On weekends when Leo displaced me, she was glad to see me, and she fed me properly. Until it was too chilly, my sister and I drove to the beach and lay on the sand while children played around us; their voices, their parents’ radios, and the sound of the waves floating through the air. I felt full of the heat of the sun, watching the ocean, hearing the disembodied words. I can always face the world better after I’ve been to the beach, where nothing is a problem, because nothing exists—just sand, heat, the ocean, and me.
I lived that way for five months; but it was an endless, bottomless time, with very few landmarks. The mailbox anchored the days as they passed. A letter never came—or rather, a telegram came first.
“Sell the car. Come immediately. Letter follows. Love, Jake.”
Nine words: Every one counted.
My mother was outraged. He hadn’t written in five months. In all that time, my mother never said I told you so; she waited without comment, trying not to hurt my feelings.
“Come immediately! That’s ridiculous!” she said. “How can you sell the car so fast? Why should you even sell it? How can you trust this man? Why didn’t he write if he wants you to come immediately? Who does he think you are?”
With every question I felt more obstinate and more strongly that she was daring me to answer—when obviously there were no answers, certainly none that I could supply, or even bear to contemplate. My mother was protecting me from Jake in the most efficient way she knew, by demolishing me first herself. And the more negative she was, the more positive I had to become.
We agreed I would wait until a letter arrived.
“Don’t run when he calls,” my mother said. ‘“Let it be his turn to wait.”
Ennis saw it differently.
“Why not go? It’s a chance to see Europe, isn’t it? Even if the marriage doesn’t work out—and no sense fooling yourself, it probably won’t—at least you’ll have been to Paris. Don’t deny yourself experiences.”
I was happy; Jake wanted me to be with him. Sally was the only one who understood how I felt, though I suspect that she, too, felt sorry for me. Soon Leo would be back; he was expecting a transfer. They would be married, and she would only need the apartment a month or so longer. Sauerkraut had begun to lose its luster for both of us. She was sure I should go to Europe, immediately. I would find out what I needed to know there, not here.
My sister thought of other things, as she had when we decided to get married.
“Why don’t you wait until he writes before you decide? He said he’d write. And then at least you’ll know more. Now you don’t even know where you’ll be going— France, Germany, England, or where you’ll be living. You don’t know what you’ll need. How long will you be there? Wait until he writes you and then decide. There isn’t any point in making up your mind until you have all the facts. Sometimes not making a decision is a decision.”
She was right; and besides, I had no choice but to wait. Jake’s letters—two or three of them, fat pages, scrawled words, wonderful letters—arrived in a week.
Jake had been in Munich, beautiful, with Oktoberfest—beer and spitted lambs. He’d made his first joke in German. He had civilian friends. He’d sold his typewriter and bought some German clothes and only wore his uniform when the Army gave him no choice. As staff photographer for the post newspaper, he’d taken pictures of Gregory Peck. He was being transferred to Stuttgart, to Special Services. If I came, we could live off the post, wherever we wanted. Maybe we could buy a car. Everything was cheap or could be traded for. I should send him a cable to let him know when I was arriving, and he would borrow a car and meet me.
Even my mother agreed that I should go. I bought a ticket for an outside cabin, a single, on the Ryndam, a Holland America ship that was all one class. It was to sail in mid-November.
8. JIL
NINE
AND NEUROTIC
I really wanted to be a good Girl Scout, but I couldn’t figure out how. It seemed as if everyone else had gotten instructions but me. I loved the forest-green uniform, the sash that draped from shoulder to hip, as if I were a Miss America contestant. I loved the badges I worked so hard to acquire: Basketry, Drawing and Painting, Music, Home Health, Sewing, Cooking, all with tiny embroidered pictures. I liked to follow rules. And I liked the scout troop meeting place, a long rectangular cabin built from actual logs, with a small bathroom at one end and a raised platform at the other, where we performed Indian chants, beating sticks to keep time, and practiced our oath and songs. I loved the oath itself, promising enthusiastically to be “clean in thought, word, and deed.” It was the first time I ever wondered about the alternative.
