I was paranoid about them. I thought they stole things, small things we’d never notice, or maybe left things: wadded-up bits of newspaper in the drawers, business cards in the books, belly lint under the rug. Sometimes I would search the house after one of them had gone, turn over all the pillows, peek into the cabinets. I never found anything amiss, but even still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had changed.

If it had just been the men, that would have been all right. I could have learned to live with the tiny inaccuracies. If it had just been the men and also the Fatties, that would have been all right too. But if my mother had been hibernating somewhere inside of herself for those two months, for those three days—well, then she’d woken up angry.

Here: her hair was everywhere. She squatted in the living room and thrust an imaginary knife up between her frogged legs. “You’re doing this,” she said, thrusting. “This this this.” Thrusting, thrusting, stabbing herself to death from below, both hands clutched around the phantom blade. I can’t remember now what I had done or said to inspire this; I know it had involved a boy. Maybe one of the men who all looked the same, but maybe not. “This is you,” she said, thrusting. Her wrists and ankles were coated with clay. She pointed to a chair with her invisible knife and told me to sit. And I said no, I wouldn’t, because I was afraid that if I sat, she would hit me. “I won’t hit you,” she said, softening her voice. “I promise.” And so I sat.

Then she hit me in the face, so hard the room went dark.

“See?” she said. “You see what happens?”

I know others have had it worse. I know it’s a little thing, finally, to be hit in the face by your mother. She didn’t beat me, not really. Not in any of the ways I know children can be beaten. She didn’t starve me. She didn’t pimp me out to her friends and creditors. But I was indignant, like all lucky girls. Not long afterward, she dug her fingernails into my arm so hard it bled, and I stood in the stairwell and screamed until one of the neighbors called the cops. It was the middle of the afternoon, a Saturday. When the two uniformed men rang the doorbell, I was elated. I ran to explain, to show off the slim lunar wounds on my arm. My mother, exasperated, her robe opening, followed me to the door.

“If I’d talked back to my mother, I would have gotten the belt,” one of them said.

“My father used to hit me across the face with his shoe,” said the other.

“Don’t be a brat,” said the first.

“Your mother’s a delight,” said the second.