Then you called again with more news. I’ll propose before I go, you said. What do you think?
I knew you weren’t asking for honesty, but I ignored this. Aren’t you a little young? I said. What’s the rush?
I’m not young, you said quickly. And what difference does it make, anyway. You were young.
That was different, I said, and you laughed at me.
I’ve found the person I want to marry, you said. Can’t you just be happy for me?
Afterward I called our parents and asked if it was productive to try to stop you. And did she understand your issues with money?
I think she understands him better than most, our mother said.
She’s a good girl, our father said.
I suppose a lot can happen in a year apart, I said.
* * *
YOU CALLED BACK the next day to ask if I’d help you pick out a ring. I was surprised that you hadn’t asked our mother, but this was an honor you’d bestowed upon me. So I drove home and picked you up and we stopped at three places on the east side of town.
No, no, no, you said, after each one I chose.
No, I said, when you examined the most expensive one in the case.
When you held the one you would buy, we became silent; I don’t think we’d expected the moment to feel as tender as it did, both of us looking poorly slept under the fluorescent light. You smiled at me and it was a nice moment between us, the nicest in a while. I told myself that maybe all of this, the proposal, the trip, the money, maybe it would all turn out fine. You paid and the ring was placed in a black velvet box and then we started the car back toward home.
You snapped the box open and shut the whole ride, looking again every few minutes, as if to make sure it was still there. Just when you’d nodded with approval and closed it, I’d catch you reexamining it.
What’s it like to be married? you asked me again.
* * *
WE HAD ALL PLANNED to spend a day at the beach and you decided this was the place to propose. Nervously we piled into the car, wound up Highway 1, and unloaded our coolers of snacks and drinks at a picnic table by the water. You threw around a Frisbee with your brother-in-law while the rest of us busied ourselves with blankets and chairs; our mother kept rearranging the crackers on the table until someone had to tell her to stop.
Finally you asked everyone if they wanted to take a walk. We nodded, feeling for the phones in our pockets. We began to make our way along the water like some ridiculous procession of ducks, the two of you up front with the rest of us tiptoeing behind. We walked so far and for so long that I began to wonder if you’d changed your mind, or if the bride had said something to give you cold feet. We turned around to whisper, tripping over one another’s bare feet, our words lost to the wind. Then all of a sudden you stopped and turned to her, and we stopped, our breath stopped, maybe even time stopped just for us, while we watched you get down on one knee.
Some moments are as beautiful as you’d expect. What a thing it was to see you there, your future bride with one hand to you and the other to her mouth, covering a thousand-yard smile. Our father and my husband swarmed you like the paparazzi, while our mother and I held back and stared. Tears were running down our mother’s cheeks, the wind pushing them sideways before they could fall straight down. When we came back to our picnic table our aunt had arrived and rounded up a few strangers from the beach to applaud your return. We toasted plastic cups of champagne with a host of warm, unfamiliar faces and wished you a long, happy life.
SHORTLY AFTER you came back from the mission trip, I moved from oral treatments to in vitro fertilization. I didn’t speak to you or see you. In some ways this made the time before seem amateur, as if now, with this procedure, I had finally become professionally barren, a joke your brother-in-law did not find funny; he had stopped laughing at these kinds of jokes. I was very lucky, my doctor said, and it was true: my insurance extended to these treatments when most companies excluded it; without it, each extraction could cost anywhere from six to twenty thousand dollars. I am very lucky, I said. I went through several cycles that involved new bills, new injections, new diets, anesthesia, and no drinking in a time when part of me longed for a beer more deeply than for a child. This is the part that began to haunt me: that the pain had blurred the desire. Do I still want this? I said only to myself, too ashamed to tell our mother, your brother-in-law, the newest secret I’d taken to carrying around. It seemed cruel at this point to be working so hard when there were already so many living, breathing, existing children in need of a parent, children I’d seen for myself. How did we get here? New decisions linked only to previous ones, wherever we last left off, route D if not route C if not route B, rather than to the longings of my body, my heart, which had become unknown to me. Not viable, the doctor said after the first cycle, then again for the second and the third. I know they’re in there, I told the doctor, conspiratorial; I’d seen them myself, spoken to them on the long walks home. The ones we’ve taken are not viable, he repeated, as if speaking to someone who needed things repeated.
* * *
IF THERE WAS ONE THING our mother hated more than anything, it was people telling her what a good thing she’d done. She was often answering to correlations between you and some kind of civic duty. How many people through the years lauded her for her service, how often she felt the tap on her shoulder at checkout, as if she’d spent a year in a war overseas rather than fighting the day-to-day battles of having a family at home.
