Happy Family (35 page)

“Yeah,” he says. “And what's that got to do with you?”

“I'm that baby,” she says.

When he speaks again, his voice is flat so she can't get a read on him. Billy. That's what you called a kid. By now he should have become a Bill or a William. He's fifty-seven years old, divorced, works as a super for apartment buildings. He tells her he's working, but he should be home sometime “around six.” If he wasn't there, she was to buzz number 225 and a Mrs. Crenshaw would let her in to wait for him. When she hangs up, she figures there's a fifty-fifty chance he'll even show. He wasn't exactly forthcoming on the phone.

The address is north of the train station, in a part of town that looks like it's halfway between gentrification and Baghdad. His apartment building looks like renovations started and then stopped. There's still scaffolding on one side and plastic over a few windows. “I got to go to work,” says Mrs. Crenshaw, letting her in the front door. “But you look okay to me. He doesn't have anything worth stealing anyway. Here's the key. Super's apartment has no number, just go to the end of the first floor. It's on the right.” Mrs. Crenshaw is a tall redhead wearing a cocktail-waitress outfit under a long puffy jacket. She doesn't answer Cheri when she asks, “Did Billy say he'd be back home soon?”

Cheri's not thrilled about this half-assed arrangement, but she lets herself into Billy's apartment. It's small, sparsely furnished, and smells like medicinal Chinese herbs. He's got a fake Christmas tree in the living room with a little tinsel thrown on it and a saggy, futon-type sofa. Two bar stools are snugged up to a plastic table in the kitchen.

She tries calling Billy's cell. He doesn't answer. She might as well take off her coat. Something's on her sleeve, something gray embedded in the fabric. Ashes. She'd been wearing Michael this whole time. She can't find a napkin or a paper towel anywhere. But look what she does find: a midnight special, unloaded, badly in need of cleaning. There's no ammunition, although a quick search of the kitchen reveals a bounty of interesting items. There's a stash of what smells like very old homegrown weed, an unopened box of extra-large condoms, an extensive REO Speedwagon tape collection, tons of plastic bags tossed under the sink, and rat poison. The smell of those herbs is suddenly making her nauseated.

This is taking too long. She goes to the bathroom to pee. Stuck to the mirror above the sink there's a photograph of a boy, maybe twelve years old, in a baseball uniform posed in classic pitcher's stance. It's creased and dog-eared, like he carried it around in his wallet or pocket. His kid? She peeks into his medicine cabinets and barely has time to look at the prescription labels—lithium and Depakote, which she thinks are heavy-duty mood stabilizers—when she hears footsteps and a key in the lock.

“You Cheri?” The man who must be Billy walks in and throws his keys on the kitchen table. He takes off his hat and whatever hair hasn't receded stands up a bit from the static electricity. “You got in okay. That's good. You want to sit down?”

They sit at the kitchen table. The kid in the photo has his same wide gray eyes. Billy Beal smells like Irish Spring soap, not what she'd expect from a super who was working all day. “How do we do this? You going to ask me questions?” He's been chomping on a wad of chewing tobacco; she can tell by how he talks it's stashed in his cheek. He's taking her in. Not kindly or unkindly. Just intently.

“Okay, let's start with your parents. Where are they now?” Cheri says, going into cop mode to mask the emotional investment she has in finding out about Miriam.

“Pops died of a heart attack, and Moms is in an old-age home in Trenton.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“She's got her good days and days she's in total lala land. Some days she wakes up and says she's going to open the deli.” He's staring at her harder now.

“Is this a bad time? You just got home from work. I can come back.”

“Nah, it's fine. Hey, let me ask you something. What's your favorite baseball team?”

“I'm not really into sports,” Cheri says, taken aback at his non sequitur.

“But if you had to pick a team, who would you root for?”

“In Chicago?”

“Aw, c'mon! The Cubs or White Sox? You're from Jersey. What team did you like growing up?”

“The Yankees. Yankees over Mets any day.”

“Bingo,” he says, rocking back on the stool, and for the first time his face shows a little expression. “I knew it! Listen, there's something I have for you. Stay right there.” Maybe this guy has taken too many mood stabilizers. She's still feeling a little queasy.

“This has been through a lot with me,” Billy says, coming back into the room. “I never thought I'd see this day. I'm still blown away that PI lady found me.” She looks at the gift he's holding out—a simple silver hamsa pendant on a leather cord. “Take it, it's yours,” he says.

“Is this supposed to mean something to me?”

“It was hers. Your mother's.”

“Miriam? She gave this to you?” There were questions she'd formulated, but now, holding something concrete, makes her voracious to know everything. Every detail, nuance, the weather on the day she was born, what Miriam was wearing, what she said to Billy Beal. “Wait,” she says, “don't say anything yet. I want to start at the beginning.” She gets her purse and pulls out the PI's file, a pen, and a pad of paper. “Okay, go on.”

“I remember everything about that day,” he says. The night before, on the top sheet of her notepad, Cheri had scribbled a list of newsworthy events that happened on her birthday: Marilyn Monroe's death, Jamaica's independence, and Nelson Mandela's arrest. She had been afraid these impersonal details were all she would ever know. She looks into Billy Beal's steel-gray eyes.

“Okay,” she says. “I'm ready.”

T
his is the story of family.

Like any story, what happens and why changes depends on who is doing the telling. Two siblings raised by the same parents in the same house often have different versions of shared events. Multiply that over generations, and you see why wars are started, religions divided, secrets held forever.

Who really knows about their parents' life before they were parents? Who wants to know about their parents' sex life? Forget about grandparents. Throw divorce and fertility science into the equation and you can have multiple parents and more stories in the mix. What if you knew the uncut version, the whole story, not just what was interpreted for you?

