Part 15 (1/2)

With the tattoo, I felt something essential about myself had fallen into place. The following day I hopped a train to Highland Park in search of another missing piece. I'm not sure what I had expected, but the Highland Park train station was a platform in the middle of a suburb. It was the kind of place where businesspeople parked their cars and commuted by train to the city for work. I hadn't thought to rent a car. I carried a driver's license as ID, but I hadn't driven since I left home at sixteen, and that poorly and very little. I was used to subways dropping you practically at the front door of anywhere you wanted to go.

I crossed the parking lot to the shoulder of a road where I saw a fair flow of traffic and threw out my thumb, another first. There was no other option, unless I turned around and went back. I always made up for in willingness what I lacked in forethought. A black Cadillac with a mercifully non-creepy driver took me to the entrance of Highland Park Hospital, a brick structure landscaped with long beds of pink impatiens. I wandered the hallways looking for the records department, where I was met with blank stares.

”We've got nothing for you here,” said a woman with pearlescent green talons.

”You're strange and extraordinary,” I said in response to her nails, a reference to my all-time favorite movie, Cabaret Cabaret. She looked at me even more blankly, if that was possible.

”You know. Sally Bowles. Green nails. Strange and extraordinary.”

She didn't know.

”You could try the County Clerk. For your birth certificate,” she said.

Of course there was nothing for me there. And I already had my official birth certificate. It told me nothing. It wiped out my history as if it had never existed.

I went to the maternity ward, because I couldn't think of anything else to do and I would feel defeated walking out so quickly. When I looked through the gla.s.s at the babies squirming in the nursery, I felt the cold adrenaline of a shoplifter. Why did I feel like I was doing something wrong? I left with the beginning flickers of a migraine and an emotional flatline.

I had only one more lead. I considered myself an old pro at hitchhiking by that time and I hitched another ride to the address I had scrawled on a piece of loose-leaf paper. The lawns of Highland Park looked like those of the affluent suburban town in which I had grown up and they inspired the same reaction: terror. The trees were just starting to turn, their leaves edged with hints of the gaudy colors to come.

I looked at the pretty houses and stores and a sense of hopelessness overwhelmed me. I got claustrophobic and my right eye began to swim with white spots. It felt like half my brain was being probed by alien electrodes. I thought for a minute I might also be getting ready to have an asthma attack, but it was just hypochondria. Trips to the deep suburbs give me asthma and migraines and rare diseases.

The aging Jewish trophy-wife-type woman in the driver's seat scolded me for hitchhiking and then cross-examined me about my sojourn to Highland Park. She tapped her French-tip acrylics against the steering wheel. I thought of my mother-my real mother, my adoptive mother-the thousands of carpools, the air-conditioning on high. I thought of her big black gla.s.ses with the purplish tint, her fingers, swollen with early arthritis but still shapely and perfectly manicured, wrapped around the wheel.

”I'm looking for an old friend.”

”What's the name? I've lived here a hundred years. Maybe I know her. Him?”

”Her. Her name is Carrie Gardner.”

”Gardner. Maybe there was a Gardner ahead of my daughter in junior high, but I didn't know the parents.”

I got the feeling that she was making this up. She seemed like the kind of woman who couldn't stand to be caught without the answer.

”I never pick up hitchhikers, you know, but I could tell you were a nice girl. My daughter was at school in Michigan before she dropped out. Now she follows the Grateful Dead around. Thinks she's an activist. Ridiculous. So smart, that kid. I figured you could have been my daughter standing there. I'd want someone safe to stop for her.”

What would my mother say? My daughter was at NYU before she dropped out. Now she flits back and forth from New York to Southeast Asia. Thinks she's an actress. Ridiculous. So smart, that kid. My daughter was at NYU before she dropped out. Now she flits back and forth from New York to Southeast Asia. Thinks she's an actress. Ridiculous. So smart, that kid.

The woman consulted my creased piece of paper and dropped me off at a ranch-style suburban house, plain and a.s.suredly middle cla.s.s.

”You sure you'll be okay?” she asked me.

”I'm fine. I've got a ride from here. Thanks a lot.”

I considered asking if she would wait for a minute and then drive me back to the train station. She didn't seem like she had much to do. But I decided not to. I was pretty sure she would have said yes, but I didn't want to talk to her anymore, didn't want the reminder of my own mother, of the betrayal I was committing by standing on that particular square of yard.

A moonfaced woman opened the door and squinted at me, brus.h.i.+ng a lock of hair out of her face. She told me that she had moved in only a year ago and had no information. Before she moved in, there was a family who was there three years, but she couldn't remember their names. Maybe Carrie had stayed with the family who was there before them. Maybe the family before that. She was just guessing. Nineteen years was a long time, after all. Nineteen years of waves rolling over any sandcastles Carrie might have built there.

”Is there anyone on this block who lived here nineteen years ago?”

”Not that I know of. It's a young block. It's a family neighborhood,” she said. ”Now, who are you, again?”

In ghost stories, it's always some terrible tragedy that leaves a mark behind, an a.s.sault so grievous that time itself steps aside to allow for a spirit to hang around and decry the injustice. But what about our mundane personal tragedies, the prosaic injustices perpetrated without a police file, without an audience? These slip away, washed from the counters before the next family moves in their boxes of dishware. I suppose I could have stayed in the neighborhood and been a better investigative journalist, but I was suddenly nauseated, my headache growing progressively debilitating.

Hitching a ride from there to the train station proved to be harder than I had antic.i.p.ated. I walked for about an hour down a long stretch of road, feeling stupid and stopping once to throw up behind a bush, before anyone stopped. Otherwise, it was uneventful. I don't know what I had expected. Somehow it had seemed important for me to smell the smells and see the colors of that town, but all I had smelled was the same autumn, the same trees, the same hospital trays that were everywhere else. I was embarra.s.sed by the visit to the nursery, by my own sentimentality.

