Rescuing Julia Twice

by Tina Traster

  Russian children are easier to blend into their American families than their counterparts from China or Ethiopia. But flying now on the “Orphan Express,” it’s easy to identify newly minted families. A woman is sitting across the aisle from me. She’s traveling with a girl, about two years old. The child is inconsolable, rolling around on the floor, braying like a distressed donkey. There is nothing the woman can say or do to break the child’s fit. Even the flight attendant, fluent in Russian, is powerless. I look at the woman sympathetically.

  “She’s been like this for three days,” she says. “I’m at my rope’s end.”

  I smile and debate whether to strike up conversation or simply say I understand when the captain comes over the intercom to tell us about the flight details. All around me I’m reminded of how daunting this process is. I can’t say that anyone who was handling us during this adoption process gave us any warning. Sometimes these children are just not all right.

  PART TWO

  Sometimes These Kids Are Not Alright

  Seven

  How many times have I returned to Kennedy Airport, thrilled to be back on American soil and looking forward to returning to my apartment to download the experience I’ve just had? It’s not like that today. There’s a baby in the back seat of our Honda, and it feels like we’ve returned with a little alien. As long as we keep driving, as long as this experience remains an adventure in motion, it remains just that, an adventure. But we are heading home, and everything that has defined home up to this point will be different. I have a daughter. I am a mother. I thought I might feel relief or elation, but I’m weighed down by the notion of permanence, intractability, commitment. I wonder if mothers bringing home their babies from the hospital feel like this.

  It is a clear, bright day, and it is obvious a snowstorm recently pounded New York City. Mounds of whiteness are shoved aside and soiled. I think of the cold in Siberia. I can conjure it, as though it’s been imprinted in my cellular memory. It’s as intriguing as everything else was in that place at the end of the world. I fiddle with the radio stations. I land on NPR, but I can’t concentrate. I settle on music.

  “I’ll drop you off in front of the building with the baby and our luggage,” Ricky says as we’re weaving our way through Central Park to the Upper West Side. “Leave the luggage with Stan. I’ll get it after I park.”

  I want to scream, No, don’t leave me alone with the baby, but I’m worried Ricky will think I’m a fruitcake. Instead I say, “Maybe you’ll get a spot close by and we can walk to the apartment together.” We both know that will never happen.

  When Ricky does let me out of the car, my knees are wobbling. I need his help extricating Julia from the crazy car seat contraption, then twisting her past the folded-down seat of our two-door car.

  “This isn’t easy, is it?” I say.

  Ricky is huffing. He rips off his wool hat and throws it on the passenger seat. Finally he lifts Julia and hands her to me as though she were a piece of glass. The transfer is awkward because she doesn’t seem to have the natural instincts to hold onto my arm or lean close. I had noticed this several times in Moscow when I tried to hold her. It didn’t feel the way I thought it would to hold a baby. There was a tension, a resistance. But I didn’t think too much about it. Now it gives me pause.

  “Okay, I’m going to look for a spot. Good luck,” Ricky says, pulling away from the curb. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I say.

  What if he never returned? What if I were left alone right now and forever with this brand-new, newborn to me, child who seems as indifferent to me as I still feel for her? It’s a terrifying, irrational thought—not too many people perish trying to find a parking spot in Manhattan. But it tells me that my mind is on high panic alert. I’m feeling unsteady. Alien in my new skin. I wonder if Ricky feels like this.

  “Oh, my God, Ms. Traster!” says Stan the doorman in his typical staccato speech pattern. “She is absolutely gorgeous.” He pulls Julia’s snowsuit away from her face to take a better look. “Oh, what a doll she is. Congratulations.” Then he pauses. Turns to me and says, “Her eyes. Those are not the eyes of an infant. They are the eyes of a very old soul.”

