Strangers at the Feast (20 page)

Sometimes he imagined packing a suitcase in the night and disappearing to a coastal Mexican town. He could sip tropical drinks and catch up on reading, he could learn to surf and get back into shape. He’d speak Spanish. He’d meet locals and smoke dope and grow his hair long. He’d find some American hippie girl hanging out after college; he’d be mysterious about his past, drop a few strategic clues so that she’d think he was former CIA. She’d be scared, amazed; she’d stroke his balls on a hammock. Eventually, they’d open a little beachfront bar together, start fresh, have more children…

No, no, no. He wasn’t that kind of man. Douglas loved his children, his wife. Couldn’t they see that? Didn’t they understand he might be failing, he might be losing money, but he would never leave them?

The phone rang. Denise again.

He would never leave her, but he didn’t want to take her call.

He remembered an experiment in which scientists placed a barracuda in a tank with small fish. For weeks the barracuda gorged itself, until the scientists inserted a Plexiglas partition and dumped the small fish on the other side. When the barracuda went for the fish, he bumped his head. Over and over, he rammed that Plexiglas and then, finally, stopped. That’s when the scientists took the partition out. Once again, they dumped a bucket of fish in the tank. But the barracuda wouldn’t budge.

“Learned helplessness,” they called it.

That’s what he was feeling. Douglas knew he had to keep ramming that partition. No matter what. He couldn’t afford to feel depressed, he couldn’t give up. His family was counting on him. He’d fight tooth and nail. He’d talk to Dean Obervell, tell him he needed some new territory to work with. He’d come up with ideas, new lots to assemble. He’d start looking at Bridgeport. He’d make himself essential to the company. He’d show them he had vision and perseverance. And he’d do it before Dean had a chance to think of letting him go. Douglas couldn’t end up like Glenn Mirsky. His pulse quickened at the thought; his forehead grew clammy.

Douglas strode quickly down the hallway, past the emptied offices where Glenn and Ray and Kevin had worked for years. Nothing but dusty mouse pads remained on the desks; drawers were open. The leaves on the ficus trees—Jesus, they didn’t even water the plants once you were gone?—had shriveled.

He knocked on Dean Obervell’s door. “Dean, Dean, listen, you got a sec? I wanted to run some ideas by you. New territories, while the prices are low.” Douglas waved a yellow legal pad, but Dean’s eyes went straight to Douglas’s crotch.

“Olson, Jesus, at least pretend you have some dignity left.”

DENISE

As soon as he let the turkey thud into their kitchen sink, her husband had silently trudged off to the living room. Well, let him sulk, she thought. Why should she feel guilty for his gloominess when he had brought it all on himself? Above all else in life she had wanted one thing—not to worry about money—and as though her marriage were a horrible fable, Douglas had wagered everything and lost. His boundless cheer and confidence, the qualities she had once fallen in love with, now terrified her.

“He seems a bit down,” said Ginny.

“You know where these go, right?” Denise handed her a stack of plates.

Ginny smiled away the evasion, hugged the plates, called into the living room, “Priya, wanna help Mommy set the table?”

But Denise could see in the distance that Priya was encamped with Douglas and the twins, burrowing her feet into the sectional. Her eyes were locked on the television.

“Priya? Football?” Ginny widened her eyes at Denise, and then shrugged. “Pick my battles, right?”

“Or else you have war.”

While Ginny set the table, Denise shoved the turkey into the oven, set the gravy on the stovetop, and slid the carrots into the microwave. She cleared away the plastic bags and containers and wiped down the counter. Order, the day needed some order. If she could narrow her vision to a goal she could accomplish, she could
forget for a moment that everything around her was on the brink of vanishing.

“I mean, Douglas is usually Mr. Merry.” Ginny had returned; she set her elbows on the counter and leaned toward Denise. “Frankly, I’m worried.”

“
You’re
worried?” Denise let out a desperate laugh. “Welcome to the party, Ginny.”

“He can be very sensitive to criticism, to certain tones of voice.”

Denise wondered what Ginny really knew of her brother. Ginny had never put her life in Douglas’s hands. She had no idea what it was to lash her fate to a man she loved only to have him plunge off a cliff.

