Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found Read online

  On the morning of my ninth birthday, Daddy gave me three Mexican gold coins: tiny round slivers, each one showing an eagle wrestling a snake in its talons. I didn’t want them, but saying so would have been heresy. I didn’t like coins, and I didn’t like Mexico. I got sick, I got sunburned, and I longed to be back in Miller Place, playing with my cousins. Martine—whom I might never see again—was probably finding blue beach glass, maybe even red. And here I was, in a prison.

  A short-legged donkey covered with curlicued pink and white tissue paper was hung over the thick branch of a mango tree, and a gaggle of children turned up. I’d never seen them before, and they showed absolutely no interest in me, even though it was my birthday party. None of them spoke any English at all.

  A blindfold was tied across my eyes and I was spun around three times. Dizzy, I felt a big stick being put in my hand.

  “Bataló!” said a man in Spanish. He was probably the gardener.

  “Hit it, honey,” said Daddy.

  I wasn’t the kind of girl who liked to hit things, and the stick was heavy and hard to manage. I’d never seen a piñata before, and didn’t understand what I was supposed to do.

  I swung, and hit nothing. I could feel the excitement from the other kids, chattering in Spanish and laughing at me. I swung again and heard a rustle of tissue paper, and felt the ghost of something swinging away. Of course I would be useless at this. I didn’t know that another man was stationed on the end of the rope, yanking the piñata out of reach.

  I had gone first, since I was the birthday girl. Kids who grow up with piñatas know the drill, and people yell from the sidelines, “Now! Hit it now!” Dad and Gladys weren’t the yelling sort. Nurse might have helped me, if she’d known what was going on—I know, after the England–Ireland rugby match, that she had it in her—but to her the piñata was probably as foreign as a penis gourd or a shrunken head. The gardener yelled in Spanish, which might as well have been Chinese.

  I swung again and again, since it was expected of me. All I wanted was for this unfestive, barbaric, inexplicable birthday party to be over.

  “Basta, hijita, muy bueno.” I felt the man take the stick from my hand, then untie the blindfold. At least the humiliation was over.

  “Well done, honey,” said Daddy, sounding impatient and bored, as I went back to stand beside Nurse. I took it as disappointment in me, and it deepened my misery. I didn’t know that the first child is never allowed to break the piñata; the men in charge yank it out of reach until everyone has had a turn.

  Finally, the last and biggest boy stepped up to bat. The clay pot in the donkey’s belly cracked, and candy showered down. The local kids rushed in, scrabbling for it on the bricks.

  “Run in and get the candy, honey,” said Daddy, irritated by my lack of initiative.

  I found a few pieces that had skittered to the edge. I didn’t like Mexican candy, and I was frightened by the melee, and the flailing stick, which the blindfolded boy was still swinging while the gardener tried to get it off him.

  I wished I was anywhere else. I understood—without asking, and without being told—that I wasn’t going back to Miller Place. I didn’t know why. Maybe my long, miserable bout of chickenpox had sealed my fate, or maybe Grampa didn’t like the way Martine and I used to creep up the slatted steps to his room and spy on him. But why couldn’t Nana and Grampa at least have kept me for the summer? Why had I been spirited off the moment school ended and run into a siding in Mexico, as if there were no other roof on earth that could shelter me?

  Cici told me later that Nana had written to Daddy to say that she and Grampa couldn’t keep me anymore: they were too old, the responsibility of a child was too great. I doubt it was Nana’s choice. Maybe all Grampa really wanted was more money from Daddy, as Cici contemptuously suspected. Whatever he said made Daddy determined to take me away from “the demented old dago” (as he called him in a letter to Cici) as soon as school was out. I imagine that Grampa took a bitter pleasure in forcing Daddy to take me back again. He hadn’t treated Mum properly, and now that he had a new wife, Grampa was going to make it as awkward for him as he could.

  I realized that this hated place wasn’t permanent. It was just a holding pattern, as evidently no other place had yet been found for me. But the weeks were stretching toward their third month, and there was no sign that I was ever going to leave.

