Strangers at the Feast (21 page)

In the infirmary, Priya mixed bottles of formula, deftly pinned on diapers, and wrapped each baby in a blanket.

Within two weeks, the infants were processed for adoption, and Ginny watched as Priya, with sad resignation, smeared kohl on the girls’ eyes for their photos. Over the years Priya had learned to skillfully communicate every thought and emotion with her face; she did not know how to hide her unhappiness.

“It’s not fair,” Ginny said.

“If we don’t get them adopted now,” said Ravi, “they will end up just like Priya.”

“Give her a chance! Let a family at least meet her. These rules are moronic.”

“It is the bureaucracy,” said Safia.

“If someone were to want her, they’d have to go back home, begin the paperwork, the home study, and then what? It would take six months, another year. I could conceive, carry, and give birth to a child of my own faster than it would take for me to adopt her.”

Safi and Ravi looked at each other, and Ginny blushed, realizing what she had said.

“It’s not just her age,” Ravi said. “She doesn’t speak. This is a lot for parents to take on.”

“
I
understand her.”

“Ginny.” Safia touched Ginny’s hand. “What are you feeling?”

“I go home in three weeks, and I think, well, I think Priya wants me to take her with me.”

“And you?”

Ginny thought,
I’m not ready to be a mother.
It was impossible to
picture her life in New York with a seven-year-old child. But when she imagined leaving Priya at Analisa, it seemed like abandonment.

“Where would I even begin the paperwork?”

“Ginny, this will take money and time. You must be sure,” said Ravi. “But we can contact our subagencies in the States and get the ball rolling.”

“Or,” said Safia, “maybe we can expedite it.”

“How? We need to petition the court with a home study, and we cannot even begin that until Ginny arrives home.”

“Ravi, Priya’s been with you four years. It’s time.”

“Fuck, I can’t believe I’m saying this. But, Ravi, let me take her home. Now. Please. Don’t make her sit in this place another year. Nobody else will want her. You know that. I’ll pay whatever fees.”

Ravi let his head fall into his hands. “We could lose our accreditation.”

“No one will find out,” Ginny said. “And you’ve spent every day for the past two months with me, you’ve watched me with Priya. What more of a study do you need?”

Safia stood. She was older, and he would always defer to her. Ginny sensed they both feared that if she left without Priya, she might change her mind. “It is decided.”

Ginny had to produce $3,500, bank statements, a letter of employment from the university, medical records. Safia changed the name and address on a home study from a San Francisco woman who had applied for adoption the year before. With that, Safia presented Ginny’s entire I-600A packet to an Indian district court.

Within an hour, Ginny was granted guardianship.

Ginny applied for Priya’s Indian passport, and her immediate-relative visa petition. She would have to wait to initiate official adoption procedures in the United States, after six months of home study. And she would have to relocate quickly, so there would be no questions about the changed details of her paperwork.

The evening before she left for New York, Ginny sat down beside Ravi on the front steps; he was biting his nail.

“I’m nervous, too,” she said.

“It’s the right thing. I am just one of those people used to following rules.”

“Rules are for fools. If that’s not already a saying, it should be.”

“The rules haven’t helped Priya so far.”

Ginny dug into her bag and handed him a thousand dollars in cash. “It’s not a payoff. It’s for the girls. Buy them ice cream, new shoes, something.”

He took the money, studied it for a moment, and then slipped it into his pocket. He released a noisy huff of air. “I hate this job. I’m losing two of my favorite girls.”

Ginny leaned back on her elbows and looked up at the sky. Dusk was falling; feathered clouds stretched across a purple sky. Tomorrow she would wake up a mother.

“Ravi, did you want me to take her? From the beginning?”

He stood, surveyed the yard, and with his back to her said, “That would be crazy, wouldn’t it? Really crazy.” Then turned, kissed her forehead. “Send us a postcard of the Empire State Building.”

Across the crowded dormitory room, Ginny carried an empty suitcase. Priya sat on her bed playing cards with another girl, but when her eyes fell on the bag, she stopped. Ginny laid the suitcase on the bed and threw it open.

