Nice Big American Baby

When I called home during Mitch’s visit, my father said, Your mother was due for another mammogram, so I sent Lisa with her to make sure she goes.

You mean you sent Mitch, I said. I’m Lisa.

Yes, right. You know who I mean.

A few days later my father called. His voice sounded strained. Your mother talked to the mammography clinic today, he said, but she won’t tell me anything. She’s been in her room, crying. She’s been talking on the phone to your sister for an hour. I guess the doctors found something, but I’ll let you know when we know for sure.

OK.

I hung up and called Mitch.

Hello, she said. She sounded like she was choking on one of her pens.

Mitch, I said. It’s yours, isn’t it?

She sighed and said, It’s ridiculous, but I thought I was doing her a favor, I thought I was sparing her some worry.

You went in for her, didn’t you?

You know, Mitch said, she’s more worried about this than if she was the one. She feels like it’s her lump, like it was meant for her, like she gave it to me somehow.

That’s ridiculous, I said. It was like I was talking to myself.

Although, you know, if it were possible, I would, Mitch said. I mean, if there was somehow a way to magically take a lump out of her breast and put it in mine, I’d do it in a second.

I wish I could do that for you, I said.

Yeah, we could all share it.

One dessert and three forks, I said.

And later, as I sat alone on the floor in the apartment, I thought about being my mother’s daughter and my sister’s sister, and I felt my edges start to bleed a little. I remembered standing in a white room with my breast clamped in the jaws of a humming machine. I imagined the mammogram pictures like lunar landscapes, and I could not remember who had the lump anymore, it seemed we all did, and then the phone rang again and I picked it up and heard my father call out as he sometimes did: Leah-Lise-Mitch.

nadia (#ulink_a86d405f-5078-5c38-87b4-a3b1d5160a0d)

Our friend Joel got one of those mail-order brides. It was all perfectly legitimate: he made some calls, looked through the catalogs, comparison-shopped. He filled out the forms without lying about his income or his height. Where it asked MARITAL STATUS? he wrote Divorced! and When she left me I threw my ring into the sea. “That’s so romantic,” we all said when he did it. “No it wasn’t, it was stupid,” he said. “I could have sold that ring for a lot of money.” We insisted, “No, it’s very romantic.” “Do you think?” “Any woman would want you now,” we said, as we put on bathing suits and diving masks and headed down to the beach.

I’ll call her Nadia. That was not her name, but I’ll call her that to protect her identity. She came from a place where that was necessary. Nadia brings up images of Russian gymnasts. Or is it Romanian? Bulgarian? She had the sad ancient eyes, the strained-back hair, the small knotty muscles. The real Nadia, the famous Nadia, I forget what she did exactly; I have vague memories of her winning a gold medal with a grievous wound, a broken bone, a burst appendix. I think she defected. I picture her running across a no-man’s-land between her country and ours, dressed in her leotard and bare feet, sprinting across a barren minefield where tangles of barbed wire roll about like tumbleweeds and bullets rain down and bounce on the ground like hail.

But our Nadia, Joel’s Nadia, came wrapped as if to prevent breakage in a puffy quilted coat that covered her head to foot. She kept the hood up, the strings drawn tight so all we could see was her snout poking out. She must have been cold when she first came; she stood in his apartment, and wouldn’t take it off, and then went and leaned against the radiator. We were all there to welcome her; we had come bringing beer and wine and flavored vodkas: orange, pepper, vanilla.

It was an old-fashioned radiator and her coat must have been made of some cheap synthetic because it melted to the metal. When she tried to step away and found she couldn’t, she moved in a jerky panicked way that was strangely endearing. Joel tried to help her out of the coat but she wouldn’t let him, she jerked and flailed until the coat ripped open and the filling spilled out. It wasn’t down, it was like some kind of packing material, polystyrene peanuts or shredded paper.

It reminded me—a few months earlier I’d ordered some dishes, and when they came in the mail I found they’d been packed in popcorn, real popcorn. Some companies do this now, I’ve been told, because it’s biodegradable, more environment-friendly. I took out the dishes and wondered if I should eat all that popcorn, but it seemed unsanitary. It might have touched something, I don’t know, at the plant: dust, mouse droppings, the dirty hands of some factory worker. So I threw it away, this big box of popcorn. I still think about it. Probably that box could have fed Nadia’s whole family for a week.

Joel and Nadia had written to each other, their letters filtered and garbled by interpreters. They described themselves: hair, eyes, height, weight, preferences in food, drink, animals, colors, recreations. She could speak English but not write it; they had a few phone conversations. What could they possibly have talked about? What did she say? It was enough to make him pay the money, buy the tickets, sign the papers to bring her over the ocean.

These days, ever since her arrival, Joel looked happy. He had a sheen. Someone had cleaned the waxy buildup from his ears. We asked if she was different from the women here, if she had a way of walking, an extra flap of skin, a special smell. Did she smell of cigarettes, patchouli, foreign sewers, unbathedness?

