Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Part 3

"Allison is in the hospital," she said.

"What's wrong with her?" It occurred to me, stupidly, that maybe she needed a kidney.

"She tried to kill herself," my mother said.

"My G.o.d," I said.

"She's asked to see you," my mother said. "Apparently, her therapist thinks it would be good for her to talk to you. I'm sure she wants to apologize in person. But I told them, you have a life, too, and we'll do this on your schedule, if at all, OK?"

"I'll do it," I said.

My mother paused on the other end of the line.

"I'll book us flights," she said finally.

"I can go by myself," I said.

"No you can't," she said. "I don't trust those people with you for a second."

Her fear was understandable, if belated. The year after my summer with the unfortunate pair the unfortunate pair, I didn't sleep more than an hour a night. When I said so later, my mother said that wasn't biologically possible, and then changed the subject. My father said it simply wasn't true, because he didn't sleep well that year and he remembers waking up nights, walking down the hall, and pulling back the blankets in my room to check on me. "You slept," he told me, "like an angel." Perhaps they are right. When I was very little, my mother used to say there was something of my grandmother in me, in how I tell stories the way I need them to be and not the way that they actually happened. In any case, I remember staring at the ceiling every night for a year, tracing shadow patterns with my finger. I remember closing my eyes whenever I heard footsteps outside the door and relaxing every time I realized it was only my father.

My parents were careful with me like they'd never been before; I was in college before they were willing to let me out of their sight for more than a few hours. Even when Aunt Claire requested my company, to sit beside her bed and read to her those last few months before she died, they were reluctant to part with me. That summer was still with me somewhere, and so was Allison, and my grandmother, but thinking about any of it was like looking at an old photograph of myself, staring a long time and all the while trying to figure out whether it was really me in the picture.

And then there I was in Tallaha.s.see again, this time in a downtown mental inst.i.tution, only the kind with a marble lobby and a fountain on the grounds, so you were supposed to call it a wellness center. I had waited for my mother's flight at the airport and had lunch with her when she landed. Though she insisted on driving me to see Allison, she announced in the parking lot that it was probably best if she not come in, and I agreed with her. The grounds of the wellness center reminded me of the grounds of the country club so long ago. Everything was flowering, in obstinate resistance to the severity of its locale. I was in Tallaha.s.see again, this time in a downtown mental inst.i.tution, only the kind with a marble lobby and a fountain on the grounds, so you were supposed to call it a wellness center. I had waited for my mother's flight at the airport and had lunch with her when she landed. Though she insisted on driving me to see Allison, she announced in the parking lot that it was probably best if she not come in, and I agreed with her. The grounds of the wellness center reminded me of the grounds of the country club so long ago. Everything was flowering, in obstinate resistance to the severity of its locale.

When I announced who I was and whom I'd come to see, the woman behind the desk looked at me sharply for a second but then looked again, nodded, and told me I had my grandmother's eyes. A nurse in a powder blue uniform escorted me down the hall to a waiting area with plush teal chairs. I sat in one of them before I even took note of who was sitting on the other end of the room. My grandmother looked older, of course-her hair now gone completely white, her face creased with wrinkles-but there was no mistaking her. Her eyes were still as sharp as ever, her mouth still set in a line of grim determination. Her wardrobe, though, was in a state of disarray, her silk scarf tossed on the chair beside her, her blouse and pants wrinkled as though she had been sleeping in them-which, I supposed, was entirely possible. She looked at me, gave me an almost smile. I tried to think of a comforting thing to say to her, the kind of thing you would say to a stranger in similar circ.u.mstances, but nothing came to mind. I focused instead on the insulting giddiness of the waiting-room magazine covers, their cheerful refusal to be about anything that mattered.

A nurse punctuated the silence. "Miss Ellis?"

She led me down the hallway and opened the door to a room, but didn't enter. I could see her hovering in the entry. Before I walked through the door, I heard Allison's voice, still thick like sweet liquid. "You came."

She looked worse than I was expecting, but I already couldn't remember how I'd pictured her all this time. Certainly I was never picturing her in a hospital bed, with bandages and an IV and a red plastic food tray in her lap. She was thinner now than she had been when I had known her as a child; the roundness I remembered in her face had given way to something angular. Her eyes, which I'd remembered as being almost electric blue, seemed gray in this light, and her long hair was feathered with split ends. She looked exposed in a flimsy cloth gown; I wondered if there were levels of crazy here, if some people qualified to wear real clothes and others didn't. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. Allison smiled at me. I smiled back. I looked around the room, wondering what was coming next. The clock on the wall ticked loudly, as if counting down for an explosion.

