Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (35 page)

This was troubling news for me, because it offered validation of my mother’s story. If my defects were a fluke, they might well be a mutation beginning with me, and if so my child could be born without arms or legs or both.

Faced with the possibility of a genetic mutation, I was willing to take on thalidomide again. I found all the articles I could drum up on the topic. I learned that limbs develop in the womb during the first trimester. Normally limb buds appear near the end of the first month, and the limbs are formed by the end of the third month. Based on the development of my limbs, my mother would have had to have taken the drug after the first month. One of those anti-abortion posters from the seventies flashed before my eyes: the tiny feet of a ten-week-old fetus. My legs must have stopped developing between four and ten weeks.

I had to rub my eyes and double-check the wording because the authors of one article referred to thalidomide-deformed children as “monsters.” This went beyond insensitive. Later I would learn that the Greek word
terato
means “monster,” and that thalidomide prompted the creation of the term “teratogen.” Eventually I would learn related terms, such as “monster-drug.” In the library I tried to see where my family fit into a tragedy that could be studied in tabloids or in peer-reviewed medical journals. I wondered what Mom’s initial reaction to those exploitative photographs had been. Putting my own needs aside, I could understand her reasons for distancing herself as far from that tragedy as possible, especially since she had been convinced of the “God’s choice” explanation of my defects two years before the truth came out. When I imagined myself in her place, I felt horrible for my younger mother. Then an idea came to me.

I rushed home, pulled out the box where I’d packed the paperwork from my newspaper article, and fished out the photograph of Mom and Dad on their trip to Germany. It was one of the few photos I had of my parents together. Until now I had not fully realized its evidentiary value. I studied it for clues: my parents on a mountaintop with snow sprinkled on distant mountains, Dad wearing only a blazer and Mom not yet in maternity clothes, just a loose-fitting frock and lightweight coat. Since I was born in September, my conception would have been in January. The developmental damage would have likely occurred between late February and early March. Based on the clothing and the snow, it seemed that this picture was taken at about that time of year. Ironically, it was Mom who had chosen this photo for my article.

I tossed the photo along with my notes onto the dining room table. My head ached. I walked to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of wine. I’d always suspected that Mom had taken the drug in Germany, but after reading the book my friend Daniel gave me in Boston, I wondered if she had brought the drug from Cincinnati to take on the plane. After filling a tall glass with wine, I grabbed the phone and dialed Mom’s number.

“Mom,” I said, “it’s Eileen.”

“Eileen!” she said, as always.

I sat down at the drop-leaf table she had given us. “Guess what? I just ran across that picture of you and Dad in Germany.”

“Which one?” she asked.

I could always appeal to Mom’s vanity, so I said, “You look like movie stars up there on the mountain, Mom. What is Dad doing in a beret?” I held my breath.

“What was
I
wearing?” she wanted to know.

“A brown car coat. Was it winter?” I needed the season so I could pinpoint exactly where I was in my fetal development.

“Well, let’s see, I think it was March.”

March covered her second to third month of pregnancy. “Oh,” I said, exhaling, “I have to go,” and hung up.

I finished off the bottle of wine. Surrounding me were my notes, Xeroxes of journal articles, and that photo. Everything pointed to a pill taken in March. As I alternately tried to digest this news and to numb myself against it, I wanted to convince myself that my mother was telling me the truth, that she hadn’t taken thalidomide. But that option left me with the possibility of a mutation. The consequences of a mutation outweighed the problems associated with the idea of my mother lying to me. Mutation versus a lie: which did I prefer?

This circular thinking lasted one full day.

If I had taken a step back years earlier, if I hadn’t needed to be spoken to honestly and listened to patiently by my mother, if I had accepted everything Mom told me without question, if I had never questioned my faith, if I had ignored Sister Luke’s public announcement, and if I had never educated myself, these years of psychological torture might have been avoided. I could have accepted that everything would work out or that Mom was only telling a “white lie.” In fact, my mother had been providing clues to the truth all along. For instance, she’d always made a point of saying that she was pregnant with me on her trip to Germany. She had even selected this picture for my article. Maybe she’d wanted me to figure it out. What she had not wanted was for me to ask her about it or discuss it with anyone.

