Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other Read online

  ALSO BY SCOTT SIMON

  Windy City

  Pretty Birds

  Home and Away:

  Memoir of a Fan

  Jackie Robinson and the

  Integration of Baseball

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  A Short, Superficial History of Adoption

  Room Service, Please

  Intimate Intrusions

  Frank, Carol, Alex, and Scarlet

  Another Seat at the Table

  Skin Deep

  Brown Eggs, White Eggs

  “How Come Almost All of Us Are Girls?”

  “Hang On to the Vine”

  Adults Say the Darndest Things

  “I Got Their History”

  Cherokee People, Cherokee Tribe

  A Primal Wound?

  Andrew’s Family

  A Hundred Wounds

  Cold, Mama, Cold

  “I Was Never in Her Shoes”

  Love Above and Beyond

  Don’t Be Afraid to Ask

  Kind of an Average Guy

  The Pain of What-Ifs, and the Folly of “Don’t You Know What?”

  We Fit

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOR CAROLINE,

  ELISE, AND LINA,

  MY LOVES, MY LIFE

  Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.

  “Pooh,” he whispered.

  “Yes, Piglet?”

  “Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw.

  “I just wanted to be sure of you.”

  —A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

  ADOPTION IS a miracle. I don’t mean just that it’s amazing, terrific, and a wonderful thing to do. I mean that it is, as the dictionary says, “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of divine agency.”

  My wife and I, not having had children in the traditional, Abraham-and-Sarah-begat manner, have learned to make jokes about the way we’ve had our family. (“Pregnant! Why would you do that? Those clothes! And you can’t drink for months!”) Jokes are sometimes the only sensible answer to some of the astoundingly impertinent questions people can ask, right in your children’s faces. “How much did they cost? Are they healthy? You know, you hear stories. So why did you go overseas? Not enough kids here?” But we cannot imagine anything more remarkable and marvelous than having a stranger put into your arms who becomes, in minutes, your flesh, your blood: your life. There are times when the adoption process is exhausting and painful and makes you want to scream. But, I am told, so does childbirth.

  We also know that the hardest parts are still ahead.

  RAINDROPS RATTLED the roof of our small bus, seeped through the windows, and pitted the windshield with great wet gobs. “A sad day,” sighed Julie from Utah, while the cityscape of Nanchang, China, slabs of brown and gray with wet laundry flapping, rolled by our windows. Five sets of strangers were together on the bus, about to share one of the most intimate moments of our lives. We had Cheerios, wipes, and diapers in our hands.

  “A happy day,” Julie added, “but also sad,” and then we just listened to the ping of raindrops. A month before, this moment couldn’t have happened fast enough. Now it was here; and we weren’t ready.

  We had endured three days of what we had come to call “adopto-tourism” together (“You will now visit the Pearl Museum and Gift Shop! Then the Great Wall and Gift Shop! Tomorrow, the Silk Museum—and Gift Shop!”), during which we talked about the sundry things strangers do to be companionable. “And what do you do? What kind of crib did you get? Aren’t they impossible? Do you know that little Indian place just off Thirty-second?”

  Over careful conversation between stops, we began to make some fair assumptions about the meandering paths of hope, frustration, and paperwork that all of us had navigated to get here. Most of us had probably tried to start families in the traditional manner. For one reason or another, the traditional result was not achieved. There are all kinds of wizardly things that can be done in laboratories these days; most of us had tried one or two. But wizardry does not always deliver. At some point, after all the intimate injections and intrusions, and the hopes that rise and deflate, many spouses look at each other across a field of figures scratched on the back of an envelope and ask, “Why are we doing this? There are already children in this world who need us right now. We sure need them.”

  A few weeks before, we had received a few photos in an envelope: a small girl with rosebud lips, quizzical eyebrows, and astonished eyes. She was about six months old at the time of the picture. A dossier prepared by Chinese adoption officials told us that she was smart, active, funny, hungry, energetic, and impatient (all of which remain a good description to this day). The officials had given her a name: Feng Jia-Mei.

