I remembered what Mason had told me about walking to his house and said we should go right. For a few long moments, she didn’t speak. She just walked beside me, her arms folded, her head down. I was afraid that might be all we would actually do, but she finally laughed. I paused.
“Sorry,” she said, “but I’m having trouble believing they kept you. Never once during these years did I ever consider that a possibility,” she said, and described how they had reacted to her being pregnant.
“They were always so concerned about their reputation in the community. Mom never let Dad go to work in his factory without wearing a jacket and tie, even in the very warm months. She scrutinized every employee they had with a magnifying glass. The CIA probably doesn’t check its applicants as thoroughly as my mother checked theirs. By the time I was twelve and starting to look more like a girl than a boy, I couldn’t appear at the factory unless I was . . .” She raised her hands and with two fingers of each hand drew quotes in the air. “‘Properly dressed.’ Heaven forbid I had a button on my blouse undone. I imagine it hasn’t been much different for you. Probably, it’s been worse. Am I right?”
I nodded. I didn’t want her to stop telling me about herself and how my grandparents were as parents.
“I swear,” she said, “half the things I did, I did just to annoy her. The more she said no to something, the more I wanted to do it. Is that the way you feel?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t tell me she’s done a better brainwashing job on you than she did on me. Actually, I’m sure she did. They were afraid of you,” she added, and described the day I was born, how they had prayed and looked at me, expecting to see some sign of Satan.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” she continued as we walked. “I wanted and expected that they would arrange for an abortion. I was betting on their concern for their precious pure reputation. How could they tolerate an unmarried daughter walking about pregnant in this small town, but they solved that.”
“How?”
“They practically kept me prisoner in that house,” she said. She looked at me. I nodded, and she saw that was something I understood. “That’s how they’ve kept you,” she said, concluding quickly. “Do you go to school?” she asked immediately, sounding like a detective reaching a conclusion.
“Not yet. This fall.”
“So she . . . what do they call it? Homeschooled you?”
“Yes.”
“She got away with that this long?”
“I take periodic exams. She was a teacher. I always do well.”
“I know she was a teacher. She never let me forget it. Every poor grade I brought home was like another nail in my coffin. How could I, the daughter of a teacher, be such a bad student? Don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t that bad, just bad in her terms. I was better than average, good enough to get into the state university. So what do you like? I know you like art, and you sing.”
“I like reading. I don’t mind math, and I really like science.”
She nodded. “You’re more like her than I am.”
“No, I’m not,” I said quickly. It made her smile.
“Maybe you aren’t. She’s kept you from knowing who you are, I’m sure. You probably have had no chance to have a boyfriend, even secretly.”
I didn’t say anything, but that just widened her eyes.
“Do you?”
“No,” I said. I was afraid she would mention Mason at dinner. “I dream,” I told her, and she laughed and nodded.
“Yes, that’s what you do in my mother’s house, dream, dream of getting out. I think that urge drove me more than anything to flee. I would have ended up on my face if it weren’t for my uncle Brett. He took me in and got me a job on a cruise ship he was booked on with his band. Later, he got me a job in one of the dance clubs he played in, and once in a while, I sang with his band. I was married for a while, a short while, to another musician before Carlos. He had wandering eyes. Carlos is more stable. I hope.”
She paused.
“You’re no child, but I’ll bet you don’t know any more about sex than the average ten-year-old.”
I felt myself blush but not with shyness, more with anger. “I know more than a ten-year-old. I read. I . . .”
“My point is, she hasn’t been much help in that area, I’m sure. I don’t know what kind of sex my parents had.” She told me the joke about the hole in the sheet. I tried not to look astonished that she would talk about her own parents that way. “Don’t worry about it,” she added as we continued walking. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out when you have to. It comes natural.”
I paused when Mason and Claudine’s summerhouse came into view. I was afraid they would see me and come out.
“Maybe we should turn back,” I said.
“Okay. If I knew you were here, I would have brought you something, something decent to wear, for sure, not that she would permit it. She might even cut it up at night or something. She did that to many of the things I bought on my own. We were constantly at each other. Dad tried to referee, but he was outgunned.”
I nodded and smiled, picturing what it must have been like.
“There’s something about you that tells me you’re going to be all right. I think you have enough of me in you to survive.”
Enough of you, I thought. What about what I had of my biological father?
“Can you tell me what happened? I mean . . .”
“How I got pregnant? I’m sure she told you I was raped. I was,” she added quickly. “It wasn’t one of those rapes where someone breaks in and attacks you or anything. I was drugged, the famous rape drug, at a party.”
“Was he ever caught?”
“No. I mean, I knew who he was. I wasn’t that out of it.”
“How did it happen?”
“He was one of a group of local Albany boys, Sean Barrett. His father owned a bar and restaurant on Greene Street. My girlfriends and I hung out there with him and his friends. We could get whatever we wanted to drink. I mean, they weren’t even college guys. College guys were too immature for us. These guys were dangerous, cruder, but hip, if you know what I mean.”
I shook my head.
