Bastards: A Memoir (25 page)

I whispered to myself, I’m fine.

Two minutes . . .

But the twang in the PA voice was gone. It was a new voice, a familiar voice, a voice that growled in the New Jersey accent that I had abandoned in second grade.

Pack it in, Pumpkin. Time to go.

It was talking to me.

Of course I am, genius. You’re going nuts here.

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. I closed my eyes tighter, chanted faster. I’mfineI’mfineI’mfineI’mfineI’mfine.

You’re so full of shit. Literally. You’re nowhere close to fine.

I’m fine.

You’re leaving empty bowls in the sink at Mimi and Granddad’s house.

They have enough to worry about.

Sugar, somebody needs to worry about you.

No, they don’t.

You don’t want them to really know you. Cuz if they really knew you they’d think they failed.

They know me. They’re my . . . parents.

On paper . . .

Leave me alone. You aren’t real!

Yeah, I am. You know. On some level, you’ve always known. That feeling, low and constant, that something was coming for you? You knew that was me.

I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought that when you came for me it would be quick and final. Like a car accident, or a tornado, or cancer. Not a literal shit-storm.

I had to get your attention, Pumpkin.

Don’t call me that.

Reminds you of who we really are, don’t it?

I am not you.

Let it out; you’re not hurting my feelings.

What do you want?

I want my turn. These last few years would have been a lot more fun if I were running things.

Well, you weren’t.

Neither were you. You’ve never done a single thing that somebody didn’t choose for you. There’s no mystery why you’re holding that book right now.

Sometimes I followed the advice of people who . . . knew better than me.

You did more than that; you let
’
em call all the shots.

Maybe I did.

And are you happy with that?

I was until you started talking to me.

Bullshit. You’ve been miserable your whole life.

I haven’t been miserable; I’ve been busy—

Busy?

Yeah, busy, sticking to the plan.

What plan? It’s been one foot in front of the other for you since you were four. You only looked up long enough for someone to pat you on the head and point you in the next direction. You couldn’t follow the same path again, step-for-step, if you tried.

Yes, I could.

You went along with everyone else’s plans for you ever since you let Mimi and Granddad adopt you.

I didn’t let them adopt me; I chose to be adopted.

That’s not what I remember. I remember wanting to be back home, in New Jersey, with my mother. I remember being afraid all the time, being scared of Granddad after Jacob left, I remember being so homesick I thought I could die.

Do you remember wanting to eat every day? Wanting to have electricity? Wanting to go to school? Because I do. Does that make me a horrible person? Is it a crime to want to be around grown-ups who know how to take care of things, who show up on time to pick you up from dance recitals and school and sleepovers? Who are there every single day? I remember wanting to stay with my sister. I remember not wanting to end up a high school dropout, or in jail. Is that where you’re talking to me from? Fucking jail?

No, I’m talking to you from the test prep aisle of the bookstore, because that’s where you’re standing holding a goddamn LSAT book!

Stop it.

No, you stop it! Put the book down. PUT THE FUCKING BOOK DOWN AND LOOK AT YOURSELF.

I don’t want to . . .

So what do you want?

What do you want me to say?

I want YOU to WANT something for once. Something that nobody told you to want.

I want. I do. Want things.

Like what, princess?

I want something that will make this all worth it; I want the good stuff. I’m ready for the goddamn silver lining. I want to have sisters who live down the street, I want a family; I want a mother to call when I need to know the right temperature to cook a goddamn chicken. I want Sunday suppers and summer barbecues at lake houses. I want to stop second-guessing every tiny detail of every single day, every word that comes out of my mouth. I want to be brave. I want to jump without looking down all the time. I want to be able to watch a TV show without seeing things that remind me about my sisters, about the could-have-been family. I want us to push tables together in restaurants so we all fit, I want to fill benches and rows of bleachers with us, I want the world to make room. I want to laugh too loud and make people wish they were us. I want them to feel it. Those perfect families, those perfect packages, those smug titles for everyone—mother father sister brother, step-this and half-that. They all have words for what they are. And we don’t. I want that.

