Prison Baby: A Memoir (6 page)

She heaves a sigh like I’ve forced her to talk about my race again. All I want is a hug. Also, all I want is to shove her into the wall.

“But you’re just one of us, dear, and we love you,” she says. I race down the hall to my room, slam the door behind me, and fall face-first into my pillow and scream into it. Anything to release the venom from my gut before I explode.

I rip into my cotton pillowcase with my teeth and bite the cloth so hard my gums hurt. By the time I’m done, my pillowcase is a shredded pile of strips. I recall my mother coming after me into my room, but I was inconsolable.

I gave up on the idea of ever having a mother. I was on my own. She’s one of them, I thought. White, and she won’t understand.

ONE NIGHT AFTER DINNER WHILE I’M helping clear the table, my mother takes my wrist and leads me down the hall towards Jonathan’s room.

I’d spent the whole mealtime tapping my empty fork on the edge of my plate.

“I have something of yours to show you,” she says.

Now what.

Jonathan’s usual chaotic jumble of plastic model-car parts, scissors, scraps of wax paper, glue toothpicks, and decals clutters his room. A clip-on desk lamp flexes low for his close-up detail work with his model kits. It’s the opposite of my desk, covered with sheets of paper, pencils, and an assortment of my father’s paper cigar rings that he peels off for a special present before he lights up.

Mother unlocks a cedar trunk full of table linens and mothballs tucked way in the back of Jonathan’s closet. Her voice is muffled from behind the clothes: “Something to show you.”

Why’s something for me in Jonathan’s closet?

She pulls out a wool toy puppy, four inches long—coarse beige-and-pink yarn wind together. I stare into the toy puppy’s button eyes. What’s this?

“Here.” My mother holds out the toy. Her jaw muscles clench in and out, in and out. “This is yours,” she says. “Your birth mother made this. She sent it with you to your first foster home and it followed you here.” It’s the one time my mother ever mentions my foster care. She doesn’t know I’ve read about it in the letter.

I wrap my fingers around the yarn toy.
Her fingers touched this
.

I try to pull in the pulse of my birth mother through the yarn. She’d wrapped pink thread into a knot to make ears and cut a sliver of pink felt to sew on for a tongue. Its two-inch pink and beige vertical-stripe legs stand strong. The tiny button eyes stare back at me.

“Sent it from where?” I say to my mother’s back. She’s turned to look out the window.

She lets out a deep breath.

“Where did my mother send it from?”

She pivots to face me and says, “I
am
your mother.” Not in anger, but sadness, and it veils her eyes.

“I am your mother,” she repeats, her voice soft and unsteady this time.

“I mean my birth mother, sent it from where?” I fight back tears. I can’t tell her I’ve learned about the prison. Just can’t. I need her to say it, to tell me I was born in prison, and that the toy comes from there.

“Your birth mother loved you so much she gave you up,” my mother says, answering some other question I never asked.

I press the coarse yarn against my cheek and want it to melt into my skin. Then I catch my breath for a moment at the thought of losing my other mother. I’m frozen, until the taste of blood inside my bottom lip snaps me out of it. I’ve clamped my teeth to hold myself back.

“Gave me up . . . why?”

Silence stirs the room, after which my mother replies with her standard answer. “We love you like you’re ours.”

“Gave me up . . . from where?” I insist. “Where is she now?”

Silence divides us.

“We’ll love you forever, Deborah,” my mother says again but by then I’ve spun out of the room into the hall with the yarn toy.

I lean on the wall outside Jonathan’s room and cup the yarn over my nose to inhale its softness, to pull in the wool scent beyond the cedar-chest aroma.

Take me back, I think, and ache inside. Inhale again. I want to inhale my birth mother’s scent. Nothing. I try again. Nothing.

I want her in my memory. I miss her but don’t know whom I’m missing.

As I bury the tip of my thumb into a thin spot of bared, twisted metal wire under the pink and beige yarn, my mother plucks the toy puppy out of my hands.

“I’ll take it now,” she says. And she does. She heads back into Jonathan’s room with it and I march after her.

“It’s mine,” I cry out. “Can’t I keep my toy?”

