Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  There had been no angel bearing greetings from God at my “annunciation,” and never in a million years could I—at seventeen—have imitated what I thought of as Mary’s gracious and wimpy bow-down response, “I am the handmaiden of the Lord.” I didn’t think I believed in God anymore; yet in my heart I was still a Catholic girl convinced that God had willed my pregnancy to ruin my life, that premature motherhood was my punishment for daring to have sex. I felt wounded and betrayed, and I was furious at him. Instead of Mary’s famous “Let it be,” I’d stomped and punched my stomach, I’d bumped my ass down stairs, yelling inside, “God, I hate you.” Then I banned him from my life.

  In 1968 abortion still was illegal, and in my small-town, working-class Connecticut world, I knew only one girl on the pill, and she’d been given it for menstrual cramps. When I got pregnant, they still injected your urine into a rabbit, and if the bunny died, you were doomed. I’d lied to my parents about where I was going and brought my urine sample to the lab, then went to my best friend’s house to await the results.

  Fay and I lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling. “You’re really going to marry Ray?” she asked rhetorically. I was a senior in high school.

  “What else am I going to do?”

  I’d already told Fay how Ray had responded when I told him I thought I was pregnant on the swings at the drive-in. He’d said, “I love you so much,” then got off his swing, pulled me to him, and sobbed into my neck. I was all Ray had. He lived alone with his mother, who’d let him know that the only reason he existed was because his father had come home after being drunk on the Bowery for two years and raped her. My heart ached when he’d told me that story. Ray was like a broken bird I’d found on a sidewalk. I wanted to mend his wing, drop bits of food into his mouth, nestle his wounded body in the crook of my neck. Poor sad Ray, a high-school dropout, the butt of jokes by his friends, a boy everyone called Bud. But, convinced by the greatest cliché in the book, I believed my love could transform him back into a Ray: he’d earn his high-school equivalency, become an apprentice at something, join a trade union, build things.

  “Your parents aren’t going to let you marry him.” Fay turned her face from the ceiling to look at me.

  My father was an Italian cop and the only son in a family of wild sisters. I was his first daughter, and he was determined to control me, the way he could not control his sisters. But by the time I’d reached puberty, I’d become the type of kid who, when given a Kennedy half-dollar as a present and told not to spend it—ever—marched straight into town the next day and bought a pair of movie-star sunglasses.

  I don’t know why I was like that, but the more my father tried to discipline me into being a good, obedient girl, the more I was determined to do whatever I damn well pleased.

  And now—because I did not want to give my baby up for adoption and go through life forever imagining my lost kid—I was getting married.

  “I’ll elope,” I told Fay defiantly.

  But I kept wondering, Why me? It was so unfair. Maybe I never did homework, skipped school chronically, and had a wiseguy attitude; but I had potential. I was on the Student Council and in the Girls League. I was in a singing group. I gave speeches at assemblies. I starred in plays. But no boys ever asked me out, and no boys asked Fay out, either. We knew it was because we had big mouths and called things the way we saw them, which scared guys away. But deep in my heart, what I really believed was that I was unlovable and that I was lucky that even Ray—who was not cute or smart, clever, athletic, or strong—loved me.

  Still, by the time I was a senior, one year after Ray and I had first gone out, I’d matured enough to recognize my own impatience. When I graduated high school I was moving to New York City to be an actress. In New York there’d be interesting and intelligent young men—artists and intellectuals—who might appreciate me. When I became rich and famous, they’d arrive in limos, bearing armfuls of roses, falling over one another to light my cigarettes. Eventually I’d marry one.

  I’d been relieved when Ray started talking about joining the navy. I was counting on sending him a Dear John in boot camp and taking my life back. But then I got pregnant.

  I sat at the edge of the bed as Fay called for my results. She hung up the phone, knelt in front of me, and bowed her forehead to my knees. “Poor Bev,” she said. “You’re fucked.”

  I could not face my parents with the news, so I left a note in the mailbox on my way to school, and when I got home my father was crying at the kitchen table, while my mother leaned against the stove. She crossed her arms against her chest. “You proud of yourself now?” she said. “You put every gray hair on your poor father’s head. You think you’re going to be happy? You think having a baby’s fun? You think it’s easy? You think you’re going to like putting somebody else before yourself?”

  No. No. No. No. No.

  Seven months later, I gave birth to my child, and there were no angels blowing trumpets, no magi visiting, no star to guide them in the sky. When I awoke from the anesthesia, the nurse held out my son swaddled in a blanket and said, “Congratulations, Mrs. Budrow, you have a healthy eight-and-a-half-pound baby boy.”

  “Boy!” I screamed. I’d been convinced I was carrying a girl and that she looked just like me. I think I’d wanted to give birth to myself. I looked at my baby’s face. He was sucking his bottom lip, and his eyes were closed, but he was awake. This little person had been growing inside of me, feeding, kicking, rolling, giving me heartburn. I hadn’t known it was he. He was a stranger. A boy. What would I do with him?

  Ray wanted to name his son after himself, but I insisted on Jason after a character on a TV show. “Jason” does sound a little like “Jesus,” but I can promise you I didn’t make the connection.

