Read The First Day of the Rest of My Life Online

Authors: Cathy Lamb

The First Day of the Rest of My Life (43 page)

BOOK: The First Day of the Rest of My Life
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“I sensed, when I was a child, that my grandparents and my parents knew something I didn’t know, that there was a secret. I knew there was someone named Ismael, but I didn’t know who Ismael was. Now I do. Ismael Bacherach was my grandparents’ late son, the brother of my momma. They have spent their whole lives missing him, loving him, feeling him in their hearts. My momma used to talk to him outside by the sea as she played her violin.”
I stopped so I wouldn’t sob. My dear momma, longing for her brother, talking to him into the cool sea air.
“What I’ve learned from all of this is that we can’t move on from our tragedies until we deal with them, until we face them. I need to move on, fully, from my tragedies. Here’s what I know: I am Madeline O’Shea. Flawed. Wracked with a lot of pain. Struggling. Wrestling with life.
But I am trying.
I am trying to be better, trying to be authentic, trying to be me. Trying to feel clean after what I went through as a girl, trying to feel pure, trying not to let my emotional dirt smother me, stamp out my breath, crush my soul. I have been driven by my emotional dirt for too long.”
I wiped the tears from my face, but darned if this whole thing wasn’t feeling cathartic.
“I want you ladies to close your eyes. Think of the emotional dirt in your life. Cry if you want. But think about what’s been wrapped around you tight and hard and hurtful. Think about something that happened. Maybe something you did, something that was done to you, a terrible mistake, or many terrible mistakes that you made. Think about your losses, your hurts. I’m giving you time.”
I waited for two minutes. There were a lot of women there, and those tears and sobs came. I was a mess. They were a mess. We were all a mess.
“Now, ladies, stand up. Put an imaginary pencil in your hand and write in the air about your emotional dirt. Write it all down. I’ll wait.”
I waited for two more minutes. We were all a mess as those pencils went flying.
“You want to cry? You cry then!” I shouted at them. “Cry. Get it out. Scream it out, yell! Let it out, ladies. We can’t keep this inside anymore, it’s killing us. Let me hear it!”
A woman in one of the front rows yelled, “You failed me, Mother.”
Another announced, “I’m lonely and I think I’m gay!”
“I still love my ex-husband, the pig . . . I haven’t had sex in eight years! I’m addicted to pain killers . . . I’m unhappy . . . My mother was never there for me . . . My father is in jail . . . My brother brags all the time and I wanna strangle him . . . my childhood sucked . . . I was abused by . . . I’m broke . . . my daughter’s an alcoholic . . .”
I waited another two minutes for that internal muck to be released, then I changed course.
“Now you ladies listen to me,” I boomed out, ferocious again, my hellfire gathered up and burning bright. “You listen. You drop that pencil on the ground, that pencil that spelled out your hurt. Drop it.” I watched hands drop that pencil. “Stomp on it! I mean it, I want to hear you stomping!”
