The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

  27.

  A documentary film producer named Sarah Gross wrote me a letter. She was making a film about international adoption and she had heard about my story, though without knowing the particulars. Of all the things that had happened in my life that I’d chosen to write about, the story of my Ethiopian daughters may have been the only one on which I had remained silent.

  But three years had passed since I’d said good-bye to the girls in Missouri. They were older now, and launched in their new lives.

  Though I had not published anything about the experience, it was known in adoption circles—known and condemned. Over these three years, I’d received letters from a few hundred parents of older children adopted from other countries. Sometimes the adoption had gone well. Sometimes not. Among these letters were some from people who wrote to tell me what a terrible person I was to have abandoned my daughters as they supposed I had done, and there was no shortage of voices online—bloggers mostly—giving voice to a similar point of view. I felt no need to respond to those. But I also received letters—stacks of them, in fact—from people struggling as I had with trying to help a child who had experienced terrible loss and, in some cases (unlike my own two girls, whose prospects for happiness in their new family, I believed, were good) might never overcome the wounds of their young lives.

  For these parents and so many others who had not written to me, but were out there somewhere, it seemed important that there be a voice acknowledging that they were not alone in their painful struggle, and neither were their children. Some of these parents had relinquished children as I had—and lived with the belief that doing so had been the most shameful and unforgivable act of their lives. Others remained the custodial parents of children with whom, despite years of heartfelt effort, they had never succeeded in forming a bond. At the time these people entered into their international adoptions, they had no idea, any more than I did at the time, of how often such an adoption fails—not only for the adopting parent, but most devastatingly of all, for the child.

  When I read Sarah’s letter about the project she was engaged in—and later, when we spoke—it seemed to me that it could be valuable that I share my story. But I also knew my primary responsibility lay with the girls who had been my daughters once. Some parts of our story—many—were not mine to tell.

  I spent a long time talking with Sarah, laying out the ground rules for an interview, if one was to take place. Finally, that summer, the date was set. The interviewer would be Dan Rather, long retired from CBS News but still actively working as a journalist.

  I spent six hours in a room with him, face to face under the lights and with the cameras going, talking about what I felt able to convey about our experience. He asked tough questions, as I had known he would. There would have been no point in this exercise if he hadn’t.

  When it was over, we shook hands, and I drove home to Jim, who had been worried about this, and anxious that Dan Rather might come down on me mercilessly. I wasn’t trying to absolve myself of responsibility on this one, I told him, or deny my shortcomings and failure, only to offer support and the comfort I might bring to other families who supposed they were alone.

  “Some people are going to hate you when they hear that interview,” Jim told me.

  If they did I’d live with it.

  “You know who I am,” I told him. “And you love me anyway.”

  There might have been nothing that mattered more than this. That he knew me. Same as I knew him.

  With all our failings, we accepted each other.

  28.

  For nine years, my daughter Audrey had been renting my writing cabin at our old farm from her father, who lived there now with his second wife, Kristen, and their son, Taj. It had been a wonderful writing space for me, long ago, but the cabin was heated with wood and uninsulated, with single-pane windows and an outhouse some distance away. Trips to the outhouse in spring, summer, and fall were fine. But even for Audrey—a country girl, born at home on that very property—winters were rough.

  By this point, she had earned a graduate degree as a counselor and had a good job at a residential treatment facility for troubled adolescent boys in the town where she and her boyfriend lived. She loved her work, and the town where she’d lived all her life—the swimming hole and waterfall down the road, the way when she went to the store or the town dump she could greet nearly everyone she met by name.

  But I knew she wanted a home of her own, and that though she and Tod could manage a mortgage, the prospect of ever coming up with money for a down payment seemed remote if not impossible.

  Then the Labor Day movie came out, and I got my big check, and there was nothing I’d wanted more to do with it than to help my daughter and her partner get a home of their own.

  So I lent them money with the instruction that they keep an eye out for a good piece of property. For over a year, she and Tod had been on the lookout, but though they found a few places they liked, the ones in their price range were pretty dismal. A couple of times they put a bid on a place, but they lost out every time.

  Then a great prospect appeared. A wonderful old house on the same road as her father’s place—on the other side of the waterfall and swimming hole—went into foreclosure. The first day the sign went up announcing it would be sold soon, Audrey contacted the bank.

  The place was in rough shape, but its potential was vast: This was a two-hundred-year-old cape set in a sweet, sunny spot at the end of a long dirt driveway, much like the old farm I’d bought all those years back that belonged to her father now. It sat on forty-one acres, the boundaries of which were formed by a brook wide enough in places for swimming.

  For a while it was unclear how the property would be sold, but Audrey monitored the situation closely. She contacted the Realtor for the bank, researched the title to make sure it was clear. She wanted to be ready to make an offer the moment the place came on the market. The price was $104,000.

  “Offer full price,” I said. Once she got a mortgage, she and Tod could pay me back a little at a time.

  She prepared to make her offer that day. All cash, no contingencies. She made an appointment to meet the Realtor with check in hand.

