In my third-floor office, with the door closed, I tried to explore the connections between my father’s terrible childhood and the adoption of my new sons, often just staring at the blank screen or spending hours reading sports news online. Downstairs Peter and Bohdan played with Betsy and each other, squealing with joy in their new profusion of brotherly togetherness, and protein, and love from a mother who was patient, calm, and not locked away in a room they weren’t allowed to enter.
In our weekly phone calls, Dad was still vague on their plans for coming to Winnipeg. I put the boys on the line again, this time with the speaker phone, and Mom complained that their accent was so heavy she couldn’t understand what they said. Edmonton was far away. Knowing his reluctance to talk about the past, I avoided asking Dad the questions that preoccupied me.
At mealtimes I was shocked at how easily Betsy spoke to the boys, how she anticipated what they wanted, how gently she corrected them. Even when I was at the table my mind lived inside my fragmentary manuscript, imagining my father’s childhood. Betsy found this frustrating, and I noticed that she sometimes used the same tone with me that she did with the boys when they misbehaved. The fact that after two years I had virtually no income from my writing filled me with a gnawing insecurity. Meanwhile back in my office I watched World War II movies, read books about Soviet history, read every scrap about NBA basketball that I could find on the Internet, and wrote very little.
In May we bought the boys bicycles, a bright yellow one for Bohdan, tiny, and a red one for Peter, slightly bigger. Both bikes had training wheels. We unloaded them from the car onto the sidewalk and Betsy adjusted the helmets. I lifted the boys onto their new bikes. Peter immediately got off and began studying the wheel assembly and the steering column, gesturing with his hands like an Italian, saying “bicycle” over and over. I used my hands to show him how to move the bike pedals, then loaded him back on, feeling how solid he was. As his legs began moving with the pedals, I touched them and said “push.” He did some tentative pedalling and I let go of the bike. He was moving, on his own steam, and he smiled. I stepped back panting, feeling proud of him.
Then I turned to Bohdan, who had not moved since Peter began riding. Bohdan had the same beatific expression on his face as Peter did when he was in motion, but Bohdan was making no attempt to move. Betsy held one of his legs and demonstrated a pedal stroke. Bohdan continued to smile and looked either straight ahead, without any pressure on the pedals, or down at the bright yellow paint of his bike.
Meanwhile Peter had driven into our neighbour’s hedge and fallen off his bike in awkward slow motion. He didn’t respond to this even as an inconvenience, getting up quickly, not dusting off or noticing the gash in his pants, but just getting back on the bike and pedalling again.
I came up to Bohdan and said, “Push?” and he nodded hard. “Yes,” he said, the first time he hadn’t said “tak” for the affirmative, one of his last Ukrainian words. I pushed, holding him, noticing that he had the same stocky build as his brother, and with a long waist and big chest. I’d always wanted to be big-chested like my maternal grandfather, and now I had a son with that build.
With me pushing him we travelled the length of the block, but he still wouldn’t pedal his bike. I called Betsy and she looked at him for a minute as he gazed down at his bike, lost in admiration. “Get the camera,” I said, and she ran into the house.
My first time alone with the boys was just a few hours long, a morning. I put on a Sesame Street video; Betsy and I’d agreed on the acceptability of some educational TV. Peter kept rubbing against me from the side, thrusting his body into any open space where he could reach the buttons on the TV equipment. I said no and finally placed him on the couch. When I hit play both of the boys rushed the screen, knocking the glass with their fists, roaring each other’s names and shoving. I picked them up one at a time and plunked them down on the couch.
“You can watch now. Just watch.”
Peter pointed at the screen and laughed at Cookie Monster. Bohdan stood and they both attacked the screen again.
“Boys, sit down.” They ignored me. I put them back on the couch. Their skin smelled like milk, as if they’d just dropped out of the baby factory, and that innocent smell calmed me.
I began work in the next room, then heard them arguing about something and running around the room. When I went back they were both climbing onto the TV stand. I grabbed their wrists and pulled them in front of me so my face and my breath were right in their faces and shouted. Bohdan stared right back at me, but Peter’s eyes darted all over the room.