I heard it, they stomped.
“Rip down that piece of paper you were writing on in space. Rip it! Rip it!” I saw women waving their hands through the air. “Set it on fire! Get those flames whipped right up! It’s on fire, right? The ashes are floating down? Stomp on those ashes.” I heard ’em stomping again.
“Scream at those ashes!”
They screamed.
“Yell, ‘Never again will I let my emotional dirt hurt me!’ ”
They yelled it.
“Yell, ‘I am done with it, I am done with the dirt!’”
They yelled again.
“ ‘I am clean, I am pure!’ ”
Man, those yells hurled round and round the convention center walls.
“Scream it again! Scream it again!”
Those ladies almost brought the roof down.
“You know where my transformation is going to start? Do you know? Right here.” I pointed down at the floor, then out into the audience, up into the balconies. “Right now. I’m starting with how I look. I don’t like my suits. I don’t like how businesslike they are. I don’t like the boring colors. I don’t like the matchy-matchy look to them. I don’t like that I feel as if I’m in a linen straitjacket and a chastity belt at the same time. I wore them to put armor over myself so I could believe
I was someone.
What a joke! A suit cannot make you someone. Only you can make yourself someone. And the suits aren’t me. Not me at all. You want to see the new me?” They clapped. They hooted. “Are you sure?” They screamed that they did.
I envisioned my momma, arms up, cheering, reminding me it was a “cardinal sin” to be frumpy.
“Let me show you.” I nodded at the sound guy, who turned on a funny strip tease number as I took off one piece of clothing, and another, and another.
When I was done I was standing in my new favorite outfit: A shiny pink and black cheetah print skirt. A black lace shirt. A black leather jacket with a yellow ribbon for hope tucked into the pocket.
Georgie and I had gone shopping together. She said, “You have put a screech on your hormonal layer of cataclysmic inner turpitude.”
I did not know what a hormonal layer of cataclysmic inner turpitude meant. “What does that mean?”
“It means, my rad boss, that you like yourself now and you are roaring.”
Yep, I was getting there, getting to like myself.
The finishing touch? I kicked off my dull heels, grabbed a bag onstage, and slipped on the cotton candy pink heels my momma wore.
The spotlights beamed down on me as I yanked the rubber band and bobby pins out of my hair and fluffed it. My curls cascaded to my shoulders—no more flat ironing for me. No more killing my hair because of what Sherwinn had done to my curls. “I have trapped my curls like I have trapped my life because they reminded me of something sad that happened to my sister and me, something sick. But I will have no more trapping in my life. None. Here’s my curls, here’s me!
Here. I. Am.
”
They cheered. My, how they cheered.
“This is me. This is Madeline O’Shea. No more lies. No more burying my past. No more secrets. This is me and you, all of us here together. I am me and I rock! Rock your womanhood, ladies! Rock your womanhood. Say it with me!”
Pandemonium. Groovy, yeah. They loved it.
Rock Your Womanhood!
Loved it.
“No more lies, ladies, no more muck. Be you! Be yoooouuuuuu!”
I
almost
felt like dancing.
 
