My Life, a Four Letter Word

by Dolores DeLuce

  I was willing to have an abortion to hold onto to Reg, and that would have been an easy solution, but the day before my appointment at the family un-planning clinic, I decided to take a few barbiturates to alleviate my misery. During that year living with Reg, I had been relatively sober except for the occasional joint and that one hit of acid I took for the 2001: A Space Odyssey movie. That night I popped two red devils, and before I felt the full effect, I decided to visit my pal Eugene for some comfort and understanding. When Eugene saw my drugged condition, instead of letting me cry in my beer, he reprimanded me like an old Church Lady, “Dee Grosso, you have no business getting high, girl, you havin’ a baby.”

  “I aint havin’ no baby, I’m having a fucking abortion,” I slurred.

  “Dee Grosso, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard you say, you ain’t having no abortion, girl, you Catholic,” Gene said.

  My left arm automatically sprang up and joined my right hand to give Gene the Italian style fuck-you salute as I mumbled more curse words at his shaming, wagging finger in my face. Then I left in a huff. The next day when I woke up sober and well rested, Eugene’s words kept replaying in my head.

  I reflected on a girlfriend back home who had gotten pregnant and made a choice she lived to regret. Her name was Ella May but we called her Red. She was a Georgia peach and a Jersey tomato all rolled into one. Everywhere we went together, heads turned. Her natural strawberry-blond waist-length hair and Liz Taylor eyes gave her a choice of any man she wanted, but she had the misfortune to fall in love with Johnnie, a rat pack bad boy wannabe who treated her like shit. When Johnnie knocked her up, Red decided to carry the baby to term because in 1964 abortion was not easy to come by and it was still illegal. Johnnie made her promise to give up the baby for adoption or he would leave her. In desperation to keep her baby, she brought the precious little carrot-top boy home from the hospital for his daddy to see him, hoping that the infant would melt his cold, hard heart, but it only infuriated Johnnie more. Just a few months after Red gave up her son for adoption, Johnnie left her and Red never recovered from the heartache of losing her son.

  In light of what Gene had said to me the night before, I decided to cancel my appointment with the clinic and gamble on Reg’s reaction. At the sixth week mark, biology and the mothering instinct had taken over; I was in love with Reg, or so I thought, and I wanted his child. I fully understood his reasons for not wanting to be tied down with another wife and child, yet I found the strength to choose the child over him. When I announced my decision, Reg moved out. He still lived in the neighborhood and continued to come around from time to time, mostly out of guilt or to get laid. I replaced my attraction to danger with a new addiction to the pain of unrequited love.

  Just weeks after the fall semester began, I decided to drop out and get a full-time job. I was hired as a 411 operator, but between morning sickness and the boredom, I only lasted for about a month. It was then that Eugene taught me about the benefits of welfare and Medi-Cal, so I applied for Aid to Families with Dependent Children. My false pride made me withhold the identity of Reg as my child’s father, knowing that the welfare department would go after him for child support. I told my caseworker that I didn’t know who my baby’s daddy was, but the caseworker wasn’t buying it.

  “Miss Grosso, I find it difficult to believe that a young lady of your intelligence and level of education does not recall who she had intercourse with over the past three months,” he said.

  If this guy thought I was a young lady, I made certain that he changed his point of view. “How’d you expect me to know my baby’s daddy? You think I keep a list of every John I fuck? I’m a whore.” That stopped him cold and he moved on to the next question on the form.

  16. NAME GAME

  At the end of my first trimester, the morning sickness—along with the mourning over my losses—ended. I was shocked at the number of strange men that found me to be attractive as I began to show my pregnancy. I even took one chubby chaser, a cute Latino boy from school, up on his offer to alleviate the sting of my doomed affair with Reg. I started to have a new lease on life and began to take care of my health and body. After quitting the job at the phone company and getting my welfare checks, I had lots of time to read and prepare my nest.

  Demian, a name inspired by a Herman Hesse novel, was the name I chose for the boy I was convinced I was carrying. Knowing that Reg already had a girl, I got the notion that a boy might win him back to me. I was so certain that I was carrying a boy that I didn’t even think about girls’ names.

