The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (7 page)

I emerged from Suky's womb fulsome and alert, fat as a six-month-old, and covered in fine, black fur. After a brief look round the delivery room, I turned my face to my mother's swollen little dug and latched on, sucking so noisily that I sounded like a litter of piglets. My mother burst into tears at the thought of having given birth to this beast. The doctor's reassurances that I had merely been gestating a little too long, and thus had time to grow a dusting of vestigial hair, harkening back to the days when human beings belonged to the ape family, did nothing to calm her down. Being the wife of a pastor, she was ambivalent about evolutionary theory, and couldn't help feeling that my bestial looks, explicable as they apparently were by science, somehow reflected a basic flaw or sinfulness in her own character. Handing me back to the flabbergasted doctor, she launched herself off the delivery table, her legs still rubbery from the anesthetic, and ran down the hall, slipping on her own blood and screaming ‘
I had a monkey!
'

It took two nurses and a doctor to subdue all five feet, two inches of Suky Sarkissian. They injected her with a sedative, then gave her a private room, which our insurance didn't cover, but the hospital threw in for free.

*

The sense that her daughter magically embodied all that was wrong in herself never left my mother. Long after I had lost my furry coat and grown into a pretty, chubby little girl, she thought she discerned in me a deviousness, a lustiness, a general
badness
, which was, in secret fact, her own. At the age of two, I would clamp myself to her leg like an amorous dog. She always shook
me off her, shrieking. One time, desperate to be freed from a crowded Greyhound bus, I scratched her face until it bled. She wept for my cruelty. I even took a crafty little poop in one of her favorite shoes, hoping to foil her plan of going out to dinner one night. It was one of a pair covered in pink velvet that matched her new dress perfectly. When she saw what I had done, she tried to be furious, but she couldn't stop laughing. For, in spite of the flaws in my character, or because of them perhaps, Suky loved me fervently, even ardently. She just couldn't get enough of me, couldn't stop cuddling, sniffing, kissing, nipping at me. I remember at the age of six or seven struggling to emerge from one of her embraces, not because I did not enjoy her affection but because I actually could not breathe.

I was the first girl after four boys. Suky mothered my predecessors fine; she herded them into and out of the bath as if it were a sheep dip, then shooed them into bed like a flock of pigeons. She ferried them conscientiously to their endless sports competitions. Yet I had the feeling, growing up, that Suky saw only me. Being the only girl, I had my own bath every night, and Suky would sit on the lid of the toilet, legs crossed, languorously watching me as she filed her nails, or stood at the mirror plucking her eyebrows. We would chat about this and that – the other girls in my school, who was friends with whom, who was planning on running away, what hairdo was best for which occasion – while in the next room my brothers shouted and teased and bashed one another over the head. At bedtime, she gave all the boys a swift kiss good night, but she lay down with me, tenderly stroking my head till I was asleep. We would dance to Bobby Darin in the kitchen, my feet on hers, holding hands, round and round and round.

I was the youngest, and for a few years, this lavishing of attention made a certain amount of sense. But once I was six and could fend for myself, the boys began to resent Suky's clear preference for her only girl. She even bought a camera, the sole function of which was to take pictures of me. She dressed me as angels,
cowgirls, movie stars. Occasionally she photographed me naked. She was the most passionate of mothers.

Suky was a diminutive, peppy woman with bright red hair and a high, squeaky voice with a slight southern lilt, a shadow of her mother's viscous Mississippi drawl. Her waist was so tiny, her ankles so slim, she had to shop in the teen section of the local department store. I was proud of Suky's Tinker Bell figure; other people's mothers, with their rounded, fleshy bottoms and jiggling breasts, struck me as bovine and sloppy compared to my lithe, lively, tireless mother.

Suky smiled easily, wore her hair in a low beehive, and nearly always kept her eyebrows up in an expression of bemused surprise. In spite of this, I think she was a closet pessimist. I could tell by her driving. As she man euvered our fat-assed station wagon around the narrow country roads, she sat bolt upright, her little hands clamped to the steering wheel, knuckles white. Every time we approached a turn, she whacked the horn, warning the eighteen-wheeler that was surely barreling round the bend, making ready to spin out of control and flatten us. An insomniac, she would stay up deep into the night, baking cookies, paying bills, or just pottering around. I remember waking from a bad dream in the middle of the night. The house was dead quiet. Knowing she'd be up, I walked downstairs and found her trimming the dead leaves off the plants in her pajamas. She was happy to see me. She made cocoa; we snuggled up to each other and watched TV till five, when we both passed out on the sofa, her arms around me, my head on her breast.