  A little girl named Excellent-Beautiful. From the Feng township.

  We made copies of the photos, slipped them into our wallets, sent them around to friends and families, and doled them out like business cards, often to total strangers. “Jia-Mei Simon” was imprinted along the bottom, like the name under a photo in a class yearbook. Feng Jia-Mei, Jia-Mei. Excellent, Beautiful, Jia-Mei Simon.

  Friends looked at her photo and wept. Something in her face, and in her tiny, tender shoulders, seemed to call out. We told people that the look of surprise in her eyes was because she had just read our dossier and said, “I thought you said that I was going to first-rate people!”

  OUR SMALL BUS pulled up before a great gray file cabinet of a building in central Nanchang. So: this is where we are going to become parents. You walk into the building as a couple, and leave a few minutes later as a family. You walk in recollecting long romantic dinners, nights at the theater, and carefree vacations. You leave worrying about where to get diapers, milk, and Cheerios.

  Grinning bureaucrats received us and showed us to a staircase. They took us down a flight and into a room. We saw smiling middle-aged women in white smocks holding babies, cooing, singing, and hefting them in their arms. We shucked raindrops from our shoes and coats. We checked cameras and cell phones. We looked at the women in the smocks and then realized—they held our children in their arms.

  We saw Elise. She was five months older than in the picture we had, but still recognizably the little girl in the thumbnail portrait. Pouty little mouth, tiny, endearing little downy baby duck’s head, fuzzy patch of hair, and amazed eyebrows, crying, steaming, red-faced, and bundled into a small, puffy pink coat. We blinked back tears and cleared our throats.

  “Feng Jia-Mei?” we asked softly. The woman in the white smock looked down at a tag—as if checking the size—and smiled.

  “Ah, yes. Feng Jia-Mei!”

  She put her into my wife’s arms. I tried to point a video camera, snap pictures, roll audio, and hug them, all at the same time. Our little girl’s tears fell like soft, fat, furious little jewels down her face. As Caroline lifted her slightly from her lap to hold her, Elise soaked her own tufted little legs with a hot surge of pee. And then, as we laughed, cried, and hugged her even more fiercely, Feng Jia-Mei opened her small robin’s mouth and burped up a geyser of phlegm, fear, and breakfast. Baby, baby, our baby.

  Back in our hotel room, Caroline zipped, snipped, and unbuttoned four layers of Chinese clothing. Our daughter looked up into Caroline’s unfamiliar face without warmth or disdain; one more stranger was handling her. First the puffy quilted pink coat came off. Then a black quilted coat. A mustard-colored crocheted sweater. A little red and white shirt
. A tiny white T-shirt. Four pairs of pants, white, black, gray, and pink, each with a cunning little slit in the backside (among the greatest Chinese inventions since the compass and printing). And finally, pink socks that had been tucked beneath red socks: as tiny and dear as a kitten’s paws. Each layer smelled of coal smoke and pee. We laid those small clothes aside to keep for the ages.

  Shigu, our trip coordinator, came by our room. We told him that our daughter seemed inconsolable. Well, he had seen that several hundred times before.

  “You should go downstairs,” Shigu advised. “Get something to eat.”

  Our baby was famished. She inhaled a soft egg custard and plain white rice and stopped crying for a few moments, sobbing being hard to do while you are swallowing (though she tried, she tried). She sat in Caroline’s lap, then mine. Her eyes were dull, defiant, and blistering. Her small cheeks burned so, I wondered if her tears would sizzle.

  We looked at the other happy new families across the room. They smiled back wanly. They were having as much fun as we were.

  I don’t remember what we ate. Not much of whatever it was. I had a glass of wine, my wife had a beer, and we toasted our daughter. The drinks flashed through us like tap water. We ate and talked and tried to amuse, divert, and win over our daughter with songs, food, and funny voices, leaving her sullen and unmoved, all the while asking ourselves, “What have we done? What were we thinking? We’ve ripped a baby away from the only place she’s ever known, to bring her some place on the other side of the world that might as well be the moon. What kind of people are we?”

