by Tim Kreider
This, I think, is what Sterne is doing in Tristram Shandy. Much as Mom and I liked Sterne’s voice and wit and his high unseriousness, what we remember best about Tristram Shandy are its characters. Sterne makes affectionate fun of the harmless forms of madness that afflict men in middle age, after their biological duty has been discharged—what he calls their “hobby-horses.” Walter Shandy has crackpot theories about the effects of Christian names, physiognomy, and the pineal gland on a child’s character and fate, and compiles a comprehensive guide to the care and instruction of his son—a “Trista-paedia.” Uncle Toby is a man monomaniacally obsessed with the subject of military science—you have to avoid any careless allusion to it lest he start holding forth on ramparts and bastions, half-moons and ravelins, deploying maps and diagrams and using jackboots as mortars and threatening to lead you on a tour of his backyard battlefield—who literally would not harm a fly.* Remember that Tristram, our ostensible narrator, is writing as a grown man, and his father was already in his fifties when he was born, so it’s likely that Walter Shandy and all the other characters he recalls so fondly—Uncle Toby, Trim, Dr. Slop and Obadiah—are gone. His portraits are drawn not from life but from memory—or from stories, since so much of the book takes place before Tristram’s birth. By rearranging the dreary chronology of real life, Sterne shows us the people he loves alive in their ridiculous prime, rescuing them from the oblivion of the black page.
Mom and I were back home, walking down the brick walk from the car to the house at a rate that seemed likely to take us at least five minutes to arrive at the door. To make conversation on the way I asked Mom whatever had happened to the neighbors’ dog. This dog had been our dog Maggie’s nemesis. We would see it at the top of the hill across the front pasture, right on the horizon line, a big black dog sitting just on our side of the fence and barking in a blatant provocation. Maggie hated this dog. She would sit staring at it intently, ears pointy, her whole body poised to charge, as if waiting for the order. “Maggie,” I’d say, “Go get it!” and—off she would go like a bottle rocket across the lawn, over the stone wall and up the adjoining pasture to the top of the hill in seven seconds flat. And the other dog would flee, successfully repelled!
“It died,” my mother said smugly. “I always knew that dog would die.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “What did it do?” I was imagining some fatal canine hamartia like chasing cars or eating pesticides.
“It got old and died,” she said, with satisfaction.
Mom never heard the end of Tristram Shandy. No, no, she didn’t die, Mom’s just fine, don’t you worry. In fact, a year after her collapse, she claims she can feel new connections forming in her brain: she’s learning moviemaking software, writing heterodox statements of faith, discovering graphic novels. She even went ziplining in Costa Rica, which no way in hell would I. She just kept falling asleep during Slawkenbergius’s Tale, a pretty labored double entendre in which a man with an extremely long nose sets all of Strasburg in an uproar, and we never recovered from the longueur. I eventually finished the book, though I’m not sure if Laurence Sterne did. Scholars disagree as to whether Tristram Shandy was ever finished or only interrupted. When Death turns up at Shandy’s door in Volume VII, he reacts with the aplomb of Bugs Bunny: he flees. Sterne ducked him for as long as he could, but the old bore finally caught up with him when he was fifty-five. If he hadn’t come to the end of his story, he had, at least, reached a good leaving-off point, which is probably the best any of us can hope for. One of his own characters pronounces the story “the best of its kind, I ever heard.” What my father said on his deathbed, at age fifty-six, was: “It’s been great.”
