Rescuing Julia Twice

by Tina Traster

  “Adopting a child, is, well, it makes things different.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “Julia’s difficult, different. No?”

  Not sure what to say, I put her at ease.

  “Don’t get me wrong. You do an awesome, awesome job with her, and Ricky and I are so happy to have you. But now I’ve had a chance to see you and Julia together, and I see some of the same strange things I experience when I’m with her.”

  “You mean …”

  “I mean she’s hard to manage. She doesn’t listen. She never relaxes.”

  “That’s for sure,” Anna says tentatively.

  “And it’s hard to be peaceful with her, no?” I say.

  “Well, she never, well, almost never, cries, and she’s never in a bad mood, which is interesting,” Anna says. “But it’s true, she’s never, em, what’s the word? Cozy.”

  “Cozy? What do you mean?”

  “It’s like she has a wall around her,” she says.

  Finally someone else has said what I’ve been feeling. She’s lifted the curse. It’s not me. We watch the end of the movie.

  “Good-night Anna,” I say before climbing the spiral stairs to the loft bedroom. “Thanks for being honest with me.”

  Upstairs, I join Ricky in bed. He’s reading. I nudge him.

  “Did you hear what Anna said about Julia having a wall around her?”

  “I did,” he says.

  “And?”

  “It’s true. It’s very hard to get through to Julia.”

  “I thought you thought it was just me—that I was, you know, not cut out for this mothering stuff.”

  “I don’t know why you say that.”

  “Because that’s what I thought you thought.”

  Ricky pulls me toward him.

  “Let’s get some sleep.”

  Sixteen

  An eggplant-purple sky looms in the distance. The terrain becomes more mountainous every ten miles. Traffic moves swiftly along the New York State Thruway. We allotted two hours of travel time to make the afternoon performance of The Nutcracker at the Bardavon Theater in Poughkeepsie.

  “Tell me what I need to do when we get off the Thruway,” Ricky says.

  “Okay,” I say, lowering the volume on The Nutcracker CD that’s playing and reaching for the directions in my bag.

  We veer off the Thruway and cross the Mid-Hudson Bridge. The river, wide and expansive up here in the Upper Hudson Valley, is roiling. We wind through downtrodden urban streets choked with abandoned buildings before turning onto Market Street, which is lit with Christmas tinsel. Poughkeepsie, an old industrial upstate city, has been in decline since the 1960s. The Bardavon is one of its gems, maybe its shiniest. We could have taken Julia to see The Nutcracker much closer to our apartment, but this is research. More research on what it’s like to be a denizen of a region that retains many characteristics that inspired the Hudson River School of painters.

  I do my best to squelch my mother’s negative words, which coil through my mind like a poisonous snake: “Why are you taking Julia to see The Nutcracker in some dinky theater in, what’s the name of that town anyway?” she had said a couple of days ago on the phone.

  “As I’ve explained already, it costs four times more to go to Lincoln Center,” I’d said defensively. “Besides, it’s not a dinky theater. The Bardavon is a historic theater. It’s an important venue in the Hudson Valley. And did you know that a couple of ballet dancers from the New York City Ballet company are in the performance?”

  She wasn’t listening.

  “I don’t know,” she’d said, emitting her teakettle sigh. “When you and your sister were young, we took you to Lincoln Center. There’s nothing like Lincoln Center.”

  “Okay. Next year you can take Julia to Lincoln Center,” I had said, knowing that will never happen because over the last two years my mother has not taken a genuine interest in being Julia’s grandmother, and my relationship with her continues to grow more stormy.

  A man in a neon orange vest is waving us into a parking lot across the street. Julia wakes, startled from a nap, but the buzz of parking, gathering our belongings, and families walking past our car heading toward the theater distracts her. She recovers this time without crying. Ricky and I each hold one of her outstretched mitten-clad hands as we walk toward the flashing Art Deco marquee and through the polished wood and glass doors. The lobby crackles with excitement. Tea and sugar cookies are being served. Mothers fuss over their tiny blonde girls in green or red velvet dresses, white tights, and Mary Janes. One mother spits on her hand and smooths the flyaway hairs in her little girl’s braids. Another is buying her daughter a program. The child is whining. She wants popcorn.

