Bastards: A Memoir (21 page)

I stepped back into the courtyard to breathe in some less rank oxygen. The Mad Dog guys from the coffee shop were running laps around the parking lot, barefoot. Dust and dirt caked past their ankles. Hypodermic needles glinted below the dead bushes underneath the front windows of Zack and Eddie’s apartment.

Finally, we left.

Becca’s apartment at least had a couch and a TV. But the place was covered in layers of dirty clothes that soaked the patchouli scent off her body and spread it around her apartment. My sister only did laundry once a month. She stretched that time by purchasing economy-sized packs of cotton underwear from Wal-Mart. Her cupboards held nothing but paper plates, empty mason jars, and an unopened bag of brown rice flour. In the pantry were more jars and a half-full bag of potting soil. The fridge held two beers and the dregs of a bottle of Mountain Dew.

In the freezer I found a cardboard box. It had been opened in a frenzy; the side of the box was scooped round in the shape of fingers. I pulled it out to inspect it more closely. I expected neat envelopes of frozen burritos or breakfast pastries, but I saw syringes. Twenty-four plastic syringes full of some clear liquid that had gone syrupy from the cold. The tags affixed to each one read P
SILOCYBE
C
UBENSIS
S
PORES
. Instead of food, my sister had syringes of . . . fungus?

She was sad, I thought, or angry and scared; it was hard to tell. Every time I saw her those days she was smoking a cigarette or a joint or drunk or on acid or coke or mushrooms or speed. I should have understood: she was trying to erase herself, to disappear. That was a desire I knew. But because my own strategies for self-erasure were socially acceptable things—books, music, church—I failed to see that our motivations were identical. I smacked the wall between the kitchen and her bedroom. “Hey!” I said, “Why do you have spores in your freezer?”

Becca came into the kitchen, saw the box on the countertop.

“It’s for a biology class I’m taking.”

“Twenty-four syringes of the same fungus?”

“We’re looking at them under microscopes and stuff,” she said.

I stalked through her tiny apartment; she followed me. I scanned the floors and flat surfaces for any sort of student paraphernalia.

“Where are your books?” I accused.

A college biology textbook would weigh eight pounds. It would be bigger than a Bible. There would be notebooks, flash cards, an array of highlighters and click-top pens.

“They’re . . . in the trunk of my car.”

“You must be studying a lot,” I scoffed.

“I study enough.” She blew hair off her sticky forehead.

It was late. I was tired from the drive and frazzled by the con cert; I didn’t want to fight with her. “I smell like other people’s sweat,” I said. “I’m taking a shower.”

By the time I was clean, Becca was asleep, or pretending to be. I nudged her leg with my foot. I hoped she would wake up and we could talk like we had in Peggy’s guest room the night after we met Lisa. Like we used to do when we were kids. But I got nothing.

In the morning my sister said, “Mind if I don’t go with you today?”

Her face was ashen and her voice flat. Whatever had lifted her mood and body temperature last night had worn off. “I’m not really feeling like a long drive, you know?” I told her I didn’t mind.

“If we weren’t sisters, you think we’d even be friends?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Does it matter? We
are
sisters.”

Becca shrugged and promised she would visit Mimi soon.

On my way back, I turned over the events of the night. Becca wasn’t too afraid to see Mimi; she was too fucked up. On methamphetamine, I assumed. I had to assume, because meth was too lowbrow to be included in my drug training as an RA; the affluent kids at my college were more likely to snort Adderall or smoke weed than get hooked on a drug that hillbillies cooked in their trailers. I assumed because by not outright asking I could still pretend I didn’t know.

Mimi and Granddad deserved a good daughter. They’d given up their retirement to buy Becca and me school shoes and plane tickets. When I studied abroad for a semester in London, Granddad put a thousand dollars into my bank account just because, just so I would have it. They deserved someone to be good to them. No one asked me to stay; the only thing forcing me was my own guilty conscience. Accepting help obligated a person. I couldn’t be half a world away when Mimi was dying, I knew. I made myself say it out loud, like a doctor in a waiting room.
Mary, your mother is dying.
Those were the roles we were cast in. Whatever we called one another, Mimi had taken me in, cared for me, and that meant that I owed her.