“Yeah, right. How would you know? Anyway, for us, it was like playing with fire. Maybe I got too close, but that didn’t give him the right to do what he did. Smile or turn your shoulder flirtatiously at a boy, and he’ll think he owns you. Take my word for it. Unless,” she said, smiling, “you want him to think he owns you. Nothing wrong with that.
“Anyway, I didn’t even see it coming. I should have realized how deep I was in. I wasn’t about to get too involved with him or any of them. I still had high hopes, not for the life my mother had planned for me but a better life. You know, fall in love with someone rich as easily as you do with someone poor or average like Sean Barrett. I didn’t have a chance to fall in love anyway.
“Afterward,” she continued, “I was too embarrassed about it and didn’t even tell some of my closer friends. I never thought I was pregnant, so that was an even bigger shock. I was so ashamed about it that I didn’t tell anyone, especially my parents. I was in denial, you see. Months passed, and I knew I was pregnant, but I wouldn’t face up to it. When I started to show, I got on a bus and came home from college.”
She paused and looked toward our house.
“You know how when you’re a little girl, and you cut yourself or something, and you run home to Mommy or Daddy, who you expect will fix it and make you feel better and comfort you? Well, that was how I was when I stepped off that bus and walked to that house. I was coming home so my parents would make me feel better and fix it, but not my mother. It was almost as if she was waiting for something like that to happen, just so she could drive home a lesson she had been teaching me all my life. She was determined to make me pay.”
“But you were drugged and then raped.”
“No difference to her. I’m sure she will be the same with you if something bad happens to you. It will be your fau
lt somehow. You put yourself in that place. If I hadn’t gone to that party, if I wasn’t drinking and flirting with riff-raff, bad things wouldn’t happen to me. See?”
“Yes.”
She brushed my hair with her left hand. “When I look at you now, I’m very happy that she wanted me to suffer.”
“Do I look like him?” I asked, and held my breath.
“I don’t even remember what he looked like anymore,” she replied. “I see only me in your face.”
She sounded just the way I had imagined her in my dream, making me feel like I was some kind of immaculate conception.
“Well, I can’t make these fifteen years up to you overnight, but I promise I will stay in contact with you now. Someday we’ll spend some real quality time together. When you break out of the chains and you can be on your own, you’ll come to me. Not that I have accumulated great wisdom,” she said. “I’ve knocked around, and some of what I’ve learned might help you survive out there. Speaking of that, has Uncle Brett been here much? He doesn’t like talking about them, so I don’t ask. I haven’t seen him in a few years now.”
“No. I’ve never met him,” I said. “I only heard about him a few times. I saw pictures of him, but they were taken when he was much younger. I don’t recall him ever calling.”
“Mom’s probably his most disliked person. She wouldn’t welcome him and let him know it whenever she could. As I said, he helped me survive when I ran off, gave me money, helped me find work. I told him what had happened to me and what they had done. He was very angry and promised he would never tell them where I was or what I was doing.” She thought a moment. “It would be just like him to keep the fact that you were living here a secret from me. He thought that would be painful for me, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know what to tell you about him. As I said, I don’t remember them talking about him except what he was like years ago.”
She thought about it a moment and then smiled. “I bet he doesn’t know you’re here. It would be just like my mother to make sure my father never told him.”
She laughed.
“Isn’t he going to be surprised? I think he went on the road at an early age to escape his family as much as for any other reason. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. Many people I know have little to do with their relatives, but I promise,” she added quickly, “I’ll have more to do with you. If you want me to, of course, but I can’t take you with me,” she quickly added. “I couldn’t weigh down my new marriage with the responsibility for a teenage girl just yet. Maybe later you can come to spend some time with us.”
In fantasies, I saw myself finally living with my mother, but her coldly realistic view of it was like having ice-cold water thrown on me while dreaming.
“Yes,” I said, with a neutral tone in my voice.
She smiled and hugged me. “Later, when my mother cross-examines you about our conversation, you should tell her that all I did was complain about how miserable my life really is. That way, she’ll feel better.”
“What?”
She held her smile, and then something happened that I never expected.
We both laughed simultaneously, as if we had been best friends for years and years and knew secrets we wouldn’t share with anyone else in the world.
Despite the reality she had inserted into our conversation, it was as if one of my dreams really had come true. For a few moments, at least, we were like a mother and a daughter.
But I knew that dreams pop like bubbles in the morning, and stone reality beats them down so deeply sometimes that you lose them forever.
It’s like watching something precious sink in deep water. You reach frantically but can only watch helplessly as it goes into the darkness and becomes as lost as an opportunity you had failed to grasp.
Maybe all of this was already drowned and gone.
11
To my pleasant surprise, Grandfather Prescott and Carlos were laughing when we returned. Grandfather Prescott was drinking some of the aperitif Carlos had brought. Carlos stood up immediately when we entered. I could see on his face that he was looking for some indication that everything had gone all right between my mother and me. She nodded and smiled.
“Short one?” he asked her.
“You bet,” she said. “And not too short.”
He laughed, then looked at me, held up the bottle, and glanced at my grandfather.
