She awoke she could not say how much later, though the lights of the room were still burning. She faced Alex’s back — the room smelled of fried fish and potatoes. Alex heard her stir and swiveled in the chair. “I didn’t want to wake you,” he said. “There’s fried haddock and French fries. Best I could find. Everything’s fried here.”
She inquired sleepily what he was doing.
“I want to read to you some of these answers,” he said. “Do you want a cup of hot water? No lemon.”
She held a palm to her forehead. “I’m fine,” she said drowsily.
“Number one,” he said. “How do you give love? One can express love through presents, a hug, or a vacation. How do you receive love? With open arms! How do you discipline? A child must know boundaries, but there will be no spanking in our home. Describe a great personal disappointment. We have lived a beautiful life. Our only disappointment is the one that brings us to this application.”
Then he read the free essay. Alex kept several of Maya’s phrases, for instance “the ocean refreshed by a new tributary,” but otherwise he wrote about making a long journey to their present station (initially, he left the details vague, on the off chance the birth parents were of anti-immigrant cast), but now, having arrived in New Jersey, the Rubin appetite for wandering had been exhausted and the family wished to root in the soil like a tree. They wished to iterate and reiterate; they wished to put down generations, so in a hundred and fifty years, the great-grandchildren of their adopted son or daughter (in the name of increasing their chances, they could not very well leave Maya’s careless assumption that it would be a boy) would feel as solidly American as the birth parents themselves. In this way, Alex betrayed the immigrant identity of the writers, but, he reasoned, the immigrant story was beloved by Americans, and, on second thought, there was no reason to hide it. Financially, the Rubins were finally ready for adoption (“you have to let them know the child won’t starve,” Alex explained to Maya). And even though the child’s grandfather was standing by with a lengthy exercise list, that regimen would not begin for at least three months after adoption. “Funny doesn’t hurt,” Alex murmured behind his back. But Maya was asleep once again.
The next day, Alex’s entry was unanimously voted #1 by the other participants. Alex, forgetting his resentment of them, smiled shyly. Maya wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him — when he agreed to unshell himself, the world loved him. The agency presenter asked him to talk about his method. “This will be new information for my wife, too,” Alex said. “The woman sleeps and the man works.” He winked at her and the group rocked with laughter.
Alex withdrew a greasy newspaper. He had gone for takeout — fried fish. They came for a son, they left with a heart attack, ha-ha. Maya, still groggy after twelve hours of sleep, wondered who this wisecracking man was. Anyway, the fish was wrapped in a newspaper. Alex once more waved the oily copy of the Asbury Park Press. As he chewed on wet haddock, he glanced at the classified section. Slab-Face (though of course he didn’t refer to her that way) had been right — the brochure should resemble a personal. Alex skimmed the entries until he found one that suited: a letter from a retiree who wished to fill the gloaming years with a companionable rest after a lifetime of drive. It wouldn’t be all rest, though — the man had earned well, and the package included, in addition to the driver’s considerable charms, a Mustang with a retractable roof. Alex cribbed Ride With Me’s method: the subtle retranslation of unavoidable facts (the man was winding down) into virtue (the noble quietude of the gloaming years); the casual reference to considerable means (the Mustang); the humor (“in addition to the driver’s considerable charms”). Alex was willing to bet the ad had been answered many times. “I hope we are just as successful,” he summed up. One of the religious women burst into applause. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I just want to hug you right now.”
The picture Alex and Maya took that morning featured Alex grinning like a younger version of himself, his arm around Maya, the sleep hangover in her eyes masked by her pleasure in the pleasure her husband seemed to be taking, for the first time, in their shared endeavor. It was a triumphant photograph because carefree, a visitation by grace at its most needed, and it was selected as the Rubins’ winning shot by the other participants without their needing to have taken another.
+
The morning’s camaraderie still high on their faces, the Rubins were sat down for an exit interview by an Asian woman named Tran Caldwell. Instantly, they wondered if they had been given an immigrant because of their background. Then they wondered if they were given someone so young because they didn’t rank highly with the agency. (Was this Slab-Face’s subterfuge from afar?) Tran Caldwell had high, queenly cheekbones sprayed with a pollen of freckles, and the black sheets of hair that fell from her head glistened with a malevolent healthfulness. Elsewhere, she was as slight as a child — Maya, not a loomer, loomed over her. Maya, who had resolved that the agency employed only adoptive mothers, decided that Tran Caldwell had to adopt because her body was too small to hold a whole other being. Tran, however, was herself an adoptee. An alfalfa farmer from Missouri and his wife had taken her in after Da Nang — their son had been killed shortly before the Americans left. They were still out in Missouri, years past retirement, making war on weevils and armyworms. All this Tran offered by way of introduction.
“There was one last thing we wanted to speak to you about,” she said. “It’s the decision you make about open versus closed adoption.” She allowed the words to settle. Alex was rattled by the transformation of this child-woman into yet another person intending to discuss children in a businesslike way. “Have you given any thought to the issue?”
“What issue?” he said.
“Whether the child will know he or she is adopted,” Tran said. As Alex fought a distasteful expression, Tran said: “You don’t have to discuss it with me. It’s a private decision. But I wanted to tell you what it was like in my case — because I’ve been on both sides.” She was gazing directly at Alex, as if — he felt — she intended to challenge him. His oracular flight in the brochure had led him to believe that a turnaround was in the offing for the Rubins, an atonement for Slab-Face and presenters who had rattled off facts about children as if they were reading to a hospitality conference. This expectation now stalled.
“It’s natural to want no strings attached,” Tran said. “There’s that impression it’s cleaner. Who wants competition from the birth parents?” Maya and Alex exchanged glances, this additional challenge never having occurred to them.
“But what children tend to do when they know they’re adopted but they don’t have clear answers is they make up the birth parents. They tell themselves stories in order to make sense of having been given away. They imagine they were given away involuntarily, which leads to suspicion of the adoptive parents. They say, ‘My real parents really love me, and I am going to go live with them soon.’ They run away. Or the opposite: ‘My parents didn’t love me, so they gave me up.’ These are hard things for a little person to wrap their brain around.”
“I thought you were supposed to say ‘place’ instead of ‘give up,’” Alex said.
Tran closed her eyes and smiled. “All that stuff is silly, I think,” she said.