Famous Adopted People

by Alice Stephens

  At the end of the afternoon, Honey herself accompanied me back to my room, her arm around my waist as she and I exchanged compliments in elated tones, Yolanda trailing us disconsolately. “I had Ting deliver some fabulous dresses to your room today. I can’t wait to see which one you pick for tonight,” she said, before she left me at my door with air kisses and a sharp pinch to the cheek.

  There were three dresses, and I had to try them all on, for though they fit me beautifully everywhere else, they all had expectations for my bust that my bust couldn’t fill. I chose a shimmering silver cowled slip dress, pulling the shoulders back so the neck scooped higher, knowing that it was inevitable that after a cocktail or two, the dress would slip down. Honey was delighted with my look, which I had paired with dangling silver earrings and a silver mesh lariat, though she made a point to tut-tut over my hair and pull at the soft folds of the cowl, proclaiming, “Just think how much better this dress would look draped over a pair of beautiful C-cup breasts.”

  At dinner, where I occupied the coveted seat to the right of Honey, she asked, “Who wants to watch a movie tonight? Lisa?”

  “Great idea!” I cheered, sinking my knife into the weeping flesh of a perfectly crusted lamb chop.

  A fork clattered from Lahela’s grip. “Oh, pardon, pardon,” she muttered in a shaky voice, her coppery skin suddenly tarnishing green.

  “The movie’s still in theaters in the States,” Honey gushed. “We’re seeing it even before it’s available on DVD!”

  “Ooh!” I warbled, impressed.

  “What movie is it?” Wendell asked, sounding as if he were choking on his Adam’s apple.

  “The Green Hornet. Starring your favorite movie star, Vlad!”

  Dr. Panzov forced a dry chuckle. “Oh? Eh-heh-heh-heh? Which one is that?” He took a showy bite of scalloped potato, swallowing it down with a taut, sinewy jerk of his neck.

  “Cameron Diaz, of course!”

  “Oh, yes, of course!” His thin lips jerked into an unconvincing grin.

  No one contributed much to the banter after that besides Honey and me, but who could blame them? After a long afternoon of physical activity, we were tired. Still, it hadn’t happened before, a lag in the conversation. Usually at least Harvey and Wendell could be counted on to vie with each other with the more dipshit observation or wandering, pointless story.

  When Honey announced it was time to retire to the theater, I poured myself a hefty glass of cognac and was up and ready while the others dithered at the table, Patience searching ostentatiously for her shawl, Wendell folding his napkin meticulously back into shape, Lahela just sitting there, staring helplessly in front of her. Finally, Dr. Panzov led the way, me right on his heels, thinking how nice it would be to sit and stare at a screen and not have to interact with the others, whose company I was already sick of. Pleasantly surprised to see Miura-san already seated in the back row of the theater, I collapsed into the seat next to him. “What’s up, my man?”

  Shoulders rounded in on themselves as if he were trying to take up as little space as possible, he giggled nervously in response.

  “Hey”—I patted him warmly on the arm—“great job with the rack of lamb! Honey was really pleased. That must be why she invited you to watch the movie tonight.”

  He ducked and squirmed in acknowledgment. Taking a handkerchief out of the front pocket of his frayed suit jacket, he passed it over the sweat beading his plated brow.

  Harvey blundered into my chair on his way in. In a group of problem drinkers, Harvey was by far the most problematic. “Hey, Harvey, you’re pissed! Drink a coffee!” I hectored. When I turned back to Miura-san, I was surprised to see him violently rubbing his palms over his thighs, face stretched into an anguished grimace.

  “What’s wrong, Miura-san?” I asked.

  A small groan escaped Miura-san, and he patted his upper lip with his handkerchief.

  “Lisa, you’re up front with me,” Honey commanded as she swept by, the gauzy hem of her dress fluttering after her. “Lights!” she called out as I slipped into the seat next to her. “Roll the preview!”

  She leaned over and tapped me affectionately on the knee. I grinned and raised my cognac glass at her before nestling into the plush embrace of the chair, ready to enjoy the show.

