In the waiting area, portraits of successfully placed children and their new parents, usually on the steps of the courthouse where the transfer had been blessed by the law, faced off against childless couples that aspired to migrate to the opposite wall. Maya, Alex, and their sad compatriots studied the wall of success; the pregnant women who came in, Maya observing them like the other party in a car accident, studied the Mayas and Alexes. Maya was shocked the first time she saw a pregnant woman walk in, then chastised herself for her thickness; of course, the agency would serve both sides. The effortlessly full-bellied women read the prospective-parent profiles like personal ads, savoring a power that, by their looks, they had rarely, if ever, enjoyed. She hated them because they held the power, and she hated them because they were pregnant. Feeling a modest hysteria, Maya would snatch a palmful of cookies from the center console that held the uneasy peace between the parents-already and the parents-they-wish and gnash them mindlessly, hating herself as she did it. Generally, though, she directed the anger that pooled in her throat at the agency staff, which treated women who wanted to give up their children like wounded angels, and people who wanted to turn their lives upside down to make room for a foreign child like criminals until proven otherwise. (“It’s social engineering, only legal,” Mishkin, the adoption supervisor, had noted. “You Russians should know something about that.”) If Mishkin had not accosted the Rubins one afternoon, trying on them the smattering of mangled Russian in his possession — he had overheard them whispering — quite possibly they would have remained childless. The slab-faced matron to whom they had initially been assigned had been terrorizing them into confessing their unpreparedness, unwillingness, doubt.
Slab-Face could have been forty or seventy. Did the Rubins own guns? Fire extinguishers? Were the outlets sealed? Her red pen hovered over a clipboard. Maya and Alex exchanged looks: Was she joking? Slab-Face barreled on: Where had they lived? Every state would need a background check. They hadn’t crossed the river to live in New York, had they? Because New York was the worst.
The Rubins, she went on, would have to produce a self-advertisement like the ones in the waiting area. “Think of it like a newspaper personal,” Slab-Face advised. “You want to go steady with the birth parents — what can you offer?” Spotting the Rubins’ unease, she raised her chin: “Oh, yes. You have to.”
“How did you. . become involved with adoptions?” Alex mustered. He coughed lightly.
“I’ve got two little ones,” Slab-Face whipped out a photograph of two bantam-sized brown children flanking her abundance as all three roared behind the seat rail of a roller coaster.
“It is possible to adopt at all ages?” Alex said, and Maya stared at him with mortification. “He means the children’s ages,” she rushed to add.
Perhaps Slab-Face would have been willing to forgo a personal verification of the Rubins’ claims regarding firearms and ammunition, but comments like these, on steady supply from Alex, guaranteed otherwise. She arrived on a rainy afternoon wearing the same housedress in which they had found her at the office and proceeded to test the edges of their countertops, flick their stove burners, measure the height of their steps. The Rubins remained glumly seated at the kitchen table. They had refused to allow Eugene anywhere near the house during Slab-Face’s inspection for fear he would insult her so gravely that he would sully their chances forever. Maya experienced a great gratitude to her husband for saying nothing about what she had dragged the pair of them into. Also for not mentioning the duration and cost of the adoption — a year and around twenty thousand dollars, “depending on what the birth parents want.” “What do you mean, what the birth parents want?” Alex asked, thinking of Soviet bribes. “They’ll tell you that at orientation,” Slab-Face said, reluctantly marking Home Inspection Pass rather than Fail on the clipboard.
“Orientation?” Alex said.
The orientation, a statewide colloquy in an ocean-side town, was attended by nine couples and two solos, one female and one male, setting off in Alex’s mind uneasy speculation about whether the solitary man’s wife was merely ill, or here was a man taking on parenthood all by himself. Of the other eight couples, three were gay and two religious, the latter signified by pins that said “Building God’s Army.” The Rubins’ eyes clung to the remaining heterosexual parents like floaters in a cold ocean.
Alex had never touched a gay man before, but now he was holding one’s hand as the twenty participants formed a grieving circle to commemorate their failed fertility. Why were the gays grieving? They hadn’t been failed by fertility, they had been failed by their dicks. He and Maya had been failed by fertility, and as the assembled strode and chanted, Alex absented himself by trying to guess which half of the other two normal couples (for that is the way Alex thought of them) was the sterile one. Was it the pale-face in glasses or his zebra-faced wife? Was it the ham-shouldered redhead with the pageboy, or her equally cavernous beau, wheezing like an asthmatic as they pounded the floor? Cupid loves every kind.
After lunch, which Alex and Maya had passed eyeing with envy the camaraderie starting between the other castaways, the group received a PowerPoint presentation on the various scams they could expect to encounter as parents-in-waiting. Financial Scams, one screen said. What other kind is there? Alex wondered. Emotional Scams, the next screen said. “Women will put up profiles claiming to look for adoption,” the lecturer said. “They’ll interview you, they’ll spend hours with you on the phone. And in the end, there’s no child. They’re just lonely. Meanwhile, you’ve been riding the roller coaster.”
The lecturer moved on, but Maya felt that a crucial piece of information was being left out, though she was too shy to raise her hand: How could a person protect himself from this kind of scam? Should she and her husband demand photos of a sloped belly as a precondition of talks? A signed certificate from the gynecologist? A meeting? Then she disobediently realized that she would not mind talking to this woman, the emotional scammer. She would prefer to know, of course, that there was no child, but this lonely, desperate charlatan struck her as someone with whom she could have a long talk, indeed.
That night, the Rubins were given homework: the profile that would hang on the IAS wall. Like the other applicants, they got a packet of samples and an instant camera, and were instructed to capture, between then and the next morning, three images that the rest of the group, playacting birth mothers and fathers, would cull for the one that made them say: I want to give my child to these people.
Alex and Maya had not filled out an application since writing colleges fifteen years before, and that was colleges; they were applying for a human being this time. How could one begin to answer the question of why one deserved to become the parent of a child carried and birthed by another? It was like being asked who one was, and what one planned to do about it. Of course they were loving, and patient, and generous — why would they ask to adopt otherwise — but so was everyone else filling out these forms. One had to be oneself, but what if one’s self was generic? In the seaside motel room rented with their orientation fees by the agency, Maya wondered what the other participants were writing. Alex didn’t think they were writing — they were out on the town with each other. Bonding.
He was at the small table by the window, Maya curled up on the bed, which smelled of industrial laundry detergent. Daylight began to merge with dark outside. Should they emphasize their hard work as immigrants? Downplay their religion? Try to be funny? Should they say they read books, or would that be looked upon with disfavor by mothers struggling with reduced circumstances? But they would want to donate their children to book-reading parents, wouldn’t they? However, the Rubins didn’t actually read books. With no forewarning, the assignment had brought on an existential self-examination they hadn’t requested.