What Was Mine (12 page)

Everyone lies, I reminded myself. Lies are necessary, by collective agreement. Saying what others want to hear is lying. People do it every day. They lie about having had a good time at a party, they lie about your age and theirs, lie that you haven't changed since they last saw you in high school. I heard a mother lie to her babysitter, saying she had an early-morning meeting, when she really went to the gym. Women at the playground lied to their husbands about how much it cost to upholster a sofa or renovate a kitchen. Husbands at the office lied on the phone to their wives in beach houses, saying they had to stay in the city for work, when they didn't. Lies were the very foundation of the industry I worked in, despite laws against them. The first thing I learned as a junior copywriter was how to lie legally, using phrases called weasels—misleading statements like “studies show” (what studies?) or “gives the appearance of younger skin” (because no product can legally claim to “make skin look younger”).

I especially hated lying to Mia, even as I tucked her into bed, nodding along with the Berenstain Bears, who informed us never, ever to lie because “trust is one thing you can't put back together again.” I stroked Mia's soft arm as I read her the story, feeling sorry that she was being raised by a liar.

As in the story, the longer I kept the lie alive, the bigger it got. I had to tell it to more and more people. Now the circle of people who thought Mia had been adopted in Kansas included not only Wendy, but mothers at school who sometimes asked about her adoption and I found myself expounding imaginatively on the intrusiveness of social services visits, the mountains of paperwork involved. I could never feel better by confessing my lie, as the Berenstain Bears were encouraged to do. Telling Mia the truth at this point would be cruel. If she learned the truth, she'd be scarred for life. Mia was happy. I couldn't stand the thought of her being wrested from the only home she knew.

I'd seen a baby returned to her birth mother. A surrogate mother had demanded her baby back when the child was two. I'll never forget the footage that played and replayed on TV: a distraught toddler screaming in the arms of a stranger who would now be her mother. I could never let that happen to Mia.

Sometimes you have to choose from wrong choices. Sometimes, the right choice is which choice feels the least wrong.

I knew that eventually I'd have to tell Mia the truth. She deserved to know her true origins.
Part of me thought that if I waited long enough, if I used just the right words, perhaps she'd be able to understand. I pictured our future selves sitting by a fire—she, a middle-aged woman, married perhaps, with her own children, certainly happy, and me, gray and gentled, the age of benevolence, speaking honestly, finally, with tenderness, saying all that I have had to keep from her.

What mother doesn't keep things from her daughter?

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.

—PAUL TOURNIER,
GUILT AND GRACE

M
ia was always precocious. It wasn't just that she was smart. She was wise. And surprisingly self-disciplined, even when she was little. I remember taking her to see the premiere of
Toy Story
. She was not even six. We went to the opening in Radio City Music Hall. I took the afternoon off and picked her up from school myself. I didn't trust Wendy to navigate midtown. Her English still wasn't good and her knowledge of the city was limited.

We arrived early, before the crowds; I stopped at the candy counter with Mia to buy her a treat. She chose Chuckles, those brightly colored fruit jellies I'd loved as a kid. She'd never had them before. The only package size they sold was jumbo, but I said yes. She was rarely allowed candy and I wanted the day to be special for her. I was working crazy hours—we'd just gotten the Revlon account—and I went weeks without seeing my daughter in daylight. I paid for the candy and we followed an usher to our seats, which were in a special section thanks to comps from a media buyer.

I took off her coat and we settled into velvet cushions and I opened the wrapping and held out the package to her, childishly hoping she wouldn't choose black, which was my favorite, the one Cheryl could never believe I liked. But Mia startled me by reaching out, not for the candy, but to stay my hand.

“Let's wait until the movie to eat them,” she said.

And so I smoothed back the cellophane, feeling abashed, marveling at the capacity for self-denial in the small being beside me, agitating with knowledge of my own lack of it, which accounted for Mia's presence not only in the chair beside me, but her very presence in my life.

