Emma Törzs :Patchwork Elephant

Emma Törzs

[Emma Törzs was born in Massasuchetts and received a B.A in cultural studies from Macalester College and an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana .She livse in Missoula, Montana.]

Patchwork Elephant

Emma Torzs

Joanna had met Ben and Maddie at a consent workshop at her house. It was part of a “Safer Sex” series that one of their mutual friends was organizing, and Maddie, four at the time, had impressed Joanna by staying quietly at Ben’s side with a cache of Magic Markers, doodling spiral patterns on his jeans while the grown-ups practiced saying, “Could we take this slower?” and “Can I take your bra off?”

“Is she yours?” someone asked Ben.

“What do you say, Mads?” he’d asked the little girl.

“I’m my own,” she said solemnly, and Ben grinned and kissed the top of her dirty-blonde head.

“She’s my daughter,” he said, “but she belongs to herself.”

Joanna was living then in a dingy turn-of-the-century mansion that had been owned long ago by a wealthy pharmacist but was now rented out to a cluster of punks intent on converting every habitable space into a bedroom. At first glance the house looked like any other punk house in Minneapolis—bikes tangled on the porch, Xeroxed flyers on the walls, ripped-up alley armchairs, and a half-working piano crouched in one corner of the dining room—but past the shabby furniture and scuffed floors the house still had a certain sedate grace to it. The wood trim was dark like sturdy velvet, and dust-smudged chandeliers dangled from the high ceilings. Big windows, bright sun. There were lots of houses like this in Joanna’s neighborhood, houses that had once been illustrious but were now sag-backed and cheaply rented, and sometimes she stood at the corner of her street and imagined the pavement was filled with horse-drawn carriages and big-skirted ladies instead of janky two-doors and cigarette butts.

Ben reminded her a little of the house: he was dirty and messy bodied, too tall with too-short arms, but there was an elegance in the lines of his voice, a sketched-out courtliness in the way he moved. He and Joanna were partnered up for an honesty exercise and sat across from each other in a sunlit corner of the living room, maintaining eye contact while Ben described pushing his fingers into his junior high school girlfriend, even though she’d asked him, weakly, not to.

“She said she wasn’t ready to go that far,” Ben said, “but I was thirteen and completely single-minded. She didn’t protest physically so I figured it was okay, but then once I had my hand, y’know, she just lay there, completely still. Her eyes were wide open.”

At his side, Maddie was applying a purple pen to the knee of his jeans, and as he spoke he rubbed her back absentmindedly. Shamefully, Joanna found herself turned on—something about the gentle back-and-forth of his hand over his daughter’s small shoulders and the erotic contrition of his story. She stared at his mouth and, later that evening, kissed it, after they put Maddie upstairs in her bed to let her sleep while the grown-ups drank whiskey. Ben slid his fingers loosely around Joanna’s neck when she pressed him up against the kitchen sink, and knowing that his daughter was wrapped in Joanna’s quilt, face buried in her pillow, made the kiss seem even gentler, more intimate. Intentional.

Now they lived across the river in St. Paul, and Maddie was nearly eight. Ever since she’d hit her twenties, Joanna had noticed that time moved faster with every passing year; a month at twenty-seven was much shorter than a month had been at fifteen—yet even so, it rattled her, how quickly Maddie seemed to grow. Day by day she was taller, thinner cheeked, more of a person, and Joanna felt herself rushing to try and catch up, to mature as swiftly so she could stay the necessary steps ahead. But sometimes she still felt unbearably young. Which is what she told Ben when he asked her to marry him so she could adopt his daughter.

“You’re older than I am,” Ben pointed out, which was true by a few months.

“I don’t mean physical age,” Joanna said. “Besides, you’re always saying you want Maddie to be her own person. As far as my heart’s concerned, I’m Maddie’s parent—the law doesn’t need to get involved. Do you want her thinking she’s something that can be signed away, like property?”

