by Judith Frank
“Check this out,” Matt said, rolling in his desk chair to grab another chair and pull it up. “You guys, lie down! That means you too, Yo-yo!” He’d read a mother’s diary of her child’s first year, and the recalls on the car seats—which it seemed nobody used correctly anyway—and the frighteningly intense debates about the family bed, but he’d had no success finding anything about bereaved children, except for those who had lost a grandparent or a pet. Nothing about how to talk to kids whose parents had been killed by a bomb. But then again, he wasn’t sure if he was missing some stuff because he was reluctant to register, because that required reporting his children’s genders, something he just balked at, fearing they’d start sending him grotesque special articles about how, even in the womb, little boys naturally reach for trucks while little girls reach for dolls.
Now he was reading the milestone chart “What to Expect from Your Thirteen- to Eighteen-month-old.” “Someone seems to have bragged that her two-month-old was already eating solid foods,” he told Cam, “and that really ticked the other moms off.” He read aloud: “ ‘Well, well, well. In addition to being mother of the year, you are also more educated than a pediatrician. Just because your daughter can eat solids, does not mean that she should do so. A two-month-old baby’s digestive system is not ready for the onslaught of solid foods. You are probably setting your daughter up for an increased risk of allergies, as well as digestive problems later on. I am sorry that your children have a mother who thinks so little of them that she ignores advice given by pediatricians worldwide.’ ” He looked at Cam, who was squinting at the screen and murmuring, “Dude, lighten up.”
“Signed,” he said, grinning, “‘Sad in Indiana.’” He pouted his lips. “She’s sad because those kids have to have such a bad mom.”
“It is sad, actually,” Cam said, and they laughed.
“I’ll tell you, it’s a cutthroat world out there for the moms,” he said. “Those message boards are brutal! But the good news is, they don’t expect jack shit from the dads. I swear, if these women’s husbands do anything without being hounded into it, they’re total heroes. They call them DH, which it took me a long time to figure out meant ‘darling husband.’ ”
“Gross,” Cam said.
“I don’t know, Cam,” he said, rubbing his face, suddenly depressed by all the arguments, the sheer quantity of information parents apparently had to be interested in. “Did you ever want kids?”
“Nope. The thing is, I basically raised my mother”—Cam’s mother had had some combination of alcoholism and bipolar disorder—“I don’t have the energy to be at anyone else’s beck and call.”
Matt nodded with a small smile; and yet, the women Cam loved were unfailingly troubled and demanding.
“If you get them, it’s not like you’re going to have a choice or anything,” she said. “You’ll just raise them. They’ll grow up, and be fucked-up like the rest of us.”
DANIEL WAS RUNNING LATE; he’d gone to the supermarket, where he’d been accosted by a woman who thought he was Joel for a moment, and then he’d had to stay with her as she recovered. And just as he pulled out of the parking garage on his way home, he remembered that he’d forgotten eggs, the thing that had sent him shopping in the first place. He stopped at the makolet on his block and bought eggs with his last bit of cash, and wound his way home through twisty, clogged streets. Assaf had agreed to be his lawyer, and he had set up this appointment with the caseworker. She was an American with a New York accent named Dalia Rosenblum, who’d made aliyah ten years ago, and he had bet his parents a thousand dollars that she was religious.
“You don’t have that kind of money,” his father had said with an annoying complacency.
“Okay, I’ll bet you two thousand dollars,” Daniel had shot back.
His father had given him the wise nod of the father humoring the impetuous son.
His phone conversation with Assaf had thrown him into a stew of anxiety and fear. First, Assaf had told him that the social worker assigned to do the parental competency hearing would be interviewing him six times over the course of three months. Daniel had said that he couldn’t be away from work that long, and begged him to find out if there was any way to do it more quickly. Assaf also said that the courts tended to want to toss the kids around as little as possible, especially after a trauma like this. When Daniel asked him if he thought it would help or hurt to have Matt present at the parental competency hearings, Assaf was silent for a long time.
“That bad, huh,” Daniel said.
