Bastards: A Memoir (26 page)

So far I had avoided being rocked by the impacts of my life’s turmoil by subconsciously shutting down my emotional centers. But in life, no one is spared, no one is let off the hook. Those buried sensations had to come out, be felt, addressed, and lived through.

I wish I could say I let it all out that night. All of the tears, all of the screams, all of the bullshit. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. It would take something much stronger to bring all that out of me. Still. By the time the sun rose the next morning, one thing had changed: I was no longer full of shit.

I moved out of the house on Forty-fourth Street for the final time. Maybe it looked like running away, but it felt like the right move. I could see the hurt and concern on Mimi and Granddad’s faces as I dragged out my boxes of books and sweaters. I wanted to not hurt them. I wanted to take it back. But I couldn’t do what I needed to do without hurting them. Hurting them was part of it. I needed to trust them to be hurt and not abandon me.

I drove west; needing to escape the gravitational pull of both of my families and anyone who knew them. I needed to wallow in uncertainty, without the balancing effects of religion or school, or friends, or family to cling to. If I was ever going to figure out who I was, I needed to be a stranger again.

Requiem

L
os Angeles.

I’d never seen the city before I moved in. The California in my mind was so sunny, so easy, so obvious. But it was far away from anyone or anything I knew and there wouldn’t be any school, church, or parents to give me rules to follow.

My apartment was in Los Feliz. The neighborhood was named after a man who had been the mayor of Los Angeles when it was a pueblo under Mexican rule, but it also translated as “happy” in Spanish. It was nestled at the foot of Hollywood Hills and covered in palm trees; so it was easy to think the name came from the latter.

Los Angeles was a city full of transplants, of people searching for fame, glory, or inner peace. I wouldn’t say I was entirely at home, but I no longer felt like the strangest person in the room. I found a job managing a restaurant in West Hollywood and made friends slowly. I was vigilant against my habit of absorbing people’s gestures and sublimating my own thoughts. In the absence of other people to influence me, I slowly discovered the things I liked and didn’t like. I was like a baby; everything was new.

For the first year in Los Feliz, all I owned was an air mattress and a table. And I was fine. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the scrappiness I’d learned as a child in South Jersey was still part of my foundation; it hadn’t died under the years of material comfort as I feared.

Other than my sisters, I’d never known anyone who had been adopted. In my first year in Los Angeles I met nearly a dozen. It was the first time I interacted with strangers who, in the middle of a banal conversation, used the words
birth parents
,
adoptive parents
, and described varying degrees of siblinghood with alacrity. In those moments I felt insignificant in a good way. Like the way you do when you look up at the sky on a clear night after a rain and you are so squashed under the enormity of so many stars that your little people problems don’t seem like anything worth worrying about.

It was difficult for me to think about going back to ways that I had previously existed. High school reunions, college reunions, friends’ weddings that would be full of people from my prior lives, were minefields. On the rare occasion I attended such things, I could feel myself contorting to fit their expectations of how I should behave, like the girl I had been before, and I loathed myself for it. But some reunions were inevitable.

I’d been living in Los Angeles for two years when I got the call from Granddad. “You have to come now. The doctors say this is it,” he said.

I was in a cab to LAX before I hung up the phone.

Jacob picked me up in Dallas on his way up from Houston and we drove together into a massive ice storm. We arrived in Oklahoma City in time to grab Becca from the Will Rogers World Airport.

Granddad was in the room with Mimi when Jacob, Becca, and I arrived at the hospital. He wore a translucent fiber gown and plastic gloves over his light blue sweater. Mimi’s chart showed that she had a staph infection on her skin at one point in her hospital stay, and the protocol required all of us to wear those things if we wanted to touch her.

“I don’t see how it matters now,” Granddad said, gently releasing Mimi’s hand so he could hug Becca and me hello.

His eyes were rimmed in red and his sweater sagged at the elbows and belly. He must have lost fifteen pounds since I’d last seen him.

“Can I talk to her?” Jacob gestured to Mimi in the bed.

“Oh, sure, sure.” Granddad pulled a gown and gloves from a box by the door.

