by Amy Hempel
We were there to ride out the wait. The place was not clean, but it was far away from anyone any of us knew, and once we came up with the money, the great deal of money required to be there, we would know that we had provided for the future of the children whom we would not see. We would remember this when everything reminded us of what we had done. That was the best we could do; we had done the best that we could.
But after I received the book, and read it the first time, I was made sick. After I learned what was done in the orchard of the home. Before, when I was there and didn’t know, the other women and I would pick up fallen apples in the orchard and bring them inside to place in a large wooden bowl on a milk-painted table inside the back door. The gardener took some of them home to his wife if the cook did not need them all for the pies that she served after chicken and dumplings on Sundays. After reading the book, I was made sick by apples, by the thought of apples, the word itself, even the letter “a” as it might end up spelling “apple.” Keep them away from me—the red and the green ones, the ones from Asia that taste like pears, same goes for those that hide under crusts in pies. Cider in autumn—not a chance anymore.
The author of the book had been born at the home; her adoptive parents told her. The author was a journalist, and she looked into the place. There had been rumors, accusations. The place had been rebuilt after the fire, and resumed its shady business for some years more. But things did not add up. There was the caretaker’s confession, another from an attendant who left shortly after she was hired. The author was not the first to look into the home, but she was the one who refused to be turned away. Others had been threatened. No one would cooperate. She kept on, and secured a confession from a handyman who could no longer live with himself. He told her that in order to save money, the babies that were not as likely to be adopted were not fed. They were not given milk, and they were not given medicine, and that was the standard operating procedure until these babies died, and were placed in the miniature coffins for which wooden butter boxes were repurposed. The handyman had then buried them in the adjacent orchard.
The author reported on local officials concerned with child welfare and adoption practices, and those who dedicated themselves to enlightened social welfare—the people who eventually succeeded in shutting the place down. The author advertised, and was able to locate others who had been born there and were then adopted. They were still being counted, she said. They held reunions. And who was held accountable? Those who should have been punished were already gone, the author wrote.
“Walk it off,” the nurses told us when we were strong enough to walk, as we prepared to leave the home.
*
There is a wetlands preserve a couple of miles from my house where, for a small donation, you can walk the beautiful acres that are home to many kinds of birds and wildlife. At the trailhead, there is a whiteboard where hikers can write down what they saw each day. You can expect to see gators, ibis, wood storks, and herons, and one day a joker who preceded me wrote “penguin.” On my next pass, under “Sightings,” I wrote “children.” By the time I returned it had been erased; someone had written “lawyer” and drawn a frowny face beside it. The next time I went to the preserve, I wrote on the whiteboard: “steel horse,” and went back later in the day to see if anyone got it, and was glad to see that someone had written two words before and two words after mine, completing the line from Bon Jovi: “On a steel horse I ride.” The other sightings on the board that day were common king snake, brahminy blind snake, snake, snake, Chihuahua, snake.
*
This part of Florida—not on the ocean, not on the Gulf—is, for now, exempt from the threat of flooding, though a hurricane will take down trees, and the northern part of town is part of Lightning Alley. “Fecund” is a word that comes to mind, as is the phrase “insects on steroids,” one hears that all the time. No tourist season, no real tourists, but people who went to the university often come back on Game Days, so you need to plan a different route to get across town.
There is ease, and one can afford it. The land is flat, there is a small downtown of bars and pretty good restaurants and a good coffeehouse the students hang out in. I live out where the neighborhood developments have names on wooden signs. Though mine somehow lost its sign. If you want an international city, Miami is a four-hour drive south.
It is home for now, but where does one ever feel at home? Thousands of refugees, and I have the luxury to consider this question. If a family from Syria needed this house, I would let them have it. Except then they would have the same problems to fix, and where would they get jobs? Would the children be allowed to attend a local school? For a small part of every day, I look online at houses for rent, here and in other cities. Never mind that I don’t have a job in these places, I look at houses and wonder if that might be home.
