The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

  One last reminder of my terrible selection of a travel companion also awaited me when I got off the plane: a three-page e-mail from Doug, not particularly well-written, expounding on all the reasons why I was a terrible person, a lousy sexual partner, an all-around loser in life. “They should post warnings on Match.com about people like you,” he wrote.

  I did not write back.

  4.

  My attempt at an Italian tryst with my Jack Daniels–loving sports fan was followed by a brief stop in New Hampshire to see my daughter. Then as now, Audrey lives in the town where her father and I made our home for the twelve years of our marriage, a town I’d come to some years before that, on my own.

  In 1973, when I was nineteen years old and recovering from what I supposed at the time to be the great heartbreak of my life, I had used the money from the sale of my first book to buy a farm in that town—fifty acres at the end of a dead-end dirt road. I believed that I would live on that piece of land forever, and four years later, when I met the man who would become the father of my three children, I believed we’d live together on that farm for the rest of our days.

  My ex-husband owned that farm now. At the point where I found myself returning there to see our daughter, on my way home from Venice, Audrey was working as a counselor at a school for troubled boys and renting my old writing cabin from her father. The cabin sat out behind our old house, just down the road from the waterfall and the swimming hole where I used to walk every day of every summer, where I used to bring my children to swim, and we’d launch little boats we made and chase them along the banks of the brook. I could not pass that waterfall and that swimming hole without registering a stab over all the history I’d lived there, all that was gone.

  When I was twenty-three I’d celebrated my wedding at that farm. All three of my babies were born on the bed there. I’d swum and skated over twelve summers and winters on our pond on that land, and planted a garden, and cooked a few hundred meals, baked a few hundred pies. That farm had represented all of my most hopeful dreams for my life, of marriage and children, family and home. When I left it, at age thirty-five—the year of my own earthquake, when my mother died and my marriage ended—I believed I might never know a true home again. Not one I loved as I had loved that one anyway.

  Now when I returned there, it was with the oddest combination of joy at seeing Audrey—in her thirties by this point and living a good, full life on that land in my onetime writing cabin—and regret at how far I’d traveled from the young woman I had been at her age. My daughter and I lived three thousand miles apart and saw each other only two or three times a year now. And so I asked myself: What happened to my dream of family and home?

  That visit on my way back from Italy had been brief but good. I stayed with my old friend Danny and regaled him with the tale of the Doug disaster—now transformed into a funny story for the purposes of entertainment. The next day I swam under the waterfall with Audrey and picked blueberries and made a pie that we brought to the home of other friends that night and shared, along with a meal of eggplant parmigiana (the eggplant, basil, and tomatoes from their garden) and several bottles of Chianti on the porch of their cottage overlooking a pond.

  It was a little after ten o’clock when the evening wound to a close, and I was feeling lucky and happy at all the good things in my life. I would return my rental car at the airport and fly home to San Francisco in the morning.

  Outside the old writing cabin, I said good-bye to my daughter. “Maybe you want to sleep over here,” she said. “You could leave early tomorrow.”

  I said no, better to drive back to Danny’s house that night.

  Five miles down the road, there it was: the flashing blue light in my rearview mirror.

  The policeman wanted to see my license and registration, of course. Then came the question. “How much did you have to drink tonight?”

  After the test—“Follow my finger”; “Say the alphabet backward”—he shook his head.

  “Since you haven’t given me any trouble,” he said, “you can wear the handcuffs in front instead of behind your back.” He helped me into the back seat of his police car then and brought me to the police station I remembered from long ago, when I’d gone there to report a lost dog.

  In the end, I passed the Breathalyzer test. The policeman let me go with only a speeding ticket and brought me back to my rental car, which had been towed to the local auto body shop—another place well-known to me from my years as a young mother in that town, when I’d driven an old wood-paneled station wagon that was always breaking down.

  The next day I flew home. Two weeks later, having chosen to disregard Doug’s words in his send-off to me—that women of my ilk should be barred from online dating—I met Martin on Match.com and, two dates later, sailed off on the boat with him to dock in the bay by Angel Island. I was just grateful to be in possession of my driver’s license, and more grateful still that I was in a safe place with a kind man, even though I knew I wouldn’t be having any big romance with him. Comfort was enough.

  Three weeks after that, I met Jim.

  5.

  After our marathon telephone conversation, Jim and I decided to make a date. Not a Starbucks meeting. He chose a restaurant in Marin County called the Lark Creek Inn—closer to my house in Mill Valley than to his in Oakland, because he liked to drive and I did not.

  He was already there when I walked in the door, and he looked better than his profile picture. He was a handsome man, with the kind of hair that hairdressers (mine, for instance, when she met him for the first time) would invariably mention with admiration.

