Choosing Sophie

by Leslie Carroll

  I don’t remember which I did first—called Tessa again with the bad news or downed a double scotch. Maybe I threw up. I know I did all three of those things in fairly rapid succession.

  And then I phoned Cap Gaines to tell him Marty had called his bluff.

  I’m sure I made quite the picture when I rang the Ashes’ doorbell the following day. I’d gotten no sleep, my eyes looked like they’d been made up by a raccoon, and I was having a killer bad hair day. Fabulous first impression. Having caught a glimpse of myself in daylight via my rearview mirror, I pulled over into a gas station on the Hutchison River Parkway and dashed into their grotty ladies room, where I’d tried to mask the dark circles with more cover-up and tame my mop of frizzy red tangles. My nerves remained frazzled, however, and there was no cure for that that wouldn’t have gotten me busted for a DUI.

  I turned onto East Garden Street and stashed my MapQuest directions in the glove compartment. The Ashes lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a lovely stuccoed Tudor with a fieldstone porte cochere. Elegant but unpretentious. A good start. So this is where my—our—daughter grew up. I stood outside and admired the house, with its modest sloping lawn planted on either side with hedgerows and borders of tiger lilies. Someone was a very attentive gardener. I inhaled several cleansing breaths of air. It was only twenty miles or so north of Manhattan, but it sure smelled good up here.

  Well…

  And yet of course I was vastly curious to meet the people who had raised my little girl. Their little girl, too, I guess.

  The Mother meets the Parents. Yikes!

  I took another deep breath and used the large brass door knocker—a lion’s head—to announce my arrival. There was a scurrying of footsteps just inside—from both two-and four-legged creatures, and the door was flung open.

  “Well hello!” the Ashes chorused, enormous smiles plastered on their faces. Their golden retriever’s nose immediately made a beeline for my crotch. How embarrassing is that?

  Sophie took me by the hands, after scolding the dog, and pulled me into the foyer. “I’m so glad you came!” she said. Though she, too, seemed very upbeat, I could see in her eyes that she was as nervous as I was. Thank God for a kindred spirit.

  “Livy—I want you to meet my mom and dad—this is Glenn. And this is Joy.”

  Her parents both reached to shake my hand at the same time, and laughed nervously over the synchronicity. My first reaction was that they were shorter than I’d imagined them. Sophie towered over Joy, a petite brunette with a pert pageboy. I pegged her at about five years my senior. Glenn was in his mid-fifties, about five-ten, with a sturdy athletic build. Clearly confident in his masculinity, he sported a Clarendon Kumquats baseball cap.

  “Welcome—welcome to Larchmont,” Glenn said, pumping my hand. He had to glance up to look me in the eye. “We’re very proud of our little seaside village. We may not be as grand as New York City, of course, but did you know that Lou Gehrig lived here?”

  “Baseball. All you ever think of is baseball,” Joy jested, an uncomfortable kernel of truth concealed behind her laugh.

  “And softball!” Sophie chimed in. She turned to me and grinned. “I’m a Daddy’s Girl!”

  “That you are, sweetie,” Joy said musically. “Hon, would you put those tapes away, please.” Joy gestured to a stack of videocassettes strewn across the coffee table in their den. “He and Sophie were watching some of her game tapes last night; Glenn has every softball game she ever played on VHS.” She gestured to an expansive pseudo-colonial entertainment center, its cabinets flanked by carved mahogany pilasters. There must be hundreds of cassettes in there.”

  “Don’t exaggerate, Mom. Dozens. Not hundreds.”

  “Well, several dozen are a couple of hundred, and that’s hundreds,” Joy replied cheerfully.

  They all seemed so normal, with their GAP jeans and shrine to Sophie—and then there were all the trophies and laminated plaques that adorned the fieldstone mantelpiece—and their chirpy dispositions that felt utterly genuine. What a freak they must have thought I was—I who’d spent my adult lifetime under the hot lights wearing little else but spangles and sequins and feathers, I who knew nothing of Little League and PTA meetings and senior proms and tussles over curfews.

