“We were thinking of inviting over a bunch of friends who don’t have anywhere to go,” Sunita said.
“An orphans’ dinner,” Maribeth said. She used to host them all the time, first with Elizabeth, and later, with Jason. Epic meals, with ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty people crowded into the loft. Raucous games of charades and Balderdash. Lots of wine. Everyone sprawled on the floor watching movies. A midnight buffet of seconds that decimated any hope of leftovers. (Jason had taken to roasting a second turkey the Friday after just to have sandwich fixings.)
“Yeah, an orphans’ dinner. I like that,” said Todd. “Only we don’t know how to cook a turkey.”
“And we thought if you weren’t doing anything,” Sunita said, “you could come, too.”
“And make the turkey?” Maribeth asked.
“No,” Todd said. “We don’t want you to give us the fish; we want you to teach us to fish, sensei.”
“And we want you to come, too,” Sunita added. “But we weren’t sure if you were, you know, an orphan.”
That morning, Janice had called with disappointing news. The Jewish adoption agency had no record of her. It was a minor setback, and yet it had unmoored Maribeth. For a moment, she had this panicky feeling that her existence had never been registered. “No, no, no. It just means you were adopted through some other avenue,” Janice had reassured. “We’ll check the other agencies and initiate that search with the Orphans’ Court.”
Maribeth contemplated Todd and Sunita’s invitation. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do about the holiday, but as to the question of her orphanhood, that would appear to be a yes.
30
Janice was late. She’d told Maribeth to meet her at four by the fountain in the courtyard of some municipal building downtown, but at four-fifteen, the leaden sky was darkening and there was still no sign of Janice. Maribeth shivered, and scowled, trying not to stare at the couple on the bench opposite her, who were engaged in some serious heavy petting. She felt the pelt of the first icy raindrop, the weather a perfect reflection of her mood.
Janice arrived a half hour late, apologizing for her delay, which she attributed to a printer malfunction. Given that what she was printing had been Maribeth’s paperwork, Maribeth could hardly complain.
“Perfect timing, too,” Janice said. “It’s about to rain.”
“Yes,” Maribeth said, looking at the couple, who did not seem to mind the rain one little bit. “Let’s go inside.” She started toward the building but Janice steered her back toward the street.
“The Orphans’ Court is across the way,” she explained. “I wanted to meet here because it’s one of my favorite spots in the city. Isn’t it lovely?”
“Maybe when it’s not raining,” Maribeth said.
“Oh, dear. If you subtract points for rain in Pittsburgh, nothing will be lovely. The courtyard is so peaceful. You’d never guess it used to be a jail.”
Another couple entered the courtyard, holding hands and pausing to exchange a long, wet kiss.
“And what is it now?” Maribeth asked. “A hotel that rents by the hour?”
Janice laughed. “A courthouse, but the marriage registry is right around the corner. You know how young love is.”
“I seem to faintly recall,” Maribeth said.
More than faintly. There’d been a similarly kissy couple in front of her and Jason when they’d applied for their marriage license in New York. Maribeth had averted her eyes but she could not avert her ears: the lip-smacking, the cooing.
“What is it about lines that makes people lose all inhibition?” Maribeth had whispered to Jason.
“Relieves the boredom,” Jason had replied. “We can do it, too. Give us a kiss, Maribeth Brinkley.” He leaned in, lips puckered.
“Maribeth Klein,” she’d replied, pushing him away.
“There’s still time to change your mind. Maribeth Brinkley. Sounds nice.”
“Sounds Waspy.”
“When we were in college you said you couldn’t wait to get rid of your culturally confused name.”
Well, yes. It was a peculiar name. Klein, so Jewish. Maribeth, so goyish. At least she didn’t have it as bad as a girl from her Hebrew School named Christine Goldberg.
“That was then,” she said. “People know me now professionally as Maribeth Klein.”
“You can still be Maribeth Klein on the masthead.”
