Bastards: A Memoir Read online

  bastards

  a m e m o i r

  MARY ANNA KING

  For

  Jacob, Becca, Lisa, Rebekah, Meghan, & Lesley

  I love you, Bananas.

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE: JERSEY

  The Day the Music Died

  Marigold Court

  Scars

  The Secondhand Washing Machine

  Bringing Becky Back

  Leaving Jersey

  PART TWO: OKLAHOMA

  Reflections

  Telling Stories

  Discipline

  Things You Can Tell Just by Looking

  The Debt

  Wake Up

  PART THREE: FOUND

  Hammered

  Like a Hole in My Head

  Good Daughter

  Rebekah Two

  Join the Club

  Quarter-Life Crisis

  Requiem

  Meeting Lesley

  Acknowledgments

  Note

  To write this book I consulted my personal journals from my childhood. I spoke with my sisters, brother, mothers, and father, who lived through certain bits of it alongside me, though these are the events as I recall them.

  When necessary, time frames have been condensed, though only when doing so would not compromise the underlying truth of the narrative. One minor character is a composite. Many names have been changed.

  bastards

  Prologue

  2009

  Remember . . . the last sense you lose is your hearing.”

  My friend on the other side of the phone is a veteran intensive care nurse, so she ought to know.

  “As long as she is breathing, she can hear you.”

  I nod into the phone and wait for someone to helpfully shout into the receiver, She’s nodding, like my brother did once when we were kids. But I am standing in an airport departure gate where I am just another stranger on a cell phone, another transient whom no one will remember. My nurse friend’s voice drops into the woolly alto register of one accustomed to soothing other people.

  “Don’t be surprised if it goes quickly . . . once she realizes that everyone is there.”

  “Okay.”

  It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m headed to Oklahoma because my mother is dying.

  I keep repeating that phrase—my mother is dying—although it isn’t quite true. I say “my mother,” because that is what people will understand. My mother is dying was what I said to my boss when I called him from the cab on the way to the airport, so it would be easy for him to comprehend, so the appropriate proto cols could be observed. But Mimi is not the woman who raised me all my life. She could have been, but she wasn’t. It is that arbitrariness that has led me to struggle for as long as I can remember to reconcile the person I am with the one I might have been.

  As I board my plane in Los Angeles, my brother, Jacob, begins his drive to Oklahoma from south Texas, where he is stationed with the U.S. Army. When my plane lands in Dallas for a two-hour layover, he is my first phone call. On paper, Jacob is in fact my nephew, but to call my brother my nephew is surreal and inconceivable. “I’m a mile away, I’m coming to get you,” he says in his New Jersey drawl. In another life I had that accent, too.

  I slip into the passenger seat of Jacob’s beige sedan and we drive into the worst ice storm that has hit the center of the country in one hundred years.

  “Mind if I smoke?” he asks.

  “Not if you give me one, too.”

  He smirks and hands me the cigarette he just lit, pulling one for himself from the pack in the cup holder. We leave a trail of smoke as we drive up Interstate 35, unimpeded except for the occasional patch of black ice. Local newscasters’ crowing about the Storm of the Century has kept most other drivers off the road tonight. That and the fact that it’s New Year’s Eve. Most people in the Interstate 35 corridor from Dallas to Oklahoma City are at parties, drinking champagne and waiting for balls to drop. Mimi gave me my first sip of champagne on a New Year’s Eve seventeen years ago. I was ten years old and we were waiting to watch the fireworks over downtown Oklahoma City. She handed me a saucerlike glass with a sparkling pink liquid in it—half champagne and half strawberry Nehi soda. It was sweet and bitter and the bubbles made me sneeze.

  I ask Jacob what he remembers about Oklahoma, the few years that he lived there with me, our sister Rebecca, Granddad, and Mimi. “Nothing,” he says. He clicks the radio dial to find a station that will stay free of static. We smoke two more cigarettes. We’re in the flat middle of the country. There is nothing to block the frigid wind whistling over our windshield.

