The Corn Husk Experiment

by Andrea Cale

  “Now, please understand and embrace the fact that we tell all of our prospective parents that until all the paperwork is signed and the baby is brought home, we need to be cautiously optimistic.”

  “But can you tell me before we hang up—before I have my heart set on this baby boy—are there any stipulations? Visitation requests? A catch? You name it; we’ll handle whatever comes.”

  “There is one unusual thing,” he had said.

  “Please, just say it.”

  The professor could hear the specialist flipping through notes on the other end of the line.

  “So, the girl said she has been communicating with the baby each night before she sleeps, desperate for him to one day understand and come to peace with her decision. She calls him JP. She suggested that if you didn’t already have your heart set on a name, well, she hoped you might consider it for him.”

  “But…huh?” the professor had responded. She had wondered why that particular name mattered so much to the birth mother. “You don’t think it’s so she can more easily locate him if she changes her mind down the line?”

  The monotone nature of the specialists’ voice finally turned more compassionate.

  “She relayed to me that even though she knows it’s impossible for the baby to remember their time together, she wants their conversations to be part of him. You can imagine, she’s heartbroken over giving him up. She is a fine young woman in an impossible situation. She hopes you’ll pass on the information one day when he’s able to understand. It’s up to you really.”

  After very little deliberation, the professors had opted to keep JP’s name. They had an intuition that only parents could have, and they knew he would be with them to stay. They did wonder though about the significance of his pair of letters.

  “What do you think they stand for,” the new father had asked his wife as they looked proudly over the sleeping newborn in their home. “John Paul? Jack Palance? Jelly and Peanut Butter?”

  The new mother had shot her husband a familiar look of exasperation, but she was too content to put up much of a fuss over his distinct sense of humor.

  “All I know is he’s our son,” she had said in a gentle voice directed toward their new baby. “That’s who he is.”

  As soon as he was old enough to understand, the professors had explained to JP that he was adopted. They focused on love—their love for him as parents as well as the teenage birth mother’s love to give him life.

  JP felt all of it.

  He could feel the love whenever his mother’s extra-large glasses appeared to stare at him as he pretended to sleep under the covers. JP felt it whenever his father seemed to nearly pop out of his jeans with happiness over JP learning something new, from sharpening his first pencil to making his first pancake. The professors were his parents, and JP didn’t want it any other way.

  “The young woman who gave you to us loved—and loves—you so much that she talked to you every night when you were in her belly. She named you JP, you know. It’s what she called you on each of those nights. You are our son. This family is meant to be together. You fulfill us. You make us most happy,” the professors would say on every birthday, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day.

  JP believed that the anonymous teen who carried him had loved him too, but despite all the love, he would make his adoption serve as the most dominating part of his ego.

  His own name was a constant reminder of being different. Its symbolism smacked him whenever his teacher called on him, whenever his father asked him to clear the condiments off the dinner table, and whenever his mom hollered gently upstairs for him to wake up and start getting ready for school.

  There was also the color of his skin. Having dark skin didn’t make him so different at his diverse school, but it did make him feel quite different in his own home. The gentle act of holding hands with his mother or father produced a vivid realization, forcing him to come to grips with the fact that everyone at school must know that his birth mother had given him away. In the classrooms, he wondered if the black kids saw him as white and if the white kids saw him as black. At family reunions and holiday gatherings with cousins, aunts, and uncles, he felt as though he didn’t quite belong either.

  His father understood from a background in anthropology that getting the boy involved in some kind of sport might help bridge the distance between his son and the other kids his age. With great fanfare and effort throughout the summer leading up to JP’s second grade, the professor had introduced a variety of athletics. While the professor resembled a soccer ball more closely than a soccer player, he gave the sessions his all. He had lobbed air balls on the basketball court and whiffed away at golf balls in the park. And while the pair didn’t share any genes, it appeared that the father had handed down his lack of athletic abilities to the boy, who lobbed and whiffed right alongside him.

