A friend once told me that when, during a physical, she asked her doctor’s advice on losing weight, he answered, “Get cancer. That’s the only way a woman your age is going to lose anything.”
My friend had already had a lumpectomy and radiation. “I tried that,” she said to him. “Remember?” She told me the story as an example of how stupid and sexist and horrible the doctor was. Also, of how hard it was to lose weight in our forties while feeding and caring for our families.
Now grief looked like the diet of all time. I hadn’t been looking after anyone lately, certainly not me. The tea kettle whistled. I brought Aunt Zinnia her cup. She had the family albums out now, frowning over the baby pictures of my daughter. “When they’re that little, babies all look alike. I can’t even tell a girl from a boy,” she said. “Unless they’re in the bath, and I can see which has a penis.” Aunt Zinnia was eighty-six, four years older than my mother, who would certainly have said “wee-wee” or used a plumbing metaphor like “fixture,” but Aunt Zinnia was not one to censor herself. She flipped forward through the birthdays and holidays.
She stopped at a picture from three years ago of my parents’ last Christmas. My daughter was posed with my mother under the mistletoe, pecking her grandmother’s soft, proffered cheek. Looking at the picture, it was easy to think maybe the physicists who believed time did not exist were right. Surely time was an illusion. This moment was still out there. Every moment was still out there. I imagined them as single frames in a long silent movie.
I touched a finger to my daughter’s lightly pink nose. “She looks a little like Mom, don’t you think?” I said to Z.
“Like Livinia?” she said, calling my mother by her full name, something only Zinnia did. I suspected this was because Livinia was a fair slant rhyme for Zinnia. My father always called my mother Livvy. “Why would you think she looked like Livinia?”
“Just a little,” I said. “Around the eyes.” Something about the eyebrows, I thought, the way they arched. My daughter had them arched in the picture, glancing sideways at the camera, trying to keep her eyes open in spite of the flash. My mother had hers arched because she loved being in the center of the picture, loved being seen being loved.
Aunt Z shut the album and looked up at me, clearly flustered. “But they aren’t related, not really.” She blinked, as if she were having trouble seeing me. “I mean, you do know Livinia wasn’t your real mother, don’t you? I mean, surely your parents told you that you were adopted? They tried to have children for years, but Livinia could never …”
So this was how I found out that my mother was not my mother. First I felt the blood leave my face, my fingertips go first prickly, then numb, and I fainted, dropped like a dead weight onto the red carpet that Z thought looked not quite as nice as hers. I don’t know why I passed out at this sudden news. I had not fainted on getting the news that my father had died of a heart attack, or on finding my mother dead, or on hearing that my husband and daughter, too, were dead, their faces cut by jagged glass and metal, bodies crushed, mere blocks from where I stood in the kitchen thawing chicken breasts for dinner.
I came around to the sight of Z, down on the carpet on her knees, chaffing my wrists, which struck me as an old-fashioned medical procedure, but apparently it was effective. I felt a warm flush in my cheeks as my blood pressure rose back to normal. Had she really thought I knew I was adopted? Or had she come all this way to blurt the news out, to get this last bit of family comeuppance off her chest? Z had three children, so it was hard not to take her news of my mother’s infertility as one last Z-ism aimed at me or through me at her sister. Oh, you have a nice daughter, too bad she isn’t really your child. Mine are, and that makes them so much nicer, so much more like me.
When we were off the rug and back sitting at the table, Z told me what she knew about how I had come into the world and into the family I thought was mine by birth. It wasn’t much. “Your father brought you back from Paris,” she said. My dad was a colonel in the army then. To the day he died, my mother always called him the colonel when she talked about him in his absence, as in “The colonel likes his dinner served exactly at five.” We were living in Fontainebleau, where he was stationed with NATO in those days before de Gaulle kicked the Americans out of France.
My father had had a gift for languages, and since it was a rare American officer who spoke excellent French, he’d traveled to Paris at least once a week for meetings and briefings. He was often gone for days at a time. “He was always bringing something back from his trips for Livinia. A dress. A hat. Some cognac, once, in a bottle shaped like a cannon. One day, it was you.” Zinnia said.
“My father brought me back from Paris?” I said.
She nodded.
“Just like that?”
“Well,” she shrugged.
I let the idea of me as a souvenir sink in. “Listen,” I said, “if my mother wasn’t my mother, was my father my dad?”
Z coughed, covering her mouth with one liver-spotted hand. “Livinia never said as much,” she said, “but I always assumed he was. If you know what I mean.”
She meant that my father had been doing something in Paris besides going to long meetings. I thought about it for a minute. If I couldn’t be my mother’s daughter, I was willing to settle for half, for being my father’s daughter. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“Well, no,” she said. “To be honest, I’ve never thought you looked the least like either of them.” She put her hands on my cheeks and turned my face toward the mirror. She pulled the curly blonde tangle of my hair back from my forehead. “I mean, where did you get those eyes?” I looked in the mirror and saw my daughter’s eyes—blue, big as a lemur’s, deep-set, and surrounded by circles dark as bruises. Silent movie eyes, my husband had called them. He should have known, as silent movies were his life. He studied movies, wrote scholarly articles, whole books on them. Sometimes I thought he must have married me for my eyes.
