Bastards: A Memoir (4 page)

“You’re squashing me,” he hissed.

I hopped out of the chair and onto the floor.

“There she is,” the doctor said to my mom. “You want to see your little sister?” he said to me.

I nodded, and scooted up by my mom’s head. She held my hand.

“Can you see it?” she asked me.

The doctor pointed to things on the screen. “This is her arm, she’s on her side, see her nose there?”

The fuzz snapped into focus. I saw it. Saw her. That dark spot fluttering in the middle of the screen was her heart beating. I saw her.

The doctor said everything looked good. He printed out a sheet of pictures of the baby and put it in a thick envelope for Mom. Then we trotted out to catch the bus.

“We’re meeting my friend for lunch,” Mom said.

“Is Daddy going to be there?” Jacob asked, tucking his Tenderheart Care Bear in the corner of the seat so its plastic eyes could look out the window. My brother had taken to asking this question whenever we traveled anywhere.

“No,” Mom said, “Daddy won’t be there.”

When we stepped off the bus, Jacob was in a deep sulk. He cried that he was
not hungry
and wanted to go
hooome
. Mom told him it wouldn’t be long and he would get to eat french fries. The bus pulled away from the curb, its warm breath puffing against our ankles. We were two steps away from the bus stop when my brother gasped.

“My beaaaaar!” Jacob screamed. “We have to go back!”

Jacob looked down the street where the bus had lumbered away. We would never be able to catch it. I curled my hands into fists and rubbed my cheeks.

Mom knelt down on the sidewalk to be eye level with my brother. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes were soft with sincerity. She didn’t try to make it better by offering a crappy grown-up assessment that it was just a bear and he could get another one. We couldn’t always afford dinner; there certainly wasn’t extra money lying around for new bears. Anyway, my brother didn’t want a new bear; he wanted his bear.

Jacob’s fawn’s ear burned bright red as we walked up the street. He scuffed his feet along the sidewalk and twisted away from Mom and me. With the loss of the bear, the day had taken a turn. I was not hungry, either.

We walked half a block to a diner. Inside, a blond woman waved to us from a booth. Mom slid the photos from the doctor’s office across the table to the woman. Her friend talked about getting ready for the Baby. When was the Baby due, what had the doctor said about the Baby?

I was hot and there were too many french fries on my plate. I hadn’t noticed my mom’s belly before, and now it felt like a lie somehow, that big belly hiding for so long under her baggy shirts. I was bored and tired of all the fuss and if I heard “the Baby” one more time I was going to dump my french fries all over the table.

We could never keep these little sisters, I had come to understand, because other people had more of everything. This blond woman owned a house in town and two on the shore. We didn’t have enough room, enough clothes, enough food or laps to sit on or hands to hold.

The blond woman said they were thinking of names for the baby, Mark or Meghan or—

“It’s a
girl
,” I said into my plate of fries.

My mom and the other woman looked at me.

The woman smiled a warm smile that separated her from us.

A few minutes later, we were headed home on the bus. My brother walked the whole aisle and looked in every seat, but there was no Tenderheart Care Bear.

We stopped at the grocery store. I sat in the seat in the front of the grocery cart and Jacob spread out in the roomy bottom section. I worried over the picture of my little sister from the doctor’s office, rolled it around in my mind with Becky Jo and Lisa and Rebekah Two while Mom examined the milk labels.

A grandmotherly woman brushed by our cart and waved at me.

“I have four baby sisters,” I said to her.

“Isn’t that nice,” she said to me as she unfolded her grocery list.

“They don’t live with us,” I said.

The woman looked up from her list and over her shoulder, suddenly wondering who I belonged to. My mom put the milk in the cart with my brother.

“My Mary has a vivid imagination,” my mom said as she pushed our cart around the corner.

On the short walk from the store to our apartment, my mom told me that we shouldn’t tell anyone else about the baby girls.

“Why?” Jacob looked at the sidewalk in front of him.

“Other people don’t . . . think like we do sometimes. They might not understand. If you want to talk about the baby girls, you can talk to me. But it’s better if we don’t talk to other people about them.”

“Even Daddy?” Jacob said

Mom was quiet for a moment.

“Daddy is okay. You can talk to Daddy, too.”

