Emergency Exit: Alarm Will Sound

My mother would have found the magazine eventually. She's like that. Really nosy with too much time on her hands. When I was in high school, she used to ransack my room in a desperate search for a diary, condoms, weed. Even Dad couldn't stop her. He could sway her on most things but with me, she was on a mission. Honestly, I'm not sure what she was looking for back then. Maybe some sense of who I was.

I was a pale-faced Goth chick--sullen and withdrawn--which drove her mad. Drove her to babble her way through family dinners and shovel more food into that tastefully lipsticked mouth than you could imagine would fit in her whole scrawny body. Dad let me be, but Mom never could. She's always been the type who chatters nervously, needs to know how everyone is feeling at all times and wants with all of her being to be confided in.

After years of feeling like a loser, I've finally realized I'm just plain quiet. I'm not scared of speaking out, I'm not sublimating or repressing my true feelings. I may be a therapist's daughter, but I'm just quiet. And the other day I realized I'm not a therapist's daughter anyway. Not really. When that lady came up to my register with a Chinese baby in her cart, it all made sense. I'm not my mother's daughter. I'm adopted.

So I called 1-800-US SEARCH, contacted the Beaver Creek records department, and bought this sleazy personals magazine that runs ads in the back, trying to match up long-lost biological relatives. The lady at Town Hall told me that Ohio adoptee birth records have been open for more than 30 years. As long as I'm a legal adult, I can see my records. But she also said I'd have to provide more information in order to do the search. Ditto for 1-800-US SEARCH. And the flimsy truckstop newsprint magazine is full of grainy photos of pathetic toothless white trash that I pray to God I'm not related to.

I wish I could ask Mom, or that Dad was still alive. He'd level with me. Mom would take it as an attack and cry for days. We'd have to discuss and process the whole thing to death, and I won't put myself through it.

It's bad enough that I'm 21 and had to move back home. It's bad enough that she has suddenly taken up vacuuming as an excuse to go into my room on a regular basis. It's bad enough that I have to work at the local video rental store and wear the ugly Wal-Mart smock and perma-smile just to pay off my stupid college loan. Even though I dropped out. I won't make it worse by subjecting myself to discussions of my motivations and emotions surrounding my newfound belief in my lost identity.

The thing is I sort of look like her cousin Beatrice, and I kinda have Grandma Atkins' chin, but nobody has ever commented on the stunning family resemblance. Plus, I'm shorter and fatter than either one of my parents, and I'm the only lefty in the whole Atkins clan. Dad was quiet too but in a gentle lovable way. And I always wondered why they didn't have more kids.

No matter where I put it, she would have found it eventually. So in order to save us both some effort, this morning I put the nasty magazine smack dab on top of my bed and went to work. When I got to Leo's Video Den, the phone was already ringing.

"Hey, Daphne, your Mom's on line one. She sounds pissed, good luck," says Nestor, the manager, as he hands me the receiver.

"Daphne, I realize I'm calling you at work, and you may not be able to speak freely," she begins in her best therapist tone. "But, honey, what the hell is this magazine?"

"Mom, let's talk about it later. I've got a customer and," I look around for some way out but Nestor's gone to the stockroom and the store is completely empty, "Nestor's breathing down my neck. You know I need this job."

"Fine. We'll discuss this later. But I need to say one thing to you, Daphne Marie Atkins. Whatever you've done, whatever sick ads you've answered, I love you. I'll always love you."

I slam down the phone. Sick ads. The magazine features personal ads from incarcerated felons and Alaskan Pipeline workers. From Russian women willing to sell themselves to get to America. From people with herpes looking for other people with herpes. The reuniting long-lost relatives stuff is buried way in the back and she clearly didn't get that far. She probably thinks I'm bi-curious or am about to run off to Lima to have conjugal visits with an ax-murderer named Jebediah.

At precisely 10:35 am the door chimes ring and in comes the unnaturally tan dentist with an office nearby. He's a 10:35 am regular. He always smells of Listerine and latex and always wears a purple tie. He always rents one classic Hollywood black-and-white film and one soft-core porno. He heads toward the classics section. And when he puts his movies down on the Formica exactly three minutes later, Casablanca is on top and something with big fake tits on the cover is underneath.

"Phone number?" I know it but I have to ask.

"431-9530," he announces as he adjusts the band on his shiny expensive-looking watch. I take the cases in back and fish out the actual tapes.

"That's $6.40. They're due on Thursday before 10 pm. Do you need a bag?" I smile widely, revenge for all the pimple-faced male Rite-Aid clerks who smirk and ask me if I want a bag for my Tampax.

"Yes, please." I stuff the movies into a bright yellow bag and shove it toward him.

Nestor comes out of the stockroom, the heels of his police boots tapping against the linoleum, just as the door shuts behind the dirty dentist. He's holding four tapes. His fingernails are bitten down and his nail polish is chipping off.

