Bastards: A Memoir (6 page)

I looked at her. Her storklike legs poked out of baby-blue short-shorts; she had blond streaks in her straight, straight hair, and blue eyes. She was taller than me by at least two inches
.

I’d never cared if anyone liked us before. Other people’s ideas about our family never mattered. But now, under the inquisitive gaze of someone—my sister—whom I wanted desperately to like us, our scraggliness and weirdness took on dimension and gravity. Those words—“My
name
is Rebecca”—landed like a brick to my head. They were an affirmation that she did not want to belong here. Here, where suddenly everything was bathed in the kerosene smell of fresh Raid, the places where the cats had built their own exits in the window screens gaped like empty eye sockets, my knees were scuffed beneath my Easter dress, and the welcome sign we’d painted looked like house paint splattered on butcher paper. Which it was; I had just hoped that our love and affection would transform it into a masterpiece.

I ran forward to hug her. I took her by the hand and ran her around the house to show her where we made room for her. I opened the drawers in the big white bureau that I’d emptied just for her. I showed her Jacob’s bed by the bedroom door, and the double bed that she and I would share by the window. I thought that by showing her all the effort we’d put in to conjure her, maybe she’d give us partial credit. Here was where we had saved a place for her; here was where she fit. She might think she didn’t know us, but I felt that I knew her intrinsically: I knew what her blank expression meant because I made the same one. I saw how she was pulling her eyelids wide open because blinking would make her cry. I held her hand. I grabbed it whether she wanted me to or not. We were linked. I could feel it, though it was hard to see just yet.

In our shared bed that night I rolled over to whisper in Rebecca’s ear all the things that she’d missed. I told her how Uncle Mac was supposed to be her godfather but then he shot himself in the head, and then Mom and Daddy had a baby that they gave away, then another one, and another one, all girls. I told her that the sisters were a secret, that they were
our
secret, that Rebecca was one of us now, that she always had been but now she was here, and—

“My godfather is Granddad’s nephew,” she said.

I kicked free of the covers and pulled my right foot up to my chest, confused.

“Look,” I said. “I got this scar when I stepped on a piece of glass.”

Rebecca was quiet. I showed her the smooth hairless spot on my right forearm.

“This is where I got burned when the living room lamp fell on me,” I told her.

Still nothing.

“You can show me your scars if you want to,” I prompted her.

“I don’t have any,” she said.

My sister was as exotic as the snow leopard at the Philly Zoo: shiny, well fed, and obviously grown in different soil than the rest of the kids in our neighborhood. The Becky Jo that I had built in my head over the past six years was my double. She wore dresses, threw tea parties, and would let me braid her hair. But
Rebecca
wore pants, and got muddy and grass-stained when she ran. She didn’t like eating cold hot dogs from the fridge, and she didn’t want to model all her dresses for me. When we opened each subsequent box that arrived from Oklahoma, she hollered as I touched our new toys, “That’s
mine
!” Over six years, Rebecca had grown accustomed to being an only child. She had been “spoiled,” all the adults said. Spoiled; for what, I could not immediately discern, but cursory investigation revealed that she didn’t know simple things like the rules to kick-the-can, or how to cut her own meat. Only when she got hurt would she start looking for someone to snuggle up to.

Being without adult supervision in the free fall of afternoons in the neighborhood before the parents arrived home was a particular challenge. In Oklahoma, Rebecca had spent her days surrounded by grown-ups. Our neighborhood teemed with children. With one to four kids in every apartment for blocks and blocks, we handily outnumbered the adults, who frequently left us to fend for ourselves when they went to work or to drop off rent checks. The place was more ours than theirs, it seemed. It was a difficult transition for my sister.

On the day we climbed up to the roof of the school garage with Jacob and Sal, Rebecca froze. “I can’t get down,” she said. Her face had gone pale and her knees wobbled.

“Just jump,” I said.

My sister shook her head. Jacob and Sal were already down on the ground, calling up for us to jump already, it was only six feet, right into freshly mowed grass. But Rebecca didn’t move.

“I’ll get Mom, okay?” I said. “Would you like that?”

