The Hidden World

We're in our kitchen in Iowa City preparing dinner. I'm washing broccoli and peppers while David seasons the salmon, rice already steaming in the rice cooker. “A caseworker from Boston called today to say she'll be processing my request,” David says, reaching for the roasted garlic.I nod. It's been two weeks since he sent a requisition to the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (Division of Child Guardianship), a month after our visit to Worcester, and almost two years after his diagnosis with a rare form of cancer at age 63.“But the surprise is,” David continues, turning to me, “she said I'd lived with many foster families, and I couldn't get that phrase out of my head—many foster families, many foster families, many foster families—like I had repetition compulsion.”I shake water from the vegetables. “So, you didn't live only with Aunt Adeline and Uncle John like you remembered?” He'd been with Adeline and John (he called them ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ to make them seem familial rather than institutional), from age three-and-a half to nearly eight years. That was fifty-seven years ago.“Nope.”I look at him slyly. “Well, now you've got a right to be really fucked up!”When he glances at me relief flickers across his face, and he laughs such a big, happy laugh that I grin and do a little curtsey.“Probably where I got my super-powers,” he retorts, an old joke between us.“Fucked up super-powers.”“But super-powers nonetheless.”I open the rice cooker to a billow steam. He'll be all right, I think. We'll be all right.When the foster care files arrive, David trundles them up to his study as if they're a secret, then retrieves them after dinner, placing them on the dining room table like a gift or a penance, the manila envelope still sealed. “Let's read them together, okay,” he says, pulling out a chair. “I mean, I'm not pretending this will be easy. Probably like chemotherapy . . . gotta hurt to make you better.”I nod at his little joke, then we sit side by side in the heat of the evening, reading the beginning dates and summaries by caseworkers until on the second page we stop, both jolted by the words: David received this date under Section 38: 12/20/48.“You were just a baby,” I say softly, stunned by the news. “Not even three months old in foster care.”“It seems.” He lets out a slow breath, staring at the page, then he touches the words, running a finger over the sentence. “I never wanted to find out about my mother and why she gave me up.” His face looks weighted, all hope dissolved.But instead of an easy abandonment—a desertion—we discover how hard it was for his mother to live apart from him. “Mother distressed that she will not be able to take him for day visits immediately,” the caseworker writes mere days after the mother has released him to the foster care system.“She didn't want to give you up,” I say, noting how again and again she asks if she can visit, if she can take David to her brother's place, if she can have him overnight, have his picture taken, buy him new toys, new clothes, feed him, dress him, sing to him, soothe him, every sentence a hum of desire.David nods but says nothing. In the end, she was a woman alone, uneducated and bound to minimum-wage jobs, to cheap, rented rooms, with no help from anyone. She had to let him go.That evening we get a late-night snack, then brush our teeth together, one of us inevitably talking though toothpaste is foaming and spilling and whatever is said must be repeated after the rinse. It could be any other night, but of course, it's not. The lights are too bright, the house too silent, the air too dry. Where is all the noise? Why am I still rubbing my mouth on a damp towel?David puts up his toothbrush, then ducks into his study.The next day, after fixing coffee, David yawns and pushes the stack of files toward me. “You can read the rest of them now . . . I mean, if you want.” Last night we stopped reading after page 15 (there are 69 pages), and then sat together on the living room couch, talking and not talking, leaning back and closing our eyes. “I finished them,” he says now, “lying on the sofa in my study.” I imagine him sprawled there, trying to pretend he isn't stunned by this chorus of notes about himself, his mother, and his foster mothers.Though anxious to read the files, I stare warily at them for a few minutes as if I'm about to yank off a Band-Aid and see red, wrinkled flesh. After all, this isn't a childhood but a case study, David's early years documented and interpreted by social workers, administrators, and doctors, a clinical commentary with proscriptive expectations rather than an autobiography. The 1950s. Ugh, all that rigidity, that strict, gendered postwar morality, women financially restricted and sexually indicted, their identity and ambition constrained.After getting a cup of hot tea, I sit alone in the dining room, the house shuttered and still, and slip the files from the envelope. I feel a twitch of illicit fascination, a writer about to get the goods: I remember last night how David's eyes clouded with tears (his mother's obvious pride and delight in him), how his interest sparked (the quickness with which he learned words, his “diction and vocabulary are advanced,” the caseworker wrote), then how his mouth tightened (one doctor declared him “mentally retarded” when he was placed at age two in a home alongside a four-year-old with mental deficiencies). For me, it's different to read the files alone. The comments seem more personal—Foster mother said that David understands that his foster father is not his real father, but he is not quite sure why he does not have a father like other boys—and more bureaucratically distant—eczema has cleared up; fractured right clavicle; buttocks badly scarred with sores. It's