Etched in Sand

by Regina Calcaterra

  The fall of my senior year, I’m named cocaptain of the gymnastics team. Under the guidance of Mr. Kelly and Mr. Maguire, I take my college exams and list my two schools of choice. They’re convinced that I’ll get accepted to the university, insisting that if I do, I have to go. “A bachelor’s degree from Stony Brook would serve you better than an associate’s from the community college,” Mr. Maguire says. It makes sense, but I’m afraid to get my hopes up. Preoccupied with whether I’ll have a home during or even after college, I look up a number in the phone book for the only possible family who might be able to help me:

  Calcaterra, Michael and Rose

  Grandma Rose warms up on the other end of the phone when I tell her I haven’t had a relationship with my mother for the last three years. I hear tears overcome her voice when she tells me, “We always wanted to know you kids. Will you let me take you shopping before you graduate? We’re so proud of you.” Before Easter, she and my grandfather—Grampa Mike—accompany me to JCPenney, where they let me pick out a prom dress and put it on their charge card. As Grandma Rose and the cashier exchange niceties at the cash register, I wonder: Why did you punish me when I was little by cutting me off? How was it acceptable for my siblings and me to bear the burden of Cookie alone? As she hands me the hanging plastic bag with my dress inside, Grandma Rose looks in my eyes . . . and suddenly I understand that this purchase is her amends to me. I realize that in this moment—as I’m about to leave high school and enter the world as an adult—I have a choice: I can distance myself and remain cynical toward her, or I can forgive her in the interest of developing a relationship with someone who’s actually my family.

  After I graduate in June 1984, Addie knocks on my bedroom door. “Your mother’s on the phone,” she says.

  My face twists in confusion. “Cookie? Called here?”

  Addie’s expression tells me she’s confused, too. “Yes.”

  I pick up the phone in her bedroom. “Hello?” I hear Addie gently hang up her end of the phone in the kitchen.

  “I called to wish you a happy graduation.” Cookie’s voice is gruff and strained. “I’ve got something for you.”

  I hesitate for the punch line. “What?”

  “A boot up your ass!”

  I chuckle along, slightly stunned that she’s contacted me.

  “Actually, I have something in mind,” I tell her. “I’ve saved money to take a plane to Idaho for a visit. Would you be willing to have me?” My tone is sweet. If I disarm her, she may let me come out to see the kids. I still think about Rosie constantly, even though it’s been four years since we’ve seen each other in person. I try to convince myself that she knows I did everything I could to save her.

  “I guess that’d be okay,” Cookie says. “If you agree to leave your attitude in New York.”

  When I tell Camille I’m going, she’s concerned how I’ll do when I have to face Cookie. “You haven’t seen her since that day in the motel room,” Camille says. “Are you nervous?”

  “Nah. She knows she has to pick me up from the airport, and I’ll make it clear right up front that I’m the boss of that relationship now.”

  Cookie and Norman stand by as I lift my suitcase into the car. “Get a load of you,” Cookie says, looking me over. In the last three years, my hair’s grown back thick, and I set it with rollers so it’s shiny and full. The bare limbs stemming from my tropical pink shorts and T-shirt are fit and trim, and I wear gold jewelry around my tanned neck and wrists. I’ve grown into a young woman with features that Addie says intimidate the boys, and right before graduation I found out I was accepted to the local community college. Feeling certain about my future, I stand before Cookie with satisfaction of who I’ve become. Already it’s clear nothing about her has changed.

  Rosie, who’s obviously afraid to speak in front of Cookie, is blossoming, too. Just a few months shy of twelve years old, my baby sister is almost unrecognizable from the little peanut I knew four years ago. She’s peaked much sooner than the rest of us did, already a head taller than fifteen-year-old Norm. Her father, Vito, was a tall, broad man and Rosie’s frame is taking after his. As a result, although she’s still a preteen, she could easily pass for a sixteen-year-old. Her body is muscular from working on the farm and her face has filled out with sharp cheekbones. Her hair has turned from blond to a shiny, sandy brown. No question, no paternity test needed: Rosie is Vito’s daughter.