  He had come from work, so he wore a suit and a very good shirt and a tie. He looked the part of the San Francisco lawyer, all right, but there was something in his smile that suggested another aspect that the Rolex and Brooks Brothers suit failed to conceal. There was barely perceptible pain, and a sense that he had learned (by necessity perhaps) to keep a large part of himself hidden from view. But also visible in him was a large capacity for joy—the joy part plainly evident as I approached the table. He had a wonderful smile.

  “I didn’t expect you to be such a knockout,” he said. To no objective eye would this have been so, but with my fifty-eighth birthday closing in, and so many recent reminders of all the ways I’d failed to make the life I had once envisioned for myself, I liked it that he saw me this way.

  It had given me pause, in Jim’s profile, when I read that he was five feet eight. This was still two inches taller than me, but I’d had it in my head that I should be with a tall man. Six feet anyway—“tall” representing, for me, some kind of stand-in for “strong.” I wanted a partner stronger than I was, and maybe, if he were tall and large, this might be so.

  My old and trusted friend Bill had said to me once—after the failure of yet another of my relationships—“You know what you need, Joyce? A burly man.” Bill had known me well, and when he said this I took it with sufficient seriousness. Every time I met a prospective partner, his phrase, “a burly man,” came back to me.

  Jim was definitely not that. He probably weighed under 150 pounds, and had the build of a runner, which he had been for most of his life, until he blew out first one ACL and then the second in two successive skiing accidents. By the time I met him, Jim was mostly a cyclist, but also a hiker, and an all-around active person. Though he didn’t run anymore, he still moved fast, the way I did. He could weave through a crowd at triple speed when he needed to—as I could—and though he couldn’t cover distances as he had in his days as a long-distance runner, he could break into a run anytime he wanted without evidence of difficulty.

  Now though, he stood still as he greeted me. Still, and then silent for a surprisingly long time. For some reason, there was no awkwardness in this. We both just took in the moment.

  We had talked so much on the phone by this point that he felt like a friend, and I believe that was true for him also. When he ordered drinks, I explained to him why I would limit myself to
one.

  “Four weeks ago I was handcuffed in a police car as a suspected drunk driver,” I told him. Not the usual first-date information, but already this was not a usual first date. Where, more traditionally, a first date like this one featured mutual recitations of each person’s successes, with an eye toward highlighting their most attractive qualities, this one seemed more about revealing to each other all the aspects of ourselves that might be most likely to send the other person running in the opposite direction. Only they didn’t. We stayed talking for over three hours. We had met at the bar, and somewhere into hour two, when no indication had been given that he’d contemplated ordering food, I asked Jim, “Don’t you ever eat?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just so blown away by you, I forgot.”

  He didn’t focus much on his thirty-five years as an attorney. We talked a lot that night about divorce, and all the damage that comes after. The story of my children and me was not without its hard chapters, but for Jim in particular, the bitterness that had come from ending his marriage to his children’s mother seemed, all these years later, far from finished. “I don’t think my daughter and my older son have ever forgiven me for leaving their mother,” he told me.

  It was not the central bond we recognized that night, but it was a real one: the shared sorrow of having failed to raise the three children each of us had brought into the world with their other parent, and the sense left in each of us that our family would always feel broken because of this. For Jim, as for me, raising children had been a central part of life. Being a good father to his sons and daughter—a different kind of father from the one who raised him—had been the chief goal in life. I could see, sitting across from Jim that night, that he carried profound sorrow over his children’s assessment of him as a man who had fallen short.

  “It appears that I failed at the thing that mattered most,” he said to me, though it was difficult to believe, hearing him tell the story, that he hadn’t tried desperately hard, and done plenty of things right, too. Of all the single fathers I’d met on Match.com, I’d never met anyone else who had taken three children camping into deep wilderness when the youngest was three years old. When his children’s mother moved from the Bay Area to Salt Lake City and put them in a Christian school there, he made the trip to see them on a regular basis, and when his teenage daughter was unhappy in the Christian school, he brought her back to live with him. I had known a few attorneys over the years, and had an idea of what was required of a person to be part of a high-powered law firm. Jim was the only one I ever met who left the office at five to make it home to cook dinner, and no doubt the fact that he had made this choice had cost him in his professional career.

  I had my own large failures, I told him. The drunk driving charge, the foolish choice to go to Italy with a man I didn’t even like, the double-digit numbers of relationships that had gone nowhere, the hard things my children had said to me over the years, generally concerning my tendency toward highly emotional behavior, the times they’d heard me cry, or rail against their father—all of that was real, but there was a more recent failure that had left me gutted that summer. Then I told him about that one.

  6.

  There is no easy way to tell this story. But like everything else of substance that came before—the things that made us the two people we were by the time we met that night at the bar of the Lark Creek Inn—the story of my adopted Ethiopian daughters had brought me to this place.

  The woman who walked into that restaurant that night to take her seat across the table from the handsome, well-dressed attorney was a person who had recently—just six months earlier—experienced the largest devastation of her life, and one of her own making.