At any rate, I could see now that they didn’t look like Zinnia’s, which were a jealous jade green, or my mother’s, which were also green, if a bit lighter, a bit more hazel. Or like my father’s, which, though he’d had blond hair, had been brown and hooded, as if there’d been a Native American ancestor or two in there with the Scotch-Irish.
I had someone else’s eyes. A stranger’s. I had given this stranger’s eyes to my daughter, and she had taken those eyes, that mystery, to the grave. Goddamn it. Who was I? Where had I come from? Where did I belong?
After Aunt Z was safely asleep in what had been my marriage bed, I got out more photo albums. Albums not of my daughter or husband but of my mother and father and me, that first nuclear family of which I’d thought I was also the sole survivor.
There was a picture of my mother, standing on the sidewalk outside our apartment in Fontainebleau, holding me swaddled in an oversized blanket. I’d always thought it was a picture of the day she brought me home from the hospital. Had she told me that lie? Now, after having a child, I could see I was no newborn. I was at least two, maybe three months old. It also occurred to me, looking at my wrinkled face, that I did not look happy. My mother, who was forty that year, did not look happy either. She looked like someone had tossed her a roast turkey straight out of the oven without bothering to give her hot mitts.
I felt like a fool. The given of my childhood was that I’d come along to make my parents complete. Just when it seemed my mother and my father would be childless, voilà, the stork dropped me down the chimney. We were a family, and nothing was more important. The three of us were a little circle that, like the golden ring in the folk song, had no end. But, honestly, what in that picture was changed by what Aunt Z said? Adoption didn’t make us less of a family, though I wished my parents had trusted me enough to tell me. I didn’t believe my father’s having slept with another woman made him someone altogether different than the man I’d known. I was too old for that. Still, I felt like a fool.
I thought about it, and then I knew. I fe
lt like a fool because my mother had already told me the truth about our family three years earlier. At the time, it had felt like the end of the story, something I never talked about, tried not to think about. Now it seemed more like the beginning. When my daughter was in kindergarten, my father had had a heart attack while carrying a bag of groceries into their assisted living apartment a few blocks from my house. My father was eighty-five when he died, so it seems strange, silly even, to say his death came as a complete shock. He walked three miles a day. He joked often about his own father living to be one hundred and one. My mother used to joke about how many wives he would have after her death at, say, a mere ninety-nine left him an eligible widower. Though I knew no one was immortal, I thought my father was. I think he thought he was, too. All I can say is his sudden death, holding that paper sack full of cans of Progresso soup my mother had bought at the local wholesale grocery, must have surprised him even more than her or me.
Just two days later, before my father had even been cremated, before we’d finished the plans for his funeral service, my mother took two months’ worth of valium and stretched out on what had been their double bed in their apartment two miles away from my house, the apartment I had picked out, had moved them into so they could be close to me. To make certain of what she had set out to do, my mother cut her wrists, elbow to palm, with one of the new Chicago Steel steak knives my father had given her for Christmas. Since she was on blood thinner, she quietly bled to death as she slept. No clotting, not even after she was dead. When I found her, she was as white as her sheets should have been. Down the sides of the bed were thin wet ribbons of crimson, and the white carpet underneath was a moist valentine pink. The room smelled like a meat counter. Standing there, I could taste the iron tang of my mother’s blood.
There wasn’t a note. I looked everywhere. I tore the apartment apart looking.
Then I called my husband. He rushed to their apartment to find me, wrapped his arms around me, and said, “Oh, Emma, it’s the end of a love story. She just couldn’t bear to live without your father.” More than one friend said that my mother’s suicide showed how much she loved me, loved me too much to want to be a burden. But I was there, goddamn it, just blocks away with her granddaughter. I had moved them from Florida to Indiana to be close to me. I was willing, eager to be burdened, to repay her the debt of having raised me. Instead, she left. Left her granddaughter. Left me. Left as if she had never loved anyone in this world but my father. As if I wasn’t family at all. Even then, I thought, Okay, now I know where I stand.
She was dead, my father was dead, too, but I couldn’t let them go. I couldn’t sleep without dreaming I was waiting for them at an airport, their plane inexplicably late. Or I would dream that the phone rang and I answered, knowing my father was on the line. I would listen, hearing him breathe, and I would beg him to tell me where they were. Late one night, when I couldn’t sleep and my husband was up working on his class, I finally told him how abandoned by my parents I felt. He looked at me long and hard, clearly disappointed, then said, “Let them go, Emma. Let them go. You have us.”
He was right. I had my daughter, who knew only that she missed her grandparents. I had a husband, too, who needed help with his work, with his life. My students were wonderfully, endlessly needy, because that was how students always were. My teaching filled all the time my family didn’t. For a long time my husband, my colleagues, my friends watched me like spotters at a gym, worried I would fly head-first off the trampoline, worried I would lose control. But I didn’t. Honestly. Or maybe just a little. I lost my keys, cried easily, threw away an entire semester of student portfolios by accident. Once I slammed my fingers in the car door and was so relieved to feel real physical pain that I almost did it again. But my daughter was in the car, watching.
