“Of course you did. Because you take over every conversation we ever have. Stupid?” Ramon was incredulous, his hand thumping the wheel. “What, may I ask, do you find that I say to be so stupid?”
“Let’s see.” I placed a finger to the side of my cheek, replicating a person deep in thought. “Calling people who are in charge of getting us a child the wrong name? Stupid. Telling the entire group that we didn’t agree how we were going to raise our children with regards to religion? Also stupid.”
“We agreed when we signed on for this,” Ramon said, “that we were going to be ourselves. Isn’t that what we agreed? It’s the only way I can do this.”
“Let me explain something to you.” I turned toward Ramon, whose hand rested on the gearshift, waiting for traffic to abate. “This?” I pointed from myself to him and back to me again. “Not therapy. We are not here to explain everything. To understand ourselves. We are here to present ourselves in the best possible light.”
Ramon grunted. “We said we were going to be honest.”
“To each other!” I curled my hands around an invisible giant bowl, playing to an invisible audience. “And yes, in the letter, we didn’t want to misrepresent ourselves, absolutely. We want to be natural—and this is hard because there seems to be a format for it all—but not so that people question us. As parents!”
Ramon stared ahead. More traffic.
“You know what?” I sat back in the seat. “I’ll just try not to talk too much.”
“That would really be best, because sometimes you’re exhausting,” Ramon said.
We were silent. I had lost it then, the memory of Ramon, beautiful Ramon, coming toward me in that café in Rome; his whole body silvery and smooth and filled with light in the dark cave of the Grotto; seated across from him in the restaurant in Brighton Beach, his cheeks red with steam and winter. How susceptible I was to the way good memories can slide away.
I turned up the radio. Today’s news: a woman had recently been incarcerated for throwing her baby into a Dumpster. She’d given birth in a bathroom, unaided and alone, and had then thrown her baby out the bathroom window.
We wondered—I know Ramon did, too, because we were for just one moment not cruel to each other—why that couldn’t have been our baby. Why couldn’t the baby in the Dumpster have been our Grace? Perhaps, we thought, that infant, thrown into the air and landing in a cushion of New York City garbage, had been the baby meant for us.
_______
When we arrived in White Plains, we parked in a mall, in front of a blazing Bed Bath and Beyond.
“Hurry up, Ramon.”
He fretted. Tonight, leaving the car involved a series of inspections. Were the windows secured? The sunroof shut? (It had not, as I reminded him, been opened since September.) Was the moon roof that covered the sunroof also closed tightly, its shroud pulled over the smoked glass like an eyelid? Was the heat set to off? The radio? Best to turn it on and then off again and then on and then off, and the lights too. There are countless dials and knobs and switches to check before leaving an automobile, should you be the obsessive-compulsive person Ramon had become.
“Look,” he said.
I sighed loudly.
“The car has to be left correctly.” In order to enrage me and prove his point that I did everything in a negligent and cavalier fashion, his inspection was more drawn out than usual.
“Seriously?” I could feel my jaw clenching, my hands curling into fists. “Why are you doing this?” Again we would be late and all the babies would be taken by the sane and the prompt.
“Hmmm.” Carefully he rose from his seat, looked again inside the car, running his hands along the driver’s seat—feeling for what? A time bomb? Did he not know he was looking at one right here?—before he straightened and then leaned over the top of the car toward me. “Jesse,” he said. “You really have to be more patient.”
I was like sound. I was faster than sound; I was light. I was not aware that I was at his side of the car until I was there, and once I arrived, I pushed him by the shoulders, hard, slipping on black ice and then catching myself. “Are you kidding me?” I screamed. “We’re going to be late. Again!” Already I felt our possibilities diminishing, candles on a birthday cake, burning out.
Ramon looked up at the nameless, faceless office tower we were headed toward. The building was dark except for a large room about six floors up, bathed in warm light. Several people moved around inside, pouring coffee and greeting one another.
“Nice.” Ramon shook me off. “I hope you realize that everyone can see you. Everyone just saw you.” He smiled.
I closed my eyes. Then I turned away from my husband and made my way to the building. I pulled open the door and stepped into the cold, sterile, and empty lobby, where I waited for him so that we could take the elevator up to the sixth floor and enter the agency office together. Led by the sound of chatter, we walked toward a conference room with a wall of windows that looked out onto the black parking lot, nearly empty but for a few scattered cars, including ours.
“Hello?” I said.
Ramon walked past me. “Hi!” he exclaimed to the room. “I’m Ramon, and this is Jesse! Did we miss anything?”
Everyone smiled at him. “Everyone” included a social worker—dark hair escaping in curled tendrils from a scarf she’d wrapped around her head—and her assistant, who, pudgy, with white-blond hair and watery blue eyes, looked uncannily like Tiffany and Crystal. They both stood at the front of the room by a dry-erase board and before them were two couples and a woman seated alone.
I smiled shyly and pulled out a chair.
“I hope we haven’t kept you waiting,” Ramon told the room.
“Not at all,” the social worker said. “We’re still waiting on another couple. We were just introducing ourselves. I’m Lydia, and this is our newest addition to the White Plains family, Marie.”
