Bastards: A Memoir Read online

  That day in 1985, I remember a long drive in Daddy’s beige Oldsmobile. Mom, jittery in the front seat, kept saying, We’re late, we’re late, and that she hoped that they don’t think we changed our minds. We left our coats on inside the car because the heater didn’t work, and the wind came whistling through rusted-out holes in the sides. My daddy would flip this car a few months later. It wouldn’t be the first time he fell asleep behind the wheel.

  Outside the car window, naked trees swam together. If I kicked my legs as far as I could, my feet didn’t touch the back of my daddy’s seat in front of me. My brother must have looked how he always did in winter: his black hair tangled in his eyelashes and brushing against the collar of his puffy blue coat. He had one pointed ear; mom called it his fawn’s ear. It poked out of his thatch of black hair like a pale mushroom on a forest floor.

  Through the window there were birds. Lots of birds moving with a single mind like winged soldiers in formation.

  Our journey ended in the parking lot of Olga’s Diner next to Route 70 in Marlton. Our breath made clouds above our heads as my mom and daddy opened the car doors to grab Jacob and me for transport from car to building.

  Inside the diner, another couple waited for us at a table. The other daddy wore eyeglasses. Their faces fishbowled as they leaned in to say, What’s your name? to Jacob and me. I buried my head in the dark pocket between Mom’s arm and her belly. I was not afraid, just quiet. After several minutes when no one paid attention to me, I turned around to peer through the ketchup bottles and iced tea glasses to see four pairs of grown-up hands on the table, knotting and unknotting themselves. Rings and watches knocked against plastic cups, metal forks, flaky wooden tabletop. My daddy’s fingernails were ringed in black. He’d had to dig around the belly of the Oldsmobile to get her to start this afternoon, and his fingers were covered in grease. His fingers were always covered in grease.

  I was sandwiched between my mom and daddy as the diner windows fogged over in the sunset. Jacob rat-holed himself under the spinny chairs at the long diner counter and Daddy had to collect him. From inside Mom’s round belly, the heartbeat of my baby sister pulsed against my ear. The other parents must have known this was a test, that, if they passed, they would win a baby as their reward, the very baby girl that was resting in my mother’s stomach just that minute.

  I understood that this sister of mine was going to live somewhere else, away from us, like Becky Jo. This information did not make me think of the baby as less mine. She was my sister, like my brother was my brother and my mother was my mother. The adoptive parents’ claim on my developing sister did not negate mine, she was not a kingdom or a territory or a thing with a deed; she was a person. This baby girl would be both my sister and these other people’s daughter, and my mom’s daughter. There would be moments when one claim took the focus—as right now this baby girl was more Ours than Theirs, and one day she would be more Theirs than Ours, but none of those connections could completely erase the others. It would be easier, perhaps, if they could, if after she was gone we could forget this baby ever belonged to us. But that’s not how people work.

  After the adults finished talking, my mom carried me through the diner and into the night air. Through the diner windows I could see the other mommy and daddy sitting in the booth. They didn’t watch us go, but I watched them. They held hands on the table. They looked smaller and smaller as Mom made her way through the parking lot. She was warm and the air was cold and it was nice to have a nest of a person to snuggle in, but before I could get too comfortable we were back in the car, whistling down the road and back to our corner of the Garden State.

  Daddy moved out the next day, packed his records and boots in boxes. We didn’t see him for another month, until the day that Mom had the baby. She took a cab to the hospital alone, while a neighbor watched Jacob and me until our daddy could be fished out of whatever construction site he was on. He was still covered in sawdust and wet concrete when he picked us up.

  At the hospital, he disappeared behind a set of double doors and Jacob and I were left in the white hallway. My brother was tall enough to look into a wide window above our heads.

  “There are babies in there,” he told me.

  A woman came from behind the desk and lifted me up. Through the window was a room full of babies in clear cribs. The lady pointed to these red-faced bundles and told me, This is a boy, that’s a girl. She pointed to one blue-eyed baby girl in the second row from the front.

