The Unwelcomed Child Read online

  “You’d think you enjoyed the school because you had good teachers.”

  “I know I did, Mom. They got me through well enough to get into SUNY Albany.”

  “A miracle if there ever was one,” Grandmother Myra said, and nodded at me to continue serving the dinner she had prepared.

  I rose and went into the kitchen to get the platter of pork. After I brought that out, I brought out the sweet potatoes and the broccoli.

  “Does she clean the house and wash all the clothes, too?” my mother asked, looking at me.

  “Hard work keeps her out of trouble.”

  “What trouble can she get in living locked up?”

  “You should know,” my grandmother retorted. “Curfews and rules were simply things to break.”

  “If you hold the baby bird too tightly in your hands, you’ll kill it.”

  “Too loosely, and it will fly into a wall.”

  “I feel like I’m watching a ping-pong game,” Carlos said, and Grandfather Prescott surprised us all by laughing.

  He fell silent in the wake of Grandmother Myra’s intense glare. Then he began passing the platter of sliced pork around. My mother was smiling. Suddenly, she laughed, looking as if the aperitif had finally gone to her head.

  Grandmother Myra slammed her hand on the table, making the dishes and silverware jump. “I won’t stand for frivolity at my dinner table. Food is a holy blessing. That’s why we are thankful for it. There’s no place at my dinner table for this sort of frivolity.”

  “No place anywhere in your home for any frivolity, Mom.”

  Grandmother Myra stiffened in her chair like someone who had been kicked at the base of her spine. She nodded, with her eyes narrowing, as she turned to my mother. “You’re doing just what I predicted, setting a bad example for Elle. Look at you. You look like a clown in all that makeup and that ugly thing in your nose. You haven’t grown up a day since you left. You poison the very air with your breath. Well, I won’t permit you to bring any immorality back into this house. It still reeks of your former sins.”

  My mother stopped laughing. She looked at me and pushed her seat back.

  “Hey,” Carlos said.

  “No, Carlos. This is not going to work out. We’ll both get indigestion. I thought maybe, just maybe, the years had mellowed you, Mom, but if anything, they’ve made you even harder.” She stood up and turned to me. “You would have been luckier if they had done what they had said they were going to do, given you up for adoption. At least then, you would have had half a chance at some sort of normal life.”

  “Normal? Call your life normal?” Grandmother Myra retorted.

  “Anything is normal compared with this. Let’s go, Carlos.”

  “But . . .”

  “Let’s go. I’m sorry, Dad. For a few moments, it was almost possible.”

  “I wish everyone would just calm down,” Grandfather Prescott said. “If we calm down, we can get along and enjoy our first meal together in a very long time.”

  “Enjoy?” My mother laughed again and then looked serious. “You haven’t changed, either, Dad. You’re still looking the other way. You should have been there for me. You both should have been there for me.”

  “You should have been there for yourself,” Grandmother Myra told her, her eyes strong, steady, and full of faith in her own beliefs. Not my mother, not anyone, would shake that out of her, I thought. She’d never doubt she was right. Was that good, or was that the arrogance she warned me to watch for in myself?

  “Right. Well, I hope you don’t ruin her the way you ruined me,” my mother said, “but I don’t see how that won’t happen. If she has any sense, she’ll run off now while she has a chance. That’s what I did, and if ever I didn’t regret it, it is now. At least I’m living in a world where sex isn’t a disease, where you don’t have to be ashamed of your feelings and treat your period like a stab in the groin.”

  For a moment, it felt as if the air had been sucked out of the house. The silence made my ears ring. It was like being in the eye of a storm.

  That passed, and Grandmother Myra exploded. “Get out!” she shouted, standing and pointing at the front door. “I won’t permit Elle to hear any more of this filth.”

  “She is my daughter, Mother. You can wash her until the skin falls off, and I’ll still be part of her. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

  I felt as if my insides were burning. She was saying all the wrong things. If anything, after she left, Grandmother Myra would be even more vigilant and afraid that evil would show its face in mine.

  Carlos looked terrified now. He rose quickly. “I’m sorry, Prescott,” he told my grandfather.

  My mother stood there defiantly. “You think of me as the bad one, the evil one, but when I think of what you did to me, how you treated me when I came to you in great need, I know in my heart that Christ himself would wonder how you managed to use his name and put your foot in his church.”

  I thought Grandmother Myra would have a heart attack right then and there. She was so overwhelmed with fury she couldn’t speak. Her mouth opened and closed. My mother turned and walked out of the dining room, with Carlos right behind her. I kept my head down. Grandfather Prescott looked as if he was gazing into a bright fire. We heard the door open and close.

  After a moment, Grandmother Myra sat. She drank some water. “Finish eating,” she told us. “It’s a sin to waste good food.”

  My grandfather began eating like an obedient child. I pushed my food around, wondering how I was going to get any of it down my tightened throat. Somehow, in a wakelike silence, we managed to finish what was on our plates. When I saw no one was going to eat any more, I rose and began to clear the table.

  “You shouldn’t have encouraged them,” Grandmother Myra told my grandfather. “Sitting there and drinking that . . . that whiskey.”

