1. Unwelcome Reunion Unwelcome Reunion When I was twenty-eight, my stepmother Anabel came to New York on vacation. She was living, at the time, in Pakistan, where she worked for a UN agency. At a restaurant a few blocks from my Chinatown apartment, we ate noodle soup and drank red wine. That night, Anabel told me my father did not die of cancer as I believed. He died, she claimed, of AIDS. I don''t remember why neither my sister Yasmeen nor my half brother Kwame joined us for that dinner--they both lived in New York at the time. Yasmeen worked the counter at a taco shop in Red Hook.
Kwame was a sophomore in college. My father had died fourteen years earlier, when I was weeks away from my fourteenth birthday. The argument that culminated in Anabel telling me he died of AIDS was over nothing of consequence: "After dinner, let''s go see some live music," Anabel said. "I can''t," I said. "I have plans with friends." "But I''m your mother and I''m visiting," she said. "We never see each other." I shrugged.
We ate, for a few minutes, in silence. Then: "Chew your food," Anabel said. "I am chewing. Calm down." "Who is not calm? Respect your elders. Respect me." "You''re acting unhinged," I said. I knew that my words-- you''re acting unhinged --were shots, fired.
Anabel, I predicted, would detonate. Madness, I''d observed, terrified and disgusted her. Perhaps this was because she had experienced some form of it after my father died: depression, I believed, or PTSD. For a year or more, she spent nights crying into a wineglass. Her moods, then, teetered between cold silence and hot rage. In recent years, though, she had reinvented herself as unflappable and even-keeled. She spoke of other people''s breakdowns, anxiety, and depression in hushed, haughty tones. One had to be strong, she said often, in the face of adversity.
Allowing oneself to become morbid or hysterical helped no one. Disintegration was an indulgence. She was, she insisted, happy with her life because she had chosen to be happy with her life. She chose happiness every day. If I brought up the years surrounding my father''s death, even to say how far we''d come, she''d change the subject. She seemed unwilling to entertain the possibility that she might experience any form of madness ever again. I had never seen Anabel angrier than when I called her crazy--unhinged. I did this, from time to time, to win fights.
The suggestion that her reinvented self was not entirely believable seemed more than she could bear. Her mask, I must say, was a good one. Only those who knew her best could see through it. Beneath the smooth, unlined skin, muscles twitched faintly, blood bulged in veins. In the Chinese restaurant, I wanted to tear Anabel''s mask off. I wanted to do it in public. I wanted her red-faced and exploding. I wanted to remind her I knew who she really was.
She couldn''t fool me. On the receiving end of her rage, I wanted to appear composed, and superior in my composure. It wasn''t that I cared so much what the people in the restaurant thought of me or of her. It was that I knew a public display was not something she would recover easily from. She would play the scene over and over in her mind. The memory would return to agitate her when she least expected it. She would always remember my face--my undisturbed face. She would always remember the sharp looks of strangers, their shaking heads.
My desire to tear Anabel''s mask off was not, upon reflection, about what she said. Defensiveness is aroused easily between mothers and daughters, between stepmothers and daughters. Between Anabel and me, the defensiveness could very quickly turn destructive. Instead of an explosion, though, Anabel''s words hissed from between clenched teeth: "Unhinged? How dare you. After all I have sacrificed for you," she said. "What did you sacrifice?" I asked. "You only kept me around because it meant you''d get more of my father''s money. You made it abundantly clear you didn''t really want me or Yasmeen.
" I knew that Anabel''s reasons for becoming my guardian, and Yasmeen''s, after our father died were more complicated than this. Wanting us and not wanting us were states that likely coexisted in her. They likely coexist in many parents--biological or not. But my intention in that moment was to wound her. This simplified story of her motivations would do damage. For what seemed like a long time, she squinted at me, mouth agape. Then her eyes became calm and cloudless, as though she perceived, in an instant, precisely what to say to win: "You think your precious father was so perfect? He didn''t die of cancer like you think. He was no angel.