Knowing that to open her mouth would unleash a flood of emotion, Denise continued to wipe down the counter until Eleanor pattered in.

“Shame on me, I left you gals all alone in here! What can I do?”

“Nothing,” Ginny and Denise said simultaneously.

“Why don’t you play with the grandchildren?” Denise suggested.

“They’re watching football.” Eleanor sighed. “I asked the boys to play Ping-Pong.”

Denise’s sons were frightened of their grandmother with a Ping-Pong paddle. She always won, because, she said,
letting
children win was bad for their mental development. She’d probably never been able to beat anyone at anything and couldn’t stop herself. Though Denise wondered if she was tipsy enough that the twins might finally claim the family title.

“Did you see that Priya is watching football with the boys?” Eleanor whispered dramatically.

“I’m aware,” said Ginny. “They didn’t have TV in the orphanage.”

And then Denise remembered something that had been bugging her. “So how much time did you spend in that orphanage? I mean, before you adopted Priya.” Denise had been amazed at how quickly it had all come together; one day Ginny was off to India, a few months later she had a seven-year-old child. She thought people had to go
through mounds of paperwork. A woman she knew spent two years trying to get a child from Vietnam. And Denise worked at a public school. She knew bureaucracy.

“I’m only her guardian,” said Ginny. “We still have to go through the legal adoption process here. You want these cranberries in a dish?”

Denise was still puzzled. “So what was the process before you went over?”

Ginny pressed her fingertips to her temples, closed her eyes, and took three deep, noisy breaths. When she opened her eyes, without looking at Eleanor or Denise, she announced that she needed to use the bathroom.

As Ginny left the kitchen, Denise turned to Eleanor.

“Oh, Ginny doesn’t like questions about this stuff,” Eleanor said. “It’s all so mysterious. She acts like she kidnapped the girl!”

GINNY

Ginny did not go to India intending to return with a child. It would have been crazy, and impossible, given the elaborate adoption procedures, procedures no doubt meant to prevent people from doing exactly what she had done: impulse adopting.

She arrived in New Delhi in June, relieved, despite the sweltering heat, to be thousands of miles from New York, from her crammed apartment, from Ratu.

She worked with a team of international researchers: Swedes, Brits, and an Italian couple with Save the Children. During the day, the team separated to conduct interviews at various orphanages, but in the evenings they all dined together. Ginny immediately took to a brother-sister team who worked with CARA (Central Adoption Resource Authority). Ravi and Safia were biological brother and sister who, as infants, had been adopted by a wealthy Bombay family. After learning their own story—while at university in London—they returned to India, making adoption their crusade. Ravi worked with the orphanages, and Safia with the agencies and courts. Ginny had been assigned to the Analisa Home for Girls on the outskirts of Delhi, so in the mornings, alongside Ravi, she compiled data on how long girls had been there and if they had been considered for adoption.

Ginny loved the work. After all those years she’d spent locked away in libraries, digging up demographic data on people who had been dead for centuries, here were living children.

A clear hierarchy dominated the orphanage. The older girls
worked in the kitchen while the younger girls swept, laundered, and dusted. At any given time at least one hundred girls lived at Analisa, and between them, they had few belongings: beautiful pink seashells that Ravi brought each year from his family trips to Goa; pencils; jacks; a faded postcard of the Eiffel Tower that a girl who had been adopted by a French couple once sent, now as soft as cotton from being passed hand to hand.

The girls all wore simple gray frocks, layered with the sweaters and T-shirts that arrived as donations. But on the first day of every month the new girls had their photographs taken in a white dress, of which there were ten in various sizes. Just a few weeks after her arrival Ginny watched as one of the older girls perched at the front of the cafeteria holding a hairbrush and bobby pins. As the new girls lined up, one by one she brushed their hair and carefully pinned it back. She lined their eyes with kohl and smeared it with her thumb. Using a small jar of cooking oil, she moistened their lips.

“Who’s the Avon lady?” Ginny asked.

“Priya,” Ravi answered. “I’m not supposed to have favorites, but, well, let’s just say she has a place in my heart. She’s sort of the Queen Bee here.”

