Then, on July 10, after our two-week journey, the four of us packed up to leave. Ahead stood twenty-six hours of travel: a cab, three planes, an airporter bus, and another cab. We arrived home Sunday night and the house suddenly looked very different with you in it. You threw your first tantrum shortly after we walked in the door, beating your fists on the carpet.
OUR MOTHER KEPT a stack of adoption literature next to her bed, but it never occurred to me to read any of it as a kid. After a year of trips to the fertility clinic, I asked our mother if I could take some books home. I felt hungry for something austere and impersonal, but many of the texts were written by adoptive mothers for adoptive mothers, often glossy, self-published-looking things with clip art of the Madonna on the front. I opened one called The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child for about five minutes before using it as a leveler for our kitchen table.
So I went back to the library, back to some of the Victorians I loved, the books, you’d say, that you’d use as levelers for your table, and noticed the adoption plot shake out in two ways: (1) the adoptee repairs the state of the family, one broken by the biological children or lack thereof, e.g., the little blond angel who shows up on the doorstep of the town misanthrope in Silas Marner, or (2) the adoptee brings chaos and disaster to everyone around them, e.g., Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
In high school I was tortured by Heathcliff and Cathy’s romance but in rereading I was drawn to other things, like the first description of Heathcliff as he walked through the door: We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy’s head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.
Who had taught him to walk, I wondered. The effect was eerie. How different could life have been if he’d arrived as an infant on the stoop rather than a boy old enough to step over it. I watched Hindley, the biological son, with interest, threatened by the stranger first because of his father’s attention, then later because of the question of inheritance. It was strange to me that he was unable to see what was obvious, that Heathcliff could never fall heir to the estate, too cursed by a missing history. That he’d never end up with Cathy for the same reason.
And the names Heathcliff is called. Had I noticed this the last time I read it? Villain, it, devil, black, black villain, low ruffian, gipsy, unreclaimed, an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone, his countenance a bleak, hilly coal-country. I’d forgotten that he confesses to Nelly, the housekeeper, his longing for Edgar Linton’s light hair, fair skin, and blue eyes, to which Nelly tells him: Who knows, maybe you’re actually a prince in disguise. And who could have known this better than you, the way darkness casts it shadow across a white house, a white town, a white life. How you’d asked our mother if you looked like her with your matching brown hair and brown eyes. How you’d asked me if only blond boys were handsome. A peace finally dusts over the house in Heathcliff’s absence, only to dispel the moment he returns.
* * *
DICKENS’S FATHER was a government clerk who was imprisoned for debt, which sent Dickens to work in a blacking warehouse at the age of twelve, informing some of the experiences later depicted in David Copperfield. Sometimes reading him felt like an orphan house of mirrors; half the cast of Great Expectations was grappling with the loss of a first family, a history. There’s Pip, who renames himself as a child to something he can pronounce on his own, spending the first page of the novel describing the tombstones of his mother and father, the fundamental loss that sends the story on its way. Magwitch, the convict who later financially adopts Pip, is also an orphan who, long ago, named himself as Pip has, in the absence of parents to do it for him. Herbert’s wife, Clara Barley, has no mother and hardly any family, a situation from which Herbert is eager to free her. And of course there is the centerpiece of the book, the cold and beautiful ward Estella, adopted by Miss Havisham as a toddler. Estella does not, in her case, bring destruction to the Satis House—destruction already lives there—but instead transmits it back out to the world, intent on ruining all those who cross her path, Pip included. But there is an irresistible old hurt that binds them, traced back to childhood, maybe even an odd relief in each other, that seems to suspend beyond the novel’s last sentence.
I wondered when I read it if, in another life, one where you enjoyed reading books, you would feel struck by this connection. It’s no coincidence, perhaps, that your bride was, once upon a time, an orphan, too.
* * *
MANSFIELD PARK, Daniel Deronda, Doctor Thorne, Jane Eyre. Adoption symbolized disruption from a growing industrialism, one text reasoned. It aligned with a common Christian plot structure, said another, where characters were expelled from the Eden of the womb into isolation. But I found England’s nineteenth-century divorce legislation the more interesting argument. With family structures breaking down, questions billowed up around legal status for biological and adopted children, and all this inheritance anxiety clawed its way into the literature, in the way that it had with Heathcliff.
There was always poverty, too, and sex, scars left on people both real and imagined. If illegitimate children died without a husband or wife, their personal property passed to the Crown, even if they had been raised in a loving home. They could not take Holy Orders or hold any position of dignity in the Church. There was only one way a child could be legitimated and that was by an Act of Parliament.
* * *
BUT I KEPT COMING BACK to Heathcliff, to this primitivism projected onto the bodies of dark, fictional adoptees. The narrative stretched back as far as The Epic of Gilgamesh. Enkidu, coated in thick hair, who grazes with the gazelles, is more animal than man before he’s adopted by Gilgamesh’s mother. He weeps at the knowledge that he was born without family, and is grateful to be taken in, but his own rescue is not the purpose of his plotline: he’s been created by the gods to save the people of Uruk from King Gilgamesh’s tyranny, and ultimately to save Gilgamesh from himself.
