Mavis kept to the kitchen. ‘You’re our guest,’ she said when I asked to help. I was a visitor, without birthright in that kitchen. Then. Now. Always. I’d left home unable to cook a thing.
‘So,’ I said, to break the silence. ‘I’ve found my father.’
Mavis whisked eggs into sugar without looking up.
The week before I’d read a short story, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, by Edgar Allan Poe. He says there is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient as that shuddering on the edge of a precipice.
The smartest thing would have been to step away from the edge and talk about recipes. Instead, I stepped closer. ‘He was a Formula One race driver. Died at Le Mans. Swedish. Did you know I was Swedish?’
Mavis was making a sponge cake to take to her niece’s house for Christmas lunch. ‘We’ve always loved you like our own,’ she said, and kept her focus on sifting the flour into a bowl.
I gave her a quick hug. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
The girls came running in. They wanted to try out their new inflatables. I blew them up and sat under a sun umbrella beside the pool.
I knew the problem was mine. I am a chronic over-sharer. Dumping intimacies in unwilling laps. Small bombs designed to flush out an endorsement. I wanted my adopting parents to be curious about me. And, by extension, I wanted other people to notice me, to take an interest.
I look at my kids and see snippets of me in an eye roll, in a comment or an exaggerated sneeze. And I wonder if this is what makes me want to know everything about them. To know them better is to know me. Instead, in my adopting parents’ house, I felt their indifference. I felt invisible.
Mavis packed the back seat of their car with presents and her baking. She’d devoted many hours preparing for Christmas lunch. Max drove, and we followed in my car.
My adopted cousin’s house was nearby. Most of the extended family was there. The garage door was up and the men sat in the greasy shade, clustered around a crate of beer. It was clear they’d started drinking early. The women were in the kitchen and the kids were screaming around the hard-packed earth in the back yard.
One of the men came out to greet us. When the others turned away, he tried to kiss my cheek. ‘Come on, Barbie,’ he said. ‘Don’t be a snob.’
I’d always felt at risk around him. He gave me a look, snide and complicit. As if he held something over me. He returned to the semicircle of men. Max joined them and one of them whistled and they laughed at something he’d said, just out of my hearing.
There were no trees or shelter in the back yard. I helped carry the food to a table set up beneath a tarpaulin attached to the side of the garage. At a signal, everyone swooped on the roast potatoes and meats. The salad of sliced lettuce and hard-boiled eggs remained untouched. The men took their plates back to the garage and continued to drink. There was pavlova and sponge to finish.
After the women had cleaned up, I noticed my cousins were missing. I found them huddled in a bedroom. ‘This is a family matter,’ one of them said when I opened the door.
‘Our grandmother’s headstone,’ another said as if that explained my exclusion.
Part of me wanted to remind them she was my grandmother too, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Instead, I scooped up my kids and left. We went to the beach and played in a park and the girls fed the ducks with leftover sandwiches I found in the car.
Mavis and Max returned hours later, silent and reproachful. I put the girls to bed and Mavis made tea while Max watched a rugby replay on VHS. She passed me a slice of leftover sponge.
‘I’m sorry for leaving,’ I said. ‘But I was not exactly made welcome.’
Mavis squinted at me. ‘They are not the problem.’ Her cold voice had returned. ‘They’ve always worked extra-hard to make you feel welcome.’
‘They call me the snob,’ I said.
She nodded as if she’d always known. ‘Maybe because you act like one.’
‘I don’t like sponge.’ I said, and pushed the plate away. ‘I’ll come back to visit you, but we won’t come to another family event like that. They’re all drunks.’
The windows were shut against the night-time insects and I started to sweat in the compact heat.
‘I want to tell you something.’
From the living room, we heard Max jump up and yell, ‘Come on,’ and then, ‘You beauty,’ as a player scored a try.
‘M tried to put his hands on me when I was fourteen.’
‘You’ve never been truthful,’ Mavis said. She used her fingers to pick up a large piece of cake.
I watched as she ate it. ‘Like a genetic defect?’ I asked.
She turned away. ‘I don’t know, but I’ve wondered for a long time if there is something wrong with you.’
The transgressions of adopted people are a Hollywood staple. The Good Son, Case 39, Problem Child and The Omen all use adoption as shorthand for evil. The original tag line for the hit horror film Orphan was: ‘It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own.’ Even the Grinch’s vengeful behaviour is explained away by his adopted status.
When we try to understand depravity in a person, we reach for ways they must be different from us. We look first to nurture. The murderer came from a dysfunctional family. He was bullied at school or grew up with drugs or poverty or a single mother. We work to place the blame anywhere but on the individual. Unless that individual is adopted.
In the book Serial Killers, author Joel Norris says of the five hundred recorded serial killers in recent US history, 16 per cent grew up in adopted families. This, despite adopted people representing only 2 to 3