  I sensed that plans were made up for me on the fly. I was an inconvenience—not unloved, but a problem that required constant solving. If I asked when I’d be going home—wherever that was—or whether I’d be staying where I was, I would be putting Daddy, or Gladys, on the spot. (Nurse, I figured, wouldn’t know any more than I did.) I would be able to see the uncertainty on their faces as their brains churned through the possible answers that might keep me quiet, at least for another little while. That would only confirm how random my fate was. It was better just to wait and see.

  Euclid. I saw the word on a street sign, instead of the number thirteen. Fifteenth Street, Fourteenth Street, then Euclid.

  Gladys’s heavy Impala, a dirty gold color, swung left. After a few blocks of stop signs, it pulled up in front of the house that she, Nurse, and I were to share.

  I did not want to live on Euclid Street. I despised the man who had named the streets for caving in to superstition and disguising Thirteenth Street—and despised the street itself for having a name that sounded like some nasty insect. No one would live on Euclid Street if they could possibly live somewhere else.

  Still, at least I was back in Los Angeles, splotched with that seductively unnatural bougainvillea which seemed never to wilt or fade. The late-summer sun was softened by the haze of the Pacific thirteen blocks away, and kinder than the inland sun of Mexico. I would be going to a school where Cici’s cousin was a teacher. That made me feel she was looking out for me.

  The house had fake-wood plastic paneling and carpets the greeny-brown of cowpats. It was one in a long row of low houses, haphazardly mirrored across the asphalt, and duplicated on street after street between Ocean and Twenty-sixth, where the numbering ended. These were streets where families lived. I was the one who gave us the veneer of fitting in, a nine-year-old with blond pigtails and a bike with a bell and a white basket. It was my favorite part of the day: getting the bike out of the shed in the backyard, wheeling it over the maze of snail trails glistening in the morning sun, and riding alone and independent to school with both hands on the handlebars—in full control as I ought to be on a public road with cars on it. I felt securely placed in the world as I followed my route through the almost deserted streets—a route which was absolutely and entirely mine.

  I could see the picture of myself, and I felt like an impostor in suburbia. I’d never lived on a street like this before, with front lawns studded with sprinklers and everyone mowing the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street like they were supposed to do. I doubted I ever would again. I resented the sameness, which depersonalized the people who lived there, but at the same time I yearned to share it. My nomadic life, with its high-drama story line and eccentric cast of characters, made me feel interesting and unusual—but also somehow fake, as if I hadn’t done anything to earn my special status. I felt, in myself, bog-ordinary. My skin itself was tired by my chameleon life.

  What I wanted more than any other impossible thing was to be called Nikki, with two k’s. Anjelica called me “Legs” for short, and though I didn’t like the nickname, I loved the affection in it. But the TV commercials for L’Eggs panty hose made it unbearable. Women sashayed past building sites and workers wolf-whistled, “She’s got LEGS!!!!” That same wolf whistle followed me, and it was worse because in my own eyes I was Fattypuff, pudgy and graceless, so very far from someone that men would whistle at—such as my mother, who’d been so beautiful she’d been put on the cover of Life, and my sister, who was always in Vogue.

  Nikki: so close to Ricki, but I never realized it. The echo which must have pleased me subconsciously didn’
t extend to Vicki (or Vikki), which I used as a comparison and didn’t like at all. I rarely thought about Ricki, my mother—I had no mementos of her, no photographs, nothing that had come with me from St. Cleran’s or Maida Avenue. My most vivid memories of her were that silent car drive and her anger at my bouncing; and I’d started to feel that I was remembering remembering, not actually remembering the events themselves. It was a generation loss in the mental recording, and who knew what details had been fogged away, or what shadows or halos of color had sneaked into the picture? I was three worlds away from my lost mother—too far to ever find her again.

