Some Girls_ My Life In A Harem Part 15

With the tattoo, I felt something essential about myself had fallen into place. The following day I hopped a train to Highland Park in search of another missing piece. I'm not sure what I had expected, but the Highland Park train station was a platform in the middle of a suburb. It was the kind of place where businesspeople parked their cars and commuted by train to the city for work. I hadn't thought to rent a car. I carried a driver's license as ID, but I hadn't driven since I left home at sixteen, and that poorly and very little. I was used to subways dropping you practically at the front door of anywhere you wanted to go.

I crossed the parking lot to the shoulder of a road where I saw a fair flow of traffic and threw out my thumb, another first. There was no other option, unless I turned around and went back. I always made up for in willingness what I lacked in forethought. A black Cadillac with a mercifully non-creepy driver took me to the entrance of Highland Park Hospital, a brick structure landscaped with long beds of pink impatiens. I wandered the hallways looking for the records department, where I was met with blank stares.

"We've got nothing for you here," said a woman with pearlescent green talons.

"You're strange and extraordinary," I said in response to her nails, a reference to my all-time favorite movie, Cabaret Cabaret. She looked at me even more blankly, if that was possible.

"You know. Sally Bowles. Green nails. Strange and extraordinary."

She didn't know.

"You could try the County Clerk. For your birth certificate," she said.

Of course there was nothing for me there. And I already had my official birth certificate. It told me nothing. It wiped out my history as if it had never existed.

I went to the maternity ward, because I couldn't think of anything else to do and I would feel defeated walking out so quickly. When I looked through the gla.s.s at the babies squirming in the nursery, I felt the cold adrenaline of a shoplifter. Why did I feel like I was doing something wrong? I left with the beginning flickers of a migraine and an emotional flatline.

I had only one more lead. I considered myself an old pro at hitchhiking by that time and I hitched another ride to the address I had scrawled on a piece of loose-leaf paper. The lawns of Highland Park looked like those of the affluent suburban town in which I had grown up and they inspired the same reaction: terror. The trees were just starting to turn, their leaves edged with hints of the gaudy colors to come.

I looked at the pretty houses and stores and a sense of hopelessness overwhelmed me. I got claustrophobic and my right eye began to swim with white spots. It felt like half my brain was being probed by alien electrodes. I thought for a minute I might also be getting ready to have an asthma attack, but it was just hypochondria. Trips to the deep suburbs give me asthma and migraines and rare diseases.

The aging Jewish trophy-wife-type woman in the driver's seat scolded me for hitchhiking and then cross-examined me about my sojourn to Highland Park. She tapped her French-tip acrylics against the steering wheel. I thought of my mother-my real mother, my adoptive mother-the thousands of carpools, the air-conditioning on high. I thought of her big black gla.s.ses with the purplish tint, her fingers, swollen with early arthritis but still shapely and perfectly manicured, wrapped around the wheel.

"I'm looking for an old friend."

"What's the name? I've lived here a hundred years. Maybe I know her. Him?"

"Her. Her name is Carrie Gardner."

"Gardner. Maybe there was a Gardner ahead of my daughter in junior high, but I didn't know the parents."

I got the feeling that she was making this up. She seemed like the kind of woman who couldn't stand to be caught without the answer.

"I never pick up hitchhikers, you know, but I could tell you were a nice girl. My daughter was at school in Michigan before she dropped out. Now she follows the Grateful Dead around. Thinks she's an activist. Ridiculous. So smart, that kid. I figured you could have been my daughter standing there. I'd want someone safe to stop for her."

What would my mother say? My daughter was at NYU before she dropped out. Now she flits back and forth from New York to Southeast Asia. Thinks she's an actress. Ridiculous. So smart, that kid. My daughter was at NYU before she dropped out. Now she flits back and forth from New York to Southeast Asia. Thinks she's an actress. Ridiculous. So smart, that kid.

The woman consulted my creased piece of paper and dropped me off at a ranch-style suburban house, plain and a.s.suredly middle cla.s.s.

"You sure you'll be okay?" she asked me.

"I'm fine. I've got a ride from here. Thanks a lot."

I considered asking if she would wait for a minute and then drive me back to the train station. She didn't seem like she had much to do. But I decided not to. I was pretty sure she would have said yes, but I didn't want to talk to her anymore, didn't want the reminder of my own mother, of the betrayal I was committing by standing on that particular square of yard.

A moonfaced woman opened the door and squinted at me, brus.h.i.+ng a lock of hair out of her face. She told me that she had moved in only a year ago and had no information. Before she moved in, there was a family who was there three years, but she couldn't remember their names. Maybe Carrie had stayed with the family who was there before them. Maybe the family before that. She was just guessing. Nineteen years was a long time, after all. Nineteen years of waves rolling over any sandcastles Carrie might have built there.

