by Amy Seek
* * *
I returned to Graham, to school, and to my final year. One afternoon, I got a call from a crisis pregnancy center where I’d left my name as a volunteer. Laura was four months pregnant and wanted to talk to a birth mother about adoption. When we met, I wanted to tell her, simply: don’t. But then I also wanted to tell her, do it, it will work out for the best, you have your whole future ahead of you. Everything is beautiful. Then I would be able to watch, to see if I was right. She started taking steps. She found a few couples she liked and shared their profiles with me, but it seemed she wasn’t looking very hard, if she really wanted to find someone. But then maybe she knew she didn’t. I was there when her labor began, and for the delivery. And I was there when she wrapped her daughter in her arms in such a way as to make us all know what she would do. And made me wonder anew about my own strength.
I was denied internship credit for my summer abroad, and over the next few months I would find a hundred other ways to delay the delivery of my diploma. I couldn’t think of a proper thesis topic, and when I was given one, I could not produce a proper building. One of my thesis advisers would pet herself nervously, from the side of her neck to her sternum, at my indecision, and another told me that my last name was a curse.
Graham began teaching me to play the mandolin, and for the last few weeks of school, we’d while away afternoons by the open windows, playing together. We practiced a fiddle tune for my sister’s wedding; she’d returned from China, moved to Maryland, and found a husband, all within a year. It was a Bill Monroe tune, which, I later learned, had words, and those words warned women not to get married.
I spent the summer after my graduation at an internship practicing architecture to make up for my summer spent digging it up, and before I had my diploma in hand I was accepted to a graduate program in Philadelphia for the fall. As long as I never finished, as long as there was nothing with measurable dimensions, or clean rooflines made of materials as mundane as concrete and steel, then architecture could remain a beautiful mystery, and there was still a chance it was worth it.
TWENTY-FOUR
I packed a U-Haul and started driving. My cat rode atop boxes in the front seat beside me. I’d gotten her from some kids who’d found her, named her Scarlett Victoria, and were trying to get rid of her and her kittens on the corner in front of my apartment one morning. I told them I’d take whatever they couldn’t get rid of by the afternoon, and she was all they had left. A mother cat without her kittens. Her long fur was gray and brown, more matted than plush, and she had one fang missing, so her jaw closed a little crooked, and her eyes were crooked to match. She was not a Scarlett Victoria. I renamed her Haystack. I petted her to comfort her, and Cincinnati disappeared in the distance.
As I drove, I undid all my doings there. Studying architecture, meeting Jevn. The amazing fortune of finding Paula and Erik, the only parents I could imagine for my son. Without them, my son might be surfing his hand out the window beside me. And Graham. Graham had found and chased me, scaled my apartment building wall, and ripped the groceries out of my hands and spilled them across the street and then chased me until my shoes fell off before I put it together that he was an alcoholic. But it was hard to let go, as the brokenness that drove him to drink was what drew me to him. Everything else was easy to leave, bittersweet; another landscape I’d loved and lost.
I bumped over the cattle guards, and the long, pocked farm road stood vertical before me. Sheep ignored me in the pastures along the sides, but the llama raised its long neck from within a dirty white cloud of them to watch me. I rose over the hump of a bridge my father had engineered to cross the creek for eternity. Beyond the crest of the hill was the house surrounded by tomato plants and bird feeders and grapevines and compost and tractors, assembled and not, and the cast iron dinner bell, mounted ten feet high on a metal post.
“Who’s there?” my grandmother called from her recliner as I closed the door. I went over and bent down so she could lift an arm over me, a kind of hug.
“Good to see you, dear, come in. Sit down.”
Wheelchairs, old office chairs, once-nice living room chairs, folding chairs, all floated in aimless masses like lily pads in the brick sunroom. Grandpa came in from his work with dirty hands and pants held up by suspenders, said, “Well, hello,” and sat heavily on his chair, which was softened a little by a sheepskin rug. Sheepskin softened everything at the farm. Sheepskin on chairs, sheepskin for the dogs to lie on, sheepskins wrapped around the seat posts of the farm bikes instead of seats. Big, warm tomatoes were piled on the card tables beside giant cylinders of salt and knives of different shapes and sizes, rusty blades ground sharp enough for Grandpa to shave his arm hair off with them, as he would demonstrate with pride. Flies populated the walls and surfaces, and flyswatters, the old screen kind and new plastic ones, in different states of repair, were always within an arm’s reach. Sheepdogs filled whatever space was left over.
Grandma was largely immobile, but she could put herself in her wheelchair to roll herself to the bathroom or to the computer, where she could forward good and bad and sometimes tasteless jokes to her family and friends, and she liked nothing more than a good story in return. From her recliner, she welcomed guests to sit and talk, and because her favorite topic was theology, often they were pastors or people from the church she could no longer get out of the house to attend. Whether theology or romantic dilemma, she would advise you to broaden your thinking. She’d grumble that phrase like faraway thunder, and she might roll into your shins in her wheelchair to show you how much she meant it. Sometimes she was blunt; she claimed she always said things with the best of intentions, but she couldn’t be responsible for what happened after words left her mouth.
