I could see the unhappiness on my
gran
dparents' faces whenever I had the courage to ask about my mother, and I especially could see the fear in my grandmother's eyes. It was like asking about the devil. It was better not to ask, not to be curious, but what child would not want to know? It was what drove orphans to pursue their origins, for to know as much as you could about your parents meant you would know so much more about yourself.
It was in fact the way to find the answer to the haunting question we all ask about ourselves, perhaps all our lives. Who am I? And not just who am I to other people, but who am I to myself?
For me the answer was buried in the twisted and crooked way my history was entwined. To discover the answer, I had to unravel it.
At first it was all told to me in simple ways, like my grandmother explaining what a grandmother was really supposed to be and what she was now. Whether she intended to do it or not, she made it clear to me that even though she was doing what a mother should be doing, she could never fully fill a mother's shoes. Of course, as soon as I understood, I wanted to know why I didn't have a mother or a father with whom I lived just as other girls and boys my age did.
"The reason you don't have a mother and a father is because people are supposed to get married first and plan when to have their children so they could take care of them properly," she said. "Yours didn't."
She didn't come right out and call me a mistake. She told me I was as unexpected as a sudden summer thunderstorm. I actually used to think I fell out of the sky, came floating down like a leaf from a tree to settle at their front door. Sometimes, I wished it was true, wished that I had been left on their doorstep. It was all so much easier to accept when you believed a stork brought you to your family. That way a baby was his or her own little person and arrived without any baggage, and especially without any dark past. Stork babies were truly like Adam and Eve, original, born with no past, only a future.
However, at an earlier age than most of the girls around me, I learned the so-called Facts of Life, and so the stork, like so many of the fantasies other girls were being told, was swept outside my door. It was too dangerous for me especially not to know the hard, cold realities as soon as possible. According to my grandmother, who still worked as a special-duty nurse at the hospital, teenage pregnancy was practically a raging plague, and after all, wasn't that what happened in this very house? The chance of that happening again was greater for me because of who my mother was. No one came right out and said so, but I could hear it whispered in every dark corner. I could feel it. It was palpable in every fearful glance. As Karen Stoker's daughter, I was more susceptible to weakness and lust than most girls my age would be. I must be aware of that at all times and therefore be extra cautious.
Maybe that was an even more important reason why I did everything I could to keep boys from noticing me. I was afraid it was true, afraid of myself. "Stay out of the water and you can't drown," I told myself. For a long time, it wasn't all that difficult for me to do. Boys didn't look at me with desire, only amusement.
Being she was a nurse, my grandmother was always good about explaining the mechanics of sex. She made it sound as impersonal as the workings of a car engine, maybe to keep me from being at all intrigued or interested. Until I reached puberty, her efforts were successful. I found her lectures dry and boring and wondered what all the excitement was about.
"However," she told me in a veiled warning, "even if you explain it all clearly to your son or to your daughter, there's nothing you can do if he or she permits his or her body to take control of his or her mind. There's nothing you can do," she said, her voice drifting off under the pressure of the heavy regret. I knew she felt like a policewoman whose son had become a bank robber. I didn't know whether to hate him or not for causing me to be born. I saw him so rarely and had little opportunity to think of him as my father. I really had no clear understanding of how much of him was in me.
I winced every time I heard someone refer to another girl or boy my age to be so much like his or her father or mother that they were like two peas in a pod. Whoever said it in my presence usually said it loud enough for me to hear. Of course, I suspected this person was thinking my mother and I were two peas in a pod and not my father and I. My
grandparents had told me so little. How was I to know if it was true or not?
Actually, I had learned the most about my mother and the tragic events from my aunt Zipporah, who had been my mother's best friend at the time of the tragedy, and against my grandmother's wishes had given me those pictures of the two of them. It was from Aunt Zipporah that I learned that before anything terrible had occurred, she and my mother had turned the attic into their private imaginary world. I would never have known otherwise, because neither my grandmother nor my grandfather would talk about it and because my grandfather and my father had emptied it of all that had been in it and remodeled it. I suppose it was their attempt to erase the past. However, Aunt Zipporah helped me understand why and how it had been their playground before it had become a prison.