“We’re talking about adoption,” Ben said. “Not real estate. What I want is for her to feel safe, secure. And, most importantly, to know that if something happens to me, she’ll end up with the right person.”

The right person, which of course made Joanna think of the wrong person: of Maddie’s mother, Caroline, who just last week had sent a letter from Winnipeg, her spiky handwriting blinking from the page like eyelashes. I’m nearby now, she wrote. You could send Maddie on the bus to visit—as if anyone would put an eight-year-old on a Greyhound alone; as if anyone would trust Caroline to meet her at the bus stop. There was a phone number on the bottom of the letter. She can call me if she wants.

Ben had a night class that evening, working his slow way toward a certificate in electrical engineering, so it was just Joanna and Maddie in their small house. Joanna had been reading aloud to her for years, but lately Maddie preferred to read by herself, sitting up in bed with her nightstand lamp on, stern-faced like a tired woman. Tonight, though, she handed over a battered old picture book and scooched aside so Joanna could lie next to her on the narrow futon.

“Read it in your gloomy voice,” Maddie said, tucking herself under Joanna’s arm.

“There once was a herd of elephants,” Joanna read, slow and glum like Eeyore. “Elephants young, elephants old.”

She was imagining Caroline, though, not elephants. She’d met the woman once but not for more than a minute, and she retained only a vague impression of skinny tattooed arms and blue eyes set too far apart, like a fruit bat’s, like Maddie’s. And once she’d found, wadded up in a shoebox in Ben’s closet, a yellow silk slip with Caroline’s name written across the tag in Sharpie, as if she’d worn it to sleepaway camp. It had a rotten smell, like dying flowers, and Joanna thought she detected the scent of diesel from the trains Caroline caught out of the Minneapolis yard.

“Jo, you skipped a page,” Maddie said, and burrowed her warm body closer, like a puppy trying to nurse. Joanna wedged an arm between them to get some distance.

“You’re a better reader than I am, Mad Dog,” Joanna said. “How about you take over?”

Maddie shook her head. “You.”

So Joanna began reading again, and Maddie put her head down and let out one of those animal sighs that never failed to ping against Joanna’s heart. It wasn’t a question of love.

After Maddie fell asleep, Joanna sat in the living room with her laptop and Googled photographs of Caroline. She’d found three, and it had taken her a long time to locate even those; until the return address on the letter last week her searches had been too vague, too vast, turning up gymnast Caroline Lees and sand artist Caroline Lees, and Korean nun Caroline Lee, but never the Caroline Lee Joanna needed. She’d met her before she’d met Ben, though only for that single second, a quick introduction in a crowded doorway as she was leaving a potluck and Caroline was arriving. “She has a kid,” a friend told her later. “Hard to believe,” and Joanna had agreed, although already she’d forgotten Caroline’s face—no one had told her to fix it in her mind. So many times since she’d wished there was a way to know which seemingly light moments would later become weighted.

The pictures she’d found of Caroline were all from the University of Winnipeg, where Caroline was a graduate student. The first two were thumbnails and indistinct, but the third was big and bright and direct, and Joanna maximized it on her screen and stared into that eerily familiar face: Maddie’s face, but warped—wider mouthed, smaller chinned, blonde hair cut short in a twenties-style bob. The accompanying article was from a university newsletter, a summary of an undergraduate class Caroline was apparently teaching, First Nation, First Books, and every time Joanna read it she was stunned at how poorly she’d been imagining this girl. She’d published papers, attended conferences, edited a collection of essays, and all these years Joanna had pictured her grease smeared and fierce in the metal cubby of a freight car, traveling directionless. But she wore lipstick, and aside from the delicate line of a tattoo curling out of the neck of her blouse and onto her collarbone, she had no visible wildness. Caroline had gone respectable.

