The Mistress's Daughter

The Mistress’s Daughter

Phyllis and Joe Homes

Bruce Homes

A.M. and Jon Homes

I remember their insistence that I come into the living room and sit down and how the dark room seemed suddenly threatening, how I stood in the kitchen doorway holding a jelly doughnut and how I never eat jelly doughnuts.

I remember not knowing; first thinking something was very wrong, assuming it was death — someone had died.

And then I remember knowing.

Christmas 1992, I go home to Washington, D.C., to visit my family. The night I arrive, just after dinner, my mother says, “Come into the living room. Sit down. We have something to tell you.” Her tone makes me nervous. My parents are not formal people — no one sits in the living room. I am standing in the kitchen. The dog is looking up at me.

“Come into the living room. Sit down,” my mother says.

“Why?”

“There’s something we need to talk to you about.”

“What?”

“Come and we’ll tell you.”

“Tell me now, from here.”

“Come and we’ll tell you.”

“Tell me now, from here.”

“Come,” she says, patting the cushion next to her.

“Who died?” I say, terrified.

“No one died. Everyone’s fine.”

“Then what is it?”

They are silent.

“Is it about me?”

“Yes, it’s you. We’ve had a phone call. Someone is looking for you.”

After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I’ve been exposed. I get up knowing one thing about myself: I am the mistress’s daughter. My birth mother was young and unmarried, my father older and married, with a family of his own. When I was born, in December of 1961, a lawyer called my adoptive parents and said, “Your package has arrived and it’s wrapped in pink ribbons.”

My mother starts to cry. “You don’t have to do anything about it, you can just let it go,” she says, trying to relieve me of the burden. “But the lawyer said he’d be happy to talk with you. He couldn’t have been nicer.”

“Tell me again — what happened?”

Details, minutiae, as though the facts, the call-and-response of questions asked and answered, will make sense of it, will give it order, shape, and the thing it lacks most — logic.

“About two weeks ago we got a phone call. It was Stanley Frosh, the lawyer who took care of the adoption, calling to say that he’d gotten a call from a woman who told him that if you wanted to contact her, she’d be willing to hear from you.”

“What does that mean, ‘willing to hear from you’? Does she want to talk to me?”

“I don’t know,” my mother says.

“What did Frosh say?”

“He couldn’t have been nicer. He said that he’d had this call — the day before your birthday — and he wasn’t sure what we would want to do with the information, but he thought we should have it. Would you like to know her name?”

“No,” I say.

“We debated about whether or not to even tell you,” my father says.

“You debated? How could you not tell me? It’s not your information. What if you hadn’t told me and something happened to you and then I found out later?”

“But we are telling you,” my mother says. “Mr. Frosh says you can call him at any time.” She offers Frosh as though talking to him will do something — like fix it.

“This happened two weeks ago and you’re just telling me now?”

“We wanted to wait until you were home.”

“Why did Frosh call you? Why didn’t he call me directly?” I was thirty-one years old, an adult, and still they were treating me like an infant who needed protection.

“Damn her,” my mother says. “It’s a lot of nerve.”

This was my mother’s nightmare; she’d always been afraid that someone would come and take me away. I’d grown up knowing that was her fear, knowing in part it had nothing to do with my being taken away, but with her first child, her son, having died just before I was born. I grew up feeling that on some very basic level my mother would never let herself get attached again. I grew up with the sensation of being kept at a distance. I grew up furious. I feared that there was something about me, some defect of birth that made me repulsive, unlovable.

My mother came to me. She wanted to hug me. She wanted me to comfort her.

I didn’t want to hug her. I didn’t want to touch anyone. “Is Frosh sure she is who she says she is?”

“What do you mean?” my father asked.

“Is he sure she’s the right woman?”

“I think he’s fairly certain it’s her,” my father said.

The fragile, fragmented narrative, the thin line of story, the plot of my life, has been abruptly recast. I am dealing with the divide between sociology and biology: the chemical necklace of DNA that wraps around the neck sometimes like a beautiful ornament — our birthright, our history — and other times like a choke chain.

I have often felt the difference between who I arrived as and who I’ve become; layer upon layer piling up until it feels as though I am coated with a bad veneer, the cheap paneling of a suburban recreation room.

As a child, I was obsessed by the World Book Encyclopedia, the acetate anatomy pages, where you could build a person, folding in the skeleton, the veins, the muscles, layer upon layer, until it all came together.

For thirty-one years I have known that I came from somewhere else, started as someone else. There have been times when I have been relieved by the fact that I am not of my parents, that I am freed from their biology; and that is followed by an enormous sensation of otherness, the pain of how alone I feel.

“Who else knows?”

“We told Jon,” my father says. Jon, my older brother, their son.

“Why did you tell him? It wasn’t yours to tell.”

“We’re not telling Grandma,” my mother says.

This is the first important thing they’ve elected not to tell her — she is too old, too confused to be of help to them. She might do something with it in her head, conflate the information with other information, make it into something entirely different.

“Think of how I feel,” my mother says. “I can’t even tell my own mother. I can’t get any comfort from her. It’s awful.”

My mother and I sit in silence.

“Should we not have told you?” my mother asks.

“No,” I say, resigned. “You had to tell me. It wasn’t a choice. It’s my life, I have to deal with it.”

“Mr. Frosh says you can call him anytime,” she repeats.

“Where does she live?”

“New Jersey.”

In my dreams, my birth mother is a goddess, the queen of queens, the CEO, the CFO, and the COO. Movie-star beautiful, incredibly competent, she can take care of anyone and anything. She has made a fabulous life for herself, as ruler of the world, except for one missing link—me.

I say good night and drift off into the spin of the story, the myth of my beginning.

My adoptive mother and father didn’t marry until my father was forty. My mother, eight years younger, had a son, Bruce, from a previous marriage who had been born with severe kidney problems. He lived to be nine and died six months before I was born. Together my mother and father had Jon — during his birth my mother’s uterus ruptured, and both she and Jon nearly died. An emergency hysterectomy was performed and my mother was unable to have more children.

“It was lucky any of us survived,” she said. “We always wanted more. We wanted three children. We wanted a little girl.”

When I was young and used to ask where I came from, my mother would tell me that I was from the Jewish Social Service Agency. When I was a teenager, my therapist often asked me, “Don’t you think it’s odd that an agency would give a baby to a family where another child had died just six months before — to a family still in mourning?” I shrugged. It seemed like both a good idea and a really bad one. I always felt that my role in the family was to heal things, to make everything all right — to replace a dead boy. I grew up doused in grief. From day one, on a cellular level, I was perpetually in mourning.

There is folklore, there are the myths, there are facts, and there are the questions that go unanswered.

If my parents wanted more children, why did they build a house with only three bedrooms — who was going to share? I assumed that they knew Bruce was going to die. They may have wanted three children, but they planned for two.

When I asked my mother why an agency would give them an infant so soon after a child had died, she said nothing. And then when I was twenty, on a cold winter afternoon, I pressed her for more information, details. I would do this at weak moments, special occasions such as Bruce’s birthday, the anniversary of his death, or my birthday — times when she seemed vulnerable, when I sensed a crack in the surface. Where did I come from? Not from an agency, but through a lawyer; it was a private adoption.

“We put our name on agency lists but there were no babies available. We were told that the best thing to do was ask around, to let people know that we were looking for a baby.”

Each earthquake of identity, each shift in the architecture of the precarious frame that I’d built for myself, threw me. How much was still being kept from me and how much had been forgotten, or lost with the subtle erasure, the natural revision of time?

I asked again. “Where did I come from?”

“We told everyone that we were looking for a baby and then one day we heard of a baby that was going to be born, and that was you.”

“How did you hear about me?”

“Through a friend. Remember my friend Lorraine?” She mentioned the name of someone I met once, long ago. Lorraine knew another couple that also wanted to adopt a baby, but it turned out that in a roundabout way they knew who the mother was — this was told to me as though it explained something, as though knowing who the mother was made everything null and void, not because there was something wrong with the mother, but because there was something wrong with knowing.

As an adult I asked my mother if she would call Lorraine, if she would ask Lorraine to call the people who in a roundabout way knew who my mother was and ask them, who was she? My mother said no. She said, what if the couple has other children that don’t know they’re adopted?

What does that have to do with me? And how incredibly screwed up that someone wouldn’t have told their children that they were adopted.

My mother finally called Lorraine — who said, “Let it go.” She claimed to know nothing. Who was she protecting? What was she hiding?

My mother remembered something about real estate, something about a name, but she didn’t remember enough. Why didn’t she remember? It would seem like the kind of thing you wouldn’t forget.

“I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to know anything. I felt I had to protect you. The less I knew, the better. I was afraid she would come back and try to take you away.”

“Okay, back to the beginning — you heard of a baby who was going to be born, and then what?”

“And then PopPop’s lawyer was able to get in touch with the woman and they met and he called us and said, she’s wonderful, she’s healthy, except for some problems with her teeth — I think she hadn’t had good dental care. We set up a post office box and some letters were exchanged, and then we waited for you to be born.”

“What did the letters say?”

“I don’t remember.” Everything is prefaced with “I don’t remember.”

I lean in and the subtle pressure causes some slight discharge of information. “Just some basic information about her background, about her health, about how the pregnancy was going. She was young, she wasn’t married. I think that the father was married. One of them was Jewish; the other, I think, may have been Catholic. She cared about you very much, she wanted what was best for you and knew she couldn’t take care of you herself. She wanted you to go to a very special home — a Jewish home. It was important to her to know that you went somewhere where you’d be loved. She wanted you to have all the opportunity in the world. I think she may have been living in northern Virginia.”

“What happened to the letters?” I imagine a precious short stack of delicate letters tied in a ribbon and buried at the back of a drawer deep in my mother’s dresser.

My mother pauses, looks up and off to the side, as if searching her memory. “I think there was even another letter after you were born.”

“Where are the letters?”

“I think they were destroyed,” my mother says.

“Didn’t it occur to you that I might want them, that they might be all I ever had?”

“We were told to be very careful. I didn’t save anything. We were told not to. No evidence, no reminders.”

“Who told you?”

“The lawyer.”

I didn’t believe her. It was her choice. My mother didn’t want me to be adopted. She wanted me to be hers. She was afraid of anything that challenged that.

“And then what?”

“We waited. And on December 18, 1961, we got a phone call from the lawyer saying, ‘Your package has arrived, it’s wrapped in pink ribbons and it has ten fingers and ten toes.’ We called Dr. Ross, our pediatrician, and he went down to the hospital, took a look at you, and called us. ‘She’s perfect,’ he said.”

“What else?”

“Three days later we went to pick you up.”

I met my parents for the first time in a car parked around the corner from the hospital. They sat parked on a street in downtown Washington in the middle of a snowstorm, waiting for me to be delivered to them. They brought clothing to dress me, to disguise me, to begin to make me their own. This undercover pickup and delivery was made by a friend who purposely dressed in ratty old clothes — her costume designed not to attract attention, not to give information; this is another detail I didn’t know until I was in my twenties. My parents sat in the car, worrying, while the neighbor went into the hospital to collect me. This was a secret mission, something could go wrong. She—the mother — could change her mind. They sat waiting, and then the neighbor was there walking through the snow with a bundle in her arms. She handed me to my mother, and my parents brought me home, mission accomplished.

I have only the home movie version in my head. A big old-fashioned 1961 car. Downtown Washington. Snow. Nervousness. Excitement.

The story goes that my brother, Jon, so proud, so thrilled that the new baby was coming home, stood out in the driveway with a sign that he and my grandmother had made—“Welcome Home Baby Sister.” My arrival has always been described as if it were some magical moment, as if a fairy had waved a wand that pronounced the household cured, leaving me there, like a token, a good luck charm to fix everything, to lift a mother and father from their grief.

I was carried down the hall and laid out on the big bed in my parents’ room. Neighbors, the aunts and uncles, all came to look at me; a prize — the most beautiful baby they’d ever seen. My hair was thick and black and stood up like a rocket ship, my eyes were bright blue. “Your cheeks were luscious and pink — we ate you up. You were perfect.”

Think of the differences in anticipation; with a non-adopted baby, members of the family would have visited the hospital. They would have seen me with my mother, or visited me in the nursery, picking me out from the police lineup of bassinets.

But here it begins with a phone call: Your package has arrived and is wrapped in pink ribbons. The trusted pediatrician dispatched to the hospital to make an evaluation of the merchandise — think of movies where the drug dealer samples the stuff before turning over the cash. There is something inescapably sordid about the way the story unfolds. I was adopted, purchased, ordered, and picked up like a cake from a bakery.

When I was twenty my mother confessed that the “friend” who collected me was the next-door neighbor. I couldn’t believe that all these years, I had lived next door to someone who had seen my mother, who had actually met her face-to-face.

I dialed the neighbor’s house. “So?” I said. “You saw my mother?” The neighbor was cautious. “I hope you’re not going to do something about this,” she said. “I hope you’re not going to pursue it.” It amazed me that this was the reaction. What was her fear? That I would disrupt my family, the woman’s family, that I would wreak havoc? What about me, my life, the deep chaos that had been my existence?

“What did she look like?”

“She was beautiful. She had on a tweed suit and I couldn’t believe that she had just had a baby. She didn’t look pregnant at all. She was thin. And her hair was up in a bun.”

I pictured Audrey Hepburn.

“Did she look like me?”

I can’t remember what the neighbor said. I was suffering the deafness that comes in moments of great importance.