"What happened?" I asked, which was the most delicate way I could think of putting the question. Something cold flashed through her eyes briefly, and then she smiled at me again. "I got divorced last month," she said. "But I got divorced once before, and I didn't try to kill myself afterward, so I guess that's not it, is it?"

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I probably should have learned my lesson about marriage the first time."

"Thanks for the warning." I nodded at my engagement ring.

"I bet he's a nice guy," Allison said. "Is he a lawyer too?"

"Jason's a journalist," I said. "And I'm not a lawyer yet. I just graduated."

"Still, look at you now. I always hoped you were doing well. Our grandmother would love it."

The way she said it, it sounded like an accusation and a compliment at the same time. I waited for her to tell me why she'd asked me to come. To fill the silence, I told her a little about school, about Jason, about the sample bar question essays I'd written out and read into a tape recorder that I played so often I could hear it in my sleep.

"What are you doing these days?" I asked finally.

"Other than slitting my wrists?"

I flinched.

"I teach music," she said. "We tried to make a real pianist out of me, but I was never quite good enough. My heart wasn't in it."

" 'We '?"

"Grandma and I," she said. "Grandma more than me. My parents gave me to her after that summer, you know. They put me in a place like this for a few weeks, and when I came out they said they simply lacked the knowledge lacked the knowledge to deal with a child with those kinds of issues. They moved to LA the next year." to deal with a child with those kinds of issues. They moved to LA the next year."

"I know," I said. I had known, but hearing it out loud still felt like a slap. "I never understood why you told them. You could have said I'd fallen. I never told them you pushed me. I never said that. I wouldn't have."

"I could have said a lot of things," said Allison. "I thought my parents would come get me and yours would come get you. I thought if anyone got in trouble, it would be our grandmother."

"I'm sorry," I said. "We were kids. We didn't know what we were doing."

"It took me all these years to figure out that she didn't know, either. She had the next decade of my life scheduled before my parents were on the plane. She was so scared to mess up again that I was barely allowed to leave the house. I think I got married the first time just to get away from her. She went on and on about my first husband being trash. Her favorite thing to say when I messed up was that I took after my mother's side of the family, and water seeks its level. I guess it never occurred to her I hadn't seen my mother in years, or that it probably didn't say much about her that I had decided that moving into a trailer with a man who sold cheap souvenirs in the Everglades would have been better than going back to her house."

"But you went back," I said.

"I didn't know where else to go. So I lived with her until I got married again last year. He was grandmother-approved, but that didn't stop him from sleeping with our next-door neighbor. Maybe I would have been better off staying in the Everglades. Lots of snakes there, but most of them are harmless. Sometimes seeing one would startle me, and I would think of you."

I closed my eyes. I thought about all the things I'd acc.u.mulated since I'd last seen Allison, and how absolutely useless they seemed right now.

"Maybe you just need to start over someplace new," I said. "Get away from all of this. You could stay with me for a while when they let you out."

She parted her lips a little, like she was going to laugh, but she didn't. I tried to picture it in my head: the look on Jason's face when I told him I was bringing home a suicidal white woman who had almost killed me once; Jason and I converting the study into a bedroom for her, getting a piano, her getting settled in Connecticut. I imagined our kids growing up together, the way she and I had thought we would.

"Maybe I'd like that," she said finally. "I never thought of you getting married without me. Remember, we were going to be each other's bridesmaid?"

"I remember," I said. "I was going to pick mint green dresses, because that was your favorite color, and you were going to pick orange, because it was mine. Jason's sister is being a pain in the neck and doesn't want to wear the dress I picked out. You should be a bridesmaid instead. I'd even change the color for you."

"You would," she said. "But I just wanted to see you. I just wanted you to see me. Take care of yourself. I really am glad you're happy."

I looked at the clock again, then back at Allison. It had been an hour; I was ready to go, though still uneasy about why I'd been sent for in the first place. I reached for her hand and squeezed it by way of good-bye. She didn't ask me to stay. I felt like somebody ought to stop me from walking out, like there was a rule that you couldn't leave behind such palpable need.

