Mommies Who Drink

by Brett Paesel

  “Well, good,” says Jerri. “You’ve been great.”

  I’ve been great? I haven’t done anything.

  “So, Jerri, is there anything I can do to help you with the yearbook deadline?”

  “Oh, no, I’ve got it. I just have to wrap up the pages in Adobe, input the interviews, do a graphic for the cover, and copy it all on the color printer at school. I only needed to tell you that it’s going to be late. And I wanted to hear your thoughts on the interview questions.”

  “You’re sure I can’t help?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she says. “You’ve done so much. I just get worried because the parents at school are getting antsy. Calling me about when they’re going to have the yearbook. They want it yesterday, you know,” she says in a collusive tone.

  I nod. “Oh, I know.”

  I don’t know. I know only that I’ve been let off the hook somehow. I’ve managed to do absolutely nothing and have Jerri feel like I’m her best friend. I feel horrible and relieved. Horrible because I’m relieved.

  “You do such a fabulous job with the yearbook,” I say. “Everyone says so.”

  “Well, they say it behind my back. Because all I hear about is which pictures are missing and how late it is, and how Jackson got left off the dedication page last year.”

  I can feel Lana’s presence hovering, telling me to back off now. But I need to make Jerri feel better so that I can feel better.

  “Jerri, the dedication page last year was a masterpiece. It’s such a small thing that Jackson’s name was missing.”

  “Tell that to Jackson’s parents,” says Jerri, looking miserable.

  “Hey,” I say, like there should be a swelling strings sound track underneath my words. I have to stop myself from taking her chin in my hand. “You are only one person. There’s just so much one person can do. And you already do the work of twenty people. So that’s twenty times more than me or anyone else. And since most people only do half of what they say they do, it’s like you’re forty people.”

  Huh? Whatever it is that I’ve just said makes Jerri smile. Her eyes shine.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  I say many more things like this in the two hours that follow. I hold Jerri’s hand and tell her that she needs to take more time for herself. I say things I’ve heard on talk shows. I turn off Lana’s voice in my head. The voice that would tell me I’m being duplicitous and patronizing. Lana’s voice that would tell me that this is more about my seeking forgiveness than it is about comforting another person.

  After giving Jerri a hug on the threshold of her pale yellow house, I walk north on Highland. My sneakers slap the pavement.

  Slap, slap, slap.

  I feel a pull in my chest and a sharp stinging behind my eyes. Self-loathing fills me up like bile. I am corrupt. I am untrue. I am evil.

  Slap, slap, slap.

  I look up into the smog-cloaked hills. I need to feel better. I need to be washed clean. I need exoneration.

  Slap, slap, slap.

  Where will I find it?

  Slap, slap, slap.

  But, of course, I know. I will find exoneration where I always find it.

  Slap, slap, slap.

  I will find it on Friday.

  Slap.

  On Friday Lana will exonerate me. Lana will fix me. She will fix me with listening. She will fix me with a story about her having done something far worse. The other women will nod and they will all forgive me. Lana will buy me a glass of wine. We will move on to other stories. There will be other stories. I will feel soft. And then Lana will stop. And remember. She will stop and remember the house. She will stop it all to demand every single goddamned detail about Jerri’s yellow house.

  How Much Is that Baby in the Window?

  Pat and I have been on the road for two hours when we exit the highway. We wind through small towns, ending up in a dense forest. Our car chugs up a dirt road past No Trespassing signs and locked wooden gates. I shove thoughts of getting caught in a Ruby Ridge shootout to the back of my mind.

  We’re looking for Christian Outreach Adoptions, which operates out of someone’s home near San Diego. It’s taken quite some doing to get Pat to even consider going with an outfit with “Christian” in its name. But I point out that most adoption agencies have a Christian angle. Some agencies probably throw the word “Christian” in the title so you won’t think they’re people who will rob you blind. I tell him the “Christian” probably doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean you have to sign any Christian papers or take any Christian blood oaths. We’ll just pick a baby, fill out an application, and split.