It is Valentine’s Day, and we hear that up north it is so cold that flower vendors are losing a fortune, the flowers freezing before they can be delivered. Which probably boosts sales for purveyors of chocolate. This is either cyclic or a new and ominous development for the planet. A real estate broker tried to interest me in a house on the Gulf coast when I was still looking, and when I asked how many years till it would be underwater, the broker said, “Why bring up the controversy?” Climate change is the controversy. The broker said it had not hurt sales at any of the beaches yet, not even Miami or St. Pete, expected to be the first to go under.
I don’t need flowers or chocolate today, but because I need a pick-me-up and am not carrying cash, I drive over to the college campus, where, planted throughout, there is a kind of holly called yaupon, the berries of which are poisonous, but if you chew a handful of leaves they work on you like caffeine.
Half an hour’s drive from my house is a prison town; the prison is a serious one, at that. Put to death there?—Ted Bundy, for one. It’s not a town where you want to stop for gas, and you’ll get a ticket for driving two miles over the limit. I’ve only known one person who was imprisoned, a guy I went out with once. He was smug, I thought, but this was back when I gave people a chance. We met up at a movie theater, and had to wait in line for half an hour.
“Lucky I brought something to read,” he said. Ha! What a dick. Not long after, I heard he was doing time for embezzlement. Asked myself: Going to learn this time? Okay, another time. Next time.
*
The climate change nonbeliever across the street stops by on a weekday morning to ask if it is a good time “for a little neighborly chat.” I’m late to visit a patient, and tell him I’m getting ready to go to work, but when he turns away with an apology, I make the effort and ask how he’s doing. He’s going to be ninety in a week, he says, which is impressive since he so recently told me he was eighty-eight. Plus I know what the neighborly chat will be about—he has made other neighbors believe that we are close, so they have deputized him to speak to me about the yard. He would be within his rights to speak to me about the mailbox tumped over on its post. How quickly this place could become the neighborhood eyesore. It’s already worse than when I moved in. The house that someone died in at the corner is in better shape than this one, and it is kept up by the grandchildren who live in Colorado.
The day before the neighbor’s visit, what a scare! I was dog-sitting Lois’s Samoyed, and he jumped the fence and disappeared. A kind woman found him wandering alone and saw the number on his tag. She phoned to tell Lois he was safe nearly a mile away. Lois gave her my number, and she offered to drop him off for me as she would be heading to the nearby mall. I stood at the corner by the street she would take to reach me and waved her in. The white Escalade slowed and I saw the white dog sitting up in the passenger seat. His eyes were squinting at the air-conditioning blowing his way. The woman turned onto my street, stopped, and put on her flashers.
She had attached one of her own dog’s leashes to his collar I could see when she handed him over. She had brought her young daughter with her, and told me that her daughter could commu
nicate with animals. “He loves you,” the little girl said to me. That’s what he told her? I thought: Why didn’t he tell her where he lived and save the mother a call? But that was just me being awful. I tried to give the woman money, which she refused, so I thanked her and her daughter, and told the little girl that I wished I had her gift.
*
It is Girl Scout cookie time, and outside the grocery store there is a table set up and covered with boxes. New this year is a gluten-free option; the flavor is toffee. This is the kind I buy two boxes of, and the girl I hand the money to is the girl I gave away. Not every girl I see is the one I left behind. I have to be in a mood in order for this certainty to hijack my day. Not every girl is even the right age, but that doesn’t make any difference. It’s been how many years, and I see her—the girl I never saw—wherever I go. I never made a list, and don’t keep count of the number of times I see her. But man, she gets around.
We have taken road trips together. I am the driver, of course, and she the imagined passenger as we cross the southern states from Florida across the Gulf coast into Louisiana. I show her New Orleans, I show myself New Orleans since I’ve been there so few times. You feel fifty percent hipper just walking down a street in that city, even if it’s the wrong street. Forty dollars to park for the day—happy to pay it in New Orleans. I don’t drink or party, so in New Orleans I’m a wallflower. I’m more of a one-to-one type anyway, and the girl, the imagined passenger, that’s okay with her. I used to travel with men who brought guidebooks. It made a trip feel like school, having to learn about churches and trade routes, agriculture and exports. I’m not opposed to learning something, but I like a more associative experience in a new place. Especially when the new place is old. I would rather learn about a place after I have left it.
