Bastards: A Memoir (14 page)

Mimi wasn’t any easier to crack. I didn’t have anyone to tell me stories about her past, and she refused to answer a straight question. How many times had she been married? How old was she when she left home? When she was a child, what had she wanted to grow up to be? “Why would you want to know a thing like that?” Mimi would respond, or “Nobody likes a gossip,” or “None of your business, young lady.” Every once in a while she’d accidentally drop a fascinating biographical crumb, like the fact that she learned to shuffle cards from a boy in a quarantine ward when she had scarlet fever. Or that when she was my age she pin-rolled her hair in bed in the dark for school the next day. She’d get the whole set finished in five minutes, she said. Mimi had one older sister and two younger brothers. Her parents were dead, but Rebecca had met them when she was little. When I asked my sister what Mimi’s parents were like (hoping for something to wrap my fingers around), she shrugged and said, “Old.”

But when I stopped expecting Mimi to be the same kind of mother Peggy was, I could appreciate her strengths as a teacher. She might not have been forthcoming about her biography, but if I asked her about the right way to do something she’d spend the whole afternoon sewing a dress with me. She taught me how to cut my own hair and how to look sharp with nothing but a handful of bobby pins and a tube of lipstick. Mimi had perfected systems for everything from polishing silver to scooping ice cream and hemming pants.

It was easier to learn about my new parents by the objects they kept around the house. Most everything, even photographs, was tucked into shelves and boxes. I had to dig. Mimi called it snooping; I considered it research. Both words were appropriate. I’d wait until Mimi was downstairs in her workshop, then I’d sift through the trunks in the attic and the photo albums in the hallway.

One day, as I dug through the albums, I found a story that Mimi had written. I assumed it was from the early 1960s; it wasn’t dated. It was about a soldier coming home from the Korean War; I never learned how it ended. Mimi found me reading it and snatched it out of my hands. “These are my things,” she said. Her voice was even and low. “These are my things and don’t be going through them, please.”

Beside the leather-bound books were fat binders filled with pedigree charts (genealogy was another one of Mimi’s hob bies). Between the binders that contained Mimi and Granddad’s respective lineages was a thin volume where Mimi had begun to trace Rebecca’s family tree. There were marriage licenses and death certificates for the Freidrichs and Hendrickses and Teels in Mimi’s family. Fewer for the Kings and Carlsons in Granddad’s. Rebecca’s chart had some familiar Halls and Eagans but I was not prepared for the pieces that were missing. The charts only went backward, not forward. I was not on any of them. The few photos I found of myself filled two pages in one of Rebecca’s baby books.

The truth became more twisted a few months after our adoption when Granddad decided to rejoin the Catholic Church and take Mimi, Rebecca, and me along with him. In the process, he had his marriage to Joan annulled. It was a formality that allowed Granddad and Mimi’s marriage to be blessed by the Church, but it also edited my history further.

Annulment meant that, on paper and in the eyes of God, Granddad and Joan had never married. If they had, in fact, never married, Peggy would never have been born. I wouldn’t exist. Maybe I was never meant to. All these pieces of paper, pedigree charts, adoption certificates, birth certificates, marriage licenses, and annulment decrees were meant to set the record straight, but for whom? The annulment was the final act; it pruned my family tree at the root. One hundred years from now, if someone were to look for Mary King, the story they’d find would not include the long shadow of my ill grandmother, a ghostly uncle guardian angel, the trill of my singing daddy, the bone-whiteness of my mother’s face.

Was I allowed to keep that past, which I had preserved in my mind with cinematic precision? Was I still me without the stories I’d been telling myself all my life? What did
me
even mean if I removed all the context around that word? I had an overwhelming desire to crawl under the dining room table like I did when I was little; a desire to fade into the wind or disappear into the walls. To let the world erase me like it seemed to want to.

