Roy and Claire had arrived in a yellowish, beat-up Chevy Nova with two empty car seats in the back. This was a different car from the one Roy usually drove to visit us in. Not that I paid such careful attention to the car he drove, but he’d come every year, and this time I couldn’t help but notice the car seats because I knew that Roy didn’t have kids. Maybe they’d given a ride to some friends who had kids?
Claire had been so easy to talk with from the moment we met that I felt comfortable asking her about the car seats. “Oh,” she said, “we borrowed this car from Roy’s sister, Tess.
“Tess is a good friend of mine. We were even roommates for a while before Roy and I got together,” she said, smiling at the distant memory.
We paused at the foot of the garden, where all the large-petaled pink peonies were in their heaviest concentration. I felt like leaning my back into them, like a trust fall. How many times had I smelled them adoringly, or played and danced near them as Mom carefully pulled up the weeds around their roots. Would they catch me? Would anything or anyone catch me inside of this moment? Maybe I could lean forward into Claire, her naivete so resolute. Or would she need me to hold the weight of us both when I told her that her former college roommate, her boyfriend’s sister, was my birth mother?
How did she not know who I was? Maybe she did know, and was just pretending she didn’t to protect Tess’s privacy?
“Did you know that Tess is my birth mother?” I asked, suddenly desperate to be proven wrong.
Claire’s eyes softened, and her lips turned up into a delicate smile.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.” The sky spread out above us in aching silence.
I skipped straight from feeling hidden to feeling replaced.
“So those car seats are for… her kids?”
Claire’s body shifted into a more professional posture, like Dr. Levis, our local doctor down the road, who smelled like formaldehyde and always bent toward me just slightly before she spoke, as if I were hard of hearing. “Yes,” Claire said. “She has two beautiful baby boys.”
“Do you think she thinks about me?” I blurted out before even fully processing what she had just told me. It was the question I’d wanted to ask Roy every single year since he had started visiting and I was old enough to know who he was, but hadn’t had the courage.
“I’m sure she does,” Claire said, her voice measured and compassionate.
“I don’t think she wants to meet me,” I said, eyes downcast, because if she did, why would she have had other children to replace me?
“I don’t think that’s true at all, Becky,” Claire said. “I think she’s probably very busy with two babies, but I’m sure she’d love to meet you.”
I could hardly believe my birth mother had two kids. How was it possible that she had given me up, but kept two other kids? These were, then, my brothers? Would my having other siblings mean Riana and Sean would no longer be my brother and sister? Or would my new brothers be their new brothers, too? Tess, I thought, must love them so much more than she loved me, because she kept them. After eleven years of being a little sister, would I even know how to be a big sister? This all felt both revelatory and debilitating, like finding out you suddenly have superpowers, but can only use them if you throw away the thing in your life that makes you feel safest.
It suddenly clicked in my head that Roy had not told Claire about me because it must have been a secret he’d promised to keep—that I was a secret he’d promised to keep. The idea of being a secret ran so counter to everything I understood or felt myself to be, an outgoing, social, and inescapably disclosed entity. You couldn’t miss me in my family if you tried, in my town, in my school, much less keep me a secret. It felt like further assurance that Tess didn’t want to meet me.
Years later, Roy confirmed to me that he had in fact vowed to Tess he would protect this very private moment of her life from public knowledge, but it seemed unfair then that he had kept information about Tess from me while sharing information about me with her. The image of Tess that I had in my mind was frozen in time, the way she had been described to me by Dad, as a young, attractive, and precocious teenager with long brown hair and sometimes glasses. I could not comprehend the difference between seventeen-year-old Tess and the now twenty-seven-year-old Tess.
“She lives in Portsmouth, with her partner, Miguel,” Claire said.
Somehow I understood that this was not my birth father, that my new brothers and I had different fathers, because Claire didn’t mention my birth father at all. And how could Tess live so close for all these years without me knowing? I always imagined she lived in Boston, where she was from. But in Portsmouth of all places? A mere sixty-five miles away?
