Coming Clean: A Memoir (9 page)

The government job she’d had for years didn’t wait for her to recover; she lost her job while her body struggled to once again become functional. She had been the breadwinner of our family. She might not have been able to keep a clean house, but my mom could take care of us—and now she couldn’t even sit up without help.

Stranded in bed, she far preferred the company of the television to me. I didn’t understand her depression; I just knew that my mom, my one stabilizing force, wanted nothing to do with life.

A
FTER HER SURGERY
all my mother wanted to eat was fruit, so my father would cut up slices of watermelon and cantaloupe to leave by her bed for her to eat throughout the day while he went to work. He had started working again as a school bus driver. He made far less driving school buses than he had working for the MTA, but the hours meant he could come home during his lunch break and check on my mother, make sure she was still stocked on melon and rub cocoa butter into her scars, and still be home early enough to drive me to dance class after school.

Without my mother to cook for us, my father and I subsisted mainly on fast food and microwaved hot dogs.

My father seemed to function better when he worked—having a place to go during the day and a paycheck to show for it seemed to keep him engaged in the world a bit more. Engaged, but still messy. With my mother bedridden, there was no one to keep him in check, no constant nagging to keep his papers off the kitchen table, dining room table, and couches. The house filled with flyers, books, and newspapers. He expanded his horizons
to anything he could find in the clearance aisles of Kmart or Caldor, mostly gadgets missing parts, books with missing covers, and tools that had been separated from the rest of their set. My mother started joining in. After I would leave for school and my father for work, she was alone all day with nothing but television to keep her company. She spent her days ordering things from Home Shopping Network and QVC.

Each day, I would come home from school to piles of UPS boxes waiting outside our door. By now, the house had already started to look unkempt, the grass overgrown and the paint chipping. If he could see inside our drapes, the UPS man would have seen mountains of the boxes he delivered each day, many never opened, surrounded by walls of paper and garbage bags. I wondered what he thought of us, if he ever skipped knocking and just ditched the packages outside. But then again, I wondered what everyone thought of us.

I hated my mother for being in a wheelchair. When she was in bed, I could tell myself that she was relaxing, letting her body heal. But once a week, she would pull herself into a sitting position, and my father would help her into the big plastic brace she wore from her tailbone to her chest. While he did that, I was responsible for cleaning from off the stairs whatever debris had collected there so that she wouldn’t slip on anything on the way down.

She just wanted to be out of the house, she said; she didn’t care where we went. And so we usually ended up at grocery or department stores. Shopping always seemed like the only thing there ever was to do. My father pushed her down the aisles, and I
would get lost among the shelves, doing everything in my power not to be seen with her. People stare at people in wheelchairs, and I had made it a practice to be noticed as little as possible.

In my memory, the years that come after my mother’s surgeries are a haze, and I suppose that is what we were living in.

By the time sixth grade started, I had stopped speaking aloud almost entirely, and the school wrote home to inform my parents that another girl had been assigned the duty of speaking for me because I refused.

My mother signed me up for acting classes advertised in the local Pennysaver, desperate for any activity that might force me to interact with other children at an audible level. She was vacillating between the mom I had always known, nurturing and protective, and being completely apathetic. She was at her best in the morning before she had a chance to spend the day wallowing. In the mornings, she would sip coffee while I ate breakfast, and we would talk like we always had. But inevitably the conversation would turn to her deformities, exacerbated by the surgeries, the constant pain she was feeling and the worthless creature she said she had become. By the time I got home from school, she was gone for the day, lost in her own world.

M
Y PARENTS PROMISED
to wait in the parking lot in case I needed to make a quick getaway, but when my first three-hour basic acting class was finished, I took my spot in the backseat and said, “I like it.”

It took a couple of hours to get to that point, though. When I first walked into the musty old barn theater, I took a seat in the last row while all the other kids in class promptly filled out the first two rows. The teacher, with her long curly black hair and breasts that seemed to take up the entirety of her abdomen, stood on stage introducing us to the theater. Stages were once built on a slant, she told us, so
upstage
meant toward the back,
downstage
toward the front. I soaked in the vocabulary, repeating stage directions—
up, down, stage right, stage left
—over and over again in my head so I wouldn’t embarrass myself when the time came to stand in front of everyone.

My hiding spot was outed by the attendance sheet, and I was forced to join the rest of the class in the front of the theater, where I was subject to all the same vocal warm-ups, improv games, and scene readings that the other kids were. When the teacher walked around handing out scenes, she looked at each
of us, evaluating what she saw during our warm-up games, and handed me the part of Fern from
A Rosen by Any Other Name
. Sweet and moderately boring, the prepubescent love scene took place via a phone call, so I wouldn’t actually have to interact physically with my scene partner. I wouldn’t have, anyway—I barely interacted with the hand I used as my prop phone, instead focusing all of my energy on the three stapled pages of photocopied budding romance. I didn’t dare look up when my acting teacher yelled at me to speak louder.

The voice I conjured in my head sounded like she was screaming, but the actual voice that came out was only slightly louder than a whisper. Even so, I felt comfortable onstage with Fern’s words to keep me company. I didn’t have to think of anything to say, I didn’t have to worry about embarrassing myself, and I didn’t have to worry about anyone asking any questions about me. All anyone wanted to know about was Fern.

Speaking above a whisper still felt like an overwhelmingly revealing task in school, and the girl who sat next to me in class still had to answer my teacher’s questions for me, but onstage, I felt safe behind the guard of whoever I was playing. In acting class, I was encouraged to talk about my character in the first person, and I knew that the audience would judge my character’s personalities and feelings—not mine. So I savored every single raw emotion my acting teacher instructed me to feel. The characters I played were people that existed solely on paper, yet their words and feelings were so much more tangible to me than my own. I started to convince myself that I might just be able to create a character to use in real life as my own personal security blanket.

