Replacement Child (6 page)

The hospital in New York City was gigantic inside, and even though I was holding my mother’s hand, I felt lost.

Everything was white metal and glass. The ceiling was so high I had to put my head all the way back to see it. People were moving everywhere around me, but I couldn’t hear them. They were silent walkers in white and green. I shivered with goose bumps.

The doctor explained something about putting me to sleep for the operation with “magic gas” so he could fix my eyes with tiny tools. I pictured him tying knots in the muscles in my eyes to make them tighter, pulling my eyeballs to the center.

We went up to the fourth floor and into a long hallway full of beds. I counted fifteen before we got to mine.

A nurse pulled a curtain all the way around my bed, and I changed into the hospital nightgown. It was very thin, and I shivered more.

I had expected that my mother would stay with me at the hospital, as she always did with Linda, but on the elevator my
father talked about how they were going home and would be leaving soon.

“We’ll be here when you have the surgery tomorrow, kiddo,” he said. He smiled and squeezed my shoulder, but I was having none of it and shook him off.

My mother put a shopping bag next to my bed with the books she brought for me. She went to a sink down the hall and filled a water pitcher, put it on my nightstand next to a plastic cup, fluffed the pillows behind my back, and tucked my Tiny Tears doll in next to me. She looked as if she wanted to stay, but my father took her hand and they gave me a hug and left.

I couldn’t catch my breath, and my eyes filled up when I watched them walk away down the hall. I thought about how Linda did this all the time and tried to be a “good little soldier” like her. But there was no one to see me do it, so I just curled up with Tiny Tears.

2005

T
HIS AFTERNOON IS
quiet at home. Justin is still at school, and David won’t be home from work for a few more hours. The energy in the house is different when I’m alone here. David is my best friend and confidant. We talk through dinners about our day, what’s on our minds, our schedules, the news we heard. Even though we’ve been married a short time, we seem to have a shared past. Maybe because we are nearly the exact same age, or because we grew up in similar suburban New Jersey towns and come from Jewish backgrounds. Whatever the reason, we have felt like old souls from the beginning of our relationship. I can count on his steadiness in any situation, and I am spoiled by this man who puts my feelings and happiness ahead of his own. At times, I think he is too good for me.

David and I were early adopters of online dating in 1997. He was just coming out of a divorce and was struggling to make a new life for himself while still being there for his three sons. I had been divorced for nearly six years. We joke that it was kismet that we both bought computers the same week and happened to try out a new dating site. Neither one of us was into the bar scene
to meet people. It was even more amusing that he lived about five minutes from me. We both shopped at the same Stop & Shop supermarket around the corner.

I had been on three disastrous dates in the past couple of weeks with men I met on the site when David and I struck up a conversation online. His emails were sincere and funny, so I decided to meet him. I dropped Justin off at my friend’s house and told her, “This is absolutely the last date I’m going on.”

We planned to meet at a local restaurant, and when I saw David waiting outside for me, I was relieved that it seemed he had been truthful in his online profile. He had a full head of dark hair, a kind, handsome face, and he looked fit in his red sweater. At dinner, David seemed a little nervous, and it took a while for him to start talking. I thought it was cute that he was sort of shy. We exchanged the first date preliminaries, much like a job interview. Where we worked, details of our kids, status of our relationships with our ex-spouses. When he talked about his sons, I could see how devoted he was to them and to doing the best for them, which further endeared him to me. We agreed that divorce was a complicated thing for adults, and even more confusing for the kids who have no vote in the outcome.

After dinner, we made the evening last a little longer by taking a walk and talking more. We weren’t running out of conversation—a very good sign, I thought. By the end of the evening, we had been laughing quite a lot.

After three failed marriages, I was being very careful about whom I got involved with, so at the end of this evening, I held out my hand to shake his. David looked hurt and asked if he could
kiss me good night. It tickled me to be asked, and we kissed in the parking lot quickly. It was enough, though, to recognize a spark of passion between us.

I tried to stay objective as we got more seriously involved, remembering my earlier therapy sessions that pointed to my propensity to throw out reason when I fell for someone. I looked in my self-help books and found the notes I made about why I had chosen the wrong mates in the past.

I told myself I didn’t want to get married again since I was so bad at it. My primary responsibility, I felt, was raising my son. David and I had conversations early on about how neither of us was looking for a long-term relationship. He was so newly divorced and still in the throes of adjusting. In fact, we didn’t even meet each other’s children for quite awhile. We dated on the off weekends when our ex-spouses had the kids, negotiating our schedules so they coincided. Then, of course, it all changed when we fell in love.

I had made long lists of the traits of my three past husbands and corresponded elements of my childhood to my choices. It had been an awakening for me to recognize the similarities in the three men that I had thought were so different. They were all very critical of me, something I didn’t see myself until friends pointed it out, about everything from what I wore to my cooking. They all shared an insecurity that manifested in putting me down in some way. Each one was emotionally distant, not wanting to talk about feelings or issues between us. All but one had trouble showing affection.

By the time I met David, I was prepared to put all that self-work to good use. It was a lot to track in a new relationship. I mentally went through my checklist as the relationship evolved, and it was passing all the preliminary screening. We talked openly about how we felt about our past. David was accessible and honest. He was the most stable person I had ever been involved with and had been at the same insurance company for twenty years when we met. And although he was shy at first, once he opened up, he made me laugh more than anyone I had ever known, and we had an immediately strong connection.

