“My sisters hate you,” Kathi sobbed. “They’ve been jealous of you since the day you were born.”
I couldn’t bear to see my mother in tears, so I tried my best to comfort her. The cousins were growing up, I explained. Now that we weren’t little kids who needed to be watched, there wasn’t as much reason for the family to get together anymore.
Or so we thought. Although we no longer spent every weekend together as before, our family still gathered on holidays and birthdays without inviting my mother and me.
“It’s because of you,” Kathi loved to say. “Because you’re gonna go places and they know it.” She was crying, but she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face. We had been shunned—a mixed blessing, to be sure: to my mother it meant winning and losing everything at the same time.
Bedtime Stories
———
“NEVER FALL IN LOVE WITH A BLOND,” MY MOTHER WARNED ME.
“Why not?” I said, though there was no point in asking. Kathi was high and in the mood for a soliloquy. She had a trove of stories that she loved to tell over and over. My role was to shut up and listen, even if I already knew where the story was headed. Most of the time, I did.
Kathi had somehow gotten wise to a scientific study that found that the human eye registers light colors before it does dark, ergo blond hair before black or brown. “Why do you think Cinderella and the Virgin Mary are always blondes? It’s utter bullshit,” she said. Blond hair, she went on to explain, is the first thing you see when you enter a crowded high-school gymnasium or a party in the dark woods.
“And you think it’s love at first sight. But it’s not. Just your eyes playing tricks,” she said bitterly. “Blonds. They’re the vainest people on earth.”
She was obviously talking about my father.
MY PARENTS MET AS teenagers, when both of them were still high on the most dangerous intoxicant, the promise that good looks were enough to deliver them to their dreams. As the legend goes, seventeen-year-old Kathi was babysitting for a rich family that also employed a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy to mow their lawn. She watched him through the window for a few weeks before making her move.
“When are you going to take me out to dinner?”
“Tonight?” Zeke offered. He was nineteen, cute, and defenseless.
I can imagine my young mother pulling my father’s blond hair, clawing his back with her long, sharp nails, my father grunting and roaring on top of her. A sickening thought for most people, it gives me great comfort now. Once there was love, brutal physical love, the kind that makes people scream, then wake up in each other’s arms hungry, tired, and a little sore.
“He looked just like Robert Redford,” Mum used to say.
Looking at the pictures now, I think, “Not quite …,” though Zeke was definitely handsome in a small-town way. My father never spoke about my mother’s former beauty. He didn’t need to. She bragged enough for herself. Neither of my parents tired of telling me how gorgeous everyone thought they were when they were young. Pride like this is both tyrannical and tragic, for the chief function of pride is to usher in the fall.
My parents had sufficient raw materials to achieve a level of fame in a small town, but not much more than that. Zeke was the middle child of five black-haired, brown-eyed, hockey-playing brothers, the dazzling expression of a recessive gene with his long curly blond hair, his round blue eyes, and the winning smile of a natural-born athlete. Too short even to consider going pro, he would have liked to become a hockey coach on the high-school or maybe college level. Teenage Kathi wanted to be an actress. If she had gone to college, I think my mother would soon have discovered that the stage was a better outlet for her than film. She had the kind of talents that were best seen live. She loved a monologue, and her lungs were astonishing. Although fascinating as a performance artist, Mum would have been incapable of the subtlety even bad movies have required of actors since the pictures went talkie. But I believe she could have made a name for herself in local theater, and that my father could have been a popular coach and PE teacher if their ambitions had not already begun to wane before an unexpected pregnancy extinguished these small dreams.
NO ONE IN THE world would ever describe me as plain. I take a lot of pride in that.
In the wrong light—fluorescent, especially—I look like a monster in a Halloween mask, all cavernous eye socket and bulging prefrontal lobe. But in a better light, with my head tilted just so and my lips parted in a wry, hard-to-fake smile, my face can take on a villainous beauty, like Cruella De Vil or Snow White’s stepmother in her better years. People often compliment my teeth. (“No braces? Ever?”) I have good hair days and bad, like anyone else. Makeup helps, but only so much, because I have never, not for one second, been the kind of woman who could get by on her looks alone.
