The Russian Word for Snow Read online

  "Two or three." But I'd already calculated the number of tries against my mother's money, and knew I'd keep going until I'd used every bit of it.

  Grisha

  "The people who have successful adoptions are patient, willing to be flexible, and are not easily discouraged," said the woman at the front of the room. She was wearing a baggy sweater and a paper badge that read: "Hello my name is Maggie." Beside her, printed on a flip chart, was the question, "Is Adoption for You?"

  I was sitting on my coat and the backs of my legs felt itchy and hot. Ken and I had arrived too late to get a seat at the big table in the center of the room, and we'd had to squeeze into a row of chairs that had been added along the wall.

  The room smelled of wet wool and the green powder that the janitors would use to sweep the floors in high school. Someone had written, Gung Hay Fat Cboy, the Chinese for Happy New Year, across the blackboard.

  Beneath fluorescent lights, couples close to forty and single women with resolute expressions were writing Maggie's words into notebooks. Ken had handed me a pad when we sat down, but I hadn't gotten any further than the question on the flip chart.

  I was three months away from my in vitro appointment.

  In the weeks following the orientation at the fertility clinic, I'd started calling adoption agencies I found in the yellow pages.

  "Please send me your materials," I'd say. And my mailbox would fill with photographs of adoptable children.

  "Would you like to make an appointment?" the bright-voiced women at the other end of the line would ask me.

  "Not yet," I'd tell them. "I still have other options."

  I'd known only one person who was adopted. She was the daughter of friends of my father's; people who were not related to me by blood, but seemed to be because I'd known them all my life. This adopted girl was tall and dark, and when she stood next to her short, fair parents, she made me think of the object that doesn't belong on an IQ test—the carrot in a row of apples.

  Maggie was writing on the flip chart with a marker that left the sharp smell of ink in the room. On one side of the page, she printed the words Domestic Adoption, on the other, International Adoption. Beneath them, she wrote Risks in red ink. Each time she lifted her hand, the sleeve of her sweater slid down her arm.

  "Birth mothers are your biggest risk in domestic adoption because they can always change their minds." Maggie printed Birth mother below the red Risks.

  "In international adoption, it's the instability of foreign governments." She wrote Political Instability beside Birth mother, and drew little red arrows radiating from the words.

  "My agency handles international adoption, mostly children from Russia and former Soviet bloc countries."

  Maggie tossed a pile of brochures on the center table.

  The woman sitting in front of us turned to pass one to me. I noticed that she kept a hand on her husband's arm, as if to keep him in the room.

  Maggie had used a picture of herself on the cover of the brochure; her pale eyes and dull brown hair looking much the same in black and white as they did in person. In the photograph, she was holding the hand of a small boy wearing the kind of hat that's sold at Disneyland: a black beanie with plastic mouse ears. The hat was too big for the boy, and it made him look shrunken and elderly.

  Inside the brochure, Maggie described Russia as bleak and degenerating. Delays are to be expected, she wrote. It is not uncommon for adoptions to be stalled or never completed.

  I'd heard about this meeting on the radio while driving across

  34 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  the Golden Gate Bridge. I'd had to keep repeating the phone number over to myself until I could stop and write it down.

  "We should go to this, just to see what our options are," I told Ken.

  "But I thought we weren't planning on adopting."

  "We're not." I did not tell him that I believed going to an adoption meeting would help me get pregnant, the way that women who adopt suddenly find themselves pregnant.

  Maggie turned the flip chart over to a clean page.

  "These are the documents you'll need for an international adoption: Certified originals of birth certificates and marriage certificates." She scrawled the words in black ink, putting a little check mark beside each each item. "Notarized financial statements. Copies of federal income-tax returns. Letters of recommendation." She filled the page with check marks like a child drawing a flock of birds.

  I watched a nearsighted woman whose glasses reflected so much light that her eyes seemed to float. She was moving her pen quickly across the paper. I could hear it scratching like a small, nervous animal.

  "Then there's the paperwork required by the Immigration and Naturalization Service."

  Maggie wrote 1-600 Orphan Petition at the top of the paper and started a new list beneath it, writing so fast I couldn't keep up.

  "We are never going to have a child," I whispered to Ken.

  He smiled as though I'd said it to make him laugh. Then he reached for my leg, but patted my folded coat instead.

  Maggie turned back to the page that read "Is Adoption for You?"

  The nearsighted woman was nodding her head, as though the question had been asked aloud.

  "I just received a tape of Russian orphans." Maggie pointed to a portable television in the corner. "It'll be on in the back of the room."

  She snapped the tops back onto her markets, and everyone closed theit notebooks.

  The woman in the thick glasses stumbled over a chair rushing to speak to Maggie. I pulled my tights away from the backs of my thighs, and went to watch the videotape.

  On the screen, a small blond boy in blue overalls was trying to walk. He took a few heavy-footed steps, and fell face first onto an Oriental carpet. I waited for him to push himself up and try again, but he didn't move. He just lay there, crying into the elaborate pattern of the rug. Behind him, the thick calves of a woman in a white coat moved back and forth, busy with something else.

