Wrong Turn - I Find Myself Alone

by Zoe Jasmine

  Sunk low in the guts of the building, a furnace began to hum louder, as if trying to drown out Mabel's pitch for Forever Families over other local agencies. The infomercial won. Mabel blinked at them with mercy in her eyes, mercy overlaid by a proper respect for the cash of clients shopping in the baby market.

  Winding down, she intoned, “For most of you, there is a Precious One in your life. Maybe already born. Out there. Waiting. You've already taken the first step. Congratulations on brooking our hurricane, which Forever Families scheduled to winnow out the sheep from the goats. Now let's have our coffee, shall we? Fifteen minutes, people. When we come back, I'll give you the skinny on the legal angles of international adoptions, we'll review issues of health and welfare, we'll do some other fun and games. Then after our lunch break, we'll have our visit by a Forever Family, the Stankos from Pepperell. They have three Precious Ones from Moldova.”

  Suddenly Mabel Quackenbush looked exhausted, as if she'd rather be home tucking into a Sara Lee coffeecake than sorting papers with the tips of her shoes. “Stretch, now. Scatter and chatter. Look at the displays.”

  Winnie wasn't much of a coffee drinker, but as the only solo registrant she was a natural target for a social worker on the prowl. So Winnie hid in a herd of other bleary registrants and lined up for a cup of lukewarm water flavored with coffee stains. When she'd dumped enough sugar in it to make it tolerable, she headed for the hall, hoping to stand outside in the covered walkway and light a cigarette. But one of the Boys ambushed her by the coatrack.

  “Are you a Scrooge or a Cratchit?” he said.

  She flinched and laughed, blushing. She didn't want to talk to anyone. Was this Geoff or Adrian? They both reeked of the benignity that middle-class professional gay men seemed to prize these days. “I'm a humbug, if that's what you mean,” she went on, trying to be honest, though it wasn't her strong suit.

  Unforgivably forward, he reached out and opened her scarf so it spread across the bosom of her sweatshirt. Within the latticework of the intertwined sprigs of red-berried holly was stamped the image of Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig dancing with Christmas cheer. Eight, ten, a dozen pairs of Fezziwigs, cavorting in perfect synchronization.

  “It's the famous illustration, I recognized it,” he said. “I read A Christmas Carol to my fourth-graders every December. I know the Fezziwigs when I see them.”

  This silly Bond Street scarf, a Christmas present from John Comestor some years back. “I can't remember if you're Geoff or the other one,” she said, to change the subject. “You put your sweater on over your name tag.”

  “Adrian. Adrian Moscou.”

  “Of the Spencer-Moscous.”

  “Oh, that. Boy, you sound appalled. Not that I blame you. That's Geoff's thing. He's the one in the family way. But Geoff and I didn't sign up as a hinged name, not today. Too risky, considering what's at stake. Our Precious One . I suppose the Forever Families staff ran our Social Security numbers through a computer check, because Spencer-Moscou is how the phone company lists us.”

  “Creepy,” said Winnie. That must be how Forever Families got her real name. W. Rudge. She had signed up as Dotty O'Malley, hadn't she? These days her memory wasn't reliable.

  “It is creepy,” said Adrian Moscou cheerfully. “Well, it's a creepy day. Hurricane Gretl—whoever heard of a hurricane this late in the year? More proof of global warming, I guess. Now, are you going through this process on your own or is there a partner waiting in the parking lot?” Meaning, probably, was she a dyke.

  “Which one of you is going to be the mommy?” she countered.

  “Well, neither of us wants to be the daddy,” he said, without taking offense. He shrugged. “I guess we'll just be like the virgin governesses from Victorian novels, and spend our lives in the service of a Precious One who never bothers to learn our names.”

  “Innocent and heartless,” said Winnie.

  “I beg your pardon?” he said.

  “What James Barrie said children were like. In Peter Pan . Innocent and heartless.” The actual sentence had been gay and innocent and heartless, but Winnie wasn't up to uncorking that line of camp.