  Rosie and I spend most of the time alone near the water, tubing or lying on the rocks near the river. We talk and talk, and she drops hints that she’s embarrassed for me to see the way they live. It’s clear she trusts me as her sole confidante when she informs me about the tensions in the house. She joined cheerleading and often sleeps at a friend’s house or at the home of one of her teachers to avoid the chaos at Cookie and Clyde’s. Thinking of her as a cheerleader makes me sad . . . she’s the one who needs cheering on. I keep those thoughts to myself, familiar with the security that comes with having an organized schedule and stable places to go. Cookie’s house is cluttered with junk, and the barn cats act like they own the house—it’s obvious just from the smells.

  At one point, when I want to make a call home, Cookie demands that I leave her twenty bucks to pay for the call. We end up in a yelling match in which she threatens to beat the shit out of me. “Let me set you straight like old times!” she says.

  I start laughing. “You can’t touch me, remember? I’m not your daughter anymore, you can’t push me around.” But as the words come out, they sting me because I know who the recipient of her anger is now that I’m no longer there . . . and suddenly I’m overcome with guilt.

  I don’t make it through a single day during that weeklong visit without hearing Cookie threaten to take me back to the airport. By the end of my stay, I’m counting down the hours until I head back home. When the moment arrives at last, I take my bambina in my arms. “No matter what she says, you remember our codes, and always keep my phone number hidden away,” I whisper.

  “I know it by heart,” she says.

  I kiss her cheeks and tell her to make sure she checks the mail at her friend’s and her teacher’s houses, because I’ll be sending her money so she can mail me letters, call me, and buy whatever she needs for school.

  IN LATE AUGUST 1984, a few weeks before I’m to start classes at the community college, I receive an unexpected phone call from Stony Brook University Admissions informing me that I’ve been accepted off their wait list. “If you wish to accept our offer,” the admissions worker says, “you’ll need to attend orientation later this week.”

  When I hang up the phone, I call Ms. Harvey right away. “She’s out,” the secretary says.

  “Then get me her supervisor, please! Tell him it’s Regina Calcaterra.”

  He picks up. “This is Mr. McManus.”

  “Mr. McManus, I got into Stony Brook!” I tell him. “Admissions needs a letter to prove I’m a ward of the state so I can apply for a school loan and the Pell grant.”

  There’s silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Mr. McManus?”

  “Regina,” he says, “can’t you hear me smiling?”

  I laugh. “Really?”

  “You did it, Regina!” he exclaimed. “We are all so proud of you. I’ll get the letter done so you can pick it up today and bring it to the university before five o’clock. Sound okay?”

  “That’s perfect,” I tell him. “Mr. McManus, can I tell you something?”

  “You can tell me anything, Regina.”

  “Thanks. This is the biggest day of my life.”

  “So far,” he says.

  “So far.”

  But while my work and academics are falling into place, I’m far from living worry-free. Later that summer, just weeks after I’ve seen her, Rosie’s challenges at home seem to escalate, and her communications with me begin to increase. I send letters to her, addressed to her friends’ houses or teachers’ addresses, that include money for her to use t
o go out with her friends or buy anything she can get away with that won’t raise Cookie’s suspicion.

  Just when it grows too much for me to manage, Cherie calls to tell me she’s thinking of moving out to Idaho to help Rosie. Cherie and her husband, who have been separated for a while, are now divorcing, and his parents had a judge give them custody of her son. “I didn’t want to tell you any of this, Gi, because you have enough to worry about. But they took my son from me and I can’t fight them anymore,” she says. “This is my chance to try and help Rosie.”

  And not much later, she is gone.

