The night before your departure, I threw you a goodbye party at my apartment with our parents, our aunt, your best man, and a few others who had given to the trip. After work, I rushed to the store for a cake that read Happy Travels! and we all ate it anxiously while you and your future bride held hands under the table.
I’m proud of you, I said, but I couldn’t tell if you were too nervous to hear it.
The rest of the group was proud that evening, too. We ended up going around the table, telling stories about you. We talked about meeting you that first day in the orphanage, the white bear, the puke in the car. We talked about that long, long plane ride home, about Disneyland, about that time an opossum got in the house. You sat there quietly and listened, and at the time I thought you were happy to hear it. It seemed to me that all your life you had wanted a moment like this: filled with recognition, purpose, ambition, and most of all, our approval for you to go on your way. Though now I think I’m wrong about this, that I’ve had no idea what exactly you’ve wanted all your life. What have you wanted?
Did you know then that you weren’t going to make it to the end of the first month, let alone the year? You stayed for three weeks before purchasing a ticket back to Reno, just a few days before the group made it to Thailand. You used your remaining funds to put down a deposit on a new apartment with your future bride.
I don’t want to talk about it.
But why?
I don’t want to talk about it.
But why did you leave?
I just wanted to come home.
But the money? What’s going to happen to the money?
I said I don’t want to talk about it with you.
It was our father who drove to see you a few months later, to help you once you began the old spending habits there, to process what you’d done, or hadn’t. Because this was how you’d taught yourself to cope, and soon the credit card companies deactivated your accounts, the rest of your money disappeared, and in its place came an eviction notice for your apartment. Once again the debt began to pile.
When you opened the door, our father walked into the room you could no longer afford, examined the items collecting dust. He helped you pack your things and find a new place to live with your fiancée, who could no longer shoulder the cost of both of you. He paid off the credit cards, the security deposit for the new apartment, the neglected payments toward your car. He and our mother were on the cusp of retirement. And all that time, our mother and I never knew exactly what words were exchanged between you and our father, only that he stayed for many days, he stayed until, once again, it was all cleaned up. We assumed that there were more promises made, words our father knew well by then. And the spending might have been forgivable in time, as it always was, chalked up to the cyclical nature of addiction, of the tornado of need and confusion collecting more and more in its path, except then, after all that kindness, you took again.
* * *
ARISTOTLE LIVED with a guardian, and Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire, was an adopted heir to the throne. Andal, a Tamil saint, was found in a temple garden, and raised by the man who found her. Batman was orphaned, Robin was orphaned and adopted by Batman. Spider-Man was raised by his aunt and uncle, Tarzan by apes in the jungle. Boba Fett found refuge with a bounty hunter, Snow White with a cottage of dwarves, Curious George with his captor in the yellow hat. James Bond went to live with his aunt, Superman was adopted by farmers. Beowulf was raised by his grandfather before becoming the king of the Geats. Oedipus was abandoned on a mountain and rescued by a shepherd.
Romulus and Remus were nursed and cared for by a wolf. Edgar Allan Poe was taken in by a foster family at age two, Bertrand Russell by grandparents at three, Ivan IV by feuding boyar families at eight, Herbert Hoover and Leo Tolstoy by relatives at nine, Eleanor Roosevelt and W. Somerset Maugham by relatives at ten, Joseph Conrad by an uncle at eleven, J. R. R. Tolkien by a Catholic priest at age twelve. Moses was raised as an Egyptian, Muhammad was sent to live with a Bedouin family in the desert.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Cato the Younger were raised by their uncles. Edward Albee was adopted as an infant, John Keats was raised partly by his grandmother.
Malcolm X lived in a series of foster homes, Nelson Mandela was placed under the guardianship of a Tembu regent.
Friedrich Nietzsche and René Descartes and Isaac Newton were all cared for by grandmothers; Elizabeth I was taken in by a baron who would later try to take her as his wife.
Little Orphan Annie was adopted by a billionaire businessman, Alexander Hamilton by a wealthy merchant, Paddington Bear by the family who found him at a train station.
It still surprises me when I hear people call us different. It shouldn’t, I suppose, but it does. I want to tell them that unconventional families have been here, in the literature, the mythology, the history, the religion. Convention is just a failure to see it.
* * *
* * *
ABOUT A WEEK BEFORE the wedding, I spend a Saturday reading a book at the library. I stay until the tables are empty and a woman asks me to pack up my things. The book is nonfiction, about an American Arctic explorer who brings a group of Inuit from Greenland to New York City in the late 1800s, delivering them as a living exhibition to the American Museum of Natural History. The group is promised passage home in a year, but they are not told that they’ll be housed in the museum’s basement, where the superintendent allows select visitors to come and inspect them. Large crowds begin to peer through a grating where they can look down on the group in their quarters.
When most of the Inuit die of pneumonia shortly afterward, one of the children in the group is adopted by the superintendent and his wife. The boy grows close with his adoptive mother and continues to spend time at the museum’s Eskimo exhibit, surrounded by the material brought south by the explorer. The boy doesn’t realize until several years later that his father’s bones have been exhibited there in the museum, too, right in front of him, that they’d been preserved and displayed after his death in New York.
