Bastards: A Memoir (9 page)

Mimi glided through the rooms with the fluency of a native, delicately removing her driving gloves finger by finger and laying them on the edge of the dining room table. She wore driving gloves whenever she left the house, regardless of season. The compression helped relieve her arthritis, and when she was a girl people always wore hats and gloves in public. She hung her coat in the hall closet and said, “Girls sleep downstairs and boys upstairs,” as if saying boys in the plural would soften the fact that Jacob would have to sleep in a room all by himself.

The attic bedroom had a brass daybed pushed against one wall as an excuse to call it a guest room, but its official purpose was to act as the way station for things that Mimi couldn’t decide if she wanted to keep. Having grown up during the Great Depression, she never discarded anything until she was certain that she didn’t have a use for it. She tucked items upstairs to keep Granddad from throwing them out before she was ready to part with them. There was a black-and-white TV with rabbit-ear antennae, a giant wooden hope chest full of quilts, translucent christening gowns, and slippery silk kimonos that had been gifts from Granddad when he was stationed overseas. In the corner by the heating vent was a conical, stainless steel hair dryer—the kind that looked like a helmet—that once lived in the beauty shop that Mimi had owned in the 1950s. This room was where my mother slept before she ran away. The nameplate on the door still read P
EGGY’S
R
OOM
.

The house was built in 1922 and had belonged to Mimi’s parents. Its original location was across town, fifteen miles away. Mimi had already owned the large corner lot on Forty-fourth Street on the southwest side of the city, so when her parents gave her their old house—the perfect house fifteen miles from the perfect piece of land—Mimi hired men to pick the house up and move it. They had to take down traffic lights along the route to get the house across major intersections. There were photographs of it in the local paper
.
She hired another string of men to build a foundation for the house by cutting into the hill. This added a half story underneath the property, and when the house arrived, that dugout became Mimi’s basement workshop, where she made porcelain dolls.

Every exterior wall of the house, both upstairs and downstairs, was covered in banks of windows, but they were shrouded with floor-to-ceiling drapes, the heavy kind, faced with plastic blackout backing that blocked the sun. The overall effect was like walking into a cave: cool and dark, with shadows clinging to the high corners, hiding all manner of menacing things.

Every piece of furniture had permanence to it, details from another era—clawed feet, dark woods, brass fittings. Things crafted and carved before the distractions of basic cable, Internet, or telephones, when you could get workmanship, when people knew and cared about the difference between an English dovetail and a French one. In the months to come, I’d learn that this house needed constant care. It required the taking down of drapes and washing them, wrapping brooms with dampened dish towels to clean ceilings, soft rags greased with lemon oil to polish window frames. Mimi didn’t get this far having nice things by not taking care of them.

Mimi, Granddad, and Rebecca fanned out through the house. Jacob and I stopped at the edge of the dining room, unsure where to begin. The dining room and hallways were lined with china presses whose glass fronts were so sparkling clean they reflected the rooms of the house back at you. As if placed strategically, they bounced reflections around corners and through the whole house. Standing at the edge of the dining room, Jacob and I could see Mimi rummaging through dresser drawers in the back bedroom, Granddad taking off his watch in the front bedroom, and Rebecca disappearing through the doorway of what must be a walk-in closet.

“Come on, now, brush your teeth, and then bed,” Mimi said from the other room, her ghostly face looking directly at us through the glass of the cabinet in front of us.

I scrambled through the hallway, following the path I saw my sister take. I stopped short when I saw myself in the glass door of Mimi’s doll cabinet. The girl looking back at me was shocking. People calling me Punky and Pumpkin all my life had led me to believe I was ruddy and round, but the reflection in the glass was bony as a skeleton. Elbows and knees protruded like horns from my skinny arms and legs, my hair frizzed around my head with a will of its own. Mixed with my freckles were weird bruises that I didn’t remember getting. My hands were floppy and big as flippers. I searched my face for something that matched the image I had of myself in my head, but nothing squared up.

