The Ginger Child

by Patrick Flanery

  We can tell that we are befuddling Gemma and so start to slip into a teacherly mode of explanation, trying to describe for her the nature of our lives, trying to make her see that we are nothing terrifying, that we are more normal than she imagines, but perhaps our idea of normal is very remote from her own.

  We describe our days, the way we get up at seven, have coffee, eat breakfast together, and then go to work. If Andrew does not have a class to teach, he and I might both work at home in our respective studies, writing and reading all morning before breaking for lunch, which will last an hour, without fail. After lunch, I sometimes go for a walk if I’m home alone, and if not then the two of us will work through the afternoon until we might go for a walk together, or to the gym, and then make dinner. Or, if Andrew has been at work, I’ll have dinner ready for him when he gets home, and—

  You cook every night? Gemma asks, sounding incredulous.

  Yes, I say, we cook every night, unless we happen to go out to eat, but that doesn’t happen very often.

  And who’s the cook?

  We both cook.

  She makes a note.

  And then, after dinner, we watch a movie, or a couple of episodes of a series, and then read before going to bed and get up the next morning and do it all again.

  And what about weekends?

  Weekends we might go shopping together, or for a walk, or to see a movie, or to a gallery, and some weekends we work. Some weekends are no different structurally to our weekdays.

  She makes a note.

  You do a lot of reading then, she says a little hesitantly, and I think of Eleanor, who saw our many books as possibilities, exciting ones.

  Gemma wants to know about our social lives, whether we go to clubs and bars, what it will be like to give up that sort of thing.

  We don’t go to clubs or bars. We don’t go out dancing. That’s not the kind of life we have. That’s not the kind of life we’ve ever had. Our social life is about lunches and dinners, usually in our home or in the homes of our friends, most of whom, as a matter of fact, are opposite-sex couples.

  The formulation seems to confuse Gemma. Her face wrinkles.

  Do you mean straight couples? she asks.

  Yes, I say.

  She makes a note.

  In retrospect I think about Didier Eribon’s description in his book Returning to Reims of the demands made on people who identify as queer. ‘The social order puts pressure on all of us,’ he says. ‘All those people who want things to be “regular,” or “meaningful,” or to correspond to “stable points of reference” know they can count on the way adherence to the norm is inculcated into the deepest levels of our consciousness from our earliest years’ and that ‘anyone inhabiting… alternative family forms’ is ‘required… to experience them as somehow deviant or abnormal, and thus inferior and shameful’.

  At the same time, however, Eribon articulates his ‘distrust of the opposite kind of injunction’, a distrust I share, because it insists, in ways that are ‘just as profoundly normative’ as the shaming conservative pressure, that the queer person or couple ‘be abnormal’ because ‘non-normativity’ functions in this case ‘as a kind of prescribed “subversion”’.10

  I sense in Gemma’s response to us a strange combination of these forces: on the one hand it feels as though she cannot help seeing us as abnormal, even though I am sure she would insist there is nothing shameful about our status as a same-sex couple, and on the other hand she seems both to expect a certain performance of abnormality that we refuse and also to fear that our description of ourselves as ‘queer’ is an indication of a degree of abnormality much greater and darker than any she would associate with a couple who described themselves as ‘gay’.

  *

  Our first meeting with Gemma lasts three hours, but seems to be much longer, three days, three weeks, every minute of question and answer expanding and swallowing time, stretching me out through its long digestive temporal processes so that at the end of it I collapse into bed, wondering what is yet to come, how someone like her can ever be made to understand who we are, how we live in the world, what makes us tick.

  The fatigue, the elongation of those hours, comes from the sense that we are now required to deal with someone who struggles to understand what is obvious to us, and what was obvious to Eleanor when we met with her. For Gemma, I begin to sense that even the simplest detail of the way we live requires careful explication, and then those clarifications seem to require explanations of their own because, in thinking we have cleared up a particular point, we discover we have assumed an area of common knowledge that is alien to her. We have to educate at the same time that we are trying to describe who we are, to demonstrate our capacity and suitability to parent, and we have to do it all with a sense of patience and goodwill that is often difficult to sustain. I try to remind myself that Gemma is just doing her job, asking what she must, and whether I like the way she does it or not is beside the point. I just have to get through it.

  We see Gemma two weeks later, at the end of July, and three more times in August. At each of these meetings we talk about ourselves, we discuss potential kinds of children, situations with children, but never at the end of any of these conversations do I come away feeling I have learned something useful about what it might be like to parent an adopted child. I begin to understand that such instruction is not the point. The point is for Gemma to determine if we are capable of parenting an adopted child, but I had expected a more reciprocal process of information sharing. Instead she expects that we should be reading about adoption on our own time, poring over guides and books and pamphlets and websites. Her job is to assess rather than educate.

