The Gaping Asshole in My Parents’ Front Yard
Julia’s Anus
1.
Earth split open on a Tuesday. It happened right as Julia was telling me I was a LACKADAISICAL FUCKING LOSER for the second time. She had to repeat it, because the first time, I roller-coastered my eyebrows and said, “A what? A lack of daisy owl?”
“It means,” Julia spit out, lungs big in her abdomen, “lazy. Purposeless. It means I know you’ve been going through my clothes and makeup while I shower, and imitating the way I speak, and just generally mooching your whole personality off me.”
“My God,” I said. “There’s one English word that can mean all of that? I never knew.”
People think of anger as the color red, but the madder Julia got, the more her face resembled a citrus fruit. Her hair was an energetic shade of auburn, and her cheeks puffy from yelling, so it was less a delicate tangerine and more like a Sumo orange left out in the display kitchen of a model home for too long. Even so, she was very pretty.
“This friendship is suffocating me,” said Julia.
“But how else would I learn these big words? I’m too—what’s it again?”
We stood there, in my parents’ yard, gunslinger-style, I with a hand visoring my forehead to hide that I was crying, Julia gritting out the word “LACKADAISICAL” like a humorless preacher, and that’s when there was this loudness, this GHHH-GRRRRAHH kind of thunder sound but confusingly not from the sky. Julia’s mouth expressed my alarm. Then, Julia got shorter. I thought she was kneeling or falling over, but her spine stayed straight, and quickly her whole bottom half and torso and neck were unavailable, then her head, too, an orange tumbling out of sight. The sound stopped. Where Julia had been standing just a second earlier was now a clean crack, six or seven feet in diameter, a completely vertical tunnel, so imposingly black that it made the night sky cower into a dull gray. The most eerie thing was that the crater was perfectly round, like someone had made a hole-punch.
2.
Whenever I meet a self-confident person, the first thing I do is Google their name plus the word “parents.” Always, always, this excavates a mother, father, uncle, godparent, grandparent, stepparent, or cousin fifteen times removed who is/was a prominent psychologist, surgeon, landlord, venture capitalist, tenured professor, architect, sculptor, memoirist, Founding Father descendant, or minor member of overseas aristocracy; or otherwise designed/founded/sold a special type of cardboard corrugation that made milk unhealthier but more shelf-stable, or else filed the patent for a predictive debt-risk algorithm that oppresses lower-income communities and was later acquired by MasterCard at double its market cap, or operates some other obscure little gold mine that no one ever thinks to exist—you get the idea. Some people’s psychological genealogy is obvious in the name. These are people like Tapley Kennedy-Buckley, Scheherazade Freud, Euripides L’Amareux, Astra Abraxia Choi, Waxing Gibbous Tiller III.
But “Julia Adams” is a regular enough name, and she was not so confident-seeming at first. She tiptoed into our History of Migration seminar and blushed when she complimented my handwriting. So it wasn’t immediately apparent that her parents both had their own Wikipedia pages with eleven or twelve subsections each, or that she’d grown up in Scarsdale, New York, the richest residential town in America. That fact, too, I only found out from Scarsdale’s own Wikipedia page.
When you look up my hometown on the internet, you get the word “disadvantaged” a lot. Googling my name leads you to a math competition held by the local hardware store when I was in the sixth grade. The questions were like, if a house X by Y feet in dimensions requires Z 4×4 planks, how many times do you need to hammer? I won a lifetime supply of nails.
“What do you do with so many nails?” Julia asked, genuinely boggled. “Like, how many picture frames can one person need to hang up?”
Julia had movie directors on speed dial and skin that never pimpled, so a druggish euphoria came over me whenever she asked me to hang out. I second-guessed anything I said in her presence. Pugs were bred to spell the Chinese character for “king” in their wrinkles. Tokyo is the size of New Jersey. But were they? Is it? Holding a steak knife in the wrong hand meant shaming my entire ancestral tree—not that my ancestors were anything more than serfs to Julia’s, or whatever.
