16
YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN
In September, I flew to Montreal to visit my parents, whom I hadn't seen in two years. They seemed foreign to me, their lives empty. They didn't communicate; they just went through the same actions I remembered, bereft of feelings. He went to work, she watched TV, he came home, she paid no attention to him, we sat down to dinner, and nobody talked.
I called a girlfriend from my McGill days. She was still married, had a boyfriend for years, and when she spent time with him her daughters covered for her. She seemed resigned to her life of pretense and because of orthodox religious dogma and an overbearing mother, she didn't dare change. Another friend from my sculpture class picked me up the next morning and, after driving downtown to a gallery where her sculpture was displayed, took me to lunch. When I returned to my parents' apartment, my mother was where I had left her - watching television. She glared at me without saying a word. When my father got home she met him in the hallway and when asked if we were having a good time, she complained that I had been out all day. The fact that I had been home for most of the time except about two hours gave her the excuse to belittle me and get his sympathy. Feelings reminiscent of my youth surfaced and I found I couldn't let it pass. She had lied and I had to defend myself, which was why we had fought all those years.
HI directed my inarticulate anger towards my adoptive mother. My inability to discover the source of my anger contributed to an impasse between my adoptive mother and me, which remained, sadly, until her death." 1
My oldest girlfriend Judy dropped by after work. She was divorced, remarried, a mother of two daughters, and as she brought me up-to-date with her life, I de- noted a slight rebelliousness in her demeanor and understood why we had been so close. She invited us to tea and on Sunday my parents and I went to visit Judy and her mother Miriam who hadn't seen me in twenty-eight years and gasped when she saw my grey hair because everybody she knew dyed theirs. We sat on their back porch and talked about the past. To my astonishment Judy reminded me of an incident in public school when a friend kidded me about being adopted. When I asked her at the time if it was true, she denied it because her grandmother had made her swear not to tell. Forty years later and it was still on her mind. I hadn't remembered the episode and was taken aback at her ease in talking so gingerly about something I was unable to discuss. I glanced at my parents who behaved as if they hadn't heard the remark. They obviously still couldn't come to grips with our situation and continued, as I, to exist in denial. I realized too that I didn't think about my adoption as often as other people did. In fact I didn't think about it at all until it came up in one way or another. And it always did. I was labeled "adopted." That's what people thought about me. I had lived for forty-eight years thinking otherwise.
We had moved to the living room for tea and cookies and were reminiscing as we pored over family photo albums when my mother suddenly decided she wanted to leave. Even though we had been invited for dinner, she saw to it that we left against everybody's wishes. In the car she made the excuse that she thought I would like to see how the city had changed. She didn't want to go home because we had talked about eating out. Suddenly our afternoon was completely destroyed. We were in the car with nowhere to go and nothing to do. As usual, my father submitted to her.
I believed it was related to the adoption incident. My father said nothing, dis- playing an apathetic front, and my mother escaped, pretending it never happened. I sat in the back of the car, furious, resenting my parents for their betrayals of the past. The traffic was heavy, the day humid, I didn't want to go sightseeing, and my father didn't want to drive around the city. It was no coincidence that when we finally sat down to dinner at some steak and lobster joint, I accidentally knocked over my beer, spilling it onto my father's lap. I was angry at him for not saying anything and letting my mother get away with a decision that made everybody unhappy except her. "Be good to Ma." He let his wife have her own way, always humoring her, because he was guilty of something I found out about years later. We sat there, talking trivialities, while the most significant issue went unmentioned.
The next evening I asked again how they got me. To my surprise my mother began talking about how it had happened, so unexpectedly. All the neighbors brought things over - a crib, a bassinet, baby clothes. She spoke in warm tones about what a beautiful baby I was, while my father continued to eat his supper, eyes glued to his plate. She was actually relaxed, enjoying herself, but he remained quiet and some- what anxious during her reverie. Was he nervous that she might spill the beans or just sullen because of the memories awakened in him? Had he lied to my mother about my origins? Did he know something she didn't? He squelched her enthusiasm with his usual impatience and she stopped talking. I too felt intimidated and didn't ask any more questions. There we were, three human beings who had lived together for twenty years, had been in contact for another twenty-eight, and were still painfully hindered by family secrets.
Who was I? Why was I so afraid to ask questions? If my parents couldn't face their failings, and they were my role models, how could I? They were strangers to me and when I left four days later, I wondered why I had bothered to go. I had been away for ten years and nothing had changed. We still didn't communicate nor enjoy spending time with one another, and it was alarmingly apparent how empty our relationship had become; perhaps it always had been.
When I returned home I received a letter from Susan saying we'd forgotten each other; she was upset that I hadn't called her when I was in Montreal. I accused her of always turning me out in the cold, a feeling with which I was introduced into the world and still couldn't overcome. I was actually protecting myself by not seeing her, not wanting to reopen the wound and go through all that hurt again, but at the same time doing to her what my mother had done to me. I see now that it must have been very difficult for her to have turned her back on me, especially when we were so close, and she was trying to make up for it. But I was hurt and couldn't get over it. One day, she said, I would stop pushing her away. She was hoping for more than letters full of questions, wanted feelings and thoughts, loved me very much and missed me. I wondered what was happening in her life to suddenly warrant this.
Steve and I talked again about trying to find out about my origins. It wasn't something that urgently gnawed at my gut - it was just there - all the time.
East Germany agreed to unite with West Germany and the Berlin Wall was dismantled. In Czechoslovakia a new non- Communist government came into being headed by playwright and former imprisoned dissident Vaclav Havel. On June 4 about 1000 young protesters who were calling for democratic rights were killed by security forces in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China. The massacre was witnessed by the world as courageous television crews and reporters provided live coverage. A major earthquake devastated San Francisco. The Exxon Valdez supertanker disaster with the spillage of 64 million liters (just under 17 million gallons) of oil caused a major environmental disaster.
Elizabeth met a young man named Ted at the health food store where she worked and brought him home for dinner. After spending a few weeks together they left for Boulder, Colorado. She promised me she had enough money to get back on her own if the need arose. Two weeks later she wrote that she had rented a neat cabin in the mountains and she and Ted were becoming great friends. "I'll be okay as long as he helps with the dishes.”
We purchased a 1982 Toyota long-bed truck, had a camper top made, in- stalled a tiny woodstove that we bought from a friend, and worked on fixing