On the train home, I laid my head against the window and thought of Joni Mitch.e.l.l. In high school I had decided that I looked like Joni Mitch.e.l.l, in spite of her delicate, elfish features. I didn't look like her in obvious ways, but in ways only I, intimately acquainted with my own bone structure, could see. I even sang like her when I sang alone. On stage in musical-theater productions I was a cla.s.sic belter, but in my secret moments, I sang just like Joni, my voice high and breathy and folksy.

I had read in Rolling Stone Rolling Stone that Joni Mitch.e.l.l gave a baby up for adoption. This baby was the child born with the moon in Cancer that she sings about in the song ”Little Green.” I was certain that this baby was me. Never mind the fact that I was a Leo. Never mind the fact that the 1971 that Joni Mitch.e.l.l gave a baby up for adoption. This baby was the child born with the moon in Cancer that she sings about in the song ”Little Green.” I was certain that this baby was me. Never mind the fact that I was a Leo. Never mind the fact that the 1971 Blue Blue alb.u.m with ”Little Green” on it came out two years before I was born. Never mind that I was hardly the blond and blue-eyed sprite Joni Mitch.e.l.l was. alb.u.m with ”Little Green” on it came out two years before I was born. Never mind that I was hardly the blond and blue-eyed sprite Joni Mitch.e.l.l was.

I filtered out the contradictory evidence and knew, beyond all reason, that my birth mother was Joni Mitch.e.l.l. Because her spirit was the spirit I had inside me. And what I needed was not a mother who had carried me in her body. That I could live without. But I needed to find the place my heart came from. My heart refused to be an orphan forever.

I got my tattoo not to say ”I wuz here,” a tag on a freeway overpa.s.s, but rather to say ”Here wuz me.” Here they are, the landscapes inscribed behind my eyes. Because even when your dream slips away, your mother slips away, your baby slips away, your lover slips away-even then, you have your story. With my tattoos, I serve as witness and doc.u.mentarian to myself.

After the first tattoo, I got many more. Now people often run their hands over my tattoos as if they're braille. All this touching gets on my nerves sometimes. People who don't know me at all will reach out and grab my arm, will run their palms over my forearms. But I get it. My tattoos are pulsing with stories. Hold your ear close to them and you'll hear the ocean at Beach Haven, you'll hear an insistent knocking on a door in Brunei, you'll hear the train pulling out of the Highland Park station.

I let Highland Park disappear behind me. That town held nothing, not the smallest clue that there once had been a girl somewhere in that house pregnant with me, feeding me her thoughts, feeding me her fears, staying maybe with the last nameless family or maybe with the family before that; no one can remember.

My mission in Highland Park had been unsuccessful, but I had figured out something, at least. The air there weighed a million pounds, but riding the train out of town I felt so light. I recognized time's s.h.i.+fting weight-the heaviness of the past, the lightness of the moment.

What I was looking for wasn't in Highland Park, wasn't in any one place. Sometimes all you need is a Joni Mitch.e.l.l song to know who you are. Sometimes you find it by accident on a foreign balcony at dawn. And sometimes your story looks like the purple spine of a snake spiraling outward across your belly, etched forever under your skin.

chapter 24.

A snake tattoo is preferable to a live snake. I drank an espresso and stared into the cage of my vicious Burmese python, Varla. Only our extremely strange cleaning woman, Shakti, potentially part reptile herself, could handle Varla without elbow-length gloves. I had wanted a pet and anything cute with fur was forbidden in our apartment, so I had walked into a Lower East Side pet store one day and walked out with Varla. I had always liked snakes and thought it would be fun to have one. I was wrong. snake tattoo is preferable to a live snake. I drank an espresso and stared into the cage of my vicious Burmese python, Varla. Only our extremely strange cleaning woman, Shakti, potentially part reptile herself, could handle Varla without elbow-length gloves. I had wanted a pet and anything cute with fur was forbidden in our apartment, so I had walked into a Lower East Side pet store one day and walked out with Varla. I had always liked snakes and thought it would be fun to have one. I was wrong.

I hadn't realized how traumatic it was going to be to feed the snake live mice. Even more traumatic was when I sought advice for dealing with Varla's bad temper and the man at the pet store told me to stun the mice first. He said it would help her lose her lunging instinct. I was mortified. I was the little girl who, inspired by the Met's Temple of Dendur, had buried my hamster in a s...o...b..x painted to look like a pharaoh's sarcophagus, had wept for weeks over his garden grave. But I had bought the snake and she was my responsibility. I put the girl who had lovingly constructed Habitrail castles behind me.

After that, every time Varla needed to eat, I would cry and put a mouse in a paper bag. Then I would profusely apologize to the mouse as I smashed the bag against the wall. I would drop the mouse into the terrarium and it would twitch while Varla ignored it for hours before eating it and I drowned in guilt. It was gruesome.

Andy refused to feed her.

”You wanted her, you feed her.”

It was the couch debacle multiplied by a thousand. Varla was every bad decision I'd ever made coiled tightly and hissing out at me from a smelly cage. That morning, I was contemplating how the f.u.c.k I was going to move that huge terrarium and whom I could get to adopt a mean snake, when the phone rang.

It was legendary downtown theater director Richard Foreman calling to tell me that I had been cast in his upcoming play, Samuel's Major Problems. Samuel's Major Problems. When I hung up the phone, I screamed and danced around like a housewife who had just gotten a visit from Ed McMahon. When I hung up the phone, I screamed and danced around like a housewife who had just gotten a visit from Ed McMahon.