Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Portia explained that she had recently returned from Europe. “I’ve sort of been doing it on my own,” she said to his obvious disapproval.

  He examined her, made notes, pronounced her healthy, gave her proper vitamins and a test for gestational diabetes. When they returned to his consulting room, Portia told him that she wanted to discuss adoption with someone.

  He looked at her blankly. “Discuss?”

  “Adoption.”

  “You mean, you’re giving up this child?”

  Now the disapproval was palpable.

  “I’d like to consider it.”

  “May I ask why?” he said.

  She looked at him in complete disbelief. “No,” Portia said. “You can’t.”

  After a minute, he said: “I know a group here in town that takes in young women in your situation.”

  “I don’t need to be taken in,” she said unkindly. “I just want to talk to someone who can explain the options.”

  He frowned at her. “I don’t know if you really understand the trauma of giving your baby away,” he said with highly disingenuous concern.

  “I don’t either,” Portia said deliberately, as if to a child. “That is why I would like to discuss it with someone.” She got up. “Do you have a name for me?”

  He held her gaze for a long moment. He must not, it occurred to her, be used to single pregnant girls who gave him a hard time.

  “The nurse has a list,” he said finally.

  Portia collected the list and took it home with her. Catholic Adoption Services. Lutheran Services. LDS Family Services. New Hope Christian. The idea of the people who would call these agencies, people who only wanted a baby sanctioned by their own faith, appalled her. At the bottom of the page, in a different typewriter font—as if it were a grudging afterthought—was the state agency number for adoptive services. They could see her the following week.

  She paid her rent in traveler’s checks. When those ran out, she drew on her bank account in Hanover. One of the librarians who saw her every day asked if she would tutor a couple of seventh graders who were failing English. Their names were Milagro and Gloria, and they were cousins. Portia had never taught anything except soccer, but the girls tried hard and got a little better. She was in the library study room with them when the baby kicked for the first time. Squealing, they put their hands on her belly.

  Portia finished The Old Curiosity Shop on the morning of her appointment with the social worker, a transplanted Californian who asked to be called Lisa and whose husband taught Latin just over the hill at Andover. To Portia’s disappointment, Lisa, too, seemed quite taken with the idea that Portia couldn’t know what was best for her, that she must be unaware there was support, in the state of Massachusetts, for single mothers.

  “I get calls every day,” she explained patiently to Portia. “Women who gave up their babies in the fifties and sixties. They’ve never gotten over it. It ruined their lives.”

  “My life will not be ruined,” Portia said firmly.

  “Back then,” the social worker went on, “the idea was that the baby would get a family that could give it what a single mother couldn’t, and the birth mother would just magically forget that she had ever given birth. She was supposed to go back to school, meet somebody, get married, and have her real babies. But you couldn’t become a mother and then sign a piece of paper that said you weren’t a mother. Biology is a little tougher than that. And today there isn’t the stigma of a single parent.”

  “I’m aware of that,” said Portia, who was, after all, the daughter of a militant single mother.

  “You’re clearly an intelligent woman. You can go to college, and the college might well have day care facilities. You’d be eligible for medical coverage and other benefits. You think you can’t do this, but you can.”

  “I don’t want to do it,” said Portia, losing her temper. “That’s the reason. Would you be happier if I had an abortion?”

  “You can’t,” said Lisa. “It’s too late.”

  “I know it’s too late!” Portia told her. She was just barely in control by this point. “I mean, if I’d had one. Listen, I’m pro-choice, and this is my choice, okay? And please don’t tell me there won’t be families willing to adopt a white newborn.”

  Lisa sighed. “No, I wouldn’t tell you that.”

  “Because you can’t have that many white newborns coming down the pike, I’m guessing.”

  The woman shrugged. Portia almost felt sorry for her. But not sorry enough to stop making her perfectly valid point.

  “How many? I’m just curious.”

  “What?” said Lisa, though she probably knew exactly what she was being asked.

  “White newborns. Available for adoption in this state. Last year, say.”

  She waited.

  “Oh… well, I’d have to look it up.”

  “Ballpark.” Portia folded her arms.

  Lisa sighed. “I do remember one, last year. I don’t think there were others.”

  “And how many families willing to adopt that one white newborn?”

  The social worker looked at her. She was no longer trying to be nurturing or even polite. “Quite a number,” she said at last. “As I’m sure there will be quite a number hoping to adopt your child. If you continue to make that decision.”

  “Past tense,” Portia said unkindly. “I’ve made it.”

  “But you don’t have to make it yet. You can wait. You can see how you feel once your baby is born. I can promise you, there will still be families then.”

  “No,” Portia said icily. “Look, it’s my life and my decision. I’m trying to do the right thing, for both of us. Can you just explain to me, what is the problem here?”

  But she was the problem. In the silence that followed, Portia understood this very clearly. There was something off about her, a woman who clearly could raise her own child and bafflingly didn’t want to. It had not occurred to her that she would run into this difficulty. Honed as she was on the brutality of the clinic bomber, the “pro-life” assassin, and the prayerful protesters helpfully pointing out that young girls terminating their pregnancies had the agonies of hell to look forward to, she’d naively assumed that choosing to carry and give birth to her child would have everybody standing up and applauding. Not so.

