Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (34 page)

It was an awkward and tense reunion, but my birth mother is a tough woman. She shed exactly one tear, apologizing as she wiped it away. I am taller than Carrie. As we waited at baggage claim, she told me that I had my birth father’s eyes. I already knew this from the pictures she had sent. I kept those eyes trained on the baggage carousel, pretending to be searching hard for her luggage even though I didn’t know what it looked like.

Later she told me more about Jim, about the two of them, as we sat on high stools eating Chinese food in the kitchen that doubled as Lindsay’s sewing room. I felt strange and out of proportion. I was tiny in the tallceilinged room; I was huge next to my petite mother. My hands looked embarrassingly big and masculine to me, wrapped around the chopsticks. My eyes felt swollen and tired and were suddenly sinking shut.

“We were in love. He followed me back to Chicago after the show,” she said.

She lit up when she talked about him, even after all the years in between, all the pain he had caused her.

“He was very good-looking, very charismatic. He was trying to act in Chicago and we lived in a studio apartment. We struggled. I remember that Jim broke his leg and he had this huge cast on it and we got in a fight. It was snowing out, a blizzard, and he dragged himself down the street through the snow. I got in the car and skidded along behind him, hollering at him to get in.”

I laughed.

“I lodged the car in a snowbank and we both had to walk home.”

Then she got vague. I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed or relieved that she traded her frankness for fog. Hearing her talk about my birth father and their time together had the uncomfortable scrape of talking to your parents about sex. You want to be one of those cool mom/daughter teams that talk freely about everything—best friends. But you’re not. In this case we weren’t even talking about sex. And this wasn’t even my mother, really. But I still had an instinctive aversion to the subject matter.

“There’s a lot I don’t remember. I’m sorry. I think I blocked it. I had fantasies of raising you but trust me, a long-term relationship with Jim would have been a disaster. Anyway, he left. He left before you were born.”

The story she told lasted through dinner and fortune cookies. It was a good story, but it felt unrelated to me. At the same time, I recognized it was the story I had been waiting to hear all my life. Here it was. I was finally hearing it. I was finally looking at another person in the world who looked like me. It was odd, off. Something in me blanched. I couldn’t relax around Carrie.

I don’t remember much of what we did that week, except that we hung out a lot with Lindsay and Colin. Carrie met the various friends who cycled through our loft. She was interested in everyone to whom she was introduced and she seemed comfortable with herself, even in a world of theater hipsters and art queens. I was so relieved. I guess I had been worried about what I’d find, worried that in her I’d discover some deep indictment of my character.

We went to Central Park and to the Met. We met Carrie’s Rockette friend, a lithe blond woman in her early forties. I learned that the Rockettes is where ballerinas go to die. Apparently, aging dancers from all over the country travel to New York to do the Christmas show. It’s run like a military operation, and being a Rockette is practically a nationality all its own. Carrie’s friend was in town to weigh in, brush up, and take some classes.

Like nearly every child within driving distance of Manhattan, I had seen the Rockettes many times. I mostly remember their furry hats and their long, long legs moving as one lovely machine. It was so satisfying to the human eye, the homogeneous herd of women and the kaleidoscopic patterns their bodies sketched in space. It was glamorous to meet a Rockette wearing sweatpants in the park. We had tea—black, no sugar—and watched the remote-control boats zoom around Conservatory Water.

 

Planning to join Carrie for dinner after a dance class that she had decided to drop in on, I walked to Columbus Circle and met her at Steps. Steps is where all the kids from the Broadway shows take their classes. I’m an okay dancer and can usually hold my own, but the Steps dancers are vicious. I have sat in the back stairwell of the school numerous times and wept into my sweaty jazz shoes, thinking: I’m too fat; I’m too slow with choreography; I lose count. And, most damning: I’m too lazy. I could have been so much better if I had just tried harder, if I had just paid more attention in class when I was young, if I didn’t always quit the minute things got hard.

“Ballerinas have long, thin necks like swans,” my father had often said. He didn’t need to complete the thought. Ballerinas were born swans. I could see as well as anyone that I was a duck. I would have to learn to take solace in the fact that water ran off my back.

I arrived at Steps early and tried to stay out of sight while I watched Carrie’s class through the window that overlooked the studio. She was in an advanced-level jazz class, one I would never even attempt. In spite of her age, her now-un-dancerly physique, and her one leg perpetually swollen due to a bout with skin cancer that had necessitated the removal of her lymph node—in spite of all this, she was stunning out there. She had that special thing.