  When we get to Oklahoma City, we loop around the Will Rogers World Airport until Rebecca arrives from Minneapolis. It’s after ten o’clock at night by the time the three of us arrive in the intensive care unit at Baptist Hospital. Granddad is in the room with Mimi when we arrive, just as he has been since Christmas Day when she was admitted. Seventeen years ago—when Granddad became, on paper, my father—I was afraid of him, afraid of the way he could turn so quickly from the guy who sang Irving Berlin songs to wake us up in the morning to a red-faced, jaw-clenching belt-wielder. He is seventy-six now. His shoulders have rounded and he has softened.

  Rebecca and I hug him and Jacob shakes his hand. “We’ll take the night shift,” I say to him. There’s a moment when all four of us look at the unconscious Mimi and listen to the sound of her breathing. It’s loud and fuzzy, an aircraft engine preparing for takeoff.

  I tell Granddad what my nurse friend said on the phone, that the last sense you lose is your hearing, because I need to say something and there is nothing else to say.

  He nods, and tells me he’ll be back in the morning.

  Many people have an event that tears their lives into before and after. Before the divorce and after the divorce. Before the war and after the war; before 9/11 and after 9/11. If I were like most people, Mimi’s death—my mother’s death—would have been that event for me. But in fact, losing people is the only constant I know.

  P A R T O N E

  jersey

  1983–1989

  The Day the Music Died

  At the end of summer in 1983, I was fourteen months old, Jacob was two years, and Rebecca, whom we called Becky Jo, was two months. She was born the day after my first birthday: my only present that year. Our daddy worked construction and deejayed weddings on the weekends. Mom had been a cashier at a department store until she quit to stay home with us kids. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in southern New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia. My parents had been married four years. They were young. Their passions burned like an incinerator and swung wildly from love to hate and back again.

  UNCLE MAC was my daddy’s little brother, the baby of his family. He had been the best man at my parents’ wedding in 1979, and would be Becky Jo’s godfather when she was baptized. At twenty, he was a pink-cheeked homebody with a sweet singing voice and a mop of jet-black hair that waved around his cheeks and down his neck. If I dig to the deepest corners of my memory, among the pocket-lint pieces of splintered sunlight and walnut crib bars against white apartment walls, I brush against an image of my pudgy baby body lying beside my brother on deep brown shag carpet, while above us my mustachioed father and his mustachioed brother faced one another with guitars, their corded arms strumming, faces lifted like wolves howling at the moon as their voices—for moments, mere fragments of breath—met in effortless harmony. I can’t be sure if this is pure memory or something I created from stories my parents told me. My mom insists that Mac’s spirit deposited this image in my mind on one of several nights in the mid-1980s when he haunted us, his restless spirit never satisfied that we were comfortable without him. r />
  Mac called our apartment early on Labor Day morning in 1983, before the salty south Jersey air got humid enough to suffocate a person, to invite us all to spend the day at the swimming pool where he was a lifeguard. Bringing unbaptized Becky Jo to a public pool seemed like preparing a gift too tempting for the greedy hands of fate to ignore, so Daddy told Mac that we would meet him for a cookout later that night instead.

  It was late afternoon when Mac finished his shift at the pool. His friends would tell us that he was setting up the chess set in his living room, heating the grill on the balcony, and only half paying attention when his buddy Davey arrived.

  Davey had just bought a gun from a guy on a gambling run at Twosies Bar across the street. It wasn’t anything fancy, a black snub-nosed .22 caliber revolver that fit in a jacket pocket, the sort of gun that wouldn’t hurt too much to lose in a round of five-card stud. Davey strolled into Mac’s apartment, put the gun to his temple, said, “Hey, look at this!” and pulled the trigger. Just joking, nothing to it, he hadn’t loaded it anyway.