My brother rested his gloved hands lightly on Mimi’s left arm. He told her about his wife and his two young sons. “I’m sorry they won’t get to meet you,” he said. “You’d like them, they’re good boys.”

Listening to Jacob’s words felt like an intrusion. But curiosity was more powerful than my sense of propriety. I needed to see it with my own eyes, what the act of letting go looked like. I was glad that there was someone older than me to go first. It would be my turn soon and I had no idea where I would begin.

There were too many things to say. For ten years I knew this day was coming. I’d had plenty of time to prepare. But so much of that decade had been chewed up by my attempts to figure out who I was, with retreating into the cocoon of the reunions with my sisters. I hadn’t yet begun to unpack my relationship with Mimi. And now it was time. I would have to speak both sides of our conversation. As Mary, I would say that I was sorry for not being around more in her final years. Then I’d say Mimi’s part—that she forgave me. Mimi would say that she was sorry she’d sent my brother away. And I would say that I forgave her, too. It was all so long ago.

Granddad hugged us goodbye and said he would be back in the morning to relieve us.

This would be harder for Becca and Granddad than for me. They loved Mimi, and it was obvious she loved them, too. Becca was losing her mother, a woman she adored and who adored her. What was I losing?

Mimi was a legend, a mentor, a monster, an artisan, an icon to me. I blamed her and hated her and was fascinated by her. But I also wanted to be like her. Strong and efficient, fierce and wise. I respected her and misunderstood her and didn’t know her, not really.

Underneath everything I regretted and was sorry for, I was simultaneously stupidly, messily grateful. That she came to New Jersey that day in 1989, that she brought me to a place where I could play piano and sing in church and read books to her out loud in her basement workshop. That she told me I could leave even when she was sick, that she hadn’t held me hostage when she could have. I couldn’t remember if I told her thank you, or if I just thought it at her and hoped she’d picked up on it.

Did she love me? I had never been sure, and now I would never know. Those thoughts seemed picayune and cruel against the vast backdrop of life and death.

Jacob, Becca, and I spent the night with her at the hospital. I relied on the only thing that had never disappointed me: the words of other people. I started singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” a song Mimi had played in the car often when I was a kid. Becca chimed in with the alto line and for a few moments—mere fragments of breath—we met in effortless harmony. The song joined me and my sister and brother and Mimi in a way we had never been before. A way we never would be again.

It was nine o’clock on New Year’s morning when Granddad returned and my brother, sister, and I drove to the house on Forty-fourth Street to shower.

Mimi drew her final breath when we were on our way back to the hospital. Jolene was waiting for us in the lobby when we walked through the doors.

“Oh! Mary, she’s gone. She just slipped away, just now.” Jolene patted my shoulders with both of her hands, in a close approximation of a hug. That syllable “Oh!” always struck me. The surprise of it, the shock, the desperation, like a splash of ice-cold water on my face.

After the hospital arranged to transport Mimi to the funeral home, Granddad and I went to the church we had attended since I was ten years old. It was the Feast of the Solemnity of Mary, a holy day of obligation. Since I’d moved to Los Angeles I had been taking a break from the Church. But I couldn’t let Granddad attend alone. He would be sitting in this pew alone every Sunday; I couldn’t let him start today.

We sat in the fifth pew from the back on the left-hand side of the altar, the place he and Mimi had sat for eighteen years. Becca and Jacob stayed at the house on Forty-fourth Street to receive the people who dropped by with puddings and lasagnas. During the announcements at the end of service the priest advised the parish, “This morning we lost a longtime parishioner, Mimi King.”

I had been expecting that; it’s what was done before the Requiem Aeternam prayer.

But this time the priest took a detour. “You’ve all seen her, the tiny lady in the fifth pew on the left”—he gestured to the spot where Granddad and I stood—“accompanied by her husband Charles, whose steadfast care and devotion are the greatest testament of love that I have ever seen.”

Granddad gripped the back of the pew in front of us and I reached over to cover his hands with mine; he hated anyone making a fuss. I felt his wedding band and his garnet ring against my palm. I was overwhelmed by that word,
love
, again, like I always had been, flattened under the weight of everything I did not understand.

