But then it started to, didn’t it? he said. You didn’t stop living after all. Which is how your mom would have wanted it.
The part I don’t understand is where I belong now, she said. My old life just sort of disappeared.
It’s still there, Alan said. People’s lives just keep changing. That would be so even if your mom hadn’t been in that building that day.
I want to see my dad and my brother, she said. She meant Josh when she said that.
I miss New York, she said. But in some ways, it’s good being here.
You’ll figure it out, he said. It seems to me like you’re doing the right things. Though it might be a good idea if you didn’t play hooky forever. An education comes in handy. Not that you aren’t getting one, in a manner of speaking.
I just wanted a little while to think, she said.
I can appreciate that. I won’t tell anyone. At least I’m glad nobody’s hitting you. That’s what had me worried before.
I’ll take the number of the person you told me about in Sacramento, for my friend, she said.
Let me know if you need help, he told her. I know you want to take care of things yourself at the moment, but everyone can use a hand on occasion.
Garrett was late coming home. I’ve been at Carolyn’s, he said. She got a call from her son.
It took Wendy a second to remember about the baby she’d given up.
He’s living up in Oregon, Garrett told her. Tracked her down through some kind of adoptees’ rights organization. She got a call today. Not from the boy himself. From his girlfriend. Wanting to know if she’d had a baby on this certain day. Everything matched up.
How’d she take it?
She’d always wanted this to happen, but once it did, she wasn’t sure what to think. Never having had any other kids, she’s worried about what he’ll think if he meets her. She’s going on a damn diet, just on the chance he might come down and see her. As if what he’d care about is whether she’s a size eight.
If I’d been adopted and I’d tracked down my birth mother and it turned out to be Carolyn, I think I’d be pretty happy, Wendy said.
That’s what I told her, said Garrett. A person could do a lot worse. Look at you. All you got was me.
That’s fine.
So what’s he like? she asked him. Did he end up with nice people?
The girlfriend didn’t fill her in on a whole lot, he said. I guess she was the one who was kind of pushing the whole thing, and now she’s going to tell her boyfriend that she and Carolyn talked. His name is Nate. Twenty-five years old.
What’s Carolyn going to do now?
Write him a letter, I guess. Hope he decides to come down here. Paint the entire house inside and out, knowing her. I told her not to worry so much. You are who you are, I said. It’s every kid’s job to work that part out and learn to deal with it.
Still, Wendy said. I can understand how she’d be kind of worked up.
What can you do? he said. There’s no changing the past. All you can do is move on from where you’re at now.
Wendy and Garrett worked on their fishing flies for a while. She wasn’t sure she’d be into fishing, but she sort of liked making the flies. The long, quiet evenings bent over the table with his tackle box, tying the knots and constructing the perfect little lures to fool a trout into thinking he was catching a piece of food in the water instead of a hook.
Soon as spring comes, Garrett said, you and I are heading up to the Sierras, camping. We’ll catch ourselves a big old fish dinner, and sleep under the stars. Maybe bring along some art supplies and do a little sketching. I’ve been realizing how I’ve been missing out all these years, not spending time with you. Kind of like Carolyn and her son, in a way.
Then there’s a person like Alan, Wendy thought. Driving the sixty miles to visit Tim every Tuesday, dependable as the sun. Sitting in the Laundromat year after year, watching the tumble dry cycle.
She thought of her mother’s words: Your idea of parenthood, Garrett, is to drop in when you’re in the neighborhood.
You do what you can, Garrett said. Sometimes you do the right thing. But sometimes you make mistakes. One thing’s for sure. Hardly anybody actually means to screw up their kid. Not even my parents probably.
Why would I ever go back to Cleveland? Todd had told her. At least whatever mess happens from now on, I did it to myself.
Twenty-Seven
Chief and Amelia were kissing now. He had also put his hand inside her bra. Not that he found anything.
We were in Washington Square Park, she told Wendy. We’d spent the afternoon looking at CD’s. He bought me the new Michael Jackson for my birthday.
Oh my God, I can’t believe I forgot, Wendy said. Amelia had turned fourteen right after Thanksgiving.
It was getting dark, she said. We were sitting by the fountain, and he just reached over and did it.
How did you feel?
At first, it was weird when he put his tongue in my mouth. Then I got used to it. He’s pretty experienced.
But he didn’t try to do anything else, right? Wendy asked her. They had decided to stay virgins until they were seventeen, and not do anything with anyone until they’d discussed it with each other first.
We talked about it, she said. He explained to me how it is for boys. The sex drive and so on. He did it one time already with a girl at his old school. He said next time he wants it to be with a person that he’s really good friends with first, like me.
Listening to her, Wendy got a depressed feeling, a little like how it was when her mother and Josh would be in the kitchen dancing to Clifford Brown with Strings, and it was as if for those few minutes she wasn’t even there.
Carolyn had come for a sleepover. Before, Garrett had just gone over to her house on his own now and then—the times Wendy figured they wanted to have sex. But this time, she showed up around nine-thirty, when he was reading and Wendy was working on one of her storyboards.