  Then something odd happened. Twenty minutes before they were due to meet, the Realtor who had listed the property canceled her meeting with Audrey. The next day, when Audrey called her again to find out what happened, the Realtor told her the place had been sold.

  Someone else had put in a higher offer, the woman said. But something in the deal—and the timing of events—felt odd. To me and, most significantly, to Jim.

  Although he was not a real estate attorney, and not licensed to practice in the state of New Hampshire, Jim got to work researching the situation.

  He wrote a tough-sounding lawyer letter—one of the things he was best at. We made sure it was on the desk of the head of the realty company that afternoon. Two days later, Audrey signed the papers that allowed her to buy the property.

  “You may not have earned the big bucks on this one, Jimmy,” I told him, “but there might be no case you took on all year that brought about a more important change in anybody’s life than this one.”

  My daughter and her boyfriend got their home.

  29.

  Spring of 2014, I was still having trouble writing. At Jim’s house in Oakland, where we lived now, there was no good place for me to work.

  My friend Karen offered a solution. She owned a little cottage in the town of Lafayette, a fifteen-minute drive from where we were living. She told me I was welcome to work there if I wanted.

  I started driving to Lafayette every morning with my laptop and spending my days at Karen’s little red house. By the third day I had a novel in the works. Nobody was happier about this than Jim.

  One day on a break from work, something inspired me to go online and see what houses cost in Lafayette. Jim and I had no plan to buy a new home at that point; we each owned a house, though each had a big mortgage attached.
/>   A property had just come on the market that day. The moment I saw the pictures I knew I wanted to live there with Jim.

  It was not one house, in fact, but two of them on seven acres of land—an unimaginably large piece of property to find at an affordable price so close to San Francisco and Oakland. The house was located in a place called Hunsaker Canyon, a few miles out of town. This place had not been on the market since 1979.

  The original house on the property had been built in the forties, but when the current owners had purchased it back in the seventies they had made the plan to design and build a new house there while living in the old one. Now there were two houses, not far apart from each other, with a stone patio and a pergola connecting them—the original house functioning as a place for guests or work, the new place (not so new anymore) a wonderful, almost magical living space.

  The two houses were shingled, with all kinds of interesting architectural features: a huge arched window in the living room salvaged from an old school and another in the bedroom, a cozy nook by the fireplace enclosed by a couple of wooden columns that we would later learn had also been salvaged from the old Black Panther house in Berkeley. I could picture sitting there with Jim—he’d be playing his guitar, maybe; I’d have a book—with a fire going.

  The kitchen wasn’t huge, but I could tell it would be a great place to prepare meals with enough room that I wouldn’t find myself pushing Jim aside as I did now in his small Oakland kitchen. I loved how the room opened up to the rest of the ground floor in a way that would allow the person making the food—or both of them—to talk easily with her guests, or her husband, as she did.

  There were skylights and a propane stove to take the chill off on a winter morning, and built-in shelves. The floors were tile with radiant heat. There was an outdoor shower opening out onto a brook. Nobody to see you there but the deer.

  The newer of the two houses had only one bedroom, but that room filled the entire upstairs, with a bathroom to the side that had a big, deep, old-fashioned tub and a balcony off to one side where I pictured Jim and me sitting at night, taking in the night sky. This was a spot where the stars would be undimmed by ambient light.

  I loved the house, but it was the piece of land that got to me the most. It was situated at the end of a long driveway with no neighbors in sight—meaning we’d have to push our garbage cans all the way out to the road on trash day, not that we cared. Huge old oak trees, the largest of which stood at the entrance, surrounded the property. There was a big sunny lawn, and beyond that a hill rising steeply above the house, full of more live oaks. In another direction, there was a barn with three bays, and a large garage with a big studio above it that would be perfect for writing. A hot tub under the largest of the oaks. We could bring our coffee out in the morning and watch the sun coming up.

  I called Jim right away. “The amazing thing is, this place is unconventional enough that it actually costs less than the ranch houses down the road,” I told him. “We could afford this. And if we sold our two houses, we’d end up with lower taxes and less debt.”

  Jim was working at home that day. He said he’d be right over.

  Twenty minutes later he showed up on his motorcycle at my friend Karen’s little writing house with my helmet strapped to the seat behind him. I hopped on the back and we rode over to Hunsaker Canyon together.

  We had no appointment to view the property and we knew we shouldn’t disturb the owners. So we just stood a ways off, admiring the property from a distance and picturing the two of us living there together.

  Even before the day, a week later, when the Realtor took us inside—the earliest appointment possible—we knew we wanted to buy that house. I had studied the pictures online so closely I knew every room and where we’d put our furniture. But we also recognized this would require a huge amount of effort and no small amount of ingenuity.

  My Mill Valley house was rented out at the time, so there was no way to put it on the market yet. But we got to work right away preparing to sell Jim’s. I also listed, for sale, the little shack of a cabin on a pond in New Hampshire that I’d bought—without consulting Jim, as usual—a couple of years earlier.

