Bastards: A Memoir (12 page)

Jacob’s cries traveled through the air-conditioning vent in the floor. They hit my back like birdshot. I felt my sister’s ribs hitting mine; there was not enough air in the room to fill us up.

And then it was silent. The air conditioner cycled on. In its silence the house accused me of not doing anything, of failing to step in, of failing at everything.

Mimi’s adult daughter, Jolene, came by the house to visit Saturday afternoon. Jolene was in her mid-forties and thin, with severe black hair and one incisor that had grown in crooked. When Jolene was a little girl Mimi ran a beauty shop. Jolene learned to set and perm hair before she was out of middle school. Mimi had hoped that Jolene would finish college and lead a fascinating, adventurous life. But Jolene left school after two years, when she met and married a Baptist naval officer. Since Mimi’s arthritis got bad, Jolene came over once a week to set Mimi’s hair in brush rollers. And while the greatest disappointment of Mimi’s life might well have been that her daughter didn’t go farther into the world than Mimi had herself, she never mentioned it while Jolene had her hands in her hair.

I was tucked around the corner from the kitchen counter where Mimi sat, her hair wet and her shoulders draped in a towel. I had my nose pointed into a Louisa May Alcott book about a girl who got paralyzed in a sledding accident, but I couldn’t help picking up tidbits of the women’s conversation. The sound of women talking was one thing that always comforted me. In the kitchen Mimi said to Jolene,
You can’t be too careful with boys, especially teenagers.
Jolene, who had two boys of her own,
mm-hmm
’d with her mouth full of curler pins and carried on rolling Mimi’s hair.

I have the girls to think about
, Mimi said.
You can’t have that sort of thing in a house with young girls
. Her tone was a lean mixed with a whisper, the same tone I’d heard the Mothers of Marigold Court use hundreds of times when they knew children were around and didn’t want us to know they were talking about
sex
.

My guess is, Mimi thought somehow we had inherited the appetites of Peggy and Michael. Their having so many children suggested a criminal lack of self-control, and because of his rela tion to them, my brother’s adolescence could not be allowed to develop without strict guidelines, otherwise it would lead to something grotesque, something strange.
That kind of thing
must be stamped out by force if necessary.

A week later, we took Jacob to the Will Rogers World Airport. He was going back to New Jersey, where he would live with our father. According to Peggy, Michael was the only person Granddad would release custody to. She would always maintain that when she called to protest that Granddad had told her he’d
be damned if that man doesn’t raise a single one of his children
.

On the day my brother left Oklahoma, we all walked with him to the airport departure gate. I didn’t hold his hand or hug his neck, not with Mimi and Granddad watching so close, not with the image of the belt still in my mind. My brother stepped into the tunnel to the airplane and I watched his blue backpack bob until he reached a bend. He turned and waved. All I could do was stand there while my brother receded.

That night when everyone was asleep, I walked into the kitchen. Moonlight shone through the lace curtains. The table was set for breakfast, cereal bowls turned upside down over the juice glasses like Mimi did each night before bed. The fruit basket in the center was full of bananas. There was always a surplus of bananas because Granddad ate one every morning for breakfast. Before devouring it he made the banana talk to us in a high-pitched mouse voice as if we were unable to distinguish between a magical animate banana and a grown man jiggling the thing around like a puppet. He didn’t even try to keep his lips from moving.

I climbed on a kitchen chair and grabbed one. It was oily and cool in my hand. Beneath the firm peel I felt the possibility of softness. So I squeezed. I squeezed its thick yellow skin as hard as I could. I squeezed with both hands. I wanted to strangle the life, the color, all the bright blandness out of that wretched fruit. But when I let it go, my hands didn’t even leave a mark on the flesh; the banana I chose was not yet ripe. Euphoria washed over me nonetheless, a warm wave of satisfaction that came from hurting something and getting away with it.

At breakfast the next morning Granddad reached for that strangled banana. When he peeled it, the fruit inside was brown, goopy like baby food. A powerful surge ran through me—I had ruined something of his and was eager to see how he liked it. I waited for the roaring monster to return, for the belt to come off. I braced myself to take my lashes like my brother had. But the look on Granddad’s face was confused, childlike.