also like putting together a puzzle, finding the odd pieces that might make the whole cohere. The whole being my husband. The whole being how I see him. For so long, I've known only stray bits of his past, snippets of stories, a few photographs, ordinary details about his life with Aunt Adeline and Uncle John; the rest I've conjured, interpreting hints, gestures, sadness, deflection.After rereading the first few pages, I'm still troubled by that fateful progression: child was “received” into foster care seven days shy of three months of age; child was moved to at least five different placements before he was three and a half years old; child was so distressed as the caseworker drove him to his sixth placement—Aunt Adeline's and Uncle John's, a journey of 35 miles from his former foster home in Worcester—that the caseworker feared he was ill.Two days later when the caseworker returned to check on him, he was finishing his lunch in his new foster home. “He immediately tells visitor that he does not want to go in her car and wants to stay where he is.” On the next visit, he was playing happily outdoors “with his little cart and his tricycle.” “Again, upon greeting visitor,” she writes, “he shakes his head very solemnly and says he doesn't intend to go anywhere else.”I'm now sitting on the floor in my nightgown, the glow of the lamp a halo around me.“. . . he doesn't intend to go anywhere else.” Sadness. I put down the pages and a ragged piece of my husband's story falls into place: Sixty years later he still hates to move, hates to disrupt one household and start another, hates packing and unpacking, hates not just the physical act of moving but the preparation, the concept: leaving the familiar for the unknown. Not only that. He resists all fantasies about a new place, never indulging in “what it will be like” or “who we'll be when we're there” or “how this will change us” or “what we'll miss or forget.”Because he refuses to conceptualize moving, his packing is always erratic and last minute, making the move a disaster, every departure delayed, the two of us shouting and insulting each other—“Come on, Jesus, come on!” I yell—because the movers are here and he's still not finished though he stayed up all night, sorting and discarding, half-empty coffee cups scattered around the room. “Leave me alone,” he yells back. “Just leave me alone.”I remember his face the day we packed for a temporary move from our house in Iowa City to Auburn, Alabama, where I'd be a Breeden Scholar at Auburn University for the fall semester. Though we took only clothes, books, laptops, and art supplies, the move meant renting out our house and driving 15 hours from Iowa City to the southeastern corner of Alabama. By the time David had crammed all his photo equipment and suitcases into the car—two hours late—he was tense and distressed, complaining that he didn't feel well.“It'll be okay,” I kept saying, wondering why I always had to coddle and soothe. Then, an hour later, my irritation flared. “You're being ridiculous! Just stop!” All I wanted was for this to be an adventure, a pleasant little “getaway” from routine, but to him it was all rupture and trouble. What's wrong with you? I kept asking as we turned onto I-80 E, David slumped in the passenger seat, his shirt damp with sweat.Now, of course, I see the three-year-old inside him unconsciously resisting, refusing to start over. Our traumas, it seems, will never abandon us.To me, childhood meant a secure home and family in a small Alabama town with three meals a day, baths every night and stories read to us at bedtime or under the oak tree in our back yard. Insecurity didn't rear its head until adolescence. At age five, I could walk with my sister to the drugstore to get a Coke float or sit sucking my thumb in my mother's flower garden, squatting by the caladiums while she finished making homemade ice cream, the clacking sound of the crank handle mingling with the shouts of the neighbor boys playing kickball. I knew that my mother would cook waffles or eggs and bacon every morning and that my father would return home from the clinic each night, fixing himself a drink and sometimes saying, “Com'ere, Pooch,” patting the sofa beside him. To David, childhood was a series of temporary stops to unfamiliar places, a new mother always at its center.“It was hard to realize I'd been placed in so many homes, that I had no home,” he said one night, not long after he'd read the files. Though his birth mother visited him at his first foster home four times a week, the files note, this was reduced to once a week after his third move and once every three weeks in the final move to Aunt Adeline's and Uncle John's. Each time the caseworker took him in her car, did he worry about who would give him food and warmth and a cuddle? Did he feel anxious and afraid, uncertain if he was safe?The first foster mother, the file suggests, is befuddled and sweet and young, the second one middle-aged and strict, the third one soft-voiced but mentally limited. From my reading I know that children in foster care, especially when they're preverbal, sometimes have difficulty forming secure attachments to new foster parents if they've lived in compromised environments with frequent moves. When this happens, children often become confused about how to behave, having lost two of the things a child most needs: the familiarity of habit and the feeling of safety. “Each move means ruptured attachment, another break in trust, another experience of being unwanted or unloved,” Cris Beam notes in her book about foster care, To the End of June. Did David learn to fear a change in mothering, to respond to dislocation with episodes of sickness and stress and anxiety about the unknown? Where were they taking him? Had he done something wrong?Days later, I'm shocked