On my last day in Maryland I took a walk around the farm, revisiting landmarks from the map of my childhood that I hadn’t seen in years: the Big Rock, the Brainfruit Tree, the ford where deer and cattle and us kids always crossed the stream. Maggie went along with me. I am not what’s called “a dog person,” but my love for this particular dog is unsound. The first time I saw her I exclaimed, “Why, but this is not like a dog at all! It is more like an otter, or a seal!” She was short-haired and sleek and wiggly, with a pointy snout. I immediately picked her up and held her up in the air above my head. She went limp in my arms and looked gamely around at the world from her new perspective. Whenever I get out of my car at the farm now and see her loping up to me sort of sidewise (which is how she’s run ever since Mom accidentally ran over her head with a riding mower years ago) and wagging her tail, I behave like someone on a very short supervised visit from an institution. “Maaaaag-gie!” I yell. “Mags Marie! Maggie Maroo! Maggle! Magwort! Maaaaaaaaaaags!” I get down and hold her nose in my hand and nuzzle her face and whap her vigorously on the sides. Ah—a solid thump! A solid dog.
Maggie followed me around the whole perimeter of the seventy-acre property, down hills and across streams and through the woods, like a boy’s best friend. But Maggie is an old dog now, over fourteen, and the effort to keep up exhausted her. On the last steep hillside before home her feeble hind legs gave out on her, and she collapsed onto her haunches, panting helplessly up at me. She would live only a few months longer; someone ran over her a second time, and this time it took. I crouched down next to her and put my arms around her. “O Maggie,” I told her, “you’re the fastest dog in the world.” I whispered it in her ear: “The fastest dog in the world.”
Sister World
My half sister Sophie and I talk sometimes about how weirdly normal our relationship feels after having known each other only a year. She lives three blocks from me now, and we get together for dinner or drinks once every couple of weeks. We’re like pals. But every once in a while I’ll throw an extra tablespoon of capers into a sauce on a whim and she’ll tell me, “My mother makes this same recipe, and she always adds extra capers, too,” or I’ll be distracted from our conversation by her eyes, the same blue as my own, and the strangeness of it all makes us shiver. She knows what certain fleeting half expressions on my face mean—she can, in a sense, read my mind. Not many of us see our siblings as particularly miraculous; they’re more like randomly assigned roommates we had to live with for eighteen years. As Sophie once put it, most people don’t think about their biological connection to their families in the same way that, after about age seven, they quit thinking about the sky—wondering why it’s blue, why it turns red at sunset, how high it goes, what clouds are made of, how come they don’t fall down. “But the sky is pretty cool,” she insisted. I nodded soberly. “The sky is cool,” I admitted.
I’d always thought of being adopted as being about as interesting and significant a fact about myself as being left-handed or having family in Canada. What seems freakish and fascinating to me is something so commonplace most people take it for granted: being related. As an outsider and a newcomer to this phenomenon—what people call kinship, or blood—I may have a privileged perspective on it, like Tocqueville visiting America. What’s so familiar to you it’s invisible still seems outlandish to me. For most people the bonds of blood and history are inextricable, but I experienced them in isolation from one other, just as my transgendered friend Jenny has had the rare vantage of living as both a man and a woman. Meeting biological relatives for the first time in midlife, I felt like one of those people, blind from birth, whose vision is surgically restored, and must blunder about in an unintelligible new world, learning, through trial and error, how to see. You can’t understand the word blue until you see the sky for the first time.
I had a family growing up, like you probably did. We were even a happy one, as families go. My parents were smart and kind and funny and encouraged all my weird interests and never kept me from reading anything I wanted to. My sister Laurie and I sometimes played elaborate imaginary games together, and sometimes threatened to kill each other. We watched Sesame Street and The Brady Bunch and M*A*S*H. We had dogs and cats, a carousel slide projector and Super 8 home movies, big American Christmas mornings. We went to church a
nd to Disney World. People who didn’t know that my sister and I were adopted told us we looked just like our parents. But I didn’t meet anyone I was related to until I was in my forties.