Julia’s arrival over winter break was accompanied by no fewer than three monogrammed suitcases. Her eyes swept over my parents’ peeling baseboards and the expired Velveeta tins in the fridge with an excitement that kind of made me want to die. I’m not proud of snooping through her stuff; it brought me joy to see we used the same brand of tampons, though. Most days, I couldn’t tell if I wanted to kiss her, be her, or skin her alive.
There were so many things I was too scared to ask her. Things like: How are you so good at training other people to love you? Is it true that rich women pay to wax and bleach their assholes? Is yours bleached? Do you choose your shade? Could you show me? Is it like smooth eggshell, or a little pink asterisk, or a child’s blinding-white idea of the sun?
3.
So, the thing is, after the ground opened up and swallowed Julia that night, that’s when life got stressful.
Search and Rescue came, but the crater went way farther down than ropes could reach. Then the FBI, the journalists, the geologists, the YouTubers. Finally the big-shot physicists flew in with all these special beepy tools. They set up stadium floodlights in the yard and my father raged around the house hollering about privacy and disaster tourism; my mother nailed boards to the windows to shield us from the all-hours glow. The physicists announced their findings: The hole, apparently, had no measurable depth. It was literally bottomless. An impossible, irreconcilable blip of nature. Radioactive? Supernatural? It emitted no gas, light, heat, radon, no frequencies or wavelengths or energy whatsoever.
Julia’s parents went on TV. What malicious kidnapping plot was at play here? Who was this no-name girl who’d tricked, trapped their daughter? They’d raised Julia to be generous and kind to the less fortunate, but they always feared someone would take advantage of her big-hearted charity.
“Charity?” spewed my father. “Charity?”
“Please stop screaming,” said my mom, wiping his spit off her cheek.
Every week, more spectators arrived. The National Guard had a 24/7 watch around our house and still the gonzo reporters, TikTokers, and Satanic worshippers would break through the perimeter; the sound of people getting Tasered became routine and natural to me, like cicadas.
The hole got its own Wikipedia page.
A glossy helicopter scraped down in the yard one day, sawing the lemon tree’s fruits out of their sockets. My father charged up to the couple that emerged from it, waving the nail gun he’d made a point of purchasing full-price from the hardware store where I’d won the competition, because, he’d shouted, we were not a family that took freebies. I don’t think Dad really meant to pull the trigger, judging by the shock on his face when the spikes sailed out.
A couple of nails barely, barely grazed Julia’s parents. But their media blitz got a lot meaner. “Charity” became “FAMILY OF MURDERERS.”
That got me my own Wikipedia page, blue-linked to that of the hole.
Online, strangers said my face was untrustworthy. I had a suspicious overbite. “That’s code for immigrant and poor,” yelled my dad. “Why’d you ever invite that bitch here?”
“Mom said it was okay,” I said.
“So everything’s my fault,” said my mom, charging out of the room.
That night, Mom shook me awake.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt—”
“Listen,” she whispered. “I need you to do it for Dad.”
“Do what?”
“The same thing.”
“What thing.”
“Make a hole.”
“What?”
“Please,” Mom said, crouching so close her nose touched mine. “I can’t do it anymore. His temper. The way he smells. I wanted a divorce for years but I was afraid. I am afraid.”
“Shit,” I said, “Mom, you really think I can conjure magic black holes that make people disappear?”
“I’m begging you.”
I said, “You think I’m capable of killing people with my mind?”
Mom said, “You know I am so proud of you, leaving this place, making all these sophisticated new friends, having the sort of life that was never a choice for me. I always hoped you would have choices.”
Her tears pooled on my forehead.
I squeezed my eyes until the blackness became colorful.
“Under the chair over there,” I said finally, “is Julia’s stuff. She’s got a thousand dollars in cash and a couple of Van Cleef necklaces in one of the bags. Take it. Go wherever you need to go.”
Mom was silent.
I waited for her to laugh and say she’d been joking, playing a prank to lighten the heavy mood around the house.
