Prison Baby: A Memoir (5 page)

The neighbor storms out. No proof. I’m an unconvicted flour-bag thrower, the bad girl I believe I was born to be. Now I just need to live up to it.

THE WHOLE AFFAIR fed my taste for thrill and adventure, far from my mother’s “don’t stir things up” way of life. She hated any kind of discord. Even with her fierce will, she restrained her voice like many of the women of her generation. Her ancestors emigrated from the Poland/Lithuania region after World War II, and, like other first-generation Americans, my mother strived to blend in, not to stand out.

My motto, on the other hand: Defy and stir things up.

MOTHER KEPT HER day-to-day life within the rules, but still she wanted a daughter at all costs, a multiracial girl in our still-segregated country, even a daughter who rejected her year after year.

A high-energy drive kept my mother in constant motion. I’d step through the front door after school and find her in a scurry around the house. She’d transfer a vase of flowers in the living room from one end of the teak credenza to the other, then dart over to the other side of the room and restack a pile of books on the coffee table.

Half the time I never knew why she scooted from room to room. An open book on her lap stilled her intensity, or classical music, often after dinner. My mother’s insatiable curiosity drove her to constant learning—an art history class at night, lectures about a new archaeological find, tickets to every new museum exhibit, and constant reading. She yearned to earn her master’s degree and on several occasions shared her disappointment about how she never finished her thesis on James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. “Maybe I’ll go back to it someday,” she’d say.

Most days after I came home from school, Mother would pause from organizing the kitchen countertop and as soon as I opened the front door, she’d pop two slices of white bread into our stainless-steel toaster.

I had a stress-related eating disorder. Most meals I’d pick at and shred the food with my fork because I knew I couldn’t get it down. I wanted to eat and often felt hungry, but the tightness in my gut forced my throat shut. I’d chew and chew my food until it turned to liquid, then pocket the mush inside my cheek to fool my parents.

My eating problem made me a skinny girl, like a bird with stick legs, my arms, long and narrow, dangled from my shoulders. I felt like a hummingbird in a sky full of eagles. Over time, my mother reduced my portions so I could eat a complete meal. One night she set a perfectly round hamburger the size of a marble on my plate, and my all-time favorite, noodles and butter. When I finished my whole dinner, she cheered. But after that night, it was back to picking and poking at my food.

After school, Mother would pull out a jar of her homemade raspberry jam from the refrigerator for my snack, then we’d wait for the bread to turn dark brown and crunchy, the way I liked it. My brother and I often picked raspberries from the patch behind our house. Jonathan ate his plucked right off the bush, while I collected as many as I could in my bucket. I loved to wear the berries like crowns on my fingers. They’re still my favorite food, and I still crown my fingers with them. Sometimes we ate the raspberries fresh with cream, then Mother boiled the leftovers for jam.

We sat on kitchen stools with our toast, silent together, and munched on our late-afternoon snack. Our crunches synchronized in a kind of music but if I relaxed a little with our closeness, something took over, like a thorny fist in my gut. I’d march off to the solitude of my room and leave her to sit alone, a piece of half-eaten toast and a dollop of my favorite raspberry jam left on my plate.

The jam knife would clunk into the sink and our ceramic toast plates clink as she’d stack them in the dishwasher. The clatter of her cleanup drove me into guilt that consumed me more and more because deep down I held compassion for Mother. But still, I couldn’t help myself.

MY PARENTS LOVED good food and the kitchen buzzed with my mother’s cooking. Jonathan and I helped set the table, my father hand washed the dishes and I dried them. My mother taught herself to make fine French sauces and called her sometimes-extravagant preparation for their dinner parties of lamb and couscous “just a little pick up.” She prepared gazpacho with watercress in the summer and ratatouille in the fall, and Dad made leek and chicken soup with carrots and bok choy, and French-style omelets with browned butter. He used a special omelet pan that he’d only wipe clean with a damp paper towel, and he’d bark at me if I tried to wash it with dish soap because he thought it would spoil the omelet flavor.

