Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [4]
Who are you when you don’t have a birth certificate, only a poorly typed, creased affidavit sworn out by a nun who signs herself Sister Madeleine, Gray Sisters of Charity? And that name? No mother’s name, no father’s name, just Baby Clear Water Iris-Daughter meticulously copied out, taking up two full lines, when Father and Mother with long spaces after them are just ink flecks of nonexistence. What are you when you have nightmares and fantasies instead of dates and statistics? And, in place of memory, impressions of white-hot sky and burnt-black leaves? Nothing to keep you on the straight and narrow except star bursts of longing?
We thought Mr. Bullock was giving us a routine assignment, but what if a junior high English teacher with hair in his ears is an agent of destiny? He’d made us read a Robert Frost poem about a bird flying off a snow-dusted bough. “The Muse,” he’d encouraged us, “notices the humblest object and the tritest movement and turns them into the gold of passion and poesy.”
Mr. Bullock said he wanted for us to write about something we knew, something we knew so well that we didn’t see it anymore. And so I wrote about the lacy, summertime shadows of the squat oak that Grandpa DiMartino had planted in the backyard to celebrate his escape from the Bronx—so the family story goes—the day he got the deed to the Schenectady house, and that set me thinking that the grandpa who’d planted that oak and landscaped the garden and put in the lily pond was Angie’s grandpa and not mine after all. That made me hear tiny gypsy moth jaws on the tender skin of stalks, and that made me remember other leaf patterns against other horizons. I wrote another about the dogs I’d seen at the pound, pretending that I was alone and that I was a dog myself. Take me, love me, shelter me, my barking said. I felt more deeply than Debby’d ever dared let herself feel. Words ribboned out of me. And when the assignment was done, I felt cheated of places I couldn’t draw and of parents I didn’t miss. I blamed the poem for robbing me of what I’d never owned. It was as if a psychic with a 900 number had said to me through the poem, You’re just on loan to the DiMartinos. Treat them nice, pay your rent, but keep your bags packed.
Back then, in Schenectady, I waited for the call. Not to be a model or a poet, which was to be not extraordinary enough. The call would be to something more special, to satisfy the monstrous cravings of other Debbys hiding inside. I didn’t envy Angie as I helped her into the Greyhound bound for Manhattan and her modest transformation of a Hudson Valley accent, hair color, clothes, muscle tone and skin. I knew by then that there was a life beyond the state lines waiting for me to slip into. Star Quality just plays taller and thinner and younger than it really is; second bananas just look older and fatter than they really are. All I’d have to do was be beautiful, be available, and my other life, my real life, would find me.
The summer I fell for Frankie Fong I was telemarketing Elastonomics out of an abandoned shopping mall near Schenectady. The Elastonomics frontman ran my job interview from his room at a Ramada Inn. He was a fat boy in a tight yellow shirt with a HI, I’M TONY TUCCIANI name tag. I knew I had the job because the first thing Tony said to me was “Okay, you’re a natural.” The second thing he said was “Miss DiMartino, you have the voice of a sexy nun.” I waited for the third thing. I could tell what a strain it was for him to call me Miss DiMartino instead of sweetheart