MY MOTHER DROPPED ME ON MY HEAD RIGHT AFTER I WAS born.
It happened in the hospital, just moments after bequeathing my first sound (a rough high-pitched scream reminiscent of a mezzo-soprano). The doctors handed me to her, and slimy and laminated with blood and amniotic fluid, I just slipped through her fingers and fell right onto that sweet spot of softness crowning my skull. Preempting a double lawsuit, one of the nurses gathered me from the ground and pumped me with drugs while the doctors attended to my mother. I never even had a chance.
Okay, it didn’t exactly happen that way. And clearly, it’s not exactly a memory per se, but it’s a story that I like to think captures my early days. Take it or leave it.
It is true, though, that my mother dropped me when I was a baby. As the story goes, I actually did fall out of her hands from the top of a stairway when I was ten months old, landing on my right side where the shoulder meets the arm. My mother screamed at the top of her lungs after it happened and rushed down the stairs until she grabbed me from the floor.
“Noa!” she cried, scooping me up into her bosom, kissing my ears, my forehead, my shoulders. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” Kiss, kiss, kiss. “I’m so, so, so, so sorry,” she continued, as if any ten-month-old could understand her muffled apoplectic utterances. But perhaps I did, because, as the story goes, I stopped crying at that point, which did anything but calm her.
“Noa?” my mother stuttered. “No … Noa?”
Needless to say, she was afraid I was dead.
“Noa?” she screamed, running to the phone to dial 9-1-1. “Please be okay, please be okay, sweetheart.”
No doubt not only the idea of my death or paralysis tackled her fears, but perhaps also the news that a year earlier, her best friend’s boss’s older sister’s cousin’s next-door neighbor accidently fell in her kitchen, rather unfortunately causing a burning skillet to fly off the range of the stove and land on the soft head of her two-week-old newborn, killing him instantly. This woman was immediately arrested for capital murder and had since been in jail in some nameless state in middle America awaiting trial for something over two years. I’d like to think that my mother was more concerned about my continued life, but somehow I’m fairly certain her fears were slightly more focused on the urban legend du jour. That’s what I take from her semiannual mythological reprisal of the day that changed our lives forever. (At first, she seemed almost proud of her ability to cover up for her immortal maternal deficiencies. Then I was arrested, and oh-so-conveniently, she decided to publicly blame herself and this incident in particular for how I turned out.)
“Noa, sweetheart,” my mother screamed. “Cry for me, baby. Cry!”
At that exact point in time, I apparently issued a guttural sound, a choke that sounded like I was releasing a gulp of seawater.
“Noa!” my mother cried. “You’re okay. You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay. You have to be okay.”
She reached for the phone. She still used a rotary and struggled to insert her red-tipped index finger into the pea-sized holes.
“You have to be …” she mumbled. “You have to be.”
She called the police.
“Nine-one-one operator. What is your emergency?”
My mother picked me up and patted the pillow of my arm as she spoke.
“Yes, please, send someone right away. My daughter, she’s ten months old.”
“And?”
“And there’s been an accident!” she continued.
“What happened, ma’am?”
My mother froze, words unable to both form and swim from her. “My daughter—”
“What happened, ma’am?” the operator persisted. “I need to know what happened.”
“My … my daughter has been injured!” she cried.
“How was she injured?”
My mother kissed the windshield of my forehead with her two wide lips and continued to smother me with them, creating a path of saliva all the way down my arm, from the injured shoulder to the elbow.
“Hello?” the operator asked. “Ma’am, are you still there? Is this a crank call?”
She held my arm between her thumb and index finger, feeling the heat of the injury beneath.
“Ma’am?” the operator asked, raising her voice.
“There was an intruder,” my mother blurted, spontaneously spouting language. Any language. “I don’t know who it was, but he came in and took some of my jewelry and then left.” My mother paused. “And … and … and when he was here—he was wearing a black ski mask, so I didn’t catch his face—my baby girl started screaming. He ran … he ran … he ran upstairs to stop her, and, and then … when he got there, somehow, she … she had crawled off the top of the stairs. And … then … that was when it happened!”
“When what happened, ma’am?” the operator asked, her voice still calm.
“That was … that was when she fell.” My mother paused again, gasping and punctuating her tears. “She fell down from the second story. Oh my God, please come quickly with an ambulance. Hurry, please!”
An unnatural pause dangled between them.
“What is your address, ma’am?”
“I don’t even know how she got out of her crib,” my mother added. Each syllable was laced with emphatic tension.
