Bastards: A Memoir (3 page)

My-Mom’s face was round and flat as a moon. Her brown hair fell in waves down to her shoulders and her wardrobe consisted exclusively of sweatpants and baggy tops. She was fair-skinned, golden-eyed, and sunburned like a newly shorn sheep if she stayed in the sun too long. She was petite, only five feet tall, but her breasts swelled with each of her pregnancies (four by 1986, but the Other Mothers didn’t know that), which made her look a bit like a puff-chested pigeon.

I believed then that all families operated with moms and kids living in one place and daddies living somewhere else in a similar communal arrangement. The presence of a firehouse up the road from Marigold Court, housing a fraternity of firefighters, strengthened my theory. The firemen, in fact, made their way to Marigold Court with more regularity than any of our fathers did; they were the ones we called when a kid got his head caught in the balcony bars or climbed so high up a tree that he got stuck. The sight of the firemen was a jolt of testosterone that was worth every second when they came around.

The female residents of the complex appreciated the firemen’s strong shoulders and finesse with a hatchet, but their admiration was less than sexual. They were relieved for the assistance of men no one had to sleep with in order to get some thing done
.
When the women did have the blessing of a fireman in their apartments, they usually asked him to reach that bowl that had been stuck behind the fridge for a year and to tighten the screws in her kids’ bunk beds.

We always called them “firemen,” but it seemed that when necessary they were paramedics, keepers of the peace, judges, priests, and notary publics. Firemen may have simply been the word the Mothers used for men they trusted to help without possible recriminations, a title for the men who ran in to help with the difficulties that had caused other men to run out. Asking for help was an act of bravery in Marigold Court. We all perched perilously on the knowledge that if the Mothers requested too much assistance from the wrong people—teachers, doctors, police officers, social workers, non-
firemen
people—us kids could be taken away. Taken away to where was never clear, but the idea of being removed from my mother was a fear that constantly pricked the back of my mind.

NONE OF
the Mothers in Marigold Court were older than thirty-five, and all of their children were younger than fifteen. Our apartments didn’t have phones, because the only people who wanted to contact the Mothers were bill collectors, former boyfriends, ex-husbands, or their parents (the ones who were still talking to them). There was no point in paying a phone bill if all your calls would be scoldings.

For emergencies, we used the pay phone at the end of the parking lot. The teenage girls milled around by that phone on the weekends wearing every belt they owned slung around their hips, fluffing their hair and smoking cigarettes while they waited for the phone to ring with an invitation to jump into some boy’s car and drive someplace where they could use their fake IDs.

Some nights after everyone had gone to bed, I heard the pay phone ringing into the darkness. It was a faint chime that echoed around the parking lot. We were all asleep, or pretending to be. Whoever was on the other end of that line was someplace far away from here, and that ring, ring, ringing in the night was a reminder that, whether or not we could see it, there was a whole other world out there. A world that we were all better off not wanting, because it seemed not to care at all about us.

We kids spent most of our days tromping the plains of the lot between the facing buildings, communicating through grunts and howls. We didn’t have many toys, but we didn’t need them; the complex and its surroundings provided plenty of playthings. There was an overgrown field behind the apartment complex. No one knew whom the field belonged to, it was fenced in, but the gate was never locked. The packed earth path down the center of the field was the best shortcut to get to Mr. Ed’s Corner Mart to stock up on Push Pops. This shortcut had been handed down from the older kids, and it was our job to tread it regularly to keep it clear for the ones who would come after us. It was the only heirloom we had, and this simple act made us part of something large, something important.

Wild grass grew on either side of the path, topping out at two feet above my head. Monique, a beautiful fourteen-year-old with braids running to the middle of her back and skin the color of diner coffee, told me that people let their dogs loose in the field after they turned mean and couldn’t be around kids anymore; it was cheaper than having the dogs put down. Monique said that there were one hundred dogs in that field; a staggering number for which I had no frame of reference until she found a jar of pennies and we counted one hundred of them onto the sidewalk. Looking at all those pennies and imagining each one was a mean, lonely dog sent a shiver down my spine.

