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For my parents and my brother
And for D
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
—CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
LAST NIGHT I told you that today might be hard for us, and you said why, and I said because you’ll be married and all grown up, and you said I’m already grown up, and gave me a look that I’ve never seen on any face but yours, a kind of mischievous pride that wavers between the certainty of your own truths and the question of whether you’ll get away with them.
I was supposed to be with our mother, helping fuss over the bride, your soon-to-be wife, but instead I made my way over to your corner of the Mexican restaurant during the rehearsal dinner. Over your head was a red piñata and behind you was a large dark window that a few hours before had held the beach. You were surrounded by our father’s friends, holding a beer that was as much a display item as the piñata; what you probably wanted was just an ice-cold Coke. The other hand was in your pocket and you hunched a bit in your collared shirt, happy to be noticed, to be at the center somehow, but unsure how to handle your body as a result. A month ago you had called to ask if I would give you a speech. When I saw your name I wondered if you were calling to apologize, to set things right between us, but instead you cut right to the question. This is exactly the way you said it: Will you give me a speech.
I listened closely to the sound of your voice because I didn’t hear it as often these days, and rather than being upset like I’d thought, I marveled at the feeling it brought along, like no time had actually passed, like the bad things hadn’t happened or maybe they still had and regardless here we were, back to our old selves again. A speech? I said. Isn’t that a best-man thing? And you explained that your best man had backed out of the speech, maybe even backed out of the wedding, and you didn’t want to talk about it because it was a long story and please. You said please twice, please give the speech, you were in a bind. Otherwise would you really be asking your sister?
Did Mom put you up to this? I said, and you breathed a loud sigh into the phone, like those brief hits of Northern California wind that come from nowhere out of the sunshine and push all your hair into your face, unsettling an otherwise pleasant day. The sigh made you sound like you had lived a long hard life even though you were twenty-eight years young and seemed to lose accountability like a sock in the wash.
So it’s a best-sister speech then, I said.
I guess, you said, and before we hung up I reminded you that I hadn’t put you on the spot at my wedding, and you reminded me that I hadn’t asked.
* * *
YOU USED TO WRITE to me when we were young; I’d find messages tucked into my shoe or lunchbox. Back then all of your letters were a signature combination of great feeling and formality that I’ve come to miss very much.
To my sister: Your the best sister in the whole world. From, Danny Larsen.
Hello, I love you HEPPY BIRTHDAY Sincerely, Your Sibling
Even now, as adults, I still hear it in your voice mails. It’s me, Danny, you always begin, as if I won’t recognize the number, or the sound of your voice.
* * *
ONCE, WHEN YOU WERE A TEENAGER, I wrote you that angry letter—do you remember this? I was home from college and handed it to you on Christmas Day, for effect. You tossed it on your dresser where it remained unopened the rest of the week and, feeling remorseful by then, I took it back and tore it all up.
The letter was about money, of course, as most of our fights would come to be. You’d taken cash from our mother’s underwear drawer a few days before and bought a silver bracelet for a blond girl at school. (How much I could say in the speech about your lifelong appreciation for blond, blue-eyed girls.) When our mother discovered the bracelet in your backpack, you’d pretended the gift was for her, the dangling hearts so clearly unintended for a mother. In reality you hadn’t gotten anything for our parents for Christmas yet, and I’d just put both our names on whatever I had. When you asked me what the letter said as I packed my car to head back to school, I said it explained what I thought of you when you did things like that.
Your body settled into this statement and from across the driveway I watched the words warp into some strange shape for the journey ahead, through your ears, your frown, your throat, your heart.
Well, you said after a moment, what do you think of me? You said it so earnestly that we both couldn’t help but smile. The question seemed absurd after so many years together, and I didn’t end up answering before I hugged you goodbye.
* * *
YOU ASKED ME WHAT IT’S LIKE to be married, what we did at home if we had no TV.
Talk, I guess, I’d answered, and your eyes widened like it was the last line of a ghost story.
* * *
I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT US OFTEN over the past few years as I’ve tried to become a mother. I’ve thought about simpler times: like when our parents went out and we’d have pizza delivered and you’d squeeze the blue cheese dressing on our plates for dipping like I’d taught you. We’d watch whatever you’d picked out at Blockbuster because in about thirty minutes you’d fall asleep. Sometimes you’d fall asleep still holding the pizza, your little legs crossed on the couch; I was probably about fourteen, which would make you eight. Your head would slide back, your mouth open, and then when I’d take your plate your body would slide over to me, slumped deadweight on my shoulder or lap. At this age our days no longer contained physical closeness; I no longer picked you up or swung you around or carried you on my shoulders as I once had. I was fourteen and bodies were becoming new territories to me, mostly my own, and I no longer touched people without awareness. But on nights like this I would let you take full comfort in sleep, I would cover you with a blanket and finish your pizza and occasionally if you stirred I’d rub your back. What surprises me after all these years is the fear I still feel in talking about your body, a body I’ve known and lived next to for so long, a body I’ve hugged and pushed and carried and cleaned.
