When she woke up the morning after seeing the documentary and couldn’t get the idea of adopting a Russian child out of her mind, couldn’t stop thinking that her life had been lived in service, strictly service, and that this was her
chance to actually be a real human, to get off her ass and make something stable for someone else, she knew she had to act. She had to learn to keep something, to not spontaneously rid herself of responsibility.
What Tania didn’t realize was how long and arduous and pricey the whole experience would be. It took just over a year between the day her dog died and the exact moment she stepped off the airplane in Las Vegas with her daughter (
her daughter!
) by her side. She spent eleven months searching for the right child, filling out the paperwork, getting the approvals, paying the fees—it was $20,000 to the Russian agencies, another $5,000 for lawyers and paperwork stateside—until, in the end, she had to ask her parents if she could borrow another $5,000 just to get to Russia, where she’d need to stay for a month to attend adoption hearings and to get Natalya legal for her arrival in the U.S. Her parents ended up giving her $10,000, told her it wasn’t a loan, that it was a gift, that they were so proud of her.
Natalya lived with Tania for five years. Five good years, Tania thinks now, dropping off drinks in the slot aisles for nickel and quarter tips, though like everything else about the past, she’s sure that’s just the romantic version. She loved Natalya, though. This Tania is sure of. And if Natalya never really loved her, that’s okay, too. She’d given Natalya the chance and there was worth in that.
After her shift ends at six, Tania walks down Palm Canyon Drive and looks into the shop windows, examining the silly T-shirts and bumper stickers (“What happens in Palm Springs, stays in Palm Springs . . . usually in a Time Share”),
the gaudy jewelry only a vacationer would find the impulse for, the fancy clothes she never sees inside the casino, but assumes someone must wear somewhere. She’s always reading about these gala charities and benefit balls held in Palm Springs but can’t imagine who the people are who attend such things or where they buy their clothes. Surely none of them pile into the Mercedes and come to the tourist traps to do their shopping.
Tania pauses in front of Chico’s and peers inside at the shoppers, all of whom look to be around her age, but are infected with what she thinks of as Realtoritis: their hair about five years past the trend, their tans rubbed on, their heels inappropriately high. And yet they exude an air of success, as if by showing property they somehow glean personal value.
She wonders, if she were a dental hygienist—if she somehow managed to finally pass chemistry, which she failed three times while she lived in Las Vegas, twice in the year she waited on the adoption, once in the six months after Natalya ran away (and really, she didn’t run away, she just left)—if people would be able to tell just by looking at her. Maybe she might be mistaken for a doctor occasionally. That wouldn’t be so awful. And maybe people would treat her with respect without understanding why they did it. Cocktailing was never her dream job, but then nothing else struck her as all that compelling, either. When she was young, if there was a chance to fuck up, Tania usually took it, just to see what it felt like. And the result was that she felt, after forty-seven years, that she’d lived, even if she didn’t really have much to show for it anymore.
The idea of being a hygienist was a good one, and she really pursued it during that year of waiting, if nothing else because it looked good on all of her applications. She wasn’t
just a cocktail waitress, she was “studying to become a dental hygienist,” and people at the various agencies seemed to treat that with some dignity. But now, staring at the women trying on skirts too short by a decade, she thinks that it’s all the same in the end. Just a job. Just a way to afford the things you want. Tania doesn’t
want
anything anymore. She
needs
to find Natalya, if only to know that she’s alive, but even that has quelled some in the intervening years as she’s learned how frequently teenagers adopted out of Russia simply pick up and leave when they have a little money or the keys to the car or the PIN code to their parents’ATM card.
Tania checks her watch. She agreed to meet Gordon at 6:30 in front of the statue of former Palm Springs Mayor Sonny Bono that graces a courtyard up the street from the casino. He asked if he could buy her a drink after work, and when she told him she didn’t drink anymore, which wasn’t strictly true, he didn’t flinch. “Then let me buy you a lamp. You must like lights, right? I know a great little lamp store. They even give you the shades and bulbs, too. It’s a real deal.”
