Growing Girls Read online

  My daughter looked at me, drew the same blank I was drawing. “Can you do it for the people?” I said, and tried to get her started with the Mandarin words for “one,” “two,” and “three,” but I couldn’t seem to remember them. If I could just get her started, the numbers would roll off her tongue, I knew they would. She was really very good at this.

  “Oh, how do you say ‘one, two, three’?” I said to the woman at my feet. She looked at me, smiled. She spoke no English at all. “Can someone get us started?” I said to some of the other women gathered. “What is ‘one, two, three’ in Mandarin?”

  “Thirty-five dollars,” a woman at the sink said.

  Huh?

  “Thirty-five dollars,” she said.

  “Um, I’m talking about counting in Mandarin,” I said. “How does it start? Anna, don’t you remember how it starts?”

  “I am going to get one hand blue and the other hand green, Mommy,” she said, way too far gone into the manicure scene to care about Mandarin.

  “Well, she can count to one hundred,” I said. “You just have to get her started.”

  “Ahhh,” said one, smiling. “Chocolate?”

  Chocolate? She could see my confusion. “No, I said she can count to one hundred in Mandarin,” I said, raising my voice loud, like you do in nursing homes.

  “Ice cream?” the woman said.

  Okay, I officially had no idea what we were talking about.

  I shook my head, shrugged. The women gave up on me. They began chattering to one another in Chinese, smiling much of the time, looking over at my girls, and then one of them seemed to get angry about something and a debate ensued. Arms flailing, fingers pointing, brows narrowed and lips pursed. I sat there wincing, as you might when trapped in the crossfire of another family’s fight, but I didn’t just stay there. No, soon I was cringing, gripped with a ridiculous paranoia. The argument could have been about the temperature of the pedicure bath water, or about towels, or about paychecks, or about a mutual friend who needed a ride home, but what I imagined in all that animated Chinese chatter was a debate about me and my girls. That’s where my imagination went. They were talking about me. And my girls. These little girls here, who looked like them, but no, they were my girls. The women were commenting on what a crazy mixed-up picture this was. Of course they were. Who is the mother here? That one? Her? The one getting her feet massaged? The bleached-blonde American in jeans and a tank top spending her Saturday flipping and flopping through the mall and dreaming of food-court pizza? Her? She’s the mother of these Asian girls?

  Yeah, I’m the mother. And yeah, my girls are from China and you women working here are all from China but these are my girls. Girls I took away from you. No, girls you gave up. Girls I rescued. Girls who rescued me. Girls I stole?

  In one unexpected moment of clarity, or maybe it was transparency, I tumbled into a nameless shame.

  When I was working on my last book, about adopting Anna from China, a professor visiting the English department where I teach asked me if I was struggling at all with the material. “Of course,” I said, since writing is almost always a struggle, a miserable truth I didn’t feel like descending into at the time, so I tried to remain optimistic. “But I just got a few chapters in to my editor and she liked them, so at the moment I think I’ll survive.” She asked me about the content of the chapters and I told her they included some of the tender moments upon first holding Anna in my arms, a section I reworked a thousand times so as to avoid making it as sappy as, in fact, it was. “It’s hard to write about that kind of joy without getting all gooey and sentimental,” I said. We were standing by the department mailboxes and I was sorting through my mail, throwing out all the invitations for evening lectures on dialectical approaches to pedagogy, seeing as my nights were now pretty much booked with bath time and story time and watching the girls twirl around to the beat of “Toot Toot Chugga Chugga Big Red Car.”

  “Oh, I don’t know why she won’t let you write about what you really want to write about,” the woman said.

  I looked at her blankly. Did she mean Anna or my editor? Anna was only three at the time so I assumed she meant the latter. “Yeah, I know …” I lied.

  “No commercial publisher wants to deal with American imperialism!” she said, with a knowing chuckle, so I chuckled, too. “Or the politics of white supremacy inherent in the international adoption trade.” She went on like this. “It would be so interesting to read about the ways in which you locate and manage the guilt you must on some level feel when facing up to your own complicity in such a fundamentally racist experiment.”

