Magical Thinking (4 page)

The Vanderbilt estate was called The Breakers. It was the most popular tourist attraction because it was the most astonishingly lavish, a structure that made the White House seem more like a double-wide. The moment I stepped inside the grand foyer, I knew I belonged there. The feeling was similar to what it must be like to be a twin, separated at birth, and then reunited years later on television. I seemed to recognize the lavishly carved ceiling, the gilt mirror, the absence of white shag carpeting, like we had “at home.”

The tour guide was very strict: we had to stay in a neat pack, like crayons. We were not to finger the tapestries, sit on the chairs, or lick the paintings. We were to follow, listen, and be awed by our own smallness.

My first instinct was to inform the appalling tourists and my so-called parents that they must all leave immediately. I wanted to point back to the entrance and announce: “I’m sorry, people. But there has been a mistake. You must now leave my home and return to your busses. The rottweilers are being brought up from the wine cellar.”

An overpowering sixth sense engaged, and I knew what each room would look like without even needing to explore.

How, I wondered, had I been kidnapped by a southern couple with Del Monte green bean breath? How could it have happened that I would end up being raised by common academic trash? My father, a professor, and my mother, a graduate student earning her M.F.A.—these people had no business with me.

Of course, my “parents” were suitably impressed with the majesty of the house, but I felt possessive and sullen. They walked
enthusiastically through the rooms, commenting on the splendor, while I lagged behind them, just at the edge of another family.

When the tour guide pointed to a gold faucet fixture in one of the gargantuan master bathrooms and remarked, “These faucets feature hot and cold running seawater,” I glared at my parents.
See what I used to enjoy?
I tried to recall if I’d ever sat in that tub. A dim memory floated to the surface, but a memory without any images, only a taste on the tip of my tongue: sea salt.

Our own faucets had hot and cold running
tap
water, the same plain water that everyone in town had, even the Latts, with their Down’s syndrome girl, who lived in a shack near the dump. Our own bathtub featured a permanent dark ring of grime compliments of my older brother, who was seventeen and learning to repair car engines. A common grease monkey, someone who would hit me on the shoulder with the serrated edge of the aluminum foil box and then laugh as pinpricks of blood bloomed through the starched white dress shirt that I always wore. My brother was a farm animal, a grunting primitive.
Not
a Vanderbilt. Certainly not suitable for this vacation to Newport. He had thankfully stayed home with his pet car.

I saw my self, my other self—the one who lived in a parallel universe and had not been stolen—hiding behind the heavy velvet drapes in the formal living room, while my mother searched for me, silk and gold-thread slippers on her feet, martini glass poised in her hand, pinkie extended. “Amadeus?” she was calling out through the vast home, peering behind tufted sofas, under fourposter beds. “Come out, come out wherever you are.” In the vision, I am smiling behind a large Ming vase, thinking about dashing outside and scratching the ears of my pet camel.

I also knew with certainty that I was an only child. I had learned about only children at school, and everything those only children felt, I felt. The feeling hit me, too, in the Vanderbilt mansion. Why else would it be unoccupied, a museum? My real parents had been hopelessly distraught when I was taken, neither
of them able to bear such extravagance in the face of such unthinkable loss. “Amadeus,” my mother would have wept. “Every tassel reminds me of him. All these marble columns he used to dance around.” My father would have wiped a tear from his own eye, the memory of me being placed in his arms by my Scandinavian wet nurse while he sat in the library too much for him to contain. Of course they would have sold the estate, at a loss. Unloaded it to the state. “Do whatever vulgar thing you want to with it; I don’t care. Sell tickets, print postcards—it just doesn’t matter,” my mother would have told the governor.

The tour guide pointed to a painting of Cornelius Vanderbilt hanging above a fireplace that was larger than our car. I studied him closely, and it was like looking into a mirror.

How did they do it, I wondered? My parents, how did they snatch me? Was I playing outside alone, perhaps chasing one of our peacocks, while my mother was taking a bath in the marble tub? Had she told me never to leave the house, but at the young age of three or four I simply didn’t understand? Or had they done it sooner, when I was a baby? I had no way of knowing, as I could remember nothing of my life until the age of five.

My first memory is of the pyramid of the moon in Mexico City. I was there with my mother, who had taken me on a
trip
. Thinking back, it makes such polished sense. Steal the Vanderbilt child, leave the country, hide out in a motel in Mexico, and eat Vienna sausages stashed in a blue, hard plastic American Tourister. The Dippity-Do also clicked into place. She needed that green hair gel to glue temporary curls into her flat hair. Curls like I had
genetically
.

All criminals leave behind evidence, and my evidence is my pedigree. That, they couldn’t remove. My instinctive appreciation for all things shiny. My fondness for gold. The fact that I am not intimidated by fine works of art but instead want to place my tongue on them and taste them. And, of course, my belief that everything I see is mine or was designed with me in mind.

“No,” I spat at my father when he insisted it was time to leave The Breakers. “I’m staying,” I said, arms folded across my chest.

He lowered his voice. “We are leaving now son, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

I scanned the room for a butler. “Don’t call me that: I’m not your son.” I wanted to call out for someone to take him away. Perhaps my aging aunt, who lived upstairs in the attic and watched the tourists on a secret surveillance camera, perhaps she would recognize me. I angled my face up to catch the light from the thousand-foot-high windows that adorned the wall of The Great Room, a room formally known as The Amadeus Play Room.

