Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  I remember being alone in the apartment on Second Avenue, standing in front of the floor-length mirror. From the front, I looked the same. Sideways, my body bubbled out into an awesome bulge.

  I don’t remember the baby moving or kicking. I don’t remember discomfort. I don’t remember whether the birth was early or late. I don’t remember my water breaking, or feeling contractions and going into labor, or getting to the hospital. I only remember those few things—the times when I was alone, or at the hospital, when it was all right to be pregnant, when I could look at my body and watch it change, or when I could hand my body over to its caretakers and have them measure it, and listen to it, and tell me it was all right.

  In those weeks and months just before the baby was born, I came no closer, even with the help of the agency counselor, to knowing why this had happened. I had a diaphragm; why hadn’t I used it? The easiest answer is to say that the idea of having a baby had never occurred to me. It wasn’t something that could happen to me. It was an idea that had no reality. I was not stupid, but I never made the personal connection between having sex and having a baby. Like when you acknowledge that everybody dies, but you certainly don’t really believe—can’t imagine—that you yourself will turn out as everybody else does: dead. That’s the surface. Of course there had to be more.

  Later, with the support of a very good psychiatrist, I would finally be able to shake off that awful numbness and passivity and begin my life. In the process, I came to believe that this baby was wanted—not in any healthy way, but because, like those teenagers today who become pregnant because they want someone to love, I wanted this baby.

  I didn’t want to have an abortion. I wanted the baby to grow; I wanted it to be safe inside my body; I wanted it to be born.

  I certainly didn’t want to sell my baby on the black market, as if it were a carton of cigarettes or a pound of coffee. I didn’t want to be part of a babies-for-profit corporation, with parents chosen because they could afford to pay the price. I didn’t want my body to be part of a lawyer’s production line: That’s what Ennis’s lawyer had seen in my face. I wanted my baby to be brought up by people who had been chosen, checked and double-checked, not handed to someone in exchange for a bundle of money.

  I wanted this baby to have what I couldn’t give it—a chance better than my own. I didn’t want another me, another passive and numb soul, drifting through life.

  I can’t pretend all this was logical, commendable, or rational. It’s simply what was. I didn’t expect to be pregnant; but once I was, I wanted to have the baby.

  And I wanted to have it by myself. The counselor at the agency urged me to talk to my mother, to tell her that I was pregnant; but I couldn’t. She would not have allowed me to give the baby away. However she did it, she would have stopped me. I couldn’t take care of a baby. Most obviously, I had no money; I didn’t even have a job. There was no day care then. Jake would not have stayed with me: He’d told me that plainly and clearly. Single mothers were shunned then. It never occurred to me to go on welfare. I don’t even know if there was welfare for single mothers at that time.

  And even if I could have managed somehow, how could I be a mother? I could barely take care of myself. If my mother knew about the baby, she would have kept it; that’s the only way it could have been managed, and the baby would have been hers. The baby would have been another me, and I didn’t want another me.

  I also believed that if my mother had known what I planned to do, if I had done it with her knowledge, her heart would have been broken. I thought she would die—surely, literally, die—just as my father had if she knew what I was doing. I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t tell her.

  I did try to do what was best for the baby; given everything else, the baby was real, no matter how unreal it all seemed. The adoption agency was a good one; everything seemed to be done with care and thought. I believed the baby would be loved, would be safe. I thought adoption was the best possible solution. I also wanted to keep this baby, with all my heart. But I couldn’t put it all together, and so I went through the motions, one by one, each one as it came along.

  Almost no one knew I was going to have a baby. In Europe, Pierre knew, period. In America, only Ennis, his lawyer, and the adoption agency knew—not my friends, not my sister, not my mother.

  We told my mother that Jake had found a temporary job in Cleveland, to last until just after Thanksgiving. A friend of Jake’s lived in Cleveland; we wrote letters to my mother and mailed them inside addressed and stamped envelopes to Bobby; he mailed them to her and then forwarded her answers to us.

