Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (9 page)

Nervously I gave Daddy my present. His long, square-tipped fingers flipped open the card, and he read it out loud.

“With apologies to Winslow Homer.” He looked at me quizzically, then slid a finger under the overlap of the wrapping paper and sliced it open.

Nana had suggested writing those words on the card, so I did, though it felt as if I were giving Winslow Homer some kind of credit for my piece of red beach glass while apologizing for making the picture at all.

“Aah-hah,” said Daddy as he uncovered the picture, which, despite being wrapped in tissue paper and put in a box, had lost two of its pieces of beach glass. I longed to grab it from him and disappear with a tube of glue to fix it, but my limbs had frozen.

He started to chuckle. “You’re a great admirer of Winslow Homer, I see. How well do you know his work, honey? And tell me why you feel apologies are in order.”

I stumbled to answer him, unable to explain how special the red piece of beach glass was. I heard a contempt for Nana in his teasing, and I resented Nana for the waste of my treasure and the shattering of my feeling that it was treasure at all. I resented her fiercely, with every drop of resentment I had—so that none would be left over for him.

“Thank you, honey,” he said finally. “It’s a wonderful present.” He put it aside, and I knew instantly that he would never pick it up or look at it again.

Why should he have liked it or wanted it, anyway? Beach glass wasn’t paint, and when it was stuck to the glass it looked crude—like the trash it was. Winslow Homer had probably been the wrong choice, too: suburban, second-rate, not in the pantheon of artists Daddy admired. I realized I’d never seen that kind of painting at St. Cleran’s—obviously Daddy didn’t think it was worth having. I should have known better than to think a painter that Nana liked was good enough for Daddy. But what would have been? Even if I’d copied a Toulouse-Lautrec, it wouldn’t have been a Toulouse-
Lautrec, just my copy of it. In beach glass. You were supposed to make up pictures yourself, not copy other people’s.

I felt like a savage duped by worthless trinkets, an idiot who knew nothing about art. I wanted more than anything to please Daddy. At St. Cleran’s I had felt able to, with my drawings, my gift for games, my Irish dancing. In the last six months, evidently, I had taken a wrong turn without knowing it, away from the person I was supposed to be if I was to be worthy of being Daddy’s child, Anjelica’s sister. In the absence of talent like they had, I’d relied on my intellect; but my intellect had let me down. It wasn’t the execution of the beach-glass picture that was the problem; it was the very idea of making it at all.

T
he car juddered down a cobbled street lined with plain, blank walls. I liked the colors of the walls—pinky-orange, pinky-brown, orangey-yellow—but their blankness was unsettling, like a row of faces with skin where eyes ought to be.

I sat in the back seat between Nurse and Gladys. A dark-skinned, dark-haired man drove. He had a round, flat face like the faces of Daddy’s pre-Columbian idols, except that he wasn’t scary like them, because his face seemed shaped for smiling. His name was Arturo and he always drove for Daddy in Mexico City. He had once been a boxer and had killed a man in the ring. Of course Daddy would have a driver with a story like that.

“
Gracias,
Arturo,” said Gladys as we pulled up in front of an iron gate. A gardener unlocked it for us. As we went inside he locked it behind us. How odd, I thought—like a prison. This was a street lined with prisons that people had put themselves in.

The house was in Cuernavaca, a resort town about two hours from Mexico City, and belonged to Daddy’s agent. He was borrowing it while he worked on the screenplay of
The Man Who Would Be King
with Gladys. Cici wasn’t with them, and I didn’t think that odd at all. I would have found it much stranger if Cici had been there and Gladys hadn’t.

Though Gladys kept herself apart from Dad’s social life—she’d never been part of the gang at the Big House, watching racing or the World Cup in the basement TV room, or following the hunt, or drinking cocktails in the study—it was impossible to imagine her without him. She was his moon, her orbit sometimes closer, sometimes farther, but always held by his gravity. She was ageless, as if she’d managed to keep the harshness of life at one remove, the way she’d kept the skin of her face untouched by the sun. Her severe hair and black-rimmed glasses were not designed to attract a man; she wore lipstick only because she would have been half dressed without it. There was something wraithlike about her paleness. She was neither heavy nor thin, but she moved silently, and sometimes you didn’t realize she was there.

She and Daddy occupied the two bedrooms of the main house. Nurse and I were given the guesthouse. I was happy to be with Daddy again, but nervous too. I felt an intense pressure to be the kind of girl I ought to be—whatever that was. All I knew was that it was not the girl I was becoming as a Soma cousin in Miller Place. Trying not to be that girl made me mousy. Daddy didn’t seem to notice. He was remote—traveling imaginatively in the fictional Himalayan kingdom of Kafiristan, or (I suspect now) wandering gloomily through the collapsing promises of a new marriage going bad. I watched him through the open garden doors as he sat in a leather bucket chair, the legs of his cotton trousers hiked up by his knees, his long bare ankles sinewy and brown like the leather of his loafers; or as he paced the room in long strides, arms hanging, while Gladys scribbled furiously on a yellow legal pad on her lap.

