Bastards: A Memoir (13 page)

I was horrified that Mimi knew this thing about me. Horrified that this bad thing had left such a mark on me that people could tell it just by looking. I wouldn’t be going back, not even if I could.

TWO WEEKS
later Mimi and Granddad perched themselves on the armchairs in the living room and called Rebecca and me to sit on the couch. We only used this room for company, or Christmas morning when we opened presents. Whatever they had to say was big.

“We’ve been talking to your mother about adopting you. The two of you,” Granddad said.

His words were still hanging in the space between his chair and the sofa when Rebecca leapt up from her seat as if she were spring-loaded. She squealed and wrapped her arms around Mimi and Granddad’s necks simultaneously. I couldn’t move.

“You don’t have to decide right away,” Mimi said, but it was obvious that my sister had already decided.

Granddad cleared his throat and looked at me. “You can stay here with us even if you don’t want to be adopted.”

“You’ll get to change your name if you want to,” Mimi said. “A whole new start.”

Granddad added that if I really wanted to go back to New Jersey, then I could do that, too. It was my choice.

“If I get adopted and you don’t, you’re gonna be my niece!” Rebecca said, her blue eyes glistening with the same genius as they had on the day when she recognized that Jacob had outgrown Mimi.

Since that day in the kitchen with Mimi, I’d been stunned into submission. They knew what the answer would be. I knew that I would never go back home. Maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe I only hung on to the idea of New Jersey out of love for my mother, a desire to be on her team, to support the image of events that she had worked so hard to present to her father and stepmother, a need to prove that, for all her shortfalls, my mother was a great mother, that her love could cover any sin or shortcoming. But it didn’t. It couldn’t. Nothing I did could change the facts that my mother loving me and my loving her were not enough.

Love
was a word that confused things. I needed to pull it out of my vocabulary to clearly evaluate my situation. I was angry about the way Mimi and Granddad had treated my brother. It was difficult to reconcile my resentment at losing him with my eager ness to accept the gift they offered: a fresh start, a new name, something like a family.

Weren’t these the things I had imagined having when I whispered with Rebecca and Jacob about Oklahoma? Mimi and Granddad had provided all of the material things that I didn’t have with my parents. They ran like clockwork, with a precision that they had perfected over many decades of life. There was plenty they could teach me if I was willing to learn—sewing and sculpture, math and music, discipline and domestic skills. Mimi and Granddad were a framework I could plug into; all I had to do was follow their rules. Perhaps the act of signing papers and changing names would be the alchemy we needed to make us a family. In the face of all of those gains, my losses didn’t seem so much. If I went to back New Jersey there were no guarantees; my mother and brother didn’t live together there, so I would still be short one of them no matter what. In Oklahoma, at least, I had my sister.

On the day of the adoption, I wore a pink plaid dress with lace at the waist and puffed sleeves that Mimi had made for me at Easter. Since our brother had left, Rebecca had become prone to throwing tantrums about simple things; she wouldn’t slip into her matching blue dress until after she hollered for a few minutes about how this place could be COMMUNIST sometimes. But she ultimately fell in line. There was a small hope that licked against my rib cage, like a flame against glass, that the adoption would solidify the vagueness inside me, snap me into focus.

We drove to a courthouse, walked into a wood-paneled room, and the adults signed papers. I thought it would be bigger, like something from a movie. That we would go into a proper courtroom and sit behind a large table; that there would be people in the gallery to see us in our coordinating dresses and think,
What lovely little girls, I’d adopt them, too!
But it was just a conference room, barely bigger than the table in it. When I scooted around the side of the table, my skirt brushed the chairs and the wall simultaneously. It was stuffy and everyone’s cheeks shone with sweat.

The judge was a redheaded lady with black-rimmed eyeglasses. She signed a stack of papers and nodded when it was finished.
That can’t be it
, I thought. Surely this was just the beginning, the red-haired woman was just the gatekeeper. She would lead us into a grander room, where there would be tests and things to prove ownership. There would be spells and incantations and something to transform us all.

But no, everyone shook hands. That
was
it. Then Mimi, Granddad, Rebecca, and I went to the Social Security office. At a Plexiglas window I signed my new name on my old Social Security number in my most elaborate cursive.