“No, no—it’s that I honestly don’t know. I have never experienced such a situation.” He weighed it out loud: On the one hand, it wouldn’t help that they were gay, and that Matt wasn’t Jewish, but on the other, Daniel couldn’t lie about his living situation, and Assaf believed that parental competency assessments explicitly mandated assessing the spouse. “I think you will have to acknowledge him, and that therefore he will need to be present,” Assaf had concluded.
When Daniel got home, he saw a strange car parked outside and cursed; he was late for the caseworker. He walked into the house, apologizing, laden with plastic bags of groceries. “Don’t worry about it,” Dalia said. She was a young woman with a covered head; she wore a dress and hose. Daniel swiveled toward his father, who was hovering over the hissing kettle, as he hefted the bags onto the counter, and rubbed his fingers together to signify the money Sam owed him. He had the sudden memory of Ilana calling the cops on the religious people who’d put up a succa by her supermarket and played loud music during evenings of the Succot holiday. They’d told her they couldn’t do anything about it, which she’d known before she even called. But it had made her feel better to do something rash and mean toward the religious people she—and most of her friends—lived among in simmering animosity.
He put some biscuits on a plate and brought them out, set them on the big nicked coffee table. His mother emerged from the bedroom in a nice dress, freshly made-up, and introduced herself. They sat. Dalia began by emphasizing that she was the advocate for Gal and Noam, and that the court, to which this case would surely go, would settle it according to its best judgment of the best welfare of the children. “You say that in a way that implies that Daniel doesn’t want the best for them, that he’s not their advocate,” Lydia said.
“Not at all,” Dalia said. “But the custodianship of the children is contested. I have just come from Ilana’s parents, and they are quite determined to raise the children as their own, here in Israel.”
“You’re aware that Joel and Ilana wanted Daniel to be the guardian, yes?” his father said.
“I have seen the will,” Dalia replied, implying, to Daniel’s ear, that it was somehow open to interpretation. He wished his parents would shut up; they were making it look as though he couldn’t speak for himself. Dalia was probably in her midthirties, with dark eyebrows and straight hair slanting across her forehead. She sat with a pad of paper in her lap and a pen in her hands. Her hands were quiet. “I know this must seem arbitrary and wrong to you,” she said. “But evidence shows that the mourning process is best facilitated if the child’s physical and social environment remain essentially unchanged.”
Daniel’s heart sank. So not only might he and Matt not get them, but even if they did, they’d be harming their mourning process.
“You live, in the States, with a homosexual partner, is that true?”
“Yes,” Daniel said, holding her gaze.
“Will the court have a problem with that?” his mother asked. Daniel leveled a stare at her, and she looked at him, uncomprehending.
Dalia gave an expressive shrug and said she didn’t know. “There are two parts to it: the partner and living in the States. How does your partner feel about raising two children who are not his own?”
Daniel made a quick, strategic decision to read her as simply direct, as many Israelis were, rather than as homophobic. He paused; he wanted to get this right. “Matt hardly knows the baby. But he and Gal h
ave always been close. He’s devastated by what has happened and wants to take these children in, to help them heal in a loving home.” It sounded wretchedly platitudinous when it came out of his mouth, but it wasn’t untrue.
“It will certainly be a big change in his lifestyle,” his mother said. Yes, Daniel thought, those are the words coming out of her mouth. Dalia looked at Lydia and then back at him, then at Lydia again. He saw that she was registering that Lydia didn’t like Matt. “What do you mean?” Dalia asked.
Seeing all eyes on her, Lydia backtracked. “Oh, nothing dramatic,” she said. “I only mean that he’s a young man.”
“Mom, he’s thirty-two. A lot of men have children at that age, and they adjust just fine.”
“That’s all I meant,” Lydia protested.
