Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  I had been wrong about insanity; I might be wrong about sanity, too. This party was my first weekend away from all that, back in the world I had once thought was reasonable. It would have been very difficult for me to have a good time at any party, when I was so unsure, and so alone.

  I was just old enough to have learned to set myself apart when I needed to— to be separate by choice. Before, I would have stayed at the side of the room, at the edge of the party’s life. I learned to be physically separate by watching Karla, who sat under tables, oblivious to everything at parties when she wasn’t having fun—full of mystery and an odd, introspective air. That’s what I wanted to convey.

  I sat on the stairs, leaning my head against the wall, and listened to the music, barely audible under the voices, though the apartment door was open. When Jake came out, I moved closer to the wall so that he could get by. Instead, he sat down next to me.

  I have to imagine words I don’t remember, but the imagining—like memory—is real.

  Jake’s smile was lopsided, and because it was not perfect, not what it should have been, it seemed intimate.

  “Which were you—on your way in, or out?”

  “Undecided,” I said.

  “I was thinking about leaving,” he said. “New Year’s Eve parties don’t make it. You keep thinking you’re supposed to be having a better time, and you never do.”

  “Last year was lovely,” I said. “We all went to Karla’s mother’s house and at midnight, we called Mary.”

  “Doesn’t Mary live in Texas?”

  “Dallas. It wasn’t midnight there yet.”

  “You could follow midnight around the world that way,” Jake said. The planed, flat surfaces of his face connected when he smiled.

  After dropping out of Antioch, Jake had been drafted. This was 1953, and there was a war on in Korea. He wasn’t wearing his uniform; if I had to guess, I’d say he was wearing brown corduroy pants and a blue shirt. His hair, brown, hung straight and fine across his forehead, which rose flat and high over his dark eyes.

  “Do you hate the Army?” I asked.

  “It’s worse than anything anybody ever says: Nothing redeems it.”

  “What do you do? March around, clean rifles, all that stuff?”

  “I did. Now I’m in Special Services, not quite so bad. I’m in a photography school.”

  “That sounds as though it might be a little redeeming.”

  “I won’t allow it. I can be redeemed, but not the Army. So my redemption—my revenge—is photography school. I’m learning to see through a camera, to be a camera. They made me say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and they made me wear khaki underwear, but now I’m learning what I want to learn.”

  “Khaki underwear? Even on your days off?”

  “When I start wearing khaki shorts on my days off, I’ll know they’ve got me.”

  “Do you get to do anything you really want to, when you’re not looking through a camera?”

  “Sure. You’ve always got to find something you really want to do, and then you just do it. I come into the city. I go to parties. I talk to you.”

  I could only smile.

  “And you?” Jake said. “Do you do what you really want to do? If you could do anything you wanted to do tonight, New Year’s Eve, on the edge of 1953, what would it be?”

  Want was such a strong word. “I’d like to go someplace I’ve never been,” I replied.

  We paused for a minute.

  “Have you ever been to Staten Island?” he asked.

  The native New Yorker blushed. “No.”

  “We could go over on the ferry, and when we get there, we’ll get off and walk straight ahead, wherever that takes us.”

  Jake was an explorer, not a surveyor; he would never stay to measure. He was a person who found new places, new things, and new people, and then told others about what he’d found. That was how he saw the world: always brand new. Everything he did was an adventure, and every place he went was newly discovered. Life was a romance. He was the captain of the Staten Island Ferry, sailing through the dark and icy waters of the Hudson River for the first time; natives waited for him on the far shore, and though they might be wild, he would know them, and love them. They would enchant him.

  The second lesson in Jake’s charm, after his smile, was that it was like a politician’s, totally focused on you while he was in your presence. Later he might forget your name; but while he was with you, he was hard to resist.

