ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although writing a book seems to be largely about long periods of time spent alone with a computer, it is ultimately a collaborative effort. In that spirit, I'd like to begin by thanking my best collaborators, Adair Lara and Wendy Lichtman, teachers who became writing partners and then friends, and who have been with this memoir since the very first words I set on paper. Also, thanks to Rebecca Koffman, who has read every version of these pages.

To Richard Reinhardt, who encouraged me to attend the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, where I learned how to write this book. And to both Richard and his wife, Joan, for the use of The Cabin and The Vineyard, truly charmed places in which to write.

Thanks to Meg, for her encouragement and love. And to Kurt, for liking all my endings, especially the ones with hats.

To Jim and Tracy, for the dinners, the babysitting, and the friendship.

I would also like to thank my wonderful agent, Amy Rennert, for her good advice, and for coping with the many neuroses of a writer with a first book. Thanks to my editor, Diane Higgins, for loving this story, and to her assistants, Patricia Fernandez and Nichole Argyres, for handling all the details turning it into a book required.

Thank you to Elaine Petrocelli and the staff and teachers at

vi Acknowledgments

Book Passage for providing so much inspiration and support. They are some of the best friends a writer could have.

Finally, this book would not exist without my husband, Ken, my best editor and best friend, who never stopped believing that we would bring Alex home, and never stopped believing in me.

For Ken,

who gave me the time and space in which to write

And for Alex,

without whom there would be no story

Matryoshka

My son Alex, who is two years old, loves to play with the ma-tryoshka dolls my husband and I bought from a vendor in Iz-mailovsky Park. Each doll is a different family member, and Alex likes to twist open the father, who is playing an accordion, to find the mother nested inside. One by one, he opens them all: the grandfather balancing a yellow balalaika on his knee, the grandmother holding a golden samovar, until he comes to a tiny baby with a red pacifier painted into its mouth.

When he's got them apart, purple and green and black half-bodies scattered across the carpet, I'm struck by how complete the family is: children, mother, father, grandparents. No one is missing, pulled out of place by death or desertion.

As I watch him stacking the dolls, one smiling face disappearing into the round body of another, I have a strong and sudden urge to call my mother. I want to ask her if it's normal for children to eat what the cat threw up, or learn to say "dog" before "Mommy." I want to know if she ever wished I'd get tired of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, if she thought about leaving me in the frozen-food aisle when I started to scream and kick the shopping cart, if she lay awake at night, afraid something might take me from her.

Instead, I ask Alex if he wants to play naked tiger, which is what we do to get him ready for his bath. He yanks on the tabs of his diaper and removes it with a grand gesture, a magician

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delighted with the reappearance of his penis. I throw his toys into the tub, while behind me, he leaps around with the white bucket from his training potty on his head. His legs are starting to look more like a boy's than a baby's, and I want to catch them and kiss them while he'll still let me.

I put Alex into the warm water of the tub and push back his hair with a wet hand. With his hair slicked back, he looks like a small, smooth-skinned businessman.

After his bath, I dress him in a T-shirt printed with circus animals.

"Elephant big-nose," he tells me, pointing to an elephant balanced on a ball.

We jump onto the bed together, the weight of our bodies pressing a valley into the comforter. Alex slips the first two fingers of his right hand into his mouth, fingers that have developed small calluses from rubbing against the sharp edges of his teeth. He presses his damp head against my chest, wetting my shirt and raising goose bumps. I tuck my knees beneath his legs, so more of his body touches mine, and remember another bed.

The pink chenille spread that left curved tracks on my cheek if I rested on it too long, the stripy light from Venetian blinds that clanged like something mechanical whenever the wind blew, and my mother, sleepy and pregnant with my twin brothers. Every afternoon we'd nap together, with my face as close to hers as she would allow. Before we'd fall asleep, I'd ask her to sing the same song over and over—a song in Italian about an orchestra.

Lying on her back, my yet-to-be-born brothers causing the middle of her body to rise like a mountain, my mother would pretend to play the trombone, her arm pulling the long slide up toward the ceiling. Turning to look at me, she'd purse lips with traces of pink lipstick on them and make the wet sound of a trumpet. Just her breath on my face made me feel as if nothing bad could touch me.

Now, in the bed with Alex, I try to sing the Italian song about the orchestra, but only a few of the words come back to me. The rest I have to invent: long phrases filled with vowels that make Alex smile around the fingers in his mouth.

Lying there, I wish I could ask my mother if she can still slide the trombone to the ceiling, still make the wet sound of the trumpet. I wish I could ask her if she would breathe on my face again.

Alex's biological mother abandoned him in a Moscow hospital three days after he was born. She left without telling anyone, disappearing back to the Ukraine, leaving the orphanage to find a name for him. Because it was still winter, they chose for his last name the Russian word for snow.

Alex was the result of his mother's third pregnancy. Ken and I do not know whether he has a brother like the boy matryoshka who plays a flute painted around the curve of his head, or a sister like the matryoshka who carries a single spotted teacup. We don't know if his mother ever had the babies from those pregnancies, or why she chose to have him.

Alex loves the mother matryoshka. Sometimes he opens up the set just to her. Her painted dress is embroidered with puffy white sleeves, and she has round blue eyes and blond hair. She looks much more like him than I do.

One day, I imagine that he will look at her small painted-on mouth and ask her the questions about his Russian mother that I cannot answer.

Alex throws his body over the footboard of the bed to show me how he can stand on his head. His hair falls into the air like ruffled feathers.

Then we go into his room, and I sit on the floor beside a dress-up frog whose clothes I can no longer find. Alex puts the matiyoshkas back together, starting with the baby with the painted pacifier in its mouth, which he threatens to eat because he likes it when I tell him not to. When he's finished, he comes

8 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

and sits in my lap, nesting himself there. I push my nose into the skin at the back of his neck, breathing in the scent of rising bread, and vanilla bean, and the ocean. And I wonder if my mother had ever breathed in the scent of my skin, and if she thought it as sweet.

ww>

Cellular Multiplication and Division

I never wanted to have children.

I'd watch the families climbing out of their minivans and walk wide around them, so I wouldn't be contaminated by the damp stickiness of their parenthood. I'd study them from afar, little girls with princess hair and socks that matched their dresses; moms lumpy from pockets filled with goldfish crackers and Cheerios. The dads always seemed confused, lugging a crying child in a plastic carrier like something heavy someone else had slipped into their basket at the supermarket.

The lives of these parents appeared to be made up of running noses, earnest cartoon characters, and small plastic cars to be stepped on with bare feet. Watching them move across the parking lot, the mother unaware of the small chocolate-colored handprint on the seat of her pants, the father dragging a flowered diaper bag behind him, I'd shudder and walk cleanly away, a neat leather purse over my shoulder.

And then my mother started dying.

My mother's cancer came as a small hard lump in her breast. She discovered it one morning in the shower and told her doctor before she told anyone else. She had to wait a week for the mammogram. Another to see the surgeon. She said she could feel the cancer cells spreading through her body as the receptionist turned the pages of her appointment book.

When the surgeon did see her, he put her in the hospital and removed the hard lump the size of a BB that wasn't supposed

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to be there. Afterward, I flew from my home in California to New Jersey to see her.

"It's in the lymph nodes," she said. She was sitting up in bed, dressed in a hospital gown with green geometric shapes printed on it. She wasn't smoking, and it made her look strangely still. "All I get is bad news."

They kept her in the hospital for five days. The night before she was released, she told me, "Tomorrow, we'll go to the outlets."

"You're sure?"

"Yes. I want to go to Lizzie's." Lizzie's was the Liz Claiborne outlet. My mother kept on a first-name basis with all of her favorite stores.

By 10:00 the next morning, we were walking among clapboard buildings with false dormers meant to make the mall resemble a small New England village. By noon, we'd made two trips back to the car to unload shopping bags. By 3:00, the arm where the surgeon had removed my mother's lymph nodes was so sore, she could try on only slacks and shoes.

The following week, I drove her to her first appointment with the radiologist. While we waited, I pointed out the purplish highlights in the receptionist's hair, the outfits of celebrities in People magazine, hoping these things would keep my mother from noticing the sallow-skinned people waiting beside us.

After half an hour, the purple-haired receptionist called my mother's name, and a technician tattooed the place on her breast where they would aim the radiation.

The next day, my mother told me to go home.

"I'll be fine," she said. My parents were divorced, my mother now married to man who was younger than she was. "Mike will take care of me."

After the radiation, my mother was given chemotherapy. Every three weeks she'd lie in a reclining chair while drugs that destroyed every fast-growing cell in her body dripped into her

veins. Her last treatment came the week before Thanksgiving. My husband, Ken, and I flew back to spend the holiday with her.

We sat in her living room surrounded by my mother's collection of antique clocks—clocks that chimed the hour several minutes apart, so that I always felt that time itself was forced to wait until the last clock had caught up. My mother's scalp was covered with soft down like a baby duck's, and she'd lost the thick black eyebrows that made her look like herself. Her skin had a greenish cast, made greener by the pale pink lipstick she liked to wear.

"It was hell," she told us. "I don't care what happens, I'm never going through that again."

But two years later, when the cancer metastasized to her liver, she agreed to try an experimental high-dose chemotherapy.

When my mother's cancer returned, undeterred by the radiation and chemicals the rest of her body couldn't tolerate, I began to believe that I would be next. At least once a week, I'd check my own breasts, lying flat on the floor because I thought it would make it easier to detect the lump I knew was hiding under my skin like a small time bomb. Moving my fingers in the tight spiral shape I'd learned from the "Guide to Breast Self-Exam" enclosed in a package of panty hose, I'd hold my breath until I'd reached the last spiral.

"I'm thinking about having a mastectomy," I told my mother on the phone.

"Whatever for?" she asked.

"I'm afraid this is going to happen to me."

"I did not give you breast cancer," she said, and hung up.

Not long after, I stood in line at the supermarket behind a woman with boxes of apple juice and a little boy in her cart. As the woman waited for the cashier to ring up shampoo that wouldn't cause tears and packages of fruit leather, she ran her fingers up and down the back of the boy's Winnie-the-Pooh sweatshirt. I watched her brush the fuzzed fabric and thought

16 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

that her life must be filled with the touch of soft things: flannel pajamas and stuffed bears, well-washed blankets and the little boy's skin. Running my fingers along the sleeve of my sweater, I tried to imagine what that would be like.

As my mother lost the ability to walk—from the cancer or the chemotherapy, nobody seemed to know which—I began to wonder what it would feel like to be pregnant. I imagined myself huge and round, so fertile I could make fruit and flowers spring out of the ground just by walking over it. Pregnancy seemed the antithesis of cancer; another condition that caused cells to multiply and divide, but with an entirely opposite result.

When the experimental chemotherapy did not slow the cancer in my mother's liver, I called and told her I wanted to visit.

"This isn't a good time," she said. "The house is a mess. I've got a woman here taking care of me. There's really no room for you."

And I let her talk me out of coming, afraid that if I saw her I would have to tell her about wanting a baby.

The one time I'd gotten pregnant, my mother had slapped my face. I was twenty-one years old and had forgotten to use my diaphragm.

"We could get married," my boyfriend told me. He was thirty-three and had been married before.

"I don't think so," I said, not realizing until he'd asked that I didn't want to marry him. "Besides, I don't want children."

On a bright morning, he drove me to a clinic near the Bronx Zoo, where they performed so many abortions the preop counseling was done in groups of five.

Two weeks later, I woke in the middle of the night with stomach cramps and threw up on the floor.

It took nearly two months for the doctors to discover that I was still pregnant, the fetus trapped inside one of my fallopian tubes, rupturing it every time it tried to grow. They put me in the hospital two days before Christmas and scheduled me for surgery.

The night before the operation, a fireman dressed as Santa Claus came into my room and gave me a candy cane and a handful of Hershey's kisses. Later, the doctor came by to explain that he would have to remove the damaged tube.

"As long as you're in there," I told him, "tie the other one."

The doctor stared at me, sucking on the chocolate kiss I'd given him.

"I'm not planning on having children. Ever."

"That's not a decision you should make right now."

And when the surgery was over, I still had one untied tube.

After the operation, I moved back into my old bedroom. I told my mother I'd had the surgery to remove a cyst.

A few weeks later, a bill from the anesthesiologist arrived and she opened it. At the bottom of the page, under diagnosis, someone had typed "tubal pregnancy." My mother read the words and slapped my face. She said it was for not telling her the surgery had been so complicated, for not letting her know that I might have died. I told her people rarely died from having a fallopian tube removed, but she only looked as if she wanted to slap me again.

"I'm so glad you don't want to have children," my mother would say after that. "It's too risky for you." And I didn't argue with her, though I knew that women who'd had tubal pregnancies also had babies every day.