One minute . . . The bookstore will be closing in one minute . . .

What?

What do you want to do with your life?

I don’t know . . . What do you want to do?

I asked you first.

“Excuse me, miss, we’re closed now.”

There was a hand on my arm. A store clerk with thick glasses stared back at me.

“Are you all right?”

He touched my arm again in that overly familiar way that people of the plains have, believing, as they seem to, that they could never offend someone.

I didn’t like people touching me. That simple thought was pure motivation and I moved my arm away. The book landed with a
thwap
on the floor and I turned on my heel and I left.
I am fine
, I said, and I left the book on the floor and the clerk in the aisle and I was gone. I walked until I felt the parking lot crunch beneath my feet. I leaned against my car and sucked in the night air in giant gulps.

I knew I wasn’t going to sleep that night, but the act of lying in bed for a few hours soothed me. In the dark, I wondered if my spell in the bookstore was what it had been like for my grandmother Joan. Was this how the schizophrenia that led her to desert Peggy began? Was this what it was like for her when she heard the voices that told her to send her daughter away? Had I finally lost my mind?

I decided that the difference between Joan and me was that I realized I had a hallucination. I also realized that it must have been brought on by lack of sleep. It was a waking dream, which made some sense. My body wasn’t sleeping, but my mind was still dreaming. Right? Of course. Obviously.

By 8:21 the next morning, I was back in my car wearing smart slacks and a silk blouse. I gulped from a mug of coffee. The caf feine couldn’t have helped the insomnia, but it was the only thing that allowed me to function during daylight hours. I sat in the parking lot outside the bank building. I watched the clock on my cell phone creep closer to 8:30.

8:23—The phone was the exact phone that my best friend from high school chose before me. From the deep knot in my stomach, I heard,
You can’t even pick out your own phone.
I grew nauseous. I pushed the car door open, but my legs refused to step onto the asphalt.

8:25—I had five minutes to walk through the lobby, take the elevator to the fifth floor, make the coffee, and be in the morning meeting.

8:27—The clock on my cell phone blinked. My hands wouldn’t move.

8:29—If I sprinted from my car, through the lobby, and up the elevator to the fifth floor, I’d still be late for work.

I
was
late for work.

I’d never been late for work in my life.

8:30—I should have been at my desk, saying things like,
Good morning, sir
, and
The weather’s getting chilly, don’t you think?
But I wasn’t. I was still in my car, in the parking lot, a hundred yards from my desk, and I wasn’t going anywhere.

8:32—I was, officially, brazenly, late for work.

Fuck it.

I pulled the car door closed. I pinned my eyes wide and drove. I drove until I reached a doctor’s office.

In my family, help came from a doctor or a priest. Ailments of the body went to the doctor; plagues of the mind and spirit were the purview of the priest. If neither of them could help you, then you didn’t have a problem and you had to get over it.

The only available doctor was a friendly blond woman, a pediatrician. All the grown-up doctors were booked solid.

The pediatrician clicked her pen. She opened my chart and read back the list of symptoms I told the receptionist when I’d arrived at the front desk.

You’re here for . . .

Insomnia.

And . . . chronic constipation?

I cringed.

Yeah. And other digestive stuff.

Vomiting? Reflux? Cramping?

Yes. Yes. Yes. All of those.

Fever?

No.

How long since you slept?

Three weeks. No. Four.

Lay back on the table, please.

She dug her fingers into my stomach. I concentrated on my breath. I didn’t like people touching my body. I didn’t even like
me
touching my body. Putting contact lenses in my own eyes was necessary for the sake of vanity, and even that small bit of business took me months to execute when I got the things in eighth grade. I concentrated on the ceiling tiles and shivered with humiliation.

We’re gonna need an X-ray.

I put on a paper gown. A technician took three pictures of my viscera. A nurse filled four vials with my blood. I filled one cup with my urine. I waited. There were two missed calls on my cell phone from the temp agency. The pediatrician returned.

