American Daughter Read online

  Dedication

  To my mother, Florence. In the most

  untraditional way, you gave me what I needed.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  ON THAT JANUARY morning, I woke up in a car. Isabella and the baby were beside me in the back of our station wagon, still asleep. Allan and Pablo were outside, lying on the ground in their sleeping bags. Our mother was gone.

  The year was 1974. I was six years old. We were in Mendocino Headlands State Park on a bluff overlooking the ocean. The car had been our home for many months, and it would be our home for many months to come. It was the car of someone who had come to the end of the line—the car of a driver who’d driven as far as she could go.

  I was warm beneath the wool blanket, pressed against my sister with the sun slanting through the back windshield. Every morning I lingered in the shelter of the station wagon for as long as I could, until hunger and the need to relieve myself drove me up and out of our makeshift bed.

  It was always cold outside the car. A bitter wind came hard off the water, whipping my hair in every direction and making the bones of my face ache. Each morning began with the same ritual: First I crouched to urinate in the brush, and then I went to the cardboard box in the back of the car in the hope of having some semblance of breakfast. Whatever was inside that box was what we had to eat that day.

  On a good day there might be hempseed bread and fresh-ground peanut butter, Tiger’s Milk bars, or apricot granola.

  On other days, there might be nothing but bran cereal. The bran pellets were hard and dry and tasted like dust, and they made my stomach hurt.

  Or there might be nothing but brown sugar, which I’d eat straight from the container. My mother said brown sugar was good for us because it had molasses in it.

  Or there might be nothing at all.

  On the nothing-at-all days, the empty days, my brothers collected seaweed for us to eat. They climbed down the cliffs to the cove where the kelp was most abundant, and they would gather armfuls of it—as much as they could carry. Allan, who at ten was the oldest of us, went first, with nine-year-old Pablo following close behind. Each time they descended into that canyon of rock and moss and pounding surf, I felt afraid that they’d be swept away to sea or dashed against the jagged black boulders. The ocean was a fury; to live beside it was to know this well. Evidence of its violence was everywhere we turned. The sand was littered with broken things: dismembered claws, gutted shells, the shards of clams dropped from the sky and eviscerated by gulls.

  But Allan and Pablo always reappeared beside the car with the seaweed. They spread it on a blanket to dry in the sun, a process that took several hours. Even then, the seaweed was nearly impossible to swallow—slick and oily, hard to chew, with a lingering aftertaste like dead fish. I held my breath while forcing it down, and gulped water after each bite.

  Our mother worked as a maid at a motel several miles away. She left the car before first light to hitchhike to her job and didn’t come back until early evening. For months on end—for most of that year—we were on our own every day, fending for ourselves, aimless and feral and free.

  We didn’t go to school that year, and this drew no notice from anyone. Mendocino was a hippie refuge where a passel of half-wild children wandering around unattended struck no one as unusual and aroused no concern. Every afternoon we ran and capered and played on the beach like a pack of stray puppies.

  Each morning brought the same set of difficulties: the hunger and the cold, the relative lack of shelter, the long stretch of unstructured hours. And yet each morning the world was new. The sky was pink like the inside of a shell. The shoreline was studded with treasure: sea glass, shards of abalone, intricate sticks of driftwood, and the occasional fisherman’s float.

  I loved just to look at all the marvels of the ocean. I would crouch down to peer for long minutes at the skeletal underside of a horseshoe crab, the elegant twist of a whelk, the clear blue bodies of jellyfish washed up on the sand. The beach was as much our home as the station wagon. Years later I would hear the phrase “sea urchins,” and although the reference was to a marine creature, my first thought was: That was us.

  We spent our days roaming the same two-mile stretch again and again. On any given afternoon, we could be found beside the bluffs, on the outskirts of the village, on the winding trails along the cliffs, or down by the water.

  It was a relief to see our mother each time she returned in her pale blue uniform dress, and to trail her to the neighborhood store. We never had more than a few dollars to spend on dinner for the six of us. My mother’s scant pay had to cover diapers for the baby, the cost of washing our clothes at the laundromat, soap and shampoo, cigarettes by the carton, the little squares of paper she ate every morning, and the pungent green clusters of buds she called herbs. At the local grocery, we picked out random items: grapes or tangerines, carob bars, halvah, dried slices of persimmon or papaya.

  Sometimes a kind cashier gave us hot water in cardboard cups. On these blessed evenings, we would divide the contents of a Top Ramen package among the cups and sit on the curb outside the store to eat it. That soup was the best dinner I’d ever had, the best dinner I could imagine having.

  After this, we would go to the public showers at Fort Bragg, an event that rivaled dinner as the best of the day. Hot water was a benediction, however it came.

