Bastards: A Memoir (8 page)

Setting our plan into motion was complicated. For Mimi and Granddad to talk to her, Peggy would have to call them, since we still didn’t have a phone for them to call her. That call would open a whole can of worms about what Mom had promised when she took Rebecca back three months ago. Her father might dig deep enough to find out about the baby girls that she had relinquished for adoption. They might discover that she was, in fact, pregnant right now, and that it was the pressure of this baby that drove her husband away again.

AS THE
sun rose the next morning, the house was silent. Mom hadn’t roused herself, so Jacob cooked breakfast and Rebecca and I tucked ourselves around the glass-top table in the dining room. Through the wall I could hear Jacob scraping a pan of sizzling eggs. I pressed my palms onto the gray glass tabletop. The heat from my body steamed an impression on the glass for a moment before the air caught it and swept it away. When the sun rose high enough I could see the greasy remains of hundreds of old handprints, Jacob’s and Rebecca’s and mine layered all together from the many times we had sat around this table waiting for something to happen, pressing our handprints down and watching them disappear like smoke.

This was the way our lives had always gone. Change was the only constant I knew. Things changed and we were always somehow fine. I had not been confronted yet with the idea that luck, like daddies, can run out when you least expect it.

Jacob covered our fried eggs with neon slices of American cheese and we buzzed over our plates about events that were likely to happen. It was a meditation, so we would be prepared for anything and would know what plan to throw our joint weight behind.

MOM CAME
downstairs, and neighbor women came over, offering not so much plans as condolences. They called Michael the names that my mother couldn’t,
asshole
,
burnout
,
lazy
,
jackass
,
hippie
,
fuckup
,
liar
,
liar
,
liar
.

“I thought maybe we could keep this baby,” Peggy said. “Maybe we’d do the whole thing like we did when Jacob was born. Maybe we’d be okay.”

My mom dragged more and more visibly as the day progressed. She was like a house without electricity; still standing, but dark inside. Meanwhile, Jacob, Rebecca, and I pulled out every toy we owned to distract ourselves from the spooky silence in the house. As the days turned into a week, we attempted to do the laundry. School was starting soon and we’d have to get ourselves ready. We got as far as piling all the dirty laundry into stacks in the living room and then took a twenty-four-hour break because no one was brave enough to venture into the basement.

The apartment looked like every closet and drawer had vomited its contents down the stairs and into the living room. The TV blared cartoons, Jacob made us toast when we were hungry. Mom went up to her bedroom to rest a lot. We were supposed to think that she was cleaning, but it was obvious from the paths that wound down the stairs and to the kitchen that no one had been cleaning here for a while. I had no way of understanding the desolation she must have felt at the blunt knowledge that this family was not enough to convince my father to stay. To my mother, his willful absence was an indictment: She was unlovable. Maybe we all were. It was a thought that was so overwhelming, my mind refused to acknowledge it.

Then one afternoon, a week into our limbo, there was a knock at the door. I cast around for a place to hide. Unexpected knocks were always bad news. I snuck behind the door as Jacob opened it.

“Oh, hi!” he said to a woman in a trench coat.

Rebecca leapt from the back of the sofa and hugged that woman like a lion hugging a piece of steak. The lady had gray hair curled just so, she wore leather driving gloves that coordinated with her coat and sunglasses on top of her head perched behind big rose-petal ears. She saw me staring at her.

“Hello, Mary.”

I took her hand when she offered it and felt all the little bones creak inside it.

“This is Mimi,” Rebecca said.

“You remember me,” Mimi told me.

So the woman who had rescued Rebecca in 1983 was here in my living room again. She was as businesslike and unruffled as I had always imagined, though she was less blond and more gray-haired than I remembered from our very brief meeting years ago. It was as if we had conjured her. Mom was pale and strange as a beached jellyfish when Jacob dragged her downstairs. When she saw Mimi, though, the look on her face was unmistakable; it was relief.

Mimi didn’t dwell on the mess we had ceased to notice; she got things done. She laid her coat and gloves across the arm of the sofa and said, “Let’s clean this place up and get some dinner.”

The next day, she rustled my father out of whatever hole he’d been hiding in and brought him home for a sit-down.