Suky slept there often. She'd say she was up so late, there was no point going to bed. We'd come down and find her huddled under the blanket she kept for watching TV. I would shake her awake, and she'd shuffle into the kitchen, drink a glass of orange juice, look at the clock. At seven on the dot, she'd take her medication – she was always muttering about her thyroid being off-kilter. By the time my dad came downstairs, she was dressed and cheerful,
masterfully fixing everyone's breakfast, packing lunches, organizing book bags. She cooked nourishing meals but rarely sat with us at the table for long, preferring to stand by the stove spooning rice pudding from a china cup into her endlessly chattering mouth.

But then there were days when my chirpy, talkative, cheerful mother went quiet and staring, seemingly deaf to even my requests. She would dump the dinner on the table and rush away from the teeming mass of us to lie down and eat toast with butter in front of the television that stood at the foot of her bed. My father, Des, sighed when this happened, but he didn't reproach her. He knew there were times when his wife quite simply shorted out, went limp and affectless as a run-down robot. Des would rally then; singing in his painful rasp, he washed dishes, supervised baths. I relished these evenings being overseen by my father, because he would ignore me a little. I was just part of the other kids, not a unique and special creature, not the apple of anyone's eye. It was a relief. I roughed around with the boys, wrestled, kicked, giggled. But inevitably a sense of guilt overwhelmed me on those nights and, wish as I might to simply go to bed with a rough kiss from Dad, skipping the elaborate affections of my mother, I felt her pull me toward her; her will had infested my own. I walked into her room then. She was always fully dressed, on the bed, her plate of toast on her abdomen. She looked at me with a mix of joy and apprehension, as though at any moment I might renege on my affections. I had such power over Suky; it frightened me and made me bold. Sometimes I let my face go cold and stony just to watch the fear flash in her eyes.

An impassive Hartford Armenian, my father had a thick, gravelly voice that made him sound as if he had just eaten a large spoonful of peanut butter. He moved his powerful, squat body with a deliberate, oxlike slowness. The russet circles surrounding his kind black eyes made him look perpetually exhausted. Father Sarkissian never got too happy, but then he never got too sad, either. His unlikely choice to become an Episcopalian minister had been made against the wishes of my grandfather, a fervent Armenian Orthodox who never forgave his Protestant wife for luring their only son from the church of his ancestors.

As it turned out, Des was a born pastor. He worked on his sermons scrupulously, kept the rectory open late for lost souls who needed a sympathetic ear. Yet one sensed, beneath the folds of his holy robes, not the airy, bodiless expanse of the spiritual man but the squirming flesh of a man all too much alive. Des always emphasized Christ the man in his sermons, to the point that some of his parishioners wondered aloud whether he actually thought Christ was also God, seeing as he nearly never mentioned it. To be honest, I don't think my father cared much about the God part. The miracle was the reality of Christ, his it-ness, the
fact
of him. I remember at dinner he once said that what really mattered was what people did to each other here on earth. The Holy Ghost could take care of itself.

Des was a compassionate man. He listened with a concerned, interested look as people with porridge-colored complexions and red-rimmed eyes told him their troubles on their way out of church or at our house in the evenings, when they had put their children to bed and had a few hours' respite before their daily obligations
kicked in again. He seemed to enjoy us kids, in an abstracted sort of way, cocking his head and watching us as we did our homework, argued, played. He was always tender with us when we were hurt or sad and would sit with a weeping child for an hour, well after the crisis had passed, holding a small hand, in no rush to go anywhere. In that sense, he was the opposite of Suky, who skittered around in a flurry of activity eighteen hours a day. She relaxed only when she lay down with me to put me to sleep, humming wisps of songs into my ear in her high, breathy voice and curling a strand of my hair round her finger.

The truth is, I never got to know my father very well. Suky eclipsed him; the fire that burned in her day and night blotted him out in my imagination. He was a shadow figure, a refuge at times but not fully real to me as a man. I find this sad, because now I realize that, of all my traits, the ones I got from my father are the most valuable; it was the Des in me that allowed me to survive.

It didn't seem strange to me that my parents barely spoke to each other. Their exchanges were almost entirely confined to talking about the children, or simple requests, such as ‘pass the milk please.' As far as I could tell, Suky spent any free time she had with me. She got most of her affection from me, too. I wonder what my parents' life together was like before I was born, or when they were newlyweds. In one early photograph, they seem shyly happy together, holding hands and smiling outside my father's first parish in Hartford. My mother is wearing a flowered housedress. Her face is young and round. Growing up, I was fascinated by this image, because Suky was not tiny then. She was almost plump.

I was always a housewife when I played, a little mother pushing my toy vacuum cleaner, a fussily dressed baby doll on my hip, or primly taking messages on a pink pretend phone for my husband, a tall, shadowy being I called Joey. Sex with Joey was a swift, choreographed movement. I would lie down, flap my legs open and closed, and stand up again, returning to my chores. I think I got the idea that you lie down from my friend Amy, who was, at nine, already a bit of an aficionado.

