by A M Homes
“What kind of problems?”
“She never signed the papers. She was supposed to sign them before she left the hospital and she didn’t. And then we arranged for her to go into a bank to sign them, and she never showed up. She never signed anything and when we first went to court the judge wouldn’t let us adopt you because the papers weren’t signed. It took more than a year after that and then finally a second judge allowed us to adopt without a signature. For an entire year, I lived in fear. I was afraid to leave you alone with anyone except dad and Grumama, afraid if I turned around she’d come back and you’d be gone.”
I think of my mother having lost a child six months before I was born, having ushered him into and out of the world. I think of her having received me as a kind of get-well gift and then worrying that at any moment I too would be gone. I don’t tell my mother one of the first things Ellen Ballman said to me: “If I’d known where you were I would have come and gotten you.” I don’t tell my mother that it turned out that all along Ellen Ballman wasn’t far away—a couple of miles. “I used to look at children,” Ellen told me. “And sometimes I followed them, wondering if they were you.”
Our conversations are frequent—I call her a couple of times a week but I don’t give her my phone number. They are seductive, addictive, punishing. Each one shakes me; each requires a period of recovery. Each time I tell her something, she takes the information and holds it too close, reinventing it and delivering it back to me in a manner that leaves me wanting to tell her less, wanting her to know nothing.
She tells me that she never got along well with her stepfather and that her mother was cold and cruel. I feel that there’s more to the story than she’s telling me. I get the sense that something was happening at home involving the stepfather, and that the mother knew and blamed her for it—which would also explain the animosity between them and why Ellen, as a teen, was propelled into the arms of a much older, married man. I never ask her the question directly. It seems intrusive; her need to protect herself is stronger than my need to know. There is an odd and anxious unknowing to much of what she says that makes it difficult to get the story straight. She reminds me of Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois, moving from person to person, desperate to get something, to find relief from unrelievable pain. Her lack of sophistication leaves me unsure whether she’s of limited intelligence or simply shockingly naive.
“Did you think of having an abortion?”
“The thought never occurred to me. I couldn’t have.”
Pregnancy, I gather, was the perfect way out of her mother’s house and into my father’s life. It must have seemed like a good idea, until my father refused to leave his wife. He tried. He sent Ellen to Florida saying he’d join her there—and never showed up. Three months later, homesick, she returned to Washington. They got an apartment together; for four days, he lived with Ellen. Then he went back, claiming that “his children missed him.” Ellen had him arrested under an old Maryland ordinance for desertion. At the time his wife was also pregnant, with a boy who was born three months before I was.
“At one point he told me to meet him at his lawyer’s office,” she says, “so we could figure out a way to ‘take care of everything.’ I sat down with him and his lawyer and the lawyer drew a diagram and said, ‘There’s a pie and there are only so many slices of the pie and that’s all there is and it’s got to go around.’ ‘I am not a slice of pie,’ I said, and walked out. I have never been so angry in my life. Slices of pie. I told my friend Esther I was expecting a baby and didn’t know what to do. She told me she knew someone who wanted to adopt a baby. I told her the baby must go to a Jewish family who would treat her well. I referred to you as ‘the baby.’ I didn’t know if you were a boy or a girl. I couldn’t take care of you myself—young ladies didn’t have babies on their own.”
She interrupts herself. “Do you think, one day, we might have a portrait painted of the two of us?” Her request seems to come from another world, another life. What would she do with a portrait? Hang it over her fireplace in Atlantic City? Send it to my father for Christmas? She is in stopped time, filled with fantasies of what might have been. After thirty-one years, she has returned to reclaim the life she never had.
“I have to go, I’m late for dinner,” I say.
“Okay,” she says. “but before you go out, put on your cashmere sweater so you don’t get chilly.”
I don’t have a cashmere sweater.
“When can I see you?” she starts again.
“Ellen, this is all new for me. You might have thought about it for a long time before you contacted me, but for me it’s only a couple of weeks. I need to take things slowly. We’ll talk again soon.” I hang up. The sweater is Ellen’s fantasy, an image of an experience that is not my own, but one that has meaning, import elsewhere—in her past.
I am losing myself. On the street I see people who look alike—families where each face is a nuanced version of the other. I watch how they stand, how they walk and talk, variations on a theme.
A few days later, I try Ellen again.
“Ruggles slept in the hall,” she says. Ruggles is the stuffed animal I sent her, in a gesture of kindness. Tonight Ruggles is me.
There is the flick of a lighter, the suck of a cigarette.
“I’m angry with you, can you tell?”
“Yes.”
“Why won’t you see me?” she whines. “You’re torturing me. You take better care of your dog than you take of me.”
Am I supposed to be taking care of her? Is that what she’s come back for?
“You should adopt me—and take care of me,” she says.
“I can’t adopt you,” I say.
“Why not?”
I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know if we’re talking in fantasy or reality. What happened to “in the best interests of the child”? Who is the parent and who is the child? I can’t say I don’t want a fifty-year-old child.
“You’re scaring me,” is all I can manage.
“Why won’t you forgive me? Why are you always angry with me?”
