by Dani Shapiro
Out of 5,743,017 in the United States social security public data, the name Daneile was not present. You simply have a name that no one else in America is using. For 136 years, only your parents have thought of using your name. Hoorah! You are a unique individual.
Another trenchant line from the psychoanalyst Bollas: “We learn the grammar of our being before we grasp the rules of our language.” He’s speaking of infancy, of course, and the underpinnings of our psyches. The grammar of my being—the mortar into which words would eventually settle—was formed by a mother who had shoved the truth of me away from her so forcefully that all that was left was a chasm, the tender ground just after a quake. Her trembling eyes, her practiced smile, trained on me. Insisting, from minute one, that I was different, special, other, and, above all, hers.
Daneile. Pronounced Da-neel. It was a name that called attention to itself—that required an explanation. It stopped people. I had to spell it out for official documents, or when making travel reservations, and still, more often than not, airplane tickets would arrive for Danielle, Danelle, Danyelle, Daniele. I’d be stopped in security lines when the discrepancy was noticed. All my life—in addition to being asked how it was possible that I was Jewish—I was asked if Dani was my real name. Yes, I would say. It took too much out of me to explain. Sometimes I would add that I had never thought of myself as Daneile, not once, not even as a child. I never answered to it. But was this true? Try as I might, I couldn’t ask the child I once was what she understood about herself, in the grammar of her being, before the rules of her language set in.
47
One afternoon, while sitting in my office, I glanced up at the portrait of my grandmother that hung over the chaise where Michael and I had felt the first stunning blow about my paternity. Who are you to me? I asked the woman in the portrait. She didn’t seem ready to answer. And so I reached up and removed the heavy frame from its hook. I replaced it with a piece by the artist Debbie Millman: a large, blown-up yellow legal pad on which, in the top corner, in her own script, are the words: This, just this. I am comfortable not knowing. I put my grandmother off to the side, to be reckoned with at a later date. I thought of John Keats’s negative capability, “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” In this direction lay freedom, and, paradoxically, self-knowledge. By my being willing not to know thoroughly who I am and where I come from, the rigid structures surrounding my identity might begin to give way, leaving behind a sense of openness and possibility.
I was beginning to see the danger in adhering to a single narrative, hewing to a story. The peril wasn’t only in getting it wrong. It was in a kind of calcification, a narrowing, a perversion of reality that hardened and stilled the spirit. Back when Rabbi Lookstein had asked me which story would ease my heart, it felt impossible to me that I could survive without knowing what had been real. But I was at the threshold of understanding what Shirley had meant about my not being an accident of history. Or rather: either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are. One sperm, one egg, one moment. An interruption—a ringing phone, a knock on the door, a flashlight through the car window—a single second one way or the other and the result would be an entirely different human being. Mine was just more complicated, an accident involving vials, syringes, contracts, and secrets.
* * *
—
A couple of hours after Jacob was born, my mother entered my hospital room at Mount Sinai in New York City—the very same place where she had given birth to me thirty-seven years earlier and where my birth certificate had been signed. She leaned over Jacob, who was bundled in a blanket, cradled in my arms, and examined him, her face composed, masklike.
“He looks just like a Shapiro,” she finally said. “He has the Shapiro forehead. And the Shapiro chin.” Was my mother perversely manipulating the moment, like the magician who appears to bend a spoon without touching it? Could she have been thinking about her own experience giving birth at this very same hospital to an infant whose father was a complete unknown? I don’t think so. I think that when my mother first laid eyes on her only grandson, she believed that he was my father’s grandson as well.
And when Jacob was terribly sick as a baby, stricken by a rare seizure disorder about which little was understood or known—its origins possibly hereditary—I’m convinced that my mother did not lie awake at night, wondering if the time had come to tell me the truth of my paternity. After all, if the disease that threatened Jacob was hereditary, what was there to be done? There were no records. Easy commercial DNA testing did not yet exist. There was no trail of bread crumbs to follow. I confidently told the doctors that there was no family history of seizures. Choices were made, theories posited, based on more false information.
It would have been a dreadful, perhaps unforgivable thing for my mother to have withheld information from me at the time of Jacob’s illness. Even if the information may have led to further frustration or a dead end, it would have been my right—as a mother of a mortally sick infant—to know it. But, though I’ll never be certain, I don’t believe that’s what happened. The narrative my mother clung to as if it were the only buoy in the sea was the way she had managed to get through her life. It had contributed to her becoming a miserable, alien creature, a woman who radiated rage. When the careful seams of her well-honed narrative momentarily came undone—my daughter was conceived in Philadelphia—she quickly stitched them up again.
During the year of Jacob’s illness, as Michael and I medicated him around the clock and watched him every waking moment for signs of a flicker of motion that would indicate a seizure, my mother seemed to grow more and more furious with us. As we attempted to save our child’s life, she criticized us for not properly tending to his needs. One winter night she screamed at me for not having covered his head as we carried him from the front door of her apartment building into a heated waiting car. It was the seam beginning to unravel.