  “It was hard for a stranger to walk into all this, Myra. I tried to make it easier.”

  “You shouldn’t have invited them in the first place. She thinks she can just walk in here after all these years, and everything will be forgiven?”

  “She is our daughter.”

  “Not anymore. That ended when she . . . when all this happened and she refused to accept responsibility.”

  “She was raped,” Grandfather Prescott said. I looked up quickly. This argument had never been conducted in my presence.

  “I’m talking about afterward,” Grandmother Myra said. “And you know how I felt about that . . . incident. She was bound to get herself into some trouble.”

  Grandfather Prescott shook his head and stood up.

  “You’d better go lie down,” my grandmother told him.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Fine,” she spat, and rose. “You’re inebriated.”

  “I am not, thank you.”

  She ignored him and looked at me. “Finish up here,” she ordered.

  I hurried out with the dishes and silverware. While I washed and cleaned in the kitchen, the two of them continued their argument in the living room.

  “She wasn’t here five minutes, and look what sort of an influence she had on that child,” I heard her say.

  “She’s fine,” Grandfather Prescott said. “There was no influence.”

  I held my breath, anticipating the next comment from my grandmother being why they shouldn’t send me to public school, but she didn’t say it, and they both quieted down, my grandmother surely quietly fuming. I made sure the kitchen was spotless, along with the dining-room table, before stepping into the living room.

  Grandmother Myra looked up at me sharply. “What did she tell you out there? I want to know exactly,” she said.

  “She told me how difficult things were for her when she left, how Uncle Brett had helped her find work.” I thought carefully for a moment and then added, “She said she could never take me to live with her. She couldn’t have the responsibility for a teenage girl.”

  “Amen to that,” Grandmother Myra said. “I
don’t expect this new marriage of hers will last long anyway. I don’t want to talk about her anymore. Go do your reading.”

  I looked at Grandfather Prescott. He was huddled in his chair, looking more like a whipped puppy. He glanced at me and then looked away like someone who knew there was little more he could do. I left them and went to my room, a room that had never looked darker and more dismal. Despite the bad argument at dinner and the way my grandmother talked about my mother, I couldn’t help but envy her for her freedom, the places she had been, and the things she had seen. The contrast between where I was and where she was couldn’t be any starker.

  And yet this was not the mother I had fantasized about. In my dreams, she was softer and more loving, even to my grandmother. Time had healed all wounds. The mother I had wanted was a mother who wanted me now more than anything, not this person who had arrived and left. This woman was still little more than a teenager. She wouldn’t have fled firing warnings back at me, warnings she thought I should consider. Where did she think I would run to anyway? Did she think life on the road, scrounging for some work to survive, would be my salvation? I didn’t have Uncle Brett into whose arms I could throw myself. We hadn’t even met. I would be more of a stranger to him than I was now to my mother.

  It’s stupid to dream and to live in these fantasies, I thought. I wouldn’t permit myself to do it anymore. Yes, I’d learn everything I had to learn to succeed out there, but I wouldn’t follow in my mother’s footsteps. She didn’t even remember the face of the young man who was my father, according to her. She had blundered into some trap and refused to acknowledge the results until she could do nothing about it, especially when she was back in the grip of my grandparents.

  How did you learn to love a mother who wanted you to be disposed of and forgotten, either through abortion or through the anonymous world of orphans? I was just a blip on her radar screen. Now that she knew I existed, she had to look at me, and although for a few moments I had thought we could be friends, possibly even more, I realized that was even more of a fantasy than the ones I had preferred.

  I fell asleep on a bed of disappointment. My grandparents argued late into the night. I heard them mumbling in the living room and then as they climbed the stairs to their bedroom. Their voices droned on as they reviewed what had happened. I was sure they both fell asleep thinking about the daughter they once had high hopes for, a little girl not yet stained by the temptations of the real world, not yet defiant, not yet so selfish that all she could do was service her own passions.

  Maybe it was better to be like Grandmother Myra when it came to my mother. Maybe it was better to think she was gone forever, someone who had streaked in like a falling star and glittered just long enough to be noticed before she disappeared in the darkness forever. I welcomed sleep like the darkness that would drown out a glaring, painful light.

  After I awoke and dressed, I went about the morning chores in silence, aware that my grandmother was watching me more closely to see if meeting my mother had changed me in some detrimental way. I asked her no questions and made no more comments about my mother. Neither she nor Grandfather Prescott mentioned her, either, but every time my grandmother began to speak to me, I held my breath, anticipating something that would mean my school enrollment was far from assured. She didn’t mention it.

  Late in the morning, I had gone out onto the back porch and tied my ribbon on the banister. As soon as lunch was finished and my grandmother was satisfied, I went for my art equipment and supplies. My grandparents told me they were going to do some grocery shopping, and Grandfather Prescott said he needed some things from the hardware store.

  “Your grandfather thinks we should try that restaurant we took you to on your birthday,” Grandmother Myra said, surprising me. “Somehow, in his wild imagination, he thinks doing that will cheer me up. We’ll leave about five-thirty,” she said. “You can wear one of the new dresses for school, if you like.”

