Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“What ads?”

“The ones telling him to show up or else. But this happens a lot. Even if we find these guys, we usually can meet with them at McDonald’s, buy them a burger, and let them know that giving up their rights is the best thing. Even if they’re in prison we go and talk to them, though that’s a little harder. A guy in prison won’t give up anything. He’s given up a lot already.” She paused, as if she thought that might sound brutal. “No one is coerced. They are convinced in completely compassionate and reasonable ways. Everything is legal. These are usually young guys who’ve come up from Milwaukee or Chicago for a job in the canning plant and one Friday night just had a couple beers, if you know what I mean.” Then she added, “The birth mother is white — did I say that already? She didn’t know the father for very long; Victor — we’re on a first-name-only basis here all around. But the birth mother is not romantic about motherhood: she would like to pull her life together and go back to school. She doesn’t have much.” She thrust the photos toward me. Uncertainly, I went to take them but she quickly pulled them back. “I’m sorry,” she said, touching her head as if she had a headache. “You,” she said to Sarah. “I meant to give them to you. Sorry.”

Sarah took it in stride. She didn’t want to upset the applecart in any way. She gently took the photos as if they contained the baby herself. “Oh, look at her,” she said with pleasure. “She’s beautiful.”

“She’ll darken up, of course,” Roberta Marshall said quickly.

“Of course. It’s not as if that’s a problem!” Sarah arranged a look of benign indignation.

“Well, I didn’t mean to suggest it was a problem. I just think people should understand. I have a biracial son myself. And he has been raised with a sense of total racial blindness. It’s a beautiful thing. He knows his adoption story by heart, how mommy’s tummy didn’t work, and he has completely embraced it.” The adoption business seemed to be full of women’s “broken tummies.” “When he was ten years old he was watching Gregory Hines dance on TV, and he said, ‘Look, Mom, that dancing man is adopted.’ It was the cutest thing.”

It didn’t sound that cute. It sounded odd. It sounded like it had the sharp edge of a weird lie poking into it. Perhaps, as we said in Dellacrosse, the former home and hope of extraterrestrial visitation, she had her head up her hinder. I glanced over at Sarah, who was remaining tight-lipped and nodding. I always had the sense with her that she didn’t suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how. Although later I would hear her say, repeatedly, “Racial blindness — now there’s a very white idea,” right then she merely asked, “When were these pictures taken?”

Roberta craned to look at them again. “They were taken by the birth mother the day before yesterday, I think.”

“She’s healthy? The baby?”

“Healthy. A little allergy to her formula, initially, but that all got worked out. She’s eating regular food now, I do believe. We’ll have to see what the foster family says. I have to warn you about the foster care from Catholic Social Services: it’s not the Pfister Hotel.”

“And what else do we know about the birth parents?”

“Well, the birth mother you’ll meet today — everyone on a first-name basis only. She needs to interview you and see if you are the right parents — right mother — in her mind. The birth father, well, we don’t know much. And there are privacy issues. She didn’t know him well. It was, I think, only a fling, of sorts. Possibly it was a — no, I take it back. I don’t think it was a date rape.”

A dry quiet descended on the room like snow.

Finally someone stirred stiffly, as if shucking off ice. Sarah. “Can we meet the baby?” she asked.

Roberta grinned. “You’ve come all this way. Of course! But first you need to meet Bonnie. The birth mother.” And here she lowered her voice. “She’s just going to ask you a few questions. Her concern is religion. The baby’s already baptized, but Bonnie wants a promise that she’ll be confirmed.” And here Roberta lowered her head and her esses made a hiss: “ Unenforceable, of course. ” She then resumed a normal tone and what seemed to me an attorneylike posture. Broom up the back. “You wouldn’t have any problem with that, would you?”

“I don’t think so,” said Sarah. “I have attended the Unitarian Church and often there they have ceremonies that—”

Roberta did not like the word Unitarian. She interrupted with an ominous richness of voice. “This is a birth mother who spends her Saturday nights ice-skating with nuns. You wouldn’t have any problem with having the child confirmed and taking First Communion in a Catholic church.”

“Uh, no, I wouldn’t,” said Sarah, on cue.

“Good.” Roberta stood. “Now let’s meet Bonnie.” She opened the door to her office and signaled to someone inside. “We’re ready for you,” she said quietly, and then opened the door wide.

Bonnie was not bonnie. She was dressed formally, in a beige knit suit, pantyhose, and brown flat shoes, to make her look professional, I supposed, which she wasn’t but wanted someday to be. She was heavy, perhaps still from the pregnancy. Her hair was thick and pale, the color of a wax bean, with roots of darker door-knocker blond. She was older than I was. Maybe she was even thirty. She wore glasses, and behind them I could see her eyebrows were shaved into a thin line — the stubble showing both above and below. The thin line was lengthened at the end with an eyebrow pencil, which looked about as natural as if she had just taped the pencils themselves over her eyes. I had always been told never to pluck above the brow, only below but never above, and never, ever shave them, and seeing her standing there, in the muck of her mistake, I finally knew why people had said all that stuff about plucking. I stood to greet her. She looked puffy and medicated. I wondered how it would be for her going back to school, inconveniently carrying around this ironic name — like the birth father, Victor. I wondered if she thought it mocked her. When everything else in her life probably was a source of sorrow, on the other hand, why would she care about the rhetorical mockery of her name?

She walked toward us slowly, with the fibrous, brushing sound of pantyhose, and then she sat down on the sofa next to me, so I sat back down with her. Beneath her stiff composure and mask of a face she gave off a whiff of bacon grease and gum. The smell of spearmint grew, and I began to wonder whether she had a wad stashed in the back of her mouth to disguise a terrified breath. Close up the odd art of her eyebrows seemed more a mild madness than a mere miscalculation.

I smiled at her, thinking she could see me in her peripheral vision — and she could. She turned and nodded but then focused her attention back on Sarah, who sat across from us.

“Have you met my daughter yet?” she asked Sarah.

All the words in that question felt wrong. There was an awkward pause, and Roberta jumped up. “I’m going to have Suzanne bring us some coffee.” She got up and went looking for Suzanne, who for some reason had left her receptionist’s desk and gone into Roberta’s office, as if they had traded places and it didn’t really matter who was who. That of course was what this whole adoption agency was about: women switching places.

“No, I’ve only seen pictures,” said Sarah. “She looks very beautiful.”

“Yes,” said Bonnie, her eyes suddenly welling. “She is.”

“She looks like a little Irish Rose,” said Roberta, overhearing as she returned to the room, carrying a tray with two bowls: one piled with creamers and one jammed with yellow packets of sweetener that I’d learned from friends had been invented accidentally by chemists during a reformulation of insecticide. Death and dessert, sweetness and doom, lay side by side: I was coming to see that this was not uncommon. Such sugar, of course, was corrupt. Death, on the other hand, was pretty straightforward. I knew several kids who for money had been lab rats in pharmaceutical experiments, and they had secretly mucked up the data by doing things like eating doughnuts on the sly or getting high on glue. But after their blood was tested or their sleep observed, the results were sent out as science.