* * *
—
The box of her papers that we found in the basement—the one in which I discovered the florist’s card from my father—yielded its secrets slowly. Just as in my research on the history of donor insemination, I could take only so much before I had to pack it away. It took months to examine it all: wax envelopes filled with my baby hair, labeled Dani’s spun gold, other small envelopes containing baby teeth. There were reams of my artwork, finger paintings of a little girl who depicted her mother as a jagged-toothed monster and herself as a small, shapeless blob. If a father appeared at all, he was a faint stick figure, off to one side. My mother had saved a letter I had written to her when I was in the third grade and had apparently received a poor grade on a math quiz. In it, I promised her that nothing like this would ever happen again, and I begged her to forgive me. But it was the way it was signed that I found most unsettling: Yours in sorrow, Daneile.
The truth in a thousand shards all around me. I had been certain that I had never thought of myself as Daneile, nor answered to the name. But here it was, written in my own loopy, little girl script. I had always known that I hadn’t felt at ease around my mother. But I hadn’t known that I had been so frightened of her. Yours in sorrow.
Stories ran like water through my open fingers. There was a letter written by my mother to the director of a sleepaway camp I attended when I was twelve:
Daneile may not have wet hair. I am sending her with a heated comb and she must dry her hair after swimming. I would like to prevent colds as much as possible. She thinks she’s a good diver, but the back arches too much. She must be watched carefully. She is allergic to insect bites and the area rapidly swells and enlarges. Usually bites are first swabbed with ammonia. She may be given Benadryl as per her pediatrician’s instructions.
The letter went on for two single-spaced, typed pages filled with bullet points, with passages underlined for emphasis. Of all the box’s cont
ents, I found it most unbearable to read. My mother was presenting me as an object—valuable, delicate, not made of the stuff of the other campers. It pained me to imagine what the camp director must have thought about the fragile, high-maintenance child being entrusted to his care.
As I neared the last of the letters and documents in the box, I came upon a letter my mother had written to me only a few months before she died of lung cancer. She was concerned about three-year-old Jacob rubbing his head and worried that he might later develop migraines, which are hereditary.
Just in case, as your father had migraines somewhat…and as I mentioned to you, I noticed that Jacob sometimes rubs his head after he gets up from watching his little television…
I read the sentence over and over again. It seemed more astonishing than my memory of my mother upon first seeing Jacob at Mount Sinai. This was something even more than a physical similarity she was imagining. This was a genetic condition, something inherited. There was no mistaking the transparent overlay, the world she created on top of the world that was.
My mother’s letter to me seemed to come to a close with an unusually sentimental line, all in caps: THANK YOU FOR MAKING ME A MOMMY AND GRANDMOM. She was dying. She was nearing eighty, and I was nearing forty. All my life she had asked for my thanks, and now—in her own way—she was attempting to thank me.
But before the letter ended, my mother added one more passage. It was another unraveling stitch in the seam. She referenced a large manila envelope filled with cards and letters sent to my parents congratulating them on my birth, and a particular, elaborate pink card that opened like an accordion. On the first page was a couple—a husband and wife—along with a stork and a brand-new baby. The final page of the card was crowded with a note in a stranger’s careful cursive, congratulating my mother on the birth of a beautiful young lady, and a request to please send a photo for all the girls in the office.
My mother must not have been able to help herself. The final words in what may have been the last letter she ever wrote to me—her parting shot—were all in lowercase and in parentheses, almost as if they didn’t exist at all.
(by the way, this handwritten note from mrs. farris. I had totally forgotten about it. her husband, dr. farris, was he without whom there probably wouldn’t have been thee.)
48
Three of us—Michael, our attorney, and I—sat on a bench outside a probate judge’s chambers in a nondescript suburban Connecticut courthouse. The long carpeted corridor was silent and empty, lined in paneled wood. As the big clock on the wall ticked a few minutes past the appointed hour, a woman came out to let us know that the judge was running behind schedule. My attorney placed his folder on his lap, and we waited for our meeting beneath the fluorescent lights. We had brought all the paperwork, and I hoped it would be in order: birth certificate, social security card, driver’s license, and an official petition to the court.
Reflexively I reached up and touched my left shoulder. It was still a bit sore. Two weeks earlier and three thousand miles away I lay on a metal table in Los Angeles, in the sun-drenched studio of the tattoo artist known as Doctor Woo. My fists had been clenched, girding myself for the pain. A friend had offered to come with me. Another had suggested that I ask Woo to use lidocaine, or numbing cream. Yet another had advised premedicating with a glass of wine. But I didn’t want to be accompanied on this day, nor did I wish to be numbed. The pain, if there was to be pain, was a part of this. I wanted to feel everything. I was marking my body, permanently memorializing the before and after of my discovery. Doctor Woo—whose delicate designs I found on Instagram as I scrolled through thousands of artists—often incorporated compasses into many of his tattoos. The compasses were made of lines and circles so light and thin they appeared like unspooled thread, arrows so delicate it seemed they might spin.
