by Diane Burke
I was about seventeen when I started working for my dad. He paid me well. More than any of my other friends ever got. I bought my own car. I always had money in my pocket. Being a typical kid, I didn’t appreciate the large paycheck I earned unless I was flashing around what that money bought.
I never wanted for anything—except maybe freedom.
While my friends were playing ball or hanging out, I was rolling meat for party trays or slicing celery and onions for salads. I worked after school and, as my father’s business grew, most weekends. I began to hate the sight of salads and meats. I began to resent always having to work when it appeared to me the rest of the kids my age were out having fun.
At times, I was frustrated. When my dad and I argued or when I missed an outing with some of the guys that I hadn’t wanted to miss, the recollection that I was adopted snuck into my mind.
On at least one occasion, I would actually think “You’re not my father!” during a heated debate.
Of course, in hindsight, I wish I’d never had those thoughts. My father was a good man and didn’t deserve those words from me.
But I was adopted.
I wasn’t his biological child.
And no matter how much I loved him or he loved me, the truth of that situation was beginning to impact our lives.
As a teenager, I didn’t give much thought to my birth mother. I didn’t lie awake at night and wonder what she looked like or who she was. She really wasn’t important to me at all one way or the other.
My adoptive parents had provided me with a great childhood. I never felt rejected or unloved. I spent most of my life never thinking about the situation at all. My birth mother was nothing more to me than a mild curiosity. Except for those unexpected, unpredictable moments when she would creep into my mind.
I never knew what triggered those thoughts. They’d just show up and take residence in my mind. I’d be driving my car. Maybe I’d be just walking down the street. Maybe I’d just had a particularly hard day at work. Nothing in particular that I can remember would trigger these thoughts but they’d come anyway. I’d hear that little voice in the back of my head. The voice that would remind me I had a parallel life out there. It grew louder over time.
Of course, as a teenager I always fantasized that the other life was better. You know, bigger, more exciting, whatever. The grass-is-always-greener syndrome I guess. I’d fantasize that maybe my mother had married my father and I had brothers and sisters out there. Or if not my father, I was pretty sure she had probably gone on to marry and have more children so I’d have half-brothers and half-sisters. For an only child, I have to admit it was an intriguing and interesting fantasy.
Maybe my mother was rich and lived in a big fancy house and drove a cool car.
Material things didn’t matter to me. Honestly, they didn’t.
But on days when I’d have to work in my father’s catering business, rolling meat for party trays instead of being able to go out with my friends, the thought of a rich, catering-free life had quite an appeal to a teenager.
The voice inside my head didn’t crop up very often. But when it did, it planted seeds and those seeds started to grow.
Most of the emotions I dealt with at that time weren’t overwhelming. I didn’t stay awake at night worrying about any of it. The word pretend kept coming to mind, though. It’s a shame, really. I don’t want to belittle my relationship with my parents in any way because I love them. But I seem to be a very analytical, down-to-earth, call-things-as-they-are type person. It’s just the way I’m wired and this word pretend just wouldn’t go away.
I know that word may seem harsh for some people to hear but, in its simplest form, that was my truth. We were all pretending. My adoptive parents were pretending they were my parents. I was pretending I was their son. My grandparents were pretending they were my grandparents.
It didn’t mean that we didn’t love one another. I loved my parents, and still do as much as I possibly could, and my parents loved me as much as they possibly could. I know that.
But we all knew that I wasn’t their flesh and blood, that I was born to someone else, that I belonged in someone else’s DNA gene pool, so we pretended.
Slowly, that voice inside my head bothered me with more and more frequency. I began to wonder who I really was, where I came from and where I belonged. I also began to understand that someday it would be more than an occasional thought or a teenage musing. Someday I would need to know the answers to those questions.
Diane
It took a long time to recover from my divorce. Step one was climbing out of my depressive state long enough to care about what was happening to me and to my children. Eventually I did.
First order of business was to move out of my parent’s home. That had been a particularly painful place to try and recover, anyway.
As I said in the beginning of this story, my mother didn’t like most of her kids, but she loved my sister. As adults, my mother and sister had been more like best friends than mother and daughter. They saw one another daily, went shopping together, were in and out of each other’s home with regularity and even belonged to the same bowling team.
When my sister moved away from Michigan to live with me in New Jersey, my mother was crushed. She couldn’t understand why my sister would ever choose living with me over living with her and, truthfully, it added to her hatred of me. When the divorce hit, my family rallied around me in support. My mother … not so much.
One particular morning about five months after my separation, I was walking down the stairs and I could hear my mother sobbing at the base of them. When she saw me, she raced up the steps, meeting me on the stairwell. She was screaming at me and totally out of control.
I really don’t know what had set her off, only that she was actually grieving the loss of my sister who had been her one true friend. Something must have happened or been said that morning to trigger my mother’s emotions.
“You never should have moved her into your house!” she yelled. “This is all your fault! If you had been a decent wife to your husband, he wouldn’t have gone looking for someone else. Now look what you’ve done!”
