Bastards: A Memoir (16 page)

“I’m going to miss you,” she said.

Her arms were crossed and I could see a fresh
x
cut deep in the flesh between her right-hand thumb and index finger. I tucked her hair behind her ears, folded her in my arms, and hugged her tight. She was still two inches taller than I was—she always had been—but she suddenly seemed small.

“Keep Mimi out of the liquor cabinet,” I croaked into her ear.

She rolled her eyes and let me go.

It was hard for me to believe that I was leaving Oklahoma. I had planned it for so long. But I’d spent most of that time thinking about the obstacles that would have prevented my success. I had arranged reactions, ways to circumnavigate, options A through F. I’d imagined my exit millions of times. But now that my plan was falling into place I found it impossible to relish the moment. New struggles reverberated in my mind, millions of things that could still derail me.

I wouldn’t know anybody. There would be no one around to define who I was in relation to them—Granddad’s and Mimi’s daughter, Becca’s sister—no one would know anything about me unless I told them.

I HAD
two days to figure out what I would say.

P A R T   T H R E E

found

2000–2011

Hammered

W
hen Granddad and I arrived at my college in central New York, I was three weeks past my eighteenth birthday, painfully virginal, reeling from Mimi’s illness, and fragile as a hothouse orchid (though I would sooner die than admit any of these things to another living soul). When we parked on the campus, a golf cart full of neon-shirted upperclassmen chirped that all we had to do was unload my boxes from our car and they would cart them up “the Hill” for me. Once we were stripped of the business of the moving my boxes from car to dormitory, Granddad’s presence seemed unnecessary.

“Well . . .” he said, “I could just get back on the road. Unless you want me to stay?”

He would stay if I asked, but Mimi and Becca needed him in Oklahoma more than I needed him here; we both knew it was true. I told him I’d be fine.

Whoever set the agenda on move-in day knew what he was doing—walking up the Hill from the field in front of the Hall of Presidents was the most picturesque way to see the campus. The buildings draped down a hillside where the Adirondack Mountains melted into the Chenango Valley. I chewed on those words
Adirondack
,
Chenango
, as I hiked up the hill. Butter-yellow daffodils grew in profusion around the dark lake at the main entrance. Every wend in my path revealed green lawns soft as mink, benches tucked in niches, tree roots arranged like cups inviting reflection and repose. Vines grew up the base of the older limestone buildings; it was Camelot-like. Precisely what I was looking for when I picked this place from the piles of catalogs in my high school guidance counselor’s office.

The nearest airport was an hour away and the nearest train was thirty minutes. The remoteness was the most appealing aspect. This college was a fortress between me and the chaotic forces of the rest of my life.

No one noticed me as I made my way up the path; they were absorbed in their own dramas. I sensed who belonged to whom from the invisible pulses between this outstretched hand and that arched eyebrow, this hand in that hair, along that shoulder. The Esperanto of connection, a language that I only ever learned well enough to read but not speak.

Lonesomeness clawed in my sternum. I didn’t wish Granddad had stayed or that I had Michael in his place. It wasn’t about Mimi or Peggy, either. I wanted something I’d never had. The thing these other people had: a clear, obvious connection with a parent. Someone who not only provided for my care and feeding, but lit up like a Christmas tree when I walked into the room, who had to clutch their heart when I left. I envied these families on the quad who took that sort of thing for granted.

I shook my head and reminded myself that the last eight years of my life had been about preparing for this. Not for college per se, but for the family that college would help ready me for. I’d buried myself in schoolwork, test preparation, music clubs, and after-school jobs to buy myself the luxury of four years to become a person worth finding.

My boxes were waiting for me in my dorm room when I arrived, as were my roommates. I’d lucked into a spot in a two-bedroom suite. I was to share the front room with a pink-haired Long Islander named Sadie. Our wide double window looked onto the academic quad. The sill wasn’t wide enough to be a true window seat but I tucked myself on it anyway, stuffing the corners with pillows and blankets to smooth the edges. Many nights around sunset I would dangle my bare legs out the unscreened window and tease the chilled, empty air with the thought that I could jump out. It made Sadie uneasy. “You can open the window from the top, you know,” she’d remind me, and I’d pretend not to hear her.