  The woman who'd been holding onto her husband's arm made a little "aww ..." sound.

  Ken was looking through a binder of children's photographs. The children in the pictures were dressed in tetry-cloth jumpsuits, and had neat lines in their hair, marking where someone had passed a comb. I watched their small, serious faces appear and disappear as Ken turned the pages.

  "Cute," he said without much conviction.

  "This is the fourth adoption meeting we've been to," said a man in a leather jacket. "China, South America, Vietnam, now Russia." He ticked the countries off on his fingers.

  Ken pushed the binder over to him. "Here."

  "Thanks."

  Ken touched the man's leather shoulder.

  "Let's go," he said to me.

  "Single-parent adoption is possible," Maggie was telling the nearsighted woman, "at least for now." The woman leaned in close, trying to focus on each word as it came out of Maggie's mouth. "But all that could change. The Russians are always changing the rules."

  "Good night," Ken told her.

  I took my umbrella out of a metal wastebasket. It was still wet.

  "Thanks." I followed Ken to the door.

  36 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  "You know," Maggie said to our backs, "there's a little boy on that tape who could be yours."

  We turned around.

  "I mean, he looks like you." She stared at me. "Same big, dark eyes."

  Ken took a step to where the video was still running. "On that tape?"

  "He's the last child."

  The nearsighted woman turned her glasses to me, showed me her floating eyes.

  My umbrella made a little shh . . . sound as it slid back into the wastebasket.

  The boy on the videotape had enormous eyes and wispy brown hair that stood up on the top of his head. He was naked, lying on a white metal changing table and kicking his legs out behind him in little swimming motions.

  Beside him stood a squat woman with the kind of determined round
face that had once appeared in photographs of Russian housewives lined up to buy toilet paper. She was wearing a white lab coat and had tied a babushka around her hair, and it made her look like a cross between a scientist and a charwoman.

  In the background, I could hear a man's voice speaking in Russian. He shouted at the woman and she turned the little boy's head toward the camera. His dark eyes stared at me.

  A hand in a white sleeve materialized from the side of the screen. It held a yellow-spotted giraffe that squeaked when it was squeezed. The hand crushed the giraffe close to the little boy's ear, and a female voice called, "Grisha! Grisha!"

  The man behind the camera barked a command, and the woman in the babushka lifted the boy up. His small hands were clenched into fists, and I could see his ribs, his uncircumcised penis, his too-thin legs.

  She's gripping his chest too tightly, I thought, forcing a breath of air into my own lungs.

  The woman made a move to set the boy down, and the man behind the camera shouted at her. He seemed unable to decide how he wanted the boy displayed, and the woman swung the small body back and forth like a bell. When at last she lay him belly down on the metal table, he slid the first two fingers of his right hand into his mouth and began sucking them.

  The woman shot out a thick arm and pulled the fingers from his mouth.

  "Don't do that," I scolded the videotaped woman.

  Two hands in white sleeves appeared and began clapping out a rhythm that made me think of Cossacks dancing with crossed arms. The little boy watched the moving hands, curling his upper lip back over three new teeth, and squinting his eyes shut. His flat baby nose was creased, and I supposed he was smiling, because the woman in the babushka smiled back just long enough for me to see a gold incisor.

  The camera moved in close to the boy's face, turning his features soft and blurry. The two fingers of his right hand rested near his cheek, on their way back into his mouth, and the odd smile was gone, replaced by a certain vacancy. I could not pull away from the dark eyes Maggie had thought so much like mine, and I felt a pressure in my chest, as though my heart had become too large for the space that contained it.

  Ken made a sound like choking, and the little boy disappeared into a blue screen.

  "I've got a photo of him somewhere," Maggie said. She searched through a folder stuffed with brochures, pushing aside pictures of her own face. "I took it from the TV."

  She pulled out a blurred Polaroid photograph, held it out to me. "You can take it with you."

  But I still have other options, I wanted to tell her. I still have the piercing needles and the urine of postmenopausal nuns.

  38 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  "Go ahead," she coaxed, waving the Polaroid as if she were drying it.

  But Russia is full of political instability. And // is not uncommon for adoptions to be stalled or never completed.

  "I can take another one."

  I looked down at the small face in her hand, remembered the odd unpracticed smile.

  It's only a picture. It doesn't mean anything.

  I reached for the photograph and slipped it into the soft wool of my pocket.

  "Why don't you try domestic adoption?" asked a woman who was balancing her two-year-old son on her hip. "That's what we did with Paolo." She slipped her hand under the bottom of the little boy's sweater and rubbed his smooth belly.

  I ran my finger along the thick edge of the photograph that had spent the past week in my pocket. Below us, thin January sun shone on rows of bare vines that seemed incapable of bursting into leaf.

  A woman walking by touched the rounded curve of Paolo's cheek. Another woman asked if there was any more chardonnay.

  It was a party of women. My friend Kate hosted it every year in a borrowed house above vineyards. She called the event "No Boys Allowed" and invited mothers and daughters and women she'd only just met but who seemed interesting. Women who'd been arriving since late morning, carrying in winter flowers and pots of soup, blue-veined cheeses, and blood oranges.

