Leave It to Me (2 page)

Celia would never have made it, she would have laughed in his face, or she would have stared at the floor. A couple of other girls couldn’t take it either and said Wyatt’s voice drove them to drugs and housebreaking. Wyatt was the first to ask me about adoption, what I knew, what I remembered. He put a lot of stress on it, and I know it would have upset Pappy if he’d known that rehabilitation meant bringing up feelings I didn’t know I had.

“I’ve been reading your file, Debby,” Wyatt’d say, once we were out of the Circle. “How did the DiMartinos come to adopt you?”

I’d never asked, and they’d never told. Lawyers, they always said, but it had to have started with the Church, all those little pledge envelopes for missions in Asia that Mama still fills out. I knew only that they’d found me in an orphanage run by Gray Nuns.

“You’re not even interested?”

“I always figured it was fate.”

“Schenectady was fate?”

Wyatt took me out to the animal shelter. It was where he’d worked on weekends and high school summers. It was the place that had formed his philosophy of life. It was the only place where the Ultimates sat side by side. “Love and Death,” he said. “Kindness and Killing.” He
thought he could be the catcher in the pound; everything depended on his keeping his orphans clean enough, making them just a little more appealing, giving them cutesy names like Barbra, walking them and running them in the park. My family always called the animal shelter the pound, and I thought of it, if I thought of it at all, as an alternate lodging between loving homes. You don’t usually visualize the dog pound as the palace of love. No one ever told me they gassed puppies and kitties.

“Cuteness is all that counts,” Wyatt said. “You have a bad day, you wake up with a dry nose, with dull eyes, you take a nap, you scratch your fleas—it’s your life.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you’ve got a chance, don’t blow it. You might never have made it out of that orphanage. Someone must have seen something.”

And what could they have seen in a baby girl whose unnamed mother identified herself as Clear Water Iris-Daughter, and whose father, also unnamed, was called Asian National in the adoption papers? The nuns weren’t interested in my origins, they didn’t care about filling in the gaps of my life; they were into good works. It was the mid-seventies and I was just a garbage sack thrown out on the hippie trail.

There’s no passion in the world like that of a thirteen-year-old girl; she’ll do anything for love, or what seems like love. She’ll interpret anything as a little sign, she’ll believe anything he says, she’ll do anything to prove herself worthy of his notice. And then the time will come when she begins to feel her own power. I was only thirteen,
but I was a knowing thirteen when I didn’t want to hide it, and mellow-voiced Wyatt was the first man I showed it to.

Our little Circle meetings grew shorter and shorter, our trips in the country longer and longer. There were motels in the afternoon, flowery pastures, canoe trips. I could ruin him if I wanted, and he knew it. He shared his stash (which I knew he had), and before long he was praising my orphan’s maturity, the integrity of shoplifting in a consumer society and of course saying that I was older than my age (at least three years for his sake, I hoped).

Wyatt signed off on my parole, then dropped out of grad school. I had been a bad influence on him, he said. He decided to go to California and work for the Sierra Club or become a nature photographer. Human emotions were too difficult. But he left me with the most important prediction of my life, something that got me through high school and college, and even helps today. I was just a small, dark thing, and he said, “You know, Debby, I can tell you’re going to be tall and beautiful very soon, and someday you’re going to be rich and powerful.” He thought he had everything to do with it.

After Wyatt left, I convinced myself that I was lucky to be an orphan. From the families I’d been given, I’d scavenge the traits I needed and dump the rest. If a person is given
lives
to live instead of just one life (Mama’s favorite soap), especially lives she hasn’t even touched, she’ll be far better off for it. Once in a junior high English class, on assignment, when the other girls were composing little rhymed Hallmark verses about love, I raged in rhyming
couplets against whole peoples who brawled inside me. The poem shocked me. It throbbed with pains I had no right to feel. That was the first time I’d really cut loose.

