Prison Baby: A Memoir (3 page)

It’s one of the random days I remember I was born in prison.

They’re all crazy. Everything’s wrong
.

All the wrong out there, I store deep inside a cave, and stay mute for days at a time, day after day after day. No one can get to my deepest feelings.

My mother doesn’t miss a beat in her mission to groom me into refinement. Piano and French lessons, Hebrew in Sunday school, swim-team workouts where I train in the butterfly and breast stroke, and a two-week modeling class. It’s like forced servitude inside a world of arts and civility, tea and classical music, hours on hours of traipsing around the Seattle Art Museum, when my instinct wants to run free and play and prank. Prancy by nature. At the same time I find peace in art and music. Our family ritual of tea at night is way too civil.

But my ballet on the weekend . . . Every Saturday afternoon from the time I’m in third grade, my mother walks me to the last house on our dead-end street where I sashay across the oak floor in the basement of our neighbor’s homemade dance studio and do grand plié at the ballet bar.

I love the freedom and silence of dance. The classical music, the meditation, and the athleticism all ease a struggle I later learn relates to sensory-integration issues often triggered in drug-exposed children. The shiny, varnished oak floor, the bright reflection of the sun on the mirrored walls, everything makes life better for the hour I’m cocooned in the studio filled with sweat and fluorescent lights. Most of all, I love my pink tutu and love grinding the leather of my ballet slippers into the dusty box of resin.

Dance is my relief from feeling abnormal, an escape from the angst. No one’s told me what race I am, yet I see I’m weird because nobody else in my world is brown with white parents. I already know I’m adopted, but what else? And why am I a different color than my parents? I need answers.

MY PARENTS TAKE my brother and me to the theater, ballet, modern-dance performances, poetry readings, museums, and everything kooky and experimental in the arts. The magic of dance and mime touch my soul more than anything, then or now. It started when I was around eight. I’d dream of theater and movement, mime and dance, from the moment I sat in a darkened theater with my parents and Marcel Marceau tiptoed on stage in his white ballet shoes and mimed inside an invisible box.

But I’m sure I don’t belong in the world of dance or theater. Apart from my love of dance, I’m a tomboy, and besides, the ballerinas on stage and the dolls in stores only have blonde hair. Not light caramel-brown skin or wavy black hair like mine, so thick it volumizes into troll-doll hair whenever the humidity spikes. It’s the 1960s, long before Alvin Ailey and Judith Jamison have shown the world ballet isn’t just for white people.

Besides, how can I flit around in the dance studio like a fairy or dream of grand jetés across the big stage with red velvet curtains if my dance teacher—if anyone—ever finds out my secret? The more I suppress it, the more profoundly I believe I’m a bad girl. I think being prison-born means I need to walk tough in the world.

I ALSO CRAVE adventure.

Spring leaps into the first day of summer, liberating me from sixth grade. It’s before I find the letter.

Away from the confines of my house and family, I’m emancipated and brave, not the timid, compliant, and sometimes mute little girl my family thinks I am. Whenever I’m out on some adventure in the neighborhood, my mother’s words that boil my blood—“you’re one of us”—disappear. It’s magic. She’s gone. My family’s gone. My school and the kids with their jeers of “ching-chong” and taunts of pulled eyes, all gone.

One day I head to a neighbor’s house across the street where they’ve just finished building a ten-foot-high retaining wall. Cement still damp, it calls to me.

I tread across the dewy lawn and plant both feet firmly on the concrete where the grass meets the top of the wall. The back of my tennis shoes hang into the grass.

Heights jumble my guts, but I’d do anything—even fly to the moon and back if I could—to dance on the hairline between fear and excitement. I leap. I fly. I drink in every blast of adrenaline as if my very life depends on it.

Inch forward, I tell myself. Then I lift a foot, ready to jut my toes over the wall’s edge. My rubber soles slip, still slick from the moist grass, and the fear of falling fires panic in me. My stomach pulls tight. The world around me vaporizes and my head fills with the fervor for risk and fun: danger-fun. My whole universe right up to the edge of this second disappears. The rush of adrenaline drowns out everything else—my past, my pain, even the lockdown. Rather than quiver in terror, I’m at peace in the face of fear and excitement.

