If You’re That Happy, Something Wrong Is Going to Happen

We learned early never to question his moods. If he was sad, he was sad. If he was angry, it was our fault. If he was inexplicably elated — and sometimes he was, the manic highs as unaccountable as everything else about him — you waited to see what came next, because what came next was never what the mood suggested. His emotional states were not invitations. They were weather conditions to be read and managed, the way you read and manage weather when you have no shelter from it.

What we didn’t learn quickly enough — what took longer to understand, because it was subtler than the violence and the phone calls and the protocols we’d developed for surviving the worst nights — was that our own emotions were not safe either.

He couldn’t bear to see us happy.

Not dramatically unhappy with our happiness — not visibly enraged by it, not making a scene about it every time. Just: unable to let it exist undisturbed. A child smiling, a moment of laughter, three siblings doing what children do on an ordinary afternoon — these things required his assessment, and his assessment was almost always the same.

You’re very happy. Surely you received good news.

Why are you so happy? Did you win the lottery?

If you’re that happy, something wrong is going to happen.

He said this last one with the specific conviction of a man stating a fact rather than making a prediction. And then, reliably, he would make sure that something wrong did happen — because that’s what he did, and because the tools were always available, and because a child’s happiness was a small and easy thing to extinguish if you had no particular reason not to extinguish it.

Just for being twisted. Just because he could.

In the summers, our access to the beach depended entirely on my aunt and uncle — my mother’s sister and her husband.

If they went to the beach with my cousin and invited us, we had a day at the beach. If they didn’t, there was no beach. My father would not take us. We didn’t want him to — the specific dread of a day at the beach with him, with the ticking time bomb quality of his presence in a public space, was worse than no beach at all. We were glad he didn’t offer.

My aunt and uncle had a small white Fiat 127, and later a red Volkswagen Golf. These cars meant something to us that cars are not supposed to mean to children. They meant a day outside the apartment. A day outside his orbit. My uncle would tell jokes and say silly things and sometimes make us believe we were the ones driving, and we would laugh — genuinely, unreservedly, the way children laugh when there is nothing in the immediate environment requiring them to monitor it.

We would spend the day at the beach. We would start feeling sad on the drive home, as the apartment got closer, as the day ended. Returning was its own specific grief.

So my siblings and I developed a ritual.

On Sunday mornings, when a beach day was possible — when the weather suggested it, when there was a chance my aunt might call — the three of us would sit together on a bed and sing We Are the World.

I remember this very clearly. The three of us, on the bed, singing the 1985 charity song that had been everywhere that year, that we knew all the words to, that we sang with the specific seriousness of children conducting a ceremony they believe in completely.

And sometimes, after we sang it, the phone would ring. My aunt, inviting us to the beach. The skies would clear. The Fiat 127 or the red Golf would appear.

We were convinced — genuinely, completely convinced — that by singing We Are the World we had summoned the sun and the beach day. That the ritual worked. That we had found the one small thing we could do to influence the outcome of a Sunday morning in a household where outcomes were almost entirely outside our control.

Looking back, I understand what the ritual was. It was agency — the only form available to us. Three children who had almost no power over anything in their lives had found a thing they could do, and they did it, and sometimes it worked, and the belief that it worked was worth more than the probability that it did.

He would see us preparing to go. He would see the happiness — the anticipation, the singing, the specific lightness of children who believed the beach was coming — and he would find a reason.

You’re grounded.

You need to mop the floor.

You need to study.

Not always. Not every time. Enough times that the happiness was never fully free of its shadow — the awareness that it could be taken, that it was being observed, that the observation itself was a form of danger.

That’s the thing about what he did to ordinary moments. It didn’t require him to act every time. It only required him to act sometimes, unpredictably, for the contamination to be complete. You never knew which happiness was safe and which would trigger the assessment. So you held it a little more carefully, laughed a little more quietly, kept one part of your attention on the reading of the room even when the room seemed safe.

We still sang We Are the World. We still believed in the ritual. We still felt the specific joy of the phone ringing, the car arriving, the day beginning.

But we learned to hold the joy lightly. You don’t put all your weight on something that might be taken.

That’s not a lesson children should have to learn. We learned it anyway.

The household this describes — its texture, its protocols, its specific quality of ordinary days inside extraordinary conditions — is the subject of Surviving a Psychopathic Father and runs through everything in the Good Bad Person Series.