by Barbara Hall
And they became my parents.
Good stopping point. I was exhausted.
I put the letter aside and turned off the light.
I lay in the dark for a long time thinking about it, this sudden and profound history lesson. My parents never talked about their past; it was as if they didn’t have one. I used to ask my mother about her family and she would say, “Oh, sweetie, you’re never going to have to worry about them.”
I didn’t understand why family was something you’d have to be worried about. But I was smart enough to sense that a sad story had to be behind it all. And I didn’t want to make her sad. I never liked to think of either of my parents as having strong emotions apart from joy and humor. When you’re a kid, your own emotions are all you can handle. Later you let your friends have some, but that was where it ended.
The story was interesting and I had grown to like having my mother’s voice so close to me. Now I felt she was under the bed, at least, instead of always under a white stone in Westwood.
I still wasn’t entirely sure how any of it related to me having a car.
All I knew was that I was slowly losing my concern and the sense that I had been deprived. Maybe that was the point.
My father was not a stupid man at all.
SIXTEEN
and Two Days
• 1 •
Zoe thought it was completely Gothic that I met a boy in a cemetery.
“Things like that never happen to me,” she complained.
“That’s because you don’t have a dead mother,” Talia reminded her.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, and for a moment she actually pouted and seemed jealous.
“So your dad is not kidding about the car,” Zoe said. We were eating our lunches on the manicured lawn of Hillsboro. The sun was shining and I had a sudden image of what we would look like to someone like Clyde Pittman. To him I would have been one of the in crowd, one of those fancy types in Union Grade who wouldn’t give him the time of day. It also made me think of Mick, and whether or not he saw me that way. I had never really thought about social classes before, never thought of myself as rich or privileged. But now it was starting to come into focus.
“No,” I said. “He’s not kidding. There will be no car for Little Lynnie Russo.”
“That is so bizarre,” Talia said. “It’s tragic, really.”
“It’s not,” I said. “I mean it sucks, but it’s not tragic.”
To Talia everything was tragic. And I realized that before I’d started reading the letter, I would have agreed with her.
“I see you’re still rocking the bird bracelet?” Zoe asked.
I had almost forgotten it. I had slept in it and woken up with tiny little bird marks on my wrist.
“I’m starting to like it,” I said. “Is that scary?”
“Pretty scary,” Zoe admitted. “I mean, the birds look deformed.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of metaphor. Even deformed birds can fly,” Talia said.
I laughed, but there was something to it.
“So rumor is you went surfing with Jen,” Zoe said, “the day you ditched. Are you a surfer now? Should we prepare for the red beads and the Uggs and the lingo?”
“It was really fun. I think I’m good at it.”
“Lynne, we cannot lose you to surfing,” Talia insisted.
“Yeah, we’d rather lose you to the guy in the cemetery.”
“You’re not going to lose me to anything.”
But I wasn’t entirely sure about that. I was changing and I could feel it.
I stayed late at school to finish my homework. But also, I realized, because I was avoiding the letter. I wasn’t afraid of it anymore. I just wanted to make it last.
My cell phone rang as I was riding home on the late bus. The number that came up was unfamiliar to me. I answered it anyway.
“Hi,” he said, “it’s me, the guy from the cemetery.”
I laughed. “I meet a lot of guys in the cemetery.”
“Mick,” he said.
“I’m kidding. I don’t meet guys in cemeteries.”
“Oh, okay. I’m nervous.”
I smiled. I thought it was cute that he admitted to being nervous.
“How did you get my number?”
He said, “I know a guy who dates a girl at Hillsboro. He got me a school roster. Your number is on there. Is that creepy? Am I stalking you?”
“Not yet. But there’s time.”
He laughed.
He said, “Well, I was just wondering if you wanted to get together sometime and hang out.”
“In the cemetery?”
“Sure, if you want to.”
“You’re totally missing all my jokes.”
He said, “Well, I take all my dates to the cemetery, so I thought it would make sense.”
“Funny.”
“So I guess I just admitted that I’m asking you on a date.”
“You don’t do this a lot, do you?”
“Almost never,” he admitted. “I mean, I have dated. Not in cemeteries. You know, this went much better when I practiced it in my room.”
“Oh, really? What did I say when you practiced it?”
“You said you’d love to go out with me sometime.”
“I’d love to go out with you sometime.”
“Oh, shit,” he said. “I didn’t practice anything after that.”
“Well, let’s see. Here’s where you tell me what night you were thinking of and what we might do.”
“I haven’t thought about that, either.”
“Do you want to call me back after you’ve rehearsed it?”
“No, no, I can think on my feet. We could see a movie. No, wait, we could get dinner. No, probably just meeting at Jamba Juice or something in Larchmont after you get out of school. And if we like each other over smoothies, then we could do something more serious.”
“Like go to the cemetery.”
“Right.”
“Okay, when?”
“Tomorrow. Which is a Friday. That’s a good day for a date.”
