by Liz Murray
By the time I started Junior High School 141, our phone was back on for a short while and Ma had called at least four times to describe how clean Brick’s apartment was. “Bedford Park is a much better neighborhood, Lizzy. Lisa thinks so, too.” She always placed her calls when she was at the stove. Living with Brick, Ma had taken to cooking. “I haven’t used coke in months. Do you realize that, Lizzy? I feel great. I told you, I only needed to get away from it to stop,” she said, deflating my argument before I could even get the words out of my mouth.
In the background, I heard Brick prodding her, “Jean. Jean, the pork chops. Jean!” The grease crackled loudly and she returned her attention to me. “I have to go now, Lizzy. We’re about to eat. I love you, pumpkin!” My heart dropped. “I love you too, Ma.” And then instantly, a click, and the hum of a dial tone.
Junior high was a whole new system to adjust to, one I hoped to manage the way I had managed grade school—squeaking by with my performance on the annual standardized tests. That fall, I began taking half-hour bus rides, packed with wild twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, for the whole first month that I actually attended.
Though, as with grade school, I eventually found myself absent more than I was present. The only difference here was that with the long distance to travel and the jarring experience of now having several teachers to deal with, I was actually absent all the time. My truancy got worse than ever. On the rare occasions that they did see me, some of my teachers didn’t even know my name, and I did not know theirs.
In those first few weeks of the semester, whenever I would return to school after a few days of absence, I’d find several handwritten notes stuffed into my student mailbox, summoning me to meet with the school guidance counselor to discuss my truancy. While the notes made me nervous, I just ignored them. I carried the thick office stationery as I walked to the bus stop and I shredded it into a thousand tiny pieces that I released behind me.
I was good at that, tuning out official notices from school and child welfare—just as I had grown accustomed to tuning out the barrage of “official” people who always seemed to be pushing themselves onto our family: social workers, Ma’s caseworker at welfare, disappointed teachers, and guidance counselors. They had never really felt like separate people. Instead, to me, they felt like one disapproving entity, one voice repeating the same threats to take me into “placement,” shaking their heads at my mistakes, telling my family how to run our lives. I responded to them uniformly, disposing of the mail they sent and barricading myself in my home.
Daddy made regular day trips downtown to see his friends, and I spent my days content to lie on the couch and watch television. Sometimes, I’d scour Ma’s dresser drawers in search of things to remind me of her. Other times, I was content just to sleep, wearing Ma’s robe like a big warm blanket.
One day, while Daddy had gone downtown for something, I spent the afternoon sifting through the contents of his and Ma’s closet. I discovered a huge stash of Ma and Daddy’s seventies things packed deep inside. Behind crates of dusty records and eight-tracks, there was a plastic bag stamped FARMERS’ MARKET, with a picture of an old guy wearing overalls and plowing a field of hay on the side. I dumped the contents out across Ma’s and Daddy’s bed: a set of matching turquoise pipes for smoking, a teardrop-shaped pendant of amber, a museum ticket stub, and a thick stack of old photographs, the corners of which had begun to curl with age. There were three dinky silver rings, the smallest of which had a peace sign carved into it, and which fit right on my finger. Scattered between the pictures were grains from their pipes, which gave off the acrid scents of tobacco and weed. Most of the people in their pictures were unrecognizable to me—twenty-somethings wearing headbands and tie-dyed shirts, posing in city parks or beside old Volkswagens. Proof that Ma had had a life before me, and an uneasy reminder that Ma could build a life after me.
I found one faded shot of Ma and Daddy together, taken in a newer version of our kitchen. Daddy had dark, wide sideburns that connected to a fuller head of hair. Ma wore an Afro and a paisley blouse; neither one of them looked up for the picture, but lowered their eyes and heads as though they’d received bad news.
“You look miserable,” I said to them. “You are miserable.”
