Life Imitates TV

Monday

I guess you could say that the night I saw my three-armed son on television, everything changed.  I had never thought that television could change my life. In fact, television had almost ruined my life when I was eighteen.  And yet, when you’re twenty-eight years old and you’ve just moved back in with your mother in Stirling, New Jersey, there’s not much else to do. So, while regular people were out working or falling in love or whatever it was that “normal” people did, I spent my time watching the skinless man and the lobster claw family on the Discovery Health Channel.  Then, one night, on the screen was a ten year old boy named Henry having his third arm removed.  The minute I saw him, I knew he was mine.
    “We just want Henry to feel like a regular boy,” his mother was saying.  Then they showed these diagnostic diagrams of his less-developed third arm and how it came out from under his shoulder and was still essentially the size that it was when he was born.  They didn’t say anything about the fact that he was adopted.  They also didn’t interview him which was annoying because I wanted to hear his voice.  But little Henry didn’t say anything the entire time.
    “Why did you adopt him then?” I screamed at the television.  “What kind of jerk are you? You KNEW he had three arms when you adopted him and now you’re changing him.”
When I was eighteen, I had a baby, Dexter, and he had three arms. I guess there might have been some other stuff wrong with him too, and I was eighteen and pretty much a mess. And since I had agreed to give him up for adoption, the minute he was born, they took him away. I guess the adoptive parents didn’t want to meet me and I certainly didn’t want to meet them.  I didn’t forget about the whole thing, believe me, I thought about it a lot.  But then Mister Rogers went to jail and I got a job taking tickets at the zoo. So, it wasn’t like I obsessed about it every day or anything.  I had a baby.  But I also had to pay the electricity bill.  So, I didn’t think about him like a lunatic. I mean, life goes on, isn’t that what they said on that TV show?
But then, when I saw him, on the Discovery Health Channel, all of a sudden, I was like, what is this idiot doing with my baby? I knew it was him, too. Sure, he was named Henry.  But, he was just the right age: ten.  He was a cute kid.  He had a kind of pug nose, red hair and freckles like me.  Poor thing, in addition to being a kid with three arms he probably also got called “carrot top.”  Mine has gotten more auburn over the years, which is what my mother told me would happen, it just glows red now.  I don’t mind it so much.
And they were doing surgery on him to remove his third arm. My baby had a third arm.  What are the odds of two babies being born in the same year having three arms? Pretty low, I’m sure. I never would have changed a thing about Dexter.  I mean, I probably wouldn’t have been a very good mom at eighteen and certainly Felicity Baker, my mother, would not have been much of a help.  But, anyway, it didn’t matter because I agreed to give him away.  But now I knew that that was the dumbest thing I ever agreed to.

I called upstairs to my mother, Felicity Baker.  I’m not a total loser for living with my mom, by the way. I did move out for a little while after I graduated from high school.  I lived in Hoboken and I worked at the zoo taking tickets and at the Pompton Plains Public Library as a Periodicals Manager and in Atlantic City as a dealer. I met my boyfriend, Ethan, at the casino, but that didn’t work out, so when we broke up, I moved back here and started working as a waitress at a diner in bustling downtown Stirling, New Jersey.
I yelled and yelled until she turned off her hair dryer, I’ll never understand why she dries her hair before she goes to sleep, but what can you do. Old people, they have weird habits that are heard to break. “What do you want?” she said.
“I just saw Dexter on TV.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, walking down the stairs in her flannel “Save the Children” nightgown that was covered in pigs and monkeys drawn by children.
“A ten year old boy named Henry just had his third arm removed on the Discovery Health Channel. What would you conclude if you were me?”
“Oh, Jill, it’s not Dexter,” she said.
“Felicity. It is Dexter,” I started to cry.
“Well…”  She never did know what to say when I was upset, she just went into the kitchen and made me an ice cream sundae.  She brought it back into the living room and sat next to me on the couch.  She flipped through the channel guide on the cable to see if that episode of “Medical Incredible” would be on again so we could tape it.  Ice cream almost always makes me feel better.  But my stomach was in knots over this.  I could barely eat a bite.
“Are you going to tell him?” she asked, after she got fed up with the channel guide and turned on her favorite channel, Jewelry Television where weird Southern women sell loose semi-precious gems called things like Zirconite and Alexandrite.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“He probably has a right to know,” she said.
I sighed because I knew she was right.  The father of my baby was also my high school English teacher, Mister Rogers, he had gone to jail over the whole thing and they had made a bunch of TV movies about it.  He had recently been released, I guess they let out sex offenders pretty quick these days, so he was living nearby.  I had been meaning to go and see him, but here was my opportunity.

All I wanted to do was watch that episode of “Medical Incredible” over and over again to look for hints that Dexter/Henry was my baby.  Of course, I hadn’t taped the episode and for once, they weren’t re-running it.    That channel is forever re-showing things back to back to back.  I never understood this.  Don’t they know that people want to watch the Discovery Health Channel for hours at a time?  This is not to say that I haven’t personally watched the same show a second time just because I wasn’t ready to turn off my favorite channel.  I have done this.  But it was grudgingly.
They replay the made-for-TV movie of my teenage drama at least once a month.  I know, I’ve signed up for an email alert so they tell me whenever “Three Hands in the Cradle: The Jill Baker Story” is going to be on.  On those days, I unplug the cable from the television.  I try not to think about that time if I don’t have to.  Of course, it always seems to be creeping back up on me. I mean, I know what the world thinks of me, I saw myself portrayed on television by Sara Ann Schwartz, who was nobody before she met me, but just recently became an Oscar-winning actress, I know that other people think I am ridiculous.  But even though I’d like to say that I don’t agree with them.  Some of the time, I do.
I stood in front of the photo that hadn’t moved from the top of Felicity’s television for the past ten years, the one of Barbara Walters, Felicity, my father, Bill, and me after she interviewed us for 20/20. In the photo, I am making this crazy contorted face because Dexter is kicking the shit out of me and they all have fake smiles.  At the time, I thought that Dexter was brilliant because he was clearly trying to tell me that Barbara Walters was a bitch.  We were all in awe of her then.  But clearly, we made a mistake.  Because when the interview aired on 20/20, she said in her intro that I was a troubled girl from a troubled family and then only showed clips of me being sullen and Felicity and Bill contradicting each other.  I wrote her a letter to tell her that she misrepresented us, but she never responded, someone in her office just sent us an autographed picture, which I ripped to shreds and left in the Porta-John behind my high school.
 I wasn’t going to let something like that happen again. I was going to lead a normal life now.  I wasn’t going to be the freak who had been all over the cable news at age eighteen.  That was why seeing Dexter on television made me so mad.  They were doing to him what had been done to me.  And he didn’t even know it was happening.  He was just a big, chubby, red-headed kid with a third arm.  He deserved more than that. I went to sleep that night with more hope than I had had in a long time.  I was going to make everything right.  I wasn’t sure how, but I knew I was going to do it.