“I’m not angry with you,” I tell her and it is entirely true. Of all the things I am, I am not angry with her.
“Don’t be angry with me forever. If I’d known where you were I would have come and gotten you and taken you away.” Imagine that—kidnapped by one’s own mother, the same mother who had given you away at birth. She lived not two miles from where I grew up, and luckily didn’t know who or where I was. I cannot imagine anything more terrifying.
“I’m not angry with you.” I am horrified at the way I see myself in her—the loose screw is not entirely unfamiliar—and appalled that in the end I may end up rejecting the one person I never had any intention of rejecting. But not angry. Not unforgiving. The more Ellen and I talk, the happier I am that she gave me up. I can’t imagine having grown up with her. I would not have survived.
“Have you heard from your father? I’m surprised he hasn’t been in touch.”
It occurs to me that “my father” may be having the same reaction to her that I’m having, that he equates me with her, and that may be one of the reasons he’s keeping his distance. It also occurs to me that he may think that she and I are somehow in this together, conspiring to get something from him.
I write him a letter of my own, letting him know how surprised I was by Ellen’s appearance, and suggesting that, while this is something neither he nor I asked for, we try to deal with things with some small measure of grace. I tell him a little bit about myself. I give him a way of contacting me.
I go to the gym. Overhead there is a bank of televisions, CNN, MTV, and the Cartoon Network. I am watching a cartoon in which a basket containing a baby bird is left outside a wooden door carved into the base of a tree. The words “Knock, Knock” appear on the screen. A large rooster opens the door and picks up the basket. A note is pinned to the fabric covering the basket.
Dear Lady,
Please take care of
my little one.
Signed,
Big One
The rooster looks inside; a small but feisty baby bird pokes up. The rooster gets excited. An image of the baby bird in a frying pan dances in the rooster’s head. A chicken wearing a bonnet comes into the house and shoos the rooster away. The rooster is disappointed. I am on the treadmill, in tears.
A couple of months pass. It is a cold night between the end of winter and the beginning of spring, and I am in Washington, D.C. I have spent an hour circling my father’s house, wondering why he hasn’t answered my letter.
I am a detective, a spy, a bastard. The house is large; there is a pool, a tennis court, and a lot of cars in the driveway. I sit outside under the cover of night, imagining him with his family, his wife, his other children.
I am on the outside looking in, the interior lights lay bare their lives. The lit windows are like light boxes illuminating X-rays.
From the outside, it looks as though he has it all and then some. The walls in one of the upstairs rooms are painted a deep forest green, with white trim around the edges. I imagine it as a library.
I see a girl pull back the curtain and look out—is she my sister?
There is a For Sale sign in the front yard. I imagine calling the realtor and taking a tour, moving from room to room like a true ghost, unseen, unknown, gathering information, looking in closets, cupboards, acquiring false intimacy by passing over their things, witnessing how they live, which way they unroll the toilet paper, what books are by the side of the bed.
I sit outside the house until I have had enough and then crawl back to my parents’ house.
There is a message on my answering machine at home in New York—the voice raspy, accented, coarse. “Your cover is blown. I know who you are and I know where you live. I’m reading your books.”
I dial her immediately. “Ellen, what are you doing?”
“I found out who you are, A.M. Homes. I’m reading your books.”
It is the only time in my life that I have regretted being a writer. She has something of mine and she thinks she has me.
“How did you get my number?”
“I’m very clever. I called all the bookstores in Washington and asked them, ‘Who is a writer from Washington whose first name is Amy?’ At first I thought you were someone else, some other Amy who wrote a book about God, and then one of the stores helped me and gave me your number.”
She stalks me. I stop answering the phone. Every time the phone rings, every time I call in for messages, I brace myself.
“Do you live with someone on Charles Street? Is he there? Does he not like it when I call?”
“How do you know I live on Charles Street?”
“I’m a good detective.”
“Ellen, I find it very upsetting. How do you know where I live?”
“I don’t have to tell you,” she says.
“Then I don’t have to continue this conversation,” I say.
“Why won’t you see me? Do I have to come up there and find you? Do I have to come up to Columbia University and hunt you down? Do I have to wait in line to get your autograph?”
“I need to be able to do my job. I need to teach my classes and go on my book tour and do all the things I’m supposed to do without worrying that you are going to hunt me down. You can’t do that. I have to be able to lead my life.”
“I need to see you.”
There are no limits. It is all about her need, incessant and total—she wants more and more. I am not allowed to have any rules. I am not allowed to say no.
Sometimes as a child, I would cry inconsolably. I would bellow, a primal cry, so deeply guttural, cellular, and thoroughly real that it would terrify my mother.
“Stop, you have to stop. Can you hear me? Please stop.”
If I was able to speak at all, the only thing I would say was, “I want my mom. I want my mom.” Again and again—an incantation. I would repeat it endlessly, comforting myself by rubbing back and forth over the words. “I want my mom, I want my mom.”
“I’m right here,” she would say. “I’m your mother. I’m all the mother you’ve got.”
