Rescuing Julia Twice (21 page)

For the past eight months, we've spent every weekend visiting suburbs and small towns up and down the Hudson Valley. We're not househunting, per se. I pretend we take these weekend excursions because I write a column for the
New York Post
's real estate section about living in such towns. But the truth is—and Ricky knows this—I could easily gather this material online and by phone. Exploring this territory, however, is a safe way for me to look at the merchandise without purchasing. I'm window shopping. And Ricky, who is quietly tactical, has got me watching HGTV nonstop. It's a slow-drip intravenous drug.

With each road trip we wander through a town, popping into bakeries, visiting playgrounds, checking out stores. I take note if a town has a bookstore, health-food shop, and swimming pool—things that are important to me. I pick up the local newspaper. Lately I'll do an errand, such as go to the post office or buy glue at a hardware store. I'm getting beyond window shopping—I'm inside the dressing room trying towns on for size. Best find of all is the local bulletin board sheathed in fliers, ads, and requests in a coffee shop where I find out about a yoga class or a concert or a lost cat. It's like putting my ear up against someone's chest
and listening to her heartbeat. Then we drive around and look at houses. Inevitably on some main road near town or on a hill on the outskirts I see an old farmhouse and I screech, “Wait, stop!” Ricky slows down and brings the car to a halt. I roll down the window and gawk, like a lovesick teen. I say something like, “That's a beautiful old house,” or “Wouldn't it be great to have a covered porch like that?” And Ricky says, “Absolutely.” Then he asks coyly, “Are you ready?” and he seemingly means am I ready to go back home now, but I get the double meaning of his question.

Mondays after our jaunts, I finish my story research by phone in interviews with city folks who, like the woman I met in the New Paltz playground, have relocated. Their personal anecdotes add a human touch to the column, which is filled with practical information. I only need fifteen minutes to extract a good quote, but I can't get off the phone. As soon as they start talking, I'm a fish on the end of a reel. I want to hear it all. How they finally made the decision to leave. How they chose this town, their house. What it's been like. Do they have regrets? These people are as happy to talk as I am to listen. One woman told me about standing at her kitchen window, watching her daughter swing on a rubber tire that hangs from an old oak tree in their front yard. Another man related how he sits on his deck after his commute back from the city. He said he loves to watch the deer munching on his shrubs at dusk. After each call, I'm lost in thought. If this were us, would things be different? Would Julia settle down? Would I enjoy motherhood? Would an old farmhouse surrounded by tall trees take away the hurt?

“Do you remember … ” I shout, then pause to wait for the moaning fire engine to rumble past the outdoor cafe on Amsterdam Avenue where Ricky, Julia, and I are eating dinner. “Do you remember that lake house we rented a few years ago?”

“The one in Ellenville?”

“Yeah, John and Carroll's house.”

“Sure. What about it?”

“Why don't we rent it again this summer? We can do a few weekends and maybe a two-week stretch in August.”

“Sounds interesting. How would that work?”

“Well, the rental is very reasonable. I could work out six weekends.”

“What about Julia? Where would she sleep?”

“There's the second bedroom on the ground floor.”

“We'd need to get a crib in there.”

“We could get one from IKEA and build it in the room.”

“Call Carroll. See if it's possible.”

Three years ago, Ricky and I rented John and Carroll's house for summer weekends. Being in the Catskills took me back to sleepaway camp. It had been two decades since I'd swum across a lake or laid back in the grass and stared at a starry sky. The snug two-story bungalow was basic, with loose wires, unpainted walls, and clattering appliances, but the view of the dappled lake from the large living room window and the silence at night were restorative.

The house is still available, and I book it. When I tell Ricky about the two-week stretch, he suggested having Anna come with us. I thought it was a brilliant idea.

By July we are spending weekends in the country. On Fridays, we load the car with food, toys, books, clothes, and our cat. Two hours later, with the sun sinking behind the brooding Catskill peaks, we take a left off Route 209 and turn onto a rough mountain road. Concrete and commotion is replaced with desolation and ruin. The ghostly path is lined with abandoned bungalow colonies and hollowed-out horse ranches from the long-lost days when the Catskill Mountains were a first-class tourist destination. Every other house is for sale. One family keeps a herd of goats. The Hotel Rainbow on the right, now a camp, is filled with wool-wearing Hasidim milling about the grounds. Finally we turn onto Camp Road to Carroll's house. My chest releases. There's more space in it. I'm like an asthmatic sucking an inhalant.

We walk down to the lake at dusk to watch the water lilies close, as though there were tiny invisible storekeepers pulling down iron gates. The peepers belch; a gaggle of geese look like a fleet of lawnmowers. Slowly, the silence takes over.