  If you were the kind of person who measures the success of a prank by its likelihood to cause heart attacks, this was a gold-medal winner.

  The sun hadn’t yet dropped below the horizon. My mom and daddy and we three babies were stuck in a traffic jam on the White Horse Pike when the next wave of guests walked in Mac’s door. We couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes away when Mac picked up Davey’s gun from the table, put it to his temple, and said, “Hey, look at this!”

  There wasn’t any blood, the story goes. Not like you see in movies. There was only a trickle that you could make out if you got close enough to check that Mac was breathing. Everyone in the apartment thought he was horsing around. It was a really great prank, until someone realized they needed to hide the drugs and call an ambulance. There was a bullet in the chamber that sheer idiotic luck had kept from nailing Davey when he’d demonstrated the same trick.

  My mom and daddy pulled into the lot of the apartment building just as the EMTs were loading Mac’s body in the ambulance. There was nothing that could be done but drive over to Grandmom Hall’s house and tell her that her baby boy was gone. Better to hear news like that from family than from a police officer. Having a grandbaby to hug can soften such a blow, too, but baby Becky Jo was a screamy thing that sucked all the available comfort out of a room, making everyone’s nerves raw and snappish. We didn’t stay long.

  After that Labor Day of 1983, my daddy started disappearing. For all we knew, he was mourning in his mother’s basement, getting blasted with his construction buddies, or pawing into the ether for divine guidance to show him the way. He never packed a suitcase, never tipped his hand to us when he was planning an escape. He would go out the door one morning and not come back for days. Every time he left, it seemed like he would never return. On the nights when he did come home, he’d walk in the door, slip off his work boots, open a beer, and sit in the dark living room by himself. He’d be gone before breakfast the next morning and the cycle would start again.

  With Daddy gone, Mom did something she hadn’t done since she’d married him. She called her father in Oklahoma. The last time my mom had seen her father was when she was seventeen years old, the morning she ran away from his house in Oklahoma City. Reaching out after seven years of silence had to show my grandfather that my mother needed serious help. Mom called collect and Granddad accepted the charges. Then he sent his wife, my mom’s stepmother, Mimi, to New Jersey to sort things out.

  Mimi would say that she came because she had a more flexible schedule—Granddad worked for the Air Force, and Mimi was already retired—but she was also better suited to the task. My mom was alone with three kids under the age of three years old. The water and electric service had been shut off. Mimi was born during the Dust Bowl, and before she married my grandfather she’d raised a daughter on her own in 1950s Oklahoma. She’d seen enough low points in the human experience to be unemotional about things like cockroach trails among the mountains of dishes on the kitchen countertop, sweat-stained bedsheets, and three babies with full diapers. Mimi would tell me twenty years later that she had decided before she set foot on the plane to New Jersey that she was going to take one of us kids back to Oklahoma with her. Initially, she planned to take me. She said she’d never seen a milder baby.

  Everyone in New Jersey told my mom that her third, screeching infant was her just dessert after Jacob and I had been so easy. But Mimi sensed something wasn’t right with my fussy baby sister. A trip to a pediatrician revealed that a muscle in Becky Jo’s stomach had never fully developed. Everything she swallowed would come burning back up her throat and onto whoever was holding her at the time. Mom couldn’t afford the medical care required to treat it. But Mimi and Granddad could.

  So Mimi took Becky Jo back to Oklahoma. Temporarily. Until Mom could work things out with Daddy, until they could get back on their feet. I wonder if Mimi knew as she said those words—just until you get back on your feet—how unlikely that was to ever happen for my mom. I wonder if Mimi regretted not taking all three of us that day, or if she thought then that such a gesture would be an overcorrection, a permanent solution for a temporary situation, too devastating to our mother.

  So because my daddy lost his brother, I lost a sister. There was a kind of logic to it that I never questioned.