  We whisk past the crowd, enter the theater, and take our seats. Above us is a recessed ceiling dome lit in soft electric blue. A current of excitement electrifies the room. Every adult in the theater has probably seen The Nutcracker one or countless times, but now it’s our turn to pass along this gift. The opening scene around the Christmas tree is as idyllic on this stage as it would be on any other. The music is recorded, not live, but it works. I peer at Julia, who is seated next to me, and my stomach knots. She’s already shifting restlessly in her chair.

  “You are going to see a beautiful ballet,” I tell her, putting my hands up over my head to look like a ballerina. I’m hoping she’ll find some connection between what’s happening on the stage and what she does in the ballet class Anna brings her to. But I don’t see an eager child with an open expression. I see a child who’s not here with us, who is trapped inside her mind. A child who is ready to sabotage the possibility of something pleasant. As soon as the curtain rises, she is on and off the chair, snapping it back each time with a wallop. I glance over my shoulder and apologize to the patron behind us. It’s as though she doesn’t even know she’s in a theater or that what’s going on up on stage is meant to be watched. The next time she’s on the chair I press her leg to keep her still, but it’s useless. She wriggles more forcefully and jumps off the chair. I pull her back and point to the ballerinas, saying, “Look, look,” but she won’t. Ricky, who’s sitting on my other side, sees I’m struggling. He reaches over me and pulls Julia on his lap. He tries to direct her attention to the stage, but she’s climbing him like a pea plant twisting up a vine. I notice there are plenty of two-and-a-half-year-olds like Julia sitting calmly, watching with awe. A memory pops to mind. When she was around nine months, someone, and I can’t remember who, had said, “Think of her as a newborn infant trapped in a nine-month-old’s body.” What she meant was that Julia’s emotional life wasn’t synchronized with her chronological age. She needed to catch up because she’d never been given what she craved as a newborn, or so went the theory. It’s confusing, because Julia crawled, walked, talked, and even potty trained early and without much effort. Maybe the two forms of development—physical and emotional—are not always connected.

  I should be tolerant and able to feel her pain. That I’m not makes me feel like a brute. I want my daughter to love sugar plum fairies in a deep purple forest.

  By the time the performance ends, Julia has passed out on Ricky’s shoulder. The battle to resist and fight finally exhausted her. Ricky carries her as we walk up the aisle.

  “Hungry,” she says, rubbing her eyes as she wakes.

  “We’re going to eat,” Ricky tells her.

  “Sorry,” I say to Ricky. “I know that was difficult.”

  “It’s not a big deal. Maybe she’s just not ready for this kind of thing yet.”

  “Maybe. Did you see how many little girls her age were in the audience sitting quietly or at least attentively?” I whisper in his ear.

  “I know, but it’s not a big deal.”

  I’m silent. Processing sadness. I laugh to myself imagining Julia at Lincoln Center with my mother, not watching The Nutcracker, a performance that is twice as long as today’s.

  The car is icy.

  “Cold up
here,” I say, my lips chattering.

  Ricky fiddles with the heater buttons.

  Julia is babbling loudly. In a low hush I say, “I know she couldn’t sit still and it wasn’t easy for you—or me. But you know, I don’t think it was a total waste of time. Music finds its way into the soul.”

  “Don’t worry so much.”

  “I can’t help it,” I say, choking back tears.

  We leave the theater parking lot. Light snowflakes drizzle on us. Not much light remains in the flat sky.

  “It’s beautiful out here. Let’s get a bite in New Paltz before we head back to the city.”

