Bastards: A Memoir (23 page)

On my return flight to Oklahoma, I nursed an angry hurt that Becca hadn’t made it to this reunion. If she knew anything well, it was how to handle a hard time coming down from a bad trip.

OKLAHOMA CITY
was exactly as I had left it. Mimi still bruised like a peach and Granddad still sang “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” in the morning. After this reunion, though, I couldn’t sleep. I’d pass out for an hour a night, but never more.

During those long, sleepless hours I stalked Rebekah’s blog. The things she wrote were so intense that I wanted both to look away and wallow in them. I wished she had someone to talk to, someone who might advise her that someday she might regret writing these things for strangers to see. But on the other hand, I loved that it allowed me to look into her mind. Rebekah wrote that since she’d experienced “what a true family felt like,” she’d grown angry over the things that were missing from her extended adoptive family. Her father’s relatives had never really accepted her as a full-blooded family member. To them Rebekah always had an asterisk. She was their Adopted* granddaughter, Adopted* niece.

Rebekah wrote that she felt like a tapestry of qualities that she inherited from her biological family and her adoptive family; she was terrified of being too much of either of them. She didn’t want to be anxious to the point of paralysis like her adoptive father, nor dreamy to the point of failure like her birth father, Michael (whom she’d met on a subsequent solo trip). She’d always felt a void in her life, she said, and after meeting us she knew what it was: it was us. She sensed a kinship with me and Jacob and Lisa, but because of her father’s ailments she felt obligated to remain quiet to avoid upsetting him. She wrote that she didn’t know what she was supposed to feel or what she was allowed to feel; she wasn’t sure she was entitled to feel anything.

Hardest to read of all of it were the stories she told about her father. Rebekah blamed herself for his anxiety. She said, now, that she walked on eggshells in social situations because growing up with her father had ingrained the habit. Seeing those words broke my heart afresh. The thoughts Rebekah recorded on her blog were echoes of the ones I had recorded in the canvas journals locked in my childhood closet. We had the same voice, the same thoughts, the same way of feeling guilty for everything that happened to us. I was relieved to find a spiritual kinship in this sister, but my gut thumped with the knowledge that I had developed all of the characteristics we shared as a result of trauma, which meant she had, too.

That wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. Wasn’t there an implied deal in adoption; that the adoptive parents would take better care of a child than her biological family could? Rebekah was supposed to be stronger, more confident, smarter, better adjusted, more graceful, charming, and educated than I was, wasn’t she?

The only things I remember Peggy asking for was that my sisters’ new parents promise to send the girls to college and that they allow the girls to search for us. Those were the only unbending demands she’d made. Where they had once seemed hopeful, they now seemed tragically naïve.

After our reunion, Rebekah called me every couple of weeks. In January, she confided that she’d argued with her father about her plans to see Peggy and Jacob when she was home from school over the holidays. Her father told Rebekah that as long as she was living in his house she could never see “those people” again. He didn’t see what Rebekah was so upset about; it wasn’t like we were her real family anyway.

Those words hit me like a truck:
real family
. They brought me back to a day when I was a kid and I had asked Peggy what the word
bastard
meant. She told me it meant “illegitimate, like not real.” It had seemed like a toothless insult. But now I understood where the word had bite: If you are not real, you can be dismissed, erased, forgotten. It means that you don’t matter.

Rebekah fought with her father through Christmas. She spent Christmas Eve by herself in her childhood bedroom, watching reruns of
Friends.
Then she drove herself to a parking lot and cried for an hour, listening to that stupid banana song on repeat.

Join the Club

P
eggy met my third lost sister, Meghan, in the clearance aisle of the department store where she worked. It was August, three months after we’d reunited with Rebekah. Peggy was pacing the store with a sticker gun in her hand when Meghan appeared with her mother. They lived in the same town and Peggy frequently saw them at the store, usually with Meghan’s little sister and the last of our lost siblings, Lesley, in tow.

Meghan and Lesley were the last of our set of seven, born two years apart. Like Becca and me, they were adopted by the same parents and grew up together. But in all the years that they shopped at that southern New Jersey store they didn’t know that the woman in the red polo shirt was their birth mother. She was some lady their mother chatted with on the way to the toy aisles. They probably never noted Peggy’s features to the point that they could pick her out of a lineup.