Joanna closed her laptop and stared intently at the ceiling, as if she could read the beige drips of cheap paint. You couldn’t hop trains with a kid, but you could study—people did it all the time. Was this what had prompted the letter? A permanent address, a steady job, a career path, maybe a boyfriend, and the only thing missing from the picture was a child. Which she’d had, and given up, and perhaps wanted to take back. For the first time Joanna felt her own power over Caroline, which shook her, so long had she felt herself in thrall to the woman. Sometimes when she and Ben were in bed together she imagined she was Caroline, and she took sweet, shameful pleasure from it, as if she were siphoning away some pleasure Caroline herself may have had. She liked to imagine Caroline imagining her. Was Caroline lying on a couch this very moment, thinking of Joanna, and of Maddie and Ben? It was nine o’clock, a Wednesday night, and the weather was warm for early, northern May—she might be on a dinner date, sitting outside at a metal tabletop in a cardigan with folded-up sleeves. Or in a bar with other hip-haired academics, drinking beer from a frosted glass. No, Joanna told herself, you’re being romantic: likely she’s alone in her apartment, in pajamas, chewing on a toothbrush. Likely, she’s as lonely as anyone.

When Ben came home that night he checked on Maddie first thing, as he always did, but tonight Joanna wondered if it meant something more, if maybe he was rethinking his trust in her. She’d never known him when he wasn’t a father, and she wished sometimes that she had. Overall he was good-natured and funny, but as a parent he had a dim humorlessness about him, and when Joanna said, watching him peek into Maddie’s room, “She sneak back in through the window yet?” he only blinked at her, stone-faced.

“How was class?” she tried again, trailing after him as he went to rummage through the fridge.

“Good,” he said, distracted, then: “No leftovers from dinner?”

“No,” said Joanna.

“Is this chicken okay?” Ben asked, waving a Tupperware container at her.

“Your nose is as good as mine,” she said, and watched him assess the contents, shrug, and go to the sink for a fork. She sat down across from him at the table as he dug into the cold food, and resisted the urge to offer to heat it up. Partnership didn’t have to mean micromanagement.

“It’s supposed to rain tomorrow,” he said. “Do you want to take the truck?”

The driver’s door of her car, a tenacious old Mazda, had eaten its own window the morning before, and she hadn’t had a chance to get it fixed. Ben worked close by, but she worked across the bridge in Dinkytown as an administrative assistant in the geography department of the U, surrounded by the same office ladies who’d stamped her paperwork when she was an undergraduate. “Yeah,” she said. “That would be great. You don’t mind?”

He chewed, swallowed, and said, “Of course not.” He never spoke with his mouth full. “So. You think any more on what we talked about?”

“Give me more than half a day, my god. This isn’t a casual decision.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just—I mean, you said it yourself, it wouldn’t really change anything but your legal title.”

“I didn’t say that,” Joanna said, though she couldn’t remember exactly. “What I said was, I needed some time to think. Have you spoken to Caroline about this?”

“Not yet,” Ben said. “And I can’t say I’m planning to.”

“Don’t you think she deserves to know you’re thinking about terminating any parental claim she has to her own daughter?”

“Well,” Ben said, “no. I don’t think she deserves to know anything. Even if she refuses consent, which she won’t, the law will override her—she gave up any formal rights to Maddie a long time ago.”

“Formal rights are different from emotional rights, Ben.”

“She doesn’t have any emotional rights.”

Joanna stood up and stalked out of the kitchen, though she knew it was an immature move. Proof, she thought, flopping onto their bed and hugging a pillow to her chest, that she was too young to be a mother. Except she’d been doing it for four years now, and had even felt at times that she was better at motherhood than she’d been at anything else in her life. Her own mother was affectionate and attentive in a mindless, natural way that was comforting to the point of obliteration. Most of Joanna’s friends had realized by their teens that their parents were not all-powerful, nurturing gods; they were, rather, fallible human beings like themselves—but Joanna had been years behind in reaching this conclusion. She’d nearly had a heart attack when, at twenty-one, she’d discovered her mother smoking a joint in the backyard while she trellised her tomato plants.