“I’m not taking your name!” Her voice was sharp, cracking through the echoey hall. Even the PDA couple came up for air to see what was going on. In a softer voice she added, “I mean, what if we split up? Then I’m stuck with it.”
He didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at the couple in front of them who now had their hands in one another’s back pockets. Then, in a quiet voice, he said, “We’re getting our marriage license and you’re thinking about breaking up?”
“I’m not. The waiting in line is making me nervous,” she’d said.
What she didn’t say: though we did break up once before.
THE ORPHANS’ COURT was housed in a stately historic building, full of deep rich woods, marble, and brass, all of it looking freshly polished. Two bronze lions stood sentry over the entrance and a giant stained-glass window of a woman floated over the lobby. It was apparently from a famous artist. “The name of that one is Fortune at Her Wheel,” Janice said, as they waited for the elevators. “Which is fitting to our endeavors, no?”
Maribeth didn’t answer. She felt sick with nervousness, as if the elevators would open onto the fifth floor and her birth mother would be there waiting.
But there was just another lobby, pretty if a little shabbier than the one down below. Janice announced herself and Maribeth, and after a short wait, a woman came out to collect their paperwork and have Maribeth sign a form.
“That’s all?” Maribeth asked after the woman returned to her office, saying she’d be in touch.
“For now,” Janice replied.
A bleakness had fallen over Maribeth. This whole process was just dispiriting. Half of her wanted to get far away from Janice, from all of this, and the other half didn’t want to be alone.
They found a deserted café and Maribeth ordered a coffee for herself and a decaf pumpkin spiced latte for Janice. Then they huddled into a corner table.
“Are you okay, dear?” Janice asked, patting Maribeth on the hand.
Maribeth nodded.
“I imagine this stirs up a lot of feelings, thinking about your birth mother. And everything is worse around the holidays.” She paused and slurped her drink. “You might think about starting your letter.”
“My letter?”
“The one you’ll write to your mother when you locate her, explaining who you are, why you’re looking for her. It might help you process.”
“Did it help you?”
Janice stirred her drink with the wooden stick. She had not been forthcoming with her own story but it was obvious to Maribeth that she too had searched for her birth mother.
“Yes, it did,” she said at last.
“I don’t know what to say,” Maribeth said.
“Just speak from the heart. Tell her about yourself, your family. Whatever feels true to you.”
Maribeth tried to imagine writing the letter. She knew she was supposed to be the tearful abandoned daughter, full of questions, but really, all she wanted to know was if anyone else had had heart disease. It was as much for her children now as for her.
“You know,” she told Janice. “I think I conceived my children on Thanksgiving.”
“You did?”
Well, she couldn’t say for sure it was on Thanksgiving. And the procedure by which Dr. Simon had implanted the fertilized embryos into her uterus could only be called conception in the most science fiction of contexts. It was their fourth, and last, IVF try. They were out of patience, time, money. They’d had to ask Jason’s mother for a few thousand dollars to cover this last one. Nora had given them the money, but in return, had real
located a diamond tennis bracelet that she’d apparently willed to Maribeth to go to Lauren instead.
The implantation had taken place the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. When it was over, Dr. Simon had patted Maribeth on the belly. “Third time’s a charm.”
“It’s the fourth,” Maribeth had said glumly.
She didn’t think it would work. She’d been abstaining from drinking but that year she got rip-roaring drunk on Thanksgiving. She woke up the next morning, puking. “I think it took,” Jason said. “It’s too soon. I just drank too much,” she’d replied. But a few weeks later, she tested positive. Even then, she didn’t believe it would stick. She’d been pregnant before and had always miscarried before the sixth week. When the ultrasound showed two beating hearts—they’d never had heartbeats before—Jason had joked that it was the getting drunk that did it. “Maybe we should’ve been doing that all along,” Maribeth had said, laughing. “Getting wasted and humping in the backseat of our parents’ car.”