While my mother waited to hear if she'd be a candidate for a bone-marrow transplant, I sent her small gifts. Bath oil scented with lavender, a wooden roller etched with tight grooves to massage her feet, books on tape with stories where nobody died. One day, I sent her a tape about cancer patients who had cured themselves using meditation. It was called, "How to Be an Exceptional Patient."

"Why did you send this to me?" my mother shouted into the phone. "I don't want to be an exceptional patient, I want to be left alone." And she hung up before I could say anything.

The only time my mother had ever walked me to school was

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the first day of kindergarten. I remember shiny black plastic shoes reflecting red and yellow leaves, a pear in a brown paper bag with my name printed on it, the feel of her bigger hand wrapped around mine. When school was over, I ran outside, searching for her among the mothers standing outside the chain-link fence.

"It's only two blocks," she said, when I got home, my plastic shoes already cracking across the toes. "You know the way."

The summer I was ten, my father would take my brothers and me waterskiing on a small lake that smelled of oil and gas from the boat engines. We were each allowed to bring a friend, and every Saturday, six kids and my tall black-haired father would take turns skiing until our legs felt shaky and we'd swallowed so much lake water that it hurt to take a deep breath.

My mother never came with us on those Saturdays. "A whole day on a boat with a bunch of kids?" she'd say, taking a pack of cigarettes and an instant iced tea out to a lounge chair in the backyard. "No, thanks." And she'd look at my father as though his wanting to spend the day with us revealed something embarrassing about him.

I remember hearing my mother once say that she wished she'd never had children, but when I asked her about it, she sounded surprised.

"That's impossible," she said, lighting a long, thin cigarette. "I couldn't wait for you to be born." And then she repeated the story she told me every year on my birthday.

"When I went to the hospital to have you, it was still winter. The trees were bare and there was snow on the ground."

"In April?" I asked, because that was what I always asked.

"Yes. But the day I left the hospital to bring you home, the flowers were blooming and the birds were singing. It was like you'd brought spring with you."

After a while, my mother stopped talking about the bone-marrow transplant. I knew she was on antidepressants, and there

must have been something else for the pain. Sometimes she'd fall asleep while I was talking to her, and the woman who was staying at her house would have to hang up the phone.

Again I made plans to visit.

"Ken and I are going to Boston on business," I told her. "We'll come to see you as soon as we're finished."

She drifted back into sleep before she could tell me not to come.

While we were in Boston, my brother called to tell me that my mother had died. When I told Ken, he held me in his arms and cried into the back of my neck. I could see his shoulders moving up and down.

There were no flights to New York until the next morning. In the meantime, I needed to be around noise and people, so Ken and I walked to Boston's North End, to the Italian neighborhood. It was the last night of a feast dedicated to a Catholic saint—I didn't know which one, and the hot, rainy streets were jammed with tourists and locals. Men in white V-necked T-shirts carried a plaster statue of the saint, dipping him so the faithful could pin dollar bills to his ribbon sash.

There were sausages sizzling at stands on every corner, and somebody had set a pair of speakers in their second-floor window—Frank Sinatra singing "Fly Me to the Moon." I knew these things were there, the smell of meat cooking, the syrupy sound of Frank Sinatra's voice, but it was like observing them through water.

I don't have a mother anymore, I repeated to myself, as Italian women with fleshy arms reached past me to embrace friends in the crowd. And I wondered when I would cry.

Ken and I walked by booths featuring games of chance— roulette wheels where the money lost would benefit the church—past stands filled with pyramids of sugarcoated zeppoles shiny with oil.

"We should eat," I told Ken. And we pushed into a tiny

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restaurant where a neon sign blinked: "We are famous for our mussels."

We sat at a small table, our knees touching beneath the red and white checked cloth.

"Mussels," we told the waitress, unable to disobey the sign.

The mussels came served in a cast-iron skillet that burned my wrist when I touched it to the edge. We washed them down with wine that stained our teeth purple.

I tried thinking about the time my mother had hit me with a can of frozen orange juice and broken a blood vessel beneath my eye. The six months we didn't speak to each other after she made me leave the house.

Instead, I remembered the Easter I was thirteen and my best friend and I were to sing a duet in the church choir. We'd practiced for weeks, our voices high and pure—just like angels, I'd thought. But on Easter morning, as we stood surrounded by white lilies, the hymn about Jesus rolling away the stone suddenly seemed unbearably funny, and we started giggling.

The organist began the music over again, giving us a chance to catch up, but we couldn't stop laughing long enough to get out any of the words about the washing away of our sins. My Sunday-school teacher hissed at us from behind the organ, and I was certain that my mother would be furious. But when I spotted her in the second row, her face was buried in the Easter-morning program, and the top of her head was shaking with laughter.

In the restaurant famous for its mussels, a man wearing a plastic lobster bib pretended to catch his little girl's finger with a red claw as his wife showed their son how to twirl spaghetti in a soup spoon.

My mother is gone, I thought, watching the woman lick sauce off the little boy's nose.

"I've been thinking about having a baby," I told Ken.

He held a mussel shell shaped like a small boat in the air.

"You said you never wanted children."

"But you always did."

He took a drink of the wine. His tongue looked purple.

"I could never imagine not having them."

"Did you think I'd change my mind?"

"I hoped you would."

I watched the father in the plastic bib wiggle the front half of a lobster in his little girl's face.

"It might not happen right away. I have only one fallopian tube, and I'm almost forty."

"We could start tonight." Ken showed me his purple tongue.

"Not tonight." I didn't want to start a baby in all that sadness.

Instead, we ordered another bottle of purple wine, and as the pile of mussel shells grew between us, we talked about whether crooked teeth were hereditary, and spoke aloud every name we had ever loved.

The Urine of Postmenopausal Nuns

The first time I tried to get pregnant was in a small hotel on the coast of Maine, shortly after my mother's funeral. It was an old-fashioned New England place with croquet on the lawn and a boathouse where you could sip gin and tonic and watch the other guests in outfits from L. L. Bean rowing on the bay.

Our room had a small window with starched white curtains that blew in on a wind smelling of salt water and boiled lobster. Ken and I made love on scratchy sheets, and afterward I lay listening to the wooden rowboats bumping against the pilings, wondering if I was pregnant.

When I wasn't, I bought a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves: Updated and Expanded for the Nineties. It still had the illustrations I remembered from college: diagrams of female genitalia, and line drawings of couples engaged in sexual intercourse. The women were always sketched with unshaven armpits. They were nearly always shown on top of the men.

Thumbing through, I found forty-nine pages devoted to preventing pregnancy, nothing about encouraging it.

However, a section on natural birth control gave elaborate instructions on how to use changes in body temperature and vaginal mucus to determine when you were most fertile. I decided to practice this natural method, charting the rise and fall of my fertility, and then have sex whenever I wasn't supposed to.

I spent the next few months making a graph of my daily temperature and checking the viscosity of my vaginal mucus.

24 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

But my temperature graph never seemed to make any of the little spikes the book described, and no matter how I rolled and pressed it between my fingers, my vaginal mucus always felt exactly the same.

"Stay in bed with your legs and hips elevated for thirty minutes after sex," said a woman who was having her hair shampooed next to me.

And the next time Ken and I made love, I lifted my feet high on the wall behind our bed and lay there like a biblical vessel waiting to receive the gift of life.

"Could you bring me a glass of water?" I asked Ken. "Can I have another pillow?"

While I waited, I visualized thousands of tiny sperm swimming up my vaginal canal like little salmon.

"Your uterus is probably out of balance," said my friend who believed in the healing power of crystals and the advice of psychics. "Let me align it for you."

I took off my clothes and crawled onto her massage table. My friend lit votive candles, placing them on every flat surface. Then she put on music sung by a woman with a high breathy voice.

I closed my eyes, and the friend who listened to psychics rubbed sandalwood oil in little circles around my navel, working her way out to the edges of my pelvis, as if she could see what lay beneath the skin with her fingertips. When my breathing became deep and slow, she placed her fingers near my hipbones and pressed, fast and hard. It felt as if everything inside me had been rearranged.

"You should get one of those ovulation predictor kits," suggested a pregnant woman in my yoga class.

There were eight different brands on the drugstore shelf. I chose the one with the baby on the box.

I put the box with the baby on it in my medicine cabinet and tried not to think about it too much. Buying the ovulation predictor meant that Ken and I had made the leap from people

who were going to get pregnant right away to people who weren't—a distance we'd been covering in baby steps each month when I'd get my period.

"I have to pick up some tampons," I'd tell Ken, as if what I was saying had little importance. "Do we have any Advil?" And I wouldn't look at him, afraid that seeing his disappointment would make mine more real, the way looking through a magnifying glass makes everything appear bigger and more sharp.

I began measuring my life in two-week increments. When I got my period, I'd just want the two weeks until I ovulated again to be over. Once I ovulated, I wanted to fast-forward to the day I'd written the P in my calendar, to find out if I was pregnant.

Each month, when my breasts felt heavy and sore, I'd think, I'm pregnant. I'd lie in bed and convince myself I was nauseated, focusing my attention deep in my belly, certain I could feel a soft fluttering there. I'd turn down a glass of wine without saying why and imagine my baby growing ever more perfect.

And then, when I felt the warm blood slide out of me, I'd be sorry I ever made myself want this. I'd wish I could go back to pitying the pregnant women in their tentlike dresses with little collars that made them look like gigantic schoolgirls. I hated envying their swollen bellies and feet, their need for naps and glasses of milk.

"My sister-in-law had a friend who got pregnant after trying acupuncture," the checker at the drugstore told me.

The acupuncturist's office smelled like the shops in Chinatown, the ones that sold ginseng roots shaped like little men.

"Stick out your tongue," the acupuncturist said, and I made a face like a Balinese mask while he stared into my mouth. Then he placed four fingers along a tendon in my arm and concentrated so deeply that I was afraid to breathe.

"Take off your shoes and socks and lie on the table," he instructed.

I heard him opening small paper sleeves, and when I turned

26 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

my head I saw him slip a short needle into the skin of my wrist. The needle didn't hurt; it didn't feel like anything. Only the sound of the paper sleeves being torn let me know he was putting in another.

Afterward, the acupuncturist gave me a small plastic bag filled with a fine gray powder that had the same bitter, musty smell as the room.

"Mix two teaspoons of this with hot water, and drink it three times a day."

I drank it all, even though it tasted like dirt.

"Isn't it funny how you get pregnant only when you don't want to?" my chiropractor asked, twisting my neck so it made a burst of popping sounds. "Like when you're in high school and it'll ruin your life?"

"I want to have sex in the car and pretend we're seventeen years old," I told Ken.

"No problem," he said.

We made love in our Toyota Celica, parked in our own driveway, twenty feet from our bed.

"Can you move just a little?" I asked Ken. "My head keeps bumping against the button that makes the window go up and down.

"Try taking a vacation," my dental hygienist advised from behind her plastic mask. "I know loads of people who have gotten pregnant on vacation."

Ken and I went to Mexico and made love on a lumpy bed in a town where dogs barked all night. At an open-air market, I found an old man who sold potions and remedies. His stall was crowded with old shoeboxes filled with powders, dried herbs, and plants I'd never seen before.

"Do you have anything that might help someone get pregnant?" I asked him, making my hands emulate the curve of a pregnant belly. The woman selling chipotles in the next booth turned away, smiling.

The man handed me a round black root still covered with dirt. :h chocolate," he said. He mimed shaving a piece off the root.

"Why chocolate?*" I asked.

Again, he made the little shaving motion. "This," he said, pointing to the root; then another shaving motion. "And chocolate."

Ken took the root from me, turning it over in his hand.

"What is this?" he asked the man.

The man shrugged, and said something in Spanish to the woman in the chipotle booth. They both laughed.

1 brought the root home, hiding it in my suitcase from the agricultural inspectors at the airport.

j re not going to eat that, are you?" Ken said. course not." I told him.

I put the root in my underwear drawer, along with a Cadbury Fruit and Nut bar and a vegetable peeler.

The next morning, while Ken was in the shower, I shaved off a piece of the black root and a piece of the Cadbury bar. I put the two pieces together, black and brown curls, and smelled them. Chocolate and earth. I heard Ken turn off the water, step out of the shower, and I put the shavings on my tongue. Bitter and sweet, they tasted. I swallowed them.

When the black root from Mexico did not make me pregnant, I called a fertility clinic.

"How long have you been trying?" asked the woman who answered the phone.

:een months. Eighteen cycles of my period." That's long enough."

She explained all the treatments I could try: hormones that would make me produce more eggs, a procedure that involved ng Kens sperm before injecting it into me. Which would be most likely to get me pregnant?"

