The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (15 page)

Stephanie, Seattle's best waitress, put a big bottle of Chimay and a couple of glasses on the table. Terry pulled Melissa's ultrasound and some things he'd found in the store about FAS out of his bag and handed them to me. I pulled the notes I'd taken during my phone conversations with the FAS specialists out of my bag and handed them to Terry.

We read.

We drank.

But neither of us said anything.

Stephanie saw that our bottle was empty and dropped another off. We were done reading; while Terry poured us each another beer, I broke the silence.

“The good news is that no one thinks Melissa's baby will have FAS. The bad news,” I said, holding up the list of FAS/FAE personality traits I found online, “is that you and I have FAS.”

Terry read the list out loud, and laughed. “Temper tantrums, impulsiveness, inappropriate social behavior; I didn't know it, but it looks like I had FAS as a child.”

“If that list is correct, you still have FAS.”

Terry dipped his fingers in his beer and flicked them at me.

Even while I was wiping the beer out of my eyes, it seemed obvious we'd already come to a decision. My mind had been pretty much made up after I spoke to the FAS docs, and I could tell Terry was making up his mind while he was reading my notes. Last night's Internet-induced gloom was gone, and each of us sat waiting for the other to go first. We were both suppressing smiles, as if somehow the importance of the decision we were making required us to look serious while we made it.

“I talked to my boss about it,” Terry said. Barbara was a lesbian who didn't understand why anyone would want kids. “Her mother had three martinis a night, every night of her adult life, during all her pregnancies, and none of her kids was born without a head.”

There was a pause.

“What's your worst-case scenario?” Terry asked.

“The baby has FAS.”

If we said yes, and the baby turned out to have FAS, I pointed out, well, adoptive parents could change their minds at the last minute, too. Birth moms weren't the only ones who could disrupt an adoption. We could say yes to Melissa, and if the baby was born with FAS or any other problem we could back out at the hospital, and the agency could find another couple for Melissa's baby.

“We have that right, you know. If the baby is born messed up, we don't have to take him.”

Terry looked at his beer.

“We wouldn't be able to do that, and you know it. We wouldn't show up and say, ‘Oh, sorry, pointy chin, no thanks.’ ”

“It's just a hypothetical.”

“No way would you, Mr. Guilt, be able to back out at the last minute. And once I see that baby, no matter what's wrong with him, I won't be able to just walk away. So it's not even a hypothetical, really. You're too Catholic, I'm too sentimental.”

Terry was right. If we said yes to Melissa, that would be that. We'd be pregnant, too, and we'd love that kid no matter what was wrong. We wanted a healthy baby, and this was the moment to decide whether we thought the odds were good that Melissa was carrying one.

“If we think she's going to have a healthy baby, we should say yes right now,” Terry said. “And if we think she isn't, we should say no. So . . . what do you think?”

“I think even if the kid turns out to be the healthiest newborn baby on earth, there are still swing sets,
E. coli
hamburgers, and car accidents to worry about.”

There was a long pause, and we sipped our drinks. We looked at each other.

“What if we say yes, and Kate's right and Melissa changes her mind after she sees the baby?” Terry asked. “This is the girl who can't be parted from her dog and cat.”

“If she changes her mind, we go back in the pool. In the meantime, we don't let ourselves get carried away. We don't fill the house with baby stuff or have showers.”

“So, what do you want to do?” Terry asked.

“No, you go first.”

“If you were going to say yes,” Terry said, “well, then, I would say yes. But if you don't want to . . .”

“I was going to say yes if you were,” I said.

“So it's yes?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

We both let out loud sighs, and sipped our drinks. I held out my arm for Terry, showing him the gooseflesh. Terry picked up my notebook and walked over to the pay phone. It was almost midnight, and when Terry called the agency he got someone at their live twenty-four-hour answering service. He left a message for Laurie, telling her we wanted to go ahead with this placement, and that she should tell Melissa yes. Then he came back to the booth and sat down beside me.