Priya shooed the other girl away and stared at the empty bag. Then, as though trying to remember a list in her mind, she jumped to her feet and began pulling sweaters and skirts from her bedside drawer. First, she set them in the suitcase slowly, carefully, but with each new article of clothing, the reality of her escape began to dawn on her, and she giddily flung her socks and nightshirts into the bag. She held up a blue shirt, shook her head in disgust; it would not do. She held a pair of tights to her waist, and then tossed them to the floor. She flitted and scampered; she rattled drawers, putting on a triumphant show
for the room of gape-mouthed girls. She left the hairbrush and bobby pins on her nightstand.

When the suitcase latches were sealed and she had made her good-byes, Priya lifted the bag, held her head high, and slowly stepped forward, as though it were a moment she had rehearsed her whole life. She clasped Ginny’s hand, and pulled her along, proudly leading the way, as though she were the one rescuing Ginny.

KIJO

The man who made Kijo was a shadow, a shadow without a name; he was ten names, he was nobody. He was good, or maybe bad. He was a neighbor, a classmate, a man in an alley. The woman who made Kijo was eleven faded pictures locked in a trunk. She was a scuffed pair of tap shoes. An amusement park bracelet. A high school yearbook. She was a name—Arlette—without a voice, without a telephone number, without an address.

Kijo knew it was stupid to miss a person you’d never known, but he did. He wouldn’t say it to Grandma Rose or Spider, wouldn’t tell them he lay in bed as a child wishing he could talk to his mother. When he stuttered, he’d been certain his mother would have understood him. That’s what a mother was, the person who always knew what you were feeling.

So as a child, Kijo learned what he could of his known lineage.
Lineage,
a word he could say.
L
s were easy for him. A man had to know where he’d come from before he could know where he was going.

Just as some kids studied baseball cards, Kijo had studied old photographs. All those years his stutter had made him afraid to speak, he sat quietly at home, on a twin bed beside a gooseneck lamp, flipping through his grandmother’s scrapbooks.

He’d traced his family as far back as Elton Washington, his great-grandfather, who’d fought in World War II in a Buffalo division. After Elton had returned from France, he and his wife, Rose, moved north from the Carolinas. There had been a hold on factory walkouts during
the war, but once the treaties were signed, workers pulled off their goggles and threw down their helmets and picketed textile mills and auto plants. Since the unions had never let in blacks, Elton had no problem joining an assembly line. That’s what he’d told a newspaper reporter,
They ain’t let me work beside ’em, I ain’t gonna stand beside ’em.
In 1946 he got a job at Yale & Towne, working there until the plant closed. The newspaper had also run a photo of him: a broad-shouldered man with a long beard, standing at the factory gate with a tin lunch pail,
ELTON
painted on the side.

Elton and Rose rented a small yellow house on Freedom Avenue in Stamford, south of what would be the interstate. They had three children: Franklin, Leroy, and Augusta Rose.

A decent family, Kijo thought. Until another war came.

Franklin and Leroy died fighting in Vietnam, alongside their best friend and sister’s husband, Joseph Jackson. Joseph Jackson’s father had also worked at Yale & Towne, but when the factory closed, he opened a locksmith shop. As a child, Joseph worked there, picking up the trade so well he became known as Key Joe. The man for whom Kijo would be named. Kijo had a picture of him in a uniform leaning on an army truck. Joseph was smiling, revealing a gold front tooth. That might have been the end of the Jackson line, but Joseph left Augusta Rose with child.

In 1973, with the money from her husband’s army life insurance, Augusta Rose made a down payment on her parents’ Freedom Avenue house. That same year, in the upstairs bedroom, she gave birth to Arlette Jackson. Eighteen years later, as Grandma Rose would eventually tell Kijo, after both Elton and Rose had passed away, Arlette vanished one night, leaving her newborn on the sofa wrapped in the pink robe Augusta Rose had sewn for Christmas.
Sorry, momma,
the note supposedly said, though Kijo had never seen it.
You better at this.
Augusta Rose said her heart was split in two, snap, like a wishbone. For fifteen years she waited in that house in case her daughter came walking up the porch steps.

231 Freedom Avenue.

Kijo had been made to memorize the address, in case he got lost. On the bottom of his shoes, she wrote it in permanent ink. His grandmother stitched it inside his jacket for when his stutter got him. She showed him how to hold up his fingers: two, three, one.