“We can worry about that later, but let’s get your daughter the attention she needs,” the operator added in a soothing voice. “I need your address now, though.”
“It’s 1804 Pin Oak Drive,” she sputtered. “Hurry!”
“We’ll have an ambulance there right away, ma’am. And please try to stay calm until it gets there.”
“Uh-huh …”
My mother hung up the phone before the operator could complete her warnings, ran back upstairs with me in her shaky grip, and placed me on a rocking chair. Then, she leaned over and kissed me again, this time on the tip of my nose.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I can’t lose you. Not this way.”
People might wonder how much of this story is true. But every other year when she got a part in the local theater or when she met someone new, there it was like the goddamned quality of mercy, polished in iambic pentameter. I don’t know. Perhaps I piece together bits and pieces of the legendary story in a way that makes me comfortable. It doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matters is the truth, and the truth is, I’ll never forget the sound I next heard.
“I love you, sweetheart,” my mother whispered, before lacing up a long black boot, sticking it out from her body like a martial artist, and pirouetting it to kick the wooden bars of my crib with so much power so that they broke into dozens of splintery pieces. I began to cry again.
“Shhh, shhh, sweetheart,” my mother continued to say, looking over her shoulder to make sure I was still safe. “I have to do this. I have to do this.”
She tore apart one side of my crib so that an exit route was simple, even for my underdeveloped ten-month-old mind. She picked me up and then ran downstairs, grabbed a butcher’s knife and launched it into the cushions on the couch. Dragging it horizontally, a single stab carried across the flat surface, resembling a fault in the earth’s crust. Puffs of polyester shifted beneath.
My mother knew that in order for the break-in to appear authentic, there had to be collateral damage. She picked up her trophy from the Los Angeles County Beauty Pageant of 1970, and with the strength of an Olympic shot-putter, tossed it directly into the television. An explosion of colorful wires, seizing and scorched with clouds of smoke, culminated. My mother dropped the trophy on the serrated sofa and fell onto it; I was placed on the neighboring love seat. And then we waited. She, sweaty with feathers of polyester floating across her chest, and me on my back, upturned like an exterminated cockroach.
As soon as the ambulance arrived, my mother was finally able to dry her tears. She sat in the back of the van, along with the two paramedics who arrived on the scene a cool seven minutes after the television exploded. No police arrived, even though my mother’s call expressly suggested illegal activity. No report was filed about a break-in, and nobody ever called to follow up. I’m not sure how she managed to avoid that, but then again, she was an expert actress. It never brought her the success she dreamed of, but it came in handy at times like this.
“She’s going to be fine, Mrs. Singleton,” a paramedic said. He had blond hair and a long Corinthian neck.
My mother was strangled by tears. Her left hand, naked as the day I was born, caressed my right arm.
“It’s a good thing your little tot has so much baby fat. It really protected her fall,” another paramedic added. “It looks like it’s just going to be a bad bruise.”
My mother’s voice croaked through her hysterics. “A bruise?”
The first paramedic put his arm around her, covering her shoulders with one of the red blankets in the back reserved for flood survivors. “Yes, Mrs. Singleton, we’ve just got to check her out at the hospital, but it looks like she’s going to be okay.”
She shrugged, pulling the blanket a little closer to her chest. “It’s only Ms. Singleton. There’s no mister.”
Three months later, my mother married Paramedic One in a little white chapel in Las Vegas. She was pregnant again and determined not to lose this one to another woman five years her junior. It was June in the late seventies. My mom wore a miniskirt, long auburn hair, flat and singed at the tips by an iron, and gold-plated hoops. I was her bouquet, dressed in a ballerina costume painted with lilies. My mom even sprayed my dress with perfume so that I would smell like flowers. She walked down the aisle to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” when Paramedic One took her as his one and only wife. And then, he proudly slept by her side for another fourteen months.
Regardless of what transpired during my first year, my arm never properly healed. Although the ER doctors disagreed with Paramedic One’s initial diagnosis of “just a bruise, ma’am,” my mother refused to accept anything but his advice and treatment. In fact, my arm was broken in three places and, considering the early stages of bone development of a ten-month-old, required a great deal of care. After we arrived at the hospital that night, my mother stopped paying attention to me. She was flirting with Paramedic One throughout the drive, the examination, and the treatment plan, with which, of course, she and Paramedic One disagreed. She was supposed to wrap my arm every few hours for ten days, changing the dressing and keeping the arm tightly wound to my torso, but over the next month, she was too busy making baby #2 to wrap and rewrap the arm, so needless to say, it healed improperly.