  I look at Stan—who Ricky and I secretly call the “former KGB spy” because of his Eastern European accent—and begin to ask him what he means. But then I look at Julia’s dark, mysterious eyes, and I suddenly know what he means. It reminds me immediately of the way she grinned at me both times we met at the orphanage. It’s as though she learned something about human interaction way too soon, and now I see that in her eyes too. They do not look like an innocent baby’s eyes.

  “Let me help you,” says Stan, who speaks in clipped sentences and is built like a tank. He holds open the elevator door and presses the button for the eighth floor.

  “My husband will get the bags when he comes up,” I say.

  Stan is still smiling, standing there like a proud uncle. Come to think of it, he and Julia share physical traits of people from the Eastern bloc. Stan, too, has a large forehead, pale skin, and dark eyes. And of course, he’s a mystery.

  I fiddle with the key for a few moments before I can open the door. I’m already envious of those mothers who balance infants on one hip while accomplishing nearly everything else with their other free arm. Our cat comes to see what I’m holding. He sniffs a few times and saunters off. It occurs to me Julia has probably never seen a live animal, not even a dog or a cat.

  “Cat,” I say to her. “That’s Floopy, our cat.”

  Once inside, I don’t know what to do with myself or with the baby. She probably needs to have her diaper changed or be fed or something obvious, but I lower her into the crib and take off my jacket. I’m hoping Ricky returns quickly, because I know he’ll take charge of the baby. I am overwhelmed and I’m thinking that in any other situation I wouldn’t be. If I walked into the apartment now and there had been a flood, my instincts would kick in and I’d know exactly what to do. But here I am with a baby, my baby, and I am lost.

  I hear the elevator doors open and I’m elated.

  Ricky walks in the apartment.

  “How are my girls?” he says.

  I’m amazed at his grace.

  “Let me take the baby,” he says. “Let’s get her undressed and bathed and fed,” he says. He’s the one with maternal instincts. But I’m relieved to turn my attention to unpacking, settling in, and making us something to eat.

  We are sitting at our round table, which is next to a window that overlooks a courtyard. Steam pours from the radiator. We have put a playpen in between the table and the seating area. The main room of our apartment—the only common room—already feels a lot smaller. Ricky has bathed Julia and dressed her in a onesie. She looks cleaner than I’ve seen her look yet. She is as bald as a melon. She is sucking on the pacifier we brought from the orphanage. She gurgles as Ricky lowers her into the high chair a cousin donated and ties a bib with a little pig on it around her neck. I’m spreading salad and pasta on the table while he spoon-feeds her organic applesauce. When the jar is empty and he pulls the spoon away for the last time, she cries. Finally. Ricky and I look at each other.

  “What should we do? Should we give her another jar?” he asks.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “She’s just getting used to solids. I don’t think we should tax her system. How about formula?”

  “Okay, let’s get that going,” he says.

  I hand Ricky the bottle. He tips it back into Julia’s mouth, and she stops crying.

  The pasta has gotten cold. We start eating, but the phone rings.

  “That’s my mother,” I say to Ricky, reminding him that before we left I had arranged for my parents to come over and meet Julia this afternoon.

  “Welcome back,” my mother says when I answer the phone. “How was the trip? How’s the baby?”

  “She’s good.” Ricky’s feeding her a bottle. “Are you coming around?”

  “Well, there�
�s been a slight change of plans,” my mother says, explaining she has my sister’s children with her. “I’ve got Emily and Charlie here with me. They slept over last night. But I’ll bring them.”

  “No!” I shout. “That was not the plan. The plan was for you and Daddy to meet your grandchild this afternoon, alone.”

  “What’s the big deal?” she asks. “We’ll all come. Everyone’s curious to meet Julia.”

  “Uh, no, that’s not possible,” I say.

  “What do you mean, why? What’s the problem?” she asks, incredulously.

  “Julia is not yet allowed to be around other children—she’s still too vulnerable,” I say, fabricating a ridiculous excuse, as though I was talking about a puppy who couldn’t yet go outside because he didn’t have his vaccines.

  Ricky looks at me queerly.

  “I’m sorry, but we had an arrangement and it would be nice if once, just once, you could stick to a plan. I have to go.”

