Bornfamous

It was my eighteenth birthday. I was working in the Diner as usual, wanting to feel older but disappointed that nothing was actually different or even special about the day. A customer came in and sat at the counter. He was our new neighbor in the apartment building that we had just moved into next door, a good-looking guy in his twenties — tall, dark, sleepy too-pretty blue eyes — the kind that never looked twice at me.

I said hi and brought him a glass of water. There must have been some flirtation, though I can’t remember any, because then this guy, let’s call him Bill, asked me out.

“You want to go out tonight?”

I blinked. “Um — sure.”

“Great, I’ll pick you up at eight.” And then he left, just like that.

I was shocked and flattered.

This must be what it was like to be a grownup. Men just up and asked you for dates. Could it be as easy as this?

It was a lot better than high school, where the only date I’d ever had was for the Sadie Hawkins Day dance — the girls asked the guys. Of course, I asked a completely non-threatening boy named Otte Knudsen [not his real name] — who, I believe, later turned out to be gay — but in those days, we never thought of such possibilities. Some boys were just different, you know? You never had crushes on boys like that. They were friends. Otte was a friend. [Oh yes, I forgot the Senior Prom, but let's not go there just yet, shall we?]

So now I had a date, a real date, with a cute guy, as if I was the kind of girl that cute guys asked for dates. I had to tell someone.

“Mom, guess what?”

Mom was in the kitchen getting ready for the lunch rush.

“That new guy next door just asked me for a date!”

“Oh?” She said stirred the chili — or maybe she chopped the onions. “That’s nice.”

I don’t actually remember if she really said it was nice. She might have asked me a few questions about Bill [or Jim or Steve] but I didn’t have any answers. I knew nothing about him except that he was exceptionally good-looking, several levels above what I ever hoped for in a date. Well, any level was more than I hoped for at that point. So it seemed that my birthday was turning out well after all, very well indeed.

After the lunch rush, Mom motioned to me to sit with her in one of the booths, away from other people.

“LaVonne, come here a minute. There’s something I have to tell you.”

And my mother began to tell me the story of how, when she was nineteen, she went on a blind date with a Greek immigrant, and got raped. As they were walking through a park, this man tripped her into a bush and fell on top of her. She told me that she tried to fight him off but he was too heavy, and all she could do was bite his tongue as hard as she could.

And Mom wound up pregnant.

None of her brothers or sisters knew anything about her pregnancy, she said. Gramma and Grampa were the only ones who knew. They told everybody that Mom took a job in Utah but she really went to an unwed mother’s home in St. Paul — where, on St. Patrick?s Day 1936, she gave birth to a baby girl.

I had a sister. I was stunned.

“I’m telling you this,” Mom said, “because now that you’re eighteen, you’re going to want to get your birth certificate at some point, and it says that you were my second child. I didn’t want you to find out by accident.?

“What happened to my sister?” I asked. “Did you give her away?”

“I had no choice,” she said. “In those days, you didn’t keep babies born out of wedlock.”

“Were you sad?”

“Of course,” she said, “very sad.” I could see the distant longing in her eyes. “They let me keep her for two weeks to nurse her. It broke my heart to let her go.”

All these years, I thought I was an only child. Mom used to say she wanted 13 children but I’d always thought she was joking. Now I could see that she wasn’t. Who knows how many siblings I would have if things had been different? One, at least.

“There’s another reason I’m telling you this,” she went on. “You have to be very careful about dating men you don’t know. I went on a blind date and look what happened.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” I said. Suddenly, Bill didn’t look so cute in my mind. His too-pretty blue eyes seemed dangerous instead of sleepy.

Mom went on.

“Your stepfather and I have heard a few things about this Bill person. Did you know that he just got out of prison?”

“What?!” I was shocked.

“Yes,” she said, “and that’s not all. He was in for murder.”

“Oh, my God. How do I get out of this date?”

“Just tell him you changed your mind,” said Mom.

“But what if he asks me why? Can I blame you and Joe?”

She patted my hand and smiled. “Of course.”

So, when Bill wandered back into the diner later that afternoon, I told him.

“I’m sorry, but my folks won’t let me go out with you.”

“Oh,” he said, not really surprised. Was there a disappointed look on his face, or was I imagining that? “Okay,” he said. “Bye.”

He turned and walked out. I don’t remember seeing him again.

So that was my eighteenth birthday. But wait a minute. We moved into that apartment building on my eighteenth birthday. Did we move and work at the diner, all in the same day? It’s possible. We didn’t have much to move, after all. I just looked it up, and my birthday fell on a Saturday that year — which explains why I can’t remember a lunch rush even though I wrote as though there was one, and there was a curious lack of customers and waitresses in my memory as well, just me and Mom. Must have been a slow day even for a Saturday.

Well, so much for memory. After forty years, it’s the best I can do.

Oh, btw–tomorrow is my 58th birthday. Thanks.