I was racing down the stairs that afternoon when I slid around the doorway into the dining room and ran right into the adults’ pow-wow.

“Hey, come here, Pumpkin!” I heard over my shoulder.

My father was sitting in the far corner, behind the gray glass table, which had been cleaned of all our sticky handprints. Mimi stood by the window, and Mom hovered in the kitchen. Everyone in the room knew my father was in trouble but him. He reached into his pocket.

“I almost forgot your allowance.” He waved a dollar bill at me.

“What’s allowance?”

“It’s for doing your chores.” He grinned.

“What’s chores?”

“You cleaned your room.”

“When?”

“Two weeks ago.”

Did I?

“No, I didn’t!”

He threw his head back and laughed up to the ceiling. I had no idea I was so hilarious. But I wasn’t an idiot, so I took the dollar and slipped out of the room.

On the front porch, Jacob and Rebecca were sitting on the step grabbing fragments of broken concrete and pitching them into the yard.

“Did he give you a dollar?” Jacob asked me.

I nodded.

“Let’s get some candy, then.”

Normally I would have saved this dollar in the pencil case under my bed where I kept the seven dollars in pennies that I had won at a church picnic, but that would mean going back in the house where my daddy was getting in trouble and laughing about it.

Today felt like the world could end at any moment, and we had three whole dollars between us, so what was the point of having a savings? We bought butterscotch Krimpets, Dr Pepper, M&M’s, Reese’s Pieces, and Fun Dips, and took our candy haul to the parking lot of the school around the corner from our apartment. Close enough to the house that we could hear anyone yelling for us, but far enough away that we didn’t have to be seen.

“She’s probably telling him that he’s got to stick around.”

“She looked mad.”

“No . . . sad.”

If it came down to it, the three of us knew the nooks and crannies of this neighborhood better than any grown person, so if the negotiations went the wrong way we had a catalog of abandoned sheds, empty dugouts, and alleyways at our disposal. My seven-dollar stash of pennies could keep us afloat for a couple of days at least.

TWO WEEKS
later, soon after school started, Mom and Mimi broke the news to us that Jacob, Rebecca, and I were going to Oklahoma with Mimi. It was what we wanted and now it was happening. It felt inevitable, unstoppable; not at all the way I expected.

No legal papers had been drawn up to transfer custody to Mimi when she scooped up my sister in 1983. When my mother returned for her child, it was impossible for Mimi to say no. But this time around, if Mimi and Granddad were going to help, they had terms. If they were going to take the three of us under their wing, they’d need custody granted to them. They’d need a piece of paper to get us enrolled in schools and listed on Granddad’s insurance, something that would make it possible for them say no next time. After another week to get all the paperwork in order, we were off. Still, Mimi and Mom promised that the arrangement was temporary, just until one of our parents could get back on their feet enough to bring all three of us back.

We didn’t have a lot of luggage. Most of our clothes and toys were too ratty to bother packing. We’d figure it out when we got to Oklahoma, Mimi said.

In the plane, I sat next to my brother. Mimi and Rebecca were across the aisle and one row back. My feet stuck straight out in front of me. Mimi gave me a stick of gum at the airport so I could chew it and my ears wouldn’t pop when we got in the air.

As we left behind the salty humidity of New Jersey, a flight attendant handed me a packet of peanuts. I was entering a world where people handed me things when I needed them, where I got the things I wished for. I no longer had to worry about where my next meal would come from, and I was done, too, with the concern about how I would stay attached to my brother and sister. I’d no longer have to watch my mother for the signs that she was falling apart.

It was in that moment of emptiness when we reached a cruising altitude and I was neither in New Jersey nor yet in Oklahoma that I finally felt it, the donkey kick to the ribs that only a great loss can give a person. I had never been away from my mother. Not once in my life had I gone an entire day without seeing her. Now I’d have to live without her. The woman who understood everything I meant to say, who let me bury her face with her hair so I could dig her out again. The woman whom I didn’t let hold my hand when I got my ears pierced because I’d thought I was too grown up. I didn’t feel grown up now. I wanted my mommy more than I had wanted anything in my life.

It’s only temporary
, I reminded myself. I didn’t know how long temporary was, but I did know that it was not forever.