  Just two weeks before my due date, I found myself on a bus packed with students from Los Angeles City College. We were headed north to San Francisco to march in one of the country’s largest antiwar protests. To save money, the organizers of the march had found the cheapest charter bus company possible, and I spent an uncomfortable twelve hours riding up Highway 101 through the dark night, pressed against the hard wooden seat that felt like the same one Rosa Parks refused to sit on in the back of the bus. By dawn, the bus deposited me and my fellow protestors somewhere in the Haight Ashbury. I followed the organizers who directed the traffic in the crowd of thousands of young people from all over California. After the sleepless night on the bus and a quick pit stop, we began walking up and down the many hills of San Francisco for what felt like hours. The discomfort of the trip and the lack of sleep did not matter since I was high on the experience and excited to be taking a stand for my conviction to help end the war.

  On that day in 1970, in the crisp bay air, much hope hovered. Mesmerized, like a child at the fair, the magic and colorful banners led me. One image caught my eye above all the others—a bright banner that waved high above a group of Latino Students. The letters, VIVA LA RAZA—Long Live the Race—represented their racial and cultural pride. I made a mental note of the word Viva; that, I thought, would make a cool name for a girl—just in case. By the end of that long demonstration, we were assigned places to stay with locals who had opened their homes to the out-of-town demonstrators. For the first time in twenty-four hours, I got to recline on a stranger’s sofa. No sooner had I stretched out and let my body relax, I was overcome by severe cramps. Sharp pains shot up and down my legs from my calves up to my inner thighs and into my hip sockets. I thought I was having early labor pains, but it turned out to be a false alarm and only leg cramps caused by the weight of my eight-month-pregnant body pounding the pavement the day long.

  A month later, two weeks past my due date, I began to feel familiar cramps again, but this time I was so laid back that when Reg showed up, I insisted we stop off for Chinese food on our way to the hospital. I had not yet had dinner and argued that it wasn’t good to deliver a baby on an empty stomach. As I took my first bite, I dropped my chopsticks into my egg drop soup and doubled over with the sharpest pain I had ever known. When the pain stopped, Reg, sitting across from me looking as though he saw a ghost, watched as I inhaled the rest of my meal. With only a few bites left, the next contraction hit.

  By the time we checked into the hospital, it was after 9 p.m. and the pains were coming about every ten minutes. Once examined, the doctor told me I was almost fully dilated but my water had not yet broken. At which point, he took out a wooden stick about twice as long as the thing a manicurist uses to push down your cuticles, and with the sharp, pointed end, he inserted it into my vagina to pop my water sack; then came a pain that made any previous pain seem like your average period cramps.

  After pushing for seven more hours with no further progress, the doctor signaled, “Houston, we have a problem.” I was then wheeled into X-ray for a photo shoot. I was screaming. Perhaps if I had not gone to the low-end medical clinic for my prenatal care, the doctors might have paid attention to my narrow hips and would have known a C-section might be required. So after two more hours of unnecessary labor while waiting for the surgeon, a nurse finally wheeled me into the O.R. where I was given an epidural that took all the pain away. Then the doctor made a precise slice: a
teeny, weenie, bikini cut, and out popped a baby girl, just shy of eight pounds, with the shoulders of a linebacker. Another life had come to save mine, and I called her Viva.

  After a week-long recovery from post-surgery complications in the hospital, I returned to my apartment alone with Viva. I had just turned twenty-four and found no congratulatory cards from relatives; I had no diaper service, no fancy car seats or baby buggies, and no family elders to help ease me into motherhood. The only practical gift I possessed was a second-hand stroller given to me by Eugene, which his son Troy had outgrown. Nothing short of a miracle kept me and baby Viva alive in those first few weeks. Within days I started to use the hand-me-down stroller as a carriage and diaper carrier. I somehow managed to hold my healing incision with one hand as I carried bundles of dirty diapers and a baby in the other. I felt I was a warrior building scar tissue over my wounds.