It was my first tattoo. That there is a prohibition against Jews getting tattoos was something I was acutely aware of, and yet that was a part of it as well. It was subversive, rebellious. I’m half Jewish, half something else. Why not allow that, announce that—be that? I’m a hybrid, made of two sets of ancestors who would never have crossed paths or sprung from the same village. I had decided on my shoulder—not a hidden place, a secret spot that only those most intimate with me would see. My shoulder was visible, if I wished it to be.
The following afternoon, I had an appointment with Rabbi David Wolpe, the Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. I had long admired Wolpe for his brilliant and incisive thinking. I had already planned to wear a cardigan, to keep my transgression private. I was afraid he would judge me—though I needn’t have been concerned. I would quickly come to realize that David Wolpe had no time to waste on antiquated propriety. “We all feel as if we’re other,” he told me. “Any thinking person knows we are other. Only you’ve actually been to the front lines of otherness. And you’ve come back with something to teach us.” As we sat in his quiet inner sanctum, he recited the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, / And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in it.”
In that instant—my fresh tattoo hidden beneath my summer cardigan—I understood what the rabbi was offering. My newfound awareness was both gauntlet and gift. The choice wasn’t to see it as one or the other. It was to embrace it as both.
* * *
—
In Doctor Woo’s studio—a far cry from the hallowed halls of Sinai Temple—I explained my reason for wanting a tattoo to the artist. “Last spring I found out that my father was not my biological father,” I told him, keeping the story as brief as possible.
I wondered how many stories he heard every day—reasons people have for turning their bodies into canvases, vessels, statements of identity. The young donor-conceived people Wendy Kramer had told me about had desperately, fruitlessly searched for their biological fathers, until they settled for a series of numbers—the donor ID—inked into their arms as if to say: this is all I know of who I am.
“I’d like a bird,” I told Woo.
“What kind of bird?” he asked.
His Instagram feed was full of birds: eagles, ravens, hawks.
“I don’t want an angry bird,” I said.
Woo began to sketch on a piece of paper.
“Not a fierce bird,” I went on. “And not a hummingbird.”
Michael had pointed out to me that hummingbirds hover. I wanted one that soared.
“Maybe a swallow,” he said.
“Maybe. A sweet bird.” My eyes stung. “A free bird.”
On the table, as Doctor Woo began needling the bird into the front of my shoulder, I hardly felt a thing. It was as if I were floating, suspended somewhere in the in-between. My clenched fists loosened. The meditation teacher Jack Kornfield often begins his meditations by saying, “Take your seat beneath the tree of enlightenment, halfway between heaven and earth.” I felt as if I were taking my seat, taking my place as a human being who had undergone a profound experience and was now integrating it, creating a sign on my own body.
Uk’shartam l’ot al yadecha v’hayu l’totafot bein einecha. I heard the words of the central prayer V’ahavta as if they were being chanted beside me. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you on this day. Impress them upon your children…Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead. I had been raised with the powerful idea that we must show the world who and what we are. We must keep mezuzot on our doorposts, and men must wear yarmulkes on their heads. I closed my eyes as Doctor Woo continued to make me my own sign, incorporating tiny compasses, and two faint circles—hints of direction—around the swallow’s beak.
Migratory birds have internalized compasses; they use earth’s geomagnetic field—along with light, stars, and other cues—to guide them as they fly. I hadn’t known north from south, east from west. I
had been clueless about my own coordinates. Beneath all the comments I had fielded thrummed the most fundamental questions: Who are you? What are you? They were beneath Mrs. Kushner’s baffling statement, beneath Mark Strand’s icy renunciation of who I thought myself to be. It was the subtext of every pronouncement about my ethnicity. For the rest of my life, I wanted a visual reminder that now I had my own internalized compass. I knew what and who I was. Now, the map was mine.
* * *
—
The judge at the Probate Court of the State of Connecticut was finally ready to see us. We all sat around a conference table, and my attorney distributed his prepared documents. The judge, wearing a suit, asked me to raise my hand and recite an oath. Then he asked why I had petitioned the court to change my given name.
“Because I hate it,” I said. “Because no one can pronounce it or spell it. Because I’ve never answered to it.” Which wasn’t entirely true, of course. I had painful proof that I once had answered to it.
I signed the papers in front of the judge, county clerk, my attorney, and Michael. The document was then stamped with an official seal. An undoing. The little girl with the unpronounceable name who stared and stared at her face in the mirror, trying to understand what she was seeing, was finally a grown woman who knew who she was and where she came from. Daneile was the name that had been handed me along with so many other mysteries of my existence. But I didn’t have to be stuck with it. This was something I could let go.
“Your name is now legally Dani Shapiro,” said the judge.
“Just like that?” I asked.
Somehow I thought it would take longer to unravel something that had identified me for a lifetime. I hadn’t understood that at that very moment, my given name would fall away, fly off like the swallow on my shoulder. Two weeks earlier I had reclaimed my body. Now I was reclaiming my name. Later, I will change all of my documents of identification save one. My birth certificate will remain the same. Daneile, daughter of Paul. In Hebrew that would be Daniela bat Pinchas. That piece of history, more true than not, can never be altered.