Authors: Regina Calcaterra
Camille and I are obsessed with what will happen to Cherie when she’s finally released from the hospital. “She’s a sick woman,” my older sisters say about our mother, and I’m coming to understand that’s the only explanation for her choices in her manner of raising us. Beyond her heavy drinking are her violent mood swings and unpredictable outbursts, which we’ve been trying for years to accept as part of who she is. Sooner or later she always found ways to repent by taking my siblings to the movies or bringing us to a bar and giving us all the money we wanted for the jukebox and Shirley Temples. But the ruthless abandonment of us in midwinter in a desolate neighborhood—with no heat, no food, and limited contact with the outside world—has changed Camille.
The first outward sign of her contempt of our mother is when we’re placed in our new foster home in Brentwood. “I don’t want to be called Camille anymore,” she tells me.
“What? Why?”
“I don’t want to share a name with Mom.” After a few days, Camille announces that she wants me, and everyone, to call her by her middle name: Deanna.
My task of having to call my sister by a new name after a decade knowing her as Camille is only further confused by the fact that our foster parents, Nancy and Frank, named their son and daughter Nancy and Frank. Nancy and Frank, Nancy and Frank, Deanna . . . and Regina.
Like most twelve-year-olds, Deanna is allowed to play after school with friends from her new school, go to dances, style her hair, and eat whatever she wants as long as she goes to class and does all her homework.
But Frank treats me like his second son. He shares his love of boxing and Sugar Ray Leonard with me, and I find myself liking Sugar Ray’s baby face . . . and having someone who acts like my dad. We constantly watch boxing matches, interviews, and news on Sugar Ray, and as we prepare for a match, we talk about it for days leading up to it. Then we warn Nancy, Nancy, and Deanna what they’re in for if they dare to join us for the fight. This is the first foster home for as long as I remember that we actually
don’t want
to leave.
Anytime Deanna mentions Mom, she refers to her as Cookie. “She doesn’t deserve to be called a mom,” she explains. I begin to call Mom “Cookie,” too—after all the months and years of growing up without her, she feels too unfamiliar and detached for the name Mom. Nancy tells us that Cherie’s being released from the hospital and the court has permitted Cookie to take Cherie back, as long as Cookie lives in the same residence as Karl. Deanna and I roll our eyes.
Not long after that, Nancy learns Cookie’s won back guardianship of Norm and Rosie, too. Nancy explains that the court only wants Cookie to take care of a few kids at a time, and if she proves she can, then we can return to her, too. “We’re not in a rush,” I tell Nancy. “Trust me.”
Our summer’s been filled with inground swimming pools, Slip ’N Slides, and water balloons. Frank takes us to the community celebration parade and shares our amazement over a fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast named Nadia whose score showed up as 1.00 because the Olympic scoreboard makers never imagined that they would need room to post a fourth digit, since before her routine, no one had ever scored a perfect 10.00.
As our summer of Olympic-size fun comes to a close, so does our stay with Nancy, Frank, Nancy, and Frank. With a new school year coming, the court has ruled it’s time for us to return to our mother . . . or, as we’ve made a pact to refer to her from now on: to Cookie.
Deanna and I hatch a plan to write a letter to the court, asking them if we can please stay with the Nancys and Franks, but we finally reason that Cherie will need our help taking care of Norm and Rosie until her lungs get better.
September 1977
T
HE MONTH BEFORE
fifth grade starts, Cookie and Karl reunite. They find a nice two-story home to rent, directly across the street from the Saint James Episcopal Church. “Does this mean I’ll get to go back to Saint James Elementary?”
“No, Regina,” Cookie says. “I’m gonna send you to school in Timbuktu.”
The house is nestled off of busy North Country Road, surrounded by dense woods that hide a secure tree house built high into a group of trees. Norm and Cherie are settled in bedrooms on the second floor by the time Deanna and I arrive. Cookie puts me in a bedroom on the first floor with Rosie, right next to the bedroom she shares with Karl. “I remember your little tendency to run away,” she explains. One night, very late, when I hear strange noises coming from Cookie and Karl’s bedroom, I knock on the door. “Is everyone okay in there?” I yell. Instantly the noises cease, and the next day Cookie tells Camille—whose new name was dropped the day we arrived here—to help me move my things to the spare room upstairs.