Beyond my reflection, in the cabinet itself was a pair of chestnut-haired dolls—a boy and a girl—holding Easter baskets. They were the first two dolls Mimi had sculpted by hand. “I based them off of pictures that Peggy sent me of you and your brother,” she said as she walked past me into the kitchen and began laying out bowls and juice glasses for tomorrow’s breakfast. The dolls didn’t look anything like us. They were dressed in starched clothes with serene expressions on their faces. Neat caps of hair framed their faces. The only things that looked right were the strips of tape on their hands where Mimi’d had to reattach fingers that had fallen off.

The bedroom in New Jersey where my siblings and I had planned our rescue seemed like another life now. When we were whispering about Oklahoma I didn’t know it would be so different or that I would feel so strange. I didn’t know about nice furniture and reflections, about dogs and yards and a sky so big and a land so flat and a Granddad so quiet; a place that was home to them but not to me. I wished more than anything that I could close my eyes and be back in New Jersey with my mother, falling asleep in the nest of her arms and listening to the lullaby of passing cars.
That
was my home. I wanted to scratch out the window screens and scream and cry and hightail it back to New Jersey, but it was too far and too dark and I was too small and I couldn’t.

I crossed through the downstairs bedroom that Rebecca and I would share and into the bathroom, where my brother and sister were huddled around the sink. There were three kid-sized toothbrushes in a plastic cup on the counter; Granddad must have picked them up before we arrived. I imagined his broad-shouldered frame in a drugstore aisle, holding these child-sized accessories in his massive paws, his garnet ring clicking against the blister packs. Like the rest of the house, the bathroom was covered in deep shag carpet because Mimi was always cold. The thought of her feet touching cold tile or wood floors for even a moment was unthinkable; it was her house, after all.

A nightgown was laid out for me on Rebecca’s and my queen-sized bed. It matched the one my sister wore. Mimi glided into the room and clasped her hands together, announcing, “It’s time for little boys to go upstairs now,” and ushered my brother out of the room. We didn’t even say a proper good night. I slipped into my nightgown. It was brand-new, with bell-like ruffles around the wrists and a wide ruffle skimming the floor. Rebecca’s gown had blue flowers and mine had pink. This was the first occurrence of what would become a pattern of dressing Rebecca and me in identical outfits of different colors. I wondered if Jacob had brand-new pajamas on his bed, too. I wondered if he was happy to have his own room, if he was relieved to not have to worry about me anymore.

My new bedroom had three windows covered in forest-green crushed velvet drapes. The carpet was the same deep green and the walls were covered in shiny gold wallpaper printed with autumn leaves. It was like being inside a jewelry box.

Mimi tucked Rebecca and me under the sheets. She lingered for a moment on Rebecca’s side of the bed, brushing my sister’s long hair back from her forehead and squeezing her hands. “Are you happy to be home?” Mimi asked, and Rebecca nodded with such enthusiasm that my stomach flopped against my ribs. Mimi kissed my sister on top of her head and squeezed Rebecca as tight as her arthritis would allow, then rose to turn off the lights. “Good night girls,” she said as the room became dark as coal.

On this first night, my unease made me good. I didn’t roll over to Rebecca’s side of the bed and smack her arm. I didn’t kick her in the back. In the bed that we had shared in New Jersey, my sister and I were close enough that I could wrap my arms around her like a doll. But this new bed was so big that when I stretched my arms and legs out as far as I could, my limbs connected to nothing.

I lay awake long after my sister’s breathing told me she was asleep. The wind moaned outside like something dying. The stress of Rebecca knowing all the street names that I’d never heard, of the house watching me, of my brother so far away and my mother even farther . . . I was squashed under the weight of it all, and I buried my wet face in the pillow. I cried because of the strangeness of this place, because I was afraid of the dark, because I was relieved, because I didn’t know how any of this was going to unfold.

I wiggled my feet under the covers out of habit. I used to do this to keep myself awake until my mom came home from her night shift at the fast-food place, but this act soothed me in a different way tonight. It was not so much a distraction to keep me awake as it was a connection to my
me-ness
, a reminder that I was still myself. Even in these pink pajamas in this big bed in this big house in this flat state, I was myself and I was in one piece. I was still my mother’s daughter, my brother’s sister, my sisters’ sister, still Mary. Nothing had changed except my address.

Telling Stories

W
hurr you frum?”