  It is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and it’s biting but blue. Julia is home with Anna. For months, we’ve been looking at houses. An offer we made on a New Paltz house fell through. Last week, we saw a tiny village house in Nyack, a pretty Victorian village on the western banks of the Hudson River. The house wasn’t right, but the hilly community seemed appealing. Nancy, the broker at the open house, handed me her card and mouthed “call me.” I called the next day, and we spoke for quite a while. I reminisced about the wonderful summer we’d had in the Catskills and how much I loved living on the lake, surrounded by tall trees and wildlife. So today, Ricky, Nancy, and I are trudging through thigh-high snow along an unplowed path leading to the side door of an old farmhouse perched on a mountain precipice. To our left is an enormous expanse of snow-covered woods. Finally, we step onto a creaky porch and shake loose the snow. Nancy struggles with the lock. Eventually it gives, and she uses her boot to push open the wooden door. The entry-way is filled with cobwebs. The owner has relocated to Pennsylvania; no one’s lived here for years. It looks more like decades. It’s more a ruin than it is a house. Like a child in a haunted house, I’m thrilled. We pass into a large open space that passes for a kitchen and dining area but is a graveyard of sad appliances. I twist on the water tap, which emits brown liquid. We turn right into the next “room,” which has an enormous burn from an old iron stove tattooed on its tilting floor. By the time we walk through the front hall and make another right, we are standing in the living room in front of a masculine brick hearth.

  “You’re not interested in seeing the upstairs, are you?” Nancy says, assuring us there are other houses to see.

  “No,” I say, “I would like to see upstairs.”

  Up the narrow, wood-paneled stairway there is one bedroom on either side of the house and a bathroom in between. The bedrooms are large, though the ceiling couldn’t be more than six-and-a-half feet high. I’ve seen outhouses that rival this bathroom, though I do notice an old iron claw-foot tub.

  “Okay, then,” Nancy says in her chipper real-estate voice. “Shall we move on?”

  We come down the steps and walk toward the side door.

  “Can I have another minute?” I say.

  Nancy looks perplexed, but she and Ricky go outside onto the porch.

  I sweep by the wall of windows in the kitchen-dining area. Right outside the windows is a pair of deer traipsing across the snow, working as hard as we did earlier to navigate deep snow drifts. Their beauty hypnotizes me. I want to sit in front of that large hearth in the living room with a pot of cocoa.

  “Do you believe in spells?” I say.

  “Sorry,” Nancy says. “We can move on.”

  “Um, okay. But I’m not discounting this house.”

  “It’s a money pit. Let’s keep looking.”

  She pulls the door a couple of times before it shuts properly.

  Nancy shows us a handful of houses that day. Riding back to the city, I ask Ricky what he thinks about the old farmhouse.

  “I can see why you like it,” he says. “It has good bones. And really nice light.”

  “Yeah, but maybe Nancy’s right. The house needs a total rehab.”

  I think back on the fifty or so houses we have seen in the last two months. This house felt different. That woozy way your heart and stomach react when you fall in love. I realize rationally the house is a pile of work, which is ironic because thus far I’ve rejected houses that needed only a coat of paint or new tiling. But something tugs at me. Something intangible. It’s a vexing cocktail, taking a sad, ghostly thing and rescuing it. It’s not about what’s there but what’s possible. Does this house attract me because it’s another chance to rescue that which needs to be saved?

  “You’re going to think I’ve gone mad, but I think we should make an offer on the house,” I say, as we turn onto West End Avenue.

  “I don’t think you’re mad. I understand love is irrational. Make an offer. See what happens.”

  The next day I call Nancy and tell her to make an offer.

  “The owner will never accept that,” she says.

  “I think she will,” I say. “I’m not moving on the offer. That’s my offer.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Nancy calls to tell me the offer is accepted.

  I am thrown back to the day the social worker from the adoption agency called and said, “We have a baby for you.”

  It felt right and wrong, exciting but terrifying, crazy but sane.

  Seventeen

  “Julia, get off the bookcase. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  I spring from my desk chair and yank her off the bookshelves. I redirect her toward her bedroom, where she tosses herself on and off her “little girl” bed wildly.

