Bastards: A Memoir (19 page)

In the minivan, we were a world unto ourselves. Wind shot through the van doors and it seemed that it had to reach into our pockets because we had too much energy that needed to be cooled somehow to keep us from spontaneously combusting. We were rosy from cold, rosy from warmth, like pomegranates, like summer peaches, like something I could sink my teeth into. The car windows fogged over. We were the stars and the clouds and the icy roads and the thud of bass and the
chikka-chikka-chikka
of the tire treads on the pavement. Nothing else that had happened before existed and nothing that would happen in the future mattered.

Until we reached Michael’s house. I didn’t want to get out of the car; I knew the spell would be broken once we did. But it was inevitable. We walked to the front door and Jacob knocked. Nobody answered, so he opened the door and stuck his head in.

“Pop?” he yelled through the house.

My sisters and I stepped over the threshold. We were in the living room, I guessed. The only furniture was a sagging sofa shoved against the wall and a few guitars in the left corner. I noticed a photo on the wall of Rebecca and me at our first Communion. Peggy must have given this to him; there was no way Mimi and Granddad would have sent Michael anything. It must have been hung for our benefit, or moved from another room, because dust settled on the wall in a way that suggested something larger and oval-shaped usually hung in this spot. It was exactly the sort of fumbled gesture I expected from Michael. I wanted to like it, wanted to let it land on me the way he intended, but I couldn’t help scanning the room for whatever thing usually hung there.

Michael materialized from a doorway at the back corner of the room.

“Hey, sport!” he hummed, a fresh beer in his hand.

I recognized him from his movements: the sure-footed tromp, his wide-footed stance, the smirk through his beard. But his look had changed entirely; I wouldn’t have known him if we sat beside each other on a bus. Michael’s hair and beard were all silver. He had grown a potbelly. But it was his eyes that had changed the most. They didn’t appear to focus on anything, at least not anything I could see. Had he always looked like he was peering into another world? Was I too young to notice this when I was a child, or was this new?

He came forward to hug me. I hugged him back so I wouldn’t be weird, but all I could think was that I shouldn’t have come here. I still had a handful of sepia-toned memories of Michael. Nights when he sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” until I fell asleep, the way he played “Monster Mash” for me whenever I accompanied him to deejay gigs, regardless of the season or the occasion. I remembered riding on his shoulders with my fingers twined into his scratchy beard. Seeing him now in this ramshackle house with his funny eyes and the wind blowing through a million cracks, I was sad. He was a stranger. I preferred to hold on to the handful of nice memories about him than to get to know this new, strange man.

A broad man with dirty blond hair followed Michael into the living room. “I go to church with your pop,” was the only introduction he gave. He shuffled over to a corner of the room and sucked on a beer. He was here to watch, like we were a circus sideshow.

I sat on the sofa and Jacob joined me. Michael held Lisa out at arm’s length, took in her features. “I remember the day you were born,” he marveled. His eyes sparkled at her like they did when he used to talk about Jesus. His charisma pulled her toward him like a bug to a zapper. “Let me play you something,” he said, grabbing one of the guitars in the corner. Michael sat cross-legged on the floor, the guitar in his lap. He waggled his feet so the steel toes of his boots hitting the wood floor provided percussion. It was a song he had written, about Jesus and being moved by the spirit, being given the gift of salvation. He closed his eyes, and when he reached for a high note his top lip jumped up to reveal his teeth. When the song was finished, his blond friend applauded from the corner.

“That’s where we get it from!” Lisa said earnestly. “That was so cool.”

“You think
that’s
cool?” the blond guy said, like we were all suddenly buddies. “You wanna see cool, for real? Check out this hole in my head.”

“What?” I said, in as nonpanicky a voice as I could manage.

“Got hit in the head with a hammer a few years back. Check it out.”

“We have to get Lisa back to her parents . . .” I demurred.

“I’ll touch it,” Becca said.

I could have strangled her.

“A’ right! You wanna get your finger riiiight there,” the man coached as he offered the back of his head to Becca. He flipped his greasy locks to one side and revealed a large divot in his skull. “It’s deeper than it looks. Get in there.”

