Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

No white sentimentality invents, and no hard-nosed street wisdom disputes, the preternatural awareness of the four-year-old adopted child who shares with other abandoned children a perspective verging on the otherworldly. “Oh, yeah,” says another father at Sheba’s preschool when Zan identifies her as his, “the little girl who talks like she’s twenty.” The night that Zan takes Parker to the emergency room with a broken hand and loses his car keys, he’s still railing at the experience an hour later behind the wheel when, from her infant’s seat in back, Sheba advises, “Poppy, let it go,” before plopping her thumb back in her mouth.

Sheba dazzles everyone she meets. Eyes big enough to center whole swirling solar systems, her charismatic entrance into every room brings it to a halt. Not unlike her new brother she’s an irrepressible goofball, walking around with small stickers stuck to the end of her nose, spitting water across the dinner table in a stream like the stone water-breathing lion she saw in a fountain — a mimic who spins off her own original permutations. Lovingly seizing on a word like, say, buttocks, enthralled by both its emphatic sound and the unmistakable impact on those who hear it, soon she transforms everything into a variant. When her brother’s feet stink, they’re footocks.

Eventually the mimicry becomes not only more precocious but blacker, inevitable less because she herself is black than because her white brother — like all kids in the Twenty-First Century, or maybe all kids since the first white boy or girl heard Louis Armstrong blow his horn — is blacker: “Hey there, girlfriend,” or “What up, sweet cheeks?” to people who probably shouldn’t be greeted in that fashion. When she high-fives, she follows it with the sweep of her hand across her African head and declares, “ Smooooth .”

Those few whose reaction to her is openly malevolent are all the more conspicuous for it. In a western Michigan restaurant during summer vacation a woman shoots daggers at them, and it’s all Viv can think about for days, rather than the hordes who welcome the girl. “You can’t get too defensive about this stuff,” Zan says, as the entire Nordhoc family tiptoes across minefields.

The sternest look Zan has gotten is on the afternoon he carried Sheba from the pediatrician’s office and, having received her first round of immunization shots, she wailed in betrayal, “DOCTOR SHOCK ME, POPPY!” A black man at a bus stop on the corner closely monitored the father and daughter the entire walk to Zan’s car, the two fixed in his gaze, and only as Zan struggled to strap the outraged girl into the backseat did the penny drop: I’m a middle-aged white guy hustling a screaming little black girl out of a building.

Sometimes the color confusion has its advantages. When Sheba slams into a grocery checkout line and the person in front whirls around furiously, Zan studies the architectural wonders of the supermarket ceiling as the aggrieved party searches in vain for a wayward black mother to chastise. Then there’s the time on Melrose Avenue when a young black guy comes up to Zan and says, “Hey, man, just want you to know you have two beautiful kids,” and though it’s obviously Sheba who’s caught his eye, Zan is touched that he includes Parker in the compliment. Now the only way that Zan knows to conclude the conversation with Sheba about the difference between his skin and hers is to say some squishy white liberal thing like, “You’re beautiful,” silently adding to no one, You come up with something better. Sheba takes her thumb from her mouth, locks his eyes with hers, and draws a finger across her throat.

Of course when she first starts doing the finger-cross-the-throat thing, it’s alarming. Now she does it all the time, little brown buccaneer, to convey irritation at whatever parental lapse has transpired.

Zan thought they were going to get a shy little Dickensian orphan girl. Please, sir, may I have some more? with empty porridge bowl lifted pitifully to a merciless world; and when Viv first met her at the Ethiopian orphanage, Sheba seemed exactly that. She barely spoke, only looked at Viv when she thought Viv wasn’t looking. Viv would lie with Sheba until the child fell asleep, but when she rose from bed, the girl’s hand shot out and clutched the mother’s wrist in a death grip.

From California to Ethiopia, Viv brought to the girl pom-poms and a toy giraffe and a photo of Zan and Viv in a bag with pictures of cherries on it. The girl cast all of it aside except for a picture of Parker that she kept day and night. She slept with it and woke to it. No one could take it from her.

So the first time that the shy little orphan girl emits more volume per capita than any single body Zan has heard, it’s like a boombox in a confessional. Planting her small feet in the middle of the house, Sheba rears back and roars whims and needs, complaints and demands. She engages Zan, Viv and Parker in discourse about everything under the sun.

Early on, Zan assumes this is Sheba’s bountiful curiosity, the expressions of a turbo-wonderment. She sweeps through the house picking up everything within reach and turning things on and off, pushing every button of every machine, appliance and device until all are rendered digitally senseless. This drives Zan to distraction, maybe because it feels a little too representative of the way everything else about their lives is falling apart. “Lighten up,” Viv advises, until she finds her new digital camera has been similarly sabotaged, summing up perfectly the way her photography career has flatlined as well.

Soon Zan realizes that, for the four-year-old, the substance of communication is beside the point. “It’s like she’s afraid,” Viv says, “that with the first break in a connection, everything and everyone around her will vanish.” Sheba kneads her fingers into Viv’s body like a kitten, expanding and contracting its claws. She presses herself into her mother as though to meld herself physically.

Before Sheba came home from Ethiopia, Zan and Viv worried that the shy little orphan girl would be traumatized by the family dog Piranha, a demented mix of jack terrier and chihuahua called a jackahuahua. Named as a puppy by Parker, Piranha so terrorizes the neighborhood — attacking other dogs, chasing neighbors’ cars, holding UPS men hostage on their trucks — that an electric fence has been installed around the yard and the dog has been fitted with an electric collar, this in spite of Zan’s doubts that Piranha can be restrained by any mere voltage once used to execute Soviet spies. “He’s a sociopath,” Zan scoffs to Viv, “an electric fence? That dog?” pointing at the animal. Piranha’s head jerks up expectantly; he’s practically vibrating. “Sniper fire wouldn’t stop this dog.”

“Aren’t all animals sociopaths?” says Viv.

“Maybe I mean psychopath.”

“Is there a difference?”

“I think one doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, and the other knows but doesn’t care.”

“Which is Piranha?”

“Which is Piranha? His name is Piranha . Oh, he knows.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Viv says. “Piranha fish know it’s wrong to eat people?”

“He knows,” Zan assures her, “and he doesn’t care.” When Viv left for Africa to go get Sheba, figuring out what to do about Piranha was one of Zan’s tasks back home. The canyon’s local dog expert, mistress of all breeds and their mutations, told him flatly, “You’re going to have to get rid of that dog — he’ll terrorize the poor child.” From Ethiopia, Viv wrote in an email, She’s so sweet I’m afraid the dog will terrify her.