Coming Clean: A Memoir (2 page)

I never doubted his love for me but was always slightly afraid that he would get distracted one day and forget about our life. He might trail off in the direction of a shiny new thought and end up like the man in Penn Station, content to wander the corridors of the world with bags of papers to keep him company.

At the end of the two-hour train ride home to Long Island, I saw my dad out the window, waiting at the curb of the station for us in our baby blue Mercury Zephyr. Dutifully, he left the driver’s seat to open up the back door for me. I ran up to him, and in his usual greeting he threw me over his shoulder, fireman-style. He turned around quickly, asking “K-Rae, where’d you go? You were right here.”

“I’m behind you,” was my answer—it always was—and when he turned around again I was still behind him, my hands anchored into the back pockets of his jeans to ground myself. This went on for three or four turns, both of us laughing, before my mother reminded us that we were in a parking lot and I officially ended our game.

“I am over your shoulder! Please put me down.” These two
sentences had been established through routine as the game-ender.

A feigned double-take and an “Oh, there you are” later, he was buckling me in the seat behind my mother. He had to push aside the shiny loose pages torn from waiting-room magazines, old newspapers, empty cups, and long-ago-used bottles of motor oil and funnels that lived in the backseat to make room for me. He sang the seatbelt song as he buckled me in, as was my rule. If this particular ritual was not done to my liking, I would unbuckle my seatbelt as soon as the car was in motion.

Buckle up for safety, buckle up!

Buckle up for safety, always buckle up!

“I can’t believe you’re making your daughter sit in garbage,” my mother said.

Show the world you care by the belt you wear.

Buckle up for safety, everybody, buckle up!

“You had all day to clean the car out, Brian!”

My father said nothing as he returned to the driver’s seat. Instead, he turned on the car radio and let the news answer for him.

W
HEN
I
WAS BORN
,
my grandparents ordered little bottles of champagne with my name, weight, and birth date on them.

Brian & Nora proudly announce the birth of their daughter:

Kimberly Rae Miller

December 23, 1982

10:49am   3lb. 2 oz.

They waited until I was two months old to hand them out to family and friends; they waited until they were sure I would live. I was born three months early, just like my father had been. The doctors told my parents that premature birth doesn’t run in families, but my father and I have always had a striking number of similarities: same IQ, 138; same Chinese horoscope, Year of the Dog; same inability to understand why anyone would eat caramel of their own volition.

My mother kept the makeup mirror in the passenger seat’s visor angled so she could watch me in the backseat while my father
drove us around. She didn’t drive; she had a license and technically knew how, but was always phobic behind the wheel. Her fear hadn’t much affected her life until she and my father decided to leave the Bronx, their mutual hometown, in favor of suburban living a few years before I was born. She often said she felt like a prisoner on Long Island, dependent on my father to take her everywhere, but New York City during the 1980s wasn’t a safe place to raise a family anymore—at least not the part where we could afford to live.

I could see that she was watching me—her eyes reflecting back to me in the mirror. With a captive audience, I asked for her to tell me the story of my birth. It was a story I wanted to hear as often as possible. Without fail, she would start each recitation by telling me I was her miracle baby. I took the definition seriously, as if it were a job title, and always studied her story for clues about my miraculous nature.

Two days before Christmas, her water broke while she was in the shower. She didn’t realize what had happened, so she called her own mother to ask what labor felt like. “I don’t remember, it was a long time ago,” was my grandmother’s response. My mother had never been pregnant before, and I wasn’t due until March, so she assumed that this was just a normal part of pregnancy and went about getting ready for work. At the time my parents worked at the same civil service job and drove into Manhattan together each morning.

“We were halfway to the city when I realized your foot was starting to crown,” she told me. “I called my doctor, who was on vacation playing golf somewhere, and he told me to turn around and go to Stony Brook University Hospital, because they had a NICU.”

