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.
“I don’t really believe in interracial relationships,” said Bonnie, looking in a kind of dead-faced way at Sarah.
“The whole tragic mulatto thing?” said Sarah with a light, fluffy sarcasm that had flown in from some other conversation entirely. “The whole what about the children thing?”
“What?” Bonnie contorted her face as if in pain. She wanted to be respected for the gift she was giving the world and in this room she wanted to be in charge, but now it seemed clear she probably wasn’t.
Roberta glared at Sarah. “Sorry,” said Sarah. Something gentler returned to her voice. “Sometimes other people’s cell phone conversations come in on my fillings.” She grinned.
“Really?” asked Bonnie, confused.
“Actually, that happens to me sometimes,” I chimed in. “I swear to God. It’s very weird.”
Sarah tried to make her way back to Bonnie, whom she’d lost. “But, Bonnie, I just wanted to ask you: Isn’t the baby half African-American?” Sarah recrossed her legs. She had winced a little at Roberta’s “little Irish Rose.” I could see she was torn between not wanting to seem confrontational and wanting to know just what kind of racism was here in this room.
“More like a quarter, I think. I don’t know. He — my daughter’s father — once asked me what I would think of having a child who had one black grandparent.”
This did not sound like date-rape chat, or like fling chat. Or chat, really, of any sort at all. But perhaps I was learning a thing or two about chat. Where was Suzanne with the coffee?
“Maybe he was Italian,” said Bonnie.
No one laughed, which was excellent. No one laughed out loud.
Suzanne at last came in with coffeepot and cups, and just as she was pouring and passing around the coffee the outside door cracked open. “Is this—” said a man’s voice. “Oh, yes, I see it is,” and the door opened wide. In stepped a distinguished-looking man: he had a balding head with pewter-hued hair grown long and wavy in the back; it was like he was wearing a head cape. His salt-and-pepper mustache was clipped neatly.
“Edward!” Sarah jumped up.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. His gaze, which had been on her, turned to his own paper cup of coffee, which he sipped from, as if it were not just delicious but urgent, and I could see he was showing us himself, his aquiline profile, his handsome objectness, so that for a minute he did not have to trouble himself to admire us but to soak up our appreciation of him. He had snapped in two the connecting gaze he’d quickly made, then unmade, with Sarah, but one could see it was his habit to almost imperceptibly dominate and insult.
Instead of being angry, Sarah looked happier than I had ever seen her in my brief acquaintance with her. Something in her face softened and relaxed, and a youthful light went on behind every part of it. Despite everything, she was in love with him. I had not seen love very much, and it was hard for my midwestern girl’s mind to imagine being in love with a guy this flamboyantly self-involved and, well, old. He could have been fifty or even fifty-four. But Sarah went over to him, clasped his face in her hands, and smooched him on the lips. He patted her on the back as if to calm her down. His deep eyes, his charming smile — I could not then and there see any of it. This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to understand its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.
“The cab headed out of the airport and got halfway to Pulaski,” Edward was saying, “before the driver realized he was headed in the wrong direction.”
“Here we say ‘Plasky,’ ” Roberta said quickly.
“Came back through something called Allouez — how do you say that?”
Many of the original French traders seemed to have had such an adversarial relationship to nature, especially water, that everything they named took on their gloom: Death’s Door, Waves’ Grave, or Devil’s Lake, all lovely vacation spots translated from the French. Even in Delton County “the lake of God,” du Dieu, was known by the locals as Lake Doo-doo. By comparison, “Allouez” seemed welcoming, though perhaps sarcastic.
“Alwez,” she said, as if it weren’t French at all.
“Edward Thornwood,” he said, thrusting out his hand at her.
“Edward. Edward. Yes. Edward. I’m Roberta,” she said, clearly trying to emphasize that this was a first-name-only situation. Could the revelation of his last name be a deal-breaker? Would the birth mother in a change of heart later remember it, track him down, take her baby back? I tried to live cautiously — or eventually learned to try to live — in a spirit of regret prevention, and I could not see how Bonnie could accomplish such a thing in this situation. Regret — operatic, oceanic, fathomless — seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took, regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, lightlessly and lifelong. It had already begun.
Sarah introduced Edward to everyone again, once more as just “Edward,” perhaps to help erase the memory of his uttered last name, and he focused his bright gaze and kind words—so wonderful to meet you, I know this is a complicated time—on me. This caused visible consternation in Bonnie, who began to look even sadder and more distant, for it was clear Edward thought I was the birth mother and that I was the one who needed to be charmed. Bonnie desired and required the focus of this meeting, if not this entire day, to be on her. Could she not be the star even for that long, just once, given everything, giving everything away as she was doing?