The Mistress's Daughter (7 page)

The paper is local, deeply local. You can only get it in a small radius around where Norman lives—which is near where I will be reading. It is like a scene from a movie. I am obsessed, there is no stopping me. I drive past broken-down cars—police are directing traffic with flares. Oblivious. I am going to meet my sister—well, not meet her, but at least see her.

When I get to the shopping center near Norman's house, I park the car and hurry into a little card store. I pick up a stack of copies of the paper and run back to the car.

The papers are wet, the newsprint sticks together, it shreds as I pull at it, the rain stains the pages, the sides bleed and blur. I find the picture of myself—it is the publicity photo from the book, strangely formal and out of place with what is happening now. I am there looking out, oblivious to what is happening now. I scan the page. “Dress Like a Doll.” The article is about a Barbie children's fashion show at McDonald's. There is a photograph of Norman's granddaughter dressed like a Barbie. Norman's daughter, my sister, is almost invisible. She is sitting on a chair, bending over, wearing a large hat that blocks most of her face. She is wearing white pants with some sort of polka-dotted thing around her waist, a scarf belt. Is she dressed right for a nice lunch? Does she own jewelry?

I look at the picture carefully—I see her fat thigh, her belly, her feet, her outstretched hand, and it is my thigh, my belly, my feet, my hand.

There is something deeply ironic and pathetic about the whole thing. I am staring at a piece of wet newsprint trying to see what my sister, who doesn't even know she has a sister, looks like. There is an incredible sense of disappointment. She is in a McDonald's with her kid dressed up like a Barbie doll, and all I can think of is the short story I wrote,
A Real Doll
, about a boy dating a Barbie doll. I was being ironic; she is being serious. And to top it off—Norman thinks this picture of his daughter taking her kids to a fashion show at McDonald's is equal to an article on me giving a reading from my third book. His daughter went to finishing school, had a debutante coming-out ball, and now does “interiors.” She has fat thighs, a belly, and paws for hands, but I'm sure she dresses right for lunch. It's depressing as hell.

Drenched, I return to my parents' house. I have ten minutes to get ready for the reading.

I go alone. Ever since the night Ellen appeared without warning at the bookstore, I am afraid of what might happen. My parents want to come, but I excuse them. I am protecting them as well as myself. The library where I'm reading is en route to Norman's house and just down the road from Uncle George. I have no idea if Ellen has told her brother about me or if they are even speaking. I never know who knows what.

Libraries are sacred, preserved spaces where people are supposed to behave well; they are trusted places for people who love books.

I am oddly ill at ease. From the moment I arrive, I have the sense they are there—exactly who, I'm not sure—but I can tell I am being watched, sized up. There is the strange sensation that something else is going on—there are people here who have come for a reason other than to hear me read. No one approaches me, no one identifies themselves or makes themselves known in any way. It is incredibly eerie.

The librarian introduces me and I stand to read. The lights onstage are bright; I cannot see far enough into the audience to memorize every face. I wish I had guards on either side of the stage, looking out on my behalf, reading the crowd, identifying faces, reporting into their lapel pins.

I read from a work in progress. The crowd follows closely. There are book club ladies, friends from high school, fans with first editions, people who are habitués of that library, but there is something else, some unnameable force field. I am on display, I feel myself being watched, scanned, and yet I am obligated to keep reading, to pretend I don't know this is happening. Do they think I don't know they're out there, that I'm oblivious to them, that they are invisible, anonymous, in the dark?

I wish I could turn the lights around, shine them into the audience, I have some questions of my own. I am tempted to pull a Lenny Bruce, stop the show, and address the mystery guests, imploring them to reveal themselves—hey, you spies from the other planet, it's October, the least you could do is put on a Halloween costume, maybe show up looking like a skeleton or something. But it would look as if I'd lost my mind.

At the end of the reading, the librarian asks if I am willing to answer questions from the audience. “I'd be happy to.” Hands go up.

I used to believe that every question deserved an answer, I used to feel obligated to answer everything as fully and honestly as possible. I don't anymore.

“Where do your ideas come from?” someone asks.

“From you,” I say. The crowd laughs. I look at the woman asking the question; she seems innocent enough. I continue. “I get them from looking at the world we live in, from reading the paper, watching the news. It seems as though what I write is often extreme, but in truth it happens every day.”

There are questions posed as challenges, tests. I have the sense that depending on my answer, they might say, You're lying, I know this and that fact about you.

I point to a raised hand.

“Do you write autobiographically?”

I feel the watchers zooming in.

“No.” I say. “I have yet to write anything that is truly autobiographical.”

They are taunting me.

“Are you adopted?”

“Yes, and I'm coming up for adoption again soon, so if anyone is interested, please let the librarian at the back of the room know.” More laughter.

“Do you know who your parents are? Have you searched?”

“I am always searching,” I say, “but no, I have not searched in that way.”

 

December 18, 1993. My birthday, the lightning rod, the axis around which I spin. I hold myself braced against it—an anticelebration.

How can a person with no history have a birthday? Are you sure it's my birthday? Are you sure of how old I am? How do you know? What proof do you have?

I was born in 1961. My birth certificate was issued in 1963. Is that normal? Was there a delay because I belonged to no one, hovered in limbo land, waiting to become someone?

For those two missing years did I have another name?

To add to the confusion, my birthday is in the middle of the holiday season; it features not only all the standard natal elements, but also the ongoing and age-old battle of the Christians versus the Jews, which oddly turns out to be among the battles of my biological origins.

December, the season of joy, is the season of my secret sorrows.

