by Wally Lamb
“So if everything was always even-steven, Poppy, then why was I the one you were always teasing and making fun of?” She points her finger at Ma. “And why was she always playing favorites? Whenever I asked her if I could do something, it was always no. But if the little prince or the perfect daughter asked, it was always . . . You can stop shaking your head over there, Simone, because you know I’m right.”
Dr. Darda asks Simone if she’d like to say something. She shakes her head again. Well, I would. I’d like to say that none of what she’s claiming is true, and that Frances is just being her regular whiny self. But no one wants to know what I think.
“Well, for your information, all your lying didn’t work because a part of me always knew I didn’t belong to you people,” Frances says.
She did? Then why was she always telling me that I was adopted? Why did she take me to that orphanage and say it was where they got me from? Was that where she came from? Or did we both come from there? Have they been lying to me all this time, too? Am I adopted? This is all so mixed up.
Ma says, “Honey, we’re not ‘you people.’ We’re your family.”
“Ha! So now that you’ve finally stopped lying to me, what should I call you? Auntie Marie? Mrs. Bullshitter?”
“That’s enough,” Pop says. “Show your mother some respect.”
“How can I do that?” Frances snaps back. “She’s dead.”
She is? Who is she? Was she? This is like being in a race where you can’t catch up because everyone else has a big head start.
“You know damn well what I mean,” Pop says. “Cut it out.”
Frances turns to Dr. Darda and asks what the new rules are. “I mean, if he’s not my real father, I don’t have to obey him anymore. Right?”
Ordinarily, Pop would not put up with this kind of smart-ass from one of his kids. He would yell. Give her a punishment, maybe. But here in this windowless office with its gloomy gray walls, he just puffs up his cheeks, then lets out the air.
“Sweetheart, you should call me what you’ve always called me,” Ma tells Fran. She’s in tears now. “You’re our legally adopted daughter. Poppy and I feel the exact same way about you as we do your sister and brother. You are loved.”
“Nice try, Marie,” Frances says. Her cheeks are sunken in and her eyes are bulgy. I can make out the skull underneath her tissue-paper skin. Her teased hair is lighter than Simone’s and mine. In some of the pictures of her when she was little, she had reddish blond hair. I guess that should have been a clue that she was someone else’s kid. How did her real mother die? Why were the cops—
“Look, kiddo,” Pop says. He’s glaring at Frances but pointing his finger at Ma. “You oughta thank your lucky stars you ended up with her for a mother. You could’ve been stuck in some foster home someplace. And anyway, your situation’s not even all that different. You’re still a Funicello, aren’t you?”
So Pop really is her father? Why did Ma say he wasn’t?
“Well, whoop-de-do,” Frances snickers. “My so-called parents are impostors. My real mother copped out by dying. Oh, and my real father pawned me off on his brother. But, hey, I’m still related to a Mickey Mouseketeer, so thrills, chills, and peanut butter.” So her real father is Uncle Iggy? Is that what she’s saying?
It’s weird that the room has grown so quiet. Why isn’t Dr. Wen Head saying anything? Isn’t he in charge? My eyes roam the room, trying to find something to look at besides Frances’s skull head and that wen of his. There’s something cruddy-looking stuck to the doctor’s tie—dried oatmeal, maybe?—but who wants to look at that? I glance down at my scuffed Buster Brown shoes. The last time Ma and I went shoe shopping, I begged her to let me get Snap Jacks because they didn’t have laces, just tongues that you could open or snap closed. Now I’m glad I’ve got laces. I untie them, pull on the ends, retie them. Double-knot them. Why do Simone and I even have to be here? We didn’t do anything. It’s Frances who’s causing all the trouble. And anyway, I’m just a kid. Shouldn’t I be protected from this kind of stuff? I think I may be getting a headache. I wish we could go home. Then I surprise myself because it’s me who breaks the silence.
“Am I adopted?”
“What?” Ma says. “No, Felix, of course not.”
“Of course not,” Frances mimics. “You’re the boy. The chosen one. Sal and Marie’s flesh-and-blood son.”
