CHAPTER 4
Stephanie
“When I was sixteen, I entered an essay-writing contest at a major women’s magazine and won. In the contest’s half-century history, I was the youngest woman ever to take home the honor. You have a voice beyond your years, the editor in chief told me in a handwritten note, and because of that we are willing to bend the rules for you. I had lied about my age on the application form. Contestants had to be eighteen to enter. To this day I keep that note in my top desk drawer, reading it whenever my confidence wavers. It’s a reminder that I once believed in myself so much that I, Stephanie Simmons, broke a rule.
“There were prizes. Publication, of course. Five thousand dollars, though that was incidental. I would have left all of it on the table for the trip into the city to meet with a literary agent. Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein before she turned twenty. S. E. Hinton published The Outsiders when she was just sixteen. I had the first two chapters of my novel already drafted and an outline of the rest, and I planned on not just meeting with Ellen Leibowitz of the Ellen Leibowitz Agency to find out how the publishing world worked, but on pitching her and leaving with representation.
“ ‘We’ll make a day out of it!’ my mother exclaimed after reading the letter from the editor in chief. Breakfast at the Plaza. Shopping at Bloomingdale’s. She would get a manicure while I was no doubt signing with the Ellen Leibowitz Literary Agency on Lexington Avenue (‘Lexington Avenue is a very upscale street,’ my mother said with authority when she looked up the address on the Internet.) We’d end the day with a celebratory drink at The Ritz Carlton in Battery Park, watching an orange sun glaze the Hudson. I would order an iced tea and my mother a glass of champagne, and when the bartender wasn’t looking, we’d swap. ‘Oh, Stephanie,’ my mother said, pinning the letter to the refrigerator with a magnet from Baltusrol Golf Club (I was a single-digit handicap by the time I entered high school). ‘Aren’t you so proud of yourself?’ Her blue eyes brimmed with tears, the effect infuriating and depleting all at once. Let me have this, I remember thinking, incapable of parsing what I wanted more: to break something or to sleep.
“I understand my anger and my exhaustion now. As a child, my mother was constantly asking me to perform for her, to reassure her that I was doing well, that I was thriving, that I was happy. That she was a good mother and that she had made the right choice in adopting me, defying all those who counseled against it. She was single, they told her. She was fifty. She was white. Did she have any idea how much work it took to raise a child in a two-parent family? Sure, she could afford help, but wasn’t it a little bit cruel, wasn’t it a little bit selfish, to bring up a black girl in a town as homogeneous as Summit, New Jersey, just because she missed her window to have a baby of her own? My mother was married briefly in her thirties, the ink barely dry on her divorce papers before her own mother was diagnosed with an aggressive and intractable form of breast cancer. She put her life on hold—thirteen years of it—to take care of her mother, and her death left a void for a new dependent. She was volunteering at a women’s shelter when a counselor mentioned a friend’s troubled teenage daughter had gotten pregnant, and that the family was looking to put the baby up for adoption. ‘I didn’t care if you were black, white, green, or polka-dotted’, my mother told me the only time I asked her why I didn’t look like her. ‘I wanted you.’ It was the closest we ever got to acknowledging my race.
“ ‘You’ll need an outfit for the interview,’ my mother said, even though I didn’t. When I went back to clean out the house after her death five years ago, I donated so many unworn pieces to that same women’s shelter that a volunteer asked me if I had a clothing store that had gone out of business. But my mother insisted that I take my winnings and go to the Short Hills Mall two weeks before the meeting. ‘So there’s time to get to the tailor if we need to.’ My mother loved the tailor. At five-foot-one and ninety-seven pounds, she needed his step stool more than I ever did. I had twenty-five pounds and half a head on her by the time I could drive. People didn’t know what to make of the two of us. This frail, glamorous white woman approaching her seventies and the young black girl dressed in her likeness. Was I her elderly aide? Her expensively turned-out housecleaner? I grew up stared at. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the reason I feel comfortable buying tampons with a camera crew in tow.”
