“He was rich?”
“Well, sort of. Is your dad rich?” Her eyebrows arced and her eyes bugged out. We were in a dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying. At least I hoped so.
“People thought we were, but we weren’t,” I said. Actually, I wasn’t sure. I repeated the conventional wisdom. “Farmers aren’t rich. They have land but no money.” Actually, my father didn’t even have that much land. He had once stood on the porch and flung his arms out and said, “Someday, kids, all this will be yours.” But his knuckles had hit the porch supports. Even the porch wasn’t that big.
“Farmers are rich when they die,” I added.
“I suppose,” said Sarah. “I never think of anyone as rich when they die. I think of dead as about as poor as you can get.”
“Gate two, upstairs,” said the woman at the counter, handing us our boarding passes, and since we only had carry-on bags, we went directly upstairs, except that Sarah, seeing that no people were on the down escalator, decided to try to go up it. “Watch this,” she said to me. “This is how you get a little exercise before getting on a plane.” And she ran quickly up the moving steps, using it like a treadmill, and waving goofily to me from the middle, as if she were Lucille Ball. “Ma’am, that’s the wrong escalator,” said someone on the other side, going up, and then because it was taking Sarah so long to get to the top, someone else came riding up and said, “Do you know you’re going up the down side?” No one understood what she was doing, and so no one smiled.
“Exercise!” exclaimed Sarah. This burst of eccentricity in her I could see was familiar to herself, and unresisted. Such self-permission I don’t believe I’d ever witnessed before in almost anyone of any age. I myself went up the up escalator and watched as, still holding her carry-on bag, her shearling coat lifting behind her, she took the flying gazellelike leap necessary to get off the descending stairs, and which if her timing had been even a moment different could easily have left her maimed. That all this failed to draw the notice of anyone in security was a relief.
“Not too bad for an old gal, eh?” said Sarah, breathlessly grinning and pink in the cheeks. I made a smile of some kind — I have no idea what kind — and we then moved quickly to the elaborately cordoned security line, where a beefy, bloat-faced man took our nail clippers and Sarah’s tweezers. “A girl just can’t groom anymore!” she said to me. I chuckled to please her. She had an anxious energy swimming around her, which laughter — hers, anyone’s — seemed to dispel.
As for me, tension gripped my neck. I couldn’t distinguish my own fears of flying from my general disorientation regarding this sudden trip. The plane was small, only a fifty-seater, hardly a hijacking target, and from my window seat the gray pieces of the wing seemed fitted together both randomly and intricately, like the plumage of a goose. The handles on the emergency exit doors were grizzled, crooked, and beat. Was this good luck? The January day was blue, sun sparkling off the evergreens, the air clear as a bell; it was state-of-the-art light, as noon in January sometimes could be: not rich but pale and cleansing as lemon wine. Watching from the plane window, I saw dozens of planes negotiating the small grid of runways: a bee dance of near collision and narrow escape. Oh, where, oh, where was the nectar? There was just the busy dance and commerce of a hive. Robert’s word — and true.
Then suddenly we were taking off, racing down the runway and lifting into the air like a carnival ride, the plane with a seabird’s wobble. It seemed to me like a ride you’d spend extra tickets on at the state fair. I felt the lift in my gut and the plane tipping side to side, finding itself. For a split second I darkly imagined all the workers at Boeing or wherever this puddle-jumper had been made (Brazil! I would later find out) as carnies, toothless and tattooed. Beneath us the ground shot away — if the world vanished like the wake behind a boat rowing away at dawn, would that really be such a bad thing? The twenty-five minutes of farmland between Troy and Green Bay became a snow-splotched checkerboard of drained olive, khaki, gold-gray, and nut brown — not unlike the roasted bean display, green to french roast, that Starbucks had set up near the register, and which I sometimes found myself staring at as if the displays were glass vats of pistachios or M&M’s or gumballs one might get from a machine if one only had the right change.
The right change. I thought of this phrase now and its meaning for Sarah. Her desire for a baby. Her undertipping of the cabbie. I had yet to see her get ahold of the right change.
Contents may shift during the flight, we had been told. Would that be good or bad? And what about the discontents? Would they please shift, too? And what if oxygen deprivation in the cabin caused one to think in idle spirals and desperate verbal coils like this for the rest of one’s life? Below us moved the continued squares of greens and browns that Rothko never got to. The ground mottled with mud and snow, broken occasionally by the shiny shoe print of a lake. Beneath us was a tone of ochre that when the sun hit looked like a vellum lamp.
“So, here’s the story about this birth mom,” Sarah said softly, for privacy, though the plane engine was loud and I had to ask her to repeat things. Birth mom. It was one of those faux-friendly terms invented by the adoption business itself. I studied the intricate construction of the plane wing as she spoke. One had to fix one’s gaze somehow. Apparently this birth mother had been working with Catholic Social Services, who had been looking to place her baby daughter, but when too many months had gone by and the family they had found suddenly backed out (they had prayed and their God had told them no; “their God,” emphasized Sarah, “no one else’s. Everything’s been privatized, even the Creator”), the birth mother switched agencies, and the one she hired had been in touch with Letitia Gherlich, with whom we’d had lunch at Perkins. They had a fee-splitting arrangement.
What about Amber?
Amber was no longer in the picture, apparently, having violated her parole, and not having liked any of the prospective parents well enough. She was considering keeping her baby.
“I kind of liked Amber,” I said — a mistake.
Sarah’s face became a polished stone. “Amber was a coke addict and a meth-head. Both,” she said. Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was. Only her bare feet were sticking out, an ankle monitor brightly in place, perhaps one tiny toe wiggling good-bye: I had kind of liked her.
The new birth mother in Green Bay was named Bonnie and was apparently in her late twenties. A grown-up! Her baby was well over a year old, possibly two, already languishing in foster homes. “And after we pay them both a visit, we may see why, though I think I already know.”
I was quiet. The plane was now descending and my ears were closing from the pressure. Everything she said seemed to be coming to me from under water.
“The baby’s black,” she said. “Part black. And nobody wants her. People would rather go to China! All the way to China before they would take in a black kid from their own state.”
When I was a child the only black kids I ever saw were indeed in Green Bay. I would see them when we went there to shop: children of the professional football players who lived in big suburban houses and were said to move every three years, when their dads got injured or traded. “I warn my kids not to bother getting to know them,” clerks said openly in the stores. “They’re just going to move.” This was how bigotry got conducted among people who swore they weren’t prejudiced at all.
“I’m sure that’s what it is with this baby,” said Sarah. “Race.”