When I stepped out of the bathtub at their house, the warm fluffy bath mat beneath my feet felt like a miracle. Mama Bee cooked dinner every night, and this too felt like a miracle. Her simple dinners were by far the most wholesome and delicious food I had ever eaten. Spaghetti and meatballs. Macaroni and cheese, baked in the oven with buttery bread crumbs on the top. Fried chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy. Mama Bee’s food was warm and nourishing and it filled me up.
In the backyard was a little garden plot where they grew their own vegetables. Every day I went out and sprinkled the plants with water from a light green watering can, and I gathered every cherry tomato that was red on the vine.
Each of their daughters had a lunch box with a red plaid pattern, and they gave me one as well. I loved to spring it open and then press it shut with a satisfying click. In our shared bedroom there were pink gingham curtains on the windows. There was a braided rug and a rocking chair and a magical night light with a clown and a dog and a bouquet of colored balloons. The balloons were the part that lit up, from within. That night light filled my heart with happiness.
Every night, Mama Bee tucked me under covers of lavender flannel. She smoothed my hair back from my face and kissed my forehead. Papa Bee knelt beside my bed to pray, as he did with each of his children in turn.
He said words I didn’t fully understand but I loved the sound of them anyway.
Lord, thank you for delivering this precious child into our care. Her young life hasn’t been easy so far, Lord. As You know, she has been at the mercy of some very dark forces. But she is thriving here with us, and we hope to keep her with us. If you see fit, Lord, please continue to grant us the privilege of sheltering her and watching over her. Let us fill her innocent heart with the knowledge of Your grace and Your everlasting love. Amen.
No one had ever prayed for me or with me before. No one had ever told me about God, who had created the earth and everything in it. But the Bertolinis said He was everywhere at once and I could talk to Him directly, anytime I wanted.
I could feel God in that house. He lived in every one of those warm and cheerful rooms. He was holding us in His hands all the time, like the song we sang in the children’s service at their church while Sister Paula rattled a tambourine:
He’s got you and me, brother, in His hands
He’s got you and me, sister, in His hands
He’s got the itty bitty babies in His hands
He’s got the whole world in His hands.
In bed one night, after learning that song in church, I thought about our car, turning over and over on the concrete, and how I’d stayed in one place within it, like a sock in the very center of a dryer full of clothes. This made perfect sense now. All the while the car was rolling like a tumbleweed across the road, I was tucked inside the cup of His mighty palm like an egg in a nest.
THE FIRST MORNING we saw frost on the ground was the morning my mother showed up on their doorstep, and the dread of that moment will never leave me. All these decades later, I can feel it burning a hole in my stomach. At the sound of her voice from inside that house, a splotch of urine blossomed suddenly on the front of my green corduroy pants, and a moment later I felt it flowing down my legs and pooling on the floor.
And then I was snatching my shoes from under my bed and pushing them beneath my pillow. It was winter. Every day Mama Bee said I couldn’t leave the house without my shoes on. If my shoes were nowhere to be found, then surely I would not be able to go with my mother.
From my own hiding place behind my bedroom door, then, I listened to the voices floating up from the floor below.
“I’m here to take Stephanie home,” I heard my mother say.
“She is home,” Mama Bee said sharply, her voice scaling up like mine did whenever I was about to cry. “She’s very much at home here. She eats three meals a day, she has a regular bedtime, she’s been to the dentist, and she just learned the alphabet. None of those things were happening on your watch. Five years old and she didn’t even know the alphabet when she came here! But she does now.”
“Well, thank you for looking after her,” my mother said, as if I’d merely been there for an afternoon.
“Why don’t you let her stay here with us?” Mr. Bee broke in. “You can visit any time you want, but she’d be one less child for you to keep track of and feed and whatnot. You have your hands full with so many.”
“Nothing doing,” said my mother. “She’s mine. Of all the nerve! Stephanie!” she called out.
“Florence,” Mama Bee tried again. “Think of the child. Don’t you want what’s best for her?”
“I’m what’s best for her!” my mother said hotly. “Children belong with their mother!”
“You,” said Mr. Bee, in a voice like spitting. “You’re not fit to take care of a cat.”
My mother’s tone was more venomous still, though shot through with the strange formality she resorted to whenever she felt defensive. “How dare you address me in that manner? Get my daughter down here this instant or I’ll call the police!”
Through the crack along the edge of the door, I saw Mama Bee stagger a few steps backward and then crash to her knees on the floor.
“Mickey!” her husband cried, rushing to help her.
Mama Bee brought her apron up to her face and wailed. It was the kind of sound you might hear from someone wild with grief at a funeral.
My mother stepped past her with perfect composure. As she mounted the stairs, I suddenly sensed the inadequacy of my hiding place and bolted to the other side of the room. The closet—I would hide in the closet. She reached me before I could even wrestle its folding doors apart. When she grabbed my arm, I went as still as an insect paralyzed by a spider.
The best part of my childhood was over in that moment. As soon as she touched me, I was hers again, and I felt the futility of resistance in my bone marrow. I had always been hers. I would always be hers. That was the way it was, and fighting it would only make it worse.