Were there simpler times? Was anything ever simple for you?
* * *
I TELL MYSELF I CAN’T WORRY about the speech. I can’t worry about the speech in a place where everyone will have drunk too much and you’ll be so busy being famous for a day that you’ll hardly remember the words at all. I tell myself that I’m a last-minute substitute, which should keep expectations moderate at best. I tell myself that the success of a marriage does not depend on the success of the speech, and if it did there would be many more luckless unions in this world.
Maybe I worry because I’ve watched our parents plan with your bride for the past six months, how money has again translated to care. Where have you been? Maybe I worry because I want to be good for the three of them, because I’ve refused to do anything just for your sake. I helped with the cake, the color scheme for the bride, the backstage drama of who would sit next to whom. I helped with the flowers and finding our father a tie, the silverware, the chicken or steak; I co
nceded to wear whatever the bride picked out. I tried to help with the absence of the bride’s parents, and how our parents shouldered the costs as a result, but too often I became angry and ungenerous and consequently no help at all. I was angry most of all because of course I still loved you, because everything was always done for that reason, despite what I told myself.
When you called a month ago about the speech, I realized I had never put words to that kind of love, or more specifically our kind, and how it had always felt a little different from everyone else’s. I didn’t know how to angle it into the light, to see through it, and instead I longed to just buy the cake and wear the dress and show up on time to explain that I love you. Because what did I know about which facts should be collected or shed in the story of a person? What right did I have to speak of your life?
IF I WERE TO START from the beginning, I would say that you entered the world on May 28, 1991, ten minutes after eight in the evening. Your birth certificate, which now sits in the box of paperwork next to my bed, tells us you were born at home, with only a nurse present. The address listed is difficult to trace, but if you widen your search to Samut Prakan, suddenly your corner of the earth appears. For the first nine months of your life you lived there with your family just south of Bangkok, at the mouth of the Chao Phraya River on the Gulf of Thailand, on the western side of the province. You know this because our mother and father told you, but it’s not something you asked about while growing up.
But I always wanted to know more about the baby I never got to meet, because hard facts were the most intimate records we had, and so from about eight or nine years old I memorized your paperwork the way children learn their favorite book. You were three thousand grams, roughly six pounds, six ounces, when you were born, and your name was Boon-Nam Prasongsanti. Your mother was named Nin and was thirty-two years old at the time of your birth. Your father, Chet, was thirty-six. Both of their identification numbers are listed on your birth certificate, though, coupled with their names, still return no search results. Years ago, when I first saw their names, I remember thinking that your mother seemed awfully old to be having a child. Thirty-two, I said to myself, probably horrified. Now it strikes me just how young your mother was, how quickly she had to say goodbye to you. I wonder if she knew from the beginning that there wouldn’t be much time.
There was one other person present at the birth, a Mr. Kit Foythong, age fifty, who, according to the home address provided, appears to have been your neighbor. I don’t know why his is the face I can imagine so clearly, the neighbor, whose role in the delivery may have been critical or merely passing, stopping by only afterward with a pen. His relationship to you is listed as Other, and it is his signature that certifies the report of your birth.
I don’t know how long your mother labored, or what, if anything, she was given for the pain. I don’t know if there were siblings also present at the birth, as the certificate lists you as Child No. 4, something that was initially withheld when we first came to meet you, and confirmed finally when our parents knew to ask, though no other information was provided about the three children before you. In fact, of the period between your birth in May 1991 and the July day in 1994 when we first locked eyes on you, we know very little. We know that your mother had nine months with you before she passed away of liver disease. Judging by your eyes and bright, straight teeth, your thick hair and walnut skin, I imagine she was very beautiful.
Of your father we also know very little. The paperwork from the orphanage documents him solely as handicap, and our parents were told he couldn’t earn his living and depended on food from his temple. Shortly after your mother passed, he gave you to the Department of Public Welfare. He signed the forms that referred you to your first orphanage, Phayathai Babies’ Home, on March 9, 1992, and it is at this point in your paperwork that you begin to be called an orphan. The orphanage told our parents that your father likely didn’t have much longer to live, though at the time, with all the blank pages they’d been given about you, they weren’t sure what to believe.
On December 2, 1992, you were transferred to the Rangsit Babies’ Home, where you were considered legally available for adoption. Records indicate that you never had any serious illness in either orphanage, only the common cold, fever, and common diarrhea, though we wouldn’t learn this was untrue until two years later, when we’d finally meet you.
