Maybe it’s jet lag but I cannot muster any enthusiasm. I just sit at the cash register with a deeply crabby look on my face that doesn’t change all day. The only time it even comes close to changing is when a group of ten-year-old kids comes running into the store and all start clapping loudly. At first I think it’s a Boy Scout troop putting on a little show for money, but it turns out they’re clapping to set off the sound-activated ghosts hanging all over the store. At the sound of a clap, the ghosts start shaking and making a high pitched “Ooooo” noise. It’s not unlike my “huuuu” chant, but without the accompanying golden light it’s brutal.
As soon as the ghosts stop, the kids clap again, setting them off. Everyone in the mall knows about these ghosts, and throughout the day, just as it finally gets quiet, someone sticks their head in, claps, and leave me huu-ing in hell.
Besides the ghosts, the relentless use of the word “cute,” and eating muffins the size of Bundt cakes for lunch, the hardest thing about the day is my mother explaining my behavior and appearance to every customer—whether they ask about me or not.
“That’s how they dress in Europe, I guess!” she says, repeatedly. Or if I fail to give a customer a receipt: “In Copenhagen you don’t give receipts, I guess!”
When I correct her and tell her I live in Amsterdam, she blames that on Europe too. “I guess in Europe it’s either Copenhagen or Amsterdam. It can’t be both!”
While this makes no sense to me, it seems to make perfect sense to the customers, who all smile and nod in agreement.
The harsh judging I had been required to do since landing in Indiana was really making it difficult to showcase my new “ability to love” talent. But tonight I am making dinner for my entire family. Tonight is Pannekoeken Night.
Family lore has it that as a teenager I’d made Jello-O that never gelled. Many a bewildered dinner discussion was spent trying to figure out how I managed that. But now I am going to make a feast of savory and sweet Dutch pancakes everyone is going to love. And the great thing about pancakes is that you have to keep making them, thereby avoiding a great deal of the dinner table discussion.
“Lauren, can I get another apple one?” my sister calls sleepily from the table.
“Why yes, you can! Any other orders?” I ask, doing my family pancake-making dance in the kitchen. The pannekoeken are coming out perfectly—thin and crepelike. Perfect.
“She can’t balance a checkbook or remember her house key to save her life,” my dad chimes in, “but she sure can make some pancakes, can’t she!” He polishes off another sausage delight.
This moment is not about pancakes. It is about me giving of myself unto them—doing something that is entirely not about me. And as I watch my family using way too much syrup, I realize I’d been thinking about them every moment of the day in Amsterdam. That with everything I did, I’d imagine them watching me do it. Approving or disapproving (mostly disapproving), but they were with me.
“Mom’s choking!” my sister yells, interrupting my reverie.
I run to the table and find that, sure enough, my mom is choking on her apple pancake.
We all freeze and watch her for a moment. But when we finally realize that wishing the moment away isn’t working, someone takes action—the person most concerned for my mother: my mother. She reaches her finger into her throat and sends a piece of pancake flying out of her mouth.
As the whole family—still shaken—clears their plates away, my mother breaks the silence.
“Lauren, I’m awfully proud of you for making it on your own over there. I just wish I’d told you sooner so you wouldn’t have tried to kill me with those Danish pancakes.”
The next day Mom and I return to Romancing the Seasons. We are both quiet on the drive to the mall, perhaps due to last night’s brush with matricide. (“How was your vacation?” “Well, I killed my mom with a pannekoeken, so that was awkward. From now on I’m going to put two eggs in the batter—do you think that’s too eggy?”)
As Mom opens and readies the store, I notice how she hums softly to the Perry Como Christmas music and deeply inhales the Glade evergreen room freshener. This shop is her New Age bookstore. In the calm before the customers arrive, my mother gazes at the Santa doorstops and Rudolph’s-head coasters and sees nothing but answer, answer, answer.
ARE YOU MY MOTHER?