It was the first secret I had ever had; it felt luxurious to own something so important, but it also made me nervous. As soon as I had it in my possession, that secret tugged at me to be told.

I CAME
close one early summer morning. Monique of the beautiful braids and coffee skin was coaching me how to walk like a TV lady. I was barefoot, wearing three of Monique’s belts, and swishing through the overgrown grass in front of my apartment on the balls of my feet. I imagined that I was wearing high heels while Monique demonstrated a slithering sway step on the pavement. In her white denim jacket and bright miniskirt, she looked like a model on a catwalk. I’d managed a lower-back swivel dramatic enough to keep Monique’s belts on my nonexistent hips (rather than slipping down my legs in a pile of vinyl like they had the first twenty-seven laps) and I sashayed right over a piece of broken window nestled like a land mine in the unmowed grass. My leg kicked up reflexively as pain shot up to my thigh. The glass was curved like a fishhook, cutting a jagged tear into the arch of my right foot. I hopped on my undamaged leg over to the curb to keep the glass from driving deeper into my flesh while Monique ran to dial the firemen.

As I sat alone on the curb, a thought overtook me as swiftly as the glass had cut into my flesh: A sister would be a nice thing to have in a time like this. A little sister might have been practicing a TV walk with me, might hold my hand when Monique left to dial the firemen, could marvel with me at how the glass in my foot caught the sunlight like a diamond.

The firemen arrived without sirens. The tall one located my mother while the freckled one bandaged my foot. Monique was beside me when the fireman said, “You’re gonna have a nice scar, kid.”

Monique sat close and said, “A scar! I got one, too.” And she peeled up the sleeve of her white denim jacket to show me a dark raised spot on the inside of her left arm where her daddy had put out a cigarette when she was seven years old. And there it was: a pocket in the conversation that was the perfect size for my secret. It would have been easy. But suppose I told her and she looked at me like the lady had looked at my mom in the grocery store that day—startled, confused, fearful, judging? How would I feel then? Or suppose my mom found out that I told and was mad at me? I couldn’t risk it.

The secret would build up a retaining wall against me and other people, cutting short the bonding moment that needed to happen in a friendship. No matter how close I got to people, I always held it back. But I would always know it was there, like the scar I now had on the sole of my right foot.

A few months later my next little sister was born. The name on the crib read H
ALL
, but not for long, not forever.

Her adoptive mother named her Meghan, just like she said she would.

The Secondhand Washing Machine

T
he autumn when I began first grade, Daddy started making regular, daytime appearances in Marigold Court. I didn’t know then—but would understand later—that my father had been paying late-night visits to our mother for a while, sleeping on the sofa in the living room while Jacob and I slumbered in the bedroom. Hence my long-lost sisters.

Daddy had replaced the beige Oldsmobile with a royal blue Ford Pinto whose rumbling purr could be heard half a block away. When we heard the car sputter into the parking lot in front of our apartment, Jacob and I ran for our coats and shoes because days with Daddy were full of adventures. He never made special plans when he took charge of us. He was going to treat us like grown-ups, he said. So he took Jacob and me on whatever activity he had previously arranged for himself. Jacob and I would dig around the backseat of the Pinto, piecing together two full seat belts if we could, and Daddy would tell us about Jesus, the Son of God, who was a carpenter just like him, as we drove through town delivering cash to the guys on Daddy’s construction team. When he was invited to Christian ladies’ houses to talk about the Bible, Jacob and I sat at his feet, listening to them argue about whether the devil had one goat foot and one chicken foot or two hoofed feet. That I had nightmares about a chicken-footed devil watching me sleep for months afterward was a small price to pay for my introduction into such a magical new world.

The best nights were when Daddy had a deejay job. Those times I would wear a dress and dance behind the deejay booth while older people in nice shoes bribed me with sugary drinks to bring their song requests back to my daddy and heckle him until he played them.
Daddy, play “Hot Hot Hot”!
I would say, bouncing from one socked foot to the other, my face slick with sweat.
Play Madonna, play Michael Jackson, play “La Bamba.”
My hair would spring loose from my ponytail and curl around my face like whiskers.

