The Year She Left Us (13 page)

“Don't tell any of this to Ma,” Les warned Charlie. “Can you imagine what she'd say? ‘Let them buy their own dishwasher! You paid them enough to get her!' ”

“She doesn't want us to go at all,” Charlie said. “She says the government is not to be trusted.”

I pretended that I didn't hear them. I hoped Gran wasn't right that the government could do things without Charlie's permission. Surely Les and Charlie could protect me. Les was a judge; they couldn't tell her what to do. And there was no way that Charlie would leave me in China. I was hers, that's what she always told me. I reminded myself over and over that my biological parents—we'd been taught in Whacks not to say “real parents”—had given me up for good. It was perfectly safe to go.

Our June departure date drew closer. Instead of practicing my Mandarin, as Charlie had suggested, I hung out with A.J. and Becca, learning their Torah portions. A.J. had the burning bush and Becca had clean and unclean foods. I envied them their task. Since third grade, they'd been complaining about going to Hebrew school and talking about how nervous they were going to be at their bat mitzvahs, still years and years away. I heard the pride in their voices and felt their excitement. Sometimes they missed Whackadoodle events because they had a field trip or a holiday party at temple. It was another way they stood apart from me, another group to which they belonged and I didn't. I wanted so badly to share their every experience that in fourth grade, I asked Charlie if I could go to Camp Haverim summer day camp. A.J. and Becca were signed up for the first session. Charlie agreed, and I spent two weeks learning the blessings, baking challah, and practicing the Hebrew alphabet. I loved the camp and went back the next summer. At the beginning of sixth grade, I told Charlie I wanted to become Jewish.

“Why can't I?” I asked. We were in the grocery store, which had a big display of foods for the Jewish New Year. I had just persuaded Charlie that we had to buy apples and honey.

“We're not Jewish,” Charlie said. “Can you hurry up, please? We're having supper at Les's tonight.”

“A.J. isn't Jewish,” I said. “Becca isn't. But now they are.”

“Their parents are Jewish, which makes them Jewish.” She unloaded our cart and took out her wallet. “Just be happy you're
you
, okay?”

In Les's kitchen, I told Les that Jews ate turban-shaped challah on Rosh Hashanah and casually mentioned that I was planning to become a Jew.

“Really?” said Les. “I'd like to hear about it.” She sat down with me at the table. Sometimes Les took me more seriously than Charlie did. I explained about summer camp and how I practiced the Hebrew alphabet with A.J. and Becca.

“I think it's great that you're interested,” Les said. “It's a big decision, though. You probably want to take your time, think about it some more, and talk to others.”

“Charlie says no,” I said. It always pleased me in a queasy-making way when I could get Les to side with me over her sister.

“She wants you to be sure before you take that step. Like I said, there's a lot to learn about it. Can you think of ways you could do further investigation? Maybe read some books or take a class or two?”

“Ari is not becoming Jewish,” Charlie said. She stood over the soup pot, furiously shaking the salt, which she usually measured by the quarter teaspoonful.

“Give her a break,” Les said. “She's feeling left out because her friends are getting bat mitzvahed. I don't see the harm in letting her ask questions. Let me do that.” Les stood up to take over, but Charlie didn't budge from her place in front of the stove. Her raised wooden spoon was red with tomato.

“They are getting bat mitzvahed because their families are Jewish. Unlike, say, the Kong family,” Charlie said.

“She told me no before I even got to discuss it.” Thinking that this would be a good time to show how responsible I was, I got up to set the table. “There's classes at the synagogue for people who want to convert.”

“For adults,” Charlie said. “That's not you.” She jerked open a drawer; the utensils rattled.

“Is there anyone you could talk to at A.J.'s synagogue?” Les asked. “Maybe one of the teachers or a youth rabbi?”