  We went back to our room. We called our respective parents, contriving to sound cheerful over our daughter’s screams. We put her into her crib and stumbled across to the bed, kicking our shoes off like lead ankle weights, weary to the bone. We called over to Elise. “Goodnight, baby. Goodnight, Feng Jia-Mei. Goodnight, Elise Sylvie Jia-Mei Simon.”

  She just cried back.

  We looked at the ceiling. We listened to the thrum of buses along the highway just outside our hotel window and turned our heads away from the leak of neon light around the edges of the curtains. It was no later than eight o’clock at night, and our limbs felt as sodden as logs.

  “We love you, baby,” we called softly. “We’re glad you’re here. We’ve been waiting for you, Feng Jia-Mei. We love you, Elise Jia-Mei Simon.”

  She cried, gurgled, and spat. We brought her into bed with us. She cried and kicked, cried and kicked. At one point I caught one of her little legs carefully in my hand. “Nice kick, baby,” I told her, and sang, “All you really needed was the music, and the mirror …” She cried and kicked some more.

  But after a while, her breathing changed gear, and she began to drift into sleep. We followed. My wife and I turned to each other across Elise’s small, sweet, flushed, pink, teary face. Her small nose quivered three or four times with each breath. She kicked and twitched, but was letting herself fall into slumber. And in that moment of deep, condensed, and intense silence, Caroline and I realized that in the space of an afternoon, our lives had suddenly developed a few new and indisputable truths.

  That my wife and I loved each other even more than we had a few hours ago. That we loved no one on earth more than this new, small, squalling, hungry, thirsty, and occasionally ornery human being that was now ours. Our baby had opened new chambers in our hearts.

  And we realized: our daughter hated us.

  MY WIFE AND I were up early the next morning, fitful, nervous, and sleepless. We took up positions on opposite sides of Elise and looked down as she stirred awake. Our baby. Elise looked to the left at Caroline. She looked to the right and saw me. Her face was blank. She might have been trying to remember the faces of her pursuers in a bad dream.

  “We’re on your side, baby,” we told her. We began to chant, softly, “Feng Jia-Mei! Feng Jia-Mei! Feng Jia-Mei!”

  She burst back into tears.

  EXPERTS HAD cautioned us that children in cold orphanages were rarely bathed. It was just too much of a chore. So the first thing many new Western parents want to do is plop their child into a warm bath to wash off the soot of coal fires. But they warned that the babies, being unfamiliar with baths, will squall and claw like cornered cats. Wait, wait, wait, they counseled.

  Yet it didn’t feel right to leave our daughter to stew in her own juices after she had pooped, pissed, and whoopsied. So we drew warm water into a small plastic tub and plunked her in, along with a yellow plastic duck. She liked it, the warm water, the soft, fragrant soap, the rubbing, singing, and nonchalant touching. Elise began to splash; she smiled. We washed her gently and wrapped her lightly in a hotel towel.

  And as she warmed up, Elise remembered to start crying again.

  We placed her in the small, rocking Chinese hotel crib. She kept crying. We took her into our arms and onto our bed. She cried even more. Our love intensified with admiration. Elise Jia-Mei Simon wasn’t going to fall for a couple of strangers just because we gave her dinner and a warm bath.

  I HAVE A PICTURE I keep in whatever office I have and will ever have: my wife, a soft, raven beauty with a radiant smile, holding Elise aloft in her graceful hands, almost like a fluttering dove (I have made my wife smile occasionally; I have never made her smile like that even once). Elise is in a small white silk Chinese dress that we got—I wish we had a better story—at the Nanchang Wal-Mart, and she is also smiling. A grand, goofy, and mischievous smile that makes people smile back, laugh, and say, “What personality!” It is certainly a smile that discloses a hint of the charismatic and clever little girl she has become.