  That January day began like any other: shivering, driftless, dreaming of heat, wandering the headlands with my sister and baby brother. Allan and Pablo were back at the car, drying seaweed. On a distant bluff was a bus—one we had never seen before—like a school bus but bleached white on the outside with blue-green trim. The novelty of it pulled us near and somehow, though we moved through the world with a kind of wary insularity (we did not talk to strangers; we tended not to even go near them), I found myself knocking at its door.

  I’ll never know what led me to knock, and I’ll never know why the man inside swung open the door to admit us. I only know that I climbed the steps that day and beheld a sight that seared itself into my mind, an image that never dimmed, that carried me through the weeks and months and years ahead. It’s an image that’s still with me now: a vision of sanctuary, of a haven, ensconced within the metal shell of a battered old vehicle. It was a home on the road just as ours was, but inside it was as enchanted and exquisite as a Fabergé egg.

  It was warm inside the bus. There were cream-colored café curtains on all the windows, and each pane of glass was clouded with steam. There was a stove with a cooking pot and a red teakettle. There was bench seating built in along the sides, covered with brightly colored pillows and a batik throw. A macramé owl hung on one wall.

  The air was fragrant
with cooking spices. The man stirred whatever was in the pot with a wooden spoon. I had never imagined a space like this: orderly, cheerful, cozy and snug, a world unto itself. It was like a cottage in a fairy tale.

  I looked at Isabella in wonder, and she looked back at me with nothing in her face. The indifference in her eyes filled me with bewilderment. She doesn’t see it, I thought.

  I would think about that bus every single day for years and years. I’d conjure the memory of it just before falling asleep at night. I would draw pictures of it, embellish it in my mind, and add whimsical touches like a jeweled curtain, woven rugs, and paper flowers. I’d imagine it with different drapes and fixtures and furniture. I would hold it close to me.

  But at the moment, I could only stand as if rooted in the middle of the room, overwhelmed by a desire so fierce it was like a revelation.

  This, I thought. I want this. And one day I’ll have it.

  Chapter 1

  All the leaves are brown

  And the sky is gray

  I’ve been for a walk

  On a winter’s day

  I’d be safe and warm

  If I was in L.A.

  Califonia dreamin’

  On such a winter’s day . . .

  IN HER BRONX apartment on that March afternoon in 1967, my mother was listening to the wind. It had a message for her. She was ready to let it blow her west, blow her all the way across the country.

  It was spring, not winter, but the world around her was as drab as in the song. She didn’t belong here among these brick-box apartment buildings, the charmless storefronts—the drugstores and nail salons and bodegas with their dirty windows and weathered awnings. She hated the dreary stretch of Ogden Avenue and the swamp-green swath of the Harlem River. She didn’t care if she never saw any of it again. It was time to leave it all behind.

  Birds don’t think about flying south, they just fall into formation. They yield to the great pull, the directive written into their wings. What she felt now was like that, and it wasn’t just her. What was happening now was a great migration.

  She could almost hear the rustling across the country as the bards and muses and dreamers and seekers and poets and mystics and flower children came forth from their former places to heed the call. She saw them hitchhiking on the highway, driving VW buses, riding in makeshift caravans and gypsy wagons, walking with rucksacks and blankets and musical instruments, shawled and beaded and embroidered and feathered and fringed. All of them were tuned into the same frequency and heading west.

  California was the gathering place, the mecca. It was where she belonged. The people making their way there were her rightful tribe. She was one of them—anyone could see that. She had waist-length hair the color of sunflower honey and light blue eyes like an invitation.

  Not everyone heard the call, of course. The country was still full of establishment types with no interest in expanding their consciousness. The war was still going on, and plenty of people were still into working for The Man. She refused to be left behind with them. She was going.

  Louie, her husband, knew this. Or rather, he was willing to defer to her certainty. He had gone there ahead of her, to find them a place and himself a job, and that was a good thing, because she could take care of her problem while he was away.

  The problem wasn’t that she was unexpectedly pregnant for the fourth time. No, that would have been fine under ordinary circumstances. She had three kids already, what difference would one more make? She liked being pregnant and she didn’t mind babies. The problem was that she couldn’t be sure who its father was.

  Of course it could be Louie, which would be the best thing. He had already given her Pablo and Isabella, and he treated Allan—her first baby—just the same as them.

  Allan’s father was a bartender at McSorley’s Old Ale House. He had stepped outside for a smoke one autumn evening when my mother happened by and asked him for a light. The moment she heard his brogue, she decided to go to bed with him. She never saw him again, and by the time she learned she was pregnant, she didn’t even remember his name.

  At that time, she was a waitress in a pancake house. She had moved to New York City to be an actress, but so far the only roles she’d been offered were in blue movies. She was staying uptown with her Aunt Lily, but she knew she would never be forgiven an illegitimate pregnancy. She would surely lose her waitressing job for the same reason, but she had some time before that would happen. She was naturally slender and would not start to show beneath her loose peasant blouses until the sixth or seventh month.

