The Mothers: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

conversation.
    She waved me away. “No, she didn’t, but it’s Angelina and Felicia Hirschfeld is the best—The. Best.—so Angelina used her for her African child.”
    “Oh,” I said. I would soon learn that most everyone adopting a child referred to Angelina Jolie often, and by her first name. “Ramon and I were thinking about Ethiopia as well.” I looked up at the lawyer, the sides of her face tinted purple where the stylist had not wiped her skin clean of dye. We were thinking of Ethiopia because the criterion for Ethiopia was: you can get a child now. They can be six months old, and the orphanages were said to be clean, with loving caretakers, and they did not seem to care about cancer. I imagined getting a grant to learn about a feminist activist community movement in the Sudan while I waited for my baby to make her way to me. Perhaps my own mother, with all her access to the developing world, might be able to help in this situation as well. The Ethiopians, my mother once told me, are the most beautiful people on earth.
    Was I allowed to care about beauty? I had no idea, but this lawyer looked at me, her chin quivering, pointed down. “You know . . .” Her index finger drew imaginary lines on the sticky table. “If you get an Ethiopian child, that child will be black.”
    I stopped writing and looked up. We were in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in one of the most diverse cities on earth. “Obviously,” I said. “Of course we’re aware.”
    “Well, I’m just saying that if you have a black baby you will have to pal around with black people.”
    I took a long sip of my coffee. “Okay.” I went back to writing. Pal around, I wrote. With black people.
    “I’m glad you see my point. Your people are Russian.” She raised her chin.
    I nodded. She was not wrong.
    “It matters,” she said. “Let me tell you about international adoption. It’s not open. You do not want open. That’s the way they do it now, domestically.”
    “Really?” I looked up from my note taking. “I thought research was showing open—where all of us know each other to some degree—was best for the child. I’ve got adult friends who didn’t know their biological parents and I don’t know that it was better for them. They have a lot of fantasies about where they might have come from, who their parents might have been. They have to decide as adults if they want to find these people, strangers really. It can turn their worlds upside down.”
    She smiled. Her face stretched, a drum, a lampshade. “I had a mother who would give me furniture and then take it back. Give me a beautiful dresser—inlaid, just gorgeous—and then take it back. A mirror. Take it back. I just couldn’t bear that. Someone’s mother coming back, I mean. Taking them back.”
    “Coming back for the child?” I asked.
    She looked at me, incredulous. “For the child,” she said. “Yes. I cried for weeks when my mother took the beautiful dresser. A stunning mid-century piece.”
    I had that same horrible feeling that I would leave many conversations about adopting with: paralyzing anxiety. They made me politically uncomfortable, or they made me fearful that I had made a fallacious choice, taken an incorrect path through the wrong forest, and, because of this, my magic pot would not only not be brimming with babies, it would not even be partially filled, not even with one infant. If every meeting, every conversation, each scrap of knowledge I accrued, told me something about adoption, here was my lesson from this meeting: When you are adopting a child, the rules of social conversation are not applicable. When you are adopting a child, you are allowed to say what you please about race. You will eventually have to write it down on a form for everyone to see, what race you want, what race you do not want. You will have to know this, but you will not have to explain your reasoning. You will not have to explain anything at all. You simply do not check