to read that “foster care children are twice as likely to suffer PTSD as war veterans.”1 I put the article down and stare out the window at the spill of impatiens hanging from my neighbor's back deck. Breathe. Just breathe. I begin rereading the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) study on trauma, an article that explains how the HPA (hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal) axis is “very reactive to adverse early experience”2 and that “foster children more frequently show ‘atypical’ patterns of cortisol production when compared with other children,”3 which means the fight-or-flight response can go haywire, a twitch, a seam of fear, then panic swimming through the blood. I think of the body fragile and clenched, the brain marbled with dread, a subtle but ghostly disruption of the neuroendocrine system where nests of cells begin silently to rebel. I read these facts, but I can't take them in. Did David feel this powerless as a child or did he, by some miracle, develop survival skills, perhaps the ability to mimic behavior, to assert and please and gain attention?In our life together he seems remarkably resilient: ambitious and friendly and comfortable with diverse groups of people, never shy or tongue-tied as I often am. His energy kicks up at English Department parties, writers’ receptions, art openings, and community events, where he's instinctively charming, his head tilted as he teases someone or makes a provocative comment, often moving physically near to people as if establishing intimacy, though the talk is never personal or deeply revealing. “What did you talk about?” I often ask as we're driving home, jealous at how engaged in conversation he was with colleagues who seemed to laugh much more easily with him than they did with me. “Oh, you know, we just played, batted the ball around,” he'll say, never offering any concrete details. Such a response only makes me stew. Batting the ball around, my ass, I brood. It's taken me years to recognize that he wasn't being intentionally evasive or simply bullshitting and that the right term for what he was is It doesn't the is about it's the ability to a but perhaps a one for a who learned early in childhood that is we to the in Iowa City to get broccoli and and with the household we our onto the the says, “Well, to David as if they're old a woman with and a David and about our about the and then they talk for a few minutes about the done to her I look on, He He says something and makes her “You must be David's she says, offering her me in their he's always I realize as we up our and head for the It's to him, a of a of later, he'll give me another he's from cancer he a in the early evening after we or minutes of a He back on the his head on a of while I the and it and him, then it in at his and around his time I do his face into such I can't help but as I sit on the of the for you to do I for It all of my he tells me one night after I him in. I no one act of care and what he often in childhood and still in could I have I do know is that anxiety isn't It too has a does now three cups of tea, one right after the and I'm and why I'm when I read the for David's by his mother and him when he's years a by the of the Department of and from summaries of the On page of this the the that he was under the care of the Department he many foster home of his and of being him was more of the frequent visits of his mother, who him. his care, has been a of his the the It's near but I start and at what is so David was from his first foster mother's house after four months (he was seven months of the caseworker that this woman was and to care for the that child got little air and and was always and that the doctor didn't feel she out his but let the child for is no that at this his was placed on the back where it over and down the back and the child his is no that he had and such a with at all from the first that the second foster mother she was of is no that the first foster home was down as for all a David was off to a third foster home, in which the mental of the foster and a mentally gave the caseworker about David's though he was kept for mentally another home could be I can imagine David was a as a it might also be that his and him to these and become the he he'd been a he might have been with the first foster mother, who let a for why am I in a about such as when I know these were by who the rather of postwar of to with other easily from I care but I'm on his I to around the room, the sofa and toward the and back to the files on the dining room only to the week that I'm reading the files, David and I go out to with people who will be their seven and to a that a people who are and will have every in to learn to to on their with the the most with familial The a and former about his a he's and the he's for another and when he asks what I'm on, I find to talk about my on and super-powers,” I want to say, and for a I imagine it to this so in and I ask him about his about his new and his most before I get for I see David sitting at his in a familiar toward the a he's or perhaps just his He glances up as if to see me, and now I see the in the the scattered across his the quickness with which he to new people, the of his room as if each to the floor or the is a of I live Though it might be a I like to think that the I in and sometimes have from any other than the one he no to I know only that for most of our life together been a between his a of I couldn't through until he out to it he couldn't look at his until he'd been into the of I couldn't have it if I been sitting long hours in rooms, the to to I say an hour later, in the to his study, and I'm in my my face my David looks up and to me. he says, but I know that his eyes his his only the that in where the and only the and the of