The joke elicits a few laughs from the audience gathered to hear me read from my memoir at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. No, I realize, my eyes settling on a woman in the third row. Not a laugh. A yawn.
“I asked my best friends to accompany me to Nordstrom,” I continue, speaking over the voice inside my head that insists I am boring everyone. Get to the good part already. “As always, Ashley, Jenna, and Caitlin went best of three on a game of rock, paper, scissors to decide who got to drive my car to the mall that day. I hated my blue bimmer. I felt screamingly self-conscious behind the wheel, ever since the night a middle-aged white man saw me searching for my keys in the parking lot of Kings and called out, ‘Hey! You! What are you doing to that car?’ He probably had a daughter my age, but to him, I wasn’t anybody’s daughter, a promising young woman with the fifth-highest GPA in her class, a nationally ranked field hockey player, or a talent on the page. I was an anonymous, suspicious, and potentially threatening you. The word still makes me shrivel in shame. I tried to imagine any of my friends being addressed as such and could not. I saw the way grown-ups looked at them—with fondness, with amusement. Oh, let them eat candy for breakfast now. Let them break curfew. Real life will come for them soon enough. Some people got mulligans in life, but I learned early on I was not to be one of them.
“In the contemporary designers department of Nordstrom, my friends flung pantsuits and skirt suits and twinsets over the top of the dressing room door. ‘Come out! Come out!’ they chanted like little kids for their dinners, rotating their thumbs down or up, depending. ‘I miss my tan,’ Caitlin sighed wistfully when I emerged in a white turtleneck and short schoolgirl kilt that Jenna liked so much she went in search of her size and tried it on too. If there is such a thing as teacher’s pet among a group of friends, then that was what I was. I was never going to call the shots, take the quarterback with the biceps to prom, or inspire copycats to steal my hairstyle. I was not a threat to my friends and that’s why I never had to worry about falling out of favor with them. For a while I found the upside to this. No one ever ganged up on me, no one ever got three tickets to Pearl Jam and said to me, ‘Sorry, you’ll have to sit this one out,’ which is something Ashley did to Jenna once because she had instant-messaged a guy Ashley liked. If the girls could only invite one friend to their beach house, it was always me. Number two wasn’t such a bad place to sit, I reasoned. And this is the insidiousness of the world in which we live. It doesn’t just discourage little black girls from being great. It makes them grateful they are not great.
“ ‘What shoes, though?’ Ashley asked after the unanimous vote in favor of a Theory pantsuit in navy. ‘Nude pumps?’ Caitlin suggested. ‘Brown boots,’ Jenna said with a sly grin. ‘We wear the same size, right?’ She did a spin in the new plaid miniskirt she was about to buy.
“We called for the salesperson, hoping she might bring us some footwear options, but she was nowhere to be found. I had been relieved that she had been rude not just to me but to all of us, which allowed me to pretend that it wasn’t so much about the color of my skin as it was about my age. No doubt she dismissed us out of hand—just a bunch of bored teenagers here to not buy anything and leave the dressing room in shambles, which my friends routinely did when we shopped together. They made fun of me for neatly clipping trousers to their hangers and folding sweaters into tidy squares. ‘Such a neat freak,’ they said, and I let them think that was what it was about.
“The shoe department was on the other side of the escalators, but still close enough that I felt comfortable leaving my purse in the dressing room. There, standing before the full-length mirror in a pair of brown boots that really were the best choice for the Theory pantsuit, I saw the security guards before they tapped me on the shoulder from behind.
“They escorted me to a leather sofa outside the restrooms. A small crowd gathered, the way it did when the in-house pianist played a selection from Phantom of the Opera, watching as I was pressured to sign a statement admitting to an attempt to leave the store wearing the Theory pantsuit without paying for it. Jenna had walked out of the dressing room in a skirt she hadn’t yet paid for, but two adult men hadn’t been called in to isolate and intimidate her. ‘She wasn’t trying to steal it!’ my friends cried in exasperation. ‘Her purse is in the dressing room!’ When the security guards threatened to call their parents, they became incensed. ‘I’ll call my parents and her mom, right now!’ Ashley shouted with a defiance that crushed me. I had that nerve—would I ever feel safe enough to use it?
