A Gate at the Stairs (11 page)

What about Amber?

Amber was no longer in the picture, apparently, having violated her parole, and not having liked any of the prospective parents well enough. She was considering keeping her baby.

“I kind of liked Amber,” I said—a mistake.

Sarah’s face became a polished stone. “Amber was a coke addict and a meth-head. Both,” she said. Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of
was
. Only her bare feet were sticking out, an ankle monitor brightly in place, perhaps one tiny toe wiggling good-bye: I
had
kind of liked her.

The new birth mother in Green Bay was named Bonnie and was apparently in her late twenties. A grown-up! Her baby was well over a year old, possibly two, already languishing in foster homes. “And after we pay them both a visit, we may see why, though I think I already know.”

I was quiet. The plane was now descending and my ears were closing from the pressure. Everything she said seemed to be coming to me from under water.

“The baby’s black,” she said. “Part black. And nobody wants her. People would rather go to China! All the way to China before they would take in a black kid from their own state.”

When I was a child the only black kids I ever saw were indeed in Green Bay. I would see them when we went there to shop: children of the professional football players who lived in big suburban houses and were said to move every three years, when their dads got injured or traded. “I warn my kids not to bother getting to know them,” clerks said openly in the stores. “They’re just going to move.” This was how bigotry got conducted among people who swore they weren’t prejudiced at all.

“I’m sure that’s what it is with this baby,” said Sarah. “Race.”

I wondered whether the birth father might be a Green Bay Packer. That would be cool. When I was a freshman there was a girl in my dorm named Rachel. Because her dad was black and her mom was white, her friends called her Inter-Rachel. She would always laugh.

The plane bumped down, and I swallowed hard to open my ears and settle my stomach. I dug some chewing gum out of my backpack. I hadn’t eaten very much and that, combined with my slight queasiness, had surely given me bad breath.

Out in the airport we looked for Edward, but he wasn’t there. Sarah asked about the flight from Chicago, but it had arrived fifteen minutes ago and all passengers had already deplaned. “Maybe he’s at the baggage carousel,” she said, and I traipsed after her. We circled the luggage belts and wandered over to the Hertz counter, where Sarah filled out the forms for renting a car, and then we waited near the men’s room. He just wasn’t there. I thought the men’s room should also have a big yellow sign that said
HERTZ
.

Sarah sank against the wall, beneath the sign that did not say
HERTZ
but instead the restroom one that said
MEN.
Her eyes were starting to mist. She closed them, and when she opened them again she shook her head and sighed. “This,” she said, “is why God invented the fetal position.”

I was starting to admire her. Or at least I was fearing her less.

She reshouldered her bag and pulled her coat tighter. “Oh, let’s just go,” she said, car key and map in hand. Her features had fallen but I saw her lift them again, one by one, the way one rights light porch furniture after a wind. I wondered what her marriage could possibly be like. Made up as it went along, no doubt. Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around. They were like the poor that way, perhaps. What sense did anything they were being told possibly make, given the scarcity of their world?

We found the car, a shale-colored Ford Escort, in the far end of the lot. I got in and felt how clean it was, cleaner and tidier perhaps than any car I’d ever been in. Sarah handed me the map. “Mind being the navigator?” she asked, or sort of asked.

“Not at all.” I opened the map, knowing it would never again be folded back correctly, at least not by me. I had map skills, but not that kind.

Out the windshield the busy grid of a small mill city full of bridges stared back at me. The giant sports arena with its glistening white top on the horizon, or the big bowl of the stadium, all this took up a good portion of the sky. I navigated as well as I could. I remembered that once on a Miss America broadcast Miss Wisconsin, when asked by one of the judges, hadn’t known what “the Bay of Pigs” referred to and had said anxiously, “Green Bay?” The fire hydrants were painted lime—it was strange to see green in winter at all—and there were green trolley buses, as if this were all some hilarious tourist town where one came to visit the Jolly Green Giant himself. I’m sure some people came looking but found only Vince Lombardi, the pope of Green Bay, in statue form. Plus factory after factory slipping waste into the river. “I wonder if there’s a high incidence of cancer here,” Sarah ventured out loud. “Or birth defects …”

“I know there’s a high incidence of football,” I said. In the distance I could still see the light roof of the arena and the new high boxes of the stadium, in a ring of towers like castle lookouts. Sarah fiddled with the radio until she found the soul station and the snake-rattle opening of “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Her left foot tapped the car floor, and I thought I saw her shoulders shimmy through her coat. A car passed us with a
BEARS STINK
bumper sticker.