“How long has this been going on?” she’d demanded, and her mother had gazed up at her with bloodshot, amused eyes.

“Since I was seventeen,” her mother said. “What, you think you have the monopoly on fun in this house?”

Yes, Joanna had thought that. Which, she’d decided later, after she’d smoked a joint herself and calmed down, was a good thing—a testament to her mother’s seamless love. In Ben’s house there’d never been any doubt as to the allocation of fun: his mother was a delightful, furious drunk, and his father a murky-eyed NASCAR addict. They often called Ben for financial advice, and Joanna knew that as a kid he’d stayed up many nights straining for the sound of their car in the driveway, certain they’d left for the last time and would never come home. This kind of self-parenting childhood stuck with a person, twisted things up inside them, and, Joanna believed, had led Ben to where he ended up at nineteen: on his knees in a grimy kitchen in front of his train-hopping pregnant girlfriend, begging her to keep their baby. “If you can’t handle it,” he’d said, “I swear I’ll take full responsibility.” And he had.

The bedroom door creaked open and Ben poked his head in, lifting a thick, apologetic eyebrow. Joanna patted the bed and he stretched out alongside her, an arm slung instantly across her waist, his lips at her temple. No amount of fighting could diminish the physicality of his affection. He was a hugger-outer.

“I want to ask you a delicate question,” she said.

“Uh-oh,” said Ben.

“Back when you first found out about Maddie, was it the baby you wanted, or Caroline?”

Ben groaned into her hair. “I’m not trying to tie you up to me, Jo. Maddie’s not a piece of rope, and anyway, this isn’t about us. Marriage would be a formality.”

“So you wanted Caroline.”

“I don’t know what I fucking wanted. Yeah, Caroline. And, I don’t know, something to do? A purpose? An outline for the rest of my life?”

“That’s a terrible reason to want a kid.”

“Okay, smart-ass,” Ben said, and pulled her closer, incongruous with his tone. “Name a good reason.”

Joanna waved a hand. “To carry on the royal line.”

“Having a baby is always a selfish decision. I mean, not the actual being a parent part, but the decision itself. Selfish as hell.”

Which, Joanna wondered, was more selfish on the scale of things: to have the child in the first place, or to leave it behind?

“And if we get married and I adopt Maddie?” she said. “Is that selfish?”

“No,” Ben said without hesitation, but Joanna never trusted a quick answer.

The next afternoon, on her half-hour lunch break, Joanna went to the top floor of the humanities building and found an empty classroom. She was ten floors up, and the wind-driven rain that lashed against the windows was louder than it had been below, more powerful. She flicked on the classroom light and then, when it poured harsh yellow on the scuffed desks and whiteboard, turned it off again and walked the perimeter of the cool, cloud-dimmed room, phone clutched so tightly that her fingers began to sweat against its plastic skin. She dialed the number. She stared down. Finally, in one fast movement—like stripping off a Band-Aid—she jabbed the Talk button and lifted the phone to her ear, thinking Please don’t answer, please answer, please don’t.

Caroline answered singsong, as if calling out to herself, voice throaty and brusquely girlish: “Caaaaaroline!”

“Caroline?” Joanna said, like a shouldered parrot. “Hi. Hi, this is Joanna, from Minneapolis—Ben Singer’s girlfriend? We met once at a potluck. You probably don’t remember me.”

There was a long silence. “Were you wearing green?”

Joanna blinked. “I have no idea.”

“I think you were. I think you had on a green dress. Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah, no, everything’s fine. I was just calling to—well, you sent that letter, with your phone number? So I just—thought I’d call.”

“Uh-huh,” Caroline said slowly, and Joanna grabbed a fistful of her own hair and closed her eyes.

“About Maddie,” she said. “I thought I’d call about Maddie.”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s great,” Joanna said. “She’s really great. The thing is—Ben and I have been together for a while and, you know, I think we’re in it for the long run, and obviously Maddie is a big consideration, and we’ve been talking about adoption lately, or Ben has, and I guess I just wanted to talk to you about it too. Before we make any decisions.”