  We disappeared. To the middle of New York City, where no one knew we were.

  14. JIL

  LOSS

  Because I didn’t have the wedding she’d been planning since the adoption agency called and said, “We have a baby girl for you,” my mother hosted a big party for us a few weeks after we were married.

  On a wet morning in August a big tent went up in the backyard, with music and dancing, a bar and buffet. It rained so hard that the ground under the temporary wooden floor was soft, and the boards of the dance floor bounced gently beneath our feet like long sponges. Dozens of people came, all my aunts and uncles and cousins; there were seven first cousins on my mother’s side, and twenty or more on my father’s, I could never count them all. We rarely saw my father’s family: My mother called them “common,” a term that covered everything from uneducated to drinks too much to scratches himself in public.

  But we were very close to my mother’s two brothers and their wives, despite the fact that my mother disliked her sisters-in-law. Despised them, actually, with a fury so intense it was sometimes hard to be around. After each visit—every Rosh Hashanah and Thanksgiving and long weekend—we’d be trapped in the long car ride home with her furious litany. Aunt Cynthia was a snob, she said, a show-off. She had gone to college and to Europe on vacations with my Uncle Bernie. She liked to talk about books and magazines and went on Jeopardy! when I was in second grade, and won. Who the hell does she think she is, my mother would spit. She grew up in the Bronx—same as me.

  Her other sister-in-law was a bad wife and mother. Aunt Michelle was twelve years younger than my Uncle Sam, my mother’s twin brother, and loved to cook exotic meals and decorate her beautiful homes. Did you see those poor kids, the little one doesn’t even have clothes that fit, nebbuch, and the girls run around like wild animals, and she doesn’t give a damn.

  I loved my uncles and my aunts. I loved my cousins, too, especially my cousin Neil, a year younger than me, smart and irreverent. His was the first penis I ever saw, breathless under the blankets of our makeshift bed in my parents’ den, playing “I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours” while the grown-ups drank cocktails upstairs and Neil and I nearly wet ourselves giggling while the flashlight bounced from our laughing red faces to his fishy-looking little member.

  Neil organized my first séance, in the loft of Uncle Sam’s unused barn upstate. Using candles he swiped from Aunt Michelle’s party supply, we nearly burned the place down trying to contact the spirits with my battered Ouija board. Neil scared me silly and made me laugh. He went to tennis camp and boarding school, both faintly gentile and completely alien endeavors that I admired. He made a joke of everything, but somehow managed to get through cutting classes and smoking pot without ever getting caught. There was a lucky charm on Neil’s head, and it made him a joy to be with, and a pleasure to love. He’s going to be the first Jewish president, his mother said. In spite of her jealousy, my mother agreed.

  At my wedding party, Uncle Bernie cracked bad jokes and made funny faces for the camera. Aunt Cynthia was elegant and reserved. Neil’s younger brother, my sweet cousin Jon, hung out with my brother. But Neil was driving cross-country before heading back east to start college at Williams. Two weeks later, he was dead.

  I don’t remember who told me—it must have been my mother. But I do remember knocking on my grandmother’s door in the Bronx, and h
ow her face looked when she opened it. We never paid unexpected visits in my family; she knew immediately that this had to be very bad news.

  The next day, we rode in near silence the four hours to my aunt and uncle’s home in Massachusetts: my parents, my brother, my new husband, my grandmother, and me.

  “I don’t understand,” my grandmother said. Mema, we all called her, had become an old lady overnight. In two weeks she had gone from the wedding of one grandchild to the funeral of another.

  My mother said all she knew. “It was a robbery. He picked up a hitchhiker on the road. And…”

  She couldn’t say it again. They camped somewhere along the way, in Colorado. In the middle of the night the hitchhiker shot Neil and stole his car. That was all we knew.

  “I don’t understand,” Mema said. She looked shriveled and worn.

  I was terrified. Sitting in the backseat, sandwiched between my husband and my grandmother, I could not imagine what I would say to my aunt or my uncle. I could not imagine how they would survive. This was a world I had no words for.

