Bastards: A Memoir (10 page)

I didn’t have a vocabulary to explain this feeling to anyone around me. I was afraid that if I tried to describe it, Mimi and Granddad would think I was bad. Maybe they would send me back. Part of me longed to return to New Jersey and to my mother, but I feared that I would be sent without my brother and sister. It was a fear that I absorbed over the many years I had seen my sisters sent away, one that grew larger when I was sent away myself. I had been a willing participant in my relocation, but I knew that I would have been sent here even if I hadn’t wanted to go, that I was a person who could be shipped off on a whim.

We were halfway through dinner that night when I took a deep breath and asked, “What’s a Yankee?”

Mimi said, “It’s a person from the Northeast.”

But Granddad wanted to know where I’d heard that word.

I told him about the Spitter and he harrumphed. “Some of these Okies think the Civil War is still going on. We’re all Yankees here, except Mimi-Mouse,” he continued, his eyes glittering mischievously as he winked at his wife. “But you don’t mind, do you?” He squeezed her knee under the table.

“Not so long as you worsh your feet,” Mimi said.

From time to time she’d slip into the same banjo-twang as the kids from the schoolyard. It only popped up with certain words and turns of phrase, like
worsh
instead of wash,
Missour-ah
instead of Missouri. Then there were the phrases like “hide and watch,” which was a warning (
You kids keep getting out of a bed, and you can hide and watch what happens
); “we don’t need to be entertained,” which meant hush (
Finish your dinner, we don’t need to be entertained
); and “telling stories,” which meant bald-faced lying (
Don’t tell me any stories, now . . .
).

Our plates were nearly clean when Mimi looked sidelong at my brother. “You’re watching that TV upstairs after bedtime,” she accused, folding her hands in her lap. Jacob said that he was not.

“Nobody likes a storyteller.”

There it was.

“I can hear you moving around up there at night,” she continued.

“I’m
not
,” he insisted.

“Charles, what do you think?” Mimi turned to Granddad for backup.

Granddad adjusted his glasses, thinking. “I think you need to write,
I will not lie
, one hundred times before you go to bed tonight, young man.”

I had a sense that this was a test designed to show all of us at the table who was in charge of the house, who was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, and who was NOT. Mimi nodded softly, and it was clear that Granddad had passed with high marks.

I’d never known my brother to be a liar, but if I knew anything for sure, it was that Mimi heard every squeaking floorboard and saw every reflection in this house. Maybe my brother was, in fact, telling stories. I tried to catch Jacob’s eye but he stared at his plate, no doubt wondering over the words
one hundred sentences
, feeling how impossibly dreary it would be to write them all before bedtime.

IN ADDITION
to Jacob’s lying, Mimi set her sights on me and my shyness. It was another thing that simply would not do.

One afternoon in early November, Mimi took Jacob, Rebecca, and me to a library after school. I slipped into the silence like it was a well-worn winter coat. The Young Readers section was a sunken room sprinkled with tuffets and various child-sized nooks scooped into the brick walls. I’d never read a book without pictures. Mimi glided through the aisles and snapped up
Little House in the Big Woods
,
Anne of Green Gables
, and
Little Women
.

When we arrived home, Mimi left the stack of books on the dining room table. I waited until I saw her back disappear into the kitchen before I made my move to dive under it. The phone rang.

Mimi and Granddad had three rotary-dial phones spread throughout the house and one wireless phone in the basement. Their tinny ringing jangled my nerves and forced my tongue against the roof of my mouth until someone picked up the receiver. Not knowing who was on the other end of line, I avoided answering the phone myself. Jacob and Rebecca, however, loved nothing better than answering the phone. This time Rebecca got it first.

“King residence!” she chirped into the phone. “Hi, Mom,” she said after a beat. Through the table legs I saw my sister’s plump calves lift from the floor and dangle from the chair by the phone. Jacob stood close, fidgeting to be next.

Once I knew it was my mother on the other end of the line, my hunger for hearing her voice sent me scrambling out of my hiding place and fidgeting alongside my brother.

Mom was more my mom than she was Rebecca’s mom, and in those interminable minutes when my sister was talking to
my
mom I was wild with rage. I could have ripped that receiver out of her soft pink hand and kicked her out of the chair down to the floor. I didn’t, but I knew I was capable of it.

