by Sara Dillon
The mild-mannered gentleman at the next computer terminal could not have failed to notice that tears were coursing down my face. I wiped them away with my hand, and suddenly felt as young as a student, able to do anything. Merrill wanted me to think of him, to write to him again.
I am so happy, so tremendously happy to hear from you. You will certainly begin to write some poems again. It is just a pause.
I sounded moronic, idiotic. But it was either those platitudes or something like, Let me pour out upon you one thousand years of exile; rescue me by any conveyance of your choosing, and I shall be waiting. Even Merrill, unfazed by anything I had ever said, could be daunted by this. Among the e-mail messages from the Land’s End Shop at Sears or the latest promotion from LL Bean, the name of John Merrill. Oh, Mr. Merrill, do you remember Sobre Los Angeles, because I still, even now, think about it a lot. I don’t want to force it, he replied after a few days. There may be nothing there.
Emmet; 2005
Someone said to me that Madina’s magically perfect life came to an abrupt end when I brought Emmet home. I hoped it was not so, but I knew that Madina was shocked by the squalling bundle of angry boy. For years, Madina had dressed up to go off and get a baby in Kazakhstan; little did she imagine that Emmet would be the one.
For several years, we had lived in our tiny rooftop apartment in Cambridge, strolling out to the corner pizza restaurant, to the park, to the library. Everything Madina said was doted on, attended to and acted upon immediately; her every doodle was cooed over. Peaceful and happy, Madina would lounge in the corner, setting up her elaborate set of Barbie furniture. Every trip to the store meant another trinket or treat. As people pointed out to us, as we walked down the street, we were always deep in conversation. I carried her home from the Red Line stop until she was very big and tall, her legs dangling down unceremoniously as we went.
In those early days, I was still a good citizen at the law school, attending lunches, trying to make conversation with colleagues I met in the hallway. I continued to memorize all the vast, disjointed material on cases and courts and doctrines; I could never hold onto it, my mind kept tossing it overboard as fast as I could learn it. Away, away! I kept calling, but trunksful of it kept on appearing.
I told Madina that some day we would be somewhere nicer, more beautiful, but maybe she could not imagine anything nicer.
At night I smelled her hair. She was still such a small child then. I could fix everything that was wrong. I could make all sad thoughts disappear.
There was tenure to go through, a more elaborate process than in Dublin; professors slipping in and out of my classroom, taking notes, calls from the Dean to tell me how I was doing. I couldn’t have been what anyone really wanted; I had no links and no longings towards the world of courts and judges, no ambition to head out in small planes and give talks to law professors about recent developments in trade jurisprudence. And yet, I had to stay calm, rational, as organized as I could manage to be—and I was terribly disorganized by nature. Madina watched her Pocohantas movie and cried when John Smith sailed away.
It wasn’t as if we hadn’t discussed it often enough, Madina and I. We had talked about a new baby brother or sister, we had dreamed up all kinds of babies, and Madina had always dressed up joyfully to go get them. I’m back, she would cry out after a brief disappearance into the bedroom, holding up a tightly wrapped bundle.
A baby might have been one thing; what she couldn’t have imagined was the two year old the size of a six month old, who could barely walk, but stood and pointed at plastic things on shelves and all kinds of kitchen objects, shouting and wailing Uh, uh, uh, and stamping his feet. Poor Madina, the peaceful river that was her life was gone, and gone forever.
I guess a few eyebrows were raised when I decided to head off and adopt another child. Up for tenure, single, and getting another? They might have said. Whatever they were saying, it was something along those lines. To have children with a man in the picture erased the impression of it being discretionary. Rather, in that scenario, it appeared as a force of nature, automatically excused. But to voluntarily take on not one, but two, deserved no sympathy, no assistance, no encouragement. Certainly Gramma did all she could to dissuade me; no break from teaching to accommodate the new child was suggested.
My e-mail to the Dean had been cryptic. I’ve decided it would be a good thing for my family to have one more child, or some such understatement, therefore I will be heading off to Central Asia in the very near future.
