A Southern Girl (26 page)

We were in Charleston by then, where Coleman’s father passed away two months after we arrived. He regained only limited speech, and what little he communicated was spent on subjects well wide of adoption. He died without ever meeting Allie. Sarah composed his obituary, and when I realized she had omitted Allie’s name as a surviving grandchild, it was all I could do to attend the funeral and to feel empathy for his widow. Sarah knew I was livid, and I stayed so for weeks afterwards. It was not until that summer, on the beach, when we watched Sarah instruct a toddling Allie on the proper way to build a sandcastle, that I began to sense things would only get better between them. And they did, but it was gradual.

At eighteen months, Coleman took her for her checkup.

“How is our girl?” I asked as he loosened his tie and tossed his coat over the back of a kitchen chair.

“She’s still not on the growth chart, but Rick says she’s healthy. She didn’t like the shot at all. She let the whole clinic know how unhappy she was.”

“Good lungs, eh? If she develops a chest I’m going to be very upset.”

Coleman laughed. “You’re feeling threatened?”

“Asians are supposed to be small breasted. I’m counting on it. She can be as beautiful as she likes, but I refuse to be intimidated by a daughter who won’t wear my dresses because they are ‘snug.’”

“Maybe you can bind her chest. It works for feet.”

On the day President Reagan was shot, Allie tripped on a pull toy in the playroom and struck her mouth on an end table. For a time it looked as if she might lose a tooth that had just emerged on her lower gum. Like Reagan, the tooth survived.

Josh and Steven, adapting to new friends and surroundings, ignored her. They rode their bikes, tested their imaginations against neighbors, adapted to a different school. Occasionally they would use her as a prop in
a game, or grow bored enough to torment her by hiding behind doors and jumping out suddenly with a yell. I found a playgroup for her, watchful for any sign of alienation from toddlers her own age, but she mixed well. Parents of other children either hid their curiosity behind a mask of indifference or, at the other extreme, asked so many questions for which I had no answers. “We know very little about her,” I would say, and the more I repeated the phrase the more it came to me that it was true.

I shared those doubts with Coleman one evening over drinks. The kids were all in bed and I mentioned Dot Ellis, whose daughter Catherine was in Allie’s playgroup. “I guess I was a bit defensive with her,” I told him. “She didn’t come out with it to my face, but she implied I was nuts to have taken a child with no background check or history. Looking back, maybe it was a little nuts.”

“Oh?” he said, and I felt a huge I-told-you-so on the way. “My dear, coming from you that is quite an admission.”

But then, just when I thought he would lecture me on how truly rash it was, or at least how rash it seemed to others, he said, “But you went on your instincts. You usually do. And in this instance I think you were right, so to hell with Dot Ellis.” I could have kissed him for that. In fact, I did kiss him for it.

Still, we both worried, and although we did not talk about it much, I know we both studied her for signs of trouble, particularly in the early days. How bright was she? Would she grow up awkward and ugly? Had her parents bequeathed lethal, time-delayed drug addictions or lymphomas? Like the survivor of an accident who has no time to appreciate the danger until after it has passed, I nervously studied her for any sign that my great experiment had been, in fact, a fanciful whim destined to disappoint. In time, I came to associate these anxieties with the move to Charleston rather than any objective observations of her. To my eyes and ears, she showed every sign of relentless normality.

For Coleman, the adjustment to having a daughter, this daughter, seemed to me to take an opposite course. Before her arrival, he had echoed the prophecies of skeptics. I knew he was waiting for confirmation of retardation, of family-wrecking mental instability, of mortal infant illness, of deformed growth. In Virginia, he had bathed her, changed her, fed her, and rocked her on nights when I craved sleep and Allie didn’t, all the while certain that he held a time bomb of sorts.

But when we reached Charleston he relaxed, and these dreads had been supplanted by feelings I think he was just beginning to understand. When she learned to walk he took her to the Battery, holding her hand as she tottered along the edge of the parapet. She kept her head down, eyes focused directly a step ahead, concentrating. When they reached the end, she turned at once to retrace their path. Sometimes he directed her to the railing, where they could see the harbor and he could teach her words like “wave” and “boat” and “fort” and “ship.” The bond they were forming thrilled me, even if he didn’t recognize its strength right away.

