All those Wednesday-night bull sessions had taught her that love is not enough? That’s where she was getting her information? And that’s what she had taken away? Who was the woman who was going to kill Karl Rove? Wasn’t that her? I wanted to shake her.
“I am not enough,” she added. She was fighting despondency with rigidity. Where had I seen this before? Bonnie.
I was quiet. Did she not have me to help? Wasn’t that why I was here? Was I failing, too? You have me, I wanted to peep but didn’t.
“Edward is not on board. I can’t stress this enough. Emmie deserves better than us. Ideally, she should be with black parents. At least one. Ideally.”
“But she’s mixed! Besides, there were no black parents for her.”
Sarah looked startled at my words. “Well, I know, but some time has gone by now: maybe some have newly become available. We have to look at the bright side of this. She should have better people who would show her the way. Edward and I are not good at being canaries in this particular coal mine. We are like two canaries looking at each other and saying, ‘Are we going where I think we’re going?’ One could write a whole sad children’s book on the subject. The worried and chattering canaries headed for the mines!”
“What about the feelings of a two-year-old girl?”
Sarah began to speak with a slowly building force. “You know, maybe I’m not good at this. Last week I was so stressed, I said to her, ‘If you don’t go in there and watch TV right now, there will be no TV for the rest of the week.’ ”
I tried to smile, perhaps ruefully. “Is that so wrong?”
Sarah stiffened. “Maybe women have been caught in a trap: we work harder so we can have more babysitters so we can work even more so we can have more money to hire more babysitters.” I tried not to feel personally stung by this. “I almost took all her frozen yogurt pops and zapped them in the microwave. As punishment. I think nuking the treats is a sign of something not good.”
“Well, you didn’t actually do it.” I was in over my head.
“I didn’t?” she said, testing me.
There was being in over your head and then there was being sucked completely under. My heart pounded against my chest like a prisoner against bars. I was sure I had read that expression somewhere and now I knew what it meant. When people in deep water started to drown, parts of them exploded. “No,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “I didn’t. She’s a fantastic little girl. She really is. I love her to death.”
I did not say anything. She blanched at her own words.
“So do I,” I said. I would rescue her.
“I know you do. You know? When she first came into our lives, neighbors would stop by with little presents and they would always look at her and smile and say, ‘What a lucky little girl.’ They thought she was lucky to have us. But one day I took her for a walk in the neighborhood and the most racist person on the block came up to us, smiled at Emmie, and said to me, ‘You are very lucky.’ She’s the one who got it right.”
“Maybe everybody’s lucky,” I said awkwardly, adding, “that is, if they are lucky.”
“Or maybe in the end everybody’s unlucky. She shouldn’t have a punishing, faithless father whose idea of racial equality is to bring a rainbow coalition into his bed.” Now things were beginning to harrow me again. “Forget that! That was just the wine! But, well, you know that Edward is a flirt.”
I said nothing. If she wasn’t careful, everyone would rush out of her life, like out of a burning building.
“He can’t do relationships. Can’t really do acquaintanceships. He can’t do people at all. In fact, really he should just stay off mass transit!” Here she sipped some more wine. “All forms of transportation!”
“He bikes a lot,” I said dopily.
She smiled in a bitten, crooked way.
“The problem with seeing one’s marriage as a farce,” she continued, “is that all the slamming doors are in your heart. Well, that’s not the only problem.”
“There’s always Farceholics Anonymous.” I was now being inhabited not just by loamy, briary wine but loamy, briary Murph. “I’ve actually heard of that,” I added, lying.
“Really?”
“Really,” I lied again. Perhaps I had lost my mind.
Her voice was mordant. “A match made in heaven — where do you get those? That’s what I want to know!”
I now put my wine down on the coffee table and was wringing my hands as I used to when I was a child. “I think you have to actually go to heaven to get one.”
“Yes,” Sarah mused. “I suppose they don’t ship. Or rather, they don’t ship well.”
“Yeah, you’d have go to the source. Where they’re made. That’s a lot of stairs. And steps. Stairs and steps both. There are always obstacles.”
“Yesterday at the bank I accidentally made off with the suction canister at the drive-in teller. Maybe what Emmie really shouldn’t have is a mother who is too busy.”
This again seemed to negate me. I was the one who was hired to neutralize or at least mitigate the busyness. But I hadn’t succeeded and could feel myself being neutralized and mitigated instead.
Here Sarah leaned forward and put her hand on my cheek, which reminded me of Murph. Why were people doing this all of a sudden? “Of course, Emmie has you. That’s been nice.” The hand came down and her gaze turned away. She seemed to be speaking to no one in particular. “So I didn’t name her Maya or Kadira or Tywalla: I named her Emmie. Was that so wrong?” I could see she felt under some critical eye, as she had from the beginning. “You know what my neighbor across the street said to me? ‘I always see the babysitter with the baby, but I don’t see you.’ Day and night, I’m down working at the Mill.”
Where were effective, urgent words when the world most required them? I felt I needed to persist. But it was like all bad dreams: the dreamer, even while dreaming, thinks, What is going on here? What am I supposed to do? In pleasant dreams, equally strangely, one always seemed to know.
She continued. “Women chew up their lives trying to heal themselves from the bad arrangements they’ve made with men; all this healing is not attractive. It’s boring.” And then she added, “Anything that does not throw a young black person into despair is all for the good. Unfortunately, I don’t qualify as that. I officially don’t qualify.”
“Nothing’s ideal. You are her real mother now,” I said boldly.
“You’re not getting it!” she said sharply, her face flushed with exasperation. “We have been caught in our own home cooking.”
“Home cooking?”
She sighed. “That’s restaurantese for throwing something back in the pot when it has fallen on the floor. Deceit. It means deceit. Even if by some miracle we challenge the agency and win, we will have a public story. Emmie will be shunned!”
“No, no, that’s not possible.”
“Yes!” she said as if I were an infuriating dimwit. “We all will be spoken of! And when Emmie is old enough, she will hate us.”
Perhaps I’d become like the teenage McKowen daughter we’d all glimpsed at Mary-Emma’s first foster home. Perhaps I was clinging to something that wasn’t mine to love. Perhaps I was treasuring love that wasn’t mine to treasure. My hands were twisting at each other in a way that my mother used to yell at me for. When I was young she would just lean over and swat them.
Sarah grabbed the glasses and I followed her back into the kitchen.
The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting, unimportant, but spellbindingly mad speeches. Only Mary-Emma seemed immune, undeviant, not part of that, though she was, and had her own soliloquies to be sure, and would have them up ahead in life — how not?