I’m not sure what Sufism is, I wrote back. I slid him the paper.
I’M NOT SURE WHAT WINTER IS, he wrote once more in all caps.
Welcome, I scrawled. Usually it’s not this warm—a reversal of the old local joke. Usually it’s not this cold, we used to say to visitors during a midwinter thaw.
WHAT???!!!!! he wrote with great energy.
I feel that mysticism isn’t really happening here in this course, I wrote.
IT ISN’T.
Are you quasi mystic? I wrote.
I’M PESSI-MYSTIC, he wrote back, AND OPTI-MYSTIC. BOTH.
After class, I went home and with my earphones on picked around on my electric bass, pressing my fingers into the steel strings, toughening my calluses. I loved “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which I referred to as “Mozart.” I played and sang aloud over and over again the line “How I wonder what you are,” which without any audible accompaniment, to Kay-with-no-life upstairs, I knew sounded like the mad howling of a simultaneously sexed-up and brutally injured alley cat. She had already told me this. Honoring the classics, I apparently nonetheless sounded undone in agony. When I felt finished, when I felt expressed and spent, I found an old pack of Murph’s Marlboros and smoked one in front of the bathroom mirror, blowing the smoke up and out, and turning my head slowly this way and that as I did. In the dim lights I did not look so bad.
Sarah and I made one trip to the courthouse, to pick up copies of the provisional adoption papers from the judge’s office. After six months they would be signed and Mary-Emma would officially be Sarah’s. And Edward’s. Until then she was in their foster care. On our way in we passed a bench in the corridor on which sat a row of young boys awaiting hearings of various sorts. Some of the boys were as young as nine. They were all black. We carried Mary-Emma past them and they all looked at her and she at them, everyone entranced and baffled. In the judge’s office the clerk and envelope were waiting for us. Sarah took the envelope with a smile. “Is this your other daughter?” the clerk said of me.
“Twenty’s a cute age,” Sarah said to me later in the car home.
Once she and Edward asked me to stay overnight, like a bona fide nanny, and I said OK. They were going to have a date night together and would be out late, so my just staying over would be the most civilized thing. This worry about civilization seemed tardy for just about everyone. “Sure,” I said.
When I arrived for their Saturday-night date, Sarah said to me, “Don’t be afraid to rock Emma against your bare skin. Breast to cheek, belly to belly. I do it all the time. It soothes adopted children who haven’t been genuinely nursed.”
“OK,” I said.
“It’s a good thing you’re not actually nursing,” Edward said to Sarah. “You’d probably try to make a cheese.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “He keeps thinking I’d make some boutique cheese!”
After they left, Mary-Emma and I spent the evening watching so many different toddler videos — baby songs and train stories — that she beamed with happiness every time the FBI warning came on at the start of a new cassette. I made cookies. I did my animal imitations. I gave her a bath and in the bathroom tried some of Sarah’s wrinkle tonic on my own chapped cheeks and then rubbed the extra into Mary-Emma’s knees, which were dusky and dry. There were also jars of cream made from Andean snails and lotions from Japanese sake; we stuck our fingers in and smoothed the little dollops into our arms.
And though she was too old, when her bedtime arrived, I lifted my shirt and bralessly rocked her to sleep in the upholstered glider in her room, both of us falling asleep there. When I snapped awake, there was a figure in the doorway: Edward. I pulled my shirt down groggily.
“We’re back,” he said quietly.
“Should I go home?” I asked.
“Not at all,” he said. “Make yourself at home in the guest room downstairs. Good night.”
And I placed Mary-Emma in her crib and crawled off downstairs to the second floor to sleep in my underwear. Edward again appeared in the doorway there. “All went well?” he asked, smiling.
“Yes,” I said, from under the covers.
“Well, good.” There was a long silence with a slowly fading smile in it — his. “Well, good night, then,” he said. Handsome is as handsome does, my mother used to say. Dashing dashes.
“Good night.” And when he left I got up and pressed the door tightly shut.
In the morning Mary-Emma dashed to all our rooms, newly, wordily singing, “Time-for-to-get-up my daddy. Time-for-to-get-up my mama. Time-for-to-get-up my Tassa.” Sarah made pancakes and we poured syrup on everything, even into our coffee. For stray minutes we seemed like a family, laughing and chewing. I felt included. We were all in this together.
But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.
“Thank you for our date night,” Sarah said to me when I left. Her face looked tired and drawn. With every new word or phrase Mary-Emma learned, one seemed subtracted from Sarah.
On the weekday mornings that I walked to the Thornwood-Brinks’ the sharp air turned my cheeks to meat — on one of Sarah’s menus lying on the counter I had once seen the phrase “beef cheeks”; maybe this was how they were made! My nose dripped profusely when I stopped at curbs and crosswalks. But when I kept moving — the snow so cold it squeaked like Styrofoam beneath my boots — single clear drops, like baubles, collected just inside my nostrils and dangled pendulously until I dabbed at them with a gray carnation of Kleenex that had died long ago in my pocket, never to wake again. Moreover, the dabbing caused the tissue to disintegrate further, and soon it was little more than crumpled, powdery ice against my nose. My too-thin socks, also, left my feet cold even in good boots. Why was it that here in Troy country girls had the thin cotton socks (from Home Dollar) and the suburban girls had the thick ones (J. Crew or L.L.Bean)? Was it that we just had bigger feet and no room in our shoes? Or did we not think of the weather as something separate from us, although we should have? Perhaps we accepted the weather as being us, weren’t terrified of it, carried around all its severity and storminess inside us, as a kind of defeatedness. Our outer veneer was thin and meek and weak — futility! — and part of our defeat. Our inner giving up, self-designed to simplify life, matched the outer, and left us merely dazed. Thus, the socks. And thus other things.
Edward was sitting alone at the kitchen table when I came in. His hands were pushed inside the green sweater sleeves of each opposite arm, like those of a girl trying to stay warm, but his hair — its mix of old road snow and smoke — gave him the steely look of the wise elder. The contradiction — the hair, the girlish hands-up-the-sleeves — was unusual to my eye, and if you studied it, perhaps some conclusions could be reached about the nature of his character, but I didn’t then appraise it with any purpose, and the look of him just seemed to produce a slightly odd and comic swirl of hybridity. On the sides his hair was receding and thinning, something you noticed more after a haircut, which I could see he’d recently had. The balding of men! I had once seen a documentary that traced the lives of ten boys from the age of seven on, and with every installment more and more scalp emerged on the subjects; the film, intended to examine the struggles of masculinity and social class, was one long glacial retreat of hair.