Bastards: A Memoir (27 page)

That was where I recognized us. I loved Mimi like a plant loved the sun. I couldn’t help it. So what if we weren’t the first definition, the purest form of the thing? A lesser-used form is no less true. Love wasn’t just about affection. It was about nourishment. It was about showing up. She nourished me and I needed her. Of those two actions, Mimi definitely had the harder job. As much as I fought it, as much as I didn’t want to feel it, I knew in that moment that I had loved her.

I realized, finally, that loving Mimi and Granddad was not a betrayal of Peggy or Jacob. Love was not finite. I did not have to earmark a special portion for each of them, balance it and keep it fair.

In the days after Mimi’s death, I felt more like a child than I ever had in my entire life. I was like a baby, with no idea what I needed to make me comfortable, just fussing and reaching out until anyone reached back.

I gritted my teeth so much over the next twenty-four hours that I cracked a filling in my left molar. My childhood dentist came back early from his holiday to replace it for me.

Over the next two days, every demonstration of kindness destroyed me. Girls I hadn’t seen since high school came to the wake and I felt as if my skin had cracked open. Off-duty police officers on motorcycles stopped traffic so we could drive to the cemetery in one unimpeded line, and my bones ached for them riding in the cold. The cemetery was one solid sheet of ice, but blankets were laid on the chairs by the casket as if draped there by elves. I was humbled into muteness by the time we returned to the church for the post-funeral supper.

The ladies of the Altar Society quietly milled around the kitchen of the parish hall; they were well versed in ministering to mourners. A Filipina woman in thick glasses placed the final platter on the buffet table as we removed our ice-crusted coats. The simple table was laden with those comforting things that spell affection in the plains: biscuits, brownies, sweet tea, macaroni casserole, fried chicken.

At the end of the dinner, the Filipina woman wrapped the leftovers in foil and pressed them into my hands. She said, “Peace be with you,” as she tied a scarf around her feathered pixie cut and prepared to head into the cold. I had to turn my face to the wall to bear the weight of all that goodness.

Meeting Lesley

I
met the last of my lost sisters, Lesley, at Jacob’s long-postponed Real Wedding. It was in Houston, Texas, on a hot February weekend in 2011. Jacob would ship out for his last tour in Iraq two days later. He and his wife had been married for five years, but they said their original vows in a stuffy room on an air base in Germany and they’d always said they’d have a do-over later, for the family. Jacob’s three tours in Iraq and the births of their two sons kept pushing back the main event. But it was finally here.

As I waited to board my flight at the Los Angeles International Airport it struck me that all the important moments in my life involved flying or driving. Never home and never not-home, always some in-between place. I liked the way the journey provided parentheses. It buffered my moments with my family from the ordinary business of life.

It was sunny when I landed in Texas. The people waiting in baggage claim for their loved ones wore shorts. I scanned the crowd for my brother, but he wasn’t there yet. So I stepped outside and called his cell phone. For a brief second I stood in the sunshine and it was just me and the concrete under my feet and the placid ringing in my ear and it was calm.

Then Jacob answered on the other end of the line and I was filled with the chaos of voices piling up in the backseat of a car I could not yet see but knew was close.

“The friggin’ security guys made me keep circling. So I’m circling.”

Underneath his words voices chimed my name at different pitches and in their own rhythms.
Mary Mary Mary
, like a canon. I smiled and soaked it in.

Jacob had traded his sedan for a black SUV, a Texas-sized thing that glistened like a beetle’s shell in the sunlight. As he glided to the curb I could see that my brother, as always, left the front passenger seat for me. It was my birthright. I could see my sisters’ faces through the windshield—Becca, Rebekah, Meghan, and Lesley. Lisa had just re-enrolled in college and couldn’t afford to make the trip this time. Even for such a big event we couldn’t manage to get all seven of us in the same place at the same time. I wondered if we ever would.

Lesley was in the way-backseat, squeezed between Becca and Meghan. Her butter-blond bobbed hair perfectly framed the blue eyes that took up most of her facial real estate.