Now, Justin fills the house with the exuberance of a teenage boy. His friends are in and out, his music is sometimes too loud, and his clothes and belongings are scattered around the place. And even when I complain about some of it, I have to admit that I love it. All the ragged edges of his growing up, and even the small annoyances, make it real, and make me part of his life.

I can’t believe that this is his senior year in high school, and that next year he will be off to college. It doesn’t seem possible that time has passed so quickly. This fall, we took a few trips to visit schools in upstate New York, Boston, and Amherst, Massachusetts. The trips together reminded me of how it was when it was just he and I, after the divorce from his father, my third husband. We were quite a team when it was just us, for six years, before I married David. Justin and I took lots of road trips back then, to visit friends in Pennsylvania, family in Washington and in Florida. By the age of six, he was a practiced traveling companion happily seated either beside me or in
back, depending on his size at the time, singing along with me to “Truckin’” or “Friend of the Devil.” He learned how to use maps to help me navigate, and he was patient when I got lost. Now he’s applying to schools and writing essays. I’m mostly writing checks.

I
TAKE A
notebook and pen down to the family room to continue my research for the book I have decided I want to write. My parents’ notes to me have an urgency now, almost insisting that I pay attention, that I try to tell the story. I’m still wondering whose story it will be: theirs or mine.

I have three storage boxes full of writings, clippings, and photographs to go through. There’s also a musty leather suitcase chock-full of my parents’ things. Sitting in the middle of the floor, I surround myself with the loot and start looking through it. Today’s mission, I decide, is to find out something about my parents’ lives that I didn’t know.

My parents seemed to have sprung to life at the time of their meeting. Before that time, their individual histories are sketchy for me. Partially, that may be because the fire took away any photos of them as children. I don’t recall seeing even one picture of either of them before they were together.

My mother and father were introduced by my mother’s brother, Arty. He and my father were best friends in high school. My father was sixteen when the Depression hit hard, and he left school to take a job to help his family, but he and Arty remained friends. Arty had a little sister, Florence (my mother), and when
she turned eighteen, my father noticed that she had blossomed into a lovely young woman.

My father told me the story of how he asked Arty to introduce him to his sister time and time again and how Arty refused, telling him he was not her type. My father didn’t give up.

“I have two steady jobs, I’m industrious, I’m supporting my family for God's sakes. And let’s face it, I’m adorable,” he kept insisting, until one day, he talked Arty into inviting him for dinner.

It was a gray, rainy Friday evening in April. The few cars on the road, bulbous and glistening, crackled through the slick streets, kicking up spray from their whitewall tires. The town bustled with people walking home from work and school. On Friday night in a Jewish neighborhood, most everyone rushed home to make dinner for Shabbat at sunset.

My father wore his best clothes—clean white shirt, dark tie, pressed black dress pants, spit-shined shoes. He walked in to the small brick building and up the two flights to the apartment that housed Arty’s family: his mother, Hermina; his father, Desher (David in English); brothers, Henry and Eddie; and his beautiful sister, Florence.

Before ringing the bell, my father took a moment to collect himself. When the door opened, he swaggered in with a quick smile, but he backed up two steps at seeing the three brothers flanking my mother. With dark soft curls and wide expressive green eyes, my mother was the family jewel.

Nodding to them, he offered his hand to her, which Eddie intercepted.

“Very nice to meet you. I’m Al Mandel,” he said, shaking Eddie’s hand, moving on to Henry and finally my mother, who averted her eyes.

Before dinner, my mother lit the Sabbath candles, saying the blessing by heart. Wearing a shawl over her head, she waved the heat of the flames upward toward her face. Her mother and father looked on with pride, keeping their eye on my father, who couldn’t keep his eyes off my mother.

The cacophony of conversation was a mix of English, Yiddish, and Hungarian. My father tried to answer the parents’ Hungarian questions in Yiddish and tried to keep up with the brothers’ banter in English. My mother took pity on him and began to translate. Soon, they had made up a blend of English, Yiddish, and Hungarian that got them laughing, and the brothers staring suspiciously.

I know this hybrid language well. They spoke it all through my childhood when they didn’t want my sister and me to understand.

At dinner, my father fit in a few jokes, in both Yiddish and English, careful to keep them clean. He got some laughs, but Papa Desher remained stone-faced.

Dinner was a traditional Sabbath meal, with a freshly killed chicken from the neighborhood kosher butcher, roasted potatoes, green beans, and Hermina’s home-baked challah bread. Nearly the same exact meal was then being served at my father’s own house. In fact, he had gone to the butcher that afternoon for his mother.

He hated watching the slaughter. The chicken’s neck was stretched across the chopping block to be severed quickly and completely, causing the least amount of suffering possible, according to Jewish law. Then the chicken would still move without its head, sometimes actually running for a moment, before it dropped. The carcass was hung upside down to let the blood drain out into a pan placed below the open cut of the neck. My father always looked away.

When they finished dinner, my father gave Arty a serious look and flicked his head toward the front door. Outside, they sat down on the stoop to talk and smoke.