28 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

"We have the most success with in vitro fertilization."

"That's what I want."

Everything in the clinic's waiting room was baby-colored: pink walls and pale blue carpeting. Another couple sat across from Ken and me on a mint green couch. They were holding hands and laughing about something in the clinic's copy of Business Week. I'd heard that only 25 percent of the couples who tried in vitro got pregnant—one in four—and I worried that the laughing couple would get our baby.

A woman in a pale blue lab coat that matched the carpet came into the waiting room. "I'll be your in vitro fertilization counselor," she told Ken and me. "I'll be taking you step-by-step through what can often be a difficult and complicated process."

"Thank you." I leaped off the couch and reached for her hand. "Thanks so much."

The in vitro counselor led us into a small office with photographs of snowcapped mountains on the wall. She sat behind an empty desk and smiled. Her teeth were very white, like the snow in the pictures. Extending her baby blue arms, she handed us each a little book titled The In Vitro Fertilization Story.

"The first thing we're going to do is put you on birth-control pills."

"But I want to get pregnant."

"The birth-control pills are to regulate your cycle, so it coincides with your in vitro appointment."

"Couldn't I just change my appointment?"

"These appointments are given out months in advance." She stretched out the word "months." "They cannot be changed at the last minute."

"Yes, yes, of course," I assured her. "I wouldn't do that."

"Good." The counselor showed me her white teeth. "Now, a few weeks before your appointment, we'll start you on injections of Pergonal."

"What's Pergonal?" asked Ken.

"A fertility drug made from the urine of postmenopausal nuns."

Ken laughed through his nose.

"The nuns live in the French Alps," the counselor informed him. She looked pointedly at the snowcapped mountains on the wall, making me believe they must be the home of the postmenopausal nuns.

"The possible side effects of Pergonal include mood swings, severe headaches, and strangulated ovaries."

I gave my head a little nod for each side effect.

"What about cancer?" Ken asked. "Don't fertility drugs cause cancer?"

"Preliminary studies show a possible connection." The counselor studied the cuff of her baby blue sleeve. "But as of this point, nothing concrete has been documented."

Since my mother's death, I'd begun to believe that cancer's having come so close to me had made me more susceptible. I'd hold my breath when I walked past idling cars, wouldn't let the dentist X-ray my teeth, and stepped away from the microwave when it was on. I ate only organic fruits and vegetables, checked my meat and milk for growth hormones, and swallowed so many antioxidants and cancer-fighting vitamins that it took two glasses of nonirradiated orange juice to wash them all down.

Yet now I could sit in a room decorated in baby colors, and ignore everything the counselor was saying about the increased risk of uterine and cervical cancer.

"So there's no documented connection between Pergonal and cancer?" I said.

"Not at this time."

"Good."

"When your eggs are ready, we'll remove them with a long needle that can pierce the uterine wall. And then we'll fertilize them."

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"That's where you come in." The counselor turned to Ken and flashed him her white teeth.

"Once the eggs are fertilized, we'll use a catheter pushed through the cervix to introduce them into your uterus."

I was nodding my head at her like it was attached by a spring.

This is how it should be done, I thought, with piercing needles and catheters filled with fertilized eggs. All this relying on penises and vaginas was much too imprecise.

The counselor stood and excused herself, leaving us alone while she went to get something she called "the financials."

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Ken whispered. His copy of The In Vitro Fertilization Story was open to a drawing of a fallopian tube with a twisted-looking blob at the end of it.

"I want a baby."

"Can't we keep trying on our own?"

"If you want. But we're going to do this, too."

The financials were three pages long. At the bottom of the third page was the total cost of our vitro fertilization. $10,000.

"And we pay this whether we get pregnant or not?" Ken said.

"Of course," the counselor told him.

"Of course," I echoed.

I'd already decided that I would use the money I'd gotten from the sale of my mother's house, an amount that was close to $100,000.

"How many times are you thinking of trying this?" Ken asked me.

"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

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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.

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"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 clay 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."

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"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."

Outside, Paolo's mother was dancing with her son, riding him on a hip and holding his arm up as if they were waltzing.

"Maybe you should call Maggie," I told Ken.

"It's Sunday."

"You can leave her a message."

"OK," he said. "I love you."

"I'm going to hang up now so you can call."

Outside, more women were dancing: Kate and the vegan and the speech therapist who had loved being pregnant. They swirled beneath a papier-mache parrot that hung above the patio.

I reached into my pocket and took out the Polaroid. There never was an unborn child for me to mourn, I thought, never a name to send skyward. There is only this little boy.

I put the photograph back and went to dance with the women beneath the bright bird.

The address Maggie had given us was a small, dark house in the Berkeley hills. It slumped in a grove of peeling eucalyptus trees that made the air smell like Vicks VapoRub.

We ran to the porch through rain that dripped off the sword-shaped leaves of the eucalyptus. Ken knocked on the door, bouncing a crystal that hung behind the window. I unrolled the collar of his jacket where it had bunched up; picked a piece of lint off my corduroy skirt and threw it into the rain.

Maggie opened the door.

"Good," she said, "you're here."

She turned to lead us into the house, and I saw that the seat of her black leggings was covered with cat hair.

"Just let me get something." She stopped at a small room that must have been her office.

The screen of her computer was covered with overlapping Post-Its reminding her to buy cat litter and get gas. She had an old-fashioned fax machine that printed messages on rolls of curled paper, and a long fax had tumbled out of the machine and onto the floor like a paper waterfall.

Maggie searched through the piles of paper on her desk, rearranging them into new configurations. Buried beneath a book about achieving financial freedom, she found a yellow folder covered with the rounded scribbles someone makes when they're testing a pen.

"Why don't we go into the living room?" she said, waggling her fingers at the tiny office. We followed her down a dark hallway that smelled like mushrooms growing.

I sat on the couch, trying not to touch a pillow that looked to be made of some kind of fur. Ken sat beside me, sinking into a cushion so soft it puffed up around his hips.

"I don't know if the little boy you're interested in is still available." Maggie pulled a chair over from her kitchen table.

"What do you mean?" Ken asked.

"Yuri probably sent that tape to all the agencies he works with."

"Yuri?"

"Yuri's my Russian coordinator."

Maggie brushed something off her seat.

"Frankly," she said, "he's a bit of an asshole."

Ken and I stared at her from the depths of the couch.

"Anyway, I sent him an E-mail."

"Can't you call him?" Ken asked.

"I don't know where he is. I only have a number for his wife."

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"What does she say?"

Maggie shrugged. "Who knows? She doesn't speak English."

"You mean there's no way to reach him?" Ken, who wore a pager that vibrated against his side whenever someone wanted him, did not believe in the unreachability of anyone.

Maggie put her face close to us.

"He's hiding from the Russian Mafia," she whispered.

"Mafia?" Ken tried to raise himself out of the billowing cushion.

"They broke into the apartment of a friend of Yuri's—another adoption coordinator." Maggie's face looked overheated. "They burned all his papers and smashed his computer."

"Why?"

"There's money in adoptions." Maggie sat back in her chair.

I touched the furry pillow by accident and wiped my hands on my corduroy skirt.

"Anyway, if it turns out that your child is available, you'll have to travel to Russia right away. Moscow wants families to see their children before they send in their paperwork."

"You mean we see him and then we have to leave him behind in the orphanage?" I couldn't imagine how I would be able to hold that little boy, learn the smell of his skin, and then get back on the plane carrying only a paperback and an inflatable pillow. "Isn't that hard?"

"Everybody does it." Maggie shrugged, but it seemed to me as fantastic as discovering that everybody breathed water or had X-ray vision.

Maggie dug around in the scribbled-on folder, pulling out forms and little notes and shoving them under her thigh for safekeeping.

"Here's a list of all your adoption expenses." She handed me a green paper. "My fee is $5,000." She pressed her finger against the page. "Yuri's is $10,000. A lot of his is used for bribes." Talking about bribes gave her that feverish look again.

"What's this?" Ken asked. "Humanitarian aid, $1,000."

"That's money you pay directly to the orphanage."

"To buy food and things for the children?"

"Sometimes that happens," Maggie said, and I remembered the bones along Grisha's spine, sticking up like a row of small mountains.

Maggie handed me one of the papers from beneath her thigh. "This is a list of the documents you'll need to send to Moscow."

According to the list, the Russians wanted us to be tested for HIV, TB, and the exact amount of albumin in our urine.

"What should we do about the letter from our employer?" Ken asked. "We work for ourselves."

"What do you do?"

"Write comedy."

Maggie frowned and crossed her legs, a couple of papers fluttered to the floor.

"Trade-show scripts," I explained. "Very technical."

"I guess you could just write your own letter," Maggie said, but she didn't sound certain..

Maggie didn't sound certain about a number of things. "They don't need to see your tax returns," she told us, then a little later instructed us to make three—no, four—copies of our 1040s. "I think you'll have to wire over an I-17IH approval form," she said, although when she thought about it, it was possible that they'd changed that requirement. "Everything you send in must be apostilled," she explained, and when we asked her what apostilled meant, she told us it was something they did up in Sacramento which she'd never quite understood.

"How many adoptions have you done?" I asked Maggie.

She scratched at her leggings.

"Three, maybe four."

I waited for her to decide which it was.

"I'm working on one now. A six-year-old girl from Siberia. The orphanage director doesn't want to let her go."

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"Why not?"

"I don't think he likes Americans."

I stared at the arm of the couch where a cat had pulled fibers into a little forest of loops. I needed to make myself believe that Maggie could work the magic necessary to get Grisha out of the orphanage; that she and the man named Yuri she couldn't reach by telephone would be able to wave our documents and money and release him like a dove from a dark-sided box.

"Anyway, this is all we can do until we hear from Yuri." Maggie stood. A yellow Post-It was stuck to the back of her leg.

We followed her back through the damp little house.

"You'll call us as soon as you hear from him?" Ken asked.

"Of course."

"When do you think that'll be?"

Maggie's shoulders moved up in a shrug and stayed there as we went out into the rain.

While we waited for Maggie's call, Ken bought books. Every day he'd come home with a new title: Raising the Adopted Child. Real Parents, Real Children. Are Those Kids Yours?

He'd stack these books beside the bed and read to me from them at night; entire chapters about bonding and attachment, pages on the telltale signs of abandonment grief.

"What if he's not available?" I'd say, turning onto my side and pushing my feet down to where the sheets were cool. "What if somebody else saw him first?"

But Ken would just keep reading, insisting that I listen to the section about the adopted preschooler.

Ken told everybody about Grisha. "He's a little boy from Russia," he explained to his mother on the phone. "Didn't Daddy's family come from there?"

"He sucks his first two fingers," he said to Kate, who'd called to talk to me. "The same ones I did."

"We'll have to go to Moscow," he informed a man from a

software company we were writing a script for. "Probably sometime this month."

"What are you going to tell them if we don't get him?" I'd ask. "What are you going to say?"

But he wouldn't answer me. And later I'd hear him on the phone, explaining to whoever had called that Grisha was the Russian diminutive for Grigori.

"Where should we put his bed?" Ken wanted to know when we were supposed to be working. "Do you think he'll want to sleep with us?"

"I don't know," I told him, trying to concentrate on a brochure with glossy photographs of people smiling at their computer terminals.

But I'd be remembering the swimming motions Grisha had been making on the videotape, imagining the two of us in an ocean as warm as a bath, me holding him across the surface of the water, and him splashing me with drops that would leave my lips as salty as if I'd been kissing away tears.

"Did you call the fertility clinic?" Ken asked me, at least once a day. "Did you cancel the in vitro?"

"I will," I told him. But I kept putting it off.

I couldn't see myself with any of the other children on Maggie's videotape; the dark-haired boy in the saggy diaper who was trying to climb the bars of his crib, the brother and sister with identical faces in different sizes. If the little boy with the inexpert smile couldn't be mine, I wanted my turn with the piercing needles and the urine of the postmenopausal nuns.

It was three days before we heard from Maggie.

"The phone!" Ken shouted. He was wearing a pink towel and his cheeks were covered with a green shaving gel that smelled seaweedy.

"You get it," I said.

He ran past me, still clutching the black handle of his razor.

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"Hello? Hello?" He yelled into the receiver, like someone using a phone for the first time.

I stood in the doorway of the bathroom, wet hair dripping down my neck.

"It's Maggie," Ken mouthed. "She's heard from Yuri."

If I can touch two pieces of wood before she says anything, I thought, nobody else will be taking him. I placed a hand on either side of the doorjamb.

"Yes?" Ken was saying. "Yes?" And then he was nodding his head at me and wiggling his legs in a little dance beneath the pink towel.

