Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  Rain pounded the skylights above me as I finished my first, terrible short story and sent it to Colin. He responded in kind and we began to send stories back and forth. At first, I sent them with a prologue of apologies for the horrors contained within, until Colin wrote that he refused to accept any stories that I prefaced with self-deprecating remarks. He told me that even when I did things poorly, I should do them without apology.

  The first story was about a girl who had to go with her mother to pack up the china in her dead grandmother’s house. The story was based on the time I went with my mother to pack up the china in my dead grandmother’s house. The second story was about a stripper who sold her soul to Satan to have her own show in Las Vegas. It was a metaphor for something but I can’t remember what.

  While I was busy writing and the Prince was busy on his hajj in Mecca, a new lounge singer, named Iyen, showed up. She was a pretty Filipino girl with a fondness for I Dream of Jeannie ponytail falls and gauzy harem pants. When Robin returned, he fell in love with her at first sight. By the end of two weeks, she wore a ring on her finger the size of Brunei itself. I’ve tried to find out if they ever tied the knot, and if so, if they are still together, but there is a shroud of mystery around how many wives the Prince actually has, and which of them are “official.” According to one former Washington Post reporter I talked to, the number appears to far exceed the permitted four.

  Robin was pleasant to me and when he sat to talk to me there was no buried ire left in his manner. I no longer feared his retribution. I had gone from being spoiled to being punished to being common. That was when I knew I had landed at the bottom of the chute with a thud.

  Robin did sleep with me a few more times, fiancé or no, and he even took me for a spin in his new Aston Martin one night, but the charge between us was gone. A feeling of resignation hung around the girls. The Prince was in love. There was a change in him. He rarely even came inside the parties other than to hear Iyen sing. The two of them sat out on the stairs talking all night while inside we would make fun of her outfits, imagining our taste incredibly sophisticated due to our hours and hours of watching Style with Elsa Klensch. And we would wonder how, when we were so stylish, so expensively attired, so coiffed, so fucking slim, the Prince had chosen a chubby, fashion-challenged lounge singer over us.

  I spent my twentieth birthday in Brunei and I got not one but two more incredible watches dropped in my lap by Eddie. After my official birthday party, my housemates and I hung around in our nighties and had a little birthday party of our own back at the guesthouse, with a cake and champagne brought over from the main palace by a small parade of smiling servants. I was no longer an anathema, because I no longer mattered. At least I got to have friends. But in truth, I preferred having power.

  My friend Donna, a gorgeous Filipino-American kickboxer and model, held up her champagne flute and did her best Ricardo Montalban accent: “Welcome to Fantasy Island,” she said, “where all your dreams come true. Kind of.”

  I had a hard time sleeping. I started writing every night from the end of the parties until sunrise, when the first light touches that part of the world in a hundred shades of luminous blue and purple, clear and full of hope.

  I wrote to Colin that I just wanted to want something. I had stopped wanting anything and I felt a terrible hole where I had once had purpose. He responded in an e-mail:

  When I climbed into an inflatable kayak at the beginning of some rapids up in Canada, I turned to my brother and asked, “Does it look like I’m going to die?” He said, “No, it looks like it’s going to be fun. From here, it doesn’t even look all that scary.”

  Well, from here it looks like you’re going to want something real soon. Send another story.

  Four months and five stories later, I left for New York again. I left with a fatter envelope than I had before and with the kind of jewels that should come with their own bodyguard. There is something about that kind of hard, cold, sparkling sign language for power that even I, quasi-socialist sometime-vegetarian artist—even I wanted to hold up and shout, “Look motherfuckers: I have treasure from a prince. I am beautiful.” But treasure loses its power as an ego boost pretty quickly and becomes just another watch, another pair of earrings, jewelry so gaudy it looks like you probably bought it at Patricia Field.

  Eventually the jewels lose their sentimental value entirely and you wind up selling them to an estate-jewelry buyer in a second-floor office in the diamond district. As you sit across the small table and watch the little old man who sounds like your Uncle Leon examine your jewelry with a tiny telescope, you think of what your grandmother used to say to you when you waited until the last minute to write your English paper: Pressure makes diamonds.

