Double Name

Double Name Maria (S) Turner (bio) But there had been a mixup the night of the dinner party seven years earlier, and Sachs had never properly understood who Maria Turner was. Leviathan, by Paul Auster It was only when my sister threatened to call her unborn child Maria that I realized I had a singular attachment to my name. Having someone named after you is usually considered a tribute, something to be proud of, but I didn't like the idea of there being two of us in the family. It would be confusing, I explained to everyone but my sister. But my discomfort went deeper than that. Maria Turner (my niece would carry my last name as well as her own) was my name, and although I didn't know exactly what that meant, I wasn't ready to share. When I was in elementary school, I didn't like my name. My initials, M.T., if you said them fast enough, sounded like "empty." There was no convenient way to shorten Maria—I was occasionally called Mary or Marie (both of which I hated) or, in the sanctity of the playground, "Maria diarrhea" or "Maria pa pee ah," called out in the singsong of childish insults. But I think the worst moment came when I discovered Great Aunt Maria Turner—the feared great aunt of Nancy and Peg, the heroines of Arthur Ransome's The Picts and the Martyrs. "Is she very awful?" asks a friend of Nancy and Peg's when first apprised of a threatened visit from the Great Aunt. "She jolly well is," replies Nancy, who goes on to explain that when the G.A. is around, she makes the girls wear their best frocks, learn poetry, and "be seen and not heard and all [End Page 91] that sort of rot." What did that say about me, I wondered, that I had the same name as such a terrible woman? In 1970s Vancouver, there was no reassurance to be found among my peers. There was a Sarah, a Susan, a Jill, a Karen, and a Rohan (pronounced Rowan), but no Marias. Nor did I have a middle name to turn to. Unlike many other children who had a slew of names to choose from, I just had a first name and a last. My parents had both been saddled by middle names and decided that they would not complicate the lives of their children. We were to have no such appendages. My British father complained that his signature was too long (even I had to admit that Roy Henry George Turner was a bit of a mouthful), and my Argentine mother (first name Elsa) eventually hinted she didn't like her middle name, Lucrecia, because of its association with the murderous Borgias. As far as they were concerned, they had done us a favor. I stayed plain old Maria Turner until 1982, when at age 15 I was given an additional name. It was not, however, Suzie or Sandy or any of the names I had dreamt of as a ten-year-old. After my parents' divorce had been settled, my mother decided to reclaim her maiden name, Schamis. Unhappy that she no longer shared a surname with her children, she added her maiden name to ours to maintain the family ties. I became Maria Schamis Turner. "Shamus?" people asked. "As in detective?" My mother kept up the battle—"Schaaamis," she would insist, "not shamus"—but I eventually stopped giving out my middle name and pared it down to the S. As I grew older, I discovered the name Maria had a certain international cachet that I was only vaguely aware was associated with its being a good Catholic name. There were Italian Marias, Greek Marias, Spanish Marias, and, as I discovered when I received an incomprehensible phone call from my Polish dentist, even Polish Marias. However, I couldn't shake a certain feeling of being an imposter when it came to my Maria-ness. "Where are you from?" I was asked when working in a Portuguese bar in Montreal. "Vancouver," I would reply. "No, where are you really from?" was the standard response...

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