  Where to begin? I had given birth to three well-loved children, who were five, seven, and eleven when their father and I parted. And though I believe we went on to make a strong family together, and certainly a loving one, none of us had escaped injury in the divorce, and in different ways each of us bore its scars. My children had seen way too much of my sorrow over the years, way too much of my anger toward their father. Sitting across from Jim that night at the restaurant, hearing the story of a man on the other side of a bitter divorce—a man I deeply liked—whose ex-wife had, like me, moved to another city to raise the children, I could see the other half of the story I’d lived, played out in the life of a truly decent and loving man who had wanted nothing more than to be a good father. Twenty-four years later, he still suffered over his failure to protect his children from the pain of growing up in what much of the world refers to as “a broken home.” I carried that regret too, and it was vast.

  For all the years my children lived with me, I had held on to the dream that I would somehow have the chance to redo the old dream, but better next time. Later into my forties than any sensible person should, I had maintained the hope that maybe I’d have another child one day with a partner who would be there to share raising him or her, and that somehow through this experience we would all manage to become whole again as a family.

  My ex-husband actually accomplished this, becoming the father to a son born when our three children were all grown and he was fifty—a son whom my children considered from the day of his birth not as a half-brother but simply as their deeply loved brother, Taj. It was a beautiful thing to see.

  In my own life, the years passed with one failed attempt at a relationship after another, until finally my children had all left home to make their own lives in the world and I had at last accepted that I would never give birth to that fourth child, the magic baby.

  I missed being a parent as much as a person crossing the desert misses water. I missed soccer games and family meals and coming in out of the snow after sledding, dancing in the living room, and putting on plays and making Halloween costumes and art projects. I missed the first day of school, and all the other days—driving them to school, listening to all the things my children had to say not only to me but to each other. I missed holding a child and reading to her. All those nights on the bed, with one or another or all three of them pressed up against me, showing them the world one page at a time, starting with the first book, the beginning of everything—those first five words that were, for us, where all the other nights of reading began. “In the great green room …”

  I missed the simple fact of loving someone in a constant, daily way as I had done with my children. With my children, and no one else, ever. I had always seen myself as a person whose first and best gift was the ability to give love. But there was no one around anymore to receive it. And no one around loving me back.

  I was traveling to Guatemala a lot in those years—having bought a house in a small Mayan village on the shores of a deep volcanic lake. At the point that I started traveling there regularly, Guatemala was still, as it no longer is, a center for international adoption. Every time I landed at the airport in Guatemala City, I’d see the hopeful couples—most of them young, but some not so much younger than me—carrying their empty strollers and diaper bags in anticipation of the child they’d be meeting there and bringing home to be part of their family.

  But it was the flights back that got to me. Because surprisingly few Americans travel to Guatemala as tourists—nearly every Caucasian person on the plane (everyone but me) had come with the same purpose: to bring home a baby.

  Here’s how it would go every time I made the trip to Guatemala in those days: I’d be sitting on the airplane, and all around me were the anxious couples, the beautiful dark-eyed children, around eighteen months old, but sometimes a little older or a little younger. Looking shell-shocked, generally, but seldom crying. Guatemalan children don’t do that much.

  I read a lot about international adoption in those days. I studied websites. I clicked on links, a few of which actually showed photographs of children for whom homes and parents were needed.

  “Here is this child who needs a parent,” they said. And who was I? A parent who needed a child. There was a red flag in that li
ne, but I missed it.

  I had no partner. But I was accustomed to taking care of things on my own. I knew how to do without a husband. I did not ask whether a child could do without a father.

  For a long time I resisted the impulse to pursue an international adoption as a single person out of the recognition that I lacked the financial resources to provide for a child. The other part—about emotional resources, the presence or absence of a strong support system—was one I was too naive or ignorant to explore.

  Then a novel of mine was sold for more money than any book I’d ever written, and though I was not rich, I felt I was. One of the first things I did then, after receiving the check for Labor Day, was to click on the bookmarks of my adoption websites.

  By this point Guatemalan adoption had been shut down. And a new thought came to me: Rather than adopting a baby or a toddler, I saw myself providing a home for an older child who might have a harder time finding one.

  I read a book by a woman around my age, Melissa Fay Greene, who had adopted several older Ethiopian children and was raising them very happily, it seemed, along with her birth children, and though, unlike me, she had a partner at her side, Melissa’s story inspired me greatly.

  But it was a CD-ROM sent to me from an agency dealing with Ethiopian adoptions that convinced me to act. The orphanage had lined up the children there—ranging in age from three or four to eleven or twelve—to introduce themselves in front of the camera. Each one had about fifteen seconds to say his name, his favorite subject in school, his hopes for the future.

  I sat on my bed watching the CD, weeping as the face of one hopeful child after another filled the screen, their voices eager to please and so filled with longing you could almost touch it. “I am Abebe. My favorite subject is English. I hope an American family will adopt me. I am clean and neat.” “I’m Negasi, and my favorite subject is English.” It always was.