by Mira Ptacin
This new feeling must be temporary. It must come from somewhere, from something. There are all kinds of anger.
It’s 9:45 a.m. now and we’ve been sitting in the exam room for over an hour. It’s to be expected. During these appointments to Phillips Family Practice, Andrew always manages to keep himself occupied. During all the hours we’ve accumulated in waiting rooms, he’s managed to distract me from the boredom and frustration of this run-down, sliding-scale, open-access medical clinic. He’s figured out how to access the Internet on the computers that have replaced paper patient charts with electronic ones. He reads The Times, checks his email, and browses cuteoverload.com and hotchickswithdouchebags.com. He puts the sphygmomanometer cuff around his neck, and, with his hand on the pump, turns to me as I roll my eyes and says, “I’ll do it. Don’t make me do it. I’ll do it!” He fills the rubber examining gloves with water from the sink. Later, when the doctor finally knocks on the door, intern at her side, he will extend this glove to shake the intern’s hand.
I sit on the exam table and bang my feet against its metal base, then finally lean back, rest my head on a paper pillowcase and close my eyes, wishing I had picked up a cup of coffee on the way here. I didn’t sleep much last night. I thought the hot soup and drinking no coffee after 3 p.m. would put me down and keep me down, but it didn’t. Before we got into bed, I stuffed earplugs into my ears, took a valerian root tablet, and made Andrew inhale some anti-snoring vapor from Rite Aid. I used to find his snores soothing, soft and endearing, but last night his breath was like water torture. I nudged him with my elbow and he mumbled an apology, then rolled onto his side. Within seconds, he was sawing logs again. I sat up, livid, listening and waiting for the next snore to push me even closer to the edge. He snored again. I kicked my feet from under the comforter like a child. Andrew’s peacefulness was driving me crazy, filling me with something that felt like hatred. And even though I was exhausted, I kept myself up, thinking, wondering, Why does he get to fall asleep and not me? Which really meant: Why does he get to feel better and not me?
Last night I started to accept the idea that I’d feel this way forever: afraid and alone. That the person sleeping next to me had already started to move on. We were only newlyweds and I was beginning to resent the person I was going to be spending the rest of my life with. Andrew snored again and I kicked him hard on his shin, then cried.
Segundo was up, too, drinking. When he listens to the Eagles late at night, he’s getting himself drunk. He was a hard-headed man, he was brutally handsome.
“Life in the Fast Lane.” He turned it up, loud; even with earplugs I could hear the lyrics through the wall. I thought he might be homesick. I pictured him drinking to Ecuador.
“Congratulations.”
“Sorry?”
“Congratulations on your wedding, you two,” says Dr. Reich, slipping off the powdered, pale rubber gloves and dropping them into a trash can.
“Thanks, Danya,” I say and sit up.
“Do you guys have anything planned for the honeymoon?”
“We’re going to Puerto Rico for a weekend in February,” Andrew says. “For Valentine’s Day.”
“But we’re saving up for a real honeymoon,” I tell her. It’s part of our plan. “A long one. Like three months or longer. Outside of the States—maybe someplace like Spain or Greece or New Zealand.” It’s unrealistic but a nice fantasy.
Danya looks into my eyes and nods. “I think that is a good decision,” she says. “I think you guys should try to live a normal life from now on. And I’m gonna plan on not seeing you around here for a very long time. At least six months, which is when you should have your women’s wellness exam. Six months. Got that?”
I almost don’t believe her when she tells me this. She promises that it’s over, that we are finished, there’s no more, that this is the end of it. I don’t believe her because it can’t possibly ever just end.
“Thank you for taking care of us, Danya,” I say. “I hope we’ve prepared you for when you become a real doctor.”
“Most memorable residency ever,” she tells us, and I think about how we just gave her the experience she might have only read in textbooks. Or heard about in a lecture. But Danya experienced it in real time. Helped navigate us through life and death in just a few short months. And now those months are over.
“Oh, it was my pleasure,” she says.