The boy makes a case for his father’s bones to be returned to Greenland, but this isn’t granted in his lifetime. Instead he eventually travels home, relearning his native tongue and way of life. He returns to the States a few years before his death and is buried in Pittsburg, New Hampshire.
When I step out of the library I remember that the day was warm when I got there, but now wind abuses the streets. I walk toward the Ferry Building, past restaurants and bars and boarded-up windows. And I want more than anything in that moment to ask you if the past should just be left to rest, if that’s the way you’d prefer it. Because I can’t tell anymore if digging it up is an act of love, or if it’s stringing up your insides in a window. I can’t tell if all of this is an exhumation for which you have or have not granted permission.
* * *
WHEN OUR FATHER RETURNED HOME the credit card company flagged fraudulent activity, then canceled his cards due to the enormity of the charges, and of course he wondered but then put the thought aside, wondered but then put the thought aside; you were no longer on his card, he reminded himself. He wouldn’t have guessed that you’d written down his number and security code during his visit, charged more concerts and clothing and equipment while he sat in the next room handling your bills, that you would sell the items for cash as soon as he left, as if the name on the card didn’t connect to the man you loved, as if pocketing the cash would mean you wouldn’t have to ask for more help. When the company called back to tell our father the zip code where the purchases had been made he said nothing at first to the women, instead wandering alone in his own house, perhaps introducing the thought to each room he passed: This is the den where my son has taken from me, this is the kitchen where he has lied, this is the bedroom where I must acknowledge his addiction, the garage where I’ve chosen to keep my pain to myself, unsure how to explain it to my wife, my daughter, the world.
Will you take this man? the officiant asks.
> The months passed and a silence grew between us again. I spent the weekends at home, unsure how to face the hours unoccupied by work. It had become bigger than the three of us this time, the destruction let out of the house. I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, said my footsteps, my heart. I had lost you, the damage irreparable. But of course it was the opposite. Because really you had lost me. I continued to visit our parents, often returning without your brother-in-law, slowly reverting back to the old unit, and eventually the anger was replaced with a sadness. Never threaten abandonment, the books said. You cannot take away your child’s pain. You reconciled with our parents after a few months, but a year stretched on without a word between us.
Then, the sound of your voice. That first phone call. It was almost Christmas. Like hearing from the dead in a dream. Hello, hello? my chest saying. Brother, is that you? Then the frost. Brother, brother, what do you want. You can’t find it here. You were working a lot, you said. You still planned to get married. I said things had been hard for our parents, and you said that things had been hard for you, too. You asked how I was and for some reason all I could think to answer was dead. I have been the walking dead, thanks, and you? Then we hung up angry and I didn’t know what would happen next.
* * *
THE OFFICIANT asks if you will take this woman, and I wonder if a person can take love without forgiveness. You agree to love her in sickness and in health, but just how far does sickness extend? No one ever asks about agreeing to love in the absence of self-correction.
* * *
THREE AREAS OF THE BRAIN affect monetary decisions. The amygdala responds to winning and losing; the prefrontal cortex organizes learning associations from past successes and mistakes; and the anterior cingulate cortex helps judge the value of a reward. It’s the anterior cingulate cortex that activates that awful feeling in the pit of your stomach when an anticipated reward fails to show up. Or, money issues can all simply come down to dopamine neurons, which, when fired, create the euphoric feeling associated with risk.
Instead of picking up the phone in the months after the mission trip, I read about a gambling test conducted on people with complications in their prefrontal cortices or amygdalae. Subjects are given four decks of cards. In decks A and B, the possible immediate reward is high, but the decks also include cards that have a high penalty. In decks C and D the reward is low, but in choosing consistently from those decks the subject will experience an overall gain. The experiment showed that problems in the amygdala prevented the triggering of discomfort toward the riskier decks. Problems in the prefrontal cortex showed an inability to transfer information from past experiences, resulting in the continuous selection of high-penalty cards. When these issues were present, players could not make advantageous choices, even though they were able to think about what they were doing.
* * *
THE THIEF is not looking for the object that he takes, the pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott writes, and I think, not the thief, the child. He is looking for a person. He is looking for his own mother, only he does not know this.
* * *
GIVEN THE CHANCE, there is so much I would have done differently. And somewhere, in the quiet place where you process things, I know there is remorse.
I just no longer know what I need to believe in: that you can see the consequences, or that you can’t.
LOOK AT ANY ADOPTION PLOT and you’ll see the same picture: a stranger steps into the house to build it up or burn it all down. The absence of history, or the inability to rewrite it, keeps tensions high, that handful of blank years you can never take back. I’d never noticed the role the house itself can play. Destruction is transitive, after all, requiring an object on which to act.
Where is the third option, of a house caught in an endless cycle? Composition, demolition, composition, demolition, composition, demolition.