I waited in the doorway with my palms touching wood.

"Thank you," Ken said into the phone. "Thanks so much."

He put down the receiver and yanked off the pink towel, twirling it over his head.

"He's ours, he's ours, he's ours!" he sang, dancing around the bed with his penis flapping.

I ran across the room and caught him around the waist. The hair on his chest was springy and damp.

"Let's ask Maggie for a copy of the tape," I said.

"OK."

"And more of those pictures."

"All right."

Ken wrapped his arms around me. The seaweedy gel made our cheeks stick together.

"I think he should sleep with us," I told him. "Don't your books say that's better for bonding? Later, we could put a crib, or maybe a small bed, in the room next to ours, so we can hear if he has a bad dream."

"All right," Ken kept saying into my wet hair. "OK."

Perinatal Encephalopathy

Kate and Dan lived in an old house they'd spent years renovating. Before they'd bought it, the house had come loose from its foundation, torquing itself around an old stone fireplace like a bent back. Kate and Dan had had to raise the entire structure in order to coax the house back into alignment.

Ken and I walked up the stone steps, skipping the one that was loose.

Inside, the house smelled like the Middle Eastern markets Dan was always taking us into; tiny grocery stores where he'd spend an hour poking his nose into jars of spices, before presenting us with little bags of the sweetest cardamom, the hottest clove.

"Dan's making Moroccan lamb stew," Kate said. She stretched up for the wineglasses, her loose sleeves moving a second or two behind her. "He's been simmering it for three days."

"It gives the spices time to get into the meat." Dan hugged Ken and me at the same time, the way an adult can hug two children at once.

"Can I put this on?" Ken waved around the videotape Maggie had given us of Grisha in the orphanage.

"In the living room," Kate said, but he was already gone.

Ken aimed two remote controls at the television like a gun-fighter. Behind him was a photograph he'd taken in Mexico and given to Kate because she'd loved it: twin girls walking along a cobblestone street in white communion dresses, the girl in front examining her lace bib for stains.

"Hey, Dan, which remote is it?"

"The one that says Sony."

"They both say Sony."

Ken pressed a button, and the sound of a woman singing in Portuguese wailed out of speakers that flanked the fireplace like Easter Island statues.

"I love this singer," Dan shouted over the woman's moaning. "She's Brazilian."

Ken pressed the other remote, and Grisha popped up on the television. He seemed to be moving his legs in time to the Brazilian music.

"It's on!"

"Pause it!" I made little motions with an imaginary remote at the television.

Ken pressed a button and silenced the singer from Brazil. Grisha continued moving his legs, as though he could still hear the music.

"The other one," Kate said, touching Ken's shoulder as she went by.

Ken froze Grisha with one leg in the air.

Dan carried in a tray of gold-colored drinks, placing them on a New Yorker magazine that, because of an error in the subscription department, came addressed to Dan & Kate Ryan, Best in Frozen Foods.

"I'm starting it." Ken pressed the remote and Grisha's legs started moving again.

"Grisha! Grisha!" called the off-camera voice.

Dan sat beside Kate on the couch.

"Grisha is the nickname for Grigori," I explained, forgetting that Ken had already told them this.

Dan repeated the name in the accent of a Russian cartoon character.

The babushkaed woman on the television lifted Grisha, displaying his naked body for the camera.

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"Look how long those legs are," Ken said, pointing with the remote. "I think he's going to be tall."

"He will grow strong for to work for the people," Dan said in his Russian cartoon voice.

The arms in the white sleeves appeared, clapping out the music for Russian dancers. Grisha pressed his eyes shut and lifted his lip, in his off-kilter smile.

"I love that," Ken said.

"Hmmm ..." Kate made the sound with her gold-colored drink pressed against her lips.

Dan was still talking in his cartoon voice, referring to the little boy on the tape as "comrade."

Grisha's face blurred, then cleared. He was closer now, his dark eyes staring out of Dan's wide-screen TV.

Kate is going to cry, I thought. And I set my drink on the magazine addressed to Best in Frozen Foods, so I could watch her.

Kate cried at things that were sad, and things that were happy. "Once I cried at the opening of a Kmart," she'd told me. And I'd never once doubted it was true. Every Thanksgiving, we'd gather with Dan's family at the cabin in the Sierras, and after dinner, we'd put on hats that hung from antler pegs—a plaid hunting cap, a rubber rain hat, a turban from a play Dan had been in—and go around the table telling the things we were thankful for. As each person listed his or her particular blessing, Kate would sit in a little felt pumpkin hat and cry.

But now, with Grisha's solemn face wide across her television set, Kate's eyes were narrowed and dry.

I turned back and watched Grisha disappear.

Kate and Dan had told us where Tuscany was and explained why we would want to go there. They'd cooked the first cassoulet I'd ever eaten, the first posole. They'd taught us about the painted animals from Oaxaca, the music of Ben Webster, and how to make ice cream out of fresh peaches.

Every New Year's Eve, the four of us would cook an elaborate

dinner while wearing hats made of shiny paper. On their tenth anniversary, we'd all gone to Mexico, where we spent a week sampling the cocktails Dan invented and fishing out the iguanas that fell into the toilet. Once, to settle a bet, we took turns weighing our heads on an old bathroom scale.

Now Ken and I needed to know what they thought of the little boy kicking his legs in a Russian orphanage.

Ken rewound the tape, making everything on the screen happen backward.

"You can see why we fell in love with him," he said.

Something beeped in the kitchen.

"The stew!" Dan ran out of the room, bumping the photograph of the girls in their communion dresses.

Ken turned to Kate, spilling some of the gold-colored drink on his leg.

"Incredible isn't he?" She was staring at the screen, watching the woman in the babushka push Grisha's fingers back into his mouth. "He's very cute."

"Katie?" Dan poked his head in the room. "Did you remember to put in the tabil?"

"The stuff in the little bowl?" She hopped off the couch, making waves in her drink. "I can't remember." And she followed him into the kitchen.

On the television, Grisha's body was swinging back and forth like a bell in reverse. I watched with Ken for a while, and then went into the kitchen.

The kitchen windows were steamy, the air peppery and damp.

"Smell this." Dan held a small bowl of brown powder under my nose. It was sharp and spicy and burned a little, like breathing in cayenne.

"Every one of my kids wants to be Martin Luther King, Jr.," Kate was saying. Kate taught preschoolers: three- and four-year-olds whom she spoke to in both Spanish and English. "We're doing a play for Martin Luther King Day, and I've got twenty little MLK, Jrs."

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She lifted the lid on a steaming pot of fennel, letting loose the smell of licorice.

"Do you think he's a little thin?" I asked her.

She poked at a fennel bulb with a fork.

"That's to be expected."

"We have to go to Moscow soon to see him."

"You should try to get some Cuban cigars, while you're there." Dan leaned over the fennel pot.

"They want us to make sure we want him."

"That fennel is done."

Then Ken came in and asked Dan a question about the way he'd hooked up his speakers, and Dan went into the other room, saying he wanted Ken to listen to something by a new band made up of musicians from an old band he remembered Ken liking. Kate said the couscous was probably ready and wouldn't be good cold, and Dan opened a bottle of red wine he'd found in a North Berkeley wine shop that reminded him of a meal he and Kate had eaten in Spain. Then we all sat down to dinner, and Ken tried to remember the name of a movie he'd seen in college that he thought took place in Morocco, and Dan told us about a play he was thinking of doing which would require him to learn several accents, though none of them would be Moroccan, and Kate said that North Africa was supposed to be beautiful and we should all try to take a trip there, and somehow the conversation never came back to what it was Kate had or hadn't seen on the videotape.

Kate called the next day.

"I'm giving you the name and number of a specialist in child development. I think you should show her your videotape."

"Why?"

"She'll know if he's doing all the things a nine-month-old should be doing."

"From a tape?"

"You can tell a lot from a tape."

I doodled on the number she'd given me, turning the eight into a little man with a hat.

"You really think I should do this?"

"Just so you know."

I added a pair of running legs to the little man, remembering the boy in the helmet. He was twelve, maybe thirteen years old, and couldn't control his limbs, so that he had to wear a Styro-foam helmet whenever he went out. Now and then, I'd see him with his mother in the grocery store; the mother making one-word exclamations—"Apple!" "Carrot!" "Pear!"—and the son repeating them.

I didn't want to be doing that, I thought. I didn't want to be teaching my teenaged son the names of the most common fruits and vegetables.

"All right," I told Kate, "I'll show her the tape."

"That was heartbreaking," said the specialist in childhood development.

The director who was sitting beside her nodded, her glasses inching down her nose.

The specialist's name was Jill. She had big, bony hands, and when she shook mine, she'd made it look like a child's.

The director's name was Sharon. She was round and hard, like the small European ladies who push you out of their way at the market.

"Could we watch it again?" asked Jill.

Ken rewound the tape, the sound like a small motor racing.

I looked around the room. In a corner, someone had set up a puzzle board with cutouts in the shapes of ducks and chickens and horses. The wooden pieces that fit these cutouts had been scattered over the floor, and I imagined a child struggling to find the right place for the wooden rooster while a specialist stood over him, taking notes.

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The tape stopped winding, and Ken pressed the remote. Grisha appeared, swimming across the screen.

I watched Jill's face, but she kept its broad planes blank, like the featureless masks that are sold at Halloween, masks that are often more frightening than those made to look like goblins or monsters.

"There's no vocalizing here," she said. For a moment I thought she was speaking to me.

"And no evidence of crawling ability," Sharon replied.

"I don't remember him tracking that squeeze toy."

"The giraffe."

"Did you notice the arms and legs?"

"Very rigid." Sharon made a fist with her fat little hand.

"But it's that expression that concerns me." Jill put a long finger on Grisha's sideways smile. "It doesn't seem to be caused by any outside stimuli."

Sharon hitched her chair closer. The backs of the two women were blocking the television. Grisha poked his face out from between their heads, as if looking for me.

"Heartbreaking," Jill repeated when the tape went to blue.

"What are you seeing?" I asked her.

"What we're looking for are developmental milestones," Sharon explained, "as well as evidence of basic neurological functions."

"Are you seeing something wrong?"

The room filled with the loud frightening sound of static.

"Sorry," Ken said, pressing buttons until the television turned off.

"Let me show you something." Sharon stood and I could see she was not much taller than a child herself. "I think you'll find this helpful."

She walked to a bookcase filled with videotapes and brought one back.

"May I?" she said to Ken, who had not let go of the remote.

On the screen, a middle-aged man in a suit sat beside a little girl with an elastic bow stretched around her bald head. The little girl looked to be about the same age as Grisha.

"This man is an expert in assessing childhood development." Sharon gave his image a little pat with her finger.

The man in the suit placed a tower of plastic blocks in front of the little girl, and watched with delight as she took them apart. He put a plastic dump truck in her lap, and clapped when the little girl pushed it over to him. He hid a stuffed monkey under his jacket and waited for the girl to find it. "Good job," he repeated each time the child completed a task. "Good job."

I wondered if Sharon meant to show us that Grisha was not like the little girl with the bow on her head? Wanted us to see that he would not be able to take apart the blocks, or push the truck? That the stuffed monkey would remain lost to him?

"Perhaps that's enough," Jill said, when the man began singing "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider."

Sharon turned off the television.

"Do you have any other information on this child?" Jill asked.

"Just this," Ken said. He pushed a paper across the shiny conference table.

Jill read the words out loud, the medical diagnosis for the child we wanted to adopt. "Perinatal encephalopathy. Muscular distony. Hypotrophy. Where did you get this?"

"From our adoption coordinator."

"Vegeto-visceral syndrome?"

"She thought it might mean he was allergic to vegetables."

Jill pushed the paper back to him.

"Some of these diagnoses are left over from the time Russian children couldn't be adopted by foreigners, unless they had something wrong with them," Ken explained, repeating what Maggie had told us. "They don't really mean anything."

The two women sat across the table from us without saying

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anything, and I began to believe that I'd been unclear about why we'd wanted them to watch the tape.

"So, what can you tell us about Grisha?" Ken finally asked.

"Normally, what we talk about with the parents is therapy," Sharon told him. "Various treatments for the developmental issues we've observed."

"But in this case, you're not yet the parents of this little boy," Jill said. "Correct?"

"Is there something wrong with him? Something bad?"

"We don't ever use terms like 'bad.' " Sharon smiled.

Jill put her large wrists on the table. I thought she was going to reach for my hand.

"There is every evidence that this child's development is severely delayed," she said.

"What does that mean? That he won't put sentences together until he's four or five? Or that he'll never learn to read or write?"

"It's impossible to predict how the delay will manifest itself," Sharon explained.