  “I will. Thank you, Grandmother,” I said. I smiled at my grandfather.

  “Waste of time and money,” she muttered.

  They left the house before I did. The silence seemed heavier. It was as if my mother’s visit, her presence in the house in which she had grown up, had changed the very air in it. Her voice and her laughter were still resonating, echoing in my ears. The sound of the phone ringing startled me. I looked at it for a moment. Probably the Marxes, I thought, and lifted the receiver.

  “Hello, this is Elle,” I said, as I was taught to say.

  “You can come live with me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I feel terrible about leaving you there. I’m sorry I said that it wasn’t possible. Carlos is willing to take you in, too. We’ll manage. Whatever, your life will be better than what you’re living there. Here’s my address. Write it down.” She repeated it slowly. “We’re spending most of the year in Atlantic City, New Jersey. You don’t have to go to school if you don’t want to. We can find you some work in one of the hotels or restaurants.”

  She paused. I said nothing.

  “I expected my mother to answer the phone, not you, and I didn’t expect she would let you speak to me.”

  “They’re out shopping,” I said.

  “Perfect. Pack your things, and get on a bus. I’ll give you some credit-card numbers, and you can call ahead for your ticket. Call me on my cell phone and tell me the schedule. Here’s the number.” She dictated it twice. “We’ll be there to pick you up.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can. I did it, and I wasn’t all that much older than you are.”

  “You were,” I said. “I’m only fifteen.”

  “I felt sick leaving you there. It brought back all my ugly memories,” she said in reply.

  “I’m not ready to leave,” I said. “I’m going to public school this fall.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. Get out. I can see what she’s doing to you. She’s turned you into a house slave and probably convinced you that you’re well on the way to hell. Hell is in that house, believe me.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “I thought you had more grit in you. I thought you were more like me.”

  “I’m not,” I said. I said it so fast. If I had thought first, I might not have said it so bluntly.

  “I see. Well, you have my cell-phone number. Call me when you wake up. I have to go. I won’t call you again,” she warned. “I’m surprised I did, but as I said, I felt bad for you.”

  Do you? I thought. Why didn’t you feel bad for me the day I was born? A month later, a year? Why didn’t you ever call to see what they really had done with me?

  I hated how hard and cruel Grandmother Myra could be sometimes. I hated the fear of evil she had embedded in my very soul, how she had made me doubt my own self-worth so many times, and what she had prevented me from enjoying, but I didn’t think she was so terribly wrong about my mother now. I would fulfill the prophecy if I went off to be with this woman who had come bursting into my life and gone bursting out of it with lightning speed. Grandmother Myra wasn’t wrong.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate your calling.”

  “Christ, you even sound like her,” she said. “Good luck.”

  She hung up.

  I held the receiver for almost a minute, rehearing every word of our conversation. Then I hung it up slowly. I was trembling, because I thought she might be right. I should be packing and running.

  But then my thoughts shifted to my picture and the lake and Mason.

  There were other ways to escape, I concluded. I gathered my things again and hurried out into the woods to follow my path, looking back occasionally as I went. I was more like someone fleeing than someone rushing toward someplace or someone she wanted to see.

  My mother was right about one thing.

  I wasn’t living in the Garden of Eden.

  But I’d be a fool not to realize that Satan had moved on to other gardens.

  12

/>   “I’ve got most of the afternoon,” I said as Mason guided the rowboat to the shore. He wore a pair of white shorts and a light blue tank top, and he was barefoot. He got out of the boat to load my art equipment and supplies. “There’s no dinner preparations. Tonight we’re going to the restaurant where I first saw you.”

  “Oh, what’s the occasion?”

  I didn’t want to get into my mother’s unexpected visit.

  “No occasion. My grandfather talked my grandmother into doing it.”

  He smiled and put his arm around my waist, kissed me softly on the lips, and lifted me comfortably into his arms. He didn’t move.

  “Claudine can put all the makeup in the world on and teach you how to use it, but it won’t matter. You’re a naturally beautiful girl, Elle. I can’t get tired of saying it.”

  “I don’t really want to put on a lot of makeup anyway,” I said, recalling how made-up my mother was.

  “Good.” He kissed me again and set me softly in the rowboat. “You’ve got to meet my parents. They know I came to get you.”

  He saw the look of concern on my face.

  “Don’t worry. They are cool parents.”

  It occurred to me as he started rowing back to the dock that I had never met any parents of anyone my age. What did “cool parents” mean? Understanding? Loving? Considerate? As wild as my mother? I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  As we pulled up to the dock, Mason’s father came walking quickly toward us. He was in bright red swimming trunks and a pair of black sandals. He looked as if he had been in the sun for months.

  “Well, well, so this is the forest princess,” he said, and Mason laughed. Mason’s father reached down to help me out of the boat. As soon as I took his hand, he lifted me onto the dock, gazing into my face with a small smile on his. “I can see why you’ve captured Mason’s heart so quickly. I’m Mason’s father. You can call me Doug. Elle, is it?”

  I nodded. I could barely speak. No grown man, not even my grandfather, ever had held me so closely. He released me and stepped back.

  “What’s with the easel?”