The opportunity to test out this strategy was provided by my seventh grade English teacher—a skinny man with a round head and neatly trimmed white beard. Mr. Griffith noticed me, quiet and invisible as I tried to be. He had a crisp, quiet voice, but he used it to command attention. Mr. Griffith seemed to truly respect the literary insights of his twelve-year-old students, but had no tolerance for the boys in my class who answered his questions about symbolism and Steinbeck in mocking effeminate tones. I liked him immediately, but he never let on that he felt the same about me. Instead, he called my mother shortly after the school year started to inform her that he had already spoken with the rest of my seventh grade teachers and, with my parents’ approval, wanted to change my curriculum to put me in class with the advanced students.

I had never considered myself particularly smart. My father was brilliant, but I didn’t want to be like him, as I was convinced it was his brilliance that made him strange. What I did want was a fresh start and a chance to be someone else. I would settle for smart, if it came with a clean slate.

The “smart kids” were a cloistered group unto themselves. I didn’t know them, and more important, they didn’t know me. What I saw was a group of well-rounded, micromanaged prodigies who were exceptional in all arenas of middle school life. I decided I would use this as a template to create a new Kim.

Just like the monologues and scenes I spent my weekends rehearsing for acting class, the character I was creating required practice and research. I created role models out of other kids in my class, watching what they did and mimicking vocabulary, mannerisms, and favored topics of discussion. I cut pictures of
models and actresses out of magazines and glued them to the inside of my notebooks, perfect people to channel when I was sure that my own personality was lacking. I gave myself period-long pep talks before lunch to muster the courage to ask to sit with new people and try out these well-practiced topics of conversation. I created a set of “normal kid” problems to fall back on when a conversation with my new social circle was complaint-based, pretending that my parents were sticklers for grades and appearance. I was too old for make-believe, so I simply tried on one lie after another until I created the person I wanted to be.

Anna was the first person in my new social circle with whom I became close. We sat next to one another in French; I was good at French, but she was better, understanding the nuances of the language in a matter of months. When the teacher realized her aptitude, she was allowed to take more and more language courses, first adding Spanish and then Italian to her course load. Tenses and vocabulary lessons gave us something to talk about, but it was obvious from early on that Anna was one of those people that just liked everyone, and in return, it would be hard to find someone in our grade, regardless of social hierarchy, who didn’t like her. It helped that she lived a few blocks from me and was an easy walk from my house.

Anna’s parents were both teachers, and her house reflected that love of learning. Mind-teasing games could be found on every surface, and the walls of her living room were lined with books. Her parents loved information just as much as my dad did, and there were books and newspapers and knickknacks in Anna’s house, too, but they never took over. On the days my dad
would drive over to pick me up, I wanted nothing more than to invite him into my new friend’s house and show him what our home could look like.

I also envied her family’s heritage—they were 100-percent Italian, unlike my family that was full of mixed-breeds. Everything about Anna’s family was identifiable as Italian, from the tiles on her kitchen floor to the food they cooked to the way Anna looked, with her heart-shaped face, big brown doelike eyes, thick brown hair, and womanly-even-in-seventh-grade figure. Anna had come into this world with an identity already waiting for her.

I was amazed by her ability to react to things, to laugh fully when things were funny, to cry when they were sad, and to turn a bright red when they were embarrassing. Anna seemed to feel everything deeply, while I was constantly trying not to feel anything at all.

I slept over Anna’s house often, and when her parents would go to sleep, we would inevitably find ourselves in the kitchen making pasta or pancakes; afterward, we would sit on the floor to eat them, always at my request. Sitting on the floor was no longer an option at my house.

“You know,” she said, head in the refrigerator, searching for syrup, “you never
don’t
look happy.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you can’t say anything without smiling. Even when you’re saying things that don’t go with a smile.”

I took her psychoanalysis as a compliment: I was pulling off happy.

Anna introduced me to her group of friends, who accepted me easily. They had adopted another new member to their gaggle recently, a girl named Rachel who had just transferred from another middle school.

Rachel looked like the kind of twelve-year-old you knew would grow up to be beautiful: slightly built, with brown hair down to her waist, perfectly straight bangs, and legs that reached the ceiling. She was new to our school and already the topic of curious whispers between classes—a popular girl in the making. Rachel looked familiar to me, and at lunch, we pieced together that we had been running into each other for awhile. We had both been in the NICU at the same hospital at the same time as babies. She was five months older than I was, but had meningitis as an infant. We had taken the same dance class years earlier and also worked on an article together in the newspaper club in the children’s section of the local library.

My father loved the library and was constantly paying fines for the books he took out and never returned because they had been lost somewhere in the house. When we first moved to the area after our house burned down, he had spent a good amount of time getting to know the library stacks and staff. He’d heard about the library club from the children’s librarian and immediately signed me up. He was so excited about the idea of me writing for a newspaper that I didn’t tell him I couldn’t think of anything I’d like to do less. He hadn’t been excited about anything for a long time.

My first ever article was about prejudice, and Rachel had been my partner. After school that day when we made the connection, I brought up the newspaper club to my dad, and he fished through one of his dresser drawers to pull out the small
yellowed newspaper with a cover article about prejudice and tolerance that I had written years earlier—Rachel and I shared the byline.

Through Anna and Rachel, I met more and more people and made more and more friends. I still wasn’t an extrovert by any means, but I was acting like I had a modicum of social grace.