‘You know what the worst word in the world is?' Amy asked me one day as we played in the dark corridor of our second floor. ‘What?' I asked. Amy stood against the window, pensively swiveling the head of one of my dolls round and round. A web of fine, shiny brown hair tumbled to my best friend's waist. Her cornflower blue, crescent-shaped eyes gave her an old-fashioned, wistful air. ‘Fuck,' she said flatly. Then she turned to look across the street at her older brother, Andy, who was mowing the town green. Amy's family was rich compared with ours, yet all the kids but Amy had summer jobs, to teach them the value of money. I watched Amy from behind: her arms rested on the crossbar of the window frame. Her lilac dress was cinched at the waist by a slender belt and fell in neat little pleats to just below her knees. Her bare feet were crossed at the ankles. I felt awed by her elegance and her beauty. There had never been such a girl, I thought, so perfect, so confident, so lovely. I felt like a troll in comparison. I was short, my face was flat, my hair was the color of straw, my eyes like gray marbles. One summer afternoon, as I pulled on my bikini bottom, Amy contemplated my muscular stomach with a cool, thoughtful air.
There was a faint line on my belly, like a sepia seam, from my navel to my sex. She pointed to it and said, ‘You know what that means, don't you?'

‘What?' I asked.

‘When you were in your mother's stomach, you were going to be a boy until the
very last second
.' I looked in the mirror, at the broad muscles in my little shoulders, the round, strong thighs. I didn't look like a girl at all.

‘You're a boy-girl,' she said, laughing. I laughed, too, though I felt my throat constricting. I shoved her onto the bed, and we tumbled, hysterical now, screaming, wrestling. Then we lay very still beside each other, catching our breath. I propped myself up on one elbow. Amy had a chipped front tooth that glimmered inside her parted lips.

‘If I'm a boy-girl, then I can be your boy-girlfriend,' I said.

‘No you can't,' she said dismissively.

‘That way, when you have a real boyfriend, it'll be easy.'

She mulled this over for a moment. ‘But we wouldn't tell anybody.' She looked at me, her eyes narrowing.

‘You think I'm dumb, or crazy?' I asked. Then I let myself tip forward, very slowly approaching her face, and kissed her. Her lips felt cool and rough. She pushed me away, laughing, but later that day she let me do it again.

We kissed a few more times that summer. I persuaded her to let me lie on top of her twice, as well. I loved feeling myself crush down on her. She struggled out from under me, though. Once, I was surprised to see alarm in her face as I pinned her down; she was clearly relieved when we heard my mother's steps on the stairs.

Years passed. Amy turned out to be a very intelligent girl. She got A's in everything but history, a subject she detested for some reason of her own. I was an indifferent student. The words in my schoolbooks held no reality for me. I consumed them reluctantly, as if they were stale bread. I spent less time with Amy now; she was always in the library with her brainy friends. She studied at
a round table with those geeks, sitting up straight like a princess, her long, dark hair glistening down her back, and worked away for hours under the admiring gaze of Mrs Underwood, the wheezing librarian. Ravaged by cigarettes, she rolled an oxygen tank with her while she was stacking books.

The kisses Amy and I had shared melted away into a childhood we both remembered like a dream. I could no more have kissed her now than fly a 747. I wouldn't have known how. I was thirteen, and I must tell you I was really something. Two compact and perfectly formed breasts had sprung up on my chest like mushrooms, overnight it seemed, disconcerting my brothers and sending my mother on an emergency shopping trip for my first bra. It took my father months to notice them. I'll never forget the look of muted surprise on his face as I bent to clear his plate and he realized what had happened to me. I was small and lithe, with copper-colored hair, padded little hands, and a face like a cat. That's what everyone said, that I looked like a kitten, with my broad, flat face and wide, slanting gray eyes, my small, cupid's bow mouth – and my lassitude. I could lie on the couch in a torpor all morning long, then spring up and bolt out the door in a pair of tiny shorts, my mother shouting after me, pleading with me to come back in and change.

As I have mentioned, I was a sexual creature pretty much from the get-go. At eleven, I found a way to achieve orgasms while doing the breaststroke, which subsequently led me to join the swim team of my junior high school and accounted for my iron thighs. In my early teens, though virginal in the extreme – I had never even kissed a boy – I developed a peculiar fantasy in which I met a faceless, unimpeachable gentleman whose pristine heart was overwhelmed with forbidden love for me. The boys in my school held no interest for me. They were all dying for it. I needed to find someone who absolutely didn't want to be seduced. But I'm getting ahead of myself. At the moment, I'm thirteen, Grandma Sally has thrombosis, and Suky is going to Delaware.