For Anne’s sixteenth birthday, I snuck into her house while she was out and cleaned her disastrous bedroom. I scraped away years of black mildew from the sink and shower in her attached bathroom, inches of dust and ash from her immobile ceiling fan. I excavated through layers of term papers and fanzines and tape cases and costume wigs and bootlaces and fishnet stockings and family Christmas cards until I finally found the soft carpet of her floor. Once I had, I dragged out her mother’s ancient vacuum cleaner and went over it twice, the tracks of lifted tufts like a freshly mown lawn. I went through shoeboxes filled with junk and found about a dozen broken black eyeliner pencils, stickers from her childhood, postcards from other Texas cities. I held my breath as I dumped out four or five large lead crystal ashtrays, and blackened my nails scrubbing them in the kitchen sink. I cleared her packed shelves and dusted them, I washed her sheets and remade her palatial bed. I found her journals, but had no need to read them; I was sure I knew everything she’d written.
Anne came home just as I was finishing. I was covered in sweat and dust, and glowing with satisfaction. My right foot bore a razor-thin cut from where a submerged coat hanger had caught it, a tiny wound that would turn into the bright scar I still carry. She smiled at me, looked around, and said, “It won’t stay this way for long, you know.” I knew. What mattered was that I had given her some breathing room for a while, a small break from the chaos she was so adept at creating for herself. What mattered was that she let me take care of her, if only for a while.
* * *
While I spent nearly all of my free time with Anne, Tootsie’s house remained much the same, full of tension and recriminations and occasional, disorienting displays of kindness. I had been there about a year when she and Jimmy began the process of legally adopting me, something that I hadn’t given much thought to. Although I hadn’t grown any more comfortable in their house, once the discussion began, I became attracted to the idea of security. If I was adopted, no one would have to worry that the state—any state—could come and take me, or that Tom would suddenly decide to challenge Carol’s power of attorney. I’d be spoken for, and I could stay there in that sunshine I loved, my weekdays filled with satisfyingly challenging classes and time spent in the friendly crew of marching band, and my weekends with Anne.
About a month after Tootsie first mentioned the adoption, though, she came to me in my room, shut the door behind her, and said that Jimmy was having second thoughts. She didn’t tell me why he was reconsidering, but she said that if he didn’t agree, I would have to go back to Maine right away. I couldn’t discuss any of this with him; it was tacitly forbidden. Over the next few weeks, I tried to identify what he might not like about me, what I could tone down or compensate for. I tried to be extra nice without being obvious about it.
Jimmy had always been a mystery to me. He’d been a cook in the Army, and it made sense to me that his job hadn’t involved direct combat, so adept was he at avoiding it at home. In the years I lived in that house, I had just one real conversation with him. He told me he could make almost anything out of cake, and for special Army celebrations he had re-created famous battlefields and monuments. I could not imagine him doing anything so whimsical or imaginative. He seemed so serious; he smiled so rarely. Usually, my only sense of how he felt about anything came from Tootsie.
Eventually, Jimmy apparently agreed to the adoption, and the three of us went to the courthouse in downtown San Angelo for a short proceeding before a judge. I would never discover what his resistance had been about, or if it had maybe all been fabricated by Tootsie, a manifestation of her own uncertainty, or an attempt to make me feel indebted to her for winning him over.
All the paperwork had been completed and reviewed in advance, and the hearing had the feeling of a technicality. It was important to the judge, though, to know what I thought about being adopted, if I felt that it was in my best interest to stay with Tootsie and Jimmy until I was of age. I wanted to stay, as I had in Bridgton, so I agreed to the adoption, happy to be officially consulted, happy to be spoken for and settled in for the next four years. We would all work out our difficulties, I thought, or I would work around them, in the tight spaces of freedom they left. And anyway, things might get better. After all, we did celebrate the adoption with a nice lunch out.
But if I really expected paperwork to bring about any dramatic changes, to make Tootsie gentler or Jimmy more communicative or to make me feel closer to their kids, that was not to be. I may have relaxed my guard a little, but the strained, tense aura remained. Every weekend I could, I went to Anne’s, where I felt accepted and loved by her and her mother, who hugged me hello and goodbye.
Tootsie had become increasingly suspicious about the time I spent at Anne’s house, though, convinced that I was smoking and possibly drinking. When she picked me up, my clothes filled her car with the reek of cheap cigarettes, and I’d have to tell her, again, that although Anne and her friends smoked around me, they probably wouldn’t have let me smoke even if I’d wanted to, and they would have been disappointed if I drank. There was no way to fully explain to her how protective they were of me. What I now understand as their instinctive compassion made little sense to me then.
After hearing about Tootsie’s interrogations, Anne’s mother tried to drive me home on Sundays as often as she could. Reluctant to hand me off to my aunt, Anne would come along for the ride. One late-spring morning, she walked me to my door, then leaned in and gave me a small kiss on the lips, as she often did. I felt a quick bolt of happiness spiked with nervous fear, because I knew that kiss didn’t mean to Anne what it did to me, or if it did, she would never have admitted it. And then my flush deepened and a nauseating fear took hold of me as I saw Tootsie’s shadow pass behind the cut-glass panel of the door. Anne didn’t seem to notice. I remember her stepping backwards into the sunshine, smiling, then turning to walk back to her mother’s waiting car.
I turned the brass handle of the door, sweat breaking out on my palm as I wondered whether Tootsie had seen this kiss. This meaningless thing. I tried to duck into my room, but just as I rounded the corner in the hallway, I heard her voice at my back, its low, gruff tones tinged with disgust. “Is Anne always quite so friendly?” she asked.
I turned toward her; her face looked both angry and amused, prepared to mock weak explanations. “Anne? Oh, she’s just like that. She’s just very, um, affectionate,” I said. Tootsie had me trapped: if I said anything more, it would reveal that I knew what she was talking about. I had to pretend that it had not even occurred to me that the kiss could be romantic. “I see,” she replied. We stared at each other for a moment. When she didn’t say anything more, I gave her a shaky smile and escaped to my room as slowly as I could.
Within days, Tootsie had banned me from going to Anne’s ever again. Her only explanation was that she thought I wasn’t telling the truth about what happened over there, that Anne’s mother wasn’t as careful a parent as Tootsie would have liked. It still shames me that I obeyed her. I tried to explain to Anne, and she repeatedly asked me to lie, to say I was elsewhere and to come over as I had before, but I couldn’t risk it. I was too afraid of Tootsie; I felt anxious just thinking about it. Looking back now, I can also see that part of me—a small part—was relieved to be out of Anne’s orbit, the overwhelming pull she had on me, a magnetism I didn’t want to understand.
* * *