From my eye’s first focus I was an observer, two persons, a lonely double “I”: the person experiencing my story firsthand and the person who felt as if she had already experienced it.
As far as I know, I was conceived in New Orleans, and born in West Benton Township near Joplin, Missouri, at the U.S. Army Hospital attached to Camp Crowder Military Base, at 7:54 pm, on Tuesday, September 2nd, 1952, a leap year. My birth certificate says that Daddy Ralph my Baby Brother’s father is my father too. That isn’t true, but that’s what I believed until one blustery day in Missouri when I was ten years old...
Mama skipped the freeway exit adjacent to her parents’ house and sped straight to the opposite side of town. Drove through a landscape of rock piles and open pits into unfamiliar countryside. I didn’t know where she was going. She stopped at the intersection of two gravel roads beside an old sandstone house. Waist-high grass grew from porch to driveway. Fat flowers bounced on slender stems under the windows. Trees older than anyone grew in the surrounding field. Beyond the house was a pond, a thin line of wet blue in the distance. Cows stood by a weathered barn. I had never seen any place like it. Chickens walked around the yard like dogs.
“Where are we, Mama? Who lives…?” I started to ask. Then I saw her.
A small woman, maybe old, crooked as she ran, galloped from the stone house toward our car, straight toward my backseat window. Zeroed in on me, only me, a wild look in her eye.
“Christy, Christy,” she cried, singing out like she’d found lost treasure. A flowered house dress, snapped shut from knee to neck, flapped as she ran. Baubles swung from her ears.
I locked the car door.
The old woman slammed her hands flat against my backseat window and brought her face up to the glass. Old-fashioned gray curls curved around her smooth oval face. Above brown eyes, her furrowed forehead seemed frozen that way, worries chiseled over time. And then I saw her mouth. It was my mouth. “You have an ugly mouth,” Mama always said. “Nobody in my family has that mouth.”
The old woman at my car window did.
I sat still and staring as she motioned for me to open up the car door, mouthing unlock, unlock through the thick glass, over and over.
“Open the door and get out, you little idiot,” Mama ordered.
“Who is she? What does she want?”
“That’s your grandmother. Your real father’s mother. Now get out and act nice.”
“What do you mean, real?” I asked. What about Daddy, the only Daddy I knew, the man she always told me to call, to ask for money and make sure I said I loved him, the man who’d taught me how to ride a bike and to come straight home when he whistled? What about that daddy?
Mama hooted. “My God, you didn’t actually believe Ralph was your father, did you?”
I looked at the twins asleep in a damp heap on the backseat. John was their father. I knew that. I’d overheard Mama say so during a conversation with Aunt Jo. “John,” Mama said, “his name is John. He’s their actual daddy, not that other asshole.” I looked at Baby Brother, hanging out the car window, watching the chickens strut. His aquiline nose did not turn up into a pug. His wide mouth was mobile and expressive, not thick-lipped, and pursed. His blue-gray eyes, oval and fringed with dark lashes, were not deep-set. Large ears stuck out from his smallish bony head. Boxer wiry, he moved around the backseat like a trapped fighter, imitating the chickens. Neither stocky like me nor tall like Moody Sister, Baby Brother was mid-weight and slender of build, like Daddy, like his daddy.
The man who’d taught me to chew with my mouth shut, and always tell the truth, the man I’d called Daddy since I could put a name to the role.
“How’s my boy?” Daddy always asked me on the phone, a singular concern, excluding me, excluding Moody Sister.
Moody Sister. Today she wore her favorite blouse: pale pink contrasted with the olive of her cheeks and the deep russet of her lips. Though two years younger, I couldn’t remember when she hadn’t been half a foot taller and pounds heavier. My brown hair was stick-straight; her pitch-black hair never needed curling.
Comparing the lines of my body to Baby Brother and Moody Sister, gauging proportions, the halves in them and in me that hadn’t come from Mama, told me the truth. Right there and then I parsed it out.
We all had different daddies.
I lost track of time, of seasons, of states of mind. All these years later I still don’t know how to describe it. The bodiless feeling of not looking like your mother, your sisters, your brother.
Meanwhile the old woman had not stopped pounding on my car door.
“Well, I’m getting out,” Moody Sister said, and she did. She put her dog down in the dirt to run with Baby Brother, who was already chasing the chickens.
“Open the door now,” Mama hissed at me, “and get out of this car.”
As soon as I did, the old woman grabbed me. Held my head with both hands and forced me to look straight into her eyes, brown to brown, then kissed me smack on the lips.
“There she is,” Mama said, as if delivering a package. “Just like I promised.”
“God be blessed, it’s good to see your face,” the old woman said. “Do you remember your granny?”
“No.” What was going on? Mama didn’t keep promises.
