A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body (22 page)

One night the phone at the hostess stand rang. “Arthur's Bar and Grill, can I help you?” I answered, trying not to sound as bored as I was.

It was my mom, who never called me at work. I wasn't even aware she knew where I worked.

“LAUREN, THE EAGLE HAS LANDED!” she yelled. “HE'S LANDED! I GOT HER! COME HOME RIGHT NOW! I GOT HER!” She was talking so loudly that the party of five waiting to be seated asked me who “her” was.

I told them it was a fishing thing and asked to leave work early.

When I opened the front door to my parents' house the first thing I heard was my mother screaming, “WE GOT HER!!”

 

 

As she told me what had happened in the last twenty-four hours, I stood over the sink shoving handful after handful of stale microwave popcorn in my face. I didn't bother to shut my mouth or swallow—I just chewed furiously and took in her story.

Continuing her life of crime, my mom had bribed Jim, the Pizza Hut committee member, who conveniently worked in a hospital, to go into the state records and see what he could find. He had typed my name into the computer and my
birth mother's name had come right up. He called my mother immediately and gave her the name: Diane McQuillen.

My mother researched McQuillens who lived in the area where I was born and discovered the only current listing was an Emily and David McQuillen. When she felt it was getting too hot (“too close to the flame”), she handed the information to her assistant PI, Jim, whom she'd been working closely with over the years and trusted.

Jim called the McQuillens, posing as an insurance man who needed to contact Diane. Sure enough, Emily and David were Diane's parents. Suspecting that the nervous man on the other end of the phone was not who he said he was, they offered to call their daughter on his behalf and give his number to her. Emily hung up and immediately called Diane, who now lived in Denver.

“She's back,” Emily said to Diane. “The baby has come back.”

At this point I was feeling incredibly relieved that nobody had threatened to shoot anybody for “meddling in their personal business.” And it was happening. After so many dead ends, the answers were just flowing and flowing. And if things kept going like this, I knew I'd soon be talking to my birth mother, and that was something I'd never allowed myself to imagine. So for the moment I just tried to wait and see what was next.

My mom continued her story: Diane, who was at work when she got the call, snuck to a pay phone and called Jim back.

“This is Diane,” she said. “My parents told me you were looking for me?”

“Yes,” Jim said. “Does the date March 5, 1969, mean anything to you, Diane?”

It did. It was the day her parents re-mortgaged their farm. It was also the day she had a baby. Diane was my mother.

 

 

A
fter making the initial contact, Jim had set up a time for my mother and me to call Diane: that same night. My mother was sharpening pencils and prepping questions from her research notebooks—as if she was sure Diane was going to jump on board, thrilled to be found and be reminded of her sordid past.

“Did you ever think that maybe I was a product of some incest/rape situation that maybe she doesn't want to be reminded of?” I asked my mom.

“Well, the inbred thing has crossed our minds quite a bit,” Mom said. “But I doubt she'd be so eager to talk to us if there was some big trauma.”

I thought she was being so naive. I suspected that Diane agreed to arrange the call so she could tell us to once and for all leave her alone. “There is a reason why I gave her up—please
respect that reason,” she'd explain. Then she'd refer us to her letter published in Dear Abby.

I changed my mind. I didn't want to make the call. “What if we can't understand her?” I asked my mom. I remembered the yellowed column stuck on the fridge:
Signed, Leave Me Alone in Alabama.

“I'm pretty sure she speaks English,” my mom said. She already had the receiver in her hand and was getting ready to dial.

“No, I mean, because she's missing half her teeth and has a mouth full of chewing tobacco ...”

Mom finished dialing and put the phone to her ear. My dad was in the next room, watching a repeat of
The Rockford Files.
But sensing something big was happening in the house, he switched it off and just sat in his chair looking toward the kitchen. I held on to the counter so I didn't start shaking.

My mom was beaming, until someone on the other end of the line answered. Then her face fell and I could see how scared she was.

In the smallest voice I'd ever heard her use, she said, “Hello? Diane? Hello. My name is Sharon Weedman and I'm calling about Lauren. I'm her mom. I mean, you're her mom!”

I could hear Diane's laugh coming through the phone, and that was it. My mom started laughing too, and continued with what she now saw as a hilarious joke: “No! You're her mother!”

The “No, you are!”s went back and forth for a while before my mom got serious and picked up her pencil. She wanted to get some solid facts for the book she was working on, called
I Searched ... I Found!

Mom's excitement was so sweet and intense that I worried she'd thank Diane for the information and hang up. She told Diane that in the book she would refer to her as my “BM” (birth mother).

“BM! Right! You're her BM! Ha ha ha!” she giggled into the phone. “Oh, Lauren's giving me a dirty look. She doesn't like the term ‘bowel movement' so I usually say ‘BM,' which she hates even more. Now, Diane, do you like to eat? Because Lauren sure does. We just can't get her out of the kitchen. In fact she's in the kitchen right now! Yes. She's standing right in front of me.”