She liked the games our sons had liked at that age. When Coleman sat in his den chair, crossed his legs and she straddled his foot to ride the bucking bronco, she laughed as hard as they had laughed. At night, she insisted on playing “Superman.” Bathed and dressed for bed in feeted pajamas, she spread her arms as he held her aloft by material gathered behind her shoulders. Squeals of pleasure echoed through the house.

By the time she entered preschool, her foreignness had become no more remarkable to Coleman than Josh’s cowlick or Steven’s slight overbite. When the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner, killing 269, the grim news stories reminded us that we had not given the country of her birth a thought in months. Shortly after that disaster, I planned a picnic. We would travel in separate cars, as I planned to go directly from the park to visit a sick friend. The boys were waiting in my car, and Coleman had just told me he would meet us there when Allie climbed into the front seat beside him. On the way, according to him, she said that her mother must have been poor.

“What makes you think so?” he asked.

“I just think so,” she said.

When Barron Morris retired, the law firm fell into rare dissension. Coleman played the role of peacemaker until it became apparent that the competition for control would be bitter and protracted. He met with Harris Deas, a lawyer his age also impatient with the infighting, and together they formed Carter & Deas. The new firm prospered. When Sarah downsized to a small house on Sullivan’s Island, we moved into the house on Church Street.

On Allie’s fifth birthday, I arranged for a pony. In the back yard, seven other children from her kindergarten class took turns being led. Allie returned to the line after each ride. She giggled with the waiting girls and
ignored the two invited boys, who darted among them playing a form of tag that required a slap to the top of the head. But she kept an eye on the pony. By her third or fourth mount, she grew possessive, seeming to resent turns the others took and imagining that the pony responded when she approached, threw her leg over the pommel, gathered the reins, and planted her feet in the stirrups. When it was time for the cake and presents, she reluctantly went inside after I assured her the pony would be there when she finished. That Christmas, a pony topped her wish list. I prepared her for disappointment in a short, elementary lecture that was part economics, part zoning. Later, I reported to Coleman that the child was obsessed.

“She wants pony books, pony videos, pony clothing. Maybe I’ll look into lessons. I think I’d like to ride as well.”

“That’s a great idea,” he said, telling me it would be good for both of us.

Mastering Charleston’s antiquated rules and conventions would challenge the most determined transplant and God knows I tried, genuflecting to customs, traditions and rules of etiquette centuries in the making, and little changed. Coleman had warned me that folks here believed “nothing should ever be done for the first time,” and how true that proved. I gave and attended teas. I took my turn on the garden tour and the open houses. I resisted the urge to crash after-dinner drinks in wood paneled libraries thick with cigar smoke and men. I fussed over debutantes. I kept track of invitations given and received with the precision of the most meticulousness accountant. I volunteered, donated, served, supported, venerated, and praised. I did these things and more for Coleman, for our sons, for the life and family we had resettled in Charleston. They were all part of the informal bargain struck in Virginia. “Lord, I’m mellowing,” I told a friend.

To feed my inner rebel I relished tiny acts of defiance, venial as they seemed, which kept something within me alive. I refused to leave calling cards (“fucking absurd,” I muttered on more than one occasion). I refused to wear hats or white gloves (“people, it’s 1987, and it’s 98 degrees out there, for Chrissake”). Behind the walls, I sipped tea and re-read Camus, Virginia Woolf, and Garcia Marquez.

For a time I looked at Allie as both a daughter and an ally. We had both been transplanted, seeking air, light and water in foreign soil. She was my
comrade-in-arms, a fellow pilgrim on the humid, azalea-lined road the family had taken. Then, just after her seventh birthday, I came home to find the strains of
Die Fledermaus
blaring loudly from the study. Opening the door, I saw them waltzing on the hardwood floor, Coleman holding Allie with ballroom formality. She wore her soccer uniform. Her feet, clad in athletic socks, rested on the tops of his. “The perfect lead” he called it after they became aware of my presence. And I wondered, not for the first time, just whose ally the child was.