Telling Janice now about the false starts, the misses, put a lump in her throat. She swallowed it down with her lukewarm coffee. “The thing is, when my kids were born, when I saw them, I thought, Yes. This was why. It was like all those other zygotes that didn’t implant had been impostors. These had been my children all along.”
She looked up, surprised to find tears glistening in Janice Pickering’s eyes.
What a fraud Maribeth was, peddling a story of loving motherhood. Look at her now. Her strength was back. And she was still here.
“I wonder if that’s even true or if I just needed to believe it was,” she said.
“Are those two things really so different?” Janice asked.
31
She tried. She tried to write her birth mother a letter. But it felt like writing to Santa Claus, as an adult, and a Jew. What was she supposed to say?
She had no idea. So she put the letter aside and instead wrote to the twins.
Dear Liv and Oscar,
The Thanksgiving decorations are up here. Across the street, there’s a turkey made of balloons, not like Macy’s balloons but actual balloons. Do you remember last year when, Oscar, you asked why there were no presents on Thanksgiving? I think Daddy said it was the one holiday the corporations hadn’t co-opted and I think I’d said Hanukkah and Christmas were right there so we didn’t need to have presents on Thanksgiving, too.
But the real truth is that we got you two on Thanksgiving. It’s not when you were born but when you were conceived. (One day that will make sense.) So how could any present compete with that?
She laid down the pen. Because what she wanted to write was that she was sorry. Sorry for ruining this Thanksgiving. Sorry for ruining every Thanksgiving so far.
She had not lied to the twins. She really did consider them the ultimate Thanksgiving gift, the source of so much of her gratitude in life. Which was why it was so bewildering that every single Thanksgiving since they’d been born had been awful. One year worse than the next.
The first Thanksgiving they’d all trekked up to Jason’s sister’s—the orphan dinners discontinued without any discussion. Lauren’s kids had wanted to hold the twins and Maribeth hadn’t wanted to be that mom, the one who was obsessive with the hand sanitizer, and as a result, Oscar and Liv had come down with matching colds, and Maribeth had spent the holiday holding, walking, and nursing two cranky infants. “The days are long but the years are short,” one of Jason’s aunts had said. Which she’d found hard to believe given that the weekend alone felt like it might last a year.
The following Thanksgiving, her parents had come to visit and to “help” with the food prep and childcare, no small feat as Oscar and Liv were now fifteen months old, heat-seeking missiles of destruction. Maribeth had left others in charge for twenty minutes to take a shower, and when she’d come out, Oscar had managed to tip over the cooling turkey. It had taken a half hour to rescue the bird, an hour to calm Oscar. When they went around saying what they were grateful for, Maribeth, feeling spiteful, had said, “Pass.”
Which she regretted. Particularly because by the following year, her father was gone. Which was why she and Jason and the twins had flown to Florida to be with her mother. Upon their arrival, her mother had announced that after fifty years of preparing food for others, she had retired from kitchen duty. Maribeth, she said, was welcome to cook the meal. Maribeth had stayed up until two a.m. the night before finishing a freelance story so she wouldn’t have to work over the holiday and had spent eighteen hundred dollars they couldn’t really spare on the airfare. She knew her mother was in mourning, but that didn’t prevent her from wanting to kill her. They wound up eating the most depressing meal in history at a near-empty restaurant in downtown Boca.
Last year, they went upstate to see Jason’s father, and it hadn’t been bad. Now working at Frap, Maribeth had been forced to bring work with her, but Jason and Elliott had kept the kids entertained so she could focus on work and the cooking. On the drive home, she was trying to finish up an edit. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she’d caught a glimpse of Liv coloring and smiled for a moment, savoring the connection, mother and daughter, hard at work.
“Did you have fun?” she asked.
“No. You worked. You always work,” Liv said. Her tone was mild but that made the accusation punch even harder.
She put the article aside for the rest of the drive, and that night she stayed up late trying to finish it.
