Part 18 (1/2)

Heritage? I guess primarily white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I believe Jim was of English heritage. My mother's maiden name was MacDowell-Scotch. I'm a mixture of Scotch, German, and I think Irish.

I've always thought I look Jewish-New York Jewish, Russian Jewish. That is what I say when people ask me my ethnicity. I'm a Russian Polish Jew. When I recently told this to my Russian manicurist, she nodded her head and said, ”I knew it.”

I was extremely independent and found it easier to deal with things myself. As a young adult, I was not easily fulfilled with what I was doing and kept looking for more out of life. I guess that wasn't too unusual in the sixties and seventies . . . I guess a lot of the old ideas are still somewhere within me. You've reminded me of a lot of the old feelings and ideals as I've been digging through old pictures and papers.

In this, it seemed, I resembled Carrie far more than I did my adoptive parents, who had closed the shutters and sat out the sixties as if it were a hurricane.

Carrie's letters were written on six-by-nine white, lined paper, with a slightly serrated edge at the top-practical, not a theatrical flourish to be detected. She wrote her letters to her long-lost biological daughter on a kitchen notepad.

Of course I've thought about you often. I had wondered lately what contacts I could make to make finding me easier if that's what you wanted to do. I hope I can give you whatever you want or need. I hate the stories of adopted people who are so desperately in search of their birth mother. I always hoped you would have a happy, fulfilled life without me.

Was I desperately in search of her? Not exactly. But something. I was desperately in search of something and she was a part of that something.

Carrie's letters recounted a young woman's wanderings from a middle-cla.s.s childhood in Bellevue, Nebraska, to a short stint at the University of Utah to a dance career in Chicago to a show in Florida, then back to Chicago, where she got into some trouble with the wrong guy at the wrong time, then back to Nebraska, where she got married and finished college, and finally to the suburbs of Boise, Idaho, where she worked as a medical technician and a dance teacher and eventually adopted two daughters of her own.

She seemed intelligent and sane. Not trashy, not crazy, just a woman who had once been restless, had once been confused.

Did you plant your garden? I asked in my letters to her. I asked in my letters to her. Did you ever wind up getting the kite with two strings up in the air? Did you ever wind up getting the kite with two strings up in the air?

Lindsay and Colin sat by my side on the black leather couch in our loft when I called Carrie to ask her to come visit me in New York. I figured I was ready to put one chapter of this story to bed and to open another one. What would Patti Smith do? She would look the truth in the eye and never once would she blink.

I have stood at the arrival gate at Newark International Airport maybe a hundred times in my life, but picking up Carrie is the most memorable.

Seared into my brain is the image of her as she moved toward me down that long hallway with her matter-of-fact walk. She was sweet-faced and big-hipped like me, wearing high-waisted jeans and a plaid flannel. We greeted each other with tight smiles. I believe that both our faces were laced with some regret that we had ever made those plans to meet. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but the execution of it was suddenly too sharp, too bright, like walking out of a dark room into the suns.h.i.+ne.

It was an awkward and tense reunion, but my birth mother is a tough woman. She shed exactly one tear, apologizing as she wiped it away. I am taller than Carrie. As we waited at baggage claim, she told me that I had my birth father's eyes. I already knew this from the pictures she had sent. I kept those eyes trained on the baggage carousel, pretending to be searching hard for her luggage even though I didn't know what it looked like.

Later she told me more about Jim, about the two of them, as we sat on high stools eating Chinese food in the kitchen that doubled as Lindsay's sewing room. I felt strange and out of proportion. I was tiny in the tallceilinged room; I was huge next to my pet.i.te mother. My hands looked embarra.s.singly big and masculine to me, wrapped around the chopsticks. My eyes felt swollen and tired and were suddenly sinking shut.

”We were in love. He followed me back to Chicago after the show,” she said.

She lit up when she talked about him, even after all the years in between, all the pain he had caused her.

”He was very good-looking, very charismatic. He was trying to act in Chicago and we lived in a studio apartment. We struggled. I remember that Jim broke his leg and he had this huge cast on it and we got in a fight. It was snowing out, a blizzard, and he dragged himself down the street through the snow. I got in the car and skidded along behind him, hollering at him to get in.”

I laughed.

”I lodged the car in a s...o...b..nk and we both had to walk home.”

Then she got vague. I wasn't sure if I was disappointed or relieved that she traded her frankness for fog. Hearing her talk about my birth father and their time together had the uncomfortable sc.r.a.pe of talking to your parents about s.e.x. You want to be one of those cool mom/daughter teams that talk freely about everything-best friends. But you're not. In this case we weren't even talking about s.e.x. And this wasn't even my mother, really. But I still had an instinctive aversion to the subject matter.

”There's a lot I don't remember. I'm sorry. I think I blocked it. I had fantasies of raising you but trust me, a long-term relations.h.i.+p with Jim would have been a disaster. Anyway, he left. He left before you were born.”

The story she told lasted through dinner and fortune cookies. It was a good story, but it felt unrelated to me. At the same time, I recognized it was the story I had been waiting to hear all my life. Here it was. I was finally hearing it. I was finally looking at another person in the world who looked like me. It was odd, off. Something in me blanched. I couldn't relax around Carrie.

I don't remember much of what we did that week, except that we hung out a lot with Lindsay and Colin. Carrie met the various friends who cycled through our loft. She was interested in everyone to whom she was introduced and she seemed comfortable with herself, even in a world of theater hipsters and art queens. I was so relieved. I guess I had been worried about what I'd find, worried that in her I'd discover some deep indictment of my character.

We went to Central Park and to the Met. We met Carrie's Rockette friend, a lithe blond woman in her early forties. I learned that the Rockettes is where ballerinas go to die. Apparently, aging dancers from all over the country travel to New York to do the Christmas show. It's run like a military operation, and being a Rockette is practically a nationality all its own. Carrie's friend was in town to weigh in, brush up, and take some cla.s.ses.