As I watched this barrel-chested man holding a squashed banana, my stomach fell into my shoes. I couldn’t even say I was sorry; an apology would let him know that I had done it. I knew, deep down, that my badness was nothing close to the adult transgressions I had witnessed, but it landed on me with force because it was mine. And I was ashamed of all of us, ashamed of myself and Rebecca, ashamed of Mimi, and of Granddad; every single last one of us.

Things You Can Tell Just by Looking

A
fter my brother left, I learned what restraint looked like. When Rebecca and I fussed about who was actually kicking whom under the dinner table, or brought home tests from school with low enough scores that they required a parent’s signature, Granddad went silent and looked deep into the empty air to avoid our eyes. When I babbled about how long it might be before Mom could bring us back to New Jersey, Granddad settled firmly into his chair, as if to cement his body to it. As if to keep him from doing something we would all regret. There was something chilling in these gestures. I had seen a monster that day in the kitchen before my brother went away, but Granddad had been the monster. It was possible that he could become that monster again. He knew it as well as the rest of us did.

One night, I was washing dishes in the kitchen when Mimi sat at the table in the corner working on a bit of sewing. I asked her, “What if I went back? Like Jacob?”

Every time I washed dishes after supper, I thought how I hadn’t had to wash dishes in Jersey. I thought about how nobody said
supper
in New Jersey. Nobody called soda
pop
. There were beaches and pizza slices and in New Jersey my mom let me fold my slice in half around my finger so the cheese melted together and the grease dripped down my elbow. She did not make me cut it into bite-sized pieces like a baby. Real rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi came from New Jersey, not a bunch of sappy hillbillies singing about guns and dogs and trucks. I listened to rock music in New Jersey, not the bland oldies and standards that Mimi and Granddad played in Oklahoma. Everything was better in New Jersey. More than all of that, of course, I missed my mother and brother. I kept my face to the wall, kept the water running. It rushed over my hands, loud as a waterfall, and I thought for a moment that Mimi hadn’t heard me. “What if I want to go live with my mom?” I said again, louder this time. I wanted to put those words out in the world, see what happened to them.

“Peggy isn’t ready for that,” Mimi said. I didn’t need to turn around to know that she still had her eyes on her hands. She was working with taffeta, so the fabric rustled like bees’ wings under her fingers as she moved along the hem. “She might never be ready.”

My heart clamped down on the love I had for my mother, like a pit bull on an intruder. I couldn’t believe that she
wouldn’t
or
couldn’t
or
might never.
I knew her differently than Mimi did. I would not give up on her. I locked my knees and pursed my lips at the sink. My mom was going to find a way to bring me back home.

The taffeta stopped rustling behind me. “New Jersey isn’t as great as you remember it,” Mimi said. She crossed the kitchen and took my chin in her papery fingers, turning my head to look her square in the eyes.

“Your parents often did not take good care of you,” she said.

She searched my eyes for comprehension, agreement. I wouldn’t give it. Mimi removed her hands from my face and took a breath.

“Do you remember when I came to visit, when you were little?”

I shook my head.

“You were five, maybe six,” she said. “Something was . . . funny about you then. So I took you to a doctor. She said someone hurt you. Down. There
.
” Mimi raised an eyebrow. There was a burnt look in her eyes, like this morsel of a story scalded her somehow.

I did remember her visit, vaguely. It was the time Mimi and Granddad drove from Oklahoma to Florida to take Rebecca to Disney World. The time I was so gutted by the fact that someone was going to the Magic Kingdom and I wasn’t that I tried to forget all about it. But Mimi’s expression in the kitchen tonight and her tone brushed against a memory that I had buried deeper than that. Something I’d never told anyone.

Years ago, the boy who put on his leg braces just to kick people in Marigold Court had a fort. It was three sheets strung between a dumpster and a wooden fence that separated our territory from the property of another apartment building around the corner. You would never notice it if you weren’t looking for it. The dumpster and the fence made up two walls, the sheets made the other two walls and the roof. The black asphalt floor was covered alternately with brown pine needles and bottle caps. Alongside the fence was a crumbling concrete parking bumper that was the only furniture in the place. An enormous honeysuckle bush grew over the fence from the backyard on the other side. It brushed against the roof of the fort, dropping leaves and flowers when the wind shook its branches. The roof sagged in the middle, heavy with floral debris.