"But you said there are treatments to help him catch up," Ken reminded her.

"Again, we don't like to make predictions."

"But all we're talking about are learning delays, right?"

Jill leaned across the table. "I also believe there's neurological damage, based on that odd facial expression."

"Couldn't it have been a smile?" Ken asked, twisting up the corners of his own mouth to demonstrate.

"I didn't see anything in his environment likely to produce a smile."

Jill pushed back from the table. Her large hands left opaque prints on the waxy surface.

"Do you think we should take him?" I asked her.

"That's not a question I'm ever asked. It's generally not an option for the parents who come to me."

"And as I mentioned," Sharon repeated, "our recommendations are strictly in the area of treatment."

"But if you do adopt him," Jill continued, "expect that he'll require some kind of therapy—for how long and whether it'll ultimately help, I can't tell you."

The four of us examined the smudges on the table.

"Well, if that's it then." Sharon rose.

Jill stood beside her, and their disparate heights made me feel queasy. I walked around the table, stepping on a cutout duck.

"I'm sorry," Jill said, when we went through the door. But I didn't know whether her apology had been for what she'd told me about Grisha, or for bumping me with her long arm.

Ken and I sat in the parked car with our seat belts fastened.

"They might be wrong," he said. He was flicking his finger on the edge of a key chain—a flat metal square with the masks of comedy and tragedy on either side.

"He wasn't crawling."

"Maybe they wouldn't let him."

"And he wasn't sitting up by himself."

"He might be too young."

"At nine months?"

"It's possible."

I pushed on the button that made the window go down, forgetting it wouldn't work when the car was off.

"He wasn't anything like that little girl," I said. "He didn't do any of the same things."

"Nobody was giving him any toys."

"They gave him a giraffe."

"They didn't give it to him. They just squeezed it next to his ear."

I stared at an enormous bougainvillea that seemed in the process of swallowing the building we'd just left.

"Do you think they're wrong?" I asked.

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Ken watched a woman dragging a small boy past our bumper.

"Probably not."

"I don't think I can raise a special-needs child." I pressed my knee against the door handle until it hurt.

"Are you saying you don't want him?"

"He could be severely delayed."

"We could fix that—after we get him."

"They say he has neurological damage."

"How can they tell that from a videotape?"

I leaned my head against the window I couldn't open. My face was reflected in the side mirror, and I moved so I wouldn't have to look at it.

"We're forty years older than this little boy," I told Ken. "Do you see us at sixty, or seventy, holding the hand of our grownup child so he can cross the street?"

Ken flipped the key chain. Showed me comedy, tragedy.

"Do you think you can raise a special-needs child?" I asked him.

"No, I don't think so."

"I can't believe you're not going to take that little boy." Maggie's voice quavered on the other end of the phone, making our connection sound watery.

"We're not the right parents for a special-needs child," I told her.

I was pacing the kitchen with a sponge in my hand, wiping at spots that were part of the tile. Ken sat at the table with the portable phone pushed against his ear.

"He is not a special-needs child," Maggie insisted.

"They told us he had neurological damage."

"They're wrong."

"These women are experts—this is what they do."

"I've been to these orphanages. I've seen these children."

"They showed us a videotape."

"There is nothing wrong with that little boy."

I scrubbed at a brown ring in the shape of a coffee cup.

"We might still considet Russian adoption sometime in the futute," I told her.

"I can't believe you're not going to take that little boy."

"You should tell Yuri we'te not coming."

"Just go to Moscow. See him. I've met these childten and—"

"We'te not the tight—"

"Let net finish," Ken said.

I squeezed the watet out of the sponge, waited to heat what Maggie would say.

"He just felt like youts."

My hand was wet and smelled musty.

"Take some time and think about it," Maggie said.

Ken looked at me and nodded.

"We'te just not the tight people."

Maggie sighed.

"I'll wait a few days befote I e-mail Yuri, just in case."

"Whatevet you want."

"I just can't believe you'te not going to take that little boy."

Jill called the next day with the phone numbets of a pediattic neutologist, an infant-bonding thetapist, and a child psychiattist.

"All these people wotk with childten ftom Eastetn Eutopean otphanages. I want you to call them."

"Why?"

"They can tell you what to expect if you adopt that little boy."

"We've alteady decided not to take him."

"You'te sute?"

"It's what we told out cootdinatot."

"Call these people anyway. I want you to be certain."

I wtote down the numbets and called each one in tutn.

"Without dtugs, some of these childten can't sit still long enough to wtite theit names," explained the pediattic neutologist. "Othets have to be testtained to keep ftom banging theit heads against the wall."

"Growing up in an otphanage can ptoduce attachment

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disorder," said the infant-bonding specialist. "What you wind up with are children who cannot tolerate being touched by their parents."

"The inability to bond causes sociopathic behavior," the child psychiatrist informed me. "I've treated one child who broke his biological brother's arm, and another who tried to set his grandparents' house on fire."

After I finished talking with these experts, I went out to hike the mountain that kept the southern light from reaching our house. I chose the steepest path and didn't stop walking until my heart was pounding in my ears and I was choking down air that smelled of mud and rainwater and decaying leaves.

The next day, Jill mailed me a magazine article. On the cover, the words "Disturbed, Detached, Unreachable" were printed over the blurred photograph of a screaming child. Inside, I saw that all the photographs were blurred, as if these children had been too badly damaged to create a clear image.

Beneath the out-of-focus faces, I read about the little boy from Romania who flinches whenever his mother tries to hug him, the girl from Russia who has threatened to kill her parents while they're sleeping, the nine-year-old from Moscow who must take medication before being allowed out to play.

Along with the article, Jill enclosed a graph that charted at what age a child should be able to smile spontaneously, balance on one foot. According to the graph, 90 percent of the children tested could sit up by themselves before nine months.

I put the blurry children and the graph back into the envelope and called Kate, asked her to meet me at an Indian restaurant where the curries were so hot they made your ears itch.

"This doesn't feel like deciding not to take a child I never had," I told her, wiping away tears caused by the chicken vin-daloo. "It feels like losing one I did."

"All you saw was a videotape. Everything else you imagined."

So I imagined myself singing the letters of the alphabet to Grisha and watching him walk away before I'd gotten to M; telling him, "No," and having him hit me so hard I'd be left with a bruise; trying to kiss him good night while he whipped his head from side to side on the pillow.

Yet whenever I looked at his small face in Maggie's photograph, he still felt like mine.

Jill continued to call me with the phone numbers of other specialists. I'd write these numbers down in a notebook covered with Chinese silk, leaving a blank page between them.

"Why do you keep calling these people?" Ken asked me.

"I'm waiting for one of them to tell me something different," and I'd remember the experiment with the lines.

It was a college experiment for a psychology class, and the subject had been a freshman with a mouth full of braces. He was put in a room with five of us from the class, and everyone was asked to choose one line from a selection of three that most closely matched a sample. It wasn't a difficult choice; of the three lines, only one was a clear match. Yet the five of us were told to choose a line that was much longer.

At first the freshman with the braces stuck with his choice, measuring the lines with the side of his finger to show us that his was the better match. But after we'd been given a number of sample lines and hadn't once agreed with him, the freshman began to doubt his perception. Before long, he was choosing whatever line the group chose.

Then the freshman was given an ally—one person who saw the lines the way he did. That changed everything. Now, when the five of us chose a line that was too long or too short, the freshman no longer went along with us. Even when fifteen more people were added to the experiment, fifteen people who didn't see what he saw, the freshman stuck with what he believed to be true—as long as he had one ally.

That was what I was looking for: an ally. One person among

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all the names in the Chinese notebook who would look at Grisha and see what I saw.

The door to the pediatrician's office kept closing on me as I struggled to get a small television and a portable VCR into the waiting room.

The thin, dark head of a man who looked to be from India poked itself out of the receptionist's window. The man's mouth was a little oval of surprise.

"I have an appointment with Dr. McKenzie," I told him.

He regarded the equipment in my hands with alarm.

"She's going to look at my videotape." I lifted the VCR to the height of his window.

The man flipped through the wide pages of his appointment book. He had soft black hairs on his upper lip that had never been shaved, and I thought he might be a young relative of the doctor's.

"Newman." I pointed to the name in his book with my chin.

"Yes, yes," the young man said. He nodded many times. "You will be having a seat, please."

I sat on a striped couch beside a stack of Highlight magazines. A small boy with a runny nose shuffled out of a back room with his mother. He stared at the little television at my feet.

I'd found Dr. McKenzie myself. Gotten her number from the phone book after I'd called the last name on Jill's list. She was the only pediatrician who would agree to make a diagnosis from a videotape. After she told me what was wrong with Grisha, I didn't know who I would call.

"You will be coming in now." The young Indian man stood in the door.

I picked up the television and the VCR and followed him down a hallway. He walked so smoothly, his backless sandals never slapped against his heels.

"This will be the room," he said. And I stood holding the

VCR and the television while he pulled a new sheet of white paper over the examining table.

"The doctor will be coming in soon." He turned to go by pivoting on the ball of one foot.

I set the VCR and the small television on the examining table and crawled behind a rolling cabinet to plug them in. On the way up, I bumped the cabinet, rattling a metal tray full of sharp instruments. There was one chair, and I sat in it.

"And where is this videotape I am supposed to watch?" said Dr. McKenzie as she came through the door. She was wearing a red sari flecked with gold threads beneath her white jacket.

I pointed to the small television on the examining table.

"So let us see it." She folded her arms over white cotton and red silk.

Dr. McKenzie watched the tape standing in the doorway. I stood to offer her my seat, but she waved me down with the clinking sound of her gold bracelets.

The doctor's eyes were perfectly round, echoes of the small red circle on her forehead. I watched her face, curious which of Grisha's small movements would be the first to disturb her.

When I heard her laugh, a deep, throaty sound, I thought something had gone wrong with the tape—that it had stopped, and she was now watching a situation comedy or scenes from a soap opera.

"That is a delightful expression." The doctor pointed a hand covered with rings at the television.

Grisha was making the scrunched-up face, the expression that was not produced by any outside stimuli.

"What do you think it is?" I asked her.

"A smile."

I made a sound that could have been either laughing or crying. Dr. McKenzie stepped closer and rested a hand on top of the television.

"I do not see anything wrong with this child, except that he's in an orphanage."

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"Thank you," I whispered.

"Have you seen him yet?"

"No."

"I suggest you do. See him, and then go with your gut."

She gave the handle of the small television a squeeze before turning to go, pivoting on one foot precisely as the young man had done.

I put my hands over my face and saw Grisha using my fingers to count all the way to ten, throwing his arms around my legs in a hug, bringing me the drawing he would have to explain was a pirate ship; and it felt like waking beside someone you love after dreaming that you'd lost them.

I called Ken's pager from a pay phone outside the doctor's office. "Doctor says Grisha is fine," I dictated to the person on the other end. "We should go to Moscow."

Later he told me the message had come while he was sitting in a conference room with a client.

"It was all garbled. All I could read was 'Grisha' and 'fine,' and something that looked like Moscow without any vowels."

But it had been enough for him to excuse himself to go into the men's room and cry.

The Blueberry Hat

Smoke was coming out of Yuri's nose and his gray fur hat bristled. He shouted at Volodya jabbing a lit cigarette at him for emphasis. Volodya pumped the gas pedal of the stalled Lada, his long thin body bouncing up and down in time with his foot. The little car made a sound like a ticking bomb.

Ken and I sat squeezed into the backseat with Anna, the translator Yuri had arranged for us. Anna sat with her stockinged knees pressed close together, her hands folded in her lap. I was in the middle, over the hump, and my shoes kept sliding down onto her polished high-heeled boots. In the backpack balanced on my lap were the presents Maggie had told us to bring for the women who worked at the orphanage: battery-operated flashlights, travel-sized bottles of hand lotion, postcards of San Francisco.

"Why would they want a picture of a cable car?" I'd asked her.

"They like anything American," she explained.

The Lada was surrounded by cars, each one exhaling exhaust in thin blue clouds. A Jeep Cherokee drove onto the sidewalk to get around us, just missing three women in fur coats, who looked like bears with shopping bags. The women didn't turn around.

"If you like while you are in Moscow," Anna said in her child's voice, "we go to Tretyakov Gallery." Her pale pink lips were three inches from my ear. "We see the umm . . . religious paintings." When Anna couldn't think of the English word

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for something, she'd make a soft humming sound until it came to her.

Yuri rolled down his window and blew smoke into the snarling faces of the drivers trying to pass the little Lada. A large man in a Mercedes shook an angry paw at us.

Volodya pressed the pedal again, and the Lada filled with the smell of gasoline. Yuri lit another cigarette.

"Do you do many adoptions?" I asked him, directing the question to the back of his fur hat.