  After making two trips down the flight of steps from my apartment to the street, I placed my sleeping infant gently in the rickety old stroller in the flat out, non-seated, position. I then put the large laundry load at her head and started the climb up the hill on Hoover Street to the closest laundromat. As I pushed my precious bundle, I didn’t notice that both Viva and the laundry were slowly inching back toward the opened front edge of the stroller. As I struggled to maneuver the heavy load over a high curb, I didn’t realize at first that baby had slipped out the top until she hit the pavement. In a panic, I reached for her imagining the worst; I was instantly relieved when she opened her big eyes and just smiled at me. In that instant I knew the load of dirty diapers must have softened her fall unto the hard pavement.

  When I had first heard Joni Mitchell’s album, Blue, I took note of a song called “Little Green” that she wrote about a daughter she had given up for adoption when she was nineteen. In her lyric, a phrase jumped out at me, “Child with a child, pretending.” That was me. Although I was twenty-four, I was still a child, running wild, and it took a child of my own to put a speed bump on my road to self destruction.

  17. BACK HOME

  An unexpected call from Mom came. “I never meant to disown you, but what could I do? She sobbed into the phone. “I’m sorry. It was my duty to obey your father. I hate to tell ya, but I got bad news. If you ever want to see your grandma again, ya better get here fast. Not seeing that baby is killing us both.” So seven weeks into Viva’s new life, I used my welfare check to buy a coach ticket and Viva and I boarded the red eye to Newark.

  Since my father’s house was still off limits, my friend Angela, then a professor at Rutgers University and married, with a two-year-old daughter, offered to let me stay at her home. I hadn’t even unpacked when Mom called and told me to come over right away since Grandma had taken a turn for the worst and was asking for me; Dad would be at work all day.

  Angela offered to drive me, but I wanted to walk after sitting for hours on the plane. I put Viva in a papoose snuggly strapped to my chest and took off for the two-mile hike across town. With spring in full bloom I strolled through my old neighborhood under the shade of the maple-lined streets and took a detour past my high school. As I observed carefree teens hanging in cliques, smoking and gossiping, I felt like the past five years had brought me light years away.

  As I approached my family’s home, I paused on the stoop where I used to sit to put on my roller skates; the same pungent lilies-of-the-valley still grew. There were blossoms on the cherry tree in the back yard, and I could hear the chirping of baby birds from the branches above. I remembered how, as kids, my sister and I would place dead baby birds that fell from these nests into shoe boxes and hold funeral services before we buried them in the yard. My own baby bird, Viva, was sound asleep at my breast as I rang the doorbell.

  I was uneasy as I stood on the front porch waiting, and when the door opened, I knew why. Mom had set a trap. There, in the doorway, stood my father. Suddenly face-to-face, we were both speechless. The shock was somewhat absorbed when my little brother Richie flew past Dad and threw himself into my arms, nearly crushing Viva, who was still sleeping at my chest like a hidden weapon. Richie took my hand and escorted us past my father who remained in the doorway apparently dumbstruck.

  As I stepped into the living room, Mom and Grandma showed their surprise like bad actors in a melodrama making gestures to the back row. But my sister was completely overcome since Mom knew better than to tell her of the plot ahead of time. Viva began to stir and I removed her from the pouch. A big fuss was made by all—all but Dad, who kept his silence and distance while observing his family in action. Mom reached for Viva first, then Ginny took her and held her up, and Grandma gave Viva the mandatory seal of approval with a pinch on the cheek. As the flurry of baby passing continued, Grandma called Dad over to join us. As Dad inched closer to examine his first-born grandchild, I could see a battle raging behind his eyes. The sentinels between head and heart were in full regalia. It was obvious that Viva carried the Grosso bloodline since she bore a strong resemblance to my father. Viva had his dark, soulful eyes and his nose. He tenderly stroked her cheek. Her mocha skin was no darker than my own. He ran his calloused fingers over her soft, beautiful black ringlets, the same ringlets his son and other daughter—the obedient one—possessed. How could he not accept his own flesh and blood? That’s what Mom and Grandma were banking on. Dad was not a monster; he just had some old ideas he needed to shed, and my mother and grandmother had imagined the sight of my child would melt his heart. They were right.

