I won’t have much to say. Most was said in our first moment, when we were so quiet. He swam through the air to me and there was nothing.
There was nothing between us. No spaces.
I suppose it was the first moment I was thoroughly alive because I fell too far in it to ever describe it. There was nothing to look at because I was too busy seeing, and I got to be a beginner too. Will always be now, as every moment with your child will never repeat itself with something lovely after it, like a sunset or a passage in a book. Real time with them, I think, is the only actual. Everything left over is just a weather report.
This morning, before I got here and he was born, I wrote to him in his yellow book that I kept for recording thoughts. I said
You are on your way I just wanted to say OW WOW that was you banging on the door so you will be here soon should I say bon voyage?
I closed the book and sat waiting for that pain that dovetailed its wrenching ecstasy. I put my hands on my stomach and went straight toward it. It was the sort of pain that I can handle, and when it passed I leaned over and scrawled in that book again, I wrote
I hope I do okay by you
and
please, let’s like each other
I will clarify something so you don’t get the wrong idea. My own mother. She came to see me in a play in college and spent the entire day beaming at me in the background to not distract or steal focus. Waiting shyly whenever I floated over, she gave me her sweet smile and the batting of her eyelashes that calms. When I burst into her hotel room sobbing at midnight, she sat up and put her hand to her heart in alarm, her ladies’ hairdo protected by a silk sleeping bonnet. “What is it, dear, what’s wrong,” she whispered so as not to wake my father, who was already half dressed, assuming there was a bomb scare or a tornado. “Sweetheart, what?” she said, patting the bed beside her, too modest to get up in her nightgown.
“I’m so sorry, Mother. I’m awful. Happy birthday. I forgot.” I put my head on her shoulder and wept. She just laughed and patted me.
“Oh, honey, no. You had too much going on, don’t cry.”
My mother asks for nothing. My mother does not ever swear or comment negatively of others except with a light rolling of her eyes. She said to me as she watched me with my infant son, the best compliment I have ever received, in fact, she said
You are the best mother.
My dear, you are better than me.
You should have had six more.
• • •
Anyway I won’t match that. She let all of her children leave the nest without making it about herself for one moment, and how she managed all those partings I can’t fathom.
So you see, sir, I know what kind of mother you might take me for, based on my not giving up the baby. You probably think I’ll be the smothering kind. I really don’t think so. I’ve been aware, since that first hello, of the inevitable good-bye that follows it. Actually begins on the heels of it. If nothing else, it’s my job to prepare both of us for those farewells. I want so deeply for him to celebrate his freedom. A couple of tugs at his heart when I leave him at college or wherever, but I am hoping he feels it his ethical imperative to go and have fun without the thought of Mom lingering. I will have practiced the good-bye in the mirror, meditated for days before it happens and will give him that moment of being a little sad and then forgetting about me entirely. And I am crafty! I will have tools to help! I’ll have the movies we are going to make, the horror movies and music videos, the home movies that go on longer than any polite person could feign interest, of him sitting in his high chair in the bathroom while I do a shimmy, shimmy and then two spit takes in the sink while he shrieks with laughter every time, like I am Chaplin, enough to fill a whole memory card, or the movies of us going cross-country in an RV and him in the front seat with a lime popsicle, trying to incite truckers to blast their horns by waving at them in his surfer shorts, shirtless, his skin perfect and unmarred as the smile he gives when he turns to the camera, thrilled that the trucker waved back! I will watch the quiet films of the three of us back when we would have Monet Day, where we’d fill the bathtub with cheap flowers from the deli and food dye that we’d drip around them, huddling on the bathroom floor and painting what we saw. I can pore over all the Post-its he’s left by my desk, with “I love you mom.” “But I love you.” “I do.” “This is the thing, I love you mother.” I’ll have the memories of him showing concern over every old person on the street who walks alone. Him helping white-haired ladies down the street, or holding the door for so many people in the morning at school that I worry he’ll never get in the door himself, and that time he said Mary-Louise, Mar-la-weez Mar-la the beautiful, Mar-la beautiful, that’s it, Mommy, I will call you Mar-la beautiful. I will call you that forever, until my bones are air.
I’ll remember him dozing off, being close to dreams and then waking with a start and whispering, please sing me a song, Mom. I will remember all that in private when he is gone. If I am the best ever, I’ll be happy when days go by and he forgets to call and then calls and says it’s because he’s been doing something wonderful, and like my own mother, I’ll be thrilled to hear it, whatever it is, and his not calling me won’t be touched on. This is what I am shooting for. It will take massive effort but I can see it. I can picture myself doing it right.
Look at him there, would you? I mean, have you ever? I almost can’t believe it. He’s my only and my one. He’s my ever and after. Sorry, sir. It may be the very best choice, but no, you may not have this baby tonight. He is my job now, the best one I’ve ever had, by a zillion, and I will be doing this one until I drop, in my own way and I say no.