“You best come in then and get reacquainted, if you’re staying,” the old woman said to me, every word a singsong coo. Then she turned toward Mama, still in the driver’s seat. “She’ll stay the week with me, won’t she?”
“What about her, why isn’t she coming?” I asked, referring to Moody Sister.
“Only Christy and only for a week or two,” Mama said, ignoring me, avoiding my fierce look with practiced indifference.
“Cool,” Moody Sister said, and jumped back in the Rambler with the dog. She slammed her car door, and the twins woke up screaming.
“Somebody give them a bottle and shut them up,” Mama said. “My nerves are shot.”
“I never let them cry too long,” I reminded her. “I keep them quiet.”
I knew what they needed: bottles as soon as they woke up and dry diapers throughout the day, clean hands and faces before they fell into sleep. I knew them better than Mama did. I knew a startling game of peek-a-boo would make them laugh, and that a too-sudden frown would make them wail.
From the day they came home from the hospital, Moody Sister and I had played with them as if they were dolls. Rolled their baby bodies side to side on the couch while we watched TV, kissing their faces, amazed. “Mine is prettier,” Moody Sister said, pulling Platinum Twin to a standing wobble, a new pet with blue eyes, straw hair, and pale skin. “So?” My heart belonged to Tomboy Twin, the pretty girl’s plainer sister. Thicker in body, with fat arms and legs and blue eyes, there was already a solid somebody in there, paying attention.
“I’ll be at my sister’s place,” Mama said to the old woman. “Just like I told you on the phone, remember? Remember?”
She frowned, reached into her house dress pocket, and handed Mama a folded wad of cash.
“Get back in the car,” Mama yelled at Baby Brother. “It’s time you learned how to take care of your baby sisters. I’ll see you in a few days,” she said to me. “Time to vamoose.”
The babies were still crying.
“Hurry up and go,” Moody Sister said, jostling Platinum Twin on her lap. “When we get moving, they’ll be quiet.”
“Quick! Pick up the other one!” Mama told Baby Brother.
“Stay,” Baby Brother said to me. “Stay,” he said again and again. He pressed his face against the back window, yelling for me as Mama drove off.
I stood on the gravel driveway, my back to the stone house and the old woman, watching the Rambler disappear. Across the road were towering pyramids of rock, ancient and abandoned. Gray dust silted as their edges shifted in the breeze, endlessly rearranged.
“Soon it will all come back to you,” the old woman said. “Soon it will be like you was never gone.” She turned from the road and walked up a worn path to the rock house. Her shorter right leg made a lopsided thud against the ground as she went.
I followed her through the front door of the old sandstone house into a low-ceilinged living room. Dark-paneled walls. Framed portraits of smiling faces everywhere, in all sizes. They hung on fading wallpaper blooms, filled the coffee table, made a squiggly display across the top of an old upright piano. One wall was covered with baby pictures and paintings of young men in uniform.
A woman Mama’s age stood on the other side of the room in the kitchen doorway.
“Here she is, finally,” the old woman said to her. “Christy, this is your daddy’s sister, Helen, my only girl.”
Helen was as petite as her mother with trim brown hair the color of her raisin eyes.
“Where is he?” I asked, looking around for my real father. “He’s not here, is he?”
“No,” the old woman answered.
“What a pretty sourpuss,” her daughter interjected. “Smile, why don't ya? Can’t be that hard?” She gave her mother a questioning look, talking with her eyes, eyes that walked all over me, as she compared, measured, or matched me up to some mental checklist: brown eyes, yes, turned-up nose, yes, tawny hair, yes, similar mouth, yes, yes, and yet...
I knew the differences she saw before her: a round face with broader, higher cheekbones, amber freckles across my upturned nose, forehead knotted, and a deep-set frown on the family mouth. What else? Helen eyed me from toe to ponytail, looking for something. What was it? Had she stared into my dark eyes long enough to see the buried glints of green— a sign of too much Mama? Had she found an enemy hidden in their lost treasure?
“Whatever could keep that face from smiling?” she asked her mother, then swiveled back to me for a tease. “Give it a little try. Show your auntie your smile.”
I glared at her, similar lips a straight line. Blood relation or not, she was a stranger.
“Well, let’s feed you then,” Aunt Helen said, pinching my waist as I squirmed. “You could use a good meal.”
I scooted from her grip and stumbled into a stack of notebooks on a side table near the front window. “What’s all this?”
“My picture books,” the old woman answered. “You’re in them. So is your daddy.”
Mama cut people out of lives and pictures, keeping only what fit in the Rambler’s trunk. “Leave it,” she’d say. “You can always get it again.”
We never got it again.
“Can I see?” I asked. Show me what my real father looks like. Help me figure this out.
My new granny pulled the light bulb string on the side table lamp and picked up a leather album from the top of the stack. “What would you favor?” she asked. “To sit yourself down here and have a look-see or help us fix supper?”