Faster than I can grab it, my mother flips up the trunk lid to toss it back inside its coffin of mothballs and table linens, and locks the trunk. “This will stay here until you’re older. I just wanted you to see it,” she says. Her hands flutter around the clothes hanging in the closet. “In case it helps,” she adds.

Helps what? There’s so much unspoken between us, I don’t have a clue what needs help. She’d attempted another “in case it helps” earlier in the year and offered to buy me a horse. What’s she thinking? It’s not like I’ve plastered horse posters all over my room. I never mention horses. My friend Wendy, from our old neighborhood, rode horses, so maybe my mother holds some idea that a horse makes a girl happy.

“That’s mine!” I yell, then try to sound cavalier: “I don’t care anyway.” My toes grip the inside of my socks. I step closer then she leans back against the closet wall and remains silent. We stand face-to-face. “I don’t care about you, Mother. Or anyone else.” I pause and take a deep breath to prepare for what I’m about to say out loud for the first time. “You’re not my mother anyway.”

My mother’s soft brown eyes hold back tears. I push my face an inch closer to hers and turn my next words into three separate sentences. “I. Hate. You.” I storm away, leaving her alone. I feel guilty turning my back on her but hate her more, both at the same time. Rage and guilt replace my confusion, and when I provoke others and roil everything up, it’s the only time I feel better.

ONE NIGHT WHILE my parents hosted one of their monthly cocktail parties, I rummaged through the mound of coats and purses piled high on their bed. They expected my brother and me to mingle at their gatherings, but I felt devoured by the conversation of so many adults.

I turned on thief mode as soon as the guests arrived and snuck into my parents’ bedroom to swipe a handful of quarters, a pocket comb, another Zippo, and a ballpoint pen. The thieving thrills me more than my mother’s declaration about their guests: “They’re famous, you know.” She reminded me of this after one of my smart-mouth quips about their friends. I can’t help that I steal. The secrecy—and even more, the fact I’m never caught—excites me. The tug of guilt afterward gnaws at my insides, but it’s not enough to stop me.

Maybe what I stole belonged to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Roethke, Robert Penn Warren, Mark Strand, Richard Hugo, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, or John Berryman. I didn’t care. All friends of my parents and guests in our home at one time or another, the kind of crowd who voted for Dick Gregory for president, the 1960s literati and heavy hitters . . . and I couldn’t have cared less.

One night I stole a quarter from Elizabeth Bishop’s jacket pocket. No need to rifle through the rest of the coats piled on my parents’ bed—I now owned a coin from the queen of poetry.

During a reading tour she visited my parents, but a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet didn’t help me feel any more normal. Normal does not look like twenty or so writers with glasses of dry vermouth on the rocks sitting around the living room with your parents and reading their latest creations. The whole thing embarrassed me—the living room readings and the awkward silence right after while everyone sat pondering and staring off into space. Before anyone said even one word, someone in the crowd always coughed during the silence, and others would light up fresh cigarettes.

It was Elizabeth Bishop who led me into a father-daughter talk about homosexuality. It wasn’t her plaid shirt that gave it away, but something else I sensed the afternoon I asked my father about her. He sat me down at the kitchen table with his afternoon tea set up. I still had the stolen quarter clamped in my little hand. “Some women love women, and some men love other men,” he said.

It was easy for me to grasp the concept because, after all, every month or so two gay men scampered around our house with feather dusters and aprons strung around their waists to help Mother clean the house. Once in a while she invited them for dinner, and for a short time they joined as part of our family.

I learned a lot that year for just a quarter.

SOME MONTHS AFTER I’ve read the letter, at the start of seventh grade, I slurp down my half grapefruit for breakfast. I’m in my pajamas instead of all dressed in my usual cords and sweatshirt. A Seattle drizzle spatters the kitchen window.

On the dash back to my bedroom after breakfast, I grab my raincoat from the front door closet. I yank an oversized sweatshirt from under my mattress that I’d tucked under there after an eighth-grade boy gave it to me for his “let’s go steady” gift instead of a friendship ring. Nine-inch white-stenciled letters—BFD (“Big Fucking Deal”)—stretch across the sweatshirt’s maroon front.