  It’s dark by the time we ring the chimes of an old two-story home, miles from any other house. A boy in a red vest and a tie opens the door. He looks about twelve.

  “My father is expecting you,” he says, like an adult. He motions us into a foyer.

  I glance into a living room as the man/boy takes our coats. It takes a moment for me to make out anything, as the room is lit only by a few sconces illuminating small paintings of Christ. As we follow the careful walk of our juvenile host, I notice crisp white doilies on maroon chairs that look like no one’s ever sat in them. A Bible lies open on a gleaming wood table, a leather bookmark arranged across one page. I don’t allow myself to imagine what is going through Pat’s head.

  Mr. Boy leads us into an office.

  “Have a seat,” he says, making a graceful arc with one hand. We walk into the room, then turn around to see him back up and leave.

  The love seat squeaks as Pat and I settle. Three leather photo albums are lined up on the coffee table in front of us. On the wall above a mantel hangs a large photograph of a family. Two parents with two blond boys, the boys both in red vests.

  Pat coughs a bit and looks down at the albums.

  I pick one up and open it to see rows of pictures under plastic. Each picture shows a couple with a baby. The family groups are all posed about the same way. A child between a man and a woman, the smiling faces in a line. All of the children are white. I flip through the pages, fascinated by the rows of families in identical poses.

  I hear a voice behind me. “You’re looking at our success stories,” it says.

  I look around to see a man who looks like a skinny Les. He’s unusually tall and wears a suit. When Pat stands to shake his hand, the top of his head is level with skinny Les’s shoulder. I simply smile at him. Something tells me that the man is going to do most of his talking to Pat.

  “I apologize for making you wait,” he says. “I was just talking to a couple who got back from Russia with their daughter last week.”

  He sits across from us, his knees bending at chest level so that he looks like a broken mannequin.

  “I’m Mr. Brooks,” he says to Pat. “I believe I talked to your wife on the phone.”

  I feel Pat juggle things around in his mind. I suspect he didn’t anticipate talking at all. I’m the one who’s made the phone calls and talked to friends who’ve adopted. I’m the one who has gotten up in the middle of the night and paced around, only to crawl back into bed, wake him up, and say, “What if we die in a car accident and Spencer is left alone, what then?”

  I remind myself to thank Pat for not mentioning that the surest way for us to die in a car accident, orphaning our son, is for us to make repeated trips to the Christian Outreach Adoptions on roads that would test anyone’s faith.

  “Um . . . yes,” says Pat. “We’re looking into adopting our second child.”

  He wiggles next to me like he’s in a tight spot.

  Mr. Brooks lights up.

  “Well, that’s what we do,” he says. “We placed all of these children in loving homes.”

  He leans over and strokes the albums with his long hand.

  “The pictures are . . . very convincing,” says Pat.

  Mr. Brooks fingers the bindings. A pause descends as we watch Mr. Brooks’s hands move over the albums.

  “So how do we go about getting on
e?” says Pat, breaking in. “A baby. How can you help us get a baby?”

  Mr. Brooks sits back and smiles.

  “Sounds like I should tell you a little about us. Just a minute . . .”

  He pops up from his chair and pokes his head out of the office.

  “Jeremy?” he says.

  We wait for a bit, then red-vested Jeremy appears in the doorway.

  “Jeremy is our second,” says Mr. Brooks. Jeremy smiles like he’s done this before. “We got him from Russia when he was ten months old.”

  Pat and I nod at Jeremy.

  “Can I get you any coffee?” asks Jeremy.

  “No thanks,” we say.

  It’s as if Jeremy is a modern-day Pinocchio, working on his “real boy” skills. I can’t imagine this has anything to do with being adopted. One has only to look around the funereal home to see that this is an odd place for anyone to land.

