Bastards: A Memoir
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0393088618
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"A stirring, vividly told story of a young woman's quest to find the family she lost . . . an impressive debut." ―Peter Balakian
In the early 1980s, Mary Hall is a little girl growing up in poverty in Camden, New Jersey, with her older brother Jacob and parents who, in her words, were "great at making babies, but not so great at holding on to them." After her father leaves the family, she is raised among a commune of mothers in a low-income housing complex. Then, no longer able to care for the only daughter she has left at home, Mary's mother sends Mary away to Oklahoma to live with her maternal grandparents, who have also been raising her younger sister, Rebecca. When Mary is legally adopted by her grandparents, the result is a family story like no other. Because Mary was adopted by her grandparents, Mary’s mother, Peggy, is legally her sister, while her brother, Jacob, is legally her nephew.
Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she’s sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she left behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each subsequent reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again. Moving, haunting, and at times wickedly funny, Bastards is about finding one's family and oneself.
was temporary, just until one of our parents could get back on their feet enough to bring all three of us back. We didn’t have a lot of luggage. Most of our clothes and toys were too ratty to bother packing. We’d figure it out when we got to Oklahoma, Mimi said. In the plane, I sat next to my brother. Mimi and Rebecca were across the aisle and one row back. My feet stuck straight out in front of me. Mimi gave me a stick of gum at the airport so I could chew it and my ears wouldn’t pop when we
Jacob had to write, I will always be conscientious in my chores to ensure the safety of everyone involved. On a random Tuesday night when Mimi was certain that my brother had not, in fact, brushed his teeth—she said she checked his toothbrush and it wasn’t wet—he wrote, I will practice good hygiene every day, followed by a full copy of the definition of hygiene out of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Two hundred and fifty times each. If at any time Jacob protested these assignments, a few hundred
that would be my ticket back to the East Coast, back to Yankee country where my sisters could find me more easily. When I mentioned the school at dinner one night, Granddad stared into the kitchen table like it was an oracle. “I don’t know,” he said. My heart flipped in my chest like a goldfish out of water. “I don’t see any harm in her trying,” Mimi countered. “If she’s not accepted, she’ll go to the Catholic school, of course. It doesn’t cost anything to try, Charles.” MIMI TOOK me to the
work. After the adults finished talking, my mom carried me through the diner and into the night air. Through the diner windows I could see the other mommy and daddy sitting in the booth. They didn’t watch us go, but I watched them. They held hands on the table. They looked smaller and smaller as Mom made her way through the parking lot. She was warm and the air was cold and it was nice to have a nest of a person to snuggle in, but before I could get too comfortable we were back in the car,
belly all the way around her waistband. There wasn’t a stage at the coffee shop, and there was only one microphone. With the drum kit set up in the corner and the amps for the two guitars, the thirty people gathered in the shop came close enough to touch the band. They started to play. The venue was far too small for their full drum set; the percussion flattened the rest of the instruments and vocals into an unintelligible mess. I couldn’t hear my sister’s lead guitar at all, but I could see that