Sadie and I both came from Catholic households, were studious nerds in high school, and it was clear from the lack of labels on our clothing and the speed with which we secured on-campus jobs that we were both scholarship kids. The previous June, when the Department of Residential Life mailed letters with the names and phone numbers of our future roommates to all of us, Sadie called me first. We had a polite conversation where she advised me not to cut my hair short as I was planning, because I’d want it to cover my ears in the winter. She was a sensitive, sensible girl who dressed almost exclusively in black: the East Coast version of the creative types I knew from my artsy high school. But I didn’t come halfway across the country to be the person I had been before. I wanted new everything.

A San Franciscan named Abigail and a recent Russian immigrant named Elena occupied the adjoining back bedroom. Like Sadie and me, Abigail and Elena shared a lot of biographical bullet points with one another: They were pretty girls who knew they were pretty and were accustomed to being rewarded for it. Boys smiled at them in the dining hall and turned to watch them walk away. Their mailboxes filled regularly with delicacies from home—pastries from Abigail’s favorite San Francisco bakery, snuggly woolen things from Elena’s people, who had settled in Alaska. Both played sports in high school, and in college they jogged daily with obsessive urgency. They disliked one another with an intensity that is usually reserved for one’s own reflection.

The second week of school, at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night; my roommates and I were already in our pajamas. Elena made herself a bowl of herbal tea, filling the room with the smell of honey and warm milk. Under the strains of the Abigail’s computer playing the Dave Matthews Band, we were all tapping out the first five-hundred-word essays of our undergraduate careers when the phone rang.

Sadie answered it, saying, “Hello?” then, “Hold on.” She stretched the phone toward me and announced, “It’s for you.”

My pulse thrummed in my arms. It had to be Mimi.
Mimi’s dead. Mimi’s dead and I am not there and I should have stayed and I didn’t.
I focused on keeping my hand from shaking as I took the phone from Sadie.

“Hello?”

“Is this Mary King?” a strange boy’s voice asked on the other end.

“Um, yeah, speaking . . .” I stammered.

“You don’t sound like you’re from Oklahoma . . .” he said, his voice heavy with the suspicion that this early in the conversation I was already duping him.

“Who is this?” I demanded.

“This is Blake, from the Beta House,” he answered. “We’d like to invite you down for a little party tonight.”

No boy had ever called me out of the blue in my entire eighteen-year life. I rifled through the library of my mind, frantically searching for the right way to behave in this situation. I’d never seen someone else have a conversation like this up close. And I’d already snapped at him. Oh god. Oh god, oh god, oh god, he was waiting for me to say something.

“Tonight?” I said.

“Around ten, ten-thirty.”

“Um . . . I’ve got an early class tomorrow, so—”

My roommates circled for crumbs of the conversation.

“Bring your roommate if you want to . . .”

“I’ve got three.”

“The more, the merrier!”

“I’ll check with them, but we’re all in our pajamas already.”

I’d read somewhere that a lady never accepted a last-minute invitation. A lady probably never volunteered information about pajamas, either. God, I was mangling this.

Blake paused.

“We really hope you make it down. We’d love to meet all of you.”

“Thanks for the invitation,” I said and hung up.

When I relayed the other side of the conversation to my roommates, Abigail groaned into her hands.

“You just told the Betas that we’re in our pajamas. At nine o’clock!”

“What’s a Beta?”

“It’s a frat! They just invited you to a
party
and you told them that we’re in our
pajamas
.”

“You can go if you want to.”

“They invited
you
. . .”

“If you want to go, I’ll go.”

“Nah . . .” Abigail exhaled heavily. “I mean, I’m already . . . you know. In my pajamas.”

The craving for something to erase the taste of that phone call overwhelmed me. I wanted to tap my face against the tile bathroom wall until the words he’d said and the ones I’d said back stopped echoing in my skull, but there were too many eyes; I couldn’t do it. They’d report me to Psych Services. The only choice was to sit at my desk and act like that was exactly how I meant to play it. Like I got invited to parties so often that I couldn’t be bothered. Like I was not that very minute wondering how the boy on the other end of the line obtained my name and number, why he decided to dial me up, and if that meant that he liked me (if that meant I was likable).

