Ma Was a Sex Slave

It’s a funny thing about parents. As a child of one, you tend to think their lives began the moment you were born. By the time you discover they were different people before you popped into the scene, it’s sometimes too late to learn the whole backstory. An opportunity to fill in some of the missing pieces of my mother’s life arose when I met a cousin I never knew existed. As you know by now, I grew up along a stretch of Echo Park Avenue where every resident was a relative. That doesn’t mean I knew any of their last names or how we were related. All the older people were referred to by their first name, preceded by the title Aunt or Uncle, including complete strangers who made the mistake of moving into Echo Park. (This is another example of why I’m drawn to India. Everyone there over the age of 40 also becomes Aunt or Uncle to complete strangers.) The family dealt with duplicate names by forcing newcomers to accept nicknames. New Moishe became Moishela in deference to old Moishe. New Sarah became Moishe’s Wife Sarah because everybody liked the original Sarah better. The cousins just played together without needing to know first or last names or how we were linked. For example, I always heard about Mimi Scheindle. (Don’t quote me on the spelling. Pretend we’re using the phonics system.) Everyone was always talking about Mimi Scheindle this and Mimi Scheindle that. Turns out her first name wasn’t Mimi. Her first name was Scheindle. Who gives their daughter a name like Scheindle? And the Mimi part? Apparently Mimi was a fond term for Aunt. So Mime Scheindle was, in fact, my Great Aunt. Who knew? Here’s a better example. I was in High School orchestra. I was also in Junior High School orchestra and this is important to know because that means I’d been in a music class with the same people for at least six years. I was in drama class, too, but that doesn’t count. My parents never attended any of these musical or dramatic events, nor did I expect them to. We had a tacit agreement: they would work day and night so I had a home to live in and food to eat. In return, I would secretly raise myself and not embarrass them by getting carted off to foster care. You can imagine my surprise when my mother walked into the orchestra classroom following a daytime concert and asked me, “Where is Michael Peskin? He plays the trumpet.” How did she know his name? Who told her he played the trumpet? Why was she even there? I pointed to the youngest member of the trumpet section. She walks up to him and says, “Hello, Michael. I’m your Aunt Mary.” Michael and I looked at each other in mute horror. He was a Sophomore; I was a Senior. He had freckles. I was pathologically shy. We’d managed to avoid all personal contact for years, and now my mother tells us we’re first cousins. Not only were we first cousins, we lived about half a mile from each other and probably rode the same bus every day. I think his grandfather was Moishe. This is a true story; you can’t make this stuff up. Once Ma vanished out the door the way she’d miraculously appeared, without thinking to ask if I’d like to vanish with her, Michael stared at me with undisguised loathing. We never said another word to each other for the next fifty years. Meeting Michael fifty years later is important because it’s going to lead us to why my mother was convinced she had been abducted by her second husband’s nephew, taken to Mexico, and sold there as a sex slave. But that involves Michael’s older sister, who was about my age. We lived blocks apart but rarely played together because, you know, we lived blocks apart. Apparently she was a guest at my first wedding. I have no memory of her being there or that I attended her wedding, which she assures me I did. All I remember is that when we left some wedding, my mother blessed the bride and groom with “You kids go have fun.” Then she snickered all the way home. Fast forward to a few years ago. I reconnected with Michael’s older sister. She is a super genealogist. She knows everyone’s last name and how we relate to each other. She’s so good at it that when we reconnect, she unlocks the secret of my father’s actual name and helps me get in touch with his side of the family, but that’s a different story. We arranged a meeting. My daughter and I would bring my mother’s photos to her house so we could put names to the faces in the albums. Among her other guests were two cousins I never knew existed. Never heard of them, never heard of their last name. Second cousins, total strangers. So I’m sitting at the opposite end of the dining room table, staring at this youngish man, and he starts telling me stories about my mother before she married my father. How is this possible? His grandmother was one of my mother’s nieces. This stranger, who has no reason to lie, and who tells stories about his grandmother that sound totally believable given my family history, describes to us how my mother and her sister Rose used to take his grandmother with them when they went to gambling boats moored 3 miles out from Long Beach in the 1920s. Ma and Rose introduced his grandmother to cigarettes, bootleg liquor, and whatever drugs were the 1920’s rage. Ma and Rose took his grandmother with them as a decoy to fool the family when they went to Tia Juana, Mexico, for weekends of unmentionable entertainment with male escorts. In short, my mother was a wild and naughty Roaring Twenties flapper girl. I learned this long after Ma passed away, but it added a little context to some of the stories she used to tell us as she had slid into full dementia. For example, one day I walked into her private room at a convalescent home to find her staring out at the beautiful landscape painted on the stucco wall three feet from her window. She had such a sorrowful expression on her face, it broke my heart. “Ma,” I said, plopping myself on the side of her bed. “What’s wrong?” She replied, “I’ve been thinking about the sad times in my life. I’ve been through some terrible times.” I held her hand sympathetically. She added more details. “Your step-father’s nephew took me to Mexico. I thought we were going there on a vacation, but he sold me as a sex slave and left me there.” With that, her face grew even more sad. Maybe a tear fell on her cheek. “Ma,” I said, doing my best to look firm and certain. “Listen to me. You were never deserted in Mexico. You were never a sex slave. You were day-dreaming and you started to believe it, but it’s not true.” “It’s not?” “No, it’s not.” “Oh, that makes me feel so much better.” She actually looked relieved and started smiling again. I left, feeling worthwhile. It was my job during those years to convince her that her reveries were not reality, and happily she believed me for a while. The sex slave story was almost as good as the one about the young man who came to rob her at gunpoint but she invited him in and told him to sit on the couch until her husband came home and eventually he got nervous and left without robbing or shooting her. We all figured it was her dementia talking. Now, after listening to the cousin I never knew existed tell about her wild weekends in Mexico, I’m not so sure.