A road trip with the imagined passenger does not need a destination. We can turn back anytime we want, go to another city if we get where we were going and find out we’re not interested after all. No need for souvenirs as she is not really there. But I keep the seat belt buckled over the empty seat.
*
The day before the Twin Towers fell, I attended a memorial service for one of my best friends. There were so many people there—more than four hundred—and we filled the polished private club. The next morning, watching the horror on TV, I was glad my friend had not had to see this. And immediately realized the mistake in that. He was a New Yorker, and would not have wanted to be spared the anguish. He would have rushed to offer what help he could, and been proud to stay in his neighborhood, which was only blocks away. He would have breathed in the toxic clouds that followed, in love with the injured city. His natural eloquence would have comforted others. But he was dead; he was already dead.
*
Years ago, I bought fancy onesies from a catalog for a colleague’s baby. Ever since, I have received that catalog four times a year. Rather than put it in recycling, I let myself get pulled in, and follow the narrative of the tiny outfits worn by child models wearing lipstick. The catalog comes from England, and one could do worse than dress a child from its pages.
I never tracked her in terms of what she might be wearing at a certain age. I didn’t think about what she might be learning, or when she learned it. I don’t know the age that a child is taught long division.
Those clothes in the English catalog include dresses with gold tulle skirts and teensy cashmere sweaters. Not things one can throw in a washing machine when a baby gaks up lunch. I guess these are ceremonial clothes, and anyway there must be countless babies who have hurled on their christening gowns. Having never seen someone christened, I don’t know what I’m talking about.
*
Today new signs are posted on the walkways of the botanical gardens. The first instructs visitors not to carve their initials in the bamboo. Behind the outer bark are the cells that carry water and sugar to all parts of the tree, though here many poles are already covered as high as a man can stand with names inside of hearts, threatening the hollow culms.
The second sign is smaller, and it turned up in three places: SNAKES, COTTONMOUTH NEST. The places the signs went up look no different from the rest of the spread. Like the venomous snakes won’t slither over to a nonnesting area? The bromeliad gardens, for example? The signs are only inches from the walkway where women push strollers. Good luck, visitors!
*
The beach towns near here are covered with For Sale signs. Residents argue with each other over which town will be underwater first. As I have said, everyone thinks Miami, but say that to a Realtor and she will tell you that these predictions do not affect the market; sales are brisk. But the number of For Sale signs does not seem to change, as many as every other house on some Gulf coast drives. Walking along the water on a seventy-degree February day, the mildest of breezes not even rippling the water where dolphins leap in pods, and pelicans swoop down on fish, I could believe the danger was not real. But I have shown myself to be a person who does not recognize danger.
*
At a frozen yogurt place, I stood in line behind a woman holding a baby, about a year old, and dressed in a diaper. I watched as the mother carried the baby up to the flavor I planned to get, and coaxed the chubby fingers to touch the spouts where the yogurt came out, so the baby could feel the icy peaks of chocolate and vanilla left over from the last person who got some. I looked at the store attendant, like do something, but the attendant—a teenage girl in a uniform—smiled at the mother and the diapered baby. What the hell was wrong with them? Or what was wrong with me? No, what was wrong with them?
*
A friend in a long, successful marriage, her children grown, said to her husband in their house in New York’s Chelsea, “I think I need to go to India and teach needy children to read.” Her husband said, “I’m pretty sure you can find children to teach on Twenty-third Street.” He was right. And she did. And felt better.