“God, no,” Grandfather Prescott said, looking toward the kitchen. “Perish the thought.”
I was disappointed. I had never tasted anything remotely alcoholic. Grandfather Prescott shook his head at me, and I hurried into the kitchen to help Grandmother Myra. She was banging things around, slamming pots a little harder, and clanking spoons and knives as if she wanted to take the kitchen apart. She turned sharply when I appeared, her hands on her small hips.
“I suppose she filled you with a lot of garbage and told you how wonderful her life is now, how she’s on the Easy Street that she never stopped believing in,” she said.
“No. I mean, she’s hoping to be happy with Carlos, but she had one unhappy marriage already.”
“Only one?” she asked with a wry smile. “You mean only one she admitted to having. I can’t imagine marriage ever being happy for her. Or for the poor soul who blindly says ‘I do.’”
She paused to catch her breath, her hand over her heart. Then she put her right hand on the counter to steady herself.
“Are you all right, Grandmother?”
“No.” She paused and shook her head. “I knew this day would come. I dreaded it, if you want to know the truth. It was easier to pretend she was dead.”
How hard, I thought. Does she really hate her own daughter this much? Will she come to hate me equally?
“That girl ruined her life. She could have had a decent life, even after . . . even then. Let this be a good lesson for you. Choose your friends wisely. If you lie down with dogs, you’ll wake up with fleas,” she said. She took a deep breath and returned to the food. “Let’s get this meal over with.”
She had made a pork loin roast with sweet potatoes and broccoli.
I quickly got to work chopping up the salad, and she checked on her homemade bread. The aromas were delicious. She never intended it, for sure, but this was a wonderful welcome-home meal.
“All right. Enough. It’s probably the first wholesome meal they’ve had in days, maybe months. Tell them dinner is ready,” she said.
All three were laughing when I returned to the living room. Grandfather Prescott’s glass had been refilled. My mother’s was nearly empty. They stopped and looked at me as if they had forgotten what we were waiting to do.
“Grandmother says dinner is ready. We should all go into the dining room.”
Grandfather Prescott’s face looked a little red from drinking the aperitif. Looking quickly at the bottle, I saw that more than half had been drunk.
“Get ready. This will be an experience,” my mother told Carlos. “I’d have offered to help, but I’m sure my touch would have contaminated something.”
They moved to the dining room, and I returned to the kitchen to help serve the salad first and bring in a jug of cold water. In silence, everyone gathered around the table. My mother and Carlos sat across from me.
My mother looked around and shook her head. “Believe it or not, Mom, I used to dream about this room and the meals I had in it.”
“You weren’t much of a help,” Grandmother Myra said. “I’m sure you’re not much of a cook now, either.”
“Sure I am. I cook up reservations,” she said, laughing. Carlos smiled. “Carlos can whip up a mean enchilada. I’ll give you this. You were always a good cook, Mom. ‘Slave to the kitchen, slave to the house, and slave to the man I love,’” she sang. Carlos laughed again. Grandfather Prescott risked a smile.
My grandmother looked disapprovingly at him, wiping the grin off his face as quickly and roughly as she used to wipe jelly off my lips. Everyone was quiet. She brought her h
ands together and lowered her head to say grace. I looked at Carlos and my mother. They didn’t lower their heads at first, and then Carlos did, quickly. As soon as Grandmother Myra was done, she nodded at me, and I rose and began to serve everyone the salad, just the way I did when my grandparents had their friends, the Marxes, over for dinner.
“You could get a job at any restaurant,” my mother said.
“Sure could,” Carlos agreed.
“I would hope her ambitions will reach a lot higher than that,” Grandmother Myra said.
“Got to start somewhere, Mom.”
“Not in the devil’s lap,” she muttered.
I served myself some salad and then poured everyone a glass of water.
“The town doesn’t look much different from the last time I saw it,” my mother said.
“You must be blind,” Grandmother Myra told her. “Many of the older classic buildings have been torn down and replaced, and many lie fallow.”
“Like I told you earlier,” Grandfather Prescott said, “it’s become one of those second-home communities. People from New York gobble up the properties at ridiculous prices and use them for vacation homes.”
“Love to have one of those houses on the lake,” Carlos said. “We got just a short view of it coming here. How big is it?”
“Two miles from end to end, with some coves, of course.”
“Who bought the Nelsons’ house?” my mother asked. “The one closest to ours on the lake?”
“Don’t know who they are,” Grandfather Prescott said. “Some city people, I’m sure.”
I looked down quickly. They were talking about Mason and Claudine’s summerhouse.
“I remember one summer,” my mother began. My grandmother cleared her throat loudly. “I was just going to say when we all took that boat ride with the Nelsons. Even you had a good time that day, Mom.”
“That was a long time ago,” Grandmother Myra said. “You were still . . .”
“Innocent and pure? Yes, I was. I enjoyed my high school life here,” she told Carlos. “We were a small school, but we had great basketball teams and baseball teams. Great school parties, too.”
The Unwelcomed Child Page 15