I slide on the wall up to the arches of my feet. Adrenaline rips through me and crackles my world open, my senses on fire. I inhale the whole neighborhood—chlorine from my best friend Wendy’s pool next door, dog poop in someone’s backyard, fumes from the Ferrari revving at the end of the block. The crack of a baseball across the yard means Jonathan won’t check on his little sister. It all mingles in my lungs and floods me as I teeter on top of the wall.

No one’s around as I teeter on the wall. Just how I like it. I’m not here to impress anyone. I’d rather daredevil alone.

Petrified to even peek over the wall ledge, I pace back and forth on top across its six-foot length. Then I lean to gaze past the brink onto the hard-packed dirt below. The soles of my tennis shoes, now dry and squeaky, catch on the concrete. I stumble. Back away. My heart pumps and swells into a bowling ball in my chest. Terror and excitement clash inside me.

Better sit, I tell myself, and plop on top of the wall and dangle my feet. I press my palms into the concrete nubs, bend at my waist to peer down, and dig my nail-bitten fingertips into the edge, not much to grip onto. So I push the heels of my shoes into a crevice in the wall to stabilize. Then I lean over farther to gauge where the concrete meets earth.

Almost sick to my stomach from the jumble of fear and anticipation, I pop up to my feet. My mother’s voice rings in my head: Be more careful, dear.

“Careful” is not part of me unless I’m around my family, my teachers, or my mother, and only then does caution seep into me like an oozy infection.

A few kids, mostly boys, gather below me. They dig in the dirt with sticks and fling pebbles against the wall. Behind them a swing-set sits empty. Lobe-leafed ivy grips a fence. A songbird perches on top and flaps its wings in a dance to the da-da-da-dat da-da-da-dat of a jackhammer from a few houses away. Maybe there’s another wall under construction for me to climb. Pretty soon some boys from next door run over to join the kids at the bottom of the wall and they all toss their heads back to look up.

I squat down a bit as if to high dive off the end of a diving board, then swing my arms forward and fly, feet first. I whoop with glee and the kids hoot and howl. One of the boys jumps up and down and shouts: Do it again!

Yes, do it again
, I tell myself in the split second after I hit the dirt. I’m high from the flight and relieved to land, yet at the same time hate how my feet must ever touch ground again. Why can’t I soar into eternity? Maybe I was born in the wrong body—meant to fly, not walk.

My courage balloons with the claps and cheers, the kids egging me on.

“Anyone wanna try with me?” I ask my audience. No takers.

“You go again!” a boy shouts. He pumps his fist in the air.

I race up the grassy slope to the corner where the wall meets the house. This time, with no pause, as soon as I reach the top and without one look down, arms out in a perfect second position—a T—head high, in my longest stride, I step straight into space. Three quick steps of walking on air! Then I plummet down.

I LAND ON MY FEET AS ALWAYS. When each succeeding jump grows duller, the one thrill left catches my eye on my last flight through air: a flurry of snapdragons and purple and yellow pansies in the garden. They beam their happy-smile faces at me. Beauty blurs with speed but nothing equals my first thrill, alive on the edge.

I’ll do anything to soar in the air and feed this adrenaline rush, where something drives me to take risks, to jump from heights, from a tree, a wall, the small cliff down the street from our house, from on top of the swing set in our backyard, a rooftop, the moon. I need the high, the fire in me between fear and fun. It also helps calm the bounce in my brain.

It happens anywhere, most often at school or at home. Ideas ripple behind my eyes as if a tsetse fly had burrowed there and infested my senses. Sometimes thoughts tumble through my brain and I can’t connect them in order. Then, it’s free-for-all fun inside my head where my wires spark wild and crossed. It can happen when people talk, when I write, or when I read. It can happen when I speak. My imagination chases a phrase somewhere and I might not come back in time to catch the next sentence. The flow, the meaning, sails away. Then I’m in sensory overload and sentences swim. My thinking turns into a cut-and-paste collage and once I put the pieces together, a slow-motion static buzzes in a hive inside where I need to decode and unscramble key words, phrases, sentences. Everything mashes together while I patch the full meaning into something that makes sense. How can just twenty-six letters in the alphabet whirl up such pandemonium?

