Pretty Mess

by Erika Jayne

  The thing about John is he was always great in business. Very motivated. The one consistent thing in my life is that everyone around me has always been a hard worker. This includes both of my husbands, my stepfather, my father, my mother, my grandparents, and my son.

  After a few years, we upgraded and bought a bigger house in Lilburn, Georgia. It was a big, two-story home. I transferred to Lilburn Elementary School and, for the first and only time in my life, brought home straight As. Renee was working with my stepfather, helping him run the car lot. It was just like how my grandmother had helped my grandfather run his plumbing company.

  For a while, things were very good between Renee and my stepfather. My mother went so far as to apply for an annulment for her first marriage (to my father) so that she and my stepfather could get their union recognized by the Catholic church. When I was ten, Renee pushed to have my stepfather legally adopt me.

  By that time, I think my stepfather considered me his child. I think he really did love me. This adoption push came in the summertime. I was upstairs in the house and my mother was sitting on her bed, talking on the phone.

  “Your father wants to talk to you,” she told me, holding out the receiver.

  Huh? What? I thought, a bit confused to speak to this man I’d only heard about until now. “Okay.”

  I got on the phone with him, and he asked if I wanted my stepfather to adopt me. The whole thing was confusing to me, because I was just a kid. I knew this man on the phone was my “real” dad. I knew that my stepfather was doing this thing called adoption. But at age ten, I wasn’t sure what all that meant. I just wanted to go to ballet class and be done with it.

  “Is this something you want to do?” my father asked.

  “Yeah,” I said automatically. I didn’t know what I wanted, but Renee really wanted it, and I wanted to make her happy.

  Apparently, that was enough for my father. He relinquished his parental rights so my stepfather could legally adopt me. That summer, the process was completed and I got a brand-new birth certificate with my stepfather’s last name as my last name.

  We had a few great years together, with Renee and my stepfather getting along and the business thriving. But then the fighting resumed when Renee discovered that he’d been unfaithful again. One day when I was in middle school, it all blew up. He left us for the second (and what would be the final) time on Thanksgiving. That year, none of us had much to be thankful for.

  By that point in their relationship, I was done with both of them. To be honest, I’ve been done with these people since I was basically walking and talking. I thought, This is dumb, the whole thing is dumb. This is not going to work out. It’s crazy how instinctually right I was about their relationship. If I could see as a kid that it wasn’t going to work out, why the hell couldn’t they see it?

  While they were fighting and cussing each other out, I didn’t blame myself as some kids do. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. I knew that everything was wrong with them. There are two things I knew since the day I was born: I was fine, and my grandmother and I were the only two sane motherfuckers out of all of these crazy people.

  The day that my stepfather left was hard, though. Renee sat in a chair in the living room, wearing a pair of navy shorts and a purple polo shirt. She was sobbing into her hands. Her face was pressed into the side of the chair.

  I thought—and I will never forget this—I don’t ever want to be like that. I love my mother, but in that moment, I saw her as weak. I knew that she could survive without a man, but she wanted a partner so badly that she let him ruin her life. We’d had a great house. We’d had Christmas trees and parties and a yard and a dog named Cubby. It was all great. Now it was all gone.

  Renee and I were still living in that big, two-story house. But since she’d been working for his business, he was the one making all of the money. When he left, he cleaned out their checking account and left Renee with nothing. The next month, Renee didn’t have enough money to pay the mortgage, keep the lights on, pay for her car, and buy Christmas presents.

  I remember sitting at her piano, making up a song called “Slim Jim Christmas.” “It’s going to be a Slim Jim Christmas, everywhere you go,” I sang as my mother played accompaniment. We had to laugh about the situation. We had to make fun of it, or else the gloom would have been too much to bear.

  The irony is that my mother’s annulment papers finally showed up in the mail the very next day after my stepfather left. She would finally be able to get married in the Catholic church! The only problem was that her husband was gone. I don’t know if that’s divine intervention, exactly, but it’s something.