The first thing I did when I got in the house was find my letter for that job in Japan. Standing in the kitchen, I took one last look at it, then balled it up and threw it in the garbage.

Two days later Peggy called. She had called before I left for Lawton, too. We’d do this dance every month or two where she called every few days until she caught me. I wasn’t avoiding her, but I did always hesitate to call back. Most of what I had to talk about would be Mimi’s condition, and Becca’s annoying absence. It was impossible to mention those names to Peggy without opening wounds. Peggy might bristle that Mimi and Granddad had spoiled Rebecca. That they thought my sister’s acting out was a result of Peggy’s rebellious genes expressing themselves,
But look at who raised us both
, Peggy would say. I could hear the defensive shrug in her voice.

I was gearing up for just such a conversation when Peggy said, “I just got off the phone with Rebecca.”

I rested my forehead on my hands.

“Did she say I was rude to her friends?” I bristled, ready to defend myself. “Did she tell you what her friends were
like
?”

“Not Becca,” Peggy said. “
Re
-bekah. Rebekah Two. Little Rebekah.”

The adrenaline that pumped through my veins was redirected. The repeat, the echo, the record skipping. Rebekah.

Peggy planned to meet her this weekend in New Jersey. Jacob was home on leave from the Army and Lisa would be there, too.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

Two days later, Granddad drove me to the airport. Before I opened the passenger side door, he stopped me with a request.

He looked me squarely in the eyes, which froze me to my seat. “Would you tell her for me that I didn’t know?” he asked. I was self-conscious under his direct gaze, certain I would somehow fumble. “Tell her that I would have taken all of you—Mimi and I would have taken all of you—if we had known,” he finished.

I promised I would tell her.

Rebekah Two

W
e gotta figure out what we’re gonna call the new one,” Jacob said. “Rebekah Two?”

“Big Rebecca and Little Rebekah?” Lisa offered.

“Nobody wants to be called Big anything,” Peggy said.

It was the Friday night of Memorial Day weekend. Late. Jacob, Lisa, Peggy, and I were working our way through a bottle of Irish whiskey. Jacob was stateside for two weeks of leave from the Army; he’d return to Germany in a few days. Peggy had only consumed two ounces of actual liquor, but her voice was already thick and slow. My mother always had been a lightweight.

“How about Becca and
Re
-bekah?” I said. “You know, like that joke about Pete and Re-Peat?”

“Pete and Re-Peat sat on a fence . . .” Peggy said.

It was a joke Granddad told over the breakfast table. Jacob and Lisa had no idea what we were talking about. For a moment, Peggy and I were frozen in separate but similar pasts, replaying his voice our heads.
Pete and Re-Peat sat on a fence. Pete fell off and who was left?
Had Granddad kept repeating the lines until the child Peggy hollered, “I get it! I GET IT! You can STOP now!” like I had? Did she think the Becca and
Re
-bekah thing was funny like I did, or did it remind her of our strange dual relation, mother-sister, sister-daughter? Another echo, another record skipping.

“We only got one of ’em here this time,” Jacob said. “We can figure it out later.”

Becca hadn’t made the trip. She said she had to work.

Peggy yawned at the head of the table. “Let’s toast before I go to bed,” she said. “I’ll teach you my favorite one.”

We raised our glasses and she intoned:

May those that love us, love us

And those that don’t, may God turn their hearts.

If He cannot turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles,

So we will know them by their limping.

We clinked glasses and sipped. The fiery burn of the alcohol seemed the perfect companion to the searing bitterness of the words. It fit us perfectly. Jacob poured a portion of whiskey in a shot glass that he set in front of an empty chair. “For Becca,” he intoned, “absent but not forgotten!”

We drank to that. We found drinking could help in the lead-up to a reunion. It kept the doubts at bay, lent the thing a party atmosphere. In my case, the booze calmed the waves of shakiness that could sometimes overtake me. This was my third reunion. I was developing strategies to make it through the thing. I worried that this form of self-medication wasn’t exactly healthy, but I needed it.

After Peggy went to bed, my siblings and I moved to the living room to sit in softer chairs. Lisa curled, catlike, into a corner of the love seat and I sat beside her. Jacob groaned as he stretched into the full length of the sofa. I hadn’t been in this room since the day I met Lisa. Every visible inch of wall space in the place was now covered in photographs of my siblings and me. We surveyed the framed faces staring back at us.