  I didn’t exactly know that it was going to be my last time in Brunei. But I had an intuitive flicker of resolution as I said good-bye to Robin. I looked at him hard, memorizing his face. What if I never saw him again?

  I had made the most un-Patti of choices. Even with the freest, most punk fairy godmother of them all, I had wound up a well-paid piece of property—only a rental property, but still, I had severed the connection between my soul and my body so profoundly that I could barely feel my own skin anymore. If I never saw Robin again, maybe I’d be free to return to myself. I knew I was facing a long road back.

  chapter 29

  It took the investigator about two weeks to locate my birth mother. In Carrie’s first letter to me, she sent pictures of her family. In their holiday photo, her husband is a tall, balding, kind-eyed man in thick glasses. You can see that the older, teenage daughter has special needs. The younger one, probably around six years old, is a round-faced, pretty Latina girl. The letter told me that they were both adopted.

  Carrie looks intrepid and sturdy, with no lipstick on her no-nonsense smile. The four of them stand in matching Christmas sweaters in front of an aluminum-sided house, hardened patches of gray snow scattered around the dead lawn behind them. They are one of those Midwestern families you’d pass right by at Disney World.

  I inserted myself into the picture. Who would I have been if I had returned from high school every day to that little house? I imagined it like a high school movie, in which the main character has pictures of pop stars tacked to her wall and blue ribbons pinned around the edge of her vanity mirror. She lies on the bed talking to her best friend on the phone while her feet rest up on the headboard. The whole scene is washed in buttery sunshine. I knew it was ridiculous, embarrassing, but I indulged myself with imagining for a moment a world in which there could have been a possibility for me other than the one I was living, a world in which maybe I’d have been equipped to make some better choices.

  Carrie sent other pictures also, color photocopies with her own captions penciled in below them. Most of them were from The Cross and the Sword, performed at a regional theater in Jacksonville in 1972, which is where she met my birth father, Jim.

  I did find some pictures of your birth father. I always thought you’d be lucky if you got his looks—not that I’m complaining about mine.

  In my favorite photo, Jim is at center stage in a heroic stance. He has long, wavy seventies hair tucked behind his ears and he wears a Renaissance Faire-looking outfit. Carrie is on one end of the line of dancers behind him. She has a wreath of flowers in her hair and is wearing a wide skirt and a peasant blouse. She is down on one knee, holding a tambourine in the air, and looking up at him.

  They are both so pretty, but he is even prettier than she is. In her letter, Carrie tells me that Jim was a talented actor and a poet. To me, he looks like a shifty hustler. I can see it in the eyes. I look a lot like Carrie around the nose and mouth, but my eyes are strictly Jim.

  Heritage? I guess primarily white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I believe Jim was of English heritage. My mother’s maiden name was MacDowell—Scotch. I’m a mixture of Scotch, German, and I think Irish.

  I’ve always thought I look Jewish—New York Jewish, Russian Jewish. That is what I say wh
en people ask me my ethnicity. I’m a Russian Polish Jew. When I recently told this to my Russian manicurist, she nodded her head and said, “I knew it.”

  I was extremely independent and found it easier to deal with things myself. As a young adult, I was not easily fulfilled with what I was doing and kept looking for more out of life. I guess that wasn’t too unusual in the sixties and seventies . . . I guess a lot of the old ideas are still somewhere within me. You’ve reminded me of a lot of the old feelings and ideals as I’ve been digging through old pictures and papers.

  In this, it seemed, I resembled Carrie far more than I did my adoptive parents, who had closed the shutters and sat out the sixties as if it were a hurricane.

  Carrie’s letters were written on six-by-nine white, lined paper, with a slightly serrated edge at the top—practical, not a theatrical flourish to be detected. She wrote her letters to her long-lost biological daughter on a kitchen notepad.