I stared out the window, past my brother’s head. I had been excited to distraction about getting on an airplane because I was certain that once I was above the cloud cover I would see where the Care Bears lived. If I could get their attention, if they saw my brother, sister, and me in transit like this, the Care Bears would scoop us up, bellies blazing with rainbow light, and fix our fractured family. Or maybe the Care Bears would let us live with them in the clouds where there weren’t any grown-ups to muck up our lives. That might be the best of everything.

____________

¹
The scene works best if read aloud, ideally by two people. If you’re alone, give it a shot. Or if you have a close friend at hand, share. If, on the other hand, you are on a train, plane, or otherwise beside a stranger, just use your imagination.

²
Obviously, I would never speak about my own mother this way. But Tarantino might. Speak about somebody else’s mother, I mean, not necessarily his
own
mother . . .

P A R T   T W O

oklahoma

1989–2000

Reflections

M
imi herded my siblings and me off the plane and through the airport arrivals gate at the Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City. At the end of the skyway stood my grandfather, the man my mother had run away from so many years ago. He wore tan trousers and a periwinkle button-front shirt that made the blue in his blue-gray eyes stand out.

Granddad was immediately different from the daddies I had seen before. Standing at five feet eleven inches, he was the tallest man I’d seen in person. When he enlisted in the Air Force at the age of seventeen—before age compressed his bones—he was probably a full six feet. He was broad-shouldered and bifocaled, with a belly that spilled slightly over his belt. The sheer amount of space he took up demanded my attention. His silver hair was parted deep on the right side and tastefully combed back. It was the same hairstyle he’d worn since he was a child in the 1940s in Philadelphia. In addition to his wedding band and a large silver watch, Granddad wore an enormous garnet ring on his right hand; the stone was bigger than his knuckles. When our group reached him, he kissed Mimi on the forehead, then methodi cally hiked up the legs of his trousers before squatting down and wrapping Rebecca in a bear hug. He wrapped Jacob and me in a second, shared hug, then turned to the business of tracking down our luggage.

Granddad’s eyes darted to television screens that told where each flight’s bags could be found. “It says carousel number two, but we’ll see . . .” he said, already bracing himself for things to deviate from his plan. The walk to baggage claim was punctuated with Granddad’s sporadic exhalations as he struggled under the weight of the many things he could say right now, but wouldn’t.

We collected our few small bags—from carousel four, not two. Granddad shook his head because he hated to be right about these things. Then we climbed into his shiny Chrysler. I worried that I was sullying its light gray upholstery by simply breathing on it. I was careful not to brush my shoes on the seat and leave a stain.

As we drove toward Mimi and Granddad’s house, Rebecca chirped out the names of the streets we took.

“Interstate 40!”

“Twenty-ninth Street!”

“Grand Boulevard!”

Granddad rumbled from the driver’s seat, “What street do we take to get home?” and my sister said, “McKinley Avenue!”

I could only see the upper half of this new world as it crawled slowly past my window. The few trees I could make out were short and fat and wind-burned. Without tall buildings or trees to frame it, the sky filled my view like an ocean.

Jacob dug his elbow deep into my side when the Chrysler pulled into the brick driveway of the house on Forty-fourth Street. I sucked in my breath. The house was built into a hill on an acre of land in the middle of the city. In a state that had so far looked like a flat moonscape, Mimi and Granddad had found a spot that was covered with trees and topography.

Two collies rushed to the chain-link fence as the car came to a stop. When they saw Rebecca step out of the car, the dogs jumped on each other’s backs and fought to be the first to lick her hands through the fence.

The house was two and half stories, gray with white trim. Granddad pushed a giant wooden front door open and the air-conditioned air turned the sweat on my skin into goose bumps. From the main entryway, the first floor of the house split into three rooms: the living room to the right, Granddad’s den to the left, the dining room straight ahead. Between Granddad’s den and the dining room a staircase led to the second floor, which contained only the attic and one bedroom. Past the dining room were two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and the kitchen. Beneath the preserving effects of the central air-conditioning was the hint of lemon polish, window cleaner, and the toasty aroma of wall-to-wall carpet that had been recently vacuumed.