Bastards: A Memoir (17 page)

And so, of all the things I could have said, “I can’t wait to see you!” was what came out of my mouth. It was true, but it complicated my life considerably.

For the next two weeks I dashed to my classes at cheek-reddening pace, wondering how I would explain Peggy to my roommates, who were under the impression that my Mother, my Real Mother, was laid low by a lung disease; I’d had to tell them to explain my suspicious lack of parents on move-in day. My identity was so carefully constructed here; I had been doing so well. All it took was one moment of lonesomeness for me to let my former life invade my new place. My roommates wouldn’t understand that there wasn’t a lexicon to discuss my family; they would simply think I was a liar and a strange, pathological person. In the days before Peggy and Jacob arrived, I worried the fabric of my story until it fell apart, threadbare, in my mind. Then I gave up and decided to play it by ear.

This would be the first time in eleven years that Peggy, Jacob, and I would be alone together. The prospect was both maddening and exciting.

On the Saturday morning of Family Weekend, they arrived at nine o’clock. Abigail and Sadie were out to breakfast with their families. Elena’s people were in Alaska and would have spent more time in airports than on campus if they’d made the trip.

“Who is coming for you?” Elena asked me from the other room.

I flipped through the words that would apply, trying to choose the simplest ones . . . My older sister and my nephew? That was who Peggy and Jacob were on paper, but suppose she encountered them and they said something different. Cousins, maybe? Aunt? It all seemed ridiculous.

“My brother and my mom,” I said.

“Is your mom better?” she asked.

“This isn’t . . . that mom. This is my birth mom,” I said. “I’m adopted.” I waited for these words to shatter glass, to tip off an earthquake, but they didn’t seem to have any external impact. All their confusing force was turned inward on my gut, as my stomach growled at me in protest.

I left Elena in the suite and headed down to the parking lot to wait for them. The morning was gray and crisp. I sat on a wooden pylon at the edge of the parking lot by the dining hall, watching as my classmates entered and exited with their parents, a crowd of Lilly Pulitzer prints, pleated khaki slacks, boat shoes. I waited until a white sedan with rental placards on the plates turned the corner.

My brother was driving; it was strange to see that he was a grown man now. Peggy leapt from the car while the engine was still running. “Meems!” she hollered. No one had called me that since I was seven years old; it was a name that no one other than Peggy knew. It drew me toward her like iron to a magnet.

Jacob appeared over her shoulder. “It’s fuckin’ cold here!” he said.

They looked like shadows, Jacob in a black leather jacket and Peggy in a black knee-length coat. Her once-chocolate-brown hair was dyed red, gray roots peeking through at her temples. It fell straight and flat against her cheeks; I couldn’t bury my face in her hair anymore.

Over the intervening years since I had left her in New Jersey, I’d carried a picture of her in my mind. Loss had made my image of my mother grow soft and saintly, rendered in watercolor: graceful and strong, her golden eyes wide and calm. In this parking lot, however, the real mother and the imagined one slapped against each other like the simultaneous striking of two adjacent piano keys, their dissonant pitches so close together that they begged to be resolved.

Both faces had the same form: round cheeks and soft chin—the Cupid’s-bow lips that I inherited from her—but the Real Peggy’s eyes had the scorched look of a person who had been lost at sea. She carried her shoulders high against her ears as if she were constantly braced to receive a blow, and she was smaller than I remembered. When I was seven years old, she towered over me at five feet two inches tall, but now I was two inches taller than her and my arms wrapped all the way around her back. She was still plump and carried most of her weight in her chest. Her breasts had grown a cup size larger with each subsequent pregnancy—I remembered that—but I’d assumed they would deflate once her body realized she didn’t have any babies. They hadn’t.

How much cleaner it would be if she could have stopped being a mother. A man can walk away and live his life, no one knowing for sure if he is a father, but I understood, looking at Peggy’s body which still carried the marks of all of her lost children, that she would always be their mother. Hands that once cradled infants may empty, a body that once curled around another life like a warm shell may grow distant over time, but that body will never be the same. Being a mother had changed her forever.

“I brought you presents!” Peggy said.

Jacob popped the trunk of the car open and grabbed two paper bags the size of suitcases.

