Bastards: A Memoir (2 page)

With Daddy gone, Mom did something she hadn’t done since she’d married him. She called her father in Oklahoma. The last time my mom had seen her father was when she was seventeen years old, the morning she ran away from his house in Oklahoma City. Reaching out after seven years of silence had to show my grandfather that my mother needed serious help. Mom called collect and Granddad accepted the charges. Then he sent his wife, my mom’s stepmother, Mimi, to New Jersey to sort things out.

Mimi would say that she came because she had a more flexible schedule—Granddad worked for the Air Force, and Mimi was already retired—but she was also better suited to the task. My mom was alone with three kids under the age of three years old. The water and electric service had been shut off. Mimi was born during the Dust Bowl, and before she married my grandfather she’d raised a daughter on her own in 1950s Oklahoma. She’d seen enough low points in the human experience to be unemotional about things like cockroach trails among the mountains of dishes on the kitchen countertop, sweat-stained bedsheets, and three babies with full diapers. Mimi would tell me twenty years later that she had decided before she set foot on the plane to New Jersey that she was going to take one of us kids back to Oklahoma with her. Initially, she planned to take me. She said she’d never seen a milder baby.

Everyone in New Jersey told my mom that her third, screeching infant was her just dessert after Jacob and I had been so easy. But Mimi sensed something wasn’t right with my fussy baby sister. A trip to a pediatrician revealed that a muscle in Becky Jo’s stomach had never fully developed. Everything she swallowed would come burning back up her throat and onto whoever was holding her at the time. Mom couldn’t afford the medical care required to treat it. But Mimi and Granddad could.

So Mimi took Becky Jo back to Oklahoma. Temporarily. Until Mom could work things out with Daddy, until they could get back on their feet. I wonder if Mimi knew as she said those words—
just until you get back on your feet
—how unlikely that was to ever happen for my mom. I wonder if Mimi regretted not taking all three of us that day, or if she thought then that such a gesture would be an overcorrection, a permanent solution for a temporary situation, too devastating to our mother.

So because my daddy lost his brother, I lost a sister. There was a kind of logic to it that I never questioned.

But as soon as I was old enough to understand that I’d lost a little sister named Becky Jo, I understood that she was coming back to us someday. Mom uttered the phrase constantly
when Becky Jo comes home, when Becky Jo comes home
. When that day came I’d want to be able to catch her up on what she’d missed, to tell her the story of us, how we got split apart and how we came back together. I would collect facts, like the story of Uncle Mac, details like the aroma of hand-rolled cigarettes, sweat, and grease that announced the arrival of our father, or the way our mother’s face was so white and her hair so dark that brushing the curls from her face in the morning was like uncovering buried bones.

It was my duty as an older sister to catalog these things. With each subsequent fracturing of our family tree, I would take a further step back from myself to get a better perspective, to see the whole picture, and preserve each image so I could share it later. If I stepped back far enough, if I focused on building my memory, I could become the narrator of our story as well as a character in it. That is how I came to see us, how I came to know myself and my family; from a distance.

A great loss can drive people apart or bring them closer together. For my parents, losing Becky Jo did the latter. Daddy started coming home regularly; he was less drunk more often. He picked up his guitar again and sometimes made it all the way through “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” while Mom put Jacob and me to bed.

Six months after Becky Jo left, my mom was pregnant again. She held off telling my daddy for months. Decades later, Mom told me about the night she delivered the news.

She waited until Jacob and I were asleep. The living room was dark. Daddy was sitting in his recliner, Mom wasn’t even sure if his eyes were open. She said,
I’m pregnant.

He said,
Okay.

She said,
What do you want to do
? He didn’t answer. I can imagine how the silence and the dark room and her husband with his eyes closed would have set her on edge. She said,
I don’t want to name it if you’re not going to be around; I don’t want to keep it if you’re not going to stay
. He said,
Okay
.

She asked if he thought he would want to be around. He said he’d have to think about it.