I was lunchtime at Grandview Elementary School in Indianapolis and I scanned the sea of fellow first graders to pick whom to sit next to. I chose Billy Randolph because our striking similarities lead me to believe that we may be long-lost kin. Judging by his skin tone, Billy appeared to be kind of black and kind of white. Just like me.
As soon as I sat down next to him, he curled an arm around his tater tots to guard them from me.
“Hey, I’m kinda black and kinda white, like you,” I told him.
“No, you’re not,” he said. He pointed at Shawna, the blondest, whitest girl in the first grade. Shawna was so pale you could see her delicate organs working hard to keep her alive under paper-thin skin. Nobody ever wanted to invite Shawna to birthday parties because she was allergic to milk, sugar, grass, and air, and she always arrived with her own allergy-friendly birthday cake and a special mat to sit on.
“You look just like her,” Billy said, “but fatter.”
But Shawna and I looked nothing alike. Sure, I had blonde hair and blue eyes and white skin, but I didn’t look like that.
The next day at lunch I sat next to Rachel Fishman.
“I’m Jewish, like you,” I told her.
Wendy was at least open to the possibility. “But you don’t go to temple. I’ve never seen you there,” she said.
I told her I go every Saturday but I sat in the back. I thought I was doing okay until she waved a giant saltine cracker in front of my face.
“What’s this? What’s it called?” she demanded.
My answer—“a Jewish cracker”—made her so mad she turned me in to the lunchroom attendant for saying “mean things about Jewish people.”
“I would never do that! I’m Jewish!” I insisted. I continued to defend myself as I was transferred to Shawna’s table.
Shawna wasn’t eating. She had her head down, practically lying on the table, as she drew pictures of a world she’d never know—a world where big, sugary cupcakes sit in a field of pollen-heavy grass.
“I wish I was in this picture,” she said, holding up her magical dreamland.
“Well, you can’t be,” I told her. “You’d throw up and pass out and die.”
Shawna nodded her head slowly, still coloring green for grass. “Yep,” she said. “That’s exactly right. You must have allergies too.”
Besides the fact that I’d never had allergies—that wasn’t interesting enough for me—I knew Shawna wasn’t my long-lost sister because she was too similar to my real sister, or at least, my sister in my adopted family. Elizabeth didn’t have allergies but she did have thyroid disease, which exempted her from gym class and somehow was connected to her love of stamp collecting.
In the third grade my teacher, Ms. Hart, announced, “Today we’re going to do family trees.” She wrote the word “heritage” on the chalkboard in her loopy script, and before she got to “tage,” I was on my feet with my hand in the air.
“I’m adopted! I’m adopted!” I screamed, with such intensity that the other kids in the class whipped around to see if it was some special way of saying, “I’m on fire! I’m on fire!”
When Ms. Hart explained what being adopted means, someone in the back of the class yelled out, “Gross!”
“It’s not gross,” she said, “It’s a wonderful thing. Lauren has a family that wanted her very much and therefore she has a family tree.” Ms. Hart handed me the ditto sheet with the empty tree for me to fill in.
“No, I’m adopted. I have no trees,” I said. Then I made a sad clown face and stared out the window at the barren landscape. “Sigh.”
The mystery of my origins was endlessly fascinatin
g to me. While my parents could account for my sister’s whereabouts every day of her life so far, nobody knew where I had been the first eight days of my life. This didn’t prevent my sister from theorizing, however. “Just lying there in the trash can, looking at stuff,” she’d often posit.
My beloved grandmother said she hadn’t wanted any direct skin-on-skin contact with me when I first arrived on the scene. “Back then nobody knew what kind of germs you might have, and I didn’t know if your mom had a chance to really wash you off yet,” she explained. “I made them put you on the floor on one of the dog towels.”
She also made sure to point out that my biological parents could have dropped me right before they handed me to my new parents and had just acted as if nothing had happened. “They do it at the grocery store with the apples all the time.”
