Swimming Across the Hudson (8 page)

“We can sit on chairs if you want.”

She seemed slightly embarrassed. “It's Ethiopian food, right?”

“Don't you like it?”

“I've never had it.” She reached into her pocketbook and took out a tissue, then rubbed it gently across her lips as though she were worried there was something there. She checked the pockets of her blazer to make sure the flaps weren't stuck inside. “They don't use utensils here, do they?”

“Do you want to go somewhere else?”

She hesitated. “We don't really know each other.”

“That's true.”

“Maybe next week.”

“Maybe next week what?”

“Maybe next week we can eat here.”

“Next week?”

“Or the week after.”

How long was she staying in town? Part of me hoped that she planned to stay forever, that she was uprooting her life for me. But if she told me that, I'd panic and bolt. It would be like a first date. You had just met, and the girl was already saying that she wanted you to meet her parents.

“There's a Chinese place across the street,” I told her.

Before I could say anything else, she was out the door and crossing Telegraph Avenue, weaving through the traffic.

But when we reached the Chinese restaurant, she changed her mind. The place was too dark, and the menu had pictures of all the items. “It's like Denny's,” she said. “It's the first time we've met, and I don't want to feel like we're eating at a Denny's.”

We walked up the street toward campus. We passed salad bars, taquerías, sandwich shops, and pizza joints. We stopped in front of
the restaurants and glanced at the menus, but at each place something else seemed slightly wrong. We were dancing around each other: You choose; no,
you
choose. We really must have looked as if we were on a first date, all elbows and knees as we walked up the street, unable to find the right distance between us, several times almost colliding with each other.

Finally we settled on a combination restaurant and music store across the street from campus. We sat on the landing, where the menu offered sandwiches, quiche, and fresh-squeezed juices. On the floor below us compact discs were for sale. Classical music came from the speakers.

“Do you feel comfortable here?” my birth mother asked.

“I'm fine,” I said. In truth I was nervous.

She closed her eyes. She was concentrating on the music, a plaintive strain of cello and violin. “Do you like classical music?”

“It's okay. My parents played it all the time when I was a kid, but I never really was interested in it.”

“I like classical music.” She paused for a few seconds. “What do you like?”

“In general?” I tried to think of a good example, but I couldn't come up with anything. I was uncomfortable with the conversation. It felt like an interview, my birth mother asking me lots of questions, trying too hard to learn who I was. “What do
you
like?”

“I like the beach,” she said. “I like a good meal. I like Italian food. I like getting the chance to meet you, Ben. That's what I like most right now.”

“I'm glad to meet you too,” I said.

“You don't have to be polite.”

“I'm not being polite. I really am glad to meet you.”

She smiled at me, then took a sip of water. “I like to read. I like to open a good novel before I go to bed.”

“What do you read?”

She thought for a while. “Danielle Steel and Rosamunde Pilcher.
I like the kind of book you can take to the beach.” She smiled tentatively, as if seeking my approval. “I like James Michener too.”

Danielle Steel. Rosamunde Pilcher. James Michener. I also love to read, I always have; on the way home from school, I often stop at the public library. I make sure to read at least a novel a week. I wished my birth mother had mentioned an author who surprised me—André Gide, Paul Bowles, even someone as popular as Jane Austen—anything to suggest we had more in common than I thought.

“I like Marcel Proust,” I said. Proust was a great writer, but I hadn't read that much of him. Was I simply trying to contrast myself with her, to make her tastes seem philistine?

“What else do you do?”

“I play basketball,” I said. I wasn't sure why I'd brought this up. Basketball was fine. I'd played in high school, and at Yale I'd spent a season on the junior varsity bench, getting beaten up under the boards during practice. I still played pick-up twice a week, but basketball wasn't my life. It wasn't the best way to describe myself.

“Your birth father played basketball.”

“He did?”

“I used to watch him on the playground after school.”

His image came to me, this man whom for years I'd thought of as Abraham. Every Abe I'd met, every Abraham: I'd examined him as if for a mark, wondering whether he was related to me.

“Did you love him?” I asked.

Her eyes grew moist. “Very much.”

“Didn't he love you?”

“For a while he did. For a while we both loved each other.”

“But then?”

She looked sadly at me. “Then we got older.”

What, I wondered, had gone wrong between them? If I'd been their son—if I'd
stayed
their son—maybe I'd have been able to patch things up.

We went to the counter to get our food and then returned to our table. My birth mother raised her sandwich to her mouth. “I want to know everything about you,” she said. “I want us to catch up.”

That was what I wanted too. So why did I feel compelled to tell her the truth? “We can't catch up.”

“Why not?”

“Because I'm thirty years old. We can sit here and talk. We can be cordial to each other.”

“But I want us to be more than cordial.” She reached her hand across the table. For a second I thought she was going to touch me. For a second I wanted her to.

“You've never been part of my life,” I said.

“I know that.” She looked downcast. She had her hand on her water glass. Her fingers made slender imprints in the condensation.

