by Meg Wolitzer
Mostly, Selby Rothberg was difficult to PAs during movie shoots and to office assistants bearing floppy cardboard carriers of lattes. She yelled at them freely. Still, young women looked up to her, for she was someone who had survived the ritualistic antifemale hazing that all women in the industry had to endure if they wanted to get anywhere. Jill looked up to her too, without really knowing her at all. She was primed for the mentor-protégé relationship, although in this case she knew that Selby Rothberg might not even be aware that the potential for such a relationship existed.
Of course Selby needed to vent, they all said; of course she needed catharsis. They could understand this. Men still dominated the industry even then, decades after feminism had been established, though women were coming up through the ranks with a kind of stealth now, as if not wanting anyone to notice how much power they were gathering, until one day it would be too late, and women would have taken over Hollywood, producing and directing an entire slate of sensitive films about strong, interesting female characters like Willa Cather. Until that day in the utopian middle distance, stealth was the main tactic.
Jill, early into her job, had the idea to try to option Amy’s mother’s first and still her most well-known historical novel, Turning Around and Going Home. All the characters, except for the farmer lover, were women. Amy had told Jill that Canadian writers tended to have a hard time finding many American readers because their books were often “about the land,” and, of course, that land was Canadian; much time, in these novels, might be spent describing the view from Bathurst Inlet. But Antonia Lamb’s work, while being geographically detailed, also focused on character, and her first, exquisite novel from the 1970s seemed to Jill as though it could pleasingly be reimagined for film.
Selby Rothberg read the book, or at least read Jill’s synopsis, and gave her the go-ahead to option it for a small sum. Antonia Lamb was so excited and sent Jill flowers on the day the contracts arrived in the mail in Montreal. Jill began to take meetings with a young screenwriter to talk about the adaptation; she wrote up elaborate progress reports that were then faxed to Selby in L.A. She returned home late at night to find Donald often already asleep.
One afternoon, it got around the office that her colleague Claire Madding had just received word that a film project she had been quietly nurturing had gotten the green light from the studio. It was about a professional assassin sent for reeducation to an assassins’ academy after a botched job, and it was going to be a big, violent, expensive film with male stars and, said Claire, “a beautiful demographic.” Jill had not recalled hearing the word “demographic” used in casual conversation until that moment, but once she heard Claire use it, she began to hear it spoken everywhere. She and the two other people in development talked anxiously: Why hadn’t Claire told them about this project? Why were the rest of them made to think their mandate was solely to make quiet, meaningful, literary films?
Soon, faxes chugged in from Selby in the L.A. office, asking them “to think more about who would actually go see your film once it got made.” You could not just bring in sensitive women viewers, she said; no one really wanted them anymore. Or else everyone wanted them, as long as they came to the film with their boyfriends and their younger brothers. “THE YOUNG MALE DEMOGRAPHIC IS ESSENTIAL,” Selby wrote in a fax. “IF WE DON’T HAVE THAT, PEOPLE, WE ARE FUCKED.”
Three months later, Turning Around and Going Home was dropped. Jill could not explain to Amy’s mother that just because a film production company was run by a strong woman did not mean, in the end, that its product would be progressive or sophisticated or, of course, about women.
“This is not going to be good,” Jill said to Amy on the phone. “I can see the way it’s all heading.” Selby Rothberg, who had been described with such admiration by the staff, finally turned her anger on the New York office, and none of them should have been caught off guard, yet they all were. They were not bringing in enough projects of the sort she now wanted to foster, she said. (Except, it was understood, for Claire Madding, who had been promoted, and moved to the L.A. office.) They did not understand her MISSION, and they had BETTER PULL IT TOGETHER, ASAP.
The three remaining development people, Jill, Harold, and Peter, convened secretly at a coffee shop around the corner from the office one morning to discuss what to do. They decided that one of them would call Selby in L.A. and say to her, on speakerphone, “Selby, we really respect you as our employer, and of course you’re an incredible mentor, and we think you’re brilliant, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but we don’t think you’ve been treating us fairly.” They drew straws and shy, slight Peter Chen was designated the imparter of these words. He almost hyperventilated when he was chosen. The phone call was to be made at lunchtime.
But by eleven A.M. EST, Selby Rothberg had sent a fax to say that she was shutting down the New York office—or at least the studio was—and so as a result none of them ever had a chance to tell her the way they felt. Jill, suddenly without a job, was frantic and humiliated.
“I have failed at two things,” she said to Donald the night she lost her job. “It is not what I do.”
“You didn’t entirely fail at the first thing. You just haven’t reimagined it,” he said. “And the second thing has nothing to do with you.”
“Those are semantic distinctions,” she said, but again she was relieved by his belief in her. He was optimistic, she realized. His parents were living; he did not have a mother who had killed herself. A parent who commits suicide, people said, leaves a door open for the child to do the same thing someday too, as if following the parent into oblivion. Donald, though, knew nothing of this door. He was both an optimist and a pragmatist, and she was grateful for this paradox. Jill clung to him. They were young then and married and living in New York City, and love drew a circle around them both. They would have a baby, they decided one night shortly after, in the agitation of lovemaking. This seemed like a good time, didn’t it? Jill was “between things” and would not have to put off a career. She could think about reworking her dissertation later on, after the baby was born. She could rewrite the whole thing over a series of nap times.