But I thumbed through the rest of the stack only to discover a cluster of pictures that proved there had actually been much happier times—such as one photo of them standing together in a living room that I did not recognize. In the picture, they were both smiling brightly with their eyes shielded behind large, red-tinted sunglasses. Ma and Daddy had on matching his-and-hers leather coats and were holding hands, something I had never seen them do. Another picture showed Ma in a fit of laughter. She was sitting cross-legged on a thick, orange rug, wearing a white T-shirt and tiny pair of jean shorts. Her head was thrown back in a moment of joy. Curled around her shoulders and propped up by her petite hands was a long, muscular snake of some kind. In yet another photo, Ma was blowing out candles on a birthday cake. There were several people surrounding her that I did not recognize, their clapping hands frozen in streaks of motion. Daddy was standing beside Ma, his arm over her shoulder; he was leaning in to kiss her on the cheek.
That one gesture captured in that photograph was the single greatest act of affection I had ever witnessed between my parents. I felt like I was looking at strangers.
But my favorite picture, by far, was a black-and-white headshot of Ma that had been taken when she was high school age. With a brooding look on her beautiful face, she could have been a model, I thought. The photograph drew me in and I stared down at it for what felt like forever, at this single moment of Ma’s life before she went and accidentally made children, before mental illness, welfare, and even before HIV. I wondered if this was where she was always running back to: her old life, happier times that had nothing to do with children, a truant daughter interrupting her, driving her crazy, holding her back, making her sick. When I finally packed everything into the plastic bag again, I took that single headshot and slipped it into the back pocket of the jeans I wore under Ma’s robe.
Placing the bag back onto the shelf turned out to be trickier than pulling it down, so I grabbed a chair from the kitchen and stood on it to see high over the crates of records. As I did, my eyes caught sight of something I had missed before, an old, dust-covered wooden box situated on the very back of the high shelf in my parents’ closet. I returned the Farmers’ Market bag to its place and lifted the wooden box out from behind the crates of records; it was much heavier than I had expected, given its small size. I climbed down from the chair and sat on my parents’ bed, where I placed the box on my lap.
Inside, there was a scrapbook held together by rubber bands so old that they snapped when I pulled on them; a few pictures slipped to the floor. “SAN FRANCISCO” was scribbled across the tops of the remaining pages of the scrapbook, in my father’s bold handwriting. On each page, there was picture after picture of Daddy looking even younger than he did in the photographs with Ma, his head nearly full of hair. There were shots of him pointing to the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, relaxing on a beach, cooking hamburgers with friends at a barbecue, and laughing at parties.
In one photo, Daddy was standing in front of a place called City Lights Bookstore, in a row of four well-dressed men who were playfully serious for the camera, their chins bucked up, eyes squinting in the sun.
There were also two black-and-white pictures of Daddy, and on the back of them, unfamiliar handwriting stating three words, “AT CITY LIGHTS.” In one, Daddy is reading by himself, seemingly unaware that he is being photographed. In the other, he is part of a group of serious-looking people all seated audience-style before a bearded man, whose arms are raised in a gesture that implied storytelling.
Paper-clipped onto the back cover of the scrapbook was an old, faded letter, the return address of which I recognized as my grandmother’s, on Long Island. I unfolded a brief, handwritten note in which she informed Daddy of her surprise
the day she had received his tuition check, returned by his school in the mail, uncashed. In the short note, she explained that Daddy’s former roommate had given her his forwarding address in California, and she asked when he intended to continue his studies and how long he would be “vacationing” out west. She signed it With love, your mother, just as she had signed every birthday card she had ever mailed to him at our apartment.
