“I’ll take it now,” she says. And she does. She heads back into Jonathan’s room with it and I march after her.
“It’s mine,” I cry out. “Can’t I keep my toy?”
Faster than I can grab it, my mother flips up the trunk lid to toss it back inside its coffin of mothballs and table linens, and locks the trunk. “This will stay here until you’re older. I just wanted you to see it,” she says. Her hands flutter around the clothes hanging in the closet. “In case it helps,” she adds.
Helps what? There’s so much unspoken between us, I don’t have a clue what needs help. She’d attempted another “in case it helps” earlier in the year and offered to buy me a horse. What’s she thinking? It’s not like I’ve plastered horse posters all over my room. I never mention horses. My friend Wendy, from our old neighborhood, rode horses, so maybe my mother holds some idea that a horse makes a girl happy.
“That’s mine!” I yell, then try to sound cavalier: “I don’t care anyway.” My toes grip the inside of my socks. I step closer then she leans back against the closet wall and remains silent. We stand face-to-face. “I don’t care about you, Mother. Or anyone else.” I pause and take a deep breath to prepare for what I’m about to say out loud for the first time. “You’re not my mother anyway.”
My mother’s soft brown eyes hold back tears. I push my face an inch closer to hers and turn my next words into three separate sentences. “I. Hate. You.” I storm away, leaving her alone. I feel guilty turning my back on her but hate her more, both at the same time. Rage and guilt replace my confusion, and when I provoke others and roil everything up, it’s the only time I feel better.
ONE NIGHT WHILE my parents hosted one of their monthly cocktail parties, I rummaged through the mound of coats and purses piled high on their bed. They expected my brother and me to mingle at their gatherings, but I felt devoured by the conversation of so many adults.
I turned on thief mode as soon as the guests arrived and snuck into my parents’ bedroom to swipe a handful of quarters, a pocket comb, another Zippo, and a ballpoint pen. The thieving thrills me more than my mother’s declaration about their guests: “They’re famous, you know.” She reminded me of this after one of my smart-mouth quips about their friends. I can’t help that I steal. The secrecy—and even more, the fact I’m never caught—excites me. The tug of guilt afterward gnaws at my insides, but it’s not enough to stop me.
Maybe what I stole belonged to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Roethke, Robert Penn Warren, Mark Strand, Richard Hugo, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, or John Berryman. I didn’t care. All friends of my parents and guests in our home at one time or another, the kind of crowd who voted for Dick Gregory for president, the 1960s literati and heavy hitters . . . and I couldn’t have cared less.
One night I stole a quarter from Elizabeth Bishop’s jacket pocket. No need to rifle through the rest of the coats piled on my parents’ bed—I now owned a coin from the queen of poetry.
During a reading tour she visited my parents, but a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet didn’t help me feel any more normal. Normal does not look like twenty or so writers with glasses of dry vermouth on the rocks sitting around the living room with your parents and reading their latest creations. The whole thing embarrassed me—the living room readings and the awkward silence right after while everyone sat pondering and staring off into space. Before anyone said even one word, someone in the crowd always coughed during the silence, and others would light up fresh cigarettes.
It was Elizabeth Bishop who led me into a father-daughter talk about homosexuality. It wasn’t her plaid shirt that gave it away, but something else I sensed the afternoon I asked my father about her. He sat me down at the kitchen table with his afternoon tea set up. I still had the stolen quarter clamped in my little hand. “Some women love women, and some men love other men,” he said.
It was easy for me to grasp the concept because, after all, every month or so two gay men scampered around our house with feather dusters and aprons strung around their waists to help Mother clean the house. Once in a while she invited them for dinner, and for a short time they joined as part of our family.
I learned a lot that year for just a quarter.
SOME MONTHS AFTER I’ve read the letter, at the start of seventh grade, I slurp down my half grapefruit for breakfast. I’m in my pajamas instead of all dressed in my usual cords and sweatshirt. A Seattle drizzle spatters the kitchen window.