  After our walk from the ferry, we wandered into a neighborhood bar, decorated with bits of pine and Christmas tinsel, to warm ourselves. A Schaeffer beer sign on the wall opposite the bar offered “Season’s Greetings” in big red letters. A few men sat at the long, dark counter, ringing out the old year in wet circles on the bar’s shiny wooden surface. These people were, for the moment, and for whatever reason, where they wanted to be. Their fellowship was no less deep for being fleeting. Circumstances made them friends, not anything else. One of them smiled at us, surprising me; I had never been in this kind of bar before, and expected it to be a sullen place.

  “Cold?” the stranger asked.

  “Freezing,” Jake said, and we both smiled. “We’ve never been here before, and we thought we’d start the year off by seeing Staten Island.”

  The men laughed. “That’s the way to start the year, all right,” the bartender said.

  “Listen,” said the first man, “lotta good people on Staten Island.”

  “Name three,” another man said.

  “Him, him, and him,” somebody else volunteered, pointing at the bartender.

  “I like it here,” I said.

  I felt as though I’d been allowed into a new part of the world, one that I’d always thought was private and closed, especially to women. No one in my family drank—except before family dinners, when the men would gather in the kitchen for schnapps, each holding a shot glass, calling out the toast—L’chaim!—and then throwing their heads back to swallow the amber liquid in one gulp before going back to the dining room to rejoin the women and children for dinner. I was sixteen before I found out that people drank in living rooms before dinner, men and women sipping slowly together. I’d been in bars at Antioch, but those were college bars. It wasn’t that nice girls didn’t want to go into corner bars then; it was that they—or I—didn’t think they’d be allowed past the door. Now I’d found a passport, stamped “Good for Tonight Only.” My enjoyment must have showed.

  They all smiled, and said in unison: “Happy New Year!”

  “You live in the city?” one of them asked Jake.

  He shook his head. “I’m in the Army. I’m on leave from Fort Monmouth.” Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, was less than ten miles from Marlboro State Mental Hospital.

  “Lucky you—you RA (Regular Army)?”

  “No,” Jake said. “I was drafted.”

  “I’ll buy you a drink for the holiday; for a GI and his girlfriend.” He smiled at me. “You know how Staten Island got its name?”

  Everybody else groaned.

  “You know Henry Hudson, the one they named the river after? He was the first white man who ever saw this place. He was sailing up the river and he saw this chunk of land, and he said to the other guys on the boat, ‘S’dat an island?’ Like he couldn’t believe it was worth it. And that’s why it’s called Staten Island.”

  I laughed. We drank together, and wished each other “Happy New Year!” yet again when we left.

  Jake took me to Penn Station and waited for the train with me. By the time I got to my mother’s house, the sun had come up. On the first day of the New Year, the world was still and golden as I moved through it.

  4. JIL

  THE CHOSEN BABY

  I’ve always known I was adopted. I don’t remember my parents ever telling me. It was simply a fact that went without saying. After all, did your mother tell you she gave birth to you?

  My parents gave me a book, the first one I can remember, a slim book with a dark-green cove
r, a little faded and worn. It had lost its dust jacket somewhere along the way, and thin threads floated delicately off the spine like spider’s webbing. Published in 1939, The Chosen Baby was a must-read for decades of adopted children. The warm watercolor pictures tell the story of the perfect couple, Mr. and Mrs. Brown, who are very much in love: “Only one thing was wrong. They had no babies of their own, although they always longed for a baby to share their home.”

  A lady named Mrs. White helps Mr. and Mrs. Brown find “a rosy, fat baby boy.” Peter is clearly not a newborn when Mr. and Mrs. Brown meet him; he looks at them and smiles, laughs, then kicks his legs and wiggles his toes. But there is no suggestion that Peter has come from anywhere but heaven, and Mr. and Mrs. Brown know right away that he is their chosen baby. Soon a sister arrives from the same magical place, and they grow up healthy and rosy: “Peter and Mary like to hear the story of how they were adopted. And Mr. and Mrs. Brown and Peter and Mary are a very happy family.”

  The book was read to me; eventually, I read it myself, and the message sank in: I was chosen. I was lucky. We were a very happy family.