I’d never told anyone how one summer afternoon I happened upon the fort. When he saw my shadow outside, the kid drew the sheet back and said,
Come in
.

It was hot outside, one of those days when the sun hit the pavement and beat back up at you, frying you twice, but inside the fort was shady on account of the shelter of the honeysuckle. The bush took the biggest beating from the heat, making the inside of the fort five degrees cooler than the outside. I sat on the asphalt and he sat on the parking bumper. He held a stick in his right hand like a scepter. It swayed over his head and jostled the roof, sending flowers and leaves into alternating splinters of orange and green where the sun shone through. I was watching the flowers on the roof, thinking how it was like being inside a kaleidoscope, when I felt a sharp, sudden pain in my left shoulder, a force that rocked me back. My elbows scraped along the rough pavement and I saw him drawing the pointed end of the stick back to hit me again.

In the same millisecond, we both realize that a second blow would be redundant; I was already on my back. Then he was on me, his knees on either side of my waist, the stick still in his hand.

He said,
Stay down.
He said,
Lay still
, or he’d have to cut me. He indicated the knife in his belt, a curved and sinister-looking thing that one of his mother’s recent boyfriends had bribed him with. There was a glint in his eyes like the bright shard you see when sunlight hits a mirror and pierces you deep into your brain.

Pine needles and pebbles and bottle caps pressed into my back through my cotton dress. He pulled up my skirt and rooted around in my underwear as if searching for loose change.

I was five years old. I hadn’t even thought about my body beneath my clothing, but I knew this was bad. I knew because they told us in school on a constant loop to
keep your hands to yourselves
and
keep private parts private
, but those statements got drowned out in the static of the many things grown-ups said that never had any consequences, like
eat your vegetables
,
go play outside
, and
your face is gonna freeze that way.

My mind could only accommodate the idea that this boy was not keeping his hands to himself and it was somehow my fault. His fingers found a spot inside me and it felt like he was reaching straight into my throat, yanking my tongue down to the floor of my mouth so I couldn’t cry out, no matter how much I wanted to. In the years to come, when I heard other kids whispering about
popped cherries
I returned to this moment and I knew that this was when mine was lost. I didn’t know what it was, didn’t know I’d had it, before someone took it from me.

All I could do was look at the honeysuckle shadows on the roof of the fort and wait for it to be over. I locked my mind away, separated it from my body somehow. It was like this whole thing was happening to some other girl while I was looking at sunlight shining through the flowers. Then I heard the sound of other kids running in the lot.

The wind created by their racing bodies pressed in on the flimsy walls of the fort. The kid perked his ears up, gauged how close they were. He pulled my panties up, wiped his hand on his shorts, and leaned his face so close to mine that I could feel his teeth on my cheek, and he said, “You tell anybody and I’ll stick a knife up your pussy.”

I don’t know how Mimi or a doctor could find that mark on me. I don’t know what the doctor would have looked for, or asked, or what the doctor might have seen.

I didn’t know how long I had been standing at the sink, staring into the middle space between Mimi and me. She hadn’t said a word since
down there
, and I know for certain that I’d been mute, but for how long? I let out a breath that I’d been holding this whole time and Mimi said, “Maybe you don’t remember. The doctor said you mightn’t,” then she turned back to the kitchen table.

“No,” I said to her back, “I remember.”

I didn’t need to say anything else. We both knew that her point had been made.

She knew that my scrubbed-clean memory of New Jersey was bullshit. She’d always known it. Years before she came for us, she knew. She knew it when she let Rebecca go back to New Jersey with my mom. She knew it when she stayed with us for three weeks, negotiating for my parents to turn over guardianship. She knew that it wasn’t all games of kick-the-can in the twilight and sitting under linoleum tables listening to women bicker. It was dangerous, dirty, we were hungry most of the time, and around every corner were boys with knives, and broken glass.