My father—clearly not for the first time in my life—grabbed my arm and pulled.
Oh no you don’t
, I thought.
Not again
. I yanked my arm away from his grip and concentrated hard on making my feet extremely heavy. I would not make this easy for him. I felt certain an alarm would sound at any moment. Somehow, this time, an alarm would sound, and people in authority would appear from unseen rooms and they would tackle my father, while I would be quickly whisked away for a de-brainwashing.

He grabbed my arm again and pulled. Stiffly, I slid across the marble floor, the rubber soles of my Kmart sneakers making a screeching noise, a sort of sneaker scream. My mother vicegripped my other arm, and together they yanked me from the house, as they had done so many years before.

“What’s gotten into you?” my father asked when we were back in the station wagon. “If you can’t behave, we’re going to turn around and go straight home.”

Why had no alarm gone off? How could they have done this to me a second time? I felt stunned that these people were not this very moment being shackled together in the back of a blue police car.

“Why did you do it?” I demanded of them, my new grown-up teeth clenched tight, ten years of displacement oozing out of me.

“Do what? What are you talking about? What did we do to you?” my mother asked, turning to look at me.

“You’re not my real parents,” I told them. “You took me when I was little. I’m a Vanderbilt. You stole me, and I want to go back.”

At first they laughed. They laughed until I screamed, “It’s not funny! It’s criminal. I hate you both. You’re monsters.” I kicked the rear of their bench seat with my feet. “I hate you I hate you I hate you.”

My mother lit a cigarette and sighed. “I can’t deal with this hysterics.” She turned to my father. “Why don’t you let me out, and I’ll take the bus home and you can deal with him?”

My father glared at her. “No, you’re not going to take a damn bus home.”

“Don’t you try and control me you son of a bitch.”

My father’s fists tightened on the steering wheel, and he looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Where did you get this from, hmmm? We didn’t raise you to behave like this, concocting these wild fantasies. What’s the matter with you? Are you mad because you didn’t get your apple pie at McDonald’s?”

I sat as close to the door as possible, not caring if it flew open and I fell out onto the highway. Better to be a paralyzed ward of the state than live with these people.

My mother tossed her cigarette out the window and immediately lit another. She reached into her bag and pulled out a stack of papers—a portion of a manuscript she was working on—and began reading silently to herself, her lips moving.

My father settled in and drove, wordlessly. For the remainder of the drive home, nobody said anything, not even the radio. The only sound was the occasional small intake of air from my mother as she read her own work.

By the time we got home, it was dark. My parents went into the kitchen, and they both sat at the table. My father had mixed himself a tall glass of vodka, and my mother sat making marks on her manuscript with her pen.

I went into the bathroom and ran a bath. Then I marched into the kitchen, glared at them, and pulled a container of Morton’s salt from the cabinet. They were too numb to say anything; they just watched me without the slightest hint of curiosity. I took the salt with me into the bathroom and poured all of it into the tub before climbing in.

As I sat in the hot, salty water, I thought,
No wonder Mr. Bubble always gives me a urinary tract infection and hives
. Mr. Bubble was for common people. Mr. Bubble was for my so-called brother, their true child. I was a Vanderbilt. I should bathe in condiments and seasonings. It was in my Vanderbilt genes.

At my school in western Massachusetts the students had their own cubicles. This was the late seventies, when everything was about personal space and emotional growth. We were allowed to decorate our cubicles any way we wanted. Most of the boys taped pictures of race cars or football stars to their walls. The girls favored snapshots of their cats, taken with their moms’ Kodak 110 Instamatic cameras.

My cubicle was a shrine to Christine. I had newspaper clippings, photographs, and an article from a magazine that had before-and-after anatomical line drawings.

“Who is this?” asked Mrs. Rayburn, fingering a clipping of an extremely tall woman in sunglasses climbing down the steps of an airplane, parked dramatically on the center of the tarmac.

“That’s Christine Jorgensen,” I told her, feeling very superior. “Isn’t she incredible?”

Mrs. Rayburn leaned in for a closer look. “I’m not sure I know who she is,” she said, smiling and intrigued. She must have wondered if this was some new folk singer or perhaps the author of a popular series of children’s books.

“She’s not
the
first, but she’s
one of the first
and definitely the most
famous
male-to-female transsexual,” I explained. “She was born George Jorgensen, and then in 1953 she flew to Denmark to have her surgery.” I could have talked about her all day.

Mrs. Rayburn appeared alarmed. “Do you identify with Ms. Jorgensen?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” I replied enthusiastically. “If I could be anything in the world, I would be her.”

Which pretty much ended
that
conversation.

It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be a girl. It was that I wanted to make a dramatic change in my life. My parents hated each other, and I hated them. I longed for them to die in an auto accident so that I could be whisked away by uniformed social workers and sent to live in a compound near a major city.

I was in the midst of an unhappy childhood, ripe for transformation. The idea that a person could make such a profound change in life gave me hope. In my world there were boys and there were girls and that was it. And here’s this girl who used to be a boy. My whole idea of what was possible in life expanded.

Besides, I already had more in common with the girls.

Boys only seemed to care about trading baseball cards or riding their dirt bikes. And my feeling about baseball cards was,
Give me the gum, and you can have the stupid cards. As for riding a dirt bike, dirt made me anxious, so I preferred my mother’s station wagon. And the girls were always much more fun. They read books and talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up. All the boys ever did was snort and then swallow it.

Eventually, I took down my articles about Christine Jorgensen and replaced them with pictures of Jesus on the cross, though I wasn’t religious. I had asked my parents “Is there a God?” And when I couldn’t get a definite answer from them, when they offered no actual proof, I decided that God was like Santa Claus for adults. But I did like the image of a naked man with his arms outstretched, as though thanking his audience after a performance.