  During the last September afternoon of their summer break together, the father and son tossed a football in their backyard. The lush leaves on the trees were just beginning their crisping process in preparation of an inevitably frigid central New York winter. They shook and whispered in the wind as though they were gossiping to one another behind the Hemmings’ backs, just as too many onlookers had done over the years.

  Neither the throwing nor the catching went well, and for the first time all season, the professor had begun feeling frustrated over his son’s lack of skills. As the man crouched and located the ball hidden under his big belly, he exhaled noisily. He grabbed the football with his sweaty palm and accepted the fact that their summer of athletic attempts was all for naught.

  His son surprised him.

  “I think I’m gonna pick this one,” JP said.

  “Excuse me, young sir?”

  There was something about the pale, old-fashioned laces against the dark, smooth skin of the ball that felt comforting and familiar to the boy. He liked it.

  “I think I’m gonna be a football player,” JP said. “Maybe we should find out about some tryouts or somethin’?”

  “Well, hooray!” the professor said as he tossed the football in the fall air with both hands in an act of celebration. The ball delivered a swift blow to the professor’s head, startling the man enough to make him fall back on his bottom. A grass stain smeared across the seat of his pants. He felt so happy that he didn’t give his aches on either end of his body much notice.

  “And that is why I just tell people to call me Mr. Roly Poly,” the professor of anthropology said as he rose to his feet and shuffled back toward their house. “I’m all about embracing all qualities, no matter how popular or unpopular they are with society. That’s neither here nor there in this moment. Anyway, let’s go tell your mother. Mum, oh Mum! Have we got a surprise for you-hoo! Without further ado, Madam, let me introduce to you…our son, our star, our football player extraordinaire—Mr. JP!”

  Between the exercising and the yelling, the man had to take a moment to catch his breath in the grand September air.

  CHAPTER 5

  HENRY

  The Shy One

  On the warm September night of a boy named Henry’s conception, the moon and some distant city lights dimly outlined the young man and woman who would unexpectedly become a father and mother in the longest and shortest nine months of their lives.

  The two teens appeared every bit a close pair as they took in the fresh air on the bed of Chad’s old used truck, but aside from their high-school popularity, Chad and Misty shared little else in common.

  While Misty was clumsy, Chad served as the star wide receiver of the Brockton Technology Minutemen. And as the girl turned heads with bright blue eyes that appeared to glow as much in the daylight as a wild cat’s at night, Chad’s face showed a farm of acne, fertilized each football practice as sweat dripped under a dank, maroon helmet.

  It was Misty’s eyes that ultimately drew Chad to her during their summer counselor shifts at the popular Youth-Brockton branch of the Old Colony YMCA, but her kindness was perhaps her mos
t beautiful—and also most unappreciated—quality.

  Her heart was as warm as Chad’s was cold, and as a stray cricket chirped loudly near the wheel of the truck, that difference was the reason that this otherwise pleasant evening was supposed to mark Misty and Chad’s last as a couple.

  She had cringed one too many times in the senior hall as Chad released his frustration over things as benign as a demanding homework assignment or a challenging pop quiz. He loathed school as much as he treasured playing at the Minutemen’s Vincent Palumbo Field. One was the cage that kept him away from the other.

  The victims of his angry lashes tended to be underclassmen who got too close to his locker or students who looked homely like Chad himself but lacked the prestige of his football status.

  “Nice donkey, real nice,” he had shouted recently in the hallway while clapping sarcastically at fellow senior Boris Domkee. “The square root of 5,159 is blah, blah, blah, wah, wah, wah,” Chad had mimicked in Boris’s higher-than-normal voice following their second-period Algebra II class.

  The teacher had returned pop quizzes at the end of period, and Chad had flunked.

  “What do you want, an award, Sir King of Friggin’ Hand-raising?” Chad had added. “Who gives a flying crap? Why don’t you get out of my face for once and take those annoying hands along with you?”