The baby fat that protected me from the initial fall slowly evaporated, and my arm atrophied into a pencil-like spike for a short portion of my toddlerhood. I was briefly left with only three working limbs, which, at the time, wasn’t as horrid as it sounds. I learned to walk earlier than most toddlers because I needed my feet to take me places that my arms never would. I learned to talk early, too, because I couldn’t point to what I wanted. This is not to say that one look at me, and I appeared like Kevin Spacey migrating between Verbal and Keyser Söze. My right arm was fine—it fell parallel to my left, enabled me to grasp a pen, write on a chalkboard, hold a flute, that sort of thing. By the time my little brother came around, it was as if my mother had never dropped me in the first place. Had she not felt the need to habitually remind me of that day, memorializing jolts of electricity up my right arm with each retelling, I would have forgotten it even happened.
But this was not enough for Ollie’s first day out.
“The more we speak, the more I can know you,” he pleaded to me when I told him I was done for the day. “The more I can try and find people who can write in to support you. It will help us produce the best clemency petition possible. Marlene’s endorsement is essential, but if you have any other people in your past who might write in to help commute your sentence, it can only help.”
Like Paramedic One was going to sign an affidavit in favor of keeping me alive.
I actually lived a decent, middle-class suburban life with a single working mother, stereotypical tagalong baby brother, and a rotating set of stand-in fathers, each one sporting a different style mustache. One was a wormlike Clark Gable do, another an oily blond handlebar, another an ebony Dalí, and sadly, I’m embarrassed to report, my mother slept with a man sporting a Hitler ’stache. (I know it was peculiar, to say the least, but I didn’t know better at the time.)
I must have been seven when my mother stuck me in speech therapy, thinking it would help eradicate my minor speech impediment, thanks to an incident with one of the ’stache men. She had been sleeping with a man with a caterpillar mustache and thick wiry spectacles who worked as an accountant for the restaurant where she waited tables. (I saw him at our house for breakfast one morning. He was wearing blue pin-striped boxer shorts and a V-necked white undershirt with mustard stains across the chest. I remember feeling his shifty eyes scanning my body like a Xerox machine, from top to bottom, slowly, a light flashing behind his eyes when he reached my end.) One morning, he made fun of the way I asked for my cereal (“Mommy, can you pwease pass the fwoot woops?”), and the next thing you know, I was stuck in speech therapy two afternoons a week.
The speech therapy continued for two years, bleeding into my mother’s theatrical antics, and led to advice by my therapist to propel my newfound freedom of speech into professional public speaking. So, when I was nine years old, my mother dragged me and my brother to some forty rehearsals for her one and only starring role in a musical. She was playing Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, and dressed to the nines in colorful anachronistic country western flair, she belted out those ridiculous songs from the stage as if singing directly to me.
Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you, she sang, as the pathetic twelve-person orchestra below her cranked the final notes of the obnoxious song. At the time, I might not have known what they were singing about; but what I did know was that my mother and this actor (who, because he had a mustache, I’m pretty sure she was sleeping with at the time) sang that they could do random acts of attrition better than the other, thirteen times in three minutes without any evidence backing it up other than playful romps that only slightly humored the audience. I was on the crux of double digits, and even then the music seeped under my skin with irritation. Here was a woman who could do nothing right in life singing before thirty or forty people about how great she was, and they all believed her because of painted-on freckles and a fake wooden rifle. On opening night, right after she finished the song, I remember her tilting her head ever so slightly to my direction and winking. It was the last time she would break character.
When I was ten years old, my mother’s facial hair fetish gave way to an athletic addiction. By that, I mean, she only dated runners. And by runners, I mean competitive speed walkers. I don’t mean to pass judgment or anything, but approximately half of the speed walkers my mother took home sported a mustache across their upper lips, so she can claim she got over the ’stache fetish, but she didn’t. Not really.
I’ll never forget walking home from school one day and seeing my mother and a mustachioed speed walker sashaying up to the front door after a whopping three-mile jaunt, their hips shifting from left to right, their arms staggered in pendulous rhythm, and their feet tenderly touching the ground from heel to toe, heel to toe, like developmentally challenged salsa dancers. I was with Andy Hoskins, the most popular boy in school, and Persephone Riga, the most popular girl in school. My mother’s feet picked up movement along with her boyfriend’s, all the while as she placed the key in the door’s keyhole, and then within moments, their rotating hips almost swayed in syncopation, his mixed with hers, like vodka and cranberry juice, like rum with coke. Right there in public. On our front door. For the entire neighborhood and Andy Hoskins and Persephone Riga to observe.