Mama liked drive-ins where she didn’t have to cut the motor, where we could order while the engine idled, ready to run. “I’ll stay here, Ma’am,” I said, and sank into a flowered armchair near the kitchen, where I had a straight shot out the back or front door.
“Call me Granny,” the old woman said, tucking a patchwork shawl around my shoulders. The navy-blue photo album she laid in my lap had a sailboat on its cover. “This here one might interest you.”
“Make yourself’t home,” her daughter offered.
Through the kitchen doorway, I watched them work. While her daughter assembled ingredients, my new Granny leaned against the kitchen counter for support. Once steadied, her too-short right leg planted on a footstool, her stronger left wedged against the kitchen table, she started to cook. She didn’t use a recipe book. Her quick hands mixed by heart: rolling out dough, cutting noodle-shaped strips and then hanging them over a cereal box to dry.
“A passed-down recipe,” she explained. “A Mary Hester Clark specialty.”
“Her mother,” Aunt Helen clarified. “My grand and your great. The one in the center.” She pointed to a tinted photograph on the wall behind me, a faded image of a genteel woman holding three infants.
“She was a homemaker, my mother,” Granny said.
“My Mama doesn’t cook,” I explained. “She drives.”
I pulled the warm shawl tighter around my shoulders, sank deeper into the overstuffed chair and opened their family photo album.
“Did she say if they’re staying or going back?” Helen asked. She pulled noodle strips off the box and dumped a pile of them into a steaming pot on the nearby stove.
“You know about June,” her mother replied. “She’s still June. Keeping it to herself, most likely, or from us. Same thing in the end.”
“All the women in that family are bad luck if you ask me, all of them,” Aunt Helen said.
I paused to look more closely at a faded color photo of a young girl sitting in a flowered chair with a baby, its head round as a basketball, midget arms outstretched, open face smiling beside her own.
Mama was proud of me then, before I could talk or walk, when I was her first and only baby, immobile and wordless.
“June must know he’s coming home soon. Why else would she show up here all of a sudden?” Helen asked her mother in a too-loud whisper. “What does she want?”
“She wants what she’s always wanted and will do what she always does to get it. There’s no teaching that one,” my new Granny said, as she sliced a silver dinner knife through a slab of noodle dough on the table, cutting long lines into it, over and over.
In a photograph once torn and now taped together, a young girl sat beside a young man on a patch of bleached-out grass. The young man gripped the girl’s arm, wrinkling her sleeve. His flat gray face pressed against her flat gray face. She wore a plaid skirt and a white blouse. He was slight of frame with eyes at half-mast, a wry grin twisting his mouth. On his dark hair was a crisply creased white hat. A silk scarf was knotted at his neck. A sailor. I dropped the picture.
Real Dad.
My now unreal Daddy had been a sailor too. He’d met Mama in San Diego, he said, when his battleship docked after two long years at sea.
“Maybe she’ll leave Christy with us again,” Aunt Helen said.
“I pray for it,” Granny answered. Cameo earrings dangling against her cheeks, she draped more strips of noodle dough over the cereal box and continued stirring, steam in her face. “But I reckon we best not count those chickens yet.”
“June’s still so pretty,” Aunt Helen complained. “How does she do it?”
“Beauty is only skin deep, never forget that. And that one,” she said, dropping a handful of noodles into the steaming pot, “is a shallow grave.”
“You can count on one thing, Mom,” Aunt Helen countered. “When my brother is back, he’s going to want his girl, and it sure doesn’t hurt none that she favors him some.”
“For today lets us just have our supper. Tomorrow always comes soon enough.”
Centered and alone on the last page of Granny’s picture book was a square photo of three adults, posing in a generational row. They sat on wooden chairs in front of a piano lined with framed photos. On the left of the two women, the sailor held me. I was not a baby slumped stupid in his stiff arms. I was a toddler of at least three, returning the camera’s stare, evolved enough to know the room, the house, and the man, old enough to record the moment. In the center of the photo sat my new Granny, entranced by her handsome son and the brown-eyed girl smiling in her father’s arms. Near the edge of the frame, almost out of the picture, the camera caught the profile of an elderly woman. Oblique and long-faced, she was a sepia cipher, old-old and most serious. I didn’t remember her or the house I sat in then and now. I had no memory of myself in that row, in that lap, inside that happiness. I felt like a reverse ghost, invisible and unknown to myself while clearly seen by others.
I felt unreal.
Forever t’other one, living in the strange land Mama’s lie had made.
That monster lie would continue to hop alongside me, chasing and taunting and haunting, galloping after me while I stood passive and watchful. Afraid that no matter how hard I thought, how much I wondered and worried, how truthful I tried to be, Mama’s lies would always move faster; truth would always elude me, power would evade me, and love would always leave.
Daddy wasn’t Daddy. And he would never be Daddy again.
Childhood is confusing enough...