  Misty had stood next to Chad during the outburst and felt mortified. She had watched her boyfriend’s teammates look away in passive disapproval as they pretended to keep busy with other things. Worsening the moment, Misty held onto a fondness for Boris since grade school, when she had caught him placing an anonymous Snoopy Valentine on her desk along with a plastic bag of candy conversation hearts—all baby green. Somehow he had known her favorite color.

  As she watched Boris slink away from Chad’s rant, she realized that Boris, with all his awkwardness, odd outfits, and incessant hand-raising, was a much better young man than the one who shared her locker. Even the littlest charm Chad first used to woo her during their stints as summer counselors had worn off until it was impossible for even Misty to see a redeeming quality.

  As the cricket chirped on, they lay still on the truck bed with only an itchy blanket to cushion them. Misty was supposed to have finished the relationship hours ago. She wanted to relay an excuse along the lines of “It’s not you, it’s me,” without actually using those clichéd words. That explanation would’ve been a lie, but she believed, as many in her seat do, that it would go over much smoother than the truth.

  Like a shark drawn to the scent of blood, the teenager with raging moods and hormones sensed his own prey in Misty.

  “Be right back,” he snapped as his sizable teeth lit up slightly in the moonlight. It suddenly occurred to Misty that they looked more like jaws.

  An athlete on a mission, he swung his legs up and over the truck bed, positioned himself halfway into the cab, and gently turned the key one click to power the radio. The iconic Boston station WBCN had recently switched its format from alternative to modern rock. Everclear’s hit “Father of Mine” joined the sounds of the cricket.

  Unlike her boyfriend, Misty enjoyed her years at school, and as she gazed into the dark night, she pictured her third-grade classroom where she learned that only male crickets chirp. The one positioned next to the tire had her attention tonight.

  For less pure reasons, Chad was determined to do the same. And as the cricket raised its front left wing about forty-five degrees and jabbed it against its right one to let out more chirps, Chad softly jabbed his elbow into Misty’s forearm to engage her. She made out the bumpy landscape of his profile and his saccharine smile through a creepy darkness.

  “You have the most beautiful eyes,” he said.

  Too easily, Misty surrendered to his advances. She felt as though she were on a T ride through Boston, afraid to ring the bell and annoy the grumpy driver.

  “I’m an idiot,” she mouthed silently to no one as she let the player make his moves.

  Misty focused on the cricket and began counting the insect’s yips for distraction. She recalled a class lesson on calculating the temperature by counting a cricket’s chirp for fifteen seconds and adding forty. She estimated the temperature to be sixty-one degrees, despite it suddenly feeling unpleasantly hotter to her over Chad’s body and Everclear’s lyrics.

  As she listened to the emotional words and imagined how horrible it would be for someone to actually feel that way, Henry was conceived.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 6

  HENRY

  The Shy One

  Wearing his treasured University of Boston Falcons football sweatshirt, Henry resembled a walking contradiction on the playground of his elementary school in Brockton. While he shared a few similarities with the athletic father he didn’t know, neither the swiftness of a falcon nor the skilled movement of a football player was among them.

  Henry was generally a mix of his parents. He had Misty’s inner intangible qualities—her clumsiness, big heart, and love for school—and Chad’s outsides—his oversized teeth, broad shoulders, and skin that would one day show blemishes.

  To Misty, he was everything.

  To Henry’s fellow sixth-graders at the start of the school year, he was different at a time when fitting in was most important.

  Henry preferred reading and writing—and if he was being honest with himself, spending time with his quirky grandmother—over the most popular elementary-school games. Henry particularly hated punch ball, his classmates’ current game of choice. It had the flow of baseball, but in lieu of a pitcher, offensive players took turns launching a red rubber ball as far as they could by serving it volleyball-style. If the defending team caught the ball, it was an out. If a runner was tagged or hit by the ball between bases, it was an out. The offense and defense switched sides after three. The innings came to a stop only when the morning bell told them to come inside.