On the dash back to my bedroom after breakfast, I grab my raincoat from the front door closet. I yank an oversized sweatshirt from under my mattress that I’d tucked under there after an eighth-grade boy gave it to me for his “let’s go steady” gift instead of a friendship ring. Nine-inch white-stenciled letters—BFD (“Big Fucking Deal”)—stretch across the sweatshirt’s maroon front.
There’s no way Mother would ever allow me to wear any sweatshirt to school. Just the opposite. She grooms me like I’m an upper-crusty debutante, even though we live mainly on my father’s slim English professor salary. We aren’t affluent, and my father teaches summer school at Yale or Harvard once in a while for extra money.
My buttoned raincoat hides the smuggled sweatshirt and I make it out of the house, onto the bus, and straight into my classroom with no one noticing. I’m the first to arrive and dart to the front sideline of the room. I lean against the teacher’s shoulder-high, open supply cabinet against the wall where she keeps blank paper, boxes of unsharpened pencils, and blue test notebooks.
The multicolored map of the world tacked above the cabinet behind me boosts my courage with its pictures like the photos in our issues of National Geographic at home. I belong in the map and the magazines with photographs of people from tropical countries and other continents more than I do in my white family. The map at school gives me a place where I imagine myself, even though I can’t say in what country or with what race I might belong. I see myself in the Thai children with my same wide smile and lips. I see my summer-darkened self in the complexion of boys from Samoa. My nose is like that of people from the Philippines. Babies wrapped on their mothers’ backs in China wear my eyebrows. I see my own feet in the photos of South American girls, their bare feet brown like mine. Sometimes I even recognize my skin tone in the pictures of light-skinned Africans. I saw myself everywhere in those magazines and maps, and it helped settle the crazy inside me.
THE BELL RINGS. My classmates file in and fill their desks. My heart pounds behind the BFD, and my teacher glares at me for a long second before she leans back against the front of her oak desk, cluttered with stacks of our homework, and presses her palms flat on the wooden edges.
Here goes. I uncross my arms and open my jacket to flash my sweatshirt to the class. The noisy chatter snaps to a stop as if our school chorus conductor had just hit a down stroke. A few kids giggle and some dive their faces toward their desks and pretend to write.
Now what? My timid self slips away.
“Deborah! Go to the office!” my teacher orders me. Her eyes flash.
We lock into a stare down, and a rush of adrenaline kicks into my gut. I shrug. “Go to the office for what? I’m just standing here,” I say. I turn my palms upward to the ceiling, fingers spread apart.
Now I’m in control. A sea of eyes shine on me, and we all wait for what’s next.
Whose move is it now? Better do something.
I tug at the bottom of my sweatshirt. The creases stretch out and with a flick of my fingertips, I brush off each of the three letters. I sweep away imaginary lint, then trace each letter with my fingertip.
My teacher pulls me by my wrist down the hall into the school office. I’m in for it now.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ON THE FAST TRACK
“IT JUST MEANS BELLINGHAM FIRE DEPARTMENT,” I say to the principal. “You know, Bellingham.”
It’s a town north of Seattle.
Adrenaline pumps more fear, more power, more risk into my heart, but I can’t stop.
“Not ‘big
fucking deal,’” I add. “Not what everyone thinks.”
Jumping beans somersault inside my stomach. I’m scared but don’t dare show it.
The fun’s over when the principal calls my mother to tell her to pick me up.
“What’s the matter?” the principal asks while we wait. He crosses his arms over his chest. “You have a good home, two parents, what’s the problem?”
Guilt sets in. He’s right, I have all this.
I want to shout at him, “Don’t mess with me!” but I can’t. Those jumping beans now pole vault around inside.
Back home, I’m in my room, grounded again. BFD.
More and more I catapult into a well all by myself, a world with my own rules, a world where I’m convinced no one loves me, no matter how much and how often I hear it.
Just because people tell us something doesn’t mean we believe it.
SOMETIME AFTER I’M expelled from school, I stash the pocket flashlight I’ve lifted out of someone’s purse under my pillow. I’ve needed this to read. Up until now, my parents think I’m asleep at night, but instead I sit on a pillow under my bedroom window with the shade cracked, lean against my wall, and prop my Puffin Book of Verse on my knees to read under a clear sky and bright moon. The Seattle night clouds limit my midnight reading, but with my new flashlight I can read in the comfort of my bed, buried under the covers. I also write poems and little short stories by the light of the moon and flashlight.