“Adoption?” Caroline said. “Like, you adopting Maddie? With all due respect, why isn’t Ben calling me about this?”

“He doesn’t want to include you until he has to,” Joanna said. “But I don’t know, that felt . . . unfair, to me. I didn’t tell him I was going to call.”

“Why are you calling?” Her tone was curious, blunt edged. “To ask my permission? Or to politely lay it down for me?”

“I haven’t made up my mind about this,” Joanna said. “About what I’m going to do.”

“So, what,” Caroline said, “you want advice?”

“You’re Maddie’s mother,” Joanna said. “I’m trying to respect that.”

“She came from my body,” Caroline started, and Joanna waited for her to continue, to refute any other claim, but she was quiet.

“I love her,” Joanna said. “I want to take care of her. I’ve been taking care of her.”

“I haven’t,” Caroline said. “I haven’t even seen her in five years, Joanna. She’s already more yours than mine, at this point.”

“She doesn’t belong to either of us,” Joanna said. “At least, not until I sign these papers. Then she will be mine.”

“What am I supposed to say?” There was a catch in her voice like a snag in cloth. “I’m not going to try and stop you.”

“But you sent that letter,” Joanna said. “Out of nowhere. You must want something.”

“I don’t know,” Caroline said. Then, quietly, “I have dreams about her. About a little girl. Really bad dreams—that I’m trying to drag her out of a lake, or that someone’s pulling out all her teeth. My friend, she’s a therapist, she says the little girl is me, a manifestation of my unconscious, but I never told her about Maddie—I don’t tell a lot of people, for obvious reasons. They’d think I’m the worst kind of woman.”

This was probably true, so Joanna said nothing, just waited, listening to Caroline breathe down the line.

“After she was born I was in a constant state of panic,” Caroline said after a moment. “I kept thinking I would accidentally put her down somewhere and forget about her and lose her and I’d have to kill myself. Every morning when I woke up and remembered I was a mom I wished to god I could go back in time and get an abortion.”

“Jesus,” Joanna said, stupidly.

“I’m just being honest here,” Caroline said. “Leaving was the best, most relieving thing I’ve ever done.” She paused, and Joanna heard the click of her throat as she swallowed. “Except lately,” she said, “I’ve been having that same kind of panic. I keep thinking, Shit, where’d I put the baby? Or I think I’ve left the burner on, or my bike unlocked, or parked my car in a no-parking zone, and it’s all the same awful feeling, the ‘Where’d I put the baby?’ feeling, only there is no baby.” She drew in a ragged breath, let it out. “It’s hard to think of yourself as a good person when you know you did something so awful.”

“Maddie turned out fine, though,” Joanna said. “She’s happy, she’s healthy.”

“That should make me feel better,” Caroline said, “but really, it almost makes me feel worse.”

Joanna pressed the cell phone to her ear and perched on a desk, drew her knees to her chin. The rain kept up its reassuring scourge against the building, and she felt safe and calm and so tender toward Caroline, toward her naked little voice, her erratic breath, the hitch at the end of her words.

“I don’t want to take anything away from you,” Joanna said, mostly believing it. “I’m just trying to be fair. To figure out if you want to be a part of Maddie’s life.”

“I guess I do,” Caroline said. “Honestly, I wouldn’t have expected it to hurt so much, to think she could belong to someone else. But it does hurt.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” Joanna said. “That’s why I called.”

“Does this change anything?” Caroline said. “For you, I mean?”

“I have to think,” she said. And only when she’d hung up moments later did she realize that Caroline hadn’t asked a single question about Maddie—about how she was doing in school, what she did for fun, if she liked drawing or Legos or playing outside, or if Maddie was growing up to look like her. Joanna would have asked. She was sure of it.