Another feral adoptee appears in Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the Disney version you loved growing up. Mowgli appears hanging from a branch, just old enough to walk, when adopted by the family of wolves, who bring him to Council Rock to approve his assimilation into the pack. Eventually Mowgli is cast out both by the wolves in the jungle and the men in the village, even after killing the wicked Shere Khan. I am two Mowglis, he croons. My heart is heavy with the things that I do not understand.
The more I looked, the quicker I found the formula: a family either destroyed or fulfilled, the adoptee ornamenting a sameness or tamed by it, and in this way saved, but perhaps not for long. I thought again of our own family mythology, the way we described our first meeting. Out you walked from the doorway, powder swiped on your face to combat the lice, your frame shaky, unable to speak. This was the story we all participated in, you included, with love and fondness, with each anniversary, every birthday.
Is this not imperialist nostalgia at its best, bell hooks writes, potent expression of longing for the “primitive”? One desires “a bit of the Other” to enhance the blank landscape of whiteness. I underlined the question because it troubled me.
* * *
EVENTUALLY I PICKED UP The Primal Wound again and found myself reading it cover to cover. Our mother had underlined a sentence that said, The fact that the child does not consciously remember the substitution of mothers does not diminish the impact of that experience.
I stopped at the page that said, The people from whom the child steals are likely those whom he respects the most, and there is tremendous reluctance to return that which was stolen, for fear of being returned himself.
A later chapter stated the FIVE CARDINAL RULES FOR ADOPTIVE PARENTS:
NEVER THREATEN ABANDONMENT
ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR CHILD’S FEELINGS
ALLOW YOUR CHILD TO BE HIMSELF
DO NOT TRY TO T
AKE THE PLACE OF THE BIRTH MOTHER
YOU CANNOT TAKE AWAY YOUR CHILD’S PAIN
I studied the last cardinal rule. Were we capable of taking away our own?
THE NIGHT BEFORE your wedding I fall into strange, lucid dreams. In one, I’m birthing a baby in front of the wedding guests, the crowd watching from their seats; in another you’re yelling at me but keep mistaking me for our father, no matter how many times I correct you. In the last, three faceless people are walking you down the aisle; I assume it’s us until I notice that one has the head of Peaches, our old garage cat. She walks past me and says, I persssssssonally would have done things differently. I spit at her, because I’m certain she means the flowers.
* * *
THERE ARE SEVEN INSTANCEs of infertility over the Bible’s six thousand years, all attributed to women, all of whom conceive sons with the help of God, with the exception of Michal, the first wife of David, who is thought to have died childless. One Sunday in church with our mother, I hear the story of Elkanah and his two wives, Peninnah and Hannah. Every year, Elkanah would go to sacrifice to the Lord at Shiloh, and on the day when he sacrificed, he would give portions to Peninnah and all of her children, but to Hannah he gave double, because he loved her, even though the Lord had closed her womb.
Peninnah, in her cameo, sounded terrible. She provoked Hannah, reminding her that the Lord had closed her womb, as if Hannah needed reminding. So it went on year after year, with Peninnah’s cruelty and Hannah still with no children of her own. Hannah wept and would not eat.
Elkanah said to her, Hannah, why do you weep? Why don’t you eat? Why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?
One year Hannah decided to go to Shiloh herself, the first woman in scripture to petition the Lord directly. She prayed and wept bitterly. Eli the priest came across her as she prayed and, in seeing her lips moving soundlessly, assumed she was drunk.
How long will you make a spectacle of yourself? Eli said. Put away your wine.
But Hannah told him she was a woman deeply troubled. She had not been drinking but pouring out her soul. She asked not to be regarded as worthless, she had only been speaking out her great anxiety.
Then Eli answered, Go in peace, may God grant the petition you have made to him.
They rose early in the morning and worshipped before the Lord; then they went back to their house at Ramah. Elkanah knew his wife, and the Lord remembered her. In time Hannah conceived and bore a son, whom she named Samuel.
* * *
AFTER OUR LUNCH together in the city, something turned for me on the clomiphene treatments. The world became colorless: gray buildings, gray skies, gray trees, as if a plane had crop-dusted the city. This often changed with the dosage; some weeks it turned the world Technicolor instead, bright with rage and injustice, the saturation stinging my eyes. Words were poor indicators of feelings: manic, sad, hopeless, jealous. All insufficient. When I heard this passage from Samuel with our mother, a story meant to provide a happy ending, I heard only the words and the Lord remembered her. I almost stood up and screamed: What had she done to be forgotten???
* * *
WHAT’S IT LIKE to be married, you’d asked me, and I never considered how the answer might change. How children had begun to materialize in restaurant windows, spill out from bathrooms, appear behind the library shelves. How trains were filled with pregnant women, creatures I often watched with reverence rather than envy. It wasn’t just that they had passed through to the other side, where purgatory would not release me; I was struck, too, by how they took up space, gorgeously, flagrantly, hand on their stomach like a queen with her scepter. Make way, there’s a pregnant lady! passengers would yell, and I’d wonder if they could just step right through me, my own body waifish, a ghost.