  As a test of our capacity to ‘be fun’, Gemma brings a video game console to one of the meetings and asks us to play a dance-off game that has us thrashing around our living room while she sits in the corner, videoing us on her smartphone without asking our permission and convulsed with laughter. We do one dance contest, then another, and another, the steps growing faster each time, the moves more difficult, and we are so desperate to pass this ridiculous test that we throw ourselves into the activity, but feel at the same time a rising sickness and sense of misgiving about the whole situation.

  When Gemma leaves we look at each other, struggling to fathom what has happened. I feel strangely violated. Andrew is irritated but willing to go along with whatever is necessary, within reason. We fear that to resist anything our social worker demands would imperil our chances of being approved as adopters, but the idea that dancing to a video game in any way signals our capacity to parent strikes us as both ludicrous and depressing.

  Is this how social workers determine the suitability of prospective adopters? Does it matter at all that many of our friends with children don’t even allow video games in the house? Would Gemma understand if we said that we would find other ways – non-technological ways – of entertaining a child? Does she even believe that children can be entertained without video games or tablets or smartphones, or that it’s okay for children to be bored or to be given time to entertain themselves?

  Gemma’s philosophy of raising children seems to rest on a belief that when they are awake, they must be occupied, they cannot be left alone even for an instant, and while that is certainly true of infants, Andrew and I can both recall being left to draw or read or play with minimal supervision from our mothers when we were three and four and five years old.

  What has shifted in the world so that the idea of unstructured play is regarded not just as undesirable, but actively wrong?

  Despite such odd moments, it is clear that Gemma is not finding anything about us that can really give her pause. Even if she does not always understand us, we are able to answer all of her questions, even those that strike us as inappropriate.

  In the weeks before the approval panel, Gemma starts sending emails with questions that she feels need to be answered. Most of these are straightforward, but then she writes to ask how I might have bee
n affected by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. We have spoken about the attacks in our previous meetings, but only insofar as they are a marker for me, having happened just weeks before I moved to Britain to begin my graduate studies at Oxford. I reply to her question:

  I could write a book about this, and I don’t see that it’s necessarily relevant for this process, nor something I can summarize in a few lines or paragraphs. I think this is true of anyone who lived in New York before the attacks. If pressed, I would say only that it made me value friends and family and life even more than I did before.

  She does not respond to my answer, but I am left wondering why she would think it necessary to explore this.

  The approval panel is made up of women and men of various ages, races, professions and social backgrounds. It all goes surprisingly smoothly, barring another question about our use of the word ‘queer’. We patiently explain once more that this is how we understand ourselves, how we describe ourselves to ourselves, and in the spirit of honesty we chose to use this word in the adoption workbooks because to describe ourselves as ‘gay’ does not fit as comfortably with our sense of who we are and how we function in the world. The panel seems satisfied and shortly after concluding the conversation the chair comes to tell us that we have been unanimously approved.

  For the first time since embarking on this process we both feel an uncomplicated sense of hope, even of joy. And yet, looking at Gemma, I have the impression that the panel’s decision surprises her. It occurs to me that she may never have had faith in us in the first place, and I wonder, as we contemplate moving on to the next stages, how this may affect our search for a child.

  A few days later, she sends us an email addressed to ‘Andrew and David’, asking whether we’re celebrating yet.

  CITIZEN RUTH

  Over spring break of my freshman year in college I went home to Omaha to find my family splitting apart. There was more to the story than I knew at the time and it would be another two years before I heard all of it. My mother had decided a decade earlier to get her doctorate and, now that I was done with high school, to search for a job wherever it might take her. She had phoned me at Georgetown to say she was sending a plane ticket and I would need to come home for the break because we had to talk about something as a family.

  Typically for us, the matter was not discussed immediately on my arrival. It required careful stage management, and, atypically for us, a public venue. I wonder now whether my mother was trying to cast off the shame of our dysfunction, or, more likely, if she feared what discussing her news alone in the house might ignite.

  We went to a restaurant downtown where my mother revealed that she had been offered a job in upstate New York. She wondered what we thought about it.

  I didn’t hesitate. I told her to take it.

  My parents had been married for more than three decades and this was a relief after the years of combustible anger that crackled around the three of us. Throughout high school my closest friends would often ask why my parents stayed together. I long knew it was not a happy marriage, that we were not and had never been a happy family, but I also thought we managed to keep all of that hidden from the rest of the world, as if our unhappiness were known only to us.

  I went back to Georgetown, finished the semester, then returned to Omaha in May to pack up the house and leave with my mother. By that time, I had been accepted as a transfer student to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and it was clear to me that the only sensible choice was to get out of Nebraska.

  During those weeks, there was constant arguing over furniture and art and who was getting the three cats. My mother took all the good art, most of the best furniture, and all three of the cats.

  In the midst of packing, a woman from my father’s church phoned to tell me that the producers of a film shooting in the area were looking for extras. As a child I had been active in community theatre and once appeared in a training video for the famous children’s home Boys Town, sitting in the back of a classroom as a not very convincing juvenile delinquent with floppy hair and baggy sweatshirt.