On this particular August afternoon, it was just Meghan and her mom. It was the end of summer, when the patio furniture displays faded into back-to-school season. The shelves overflowed with notebooks and extra-long sheet sets. The ends of the aisles were claimed by die-cut pencils shouting, A+ P
RICES
and S
CHOOL
C
OOL
!

From the edge of the main thoroughfare Meghan’s mother waved to Peggy as she had many times over the years. Peggy approached with the standard manual-issue verbiage: “Can I help you find something?” But rather than asking about ChapStick or lunch boxes, the other mother said, “Well, Meghan, here she is. This is your biological mother.”

The truth fell between them like a freshly shot bird dropping from the sky. Peggy had four more hours in her shift. I imagine the fluorescent light made her skin green and her red work shirt brought out the rosacea in her cheeks in a way that she hated. She had to rest her sticker gun against her hip to shake Meghan’s hand.

“She has my phone number. She knows where I live,” Peggy told me on the phone later that night. “Why would she do it that way?”

We told one another that we didn’t understand it, that we couldn’t wrap our minds around the strange woman’s behavior. But I suspected that she was afraid of us, like Rebekah’s father had been. That she wanted to diminish Peggy and look superior by comparison. I couldn’t say it out loud. If Peggy was thinking the same thing, I didn’t want to reinforce it.

I FLEW
to New Jersey the week before Christmas for the proper reunion. Winter weather in the Midwest kept me grounded in Oklahoma City until after dark.

When I finally walked into the baggage claim at Newark Airport after midnight, I was greeted with a
whoop
. Jacob, Becca, Lisa, Rebekah, and Meghan bounced against one another. No one was in a holiday mood but the six of us; the slog of winter travel delays and lost baggage made the other travelers silent background extras in our scene. This was our airport, our stage, our story.

I’d never thought that Becca and I looked alike. Not even related. My features came from our grandmothers. Becca took after Granddad and Peggy. We looked as different as two siblings could. Meghan, however, had my nose and mouth, with Becca’s cheeks and chin. She was the missing link between us. She had Jacob’s chocolate-brown eyes, long brown hair like me and Little Rebekah, with Becca’s high, round cheeks. She had Lisa’s social ease and popular girl manner.

Jacob grabbed my luggage. He’d finished his assignment in Germany and was enjoying a month stateside before his first tour in Afghanistan. He’d married an American girl, a Texan named Katy, whom he’d met on post. They’d had a small ceremony in Germany and honeymooned in Italy. It was a rushed affair with no time for invitations. Jacob had called Peggy to tell her the news the day before the wedding and I found about it secondhand. Jacob and Katy planned to have a “real wedding” stateside after Jacob came back from his tour in Afghanistan.

“The wife is back at Ma’s, sleeping. You’ll meet her tomorrow,” my brother told me through a sloppy grin. Katy was five months pregnant and needed her rest. It was surreal to think that Jacob was going to be a father in mere months. We hadn’t even met all the sisters yet, our set was not yet complete, and already my brother was starting his own family.

I draped my arm over Meghan’s shoulder and she wrapped her arm around my waist as we walked to the car. Maybe because she’d had a day of getting to know everyone already, or maybe because I was accustomed to these reunions by now, Meghan seemed immediately familiar.

“Mary gets shotgun, and I don’t wanna hear any whining,” Jacob barked when we reached the parking garage.

There weren’t enough seat belts for everyone in the backseat. Rebekah sat on Becca’s lap. We were unaccustomed to planning for a number of us. Jacob had to turn on the air-conditioning because the heat of our bodies and breath fogged the windows to the point that he couldn’t see in any direction. As he pulled onto the highway it started to snow.

“I gotta apologize for my mom,” Meghan said. She spoke with a slight lisp; it gave her a charming underdog quality.

I looked over to Jacob in the front seat. I wasn’t going to pick up that live wire. Neither was he.

“That was unbelievably bitchy,” Lisa said.

We drove into a tunnel of snow.

“Mary, you should have been here last night,” Becca said. Lisa, Rebekah, and Meghan groaned their agreement.