I’m excited when I return to Saint James Elementary, the school I loved attending from kindergarten to the middle of second grade. My fifth grade teacher, Ms. Van Dover, is known for being nice, and my old friend, Beth Nadasy, sits in the desk right next to me. “I’m sorry I never got to say good-bye to you in second grade,” I tell her on the first day of school.
“That’s all right. Where’d you go?”
Of course I can’t tell her that we were taken away in a police car in the middle of the night because my little brother was found wandering the streets in his pajamas, or that we’ve been living with strangers for the last three years. But what I tell her is still the truth: “I thought of you all the time.”
Cherie begins high school with her lifelong friend Kathy, and Camille is in Nesaquake Middle School with her old friends. The single advantage about being forced to live with Cookie again is that, for the first time in our lives, we don’t have to walk into a school on the first day and fear whether anyone will sit with us at lunch or invite us to play on their dodgeball team. This makes going to school easier for all of us, and now staying home is easier, too: Karl’s insisted that the only way he’ll stay is if Cookie stops drinking. So she does.
We’re even in walking distance from our favorite spots like Cordwood Beach, Saint James General Store, Wicks Farm, and Saint Philip and James Church where Rosie was baptized. It strikes me how strange it is for life to feel so normal. Then, one night at dinner, Mom announces that Vito, Rosie’s biological father, has been “wasted.”
“Wasted?” I ask. “You mean he’s drunk?”
“Wasted,” Cookie says. “Smoked. Rubbed out. Murdered by the enemy.”
I shut my eyes and hope that the Mothers and Fathers Italian Association is still watching out for us. Then I turn and look at Rosie, whose blond pigtails bounce as she claps and laughs in her high chair. She’ll never get to know her real dad, which makes me lose my appetite. My wish to meet my father one day sometimes feels like the only thing I have to look forward to.
Cherie and Camille begin studying foreign languages. When Cherie asks her teacher about the phrases we’ve been using for as long as we remember, we learn that
je t’aime
means
I love you
in French, and
mia bambina amore
means
my baby love
in Italian. Both are much sweeter to hear than Cookie’s old foreign words like
vaffanculo
(which I’m pretty sure means something about the F word) and
puttana
(which, based on Cookie’s context when using it, we’ve translated to mean
whore
). I begin writing
je t’aime
and
mia bambina amore
all over my notebooks and then in the daily love letters I share with Justin James, a boy whom I rarely speak to, but who tells me he thinks I’m pretty. For a girl who thinks her teeth look like Tic Tacs screwed into her gums, this is irresistibly wooing. Every day I hide his letters in a shoe box under my bed, tucking them in a dark spot so Cookie will never find them.
When my classmates ask me where we lived over the past few years, I answer, “With my grandparents.” Then I quickly change the subject. And even though I think of this as my school, I sometimes can’t help but feel like a visitor. I observe others in the class—while they haven’t changed much, I definitely have. I wonder if I would be as content and confident as they are if we’d never been taken away that night. Would I feel differently about myself—pretty, clean, and carefree, like my classmates? I love to watch Kathleen Totter in her dresses, knee-high socks, and Mary Jane shoes, how her silky blond hair is neatly parted into two perfect ponytails that are tied with matching ribbons. But even if I had nicer clothes and polished shoes, none of it could cover up the past few years of turmoil. So I dress like I feel inside: stained, torn, wrinkled, and mismatched. The school made me get these big silver-rimmed glasses when they figured out I’d been hiding my strained vision by memorizing the eye chart every year, and my haircut makes me look more like my brother than my sisters. But for me, this actually works: I want my awkwardness to be clear to the other kids. Pretty much the only comfort I’ve ever felt is when I’ve been living in my own world, sending signals to others to keep away from me so they never find out the truth about my life.
Rather than bothering to hint to my classmates that I’d love to be invited to their homes, I spend my afternoons studying in the school library or napping in the tree house. I also spend endless time in my room listening to my little vinyl records on my phonograph, always playing over and over the funny songs on the
Dumb Ditties
album we got from the Salvation Army.
