I WAS BORN IN BROOKLYN in 1962 to a working-class Italian American family. My mother was an unfulfilled housewife; my father was a gambling addict. She worshipped the ground he walked on; he wouldn’t give her the time of day if he worked in a clock factory. You could have torn us from a Scorsese film—one of those period pieces on the Italian immigrant experience—except no one in my family had an association with the Mafia. Yet.
My father and I had no real relationship. He was a narcissist, and our lives revolved around his gambling addiction, without any thought for what it did to us. The best I can say is he never hit us—his father beat him as a child, and he didn’t believe in administering discipline that way. He also didn’t believe in administering anything. He was absent. He worked a civil service job and did real estate deals on the side, but as soon as the money came in, he’d gamble it away. He took night shifts as a waiter to pay his debts. On weekends, he’d make himself scarce.
My mother didn’t know how much money my father made. If he gave her five dollars for the week, we had to find a way to live on it. I remember going two straight years as a child without new shoes. I assumed we were poor, and so did my mother. I didn’t learn until later that we were actually middle class, or at least we would have been had my father not gambled our money away. I revered my mother. If this life was good enough for her, what right did I have to expect better?
I have two older brothers, but when it came to chores and housework, the responsibilities all fell on me. At the tender age of six, I learned my duties: “Bebe,” my mother said (Bebe was my nickname; Ahmet was the first person in my life to call me Dorothy), “you have to clear the table and wash the dishes every night.”
“Why?” I said. “They eat too, but they don’t have to clean up.”
“We’re not talking about them.”
“Why aren’t we talking about them? What’s the difference?”
She grabbed my arm and pulled me to the sink. “Do the dishes,” she said.
“I can’t reach the sink.”
She got her wooden spoon, gave me a couple of whacks on the ass, and set up a bench. Every night, while my brothers lived wild and free, I had to set and clear the table and wash dishes like I was in the army. That’s when I first discovered the difference between boys and girls.
I felt rejected at birth just by being female. It wasn’t something to be cherished or honored. It was a burden to bear. The message was: men live for themselves; women live for men. I saw this message repeated everywhere, from my brothers, to my parents, to my aunts, who pretended to be modern but were just as backward as the rest of them.
I also have a younger sister. My parents spoiled her in comparison to the rest of us—they had more money by the time she came. When she turned six years old, I didn’t want to do the dishes anymore. I asked my mother if my sister could start doing the dishes, and my mother said, “No, she has to develop at her own rate.” There was another message: if you have to be a woman, at least don’t be the oldest one.
My mother devoted her life to taking care of others, and she trained me to do the same. It was like a script I had to follow. The playbill of life listed my role as girl who follows men around with a broom and a mop. It seemed like a bum deal, but every time I tried to wrestle my way out of it, someone came along waving the script in my face. Don’t get any bright ideas, they’d say. Know your role.
Life under these conditions left no room for fantasy. “Look at where you come from,” my mother would say, tethering me to reality. “Look at how you look, how you speak. This is the best you can hope for.” To even acknowledge my needs and desires felt selfish and wrong.
Sometimes I’d see a crack in my mother’s facade, a glimpse into her inner life with all its stunted desires and unused talents. In those rare glimpses, I sensed a mother’s tenderness. One particular moment stands out. I was ten years old, it was the Saturday before Christmas, and she took me to lunch at Abraham & Straus, a high-end department store in Brooklyn. Walking past the toy department, I mooned over a stuffed Siamese cat in the display window. It must have cost about eight dollars—serious money back then—but I begged for it. My mother said, “I know you want it, but Christmas is coming and we can’t afford it.” I upped the ante, threatening to make a scene the way children do. She relented. God only knows what she must have sacrificed to buy that stuffed cat, but I cherished it. I still have it in my bedroom today.
Despite my mother’s occasional shows of support, I felt no encouragement from the rest of my family. No one jerks you off in an Italian household. If I expressed any determination, any dreams or ambitions, I got smacked down. “You’re too stupid,” they’d say.
Life outside the house wasn’t much better. One year my uncle took us to see Santa Claus in the old Daily News building on Forty-Second Street. Santa Claus asked what I wanted for Christmas. I said an Easy-Bake Oven. I knew I wasn’t getting the oven. I just wanted to dream. He said, “I can’t give that to you because you might burn yourself.” Motherfucker, I thought. Even Santa Claus won’t jerk me off.
Once or twice, my mother tried to warn me away from her life. She told me the most important job in life is being a mother, but she cautioned, “Don’t do it unless you’re prepared to give one hundred percent.” She told me I could do better and I believed her.
At the same time, my own desires were crushed under insurmountable guilt. I learned to feel the guilt at home and had it drilled into my skull at Catholic school. Those Irish Catholic nuns didn’t fuck around. They believed in an angry God and built their world around repression and retribution. These women never had a normal, healthy human impulse they didn’t despise.
