Bastards: A Memoir (5 page)

To cap off that strange night, the Pinto refused to start when we wanted to leave. This was not unusual; after it had time to nestle into a parking space, we always had to sweet-talk it and give it a few minutes. I kept digging in the backseat for the seat belt while Daddy went from the normal coaxing—
Come on . . . you can do it . . . come on, girl—
to the kind of swearing he did when kids were around—
Shoot! Son of a . . . son of a . . . gun. God . . . darned Pinto
. Once my daddy started son-of-a-gunning, he was close to the scarier, angrier place where he would bark at us to
stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about
and swing his arms around until he broke a window. This time he stopped short of those histrionics.

“We’ll have to walk to the bus stop,” he finally said.

The bus stop was a mile and a half away. We were in the middle of nowhere, there weren’t even sidewalks for most of our trek. There was nothing but trees, high grass, and icy wind blowing off the Delaware River. Compared to Marigold Court, this was wilderness.

“Look how many stars you can see without all the city lights in the way!” Daddy crowed. He was pointing out the Big Dipper when it started to rain. It was just a spitting rain at first, but by the time we reached a sidewalk, it had turned to a downpour. The rain soaked us as it fell from the sky, then bounced off the pavement to hit us again. My feet squished in my shoes. Daddy promised that
one day we’ll look back at this and laugh
, but I couldn’t see how.

So when I heard the Pinto sigh into the parking lot on a late October evening, I prepared to hide in the closet. I didn’t want to face another night of sad men and rainy walks. It was Mom’s birthday. Monique had come over to watch Jacob and me while my mom feathered her hair and shimmied into a black-and-pink-striped sweater dress, and then Stevie’s-Mom took her out for a drink at the bar down the street. She’d been gone for half an hour by the time the Pinto arrived, accompanied by the deeper rumble of a pickup truck. Jacob ran to open the curtains.

Daddy tapped on the glass and Monique hollered to him that she was not supposed to let anybody in. Daddy pointed to a washing machine in the bed of the pickup truck.
I’m just here to deliver a present
, he said. Monique opened the door, and soon he had sweet-talked her into helping him get the other Mothers in the building to join us for a surprise party. He pulled beers from the trunk of the Pinto and chilled them in the fridge. He ordered pizza while Monique ran around the complex knocking on doors. A paunchy man climbed out of the pickup truck and helped my father wrestle the washing machine into the apartment.

It was mustard-yellow and wheeled, so you could roll it out of a closet and attach it to the kitchen sink to fill with water. The dings and floppy dials suggested that it had already lived a long life. I couldn’t imagine ever wanting a secondhand washing machine for my birthday, but maybe Daddy knew something I didn’t.

Soon other Mothers started arriving in groups of two and three to obscure the fact that they had rendezvoused over vodka and Cokes in Nicole’s-Mom’s living room and dished the good dirt about this birthday business before they arrived at our place. The crumbs of the conversation they had started there slipped out under their breath as they milled around our apartment. This
Johnny-come-friggin’-lately,
they’ve
got his number
, they’ve
seen Hail Mary passes like this before.
Before we had plowed through all the pizzas, my father ordered everyone into the kitchen and we scrambled around the washing machine.

The steel was cold against my cheek and the Mothers’ legs were warm behind me. When Daddy turned out the lights, it was like the apartment had closed its eyes with us inside. I couldn’t see my
hand
right in front of my
face
. Shushes buffeted me like waves.

The front door jiggled and we all held our breath. Feathered bangs rustling behind me sounded like a nest of beetles rubbing their legs together. My mom stumbled through the door.

“It’sh just like him to comp
lete
ly forget my birthday.”

“Hey, Peggy, were all these lights off when we left?” Stevie’s-Mom said, trying to give my poor drunk mom a hint.

“Wait! I got some Ding Dongs in my purse, we’ll put a candle in that. Happy friggin’ birthday,
Peggy
. . . ”

Her keys jingled as she crossed the living room. When she hit the kitchen, her feet slid slushily across the linoleum. She was only a foot away from us, but hadn’t looked up. She flipped on the lights. We all yelled, “Surprise!”

