King - Bastards: a memoir

bastards

a m e m o i r

MARY ANNA KING

For
Jacob, Becca, Lisa, Rebekah, Meghan, & Lesley
I love you, Bananas.

Contents

Note

To write this book I consulted my personal journals from my childhood. I spoke with my sisters, brother, mothers, and father, who lived through certain bits of it alongside me, though these are the events as I recall them.

When necessary, time frames have been condensed, though only when doing so would not compromise the underlying truth of the narrative. One minor character is a composite. Many names have been changed.

bastards

2009

R emember... the last sense you lose is your hearing.

My friend on the other side of the phone is a veteran intensive care nurse, so she ought to know.

As long as she is breathing, she can hear you.

I nod into the phone and wait for someone to helpfully shout into the receiver, Shes nodding , like my brother did once when we were kids. But I am standing in an airport departure gate where I am just another stranger on a cell phone, another transient whom no one will remember. My nurse friends voice drops into the woolly alto register of one accustomed to soothing other people.

Dont be surprised if it goes quickly... once she realizes that everyone is there.

Okay.

Its New Years Eve, and Im headed to Oklahoma because my mother is dying.

I keep repeating that phrasemy mother is dyingalthough it isnt quite true. I say my mother, because that is what people will understand. My mother is dying was what I said to my boss when I called him from the cab on the way to the airport, so it would be easy for him to comprehend, so the appropriate proto cols could be observed. But Mimi is not the woman who raised me all my life. She could have been, but she wasnt. It is that arbitrariness that has led me to struggle for as long as I can remember to reconcile the person I am with the one I might have been.

As I board my plane in Los Angeles, my brother, Jacob, begins his drive to Oklahoma from south Texas, where he is stationed with the U.S. Army. When my plane lands in Dallas for a two-hour layover, he is my first phone call. On paper, Jacob is in fact my nephew , but to call my brother my nephew is surreal and inconceivable. Im a mile away, Im coming to get you, he says in his New Jersey drawl. In another life I had that accent, too.

I slip into the passenger seat of Jacobs beige sedan and we drive into the worst ice storm that has hit the center of the country in one hundred years.

Mind if I smoke? he asks.

Not if you give me one, too.

He smirks and hands me the cigarette he just lit, pulling one for himself from the pack in the cup holder. We leave a trail of smoke as we drive up Interstate 35, unimpeded except for the occasional patch of black ice. Local newscasters crowing about the Storm of the Century has kept most other drivers off the road tonight. That and the fact that its New Years Eve. Most people in the Interstate 35 corridor from Dallas to Oklahoma City are at parties, drinking champagne and waiting for balls to drop. Mimi gave me my first sip of champagne on a New Years Eve seventeen years ago. I was ten years old and we were waiting to watch the fireworks over downtown Oklahoma City. She handed me a saucerlike glass with a sparkling pink liquid in ithalf champagne and half strawberry Nehi soda. It was sweet and bitter and the bubbles made me sneeze.

I ask Jacob what he remembers about Oklahoma, the few years that he lived there with me, our sister Rebecca, Granddad, and Mimi. Nothing, he says. He clicks the radio dial to find a station that will stay free of static. We smoke two more cigarettes. Were in the flat middle of the country. There is nothing to block the frigid wind whistling over our windshield.

When we get to Oklahoma City, we loop around the Will Rogers World Airport until Rebecca arrives from Minneapolis. Its after ten oclock at night by the time the three of us arrive in the intensive care unit at Baptist Hospital. Granddad is in the room with Mimi when we arrive, just as he has been since Christmas Day when she was admitted. Seventeen years agowhen Granddad became, on paper, my fatherI was afraid of him, afraid of the way he could turn so quickly from the guy who sang Irving Berlin songs to wake us up in the morning to a red-faced, jaw-clenching belt-wielder. He is seventy-six now. His shoulders have rounded and he has softened.

Rebecca and I hug him and Jacob shakes his hand. Well take the night shift, I say to him. Theres a moment when all four of us look at the unconscious Mimi and listen to the sound of her breathing. Its loud and fuzzy, an aircraft engine preparing for takeoff.

I tell Granddad what my nurse friend said on the phone, that the last sense you lose is your hearing, because I need to say something and there is nothing else to say.

He nods, and tells me hell be back in the morning.

Many people have an event that tears their lives into before and after. Before the divorce and after the divorce. Before the war and after the war; before 9/11 and after 9/11. If I were like most people, Mimis deathmy mothers deathwould have been that event for me. But in fact, losing people is the only constant I know.

1983 1989

A t the end of summer in 1983, I was fourteen months old, Jacob was two years, and Rebecca, whom we called Becky Jo, was two months. She was born the day after my first birthday: my only present that year. Our daddy worked construction and deejayed weddings on the weekends. Mom had been a cashier at a department store until she quit to stay home with us kids. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in southern New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia. My parents had been married four years. They were young. Their passions burned like an incinerator and swung wildly from love to hate and back again.

UNCLE MAC was my daddys little brother, the baby of his family. He had been the best man at my parents wedding in 1979, and would be Becky Jos godfather when she was baptized. At twenty, he was a pink-cheeked homebody with a sweet singing voice and a mop of jet-black hair that waved around his cheeks and down his neck. If I dig to the deepest corners of my memory, among the pocket-lint pieces of splintered sunlight and walnut crib bars against white apartment walls, I brush against an image of my pudgy baby body lying beside my brother on deep brown shag carpet, while above us my mustachioed father and his mustachioed brother faced one another with guitars, their corded arms strumming, faces lifted like wolves howling at the moon as their voicesfor moments, mere fragments of breathmet in effortless harmony. I cant be sure if this is pure memory or something I created from stories my parents told me. My mom insists that Macs spirit deposited this image in my mind on one of several nights in the mid-1980s when he haunted us, his restless spirit never satisfied that we were comfortable without him.

Mac called our apartment early on Labor Day morning in 1983, before the salty south Jersey air got humid enough to suffocate a person, to invite us all to spend the day at the swimming pool where he was a lifeguard. Bringing unbaptized Becky Jo to a public pool seemed like preparing a gift too tempting for the greedy hands of fate to ignore, so Daddy told Mac that we would meet him for a cookout later that night instead.