Every one of them had two stories. One story was about what really happened, and the other story was the one they told the people they knew about why they were gone. Babs had fallen in love with her married math teacher in Sacramento, who’d refused to leave his wife for her, but she was pretending to be in Portland looking after her sick grandmother for the first half of her junior year. In a little town in eastern Washington, Rita had been taken advantage of at a party—they didn’t then think to call it rape—and was now, according to her parents, attending a Catholic girls’ school that took boarders. Most of their stories were, like Geraldine’s, more mundane—young love for which they alone had paid the price.
Each was to Geraldine a kind of friend who wasn’t exactly a friend but rather someone who was at once both more and less than that. Like someone she’d fought alongside in a war.
8
She could not deny that the baby looked like Jim. By the time she was born, Geraldine had almost forgotten he had any relation to the person who’d been growing inside her, his presence having been so fleeting, so paltry, so optional. But there he was, a grown man overlaid onto the body of this baby—theirs—the entire dark-haired essence of him emanating from her.
She named her Caroline, though she’d been explicitly instructed not to give her a name—it would be the real parents who’d do that, she’d been told. She didn’t care.
“Caroline,” she whispered over and over in the first days, when she’d been allowed to hold her. “Like Caroline Kennedy,” she sputtered to the social worker when she showed up to have Geraldine complete the adoption paperwork. “And also because I want our names to have the same last three letters—ine.”
For this, she got a talking-to. For this, she was yet again reminded that a doctor and his wife desperately wanted a baby. For this, she was made to name what she thought she could give her daughter that would be better than what the doctor and his wife could give her.
She couldn’t name a thing. Not one thing!
She had nothing to give but her daughter.
9
She didn’t return home afterward. She didn’t have to. She was eighteen now and free to do as she wished. She bought a bus ticket to Duluth with the last bit of money she had left over from her old job at the Dairy Queen, and she and Valerie executed the plan they’d made when they’d been seniors in high school, though it had been pushed back by six months—a delay Geraldine explained by telling Val that she had to help her mother move the family to Colorado, which was true enough, as in the time she’d been away, her father had been stationed at a base in Colorado Springs.
By the beginning of March, she and Val had rented a studio apartment downtown that had a creaky set of bunkbeds and a partial view of Lake Superior. Geraldine got a job as a hostess at a breakfast and lunch place, and Val was a cashier in a drugstore. In the evenings they took classes at the secretarial college, and afterward they went to a bar called the Lakeshore Lounge. They played the jukebox and drank rum and Cokes and had flirty conversations with men and met other women their age, a few of whom would become their best friends for life. They worked out a system where Val would fold a napkin and place it on the table in such a manner that Geraldine would know where to look when she’d spotted an attractive man, though the truth was nothing stirred inside her when she turned her head.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to find love. It was that she felt dead to it now and also afraid of what it might lead to.
“You’re such a prude!” Val scolded her after their nights out together, believing that she was the more sexually experienced of the two.
Back in their apartment, tucked into their beds, Val would regale Geraldine with stories of her escapades, telling her about hand jobs she’d given to the two men she’d given them to and groping sessions in the back seats of cars with the boys she’d gone to high school with in Wisconsin.
“You next!” Val would demand from the bottom bunk.
“I can’t think of anything,” Geraldine would say from above.
“Come on! Tell me!”
“No,” Geraldine once replied too sharply. “There’s nothing to tell.”
10
Eventually, that changed. There was Richard. There was the birth control pill. There was Dave.
There was a brief, enraging letter of apology from Jim that had somehow found its way to her after traveling from El Paso to Colorado Springs to Duluth, in which he called her a “great girl.”
There was a low-grade longing for the man who worked behind the meat counter at the grocery store, who turned out to be gay.
There was Richard again.
There was feminism and her extremely quiet endorsement of its general principles, though, aside from her status of what people then referred to as a “career girl,” it was indiscernible to the untrained eye.
There was the Charley Pride concert at the Duluth Arena to celebrate Val’s twenty-sixth birthday, which coincided with the occasion of Geraldine’s first and last one-night stand.
There was no one for what felt like ages but what was actually about a year.
There was the man who worked as the supervisor of maintenance at the high school where she’d recently been hired in the attendance office, whose file she looked up. He was seven years older than her and single.
His name was Buck.
11
According to this, you’re a dragon,” she said to him on their second date, reading the Chinese zodiac on the place mat. “You’re courageous, direct, hardworking, and passionate.” She looked at him across the table; a red votive candle glowed between them. “Does that sound like you?”
“Close enough,” he said and laughed. “You’re twenty-eight, right—1947?”
She nodded.
“A baby!”
“A pig, unfortunately.”
“Not unfortunately!” he said, thumping his finger on the place mat. “Ger, listen to this: ‘pigs are a symbol of abundance and good luck.’”
“Well then, we should go to Vegas!”