We visited Mom’s parents, my grandparents, in Portsmouth every year a few days before Christmas, but no one had ever told me that Tess lived in the same town. While I was opening the inevitable, high-collared flannel nightgown wrapped in Christmas paper dotted with fat Santas, Tess could have been within walking distance, at her home reading bedtime stories to her babies, my brothers. Mom and Dad had always been transparent about everything, maybe even too transparent, but for whatever reason, not about this. It didn’t make sense.
I began to wonder in earnest what Tess looked like, because now she was no longer just a character in a story that Mom and Dad had told me. Now she was someone who lived within an hour and a half away, with a family of her own, in an apartment, probably with a job, too, though I’d forgotten to ask Claire if she had one or what it was. She had a car with car seats.
“I’m sure that Claire is right,” Mom said when I told her what Claire had said about Tess wanting to meet me. “We’ll just have to wait and see what we can work out.”
Dad had always told me that one day, when the time was right, I would be able to meet Tess, but after my conversation with Claire, and Mom acknowledging it as a step in the process of getting to that right time, it felt almost painful to wait another minute.
Seven
My Love, I wish we could run away together, the note began, written in swirly, round, and flirty handwriting on light blue rice paper. Just you and me and Becky. I love you, Catherine. I’d found the note folded several times into a small diamond shape nestled under the right corner of Dad’s drawing board, where he kept notes and letters—not all from Catherine, but many of them.
Catherine was my father’s lover. She and her husband, Anton, had moved to town with their young daughter, Lucy, earlier that summer before I started fifth grade, right around the same time that Mom and Dad decided to have an open marriage. Mom described the new marital arrangement to me as their decision to “branch out.”
Initially, the arrangement involved spouse-swapping exclusively with Catherine and Anton. Things didn’t work out with Anton and Mom, who later found another extramarital partner, but Catherine and Dad fell in love hard and maintained an intimate relationship for nearly a decade. I liked Catherine, who paid me a lot of attention, took me places, bought me clothes, and frequently told me that I was the most strikingly beautiful girl she’d ever seen. But I didn’t know that she dreamed of running away with me and Dad until I found the note under Dad’s drawing board, where I shouldn’t have gone snooping around, much less read anything I found there, but I couldn’t help myself.
I loved the smell of my parents’ bedroom. It smelled like dark corners, brocade drapes, worn cotton, and pencil lead. Mom and Dad kept the heavy curtains drawn on the windows that faced the street, opening them for a few hours in the mid-morning to warm the room, then closing them in the afternoon. Mom’s solid-oak antique dresser with brass drawer handles stood against the wall to the right of their bed, her side, with a small square mirror propped against the wall behind it, and baubles and rings and random buttons, sewing needles stuck into spools of thread, all laid out in disarray. It was a favorite place of mine to pause, as I was drawn early on to the collagist aspect of it, the art of its clutter and small yet vivid reflections of Mom. But Dad’s
desk held more appeal.
The quill dip pen and silver replacement nibs, ink jars and burnt sienna colored pencils, sketches of nudes, stacks of journals, foreign language guides and poetry books by Federico García Lorca. It was such a tender display—an elegant meditation on how thoughtful he was, how loving and deliberate. Standing in front of Dad’s desk as a ten-year-old felt like worshipping at the altar of wisdom, art, and words, the nucleus of all that mattered in our household.
I refolded the note from Catherine and tucked it back under Dad’s drawing board where I’d found it, feeling like both a loyal disciple and a devious traitor. Whether it was right or wrong that I’d found and read the note, it felt momentous, weirdly disquieting, and I knew that the one person I could tell about it who would keep a secret without judging me was Leah. I left Mom and Dad’s room intent on telling Leah about it the next day at school.