I
always wished I was more connected to Mia. I was her only aunt. Doug, the boys, and I were her only family besides Lucy. In Doug's family, nobody talks to each other anymore. Lucy and Mia would come upstate for holidays, to our house. I inherited the old Victorian we grew up in. Our parents bought it for a song in the early fifties because it wasn't modern, which was the style everyone wanted back then. Lucy got everything in the safety-deposit box except for the deed. There were stock certificates and our mother's jewelry, which went to Lucy because she had a daughter. But neither of them ever wore the jewelry, as far as I could tell. That always made me a little bit sad. Maybe it wasn't their style. But I would have worn it.

Christmas mornings were always fraught with Lucy here, trying to minimize the pile of presents for Mia under the tree, trying to make them balance out with the ones we'd wrapped for the boys. Mia had another Christmas at her house, the boys once told me, and I silently thanked Lucy for not delivering the extent of her bounty in front of them. But she was always generous to the boys. We were grateful for that.

I remember one Christmas when a bonus had come through for Doug, I opened my present from him and it was a Kate Spade bag. I was thrilled. Those bags went for hundreds of dollars. “I have one in red,”
said Mia, and I couldn't believe it. What did a nine-year-old kid need a designer bag for?

“All my friends have them,” she said. And then I saw Lucy shut her down with a look.

We didn't see them for the rest of the year. We never went down to the city to visit. It's a five-hour drive, too far to go for a day, and their apartment wasn't big enough to host the four of us overnight. The only time we stayed there was when Lucy took Mia—and the nanny!—to Disney World. What fun we had living in their place for a long weekend, pretending to be New Yorkers, seeing the sights New Yorkers get to see every day. We fed their cat, who ate food so fancy it didn't come in a can. It came in a pouch you had to peel and reseal and keep in the fridge. I'm not big on cats, but Pumpkin was cute: soft and cuddly and orange. I knew that Lucy wasn't a cat person either. She'd got the cat after seeing a mouse in their apartment.

Mia was always more into school than my boys were, maybe because she started school so early. I didn't send my boys until kindergarten. They never liked reading, but Mia always did. One Christmas when she was about eight, she asked me if I wanted to be in her book club. “Who else is in it?” I asked. The answer was no one. Her mother was too busy. Her nanny couldn't read English. So I agreed, of course, to be in her book club. I was always looking for ways to connect with her. I picked the first book, choosing one of the Ramona series, which I'd loved at her age. She wrote me a letter saying she'd read it in a day and that she'd always wanted a little sister, but now this book put her off that desire. In the letter, she gave me her choice for our next book. I'd expected it might be another book in the series, but it wasn't. It was Edith Hamilton's
Mythology
! I thought maybe she had to read it for school, was killing two birds with one stone. But it turned out she really wanted to read it. I have to admit, I never got through it. The boys were teenagers and I'd
gone back to work as a nurse and I didn't have a lot of leisure for reading. That was the end of our book club, of course. Which I always felt bad about. I wished I could have been closer to her as she grew up. But Lucy always kept Mia pretty much to herself. I told Lucy that Mia was welcome to visit us during the summer. I would have taken time off from work when she came. But Lucy opted to send her to expensive sleep-away camps instead.

T
his is what I remember: the lovely scent of her baby head and the weight of it in my lap; her first glimpse of ocean, calling it “Bubbles”; that her favorite toy was my toothbrush; that the sun made her sneeze.

A man I once worked with lost his wife, and worried he was losing his memory of her. He'd forgotten the color of her eyes, he said. I'll never forget Mia's eyes, the startling blue of a glacier.

How could I have done it? What was in me, a decent person, that made me capable of such an indecent act?

Taking time—oh, now I have nothing but time—to look back on my actions, to try and make sense of them, to arrange them and order them, to account for what my life has become—my mind catches on an incident I haven't thought of in years.