  Of course I’ve thought about you often. I had wondered lately what contacts I could make to make finding me easier if that’s what you wanted to do. I hope I can give you whatever you want or need. I hate the stories of adopted people who are so desperately in search of their birth mother. I always hoped you would have a happy, fulfilled life without me.

  Was I desperately in search of her? Not exactly. But something. I was desperately in search of something and she was a part of that something.

  Carrie’s letters recounted a young woman’s wanderings from a middle-class childhood in Bellevue, Nebraska, to a short stint at the University of Utah to a dance career in Chicago to a show in Florida, then back to Chicago, where she got into some trouble with the wrong guy at the wrong time, then back to Nebraska, where she got married and finished college, and finally to the suburbs of Boise, Idaho, where she worked as a medical technician and a dance teacher and eventually adopted two daughters of her own.

  She seemed intelligent and sane. Not trashy, not crazy, just a woman who had once been restless, had once been confused.

  Did you plant your garden? I asked in my letters to her. Did you ever wind up getting the kite with two strings up in the air?

  Lindsay and Colin sat by my side on the black leather couch in our loft when I called Carrie to ask her to come visit me in New York. I figured I was ready to put one chapter of this story to bed and to open another one. What would Patti Smith do? She would look the truth in the eye and never once would she blink.

  I have stood at the arrival gate at Newark International Airport maybe a hundred times in my life, but picking up Carrie is the most memorable.

  Seared into my brain is the image of her as she moved toward me down that long hallway with her matter-of-fact walk. She was sweet-faced and big-hipped like me, wearing high-waisted jeans and a plaid flannel. We greeted each other with tight smiles. I believe that both our faces were laced with some regret that we had ever made those plans to meet. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but the execution of it was suddenly too sharp, too bright, like walking out of a dark room into the sunshine.

  It was an awkward and tense reunion, but my birth mother is a tough woman. She shed exactly one tear, apologizing as she wiped it away. I am taller than Carrie. As we waited at baggage claim, she told me that I had my birth father’s eyes. I already knew this from the pictures she had sent. I kept those eyes trained on the baggage carousel, pretending to be searching hard for her luggage even though I didn’t know what it looked like.

  Later she told me more about Jim, about the two of them, as we sat on high stools eating Chinese food in the kitchen that doubled as Lindsay’s sewing room. I felt strange and out of proportion. I was tiny in the tallceilinged room; I was huge next to my petite mother. My hands looked embarrassingly big and masculine to me, wrapped around the chopsticks. My eyes felt swollen and tired and were suddenly sinking shut.

  “We were in love. He followed me back to Chicago after the show,” she said.

  She lit up when she talked about him, even after all the years in between, all the pain he had caused her.

  “He was very good-looking, very charismatic. He was trying to act in Chicago and we lived in a studio apartment. We struggled. I remember that Jim broke his leg and he had this huge cast on it and we got in a fight. It was snowing out, a blizzard, and he dragged himself down the street through the snow. I got in the car and skidded along behind him, hollering at him to get in.”

  I laughed.

  “I lodged the car in a snowbank and we both had to walk home.”

  Then she got vague. I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed or relieved that she traded her frankness for fog. Hearing her talk about my birth father and their time together had the uncomfortable scrape of talking to your parents about sex. You want to be one of those cool mom/daughter teams that talk freely about everything—best friends. But you’re not. In this case we weren’t even talking about sex. And this wasn’t even my mother, really. But I still had an instinctive aversion to the subject matter.

  “There’s a lot I don’t remember. I’m sorry. I think I blocked it. I had fantasies of raising you but trust me, a long-term relationship with Jim would have been a disaster. Anyway, he left. He left before you were born.”

  The story she told lasted through dinner and fortune cookies. It was a good story, but it felt unrelated to me. At the same time, I recognized it was the story I had been waiting to hear all my life. Here it was. I was finally hearing it. I was finally looking at another person in the world who looked like me. It was odd, off. Something in me blanched. I couldn’t relax around Carrie.