“It’s a date. See, that wasn’t so hard.”
He laughed. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
“No,” I answered honestly. “This will be my first juice date.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Lynne,” he said. A kind of electric current went through me when he said my name. I hung up the phone and settled back in the seat and smiled out the window at all the things passing. The world looked good to me.
• 2 •
When I got home, the letter was waiting, and except for a snack and a quick glance at MTV, I didn’t avoid it.
September 28
Dear Noah,
You tried to talk to me as we were leaving English class today. You asked if you could look at my notes for the test next week. I told you that my notes were a mess and that you should ask someone else. You looked kind of upset. I realized that you didn’t really care about the notes—you were just trying to talk to me and I blew you off. You were aware that I was blowing you off. I felt bad about it and I wanted to explain. What I would have said to you is that we can’t get to know each other. The whole idea is that we don’t know each other—that’s why I can write the letter to you. If I get to know you, I’ll have something to protect. After all, I have plenty of friends and relatives and even my pastor whom I could tell this story to. I’ve had the opportunity but I let it pass because by virtue of knowing me, they will want to disbelieve me. They will want it not to be true. They might even try to tell me it’s not true and that would make me completely crazy, crazier than I already fear that I am.
But I’m not crazy. I’m just someone who was born into insanity. I’m sane, and this letter is my last best hope of hanging on to that.
By the way, what I want you to know when you read this is that I’m probably completely in love with you. I don’t really know you so it’s not entirely accurate to say that. But I love who I think you are,
the person I’ve made up in my mind. That person is warm and funny and worldly and sweet and wise. I know you’re handsome; that’s not a subjective thing. It’s just a fact. I just want you to know I love you for bigger reasons than that. Believe me, I have imagined it so many times—me and you in a perfect world, or at least a world in which I’m not carrying around the secret of my criminal life. In a weird way, I have to keep you at a distance and write this letter to you so you won’t make the mistake of falling in love with me, too. Because you can’t have me. I can’t have you. I’m damaged goods. I’m the wrong girl for reasons you can’t even imagine. I am the enemy.
It would have been nice. I want you to know that. You and me holding hands at assembly or at a movie. Us being a couple. Noah and Cat, Cat and Noah. I think about it all the time. It stirs up the same feeling I always had watching kids playing on the playground, on the monkey bars and the swing set and the slide. They get to do that because they aren’t me. Because they don’t know what I know. They haven’t done what I’ve done.
And I also want to tell you that never in a million years did I ever think you’d be interested in me. That was not in the game plan.
But I digress.
Now for the story of my brother.
My brother Gregory is twelve years older than I am, the product of my mother’s first marriage. He’s a half brother but that hardly matters. He is a minister in North Carolina and he’s married to a very nice woman named Suzanne. They don’t have any kids yet. We see them periodically. They come to visit and the visits are always stiff and awkward. He doesn’t know my mother well, because she didn’t raise him, and he resents (I suspect) me and my sister because my mother did raise us. You can imagine his position. Why were we good enough for her and he wasn’t? He doesn’t have any perspective on it, that’s the problem. The person who does have perspective is his wife, Suzanne. She gave me a lot of the history I’m about to tell you.
I realize I’m bad at creating suspense because now I’ve revealed that my mother never got her son back. He was raised by my grandparents. My parents had me and my sister, but Gregory’s relationship to our family remained sporadic. We saw him when we drove to the farm to see my grandparents every other Sunday. He stayed with us now and then and always at Christmas. But by the time I was seven he was married (he married very young) and in seminary. After that, he moved around a lot because that’s how a preacher’s life works. He was handsome and charming and charismatic (he looked a little like you, to be honest) and I adored him, but we just didn’t have much of a relationship. It took some time, but eventually I understood why, mostly through Suzanne’s stories. He has a lot of anger toward my mother, but that’s because he doesn’t know the whole story. For some reason, I’m the person in possession of the whole story. Maybe that burden always falls on the youngest. And it’s a very heavy burden.
Here is what I know of the next part of my parents’ lives, after they met in the bowling alley. Some of it I’m guessing at and most of it is culled from family dinners after Suzanne had had too much wine and started to talk, but only to me. Maybe she thought I was too young to remember or understand. But I’ve always been able to retain things.
My father began to court my mother in the usual way. After several dates, she revealed that she had been married before and had a son. He might have cared about that in the beginning, but by this point he was taken with her and he was willing to accept her history. She took him home to meet her parents and they mostly approved. They saw that he was not exactly their class (laborer versus wealthy landowners again), but he was handsome and had a decent job and, unlike a lot of men in that era, he was willing to take her on. My mother’s parents were a little bit nervous because by now Gregory was seven and they had gotten used to having him and secretly had no plans to give him up. He was their son. I can imagine that my grandpa Will had sized my father, Clyde, up and decided that he was too weak to put up much of a fight. Possibly they had had some walks in the backyard and Grandpa Will had let him know that Gregory was not part of the deal. My father must have known that Fern had every intention of taking her son into the equation. But there was probably a part of my father that didn’t want to take on a ready-made family. So there was a complicit agreement. Such an agreement, however, didn’t make Grandfather Will entirely comfortable. He was examining his arsenal and preparing for a fight, but as it turned out, the ultimate weapon appeared out of nowhere.
