Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [2]
Wyatt was a lanky, crinkly-blond longhair (he had the first male ponytail I’d ever seen) getting a master’s in social work, and I was his project. He had that low, slow, soft voice that just cries out sex, sex, sex! and deep brown eyes that bathed you with attention without ever blinking. The voice, the eyes, they burned at a very low flame, they never flared, but they consumed me just the same. He also had my police file, and he had the power if he ever wanted to use it to fuck up my future, all of which made our relationship an exciting kind of power trip.
Celia Montoya and I used to hang out at the mall, and one day (actually, many days) the temptation got too much and we “liberated” a little candy, some tapes, some perfume and panties—no problem—then we pushed our luck at Radio Shack since nothing was cooler that year than a portable phone. I should have figured out Radio Shack of all places would have some kind of electronic alarm. And the total value of the loot was over a hundred dollars, which automatically sent us to court and gave us a police record, and some sort of correction.
Pappy had connections in court and with the police. Celia had connections, too, but all the wrong kind, and she was out of school and in a facility for girls two days after her appeal. I never saw her again. Me, I got Wyatt, and a chance to erase my record. The penalty was I would do some service, I would read some books and write something about them, I’d stay in school and improve my grades, and I’d talk my problems out in a circle of troubled girls, as we were called, led by Wyatt. I got to stay in school and no one knew about the Circle, or Wyatt.
Celia would never have made it, she would have laughed in his face, or she would have stared at the floor. A couple of other girls couldn’t take it either and said Wyatt’s voice drove them to drugs and housebreaking. Wyatt was the first to ask me about adoption, what I knew, what I remembered. He put a lot of stress on it, and I know it would have upset Pappy if he’d known that rehabilitation meant bringing up feelings I didn’t know I had.
“I’ve been reading your file, Debby,” Wyatt’d say, once we were out of the Circle. “How did the DiMartinos come to adopt you?”
I’d never asked, and they’d never told. Lawyers, they always said, but it had to have started with the Church, all those little pledge envelopes for missions in Asia that Mama still fills out. I knew only that they’d found me in an orphanage run by Gray Nuns.
“You’re not even interested?”
“I always figured it was fate.”
“Schenectady was fate?”
Wyatt took me out to the animal shelter. It was where he’d worked on weekends and high school summers. It was the place that had formed his philosophy of life. It was the only place where the Ultimates sat side by side. “Love and Death,” he said. “Kindness and Killing.” He thought he could be the catcher in the pound; everything depended on his keeping his orphans clean enough, making them just a little more appealing, giving them cutesy names like Barbra, walking them and running them in the park. My family always called the animal shelter the pound, and I thought of it, if I thought of it at all, as an alternate lodging between loving homes. You don’t usually visualize the dog pound as the palace of love. No one ever told me they gassed puppies and kitties.
“Cuteness is all that counts,” Wyatt said. “You have a bad day, you wake up with a dry nose, with dull eyes, you take a nap, you scratch your fleas—it’s your life.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you’ve got a chance, don’t blow it. You might never have made it out of that orphanage. Someone must have seen something.”
And what could they have seen in a baby girl whose unnamed mother identified herself as Clear Water Iris-Daughter, and whose father, also unnamed, was called Asian National in the adoption papers? The nuns weren’t interested in my origins, they didn’t care about filling in the gaps of my life; they were into good works. It was the mid-seventies