As the days wore into weeks, I felt more invisible than inspected. Daddy and I didn’t play pelmanism anymore, and I’d lost any appetite for drawing after the Winslow Homer beach-glass debacle. As we didn’t eat meals together, all conversations had to be initiated from across what suddenly seemed to be the vast gulf of the last year. We didn’t talk about the lost paradise of St. Cleran’s, or Nana and Grampa. Eventually Daddy hit on the idea of teaching me backgammon. It was like a rope flung across the abyss, and I quickly became good enough for him to enjoy playing with me.

Mostly I just splashed about aimlessly in the pool while Nurse watched from the side. One day Gladys showed me how to dive.

“You bring your hands together above your head,” she said, “fingers pointing where you want to go. Then just fall forward.” She demonstrated.

I couldn’t follow her. Gladys climbed out of the pool and bent my knees for me.

“Like a frog,” she said. I looked for a smile on her face, but she was completely serious.

Still I couldn’t let myself fall, so she bent my knees farther, until I was squatting so low I was almost sitting.

“Try it from there.”

She accepted my fearfulness as a matter of course, not worthy of notice, and that took away its sting. Her way of not treating me like a child made me think I could choose to be taught, just as she chose to teach me.

I longed to be physically competent. After a year in Miller Place, I had still never dared ride my bike with no hands. American schools gave a grade for PE, and it infuriated me when my straight A’s were unfairly ruined. A mother—my mother, I fantasized—would have taught me to play tennis on the court at St. Cleran’s, and would have kept at me until I learned to ride a horse.

I practiced diving for hours a day. There were no English-speaking kids to play with, no books I cared to read, and no bookstore to
buy more, no beach or woods or river. Just this squared-off pool, a brutal burning sun, and packs of cards with which I played solitaire, recording my score on page after page in the cumulative Vegas style that Daddy showed me. I made endless lists of world nations and their capitals, and which ones I had currency from. Daddy gave me some, the leftovers from his travels—and so began a desultory, unexciting coin collection, which hung around me for years like a drizzly cloud. I feigned enthusiasm to please Daddy. He seemed to think a coin collection would distinguish me, give me an area of expertise. He liked people to be expert in something. I often heard him say things like “He’s the finest mule breeder in the state of Jalisco,” or “the cleverest plumber in the west of Ireland.” Arturo was the finest driver in all Mexico.

On the morning of my ninth birthday, Daddy gave me three Mexican gold coins: tiny round slivers, each one showing an eagle wrestling a snake in its talons. I didn’t want them, but saying so would have been heresy. I didn’t like coins, and I didn’t like Mexico. I got sick, I got sunburned, and I longed to be back in Miller Place, playing with my cousins. Martine—whom I might never see again—was probably finding blue beach glass, maybe even red. And here I was, in a prison.

A short-legged donkey covered with curlicued pink and white tissue paper was hung over the thick branch of a mango tree, and a gaggle of children turned up. I’d never seen them before, and they showed absolutely no interest in me, even though it was my birthday party. None of them spoke any English at all.

A blindfold was tied across my eyes and I was spun around three times. Dizzy, I felt a big stick being put in my hand.

“Bataló!”
said a man in Spanish. He was probably the gardener.

“Hit it, honey,” said Daddy.

I wasn’t the kind of girl who liked to hit things, and the stick was heavy and hard to manage. I’d never seen a piñata before, and didn’t understand what I was supposed to do.

I swung, and hit nothing. I could feel the excitement from the other kids, chattering in Spanish and laughing at me. I swung again and heard a rustle of tissue paper, and felt the ghost of something swinging away. Of course I would be useless at this. I didn’t know that another man was stationed on the end of the rope, yanking the piñata out of reach.

I had gone first, since I was the birthday girl. Kids who grow up with piñatas know the drill, and people yell from the sidelines, “Now! Hit it now!” Dad and Gladys weren’t the yelling sort. Nurse might have helped me, if she’d known what was going on—I know, after the England–Ireland rugby match, that she had it in her—but to her the piñata was probably as foreign as a penis gourd or a shrunken head. The gardener yelled in Spanish, which might as well have been Chinese.

I swung again and again, since it was expected of me. All I wanted was for this unfestive, barbaric, inexplicable birthday party to be over.

“Basta, hijita, muy bueno.”
I felt the man take the stick from my hand, then untie the blindfold. At least the humiliation was over.

“Well done, honey,” said Daddy, sounding impatient and bored, as I went back to stand beside Nurse. I took it as disappointment in me, and it deepened my misery. I didn’t know that the first child is never allowed to break the piñata; the men in charge yank it out of reach until everyone has had a turn.

Finally, the last and biggest boy stepped up to bat. The clay pot in the donkey’s belly cracked, and candy showered down. The local kids rushed in, scrabbling for it on the bricks.

“Run in and get the candy, honey,” said Daddy, irritated by my lack of initiative.

I found a few pieces that had skittered to the edge. I didn’t like Mexican candy, and I was frightened by the melee, and the flailing stick, which the blindfolded boy was still swinging while the gardener tried to get it off him.