“Within half an hour, my mother arrived and cleared everything up, which is shorthand for me, apologizing to the saleswoman and the security guards for the misunderstanding and her, purchasing the pantsuit. (Jenna left the kilt in the dressing room in an act of revolt—‘No way is that bitch making a commission off me,’ she got to say with her nose in the air.) Two weeks later, sitting in the meeting with Ellen Leibowitz, that pantsuit felt like wearing a porcupine’s coat inside out. The humiliating memory pricked me and pricked me, rendering me a stuttering, blushing child in front of an accomplished woman I had been dreaming about impressing for weeks. ‘Oh, no,’ my mother exhaled when we met on Lexington Avenue afterward. She could see in my face that I had blown it. And instead of going downtown to celebrate, we just went home. I remember feeling relieved that it was rush hour, that the train was so crowded that we had to split up to find seats, that for the forty-one minutes it took to get from Penn Station to Summit I got to hold myself by the elbows and cry without having to consider my mother’s feelings.
“In the weeks that followed, I didn’t sleep. I slumbered. Like a character in a Disney story under a wart-nosed witch’s spell. Even at sixteen I knew my propensity for sleep was not just a byproduct of a still-growing body and brain. I hungered for it like a meal, was addicted to it like sugar—a little bit was sometimes worse than none at all, because it only made me want more, more, more. Worse: sometimes, I heard things. Words and names, so clearly enunciated that the first few times it happened I looked over my shoulder, thinking someone had stepped into the room to speak to me. I’d seen the episode of Sally Jessy Raphael where she’d interviewed teenagers with schizophrenia, the kind that makes you hear voices. Not everyone who hears voices has schizophrenia, I later learned. But at the time, I was terrified something was wrong with me and terrified to be found out. I thought if I could just get some information about my family history, I could control whatever was happening to me. I thought I could get out ahead of it.
“I didn’t tell anyone when I started the search for my biological mother. I didn’t want to call any more attention to the fact that my make was different, or have to explain any of it to my adoptive mother, who would only hear that she wasn’t enough of a mother for me. Lots of adoptees report wanting to meet their birth parents because they can never shake the feeling of rootlessness, or they want to make sense of their origin story, or they’re simply curious about where they came from. My motivation was strictly clinical. I wanted to look my birth mother in the eye and ask her if she was sick and if I was going to get sick too, and if so, how could I get better before anyone noticed?
“My adoption was a closed adoption, which might have meant something in the 1980s. In the early aughts, around the time I started my search, the Internet may not have been what it is today, but you could pay to run a background check if you had a name. And I had a name. When I was seven, I’d come home from a movie with my mom to find a message from the housekeeper: Sheila Lott, 12:47 P.M. I would never have remembered this if not for my mother’s pallor when she suggested I go read in my room for a bit. She’d spent all afternoon on the phone, her shrill terror occasionally snaking its way up our double staircase and interrupting my umpteenth reading of Beezus and Ramona. I had to memorize a new home phone number after that and all I knew was that Sheila Lott was to blame.
“There were ninety-seven Sheila Lotts on , thirty-nine once I eliminated any over the age of forty, and seventeen once I narrowed down the ones who lived on the East Coast. At $24.95 a pop to ‘get the report on,’ I would have had to explain the charge of $424.15 on my credit card if I hadn’t found her on my fourth try.
“I knew it was my mother the moment the image loaded. We had the same grouping of freckles under our eyes, the same sweeping, smooth foreheads. Had she been smiling in the mug shot, I was sure she’d get those brackets around her mouth, the ones that made my cheekbones appear both soft and sharply pronounced. A boy at my school once told me that when I smiled, I was prettier than most white girls he knew.