"Is there anyone on this block who lived here nineteen years ago?"

"Not that I know of. It's a young block. It's a family neighborhood," she said. "Now, who are you, again?"

In ghost stories, it's always some terrible tragedy that leaves a mark behind, an a.s.sault so grievous that time itself steps aside to allow for a spirit to hang around and decry the injustice. But what about our mundane personal tragedies, the prosaic injustices perpetrated without a police file, without an audience? These slip away, washed from the counters before the next family moves in their boxes of dishware. I suppose I could have stayed in the neighborhood and been a better investigative journalist, but I was suddenly nauseated, my headache growing progressively debilitating.

Hitching a ride from there to the train station proved to be harder than I had antic.i.p.ated. I walked for about an hour down a long stretch of road, feeling stupid and stopping once to throw up behind a bush, before anyone stopped. Otherwise, it was uneventful. I don't know what I had expected. Somehow it had seemed important for me to smell the smells and see the colors of that town, but all I had smelled was the same autumn, the same trees, the same hospital trays that were everywhere else. I was embarra.s.sed by the visit to the nursery, by my own sentimentality.

On the train home, I laid my head against the window and thought of Joni Mitch.e.l.l. In high school I had decided that I looked like Joni Mitch.e.l.l, in spite of her delicate, elfish features. I didn't look like her in obvious ways, but in ways only I, intimately acquainted with my own bone structure, could see. I even sang like her when I sang alone. On stage in musical-theater productions I was a cla.s.sic belter, but in my secret moments, I sang just like Joni, my voice high and breathy and folksy.

I had read in Rolling Stone Rolling Stone that Joni Mitch.e.l.l gave a baby up for adoption. This baby was the child born with the moon in Cancer that she sings about in the song "Little Green." I was certain that this baby was me. Never mind the fact that I was a Leo. Never mind the fact that the 1971 that Joni Mitch.e.l.l gave a baby up for adoption. This baby was the child born with the moon in Cancer that she sings about in the song "Little Green." I was certain that this baby was me. Never mind the fact that I was a Leo. Never mind the fact that the 1971 Blue Blue alb.u.m with "Little Green" on it came out two years before I was born. Never mind that I was hardly the blond and blue-eyed sprite Joni Mitch.e.l.l was. alb.u.m with "Little Green" on it came out two years before I was born. Never mind that I was hardly the blond and blue-eyed sprite Joni Mitch.e.l.l was.

I filtered out the contradictory evidence and knew, beyond all reason, that my birth mother was Joni Mitch.e.l.l. Because her spirit was the spirit I had inside me. And what I needed was not a mother who had carried me in her body. That I could live without. But I needed to find the place my heart came from. My heart refused to be an orphan forever.

I got my tattoo not to say "I wuz here," a tag on a freeway overpa.s.s, but rather to say "Here wuz me." Here they are, the landscapes inscribed behind my eyes. Because even when your dream slips away, your mother slips away, your baby slips away, your lover slips away-even then, you have your story. With my tattoos, I serve as witness and doc.u.mentarian to myself.

After the first tattoo, I got many more. Now people often run their hands over my tattoos as if they're braille. All this touching gets on my nerves sometimes. People who don't know me at all will reach out and grab my arm, will run their palms over my forearms. But I get it. My tattoos are pulsing with stories. Hold your ear close to them and you'll hear the ocean at Beach Haven, you'll hear an insistent knocking on a door in Brunei, you'll hear the train pulling out of the Highland Park station.

I let Highland Park disappear behind me. That town held nothing, not the smallest clue that there once had been a girl somewhere in that house pregnant with me, feeding me her thoughts, feeding me her fears, staying maybe with the last nameless family or maybe with the family before that; no one can remember.

My mission in Highland Park had been unsuccessful, but I had figured out something, at least. The air there weighed a million pounds, but riding the train out of town I felt so light. I recognized time's s.h.i.+fting weight-the heaviness of the past, the lightness of the moment.

What I was looking for wasn't in Highland Park, wasn't in any one place. Sometimes all you need is a Joni Mitch.e.l.l song to know who you are. Sometimes you find it by accident on a foreign balcony at dawn. And sometimes your story looks like the purple spine of a snake spiraling outward across your belly, etched forever under your skin.

chapter 24.

