Bastards: A Memoir (7 page)

By the end of her first month with us, Rebecca was no longer surprised by meanness or danger; she expected it. And when the time came for her to take her licks—as it did the day that an older girl punched her in the stomach without any reason except that Rebecca was new—my sister set her jaw and she didn’t cry.

Leaving Jersey

S
ince Rebecca’s arrival, Mom made a point to spend time with each of us individually. It was more economical than trying to do something as a group of five, and it was nice to have a few hours alone with my mom even if my turn only came around once a month.

Which meant that a week before I started second grade, Mom took me to get my ears pierced at the Piercing Pagoda at the mall where she’d worked during the holiday season. I decided on a pair of silver studs shaped like teddy bears and the woman behind the counter loaded them in a pink gun. She looked me in the eyes and asked, “You want your mom to hold your hand?”

I shook my head no; I was resolved about this piercing business. I was eager to work my way up to wearing shoulder-grazing hoops and clanging feathery affairs like the teenage girls in the neighborhood.

The gun clicked loudly in each of my ears; it didn’t even sting.

With my new, bear-shaped studs in my lobes, Mom and I headed on home. She kept saying, “Don’t play with ’em or they’ll get infected,” but I couldn’t keep my fingers from turning the studs just a little bit.

As we rounded the corner from the bus stop onto our street, we saw Jacob and Rebecca sitting on the front porch roof that we were never supposed to sit on. They had their legs dangling over the edge, watching the sunset. Mom started to run, yelling, “What are you doing up there?”

“Their dad said they could,” Donna said from her porch next door, where she was trimming the ends of her hair with a pair of kitchen shears.

In thirty seconds flat, Mom was in the front door and up the stairs. She opened the windows in our bedroom and pulled my siblings inside as she puffed, “What if you fell? What if you’d have died? What would I do then?”

Jacob and Rebecca didn’t protest or apologize. Mom didn’t seem to notice, but I was puzzled. Something was up with them, but I couldn’t tell yet what it was.

Daddy was in the alley behind the apartment, sorting through boxes of records in the trunk of the dead Pinto. Mom yelled at him that children should not be allowed to sit, unsupervised on an ancient porch roof that holds on to rainwater so good that it might as well be a reservoir.

“Donna was right there,” Daddy said grandly, keeping his voice mellow for the benefit of the gathering neighbors.

Mom snarled, “Yes, because their father was playing in the backyard.”

A truck pulled into the alley behind the apartment and honked twice; it was one of Daddy’s disc jockey buddies. They were splitting a wedding gig tonight.

“They’re fine. Everybody’s fine. I gotta go,” Daddy said, maintaining the calm and unbothered tone that made Mom clench her fists so hard that her knuckles popped.

Daddy heaved a milk crate full of records out of the Pinto’s trunk and into the bed of the truck. Then he was gone.

Mom retreated to her bedroom. I could hear her opening drawers and dumping out boxes from the closet; she was looking for something. Amid the clatter, her breath was jagged and audible. She’d been breathing funny all day, but it’d gotten louder and wheezier since we got home. When I heard the rummaging stop in her bedroom, I went to check on her. I found her sitting on the side of her bed, holding a piece of foil that had been folded into an elaborate pipe, like ones I used to see at jam sessions with Daddy. The room was a war zone; clothes and shoes covered the floor and the bed. The rolled-up shades were askew and the twilight glow coming through them cast everything in a chilly blue-gray. My mother had lined up Daddy’s contraband on the nightstand: besides the pipe in her hand, there were loose leaves of marijuana dumped from his jacket pockets, a couple of small white pills. Mom shook her head and melted onto the bed, defeated. Maybe Daddy had gotten tired of being on his best behavior. Or maybe he had never changed at all.

That night at dinner, Rebecca dragged her food across her plate and locked her sights full on Mom.

“Mommy, you’re fat,” she said flatly.

My bite of potato plopped back on my plate. Rebecca was lucky that Daddy wasn’t here; that’s the kind of rudeness that could set him flying off the handle and talking about belts.

“Rebecca Hall! That is not a nice thing to say!” Mom wheezed.