“I wore bad clothing,” the neighbor was telling me. “I disguised myself. I didn’t want her to know anything. And she too was very concerned about anyone knowing who she was.”

The amount of mystery that surrounded the proceedings was enormous, everything was subtext and secrecy. Beneath the intrigue was the element of shame that no one ever talked about.

“‘If you ever see me, don’t acknowledge me,’ the woman said. Meaning that if I ever saw her at a party or around town, I should pretend that I didn’t know her,” the neighbor told me.

“Did you ever see her again?”

“No, I never saw her again.”

“If you ever see me, don’t acknowledge me.” The one line of dialogue, the only direct quote.

In the morning my mother comes into my room with a scrap of paper; she sits at the edge of my bed and asks me again, “Do you want the name?”

I don’t answer. Even if I want it, I can’t say so — it feels like a betrayal.

“It’s the same name as a friend of yours,” she says, as if she were trying to warm it up, to detoxify it, to make it somehow more palatable. “I think she has a brother, a lawyer who lives in the area — Frosh recognized the name.”

“You can just leave it on the desk,” I say. Her name is Ellen. Ellen Ballman. It sounds like a fake name. Ball-man. What is she like? What does she do? Is she smart?

I once met an adopted woman whose mother had come back and found her. The mother was a photographer who traveled a lot. She was lovely, warm, respectful. She said, “I just want you to know I’m here if you need me.”

Ellen has a brother who lives in the area, my mother had said. I look up the brother’s address. I go for a ride. I am trying it on — the concept of biological family. His house is on my regular route. As a habit, I drive to think, I drive the way other people jog. I have a regular routine, landmarks. I have been riding up and down this road for years, fixated on the roll of the hills, the long driveways — how strange that my uncle’s house is just a left turn away.

White brick, lots of cars, a basketball hoop in the driveway — a sore point. As a kid the thing I wanted most was a hoop. A hundred times a year I asked for one — and my parents, entirely unathletic, would say no. A hoop would ruin the aesthetic integrity of the house. I played next door, I played up the street, I played until inevitably someone would stick their head out a window and suggest I go home for dinner.

I park outside the uncle’s house; this is the first time I’ve been within feet of someone biologically connected to me. I sit and imagine them inside, the uncle and his sons, my cousins. The Christmas decorations are up. I see their tree through the window. I imagine this as a joyous, prosperous place. I imagine they are somehow better than me — I drive away.

I call a private investigator, the friend of a friend — also adopted. I give her what little information I have.

“Give me a couple of hours,” she says.

I am a spy, a hunter, hot on the trail. I have no idea what I’m doing except that I want information, something to go on before I proceed. I don’t want any more surprises.

The P.I. calls me back.

“The woman you’re looking for doesn’t have a phone listed in her name in New Jersey. And she doesn’t have a local driver’s license, but she does own a home in the Washington area.”

The P.I. gives me the address. I get back in the car. It’s nearby, very nearby. Did she really live that close? Has she lived there all along? Might I have seen her somewhere without knowing it — in a shopping mall, or a restaurant? I circle the house. It looks empty. I park, knock on a neighbor’s door — asking questions, talking to strangers. What is a stranger? Who is a stranger? She could well be my mother.

“Do you know what happened to the folks next door? Moved? Any idea where to?” Dead end.

I go to the library of my childhood, of book reports and science projects. I look things up. I am always looking things up. I get a map of the town in New Jersey where she lives, I find her street. I look in phone books, call information. Nothing. Why is she not listed? Does she live with someone? Does she have another name? Is she a liar? An outlaw?

I call Frosh, the lawyer. “A letter. I’d like a letter,” I say. “I want information — where she grew up, how educated she is, what she does for a living, what the family medical history is, and what the circumstances of my adoption were.”

I am asking for the story of my life. There is an urgency to my request; I feel as if I should hurry and ask everything I want to know. As suddenly as she has arrived, she could be gone again.

As soon as I hang up, I start waiting for the letter.

Ten days later, her letter arrives with no fanfare. The postman doesn’t come running down the street, screaming, “It’s here, it’s here! Your identity has arrived.” It comes in an envelope from the lawyer’s office with a scrawled note from the lawyer apologizing for not having got it to me sooner. It’s clear that the letter has been opened, presumably read. Why? Is nothing private? I am annoyed but don’t say anything. I don’t feel I have the right. It’s one of the pathological complications of adoption — adoptees don’t really have rights, their lives are about supporting the secrets, the needs and desires of others.

The letter is typed on her stationery, simple small gray sheets of paper, her name embossed across the top. Her language is oddly formal, less than artful, grammatically flawed. I read it simultaneously fast and slow, wanting to take it in, unable to take it in. I read it and then read it again. What is she telling me?

…. at the time I was carrying this little girl it was not proper for a girl to have a child out of wedlock. This was probably the most difficult decision of my entire life to make. I was 22 years old and very naive. I was raised very sheltered and very strict by my mother.

I remember being in the hospital with her and dressing her the day we both left the hospital. I have never forgotten the beautiful black hair and the blue eyes and the little dimples in her face. As I left the hospital with the lady who was picking up the little girl, I can still see myself in the taxi and her asking me to give her the baby. I did not want to give her the child, however, I did realize, I did not have the wear-with-all to take care of her myself. Yes, I have always loved this little girl and been tortured every December of my life from the day she was born that I did not have her with me.

She writes that watching television shows like Oprah and Maury gave her the courage and the confidence to come forward. She lists the facts of where she was born, what street she lived on as a child, how she grew up. She tells the names of her parents and when they died. She says how tall she is and how much she weighs.

She writes of never forgetting.

Each bit of information swims through me, takes root, digging in. There are no filters, there are no screens. I have no protection from this.

She closes her letter by saying, “I have never married, I have always felt guilty about giving this little girl away.”

I am that little girl.

I call the lawyer and ask for another letter, with more information, a medical history, a more detailed explanation of what happened, what she’s been doing since, and a photograph of her.

A day later, in a panic, I call the lawyer back. “Oh,” I say. “Oh, I forgot. Could you ask her who the father is?” Not my father, but the father.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. I’ll put it on the list.”

Within days, a second letter arrives, again having been opened.

I suppose now, I should tell you about Norman Hecht. This is difficult for me because to me it is turning back the hands of time. I went to work for Norman at the Princess Shop in downtown Washington D.C. I was 15 years old. I worked for him on Thursday night and on Saturdays. During the summer, I worked fulltime. Norman as you know was much older than I. He was very nice to me. This relationship started very innocently. He would offer to drive me home and we would talk about many things on the way. Then one day while we were working he asked me if I would like to go to dinner with him. This was the beginning. At age 17, he called my mother and asked if he could marry me. My mother said, “she is too young.” Hung up the telephone, turned to me and said, I do not want you to see this man ever again. At this time, I was in love and nothing she said would stop me. I have always been a very determined person. Stubborn if you will. This is me. Norman is married at that time and promises to get a divorce and marry me. This was not my idea but his. Time goes on, I become pregnant with the young lady. He thinks I should go to Florida. He will buy a house for us both. About three months later, I am very unhappy. I return to Washington. Norman and I start to have disagreements. During the last three months of the pregnancy I stayed with my mother in Virginia where her home was. Shortly before the baby was born, Norman again said he would marry me. He asked if he could come and pick me up and take me to buy things for the baby. I told him no. I did not call him when the baby was born.

Norman to the best of my knowledge lives in Potomac, Md. He has four children. All of his children were born prior to the birth of our child. He was an All American Football Player. To the best of my knowledge his father was Jewish, his mother, Irish. I knew only his mother. She was a little chubby lady. Very kind and very nice to me.

You asked about my general health. I periodically do have a problem with bronchitis. This is treated with medicine. Damp weather is not for me. I do take pills for high blood pressure. Other than that, I am fine. I am nearsighted and do have soft teeth. Both inherited, my eyes from my father, my teeth from my mother.

She ends her second letter, “…I have a great fear of being disappointed with what I am now doing.”

Later, she will tell me that Frosh, reading the letter, recognized the father’s name and called her saying that if she was going to give the father’s name, she’d better let the father know what she was doing. She will tell me that she called my father and that he was shocked to hear from her, horrified at what she was doing, and told her that watching Oprah and Maury was beneath her.

Frosh is driving me crazy with his tinkering. It is an intrusion and interruption of the events — whose side is he on, what is he looking for, who is he trying to protect? I don’t want anyone reading my mail. I get a post office box. I call Frosh and ask him to pass my new mailing information on to Ellen. I purposely do not give her my last name, or my phone number. Having had no control over this situation for thirty-one years, I need to measure things out, moderate the amount of contact.

The father, another name to look up in the phone book, another set of blanks to fill in. What did his name mean to the lawyer? Why did he recognize it? Who is my father?

I call a friend in Washington, a native, a man who knows things.

“Does this name ring a bell?”

There is a pause. “It does. He used to come into one of the clubs.”

“Anything else?” I ask.

“That’s all that comes to mind. If I think of anything I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, is this someone you’re thinking of writing about?”

The next week, without warning, my parents visit me in New York.

“Surprise, surprise.”

They are being incredibly nice, warm and loving, as though I have a terminal disease — six months to live.

“We’d like to take you out to dinner,” they say.

I can’t go and I can’t tell them why. I send them to dinner, knowing that while they are gone, I will call her.

Hers is the most frightening voice I’ve ever heard — low, nasal, gravelly, vaguely animal. I tell her who I am and she screams, “Oh my God. This is the most wonderful day of my life.” Her voice, her emotion, comes in bursts, like punctuation — I can’t tell if she is laughing or crying. In the background there is a flick, a sharp suck of air — smoking.

The phone call is thrilling, flirty as a first date, like the beginning of something. There is a rush of curiosity, the desire to know everything at once. What is your life like, how do your days begin and end? What do you do for fun? Why did you come and find me? What do you want?

Every nuance, every detail means something. I am like an amnesiac being awakened. Things I know about myself, things that exist without language, my hardware, my mental firing patterns — parts of me that are fundamentally, inexorably me are being echoed on the other end, confirmed as a DNA match. It is not an entirely comfortable sensation.

“Tell me about you — who are you?” she asks.

I tell her that I live in New York, I am a writer, I have a dog. No more or less.

She tells me that she loves New York, that her father used to come to New York and would always return with presents from FAO Schwarz. She tells me how much she loved her father, who died of a heart attack when she was seven because “he liked rich food.”

This causes an immediate pain in my chest: the idea that I might die of a heart attack early in life, that I now know I need to be careful, that the things I enjoy most are dangerous.

She goes on, “I come from a very strange family. We’re not quite right.”

“What do you mean, strange?” I ask.

She tells me about her mother dying of a stroke a couple of years earlier. She tells me about her own life falling apart, how she moved from Washington to Atlantic City. She tells me that after she gave birth to me her mother wouldn’t come to the hospital to pick her up. She had to take the bus home. She tells me that it took all her strength and courage to come looking for me.

And then she says, “Have you heard from your father? It would be nice if the three of us could get together,” she says. “We could all come to New York and have dinner.”

She wants everything all at once and it is too much for me. I am talking to the woman who has loomed in my mind, larger than life, for the entirety of my life, and I am terrified. There is a deep fracture in my thoughts, a refrain constantly echoing: I am not who I thought I was, and I have no idea who I am.

I am not who I thought I was, and neither is she the queen of queens that I imagined.

“I can’t see you yet.”

“Why can’t I see you?”

I am tempted to tell her, You can’t see me right now, because right now I am not visible to anyone, even myself. I have evaporated.

“When can we talk again?” she asks as we are hanging up. “When? I hope you will forgive me for what I did thirty-one years ago. When can I see you? If you said yes, I would come there right now. I would be at your door. Will you call again soon? I love you. I love you so much.”

My parents return from dinner. I am looking at a picture of her, a Xerox of her driver’s license that the lawyer forwarded to me. Ellen Ballman, strong, thick, fierce, like a prison matron. There is another photo in the envelope — Ellen with a niece and nephew, with stuffed animals in the background. There is something about the way feeling moves across the face — something vaguely familiar. In the cheeks, the eyes, eyebrows, forehead I see traces of myself.

“How did she have Frosh’s name?” my mother wants to know.

“She said she’d heard it once and never forgot.”

“Interesting,” my mother says, “because Frosh wasn’t the first lawyer; the first lawyer died and we got Frosh after you were born, when we were having some problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“She never signed the papers. She was supposed to sign them before she left the hospital and she didn’t. And then we arranged for her to go into a bank to sign them, and she never showed up. She never signed anything and when we first went to court the judge wouldn’t let us adopt you because the papers weren’t signed. It took more than a year after that and then finally a second judge allowed us to adopt without a signature. For an entire year, I lived in fear. I was afraid to leave you alone with anyone except dad and Grumama, afraid if I turned around she’d come back and you’d be gone.”

I think of my mother having lost a child six months before I was born, having ushered him into and out of the world. I think of her having received me as a kind of get-well gift and then worrying that at any moment I too would be gone. I don’t tell my mother one of the first things Ellen Ballman said to me: “If I’d known where you were I would have come and gotten you.” I don’t tell my mother that it turned out that all along Ellen Ballman wasn’t far away — a couple of miles. “I used to look at children,” Ellen told me. “And sometimes I followed them, wondering if they were you.”

Our conversations are frequent — I call her a couple of times a week but I don’t give her my phone number. They are seductive, addictive, punishing. Each one shakes me; each requires a period of recovery. Each time I tell her something, she takes the information and holds it too close, reinventing it and delivering it back to me in a manner that leaves me wanting to tell her less, wanting her to know nothing.