My father assures me that this is a blessing. On a trip to the beach not too long ago, the old man was moved to appraise all the aesthetic flaws of my younger sister, his daughter by another woman, and me. Not one to take things lying down, my sister fired back at our father with a litany of the bad genes he’d passed down to us.
“Flat feet, oily skin, a friggin’ unibrow …”
Zeke tried to defend himself. “You know, your mothers had some part in it, too.”
I pointed out that my sister and I spend more time, money, and effort on hair removal than most drag queens, and that neither of our mothers possesses this trait.
“Listen, you two girls have no idea what it’s like to be really good-looking,” my father said. “It’s not what you think. People are always looking at you. They expect things from you. It’s an awful lot to live up to. And, frankly, I don’t think either of you could have handled it.” He smiled to himself and ran his fingers through his hair.
“Whatcha doing, Dad?” my sister railed. “Counting how many strands are still left?”
“I’d feel sorry for your future husbands,” my father said, grinning, “but who would ever be crazy enough to marry cows like you?”
“It’s a miracle we don’t have fatal eating disorders,” I told him, the perfect riposte, laced with guilt and the threat of debilitating illness. It must have had an impact, because the old man felt bad enough to offer a concession.
“You were pretty cute when you were little.”
Isn’t every mammal? We’re all ridiculously cute before we move on to solid foods. It’s a trick of evolution. Who would put up with us otherwise? As the darling glow of infancy wore off, the concomitants of maturity—my real face, my real character—began to emerge, and I couldn’t help noticing the puzzled expressions I’d begun to elicit from adults. I hit a particularly awkward phase when I was seven, peaking in ugliness around fifth grade. By junior high, my mother could stand it no more.
“I’m not leaving this house with you until you put on some friggin’ makeup and do something to that rat’s nest you call hair.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. As far back as I can remember, I had trained my eyes to avoid reflective surfaces. On a good day, I was and still am often startled by what the mirror has to offer. I don’t know who it is staring back, but it’s not—that can’t be—me. On a bad day, this disorientation can get gothic. I will start to imagine that one of my eyes is bigger than the other. If I stare too long, it begins to grow as the other eye shrinks, until I look like a helpless grotesque from Picasso’s Guernica. I have a talent for turning an invisibly clogged pore into a gaping wound, and, like most women in the industrialized world, I sometimes hallucinate that my legs are as thick as sequoias.
During my late childhood, I hid inside Double XL sweatshirts. I was in junior high when the nineties grunge-rock movement arrived. Though I was never cool enough to commit to the whole punk-rock aesthetic, I finally had both an explanation and an excuse for my billowing sweaters. I learned too late that it actually takes a lot of effort to look rebellious and morose, and my nihilism, however authentic, was just plain dumpy.
My mother was a pro
duct of the seventies. If you didn’t have to lie down horizontally and hold your breath to zip your fly, she felt, your pants were obviously too big. All the flannel I was buying in my early teens had her deeply concerned. One Saturday after a very satisfying afternoon of moping in my bedroom, I walked into the kitchen to pour a bowl of cereal. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table. A cigarette dangled from her wrinkled lips. She looked me up and down, the ember of her Newport bobbing in sync with the scan of her eyes. She reached out and tugged on the enormous plaid shirt I was wearing.
“Honey,” she asked in a plaintive voice, “why do you always look like a fat forty-year-old lesbian?”
Around this time my mother got a job as a manicurist in a full-service beauty salon, and her co-workers persuaded me to bob my long, tangled hair. It was a ruse, I soon learned. Once they got me in their clutches these women held me down on a chair in the back room of the salon, swabbed my upper lip and eyebrows with hot wax, then ripped it off.
“Jesus Christ!” I screamed.