Rebecca nodded. I shinnied down the rainspout and raced to the apartment, where my mom was folding laundry.

Mom stood by the rainspout and said, “All you have to do is come halfway. I’ll bring you the rest; I’m right here.”

My sister slid down the drainpipe, cautiously, into Mom’s arms.

Rebecca was far too big to be carried, but she wouldn’t release her grip on Mom’s shoulders. Her feet slapped against Mom’s knees for the three blocks home.

But maybe I shouldn’t have done that. It didn’t teach my sister anything; Rebecca continued to look for adults to entertain her, state rules, and dole out punishments. Like the day we got tangled up with the Secretary.

About a week after Rebecca came home, a Secretary and her handyman husband moved into the house on the corner. They were a new breed of tenant for our block. Most every household in a mile radius harbored litters of children fed by free school lunches, or retired Social Security recipients. These two fresh faces were doughy, hopeful. Not like us. They arrived childless and ready to polish up the crumbling brownstone they’d purchased. Otherwise, they seemed to ignore everyone around them. They didn’t sit on their front porch and holler at the neighbors over cans of Coors, or leave their front door open behind the screen door like everyone else
.
They went in their back door, and stayed inside hammering and refinishing until one of them had to leave for work again. Every few days or so, I would see the Secretary watching our neighborhood game of street football from the safety of her front window, her form slim and shadowy behind her lace curtains. One rare day, the Secretary ventured from her brownstone in the early afternoon, dragging a refrigerator box to the curb.

The box looked about the size of a pop-up playhouse I’d seen at the Bonanza Supermarket a week before. It was available for “10 cereal box tops and $5.95 shipping.” The length of time required to accumulate so many box tops—not to mention the $5.95—seemed interminable, so when I first laid eyes on that refrigerator box, I considered it a gift.

I scrambled inside the box, to claim it before another neighbor kid could snap it up. Its cardboard confines were quiet and cool, until Sal tumbled in after me (with much less stealth). We were figuring out where to cut the first window when the storm struck. The Secretary began shaking the box and yelling for us to “get out of there this
instant.
”

I thought if we were quiet, maybe she would go away, but she rattled that box like we were the last two Raisinets stuck to the bottom.

“Boxes are dangerous to play in,” she roared as Sal and I rolled out into the daylight.

“You step on a staple, you’ll get tetanus, and your arms and legs will fall off,” she said as we skittered back to the shelter of my front porch.

Considering the parking lots and abandoned sheds that were our usual playgrounds, staples seemed like a silly thing to worry about. Plus, we had to be inoculated against pretty much everything in order to qualify for free milk and school lunches. The Secretary either didn’t know this or didn’t care, and proceeded to slash my new playhouse to pieces with a razor blade while Sal and I watched.

From the length of our front yard, the Secretary looked so thin that a stiff breeze could blow her over. Up close, she towered over us with her dark eyes firing and her face twisted into shades of concern, condescension, and pity. She seemed to simultaneously like and loathe being the only responsible person on our block, but that was what she got for moving to this neighborhood for the cheap real estate.

It was a summer Saturday. The day was a warm bath, not unpleasant, but stagnant. The government-funded “recreation” program at the public school—designed to dissuade us from reckless shenanigans while our parents were working—was not running. We were home all day under the clumsy supervision of Sal’s sister, Donna. Though Donna was fourteen, she was barely taller than me.

Sal and I were mourning our loss by stomping down anthills in the front yard when Rebecca’s wail chain-sawed the early afternoon quiet. She shot out of our house and into the amphitheater of the lawn we shared with our neighbors. Rebecca had played too rough with a kitten, and this time the kitten had lashed back, scratching her near her left eye. Jacob and Donna came running out after Rebecca, and all five of us—Rebecca, Donna, Sal, Jacob, and me—were standing in the front lawn when the Secretary took interest in our drama.

The Secretary stalked out of her house—faster than I thought she could—right onto our turf. Khaki-shorted and red-cheeked, she sneered at Donna. “Babysitter? You can’t be more than ten years old yourself.” She took my sister’s face in her hands and asked, “Where are your parents?”

My brother’s face was blotchy and red as he delivered the answer that had been drilled into us for years:

“They’re working and they’ll be home soon.”

