Growing Girls (5 page)

up for grabs

A father, a daughter, a balloon. They are just now heading toward the car, hand in hand, toddling down the driveway. It is the same way every week. They’re going to the grocery store. They’ll get a free sample of cheese, they’ll get a free cookie, she’ll ride in the cart awhile, then get down and push. He’ll say, “Whose little girl are you?” She’ll say, “Daddy’s!”

It is the same way every single week. Except there isn’t always a balloon.

Alex is an older dad, well into his fifties. Before Anna arrived, he wondered if he could do it. He wondered if he’d have what it takes.

On this day she’s barely three. She knows she has an older dad. “I think,” she’ll say, “he might be twelve.”

The balloon is two days old, practically ancient in the life of
a standard-issue balloon. It is red. It’s tied to the end of a purple ribbon. It has fewer thoughts than a household pet, and yet, to a three-year-old, it is in every way a pet. You have to take care of it, and it won’t last forever. But for the time being it is all yours.

The center of everything.

“Would you like me to tie the balloon around your wrist?” Alex is saying, already knowing the answer.

“I would like to hold it,” Anna answers. “I would like to hold my balloon in my hand.”

“Okay, sweetie,” he says. “Well, hold on tight.”

The balloon has lost a good bit of its helium, and there is no wind, and so the balloon appears to be walking one step behind her, at just her height. A pal if ever there was one.

He is boosting her up into the car seat, they are fumbling with sleeves, straps, buckles. It’s hard to tell how it happens. A slow-motion replay probably could not verify the sequence of events. But the balloon! The balloon gets loose. The balloon is floating in the air, just above the father’s head. “Oh, no!” she is saying. “Oh … no!” He reaches into the air, tries to pluck it from the sky, but the balloon at that moment catches an up-draft and lifts higher, just beyond his grasp.

“Daddy!” she is saying. “Oh, no!”

He tries again; this time he leaps. But the balloon soars a foot higher, hangs there stupidly.

“My balloon,” she cries, craning her neck so as to make a more direct appeal. “Please, balloon! Please, Daddy! Oh, my balloon…”

Another father might say, “I told you, honey, I told you to
hold on tight!” Another might think,
We have to hurry, we have a long list of groceries
. Another might think,
We can just buy another balloon at the store
.

“That’s my balloon!” she is saying, looking into the sky with longing. “That is my best balloon….”

This is one way a father, old or young, finds out who he is, with no time to decide which one he should be, which one he wants to be, which one might, perhaps, look better. When a balloon is loose, there is no time. You either charge after it, or you don’t.

And so he finds that he is the kind of man who charges after a loose balloon, charges after it with courage and fight. He isn’t aware of his heroism, or his foolishness, he is too busy chasing a balloon. He hops, runs, reaches, trots over the grass and trips into the boxwoods. That balloon is either dancing or flirting or maybe a little of both. It doesn’t have enough loft to go into the clouds—no, it hovers, dragging its purple ribbon just beyond his pleading fingertips.

“Get it, Daddy!” she is saying, cheering him on. “Oh, good job, Daddy!”

It is all he needs to hear. It is fuel. He leaps a few more times until he gets an idea. He’s going to outsmart that balloon. He calculates its direction, like a receiver estimating the trajectory of a touchdown pass, and he runs past it, up a little hill, to the top of a wall, off of which he can hurl himself and go for the grab.

One, two, three—the timing here is critical—and he leaps! And don’t you know that darn balloon darts left. Left? The balloon is now over the wall, high in the air.

To another father, that balloon would be a goner for sure. But not him. Not yet. He watches it. He shakes his head. He wonders how he might break the news to her. He thinks,
Life isn’t fair
.

Just then the first real breeze of the day kicks in, and the balloon makes a U-turn, an absolute about-face. It drifts toward him, closer now, and closer. He hops at just the right moment. He feels the ribbon like a tickle between his fingers and so he grabs, he grabs happiness out of the sky.

“Aaaah!” she says, her mouth dropping open. “You did it! Daddy did it!” She can’t quite believe it’s true. Her father has performed a miracle. Her balloon is back. And life, to her, but also to him, has plenty more fairness left.

meeting the ghost-mother

When we were waiting to travel to China to adopt Sasha, I signed up for a Yahoo! group for people who had adopted or were adopting from the Huazhou Social Welfare Institute in Guangdong province, the orphanage in southern China where Sasha was living. The people at the orphanage knew her by the name they’d assigned to her—Ji Hong Bin—if they knew her at all, but Alex and I had already decided to name her Sasha Marie as soon as we got her home. We picked Sasha because it means “little Alex” in Russian and we loved the sound of it. At first I worried that a Russian name for a girl of Chinese ancestry would be somehow … crooked. But the truth of the matter was this girl from China was going to be the daughter of a Russian-Lithuanian Jew and a French-Irish-Lithuanian Catholic, so I figured we may as well just go ahead and enjoy
the benefits of being a family of mutts, one of which surely must be you aren’t beholden to any particular rules of pedigree.

At that point all we had of Sasha was a little picture, her date of birth, some scant medical information, a brief report about both the day she was found and her subsequent life at the orphanage.
She is gentle. She likes listening to music. If another child snatches her toy, she will look at the child but not cry, and pick another toy up. If you cuddle her, she will touch your face by her little hands
. The report also said that she weighed about six pounds when she was first found on the streets of Huazhou, on the steps of a pharmacy, lying in a paper box.
She was wearing a suit of gray dress, and covered with a hand-me-down cotton padded coat
.