I honestly can’t remember what I said back to her. I’m sure it was mean and loud and cruel. All I know is that the situation on that landing turned ugly. She grabbed my hair and slammed my head into the wall.
“You are not the Virgin Mary!” she screamed. “And your sister isn’t the scarlet woman. You did this! You did this and I’m sick of everyone cutting your sister out of our lives! Why did you take her in with you? Why?”
She went downstairs, grabbed her jacket, and stormed out the door for one of her long walks down Blood Road.
My father had been sitting at the kitchen table. Although he hadn’t witnessed the encounter, he had certainly heard it. I stormed into the kitchen.
“You heard that!” I accused.
He nodded but didn’t look up from the paper.
“I can’t take it anymore. She’s blaming me for all of this!”
“What can I do?” he asked, laying the paper on the table. “How can I help? I’ll do anything to help.”
“Get me out of this house,” I said.
And he did.
Within the week, my father helped move me into a cute little rental home about an hour south of Oakland. We were finally and forever out of my mother’s home. My children, ages nine and eleven, and I were starting a new chapter in our lives and I tried hard not to choke on the fear of doing it alone.
I found a job as a secretary in a law firm. That didn’t last long. Not because I didn’t like the job but because it paid only a couple of dollars over minimum wage. I was struggling financially and didn’t know how I was going to continue paying for this home much longer on my own.
My ex-husband sent $40 a week child support, which was supposed to cover all the needs of two children. Our assets had been split down the middle, including the bills, and after I paid for my lawyer and paid my mo
ther more than $1,200 for support for the months I had lived with her, there wasn’t much left of my settlement. Money was getting really tight and I was scared.
I knew I had to find another job. I had to earn a man’s wage if I was going to support a family. But how? I didn’t have a college education and I definitely didn’t have a trade like plumber or mechanic.
One night I saw an ad in the classified section of the newspaper: Sell fun! Fun! Fun! If you are a people person, if you enjoy showing families how they can build a lifetime of happy memories, call us today for an interview.
Sell fun? I could do that. And I was all for families and happy memories. I called the number and went in for an interview.
It turns out the position was for a timeshare salesperson. I had never even heard of timeshare, didn’t have a clue what it was. All I did know was that a bell kept ringing, people kept cheering, and those sales people were making money, more money than any secretary I ever knew. I wanted the job.
The manager of the business, a kind, sweet, lovely Indian man named Paul found out in the interview that I was a single mother with two young boys and he all but threw me out of his office.
“Go home, missus. This is not the job for you. You have two children who depend on you. Go home.”
I didn’t understand he was sincerely trying to help me out. He knew that the timeshare business was sporadic and unpredictable. You could make some very good commissions, but those commission checks could be few and very far between.
I was desperate. Every single night for a week, I showed up at the office and begged for a chance.
Paul kept sending me home. I kept coming back.
About five days into this back and forth dance that Paul and I were caught up in, one of the salesmen, Freddie, approached Paul on my behalf.
“Why don’t you give her a chance?” he asked. “What do you have to lose? It’s all commission, anyway. Seems to me if she has the bulldog tenacity to keep showing up here she just might turn out to be pretty good. Besides, if she can’t hack it, she’ll be gone in no time anyway.”
Paul looked from Freddie to me and then gave in. “Okay,” he said. He handed me a book filled with pictures of beautiful resorts throughout the United States. “Go sit behind that man. Don’t say anything. Don’t do anything. Just look at this book and listen.”
I instantly did what he said before he could change his mind. The salesman’s presentation took about an hour and a half. It included a ten minute movie of a resort in Florida called the Outrigger Beach Club followed by the dollars and cents of what it would cost to belong.
My vacations had always been sleeping at family residences and going to the beach. This book held thousands of beautiful places with everything you could ever want to see or do. Mountains. Beaches. White-water rafting. Horseback riding. Gambling in Vegas. I didn’t just want to sell the product, I wanted to sign on the dotted line and have this life for myself and my kids, too.
After I listened to the entire presentation, I ran into Paul’s office.
“Please,” I said, “You have to let me do this.”
“Okay. You’ve got the book. I’ll give you a couple. Go for it. After you show them the movie, call Bob over to close the deal for you.”
“What? What about training? Isn’t there training?” I asked.
“You had your training. You wanted a chance. I’m giving you one. Now, go introduce yourself to the next couple waiting in the lobby.”
My heart beat so fast, I thought it was going to explode. But I was also happy and excited and hopeful that my life was about to change for the better. Perhaps it was my enthusiasm or my honesty of what I thought about the product at the time because I certainly had no formal sales experience, but my first couple bought. They bought two red weeks, which was prime time in the Florida resort, and they paid full price.
I’d never been told that nobody pays full price. That’s why closers like Bob are called in. They are management. They are authorized to sell “back in inventory” properties. People are already sold on the idea of owning timeshare so when the price drops by thousands, many of them sign on the dotted line, believing they are getting an incredible deal.