  We struggled up the walk of their home like the survivors of some horrific disaster, too afraid to go on, too tired to go back. Inside the house, several of my aunt and uncle’s friends sat scattered on the Swedish modern furniture, which seemed too spare and low-slung for such a grave occasion. Their hands were clasped in front of them, their voices a furry hush, their eyes darting, confused. They seemed desperate, as if they were looking for a way out—a way not to feel guilty that this had not happened to them. Perhaps they wondered, hoped, that this would insulate them. My aunt and uncle had generously absorbed all the bad fortune for the entire community.

  My mother gave her brother a stiff hug, her sister-in-law an even stiffer one. We sat down, absorbed into the mourning mass. Small talk sputtered around us. How was the drive? Did you hit traffic? Are you hungry? I had expected a rending of garments, or furious hot tears. This quiet buzz was strange; I was very afraid of what lay under it.

  A few minutes later, Uncle Sam and Aunt Michelle arrived. Sam shook hands with his older brother, unable to look him in the eye. My two uncles seemed like people who had long ago survived a terrible disaster and never quite recovered, but weren’t really sure what to say to each other.

  Aunt Cynthia spoke, her voice raspy. “Why don’t you hug your brother?” she asked Sam. “He needs it.” She started to cry quietly.

  Both men stared at her in silence.

  “He doesn’t have to hug him,” my mother said, her voice loud in the hushed room. “Bernie knows what we feel.” She turned her head away and whispered loudly to my grandmother, “Idiot.”

  Later that day, Uncle Sam flew to Colorado to identify the body and bring my poor torn cousin home. I never saw either of my uncles cry. My mother seemed to channel her misery into hating Cynthia, despising her tears, her scenes. She has no shame, she said. She has to make a big show in front of everyone. She should shut up and pay attention to my brother. My mother hated her for what she saw as weakness, for her tears and her red nose—for her mess.

  “There’s something wrong with your uncle,” my mother said on the phone. Two years had passed since my cousin’s death. I had graduated from college and was working in advertising. “It’s very bad.”

  I knew what that meant: the one unnamable thing—cancer.

  Once again we drove in silence to Massachusetts, a drive that seemed to grow longer, because of the pain we were in, and at the same time, shorter, because I longed never to arrive—to have this road that led to awful darkness go on forever, leading nowhere.

  My mother and grandmother and I went to see my uncle several times during the long, slow course of his illness. I was freelancing then, and could come and go when I wanted, and my mother would take a day or two off from her job as a saleswoman at a local department store, a job she started when I went to college. Each time we saw him, my uncle was thinner and paler, until he seemed to become transparent, his blood pulsing a weak blue beneath his skin. He still laughed and made bad jokes, but quieter and slower, as if he couldn’t concentrate. He was trying to be himself, the son his mother adored, the older brother the twins worshipped, the funny uncle, the beloved father and husband. But he was slipping away from himself.

  On our awful, painful visits, my mother and Mema and I stayed at a nearby motel. My aunt didn’t want us at the house, and my uncle was too sick to insist that she play host to us. I understood, and was glad to have someplace to go that wasn’t surrounded by death and dying, a place where I didn’t have to wait tensely for things to erupt between my mother and my aunt.

  At our last visit, when it was clear that it was all almost over, my mother and grandmother and I sat in the hospital’s waiting room. It was gray and a little worn out, just like we were, and dimly lit, a protective darkness that helped us keep our pain to ourselves. A strange woman entered, holding a clipboard. She had professional warmth and shrewd eyes.

  “Excuse me. Are you Bernie’s sister?” she said to my mother with a slight Boston accent.

  My mother stood up. “Yes?” she said, shaking hands.

  “I’m Joanne Rubin, the hospice ward’s social worker,” she said, extending her hand to my grandmother. “I’ve been spending some time with Bernie and Cynthia and Jon. I’m here to help you through this very difficult time.”

  I could see my mother’s back stiffen. “We don’t need any help,” she said. “Thank you. We’re fine.”