I loved the Girl Scout Handbook, thick with what seemed to be all the advice anyone could ever need: how to survive in the woods, how to build a fire from twigs, how to be a good citizen. Surely somewhere in these hundreds of pages I would find the instructions for how to be the thing I most longed for: just like everyone else.
In June, after school ended, my entire troop went to Girl Scout Camp for five days. Amazingly, my mother gave me permission, despite her fear—her horror—of my eating and sleeping outside her dominion. The Girl Scouts were so wholesome, so American, that she couldn’t summon up the will to resist my pleas.
The camp was scruffy and bare, a murky pond and a quartet of cold, damp cabins huddled around the dusty circle where we built our campfires and gathered in the evenings to roast marshmallows and sing songs. In between cooking breakfast on the rusty barbecue pits and the evening songfest there wasn’t much to do; it was too cold to swim, and we quickly tired of hiking in the dark, piney woods. Without much purpose or order to our days, the group quickly devolved. There were tormentors and victims, just as there were in school; but here we had eight hours a day of unsupervised, unseen time.
Luckily for me, we had a new member, who was almost too good to be true. The new girl had a lisp, and a limp. She wore glasses; best of all, her name was Bertha. To my enormous relief, Bertha took some of the heat off me; she was my limping, lisping force field.
At nine years old, I had no decency or shame. If Bertha could become the new bottom rung of the ladder, maybe I could scurry up a couple of rungs while she drew fire. If she was “them,” could I be “us”?
I bounced from group to group, girl to girl, trying to burrow my way into the social scene. By day two, Bertha recognized me as her most likely friend; but I rejected her soundly, ignoring her looks, her conversation, moving away when I saw her limping toward me, marshmallow stick aloft. I was not outwardly cruel, partly because I didn’t have the courage, but mostly because I didn’t know how. I’d been too busy trying not to get rejected to have had any experience with rejecting anyone myself. Mostly I ignored Bertha completely, until she caught on, and gave up pursuing my friendship.
By day three I had made some inroads with our social sovereign, Elizabeth, and her entourage. They let me sit at their picnic table for lunch, join their team at Sing. Maybe I’ve figured out the rules, I exulted. Maybe I could navigate this world.
On day five we packed up our sleeping bags and duffels and waited on the sandy shore of the pond for the bus to take us home. It was a chilly morning, so I wore the ugly green parka my mother insisted I bring, embarrassingly bulky and a hideous shade of iron-green, like the underside of old leaves. The hood hung down my back, trimmed with ratty fake fur that looked like it had been taken from an elderly German shepherd.
The girls were chatting, giggling; Elizabeth was whispering something to one of her lieutenants. I joined in whenever I could, happy just to be sitting there with them in the cool morning air.
“I want to ask you something,” Elizabeth said, leaning toward me. Her Virginia lilt made “ask” into a two-syllable word. “Would you like to join our new club?”
I was stunned. I looked into her dark blue eyes. The color almost matched her thick navy pea coat, the coat all the girls in her group were wearing that year. She was so pretty, so long-limbed and suppl
e, like a willow. I wanted to be her more than I’d ever wanted anything.
“It’s going to be a different kind of club, an acting club,” she said. “We’re going to act out scenes from plays. Donna told me you can write stuff for us.”
I nodded vigorously. “That would be great.”
“Cool. We’re going to call it the Shakespeare Club, but we’re not going to use just Shakespeare.”
I was thinking of the March girls in Little Women, putting on theatricals in the attic. I would be Jo!
“It’s kind of cold today, you know?” she said, as she eyed my jacket: “That looks warm.”
I stopped nodding.
“Why don’t you put your hood up?” she asked. “You’d be warmer.”
I wanted to believe she was being friendly. “I’m okay,” I said.
“Go ahead,” she said, her voice cold. “Put your hood up.”
The other girls had stopped talking, and were all looking at me. Two of the girls stepped closer. Each took hold of one side of my hood, and then pulled it up and over my head, quickly, and the sand they’d packed into it poured down my face, in my eyes, my mouth, my hair, and down my shirt, where it ran cold and damp down my chest and back.