  “C’mon, let’s get ready. Today’s a big day. You start nursery school. Isn’t that exciting?”

  I pull on her blue corduroy pants and a pink long-sleeved shirt. It’s hard to dress her because she isn’t pliable or accommodating.

  “Okay, that looks nice. Julia, get me your brush. It’s over there, on the floor. Under Elmo.”

  She stares at me blankly.

  “Go on, the brush,” I say, making hair-brushing strokes on my own hair. “Bring it to me.”

  I know she hears me. I know she understands the words. She has what I call the “serial killer look” on her face. It’s an expression that says, I’m trifling with you and I’m enjoying it. There’s a wicked glint in her eye. A subtle grin. The more distressed I get, the more pleased with herself she seems to be.

  What is this about? Why is a two-and-a-half-year-old so vested in such oppositional behavior? I’d expect it from an angry adolescent who hates the world or her mother.

  I love the movie Gaslight where Charles Boyer attempts to make his wife, Ingrid Bergman believe she is going mad. Bergman slowly falls for her husband’s deceptive plot because she closes herself off from the external world and there is nobody to remind her she’s perfectly sane until the end. Being Julia’s mother feels like this. To the world beyond this apartment, Julia is a charming, outgoing, engaging, energetic (these are some of the common adjectives I hear) little girl. She turns it on. She works the room. I’m often haunted by the first time she was put in my arms. She flashed a smile that I had, back then, described as “flirtatious.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Don’t brush your hair.”

  I walk out of her room. I’m disappointed. She knows it.

  Even if a young child were playing a psychological tug-of-war over getting a brush, if in fact the object of the child’s intention were the brush, the exiting of the mother might cause the child remorse shortly after. Not Julia. She is singing.

  I glance at a letter lying open on my desk. It says parents should come forty-five minutes early the first day of nursery school because children have a tough time adjusting. I snort. I know there will be no tears or tantrums. Julia has never made a fuss, not once. The lack of drama is what makes it dramatic. But I’ve witnessed gory separation scenes, and I often count myself lucky that it isn’t me in the situation. A child is inconsolable. The mother is at her wits’ end. A child looks like she is going to vomit. So does the mother.

  I’m walking with Julia up West End Avenue to the Purple Circle. I clench her hand tightly, but she’s straining to get loose. I pull her back because the streets are slippery with wet snow. “Are you ready
for nursery school?” I ask her. She doesn’t look up. I think about Anna, and already I miss the reliable routine we had established over the past fifteen months. But everything is changing. We are buying a house in the Hudson Valley. We have sold our apartment. By July, we will leave the city and live in the Ellenville lake house while our new house undergoes a monster renovation. I cried when I told Anna the news. Her eyes moistened too. I begged her to stay on for evenings and weekends. It’s inevitable she will fade from our lives. I explained to her we thought Julia needed a school setting. She understood, but she was hurt.

  We enter the large brick synagogue on West 100th Street and ride the elevator to the fifth floor. An overweight woman holding a clipboard directs us toward a room beside a classroom. Down a long hallway beyond a bathroom and a wall of cubbies is a tight sitting area with couches and bookshelves. I take a seat, but Julia is buzzing about, grabbing picture book after picture book scattered on the table and in boxes. A woman asks if I’m Julia’s mother and extends her open hand. “Welcome to the Purple Circle,” she says. I feel like I’m a guest on a talk show. “You can put Julia’s jacket and lunch box in this cubby.” Then she turns to say “Hi Julia! I’m Janet. How are you today?”

  Julia runs to Janet and gives her a loose hug.

  “I know all the letters of the alphabet,” she says.

  “Wow,” says Janet. “That’s wonderful.”

  It’s public Julia. Eager to please. She reminds me of a starlet who can turn on charm, flash a smile, and dazzle with her lashes but just as easily morph into a brooding handful when she’s offstage.