What are they talking about? you’d say to her, sometimes loudly enough that the person could hear it, and only then would it occur to them that they’d said something strange, and they’d turn back to their cart with a shame that seemed to confuse them.
Sometimes people had the wrong ideas about adoption, our mother would go over again in the car. Sometimes it was hard for people to understand if they hadn’t experienced it themselves. About why people did things.
People never say the right thing about anything, you said once, after one of these episodes, and I remember looking at you from the front seat, because it was clearly an unshakable truth, and one I would return to as an adult.
Then our mother would say: You are my son because I wanted to be your mother. So if anything, I was terribly selfish.
Everyone should tell you you’re terrible instead, you would say, and she would say, Yes, probably they should, and the two of you would smile.
At the library one afternoon I found an extract from The Literary Digest’s April 8, 1916, issue, which quoted a Mrs. Charles F. Judson, maybe one of the first to figure out how to gratify white, infertile, middle-class women. She privately placed children out of her home in Philadelphia and had three hopes for her work:
First.—To make happy many empty and discontented homes, and thus, perhaps, to diminish the divorce-evil … So many people are bored with life who do not realize they are not leading a normal family life, since no family can be complete or normal without children and the happiness they bring.
Secondly.—To give the little ones a chance in life … Unless the spiritual part of a child is cared for, it may become a menace to the community, whereas with culture and training, it will become a joy.
Thirdly.—To give our country more of the best class of American citizens. Our forebears, through toil and struggle, often gained ideals, culture, refinement, and beliefs which have built up this nation … If a child is adopted and these ideas and beliefs passed down to it, we create another American citizen, guided by the same uplifting faiths as held and helped our forefathers.
Was it Angelina Jolie who did this to us? you would joke when you got older. Mia Farrow? Madonna? We’d come to acknowledge ourselves as a math problem in the face of strangers, but we couldn’t figure out who had made the look of us charitable. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker was one of the first celebrities to make a public statement about transracial families in the fifties, referring to her adoptive household of twelve as the “rainbow
tribe,” raising children from Korea, Japan, Finland, Colombia, North Africa, France, Venezuela, Morocco, and the Ivory Coast. On days when the family was at home in the Château des Milandes, tours were arranged so visitors could walk the grounds and witness how natural they’d find the scene.
As the aughts arrived, as our mother watched the life we’d been leading transform into celebrity trend, she looked away from stories that spoke of fame and money expediting the process. Five years, she told those who asked.
Even all those years later, when you were an adult, when the pictures left the magazines, when every set of famed parents had divorced, the words still flew back to her, like an old, loyal paper plane. A tap on her shoulder. What a wonderful thing you’ve done, they’d say.
And what have you inherited as an American?
* * *
ON OUR WORST DAYS with you growing up, our mother would say, I should never have taken him out of his country. She often worried that she had done you a disservice by bringing you here. She worried that it hadn’t been a wonderful thing at all.
Other days she would say: But he’s had a good life.
The poet Mary-Kim Arnold writes: As a Korean child growing up in a white family, in a white neighborhood, what I was aware of most was being conspicuous. Rarely did I go unnoticed. Unquestioned. But being visible is not the same as being seen.
Mrs. Charles Judson says: He shall have had a hand in the building of the nation and of the world.
Our mother wondered: Was love enough?
THE MORNING of your wedding I head down the hall to our mother’s room, where I find her pacing in the thin hotel robe that hangs in all of the closets. She tells me our father’s out pacing the grounds.
We have an hour before we meet the bride in her room, so I direct our mother to the bathroom mirror, where she begins winding the hot rollers into her hair, the ones she’s taken on every trip with her since the eighties. We replay the events from the previous evening at the rehearsal, the strangers who are cast to star together in a wedding. I tell her about the romance that seems to have sprung up between a groomsman and one of the bride’s cousins; I do not tell her about the guest who plucked a bottle from behind the bar before leaving, wedging it unsuccessfully in her purse.
How are you feeling? I’d asked you as the guests started to leave, and your bride answered for you.
You were nervous, she said, you didn’t like the attention. You offered a shrug as some sort of agreement.
I see, I said, and then felt a funny thing well up in me, as if I were supposed to acknowledge to your bride that she knew you better than I did.
I take a seat on the bathroom floor and look up at our mother as she applies her eyeshadow. Our hearts are preoccupied with simpler questions: who will drive the car, who will bring the rings, who will remember to take the flower girl’s petals out of the fridge. I read our mother the speech, and she interrupts to remind me to thank the bride’s side at the beginning, all the cousins and aunts and friends who have traveled. She writes THANK U BRIDE at the top of the page so I won’t forget, and I wonder if we’re all collectively feeling that in some way today. THANK U BRIDE for loving our son, our brother. THANK U BRIDE for promising to take care of him. I ask her if she thinks you’ll be happy with what I’ve written. Then our father comes in with three coffees and we sit there in the bathroom for a few minutes, drinking in the last few quiet moments of the day.