I was too stunned to cry. I ran to the cabin, shaking sand out of my hair and clothes, blinking hard, wiping it frantically from my ears and off my face. I flung open the door and there was Bertha, sitting cross-legged on a cot, reading a book. She didn’t even ask me what happened.
That night, I told my mother about it, sitting on my bed in the pink-and-white bedroom that was my mother’s candy-cane fantasy of a little girl’s room. She didn’t stop unfolding and folding my laundry when I started to cry.
“You don’t need to bother with those girls,” she said. “They’re just jealous of you.”
I didn’t understand what she meant. I didn’t “bother” with them; they were my classmates, they were the girls I saw every day in school, the girls I wanted to be friends with.
“They’re not jealous of me,” I said. “They hate me.” This was the simple fact of my existence. They weren’t jealous, they detested me. And they did so because there was something deeply, fundamentally wrong with me.
“They’re jealous of you because you’re beautiful and smart.”
I knew I was fairly pretty, plump, sweet-faced, freckled. I wore funny-looking pink glasses with gold flecks in them. I was small and looked younger than my age. I was terribly innocent, even for a nine-year-old. I did believe I was smart, but Elizabeth and her friends would no more be jealous of my brainpower than they would my ability to collect stamps or conjugate verbs.
My mother was insistent: They were jealous because I was beautiful. I was brilliant. I was superior.
I knew none of these things were true. There was something at the heart of me that marked me as broken, something that made me different. I didn’t know what it was, but the other girls could smell it, like jungle animals. I was defective.
“Don’t bother with those girls,” my mother repeated as she picked up the dirty laundry and headed for the basement. “They don’t matter.”
It was a denial of my reality so powerful that I decided then and there that I would never confide in her again.
I did not confide in my mother that fall, when I became convinced I was dying. I had strange pangs in my chest, twinges that stung when I took a deep breath. I was sure they were a heart attack. I lay in the dark at night, terrified of falling asleep, because I thought sleep was just like dying. Sleep was a lack of consciousness, which is what I feared in death. My solution was to delay sleep as long as possible.
I stayed awake reading later and later into the night. My mother tried to stop me. When she turned out the light; I read with a flashlight. She took away the flashlight; I sat by the window, using the faint glow from the streetlamp. She argued and demanded and ordered and nagged. In November, she took me to see Dr. Rosenberg, our fat, friendly pediatrician. Waving away clouds of smoke from his ever-present cigarette, Dr. Rosenberg asked my mother what was wrong. My mother told him I was up until one and two and three o’clock in the morning.
“Are you afraid of going to sleep, shayna?” Dr. Rosenberg asked.
I shook my head no.
“Are you afraid of dying in your sleep?” he asked.
I didn’t have the words to explain it to him. In sleep I wasn’t me; I wasn’t anyone. And if I wasn’t anyone, then what was I? Dead.
He did a quick examination, stethoscope in one hand, cigarette in the other, and then told my mother, “She’s perfectly healthy. She’ll sleep when she needs to. Ignore it.”
But my mother couldn’t ignore things; it wasn’t in her nature. She nagged and argued, checking on me in the dark, hour after hour. She insisted that I stop reading by the window, which not only deprived me of sleep but also strained my eyes; so I lay in darkness, staring up at the ceiling. This made her skin crawl, so she bought me a television, thinking the sound would lull me to sleep.
My father set it up on top of my dresser, hooked to a timer so that once I was asleep, it would shut itself off. I disconnected the timer on the third night.
The black-and-white shadows flickered in my room: The Late Show, The Late Late Show, and sometimes, on really long nights, The Early Show; Fred and Ginger and Busby Berkeley, Esther Williams, James Cagney, Jimmy Stewart, and my favorite, Gary Cooper, always strong, always decent. Bette Davis was bug-eyed and powerful, compelling yet ugly; Katharine Hepburn was tough and witty, with a cold, confident intelligence I admired. I loved soft, beautiful Ingrid Bergman. Barbara Stanwick reminded me of my old Sunday comics favorite Brenda Starr, with her wavy brown hair and the smart twinkle in her eyes. The week I stayed home from school with measles I watched The Thief of Baghdad every day on Million Dollar Movie, and loved it more each day. I memorized all the words to Cole Porter and Irving Berlin musicals and I learned to love two things: old movies and the sleepless night.