There was a pause in which the air seemed motorized, whizzing with brainpower, as everybody made a quick decision about how to proceed. Then Dalia asked a series of questions—about their jobs, their income, their house—and the hum dispersed and settled. She asked Daniel what his town was like, and where the kids would sleep in his house. He gave her the names of references, Derrick and his boss April; and he had the idea of giving her the name of Joel’s best friend, Josh Levinson, who’d come over with them in the junior-year program and had made aliyah around the same time as Joel. He’d seen Josh and his wife at the shiva, and they’d tearfully urged him to stay in their lives. Dalia wrote the names and numbers on her pad without looking down at it. She asked if he and Matt knew how to take care of a baby, and he said they hadn’t before now, but that they’d had a crash course in the past weeks. As if on cue, they heard Noam begin to cry in his bedroom. Daniel and Lydia stood at the same time. “I’ll get him,” Daniel said, his desire to display parental competence only slightly stronger than his desire to get his mother out of Dalia’s earshot before she said anything else that might sabotage his cause.
He went into the kids’ room, sighing in a big release of tension, saying, “Hi, mister!” He stopped in his tracks. In his crib, Noam was red and crying and covered in poop. “Holy shit, Noam, you exploded!” Daniel cried, and hoisted him up, holding him at arm’s length. “Mazel tov, sweetie!” He planted a big kiss on the baby’s red face, and then pulled away in disgust from the smell. It was even in Noam’s hair. He laid him on the changing table and peeled off the filthy diaper with his fingertips, fastidious at first, and then realized that if he just accepted the fact that he was going to get covered in shit, things would go a lot more quickly. He dropped the diaper in the pail. There were streaks of shit on Noam’s thighs and on the hands he was grabbing his pacifier with. The stench made Daniel gag.
There was a shadow at the doorway and Dalia came in. “I let the baby get covered in feces!” Daniel exclaimed. “Choose me, I’m a fantastic parent!”
Dalia approached with a faint smile. “Sha-lom,” she cooed, caressing the second syllable. “Did you make a big kaki?”
“He’s been constipated since we got here,” Daniel said. “This is an event, his first bowel movement in two and a half weeks.”
Dalia nodded, reaching to smooth Noam’s hair off his forehead, then clearly thinking better of it. “It’s very common in grieving babies.”
Daniel stared at her. “Constipation? You’re kidding.”
“No, why would I be kidding?” she asked.
“That makes so much sense! It didn’t occur to me . . .”
She shrugged. “How does a baby mourn? He doesn’t have a language for what he’s lost.”
They looked at Noam, who had picked up the wipes box and was turning it around in his hands with great interest.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Dalia said, moving forward quickly to ease the box out of the baby’s hands before he could put it in his mouth. “I have a brother too, in New York. He’s homosexual, too.”
Daniel nodded warily. She said it without looking at him, without any kind of emotional fanfare. She wasn’t a particularly warm person, he thought, except maybe to the baby, but all Israelis loved babies and talked to them with warm expressiveness. He wished she had said “gay” instead of “homosexual,” which always made him flinch because it made it sound like a medical condition. But she seemed smart to him, and observant, and not unkind.
After dinner, on the phone with Matt, he told him how, in front of the caseworker, he gave the baby the longest, most disastrous bath in modern history. “It had everything,” he said, a grin saturating his weary voice. “We ran out of hot water and I’d forgotten to turn on the boiler. The baby conked his head on the faucet and actually bled.” He laughed. “Matt, I actually made him bleed. And those scalps, they’re still a little soft, it turns out, so he’ll probably have a bruise that his maternal grandparents will show to every social service official in the country. But wait. Then he had a second bowel movement—a much much looser one, I’m here to tell you—right in the tub. Which made me vomit. Yes, literally.” He held the phone away from his ear a little and waited for Matt’s laughter to subside. “We must have used at least twelve towels. Okay, four. By the end, I was soaking wet.” He paused. “We so shouldn’t be allowed to raise children.”
“It probably at least broke the ice with the caseworker,” Matt said.
“I guess you could call it that. And the baby’s pretty happy tonight. We played a rousing game of Napkin on the Head.”
“What’s that?”
“A game where you put a napkin on your head,” Daniel said.
“Aha,” Matt said.