  9

  Out of Idaho

  Fall 1984 to Spring 1986

  I’M SEVENTEEN IN the fall of 1984, when I start my freshman year of college at Stony Brook. I quit my job selling ceiling fans and outlets at Rickel’s (where, after a year, I was promoted to a sales job with commission) to take a job selling shoes at Thom McAn in the Smith Haven Mall. Status-wise this is a step up; plus, I’ve joined the university’s gymnastics club, and early in the semester my gymnastics coach seems to detect my sense of discipline. He operates a camp every July in Southampton and asks me to come and work for him next summer. As long as I coach every day from nine in the morning to nine at night—“With breaks in between, of course,” he says—I’ll get to sleep there for free and make a respectable sum of money at the end of July to use for the next semester. Not to mention the fact that I could spend the entire month of July out in the Hamptons . . . and not have to pay.

  The spare minutes of free time I have, I spend with Camille, who’s now twenty. She married Frank last fall after they’d been dating for a year and knew, without question, that they were born to take care of each other. While a small part of me had feared that marriage would take Camille away from me, it’s actually made our relationship even better. Camille inspires me. She doesn’t look back; she doesn’t get shaken by our past with Cookie . . . and her strength is what reminds me to keep looking forward, too. My sister and I are aware that we’re both laying the foundation for our next phase in life—especially Camille, who learns in the spring of 1983 that she’ll become a mother in November.

  Camille has in fact found refuge from our life at home by beginning her own family. Not only is she the happiest I’ve ever seen her, but my sister—whom the social workers once documented was too affected by our upbringing to ever have a functional family of her own—is also proving wrong all the naysayers from our past who predicted so pessimistically what our futures would look like. What our social workers said was impossible was now happening for us both.

  Camille gives birth to baby Frankie on November 16—exactly one week after my eighteenth birthday. I edge in next to Camille on her hospital bed, and she passes the baby into my arms. From the very first moment I hold him, I feel how determined he is and how sensitive his heart will be for others. I marvel at him: his eyelashes, his cheeks, his face. His hair is dark brown, just like mine and his parents’, and it’s an instant miracle how much joy and excitement he brings us just by breathing in his trusting, restful sleep. When I look up at Camille, we both have tears in our eyes. It’s our silent promise that no child we love will ever experience the pain that we did . . . and that Cookie will never come near this baby.

  While Camille enjoys her new son, Cherie is forced to come back to New York to defend her right to keep hers. Once again, Rosie and Norman are left without any of their older sisters nearby to watch over them. While we work to keep our contact with them, I continue to try and create normalcy in my life by wrapping up my freshman year in college and heading out to the Hamptons to work for the summer at gymnastics camp.

  This first summer away from the home of a parent figure, combined with the coaching staff’s seventy-hour workweek, makes letting loose on the weekends a wild occupational bonus. With my coworkers, I befriend the bouncer at Toby’s Tavern, who lets my fellow coaches sneak me in although I’m underage. The agreement? We entertain them with flips and back-handsprings inside the bar. Plus, I’m aware that I’m in the healthiest, fittest shape of my life. My legs, which were once scrawny and bruised are now tanned and muscular. My shoulders and torso, once sunken from malnourishment, are sturdy and strong. By the time Monday rolls around again, my colleagues poke fun at my morning chirpiness . . . and I have no intention of letting them know that this job is the easiest, most lucrative, most fun responsibility I’ve ever been granted. At the end of July, when Coach hands me my pay envelope, I hold the package in my hand, feeling its thickness and weight. For the first time, it occurs to me that maybe my impossible upbringing sets me apart from the rest. I’ve cultivated a strong work ethic and faith in my capacity to take care of myself.

  THE WEEK OF Thanksgiving 1985 I receive a letter accepting my transfer to the State University of New York at New Paltz, majoring in education with my friend Sheryl from high school. With Frankie now a year old, such a fun and engaging baby, there couldn’t be a more conflicted time for me to consider leaving Long Island. I’ll tell Addie closer to the holidays, I tell myself. I want my own life.

  In my bedroom at the Petermans’ the night before Christmas Eve 1985, I’m deciding where to pack my Baby Jesus figurines when Addie raps on my door frame. “What’s all this?”