Despite this nefarious production, Persephone later became my closest friend, my constant companion, and my confidante, until the middle of seventh grade, when her parents moved the family away from the school district to a neighborhood where having a tennis court in your backyard was not considered excessive or affluent. It was just considered normal, like having an indoor bathroom and doggie door was considered normal in my neighborhood.
At first, I didn’t see a lot of Persephone after she moved, but after about a month or so, she started to invite me over to her house and teach me how to serve and volley on the backyard tennis court, or smash down a lob so that nobody could possibly return it. After only two or three weeks, it was as if she had never left.
I still remember the first time I visited her small palace on the other side of town. Her parents were pleased that she was still comingling with her former classmates, as she was having a rather clumsy time acclimating to her new school. They invited me in, gracefully, almost as if they were the servants to a new manor, and served me lemonade in a crystal wine glass and Girl Scout cookies on a crystal cheese platter.
“Thin Mints, Noa?”
I nodded, eloquently, the way I thought someone in her home would reply. “Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Riga. Thank you very much, Mrs. Riga.”
“Freshly squeezed lemonade or pulpless, Noa?”
“No pulp, Mrs. Riga. Thank you so much, Mrs. Riga.”
Persephone laughed when she heard me talking to her mother as if she were royalty.
“Come!” she cheered, “I want to show you something.”
She grabbed my hand and pulled me over to her parents’ dining room, where dozens of porcelain dishes were displayed behind glass so thick you’d think it was protecting the Mona Lisa from itinerant fingerprints and bullets.
“Check it out,” she told me. “My mom says they’re worth like twenty thousand dollars.”
The china had fleurs-de-lis hand-painted on each bowl and dessert dish. How did I know they were hand-painted? Persephone told me.
“They’re hand-painted,” she said proudly. “My mom told me they’re hand-painted. That’s what makes them worth so much. We got them with the house after my grandpa died. Isn’t it cool?”
I wasn’t sure which part of it was cool, but I was pretty sure that I didn’t fit in with people who spoke about china patterns and fleurs-de-lis, and even less so with people who had tennis courts in their backyards. I understand now that Persephone and the Rigas didn’t fit in with them, either. Susan and Georg Riga didn’t paint those fleurs-de-lis by hand. They didn’t build that tennis court by choice. They were merely inhabiting new imperial robes, almost like I have with the color cocoa brown.
For months, Persephone proceeded to invite me over after school on days when she didn’t have a tennis lesson or a French lesson or dance practice, to show me some extravagant new relic of inheritance that her mother or father deemed too priceless to display. The Rigas were always placing their beloved items behind glass or behind a closet or behind a wooden cabinet or in a safe. It was as if they never felt comfortable in their new station, like they never unpacked from their old life. Clothing that Persephone and I had purchased together when we were neighbors lay dormant in old suitcases, never opened. Mrs. Riga started picking up extra lines around her eyes and lips every time someone called, because she didn’t quite know how to answer the phone. And sticky plastic skins cloaked all their furniture, as if they were too nervous to soil it with their old routine. They woke up one day with someone handing them a new life without their choosing, and they were unsure of how to conform, like someone who has recently been relegated to a wheelchair.
It took me over twenty years, but I finally could relate.
My mother told me years later that if someone hands you a new life that has been watermarked as enviable and emerald, you take it—regardless the cost. I thought of Persephone’s transformation away from me for years, never quite grasping her need to step into that new life, until it was time for me to do the same.
When I was seventeen years old, I was salutatorian of my high school class. I was chosen to give the oration at graduation. I had earned a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and was sharing postcoital cigarettes with the cutest boy in school (yes, Andy Hoskins) on a triweekly basis. To top it off, I had no father to tell me I was doing it all wrong.
Andy Hoskins ran track for our school and was going to Cal State Bakersfield on a full athletic scholarship in the fall. The night before graduation, he slept in my bed along with a box of cigarettes, a matchbook, and an empty notepad. He kept urging me to work on the speech, finish the speech, practice the speech, trying to frighten me with such comments like: “Do you know how many people are going to be watching you tomorrow?” “These words will be your epitaph!” “This is the most important thing you’ve done up until now.” And so forth. Perhaps he knew how prophetic those comments would be, fast-forward a few years into the future. Perhaps not. It’s not my job to dwell on these things.
