My natural father is a Rod Stewart wannabe, at least in the marriage department. He has been married six times, five times to women whose names start with the letter S. Mary Claire, his fourth wife, didn't think to tell him that her middle name was Suzanne until after he saw it on the divorce papers and ripped them up right there in front of both divorce lawyers and Mary's secretary. He thought she'd deceived him, not telling him that she had an S name after all, just when he was trying to get away from what he called the curse of the S's.
After Mary Claire there was Sherley, a college professor in her 60's with grown children whose real age was probably around 35 from the looks of her. My natural father figured that since his marriage to Mary Claire had failed he might as well marry Sherley even if her name did begin with the letter S. He moved from his double-wide in San Jose down to Santa Cruz and took a job in the pharmacy at Long's working the early shift so he could be home in time to make lunch for Sherley between classes. He cooked spaghetti from scratch, winding the strands of wheat through the pasta maker like he was styling hair. He learned how to make vegan chopped liver out of mushrooms and cashews, and vegetarian soups and stews which he served on the deck overlooking the beach. In the evenings when Sherley wasn't teaching they walked on the beach and collected driftwood which they placed at strategic points around the house. Some of the pieces were so big they could actually be used as furniture. My natural father made one into a bed frame and another into an arm chair for Sherley's sixty-fifth birthday.
"Soon all of his furniture will be made of driftwood," my sister told me as we spoke on the phone the day after Christmas. His driftwood statue of an angel without wings stood next to my fireplace. He had had a lot of trouble carving the wings and had finally sent me a wingless angel. "I hope it won't offend you," he had written in his note to me, "but I don't think it's written anywhere that Jews can't believe in angels just like the rest of us. I am enclosing a business card in case any of your friends would like one." I threw the business card in the trash and put the angel in the triangular spot between my desk and the wall where I put everything that has no function in my life.
After Sherley my natural father married Sharon, a biologist who worked at the marine lab in Monterey. They got married in January on a yacht in the middle of San Francisco bay. My sister told me that Sharon wore a dress with a deep neckline like she was a teenager and one of those wonderbra things that made her breasts so high they looked like chin rests. Sharon got so cold during the ceremony that her shoulders actually started to turn blue. My natural father took off his jacket and gave it to Sharon but took it back when he himself got cold. He moved to Monterey and sold driftwood carvings from Sharon's house on the beach. "He was actually starting to make some money from it," my sister told me after he'd divorced Sharon and moved up to San Jose and gotten his old job back at the pharmacy.
My mother dated my natural father on and off for three years before she finally married him. She was twenty years old and she wasn't sure she wanted to marry anyone but she told me that if she had to get married she thought she might as well marry someone as gorgeous as she was. "That was my first mistake," she said to me when I was fourteen. We sat outside in the Arizona heat eating red pistachios and drinking sun tea with orange slices over ice. "Your natural father couldn't walk past a mirror without looking in it. He'd even look in the windows of storefronts to see if he could catch a glimpse of his reflection. Wherever we went, women were always willing to leave their slippers under his bed, if you know what I mean. Ugh!"
"Sylvia," my dad said quietly, throwing my mother one of his she's-just-a-baby looks.
"Ugh!" my mother said again. "Never marry a good-looking guy!"
"Sylvia," my dad sighed, rolling his eyes at me over the top of his newspaper.
"Well, I don't mean she should marry someone she's not attracted to," my mother said. "There has to be some chemistry there. Just make sure he's not too good looking, is all I'm saying. Just make sure he doesn't always have an alibi."
My dad's first wife died in childbirth. My dad got my mother's number from a mutual friend who knew my dad was looking to get married again and thought he would have a better chance of finding a mother for his son if he considered all the available women and not just the ones who had never been married. My dad had my mother's number in his book for a year before he inadvertently called her up and asked her out. He'd really meant to dial the number of the woman one line down. By the time he realized his mistake my mother had accepted the date and my dad didn't know how to get out of it without being rude. When he first saw my mother she was standing in the foyer of her parents' house with her hands clasped in front of her and her head bowed like she was a nun and my dad was so taken that he couldn't stop looking at her and tripped and nearly fell flat on his face three times on the way down the front steps to his car. He asked her to marry him on the second date and on every date after that until she finally agreed.
"We didn't think he was her type at all, what with the big ears and being short and bald," my grandmother told me just after she had moved to Arizona to live with us, "but she surprised us all, your mother did."
I heard a lot of conflicting stories about my family while I was growing up, but I always believed my dad. My dad was the one who adopted me after he convinced my natural father to give me up when I was four years old. My dad was the one who taught me how to throw a baseball and how to swim and how to roast marshmallows all the way through without burning them on the outside. It was my dad who ran behind me holding onto the seat of my bicycle when I first learned to ride. When I had questions about the boys I was dating or about sex I asked my dad.
I found out from my uncle that my mother had gone to her parents the night before she was supposed to marry my natural father and begged them to call off the wedding. "I don't want to marry him!" she had wailed as my uncle hid behind the kitchen door and listened. "He's conceited and arrogant and mean and he burned me with his cigarette."
"It was an accident that he burned you," my grandfather said. "He told us so."
"Everyone is nervous the night before their wedding," my grandmother murmured. "Sit down, honey. I'll make you a little sandwich and you'll feel better."
"He burned me on purpose!" my mother shouted, and my uncle watched through the crack in the door as she raised the sleeve of her nightgown and exposed the small red circle just inside her elbow.
"To even think such a thing! He's good-looking, successful...what else do you want?" My grandfather was already yelling. "The hall is rented and the food is catered and we got you the band you asked for! Just think of all the money that will go to waste!"