Gradually, I started sleeping again. Gradually, I came to think my husband was right. I could let them go. I did let my parents go. At least, I tried. Though, I’ll confess, it often seemed my parents were right there, the wall in front of me no more than a membrane. They were so close I could put my palm flat to the cool gloss enamel of the paint on the wall and feel the warmth hiding there. Now, oh, God, my husband and my daughter were there, too. I closed the photo album.
Had Livvy been willing to leave me because she wasn’t my mother? Or was that crazy, no more answer to the mystery of her death than anything else I had considered? Even if Livvy had loved me exactly like I loved my own daughter, that didn’t answer the question of whether or not she had been my biological parent.
I got up and dug out the folder my husband kept, labeled “Important Documents,” and found my birth certificate, although I knew what it said. I looked carefully at the yellowing sheet. In French, it listed my parents as my parents. Nothing had changed. It listed my birthday—or what I’d always thought was my birthday—as my date of birth. My place of birth was Fontainebleau, not Paris. Attached was a typed “official English translation.” I read that, too. It was the same. A lie carefully translated into a lie.
The translation, as a matter of fact, had been written and signed by my father, by the colonel. He’d done it the night after my mother was turned away from kindergarten registration because no one at the elementary school in Florida could make heads or tails of the French. It was a family joke how no one ever questioned the authenticity of the translation. “You should have been a forger,” I said to my father once.
He’d winked. “Oh, didn’t you know? I used to be a spy.”
Next in the folder was my naturalization paper, a stiff gray sheet folded neatly into threes like a brochure that declared me an American citizen from that date forth. Attached was a black-and-white photograph of me at four, with long fair hair held back by twin tortoiseshell barrettes. My parents had explained my naturalization as just an extra step, a precaution they’d been advised to take. If I had American parents, I was an American citizen, but since I’d been born in a French hospital, not on an American base …
Now I wasn’t sure. My father always said I cried nonstop as we flew across the ocean to America, saying over and over I wanted to go home, back to France. The first thing I remembered was being in Washington, D.C., with its peculiar, smooth white buildings, including the one where my parents took me to be naturalized. Inside, it was hollow. The three of us crossed to the empty center on a bridge, stood looking up, looking down, floor and ceiling both impossibly distant. “What a waste,” my father said, meaning what a waste of money, of space, meaning how American.
I began crying again, kept crying even when the man we’d come to see took my picture and asked me why I wanted to be American. “I don’t,” I said. “I’m a little French girl.”
He laughed and stamped my papers. “Not anymore, you’re not,” he said.
He was right. Now, looking at the picture he’d taken, I recognized the dotted swiss dress Livvy had made for me, but I swear the girl was a total stranger. Her lips, pursed, disdainful, were definitely French.
When I was a junior in college, I’d gone back to France for the first time and made a side trip from the excitement of Paris to staid Fontainebleau. With no address, no picture, I’d found the block of flats where we used to live, sat on the same stone bench where I used to play while Livvy watched over me. The block had been built by the U.S. Army and was full of NATO families when we lived there. By the time of my junior year visit, it was as French as could be. There was no one we knew there. Now, four decades after we’d lived there, no one in all of France would remember my family and the years we spent as expatriates. Except for Aunt Z and her children, neither of my parents had any family. Who could I possibly ask where I had come from, who my parents really were? Who would know?
Then I remembered Apolline. She’d been our maid in France, and after we came back, my parents had sponsored her into this country. She’d lived with us for a year, studying hairdressing, and then she’d moved to New York. She’d gone straight to work for a famous salon, her French accent her meal tic
ket. She did the hair of rich old ladies, and her clients gave her seats to the opera and ballet. She traveled with them, too. Often, it seemed, their hairdresser was their only friend.
When I was little, Apolline always came down to Florida from New York for Christmas with us. In the photo album were shots year after year of her picking oranges or tangerines in our backyard. Photo by photo, she had distinctly different hair colors: red, black, one year a color she called champagne. “The hairdresser’s curse,” my father said. “They always practice on each other.”
She was always after my hair, even then a long, unfashionably curly tangle that was my mother’s bane. Apolline wanted to cut it short. Like Twiggy, she said when I was very little, then like an ever-changing list of crop-haired fashion models. Whenever I saw her with a pair of scissors, I ran.
When I was in high school, I visited Apolline in New York, and she took me to see Balanchine’s Swan Lake and then to the Rainbow Room for dinner, a dream night out for a sixteen-year-old. Then Apolline drifted into her own life and stopped visiting us, even when she came to Florida with a client or friends. But I know my father had occasionally exchanged cards with her. With a sudden flush of guilt, I realized I hadn’t let Apolline know about my parents’ death. I opened the last photo album again. In the very back I found a Christmas card from Apolline, dated four years ago, still tucked in its holiday green envelope with the return address neatly inked in one corner. Astoria, Queens. Surely that was the same apartment I’d visited on my first trip to New York.
My Life as a Silent Movie Page 2