A snake tattoo is preferable to a live snake. I drank an espresso and stared into the cage of my vicious Burmese python, Varla. Only our extremely strange cleaning woman, Shakti, potentially part reptile herself, could handle Varla without elbow-length gloves. I had wanted a pet and anything cute with fur was forbidden in our apartment, so I had walked into a Lower East Side pet store one day and walked out with Varla. I had always liked snakes and thought it would be fun to have one. I was wrong. snake tattoo is preferable to a live snake. I drank an espresso and stared into the cage of my vicious Burmese python, Varla. Only our extremely strange cleaning woman, Shakti, potentially part reptile herself, could handle Varla without elbow-length gloves. I had wanted a pet and anything cute with fur was forbidden in our apartment, so I had walked into a Lower East Side pet store one day and walked out with Varla. I had always liked snakes and thought it would be fun to have one. I was wrong.

I hadn't realized how traumatic it was going to be to feed the snake live mice. Even more traumatic was when I sought advice for dealing with Varla's bad temper and the man at the pet store told me to stun the mice first. He said it would help her lose her lunging instinct. I was mortified. I was the little girl who, inspired by the Met's Temple of Dendur, had buried my hamster in a s...o...b..x painted to look like a pharaoh's sarcophagus, had wept for weeks over his garden grave. But I had bought the snake and she was my responsibility. I put the girl who had lovingly constructed Habitrail castles behind me.

After that, every time Varla needed to eat, I would cry and put a mouse in a paper bag. Then I would profusely apologize to the mouse as I smashed the bag against the wall. I would drop the mouse into the terrarium and it would twitch while Varla ignored it for hours before eating it and I drowned in guilt. It was gruesome.

Andy refused to feed her.

"You wanted her, you feed her."

It was the couch debacle multiplied by a thousand. Varla was every bad decision I'd ever made coiled tightly and hissing out at me from a smelly cage. That morning, I was contemplating how the f.u.c.k I was going to move that huge terrarium and whom I could get to adopt a mean snake, when the phone rang.

It was legendary downtown theater director Richard Foreman calling to tell me that I had been cast in his upcoming play, Samuel's Major Problems. Samuel's Major Problems. When I hung up the phone, I screamed and danced around like a housewife who had just gotten a visit from Ed McMahon. When I hung up the phone, I screamed and danced around like a housewife who had just gotten a visit from Ed McMahon.

I wanted to call Andy and tell him, but his a.s.sistant screened me out. I decided to walk over to his studio and tell him in person. He could tell his a.s.sistant to hold his calls, but he couldn't exactly turn his girlfriend away at the door. Living with a workaholic, even one who paid the bills, wasn't all I had hoped it would be. I picked up my script at Richard's Wooster Street loft on my way to tell Andy the news.

I starred in the show with Steven Ratazzi and Thomas Jay Ryan, both fabulously gifted actors. I played Maria Helena, sort of a ghost/devil/succubus/nurse/Marilyn Monroe figure. My time in New York didn't get any better than walking from my Mott Street apartment to St. Mark's Church for the first day of rehearsals.

It was the beginning of December and my body buzzed with warmth under my overcoat, my nose frozen at the tip from the wind cutting a swath down Second Avenue. "On the Street Where You Live" played in my head-I have often walked down this street before, but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before-my dorky musical-theater background impinging on my rebirth into the avant-garde. I entered the wrought-iron gates and cut past the dilapidated front doors and along the paving stones of the church, through the graveyard and back to the theater.

Richard stages plays that aren't plays, exactly. They're more like three-dimensional poems or philosophical treatises told as a nursery rhyme. Being cast in one of his shows means that you'll be standing in for any number of the shadowy figures in his subconscious and that essentially you'll be moving around inside his head for a few months. This was alternately sublime and maddening.

Richard was a nebbish, genius sweetheart and he was also a maniacal, condescending tyrant. He completely changed the set around every few days, adding obstacles, such as three waist-high black poles that blended into the rest of the scenery and caused painful accidents. During one lunch break he took away all our props and added a Plexiglas wall between the actors and the audience. During another he added body microphones and directed that all the dialogue be delivered in a whisper. During yet another he added all the props back in and changed the shape of the stage.

It was a blast. Every person on the crew was fascinating and we all tended to get drunk and make out with each other at parties. We had a costume designer named Lindsay Davis, a leather queen with an infectious laugh and a closet full of sharp little hats. Lindsay and I fast discovered that we were soul mates. I went to his loft on Thirty-eighth Street for fittings and wound up staying the whole afternoon, smoking pot and then going for pancakes at the diner downstairs. He made me a beautiful black dress that looked like a perfect 1950s c.o.c.ktail number except it was completely see-through.