“Then how come you always used to tell me I was adopted?” This is the first time I’ve said anything to Frances in weeks. “Remember that orphanage you took me to? The one you said I came from? We were looking through the fence at the kids who lived there and—”
“Are you mental or something? I never took you to any stupid orphanage.”
“Yes you did.”
“No I didn’t. What are you even talking about?”
Dr. Darda asks if we might change the subject. He’d like to know what Frances is feeling about her birth father now that she’s had a few days to process the information. Does he mean Pop? Uncle Iggy? I’m still so confused. And Frances’s answer is weird. She starts clucking, flapping her elbows, pecking at the air. Oh, I get it. Chicken. Coward. “You said you invited him to this little party, right?” Dr. Darda nods. “So Daddy’s a no-show. At least he’s consistent. I’ll give him that.”
Pop starts sticking up for Uncle Iggy, but Dr. Darda puts up his hand like a traffic cop. “Let’s stay with Frances’s feelings a little while longer. You seem angry, Frances. Is it fair to say that anger is the primary emotion you’re feeling toward your birth father?”
She shrugs. “I don’t feel anything, to tell you the truth. I couldn’t care less about him.” Which I know is a lie. “It explains one thing, though. My whole life, I’ve wondered why he can never look me in the eye.” Turning to Simone, she says, “You’ve noticed that, haven’t you? The way he looks over my shoulder when he talks to me? He’s so ashamed of my existence that he can’t even look at me.”
Simone tells her she hasn’t ever noticed that. But I have. Uncle Iggy shadowboxes and wrestles with me on our braided rug. He let Simone teach him how to do the bop and he taught her the jitterbug. But I can’t remember one single time when he danced or horsed around with Frances. What I have always been aware of, however, is that he gives her much better gifts than he gives Simone and me. Last Christmas, Simone got a Dave Clark Five album from Uncle Iggy that she already had, I got a can of Lincoln Logs, and Frances got a girl’s bike with purple fenders, saddlebags, a front basket, and a silver bell. For Frances’s tenth birthday, Uncle Iggy bought her a three-story dollhouse. It had furniture, a carport, and a doll-sized Thunderbird convertible that I kind of wanted even though the car was girlie pink. For my birthday two weeks later, I got a Davy Crockett coonskin cap that Ma wrecked when she accidentally washed it in the washing machine. I’d complained to my mother once about Simone and me getting chintzy presents compared to Frances’s and she’d said something weird about not looking in a horse’s mouth if that horse gave you a gift.
“She’s right. He never looks at her.” When everyone turns to look at me, I drop my head and go to work again on my shoelaces. Why did I just stick up for Frances when she’s being such a brat?
Dr. Darda asks Fran how Uncle Iggy’s lack of eye contact makes her feel. She lies again and says it doesn’t bother her. And then, there’s a soft knock on the door. “Come in,” Dr. Darda calls.
The door opens and there’s Uncle Iggy, looking kind of scared. Frances jerks her head away from him, talking to the wall. “What’s he doing here?” she says, even though two seconds ago she was criticizing him for not showing up. My uncle shoves his hands into his pants pockets and jingles his change. His watery eyes stay on Fran. Now she’s the one who can’t look at him.
Simone and I are asked to go back to the waiting room, with its chilly metal folding chairs and rippy magazines. “Poor Frances,” Simone says, and I think, Poor her? What about poor the rest of us? She should be glad we let her be in our family. Why
doesn’t she stop causing all this trouble and just eat? And why did she lie about taking me to that orphanage? Or did she lie? Was it just something I made up? No, I couldn’t have because then I punched her, and the Miss Rheingold box got run over, and Mr. Melady yelled at us. I didn’t imagine all that. That squashed ballot box is whadda you call it? Evidence!
Simone tries to read one of the waiting-room magazines, but its loose pages keep falling to the floor. From a plastic basket filled with old toys and junky Golden books with scribbled-on pages, I pull out a banged-up Etch A Sketch. Twisting the knobs any which way, I create a jumble of nothingness on the scratched-up screen. You can sort of hear them saying stuff in the other room, but Frances’s words are the loudest and the only ones you can make out. “Because you’re all a bunch of liars, that’s why! . . . So she was a slut? . . . Well, maybe I want to die!”