In the waiting room, my grandmother still sat. I was struck by how open she looked, the way her grief pulled her out of herself the way most people's tucks them in. I felt bigger than her for the first time in my life, but I couldn't feel good about it. I thought of saying something to her, but I didn't know where to start, how to explain who I was now, or what she'd had to do with it.

"I hear you're really something these days," she said when I stopped in front of her. "Congratulations."

"Thank you," I said, before I had time to regret it. I turned my back to leave, waited for her to say something else. I only heard her breathing.

My mother was still in the car outside. When I knocked on the window to be let in, she jumped, then seemed relieved to see it was me. still in the car outside. When I knocked on the window to be let in, she jumped, then seemed relieved to see it was me.

"I'm sorry you had to do that," she said as I got in the car. "You're a better person than I'd be, in your shoes."

"I'm not," I said. "It wasn't a big deal. It was a long time ago."

" 'A long time ago'-Tara, we almost lost you. Maybe you don't remember, but to me it's like yesterday. Like yesterday."

"How could you possibly remember?" I said. "You weren't there."

The tone of my own voice surprised me. My mother looked stung and I was sorry, but not sorry enough to apologize. She bit back tears.

"Tara, don't. I mean, not now. Look, I wanted you to have your own life and me to have mine. I made a mistake, putting you there that summer. But I loved you, you always knew I loved you?"

I didn't think she meant for it to be a question, so I didn't answer her directly.

"I didn't mean it like that."

I looked out the window, watching people at a park through the gla.s.s. I thought of saying a lot of things that I didn't. I didn't tell her how badly I had wanted her back, not just that summer, but all the years before it; how those days she had lain beside me in the hospital bed, for once mine and mine alone, were among the best of my childhood. I didn't tell her that every time I took note of the scar on my elbow, I thought she ought to thank me for giving her the way out of her mother's house that she'd never found for herself, no matter how many times she ran away. I didn't tell her how I had learned it wasn't just snakes that could eat you alive. I didn't tell her what I had told no one in all these years, what I had lied about even to the love of my life, because saying it out loud would unravel so much. Whatever motives Allison had for saying so-whatever she thought she saw a way out of, or more likely, back into, in confession-there had been no push, no one's hands on my back. I hadn't fallen, I'd jumped. It was shallow water, and though as it turned out I'd been lucky not to kill myself, at the time it hadn't seemed like a long way down. Twenty feet and I would have my parents back, I would have my mother forever, I would have years before I had to consider the costs. I'd been, for the second time that summer, less afraid of the fall than what else I thought awaited me. That afternoon above the murky water, which I remembered quite clearly, there had been nothing but me, looking down at my own reflection, and seeing at last a way toward what I wanted most.

Harvest

Eggs. They wanted eggs, and their requests came trickling in daily in ten-point type, through the want ads of the campus paper. Five, ten, fifteen thousand you could get for doing it just once. More than that if you were experienced. We knew girls who did it over and over and over again, once a semester. Mostly they were girls whose parents paid their full tuition anyway, and the money quickly manifested itself as stuff: cashmere sweaters crumpled on the bathroom floor, new stilettos clicking across the kitchen linoleum, matchboxes from Le Cirque and n.o.bu, endless overpriced trinkets collected on excursions to the East Side. Sometimes the stuff was more practical: new computers, a savings account for grad school. Sometimes it was just bigger: a brand-new entertainment center that got stolen the next week, and shame on us, because we weren't particularly sorry when it did.

It wasn't our eggs they wanted, so we spent the weekends watching burned DVDs and chasing ramen noodles with Corona the way broke college students were supposed to. Columbia credentials be d.a.m.ned, no one was interested in paying us for our genetic material. If they had wanted brown babies who so obviously didn't belong to them, they would have just adopted. Laura Kelso, who lived in our suite-that was whose eggs they wanted. I was surprised no one had come to our door to recruit her personally; she'd practically stepped out of a want ad. 1600 SAT score, 4.1 GPA, and that only because some professors didn't believe in A+'s. Then, of course, there was the important stuff: blonde, blue-eyed, five-foot-seven, barely 115 pounds, though we suspected the green pills she stored in a clear plastic bottle with the label torn off were diet pills of some kind. She'd been normal-sized when we met her.