  “I made my special raviolis for you just the way you like them with the marinara sauce,” Mom said. “It’s about time we celebrate our first grandchild.”

  After being abandoned in the desert for so long, I felt like the prodigal daughter.

  “Since I knew you were coming, I put a call into Father Mark and he said we can have a christening while you’re here. I booked the church for next Sunday.”

  Mom was in her glory. She asked me to come up with a Christian name so that my child could be baptized in the Catholic Church. All the while, my father remained silent. Although I had rejected the faith of my youth, I was willing to compromise, and picking a second name for Viva was easy. It would be another version of Mary. Marie was my grandmother’s name, so my child’s full name would become, Viva Marie—long live my grandmother! It was the least I could do to repay Grandma for her years of looking after me. And this way Grandma, who had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, would live on.

  When I took Viva to Mom’s room to change her and put her down for a nap, I noticed the bed covered with dozens of homemade ravioli drying on towels over the bedspread. Jesus on the cross overlooked Mom as she scurried to scoop them up to bring them back to the kitchen. Mom took off with the dinner in her apron, and Richie and Ginny kept me company as I changed Viva and breast fed her until she fell asleep. As soon as she nodded out, I made a barrier with pillows to keep her from falling off the bed. Richie ran to his room to collect his favorite stuffed toy, the Black Sheep he had inherited from me. He wound it up and it played a lullaby.

  Dad was out in the yard tending his garden, and I joined Grandma on the couch. Then Mom called us all to the table. At first, it was just like all the special family meals: everyone talking over one another; Mom scurrying about with her apron untied; Grandma and Dad yakking in Italian as the gigantic bowl of steaming ravioli was passed, followed by the cheese grater and extra sauce. We were only into our second course when Dad, out of nowhere, blurted out, “It’s just not right for the races to mix; it even says so in the Bible.”

  Ginny attempted to make light of his remark and replied. “Dad, since when did you ever read the bible?” My father hadn’t been in a church since my sister’s wedding, never even owned a bible. But now he was interpreting the scriptures to support his argument.

  Instantly the prodigal daughter’s party came to an abrupt end. Like Carrie in the Da Palma horror classic, one minute I was happy and being crowned queen of the prom, and in the next I was hit over the head and drip
ping in shame and pig’s blood. Mom started to cry as Dad made it clear that he was not going to take my defiance lying down.

  “You have disgraced this family enough and now your mother expects me to invite my family to a Baptism in the Church, no less. How can you expect me to accept this child as my own flesh and blood? Even her own father doesn’t want her? That poor kid doesn’t have a race she can call her own.”

  I jumped up from the table, spilling Dad’s red wine on Mom’s best table cloth.

  “Ever hear of the human race?” I yelled. Then I heard Viva’s cries and I went to the bedroom to tend to her. As I got Viva ready to leave I could hear the drama escalate. Mom and Dad were fighting and Grandma was yelling at her son in Italian. My sister left the dinner table and offered me a ride back to Angela’s house.

  I stayed in Jersey for another two weeks and saw my sister, brother and Mom when she could get away. If this visit was my act of surrender, Dad was laying down the terms for the peace treaty. He had made it clear that he expected me to be punished for my crime. I went back to my little apartment in L.A. and my unrequited love affair with Viva’s dad. My grandma died just a month after I left and I didn’t return for her funeral. I rebuilt the wall between me and my dad, that went from coast-to-coast, and it remained for some years to come.

  18. ROCK N’ ROLL A GO-GO

  By February 1971, Viva was ten months old and we moved to a small one-bedroom house on Navy Street in Venice, next door to Davy Jones Liquor Locker. After I put Viva down for the night, I unpacked the boxes of my meager possessions and set up my new kitchen. At exactly 6 o’clock the next morning, nature welcomed us to Venice with a magnitude 6.6 earthquake. Another pattern of threes: this one being 666—the symbol for the devil.