Since my early history was so murky, every person I came into contact with was a potential family member. After the first-grade Easter party at school, I threw up in the hallway (due to the stress of the egg hunt). By the time the janitor was done cleaning up after me, I was convinced he was my real father. His misdiagnosed dyslexia and love of harmonica seemed oddly familiar. Plus he had messy hair, which I had almost every day when I first woke up. The similarities were eerie.
My real mother, I once concluded, was the newscaster on our local TV station. All of Indiana loved her and marveled at her beauty and poise. She was the most beautiful woman I was exposed to on a daily basis. The similarities between us—the hair that grew out of the top of her head, the two eyes and the skin covering all of her body—were so uncanny that watching the news was like looking in a mirror.
By middle school—perhaps well before—nobody wanted to hear about my being adopted anymore, which left me no choice but organized religion. I was forced to join the local Protestant church to get a fresh audience.
When the minister announced, “We’re passing around a sign-up sheet for the annual Thanksgiving dinner, so put down your last name and how many members are in your family,” I wrote in, “Weedman, family of 1,” and passed it down the row. Before the sermon was over someone had passed me a note saying, “Lauren, please join us for dinner. Love, The Ernest family of 8.”
As the church started emptying out, Mrs. Ernest motioned me over to join her family. I didn’t waste any time—I made a few church-appropriate jokes about the minister’s haircut to endear myself and took notes on how the Ernests dressed so I could begin to blend in more easily.
“What does your family think about you being here all alone every Sunday?” Mrs. Ernest asked, with such deep concern I started to worry she was going to call child protective services.
“They know but they don’t care,” I said. “I tried to get them to come to church to gain a sense of fellowship, but my dad’s always like, ‘No, you go ahead—your mom and I are busy putting chains and locks on our bedroom doors to keep you out.’” I followed up this revelation with a face that said, “Pretty crazy, huh?”
“What? Locks and chains?” Mrs. Ernest said. “Are you being funny?”
“Only to survive, only to survive,” I told her. I gestured toward the picture of Jesus on the front of the hymnal, as if to say, “This guy knows what I’m talking about.”
Truth be told, the chains and the locks hadn’t appeared until everyone in the family had had enough of me spending every day after school milling about in their rooms. I’d try on their clothes, dip into their beauty products, and, most importantly, search for clues about who these people were. The things I really wanted to find—diaries, anything sex-related, personal letters—were never found. Which only made me hungrier for something graphic and gritty.
Mrs. Ernest was understandably shocked by what I was saying, so I told her more.
“Every night I see them enter the combinations to unlock the locks. They think I’m watching to decipher the code, so they block the locks with their hands. Isn’t that insane? Like I could tell from across the hallway ‘2 left, 19 right.’”
What I didn’t mention to the Ernest family was that the reason I didn’t try to crack the code was because it was so much easier to just get a screwdriver and take the entire door off its hinges. Once I’d wrenched the door off and set it against the wall, I could continue my most urgent search unhindered—the search for the secret file.
I was certain that somewhere in the house was hidden a file that held all the information about my birth parents. I had thought about it so much I could see the contents: photos and facts and perhaps half of a heart-shaped golden locket. I knew it was somewhere in our house.
Despite the Ernests’ surprise at my revelation, they began including me in their celebrations and holidays as a “special family member.” They did feel like family to me. Right down to the tension that arose at the dinner table whenever I’d excuse myself to use the restroom.
It was during one of these strained moments that the Ernests’ sixteen-year-old daughter complained (in a voice she knew was loud enough for me to hear all the way upstairs in her closet), “She’d better not be sneaking into my bedroom! And searching for the other half of her locket and messing up my sweater drawer again!”
At that point I decided it was better to confine my relationship with the Ernests to the church, where they had to be nice to me or they’d go to hell.
In high school I tried not to dwell on my missing birth mother, keeping my focus instead on sex and Weight Watchers portioning. But my best friend Jill Schenburg wouldn’t let me forget it.
“Ask your mom about your real mom!” she often urged. “Just ask her!”