“Is that referring to football or actual bears?”

“Football,” I said.

The lawyer’s office was in a creepy old hotel downtown. We circled the parking lot, looking for spaces. “When trying to park I tend to go into fortune-teller mode,” Sarah said. “As in I have a hunch there’s a spot right around this corner. Or else into defense attorney mode, where I argue with the signs: Why
aren’t
I an authorized vehicle? I’m as authorized as the next guy, also as handicapped as the next guy, and as for the hour limitations, well, on the East Coast, where
I’m
from, it’s four o’clock right now. Crap like that. Sometimes I will vibe and seize the
intent of
a rule and go with that—rather than with the rule itself.”

There was only a tight space next to a black sedan that had parked jauntily—much space on the right, none on the left. Nonetheless, we pulled up on the left to see the driver was still there, slumped down, waiting for someone, a Packers cap pulled down over his brow. He rolled down his window. “Lady, why don’t you find some other place to park,” he said.

Sarah muttered, “Why on earth should I?” then turned off the engine, opened the window on my side, and shouted, “If you could move over a few inches there would be room for everyone. This is the only spot left in the lot.”

“I was here first,” he shouted indignantly.

“What on earth difference does that make?”

“Lady, you’ve put me in a tight spot. I’d hate to see your car all banged up and scratched.”

She got out and slammed her door. “Yes, sir, and I’d hate to see the air let out of all four of your tires.” I got out carefully, and we walked quickly toward the building entrance. “The rental insurance covers everything, I do believe,” she said to me with great confidence. “Or else the credit card. I once murdered someone and American Express covered everything!”

I smiled. The lobby was dark with faded scarlet and maroon. The elevator was brass and tarnished, and it wheezed and shuddered slowly to the third floor. When its doors crashed open, I stepped out quickly before the contraption changed its mind altogether and swiftly shot its way to the basement in a jangle of steel. “Suite Three D,” said Sarah, reading from a business card that said
Roberta Marshall, Attorney-at-Law
, and soon we were in a large sunlit room, decorated in green and pink. The wallpaper was olive with great swirling blossoms of lilies and roses ballooning and bursting or mating and probing and flipping out, in repetition, across the walls.

“We’re here to see Roberta Marshall,” said Sarah to the receptionist, a large woman with hair dyed a tarnished gold hue and gelled into a stiff hood.

“Your name?” said the receptionist.

“Oh, sorry. Sarah Brink.”

The receptionist dialed three numbers and waited with the receiver against her ear. She moved her head back and forth, rolled her eyes a little, looked at her watch, looked at me and gave me a quick tight smile, then looked at her manicure, which seemed in need of new paint. “Sarah Brink is here,” she said. “Along with … I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

But as I was saying “Tassie Keltjin,” she was simultaneously repeating Sarah’s name into the phone so that the utterance of my name was wiped out by the utterance of hers. “Sarah Brink. Yes. Brink.” Then she slammed the phone down and sighed. “She’ll be with you in a minute.”

We sat down and waited. It was hard to tell where we were or what year it was. It could have been anywhere, anything.

Roberta Marshall burst through the door but then shut it closely, secretly, behind her. She was a small, dark-haired woman with a wide smile that had long ago given her marionette lines and crow’s-feet. Though it was daytime she wore a tailored black velveteen jacket with a notched lapel that cut in and out in a way that gave her angles and flattered her, and which she probably hoped made her look rich. I was already becoming a woman who sized up another one fast—I was becoming typical.