  The second time the relationship ended wasn’t as easy as the first time, back when my stepfather just took off and I didn’t hear from him for a year. This time, he had adopted me. He had parental rights.

  My mother and stepfather were trying to decide visitation. Because their divorce wasn’t amicable, we all wound up in family court. I was about twelve and I was called in to testify about whether I wanted to see my stepfather or not. I had to go to court about three days in a row in the summertime in Lawrenceville, Georgia. I sat next to my grandmother on those hard wooden benches in that hot, stuffy courtroom. I just felt sick to my stomach the whole time. I kept asking my grandmother, “Can we leave now?” But no, we couldn’t.

  I heard too many adult things in that courtroom; hurtful, spiteful language. My mother was talking about what a bad husband my stepfather had been, and then he was saying the same sorts of things about my mother. It was all of that tit-for-tat bullshit.

  I realize now it was not necessary to put a child in the middle of the divorce like that. Making a little girl sit on the stand and be questioned was cruel. I didn’t want any part of it. Not on my mother’s side and not on my stepfather’s side. To this day, I don’t appreciate it.

  I was sick to my stomach with anxiety being in that courtroom. Decades later, when I first started to accompany my husband, Tom, to court, I would become nauseated. In the deep recesses of my brain, I always equate the courthouse with the awful feeling I had during those visitation disputes.

  When it was all settled, I was scheduled to have visits with my stepfather. He had gotten an apartment, and I would go hang out with him there. We would go to the movies and stuff. It wasn’t bad, it was just different. He was a good dad and never mean to me, so I’m not sure why I wanted to stop going to see him. There are some holes in my memory from back then, and this is one of them. Even Renee doesn’t remember the specific reason.

  When I told my mother that I no longer wanted to go, she asked her lawyer for advice. He said that the next time my stepfather picked me up, I could go out in the driveway, look him in the eye, say, “I’m not coming,” and then come back into the house. That was supposed to be good enough.

  The next time he came for me, I saw his car pull up. I walked outside. My mother was at home, but she was upstairs putting on her makeup. She figured that I would deliver my lines as discussed, and everything would end peacefully. My grandmother Ann’s sister, my great-aunt Helen, was standing by the window watching me walk out there to say I’m not coming. She had a feeling it wasn’t going to be as easy as Renee assumed.

  After I told him I didn’t want to come, my stepfather got out of the car and tried to take me.

  “Renee, he’s got her!” Helen yelled to my mother. Helen and Renee came running out to stop him, and my mother tried to pull me away from him. My mother had one of my arms and my stepfather had the other; they were literally having a tug-of-war with me. I wrapped my feet around the railing leading up to the front porch and started crying. It was a spectacle, and all of the neighbors could see this scene unraveling in the front yard. It was just trashy.

  My mother jumped onto my stepfather’s back and started scratching him. Finally, he let me go. When he snatched me, it’s like something in him had snapped. He was angry at my mother and wanted to see his little girl, and he was just enrage
d and frustrated. Finally he came back to his senses, and he dropped the whole thing. After that, I had to go see a child psychologist. Eventually, the court said that I no longer had to visit my stepfather if I didn’t want to. I didn’t see or speak to him again for a long time.

  In fact, the next time I spoke to him was in 1989, just after my mother and I moved to New York. I was eighteen at the time, and my grandmother found out that my stepfather’s parents were both killed in a tragic car accident. She was really good about reaching out to people in times of crisis. She called my stepfather’s sister, who told my grandmother that when they went through her mother’s possessions, my step-grandmother still had my picture in her wallet. As I reminisce on this story, I feel really terrible about that. There was so much sadness around that whole part of my life, and I wonder why she kept that photo all of those years.

  After my grandmother told me that news, I thought I should reach out to my stepfather and give him my condolences. When he picked up the phone, I could hear noise in the background, like he had people over or there was a party going on.

