Inside Out(11)

Charlie, on the other hand, was excited, and invited me to come and visit him and meet my grandparents and half siblings. A few months later, I flew to Houston and he picked me up at the airport—with his mistress. He dropped her off on the way to see his parents, who were so happy to meet me; they’d always wanted to, they said. As it turned out, my grandma Marie had snuck them a few photos over the years, knowing how much it would mean to them. I stayed with them that night.

Charlie’s wife felt insecure—and rightfully so: he’d introduced me to his mistress first—and was reluctant to meet me. I went over to his house on my second day to meet her and my half siblings—one of whom was a brother from yet another one of Charlie’s marriages who looked exactly like a male version of me. It was awkward. I didn’t know where I fit in or even why I was there. I left feeling clear about one thing: Charlie may have been my biological father, but Danny was my dad.

The justification for having kept my paternity a secret from me was that Danny feared that if I found out, I would feel differently about him. But the reality was that once I knew, he pulled away from me. Even before my parents’ split, he had become distant, withdrawing into drinking and drugs. And, of course, once they decided to divorce, it was my brother he couldn’t live without, not me. But after my discovery, our relationship completely deteriorated. He ceased making any effort to see me; he stopped calling; when we did see each other—when my mom and I visited Morgan—he barely looked at me and his hugs were awkward and forced. He was just . . . gone.


DISCOVERING THAT I’D been lied to my entire life about something so profound wasn’t great for my relationship with my mother, either. Whatever fragile trust we had shared was shattered now that I realized she had gotten pregnant with me when she was still with Charlie, and then just come up with a lie that was more convenient than the truth. But like every child in history who has been let down time and again by her parents, I held out the irrational hope that my mother would change and become someone I could count on.

Instead, one afternoon when I came home from school, I found her sprawled across the bed, surrounded by empty pill bottles. I remember calling the hospital for an ambulance in a kind of frozen trance, a dissociated state that would become increasingly familiar to me as years passed, in which I would leave my body and just cope without really being present. An ambulance came and took us to the hospital to get her stomach pumped. Everyone in the building saw the arrival of the paramedics and her departure from the apartment on a gurney. I was somehow simultaneously embarrassed, numb, and terrified.

My mother survived that incident. But her faux suicide attempts became a regular occurrence, a routine. Back would come the emergency medical teams with their sirens and gurneys, and off we’d go to get her stomach pumped again. She didn’t want to die: she was crying out for help, and she wanted attention. Often, her overdoses followed some sort of devastating interaction with my dad. The man I thought of as my dad, anyway.

I was in a constant state of anxious vigilance. I never knew what I’d find when I walked through that apartment door: my mother’s self-destructiveness was boundless, narcissistic, and unstoppable. And yet I was developing armor: I took comfort in my ability to deal with her crises and the knowledge that I could handle whatever came my way. I never felt I was going to fall apart, never turned to anybody and said, “I can’t take this.” I could get through anything she threw at me: if she tried to kill herself; if I had to peel her off of a bar stool; if she told me Danny wasn’t my real dad. I would survive, no matter what. But I would survive by being on guard. And then, when crisis struck, by exiting my body: functional but frozen.

Everyone knew about my mother in our apartment complex, of course, and I adopted an invulnerable, self-sufficient persona in response. My character was on her own, unfettered by curfews or rules. Every time I tossed off “My mother doesn’t care if I . . .” or “I can do whatever I want . . .,” I rode the wave of that dubious freedom, but I also felt the emptiness of it. I did not feel particularly sympathetic toward Ginny. Even as a fourteen-year-old I realized that her self-absorption and “suicide attempts” came at my expense.

Her accelerating self-destructiveness lent an urgency to my attempts to define myself in opposition to her. I’m a different person, I kept telling myself. I’m not like that. But the insecurity that had been nipping at my heels was intensifying.

I was the girl whose mother was always trying to kill herself. I was the girl who’d been abandoned by two fathers. My wandering eye suddenly seemed like an obvious physical manifestation of the truth about me: I was just off, and everyone could tell. I had surgery just before I turned fifteen that finally fixed my eye, but in my own mind, I remained marked as broken.

All of this coincided with puberty. My transformation from a skinny, lazy-eyed kid to a young woman who men desired was confusing. The unfurling of my sexuality was linked for me on the deepest level with shame. It would be decades before I could even begin to disentangle the two.


I STARTED SPENDING time with a couple of guys who lived down the hall and were very friendly to me. They were older, in their mid-to late twenties, but I thought I could impress them and join their crowd by acting cooler and more mature than I actually was. I was alone a lot in my mother’s apartment, and sometimes they’d stop by to visit, or I’d wander down the hall and hang out with them at their place.