She was telling me about an e-mail she’d just read from one of her friends. “Some of my friends think that God has a body, but they also like George Bush!” She raised one eyebrow, glared at me, and relaxed it. “Love them anyway, even if they are totally mixed up.”
Her wardrobe was limited to a few giant dresses with wide straps but no sleeves, all of them cotton faded to lavender-gray and worn to silky softness. She’d had a hernia for fifty years she didn’t think worth the money to fix, and her right shoulder continually fell out of its socket, so she’d learned to use her left hand to maneuver the computer mouse. Dirt collected in all the edges of that mouse as it sat in the sun on the card table or nested between articles from The Washington Post she was saving for you to read when you got there.
She didn’t think I should be moving to Philadelphia. She didn’t see why I needed another degree, much less one in landscaping.
“Landscape architecture,” I corrected her. My architecture history professor had told me that if I really wanted to understand architecture, I should start by studying the history of the garden. She told me not to worry about my accumulating student loans; they were a fact of modern life. I’d called Jevn, who was living in New York, to talk about the programs offered at different schools, and he’d helped me pick.
My grandmother speculated about how such a degree might help the homeless, which was what she had hoped my degree in architecture would do.
“I have a very unfavorable idea,” she said. “I wonder how it could be implemented. A park for the homeless.”
My grandpa breathed heavily, jaw half-open, eyes shut, head falling slightly back.
She continued, “A welcome atmosphere of benches which do not contain bars across the middle! Blankets to be borrowed and returned; comfortable seats to overlook the water. Maybe you wouldn’t want to walk there after dark, but you ought to be home anyway.”
My uncle Mick came in and said hello; then he continued back to the kitchen to make lunch. He and my aunt lived a tenth of a mile up the driveway and took care of Grandma and Grandpa. Grandma could no longer get to the kitchen, her movements restricted for the past five years to the sunroom, which had been added on to the house by my grandfather. She had determined the size and shape of the
room based on where she thought she would like to sit and what she would like to look at while sitting, for the rest of her life. She could see cars coming up the driveway, tomatoes growing right along the windows in wire cages. She could see people coming in the door. And she could put her washcloth over her eyes and see nothing, while she listened to books on tape.
She was probably sitting there when my sister told her about the adoption, and when she forgave me and called me to tell me so. She would begin sending e-mails to Paula and Erik from that seat, and she’d be sitting there when she finally met my son.
“A warm building containing cheap, nourishing food, at every park,” she continued. “Rice, noodles, beans sorts of things. But perhaps no fast food. Board games to be borrowed. A system of coupon payment in exchange for work done maintaining the park. Warm showers.”
Grandpa opened his eyes and oriented himself.
“Was that Mick’s truck?—Dammit, Helen!”
Grandpa always thought that Grandma had interrupted him. From the angle of their chairs, he couldn’t see that her mouth had always already been moving. Grandma ignored him and lowered her voice and her chin to capture my undivided attention.
“Have you ever been told about how I got your grandfather to marry me?”
Grandpa leaned forward and put a folded fifty dollars in my hand. “Get yourself an apartment in Philadelphia,” he said quietly, and leaned back. My grandmother’s advice would be just as useful.
“I sat on him, when he was reclining on the settee, and pounded on him.” She opened her eyes wide. “And now we’ve been married sixty-nine years and have had four children, one of whom died at age fifty-three, and fourteen grandchildren all told. And a bunch of great-grandchildren, but I’m too befogged to count. So you see it was effective for me to sit on him and pound. Is there a suggestion here for you?” She dropped her chin, her gray eyebrows growing wild, her jowls hanging low. “Forget about graduate school! I suggest you go after a man, and get him to the altar, and let him think about it later at his convenience.”
“I’m going to landscape school, Grandma!” I said. Marriage and family were an infinity away. I couldn’t possibly think about settling down and starting a family just three years after giving up Jonathan. Hadn’t we all agreed I had a whole future in architecture ahead of me?
My uncle, slicing himself a tomato, weighed in. “Give me thirty thousand dollars; I can show you how to dig a hole and stick a tree in it.” Uncle Mick was a blacksmith and a mason and a farmer and an inventor. He was best friends with my father when they were kids. They spent summers taking junked cars apart; they’d saw off the roofs and throw a cupful of gasoline and a match inside to remove the paint and upholstery. They’d race those cars through the woods, ragged metal edges right at eye level, and they spent many afternoons tormenting my father’s sister, who later became Mick’s wife. He was always skeptical about my big ideas. Vegetarianism, architecture, landscaping.
“It’s not landscaping!” I insisted. “It’s grad school. It’s a really good program. I want to teach, or do research, or—”
“Tell me what you want, I’ll tell you how you can live without it,” my grandmother said. “Now, you may have already told me this, but I’m in the over-eighty group; when was the last time you saw Jonathan?”
I sighed, but I was grateful for this question. My grandmother was the only one who asked about Jonathan. Not Paula and Erik, not North Carolina. Jonathan.
“Just a few weeks ago,” I told her. “He’s walking and talking now. He turned three in July! Paula said they were making him a Spider-Man cake.”
