The Love Wife

by Gish Jen

  She didn’t need a libretto, knowing every aria already, and one day came in with yet more amazing knowledge. A baby had been left on the steps of the church proper; an Oriental baby. She hoped she wasn’t being racist, but was there any chance I knew where the baby had come from? She was sorry to ask. So far as she knew, though, I was the only adult Oriental in town. Did I have any thoughts about what would be best in terms of finding a home for the baby?

  BLONDIE / Was he offended? I did wonder that, later.

  For you see, I had gone to school in California, and majored for a while in East Asian Studies. I had had my consciousness raised.

  CARNEGIE / Offended? No.

  Would I follow her back to the church? she asked.

  We left before class started, our rudeness forgiven by special dispensation. It was an enormous night. Dark enough to see the Milky Way, and how many colors the stars came in, actually: blue, green, citron yellow. No moon, just a summer breeze crackling as if with the waking stretch of night animals. We passed the old beech tree. The dark street glimmered with a recent rain, like a river.

  If only I did not have allergies. But I did, hives. It was soybean-harvest season. My skin was dotted like op art.

  Still I traveled the street river behind my guide, eyes on her fanny pack. My allergies, I knew, could not be racially linked, exactly. How many Asians, after all, could be given hives by soy harvesting? Yet they did seem linked to a certain proclivity to skin sensitivities; for example, an inability to wear wool. And these in turn seemed linked to my smooth and sparely hairy body. As I stood, itching, in the church hall, I wondered if there weren’t indeed things I understood better about this bundle of swaddling than did, say, Sister Mary Divine.

  I had never held a baby before, much less an abandoned baby.

  The bundle was like a longish football, only warm and light. So tossable, yet untossable, what an idea! I felt what a civilized being I was. An enormous strength, stilled by defenselessness. Sister Mary Divine was saying, I thought, that from the umbilical cord she judged the baby to be a day or two old. This was not the receiving blanket the baby had come in, she said. That blanket was being fingerprinted by the police. I nodded, idiotic. Surprised by how close I felt to her. How intimate to be sharing this experience—of what? Of staring into this miniature face, like something out of a fairy tale. So red! So squashed. Circular. A gnome’s baby, this seemed, with a white stocking cap on. The white cap was not even a real cap but a surgical stocking, knotted at the top. Fringed at the bottom by the baby’s black hair.

  Asleep.

  — Where did you come from? How can you sleep at a time like this?

  I wanted to count the baby’s lashes. I put my face to the baby’s face; that innocent breathing, breathing. Sweet, noisy, unpracticed. Its whole body heaved and collapsed. The abandon in its exhale! As if one part of its small spirit was bent on returning to the Old World, even as another said, Stay.

  — You are the first to see her other than Sister Angela and myself. And of course the police.

  A girl! I had forgotten to ask boy or girl. A girl. Of course! An abandoned Asian baby, even here, was most likely a girl. Again I felt it, a tug of connection like a hitch in my sweater. Healthy? Sister Mary Divine said so far as she knew. She had a doctor on the way.

  — I don’t think you have to clutch her like that. I think you can just rest her on your forearm.

  I was indeed clutching it—her. My shoulder was raised way up into the air as if I were on a stage, and about to be yanked post-haste into the sky. Sister Mary Divine eased the baby from my wrist and hands into the crook of my arm. How loving her touch! I wanted to kiss her. She had exquisite hands, with surprisingly shiny nails, marred only by that ring. That ring was too big, witness the red indentations on the adjacent fingers.

  — There, she said.

  — Ahh, I said, or something like that. Then I said (or thought I said, or wanted to say): — Let’s get married and have this baby.

  — Thank goodness, the doctor’s here!

  Sister Mary Divine escaped to the door, that medievalish oak door, her auburn hair lifting behind her like a magic carpet. Her breasts were bouncing, her fanny pack unzipped. Later she left the convent, I heard. She ran for Congress as a Green Party candidate and married a dog-sled racer. In the meanwhile, the doctor was here! Another marvelously unswerving, sensibly shod, braless woman. She had a large bag in haul, and a friend, similarly jiggly.