* * *
WHAT DO YOU THINK, you’d said, stepping out of the dressing room. Your brother-in-law and I were waiting on the couches of the Men’s Wearhouse, fearing the fate of our own outfits. We were six months out from the wedding by then, and this was only the second time I’d seen you since you’d come back from the mission trip.
Purple, your brother-in-law whispered, as you pulled back the curtain to reveal your suit.
You look like an eggplant, I said.
You frowned and studied the tag. It says “indigo gray,” you said, and looked at yourself again in the mirror. I think I look nice.
What if the groomsmen don’t wear the jackets? you conceded, after a moment. Just the pants and the matching vests?
Have you ever seen the California Raisins? I said, and your brother-in-law squeezed my knee. It’s your outfit, too, I whispered, examining the price tag, relieved that if anything it would at least be a rental.
Never heard of them, you said, keeping your eyes on the mirror. Somehow your bride was nowhere to be found, though I’m sure she would have only stuck up for you. I think it looks nice, you said again, and your reflection smiled.
Blue is also very nice on you, I said a little curtly.
Dark blue, your brother-in-law said.
You shrugged. Well, you two are older, anyway, you said.
So? I said.
Maybe when you have kids you’ll be more in touch, you said. You know, understand what’s good with the younger generation?
Then you looked at my face and frowned. What? you said. What did I say?
* * *
ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I went to visit a close friend who’d just had a baby. The scene in her apartment was harrowing: burp cloths and baby loungers and nipple pads lay like debris from a recent explosion. I’d heard that newborns slept a lot, but this one cried the entire visit, the noise prehistoric. I stared into its little red face, a lump of clay fixed into unhappiness, and tried to think of an honest compliment. Good strong lungs! I said.
The doctor said he would settle down in just a few more months, my friend explained loudly. I’d been there five minutes and the promise felt like a death sentence. I went home and opened a forbidden bottle of wine and drank it very quickly.
Recently, I went back to visit that friend. Her apartment was still a mess when I walked in, but I was shocked to find the creature gone; a little boy took his place on the couch.
He smiles with his whole face, I said, and this time I was a little in awe of him.
Ten months, she said, as the baby clutched the hair on her neck. And as I looked at that boy who was so in love with his mother, I realized I was thinking of you. He knew exactly who she was, this boy, who was about the same age as you when your life changed. Of course you had known who she was then, even if you couldn’t remember it now. That recognition was all I could see.
* * *
ZOOLOGIST KONRAD LORENZ studied this recognition while observing goslings following their mother through the wild. Immediately after hatching, he said, the birds’ neural system was programmed to attach to the first object they saw, imprinting, he called it, when young locked on to a mother’s characteristics. But it was later proved that this system can be fooled—studies showed lambs forming attachments to televisions, guinea pigs to wooden blocks, monkeys to cloth bundled into the rough outline of a simian mother. It wasn’t the most romantic argument for adoptive bonding, but wasn’t it an argument, nonetheless? That primal love could be reprogrammed, redirected?
* * *
YOU SHOULD CALL HIM, your brother-in-law said after the incident with the suit. Talk to him about what’s been going on with us.
Stay out of it, I said.
* * *
IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY, Holy Roman emperor Frederick II tried to determine the inborn language of mankind by raising a group of children without speech. Foster mothers and nurses were instructed to suckle, bathe, and wash the group of test children, but not to speak to them under any circumstances, so the emperor could witness whether the first words out of their mouths would be Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Arabic. But in the absence of sound, all the infants died before yielding any kind of linguistic result.
Centuries later, in the 1940s, psychoanalyst René Spitz described orphaned children raised in institutions who were fed and clothed, kept warm and clean, but were not played with or held to protect against exposure to infectious organisms. Spitz found that while the physical needs of the children were met, they soon became ill, withdrawn, and underweight. And in a strange twist, the infant
s became exceedingly vulnerable to the measles.
Spitz ended up publishing his findings with this central argument: For a child, love is necessary for survival. Could there really be a home without someone who welcomes you there?
But what about the more pressing question: Did it matter who that someone was?
* * *
LOVE ISN’T BOUND UP in food, said psychiatrist John Bowlby, the creator of attachment theory. He disagreed with Freud, who believed a baby’s first relationship with his mother focused mostly on her breast. Love is primary, Bowlby said, attachment is primary; we’re not conditioned to love merely because someone feeds us. We love certain people and we need them to love us back. His studies showed that as children became toddlers, this need only intensified. They grieved when their mother left them, they understood a loss. They wanted their mothers back.
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