On my legs, Richard instructed me to put stripes of black electrical tape that were visible through the sheer fabric. They echoed a diagonal of stripes on the stage, which looked like a very narrow crosswalk. The electrical tape, reapplied each night, left red welts on my legs that didn't go away for the whole run of the show. I felt proud of them; they were my battle scars.

We rehea.r.s.ed for the month of December and the play ran for the first three months of 1993. I took a handful of hundreds out of my safe-deposit box and bought a dress to wear to dinner after opening night. It was made of burgundy crushed velvet, with a cl.u.s.ter of silk roses at the small of the back. True, I had a closet full of fancy dresses I never wore, but I wanted something bought by my own dollars at a store I had wandered into off a SoHo street, not a dress purchased in a frenzy by a royal guard with a sackful of Monopoly money. I wanted a dress to celebrate nothing less than a dream come true, because that's what it was, the whole thing, from the grind of the rehearsals to the nauseating anxiety of opening night.

My parents, supportive to a fault, drove into the city and watched me perform at least once a week. Even near the end of the three-month run, my father still insisted he had no idea what the show meant and my mother still insisted on bringing the crew loaves of banana bread and trays of rugelach. My father enjoyed hara.s.sing whomever was in the seat next to him (it would inevitably be Wallace Shawn or John Malkovich or someone), demanding that the startled soul explain to him what the h.e.l.l was going on up there. I might have been able to explain it, but he never asked me. I think my father much preferred frightening the glitterati.

There was a windfall of perks that came with acting in Samuel's Major Problems. Samuel's Major Problems. We got great reviews in We got great reviews in The New York Times The New York Times and and The Village Voice. The Village Voice. Before the run was over, I already had calls for other auditions. I had a lunch date with Don DeLillo the day after he came to see the show (during which I acted like a complete dips.h.i.+t, but really, sue me, I was struck dumb). Before the run was over, I already had calls for other auditions. I had a lunch date with Don DeLillo the day after he came to see the show (during which I acted like a complete dips.h.i.+t, but really, sue me, I was struck dumb).

Andy came on opening night and I believe he was proud of me. On one or two other nights, he left work and snuck in after the show had started. On some nights he'd come out after the show and drink with the cast and crew at Mona's or 7A. He was a hard-drinking Texan and he could stay lucid and charming while everyone else got plastered. Everyone adored him and no one could understand it when we broke up. It was a weird thing how it happened. Andy and I never even talked about breaking up before the day I left.

The idea of Andy, the life I had imagined for us, had disintegrated before Mark showed up. But before Mark, I didn't see it was gone. I didn't notice. I was busy. It was a full-time job just being me, trying to stamp myself onto the face of New York, as if the heels of my shoes held a red-hot branding iron.

One night when the theater was dark, Andy asked me to come with him to meet an old Texas friend of his for drinks at Mona's. This friend of his was visiting town from Los Angeles. He was an art director who was having a hard time holding a job in film because of his cocaine problem. I didn't connect the dots until after two drinks. This Texas friend was the older man with whom Andy had had a "relations.h.i.+p" when Andy was twelve years old, a two-year relations.h.i.+p that had ended with an arrest in the back of a station wagon. I knew that Andy still talked to the guy, but I never expected to find myself sitting across a table from him.

They prey on the sensitive ones, the smart ones, the lonely ones. Before I left for camp the summer I would turn thirteen, I saw the movie Marjorie Morningstar Marjorie Morningstar and I figured that I was just like Natalie Wood. I was that fresh and daring inside. And I would rewrite the ending. I would never wind up a mediocre, lost housewife on a porch. and I figured that I was just like Natalie Wood. I was that fresh and daring inside. And I would rewrite the ending. I would never wind up a mediocre, lost housewife on a porch.

I favored white Keds and headbands. In the first week of camp I bleached orangey highlights into my hair with Sun-In and I tanned my skin with baby oil. I imagined I looked like a girl on the beach in Blue Hawaii Blue Hawaii, except I didn't need a bra. Though I did steal a pink disposable razor from Erica's shower caddy to shave off my leg hair for the first time.

Nathan was the archery guy. Everybody liked him when they didn't kind of hate him because he was much too glamorous for that run-down camp. He was twenty-one and from New York City and rumor had it that he was a model for United Colors of Benetton. You could just picture him in one of those ads, slouched against some global-y model with an Afro and a striped scarf. Nathan had bleached blond hair that he wore parted and hanging over one eye. His khaki shorts were slung so low that you could see the waistband of his boxers. He gave me stomachaches and asthma attacks. He was more handsome than John Travolta in Grease Grease and sometimes and sometimes Welcome Back, Kotter. Welcome Back, Kotter. Cooler, even, than Elvis in Cooler, even, than Elvis in Jailhouse Rock Jailhouse Rock and and Viva Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas.