What if you were adopted and got a glimpse of your birth parents? Would your biological father have your flat butt, explain your love of guns; would your birth mother have two different-colored eyes? If you discovered that your adoptive father had another family living two towns away and hated him for his deception and yourself for being complicit, would it change anything if you knew the reasons why? What if you learned that your parents had a baby who died just before they adopted you? That your adoptive mother nursed you on the milk of her dead son, a mixture of her grief and hope—hope she'd put all on you because she'd never be able to carry another child? Would it change how you feel about your parents and about yourself? Would this knowledge rewrite the story enough so you could find forgiveness for a bigamist father, compassion for a mother who stalks you with her love?

If life is a river, we can see only a small patch of it. A little in front of us, some behind. We don't know when we're going to run into a tributary or hit a waterfall. If you could pull back and up to see how it all connects to the ocean, if you could see the whole story of all of your parents and their parents, would it alter your memories of them? Would it change what you translate to your kids, what they then revise and tell their kids?

If you could do that, even for a moment, you'd get God's sense of humor. You'd know your story is perfect. That your terribly imperfect parents were perfect for you, that your life could only have been written by and for you.

This is the story of the Matzner family. Its end is its beginning. August 5, 1962: Marilyn Monroe is found dead, Jamaica celebrates its independence, Nelson Mandela is arrested. In Trenton, New Jersey, a pregnant teenage girl walks into a clinic and gives birth, then walks out, leaving her baby forever. The baby is adopted, named Cheri, wears her Girl Scout uniform to school but ditches the troop for shooting practice at the local 4-H, pierces her tongue, has a love affair with speed, becomes a cop, discovers her father leads a double life, witnesses a murder, buries her father and her husband, forgives her mother, eats a T-bone steak with a stranger in the rain, meets her biological father and the person who rescued her from the clinic, without whom this story would have been very different.

Oh, and the baby ends up having a baby. The result of that T-bone steak in the rain, some excellent whiskey, and the stranger who showed her how to open herself up, to tell her story. That baby is you, Henry. I named you Henry in honor of Michael, who wanted a Hank. I wrote this book for you. So you can smell the ocean. Have a wider view. And be able to laugh at it all just a little bit sooner than I did.

 

—Cheri Matzner, October 7, 2015

For their courage in helping me see them outside of their roles as my parents, I thank my mother, Cynthia Barber, and father, David Birenbaum. Tireless readers, they provided not only love and support but incisive comments. Thanks also to my stepmother, Vanessa Ruiz, for her calm and counsel.

For their enormous generosity of spirit, I am indebted to these friends who were there for me, unfailingly: Philipp Keel, A. M. Homes, Angela Janklow, Maria Semple, Tamar Halpern, Rick Mordecon, Matthias and Melodie Mazur, Ingrid Katal, Susanna Brisk, Janet Yang, Amy Raine. For their early, close reading, thanks to Cathy Coleman and Judy Sternlight.

For her encouragement, guidance, and patience, I thank my wonderful agent, Susan Golomb. Thank you to my editor and publisher, Lee Boudreaux, for putting both her heart and intellect into and behind this book. To Reagan Arthur, Lisa Erikson, Carrie Neill, Carina Guiterman, Lauren Harms, Tracy Roe, and the entire team at Little Brown, a debt of gratitude for believing in me and working so hard to bring this book into the world.

To Shaun, who was here at the conclusion, thank you for a new beginning.

Lastly, thank you to my beautiful daughter, Zoë, who has grown faster than my ability to write these words. I know you will be able to laugh at it all far sooner than I did.

Tracy Barone earned a BA and an MFA in dramatic writing at NYU and has worked as a screenwriter and a playwright. A former film executive in Hollywood, she was the executive producer on
Wild Wild West, Rosewood,
and
My Fellow Americans
and was instrumental in acquiring and developing the films
Men in Black
and
Ali.

Unusual stories. Unexpected voices. An immersive sense of place. Lee Boudreaux Books publishes both award-winning authors and writers making their literary debut. A carefully curated mix, these books share an underlying DNA: a mastery of language, commanding narrative momentum, and a knack for leaving us astonished, delighted, disturbed, and powerfully affected, sometimes all at once.

I like a novel that surprises me, and Tracy Barone's
Happy Family
did just that, in spades, from first page to last. And the whip-smart, fiercely independent, and complicated woman at the heart of the book supplies more than her fair share of those surprises. She's not always likable, but I found myself rooting for her all the more as she simultaneously hungers for meaningful connection and pushes it away with both hands. And who can blame her for her deeply suspicious nature? After all, the whole truth of her existence is shrouded in secrecy and shame until the fact that she's adopted emerges, in all sorts of puzzling detail, when she's eight years old. As an adult, she's a flawed, messy, deeply relatable modern-day woman trying desperately to sort out her career, her marriage, her past, and her future before the clock runs out, all chronicled in a voice that's as cracklingly intelligent and wryly observant as its heroine. In the end, there's no one whose long, hard road to happiness I'd rather witness.

 

______________________________________

Over the course of her career, Lee Boudreaux has published a diverse list of titles, including Ben Fountain's
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk,
Smith Henderson's
Fourth of July Creek,
Madeline Miller's
The
Song of Achilles,
Ron Rash's
Serena,
Jennifer Senior's
All Joy and No Fun,
Curtis Sittenfeld's
Prep,
and David Wroblewski's
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,
among many others.

For more information about forthcoming books, please go to
leeboudreauxbooks.com
.