Clipped to Grandma’s letter were two more letters; these were unopened and not addressed to Daddy, but rather were from Daddy, to a Mr. Walter O’Brien, in San Francisco. They each were stamped RETURN TO SENDER. In my entire life I had not seen Daddy write a letter to anyone, and I wondered what they could possibly say, but I knew I was already snooping and that I couldn’t get away with opening them. So I thumbed through the postcards. One featured a photograph taken at the bottom of a very curvy hill, and it read LOMBARD STREET; it was sent to Daddy at a New York City address from a woman whose name I no longer remember, telling my father that she missed him and his “bad taste” in poetry. She also wanted him to know that their friend Walter missed him too, and that she hoped he would return to San Francisco. Daddy liked poetry? I couldn’t imagine it. With his true crime and trivia books, all he ever seemed interested in were facts, and usually dark ones, or those absent of deep meaning. Poetry didn’t fit.
I gathered up pictures that had fallen out of the scrapbook. There was one photo of a baby girl wearing a pink dress. At first, I thought it was a photograph of me, only I’d never seen it before and the picture was badly faded. Then I flipped it over to find that the writing on the back read, Meredith.
My chest tightened. I stared at the photo for a long while, comparing Meredith’s face to the foggy memory I had of her that day in the park when Daddy had directed Lisa and me to walk toward our big sister. I stared at Meredith’s face as a baby and compared it to Daddy’s. Taking in her complete vulnerability as an infant, I wondered where she was now, and how Daddy could have left her behind, and why we never talked about her. It filled me with a deeply unsettling feeling to wonder what else he was capable of doing.
In the last few photos, I found one that read “Peter and Walter, July 4.” I flipped it over and saw a picture of Daddy smiling. In it, his eyes were so bright, it was as if they were smiling too. The other man in the photo, Walter, was handsome, slim, and even younger-looking than Daddy. He was fair-skinned, with red hair and freckles. He was also smiling, and he had his arm around Daddy’s shoulder. In the background, I saw people carrying American flags in a park that did not appear to be in New York City, but rather someplace I had never seen before. It looked as though everyone was having a picnic.
Finally, I reached the last photo—a Polaroid at the very bottom of the stack, underneath the pictures. At first, the image confused me. I stared at it for some time because my mind simply could not make sense of what I saw. Slowly, though, the reality of it seeped in. First, I understood that I was looking at a picture of two men kissing. I then processed that the red-haired man in the picture was Walter. My father’s friend Walter. The Walter mentioned in the postcard. The Walter of the returned letters. Walter was kissing another man, and that man was Daddy.
Without thinking, I sprung to my feet in a sudden panic and stuffed the letters, postcards, and pictures back into the scrapbook and slammed it shut. I jammed the scrapbook into the wooden box, fast, as though if I moved quickly enough, I could pack my discovery back in there with it. I returned the whole thing to the very back of the closet, put Ma’s robe back in its place, and ran to my room.
On the bed, my head buried in my pillow, Ma’s warnings about Daddy came roaring back to me. I remembered all the times she accused him of being secretive and not loving her. I thought it was her illness making her paranoid. I had defended him and felt sorry for his having to put up with her irrational meanness. Did I really just see that? Was that real? Did Ma know?
I cried hard into my pillow. I cried out all my hurt over missing Ma and Lisa. I cried out deeply unsettling feelings. I cried because, buried in the back of the closet in the bedroom Ma and Daddy had once shared, was evidence that I didn’t really know my father. Was he still seeing this Walter? Was he seeing some other man? Had he ever loved Ma? Could Daddy have given Ma AIDS?
Those next few months, I began spending a lot of time in my room with my door shut. Each night when Daddy returned from his drug runs or his time spent downtown, I’d step out briefly to receive the take-out food that had become our routine dinner, fried rice or a slice of pizza. We’d make brief conversation, and then when Daddy was ready to get high in the kitchen, I’d retreat into my room, where I could eat in privacy. When he brought home a second, smaller TV set from the trash one day, he let me keep it in my room. I explained that the couch wasn’t comfortable anymore. Sometimes at night, before Daddy went to bed, he’d tap lightly on my closed door to say, “Good night, Lizzy, I love you.” From the other side, I made him wait just a few moments before I’d finally answer “. . . I love you too, Daddy.”