Mary Anna King

The whole affair barely took two hours. In less time than it takes to bake a cake, Mary Agnes Taggart Hall was expunged from the human record. She ceased to exist.

I’d hated my full name, the old-timeyness of it, the way saying
Ag-nes
lifted the back of my throat like I was going to cough up a hairball, the way my initials spelled M.A.T.H. But suddenly I wanted it back. I knew Mary Agnes Taggart Hall. I knew where she belonged, what she sounded like, what her favorite color was. I did not know this newly minted Mary Anna King.

After the Social Security office we picked up cheeseburgers from a drive-through and Rebecca and I ate in the kitchen while Mimi went down to her workshop and Granddad rode his stationary bike in the den.

Sitting in the kitchen in my pink plaid dress, the thing I wanted more than anything was for someone to fight. This morning I’d woken with an image in my heart: my mother arriving at the courthouse, breathless, saying,
Stop stop stop. I can’t part with my Mary. You can’t have her. I can’t live without her.
But she didn’t. I thought there was a chance that Michael would come striding up in his work boots and say he’d fixed things, that he was sorry
.
But he didn’t, either. And now in the silent afternoon I realized the desire for a fight was the reason I went through with the adoption in the first place. I wanted there to be such a scene that someone would have to call the cops and let them figure out who belonged to whom. I wanted to know that it couldn’t be so easy to lose me.

In the twilight hours before dinner I went upstairs to Jacob’s old bedroom. It had been empty for a year. Since Jacob had left, I’d avoided that room like it was a downed electrical line.

I sifted through desk drawers, searching for any scrap of my brother or my mother that might have been left behind. All I could lay my hands on was a tooth-marked pencil in one of the desk drawers.

The warm light faded as I opened the closet door and pushed winter coats aside to see if my brother’s writing was still on the wall. It was. And there was more. Beside the
I HATE MIMI AND GRANDDAD
was a drawing of a monster. The monster had rows of teeth in his open mouth. He held screaming bodies—children—in his claws, en route to his gaping maw. It was drawn in No. 2 pencil, and while the drawing was graphic, included scales and blood, it had a textbook quality to it.

It was grotesque, but something about that monster felt kindred. It was a call that echoed something I felt inside. A hunger that wanted to destroy everything, devour everything, to hurt back, to show Everyone, whoever Everyone was. The people in this monster’s hands were kicking and screaming; fighting back. Like my brother had. Like my mother had. Not me. I never fought back. Not today, not ever. I didn’t that day in the fort at Marigold Court, or the day when I was sent to Oklahoma. I didn’t fight anytime my first parents gave one of my four little sisters away, or the day when Mimi and Granddad sent my brother away. I never fought anything.

Maybe I was not a fighter.

As this attic room wrapped its cold arms around me, I applied the tip of the chewed pencil to the closet wall and added to my brother’s drawing. I drew a girl inside the monster’s mouth, getting chomped on and swallowed up.

A week later I moved into the upstairs bedroom.

Mimi and Granddad bought me a whole set of matching bedroom furniture that I got to pick out. Ensconced in the attic, away from the perfect trio of Mimi-Granddad-Rebecca, I didn’t feel like such an outsider. There was a closet full of hate graffiti up here and the sign on the door read P
EGGY’S
R
OOM
. This was where I belonged.

It was the last room people lived in before they left the house on Forty-fourth Street for good.

The Debt

T
he panic attacks started after my adoption. I’d always been a jumpy kid, but as soon as my name changed my jumpiness got jacked up to new heights. When I got nervous now, my limbs went numb or my breath would stop. Sometimes my heart beat so fast that my ribs throbbed from the impact. Some attacks happened at home, some at school. There was never one single trigger that I could identify. I only knew that, whatever the cause, it was inside me and I couldn’t escape it.

