I wished she did because I could understand that as a crucial flaw in her character. Everyone knew it wasn’t right to physically abuse a child.
She fed me. She clothed me. She didn’t leave me alone to fend for myself. When she wasn’t around to watch over me, I had keepers.
She was also an ambitious woman. She worked to get ahead. We were not wealthy, but by the time I hit double digits, we lived in a relatively decent condo in a neighborhood that wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t as terrible as the ones we’d been in before. A condo that, even if it wasn’t much, it was decorated to impress.
As for me, I was “normal.”
I had friends. I was always pretty, so I was relatively popular. I liked school, I liked to learn, and I did well there. I dated. I lost my virginity at the age of seventeen to a boy I liked very much and had been seeing for some time. It was the worst sex of my life, and there was a bit of pain, but it was my choice, and it didn’t mark me or turn me off future interludes.
But I lived in the world, so I knew that a mother was supposed to love you. Care, not only for you, but about you.
And I did not have that.
So I found ways to adapt.
One of those ways was to watch TV, which was why I became an actress. A decision I would later realize was a mistake, not only because it wasn’t my true calling.
Another way was to read, a lot. This didn’t only take me away. I was naturally a dreamer. I would understand about myself years later that I was born to be a writer not only with the way I consumed books nearly all my life, but also with the way my mind sought stories.
This was one of the few things I had from my mother. She often bought me books, and I was grateful she did, even if I grew to understand she did it because she knew she wouldn’t have to put up with me if I was in a book.
She also never refused me permission to go to the library, which I frequented and in which I spent a good deal of time.
Indeed, the only semi-motherly woman in my life was a librarian named Donna, who not only shared my love of books, but who read in me why they were so important.
It was not her job to look after me and give me the love I didn’t have.
But she did her best, and it was she who was sitting beside me in the audience when I won my Emmys. And it was her name in the front of We Pluck the Cord, because it was dedicated to her.
It was also she who was buried with a first edition, the first one I signed, of that book folded in her hands and my National Book Award medallion resting on her chest.
As I grew up, my mother complained about me in a way that was both constant and consistent, but it too was negligent. An aside. A nuisance.
She did not like me dragging on her time. She did not like me dragging on her resources.
I remember with an alarming clarity the day she came home with her first pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes, a pair she’d found at a consignment store.
I remember how she put them on, traipsed around the house admiring them, and as if talking to herself, not even glancing at me, which was how she always did it, she said, “I can’t wait until you’re gone. I’ll have the money to buy more of these. Next, I’m getting Chanel.”
I also remember those times I was meant to disappear.
Not literally, but as close as I could get.
“I’m probably going to be bringing someone home tonight, Delphine, and you do not exist. You hear me?”
I’d learned what she meant when, in the beginning, I’d had no idea what she meant and inadvertently existed when I wasn’t supposed to, and her negligent abuse became much more focused.
What she meant was that I was not to do that first thing to be a discoverable presence in our home when she brought a man there to fuck him. She was an attractive, single, unencumbered professional, and I was not to belie that.
Eventually, she’d learned, if there was one she might want to keep, this wasn’t the way to play it. Men, understandably, were not fond of finding out at the third hour that the woman they were banging, a woman they were thinking they might want to spend more time with, had a kid—and she’d hidden that.
In this time, I would find there was an irregularity in my mother’s behavior.
She’d had three men in her life who she also introduced into mine. The irregularity was that they were all good men, and I knew that because I still had relationships with all three. All of them reaching out to me when I found fame and fortune, doing it in a genuine, proud, not-quite-fatherly but definitely affectionate way.