There were no signs of Crohn’s, celiac. No obstructions.

She held the black and bluish film where I could see it. My softest places, twisted and knotted, collapsed in on themselves like bridges and tunnels ravaged by a storm.

You’re all knotted up.

That’s what it looks like.

These things are sometimes psychosomatic. Which means that—

It means it’s all in my head.

That doesn’t make it less real.

The pediatrician was earnest now.

How old are you?

Twenty-three.

She nodded.

Have you ever heard of a “quarter-life crisis”?

I imagined slapping her pert pink cheek.

You’re too young to be so stressed out! Go for a jog! Hang out with your friends. Go to a football game!

She squeezed my knee and grinned into my face.

This should give you a little kick-start.

The pediatrician handed me a prescription slip.

It’s a stimulant to get your insides moving.

She squeezed her hands closed, fingers over palms, like the way a person waves to a baby, to illustrate for me.

And this . . .

She jiggled a brown paper bag.

. . . this should give you a li’l boost.

The bag was filled with sample packs for Effexor.

It’s an antidepressant. Take one of those packs a day. Should last you a month. If you’re still blocked up after that . . . we’ll have to get more aggressive.

I DIDN’T
want to think what “more aggressive” would look like.

I was glad to have pills. Pills were a sign that I had a real problem, not an imagined one. I saw the doctor. She gave me pills. Therefore, I was ill. I filled my prescription and drove to the house on Forty-fourth Street. Mimi was napping; she was only awake for a few hours at a time now. Granddad was in the living room, eating the lunch he’d eaten for ten years—a red delicious apple, a handful of pretzels, and a diet Dr Pepper.

“I’m sick,” I said when I passed him. “I have pills.” I raised the bags for him to see. He looked concerned, asked if there was anything he could do, but I waved him off. I was taking care of it.

I took my pills and lay down in the guest bedroom. The drugs competed with one another to control my body. The antidepressant covered my senses in a nonstick coating, while the stimulant liquefied my insides. Outside, I was Teflon and inside, I effervesced. It was not pleasant and not unpleasant. I stared at the drop ceiling.

The knot in my center loosened. I didn’t know what dark force would escape when it unraveled completely. I tried not to think about the voice from last night, the voice of the other me. Yesterday, I would have called it anxiety. Yesterday, I would have said that my preoccupation with bad things happening to me was a tad self-absorbed. Today, though, I knew where that feeling came from.

It began in 1989, the day that I left New Jersey. It grew bigger each time I corrected myself to fit a new place: Oklahoma, the Church, high school, college. Every time I submitted to someone. It was all coming to a head now. It was her. It was Mary Hall. It was my shadowy and coarse other self. The girl who lived in Marigold Court, who ran from wild dogs and was grateful for firemen and who hid in basements when her daddy played guitar in strange houses. She was the deep wrongness in me, the thing I feared would draw disaster to me like a tornado to a trailer park. I was not expecting to bargain the terms of my existence between my physical self and my psychic self. Mary Hall might have only existed in my mind for the past sixteen years, but she was more real than the person I had been pretending to be.

I was a clipping. I was a knockoff, the bastard version of the girl I was born to be.

In this fresh state of awareness I realized I hadn’t cried in thirteen years. Not since Jacob left Oklahoma. I didn’t cry when Mimi got sick, or when I left for college, not when I met Lisa, not when I said goodbye to her again. Not for things that any normal person would be affected by. Those things had made me sad, but I turned away from that sadness immediately, as if I had accidentally touched a hot stove.

Denial is a crooked crutch. When it’s all you have, you don’t see how it bends away from you, the way it makes each step longer and more tedious. When you’re deep in reliance on such a twisted thing, you adjust yourself to accommodate it. You two coil together so tight that it becomes impossible to tell where you end and it begins. You have to break your own bones to get at it, break yourself up so you can be set straight. It’s messy work best done alone, so you set right. So you don’t grow your bones around some other crooked thing and have to break yourself up again.