She told me this on a day when I was thinking about situational ethics. I was thinking about it for around two minutes, but still. As if anyone needs an even murkier situation than usual to figure out. And of course it had to do with the home, with the question of what I would have done if I had known what my decision meant at the time. Excuses abounded. But other women managed who had had a harder time. But a harder time for them. My hard time was still too hard for me, so the argument with myself was moot.
Tried a nap the other day. Maybe it is a thing you have to get the hang of. Nappers say they wake up refreshed. I have only felt refreshed walking into a bracing lake in Maine. Not every thought of Maine is something to do with the home.
*
In the old part of downtown, where small bungalows have not been gentrified, I have a good time with Lois, the patient who loves to talk about desire. She and I agree that if liked, we had wanted to be desired; if desired, we had wanted to be liked. Not instead, in addition. But it felt to me like wearing shoes on the wrong feet, and touching one knee to the painted white line, waiting for the gunshot to start the race.
The only race I ever ran was the midnight run in Central Park on New Year’s Eve, in costume. I did it four years in a row. Close to six thousand people ran from staggered starting points while a rock band played and twenty minutes of first-rate fireworks went off. The paper cups of water on tables along the route were replaced with plastic cups of champagne. The course was only four miles long, but it was midnight and it was cold. Some of the runners added bulk in elaborate costumes and masks, but all I did—still the English teacher then—was write AND, AND, AND all over the number pinned to my shirt; I went as a run-on sentence. There was an official time clock at the finish line, and I was not the last person to cross it. Then it was off to a diner on the West Side for cheesecake at 2:00 A.M.
*
The colleague at school that I ran with got weaker each year until she walked the course the final time. She urged me to run ahead and meet her at the end. The year after that I ran the race alone. On that holiday afternoon I was stuc
k in traffic that made the drive two hours longer. Sitting on the southbound Hutch, not moving, I thought: She would have wanted these two hours stuck in traffic; she would have welcomed two more hours in a car, on a road, on this earth.
*
Peril, Peril, Peril, Peril—Cloudland’s four little girls in white.
*
What will you do with all that extra time?—the question people ask women whose children are soon to move out. I’ve been asking myself that question since I left the girl at the home.
*
I learned from the next-door neighbor, an attorney for the city, about the tiny white cross with the night-light on it that you can’t miss out there on the grassy median where you turn to get to my house. It commemorates a boy who was struck and killed by a car there, sixteen years ago. His family has moved away, but one of the dead boy’s teachers keeps flowers blooming there. The problem, according to the city attorney, is that the dead boy’s teacher planted nonindigenous species, and they spread and choked out what belongs here. I heard yelling out there, and it was a woman and my next-door neighbor who wanted to dig up her plantings. He tried to get me to cut down an invasive tree in my front yard, but since it isn’t my yard, that ended that.
*
“You know, Jesus gave us his commandment: ‘You are to love your neighbor as yourself.’ You are seeing neighborliness in action! God bless you out of all your troubles. Twill take time and dollars, though. Your caring neighbor, (ret.) Professor Ken Warmley.”
This accompanied a handwritten list titled “Your Priorities” that my neighbor who does not believe in climate change delivered. According to him, my top priority was the clearing of the easement that the utilities company had hacked to pieces. My elderly neighbor listed four services I might call to get an estimate for this job, which the owners of the house I’m renting have refused to do. He has annotated the list such that next to the first name he has written, “He’s been my mow-blow-go man for years.” Beside the second name listed he had written, “He’s a healthy young black man.” What—was I looking to buy a slave? I’m told not to take this the way it sounds, that I’m in the South, but I did not end up hiring the “healthy young black man” because he did not have a truck and thus could not haul away the butchered trees. I found a YouTube site headed “Tree Cut Fails.” The man who said the utilities company does to trees what Hitler did to Jews got more comments than anyone else. “Crybaby,” someone wrote. “You want electricity, don’t you?” At least “Tree Cut Fails” narrows it down from all the other fails. Thank God we can’t yet photograph a conscience, or a crisis of confidence, or a lapse in moral rigor, or the next thing over from regret.