  The person I spoke with in the film’s production office gave me directions to a bowling alley across the Missouri River in Council Bluffs, Iowa. I spent most of the next day at a sticky table overlooking the lanes reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, hoping the book’s recent film adaptation would suggest to the director that here was a young man with an artistic sensibility who could really do something interesting on screen. I tried to read with dramatic flair, contorting my face with surprise and amusement and meditative engrossment, pretending I was somewhere other than a bowling alley in a blue-collar Midwestern town.

  None of us had heard of the director, Alexander Payne, but people were proud that he was an Omahan who had been to UCLA and decided to come home to shoot his first feature, the abortion satire Citizen Ruth. If my work as an extra didn’t open doors to Hollywood stardom, at least there was the sixty bucks for an easy day’s work and the chance of very minor local fame that seems to matter when you’re nineteen.

  Late in the afternoon the production assistants marched us a few blocks away to a building ringed with chain-link fence and barbed wire at the edge of a run-down residential neighbourhood. They began dividing us into anti-abortion protestors and abortion clinic defenders. At a critical moment I edged towards the second camp and they put me in a yellow poncho with two bumper stickers plastered across my chest.

  One of these stickers said ‘Celebrate Diversity’ and the other, in what the costumers no doubt thought was a stroke of comic genius, ‘Keep Your Laws Off My Body’. I wanted to ask them, ‘Don’t you see that I’m a boy?’, and ‘What does a rainbow-striped diversity sticker have to do with abortion rights anyway?’, but I figured they knew what they were doing and the joke would make sense to the audience even if it didn’t to me.

  That’s not strictly true. It did make sense, I just didn’t want to get it. In the previous months, I had come out for the first time to a few friends at Georgetown, and the bumper stickers were both thrilling and terrifying, as though the costumer had recognized a truth about me that I was only beginning to see myself and did not want to imagine might be visible to anyone else. Or maybe the costumer didn’t read me for what I was and thought it was funny because I looked so straight (khakis, button-down Oxford shirt). It’s impossible to know one way or the other. I had been trying to keep my gender and sexuality in check for so many years that I could no longer tell what my tells might be, or when they would flare into view and give me away.

  For the rest of the day I stood with a stern expression behind that chain-link fence and helped usher Laura Dern and Tippi Hedren from a car into the building that served as the clinic. In breaks between shots, Payne and the lead actors ate sushi from large catering trays. I had never eaten sushi and would not do so until I moved to Manhattan later that year, when more cosmopolitan friends would introduce me to what they called Disco Sushi on Avenue A and I stuck a pyramid of wasabi in my mouth thinking something so vividly green must also be sweet.

  At the end of the day’s shooting I went home and a week later my mother and the three cats and I drove to New York, staying in roadside motels, the cats smuggled in their carriers through back doors and allowed to roam the dingy rooms. I forgot about the movie.

  Later that summer I moved into NYU housing, just around the corner from Bellevue Hospital. I met the first guy I ever kissed, Brody, a gender studies student from Mississippi with a line in white t-shirts that showed off the gentle curve of his biceps. We were both dreaming of success, of one kind or another.

  After we made out in his dorm room a few times, Brody said that kissing me made him feel like a woman. I was too embarrassed to confess that kissing him made me worry about disease and what my family and friends from home would be likely to say about someone so flamboyant. I can still remember what he tasted like and the things he said to me about my body, the way I wanted him and his mouth, but was also uncom
fortable with his campness and squealing laughter.

  I know now that both of us were suffering from internalized homophobia and the cousin of misogyny that so often accompanies it. Even in New York, Brody and I were both grappling with the shame that attached itself to our desire. I was too naïve and politically disengaged to think about how ‘Keep Your Laws Off My Body’ could ever be pertinent to my own life as a young queer man who would keep shuttling in and out of the closet for another six years before deciding that life was too short to keep anything in closets but shoes and clothes and the rubbish of life I was too tired to file or throw away.

  *

  When Citizen Ruth was released and later went to video, friends emailed or phoned to ask if it was possible they had seen me, briefly, towards the end of the film, standing behind a chain-link fence in a yellow poncho. I am most visible in a lingering close-up, posed next to a woman who speaks briefly into a walkie-talkie.

  Watching the scene now, I’m surprised by my awkwardness and physical self-consciousness. No one was going to turn me into Henry Fonda or Montgomery Clift, let alone Marlon Brando – all Omaha boys in their time – and luckily some part of me must have understood that was the case. I gave up acting soon after, or at least gave up the fantasy of being an actor. Performance requires a forgetting of the self and a public vulnerability I knew I was never going to master.

  Twenty years later, here is the irony that strikes me as a middle-aged man married to a man who never embarrasses him, in whose company I never feel shame, and with whom I am trying to form a family: at that critical moment in my own outing of myself to the world, I played an activist version of my actual self, a queer abortion clinic defender, asserting the rights of women to make their own choices about their bodies. For my own sense of myself, I knew that even in the realm of fiction I could not risk appearing as an anti-abortion protestor, occupying an ideological position that remains anathema to me.11