None of this is good for a daughter with a scholar for a father who lectures us kids, not yet double-digit ages, in sentences a paragraph long and addresses us as if we’re graduate students in his advanced seminar on
Paradise Lost
, the epic poem to which he devotes his entire career as a literary critic. As an undergrad at Yale, my father’s advisor suggested he not write about Milton for his thesis because, as my father tells the story, “How could a Jew understand Milton?” Yale and Harvard once had a quota of ten percent Jews. As it turns out, my father ended up an expert on Milton and was asked later to teach in their summer schools.

I DON’T ALWAYS let on when I need help but my teachers reexplain homework assignments until I understand. It just takes their patience, with a hand on my shoulder and one extra try. Or two tries. Or five. Sometimes I just pretend I understand.

Whenever a teacher stands next to my desk and drapes her arm across my back, I lean an inch closer to her side and breathe easier as my lungs fill with a puff of billowy clouds. My insides shift and the taut rubber-band ball in me bounces out, at least for the moment.

I love a teacher’s arm around me while she tells me what to do. I’m starved for physical affection since I won’t let my mother close to me. I long more for my birth mother’s arm on my back. Forever.

I want my teachers to take care of me, and I make a silent vow to them:
I’ll always behave how you want and promise to follow rules. I’ll be good
.

Even more than attention from my teachers, though, I love hanging around Eloise, my mother’s best friend, and the mother of my best friend, Wendy. Weekends I dash down our driveway and across the street to their house. They’re my favorite family and I want to spend all my time there. Not because of their swimming pool and horses, but to escape from my house. Wendy’s father, affectionate and soft-spoken, is a Superior Court judge and later a state legislator, and he never minds if any of us kids run or yell in their house. Eloise never makes demands on me to speak or do anything. I don’t want her as my mother, but sometimes I wish she were because I just want to be near her warmth.

I often grow enamored of other women, other mothers, even my teachers, and I wish to belong to them, to any motherly woman whose tender encouragement frees me inside.

Things feel simpler with Eloise. She doesn’t try to engage me in conversation, and I follow her around her house, from the kitchen to the living room, and she never seems to mind. She includes me in her baking and snack preparations, and hosts elaborate Easter egg hunts for the neighborhood kids. Though we’re the only Jewish family in the neighborhood, Mother sends us over to their yard to dive into the bushes and look for colored eggs with the other kids.

ELOISE THREW BIRTHDAY parties for Wendy and her older sister, Gini, and their brother, Frankie, with cupcakes and wrapping paper strewn on the floor and friends over, too. They were nothing like the more formal birthday dinners with my family, where we celebrated with just the four of us. My heart always ached on my birthday. I’d sit on the fireplace hearth and hold back tears, watch my mother set the dinner table for my birthday dinner, and yearn for a fun birthday. But I couldn’t stop my sadness. At the same time, I felt sorry for Mother because she wanted me cheery on my birthday.

I GROW UP at my father’s side watching Friday night fights on television. His Brockton hometown is famous for boxers, Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler. I plop my sixty-pound skinny self in a chair next to him, his six-foot-four frame sprawled on the couch. My mother hates the violence of boxing, and Jonathan prefers his model cars or painting watercolors in the solitude of our bathroom, his makeshift art studio.

Even though my father’s ready rage—often for no apparent reason related to me—and the thunder of his voice makes me cower, I look forward to the boxing matches on TV with him, look forward to a time to sit together without having to talk. I love the smack of the boxers’ shoes in their dance against the canvas. The bell, the referee’s modulated announcements, the ringside shouts from the crowd, the boxers’ deep huffs for air, sweat raining down their faces, the Vaseline dabbed on open wounds between rounds, and the pound of glove smacks. Every sound pierces through the TV screen and it all makes me want to box, to jump in the ring and fight, to burst out in an explosion.

After the ref’s opening instruction—“Now touch gloves, then go to your corners, and come out fighting”—my father’s running commentary on the rounds is the one time the boom of his voice doesn’t alarm me.

“Good right!” my father shouts and pitches forward, his elbow propped on his knees.

“Keep ’em up!” he coaches a weary boxer to raise his gloves and protect his face. “That’s it! Wear him out. Just keep ’em up!”