  I think I had my eyebrows way up. I think I had inhaled but the exhale wasn’t coming out. There were so many things I wanted to say, not the least of which was, “What in the name of poopie diapers are you talking about?”

  “The personal is political!” she said with a smile.

  I stood there speechless. I hate this. I’m so bad at expressing anger, so lame at returning punches. When it comes to fight or flight, I’m on the first available plane. Only well after the fact do I imagine what I could have done if I had stayed for battle.

  “Look,” I could have said, “you can criticize my work all you want, but stay away from my kids.” Or, “Hey, where do you come off talking about the ways in which I formed my family?” But that wasn’t quite it, either. “What do you mean … experiment? My children are not an experiment!” Or, “Listen, sweetie, you don’t get to turn my kids into a victim for your cause. Get your hands off of them! Off!”

  I didn’t say anything. Or, at least, anything intelligible. I think I mumbled something about being late for class and went on my way.

  I had a hard time writing anything for a while after that. I walked around for months trying to untangle the attack. Here we had one brainy Caucasian female accusing another of participating in a “racist experiment,” with an oblivious yet deliriously happy tutu-wearing preschooler its guinea pig and victim. This was, to me, as preposterous as accusing me of secretly sheltering space aliens in my basement. Why would I even waste time entertaining the thought? Perhaps it was the delivery, the confidence with which that woman leveled the accusation, that made it stick.

  White American guilt. To be a socially responsible white American in America today is to have white American guilt. It’s good to have white American guilt. It means you’re a thinking person, a moral person, a person who has some awareness of the fact that you are entitled, spoiled, fat, and greedy. This was the subtext of my attacker’s claim. I was busted for having no white American guilt, or certainly not enough of it. I believed that woman and I felt guilty. I hadn’t had the time for white American guilt. I’d been too busy trying to find the matching lids to all those sippy cups and wondering why the sippy cup industry didn’t standardize those damn things. I’d been too busy scrubbing spilled glitter out of my living room carpet and shopping at Target for some kind of craft table I could set up to save my floors from the ravages of Elmer’s glue and Play-Doh chunks.

  (I don’t know if my attacker had kids, but I doubt it. One thing about mothers is we give each other enormous slack around almost every issue. Cleaning throw-up off one’s shoulder has a supreme leveling effect.)

  So, I was … a racist? No, I was a dolt racist, ignorant of my own crime. If only I had had an awareness of my offense, I could have written about it. I could have put it in some larger geopolitical or moral context, and thus receive from my attackers the forgiveness that comes after a show of noble guilt.

  I felt like an idiot. I felt irresponsible. I felt like running away, taking my girls to a deserted island where we could duck the madness—and this is what I more or less did.

  When I was a kid I learned the best thing to do when I was angry, or scared, or disgusted, was run to the neighbor’s backyard where they had a little barn with a pony and some rabbits and even a goat. I’d stay there for hours just talking to the animals about how cold it was or how hot it was and how I might assist them
with any of their comfort needs. Now I have a fifty-acre farm I live on and where if you don’t put the chickens away at night the raccoons will come and eat them in just a few quick gulps. These are important, urgent matters that steal your attention. Anger and shame and guilt and other worldly matters get absorbed into the earth, or they dissipate into the clouds, or maybe they just hide in the soft folds of your skin.

  I’m an avoider. I don’t take people on. I decide they’re not worth my time. I move on. I go about my life. I know I’m a good person. I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I drink wine. I watch TV. I get insomnia. Then one day I’m at the mall, at the Pedicure Junction nail salon, and I’ve got my feet in a tub while all these Asian women around me are bickering in a language I can’t understand, and there I am, with zero evidence to support the theory, but fully convinced that the conversation going on around me is about me and my girls and my crime at taking them from their homeland.