I was mute and compliant and already dead-eyed as she tugged me down the stairs and out the door. Away from the lemon-scented kitchen and the cookie jar and the garden and the balloon man night light and the lunchbox and God.
BACK IN MY car after our visit, in the parking lot of her apartment complex, I rested my head on the steering wheel. Jim was right. I should have let more time go by. Once a month was enough, even if that meant only a handful of interviews before she was gone.
As I took the car keys from my coat pocket, a text notification appeared on the screen of my phone.
Stephanie, my love, it’s Mama Mae. Will you come out with us on the boat this Saturday? For once I’m going to have all my children with me on the river: Kim, Lara, and even Owen! His girlfriend is away and he’s at loose ends this weekend. And Kim and Lara are coming as usual. So I just need my last daughter to feel complete. I’m talking about you, sweet girl!
I hesitated before typing a reply, remembering that I always felt out of place on the yacht. As if I didn’t belong. Painfully aware that, underneath her lavish affection for me, I was not truly her daughter, as Kim and Lara were. But I felt a flutter inside at the mention of Owen. And it didn’t hurt to know that his girlfriend would be elsewhere. I wondered if he was hoping I’d come. I even wondered whether he’d asked Mae to invite me.
I found myself calling her back instead of typing a reply. I felt a sudden longing to hear her voice.
“Tell me you’re coming,” she said as soon as she answered.
I laughed. Why not? Andrea would be with her friends at the mall. I didn’t even have to ask Jim if he’d be around; I knew the answer. Why shouldn’t I spend a beautiful afternoon on the river? No one would even know I was gone.
“I’m very tempted,” I told her. “Actually, I just might.”
“Oh, you must,” Mae said. “Owen told me you got the most beautiful haircut. I can’t wait to see it!”
Chapter 8
THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY, I woke exc
ited. A tennis match was on my morning schedule. Tennis was the one interruption I allowed in the course of a workweek. It was my passion and a cherished form of catharsis.
Before every match, I would see Andrea off to school and then go out to the garage and hit balls for an hour. It didn’t matter how well I hit: how hard, how fast, or how relentlessly. The wall always returned the ball. There was something calming about that.
Tennis was an escape for me. When I was playing, everything else went away: the teacher I was probably going to have to fire, Jim’s perpetual absence from home, my mother’s withering criticism and her cancer and her insanity. Even my opponent disappeared, or at least seemed incidental. There was nothing but the next ball and my will to reach and return it.
I went to meet it wherever it went. I did whatever it took to get to it and send it back over the net. I lunged, I stretched, I dove, I jumped. There was at once a desperation and a strange sort of serenity in this. It was a relief to be empty of everything but a mindless drive.
Tennis represented the unlikely life I had made for myself. The missed opportunities I chased down and claimed. We’d joined a sports club as a young family, and soon afterward I found myself gazing at the couples on the tennis courts.
That looks fun, I thought. I want to try it.
Even this kind of speculation was new to me back then: the idea that I could cross the invisible line that had been there all my life, the line between me and people with normal lives, people with money. Who was I to try tennis? Tennis was for them. It wasn’t for someone like me.
But in the private introductory lesson that I scheduled soon afterward, I surprised both my instructor and myself with what was either beginner’s luck or considerable natural ability. The racket felt natural in my hand. Hitting the ball felt natural too. I could do it right away and I could do it pretty well. That introductory session turned into a series of lessons, and a kind of fever took hold of me. Before long, I was on the tennis court every spare hour of my week.
When the club first paired me with a practice partner, I felt afraid to show up, certain that I wouldn’t be able to hold my own. After a few weeks, the club had to find me someone more advanced. Within the year—the same year I picked up a racket for the first time—I was invited to join the club’s competitive team.
When I tried on the team tennis outfit, the one I’d need to wear in official matches, I could not stop staring at my reflection in the shop mirror. Who was this pony-tailed woman in a white skirt and white visor, little white anklets for socks and pale gray sweatbands on her wrists? I gazed and gazed at this vision of privilege and could not reconcile it with myself.
It was still a marvel to me: the apparent fact that I could simply buy these clothes and stride onto a court with my racket. That there were no border police at the club, and nobody who would demand special papers or a secret password.
I could barely eat anything before a match. The first time I was slated to face a formal opponent, I was so sick with anxiety I could eat nothing but Wheat Thins. I won that match 6–2, 6–2, and, as superstitious as the next athlete, I ate Wheat Thins before every match for the next fifteen years.
Today, as always, I took a special pleasure in preparing my tennis bag. I packed two rackets, grip tape, bottled water, Gatorade, those lucky Wheat Thins, and two extra tennis outfits. And inwardly it was still a thrill to walk onto the court with my bag and my teammates, all of us wearing matching tennis colors. Those colors said I belonged, even if I knew in my heart that I did not, even if I was sure they would find a reason to throw me out of the league if they knew my background: that I was white trash passing as one of them, and blind in one eye to boot.
When I reached the court, I shook hands with my opponent, a blonde and muscular woman from another Portland club. I noticed that her daughter had come along to cheer her on. I was alone, as I always was. No one in my family ever watched me play. I forbade them to set foot inside the club when I was competing. I could not risk letting them see me lose.