But there was still a loose thread tying me to the world: the long-lost sisters. Years ago, Peggy had told me that, along with securing promises from my sisters’ parents that they would teach the girls about God and send them to college, she had made sure that the adoption agreements contained a clause that the girls would be permitted to search for us once they turned eighteen. Their parents had agreed not to hinder their search if the girls wanted to reunite with us. And if my long-lost sisters didn’t look for us, Peggy was permitted to contact them after their eighteenth birthdays, too. Either way it happened, these girls could be back in my life someday. Suppose they wanted to find me? Suppose they had questions that no one else could answer?

The first adopted sister, Lisa, was three years younger than me. She was born in March. If my math was right, I should be twenty-one and about a month shy of graduating from college by the time she started her search. I’d probably be graduated by the time she actually located me. The thought of being pursued thrilled me. I wanted to be wanted, to be admired, to feel connected. Reunion with my sisters would undo all the erasing and chopping of my life.

When my sisters came looking, therefore, I wanted to be there. To be a person worth finding, worth keeping. A person who was un-leave-able
.

I tried to imagine what my sisters’ lives must be like. I envisioned brick houses with lush lawns and swing sets. I wondered if they played music and had freckles. If they were scrawny and dark like me, or stocky and honey-haired like Rebecca. They would grow up to be doctors and lawyers and English teachers.

So I’d have to be at least as good as that. I couldn’t simply exist and hope that they would like me. I had to improve myself. I had to make it through the next few years in Oklahoma, and then become who I wanted to be.

As high school approached, it became clear that Granddad planned to send me to St. Margaret’s, the same private Catholic school that Peggy had failed out of three times. I didn’t want to go. Not because it was the site of my mother’s great academic failure so much as it was a big nothing. As far as I could tell, nobody who went there did anything interesting with their lives. And the prospect of adding four years of private school to my debt to Mimi and Granddad was daunting. I would exhaust every outlet possible before I reached that point.

There was a public performing arts high school on the north side of Oklahoma City, and I decided I wanted to go there. I had been born with a voice people liked to hear. It was something that I inherited from Michael, which complicated my appreciation of it, but when parishioners at church started hiring me to sing their wedding and funeral Masses, I knew I could use it for something. I was unable, then, to decide how I felt about any particular thing without researching how other people felt about it first. Even saying that I “felt” a certain way about something seemed flimsy. I preferred to say that I “thought” a thing. Thoughts were much more concrete. Based on the singing gigs I’d been getting, I thought that attending the performing arts high school would let me use my strengths to get into college, to get scholarships, to get out of Oklahoma. I thought that would be my ticket back to the East Coast, back to Yankee country where my sisters could find me more easily.

When I mentioned the school at dinner one night, Granddad stared into the kitchen table like it was an oracle. “I don’t know,” he said. My heart flipped in my chest like a goldfish out of water.

“I don’t see any harm in her trying,” Mimi countered. “If she’s not accepted, she’ll go to the Catholic school, of course. It doesn’t cost anything to try, Charles.”

MIMI TOOK
me to the audition. I stood in the curve of a baby grand piano and sang “Amazing Grace.” My voice bounced around the white-tiled room like it had in the bathroom of Marigold Court all those years ago. The school called a week later to tell me that I had been accepted. Granddad still thought it was impractical, but if Mimi thought the place was good, then he’d allow it.

I was a vocal performance major, which meant mandatory auditions for choirs, ensemble performance groups, and the annual musical. After the first week I was assigned to show choir, women’s show choir, advanced chorus, and a supporting role in
Oliver!
It was the first play I had ever done, the first time I was asked to memorize lines without music. I discovered at my first rehearsal that I loved it. When I entered a scene, I had words on my tongue; I was never stuck with nothing to say, never stymied by the possibility that my own words could betray something spurious about me.

I made most of my friends at school by watching their facial expressions, listening to their speech patterns, noting their gestures, and mirroring them back. It wasn’t a foolproof strategy; most people didn’t like me when we first met. I was too distant and analytical, pocketing their characteristics for later use. After a couple interactions, though, my new friends would laugh and say, “When I first met you, I thought you were so weird!” but they could never place exactly why they had thought so, or what had made them change their minds.