  Five days after Jason’s birth, Ray and I brought our baby home to our little duplex on a dead-end street across from a fireworks factory. My mother was there with the marble cake she’d baked; my father and sisters were waiting too. The place almost glittered from the cleaning my mother had given it; the bottles she’d sterilized were drying upside down on top of paper towels. Everyone took a turn with Jason; but when they left, and Ray fell asleep, I was alone with my baby son. The vulnerable, soft circle at the top of his head; those tiny toes with nails no bigger than a match head; his bouncy penis that would go erect; the wrinkly walnut sacs of his testicles; the smell of him: I was overwhelmed by his presence and terrified by his need for me.

  But like a new puppy, Jason grew on me within a day, and I fell in love. I rocked him alone in the house, intoxicated by his baby smell, the squirmy warmth of his little body, his skin as soft as a bubble. I could not stop kissing him. I was fascinated by his tiny hand gripping my finger as he drank his bottle. My eyes followed his hand as it let go, then drifted weirdly through the air with no destination or reason—or was it looking for something more solid to hold on to?

  After I burped him, his faint breath next to my ear as we rocked made me sleepy, and I lay on the floor with his body like an eternal hug on my chest.

  We were napping like this one afternoon when the door-bell rang, and I answered it to a salesman selling a set of knives that came with a clock that had scenes from the life of Jesus and Mary in six circular pictures around the walnut frame. I bought the knives but hated the ugly proselytizing clock. And I hated Mary. I despised her abdicating her will to God’s. Not that I’d believed in her since puberty, but she was a figurehead for a mythology I wanted nothing to do with: woman as ever-loving wimp.

  I threw the clock in the garbage, then pulled a sack of potatoes from under the sink, filled a pot with water, and brought it all, along with my new paring knife, into the living room. I strapped Jason into his little tilted chair, which I bounced with my foot as I peeled potatoes on an aluminum snack tray, dropping the peels onto soggy newspaper while watching Days of Our Lives.

  When I finished with my peeling, I dumped the potato peels on top of the Holy Mother and Son, then slammed the lid down
.

  I may have wanted nothing to do with the Holy Mother but was very lucky to have my own flesh-and-blood mother nearby. My parents lived a mile away, and Jason and Ray and I ate dinner at their house at least three times a week. We watched television with my sisters, and my mother often washed our clothes. But by the time Jason was six months old, Ray and I had discovered marijuana and made a break for independence. It was now 1969; I listened to albums all day long, smoked endless cigarettes, buried myself in books my girlfriend loaned me from her college classes. While I threw away my bras and started to write poems, Ray grew his beard and longed for a motorcycle. After we were married a year, and Jason was seven months old, Stephen was laid off from the fiberglass factory, and we considered it a stroke of good fortune. He’d receive unemployment. We could hang together, drive to Hubbard Park to feed the ducks with Jason, take turns going out with our friends while the other baby-sat.

  But then one night, Ray said he was going to his friend Jimmy’s house and came home the next day with a tattoo of a devil holding a pitchfork illuminating his forearm. That was only the first little betrayal. There were many more, more than there were records in our collection or ten-dollar bills stashed in our attic for a rainy day. When I wasn’t paying attention, Ray had become a junkie; he’d broken into houses and stolen things. He and his friends had taken turns tying off and shooting up in our bathroom, while I’d baked jelly muffins in the kitchen—which they never ate because they were too high. Ray spent every dime of our savings; he robbed Jason’s piggy bank.

  When I threw Ray out, Jason was thirteen months old and napping in his room. Ray stuffed his clothes into two pillowcases; then turned to me with his hand on the door-knob. “I love you, Beverly. I always have.”

  There were tears in Ray’s eyes. When I said nothing, he continued. “I’m no good. You shouldn’t have loved me.”

  I’d nursed him through one withdrawal and I’d told him if he ever used heroin or lied again, our marriage would be over. When I caught him walking out the door with Jason’s savings bond—a gift from his baptism—sticking out of his back pocket, it was all finished for me. Still, I felt my heart collapsing under a waterfall of memories: Ray’s large hands tenderly soaping Jason’s tiny back as he bathed him in the kitchen sink . . . Ray with his ears sticking out from a new haircut, looking so scared and young at the bottom of the aisle, waiting for me at our wedding . . . his eyes playful with desire in our living room, crowded with our friends. (I allow my knees to fall open to give him a peek; then later, in the kitchen, he pushes me against the counter, his hands like little tickly animals under my skirt.) . . . Ray slapping his hands to his eyes when I tell him our best friend, Dickie, has died in Vietnam—how I rocked my husband, and how we cried together as he moaned, “My buddy, my buddy . . .”

  Remembering, my tears filled my eyes, and I wished I’d loved him more, better, truly—then, the next second, my heart wrung into a fist of self-protection, and I was responding to his woe-is-me “You shouldn’t love me” with “No shit.”

  I locked the door behind him.

  A few months later, Ray volunteered for Vietnam, where heroin was abundant and cheap, and although I eventually heard he’d returned from the war, he never returned to live in our town, never supported us, and never was a father to his son.