Kurt, Septième's owner and my old boss, came over to say hello.

“What's the news?” he asked.

We both looked up at Kurt, and then one or the other or both of us said:

“We're pregnant.”

T
he agency encouraged birth moms and adoptive couples to get together as much as possible before the baby came. Melissa was seven months pregnant when she picked us and we accepted, so we had to squeeze as many of these meetings in quickly as we could. We didn't have to meet in the presence of an agency counselor; only the initial introductions were stage-managed. Since birth moms have less money than adoptive couples, poverty being one of the top reasons women give their children up, the adoptive couple was expected to travel to the birth mom. Over the next few weeks, Terry and I would be seeing a lot of the dull, flat highway between Seattle and Portland, and getting to be regulars at the Mallory Hotel.

A few days after Terry left a message for Laurie telling her that, yes, we would adopt Melissa's boozy baby, we were back in Portland to meet with Melissa on our own. This time, without Laurie, there would be no net. After we dropped our bags at the Mallory, we drove the few blocks to Outside In. At the seminar and during our home study sessions with Ann, all the counselors had emphasized that in an open adoption the stronger the bond between adoptive couples and birth moms the better for everyone involved, especially the kids. “Think of your birth mom as a relative,” said Ruth during the seminar. “You will be related to each other through the baby you adopt. She will forever be your child's birth mother, just as you will forever be your child's parents. You don't get to pick your relatives and, as adoptive parents, you don't get to pick your birth mom. But you should make the
most of your relationship with your child's biological mother, one based in respect, trust, and love.”

Getting close to Melissa was not going to be easy, but since she would forever be part of our family, we were going to try. At that first meeting, Melissa had hardly looked at us. She wasn't hostile, just standoffish, her early-onset world-weariness leavened by traces of adolescent awkwardness. Only when she and Terry started talking about music, or when I asked some polite questions about the logistics of living on the street, had she opened up. Talking about spare-changin' or avoiding cops, Melissa could get very chatty. But she didn't have any questions for us.

There was more we needed to know about her, though, and we didn't have a home study to refer to. And I was curious what role, if any, our being gay had played in her decision to pick us. Why did she want two fags to raise her son? I'd wanted to ask the question at our first meeting, but it seemed . . . a little selfinvolved. “Oh, enough about you already, Melissa, let's talk about how gay Terry and I are; gay, gay, gay.” When we were with Laurie at Outside In, or later at Rocco's eating pizza with Melissa, I just couldn't bring myself to say, “You're homeless and pregnant, Melissa, and that's very interesting, but how do you feel about us being cocksuckers?”

Still, it seemed an important issue, practically the defining issue in this particular adoption. We were fags; no other fags had successfully adopted through the agency before, and it's not so common for gay men to have kids at all. For gay men to adopt children is controversial—in a few places, illegal. So why Melissa chose us seemed important, and it seemed like something the three of us should discuss before the baby came. Had she given it any thought?

On our way down to Portland, I told Terry I was going to ask Melissa about all this.

“She didn't seem to care that we're gay,” Terry said, leaning over to turn down the car stereo. “Why should it matter to us if it doesn't matter to her? It's a nonissue.”

Terry had a point. But as we drove through Olympia, I told Terry it didn't seem possible that Melissa hadn't thought about the fact that we were gay.

“But if she didn't, asking her about it might make it an issue,” Terry said.

“If it's gonna be an issue, it'll become one sooner or later,” I replied. “Wouldn't you rather get it out of the way before the baby is born, instead of having it all blow up in our faces later on? And aren't you at least a little curious what this twenty-year-old from Small Town, Oregon, thinks about homosexuality?”

“She's giving us her baby; I think that's a good indication that she likes us, Dan, she really likes us. Leave it alone; if it were an issue she wouldn't have picked us. She saw our picture, she read our home study, she met us. She knows we're gay. The end.”