I didn’t have to call Bob to my table. My couple bought right after the movie. I will never forget the look of astonishment on Paul, Freddie, and Bob’s faces when I walked over and asked them if someone could help me fill out the paperwork.
My first commission check was more money than I had made in four weeks as a secretary. It was also the last commission check I got for almost two months. No matter how hard I tried or what I’d do after that night, one couple after another turned me down. But I refused to give up. I had done it once. I could do it again.
One day I was sitting in the break room when an older gentleman, a quiet salesman who didn’t mingle with the rest of us and usually kept to himself, approached me and asked if he could sit at my table for a moment.
I nodded.
“You seem to be having a run of bad luck,” he said.
I nodded again.
“Would you like me to help you? If you’ll give me some of your time, I’ll show you how I sell this product.”
I knew this man wasn’t the top salesperson on the floor but he wasn’t the worst either. He sold regularly enough to make me feel he just might have something to offer.
“Sure,” I said. “I’d be grateful for any help I can get.”
He sat down. “My name’s Bill.”
“Hi, Bill. I’m Diane.”
He smiled at me. “Let’s get started.”
Bill quickly became my mentor, my best friend, and eventually my second husband. He was twenty-one years older than me and had never been married. He had poor health, was overweight, and was a shy little man with a curmudgeon side to him that rubbed many people the wrong way.
But he was a good man, a moral man, and he fell head over heels in love with me. I wish I could have loved him back. I really, really do, because he certainly deserved it.
When he asked me to marry him, I accepted for all the wrong reasons. He was good to me and to my kids. The three of us were a package deal and Bill would take all of us on dates to movies or dinner or whatever. He didn’t make a lot of money, but he was willing to throw what he did make into the joint pot, which made my financial life much easier. Most of all, he was my best friend. I trusted him. I confided in him. I truly enjoyed spending time with him—and I was tired of being alone—so I accepted.
The boys accepted Bill at first. They didn’t like him, but they didn’t dislike him either—until we announced our wedding. If I married Bill, then any hope they had of their father and I getting back together would be gone. They resented Bill from that day on and acted out on many, many occasions throughout their teenage years.
The night before the wedding, I got cold feet. Not for me—I still believed marrying Bill would benefit me in a myriad of ways—but for him. He deserved better. He deserved someone who loved him back. So the night before our wedding, I went to call it off.
He had been staying overnight at my house and the children and I had been staying overnight at my brother’s—the “can’t see the bride before the wedding” scenario. But now that there wasn’t going to be a wedding, I went back to my house to let him know.
It was about three o’clock in the morning when I quietly let myself into the house. The light was on in the bedroom. As I approached, what I saw broke my heart. He had his suit and shirt and tie laid out on the bed. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, polishing his shoes and humming a tune under his breath. When he saw me standing in the doorway, he stopped.
“Hello, darling. What are you doing home?”
I sat down beside him.
“Bill, we have to talk.”
“Okay.”
I knew what I was going to do would break his heart, but I told myself it would be better to hurt him now than make him miserable later.
“Bill, I’m sorry. I really am, but I
am not going to marry you.”
“What?”
“I know my timing is terrible and I’m sorry. I really am. Don’t show up tomorrow. I’ll tell everyone the wedding is off. There’s no need for you to be embarrassed.”
“I don’t understand. Why are you doing this?”
I took his hands in mine. “Because I don’t love you, Bill, and you deserve to be loved.”
He studied me for a moment and then asked, “Do you like me?”
“Of course I like you. You’re my best friend.”
“Well, maybe you’ll grow to love me.”
My eyes filled with tears. “I won’t, Bill. I’m so sorry but I know I won’t.”
He patted my hands. “That’s all right. As long as you like me, then we can make it work. You see, darling, I love you enough for both of us.”
By now, tears trickled down my cheeks. “Please, Bill. Please don’t make this more difficult for either one of us than it has to be. Please don’t show up tomorrow. Please. I’ll tell everyone that you changed your mind.”
He let go of my hand, picked up his shoe, and continued polishing it.
“I’m going to be there. Hopefully, after you get a few hours sleep, you will be there, too.”
He kept his word. When I arrived at the justice of the peace and was escorted into a room where my family and all my coworkers were already waiting, I saw Bill, wearing the biggest grin on his face and dressed in his Sunday finest, standing in front of the judge.
Maybe Bill was right. Maybe being best friends would be enough.
When the judge started the section of the ceremony that began with, “Will you, William, take Diane as your lawfully wedded wife …,” Bill never waited for the rest of it. He never listened for the “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health” stuff.
Instead, he yelled, “I will! I will! I will! I will!”
The whole room burst into laughter, including the judge, and I knew then that it was going to be all right. I would be a loving and loyal companion to this man for the rest of his life and he would continue to be my best friend and a companion to me. We could make it work, and we did for twenty years, until he died in September 2007.