“We can’t send that out,” Mom said, still looking at me.
“No, I guess not,” said Dad.
My brother was staring. “What?” He had just turned eleven.
“Your sister’s figure, is all,” said Dad briskly.
My brother was unmoved. “Oh.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
Mom had recovered. “It’s no problem, sweetie. It’s just that it’s inappropriate for a girl your age to have breasts that large. Maybe we could try another dress? Let’s go up and look.”
Upstairs she held out hangers for me. I dropped the velvet and slipped into red wool. She pulled my hair in front of my shoulders and smoothed it flat. “I have all these zits,” I said. “And my teeth are too small.”
“Oh, no,” said Mom, still moving my hair. Her touch made my stomach hurt. I wanted so badly to cry. “Oh, you’re exactly the girl I used to hate in high school. The blond one with the big boobs.”
Hate. I grabbed onto that word like the fin of a shark. I wasn’t blond and I didn’t have big boobs, but I was fascinated by the thought of my mom as the girl doing the hating because, I realized, it was exactly what I feared: that my mom would learn what I had done, and hate me.
I tolerated the veneer for the duration of a photo shoot. Mom swept blush on my cheeks and gloss on my lips, and finger-combed the hair at my temples. My brother grinned his new grown-up-tooth grin. I put my arm around him. Such a good girl, hanging on by a thread.
Given the chance, I would finish her off.
Then we drove the six hours to St. Louis. I was back in jeans, and I brought into the back seat a pillow from my bed, a yellow Walkman with several mixtapes, and the remaining rag of my baby blanket, Nigh-Nigh, which had come home in my suitcase. I had no books in the car because I got carsick, so I smashed the pillow against the cold window, spread my blanket over my shoulders as best I could, and listened to Linley’s Colorado mix (Clarence Carter, the Eagles, the Steve Miller Band) while we drove south the length of Illinois.
In the passenger seat Mom was tense. I didn’t know whether it was fact or myth that my father’s family disliked my mom, but the resulting conflict was part of my earliest memories and that made it true. I had cousins I had not met. My father had a brother who lived twenty minutes away, but we did not see him. Dad, aiming for balance, landed on evasion—“I think it’s just such a shame all around”—and his equanimity felt to me disloyal. I had long before taken my mother’s side. As I got older, I looked forward to discovering what it was that they did not like about Mom because, I assumed, it must be true about me too. I was her girl; I meant to do more of whatever it was. I saw my grandparents once a year, and they did not appear to enjoy it.
“They hate me, and they hate my children,” Mom said, in the car on the way down.
Dad just said, “It means a lot to me to see my parents.”
My father had grown up on a small street in suburban St. Louis called Black Creek Lane. Behind it was an actual creek where as a boy he’d pulled newts from the mud. When I went down there to look, there were only rocks ringed by wet earth. There was always something evading me at this house, some animal truth I could not put my finger on. I figured it lived like the dried-up creek, in the past.
My grandmother Ginny had birthed three sons in the immediate postwar years while my grandfather, whom we called Big Jim, was in Asia with the merchant marine. My father, their eldest, was expected to be born during one of my grandfather’s leaves, but Big Jim’s stay at home came and went, and the baby did not arrive. “The doctor told me October,” said Ginny. Dad was born in the last days of December. “He was in there for eleven months.”
Not until I was older did I realize that my grandmother, who had a bachelor’s degree in child psychology from Sarah Lawrence, had spent her entire life thinking my father gestated for eleven months. There was no question about paternity—no reason for the doctor to lie or be cavalier except that he simply didn’t know or care. And my grandmother apparently had had withheld from her enough information about the female body to not understand that the doctor was wrong. I could not believe, when my grandmother told me this, that she had been subjected to such crap; either the doctor was crazy or the 1940s were hell.
But then, after my brother was born at the end of the 1970s, my mother’s obstetrician joked that he had put in an extra stitch or two for my dad. So.
Once my father finally arrived, in late 1945, Big Jim requested leave to visit his firstborn son. My favorite story of my grandfather’s is the only one he ever told me: “I put on my dress whites to go meet your dad in the hospital, so he would be proud of me.”
I see it so clearly, it’s as though a photograph survives. Big Jim, six feet and change, with his narrow, handsome face and bright blue eyes, standing at attention before a hospital bassinet, waiting to be admired.
We arrived at Black Creek Lane and piled out. My grandparents came to the door. Ginny was a square woman with blunt-cut hair and a set jaw, no bullshit, the sort who ran all the