  "Domestic is so much easier," said Paolo's mother. "You work with a lawyer. You know all about the birth mother." She was keeping track of the advantages on the fingers she'd wrapped around her son's back. "And you get your child younger, so you can bond with him sooner."

  The little boy on her hip pulled open the breast pocket of her shirt and looked inside.

  "They gave Paolo to me as soon as he was born." She cupped one of the little boy's red basketball sneakers in her hand and jiggled his leg.

  "But what if the birth mother changes her mind?"

  "That's why you work with a good lawyer. I'll give you the name of mine."

  She handed Paolo to me while she searched her pockets. I shifted him to my other side so his weight wouldn't crush the photograph in my pocket.

  "Call this number." She traded me the card for her son. "This woman will get you a baby." She blew a dark bang out of Paolo's eye and went to get more wine.

  I watched a thirteen-year-old girl and her mother dancing to Aretha Franklin, their winter coats twirling around them. Then I sat at an outdoor table, where women were shaping small figures from blocks of clay.

  A speech therapist had made a horse with uneven legs. An actress who sold real estate was just finishing a mermaid with a clamshell bra. Her five-year-old daughter was making a pig.

  I sat beside Kate, who was working on a pregnant woman. The little figure had wide hips, swollen breasts, and a rounded belly twice the size of her small clay head.

  "It's a fertility goddess," she explained.

  Kate had been trying to get pregnant for four years.

  "Do you think it'll work?"

  "Who knows?" She shrugged. "My mother has me visualizing my baby floating around in my uterus now."

  She thwacked a piece of clay in front of me. "Here, make one for yourself."

  Kate was the first person who knew I wanted a baby.

  It was the summer my mother was dying. Ken and I had gone with Kate and her husband, Dan, to a cabin in the Sierra foothills that had been built in the 1940s by Dan's grandfather. In the afternoons, we'd swim in a green lake that made our teeth chatter

  40 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  if we stayed in too long. At night, we'd drink bourbon and play board games we found on the knotty-pine shelves, the clicking of the dice competing with the sound of crickets outside the screens.

  Every morning, Kate and I would walk into town for newspapers and doughnuts.

  "I'm thinking about having a baby," I told her, halfway between the 7-Eleven and the bakery.

  Kate stopped walking and dropped the branch she'd been using to knock the heads off weeds along the side of the road. She was shorter than I, and when she reached up to hug me, the hair on the top of her head tickled my chin.

  "I'm so glad we're going to do this together," she said, rubbing my bare shoulder.

  Kate added a little more clay to her pregnant woman's belly, using her thumbs to make the mound symmetrical. "I'm going to keep her under the bed."

  "I loved being pregnant," the speech therapist said.

  "Me, too," agreed the actress. "I felt absolutely and completely sensual."

  I pulled small pieces from my block of clay, remembering a book on infertility I'd taken from the library and kept only two days because having it in the house made me think of myself as barren, like Ruth in the Old Testament. The book had suggested holding a little mourning ceremony for the biological child you would never have.

  Write a letter to your never-to-be-born baby, the book advised. Print his or her name on a piece of paper and burn it, sending all your hopes and expectations skyward with the smoke.

  Pressing my fingers into the wet clay, I wondered if that would work. If burning the name of a nonexistent child would keep me from feeling that I'd been excluded from something, like the boys who were not allowed at this party.

  "What are you making?" asked Kate.

  I looked at the rounded bits of cla
y I'd fashioned into small arms and legs, the piece that could be a torso, lying on its belly.

  "I'm not sure."

  I could attach the clay legs so they looked as if they were about to make the kicking motions from the videotape, thin the body so it would be a more accurate representation, take a pointed stick and draw in the feathery hair. Afterward, I could take the clay figure of the little boy and put it under my bed, and let something other than me decide if this was the way I would become a mother.

  "Have you ever thought about adopting?" I asked Kate.

  "Oh, Dan and I are pretty far from that. We still want to have our own child."

  She used a stick to give her fertility doll a pair of oval-shaped nipples.

  "Why? Are you thinking about it?"

  "I don't know." I smushed the clay arms and legs together. "I'm terrible at this kind of thing."

  In the kitchen, a woman was hovering over a pan of brownies. "My husband's a dentist," she said with her mouth full, "but he's really a poet."

  "Are those vegan?" asked another woman, who kept touching the side of the pan.

  I wandered into the back bedroom and shut the door. Sitting on the bed, I picked up a knitted doll from Guatemala and walked it across the pillows. Then I dialed my own number.

  "Is it just me, or can you not get that little boy out of your head?" I asked Ken.

  He breathed into the phone.

  "It's not just you."

  "What should we do?"

  "I could call that woman from the meeting."

  "Maggie."

  "I could call her."

  42 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  "What about the in vitro?"

  "I'd love it if you didn't have to go through that."

  "But then I don't get to be pregnant."

  I sat the Guatemalan doll on my lap and straightened its knitted hat.

  "We don't know anything about adoption. We've never even thought about Russia."

  "My family came from there," Ken said. "Poland, actually— near the Russian border."