When her group took the floor, I saw the normally snotty dancers on the sidelines, all of them twenty years younger than she, watching her with respect. The teacher flashed her a smile. She was alive, electric. She was better than all of them. When class ended, a small cluster of dancers gathered around her. They lingered, talking while the people taking the next class trickled in.

I, of all people, who had always found a home in my group of outlandish and uncompromising friends, knew that there were many ways to make a family. And I knew that my parents, my real parents, lived in New Jersey and loved me like crazy, if poorly at times. But standing behind the glass at Steps was the first time I felt a flash of anger. I wished for a moment that Carrie had been a little less selfish, a little more together, had loved me just a little more. If she had stuck around, I might have danced like that. Or that is what I wanted to think. But I didn’t dance like that. And frankly I was sick of wishing that I did.

I sat at the Newark airport for a long time after Carrie left. I parked myself in front of the wide panes of glass and watched the planes take off and land and take off again. I was only twenty, the age Carrie had been when she put me up for adoption. And when I chronicled my list of outrageous fuckups in the preceding couple of years, when I visited my dismal graveyard of buried aspirations, when I looked at all I had trampled, I was forced to forgive her.

Fifteen years later I lay on the couch of a beachfront apartment with the windows open and the sea breeze blowing through. My husband and I sat there in the darkening room, watching the sea suck up the last of the pale sunlight. Patti Smith was performing on the Santa Monica pier, seven stories below, but we couldn’t go to the show because I was on bed rest after my in-vitro procedure that day. I had my doubts that it would work and I was right. But I never doubted that we would have a child somehow, a child who would break our hearts wide open, who would help us to grow in compassion.

Patti’s voice was unshakable after all those years. The music was muted by the space between us, by the wind, but I could still make out the words.

I have the answer now, I believe. What would Patti Smith do? She would sing to me. She would forgive me for losing myself.

 

 

 

 

I
t’s been seventeen years since I first stepped onto the plane headed for Singapore.

I left New York for San Francisco soon after I returned from Brunei, and I never did make it back. Leave New York and it leaves you behind so quickly. New York is like the lover you leave, the one who still somehow retains the upper hand for the rest of your life. When you pass him on the street, you will recognize him before he recognizes you. You will have to decide whether or not to call out, It’s me. It’s Jill. You will read his name in the paper and your body will remember.

You will watch on television as thick pillars of black smoke rise into the air and you will remember New York, like someone just ran a plane into your heart. But New York, even at its moment of greatest pain, will not remember you. And though I like my view so much better since I left, it sometimes still smarts when I realize I’ve been forgotten.

I am married now, entrenched in a three-bedroom life, my mornings spent drinking green tea and looking out my picture window at the lush camphor trees and the purple-frosted jacarandas that line my suburban California street. When I pause, I sometimes feel an unfamiliar emotion flickering somewhere in the periphery of my consciousness. It’s there for a moment and then it’s gone. It takes a moment for me to locate a name for it. I believe it may be happiness.

As I wind further into this forest of domesticity, the dense sleeves of tattoos on my arms hint at another life to my neighbors. They look at me strangely when I stop by with homemade Christmas cookies, knowing somehow that the picture is skewed. And when, at cocktail parties, I drop hints of my former sordid self, they look at me and laugh, unsure if I’m joking.

I’m sure Robin is also leading a life he never expected. In 1997, a former Miss USA filed a ninety-million-dollar lawsuit against him claiming he drugged and raped her and held her as a sex slave against her will. The charges were dismissed based on his diplomatic immunity, but it was an international embarrassment. Not long after, Prince Jefri and the Sultan parted ways after Jefri was accused of embezzling about thirty billion dollars.

The case has been in and out of court and many of Prince Jefri’s holdings have been seized and sold at auction. Most recently, he failed to appear to answer contempt charges at the High Court of England; there is currently a warrant out for his arrest. I follow his travails with some interest, wondering what he’ll do now and what’s going to happen to his wives and children.

As for me, I’m about to take another long plane ride. A few days ago I received a call from our adoption agency saying that our son had made it through court in Ethiopia and that our travel date had been confirmed. I have a ten-month-old son whom I’ll meet for the first time in two weeks. I have seen pictures of him, so I know that he has huge chocolate eyes and is beautiful beyond measure.

Though he isn’t here yet, I still open his green gingham curtains every morning. I stand looking out the window, imagining what it will look like to my son, whose landscape now is so different. My son, who is about to travel so far for such a little boy. We’ll both have traveled so far to find each other.

The story of Scheherazade is the story of the storyteller. We hope the story we tell will be the story that saves our lives.

My son’s name is Tariku. In Amharic it means “his story,” or “you are my story.”