A month after Mom told him about the pregnancy, Daddy came home with a newspaper in his hand. He pointed out a classified ad from a couple looking to adopt. He said,
I think we should meet with them
. Mom said,
Fine.

The phone number in the ad was for the other couple’s lawyer, and it was in his office that they met the potential adoptive par ents. Once Mom and Daddy were sitting across a wide walnut table from a pair of genuine adults who had college degrees, owned a house, had a lawyer, and desperately wanted a child, they seemed adolescent by comparison.

All at once, my mother knew what she wanted to do. Another world was suddenly available to this child, one with a two-car garage and a mother who wore sweater sets, a father with a good bank job. It seemed selfish to force this baby to share a one-bedroom apartment with two kids and two grown-ups, when she could have a house with a pool, a room of her own. So my mother decided she would give this baby up. But not to that first couple, not in that office that felt like it was judging her. My mother was going to do it on her own terms, on her turf. She would be the one asking the questions.

She called the lawyer the next day. She said she decided not to go with the couple they interviewed, but did he have anybody else? He said of course he did, and mom laid out her demands. She wanted to bring her kids with her this time, and the meeting would be on neutral territory. No offices or anybody’s home. A coffee shop or shopping mall; someplace where they were all strangers. My mother was eight months pregnant by then; it was getting down to the wire when she packed Jacob and me into our winter coats on a January afternoon in 1985. She wanted to see how her daughter’s potential new parents behaved around us, how they might treat a baby. If we liked these people, maybe everyone could feel good about the situation.

It was sixteen months after Becky Jo left us; I was two and half. All I knew of love was my mother’s face and the way she let me boss her.
Wiggle your feet so I know you’re awake, make me potatoes with things mixed inside. Tuck me in. Lemme pull your hair, scratch your back, wear your shoes. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Gimme some
of what you have.
I could boss my brother, too. I loved him so much it excluded other people. When I first learned to talk, all I would say was Jacob for weeks and weeks. Then I learned to say,
Jacob, turn on the cartoons, reach me the cereal, boost me up on the countertop, bring me things, sing with me, STOP singing with me. STOP looking at me. Scoot over. Gimme some of what you have.
I got whatever I wanted because I was the littlest.

That day in 1985, I remember a long drive in Daddy’s beige Oldsmobile. Mom, jittery in the front seat, kept saying,
We’re late, we’re late
, and that she hoped that
they don’t think we changed our minds
. We left our coats on inside the car because the heater didn’t work, and the wind came whistling through rusted-out holes in the sides. My daddy would flip this car a few months later. It wouldn’t be the first time he fell asleep behind the wheel.

Outside the car window, naked trees swam together. If I kicked my legs as far as I could, my feet didn’t touch the back of my daddy’s seat in front of me. My brother must have looked how he always did in winter: his black hair tangled in his eyelashes and brushing against the collar of his puffy blue coat. He had one pointed ear; mom called it his fawn’s ear. It poked out of his thatch of black hair like a pale mushroom on a forest floor.

Through the window there were birds. Lots of birds moving with a single mind like winged soldiers in formation.

Our journey ended in the parking lot of Olga’s Diner next to Route 70 in Marlton. Our breath made clouds above our heads as my mom and daddy opened the car doors to grab Jacob and me for transport from car to building.

Inside the diner, another couple waited for us at a table. The other daddy wore eyeglasses. Their faces fishbowled as they leaned in to say,
What’s your name?
to Jacob and me. I buried my head in the dark pocket between Mom’s arm and her belly. I was not afraid, just quiet. After several minutes when no one paid attention to me, I turned around to peer through the ketchup bottles and iced tea glasses to see four pairs of grown-up hands on the table, knotting and unknotting themselves. Rings and watches knocked against plastic cups, metal forks, flaky wooden tabletop. My daddy’s fingernails were ringed in black. He’d had to dig around the belly of the Oldsmobile to get her to start this afternoon, and his fingers were covered in grease. His fingers were always covered in grease.