The archery range was located down a gra.s.sy slope near the girls' side of camp, between the nature hut and the pottery shack. Free play was the time before dinner when we could pretty much run wild and do whatever we wanted. I decided I wanted more than anything to learn how to shoot an arrow. But I never picked up a bow. Instead I hung out by the archery range, sitting on the nearby hill with my knees tucked under my chin.

One evening, I noted that it was too chilly for Nathan to be wearing just his T-s.h.i.+rt, so I ran back to my bunk and got him an oversize fuzzy pink Benetton sweater with a big white B B on the front of it. When he put it on, I knew that it meant we had a secret, but I wasn't sure yet what it was. on the front of it. When he put it on, I knew that it meant we had a secret, but I wasn't sure yet what it was.

I sat quietly and watched him shoot, too far away to really talk. He was all height and angles, perfect stance, casual and confident, with the arrow placed neatly in the bow, pulled back taut.

Sometimes we girls snuck across camp to raid the boys' side in the middle of the night. The counselors normally pretended to sleep through the nighttime shaving-cream shenanigans and panty raids. The night after I gave Nathan my sweater, I put my small travel alarm, set for three a.m., under my pillow. I kept gum by my bedside and slept carefully on my hair. But that night was different than usual, because I wasn't waking any of my friends. I was embarking on a solo mission.

I traveled across the familiar path with tense steps, the darkness outside the beam of my flashlight dancing with disorienting shadows, saturated by the characters from every camp ghost story I had ever dismissed with a snort. I was madly inspired and frightened. The adrenaline emboldened me. It sailed me across the camp until finally the wet rubber of my sneakers tapped up the green steps to his door, which creaked as I opened it. I walked through the rows of sleeping boys in their army cots, sucking on my spearmint gum, wondering if I should swallow it. Saliva traveled down my throat like cold acid. I shook. Nathan made me ill. He had poisoned me.

I touched his shoulder blade to wake him and it was bare and sharp. When he sat up, he was a full head taller than I. I had never been that close to him before. I could barely make out his expression in the dark, but he didn't seem surprised. He put out his hand in front of him and whispered to me, "Give me your gum."

And when he kissed me, I thought, Tongues are like velvet sh.e.l.lfish. And men are easier than I ever thought. I was surprised that I had gotten what I wanted. I had gotten him to break the rules. I thought it was quite a coup. And if I often wished that I had never gotten involved with Nathan, if I felt hopelessly and immediately in over my head even though our early morning make-out sessions never really went very far, I didn't admit it. Not even to myself, most of the time.

Later, when Nathan got fired and I was humiliated, my father had said, "What did you think was going to happen? That's what you get for always breaking the rules."

I drank too much that night. I was short-tempered and sarcastic and finally had to excuse myself. I walked home alone and pa.s.sed out.

Later that night, Andy came back and sat on the edge of the bed. I squinted at his silhouette in the blue darkness and hazily came to the realization that the person who was stroking my calf, more like petting it, wasn't Andy.

I sat up like a shot, immediately awake and terrified.

"I lost my job."

It was Mark, of course. I had been having nightmares about Nathan and I woke looking at Mark.

Do you know what you do to me? I have to watch you run around in your shorts all day long. It makes me crazy. And I can't do anything about it, and I can't tell anyone.

"Andy?" I called out.

"He had to stop at work and get something," Mark slurred.

Why did he have a key? He wasn't staying with us. Andy told me he had a hotel room.

"No one will hire me."

Maybe this guy was a psycho. Maybe he resented me for living with Andy and was going to kill me. Or maybe he was just a sad-sack, alcoholic, run-of-the-mill pedophile. I figured in his current state I could probably take him. My fear was suddenly steamrolled by a surge of fury that rose to the back of my throat, threatening to spew out like vomit.

"Really? Why is that, Mark?"

"Because I like boys."

Is this okay, honey? You are so pretty and soft. Is this okay, sweetheart? You are so beautiful.

"Because I like little boys," he repeated.

I'm going to pick you up from school and take you into New York and we're going to see bands and movies and do things, okay? I'm going to take care of you. Isn't that what you want?

I looked around for a weapon of some kind. Where was that f.u.c.king stun gun? What's the point of a stun gun if you can't remember where you put it? Maybe he wasn't the danger here. Maybe I was. Maybe I was going to kill him.

But I didn't. Instead I yelled at him to get the f.u.c.k out of my apartment. When he sat there dazed, I yelled it again. I yelled it after he was long out the door.

Go on back to your bunk now, honey. Come again tomorrow. Promise?