Not long into the school year, Tess discovered she’d gotten pregnant during one of her trips back to Boston to see her boyfriend, an older black man. Tess dropped out of school to figure out her options, but on her last day before leaving she left a letter in Dad’s office mailbox, explaining her situation. In that letter, Dad explained, he saw an opportunity that he thought might work for everyone.
“We had Sean and Riana, and we wanted another child,” he told me. “But we believed in Zero Population Growth, and so we didn’t want to bring another child into the world and all.”
From the very beginning, Dad described a situation free of tension, even for the teenage girl, a student he had mentored, who had gotten pregnant and was not prepared to become a mother.
“So I called Tess, and told her that if she was interested, we would be willing to adopt her baby,” as Dad’s story goes. “It wasn’t a problem that the father was black. In fact,” he said, “if anything, the idea of adopting a child of another race had great appeal for us. We had thought about adopting a Native American child, but I think there was a real problem with placing Native Americans at that time.”
Dad has always boasted about having an innate connection to Native Americans based on his own reverence for and spiritual connection to the natural world, his passion for preserving wildlife, and his devout anti-commercial-development stance.
I was told that my birth father was black, but that was all I knew about him. Mom and Dad never spoke his name or told me where he was from, where he was now, or what his feelings were about me or about Tess. Nothing beyond the fact that he was black, and that Tess had decided he would not be part of whatever her plans might be regarding my upbringing. Mom and Dad didn’t have pictures of either biological parent, but the absence of information about my birth father, and the fact that my parents had not had any sort of relationship or interaction with him when they were negotiating my adoption, made him seem less important in the overall retelling of my story.
We didn’t watch much TV as kids. For a long time we didn’t even have a TV. But when we finally got one, an old black-and-white Zenith, I remember seeing Easy Reader for the first time on the classic children’s PBS show Electric Company, and immediately imagining that he could be my birth father. I’d watch eagerly as a young Morgan Freeman sang about words and reading, with his perfectly rounded afro, black turtlenecks, and cool ’70s sunglasses, feeling an inexplicable connection, as if he saw me as sure as I saw him. His dark skin mixed with my white birth mother’s skin would account for the lighter brown shade of my own skin, which I’d heard the adults around me describe as “beautiful” or “mocha-colored,” as if it were a shade I’d picked out myself as part of my personal style, an accessory like the scarves and jewelry and puffy-sleeved blouses that I’d become known for mixing and matching in various forms.
And then, when The Electric Company was over, so, too, was the imagining.
* * *
“I tried to talk her out of it,” Mom’s version of my adoption story always begins. “We went for a long walk behind the house, Tess and I, and I really played devil’s advocate with her. I told her she could do it, she could keep you.”
Raised in the New Hampshire coastal town of Portsmouth, where her father worked as a naval pilot, Mom can appear fragile, but she is adamant about some things. “The most defiant person I know,” Dad likes to say about her, although I’ve never seen her this way. Someone who aggressively yearns for everything and everyone to be OK, Mom went to art school despite the objections of her parents, but majored in commercial art to placate them. She switched to drawing after her first year, when she met Dad, who cast such a spell that she called off an engagement to a man her parents had approved of, but whom she’d suspected was gay. Mom married Dad in the same local church where she’d spent hundreds of Sundays quietly bored out of her mind, in a proper white veil and gown, as a final gesture of appeasement to her parents.
After they were married, free to sate their own desires and cultivate their own ideals, Mom and Dad decided that the family they would make together would be free of rules and religion, rich with art and laughter no matter how little money they had, each person an individual of his or her own making. Like “pre-Garibaldi Italy,” as Dad described it. “A loose federation of independent city states.”
No angry, violent rages or lamps thrown across the room, as there had been in Dad’s own childhood in southeastern Connecticut. No terrifying car trips in the pitch-dark night with a blind-drunk parent behind the wheel. No church on Sunday or any other day of the week, no family dinners or duties or obligations. Nobody counting the empty liquor bottles in the trash cans outside or telling anyone they’d burn in hell for using the Lord’s name in vain. No Ecclesiastes or Blood of Christ. No sin. No guilt.