Mr. Bullock said, “Debby, that’s deep,” and he forced me to read the poem out loud in class. And the kids said, “Jeezus, it could be, like, a song, Debby!” which was their highest compliment. Then Mr. Bullock asked, “Have you read Sylvia Plath, Debby?” and I said I didn’t know any of the senior high girls, and he laughed. “Then you’re a natural poetic talent, Debby,” which sounded to me as thrilling as a new zit on the nose. He invited me to join an after-school geek club. I attended twice, but its members were weird and I could feel how easy it would be to weird out too.

Until that poem, I’d been Debby DiMartino, second daughter of Manfred and Serena DiMartino, hardworking, religious parents. In junior high, I’d looked enough like my sister Angie to pass for a real DiMartino, and I expected to ripen and coarsen early, like Mama and like Angie. But I didn’t thicken like Angie did, and by my senior year, I was the tallest one in the family, including Pappy. I stayed thin, clear-skinned, dark-haired, amazed at the assertiveness of my body. The gym teacher encouraged me to think volleyball scholarships, and Angie nagged at me to try out mail-order-catalog modeling. My senior portrait was just the kind of thing that you find in
People
magazine at the Price Chopper, one of those bad-hair, ugly-duckling pictures of some high school cheerleader gone bad or murdered or of some eventually famous movie star.

My junior-year growth spurt ended a few months too early, leaving me a shade below five-nine. I was a tall girl in a small school, a beautiful girl in a plain family, an exotic girl in a very American town. I’d always had this throaty whisper of a voice, couldn’t raise it above a satiny purr, in a family of choir singers and a town of chirpy sopranos. But I wasn’t tall, beautiful or exotic enough to trust any of it, and so I made up my mind to find out if I was someone special or just another misfit. I didn’t write another poem, but I began to understand about mugged identities. There was something to nature over nurture, and to the tyranny of genes. But you pay for all the knowledge you’ve gained. How could I explain to a Schenectady DiMartino that destiny’s the bully you can’t outpunch or outsmart? That the Gray Nuns, Mama, Pappy, Angie, Mr. Bullock, Wyatt, the junior high geeks and creeps I’ve blown off fit into the Big Picture? I need to believe in the bigger picture. Most orphans do.

Who are you when you don’t have a birth certificate, only a poorly typed, creased affidavit sworn out by a nun who signs herself
Sister Madeleine, Gray Sisters of Charity?
And that name? No mother’s name, no father’s name, just
Baby Clear Water Iris-Daughter
meticulously copied out, taking up two full lines, when
Father
and
Mother
with long spaces after them are just ink flecks of nonexistence. What are you when you have nightmares and fantasies instead of dates and statistics? And, in place of memory, impressions of white-hot sky and burnt-black leaves? Nothing to keep you on the straight and narrow except star bursts of longing?

We thought Mr. Bullock was giving us a routine assignment, but what if a junior high English teacher with hair in his ears is an agent of destiny? He’d made us read a Robert Frost poem about a bird flying off a snow-dusted bough. “The Muse,” he’d encouraged us, “notices the humblest object and the tritest movement and turns them into the gold of passion and poesy.”

Mr. Bullock said he wanted for us to write about something we knew, something we knew so well that we didn’t see it anymore. And so I wrote about the lacy, summertime shadows of the squat oak that Grandpa DiMartino had planted in the backyard to celebrate his escape from the Bronx—so the family story goes—the day he got the deed to the Schenectady house, and that set me thinking that the grandpa who’d planted that oak and landscaped the garden and put in the lily pond was Angie’s grandpa and not mine after all. That made me hear tiny gypsy moth jaws on the tender skin of stalks, and that made me remember other leaf patterns against other horizons. I wrote another about the dogs I’d seen at the pound, pretending that I was alone and that I was a dog myself. Take me, love me, shelter me, my barking said. I felt more deeply than Debby’d ever dared let herself feel. Words ribboned out of me. And when the assignment was done, I felt cheated of places I couldn’t draw and of parents I didn’t miss. I blamed the poem for robbing me of what I’d never owned. It was as if a psychic with a 900 number had said to me through the poem, You’re just on loan to the DiMartinos. Treat them nice, pay your rent, but keep your bags packed.