I could have told her that I loved her and that I didn't. Why had she brought me into this world? Why had she left me, and why had she waited? Why, right now, had she finally come back, this woman who was sixteen years older than I was, who sat before me after all her troubles and looked young enough to be my sister?

“Mrs. Green—”

“Please, Ben. Susan.”

“Susan.”

“Tell me what you're thinking.”

“I'm not thinking anything right now.”

“Then tell me the first thing that comes to your mind.”

So I told her that, when we were children, Jonathan would take a picture of me every month. “I used to line up the pictures,” I said. “I was trying to figure out the person I was becoming. I wanted to pinpoint the moment I changed.”

“I like the person you've become.”

“But you don't know me.”

“I want to
get
to know you.”

I wanted to get to know her also. But what if she tried to take
over my life? What would Jenny think—Jenny who had encouraged me to meet her but who hoped that, in doing so, I'd move on? I had no idea how you got to know someone when you were trying so hard to do just that. You could fail from all the effort.

Perhaps I'd grow bored with her. Or maybe she'd grow bored with me. If we'd met under different circumstances, we might not have had anything to talk about. What could be worse than being bored by your own birth mother?

“How did you find me?” I finally asked.

“I tracked you down.”

“Right, but how?”

She cupped her hand in front of her face as though she were about to tell me a secret. But I knew no one in the restaurant besides her.

“I hired a private detective,” she said.

“To follow me?”

“To find out where you were.”

“Susan.” Had someone been following me to and from school? Had this person been peeping through the windows? I was angry with Susan, although at the same time I was touched that she'd tried so hard to find me.

“It was the only way to contact you,” she said. “For a while when you were small I was living in New Jersey, and I used to take the bus across the George Washington Bridge and come down to Riverside Park and watch you. But then I moved to Indiana.”

“You used to watch me?”

“I was always careful. No one knew who I was.”

I used to see strangers in Riverside Park, idle men and women sitting on the benches, feeding bread crumbs to the pigeons. One of those strangers might have been Susan. My parents had warned me not to talk to strangers. I'd heeded their warnings with such diligence and fear that even when I was asked what time it was I looked down at the pavement and kept walking. Children could be kidnapped,
just like Patty Hearst. Had Susan thought of kidnapping me? I'd read about birth parents who changed their minds and tried to retrieve their children.

“Is the detective still following me?”

“He found you,” she said. “I don't need him anymore.” She stared down at her lap. “I'm sorry.”

She sounded sincere. I didn't know what to do other than to tell her I forgave her.

“A week ago,” I said, “I found out you weren't Jewish.”

“You thought I was?”

“It's what my parents told me. I believed it all my life.”

“Your parents don't approve of me, do they?” She'd left a tiny slice of turkey on her plate, pale and milky as a sliver of moon.

“Why would they disapprove of you? You're the person who brought me into the world.”

“That's true.” She seemed happy to hear me say this.

She told me that her ancestors had come from Scotland, and I in turn told her about my Jewish heritage.

“I stopped being religious in college,” I said. “But when I was a kid, I thought I'd be a baseball player in the spring and summer, and a rabbi the rest of the year.”

Then I told her about Jonathan, Jenny, and Tara.

“I know about them,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You already mentioned your brother.”

“And Jenny and Tara?”

She seemed to regret having brought this up.

“Your detective?”

She nodded.

“Susan—”

“I'm sorry. But I would like to meet them.”

I wanted her to meet them too, but I wasn't pleased that she already knew about them. I considered laying down some ground
rules. We'd meet only so often and in certain locations; we'd meet on my terms or we wouldn't meet at all. But I couldn't get myself to do this. I kept thinking of myself reversing our roles, treating Susan as if she were my child: This much TV, be home by midnight, don't dye your hair green, no beer in the house.

“Why did you track me down?” I asked.

“It seemed time. When your child dies, it gets you thinking.”

“I'm sorry.” I'd forgotten that her son had died. I wanted to tell her I'd do all right by her; I'd try not to let her down.

“There are articles about this. When a child dies, the sort of strain it puts on a marriage.”

Was she talking about her own marriage?

“Another reason I've flown here is that I make earrings, and some stores in San Francisco want to sell my work.”

“Is something wrong with your marriage?” I asked.

“My husband and I are on a trial separation.” She looked embarrassed. “I'm not good at much, am I?”

“Of course you are.”

“Like what?”

“You just told me about your earrings. You live in Indiana, and stores in San Francisco want to sell your work. You must be good at that.”

“But important things.”

“That's an important thing.”

“Is your work important to you?”

“Sure it is.” I told her I was a schoolteacher.

She seemed about to say she knew this as well.

“What happened after I was born?” I asked.

“I was sad for a long time. I was in eleventh grade when I got pregnant with you, and when I started to show I dropped out of school. You almost had to then. Times were different.”

“And afterward? Did you go back?”

“I got my GED. I'd always planned to graduate from college, but
things didn't work out that way. I spent a year in junior college and a year in secretarial school. Then I met my husband, and we moved to Indiana for his work. He's a manager at a bank, and he got me a job there. I've been able to save some money.”