A few months later, when I was thirteen years old, child welfare finally took me into custody. When they came for me, I didn’t put up a fight. In someplace deep inside of me that is hard to think about even now, I do believe that my heart broke when Daddy didn’t put up a fight either.
In response to numerous calls regarding my truancy from Junior High School 141, two unsmiling male caseworkers wearing starched suits appeared at our door to escort me by car to “placement.” One introduced himself as Mr. Doumbia, and the other was nameless. While Daddy signed the papers handing over legal custody of me to the state, I had ten minutes to pack whatever I could into a book bag. In a tearful panic, I’d taken some clothing, Ma’s bronze-colored NA coin and that one black-and-white picture of her, and that was it. Daddy’s hug was stiff and nervous at the door. “Sorry, Lizzy,” was all he said, his hands shaking with tremors. I hid my face from him because I didn’t want Daddy to see me cry. If I just had gone to school, this never would have happened.
In the backseat of the car, I sat with a bag in my lap. No one spoke a word to me. I tried to figure out what was going to happen next by listening to their conversation. But I couldn’t make out much through their guttural accents, which were drowned out by the roar of the car engine. My eyes were darting everywhere, up and down the Bronx streets that we drove through and which I did not recognize. They took me to a massive, anonymous-looking office building made of tarnished bricks, with no sign above the entrance, I noticed as we walked in.
I was brought to a small office that resembled a doctor’s examination room, but without the examination table. “Sit here,” a tall woman said, pointing to a chair, before walking away and leaving the door wide open. The walls were bare. The window was barred with a thick, rusted gate, and the sun illuminated a small, trash-filled back alley behind the building. From my chair I could see another girl seated alone in the hallway, hair in cornrows, wearing sweatpants. Her eyes were lazy; she looked the way people in Ma’s psychiatric ward looked when they were doped up on medication. More than a half hour went by, and no one returned. I got up and dared myself to walk over and speak to the girl.
“Hi,” I said. “What are you here for?”
“They think I stabbed my cousin. I’m sick of this shit,” she muttered, not looking up at me.
“Oh . . . sorry,” was all I said, and after a moment I went back to my seat. I don’t know how long it was before the tall woman came back, but when she did, she shut the office door and it was just the two of us alone. She opened a file under her desk lamp, read something, and then she turned, looking at me from over the top of her glasses. It was the first time anyone had looked at or spoken to me since I had gotten in the car.
“I need you to undress,” she said, followed by nothing but silence.
“Get naked?” I asked.
“Yes, I need to examine you. Please undress.”
The last thing I wanted to do was take off my clothes, but what else
could I do? What wouldn’t I have done if she told me to? So I did. She flipped through a couple of pages from the folder while I stacked my clothing on the extra office chair. I stood slightly hunched over in the chilly office, rubbing my arms to smooth away the goose bumps, and I waited for my next instruction.
“Your underwear, too. Everything.”
“Why?” I asked, pulling my underwear down. “What’s this for?” If someone had just talked to me like a human being and walked me through what was happening, that would have helped so much, made it so much less frightening. But instead, she talked to me with a stiff office voice that told me I was not a person, but a job, to her.
She didn’t answer my question directly, but looked up from the page again and began to recite what felt to me like a practiced script.
“Elizabeth, we will be examining you today and I will need to ask you some questions. All you have to do is answer honestly. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” I said, standing there completely naked, repulsed by the feeling of her eyes on my skinny body.
Looking up from her notes, with the tip of her pen she pointed to a bruise on my shin and asked, “Where did you get that, Elizabeth?”
There were lots of bruises on my body. I was naturally pale and always bruised easily. Every time I came back from playing outside, I had a bruise somewhere, so how was I supposed to know where one particular one came from?
“Um . . . playing outside?”
She wrote something down. “And that one, and this one,” she asked, pointing to two more on the same leg, in approximately the same area.