“Selling a child.” My mother finished his sentence. “Which would be wrong.”
“We don’t know that’s what they’re doing,” Andrew said. He’d put down the highlighter and picked up a paper clip, which he toyed with absently.
“No,” I offered. “But it does happen.” I’d seen a Lifetime movie starring Melissa Joan Hart or some reasonable facsimile of her as a young girl who’d fallen into a baby-selling ring. Sabrina’s Secret Shame: My Womb for Hire, or something.
“I bet this Families by Design cuts other corners, too,” my mother observed. “Whatever preadoption screening they did couldn’t have been too careful if they let Adam wind up with two meshuganas like the Merrs. What about the follow-up visits? How do you miss that the baby’s in a cage? ” My mother pursed her lips together and pushed out air, miming a spit. “Animals.”
“I agree,” I said. “But, still. What can we do about it? I doubt we’ll get them to come on the show.”
“Obviously not,” my mother said. “I’m thinking we go undercover. A stink operation.”
“A sting,” I corrected, although she probably had it right the first time.
“What,” Andrew asked her, trying to keep an expression of horror off his face, “do you have in mind?” I noticed he’d half uncurled the paper clip he’d been playing with, bending back the metal with nervous restlessness.
My mother sat up straighter, excited to present her plan. “We pretend to be a couple looking to adopt. A rich couple. But a crazy one-clearly not suitable as adoptive parents. We go in… what’s that word from CSI? Wired. We get them to make some incriminating remarks on tape, and then expose them for the scum they are.”
Andrew gave up the pretense of remaining calm. “We?” he croaked.
“Not we. ” My mother gave a little giggle, wagging her finger between herself and her producer. “I don’t think we’d make a particularly believable couple, do you?”
“No!” Andrew almost shouted in a combination of relief and agreement. “We wouldn’t.”
“I meant ‘we,’ ” my mother explained, indicating with her finger again.
Only this time, it was me on the other end of the wag.
15
Is there a reverse Oedipus complex? If so, I was pretty sure my mother had one. I instinctively scooted a foot away from her on the couch.
“You want to pretend we’re a couple?” I asked, my voice rising on each syllable, until I squeaked out the end of the sentence like a sixteen-year-old girl.
“Why not? You’ll be perfect.” To Andrew: “He looks so much like his father did at that age.”
“Yeah, but now you look your age,” I pointed out, too appalled to be polite.
“Don’t be silly,” my mother trilled. “You know I look a lot younger than I am. How often have people told us we look more like brother and sister than mother and son.”
Unless the A in ADHD stood for “amnesiac,” I was pretty sure the answer to that was “Never.”
“Why not have Dad play your husband,” I suggested, trying the more diplomatic approach. “He’s had more experience.”
“Oh, your father’s much too old.” She dismissed my suggestion. “Who’d ever believe he’d want a child at his stage of life? Besides, you know he’d never go along with the idea.”
It was true; my father was much too sensible to get involved with my mother’s attention-seeking machinations.
“He’s too jealous,” she explained. “Of my success.” Then, lest she sound immodest, she added, “He’s such a sweet man. Wants me all to himself.”
What my father wanted most from my mother was to be left alone. My mother saw the skepticism on my face.
“Listen, we have some of the best makeup people in television on this show, right?” She turned her attention toward Andrew. “We have them glam me up a little, take a few years off. At the same time, they throw some gray in Kevin’s hair, give him a few wrinkles; he’ll look a decade older. He’ll appear to be in his mid-thirties, I’ll pass for early forties. That’s not a huge difference. Remember that episode we did: ‘Cougars and the Boys Who Love Them’? Some of those women were twenty years older than their lovers. Kevin and I will look much closer in age than that.
“I mean”-she bestowed upon Andrew her patented imperious expression, which combined the most outrageous possible claim with an implicit dare that you’d better not challenge her-“I really don’t look like a woman past her forties even before your hair and makeup crew touch me. Given the level of quality I know you insist on from the staff, there’s no reason we can’t make this work, right?”
I could think of at least a dozen reasons, not the least of which was the probability that at least one of the people we’d be meeting with would be sighted. But my mother was studiously, purposefully ignoring me and directing her question at her producer.
Andrew’s eyes widened and darted back and forth like a rat caught in a trap. Any sane person would tell my mother her plan was ridiculous. She looked like a woman in her forties only if you took that to mean the decade in which she was born. Plus, I was cursed and blessed with looking far younger than my real age, as proven by the fact that I still got carded at bars. I couldn’t imagine a coma patient buying us as a couple, let alone a conscious person.
Added to that, my mother had no experience “going undercover.” One of her few undeniable charms was that she was always herself, for better or worse. Her ability to convince anyone that she was genuinely looking to adopt, and to trick them into an admission of unethical practices, was highly doubtful.
Another issue: Who knew how much this wild goose chase would cost? We weren’t prepared for this kind of investigation-no hidden camera equipment, no crack research team. As the producer of Sophie’s Voice, Andrew had to consider the bottom line on things like that.
On the one hand, Andrew had all these arguments and more he could make against my mother’s wacky scheme.
On the other hand, he’d like to stay employed.
“No reason at all,” he agreed, sounding less believable than Megan Fox in a Michael Bay movie. By now, he’s completely unfurled the paper clip he’d been mangling, turning it into a thin, straight, pointed rod. He discreetly pressed it against the skin of his palm while looking at my mother with a, literally, pained smile. “Sounds like a great idea to me.”
Back in my office, I stewed for a while. Then I brooded. I followed up this productive activity with some pouting, gnashing of teeth, and an imagined argument with my mother for her harebrained and, on some deeply psychological level, unsettling scheme. That was followed by an interior monologue in which I berated Andrew for agreeing to it.
Unfortunately, in real life, I knew he had no choice but to indulge my mother’s folly. It was his job to keep her happy, and if helping her play Girl Reporter was what it took, that’s what he had to do.
No, it would be up to me to convince her otherwise. Unfortunately, my mother was like a toddler when it came to being denied something she wanted. You couldn’t reason with her. Would you ever try to convince a two- year-old it was genuinely not in her best interest to eat the whole bag of cookies at one time? No. You’d give her one and put the rest somewhere she couldn’t reach them.
Taking away my mother’s determination to go through with her plan wasn’t an option, though. There was no metaphorical cabinet in which I could hide her crazy.
However, as my volunteer work as a teacher at the Sunday school program at my Unitarian church plus my time with Rafi taught me, there are other ways to forestall a child’s tantrum when you want to take away something they want that might harm them.
Method number one?