“Hey, sis,” she said. Like she’d been saying it for years. Her voice had the same growl as Peggy’s. She was twenty-one years old. The same age Peggy was when Jacob was born. She was so young.

“That’s not her natural hair color,” Meghan pointed out to me.

“It’s
fashion
,” Lesley corrected.

Lesley had two crystal studs embedded into her clavicle. My eyes kept darting down to her chest, trying to figure out how that could work.

“They’re dermals,” Lesley said, clearly accustomed to the attention. “They’re anchored in there good, don’t worry.”

“Fashion?” I asked.

“Yeah, fashion,” she agreed and, to my surprise, moved seamlessly into a stream-of-consciousness slam-poetry-style rap. “You know it’s fa-shion. You can’t be crashin’ in my party looking like a smarty, if you wanna sip on my Bacardi you got to have. The. Look.”

Becca and Rebekah howled in the middle seat.

“You should know that she raps as much as she speaks like a normal person,” Meghan advised.

“Girl, you’re jealous,” Lesley said with a smile.

Lesley had Becca’s face. Her whole face. The cheeks, the nose, the lips, the chin, it was all there. And she had the same disarming sincerity about her that had always made people want to befriend Becca.

We drove to Jacob’s in-laws’ giant stone house in the Houston suburbs.

When I arrived, Granddad and Peggy were sitting side by side on the back porch smiling for family photos with Jacob’s sons. These brown-eyed toddlers were Peggy’s grandchildren, Granddad’s great-grandchildren. It seemed that the mere passage of time had wrought more grace on all of us than I thought was possible.

Our sister-in-law had invited all of us to be part of the bridal party. It wasn’t that she needed us—she already had five bridesmaids without us—but it was a gesture of inclusion and we all accepted.

The place bustled with Katy’s parents’ friends, Katy’s sister and brother, the rest of the wedding party. I could tell that they all knew our story; they had prepared faces for us to see. They sustained eye contact, blinked little; as if constantly reminding themselves they were not looking at ghosts, but real people.

“If one more person smiles at me, I’m gonna need a drink,” Becca whispered to me.

I watched my sisters as we sat in the kitchen alongside Peggy and Katy, shearing roses and wrapping them in floral tape. I remembered what Meghan said the night we met her:
Lesley always said that she felt like she had a piece missing.
This youngest sister had sensed our existence before she even had proof she was adopted. Was that hole a memory of Jacob, Becca, and I that fateful summer of 1989, in the Camden apartment where she was conceived? Had she absorbed our voices the way doctors say developing babies sense light and music through the womb?

The hotel that night was like summer camp. Rebekah, Meghan, Lesley, and I gathered in Becca’s room because the rooms around her were empty; we could be as loud as we wanted. Lesley and Becca brought out their guitars and faced one another on ottomans. I sat on the floor, looking up at them as their freckled arms strummed in unison and their faces were raised to the ceiling like wolves howling at the moon.

They were the bright shadow of Michael and Mac, men none of us had ever really known. In this room I was the only one who held this earlier image of the men who had come before us, the spark of the tragedy that started our split all those years ago. I wondered what Peggy would feel if she were in this room right now.

Rebekah sat on the floor beside me, bobbing her head in time to the music. The wall behind our backs vibrated with sound. When the music paused, she leaned her head on my shoulder and asked, “Do you think we’re cursed?”

I dug deep into the corners of my brain to answer her. I wanted to say that I could see why she thought we might be; our family tree cast a lot of deep shadows. It seemed every one of us had a tendency to beeline to rock bottom. But then, once we hit it, hadn’t we bounced? And wasn’t it improbable, miraculous even, that we had all found one another? Wasn’t it bizarrely amazing that we had searched and had been found?

I wanted to tell her all these things, but I was overcome with the feeling that I didn’t need to say anything; everyone around me already
got
it. So as I leaned my cheek on Rebekah’s head I thought my thoughts into that dim Houston hotel room and I was certain that my sisters understood. I was certain that Peggy and Michael and Lisa and Mimi and Granddad, wherever they were, understood, too.