  Nurse hated Euclid Street too, though she never said so—she wouldn’t have thought it her place. But I could tell. She tiptoed around “Miss Hill,” as she always called Gladys, and we would have taciturn dinners in the dining room, its windows barely penetrated by the dying rays of the sun, stagnant with the ghost smells of old food hanging in the curtains and trodden into the fibers of the carpet.

  Since Nurse couldn’t drive, she was virtually marooned. She had one afternoon off a week, on which she would walk a mile or so to an English tea shop to meet a friend. I wondered how she had found that friend, but she clammed up when I probed her. She was, I think now, clinically depressed. My teeth and hair were always brushed, cookies and milk awaited me when I got back from school, but Nurse was always too tired to play games with me and her patience was short.

  On Saturdays, we would walk to the bookstore and she would buy me five Nancy Drew books—my new obsession. Nancy Drew was a teenage detective with titian hair, two sidekicks, and a sky-blue convertible car. I enjoyed the implausible mysteries, but what fascinated me most was that Nancy (like the Famous Five) could have such adventures while still being part of an intensely ordinary world—and that her world could be so ordinary, when her mother was dead too. When we got home, I would lock myself in the bathroom and read one from cover to cover. The rest I would finish during the week after school, lying on one of the twin four-poster beds that Aunt Dorothy had contributed to the house.

  For someone who disapproved of Enid Blyton—as Daddy did, or at least as Gladys said he did—Nancy Drew would have been beneath contempt. I felt an unspoken collusion with Nurse as she bought me books that “Mr. Huston” wouldn’t like. I don’t think Nurse ever said the words “your father.” I was starting to understand that people had taken sides when Mum and Daddy had split up. Nurse was—obviously—on Mum’s, Gladys—obviously—on Daddy’s. I wasn’t sure where I was. It would be loathsomely disloyal to abandon my dead mother’s memory, flimsy as it was; but then, how could I not be loyal to Daddy, since he was the center, and the puppet-master, of my world?

  Gladys would never have directly defied Daddy’s wishes, but she managed to seem blind to the blaze of yellow spines on my bookcase. Her gestures of friendship were so subtle it was easy to miss them. We were adopted by a Siamese cat, and Gladys suggested we call him Ignats, because she knew I’d find it funny. She gave me a typewriter and a book on teaching yourself to type, and when I had to write an essay for my history class at school, she suggested the subject of grottoes—someone had given me a book about them, which I could crib from—and helped me write it on the morning it was due, watching over me as I typed it. She drove me to school so that she could excuse my lateness herself.

  Then Gladys’s mother came on an extended visit, and our flickering understanding was snuffed out. It was winter, and the thermostat in the house was turned up to eighty. I didn’t see why Mrs. Hill couldn’t put on a sweater over the thin cotton housedresses she wore, instead of stifling us all in this claustrophobic re-creation of what I imagined must be the torrid heat of West Virginia, where she was from. The heat made the house smell even more strongly of old dust and carpet backing, and the air was as limp as the air in a tomb.

  Nurse moved out of her room into mine so that Mrs. Hill could have hers. The low murmur of the radio came from behind the closed door, underscoring the absence of live human sound. Gladys and Nurse spoke to each other only when necessary, their exchanges polite but minimal. I rattled between them, trying to be as quiet as I could.

  I kept the door of my room shut too—to block out the embalming heat of the furnace. I shut off the heating vents and opened all the windows, not caring how many sweaters I had to wear. Though I hated the house, I considered it primarily mine. I thought it wouldn’t have been rented if not for me; without me it would, as far as the Huston family was concerned, not even exist. It didn’t occur to me that Gladys would have had to live somewhere, that without me there would have been some rented house or apartment, that in fact I was sharing her digs rather than she sharing mine. She let me claim the master bedroom, with its own en suite bathroom, when we moved in. I saw the shock on Nurse’s face, but Gladys let my arrogance pass. Now, as Mrs. Hill’s visit wore on, I felt as if I was being isolated into a back corner while the rest of the house reverted to its true nature: smothering and lifeless.