She tells me that she never got along well with her stepfather and that her mother was cold and cruel. I feel that there’s more to the story than she’s telling me. I get the sense that something was happening at home involving the stepfather, and that the mother knew and blamed her for it — which would also explain the animosity between them and why Ellen, as a teen, was propelled into the arms of a much older, married man. I never ask her the question directly. It seems intrusive; her need to protect herself is stronger than my need to know. There is an odd and anxious unknowing to much of what she says that makes it difficult to get the story straight. She reminds me of Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois, moving from person to person, desperate to get something, to find relief from unrelievable pain. Her lack of sophistication leaves me unsure whether she’s of limited intelligence or simply shockingly naive.

“Did you think of having an abortion?”

“The thought never occurred to me. I couldn’t have.”

Pregnancy, I gather, was the perfect way out of her mother’s house and into my father’s life. It must have seemed like a good idea, until my father refused to leave his wife. He tried. He sent Ellen to Florida saying he’d join her there — and never showed up. Three months later, homesick, she returned to Washington. They got an apartment together; for four days, he lived with Ellen. Then he went back, claiming that “his children missed him.” Ellen had him arrested under an old Maryland ordinance for desertion. At the time his wife was also pregnant, with a boy who was born three months before I was.

“At one point he told me to meet him at his lawyer’s office,” she says, “so we could figure out a way to ‘take care of everything.’ I sat down with him and his lawyer and the lawyer drew a diagram and said, ‘There’s a pie and there are only so many slices of the pie and that’s all there is and it’s got to go around.’ ‘I am not a slice of pie,’ I said, and walked out. I have never been so angry in my life. Slices of pie. I told my friend Esther I was expecting a baby and didn’t know what to do. She told me she knew someone who wanted to adopt a baby. I told her the baby must go to a Jewish family who would treat her well. I referred to you as ‘the baby.’ I didn’t know if you were a boy or a girl. I couldn’t take care of you myself — young ladies didn’t have babies on their own.”

She interrupts herself. “Do you think, one day, we might have a portrait painted of the two of us?” Her request seems to come from another world, another life. What would she do with a portrait? Hang it over her fireplace in Atlantic City? Send it to my father for Christmas? She is in stopped time, filled with fantasies of what might have been. After thirty-one years, she has returned to reclaim the life she never had.

“I have to go, I’m late for dinner,” I say.

“Okay,” she says. “but before you go out, put on your cashmere sweater so you don’t get chilly.”

I don’t have a cashmere sweater.

“When can I see you?” she starts again.

“Ellen, this is all new for me. You might have thought about it for a long time before you contacted me, but for me it’s only a couple of weeks. I need to take things slowly. We’ll talk again soon.” I hang up. The sweater is Ellen’s fantasy, an image of an experience that is not my own, but one that has meaning, import elsewhere — in her past.

I am losing myself. On the street I see people who look alike — families where each face is a nuanced version of the other. I watch how they stand, how they walk and talk, variations on a theme.

A few days later, I try Ellen again.

“Ruggles slept in the hall,” she says. Ruggles is the stuffed animal I sent her, in a gesture of kindness. Tonight Ruggles is me.

There is the flick of a lighter, the suck of a cigarette.

“I’m angry with you, can you tell?”

“Yes.”

“Why won’t you see me?” she whines. “You’re torturing me. You take better care of your dog than you take of me.”

Am I supposed to be taking care of her? Is that what she’s come back for?

“You should adopt me — and take care of me,” she says.

“I can’t adopt you,” I say.

“Why not?”

I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know if we’re talking in fantasy or reality. What happened to “in the best interests of the child”? Who is the parent and who is the child? I can’t say I don’t want a fifty-year-old child.

“You’re scaring me,” is all I can manage.

“Why won’t you forgive me? Why are you always angry with me?”

“I’m not angry with you,” I tell her and it is entirely true. Of all the things I am, I am not angry with her.

“Don’t be angry with me forever. If I’d known where you were I would have come and gotten you and taken you away.” Imagine that — kidnapped by one’s own mother, the same mother who had given you away at birth. She lived not two miles from where I grew up, and luckily didn’t know who or where I was. I cannot imagine anything more terrifying.

“I’m not angry with you.” I am horrified at the way I see myself in her — the loose screw is not entirely unfamiliar — and appalled that in the end I may end up rejecting the one person I never had any intention of rejecting. But not angry. Not unforgiving. The more Ellen and I talk, the happier I am that she gave me up. I can’t imagine having grown up with her. I would not have survived.

“Have you heard from your father? I’m surprised he hasn’t been in touch.”

It occurs to me that “my father” may be having the same reaction to her that I’m having, that he equates me with her, and that may be one of the reasons he’s keeping his distance. It also occurs to me that he may think that she and I are somehow in this together, conspiring to get something from him.

I write him a letter of my own, letting him know how surprised I was by Ellen’s appearance, and suggesting that, while this is something neither he nor I asked for, we try to deal with things with some small measure of grace. I tell him a little bit about myself. I give him a way of contacting me.

I go to the gym. Overhead there is a bank of televisions, CNN, MTV, and the Cartoon Network. I am watching a cartoon in which a basket containing a baby bird is left outside a wooden door carved into the base of a tree. The words “Knock, Knock” appear on the screen. A large rooster opens the door and picks up the basket. A note is pinned to the fabric covering the basket.

Dear Lady,

Please take care of my little one.

Signed,

Big One

The rooster looks inside; a small but feisty baby bird pokes up. The rooster gets excited. An image of the baby bird in a frying pan dances in the rooster’s head. A chicken wearing a bonnet comes into the house and shoos the rooster away. The rooster is disappointed. I am on the treadmill, in tears.

A couple of months pass. It is a cold night between the end of winter and the beginning of spring, and I am in Washington, D.C. I have spent an hour circling my father’s house, wondering why he hasn’t answered my letter.

I am a detective, a spy, a bastard. The house is large; there is a pool, a tennis court, and a lot of cars in the driveway. I sit outside under the cover of night, imagining him with his family, his wife, his other children.

I am on the outside looking in, the interior lights lay bare their lives. The lit windows are like light boxes illuminating X-rays.

From the outside, it looks as though he has it all and then some. The walls in one of the upstairs rooms are painted a deep forest green, with white trim around the edges. I imagine it as a library.

I see a girl pull back the curtain and look out — is she my sister?

There is a For Sale sign in the front yard. I imagine calling the realtor and taking a tour, moving from room to room like a true ghost, unseen, unknown, gathering information, looking in closets, cupboards, acquiring false intimacy by passing over their things, witnessing how they live, which way they unroll the toilet paper, what books are by the side of the bed.

I sit outside the house until I have had enough and then crawl back to my parents’ house.

There is a message on my answering machine at home in New York — the voice raspy, accented, coarse. “Your cover is blown. I know who you are and I know where you live. I’m reading your books.”

I dial her immediately. “Ellen, what are you doing?”

“I found out who you are, A.M. Homes. I’m reading your books.”

It is the only time in my life that I have regretted being a writer. She has something of mine and she thinks she has me.

“How did you get my number?”

“I’m very clever. I called all the bookstores in Washington and asked them, ‘Who is a writer from Washington whose first name is Amy?’ At first I thought you were someone else, some other Amy who wrote a book about God, and then one of the stores helped me and gave me your number.”

She stalks me. I stop answering the phone. Every time the phone rings, every time I call in for messages, I brace myself.

“Do you live with someone on Charles Street? Is he there? Does he not like it when I call?”

“How do you know I live on Charles Street?”

“I’m a good detective.”

“Ellen, I find it very upsetting. How do you know where I live?”

“I don’t have to tell you,” she says.

“Then I don’t have to continue this conversation,” I say.

“Why won’t you see me? Do I have to come up there and find you? Do I have to come up to Columbia University and hunt you down? Do I have to wait in line to get your autograph?”

“I need to be able to do my job. I need to teach my classes and go on my book tour and do all the things I’m supposed to do without worrying that you are going to hunt me down. You can’t do that. I have to be able to lead my life.”

“I need to see you.”

There are no limits. It is all about her need, incessant and total — she wants more and more. I am not allowed to have any rules. I am not allowed to say no.

Sometimes as a child, I would cry inconsolably. I would bellow, a primal cry, so deeply guttural, cellular, and thoroughly real that it would terrify my mother.

“Stop, you have to stop. Can you hear me? Please stop.”

If I was able to speak at all, the only thing I would say was, “I want my mom. I want my mom.” Again and again — an incantation. I would repeat it endlessly, comforting myself by rubbing back and forth over the words. “I want my mom, I want my mom.”

“I’m right here,” she would say. “I’m your mother. I’m all the mother you’ve got.”

After Ellen came back, I never cried that way again. I was longing for something that never existed.

The lack of purity became clear to me — I am not my adopted mother’s child, I am not Ellen’s child. I am an amalgam. I will always be something glued together, something slightly broken. It is not something I might recover from but something I must accept, to live with — with compassion.

I want my mom.

“Do you wish she hadn’t come back?” my mother asks. “Do you wish we hadn’t told you?”

“It wasn’t your secret to keep.”

Do I wish she hadn’t come back? Sometimes. Yes. But once it happened, I wouldn’t have wanted to stop the flow of information. It is about fate, the life cycle of information. Once I know something, the amount of effort it takes to deny it, to suspend knowledge, is enormous and potentially more dangerous than to simply move along with it and see where it takes me.

Blindness — May 1993. The day my novel is published I accidentally poke the New York Times into my eye and shred my cornea. The pain is searing. I fumble for the eye doctor’s number and go rushing off to his office, returning hours later with what looks like a maxi pad taped over my face. There is a message from my publisher letting me know that my book has been reviewed that morning in the Washington Post, a message from my mother saying that she’s arranged for brownies and crudités to be served at my reading tomorrow in Washington, and a message from “the father.”

“It’s Norman,” he says, his voice wobbly, tentative, choking on itself. “I got your letter. Why don’t you give me a call when you have a moment.”

It’s been more than a month since I wrote him. If the review hadn’t appeared in the Post, would he have called? If I’d been flipping burgers in a McDonald’s instead of writing books, would I have ever heard from him?

“Well, what do you know?” he says, when I return the call. He’s a swaggering big shot, but there’s something to him, some half-a-heart that I instantly appreciate.

“Have you spoken to the Dragon Lady?” he asks, and I assume that he is talking about Ellen.

“She’s a little crazy.”

He laughs. “That’s the way she always was. That’s why I had to do what I did.”

Norman, a former football hero, a combat veteran, for some reason feels compelled to give me a pep talk. Fifty years after the fact, he quotes what Coach once told him about staying in the game, about not being a quitter. No one has ever spoken to me this way before; there’s something I like about it — it’s comforting, inspiring. He couldn’t be more different from the father I grew up with, an intellectual type. If I told Norman that I spent every Saturday of my childhood going to museums he wouldn’t know how to respond.

“I’ll be in Washington tomorrow for a couple of days on a book tour,” I say.

“Why don’t you meet me at my lawyer’s office and we can talk.”

I think of Ellen: I am not a slice of pie.

The next day I read in Washington; the bookstore is crowded with neighbors, relatives, my fourth-grade teacher, old friends from junior high, from early writing workshops. I haven’t had a chance to tell anyone about the eye injury in advance. When I get up to read, they’re shocked.

“It’s fine,” I say. “It’ll be okay in a couple of weeks.” I crack open the book. My field of vision is a circle about two inches wide. I hold the pages directly in front of my face. My good eye is half closed in sympathy with the injured one. I perform as much from memory as possible.

When the reading is finished, a long line forms, people wanting books signed, aspiring writers with questions. In the soft distance I see a stranger, a woman, standing nervously, twisting an umbrella around and around in her hands. Instinctively, I know it is Ellen. I continue signing books. The line begins to thin. Just as the last person is leaving, she steps up.

“What did you do to your eye?” she blurts in that rough voice.

“You’re not behaving,” I say. The store is packed with people who don’t know what ghost has risen up.

“You’re built just like your father,” she says.

Later, when I try to remember what she looked like, I have only a vague memory of green with white polka dots, brown hair piled high on her head. I remember seeing her arm and thinking how small her bones were.

In the distance another shadow emerges. My mother and a friend of hers are coming toward me. I imagine the two mothers meeting, colliding. This is something that can’t happen. It is entirely against the rules. No one person can have two mothers in the same room at the same time.

“There are people here whose privacy I have to protect,” I say to Ellen. She turns and runs out of the store.

“We spotted her during the reading,” my mother’s friend says.

“I knew who she was immediately,” my mother says. “Are you all right?” she asks — she seems shaken.

“Are you?”

I’m scheduled to meet with a reporter after the reading. We sit in the basement of the bookstore, the reporter’s cassette recorder on a table between us.

“Is your book autobiographical?”

“It is the most autobiographical thing I have written, but no, it is not autobiographical.”

“But you are adopted?”

“Yes.”

“I heard something recently about you searching for your parents.”

“I have not searched for anyone.”

There is a pause. “Do you know who your parents are?” It seems like a strange question, like the kind of thing you’d ask someone who’d bumped their head against a wall and just regained consciousness.

