His friends had all very quickly scattered into other people's backyards, leaving him to face her alone.
"Well," he had said by way of explanation, "you didn't answer your doorbell."
She had folded her arms across her chest and looked down her nose at him.
Still trying to make a joke of it, Edward had said, "Trick or treat."
And she had said those words that had condemned him to this world, "Oh, trick," she had said with a malicious smile. "I definitely believe you deserve a trick."
My Real Mother
My adoptive mother always told me, "Evelyn, your real mother loved you so much, she gave you away."
I can't remember being young enough that this made sense to me. I always thought it was like saying, "I love chocolate so much, I never eat any." Or, "I love the color pink so much, I never wear it." Or, "I love Brad Pitt so much, I never go to his movies."
What's weird is that in fact, the older I got, the more ways I thought to make it make sense. Maybe you love chocolate, but you've got diabetes so you can't eat it; you love pink, but it makes you—personally, because of your coloring—look pale and washed-out; you love Brad Pitt, but you realize that good as he is to look at, his acting is a disappointment, so you better stick to just drooling over pictures of him.
So I tried to figure out how my mother could love me so much she had to give me away.
Some thoughts:
1. My mother found out, while she was pregnant with me or shortly after my birth that she was dying, and she knew it would be better for me to be placed immediately with another family rather than staying with a mother who was slowly fading and growing too weak to pick me up or feed me.
For my mother's illness, picture Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, progressively getting dark circles under her eyes and elegantly coughing her lungs out. Or Bette Davis in that old black-and-white movie Dark Victory, where she bravely continues to work in her garden, hiding from her loved ones that she has gone blind due to a brain tumor.
But I figured if my real mother was dead, my adoptive mother would have simply said so.
Besides, I wanted her alive. I wanted to meet her.
So forget that, and start all over again.
1. My mother was a princess whose wicked father, the king, took me away from her—like in those Hercules movies from the '50s that show up at 2:00 A.M. on TNT: Italian movies of Greek myths dubbed in English. Talk about multicultural. Mythology is a place where there are lots of babies that kings need to get rid of because of prophecies about the child growing up to overthrow the kingdom.
Okay, Okay, the princess mother was a rationalization from when I was really young. I soon realized that there are a lot more princesses in fairy tales and movies than in real life.
And that girls don't generally grow up to usurp thrones, anyway.
Besides, it's hard to believe a modern-day king could get away with something like that in this age of talk radio and 60 Minutes and The National Enquirer.
2. As I got older, I came to realize that a girl does not have to be a princess for her father to pressure her into giving up her baby. My mother could have been involved in a romance in the manner of Romeo and Juliet. (The Franco Zeffirelli version, with Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, thank you very much. It's hard to take Leonardo DiCaprio seriously unless he's going down with the Titanic.)
Anyway, I figured that, though in my case the young lovers survived—or at least my mother did—the families didn't approve. They refused to allow them to marry, enrolled him (if he was still alive) in one of those wilderness therapy programs for at-risk teens, and sent her to await the birth of the baby with out-of-state relatives in one of those spooky old houses way out in the country, with no neighbors and only intermittent electricity. Then they put me up for adoption while she was still groggy from childbirth.
This scenario, I figured, was a strong possibility.
3. Or maybe, even, I wasn't actually physically wrested out of my mother's arms. It could have been that she was dirt-poor, and—not having the support of her family, and being depressed and wishing the best for me—she gave me up so that I would have a better life than she'd had. Stella Dallas, but with a mother who was economically deprived, not rude and crude and trashy.
But a lot can change in fifteen years. Whether or not her financial situation had improved, my real mother no doubt often wondered what had happened to me and, I was sure, regretted the decision, which had been forced on her or which she'd had to make.
I've always liked to picture her—looking up from her embroidery, there at a leaded-glass window in her father's castle, or taking a moment from plowing a field on that gothic farm, or sitting on the fire escape of her tenement apartment—resting her chin on her fist and gazing out into the distance, as she tried to picture me. Like Maria in West Side Story.
All right, all right, Maria was daydreaming about meeting a boyfriend, not a daughter. But I just knew my mother had expressed very similar sentiments to me—okay, probably not musically, but she'd said it. Only I'd been too young to remember.
Okay, moving on from what I guessed to what I knew: my adoptive mother. When she adopted me as an infant, my adoptive mother was single, but with a lot of money, both from her parents and from her career in telecommunications. We'd visit New York to go to Broadway plays, and to museums, and to gallery openings, and she signed me up for youth-theater group—since I love the movies—and for pottery classes and horseback-riding lessons. We got along fine when she could always hand me off to nannies or au pairs whenever she'd had enough of me.
But two years ago, she got married. My new father had been married before, and he brought two little boys along with him: Judd and Bradley. You just know that a three-year-old named Judd and a five-year-old named Bradley are going to be trouble. A movie director would have a field day casting the parts to go with those names.