  The Pellegrinos drifted over. So did Malachy Fogarty, munching antacids. Now for the capsule histories. These folks, free on a workday morning?—they didn't need to adopt children. They needed to share. To get in touch with their inner childlessness. They were the reason Talk Radio wasn't called Listen Radio. Winnie treaded the oily waters with a blank expression, preparing caustic observations to serve John Comestor tomorrow when she got there. He'd love all this. But when the Pellegrinos regrouped to mutter with the Boudreaus, and Malachy Fogarty bolted off, hunting for the men's room, Adrian Moscou said, “I know, you must be the reformed Scrooge, and you're here to adopt Tiny Tim.”

  She couldn't bear to be thought of as being sentimental as everyone else here. Tiny Tim indeed. The coincidence of Adrian's lighting on the Scrooge reference was shocking and even upsetting, but really, she thought: Tiny Tim? Anything but . Out of nerves, or pride, she admitted, “I'm not here to adopt a child. Only to observe the process. I've got a novel in progress, and I'm researching. Every little bit helps. You know.”

  “Neat,” he said. “Cool. We're the raw material?”

  “Well, you have to admit, it's ripe stuff. Baring our souls like this.”

  “Embarrassing. But you do what you gotta do. At least it's all in the service of something other than ourselves.”

  “That's what we say, anyway,” she said. “Some of us lie to ourselves better than others.” He raised an eyebrow, not sure what she meant. She found she was glad that Mabel Quackenbush was ready to reconvene. She excused herself from Adrian Moscou. When Mabel Quackenbush started the next portion of the program by asking if there were any questions so far, Adrian raised his hand.

  “Ms. Rudge here is a writer,” he said. “She's doing research on a book. That makes me wonder about who gets to see our applications? How secure is the private material in our files?”

  “Oh, a writer,” said Mabel Quackenbush. “I didn't know, Winifred. How nice.” She had seen everything before and knew how to handle this one. “Would you like to tell us more?”

  Winnie wouldn't really. But her cover was blown. She looked everywhere except at Adrian Moscou.

  She tried to think of what to say. Through the pause, the sound of a truck in the lot, its backing-up beepers punctuating the sound of wind: delivering more babies to the loading dock?

  “I'm sure you're not here to plunder other people's stories,” said Mabel Quackenbush. “This is serious business. I hope I don't have to ask you to leave.”

  Winnie said, “No, you don't. I'm legit. I filled out all the forms. I'm just doing a book about adoption. A novel, that is. The smallest bit of real detail makes the biggest difference. My character is off to Central Europe to adopt a child. I take notes”—she brandished her spiral-bound notebook in a jaunty manner—“I'm a compulsive note taker. Everything hits home eventually. I could do some good for the industry, you know.”

  “Have you published anything?” asked Mabel doubtfully, in the same voice with which she had asked the couples if there were other children at home.

  “Sadly, nothing you'd have heard of,” said Winnie. W. Rudge's children's chapter books came out with pleasant regularity but little fanfare. Her only adult publication, The Dark Side of the Zodiac, was a trashy self-help succès de scandale, brought out under the name of Ophelia Marley. It was her cash cow, to the extent she had one, though its udders were going dry.

  Mabel Quackenbush stood up. “The head staff must be in by now, unless the storm has kept them home. I'll run upstairs and have a quick powwow. In the meantime, let's get going on a role-playing assignment. You too,” she said blithely to Winnie. “Might as well soak it up before we get the security guard to come break all the bones in your typing fingers. Now, people, count off, one two three.”

  They did. Winnie was a one. She joined a smaller circle with Adrian Moscou, Leonard
Schimel, Diane Boudreau, and Malachy Fogarty. Group one was told to act out this scenario: You've got a Precious One in the kitchen and an Original Mother shows up with documents proving the prior relationship. What do you do, dear?

  “I'd be a mess. I admit it. I'd just weep,” said Adrian Moscou. “Then call FF for advice, probably. Weep some more.”

  “You litigate,” said Leonard Schimel. “Nothing like it. You litigate fast you litigate hard you don't let up. Take out a restraining order. I have connections.”

  “What's the problem?” said Diane Boudreau. “I'd invite an Original Mother in. Put on a pot of coffee. The more open the better. I intend to let our child know the full scoop, soon as he or she can understand English. You can't keep this stuff under the rug.”

  “Are you mad?” said Malachy Fogarty. “An Original Mother? I'd turf the bitch out. She gave up the child, didn't she? I'd get a gun.” They would have laughed had he not sounded as if he meant it.