In the morning, I take a taxi downtown. I am going to meet the father. I take a taxi because I am blind, because my mother is at work, because I can’t ask my father to drive me to meet my father. I am out of time, outside of myself. It feels like something from long ago when women didn’t drive. It is as though I am in a remake, a dramatic reenactment of a role originated by Ellen — the Visit to the Lawyer’s Office — the scene in which the pregnant woman goes to the lawyer’s office to find out what the big guy “might be able to do for her.”

At the lawyer’s office, I present myself to the receptionist. A man comes through the interior door. Is this the lawyer, my father, or just someone who works there? Anyone could be him, he could be anyone — this is what it’s like when you don’t know who you are.

I am reminded of the children’s book Are You My Mother? — in which a baby bird goes around asking various other animals and objects, “Are you my mother?”

“Are you Norman?”

“Yes,” he says, surprised that I don’t already know. He shakes my hand nervously and leads me into a large conference room. We sit on opposite sides of a wide table.

“My God,” he says, looking at me. “My God.”

“I cut my cornea,” I say, pointing to the patch on my eye.

“Reading a review of your book?”

“No, the obituaries,” I say honestly.

“Fine thing. Would you like a Pepsi?” On the table in front of him is a Pepsi bottle, sweating.

I shake my head.

The father is a big, pink-faced man, in a fancy suit, collar pin, tie. His hair is white, thin, slicked back.

We stare at each other across the table. “Fine thing,” he keeps saying. He is smiling. He has dimples.

Having grown up without the refracted reflections of biology, I have no idea whether he looks like me or not. I’ve brought my camera, a Polaroid.

“Do you mind if I take a picture of you?” I ask.

I take two and he just sits there flushed, embarrassed.

“Could I have one of you?” he asks and I allow him to take a picture.

It’s as though we’re making a perverse Polaroid commercial right there in the lawyer’s office — a reunion played out as a photo session. We come around the table and stand side by side, watching our images appear. It’s easier to really look at someone in a photograph than in real life — no discomfort at meeting the other person’s eye, no fear of being caught staring. Later, when I show friends the pictures, it is obvious to everyone that he’s my father—“Just look at the face, look at the hands, the ears, they’re the same as yours.”

Are they?

Norman hands me a copy of my book to sign. I autograph it for him and suddenly wonder what kind of a meeting we are having. I feel like a foreign diplomat exchanging official gifts.

“Tell me a little bit about you,” I say.

“I’m not circumcised.”

Okay, maybe it wasn’t the first thing he said, but it was certainly the second. “My grandmother was a strict Catholic, she had me baptized. I’m not circumcised.”

It is strange information to have about your father. We’ve just met and he’s telling me about his dick. What he’s really telling me, I guess, is that he’s distanced himself from his Jewish half and that he’s obsessed with his penis. He goes on to tell tales of his great-grandmother, a nineteenth-century East Prussian princess, and other relatives, who were plantation owners on the Eastern Shore of Maryland — slaveholders. He tells me I’m eligible for the Daughters of the American Revolution. He says that a family member, a British admiral, came over on either the Arc or the Dove and that there’s also a connection to Helmuth von Moltke, who according to Norman said, “We will leave them with only their eyes to cry with,” when leading Prussian soldiers into France in 1870. Then he goes on about our connections to the Nazis and the Death’s Head Troops, as though they are something to be proud of.

“And the Dragon Lady isn’t Jewish either. She likes to think she is, but she went to Catholic school.” They are both half Catholic, half Jewish. He identifies as one and she as the other.

He tells me how beautiful Ellen was when she came to work in his store. When I mention the age difference between them — she was in her mid-teens, he was thirty-two — he gets defensive, saying, “She was a slut who knew more than her years — things a young girl shouldn’t know.” He blames her for his lack of self-control. I ask if it ever occurred to him that something might be going on in her mother’s house, something with the stepfather. He shrugs it off, and then, when pressed, says, yes, she tried to tell him something, but he didn’t really know what she was talking about, and yes, maybe there was something going on at home and he probably should have tried to find out.

I ask him about their relationship: How often did he see her? Did he ever really think he might leave his wife?

He is sweating, stuffed into his good suit.

His wife knew about the affair. Ellen has told me that. Ellen has also told me that Norman sometimes brought his oldest child along when they went out. She met the younger ones too but never knew them very well.

Did Norman think he was such a big guy that he could have it all? I picture the affluence of the early sixties, highball glasses and aqua blue party dresses, Cadillac convertibles, big hair, Ellen doing a kind of demented Audrey Hepburn girl thing, Norman the swaggering football hero and veteran, the guy with a gleam in his eye, a wife at home, a young girl on the side, thinking he’s got the good life.

“And what did you do for fun?” I ask, and he just looks at me. The answer is evident. Sex. The relationship was about sex, at least for him. I am the product of a sex life, not a relationship.

“She had a problem,” he says. “She was a nymphomaniac. She went out with other men, lots of men.”

Here I believe Ellen. How much of a nymphomaniac could a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl be? She was clever, crafty, probably trained by an expert — her mother. (I have a mental picture of Ellen’s mother as Shelley Winters playing Charlotte Haze in the film version of Lolita.) But what Ellen looked for in Norman was comfort.

It is clear that Norman is still taken with Ellen. He asks me about her in great detail. I feel like the child of divorced parents — except that I have no idea who these people are. I have no idea what they are talking about. And what they are most interested in is talking about each other.

He tells me that he and his wife wanted to adopt me, and that Ellen wouldn’t allow it. “I wanted to take care of you,” he says. “After it happened, after she’d given birth, I heard that you were a boy.” He looks at me as if there’s something to be said.

“I’m not,” I say.

“I guess it’s good we didn’t adopt you. My wife might have taken it out on you, she might have treated you badly.”

“Yes, it’s good.”

“She told me she was pregnant the day my mother died.”

Later, I ask Ellen about these things and she is furious. “He was never going to adopt you. He never even suggested it. I made the arrangements myself and never told him what I was going to do.”

“Did you tell him you were pregnant the day his mother died?”

“Yes,” she says, and there is the defiant flick of a lighter, the suck of a cigarette.

I change the subject. “Ellen told me about her father,” I say to Norman. “She was very close to him and he died of a heart attack.”

“He didn’t die of a heart attack,” Norman says, indignantly. “He was the White House bookie and he died in a shoot-out with another bookie.” It makes sense. It explains a part of the story that Ellen couldn’t really explain, something about men carrying her father into the house, him dying upstairs, and the family having to stay at a fancy hotel for a while.

I remember an early school field trip to Ford’s Theatre — the image of Abe Lincoln being shot and then carried across the street to Petersen’s Boarding House to die.

I am relieved that Ellen’s father didn’t have a heart attack. There are criminals in my past, but at least their hearts are strong.

“Tell me about your people,” Norman says. He asks about “my people” as though I was raised by wolves. Clearly, my people are not the same as “his people.”

“My people,” I tell him, “are lovely. You couldn’t ask for better.” I owe him nothing. My people are Jews, Marxists, socialists, homosexuals. There is nothing about me, about my life, that he would understand.

We are winding down. I am exhausted.

“I’d like to take you into my family, to introduce you to your brothers and sister. You have three brothers and a sister. But before I can do that, my wife wants everything to be clear. She wants a test to prove that you are my child.

“Would you consider a blood test? You wouldn’t have to pay for it.” It’s the “You wouldn’t have to pay for it” that throws me. Is this what I get as my big reward, the reparation for the wrongs of the past — a DNA test? And what’s behind Door Number Three? Insulting as this is, on some level I can’t blame him. Throwing it to science might be a good idea — it might make fact out of what feels like fiction.

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

“Fine thing.”

In the middle of July 1993, I agree to the DNA test. Norman and I make a plan to meet at a lab. I take the train to D.C.

It is less a lab and more a collection center, a bureaucratic black hole, the most generic office ever made. The fluorescent lighting works like an X-ray throwing everything into relief.

Norman is there waiting — the only white man in the room. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since the lawyer’s office. We sit next to each other, the metal chairs are linked together — forced closeness.

We wait.

They call Norman’s name. He tries to give them a personal check, but they won’t take it. There are signs everywhere detailing how payment is to be made: all checks must be certified. He offers to get them the cash, but they can’t accept cash, only certified checks. He goes to the bank downstairs and for some reason is unable to get one. He returns, flustered, humiliated. He insists that the technician make a call, that he try to get an exception, but it is all to no avail. The check and the blood must be sent together. Because this test is often part of a lawsuit, the lab insists on being paid in advance to avoid the complication of collection. This is the stuff of murders, rapes, proof. Are you or are you not my father?

The next morning we try again.

“Long time no see,” I say.

“What if we get in there and the nurse is the Dragon Lady? She’ll come at us with a square, blunt-tipped needle,” Norman jokes nervously. I laugh but it is not funny. We have a tacit agreement not to tell Ellen what we are doing. What we are doing is insulting to her.

The technician calls in a small child who is ahead of us. The little boy screams when they take him.

“You’re not going to do that, are you?” Norman asks.

Worse, I’m thinking, far, far worse.

As Norman walks up to the counter, I notice that his butt looks familiar; I am watching him and I’m thinking: There goes my ass. That’s my ass walking away. His blue sport coat covers it halfway, but I can see it broken into sections, departments of ass, high and low just like mine. I notice his thighs — chubby, thick, not a pretty thing. This is the first time I have seen anyone else in my body.

I stare as he turns and comes back to me. I look down at his shoes, white loafers, country-club shoes, stretched out, fading. Inside the shoe, his feet are wide and short. I look up; his hands are the same as mine, square like paws. He is an exact replica, the male version of me.

“Fine thing,” Norman says, seeing me stare.

I go first. I roll up my sleeve. The technician pulls on his gloves, assembles his tubes, and ties the rubber tourniquet around my arm. I make a fist. Norman is watching.

The needle goes in, a sharp metal prick.

I look at Norman. It feels strange. I am giving blood for this man, I am letting my flesh be punctured to prove that I am of him. It is beyond sexual.

“Let go of the fist,” the technician says and I relax my hand.

The blood is drawn, tubes and tubes of it, and then there is cotton on my wound and a Band-Aid over it.

I have allowed this because I understand the need for proof, for some true measure of our relationship, and also because I have a fantasy that there is something in it for me, that Norman will keep his word, that he will take me into his family, that I will suddenly have three brothers and a sister — a new and improved spare family.

“Please sign here.” The technician hands me the tubes, one at a time.

“What?”

“You have to sign the tubes.”

They are warm in my palm, filled with the chemical sum of who and what I am. I sign quickly, hoping not to faint. I am holding myself in my hands.

Norman is next. He takes off his jacket, revealing short shirt sleeves, sad-old-guy style. His arms are plump, pale, almost fluffy. There is something so white about him, so soft, so exposed that it is perverse. He lays out his arm. The technician ties it off, swabs it, and I look away unable to watch this strange genetic striptease.

I am sickened by it all. I wait in the hall. I do not watch him holding his blood, signing his tubes. He comes out of the room, puts his jacket back on, and we are out the door.

“I would have liked to take you for a nice lunch if you’d worn something better,” he says when we are in the hallway.

I am dressed perfectly well — in linen pants and a blouse. DNA testing is not a black-tie occasion. I am tempted to say, That’s okay — I would have liked you to be my father if you weren’t such a jerk. But I am so stunned that I become stupidly apologetic. I am not wearing what he wanted; I am not wearing a dress. I am not meeting his fantasy of his daughter.

We go to a less-than-mediocre restaurant down the block. People seem to know him there. He introduces me to the maître d’ as though that means something. We sit down. The tablecloths are green, the napkins polyester.

“You don’t wear jewelry,” Norman says.

I am single, I live in New York City, I am not wearing a dress. I know exactly what he is thinking.

I say nothing. Later, I’ll wish that I’d said something, I’ll wish that I’d told him the truth. I have no jewelry, but if you want to throw me some diamonds I’d be glad to wear them. I come from a family that doesn’t do that sort of thing. I grew up boycotting grapes and iceberg lettuce because they weren’t picked by union workers.

What kind of father makes his child travel to another city to prove that she is his child and then criticizes her for not wearing the right clothes to the blood test, for not wearing jewelry she doesn’t own to the lunch she didn’t know she was having?

“How will you feel if the test comes back and I’m not your father?”

You’re my father, I think. I wasn’t positive before, but now, seeing you, seeing your ass, my ass — I’m sure.

The heat is stupefying. I am being twisted like pulled taffy. I walk as though I have been hit with something, blasted. I have become a stranger to myself.

To be adopted is to be adapted, to be amputated and sewn back together again. Whether or not you regain full function, there will always be scar tissue.

Back at the house, my mother wants to do something to make it better. She takes me on a picnic. We go to Candy Cane City — the park of my childhood — and sit at a table under the trees looking out at the merry-go-round, the swing set, the aluminum slide. All of it empty now, deserted in this scorching heat wave. I put my hand on the slide, the metal is searingly hot — it feels good.

My mother unwraps a bologna sandwich. This is proof of how hard she is trying. In our house there is no bologna, no white bread. This is my favorite sandwich from childhood, the one I got only for field trips and special occasions. She pulls a bag of potato chips and a cold Coke out of the bag, replicating my earliest idea of the sublime. We look out at the tennis courts, the basketball hoops, the water fountain, all of it indelibly etched in my memory. I could come to this park in my sleep, just as I have come to it often in my fiction.

“Take me for a ride,” I say.

“Tomorrow,” she says. “Tomorrow I’ll take the day off work and we’ll go somewhere.”

In the morning we leave. The motion of the car is soothing — it makes up for my inability to move myself, it fulfills my need for someone else to move me, to carry me. The road unfolds.