Daddy hugged her, and gestured to the washing machine like a model on
The Price Is Right
. Hadn’t Peggy, just last month, informed him that doing laundry required her to load a double stroller with me on one end and a trash bag full of dirty clothes on the other, strap a backpack of laundry detergent on Jacob, and walk three full blocks to the Laundromat? Hadn’t she insisted then that he help out more?

See, he
did
listen.

Once the Mothers realized there was nothing to see after the big reveal, they snapped up the last slices of pizza and headed back to their own apartments, humming about
surprise party my ass,
and
bet that hunk of metal doesn’t even work.
It was hours past my bedtime and I fell asleep under the kitchen table.

I woke up when Daddy moved me from the floor to my bed. Mom was behind him saying, “You know that’s not what I meant.” She didn’t look mad; she was smiling in a funny way.

Daddy told her in a low grumbling voice about a fiftieth wedding anniversary he’d deejayed a few months ago, how beautiful it was. How it made him think that if that couple could make it through one world war, three heart attacks, and a recession, maybe my parents could figure out how to navigate the tail end of the 1980s. He kissed Mom on the forehead as he squatted to place me on my bed. Mom said, “We’ll see.”

A couple days after the surprise party, I was standing on a kitchen chair watching the wash spin in the mustard-yellow machine when Daddy dropped in again. He said he wanted to show us something and herded my mom, Jacob, and me into the Pinto. We drove across town and into the city of Camden, stopping behind a brick town house. We entered through the back door, into a narrow cream-colored kitchen, and Daddy started to show us our future. “The table would go here,” he said. “The living room is this way . . .” This place had stairs, separate floors, a basement where he could hook the washing machine into the main lines so we wouldn’t have to roll it around the kitchen.

“There’s room to bring back Becky Jo,” Mom whispered.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Daddy said.

There were two bedrooms and yards in the back and front, space to put the things I saw in commercials: plastic pools, Slip ’N Slides, games with nets.

“What do you think?” Daddy flipped his keys in this hand.

Mom tapped her fingers on the plaid contact-papered kitchen countertop. She looked at me and Jacob running around the room where the table would go. She said, “Okay.”

We moved out of Marigold Court the next day. The Mothers stood outside Nick-and-Andy’s-Mom’s apartment smoking cigarettes and crossing their arms. To the women we left behind, we would become the story of the Mother whose deadbeat husband bought her a secondhand washing machine, the Mother who packed up her children, left the crumbling confines of Marigold Court, and lived happily ever after in a town house on the other side of the railroad tracks.

I looked out the wide back window of the Pinto as we pulled out of the parking lot. The Mothers stamped out their cigarettes and went inside, back to the linoleum table. In the days to come, I imagined their crackling voices passing our saga between them when they got tired of sad stories and were ready for a hopeful one.

Because Lord knows if it could happen to us, it could happen to anybody.

Bringing Becky Back

T
he new house had two bedrooms and two floors, three if you counted the basement (which I didn’t because it was dark and smelled like old socks). Double cellar doors led from the basement to the backyard. In the summertime, a person could situate a plastic pool at the base of these doors, loop the garden hose around the door handle, and have a decent waterslide. Some water would leak into the basement from this arrangement, but nobody worried about that; it wasn’t like we owned the place.

Our furniture consisted entirely of cast-offs from friends and family members. We didn’t have much of it and none of it matched. Everything we owned would have been left on the curb for garbage pickup if our apartment weren’t available as the last way station before the dump. Our television sat on top of an elaborate old stereo table with a broken record player built in. There was a dusty brown recliner and a once-gold-embroidered sofa from Daddy’s mother’s house. The kitchen had no room for any furniture outside of the built-in cabinets, and the dining room had just enough space to fit a gray glass-top table and a few furry brown chairs whose headrests fell off daily, exposing the pointed ends of the screws beneath.