  “Come, Olivia, let me give you the nickel tour,” Joy said. “Oh, hon, weren’t you going to serve Bloody Marys?”

  “Whoops!” Glenn jumped to his feet. “C’mon, kiddo,” he said to Sophie, “come out and help me pick the secret ingredient.” He winked at me. “We use fresh tomatoes. Joy’s just a wizard in the garden. Give her anything, she can make it grow.”

  Glenn and Sophie headed outside, while Joy beckoned to me to follow her, proudly showing me their kitchen first—a room so vast you could have shot a cooking show in there. I’ve seen entire apartments in Manhattan that were smaller. “This is Glenn’s domain. He’s the chef around here. He’s right that I can grow just about anything; but I’m not very good at doing anything with it once it’s picked, whether it’s a tomato, a peach, a petunia, or a pound of beef.” She laughed nervously. “We like it,” she said, as if she assumed I didn’t. “It’s homey, don’t you think?”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said truthfully. “I’m not the greatest cook myself, but I’d kill for a kitchen with this much space.”

  “This is really my sphere,” Joy said, leading me into a mullion-windowed solarium. Dominated by a drafting table, the room was filled with high-end art supplies, including a couple of standing easels. A set of expensive calligraphy nibs rested beside an inkwell.

  “So I understand you…danced.” Joy’s voice expressed curiosity, though her eyes conveyed value judgment.

  “Yes, I did. I found it to be a tremendous lesson in anthropology,” I replied.

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “The male of the species—ours, I mean—is a fascinating animal.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Joy said. “Glenn and I were high school sweethearts.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “He was my first. And only.” Her smile was the one of a woman who was truly happy. Though I envied Joy her joy, I found that I couldn’t dislike her.

  Joy broke the awkward silence, changing the subject. “I don’t know if Sophie told you that I run my own business. I like to tell people that I write for a living.” She chuckled at her own pun. “They usually think I’m an author or a journalist, and then—oh, I’m like George Washington and the cherry tree; I cannot tell a lie—I admit that I handwrite. I’m a calligrapher. Wedding invitations, ketubahs—you know, when Jewish people get married, they have these fancy wedding contracts—it’s very lovely…and lucrative.” Joy giggled like a schoolgirl, and I glimpsed the young girl Glenn must have been smitten with twenty-five years earlier. There was something still vaguely childlike about her; something somehow unfinished. Suddenly, I wanted to protect her. Both she and Sophie seemed to lack the armor so necessary to guard against predators.

  “You know I wasn’t sure how I felt about it when Sophie told me she’d met you.” Joy’s forced cheer had evanesced; her expression was one of dead seriousness. “When she told me she wanted to find you, of course I couldn’t say no. All the books tell you it’s a bad idea to dissuade an adoptee—I mean now that she’s really an adult. If she’d wanted to find you when she was ten, I can’t say I would have encouraged it. But she’s over eighteen, and she needs to do what she needs to do, I guess. Sophie’s very strong willed. I guess she gets that from Glenn.”

  Or me, I was thinking.

  There was a rap on the open door. “Hey-ho, anybody home?” Glenn poked his head in the room. “Bloody Marys for all who are over twenty-one.”

  “Hey, no fair!” Sophie protested. “It’s a special occasion.”

  “And you’re still under the legal drinking age,” I said, but immediately zipped my lip when I realized I probably should have let her parents deal with her request for a cocktail.

  Sophie pouted. “It’s only v
egetable juice—with a little Tabasco.”

  “And a lot of vodka,” Glenn said. “And the answer is still no.”

  “God, you guys—you’re really embarrassing me in front of Livy. It’s not like I drink or anything. I just wanted one because, I mean, how often do all your parents have brunch together for the first time?”

  I was ready to relent at this argument, but Joy’s disapproving face checked my inclination.

  “It’s still a no, slugger,” she said.

  I never quite thought of calling Sophie “slugger.” Still, I hadn’t been around when she first developed a passion for America’s pastime, so maybe she didn’t mind it.

  “I hate it when you guys call me slugger.” Sophie extricated herself from Glenn’s embrace and hugged Joy. “But I guess old habits die hard.”