I don’t tell my mother what happened when I went for the blood test, I do not tell her how truly depressed I am. I don’t say anything because anything I say will make her anxious, angry, and then I will have to deal with her feelings. And at the moment I am struggling to understand my own.

I wish I had a video of Norman, of his ass walking away. I wish I had him on tape saying, You’re not dressed right. I wish I had Ellen on audio, her misplaced projections, her odd habit of seeming to confuse me with her dead mother, accusing me of not paying enough attention to her, not doing enough for her.

I wish I had it all in such a way that it could be labeled and laid out on a long table — as evidence.

My mother is driving us into the past, to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, a dark, dank old town. This is where George Washington went when he wanted to take a soak; home of the oldest mineral bath in the country — my grandparents used to take us here.

This is a place from my past that feels familiar, untouchable, unchanged. I am glad to be returned to something that predates me. The bathhouse is divided into ladies’ and men’s; everyone there is a million years old, dating directly back to George Washington. I imagine it is like a Swedish sanitarium; there is something deeply medicinal about it — we have come for a cure.

Soaking in the holy antique waters is cleansing — lying on the slab of a table while an old woman kneads my flesh is equal to the moment I am in. It is the perfect escape.

We have our treatments and then we go to the old hotel for club sandwiches and head home.

On the phone, Norman tells me he has something for me, something he wants to give me; first he tells me he will send it to me and then he says he will wait and give it to me in person. I am thinking it is a family heirloom, something of his, of his mother’s, something that came on the Arc or the Dove, something that the Nazi brought back, something that his father gave his mother, something that he wanted to give Ellen. Whatever it is, he never gives it to me, he never mentions it again.

Over the next few months, we meet several more times. We meet in hotels. We meet at Holiday Inns, Marriotts, Comfort Inns, Renaissance Quarters, in the odd spaces that are between spaces, the there that is never there.

We meet in the lobby, awkwardly kiss hello, and then move to the glass atrium, or the inner courtyard, or the café, looking up at a surround of numbered doors, housekeeping carts making their rounds. We come from the outside and are plunged into a temperature-controlled environment where the potted plants are watered automatically, where they are rotated seasonally like crops, where everything is suspended in time — hermetically sealed.

Ever since Norman’s comment about my clothing, I worry about what I am wearing, how I look. I continually feel that I am being evaluated. I want his approval. There is something about him that I like — the bigness of him; he is grandiose, larger than life. Sometimes it scares me; sometimes it lures me into another world, a world of men.

There is something sleazy about it, meeting in the middle of the afternoon in these middle-of-the-road hotels. Does he think that these are safe places where no one will see us? Does he have something in mind? It is never clear to me why we are meeting in them.

“You don’t know what it does to me to look at you,” he says.

He doesn’t mean, The resemblance is amazing, or, I’m so proud of what you’ve done with your life.

“You don’t know what it does to me to look at you.” He says it in a strange way. He is looking at me and seeing someone else.

He never does anything to push it further but I am always thinking that he will. I imagine him saying, I’ve got a room, I want to see you naked. I imagine undressing as part of the procedure of proving who I am, part of the degradation.

I imagine him fucking me.

I imagine being Ellen and him fucking her thirty-one years ago.

I imagine something profoundly sad.

It is the strangest set of imaginings and I can tell he has them too.

I have read about this; it is not unusual for the primal experiences of parent and child to morph — the intensity, the intimacy of the sensations is often expressed in adults as sexual attraction. But while the attraction may be common, almost expected, obviously it cannot be explored.

He makes no mention of the blood test — the results can take eight to twelve weeks. He makes no mention of telling his other children about me. Instead he tells me about how fond he is of his grandchildren. He tells me how close he was to his grandmother. And again he tells me how Coach always used to tell him to stay in the game — never get out of the game.

He asks me if I’ve spoken with her.

“Yes,” I say. “Have you?”

He nods, yes.

“She wants to visit me,” I tell him. “She sends letters with fantasies about going to the Central Park Zoo, for walks by the ocean, out to dinner. She has no idea of how strange this is for me. And she’s unrelenting — she could take over my life, she could swallow me whole.”

He smiles. “She’s a stubborn lady.”

“She wants to know when the three of us can have dinner together.”

He says nothing.

“Maybe you two should have dinner sometime?”

Norman blushes. “I don’t think so.” He shakes his head as if to say, You know what would happen. If he so much as saw her again, they would be back at it. He is still afraid of the power she has over him. I have the sense that he has promised himself or, more, that he has promised his wife that he won’t see her. A lot more has happened than I’ll ever know.

He shifts in his chair. He is always uncomfortable.

“Old injuries,” he says, “from the war, from football. I can’t sit still for very long.”

There is a pause.

“My wife is jealous of you,” he says.

On the rare occasions when I call Norman and his wife answers the phone, she never acknowledges who I am, never asks how I am, never says anything beyond, “Hold the line,” and then goes off in search of him.

There are times when I’m tempted to say something, something simple, like, “And how are you?” or, “I’m sorry for all the trouble,” but then I remember that it is not my responsibility. I can’t do all the work.

“Hold the line.”

Ellen thinks I’m her mother, Norman thinks I am Ellen, and I feel like Norman’s wife thinks I am the mistress reincarnate.

In September of 1993, I am in a suburban Maryland emergency room with my grandmother, who has fallen and broken her hip. I’m checking messages while waiting for the radiologist to read her X-rays. Norman has left a message.

By the time I get back to my parents’ house, it’s late. I return the call. Norman answers the phone.

“How are you?” he asks.

I tell him about my grandmother.

“I have some information for you,” he says.

I say nothing. I am not in the mood for games.

“The test results,” he says.

“Do you want to tell me something?” I ask.

“Should we meet at the hotel?”

“Which hotel?”

“The one in Rockville.”

“Sure,” I say. “But why don’t you just tell me what the results are?”

“Everything is fine,” he says.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything is fine. We’ll talk when I see you. Tomorrow at four?”

Everything is not fine. My patience is running thin. All of this is a game, a game that Ellen and Norman are playing, and I’m the object in the middle, the thing tossed back and forth. He’s making it worse, throwing in a night of suspense, leaving me to stay up late, wondering. More than wondering if he is or isn’t my father, I wonder why I keep going back for more. I will never know the whole story. There is an enormous amount that no one is telling me.

I meet him at the hotel. We are in the fern bar, the glassy atrium — the scene is like something from a science-fiction movie, a futuristic bioenvironment, the lunchroom in a space lab.

“I have the results of the DNA test,” he says.

“Yes.”

The waitress arrives and takes our order. I want nothing.

“I’m fine,” I tell her.

“Not even some tea?” Norman asks.

“Not even tea,” I say.

“Water?” the waitress asks.

“No.”

Norman waits until his ginger ale arrives before he says anything.

“The test says it’s ninety-nine-point-nine percent likely that I’m your father.” There is a pause. “So what are my responsibilities?”

I am not a slice of pie.

“So what are my responsibilities?”

I say nothing.

Norman doesn’t mention his children, or how he is going to take me into his family, or give me the large gift behind Door Number Three. He sips his drink and stares at me.

“Now that I’m your father, I think I have the right to ask — are you dating anyone?”

“No.” I am unsure whether I am answering the question or refusing to answer.

“Have you told your children?” I ask.

“No, not yet,” he says.

I’m wondering if he meets his other children for tea in cheap hotels.

We leave without saying good-bye, without a plan for what happens next.

In October I am in Washington to give a reading. Norman finds out and leaves a message. “Fine thing,” he says. “You’re in town? Would you like to meet?”

I call him back. “Hold the line,” his wife says.

“Imagine that,” Norman says, picking up. “You and my daughter in the same newspaper on the same day.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“In the Gazette there are pictures of you and my daughter. Isn’t that something?” He sounds oddly proud, two of his children in the pages of the local paper.

“You and my daughter…”

I am the ghost, the one who does not exist. When I look in the mirror, do I see my reflection?

“Have you figured out how to tell them?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I’m still having a little bit of trouble with that.” He makes it sound like something he’s trying to fix himself, a car part that requires tinkering. I have the feeling that his wife is stopping him.

He changes the subject, dividing his families. He asks if I’ve spoken with Ellen.

“She’s threatening to move to New York.”

“Yep. She said something to me about it — she’s been up there a lot lately. I think she was going back for an interview just the other day.”

Hair rises on the back of my neck — I am suddenly cold. Ellen has not mentioned that she’s actually been in the city. The fact that she’s been coming into town and not telling me is more frightening than if I knew. Has she been hanging around outside my building watching me? Has she been tracking me from a distance?

If Ellen moves to New York I will leave. I cannot be in the same place as her.

“Would you like to meet at the hotel?”

“No. I’m going back first thing in the morning.”

Norman chuckles. “I just can’t get over it,” he says. “You and your sister in the same paper, what do you make of that?”

I am thinking of Ellen moving to New York. I am thinking of his other daughter, in the same newspaper. Washington is not safe anymore. New York is not safe. No place is home. I get in my mother’s car and drive. It is pouring rain. I drive, hurling myself through space, as though I am driving toward something, as though it is an emergency. I want to see the sister, I want to know what he is so proud of. It is rush hour, the streets are filled with water. On the radio the newscaster is saying, “We’re in the middle of a torrential downpour. There are power outages, flash flood warnings.”

The paper is local, deeply local. You can only get it in a small radius around where Norman lives — which is near where I will be reading. It is like a scene from a movie. I am obsessed, there is no stopping me. I drive past broken-down cars — police are directing traffic with flares. Oblivious. I am going to meet my sister — well, not meet her, but at least see her.

When I get to the shopping center near Norman’s house, I park the car and hurry into a little card store. I pick up a stack of copies of the paper and run back to the car.

The papers are wet, the newsprint sticks together, it shreds as I pull at it, the rain stains the pages, the sides bleed and blur. I find the picture of myself — it is the publicity photo from the book, strangely formal and out of place with what is happening now. I am there looking out, oblivious to what is happening now. I scan the page. “Dress Like a Doll.” The article is about a Barbie children’s fashion show at McDonald’s. There is a photograph of Norman’s granddaughter dressed like a Barbie. Norman’s daughter, my sister, is almost invisible. She is sitting on a chair, bending over, wearing a large hat that blocks most of her face. She is wearing white pants with some sort of polka-dotted thing around her waist, a scarf belt. Is she dressed right for a nice lunch? Does she own jewelry?

I look at the picture carefully — I see her fat thigh, her belly, her feet, her outstretched hand, and it is my thigh, my belly, my feet, my hand.

There is something deeply ironic and pathetic about the whole thing. I am staring at a piece of wet newsprint trying to see what my sister, who doesn’t even know she has a sister, looks like. There is an incredible sense of disappointment. She is in a McDonald’s with her kid dressed up like a Barbie doll, and all I can think of is the short story I wrote, A Real Doll, about a boy dating a Barbie doll. I was being ironic; she is being serious. And to top it off — Norman thinks this picture of his daughter taking her kids to a fashion show at McDonald’s is equal to an article on me giving a reading from my third book. His daughter went to finishing school, had a debutante coming-out ball, and now does “interiors.” She has fat thighs, a belly, and paws for hands, but I’m sure she dresses right for lunch. It’s depressing as hell.

Drenched, I return to my parents’ house. I have ten minutes to get ready for the reading.

I go alone. Ever since the night Ellen appeared without warning at the bookstore, I am afraid of what might happen. My parents want to come, but I excuse them. I am protecting them as well as myself. The library where I’m reading is en route to Norman’s house and just down the road from Uncle George. I have no idea if Ellen has told her brother about me or if they are even speaking. I never know who knows what.

Libraries are sacred, preserved spaces where people are supposed to behave well; they are trusted places for people who love books.

I am oddly ill at ease. From the moment I arrive, I have the sense they are there — exactly who, I’m not sure — but I can tell I am being watched, sized up. There is the strange sensation that something else is going on — there are people here who have come for a reason other than to hear me read. No one approaches me, no one identifies themselves or makes themselves known in any way. It is incredibly eerie.

The librarian introduces me and I stand to read. The lights onstage are bright; I cannot see far enough into the audience to memorize every face. I wish I had guards on either side of the stage, looking out on my behalf, reading the crowd, identifying faces, reporting into their lapel pins.

I read from a work in progress. The crowd follows closely. There are book club ladies, friends from high school, fans with first editions, people who are habitués of that library, but there is something else, some unnameable force field. I am on display, I feel myself being watched, scanned, and yet I am obligated to keep reading, to pretend I don’t know this is happening. Do they think I don’t know they’re out there, that I’m oblivious to them, that they are invisible, anonymous, in the dark?

I wish I could turn the lights around, shine them into the audience, I have some questions of my own. I am tempted to pull a Lenny Bruce, stop the show, and address the mystery guests, imploring them to reveal themselves — hey, you spies from the other planet, it’s October, the least you could do is put on a Halloween costume, maybe show up looking like a skeleton or something. But it would look as if I’d lost my mind.

At the end of the reading, the librarian asks if I am willing to answer questions from the audience. “I’d be happy to.” Hands go up.

I used to believe that every question deserved an answer, I used to feel obligated to answer everything as fully and honestly as possible. I don’t anymore.

“Where do your ideas come from?” someone asks.

“From you,” I say. The crowd laughs. I look at the woman asking the question; she seems innocent enough. I continue. “I get them from looking at the world we live in, from reading the paper, watching the news. It seems as though what I write is often extreme, but in truth it happens every day.”