“Woah. That is deep,” Becca said. Her eyes widened with shock.

After we left Michael and his friend, we picked Peggy up at her apartment. We had to take Lisa back to her parents. We would meet them at the halfway point between Pine Beach and Haddonfield.

I sat in the backseat, with Lisa between Becca and me. When it was no longer simply our sibling group, the euphoria of being a world, alone, was lost. Doubt crept into my mind. Would this be the last we saw of Lisa, or would she keep in touch? Were we a surreal dream that she would rather forget?

Then the neon sign of our destination grew larger in the window frame of the windshield.

We were at Olga’s Diner. The same place where, in 1985, we first met Lisa’s parents. I hung back with Peggy as we walked in. It felt like we were going back in time. Lisa’s parents were already there, sitting on the same side of a large booth. Lisa slid beside her parents, leaving the other side for us.

Sixteen years later, there was no disappointing husband, there were no children wandering under tables. The green vinyl booths were dumb witnesses to the closing of a genetic wormhole. Echoes of that other day panged across Peggy’s face. Fragments of millions of thoughts were begun and discarded. She said only, “It was this booth. You sat over there.” We sipped our coffee cups dry.

It had been a long day and Lisa had to get home. I shook hands with her parents. It felt strangely businesslike. But a hug would have been too familiar, wrong in a different way. Jacob, Becca, and I hugged Lisa. As I pulled away from my sister, her face was red and blotched. This was her first big goodbye. She was carving a spot inside herself now, I knew. A spot that, from this moment forward, would always feel half empty. We walked toward two separate vehicles headed in opposite directions.

Lisa sobbed in the parking lot. Like a character in a soap opera, she wallowed in it. I marveled at her lack of self-consciousness. Diner patrons watched her through the windows, wondering who had broken this pretty girl’s heart. For that moment, we were merely props in Lisa’s world. I felt myself slip out of our shared bubble and into my own, smaller one; out of focus and then back in again.

In the backseat of our car Becca cried and I put my head on her shoulder. Jacob’s face was red in the rearview mirror but he didn’t have any tears. Over the years since I’d lost my brother I had lost the ability to cry in front of other people, but every bone in my body pulsed with a dull ache like a giant fist had flattened me.

If everything went according to plan, this would happen three more times.

This was the best-case scenario. An instant connection, a day-long binge on genealogy, followed by a separation that tears a hole so deep in your psychic fabric that someday you’ll encourage your friends’ long-lost kids stick their fingers in it.

I returned to my single dorm room early Saturday morning. The building echoed with emptiness; most students wouldn’t arrive back on campus until late the next day. They’d savor every moment they could with their families.

I was glad for the solitude so I could brace myself for my daily life, but then I sat down at my desk and saw a fresh email from Michael. He said he didn’t think I cared to hear from him, so he’d keep the message short. In a page and half of ten-point type he told me that the reason he hadn’t kept in touch throughout my childhood was because I had never done anything to make him feel that I cared about him. “People” had told him that I was “bitter” because he had never sent presents for holidays and birthdays. I couldn’t imagine what people he meant, since only Peggy and Jacob knew us both, and I couldn’t picture these words coming from either one of them.

But if I wanted to hate him for the lack of gifts, that was my choice. It seemed a little “twisted around” in his opinion, though. I had never sent him any presents, either. He doubted that I even knew his birthday. He said he knew that I was planning to visit Peggy over Christmas break and if I was worried that he was mad about it, I should know that he definitely was not. This letter was simply to provide closure in his life, he said. He said he would always pray for me, but that as far as my being his daughter? Well, “that was destroyed long ago.” Then he signed it “regards, Dad.”

The message left me utterly cold. I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t sad in the way he clearly wanted me to be. It was a retread of his voicemail vitriol from the year before. He was wrong about some timelines and wrong about my Christmas plans, but he was right about a few things. I didn’t know his birthday. I didn’t even know his middle name. And as for me being his daughter . . . I couldn’t have said it better myself; that was destroyed long ago. It was a repeat of all his accusations from the year before. More than anything I was simply bored with retreading the same territory. He couldn’t stop himself from signing the missive with the surreal “Dad.” Out of habit, I guessed. I didn’t know how to address him—Michael? Dad?—so I skipped a title of any kind and wrote what I felt was true.