If I were a different person, I might have realized there in my dining room that I’d made the same mistakes over and over again with my family. I had learned nothing from the alienation after my pathetic attempt to confront Liz that Christmas Eve, nor had I learned not to ask Mom about thalidomide, and I had not learned to make up a female roommate to live with in Washington before marriage. What was I missing that most of my siblings had understood and accepted about our family?

If I were a different person, I might have celebrated right then that I could have ten children with Tom. Instead, I tortured myself over why my mother would lie, which only led me back to whether my own children would be healthy or not. What I did not ask myself was whether I wanted to be married to a man I no longer understood, maybe had never understood, and who did not seem to understand me. Most importantly, I might have asked myself why I drank as much as I did.

The next day, after I awakened with a hangover and showed up at the wrong building to proctor an exam, I came home and put a stop to the drinking cycle. I opened the phone book and called the number for a recovery group. I didn’t need a fancy rehab.

“I
’m calling to turn myself in,” I said to the man on the other end.

“Well, that was easy.”

“What happens next?”

“I’ll have someone pick you up at five thirty for a six o’clock meeting. Just give me your address. Will you be all right for an hour? Do you need to talk?”

“Í don’t want to think about this too much or I might change my mind. Maybe I’ll take a shower while I wait. I feel so oily.”

“That’s a good idea. Did you eat anything today?”

“Does Diet Coke count?”

“That makes two things you need to do. Call back if you need anything else.”

At the age of twenty-seven, I was finally making a choice that was good for me—one that others might criticize—and I would be okay. Soon a woman came to my door. “I’ll drive,” I said. She looked at me with concern that quickly softened into a smile. “I’ll drive this time, and maybe you can do it another time,” she said. This would be my first lesson in handling conflict with subtlety. As I got into her car, I realized that no one in their right mind would take the passenger seat with a driver who had just called a recovery hotline. My second lesson was to accept that I had to earn people’s trust, and that my legs were not the only reason that others needed me to prove my competence.

T
he following summer, I was preparing to celebrate one year of sobriety. My husband had suggested that the meetings I attended might be overkill. That was a sign, I’d decided, that I should keep going to them. These days I felt better, sounded better, looked better, even smelled better.

In July, Tom and I visited Ted and other friends in New York. Ted had recently coached the basketball team of a Catholic school in Harlem to a citywide victory. He was finishing his master’s degree in philosophy at Columbia and shared an apartment with Richard above a vegan bakery at 125th and Broadway. The only good thing about his apartment, other than the cheap rent, was the aroma of fresh-baked bread. Realistically, though, Ted could not afford a slice of that bread.

We came out of the apartment drenched in sweat and ready to cool down in Chip’s air-conditioned apartment on the Upper East Side. Tom and Richard had gone ahead of us on the subway. Ted and I wanted to ride his bike, a used Schwinn. I climbed onto the book rack, and we got off to a wobbly start.

“Did you pick this bike out of someone’s trash?” I asked.

“I paid thirty-five bucks for this thing.”

“Dad paid that much for his first car.”

Ted snorted. My legs stuck straight out to the sides. Uncomfortable as it felt, I was more concerned about catching an ankle on a street sign.

Humid air swept under my striped cotton pantsuit. It looked like pajamas, though I preferred to see the outfit as hipster chic: cinched at the waist, capri length, with snappy white Keds. We were heading south on Broadway.

Chip was forever scoring great apartments through family connections. He had called the one with the elevator that opened into his living room his “flat.” The “loft” we were heading toward was east of Park on a block with an equestrian center. The owners of these sublets were always “abroad.”

Ted had taken a lucrative summer job as a waiter in an oyster bar near Wall Street, only to quit because “it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing.” Since then, he’d spent his summer in his bedroom over the bakery, where he played his brass guitar until its neck split in half. Then he began to paint portraits of it. He tilted it against the radiator and painted it with its neck dangling like a man hanged in a noose, or set the body on his bed so that its curves settled into his cheap bedspread and the sunlight ignited the brass.

We turned onto Morningside. I leaned left and my legs shifted us off-balance. Ted reached back to shove me into place. He started wobbling again.