They went out to dinner that night, to a Chinese restaurant Maddie loved, and Ben cracked all their cookies and read the fortunes out loud. “A musical opportunity is in your future,” he said, and flicked the strip of paper across the booth at Maddie. “Maybe it’s time for you to start piano lessons or something, huh?”

“Gross,” Maddie said. “I want to play the tuba.”

The kids Joanna had known who’d played the tuba were all, without exception, fat and quiet, glasses sliding down their noses, greasy hair pressed flat by their mothers’ worried hands. “What about the drums?” she said. “Or the saxophone?”

“Or the xylophone,” Maddie said. “I would wanna play the xylophone.”

Joanna exchanged an amused glance with Ben and trapped one of Maddie’s feet between her own under the table, wiggled it back and forth. “Whatever you want,” she said. She looked at those dirty-blonde curls, the widely set cornflower eyes, this girl who was so much lighter toned and smaller framed than Joanna herself, and she felt an unforgivable wave of relief that Maddie was so lovely. What would it be like to have a dark-eyed girl, chubby the way Joanna had been through elementary school, hovering mothlike on the fringes of popularity but never quite close enough to feel secure? She knew women who took their daughters’ appearances personally, as if every frizzy hair or extra pound was a deliberate knife to the eye. But if the kid wasn’t genetically yours, if you didn’t see all your own flaws playing out on her skin, was it different?

“Mads,” she said. “I want to ask you something.”

“Shoot,” said Maddie. It freaked Joanna out sometimes, how many of her phrases seemed to have been picked up from television.

“Do you ever think about your mother?” she said.

Across from her, Ben stiffened, tension in every line. Maddie looked up at him, uncertain, and he said, “That’s a funny question, huh, kiddo?” His voice was tight. “Joanna—”

“Hang on,” she said. “I’m asking Maddie, not you.”

“Really?” he said. “Because it feels directed at me.”

“Not everything is about you,” she said, trying to keep her tone pleasant.

“No,” he said, and put a heavy hand on his daughter’s head. She had gone silent, big eyed. “It’s about Maddie.”

“Right,” Joanna said. “Of course. It’s not about me at all.”

“For the love of—”

“What I’m trying to say, Maddie,” she said loudly, speaking over him, “is that I’d like to adopt you.”

Ben opened his mouth, then closed it. He blinked.

“I want to be your mom,” Joanna said, and felt tears begin to clog her throat. Maddie was looking at her now, not at Ben. “Do you understand what I’m saying? I want to adopt you, so legally you would be mine.”

“Ours,” said Ben.

Maddie put her fist on the table, gently. “But I’m my own,” she said.

Ben laughed, momentarily startled out of his chagrin, and Maddie whipped her head around to glare at him. “I am,” she said. “I am my own.”

“Well,” Joanna said. “We all are.” She wanted to say more, but couldn’t think what.

Ben stepped in. “The only thing that would really change is names: I’m already Dad, and now Jo would be Mom. Does that make sense?”

“You can’t just change your name,” Maddie said, but she stared down at her plate of lo mein in an attempt to hide the beginnings of a shy, delighted smile. And who had taught her this, to hide her pleasure lest someone see it, and ruin it? It was the kind of gesture you learned from watching your parents.

Ben saw it too, that smile, and he lit up with his own. He reached for Joanna’s hand across the table and squeezed it very hard—part affection, and part displeasure for the way she’d handled the conversation. “We can talk more about this later,” he said. “But what do you think, Mads? Is that something you’d like?”

“Okay,” said Maddie, and looked at Joanna with a deep, suspicious happiness. Then she pushed the last unopened cookie toward her father. “Do this one now,” she said.

“Jo,” he said. “Listen to your fortune.”

But Joanna barely heard him. She was thinking of Caroline, of the quiver in her voice, the way her lips must have trembled while she spoke. It cost a lot to admit regret: you paid for it with every golden image of yourself you’d ever formed, you melted them down till they were unrecognizable. When they had cooled, you were a new and better creature, your impurities burnished, your core solid. Maybe, Joanna thought, it was worth it in the end.