He died of AIDS. How do you think he got AIDS?" The shape of my relationship with Anabel had always been jagged. After I moved to New York at eighteen, we drifted in and out of each other''s life without explanation, without apologies. Before meeting for dinner at the Chinese restaurant, it had been over a year since we last spoke. She Facebook messaged me to say she would be in New York; to suggest we get together. Neither of us acknowledged the yearlong silence. In greeting, we kissed each other on both cheeks. We complimented each other''s appearance: her braids, my earrings.
There was no clear reason for the not speaking. Or, rather, there were a lifetime of reasons, a lifetime of unuttered resentments on both sides. I met Anabel for the first time when I was five. "This is Anabel," my father said simply, "we''re getting married." I don''t remember if this first meeting took place at an airport or in the house in Rome where we would become a family. Yasmeen and I had recently joined our father in Rome after living with his sister--our aunt Harriet--in England for two and a half years. Anabel looked to me like a movie star: tall, thin, and otherworldly in her beauty, with high cheekbones, plush lips, and a large gap between her two front teeth. A pinky finger would fit nicely in that gap.
I saw love in my father''s eyes, saw it was not directed at me, seethed. Yasmeen''s face, on the other hand, was open with hope. She jumped up, hugged Anabel. There was nothing my sister longed for more than a mother. Yasmeen called strangers in the grocery store Mommy when they bent to pinch her cheeks. She clung to our aunts, our father''s female friends, and even our sour-faced German nanny. Those poor little motherless girls , people said. Anabel patted Yasmeen''s head.
She looked at me expectantly. I wrapped my arms around my father. Anabel frowned. I too longed for a mother, but I think I was already steeled to the reality that I would not have one, not in the same way all the other children I knew had one. But, my father was, I believed, mine. Mine and Yasmeen''s. I did not want to share him with anyone else. Of those first few months we lived together, before Anabel married my father, I have memories of her glaring at me when I climbed onto my father''s lap while they sat together on the couch drinking gin and tonics.
I remember knocking on my father and Anabel''s bedroom door when I woke up scared during a thunderstorm. I remember her whispering that I should leave them alone when they were sleeping. I remember her shutting the door in my face. I remember bitterness broiling in my chest. It is possible I misread Anabel, that I am misremembering, that my memories are tainted by that bitterness. Or perhaps Anabel was cold toward me because she sensed that I saw her as competition. Maybe she wanted to assert her authority as the woman of the house. I cannot be certain.
I am quite certain, however, that as my father and Anabel''s wedding day approached, my bratty behavior intensified. On the day Yasmeen and I tried on our flower girl dresses, I was at my worst. The dresses were voluminous. We looked like little puffs of yellow cotton candy. Our headbands were adorned with giant bows. I was the kind of child who liked both rolling around in the mud and playing princess. I loved a bit of frill. But I was determined to hate that dress.
It was itchy, I complained. Anabel ignored me. "We really have to get them a relaxer," she said to my father. "They''re growing dreadlocks." She stuck her long, sharp nails into my coarse, tangled hair and yanked. It hurt a little. I exaggerated the pain--grimaced and cried out. Anabel smoothed her own freshly relaxed hair as though to make sure my nappy-ness wasn''t contagious.
My father did not come to my defense. I burst into tears. "I don''t want a relaxer," I wailed. "If you make me get one, I''ll shave my head bald. And I won''t wear these stupid frilly socks either. They make my shoes too tight." I was not crying about my pinched toes or tangled hair. Anabel was taking from me what mattered most.
The house and my father had been redecorated: Out with the old comfy couch; off with Baba''s beard. I was not about to give Anabel everything she wanted, not without a fight. Down the aisle, I walked without socks, without a relaxer. I had to walk down the aisle, but I did so with dignity. Within a year, Anabel and I had established our territories in the house in Rome. Anabel ruled the formal living room with its uncomfortable flowered settees and Persian rugs. In there, she and my father drank cocktails and white wine, her long legs stretched out over his lap. She whispered her words, but her laughter was a soprano crescendo.
I imitated her laugh in the mirror. My territory was my father''s study. In there, we read books together in silence, him in his sw.