“Calm down, Ma,” he said. “We got all day to get through.”

When we arrived at my dorm room, Elena was draped in my window seat, waiting. Perhaps I had not adequately telegraphed my desire to be unwatched. I made the introductions with my arms flopping like a marionette—Mom, Elena, Elena, Mom, Jacob.

“Here, here, here,” Peggy said as she unpacked the bags onto my bed.

“Anyplace I can smoke?” Jacob asked. “It was a long drive.”

I was grateful for a reason to walk back outside. Halfway down the stairs, though, I grew anxious about Peggy up in the suite with Elena. What would they talk about? Which of my secrets would they let slip to one another?

I’d never smoked a cigarette before. Being completely “substance-free” was 80 percent of my identity in high school, with the other 20 percent filled in by the Catholic Church. I leaned on the cool metal banister behind the building, showed Jacob the designated smoking area. We were alone.

This young man across from me with the five o’clock shadow and military-buzz haircut was not quite a stranger. I recognized pieces of the boy I’d known—the high round cheeks, his rat-a-tat giggle, the steel in his gaze when he concentrated. But the hairline retreating up his forehead and the broadness of his shoulders were new. I only knew the most basic facts of his life. After he left Oklahoma, my brother had been shuffled between family members in South Jersey. He’d lived with Michael until his second year of high school, but then moved in with our grandmother Hall when Michael and his new wife moved. That lasted until Jacob got caught shoplifting and Grandmother Hall kicked him out. When no one else wanted him, he was finally allowed to move in with Peggy for his last year of high school. He joined the National Guard, then the Army.

“Not a lot of smokers here, huh?” Jacob said.

“Everyone’s obsessed with looking healthy,” I replied.

My brother nodded, and leaned into his cigarette like I was leaning on the banister. It was a familiar thing to him, a piece of his world that he brought into this one. I felt shitty for wearing a pink skirt, for my flat-ironed hair, for the obvious way this place was me reaching away from him. I was still like him; we could share things.

“Gimme one,” I said, my open palm closing the distance between us.

Jacob smiled. The dimples in his cheeks popped as he pursed his lips to light a cigarette for me. He knew I wouldn’t do it properly. For a moment it was like we were in high school and he was my big brother teaching me to smoke. He’d rather I do these things with him than with strangers, he might have said. We could have been behind a school building, sandwiched between a brick wall and a dumpster, hiding our hands from the prying eyes of the campus rent-a-cops. I might have had my first sip of alcohol with him, too. Gone to my first party. He would have forbidden me from dating any of his friends.
They’re all assholes
, he would have said
.

If we were those people, that’s how it would have been.

Through our jagged veil of smoke, we watched the families on the quad; with my brother beside me they suddenly seemed absurd. Their smiles unnaturally bright, their handbags too big, comically large, their affection for one another so demonstrative that it felt staged.

“These people are a friggin’ riot,” Jacob said. “We better get back up there and rescue your roommate.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the sole of his shoe, and carefully discarded the butt in a garbage can.

Back in my room, Peggy and Elena lounged in two giant inflatable armchairs. “These were the last two in the back-to-school aisle,” Peggy said when I opened the door. “I saw the kids in Jersey snapping ’em up, and I held these back for my Mary.” She pushed herself up from the rubbery chair so eagerly that she nearly lost her balance. She hurried to show me the other gifts—microwave-safe dishes and mugs, a pair of black boots, a forest-green blanket that she’d crocheted for me, a Phillies cap.

“So you don’t forget where you came from.” Jacob giggled as he stuffed the hat on my head.

She shouldn’t have bought so much, but I couldn’t say that. Her smile wouldn’t let me. The possibility of our old intimacy was too dazzling.

“She was gonna bring more, but she didn’t know how big your room was.”

“I didn’t know what you had already,” Peggy corrected.

From the depths of one of the purple chairs, Elena giggled. It bristled the hair on the back of my neck. In Oklahoma, having an audience was what enabled Mimi and Granddad and I to behave like a family, but in this case the presence of Elena was intrusive. Jacob, Peggy, and I had just gotten the old band back together and we weren’t ready to perform for the public.