  “It’s hard to teach your father new tricks,” Joy said apologetically.

  Sophie grinned. “It was you who said it, Mom.”

  Joy shrugged. “So I’m an old dog, too.” She looked over at me. “We all are, I guess.”

  I plastered a smile between my cheeks. “You won’t find an ally in me, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, you dress so youthfully, I’m sure the other mourners at August deMarley’s memorial mistook you two for sisters.”

  This was not intended to be a compliment. Sophie and I exchanged a look.

  “So, what’s for brunch?” she asked, pouncing on the words.

  “Your dad’s making omelets. I hope you eat eggs,” Joy said to me. “I’m sorry, I just assumed.”

  “I don’t eat eggs, Mom,” Sophie said, a note of disgust creeping into her voice. “But no one asked me.”

  “Sweetheart, you barely eat anything breakfasty,” Joy replied good-naturedly. “There’s some fresh fruit in the fridge, Ms. Vegan.”

  “W-when did you tell Sophie she was adopted?” I asked, looking at my napkin, afraid to make any direct eye contact.

  “When she was seven,” Glenn said as Sophie emerged from the refrigerator with a banana.

  “She had an assignment for school. Second grade. To make a family tree,” Joy added. And I remember debating with myself as we worked on it whether to tell her that she could add a couple more branches—more than that, really, if you included the parents of her birthparents, too. But I bit the bullet and I told her. Soph, do you remember what your reaction was?”

  Our daughter chuckled as she peeled her banana. “Yeah, I asked you, ‘Does that mean I get twice as many birthday presents?’”

  “God bless whom-or whatever—God, I guess—that she was such a well-adjusted kid,” Glenn said. “You know, we read a lot about the behavioral, I dunno, psychoses, of adoptees, but Sophie didn’t seem to manifest any of what we read, Joy and I. The books say that as children adoptees often apologize for everything all the time—”

  “Yeah, and I never apologize for anything!” Sophie exclaimed, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Well, Glenn, you and Joy can count your blessings for that,” I quipped, adding, “as Erich Segal said, ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’”

  Glenn began to whip up omelets with Joy’s homegrown tomatoes, scallions, and green peppers. “We’re sorry to hear about your father’s death, Olivia.”

  “Thank you. And call me Livy—please. Olivia always sounds so formal.”

  “Is your mother still alive…Livy?” Joy asked. I guess she hadn’t read the obit.

  I shook my head. “No. She passed away a long time ago. I’m an orphan,” I said, the concept really sinking in as I sat around the large trestle table with this happy family of Ashes. I fiddled with my Bloody Mary glass so that I wouldn’t have to make eye contact. I didn’t want them to see me trying not to cry. “And my dad and I weren’t close for years, either. I never stopped trying to reach out to him, and he evidently knew where I was, but I guess he had his reasons for not reaching back. Did Sophie tell you about the crazy clause in his will—closing the circle? My fiancé—well, my fiancé that was—seemed to think it was about patching things up between us, but that couldn’t be it, since he died without even trying.”

  “Because it wasn’t about you and him,” Sophie said, lining up the blueberries on her plate as though she were directing a marching band. “It’s about you and me.”

  Glenn almost flipped an omelet onto the floor. “It’s what?”

  “I think Grampa knew it was too late to fix things between you guys. Too much bad blood, or whatever. Maybe he was too proud. Heck, you knew him; I didn’t, so this is just my guess, but I would bet a gazillion dollars I’m right. He knew you gave me up for adoption, and I bet that if he was secretly keeping tabs on you all these years that he also knew we’d never met.”

  “Then why didn’t he just say, ‘Olivia inherits the controlling interest in my minor league ball club once she meets her daughter’?”

  “Because he was one of those eccentric billionaires?” Sophie posited.

  “Besides, Cap Gaines told me you’d looked him up when you saw old Augie’s obituary in the paper. And you couldn’t have known about the clause in the will.”

  “Synchronicity,” Sophie answered immediately. “Or karma. Or something.” Glenn handed me my plate, and before I tucked into my omelet I reached for the salt shaker and tossed a tiny bit over my left shoulder.