The priest said:

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord.

And in a single baritone wave, the congregation responded:

And may perpetual light shine upon her.
May she rest in peace.
Amen.

After Mass, Granddad and I met Jolene at the funeral home. She wanted to curl Mimi’s hair for the laying out. “I couldn’t stand it if she didn’t look like herself,” Jolene said.

The funeral director set us up in a back room of the garage where they parked the limousine fleet. The floor and walls were concrete and the place was freezing. I stood to keep my blood flowing.

Mimi’s body was laid on a steel table, covered with a sheet. Only her head poked out. Her face was made up with peach cheeks, pink lips. Flesh-colored paste covered the bruises where the oxygen mask had rubbed her skin raw. It was clear that Mimi was no longer present in this humanlike shell in front of us. The body on the table was just a body. It looked more like one of the dolls Mimi sculpted than a person.

I pulled a notepad out of my purse to begin the obituary. We didn’t need to discuss it; Jolene and I knew it needed to be done and that we were the ones who would do it. We were Mimi’s daughters, which made us sisters. I wasn’t sure if Jolene would be a stepsister, or a half-sister, or both; I’d only ever acknowledged that relationship as a punch line.

“Mimi was the kind of person you’d want on your side,” I brainstormed.

“You really think so?” Jolene snorted, nearly swallowing the hairpins in the corner of her mouth.

“I remember one time, when Mother and I lived behind the bar . . . she promised to drive a girlfriend to the hospital when she went into labor. The husband was overseas.” Jolene combed a severe part with a rattail comb. “Well, the day came, and boy! The phone was just ringing off the hook and Mother was dead asleep. That woman took a cab to have her baby.”

There was too much new information in that story. Mimi had lived behind a bar, had been a daytime sleeper, had flaked out on someone who needed her.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this . . .” Jolene’s hands dropped to her sides. “They have people to do this. It’s just silly and sentimental. I’ve never set hair on a . . . like this.”

Her fingers were red and the cuticles jagged from where she’d stabbed them with hairpins.

Later, I returned to the house on Forty-fourth Street and went straight to the bookcases in the hallway, to the drawers of mementos that Mimi never let me go through. I sat in the middle of the room with all the lights blazing and unearthed stacks of black-and-white photos, translucent birth certificates and marriage licenses. Photos of toddler Mimi with her hair in a blunt bowl cut rested on top of a 1945 portrait of Mimi with her hair ornately curlicued around her face. Underneath were photographs of the red-cheeked boys that she’d married before Granddad. By my count there had been at least three. She’d sat for a professional portrait every year, it seemed, from 1942 until she married Granddad in 1966. Her hair faded from raven-black to golden blond as the years progressed. Her dimples became less pronounced. She wasn’t smiling in any of the pictures—though sometimes she smirked. Her face was always bare except for a swipe of lipstick, her eyebrows were always perfect. Most of the time her ears were covered. She hated her ears.

Is this what makes a person? A catalog of former surnames and peccadilloes? When I strung them together, what did I have? Mimi hated her ears and was married many times and one time she let her friend take a cab to the hospital and one time she taught me how to sew and one time she hated my brother even though he was just a kid. And she made dolls and loved dogs and she taught me to love books. I looked up to the empty air above me, as if I might find her hovering there, waiting to slap my hand and say,
A nosy person deserves whatever she finds out
.

The unabridged dictionary poked out from the top shelf and caught my eye. Granddad had special-ordered it along with an atlas the size of a sheet cake when Becca and I started middle school. It had been used when we were kids mostly to balance on our heads to prove which of us had the most excellent posture and superior neck strength. I pulled the dictionary onto my lap and flipped the pages until I found it.

LOVE [luhv] noun

The primary entry defined love as a intensely held affection for another person. The sort of connection a person would feel for a parent or a child. Which is what I always thought it meant. That was what I felt for Peggy when I was a child. Mimi was never what you would call warm or affectionate. Neither was I. But there was more. Below descriptions of sincere liking and genuine passion was the definition that stopped me cold. The last entry explained love as a need; a thing that is required in the course of development. The way plants need and profit from the sun. The way plants
love
the sun.