Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  Dr. Darling and I met once a week; she met with my parents once a month. She arbitrated, usually on my side, in disputes. I wanted to go to a summer arts camp, which my parents were sure was a den of drug- and sex-addled iniquity. She convinced my parents to let me go. I wanted to change my name at school, to combine my dull first name, Jill, with my even duller middle name, Ann, to create one name, Jilann, which would be interesting and unique, and could be shortened to Jil, which I thought sophisticated and sharp. My mother was horrified: This was the name she gave me; I should not be allowed to alter it. She ridiculed my plan. That’s a dumb idea. What do you want to do something like that for? People will think you’re nuts.

  Dr. Darling convinced her to let me do it. Not legally—that would be going too far—but I was allowed to change my name on school records and my working papers.

  Dr. Darling often asked me how I felt about being adopted.

  “I don’t feel anything about it,” I said.

  “Do you ever think about your other parents?” she asked.

  The question made me angry. “They’re not my parents,” I said. “My parents are my parents.”

  I parroted the words I had learned from my green book, The Chosen Baby.

  “I was chosen,” I said. “I know I was really wanted.”

  “You were wanted,” she repeated. “What about your birth mother?”

  “What about her?” I asked.

  She looked at me. I wasn’t making the connection. Adoptive parents/wanted. Birth mother/unwanted: In order to be chosen, you must first be rejected.

  She tried another tack. “Do you know anything about your birth mother?”

  I told her the story I had told myself so often it sounded unreal, like a fairy tale: young couple, unwanted pregnancy, a selfless plan to give the baby up. It felt like a story I’d read in a magazine. In my mind this “birth mother” was shrouded in fog, a tall, featureless woman, dark and shapeless.

  Dr. Darling persisted. “Do you ever wonder about her? What her interests were? Where she came from?” She paused. “Why she gave you up?”

  I was getting annoyed. “She couldn’t raise a baby alone. She wanted to give it a better life. And I don’t care about her. My problems with my mother have nothing to do with her.”

  But I began to wonder if my problems with my mother might have something to do with being adopted. I never thought she loved me less because I wasn’t biologically hers. I wondered, though, if she had the same sense of security about my love for her.

  Dr. Darling was tactful. “I’m not saying your problems with your mother have anything to do with her. I’m just wondering what you know about her.”

  “Nothing,” I said. “She was young. She was getting divorced. And she was Jewish.”

  “How do you know she was Jewish?”

  “It was a Jewish adoption agency,” I explained. “My parents wanted to make sure they got a Jewish baby.”

  “Couldn’t they raise the baby Jewish no matter what?”

  This was a new question for me. I didn’t like not having an answer.

  In the car on the way home, I steeled myself. Staring out at the road, I asked my mother, “Why did you go to a Jewish adoption agency to get me?”

  There was a long pause: “Because we wanted a Jewish baby.”

  “But what difference does it make,” I asked. “The baby would be whatever you raise it.”

  She glanced at me. “The baby has to be born to a Jewish woman to be Jewish.”

  “Why?”

  My mother was not good at explaining things. She saw questions as challenges, and quickly became defensive. “What do you mean? So it would be Jewish.”

  “If you raise the baby Jewish, it will be Jewish.”

  Now she was really annoyed. “That’s not the way it works. It has to be born that way.”

  “It’s not like eye color or hair color, something in the chromosomes.” I took biology in ninth grade. The teacher didn’t tell us about a religion gene.

  She was angry now, flushed red. “It’s in the blood. Either you are or you aren’t.”

  “What about people who convert?”

  “That’s not the same. They’re not really Jews. They’re converts.”

  “So Jewishness is something you’re born with, like black skin or left-handedness?” I was making fun of her now.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” She was almost yelling. “You either are or you aren’t.”

  She turned into the driveway and quickly got out of the car, slamming the door. I walked slowly behind, wondering. I had to be born Jewish, but I didn’t have to be born hers. One thing is in the blood, the other is contingent. It’s easier to convert to a new family, a new mother, than to a new religion.