  A collective sigh of relief whooshed up into the air as a close-up of a familiar face filled the screen. It took me a moment to realize that the face was mine, and I was kissing Honey’s note of this morning, my face slack with relief. In a blink, that image was gone, replaced by me asleep, my eyes twitching with dreams, jaw flexing as I ground my teeth.

  What the fuck? I wondered at my sleeping self, who groaned and gnashed away.

  Cutaway to me taking my pajamas off and then my underpants, pausing to scratch at my belly.

  “You have a tattoo? What is it of?” Wendell asked as I headed naked into the bathroom. A quick cut and there I was, sitting on the toilet, an intense look of concentration on my face. I was taking a shit.

  “Oh my god,” I whispered. “Honey, what is this?”

  Another shot of me, wearing only underpants, rubbing at my clitoris as I writhed on my bed. A close-up as my jaw waggled back and forth and my eyes squeezed shut. “Orgasm!” Harvey shouted, as if announcing a touchdown.

  Next I was in the shower, washing the crack of my ass. Then I was puking into the toilet. An extended shot of me compulsively chewing the inside of my mouth as I read. “That repulsive habit she has of biting the inside of her lip is just another form of masturbation,” Yolanda pronounced in a stage whisper, and Dr. Panzov tittered in agreement.

  Followed by a shot of me actually masturbating, this time in the shower. Then me standing in a stream of sunlight, shaking the dandruff from my hair. Gouging a finger deep into a nostril. Another close-up shot of me in the throes of sexual self-satisfaction, a thread of saliva trickling from my gaping mouth. Wiping my ass. Picking at a zit. In deep conversation with my reflection in the mirror. Rolled up in a tight ball on my bed, crying. Standing in front of the full-length mirror with my hands in my underpants.

  I heard the soft tones of Lahela chime in with the general catcalls and abuse that came from the men. “She is insatiable.”

  “Total horndog!” her husband happily agreed.

  I put my hands over my eyes. “Make it stop!”

  “That’s not a giant mole on her ass, it’s a yin-yang tattoo!” Harvey announced triumphantly.

  “Gives new meaning to up the yin-yang, eh?” Wendell crowed.

  “Is one breast larger than the other, I wonder?” Dr. Panzov asked. “What do you think, Cookie? You are an expert on child-sized breasts. Is she uneven?”

  “Most definitely,” Miura-san readily answered. With a chuckle.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I screamed, jumping out of the chair. “Stop it!”

  “Sit down!” Honey grabbed a handful of my skirt and tugged at it with some violence, handling it rather roughly for a Tory Burch. “You’re blocking the view of the people behind.”

  “Why does she always look at the toilet paper after she’s wiped her bum? Is that an American thing?” Patience inquired.

  “Sit down, Lisa! You don’t want me to have the men subdue you, do you?” Honey warned from between clenched teeth.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I implored.

  “She does touch her privates a lot, doesn’t she?” Lahela noted loudly. “Even more than you, Wendell.”

  Laughter erupted throughout the room.

  “You’re being ridiculous, Lisa!” Honey hissed, releasing the crumpled fabric of my dress with a spiteful swat at my thighs. “This is your last chance to behave yourself.”

  Whirling about, I caught a glimpse of myself drunkenly humping a pillow, eyes lidded and glazed, body rocking in an animal motion that expressed neither pleasure nor excitement but just vacuous compulsion. Of course I had been warned about the cameras, but I didn’t know they could see in the dark or in the shower.
And I certainly didn’t know that what they recorded would be broadcast for public consumption. “Fuck you!” I screamed, and lunged up the dark aisle toward the door. The lights blazed on, revealing Miura-san at the switch.

  As I clawed at the doorknob, I heard Dr. Panzov’s soft voice behind me. “You’ve really done it now, Lisa.”

  His hand gripped my shoulder and jerked me around, his face glowing phosphorescent with joy, a wide, sadistic grin pushing his cheeks into doughy dumplings. Then a fast approaching fist eclipsed his grin, until the last thing I saw was an enormous gold ring glittering with a cabochon-cut bloodred ruby that got closer and closer until the whole world went red and then black.

  Chapter 12

  “I thought that I wasn’t wanted, that my natural parents didn’t love me and if they didn’t love me, nobody could love me.”

