A Book of American Martyrs(40)

We were not exactly sure what pregnan-cy meant. We were told but somehow, we did not quite comprehend. At least, Naomi did not comprehend. Pregnan-cy was a scary word like cancer you would not say aloud so that an adult might overhear.

Pregnan-cy was a matter of free choice, we were told.

A woman must have control over her body, that is a fundamental human right.

Darren who was always having to argue to show how smart he was, how more astute than his young sisters, smarty-Darren said, A man, too?—and Daddy and Mommy said Yes of course. A man, too.





“WOULD DADDY HURT ME?”


Melissa was adopted. Melissa had been chosen. Unlike Darren and Naomi who had come into the family by chance.

Yet one day Melissa said to Mommy in her whispery little mouse-voice, “If you and Daddy didn’t want me, would Daddy hurt me?”—and quickly Mommy said, “Oh but your Mommy and Daddy want you. All of you.”

By all of you Mommy meant Darren and Naomi also.

By all of you Mommy wanted Melissa to know that she was not any sort of outsider, but one of us: brother, sister, sister.

(And was Naomi there, a witness to this exchange? She would surmise that she’d had to be in the kitchen with Mommy and Melissa, to hear these words. She could not have been elsewhere in the house. She would not have been eavesdropping. She was with Mommy and Melissa in the kitchen in the shingle-board house on Drummond Street in Grand Rapids where Melissa and Naomi went to the Montessori school but Darren went to the middle school and where Daddy was a physician/surgeon attached to the Grand Rapids University Medical Center and Mommy was a stay-at-home mom who was a legal consultant for the local Planned Parenthood office.) (The little girls loved to help Mommy in the kitchen. Preparing meals, cleaning up after meals. It was pleasant for Naomi because she was two years older than Melissa and more capable than Melissa, and Mommy would know this. Mommy encouraged Naomi to instruct Melissa, and this made Naomi feel good. Each girl had her own colored sponge to rinse dishes—Naomi’s was pink, and Melissa’s was green. These colors could not vary. Carefully the girls set the rinsed dishes neatly in the dishwasher for it made them happy when Mommy praised them—Thank you, girls! You did a perfect job.) But today in that soft little mouse-voice Melissa said, “Nobody wanted me. My real Mommy gave me away.”

“But—but”—Mommy stammered not seeming to know what to say—“but she didn’t mean it, Melissa.”


DIDN’T MEAN IT! These words of my mother’s were so weak and unconvincing, Naomi would pretend that she had not heard.





“ADOPTED”


Why’d they want her. Why aren’t we enough . . .”

This question all children ask of their parents, when a new baby is brought into the household. The most reasonable of questions, but no answer will satisfy.

Darren was outraged, resentful. Naomi was deeply wounded.

Why aren’t we enough. Oh!

Years later Naomi would recall observing their parents with the new baby, from a staircase. And Darren on the step below her, fretting.

Friends were dropping by to see the new baby. This was in the (rented) house on Seventh Street, Ann Arbor. In the living room where the baby had been brought, shimmering halos of light. Squeals of delight, uplifted voices both female and male. Giddy happiness of adults that makes children uneasy.

Of course, Darren and Naomi had been prepared by their parents for the new baby, the adoption. Still it was a shock. It was certainly a surprise!

Already at six Darren was concerned with the (hidden? secret?) motives behind the actions of others, which he distrusted. He had not liked it when the other new baby had come into the household several years before, who’d turned out to be his sister Naomi he’d grown to tolerate.

But the new baby was particularly unwelcome. For now there were two small girls in the household where before there’d been but one and there was a particular softness to girls that aroused, in adults, emotions of a kind Darren knew he could not arouse.

At three Naomi was a very young child and yet concerned that somehow, in some way she could not anticipate, the new baby would involve her in a way that was beyond her.

Twenty years later the question has still the power to wound her in her weakest moments.

Why weren’t we enough . . .


PRETTY DOLL-LIKE MELISSA with her thick dark eyelashes and small perfect features was a little Chinese girl-orphan whom Mommy and Daddy had adopted through “contacts” in Shanghai. Darren claimed to remember that they’d flown to Shanghai to bring Melissa back with them!—but Naomi was not so sure about this.

Darren would claim that he’d been at the airport to see the plane “fly away”—and he’d been at the airport when the plane had “landed.” (None of this was true, evidently. But Darren had insisted it was so.)

Naomi, who had no memory of when the new baby had been brought home, only when the new baby seemed to have been home for a while, was told that she’d been “very excited” about her new little sister and had wanted to hold her “all the time”—but none of these memories remained with her.

Much that has been related to me I must accept on faith. The memories of others confused with my own which have vanished.

Shut my eyes and see the shotgun blast striking my father’s face and all that was Daddy was destroyed in that instant including his children’s memories of him and so what point is there in trying to excavate them, if they are lost?—yet if Naomi examined her mother’s photograph albums that were brimming with loose snapshots and Polaroids she would discover many pictures from childhood, many of the mid-and late 1990s after Melissa had come into the Voorhees household. She would spread these photographs on a table for all to contemplate.