I haven’t even heard it yet. The sound that will make me happy to have been born, the sound I will draw on when I can’t breathe or think straight, when I lose or fail, the sound of a small voice looking for me, or looking to be sure of me when I am right there, the sound of
mommy?
I have that coming. It will make me taller, brighter, better. Put everything in its proper order of importance.
Dear Storyteller,
I feel I’ve lost thirty friends in losing you. It’s like an entire region wiped out: Yoda, Hercules, Santa Claus, and the Scarecrow, Atticus Finch. You were the real-life version of every one.
You would tell me
Don’t you dare let go of that, you must never let anyone take that
And
All we ever owe each other is the truth
You flew so high, and with such regularity, where the rest of us are mostly earthbound.
We told each other everything already. There is no need to write to you, I just wanted to see you in these pages, despite the fact that I can’t put you into words. You mean something untranslatable.
Now I can’t imagine an afterlife that doesn’t include you describing life and death. I can’t wait to hear it. It will keep unfolding the more I consider it, like all of your stories. Its ending will I guess be the meaning of life? With you unwrapping it, certainly it will be something bigger and more phenomenally wonderful than simple human happiness. It will be continued. Like you.
Dear Uncle,
You never occurred to me. I didn’t imagine you or consider the sacrifice of someone like you until I saw your name on a document. It said “guardian.” Still in shock from that word, I looked again and saw “siblings,” with other names unpronounceable to me, and I sat and rethought my fantasy. My potential daughter has a family? Who is alive? What will that make me? I could only envision her rejecting me one day once she understood that I was just a second chance at being provided for; a white, Western woman who didn’t speak Amharic and couldn’t make injera. My dream was a baby found in a field, left by a door, or fallen from the sky, not a little girl who’d been held and loved. Given a name and a birth order. I imagined that baby born to a mother who couldn’t provide for her, but I never realized I didn’t want to picture that woman or her family. I assumed I would find my little girl only desper
ate for my arms, but yours held her before mine.
You carried her to the orphanage. You walked with her on your hip until you got a ride hours away to that small brick building, strung with barbed wire and guarded by men in uniform. There is no way to know exactly who you handed her to when you felt her skin brush yours for the last time and no recording of your last words, if you spoke them with her crying in the background. That my daughter cried I am certain. I have the photographs taken moments after you left and the tears hadn’t yet dried or stopped falling. I know the sound of her cry because it met me when I walked into the orphanage and heard a single voice wailing with a kind of hopelessness you usually only hear in an adult, someone with no expectation of being saved.
I heard that cry and fairly floated up the stairs to follow it despite my heavy bags, and as I passed a woman in the hall she pointed in the direction of the sound and murmured something I understood only by tone. It was my baby crying. They’d brought her over to be waiting for me instead of leaving her with the other babies and she was alone and terrified. There was such resolve in her wailing, and she quieted so immediately when I knelt in front of her that I can only believe she thought she was being left a third time. Knowing my daughter now, and who she is, I know that the tears in the photograph and look of hallucinatory disbelief on her face are proof of who you were to her. If she hadn’t trusted you and needed you, she would have been easy to distract when you left and I watched the nurses at the orphanage make a ballet of their soothing. I wonder what you said to her when you took her away from the hut, or where she thought you were going when you set out to walk a distance that I might complain about if I had to travel to in a car. You wanted to give her a chance and you gave her away, believing she would get it.
When I went to meet you, we sat in a courtyard and spoke through a translator. You had brought along your children, her cousins. It would have been simpler for you to make that trip by yourself without those children, three of them under the age of ten. There must have been something you wanted them to be reassured of in meeting me.
As we sat down across from each other under that tree, I realized one of the many things that day that made me rethink my actual level of sensitivity. The first one was that we had a shared point of confusion: I had never occurred to you either. That is to say, I never occurred to you as I am. You turned to the translator and asked him
Where is her husband?
You were looking behind me for the father you’d envisioned. He told me what you said and my throat went dry. I flashed through the events of the last four years and felt wildly unsuccessful at life. I said
I don’t know. I mean, I just don’t have. One of those.
I tried to look friendly and like someone you would entrust with a human life. Your hands were clasped in your lap, the children next to you, stiff with fear from meeting someone who could only appear like a woman who’d just stepped off of a spaceship. All of you looked at the translator and then slowly started to look at me in longer glances, but when I brought forth the photo album I’d brought to show you where she would live and sleep and play, the children avoided my eyes again. I was taking their cousin to live on Mars, with things as concretely alien as beds with sheets, toys, and carpeting. A crib with a mobile of a cow hanging over it must have looked like an Escher painting, though they had never seen paint, and paper was extremely rare.
The agency said to have my questions ready for you because it would be overwhelming, so I had prepared three. The last question was really two, and both so profound that I felt my voice failing me as I asked you about your highest hopes for her, and your gravest fear.
I hope that she will be taken care of, go to school and perhaps one day be something, a doctor.