  That night she came to the door of my room while I was doing my English homework, an essay on A Tale of Two Cities. My grades were dropping in all subjects and I was cutting lots of classes. But I loved English and still did well in it.

  She stood in the doorway and stared at me until I looked up. “What do you and Dr. Darling talk about?” she asked.

  “Stuff,” I said.

  “Do you talk about adoption?” she asked quickly, looking at the wall over my head.

  “Sometimes,” I said, too surprised to lie. My mother had never brought up the subject of adoption. I knew she must have talked to me about it when I was very small, too little to ask questions. But as far back as I could remember, she had never mentioned the word.

  “Does she think the reason you’re having all these problems is because you’re adopted?”

  Standing there stiffly, arms folded, she seemed both angry and scared. Her discomfort made me nervous, and her question made me angry.

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” I muttered. All these problems? As if I’m the nutcase? “Dr. Darling thinks it’s your fault, anyway. She thinks you’re the one with the problems.”

  “Oh?” she said, her voice cold. She turned and walked out of the room.

  I never saw Dr. Darling again.

  My best friend, Bonnie, and I tripped down the school stairs like giddy children, our 1940s Salvation Army dresses flapping in the breeze, loud, provocative, daring any adult to look at us.

  Bonnie had been my best friend since the first week of high school. We met in gym class and were instant intimates. Almost without discussion, we immediately jumped into what we thought high school meant: cigarettes and drugs, Wild Turkey Bourbon and Boone’s Farm apple wine, outlandish clothes and music, movies, books, and attitudes.

  For the first time in my life I had a real friend, a friend who talked to me every night for hours on the phone, who wanted to be with me after school and on weekends. Together we flitted from role to role like hummingbirds. For a few months we only wore thrift shop dresses from the ’40s, long skirts and platform shoes and hats with rakish feathers. We tried the hippie farmer look, in overalls and torn T-shirts with hiking boots. We even went Christian, reading our Bibles on the bus home from school. Every role felt equally real and equally false. Since I didn’t have an identity of my own, switching from one to another was as easy as changing socks.

  My mother and I spent most of my high school years fighting. We fought over my smoking. We fought over my friends. We fought over the clothes I wore, the drugs I took, the grades I got. Since my mother was an immovable object, and I was determined to get what I wanted, I soon found an easier method: I became a highly proficient liar. I lied about where I went and what I did and who was there when I did it.

  I told her I was staying late for geometry help after school and got high and went driving, the car a smoke-filled box on wheels.

  I told her I was going to school and I took the bus down Central Avenue to the number 4 subway at Bedford Park in the Bronx to Greenwich Village’s Washington Square to get stoned and dance to the music of the long-haired boys with guitars and easy drugs.

  I told her I was going over to Meg’s house to study and Peter and
I drove 90 miles an hour down the West Side Highway, past the George Washington Bridge shining like lit pearls over the Hudson while we raced, raced, raced away from boring suburbia, toward the city, toward life.

  I loved the city, I hated the suburbs. I loved Herman Hesse and F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger. I memorized The Little Prince and every word to every song from Cabaret and Man of La Mancha and Guys and Dolls. My creative writing class wrote Kurt Vonnegut a letter, telling him how much we adored his books, and he invited us to visit his townhouse in Greenwich Village. Bonnie and I went to the bathroom, stopping to peek at his desk, where he wrote about Billy Pilgrim and Paul Proteus. The datebook was open. On the next day’s listing, we read: Lunch—John & Yoko. We screamed silently.

  Senior year came, and despite the fact that living together meant constant fighting, my mother insisted I only apply to commuter schools. The State University at Stony Brook on Long Island was her choice; she would buy me a car and I would drive back and forth each day.

  I threw away the applications from any school within five hundred miles. My friend Ellie had gone to the University of Wisconsin in Madison the year before. She sent home reports of parties and politics, demonstrations every weekend for peace, gay rights, and feminism.