His unembellished reply was the equivalent of, Well, good luck.
I left for Kazakhstan directly from Madina’s end of school year concert. All the other parents were smiling and relaxed; I sat in the audience sobbing, unable to look at Madina’s little face, earnest but distracted, worried.
That’s the recipe . . . for joy! her class sang, words we had practiced many times.
After the concert, Madina and I held onto each other in the midst of all the students and visitors, terrified, crying. I had never been apart from her in nearly five years. A pink pillow of trust had grown over her old wounds. But I was going away now. I was leaving her. I had promised her I wouldn’t and now I was going away.
We had known, yet we’d had no idea. I was leaving, off into the void, to see things she wouldn’t see, to find a baby brother or sister she did not know. She would be cared for by Una and the babysitter Una had for Hughie. I was going, and that was all Madina knew.
Madina’s perfect world came to an abrupt end, and I was in a Lufthansa plane on my way to Frankfurt and Almaty.
What with one thing and another, it took nearly two days to arrive in the provincial city where I would visit the baby house. A tiny plane that sounded like a vacuum cleaner with wings took me from Almaty, with its great mountains and boulevards, north and west over the steppe, where I could look down and see rivers curling across the brown grasslands.
I arrived in the evening. Madina seemed so far away, and I fought against my instinct to watch over her every minute, to know where she was, what she was doing, whether she was happy.
They put me up in someone’s apartment, rented out to foreigners like me from time to time at the going hotel rate. It had been recently done over in blue and grey, with a wide low bed, a blank and forbidding living room, and an airless sun porch. The bedroom looked out over one of the main streets of the town. I watched policemen in wide brimmed Russian-style hats flagging down motorists; what for I wasn’t sure.
The orphanage looked more or less as Madina’s had, except that this one was outside the city by a good bit, sitting back in a large field, surrounded by a concrete wall and locked away behind an iron gate. The building was flat roofed, two storied, with big windows that opened out in the summer. There were miniature dachas on the grounds outside, along with a rusty slide and a couple of curved objects, apparently meant for children to climb on.
As must always be the case with orphanages, there was from the very first step inside the door a smell of vast quantities of boiled vegetables, of endlessly stewed potatoes and cabbage and beets. I saw the inevitable ladies in white coats, some in cooks’ hats, some in nurses’ headgear, walking noiselessly along the corridors.
The dusty, oppressive heat had come early that year, or so I was told. But because it was still May, the children had to wear jackets and hats when they came out into the sunshine, blinking and quiet. They walked in a hesitant line around the grounds, holding hands.
In the first few days, the orphanage director, a learned, charming doctor, had me meet a number of toddler boys. There were many of them, of varied ages and sizes. With each, I tried to imagine how he would be with Madina; would she love him, would these little boys seem so grown up that Madina would not think it at all like the little baby she had dreamed of carrying in under her arm. But because there were so many toddler boys, I wanted to bring one home with me. Perhaps people were afraid to adopt them, afraid of some problems that would come later, afraid of the future. Ea
ch played on the floor of the director’s office, thrilled at the array of cars and blocks she kept in a stash on her shelf.
I began to panic; how would I do the right thing, bring home the right brother for Madina, how would I not be afraid myself, an unknown toddler boy in tow. It took me five minutes to decide that I would like to be Emmet’s mother; not because I heard songs or saw stars, but because he was so lively, so painfully small, and so eager.
One of the nurses placed him on my lap. He is the smallest child for his age in the baby home, she said. He looked like an infant, but was in fact turning two years old. He turned his face to look at me; I cannot say he smiled exactly, but the look was friendly. Then he reached out to grab for a set of rings and blocks on the director’s desk, pulling them apart as quickly as he could, as if fearful someone would take them away.
Would you like to spend more time with him? asked the director.
Yes, I said. I would indeed.
