... and Baby Makes Two (15 page)

Still, Jane's heart sang. A list! Lists are so specific and possible.

…

Karen and Teresa had already begun work on their lists. They were ahead of her. They would get to China before her. Jane had to catch
up. So she scheduled a homestudy right away. She tried to imagine how it would go. Some large, suspicious person would interview her and probably run a white-gloved finger over the top bookshelf, the one Jane couldn't reach. Maybe there would be an elaborate lie detector involved. Dr. Ali, who really wished Jane would call her Barbara, encouraged Jane to complete the homestudy as soon as possible. The FBI's approval of the fingerprints would combine with the homestudy in an INS office and transform into the I-
171
H. The magical result of bureaucratic alchemy. Hard to obtain. Very Holy Graily But once it was received, Jane would be ready to send her dossier to China. Jane could not see anything beyond the Dossier to China date. The DTC, as the folks on the listserv called it. Jane was learning the lingo.

Jane enlisted Ray's help with the cleaning. He could reach the top shelf of the bookcase. Jane reorganized her very organized sock drawer. She grimaced at the thought of the spare room—she couldn't call it a baby's room yet—being inspected. It looked like a warehouse in hell. Ray talked her down.

“You know, babies make messes. They're not known for their neatness.”

“This is an inspection. I had to gather three letters of reference that make me sound like the savior of western civilization. I'm not leaving anything to chance. Please tell me that the place doesn't smell too much like cleaning chemicals.”

It did.

“Please, please, please let me cleanse the place with a little burning sage?” Ray was practically begging. His eyes looked big.

“Babies. Fire. No.”

She opened the windows and tried to whoosh all the chemical smells out to the city.

“Ray?” Jane asked while she whooshed. “You'll come with me to China, won't you?”

He kissed her cheek.

“Darling Jane. Just try and stop me.”

By the time social worker Donna Dupree-O'Reilly arrived at Jane's home, it would have met the standards of the worst obsessive-compulsive in Martha Stewart's family tree. Clean, but warm. Safe, but lived-in. Happy, but stable. Good, but great. This was to be the actual judgment of her fitness to be a mother. She buzzed Donna into the building with maternal warmth and firmness.

Donna seemed to like Jane in advance. She had a list of questions that she had to ask, but they veered off topic easily. Donna had two teenagers and talked fondly of the baby years.

“Jane, you have a second bedroom? Wow! Most of the people I interview are still kicking themselves for buying a one-bedroom, you know?”

“But the room is kind of small.”

“So are babies.”

Donna wasn't judging or inspecting. She was chatting. She offered advice on the baby's adjustment to the U.S. She shared good and bad experiences in child care. She never even glanced at that top bookshelf. Jane forgot about being nervous. The interview lasted an hour and included two cups of decaffeinated tea.

“Now, I take all this stuff, the letters, the financial stuff, and I turn it into a homestudy” Donna explained. “You and your agency okay it, and there'll be two copies: a long version for the INS and a short version for China.”

“Why does China want a short version?”

“They've got to get this all translated, and they need a more condensed version. The long homestudies used to really slow them down. They've got a lot of homestudies to read. A lot.”

There was so much to know. Jane worried that perhaps she had used too many American idiomatic phrases, and her homestudy would be impossible to translate. Donna reassured her that all would be well. Jane raced to the phone and relived the entire evening for Ray. He was, as always, an attentive audience.

“Barbara, tell me the truth. Can I do this alone?” Jane knew she was asking for a passing grade, permission, and a psychic prediction. She also knew that Barbara was too smart to provide any of the above.

“Jane, sweetheart, no.” And didn't that sound like a failing grade?

Barbara continued. “No one can do it alone. It takes more than a village to raise a child, Jane. It takes a whole hemisphere. Let's make sure you stay connected.”

And so Barbara invited all her adopting Moms to dinner in Chinatown. There were other single women who were following this same crazy path, beyond Karen and Teresa. The restaurant was noisy, but the women found one another easily. There were lots of new faces.

“I'm Greta. I'm halfway through my dossier. And you?” Greta was short and heavy. Jane thought she looked like a mushroom.

“I'm Charm. C-H-A-R-M. My parents thought it would be cute. I promise you, I'll give my kid a normal name. Not Charm. I haven't started yet, on the dossier, I mean. I'm still thinking about it.” Charm was a pretty brunette with a thick New York accent.

“I'm Megan. I'm waiting.” Megan was rail thin, with an ex-punk look to her.

“For what?” asked Charm. Jane wondered if Megan waited for signs too.

“For my referral. My dossier went to China, like, six months ago. So I'm watching the Web like crazy. We all keep track of what each agency is saying about timing. And the referrals usually come in monthly batches. So you watch a whole mess of people get their referrals, and you know you're one step closer. Don't you watch the lists?”

You would think that a Web site commonly referred to as “the lists” would have had a special appeal for Jane, but so far she had avoided them. She had lists of her own. It seemed like adoption was an entire world beneath or around this one. She had just never noticed.

Barbara arrived late, with her daughter, Rachel, in tow. Rachel was six years old, with pigtails and a Catholic school uniform. She was lethally gorgeous. There was too much to react to. The baby hunger awoke in the table of women, and Rachel sensed it immediately. They all looked ready to snatch the little girl and take her home. She clung to her mother.