“It was hilarious.”
“I’ll bet it was,” Matt said, smiling. “Hey, listen, I’ve been wanting to tell you something.” He paused. “I’ve started taking Hebrew lessons.”
Daniel blinked. “You have?” he asked softly.
“I know that you’ll want Gal to continue speaking Hebrew when she grows up, and teach Noam, too,” Matt said in a rush. “So I thought I should get in on it. Is that okay?”
“Honey,” Daniel said. He knew what a stretch it was for Matt, what a gesture.
They hung together on the phone for a while, not speaking. “I love you,” Daniel finally said.
“Me too, babe.”
When he got off the phone he went into the kids’ room, where Noam was asleep in a clean diaper and shirt, and his mother was supervising Gal as she got into her pajamas. “I just got off the phone with Uncle Matt,” he said. “Guess what? He’s started taking Hebrew lessons!”
Gal looked at him and considered. “Really?”
“Really! We can help him, right?”
“Yeah!” she said in the fake chipper voice she used when prompted by an adult to be enthusiastic.
He looked at his mother, who wasn’t very enthusiastic at all; in fact, she was tight-lipped.
“What?” he demanded.
Her eyes darted toward Gal. Later, she mouthed.
A few hours later, after Gal had had two books read to her, a meltdown, and a cup of water, and had finally fallen asleep, they repaired to the kitchen. Daniel asked, “Do you have a problem you want to discuss?”
“I don’t have a problem,” his mother said.
“Then what was that back there in the bedroom? And what was that with the caseworker earlier, about Matt having to change his entire lifestyle?”
“I didn’t say that!” his mother said.
Daniel was quiet. He didn’t often fight with his mother, because when he did she grabbed the opportunity to crowd up too close to him with her tears and her drama. Joel had done better with her, their whole lives, exploding easily and making up easily, too; her drama didn’t bother him. Daniel preferred to stay away from that. But he had dealt with her undermining of Matt all day long.
“Just say you have a problem with Matt, Mother. Just say it!”
“I have a problem with Matt! There, are you happy?”
Daniel gave her a look, a challenge.
“He’s frivolous! He’s pretty and shallow! He cares more about the latest styl
es than he does about these children. I’ve visited you; I’ve seen him have a hissy fit because he got a bad haircut, or couldn’t find the right shoes.”
Daniel snorted in disbelief. Sam came in, asking if anyone was making coffee, but stopped when he saw the looks on their faces. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Mom’s busy getting all the homophobia out of her system.”
“Daniel!” his father said. “Your mother is not a homophobe.” She had been an avid PFLAG member when Daniel came out, so that was the official position.
“I have no problem with you, Daniel,” Lydia said, crying now. “I’ve come to terms with your brother choosing to leave his children with you. It’s Matt I have trouble with. The idea that Matt is going to raise my grandchildren—Matt! and not me—I can’t get over that, I’m sorry.”
“Well, you’re going to have to get used to it,” Daniel said.
“Don’t you think I know that?” she cried.
They stood in stricken positions around the kitchen, and then Sam said quietly, “My only problem is that the kids have already been through so much. Being in a gay family, which is so much tougher, seems like a lot to ask of them.”
“Oh God,” Daniel said, turning to leave the room. Then he stopped and whirled around. “You know, Dad,” he said heatedly. “People always say that about being gay. When their kids come out, they say, ‘I’m just worried that your life is going to be harder.’ But it’s they who make their kids’ lives hard! It’s people like them, who don’t support their kids because their lives are supposedly going to be harder. It’s totally circular, can’t you see?”
“Tell me something,” his mother was saying, pointing at him. “What happens when Gal needs her first bra, when she gets her period? Can you imagine Matt dealing with that in a sensitive way?”
“Our friend Peter is a very talented drag queen,” Daniel said. “I thought I’d let him take care of it.”
There was silence. “Is that supposed to be funny?” Sam asked.
“Do you think Matt will make a good, committed father?” his mother demanded with a look that challenged Daniel to be honest, that tried to bore into his soul.