* * *
IF THE VICTORIANS COULD OFFER one resolution, it would be true love. A marriage that might look beyond it all, to reset the cycle. Though what happens next they never seem to say.
WEDDINGS DO STRANGE THINGS to people. Recently at a wedding in Montana I slipped out of the tent and ran half a mile into the surrounding wilderness. I didn’t stop until I felt alone enough to scream, a scream similar to the one you used to make as a child, part moan, part howl at the moon, the pain bright and unsure of itself, laboring itself out. I will never be able to identify all the feelings that were bound up in that sound of yours, but I can name mine: by then I had been trying for four years to have a child, and as I stood there, heels sunk into the field, I didn’t know how much longer I’d be willing to wait.
I asked our mother what she remembered of the wait, and she said she remembered it like most remember pain: the hurt was white-hot at the time, practically blinding, but the memory would never reproduce the feeling. Like labor, or betrayal.
* * *
A FEW DAYS before your wedding, you and I went to the Buckhorn, a Petaluma dive. I’d invited your bride, too, though, sensing something, she’d politely declined.
You ordered a Coke and I had a whiskey because I could drink whatever I wanted by then.
Nervous?
Not too bad. A little.
And the bride?
She’s excited, mostly.
That’s good.
It was the first time that I actually longed not to be angry anymore. Finally I said: I’ve been trying to get pregnant, you know.
Oh? you said, and eyed my drink.
Tried, I corrected. I’ve tried to get pregnant.
Are you going to keep going?
I don’t know.
Keep going, you said. I’d be a good uncle.
You’re not surprised?
Surprised?
That I wanted to have kids?
You frowned and sipped on your Coke. Why would I be surprised? You’re old and married. Isn’t that what old married people do?
Then you said, Honestly, no, I’m not surprised. Mom told me you were having a hard time.
She did?
Yeah.
Recently?
Nah.
Oh, I said. Why didn’t you say something then?
I don’t know. Not really my business. Why didn’t you?
I don’t know, I said. I didn’t know what you’d think.
If what?
If I decided to adopt.
I looked at you and said: What would you think? But what I didn’t ask was what you would think if I didn’t.
You laughed at the question, and for a moment the mood between us lightened. You were making it clear that, as usual, your sister was an idiot.
Obviously I would think it’s a good idea, you said. What kind of stupid question is that?
I don’t know, I said. I could feel my body beginning to betray me, cheeks pink, eyes down, legs crossed and recrossed in my chair. I was sorry for getting the question wrong.
Everything will be okay, you said finally, and this might sound schmaltzy, but you looked about ten years old again when you said it. I didn’t start crying at the bar for that reason, for the sudden awareness of time passing so quickly, of the waste that the last year had been, with all the terrible things we’d said and all the true things we hadn’t. I cried because when you said everything would be okay you meant it, that despite everything you still somehow never said things you didn’t mean.
What did you get me for Christmas?
Not slippers.
You’re just like Mom, you said, and I looked into your face to see how you meant it, but you were smiling. So emotional, you said. It’s a wedding. Lighten up.
Right, I said.
Let’s see if we can get something to eat here, you said, and I said, Cash only, and you patted your pockets to show you’d forgotten your wallet.
I’ll pay, I said.
* * *
WAITING IS AN EXQUISITELY PRIVATE PAIN. It’s the events that broadcast the joy and the grief, concrete losses and triumphs that a
group can huddle around. But waiting we must do alone. We must wait for the sorrow to pass, for the memories to dull, for the hard work to pay off, for the object of our longing to arrive or depart. At my office one afternoon a woman confides in the bathroom that eventually her desire for a child just disappeared. The words wrap around me like wool, heating my neck and ears, and I wear them around for weeks, asking no one: Does a thing like that really just leave you?
Maybe this is how it leaves you: through the clomiphene citrate, the choriogonadotropin injections, the cod-liver oil, red raspberry leaf, nettle leaf, dandelion, red clover, vitamin Ds and Cs, folate, zinc, selenium, magnesium, anesthesia, progesterone creams, egg extractions, moderate exercise, ovulation kits, insulin regulation, thyroid stabilizers, sex with your legs straight up. The memories of how a house can hurt as much as a body, how long forgiveness in each can take.
* * *
IN READING OUR FATHER’S LETTERS again, I hear waiting. I read and reread them and hear a longing to get through the hour, the day, to leave, to see loved ones again, though he never says it, never once complains. I don’t know anything about war, Danny; reading those letters did not help me understand it. But I realized this last time that they were written mostly for his mother, who probably needed to hear about the slow parts, the strangely happy parts, the day spent sitting around a bridge, or a beach. My guess is that the experience drilled an early understanding in that twenty-two-year-old boy, of loyalty, of duty, of protection, qualities shared between war and family. What I know from these letters is that there are many ways to say I love you, with words, with plain stories, or with the act of writing itself. What I know from our life is that he will never not come for you, for better or worse. To the rescue.
Immediate Family Page 14