The Good Daughters (16 page)

A Family of One’s Own

A
FTER MY MARRIAGE
to Jim, my love of making art seemed to disappear. The sorrow was gone but I missed the excitement I used to feel, walking into whatever odd little space I’d set up for myself to paint in. The urge to make pictures had left me.

I wanted to be a mother. If the dream of a certain form of passion was over for me, this was what remained—the hunger to create a family I felt truly part of as I never completely had with my own.

I told Jim that I wanted babies. He said that was fine, so did he, though most of all what he wanted was to make me happy, and if having babies would do it, he was ready.

So I took no diaphragm with me on our honeymoon to Cape Cod. And though our sex life already had a certain tepid regularity to it—our lovemaking taking place, typically, at every-other-day intervals—now, with conception in mind, we stepped up the level of activity.

Based on my experience with Ray, I imagined I’d become pregnant right away, so after six months had passed and it didn’t happen, I started taking my
temperature. I called Jim at work if the number on the thermometer spiked, and he—though diligent about his clients—raced home to get to work on this, his most important job.

Three months, six months, nothing. The memory of the pregnancy I’d relinquished preyed on me, of course. I couldn’t help but feel that what was not happening now was punishment for my abortion, and for the arrogance of having ever supposed a woman could choose her moment for motherhood, the way a person would schedule a haircut or a dentist appointment.

A year after we’d started trying, we consulted a doctor. Though twelve months wasn’t such a long time to wait, she did all the usual tests.

It turned out that Jim had a low sperm count. “You never know, it could still happen,” she said. But she advised us that if we were anxious we should look into the alternatives: A donor. IVF. Adoption.

In the end, we found our daughter in Korea. I was just shy of thirty-three years old.

We flew to Seoul to collect Elizabeth from the orphanage. She was fourteen months old—found abandoned on the street outside the orphanage eight months earlier with nothing but a rag wrapped around her body and her umbilical cord still attached. No record existed of who her mother might have been. I’d be her mother now. That was what mattered.

They took us to a building where all the parents came to sign the papers and pick up their babies. All that morning we’d sat with the other couples on a long wooden bench, waiting for our names to be called, our daughter presented to us.

Every time the door opened, Jim and I leaned forward, ready to spring, but each time they called one of the other couples, until we were the only ones left. Then finally our turn came.

They took us into the room. At the far end, wrapped in a thin blanket, gray from many launderings, our baby girl was held out to us. Jim at my side, I ran to hold her.

She was perfect of course—smooth caramel skin, almond eyes, a thick thatch
of shiny black hair, her mouth a rosebud. Placed into the arms of a strange woman she’d never seen before, our daughter did not cry or flinch, only stared at us.

She was, from the first, a person who seemed to accept whatever happened to her next with an air of quiet, noble dignity. She shared a crib with an eighteen-month-old named Ae Sook, who’d been abandoned like herself. The two babies had scarcely been parted for more than a few minutes since that day. They slept curled around each other, closer even than the narrow confines of their crib required. When one cried, so did the other. When one reached out a finger, the other took it.

Then the world changed for her. One day she was Mi Hi—Korean for Beauty and Joy—eating rice from a pair of chopsticks. The next day Ae Sook had disappeared, and Mi Hi was Elizabeth, on a plane to the United States, in the arms of a pale American woman who could not stop stroking her hair, and a kind-faced, anxious-looking man who said, when he took her gingerly on his own lap, “How are you, Elizabeth? I’m your father,” as he handed her a saltine. Jim never spoke to a child any differently than he spoke to anyone else.

I looked down at our daughter. Her face looked serious—no smile, but neither did she reveal any sign of distress. Small as she was, she had no words for what she might be feeling, and even if she had, I could not have understood them.

Then we were at Logan Airport. Then in a taxi. Then opening the door to an apartment in Brookline, with a musical mobile circling above Elizabeth’s new crib, playing “Rainbow Connection,” and, outside the window, the lights of the city of Boston, the neon Citgo sign above Fenway Park.