  We made an offer in record time, contingent on the sale of Jim’s house. For the next three weeks we worked long hours getting that house ready to go on the market, with workmen coming over every day and laboring into the night to get Jim’s place in shape to sell. This meant boxing up our possessions, painting every room, refinishing the front entrance, updating the bathrooms.

  It was a high-wire act, this plan of ours. To get the house in Hunsaker Canyon, we had to put down a lot of money, but if Jim’s house didn’t sell—or if the sale fell through at the last minute—we could lose our deposit. Jim worried about the possibility of things going wrong. This was his lawyer’s training combined with his own more cautious nature.

  One night I woke to see Jim lying awake next to me. A kind of panic had set in of a sort I’d never seen in him before.

  “This is a terrible mistake,” he said. “If I can’t sell my house fast enough we’re ruined.”

  We lay side by side on the bed for a long time, talking. Once we sold both our houses, I pointed out, we’d actually be carrying less mortgage debt than we had before, with a lower monthly payment. We just had to get through this rough stretch, I said, and I knew we would. I, always the voice of wild optimism; Jim, the catastrophizer. Somewhere in the middle lay the truth.

  For two weekends of open houses, no bid came in for Jim’s house. At the eleventh hour, a couple put in an offer and I found a buyer to purchase my New Hampshire cabin—at a loss, but at that point I barely cared. We were getting the Hunsaker Canyon house.

  I was sixty years old at this point. I had bought four houses in my life. Every one of them purchased alone. This was the first time I had a partner at my side to sign the papers with me. A partner at my side, period.

  The day we’d first seen the Hunsaker Canyon house—in April—the wisteria had been in bloom and the air was full of sweet-smelling jasmine and bees. The grass had been green and the sun came through the trees like the dream sequence in some movie.

  It was July when we signed the papers and moved in. That first night we lay in our new bedroom with the high arched window and the balcony off to one side that looked out over the trees, in awe at our good fortune. “I’m never leaving this place,” I said.

  Forty-one years had passed since I bought my old farm in New Hampshire when I was nineteen, twenty-five years since I’d loaded the U-Haul and driven away the last time. For all those years after that, I never felt truly at home again as I had in that place; but now with Jim at the house in Hunsaker Canyon, I did.

  We got an outdoor ping-pong table, and a table for eating meals outside under the wisteria. “We’ll plant Arbequina olive trees on the hill behind the barn,” he said. “I’ll hang my guitars on the wall.”

  We talked then about the parties we’d host out on the lawn, with music and long tables lined with friends. I pictured grandchildren there, never mind whether the offspring of his children or mine. They’d be ours together.

  I’d plant tomatoes. Jim would make an office in the second house, and there’d be room left over for visiting friends and children. I’d put my desk in the studio over the garage in front of the giant window that faced the largest of the live oak trees.

  In only five years, we said, we’d be harvesting olives.

  30.

  Buying the Hunsaker Canyon house presented a new challenge. Or what looked like a challenge back then.

  Each of us had brought to the place a few decades’ worth of possessions—far more from me than by Jim, a minimalist. But Jim loved the simple lines of midcentury modern furniture and owned some pieces that mattered greatly to him: a couple of black leather Le Corbusier chairs, and a Breuer chair, and an Italian armoire. The pride of his collection was a stainless-steel-and-glass table—with molded plastic chairs, about which he was so protective that just se
tting a casserole down on it made me uneasy. I was always afraid I’d break it.

  I hated that table. It was cold and hard, I said. Unwelcoming. To Jim, it was an artwork.

  I remember the day—this was when we still lived in Jim’s Oakland house—my daughter Audrey came to visit from New Hampshire. She’d brought along a gift, an old hand-crocheted tablecloth she’d bought at a yard sale, with me in mind.

  “Oh good,” Audrey said, when she’d spotted Jim’s glass table. “It’s the perfect size.”

  Jim loved Audrey. But I could see him concealing a look of pain. That glass table was his pride and joy. I put the tablecloth away, but in truth, my view was similar to my daughter’s. I thought the crocheted cloth was great.

  Back then I didn’t mind serving meals on the glass table, because it was temporary; I never considered Jim’s Oakland house my true home. But when we moved to Hunsaker Canyon, the problem arose: Whose table? Whose chairs? What to do about a living room couch, knowing Jim liked sleek, sharp lines—his dream, an Eames chair—while I favored overstuffed thrift-shop sofas covered with pillows?

  For the first days in that house, I worried that we’d never resolve the problem. I implied that Jim’s taste was predictable, conventional. He said nothing of equal harshness to me, but I knew he hated my big red wing chair and my flower-upholstered couch.

  “Just give my stuff a chance,” he said. Up until then, the two matching Le Corbusier chairs had been exiled to the outside patio, awaiting resolution of our dispute.

  He set them on either side of the room, across from a sofa we’d bought that we had actually managed to agree on.

  “You might even find this comfortable,” he said, indicating one of the two leather chairs.

  I had never tried sitting in it, but now I did.

  I look back now on that day as one of the moments I discovered a small but significant truth about marriage: that it is in the act of surrendering the old, familiar patterns and all the things a person believes to be immutable that she may discover a new kind of beauty. Something better even than her old way.