“You’re crazy,” she said, but agreed to meet him anyway and now was going to be late if she didn’t hustle. Sundays were always sad nights for Tania, and the truth was that she was likely to pop some Two Buck Chuck tonight in front of the TV herself, Sundays her night off of the Internet, a night away from her search. Really, it was more a habit now than anything: Check the message board at
LostAndFoundChildren.com
to see if anyone responded to her photo of Natalya; read the listserv messages from her Yahoo group; scour every search engine, newspaper archive, and blog index on the planet for any mention of Natalya’s known names. This searching was
her infinity. A bottomless hope. But she gave Sundays up after her own mother told her to start weaning herself, that she had to grasp the idea that Natalya wasn’t really her child, that she’d just been a child who lived with her for a time. “Think of it like a car lease,” her mother said. “That’s how we’ve approached it emotionally; she wasn’t our granddaughter, just a child who lived with our daughter.”
Like a car lease
. Tania knew her mother meant well and so she tried, on Sundays, to treat Natalya’s disappearance like an episode of a TV show that she found particularly emotionally affecting, if only for twenty-four hours.
Up ahead, Tania sees Gordon leaning up against the Sonny Bono statue. He doesn’t see her yet, so she takes a few seconds to stare at him, notices that a few of the passing tourist ladies are doing the same. It’s late spring and the air smells like a mixture of coconut tanning oil and jacaranda blooms, and it only makes sense that Gordon has changed from his casino uniform into tan pants and a white linen button-down, but for some reason Tania is surprised by this, by how effortlessly casual he looks, how he seems to fit in so perfectly. Even from several yards away Tania can see his tan skin through his shirt, the contours of his body. She wonders how old he is, thinks he’s probably thirty-five, maybe thirty-eight, too young for her now, anyway. And what does she know about him? What does she know about anybody anymore?
“There you are,” he says when Tania finally approaches him. He puts an arm over her shoulder in a friendly way and gives her a pat, like they’re brother and sister. “I thought you were going to ditch me here with Sonny.”
“You know I’m forty-seven,” she says.
“How would I know that?”
“I’m just telling you,” she says.
“Is today your birthday?”
“No,” she says.
“Then why are we talking about it?”
“I’m not sure why you asked me out,” Tania says. “What we’re doing here. That’s all.”
Gordon exhales, and Tania realizes he’s been holding his breath, that he actually seems a little nervous now that she’s paying attention. “Can’t people go out for a drink, Tania? Isn’t that what normal people do?”
“Are we normal people? All day spent watching people fuck up their lives. Who would call that normal?” Gordon nods, but it’s clear he’s not agreeing to anything, just happy to let Tania vent whatever it is she feels the need to vent. She likes that, though is certain he’s just trying to humor her. Give him a break, Tania thinks. Act like a person for an hour, see how it feels. “Where was this lamp store you were talking about? I’m in great need of track lighting.”
What Tania remembers about Natalya is insignificant if looked at obliquely. She’s realized this before tonight, before she saw Gordon’s expression glaze over while she prattled on about the way Natalya used to sneeze every time she ate chocolate, or how Natalya’s eyes were brown on some days and green on others, or how, when she’s feeling particularly sentimental, she’ll spray a bit of Natalya’s perfume on her old pillow and will set it down across the room while she’s watching television or cooking something, so that she’ll just get a whiff of it in the course of doing regular things, and it will be like Natalya’s in
the other room, sitting on the floor like she used to do with her headphones on, listening to her English language tapes.
She could blame on the liquor this sudden descent into reverie, but that would be useless. As soon as Gordon asked her, “How did you end up in Palm Springs?” she felt it all bubble out, the whole story, from her cocker Lucy dying, to waking up one morning in her townhouse in Las Vegas to find Natalya gone, along with the Ford Explorer, the keys to the safe-deposit box (where Tania—like every other cocktail waitress, bartender, and stripper in Las Vegas—deposited the majority of her tips so she wouldn’t have to report them to the IRS), and, most disheartening, three full photo albums of pictures taken since Natalya’s arrival.