Andrew and I leave the room, and Danya leads us down the long, familiar corridor of the health clinic toward the exit. She turns to extend her hand, but the three of us hug instead. “Send me a postcard,” she instructs.
Promise, we say.
Good luck, she says.
Thanks, we say.
Goodbye. Goodbye, Phillips Family Practice.
two
In Battle Creek, Michigan, if you smell Froot Loops in the morning, it means rain in the afternoon. Pretty much most of the sixty thousand residents of my hometown, a city in southwestern Michigan, engage in their own surefire practice of predicting the weather, and they’re usually right—something about the humidity and the air pressure and the exhaust pipes from the cereal factories and our deep embedded instincts. In the city where I was born and bred, cereal is not just a breakfast staple or a harbinger of the weather. It’s an after-school snack. And a midnight snack. Kids find mini-boxes of cereal (sugary, sweet ones, of course) in their Halloween bags when they go trick-or-treating. During the summer, life-size Tony the Tigers and Snap, Crackle, and Pops wander among the picnic tables at the carnivals, giving away autographs and hugs to little ones. Cereal—artificially flavored toasted corn floating in cow’s milk—is the theme of the city museums, festivals, and fairs. The production, distribution, and marketing of cereal is what once employed more than half the population. It is the town’s foundation and livelihood.
Besides the exports of cereal, Battle Creek’s exports include: Carlos Gutierrez, our nation’s 35th secretary of commerce (and father of the boy with whom I had my first kiss); the ardent abolitionist Sojourner Truth; Ellen White, cofounder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church; Del Shannon, the guy who wrote “Runaway”; and Jason Newsted, the former bassist for Metallica. Still, Battle Creek is best known for being Cereal City USA, the world headquarters of the Kellogg Company, established by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and Will Keith Kellogg. They’re the brothers who invented cornflakes.
At Kellogg’s Cereal City USA museum, you could get your photo on a box of cornflakes. During the summer, Battle Creek’s residents put together “The World’s Longest Breakfast Table” at the Cereal Festival—a weekend community gathering of local food, blues bands, face-painting booths, Harley-Davidson displays, and dance recitals put on by local dance studios. The highlight of the whole event is an eat-off, annually pitted against “The World’s Longest Pancake Breakfast” of Springfield, Massachusetts.
Battle Creek is the city my parents migrated to after falling in love, getting married, and conceiving my sister, Sabina, in Chicago. It’s the place where, in 1979 at Leila Hospital, I was born. It’s the town where my family attended Catholic Church. It’s the town where my dad opened his own private medical practice and my mom started her own gourmet restaurant. And it’s the city where my mom decided to adopt a child from her homeland, Poland. It’s the city where, in August of 1983, I met my brother Julian.
“Where are da keys? Where are da keys?”
From behind the passenger seat, I watch my mother press her face against the second-floor window’s rusty screen as she calls out, in her sharp Polish accent, to no one in particular.
“Who took da damn keys?”
Her lips are cranberry colored and wet looking, and she’s wearing pearl clip-on earrings. She is trying to remember everything from her mental checklist: car seat, bag of Apple Jacks, wet wipes, We Sing Silly Songs cassette tapes, grape juice, car keys.
For months she’s known he is hers. She would
never say he belongs to her; it’s more as if they were meant to be; this was meant to happen. She’s been holding onto the one small picture of him as proof, carrying it around as a reminder, as encouragement to keep pushing, as hope. In the photo, she thinks her little guy looks like a concentration camp baby—round, dark eyes, weak limbs, pale skin, and a rather large head.
“Did you check on the dresser, behind my stethoscope?” Dad calls from the garage.
“Dey not dere! We have to go!”
Below her, my father is in the cluttered garage, searching and scavenging through boxes of our neglected Smurfs, Trolls, and Strawberry Shortcake dolls, which have all been replaced by our trendier Cabbage Patch Kids—blue-eyed, top-heavy, bald-headed dolls that smell like baby powder and plastic. He searches among the hammers, the jam jars full of nails, the Dutch bike, the wheelbarrow, and the storage bins. He is looking for the infant car seat.