We all stood, we shook hands, and then we sat back down. Roberta looked at me and smiled her big cracked-open smile. “Sarah told me you’d be coming,” she said approvingly. “No Edward?” she asked, looking around, knitting her brow.

“Next time,” said Sarah. Still, she had a bit of happy hope in her face. Roberta Marshall opened a manila envelope. “So here’s our little girl,” she said, pulling out some Polaroids. “Just barely still a baby,” she added. “She’s been sitting in the foster care of Catholic Social Services awaiting an African-American couple.” This was the same story I’d just heard. “They did find one, but then the couple changed their minds: said they had prayed to their God and their God had advised against it. So they turned the baby down. And then the birth mother, who is white, finally left Catholic Social Services and came to us.”

“Well, then, just as well,” said Sarah with her happy confidence still working her gaze, which cast itself eagerly toward the snapshots that Roberta was holding.

“I don’t know who ‘their God’ was that it was so different from the rest of ours,” said Roberta, rolling her eyes; you could see she had no truck with ditherers. “Once I did an international, and the couple spent two weeks in a Santiago hotel and flew back childless because they said they ‘couldn’t bond with the baby.’ So, just as well; yes, just as well.” She was still hanging on to the photos for some reason. “The birth father is African-American, or at least part African-American, though he seems to have skipped town. We have put in the ads we’re supposed to before we sever his rights.”

“What ads?”

“The ones telling him to show up or else. But this happens a lot. Even if we find these guys, we usually can meet with them at McDonald’s, buy them a burger, and let them know that giving up their rights is the best thing. Even if they’re in prison we go and talk to them, though that’s a little harder. A guy in prison won’t give up anything. He’s given up a lot already.” She paused, as if she thought that might sound brutal. “No one is coerced. They are convinced in completely compassionate and reasonable ways. Everything is legal. These are usually young guys who’ve come up from Milwaukee or Chicago for a job in the canning plant and one Friday night just had a couple beers, if you know what I mean.” Then she added, “The birth mother is white—did I say that already? She didn’t know the father for very long; Victor—we’re on a first-name-only basis here all around. But the birth mother is not romantic about motherhood: she would like to pull her life together and go back to school. She doesn’t have much.” She thrust the photos toward me. Uncertainly, I went to take them but she quickly pulled them back. “I’m sorry,” she said, touching her head as if she had a headache. “You,” she said to Sarah. “I meant to give them to you. Sorry.”

Sarah took it in stride. She didn’t want to upset the applecart in any way. She gently took the photos as if they contained the baby herself. “Oh, look at her,” she said with pleasure. “She’s beautiful.”

“She’ll darken up, of course,” Roberta Marshall said quickly.

“Of course. It’s not as if that’s a problem!” Sarah arranged a look of benign indignation.

“Well, I didn’t mean to suggest it was a problem. I just think people should understand. I have a biracial son myself. And he has been raised with a sense of total racial blindness. It’s a beautiful thing. He knows his adoption story by heart, how mommy’s tummy didn’t work, and he has completely embraced it.” The adoption business seemed to be full of women’s “broken tummies.” “When he was ten years old he was watching Gregory Hines dance on TV, and he said, ‘Look, Mom, that dancing man is adopted.’ It was the cutest thing.”

It didn’t sound that cute. It sounded odd. It sounded like it had the sharp edge of a weird lie poking into it. Perhaps, as we said in Dellacrosse, the former home and hope of extraterrestrial visitation, she had her head up her hinder. I glanced over at Sarah, who was remaining tight-lipped and nodding. I always had the sense with her that she didn’t suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how. Although later I would hear her say, repeatedly, “Racial blindness—now there’s a very white idea,” right then she merely asked, “When were these pictures taken?”

Roberta craned to look at them again. “They were taken by the birth mother the day before yesterday, I think.”

“She’s healthy? The baby?”

“Healthy. A little allergy to her formula, initially, but that all got worked out. She’s eating regular food now, I do believe. We’ll have to see what the foster family says. I have to warn you about the foster care from Catholic Social Services: it’s not the Pfister Hotel.”

“And what else do we know about the birth parents?”