I wasn’t interested in boys, though with the help of the Judy Blume repertoire, I was deft at faking it. My locker partners and lunch mates loved to discuss the hands of the trumpet players in the jazz band or the broad shoulders of the one boy in the dance department, but the thought of a boy, of anyone, touching my body made me break out in a cold sweat.

When Rebecca graduated from middle school she applied to the music program at my school, too. The prevailing wisdom in the house on Forty-fourth Street was that my sister was the more naturally gifted of the two of us—both intellectually and musically—but I was more disciplined. It never occurred to me that Rebecca wouldn’t be accepted to the program. A week after her audition, the phone call came. Her class was already full, there were no slots in the music program for more incoming freshman.

She said she didn’t care, but I could see there was a new separation between us. Rebecca enrolled in the private school and went on to dominate the music department there. She taught herself to play the guitar and composed heart-bleeding songs about girls who were no good. The creative community in Oklahoma City was small but vibrant. So, though we attended different schools, Rebecca and I frequently crossed paths at coffee shops and open mic nights where the artsy kids from my school and her school intermixed.

On those nights, no one believed we were sisters. Rebecca wore mud-caked bell-bottom jeans slung low on her hips and cut deep
x
’s between her knuckles with a black ink pen, while I wore sweater sets buttoned all the way up to my neck. My hands jittered from the caffeine in my chai lattes, while my sister smoked cigarettes in the parking lot and enthusiastically sipped soda cans filled with Everclear. All my sister’s friends called her “Becca.” I was always confused when they talked about Becca’s music and Becca’s guitar and Becca’s grades; the day my sister stamped her foot in New Jersey and insisted that her
name
was
Rebecca
was so powerfully etched in my memory that I’d forget she’d changed it. When I did remember and said, “Oh, you mean
Re
becca!” her friends would roll their eyes and my sister would say, “You see what I’m dealing with?”

It was the mid-nineties, the rebirth of female singer-songwriters and the creation of Lilith Fair. My Julie Andrews–style soprano lacked the personality that an open mic rewarded, but my sister’s husky alto voice was right on trend. She crooned in ripped jeans while older hippie types hung around the bathrooms telling girls they sounded like Janis Joplin. I couldn’t tell Rebecca that her duct-taped guitar, the patchouli oil she wore, the smell of weed and day-old whiskey sweating through people’s pores sent me back to the rooms full of sad men saying,
Gimme me a kiss, gimme a kiss
. She wouldn’t know what I was talking about or, worse, she might think it sounded romantic in its realness and be inspired that the life of a troubadour burnout was in her blood. So on those open mic occasions I stayed out of the spotlight, clapping politely at others’ performances, until I could hitch a ride home with someone with a car who was ready to leave.

Rebecca and I could have bought a car to share if I was willing to combine my earnings from a part-time job at the Gap with her wages from the Sears juniors department, but I was saving everything for my future life. It was one of the many ways I disappointed her. I also refused to break down any barriers that Granddad erected to dating or curfews. She insisted that as the oldest it was my job to press the boundaries so our parents would be more lenient with her, but the thought of willingly provoking a disagreement with Mimi and Granddad was out of the question. I was resigned to the notion that I owed Mimi and Granddad not only for my life, but also for the life of my sister. With all her sneaking out of the house and the cigarettes she smoked behind the garage, Rebecca wasn’t doing anything to pay down our balance herself. I threw away the empty vodka bottles I found under her nightstand so Mimi and Granddad wouldn’t find them and have a heart attack.

By the middle of my high school career the prospect of solitude horrified me. When I was alone, a deep sucking sense of darkness overcame me. If I gave in to it, I feared I would never find a way out. It wasn’t the physical sensation of being alone so much as the way my thoughts ran when no one else was around. That was the reason I never experimented with drugs and booze like Rebecca. I couldn’t be out of control—I wasn’t sure what would come out if I let my guard down. I wasn’t sure how to behave without other people around me to mirror. It seemed that all my biggest errors were made when I was left to my own devices.