There are questions posed as challenges, tests. I have the sense that depending on my answer, they might say, You’re lying, I know this and that fact about you.

I point to a raised hand.

“Do you write autobiographically?”

I feel the watchers zooming in.

“No.” I say. “I have yet to write anything that is truly autobiographical.”

They are taunting me.

“Are you adopted?”

“Yes, and I’m coming up for adoption again soon, so if anyone is interested, please let the librarian at the back of the room know.” More laughter.

“Do you know who your parents are? Have you searched?”

“I am always searching,” I say, “but no, I have not searched in that way.”

December 18, 1993. My birthday, the lightning rod, the axis around which I spin. I hold myself braced against it — an anticelebration.

How can a person with no history have a birthday? Are you sure it’s my birthday? Are you sure of how old I am? How do you know? What proof do you have?

I was born in 1961. My birth certificate was issued in 1963. Is that normal? Was there a delay because I belonged to no one, hovered in limbo land, waiting to become someone?

For those two missing years did I have another name?

To add to the confusion, my birthday is in the middle of the holiday season; it features not only all the standard natal elements, but also the ongoing and age-old battle of the Christians versus the Jews, which oddly turns out to be among the battles of my biological origins.

December, the season of joy, is the season of my secret sorrows.

Every year I cannot help but think of the woman who gave me away. I find myself missing someone I never knew, wondering, Does she miss me? Does she shop for the things I buy myself? Does my father know I exist? Do I have siblings? Does anybody know who I am? I spend weeks grieving.

At this point it would take nothing short of a national monthlong festival, a public parade celebrating my existence, to reassure me that my presence on this planet is welcome. And even then I’m not sure I would believe it, I’m not sure I wouldn’t doubt that it was an attempt to humor me, to temporarily cajole me out of a black hole.

And this year is something entirely new, more awful, like going back to scratch and starting all over again, a new birthday with an old child, the first with four parents instead of two, a schizoid dividing of the zygote further than the gods intended it to go.

Everyone is at me, wanting something.

My parents, who usually do nothing, are trying to plan a trip to New York. I quickly put them off.

And Ellen is calling me every night begging that she be allowed to see me, feeling that in some way this is her birthday too.

“It’s your birthday,” she says. “Please, pretty please.” And she starts to cry, and then there is the click of the lighter and “Can you hold on for a minute while I get a drink of water?”

She writes a letter saying that Decembers have plagued her for the last thirty-one years, she finds them excruciating, depressing, and so forth. And while it’s nice to know I was never forgotten, it’s stranger still that I am never known.

Norman calls asking if I’ve “got any big plans.” He says he is sending something; he has spoken with Ellen about what would be a good gift and he’s putting it in the mail — insured, overnight express, to be sure it gets there in time.

I spend the official day in hiding. I turn off the phone, I don’t answer the buzzer.

Later I go downstairs and find that people have left me flowers and gifts, similar to the way strangers leave offerings at scenes of tragic accidents. My friends have created a veritable altar to the birthday girl: an FTD Pick Me Up bouquet, a get-well card, and so on.

Norman sent a small heart-shaped gold locket, the kind that snaps open and you put two pictures in, the kind that you’d give a little girl. It is such a strange gift for a thirty-two-year-old. Is this jewelry? It is more like pre-jewelry, like a training bra. (For Christmas he will send me a thin cashmere sweater — which will make me wonder, is this the kind of “cashmere sweater” Ellen was referring to?)

Ellen sends a birthday card meant for a small child — shaped like a teddy bear, signed, “Love, Mommy Ellen.” She sends a kiddie card, a silky nightgown negligee like something Mrs. Robinson would wear, and a box of homemade candy from her favorite Atlantic City candy store. The chocolate is thick, heavy, rolled, filled — it looks like it could bend your mind. I can’t keep the things she sends me and I can’t throw them out either. I give the chocolate away. That evening I make each of my friends take a piece, like communion wafers, bits of the mother. “Here,” I say pushing the box forward, refusing to try one myself. “Take one,” and I watch to see how it goes down.

Christmas Eve — it’s a year since this started unfolding. I’m on the train to Washington — it’s packed, the mood is festive, the luggage racks are bursting with ornately wrapped packages. I’m bringing presents even though my mother has told me we don’t celebrate Christmas. The fact is we don’t celebrate Hanukkah either.

We handle the holidays by pretending they aren’t happening, by ignoring them. We hold our breath — it’ll pass. An invisible cloud hangs over the house, a depressed charcoal gray, like the set for a Eugene O’Neill play.

Some part of me thinks it’s not hard to have a decent holiday; you choose what holiday you like and you celebrate. Every year I become all the more determined that I will do it for myself, I will make my own holiday.

The winter I turned nine, I was fixated on having a Christmas tree. It made no sense to me that all up and down the block every house except ours had a tree.

“We’re Jewish,” my mother said. “Jews don’t have trees.”

“We weren’t always Jewish, were we?” Until then we’d always celebrated Christmas, a treeless Christmas, but Christmas nonetheless. I remembered leaving a plate of cookies for Santa, waking to find it empty, replaced by a long red stocking hanging from the fireplace, an orange bulging in the toe, walnuts spilling out the top, presents on the hearth. It wasn’t my imagination. Until then we’d been like everyone else, and then suddenly we were different.

“I was wrong,” my mother said. “It was my error. Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, we have Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights.”

“But the Solomons next door are Jewish too, and they have a tree.”

“That’s their problem,” she said.

It wasn’t as though we were especially religious. On Yom Kippur, the highest of the holy days, the Day of Atonement, a day of fasting, we paused only momentarily for God to count us in and then ate a late breakfast. But now, without warning, Christmas had changed its name to Hanukkah. It came early and lasted for eight days, like a plague.

We gathered around a menorah and lit the candles — no one knew the prayer; instead we said thanks. And thanks a lot. And is it returnable?

After the fourth night my brother refused to participate. “I’ve had more than enough,” he said, refusing to leave his room.

From my bedroom window I could see the neighbors’ tree twinkling with glass icicles, miniature white lights, colored balls, tinsel.

On the day after Christmas, my mother took me to the library. Next to the library was a Christmas tree lot. I sneaked over and talked to the guy. It took a surprising effort to convince him — on the day after Christmas — to take pity on a nine-year-old who lived in a house without a tree, but he finally gave me a puny Christmas tree. I dragged it to the car, stuffed it in the backseat, met my mother back in the library. I was bursting with excitement at my ingenious sneakery, beside myself with joy. Back at the house, I slipped out and was dragging the tree from the car, into the house, when my mother started yelling, “What are you doing? You can’t bring that in here, it’s a tree.”

“Why not, why not? It’s just a tree.”

“Not in the living room, you’re not going to put that in the living room.”

“Why can’t we be like everyone else?”

“Because we’re Jewish,” my mother said.

And so the tree went in my room. I knew nothing about trees, about tree stands; I put it in a Maxwell House coffee can. The tree listed to one side. I propped it against the wall. It was a pathetic tree, scrawny, a tree no one wanted. But it was my tree, my Charlie Brown tree. I loved my tree, I watered it, decorated it with construction-paper loop chains and popcorn on a thread. Despite my good care, the tree died; it went from green to brown and brittle. As I dragged the tree out of the house, the needles, once soft and supple, now sharp like thorns, fell everywhere. I dragged the tree out of the house, across the yard, down around back, and hurled it down the hill. Back inside, my mother already had the Electrolux out and was working the long wand, the power brush, up and down the hall.

And now, again, it is Christmas. Waking up in the twin bed of my childhood, I do not jump up and hurry into the living room to see what Santa has brought me. I lie there thinking, it is only one day, there is no reason that today has to be so awful, so different from any other day. I take a breath and tell myself I will make it good.

The telephone rings. I hear my mother in the kitchen, answering it. She calls my name.

“How are you? I just wanted to wish you a wonderful Christmas. What are you up to today?” Norman asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

I don’t think he believes me.

“I’m just getting ready to go to church with the family. Just on my way out but I wanted to say hello. Ho ho ho.”

There is a pause.

“Have you heard from the Dragon Lady?”

“She’s with friends in Atlantic City; they’re going to a show at one of the casinos, Wayne Newton or something.”

“Fine thing,” he says.

“Isn’t it?” I say.

“Listen, I don’t know how long you’re in town…I’m not going to be able to get together today, but maybe later in the week, if you’re still around, we can meet.”

“I’m not sure,” I say, thinking that at any minute I’ll spontaneously combust and leave a smoldering heap of ashes on the floor for my mother to suck up with her Electrolux wand.

“Well, listen, you have a nice day and we’ll talk soon.”

“Yeah, you too. Merry Christmas.” I hang up. Norman the good Christian is off to church, leaving his “other” daughter trapped like some Cinderella in the house without holidays.

I go into the kitchen. “Are you all right?” my mother asks.

“Fine,” I say, slamming the refrigerator. “I’m perfectly fine.”

“Do you want a bagel?”

I am picturing roasted turkeys, hams, a large luxurious dinner — too much pie.

“What does ham taste like?”

“It’s good,” my mother says.

“Why don’t we ever have ham?”

“Your father doesn’t really like meat — he thinks he’s a vegetarian.”

Despite my thinking I will make it a decent day, I cave in. Norman is going to church with his family and then having Christmas dinner, and they have a fucking Christmas tree. I know because late last night I drove by the house, and I saw the driveway filled with cars, a wreath on the door, a thousand lights inside.

In the afternoon, my mother does the winter equivalent of spring cleaning — she is on a stepladder in the closet. “Does any of this mean anything to you?” She shows me an old frying pan, a cookie tin, a chipped plate.

“No.”

“I’m thinking of going to a movie,” I say.

“Do you think you’ll get in?” my mother asks.

My father is in the living room reading. “What are you thinking of seeing?

“Schindler’s List.”

“I read a review that was negative,” my father says.

“Bye. Have fun,” my mother says.

“It’s not supposed to be fun. That’s why I’m going.”

I grew up convinced that every family was better than mine. I grew up watching other families in awe, hardly able to bear the sensations, the nearly pornographic pleasure of witnessing such small intimacies. I would hover on the edge, knowing that however much they include you — invite you to dinner, take you on family trips — you are never official, you are always the “friend,” the first one left behind.

The movie theater is crowded with families, with couples, young and old. I find a single seat in the middle of a row — everyone rises to let me pass. I’m sitting in the theater by myself, distinctly aware that I do not want to spend the rest of my life alone, frightened that I will never be able to make a life, that I am too fractured to connect with another person.

The film, taken from a novel by Thomas Keneally, is based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman, a Nazi, a womanizer, who ultimately turned around and saved the lives of eleven hundred Jews. I watch thinking of Norman, Norman as Schindler — German, Catholic, charismatic, charming, struggling with right versus wrong. I watch prison camp commandant Goeth, who shoots Jews for target practice, thinking of the randomness, the unpredictability, of history. Even those who seem decent or even perhaps heroic aren’t; instead they are human, deeply flawed. It is about the degradation of the soul, struggling to maintain some small sense of self amid so much loss, struggling to maintain oneself in a death camp, to remain human, alive, even in death. It is the Christians versus the Jews, the dividing of families, oddly relevant.

If Norman were truly the big guy, the good Christian he pretends to be, he would accept responsibility. He would tell his children that there had been a lapse in the marriage, but that something good had come of it — me.

On all sides of me people are weeping, and yet I am finding the film uplifting — it is equal to what I am feeling.

I drive home. The lights are on; I am in front of the house, the only house we ever lived in, in front of my family. I pull into the carport. I am so angry, so sad, hating everyone for who they are and for everything they are not. It is the rising of emotion, as everything I can’t articulate begins whirling inside me. I gun the engine. I imagine driving the car into the house, crashing through, desperate to get past what is blocking me. I am gunning the engine, wishing I’d take my foot off the brake; the car is straining under my foot. The car, a brainless machine, wants to go forward, to hurl itself blindly through the wall and into the kitchen. I picture the cabinets emptying out, dishes breaking, the engine punching through the back of the refrigerator, a headlight coming through the crisper door. I hope the dog isn’t in the kitchen, that no one has gone in for a snack. I sit with my foot on the gas, wanting to do it, and then thinking about my mother and my mother’s dishes, how much she loves her dishes, how much I love my mother, how I wouldn’t want to break the dishes and how it wouldn’t be quite the same if I went into the house first and emptied all the shelves and then came back out again and went crashing through.

I pull up outside the house and I don’t want to go home. There is no home, there is no relief, no sense of having simply survived.

Christmas is almost over. I do not want this to be the most depressing story ever told. I turn off the engine. I wait.

In January 1994, just after the new year, Ellen calls and asks, “When will you see me?”

I say, “Saturday.”

She is shocked. So am I. I’m not sure why I say Saturday; but in some way it feels inevitable. How much longer can it go on: When will you see me? Why won’t you see me? We need to meet in an agreed-upon way — and not in a kamikaze attack like the scene in the bookstore. There is no good time, no right time. I am repelled and I am also curious.

I say Saturday and immediately regret it.

She gets too excited. “Where will we meet? What will we do?” Ellen envisions the meeting as a fun-filled-day-in-New-York package — horse-drawn carriages, ice cream sodas, going to a show (by this she means a musical).

I’m thinking an hour, maybe two. I’m thinking a little bit will go a long way.

“Let’s meet at the Plaza,” she says. “At the Oyster Bar.”