Most often, though, he took us to jam sessions. These were always held in a house on the edge of town with no neighbors close enough to complain about noise. Light burned through cracks around the window frames and into the night. Daddy pulled his guitar from the trunk of the Pinto and we walked without knocking straight into the living room, where a rotating cast of six to ten other men gathered around instruments of various shapes and sizes. Guitars, bongo drums, fiddles, mandolins; the only instrument that never made an appearance was a piano. Someone pulled out a pitch pipe and blew a clean E4 and the living room filled with the wandering hum of fiddles and guitars trying to match that pitch. When the unique voices of each instrument met one another on the same note, the satisfaction filled my belly with a warm belief in the goodness of the world.

Soon the men lit musky-sweet-smelling pipes and sent us kids down to the basement. But I usually sat at the top of the stairs to listen. The other men in the room worried over their instru ments with pencils behind their ears, stopping every few minutes to curse and scribble notes. But my daddy played his guitar like most people hold a fork; it was an extension of his arm and did whatever he willed it to. His silky baritone voice blended with whatever anyone was singing, but was strong and clear when the other men forgot the lyrics and he had to forge ahead alone. Leaning off the edge of a sofa, tapping his feet on the floor, and singing sad songs about dry levees, my daddy was lit up from the inside. Everyone within arm’s reach wanted to bask in the glow he gave off.

After a couple of hours, the other men’s fingers were too tired to play. That was when Daddy started talking about Jesus and Salvation, which must have been his plan all along. This was his ministry. My father had always wanted to be a missionary, an honest-to-God traveling baptizer and house builder. When marriage, children, and lack of funds kept him from going to Africa to preach the gospel, it seemed he sought out the low-hanging fruit here in South Jersey. These jam session guys were to my daddy what prostitutes and tax collectors were for Jesus: souls to be saved.

The guys didn’t have much good in their lives—wives left ’em, factory work dried up—and the only comfort they could dependably lay hands on was a six-pack of Coors and a worn Fender guitar. Zoned out on music, weed, and booze, these guys didn’t stand a chance against the stone-cold charisma of my daddy when he got fired up on Jesus.

“Let the Lord and Savior into your heart, man,” he’d say, clapping a firm hand on some sad guy’s shoulder. “He will transform you. Give Him the power.”

Everyone wanted to feel savable when he talked that way. I wondered about the mechanics of it when I heard my daddy say
Let the Lord and Savior into your heart
. Was there a door inside me that was waiting to be opened? I wondered how Jesus could be in my heart, and Daddy’s, and the hearts of all these men at the same time, and figured it had to be some arrangement like the one Santa Claus had with all those guys in red suits at malls.

ONE NIGHT
Daddy saw me sitting at the top of the basement stairs and said,
Come over here, Pumpkin, let me introduce you
, and I scrambled to his side. He lifted me onto the coffee table among the beer bottles and cigarette papers and said,
You men should hear my baby girl sing.
I wasn’t expecting to be put on the spot like that, but I had learned “This Little Light of Mine” at a Vacation Bible School, so I belted it out.

Years later, when I was buried in religion myself, I would learn that singing was a form of meditation that—when strategically placed in a religious service—let the sinners think on the sermon they’d just heard and see how they could stitch it into their lives. My father had discovered this magical quality without a single day in a seminary.

I tried to make my voice fill the corners of the room. I could see a sense of calm wash over the glassy, bloodshot eyes of the men as the words of my daddy’s sermon ping-ponged around in their smoky heads. I was part of Daddy’s act now; I was the ringer.

When I finished singing, the men clapped and I curtsied. It was a move that I stole from a Shirley Temple movie and practiced with Monique until I got it right; I was jazzed that I had a place to use it. But when the applause ended, Daddy left me standing on the coffee table for a moment too long. I felt a wind blow through the cracked windows.

The boozed-up men started slurring,
Dawlin’, come on, gimme a kiss
. It was a slippery troublesome sound; pawing at me to give them a thing that wouldn’t ever fill the bottomless pit of dislike those poor drunk men had for themselves. Their scratchy faces were filled with a hungry lonesomeness so deep that looking into their eyes was like gazing down a well. The Christian thing to do was go on and kiss their sad, grizzled cheeks—which I guess was why my daddy didn’t tell them to knock it off—but I didn’t want to. I was a self-preserving kid, and as soon as one of those rough-handed musicians lifted me off the coffee table I ran down to the basement like the devil was chasing me with chicken-claw feet.