  “That’s your sister,” she said.

  All the other babies’ faces were squinched tight, looking like old men, but our sister had her eyes wide open, taking in the room around her. I waved at her in case she could see us. Her hands were wrapped tight against her tiny pink body; she couldn’t wave back if she wanted to.

  Our parents returned, Daddy pushing Mom in a wheelchair, and it was time to go. The lady put me back on the floor and I climbed into my mom’s lap.

  “Her name is Lisa,” my mom said into my hair.

  Marigold Court

  After baby Lisa was adopted, my mom, Jacob, and I moved to another one-bedroom apartment. This was in Marigold Court, an apartment complex in the middle of Camden County, New Jersey. Camden County was like an apple; the bad spots oozed imperceptibly into the good ones. Our town was one of the not-so-bad spots in a county whose biggest bruise was an annual contender for “Murder Capital of the World.”

  Marigold Court was comprised of two brick buildings that faced one another across a cracked parking lot filled more with weeds than with cars. We were one of the 30 percent of families that the U.S. Census Bureau benevolently described as “female households with no husband present.” Everybody in Marigold Court was.

  It was 1986, the era of side ponytails and acid wash. On the radio Robert Palmer crooned about being addicted to love, while the Mothers of Marigold Court coped with the phantom limbs of absent husbands, boyfriends, and married lovers, while surrounded by tiny people—like me and my brother—who couldn’t help that we were these men’s miniatures.

  The Mothers didn’t have their own names, as far as I knew. They were identified by the children they were attached to: Jimmy’s-Mom, Manny-and-Monique’s-Mom, Nick-and-Andy’s-Mom, My-Mom. The Mothers had leathered tan skin, were thin enough that you could count their ribs, and had feathered hair that was short in the front and long in the back. They all wore the same outfit: in the summer, cut-off jean shorts, a striped tank top, and bare feet, and in the winter, Levi’s and layers of long-sleeved shirts that their exes left behind. Except for My-Mom.

  My-Mom’s face was round and flat as a moon. Her brown hair fell in waves down to her shoulders and her wardrobe consisted exclusively of sweatpants and baggy tops. She was fair-skinned, golden-eyed, and sunburned like a newly shorn sheep if she stayed in the sun too long. She was petite, only five feet tall, but her breasts swelled with each of her pregnancies (four by 1986, but the Other Mothers didn’t know that), which made her look a bit like a puff-chested pigeon.

  I believed then that all families operated with moms and kids living in one place and daddies living somewhere else in a similar communal arrangement. The presence of a firehouse up the road from Marigold Court, housing a fraternity of firefighters, strengthened my theory. The firemen, in fact, made their way to Marigold Court with more regularity than any of our fathers did; they were the ones we called when a kid got his head caught in the balcony bars or climbed so high up a tree that he got stuck. The sight of the firemen was a jolt of testosterone that was worth every second when they came around.

  The female residents of the complex appreciated the firemen’s strong shoulders and finesse with a hatchet, but their admiration was less than sexual. They were relieved for the assistance of men no one had to sleep with in order to get some thing done. When the women did have the blessing of a fireman in their apartments, they usually asked him to reach that bowl that had been stuck behind the fridge for a year and to tighten the screws in her kids’ bu
nk beds.

  We always called them “firemen,” but it seemed that when necessary they were paramedics, keepers of the peace, judges, priests, and notary publics. Firemen may have simply been the word the Mothers used for men they trusted to help without possible recriminations, a title for the men who ran in to help with the difficulties that had caused other men to run out. Asking for help was an act of bravery in Marigold Court. We all perched perilously on the knowledge that if the Mothers requested too much assistance from the wrong people—teachers, doctors, police officers, social workers, non-firemen people—us kids could be taken away. Taken away to where was never clear, but the idea of being removed from my mother was a fear that constantly pricked the back of my mind.