A blue-eyed boy stood beside the tetherball pole, absently smacking the stringed ball so it bounced against the metal. The schoolyard was packed with kids in scratchy coats hollering at one another in voices that twanged like a chorus of banjos. Mimi dropped us off here at the yard in front of the elementary school just minutes before and my brother and sister immediately got swept into groups of kids their age. Jacob raced another boy across the monkey bars and Rebecca giggled with a girl she remembered from Vacation Bible School a couple of summers ago. My brother and sister were joiners.

I stood by the bike rack and stared at my saddle oxfords, waiting to be let inside the school building. I was hoping that no one would see me, but it was as if my wishing so hard to be invisible made me the opposite.

It was our first day.

“Frickle-Fayce, I’m talkin’ tuh you! Whurr you come frum?” the boy asked again, shouting louder because he refused to come any closer to me.

It was gray and cloudy. Other kids were looking now. I suddenly realized he was talking to me. I kept my eyes on my shoes.

“New Jersey,” I said.

“New Jersey?” he said. “Yer a dirty Yankee, then.” He spat on the ground. The tetherball’s metal fittings clanged together.

“No, I’m not,” I said. I didn’t know what a Yankee was, but it didn’t sound good.

“Yeah, ya’ are,” he insisted, “an’ a
liberal
, too, I reckon.” The word
liberal
drew another fat plop of spit from the back of his throat.

Before I was forced to admit that I didn’t know what a liberal was, either, a girl in a navy coat rang a large bell from the top of the school steps. The other kids scrambled into lines behind poles that I now saw had signs affixed to their fronts: M
S
. U
LAK’S
F
IRST
G
RADE
, M
R
. N
OBLE’S
T
HIRD
G
RADE
. I was in the same line as this blue-eyed spitter, for Mrs. Morris’s second grade.

We filed into our classroom and removed coats and Mrs. Morris—a stout woman with a blond bob—called from behind her desk, “Where is our new student, Mary King?” I froze for a moment, because the chance that there was another new Mary in this room was slim, but Mary King was not my name. It was my first name with my grandfather’s surname tacked on. I stopped breathing for a second, floating in the possibility that maybe I was not supposed to be here after all, that I would be revealed as an impostor who had not, in fact, earned a spot in this classroom, an impostor who was very likely a
Yankee
.

Mrs. Morris’s eyes fell on me and she hustled me to a desk. “There you are! Mary just moved here all the way from New Jersey!” Her smile cracked her face into rivers and tributaries. “All y’all make her feel real welcome, all right?”

The blue-eyed boy from the playground pointed his finger at me like a gun and shot me from across the room.

I DECIDED
to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the day, until I was back at the house on Forty-fourth Street.

Once there, I moved directly to my newly discovered favorite spot: the patch of carpet underneath the dining room table. It was one of the only places in the house where, once inside it, the reflections couldn’t detect me. I crawled through the carved wooden table legs and slid the heavy chairs in behind me so I could disappear. That was the clearest motivation I had, to disappear. It was nothing like a full-blown death wish, nothing so dramatic, it was more ephemeral. I wanted to fade into the shadows and exist without such inconveniences as a physical body. A physical body needed things, to be tended, to be touched, to be fed. A body could hurt, which I did when I thought about it, so I preferred not to think about it at all. I preferred to lie beneath the dining room table with the heavy wooden chairs pulled close around me, my limbs threaded through their legs, and imagine what it would be like to be the wind. To blow over the earth, miles and miles, tied to nothing and no one, never feeling lost or angry or hurt. Never feeling anything. To be a ghost, to sink into walls like a drop of rain when it hits the ocean and transforms from one solitary raindrop into ocean. I wanted to be everywhere and nowhere, to be anything but human, anything but a child.

My body was here in Oklahoma, but some aspect of me hadn’t made it to the new location. In the neighborhood tribe in New Jersey, I knew what to want and how to get it. The constellations that I had learned to navigate by in my short seven-year life—my mother, the Other Mothers, the daddies and the sound of the Pinto backfiring into the alley behind the house, the kids with bats and leg braces and the too-close neighbors—now had no relevance. I had learned a language that was useless.