She described how they fantasized up here, pretending the sofa was a car taking them on crosscountry trips. She told me about the old clothing they had found in old chests, and how they dressed in them and put on the heavy shoes, clumping about pretending to be this one or that one. They made up stories to fit the pictures of former residents they had discovered in dresser drawers, in boxes and cartons.
"We were surprised at how much the former residents had left behind. Your mother called the attic a `nest of orphans.' She was so good at imagining what their lives had been like. She spun tales of love and deceit, loss and joy, adventure and romance on a magical loom. The attic walls are full of our laughter and pretended sobs and wails. For us it was way more fun than watching television or going to a movie."
I clung to every word she used to describe my mother. I was truly like a starving person treasuring crumbs. The stories she told about the two of them filled me with such warmth and pleasure. I couldn't help wishing that I had a friend that close who would do similar things with me, a friend whose parents weren't afraid of her coming here to spend time with me and share intimate feelings and thoughts. How wonderful it must have been for both of them to have someone each could trust, have someone who brought her joy and happiness.
Aunt Zipporah described how inventive, imaginative and unpredictable my mother had been even outside of the attic, and how that had given her so much pleasure.
"If it weren't for your mother, life in this small town would have been boring for me. We had moved up from a far more urban area close to New York City, where there was so much more to do, but your mother made sure that nothing was ever what it was in reality. Karen cast her imagination at homes, people, even dogs and cats and turned them into fantasies. People used to say we walked on air and bounced about as if we had swallowed helium. In those early days, they were always smiling at us, shaking their heads and laughing at our boundless energy. They enjoyed us."
She said other girls were jealous of their relationship.
"They stared at us with half smiles, wishing we would let them into our world," she told me, a half smile on her face as well.
It filled her with such pleasure to remember, but she was also so saddened by the way it had all turned out.
When she relived all that, her smile would evaporate and be replaced with a pained expression that made it look like she was having a severe headache. I couldn't help feeling that she had felt betrayed, that her trust and love were things she should have been more careful about spending, especially when you realize how her and my mother's tale had ended.
Finishing high school here had been difficult for Aunt Zipporah afterward, but she had recuperated enough to do well and go on to college in New Paltz, where she had met and married Tyler James, a young man who had inherited his own cafe in the city where the state college was located. She earned her degree, but she didn't go on to be a teacher as she had intended. Instead, she worked in their cafe, and over the past two summers, I spent time there wo
rking as a busgirl, clearing off tables and sometimes helping with the hostess duties. I was happier there because I was away from my mother's history, which remained like some ugly stain, not only on me but also on the very streets and buildings.
Even people who were too new to the community or too young to have known my mother and my maternal grandmother, Darlene Pearson, knew the story. It was the most infamous tale in the community. The drugstore my mother's stepfather owned, Pearsons Drug Store, was practically a historic landmark because of what had happened. Nothing different had been done to the front of it and very little to the inside, from what I was told.
Not long after I had been born, Darlene Pearson (I can think of her only as Darlene Pearson), my maternal grandmother, sold the store, and it had been sold again since. She moved away, or, as I had heard many times, she fled, literally packing up and driving off in the middle of the night. No one, not even my grandparents, knew where she had eventually gone. Her real estate agent had been sworn to secrecy and handled all the paperwork between herself and the buyer, the Harrison family, who owned the lumber and hardware company in Sandburg. As far as I knew, my grandparents had never received a phone call or any written inquiry from Darlene Pearson asking about me.
Neither she nor my real mother had anything to do with naming me, nor, as far as I knew, did my real father. When I asked why my mother had no interest, my grandmother told me she didn't know I existed.
"How can she not know that?" I asked. "Surely, she knew she was pregnant and knew she had given birth to me."