This is where my father would chime in with his own details about the indignity of not being allowed in the delivery room. The size and shape of the window through which he watched the action unravel changed by the telling; sometimes it was a circle, sometimes a diamond, sometimes there was no window at all and he had to peek through the crack in the door.

“I heard your mother yelling at the doctors,” he laughed.

“They called you an ‘
it
,’” my mother said. “They said ‘It’s out!’ and I sat up and said ‘She is not an
it
, her name is Kimberly Rae.’” Up until that moment I was either going to be Jennifer Simone or Kimberly Rae. My fate was decided by a split-second decision dictated solely by anger.

“I only wanted a girl. If you were a boy, I would have sold you,” she told me, and I believed her. I would have been named Eric if I was a boy. A boy named Eric who was sold for not being a girl. I looked like my father, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a round face; I imagined that Eric looked like my mom—short, with brown eyes and kinky red hair.

At the end of it all, my father said they rushed me out of the delivery room and he ran after them yelling, “Wait, that’s mine!”

That was my favorite part.

It took my parents two years to get pregnant. Her doctor had prescribed fertility drugs, but my mother refused to take them, afraid that she would have twins or triplets. “I wasn’t sure I could love more than one child,” she said. “My mother couldn’t.”

My mother and grandmother weren’t particularly fond of each other, and from what I could tell their tenuous relationship started to deteriorate when my mother was five years old and
her sister, Lee, was born. She never resented Lee for it, but she resented her parents.

My grandparents came to the hospital a week after I was born, and according to my mother my grandmother’s only words of motherly advice were, “She’s probably going to die. Best not to get too attached.” This particular part of the story was never spared, and no matter how many times my mother told me the story of my birth, she never stopped being mad when she got to that part.

“We weren’t sure that you were going to live, but while you were here we wanted you to know that you were loved.”

The rest of the story was recited like a checklist of trials they were asked to endure. They weren’t allowed to hold me or feed me, but she and my father sat by my incubator talking to me. I would “forget to breathe” she said, and a nurse would have to come along and remind me by shaking my arm or leg. If I went ten days without forgetting, I could go home, but I had an uncanny habit of forgetting every ninth day.

There was the one time that she and my father came to visit after work and saw me with a needle sticking out of my head. My mother turned and walked away, not wanting me to see her cry. Eventually she would force herself to come back; there were other babies, she said, whose parents didn’t come every day. And those were the babies who died. “They needed someone to live for,” she told me. “And no one was there.” She and my father never missed visiting hours.

I believed with every telling of this story that my parents loved me into living, that the three of us were meant to be a family, and that I was going to be a miracle, if I could only figure out how.

“M
RS. AND
M
R.
M
ILLER
,
thank you for coming in,” Ms. Angela, my nursery school teacher said. She shifted in her seat, leaning forward to deliver the bad news in a nose-scrunching whisper. “Kimberly has been excusing herself to go to the bathroom to masturbate.”

Earlier that week, Ms. A had come into the bathroom only to find me shoving a blue plastic soda bottle into my underpants.

My father choked on his tea, holding back a laugh, and then raised an eyebrow in my direction; my mother didn’t flinch. She knew exactly what was happening. “She’s not masturbating. She’s robbing you.”

I feigned distraction. While the grown-ups talked, I placed myself at the toy station most convenient for eavesdropping, occupying my hands with Weeble Wobbles, but soaking in everything being said about me. I needed to gauge what kind of trouble I was going to be in. I wasn’t particularly concerned with my parents; at most, we’d sit down when we got home and have a tedious conversation about why my little problem was unhygienic, immoral, and unfair to the other preschoolers in my
class. Ms. Angela and the rest of the nursery school staff were my concern; I wanted them to like me.

My logic was simple. If I put something that I wanted in my underpants, even if I was caught, I’d be allowed to keep it. It had my vagina germs on it.

“Kimberly, were you putting toys in your underpants?” Ms. Angela asked me sweetly.