“My real mother was thirty-two, my adoptive mother’s junior by thirty-five years, which made her fifteen when she had me. She had been arrested twice on drug charges. There was an address in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Two weeks later, I told my mom I was helping set up for the Spring Saturday dance at school and crossed state lines in my blue bimmer. I didn’t find my mom that day—it would take three more tries until I did that—but I did find A.J.”
I could go on. I could turn the pages, recount the times A.J. elbowed me in the throat, sat on my chest, or covered my mouth and squeezed my nose until I was flapping like a fish on land. He never hit me. Never left a mark. He preferred me blue in the face, wheezing like a longtime smoker, burning for one good breath. I close my copy of Seen. It burns enough, remembering that day in Nordstrom. “Thank you.”
The Cindy Pritzker Auditorium is silent a moment. Women look left and right, some with their hands poised to clap, as though they are unsure if I am finished or not. They left their jobs early and shelled out twenty-nine dollars a ticket to hear me describe what it feels like to be starved of oxygen for eighty-three seconds by the first man who ever told me he loved me. I have to say thank you again before I receive their applause.
I am still not used to it. How different the applause for my memoir is than it was for my fiction. At my early readings of the She’s with Him series the reception was frisky, lanced with plenty of Woo-woos! and Whoops!, which always rankled. Yes, I wrote about sex, but I also wrote about identity, race, power, and the inescapable cycle of abuse. But that wasn’t enough to quiet people down, to be heard, to be respected. You want a full-page review in the New York Times? You want serious clappers at your readings? Open a vein.
“Babe,” Vince says, arms and mouth open wide, in this Are you kidding me with what an absolute inspiration you are? kind of way. He could just lean across the table and give me a kiss, but he comes around to my left so that Marc has to adjust the magnification of the Canon 5D. The producers left film of me, marching in protest of George Zimmerman’s acquittal, on the cutting room floor in season one. ‘Too polarizing,’ I heard Jesse had said. Three years later, when enough white people agree that Black Lives Matter, Jesse sends a crew to document the scores of black women who gather to hear me say that sexual violence against us has gone unchecked for too long. To her, we’re bulletproof coffee or millennial-pink blazers. Just another coastal-elite trend that she will tire of soon enough.
I kiss my husband on the mouth for the first time in a few weeks. Gwen, my editor, looks away when it lasts too long. One of the most frequent questions I’ve been asked since the memoir came out is how Vince feels about it, if he’s disturbed at all by the revelation that the fictional couple in my trilogy is loosely based on my first relationship.
My husband and I don’t keep secrets in our marriage. He already knew. That’s what Gwen had me practice saying. And then she had Vince practice too: My wife and I don’t keep secrets in our marriage . . .
Vince doesn’t usually accompany me on the book tour—and for reasons I won’t get into today, I prefer it that way—but he can always be counted on to show up when the cameras are around, because it’s success through osmosis. All the glory and none of the work. Gwen has been referring to him as the Human Step and repeat since we’ve been on the road and she’s exactly right. Get your book signed by Stephanie and your selfie taken with Vince, just to the right of her table. Even the serious clappers can’t resist an Instagram photo-op with my husband, who at thirty-two should really be losing his hair by now.
The line disappears out the door, “All the way to the lobby,” Gwen whispers to me, and there are two security guards on crowd control. No one is allowed in this room without buying a book. I have my Caran d’Ache ballpoint pen punched and ready to sign when Gwen waves over the first audience member. She can’t be twenty-five and she wears a bright yellow cardigan, pulling across the chest to reveal a pink bra that matches the neon smear on her lips. Dark acne scars mottle her jawline and is she . . . ? Yes. She’s already crying. My stomach gets that sensation, like it is a deep and maybe endless tunnel, like sadness will have a place to travel through me my whole life.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I say, and I stand and wrap my arms around her. I learned early in the book tour: no silk blouses. The women destroy them.