Suddenly she seemed to notice I had been standing there the entire time.

“Oh, Diane,” she said, looking at me. “Thank you so much. She's just great. We've just had a lot of fun with her. Did you want to talk to her?”

I clenched up, worried that Diane might say, “No thanks, but tell her I said, ‘Hi.'” It was possible that my mother had already worn her out, and that I would end up with a Hallmark card and five bucks' back-allowance.

“Well hold on, I'll put her on!” my mother said.

She told me to pick up the phone in the other room. I was hoping for a little more privacy, but since I'd been the
one breaking into people's rooms all my life, I doubted I'd earned it.

When I picked up the phone in the library, my mom's voice came blasting out. “So when is your birthday? Do you have any diabetes in the family?”

Just when I was about to give up on ever getting a chance to say something, my dad walked into the kitchen.

“Oh my god, Sid's in the kitchen too, now!” Mom screamed into the phone. “Wow, this is a big night!”

I wasn't sure my dad knew I was adopted, much less what all this excitement was about. But I heard him gently ask my mom to hang up so that I could have a chance to say hello. Hearing him ask her that made me so sad I almost wanted to hang up too.

When Mom finally did hang up, Diane and I sat on the phone for a few seconds in silence. It was too much, I thought. It was way too much.

All my life, whenever I watched television shows that featured a birth scene, I'd feel sorry for myself. I couldn't help thinking that at the moment I was born, instead of an outpouring of love and a counting of toes there was a whisking away of Baby Jane Doe to avoid the pain and the shame. Finally, this could be the celebration I'd always suspected I had been denied. Or it could just as easily not be.

But when I first heard the sound of her voice it became very simple.

Diane didn't sound ashamed or angry or inbred. (Or—sadly—Jewish.) She sounded real.

“Well hi, Lauren,” Diane said in the sweetest voice I'd ever heard. “This is a pretty exciting phone call, huh?”

It's a cliché but I have to say it—if it wasn't for my editor Brangien Davis, this book would not have been possible. She worked so hard with me the entire time and I am very grateful.

And the following people also were key supportive folks who were so good to me I almost feel guilty ('cuz I talk shit behind their backs all the time—just kidding). Deep thanks to:

Lauren Weedman made her television debut on Comedy Central's Emmy Award-winning
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
in 2001 as a featured correspondent. At the same time, Lauren was a regular on NPR's national political satire show
Rewind
and appeared Off Broadway in her solo show
Homecoming
at the Westside Theatre in New York City. For two years, Lauren was also a cast member for the long-running local-turned-national comedy show
Almost Live
for Comedy Central and guest starred on several episodes of
Reno 911!

Prior to her television work, she studied, wrote, and performed in Amsterdam for five years. Lauren returned to the States with her first play
Homecoming,
which began as a 15-minute performance art piece that ultimately grew into a full-length show. She also toured with the Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Later that year,
Homecoming
was featured at HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, before finding its
way Off Broadway.
Homecoming
earned Lauren the honor of being published in
Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2002
. In Fall 2002, the Empty Space Theatre in Seattle premiered her solo work
Rash
, which was recognized by the
Seattle Times'
Footlight Awards, with nods for both “Best New Play” and “Best Solo Performance.”

Rash
received tremendous reviews, including: “Weedman comes so very close to celebrating indulgence rather than just contemplating it that when she manages to do both things at once, it's dizzyingly brilliant: She ends up hitting all her targets—including herself” (
Seattle Weekly
) and “Since first turning up on Seattle stages in the early 1990s, Lauren Weedman has proved herself one terrifically funny gal. And more people know that since she moved to New York two years ago and earned some well-deserved breaks in TV and Off Broadway” (
Seattle Times
).

Other solo shows include
Amsterdam
,
If Ornaments Had Lips
, and
Wreckage
. Her latest play—
Bust
—about her work as a volunteer at the Los Angeles County Jail, was named “Best of Theatre” by
Seattle Magazine
in 2006.

Lauren is also the recipient of a 2007 Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship.

She currently lives in Los Angeles and is developing a pilot for Oxygen TV based on her Web series
Our Bodies, Myself
.

Copyright © 2007 by Lauren Weedman

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

 

The chapters “Diary of a Journal Reader,” “I'm Hugging You with My Voice,” and “A Fatty-Gay Christmas” were first published, in slightly different form, in Swivel magazine.

 

Publisher's note: Thanks go to Brangien Davis, who provided invaluable editorial guidance as the manuscript was written, revised, and polished.

 

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weedman, Lauren.

A woman trapped in a woman's body : tales from a life of cringe / Lauren

Weedman.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-570-61746-1

1. Autobiographical fiction, American. I. Title.

 

PS3623.E42W66 2007

813'.6--dc22

2007020905

 

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