  Louie worked at the pancake house too. He was the Puerto Rican short-order cook. He winked at her from the kitchen whenever she picked up her plates. He was handsome and muscular and she liked his ease at the stove. She liked the cigarette he kept tucked behind his ear and the slash of a scar beneath his left eye. By the time she was eight months along, she was living in his Bronx apartment and he was smitten with her, willing to treat her baby as his own. He wouldn’t do that with this baby, though. Not unless he believed it was his.

  Of course he might believe it was his, even if it wasn’t. If the father were William, for instance, Louie would never suspect a thing. William was her childhood friend, her first love. His hair was dark and his eyes were similar to her own. Everyone would say the child took after her and leave it at that.

  She and William had met when he was fourteen and she was only ten. Unlike any of the other men in her life, he had known her Before, and when he looked at her, he still saw purity and girlishness and innocence. Lovely: His word for her was lovely. He looked at her the way a sailor might look at a mermaid: as an otherworldly creature he could never really have.

  William was special. Once when she was on acid, it came to her that he had a lifelong knowledge of her very essence—that for him, she was like one of those burned-out stars whose glow is purely residual. It didn’t matter what she did for the rest of her life; to William, there would always be a light around her. For this reason, she went all calm and peaceful inside whenever she was with him, and she slept with him whenever he came through town.

  Of course it was also possible the father was Giuseppe, the dapper and handsome man who sold diapers in the maternity ward of Morrisania Hospital. All the new mothers were sweet on him. They called him the “Italian Stallion.”

  Giuseppe’s wife had once been beautiful but now she had short hair and a ruined figure: the most disastrous fate that could befall a woman. Because of this, my mother felt sorry for him. Whenever he came over, she offered him coffee and cookies and then, almost as a natural extension of her hospitality, a half hour in her bedroom. A hardworking man like that deserved a little treat every now and then.

  Giuseppe wore a suit every time he came to see her, and he splashed on a light, clean cologne that she liked. A few times a week, he stopped by during his lunch break—a perfect time because her children were napping. He was always warm and appreciative. He held her face in both of his hands afterward and called her cara, bella, bellissima: his darling, his beauty. She never ran low on diapers.

  Giuseppe looked as if he could be a cousin of Louie’s. A baby with him would raise no more suspicion than a baby with William. If the father were either one of them, then everything would be all right.

  But the father could also be Ron, her best friend’s husband, who was black, and this would not be all right. At least it would not be all right with Louie; it would be a shock to him. He might even kill her, or Ron, or both. Louie didn’t understand about free love.

  Ron was tall and handsome and college-educated. He knew about things like wine and classical music. He and her best friend Judy lived five blocks away, in an apartment filled with art and records and books. They had two little boys close in age to Allan and Pablo and Isabella. She and Judy met at the playground sometimes, shared a smoke on the benches while the children climbed on the monkey bars and rode the seesaws.

  My mother adored Ron, but if the baby were his then of c
ourse her husband and everyone else would know she’d been with another man. Louie would go crazy, and Judy would never forgive her. No, if Ron were the father, it would not be all right.

  The rape had happened on her way home from Ron’s apartment, on a Saturday in late October. She told Louie that Ron and Judy were having a party, and she went over to their apartment by herself. The truth was that Judy was upstate with the two little boys, visiting her mother, which meant she and Ron could be alone in the apartment.

  My mother knew Louie wouldn’t want to come with her. Judy and Ron were intellectuals; both of them had graduated from Fordham. When they really did have parties, a bunch of their college friends crowded into their cramped two-bedroom and drank wine and passed a joint around while talking about Malcolm X and Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon. Louie couldn’t join in these conversations, and he didn’t like to get high.

  My mother’s deception went as planned, and after her time with Ron, she insisted on walking home by herself. She couldn’t risk being seen alone with him, and anyway, it was only a few blocks. Her attacker had come up behind her on the sidewalk outside her own apartment building. She felt the blade of his knife against her neck before she saw him, and then he was dragging her behind the dumpster by the back lot, telling her not to scream because she was too beautiful to kill.

  She didn’t scream but she bucked and kicked and twisted and thrashed. As a result, he was only able to jab himself inside her a few times before she managed to dislodge him, and he ended up mostly spraying her. The worst part of the whole thing wasn’t even that, it was the knife at her throat and the damp cold metal of the dumpster at her back and the rotten sewage smell all around her. And the way Louie slapped her, hard across the face, once she reached their apartment and told him what happened. Afterward he said it was because she had been hysterical. But she knew it was really because he was ashamed of her—angry with her—for being raped.

  But back to this March afternoon: a blustery day in the Bronx. The date marking the official start of spring had come and gone, but the temperature still hovered just below freezing and the wind was howling around my mother’s fifth-story window. My mother spent a long time at that window throughout that morning. She saw a drunk passed out on the curb, with one foot sticking out into the street. At one point a cab ran over that foot and still he didn’t stir.