  Because those smiles are so euphoric, and Elise’s silk dress is immaculately white, like swaddling clothes, many people assume that it was taken at the moment she was placed in our lives. Actually, the photo was taken about three days later, after Elise had grown tired of crying and had learned that, however goofy and immature we were, the new people who had appeared in her life were easily manipulated into fetching egg custard, Cheerios, ice cream, whatever she wanted, whatever she wanted, whatever she wanted, whenever she so much as looked at us.

  Our last morning in China, we awoke in the high-thread-count sheets of a classy hotel in Guangzhou. Elise was giggling in her crib by then. I wondered how a little girl from the wilds of rural China could wind up having a laugh that reminded me of Jerry Lewis. I whisked her down to the breakfast buffet. Smoked fish melted in her small mouth. Maple syrup dribbled down her chin. Our flight would leave in just a few hours. As we sat behind a huge glass pane overlooking the Pearl River, I traced the route that would take us from Hong Kong over Siberia, the North Pole, the snowy peaks of the Canadian Rockies, and finally the towers of Chicago. I promised her that soon she would see New York, London, and Paris. I promised her that soon she would ride a pony, dance ballet, see the cherry blossoms, and eat guacamole. I sang to our daughter:

  Pearl River, wider than a mile,

  We’re crossing you in style today.

  Elise spent eighteen of the twenty-one hours aloft snuggled and sleeping on her mother’s shoulder. Business class travelers, who would ordinarily blanch on seeing a red-faced infant arrive in their premium-class precincts, put down their Financial Times and smiled; a few even gingerly chucked Elise’s chin. On arrival in Chicago, we were directed into a holding area. We sat alongside families from Poland, Ethiopia, South Korea, Kenya, and El Salvador. No matter where their flights had begun, the small boys and girls had been dressed in pressed white shirts, dark suits, and plaid skirts to fly over oceans in the middle of the night and enter the United States.

  An immigration official in a broad brown hat called out, “Simon family!” We smiled at the name, which we were just getting used to. He gave a last look at white forms separated by pink and green tissue papers. “Well, everything seems in order, Simons,” he said, handing over the folder and pointing to a place in the customs hall about twenty feet ahead.

  “When you cross that line,” he said, “your little girl is a citize
n of the United States.” Then he put one of his huge hands gently under our daughter’s chin and smiled.

  “Welcome home, sweetheart,” he told her.

  A Short, Superficial History of Adoption

  ADOPTION IS almost as old as begetting. When disease, slaughter, or smiting felled, scattered, or incapacitated mothers and fathers, then aunts, uncles, friends, even total strangers—even enemies—often picked up and cared for the children left behind.

  Just a few days after we brought Elise home, we went to Seder dinner at the home of my oldest boyhood friend, who is a rabbi. To hold in your lap a little girl who was left alongside a road in China while you listen to the story of a baby boy who was floated into the bulrushes alongside the Nile reminds you that the instinct to pick up and care for children is ancient; it may be inborn. But formal, legal adoption outside the family is a fairly modern innovation.

  Ancient Rome had adoption. But it was usually a device to promote ties between wealthy, warring families and place male heirs in advantageous positions. Several Roman emperors, including Augustus Caesar Octavius, Constantius I, and Marcus Aurelius, were adopted sons.

  Wars, famine, and village violence made orphans of a number of children. But most were taken in by families who made them slaves, not sons or daughters. Quite a few—boys as well as girls—were forced into lives as strumpets. There are still large areas of the world, China included, where this still seems to be true (and it is hard for my wife and me not to put the two small faces that we know best on that fact).

  Still, there are some Roman legal records that suggest that a few families took in children whom they found and raised them alongside their other children, as children and full members of the family. They were called alumni.

  Aristotle’s parents died when he was a boy. He was brought up by a guardian named Proxenus, who sent him to Plato in Athens when he was eighteen.

  Both of Leo Tolstoy’s parents had died by the time he was nine. He was raised by a grandmother, who died; then an aunt, who also died; and finally another aunt.