Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (2 page)

But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height….The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

—1 SAMUEL 16:7

A
t six months in utero, Wyatt and Jonas Maines are fully formed. In a sonogram performed in a medical office near Northville, New York, on the afternoon of July 7, 1997, one of them is hunched over, the individual vertebrae visible in the shadow of the fetus’s arched spine. The imaging technician uses an arrow to point out the head, then the trunk, then the legs. A tiny hand hovers in space, relaxed in the amniotic fluid, its minuscule fingers moving ever so slightly, as if practicing a piano piece. Forty-five seconds into the video, the technician points to the vaguely outlined shadow of one of the twin’s genitalia and types onto the screen “Still a boy!!!” It’s the tech being funny, of course. Both fetuses emerged from a single egg, they have the exact same DNA, and they’re identical male twins. How could one of them
not
still be a boy?

By the time Wayne and Kelly finally held their newborn sons in their arms three months later, the couple had been married five years. For three of those years Kelly suffered through multiple miscarriages as well as months of tedious and painful fertility treatments. Everything changed in early 1997, though, when she got a phone call from her cousin Sarah, a sixteen-year-old she barely knew. The teenager said she was “in trouble” and didn’t want to have an abortion. But she was also too young to raise a child on her own. Would Wayne and Kelly consider a private adoption?

Kelly’s own upbringing in the Midwest was anything but traditional. The roots of her family, as much as she knew them, began on the limestone bluffs on the north bank of the Ohio River in the town of Madison, Indiana. Founded in 1809, about halfway between Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, Madison had its heyday as a river town in the mid-nineteenth century. It was also an important first stop on the Underground Railroad and as early as the 1820s was home to a thriving community of free blacks. In 1958 it was the fictional location for author James Jones’s quaint Midwestern hometown when Hollywood filmed his autobiographical novel,
Some Came Running,
there. According to legend, the star of the film, Frank Sinatra, was so worried about being stuck in a “hick” town during shooting he persuaded his buddy Dean Martin to take a supporting role.

Kelly’s grandfather was a paddleboat captain in Madison at a time when steamboats still plied the waters, delivering goods to towns up and down the Ohio. He took his first wife there, but divorced her to marry Kelly’s grandmother, the oldest of nine and barely a teenager when her own father abandoned the family. A short time later she began working in a glove factory to help support her mother and siblings, and at age nineteen married Kelly’s grandfather, partly out of love, partly as an escape from the drudgery of caring for so many children. The couple soon moved to Indianapolis, where Kelly’s grandfather got a job with the Mayflower Moving Company, and Kelly’s grandmother raised three girls and a boy. Her grandparents were both of German descent and their values and mannerisms reflected their heritage. They were matter-of-fact, honest to a fault, and no-nonsense. Kelly grew up learning expressions such as “There are no pockets in a shroud,” meaning you can’t take your money with you, and “It beats hens pecking on a rock,” used when she saw something she could barely believe.

None of the women in the family cottoned to the popular notion that men were superior, or that “ladies” should follow certain rules or behave in socially acceptable sorts of ways. Which may be why Kelly and others in her family could be so frank about their origins, saying they’d come into the world in what some people once called the “bastard way.” For Kelly and her relatives, it was just the way it was. Roxanne, her biological mother, told Kelly her father was likely a one-night-stand. Kelly was only two in 1963 when Roxanne asked her sister Donna to adopt her baby girl.

For Donna, a woman with a quick mind and aspirations of a career, life was largely one of frustration. Under other circumstances she would likely have become a doctor or lawyer. When she was growing up, college was not something many parents wanted, or cared about, for their daughters. Donna worked for a time at a travel agency and, years later, after the kids were out of the house, enrolled in nursing school and earned straight As. If you want something bad enough and work hard at it, you can get it—that was a lesson Kelly learned from Donna. Motherhood was not the role that fit Donna best. Still, despite the fact she already had a daughter, she took in Roxanne’s baby girl. “I’m like the second dog you get when the first one is driving you crazy,” Kelly would say, laughing. The house was always clean and there was always food on the table. Dinner was at five o’clock sharp and you’d better be there on time.