Ramon flashed me a triumphant grin as he sat down. “So nice to meet you, Lydia!” he said.
Lydia smiled. Her freckles twitched and she straightened her head scarf. Marie waved wanly.
I cleared my throat and looked around the room. One couple was Caucasian, easily pushing fifty, and the other was an Asian woman and an African-American man. There was also a woman alone, also black, with short, cropped hair and bright red glasses. I sat back. I love New York, I thought as another couple walked into the room.
_______
When everyone was settled around the table, Lydia stood at the front of the room.
“I’d like to just take a second to speak about the history of adoption, if you don’t mind. I’d like to give some context of where we are now.”
She had me at context, and already I liked her for her attention to scholarship. And also? I could tell she was Jewish. I registered this, as I registered all the ethnicities we had discussed, because Lydia was likely the first Jewish person I had encountered in this adoption process. I also wondered if the birthmothers were making their decisions to bring a child to term based on their religious beliefs, would they ever give their child to a Jew, even if her mother-in-law, a strict Catholic, went to mass each Sunday and stood in line at the Vatican for seven hours in order to be the proud possessor of rosaries blessed by the Pope himself? Even if her father loved Christmas? Lydia’s presence created and alleviated that anxiety, simultaneously.
She shuffled through her disordered stack of papers, as if she were giving a paper at a conference. And I was waiting: for a lecture on how we got here, as a people.
“So, adoption in this country,” she began, her voice gravelly and deep, tremulous, perhaps from nerves. The best listeners get the best babies, I thought, rapt.
“So the first law recognizing adoption and its regulations was in 1851, in Massachusetts. In the next twenty years several placement agencies were established, and soon adoptions really began to climb.” Lydia scratched at the side of her head and looked out at us. And then she continued. “A new culture in America started
to place a premium on the innocence and vulnerability of children, and helping them, which was at odds with the more dominant idea that a poor person’s child would disrupt a superior gene pool. So began the rise of eugenics,” Lydia said, looking up from her notes. “You know eugenics?”
Five out of seven of us knew eugenics.
“It was a ‘science.’” Lydia used her fingers as air quotation marks. “It was used to ‘improve’ genetics. When the Nazis used it, well, then it really fell out of favor.”
I smiled. She said Nazis.
“And so, soon homes for unwed mothers became safe places for pregnant women, and often an adoption could take place just after the child was born, especially as the use of formula was becoming quite common,” Lydia told us.
Everyone in the room had a physical reaction. The single woman bobbed her head furiously, as did I. Of course the invention of formula would have this effect, just as one small thing—the zipper, for instance—can alter history’s meandering course. Perhaps this process could become interesting to me so that I might get through it, heart intact, I thought. I imagined building a class around this material—“For Safekeeping: A History of Women and Adoption in America”—as Ramon sat back, legs spread, head tilted in listening position.
“Also during this time,” Lydia continued, “there was something called the orphan trains.”
“Oh yes,” someone said. “I read about these just the other day.”
I glared. I did not care what anyone but Lydia had to say about the orphan trains.
“Well, these trains brought children from the industrialized East Coast out to the plains, the dust bowl, so they could be placed in foster homes. Some of these children, mind you, were not orphans; their parents simply could no longer care for them. Some were street kids. The fortunate ones found loving families, older couples that could not have children. Others, though, were thought of more as cheap labor and were treated very poorly, almost like indentured servants. As attitudes in the country began to change and move toward keeping families together, new laws began to prohibit out-of-state placement, and the orphan trains stopped in 1929. Now,” Lydia said, “what else in this country affected adoption?”
We all looked at one another. “The Great Depression?” someone offered.
“Well, yes, that’s true, the economy always has an effect, but that’s not what I’m thinking about,” Lydia responded.
“War?” Ramon said.
Lydia nodded.
Go Ramon! I thought.
“War always affects adoption, as it affects families so profoundly. And war orphans in the fifties really set the stage for international adoption. But in regards to domestic adoption, which I suppose is more our concern tonight, what happened later?”
“Roe v. Wade.” I did not ask it. Because I knew. I sat back, professorial, all my fingertips touching.
“Absolutely. Abortion was legalized. When?”
“January 22, 1973.” I practically screamed the date.
“Yes, that’s correct. In 1973 abortion was legalized. And with that, maternity homes began to decline, and adoption was presented less as an option for women. Two Supreme Court cases increased legal rights for birthfathers and a few states enacted laws requiring birthmothers to name the father of the baby. This made things very complicated. And so international adoptions increased well into the eighties and nineties.”
The invention of formula, the pill, a wire hanger, a court decision—we are all changed by it. This is why I love history. We are a living, breathing part; it affects us and we affect history. Even the word—history—is beautiful, I thought, remembering that brief period in college when I insisted on calling my history of the enlightenment class “Enlightenment Herstory.” Herstory, I insisted, would be passed down through the mothers of Diderot and Descartes and Kant and Spinoza. It was the mothers, and not their sons, who made herstory.