Annie and I scrambled out to the limousine after I’d been onstage three times with standing ovations.
When we pulled away from the curb, she opened a cabinet, pulled out two champagne glasses, poured the champagne, and handed me one.
“Cheers,” she said.
“Cheers.”
“You rocked my womanhood.”
“Thank you. Back at ya.”
 
The days after my speech were jammed with calls, e-mails, reporters.
I was a story.
I had circumvented Marlene’s article, not only with my speech at the convention center but
Boutique
printed my speech, in full, in their magazine. Newspapers covered it, too. I took some vengeful glee in cutting her off at the knees. It’s not personal.
Her article came out. It received scant publicity. There was nothing in it about Granddad, the stolen papers, Auschwitz or Drancy and the real Laurents. Perhaps Marlene couldn’t prove it. Perhaps it wasn’t relevant to the article on my mother and the trials. Perhaps she was so steamed I beat her to the punch, she gave up and wrote the thing without further ado. I don’t know.
In future articles I took the opportunity to rail against child porn. “It’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s hideous. People who traffic in this, who produce or distribute this smack, should be jailed. No, it is not okay to buy it. No, it is not okay to have it in your collection. It’s not harmless. Without a market for child porn, we wouldn’t have children in porn, being abused, raped, and attacked.
You are guilty if you are looking at it.”
Click, click, click.
Somehow, though, when I announced that I’d been blackmailed, it triggered creepy men to say online in their perverted chat rooms that they had the images of Annie and me in their collections, too. How they boasted. How proud they were. How special. They had photos of Madeline O’Shea! Famous lady! Naked! Did you see the one with her dressed in high heels and nothing else, bending over to touch her toes? Did you see the one with the rope? What about the one with the guy in the blond wig and her. . . .
I had Keith Stein, that bulldog, hire a computer forensics guy. The FBI ran stings with local police. They went to pornography-loving men’s homes. One of them was a prominent attorney from a wealthy family. He had a trust fund.
I am now suing him for that trust fund. His wife has left him. She will take half of what is left.
Another man had a massive collection of child porn, including photos of Annie and me.
He was a U.S. senator. He, too, had a fortune.
I am now suing the U.S. senator for that fortune. He has resigned under an onslaught of publicity.
A third man sent us a letter and said he had stacks of our photos. “Mountains of them. I’ve got a price. Give me a call.” Dumb man. A friend of Sam’s. He lived above his mechanic’s shop on the Cape.
Annie went to Fiji. She is a little off her rocker. He does not have a home anymore, or a mechanics shop, or photos. He has been arrested. The newspaper noted that a gas line leaked and sparks from a machine led to the fire. Troubling, it was, two fires in such a short amount of time on the Cape.
It is my new life’s mission to eliminate the production and distribution of child porn. I will do whatever it takes to prevent any child from going through what Annie and I went through. I owe it to those children. If I can prevent this relentless misery for one child, it is worth it.
Maybe that’s why I went through what I did. Eventually, I would get myself together and become a vengeful, whip-ass former victim who would come up swinging for vulnerable kids. There was the “good” in it, right there.
I am done hiding. I am done cowering.
Keith Stein called me the other day about these lawsuits. He is a bulldog, as I have mentioned. He gets very mean, legally speaking. “They’re threatening back, Madeline.” He laughed. “All sorts of things, defamation of character, they’ll counter sue you, you’ll be liable for court costs, etcetera. What do I tell them?”
“Tell them . . .” I thought about my life and what men had done to me, how they’d hurt me, how these other men-monsters were hurting other children, and I said what I thought, and I meant it all the way through to my bones. “Tell them I said,
Don’t fuck with me.
”
 
I received a package from Torey. Inside was a letter.
“I read your speech, Madeline. I have let my emotions out for you, for the kid you were, for three days. I sent you an animal hug.”
I opened the box.
Inside was a long, furry (fake) tail.
 
“Aurora King is here, Madeline,” Georgie said via the phone.
“Excellent.” I put aside an offer from a speaker’s bureau to go on a national tour. “I’ve been thinking that I need a handful of glitter in my hair.”
“She says that she can feel your spirit and it is . . . what color, Aurora? Gold. She says your spirit is gold and she is not sensing any black swirling around you. She says she was so worried about you recently that she meditated for you, at night outside . . . what? She said she lit candles, too, for you and made a special tea with mowi wowi. You know what mowi wowi is, right?”
I rolled my eyes. “Did she bring any of the tea?”
“No, she didn’t. She says she’s seeing shelves, a red hat, a boy/man, I don’t know what she means by that, and an old wedding ring with blood.”
“Good. What is she wearing?”
“Gold. Ruffles, fairy wings.”
“Show her in. Tell her not to throw glitter at me.”
“Don’t throw glitter at Madeline,” I heard Georgie say as she rang off.
I opened my door to Aurora and closed my eyes.
She threw gold glitter at me.
But this time, I was prepared. I threw silver, glittery stars back at her. Two huge handfuls.
She was surprised, but then she announced, staring at me in my blue pencil skirt with a ruffle and a pink, silky, Japanese-styled blouse, with awe in her voice, “I believe you’ve found your soul.”
 
“I have eight clients now, Madeline,” Ramon told me. “Eight clients lined up that I’m building stuff for like decks and arbors and trellises. Most of them in your neighborhood. I have other people who have called, I called them back, and I’m going to meet with them later. Plus, I had so many people who needed their lawn mowed that now I’ve hired a guy to do it. He was in jail with me. He’s a hard worker. Made a mistake when he was twenty-one and sold drugs, but now he’s going to minister school.”
BOOK: The First Day of the Rest of My Life
9.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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