“Come to bed,” Jason said.
“In a minute,” she replied, tapping the page with her pen.
“I thought you did that in the car.” When she didn’t answer, he said. “Liv?”
There was something to his tone. Simultaneously scolding Maribeth for letting a three-year-old best her, and admiring the three-year-old for being that powerful. “She’s going to give us a run for our money, that one,” Jason added, smiling.
People often said this. Though usually it was directed to Maribeth: “She’s going to give you a run for your money.”
As if she didn’t already know.
32
Thanksgiving morning, Maribeth decided to show her gratitude by taking a bath. It had been nearly seven weeks since her surgery, and she remembered from the brochures Dr. Sterling had given her that six weeks post-op was like the twenty-first birthday for the cardiac patient, the date after which many previously forbidden activities—sex, bodily immersion in water, strenuous exercise—were permitted.
As she waited for the tub to fill, Maribeth inspected her naked figure in the mirror. Though she had gained some weight back, she was still thinner than she’d been in years—she could tell by the daylight blinking between her thighs—but it wasn’t an enviable skinny. And even if it had been, there were the scars. She had three of them now: the pucker on her leg, the angry welt up her chest, and the pale white smile of her C-section.
“Scars are just tattoos with better stories.” Again, she was reminded of what Jason had told her when she’d first showed him her crosshatch of stitches after the twins were born. She’d been worried he’d think she looked disfigured (she thought she did). And then he’d said that lovely thing.
Her scars now were worse. Or would be. They didn’t even look like scars yet, more like wounds. If they had stories to tell, they were still being written.
Maribeth eased into the tub, grabbing a couple of the magazines Todd had given her yesterday when she dropped off the Thanksgiving shopping list. She’d promised to help them dress and stuff the bird, but after that, they were on their own. She was skipping Thanksgiving this year.
She was skimming an important piece of reportage about the fashion evolution of Nori Kardashian West when she heard the pounding at her door.
“M.B., are you there?” It was Todd.
“Yeah, hang on.” She heaved herself out of the tub, toweled off, and threw on her dirty clothes.
Todd and Sunita were at the door, staggering under the weight of the most enormous turkey she’d ever seen. It look
ed like a defrocked poodle.
“I thought you wanted to put it in at noon,” Maribeth said. “Though that thing is huge, so maybe you’ll need more time.”
“A lot more time,” Todd said.
“It’s completely frozen,” Sunita explained.
“Didn’t they have any fresh birds left?”
“It was fresh last night.”
“What happened?”
“It was too big to fit in our fridge so Sunny thought we should leave it on the windowsill,” Todd said.
“We wouldn’t have had to get such a huge bird if Todd had gone shopping earlier in the week when there was more selection, like M.B. said we should,” Sunita said, her tone equally scornful.
Last night it had dropped to the twenties. Maribeth gave the bird a good knock. Yep. Frozen solid.
“What do we do?” Sunita asked.
“Defrost it somehow,” Maribeth said.
“It doesn’t even fit in our sink,” Sunita said.
She thought of her bath tub. “Maybe try the tub.”
“We thought of that. Ours doesn’t have a stopper.”
“Mine does. Better bring it in.”
The bath was still full, the water grimy with gray bubbles. Todd wrinkled his nose. “I don’t mean to be picky, but I think Fred deserves a fresh bath.”
“Fred?” Maribeth asked.
“He named the turkey,” Sunita explained.
She drained the water, quickly scrubbed the basin, and filled it with fresh water. Todd gently laid the turkey in. “That’ll warm you up.”
“You do realize it’s dead?” Sunita asked.
Todd covered the bird’s wings with his hands. “Obviously. But he doesn’t know,” he mock whispered.
Maribeth went to get herself a cup of coffee. When she saw her range, with a half-sized oven that was the same as Todd and Sunita’s, she went back into the bathroom.
“I’m afraid you guys have bigger problems than Frozen Fred.”