  It seemed so logical: You want a baby, you decide to acquire a baby, and then you go and get a baby—like a car, or a toaster. Early on, I thought every child was adopted. In the way children have of accepting a magician’s trick as perfectly ordinary, I accepted the magic of adoption. It was orderly and comprehensible— much more comprehensible than the real story of how babies are made, one I learned a few years later.

  Growing up, my best friend Linda lived across the street. She was everything I wasn’t: daring, fierce, fearless. Only six months older, but vastly more sophisticated, Linda was the first person I ever heard say fuck out loud. Lying under the sprinkler in my backyard, Linda revealed the secret of the erection to me, which explained a great deal about the mechanics of sex. In the winter of first grade as we walked home from school Linda said, grinning, “My mother can’t have children, and neither can I.” Then she laughed.

  I didn’t understand. How did Linda know she couldn’t have children? And if her mother couldn’t, did that mean Linda was adopted, too? Was this her way of telling me?

  As I tried to unravel the mystery, I realized that she was staring at me. “Don’t you get it, dodo?” she asked, poking me in the side. “If my mother can’t have children, how the heck can I be here? It’s crazy!”

  Finally, I got it: If your mother couldn’t have children, then you wouldn’t exist. Yet somehow I did.

  By third grade I had it fully figured out: the facts of life, and the facts of my life. My mother didn’t believe in skimping on the birds and bees. Given that her own mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant with an Old-World inability to talk about anything related to sex, my mother erred in the opposite direction. My brother and I were never allowed to say those cute words other families used, like wee-wee and poopy, number one and number two. We knew only the clinical words: penis, vagina, rectum, bowel movement. And sexual intercourse: Never sleeping together, or making love, or even just sex.

  I knew all the right names for all the implicated body parts, but had no idea what really happened. Questions about where babies came from, or where I came from, were discouraged. I knew I was adopted, but once I was old enough to wonder about the story of “the chosen baby,” it was clear that the door was closed. Any questions I asked were dismissed with an impatient, “I don’t know.”

  “We’re very open,” proclaimed my mother. “We don’t hide anything.” But when something more specific came up, there was only discomfort, evasion, and a palpable desire to end the discussion.

  So we pretended that what I had been told early on was enough. I learned to be quiet, and to live with the pale shadow of a story I’d been given.

  It was a sweet, simple story, the story of my adoption, a story I was told at such a young age that I was never really sure I’d actually heard it. Maybe I had dreamed it, or made it up: A young couple, still in college, marry too quickly, and then plan to divorce, but she discovers she is pregnant. The marriage is over; she can’t raise a baby alone, so she does what is best for the baby (she is selfless; it is never about what is best for her). She saves the baby, throws it ashore from the sinking ship, into the safe and loving arms of my personal Mr. and Mrs. Brown.

  In the legal papers, it’s called abandonment. In adoption terminology, it’s called putting up for adoption, a term that comes from the infamous orphan trains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when as many as a quarter of a million children from the cities of the East Coast were sent by train to the Midwest and West. At each town where the train stopped, children were placed on display in the station—“put up” on platforms—so local families could look them over and make a choice, usually a child who looked best suited for hard work.

  I wasn’t chosen for my ability to work hard; in fact, I wasn’t “chosen” at all, despite the book’s title. For many years, I believed I was. The story of the Brown family made such an impression on me that the image I had of my “birth” was of a long white room, like a hospital nursery, but larger. It looked the way heaven looks in the movies, glowing with warm, white light, soft and fuzzy at the edges, as if the walls weren’t really there, the room unwinding into a glowing bright infinity. Down the length of the long, long room stood row upon row of bassinets, and in each one was a pink and white baby swaddled in a soft white blanket. In my vision, a nurse in a starched apron leads my mother and father down the rows. They stop and look into each bassinet, then look at each other and shake their heads, no, not this one, moving slowly down the rows, until they get to the one—the baby who is just right for them. And they scoop me up and take me home forever.