Jacob and I shared a bedroom, and Mom and Daddy had a separate one. Jacob’s and my room had space for both of our twin beds pressed against opposite walls and a strip of carpet down the center. Two windows opened onto the sagging roof of the front porch, which Mom told us we were never to play on. Stray cats sunned on our front porch and sheltered their kittens in our basement.

My parents were serious about bringing Becky Jo back, but first they needed the money for airfare. Mom went back to cashiering at a department store and added the graveyard shift at a fast-food restaurant five nights a week. Daddy continued with construction during the day and deejay jobs at night. They passed my brother and me between them like footballs. During times when their work schedules overlapped they left us under the care of a neighborhood teenager who didn’t mind being paid next to nothing.

The neighborhood was a strip of flat-faced two-story buildings rubbing up against each other. It had been built as a federally planned housing development in the early 1900s, a place for a nearby shipyard to house the men who built boats for World War I. Hallways were tight, ceilings were low. The street crowded quickly at dusk when the workingmen came home, but that didn’t stop us kids from playing touch football right in the middle of the road, daring them to run us over.

Our apartment was in a triplex that curved around a shared front lawn. We lived in the middle unit. On our right was a family of Indian immigrants with two children; Donna, who was fourteen years old, and Sal, who was eight. Sal was a bony little kid with a terrier complex—he didn’t think that any adventure was too big for him. Sal, Jacob, and I became a trio immediately. He was new here, too, and we took to exploring the neighborhood together. Our neighbor on the other side of the triplex was an old man named Albert who either couldn’t afford dentures or refused to wear them. I never understood a word he said. He was always yelling, which contributed both to my difficulty deciphering his words and his frustration at not being understood.

There were more daddies in this neighborhood than we had encountered in Marigold Court. Most of the daddies worked construction, on a factory line, or as mechanics. The mothers here had the threat of, “Just wait until your father gets home,” which added a new dimension to punishment. Unlike the empty swats of someone’s mom, daddies could do serious damage. Give them a couple of beers after a long day and they started growling and scratching around for something to hit. In the absence of a good fight or a wayward child, the daddies punched out walls. It seemed to me that everybody who had a daddy had a hole in their house somewhere.

In June 1989, Jacob and I were left alone with our daddy for a week when Mom went to Oklahoma to bring our sister Becky Jo back home. It was a month before my seventh birthday, which made it a month before Becky Jo’s sixth birthday.
Irish twins
, Daddy called us.

I’d met my sister, briefly, when I was five years old, when Mimi and Granddad had driven cross-country to take her to Disney World. We met up with them for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. My memory of that visit was marred considerably by my bitterness at not being invited to accompany them to the Magic Kingdom. But I was prepared to forgive my sister for meeting Mickey Mouse without me. She was coming back and nothing that had happened in the past would matter.

The day that Mom and Becky Jo were scheduled to return, I put on my Easter dress and hat and gloves to meet them. It was my special-occasion outfit, and if anything was a special occasion, this was it. We were going to be a real family now, our baby sister was coming home to us because we had been very good; everything was going to be rainbows and fried chicken dinners from now on. I could feel it. Our family would be, if not complete, at least a big step closer.

After shoving enough toys under the beds and into the closet so a vacuum could be run in our bedroom, Jacob and I sat on the couch in the freshly scrubbed house trying not to run into the kitchen and bust into the ice-cream cake we both knew was in the freezer. Each moment that passed was a breath closer to the inevitable second when one of us would spill or break something. Daddy rooted around in the basement and procured a roll of butcher paper along with the wormy ends of a can of house paint that he’d liberated from a job site, with which Jacob and I painted a sign that read W
ELCOME
H
OME
, B
ECKY
J
O
! with a smiley face. We managed, miraculously, not to get paint on anything but the paper, but we got overeager and hung the sign before the paint had dried all the way. The smiley face dripped into a sloppy cloud. It didn’t matter. I was thrilled to have a sister, someone lower than me in the pecking order. She would be equal parts my comrade and my minion.

But when my sister and Mom walked in the door and saw the sign, Becky Jo said, “My
name
is Rebecca.”