  I told him how sorry I was about his parents’ death and asked him how he was doing, but he was hesitant to reply to me. I could almost feel him on the other end of the line, looking around the room and trying to find a way out of the conversation.

  “Erika,” he said finally. “I’d prefer if you didn’t contact me again.”

  “Oh. Okay,” I replied, a little stunned. “Take care.”

  That was the last time I ever spoke to him. I was sad that he wasn’t happy to hear from me. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but looking back on it I think I understand why he felt that way. We’d always had a good relationship. I still think fondly of our time together, riding around in one of his many cars, going to a sporting event, or even just helping him run his errands around town. But he was already dealing with the heartache of his parents dying. The last thing he needed was this charged interaction on top of it.

  I think his rejection had more to do with his relationship with my mother. They still had hard feelings for each other. Hearing from me, I think, just reminded him of that pain. So I respected his wish and never called again.

  As for Nicolas, my biological father, I never tried to contact him. My mother and grandmother would tell me stories to fill in the blanks. When I was being really bad, my mother would say, “Ugh, you’re just like your father!” Which at that time meant nothing to me. I didn’t feel the need to have a relationship with him. I had grown up very close to my grandfather Hollis, who is the one who would give me away at my first wedding. I’d also had a few good years with my stepfather. That was enough. I was satisfied.

  My uncle Alejandro, however, had different ideas. Aunt Janet was long divorced from my uncle Gabriel, but she was still in touch with both my mother and Alejandro. He wanted things to be right between my father and me. He asked Janet if I would be interested in speaking with my father on the phone. Janet had my mother ask me, and I agreed. Through that complicated phone tree, we worked it out.

  I was almost twenty-five. I had already been married and divorced and was living with my mother and five-year-old son in Tudor City in Manhattan. To be honest, that first phone call was a little awkward. I was talking to someone whom I had heard about for my entire life, someone who was obviously instrumental to my even being on this planet, but I really knew almost nothing about him. We played catch-up on our lives and talked about where we were and what we were doing.

  I told him everything about myself. He confirmed that when he left Atlanta he moved to Oakland, California, and became a police officer. He was still working on the force. He was remarried and had a small daughter, who was younger than my son.

  I was planning to visit Janet, who was living in West Hollywood by that time, in a few months. So my father and I arranged that when I got to the West Coast, I would meet him in person.

  Janet lived right across the street from the Le Parc Hotel. It’s a cool, rock ’n’ roll hotel that has always been one of LA’s hidden gems. He stayed at the hotel, and I walked across the street and met my father in his room. I always thought that I looked a lot like Renee, but as soon as I met him, I realized that it is my father who I really look like.

  I have full lips and big, bushy eyebrows just like him. On my mother’s side, I come from a long line of towheads with icy blue eyes. I’m the only one with green eyes, like my father. I’m also the only one with an ass. I have my father to thank (or maybe his mother) for giving me that blessing.

  I shook his hand, and he gave me a bracelet. It was a big, thick rope of gold. When I got back to New York, I immediately pawned it to some Hasidim in the Diamond District to pay the rent. They gave me around twelve hundred dollars, so I can only imagine how much it was really worth.

  There wasn’t that Hallmark movie moment where I saw him and shouted, “Oh, Daddy,” and ran into his arms and we were suddenly the best of friends. There was none of that. It was very businesslike. What exactly do you say?

  We went out for the day. I drove Janet’s stick shift around town, and he told me, “You drive like a man.” It’s the only compliment my father ever gave me. I forget exactly what we were doing. No matter the activity, what we were really doing was feeling each other out. As sad as it sounds, we were just two strangers getting to know each other. This is when I learned about my grandparents and my father’s childhood in El Salvador. I learned about the shed behind my grandfather’s house and the unknown branches of my family tree.

  At the end of our visit, he invited me to come stay with him and his family in the Bay Area for Thanksgiving, which I accepted. A few months later, I arrived. He picked me up from the airport, and I went to his townhouse outside Oakland. I met his wife, Bridget, who was very sweet, and his adorable young daughter, Fallon, who is my half sister.

