Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [3]
There’s no passion in the world like that of a thirteen-year-old girl; she’ll do anything for love, or what seems like love. She’ll interpret anything as a little sign, she’ll believe anything he says, she’ll do anything to prove herself worthy of his notice. And then the time will come when she begins to feel her own power. I was only thirteen, but I was a knowing thirteen when I didn’t want to hide it, and mellow-voiced Wyatt was the first man I showed it to.
Our little Circle meetings grew shorter and shorter, our trips in the country longer and longer. There were motels in the afternoon, flowery pastures, canoe trips. I could ruin him if I wanted, and he knew it. He shared his stash (which I knew he had), and before long he was praising my orphan’s maturity, the integrity of shoplifting in a consumer society and of course saying that I was older than my age (at least three years for his sake, I hoped).
Wyatt signed off on my parole, then dropped out of grad school. I had been a bad influence on him, he said. He decided to go to California and work for the Sierra Club or become a nature photographer. Human emotions were too difficult. But he left me with the most important prediction of my life, something that got me through high school and college, and even helps today. I was just a small, dark thing, and he said, “You know, Debby, I can tell you’re going to be tall and beautiful very soon, and someday you’re going to be rich and powerful.” He thought he had everything to do with it.
After Wyatt left, I convinced myself that I was lucky to be an orphan. From the families I’d been given, I’d scavenge the traits I needed and dump the rest. If a person is given lives to live instead of just one life (Mama’s favorite soap), especially lives she hasn’t even touched, she’ll be far better off for it. Once in a junior high English class, on assignment, when the other girls were composing little rhymed Hallmark verses about love, I raged in rhyming couplets against whole peoples who brawled inside me. The poem shocked me. It throbbed with pains I had no right to feel. That was the first time I’d really cut loose.
Mr. Bullock said, “Debby, that’s deep,” and he forced me to read the poem out loud in class. And the kids said, “Jeezus, it could be, like, a song, Debby!” which was their highest compliment. Then Mr. Bullock asked, “Have you read Sylvia Plath, Debby?” and I said I didn’t know any of the senior high girls, and he laughed. “Then you’re a natural poetic talent, Debby,” which sounded to me as thrilling as a new zit on the nose. He invited me to join an after-school geek club. I attended twice, but its members were weird and I could feel how easy it would be to weird out too.
Until that poem, I’d been Debby DiMartino, second daughter of Manfred and Serena DiMartino, hardworking, religious parents. In junior high, I’d looked enough like my sister Angie to pass for a real DiMartino, and I expected to ripen and coarsen early, like Mama and like Angie. But I didn’t thicken like Angie did, and by my senior year, I was the tallest one in the family, including Pappy. I stayed thin, clear-skinned, dark-haired, amazed at the assertiveness of my body. The gym teacher encouraged me to think volleyball scholarships, and Angie nagged at me to try out mail-order-catalog modeling. My senior portrait was just the kind of thing that you find in People magazine at the Price Chopper, one of those bad-hair, ugly-duckling pictures of some high school cheerleader gone bad or murdered or of some eventually famous movie star.
My junior-year growth spurt ended a few months too early, leaving me a shade below five-nine. I was a tall girl in a small school, a beautiful girl in a plain family, an exotic girl in a very American town. I’d always had this throaty whisper of a voice, couldn’t raise it above a satiny purr, in a family of choir singers and a town of chirpy sopranos. But I wasn’t tall, beautiful or exotic enough to trust any of it, and so I made up my mind to find out if