In her picture she was now twelve months old and she had a beautiful, dainty, heart-shaped face with fine features and an air of serenity. She looked to me like a little, exotic flower. The exotic part was due to her hair, which was dancing all over the place, confident and springy. My pediatrician got upset when I told her about Sasha’s head circumference, which the report said was only sixteen inches, and her body weight, which was only sixteen pounds, and her height, which was only twenty-six inches. The doctor, an international adoption specialist, was so upset she had me call our adoption agency and ask them to contact the orphanage and verify. When the stats were confirmed, the doctor had me ask for more photos. She said one way you could tell if a baby had fetal alcohol syndrome was by the vertical lines connecting the nose to the mouth. No lines was a bad sign; defined lines was a good sign. When I got the new pictures I blew them up gigantic on my computer and I studied and studied them for shadows that might reveal lines,
but the photo resolution was so bad it was hard to tell what was what. Then something happened, sort of like when you can’t find your car and you suddenly realize you’re in the whole wrong parking lot, and I made the picture small again and she turned back into a beautiful flower.

The Yahoo! group was wonderful because I got to look at pictures of other babies adopted from Huazhou that people had posted and also I got to hear how everyone loved Miss Peng, the orphanage director, whom many had met and thought to be an angel.

We got the picture in March, right after Anna turned three, and then we had to wait until June to travel to China to go get Sasha. It was hard to know how to fill that big black hole of time. If you didn’t fill it with something in particular, it would so easily get plugged with fear and all the tricks of the imagination.

Right away I tried to figure out what her Chinese name meant. Ji Hong Bin. At first I got: Lucky Red Kneecap. Then I got: Lucky Roasted Hair on Temples. Hmm. Translating Chinese into English is something of a fine art. Ji Hong Bin was the “pinyin” version of her name. Pinyin is a system devised to represent Chinese characters phonetically using our alphabet. You have to first get the pinyin translation and then match that to the actual Chinese character. These are not subtle differences. In pinyin “Ji” can mean anything from “lucky” to “horseback” to “accumulate” to “bamboo box used to carry books.” And “Hong” will lead you to “red” just as easily as it will to “cistern,” “blast,” and “species of wild swan.”

I was able to get a good match on Ji and Hong. Lucky and
Red. Bin was giving me a lot of trouble. Lucky Red Riverbank? Lucky Red High-Quality Iron? Eventually, I found it. A character with every last squiggle accounted for.

So here was my daughter: Lucky Red Equally-Fine-in-External-Accomplishments-and-Internal-Qualities.

It seemed a big name for such a little girl. But I liked the meaning. The notion of balance. The notion of luck. What a wonderful wish to place upon a six-pound baby lying in a paper box.

One of the things we did while filling up time before going to China was we got goats. I wanted goats because I had heard that they would eat our multiflora rose, the thorny bush that is almost impossible to control, and also because goats are funny. Gretta recommended Nubians, the kind with the long, floppy ears, because they’re big and eat a lot and we had so much we needed eaten. I rode with her in her truck to the farm in Ohio and met the girl who raised them and her proud parents and then a month later I learned that the girl’s father died suddenly of a heart attack. I sent a card and identified myself as “the lady who bought your goats.” It’s hard to know the right thing to do in a situation like that.

We named the goats Nellie, Tut, and Cleopatra. Nellie was the oldest and her big ears flew up like Sister Bertrille’s hat on
The Flying Nun
whenever she heard any sounds that concerned her. Tut was Nellie’s son, and Cleopatra was her pregnant daughter.

Gretta gave us instructions on goat prenatal care. She said
the most important thing was exercise and she suggested we walk Cleopatra twice daily. I never knew you could walk a goat. It was like walking a very obedient dog. Cleopatra never pulled at the leash, or whimpered, or complained about the snow. She and I wandered around the farm, and I talked to her about motherhood because she was just getting started and I was by now getting sure of myself.

We bought an intercom system from Radio Shack so that we could eavesdrop on the actions of our goats in the barn. One night I was giving Anna a bath and we heard horrible goat hollering coming out of the monitor. Alex ran down to the barn. “It’s time!” he yelled. Cleopatra, he reported, was in labor. I asked him how he could be so certain. He said there was a foot sticking out.

I pulled Anna out of the tub and quickly dried her hair and bundled her and by the time I ran through the night and into the barn, baby Greg was born; Cleopatra had done all the work. Instinctively, she took on the business of cleaning and nursing—within minutes this goat was a pro. “Congratulations!” I said to her, and closed the barn door to give mother and child a chance to sleep. I thought that was the end of it, and went to bed wondering if there was any sort of message in all of this.

Three days later, George came barreling up our driveway. This was way before we went into our neighbor-feud. This was back when George was just an everyday part of our lives. “I’ve got something here,” he said, climbing out of his pickup. He was carrying a baby lamb. The tiniest creature, about the size of a kitten. Her nose was pink and her body was covered in
tight fuzz. George said she was just born a few hours previously. She was one of triplets. Her mother had rejected her, had refused to let her suckle, had kicked her away. He said sheep just do this sometimes. “Maybe you can help?” he said, holding out the orphaned lamb.