  Mr. Brooks sits back down in his chair and starts his spiel. This is a great job, he says. He and his wife adopted their first son from Russia fifteen years ago and they were so happy with the results that they made it their mission to set other childless families up with Russian babies. Pat and I ask if he deals with other countries. And he says that he could, but he specializes in Russia and Eastern Europe.

  What’s unsaid, what Pat knows, I can tell by the tilt of his head, is that the children are white. And while I have no problem with adopting a white child, no problem with others wanting a white child, I want to work with people who embrace all possibilities of what a family can look like.

  I want to say, “So you help white families adopt white babies. Fair enough, but let’s put that on the brochure. Tell me that over the phone, before I risk my life on your dirt roads to get here.” The fact that we are talking around the race issue makes my jaw hurt.

  After twenty minutes of this Pat says, “Well, we’ll certainly think about it,” as he folds up the application Mr. Brooks has handed him. Everything in his gesture a dismissal.

  As Jeremy leads us out through the living room, I see on a big German grandfather clock that it’s eight o’clock in the evening. Is Jeremy’s red vest part of a school uniform he hasn’t removed? Or is it his Christian Outreach Adoptions costume? The one that shows him off to be the beautiful blond boy that people who walk through the door dream of having for their very own?

  That is so weird, Brett,” says Michelle when I tell her the story on the phone.

  “It was like a movie,” I say. “I just can’t stop thinking about Jeremy in that house. And where was the older boy? I heard this creaking from upstairs. I wonder if they keep him locked up there—in his tattered red vest, pulling out his hair, banging his head against the wall, chained to his bed—the boy they can’t show anyone.”

  “Are you sure you aren’t exaggerating this a little?”

  “Me? I’m telling you. It was bizarre. Where was Mrs. Brooks? Dead? Her bones bricked up in the wall somewhere? Maybe there were other red-vested white boys trapped in the basement, ready to take Jeremy’s place if he slipped up or passed out from starvation.”

  “Anyway,” says Michelle, ignoring my macabre imaginings, “I never ran into anything like that. But maybe being a lesbian automatically sifts through the folks you wouldn’t want to deal with.”

  “Yeah, well. That may be true. All I know is that there’s some twisted Christian shit going on in that house, something that has to do with red vests. And what about all those identically posed families in the albums? The whole thing was freaky as hell. I really don’t want to have another experience like that. I might come back with a chip lodged in my brain that controls my every action and thought.”

  Michelle says that’s ridiculous. She and Sarah had a great time visiting lots of agencies and they never returned with chips in their brains. And finally, they went to China with a whole group of people who got along famously and they came home with Faith.

  Himlata sits at her desk, pictures of various raced and gendered families tacked to bulletin boards behind her. A bronze statue of the many-armed elephant god stands in the corner of the room, a framed photo of Gandhi above it. Pat cocks his head toward the elephant and smiles at me.

  “I have a basket of toys outside the door,” Himlata says, sunlight glinting off the beads on her sari.

  Pat gets up and brings in the basket in for Spence, who pulls out a train and carries it into the hallway.

  “I work by myself, out of my home,” she says. “This is a newsletter I send out to my families twice a year, and here are pictures of our annual picnic.”

  She lays the newsletter on her desk so we can see.

  “That’s Rory,” she says, pointing to a photograph of a brown boy with big eyes. “His parents got him from Guatemala two years ago.”

  I imagine Pat and me picking up a little Guatemalan boy from a tiny village full of goats. We walk up a cobbled path to a small cottage, where we meet a large woman dressed in a brightly colored native thing. Behind her, round babies play on a stone floor. Smells of some rustic stew waft from a bucket that is suspended over a fire. She inclines her head to a chubby boy she calls Jorge. He will be ours. Pat and I beam like we’re in an ad for this sort of thing.

  “And this,” says Himlata, “is little Emma at the picnic.” She points to a brown girl with shiny dark hair. “Her parents got her from India two years ago.”