We lunched at an Italian restaurant with red-checkered tablecloths, far from campus. Peggy beamed at me from across the table and I was reminded of how I had owned her as a child, how her body was my body, her hands my hands, the ways I would boss her and she would do what I said.
Lemme play with your hair, make me potatoes with things mixed inside, don’t leave until I fall asleep.
This had not changed, somehow. If I demanded the rest of her pasta she would give it to me, if I insisted we leave this minute we would go. If I rolled my eyes at every word she said, she would fall silent. There was nothing I could do that would raise a disagreeable word from her, nothing I could ask for that she would not find a way to give me.

What drove her was not entirely love, I understood then. There was something else, too. Something I learned in Catholic school, something I saw in Granddad, as well: it was guilt. I swore into my bowl of fettuccine that I would never ask Peggy for more than she could afford to give.

We returned to campus after dark. When we got back to the suite, Elena was sitting at her desk.

“I wouldn’t be doing my duty as a big brother if I leave without teaching you somethin’,” Jacob said. “You gotta know how to handle yourself, a’ right?”

He demonstrated some martial arts moves that he’d learned in the Army.

He instructed me and Elena how to use the sharpest part of our radius bone to break free if someone grabbed us by the wrist, how to escape if someone approached from behind. “If some football player gets in your face and won’t leave you alone, stick your finger under his nose like this.” He pressed his index finger between my top lip and my nose, and immediately my head snapped back.

Elena and Peggy laughed from the side of the room. They didn’t know why Jacob was so serious about self-defense, why this was the thing he felt compelled to teach me in our day together. They didn’t see that he was one scared kid trying help another scared kid not be afraid of the things that lurked in the dark.

A FEW
days later I returned to my room after class to find a stack of messages on my desk. In my roommates’ varied handwriting they all read,
Your dad called
. When I called the house on Forty-fourth Street, though, Granddad said he hadn’t. We waded through ten minutes of small talk to reach a place where we could politely say goodbye. After we hung up, I checked my voice mail. There was a message from a Michael. Except he didn’t introduce himself as Michael, he started the message with, “Hello, Mary, it’s Daddy,” his voice buoyant and sunshiny. I hadn’t heard from him in years.

In the voice mail Michael said Peggy had told him how to reach me. He said he was sad that I hadn’t thought to invite him up for Family Weekend, too. I didn’t call him back because I didn’t know what to say. Over the course of the week, my voice mail box filled up.

I finally checked it on Friday. The oldest messages were first. They were calm and even-toned. Had my roommates given me his messages? Michael wondered. He assumed they hadn’t because I hadn’t returned any of his calls. He reiterated his phone number. Call back. Call back, he said. On the next few messages, a twinge of doubt entered his voice. He wondered if I was avoiding him. I should know that he had wanted to call all those years ago, when I was in Oklahoma, but that Granddad and Mimi wouldn’t let him. He was certain that any letters he sent were intercepted and never made it to me. I wondered if this was a crafted lie to cover the fact that he never sent any. Call back, he said.

In the messages after that, his voice grew tight and high-pitched. “People” had told him that I was upset that he didn’t send birthday presents when I was a kid, but I should know that he was unemployed for many of those years. I had no idea what “people” he meant. Possibly Peggy? Or Jacob? Perhaps his own guilt suggested this to him. Call back, he said.

In the final voice mails he was strident, righteous. Maybe I didn’t recall the Fifth Commandment,
Honor your father and mother
, he accused. He reminded me of the fact that the phone works both ways. Why hadn’t I called him all those years I was gone? Why hadn’t I sent him any presents? Had I thought of that? I should think about how selfish I am and repent.

What kept me hooked as each message bled into the next was the hope that I would hear regret in his voice. I wanted Michael to say he was sorry for losing me, for losing my sisters, for not being better, for giving up on us. The messiness of my life had to be someone’s fault. Even if all the blame didn’t land on Michael, there were still many things I could forgive him for. But was it possible to forgive someone when they never asked for it? Or does unrequested absolution become a self-inflicted wound? These questions snuck into my psyche that day, though I wasn’t ready to ask them out loud. I wasn’t ready to ask any questions that I didn’t know the answer to. I didn’t delete the messages from Michael; I didn’t want him to have the space to leave more of them.