The Plaza is a part of the fantasy — home of Eloise, four o’clock tea, a tourist attraction. The last time I was there, Zsa Zsa Gabor was in the lobby talking the man at the candy store into giving her free chocolates.

“Will you let her kiss you hello?” a friend asks.

“I don’t think so,” I say and then feel bad. “If she wants to kiss my hand, she can.”

All of the books on adoption and reunion say to arrange for someone to meet you after the reunion for a kind of deprogramming session, to pick up the pieces. I call a friend, a woman with children and grandchildren of her own, and arrange for her to meet me in the Oak Bar at 6 P.M. I tell her that if I’m not there, she’s supposed to come into the Oyster Bar and get me. This is in case the mother tries to somehow detain me, to put me under her spell, in case I lose my free will and have to be plucked from my mother’s clutches.

“Can I meet your mother?” the friend asks.

“Sure, I guess,” I say. It seems odd that the friend is more excited, more interested in meeting my mother than I am. It seems strange, but at the moment everything seems strange.

“No,” she says. “I guess that wouldn’t be right. You’ll tell me about her. And maybe take a picture.”

I would like to go as myself, not my best self or average self, but my worst self. In the end, I dress up. I am once again compelled to try to make a good impression. In some fantasy of my own, I want her to see how well I turned out, want her to be proud of me.

In the hallway outside the Oyster Bar she is wearing a fluffy white fur jacket, a printed silk blouse, and slacks, her hair piled high on her head in a post-beehive bun. She looks like someone from another decade — a woman who believes in glamour, who listens to Burt Bacharach and Dinah Shore to cheer herself up. I suspect this is the way she must have dressed when she used to meet my father — probably also in hotels — but now she’s fifty-five years old and a lot has been lost to time.

“Is that you?” she asks, breathless.

“I can’t believe it,” she says, her voice escalating beyond giddy and into a husky sort of mania — on the verge. “I can’t believe I’m seeing you.”

She takes my hand and kisses it.

Before anything else happens I want to run to a pay phone and call my friend. “Remember when you asked me if I was going to kiss her…well, she kissed my hand. Did she know we had that conversation? Is my phone tapped? Is this the difference between what one is born as and what one becomes, hardware versus software, nature versus nurture?”

She kisses my hand and I want to run.

I follow her into the restaurant. She orders a Harveys Bristol Cream, I order a Coke. I have never seen someone drink Harveys Bristol Cream. I only remember it from ads; suave couples in front of a fireplace, drinking Harveys.

I feel suddenly defensive; under her gaze, I sense I am not measuring up. She is sitting there in her old rabbit jacket and I am across from her in my best clothes. She never graduated high school and I have multiple master’s degrees. She is the one who for months begged to meet me and I am the one who avoided her. I tell myself it is not about surfaces. I tell myself everything will be all right.

“I’m having lobster,” she says.

“And what will you have?” the waiter asks.

“Nothing, I will have nothing.” I have nothing, I am nothing. Nothing suits me fine.

“Have lobster,” she says.

I am allergic to lobster. “Nothing is good,” I tell the waiter.

She talks about Atlantic City. She says that she has left her job — I don’t know if that means quit or was fired — and is going to open a beauty parlor with a couple of “wonderful operators.” She talks, about anything, everything, without the awareness that the person sitting across from her is both her only child and a complete stranger.

Her lobster arrives, she pulls meat from the claw, dips it into a silver pot of butter, and pops it into her mouth. She brings the claw to her eye, looking to see if there is more. Nothing is enough. I stare, wondering how she can eat. I can barely breathe.

“Did your father send you something for your birthday? He was going to send you something very nice.”

I can’t help but remember the gold-plated locket that’s appropriate for an eight-year-old. The gift, apparently, was her idea — they discussed it beforehand.

I am a thirty-two-year-old woman sitting across from my mother and she is blind. Invisibility is the thing I live in fear of. I implode, folding like origami. I try to speak but have no words. My response is primitive, before language, before cognition — the memory of the body.

Her lobster finished, she removes her plastic bib and orders another drink.

“I have to go soon,” I say.

She takes out a cigarette case and extracts a long, thin cigarette.

I check my watch.

“Will you ever forgive me?”

“For what?”

“Giving you away.”

“I forgive you. You absolutely did the right thing,” I say, never having meant it more. “Really.” I get up.

“I have to go,” I say. I flee, leaving the woman in the rabbit coat alone with her Harveys Bristol Cream.

“Will I see you again?” she calls after me.

I pretend I don’t hear. I don’t turn around. I walk out of the restaurant and cross to the other side of the hotel; I don’t breathe until I am safe on the other side.

My friend is in the Oak Bar. Several minutes pass before I am able to say anything.

“Well, what was she like?”

“I have no idea.” In retrospect, I think I was in shock.

“All you all right?” the friend asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me,” she says.

Someone else, another mind, might extrapolate from her demeanor, her gestures. All I can say is, “Dusty Springfield.”

“What would you have liked from her?” the friend asks.

“Literally? I would have liked it if she’d looked at me and asked, Is there anything you need, anything I can do for you, anything you want to tell me?”

“Did you make a plan to see her again?”

“No.” I will never see her again. Somehow I know that.

On Valentine’s Day the phone rings. “You can just go to the roof of your building and jump off.”

“Ellen?”

“I’m angry with you, can you tell?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t send me a Valentine,” she says.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to,” I say. “I didn’t send anyone a Valentine.”

“Well, all you had to do was go to the store and pick one out.”

“I’m not really sure why you’re so angry with me.”

“You don’t take good care of me. You should adopt me and take good care of me,” she says.

“I can’t adopt you,” I say.

“Why not?”

I don’t know how to respond. “You’re scaring me,” is all I can manage.

“Are you still there?” She asks.

“Yes.”

“Can you hold on while I get a drink of water?” Water. Her accent, her pronunciation long, a Maryland twang infused with the flavor of the Jersey Shore. Hold on while I get a drink of water. Was it water or was it Harveys Bristol Cream?

April 27, 1994, the mother’s birthday. Against the advice of friends who say that following the Valentine’s Day massacre I should do nothing to encourage her, I should keep my distance, I should be careful about sending mixed messages or any message at all, I feel I must do something. I want her to know that I care and am struggling with all of this, and that for the moment this is the best I can do. Not knowing the name of any florists in Atlantic City, I call FTD and try to send the very best.

“What is your name?” the woman asks. “Your name, address, and phone number?”

I give the FTD operator my name, my address, my phone, and realize that I am sweating profusely. I feel as though I am being interrogated. How many years went by when I didn’t know Ellen’s name, her address, her phone number?

“Yellow, pink, or red?” I am hating the operator.

“Red.”

“We can deliver this tomorrow.”

“No, it’s for next week. I want it delivered on the twenty-seventh.”

I’m ordering ahead, I want to be prepared, I don’t want to miss the date.

“Deliver on the twenty-seventh,” the operator says. “And the card?”

“The card?” Just asking me about the card makes me livid.

The card. “‘Happy Birthday, Ellen’—signed ‘A.M.’” I can’t bring myself to say “Love.”

“Just ‘A.M.’?” the order person asks. “Not, ‘Love, A.M.’?”

“No.”

“How about ‘Fondly’ or ‘Sincerely’?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say, “you’re good at this. ‘Fondly.’ That would be great.”

“Sincerely” sounds like a business letter. “Fondly” sounds slightly authoritarian, slightly condescending, like someone trying to be warm. Later someone tells me I could have said “Warmly,” but that too is flawed, like you’re intentionally holding back.

“Well,” the operator says, “it’s for a friend, right?”

And I think about it. I think about the difference in ordering flowers for a parent—“Happy Birthday, Mom.” That’s clean and clear, no confusion there. I think about ordering flowers for a loved one in glee, in passion, in slight regret.

“‘Fondly’ it is,” the operator says. “Hold for your total.”

It is more than I want to spend on a variety of levels. I hang up exhausted.

Over the summer, I am invited to meet Norman’s wife — like a date with the queen, only she is also the archetypical stepmother. Norman makes the arrangements. I will meet them at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington — yet another hotel, this time one of the oldest, most historic, known as “Washington’s second-best address.”

I arrive early, again auditioning, always auditioning, for a role that is never clear. The hotel is crawling with Secret Service — men in blue suits and red ties talking into their lapels. The external tension, the twittery buzz, humming headsets and walkie-talkies adds a surreal edge — a peculiar psychological reality — to the situation. A bomb-sniffing dog is led past me and into the ladies’ room. Maybe she really is the queen?

Norman is in the lobby, arms open, welcoming me as if this were his own home. He tells me he’s sorry but his wife will be late — there was a problem with the daughter, something vaguely medical and disturbing. We exchange small talk about traffic and parking. She arrives, he goes to her, like her footman, her servant, her guilty suitor, an alley cat dragging in his bastard surprise. She is not what you would expect a queen to be — she is dowdy and dour, a short, middle-aged woman — and from the moment we say hello, it’s clear that this is just a formality, that she is not interested in anything about me. She has already made up her mind.

Norman leads us not into the restaurant but into the pub that is part of the bar. We sit at a small round table, too small for a table of strangers. Norman is between us. The waitress comes. His wife orders half a sandwich and it is clear that this will be brief, this is all that any of us are getting. We each order half a sandwich and Norman has a drink.

“You seem like an awfully nice person,” she says.

I nod. I am nothing if not totally polite and respectful despite what I might be feeling — which is in part fear, the need for her approval, her welcome, some stamp of acknowledgment.

“Norman would like to take you around and introduce you to people, but you know he can’t,” she says.

Because it will embarrass you, I am thinking — because you will have to admit what happened.

Norman is sitting between us — I am more of him than she. He says nothing.

Later he tells me, “You and my wife didn’t hit it off,” as though it is my responsibility.

Meanwhile I get letters from Norman’s eldest son, his namesake — someone I describe as Mr. Christian Adoption. He has two children from Korea and prides himself on being a good guy, doing the right thing, telling me stories about what a great guy his (our) father is, asking if I want to see pictures of the others — playing the rebel offering to slip me contraband.

This is the boy who used to go out with Norman and Ellen. He is the one witness to it all. He was ten when everything fell apart. He thinks we have something in common — the fact that we share our father’s secret — the one contradiction being that I don’t share the secret, I am the secret.

Norman arranges for the three of us to have lunch at the country club near my parents’ house — a club I have never been inside because my adoptive parents are so politically opposed to country clubs that the “CCC” on the flag flying outside might as well read “KKK.” No blacks, no Jews, no one “other” is welcome here.

This is the world Norman lives in — faded but presumed aristocracy. The fact is, Norman is not upper class, he is overextended. (Oddly both Norman and Ellen are obsessed with class and glamour — and talk about themselves in relation to, and as though they have something in common with, figures of the 1960s like Frank Sinatra and Jackie O.)

Norman Jr., the number one son, looks nothing like his (our) father. His hair is dark, coarse, and his complexion swarthy by comparison. We drink iced tea, eat salads of iceburg lettuce and waxy tomatoes, and talk about “my people.” At a certain point, I feel like a white female Martin Luther King Jr. I want to join hands and sing, “We Shall Overcome.”

By that fall of 1994, the second autumn since we met, Norman still hasn’t told his other children about me.

He calls. “It’s Norman. I thought I’d call ya and tell ya that I have some news. I think we’ve sold our house and I think we’re going to be moving to Florida. But I want to talk to you when you have a chance. Uh, it’ll be in the next week — so will you give me a call? Thank you, doll. Bye-bye.”

At least when he’s in Washington I know where he is. I return the call. Someone else answers, a boy, a man — maybe my brother or a nephew. “Can I help you?” he asks.

“I’ll call back.”

In 1994, I write to Norman to tell him how disappointed I am that he has not done what he promised. My life has been painful enough — I have worked too hard to get where I am in the world to now be kept a secret, to be something that anyone is embarrassed about.

Norman never mentions the letter to me. I hear about it in a letter from Norman Jr.: “Whoops, I almost forgot to answer your question about your letter….” He tells me that my letter was opened by mistake by Norman Sr.’s youngest son, prompting a family crisis. Norman Jr. goes on to say that it was fortunate the letter was opened, that he too was tired of the secrecy and what I said to our father was typical of what an adopted child would say to a biological father under these circumstances: “I would have written the same letter, only sooner.”

We all drift — estranged.

In the middle of the winter Ellen calls—“You’d better call your father. I don’t think he’s going to last.”

They now have more of a relationship with each other than they do with me, the intensity of their ongoing interest a testament to the power of the attraction.

I send Norman a note; I get no answer. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive.

Norman Jr. writes asking if it’s okay to come to a reading I’m giving in Washington. I call and tell him that I’m happy to make a plan to meet him for a drink or lunch but that I’d rather he not come to the reading. I never hear from him again.

After the millionth phone call I ask Ellen to stop calling. I am happy to exchange letters with her, but no more calls.

“What if I go to the doctor and he tells me I have twenty-four hours to live — should I call?” she asks.

“Wait twenty-five, then call,” I say, half joking.

The fact is that whatever each of them is in this for has nothing to do with me — it is not about my need, my desire, and for the moment I have had enough.

In December 1997, a week before my birthday, she sends a birthday card. It’s a putrid pale pink with roses, the color of femininity, of a box of sanitary napkins. I have now come to officially loathe my birthday, to live in fear of what it might bring.