I knew I’d frightened them. I’d frightened myself too. They wailed and their doll-like eyelashes got dewy. I felt unsure of myself in a way I’d never experienced with Jeremy, who had been docile at their age. These kids seemed more like wild dogs who needed me to establish dominance over the pack, not exactly my strong suit.
Near the end of her parental leave, Betsy spent a few days at her office to prepare for the upcoming school year. On Friday I took Peter and Bohdan on the bus to meet Betsy at the university. I sat between them, directly behind a kid in full Sex Pistols regalia, sprouting body piercings and an aggressively purple mohawk that stood a full four inches above his head. The boys pointed at him and giggled and the mohawked kid ignored us.
“My hair …” Bohdan didn’t have much vocabulary yet, and when he couldn’t express something he just made sounds and hand motions like Harpo Marx. I’d recently taken them to see Duck Soup.
“Yes, we’ll talk to Mom about having your hair like that. It’s called a mohawk.” I was scared that Bohdan would actually remember this conversation but fortunately he was distracted by a blind man entering the bus with his dog. I had to explain why we couldn’t pet a working dog. Bohdan loved animals.
Peter kept trying to cross his legs but he had trouble getting one leg all the way over the other, as though he didn’t quite have the energy to move his leg where he wanted. It was like watching Gumby with the stop-motion badly timed.
Betsy was waiting for us at the main university stop, backpack on, reading a novel. The boys saw her before I did and charged out of the front door of the bus, banging into the passengers waiting to board. I followed as quickly as was politely possible. Peter ran toward Betsy, but after two awkwardly large steps he face-planted on the concrete just in front of her.
“Are you OK?” she said, kneeling down. Bohdan and I arrived a moment later. Peter had a scrape on his chin that he wouldn’t acknowledge. He was fine.
That first summer with the boys none of the people we knew who spoke Ukrainian were around. We wanted the boys to learn English, but also to keep their first language. It was especially important to me because I had lost German, my only language until age two.
After inquiring with friends, we enrolled the boys in nursery school at Holy Trinity Orthodox Ukrainian Cathedral on Main Street. They spent two mornings there every week in June and July. I drove them and picked them up; on the way we listened to a compilation of children’s music that Betsy’s brother Andrew had put together for them as a gift. Peter sang along very loudly, especially to the Raffi tunes, and Bohdan made tuneless word-sounds that were neither English nor Ukrainian.
I walked them into the cathedral basement, which reminded me of an older Mennonite church, built by volunteer labour, with linoleum floors and the feeling of a huge rec room. The boys’ teacher was a recent Ukrainian immigrant named Halyna. They were always delighted to see her but ignored the other kids and even each other, preferring to play alone. Sometimes Bohdan tried to play with Peter, but Peter was rarely interested. Their favourite toys were kid-sized cars that they self-propelled around the big open area.
Some days I would stay and have tea with the older women who ran many of the programs at the cathedral. They asked me where the boys came from in Ukraine, why we went there to adopt children, did I know they sold perogy every third Saturday in the basement? And they offered to help with keeping up the boys’ la
nguage, although such help would involve me driving for hours into the Kildonans.
On one of the last days of the program, one of the women said to me, “Your boys are so good-looking, and that’s an asset in life, you know.” I was proud and strangely reassured. It was hard to know how the boys looked to other people; mostly I worried that people thought my kids were out of control, and that it reflected badly on me.
Every time I dropped them off for the morning I felt tremendously relieved and also guilty that I couldn’t imagine having my own kids with me for more than a few hours at a stretch. They exhausted me. That couldn’t be normal. Betsy had also talked about her exhaustion dealing with the boys’ tremendous energy level, but even with her full-time job she spent more time with them than I did.
For the graduation ceremony from Ukrainian kindergarten, the boys needed to wear traditional white blouses with embroidery up the middle and at their wrists. So I took them to a store on Selkirk Avenue nearby that the ladies at the church had mentioned.
