Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

His jaw loosened. His brow lifted. A grin budded from his lips and bloomed to fill his face. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

In a trice I was at his side. He crooked his arm around my shoulder; I curled mine around his waist and looked up at him, mirroring his grin.

Arol stood and traded her trowel for a spading fork. She stamped the tines in to the hilt, along a fresh edge of the stubborn clump. Yanking the fork back, she pulled it up, then kicked it into its rut, upside down, so it would die for lack of light. Still snug against Kro, I caught her eye.

“Thank you, Arol,” I said.

A few days later, the lingering trouble of my crush on Mason drove me to the Addition to ask Arol’s help.

That morning, to boost my courage, I’d donned my most flattering shirt—mint green, with pearly snaps—and my best pair of jeans. I’d dabbed rose oil on my wrists, neck, armpits. I’d washed my hair and combed it into a long ponytail. My nails—thanks to an hour spent scrubbing lunch dishes—were clean.

On the steps to the front entrance, I paused to listen. All I heard was the kids’ clamor, mixed with Swan’s murmur, coming from the Treehouse. That relieved me. If Arol was in her kitchen, she didn’t have company.

I stopped again on the top step, hand on the knob. Could I do this? Did I dare? I reminded myself that Arol had ordered me to come around when Kro and I floundered. Hanging back posed the greater risk.

I turned the knob and pushed the door open. Closing it behind me, I caught the plunk of teacup against tabletop. Still no voices. Blood rushed to my cheeks. I turned down the hall, hot with fear and excitement.

The kitchen door stood ajar. I knocked—not too softly, not too hard.

“Come in!”

Arol sat at her table, facing me, a finger curled through the grip of her cup. Behind her, linden branches nuzzled the window screen. Above the window, a half-dozen wide-mouthed jars, filled with beans and grains, lined a smooth pine shelf.

“I came because I need help with Kro.”

She waved me to take a seat. Sliding into one of her four matching chairs, I felt my heartbeat slow almost to normal. The hardest part—the approach—was over.

“It’s great being back together with Kro, but I just can’t get this new guy, Mason, off my mind. I feel like I have to know what it’s like to touch him. Like I’ll be missing something big if I don’t.” Beneath the certainty I thought I’d found lurked doubt I couldn’t think about: What if my “out” hadn’t shown me to my mate? What if Kro wasn’t the one?

As I blurted, Arol nodded, looking both girlish and maternal with her hair in two braids, streaked white and gray. I trusted her to tame the snarl between Kro and me, weave it into neat plaits.

She rested her chin in her palm and pressed a fingertip against the whale’s tail. Shifting forward, she gazed at me, eyes narrowed, as if divining her reply from signs in my irises. Steam wafted up from her teacup. Lavender scent seeped in from the terrace. The refrigerator purred. Set against the main kitchen’s cavernous walk-in, with its bank of roaring fans, this fridge—spotless, white, single family–size—struck me as a small miracle of calm. Even as my mind raced to guess what Arol might say, I basked in the closeness of our moment alone.

She lifted her chin from her palm and tugged at the tuft of one braid. “Kro wants to have dates with other people, right? He likes to make it with Shure, Rayel, Riven every now and then.”

I nodded.

The flat of her hand hit the tabletop with a soft thwack. “If he wants to ball around, it has to work both ways. He can’t get pissed at you for doing it, too.”

I nodded again, pleased I’d won tacit permission to hit on Mason.

“And on your end, you’ve gotta communicate with Kro. He’s your top priority. You wanna make it with someone else, you tell him first. Some other guy might drive your box wild, but he’s the one you’re with.”

On my date with Mason, the earth did not shake. So I homed back to Kro, still certain on the surface, to lift his brow with forgive-me kisses.

We both knew he had to take me back, since I’d strayed with Arol’s leave.

I was hunting fresh events for the summer selling calendar, at one of the Addition computers, when Arol’s question floated down from above:

“Wouldn’t it be great to have little mulatto babies running around?”

The word “mulatto” caught my ear—a word I’d read in books but wasn’t used to hearing. What’s she talking about? Is she talking to me ?

I looked up. Arol was leaning over the rail of the staircase spiraling down to the main office from the loft, where Kro, in headphones, was working at his desk. She fixed me with an impish grin.

“Don’t you get the best genes when you mix the races?”

She was talking to me. She was suggesting that Kro and I get pregnant.

Little mulatto babies. I was twenty-six and a half in June 2003. I’d long thought that if I gave birth I’d wait till my thirties. My mother had borne her first child at thirty and her last (me) at thirty-four. Arol had birthed Swan at thirty-seven. Rayel—the only Zendik woman besides Swan to give birth since my arrival—had done so at thirty-two, after almost a decade and a half at Zendik. I’d assumed that earning leave to breed would take at least a few more years. But as Arol beamed down on me, I conceived a new story, starring mocha-skinned toddlers who romped up the steps to hug her knees, their squeals, sharp and excited, announcing my place in the family of Zendiks. They’d bind me for life to Kro (marriage was a sham; we’d never get married) and, even better, to Arol—their grandmother. If there was a way to forge the ties of a natural-born Zendik, this, I thought, was it.

Little mulatto babies. Of course Kro would accept Arol’s proposal, if I did. Didn’t every man lust to spread his seed? It wasn’t as if he’d be signing on as sole breadwinner for a nuclear family, or even Mr. Mom. Zendik children mostly stuck together, in the care of their mothers and other women, with Zar’s Australian shepherd, Apache, standing guard. Fatherhood would not force a drastic shift in how Kro spent his time.

Little mulatto babies. Arol, who was Jewish, had married a Catholic as a teenager and given birth for the first time at seventeen. Then, taking her infant son, she fled her husband’s beatings. Working as a secretary in New York City, she fought to make ends meet.

She couldn’t. So she called a family meeting and asked each relative to help her out with a monthly pledge. They, in turn, urged her to visit a woman named Yeti, at Jewish Family Services. “Yeti will help you,” they said.

Arol thought Yeti would connect her with the money she’d asked of her family. Instead, Yeti suggested that she pass her son to a nice, well-to-do Jewish couple who’d raise him in a stable home and pay for college. Arol felt betrayed, but she agreed. Her son was two when she gave him up.

Her surrender left her shattered. She broke down, slept around, wound up in the gutter. Some friends, seeing she was courting early death, got her drunk (to calm her fear of flight) and packed her off to San Francisco. The change of scene could not heal the wound of losing her child, but it did revive her. By the time she met Wulf in Los Angeles, a couple years later, she’d pulled herself together.

This story of Arol’s son—passed to me by one of her confidants—did not serve the Farm’s creation myth. So I never heard it, as a Zendik. Instead, watching her lurking hurt reverberate through Rayel’s first years of motherhood, I assumed that Rayel, playing out a Deathculture script, had brought her pain on herself.