  — I am Dr. Pierce, the doctor announced calmly. Her voice was like a barge you could stand on. — This is my friend Jane from out of state.

  — Thanks be to God, said Sister Mary Divine.

  BLONDIE / I had just arrived at the airport when my old friend Nomie, now a pediatrician, announced, We have to go see this baby. And then there I was, in this church, with a man holding what might have been the Lord Jesus, except that in all the pictures Jesus was never crying, as this baby was. How panic-stricken that poor man! A Chinese- or Something-American. Explaining that a Sister Mary Somebody had gone to see about a bottle.

  — Formula, I hope, said Nomie.

  The man wasn’t sure; and so off she went, leaving the man and me with the baby.

  — Walk her. Give her your thumb, said Nomie as she left. Bounce her up and down.

  — Ehh, ehh, ehh, the baby cried. Ehh, ehh, ehh.

  Never had so tiny a sound seemed so loud. You could feel it pierce you—how it ran through you like a giant needle and thread. She was wrapped up like a papoose in a pilled flannel blanket with bears and bows printed on it.

  CARNEGIE / — Your thumb will be too big. Try your pinkie, said the woman.

  Why not hers? But she had just come from the airport; her pinkie was full of germs. So I advanced my finger toward the tiny mouth, and was startled by the mini-vac alacrity with which it was taken in. Electrolux, move over! And how quiet the vestibule now. I moved closer to the yellow lamplight, as if to a hearth. That hall was too big; I felt distinctly anti-rafter. The baby sucked and sucked. I was glad the tip of my pinkie was so firmly affixed to my knuckle. I could feel her tongue work my fingertip, all wet focus.

  — Thatagirl, I whispered to the baby. And to the woman: — It worked.

  BLONDIE / I moved in closer then, sharing his triumph—touched by the shine of sweat on his smooth brow. How intently the baby sucked!—working even her eyelids and eyebrows. For a minute she seemed as though she had fallen asleep. Her cheeks stopped. Her breathing deepened. Then she opened her eyes and looked right at me—looked and looked.

  — She’s strong, he said. Someone left her on the steps.

  I introduced myself.

  — Carnegie, he said in return. What do you think?

  — About?

  — I think I’m going to have to adopt this young lady. Unless a better home can be found.

  — That’s a big decision.

  — I’m a fool.

  He leaned in closer to the baby’s face. She was as profoundly asleep now as she had been awake a moment ago. Her hands moved mysteriously, as if she was dreaming. Or, no—as if her hands were themselves dreaming. Opening, closing, curling.

  — You’re not a fool, I said.

  I massaged the bottom of the swaddling, expecting to feel a foot, but grasped only flannel.

  — No, I’m not; I’m a wise, wise man.

  He lifted his wrist a little, ever so slightly changing the angle of his pinkie.

  — This is it.

  — It?

  He raised his eyebrows in a vaudevillian way I could almost have guessed would one day be familiar.

  — Now don’t go asking me what I mean, Jane, because I am too wise to know, he said. Jane.

  He winked.

  CARNEGIE / I might not have decided so easily had she not been there. Everything might have been different had I not had her to speak to. But I wanted to speak to her. People have always wanted to speak to her; everyone but Lan.

  And so I said the words aloud, and—lo!�
�there they were.

  A way, perhaps, of sabotaging my degree? suggested a therapist, with nudgy therapal delicacy, years later.

  But how much more it seemed then, than that. A way of really living. Of living bigger. How I liked those words when I thought them; how I liked the hitching of my claptrap impulses to phrases of a certain gallop. A way to meet life head-on. A way to live my own life.

  I stopped itching.

  This baby was bringing us all into the world.

  And may I point out that I did finish my degree in the end.

  BLONDIE / I thought, I am giving witness.

  I wanted to tell him how he had moved me. That I wanted to be like him, but would never be like him. How out of place, though, my small despair! I tucked it away—I had an expertise in certain fine folds, that’s what it meant to be a plain Jane. Instead I moved in closer, into his circle. I drank in the baby—the redness of her, the sucking centeredness and level peace of her. What stillness a baby could bring. I had never known such stillness. Everything in the room, even the pictures and chairs, seemed to witness her—to attend. It seemed only fitting to be in a church. All the world was hush, and holiness.