All I said was, “Not anymore.”

My sisters and I were scheduled to meet the other bridesmaids for hair and makeup at six-thirty in the morning. We had coffee instead of sleep. “It’s what we always do,” Becca told Lesley as we filled enormous paper cups in the hotel breakfast bar. I smiled. We were a “we” now. We had things that we always did.

My sisters and I piled into a rented silver sedan; Becca drove and Meghan sat beside her. Rebekah, Lesley, and I squeezed into the backseat. The floor at our feet was cluttered with strappy shoes, tins of hair spray, gum wrappers. We passed a travel-sized bottle of Listerine between us, swishing the burning liquid around our teeth and spitting out the window. Our dresses were plastic-wrapped and laid securely in the trunk where we couldn’t wreck them. It was barely light outside, but already waves shimmered on the pavement ahead of us like ghosts, promises of heat to come. There wasn’t a single other soul on the wide expanse of blacktop.

A song played low on the radio as we took in the sun rising over the flat Texas horizon. It didn’t matter how we had gotten here, what had gone right or wrong in our lives. In that moment, we were a world unto ourselves. We were complete.

Acknowledgments

I must thank my agent, Lisa Gallagher. Your counsel, humor, and endless enthusiasm are blessings that I am constantly humbled to receive.

To my editor Jill Bialosky and everyone at Norton—Thank you for your patience and guidance. You made it possible for there to be a place in this world where my siblings and I can be together, in some small way, forever.

Thank you to Peter Balakian, Franz Wisner, Jennifer Vanderbes, Sarah Bay-Cheng, and Kseniya Melnik; without your early encouragement I might have lacked the guts to continue.

To my incredible friend Kimberlee Soo, thank you for sharing your infallible reflex for truth, for those hours of revision over coffee and conversation; you taught me a master class in generosity and I hope that someday I will have the opportunity to repay it.

To my dear family—Mom and Granddad, Jacob, Becca, Lisa, Rebekah, Meghan, and Lesley—it is said there is a blessing in each trial and you have all been that for me. Having you in my life is the greatest gift that I will ever know. Thank you for understanding that it is important to describe the shadows as well as the light, and for graciously allowing me to tell pieces of your stories where they overlapped with mine.

To the families who raised my sisters—we may not know one another well, or at all, but I cannot thank you enough for loving my sisters, for supporting them, and sharing them with my family, even when it is has been difficult.

Actually, especially when it has been difficult.

I am deeply indebted to my Mimi who introduced me to my greatest love, this wild, wonderful world of words. And to Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, whose books were always there when I needed a story to disappear into.

And finally, to Brian; thank you for accompanying me on this adventure, for your unfailing support in writing and in life, for everything. I am full of quantum you.

Copyright © 2015 by Mary Anna King
Frontis photograph from author’s personal collection

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

King, Mary Anna.
Bastards : a memoir / Mary Anna King. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “‘A stirring, vividly told story of a young woman’s quest to find the family she lost . . . an impressive debut’-Peter Balakian; Born into poverty in southern New Jersey and raised in a commune of single mothers, Mary Anna King watched her mother give away one of her newborn sisters every year to another family. All told, there were seven children: Mary, her older brother, and five phantom sisters. Then one day, Mary was sent away, too. Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she’s haunted by the past: by the baby girls she’s sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she had to leave behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again. Moving, haunting, and at times wickedly funny, Bastards is about finding one’s family and oneself”—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-393-08861-8 (hardcover)

1. King, Mary Anna—Family. 2. King, Mary Anna—Childhood and youth. 3. Young women—United States—Biography. 4. Children of single parents—New Jersey—Biography. 5. Poor families—New Jersey—Biography. 6. Sisters—United States—Biography. 7. Family reunions—United States. 8. New Jersey—Biography. 9. Oklahoma—Biography. I. Title.