After Ellen came back, I never cried that way again. I was longing for something that never existed.
The lack of purity became clear to me—I am not my adopted mother’s child, I am not Ellen’s child. I am an amalgam. I will always be something glued together, something slightly broken. It is not something I might recover from but something I must accept, to live with—with compassion.
I want my mom.
“Do you wish she hadn’t come back?” my mother asks. “Do you wish we hadn’t told you?”
“It wasn’t your secret to keep.”
Do I wish she hadn’t come back? Sometimes. Yes. But once it happened, I wouldn’t have wanted to stop the flow of information. It is about fate, the life cycle of information. Once I know something, the amount of effort it takes to deny it, to suspend knowledge, is enormous and potentially more dangerous than to simply move along with it and see where it takes me.
Blindness—May 1993. The day my novel is published I accidentally poke the New York Times into my eye and shred my cornea. The pain is searing. I fumble for the eye doctor’s number and go rushing off to his office, returning hours later with what looks like a maxi pad taped over my face. There is a message from my publisher letting me know that my book has been reviewed that morning in the Washington Post, a message from my mother saying that she’s arranged for brownies and crudités to be served at my reading tomorrow in Washington, and a message from “the father.”
“It’s Norman,” he says, his voice wobbly, tentative, choking on itself. “I got your letter. Why don’t you give me a call when you have a moment.”
It’s been more than a month since I wrote him. If the review hadn’t appeared in the Post, would he have called? If I’d been flipping burgers in a McDonald’s instead of writing books, would I have ever heard from him?
“Well, what do you know?” he says, when I return the call. He’s a swaggering big shot, but there’s something to him, some half-a-heart that I instantly appreciate.
“Have you spoken to the Dragon Lady?” he asks, and I assume that he is talking about Ellen.
“She’s a little crazy.”
He laughs. “That’s the way she always was. That’s why I had to do what I did.”
Norman, a former football hero, a combat veteran, for some reason feels compelled to give me a pep talk. Fifty years after the fact, he quotes what Coach once told him about staying in the game, about not being a quitter. No one has ever spoken to me this way before; there’s something I like about it—it’s comforting, inspiring. He couldn’t be more different from the father I grew up with, an intellectual type. If I told Norman that I spent every Saturday of my childhood going to museums he wouldn’t know how to respond.
“I’ll be in Washington tomorrow for a couple of days on a book tour,” I say.
“Why don’t you meet me at my lawyer’s office and we can talk.”
I think of Ellen: I am not a slice of pie.
The next day I read in Washington; the bookstore is crowded with neighbors, relatives, my fourth-grade teacher, old friends from junior high, from early writing workshops. I haven’t had a chance to tell anyone about the eye injury in advance. When I get up to read, they’re shocked.
“It’s fine,” I say. “It’ll be okay in a couple of weeks.” I crack open the book. My field of vision is a circle about two inches wide. I hold the pages directly in front of my face. My good eye is half closed in sympathy with the injured one. I perform as much from memory as possible.
When the reading is finished, a long line forms, people wanting books signed, aspiring writers with questions. In the soft distance I see a stranger, a woman, standing nervously, twisting an umbrella around and around in her hands. Instinctively, I know it is Ellen. I continue signing books. The line begins to thin. Just as the last person is leaving, she steps up.
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br /> “What did you do to your eye?” she blurts in that rough voice.
“You’re not behaving,” I say. The store is packed with people who don’t know what ghost has risen up.
“You’re built just like your father,” she says.
Later, when I try to remember what she looked like, I have only a vague memory of green with white polka dots, brown hair piled high on her head. I remember seeing her arm and thinking how small her bones were.
In the distance another shadow emerges. My mother and a friend of hers are coming toward me. I imagine the two mothers meeting, colliding. This is something that can’t happen. It is entirely against the rules. No one person can have two mothers in the same room at the same time.
“There are people here whose privacy I have to protect,” I say to Ellen. She turns and runs out of the store.
“We spotted her during the reading,” my mother’s friend says.
“I knew who she was immediately,” my mother says. “Are you all right?” she asks—she seems shaken.
“Are you?”
I’m scheduled to meet with a reporter after the reading. We sit in the basement of the bookstore, the reporter’s cassette recorder on a table between us.
“Is your book autobiographical?”
“It is the most autobiographical thing I have written, but no, it is not autobiographical.”
“But you are adopted?”
“Yes.”
“I heard something recently about you searching for your parents.”
“I have not searched for anyone.”
There is a pause. “Do you know who your parents are?” It seems like a strange question, like the kind of thing you’d ask someone who’d bumped their head against a wall and just regained consciousness.
In the morning, I take a taxi downtown. I am going to meet the father. I take a taxi because I am blind, because my mother is at work, because I can’t ask my father to drive me to meet my father. I am out of time, outside of myself. It feels like something from long ago when women didn’t drive. It is as though I am in a remake, a dramatic reenactment of a role originated by Ellen—the Visit to the Lawyer’s Office—the scene in which the pregnant woman goes to the lawyer’s office to find out what the big guy “might be able to do for her.”