Every year I cannot help but think of the woman who gave me away. I find myself missing someone I never knew, wondering, Does she miss me? Does she shop for the things I buy myself? Does my father know I exist? Do I have siblings? Does anybody know who I am? I spend weeks grieving.

At this point it would take nothing short of a national monthlong festival, a public parade celebrating my existence, to reassure me that my presence on this planet is welcome. And even then I'm not sure I would believe it, I'm not sure I wouldn't doubt that it was an attempt to humor me, to temporarily cajole me out of a black hole.

And this year is something entirely new, more awful, like going back to scratch and starting all over again, a new birthday with an old child, the first with four parents instead of two, a schizoid dividing of the zygote further than the gods intended it to go.

Everyone is at me, wanting something.

My parents, who usually do nothing, are trying to plan a trip to New York. I quickly put them off.

And Ellen is calling me every night begging that she be allowed to see me, feeling that in some way this is her birthday too.

“It's your birthday,” she says. “Please, pretty please.” And she starts to cry, and then there is the click of the lighter and “Can you hold on for a minute while I get a drink of water?”

She writes a letter saying that Decembers have plagued her for the last thirty-one years, she finds them excruciating, depressing, and so forth. And while it's nice to know I was never forgotten, it's stranger still that I am never known.

Norman calls asking if I've “got any big plans.” He says he is sending something; he has spoken with Ellen about what would be a good gift and he's putting it in the mail—insured, overnight express, to be sure it gets there in time.

I spend the official day in hiding. I turn off the phone, I don't answer the buzzer.

Later I go downstairs and find that people have left me flowers and gifts, similar to the way strangers leave offerings at scenes of tragic accidents. My friends have created a veritable altar to the birthday girl: an FTD Pick Me Up bouquet, a get-well card, and so on.

Norman sent a small heart-shaped gold locket, the kind that snaps open and you put two pictures in, the kind that you'd give a little girl. It is such a strange gift for a thirty-two-year-old. Is this jewelry? It is more like pre-jewelry, like a training bra. (For Christmas he will send me a thin cashmere sweater—which will make me wonder, is this the kind of “cashmere sweater” Ellen was referring to?)

Ellen sends a birthday card meant for a small child—shaped like a teddy bear, signed, “Love, Mommy Ellen.” She sends a kiddie card, a silky nightgown negligee like something Mrs. Robinson would wear, and a box of homemade candy from her favorite Atlantic City candy store. The chocolate is thick, heavy, rolled, filled—it looks like it could bend your mind. I can't keep the things she sends me and I can't throw them out either. I give the chocolate away. That evening I make each of my friends take a piece, like communion wafers, bits of the mother. “Here,” I say pushing the box forward, refusing to try one myself. “Take one,” and I watch to see how it goes down.

 

Christmas Eve—it's a year since this started unfolding. I'm on the train to Washington—it's packed, the mood is festive, the luggage racks are bursting with ornately wrapped packages. I'm bringing presents even though my mother has told me we don't celebrate Christmas. The fact is we don't celebrate Hanukkah either.

We handle the holidays by pretending they aren't happening, by ignoring them. We hold our breath—it'll pass. An invisible cloud hangs over the house, a depressed charcoal gray, like the set for a Eugene O'Neill play.

Some part of me thinks it's not hard to have a decent holiday; you choose what holiday you like and you celebrate. Every year I become all the more determined that I will do it for myself, I will make my own holiday.

The winter I turned nine, I was fixated on having a Christmas tree. It made no sense to me that all up and down the block every house except ours had a tree.

“We're Jewish,” my mother said. “Jews don't have trees.”

“We weren't always Jewish, were we?” Until then we'd always celebrated Christmas, a treeless Christmas, but Christmas nonetheless. I remembered leaving a plate of cookies for Santa, waking to find it empty, replaced by a long red stocking hanging from the fireplace, an orange bulging in the toe, walnuts spilling out the top, presents on the hearth. It wasn't my imagination. Until then we'd been like everyone else, and then suddenly we were different.

“I was wrong,” my mother said. “It was my error. Jews don't celebrate Christmas, we have Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights.”

“But the Solomons next door are Jewish too, and they have a tree.”

“That's their problem,” she said.

It wasn't as though we were especially religious. On Yom Kippur, the highest of the holy days, the Day of Atonement, a day of fasting, we paused only momentarily for God to count us in and then ate a late breakfast. But now, without warning, Christmas had changed its name to Hanukkah. It came early and lasted for eight days, like a plague.

We gathered around a menorah and lit the candles—no one knew the prayer; instead we said thanks. And thanks a lot. And is it returnable?

After the fourth night my brother refused to participate. “I've had more than enough,” he said, refusing to leave his room.

From my bedroom window I could see the neighbors' tree twinkling with glass icicles, miniature white lights, colored balls, tinsel.

On the day after Christmas, my mother took me to the library. Next to the library was a Christmas tree lot. I sneaked over and talked to the guy. It took a surprising effort to convince him—on the day after Christmas—to take pity on a nine-year-old who lived in a house without a tree, but he finally gave me a puny Christmas tree. I dragged it to the car, stuffed it in the backseat, met my mother back in the library. I was bursting with excitement at my ingenious sneakery, beside myself with joy. Back at the house, I slipped out and was dragging the tree from the car, into the house, when my mother started yelling, “What are you doing? You can't bring that in here, it's a tree.”

“Why not, why not? It's just a tree.”

“Not in the living room, you're not going to put that in the living room.”

“Why can't we be like everyone else?”