The set of railroad tracks that ran behind the buildings was the setting for Explorers, a game in which participants searched for things to place on the rails and be flattened when the train passed through. Whoever ended up with the most interesting flattened thing was the winner. There was Target Practice, in which we threw rocks at the dumpster at the end of the lot from farther and farther distances. When we tired of these games, we played Monster, in which the kid who had medically prescribed leg braces put them on and chased us. When he kicked you in the shins, you were out. It was like tag, but with more bruises.

The ground-floor apartments had giant sliding glass doors that opened onto the lot; it was as if the place were designed specifically for the convenient simultaneous viewing of
All My Children
and the antics of us little hooligans outside. The Mothers fluttered around Nick-and-Andy’s-Mom’s linoleum table like wasps around syrup, smoking Virginia Slims and waiting for welfare checks. Their earrings fluttered against nests of hair that barely moved, cocktail rings clicked against acrylic nails in a symphony of uniquely feminine composition. They wore drugstore perfume and sipped large clinking glasses of iced tea while they helped Jessica’s-Mom paste together proofs of yellow-page ads. Jessica’s-Mom got $1.50 under the table for each completed page she turned in to the phone book guy. The Mothers materialized in the parking lot when one of us hollered loud enough. All you had to do was scream, “Mom!” at the top of your lungs and whichever Mother drew the short straw came running.

I was a head shorter than any kids my age and bruised easily, so I spent most of my time sitting on the sidelines. My favorite retreat was the cool tile confines of the bathroom in our apartment. I laid flat on my back in the enameled bathtub and sang every song I could think of and some that I made up. The voice that vibrated through the iron tub and the surrounding tile seemed to come from outside of me and bounce back again; the low-level reverberation of the tub itself had a hypnotic effect. If we could pay the water bill that month, I would draw a bath and put my ears under the water to feel the voice stirring it like a sea breeze.

MANY OF
the Mothers in Marigold Court were former foster kids, runaways, and high school dropouts; my mother was all of the above. My mother’s parents were both from middle-class Philadelphia families. Her father, Charles, was an aircraft specialist for the Air Force. Her mother, Joan, was a homemaker. My mom, the youngest of three daughters, was born while Charles was stationed at the Royal Air Force Sculthorpe base in England.

In photographs from that time in the 1960s their family is catalog-perfect. Three little girls in white dresses tucked into a green lawn, smiling mother, handsome father. But Joan didn’t like England. She wanted to go home to Philadelphia. She yearned for places she recognized, dinner with her sister, visits with her aunts. After my mother was born, Joan grew paranoid; started to see shadows everywhere she looked. Living in a city full of strangers didn’t help assuage her anxiety. After my grandparents moved back to Philadelphia, Joan refused to move again. So Charles worked subsequent posts in New York and Mississippi alone, driving back to Philadelphia on long weekends to see his family. He wasn’t exactly happy to do it, but he was willing to if it meant keeping the peace. He would have done it forever if Joan had been willing.

On the day Charles finished his assignment in Mississippi he came home to an empty house. He called around to Joan’s friends until he located his wife; she was at a bar with her mother and had left the girls with her sister. Joan was less than thrilled to be dragged out of a bar by her husband. She fumed. She told my grandfather that she didn’t love him anymore; she’d met someone else. She wanted a divorce. By the time Charles sent the papers—from his new post in Minneapolis—Joan could hardly remember asking for them. She stood in stocking feet in the front entry of their Philadelphia house and showed the fat envelop to her daughters. “He really did it,” she said, over and over, first to them, then to herself. “He really did it.”