“But now, with the Hague Laws, international adoption is terribly complicated. Those in a queue for international adoption can expect to wait about four years.”
We all nodded gravely. I did the math and a sack of butterflies let loose in my stomach.
“Most adoptions—international and domestic—up until about the nineties were closed. The research shows how negative this has been for the children who have been adopted, as well as for the birthmothers, even the adoptive parents, who want more information about their children’s backgrounds, their medical histories.” Lydia paused to look around the room. She smiled. I could see a space between her two front teeth. Before it closed naturally, I had this space too, and everyone told me that it meant good luck. “You are all here because you believe in some way in open adoption—and how open it will be differs with each situation—but now over eighty percent of all domestic adoptions have some degree of openness.”
Lydia looked up, her minilecture complete. She asked us all to introduce ourselves, by way of how we came to adoption, if this was something we were comfortable with.
Ramon sat up straight and tall, which seemed to indicate that he was going to speak.
First.
“I was not a fan of IVF,” Ramon began.
As he started to speak my neck and shoulders grew tight and I gripped the sides of my chair to calm myself.
“It was Jesse who really wanted to do these treatments, and so I relented. But so many times! I really didn’t want to, I felt that it was wrong, when there are so many children who need homes. Also, it’s just not healthy and I felt it was terribly bad for her, for Jesse, and, to be honest, I’m not sure how all those hormones and drugs affect her and these children.”
Inside, I was a crazed lunatic. This was not the beginning of our story. It was not the beginning of my story anyway. Inadvertently I placed my fingers, ice pack–like, over my left eye.
“That’s not really the beginning, though,” I said, removing my hand. Would he mention that we were out of money? Because that could preclude us from getting a baby. Would he mention that word—cancer—because that could very well do it too. I couldn’t remain silent. “I mean, that’s not really exactly why we came to adoption, because you didn’t want to do IVF anymore, is it?” I asked Ramon.
I could feel the temperature of the room change as people shuffled their feet. Lydia looked at us with unconcealed interest.
Ramon scanned the room. He swallowed hard. I watched his Adam’s apple move along the knobby spinelike track of his throat. “We are so happy to be here.” He looked around the table, eyes glistening. “And very relieved.”
My limbs loosened, the tension in my body draining. Perhaps this would not be a mutiny after all. I nodded my head. “We are really really relieved.”
“Everyone here is coming from a different place,” Lydia told
the group. “But I think we can all recognize that adoption is not always everyone’s first choice. That’s the reality, and everyone’s journey here is different. Even those in couples often feel differently about it.”
I nodded. The tone was so all-encompassing that I could see us dabbing patchouli behind our ears, joining hands, and breaking into “Kumbaya.” And while I was grateful Ramon did not mention our finances or my illness, I understood his urge to discuss them both. Ramon was making less money now, and we owed an irresponsible amount for doctor and hospital bills. My job was not secure. I was a cancer survivor—it was only because the cancer had been in remission for almost fifteen years that we were even entitled to pursue domestic adoption at all—and I wondered if that could be considered an ethnicity of some kind, if there could be affirmative action for the almost-died.
I remembered it then, that moment just before I was to have my first and rather sudden surgery. My mother led the surgeon by his elbow, out of the room. Doctor, she’d said—I could hear her, and she was so plaintive, my mother, who up until that moment, I had always seen in charge—will she be able to have children?
Yes, of course, he had said, and even through the haze of pain medicatio
n I’d thought he was one of those doctors who can close a woman down with a mere nod of the head.
My mother had come back into the room. You can still have children, my mother told me, taking my hand.
Jesus, Mom, I’d said. I don’t give a shit about children right now. I remember that I said this.
You will, my mother had said, patting my hand. I know that you will.
“Thank you.” I dipped my head to Lydia. I looked across the table at the single woman, so that she might continue the introductions, ensuring our story would end there, for now, willing myself, just this once, to be silent.
“Well,” the single woman began. “I had to make a decision. It was now or never . . .”
_______
The last person to speak that night was Lisa, of the white couple. I learned she was, in fact, in her early fifties. She was tall and thin, and pinched and plain and nervous and sad. The man looked younger and more dapper in his tie and hat, and he was fidgety as his wife spoke, gazing around the room with a glazed expression. I did not like him in the least.
“I’m Lisa and this is my husband, Danny. We are here because we want to foster a child again,” she began, clearing her throat. I watched her long bony fingers work themselves. “We are older, I know, and Danny already has a child, a girl, who is grown.” She looked down at her hands.
Danny’s legs were crossed and the top one kicked vigorously, rocking his upper body. He looked at his watch.
“We were fostering a boy until a little over eight months ago.” She took a huge breath and stopped suddenly, as if her heart had caught in her expanding chest. “He died!” she said, with more emphasis than I know she’d intended. “He was four years old. We’d been fostering him for two years. He had congenital heart failure.”
I closed my eyes and opened them again. And I could feel Ramon do the same.
“We are ready”—Lisa looked down at the table—“to do this again. Adoption is just not an option for us. We’re older now. So we would like to foster again. I would. Danny’s daughter, she never lived with us. She’s all grown up, you see.”
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