But no matter what they tried, they could not conceive. They spent a year and a half trying, and then they started arranging for Jill to have injections, and for Donald’s sperm to be spun and washed. It was a full-time job for her, and it replaced actual work. In bed at night Jill thought only about hormone levels and ovulation schedules. Eventually, their story ended like many couples’ did: After years of this, bowed and spent, ravaged and dry, debased from procedures that had had no effect, they found their way to an adoption agency called The House of Hope, which dealt exclusively with Eastern European babies—“trafficked in them,” Donald said darkly.
After all that sex and loss they were now open to anything. Suddenly, the idea of someone else’s newborn baby delivered into the world and handed over to them while still damp from its uterine bath became an unrealistic image. Now they could actually begin to consider adopting a dried-off, much older baby.
Manya was whom they were finally offered, and her photograph was solemnly passed around the caseworker’s small office. What they saw in that Polaroid snapshot was a wide, round face revealing an expression not of actual happiness but perhaps a wish for happiness. They were told that Manya resided in a large room in the orphanage among many other babies and possessed very little language. They were warned that her skin was prone to rashes and that she had been diagnosed with “a nervous constitution,” which could mean anything or nothing, because the Russian pediatric academy used terminology that had no English-language equivalents.
They had also been warned about one of the orphanage’s policies: In order for a non-Russian couple to adopt a baby, the child had to have been previously rejected by three Russian couples. What was so wrong with Manya that none of her kinsmen had wanted her? Was it her rashiness, her silence? Mrs. Feld, the caseworker, whispered that while the orphanage claimed
the three-Russian-couples rule, there was rarely any documentation to prove that anyone else had previously refused the child.
“Show me the Refuseniks,” Donald had said.
“Pardon?” Mrs. Feld said.
“Donald, shut up,” said Jill. Then, to Mrs. Feld, “Ha ha, he’s just trying to be funny.”
“Yes, I’m a jokester,” said Donald blithely.
Jill disliked her husband turning deadpan funny in front of people who didn’t know him. No one could ever tell when he was joking, because they saw him as a thin, bald, well-dressed accountant, which in their minds meant that he could not also be wry and deadpan; the two images seemed to have no business being in the same frame.
But Mrs. Feld at The House of Hope hadn’t minded or even paid much attention to Donald’s mild jokes, and so the slush of paperwork continued, along with the FBI fingerprinting and the home study, and eventually they made the long, multilegged trip to Tuva. The orphanage, to Jill’s surprise, was a bright, sanitary place, and though the large, barracks-style bedroom was congested with babies, the attendants who worked there proudly fretted over them.
When Donald and Jill walked through the room, a musclebound woman was tickling the plump baby girl who occupied the crib beside Manya’s, and another woman was making goo-goo faces as she changed a baby boy’s loaded diaper. The problem was that there weren’t nearly enough of these women to go around, and most of the babies had to wait their turn to receive something as basic as a hand scrabbling to tickle a chin.
“Look, look, here is your Manya, waiting to meet Mama and Papa,” another woman said proudly, bringing the wide-eyed, serious-looking baby to them.
“Oh, Manya!” cried Donald, and he flung out his arms and began to cry.
“Manya!” Jill echoed, but her throat constricted. A real baby, she saw, not just a photograph, made you think about possibilities, and also about death. Specifically, about the unbearableness of death—the end of possibilities. She thought of how her dead mother would never see this baby or be a grandmother. Her father, who had died of pancreatic cancer years earlier, would never see the baby, either, of course, but it was to thoughts about her mother, Susan Benedict, that Jill cleaved. She shielded herself against the flying sparks of sensation, the way she had once imagined she would have to do during childbirth. When Manya was zipped into a pink snowsuit and handed over to these American strangers, Jill could still not cry, though Manya and her new father were both crying in hearty bleats. Jill busied herself with paperwork, and she also took as many photographs as she could with the little camera she had brought along, relieved to be hidden behind it even briefly.
We don’t belong together, she thought later as they rode in the beaten, boxy Lada to the airport. Their baby, as in the Polaroid picture, had a perfectly round face, black hair, pale, eczematous skin, and eyes spread far apart. Jill was very pretty and blonde, and Donald was bald and physically vaguely insectlike. They sat together in the springless backseat, and the baby, imprisoned between them, wept for all she was leaving and all she was about to get.
“Hold on, little girl, it’s going to be okay,” Donald said through his own giddy tears. “Mommy and Daddy have you now.” It was startling to hear him speak this way, his voice cracking like a romantic’s.
I am so sorry, stoic Jill silently told her. My own need for a baby got so strong that eventually you felt it all the way on another continent, and got sucked out of your surprisingly pleasant orphanage, and away from the highly perfumed women who cared for you and spoke to you in your language, and dabbed Vaseline on your rashy cheeks, and fed you little sips of beef-tongue soup, and did the best they could under difficult circumstances.