“How far do we have to go?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” he yelled back. “Maybe fifty blocks. You should have gone with Tom.”

I wanted to tell Ted about the problems in my marriage, but I didn’t want to ruin the joy of being with my brother on a bike.

My hair was cut in a bob that lifted in the warm breeze. The pantsuit ballooned at my back. Ted wore cutoffs that had been long jeans when I last saw him, but the holes in the knees had taken over. He’d grown out his hair, and the wiry black curls behind his ears were back. Neither of us wore a helmet.

Now we were on Amsterdam, and we hit a stretch of crumbled pavement. My teeth rattled, which made me crack up and almost lose my grip.

“What’s so funny?” he said. I could tell he wanted to get his mind off the backbreaking task of pumping another forty blocks, so I went with a story from our childhood. One nice thing about my family: no matter what’s troubling us, we can pull a story from our past and forget everything else. I’ve seen it happen during devastating funerals, failing economies, life-threatening illnesses, and the earliest stages of Mom’s hospitalizations. Someone would say, “Remember when Michael complained that Odie drew a worm on his freshly painted wall, and Mom said, ‘But it
is
a really cute worm, Mike.’”

“Remember the ring toss?” I said.

“Ha!” Ted honked. “The Taylor boys’ carnival.”

I jiggled with laughter, almost tipping us over. “Remember our can drive?”

“The can drive.” Ted’s head turned sideways and he licked his lips. “Mrs. A.’s cookies.”

“You always got cookies out of her.”

“Yeah, but her house smelled like a zoo.”

I remembered Mrs. A.’s menagerie of animals. She always gave us Girl Scout cookies, no matter what time of year. “I’ll never eat another Thin Mint again,” I said.

“I love those things,” said Ted.

“Me too.”

We were both quiet for a while. Without any distractions, I saw as clear as the road in front of me that it was time to leave Tom. I’d been taking the standard advice not to make any major changes in the first year of recovery. That year was almost up. I had quit my job in an effort to pump more energy into my marriage. Now I had no income.

On Amsterdam, Ted picked up speed. He found a clear stretch on the sidewalk and pulled onto it. Up ahead, a shopkeeper in an apron carried a broom from his store. His buddy followed him to the sidewalk. The shopkeeper swept while his buddy talked. Ted was looking to cross Amsterdam; he didn’t see the men ahead of us. I shouted a warning and he slammed on the brakes at the last second. The jerking motion jarred my right leg loose. It spilled from the bottom of my pant leg onto the sidewalk right next to the shopkeeper’s broom. His buddy muttered something in Spanish ending in “Dios.” The shopkeeper pulled the broomstick to his chest, looked up to the sky, and blessed himself.

Ted reached down, snatched the leg, and tossed it over the handlebar. He started pedaling fast. My empty pantleg flapped in the breeze. “Give me that back,” I said. “Everyone can see it.”

Ted honked. “I know,” he said. “Isn’t it great?”

I leaned into his bony shoulder and held on tight. Nothing embarrassed Ted. If I could count on anyone, I could count on Ted.

A few weeks later, I celebrated my first year of sobriety. I spent the evening at the apartment of a friend named Geila, who was in her third year of law school and her fifth year of recovery. We’d bonded because we were both from Cincinnati and both had a connection to Georgetown Law. It helped that her religious upbringing was more confusing than mine. Her mother was Catholic, her father Jewish, and Geila had spent part of her childhood with Mormons. She had known violence from a young age, and she talked like a character from a David Lynch film. Intimidating to some, annoying to others, Geila was also respected because of her nurturing side. She attributed her mental and physical health to swimming.

Geila chatted with people who lived on the streets. She regularly took food and clothing to a man who slept in a doorway. Sometimes she snapped at people, though it was usually in the spirit of a well-intentioned mother who might throw up her hands in a panic and shriek, “Stop!” Her actions were almost invariably helpful and, in some cases, life-changing. At first I was skeptical, but Geila was the opposite of Uriah Heep, and I admired her for that. I started swimming with her and soon I was swimming every day. I became stronger and at the same time more relaxed. Deeper still, I felt a new sense of confidence in myself.