"Two, three each month." He sent the English words into the smoky air as if he had no confidence in their ability to convey meaning.

"That's wonderful, finding homes for so many children."

Yuri regarded me with small eyes. He fitted his cigarette between brown teeth, and looked back out the window.

Anna was telling me about her daughter, Victoria. "She love The Lion King."

"How old is she?" I asked.

"Twelve." And then she told me how much Victoria liked American clothes and what her sizes were.

Volodya reached for the key and rested his fingers on it. Tilting back his head and angling his long nose at a rip in the fabric of the Lada's roof, he moved his lips silently. Then he turned the key, and the little car started, shivering in the cold.

We crawled along the wide streets of Moscow's, streets my guidebook claimed had been designed by Stalin so that planes could land in the city during wartime.

"That is old KGB ummm . . . headquarters." Anna pointed to a granite building that spread over an entire block.

"What do they do there now?" I asked.

"The same thing," Yuri snorted. He laughed, and a curl of smoke rolled out of his mouth.

"And that is Red Square," Anna said. Behind two gray walls I glimpsed a narrow slice of St. Basil's swirling domes, a fairy tale caught between the pages of a textbook.

Volodya swerved to avoid a man who had stumbled into the street. My backpack toppled onto Anna's neat wool skirt.

"Sorry," I said.

Inside the pack, beneath the plastic flashlights and the pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, was the graph Jill had sent me that charted all the things a ten-month-old baby should be able to do.

Pulls to stand. Bangs two cubes. I'd spent the week before memorizing these skills. Regards own hand. Says Dada and Mama.

"Why are you doing that?" Ken would ask, when he'd find me in the bathroom chanting, Works for toy. Imitates sounds.

"These are things we should know," I'd tell him.

But the truth was that when I wasn't repeating one of the skills from the chart— Gets to sitting. Stands supported. —I'd imagine the babushkaed woman handing Grisha to me, his wrists like twigs, his hair brown feathers, and I'd be afraid that I wouldn't feel anything.

I'd never been able to master the knack of falling in love with other people's babies; never begged to hold a stranger's wobbly-headed newborn, or asked a friend if I could sniff the scalp of her sleeping child.

Ken had. Ken could be stopped on the street by a little girl in a sun hat like a French Foreign Legionnaire, and be unable to resist talking to her in the sputtering voice of Donald Duck.

I must have something missing, I'd think, as he bent over the stroller and made the little girl laugh by saying her name in a duck's voice.

But before this, it had never mattered.

I looked out the window of the Lada. We'd left the city center and were driving past massive apartment buildings with tiny windows that seemed in danger of being squeezed shut by the brickwork around them.

Volodya pulled into a short driveway and stopped the car in front of a green metal gate. Someone had painted the number 3 on the wall by hand, and small paint drips ran from the bottom curve like tears.

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A door at the side of the gate opened, and a man wearing a policeman's hat marched to the car. He shouted into Yuri's open window, and Yuri shouted back at him, pointing to Ken and me in the backseat.

"Nyet," the man in the policeman's hat told Yuri. "Nyet, nyet." And he shook his head, making the hat float from side to side.

Yuri yelled out the window, his breath white clouds. Between sentences, he shot his pointed finger at Ken and me.

The man in the policeman's hat repeated, "Nyet, nyet." His stomach was pressed against Yuri's door.

Yuri threw his lit cigarette out the window, just missing the man's shoes. He pushed open his door, shoving the man out of his way, and marched through the gate. The man rushed after him, his arms waving, like a beetle that's been knocked onto its back.

"What's happening?" Ken asked Anna. "Why aren't they letting us in?"

"Who knows?" She shrugged her neat shoulders. "They do what they do." Then she said something to Volodya which she didn't translate.

If I can swallow three times before Yuri comes back, I thought, they'll let us in. But my mouth was too dry.

Cold air blew in through Yuri's open window. Volodya revved the Lada's engine to keep it from stalling. Anna stared out her window at a row of small winter trees that looked dead. I saw Ken gripping the door handle, and was afraid he'd leap out of the car and chase after Yuri and the man in the policeman's hat.

Yuri burst back through the gate and threw himself into his seat.

"Are we going in?" Ken asked him.

He yanked off his fur hat and shouted in Russian.

Without warning, the gate to the orphanage swung open. The man in the policeman's hat rapped his knuckles on the Lada's

hood and waved us through with short irritated gestures, as if we were the ones who had kept him waiting.

We drove down a gravel driveway, over sharp rocks that poked through the snow. In a narrow strip of yard, a group of three- and four-year-old children climbed around a swing set with ice-covered seats. The children were dressed in identical blue snowsuits that made their upper bodies seem puffed up with air.

Ken and I got out of the Lada and the children came running across the snow. "Mama! Papa!" they cried, holding up their blue arms and reaching for our hands.

I didn't know if I was allowed to clasp their uncovered fingers, touch one of their cold cheeks; but before I could decide, Yuri jumped out of the car and placed his body between them and us.

"They say your son is sleeping now," Anna explained. "Someone will bring him when he wake up."

Anna and I waited at a table covered with a vinyl cloth. Three women in white lab coats like the woman on Grisha's videotape sat across from us. The women wore thick foundation that looked dry and powdery, and too much hairspray had made their hair separate into stiff little clumps. They reminded me of high-school girls who teased their hair and wore too much makeup, a look that made them seem both hard and vulnerable.

Ken was videotaping everything in the room: a couch covered with orange swirls, a pink plastic radio playing Russian disco music, Yuri scowling out the window at Volodya and the Lada. We'd borrowed the camera to record our first meeting with Grisha.

Anna spoke to the white-coated women, referring to Ken and me as Amerikanski. When I smiled at them, they lowered their eyes and let the corners of their lipsticked mouths turn up only the slightest amount.

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"Do you think I could use the bathroom?" I asked Anna.

"The what?"

"The toilet?"

She led me down a long hallway that smelled of boiled cabbage. On the walls were framed pictures of babies that had been cut out of magazines. We stopped in front of a door with a raised bottom, like a door on a boat.

"Here." Anna handed me a pack of tissues. "You not want to use what they use."

The toilet had no seat, and I hovered over a porcelain rim with a chip like a bite taken out of it. At my feet was a pile of newspaper cut into small squares. When I was finished, I twisted the tap marked with a small r, for the Russian word for hot, but the water never became less icy. Above the sink, a stiff gray towel hung on a nail like a concrete sculpture. I wiped my hands on the back of my skirt.

Yuri had taken my seat at the table. He was telling the women in the white coats a story that made them giggle into their hands.

I looked out the window at the children playing in the ice-covered yard. One little boy was twisting the chains of a swing, walking round and round until he'd worn a bare patch in the snow. When he'd wound the chains as tight as they would go, he threw his body across the seat and lifted his feet, spinning around in a circle of blue. I could see his bare fingers gripping the icy swing, his face grim and determined. When the swing came to a stop, the little boy dropped his feet to the ground and began twisting the chains again.

Other children came by, pulled on the little boy's snowsuit, or tried to grab the swing away from him, but he ignored them. He kept his eyes on the bare patch of ground, all his attention focused on the twisting chains.

"You would like tea?" Anna asked.

At the table, a woman with a white cloth tied over her head

stood balancing glasses of black tea on a lacquered tray. I nodded, and the woman served me first. The glass was hot and burned my fingers. The tea tasted bitter and tannic.

The pink radio switched from disco to news. Outside, Volodya raced the Lada's engine, making it sound as if he were trying to keep an angry drunk awake. I finished my tea and shook my head when one of the white-coated women tried to give me the untouched glass in front of her.

"I think your son come now," Anna said, looking behind me.

A woman with penciled-in eyebrows carried in a small child dressed in pink overalls. For a moment, I thought there'd been a mistake. This little boy was pale, much paler than the boy on the videotape. The feathery brown hair was blond, and the dark eyes gray blue. I tried to fit this pale little face onto the darker one I'd been carrying around with me.

The little boy looked down and slipped the first two fingers of his right hand into his mouth. I reached up, and the woman with the penciled-in eyebrows put him on my lap.

He smelled like the orphanage, like boiled cabbage, and a little like sleep. His hands were clenched into tight fists, and he sat with his back not touching my body anywhere. I wanted to turn him around, study his face, but I was afraid I might make him cry in front of the women in the white coats.

The woman with the penciled eyebrows hovered over me, prepared to catch Grisha if I let him fall. Anna pushed a glass of hot tea out of his reach. I sat very still, with my arms wrapped around the small boy in my lap.

Ken knelt on the floor beside me. 'Grisha," he said, taking hold of the little boy's fist and waving it back and forth.

Grisha kept his eyes on the table, staring at a place where the vinyl cloth had cracked and the soft gray flannel poked through.

"Grisha," Ken said again.

Grisha looked into Ken's face.

"That's my boy," Ken told him.

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He opened his hand, and Grisha brushed his fingers across his palm.

"He's great, isn't he?" Ken said, smiling up at me.

I unfolded my fingers and waited for Grisha to touch my palm.

"Yuri say you must dress Grisha now for going to American Medical Center," Anna said.

I stood, holding Grisha against my chest, and looked around the room.

"You can put him on the umm . . . sofa," she told me.

I sat Grisha on the patterned couch and worked at taking off the pink overalls. They were too big, and someone had pinned the straps together in the back. When I slid the pants down his legs, I saw that instead of a diaper, he wore a thin piece of cotton that had been folded several times and knotted on the sides.

Ken brought me a small pair of navy sweatpants and a sweatshirt that had GAP written across the chest in red letters.

"If you want to take Grisha out of the orphanage, you have to bring something for him to wear," Maggie had told me.

"Why?"

"The children can be taken out, but the clothes that belong to the orphanage have to stay inside."

Two days before we left for Moscow, Ken and I had gone shopping at BabyGap.

"Is this a gift?" asked the saleswoman in khaki pants.

"No," Ken said, "it's for our son."

"What size is he?"

"We don't know," I told her.

We'd bought the navy blue sweatpants and the sweatshirt with GAP written on it, as well as a ski parka that had light blue fur around the hood, estimating the length of an arm, a leg we'd seen only on videotape. Afterward, in a store that sold hand-knit sweaters, I found a knitted cap that looked like a blueberry with a green wool stem, and I bought that, too.

That night, I'd laid the blue clothes out on my bed, setting them down in the shape of a little boy.

While the women in the white coats watched, I pulled the sweatshirt over Grisha's head. He sat staring at the swirled fabric of the couch between his feet, the neckline of the too-big shirt dipping down below his collarbones.

"Grisha," I called. But I must have said it too quietly for even him to hear.

I took his wrist and tucked his arm into the shirt, but had no idea which way to bend his elbow to make it fit into the sleeve. I could feel the woman with the penciled eyebrows watching me, those half circles above her lids rising with concern.

"Would you like to do this?" I asked Ken.

He looked at Grisha, at the sleeves of the sweatshirt that dangled from his shoulders like flattened wings. "Sure." He handed me the camera.

Through the lens, I watched Ken ease Grisha's arms into the sweatshirt, bunch the striped socks we'd brought so the heel unfolded magically in the right place. Inside the camera, the two of them were black-and-white, like people on an old television show.

The moment Grisha was dressed, Yuri stood. "We go," he said.

Ken gathered the pink and purple gift bags with the flashlights and pictures of San Francisco, and placed them on the table in front of the women in the white coats.

"For you," he told them. And he made a sweeping gesture with his arm, as though displaying the valuable prizes they'd won.

"Spasebah," the women said, using the Russian word for "thank you." They smiled but did not touch the bright bags.

Yuri raced down the hall, his fur hat bobbing. I walked past the cutout pictures of babies, my arms tight around Grisha.

When I got to the door, the woman with the penciled eyebrows ran up with a small blanket covered with rabbits. She wrapped the blanket around Grisha, tucking it between his

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blue fur parka and my jacket. For just a moment, she let her hand rest on the knitted hat that looked like a blueberry. Then the Lada's horn beeped twice, and we rushed out into the cold.

The waiting room at the American Medical Center was filled with Russians; men in plastic shoes stained white from the salt on the roads, women wearing thick socks that poked above snow boots. The Russians sat with their coats on, though the room was heated with dry air that made my hair crackle with electricity. They kept their hands in their laps and their eyes lowered to a small table that held nothing but English-language magazines.

Ken and I sat side by side, Anna next to us. Yuri stood with his back against the wall, staring at his shoes. He'd left his fur hat in the Lada. Without it, he seemed shorter and somehow diminished.

I balanced Grisha on my lap, unwrapping the rabbit blanket and pulling off the blueberry hat. His wispy hair stood straight up like a cartoon of someone who'd been badly frightened. I tried to smooth it down, and it clung to my hand.