  I slam down the phone and the tears spill out volcanically. Ah, yes, this is the cry I’ve been needing. Thanks to my mother, I’m finally having it. Days and days—no, months and months—of building tension, and it took my mother letting me down in order for me to let go. I’m heaving and sobbing and Ricky is rubbing my shoulders.

  “You know your mother’s not reliable,” he says.

  “I,” gasp, “I,” gasp, “I know, but right now I need a mother,” I say. “I wanted this to be special.”

  Julia watches this scene unfold. She is passive. I’m glad, because I need to be indulged right now.

  “She’s too vulnerable,” Ricky says, starting to laugh. “That’s rich. How did you come up with that one?”

  I look up at his green eyes, which are alive and twinkling.

  Snuffling, I start to laugh too.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I didn’t know what else to say, so I said the first thing that came to my mind.”

  “Funny,” he says. He lifts Julia from the crib and cuddles her.

  “You see,” he says. “All this fuss is about you.”

  She gurgles.

  He puts her in the playpen.

  “Let me clean up. Why don’t you sit on the couch and relax?” Just as I’m sitting down, the phone rings.

  “Uh, oh!” I say.

  “Hello, Rosalie,” Ricky says, answering the phone. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I guess that’s okay. Okay. See you in a bit.”

  “What?” I say.

  “Your mother says she’s going to stop by alone in about a half hour,” he says.

  I’m tempted to put on my boxing gloves again, but I’m too worn out.

  When she knocks on the door, my stomach clenches. She walks into the apartment looking like an Inuit with her big, hooded down jacket and her scarf wrapped around her neck. Her boots are covered with the salt and slush of New York City after a snowstorm. Hunched forward, she makes no effort to take off her coat but carefully takes off her gloves. Then she moves toward Julia with her hands outstretched. I notice her French manicure. My mother bends to look at her but doesn’t lift her up because she never lifts anything heavy. She too has a weak back. “Hello,” she trills, avoiding eye contact with me entirely. “Oh, she is beautiful.”

  She still has not removed her coat.

  “Would you like a coffee, Rosalie?” Ricky asks.

  “Tony and the kids are downstairs in the car waiting for me,” she says. “I can’t stay long.”

  I feel like I’ve been stabbed again. She would have been better off not coming over because at this moment I hate her twice as much.

  When she leaves, I curl up on the couch in a ball.

  “I just wanted this to be special. To be about Julia and nothing else, not Emily and Charlie. She’s been fussing over them forever. She makes me crazy.”

  “I know, I understand,” he says, hesitating. “Maybe this is less important to your mother because Julia is not her own flesh and blood, like Emily and Charlie. Maybe that’s not something she’s consciously aware of, but maybe her excitement about Julia is tempered because she’s adopted. In your mother’s eyes, Julia is something less.”

  “You really think that could be the case?” I ask. “I just think she’s so angry at me that even giving her a granddaughter is not enough.”

  “It could be,” he says. “Knowing your mother. Forget about Rosalie. She’ll come around.”

  My mother would say she did the best she could raising me. It would be true. She and my father had a contentious but codependent marriage. She had a master’s degree in education from Columbia University; he never finished high school. She was a single child from a coddled Jewish family of Polish immigrants who worked their fingers to the bone at a deli. He was the youngest of six children, a street urchin who had no parental supervision, a good-looking no-goodnik who was a fast thinker and a good dancer. Their worlds collided at a dentist’s office. Not too long after, my mother’s father died. My father became the man of the household. He lived with my grandmother and mother. It took him four years to marry my mother. I came along in 1962. My sister, Jodie, was born eighteen months later. They built a middle-class life. We lived in a picturesque house in Canarsie. It had rosebushes and a red picnic table in the backyard. They grew a carpet business so successful it paid for trips to Hawaii and Puerto Rico. My father drove a yellow Cadillac. My mother frequently shopped at the jewelers on Rockaway Parkway. There was a lot to protect. So much so that my mother buried her head in the sand when it came to my father’s wanderings. I was her favorite child. Her best friend. It was a privilege. It ended up being a burden.