At first, Tess accepted Dad’s offer, the choice her brother, Roy, had encouraged, I was told, and when Mom felt she’d made her best effort to talk Tess out of keeping me, she was committed. But soon after I was born, Tess changed her mind.
“Mom was crushed,” Dad said. “But we knew it was a possibility, and we tried to understand.”
Three weeks later, Tess changed her mind again, and I became part of the Carroll family—a verbal agreement that did not become legal for three years, when Mom finally insisted on it, anxious that Tess would change her mind yet again and come back for me.
* * *
Tess later got her GED, a term that meant nothing to me as a child, but that Dad said allowed her to go to college, get an education, and move on with her life. Beyond that, I only knew that one day, when the time was right, it would be arranged for us to meet. I was desperate for the time to be right. The idea of her loomed large as the central character in a fairy tale written just for me, and I lived somewhere in between faith in her existence and disquiet over the lack of any proof beyond the story my parents told me.
Three
I skipped around the living room as the evening started to set outside, wearing a bright peacock blue long-sleeve shirt with white underpants, little bare legs Tootsie Roll brown and chubby. Mom wore a snug yellow-ocher turtleneck, a brown knee-length skirt, and tights as she busied herself setting up chairs she’d brought in from the kitchen and a folding table with a fresh, floral-print tablecloth for food and beverages. She put out chips and onion dip, and parsley meatballs with toothpicks, punch and cocktail makings, stacks of paper plates and a tower of clear plastic cups.
The three of us kids were allowed to stay up for the grown-up party if we wanted, even though no other kids were coming. Sean and Riana decided to go to bed and were already fast asleep as guests began to arrive, but I couldn’t wait—never wanting to miss an opportunity to twirl and shine, use my big words and listen to adults use even bigger ones.
I grinned, tippy-toeing on bare feet from grown-up to grown-up, lifting myself closer to their gaze, stopping to slip my hand inside the hand of tall, quiet Olive, who had been in Mom and Dad’s life forever. Elegant with short, set hair and romantic eyes, Olive brimmed with benevolence as she clasped her long, cool fingers around my little palm. She looked down at me and smiled.
“You look so pretty, Becky,” Olive said, her voice silvery and melodic. “What a big girl you are to stay up so late.” Her partner, Tina, boisterous and brassy, stood a few feet behind, where we could hear her laughing loudly with other guests.
“Are you working on any new plays?” Olive asked. “That one you performed the last time I visited was wonderful!”
“Yes!” I said, before bounding off through the knot of kneecaps and noise.
Hannah, Leah’s mom and Mom’s good friend, came with her husband, Ezra, wearing a stylish leather jacket and the same kind of pants she wore when she did tai chi in our front yard, high-waisted and bell-bottomed, in a faded red corduroy. Her jet-black bangs hung just above her eyebrows, and long silver earrings dangled from her earlobes. Ezra rarely visited, and mostly kept to himself, so it was a surprise to see him. I hugged th
em both, and Hannah knelt down to tenderly cup my face in her hands.
“How are you doing?” she asked, with a look of both marvel and concern.
“I’m great!” I said, my cheeks bursting.
* * *
The room filled up fast, and soon I couldn’t see where Mom was among the crowd of adults exchanging small talk, dipping their chips, and filling their glasses with punch. Dad had disappeared early on, after I’d seen him greet a woman I recognized from the weekly drawing group he and Mom were part of that gathered every Friday afternoon at a different house.
* * *
“There’s my little wifey,” I heard a familiar voice say from behind me. John was a close family friend who visited often, and regularly celebrated holidays with us. He had beady eyes, and his hands were weirdly oversized, with bulging veins that stuck out and wiggled under his skin. John told us that one of the bigger veins was a worm he’d swallowed as a child. Often, when he came to visit for a couple of days, he’d stay up late and tell us scary stories into the night—sometimes with all three of us, other times with just me and Riana. He was a masterful storyteller and made up the most memorable characters, like the wolfman with sharp teeth and bloody human fingers, or the sleek red fox who loved the moon and cried into his evening bowl of porridge.