The house was two stories, with a hot attic crowded with Grandma Rose’s sewing forms—armless cotton bodies of every size that terrified the young Kijo. In the damp basement, where Kijo played Battleship on rainy days, was the red trunk that held the things Kijo’s mother had left behind. Sometimes, if he couldn’t sleep, Kijo would go down there and look through it.

Grandma Rose never spoke of Arlette, but she cared for that house like it was her child. “Aren’t you pretty?” she’d say as she hung bright white curtains. Despite her troubled hip, she’d stand on chairs and dust the ceilings using a broom covered with an old pillowcase. In the corner of every room sat a spray bottle of glass cleaner and a folded red rag, in case she noticed a spot while talking on the telephone. The house always smelled of ammonia and mothballs and lemon cleaner. She eyed visitors, even Kijo, as they stepped in, to make sure they wiped their shoes; if anyone trekked mud into her home, if a hot mug was set down without a coaster, her smile would vanish. Grandma Rose once asked Auntie Henrietta to get on her way for putting her feet on the coffee table.

From the decorations around the house, it was hard to tell who Grandma Rose thought more highly of: Jesus or Elvis Presley. Jesus hung in the bathroom, kitchen, living room, and Kijo’s room, but not in Grandma’s bedroom. A signed photo of Elvis sat propped on her nightstand beside a photo of her late husband. A framed Elvis album hung over her bureau. Kijo figured Jesus probably wouldn’t like the lady friends who sometimes stayed the night.

He’d been made to call them aunties. Auntie Evangeline, Auntie Sarah, Auntie Henrietta. When Kijo was young, Auntie Henrietta had come around in the evenings for four years, helping with the cooking,
homework, and speech lessons.
She sells seashells, Kijo baby, come on.
She cleaned rooms in the Hilton and always brought wrapped soaps and little bottles of shampoo and bubble bath. After dinner, the women played chess and yawned themselves up the creaking stairs to Grandma Rose’s bedroom. Kijo thought she really was his grandmother’s sister until he came home one day and Grandma Rose said Henrietta was getting married and wouldn’t be coming around again. She spent a week making Henrietta a wedding dress, then tore it up and used the scraps to wipe grease from the stove.

“Grandma, why you crying?”

“Don’t you be nosing into my business, boy!”

Spider told Kijo women got lonely in ways men didn’t, and did weird things.

Grandma Rose made her living sewing, going down the block once a week to JoJo Jefferson’s shoe shop, where she’d measure and pin clothes on neighborhood folks, then carry the clothes home for hemming and mending. She dyed her hair a shade of red that looked pink in the sunlight; she wore it short and curled and pushed it in place with her cracked hands when she was nervous. She walked with a brass-handled St. Christopher cane and Kijo could hear her coming—
click, click, click
—a long time down the street.

When he was young that gave him time to hide his mischief: burning ants or building a potato gun. When his stuttering would frustrate him, Kijo got into trouble pocketing candy from the grocery store, stealing street signs and license plates. He and Spider liked to wander to the white parts of town and put shoe polish on pay-phone receivers. If Grandma Rose caught him, she’d sew a red felt circle onto his shirt so he’d have to tell anyone who asked that he’d been telling mistruths. Doing good deeds was the only way he could get the circles off. Until he was ten, Kijo walked around with so many red spots people called him Pox.

One day he stole a skateboard from a boy across the street. He didn’t know why since he was too clumsy to ride it. He fell off trying
and the mother, Miss Macy, saw him out her window and marched over to have words with Grandma Rose.

Grandma Rose could do more than sew spots; she took Kijo’s earlobe between her knuckles, twisting hard.

“You wanna be a thief? We ain’t got enough hoodlums round here, huh? Say you’re sorry.”

“I’m s-s-s—” Kijo couldn’t get the word out.

“He thieve like a man, but speak like a baby,” said Miss Macy. “Don’t that take the cupcake.”

“Don’t you think that stutter’s gonna make anyone feel sorry for you…” said Grandma Rose. “Don’t you bring shame on my house!”

“I’m s-s-s—”

“I feel sorry for y’all.” Miss Macy turned away with a huff. “He only gonna get worse. We all know where he came from.”

Grandma Rose waited until Miss Macy had closed her door, then yanked Kijo close by his ear. “You go bad, I got nothing. You’re a good boy, now act like it!”