I loved my mother extravagantly, with the unconditional, unrequited love of a medieval knight. I had become exquisitely attuned to her moods and expert either at defusing them or empathizing with her. My job, perhaps the most important job in my life, was to comfort her, anticipate her needs, and make her feel like she was the center of the universe, to take the sting out of her belief that she’d been robbed.
When I had enough money, I bought her flowers on the way home from school, just in case she was sad. I let her sleep in on school days if she was depressed and took the bus or subway to Forest Hills so she didn’t have to drive me. I bought her expensive gifts for her birthday and Christmas with the gift money I got from my grandparents—jewelry from Bloomingdale’s or Lladró porcelain figurines. She developed a taste for Waterford crystal, and two or three times a year I added to her collection, a glass or two, or even a decanter, at a time.
I had just gotten home from school and was going to change out of my uniform when Mom called to me from her bedroom. I didn’t get in trouble much, so I didn’t think it was because of anything I’d done.
She was perched on the edge of her bed looking stricken, a slightly crumpled piece of loose-leaf paper pinched lightly between her thumb and index finger, as if she didn’t want to be touching it at all. She held it out to me and, with her eyes downcast, said, “This came in the mail today.”
On any other occasion, I would have climbed onto the bed to comfort her, either with a hug or simply sitting next to her silently, and I’d sit there until she moved—or I’d sit next to her forever if she didn’t.
I took the note. To my relief, the writer appeared to be somebody my age, because it was written in a child’s hand.
Dear Mrs. Trump,
I am writing about your daughter, Mary. You might think you know her but you don’t. She pretends to be friendly, but she is unkind and duplicitous.
I stopped, confused. The language had matched the handwriting at first, but what did “duplicitous” mean?
Yes, she’s “popular,” but have you ever wondered why? Do you think it’s because there’s something special about her? Maybe it’s because her grandfather, Mr. Trump (your father-in-law), is on the school’s Board and that’s why the teachers treat her with favoritism at the expense of the other children. It’s a shame people feel they can’t be honest because Mary is, quite simply, a mean girl and a hypocrite. If it weren’t for your family connections, nobody would give her the time of day.
You’re her mother, I’m sure you love her. But believe me, no one else does.
As I read, a weird numbness spread across my body, as if I weren’t in the room anymore. When I finished, I came into my body again and began to shake. My eyes stung and the heat rose in my cheeks, a combination of despair and shame. When I handed the piece of paper back to my mother, tears were already running down my cheeks, but I wasn’t crying yet. My arms hung limply at my side. I thought if I moved, I’d break in half. Mom didn’t reach for me right away, perhaps waiting to see my reaction, but when she did, I collapsed in her arms, sobbing with a grief more extreme than anything I’d ever felt before.
Mom let me go and I fell in a heap at her feet, clutching her legs and still crying. She picked up the phone and called Mrs. Eaton, my fifth-grade teacher, whom I loved despite the fact that she insisted on teaching us how to diagram sentences. Mrs. Eaton recommended that I stay home the next day and she would discuss the matter with the headmaster to see if there was anything they could do. My mother asked if I wanted to speak to her, but I shook my head. I couldn’t stop crying.
After she hung up, my mother brought me to my room and came back a few minutes later with cinnamon toast and tea as if I were home with a cold, but I had no appetite.
After I read my first-ever piece of hate mail, the divide that existed between me and other people became a chasm. The shift wasn’t obvious or dramatic, but the letter accelerated the process of cutting me off from the rest of the world.
I wondered which of my classmates wrote the letter—and which of their parents had composed it. It could have been anyone in my grade; there were only twenty of us. Maybe it was even somebody I considered a close friend. Maybe there were people who thought that I got preferential treatment because of my grandfather. And maybe I did—but how could I explain all of the ways in which that either wasn’t true or didn’t matter?
I had friends—I had friends. My teachers liked me; I thought they respected me—didn’t they? I tried hard—to be good, to be better. But how could I know? How could I ever be sure of anything?
But there was more going on. An agenda existed behind the composition of this letter, and it was the agenda of an adult. How could I understand the dark, obscure motives of an adult? Was I so bad that my mother needed to have the terrible truth about me revealed to her?
I sat on my bed determined to figure out what I’d done—or what somebody believed I’d done.
It was getting harder for me to ignore the fissures that were opening up all around me, harder to keep my humiliation—about the knots in my hair or my father’s few but almost always drunken appearances—at bay.
Reading that letter fundamentally changed who and how I was at school. The change wasn’t immediate, probably not even noticeable.
I developed a wariness that affected my interactions with other people. More significantly, the letter underscored what I had already begun to intuit long before, the truth of who I was that would shadow me for the rest of my life. No matter what I accomplished, no matter how I lived or who I became, I would never be good enough.
The one question I never asked, that I never thought to ask over the course of that long, dark day, was, why did my mother show me that letter? Why had she wanted me to read it in the first place?
My mother kept a basket on the high shelf in the coat closet by the front door. Every once in a while she took it down and pulled out a folder or a manila envelope. Her movements seemed surreptitious to me, and I wondered what she was hiding. I was home alone one day and decided to find out. I dragged the stepladder from the laundry room and set it in front of the closet. I had tried before, but even on tiptoe I couldn’t reach the basket. That day, I finally could, and I pulled it off the shelf.
I sifted through the bank statements, canceled checks, and letters until I found an envelope labeled “birth certificates.” I held my breath as I opened it. Perhaps this was the answer. I pulled out three official-looking documents, and one of them was, indeed, my birth certificate, filled out in black and white with my parents’ names, my time and date of birth, and my footprints.
I felt a wild, unexpected disappointment. I’d never thought about it consciously, but I didn’t want to be from these people. It would have been so much easier if I’d been found under a rock.