All of a sudden, somebody or other decided that my adoptive mother should be a stay-at-home mom to take care of all three of us while the new husband continued in his career. Although she agreed to this arrangement, in her heart my adoptive mother was cranky. And, as long as she was home, anyway, with all that newfound extra time on her hands and me just becoming a teenager, she decided it was time to embark on the Let's-Improve-Evelyn Program.
Suddenly, as far as she was concerned, I could do absolutely nothing right.
Suddenly, as far as I was concerned, she became the headmistress from The Little Princess.
The adoptive stepfather was a self-absorbed over-achiever, who would always say that he couldn't see things:
"Evelyn, I can't see what your problem is."
"Evelyn, I can't see why you can't just try to get along with Judd and Bradley."
"Evelyn, I can't see why you feel you have to take that tone with your mother."
And when I would correct him by telling him, "Adoptive mother," he'd say, "Evelyn, I can't see why you have to say that every single time."
Well, if he couldn't see it, there was no use my trying to explain.
Two years of that, and I decided it was time to find my real mother.
Thanks to the Internet—and to a sizable chunk of change in my bank account that accumulated during the absentee-adoptive-mother guilty-conscience phase—I was able to track her down.
I learned her name—Bonnie Ryan—and that her home was in Bainbridge, only a couple of hours' drive away from where I lived, in Corning. Her address had changed from the one on the adoption papers, but I was persistent, like Frances McDormand's character in Fargo. Except, I like to think, more attractive.
When I told my adoptive parents what I had learned, they couldn't see why I would want to meet her.
Well, duh! My plan wasn't just to meet her; I wanted to go back to live with her: Put the Parkhurst stage of my life behind me and reacquaint myself with my rightful Ryan heritage.
We had a big fight, my adoptive parents and me. They talked about her privacy, and about how those k
inds of records are supposed to be sealed, and how—maybe—she had gone on to make a new life without me and that my showing up could complicate things for her in a bad way.
They also lectured me on the fact that life was not like in the movies.
Well, duh! again. I'd already figured that out on my own, with the whole princess thing.
I pointed out to my adoptive parents that the only reason I'd been able to find my real mother was because I'm so computer savvy. If she'd had the resources, she would have found me.
And apparently there was a Mr. Ryan. According to the adoption forms, my father was Marty Ryan; and my mother now lived with a Marty Ryan. So it wasn't like I was going to come as a big surprise to a husband who hadn't realized she'd had a child.
I figured I'd been right with scenario number one, the Romeo and Juliet romance that the manipulative families had tried to break up. But Bonnie and Marty, once they'd been old enough, had been able to get away from their families and find one another. All they needed to make their lives complete was to find me.
Except that I'd found them first.
Where was the problem there?
My adoptive parents got stubborn and downright mean.
I got stubborn and mean right back at them.
Long story short: I ended up needing a bandage on my arm, and I knew I had to get out of that house.
By coincidence, it was Halloween, but that just fit in extra well with my plan to visit my real mother that very night. My real parents: That thought would take some getting used to. Despite my adoptive parents' objections. I decided I would go in disguise, to ease my way in. Sort of like trick and treat.
My adoptive parents had bought tickets to some sort of Halloween extravaganza party at one of the big hotels downtown, so Judd and Bradley were spending the whole weekend at their mother's, for a change, and weren't due back till Monday after school—which was cause for celebration in and of itself.
I went into my adoptive mother's closet and got this sparkly silver evening dress that she'd worn back in her sophisticated corporate-entertainment days. From my youth-theater-group days, I found a rhinestone tiara that I'd worn in our production of Cinderella.
I put touches of J. Lo's Glow on my pulse points for luck, because she played a Cinderella-type character in Maid in Manhattan. Then, standing in front of the full-length mirror, I said out loud, "Who says there aren't fairy tale princesses anymore?"
So that my real mother would see that I was a trick-or-treater on her doorstep, and not the elegant woman I appeared to be, I took Bradley's hollow plastic pumpkin that he'd left behind in the whirlwind of his mother picking him up Friday night.
Planning ahead, I got out the big plastic Halloween bowl and the bags of candy my adoptive mother had bought. Since there would be nobody home to answer our bell once it got late enough for the trick-or-treating to begin, I set the bowlful of candy down on a wooden TV tray on the porch by the front door. That wouldn't last long, once kids realized no one was home, but there wasn't much else I could do—unless I waited for the trick-or-treating to be over. And that would have me arriving at my real parents' house in Bainbridge incredibly late, since it was over two hours away from Corning.
Two hours by car.
Driving was yet another of those things my adoptive parents and I had frequently quarreled about. Yes, technically speaking, I wasn't old enough for my driver's permit. But a lot of my friends were getting lessons from their parents or older siblings, at least in parking lots and on back roads. To give them a head start once they turned sixteen. Planning ahead. I liked to plan ahead. My adoptive parents said I had to wait.
Luckily, they were totally oblivious to the fact that my boyfriend, Robert—who's eighteen even though I've told them sixteen—has let me practice in his car.