“Van Cleef,” she said finally, in a way that was not clear if she knew very well or not at all what these words meant. I still don’t know.
By the morning, she was gone.
When Dad found out, he—appalled, volcano of fury, red like roses—shot himself in the heart with the nail gun.
4.
Aside from how depressing all of this death and abandonment was, I tried to tell myself it was kind of nice being alone in the house for the first time. No one bothered me. I got lonely, but that was okay; I had to accept that some people are maybe a little too hard to love. Because they’re lazy. Aimless. Purposeless. Lacking in daisy owls.
The only worrying thing was that I had no money. On Wikipedia, it said Julia’s family had inherited a lot of land and sold it to developers. So I agreed to an interview with CNN and announced I was putting up the hole for sale.
Ring-a-ring-a-ring! went the phone. Research universities. Government agencies. Churches. Eclectic billionaires without children. Walmart bid a six-figure sum.
Google, seven.
ExxonMobil offered one billion dollars.
I refused on principle, at first, but they made a moral case. They wanted to use the hole as a dumping ground for manufacturing waste—all this poisonous liquid, plastic, and oil that would otherwise pollute rural water systems, poison towns, choke the stingrays in the Great Barrier Reef, instead falling infinite and consequence-free into my front yard. I’d be purifying the planet. I’d single-handedly change humanity’s environmental future.
Also, I’d be richer than Julia’s parents. I could pay a private detective to find my mother and buy her a huge house in Scarsdale. I’d never get jealous of anyone ever again. And I pictured the procession of giant trucks, meanwhile, coming and pouring biohazard into the hole, flushing evil from the world day by day, like some kind of heavenly Dumpster. There would be a plaque, there, with my name on it. But no, I thought, it should say her name. “Julia’s Crater.” “Julia’s Hole.” “JULIA’S ANUS.” That made me laugh. I loved the way this sounded out loud. Historic, like Julius Caesar, but also something cosmic, planetary.
The lawyer who brought over the sales paperwork looked familiar, somehow. As I was signing the last page, he winked and said, “I know how you did it.”
“For the last time,” I said, “I didn’t do anything to anyone, it was a freak acci—”
“Nah,” he said. “That math contest. You saw the answers in the manager’s office.”
Slowly, I put down the pen.
“Excuse me?”
“That was my hardware store,” continued the lawyer. “I mean, I owned it. It was hard going—took me ten years working nights at Taco Bell to save up enough money. But eventually I opened the store, then was able to sell the store to pay for law school. Since then, I’ve been working on sustainability initiatives for corporations, although I also do some pro bono work for blind orphans on the side. Some people are born luckier than others, you know?”
My hands were shaking.
The lawyer said, “Are you OK?”
“Fuck you,” I said. “Get out.”
He said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, take it easy,” as I chased him out to the yard. It was bright daylight but the hole glowed black as always, and the lemon-less lemon tree looked hazy and undefined.
“Why didn’t you say something?” I hissed. “You saw me cheating. Why didn’t you disqualify me?”
“You were just a kid,” the lawyer said, his brows pulled down. “And it was just some nails.”
My voice sounded high and swoopy to my own ears, more bird than human. My skin itched, all over. I couldn’t stop shaking. “So everything’s been a lie?” I said. “I’m a fraud, a fake, and no one ever gets the things they really deserve?”
The lawyer said, “Um,” and took a nervous step backward.
He couldn’t see behind him, so he didn’t know until it happened that his heel was landing not in the dirt, but on the edge of that circular six-foot absence, the dirty, black, lower-middle-class asshole leading to nowhere. His eyes blew wide when he realized he was falling. It was time, I knew, to not be lazy or purposeless. I rushed forward as quick as I could, and I shot out a hand and grasped the flap of his jacket right before his body pitched over. We teetered there, on the edge, the man’s breath rapid and oven-hot on my face. And he looked at me. And I understood then. Everything was mine to choose. I leaned forward and pushed my own chest to his like a koala, and together, through the air, for several glorious seconds, we flew.