“You have to suffer for beauty,” they cackled. There was a gaggle of them, all small-town beauticians with electric tans and darkly penciled lips that made them look as if they were wearing masks. The smell of coffee and cigarettes wafted from their mouths as they hovered uncomfortably close and, one by one, plucked the more stubborn hairs from my face.
I have come to understand this moment in my life as a humanitarian act. Twelve-year-old girls aren’t supposed to have mustaches, and mine had been there since I was eight. For the sake of dignity, it had to go. While I didn’t twirl around my bedroom singing “I Feel Pretty” after the women in my mother’s salon worked their sadistic magic, I could look at a mirror without imagining that a lesser primate was looking back in the reflection. And who knew what puberty would bring? Maybe one day I would become beautiful.
Shortly after the makeover, while I was organizing one of the many heaps of clutter that Mum loved to amass in our tiny home, I stumbled upon a picture that crushed my hope of ever becoming an object of beauty. It was a black-and-white photo of twenty-year-old Kathi standing in the glassy stream of a waterfall, naked except for a microscopic bikini bottom. Her arms are folded over her small but perfect breasts, her head is tilted back, and there’s a smile on her face that suggests a night of marathon sex.
“Mum, who took this picture?”
“My God,” she gasped. “Your father.” She snatched the photo from me and considered it. “You’re in there, too, Nikki.”
Hidden beneath the taut skin of her stomach, I am something bigger than bacteria but smaller than a tadpole, a whorling system of cells that my mother’s antibodies still recognize as an invasion. It was the first visual proof I’d ever found of one of my mother’s favorite bedtime stories: “How My Only Child Came into the World.” A trashy, extravagant creation myth, I heard it as often as other kids heard “The Three Little Pigs.”
MY PARENTS SPENT JANUARY of 1979 in Hawaii. Like many New Englanders, they’d saved their money all year so that they could get away for the coldest, darkest month of the winter. My mother discovered that she was pregnant a few weeks into their trip. According to my father, this was a performance she reenacted every month. (Whether I came into the world by pure accident or by womankind’s oldest trick is still a matter of debate.) After he realized that my mother’s story was actually true, my father packed his bags and hopped on the next plane back to Boston. I don’t think I’ve met a man who wouldn’t do the same thing. He was twenty-two years old and just as terrified as she was. My mother stayed in their youth hostel and told everyone her story of abandonment, full of tears and theatrical gestures, riding on her beauty enough for strangers to buy her food and drive her around the island. She met a native Pacific Islander with mahogany skin and a giant belly, who offered to save her reputation by marrying her. This was Mum’s favorite part of the story.
“… so this big Samoan says to me, ‘Let me give your baby a name.’ ‘Fuck you,’ I tell him. ‘I’m giving this baby my name.’ ” In her next breath she added, “He wasn’t the only one, you know. I was beautiful, and skinnier than you are now. Everyone wanted to marry me.”
As the son of devout Catholics, Zeke also asked my mother to marry him when she finally returned to Massachusetts, but she refused him in similar fashion. For the following months she claims to have gone completely sober, the first of only two sober spells in her adult life. She turned twenty-one that summer and in the fall I was born. She didn’t go back on her promise and gave me her last name.
This is not to say that she didn’t seriously consider all her options first. When I was in fifth grade, my mother confessed that she had made an appointment to abort me. Her brother drove her to the clinic, but she refused to go in. She could have made this decision at home and saved him the trip. It was the seventies. There was an energy crisis, gas prices through the roof. But that would not have been a fitting scene for the turning point in her drama.
“I was crying and crying, Nikki. My brother kept saying, ‘Go in there. Don’t be stupid!’ But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t get out of the car.”
Later in the pregnancy, my mother also told me, she had set in motion a possible adoption, contacting an agency and filling out forms for prospective parents. Somewhere in the world my long-lost adoptive parents sat in a lonely house waiting for me to arrive. I spent countless hours imagining them, rewriting the script of Annie, so that instead of a redhead in an orphanage it starred a mangy brunette removed from her home by Social Services.