  NONE OF the Mothers in Marigold Court were older than thirty-five, and all of their children were younger than fifteen. Our apartments didn’t have phones, because the only people who wanted to contact the Mothers were bill collectors, former boyfriends, ex-husbands, or their parents (the ones who were still talking to them). There was no point in paying a phone bill if all your calls would be scoldings.

  For emergencies, we used the pay phone at the end of the parking lot. The teenage girls milled around by that phone on the weekends wearing every belt they owned slung around their hips, fluffing their hair and smoking cigarettes while they waited for the phone to ring with an invitation to jump into some boy’s car and drive someplace where they could use their fake IDs.

  Some nights after everyone had gone to bed, I heard the pay phone ringing into the darkness. It was a faint chime that echoed around the parking lot. We were all asleep, or pretending to be. Whoever was on the other end of that line was someplace far away from here, and that ring, ring, ringing in the night was a reminder that, whether or not we could see it, there was a whole other world out there. A world that we were all better off not wanting, because it seemed not to care at all about us.

  We kids spent most of our days tromping the plains of the lot between the facing buildings, communicating through grunts and howls. We didn’t have many toys, but we didn’t need them; the complex and its surroundings provided plenty of playthings. There was an overgrown field behind the apartment complex. No one knew whom the field belonged to, it was fenced in, but the gate was never locked. The packed earth path down the center of the field was the best shortcut to get to Mr. Ed’s Corner Mart to stock up on Push Pops. This shortcut had been handed down from the older kids, and it was our job to tread it regularly to keep it clear for the ones who would come after us. It was the only heirloom we had, and this simple act made us part of something large, something important.

  Wild grass grew on either side of the path, topping out at two feet above my head. Monique, a beautiful fourteen-year-old with braids running to the middle of her back and skin the color of diner coffee, told me that people let their dogs loose in the field after they turned mean and couldn’t be around kids anymore; it was cheaper than having the dogs put down. Monique said that there were one hundred dogs in that field; a staggering number for which I had no frame of reference until she found a jar of pennies and we counted one hundred of them onto the sidewalk. Looking at all those pennies and imagining each one was a mean, lonely dog sent a shiver down my spine.

  The set of railroad tracks that ran behind the buildings was the setting for Explorers, a game in which participants searched for things to place on the rails and be flattened when the train passed through. Whoever ended up with the most interesting flattened thing was the winner. There was Target Practice, in which we threw rocks at the dumpster at the end of the lot from farther and farther distances. When we tired of these games, we played Monster, in which the kid who had medically prescribed leg braces put them on and chased us. When he kicked you in the shins, you were out. It was like tag, but with more bruises.

  The ground-floor apartments had giant sliding glass doors that opened onto the lot; it was as if the place were designed specifically for the convenient simultaneous viewing of All My Children and the antics of us little hooligans outside. The Mothers fluttered around Nick-and-Andy’s-Mom’s linoleum table like wasps around syrup, smoking Virginia Slims and waiting for welfare checks. Their earrings fluttered against nests of hair that barely moved, cocktail rings clicked against acrylic nails in a symphony of uniquely feminine composition. They wore drugstore perfume and sipped large clinking glasses of iced tea while they helped Jessica’s-Mom paste together proofs of yellow-page ads. Jessica’s-Mom got $1.50 under the table for each completed page she turned in to the phone book guy. The Mothers materialized in the parking lot when one of us hollered loud enough. All you had to do was scream, “Mom!” at the top of your lungs and whichever Mother drew the short straw came running.

  I was a head shorter than any kids my age and bruised easily, so I spent most of my time sitting on the sidelines. My favorite retreat was the cool tile confines of the bathroom in our apartment. I laid flat on my back in the enameled bathtub and sang every song I could think of and some that I made up. The voice that vibrated through the iron tub and the surrounding tile seemed to come from outside of me and bounce back again; the low-level reverberation of the tub itself had a hypnotic effect. If we could pay the water bill that month, I would draw a bath and put my ears under the water to feel the voice stirring it like a sea breeze.