“But you
are
fat,” Rebecca said again.

“Do you want me to tell your daddy what you said to me?”

“He’s gonna leave you anyway. He told me so.”

Then the room was quiet like the whole earth was holding its breath. It was the sucking sound of the air rushing over your head in a car crash, the sound the wind made when you were hurtling forward so fast that the speed of sound caught up to the speed of light, and that was the sound of everything breaking apart.

Jacob nodded into his plate.

“Daddy said he’s moving into an apartment across the street, only you can’t live there.”

My mom’s laughter cracked the quiet like a bat. It was not the kind of laugh where her belly shook and you wanted to laugh with her, it was the way witches in cartoons cackled while stirring big black pots full of hair and eyeballs.

“Eat your dinner,” Mom said.

And I knew. I knew in that moment, as soon as Rebecca said,
Mommy you’re fat
, that my mother was pregnant again. She was wearing the baggy clothes, she was breathing hard all the time. She was pregnant again, and that was why Daddy was leaving.

My father was probably smart not to confront Mom with the news himself; my parents hadn’t had one of their explosive fights for almost a year; with all the anger they kept in check combined with the added tension of this pregnancy, somebody was likely to get shot. If my father had had the guts to talk to Mom about his decision, I imagine it would have gone something like this:

MICHAEL DECIDES
¹

For this reenactment, Michael should be played by Michael Keaton circa
Working Stiffs
; Peggy by Sally Field circa
Norma Rae
(with a few extra pounds on her). Both speak with thick New Jersey accents.

As directed by Quentin Tarantino

Michael, thirtyish, a little stoned, enters the kitchen, tosses his keys on the counter, and takes off his work boots. Pepé Le Pew–style fumes rise from his feet. Peggy, twenty-eight, her matronly chest barely contained by a faded nightgown, stirs a pot of ramen noodles on the stove.

P
EGGY
: Where’s the milk?

M
ICHAEL:
Am I wearing a shirt that says
FRIGGIN’ MILKMAN
?”

P
EGGY:
You’re the father; it’s your job to get the milk.

M
ICHAEL:
What’s the matter, your tit broke?
²
The man brings home the friggin’
bacon.

C
LOSE ON:
Michael’s greasy thumb, popping the top off of a bottle of Grolsch, clink.

P
EGGY:
Well, we’ve been out of
that
for eight years. Last time you brought home bacon, Steve Perry was singing “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” on WRAT.

C
UT TO:
The giant cauldron of ramen noodles as it bubbles.

M
ICHAEL:
Frigging Journey. Bunch of freaks.

Beer backwashes up the neck of the bottle as Michael chugs it in one go. He
BURPS.

Michael slams the bottle on the counter.

M
ICHAEL:
There was something I was going to tell you . . . what the hell was it . . .

Michael’s face furrows. Peggy stirs the noodles.

M
ICHAEL:
What the hell . . . I was over at my mother’s . . . Danny dropped me off over here . . . oh, yeah! We’re friggin’ through.

P
EGGY:
I think I missed that, what’d you say?

M
ICHAEL:
I said, we’re through. I can’t deal with this crap anymore. Danny’s waiting out front while I grab my shit. Good luck with the kids.

Michael reaches into the fridge for another frosty beer for the road.

P
EGGY:
You can’t do this to me. How’m I supposed to feed three kids on three-thirty-five an hour?

Danny’s El Camino honks loudly, twice.

Michael yells out the ripped screen, smacks the window frame.

M
ICHAEL:
Hold your damn horses, Danny! I’m leaving my fuckin’ family here!

Michael walks back to Peggy, runs his hands through his hair, collects his thoughts.

M
ICHAEL:
A’ right, Boo-Boo, listen. I’m going upstairs and get my shit. Then I’m leavin’, and that’ll be that.

Peggy’s face remains placid. She ladles noodles into five chipped, mismatched bowls.

P
EGGY:
What about the kids?

M
ICHAEL:
Oh. Yeah. That.

Michael sits down at the table to retrieve the Plan from the recesses of his brain.

M
ICHAEL:
I’m taking the boy one, tomorrow morning my ma is gonna come for one of the girls, then we’ll send the last one to your pops in Oklahoma. Or whatever.