About a month before my parents’ wedding took place, a woman in Union Grade came forth, claiming to be pregnant by my father. It was a scandal on a plate. Getting a woman pregnant in those days was a dark deed, something that mainly occurred among the lower classes, and this only served to remind my father that he wasn’t one of the elite. Suddenly he saw the whole thing slipping away—he stood to lose the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, along with the social status that her family could afford him. It’s not clear if my mother ever knew about this. She was very proper and proud, and she had already left one man for cheating on her. But her parents were intent on this marriage taking place, if for no other reason than to get this wayward daughter off their hands, not to mention keeping her son in their home.
Then a backyard talk definitely took place. It went like this: My grandfather had money, and money could make anything disappear. He was willing to write a check to this troublesome young woman and make the whole issue go away. But there would be a certain price attached. One was that my father would go ahead and marry my mother and take her off their hands once and for all. The bigger price tag was that there would be no discussion of taking Gregory from them. Grandfather Will probably threw in some other perks, such as helping my father get set up in a good job, maybe even a financial contribution. But the heftiest part of the deal was that Gregory would remain with them. I can picture my father shaking on the deal, in the backyard of my grandfather’s house, overlooking his prosperous farm.
The final part of the agreement was that my mother was never to know.
It was a deal with the devil. And once you make a deal with the devil, your soul is up for grabs.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about evil, if it exists, and if it does exist, how it works. But I do think that once you sell a tiny part of your soul, you may as well sell the whole thing. You may as well have a sign over your head saying, “I can be bought.”
My father was bought.
How did he feel when he walked away from that deal? I want to believe that he was just in love and hopeful and certain that he could somehow make up for it. I want to believe that some small part of his soul was still engaged and hoping for the best. He was betting on a bright future. He wasn’t selling the best part of himself to the highest bidder. He had plans.
But the thing about dancing with the devil is this: You’re not done dancing until the devil is done dancing. And the devil is never done.
So they got married. It was a small wedding in the Methodist church in Union Grade. My parents were dressed to the nines and they looked beautiful. My brother Gregory was a groomsman. It all looked very good and that’s what they were buying into: how it looked.
The first years of their marriage are murky, uncertain years to me. Suzanne didn’t provide any information as to how that went, so I can only imagine. What I imagine is this: My mother kept talking about getting Gregory back and my father kept giving her all these rational arguments as to why it was better for him to stay with his grandparents. They’d be taking him away from the life he knows. If my father adopted him, Gregory would have to change his name. They can still see him anytime they want. They’re going to have their own family. As the years passed, it got harder and harder for her to get him back and she just got worn down by the arguments.
But in the back of her mind, she knew this: She only married my father to get her son back. Without that, what was he to her? He moved her away from her job in Danville and into a stifling small-town existence in Union Grade. They lived near his parents, and my fathe
r’s meddling, semi-crazy mother dropped by whenever she felt like it. He wasn’t making that much money, so her life was far from comfortable; she had to make sacrifices. And none of this fit in with how she saw her life evolving. She was beautiful, after all. One of the pretty people. The pretty people don’t have to suffer. Yet she was suffering.
She missed her son, I imagine. She thought of him living out his life a few miles away, turning into a really spectacular young man, gifted in music and academics, with no reflection on her because she wasn’t raising him. She was losing him to her parents. Deep down, her resentment grew. This was not the deal she had made. Unconsciously, she must have been aware that some other deal had been made. Some kind of secret deal that her husband would never admit to her. She lost respect for him. She wanted to go home. But she couldn’t. She was trapped.
She was trapped in Union Grade, where the social class was intact. No one acknowledged her pedigree because it came from some distant place, and anyway, a woman’s pedigree was only defined by her husband’s achievement. They were permanently on the outside looking in. It was a place she had never been to before and she hated it. And because she hated it, she blamed my father. Nothing he could do was good enough for her. The only thing she ever really wanted him to do was get her son back.
Still, she persisted. She hung in there. A second divorce was unthinkable. She smoked, and ate very little and drank iced tea. My father insisted on having more children. She didn’t want them, but he told her it was part of the deal. She agreed to get pregnant and my sister was born. She wasn’t born in any typical way, though. My mother’s pregnancy had been difficult. Mainly because she smoked, and ate very little and drank iced tea. My sister was born two months premature, in the car on the way to the hospital. Everything about my sister’s entrance into the world was wrong. First, she was born too soon and should have died. Second, she was a girl. Third, and the most unforgivable sin, she lived.