“Who's going to drive her to all these classes and appointments?” Rising steam from the soup pot made Charlie's face glisten. “You have no idea how complicated our lives are. In between work, I've got to get Ari to school, make her a lunch every day, help with homework, take her to the doctor, miss work when she's sick, get her to soccer practice, do adoption group stuff on the weekends. There is no room in the schedule for Hebrew school. We don't have one hour more, one minute more, to chase around finding Ari some new thing to try. She is not becoming Jewish. This discussion is over.” She slammed the lid on the pot. Les and I looked at each other, Les as surprised as I was.

“I could talk to Robyn about it,” I offered. “She became Jewish when she married David.”

“Did you hear what I said? You are not talking to Robyn.”

“I'm just saying she knows stuff. She's good at being helpful.”

“And I'm not?” Charlie fumed.

“You're just being really close-minded.”

“Ari's right,” Les said. “This isn't like you. You're the original Ms. We-Are-the-World, Ms. Rainbow Nation. You sound positively anti-Semitic.”

“You know that's a crock,” Charlie snapped.

“I know, so why are you getting so upset?”

Charlie took a deep breath and then, straight-armed, clutched the back of a kitchen chair. “I respect your choices, Ari, I really do, but our family comes from a different faith tradition. If you want to explore Judaism or Buddhism or Islam when you are older, that's fine. But for now, we're going to leave it.”

“Oh, please,” Les said. “We don't have any faith tradition.”

“Our great-grandfather was a Presbyterian minister!”

“Like that ever made any difference. We never went to church except on Christmas and Easter.”

“This isn't about you!” Charlie shouted. “This is a conversation I'm having with my daughter!”

Les opened her mouth and then shut it. I chimed in, “So why can't I do what Aunt Les says and go to Hebrew school with A.J. and Becca?”

“I want you—” Charlie took a deep breath. She moved to the stove, turning her back to me. “I want you to be happy with who we are and what we have. You've got a good life. It's not perfect, but it's pretty damn good. For now, that's all I'm asking, that you give this life a try. Stop looking, for once, for a better family to join. I'm trying my hardest, and you need to start trying, too. There isn't anything better out there. This is the family you've got.”

“And trust me,” Les said. “It's a doozy.”

Charlie glared at her and slammed out the front door.

W
e ate our soup and waited for her to return. I took out the skillet and grilled us each a sandwich. Les occasionally made toast, but grilled cheese was beyond her. I think she subsisted on brie and crackers and pears. There was never any milk, but there was plenty of Diet Coke and beer and a chilled bottle of wine in her fridge.

“Are they really having bat mitzvahs?” Les asked me. I nodded. I was mad at Charlie for overreacting. Usually she liked my self-exploration and encouraged me to ask what she called without irony the “Big Questions.” It was unlike my mother to shut me down like that.

Les sipped a beer. “Chinese orphans chanting from the Torah.” She paused for a second. “Actually, I think it's great. Their parents are Jewish, so why shouldn't they be, too? It might get a little confusing, but they'll figure it out. They're navigating a lot anyway, having white parents, so they're already doing the whole identity thing. It must be so much easier for you, having a Chinese family.”

I studied my soup bowl. It should have been easier, but it wasn't. I felt stupid, alone, and defective.

“It's a brave new world, that's for sure,” said Les. “We've got some really complicated cases before us at court—surrogate contracts gone badly, or two couples, one lesbian and one gay, where the biological parents can't agree anymore on financial responsibility or custody arrangements, or one last week where a lesbian couple who adopted a baby from Vietnam have split up, and now the one mother isn't letting the other mother see the baby anymore.”

“Is she coming back for me?” I asked. I hadn't touched my sandwich.

Les understood immediately. “Oh, honey,” she said. She scooted her chair over and put her arm around me. “She will always, always come back for you.” She squeezed me around the shoulders. “That's the first rule of adoption.”

I wished that Charlie had been there to hear what Les had said. I wanted to be sure she knew the first rule of adoption—I knew she knew, but when Les said things, they went from “rule” to “Rule”—and, for Charlie's sake, I thought it would have been nice for her to hear Les's promise. It was the closest I ever heard to Les praising Charlie.