John was fond of Sean and Riana, but he was especially fond of me, and took to calling me his “wifey” because, he said, I was his special girl, and we could pretend to be husband and wife.
He crouched down now and put his hands around my five-year-old waist, his pointy nose so close I could see the wiry hairs inside his nostrils. “How’s my wifey tonight?”
John’s hands slid down around my hips.
“Hi, John,” I said, feeling better to be talking to someone I knew, even though his breath smelled terrible. “Do you know where my mom is?”
John stood up, moving his thick hands to hold onto my shoulders. He looked around and then knelt back down, at eye level with me again, teeth huge under his tight, wide lips. I started to feel squeamish thinking about how easily his hands could cover so much of my body, as if they could slide the skin off my bones if he wanted them to. He had touched me before in the daylight, or after dinner during story time, his hand grazing my thigh or a finger tickling my neck. Tonight, though, it felt like he was holding on to me too tightly, and I didn’t understand why or whether that was something a grown-up man should be doing to a little girl.
“I don’t see her,” he said. “Maybe she’s in the kitchen?” I sidled out from under his hands, feeling a little faint and panicky. Wading through grown-up bodies from the waist down, I saw a pair of legs wearing the same colored tights I remembered Mom was wearing, and threw my arms around them, only to look up and see it wasn’t Mom at all.
* * *
I didn’t know who the woman was whose legs I mistook for Mom’s, but she picked me up right away, seeing the worried and frightened look on my face, and carried me into the kitchen, where Mom was refilling the chip bowl. “Hi, Laurette, I think this little one is looking for you.” She handed me to Mom, who took me in her arms, setting my legs to wrap around her waist.
“I’m right here, Becky. Don’t worry,” she said, hugging me tight. “Remember I love you so much.” Mom kept me on her hip as she brought the chip bowl back out to the party. I was safe on her hip, in her arms, safe inside the bubble that was our house on Pumpkin Hill. I had no idea how spectacularly that bubble would eventually burst.
Four
We had neighbors for the first time after we moved to our new house when I was six, and Nicole, a girl my age with freckled cheeks and caramel-colored hair, lived right next door. We sat together at the giant table in the dining room of her house one afternoon, surrounded by fancy lamps of varying sizes and styles, some attached to the wall, others resting on smooth side tables, crystal goblets behind glass in a stand-alone cupboard, and upholstered chairs set against the walls without purpose.
Nan, Nicole’s mom, served us chicken noodle soup in delicate, unchipped bowls along with perfectly shaped spoons, silver and shiny. Apple juice hit just above the halfway mark in thick, squat ornamental glasses, and I felt hesitant to take a sip, worried I might spill on the neatly embroidered placemats under our soup bowls.
Nicole, all cheeks and pink lips, both free-spirited and polite, ate her soup with abandon, but used her napkin carefully, dabbing at her mouth after a spoonful of noodles. “You should come!” she said, before lifting her glass of juice and gulping it down so fast I thought maybe she hadn’t had anything to drink in months.
“Come where?” I asked.
“To ballet!” Nicole said, as if it were talking about something magical.
“I’ll tell your mother about it,” said Nan, who appeared out of nowhere in tennis whites, her crisp blonde hair short, and shaped close around her tanned face. “Now, Nic,” Nan said, directing her attention at Nicole, “Daddy has an auction and I’m going to go play tennis with Ann. But first we need to pick up your little brother from soccer, so let’s finish up your lunch and we’ll drive Becky home, OK?”
“OK, Mom. But remember to tell Becky’s mom about ballet, OK?” Nicole said, seeming very pleased with herself.
“I will,” Nan said, suddenly rushing around behind us, gathering up sweatshirts and a change of sneakers, putting sandwiches with cut crust in plastic bags and packing everything inside two separate canvas totes. “I think Mrs. Rowland would be great for Becky to learn from,” Nan’s voice sounded different when she said this, tense and hurried, and I wondered if it was because she was out of breath from all her sudden movement.