Mimi strutted in from the kitchen with a timer in her hand. “You each get ten minutes,” she said and set the timer ticking. “You two wait over here.” She nudged me and Jacob—more with her expression than with her hands—three feet away from Rebecca and the telephone. She didn’t want to hear any fussing and she didn’t want us to hang up the phone when we were done; she wanted to talk to our mother. Then she left and the three of us had to self-police.

When it was my turn on the phone, my mother said, “Hello, my Mary!” and the sound of her voice devastated me. She sounded exactly as I remembered her, but coming through the receiver directly into my ear she was both closer to me and farther from me than ever before. “Hello?” she said again, and I managed to say, “Hi, Mommy.” What I wanted was for my ten minutes to be filled to overflowing with my mother’s voice running and spilling together words; I didn’t even care what they were. I wanted to deposit all of those words, all of her voice, inside me like pennies in a bank that I could draw from later. But this was a conversation, and I had to keep up my end. It never occurred to me that my mother might be wishing for the same thing from me, for me to burble like a brook overfilling our conversations with new things I had learned.

She asked me if I was being good, and I nodded, of course I was.

“Meems?” my mother asked. “Are you still there?”

“She’s nodding!” Jacob hollered toward the phone, looking over his shoulder to see if Mimi was watching him.

“I’m nodding,” I said into the receiver.

And then the timer dinged and my time was up. I handed the receiver to Jacob and crawled back under the table, to think about what I would sound like when I became the wind and how long it would take me to blow all the way to New Jersey.

I was just pulling my ankle under the table when Mimi called from the kitchen.

“Mary, would you come in here, please?” Using the reflections bounced from the gleaming breakfront and onto the glass cabinet in the hallway, she must have seen me. I wondered if I would be made to write one hundred times,
I will not hide under tables.

“Bring me one of my books, please?”

I slid a book off the top of the dining table and bobbed into the kitchen, where Mimi was expertly sculpting hamburger into perfectly spherical meatballs.

“You can read, can’t you?”

I nodded.

“Out loud?

I nodded slowly.

“That’s good, ’cause I can’t read while I’ve got my hands in this bowl. Hop in that chair and read to me, would you?”

I tucked myself into the chair in the corner by the refrigerator and took a deep breath and began to read.

“A little louder, please? I can’t hear you over the water boiling,” Mimi said.

The timer sounded in the dining room and Mimi washed her hands. “I’ll be right back, don’t read on ahead, now,” she said as she went toward the phone in the hallway. She might have winked at me. It’s possible that was a wink, but it could have been the light playing a trick.

I tried not to read ahead, so I flipped through the pictures instead. Two little girls batting a balloon back and forth, a wild-haired girl cradling a rough-looking doll in a cabin. A big bearded father pulling on his boots.

Over dinner I was full of questions. How do you build a cabin, where is Wisconsin, is a bear bigger than Granddad, and how much bigger? I was fascinated. Something inside me switched on when I picked up that book. I couldn’t wait to keep reading.

A week later at school, our phonics lesson was interrupted by sirens. The school secretary announced over the intercom that this was only a drill, but we were still meant to take it seriously.

“It’s a tore-nado drill, Yankee,” the Spitter said in my ear.

“I
know
,” I said. But I didn’t know; no one had bothered to explain tornadoes to me.

“You don’t have tore-nadoes in New Jersey,” he insisted, falling directly behind me in line.

“We have hurricanes, and they are
way
worse,” I barked back as we marched into the hallway, hugging the windowless walls while the sirens bleated overhead.

“No, they ain’t,” he said as we crouched against the wall, our laced-together fingers covering our necks. It was the precise position we took during hurricane drills in New Jersey. This fact emboldened me.

“They are so. I knew a girl who
died
in a hurricane,” I hissed at the Spitter around my elbow.

This statement was absolutely untrue. But the spooked look in the Spitter’s eyes told me that I’d got him. He turned his whole face toward me, elbows wrapped like elephant ears around his head. “What happened?” he asked.

Of course he wanted to know what had happened. I was curious, too. How could I have lived through a hurricane that had killed a classmate? How would I have a story like that? A story big enough to haunt, but small enough to avoid being national news? I had wandered too far into this lie to back out gracefully. I had to figure out a way through it. For the briefest of moments I was struck dumb. But then it came to me.