I was so wound up, she said. I figured you and Wendy wouldn’t mind me dropping by.
Any port in a storm, huh? Garrett said. But he looked glad to see her.
They had a beer, and Wendy went to bed. She fell asleep, but later, lying in the dark, she could hear them in the other room. Not very loud, just a little. The sound of the bed creaking and low, soft whispering.
Wendy had heard her mother and Josh like that sometimes, too. It made her feel lonely, knowing there was this thing that happened between them that had nothing to do with her. There was this part of her mother’s life that she didn’t know about or understand. Something she couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to.
My mother never talked to me about sex, her mother had said one time. She gave the impression it was something bad. I never believed that. But I was definitely embarrassed to talk about it. I wouldn’t want you feeling that way.
Okay, Wendy said. She was twelve at this point.
So anytime you’re wondering about anything, she said, you shouldn’t feel like there’s any question that would be too dumb to ask.
Okay, Wendy said again.
For instance, her mother said. Some people talk about sex like the only reason to do it is having babies. People have sex because it feels good, too.
But you shouldn’t ever do it until you want to. A lot of girls end up having sex before they’re ready because some boy puts a lot of pressure on them. They want the boy to like them, so they do it. That was probably me at first.
I’ll remember that, Wendy said. She wanted this conversation to be over.
Another thing is, you should know all the parts of your body. It’s a good idea to take a mirror and just look at yourself carefully so you know what’s there. Even Anne Frank did that, all those years ago. It’s in the diary.
A woman’s body is actually very beautiful, she said. There was this woman artist named Georgia O’Keeffe who painted flowers all the time, but most people think it was actually women’s bodies she was thinking of. We can get one o
f her art books out of the library.
Wendy couldn’t imagine taking a mirror and studying her body the way her mother was saying. She had studied her breasts a lot—or the one that had started to grow, which at that point was still a hard little lump on her chest—but that was all she’d really looked at.
I guess you don’t really want to discuss this at the moment, huh? her mother said. Don’t worry. We’ll talk about it more another time.
Only they didn’t. Carolyn had told Wendy that she could talk to her anytime. But even though she liked Carolyn a lot, it was hard to imagine bringing up sex with her. Then there was Violet, of course. But just because a person had a baby didn’t necessarily make them a sex expert. It could be that Violet’s having a baby meant she didn’t know that much. How not to have one, for instance.
Now she lay in her bed, hearing the hushed sound of her father and Carolyn in the next room. She thought about Amelia kissing Chief, and Violet with the boy who looked like Brad Pitt but hit her sometimes. She wondered if, before he hit her, he had kissed her. She thought about Tim, with his copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. Todd in the Fairmont Hotel bathrobe, sitting on the chair next to her bed, eating cashews. I hope this doesn’t weird you out, he said. I wouldn’t try anything.
She wondered why not. She probably didn’t seem all that attractive.
Though sometimes lately when she looked at herself in the mirror after she got out of the shower, she thought she looked sort of nice. Definitely better than she used to.
You look like your mother, Garrett said. If that was true, it would be good.
My son might look like me, Carolyn said. If he’s unlucky.
From the next room now, she could hear the sound of Carolyn’s voice, low and drowsy. Not worked up anymore, the way she’d said she was when she first got there that night.
Lying in her bed, Wendy looked at her poster, and thought about Madonna, whose own mother died when she was just about the age of Wendy. Some people would think a person could never be alright after something like that, but there she was, selling millions of CD’s, performing her songs all around the world in her incredible outfits, doing her amazing dance moves. Probably Madonna would give up everything—all her houses and jewels—to have her mother back. But she was OK. Maybe her mother dying like that, when Madonna was so young, made her even stronger that she ever would have been otherwise, because she had to be.
Violet and Wendy were at their usual table in the food court at the Almond Grove Mall, having Cokes. Wendy had brought the brochure Alan had given her about the teen counseling center, where there were people Violet could talk to about getting mad at Walter Charles.
How did it happen that you got pregnant anyway? Wendy asked her. She figured if they talked about that for a while, the conversation might come round to the other part. Violet feeling like hitting Walter Charles and maybe even doing it.
I was dumb, she said. I didn’t know anything. My mom never told me word one about sex. Everything I know, I picked up on Maury Povich or Ricki Lake.
When I started doing it with Evan, I asked him if I should be worried, but he said no. He told me he got this case of mumps when he was eleven that made it so all his sperm was dead. When I told him he still had to use a condom, based on a show Ricki did about girls that got AIDS in high school—he said I was the first girl he’d actually done it with, so he didn’t have to use a rubber. It feels better without, he said. I should’ve asked him how do you know if you never did it before, but I only thought about that later.
I didn’t even notice in the beginning when I missed my period, because they were never what you could call regular in the first place. The throwing up part was the giveaway. My mom heard me in the bathroom in the mornings. You and me need to have a talk, young lady. Oh boy, I thought, here it comes. Turned out all she thought was I had bulimia, which she’d just seen a show about on TV. Sometime in May, I got one of those home pregnancy tests.
