In truth, I knew what disruption felt like in a house, how it stayed with you even after you left. I remembered how the world transformed with you, and I wasn’t sure if the two fears belonged to each other. I wasn’t sure if this had been the root of the resistance all along. It began to eclipse so much of my thoughts that finally one morning I went to the doctor in secret, suddenly starved for the cold, objective truth of a medical professional.
I told her I was scared about what a baby would do to my body, my life. I told her lately all I dreamed of was babies, and in the dreams I was happy, but when I woke I found myself steeped in sweat. And instead of telling me it was all right, that I was a normal person, which I realized halfway through was the reason I’d paid to come, she told me I should prepare to be patient, for women like me who have follicles on their ovaries the process could be arduous. Arduous, she repeated, after my question. She reminded me there were always other options. Would I consider other options?
* * *
YOU AND I HAD DINNER the day of that appointment. This was four years ago, and you must have been living in Reno. You were visiting our parents in Petaluma and had driven into San Francisco to see me. I asked where you wanted to go and you said California Pizza Kitchen, and I said we could go someplace nicer but you said you liked their barbecue chicken pizza, that there was a shortage of good barbecue chicken pizza where you lived.
We were getting along well in those days; there was no wedding yet, no talk of you returning to Thailand. You were working hard to get your degree but as usual all you wanted to discuss was girls. You usually preferred your brother-in-law’s advice but since he couldn’t make it that night you were stuck with mine. I listened until finally you said, What’s your problem, anyway?
Problem?
I drove over an hour to get here and I can’t tell if you’re pissed to see me.
I’m not pissed to see you.
Are you mad that we came to California Pizza Kitchen?
This made me laugh, and then your face softened but only a bit. I sat back in our booth and for a moment I considered it: I’d told you when relationships had ended, when I’d been laid off, when I was worried about your brother-in-law or our parents, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to tell you the truth. Somehow I couldn’t just say, plainly and without much consequence: Danny, I think I want to be a mother and today someone told me it might not be possible.
Instead I said: I’m glad you came. I’m just stressed about work, no big deal.
Why? you said, and you meant it.
Boring stuff, I said, and waved over the waitress for another beer for me and a Coke for you. I asked you to tell me again about the girl you were seeing now, and you pulled out your phone to show me a picture.
* * *
OUR MOTHER AND FATHER began researching the adoption process in 1989, as you’ve been told many times, when I was four years old. Adopting domestically was out of the question; it could cost upward of thirty thousand dollars and they couldn’t afford it. So for roughly two years our parents searched; they were both over forty years old at this point and many countries were closed to them because of it. They looked in Central and South America, but in many instances the adoptive family was required to stay in the child’s home country for weeks before they had clearance to leave with their new baby. You were also expected to grease some palms down there, according to our father. China hadn’t opened up yet; South Korea had shut down its adoption process after Bryant Gumbel called it a baby factory during the 1988 Olympics. One afternoon our father received a phone call from his old college roommate and the advice was brief: consider Thailand. I hear you can have a child in six months.
But then: three more years of waiting. Our father was laid off, sending the three of us from the East Coast to Petaluma, California, where we lived with our aunt for close to a year. I remember swimming in the outdoor pool of the neighborhood complex at Christmas and thinking how wonderful this was. I didn’t realize that more bad news had come: California law required our parents to do most of the adoption paperwork and in-person screenings all over again. They were transferred to another adoption agency, which, once we moved out of our aunt’s house and into the small rental on the west side, began the process of sizing us up.
First thing, a social worker began visiting us at the house. We welcomed Rosemary Pascal into our living room wearing our finest—our mother and I in long floral-print dresses, our father in his one sweater-vest—and introduced ourselves with trembling hands. I hadn’t known to feel nervous until the doorbell rang and I watched all the color leave our mother’s face. Our father went to answer the door, and unsure of what to do, our mother and I followed. We all stood there a little strangely for a moment, smiling at the visitor on our doorstep, until our father remembered to invite her in. Our parents had done these screenings before, but maybe the prospect of rejection seemed scarier now because they were even older, with fewer alternatives. Our mother had put out cookies but I was the only one who ate them while Rosemary asked me about school and hobbies, questions I returned with ease. It wasn’t until she asked if I wanted to be a sister that I looked at our parents, afraid that there was something wrong in the question. Of course, I remember saying, a little irritated. I don’t know if my mom and dad have told you, but we’ve already waited so long.
Rosemary took some notes and it occurred to me that maybe the baby wouldn’t come because of what I’d said. How was I supposed to know the stakes for this meeting were so high? Why had nobody told me? I held back tears on the couch while our mother remained pallid and our father navigated Rosemary’s questions about his recent unemployment, crossing and uncrossing his feet.