There were weeks of visiting the orphanage, sitting with Emmet (not yet called Emmet) in a small room, building up block towers that he would then whack down with his hand. He knew that I had yogurt and cheerios in my bag, and he would race to me, tugging at the bags to get me to hand these over before we did anything else. Unlike Madina, who had plunked her bottom down on my lap and refused to move when I went to see her in the orphanage, Emmet wanted things—toy cars, books with doggie and kitty fur on them for touching, spoons, cups, pencils. He wanted everything.
I would have him touch my face before he got to have his cheerios, and he would take his hand and whisk it once perfunctorily down my cheek, then reach out for the bag of cereal. He didn’t really hug, or care for a hug. He was glad to see me when I came; his face would open up in a smile, as if he were practicing this new skill. He was shaky on his legs, no doubt because he had learned to walk very late, or so they told me. And also unlike Madina, instead of entering a world with me right away, he was in his own world of anxiety about getting things; getting food, getting blocks, getting the little yellow school bus I had brought him.
When we walked around the grounds of the orphanage, he made a beeline to the gate and watched the cars pass by on the road, pointing. Once some men had parked a broken-down Lada in the driveway, and he couldn’t wait to get over to put his hands on the metal, run them up and down the chrome, the bumper.
When I phoned Madina from a public calling center, she was in tears, in bits, weeping into the phone and asking me when I would come back. I sent her photos of Emmet on the computer; she said she had seen him and he looked cute, but she wanted me to come home.
Heat bore down on the open plazas. The stores were quiet. In some restaurants, they only turned the lights on when customers came in. The days were amazingly long. I watched so much Russian television, I began to believe I could understand it. I felt the huge spaces and distances of the Russian-speaking world, a unifying set of accent sounds, even in this far flung place. The old native language had not come creeping back like grasses or small trees with the republic’s independence. Rather, Russian was used almost all the time, even for the most personal conversations.
Each day had an endless, undifferentiated quality. I visited Emmet in the morning, then returned to the apartment to make lunch and read Jane Austen. By evening, I was barricaded in behind the metal door of the apartment, with no hope of leaving until the driver arrived in the morning.
The little boys and girls of the orphanage were allowed to take off their caps and sweaters on June the first. They stared at us as they took their little walks around the grounds.
I carried Emmet, and sometimes he fell asleep as I walked. They brought him a morning snack of a half banana, and he stuffed it unceremoniously into his mouth at one go. He still smiled his big, open-mouthed smile when I arrived in the morning. After three weeks, they allowed me to go to court to ask to be his mother.
I would like to have a Kazakh brother for my daughter, I told the judge, a very fashionable woman with bright clothes and jewelry.
Does he look like your daughter? she asked, knowing of course that he did not. In the end, she said that I could adopt Emmet; they gave me flowers and hugged me. I was terrified, as I had been when I adopted Madina. I took Emmet around in the car to get his paperwork. He liked everywhere we went; he grabbed everything and, being Emmet, wanted everything.
At the end of those four long weeks, I went back to Boston. I would have to return to Almaty two weeks later, but it was worth the trip to go see Madina again. The plane was scheduled to leave, as often happens in that part of the world, at the ungodly hour of one a.m. I sat for hours in the airport, watching the ladies walk past in high heels, the shops still open at that hour, willing to sell you a toy camel or yurt. We passed over Russia, maybe over Turkey, and on to Germany. When at last I reached Boston, I found a Madina I had never known before; gaunt, sad, mistrustful. They told me that she had lain for hours in her bed, tossing a tennis ball from one hand to the other. She had eaten huge amounts of candy, sneaking it into bed with her and hiding under the covers. No amount of reassurance would induce her to forgive me.
The summer had begun. I dashed into my office, writing furiously, expanding the footnotes in an article, looking things up. I would have to travel back to get Emmet soon, leaving Madina again. I would have to think about classes that would start in August.
Madina asked what little Emmet was like; would he love her, was he cute? I took her on outings, to Boston’s Public Gardens, to the aquarium. She dressed up in her best clothes and posed for pictures. Oh, Madina, a messier, noisier life was about to begin.