  MANY OF the Mothers in Marigold Court were former foster kids, runaways, and high school dropouts; my mother was all of the above. My mother’s parents were both from middle-class Philadelphia families. Her father, Charles, was an aircraft specialist for the Air Force. Her mother, Joan, was a homemaker. My mom, the youngest of three daughters, was born while Charles was stationed at the Royal Air Force Sculthorpe base in England.

  In photographs from that time in the 1960s their family is catalog-perfect. Three little girls in white dresses tucked into a green lawn, smiling mother, handsome father. But Joan didn’t like England. She wanted to go home to Philadelphia. She yearned for places she recognized, dinner with her sister, visits with her aunts. After my mother was born, Joan grew paranoid; started to see shadows everywhere she looked. Living in a city full of strangers didn’t help assuage her anxiety. After my grandparents moved back to Philadelphia, Joan refused to move again. So Charles worked subsequent posts in New York and Mississippi alone, driving back to Philadelphia on long weekends to see his family. He wasn’t exactly happy to do it, but he was willing to if it meant keeping the peace. He would have done it forever if Joan had been willing.

  On the day Charles finished his assignment in Mississippi he came home to an empty house. He called around to Joan’s friends until he located his wife; she was at a bar with her mother and had left the girls with her sister. Joan was less than thrilled to be dragged out of a bar by her husband. She fumed. She told my grandfather that she didn’t love him anymore; she’d met someone else. She wanted a divorce. By the time Charles sent the papers—from his new post in Minneapolis—Joan could hardly remember asking for them. She stood in stocking feet in the front entry of their Philadelphia house and showed the fat envelop to her daughters. “He really did it,” she said, over and over, first to them, then to herself. “He really did it.”

  It would be years before anyone realized that what really possessed Joan was paranoid schizophrenia. Her daughters knew something wasn’t right, but they were little girls; no one paid any attention to their stories. When her husband was away, Joan had taken to hiding her children’s shoes so they couldn’t leave the house. She didn’t send them to school, afraid that they would be turned against her. She was prone to rages. One day, at the end of a screaming argument with herself, Joan sent my mother away with the housekeeper. Just little Peggy, alone. All Joan’s mental turmoil had started when Peggy was born, so surely the girl was the source of her problems. When social workers came to investigate, Joan told them that her husband had walked out on them. That she was overwhelmed. That it would just be temporary until she could get back on her feet. So my mom was placed in a
foster home one town over from her sisters and her mother. She was six years old.

  For months Mom asked her foster parents to call her father, he would come for her. His name is Charles and he’s in the Air Force, she kept telling them, but they didn’t look. They believed what Joan told them. And because Joan always managed to procure my mother for holiday gatherings and family functions, a year passed before Charles discovered that his daughter had become a ward of the state. By the time he found out, all the official paperwork said he had abandoned his family. Once it was part of the public record, how could he argue?

  Peggy remained in foster care until she was twelve years old, when Social Services asked her were she wanted to live. She said, I want to live with my dad. Charles was remarried by then—to Mimi—and living in Oklahoma City. That reunification experiment lasted five years, in which time my mother failed out of ninth grade three times and then hopped a Greyhound bus back to New Jersey when she was seventeen years old. She ended up back in foster care when Joan called her a traitor and turned her away. That was when she met my daddy, Michael, in the summer of 1978, at a Christian summer camp. She was a camper, and he was a counselor. They prayed together around a campfire one night and were engaged three months later.

  MY MOM, Jacob, and I had been living in Marigold Court for almost a year when I got the mumps and had to be quarantined. Mumps spread quickly in a group of kids, so I was sent away with Daddy.

  “You can take care of her for one week,” Mom told him when he knocked on our front door.

  Daddy drove me to his mother’s house and left me there. I lay on the gold brocade couch in my grandmother Hall’s living room for three days. That is where I was when my mom met with the woman who would become my next little sister’s mother.