Paula had written to tell me she was thinking about me on Jonathan’s birthday. They had hosted a combined birthday party for Erik and Jonathan. Paula said, “He’ll now tell you very proudly that he is free.”
“—but what a blessing they aren’t possessive or feeling threatened,” Grandma said as she moved some of the pile of newspapers on her side table.
“There it is, did you see that one?” She handed me a photo Paula had sent her. Jonathan wearing a green Windbreaker. “A beautiful child.”
I handed it back to her. I knew that wasn’t a compliment; she was saying it as a matriarch, her grandchildren her own accomplishment. Mick gave her a plate of food, and she positioned it atop her hernia like it was a table.
Her perspective about Paula and Erik had changed over time, as she’d gotten to know them through letters. They corresponded about theology and family, my grandmother’s favorite things. After my uncle’s death, she’d been looking for homes for his three youngest children because his ex-wife had been incarcerated. Grandma suggested that perhaps Paula and Erik might be interested in taking more Seek children, “seeing as they’re doing such a good job with the one they have.” I knew they were considering a third child, but I thought it would be strange for Seeks to outnumber them in their own home. Then it really would be like we adopted them, not vice versa. I mentioned it to Paula in passing, but I didn’t want to be involved in the adopting side of anyone’s adoption.
“They’re unusual for adoptive parents,” my grandmother said. “Most adoptive families are so on the edge of panic, they don’t want contact. But so much can be added to the lives of those children if they don’t build walls.”
Grandma looked down the driveway to see another truck pulling up. It was Tunie, returning from her day job at the library. She passed without turning her head, on her way up the driveway to her own house. Mick wished me luck in Philadelphia, pulling the door closed behind him. Grandma lifted her plate for a moment and tugged the afghan up to her chin.
“We’ll get him back, don’t worry.” She was not looking at me.
“What are you talking about?” I objected. “I’m not trying to get him back.” Was I supposed to be trying to get him back?
“We’ll get him back.” She salted her sliced tomato. It was as certain as the sun would rise behind the dinner bell to her right and set somewhere over her left shoulder.
“He’s legally theirs!” I was insistent. It had given me some comfort to know that my grandmother had come to terms with the adoption. If she, who had taken it so personally, could finally accept it, I could, too. My son one of the many things she could tell me how to live without. But if she’d only come to terms with it by telling herself it was somehow temporary or undoable, then there was no comfort at all. Getting him back could not be my only hope. I had to not get him back and keep going. That was the challenge. “I don’t have any right to him. I signed away my rights! It’s the law; it’s not up to me!”
Grandma put her plate on the side table, where she kept a little bag of Dove chocolates, and settled herself to take a nap. I wondered about Uncle Johnny’s birth mother, whether my grandmother knew anything about her, but I thought I knew the answer: he just showed up in the shed and stayed. Back then, there was no mother.
“Yes, but he is a Seek child,” she said, “and he belongs with the Seeks.”
“How would I even do that?” I scooted toward her in the squeaky metal office chair. She was folding her washcloth to put over her eyes. “Grandma! Do you understand that he’s happy there? He has a sister; they’re a family. I don’t even want to take him back! It would be cruel.”
“I don’t know any of the legal aspects. I’m in the over-eighty group. It’s not that I don’t love you, dear, I do, but it’s time for my nap.”
She lay back in her recliner beside Grandpa, fast asleep in the places each of them would die. I was left alone in the silent, sun-drenched room, air conditioner feebly battling the heat stored deep in the red brick floor. A pack of my grandpa’s yellow Carefree gum on his side table. Sheep baaaed in the pasture outside, and every now and then someone could be heard yelling over a tractor.
* * *
I rented the cheapest apartment I could find within walking distance of the design school, sight unseen and in a bad neighborhood of a city I’d never set foot in until that day. My sister drove up from he
r new home in Maryland to help me settle in. We shopped together and then cooked together, and by the time she left, I felt like that tiny apartment, so small I’d have to roll a futon onto the floor every night to sleep, was home. For my first few weeks, I’d return to the places we’d gone together, buoys of familiarity within the sea of the new city. Like the checkout area of the Trader Joe’s, where we had laughed so hard we crouched over and cried, and I felt as a consequence that that checkout area belonged to us.
School began the day after she left. Our studio desks were arranged in cubicles beneath sawtooth skylights that framed the shadowless blue sky. Sometimes a cloud might pass to suggest the world was turning. We designed vast cityscapes, rethought waterfronts of well-established cities, made attractions of militarized international border zones, and transformed industrial wastelands into bird sanctuaries and parks. We did not speak of flowers or trees; our profession was public space: the plazas and parks and open spaces you think of when you think of a city. It was not what I imagined, but it was interesting, and still, my curiosity veered toward the actual city surrounding us, which I would explore on foot as often as I could get out of studio.
I ran through my neighborhood, across the bridge and beside the river. Along the way, there were bronze plaques in out-of-the-way places, cast in nondescript sidewalks and affixed to bench backs, that said This space not yet dedicated, as if to offer those places up, to say the city was ripe for the picking; every corner waited to be claimed. I began to feel I was doing that; being part of the city, making it mine.