“We can leave tonight,” he said, and his eyes went to hers like he wasn’t kidding.
“Let’s go!” She laughed, and for the first time ever, she wasn’t kidding either. For the first time ever, she kept her eyes on his.
She was married to him until the day he died.
12
She never told Buck about Jim or Caroline or Portland or Aunt Ruth or the doctor whose code word was bonita. She thought about it a few times in the weeks after their twins were born, when she was exhausted and bleeding and given to sobbing in the evenings for no reason she could explain, but each time she decided against it.
By then Geraldine was thirty, and she’d come to think differently about the matter. She’d come to believe that her parents had been right to send her away, right to persuade her to give up her baby, and most of all right that her secret should be kept. Indeed, it was her secret all along that had protected her, which is to say it had done precisely what her parents had promised it would do—if not always, then most days. It had made it seem as if everything that had happened to Geraldine in that particular era of her life had not happened.
It was a lie that had turned into its opposite: the truth around which she’d built her life.
13
Except that her heart clenched every time someone asked her how many children she had.
“I have two,” she’d say. “Julie and Jason.” But she always thought three. She thought, Caroline. Caroline. Caroline.
Her name was a jagged stone that had been worn smooth inside her. Her existence an ancient pulse that only Geraldine could detect.
14
Remember these?” Debbie asked, and Geraldine turned to see a pair of shoes in her sister’s hands. Yellow heels with a discreet green bow on each toe—the shoes she’d worn in El Paso on what she’d thought would be her wedding day.
“I do,” Geraldine replied blandly.
Their mother had died the week befo
re, and they were cleaning out her things from the last place she’d lived, a condo in Tampa, where she’d settled after their father had died a decade ago.
“Funny that she kept them all these years,” Debbie said.
“She liked fancy things,” Geraldine said and turned back to her work removing the clothing that was folded in their mother’s dresser drawers and putting it into a plastic garbage bag that later they’d bring to Goodwill.
“I used to play dress up in them,” said Debbie. “I’d clomp all over the house pretending I was a princess or a movie star or a bride.” She looked at Geraldine, both of them plump and gray-haired now that they were fifty-eight and sixty-five, respectively. “I don’t suppose you remember that. It was when you were a teenager—always in your room or out with your boyfriend. What was his name? Tim?”
“Jim,” Geraldine said, refolding an old sweater. “He was barely my boyfriend. We only dated a few months.”
“I remember once you had to babysit me and Bobby, and he came over to visit you, and you told us not to tell Mom and Dad when they got home. You told us to watch TV, and you went into the laundry room with him and shut the door. Do you remember that?” Debbie asked and laughed.
“No,” said Geraldine, though suddenly she did. Jim lifting her up to sit on the washing machine. Jim pushing his hands up her shirt. Sometimes it shocked her, the things that would come to you if you let them. She shut the empty drawers and bent to tie the garbage bag closed.
“You forgot these,” said Debbie and handed her the shoes.
15
Five years later, Geraldine got a message from Jim on Facebook. He thought she should know that his son Jeff had taken a DNA test on Ancestry.com and one thing had led to another. He’d corresponded with a young woman named Rose Lopez, who said she was the daughter of the now-deceased Susan Taylor-Lopez.
The baby Geraldine had given birth to in Portland fifty-two years before.
16
It was as if she’d been struck. She stood gazing out the window that faced the front yard, seeing nothing. The early-evening spring light, the pale-green grass sprouting up in the places that weren’t mud, the daffodils and tulips blooming yellow and red along the walkway—she knew it was there, but she was blind to all of it. She felt like she’d finally been apprehended after years on the lam. Like she’d been hiding in a cave and now she’d been dragged out into the brightest, most punishing light.
She regretted having given up cigarettes two decades before. She missed Buck, who’d died three years ago. She missed her parents, who’d be the only people she could speak to about this—though in all the years afterward, neither of them had mentioned it once. She missed being able to assume the baby she’d given away was out there somewhere living a grand life. The daughter of a doctor, she’d always been told, and she’d held on to that all this time. It was only now, gazing out the window at the things she couldn’t see, that it occurred to her perhaps that hadn’t been true, perhaps he hadn’t been a doctor. And perhaps now it didn’t matter because the girl she’d named Caroline wasn’t the daughter of anything or anyone anymore. She was dead. Of ovarian cancer at the age of forty-eight, Geraldine had learned, after she’d followed up with Jim.
Abruptly, she turned away from the window, willing herself back to herself. Geraldine! she hollered inside her head. Geraldine!
All this time and she hadn’t ever grieved her daughter.
She wasn’t going to start now.