  The social worker leaned forward and spoke softly. “Can I ask you, is this pregnancy the result of a rape or an incestuous relationship?”

  Disgusted, Portia shook her head.

  “Is there something you’d like the police to know about?”

  Yeah, she thought fiercely. I’d like the police to know that I’m asking for an entirely reasonable and not to mention perfectly legal form of help and not getting it.

  “No. Look, are you going to be able to handle this adoption? Should I go to New Hampshire or Vermont?”

  Lisa looked sharply at her. “That’s not necessary. I just wanted to be sure you had adequate counseling. In fact, I’d like to refer you to one of our staff therapists. It’s part of our service package,” she said.

  Portia looked down, intensely irritated. Then she agreed, made another appointment for the following month, and left. She had given them the very least amount of information she legally could: a name, a Social Security number, birth date, level of education. She’d said nothing about Tom except that he, like her, was Caucasian and college educated. No, she did not wish to give his name.

  “Has he been notified of the pregnancy?”

  Portia hesitated. “Yes,” she said.

  “And you have discussed this decision with him?”

  What did they want from her? thought Portia, struggling to contain herself. “Yes. Sure.”

  “All right,” Lisa said sadly. “I’ll get the paperwork started.”

  There was no master plan. Portia did not intend to micromanage the adoption, choose the family, name her baby. She had no wish to present Tom with the fact of what had happened, torment her mother, explain herself to Dartm
outh College, or do any single thing that might bring any other human being into her confidence. She barely wanted to be in her own confidence. She would be writing no letters, contacting no registry, doing no search for the child she was determined to relinquish. What she wanted—the only thing she truly wanted—was to place her healthy baby in good, responsible hands and then do the very thing Lisa had declared to be impossible: magically forget that she had ever given birth. She refused to believe it would not be possible. Those women, the ones whose lives had been destroyed, they weren’t like her. They’d been forced and pressured and abandoned. Of course they’d felt violated. Of course they’d been distraught and enraged. But this was different. Not because she was a better person. There was nothing to be proud of. She had been born later and given choices. She felt for those women, of course, but she would be able to do what they could not do: become a mother and then sign a piece of paper that said she wasn’t one.

  By the time all this was over, she would have been in Lawrence for seven months and three seasons. She would have read thirteen Dickens novels, with only Edwin Drood left to finish (she would somehow never, in the ensuing eighteen years, find time to finish it), and coached Milagro and Gloria to final grades of B and B plus, respectively. She would have paid rent for the first time and interviewed doctors for the first time (after the unsavory encounter with Dr. Beerkin, she shopped around until she found a grandmotherly OB-GYN in an office at the hospital). She would have lost upward of fifty games of checkers to the woman with Down syndrome next door, whose delight at winning never seemed to diminish.

  It hadn’t even been especially hard, she would think years later. Ever since she could remember, she had fretted about the idea of growing up, always somehow worried that she would not be able to actually achieve adulthood when the time came. Since freshman year, she had watched women about to graduate go sloping off to interviews at Career and Employment Services, unsteady in unfamiliar heels, their customary sweats and jeans replaced with broad-shouldered suits. Sometimes they would fly off to Cleveland or Chicago or New York for further interviews and return with incredible stories of hotel rooms with concierge service and in-room movies—everything on the corporate tab. After commencement, off they would go to their tiny apartments and the late night car service home (again, on the company) when the account or the deal required them to stay late. They came back to visit and brought new tales of their new lives in the great world. To the college girls still in their nightgowns with their open chem or econ textbooks and powdered cocoa, they spoke of group runs with the Roadrunners Club in the park, summer shares on Fire Island, credit cards, dry cleaning, and wine tastings. Somehow, Portia had allowed herself to believe that this—this package of employee perks and health club memberships—represented adult life, not just because the former rowers and field hockey players and sorority treasurers had transformed themselves into businesswomen, speed-walking to work in their Lady Foot Locker sneakers, but because their lives didn’t look remotely like Susannah’s life. That part of it was a good thing. That part of it, Portia thought she might like very much. But in the end, she didn’t think she could ever pull off such a transformation.

  Yet in the seven months she’d spent in Lawrence, it hadn’t been at all difficult to assemble the trappings of adulthood, the accumulation of objects, the rituals, the paper trail of bills and checks. Not every twenty-year-old woman was a junior in college, it seemed; some were living on their own in places like Lawrence, paying their rent, making small talk with the bored teenager in the checkout line, taking care that there was enough toilet paper. It was, she would think perversely, a thing to be sort of proud of, perhaps not on the scale of bringing a human being into the world, but unlike the human being in question, a thing she would certainly be taking away with her. And when she went back to Dartmouth, and when she saw Tom again, she would not be the same childish person she had been, but a placid, seasoned woman, moving forward, unencumbered and unafraid, and above all else, contained. No one would ever know what had happened here. Portia would barely know, herself.