"Whaddya wanna watch today, Daph? Chasing Amy, Hairspray, Girls' Town, or Citizen Ruth." He offers them up like Thanksgiving dinner. I grab Hairspray. I love watching Ricki Lake when she was fat and campy.

"Good choice, nothing like a John Waters film at 11 am." He smiles and sticks out his tongue. His tongue ring clicks on the back of his teeth on the way out. It's big and silvery. I've always wanted to know what it feels like to kiss a guy with a bar through his tongue. I can't decide if it would be cool, smooth and sexy, or metallic tasting and in the way. He catches me staring. Before I know it, I'm reaching out and kissing him. Frenching him, hard. Swirling my tongue around the knob of the tongue ring like I'm blowing him or something. And holding his scraggly haired head in my hands so he can't escape. Then I hear the tinkling of the door chimes.

I pull away. Run into the stockroom without even looking Nestor in the face. I can hear them talking though. She's canceled her clients for the day. Something about a family emergency. She appreciates his flexibility and would be happy to speak to Leo herself if necessary. I can't listen anymore. I run through the dusty aisles between metal shelving stacked to the ceiling with numbered plastic videocassettes. I aim for the emergency exit door with its red-lettered warning sign. I body-slam into it and trip the alarm as it screeches open. The cold air feels good on my face.

I'm safe outside. But I don't have my bag or jacket. No keys to get in my car, no smokes, and there's nowhere to go except Wal-Mart, Chan's Chinese take-out, or OfficeMax. I sit on her back bumper and the word Integra imprints itself on my ass. I listen to the whirring and whistling of the alarm and wait.

Eventually she comes out. Her Coach handbag dangles from one shoulder, and my beat-up backpack hugs the other one. My leather jacket is folded across the crook in her elbow. She doesn't look at me. She presses the button on her remote door lock thing and it hiccups as usual. I slide into the passenger seat and watch her throw my stuff into the backseat as she starts the engine. She starts to say something, to lecture me. I turn around in my seat, reach into my backpack, and pull out my discman. I have Liz Phair playing before she gets the green arrow to pull out of the parking lot.

"You would have found the dumb thing eventually." We're at home and I'm counting the buds on the lilacs in the green ceramic vase on our dining room table. My headphones are silent and slack around my neck.

"Yes, but this was so, well, so passive aggressive, Daphne. What were you trying to prove, leaving something like that lying around the house?"

"It wasn't lying around the house. It was lying on my bed in my room with the door closed."

"Honey," she suddenly smiles and leans back on the table. "You know I have to go in there to vacuum and tidy up now and again."

"Who's passive aggressive? You go in there every day pretending you're Martha Stewart just to spy on me. I'm 21, for Christ's sake."

"Daphne, there's no reason to get hostile."

"Do you think I'm an idiot?"

"Of course I don't think you're an idiot. You're an intelligent young woman, but we're getting off track here." She sits down on one of the dining room chairs and picks up the offending rag. "What are you doing with this piece of garbage? You haven't answered any ads have you?" She opens to a random page and moans. "Sweet Jesus, please tell me you haven't answered any of these ads." She pushes it in my direction and the words Me So Horny jump out at me. There's a pair of almond-shaped eyes staring at me attached to a scrawny naked Asian girl. There's a 900 number underneath.

The eyes remind me of the baby I saw the other day. I was working the photo counter at Wal-Mart, as I do every Tuesday night. A redheaded lady came up to the counter to pick up her pictures. Her name was Moreau and she had three rolls. She also had this adorable Chinese baby girl sitting in the front of her cart. With deep black eyes and a little purple jumper that showed off the rolls of fat on her legs. I'm a sucker for a cute baby so I waved and smiled. She smiled and gurgled back at me. Then the lady touched her cheek and patted down her hair. The baby looked up at her and said mama. That's when I knew.

My mother's elbows are on the table, her forehead is resting in her hands, and she's still jabbering away.

"Forget it. Just forget it." I get up, grab my discman, bag, and jacket, and head up to my room.

She has to drive me to Wal-Mart after dinner for my evening shift because my car is still in the strip-mall lot from this morning. She insists on wearing sunglasses because she's been crying on and off all day and her eyes are puffy. Further proof there's no way I'm genetically linked to this drama queen. I stare out the window, trying to ignore the soft rock on the car radio. We pass huge piles of dried up leaves on people's tree-lawns. After a few blocks I see a hunch-shouldered man with a loosened tie, scraping away at the earth with a metal rake, his eyes squinting in the dim evening light.

Dad and I were raking the night he died. It was my job but he came out to keep me company and prep me for a chem quiz. We made these two huge piles of leaves. Dad took some leaves off each one, declared the piles ions, and explained about atoms losing electrons and becoming charged. When he swept a leaf bridge between the piles and started in on covalent bonding, I got bored and threw some leaves at him. He smiled, grabbed me, and rubbed leaf bits into my hair. I tried to shove a handful down his collar but he was slippery and the best I could do was the pocket of his button-down. We finally called a leaf truce and cleaned up the mess. He ran to the garage to get the trash bags, but right in the middle of the driveway he just collapsed. They said it was impossible to predict.

