relief.

On Fridays, I walked to school alone. Tiger had swim practice. That day I was thankful for it. How could I possibly tell him about my father? Would he think my father wanted to have sex with him? Would I look like freak offspring? The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree Sister Pat’s voice echoed in my ear - the words spoken in every parent-student-teacher conference we’d attended. I’ve known Tiger since I remember being alive. He’s never felt like a boy to me, just the person who knows me better than I know myself. As we were growing up, my mother and his mother, Francie, spent so much time together, we were mistaken for siblings though we looked nothing alike. I have my mother’s hair, black and straight, and my father’s chocolate eyes. Though my mother was so freckled that I thought one day they would grow to fill her in, strangely enough I’d yet to have one pigmented part of me. But scars I had in excess. Grace wasn’t my middle name.

I arrived at Saint Jude’s Elementary School in the nick of time. Sister Irene had just sounded the bell and I was the last one to walk under the arm that had held the front door open for centuries it seemed. She eyeballed me and swat me on the back with a manila folder. She was the only nun I thought that deep down, may have liked me. But I was stuck with Sister Pat for now. Tiger winked at me as I walked past him. We were seated alphabetically so Santo and Ricci landed us in desks to the left and back of the classroom. To distract my mind from the coffee acid pit I’d created, I admired Tiger’s impressive head of hair, so white from the summer sun that his blue eyes seemed iridescent. Painter’s pants, an afro comb slipped in a slot designed for a paint brush, earth shoes with plaid laces, and a red turtleneck sweater, replaced the jumper I’d stuffed into my backpack in the Bryant Park bathroom I passed on the way to school, unbeknownst to my mother who insisted on envisioning me as a six year old.

The day passed – like a rerun of a sitcom – as if people really needed to see the same dumb thing over and over to get it. I didn’t see anyone during lunch because they thought I had something wrong with my eyes, so I spent Friday lunches with teacher fix-it (formally known as Miss Dwyer) drawing shapes and things between bites of my sandwich until my hand hurt.

Tiger and I walked home from school that day, a rare occurrence during the fall. I’d skipped softball tryouts because during the previous practice, I got hit point blank in the chest. Asthma made me fragile - something I hated being - and I got the wind knocked out of me fairly easily. In a heroic attempt to revive me Father Desmond, our Vice Principal - probably a faggot himself now that it seemed to me that every man had potential to be - not adept at medical practices, slapped me across the face a few times. When I came to, my very own pinch runner, Michael Sands, had a wrist grasped in each hand, as if he were going to yank Father Desmond’s arms behind his back and cuff him.

I still hadn’t told Tiger anything and I usually told him everything, so it felt funny to even be with him. He started in on his quest again.

So when’s the big moment? Across the street, a German Shepherd sniffed a poodle’s butt. The embarrassed owners tugged at their respective leashes as if they were the ones being walked.

Drop it. I said calmly. Thinking about sex was the last thing I wanted to do - between any two people.

Why? Just because rumor had it that his friend, Christopher Sticks had done it with a yet to be identified or personified female, sex was the only thing Tiger could think about. Neither he nor I had a real idea of what it entailed. And to be honest, given all five foot ten of him compared to my five foot two, it seemed virtually impossible.

Don’t you get it?

What? He answered innocently, yearning to continue his pursuit down my pants. Was it the pure boredom of the lone Quick Bowl and Saturn Shopping Mall that lured us to the mysterious idea of sex at age twelve? Or was it the rumor that masturbation (Tina told me what masturbation meant right before I puked in the girl’s lavatory sink) was so sinful that your fingers could shrivel and fall off had been spreading around the school. Sex had yet to be assigned its very own punitive consequence - except, of course, pregnancy. And now with my dad’s situation, I didn’t want to hear anything about it.

It’s not the most important thing right now. There wasn’t or hadn’t been off limit conversations for us. And I never knew how strange that was until I saw the reaction of the other girls on the playground once when we were discussing the f word. Farts. Never mind. My voice sounded angrier than I thought I was. I wasn’t sure how to get into the inevitable conversation with him and thought that once he knew my father was a faggot, he’d feel awkward around me.

What’s gotten into you?

Just forget it. His resigned ‘What?’ lingered as I abandoned him on the corner of Cross and Main Streets to take the short cut home.

III

My Gum Idea

F OR THOUSANDS OF years, Saturn remained misunderstood. Astronomers referred to it as ‘the planet with ears’ and ‘the triple planet.’ Saturn played tricks on the eyes until its ring system was revealed. Humans don’t welcome misunderstanding. It makes us uncomfortable. Of anyone I’ve encountered during my brief insignificant life, my father was the one who was the most perplexing to others. Maybe because of his shyness, passivity, or that if he’d had the choice he would have willingly inhabited his very own planet (and I would have joined him if he’d let me). He made sense to me. I hid