  She clung stubbornly to this idea.

  Through the summer, which was very hot, she grew ponderous and breathless. The sisters next door moved on, complaining of the construction dust, and a man Portia didn’t like the look of took the apartment. The counselor she’d been coerced into seeing tried to get her to talk about the adoption. She did not want to talk about the adoption. Portia did not even want to approve the family. She didn’t want to know anything about where the baby was, only that it would be safe, as if they could promise that. She let them tell her only that the couple were from Watertown, in their thirties, and married for a decade. They were, according to Lisa, “ecstatic.”

  All right.

  And so she went home and tried to settle into The Mystery of Edwin Drood and waited for it to begin.

  On the ponderously hot morning of Sunday, August 19, her water broke as she was walking home along the Merrimack River with a bag of the few things she could still stand to eat: Triscuit crackers, peanut butter, carrots, and cranberry juice. At first, she thought she had somehow broken the juice and irrationally looked for the red liquid on the ground. When it wasn’t there, it took her a long, addled moment to realize what was happening. She stood where she was, deliberately considering her options, stunned by how quickly her world had just contracted to a few mundane decisions.

  Get home, put the food in the kitchen, call the taxi?

  Set down the bag, ask a passerby to phone the doctor?

  Stand very still until someone noticed that she was having a baby and took care of her?

  She went on home, stopping twice to fully appreciate the earliest (and, sadly, mildest) contractions, and when she arrived, she carefully placed the plastic bag on the kitchen table. Of course, she would not be eating this food now, but wouldn’t she want it when she came home? After? Or would these always be the foods of her pregnancy, things she would never want to see again, like the vast dresses she’d been wearing for the past two months and the dirty Keds her swollen feet had come to rely on, and the 1960s television shows that seemed to dominate the local channels? She was trying to think past the elephant, which was not just in the room but squarely in her path. She did not want to go to the hospital too soon and be sent home, multiplying what she imagined would be, at the very least, an uncomfortable journey, but after only another ninety minutes she decided to move while she was still competent to manage the trip. She called the taxi company, and while she waited for it to arrive, she called Lisa and told her what was happening. The social worker at the hospital would be informed, Lisa said, and she would call the parents now and tell them what was happening. “Good luck,” she told Portia, who was momentarily stymied by the use of the word parents.

  She had not attended Lamaze classes, not because she objected to the idea of it, but because she couldn’t face not having a partner. She had, however, dutifully read a book about the method, which—sadly—she had to jettison entirely once the contractions hit their stride. Within minutes of changing into a gown she was gasping for relief, which they seemed happy enough to give her, and with the lower half of her body mercifully numb, she fell almost peacefully asleep and awoke four hours later, nearly fully dilated. The room’s other bed had acquired an occupant, a sleeping woman with straw yellow hair and a ruddy complexion. She was immense, her midsection so large but so ill defined that Portia couldn’t tell whether she had had her baby yet or not, and she never found out, because as soon as her lower abdomen came jolting back to life, they moved her down the corridor to an antiseptic little chamber.

  The grandmotherly OB-GYN was away on the Cape with her actual grandchildren for the weekend. Her replacement was called “Dr. B.” He came in clapping his hands but never actually looked up from the end of the table, and he never asked her name. She tried not to take this personally, as he wasn’t much of a conversationalist in general and made use of a single abbreviated word, one size fits a
ll, to conduct the labor. “’Kay,” he said at the end of each contraction. “’Kay,” he said when the next one began. “’Kay” meant whatever it had to mean: Good job. Try harder. Stop pushing. Push harder. It was extraordinary how quickly she deciphered all this. She wanted to laugh at him, but by the time she caught her breath, it didn’t seem funny anymore. “’Kay,” he said, “next one.”

  It occurred to her that she didn’t know what the B stood for or if it represented his first name or his last, and then it occurred to her that that was something to add to the blessedly long list of things she did not know and would not know, like her baby’s name, and what he—or she—would turn out to be, and who would love him. She did not believe that she could love him. Susannah, whatever else was wrong with her, had thrown herself into maternal love, and Portia felt, again, that she must be very unnatural, and it did pain her that she did not already love her baby, did not believe she would eventually love her baby, would wish her baby away in a breath if she could catch her breath, especially if the pain went, too. But she couldn’t do anything if she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t be expected to produce the baby, or whatever raging thing had gotten itself trapped deep inside her, not if every time she tried to gather her strength, the deep pain of it came soaring through her body, leaving no appendage unturned, making every part of her crackle horribly. She remembered now that she had asked for the version of labor without pain, but when she tried to bring this up, it came out sounding sort of vague, as if she were still in Europe and attempting to accomplish the task at hand in some unfamiliar language, managing only to state the obvious: “Hurts, hurts, stop.”

  “’Kay,” said Dr. B. “Third time’s the charm.”

  Was he trying to be funny? Portia thought.

  Then, in her acrid fog, she thought: I have to do this three times?

  “You got anyone here, sweetheart?” said the nurse at her ear.

  Portia turned vaguely in her direction. “What?”