  It wasn’t until I heard the door creak, the foot clicks, the greeting chatter of my old friend Nomie—take-charge Nomie—that I really looked at Carnegie.

  A midheight man, Asian American, wearing blue jeans with no belt, and a T-shirt. No watch. An impressive chest—perhaps a weight lifter. His blotchy skin looked somehow related to his spiky hair. He wore black Keds with no socks. On the chair hung a leather aviator jacket, which looked somehow familiar.

  CARNEGIE / Her ex, it turned out, had the exact same one, which he had proudly bought in SoHo, but then discovered for sale in an in-flight catalog.

  BLONDIE / That was Christian—ever dismayed. Where his pockets were always empty, though, I saw in one of Carnegie’s gaping breast pockets, three pairs of sunglasses. In the other, breath spray. I took in an open countenance; a warm glance; an expressive manner. He had large, fine, clean-nailed hands.

  Nothing about him would have told you he could decide to adopt a baby in a moment.

  I was sorry to see him give the baby up to Nomie. But Nomie had returned, sure enough, with a bottle she had sterilized in a convenience store microwave, and formula. It was time; the baby was hungry. Still, I was sorry to see Carnegie’s finger leave that little mouth. The gesture had seemed so simple and natural, like something that went on in the tropics. I was sorry to see his wrist flip closed.

  CARNEGIE / I took to visiting the baby, and in due time really did adopt her. Made her my Lizzy.

  Mama Wong did not approve.

  — You are crazy! she said. You do not even know what kind of family that child is come from. That child, her mother could be prostitute. Her mother could be drug addict. And her father!

  Still I did it. Against the odds: though single men were not officially designated unfit to be parents, it was often judged not in a child’s best interest to be placed with such low-life types. In this case, though, the church was handling the placement, and there was racial compatibility to consider. ‘Matching,’ they called it.

  — Abandoned children speak to you, observed Blondie, years later.

  She believed I would have adopted Lizzy even if she had been white. But of course no white newborn, not even a foundling, would have come to me. As it was, I could see the doubt on the face of the social worker doing the home visit until I told her that the baby in question was of Asian descent, and a foundling. That Sister Mary Divine supported the placement.

  — I’ll write ‘unusual special circumstances,’ she said then, talking to her clipboard. — Making this a natural fit.

  In this fashion, I aced my home visit.

  BLONDIE / — Lizzy was meant for you, I told him. She was your fate.

  CARNEGIE / My mother had another view.

  — Something the matter with you, need to do something crazy, she said. How you going to concentrate on your career? You do not know what baby is. Baby is lotta, lotta work. Lotta money too. I tell you, adoption can be big mistake. You are too young even to know what big mistake is. You do not know what life is, you think it is like college, everybody end up with degree, more or less the same. But I tell you, is not like college. Nobody love a man who is nobody.

  Thus quoth Mama Wong.

  Also: — Why you have to do such crazy things. As if people will love you for that!

  But Blondie did. Blondie loved me for that.

  BLONDIE / I loved him because he did not think of himself as particularly noble.

  — I didn’t have a choice, he said. Not like you.

  CARNEGIE / We married at her family’s place in northern Maine.

  BLONDIE / Lizzy was eleven months at the time, an affectionate child—expert at shaking her head no, and just walking, though unsteady on the grass. For the wedding she wore a white bubble dress, like an upside-down crocus bulb with organdy sleeves. We fixed a circle of fresh flowers in her hair. But of course, she kept taking this off, losing a few petals each time. The dress was quickly green with grass stains where it wasn’t brown with dirt—but still adorable, people said.

  CARNEGIE / She wore a ruffled diaper cover, which wagged charmingly when she crawled.