We gave her pureed peaches and took her in her stroller in the Public Garden to see the swan boats. If she remembered Ae Sook, or the sounds and smells of the orphanage, or the arms of whoever the woman was who’d laid her in the box that day outside its doors, we’d never know. Whatever happened next, she did not protest. We were her family now.

After all that waiting, all I wanted was to hold our daughter, but she was crawling—would have been walking by now, only at the orphanage they’d kept her in that crib so much she was behind schedule.

All my life I’d kept a drawing pencil within reach, though for the last year or two, I’d barely sketched a single image. Now I drew Elizabeth until she grabbed the pencil from my hand. I walked with her for hours, through the streets of Boston, pointing out the names of things, lifting her out of her stroller when we reached a grassy spot. We tossed bread crumbs for the ducks, laid out plastic letters on her blanket, turned the pages of books, making the sounds of all the animals. Pond swimmer that I was—never fully comfortable in man-made bodies of water—I signed our daughter up for swimming classes at the Y. Nights when Jim came home from work, the three of us sat in the kitchen—Elizabeth in her high chair between us, Jim at one end of the table, I at the other. When I looked across the table in his direction, he was always looking at me, smiling. I mostly kept my gaze on our daughter.

It was a safe and cozy life we led back in those days—Jim at the office selling insurance policies, I at home full-time with Elizabeth. No sign of danger on the horizon.

I loved the routine of it, welcomed the demands of naptimes and diaper changes, feedings and walks, weekend excursions—just small ones, nothing elaborate—to the children’s museum or the beach, a petting zoo. Saturday night was generally our time to make love—a brief interval that for me was more about affection and the appearance of regularity and keeping up the business of marriage than passionate desire, though the words my husband whispered to me in the dark were those of unending love.

When Elizabeth was old enough, I put her in preschool so I could complete the last class necessary for my art therapy degree, and so she would have other children to play with. This, too, like everything that came before, our daughter accepted with as little sign of disturbance as any other change in her young life so far.

I never minded being home with her. It had been stillness that was hard for me—clear, unspoken-for expanses of time that allowed me to remember things I preferred forgetting. Ray Dickerson, of course. And my mother, with whom I spoke now only on rare occasions by telephone, and saw twice a year—my
Fourth of July weekend birthday, and Christmas, when we made a brief trip to the farm where my parents lived to see them and my four sisters and their husbands on those subdivided parcels our father had carved out.

“There’s a piece with your name on it, Ruth,” he told me every time Jim and I drove up to New Hampshire. “It wouldn’t be such a bad commute for Jim if you settled down here. I bet he could even get himself a bunch of clients up this way.”

I missed living in the country. I did not miss my mother. There was no way I would place myself or my daughter within such easy reach of her.

But her power to hurt me had diminished now that I had made a family of my own. Though it seemed to me she had never fully included me in our family—and neither had my sisters—that mattered less now.

I was the mother of a daughter of my own, who bore even less resemblance to me than I did to the other women in my family, and still I could not have felt any more connected to her if my blood ran in her veins. Whatever it was that explained that hard place in my mother’s heart reserved for me, I could not fathom. I’d given up trying.

Always Complicated

A
CAR PULLED
up at the farm one morning on a day we had our closed sign up. Two women who looked to be in their fifties got out. It annoyed me a little that they’d come down the driveway in spite of our sign, on a rare day I was going to be alone with Clarice, whose semester hadn’t started yet.

It was Connie Plank and a friend she introduced as Nancy. “We heard you were raising goats out here,” she said. “We thought it would be a fun excursion to come say hello.”

Seeing her there and hearing the oddly insistent tone of her voice, as if she was expecting something from me, I felt a momentary sympathy with Val, for all those times over the years that Connie had shown up this way, unannounced, at whatever house we might be living in at the time, with that air she always managed to convey, as if she was checking us out, to see if we were doing things she might disapprove of.