Danny, if you could have only seen us. We must have looked like the unhappiest family in the world. There was so much I didn’t know about our parents’ money problems, work concerns, but they never wanted you in order to fill a hole. When our father would come home from his new job, our mother and I would run to the door to greet him, singing yay yay yay. This is what I knew. We had a good life. We wanted you to be a part of the happy thing we had going, despite the money, the moves, the jobs, the waiting.
* * *
SHORTLY AFTER THAT DINNER at California Pizza Kitchen, I started going to a fertility clinic in San Francisco, not far from my office, passing long mornings in the waiting room. Despite high infertility rates among nonwhite groups, and less research on the issues affecting those demographics, the waiting room reflected another truth: it was white, upper-class women who had access to medical interventions or, as in my case, women with health care that actually considered reproductive health.
A fuller portrait of longing was often found in the forums online. There definitions of womanhood weren’t limited to having a working womb or having a womb at all. Women pooled recommendations for Black OBs; others asked about doctors who were LGBTQ friendly. There no one called IVF a tool of the patriarchy; often we wondered where the feminists were when it came to us. Instead we could try to put words to the force field that surrounded mothers, whereas we were unsexed, sites of a hollow desire, of an unnatural, scientific labor rather than a God-given one. I participated in these conversations and I didn’t; they weren’t a utopian escape. People fought in the forums, they corrected and insulted one another, they contested milder forms of sadness, and problems presented often remained unsolved. But talk was open and there was compassion: we wept and hoped for those we’d never meet, those who vanished once success found them. It was just that the waiting room was lonelier. In person we avoided each other’s eyes.
I used to think that a fertility clinic would be the kind of place where women cried while they waited on the couches for their names to be called. But most of us waited for our names just as we wait for the bus. Once a man came in with his girlfriend and looked at us waiting-room women as if we were contagious, as if he were going to start his period on the way home. This may be the reason I always preferred to come alone. I liked the feeling that w
e were all banded together against something while we waited, even in our silence.
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, Barthes writes.
Sometimes while we’d wait I’d hear the nurses’ laughter in the background and think, why not share the joke? I felt like telling them: those of us out here can appreciate a joke as much as anyone. But then I remembered that there are people in this world who want you to be a little bit apart, as you know. They want to know, I suppose, that they’re safe from the things about you that scare them.
* * *
WHILE I WAITED, sometimes I thought of you. I thought about how secrets change. When your brother-in-law and I first started trying for a child, it felt like the most exotic secret we’d ever made together, second only to falling in love, and we carried it around for weeks, holding it as close as a child itself.
When the weeks of trying turned into months, the secret suddenly felt too heavy to keep; I told our parents and one or two close friends. I didn’t have the strength to air it out to everybody, though seeing it written here that doesn’t appear entirely true. I don’t know why I held it so close for so long, if it was shame over my body or maybe just over my desire, that yearning for a typecast role was reductive. I began to wonder again, as I once had, if my life would be better without children. Why else would my body turn against me. Why else had it become a broken thing?
* * *
I WASN’T SUPPOSED TO DRINK once the treatments began, which ruled out the bars. And I’d lost interest in walking downtown after work, galleries and bookstores replaced by new businesses, all named after sounds that a baby might make. Kaggle. Zynga. Digg. Hadoop. So I started going to the library a few times a week in the evenings, walking up Market Street to San Francisco’s main branch.
Sometimes I would hear you as I sat there reading, reminding me of the night you turned twenty-one. Here was your sister, late to the family dinner again because she couldn’t decide on a gift, and ended up at the bookstore, circling for an hour. She finally decided on The Catcher in the Rye because it was one of the first books our father had given her, and she remembered how significant it’d felt at the time, some rite of passage that signaled she was ready for a world with drinking and prostitutes, so different from the one that she knew. She hadn’t known that books or the world could look like that, or sound like that. Catholic school had not provided that narrative.
When she presented the gift to you back at the house you looked at the wrapping and frowned. Really? you said, without even opening it, the hurt genuine. Do you know me at all?
* * *
MY HUSBAND AND I were young when we met in graduate school, filled with a kind of romantic impatience, waiting for life to get on its way. It made all the days drag and sparkle. We went for a drink after class and when he asked how old I was I answered, Almost twenty-five. Almost twenty-five when, he said, and I winced and told him. That’s nine months from now, he said, smiling. Yes, I said, gulping my drink.
Sometimes when I picked up books from young writers at the library, I’d want to tear all the pages, chew them, and spit them out. Get a job! I would tell the characters. Money and blood never seemed to concern them, how they’d eat, where they came from. Maybe the more time passed, the more fictional old selves became. Maybe they revealed the same person years later. Or maybe I’m still recovering from the idea that I won’t become any of the characters I’d once hoped, having grown into a career at one of the city’s tech companies instead, the kind I used to complain about. That first job was meant to be temporary, but that was many years ago now.