While this line usually worked on Jehovah’s Witnesses, landlords, and gas meter-readers, the Secretary was unsatisfied. She told Sal and Donna to go home, that she’d take care of
this
, as she dragged our little sister into her house. It all happened so fast.

When Rebecca slinked back to our house, Jacob and I were sweating in the living room with the curtains closed and all the doors locked. Our sister was embarrassed, and she should have been. The ointment shining on the corner of her disinfected eye was a mark of disloyalty, making her different from Jacob and me. But we all three had broken an oft-spoken rule: we’d talked to a Stranger.

The only sound in the room was the three of us blinking, and my heels thumping the cushions of the brown chair in the corner while we waited for our heart rates to slow back to normal. Then there was a knock.

Jacob was the man of the house, so he looked out the window and opened the door. I was sure it was the cops coming to take us away for talking to a stranger; for letting our little sister go into a stranger’s house
on our watch
. After a few whispered exchanges, Jacob closed the door, holding a basket of sandwiches.

“She made us lunch.”

He placed the basket in the middle of the floor and we pondered its unlikely presence in our living room. I was sure it was poison.

Why should we trust her? No other adult had ever dropped by the house with a suspicious basket of sandwiches when our parents weren’t home. This was exactly how the snake convinced Eve to eat that apple in the Bible, and how evil queens dispatched with inconvenient princesses in all kinds of fairy tales. Jacob unwrapped one foil packet as though he were handling a live grenade.

It was brown bread with the crusts on.

Tuna fish. With pickles chopped up inside.

Poison, clearly. In an act of silent solidarity, we threw the sandwiches into the jungle grass of the backyard, where the cats promptly gobbled them up. If the cats dropped dead, then I couldn’t have any sympathy for them. They were just cats, after all, and in this neighborhood, cats were as ubiquitous as cockroaches and cars on cinder blocks.

Those sandwiches reminded us that we were hungry, so we rolled bologna and American cheese into torpedoes that we slurped down with red Kool-Aid. We sat in the middle of the living room floor, staring at each other and trying not to talk about what was going to happen when our parents got home from work.

In the back of all of our minds we knew we’d betrayed them. We knew they were doing the best they could with only one high school diploma between them. Just because it was summer didn’t mean that our parents could take time off of work to keep an eye on us twenty-four hours a day. Work was the glue that kept this little life together. Pretty soon it’d be September, when we’d all need corduroys and new shoes to start school. And if the Camden County Department of Education wasn’t able to keep an eye on us, our parents would have to find a babysitter they could afford. All we had to do to was keep a lid on it; not be so bananas that we drew any attention. Mom would only be gone for five hours! Couldn’t we keep it together for five hours? Apparently, we could not.

Our mother got home first. We were terrible liars, so Jacob told the whole story. He pointed out where we had thrown the sandwiches in the backyard. Mom’s face became wolfish; her eyes narrowed, her jaw set. I had never seen this face before. She was primitive, grotesque, galvanized.

“Where is she?” Mom said.

Jacob cracked the front door with trepidation. I slipped behind it and watched through the gap in the doorframe as Jacob led the way to the Secretary’s house. Every blade of grass they brushed through sharpened. My mother grew a foot taller as she crossed the yard.

Mom told the Secretary to keep her nose out of other people’s lives. Mom told her that she had no business sending our babysitter home. The Secretary told Mom that if she saw us running around “like feral children” again, duty required her to call the Department of Children and Families.

Mom understood, of course. She was sorry, she said. She was sorry that the Secretary was a barren bitch who didn’t have any children of her own, but she’d better stay away from us, or duty would require Mom to call the cops. And just so she didn’t get any funny ideas about whose side anybody was on, the Secretary should know that Peggy’s kids fed those fucking sandwiches to the cats.

Rebecca started taking note of how we operated after that. When some kid locked me in a suitcase a few days later, Rebecca ran and got Jacob, rather than the nearest grown-up. Together my brother and sister tackled the kid and left him with a black eye. Soon she was jumping off garage roofs and eating slices of American cheese out of their plastic sleeves just like the rest of us.