I was sandwiched between my mom and daddy as the diner windows fogged over in the sunset. Jacob rat-holed himself under the spinny chairs at the long diner counter and Daddy had to collect him. From inside Mom’s round belly, the heartbeat of my baby sister pulsed against my ear. The other parents must have known this was a test, that, if they passed, they would win a baby as their reward, the very baby girl that was resting in my mother’s stomach just that minute.

I understood that this sister of mine was going to live somewhere else, away from us, like Becky Jo. This information did not make me think of the baby as less mine
.
She was my sister, like my brother was my brother and my mother was my mother. The adoptive parents’ claim on my developing sister did not negate mine, she was not a kingdom or a territory or a thing with a deed; she was a person. This baby girl would be both my sister and these other people’s daughter, and my mom’s daughter. There would be moments when one claim took the focus—as right now this baby girl was more Ours than Theirs, and one day she would be more Theirs than Ours, but none of those connections could completely erase the others. It would be easier, perhaps, if they could, if after she was gone we could forget this baby ever belonged to us. But that’s not how people work.

After the adults finished talking, my mom carried me through the diner and into the night air. Through the diner windows I could see the other mommy and daddy sitting in the booth. They didn’t watch us go, but I watched them. They held hands on the table. They looked smaller and smaller as Mom made her way through the parking lot. She was warm and the air was cold and it was nice to have a nest of a person to snuggle in, but before I could get too comfortable we were back in the car, whistling down the road and back to our corner of the Garden State.

Daddy moved out the next day, packed his records and boots in boxes. We didn’t see him for another month, until the day that Mom had the baby. She took a cab to the hospital alone, while a neighbor watched Jacob and me until our daddy could be fished out of whatever construction site he was on. He was still covered in sawdust and wet concrete when he picked us up.

At the hospital, he disappeared behind a set of double doors and Jacob and I were left in the white hallway. My brother was tall enough to look into a wide window above our heads.

“There are babies in there,” he told me.

A woman came from behind the desk and lifted me up. Through the window was a room full of babies in clear cribs. The lady pointed to these red-faced bundles and told me,
This is a boy, that’s a girl
. She pointed to one blue-eyed baby girl in the second row from the front.

“That’s your sister,” she said.

All the other babies’ faces were squinched tight, looking like old men, but our sister had her eyes wide open, taking in the room around her. I waved at her in case she could see us. Her hands were wrapped tight against her tiny pink body; she couldn’t wave back if she wanted to.

Our parents returned, Daddy pushing Mom in a wheelchair, and it was time to go. The lady put me back on the floor and I climbed into my mom’s lap.

“Her name is Lisa,” my mom said into my hair.

Marigold Court

A
fter baby Lisa was adopted, my mom, Jacob, and I moved to another one-bedroom apartment. This was in Marigold Court, an apartment complex in the middle of Camden County, New Jersey. Camden County was like an apple; the bad spots oozed imperceptibly into the good ones. Our town was one of the not-so-bad spots in a county whose biggest bruise was an annual contender for “Murder Capital of the World.”

Marigold Court was comprised of two brick buildings that faced one another across a cracked parking lot filled more with weeds than with cars. We were one of the 30 percent of families that the U.S. Census Bureau benevolently described as “female households with no husband present.” Everybody in Marigold Court was.

It was 1986, the era of side ponytails and acid wash. On the radio Robert Palmer crooned about being addicted to love, while the Mothers of Marigold Court coped with the phantom limbs of absent husbands, boyfriends, and married lovers, while surrounded by tiny people—like me and my brother—who couldn’t help that we were these men’s miniatures.

The Mothers didn’t have their own names, as far as I knew. They were identified by the children they were attached to: Jimmy’s-Mom, Manny-and-Monique’s-Mom, Nick-and-Andy’s-Mom, My-Mom. The Mothers had leathered tan skin, were thin enough that you could count their ribs, and had feathered hair that was short in the front and long in the back. They all wore the same outfit: in the summer, cut-off jean shorts, a striped tank top, and bare feet, and in the winter, Levi’s and layers of long-sleeved shirts that their exes left behind. Except for My-Mom.