The tiny store contained a bewildering variety of goods from Ukraine, including trident flags of every size, imported candies, DVDs, frozen perogies, wooden nesting dolls, and Ukrainian books. Peter and Bohdan charged in opposite directions with all the manic energy of Thing One and Thing Two in The Cat and the Hat. They touched and grabbed at every item within reach. For a moment I stood watching with embarrassed fascination, half-expecting them to begin eating the flags and dolls that they touched, so blatantly sensual was their activity.
But my limbs thawed when they reached the shipping area in the back, which had a DIY station with bare utility knives and a tabletop slicer. Bohdan clutched the slicer handle like a Jacobin. With no effort at all I could imagine one of his surprisingly thick boyish fingers severed and twitching on the slicer. Or one of Peter’s: he was trying to body-block his brother off the machine.
“Peter and Bohdan, come here!” They didn’t respond and no one in the store did either. In three steps I snatched them away from the slicer, clutching each of them by their polo shirt collars, which worked as convenient handles.
“Hold my hands, both of you.” Bohdan giggled. Peter recognized the pressure of my hand around his as coercive. He blinked rapidly but did not cry. We walked to the counter where an unshaven man with thick arms unsmilingly handed me two blouses in the boys’ sizes. While Peter tried one on I held Bohdan wedged in front of me, wrapping my legs around him so he couldn’t budge. Then they traded places, Bohdan in the change room, Peter between my legs, but Peter broke free one more time, colliding with other customers who didn’t seem in the least rattled. Maybe I’m too uptight, I thought, it’s a different culture.
In the car, though, I was breathing hard and still seeing the chaos, my inability to control them or keep them safe.
“You can’t behave like that in a store,” I barked, volume muffled by my shallow breaths. “You’ve got to calm down.” They both nodded at me, surprised at how upset I was, and we drove home in silence.
That night, wanting a much-needed shower, it took longer than usual for the water to warm up. Our house had antiquated plumbing and more demand placed on it lately, so I waited some more, but the water stayed lukewarm.
In the basement I discovered the pilot light was out on the hot water heater. Hoping we wouldn’t have to buy a new heater, I got on my knees, reset the control and struck a match, and the gas caught fire again.
The next night the pilot light was out once more. Betsy was suspicious. Peter and Bohdan played in the basement while Betsy prepared dinner, and had strict instructions to stay in a carpeted area far from the tools, the furnace, and the water heater.
In the morning Betsy asked Peter if he’d touched the water heater. He said no, and I thought he probably didn’t understand what she was saying. But at lunchtime when I came down to call them they were both hunkered near the water heater and Peter had his hand on the dial.
“What are you doing, Peter?”
“Nothing,” he said, without removing his hand from the knob. Betsy and I cross-examined him for half an hour upstairs. He looked straight at us with his beautiful grey eyes wide open and even though we assured him we wouldn’t be mad, he refused to admit a thing. We moved the toys back upstairs.
Often the boys ran up to my office to call me to dinner, knocking at the door and then almost knocking me over, giving me burly hugs like miniature rugby players. Before we had kids Betsy and I used to chat over dinner, about politics, our day, our plans. Now Peter talked so much we couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He talked about trucks and vehicles and traffic signals, words delivered at unnatural speed. I kept my head down under the barrage of words and ate rapidly. Betsy asked the boys questions about what they were doing. She did not seem as bothered by their limited vocabulary. I loved them, but did not know what to say to them, so when I talked at all it was mostly to Betsy, and usually about subjects they could not understand. Peter started talking exclusively to her when he figured out that I didn’t listen. When he addressed me he’d say “Dad” three or four times, trying to recall my mind from my computer’s spinning hard disk upstairs.
On Sunday nights I called my parents and talked to them about sports and politics. My mother, in the early stages of dementia, often repeated stories within one conversation, but she still knew the names of politicians and athletes. Dad still loved the Lakers. They didn’t ask to speak to the boys and I didn’t offer to put them on the phone, and I often hung up feeling that we had left the most important things unsaid.