Donna loved her children—two boys eventually joined the two girls—but she also worked long hours and didn’t have much time, or energy, for affection. It didn’t seem to matter to Kelly and her siblings. They knew they had a place to lay their heads every night, and for the most part that was enough. When Kelly was in her twenties and thirties Roxanne would occasionally call and apologize for giving her up for adoption, but Kelly, without rancor and in all honesty, told her she didn’t need to say she was sorry. She’d done the right thing, Kelly told her. The children Roxanne had tried to raise all had difficult lives at best.

Kelly left home at seventeen, the summer before her senior year of high school. She surfed couches for a while in Indiana and lived for a bit with her grandmother, where she graduated from high school early. But she had no idea what to do next. Like her mother before her, Kelly didn’t think college was possible. Kelly ended up living for a time with her father, whom Donna had divorced when Kelly was eleven. She made a few friends, worked different jobs, and generally had a good time. For the next few years she traveled around the country, earning her way as she went, ending up in California when she was in her early twenties. Kelly kept thinking there was more she wanted from her life than simply working blue-collar jobs and living paycheck to paycheck.

She picked up her education where she’d left off and began to take a few courses at Golden West, a community college in Huntington Beach. She wasn’t in a rush, until one Saturday night, the boyfriend of one of Kelly’s friends hatched a plan to steal some drugs from a local dealer. Afterward, when Kelly learned what he’d done, she was furious. It was a watershed moment for the twenty-four-year-old. Sharing an apartment, working low-earning jobs, partying on the weekends—she’d never thought of this as her life, really. It was always a stage, a phase, something she knew she’d grow out of. And she did. Fast.

The meandering was over. She needed to think beyond the present and plan for the future. Concentrating on her college courses, she received enough credits for an associate’s degree in art from Golden West, though she never formally graduated. A short time later she followed up on an ad for a full-time position at an environmental consulting firm. During her interview she admitted she had no experience in cartography—a prerequisite—but, she added, there was nothing she couldn’t draw. She got the job and before long was pulling down $30,000 a year.

The firm had a small branch in Chicago, and eventually Kelly found herself at another crossroads. She could go on for her bachelor’s degree in Southern California, or she could move back to the Midwest and be nearer to her family without giving up her job. There was so much she’d already learned from her colleagues, not only about the environmental business, but about what it meant to be a professional. The decision was made: She would head east.

Not long after the move, her bosses, recognizing her intelligence and capabilities, asked her to learn more about underwater wells and waste management. That’s what led her to attend a five-day educational enhancement event in Findlay, Ohio, in July 1989—and to Wayne Maines.

The seminar was held at the local community college and was taught by a former fireman who had been badly burned years earlier in a chemical fire. The days were excruciatingly long and included donning full hazmat suits. There were only about a dozen students taking the course, and at the end of each day they stumbled, exhausted, into the nearest watering hole to kick back, cool off, and relax. On one of those evenings, Kelly and Wayne, who was director of the Institute for Safety and Health Training (now the Safety and Health Extension) at West Virginia University, found themselves playing pool and talking late into the night about business, politics, and the course they were taking. They were both products of small towns, and they felt unusually comfortable with each other. She liked that he was talkative, sweet natured, and self-assured. He liked her blue eyes, her easy laughter, and her honesty. By the end of the week, when Wayne headed back to West Virginia and Kelly to Chicago, they agreed to get together again as soon as possible. Thus began a year of weekend traveling for both of them, at the end of which Kelly moved into a two-bedroom duplex in Morgantown, West Virginia, with Wayne.

