Daughters’ Bodies
WHEN I’M about to go away to college, my grandmother dies and my mother silently puts herself up for adoption.
LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO ADOPT ME: Kind, lonely, beautiful woman in her 50s. Dead husband. No children. Cooks and cleans. 4’11 and 90 lbs. Guaranteed to take up no space. Call 609-538-1212 for further questions.
She writes the advertisement on the backs of index cards and covers them in shiny tape and pastes them with purple glue from Staples onto tree trunks two towns north of Princeton. I imagine her hiding stacks of white index cards at the bottom of her backpack, fitting her bag and body underneath a grey sweatshirt, her spine growing into a mountain. Waddling in her orthopedic slippers from tree trunk to tree trunk. Looking over her shoulder to make sure that the Chinese mothers she’s met through WeChat aren’t around (always behind their phones, always seated inside their identical kitchens and feeding their working husbands tasteless, clear broth every night). The Chinese mothers are always looking for opportunities to gossip about another mother’s sadness.
My father finds the ad when he’s walking back home from the airport. He’s just returned to New Jersey after spending a week in Canada lecturing ENTs on how to capitalize on the internet’s fascination with removing large masses of ear wax from our self-cleaning bodies. He chooses to walk home so that his time away from us is as long as possible, even if it’s just a couple hours more. When my mother called him three days ago, she asked him to stop going on business trips. (He’s getting old, and more importantly she is too). He calmly said that the extra money never hurt anyone. But over the years the trips have gotten longer and longer and the money, my mother complains to me, has stayed the same. He told us that he walks for the exercise, for the fresh air, for the opportunity to live longer. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there are bills rolled into his socks, sewn into the hems of his pants—the possibility of escape, green and sweaty, slapping against his skin wherever he walks.
When my father sees the index cards, he hastily removes them and puts them in his pocket. As he’s about to turn onto Cherry Hill Road, he finds one more index card (the last one, he’s certain). He takes out a pen and crosses out my mother’s cell phone number and pencils in his. I ask him about this weeks later, when it’s just the two of us watching TV in the family room. ? He shrugs and and hides his voice inside the crinkling of a newspaper. ? He sighs and says he was just curious. He wanted to meet a person who would want to adopt my mother. Maybe it would help him take better care of her. And all I can think to say is ? For a while my father doesn’t answer me, and when he finally does he just says that he has to go, that he is going to be late. ? He points the remote at the TV and presses the volume button with his thumb. I watch the little bar at the bottom of the screen fill up as it gets louder and louder.