“Is Mrs. Rowland your ballet teacher?” I asked Nicole.
“Yep, and she’s really nice,” Nicole answered, pushing back from the table, leaving her empty bowl and juice glass on her placemat. “You can leave your bowl and stuff there, our cleaning lady will do it.”
“Come on, girls,” Nan said, starting to grow impatient, even though we’d only just finished eating.
We piled into Nan’s Volvo and drove the short distance to my house. I hopped out of the car, and Nan rolled down her window to talk to Mom, who greeted us in the driveway.
“I was telling Becky about Nicole’s ballet class,” Nan said.
“No, Mommy, I was telling Becky about my ballet class,” Nicole chimed in from the back seat.
“OK, Nic, let me talk to Becky’s mom now.” Nan’s lips were naturally pursed, but seemed more so now, as if sharing this information was an inelegant chore. “Mrs. Rowland teaches out of her studio in New London. You know where New London is, right?” Nan said this as if we’d just moved to Warner from outer space, instead of the three miles from our house on Pumpkin Hill.
Yes,” Mom said, clearly still trying to negotiate the reality of having neighbors. She looked almost as if she’d been ambushed.
“My Nicole really likes the teacher,” Nan said. “OK! We’ve got to be off, let me know if you’d like more information about the classes, Laurette. I think you’ll want to send her.” Nan gave Mom a tight smile before backing out of the driveway while Nicole waved at me through the window.
“Would you like to go to a ballet class, Beck?” Mom said, looking down at me, her arm around my shoulder as I leaned into her hip.
“Yes!” I said, breaking from her to spin and cartwheel across the driveway, while Mom watched and smiled, her laser-focused love like a spotlight on my impromptu performance.
* * *
Later that afternoon, I overheard Mom on the phone. “Oh, I see,” Mom said. “Thanks, Nan, I can see why you think this ballet class would be so good for Becky. Mm-hmm, right. And thank you for offering to give her a ride.”
I started to imagine being a ballerina, not fully understanding how ballet was different from other kinds of dancing, but eager to participate in another form of creative expression. I had already written plays and stories and created elaborate worlds, both material and imagined, and now I was going to be a ba
llerina!
* * *
Mom didn’t get her driver’s license until she was thirty-six, four years later, and Dad was busy working, so I got a ride to my first ballet class with Nan and Nicole.
On the fifteen-mile car ride to New London, where the dance school was, I sat with Nicole in the back seat of Nan’s Volvo, squirming with excitement as it purred along the highway. A stiff, clean canvas tote like I’d seen Nan pack after lunch the week before, but this one with red handles and the L.L.Bean label, sat between us, with Nicole’s pink ballet slippers, a small Holly Hobbie thermos, and Hunt’s Snack Pack chocolate pudding inside. I didn’t have a snack, but even more than the pudding, I envied Nicole’s Holly Hobbie thermos. Holly Hobbie with her little blonde braids, peachy skin, and patchwork dress, single thread of a smile and big brown eyes. Nan occasionally looked back at us in the rearview mirror, her eyebrows almost as white as her teeth.
The studio was spacious, with a linoleum floor, ceiling lights, wall-to-wall mirrors, and bars running the length of one side of the room. It felt somehow glamorous, stagelike, and important. Girls gathered in a room off the main studio to change out of their shoes and into their slippers, while I just stood in the doorway of the studio taking it all in, eager and fluttery, immediately dreaming about performing in front of giant audiences, taking numerous bows and returning for encores, flowers pouring onto the stage from fans.
* * *
She appeared suddenly, like a stencil cutout in the left corner of my eye. A one-dimensional, dark silhouette bending and arching without a face. An abstract image, gradually taking the shape of a head, attached to a long, giraffe-like neck and body. This inky-colored figure from afar didn’t look like anything or anyone in the books I read, the dolls I played with, the people in my school, or the people in my family. And yet there was something familiar about her. It felt momentarily like being in a fog, but soon I could make out the tight curls of her afro, like tiny black jewels embedded in an even blacker crown.
Surviving the White Gaze Page 2