How did she end up in Palm Springs? She asked herself this question repeatedly, and the answer was always the same: it wasn’t Las Vegas. Usually that sufficed, but tonight, sitting across from Gordon, his face getting younger with every passing moment, until she’s certain he’s no more than thirty-two (unless what’s happened is that with each drink and sad detail she’s tacked on another month to her own life, so that she’s now pushing seventy years old), she knows that she ended up in Palm Springs because it was the only place she could run to where she had no memories, no connections, nothing corporeal to remind her of everything lost, but where the world itself was essentially the same. She could do her job. She could breathe the desert air. She could listen to the dinging of the slots, the whooping of the drunks, the crunching of ice in the blender constantly making margaritas, the drone of mindless cocktail conversation and pretend that her life had frozen in place, that she’d conjured
the whole sad affair. Yes, she could close her eyes inside the Chuyalla Indian Casino and imagine herself thirty, childless and disproportionate to reality.
“I’ve ruined the night,” Tania says now. She and Gordon have been sitting at the patio bar in front of the Hyatt for three hours now. There’s a man playing acoustic guitar on a small stage a few feet away from them, and every fifteen minutes or so he plays “Margaritaville” and another ten tourists stop to sing along. “I didn’t mean to go on like that.”
“No, it’s fine,” Gordon says. He reaches across the table and tries to take her hands in his, but she pulls them back and puts them in her lap before she remembers her own admonition: be human.
“I should go home,” she says, forgetting that she doesn’t have a car anymore, that she’ll need to call a cab or ask Gordon for a ride, since the buses stopped running hours ago. “I’ll end up telling you about every boyfriend I’ve ever had otherwise.”
Gordon doesn’t smile like she thinks he will. He just stares at her. “Let me ask you something,” he says eventually. “You think you’ll ever find her?”
“No,” Tania says, and for the first time she actually believes it. The truth is that no one has ever asked her this question, though of course it has existed in the subtext of her life all the while; a nagging sense that her search for Natalya was what she
should
be doing, but the fact remained that if Natalya wanted to be found, if Natalya wanted Tania to find her, specifically, it would have already happened. “I may locate her at some point. But I don’t think I’ll ever see her again.”
Tania stares out her sliding glass door as Gordon’s taillights disappear down the hill, back toward Palm Springs. It’s midnight, and though the air has chilled, Tania feels feverish. She told Gordon, as he pulled up to her complex, that she’d invite him in but that she was afraid she caught a bug sitting outside for so long this evening. She shakes her head thinking about it now, how silly she must have sounded, how ignorant, as if she could catch consumption from sitting outside listening to Jimmy Buffett songs on a spring night.
“It’s okay,” he said, and Tania sensed relief from Gordon, though the truth is that she’s forgotten how to read young men anymore. They used to be so obvious to her, so obscenely obvious, but now they’re just mannerisms in her peripheral. “There will be other nights. I know where you work.”
She kissed him lightly on the cheek and got out of his car, didn’t bother to turn and smile or even give a little wave when she got to the top step of the metal staircase that leads to her apartment, though she knew Gordon was watching her. He’d been raised well enough to wait until a woman was inside her home before driving off, but not well enough to be doing something better with his life than bartending at an Indian casino, and that alone made Tania sad for him.
Tania opens the sliding door and steps outside onto her tiny patio. She’s arranged three pots of daisies around a single white plastic chair, and though it doesn’t seem like much, it’s all she can do to just keep those daisies alive and the chair clean enough to sit on. Tonight, though, she stands against the wrought iron railing surrounding the patio and stares south toward the wind farms of Palm Springs, watches as light jumps between the spinning windmill turbines, listens
for the low whine of the coyotes that often rummage in the dumpsters behind her building and that she sees lazing in the shadows on the hottest desert mornings.
She knows she gave up too much tonight, that things will be awkward with Gordon from now on, but that’s okay. There’s nothing permanent anymore. There’s nothing that says this life has to be lived waiting for the next shame. “Natalya is not coming back,”Tania says aloud, and then she says it again and again and again, until her words have lost all shape in her ears, until she feels something rise up inside her, a sense of confidence, of lucidity, that she can’t recall ever possessing. She sits down in the white plastic chair and realizes that what she’s feeling, after so long, after all these years, is relief.