MY MOTHER KEPT a proper appearance. A sturdy, petite woman, always with a ready laugh, she sat with her hands on her lap, ankles crossed, her brown eyes alert and eager with curiosity behind her glasses. She lost herself in reading and gardening, and played the piano and recorder. She made sure she put herself together well, with clip-on earrings and her soft brown hair pulled back. Her Italian-wool tailored suits accentuated her slim waistline, with a silk scarf draped around her neck to highlight her light-olive skin. I wanted a 1960s TV mom like Peggy Lipton in
The Mod Squad
—tall, blonde, and hip. My mother’s elegance and reserved demeanor embarrassed me. Even though I yearned for a mother who looked more like me, since I couldn’t have that, I wanted one who looked more like other mothers in the neighborhood.

Her soft-spoken voice still lifted with the sharpest wit I’ve ever known. We shared an in-the-moment intensity but not much else. She always looked complete, a well-wrapped package in under five feet. Although she claimed to be five feet some inches tall, once I grew past the five-foot mark I found out she had stretched the truth.

My mother wore the pain I caused on her soft round face, her brows sometimes bumped together in worry. Most of the time her mouth curved into a slight smile. She’d remind me at least once a day: Try and look interested or happy. Even if I wasn’t, she wanted me to look it. Not a chance.

No matter how much I pushed my mother away, she just wouldn’t stop trying to reach me. She took a class in “new math” to help me with my advanced homework in elementary school. I excelled in math and spelling, even though I tried not to. Once in a while at dinner my parents quizzed my brother and me on what we learned in school that day. My grade-school report cards often said, “Deborah is timid and withdrawn, and does not work up to her potential,” and then, in an attempt at a positive comment, “But her printing is improved.” In the column for parents’ comments, my mother wrote: “Good. Then there’s still hope.”

Did she think improved penmanship would help pull me out of my shell?

My brother strived to win in everything, but he wasn’t the best speller, and at home during dinner when our parents quizzed us, I would blurt out the correct answer as fast as I could just to better him. Most often, though, something pushed me to want to fail. My parents would tell me I was “intelligent and above average,” yet I hated their approval . . . though I sometimes wanted it.

I’VE TAKEN PIANO lessons since age six or seven. Sometimes Mother calls me over to the piano and pats the stool next to her, then opens her music book to my favorite duet, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” with its mysterious and haunting melody. Music stirs some magic inside me, loosens the rubber-band ball in my gut. Mother and I play duets together without talking, and if my fingers dance ahead of hers, she stops and releases the metronome so I can better keep tempo. Then we begin again.

I force myself to focus on the music because if I don’t, I lose my place and wander off, hypnotized by the metronome’s click click click click. The pressure of my father behind us across the room where he sits and scribbles on a manuscript or reads doesn’t help my concentration either.

I love this piano ritual with my mother, and I love her in those moments, love sitting at her side, love how her skillful fingers dance on the keys, her sophisticated perfume wafting around me.

But after one or two pieces, I’ve had enough. Enough tenderness with her because I can’t take it in anything other than small doses. A person needs to open the door, though, for any love to seep in.

Mother wants to play a second tune, even a third, but I can’t go on, can’t stand the collision in my gut. I can never shake the pictures in my head, the flashes of images in my imagination about women in denim or khaki, behind bars, images induced by television and newspapers of inmates surrounded by stern-faced prison guards with the hollow echo of steel doors slamming in the background.

I tell myself, “A girl born in prison isn’t supposed to play Bach or Beethoven duets with her mother.” In the middle of a duet, I slide my stool back and take off to my room. Solitude, always my redeemer.

It will take two decades before I tell my parents I had learned about my prison birth.

THE SUMMER BEFORE I ENTER SIXTH grade we move to Bellevue, Seattle’s latest upscale suburb, into our second house, a contemporary rambler with a fire-engine-red door. It is just months before I find the letter.

On the bus ride home from my first day of school, I’m the first one to board and head to the back for the coveted center seat in the last-row bench. The midafternoon sun beats down on the seat and hot vinyl warms the back of my legs. I settle in and one by one the other kids file into the seats in front of me, all the way down to the last seat behind the driver. Every boy and girl—white and perfect and happy—all smile and bounce and cluster into duos and trios of friends.