As an Italian girl in an Irish school, I was treated like low-rent riffraff. I didn’t fit in with my classmates. I disliked my last name—Sicignano. It was so long and no one could pronounce it. It was massacred at every Communion and graduation. It was just one more thing that set me apart from my classmates. Even my bread was different. When I brought a sandwich for lunch, I had Italian bread while my classmates all had Wonder Bread. I’d tell my mother, “I want a sandwich like everyone else has.” What could she do? We were Italian.
I always had my face pressed against the glass looking at what other people had. I never lived the life of a happy, carefree kid. I was, however, independent. I put myself to bed at eight thirty every night, unprompted. We wore school uniforms, and I had only one shirt, so every night I had to wash it, hang it on the clothesline, take it in, and iron it. I began doing this in the second grade. I never asked my mother for help.
Even my independence came off wrong, though. The kids on my block called me “Bossy Bebe,” a name that filled me with shame. Everyone told me I had a big mouth and a stubborn mind. Again, the message came through loud and clear: girls aren’t leaders. To have a backbone, or even an opinion, was not acceptable. I’ll never forget the advice I got from Sister Rose Ellen in the sixth grade. She took me aside and said, “You have leadership qualities. Men are going to try to break you.”
I only felt free while listening to music. One of my first memories is hearing a song called “Take a Letter Maria” on the radio. While the music played, anything seemed possible. One of my brothers also collected records, and I’d eavesdrop on him spinning the latest from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. I’ll also never forget the time I saw John Lennon in Manhattan. He looked right at me and passed an electric current through me that I can still feel today.
I grew up in the heyday of classic rock, when listening to the right bands made you cool. I liked the sense of belonging to the in-crowd, but I also took great interest in the way these bands turned their fantasies into reality. It fascinated me that someone could release an eight-minute-long song like “Stairway to Heaven” or “Hey Jude” and make every second of it so enthralling that radio stations had no choice but to spin it. What freedom, to bend the world around your will.
As a child, I dabbled in music. I began classical piano lessons in the second grade and continued for five years. My mother could barely afford the two dollars a lesson, but she insisted that I keep taking them. It was another sacrifice she made, another glimpse into that other world. I loved the piano, and I might have developed a knack for it, but my teacher was one of those old-fashioned nuns who seemed to revel in killing joy. She’d sit next to me on the piano bench, dressed head to toe in her habit, and slam my fingers on the keyboard if I missed a note. Those kinds of methods never worked on me. Hitting, yelling, and reprimanding made me defiant. I’d do the opposite of what I was told to do. That’s how it went in my career, too. If I had the right teacher, I excelled. If not, I rebelled.
In grade school, I found a different kind of freedom in running track. I was always fast, and running appealed to me. I suppose it makes sense—symbolically, at least, I was running away from my life. But life always catches up. At birth, I had a benign tumor in my knee, and when I turned twelve, it began pressing against the bone and causing intense pain. I had a biopsy at age twelve and a surgery at age sixteen to remove the tumor (I had to have a second operation when I was twenty-one).
After that first surgery, I spent three weeks in a hospital bed with nothing to do but contemplate my direction in life. This can’t be me, an invalid trapped in a world with no prospects. As I hobbled around on crutches for the next several months, I felt a fire burning within me. I had to get the fuck out of Brooklyn. I had to be better than my family. With the arrogance of a teenager, I saw them as slobs who couldn’t get out of their own way; only later did I realize what a burden it must have been for my parents to take the train to a Manhattan hospital and pay medical expenses they couldn’t afford. Regardless, it was a turning point in my life. I had to escape.
Leave it to my mother to plot my escape. I never had any plan of going to college—it wasn’t done in my family—but after graduating high school, I came home to find an acceptance letter from Marymount Manhattan College. My mother had filled out the application and sent it without telling me. In her youth, she was desperate to attend college herself but had to drop out because she couldn’t afford it. Now, she was making sure I had the chance. It was another subtle kindness, another glimpse behind the veil.
During college, I lived at home and commuted to school, where I majored in political science. It was a women’s college staffed mostly by nuns, giving me a false confidence in what women could achieve in the workplace. I found the classes difficult, but I got through them. In my junior and senior year, I even excelled.
After college, I decided to join the FBI. Many people in my family worked in civil service, and the advantages of these jobs had been impressed on me since birth. It was steady work with a pension. Plus, I believed in truth, justice, and the American way. I wanted to lock up scumbags. Also, the prospect of joining an organization dedicated to justice seemed like a nice tribute to Sister Rose Ellen. I filled out the application and quickly received a response. They accepted me, but first I had to prove I had held the same job for twenty-four months.
OK, where could I work for two years?