My dad said, “We’re all common as snowflakes and not near as pure.” He was only half right. Thinking of them always raises a guilty sorrow. It never made sense until later. They called me their “number-one girl.” Like Dad and Greta — not Hilda, who could rattle on and on — I was introverted and, I would say, socially unemancipated. I barely talked to anyone until I was ten. I never spoke in school.
I knew pretty early on I was different. Hilda was round and short and Dad muscular and compact as a frozen haystack. I ended up even taller than Dad. I looked like her. That’s what Life magazine wrote in ’69 when they printed Xtine’s photos of me as one of the new “faces of the year with a Garboesque profile.” And they didn’t have a clue.
Each May we’d take a trip to the city for dinner at the “21” Club. The only extravagance I remember. To Dad, New York City represented the citadel of hedonistic heathenry. We took the trip when I turned chronologically thirteen, in 1956, not long after I’d seen Ninotchka on the one television station we got clearly, one Saturday afternoon. At the table next to us: Greta. So regally alone. Hat on her head. Eyes dissecting me. I’ve never stopped imagining what she thought as she watched me. She spoke not one word to us. Her face implacable. That day, while I sipped my tomato bisque, I felt her eyes, smelled her fatigue, her horrid despair. Yes, I did. I could. She didn’t acknowledge me. When we exchanged glances, it triggered the same inexplicable hurt I felt whenever I examined myself in the mirror for too long.
The next day, Dad asked me to talk to him in the living room after lunch. He sat on the awful rose-patterned sofa. He almost never sat there but in his wooden rocking chair with its tobacco-stained tan seat cushion, smoking. He loved those Winstons. I thought about sitting in his chair but chose the sofa. He puffed on his cigarette and then ground it out in the ceramic ashtray I’d made in grade school. He clasped his massive, powerful hands. “That woman you saw yesterday, in the hat, you saw her, right?”
“The weirdess who was constantly staring at me? Uh-huh.”
“Did you recognize her?”
“Yeah, some old-time movie star.”
“Yes, and well, your mother and me, we were never able to bring a healthy child into this world.” He just spit that out and I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about and he started tearing up. His voice all strangly, like mine is now. “That woman is your mother. Your birth mother.”
I felt discarded and unwhole, like one of the hollowed-out shells I collected on the beach. Hilda had been listening in the kitchen. I heard her weeping and I started crying, too. I picked up Dad’s sweaty right hand and squeezed it between my two hands. I used to have spectacularly agile, sexy hands that made men mad with desire. I am seventy-eight in human years and now they look as if they are the hands of a thousand-year-old leper.
I wanted my hands to tell him I loved him.
After a minute, he girded himself and began rambling on about how they “got” me through the lawyer William Bickley Sr., who all the kids made fun of because he was such a priss — found out later he was married — who owned this ridiculous Tudor mansion overlooking the Sound. Hilda’s sister, my Aunt Clara, worked for Bickley Sr., and he arranged the adoption even before I was born.
“Dad,” I asked, not at all intending to hurt him, “who is my father?”
He wiped his lip, his face a mask of impassivity, but I sensated beyond the mask that my question gorged his soul. “I don’t know, Salo. Miss Garbo and Bickley got everything fixed. We are your parents.” He lit another cigarette. “Salo, sometimes you have to wait a long time before you realize that the pain the truth has caused is for the best in the end.”
I never told anyone in Orient except Kyle. My one true friend. Kyle was a year older than me. With her blond-reddish hair and creamy skin like a Botticelli Venus, everyone on the whole North Fork bowed in her presence.
We first met Malcolm Teumer outside Boyle’s Diner. He drove up and parked his two-seater Karmann Ghia, which was something special. He slow-strutted like a Euro Marlon Brando and leaned forward, his face inches from Kyle’s. Her voice so provocatively flirty, she asked, “How about you let me drive your fabulous car for a while?” She jumped in the driver’s seat. “C’mon, man. Let’s go.”
Off they went, while I stood there. Art, who was sweeping up the sidewalk in front of the diner, frowned. “Salome, stay away from him. I don’t like him.”
We started hanging out with Teumer in this deserted, decrepit shed in the Huddler cornfields overlooking the Sound, which he wanted to turn into a winery. One night, I watched the meteor showers sing across the moonlit sky while Malcolm and Kyle fucked. A few weeks later, Kyle left Malcolm’s one late night and drove off alone in the Karmann Ghia. Maybe she was drunk, or maybe they had a fight. She skidded into the bay at the end of Route 25 and drowned.
The night before her funeral, I walked alone along the Sound. I sank to my knees on the pebbly beach and cut my palm ever so slightly with the sharp edge of a shell. From my blood appeared Kyle. She knelt beside me and held my bleeding hand. “Salome, my sister, before I leave you, I bequeath my enchantress powers to you.” She brought her lips to the cut on my hand and kissed it. “I must go.” Her voice and translucent body elevated above the gravitational hum of the waves.
She came to me again only one more time. Other ancestors came more often.
I ached for Kyle. I missed her so. I don’t regret my many pleasure-burying-pain fucks, unlike lust fucking or angel fucking, which is when you are in love and which I cherish. Malcolm, I regret. We met in his shed. He made a fire. We got drunk. I got pregnant.
That pregnancy caused Dad and Hilda so much pain. I woke up earlier than usual one morning and went into the kitchen. Hilda was crying. Aunt Clara was sitting next to her, stroking her cheek. She told her, “It’s not your fault you couldn’t have your own kids.” When she noticed me in the doorway, Aunt Clara jumped up and asked what I wanted for breakfast. I pretended like I hadn’t heard them.
And then I overheard Dad on the phone with Greta. His voice, usually as sturdy as his tractor, shivered with shame. “I’m so sorry we failed you. We failed. I failed. I just don’t know how this happened.” The belief in his failure as a father began the decay of his physical self that signaled the first signs of Gravity Disease.
Dad had a talk with Teumer. I bet he did more than talk. Teumer left town. I didn’t want him to be the father of my child.
Hilda wanted me to hide my pregnancy. I refused. And Dad agreed. I always stood up for my actions. I began making drawings of Petra Sansluv, Pearl Diver by the Black Sea, the story of an abandoned boy who formed special bonds with the creatures in the Black Sea.
When the time came, Bickley arranged to send the doctor. He strutted into my room dressed in a navy blue suit, with his square jaw and comic-book-black hair. He looked and sounded like an actor playing a defrocked doctor on a soap opera. He gave me drugs and then I don’t remember much at all … The baby … Stillborn … Strangled by his own umbilical cord. I never saw him. That loss was over sixty years ago, but it was also only a second ago …