Since Karl was able to retrieve what few possessions we’d left at the Rocky Point house, I still have my Jesus figurines. Now, with a church across the street, I’m intrigued to find out why I’ve been carrying them around with me for as long as I can remember. So every Sunday, I cross the street by myself to attend all three morning services at the Episcopal church, retreating to my tree house after each one, until I see people filing in for the next service. I discover in the weekly bulletin that they also hold a Saturday-night service, and I begin attending that as well. I have no idea what I’m reading or singing about, but I take comfort in the safety of this space. It’s also the only place I’ve ever been where you can be a stranger and people still smile at you.
Fifth grade is going great because my teacher thinks I’m special. The closer I get to Ms. Van Dover, the more I want to please her. Even in winter she smells like fresh flowers, and her red curls and creamy white skin make her brown eyes stand out when she smiles. Even though she treats every kid in the class nicely, I’m convinced that she finds moments to spend extra attention on me. She holds weekly spelling bees, most of which I win; my prize being the choice between a Twinkie or a Ring Ding, which I always scarf down on my walk home. At the end of the year Ms. Van Dover announces we’ll be voting for “superlatives,” and she gives me an inconspicuous wink when my class votes me “Nicest.”
Unfortunately, my budding confidence is shaken when the end-of-the-year spelling bee turns into a showdown: me versus Susan Kominski, the president of the fifth grade class (whom the class voted Most Popular). She’s crowned the fifth grade spelling bee champion when I misspell
vacuum
, which I really should’ve known, because my classmates are always singing the “Regina Hoover Vacuum Cleaner” jingle to me. (Also, because of the
Understanding Puberty
video that we all had to watch after Memorial Day weekend, I take note that at the next school I move to, I will change my name to something that sounds nothing like
vagina
.)
After school’s out, Karl comes home exhausted from working long days at Grumman. He tells us work is stressful because of the Communists. Cookie’s out working later as well . . . back behind a bar. Although Karl threatens that she better not drink, she comes home every night smelling like booze. When he starts to follow her, she sticks me in her car, telling him she’s taking me to the mall or to visit my grandparents.
“Grandparents?” I ask her. “I don’t even know my grandparents.”
“Shut the fuck up and cooperate.”
Finally, in the heat of summer, I come down with the chicken pox. Cookie takes me to the doctor, who simply instructs me to bathe in oatmeal to soothe the itching. Karl tells Cookie he’s not convinced we went to see a doctor, and they both flee angrily in their separate cars.
Karl’s the first to finally return. He flicks off the
Donny & Marie
show and sends us out to the front yard so he can use the living room to sort through his belongings. Cookie comes home drunk, screeching and flailing when she sees his packed boxes lining the entryway. Their argument spills out to the front yard, where he tries to take her car keys away so she can’t drive while she’s smashed. He wrestles her to the ground to calm her down, and just then she starts screaming,
“Rape! Help, he’s raping me!”
A stranger stops and opens his car door, and Cookie throws herself inside and shouts obscenities from the window at us. When they speed off, Karl hurls his things into his car. “Take care of yourselves,” he tells us, resigned. “I tried to make this work, but your mother’s a goddamn hopeless case.” All five of us stand on the front lawn for a while, knowing the only thing we can be certain will come next is chaos.
When Cookie finally goes off the deep end, we’re not sure if it’s thanks to Karl’s departure or Elvis Presley’s death. When she hears on the news that the King died in his bathroom, she locks herself in ours. For the next week she consumes jars of peanut butter, known to be one of Elvis’s favorites, while sending us out to buy all of his albums, which she plays through the house on full blast.
Shortly after I start sixth grade at Nesaquake Middle School, Cookie stops paying rent. I hold Rosie as I walk into Ms. Van Dover’s classroom. “We’re moving again,” I inform her.
“Be safe,” she tells me, crouching down to sweep my long bangs out of my eyes. “And if you ever feel scared, look back at what I wrote to you in last year’s yearbook, where I told you that you were a bright girl with lots of talent and that you should never stop your quest for knowledge. I meant every word.”