  Eight

  The next day, Ricky loads up his cart, like Tevye, with tea bags and equipment. He pulls a bungee cord over the merchandise to secure it down. I’d give anything to be the one walking out the door while he stays home with the baby. He kisses me, then Julia, and says, “You’ll be fine. Try to enjoy yourself.”

  I glance over at my desk and think about the work that waits for me.

  “It will have to sit,” I mutter to myself.

  Julia is in the playpen. I’ve noticed she’s not too enamored with Elmo and Big Bird. It’s strange to have the television on at 9:00 AM. Usually I’m sitting down at my desk now to start my day. My freelance assignments have been coming in regularly again, and I’ve been grateful for the work. Ricky’s working hard at the tea business, but it’s still in its infancy.

  Julia seems agitated in the crib. I lift her out and dress her. Last night Ricky gave me a diapering lesson. I was thinking, at the time, of my old friend Leah in London. When she gave birth, the government sent home a baby nurse for two weeks, as is the custom for every new mother. What a brilliant idea. Who says any of this stuff is second nature?

  Shortly, I will receive my first visitors, if I don’t count my mother, which I don’t. Jack and Judith are a couple from upstairs. They are my parents’ age. We’ve formed a friendship through our dogs—both of whom have died and are buried side by side in a beautiful cemetery in Westchester. For years we have helped each other out and served as surrogate “dog” parents, and now they are thrilled for Ricky and me as we start our human family.

  Judith calls out, “Helloooo!” as she raps on the door.

  Julia is in the pen. I think about reaching in and putting her in my arms—the way you might add a broach as an accent at the last minute but then think twice about it—and leave her there.

  I open the door.

  Judith sails past me.

  “Where is the baby girl?”

  What is it about babies that makes every woman in her seventies go all sing-songy?

  Jack kisses me hello.

  “How ya doing?” he asks, genuinely interested.

  I think he can see how frazzled I feel.

  Judith and Jack hover over the playpen, cooing and clucking.

  “Oh, Tina, she’s just gorgeous,” Judith says.

  A birth mother would say “thank you.” What do I say when someone comments on Julia’s b
eauty?

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” I say, leading them to the couch.

  I organize tea and cookies, using the lovely Russian teacups I bought in Moscow. Might as well show off all the beautiful merchandise we brought back, I think to myself.

  When seated and sipping tea, I realize it’s hard to make conversation. My relationship with Jack and Judith has always been about mutual helpfulness, so time spent together has always been fleeting moments filled with plans and logistics, not lingering conversations.

  “Thanks for coming by,” I say, sheepishly.

  “Oh, it’s our pleasure,” Judith trills, maintaining the baby-glow effect. “She’s adorable.”

  Silence.

  “So how was the trip?” Jack asks.

  He’s thrown me a lifeline. I’m comfortable telling stories. I re-create the images of the flat we lived in, whisking Julia away from the orphanage that last night in Novosibirsk. Julia is getting restless.

  “Can I hold her?” Judith asks.

  “Sure,” I say, lifting the baby into Judith’s lap.

  It seems as though Julia can be handed over to anyone without a fuss. Judith bobs her on her knee. Julia giggles. I hadn’t noticed the dimples near the corner of her mouth before.

  She likes the motion.

  “Look at the size of her legs,” says Judith. Julia squeals with delight.

  “I know,” I say. “Definitely a future Olympian.”

  Biting my lip, I decide to tell them about Barbara’s meltdown and how ambivalent she was when she met her son.

  Judith, who is a psychotherapist, is listening intently, nodding.

  When I finish, she says, “Well, sure, many foreign adoptees suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder. It was a major problem with the Romanian orphans back in the 1980s.”

  I’m perturbed Judith is so readily familiar with the syndrome. It makes it all the more real. Something I should know about. Or have learned about before we started this process.