  Joanne smiled gently. Clearly, this was not unexpected. “A lot of people say that. But this is a very hard time for all of you.” She shook her head sadly from side to side. “And I’m sure it would help to have someone to talk to.”

  “We don’t need anyone to talk to,” my mother said. “No offense intended.”

  “None taken,” Joanne smiled, not dissuaded. “Many people feel that way at first.” It felt a little like a recitation, a performance. “But it does help to talk, to cry, and to share your feelings with someone outside the family. It’s a safe place to open up.”

  A little more steel crept into my mother’s voice. “We’re fine,” she said. “Thank you.”

  It was a dismissal, but Joanne didn’t pick up her cue. Uneasily, I backed away; I always got nervous when my mother’s voice chilled. I’d read that before a cyclone touches down, the air gets still and metallic. When my mother’s voice sounded that way, it meant some haggard supermarket cashier was about to be dressed down for overcharging on the frozen peas, or the unfortunate man who forgot to clean the windshield in the gas station was about to be told how little he knew about doing a good job. My mother’s trigger was always ready to be pulled, and I hated to be a bystander for the bloodletting.

  “Sometimes people have a hard time saying good-bye,” Joanne said gently to my mother. “For example, I think it might be a good idea for you to tell your brother that you love him.”

  There was a pause, like the silence before a thunderclap.

  “How dare you,” my mother said, moving closer to Joanne, who flinched as my mother’s face came right up to hers. “My sister-in-law told you to say this to me, didn’t she?” Her spittle was landing on Joanne’s cheeks, which were red. “That bitch. Do you think my brother doesn’t know how I feel about him? Do you think he doesn’t know how his mother feels about him?”

  “Hush…” my grandmother whispered. But my mother didn’t hear it.

  Her chest was heaving. “My brother knows I love him. I don’t have to make a goddamn fool of myself in front of him. I don’t have to listen to that pig.”

  She had Joanne backed up against the door. “Get the hell out of here.”

  Joanne reached behind her to open the door.

  “And tell my sister-in-law that my brother knows what I feel and she can go to hell.”

  Joanne yanked the door open behind her and slid out without a word. My mother stood there for a moment, staring through the glass, breathing hard. When she turned around, there were tears in her eyes, but
her teeth were gritted. “That bitch,” she said, blinking hard. “She’ll be married again in a year. But I’ll never get another brother.”

  She was wrong: Aunt Cynthia did not get married again, in a year or ever. Elegant Cynthia, the smart one, the college-educated one, the one who took her children to Broadway shows and trips to Europe, who sent her boys to tennis camp and boarding schools, slowly crept into darkness and death while my sweet cousin Jon went to college in North Carolina.

  Only one year behind him was my brother, my smart, offbeat, funny brother, who had never seemed quite real to me despite growing up in the room next door.

  Kenny was happy his first year at college, happy to be on his own, away from home. He made friends, he told us, something that hadn’t been easy for him. All through childhood he had trouble connecting with other kids, playing with the children on the circle in the afternoons, but rarely meeting up with a friend from school. He was smarter than the other kids in his class. In elementary school I overheard my mother telling Mema that the children had taken IQ tests and Kenny’s teacher said his score was the highest she had seen in twenty years of teaching.

  In junior high Kenny started creating his own artwork out of scrap metal and junk. My father bought him an arc welder, and later an acetylene torch, and on weekends and after school Kenny would hole up in the garage, a huge pair of bug-eyed goggles across his face, and create strange, elaborate works of art that jiggled and danced. He liked cars, engines, anything with moving parts and metal, Mad magazine, Frank Zappa, Superman comics, and slot-car racing.

  In high school, Kenny decided he wanted to be on the football team. This was a stroke of remarkable perverseness. Up until then he had never expressed the slightest interest in football. I’d never seen him watch a game; I wasn’t sure he even knew how it was played. Plus, Kenny was about 5-foot-6 and weighed maybe 135 pounds soaking wet.