The first time my mother catches me, rather than scold me, she asks, “What’s your favorite?” She takes the book and reads from “The Cow,” the page where I’ve folded the corner.
“I love this one, Mother.” I love our closeness then, too.
“The cow mainly moos as she chooses to moo / and she chooses to moo as she chooses.” She reads the whole poem, all four stanzas, two lines each, twice. Then I ask her to repeat it, over and over several times, the way I read it under my covers.
“Keep the flashlight, Pet,” she says and tucks me in. She doesn’t recognize that I stole it. My stomach’s in a knot from guilt. Even my constant nail biting doesn’t help, a habit I carry long past high school.
MANY NIGHTS AS a girl I’d cry at night, imagining my mother gone, dead, far away from me, and yet I hated her close most often, hated her very touch, and at the same time, just the thought of her leaving terrified me. I was scared she’d abandon me like all the rest. Still, I’d wake from nightmares where I pushed Mother off a cliff and she’d tumble a mile down but as soon as my hand pressed into her back, I’d panic and try to save her. Too late. She plummets down, her body in a slow twirl through the air.
I’d wake up guilt-ridden and sweaty, my pillow soaked with tears. I was scared of myself, horrified about the bad in me with these dreams, but also frightened I’d end up without a mother again.
LIFE GETS BETTER with a little chemical help. In seventh grade, I meet an older boy behind the gym after school. He hands me two crystal meth tablets. His eyes widen when I throw my head back, open my mouth, and toss them down.
Within an hour I’m a 500-volt bulb, my every cell alive and at peace for the first time. I need this forever. At last I feel at home in my light-brown-yellow, don’t-know-what-race-I-am skin, my adopted-into-a-Jewish-family skin, my prison-born skin. Deep down, though, I still can’t stand myself and am filled with hate for everyone. This rage and hate drive me to plan murder. Just in passing, but I give it more than a thought, and one afternoon in school, I sketch a plot with an older boy to off my parents. I plan to snake a hose from the furnace into their bedroom and gas them in the night. But if I kill them, where will I live?
Selfishness, not compassion, stops me. I’m afraid I’ll go back into foster care even though I’m not conscious of my few years there. It feels like a stigma, whether I got this impression from other kids or from something on television, I don’t know. Even today, for most people, foster care brings up images of neglect and unwanted kids even though it’s not true.
Mother and Dad, who never learn about my plot, decide my dark moods call for urgent help. And just for me, not for our family, which is what we need.
I’m mute in the cushy leather chairs of psychiatrists and psychologists where I don’t utter one word because I’m convinced my parents got it wrong: they need help. I find my one power, in silence, the one thing I can control: whether I speak or not. In the one session I remember, maybe the only time I speak to the psychiatrist, I tell him I think my parents might be racist and I talk about the name-calling and bullying I meet—at school, the swim club, at the beach. After he responds, Well, some people are, I clam up even more. I need a better answer.
MEANWHILE, THE COUNTRY’S in a civil rights upheaval, and I’m waging my own revolution at home. One day my mother and I argue about whatever daily conflict our relationship brought forth. Again. I don’t remember about what. I’m in my senior year of high school at one of Seattle’s all-girls Episcopalian prep schools, and it’s either this, where my parents send me in ninth grade, or reform school, because I’ve already been caught stealing from drug stores. My parents must’ve accepted the fact that the school held chapel assembly every Wednesday, even though the school is nondenominational.
In high school I write my name as “Debi,” with a big circle to dot the “i.” I also cover social justice issues for the school newspaper: race, and fishing rights for Native Americans in Seattle. The school requires wool uniforms, royal blue skirts, and jackets with top-button-better-be-buttoned white shirts and stand up for the teachers when they enter the classroom. Lunchtime meant formal training in etiquette and meals served in a white-tablecloth dining room. My graduating class consists of twenty girls. Because I stand out in my all-white class, there’s no way to disappear into the school crowd and hide my trouble-making.