  Attention turned to Winnie, who hadn't spoken. She shrugged, and said, “Since I'm not here to adopt, I don't need to play this game, no matter what Mabel says.”

  “But this scenario, it's like story writing,” said Adrian. “Isn't this your job? You should be good at inventing what to do.”

  “I should be very good at it, shouldn't I?” she said. “But I can't open that door, I can't see that scene. I can only write the scenes I can see.”

  “You have to play,” said Diane Boudreau. “Or we'll trade you to another group.”

  “I'll record our observations. I'll report to everyone else. I'm good at that.”

  Mabel Quackenbush was taking her time upstairs. They sat in a stalemate for a few moments, listening to the laughter and then the more careful discussion from the other two groups. Then to the rain beating yet more heavily across the parking lot, against the glass.

  “Good thing they're not doing Hallowe'en tonight,” said Diane after a while. “Think of those little kids walking out in this weather! So dangerous.”

  “Little plastic skeleton masks dripping with rain,” said Adrian. “I like it. Adds verisimilitude, wouldn't you say, Winifred? Corpses liquefy, you know. That's why they plant so many trees in cemeteries. Soak up the juices.”

  “Cheery,” said Diane.

  “Geoff and I are going to a party tonight,” he said. “The job is to come as the person you'd most like to be haunted by. Geoff has the easy costume, he's doing Bruce Springsteen from Born to Run . White T-shirt, jeans, cap. Helps that he has the body for it too,” he added, smugly proud. “Who wouldn't like to be haunted by the Boss?”

  Nobody asked Adrian what thrill he was going as.

  “Isn't the idea of haunting that you don't get to choose who does it to you?” said Diane.

  “We're haunted by the IRS, bloody ghouls,” said Malachy. “Half the reason I want to hire a kid is to get the adoption tax credit and the dependent child credit.”

  They tittered unconvincingly. Adrian turned to Winnie. “So who would you choose to be haunted by, in your wildest fantasies?”

  “I'm a writer, I spend too much time with literary fantasies as it is,” she demurred. But she admitted to herself, she was taken with that image of kids trick-or-treating in their costumes, an early snow coating them. Not bad. Troubling and calming at once. The snow making ghosts of every pint-size witch and hobo and ballerina. She scratched a few words on her pad.

  When Mabel Quackenbush got back, she looked terse, the last Soviet apparatchik. “You. Sorry. They ran you through the computer. They said you have to leave. No discussion.”

  The group bristled slightly, though was it on Winnie's behalf or not?

  “Bummer,” said Adrian, daring to show his hand, anyway, bless him. “What gives?”

  “It doesn't matter,” said Winnie, “never mind. I'll clear out.”

  “You can check in at the front office if you want the reasons,” said Mabel. “Awfully sorry, dear.” She looked ready for a fight.

  She walked Winnie to the door, a kind of senior citizen bouncer. In a lower voice she said, “They know who you are. They left me a note in my box, but I didn't see it because I was late, what with the rain and all. You applied under a pseudonym? Why? You should have guessed they don't allow that.”

  “I'm sure there's been some mistake,” said Winnie, blathering slightly, “but it doesn't matter. I'm going abroad tomorrow anyway. I can use the time to pack. And the roads are only going to get worse.” She picked up her things and tried not to move too hastily. She didn't look at Mabel as she left.

  Winifred W. Rudge, out at her car a half hour before lunch, thinking: how small, how touchy everyone in there is. How could that be? Does being unlucky in the egg and sperm department erase all personal dignity? Who needs to write fiction anymore?

  But it wasn't them; this she knew. It was her own eyes, seeing things crabbed and phony; it was her own ears, set to discriminate in favor of the ludicrous and not the humane. This was part of her problem. It was what had given her the bleak vision to create The Dark Side of the Zodiac , it was what made acid-edged gossip with John Comestor so much fun. When, really, what was so terrible about Mabel Quackenbush pitching daddy-woo and mommy-lust at childless people, if small kids got connected with families? Beware becoming superior, she said to herself. Or desiccated. Or dead.