  “Ohmigod—did you see that, Mom, Dad? What Livy did with the salt?! Ohmigod, I’ve done that all my life, and I always got shit for it. ‘Don’t make me take out the DustBuster,’ Mom always says.” Sophie did a perfect imitation of Joy; tensile steel under a falsely benign exterior of sunny smiles.

  “We always wonder where she picked that up,” Glenn said. “I mean we never do that salt—superstitious—thing.”

  “I always thought she learned it at a friend’s house or something. I’d tell her that it’s a crime to waste food when people are starving all over half the globe, but she’s always done that thing with the salt.”

  Weird, I thought. Or maybe not. Is it possible one can unwittingly “inherit” that sort of thing?

  “Anyway, dudes, I am totally convinced that ‘close the circle’ means that Livy and I are supposed to bond. I guess he couldn’t know it would ever happen, but he was an old man who had never really bothered to know his own daughter, and he really hoped that she would not end up the same way as him! See, guys, this is like the kind of stuff we used to do in my psych class sometimes. We’d, like, take a newspaper article about some people and psychoanalyze why they might have done what they did—like the kid who killed his own grandmother for drug money.”

  “Well, that’s a waste of time, slugger,” Glenn said. “You just said it yourself. He wanted money for drugs.”

  “Yeah, but he could have murdered someone else’s granny for the money if he was that desperate for a fix. Why put fifty stab wounds in the woman who raised you and gave you all the love you never got from anyone else?”

  “I empathize,” Joy murmured.

  Somehow I didn’t think we were meant to respond to that comment.

  “Anyways, Grampa got lucky because I did track down Livy.”

  “But maybe he did never expect that to happen,” I suggested. “Maybe it was like one of those impossible-to-ever-occur events like they have in fairy tales, and it was his way of more or less preventing me from ever inheriting the Cheers.”

  Sophie shook her head. “That makes zero sense, Livy. You probably never even thought about owning the Cheers, am I right?” I nodded my assent. “So it’s not like you were the one who already had a lot of shares in the team and thought you’d get it when he died. Like dorky Marty deMarley and his horrible wife. Besides, don’t you know that all the impossible-to-ever-occur events in fairy tales always happen?”

  “I have a difficult time believing that my father the hardnosed businessman invoked a concept out of Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm in something so important as his last will and testament.”

  “Maybe that was something y
ou never knew about him. His Joseph Campbell side,” Sophie argued.

  “You’ve been watching too much PBS, slugger,” Glenn teased.

  “There’s no such thing as too much PBS,” Joy said tartly.

  “I agree. But I think most people, the sort who aren’t conversant in Joseph Campbell’s work in comparative mythology, would concur that the phrase ‘close the circle’ is pretty damn vague. And legally contestable.” My highball glass slipped out of my hand, spilling Bloody Mary all over the tablecloth. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.” I leaped from my chair. “Where do you keep the sponges?”

  “Livy, are you okay?” Sophie asked.

  “Uh…yes…actually, no…not right now…I’m not. I’ll be okay in a…just let me…” Oh shit. The Ashes were probably thinking I’d had too much to drink.

  Do I mention Cousin Marty’s lawsuit? Oh, why ruin their brunch?

  “It was serendipity,” Sophie said, looking at me. Concerned. “So I was thinking that I could move in with Livy!”

  Everyone over twenty-one yelped “What?!”

  Sophie deliberately ignored the collective expression of shock. “Yeah—I mean, here we are and I’m like all grown up now, and this is my chance to finally get to know her. I mean, we get to get to know each other, y’know? And I’ve always wanted to move into Manhattan. So now I could, like, be her roommate.”

  Glenn was the first to recover what might be called composure. “First of all, slugger, you’re not quite grown up all the way; you still have a year of college left, and you’re not twenty-one.”

  “Plenty of kids move out when they’re eighteen.”

  “But—but you don’t know Olivia—Livy’s—situation. She could be living with someone already, or her apartment might not be conducive to sharing it—New York apartments can be very small, you know. Did you think of what Livy might be feeling? Or what she might be thinking about this proposal of yours?”