“I set the keys there last night,” he calls up to her, “right before we went to bed.”
Dad is a tall, lanky man with sympathetic blue eyes and curly brown hair. His personality is a blend of Jesus (patient, self-sacrificing, wise) and Steve Martin. My sister inherited our father’s long, giraffe-like legs and optimism, but I’ve got his metabolism as well as his penchant for absurdity.
“Now where the heck is that baby booster?”
Dad finally discovers the cushiony egg buried behind the old doghouse, dusts it off, and brings it over to the car—a boxy, beige Buick—in the driveway where my sister, Sabina, and I await. We’re being very good girls, buckled into the hot leather seats, not fighting, which is rare. We’re dressed up very nice and pretty and we’re being good. We understand the importance of today. Special occasions require our maturest behavior.
I am four and a half years old, and wearing a huge, yellow satin dress. It’s from Jacobson’s Department Store in Lakeview Square, the brand new mall that developers destroyed the most beautiful wheat field in the whole world to build. After the golden meadow was killed, confused and homeless herds of deer spewed into our yard and our neighbors’ yards, and soon after that, dead ones started to appear on the side of the highway more and more. We got used to it.
Beanie is six, and bouncy. Her hair is blonde, her lips are rosy, and her cheeks are pink. Whereas I’m a brunette and always pale, which worries my parents, so I get blood tests once a month at Dad’s office just to be on the safe side. The dress I’m wearing belonged to my sister until just recently, when she outgrew it. It’s still too big for me, but I’ve always loved it, so Mom let me wear it today, even though I look like I’ve just been swallowed up by a tulip. Also, my bangs are too short and crooked because earlier in the week I found some scissors and gave myself a haircut. The car is parked in the driveway and is running, which is why Mom can’t find da damn keys.
As this scene goes down, it doesn’t occur to my sister or me that our mother was once a little girl, too, just like us. That she had small kitten feet and ran without shoes along the foothills of mountains. Once, she picked wild strawberries, collected sticks, and played games like “housekeeping station” and “survive in the wilderness” and didn’t have two real little children of her own to look after. Once, Mom’s life was understandable. Her momma was warm, and her father was a big, silly bear who did not yet seem cold or difficult or corrupt. There was once a time when my mother’s life was as simple as it is for Beanie and me at this very moment.
Before I was born, before my brother or my sister or even my father or my mother were born, this Midwestern American city was a bit of a phenomenon—a miraculous, magical destination renowned for its special brand of lifesaving. Before the cereal and the cornflakes, a doctor came to Battle Creek from New York City, raised forty children and adopted seven. He opened a holistic sanitarium, a place where rich folks and prominent Americans like Warren G. Harding and Mary Todd Lincoln and Henry Ford traveled to address their dietetic concerns and indulge their gastronomic curiosities.
The Battle Creek Sanitarium, first opened on September 5, 1866, was a combination hotel, spa, and luxury hospital and the only regional bastion of self-improvement at the time. Patients participated in breathing exercises and postprandial marches to promote the proper digestion of food. They took classes in meal preparation for homemakers and embraced the sanitarium’s vegetarian, low-fat, low-protein, fiber-rich diets. The founder of the sanitarium also considered enemas to be very important, so patients participated in frequent cleansings, ones in which the doctor irrigated their bowels with several gallons of water. This was followed by a pint of yogurt—half of which was eaten, half of which was administered by enema, “thus planting the protective germs where they are most needed and may render most effective service.”
The doctor also insisted that sex drained the body of life. He encouraged the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris, claiming it was “an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.” He believed that masturbation was the cause of cancer of the womb, nocturnal emissions, urinary diseases, impotence, epilepsy, insanity, mental and physical debility, and that circumcision could remedy the “solitary vice.” He believed the procedure should be done without administering an anesthetic, “as the brief pain attending the operation would have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.” He believed he had the answers to what we should do with our bodies, and people believed him. This man, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, went on to invent Toasted Corn Flakes cereal, and put our hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan, on the map.