Her “otherness” gradually, and at times painfully, asserted itself. In grammar school, her teacher asked each member of the class to identify their family heritage as part of a geography lesson. She replied “English and German,” an accurate answer as far as we were concerned: “A plus.” But a boy behind her laughed, and I feel sure the teacher thought she was being tactful when she suggested Korea. The child shook her head and said no, “English and German.”

There was the day when I caught her posed in front of a hallway mirror. “Allie?”

Without turning she said, “Yes, mom?”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m … different.”

“You’re beautiful.”

“All moms say that.”

“No, I mean it.”

She returned her full attention to the mirror. Nearing it, her face three inches from the glass, she pulled at the corner of her left eye. “I don’t look like the girls at school.”

I winced. That which I had forgotten, she was only now discovering. “Here we go,” I muttered inaudibly. But she drew back from the mirror, shrugged indifferently, and walked to the kitchen to make a sandwich.

The truth is that, try as I did to empathize with all the assimilation issues I knew she must be wrestling with, I doubt I succeeded, and no amount of adoption literature—and I read it all—bridged certain gaps between the world she was born into and the one we brought her to. Yes, she and I were each in our own way transplants, outliers, but her challenges dwarfed mine and were made greater by the fact that she herself was undoubtedly unaware of many of them. A prepubescent child cannot articulate turmoil the source of which is only vaguely felt. As a parent, you
look for clues to understanding what she herself cannot understand. You try to help solve a problem for someone who does not know they have a problem. For example, she never expressed curiosity about her birth family or Korea, nor did she appear to feel any affinity with the handful of Asians at her school. I saw this as a form of denial, a distancing that says to herself and those around her that she is the same as the rest of us. It must be the young mind’s defense against a dislocation that demands a more mature mind to cope with. I’ve read about parents who went to extraordinary lengths to immerse their Asian adoptees in their native culture, but I always believed that was a mistake, an end run around the instinctive defense. I guess time will tell.

How would I have felt, transported to Asia as an infant and surrounded by people that looked like aliens? And we, the caregivers and nurturers, tell ourselves that we have given them a better life by adopting them because we know from reading and experience how harsh conditions are, especially for girls, in foreign countries where the supply of children so greatly exceeds the demand. But
they don’t know that.
They have not yet learned that girls are abandoned in landfills, or beside highways, or drowned as if they were a litter of unwanted kittens. They know only what they have until the self-awareness, the kind I witnessed that day when she stood at the mirror, tells them they are different in fundamental ways, which can trigger profound questions like, “Who am I? Where did I come from? Who are my parents?” And most critical, “Why was I abandoned?” For many of these children, those inquires are never answered. Some stop looking for answers. Would Allie be one of those?

Her middle school years challenged all of us. Social cliques rule in those grades. She had friends, but the movers and shakers at Porter-Gaud kept her at arm’s length. We heard about sleepovers to which she was not invited, and while she always protested that she didn’t care, we did. Bullies are endemic to every middle school, and although she never suffered physical abuse (that I learned of), she endured her share of mean jokes about chopsticks and kung fu and slanted eyes and fried rice. These taunts hurt, to the point of tears. She refused to ever use chopsticks and for a time she even disdained rice, a staple of the southern diet and a starch she had loved as a young girl. Her teachers wrote notes home expressing surprise she wasn’t doing better in math and science, when in fact she loved English and struggled with other subjects. This difficult passage was
the only time I questioned my decision to avoid immersing her in Asian culture. At one point I suggested we go together to a Korean church newly organized in Charleston, and she responded by using a new phrase popular at her middle school: “no way.”

If any boy showed interest in her, we heard about only one. She mentioned Tommy Worth, and the way she said his name told me she was in crush mode, that painful passage girls her age navigate as best they can. At the time, the poor girl had a mouthful of metal from braces plus some complexion issues. During a long walk on the beach, she confided that she thought he was going to kiss her but instead he asked if she had brothers or sisters in Korea. She told him she didn’t know. I dreaded the awkward dating years that lay ahead, but as things turned out I wasn’t destined to see them and would have given anything to be a witness.