Despite my belief that sixth-grade boys no longer cry, when I hear Frances admit she may have been attempting a slow-motion suicide—the worst of all mortal sins—I can’t help it. My stifled grunts turn into hot tears and choked sobs. Simone puts down her magazine, gets up, and moves over to the chair next to mine. She puts her hand at the back of my head and pulls me to her, promising over and over, “She’s going to be okay, Felix. Shh. Don’t let them hear you crying. She’s going to be okay.”
After I calm down, I start Etch A Sketching again. And again, the lines and squiggles on the screen make no sense. Simone says she used to be a pretty good Etch A Sketcher—that she could write her name in cursive. She asks me what I’m drawing.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Nothing? Why are you drawing nothing?”
“Is Frances going to die?” I ask.
She shakes her head. Takes a tissue out of her purse and tells me to blow my nose instead of sucking it back up again.
When my parents, Uncle Iggy, and Frances walk out of Dr. Darda’s office, I wonder if my red eyes might give it away that I’ve been crying, but nobody looks at me anyway. I put my coat on and follow them into the hallway. Without saying goodbye, Frances heads down the corridor toward wherever her room is. The rest of us wait at the elevator. No one speaks.
It was still daylight when we entered the building, but now it’s nighttime. In the parking lot, we separate from Uncle Iggy, whose car is at the opposite end of the lot from ours. We get into Ma’s Corvair and Pop starts the car, backs out of our parking space, and drives out onto the street. Retreat Avenue, the sign says. We head toward the lights of downtown Hartford.
“You two backseaters hungry?” Pop asks Simone and me. “They’ve got some decent pizza pie in this city. There’s Spinella’s and—”
He stops talking when all the lights around us and ahead of us go out all at once. Oh no, I think. First Frances, now this. It feels personal, as if God the Father has flipped a switch and, for reasons I don’t understand, cast our family into darkness. Guided only by the two cones of light at the front of our car, Pop drives toward what looks like nothing.
ELEVEN
I step out of the scene and onto the stage, relieved to exit that confusing and difficult day—to relegate it once again to my past. . . .
When we drove away from the hospital and all the lights went out at once? Turns out it wasn’t personal; it was the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. Human error in Canada had triggered a massive power outage from Ontario through New Jersey that left more than thirty million people in the dark. It had happened as most of Manhattan was getting out of work for the day; commuters were stuck on stalled trains and in elevators that abruptly became pitch-black cells. Subway cars were rendered so profoundly dark that travelers couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces. . . . And in a faraway jungle of Southeast Asia, a young marine on watch experienced a similar situational blindness. Jeff would later become my brother-in-law, my sister Simone’s husband. “I’m telling you, Felix,” he once said to me. “When those monsoons hit, the rain would fall so hard you couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face.”
It was as if that Northeast Corridor blackout and those South Asian monsoons were reminders that, collectively, we were blind to an unforeseen future that’s now become our collective history: the murders of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy; “I am not a crook” and the Fall of Saigon; hanging chads and “Mission Accomplished”; Columbine, the Twin Towers, Sandy Hook. If the future is inevitable, then maybe it’s best that we’re blind to it. Maybe our blindness is a gift from God, if God exists. If there is an afterlife where angels and saints are real and ghosts reside. . . .
Speaking of which, Lois’s ghost seems to have left the building while I was reliving that strange day in 1965. She’s neither in the orchestra seats nor up in the balcony. The projection booth is dark. The first time she showed up, she told me I was “educable.” Okay. Now that I’m alone, maybe it’s time to test that theory—to figure out why these ghosts have been haunting me. I walk to the front of the stage and sit, my legs dangling over the edge, and try to put it all together. Figure it out, Funicello. Think. . . .
In the weeks, months, and then years after that memorable family therapy session, the grim details of Frances’s conception and birth were kept from me. Admittedly, I neither sought out the particulars nor eavesdropped in my usual manner, so I remained in the dark voluntarily. Oh, I knew the basics: that Uncle Iggy had fathered Frances and that the woman he’d impregnated had died shortly after giving birth. Through the wall that separated Dr. Darda’s office from his waiting room, I had heard Frances use the word “slut,” presumably in reference to her birth mother. I therefore presumed, incorrectly, that she had been a prostitute.
