I dialed the digits between short breaths. It had been years since we had last spoken, but I always kept her latest number in my address book. I was worried that she and Elizabeth might have already left for England and I would lose that part of my life forever. I quickly placed a call to the woman who had once been a type of stepmother to me, a mother-woman caring for me alongside my fiery and anxious mother. Her face, how it was puffy and white with a tight smile that never revealed her teeth.
To think she kept it all these years!” How torn up Elizabeth was the last time I saw her. “No, I just thought this was part of her mental issues––didn’t you tell me she’d been hospitalized before?” My father wanted nothing more to do with this. Telling him they were leaving the country. “But did she say why she was calling you? Why you?” I tried to grasp this with all my might: My father, picking up the phone to hear a strange voice of a broken young woman who was the daughter of his ex-wife’s ex-lover. As if she had even crossed his mind once over the past ten years. She sounded like she knew what she was talking about, my father said, and the tone of her voice almost convinced him it made sense that she would choose to call him of all people. Family.Įlizabeth called my father to tell him they were leaving to go back to England, all three of them: her, Eve, and Traci. I believed them, and longed to be close, to taste some of their wild teenage life that was still so far from me, to believe that I was part of something, and even if there were two moms, at least I had sisters that sat around the table with us at dinner time. Then they would make clear to me that I was a spoiled brat. I looked up to them and they mostly ignored me, except when they got jealous that I had a father who took me out to eat, who bought me presents, a father who had a stable home I could visit every other weekend. Traci and Elizabeth had crazy 80’s haircuts, and clothes with lots of holes: gray, black, netted. I would sing to the cats softly, tell them my secrets and make cozy beds out of pillowcases for them. Traci would bring one home after finding it in the backyard crying for its lost mother: we have to take it in or it’ll die! I cuddled these creatures and talked to them during the long weekend afternoons when I waited patiently for some attention. We had cats, two or three, depending on the time of year. I reassured myself that it must all be okay, normal. There was passionate lovemaking in the bedroom in the middle of the night I would wake up terrified, but Elizabeth and Traci always laughed and teased our mothers the following mornings about how loud they had been.
Ragefueled memoir affair Patch#
I had inherited them overnight when our mothers fell in love and moved us all in together to that apartment on 15th street with the tall ceilings and steep winding stairs that led to a sunny patch of concrete backyard. They were my big, beautiful and exciting teenage stepsisters.
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