She was making bank, but we couldn't hate her for it. Absent her new income, she would have been broke like the rest of us: too good a daughter to guilt her single mother into sending more money than she could afford. Laura's mother was a cashier at Penney's; what she could afford wasn't much. For a while that had given us a claim to her. She was a homegirl, a hermanita hermanita: we were in this together. Then she walked through the front door wearing Jimmy Choo boots, and we knew we were losing her. Before we knew it, we hardly saw her, and then one day she invited Ellen Chambers, serial donor, and Lisette Hartley, serial b.i.t.c.h, into our common area for some egg donor support group, and they compared paychecks and pain levels and wondered what had become of the little pieces of them released into the universe. We sat in Candy's room with the door open and faked gagging. Nicole let the back pages of The Village Voice The Village Voice fall open, 900 numbers and round brown a.s.ses staring up at us from the floor. She said, "They're fall open, 900 numbers and round brown a.s.ses staring up at us from the floor. She said, "They're mother mother material, but who wants to f.u.c.k them? If we were hookers, we'd be making twice what they were." material, but who wants to f.u.c.k them? If we were hookers, we'd be making twice what they were."

We did not particularly want to be hookers, and so this was little consolation.

What we wanted was to be a doctor, a lawyer, a spy, and happy. Nicole was the aspiring doctor; she had a love-hate relationship with her bio texts, but a love-love relationship with catalogues of all kinds. Pinned to her wall where Mos Def and Che Guevara hung on ours were ads for designer shoes and clothing, electronic equipment-even the occasional house ripped out of the home buyer's guide to remind her of the bigger picture, the things she'd wanted growing up but never had. Candy wanted to be a lawyer: she had big ideas about justice and was always dragging us to meetings with her, hoping we'd pick up some of her conviction. Truth be told, Candy could have been Laura Kelso's dark-haired sister, but we didn't dare say so. Freshman year at a sisterhood meeting, some girl had looked at Candy walking in and sneered, not quite under her breath, "What the h.e.l.l is white girl doing here?" Not three seconds later, Candy was all in her face, like: "Mira, my people did not get half exterminated and have half their country stolen from them for you to be calling me a white girl, OK, b.i.t.c.h?" You didn't mess with Candy; she was going to be one scary-a.s.s lawyer.

Me, I wanted to be the spy. I liked secrets. Nicole, ever the realist, liked to point out that spies couldn't be spies on their own behalf, and I had yet to encounter a government or revolution of which I approved. So far I had not accepted the seriousness of this problem. I didn't like to think about the future, and we were only juniors, so I didn't quite have to. Courtney was the one who said she just wanted to be happy. Nicole said this was her middle-cla.s.s showing. Courtney was from one of those barely middle-cla.s.s black families where the girls are always called Courtney or Kelli or Lindsay or Brooke, and the family forgoes vacations and savings and stock for a nice house in a nice neighborhood in the hopes that the neighbors will forget they are black. Usually what happened was Kelli tried so hard to prove her parents right that she turned into a bleach-blonde, rock-music-loving creature who seemed foreign to them. Lindsay got so tired of being called white girl that she studied Ebonics on BET and started dressing like a video extra, calling herself Lil L, and begging to hang out in the neighborhood they'd moved out of. Brooke, sick of not fitting in, would become anorexic or suicidal or both. We were all proud of Courtney for coming to us relatively normal.