Michael takes a drink of his beer; watches Peggy put the bowls on the table.

M
ICHAEL:
You think your pops’ll spring for the plane fare?

Michael screws his face together, thinking.

M
ICHAEL:
Otherwise it’s Greyhound all the way.

P
EGGY:
You can’t put a six-year-old on a bus.

M
ICHAEL:
What the hell? I’m the one doin’ all the thinking around here.

P
EGGY:
I already gave away three of these babies. You said the last one would be the
last one
, and we’d move into a new house and it’d just be the five of us. Now you want me to give away all of them? I can’t live with just me.

M
ICHAEL:
Well I can’t live with you, either. Boo-Boo, plans change. The Lord came to me in my sleep last night, and . . . it doesn’t matter what He said, just, this is the only way. A boy needs his father, and as it says in the Bible, when a man—

BOOM.

Peggy pulls a .44 Magnum out of her cleavage and shoots Michael in the face. Blood splatters on the cracked beige walls. Michael’s head lands face-first in the bowl of noodles.

P
EGGY:
Kids? Dinner!!!!!!!!!!!

END SCENE.

However Daddy delivered the news, though, our parents’ split meant a world of changes for Jacob, Rebecca, and me. And if getting the message to my mom through one of their kids saved my daddy from getting shot in the head, I guess he picked the least stinky piece of that turd sandwich. Seems like he always did.

That night we stayed up until midnight watching reruns of
Cheers
in the living room. Mom was waiting for Daddy to return, and Jacob, Rebecca, and I were sticking close to Mom. We kept our ears perked for the jingle of keys in the back door, but Daddy didn’t come home. Eventually, Mom said it was bedtime.

After Mom turned off the light in our bedroom, my siblings and I conferenced in whispers. While I was getting my ears pierced this afternoon, Daddy had told Jacob and Rebecca that he was filing for divorce and the three of us would have to be split up. Our father’s plan was that I would be sent to live with his parents, Rebecca would go back to Oklahoma, and Jacob would stay on with our father in a smaller apartment across the street from where we lived now.

I bristled at the thought of being separated from Jacob and Rebecca. It had never crossed my mind that we might be separated the way our little sisters had been separated from us. I had never been alone like that before. The prospect of it made me feel like a turtle plucked from its shell.

“I’m not gonna,” I said.

“Me, either,” Rebecca said.

“Me, either,” Jacob echoed.

We were a team. If Daddy wanted to leave, fine. Let him go. But I was not going to lose my sister again, or my brother
.

I couldn’t tell the precise moment when my sister and I transitioned from strangers to friends. It happened when we weren’t paying attention. Over three months of sleeping in the same bed and playing the same games, we had gotten used to one another. And now we had a common cause to fight against. I couldn’t imagine going back to living without her.

Across the room, Jacob rolled onto his stomach.

“We called Mimi and Granddad in Oklahoma City,” he whispered. After Daddy told them about the decision, my brother and sister had walked six blocks to a pizzeria and placed a collect call to Oklahoma from the pay phone there.

“They said they’d have to talk to Mom. They want her to call them.”

“They have the biggest house I’ve ever seen,” Rebecca added.

She’d told us that the yard was a full acre, that the refrigerator had two doors, and that Mimi and Granddad had air-conditioning and cable and closets full of food. I didn’t wonder if I’d like tromping around a one-acre backyard more than I enjoyed racing through the pavement of the neighborhood. New Jersey was the only place I knew; I couldn’t imagine that anywhere in the world could be different from here. Rebecca said the situation in Oklahoma was good, so I believed her.

Mom’s relationship with her father and stepmother had always been a bear. I’d heard her tell her friends how her father used to lock her out of the house when she broke her curfew, so she would sleep under the pine tree in the front yard until her father came out for the morning paper.
Wanted to let him worry
, she said. And she must have had a reason to run away from their house when she was seventeen. But regardless of my mother’s past there, Jacob, Rebecca, and I knew that the three of us would fit in our grandparents’ house in Oklahoma. They could afford to keep us together. The biggest question was, would they? And would our mother let us go?