There’s no way Mother would ever allow me to wear any sweatshirt to school. Just the opposite. She grooms me like I’m an upper-crusty debutante, even though we live mainly on my father’s slim English professor salary. We aren’t affluent, and my father teaches summer school at Yale or Harvard once in a while for extra money.

My buttoned raincoat hides the smuggled sweatshirt and I make it out of the house, onto the bus, and straight into my classroom with no one noticing. I’m the first to arrive and dart to the front sideline of the room. I lean against the teacher’s shoulder-high, open supply cabinet against the wall where she keeps blank paper, boxes of unsharpened pencils, and blue test notebooks.

The multicolored map of the world tacked above the cabinet behind me boosts my courage with its pictures like the photos in our issues of
National Geographic
at home. I belong in the map and the magazines with photographs of people from tropical countries and other continents more than I do in my white family. The map at school gives me a place where I imagine myself, even though I can’t say in what country or with what race I might belong. I see myself in the Thai children with my same wide smile and lips. I see my summer-darkened self in the complexion of boys from Samoa. My nose is like that of people from the Philippines. Babies wrapped on their mothers’ backs in China wear my eyebrows. I see my own feet in the photos of South American girls, their bare feet brown like mine. Sometimes I even recognize my skin tone in the pictures of light-skinned Africans. I saw myself everywhere in those magazines and maps, and it helped settle the crazy inside me.

THE BELL RINGS. My classmates file in and fill their desks. My heart pounds behind the BFD, and my teacher glares at me for a long second before she leans back against the front of her oak desk, cluttered with stacks of our homework, and presses her palms flat on the wooden edges.

Here goes
. I uncross my arms and open my jacket to flash my sweatshirt to the class. The noisy chatter snaps to a stop as if our school chorus conductor had just hit a down stroke. A few kids giggle and some dive their faces toward their desks and pretend to write.

Now what?
My timid self slips away.

“Deborah! Go to the office!” my teacher orders me. Her eyes flash.

We lock into a stare down, and a rush of adrenaline kicks into my gut. I shrug. “Go to the office for what? I’m just standing here,” I say. I turn my palms upward to the ceiling, fingers spread apart.

Now I’m in control. A sea of eyes shine on me, and we all wait for what’s next.

Whose move is it now? Better do something
.

I tug at the bottom of my sweatshirt. The creases stretch out and with a flick of my fingertips, I brush off each of the three letters. I sweep away imaginary lint, then trace each letter with my fingertip.

My teacher pulls me by my wrist down the hall into the school office.
I’m in for it now
.

“IT JUST MEANS BELLINGHAM FIRE DEPARTMENT,” I say to the principal. “You know, Bellingham.”

It’s a town north of Seattle.

Adrenaline pumps more fear, more power, more risk into my heart, but I can’t stop.

“Not ‘big fucking deal,’” I add. “Not what everyone thinks.”

Jumping beans somersault inside my stomach. I’m scared but don’t dare show it.

The fun’s over when the principal calls my mother to tell her to pick me up.

“What’s the matter?” the principal asks while we wait. He crosses his arms over his chest. “You have a good home, two parents, what’s the problem?”

Guilt sets in. He’s right, I have all this.

I want to shout at him, “Don’t mess with me!” but I can’t. Those jumping beans now pole vault around inside.

Back home, I’m in my room, grounded again. BFD.

More and more I catapult into a well all by myself, a world with my own rules, a world where I’m convinced no one loves me, no matter how much and how often I hear it.

Just because people tell us something doesn’t mean we believe it.

SOMETIME AFTER I’M expelled from school, I stash the pocket flashlight I’ve lifted out of someone’s purse under my pillow. I’ve needed this to read. Up until now, my parents think I’m asleep at night, but instead I sit on a pillow under my bedroom window with the shade cracked, lean against my wall, and prop my
Puffin Book of Verse
on my knees to read under a clear sky and bright moon. The Seattle night clouds limit my midnight reading, but with my new flashlight I can read in the comfort of my bed, buried under the covers. I also write poems and little short stories by the light of the moon and flashlight.

The first time my mother catches me, rather than scold me, she asks, “What’s your favorite?” She takes the book and reads from “The Cow,” the page where I’ve folded the corner.

“I love this one, Mother.” I love our closeness then, too.