  –Greg Louganis

  When I finally unloosed myself from the sticky, insistent embrace of the unconsciousness that was holding me too tightly, too dearly, I was in a windowless, dimly lit cubicle. From somewhere inside my body, pain pulsated like a second sickening heartbeat. Was I in a hospital? An insane asylum? I felt pretty insane, like I was trapped in some sort of psychotic delusion. I concentrated on my pain, tracking it to its volcanic core, the trail of molten lava leading to my head. I tried to bring my hands up to my face to explore further, but they wouldn’t move. The inside of my left arm ached, and when I looked down I saw needle bruises blooming like night flowers on the white flesh, some creeping in long snail trails up the veins, and brown leather tightly circling my wrists. The portal for an IV was buried into the back of a hand, but there was nothing attached to it. Panic mounting, I yanked desperately at the straps, but they held tight.

  Returning to Boston for my last year of college, I started dabbling in pharmaceuticals, particularly depressants, particularly OxyContin. Mindy was all about getting into medical school in New York, where she’d live with Trip while he attended law school, and what little free time she had was parceled out between me and Trip. When graduation finally came, the rules of inertia kept me in Boston, working as a receptionist in a law firm that specialized in asbestos litigation. Mindy, of course, had been accepted to Columbia, and in July she and Trip moved into a floor-through, one-bedroom starter apartment in a prewar brownstone on East Seventy-Fifth Street.

  Eight months later, I moved to New York City, ostensibly to get a job in publishing, but really because where Mindy was, so went I, as helpless to her gravitational pull as Earth to the sun. But I hated the city, seeing only ugliness wherever I looked: rats creeping along the subway rails, dog shit smearing the pavement, trash clotted against the curbs, people shouting abuse at each other, beggars baring their stumps for loose change. My heart broke every time I ventured out the door of my tiny Flatbush studio until it was so cracked that it could hold nothing but loneliness and loathing. Though I couldn’t find anyone to employ me, I could find a drug dealer, and, swaddled in a dark veil of opioids, I hid away in my apartment, emerging only for takeout, job interviews, scoring more drugs, and dates with Mindy. After one particularly embarrassing dinner where I knocked over not one but two wineglasses and dipped the ends of my hair in my soup as I sloppily tried to drink it up, she told me not to come and see her high anymore. Taking umbrage, I reared up from the table and slammed into a waiter, running out the door as china, cutlery, and glass hit the floor with a symphonic crash. Back in my tiny mouse hole, I crushed three 80 mg OxyContins, tipped the fine powder into my mouth, and washed it down with a PBR. Bliss rolled in to seal me in a glaze of unconsciousness, whose enchantment was broken when a tube was shoved down my throat. Crowned by a golden halo, a half-shrouded face dominated by spiky-lashed eyes peered down at me. Dead. I was dead and the God that I had never believed in had eyes like silverfish that were sizing me up, judging me, getting ready to consign me to the hungry maw of hell. But then he said, “What’s her name again?” the tissue flesh of his blue mouth caving in, and I knew it wasn’t the God that I didn’t believe in because the God I didn’t believe in knew everyone’s name, all the people who ever were and all the people who would ever be. “You’re a lucky girl, Lisa,” the not-God told me. “A few more minutes and it would have been too late.” I didn’t have to ask what “it” was.

  Maybe I was still at Brooklyn Hospital, and any moment Mindy would come in, tears streaming down flushed cheeks to hug me tightly. But no, I already had that memory of Mindy grabbing fistfuls of my hair as she sobbed, arms enfolding me tightly, heedlessly pulling the IV needle that was buried in my hand. And this room was too dark and narrow to be the room at the Brooklyn Hospital, which had fluorescent lights zizzing from the ceiling and a window that showed a patch of dirty sky. The same shame that I felt then infected me now, and I seized upon that shame, hugged it close, following its slinking trail until it led me to myself, or the image of myself, on the screen of a private theater in North Korea. I tried to scream but could manage only a brittle croak, like a stalk crunching underfoot. “Help! Please, somebody help!” I waited for a moment but knew that nobody would come. After a minor eternity, the gray light of the room melded with the gray twilight behind my eyelids, and I regained unconsciousness.