  The day at the mall was at least a year after the attack from the visiting professor in the English department. A full year. And there I was wincing, listening to a language I could not understand, but wincing like some kid expecting to soon feel a punch.

  My girls. Not their girls. Girls who looked like them but talked like me. Girls who brought back memories of their own childhoods, or reminded them of the cousins they left behind, or whose eyes seemed to whisper rumors, the hush-hush of babies disappeared.

  My girls. And yet girls with toes that wiggle in angles utterly different from mine. A girl I call Anna who has a tough, compact body, oblivious to cold and heat, a ruggedness earned in my imagination by ancestors toiling in rice paddies, wearing hats made of bamboo and shaped like lampshades—a cliché. A cartoon I draw on the blaringly blank page of her ancestry.

  And Sasha, a circus gymnast. A tiny little girl with big almond eyes and skinny arms strong as piano wire; surely she descended from a family of trapeze artists. She would have been the one they shot out of the cannon at the end of each show. The finale! She would have loved that! (And so I sign her up for gymnastics class at Gym Dandy’s gymnastics studio. An apology?)

  My girls. Girls with a history that really only begins with me. Girls taken away. Girls left behind but girls taken away. Was one of those manicurists thinking me wrong and the other setting her straight? Or perhaps the reverse was true: one was saying how laudable it was of me to take these girls from the orphanages, and the other was furious at her for not seeing my crime.

  That day at the mall, I wanted to participate. I sat there in that vibrating chair getting my calves massaged and my feet scrubbed and my shame exposed, wanting to explain that there was really nothing to this picture. Really! I was just a mom and these were just my girls and we hang out at the mall and we make jokes about underpants.

  Couldn’t we just be that?

  Tourist Trap

  by Kevin Minh Allen

  Middle-class wives

  can’t get enough of these Infants.

  So adoptable, adaptable,

  so contractually obligated

  to fit neatly in a grateful paradigm.

  After their husbands hand over the check

  that greases the palms of the minister of Interior,

  who dropkicks the orphans over the border,

  these sunburnt women catch them in their gardening

  hats

  and shine them on their aprons,

  like so many apples in a bowl.

  By the time BK arrived at the mall, my toenails were dry and my fingernails needed only a few more minutes and BK decided to forget the whole manicure idea anyway. “Let’s get pizza,” she said. She was wearing “Buffy,” her wig. She named the wig as a way of trying to make light of the situation. She was doing better ever since the doctors started pumping her up with antidepressants. She never fought the idea of having to take pills in order to cope.

  When BK got sick, we all wanted to help. It was strange because she didn’t seem sick, or at least she didn’t until the day they found the lump. It was sometime midway during the second season of The Apprentice; one morning she called me, as usual, to complain about the way they had to dub Trump’s boardroom speech, only that wasn’t why she was calling at all. “They found something,” she said. I swear she was completely healthy up to that point, but then as more news came in, you could see her start withering, like a potted plant in October.

  They told her the tumor was tiny. They said “lumpectomy.” They said maybe she wouldn’t even need radiation, and that she would almost certainly be spared the ravages of chemo.

  After the surgery the lab results came in and the story grew considerably bleaker. Her cancer was a particularly aggressive one, and so it would require aggressive treatment. Even with that, the five-year survival rate was low enough to actually become a fact worth mentioning.

  We rallied. Nancy, Beth, Chris, Wendy, friends who had helped each other through scores of boyfriend and work and home-remodeling emergencies, but never anything approaching the severity of this. BK didn’t have a husband or kids; we were her family and we felt all the tugs of that responsibility. We called each other a million times. BK was spiraling down. She seemed incapable of the smallest act of helping herself. She stopped eating not as an act of defiance nor even an expression of misery but, simply, because she “forgot.” It was ridiculous. None of us knew what it felt like to have cancer, but we couldn’t understand BK’s surrender, her utter lack of muscle when it came to the fight. We would call each other and whisper our intolerance, release it, then return to battle on her behalf. We imagined ourselves soldiers, brave and tough marines, although none of us ever found the courage to utter a phrase as scary and hideous as “five-year survival rate.”

