Mavis made dinner. As always she refused my offer of help. Max grumbled as she sent him to get the battered high chair from the garage.
In the living room, I sat on the floor in front of the console that held the record player. My old records were still here, and I pulled out Bruce Cockburn’s album Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws and put it on. Ruth clapped and I turned it up for his song ‘Wondering Where the Lions Are’.
The song consumed me in inexplicable grief. I shut my eyes and lifted my small daughter and danced with her.
Max came in and turned it off. The silence felt like the last moments under the bath water, balanced on the edge of a different eternity. ‘Set the table,’ he said. ‘You’re not a teenager anymore.’
I laid out the cutlery and sat down to feed Ruth. Breastfeeding made them uncomfortable.
‘Does she eat real food yet?’ Mavis asked.
Did I read too much into her comment? In their home, I was as sensitive as the millibars of the barometer nestled in my suitcase. I wondered if it had picked up the weight of the squall pressing down on us.
Mavis served, and we took our places at the table and began to eat.
‘I’ve been at my grandfather’s house,’ I said. They looked at each other and returned to their chops and mashed potatoes.
The Earth rotates from west to east, dragging the atmosphere with it. Birds fly away from low-pressure systems as if they know a change is coming. All I felt was a wind of fury. I wanted to be in the eye of a storm. I wanted the shock of thunder, the burn of lightning. I wanted to hurt them. But most of all, I wanted them to respond, to engage in a real way. But we continued to eat, like an ordinary family, no different from any other.
‘Did you hear about the plane crash in Madrid a few weeks ago?’
Max nodded and mentioned the fog and pilot error. This was an acceptable topic for conversation.
I took a deep breath. ‘My mother was on that plane.’ A polar wind wrapped itself around us. ‘She was on her way here, to New Zealand. To meet me.’
Mavis let out a small, wounded sound. I took out the photo of Pamela that Betty had given me and held it up. Max placed his knife and fork on the table. He grabbed the photograph from my hand. He tore it in half and screwed it into a ball and threw it across the room.
‘There is your mother.’ He pointed to Mavis, his face red with anger.
Ruth began to cry, and I lifted her from the high chair and went to the spare bedroom. I pulled back the net curtains and opened the window onto the unpainted corrugated-iron fence. I wanted to leave. But there were no trains at night. I had no money for a taxi or a motel and all my energy was gone.
They usually stayed up late watching television. But tonight an old rugby match recorded on VHS boomed through the wall. I could hear Mavis washing the dishes.
When the house was quiet and Ruth was asleep, I tiptoed out to get a glass of water. Mavis was sitting in the dark. The crumpled photograph lay on the kitchen table. She had taped the two pieces together and had tried to smooth it out. I sat beside her and went to take her hand, but she pulled away.
‘We will not speak of this again,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll take you to the station in the morning.’ Her voice was devoid of warmth.
My desire to know my family and to share that with them had made me clumsy, unmindful of their feelings. Deep in the heart of stranger adoption is an unspoken contract. You are acquired to resolve childlessness. You cannot be both the cure for infertility and someone else’s child at the same time.
William Makepeace Thackeray said, ‘Mother is the name for God on the lips and in the hearts of little children.’12 By looking for my mother, I had failed to act as if I was born to my adopting parents. Over that meal, we were all undone by the failure and otherness of my blood. Nothing in me resembled them. I had named the elephant in the room. The spell cast at my birth was now broken.
I believe most adopted people experience this ‘otherness’. Even those who declare the success of their pairing. Nancy Verrier talks about the fear of dying experienced by a baby taken from its mother. To assuage that fear, we become alert to the signs and symbols of how not to be the ‘other’. We become mimics.
The French surrealist writer Caillois calls mimicry, or mimesis, a survival mechanism. It is the ability to turn into a copy of something else. Fitting in is a trick I carry with me. I had always thought of it as a sign of mastery. But Caillois says it indicates a lack of control. A type of subjugation to the dictates of the environment. He calls it spatial disorientation, a disturbance between personality and space.
Mimicry is not the same as belonging. We need deep ponds to contain the sediments of ancestry. All that primordial muck of inheritance. The stories of the drunks and saints and raconteurs are like the fossils of our forebears. Without them, our lives are as shallow as a puddle.
I have a love–hate relationship with family memoirs. All those detailed histories to draw on. The protagonists so often in flight from suffocating pasts, their resolutions