I’d always known I was adopted; it was part of the answer to the Where-did-I-come-from question. The parental talking point was that I had been chosen by people who loved and wanted me, unlike all those other kids who’d just come down the chute by chance. I never felt like I’d been abandoned, or suffered any loss or trauma, or yearned to be reunited with my original parents, imagining that finding them would be some sort of answer to the question of Me. I felt as if I’d won some sort of lottery when I was adopted; a lot of my friends and cousins envied me my parents, who seemed so open-minded and supportive compared to their own. I always imagined that people for whom being adopted was a major issue must have had deficient or abusive upbringings, been damaged or deprived in some way. Having common genes seemed to me almost as arbitrary as sharing a home state or zodiac sign, and anyone who fixated on such a flimsy bond must’ve been groping for any connection at all.
Years ago one of my adopted friends and I agreed over beers that we secretly thought being adopted made us cooler than other people, more American—less encumbered by all the dreary baggage of heritage and history, freer to invent ourselves, like young Jimmy Gatz or Bruce Wayne. This has since proven to be not entirely true. You learn that your personality has a certain shape, with definite, inflexible bounds—bounds you find out about because you keep bonking into them headfirst when you try to change. (An acquaintance who used to grate on me won me over when I overheard her sigh, “D’ya ever wish you could just . . . trade in your whole personality for a new one?”) We are not infinitely malleable. Like it or not, you are a certain kind of person. Life is, in this respect, like that game in which you’re assigned an identity scrawled on a piece of paper that everyone else can see but you can’t, and you have to try to deduce from other people’s hints and snickers who you are. It doesn’t matter if you want to be Pierre Bonnard or Vasco da Gama if what’s written on your card is Barney Rubble. Eventually you give up and ask, Okay: so who am I?
Around the time I turned forty, the age at which physicians recommend you start lying awake worrying about your health, I decided I’d be well advised to request whatever medical history I could get from the adoption agency. This, at least, was my ostensible reason for contacting them, although practicality and self-maintenance are qualities so unlike me that there must have been other, less conscious motives at work. Forty is also an age when our life spans start to look alarmingly finite, and it had occurred to me that my biological mother would be sixty-one by now, which wasn’t old but wasn’t young, either. I didn’t even know for certain that she was still alive.
I applied to the adoption agency for what’s called “nonidentifying information” about my biological mother—medical and family history, everything but names and places. Unexpectedly, the agency sent me an entire file of information garnered from my mother’s in-take interview, about not only herself and her family but the circumstances of my birth and adoption—the whole nativity story of me. It was certainly more than most people ever get to hear about their own conceptions. I’d hesitated before opening this file, a little reluctant to surrender the privilege of ignorance. After I read it, however unique or interesting my story might prove to be, it would be forever fixed as one thing and not another; the mystery of myself would be solved, limitless possibility replaced with plain old facts.
It was, of course, an ordinary human story, messy and painful and typical of millions that took place around that time. This is not wholly my own story to tell, so I’ll suffice it to say that my existence turns out to have been contingent on a number of people behaving with extraordinary decency in difficult circumstances. It was also, I feel obliged to mention, contingent on the fact that I was born six years before Roe v. Wade. This hasn’t changed my position on abortion, but it does make me feel like the beneficiary of some unfair historical loophole, like having missed out on the draft. It all made my life seem even more undeserved than it already did, as though the world were a private party I’d gotten to crash.
One of the factoids that caught my attention, among all the dates and ages and figures in that family history, was that my maternal grandfather had been 5 foot 10 inches and 150 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes—my height, weight, and coloration exactly. This is hardly a bizarre coincidence, but to me it seemed almost uncanny, like a ghost story in which you find an image of yourself in a photo taken before you were born. The most basic facts about me were not wholly my own; it was as if I no longer belonged exclusively to myself. Well, you may well point out, duh. Like everyone else in the world, I come from someone else. Omni cellula e cellula, dude. Of course it’s absurd to imagine that any of us appeared ex nihilo, but I hadn’t even been aware that I’d harbored this delusion until I was disabused of it.