“It’s like her way of never letting us go again,” Lisa whispered.

Mixed among the faces we knew, there was a photo of Meghan and Lesley, the youngest two sisters, whom none of us had met yet. Their mother sent this picture to Peggy in a Christmas card. Meghan, the older sister, was dark like me. Lesley was blue-eyed and light-haired like Becca and Lisa. If I squinted, it could have been a photograph of me and Becca at the same ages. It was surreal to look at that photo and see myself in it, knowing that these girls had no idea that we existed, that we were waiting for them.

Lisa followed my gaze.

“You ever think you’d be a big sister?” I asked.

“Hell, no,” Lisa said. “I didn’t know about the younger ones until I met you.”

It was after two in the morning when Jacob passed out on the sofa. Lisa and I retired to the guestroom.

Jacob and Lisa had both grown up in Jersey and shared a generational and geographical vocabulary. They drank coffees from Wawa and went down the shore in summertime. They knew the names of the Phillies and Eagles starting lineups, how to drive on snowy roads. Because he was close by, Jacob had been able to attend Lisa’s school plays and high school graduation. A month into her freshman year of college, Lisa got in a fight with her boyfriend in the middle of the night, and Jacob was the person she called to come help. He’d been between training rotations stateside, before the Army shipped him out to Germany. He drove over an hour to pick her up and they sat in the booth of a twenty-four-hour diner until she calmed down.

Unlike Lisa and Jacob, Lisa and I weren’t integrated into one another’s lives outside the world of our reunions. My friends didn’t know about her; hers didn’t know about me. But we talked. We had monthly marathon phone calls, sent emails, and on nights like tonight, when we were drunk on whiskey and proximity, Lisa and I crawled into the same bed and whispered to one another until the sun came up.

It was clear that my sister had been a popular girl in high school; she was skilled at making a person feel privileged to be her confidante. Lisa was cliquish and conspiratorial in an intoxicating way when she whispered about her dreams for the future and hearts that she had—regrettably—broken in her long career as a pretty girl. She craved the family stories that none of the adults wanted to tell, and I was happy to share them. The ones about Joan and Mac, schizophrenia and loaded guns, and the real reason Jacob left Oklahoma. She was a beautiful audience, absorbing each saga with wide eyes, saying,
What happened next?
and
Ohmygod
, at the perfect moments, as if I’d written the lines for her myself.

Delight rose off her like smoke from a campfire when she spoke about her plans to leave college and move to Orlando to pursue a singing career. Her energy ebbed only when she mentioned her father, how he wanted her to finish school first. For the briefest moment, my bubbly sister grew quiet. She hadn’t yet told him of her intentions. “He won’t be happy about it,” she said. Though her mother, it seemed, was enthusiastic about anything Lisa wanted to do. I wondered why Orlando and not New York. Lisa said something about the home base of the pop music industry and the weather in Florida, but all I could think was that it was far away from all of her family, biological and adopted.

We were out of bed as soon as it was reasonable to make a cup of coffee. We tiptoed through the living room, where Jacob still slumbered, stopping to cover any bit of skin that stuck out from his blanket in a layer of Post-it notes. He looked like a lizard covered in yellow scales. Then Lisa and I hurried into the kitchen before we laughed and roused him. I had just started brewing the coffee when we heard paper crinkle and hit the wood floor with a
pfft.

“You think you’re real fuckin’ cute, huh?” Jacob called groggily through the doorway.

I didn’t want to wake Peggy yet. Post-reunion with Lisa, Peggy had asked me if I thought my newly rediscovered sister was angry with her. “I wouldn’t blame her if she was,” Peggy hurried to say. Lisa didn’t say anything about it, I told Peggy. She hadn’t, then, but months after the reunion, during a phone call, Lisa said, “Angry isn’t the word. It’s more skeptical. Peggy talks like she didn’t have anything to do with giving us up, like she was a victim.”

Lisa never knew what Peggy was like before all this. My sister didn’t see that the act of giving up her children had altered the mother I had. We could never get that woman back. She had been buried under the weight of the things she’d lost. I never found the words to articulate this to my sister. Maybe that was okay. Lisa’s relationship with Peggy was separate from my own; the woman she knew was a completely different person.