Free The Love Wife by Gish Jen Page B

was awaiting something big and honest and potent.
    We both had selves that were cresting some hill, then. Lives that before setting all four tires back on the road, could have said yes to almost anything.
    CARNEGIE /  To the opera. To the Midwest: to this sky, this wind, these grids. To these polite and helpful plain folk.
    And, of course, to a most lissome, auburn-haired classmate who turned out, unfortunately, to be an anti–nuclear-arms activist and nun. Sister Mary Divine, she said her name was. I thought she must be joking. That really was her name, though, and she really was a nun, even if she seemed more of an anti-nun. To wit, she did not wear a habit or even a bra. She doodled. She carried a fanny pack. She swore. Not that she went so far as to take the Lord’s name in vain, but she was heard to say, upon occasion, Dammit.
    She didn’t need a libretto, knowing every aria already, and one day came in with yet more amazing knowledge. A baby had been left on the steps of the church proper; an Oriental baby. She hoped she wasn’t being racist, but was there any chance I knew where the baby had come from? She was sorry to ask. So far as she knew, though, I was the only adult Oriental in town. Did I have any thoughts about what would be best in terms of finding a home for the baby?
    BLONDIE /  Was he offended? I did wonder that, later.
    For you see, I had gone to school in California, and majored for a while in East Asian Studies. I had had my consciousness raised.
    CARNEGIE /  Offended? No.
    Would I follow her back to the church? she asked.
    We left before class started, our rudeness forgiven by special dispensation. It was an enormous night. Dark enough to see the Milky Way, and how many colors the stars came in, actually: blue, green, citron yellow. No moon, just a summer breeze crackling as if with the waking stretch of night animals. We passed the old beech tree. The dark street glimmered with a recent rain, like a river.
    If only I did not have allergies. But I did, hives. It was soybean-harvest season. My skin was dotted like op art.
    Still I traveled the street river behind my guide, eyes on her fanny pack. My allergies, I knew, could not be racially linked, exactly. How many Asians, after all, could be given hives by soy harvesting? Yet they did seem linked to a certain proclivity to skin sensitivities; for example, an inability to wear wool. And these in turn seemed linked to my smooth and sparely hairy body. As I stood, itching, in the church hall, I wondered if there weren’t indeed things I understood better about this bundle of swaddling than did, say, Sister Mary Divine.
    I had never held a baby before, much less an abandoned baby.
    The bundle was like a longish football, only warm and light. So tossable, yet untossable, what an idea! I felt what a civilized being I was. An enormous strength, stilled by defenselessness. Sister Mary Divine was saying, I thought, that from the umbilical cord she judged the baby to be a day or two old. This was not the receiving blanket the baby had come in, she said. That blanket was being fingerprinted by the police. I nodded, idiotic. Surprised by how close I felt to her. How intimate to be sharing this experience—of what? Of staring into this miniature face, like something out of a fairy tale. So red! So squashed. Circular. A gnome’s baby, this seemed, with a white stocking cap on. The white cap was not even a real cap but a surgical stocking, knotted at the top. Fringed at the bottom by the baby’s black hair.
    Asleep.
    — Where did you come from? How can you sleep at a time like this?
    I wanted to count the baby’s lashes. I put my face to the baby’s face; that innocent breathing, breathing. Sweet, noisy, unpracticed. Its whole body heaved and collapsed. The abandon in its exhale! As if one part of its small spirit was bent on returning to the Old World, even as another said,
Stay.
    — You are the first to see her other than Sister Angela and myself.