  “Let me show you what I do and show you around,” he said.

  We drove to the police station in downtown Oakland and he introduced me to his coworkers as his daughter. “Oh, that’s funny,” more than one person at the station said. “We’ve never heard of you before.”

  Then we went to the gun range, which is something all good southern dads do with their daughters. At twenty-five, I was finally getting my turn. At the shooting range he told me, “If I had raised you, you’d be walking around with a machine gun and a machete.” Little did he know that I’d been shooting guns my whole life. My grandfather kept a double-barreled shotgun next to his bed and a machete under the driver’s seat of his van. Atlanta and El Salvador weren’t as far apart as he thought.

  He also asked me, “How’s your mother’s weight? She’s been known to fluctuate.”

  When I got back to New York, I repeated that story to my mother. She went ballistic: “That son of a bitch. How dare he!” she shouted. “I was always small when I was with him.” It was like they were eighteen again and cussing each other out. He knew it was the perfect dig to get at my mother, and he knew that I would tell her about it. We both played our parts, just as he figured we would.

  After the gun range, we went back to the house. My stepmother was in another room, and my father and I were standing in the small hallway between the kitchen and the living room. We were watching his daughter play on the thick sandy-brown carpet in front of the fireplace. She was just a happy, beautiful blond toddler keeping herself entertained. The house was decorated for the holidays, and it was very homey.

  “So, how did you end up with Fallon?” I asked my father, trying to make small talk.

  “Well,” he said, “Bridget never had any children before, and I never had any children, so, you know.”

  He quickly caught himself, realizing he’d made a massive mistake. The air became heavy, and it was incredibly silent between us. We really looked into each other’s eyes and processed everything that was packed into his statement. It rolled over me all at once in a wave that made my arm hair stand on end. In his mind, I had never even existed. He had erased me.

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nbsp; I stood there in silence. I shouldn’t have been so surprised, since everything in his life announced this truth—he had never reached out, and the people at the station didn’t know about me.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. He gave me a hug and said, “I have you now, and I’m not going to let you go.”

  Even as he said those words, I knew the score. I knew that there was nothing here for me. Whatever I was searching for by getting to know him, it wasn’t there to be found. There would be no fairy-tale ending.

  On my father’s part, that statement was an innocent mistake. And it was the innocence of his mistake that confirmed that we didn’t need to have a relationship. It wasn’t that he thought poorly of me. He didn’t think about me at all.

  We got through the rest of the weekend. My father and stepmother were perfect hosts. They were trying really hard, but I knew that this experiment in a new relationship was doomed.

  When I got back to New York and told Renee about what happened, she got a little angry and said, “I’m sorry.” She gave me a hug. It felt like a favorite blanket. “I’m not surprised something like that happened,” she said. She knew much more of my father’s history than I did. She was more disappointed by the news than I ever would be.

  Nicolas called a few times after that, but our communication petered out. Neither of us tried very hard to pursue it. To this day, my son, Thomas, has never met him. Even though they have so much in common—my son’s a police officer in California, just like my father was—they probably never will meet.

  The day I turned forty, I remember turning to my husband, Tom, and saying, “Do you think my father thinks of me on special days like today?”

  “There is no good in even asking that question,” Tom said. That was absolutely the right answer. It wasn’t yes or no. It was, “That kind of thinking isn’t going to make your life better.”

  I don’t hate men. I don’t blame men for the way I was treated by my father. I don’t think that I have an older husband now because I needed a dad, even if that’s a temptingly easy suggestion. I love having someone who really knows his shit and has an incredible brain. Tom’s age alone doesn’t account for those qualities. Many of the men I’ve been in relationships with have been much closer to my age. My first husband was older than me, but only by seven years. The fact that Tom is thirty-three years older is not my blueprint—it’s just how things happened to shake out the one time everything else clicked.