  In May, I came home from school to find my mother at the kitchen table, the acceptance letter and contract in front of her. I wasn’t surprised; she opened all my mail. My mother regularly went through my drawers, my purse, and my pockets.

  “What is this?” she asked, waving the letter in front of me.

  I knew what it was from the address on the big envelope that lay on the table. “I got in, great,” I said, trying not to sound too excited.

  “You’re not going to Wisconsin,” she said scornfully, as if I had applied to the University of Sodom.

  “Fine,” I said.

  She was surprised. “You’re going to Stony Brook,” she said.

  I leaned against the door frame casually. “I didn’t apply to Stony Brook.”

  I had never calmly defied my mother before. I knew I had to match her power, or be steamrollered.

  I took a breath. “I only applied to Wisconsin.”

  She gave me a long look. “You’re not going to Wisconsin,” she repeated.

  “Okay,” I said, shrugging. “That’s fine. I didn’t really want to go to college, anyway. I told Wendy that I would share an apartment with her in the city.” Wendy produced extra disdain from my mother: She wasn’t in any honors classes—and her family lived in an apartment.

  My mother smiled sarcastically. “You’re going to share an apartment? And how the hell are you going to pay the rent?”

  “Wendy has a job, waitressing at the Café Metro. The owner told her I could have a job there, too. That’s enough to pay the rent. She found an apartment in the Village that’s big enough for two.”

  My mother hesitated. She was shaken. “You can’t live in the city. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I can and I will. If I don’t go to Wisconsin, I don’t go to college. I’ll share an apartment with Wendy and be a waitress.”

  I went to Wisconsin.

  9. BUNNY

  WILKOMMEN

  It is perhaps unfortunate that the existence of the incipient

  individual is still largely unnoticed and often unappreciated

  during the crucial weeks of the formation of the body.

  GERALDINE LUX FLANAGAN

  THE FIRST NINE MONTHS OF LIFE

  Jake met the boat clutching an enormous bunch of flowers and smiling widely. The ship’s crossing had been liberating, a genuine sea change: five days of belonging nowhere, of having no landmarks, no known territory beyond the confines of this gently rocking Dutch ship and the far horizon.

  Each day was the same: morning bouillon and afternoon tea, bells heralding enormous meals: grilled fish, formed salads, sauced puddings. There were Dutchmen going home with tales of American cigarettes (“Do you know what we had to smoke during the war?”). There were silly games, a small library with good books, and a fast friend, Dieter, going home after his American year, engaged to a girl who would be waiting when we docked. It was a perfect interlude, restorative, filled with sun and spray and great peace.

  Jake saw me before I saw him. He was wearing gold corduroy pants and a brown jacket, both of which looked baggy and comfortably old, and a scarf around his neck like a French schoolboy. He was happy to see me, and I was happy to see him. The flowers were wonderful; Rotterdam was wonderful. We walked all the rest of the day, looking at statues and buildings and parks with enormous piles of rubble from the German bombings.

  Jake insisted that I buy Dutch boots and a new, warm coat to see me through the German winter. We shopped in strange stores, decorated for the Dutch Christmas—to be celebrated at the beginning of December—with dwarflike figures of St. Nicholas everywhere. There were crowds of Dutch housewives, with rose-splotched cheeks, so cheerful, so happy, so round: If they could mother the world, if we could live on Dutch cheese and pea soup and chocolate pudding…

  Jake started to teach me German, though he warned me not to use the language in Holland: “They hate the Germans here, and if you speak German, they’ll ignore you—or worse.” We ate steak with strange mushrooms, as the proprietor of the restaurant beamed at us the way restaurateurs do when they think people are in love. Or it may simply have been that we looked American; Americans were warmly welcomed in Holland then.

  Back in the room, where we had deposited my things, Jake took off my shoes and sat with my feet in his hands, rubbing them, telling me how much he had missed me, how glad he was that I’d arrived.