  By the time I discovered the real story, the long room with its rows of bassinets was so firmly implanted in my personal geography that sometimes it is still the birth I see for myself.

  We pretended we were open and honest. But we were able to lay claim to our honesty only because everything that might cause pain was walled off where it couldn’t hurt us.

  We pretended we looked alike. I was blond and my mother was brown-haired; her eyes were pale, cool blue; mine green. She was dark-skinned; I was pale. I had a large, pointy chin; she was always ashamed of what she called her recessive “Queen Elizabeth chin.” But people saw a mother and a daughter, and they said, bending down, leaning in, You look just like your mommy, and You’re the spitting image. We smiled and said, Thank you, nodding politely, never looking at each other.

  She never commented, casually, “Isn’t it funny,” though it happened everywhere we went, for years. I was large-boned, a stocky child, healthy, with thick hands and short, broad fingers. She had tiny hands with thin fingers, chicken hands, my father called them, and small, pointy-toed feet, made for the high heels and the deep V of 1950s pumps. I was ashamed of my wide, flat feet, and took to standing with one foot planted on the other shin, storklike, embarrassed.

  We didn’t speak much, my mother and me; we rarely touched. I have no memory of her stroking my hair, of her cool hand on mine, the feel of her fingers circling my back, heavy on my shoulder. And years later when I found the woman whose eyes were green, whose feet were broad, whose chin was pointy, she put out her hand to me. I saw the thick small fingers, and I thought: She has my hands. She has my hands.

  5. BUNNY

  EARLY DAYS

  In a sense, each new life actually has no definite beginning.

  Its existence is inherent in the existence of the parent cells

  and these, in turn, have arisen from the preceding parent cells.

  GERALDINE LUX FLANAGAN

  THE FIRST NINE MONTHS OF LIFE

  One month later, we were married.

  I wouldn’t have to live any longer in my perfectly rectangular room in the employees’ hall at Marlboro, where I kept the light on all night and listened to the screams, and Jake wouldn’t have to sleep on a cot in the barracks at Fort Monmouth and be awakened by a trumpet playing re
veille.

  Jake said he loved me, and I said I thought I loved him, too. (It was hard for me to make a definitive statement.) He said we would love each other for eighty-seven years, exactly. I said that didn’t seem long enough. By his count, I would have been 106 when we stopped loving each other, and undoubtedly still in my prime.

  My mother tended to think we hadn’t loved each other long enough quite yet.

  “Who is he? What do you know about him?” she asked me. “What do you know about his life, his family? You don’t have to rush. He’ll still be here in six months, and so will you. What’s the hurry? How do you know this one is the right one? Wait a while, see how you feel, and then if you still want to, you can marry him. Slow down. Get to know him before the wedding, not after.”

  Why was she so stubborn? Why couldn’t she understand how I felt? Why was my sister on my mother’s side?

  I sounded so sure when I talked to my mother because anything else would have been capitulation. It was now or never, Jake or no one, true love or nothing. There was never a bridge between her point of view and mine. One of us had to be right; clearly the other one was then wrong. As an adult, a mother of my own children, I’ve tried to think of what my mother might have said that would have convinced me to wait, and not marry someone I had known for only a month.

  But there is nothing she could have said that would have stopped me. If she had threatened not to come to the wedding, I would have been sorry she couldn’t be there. If she’d forbidden me to marry him, I would have done it anyway. She tried to bribe me with a trip to Europe; I wasn’t interested.

  Though I would never have admitted it then, there was always a part of me that didn’t take the marriage seriously: If it didn’t work, we could always get a divorce—shrug. At least getting married solved a lot of problems: I didn’t have to live at Marlboro. I didn’t have to go back to school. I could be free, an adult. I would belong somewhere, and I would belong to someone. I only had one decision to make—to get married. After that, Jake would make decisions for both of us; there would be no problem he couldn’t solve. I wouldn’t have to feel as if I’d abandoned my mother, who was still new to widowhood, by going back to school in Ohio— though, of course, I was abandoning her in the worst possible way.