As Mom turns off Lantz onto N. Fairfield, she starts to talk. "Honey, you know that your father and I wanted to teach you financial responsibility and have never allowed you to live above your means. At this juncture, however, I think it might be best for you to get your own apartment. I'll pay for it and I'll take care of your loan. You can use your earnings for food, gas and insurance, utilities, whatever else you need." She pushes on the accelerator and speeds through a yellow light. "I've tried so hard but I just can't do this anymore. I just can't get through and I'm tired."

"Mom, I know." The word know weighs a million pounds.

"Know. Know what? What do you know?" she pulls over, turns on her hazards, and takes off the shades.

"What you never had the guts to tell me."

"What's that, Daphne? What are you talking about?" A small spray of saliva hits my cheek.

"I'm adopted." In one motion, I pull the door handle, grab my bag, and get out of the car. I look straight ahead and walk north along the side of the road, my feet crunching on the dead leaves below me. I concentrate on the motion of my feet, no stopping. I can hear her coming up behind me.

"Daphne!" she yells.

I turn around. Her hazard lights are blinking and other cars are swerving to avoid the open driver's side door. "Mom," I say through clenched teeth, "you can't just leave the car in the street like that."

"Daphne, forget the car. What the hell would make you think you're adopted?" She's squeezing my upper arm hard enough to leave marks.

"Mom, get back in the car." I look down at my Doc Martens and manage, "I'll come home tonight and look at apartment listings. I'll be out of your house in no time." I want to say more but I don't want to lose my shit. She grabs my other arm and says my name softly. Tears start to roll down my cheeks. She puts her arms around me and holds on for all she's worth.

"You would have found it eventually," she says as she flips the switch for the attic light. I can see dust particles swirling around in the shaft of light as we climb up the stairs. "Once I was gone, it would have fallen on you to clean out the attic and you would have discovered the book. But tonight seems like the right time, given the circumstances." She pads around in her stocking feet on the hardwood floor looking for something. "It must be in the crawl-space. Help me with this door, Daphne." We force open a half-sized door that's been warped shut so long I thought it was just decoration. She pulls on the leather handle of a big black trunk. The bottom scrapes against the floorboards as she tugs it into the main room. There's a cracked John and Yoko sticker peeling off the left side. She manipulates the rusty clasps and lifts the lid. It smells like mothballs.

She digs around and pulls out a scrapbook and a reel of home movie film from underneath some off-white plastic thing I can't identify.

"Your dad and I, we were so, we really wanted a baby," she curls her fingers around each end of the book. "We decided to make a scrapbook to document the whole process. Your dad was in grad school, and I was teaching yoga." She shakes her head and smiles. "We were so young. We got into some questionable Eastern fertility rituals. Don't even ask me what we did with this thing." She holds up the pearl colored plastic thing I didn't recognize and laughs a belly laugh I haven't heard in years, since Dad was around.

She puts the reel of film aside and opens the scrapbook. She shows me white-edged snapshots of them getting stoned and kissing. She blushes and skips over the pages that we both know I never want to see. She points to a couple of Polaroids: in one she's standing on her head and in the next she's sitting in lotus position with her palms touching each other and her eyelids at half-mast. According to the captions, they thought this would help them make a girl. There's a 5x7 of her with long dark-brown braids, lifting her shirt, a tiny bubble of a belly sticking out. There's a mustard-splattered takeout menu from Newman's Deli with Mom's favorite sandwiches circled. The words get extra pickles and no mayo! are scrawled all over it. There are smudgy pencil sketches Dad drew of Mom's silhouette as she got bigger and bigger. Yellowed cutouts from expectant mother's magazines and dog-eared Joy of Sex passages on getting it on while pregnant. Lists with cross-outs of girls names and boys names. Krishna?

A Lamaze class brochure and a business card from some lady at La Leche League. Toward the end, there are two small photos of a baby (covered in blood and pus) pasted on an otherwise blank page. In one, a big hairy hand is tying off the umbilical cord, and in the other I'm screaming on a tiny sterile white hospital scale. Then there's a close-up of my mother with a patterned hospital johnnie draped over one shoulder. She's got sweat-drenched hair plastered to her forehead and a tiny baby cradled in her arms. I'm scrunched up and veiny, sucking at her exposed breast. The caption is in Dad's handwriting and it says "Everything I ever wanted."

This little sound escapes my mouth like someone knocked the wind out of me. I'm not sure if I should cry or scream or pound my fists against the wall. I swallow hard, look at Mom for guidance. She's touching the paper and her index finger keeps going over the words.

"Mom?" I finally manage. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't turn or look up either. She just keeps looking at the words and caressing them with her fingers. She looks like she did at the funeral. Tiny and stunned. Too sad even to cry.

"Mommy?"

I unfold myself, get my legs under me, and go downstairs.

Copyright © 2003 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
All rights reserved. Comments. Last modified Mon, Nov 3, 2003.