* * *
Leah and I were in separate fifth grade classes at Simonds Elementary School in Warner, so recess was our treasured time together. My teacher, Mrs. Gordon, was frumpy and stout with dull, wiry hair. Big-busted and broad-hipped, she wore bright red lipstick and favored green wool dresses and bulbous pearl earrings. It was late autumn, and when she chaperoned recess in the colder weather, she wore a fur-collared coat with a matching muff to keep her hands warm, and stood watch at the top of the steep knoll that dipped down into the playground.
Leah and I could see our breath as we ran up the hill to ask her how much more time there was left for recess. We’d been so wrapped up in our play that I’d forgotten to tell her about the note from Catherine, but I hoped there would still be time. Mrs. Gordon pulled one hand lazily out of her muff to check her wristwatch.
“You girls have got about fifteen minutes,” she said, in her pinched-nose-sounding voice, and then stuffed her hand back inside her muff.
“OK, thanks!” Leah said, turning to me with a smile.
“You’re a very pretty girl, Leah,” Mrs. Gordon said, just as we were about to dash off. She was pretty, I thought, smiling at my best friend, as rosy red circles of blush spread across her cheekbones. “And you’re very pretty, too, Becky,” she continued, “for a black girl.”
I wondered how she knew what most black girls even looked like. There wasn’t a single other black girl in the school, or in town, for that matter.
“They’re usually very ugly,” continued Mrs. Gordon, scrunching up her face like she’d smelled something foul. “Very unattractive.”
It felt like an invisible hand had grabbed my throat and started squeezing tighter and tighter in the quiet after Mrs. Gordon said “unattractive.” She stood looking at the two of us, satisfied with the accuracy of her strident assessment. Leah and I turned to each other, and I thought maybe she could hear me choking as the invisible hand kept squeezing. Her eyes were glassy and bright with worry.
Until that moment, I had believed my parents and all their adult friends, Catherine, the grocery store clerks, the mailman, and all my teachers who had gone out of their way to tell me how special and beautiful I was. And if I was also black—about which there was still some question in terms of clear affirmation other than my own revelatory moment in writing when I was six—wouldn’t it be within the realm of possibility for other black girls to be beautiful, too?
Then I remembered that time we had talked about slavery in the fourth grade the year before. The illustrations of black slave girls in the one book we’d read pictured them with giant, caricatured lips and tar-black skin and messed-up hair. Maybe Mrs. Gordon was right.
I thought about my dry skin that my brother ridiculed me about so relentlessly. My thick, coarse hair that I couldn’t make move or sweep over my shoulders or do anything that felt pretty, so I’d pull a tight turtleneck shirt around my head and pretend it was long, glamourous hair, flipping my head back and forth to feel its weight and wonder. The times I’d tried to fit in with the blonde-headed daughters of my dad’s best friend when they came to visit during the summers who were always dressed in neat, matching Garanimals outfits, colorful clips in their silky hair, while I always felt awkward, darker, and lesser when I looked at pictures of us posing together after they’d long gone.
The cognitive dissonance between what my parents and other white adults had told me for the past ten years, and what Mrs. Gordon was now stating in such a self-satisfied, matter-of-fact manner, called up a sense of cruelty that I’d never experienced before. It was visceral, spiky, and gutting. Mrs. Gordon was my teacher, and teachers taught children factual information, like math and science and colors and how to spell. Parents only had to love us no matter what.
“Come on,” Leah said, as if she could hear the gears turning inside my head. “Let’s go play before recess is over.” She grabbed my hand and clasped it tight as we ran back down the hill to play. We were different, though. The experience had changed us. It had changed me, and I felt my body shiver as a small cell of trauma began to metastasize.
Eight
“You have to choose!” Donna said, loud and bossy, arms crossed, standing outside in front of the school during recess one day. She was in my fifth grade class, and made friends by making them give up other ones. Leah and I mostly ignored her, so I wasn’t terribly concerned when Donna confronted Leah seemingly out of nowhere, and gave her an ultimatum of choosing between me or her as a best friend. I assumed Leah would just blow her off.