A Russian woman in a thick handmade sweater smiled at me, and I wondered if she could tell that Grisha had come from an orphanage.

Ken and I had our name called before any of the Russians.

"You want I come with you?" Anna asked.

"No, thanks," we both told her.

The doctor was young and wore sneakers with tiny air bubbles in the soles. She'd only just come to Moscow to practice medicine, and still seemed to think of it as a great adventure.

"Let's see how much this little guy weighs." She took Grisha from me and set him on a scale like the ones butchers use to weigh meat.

He looked up at her and waved his arms.

"Seven-point-one kilograms," she said, and I tried to work out how much that was in pounds.

"Stretch him out on that paper there, so we can see how long he is." She pointed to a gray examining table.

I lowered Grisha onto the paper. When I let him go, he flipped over and began crawling toward the edge.

Crawls forward, I thought.

"You'd better hold onto him," the doctor smiled.

I turned Grisha onto his back and held him still with my hand on his chest.

"His heart's beating so fast," I said.

"Babies' hearts do beat fast."

She drew a line on the paper where Grisha's heels touched, then brushed back his hair to draw one above his head.

"What's that?" asked Ken, rubbing his thumb over a brownish mark on Grisha's forehead.

"It looks like a bruise," the doctor said. "I suspect he got it from pressing his head against the bars of his crib."

Holds head steady, I thought, so I wouldn't think about Grisha wanting to get out of his crib so badly that he'd bruised his forehead.

"Go ahead and undress him," the doctor told me, measuring the distance between the two lines.

Grisha kept his hands in his lap while I took off his clothes, making me think of the Russians in the waiting room. I had trouble untying the cloth rag he wore as a diaper, and when I got it off, I saw that the knots had left small indentations in the skin at his hips.

The doctor listened to Grisha's heart, and his lungs, pressed her fingers into his armpits and the place where his legs joined his body. She stretched out his arms into a T, and then watched how quickly he pulled them back.

Ken and I hovered over the examining table, stepping out of the way of the doctor as she circled Grisha, her air-filled sneakers

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squeaking on the floor. I kept reminding myself that Maggie had told us that Yuri wouldn't take children who weren't healthy, because the sick ones didn't bring as much money.

"Hold him in your lap, and we'll take a look at his throat," the doctor said.

The paper made a snapping sound when I sat on it. The doctor unwrapped a wooden tongue depressor, and scooted over on a little wheeled stool.

The moment Grisha saw the tongue depressor, he started to scream. It was the first sound we'd heard him make.

He twisted his body around in my lap, and I was afraid he'd throw himself on the floor. I wrapped my arms tight around his shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides. Ken grabbed his ankles to stop his legs from beating against the table. The doctor pushed herself closer, trying to grab onto his chin. Grisha rocked his head from side to side, digging a hole in my chest.

"Keep his head steady," the doctor said.

She held onto his jaw and forced his mouth open. I flattened my palm on his forehead, pressing against the mark that looked like a bruise.

Grisha was coughing and crying, and his nose was running. The doctor poked the stick deeper into his mouth and pushed down on his tongue. I felt his body convulse against my chest; I felt the gagging in my own throat.

"That's enough." I pulled Grisha's head away. My chest was pounding, and I couldn't tell for certain whether it was my heart or his.

The doctor sat for a moment, holding the tongue depressor in the air between us. I knew that if she tried to force it back into Grisha's mouth, I would push her away, send her rolling across the examining room on her little wheeled stool.

"All right." She threw the wooden stick into a trash can. "Just let me look in his ears."

I turned Grisha's head to the side and wiped the tears from his face, remembering something that had happened when I was

three, maybe four years old. I'd been driving with my mother in our old Pontiac, speeding down the highway, when the door next to me—which must not have been closed all the way— flew open. Nobody wore seat belts then, and the force of the air outside tugged at my legs, pulling my body out of the car. I was screaming, clutching at the smooth vinyl of the seat, but my mother never once took her eyes off the road. She just clamped her hand on my wrist, holding it so tightly that it was bruised purple for days afterward.

"How were you able to hang on with only one hand?" my father had asked her afterward.

"I just did," she'd told him.

Now, looking down at Grisha's dark lashes that the tears had bunched into little stars, I knew what it was that had kept me from flying out of the car. It was the fierce protectiveness that came from the hard edge of love.

"You're very lucky," the doctor said, sitting back. "The only thing wrong with this little guy is that he's undernourished."

She showed us a chart with curved lines that represented the range of normal heights and weights for children Grisha's age. Then she drew two small circles below the lines to indicate the places where his numbers fell.

"Is there something we can leave at the orphanage for him?" Ken asked. "Some kind of formula?"

"You can't leave anything powdered, because the water here is full of parasites, and they won't take the time to boil it. And liquid formula's expensive, so there's not much chance he'll actually get any of it."

Grisha chewed the edge of the paper with the curved lines.

"You'll just have to wait until you bring him home before you can beef him up. Do you know when that'll be?"

"Not for three months," I said, telling her what Maggie had told me. "The Russians put all orphans in a database for three months."

"Why?"

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"Because they're hoping a Russian family will adopt them first."

The doctor tapped the height and weight chart with her fingertips. "Three months," she said. And she shook her head.

Back at the orphanage, the woman with the penciled-in eyebrows took Grisha out of my arms as soon as I stepped into the cabbage-smelling hallway.

"She say Grisha is late for his lunch," Anna translated.

The woman began walking away.

I grabbed the edge of the rabbit blanket, stopping her.

"I love you," I told Grisha, slipping my fingers under the blue fur of his hood to touch his cheek.

"Dasvedanya," the women said, Russian for "good-bye."

They walked down the hallway, Grisha lost in the woman's arms. All I could see of him was the knitted cap that made his head look like a blueberry.

Hot Slotyana

The taxi driver let us out on a dark, empty street.

"Kolkbida?" Ken said, leaning in the window.

"Da, da," the driver nodded, pointing down a narrow alleyway.

"Are you sure about this place?" he asked me.

" 'Kolkhida is a lively Georgian restaurant, where a canary sings along with the various musical groups,' " I read from my guidebook.

It was snowing, wet flakes that felt sharp and icy against our faces.

"We should have stayed at the hotel," Ken said.

"Is better you eat dinner at Radisson." That's what Anna had told us, when we'd asked her to recommend a Russian restaurant. "Moscow is a umm . . . dangerous place for foreigners."

But I hadn't wanted to eat at the Radisson, which served hamburgers and salads to American and British and German businessmen. Tonight I wanted to eat Russian food in a Russian restaurant to celebrate the fact that Grisha could Crawl forward. Get to sitting. And make me love somebody else's child.

The taxi driver rapped his knuckles on the glass, the sound a small explosion in the quiet street. He waved his hands, shooing us away.

Ken and I walked down the alley looking for the pectopah sign that hung outside every Russian restaurant, but we saw nothing except concrete and fast-falling snow.

Footsteps crunched along the ice behind us. We turned and saw the taxi driver running down the alley.

"What do you want?" Ken shouted at him.

The driver took his hand out of his pocket and raised his arm.

"What!" Ken shouted. "What!"

"Kolkhida," the driver said, pointing with his raised arm.

We looked up and saw a small metal door a few steps up from the street.

The driver pressed a rusted doorbell, and the alley rilled with the clanking of locks being turned. After a minute, the door was opened by a man with hair so white it seemed to glow in the dark.

"Kolkhida?" Ken asked him.

"Da, da." The man waved us in from the cold.

The walls of the restaurant were covered with shiny silver paper painted with white palm fronds. All the lights in the ceiling had been turned on bright, and the dazzling glare pushed against my eyes.

The man with the white hair sat us next to the only other people in the restaurant, two Russian couples who were sitting together and smoking furiously.

At the end of the room, a woman in a silver dress played an electric keyboard. Beside her, a big man strummed on a balalaika, his large hands making the small instrument look like a child's guitar. They were playing Russian folksongs and songs from American movies sung in phonetic English.

A woman with gold hoop earrings appeared at our table with a pad and pencil. We sent her away with a request for vodka, which was ordered by the dram.

"According to this," said Ken, comparing the menu with his phrase book, "the special is either fried halibut or roast suckling pig."

"Is there a translation for 'What do you recommend?' "

"No. But I would be able to say, 'The meat does not appear to be fresh.' "

The woman in the gold earrings returned with the vodka in a clear glass beaker, like something from a lab.

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I ordered a dish called Hot Slotyana, because it sounded like the name of a Russian porno actress. Ken pointed to several items on the menu, but the woman shook her earrings at each of them, so he wound up ordering the thing that was either fried halibut or roast suckling pig. It turned out to be neither, but a meat stew that was spicy and good.

We ate eggplant with pistachio nuts and broiled mushrooms in sour cream, and ordered another 150 drams of vodka. The woman in the silver dress and the man with the balalaika played "Lara's Theme" from Dr. Zhivago, and "New York, New York." I looked around for the singing canary, but could find only an empty birdcage hanging near the ceiling.

The two women at the table next to us got up and started dancing together. They had long black hair that they shook across their shoulders.

Ken raised his glass of vodka over my Hot Slotyana.

"To Alex," he said.

Alex was the name we'd chosen for Grisha, after Ken's father, who had died exactly a year after my mother.

Ken and I had been trying to get pregnant when his father went to the doctor about stomach pains that wouldn't go away. Ken was having his sperm counted the day he got the news, just handing over the specimen jar when his pager went off.

"My father has stomach cancer," he told me from a pay phone. "They said it's infiltrating, and can't be operated on."

It took him a while to tell me where he was so I could go and pick him up.

"Go and see your father," I told him. "Don't wait."

Ken flew back to New York with vitamin supplements believed to decrease the size of tumors, and books about people who'd made remarkable recoveries from inoperable cancers.

Every morning for five days, Ken and his father would go fishing at Rockland Lake.

"What do you talk about?" I asked when he called.

"Photography and Marx Brothers movies and fish," he told me. "And about how he's going to get better."

On the sixth morning, Ken and his father went to the hospital instead of Rockland Lake, and Ken's father had his first chemotherapy treatment.

On the seventh morning, he told Ken he was a little too tired to go fishing.

Twenty-four hours after Ken flew home, his father had a fatal heart attack, brought on by the drugs that were meant to slow the tiny tumors that had blossomed in the lining of his stomach. He was sixty-three years old.

After the funeral, we served cake in the small house where Ken's mother now lived alone, surrounded by the photographs Ken's father had taken. I'd never seen my father-in-law without a camera around his neck, never known him to take a picture of anyone in which they weren't revealing their best selves.

Two of Ken's sisters were pregnant at the funeral: Lynne, who was due in two months, and was only a little younger than me; and Becka, who was just beginning to show. "This will be so good for your mother," said the friends of the family, patting Lynne's belly, taking Becka's hand, "such a blessing for everyone." And I remember sitting among the half-eaten coffee cake, wishing I had a baby to offer up to everybody's grief.

"In the Jewish tradition, you don't name people after someone who is still living, Ken had once explained to me."

"Why not?"

"They say it steals their soul." My father-in-law's name had been Albert. When Lynne had her baby, she gave her son Allen as a middle name. Becka chose Alicia for her daughter.

"I want to name Grisha Alexander," Ken said, the first time we talked about names. "Alexander for my father, and because it's Russian."

It sounded so right that we never mentioned another name.

I poured more vodka into my glass. "To Alex," I said, knowing

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that no matter what we called him in front of Maggie or Anna or Yuri, he would now be Alex between us.

"Let's dance."

In the narrow space between the tables, Ken spun me around so fast, the silver wallpaper flew by like a shiny high-speed train. The musicians played "Hava Nagila," and we called for more vodka. Linking arms with the long-haired women, we danced in a circle, tripping over the wires that spilled from the back of the electric keyboard. When the taxi driver returned for us, we bought him a small carafe of vodka and continued to spin round to the music until he'd finished it.

"I want to go back to the orphanage," I told Anna when she called the next morning.

"Is not possible. I take you to Red Square instead."

"But I want to see Grisha again."

"Is too much work for them."

"Can't you just ask Yuri?"

"Yuri will say you should come with me to Red Square."

"But I don't want to go to Red Square."

"Tretyakov Gallery, then."

"Can't we go to the orphanage? Just for a little while?"

Anna sighed.

"Come with me," she coaxed. "I charge only forty dollars."

"It's too cold to go out," I told her and hung up.

"Let's go to Red Square ourselves," I said to Ken.

"It's freezing out."

"We have to be able to tell Alex something about Moscow. Something besides the orphanage."