Our second meeting was less awkward than the first. Melissa's dog was chained up on the porch of Outside In, and she was inside arranging for someone to watch her cat while she visited with us. Today her belly was noticeably larger, and when we walked up the porch steps she looked us up and down before she said hey. She didn't smile, but she didn't seem upset either. She seemed businesslike. Her twelve-thirty had arrived, and she was clearing her schedule for the rest of the afternoon.

We'd come so the three of us could get to know each other better—in the best interest of the kid—but Melissa didn't come across like a person who wanted to be known. Or maybe she just didn't know how to be known. Over pizza last week, she'd told us that she didn't like getting together with Laurie because she hated having to answer lots of personal questions. Getting to know Melissa without asking questions was going to be work.

We had learned a couple of other things about Melissa during our first visit: she mentioned at our first meeting that she liked Gummi bears, and she missed eating steak. So as she got into the car, Terry handed her a bag of Gummi bears. The gesture was meant to indicate that we'd been paying attention during our first meeting, and that we wanted to be, you know, pals. Melissa looked at the bag, then at Terry.

“They're Gummi bears,” Terry said, “you said you liked them.”

“You didn't have to get me Gummi bears.”

She wasn't hostile; it was a statement of fact. We
didn't
have to
get her Gummi bears; that was true. Getting closer to Melissa was going to be harder work than we'd thought.

As Terry pulled out into the street, I asked Melissa if she was hungry—she wasn't—and if she wanted to maybe go have steak later. At least this time I didn't ask her
where
she wanted to have steak, just whether she wanted to go
somewhere
for steaks.

“I don't care.”

We didn't know what to make of “I don't care” in this context. Was Melissa being polite? If someone offered me a lunch I couldn't afford to buy myself, I wouldn't want to seem too eager to spend their money. Should we insist? Or was she just not in the mood for steak? We didn't want to force steak on her, but we had made plans to get together for lunch, and she had said she missed steak—just as she'd said she liked Gummi bears. Suddenly, our second meeting was like a bad blind date.

We parked the car and walked around downtown, Melissa pointing out the gutter-punk landmarks. She showed us where to buy drugs, which gangways were safe to sleep in, and what businesses would let you use their bathrooms, and she taught us the secrets of spare-changin'. Melissa talked about spare-changin' like it was her job. With a friend, sit or stand on a corner, asking “Spare change?” of everyone who passes by. Never spare-change alone. When there's two or three of you, folks are less likely to yell at you to get a job or take a bath.

“And they seem less scared of you if you're with someone,” Melissa said. “But you can't be with, like, more than two other people, because then you look like a gang or something.”

With anyone over thirty or well-dressed, say you need the money for food. Under thirty or hip-looking, say you need the money for beer or pot. People who say no don't piss Melissa off, it's the people that pretend not to hear her as they walk by.

“That's when I'm like, ‘Hello, I exist.’ That's when we'll follow you down the block.”

I looked at Terry. At home, I always made a point of looking the gutter punks on Broadway in the eye and saying, “Not today.” Terry would pretend not to hear them and walk by. Walking around talking about spare-changin' seemed as good a time as any to see if she remembered us. She knew we lived in Seattle, so I
explained to her that Terry and I walked up Broadway almost every day. She looked at us and . . . she . . . smiled.

“No shit?” Melissa said and laughed. “I spare-changed Broadway all last summer. I must have spare-changed you guys, like, a hundred times.”

How many times had I looked at Melissa last summer, before she got pregnant, and said, “Not today, sorry”? It was in Seattle that she got pregnant, and it's possible that she spare-changed me or Terry or both of us with the baby we were hoping to adopt already growing inside her. I looked at Melissa, and tried to picture her less pregnant and on Broadway, asking me for change. Nothing. Even if I looked 'em in the eye, I didn't really see the gutter punks any more clearly than Terry did.