It would be years before anyone realized that what really possessed Joan was paranoid schizophrenia. Her daughters knew something wasn’t right, but they were little girls; no one paid any attention to their stories. When her husband was away, Joan had taken to hiding her children’s shoes so they couldn’t leave the house. She didn’t send them to school, afraid that they would be turned against her. She was prone to rages. One day, at the end of a screaming argument with herself, Joan sent my mother away with the housekeeper. Just little Peggy, alone. All Joan’s mental turmoil had started when Peggy was born, so surely the girl was the source of her problems. When social workers came to investigate, Joan told them that her husband had walked out on them. That she was overwhelmed. That it would just be temporary until she could get back on her feet. So my mom was placed in a foster home one town over from her sisters and her mother. She was six years old.

For months Mom asked her foster parents to call her father, he would come for her.
His name is Charles and he’s in the Air Force
, she kept telling them, but they didn’t look. They believed what Joan told them. And because Joan always managed to procure my mother for holiday gatherings and family functions, a year passed before Charles discovered that his daughter had become a ward of the state. By the time he found out, all the official paperwork said he had abandoned his family. Once it was part of the public record, how could he argue?

Peggy remained in foster care until she was twelve years old, when Social Services asked her were she wanted to live. She said,
I want to live with my dad.
Charles was remarried by then—to Mimi—and living in Oklahoma City. That reunification experiment lasted five years, in which time my mother failed out of ninth grade three times and then hopped a Greyhound bus back to New Jersey when she was seventeen years old. She ended up back in foster care when Joan called her a traitor and turned her away. That was when she met my daddy, Michael, in the summer of 1978, at a Christian summer camp. She was a camper, and he was a counselor. They prayed together around a campfire one night and were engaged three months later.

MY MOM
, Jacob, and I had been living in Marigold Court for almost a year when I got the mumps and had to be quarantined. Mumps spread quickly in a group of kids, so I was sent away with Daddy.

“You can take care of her for one week,” Mom told him when he knocked on our front door.

Daddy drove me to his mother’s house and left me there. I lay on the gold brocade couch in my grandmother Hall’s living room for three days. That is where I was when my mom met with the woman who would become my next little sister’s mother.

Mom had become expert at hiding her pregnancies by now. She draped one of Daddy’s old work shirts over her shoulders, and it hung straight down from her chest like a tent. She let people assume she was overweight; it was less embarrassing for people to think she was fat than to tell them she was still sleeping with her deadbeat husband. I didn’t know she was pregnant until we went to the hospital again.

It was another girl, my third little sister. My mom named her Barbara, but the adoptive parents changed it to Rebekah. Never mind that we already had a Rebecca.

Once again, Daddy in his work boots wheeled Mom down the white hospital hallway while Jacob and I peered over the ledge of the nursery window looking for the clear crib with our name on it. No one picked me up to point out my sister this time, so I couldn’t see her face. All I got was an eyeful of pink blanket pressed against the side of a crib that read H
ALL
. In so many ways this new Rebekah was a repeat. A reprise. A variation on a theme; a record skipping.

When we added her to the litany of names at the end of our bedtime prayers, Jacob and I called her Rebekah Two.

Scars

I
n spring, a year after Rebekah Two’s adoption, I was five years old. Jacob and I should have been in school but we overslept, so Mom brought us to the doctor’s office with her.

The waiting room was warm and bright, full of round ladies and chairs big enough to accommodate them. A nurse called Mom’s name and the three of us scurried through a door and down a hallway. Mom couldn’t leave us in the waiting room because when we got bored Jacob and I started crawling under chairs and bothering people.

A nurse guided us into a cold room with a TV screen and Jacob and I sat in the one chair on the side while Mom stepped onto a table. She was as big as she had ever been.

The doctor dimmed the lights and said, “Let’s see it,” to my mom, who lay back on the table and lifted her baggy shirt above her waist. The doctor squeezed slime on the mound of my mom’s belly. I sat up straight in the chair.

“It’s okay, Meems.” Meems was what she called me sometimes. “It’s okay, he’s not hurting Mommy,” she assured me as the doctor smirked at me and rolled a stick with what looked like an eyeball on the end around in the slimy stuff.

The TV screen went black and then black-and-white. It was a cloud formation, a map of the ocean floor. I cocked my head to see. Jacob pinched me as my hair tickled his face.