I remember looking into his blue eyes that night, wanting to throw away the pencils and the pens and the yellow lined legal pads and just stay in bed. I didn’t care about my speech. I was sure that my impediment, asleep as it may have been, would come out in public, despite the years of therapy. All I wanted at that point was Andy. He was all I could think about. I can remember, even now, the windmill of air-conditioning cooling my moist back on that night in May. I still smell his olive-hued skin next to mine as I urged him to spend graduation in bed together. It would have been the first time we’d go to sleep together and wake up together. I didn’t want robes or mortarboards anymore; I didn’t want clapping parents and grandparents. I just wanted us.
My legs crawled around him. “We can skip the ceremony. It’s not that important,” I told him, closing my legs about his chest. Back then, my legs were smooth and sculpted, and my calves swung out as little tennis balls each time I flexed.
His jaw dropped at my proposition. “People like you aren’t supposed to speak that way.” Andy’s heart was pounding, probably without him even knowing it. “You don’t even realize what an opportunity you have,” he said, standing up from the bed.
Instinctively I rose and stood next to him. Our eyes met. I was just as tall as he, just as fit, just as tan. He probably never got over that, the equality between us. Then again, I suppose since I was salutatorian and I was going to Penn and he was about to be an ex-jock going to a state school, then we weren’t exactly equal, per se, now were we.
“Look, I barely study,” I finally said. “This stuff—school—just comes easy to me. Why does it even bother you?”
He sat back from me. “I can’t be with someone who doesn’t take herself seriously.”
“I take myself plenty seriously.”
He locked eyes with me. “No, you don’t.”
Then he found his shorts and slid them on one leg at a time. His calves, his thighs, his forearms were all so tan; and the hairs on that bronze skin were bleached nearly blond from the hours he spent running outside, jumping over hurdles, slipping on the rust-colored track. “I gotta go,” he mumbled. “I have to actually prepare for tomorrow.”
He grabbed his shirt and started draping it over his top just like they do in movies: all those fuming men who can’t remember where they put their pants, even though they know the room well, and rush outside half-naked, teeming with an anger that can’t be contained inside four walls. That’s pretty much how Andy looked when he walked out on me the night after we slept together for the second to last time.
I watched him storm away from the upstairs window of my mom’s bedroom. I wanted to scream, “What the hell do you have to prepare? You walk across the stage, pick up a piece of paper, shake some old freak’s hand, and move on. Real tough, Andy!” But I didn’t say it. I let him have the last word, and for that, he forgave me the night before I moved to Philadelphia.
At graduation, my salutatorian speech failed to impress. I stole a load of Shakespeare quotes and sandwiched them with Bobby Frost to create the most clichéd “Go Forth and Prosper” homily my high school ever heard. No doubt, had Persephone not transferred, she would have been salutatorian and postulated more eloquently in front of all those people than I did.
Andy collected his diploma with subdued panache. I heard he went on to train for the Olympics in track and field but couldn’t compete due to an Achilles tendon injury. Now he’s married to a dental hygienist, is a commercial real estate agent, and lives somewhere in the San Fernando Valley with his litter of five-point-whatever kids.
Three days after my high school graduation, I received a letter in the mail from my father. Not one of the baker’s dozen of men rotating through my mom’s bed in the ’80s. Nor Paramedic One (or was it Two?). No, I’m talking about the sperm donor, the one she’d always called a one-night stand, the ex. My Real Father.
It was a postcard from somewhere just outside Philadelphia. The front of it was a large picture of the cracked Liberty Bell with a little red heart painted on top of it. “The City of Brotherly Love,” it said in white cursive bubble letters. When I turned the postcard over, it said, “Congradulations! Love from, Caleb.” There was absolutely nothing else on the postcard but the word congratulations, spelled with a d, and his name and address.
“How do you know this is from my father?” I asked my mom.
She sifted through the mail, picking up a hefty envelope from Publishers Clearing House and tearing it in half, then in fourths, and eighths, and so on until a confetti mug shot of Ed McMahon sprinkled the table. She did not, however, dignify my query with a response of any sort—visual or audible.
“Mom?”
“What?” she asked, without looking my way. She was sweeping the confetti into her palm.
“How do you know this is my father? Is this his name? I thought you didn’t remember who he was?”
When she didn’t respond, I understood everything. I grabbed the postcard, stuck it in my purse, and took it as an open invitation for contact. My mother disagreed.
“If he wanted to be a father, he would have been a father,” she later said.
And that was the end of the discussion.