Mom slams the passenger-side door shut just as Dad begins to back the Buick out of the driveway. In a tubercular wheeze, our old four-door putters past Kellogg Community College and the sleeping jungle gyms of Meyer’s Toy World, past Kellogg Auditorium, past Farley-Estes Funeral Home, past Community Hospital and Dad’s office, and past St. Philip Catholic Church. It’s very early in the morning. The sidewalks are rolled up and the sun has barely shown its face. We climb the ramp of The Penetrator, which merges onto I-94 towards Kalamazoo, and Dad pops a cassette tape into the deck. Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds . . .
My parents have been waiting a long time to take this drive. The gears of the adoption machine started nearly ten months ago, maybe longer. At the very least, it all began sometime after Mom had settled into Battle Creek and after Sabina and I were born. When her dust storm settled; when she just felt right. Maybe she felt loved, and finally loved America. Or maybe she was restless. Her stocked Frigidaire made her feel awkward. Maybe my father’s love reminded her of her mother’s unhappiness, and maybe that struck her with grief. Maybe she felt guilty. Maybe she was inspired. Maybe she wanted to save a life. Maybe she wanted to save a child that someone else considered an accident.
It started with the women: Lucia, Ducia, Vita, Jeanette, Vera. One by one, they came to us. Poland was in terrible economic condition, so Mom invited the women to live in our home in Michigan, and stay until they could afford to set out on their own. She could get them here and help them find work, but after that, they were on their own. Mom wanted to do more. Save a life more fully. Save someone completely helpless.
There was a woman in Warsaw, an impoverished, unwed girl pregnant with her second child, and she was giving the baby up for adoption.
We are in the car on the highway heading to pick up this little baby boy from the airport.
It has taken months to get to this point. In Poland, a birth mother has a month to change her mind about following through with her decision. Have baby, give baby, keep baby. During the first month, the baby stays at the hospital. Mom and Dad paid the nurses in Poland to take extra-special care of the baby during its holding period. We didn’t know if he would come to us or not, but Mom kept sending money anyway because she said he just wanted to be loved. So the nurses named him Christopher and loved him until the baby’s mother never returned. That’s when Mom hired a lawyer, petiti
oned a congressman to speed up the adoption process, and paid Vera to take over loving the baby until she could put him on a plane to Michigan and deliver him to her, to us. So now, here we are, over five months later, driving to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to get this little guy. The drive will take about three hours.
We’ll wait, and Mom’s brother Matteo, his wife Mary, and their first child, a newborn named Marek, will greet us at the terminal. With our faces smeared against the windows, we will watch the plane touch down, and Uncle Matteo will capture the baby boy’s arrival on his brand-new Zenith video camera. My new baby brother will arrive at the same international airport where both my mother and Uncle Matteo landed when they started to become Americans.
The little boy will be sick, and will need someone to take care of him. He will have the flu and a crusty nose, and a big head, too, just like he did in the photo. Beanie and I will take turns kissing him on his dimpled dumpling forehead and argue about whose turn it is to hold him, how the other got to hold him longer. My father will cry, overwhelmed with joy, and all at the same time everyone will be touched and amazed and exultant. During the drive back home, the new boy will sit in the front seat of the Buick, nestled in between my parents, and he’ll stare at Dad the whole time, wide-eyed, in a trance, like Dad had come from another planet. Sabina and I will sleep.
Eventually, the little boy will get better—Dad will fix him, make his flu go away. Mom will feed him, and he’ll gain weight, gain color, and soon we’ll all be there when he’s christened at St. Philip Catholic Church. There will be a reception in our backyard under a little white tent, and Sabina and I will take off our clothes and run around naked, pushing balloons into the air. Dad will hang a tire swing. Mom will make deviled eggs. And the newspaper will write up a front-page story about Julian, the adopted baby boy from Poland and his foreign mother, Maria.