It was the spring after Mrs. Gordon had made Leah pretty and me much less so, months after I’d found the note from Catherine, who continued to focus ever more intensely on me and all but ignored Leah and other kids when they were around. Our parents along with a few other couples in town had created a bacchanalia-like band of interchangeable friendships and loverships, and for a time, shared drop-off and pick-up duties, dinners, and weekend activities made it feel like all of us kids involved were everyone’s kids. And like being in a blended family with stepparents and stepsiblings, we accepted it, if often begrudgingly, but each of us processed the experience differently. Leah didn’t like it at all. She said it made her feel claustrophobic, like her world was closing in on her.
“I’ll think about it,” Leah said, and turned away from both me and Donna. I thought I must not have heard her correctly, and ran after her to catch up.
“Did you mean that?” I said, on the verge of tears.
“I don’t know,” she said. I knew Leah’s facial expressions. Something was wrong; she was anxious. In that moment, the only thing that I could think might be making her so anxious was the thing that Mrs. Gordon had said to me, that we hadn’t told our parents about or spoken of again after it happened. Maybe Leah had decided that I was damaged goods. It never occurred to me that the claustrophobia she had described feeling about the newly blurred lines and behaviors of our parents was beginning to overwhelm her.
“It’s not that I don’t like you anymore,” Leah finally said, her voice shaky and unrecognizable. “I just need some space.”
I began to cry.
“Don’t cry, God,” Leah said. “I’m just confused and I need some space. I’m sorry.”
She turned to leave, and I watched her walk down the hill we’d run up and down hundreds of times, toward the jungle gym, where we’d hung on the bars until our hands burned and Donna now waited. I was absolutely devastated, blindsided. Leah was my best friend. How could this be happening? But children have inner lives before we know how to grow into them, and while I couldn’t help but experience Leah’s need for space as heartbreak and abandonment, Leah’s own experience of it, I would learn much later, was entirely different.
I cried every day for a week, and then one afternoon, just after my eleventh birthday in May 1980, there was a development that temporarily took my mind off Leah and the abandonment by her I felt—an uncanny pivot to the primary source of underlying abandonment that I’d felt all throughout my childhood.
* * *
“Kids! Come inside! We’re going to have a family meeting!”
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About six months after my visit with Claire, on a rare day when Sean and Riana and I were all home at the same time and, oddly, together outside, messing around and getting along, Dad cracked the screen door. The three of us looked at one another, bewildered. Dad had never called us “kids” before, and had certainly never called a family meeting.
“Somebody must have died,” Sean said, and we all laughed, turning toward the house in one last wave of solidarity before things took an irrevocable turn. Mom was already seated at the table, composed and smiling. Dad ushered us in as if to a dinner party, and we sat to join Mom, looking back and forth at one another warily.
“We got a letter from Rebecca’s biological mother, Tess,” Dad announced. “And she’s wondering if now would be a good time for her and Rebecca to meet. What does everybody think?”
I practically sprung up out of my chair. “Yes! I want to!” I clamored.
Less than a month later, Mom told me, without any discernible evidence of apprehension or concern, that Tess would come to our house on July 13, a few weeks away. Mom was excited, she said, and grateful that I had this opportunity to add “another dimension” to my life. Ever calm, steadily loving, she seemed to genuinely want this for me if I wanted this for me. And I did. I wanted to meet Tess, but more than anything, I wanted to see that she was real.
Nine
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and fussed with my hair. A family friend who said she’d had some beauty salon experience before moving to Warner told me she could braid my hair like the actress Bo Derek from the movie 10. But she’d only had time to do half of my head, so I pulled the braids back in colorful barrettes and wore the rest natural, but the natural didn’t look natural to me. It looked too fluffy or frizzy, bunched up in places, uneven and stuck. I tried to separate single strands to tuck behind my ears, but each one sprung back in defiance, into the clutch of their thick collective clump.
Surviving the White Gaze Page 4