  This was complicated by the fact that earlier in the year the singer Melissa Etheridge had appeared on stage at the Grammy Awards with her post-chemo bald head singing her guts out with such passion and triumph it made you half want to get cancer so you, too, could see what you were made of and display it in your own chosen artistic form. When BK’s diagnosis came, we all made the Melissa Etheridge link. We told BK to use that performance as her model. We told her to be strong and be cool, like Melissa Etheridge. We told her she might even have the chance to do the world some good, like Melissa Etheridge. Having a friend with cancer was like having your own personal symbol of strength and resolve.

  That she was failing to live up to this was confusing and upsetting and disappointing. Come on, BK. Be strong. What is the matter with you? You have to fight this thing. You have to stand tall.

  In my house we have a little guest room. The walls are lemon yellow, and the ceiling is all bead-board painted glossy white, falling into steep slopes around the bed. I go there when I have the flu. It’s a cocoon. It’s a room that holds you in its embrace until you get good and claustrophobic. I usually come out screaming within twenty-four hours. BK never came out screaming. She would tiptoe out reluctantly, usually just to pee. Weekend after weekend she came to the house and stayed in that room, her escape. It was an odd choice, coming to my house. She had never been the farm type, wasn’t the sort of person who found solace in wide-open spaces. She avoided our baby ducks, and when we bottle-fed our sweet lamb, BK faked a smile. I couldn’t understand any of this. I couldn’t understand a person who wasn’t healed, instantly, by the sight of a baby lamb. “Or, look at the magnolia tree in bloom!” I’d say. “Look at this beautiful day!”

  She would look at me with eyes full of tears. I wasn’t helping. I wanted to help, but I wasn’t helping. In time she became the crazy lady in our attic, a resident to avoid. I finally had to ask her if she thought coming to my place was in her best interest. She said being surrounded by family noise was the comfort. She said her own house was too quiet, no one there making noise but the cats.

  One of the things I started doing was arranging outings. I just thought it had to be good to get her out of that room. And there were errands to do. And on Saturday mornings the girls had horse
back-riding lessons, which BK did not want to ever attend because horses stink, so she would sleep in and then she would meet up with us afterwards, often at the mall, a place where she felt safe. She was a good little shopper. She had, in fact, already determined that while other aunts would be responsible for introducing my girls to the arts, and the equestrian life, and sports, BK would be “the aunt who taught them how to shop.”

  So that’s how BK and I ended up at the food court in the mall that Saturday, like so many Saturdays, and this time on the heels of some manicure confusion. The girls ate their pizza and then went over to climb on the jungle gym ingeniously provided by the food-court design team. BK stared down at her pizza. I told her I was sorry about the missed manicure. She shrugged. The last thing on her mind was nail polish. She shook her head. Back and forth, looking down at her pizza. I was going to tell her about my crisis, my swirling guilt over the fact that I had no white American guilt, but somehow it all seemed so … privileged compared to her crisis. My friend was a drowning woman. And I was a skinny tan girl standing there wondering if my bikini made me look fat. That was the difference. She had her problem and I had mine, and that was the difference.

  “I never thought I would be like this,” BK finally said that afternoon. “I thought I was a fighter.”

  “You are a fighter!” I said. Much of my role with her had been that of boxing coach, getting her ready for the next round. “Come on, now!”

  She shrugged. I reminded her once again of Melissa Etheridge’s performance at the Grammys. “We should get a tape of that. You know, you need to look to her and borrow some of her strength.”

  “I’m trying” she said. “That’s the thing. I’m trying. Don’t you think I want to be a rock star instead of some scared little girl?”

  We both sat on that one for a while. I think she was surprised to finally see things so clearly. “I just hate who I am in this,” she said, as if this were the conclusion, the end of the story. “You know? I’m stronger than this. lam better than this.”