My grandmother put the sandwich on the table in front of my mother and my uncle watched as my mother's tears slowly soaked the bread.
"What will people say?" my grandfather yelled. "What will people think?"
"You're just nervous, honey," my grandmother said again.
"No one will marry you after this! You'll be a spinster!" My grandfather's face was red and his hands gripped the sides of his head like they were squeezing a giant zit.
"There are no better fish in the sea, honey," my grandmother said. "You got the best. Now take a little bite of your sandwich and you'll feel better."
My mother was in love with her best friend Alan when she married my natural father. My uncle told me that my grandparents liked Alan even better than they liked my natural father. Alan was just about to ask my mother to marry him when he got polio and almost died. My mother had kissed him that day on the beach and then stayed for a cookout with the other kids even though Alan complained of a headache and left. When my mother got home her entire block was under quarantine and Alan was in an iron lung and my grandparents no longer thought he was such a good choice for a husband.
"He's a sick boy," my grandfather said to my mother after the quarantine passed and they knew Alan would live. "You'll end up taking care of him. It's no way to live."
The day the quarantine was lifted my mother went out again with my natural father. A year later she married him. She walked down the aisle clutching my grandfather's arm, staring at the two-carat diamond on her finger like it was an oracle, the sleeve of her wedding dress pulled down to hide the red spot on the inside of her elbow. At the end of the ceremony twenty-five doves were released to fly up into the air over the guests. One of them pooped on my natural father as he stood holding my mother's hand. My natural father was so upset that he sulked during the entire reception. "It was all down hill from there," my mother would say, laughing and crying at the same time whenever she told me the story.
My natural father went to Nevada to marry Samantha the day after President Kennedy was assassinated. He became Catholic out of respect for his new wife and in memory of his beloved president. He and Samantha hung around in Nevada until his New Jersey divorce from my mother finally came through. By then Samantha had given birth to a daughter (Susan) and my mother was pretty sure that my natural father wouldn't fight too hard to win custody of me.
"Your natural father stuck himself good that time," my mother used to say whenever she talked about it. "He couldn't come after you because if he came back to New Jersey he could have been thrown in jail for bigamy. Boy did we luck out."
"Not so lucky," my grandmother would point out from her spot at the foot of the dining room table where she was knitting another wool sweater that no one would wear. "You gave up a successful, rich guy for what? Twenty-five dollars a week in child support?"
"When he paid," my mother said, "which wasn't often." She threw me her look-how-lucky-you-are-that-I-took-care-of-you-through-all-that-crap look and went back to cracking pistachio nuts with the tips of her teeth.
My grandparents never got over my mother's divorce. When my mother met my dad she had been living with my grandparents for two years and in all that time they never stopped trying to convince her that she should go back to my natural father. To them it was as if his marriage to Samantha did not exist, which is almost the truth when you think about it. My natural father and Samantha divorced when their daughter was a year old. Samantha moved back to New Jersey and my natural father took the little sister that I had never seen and headed out to California. Just before I went away to college my uncle told me that my natural father paid Samantha for custody of my little sister. When I met my sister for the first time she insisted that her mother never would have sold her. "Dad just wasn't about to give me up, seeing as how he had lost you," she said quietly, her face reflected almost exactly in mine. "And Samantha thought I'd be better off with Dad since he had a stable job and she was just a struggling artist."
My natural father had been in California only a few months when he married an architect named Stella. He stayed married to Stella a whopping fifteen years, the longest of any of his wives by a factor of at least three. They had a son (Stephen) and Stella raised my sister right alongside Stephen just like she was her own daughter. Stella designed a house made almost completely out of glass and they built it on a lot in Tiburon just before the housing market in California went completely nuts. My sister spent summers in Princeton with her mother and was always a little out of funk when she came back to California. When my sister was sixteen years old my natural father divorced again and Stella took her son and moved to South Carolina. My natural father gave my sister the option of staying with him, going with Stella or heading back to New Jersey to live with her mom.
"He thought that I would pick him, or maybe that I would pick Stella," my sister told me one day as we stood at the top of the World Trade Center in New York and looked out over the bay. "He was really surprised when I picked Samantha. All those summers when I came back to him in such a bad mood, he never figured it was because I wanted to be with my mother."
After Stella my natural father had had it with marriage in general and women with S names in particular. He stayed single a long time (for him) before he again married, this time to an attorney named Mary Claire. They bought a small house in Mill Valley and Mary Claire commuted to San Francisco while my natural father worked at Long's during the day and made furniture out of stuff he found on the beach in the evenings. The first letter to my grandmother arrived right around this time, and she snuck it from the stack of mail on the kitchen counter before my parents saw it and opened it in her room with shaking fingers, her door locked and a chair propped under the doorknob, while I sat on her bed and wondered why she was so pale.
"Look," she breathed, holding the envelope out to me like it was a blessing, "it's a letter from your natural father." She read quickly and quietly, breathing the words as if she was praying, her eyes darting from the letter to the door and back again. When she was finished she folded the letter and locked it in the drawer next to her bed where she kept old photographs and love poems from my grandfather.
"He's going to write again!" she whispered, smiling at me. "You'll have to make sure you get the mail from now on when you come home from school. Oh, honey, now you'll finally know him, know what a fine man he is!"
I kissed her lightly on the cheek before I left her, wondering why such a fine man would burn his bride with a cigarette, how such a fine man could give up his children so easily, knowing that when I went to college in a few months I would be closer to him than I had been since I was two years old.
Lisa Mark, '83