  Weekends were my release. I would go for the day, or sometimes overnight, to Cici’s house. Or I would stay with my godmother Gina, the painter, whom I remembered clearly as Mum’s closest friend. She was living in L.A. because her husband, a Bulgarian fencing master, wanted to be an actor. (After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he came second in the election for president of Bulgaria.) Best of all, Anjelica would pick me up and we’d drive along beautiful San Vicente Boulevard, its wide grassy median lined with gnarled, red-barked coral trees, toward Hollywood, where she was sharing a house with her old friend from London, Jeremy Railton. She had just got her driver’s license, and she joked about how hard it had been for Jeremy, when he taught her to drive, to keep her under sixty miles an hour. The radio was always on. When Bob Dylan came on, singing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” Anjel turned up the volume and sang along. That was how I wanted to be: carefree, knowledgeable about music, in control of the wheel, speeding ahead. I sang too, grateful to Dylan for writing a chorus that was the same line repeated four times over. The sameness of the boulevard, the sameness of the song: if only this sunlit cocoon of a drive could never end.

  Anjel told me about the first time she had met Gladys. It was Christmastime, and Gladys came to St. Cleran’s without any presents for Anjelica and Tony.

  “I don’t give presents to people I don’t know,” Gladys had told them. “I will give you presents when I know you better.”

  “Can you believe it!” said Anjel as we drove. She looked over at me, smiling. She didn’t even need to keep her eyes on the road. “Outrageous! I hated her instantly.” She was laughing at her greedy eight-year-old self, but some of the outrage had stuck.

  “I would have too.”

  It was a lie. I didn’t want to admit that I wouldn’t have expected a present—or, if I had, I would have quickly and silently revised my incorrect views. I wished I had Anjelica’s sense of entitlement. It seemed to sum up everything that made her more interesting, more confident, more truly special than I was.

  In New York, being with Anjelica had been rather like being with Dad: stepping into a world where I didn’t belong, unsure if I was measuring up. I didn’t know then that the man she lived with there, a fashion photographer, was depressive and prone to rages, so she had been constantly on edge. Here she was full of enthusiasm and energy, and it flooded into me. She wanted me for her sister; that was all that mattered to me. We were allies: Mum’s daughters, the Soma girls.

  Jeremy had a truck, and we usually went to the garden center or the hardware store, me sandwiched between them on the bench seat, to buy supplies for his projects: cement to make ponds for turtles and frogs, jungly plants to attract wild birds, wood and wire to build cages for coveys of baby quail. Once, Anjel pulled an old dress out of a trunk, and they insisted I put it on. It was long and white, with tiny pleats and lace; it had belonged, she told me, to our grandmother Angelica. I hated all dresses—and worst of all was the frilly bonnet. Anjel had always loved dressing up, and couldn’t accept that I didn’t
. The dress made me feel silly; it erased me. But I couldn’t explain that, even to myself, and I didn’t dare refuse outright in case they decided they didn’t want me in their enchanted, artistic world. So I put it on, the bonnet too, and curled in the hammock like a surly hamster while they took a photograph of me.

  I have memories of Anjel and Cici laughing together—and none of Anjel with Daddy. Anjel didn’t spend Christmas Day with us, and I didn’t think to wonder why not. My family was made up of individual people who shared an accident of circumstance; we weren’t any kind of whole. Tony wrote to me, but I hadn’t seen him since Ireland. I doubted I’d ever see Danny again. Neither he nor Zoë wrote, and on the rare occasions when Cici mentioned Zoë’s name, it was with such acid hostility that it was obvious that she and Danny couldn’t be a part of Daddy’s new life.

  The circle of people who had loved Mum was more powerfully magnetic than this amoebic Huston family. Some mysterious force drew us together, seemingly coincidentally, in certain places at certain times: Anjelica and I and Gina and Jeremy and Anjel’s friend, Joan Buck, in London and New York and Los Angeles, and later in New Mexico. They had known me since I was a baby, when Mum had been there. They were more important than family: they were the witnesses to the reality that my own memory couldn’t prove was real.