Every molecule in me is packed with rage. One day at home, I face my mother in the hall outside my bedroom, my body so close to hers, her back presses against the wall. We’re the same height by now, but I’m lean and muscular and more athletic than her soft, petite frame, just under five feet. A few summers before, I trained in the butterfly and breast stroke and raced on a swim team, so the workouts shaped me with broad shoulders and strong back muscles.
We’re forehead to forehead. Then, right behind my eyes, an electric thread ignites, rearranges my cells inside. It’s as if I’m plugged into a high voltage outlet and fueled by seventeen years of fury and adrenaline. I power up to strike and aim my right fist for Mother’s face. At the last minute, when my knuckles almost graze her cheekbone, I divert my punch.
My hand pierces the sheetrock wall behind her, my fist a nuclear ball on fire. I can’t remember what my mother does other than duck. I retract my arm from the hole in the wall, my knuckles collapsed. From the nail of my baby finger down to my wrist, the outside half of my hand folds into my palm. The anger, still ablaze in me, blocks the pain at first but my hand soon begins to throb and then turns into a purple-black, mangled mass.
After three days, my mother hands me her car keys to drive myself to the hospital. “Tell them you rough-housed with your brother.”
Jonathan’s off at college, so that’s a flat-out untruth. I’ve never known my mother to lie, but she would skirt facts to protect the family image. She’d never want to admit my violence and let the world in on our problems. Big problems.
I’d just passed my driver’s test but we hadn’t been taught how to drive to a hospital with a swollen hand in the lap. My hand and arm throb all the way, my bones already set into a distorted form. I don’t feel a thing when the doctor wraps my hand in gauze and then, with what looks like a shiny hammer, rebreaks the bones before he casts my hand. No pain, no more anger, nothing but a frozen inside. I don’t even feel alone, though I’m by myself in the hospital.
When head and heart disconnect, the one thing left is total lockdown into a world of only two choices: adapt, or crash and fall. More often it’s thought of as fight, flight, or freeze. I’m living in this zon
e full-time.
SOMETIME AFTER THE disaster of my hand, I downed a handful of aspirin to end it all. I’d had enough, couldn’t take it anymore. My weak attempt at suicide failed and I awoke the next morning unscathed. The amount I’d gulped wasn’t serious enough to kill me but more about how helpless and hopeless I felt, maxed out and fed up with life. After this, the only road I traveled to kill myself was the self-destructive one—emotional suicide.
LEAVE HOME. That’s when I think everything will improve, the day I move out, the very second I step out the door for good. Life will change, I’m sure, and then every bit of rage and confusion and hate will dissolve into nothing but bliss. Grief will flutter away and joy will bounce right in front of me the minute I sail out the front door of my parents’ house at last with my bags packed and ready for the good life. And when I turn eighteen, then for sure life will turn golden. When I when I when I . . . What will make me better is always something outside of myself.
Why not college? I head off to Ohio because my mother has friends there who teach in the state and . . . what else can I do? I’m too broke to live on my own for long, and my dad’s university job covers our tuition, no matter where we attend.
But it doesn’t pan out. My second day on campus, I head to my dorm room after dinner, and my side of the room is empty, all my belongings gone. Come to find out, the resident advisor moved me upstairs to the floor for Black students. The school is unofficially segregated, as so many are even now. When the Black Student Union asks me to join, I figure why not, and attend a few meetings where I make friends right away. The Union is the catchall group for anyone non-white, even though I don’t fit into any race categories—I am nothing and everything, neither Hispanic nor Caucasian nor African American nor Asian/Pacific Islander but, rather, some unknown blend.
ADOPTION RESEARCH SURVEYS indicate that not until the 1970s did more than a thousand white families include adopted children of color. My pioneering parents stretched beyond the margins to adopt me. But whenever I asked my mother about my caramel-colored skin and button nose, about the hint of an almond shape to my eyes, she’d tell me she loved me and that I was one of the family. I was too scared to eke out even one word to her in response, to tell her I didn’t feel part of anything.
Prison Baby Page 5