The what’s-new- in-fiction rack; 2007
You know, I pointed out to Sasha, a lot of this recent fiction is really trashy. It relies on gimmicks; drug busts, sudden deaths, revelations of the most obvious sort.
I don’t think he knew exactly what I meant.
I always moved from shelf to shelf with hope, picking up one book with a lovely title after another (the titles were good), enticing colors, beautiful scenery. A foot in a shoe, the beach in the background. But on closer inspection they all seemed the same. The shorter ones began with someone finding out something shocking—cancer diagnosis, husband’s infidelity. Then life turned around, new discoveries were made. Another sort was the barn burner with three generations of a Tennessee family, rich backwoods Americana, no thanks. Worst of all, the mysterious but dense yarn, full of characters with opaque and monotonous motivations, nothing more at the end than at the beginning.
Maybe I was making excuses, but all my life I had simply reread the same novels; poems as well. To the Lighthouse, Anna Karenina, Jude the Obscure. Few deviations, and most of them unhappy ones. No recommendation for newer books had ever satisfied. Things that looked good in the bookshop often proved to be intolerably lightweight. Pretty writing with nothing inside, or ugly writing with too much inside. Conceits that had hidden political meanings, or glorified the globalization jetset.
I preferred hanging out with Hemingway and his two cold, crisp bottles of wine for lunch.
I wondered what Calvin Pini thought about all this. He had useful views on these matters.
I wasn’t sure if Sasha wrote in Russian or not; he clearly wished to be a writer and stacked up as much of these courses as his parents would allow. In the end, he would probably become an investment banker.
How funny to think of Joyce and the tradition of talking, of which I was somehow a part, up against the Japanese wall of silence. Self-defeating or self-punishing; I thought of Kido and the cosmetic gift bags to be given out at his concerts.
As for that whole thing, even Calvin wouldn’t know what to say.
Kitty cat; 2007
Given that things with Calvin seemed to have ended with the introduction of a kitten, as well as the fact that Aunt Olive had had a more or less wild, and ferociously unfriendly, cat, and also that I had not grown up with cats, you would think I would not have been keen on the idea. But Madina and Emmet bugged me ab
out it day and night, begging on their knees for a little cat they could love and take care of. On that last point, I had serious doubts. Nonetheless, always seized with anxiety whenever the prospect of making them happy loomed, I gave in, and off to the Waterbury animal shelter we went.
We saw long lines of cats in small cages; grey and orange and brown, big and small. Most were just sleeping, curled up in knots of boredom and despair. We asked the staff to take out several of them so that we could see them in action in the little “play room.” My own favorites were two enormous couch potato tomcats, who eagerly rolled over to be patted as soon as the kids starting cooing at them.
In the end, it was mainly Madina who prevailed, though Emmet agreed with her choice, a petite white cat with random grey markings called Princess. Stunned with love and joy, they took turns holding her; she returned their stunned look, but allowed herself to be carried away by us. She didn’t seem quite as keen on me, and actually tried to bite me once. She was what I would call medium friendly and certainly on the fretful side.
The kids would hear no criticism of Princess; she was perfect, wonderful, charming, endlessly amusing. Her every action was commented on and praised. Every mouthful of food she took was noticed. Cat toys were purchased at unconscionable prices, feathers and strings flying. Princess was the transition from winter to spring, the certainty that we would be staying, the confidence that even we could offer shelter and safety to a fellow creature.
I could hear Emmet calling Pincess, Pincess, whenever they could not find her, which was often. More than once, we were afraid she had somehow got out the front door—something we would never allow—and we walked the grounds of the house, anxiously beating on a food can and calling her name. As we drove up to the house in the evening, Madina would say, I can’t wait to see Princess!
I guess Princess liked us well enough; I understood dogs much better, I admit. She certainly knew when it was time for food; she pounced on my feet in the middle of the night, she had her routine. Let an insect appear in a corner and she went rigid staring at it, intent, determined, an almost fanatical gleam in her eye. She did not sit on laps, and did not stay put for long. Yet she was always in the shadows nearby, tracking us with some subtlety, waiting, watching.