I
gave up my plan to become a Jew but later that school year, when our orphanage trip loomed, I used A.J.'s and Becca's bat mitzvah preparations as the perfect distraction. I lay on my stomach on the floor in A.J.'s bedroom while she sat on her bed and listened to a tape of her Torah portion, her face screwed up in intense concentration. She wasn't chanting it yet; she still had months to learn it, but the cantor had given her the passage to listen to, to get her ear accustomed to the unfamiliar music, which came out of the ancient boom box in wavelets of up-and-down notes. Strong sunlight patterned the bedroom floor, and I rolled in it like A.J.'s dog, Feng Shui, sending up dust motes into the air. When Becca came over, the three of us made lists of who would be invited and what they should wear to the party and which boys they would dance with. “You can light the third candle,” they decided—this would be during the party, they explained, when they got to invite their friends to the front of the room to show everybody whom they liked the best. “We'll invite up all the Whacks, but Ari gets to light the actual candle.” We spent hours this way, and whenever A.J. or Becca brought up the trip, I got up from the floor to change the music or get us a snack from the kitchen.

“Are you girls having fun?” Robyn would ask me. “Won't it be wonderful, going to China together? Is your mom getting ready? Have you got your visas yet?” If I pretended to be looking for fruit or crackers, I didn't have to answer any of Robyn's questions and could scoot back into the bedroom and break up the conversation with a rat-ta-tat-tat of questions of my own.

The closer we got to the trip, the worse I felt. I started having bad dreams that woke me in a fright but that I couldn't remember in the morning. I wasn't hungry at mealtimes and then bought bags of cheesy snacks and giant sodas from the corner store, which I wolfed down walking home from school. Charlie was working even more than usual, trying to “get ahead,” she said, so that she could be gone for a whole two weeks without putting too much on her colleagues. Now that I was twelve, I was okay on my own for an hour or two in the apartment as long as I called her as soon as I walked in the door. From the very first time she let me stay alone, I loved the freedom and the silence. I skated on stockinged feet across the scratched mahogany floors and read dirty passages in the novels on the bookshelves and pretended that my orange beanbag chair was a huge rock in the middle of the sea and I was Prometheus, chained to it forever, or Ariadne on Naxos peering across the horizon, wailing as she watched Theseus sail away. Charlie had urged me to pack for China, so I put the suitcase ostentatiously in the middle of my bedroom floor and filled half of it with books. I figured that if the trip were horrible, I could lose myself in those pages.

Only one person sensed my deep foreboding. WeiWei called me one afternoon a few days before our departure. It was as if she knew through some mysterious channel that I was in trouble and needed her help. I was home alone, Web surfing and watching TV, anything to avoid packing, while Charlie was out running errands.

“Hey,” she said. “This is WeiWei.”

“Hi,” I said faintly. She had never called me, ever.

“You didn't answer my e-mail.”

“Um, I guess not.” I was hot with embarrassment. Busy WeiWei, important WeiWei, had sent me an e-mail that I had read three times and then not replied to, not knowing how to answer.

“I hear you're going to visit your orphanage.”

“Yeah, with A.J. Becca's going to hers, too.”

“So you excited?”

“I guess so,” I said. I felt tears spring. I couldn't let WeiWei hear me crying.

“Good,” she said. “It'll be a good trip. I've been to a bunch of orphanages. They're okay places, the kids do fine there, there's plenty of food and school books and everything they need, really.”

Everything but parents.

“But I know you,” WeiWei said. “You take things hard. I know that.”

“Is there something wrong with me? That I'm like that?” I said. “Different in some way?”

“We all have our own weirdnesses. Yours just happens to be a brand I get. Orphans have to stick together, right? Nobody knows what's it like for us, though if you think about it too long, you can drive yourself crazy. We don't want that, do we? Life is crazy enough as it is. So look, I sent you something. It'll get to you today or tomorrow. Take it with you. It'll solve all your problems, on this trip anyway. Okay?”

I nodded. The phone felt like a magical object in my hand, delivering me from a fate that was all the more scary because I couldn't imagine what it might be.

“Okay,” I uttered, then, “thanks,” I managed to say.

“Send me a postcard,” WeiWei said. “Have you got my address?”