T
HERE WAS NO MISTAKING
Wayne Maines for anything but pure American boy. He was born in 1958 and grew up in the village of Hagaman, New York, about forty miles northwest of Albany. According to the 1840 state
Gazetteer,
Hagaman’s Mills (the name it was founded under in the late 1700s) was home to one church, one tavern, one store, one gristmill, one sawmill, one carpet factory, and “about 25 dwelling houses.” Today the village is slightly more populated—about twelve hundred people sprinkled over a mile-and-a-half slice of land—but the habits and values remain old-fashioned and rural. Not until Wayne was five did the Maines family have running water. They had a well for freshwater and an outhouse. In the winter their heat came courtesy of a kerosene stove. Wayne’s bedroom was above the living room, and the grate on his floor looked directly down onto the stove and the television right next to it. All Wayne had to do was make a subtle adjustment to the TV’s position before he went to bed and he could lie on the floor of his room and peek through the heating grate to watch
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,
without his parents knowing.

Wayne’s father, Bill, worked in a carpet mill in Amsterdam, New York, and later commuted thirty miles each way to Saratoga for a job at General Foods. He also liked to frequent the local taverns and racetracks. Tall and slender, Bill Maines briefly played semipro baseball but a heart attack at age forty-four curtailed his ability to work full-time for the rest of his life.

Wayne’s mother, Betty, worked different jobs over the years to keep the family fed. She cleaned an upscale beauty shop on weekends, waited tables, and sold Avon products. For a couple of years she worked the second shift at a leather mill that made Spalding footballs. Every day after school, on his way home, Wayne would take a path that dipped behind the factory where his mother would have just begun the second shift. Usually he’d call up to her and ask, “Mom, what do you want me to fix for dinner?” More often than not she’d yell back that she’d already made something and left it on the counter. All he needed to do, she said, was put it in the oven and fix a vegetable for himself, his brother, and his sister. The conversation always ended the same way, with Betty Maines smiling down at Wayne and saying, “I love you. See you in the morning.”

As a product of small-town America, Wayne grew up with small-town values, especially devotion to family and respect for country. For Wayne, the lessons learned from his father were simple and, he figured, sturdy enough to last a lifetime: Make your first punch count, don’t ever quit on your team, never point a gun at someone unless you’re prepared to use it, try to return things in better condition than when you borrowed them (cleaned, oiled, and tuned up), and never, ever drink while playing cards.

While growing up, for several summers Wayne worked as a barker for a traveling carnival along with his brother, Bill, and toured up and down the Northeast. At one stop in Huntington, New York, when he was fifteen, Wayne was working a game booth beside a ride called the Zipper. A simple cable on an oval boom pulled about a dozen cars around the largely vertical ride. One night, a bolt attached to the door of one of the cars came loose, and as the boom whipped the cars up, the door with the loose bolt blew open and two teenage girls were flung from their seats. Hearing the screams, Wayne rushed to try and catch one of the girls as her body sailed through the air, but she hit the ground hard and broke her neck, dead on impact. The other teenager landed in a sand pit and was badly injured but survived.

Wayne had seen death before. He was a hunter. But he’d never witnessed someone killed in an accident, and especially someone so young and in such a senseless way. He’d always felt he had control over the world immediately around him, and when he didn’t like something or felt it wasn’t right for him, he was able to change it or move on. But the helplessness he felt in not being able to do anything for that girl was new to him. He knew he couldn’t have run faster or gotten to her any sooner. Sometimes things happened and there was no questioning why or what if. Still, for many years afterward he couldn’t get the image of that girl’s mangled body out of his mind.

Wayne’s only identity crisis occurred when he graduated from high school and enlisted in the air force. Joining the military was an honorable tradition in the Maines family. It was also practical. No one in the family had a college degree. In the air force he could learn a trade, so he signed up to be trained as a dental assistant. While stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska, Wayne worked for an oral surgeon. The man was an officer, voluble and opinionated. He was also a snob. One day he stopped in the hallway where Wayne and several other technicians and nurses were hanging out on break. The doctor said he had a question for Wayne.

“Who’s the vice president of the United States?”

Wayne paused, embarrassed, then told the doctor he didn’t know. The surgeon turned to the physician beside him and said, loud enough for everyone to hear: “See, I told you so.”