Bruce stood in the doorway, watching me. I should have told him my mother was coming. But the words would not come. He went down to the workshop, a dank space he’d carved for himself, burrowed beneath our lives. The lathe, constant as the sea, drifted up through the floor. He turned wood, piece after piece, shaping chair legs that never matched. Pieces of wood hit the floor with a dull thunk.
I lay in the wash of the bed and thought about the complete unknown of my mother. Not even a photograph.
Closed adoption does this, severing you from yourself. You are a faceless bundle, as devoid of identity as dough. Even with my original name on all the adoption paperwork, my parents denied I’d ever been anyone other than Barbara. The law enabled them. My birth records closed and sealed until after their deaths. Or I turned one hundred and twenty.
It’s not only the law that keeps us this way. It’s hidden in the words. Adoptee. The ‘-ee’ suffix turns you into an object, someone to whom an action is done. A lifelong sentence. That one word so close to amputee. You are forever an adopted child, infantilised in word and deed, with no rights to your own information. To gain back those early parts of yourself, you must seek a court order. Back when I began to search, they were never approved.
The lathe slowed and Bruce returned, the smell of wood as pungent as aftershave. I felt magnanimous. As though in treading water all my life, my toes had found a little solid ground. But still, I did not tell him.
Jeannie would call again and everything would change. I would take the girls and drive over the Main Divide to Christchurch airport. My mother would walk off the plane and into the terminal and my real life would begin.
Bruce slid into the bed and I touched his shoulder. He curled away, as close to the edge as the waterbed allowed. ‘Barbara?’
I hated the way he used my name with polite clarity. The light blond hairs covering the knuckle of his wrist caught the moonlight. The wind died away.
‘I saved you.’ He said this into the silence, and then he was asleep, just like that.
Years later it occurred to me that this was his talent. His thoughts whittled into one slender, all-encompassing statement. And it was true. Bruce saved Barbara. The defining statement of our marriage. He’d been my way forward, out of the mess of teenage years. Without him, I’d be homeless. Alone in my submerged life, dislocated and abandoned by my parents for the crime of having ‘adoption issues’. But his stability was enough for me to begin to shape myself.
How do we remain faithful to the essence of our early relationships and still recalibrate them in a new light? Now I wonder if I was the one who rescued him.
At seventeen I’d crawled through his bedroom window. I fell onto his bed, and into his life, a shipwreck delivered to his harbour. We made our marriage on that rocky shore. I had been his way forward, too, an easy direction. His one grand statement, the perfect comment on his religious upbringing.
I was a bad girl when he had only ever been good. But it had been a seething kind of good. A rankled, angry young man, his virtue worn like a hair shirt that did nothing but plague his skin. I was perfect for him — his salvation, the girl no one would mistake for good. He could relieve his itching without giving up the cause.
The rooster crowed; its call amplified in the pre-dawn dark. I groaned. Every morning the harsh birdcall constricted my chest with exhaustion. I threw the pillow against the wall. As if now, with the imminent arrival of my mother, I could express my dissatisfaction. Some part of me knew this was dangerous. An upset of the unspoken balance between us.
Bruce got up. At the back door, he knocked over the lined-up gumboots. His tread was heavy in the early morning hush. I could hear him stumbling over tree trimmings as he chased the rooster around the bottom of the section. Its crow faded to a frightened squawk, and I wondered what I would wear to meet my mother.
Bruce returned and stood in the doorway, naked apart from his gumboots. The rooster dangled from his hand. Its feet were between his fingers, the head lolling, the bright red comb already dulled. He shook it, and the feathers sighed.
‘Happy now?’ he asked, and his voice was empty of everything.
3
God fights back
Jeannie rang with flight details while I was making breakfast. My mother would arrive in a week. I told her I’d go to Christchurch to meet her.
Jeannie laughed. ‘Good idea. I imagine small-town New Zealand is not her thing.’
I gazed out at the ring of bush and knew it was no longer my thing either.
Bruce was reading in his chair. We’d never discussed my adoption. Devoid of a past, I had always felt insubstantial, a ghost of a person, suspended in a liminal space between identities. It would be years before I understood how humans slide past each other. As if we still bristle with the hair-like villi from the womb, our connections more instinctive than we like to believe. Rabbits sniffing the air to see if it’s safe from predators.
But then to some degree we are all predacious. I guess that’s why class matters, old school ties, the right neighbourhood, house, clothes, car or accent. We are always assessing each other. Are you one of us?
Adopted people grow up knowing the answer. You come from nowhere. You are strange fruit of obscure origin. The lack of a bloodline marks you. Just ask a mother-inlaw. I’ve had three. For years I wondered why two of them, women from different worlds, treated me with an instinctual distrust. No matter how hard I tried to please them. Now