I never considered how guilt could creep through a home. Instead of drawing closer to my husband, the guilt grew between us, because I couldn’t let go of the saddest reversal of all: that his goodness, which I had held dear for so long, was now wasted only on me. I wondered if when I first met him, twenty-four and motherhood far from my mind, some part of me had inevitably assessed how his looks might fuse with mine. How his kindness would transfer to more versions of me. Maybe it’s not possible to fall in love without this biological valuation of future assets. Though if this were true, then what did he see in me now?
One evening I came home from work and walked into the room we used as an office. I sat on the pullout couch we’d bought for friends and faced him while he sat at his desk. I said the words I’d been rehearsing, that I was tired, that it had become too much, that I needed a break from the feeling that ran through my body, a certainty that I’d been forgotten, passed over, another pained woman taken for a drunk.
How long? he said.
I looked out the window, where a breeze passed through the sweet gum trees. I knew what he was thinking, how long it would be before I’d want to stop entirely and because I didn’t know the answer to that either I said nothing. Instead I sat with the silence between us and wondered if, at one point, the two of us actually would have been enough. I heard Martha’s line just before the lights dim. Just … us?
* * *
WE SPENT ONE WEEKEND researching foster and adoption agencies during that break. I thought of how different the process might have looked for our parents as I reviewed the search filters online, with options to sort based on age, race, sex, number of children, or children whose profiles included a video. The fact that I could do this felt both convenient and questionable. It seemed that this method, so far from the experience of pregnancy, should have at least attempted to mirror it, simulating a mixture of chance and fate rather than customization. Instead it was the kind of tailored consumer experience we’d come to expect from the internet, the same demands that filled my workweek. But I also felt a tenderness I hadn’t expected as we scrolled through, the smiles either large or awkward; I found myself looking for your frown. I clicked on a few of the children’s profiles, which noted their hobbies, their respect for adults, their good attitude despite life’s challenges. Most profiles either ended or began with the words X is looking for a forever family, a phrase that stayed with me long after the memory of most of the faces disappeared.
I never told our parents this, but I called one of the agencies the following week, spoke to a woman whose voice was gentle. She said that the next step would be to register our family online and then attend the mandatory training workshops.
Do you know about the home-studies process? she asked, and your brother-in-law looked at me as we sat there on speaker and she explained how a social worker would come to our home, ask us questions, take notes. How once we passed we could be matched with a child and from there be on our way to adoption.
* * *
ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, not long after, our father showed up at my apartment, unannounced. It was midafternoon and I was in my robe.
What are you doing here? I said, and our father actually took a step back from the door. Sorry, I said. Come in.
Our father moved quietly past me, standing with his hands in his pockets in the middle of my living room.
You can sit, I said.
I don’t think I’ll stay, he said.
I don’t know what our mother would have done if it had been her there with me. I just know that our father ran his eyes over the living room, saw the books spread out on the couch, the coffee table, the floor, the paperwork from your box. He asked what I was reading and I told him the truth: a case study about an adoptee from Ukraine who began to threaten his adoptive mother with a knife.
Our father put his hands on my shoulders and said, Get dressed. So I took off my robe and put on my jacket and shoes and then our father walked me three times around the neighborhood. We looked up at the trees and though it saddened me to see them in bloom, the breeze seemed to air out my insides. I thought of how many mornings I’d woken to the sound of his luggage, the keys in his pocket, and run out of bed to catch him, begging t
o go with him. I asked if he remembered this.
You wore me down, he said. We spent that terrible night in Dallas.
Was it terrible?
You did homework in a conference room all day, and then the two of us went straight to dinner.
I don’t remember the dinner.
That was the best part. We expensed everything.
I just remember it was during the tantrums. The day was a vacation.
Not for your mother, he said. Alone with your brother and you missing school. But you’re right, you seemed as happy as anything.
I wanted to tell him what else I remembered. That in the morning I’d packed all the little soaps in my suitcase, and from the plane the brown hills of our county seemed to place us in the context of something much larger. I wanted to tell him that what I remembered later, when he would leave again, was not how hard life could be on the road, or the burden of financial responsibility, but the way he could exit when the rest of us couldn’t, pulled up into the sky where the problems of a house looked so small. I wanted to tell him that maybe you were right, that I’d taken a job like his so that, on a moment’s notice, I could leave home behind.
* * *
I WENT BACK on the Clomid, its function to increase the hormones that supported the growth and release of a mature egg. Month after month I would return for my ultrasound, squinting at the follicles on the screen while the nurse measured: right ovary, three millimeters, six millimeters; left ovary, seven millimeters, eight. At twenty millimeters the shot would be injected into my abdomen to induce ovulation but this time I couldn’t seem to get any follicles to audition for the lead role. More pills, more hopes, more months, another trip for the ultrasound. Grow, little guys, grow, I would catch myself saying while I walked home, sometimes tenderly, sometimes not. My lips would move with the repetition, like a madwoman, like a drunk.
Immediate Family Page 7