  She fumbled with her car keys, hoping that no one inside the Forever Families stronghold was watching her exile. She began to be aloof, seeing herself as if from five feet away. Not with a cinematographer's eye, framing everything, calibrating the apertures, roasting the scene with lamplight—but seeing herself as a middle-aged writer, struggling with money, frightened about the future. What does the working novelist look like, when she gets in a car on a rain-snowy afternoon in a Boston suburb? A writer handicapped in her profession by a limited capacity for sympathy?

  The wind tore the door out of her hand; the hinges creaked. The storm moved on. Her hair seethed. Suddenly she undid her ridiculous scarf and let it blow away, a surrender flag of latticed green and red, the dancing Fezziwigs sent winging out over the concrete retaining wall, flagging down the traffic crawling on a snow-choked Route 128.

  Beaky, she said of herself; a nose like an iron doorstop. Firm flat cheeks. A small bluish dot on one nostril that looked like ink, but was some residue of imploded capillary, the result of a magnificent nosebleed when she was twelve. Not tall, not dumpy, neither slender nor stout. A serviceable body shape, shy of glamour, though not yet quite fallen.

  “Why did you blurt out about being a writer?” she said aloud. Her words in a string following the scarf. “Did you guess Adrian would squeal on you? Did you hope so? Were you trying to get kicked out?”

  Safely in the car, patting rain off her forehead with a handkerchief, she added, “And since when are you talking to yourself?”

  But you're a writer. That's what you do. You just usually don't do it aloud.

  She hunched over the wheel, hating herself for being such a mess. Peering as the rain turned to snow and back again, she went skidding and sliding east on Route 9, and she watched the sky skid and slide above. The gray towers of Huntington Avenue and South Huntington loomed out of the laid-paper texture of the day's damp atmosphere.

  The car was down to a crawl by the time she got to Huxtable Street, and she scraped a neighbor's fencepost as she slalomed into her parking space. But her mood had lifted, revived by the promise of seeing her cousin tomorrow. She'd tell him about the gay teacher picking up on the scarf; John would appreciate that. What would she say if John asked her why she'd liberated the scarf? Well, she wouldn't tell him she had done so. Let Scrooge and all that—that pastness of life—let it go, let it blow off.

  She made her way cautiously up the wooden steps of the semidetached house. Shabby, shabby, unornamented, unconsoling. Home. And then as she fit her key into her lock, she paused, even though the cold rain flecked against her face—remembering the opening lines of A Christmas Carol . Scrooge's first intimatio
n of his dark epiphanies:

  Marley was dead: to begin with.

  Scrooge, having scorned relatives and employees and the filthy poor alike, headed home full of sour stomach, and twisted his key in his lock, and saw the door knocker turn into Marley's face with—she knew it well— a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. . . .

  There was no knocker on her door. But she sensed a jolt of presence, or imagined she did. Maybe nothing more than a field mouse who had come into the house due to the unseasonable snow. She bent over and peered through the flap of the mail slot. Like many who make their living exploiting the public's appetite for magic, she was a stone-hearted rationalist. She didn't expect to peer into a void of any sort—no trap of stars and galaxies—no wispy haunted otherworld. Rather she worried about surprising some neighborhood felon out to relieve her of stereo and computer components. But there was nothing, just the cold heavy air of an unoccupied house. A light was on in the kitchen, bronzing the wall on which she had stenciled blurry and unconvincing pineapples. The pineapples winked out and returned. Power surge in the storm? The dishcloth lay crumpled on the braided rug where, several days earlier, late and hurrying, she'd dropped it.

  She twisted the key in the dead bolt, then in the lower lock, and pushed open the door. Readying herself for the melodic ding that would ring for thirty seconds until she had punched in the code. She was knocked against the doorjamb, but not by an intruder, just by surprise. The wrong amplified alarm was kicking on. The other one. The “This is not a test” siren.

  The noise was so huge that she had to force herself down the hall to the closet where the control unit was mounted. Her four-digit code didn't kill the racket. She punched it in several times, then thumped the keypad until she accidentally hit the right circuit-breaking button. And the next thing that would happen, if the system worked, was that someone from the central office in Nebraska would call and ask her for her code word. If all was well she was to utter the secret signal, at which the Nebraska folk would cancel the request for Boston's finest to send a car. But in the event that a gun was pressed to her back, she was to say some other word instead, and the cops would be there in five minutes.