  When next I came to, I was all alone behind a curtain, a soft, steady electronic blip sounding regularly, like a heartbeat. It was a heartbeat, I realized. Mine. My throat ached, bruised and violated, and my chest felt like a turtle with a cracked shell, vulnerable and broken. Shame filled me to overflowing, and I wished that I had never woken up. I, who had endeavored my whole life not to appear vulnerable or weak, was now exposed for all to see as a fraud and a failure. A heavy nurse with the dewlap of an ox pushed back the curtain.

  “Oh, you awake?” she asked approvingly. “How you feeling, baby? Throat burn a little?”

  My answer came out as an old man’s wheeze, frightening in its impotence. I meant to say, “It hurts like hell.” But while my lips formed the whole sentence, the only word that was audible, in a high, whistling whisper, was the last one. The nurse mistook my meaning.

  “Oh, baby,” she said, stroking my brow as she inserted a thermometer in my ear, “it’s OK. Don’t worry. You didn’t die. You got another chance. Things are going to be fine with you.” She had an accent that hinted at the sweet sea breezes and sweaty lassitude of the tropics. “The waiting room is full up with people anxious for your recovery. When they hear you are conscious, they’re going to holler hallelujah like shouter Baptists. Your mama will be in as soon as we’re done here.” As she spoke, she checked my blood pressure, reviewed the recent history of my heartbeat, and hooked another bag of fluids to the tube that burrowed into the back of my hand.

  “It hurts,” I croaked.

  “I know it does, baby, I know.” Her stubby fingers, plump like hand-rolled cigars, stroked my forehead. “That hurt means you are healing. No pain, no gain.”

  Under her reassuring caress, I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, she was gone. Yet I could still feel her touch.

  A moment later, the baby-blue curtain billowed and my mother tentatively stepped from behind it. “Lisa, oh, my daughter, oh, Lisa,” she gasped, sinking to her knees by my bed and taking my hand in hers. “You gave us such a scare. Oh, Lisa, I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.” And then she bowed her head and started to bawl. Quickly getting to her feet, she wiped at her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. “These are not tears of recrimination,” she hiccupped, “just tears of happiness.”

  “It was an accident, Mom,” I rasped, every word like giving birth to a ten-pound baby through my windpipe. “I didn’t try to kill myself. Only wanted to get high.”

  She tried to rearrange her face; everything shut, mouth, eyes, nostrils pinching in as she took a deep breath.

  “For a little while, I was floating in the upper ether and everything felt so gooood.” That electric rush and the sensation of falling weightless through space. Gone… gone… gone. “That’s all it was, Mom. Really.”
/>
  She nodded vigorously, her whole face writhing and jumping. “Scott and Mindy are out there, but they can’t come in because they aren’t blood relatives…”

  “You neither,” I croaked.

  “What?”

  “You’re not a blood relative either,” I pointed out.

  Normally, my mother would have reacted with a laugh and a hug. But this time she hesitated, unsure what to do with my comment: Was it said in belligerence, shame, inadequacy? Or was it just a truthful observation, the kind that we made to each other regularly, openly acknowledging the peculiar circumstance of our relationship? This was the legacy of my pursuit of the highest high. My own mother would now question the motivation for every comment I made, wondering if it was a veiled cry for help or a confession of pain. I had officially outted myself as “damaged” and deprived myself of the right to be ironic. “Because I’m adopted, Mom. Get it?” I forced the words out in as lighthearted manner as I could. I sounded like a bird caught in a snare.

  With a fluttery giggle, my mother patted at her nose with a sodden tissue. “Yes, Lisa, I get it.” A shuddering, deep intake of breath. “I feel so, oh, I don’t know, negligent for not knowing how unhappy you have been lately.”

  Shame swelled big as a pumpkin inside my chest, squeezing everything else out. “This is not your fault, Mom. Please don’t blame yourself.” Hot tears slid from my eyes, plopping off my cheeks onto the hospital bed, staining into a wider and wider circle, until the circle of my tears intersected with the circle of my mother’s.