“I think she has some extra bones in her spine,” he said. “She seems to have a lot of them. Like a string of beads. A rosary.”

We’d seen more of her by then, up close, coatless. Her hair was bright red, black at the roots, which gave her head the look of a tarnished penny.

“Tell us something about her,” we said.

He closed his eyes. “When I take off her shirt,” he said, “her breasts jump right into my hands, asking to be touched.”

He opened his eyes to see how we took that.

“Her nipples crinkle up,” he said, “like dried fruit. Apricots.”

“She has orange nipples?”

We’d always insisted that Joel be completely open with us, tell us everything and anything he would tell a male friend. How could we advise him unless he told us the truth? Utter frankness, we told him, was the basis of any mature friendship between men and women. He often seemed to be trying to test this theory, prove us wrong. “Frankness will be the death of any good relationship,” he’d say.

Joel was what we called a teddy-bear type, meaning he was large and hairy and gentle. He had a short soft beard all around his mouth so you could not see any lips. Hair grew in two bristly patches on the back of his neck. His fingertips were blunt and square, his eyes set far back in his head so that they were hard to read. His knees were knobby and full of personality, almost like two pudgy faces. In fact, he sometimes drew faces on them, to amuse his soccer team or us. Some of us had been in love with him once, but that was long past. Friendship was more important than any illusions of romance.

Nadia did not smile much. At first we thought it was because she was unhappy. Then she began smirking in an awful closed-lipped way so we thought she didn’t like us. It took us a while to understand that it was her smile. Eventually we discovered the reason: her teeth were amazing, gray and almost translucent, evidence of some vitamin deficiency. When she spoke, air whistled through them, giving her a charming lisp.

She spoke English well enough, with a singsong lilting accent that lifted the end of every word, so that each word sounded as if it ended with a curlicue, a kite tail, a question mark.

She trilled certain consonants. “Lovely,” she said and trilled the V. Trilled the V! Have you ever heard that before? She must have had some extra ridges on her tongue.

She burst into tears at unpredictable times. She needed her own bedroom, so he cleared out his home office for her. We saw her bed, a child-sized cot.

We began to suspect that he had done it all purely out of kindness, that he had wanted to rescue someone and give her a better home, a new life. He wanted to be a savior, not a husband. “Why didn’t he just adopt a child, then?” we asked each other.

I thought, Maybe I should adopt a child. I ought to have one of my own; people are always looking at me and saying “childbearing hips” as if it’s a compliment. But then I think of the rabbit my sister had as a pet when we were little girls. I remember holding him tightly to my chest until he stopped kicking. I was keeping him warm, but when I let go he was limp. We put him back in the cage for our father to find. I still dream of white fur, one sticky pink eye. I worry I might do the same to a baby. I could adopt a bigger one, a toddler. Not too sickly. But what if it doesn’t understand English?

Of course you want to help, but what can you do? We did what we could: we gave money to feed overseas orphans, money for artificial limbs and eye operations; we volunteered at local schools; we took meals to housebound invalids once a month; we passed out leaflets on street corners. A friend of mine volunteers to escort women past the protesters into abortion clinics and has invited me to join her, but it’s never a good day for me. We recycle. We get angry and self-righteous about what we see on the news. When I see a homeless person on the street I give whatever’s in my pocket.

It’s not enough. But what can you do? What can you do?

Joel had a friend, Malcolm, he was always promising to introduce us to. Malcolm worked for some global humanitarian organization. We saw him on television occasionally, reporting from some wartorn, decimated, or drought-stricken place, hospital beds in the background, people missing feet with flies clustered on their eyes, potbellied children washing their heads in what looks like a cesspool. Malcolm was balding but handsome in a weather-beaten cowboy way. His earnest face made you want to reach for your wallet. “That guy, he can relief-effort me any time,” we’d say to Joel. But we hadn’t met him yet. We were beginning to suspect he existed only inside the box and was not allowed out.

As for Nadia: “Where’s she from, exactly?” we asked Joel.

“A bad place,” he said, frowning. “Her village is right in the middle of contested territory, every week a new name. Don’t ask her about it. It makes her sad.”

“All right,” we said, but privately we wondered at his protecting her feelings like that. No one we knew had ever stopped talking about something because it made us sad. No one. Not even Joel. Was it because we were fat happy Americans, incapable of real sadness? Was it because he thought we had no feelings, or because he thought we were strong enough to bear sadness? Unlike poor delicate Nadia with her pink-rimmed eyes, Nadia who bought her clothes in the children’s department because she had no hips. She said she did it because the clothes were sturdier, better quality, would last longer.

Last longer? How much longer will she need green corduroy overalls, or narrow jeans with unicorns embroidered on the back pockets? How much longer before her hips swell and her legs thicken and her collarbone stops sticking out in that unbecoming way?

Her legs are not like American legs; they are pieces of string, flimsy and boneless.

“We’ll take her shopping,” we told Joel. “We’ll show her the ropes.”

“She’s doing just fine,” he said. “I’ll take her.”