I put all this information in a file folder on my desk, where it sat, getting shuffled slowly to the bottom of the pile and then pulled out and put back on top, for the next four years. If I wanted to initiate contact with my biological mother, all I had to do was fill out a rather patronizing touchy-feely questionnaire required by the state (“Have you considered what your reaction might be if your birth parent does not consent to contact you at this time? If not, give it some thought now”) and write her an introductory letter, which the agency would forward if they could locate her. I wasn’t conscious of avoiding this next step; it just seemed like I kept not getting around to it, the same way I keep not getting around to planning for retirement. And composing a letter to the mother you’ve never met is the kind of assignment that could keep any writer procrastinating and rewriting for years. I am not privy to what was going on in my mind during this time, but obviously I was somehow readying myself, filling out my own internal questionnaire.
The decisive factor may have been that I found myself in a potentially narrow window in my life during which I felt I could plausibly present myself as having turned out okay. So one afternoon when I was visiting home, on what seemed like impulse I drove into Baltimore and dropped the form and my letter off at the adoption agency—a big Gothic cottage with steep gables and gingerbread molding, like a house from a fairy tale. I then tried to forget about them, telling myself that I might not hear anything back for months, or years, if ever. I was bracing myself against this possibility because never hearing anything back from women happens to be my very least favorite thing in life, and this was, after all, the very first woman I’d never heard from again.
I’d failed to prepare myself for the opposite possibility, which was that I would hear back from her almost immediately. In less than two weeks I got a call from the agency letting me know they’d received a reply from my birth mother, which they would forward to me the next day. (She told me later she would’ve responded even sooner, but she’d been away on vacation when my letter arrived.) It was like one of those scenes in a movie where someone takes a running start to bust down a door, only to have someone open it cordially from the other side.
I didn’t open her reply right away. I was stricken with a kind of stage fright. I actually brushed my teeth. It felt like a formal occasion. I emailed a friend of mine the message: “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.” Sitting on the desk in front of me was a handwritten letter from my biological mother, a person who had always seemed less vividly real to me than Robin Hood.
Her name was Rachel. Last name Dillon, née Campbell. She lived not much more than an hour from where I’d grown up. Her letter reciprocated the tone of my own—cautious and deferential, eager to avoid any intrusion or demands. She reassured me that it was a relief to hear from me, and to know that I’d been raised by people who loved me. After having me she hadn’t had children for twenty years—apparently we’d both walked away from the experience of childbirth with unhappy associations—but then in her forties she’d divorced, remarried, and had two daughters. I’ve lived a happy life t
hat often felt like a second chance, she wrote. It has added to that happiness to hear from you. She’d also enclosed some photos: there was one of herself as a little girl with her family, a kid who’s doted on and knows it, face squinched up in a simper, fingers at her dimples; one as a young woman a few years after she’d had me, a thin blonde in big seventies sunglasses whom my friend Jenny described as “you, in drag”; and a recent one of her husband and herself on the street, looking like a kindly couple of college professors. Lastly, there was a photo of her two daughters, Sophie, age twenty-three, and Amy, twenty-one—my half sisters.
I had asked her in my letter whether I had any half siblings as much out of courtesy as any genuine curiosity. What I’d really wanted to ask was too big to articulate, and this was one of the few specific questions I could think of. But now, looking at this photograph of two young women I did not know, something very strange happened in my head. They were standing on the back steps of a wooden house, with a green lawn and woods in the background. It could’ve been a suburban home or a summer cottage. They were smiling—one radiantly, the other more shyly—their arms around each other’s shoulders. The older one had brown hair, like mine; the younger was blond. They looked happy, well cared for, and fond of one another. “No way are those girls related to you,” my friend Kevin wrote me after seeing the photo. “They are beautiful and, well, just look at you.” I had to concur. It was hard to believe they could have anything to do with me. It took my friends to point out to me that Amy, the younger one, had the same nose I did. I had to compare photos of the two of us before I could see the similarity, but once I did, I couldn’t stop looking at it. I kept staring at that picture of these two girls I did not know, trying to understand what they were.