We walked past an antiques store with an enormous terra-cotta bust of Pope Pious XII in the window. Before the tactlessness of spending a lot of money on something so useless in front of Melissa occurred to me, we were in the store, pricing it. The bust was cool, but it wasn't a thousand dollars' worth of cool. We poked around the store, trailed by a salesclerk. Terry ran out to put some more money in the parking meter, leaving me alone with Melissa and the clerk. Here among the high-priced tchotchkes seemed an appropriate place to address the gay issue, so I asked Melissa if it mattered to her that we were gay. I'm not sure what I expected or even wanted to hear, but what it might mean for her son to grow up with two gay dads must have crossed her mind. Why gay men?

“I don't know. I didn't think about the gay stuff. You just weren't like the others.”

Carol and Jack were right. In the crowd of straight, white, Christian couples, Terry and I stood out.

“Why would anyone spend so much money on all this old crap?” Melissa asked no one in particular.

Terry was back, and I tried to ask Melissa the gay question in another way.

“It's something we've thought about. He'll have different experiences growing up with gay dads than kids who grow up with with straight parents. There are places we won't be able to go as a
family, and times in his life he might catch shit for it. Do you worry about that?”

“No,” said Melissa. “I didn't really think about that.”

Terry was looking at me with his jaw hanging open. He mouthed, “Stop,” and shook his head.

“Did you pick us because you wanted to be the only mom in your kid's life?”

“No.”

“Do you worry about other kids picking on him?”

“Everyone gets picked on for something.”

Melissa wandered up to the front of the store, the clerk trailing her, leaving me and Terry alone with the Pope.

“Would you shut up,” Terry hissed. “Don't ask her about the kid getting picked on! Are you insane? Do you want her to change her mind? Drop it!”

Melissa was eyeing the store clerk, who was eyeing her, and we made our way up to the front of the store to prevent a scene. Outside, it was getting cold and starting to rain. We couldn't walk around anymore, so I suggested we go eat somewhere.

“You wanna have a steak?” Terry asked Melissa.

“I don't care.” Melissa shrugged.

“Well, I care and I want a steak,” I said.

There was a steakhouse on the same block as the antiques store, and Terry asked Melissa if it would be all right with her if we went and ate there. She didn't have to eat, but she could get off her feet.

“I don't care.”

We walked into the steakhouse—white tablecloths, dark paneling, overly made-up hostess—and asked for a table near the window. The hostess looked at us as if we'd asked her to drink a cup of piss. She didn't know what to make of us: Terry and me looking like a couple of urban fags/frat boys ( jeans, T-shirts, baseball hats), and Melissa looking like a gutter punk (filthy clothes, dirty face, body odor).

It was about three o'clock, and the place was practically deserted. A few late lunchers were scattered at tables around the dining room. I asked again for a table, locking eyes with the hostess, doing my best rendition of one of my mother's looks: I was
smiling, but don't-fuck-with-me waves emanated from me. One look and our hostess knew there'd be an ugly scene if she tried to stick us in a table at the rear or tell us the kitchen was closed.

We were shown to a booth in the window, and as we sat down the hostess gave me a nod. She was standing behind Melissa, facing me and Terry, and now it was her turn to lock eyes. My look said “Don't fuck with us,” and her look said, “I sat you in a good table, I'll see that your waitress is here in a heartbeat, and I'll make sure your food flies out of the kitchen.” She'd keep up her end of the deal, but she didn't want us in her window all afternoon. I nodded. It was a deal. We understood each other.

Looking at the menu, Melissa's eyes went wide. The steaks were twenty dollars and up—way, way up—outrageously steep if you make your living a quarter at a time. Melissa thought it was stupid to spend so much money on lunch. We could buy steak at the supermarket around the corner for five or six bucks; why would anyone pay twenty dollars for one in a restaurant? Melissa hadn't found an apartment yet, I pointed out, so even if we did buy steak at the supermarket, we didn't have anywhere to cook it or anything to eat it with. Since I didn't want to sit on the sidewalk and eat raw steak with my bare hands, we'd have to pay more for lunch than we should.

Our waitress arrived, clearly forewarned, and demanded to know if we were ready to order. I ordered a Coke, Terry ordered a beer. Melissa didn't order anything. The waitress left to get our drinks.