The incident happened when I was six. It was my first day of school, a Catholic school. My mother had enrolled me, though its tuition wasn't inconsequential to a secretary struggling to raise two girls on her own. She'd made it abundantly clear to us that a good education was worth any expense, a belief I hope I have passed on to Mia.

She'd ordered a uniform from a company authorized to provide them and I remember the smell of the brown paper as she untied the string on the package, the woolly scent of the dark pleated skirt she removed with both hands, as if it were holy. I admired myself
in a mirror on the back of her bedroom door. The skirt fit perfectly and I thought it made me look smart. I gazed at it as she knelt beside me, unspooling a marked tape and taking my measure. As I took off the skirt, she cautioned me to be careful—she meant to return it.

“I'll make you one just like it,” she promised, and helped me out of the skirt so I wouldn't step on the hem. She folded it carefully and rewrapped it in brown paper, pressing the paper where it had already been creased, then gathered Cheryl up from her nap and, giving me the rewrapped package to hold as I sat in the front seat beside her, drove us downtown to see Mrs. Mulcahy, who owned a discount fabric emporium. Mrs. Mulcahy admired the skirt's cloth, clucking appreciatively as she pinched a pleat between thumb and forefinger, then flipped up the countertop, coming around to our side, and led us down a long musty aisle where she and my mother squinted at dark bolts of fabric until Mrs. Mulcahy called a boy to pull one of them out from the stack.

My mother did a fine job on the uniform. Several nights I drifted to sleep to the comforting hum of her sewing machine, acquired with Green Stamps that Cheryl and I pasted into pamphlets after every trip to the A&P. With what care we positioned each inside the green squares—we worried the stamps wouldn't be honored if they were even a little bit crooked.

It took her longer than it usually did to sew something—she whipped up most of our clothes in a matter of hours. The pleats were tripping her up, she said. She didn't have a pleater attachment, had to create them by pushing and prodding the material awkwardly under the needle. But when she was finished, it looked just like the original and I marveled at how clever she was to create what less clever mothers had to pay dearly for.

My pride in my mother's handiwork that day was short-lived, however. As soon as I got to school, a girl behind me in line proclaimed
my uniform to be counterfeit—she could tell by the zipper. I knew that every kid in the class would soon know it, too, and I hated my mother for her betrayal, for tricking me into not seeing a thing that was obviously perceptible to others, and for denying me what they had, what should have been mine.

My sister doesn't remember it this way. Our mother sewed her uniform, too, and her fine job as a seamstress inspired Cheryl to learn how to sew, a skill I made sure I never acquired.

So much of who you are has to do with your mother. From her, you acquire your first moral ideas, your first assessments of character. And because of this, I assure you—my mother is not to be blamed. She was honest to a fault, painfully earnest about appropriating only what was indisputably hers. She hailed from the Midwest and though raised in Chicago, maintained a farmer's sensibility all of her life: rise with the dawn, do work, take what's yours and no more, don't buy new when old will do. She was a good example to me, a good role model. The only thing she can be accused of inculcating in me was a wish to be like her—to be a good mother.

You forgive your parents if you live long enough. But I don't expect Mia will ever forgive me. I don't forgive myself.

F
or my fiftieth birthday a few years ago, Doug sent out index cards to a bunch of people asking them to record words of wisdom for me, since I'd reached the age where one is supposed to be wise. Mia's card was my favorite:
Don't leave home without your keys
. It was such a witty thing to say. But sad, too. She was fifteen and her nanny had gone back to China. Mia was too old, of course, for another nanny. But fifteen is still a kid, after all. Which meant for all that Lucy lavished on her, my niece didn't have some things my kids took for granted, like someone to greet them when they got home from school.

Of course, I had the kind of work where I could juggle my hours. I wasn't in a cutthroat office like she was. But Lucy always wanted a big life. From the time she was little, she talked about leaving home and going down to the city. I was the opposite. I liked it here. I liked living in a place where I knew people and people knew me, a place where it was safe to bring up a family.