  I don’t remember much of what we did that week, except that we hung out a lot with Lindsay and Colin. Carrie met the various friends who cycled through our loft. She was interested in everyone to whom she was introduced and she seemed comfortable with herself, even in a world of theater hipsters and art queens. I was so relieved. I guess I had been worried about what I’d find, worried that in her I’d discover some deep indictment of my character.

  We went to Central Park and to the Met. We met Carrie’s Rockette friend, a lithe blond woman in her early forties. I learned that the Rockettes is where ballerinas go to die. Apparently, aging dancers from all over the country travel to New York to do the Christmas show. It’s run like a military operation, and being a Rockette is practically a nationality all its own. Carrie’s friend was in town to weigh in, brush up, and take some classes.

  Like nearly every child within driving distance of Manhattan, I had seen the Rockettes many times. I mostly remember their furry hats and their long, long legs moving as one lovely machine. It was so satisfying to the human eye, the homogeneous herd of women and the kaleidoscopic patterns their bodies sketched in space. It was glamorous to meet a Rockette wearing sweatpants in the park. We had tea—black, no sugar—and watched the remote-control boats zoom around Conservatory Water.

  Planning to join Carrie for dinner after a dance class that she had decided to drop in on, I walked to Columbus Circle and met her at Steps. Steps is where all the kids from the Broadway shows take their classes. I’m an okay dancer and can usually hold my own, but the Steps dancers are vicious. I have sat in the back stairwell of the school numerous times and wept into my sweaty jazz shoes, thinking: I’m too fat; I’m too slow with choreography; I lose count. And, most damning: I’m too lazy. I could have been so much better if I had just tried harder, if I had just paid more attention in class when I was young, if I didn’t always quit the minute things got hard.

  “Ballerinas have long, thin necks like swans,” my father had often said. He didn’t need to complete the thought. Ballerinas were born swans. I could see as well as anyone that I was a duck. I would have to learn to take solace in the fact that water ran off my back.

  I arrived at Steps early and tried to stay out of sight while I watched Carrie’s class through the window that overlooked the studio. She was in an advanced-level jazz class, one I would never even attempt. In spite of her age, her now-un-dancerly physique, and
her one leg perpetually swollen due to a bout with skin cancer that had necessitated the removal of her lymph node—in spite of all this, she was stunning out there. She had that special thing.

  When her group took the floor, I saw the normally snotty dancers on the sidelines, all of them twenty years younger than she, watching her with respect. The teacher flashed her a smile. She was alive, electric. She was better than all of them. When class ended, a small cluster of dancers gathered around her. They lingered, talking while the people taking the next class trickled in.

  I, of all people, who had always found a home in my group of outlandish and uncompromising friends, knew that there were many ways to make a family. And I knew that my parents, my real parents, lived in New Jersey and loved me like crazy, if poorly at times. But standing behind the glass at Steps was the first time I felt a flash of anger. I wished for a moment that Carrie had been a little less selfish, a little more together, had loved me just a little more. If she had stuck around, I might have danced like that. Or that is what I wanted to think. But I didn’t dance like that. And frankly I was sick of wishing that I did.

  I sat at the Newark airport for a long time after Carrie left. I parked myself in front of the wide panes of glass and watched the planes take off and land and take off again. I was only twenty, the age Carrie had been when she put me up for adoption. And when I chronicled my list of outrageous fuckups in the preceding couple of years, when I visited my dismal graveyard of buried aspirations, when I looked at all I had trampled, I was forced to forgive her.

  Fifteen years later I lay on the couch of a beachfront apartment with the windows open and the sea breeze blowing through. My husband and I sat there in the darkening room, watching the sea suck up the last of the pale sunlight. Patti Smith was performing on the Santa Monica pier, seven stories below, but we couldn’t go to the show because I was on bed rest after my in-vitro procedure that day. I had my doubts that it would work and I was right. But I never doubted that we would have a child somehow, a child who would break our hearts wide open, who would help us to grow in compassion.