My adoptive mother's car keys were in a little crystal bowl on her dresser. All I needed was to drive slowly and carefully—the way I always do—and pretend Robert was sitting beside me to give advice if I needed it. Which I wouldn't.
No time for dinner, so I grabbed a candy bar from the trick-or-treat bowl on the porch. The Mr. and Mrs. Scarecrow figures were slumped on either side of the door, Mr. Scarecrow holding a pumpkin, Mrs. Scarecrow wearing a witch hat. I'd painted smiles on their burlap-bag faces, figuring someone in this house needed to be happy. Going down the front stairs to begin my new life with my real mother, I felt as poised and classy and glamorous as Grace Kelly, who was an actress and a princess.
Things went downhill from there.
The car kind of scraped a bit against the doorway of the garage as I backed out. I planned never to return, and it was truly a tiny scratch, and I figured my adoptive mother would never see it, so there was nothing to worry about. But still...
Then, once I was on the road, when I bit into the candy bar, a flake of chocolate dropped off and fell onto the silver dress right between my breasts, leaving a little spot of brown, which—when I tried to rub it away—became a little smear of brown.
I stopped at a gas station mini-mart to wash up, but the attendant said there was no public restroom. So I bought some bottled water and poured a bit of that onto the dress, which made the little brown smear spread into definitely medium-sized proportions, smack in the middle of a damp spot that could only be labeled as big.
The mini-mart attendant sold me some hand soap in a pump dispenser, and now the damp brown smear took on the added quality of foaminess.
I poured more water until the brown finally faded.
Now, however, the damp area extended alarmingly, and the fabric—where I'd been scrubbing at it—was stretched out right in that most obvious of places.
Corning, where I'd said good-bye forever to my old home, was a good twenty minutes back down the road I'd just driven, plus I'd already spent another twenty minutes in the mini-mart—which meant that if I wanted to go back and change, I'd have lost a whole hour. That's without even taking into consideration that I'd already settled on this outfit as being perfect and I'd have to figure out what else I could wear.
I looked at the bandage on my arm—a memento from my adoptive family, the last mark they would leave on me. I could not go back.
And there was something else I'd forgotten to take into consideration when I'd been planning this out—how early it gets dark this time of year.
Even Robert never let me drive in the dark. It was too late to change my mind—either about the plan as a whole, or about my outfit. I told myself confidently that I would just have to count on the fabric drying in the hour and a half that it would take me to drive the rest of the way to my real parents' house.
The driving instructions, which had seemed so clear when I'd gotten them off the Internet, were not clear, at least not for me, not in the dark, anxious and nervous as I was and sweating so much that the scent of all that Glow was making me dizzy. I had to open the window, which made the car cold, so I had to turn on the heater, whose noise got on my nerves.
The computer's estimate for driving time had been two hours, seven minutes. In my planning, I'd rounded that up to two hours, fifteen minutes, so that I'd assumed I'd be ringing the doorbell at my real mother's house sometime around a quarter to seven.
At twenty after nine, I pulled into the driveway of what I hoped was the right house. It was hard to be certain, since people in this neighborhood didn't seem to believe in fricking house numbers. Pumpkins, yes. Orange lights, plenty of them. But numbers? I was looking for 1593, and had passed a house whose mailbox was painted with what may have been 1509 or 1569, then there were a whole bunch of houses that didn't seem to have any number on them at all, until one where the number over the garage was 1615.
Despite cruising down that street four times, I couldn't make out any more numbers, nor did the numbers go up in any reasonable way—like by twos, fives or tens—to let me count off.
Isn't there some sort of law that house numbers have to be visible from the street?
But across the street from this
house was one that had the words fifteen ninety-six, in script, over their garage door. (Try reading that while driving a car—the first time you've driven alone or for longer than fifteen minutes—down a dark, unfamiliar street when you're pissed off at just about everything the day has thrown at you already.) The house I was looking for had to be this one or the one next door. This one still had lots of lights on, which made it look more inviting. Lights, despite the late hour. And despite the fact that all the trick-or-treaters must either be asleep by now or bouncing off the walls of their own bedrooms due to sugar highs.
My heart was beating so hard I wondered if I had found my real mother just in time to die in her arms of a ruptured aorta. Writer Charlie Kaufman goes in for that kind of irony in his films.
I got out of the car, and finally saw the number, 1593, written vertically on the post next to the front door. It was the right house.
Nice neighborhood, in spite of the lack of numbers. Nice house. Big house.
I took several deep breaths, but nothing was getting my heart rate settled into anything near normal. I rested the trick-or-treat pumpkin into the crook of my elbow à la Dorothy with her basket on the road to the Emerald City. Then, restraining myself from glancing down to check how the bodice of my dress had dried, I walked up to the front door.
The bell chimed a snatch of a classical tune that sounded familiar, from the sound track of some movie or another, but I couldn't place it.
The door opened.
I'd been afraid that my real mother—not immediately recognizing that it was me—might be irritated to have someone show up so late on her doorstep on Halloween night.