* * *
OUR MOTHER KEPT A DIARY during the first three years of my life, where every sound, outfit, sleep pattern, expression, and clip of dialogue is recorded into three small drugstore notebooks. Sometimes the entries are on scraps of paper stapled in, written quickly with a free hand or during a few quiet minutes while I napped. I’ve often wondered why you never seemed curious about the early years of your life, but then I’m reminded that I wasn’t curious about my own—I’d never asked to see the diaries until recently. When I was certain I didn’t want children, the diaries were of no interest to me, and then later when I realized I did, they were too difficult to think about. But lately I’ve found myself turning to them.
We have no pictures of you as an infant, no diary, so I’m left to imagine how handsome you must have been from the beginning, with your toothless smile and signature frown. I imagine that your mother took you right away in her arms and began to forget all the hours of long, painful work. I imagine your father sitting at the foot of the bed, and Mr. Kit Foythong at the door with the nurse, offering congratulations. I don’t imagine you cried much, because tears have been rare in all the years I’ve known you, even when you’re scared. Instead I imagine you pressed yourself against your mother’s chest and breathed a sigh of relief that your hard work was done, too. I’ve never imagined this scene with other children in the room, even though there were likely three siblings nearby while your mother rocked you, maybe sang you a song.
Have you ever wondered whether you were held, tucked in; if someone was keeping track of your sounds, your sleep, your happiness?
* * *
I WAS SURPRISED to see our mother mention adoption in those diaries from my first few years. The seeds of a life’s path are so often scattered by the thoughtlessness of the wind, but there it was: the bud of a future with you. Maybe it’s just surprising to read about any kind of longing from a parent. Though I remind myself that the woman in the pages is my age.
In one entry, when I’m seven months old, she describes the new visions that batter her head: I’m choking on a button or blinding myself with a toothpick or acrobatically flipping out of the crib. The rare times I sleep through the night she shakes me awake to ensure I’m still breathing. Our father, in the background, is bewildered. As I read, I wondered if anxieties like these could be understood without children. I remembered that when I first fell in love with your brother-in-law, I would put my hand on his chest while he slept or watch him walk away down the street and think please, please, please. Please never die or else.
I wonder what adoptive parents feel, she writes. Is it the same? Is there a physical bond because she came from me? I’ve wanted to adopt a child and wonder if there’s a difference. I’ve acquired a lot more love for her since the day she was born so maybe it’s the same, after all. Maybe I would love as I learned to know.
* * *
RECENTLY I CALLED OUR MOTHER and asked her again about when she knew she wanted to adopt, and why, and she said what she always said, that it was just something she always wanted to do. As a teenager, on cold winter afternoons, she would take the bus out to Sea Cliff after school and spend the last hours of daylight at St. Christopher’s, an orphanage in Long Island, with a building full of children, from toddlers to teens. It was a bright attempt at a home, as she remembers it, however temporary, with windows that overlooked the bay and a staff of adults who soon became her closest friends in Long Island. They stationed her in the library, where she taught children from five to nine years old how to read and write. When I asked her if there were any children she became especially attached t
o she said yes, that there had been one in particular, a little boy. She said the memory of him had stayed with her for many years, though she didn’t offer much more on the subject.
* * *
MAYBE YOU JUST DIDN’T WANT TO be pregnant again, I said a few days later on the phone.
Oh, please, our mother said, in the way she has our whole life. You know the voice I mean. What am I going to do with the two of you. She reminded me that adoption was something she had always thought about, even dreamed about, the way some women dream about conceiving.
* * *
YOU REMEMBER HOW I was in my teens and twenties: I took pride in saying I didn’t want marriage or kids. We lived in a place where children grew up and stayed, multiplying to keep the Catholic school running, and I longed to escape a cycle. It never required much of a leap, that certainty that a disinterest in marriage and children made me not only different but better, like the sexy aunt in the movies who comes to shake up the family on a weekend visit. That kind of woman always seemed to have lacy underwear, a bottle in her purse, a wrecked beauty that, back then, I found enviable.
What I never told you was the shock that came in my thirties, the kind people talk about but I’d never believed to be true, when I started to imagine my body with a baby inside it. Suddenly my brain was host for biological takeover, and the invasion spread to your brother-in-law, too. Almost overnight he began clucking at children on the street, on social media wearing funny hats, while I dreamed of the powdery scent of a baby’s skin, the softness of their feet, the heat produced from pressing them against my chest. I dreamed of an imaginary child with the wistfulness attached to romantic longing. It was a desire without a history, like new skin grafted to a body, a foreign organ implanted. But the old resistance was still in there, too. I pictured myself swollen, constipated, the acne returned to my face, leaving it cratered like the moon, its blemishes visible a planet away. I pictured rock-bottom fatigue, the carpet a plastic minefield, a pillow over my face to capture the scream. I had heard what the disruption would kill off temporarily—sleep, sex, two minutes alone in the bathroom—but no one could confess to the larger question: What were the permanent losses?
Immediate Family Page 1