When you taste this one, you can still sense the heaviness left behind. It’s the shadow under the sweet, the question on the tip of your tongue.
Marin
June 2007
Facebook is supposed to be a social network, but the truth is, most people I know who use it-me included-spend so much time online tweaking our profiles and writing graffiti on other people’s walls or poking them that we never leave our computers to actually socially interact. Perhaps it was bad form to check one’s Facebook in the middle of the workday, but once, I’d walked in on Bob Ramirez tooling around with his MySpace page and I realized that there was very little he could say to me without being a hypocrite.
These days I used Facebook to join groups-Birth Mothers and Adoptees Searching, Adoption Search Registry. Some members actually found the people they were looking for. Even if that hadn’t happened to me, there was a nice comfort to logging on and reading the posts that proved I wasn’t the only one frustrated by this whole process.
I logged in and checked my mini-feed. I’d been poked by a girl from high school who’d asked me to be her friend a week ago but whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. I had been dared to take a quiz on Flixster by my cousin in Santa Barbara. I’d been voted by my other friends as the person you’d most prefer to be stuck in handcuffs with.
I glanced at the information just above this, my profile.
NAME: Marin Gates
NETWORKS: Portsmouth, NH / UNH Alumni / NH Bar Association
SEX: Female
INTERESTED IN: Men
RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single
Single?
I reloaded the page. For the past four months on my Facebook page that line had read: In a relationship with Joe McIntyre. I clicked on the home page and scrolled through the news feed. There it was: a picture of his face and a status update: Joe McIntyre and Marin Gates have ended their relationship.
My jaw dropped open; I felt like I’d been sucker-punched.
I grabbed my coat and stormed into the reception area. “Wait!” Briony said. “Where are you going? You’ve got a conference call at-”
“Reschedule it,” I snapped. “My boyfriend just dumped me via Facebook.”
It was not like Joe McIntyre was the One. I’d met him at a Bruins game with clients; he passed me in the aisle and spilled his beer down the front of my shirt. Not an auspicious beginning, but he had indigo eyes and a smile that contributed to global warming, and before I knew it, I’d not only promised that he could pay my dry-cleaning bill but also given him my phone number. On our first date, we found out that we worked less than a block away from each other-he was an environmental lawyer-and that we’d both graduated from UNH. On our second date, we went back to my place and didn’t get out of bed for two straight days.
Joe was six years younger than me, which meant that at twenty-eight he was still playing the field and that at thirty-four I had traded in my wristwatch for a biological clock. I expected this fling to be a little fun: someone to go to a movie with on a Saturday night and get flowers from on Valentine’s Day. I wasn’t banking on forever; I fully figured that I would tell him sometime in the next few months that we were looking for different things in our lives right now.
But I sure as hell wouldn’t have broken the news to him on Facebook.
I strode around the corner and walked into the reception area of the law firm where he worked. It was much less grandiose than Bob’s, but then again, we were a plaintiff’s attorney, we weren’t trying to save the world. The receptionist smiled. “Can I help you?”
“Joe’s expecting me,” I said, and I headed down the hall.
When I opened the door to his office, he was dictating into a digital recorder. “Furthermore, we believe it’s in the best interests of Cochran and Sons to-Marin? What are you doing here?”
“You broke up with me on Facebook?”
“I was going to send a text, but I thought that would be worse,” Joe said, jumping up to close the door as a colleague wandered by. “C’mon, Marin. You know I’m not good at the touchy-feely stuff.” Then he grinned. “Well, the metaphorical touchy-feely stuff…”
“You are such an insensitive troll,” I said.
“This was a lot more civilized, if you ask me. What was the alternative? Some big argument where you tell me to fuck off and die?”
“Yes!” I said, and then I took a deep breath. “Is there someone else?”
“There’s something else,” Joe said soberly. “For God’s sake, Marin. You’ve blown me off the past three times I’ve tried to get together. What did you expect me to do? Just sit around waiting for you to have time for me?”
“That’s not fair,” I said. “I was reading marriage license applications-”
“Exactly,” Joe replied. “You don’t want to go out with me. You want to go out with your birth mother. Look, at first, I thought it was kind of hot-you know, you were so passionate when you talked about finding her. Except it turns out you’re not passionate about anything but that, Marin.” He slid his hands into his pockets. “You’re so busy living in the past, you’ve got nothing to give right now.”
I could feel my neck heating up beneath the collar of my suit. “Do you remember those two amazing days-and nights-at my house?” I said, leaning toward him until we were a breath away. I watched his pupils dilate.
“Oh yeah,” he murmured.
“I faked it. Every time,” I said, and I walked out of Joe’s office with my head high.
My birthday is January 3, 1973. I’ve known this, obviously, my whole life. The adoption decree I’d gotten from Hillsborough County was dated in late July, because of the six-month waiting period to fi nalize an adoption and the time it takes to schedule the hearing. There’s a lot of debate about that six-month period, in the adoptive community. Some people feel it should be longer, to give the birth mom time to change her mind; some people feel it should be shorter, to give the adoptive parents peace of mind that their newborn won’t be taken away. Where you fall on the spectrum, of course, depends on whether you have a baby to give away or one to receive.
I was a few days late. My father used to say that he was counting on me being his little tax deduction, but then I foiled that by arriving in the new year. On the slip of paper that came home from the hospital with me, saved in my baby book, was a bassinet card with my name torn off-but I could still make out a loop in the middle of the last name that hadn’t been ripped away: a cursive y or g or j or q. I knew this about my former self, and I knew that my birth parents had lived in Hillsborough County, and that my mother had been seventeen. In the seventies, there was still a good chance that a seventeen-year-old would marry the father of her baby, and that had led me to the records room.
Using a due date calculator on a pregnancy website, I figured out that I must have been conceived sometime around April tenth in order to be due on New Year’s Eve. (April tenth. A high school spring formal dance, I imagined. A midnight car ride to the shore. The waves on the sand, the sun breaking like a yolk over the ocean at dawn, he and she, sleeping in each other’s arms.) At any rate, if she found out she was pregnant a month later, that meant getting married in the early summer of 1972.
In 1972, Nixon went to China. Eleven Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympic games. A stamp cost eight cents. The Oakland A’s won the World Series, and M*A*S*H premiered on CBS.