Laura faded from us gradually. We kept our doors shut and she began to keep hers closed as well. We didn't know whether this was in retaliation or because she wasn't interested in hanging out with us. We never heard her in the shower, we rarely heard her enter: she seemed to glide. It was like we lived with a ghost-a snowflake, Nicole called her, and though she meant it in the harshly disapproving vein with which we spoke of most girls who were pale and delicate and seemed to be everywhere, in a more gentle sense the word had a ring of truth to it. We were living with something barely visible, something that might have vanished any second.In tenth grade, I went through a bad-romance-novel phase. In bad romance novels, women always know the moment they are pregnant; the heroine can feel her lover plant his seed inside her, or something equally melodramatic. Perhaps because I subconsciously expected pregnancy to announce itself with some such motherly feeling of omniscience, I completely overlooked mine. Winter gave way to spring, and when I started getting queasy, I thought maybe I was lactose intolerant. When quitting dairy didn't help, I thought maybe I had an ulcer. Nicole, Candy, and Courtney started to notice something was off, but by the nature of their prying questions, I could tell they were thinking I was bulimic. It wasn't until I was lying on the floor, listening to Candy complain that her cramps were killing her, that I realized I hadn't had my period for two months. It had never been regular and I had grown accustomed to red spots on my underwear at odd intervals. There was something almost thrilling about its off-kilter arrival. I liked surprises. When my friends swallowed little green and white and blue pills and marked the start date of their periods on calendars, I thought how boring it must be to have your body run like clockwork. Turning sideways and inhaling bits of dust off Courtney's carpet, I understood that my dislike of the pill was irrational, but it was too late for all that. I went through a bad-romance-novel phase. In bad romance novels, women always know the moment they are pregnant; the heroine can feel her lover plant his seed inside her, or something equally melodramatic. Perhaps because I subconsciously expected pregnancy to announce itself with some such motherly feeling of omniscience, I completely overlooked mine. Winter gave way to spring, and when I started getting queasy, I thought maybe I was lactose intolerant. When quitting dairy didn't help, I thought maybe I had an ulcer. Nicole, Candy, and Courtney started to notice something was off, but by the nature of their prying questions, I could tell they were thinking I was bulimic. It wasn't until I was lying on the floor, listening to Candy complain that her cramps were killing her, that I realized I hadn't had my period for two months. It had never been regular and I had grown accustomed to red spots on my underwear at odd intervals. There was something almost thrilling about its off-kilter arrival. I liked surprises. When my friends swallowed little green and white and blue pills and marked the start date of their periods on calendars, I thought how boring it must be to have your body run like clockwork. Turning sideways and inhaling bits of dust off Courtney's carpet, I understood that my dislike of the pill was irrational, but it was too late for all that.

Of course I had a boyfriend. We all did, they were like accessories; we kept them stored at colleges up and down the East Coast and pulled them out on formal occasions or in the event of extreme boredom or loneliness. Mine I kept at NYU, where he was lonely more than I was. I had spent a good number of nights downtown, curled up in his blue flannel sheets, listening to him breathe. He was good at hand-holding and being subtly witty and distracting me when I was on the verge of tears, brilliant in that completely useless way where he could tell you off the top of his head the architect of any office building downtown and the historic relationship between the toothbrush and cultural imperialism, but not what day of the week it was or what train to take to where. I didn't want to see him yet, so I bought a pregnancy test to confirm what I already knew, and then another in case the first one had been wrong, and then I threw the two sticks with their faint plus signs into the trash can and called my mother.

People who do not call my mother "Mother" call her Isis. Her name conjures up a persona that she indulges with miniature altars and smoky incense when she is not busy being a hairdresser. She was not busy at all when I called, the vague hum of her meditation music in the background let me know that.

"Angel. I was just thinking of you."

Every time I call my house, even those times when I am calling because my mother has forgotten to pick me up or call me back or send me something necessary, she tells me she has just been thinking of me. I ignored her and started talking, hoping maybe with some small talk she would pick up on the tremor of my voice. I was lying on the bed in my underwear when I called her, pinching the fat at my abdomen and trying to determine whether there was more of it, looking down at my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and wondering if they were any bigger. I looked the same to me. I wondered if maybe I was imagining this. Stupid girls got pregnant, careless girls, girls who didn't worry about their futures, girls whose mothers had never explained to them about s.e.x.

Laura had been a girl something like that when she'd come to college-not stupid, but naive, uninformed. She'd been sitting in the back row of the mandatory safe-s.e.x lecture, wide-eyed, when we met her. They'd divided us into teams and made us do races to put a condom on a banana and she'd screwed it up, put the thing on backward and had it go flying off somewhere, then blushed a brilliant shade of red and hid her face in her hands. The girls on the other team laughed.

"It's OK," Nicole said, putting a hand on her shoulder after we lost. "There are too many hos on this campus anyway. Who comes to college knowing how to put a condom on in five seconds?"

"Don't say 'hos,'" said Candy. "Just 'cause somebody likes s.e.x doesn't make her a ho."

They argued all the way to the dining hall while Laura and Courtney and I exchanged h.e.l.los and shy smiles.