  I see Pat and me sitting on a floor in a modest Indian home, eating some great Indian curry. We wear brightly colored robes. A woman who looks like an Indian Salma Hayek, in a sari, jingles a bell. A curtain pulls open, revealing a toddler on a pillow, with a little red dot on her forehead. Salma calls her Kaia. The little girl gets up from the pillow and walks toward us, unsteady on her perfect pudgy feet. I pull the girl into my lap and put my cheek next to hers. I am filled with satisfaction at having rescued her from a life of identifying herself as “Ellen” while explaining frequent-flier miles to Delta customers calling from a hemisphere away.

  “Many of my families stay in touch with me long after the adoption. It’s such a personal process. And we will get to know each other very well,” Himlata says.

  I imagine Spence at his high school graduation. His gown whipping behind him as he strides toward us, his family. Pat, me, his sister, Kaia, and Auntie Himlata.

  “That’s great,” I say. “We’re very interested in the picnics and the newsletter. In fact, I’m a writer. I could do a column on a different adoption story every month.”

  “Magnificent,” says Himlata, her earrings jangling.

  I look around the office. An office that will become very familiar to me through the years, I’m sure.

  “So what’s the process?” asks Pat—a little too business, I think.

  Himlata tells us about the application. She tells us about the countries she deals with. She details a timeline. She lists her contacts with various organizations.

  “Guatemala sounds good to me,” says Pat. “If we were to go forward with that, what kind of fees would we need to pay?”

  Himlata looks down at a piece of paper.

  “Guatemala,” she says, looking up, “is about twenty-three thousand dollars.”

  Pat looks like Himlata just reached across the desk and punched him in the face.

  I can’t fucking believe it. Twenty-three K for little Jorge? Who gets all this cash?

  “Wow,” says Pat, like it’s his last word before he dies.

  I hear Spence banging something against a wall in the hallway. We sit for a bit, Himlata smiling like she’s been here before.

  “Okay,” I say, “how much for the Indian girl?”

  Himlata looks at her paper again.

  “It’s a little less,” she says, her voice even. “Twenty-two thousand.”

  “Wow,” I say. “Have you got anyone cheaper?”

  Himlata smiles.

  “China, I think,” she says. “Because it’s a little more efficient. You can get a baby for about seventeen thousand.”
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br />   Faith cost us about fifteen thousand,“ says Michelle, setting down her teacup. “But that was four years ago.”

  I watch Faith and Spence build a Lego structure to contain Spence’s collection of toy dinosaurs.

  “I knew it was going to be substantial,” I say. “But seventeen thousand. We’d be so in debt.”

  “Yeah,” says Michelle, smiling at the Lego structure, which looks a little unsteady. “But it’s less than a car. Way less than a Mercedes. I mean, when you think of the things Americans spend money on. Shouldn’t a kid cost more than a house?”

  “Well, sure,” I trail off. I don’t say the obvious, which is that Michelle’s analogy completely breaks down when you get to the resale value of a house versus the financial drain of a college education. But I can tell that this isn’t that sort of conversation. And I don’t want to come across to Michelle as the biggest, tightest, whitest mother bitch on the planet, trying to get the best deal on a brown baby that she can possibly wrangle. That would mean that there is less distance between me and Mr. Brooks from the Christian Outreach Adoptions than I would like to think.

  “Was it just the most amazing moment ever when you saw Faith for the first time?” I ask, showing my softer side. Michelle is all heart and I want her to think well of me. I don’t want her to think that I’m all about the bottom line.

  “When I first saw Faith,” she says, “she was being handed to another couple.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s this kind of cool and weird thing they do when you’re getting the babies in China. All the couples who are adopting go into this big room and we kind of line up in these chairs. When Sarah and I did it, we knew all the other couples by then. We’d come over on the plane together. About twelve couples, I think. And Sarah and I were the only dykes.”