“No?” Acting innocent and confused was my general strategy for adult confrontations. That, or blaming a dog. This time, there were no dogs around. It was my word against my mother’s.

She turned back to my parents and, as if she were informing them that the sky was blue, said, “Mr. and Mrs. Miller, children don’t lie.”

I liked that Ms. A had my back, but knew my parents weren’t buying it. My attention shifted to the parking lot. Outside the big glass doors was a Jeep, the kind that on top is a normal-sized truck, but on bottom has giant wheels. I wanted that truck. If that were our truck, all the other kids would be jealous. People would stare at us, they’d want to be us, and then we could run over their cars.

“We have a Monster Truck,” I announced to no one in particular. I wanted to try on what it felt like to say that.

As the opportunity to prove her point arose, my mother schooled my teacher. “We drive a Mercury, Ms. Angela. A Mercury on Mercury-sized tires. She’s lying, because that’s what children do.”

We left before Ms. Angela could come up with some sort of retort. In the parking lot, my mother informed me that I would
have to give back everything I’d taken, and “Stop putting things in your underpants!”

My dad just grinned, and sipped his tea.

I was allowed back to nursery school the following week, but my credibility and access to the toy box were shot. Luckily, kindergarten was starting in a month, and I’d have new toys to pilfer.

My parents both took the day off from work to see me off on my first day of real school, armed with cameras and tissues and supportive smiles. While other kids cried outside our classroom, holding onto their mothers, I refused my parents entry into the school and assured them I’d see them afterward. New school. New toy box. I was ready. But once I was inside Mrs. White’s kindergarten classroom, the anxiety started to settle in.

I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t know
how
to know anyone. In nursery school, I’d had Jacob. His parents were friends with mine, so we were friends by default. Since he was the only boy I knew, I planned on marrying him.

Jacob agreed, but only if he could also marry his friend Joanna. Because she had sisters, she’d inherited the motherload of Barbie clothes. Since I figured this arrangement could only serve to benefit my Barbies, I agreed to a life of polygamy.

There was no Jacob in kindergarten. Without a preexisting friend in place, I realized that I had nothing to say to the other kids. I liked grown-ups. Grown-ups and I had an understanding; they lavished me with attention, and I accepted it. Kids, on the other hand, just thought I was weird.

My parents didn’t believe in baby talk. Instead they spoke to me like they would a well-educated yet slightly confused forty-year-old. While my vocabulary never ceased to impress
their peers, my own looked at me as if I were speaking Farsi. I would often announce to the class that I had an “urgent need to urinate,” or complain that I’d “suffered an abrasion” on the playground. I tried to blend in, but I could never bring myself to say “pee-pee” and “boo-boo” like my classmates did. It felt degrading. So I was mostly left to my own devices unless a game of house was short a person to act as the husband when all the more covetable roles in the family hierarchy had been doled out.

The first month of kindergarten was not everything I had dreamed it would be; for the most part, I was bored with the monotony of arts and crafts projects and rote recitations of numbers and letters. That is, until the day a month or so into the school year, when it was announced that each student would be meeting with the school’s social worker.

I couldn’t think of a more perfect way to spend an afternoon. An opportunity to do what I did best: Impress a grown-up.

One by one, my classmates were called to the front of the classroom, where they were whisked away by a smiling woman with long curly brown hair and two layers of bangs: one that lay flat across her forehead and another that fanned out on top of her head. I had no idea who she was, or how she got her hair to do that, but I had no doubt that we would get along smashingly.

While we recited the alphabet and listened to stories about friendly dinosaurs, my attention wandered endlessly back to the door. I imagined that each successive child was being escorted to some sort of exclusive club. A club where adults and children socialized as equals. A club where one could drink as much soda and eat as much candy as they wanted. A club that as of yet I had not been invited to join.

“Kimberly Miller?” a voice finally called. I immediately jumped up, and then, not to seem too excited, walked leisurely to the front door.