  Jason was too young when his father left to remember him. But as he grew older, in a way Jason took over the role of father in our little family of two. Jason tried to get me to follow rules, to put on my blinker at corners, to stay stopped at traffic lights when there was no other car in sight, to pay bills on time, to stop smoking marijuana. His constant refrain was “Why can’t you be normal?” But I was stuck in a state of arrested adolescence, and because I no longer had a father or a husband in the house to rebel against, I rebelled against Jason.

  But we had fun too. We sang and we danced. I let my little Volkswagen fly over bumps to give him and his friends a good ride. We visited cows and sat still by a green pond waiting to see the frogs’ eyes pop through the surface.

  The frog pond was on the ride to Wesleyan University, where I’d won a scholarship when Jason was six and I was twenty-four. We moved to campus, and while my neighbors and I organized cooperative meals, day care, and carpools, Jason and his new friends became vegetarians together, put on plays, roamed the campus like it was their own backyard.

  My best friend, Susan, and Jason’s best friend, Kitty, Susan’s daughter, lived a few doors down. We ate together almost every night. We went to Crystal Lake in the summers, drove down to the beach, ate picnics on the table in Susan’s backyard. When Susan graduated, a year ahead of me, and she and Kitty moved to New Haven, Jason and I were bereft. We sat on our porch and drank Cokes.

  “You sad, Jase?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. We’ll visit them, though. Right?”

  “Of course. What do you think you liked most about Kitty?”

  “She’s smart. We could talk. What did you like about Susan?”

  “She’s smart. We could talk. And dance.”

  “Kitty and I used to get mad.”

  “Why?”

  “That Stevie Wonder song, over and over. Mom, you knew it made us mad.”

  “We didn’t play it because it made you mad. We played it because we loved it.”

  “A thousand times?”

  “You liked it, too—admit it.” Jason and I had danced since he could stand on two feet, and we’d danced to Songs in the Key of Life almost every night for an entire winter.

  “Kitty thought like me. We liked the same things. Little Ron drove us crazy.”

  “You’re both pretty serious for kids. Why do you think?”

  “I’ve always been serious.”

  “You think it’s because I’m not?”

  “Maybe. But you’re more serious than Melanie.” Melanie was Little Ron’s mother, who never went to class, drank in the mornings, and wandered around campus barefoot.

  Susan, a gifted painter, had found a job in New Haven selling ad time at a radio station. I was entering my senior year and didn’t know what I’d do when I graduated, but could not imagine giving up my writing as she’d given up her painting. I wanted to move to New York City and be a poet or a novelist, but I had just enough money to put gas in my car every week, and had no idea how I’d ever save enough to move.

  At the end of that summer before my senior year, a new family rented Susan and Kitty’s house next door. They had a coal-black, adorably affectionate little puppy with floppy ears, named Max, with whom Jason and I fell instantly in love. We’d hear Max whining in the night from our windows and would cover our heads with our pillows. Then one night Jase came into my room. “Mom,” he said, “I can’t stand it. Poor Max. He’s afraid of the dark. Can’t we bring him in? Once? Please?”

  And so we did, more than once. In the dark, we sneaked into our neighbor’s backyard and brought Max up to Jason’s room, then brought him back down at dawn.

  Then, one day late in September, I came home from classes, and Jason ran into the house behind me. “Mom! Max is dead. He got hit by a truck.”

  “Oh, no.” I sat on the couch. Jason sat beside me. We looked at each other and burst into tears. As we hugged and patted each other’s backs, my friend Cindy showed up. When we told her what had happened, she said, “Let’s do the Ouija.” I’d bought Jason a Ouija board for his ninth birthday the week before, but Jase was already tired of it. So he went back out to play, while Cindy and I balanced the board on our knees, then lightly rested our fingers on the magic indicator and asked, “Max, are you there? Max, are you there?”

  The magic indicator zipped from G to 6—G 6; G 6—with such force we jerked our hands to our faces. “Oh, my God!” Cindy blurted. “OTB, sixth race, G horse.” Cindy had just come from the newly opened OTB. I’d never heard of the place before and had never bet on a horse in my life. Yet the next day Cindy, Jase, and I placed all our money (Cindy twenty dollars, Jason two dollars, and I, forty doll
ars) on Siwache Chief—the long shot at eleven to one. The three of us listened to the radio in Cindy’s kitchen; when it got down to the wire, we held hands—then jumped up and down screaming when Siwache Chief won. Jason was already good at math and kept saying, “Twenty-two dollars . . . twenty-two dollars!” Then, “Oh, my God, Mom—you won four hundred and forty-four dollars. That’s more money than we ever had in our lives.”

  Of course, Cindy and I went right back to the board the next day, and this time we were given three more letter-number combinations. When each one of them scratched—which means the horses didn’t even run, so we got our money back—we took it as a sign that we’d been given our one big win as a gift and should not be greedy for more.

  The $444 was the nest egg I used to finance our move to New York the next fall. I thought of the move as a gift ordained by supernatural forces. I have sometimes thought that “G-6” sounds a lot like “Jesus,” but I have also learned that six is the devil’s number, and have come to believe that New York was our descent into hell.

  In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”