That winter I spent a lot of time with my cousin Arlene, who was family, hence safe. Arlene’s mother, Estelle, was my mother’s first cousin, but she was raised with my mother and her brothers like a sister, because her father had died when Estelle was a baby. A year younger than me and sickly, Arlene often stayed home from school and couldn’t be overstimulated. Arlene needed company, and I was it; but despite the fact that she had lots of toys and games, I couldn’t stand her. She was dumb and drippy and she whined. I hated going there, but my mother made me.
“Poor Arlene,” she would say, and I knew I would spend another overheated Saturday night in Arlene’s stuffy bedroom, trying to ignore her sniffling while I played with her latest glitter paint set.
I always brought my Barbie, who was named Jessica, still my favorite name. Cousin Arlene didn’t like playing with my Jessica Barbie; she liked watching television. We watched Bonanza and Bewitched and Beverly Hillbillies. I was most partial, however, to medical shows like Marcus Welby, M.D.
For all his wisdom, Dr. Welby was not a good man for me to consult. I went to bed after every episode with visions of rare blood-borne disorders dancing in my head. One week I even developed prostate cancer, despite my mother’s insistence that this was not possible. She was so frustrated with my constant aches and pains that when I asked her, clutching first one side, then the other, where my appendix was, she replied, “In your head.” I immediately developed a headache.
The twinge in my left side, just at the breastbone, was always worse at Arlene’s house. At night, I lay very still, avoiding the deep breaths that made the hurt worse, my hand over my chest as if I were pledging allegiance to the flag, waiting for the heat of my palm to warm my sore heart and soothe the pain. I never told anyone about the fault line I was sure ran through my heart. But I lay there many nights, pledging allegiance, terrified, while my hand became wet with sweat and I waited to draw my last shallow breath.
When my mother took me to Arlene’s house I could hear her and Aunt Estelle whispering in the kitc
hen. I grew up in a bath of whispers, piecing together stories from a shred and a hint. Horrors were whispered so as not to alarm the children. Sha! my mother would say to my father in the kitchen at night, the kinder.
Sometimes I wondered if I would hear something whispered about me—about my birth. I was terrified of this possibility, sure that whatever I heard would crack me in two and leave me sundered, near death. All the whispers fed my imagination, already overgrown. Adoptees grow up in a land of imagining, forced to create a truth: This is your mother, this is your family, and this is where you belong. I am a whisper, a secret; I am imagined.
Sha, the children can hear you.
At fifteen, I started three things simultaneously: high school, cigarettes, and drugs. I was a docile child, a good girl. I was not a docile teenager. My mother took me to see Dr. Rosenberg. He heard her out, then pulled out his prescription pad and wrote Dr. J. Darling and a phone number, and handed it to my mother.
“An adolescent psychiatrist,” he explained.
“You think she needs a psychiatrist?”
“I think you both could use someone to talk to,” Dr. Rosenberg said, and when he looked at me I swear I saw him wink.
My mother did not believe in psychiatrists. Why would I want to go talk to a stranger about my problems? She did not believe in unburdening herself even to friends. Other people don’t need to know my business. When Linda’s mom cried about her difficult daughter, already climbing out the window at night to meet boys in the woods, my mother said to my father in the kitchen after dinner, She has no shame, washing her dirty laundry in public.
But she trusted Dr. Rosenberg; and she didn’t know what else to do. She was desperate.
I liked Dr. Darling right away. She was friendly and warm, and wore pants with long vests, like Maude on TV. We played Monopoly and Life in her cozy office, and she told me about growing up in North Carolina and how she babysat for James Taylor when she was in high school, which I thought was incredibly cool.
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