Mornings are fresh and pregnant with hope. I take Julia with me to pluck graceful fire lilies and gather them in bunches for a table bouquet. Later, Ricky squeezes Julia between his knees while we row across the lake in a canoe to a tiny sandy beach for a picnic. Lately I've returned to painting, a childhood passion. On canvasses, in sketchbooks, and on smooth rocks, I paint or draw a house, a village of houses, or a pastoral scene with many houses. I use dabs of color to put flowers in the window boxes, and I apply quick strokes to make a picket fence. I'm not ready to house-hunt, so I house-dream. I'm a child at play, insinuating myself into a fairy tale, lost in a world I can only get to through paint.

“That's a nice one,” Ricky says, peering over my shoulder.

I've painted a row of stone French village houses strung together like pearls. On one I added an awning and a sign, “Julia's Cafe.”

“When Julia has a real room one day, I'll hang them on the wall.”

Ricky squeezes my shoulder.

“That will be wonderful,” he says.

I squint at the clock in the bedroom. It's 6:00
AM.
I hear Anna downstairs with Julia. Since we arrived ten days ago, Anna has been caring for Julia in the morning while Ricky and I sleep until 8:00
AM,
a luxury we've not had in nearly eighteen months. My body's been trained to wake at six, so it's hard to drift back to sleep. It's easier when I hear the flimsy screen door creak closed because I know Anna has taken Julia outside in the stroller for a walk.

It's been strange to have Anna with us in the Catskills. It's no surprise she works diligently to keep Julia fed, clean, and occupied. She's given me and Ricky the freedom to take a few hours for ourselves, day and night. What does feel odd is watching Anna tend to Julia when we're in
the house or car together. I see Anna works as hard as we do to corral Julia. Julia isn't any more inclined to listen to Anna than she does to us. Anna's steely determination wins the day, and she perseveres without complaining. She never looks defeated, though now I see how Julia can tire even a seemingly indefatigable twenty-five-year-old.

One night after Julia falls asleep, Anna and I are sitting on the couch watching
The Wizard of Oz.
During commercials, we chat about her family in Poland. Eventually the conversation turns to Julia, and she asks me to tell her more about Julia's adoption from Russia. When I hired Anna eight months ago, I'd mentioned Julia was adopted but said nothing more. I did a quick recap on the Siberian odyssey and told Anna how we spirited Julia out of the orphanage in the middle of the night and flew in another snowstorm until dawn. I knew I could keep her captivated, but I decided it was time. So I took a sharp turn.

“Adopting a child, is, well, it makes things different.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“Julia's difficult, different. No?”

Not sure what to say, I put her at ease.

“Don't get me wrong. You do an awesome, awesome job with her, and Ricky and I are so happy to have you. But now I've had a chance to see you and Julia together, and I see some of the same strange things I experience when I'm with her.”

“You mean …”

“I mean she's hard to manage. She doesn't listen. She never relaxes.”

“That's for sure,” Anna says tentatively.

“And it's hard to be peaceful with her, no?” I say.

“Well, she never, well, almost never, cries, and she's never in a bad mood, which is interesting,” Anna says. “But it's true, she's never, em, what's the word? Cozy.”

“Cozy? What do you mean?”

“It's like she has a wall around her,” she says.

Finally someone else has said what I've been feeling. She's lifted the curse. It's not me. We watch the end of the movie.

“Good-night Anna,” I say before climbing the spiral stairs to the loft bedroom. “Thanks for being honest with me.”

Upstairs, I join Ricky in bed. He's reading. I nudge him.

“Did you hear what Anna said about Julia having a wall around her?”

“I did,” he says.

“And?”

“It's true. It's very hard to get through to Julia.”

“I thought you thought it was just me—that I was, you know, not cut out for this mothering stuff.”

“I don't know why you say that.”

“Because that's what I thought you thought.”

Ricky pulls me toward him.

“Let's get some sleep.”

An eggplant-purple sky looms in the distance. The terrain becomes more mountainous every ten miles. Traffic moves swiftly along the New York State Thruway. We allotted two hours of travel time to make the afternoon performance of
The Nutcracker
at the Bardavon Theater in Poughkeepsie.

“Tell me what I need to do when we get off the Thruway,” Ricky says.

“Okay,” I say, lowering the volume on
The Nutcracker
CD that's playing and reaching for the directions in my bag.

We veer off the Thruway and cross the Mid-Hudson Bridge. The river, wide and expansive up here in the Upper Hudson Valley, is roiling. We wind through downtrodden urban streets choked with abandoned buildings before turning onto Market Street, which is lit with Christmas tinsel. Poughkeepsie, an old industrial upstate city, has been in decline since the 1960s. The Bardavon is one of its gems, maybe its shiniest. We could have taken Julia to see
The Nutcracker
much closer to our apartment, but this is research. More research on what it's like to be a denizen of a region that retains many characteristics that inspired the Hudson River School of painters.

I do my best to squelch my mother's negative words, which coil through my mind like a poisonous snake: “Why are you taking Julia to see
The Nutcracker
in some dinky theater in, what's the name of that town anyway?” she had said a couple of days ago on the phone.