Mimi and Granddad witnessed a few of my “spells”; ones where I fell to the living room floor, unable to catch my breath until I nearly lost consciousness. They didn’t understand them. The simplest explanation was that I was doing this to myself. Getting myself worked up over nothing, Mimi said. They told me to stop being dramatic and get up. Sometimes they had to scream this instruction because during an attack every sound came to me slowly, as if through eight feet of water. My delay in complying was interpreted as obstinacy. I was too old for fits, Granddad would scold. By the time I started eighth grade, I’d grown familiar enough with the symptoms that I could hide in a bathroom or my bedroom when I felt an attack coming on. So long as no one had to see them, they didn’t exist. And the problem was solved.

My new parents seemed to constantly approach me with the tepid hand of obligation and the safety of distance. I interpreted this coldness as a lack of affection. It wasn’t a hard leap to make. Peggy had sparked like a campfire when I entered a room. She hung on to every word I breathed into the phone when we spoke. She still sent letters, sheets of loose-leaf paper with her large choppy cursive scrawled across multiple lines. Most of them only said,
I love you and miss you, Meems—love Mom
. But she spent twenty-five cents to mail them. It was a modest sum made larger by the fact that she only made $4.25 an hour as a cashier.

I knew Mimi and Granddad were capable of affection; I saw it every day between them and Rebecca. My sister hung by the sink while Granddad shaved every morning and sat on the side of his armchair while he checked our homework every night. Mimi reached for Rebecca’s hand when we crossed parking lots and stroked her hair at the dinner table. They were vigilant about any slight change in Rebecca; a sniffle, a sneeze, a high color in her cheeks, and she was tucked on the couch for the day with her favorite movies and an assortment of treats to woo her appetite. Mimi bought special milk for Rebecca’s sensitive stomach, cut her sandwiches into triangles instead of squares. They held the memory of the ailing baby they had saved; she would always be that for them.

Mimi and Granddad fed me, clothed me, and drove me to school. The thoughtful things they did—like sending me to piano lessons or leaving notes from the tooth fairy tucked under my pillow—I suspected they only did to maintain a semblance of fairness. We never used the words
father
,
mother
,
daughter
unless we were required to for school forms. They were my parents on paper.

Maybe it was the paper part that made our relationship feel transactional, like a loan from a bank that I would someday need to repay. Because I had needed to be rescued, Mimi and Granddad sacrificed their golden years. They never said as much to me, but I could tell when Mimi’s doll club friends talked about second honeymoons to Cozumel and fancy new mattresses with his-and-hers controls that my new parents were missing out. The money they should be spending on trips to Hawaii was instead used to buy school shoes and Christmas trees, to pay for piano lessons and choir trips. Each day I stayed, my balance grew larger. I didn’t know how I would ever settle such a debt.

I often wondered why they went through with the adoption. Was it to assuage their guilt for missing the warning signs with Peggy? Because of what had happened with Jacob? Did they simply want Rebecca to have a playmate? Or had they done it, as Peggy suggested, only because adoption simplified insurance and tax forms? Mimi and Granddad never let me get close enough to find out.

Granddad kept his thoughts to himself—to an unnerving degree. I guessed he always had. When I came across his senior yearbook, his portrait was captioned, “He’s a shy guy, so you’ll hit some snarls, but you ought to get to know Charles!” He graduated from high school in 1952, making him a member of the Silent Generation, a label I encountered in an old
Time
magazine article that was hauntingly apropos. Granddad never had conversations on which I could eavesdrop and hear his thoughts. He didn’t have any hobbies; he didn’t like receiving gifts. As far as I could tell, his only friend was Mimi. Most days the sum of our interaction was when Granddad woke me by singing Irving Berlin’s “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” and when he checked my homework after dinner. I learned from Peggy that Granddad had six older sisters, all dead. She also told me that Granddad’s father had been a boxer, a man whose first question when he arrived home from work was, “Where are the children so I can beat them?” a story that I was never able to confirm or disprove.

When I asked Granddad about his father he only ever told one story, the one about how his parents met at a church picnic in Philadelphia, just after the turn of the century. His parents both attended with different dates, but happened to spread their picnic blankets beside one another. Before the meal was over, my great-grandfather dumped a bowl of potato salad on the other guy’s head and Granddad’s parents left the luncheon together. I wanted to know more—was the potato salad fiasco a fight or a joke, what happened next, when were his parents married—but Granddad said that was all he knew. He never talked about his sisters or his first wife—my biological grandmother—Joan.