Dear Daughter

This card is being sent early as I am not sure I will still be here on the 18th of December. I go to Jefferson Hospital on December 4 for a kidney procedure. What the outcome will be I do not know. I am very scared about the whole situation. I have Chronic Renal Failure. Jefferson is in Philadelphia, PA.

Printed on the card — one of Hallmark’s best — is “I remember the first time I said, ‘I love you,’ to your face (I meant it for the rest of you as well). You had just been born, and I thought you were the most beautiful thing on earth. And in that little face of yours, I thought I could see the future. It looked beautiful too.”

I call Ellen.

“I canceled the procedure,” she says, explaining that it was some sort of diagnostic kidney test and that she was scared to do it alone.

I know I am supposed to offer to go with her. But I don’t. She asks if I’ve heard from my father; I say no. She says that he is doing well, in Florida. We talk briefly and then I find an excuse to get off the phone.

For her birthday, the following April of 1998, I send flowers — I have done this every year since she found me. This year I get no thank-you call. I call the florist to be sure that the flowers were received. I’m told that Ellen sent them back and exchanged them for a plant — she also told the florist to expect my call.

It is summer, 1998. I am on Long Island in a small rented house. It is early evening. I am talking to my mother when her call-waiting beeps. She is gone a long time.

“Hold on to your hat,” she says, coming back onto the line. “Ellen is dead.”

I am on the phone talking to my mother when she gets a call telling her that my mother is dead. It’s a little too much like a Gertrude Stein line.

The woman who delivered the news was a friend of Ellen’s. I call her for more information. She tells me that it was kidney disease. Ellen was in the hospital for dialysis, but apparently she checked herself out against medical advice, went home, and was found “moribund” on her sofa. Moribund—bound for the morgue. She tells me that Ellen’s brother was notified of her death and left Ellen’s body in the Atlantic City morgue for at least a day while he was at the U.S. Open in Forest Hills.

“He wasn’t playing in it, was he?” a friend later asks.

How could Ellen be dead? It makes no sense. The first thing I want to do is call her, ask what’s going on, and have her say, I had to do something to get your attention.

I call my lawyer and ask him to let Norman know. I don’t want to break the news or deal with his reaction.

The lawyer, ever professional, reports back that Norman “appreciated the news, asked after you, and said to tell you that he’d like to talk to you whenever you’re ready.”

I drive to Atlantic City with no idea what to expect. The cemetery is near the airport — there’s a brick billboard just outside.

Laurel Memorial Park

Atlantic City’s Most Beautiful Cemetery

For Information Call…New Public Mausoleum

Single Graves

Family Plots

Urn Garden Niches Available

According to her friend — who didn’t make it to the funeral — Ellen wanted a Jewish funeral. Instead she got a rent-a-minister in gray polyester pants presiding over a grave in the cheap part of an Atlantic City cemetery close to the airport. There are only four seats set up. Her brother, my uncle, arrives with his wife. He is wrinkled like a corn-husk doll and wears a seersucker suit. I extend a hand toward him.

“Remind me,” he says, knowing full well who I am. “What’s your name?”

I ask if any other relatives are buried in this cemetery.

“No,” he says.

I don’t tell him that I used to drive to his house, and turn the car around in his driveway, like tagging base, touch and go. I don’t tell him that I used to sit outside his white brick house — his picture-perfect prosperity — and envy him his Christmas tree and his basketball hoop. And I don’t tell him that his sister used to tell me how much she didn’t like him.

The rented minister does his thing and I find myself nodding along, saying “Amen” to everything, and trying to make a good impression on my uncle. The grave is open, waiting, the casket next to it, unadorned. I realize that I was half expecting a large show of flowers from Norman, something in the shape of a horseshoe.

I’m thinking Ellen is in there — in that coffin, paying attention. She knows she’s dead, she knows how awful it is — I remember her irreverent bursts of emotion, how she would say whatever it was she was thinking. It’s depressing as hell but I’m glad I’m there, if only to be witness to this woman’s life, the end of this woman’s life, to make note of it.

After the funeral, I buy a map and drive around Atlantic City, going to each of the addresses on her letters in chronological order. I find one of the houses and remember a picture she sent me along with a letter saying she was one block from the ocean. It is like déjà vu — I have been here before. The house tour is a downward spiral ending in a prefabricated semidetached town house at the tag end of the street by a landfill. At each location I take photographs — I collect information, images to organize, to comfort myself.

At her last house there are tomato plants growing outside, filled with ripening fruit. Through the kitchen window I see there are still lights on inside. I see groceries on the counter, big bottles of pills, Tootsie Rolls, and Gasex tablets. There is an inhaler on the counter, some cans of Ensure, a lighter. It looks like someone lives here. I go to the front door and ring the bell — why? From her front step, using my cell phone, I dial her number and hear the phone ringing in the house; her machine picks up — her voice on the recording.

Looking through the kitchen window and into the living room, I see something green, a plant decorated with blinking out-of-season Christmas lights. Is this the plant?

What is so sad is that this is a woman who I had to protect myself from while she was alive — and now she is dead and I am doing chin-ups outside her kitchen window, scrambling for clues.

From here, I go further, I look at Atlantic City — stopping at Lucy the Elephant, a wooden turn-of-the-century tavern looking out over the ocean, a window in her ass. I park, walk out onto a fishing pier; the clouds are doing what I call the God thing, splitting light into visible rays. I see dolphins in the distance. I end up in a casino dumping quarters into slot machines. It is getting late, and although I still cannot reconcile anything, I leave with more than what I came with.

A week later, Ellen’s lawyer and executor and supposed friend, who was also curiously absent from her funeral, agrees to let me into the house. I rent a car, bring some boxes, some plastic bags, and two of my friends for support.

“I don’t know what kind of relationship you had,” the lawyer says as he’s unlocking her door. “But I didn’t find much, just a few pictures. My wife and I went through it. She’s an antiques dealer, she said there’s nothing.”

The house has been ransacked — there are candles but no candlesticks, plates but no silverware, and the copper pots and pans I saw through the kitchen window are gone. The lawyer tells me that he and his wife have been organizing things, getting ready for a tag sale. Cleared of anything of material value, the house is still filled with stuff. There is the crocheted afghan that covered the sofa where she was found, lots of ugly candy dishes, weird plastic dolls with music-box bases, supplies from the failed beauty shop she opened a few years before, Christmas decorations. And there is a small blue vanity case — the kind of thing you’d see in a movie, Audrey Hepburn or Barbra Streisand carrying it through the airport, a bellhop following with all the other, larger bags. The case has a built-in combination lock and the latch was open — clearly someone had already looked through it. It is filled with the debris, crumbs of a life lived — encrusted with old makeup, bobby pins, a hair roller, a long-expired ring of birth control pills, loose coins. Either she or someone she knew was king of the silver dollar, because they’re everywhere, in every drawer of the dresser. The suitcase sums her up — it wouldn’t have surprised me to find pieces of Lego in there or parts of a broken toy. It was, on the one hand, a sophisticated piece of luggage, and yet its condition gave the appearance of having been used by a child, a girl playing an adult. I leave it behind — it’s too much, too intimate, like taking her toothbrush from its cup.

I go through the house, randomly putting things in boxes, my two friends trailing — asking what I want to keep, what I’m looking for. I am wandering, opening and closing closet doors, having no idea how to add it all up. Devastating, depressing — this was the sum of her life. On the inside the house feels impermanent, occupied by a transient, someone not living in the house but on it, like a squatter. It’s messy, as though a hurricane has blown through, and there’s no way of knowing if that was her or if someone had gone through it like a pirate, looting. There is nothing of substance — and I don’t mean value but solidity. Everything feels like it is made of paper, like it could crumble and blow away. The lawyer lets us into the house — and then about twenty minutes later he finds me and asks, “Will you be done in fifteen minutes?”

My friend takes him aside and says, “Look, this is her mother, this is as close as she’s ever been to her mother, so just give her a moment — if you have things to do, come back in an hour or so.”

I shoot photographs of everything, knowing this is it, the one time, the only time, the last time, and I have to try and capture what I can. I have to find a way to save it for later because I can’t deal with it in the moment. I photograph her bedroom and the things in her bedroom — closet, headboard (brass but unattached and leaning sharply forward). I photograph the top of her dresser — Excedrin, Johnson’s Baby Powder, perfume, candy, a China geisha, a bowl of loose change, and a stack of baseball cards! I photograph the insides of her dresser drawers — each stuffed with unfolded clothing — a lifetime supply of lingerie. I take pictures of her bathroom — thirty-two Chanel lipsticks and dozens of the strange little dolls that are all over the house, six-inches tall and dressed like colonial ladies, in wide skirts, with ruffles and, on their heads, lace hats, orange hair, and weirdly red, clown noses and circus makeup. I photograph the back of the bathroom door — her bathrobe and multiple shower caps. I photograph the other two empty bedrooms, filled with boxes, with stuff she’d clearly brought from the last place, cartons and shopping bags, wrapping paper, shoes still in their boxes. In a corner of the kitchen there is a menorah and then, just behind it, a crucifix, and in front a framed photograph of a dog. I use a half dozen disposable cameras, and when they are done I put the cameras in the boxes.

In the front closet, I find a fur: a stole, with her initials sewn into the underside in pink script. I imagine it was among her prized possessions, that Norman gave it to her. A luxury. It must have seemed glamorous when she got it. Now it looks old, mangy. I leave it hanging.

I take pieces of paper; boxes of paper, among them a receipt for a diamond ring from 1963; an old packet of what look like birth control pills, an arrest warrant, a package from Saks that must have arrived recently, two pairs of rubbery “slimming” underwear with the tags still on, one in black, one in flesh color. What size was she? A brown cashmere sweater exactly like the cream one Norman sent me for Christmas the first year we were in touch — the infamous cashmere sweater. In her bedroom her pants are hung over a chair, black jeans, not unlike the black jeans I often wear. They still hold the creases of her body. I put my hand in the pocket; there is a wad of money, loose bills, a pack of gum. This is exactly the way I keep my money. It’s the one thing my mother is always on me about: How can you keep your money like that? No one keeps their money like that — don’t you want to keep it in a purse? The wad is thick, jammed down into the bottom of the pocket — how many women in their early sixties keep money in a wad in their pocket? It creeps me out, this indescribable subtlety of biology. In her pockets I find the same things I find in mine.

I am reading a pile of clothes, a messy house, looking for information, clues.

I remember the writer James Ellroy talking to me about his mother’s clothing — getting his murdered mother’s clothing out of the police evidence room — years after the fact. He talked about taking the clothing out of the sealed plastic bags and wanting to smell it, wanting to rub his face with it.

There is a tendency to romanticize the missing person — to think about her is to allow her in. I hear her voice in my head — unreliable though she was, she is the only one who could explain to me what happened.

When I leave, I put four boxes of assorted paper into the rented car. I have no idea what I’ve taken, what it might add up to. I drive my two friends into downtown Atlantic City and take them out for dinner at one of the casinos. I feel indebted — I couldn’t have gotten through the day without them. The setting is surreal, a faux underwater ice palace. We sit staring at the slowly melting sea-creature ice sculptures surrounding us. The lighting constantly shifts, green and purple and blue — like Jacques Cousteau on acid. The three of us order the same thing — steak and baked potatoes; it’s as though we need a good meal to ground us. We are silent, stunned — it’s hard to know what to say after a day like this. In the end Ellen pays for the meal. I use the wad of money from her black pants, and whatever is left I leave as a tip.

That night in New York, I clean my apartment. Frantically, hysterically, I go through everything, throwing things out — I have shower caps from every hotel I ever stayed in, soaps, shampoo. I have everything that she had. I throw it all away. I cannot be like Ellen — it can’t all happen again the same way.

I think of the flowers she had turned into a plant, the plant I saw through the kitchen window, the plant with the Christmas tree lights turned on, and me, a Christmas baby, the thing that couldn’t be forgotten — did she leave the lights on for me?

I struggle with how to narrate the confusion, the profound loss of a piece of myself that I never knew, a piece that I pushed away because it was so frightening.

The autobiography of the unknown.

A couple of months later, I call Norman — he says, “Let me call you right back.” It’s the first time we’ve spoken since Ellen’s death. He tells me that he saw Ellen in Washington not long before she died. I have no idea if this was the first time they’d seen each other in almost forty years or if they’d been seeing each other repeatedly since their independent reunions with me. He tells me that he knew she was sick. The doctor had told her that she needed a kidney, and according to Norman, Ellen wanted him to ask me for one. He becomes adamant; she asked him and he said no. He told her that they couldn’t ask me for any favors, on account of how neither of them had ever done anything for me. He tells me he offered his own kidney — that he called his doctor and asked about it. I believe he asked his doctor something about it but beyond that it seems unlikely. We’re talking on his car phone because he’s afraid to talk to me from his home phone, but he expects me to believe that he could give Ellen a kidney — would he tell his wife, his children? I believe that when Ellen asked Norman, he said no at first and then agreed to ask me and told Ellen that I’d turned her down. That would explain a lot. It would explain why I didn’t hear from her before she died.

When I speak to Norman, I get emotional and think, Oh no, I’m reminding him of her. I tell Norman that I’ve had enough, that I can’t do this again, that I don’t want one day to get a phone call summoning me to another church, where I’ll stand in the back, unwelcome, and witness friends and family mourning the passing of a man I never really knew but was somehow a part of.

“I understand,” he says. “Call me. Call me in the car. My wife isn’t in the car very often — we can talk.”

“I’m not your mistress. I’m your daughter. And I’m not calling you in your car,” I say.

“Fine thing,” he replies.