  But as soon as I was old enough to understand that I’d lost a little sister named Becky Jo, I understood that she was coming back to us someday. Mom uttered the phrase constantly when Becky Jo comes home, when Becky Jo comes home. When that day came I’d want to be able to catch her up on what she’d missed, to tell her the story of us, how we got split apart and how we came back together. I would collect facts, like the story of Uncle Mac, details like the aroma of hand-rolled cigarettes, sweat, and grease that announced the arrival of our father, or the way our mother’s face was so white and her hair so dark that brushing the curls from her face in the morning was like uncovering buried bones.

  It was my duty as an older sister to catalog these things. With each subsequent fracturing of our family tree, I would take a further step back from myself to get a better perspective, to see the whole picture, and preserve each image so I could share it later. If I stepped back far enough, if I focused on building my memory, I could become the narrator of our story as well as a character in it. That is how I came to see us, how I came to know myself and my family; from a distance.

  A great loss can drive people apart or bring them closer together. For my parents, losing Becky Jo did the latter. Daddy started coming home regularly; he was less drunk more often. He picked up his guitar again and sometimes made it all the way through “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” while Mom put Jacob and me to bed.

  Six months after Becky Jo left, my mom was pregnant again. She held off telling my daddy for months. Decades later, Mom told me about the night she delivered the news.

  She waited until Jacob and I were asleep. The living room was dark. Daddy was sitting in his recliner, Mom wasn’t even sure if his eyes were open. She said, I’m pregnant.

  He said, Okay.

  She said, What do you want to do? He didn’t answer. I can imagine how the silence and the dark room and her husband with his eyes closed would have set her on edge. She said, I don’t want to name it if you’re not going to be around; I don’t want to keep it if you’re not going to stay. He said, Okay.

  She asked if he thought he would want to be around. He said he’d have to think about it.

  A month after Mom told him about the pregnancy, Daddy came home with a newspaper in his hand. He pointed out a classified ad from a couple looking to adopt. He said, I think we should meet with them. Mom said, Fine.

  The phone number in the ad was for the other couple’s lawyer, and it was in his office that they met the potential adoptive par ents. Once Mom and Daddy were sitting across a wide walnut table from a pair of genuine adults who had college degrees, owned a house, had a lawyer, and desperately want
ed a child, they seemed adolescent by comparison.

  All at once, my mother knew what she wanted to do. Another world was suddenly available to this child, one with a two-car garage and a mother who wore sweater sets, a father with a good bank job. It seemed selfish to force this baby to share a one-bedroom apartment with two kids and two grown-ups, when she could have a house with a pool, a room of her own. So my mother decided she would give this baby up. But not to that first couple, not in that office that felt like it was judging her. My mother was going to do it on her own terms, on her turf. She would be the one asking the questions.

  She called the lawyer the next day. She said she decided not to go with the couple they interviewed, but did he have anybody else? He said of course he did, and mom laid out her demands. She wanted to bring her kids with her this time, and the meeting would be on neutral territory. No offices or anybody’s home. A coffee shop or shopping mall; someplace where they were all strangers. My mother was eight months pregnant by then; it was getting down to the wire when she packed Jacob and me into our winter coats on a January afternoon in 1985. She wanted to see how her daughter’s potential new parents behaved around us, how they might treat a baby. If we liked these people, maybe everyone could feel good about the situation.

  It was sixteen months after Becky Jo left us; I was two and half. All I knew of love was my mother’s face and the way she let me boss her. Wiggle your feet so I know you’re awake, make me potatoes with things mixed inside. Tuck me in. Lemme pull your hair, scratch your back, wear your shoes. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Gimme some of what you have. I could boss my brother, too. I loved him so much it excluded other people. When I first learned to talk, all I would say was Jacob for weeks and weeks. Then I learned to say, Jacob, turn on the cartoons, reach me the cereal, boost me up on the countertop, bring me things, sing with me, STOP singing with me. STOP looking at me. Scoot over. Gimme some of what you have. I got whatever I wanted because I was the littlest.