Then Elena looked up from her tea and in her mysterious Russian accent countered, “It is so last-minute. How rude of him.” I was so relieved I could have leapt onto her lap.

“I don’t know how he even got the number,” I said, hoping I sounded blasé.

“From the
Inky
, obviously,” Abigail muttered, using the colloquial abbreviation for the
Incunabulum
, a booklet of photographs of every member of our freshman class with their hometown, high school, and dorm room address listed alongside. “The frats go through it looking for cute girls and then they call them up.”

This information made me reel. Someone had an idea about who I was. Someone had seen what I looked like and assumed I would know certain things, sound and act and
be
a certain way. Someone thought I was
cute.
I turned my face to the wall to hide the smile creeping across my face. I reached for my copy of the
Inky
in the mess of books on my desk, flipped through until I found my photo. I wanted to see what information this mysteri ous boy had referenced, curious if I could conjure the same image he had of me and, perhaps, find some way to be that girl in life.

All I was to people here was a smiling black-and-white picture and a short bio: Mary King, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, East Hall, Room 502. That was all anyone knew about me.

Whole chunks of my life had already flown off me like scrap paper. It was a relief to be rid of the past I’d spent so many years wrestling with. When asked, I told people that I was
born
in New Jersey but
raised
in Oklahoma. That my father was in the Air Force and my mother was a homemaker; that I had one sister. It was easy to be swept away in the bustle of the campus. I joined an a cappella group and a theater club. I read books, wrote papers, and volunteered to play piano at Sunday Mass. I smiled a lot. I tried to project a Plains-state wholesomeness.

ONE DAY
another few weeks in, I found myself alone in the suite. I was only five hours away from South Jersey, from Peggy and Michael and Jacob, whom I hadn’t seen in seven years. I’d spoken to Peggy on the phone every couple of weeks through high school, Jacob every few months when he happened to be at Peggy’s apartment. When the noise of the world stopped I could hear the siren call of their proximity: it latched onto my hand and dragged me toward the phone; it moved my thumb across the keypad. In my ear, the phone rang with the same pitch as the pay phone that rang in Marigold Court all those years ago.

I said, “Hi, Mom,” when Peggy picked up the other end of the line.

“Mary!” she squealed. Her pleasure thrilled me. I settled into the conversation like a bird into a nest.

We talked about Jacob. He’d enlisted in the Army and just got back from boot camp. Then about Mimi, whose health was hardly better than when I’d left her.

“You wouldn’t recognize her,” I said, forgetting for a moment that I was talking about my second mother to my first mother and that might be a cavalier thing to do. Mimi and Peggy still had their own strained stepmother/stepdaughter relationship to deal with, and Peggy still blamed Mimi for the way Jacob was ostracized in Oklahoma all those years ago.

I downshifted to the weather, saying that I forgot how quickly winter comes on the East Coast. Peggy told me that they were already putting out the Thanksgiving items at her store. For the past four years she’d been working as a price-change specialist at a department store. She walked the aisles with a sticker gun and a spreadsheet, working her way through the leftover odds and ends, pricing them to move. She didn’t have to deal with people much, which was exactly how she liked it. As she grew older she more frequently said things like, “People are shitty. I don’t need more friends.” Then she told me that she’d been reading about my school on the Internet.

“Family Weekend’s the second weekend in October,” she said. “Maybe we’ll come up.”

I knew Family Weekend was soon and that parents were supposed to visit during that time, but it never occurred to me that the woman I remembered from Marigold Court, the woman who sometimes kept me home from first grade because she was so lonely, could be here.

“I’ll get Jacob to drive me,” she said.

I could have said don’t come, that I wasn’t prepared to explain her and Jacob to my friends. Or I could have preserved her feelings with a small lie, said that I needed to catch up in my classes. But it was clear that she’d made a plan. On a long price-change shift with the sticker gun in her hand she’d imagined writing her name in the red binder in the break room, requesting time off the second weekend in October, and in the column titled “Reason for Request” scribbling,
Family Weekend at Daughter’s College
. She had looked up the fastest route to drive from South Jersey to Central New York, found economically priced nearby motel rooms, and decided that it was possible. My doubts were dwarfed by her desire.