“I was actually just heading out,” I said, not wanting to engage Clarice in this unwelcome visit. “But I’ll show you around the garden for a minute if you’d like.”

I showed her the strawberries first, then the goats and our cheese-making
operation. I told her nothing of the strawberry breeding project I’d undertaken with her husband, and she didn’t ask about much.

“My family were cheese makers in Wisconsin,” she said. “You probably didn’t know that.”

No reason why I would have, but I shook my head.

“Cheddar,” she said. “My father was one of the biggest suppliers in the Carr Valley for a while. He put us all to work. My sisters and me.”

“Interesting,” I said, wishing she’d leave.

“I hate cheese,” she told me. “Just the smell of it. Bad memories, probably.”

Once again, there seemed little to say. Now Connie’s friend stepped in.

“It’s just so interesting,” she said, “the way you and Ruth were born the same day and all. It would be nice if sometime everyone could get together for dinner. Share all those memories.”

I could have said “What memories?” but I didn’t.

“Tell Ruth hello for me,” I said.

“You two always loved playing with those dolls of yours,” Connie said. “Though if you ask me, that Mattel company is sending the wrong message to young girls.”

“I guess the message didn’t take, in my case,” I said, indicating my overalls and T-shirt. Though I could have added, if I’d wanted to shock them, that my girlfriend loved dressing herself up like a Barbie sometimes.

“Oh, you look just fine to me,” said Connie. “Kind of remind me of my own younger self, actually.”

This was not good news.

“I think my daughter’s a little put out with me at the moment, if you want to know the truth,” Connie said. “She doesn’t come home much.”

“She’s probably just busy,” I told her. “I don’t see Val that much either.” Though in my case, it was more than busyness that kept me from visiting, and I wouldn’t have doubted that the same was true for Ruth.

“You know how it is with mothers and daughters,” she said. “It’s always complicated.”

Seeing Things Differently

I
HAD COME
back to the farm for a brief visit so Elizabeth could see her grandparents, I said. It was still hard for me to be around my mother, but I didn’t want our daughter growing up without extended family and I knew she’d love the farm. That afternoon, my mother was baking cookies with her. My father and I had taken a walk over the fields. He wanted to show me the piece of land he’d selected to be mine and put in my name, if the day ever came I wanted it.

“I chose this one for you because it’s closest to the pond, and for how the light hits the trees,” he said. “And for the early morning sun. Since you’re an early riser like me. You could have a house here someday.”

“It’s just too hard for me,” I said. “Being around Mom.”

“Your mother does the best she can,” he said. “She sees things differently from you, that’s all. But the idea is always to look out for you.”

I kept on walking, saying nothing. I wondered if he knew what she had said to Ray Dickerson that day to make him close his heart. I’d never ask.

“After you left us that time,” he said, “she found that sketchbook on the table. I reckon that was your idea, leaving it where you did.”

“My drawings.” The ones I’d made when I was young. When all I had needed to create excitement and joy was to pick up a pencil and draw, and I believed the only limits in a person’s life were those of her own imagination.

“I thought those pictures might just give her a heart attack,” I said. “Maybe that’s what I hoped.”

“Some things happened to your mother when she was young, too,” he said. “They changed the way she looked at the world. The things some people might enjoy, to her, they made her afraid.”

“I didn’t ask her to agree with me. It just would have been better if she could have left me alone and just allowed me to be different.”

“There’s sometimes more to a story than you know, Ruth,” he said. “A person might have their reasons for doing what they do, even the things that seem so hurtful. The things she did that you blame her for so harshly might have been done to protect you. It could even be they were done out of love.”

“I’m sure she threw that sketchbook in the woodstove, anyway,” I said.

“She saved it, actually,” he said. “I have to admit that surprised me. She said you sure knew how to draw. She said you reminded her of Val Dickerson that way.”