I wished I was anywhere else. I understood—without asking, and without being told—that I wasn’t going back to Miller Place. I didn’t know why. Maybe my long, miserable bout of chickenpox had sealed my fate, or maybe Grampa didn’t like the way Martine and I used to creep up the slatted steps to his room and spy on him. But why couldn’t Nana and Grampa at least have kept me for the summer? Why had I been spirited off the moment school ended and run into a siding in Mexico, as if there were no other roof on earth that could shelter me?

Cici told me later that Nana had written to Daddy to say that she and Grampa couldn’t keep me anymore: they were too old, the responsibility of a child was too great. I doubt it was Nana’s choice. Maybe all Grampa really wanted was more money from Daddy, as Cici contemptuously suspected. Whatever he said made Daddy determined to take me away from “the demented old dago” (as he called him in a letter to Cici) as soon as school was out. I imagine that Grampa took a bitter pleasure in forcing Daddy to take me back again. He hadn’t treated Mum properly, and now that he had a new wife, Grampa was going to make it as awkward for him as he could.

I realized that this hated place wasn’t permanent. It was just a holding pattern, as evidently no other place had yet been found for me. But the weeks were stretching toward their third month, and there was no sign that I was ever going to leave.

I sensed that plans were made up for me on the fly. I was an inconvenience—not unloved, but a problem that required constant solving. If I asked when I’d be going home—wherever that was—or whether I’d be staying where I was, I would be putting Daddy, or Gladys, on the spot. (Nurse, I figured, wouldn’t know any more than I did.) I would be able to see the uncertainty on their faces as their brains churned through the possible answers that might keep me quiet, at least for another little while. That would only confirm how random my fate was. It was better just to wait and see.

Euclid. I saw the word on a street sign, instead of the number thirteen. Fifteenth Street, Fourteenth Street, then Euclid.

Gladys’s heavy Impala, a dirty gold color, swung left. After a few blocks of stop signs, it pulled up in front of the house that she, Nurse, and I were to share.

I did not want to live on Euclid Street. I despised the man who had named the streets for caving in to superstition and disguising Thirteenth Street—and despised the street itself for having a name that sounded like some nasty insect. No one would live on Euclid Street if they could possibly live somewhere else.

Still, at least I was back in Los Angeles, splotched with that seductively unnatural bougainvillea which seemed never to wilt or fade. The late-summer sun was softened by the haze of the Pacific thirteen blocks away, and kinder than the inland sun of Mexico. I would be going to a school where Cici’s cousin was a teacher. That made me feel she was looking out for me.

The house had fake-wood plastic paneling and carpets the greeny-brown of cowpats. It was one in a long row of low houses, haphazardly mirrored across the asphalt, and duplicated on street after street between Ocean and Twenty-sixth, where the numbering ended. These were streets where families lived. I was the one who gave us the veneer of fitting in, a nine-year-old with blond pigtails and a bike with a bell and a white basket. It was my favorite part of the day: getting the bike out of the shed in the backyard, wheeling it over the maze of snail trails glistening in the morning sun, and riding alone and independent to school with both hands on the handlebars—in full control as I ought to be on a public road with cars on it. I felt securely placed in the world as I followed my route through the almost deserted streets—a route which was absolutely and entirely mine.

I could see the picture of myself, and I felt like an impostor in suburbia. I’d never lived on a street like this before, with front lawns
studded with sprinklers and everyone mowing the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street like they were supposed to do. I doubted I ever would again. I resented the sameness, which depersonalized the people who lived there, but at the same time I yearned to share it. My nomadic life, with its high-drama story line and eccentric cast of characters, made me feel interesting and unusual—but also somehow fake, as if I hadn’t done anything to earn my special status. I felt, in myself, bog-ordinary. My skin itself was tired by my chameleon life.

What I wanted more than any other impossible thing was to be called Nikki, with two
k
’s. Anjelica called me “Legs” for short, and though I didn’t like the nickname, I loved the affection in it. But the TV commercials for L’Eggs panty hose made it unbearable. Women sashayed past building sites and workers wolf-whistled, “She’s got LEGS!!!!” That same wolf whistle followed me, and it was worse because in my own eyes I was Fattypuff, pudgy and graceless, so very far from someone that men would whistle at—such as my mother, who’d been so beautiful she’d been put on the cover of
Life,
and my sister, who was always in
Vogue.

Nikki: so close to Ricki, but I never realized it. The echo which must have pleased me subconsciously didn’t extend to Vicki (or Vikki), which I used as a comparison and didn’t like at all. I rarely thought about Ricki, my mother—I had no mementos of her, no photographs, nothing that had come with me from St. Cleran’s or Maida Avenue. My most vivid memories of her were that silent car drive and her anger at my bouncing; and I’d started to feel that I was remembering remembering, not actually remembering the events themselves. It was a generation loss in the mental recording, and who knew what details had been fogged away, or what shadows or halos of color had sneaked into the picture? I was three worlds away from my lost mother—too far to ever find her again.