I closed my eyes and saw my former classroom in New Jersey; I heard the sirens, smelled the chalk and humid air. I saw myself filing into the hallway with my classmates. Mixed in with everyone else was an imagined girl. A hazel-eyed girl . . . She was unimpressed by the warning signs all around her and ducked into the girls’ bathroom on the first floor. She thought the alarm was just another drill, thought that maybe she’d sneak out the window when no one was looking and run over to Mr. Ed’s bodega and buy herself some Skittles. She could taste the sugary syrupy goodness already. Her mouth watered.

But that was her mistake.

Because this time the drill was
real.

In the hallway in Oklahoma, the Spitter’s face was slack-jawed and guileless. He believed me. I told him how the hazel-eyed girl climbed onto the radiator to boost herself out the window, how she couldn’t have seen the wind pick up a tree and send it crashing through the glass. How the girl was crushed to the cold tile floor.

“She was killed on impact,” I said, like I’d heard in crime shows back when my mom let me watch them with her. I shook my head. Killed on impact.

“That’s awful,” he whispered.

I nodded.

I knew there was nothing worse than a story where a kid disappears.

Discipline

W
e had only been in Oklahoma a few months when the truth came barreling out and ruined everything. It was the night after we talked to our mother, my brother said, over his plate of spaghetti, that Mom told him she had found a nice family for the baby. It was the same family that adopted baby Meghan.

Dinner paused. Forks suspended in mid-bite.

“What baby?” Granddad asked.

“The new baby. The one that isn’t born yet. Mom’s giving her to another family. Like the other babies,” said Jacob.

“What other babies?” Granddad said.

“The . . . other babies. Lisa and Rebekah Two and Meghan.” Redness crept up his neck like a quickly advancing allergic reaction.

“That’s enough. There are no other babies. There’s just the three of you.”

“But there are—”

“That’s impossible,” Mimi said, as she unblinkingly sliced her pasta noodles with a knife. “I was just there, Charles, I would have known.”

Granddad, however, didn’t look so sure.

“Now that you’ve upset everybody’s dinner, you can be excused from the table,” Mimi said to my brother.

“And before you go to bed tonight,” she continued, “I’ll need two hundred sentences from you.
I will not tell stories.
Two hundred times. Go on, now.”

Jacob spent the next couple hours before bed alone in the upstairs bedroom while Rebecca rolled on the TV room carpet in front of Granddad’s recliner yelling, “Buy a vowel!” and I pretended to do homework until it was time for us to put on our pajamas and line up for good-nights. My brother arrived for the good-night scene with five sheets of paper in hand. Granddad inspected them through the bottom of his bifocals.

“Did you learn your lesson?” Granddad asked.

“Yeah.” My brother tried to keep his eyes off the floor.

“Don’t say,
Yeah
.
Yeah
is not an answer. Say,
Yes, sir
, or
No, sir
. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” my brother puffed.

My brother didn’t cry like most people do. When he was little he had problems with his tear ducts and had to have them removed. Even though his tear-making apparatus worked fine now, something in him hung on to that old wound, and when he got upset he didn’t produce tears. His eyes got red, and the redness spread down his face. His dry waterworks always led adults to think he was faking. I knew he wasn’t, but I didn’t say anything in my brother’s defense.

That night, I lay wide awake in the big queen bed, feeling the earth shift beneath me while my sister softly snored. As glad as I was that I didn’t have to write sentences, I wished that I had jumped in at the dinner table. I wished I had said that my brother was right, that we were both there when it happened and it was true. But I didn’t. Maybe the habit of keeping a secret for so long was impossible to overcome. Once it was hanging in the air, and my brother was being branded a liar, I couldn’t shout out in his defense. We were supposed to be a team. Wherever my brother was, I was supposed to be right by his side. But this place, this house with its upstairs and downstairs, these people with their
yes, sirs
and
no, sirs
, with their books, backyards, and plates of pasta dinners had twisted my allegiance. I was the one who lied, with my story about the girl in the hurricane. My brother had told the truth. He got the punishment I deserved, but there was nothing I could do about it.