I read a lot about Marilyn, conspiracy theories about her death and about her upbringing. The more I read, the more I connected with her and understood why I was drawn to her. She had a very difficult childhood, moving from one foster home to another. That was close to my story: being uprooted and unprotected, feeling like an outsider. I intimately understood her struggles with poverty and family. Ultimately, what I loved about Marilyn was her ability to come from nothing—to belong to no one—and evolve into a huge icon. I latched onto that. I believed in that.
I’ve heard Marilyn might’ve even been my mother’s inspiration for my name. The first four letters are the same: M-A-R-I. However, my father claimed that my name comes from the Black Maria/Mariah, the infamous police van used to haul people off to prison in the UK. The story also goes that I was named after a hit 1950s show tune, “They Call the Wind Maria,” from Paint Your Wagon, a Broadway show about the California Gold Rush. (Both references use the soft pronunciation, with the second syllable having a rye sound.) Perhaps it’s a combination of all three: a 1950s starlet, a show tune, and a paddy wagon.
Whatever the origin, when I was younger I didn’t like my name. No one else had it, and when you’re a kid that’s not cool. I always wished I had a regular name like Jennifer or Heather. There were no cute stickers, key chains, or mini license plates with my name on them. But the worst part was hardly anyone could pronounce it. I always dreaded seeing a substitute teacher, knowing roll call would be a Maria/Maya calamity. I wouldn’t meet another Mariah until I was about eighteen years old; she was a cool Black girl and we commiserated good-humoredly on the mispronunciations of our childhood. I had no way to imagine that only a few years after that, many people would be naming their children Mariah, after me.
Of all the supposed inspirations for my name, the Marilyn Monroe connection resonates the most with me—self-created and controlled, confident and vulnerable, womanly and childlike, glamorous and humble, adored and alone. Marilyn is a source of inspiration for me, and Lawd have I needed that.
When I was in the eighth grade, there was a pack of pretty, mostly Irish girls whom I desperately wanted to befriend. At that time, in that town, most of these girls were considered the pinnacle of physical perfection: milky skin, silky hair, and blue eyes. They used to have a chant: “Blue eyes rule!” These were not nice girls.
And I felt wholly inferior around them. Compared to them (and in the eighth grade, comparison is the only method of measurement) my skin was muddy, my hair was lawless. They called me Fozzie Bear (from the Muppets) because of my unruly hair, and try as I might, I could never flatten it all out to look like theirs, and my eyes were distinctly and undeniably unblue. (I liked my dark eyes, but I never stood up for myself during their weird chant.) Clearly I stood out from their group, but they let me hang with them. Maybe it was because I was the class clown, always quick to crack a joke or snap on somebody and make the whole group laugh. Even if I was only there as entertainment, I was happy to put on a show.
The girl in that clique who was my closest friend (and I use that word liberally) was also the prettiest. I guess now they’d call her a “frenemy.” I would tell her I was interested in a boy at school, and, knowing full well I never acted on any of my crushes, she and her big blue eyes would go after him and almost always score. I believe she did this just to push me down, to let me know she had all the power. But what she didn’t know was that I didn’t ever pursue boys because I wanted to avoid the inevitable humiliation once they learned that half of me was Black and all of me was poor. She also didn’t know that I didn’t want to get wrapped up in some stupid boy and derail my dreams or, worse, get pregnant like my sister. She didn’t know me at all. None of them did.
Some of the girls’ parents did know my mother, however. They had a modicum of respect for her because she was also Irish and a professional opera singer—and opera was classy. Adult drama works differently than that among teens, but they often intersect. Word got out that the Irish father of the prettiest girl was physically abusing her mother. My mother, who can get really righteous when she wants to, took it upon herself to write him a letter. In that letter I’m pretty sure she disclosed that she had been married to a Black man and that he was the father of her children (of course, I wouldn’t learn of the letter until much later).
As I said, these were not nice girls, but eventually I was invited to go with some of them, including the prettiest one, to Southampton for a sleepover. One of them had a rich aunt, Barbara, with a fancy house near the beach. Fancy-schmancy Southampton? A sleepover with the popular girls? Of course I wanted to go. We piled into one of their big cars and took the two-hour-long drive along the lovely Atlantic edge of Long Island to the small village where the wealthy “summer.” (Summer was a season for me, not a verb.)
The house was big, airy, and orderly. It even had an all-white room no one was allowed to enter. I was awestruck when we arrived, so busy comparing and craving that I hadn’t noticed that the girls had gathered into a cluster by a door.
They called over to me: “Come on, Mariah. Let’s go back here.”
Without