17
She saw the first line of the email the next morning when she got a notification on her phone, but she couldn’t bring herself to go to her computer to read the rest of it. She took the decorative pillows from the couch and thumped them against each other and then placed them very carefully back where they’d been as if a guest were about to arrive. She rearranged her collection of horse figurines, wiping each one with a special cloth she kept in a drawer for just this purpose. She swept the kitchen floor and gathered almost nothing with her broom. Dear Ms. Turner (or should I call you Geraldine?) that first line said—the one that had appeared and then disappeared like a phantom on the screen of her phone. She’d been expecting it—she’d given Jim her email address and permission to pass it on—but still it came as a shock.
By lunchtime she was standing in her gleaming kitchen, looking around for something else to do and finding nothing. Finally, she approached the little nook in the corner where she kept her computer and sat down and clicked on the email.
Dear Ms. Turner (or should I call you Geraldine?),
I hope it doesn’t upset you that I’m contacting you. My name is Rose Lopez and I’m your granddaughter (biological). My mother was Susan, who was born in Portland, Oregon, at Emanuel Hospital on January 19, 1965 (the last day of Capricorn!). She was the baby you gave birth to and gave up for adoption. I learned this when Jim’s son Jeff was listed as a DNA match on my Ancestry account and we did some detective work and he talked to his dad, who told him the whole story. Also, after MUCH effort, I got my mom’s original birth certificate and your name is on it, though your last name was Waters at the time (which I know you know, so why am I writing all of that?!!).
Can you tell I’m nervous?
Okay, some facts about me. I’m 25. As I know Jim told you, sadly, my mom/your (biological) daughter died four years ago, which was really hard and awful (and still is and will always be). I have a great dad (he and my mom got divorced when I was 12) and I’m happy to say all of my grandparents on both sides are still alive too, though they’re all getting old. I don’t have any siblings.
So why am I writing to you? Because I’d like to meet you. I’d also like to hear about my mom, even though I know you didn’t know her for very long (the records I was able to obtain said five days?).
I want you to know that I do not blame you for making the choice you did. I’m ALL ABOUT women having reproductive choices—and so was my mom, who, by the way, never knew your name. She only found out that she was adopted when she turned 16 because her parents thought they shouldn’t tell her until then.
I live in NYC, but I could fly to Duluth to meet you. Can I? Please say yes! I think it would be healing for both of us.
xRose
18
There’s something I need to tell you,” Geraldine said to Julie the next morning. “Something important.”
“What is it?” Julie asked, turning abruptly to her mother. She’d been making the rounds, gathering up the things her son, Isaac, had strewn about. His dinosaur coloring books and toy automobiles, a stuffed bunny they called PawPaw.
Geraldine had rehearsed every word on the drive over, what she’d say to Julie in person and to Jason later on the phone, but now that it was time to speak, she found herself unable to do so. She took a sip of the green tea Julie’s wife, Dana, had made for her before she and Isaac had departed for work and preschool. It was cool now, and bitter, which reassured her somehow. “When I was younger,” she began, but her voice wavered with so much emotion she had to stop.
“What is it?” Julie asked, alarmed now. She came over and sat down at the kitchen table, still holding PawPaw. She was forty, her strawberry blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. She reached across the table and took Geraldine’s hand. “You can tell me anything, Mom.”
“I know,” Geraldine replied, and it was true. She and Julie were close in a way she hadn’t been with her mother. They talked to each other on the phone every day and had dinner together at least once a week. When Julie and Dana had decided to conceive Isaac via donor insemination five years before, they’d solicited Geraldine’s opinions about the questions that inevitably arose. Should they choose a donor who was an attorney or a graduate student in art history? Was it better if he was six four or five eleven? Introverted or extroverted? Skilled at math or piano? And then, after Isaac was born, she’d been the most devoted grandmother, babysitting him several days a week to cover the hours that needed covering when Julie and Dana were both at their jobs, taking hi
m for overnights so they could have time alone.
“When I was—” she began again and again stopped, feeling as if she were being choked. She’d kept the secret sealed so tightly inside her for so long it could not be extracted without altering who she was, she realized now. The secret was not separate from her. In the telling of it, she’d come undone. She remembered a time in her forties when she’d been with Julie and Jason at the mall, and she turned and there was one of the girls she’d lived with at Aunt Ruth’s. Sandy! she thought but didn’t say, when their eyes had met with recognition, in the flash of a second before they each turned away. Where were they now, Geraldine wondered. What had they told?
“When I was a teenager,” she said.
“When you were a teenager, what?” Julie asked with some impatience.
She looked at her daughter, and all the words she’d rehearsed that morning in the car came back to her. About how a body can be a prison. About the ancient pulse that only she could detect. About her poor sweet lonely mother screaming did she want to ruin her life.
She didn’t. She wouldn’t. For the first time ever, she knew that this telling was part of that.
“Mom,” Julie whispered.
And Geraldine began.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © Joni Kabana
Cheryl Strayed is the author of the number one New York Times bestselling memoir Wild, which was adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film of the same name, as well as Tiny Beautiful Things, Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere.
This Telling (Out of Line collection) Page 2