The odor of someone’s leftover open banana in a lunch bag fills the air, and its fruity scent distracts me from the noisy chatter. Relieved no one sits beside me, I stare out the window, glad the first day of school has ended. Meeting new people is hard for me. I’m not quick to make new friends, always sure that I look odd and kids might tease me about my sometimes earth-yellow skin, sometimes a dark sienna, depending on how much or how little sun I’m under, and racially ambiguous features, different from my classmates’ and other kids’ in the neighborhood.

My bus stop’s one of the first. I peer down the long bus aisle and through the driver’s window, our row of mailboxes ahead over the horizon at the top of our lane, a block away. The bus rattles to slow down for my stop and my gut tightens. I hadn’t taken the foresight to plan ahead and sit close to the door for a quick exit.

Now I have to walk down the long aisle past the rows of kids, all eyes on me
.

I start to stand and the bare skin on the back of my thighs sticks to the rough plastic of the seat. A quick flip of my hand flings my skirt down behind me. My mother had insisted I change out of my jeans for the first day of school.

I brace myself, fingers wrapped on the steel bars above the seat backs to my side, then grip the back of every other seat—left, right, left, right—down the aisle to steady myself from the bounce of the bus and from my panic. Every face turns up to me.

I hate when anyone looks at me for any reason other than when mischief calls my name, and then every bit of attention sends a thrill through me.

I bite the inside of my cheek to gather strength.

What was I thinking? They’re looking at me!

Nothing else to do. Keep on.
Go
.

Halfway down the aisle, a girl’s voice whispers behind me.

“Nigger,” she says in a tone soft enough so the driver won’t hear but loud enough to reach my ears. My stomach clenches even more, and the thought flashes through me: I don’t even know what I am and you’re calling me this?

I never cry in public, but I want to collapse and bawl, run and hide. Gone forever. Instead I pull my back as straight and tall as my four-foot, ten-year-old skinny-girl frame can stretch, bite harder into the inside of my cheek, and hold my breath. Bite, hold breath, freeze. I’ll spend twenty-some years in this lockdown position.

Drop your hands, I tell myself. I’m darker than usual from summer days at the beach and need to keep the brown on my arms and hands away from everyone. Just when the bus rattles to its stop, the silence breaks with the whisper from a second girl behind me: “Yeah.”

I know it’s coming this time, bite deeper into my cheek to prepare.

“Nigger,” she says.

I suck in my ribs.
Spin around
, I tell myself like a command,
smack those girls
.

Knock out their every tooth, smash their pointy noses.

But I never turn, never say anything other than inside my head. I hate myself, hate my parents for their whiteness, hate I’m not, and hate not knowing my race. I detest myself. I’m a mishmash like no one else.

By the time the hydraulic door gasps open, my rage and pain have hardened into a deeper lockdown. I run downhill on our quarter-mile lane, past the other houses, past the field of tall dry grasses, and home to the bottom of the lane.

I barge into our house a sweaty mess, my cotton skirt stuck to my thighs, my t-shirt glued to my back, and an ache buried deep in my heart. My mother bustles in the kitchen, wiping the countertops over and over to collect crumbs and spills from her elaborate gourmet preparations.

The bergamot scent of Earl Grey tea lingers in the air and the classical music turned low on the radio soothes me for a moment. I stumble into the kitchen, still out of breath from my dash home. Sponge in hand, my mother turns to me, smiles, and says, “How’d your first day go, pet?”

I’m too frozen for any words to leak out, shredded inside. Can’t she tell?

I sit down on the fireplace hearth and press my fingertips into the cool slate edge to keep me from smashing her with my fist. Mother sets down her sponge and buries her hands in the side pockets of her apron.

“How’d it go, dear?”

I force my eyes to meet hers, choke back tears, and in an almost-whisper say, “Kids called me ‘nigger’ on the bus.”

Her eyes widen.

I yearn for her arms around me so I can fall apart against her chest, but I don’t want to break down before my mother reaches out first. I wish I could melt into her. Into someone. Anyone. But I can’t, don’t know how.