“She's not usually so shy” Barbara apologized, then got down to business. “Ladies, one of the reasons I've brought you all together is this: I'd like to hold a couple of seminars or discussions that I wish I'd had back when I was paper-chasing.” The women glowed. It was like free money. Or shoes.

“But I'll need someone to organize the materials, schedules, and such. Any volunteers.”

It looked to Jane as if every woman at the table was trying to shrink. Jane shot her hand up. This was a job for List Woman!

“Jane. Of course. I should have known. Let's talk about this separately, okay? I'm so hungry. Rachel, honey, I've lost all feeling in that arm. Can you relax a little bit?”

Eventually Rachel sat and ate and colored the dragon picture
that the waiter had given her. She started her own pictures on the side, a parade of Disney villains.

Jane took a chance. She pointed to a black and white woman on Rachel's page and said, “Cruella De Vil.”

“Uh-huh.”

Jane sang, “If she doesn't scare you, no evil thing will. To see her is to take a sudden chill.”

Rachel lit up. She stopped drawing and gazed at her new American Idol.

“Cruella, Cruella De Vil.”

Why Jane knew all the words to this song, she could never explain. But they had taken up space in her brain, and now they were connecting her with little Rachel. As they sang greatest Disney villain hits (Jane got a little carried away and shimmied as she belted “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from
The Little Mermaid),
Jane realized that she was missing all the helpful hints that the Chinamoms were sharing around the table. She should have stayed in the grown-up conversation.

“Do you know the Gaston song?”

Jane did her best baritone and kept singing.

…

The women helped one another with the dossier work:

Saturday morning. Jane was still half asleep, or so she thought. She wanted to sleep in. She blinked at the chair in her bedroom and
saw her mother. Sitting, smiling, and looking about thirty years younger. Jane blinked again and sat up. The chair was empty. Of course.

…

Jane received her homestudy in the mail. It was surprisingly cold. It listed pertinent dates about Jane's life. It listed her family members. It noted the recent death of Betty. It gave a sketchy description of her job, her apartment, her appearance. It listed her assets and her lack of debt. It was so impersonal. But then it stated that Donna, a social worker qualified to make such judgments, recommended Jane for adopting a child. There. She was catching up with Karen and Teresa. Wasn't she?

…

Another Saturday. She should really sleep in while she can. Time would come soon when she wouldn't be able to. And there was Mom, standing in the doorway, keeping the thirty-years-younger look. A good choice. Jane followed her out of the bedroom, to the far end of the apartment.

“Janie? What are you going to do with this extra room?”

“The darkroom? I'm changing it. You'll see.”

“No, dear. I know that's the baby's room. I meant over here. See? You have a whole extra room you've never used. See?”

She guided Jane through a hidden door and into a large room, off the kitchen. Had it always been there? It was a rough space. Dark and musty. It would need a lot of work. A lot of fixing up. But Jane could do it. Oh, look. It needed new windows. And maybe she should break through the wall here and—

She woke up and laughed at herself. Every New Yorker's dream—discovering extra space in your apartment.

…

“This is such a powerful dream,” Ray told her over drinks. “Let me look up some of the symbols in my book and I'll give you a full interpretation.”

But Jane didn't want it interpreted. It was about mother and baby and real estate. That was enough. Besides, she was late for meeting Peter, her dinner buddy.

“You really think he just wants to be friends with you?” Ray could not hide his cynicism.

“Listen, if he wants more than that, I'll scare him off with my baby plans. A married man looking for a little something-something doesn't want that kind of complication.”

“Speaking of baby plans—have you told Howard yet?”

No. She hadn't. Jane visited her father, but it was more difficult now. Her brothers wanted nothing to do with her. They kept the children away, made dramatic exits, and stayed away until Jane was back on her island, Manhattan. Jane had allied herself with Sheila, the traitor, and the Irish boys' sense of loyalty to their mother locked Jane out in the cold. So Jane did not visit often.

“He looks so exhausted these days. Don't yell at me, but I'm waiting for a sign—for the right time. For timing. I'm waiting to tell him.”

“Hey who am I to lecture? I had a hard time coming out to my parents too. You'd think my Judy Garland album collection would have clued them in, but I still had to do it. And so will you.”

Jane hadn't been paying close attention to Ray while she took care of the great paper chase for her dossier. But today, she looked at him and saw a change. Was it his skin? His eyes? Was he really getting something from this new phase he was in?

“Ray. You look gorgeous. You look, I don't know how to describe it, happy”

“That's right.”

Jane kicked herself for being so self-involved and missing this change in her friend. Ray was happy. Ray. Happy. Anything was possible.

He was still smiling, still quiet, still happy. Jane squirmed with curiosity.

“Ray? Talk to me. What happened? How did you manage this?”

“How to be Happy in Ten Easy Steps. Is that what you want to hear? Come on. I'm happy, Jane. That's all.”

“Wow.”

Jane sat, chastened and silent, for at least three minutes. Didn't she look so shallow, with her martini glass and obliviousness. But then, chaste silence didn't suit her relationship with Ray. She giggled and said, “Is he cute?”

Ray smiled like the Grinch. “So cute. So, so cute. His name is Burton, such a movie star name. He introduced me to this great meditation class. I pondered his cuteness until I found that I really liked the rest of him too.”

“Wow.”

…

Jane met Peter at an Argentinean restaurant. She was prepared for an evening of awkward conversation and prolonged pauses. After all, this date/nondate may well have been forging new territory in the relationships between married men and single women.