Betcha they’re smart! Betcha they’re cool!
Vegetarian lunch box at my Waldorf school!
The story of how I actually learned about my almost-adoption is less a Broadway musical than something out of a daytime soap opera.
In seventh grade I was invited to a summer pool party. Kids from other schools would be there, including boys. When my mother heard this, she demanded that I wear a bikini, a hot-pink one that she picked out herself. “Please, Honey! Wear it for me,” she begged. I covered it up with a T-shirt that came down to my knees. This is how I gleaned my first lesson in attracting the attention of boys and men—that desire is only intensified by concealment and withholding. When my wet T-shirt stuck like a second skin with a neon bathing suit peeking through, I found myself in the middle of a swarm of boys, all of them constantly readjusting their shorts. The cutest one, I thought, was a boy from Salem named Seamus. I mentioned this to a girl at the party and a commitment ceremony soon followed. That’s all it takes in seventh grade—vague interest and a series of emissaries to handle the details.
The next day Seamus and I had our first conversation on the phone. We had little in common apart from the fact that we shared the same birthday and were both die-hard fans of U2. I’d prepared for our chat by writing down a list of things to talk about. Item one was which song from The Joshua Tree best represented our love.
“Um, I don’t know,” Seamus said.
Fine. I moved on to the topic of our cosmically aligned birthdays. “Where were you born?” I asked him.
“Beverly Hospital,” he said.
“So was I! That means we were there together as babies!”
I was in raptures. How could any girl be lucky enough to meet her soul mate in junior high? I would wait until I was eighteen to move in with him, twenty-one to have our first child, just like my mother, only the situation would be slightly more dignified by a legal marriage.
Kathi overheard me talking to Seamus and she came running into my bedroom. “Tell him to put his mother on,” she said, and took the phone from me. The two women spoke for a while, my mother’s voice hushed and excited. Afterward, Mum sat on my bed and told me her version of my first days in the world outside her body:
Seamus and I both had young single mothers planning to give their babies up for adoption. The hospital put these two girls in the same room, thinking it would spare them the pain of sharing a room with happy families who had conceived their
babies on purpose. Or, as my mother liked to explain, “They wanted to consolidate the two whores in the Scarlet Letter room.” Seamus’s mother actually went through with the adoption, while my mother had again changed her mind.
“It was a whim,” she admitted. “You were so small and hairy and you looked vaguely Chinese. I couldn’t get over your feet.”
And so my mother had met my seventh-grade boyfriend long before I did, and had shared intimate postpartum words with the birth mother he had never known.
Mum loved to relive moments like these. Stories of her lost youth were our nightly bedtime ritual. She never read books to me. She wanted to, but whenever she tried to read she said the letters jumped around and flipped backward on the page. It was frustrating, and also humiliating. “Mummy’s not smart,” she’d say, pouting. Stupidity was the diagnosis that her teachers in the Danvers public schools had given her. Stunata was the word in her mother’s native tongue. Dyslexia was not even mentioned until late in my mother’s senior year of high school. By then Kathi had carved her own path that was more successful.
“I was beautiful and popular,” she told me. “Everyone worshipped me. And you know what? I was nice to everyone. Even the geeks. The geeks loved me. I won class president four years in a row by a landslide. The geek vote was crucial. My senior year, no one even bothered to run against me.”
The crowning achievement of her presidency, she told me one night as she sat smoking at the foot of my bed, was a screening of the 1930s cult film Reefer Madness in the high-school auditorium. A natural-born entrepreneur, my mother saw her position in student government as an opportunity to make some money for herself. She and a friend went in on an ounce of grass, rolled dozens of joints with a little tobacco sprinkled in them to make the marijuana stretch, and sold them at the movie screening on the sly.
“We made more money from the first showing than the PTA had collected all friggin’ year!” she said. “It was a coup, Nikki! Your mother was something.”
With or Without You: A Memoir Page 3