But I almost never lost. I hadn’t lost in nearly a year. And I didn’t lose this time either. The final score was 6–4, 6–1.
I’D SCHEDULED A design session with Owen for just after the match. The timing was deliberate. I wanted to show up in my tennis dress, still rosy-cheeked from exertion and victory.
Today we were planning his young daughter’s bedroom. There was something bittersweet for me about designing the perfect room for someone’s sheltered little princess, just as I had done for my own daughter. It was both a deep pang and a strange consolation to create for other little girls what I’d never had.
“Hey,” Owen said as we climbed the stairs together with all of my materials. “Are you coming out on my mom’s boat this Saturday?”
“That’s the tentative plan,” I told him.
“You don’t strike me as a tentative woman,” he said. “What would it take to get an upgrade?”
“An upgrade? To what?”
“To a hard yes.”
“To a . . . hard yes?”
Here we were again, laughing at our own cartoonish flirtation. Making fun of ourselves and each other. It was ridiculous. It was delicious.
“Well, with your powers of persuasion, I’m sure you’ll think of something,” I said. “You don’t strike me as a tentative man.”
“What if I brought your favorite wine?” he asked. “You gotta be there. My mom really wants you along.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to disappoint Mama Mae.”
“No, ma’am,” Owen said. “We wouldn’t want that.”
I couldn’t help smiling.
“Okay!” I said, turning to the materials I’d brought. “Let’s focus on this bedroom! I have some paint samples for you to choose from.”
His daughter’s favorite color was pink. Owen had already picked out an area rug shaped like a pink rose. He’d chosen a vanity table and softly lit mirror, an overhead chandelier dripping with pink crystals, and a canopy bed. Now I set out the paint swatches I’d brought with me.
I dipped a paintbrush in Persian Rose and left a broad swath of it on the wall. Doing this always made me feel gleefully transgressive, even though it would soon be painted over.
“Nice,” Owen said, standing back to appraise it. He shot me a meaningful glance. “Warm.”
I added swaths of Valentine Candy and Pastel Fantasy. “So what do you think?” I asked. “Do you have a preference so far?”
“You’re asking a very straight man to pick a shade of pink?” he said. “Come on, you’re the girl. Which shade would you choose?”
“Actually,” I said, opening the last sample I’d brought and adding it to the display, “I would go with Sunrise on the Beach.”
I dipped in the paintbrush and drew it across the wall again, leaving a color like a pink mango in its wake.
“Wow,” Owen said. “You’re good. I think that’s the one.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“The name fits,” he said. “Have you ever seen a sunrise on the beach?”
I choked back a laugh.
When I was his daughter’s age, I’d watched the sun rise on the beach every morning. Maybe that was why it called to me when I’d scanned the colors for her room. It was in fact the most hopeful color I could imagine: the pink of promise, of a new day. It meant dawn; it meant renewal. It meant the darkness had lifted.
* * *
DURING THE BRIEF period between my mother’s arrest and Rick’s own, he managed to sell most of her possessions. Once he too had gone to jail and there was no one to pay rent, the owners of our house obtained an order of eviction and disposed of the rest.
As a result, six months later when my mother was released, she had nothing left to her name but the clothes she was wearing and the car that was still parked on our old street. Everything else was gone: our home, clothes, linens, toys, photos. Everything.
When she’d recovered all her children—Isabella from the home of her second-gra
de teacher, my older brothers from the state dependent unit, her newest baby Walter from his foster home, and me from the Bertolinis’ house—she spent the remaining gas in her tank on the drive to Mendocino Headlands State Park.
So began our months of living in the car and on the beach. Months of frigid ocean air and bran cereal and seaweed. Months of homelessness, aimlessness, truancy. Long days wandering the shoreline and the outskirts of the village with no adult supervision, no schedule, no structure. Dinners taken in the parking lot of the nearest convenience store, eaten while sitting on the curb. It was winter in Mendocino, and our only shelter was a station wagon.
I imagine my mother shooing us out of the car and onto the beach upon our arrival, leaving the older kids in charge, so she could drive back alone to a local motel where letters spelling out Help Wanted had been added to the vacancy billboard. I see her sitting in their parking lot, combing her waist-length hair with her fingers. I picture her walking into the motel office and turning on her charm. And then I imagine her returning to us, flushed with triumph and employed.
Her hourly rate was low—minimum wage around that time was $1.60 an hour—but they paid weekly and in cash. I picture her with her first week’s pay and the competing needs it had to cover. Which felt the most pressing? What did she spend it on? First something to eat, I would think, but after that?
Diapers for the baby? A hairbrush, laundry detergent, aspirin, tampons? Her first fix in forever? She doesn’t remember these details.
Harder for me to imagine is how she made it until her first payday. But then, hippies were everywhere: all along the highway and all over the village. And hippies were all about sharing. Did people help her out with some food, a cigarette, or a little cash? I try to imagine having five children and no home, no possessions, and no money. What would it be like to be an adult woman without a change of underwear, without toothpaste, without a pillow?
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