Why had I not pursued the specifics—inquired, for instance, why there had been police involvement? Was I attempting to forestall my coming-of-age—to put the brakes on the train that was carrying me, inevitably, toward the darker aspects of human sexuality—the messy complications and scandalous secrets that sometimes accompany and taint the natural urges of adults? Whatever the reasons for my elective ignorance, the effort was proving futile as I entered puberty. In the cafeteria and out on the schoolyard, my peers began saying things like, “She goes down for nickels,” and “It’s Thursday and he’s wearing green. Must be a fag.” Sometime near the end of seventh grade, Rosalie Twerski passed by my desk and said, “Ick. Who’s got BO?” I sniffed my underarm and realized it was me. Humiliated, I began smearing on Pop’s Mennen Speed Stick deodorant and dousing myself with his Old Spice aftershave even though, at the time, I was whiskerless. In ninth grade, a girl in my homeroom disappeared from our midst and the rumor circulated that she was pregnant. This confused me; Pauline was one of the quiet ones, not one of the hoody girls you might expect to get “knocked up.” Then the worst happened. Roxy Rajewski, the mentally challenged tomboy from our neighborhood, was on the front page one morning. Her raped and bludgeoned body had been disposed of along the litter-strewn riverbank behind the abandoned mill where Lonny and I had once thrown rocks at the windows for the cheap thrill of hearing them smash. To the best of my knowledge, Roxy’s murderer was never found, probably because no one looked very hard.
Ready or not, during the head-spinning year 1971, I finally began to uncover the sad details about Frances’s origins. That summer, poised between my high school graduation and my first year of college, I discovered the feel-good fun of beer-chugging with my buddies and the sweet release of marijuana-heightened blow jobs courtesy of my first steady girlfriend, Jerilyn, who was two years my senior and, to me, worldly because she was going to community college. Jerilyn stopped short of letting us go all the way but, stoned herself, she would direct me in how to finger her to shuddering ecstasy.
I worked two jobs that summer, helping Pop and Chino at the lunch counter through the noontime rush and then driving back from New London to Three Rivers, where I was an afternoon cashier and delivery boy at a downtown pharmacy called Medical Drug. Two or three times per shift, my boss would send me out on the road in the Medical Drug Volks
wagen. “Punch buggy blue!” kids would shout as I passed by, and I’d toot the horn and wave. I delivered medicine to sick kids and shut-ins, honchos and hypochondriacs, the afflicted, the addicted. At eighteen, I was getting my first close-up look at the myriad ways in which people whose last name was not Funicello lived their lives, and my first unavoidable realization that life wasn’t necessarily fair. “Medical Drug,” I’d say when customers came to their doors, and as they went to get their money or bent to sign their welfare paperwork, I’d study who they were via their furniture and framed photographs, the magazines and snacks on their coffee tables, the knickknacks on their windowsills, the shows on their talking TVs.
Once I had to leave Pop and Chino to their own devices at the lunch counter and pinch-hit at the drugstore for the morning delivery guy. A customer in the projects, an elderly man who must have been hard of hearing, had been watching a soap opera when I rang his bell. The TV was turned to such a thunderous volume that the actors seemed not so much to be performing their lines as screaming at each other. Glimpsing Joanne Tate, the long-suffering heroine of Search for Tomorrow, I was glad to see that she had managed to survive whatever melodramatic miseries the writers had thrown at her since I’d lost track. That was another thing I was beginning to comprehend: the difference between the flamboyant problems of TV characters and the quieter desperations of the afflicted at whose doorways I showed up with their medications.
Sunday was my day off from both my summer jobs—my time to kick back and relax, go to the beach, or, if her parents were away, hang out with Jerilyn at her house. But Pop had developed hypertension by then. On the advice of his doctor to discover ways to relax more, he bought himself a second- or third-hand fishing boat with a cramped little cabin and an unreliable inboard motor. He named his boat Sweet Marie in honor of my mother. Honored or not, she refused to come aboard. “I can’t swim,” she reminded Pop. “And anyways, I just don’t see what’s so much fun about hooking some poor fish by its mouth and yanking him out of his . . . what’s the word I’m looking for, Felix?”