  Before each game, two captains took turns picking their teams, and no matter which kids held the posts, Henry and a bull-legged girl with the nickname of “Patsy, Patsy, Four-Eyed Fatsy” were almost always selected last.

  “Easy out,” yelled the opposing team’s captain when it was Henry’s turn at the plate.

  The captain’s defense obediently marched a few paces toward the shy boy and surrounded him more tightly, like intimidating little soldiers.

  Henry whiffed the edge of the ball with his fist on his first attempt at a serve. He had tried so hard for a home run that his own arm delivered a punch to his forehead. The soldiers chuckled.

  “Do-over—you get one do-over,” quickly reminded a pudgy boy named Oscar, Henry’s best and only friend.

  Henry took in a deep breath of crisp autumn air. He made a point to keep his eye on the ball this time. He connected with it, but he didn’t disappoint the opposing team’s captain, whose only mistake was not ordering his followers to move in closer. The ball shot up high, but not far out, and the captain himself retrieved it and nailed Henry’s pointy shoulder with it before he could reach first base. Henry’s face gave way to defeat while loyal Oscar kicked the gravel with a too-tight tennis shoe in genuine disappointment.

  Oscar and Henry were two boys who experienced the gravitational pull of friendship through their shared misfit-boy status. Fortunately for each of them, the alliance grew much deeper than that.

  “Don’t worry about it, Henry,” Oscar whispered. “You’ll get it next time. I’m so sure of it that if I get to be captain tomorrow, I’m gonna pick you first.”

  Henry gazed up toward the fall leaves on the trees in hopes that a tear wouldn’t escape his eye. September was usually Henry’s favorite time of the year. The month annually charged him with a nervous hope as the cool, New England breeze mixed with a warm promise of a fresh start. Each year at this time, he hoped to dig his way out of being a perpetual misfit at school. He also hoped that Boston’s Falcons would win their opening football game of the season along with every matchup thereafter.

&nbs
p; For Henry, September would easily serve as a better time of year than the real New Year, when he would pretend not to notice his mother’s dark sadness over being unable to provide him with the Christmas presents on his wish list or a father to help them take the tree lights down.

  As the wind hit the playground and shifted Henry’s Falcons jersey, the boy stepped on a red leaf, hiding its beautiful color just as he always did his words, and prepared himself for an all-too-familiar defensive battle against his very own classmates.

  As Henry struggled with punch ball at school, his mother and grandmother shared their morning cups of inexpensive tea in the modest two-bedroom apartment the three generations shared.

  The month marked twelve years since Henry’s conception. Misty was much more tired and much less stylish these days, but her eyes still carried that pretty spark that would always make her in vogue.

  Misty was a busy mom by day, getting Henry ready for school, carefully washing, delightfully smelling, and lovingly folding his clothes, and if she was especially on top of things, preparing some make-ahead casseroles. By late afternoon, the single mother waited tables at a large, fast-paced pizza chain within a lively triangle of Fenway Park, Landsdowne Street clubs, and Regal Cinema in Boston.

  A typical September day at the restaurant involved a heavy, pre-game wave of playoff-hungry Red Sox fans followed by a second sloppier crew of tired and drunk ones. Appearing intermittently were the moviegoers who would inevitably announce their rush to make their showtime. And whenever Misty felt the evening’s wild pace begin to weaken, she would contemplate giving her sore feet a respite to grab a kid-sized order of pasta with tomato and cream sauce for herself. Her plans would usually change as a hostess sat her a few late-night tables of low-bill, high-maintenance college students en route to Boston’s Landsdowne Street clubs. They’d fuel themselves with endless refills of waters and only an appetizer or brownie sundae, a dessert servers like Misty were responsible for making. The two cherries on Misty’s night were extensive side work to clean up a trashed, sticky restaurant and a twenty-mile commute home in the finicky 1996 sedan that Misty shared with her mother, as she did many things.