Nicole and Candy were virgins then, too, though you wouldn't have known it by looking at them. Even on budgets they knew how to dress like city girls, girls who knew their way around-not like Laura, whose wardrobe screamed Kmart and favored the color pink. Maybe that was why we'd liked her right away: her need for us was immediately apparent, and unlike most of the people who needed us, we knew what to do for her.

I told my mother about Nicole's new Triple Five Soul sweatshirt and Candy's plans to go abroad next year. Pages rustled in the background. My mother told me how Mrs. Wilson from down the street thinned all her hair out, leaving braids in too long.

"She'll be back by Easter," my mother said. "She won't let anybody else do her hair for Easter Sunday."

"Uh-huh," I started to agree, but my mother had already interrupted herself to read out loud from the catalogue she was thumbing through. Health crystals, mood-balancing jewelry, a guide to spiritual belly dancing.

"Spiritual belly dancing, Angel. Doesn't that sound like fun?"

I imagined myself dancing for a minute, and then I imagined my belly fat, swollen, with stretch marks, and felt most unspiritual. I told her I had a test to study for.

"OK," she conceded. "You should go out later, though. Your horoscope says it's a good day for Pisces to be in the right place at the right time."

I hung up and thought to myself that the right place was two months ago in Rafael's bedroom, but I wasn't sure what my horoscope could do about that.

In the morning I skipped a review session and took the C train to Brooklyn to visit my father. He opened the door to my still-raised fist and seemed pleasantly surprised to see me.

"Angel. To what do I owe the honor, Miss Lady?"

My father had called me Miss Lady since I was four years old, and though I had not been prissy enough to deserve the nickname since then, it stuck. Uncomfortably, dishonestly, but it stuck. I walked in without answering his question. My visits were always like this. I liked to disrupt him. Interrupting people was the only way I could be sure of my presence in their lives.

My father's apartment had been painted red since the last time I was in it. I could still smell the newness of the paint. It looked as though he had painted it himself; whoever did it had forgotten a drop-cloth, and the furniture was flecked with red.

"Better not let the cops in here, Daddy. They'll think you killed someone."

He didn't hear me. Instead, I heard the pop of two bottle tops and then he walked into the living room and handed me a soda. My father drank only the kind that came in gla.s.s bottles; he believed aluminum was unhealthy, and wouldn't drink or eat anything that came out of a can.

"I want you to hear something," he said, before I had a chance to open my mouth. I occupied myself by running my tongue around the rim of the bottle. My father had his back to me and was messing with the ancient stereo in the corner of his living room.

My father was into radio then. My father was always into something; he was a collector of hobbies and habits. Sometimes I wondered how my parents could have been in the same room for long enough to conceive me, let alone be married for four years, but my mother had ama.s.sed her own fair share of collections over the years. I imagined their marriage was just a phase during which they had collected each other until something more interesting came along. A year ago my father was into the stock market, but then he invested the few hundred dollars he'd made initially in a company that marketed giant tomatoes, and lost it all. Now he planned to get famous doing radio commercials.

The tape started. I watched its wheels spin as my father's b.u.t.tery baritone echoed out of the brown speakers, their wood paneling peeling at the edges. In two minutes of tape, my father sounded convincing selling: cars, liquor, a sw.a.n.ky restaurant downtown. He sounded unconvincing selling: study aids, season tickets for the Knicks, diet pills. He sounded downright ridiculous selling: golfing equipment, stain remover, the Daily News Daily News.

"What do you think, Miss Lady?" he asked when the tape stopped.

I said, "Daddy, I'm pregnant."

My father said nothing, finished his soda in a few sips, and rested it on top of the speaker. He left the room and I heard creaking in the kitchen, the squeak of hinges, and then the rustling of cabinet clutter. He emerged triumphantly, smiling, and handed me a sticky, half-gone bottle of mola.s.ses.

"Take a spoonful of this every day, it's good for the baby. Your mother took it when she was pregnant, and look how good you turned out."

From the looks of the dusty amber thing he had just handed me, the letters on its label faded into nonexistence, my mother had taken her spoonfuls from that very same bottle.

"I might not keep it," I said.

"Oh." He looked uncomfortable, as though he wondered why I was telling him this. It was simple. I had screwed up, I wanted to punish somebody. He sat beside me on the couch and held my hand.