So now Jill would have to do the best she could too. In New York City, Manya became Nadia, and she and Jill were alone together during the long days while Donald was at work. Sometimes in desperation Jill would plant Nadia in her high chair in front of the television for a couple of hours, hoping that the mix of voices and pictures and commercials would entertain or teach her. Jill enrolled her in Maestro ’n’ Mommy, an interactive class that Amy had taken Mason to, in order to grip bacterially overrun maracas while listening to original songs that whipped everyone into revival-tent ecstasy. The name of the class sounded uncomfortably suggestive, as though Mommy was having an affair during the day with the maestro while the baby watched somberly. It depressed Jill to see the way that mothers were bossed around. “Remember, moms,” said the young instructor, “always make sure your little ones are no more than one maestro’s baton length away from you.”
The mothers obeyed; they guarded their children, and they gamely sang the prescribed songs that came on the CD you had to buy when you signed up for the class. “Rum tum tum and a ho ho ho,” sang the willing and tired mothers. “Everybody on your trikes, and go go go.” Nadia became just one baby among many in that class and among the volume of stroller traffic on the city’s sidewalks, and no one seemed to recognize how different she was, except for Jill, who was forever appraising Nadia’s face and trying to imagine her becoming a schoolgirl and then a woman. Jill found herself unable to picture a direct and gratifying route taking Nadia from toddlerhood to adolescence to adulthood.
Once, early on, when Jill and Amy were together at the Golden Horn and Nadia lay asleep in her stroller, Jill said to Amy, “I have to ask you something. Do you like Nadia?”
“What? No, Jill, I actively dislike your two-year-old daughter. She is such a bitch.”
Jill tried to laugh at the little joke. “But come on, do you really like her? Please just think about it.”
“Look at her sleeping there. She is beautiful, and she is your baby. That means I automatically like her. I automatically love her. Why? Do you not like Mason?”
“Of course I like Mason. I love him too. I don’t even know why I asked you this. Ignore me.”
But Amy had looked concerned. “I think,” she’d said, “you just have to be patient and see how things unroll. That’s what parenthood is, basically.”
“What do you mean?” Jill asked.
“All these long waiting periods. And then things happen all of a sudden—these developmental growth spurts—and you end up saying, ‘I can’t believe it went by so fast.’ Even though everybody always warned you it would.”
In bed at night now, looking up at the constellations on the ceiling of her new room and thinking thoughts that her mother could not imagine, six-year-old Nadia Hamlin sang to herself that strange song of uncertain origin. Her voice was interesting but parched-sounding, the words smashed together. To the extent that Jill could figure, it was some kind of folk song that Nadia had probably learned back at the orphanage and had retained in the peculiar way that certain small details in life might be retained forever.
Nadia lay on her back in the dark, and over and over she sang that single line: “Rise, sorrow, ’neath the saffron sister tree.” The words were elusive and beautiful. Why would the children have been singing in English back in that orphanage in Russia? Maybe as a way to prepare them for the American families they would likely be joining? It didn’t exactly make sense. The first time that Jill had heard the plaintive song, she was shocked and moved, picturing Nadia standing alone in her crib in Tuva, bouncing lightly on a mattress and singing.
Rise, sorrow, ’neath the saffron sister tree—what words for a baby to know! American toddlers were usually taught some of the more anodyne Beatles songs, the house music of Maestro ’n’ Mommy, and all the songs from that somewhat manic children’s TV show Ahoy, Mateys. Jill sometimes tried to ask Nadia about her song and to tell her that folk songs were an essential part of a country’s tradition. For a brief moment she had imagined her daughter developing a folkloric fascination. (“Yes, Nadia is a professional folklorist,” she would tell her friends years from now, enjoying the yeasty syllables of the word.) But the song remained simply the song, and it had not yet led to an interest or a passion for anything in particular. Nadia sang other, identifiable so
ngs too; quite often she could be found humming or singing, but music seemed to be some sort of private experience for her, not the joyful and communal one that it was for many children.
Was Nadia mentally retarded? You could put off the truth for a surprisingly long time, even in this sophisticated time in the culture. She had known a couple back in the city named the Devlins whose autistic son Teddy had gone undiagnosed for years. His problems were obvious: He disliked eye contact, and he loved thermostats. Once, on a visit to another family’s apartment, he broke off the tiny red metal needle of their thermostat, and making sure everyone saw him, he put it slyly into his mouth, as though he thought this was witty. But you weren’t meant to mention any concerns to Teddy’s parents, for if the suspicions were not true, then it would be an enormous insult, from which your friendship would not recover. Besides, his own pediatrician was not worried yet. “We can’t have an entire world of extroverts,” the pediatrician had said more than once when the mother expressed her fears.
No one would dare tell Jill that Nadia was a little slow. None of Jill’s friends in the city had said a word to this effect, and she had no real friends here in Holly Hills. A few of the mothers in this suburb appeared friendly or articulate or both, but they also struck Jill as being as opaque and smooth as their houses. It wasn’t lost on her that Nadia, so far, had no friends here yet, either.