  It was one of the best nights we ever spent together—one of the only times since we’d been married that we talked about loving each other, or that Jake showed tenderness toward me. It was one of the only times I felt loved, even wanted, by him. For the first time—since my first day at Marlboro, or maybe when my father died, and certainly for the first time with Jake—I felt real. In this strange place surrounded by differences—language, landscape, even teaspoons—for one night we existed without a past, with no expectations, no preconceived notions, and no reasonable knowledge of where we’d be tomorrow. Everything was new, everything was underlined, and everything was marvelous. This must be the way Jake had always seen the world.

  In the morning, I asked him why he hadn’t written.

  “I tried. But so much was happening. All I really wanted to do was watch, and learn, and experience. I couldn’t communicate yet, I couldn’t explain, or tell you about it. I walked all around, every day, whenever I could. Munich was so beautiful! And the people! The faces! I took so many pictures. I had to learn German. In the beginning, the Army was worse than in the States—until I bought the clothes. They hate soldiers in Germany; no one would talk to me when I was in uniform. You can tell a soldier right away, even if he’s not wearing khaki. You can tell an American, even just by the shoes. I didn’t feel free until I bought clothes here. Now they don’t know who I am, until I start to talk.”

  That’s why he hadn’t written.

  We had a continental breakfast, my first (America had not yet imported continental breakfasts). Everything was perfect: a perfect roll, perfect butter, perfect jam, and a perfect cup of coffee with perfect cream. Nothing had ever tasted like this before.

  We left Rotterdam amid a sea of bicycles. The car Jake had borrowed was a low sports car, a two-seater, with an open top and a canvas cover in case of rain. It was cold, so we used the cover, and drove through Holland in two days and a night.

  I remember herring stands and an incredibly beautiful church, modern, perhaps by Le Corbusier, and filled with the presence of God—built with such strong conviction and faith and so much beauty, that it was a witness to God.

  I remember market squares filled with wheelbarrows and wagons holding flowers and vegetables and bits and pieces essential to life. I bought a beautiful wooden spoon for only pennies. There were rows of cyp
ress trees, and tiny stores tucked in at the bottom of old houses on small streets. We slept under an enormous feather bed, on the top of a mattress filled with feathers, and in the morning ate another continental breakfast. Then we came to the border, at Aachen, and saw bullet holes in the sides of the buildings.

  On the next evening, we reached the outskirts of Stuttgart. Jake drove too fast down the road on the side of a steep hill leading into the city; he was going to be late getting the car back.

  “After the war, they cleared away the debris, and piled it all up in one place, this mountain of rubble. It’s incredible! Most of the city has been rebuilt—you’ll see the difference right away between the new part and the part they call the alte Stadt.” He turned sharply around a curve. “You tired?”

  “Who could be tired?” I said. “I’m scared stiff.” We were going very fast.

  “I wondered if you were.” Jake smiled, pointing out the sights: an art gallery, the main trolley station, the Army club. “That’s the railroad station, der Bahnhof. That’s the first sentence the Army teaches GIs in Germany: Wo ist der Bahnhof? So they can always get home.”

  “Or get away,” I said.

  “Yes,” Jake answered. “Or get away. So you learn it, too. Wo ist der Bahnhof, bitte? You can buy great sausage there.”

  Our hotel was, in fact, a restaurant with rooms upstairs. We met the landlord, drank some welcoming brandy, and went to inspect our room. It was small. There were twin beds set at right angles to each other, a desk and chair, and a closet. Everything was immaculately clean. There was hot water in the bathroom (in the hall); the owner said it twice.

  In the morning, Jake took me to the camp, the Caserne, a short walk from the hotel. The guards at the gate checked my passport. Inside was a grassy field with cannons at one side. To the left, there was a large, rectangular building with a small shop (a PX, Post Exchange, for buying American cigarettes and other goods), a lounge, a coffee shop, and a library. There were barracks, garages, mess halls, and other buildings scattered around—and men in fatigues everywhere. Fatigues have the advantage of every uniform: Faces emerge so clearly without the distraction of individually chosen clothes. There’s so much you don’t know about somebody wearing a uniform; he could be anybody. He hasn’t made any choices yet.