“And no one has scooped her up?”

“We don’t think it’s medical, but she doesn’t speak. When she was three, and she had just arrived, we tried to place her. But eventually we had to designate her as ‘special needs.’ Now the years when she had a good shot are over. In a few years, she will go to an adolescent home.”

“Then someday open a beauty shop?” Ginny joked.

“Those ones do not fare so well.” Ravi looked down. “Prostitutes, mainly.”

In the afternoons, Ginny worked at the adoption agencies, watching as couples from London and France arrived with bank statements, home study reports, reference letters, marriage licenses. Orphanages
gave babies and infants to Indian couples only, toddlers to Indian citizens living abroad. Children over five were the candidates for foreign adoption, but adoptive couples could not be more than ninety years old in combined age, or individually younger than thirty. They could not be gay. They could not have more than two children, or two divorces.

Every evening, after she had typed up her notes, Ginny returned to the Analisa Home, where she played jacks with the girls, or read aloud from
Goodnight Moon
. When they were herded off for dinner and evening chores, Ginny opened a beer and sat outside on the bench watching the quiet playground, the empty hopscotch board where Priya leapt like a gazelle. The girl, who was assisting Ginny with her interviews, sharpening pencils and filing papers according to Ginny’s color-coded tags, was exempt from evening cleanup. At first Priya’s silence made it difficult for Ginny to communicate. Ginny was a talker—
Holy moly, how am I going to
squeeze in three interviews before a meeting at 11:30?
Or,
The bugs here are like army tanks, I’m under attack!
She had so little experience with children, she rambled on as though Priya were an adult, which Priya seemed to enjoy. Priya listened intently as Ginny spoke. And with graceful indifference, Priya swept the bugs from Ginny’s office. When Ginny arrived each morning, Priya was waiting with a steaming cup of tea. And at the end of the day, she tidied Ginny’s desk. The girl’s industriousness impressed Ginny. And Priya’s curiosity—she lifted books from Ginny’s shelf, pointing at their titles for an explanation—stirred something in her heart.

Priya used basic signals to communicate. An excellent mime, she could gesture not only eating and sleeping but also listening to the radio or looking for the dustpan; with a simple tightening of her face, she could make it clear which of the other girls at the home she thought were stupid, arrogant, or troublemakers.

Ginny didn’t think she’d fare half as well as a mute orphan in a country where beggars lay half-naked on the street, where eleven million other girls awaited a home.

“So I Googled you,” Ravi said one night, startling her on her bench. “You specialize in American family studies. And write poetry.”

“Uh-oh. Why were you Googling me?”

He opened a soda. “For the very serious official and professional reason of wanting to ask you out.”

“Oh, I’m off men for a while.”

“Hmnn… Sounds like there’s a story there.”

“Stories. Plural,” she said. “You know what they say about American women being slutty? All true.”

He laughed. “Lucky me that you are off men. Timing has always been my thing.”

“I’d think a man that spends his days crusading for children would be a chick magnet.”

“Except that my crusade prevents me from wanting children of my own. I could never manage both. What about you, no children?”

“I still feel like a child myself.”

“You are so good with the girls. They adore you. Especially Priya.”

At the sound of her name, Priya paused on the hopscotch board and looked over.

“My little wingwoman.”

“You know, Ginny, I’ve seen many people, in many different situations, come here. This place, it is like a mosque, or a church; people come for something they need.”

At the end of each day, they sat together on the bench. Sometimes Safia joined them, complaining about the red tape that kept her from doing her job. By July, the monsoons came, and as the rain pounded the corrugated tin roof, Ravi and Safia told Ginny about the day their mother flew to London to tell them, after nineteen years, that they had been adopted.

“We had always known,” said Safia. “These things, you know them in your bones before you know them.”

One morning, unable to sleep, Ginny arrived early at the orphanage.
The sun had not yet risen and as she approached the dark gate she heard a whimper. On the ground lay a cot with three infant girls. Ginny scooped up two of them, who quickly began to wail. In a moment, Priya emerged from the building, rushed to the gate in her nightdress, and lifted the third baby.