I fear that she will not know God.
There are so many reductive adjectives used to describe those materially less fortunate, words the privileged use to anoint them. Words like proud, or graceful. “They are such an elegant people.” “The women have such a regal bearing.” It never rings true. Having seen what I saw when you brought me to the hut where my daughter was born, and introduced me to the people in your village, I felt like I was hovering over every judgment of my reality and yours, unable to land. None of the families I met were intact, everyone had lost children, parents, or a spouse. There was not enough of anything for anyone. The only bounty was in categories of suffering or possible ways to die. I didn’t feel them looking at me with distance, they all smiled and shook my hand. I hid my embarrassment at how stupid I felt when I entered your hut and was alarmed by the darkness that swallowed me despite it being late morning. Of course I knew there was no electricity, no light would be there except for what might creep in through that ceiling of straw. I knew it, but I couldn’t fathom it until I stood inside with you and stared at an actual nothingness and my eyes adjusted to near black. There is nothing, and there is not one bloody thing. As you pointed at different parts of the hut that were designated for the cows to sleep, or the spot where your family of twelve eats when there is food, or where you slept, I saw spots with absolutely nothing in them. There was an absence of comment on your situation that made you seem twenty feet tall. It’s something I could never know if I hadn’t stood there, with you showing me what life is like on another planet where there is no complaining, or showing disappointment.
You were kind. I don’t want to quantify or describe it to anyone who won’t see how far you walk or what you have to eat or where you go to pray. It feels vulgar to be more explicit about what you face. I saw your life, less than lucky in every obvious respect, but blessed in ways I’m not built to understand. I don’t think you would appreciate being characterized as anything other than a man who loves God and tries to be good. I think I know what actual divinity is because you handed it to me when I said I hoped I would come back and you would meet my son, and you said
You must, because we are all a family now
I hit a new threshold of speechlessness when you gave me the most tremendous gift I’ve ever received and then thanked me. What can you say to that, there is no saying, “Oh no, thank you.” There’s nothing but commonality. Just humility and being keenly aware that I will never live up to that gift, but will wake up every morning and try ferociously to meet it and marvel at it.
Dear Lifeline,
The day you married my friend, I pulled up to the hotel and found you outside in the driveway giving directions to someone looking for the check-in.
I waved, rolling down my window, and you loped over with a huge grin on your face. You folded your six-foot-four frame through the car window to kiss me hello and I said, how is she, where is she, and your face lit up as you put one hand in the air and one on your heart, and you said, “Oh, you can’t believe, she’s in there weeping. All day, like this,” you said, drawing a stream of tears down your face with one long finger and making a mime’s expression of anguish, “she’s just been crying.”
I put a hand on my heart, too, as you reenacted her anguish. You were beaming at the thought of your lovely bride, tears overflowing on the morning of her wedding.
I asked could I go and find her and you said, “Are you kidding? She’s dying to see you. She will probably see you and pass out from crying again. It’s epic, I mean, pure Chekhov. She’s amazing.”
I rolled up my window and you did a little soft-shoe move and waved me off with genuine exhilaration in your eyes. I thought, gee, that’s something I haven’t seen before, a man who could find beauty in a woman’s unruly display of emotion. There was no making her tears about you; just tap-dancing in the driveway and accepting that you were about to marry someone who was spilling over with feeling and too honest to conceal it.
The wedding was lovely and simple, except for one moment. Your bride reached the aisle, which was just around fifteen feet of grass leading to you. Still on the verge of weeping, she stopped. We all turned to face her, expecting her to sweep by, but she was planted, staring back at everyone. It’s the
moment where everyone is rooting for a woman’s beauty, projecting loveliness onto her even if she’s low on it, but my friend wasn’t doing that production. She crept up those first few rows until she’d taken a soul count of every person bearing witness to what you were about to swear to each other. Her brow was set and her eyes fervently searched the crowd, her face aching with sincerity. If any part of me was somewhere else I was snapped to the present; she wanted to fully inhabit the moment most people say they barely remember.
• • •
I called you one night, nine years after that wedding. I don’t know if I needed someone to hear me or talk to me. I’d stood outside many cold nights in a row that month after my kids were asleep. Sometimes I’d dial a friend only to hang up before they answered. I didn’t feel like anyone wanted to hear me complain and I had nothing terrific to report.
I stood on the tiny balcony of the absurdly overpriced sublet that was draining me of enormous amounts of money. I looked at the lights in Battery Park. I could see inside people’s apartments across the street, families decorating Christmas trees or sitting on their couches, watching television together. I thought about all the places I’d lived, which were too many to count and how at one point in my life this apartment would have felt like a palace. I moved the phone to my other hand so I could warm that one in my pocket for a second. I found myself dialing you. My nose was so cold that I had to keep rubbing it to revive feeling in the tip. You answered.
I said I just wanted to talk. You said great. I’m listening.
Dear Mr. You Page 11