II
Betsy’s mother Molly died that May in Illinois, though Betsy said Molly had actually died five years earlier. Already suffering from Alzheimer’s, she’d had a massive stroke in 2000 that damaged her brain so badly she had to live in a nursing home. She was sixty-three.
The one time I saw her there it was dinnertime in the dementia ward. The residents stared quietly at their trays of food or at the television as if locked in a terrible and futile state of concentration. The air was fetid. Many let their heads loll sideways.
Molly’s eyes were dead. She didn’t recognize Betsy although at the sound of her voice Molly stirred slightly, maybe by accident. Molly had been a funny, gregarious woman who invited strangers she met at the grocery store to join family dinners. Here she was wearing diapers. Betsy suspected the dark lines under her nails were fecal matter. Fred, Betsy’s dad, constantly battled the home’s administrators to make sure Molly’s diaper was changed more often.
Molly’s health continued to decline and then she lost the ability to swallow food. Assured by the doctors that Molly had a few more days, Fred came to Winnipeg to meet his new grandsons. He spent one day with us. Then we heard his cell phone ring at 2:30 am, and found the next morning that he had left for Illinois without waking us to say goodbye. In the morning Bohdan asked me why Poppy had to leave.
“Grandma Molly died last night. Poppy had to go home.”
“Will Poppy die?” said Peter.
“No, not now, Peter,” I said. “He’s doing fine.” This wasn’t strictly true. He had a heart condition and bladder cancer. But Fred was still active and his mind sharp.
We decided to rent a van rather than fly from Winnipeg to Champaign for the memorial service; it would be cheaper and we’d see if the boys would do any better on the road now that they were more settled.
I was nervous driving such a large vehicle and made a wrong turn at the end of our block.
“Maurice, we have to go south,” said Betsy, in a neutral tone.
“Yeah, I know,” I snapped, edgy because I’d had to rush my morning coffee.
“You’re driving us north.”
“Yeah. OK. Do you want to drive?” I took a right turn at random, my voice going up in pitch.
“No. No, I don’t.” Betsy stayed neutral, which she knew drove me crazy.
The boys were great on the road. For hours they stared at the barren landscape of North Dakota — the American steppes — as if mesmerized, w
hile they listened to Raffi and Fred Penner on their headphones. We didn’t make bathroom breaks any more often than we used to on our own.
Then somewhere in western Minnesota Bohdan said he had to go to the toilet now. His face scrunched up like a gargoyle, and he emitted a very bad smell. I turned off the highway into a rest stop within a few miles. On the long driveway going in there was a pop from one of the tires and the van sagged at the back left. We limped to the parking area and emerged from the air-conditioned van into the blazing summer heat.
I hate changing tires and always worry I’ll crush myself under a vehicle by placing the jack in a dangerous position. A friendly midwesterner in golf clothes saw me fumbling ineptly with the spare and offered to help me. He was an angel of competence and we put the spare tire on the van in a few minutes.
Meanwhile Bohdan had been to the bathroom with Betsy and Peter. Turned out he had no business to do there.
“You have to say what you want,” said Betsy, irritated.
“He did. Just without telling you,” I said. We had to buy a new tire because we’d driven over a razor blade. We got back into the van sweaty and annoyed but Bohdan looked like a boy chorister and it was hard to stay angry with him.
During the last three hours of the trip south, I kept asking Betsy to watch the signs for me on the eight-lane, perfectly straight Interstate 90 that went directly to our destination. I had a history of exiting this highway without intending to, and leading us into rush-hour traffic just outside Chicago, three hours off course.
“Why can’t you read the signs yourself?” asked Betsy the fifth or sixth time I demanded confirmation that we were on the right highway.
“I have trouble paying attention to everything going on at once. The boys in the car, the other vehicles going by faster than I’m used to in Canada, talking to you … Studies show men can’t deal with multiple inputs as well as women, you know.”
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