In one particular instance, Jill was pestering me from the back seat of her car. We were both lying on the floor—me in the front, her in the back—smoking Benson & Hedges Menthol 100s between classes. (Nothing to see here, folks, just an empty car in the school parking lot with smoke pouring out the windows.)
“How can you not want to know? I’d be going crazy!” Jill repeated, for the millionth time. “Just ask your mom if she has any information she’s never told you!”
“I don’t want to hurt her feelings,” I said. “Or make her think I’m not grateful. I at least need to wait until I’m not grounded. Everyone’s mad at me right now.”
Jill sat up, threw her cigarette out the window, and lit another one. She wanted to skip our next class to get breakfast at Shoney’s Breakfast Bar Buffet, and she wanted me to come with her. It didn’t take much to convince me. Driving out of the parking lot, both of us ducked down in the car so it appeared the car was driving itself away from school. We had a good laugh at that, and then Jill grabbed my hand and said, “You know you’re a Jew. I guarantee you’re going to find out you’re a Jew.”
That night, my mother and I prepared dinner together in the kitchen. She was grilling lamb patties for the slender members of the family (everyone but me) and I was thawing my own Weight Watchers ravioli in the microwave.
“Lauren, don’t stand with your mouth wide open in front of the microwave,” my mother scolded.
I hadn’t realized my mouth was open. My diet left me so hungry, the ravioli-scented radiation blowing out of the microwave must’ve seemed like a snack.
My mother always tended to scare the shit out of me. “Give her a break,” Elizabeth would snap, when I complained about how strict I thought Mom was. “Grandma tied Mom to a tree when she was little,” she’d say, by way of explanation. I used to wonder if this was just a family myth or if it was just harder to find babysitters back then.
But as I watched Mom scrape the lamb patties off the grill and flip them over, I could see how truly angry she was. It was as if she hated that lamb. As if that lamb couldn’t remember its house key day after day, just like me.
Tonight was not a good night to ask her about my birth mother. I did it anyway.
“Mom, can I ask you a question?” My heart was beating like I had just escaped having my ass kicked. Or was about to have it handed to me.
She tossed the lamb patties o
n a platter and gave me a dirty look. “What is it?” she said.
Suddenly I could see everything she was probably mad at me about—that twenty-dollar bill gone missing from her purse, the fact that I smoked not just cigarettes but pot, and that she kept paying for diets that didn’t work.
“What do you want, Lauren?” And now she was also mad at me for waiting so long to ask my question. The buildup was too much and I was tempted to say never mind, but I knew that could sound suspicious. Too suspicious.
“You’ve got two more seconds,” my mother said.
I took a deep breath. “I want to ask you about my real mom.”
I did it. It took eighteen years for me to pop the question, but I did it.
The look on my mom’s face was one I’d never seen before. It retained its anger but gained a sort of hurt too. This was my worst nightmare—to hurt her. In fact, I didn’t think it was possible. Even when she was physically hurt, her predominant expression was anger. (“Dammit, I twisted my ankle!”) So I had stolen from her, lied to her, talked smack about her behind her back, and now this.
“Lauren, I am your real mom,” she said, clearly and directly. She turned around and started putting the napkins on the table.
“You know what I mean,” I said. “I mean my biological parents.” This was good. I was able to continue and not get too flustered.
She didn’t answer my question and instead sent me to gather everyone for dinner. Which took a little while—Elizabeth was in her bedroom so she had to re-chain her door.
Picking at the crust of my Weight Watchers meal, I figured that was that, so I was surprised when my mom raised the subject again at the table.
“Is this why you’ve been going to Hebrew school?” she asked. “Do you think you’re Jewish? Because you’re not. They don’t give Jewish babies away like that. You have to go through the Jewish Community Center and it’s a very long process. Did Jill Schenburg tell you that you were Jewish?” She pronounced Schenburg with her interpretation of how a Jewish person talks—half screaming.
A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body Page 15