I could’ve come up with the money to get rid of it. But I just blocked it out, like it wasn’t really happening. Every time the thought came into my head, You’re pregnant, I’d zap it out. I’d make my brain start playing some song off the radio. If I was home, I’d call up one of my friends and say, Want to go shopping? Loose clothes, that was the ticket.
By the time school started up again at the end of August, some people were wondering, even with all the layers I had on. Mostly what I did was keep to myself. I moved through my classes, answering questions when they called on me, but I didn’t volunteer. Just don’t attract attention to yourself was my motto.
Evan had already dumped me a long time before this. I was mad at him for telling me that stuff about the dead sperm but the only way to tell him I knew that was a crock would have been to tell him I was having a baby, and I wasn’t about to tell him that. He was going with this other girl by this time. I could’ve written her an anonymous note not to believe him if he told her some story about getting the mumps, but I never liked her anyway.
Didn’t your mom ever notice that you were looking pregnant? Wendy thought of her own mother, who could tell if all you’d done was go to someone’s apartment to see their home theater setup. Just by the look on your face. Who could tell if Wendy was coming down with a cold—before Wendy knew it herself.
You’d think, said Violet. The weird thing was, after that one remark about me throwing up, she never said anything. Maybe she blocked things out, too. Then one day when I was going out the door to school, she said, You’re having a baby, aren’t you? That was like two weeks before Walter Charles was born.
At that point, I was still planning on giving my baby to the San Francisco people. But before I even had a chance to tell her that part, she was screaming at me how she wasn’t going to be stuck taking care of another kid and if I was thinking that, I had another thing coming.
I wasn’t thinking anything like that, I said. As a matter of fact, I’m moving out.
I had over a thousand dollars saved up from my waitress job. I bought my furniture and the boom box. I went back to my mom’s apartment once to get a few clothes and some CD’s and that was it.
Then it hit me. Here I was this person that never had anybody that really cared about me. Not my boyfriend that lied to me and hit me for no good reason. Not my father that I never even knew or any of my mom’s boyfriends. Not my own mother. Now along comes this person that’s my blood relative, and he’d love me more than anyone in the world. Why would I give him away?
I told the lawyer in San Francisco the deal was off. And I went out and got the crib on the installment plan and the stroller.
But your mom must have called you or come by to find out how you were doing, right? Wendy couldn’t imagine how there could be a mother who wouldn’t love her child more than anything. Or at least enough to go see her when she had a baby.
They aren’t always like that, said Violet. I got one of those moms that never read the rule book on how moms are supposed to act. Violet sat there playing with her straw for a minute. Tapping it in front of Walter Charles, in case he might like that maybe. He was fussing, as usual, but the straw didn’t help.
The problem is, she said, when you have one of those moms that didn’t get the rule book, you don’t know how to act yourself. You want so bad to do the right thing. You just never saw what it was except maybe on some TV show like Family Ties. So you keep screwing it up, too, same as she did.
Carolyn was working on her letter to her son. She must have been working on it for a while, because there were a number of pieces of paper on the table that she’d started and then crumpled up.
The funny thing is, Carolyn said to Wendy, when your father decided to go see you in New York after all that time, he didn’t sit around thinking up what to say to you. Just got on the plane and flew out there, like he was running down to the hardware store. He might have looked like an idiot, but odds are no more so than if he’d spent three days scratching o
ut a couple of introductory remarks on a notepad.
Why don’t you just tell your son a little about yourself? Wendy said. Like about your cactuses, and how you can read palms.
That might not go over so big, she said. So, Nate, let’s take a look at your lifeline, see what it indicates. Oh right, abandoned by your mother at age thirteen hours. There’s a good start in life.
Wendy had never seen Carolyn like this. Before, she’d always thought of Carolyn as such a laid-back person. Now she was a wreck.
I bet he can understand perfectly well why you gave him up for adoption, Wendy said. This girl I know that has the baby is having a really hard time with him. Sometimes I think he might do better if she gave him up. She never seems to know what he wants, and he cries all the time.
He’s picking up on her vibrations, probably, Carolyn told Wendy. Babies know a lot more than we give them credit for. He probably knows his mom’s in a tough situation.
Wendy looked at Carolyn’s kind, freckled face, her hair falling out of her braid as usual, her worn gardener’s hands, so different from Wendy’s mother’s, with their pink nail polish.
You should put a picture of yourself in the letter, too, she said. He’d probably like that.
Carolyn didn’t have a camera, but Wendy had one that made miniature Polaroid pictures the size of a sticker to give your friends to stick on their notebook. She bought it at South Street Seaport one time when she and Amelia were fooling around together trying on clothes.
While Wendy went to get the camera, Carolyn went into the bathroom. When she came back out, it looked like she had brushed her hair, and put on some makeup.
He’s going to love it, Wendy said. She snapped the picture. She counted to thirty and peeled off the adhesive backing. The pictures her camera made were only about the size of a postage stamp but Carolyn looked good as much as you could make out. They stuck it on the bottom of her letter.
The Usual Rules Page 27