“I thought we weren’t gonna tell her about that!” Jacob giggled. “I’m never trusting you punks with anything.”

My siblings talked in a hurry to catch me up. Their voices teased and gamboled and leapt; they piled on top of one another in one breathless mountain.

They’d spent the night before in Peggy and Tom’s kitchen

Playing this drinking game,

“With cards”

A circle of death

“No, King’s Cup, we call it King’s Cup”

“It’s the same thing”

ANYWAY

They played this game and

“Lisa made this rule that no one could remember”

Because they had been drinking

And then they drank more

“So much”

And “Re-bekah threw UP in the bathroom”

And “Becca passed OUT”

And “Jacob dropped her head on the hardwood floor when he tried to lift her onto the sofa in the living room”

“It
bounced
”

And the other sisters gasped

And he said

“IT’S A PROCESS”

Their howls of laughter escaped through the seams of the car, into the night air.

Everyone woke up this morning with matching hangovers.

“It’s a good thing your flight was delayed,” Jacob said. “We were all still drunk until an hour ago.”

At our last reunion I had accepted a nip of booze as an elixir that was an integral part of the developing relationship with my sisters; it eased our jitters, gave us something to do with our hands. But it was easy to overdo it. Maybe in the future it would be better if we all took up knitting.

“If you’d been here you would have kept us in line,” Becca said, as if she could read my mind.

“I don’t know about that . . . ” I demurred; I didn’t want a reputation as a killjoy.

“You know you would’ve,” Jacob said. “It’s what you do. Mother Mary.”

It was after one in the morning when we reached the apart ment. Peggy and Tom and Jacob’s new wife were asleep. So we went to a twenty-four-hour diner, where six cups of coffee would pay the rent on a corner booth for a few hours.

Diners always reminded me of the days I lost my sisters. The smell of coffee burning on a hot plate and peanut oil bubbling in a fryer brought me back to those days with Peggy, those ominous lunches. The suck of vinyl booths sticking to the back of my legs and the feel of bumpy gum topography beneath the linoleum tabletops were an inextricable part of my family mythology.

This diner was sparsely populated. The real holiday was days away. We ordered our coffees and an assortment of fried things—onion rings mixed with french fries and chicken fingers. After the delay and the flight and the drive I was ravenous.

“Lesley doesn’t know that you guys exist yet,” Meghan said. She took a deep breath. “I’m not allowed to tell her. Mom doesn’t want to upset her. She’s acting out a lot and being . . . unstable.”

“Mary grew up with someone like that,” Becca said, raising a self-referential eyebrow.

Since the last time I saw Becca, she’d met someone: a good Catholic girl whom she had followed to Minneapolis. My sister came out to me just before her move. In some ways it made perfect sense: No wonder she had raged against her life as a teenager, no wonder she felt out of place. No wonder she struggled more than I did in her adolescence. Becca was more clear-eyed than she had been in years. She’d gained ten pounds, filled in the hollows around her eyes and cheekbones. Tonight, Becca was the healthiest I’d seen her in years.

“I didn’t know what adoption meant until I found my hospital bracelet in my parents’ closet,” Meghan continued. “It had Peggy’s name on it and I asked my mom if that was what my name was supposed to be.”

Lisa shook her head and braced herself against the table. “I’m sorry, that’s just fucked. I mean . . . how could your parents lie your whole life?”

“I was eight or nine; it wasn’t my whole life. And it wasn’t totally a lie,” Meghan said. She leaned back in the booth, digging for deeper memories. “My mom mentioned the word adoption when I was younger. I was five, I think. We were talking about where babies come from. I could tell she didn’t like talking about it. She kept saying we’d talk about it when I was older. The day that I found the bracelet was the day I realized what the word adoption
meant
, you know?”

Rebekah nodded from the corner of the booth. “It had to be horrible to find out that way, though,” she said.

With each subsequent reunion Rebekah had come out of her shell more. She had an incredible ear for indie bands that none of us had heard of; she’d begun deejaying at her college radio station. She sporadically mailed me mix CDs. When she turned her head to look at Meghan, I saw a dainty stud embedded in her left nostril. That was new.