Back then, in Schenectady, I waited for the call. Not to be a model or a poet, which was to be not extraordinary enough. The call would be to something more special, to satisfy the monstrous cravings of other Debbys hiding inside. I didn’t envy Angie as I helped her into the Greyhound bound for Manhattan and her modest transformation of a Hudson Valley accent, hair color, clothes, muscle tone and skin. I knew by then that there was a life beyond the state lines waiting for me to slip into. Star Quality just plays taller and thinner and younger than it really is; second bananas just look older and fatter than they really are. All I’d have to do was be beautiful, be available, and my other life, my
real
life, would find me.

The summer I fell for Frankie Fong I was telemarketing Elastonomics out of an abandoned shopping mall near Schenectady. The Elastonomics frontman ran my job interview from his room at a Ramada Inn. He was a fat boy in a tight yellow shirt with a
HI, I’M TONY TUCCIANI
name tag. I knew I had the job because the first thing Tony said to me was “Okay, you’re a natural.” The second thing he said was “Miss DiMartino, you have the voice of a sexy nun.” I waited for the third thing. I could tell what a strain it was for him to call me Miss DiMartino instead of sweetheart or Debby. Because I don’t have trouble being kind to myself, I translated Tony’s compliment to mean my voice came on as warm but implacable. I was so innocent back then that I didn’t guess that the scratchy voice that got me in trouble in church choirs was thick and low not with sexy promise, but with scar tissue.

Elastonomics, Tony Tucciani explained, was the newest product manufactured in Asia by Fong Home Products, a multinational fitness equipment company. “We’re in the business of promoting all-round well-being” is how he put it. Tony, then, offered some of FHP’s tested-in-Hong Kong tips on making the sales pitch. Like, turn the question “Expiration date?” into a command. Like, if a sucker
doesn’t bite in four frames, cut him off. After that he made his move. Bending forward, he said, “In other words, Debby, leave his dick flapping in the wind.”

I asked for him to practice me a couple of times. I’d had the usual upstate after-school and summer jobs, waiting tables, ringing up cash registers in the mall, demonstrating everything from sorbet makers to electric drills, but selling invisible fitness equipment for a Chinese company was a first. Tony wasn’t worried about taking a risk on me, because I had this great telephone voice, he said, gritty and seductive, like I was lying naked in bed smoking raw Camels and swilling gin. I was going to ask him if he praised all his interviewees like this when he explained, “The boss doesn’t do scripts anymore. Improv’s his new shtick.” Niceties over, he said, “So when we going out, Debby?”

I saw what I saw: sweaty-frontman longing, motel, fifteen minutes, cute girl wants the job, give it a shot. I did need the job; he was right about that. I said, “Zip it up, fat boy!” and slammed down an imaginary phone. Then, sweetly, “How was that? Did I come on a little too strong? Too rude?”

We both knew to keep my triumph low-key. “No, no, just testing,” he mumbled. “Just don’t mention fat. Guys who call in think they’re not getting laid because they’re fat. When you work the midnight-till-six shift, you’ll get all types.” Then he launched into the list of sales videos that FHP and I were going to blast the American consumer with.

“I did okay?”

“You were good,” the frontman assured me. “Very good.”

So I became the sexy nun with the 800 number selling contrition by UPS. The telemarketing job made it possible for me to move out of the DiMartino split-level. I’d graduated from SUNY-Albany earlier that week. It was time. The sad, fat people punching out 800 numbers weren’t the only ones looking for change.

The surprise for me was that my callers were romantics. They believed in me, not in salvation through Elastonomics. They begged,
If I call back, how do I know I’ll get you?
I made them effortless promises. Just ask for me, Helena. Or depending on the mood of the day, Staci, Traci, Eva, Magda, Desiree. Some nights I tried out thirty personas. My lies paid off. Loverboys and couch potatoes parted with bucks. What did they expect from me? Phone sex passing itself off as self-improvement, a date once they got in shape?
Sounds good, Roger! You never know, do you, Dave? Expiration date?