I do not bear you any ill will, anger, or bitterness. Our paths in life split a very long time ago, and today, I simply do not know you, nor do you know me. I think if we are honest, we would agree on that. It has nothing to do with presents, birthdays, or phone calls. I do not recall your birthday because I never remember celebrating it with you. You found a place in a family that needed you, and so did I. And now we both have very full lives and seem to be taking care of ourselves just fine.

I don’t wish to keep revisiting this issue every few years, and think it would be best if you let it go, as I have.

Thank you for the good wishes; I wish nothing but good things for you and your family as well.

Mary

I read it several times before I sent it and was stunned by the seeming maturity of the language. It came more from exhaustion than from anything else. The part about my finding a place in a family that needed me overstated my situation with Mimi and Granddad, I felt, but in my final message to my ex-father I felt a need to convince him that I was at least as well loved as he was.

When I woke up in my dorm room the next morning, my throat was coiled tight. I coughed streaks of blood into my hand before breakfast. I was at the intake desk of Student Health Services before I realized that my throat was too rigid to talk. Words came out as an insubstantial whistle of air.

The doctor diagnosed my ailment as “laryngitis caused by gastro-esophageal reflux.” He gave me pills and told me to avoid coffee and spicy food. I walked back up the hill to my dorm room, bottles of ibuprofen and antacids jostling in my pockets. Joshua arrived in my room that evening armed with both soup and ice cream, saying he’d eat whichever one I didn’t want.

In that moment, silence was my friend once again. When Joshua asked what I did over Thanksgiving break, I didn’t have to say,
My ex-father broke up with me
, or
I was in a world of icy roads and fogged windows
. Through finals week I remained mute. My doctor scoped my throat; my vocal cords were too swollen and inflamed to operate properly. He wrote me a note so my professors wouldn’t think I was faking and prescribed a stricter diet of bread, bananas, rice, toast—things even babies can eat.

In the final weeks of the fall semester, I found myself mentally blanking out in the middle of conversations. Friends joked that I was becoming scatterbrained. Sad movies—sometimes even sad commercials—could send me into an earnest depression for the rest of the day, like I was a delicate character from a Louisa May Alcott novel. All of these qualities led Joshua and my friends to grander demonstrations of affection. They made a point to invite me on shopping trips to Syracuse, to parties and art history lectures. Fellow resident advisors dropped by my room on their nightly rounds. Everyone thought I was depressed because I couldn’t sing, or that I was experiencing a particularly violent bout of homesickness. Both were somewhat true, I supposed.

Good Daughter

I
graduated from college with a degree in English and a minor in political science, broke up with Joshua, and I headed back to the house on Forty-fourth Street to plan my next move. By that point I was leading what felt like a triple life. I was Mary the successful student, Mary the oldest sister in a growing brood of the lost and found, and—as some of the parishioners at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church referred to me when I visited on holidays—I was Mary, Charles and Mimi King’s “good daughter.”

The “good daughter” always made me cringe a little, for what it insinuated about Becca. It couldn’t be a compliment to me without being an insult to her. But I mostly hated the moniker because it came with so much responsibility and, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure it was true. I’d left them behind when I went off to college. Becca was the one who stayed in state. She was the daughter they saw more than once a year.

As I negotiated my suitcase through the screen door and onto the porch, I adjusted my purse strap more firmly on my shoulder. I had a letter in there, a job offer, from a company that wanted me to teach English for them in Japan. All I had to do was sign the thing and mail it back. Four years ago I had wished for precisely this prize—a good-paying job that made me sound interesting. I hadn’t told anyone about it yet. I just had to get through this summer with a little money in my pocket. Then I’d be halfway around the world saying,
Konnichiwa
, and eating real sushi for the first time.