How do I still not get what you do? you’d said.
The more important you are the harder it gets to explain your work.
You’re not that important, you said. Come on. In five words or less.
So I explained it to you, first in five words, then in ten.
Huh, you said.
Does that actually help?
Yeah, you said. But it makes me a little sad for you.
* * *
IN THE BEGINNING I traveled for work because I enjoyed it, and later because it was easier for me than for my boss; without children I could quickly pick up and go. When I would call you at airports or while waiting for a cab—all the pockets of time one fell into while traveling—you would ask if my life was getting fancy and I would correct with the reality of the scene. I ate alone every night. I forgot to pack underwear again. The flight was delayed and the thing that I came for didn’t go through. Like Dad, you would say, the comparison always surprising me. And we’d remember together how he would come home after a week away and we’d swarm him with the small details of our days, unconcerned with where he’d been, what had happened to him.
* * *
EVEN WHEN YOU GREW into a man’s body, I always carried that inch or two over you; I always had to look down to consider you. I also had those nine long years before you turned up, which I’m still not sure you’ve forgiven me for.
Nine years was a long time to be an only child, though, and perhaps not something to be envied. Childhood didn’t pass as quickly without the slick surface of chaos; being an only child was mostly a waiting game. There was time to settle into oneself, to become accustomed to the quiet, to learn to talk to myself under my breath. Solitude, great inner loneliness, Rilke writes. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours … Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child. I don’t recall being lonely. Only lately have I thought about who I became in all those free hours of childhood, building up a quiet little island from books, population one, a place where you could never reach me. Our mother began reading to me early on and language became the bridge between us. If I was hit with a rumble of anger or need or hurt or confusion, I was instructed by our mother to explain why that was. I never considered the enormous advantage in all these things until you came, when I was left to imagine an entirely different kind of silence, so different from the one I knew. To be three years old and have no words or expressions to draw from, minimal Thai, no English. I don’t need to explain to you how deeply the first few years of our life affect the outcome, tracing the ghostly shape of who we’re destined to be or who we’ll hardly escape.
I had spent those early years in a home you would never know, a small one-story far from California’s dry climate, with a pond in the backyard and green carpet in my bedroom, a house that, shortly after we left it, was demolished and replaced with something much larger. But back then, the heat rose up from the floors and in winter I associated the mornings with bare feet on the embers of the kitchen tile. In the summer, fireflies would blink in the backyard and the house would fill with the scent of cut grass. And in the front our father planted our first Christmas tree, whose bottom branches we decorated every December.
It was there in that little home where I grew alongside the anticipation of you, imagining a sibling at four, five, six. In the beginning I could hardly wait, asking our parents again and again when a sibling would come, until eventually expectancy became so common that I no longer felt compelled to ask. But I never feared or dreaded your arrival, and this is truth, because in my naivety I didn’t think it would change anything. I pictured our life with you as an extension of what already existed. Back then it felt like the three of us against the world in the long fight to get to you.
So we were bound by that little house, we were bound by wait and process, and of course we were bound by the body, too. Adrienne Rich describes the connection between mother and daughter as a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies. This knowledge lived in the comfort I took in our mother’s body: her lap, her neck, her hair, her hands, her voice, the ears that announced themselves when she pulled up her hair. It was an ownership I felt, in the way a child would show an adult her room, with the confidence that each object inside it was hers to touch, to test, to name, to hold close to her chest while she slept. This knowledge extended to our father, too, because
in his body I found proof of myself: there, marked up all over him, were my fingernails, the curls that wound around the base of my neck, sense of humor, legs, that miraculous alchemy of nature and nurture that continued to bloom. A parent could spend a whole life in fear or admiration, depending on the work nature had done.
* * *
SOMETIMES IN THE WAITING ROOM I’d think about which secrets became acceptable to keep. I still hadn’t told you about the treatments, and I’d think about how or why that had happened, as if it were a decision separate from me. For a while I told myself it was because I was the older sibling and didn’t need to burden you. But there was the other part, too, all this work being done to modify my body, all the shots and pills and routine ultrasounds, structures put in place to prevent or prolong what might be the next question.
Hypocrite, I would imagine you saying, reminding me of the health scare our father once kept from us. I often thought about that in the waiting room. How we were both moved out and grown, both furious. How after a final positive report from the doctors and a few glasses of wine, he announced the good news to us one evening over dinner. No special occasion had brought us together—you were driving through town on your way to see a girl, and your brother-in-law and I had joined at the last minute to see you. Maybe it was the spontaneity of our meeting that made the news that much stranger, or perhaps it would have felt strange either way. Six months? I said, ignoring his relief. You lied for that long? You looked at our father and said nothing.
Immediate Family Page 2