  I glance around my room, where I’ve begun piling warm clothes into black garbage bags and a shoe box of cassette tapes that I’m alphabetizing—the Cure, the Four Seasons, Genesis, Billy Joel, Diana Ross, and Van Halen. There’s no more hiding what I’ve been putting off. I tell her: “For the spring semester I’ve decided to transfer upstate to SUNY New Paltz.”

  After a moment of shock, Addie tugs on her cardigan to gain control of her expression. “I didn’t know you’d applied,” she says. “When will you be leaving?”

  “First week of January. What’s that, three weeks?”

  “Well,” she says, “congratulations. I’m sure with Camille’s marriage and the new baby you’ve gotten the itch to experience adulthood, too. Why are you packing now?”

  I shrug. “Just excited, I guess.”

  Addie nods curtly. I hear wheels turning in her head. “Regina, I have to say this, and I’ll only say this once: If you go away, that’s it. That’s the start of life on your own.”

  She’s affirming my fear; the reason I didn’t want to tell her. “What do you mean?”

  “If you leave, you will be on your own for good—do you understand? Once you’re out, you’re out.”

  “But—even for holidays, and intersession . . . and the summer?”

  “Yes, Regina. Let me tell you something: This house is not a hotel. You’re constantly in and out, spending the night at Tracey’s and Camille’s and all the places I know you prefer to be. It’s clear I haven’t done a very good job establishing this, but you can’t just come and go as you please.”

  “What would you prefer I do, Addie? Live as the bastard daughter with no life? No friends, and no future? Counting down the days until I get pushed out of here once the checks stop coming in? I’d rather take control now.”

  She clenches her fists, fuming, and her chin begins to quiver. “Either you live here, or you don’t; and if you leave, you don’t. Is that clear? And I’d prefer if you don’t challenge me again.”

  In a total of twenty seconds, Addie Peterman has just reinforced the way I’ve felt since I first set foot on her perfect carpet five years ago—or actually, since I first understood what foster care was. I’m just a Rent-a-Kid. I’m suddenly suspicious that the reason she and any foster parent has given me shelter was to keep the checks coming. Anger boils in me and my words sear my tongue as I tell her what I’ve feared since I met her. “You’ve always been in this for the money!” I yell. “It’s not for the kids, or because you’re some saint! Now that I’m going away, I will get the government’s subsidy—not you. And you can’t stand that, can you? If you were in this for me, if you were really concerned about supporting me, then you would want me back at holidays and breaks. This whole stupid act—y
ou’re not my family! You’re just the people who get paid to act like it. And you know what? I’ve already gotten rid of one mother. Don’t you dare think I won’t do it again.”

  “Regina, you’re jumping to conclusions,” she says steadily. “We could always discuss some kind of rent arrangement so that you can come back.”

  In my seasoned insistence to get the last word, I scream in her face, “Don’t worry! This is the last place I’d ever come back to!”

  During this last half-decade in Addie’s home, I’ve been grateful that she’s provided every necessity a young woman needs and some sense of family so I could feel like a normal kid. At moments I was even distracted from my guilt for failing Rosie and Norm. Addie and Pete have filled that emptiness by being the family who greet me when I walk in the door; for being involved in my life for more than the length of a beating or a heated phone call like the negligent fools who are my biological parents. Addie and Pete have been there so much that sometimes my teachers and my friends and their parents have asked why they never adopted me.

  Deep down I’ve always been aware that I’m just like the forty thousand other foster kids in America who age out of care every year to end up homeless, incarcerated, addicted, or dead. Transferring to New Paltz is a stepping-stone toward finally creating some presence in the world, to make a living and something of my life.

  Three weeks later, it’s really time. Camille and Frank host a special farewell dinner for me at their home. Camille squeezes me tight after I put on my coat to leave. “I heard that living away at college is all fun, all the time. Will you promise me something?”

  I pull away to look at her. “What?” I anticipate a motherly request to be careful.

  “Forget everything, and for once, just enjoy yourself,” she says into my ear. “You deserve it.” Frank hands over baby Frankie, who plants an openmouthed kiss on my cheek, and the expression on my brother-in-law’s face is enough to convince me how much they believe in me.