“I want to leave,” she sobs into my shoulder.
Ugh. So she’s one of those. One who is still holding on, hoping it will get better. I could knit the world’s least cozy quilt out of the things they’ve confessed on my shoulder: I’m so stupid. No one knows. My mom said it’s nothing compared to what my dad did to her. I should be grateful. He has a job. I’m being dramatic. I have nowhere to go. I have no one. It’s not that bad. It’s not that bad. Black women are three times more likely to die at the hands of an abuser than white women. It’s unconscionable that our government hasn’t stepped up to do more for us. One of the things I’m planning on speaking about with the Female Director when I meet her in a few months is the possibility of an initiative specifically devoted to helping black women extricate themselves from their violent partners. I was thinking we could roll it out in tandem with the movie’s release.
I pull away and pat her on the shoulder. “We’re going to get you help, okay?” I beckon Gwen, who is armed with the numbers for Chicago’s women’s shelters and some of the national hotlines. She will call none of them. Or maybe she will, and he’ll kill her anyway. As Gwen passes her the cards, I scrawl Be strong in the book she was forced to buy to enter this room.
A small woman steps forward next. It’s nearly June but she’s drowning in a heavy winter sweater, which either means she runs cold or she’s covered in bruises. Her face is unsmiling as she passes me my book, telling me her name is Justine.
“I knew your mother,” she waits to say until after I’ve signed.
Instantly the line ceases to exist. There is no one else in the room but this woman who knew my real mother. I was prepared for this at the signings in New York and New Jersey and Philadelphia, for long-lost relatives angry I’ve aired our family’s dirty laundry, for the truthers with documents and police reports that fact-checkers missed. But here, in Chicago, in front of the cameras, I am completely defenseless and at the mercy of this frail, cold, and possibly battered old woman. Justine looks to be in her seventies, meaning she can’t have been a peer of my mother’s. If my mother were alive today she’d be approaching fifty. It takes a sizable amount of courage just to ask, “How did you know her?”
Justine nods, a single slow dip of her chin, as though she’s gotten my attention now. “I grew up with her mother.” Her pointer finger does a little leap, skipping a generation, the gold bracelets on her wrists caroling together. “Your grandmother. Your grandmother was a good woman.” She makes a noise to back this up. “She tried everything to help Sheila. Rehab. Doctors. A program in California one time too. And Sheila, she wasn’t a bad person. But she had her troubles with alcohol and with men. Your grandma did too. With men, that is. So many of us did back then.” Justine’s chin is held at a high, strong angle, but a tear slips down her face.
I pluck a tissue from the box on my table. I also learned on the last book tour: Keep tissues at the ready. “What happened to her?”
Justine blows her nose quietly, folding the tissue in half and taking her time slipping it into her purse. When she looks at me again, her eyes are dry. “She died. Twelve years ago this summer. She would have been so sorry this had happened to you. It was in your blood, for this to happen to you. But she would have been proud”—her voice wavers briefly on the word—“that you found a way to break the cycle. Promise me you’ll stay away from it. Alcohol and bad men.” Justine draws herself together with a deep breath, casting a steely glance first at Vince, then at me. “I only wish you had the courage to pay your respects at St. Mark’s. We would have embraced you.”
There is a resistance in my chest when I try to breathe, like I’m wearing one of those lead bibs in the dentist’s office. In the book, I write that I stood across the street from the church during my mother’s funeral service, watching the puny gathering process in and process out. Thinking about going inside was as close as I got. There just weren’t enough people. I would have been noticed. I would have had to explain who I was.
But that’s not what has left me short of breath. It was the very particular mention of St. Mark’s that did that. And now I just want her to go away. I need her to go away. I say, with a note of finality in my voice, “Thank you for coming tonight, Justine.”
“Well, okay now,” she says, with a smile that says she gets it.
I wanted to be seen so badly I made it the title of my memoir. Whatever comes next, I asked for it. I had it coming.