So we put on all the winter clothes we'd brought—long underwear, thermal socks, glove liners—saying the name of each thing aloud, as though invoking its power to keep us warm.

The guards outside of Lenin's tomb had little puffs of steam coming out of their nostrils like dragons. In the building behind

them, the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, dead since 1924 and preserved with formaldehyde, lay in a glass sarcophagus.

" Tor a quarter of a million dollars,' " I read to Ken from the guidebook, " 'y° u too can have the Eternal Lenin Deluxe package.' "

The guidebook also listed several "Travelers' Tips" for avoiding the "inevitable long lines to view the dead leader"; but other than the two cold-looking guards and us, nobody else appeared interested in the father of the Soviet Union.

"I don't think it's open," Ken said.

"It's supposed to be.

We walked back and forth in front of the low building.

"I can't even see where the entrance is."

"Maybe we should ask one of the guards," I said. But the guards did not seem approachable, in spite of the wide-brimmed military hats that made them look like children playing dress-up.

Ken and I walked across the square to St. Basil's Cathedral, its green-and-yellow striped domes like hot-air balloons tethered against the cold blue sky. At a little kiosk, an ancient woman wearing two woolen babushkas over her head sold us tickets for more rubles than any of the prices printed on her sign.

Inside the cathedral, the walls and ceilings seemed to have been painted in a rush with wide-eyed Madonnas and red and turquoise flowers. But a thick film of smoke and dust lay over everything, making the Madonnas look tired and sad. Icy wind blew through windows where the glass had been replaced with chicken wire, and after ten minutes we were too cold to explore all the little chapels under the fanciful domes. Shivering, we hurried back out into the thin sunlight.

"Let's go to the Kremlin," I said. "It's mostly buildings; some of them have to be heated."

We walked beneath the high wall that surrounded what was once the center of Soviet government, its turrets and gold-faced clock tower reminding me of a castle in a storybook. Small

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openings had been worked into the bticks at the top of the wall, and I imagined sentties with crossbows looking down on us.

At last we came to a tall, narrow gate flanked by guatds holding guns. When we ttied to enter, one of them rushed over, wagging his finger and shouting, "Nyet! Nyet!"

We backed away, feeling embarrassed and unwelcome. I opened the guidebook to see if there was another entrance.

"Watch it!" Ken shouted, pulling me out of the path of a black limousine that had come roaring out of the narrow gate.

"I don't want to stay here anymore," I told him. "Let's go have lunch."

"Where?"

' The Slavyansky Bazaar serves blinis in an atmosphere that hasn't changed since Stanislavsky sat in a corner booth dreaming up the Moscow Arts Theatre,' " I read.

"What street is it on?" Ken led to unfold a Moscow city map in the wind.

"Nikolskaya."

"What does a Russian N look like?"

"Like an H."

I stamped my frozen feet on the cobbles of Red Square while Ken looked at the map.

"It's not here," he said. He tried to show me, but the wind whipped away a corner of the map and flattened it against his coat.

" 'Until 1991,' " I read, " 'Nikolskaya Street was called Twenty-fifth of October Street.' "

"What does that look like in Russian letters?"

"It doesn't say."

A man with several bottles of vodka clinking against each other in a shopping bag pushed past us.

"Nikolskaya?" Ken called after him.

"Nikolskaya?" the man repeated. He shook his head.

"Slavyansky Bazaar?"

"Slavyansky, da, da." The man nodded, and he grabbed Ken by the arm and dragged him down the street.

I ran after them, pushing my way past men who were trying to sell me fur hats. When I caught up, the man with the shopping bag was pointing to a small alley across the street.

"Nikolskaya," he said. And before we could think of the Russian word for "thank you," he hurried away, his vodka bottles jingling like sleigh bells.

To get across to Nikolskaya Street, we had to take an underground walkway beneath the road. The walkway was damp and smelled as if many people had peed against its concrete walls. A man in sandals and rough wool socks squatted before a display of music cassettes he'd set up on a cardboard box. A little farther on, a gypsy woman dressed in overlapping pieces of material without any sleeves or legs sewn in, was nursing a baby and holding out her hand. Her child looked to be the same age as Alex, and I wanted to put something in her dirty palm, but I was uncertain of the value of the rubles in my pocket, and all the zeros made me think it might be too much.

When we came up from under the street, the sky had clouded over and it was much colder. I wrapped my scarf over my mouth. The moisture from my breath froze there and made the wool feel scratchy against my face. Ken and I walked the length of Nikolskaya Street, searching for a sign with a letter C followed by something that looked like a little end table.

"You're sure you have the right address?" Ken said.

"Nineteen Nikolskaya Street," I told him.

At the end of the block, we turned and walked back, thinking we must have missed it.

Halfway up the street, Ken stopped in front of a padlocked building with Moorish windows. "Hang on a minute," he said. He climbed the wooden steps, and rubbed at a dirty sign with his fist. "This is it."

The curved windows were covered by thin plywood. I pulled

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back a corner. Inside, overturned tables, metal sinks, and the cast-iron burners from a stove had been thrown around the bare wood floor. A crumpled steel oven was pushed up against the door, as if it had been used as a barricade.

I let my breath cloud the glass until I could no longer see inside. What will I tell Alex, I wondered, when he is ten or twelve or fifteen and wants to know about the city he was born in? As it is, I can tell him nothing about his Russian mother or father, nothing about his family. The only history I have to give him is my experience of this cold city; its abandoned attractions and ruined restaurants.

Ken tugged on my arm, pulling me away from the Slavyansky Bazaar. "Let's go back to Red Square," he said. "We'll find something to eat there."

We trudged past shops that sold tinned herring and dusty canister vacuum cleaners. At the edge of Red Square, we came to the back entrance of GUM, the Russian department store, and went inside.

The GUM building stretched out for over a mile, with three levels of tiny shops connected by black iron footbridges. The front of every shop was blocked by the backs of women in fur coats, and I could see what was being sold inside only when one of them turned to examine a piece of linen, or a child's dress in the light that fell from an arched glass ceiling.

The glass in the ceiling was grimy, and the stucco walls had gouges in them as though they'd been nibbled on. We found the bathrooms down a flight of broken tile steps, and I got on the end of a long line.

In front of the door to the ladies' toilet, a woman in gray ankle socks sat at a small table, collecting a coin from each woman before allowing her inside. I searched my pockets for a coin the same size and shape as the one the woman was grabbing out of each hand, her fingers pointed like the beak of a ravenous bird. When it was my turn I waited until I felt the dry rasp of

the woman's fingertips in my palm before moving toward an open stall.

I was holding the thin metal doot in my hand when the woman who'd been standing behind me called out something in Russian. She flutteted het fingers as if plucking something out of the air, and pointed with her other hand at a pile of small squares of brown paper on a shelf.

I picked up a couple of the rough squares and waved them at the woman to show that I'd understood. She nodded her head and smiled, pleased with me.

"Spasebah," I thanked her. Spasebah for this small kind gesture I could one day tell Alex about.

It was still dark the next morning when Volodya came to take us to the airport. Ken tried to help him load the suitcases into the Lada's tiny trunk, but Volodya kept grabbing the bags away from him, all the while nodding and smiling the way people do when they cannot understand anything you're saying.

I'd woken with a migraine headache. There was a sharp pain on the left side of my head, and a metallic taste in my mouth as though I'd spent the night sucking on nickels. The long silk underwear I'd put on under my clothes itched and scratched like mohair.

The Lada smelled of cold and gasoline. As we drove through the dark streets to the airport, I counted the lit windows in the massive apartment buildings, trying to imagine the Russians who lived in these narrow squares of light. I pictured them brewing glasses of bitter tea and listening to the news on plastic radios.

When we arrived at Sheremetevo Airport, Volodya unloaded our bags and then nodded and smiled us through the big double doors.

Inside, a few sleepy-looking travelers scraped their suitcases across the floor. Only a few of the overhead lights had been

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turned on, and the long halls to the departure gates disappeared into blackness.

I bought a cup of coffee from a woman who still had sleep in her eyes, hoping the caffeine might ease the throbbing in my head. The coffee was oily and undrinkable, but I held onto the Styrofoam cup because it was warm.

Ken and I sat on molded plastic chairs that felt cold through our clothes. After a while, a woman carrying a portable computer sat beside us. She had Batman stickers stuck to the front of her computer case.

" 'Morning," said the woman. She had an American accent and freckles.

" 'Morning," Ken said. And while we waited for the flight to be called, he told the woman all about Alex and the orphanage, and why we didn't have him with us.

"Do you have any children?" I asked the woman.

"Two boys." She opened a Velcroed pocket on her computer case and took out a book of photographs.

I flipped through the pictures: a freckled boy of six or seven riding a bicycle with a helmet like a colander; a slightly older boy hugging a basketball and trying to keep his lips closed over braces.

"This is our son," Ken said, handing the woman the blurry Polaroid Maggie had taken from her television.

"He's adorable."

"We have a lot more pictures." Ken showed her a lead bag filled with rolls of exposed film. "And we have a video we took at the orphanage."

But she has the little boys, I thought. And when the flight is over, she'll go home and hug them. Then she'll let them tear through her suitcase looking for the presents she's hidden there. Later, after they've fallen asleep, she'll sneak into their bedroom and listen to them breathe.

When we get home, we'll put our rolls of exposed film into

envelopes and wait for the processing lab to show us our son. Later, we'll hook up the video camera and watch him being carried away by a woman in a white coat.

The flight to San Francisco was only half filled. We took over a whole row, and I shut my eyes and slept until we were somewhere above Iceland.

"What was three months ago?" Ken said. "Thanksgiving?"

"Halloween. Why?"

"I'm trying to see how long it'll feel until we can bring Alex home." He twisted the plastic latch on his tray table. "Halloween doesn't seem that far back."

"Try remembering everything that's happened since then," I said. And I thought about how our carved pumpkins had turned soft and furry in the warm weather the week before Halloween, the night we'd cut tracings of our hands to make turkey-shaped place cards for Thanksgiving, the afternoon we'd forced an eight-foot Christmas tree in through the front door, and the day we pushed that same tree out, dry and dropping needles in the January rain.

It seemed such a long time that I wished I could be put to sleep, the way people are put to sleep during a surgery. I wanted to be given anesthesia, asked to count backwards from one hundred, and wake up three months later, feeling I'd gotten only to ninety-six.

I stretched across the seats, pressing the place where my head hurt against the cold buckle of the seat belt, and didn't move until we'd begun our descent into San Francisco.

Spells and Incantations

Ken started getting up at 6:00 every morning to call the cities on the East Coast where we'd been born and got married. At 7:30 I'd find him still on the phone in his bathrobe, his hair sticking up where he'd slept on it.

"I need to get a letter of exemplification for my birth certificate," he'd be saying. "Well, what department should I call?"

On his desk was a little stack of color reprints of the photograph Maggie had given us, reprints we included with every letter we sent out. Please forward five certified copies of Marriage License #20-89, the letters said. And, Could you have this document authenticated? At the bottom, Ken would explain that we needed these papers in order to get our son out of a Russian orphanage. Then he'd enclose one of the reproductions of Alex's face, a small messenger sent to encourage a quick response.

We sent these letters by overnight mail, and included envelopes from Federal Express with our credit-card number for the documents to travel back to us.

"Isn't this going to get expensive?" I asked Ken.

"Maybe, but it's faster."

Maggie had instructed us to get our paperwork together as soon as possible. "Yuri's already asking for it."

"But Grisha doesn't come off the database until April 15."

"He's got twenty-three signatures to get."

Nearly every day, a package would arrive from a county courthouse or a hospital administration office. Sometimes these

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packages contained the documents we'd requested, and sometimes our Federal Express envelopes would have been used to return Ken's letter back to him.

One day I picked up the phone and heard Ken asking a woman why she hadn't sent him the authenticated copy of his birth certificate.

"The department of health does not make change," the woman explained.

"But it was only a couple of extra dollars—you could have kept it."

"Oh, no, we can't do that," she said, "the department of health does not make change."

"But I have to have this certificate right away. It's for an adoption."

"I understand that," the woman informed him, "but the department of health does not make change."

"You'll need a set of fingerprints to send to the FBI," Maggie told us. So we went to a one-hour photo shop that did fingerprinting in a back room. The teenager who took our prints worked with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, like a child using a stamp kit. I half-expected to see the inked outline of a horse or a dinosaur when he lifted my finger.

"Maggie says we have to get a good-conduct letter from the local police," Ken told me one day.

"How can they tell if our conduct is good? They don't even know us."

"Maybe that's how," he said.

All the documents that came from Yuri had to be notarized; pages he'd fax to Maggie that were entirely in Russian, the Cyrillic characters looking more like decorative strips than sentences.