  BLONDIE / My father’s family, the Baileys, were immigrants. This was the family of Grandpa the judge—Scotch-Irish city folk who didn’t much care about land. Or at least not as much as the German side of the family—my mother’s family, the Behnkes. So deeply attached were they to Wisconsin, where they had lived on a farm and kept a cabin on a lake up north, that the first thing my Grandma Dotie did when she married and moved east was to buy a good-sized neck of land on a good-sized pond. How the big fish and wild berries reminded her of her childhood!—though her family had never owned as much waterfront as she and Grandpa Werner bought here in Maine. A whole peninsula—really a skinny causeway broadening into a kind of island. There was a dock on one side, perfect for boats; and a sandy beach with a gradual dropoff on the other, perfect for children. It was so far north that she and Grandpa had no neighbors at first—so far north that it seemed a real retreat from all the getting and spending of the East Coast. Why ever had she moved?

  Back home, her farm relatives struggled; they could barely survive on the milk they sold to the cheese factory. True, the ones who moved in—into town, that is—did better. Their boys worked in the cheese factory or became ministers; their girls worked in the cheese factory or became teachers. But in the end, no one stayed; no one could. In the end, everyone moved to Wasa, to work in the paper mill, or else to a bigger city still. Chicago, other places. Once the factory shut down, they had no choice. Yet still, as the years went on, Grandma Dotie wondered sometimes, Was life happier in Wisconsin? She did remember life on the farm—how they had no electricity, and no heat besides a woodstove in the kitchen. Still—the joy when the train brought oysters and oranges at Christmas! She could still taste her mom’s oyster stew. And how she had loved huddling in the kitchen with her older brothers and sisters! All six of whom married the six kids of the farm next door; if the Voigtlands hadn’t run out of kids, who knew whether she would have married Grandpa Werner with his lab books and specimens.

  As she grew older, she began to talk about going back. She began to talk too about the lost past—about things disappearing. By the end, she was made anxious by anything missing, even for a short while—people, dishes, furniture. She would fret about threats she read about in the paper—to our country’s waterways, to our country’s forests. This world, after all, can disappear like any other, she would say. I just pray for the health of the trees.

  WENDY / We still have these empty boxes in the attic that my Great-grandma Dotie saved, because that’s like what girls got when they were twenty-five and not married yet, seeing as how that’s what they were considered back in Germany. An old box. Never mind that Great-grandma Dotie did get married in the end, and anyway wasn’t even all Ger
man. She was some other things too, like I think French.

  Still German was what Great-grandma Dotie grew up praying, she said because prayers in German went to God faster than any other kind. And German was what she grew up eating—gross stuff like blood sausage and headcheese that they made on the farm. Also sauerkraut that Great-grandma Dotie kept on making herself in Maine, in these crocks Mom wants to teach Lizzy and me to use, forget about if we want to learn or not. She’s set on it, Lizzy says, because she herself mostly ate SpaghettiOs and Spam and Twinkies growing up. Talk about gross, but that’s what people ate because of the war, even after the war. Because they all just got used to it.

  And that’s why she talks about the farm like some people talk about movies too, Lizzy says—like she actually lived there or at least went there on vacation. She talks about stuff like how everybody back in Wisconsin knows what to do with a baby calf, nobody is grossed out by the newborns being covered with bloody gunk and the mama cow licking it all up, or is surprised by the mama cow lowing and pushing until that poor baby has to stand up either. My class saw that on a field trip once and we couldn’t believe it, the way the mother was bullying that baby, pushing it all around the stall even though it was just born and kind of shocked. You know, by the outside world, it probably wasn’t expecting so much hay. And to be pushed around first thing like that and expected to stand up. Everybody on the trip was shocked except Mom, who said that about Wisconsin. Quiet like of course, and not to make everyone else feel stupid. It was like she just wanted to tell me, because her mother told her.

  LIZZY / And because she didn’t want us to be so Chinese anymore. She wanted us to know we had relatives besides Mama Wong; she wanted us to know there was such a thing as too Chinese. Not that she would say so, of course.

  BLONDIE / How Grandma Dotie had loved the property in Maine! The deep forest especially, with its cathedrals of evergreens. There were also, on a slight rise and small plateau, some buildings—summer-camp cabins that had been used for a time as a boys’ school. She loved the cabins being so small, like her family’s original lake cabin up north. She loved it that there was no heat besides a woodstove in the main building.