“Don’t you get the best genes when you mix the races?”
She was talking to me. She was suggesting that Kro and I get pregnant.
Little mulatto babies. I was twenty-six and a half in June 2003. I’d long thought that if I gave birth I’d wait till my thirties. My mother had borne her first child at thirty and her last (me) at thirty-four. Arol had birthed Swan at thirty-seven. Rayel—the only Zendik woman besides Swan to give birth since my arrival—had done so at thirty-two, after almost a decade and a half at Zendik. I’d assumed that earning leave to breed would take at least a few more years. But as Arol beamed down on me, I conceived a new story, starring mocha-skinned toddlers who romped up the steps to hug her knees, their squeals, sharp and excited, announcing my place in the family of Zendiks. They’d bind me for life to Kro (marriage was a sham; we’d never get married) and, even better, to Arol—their grandmother. If there was a way to forge the ties of a natural-born Zendik, this, I thought, was it.
Little mulatto babies. Of course Kro would accept Arol’s proposal, if I did. Didn’t every man lust to spread his seed? It wasn’t as if he’d be signing on as sole breadwinner for a nuclear family, or even Mr. Mom. Zendik children mostly stuck together, in the care of their mothers and other women, with Zar’s Australian shepherd, Apache, standing guard. Fatherhood would not force a drastic shift in how Kro spent his time.
Little mulatto babies. Arol, who was Jewish, had married a Catholic as a teenager and given birth for the first time at seventeen. Then, taking her infant son, she fled her husband’s beatings. Working as a secretary in New York City, she fought to make ends meet.
She couldn’t. So she called a family meeting and asked each relative to help her out with a monthly pledge. They, in turn, urged her to visit a woman named Yeti, at Jewish Family Services. “Yeti will help you,” they said.
Arol thought Yeti would connect her with the money she’d asked of her family. Instead, Yeti suggested that she pass her son to a nice, well-to-do Jewish couple who’d raise him in a stable home and pay for college. Arol felt betrayed, but she agreed. Her son was two when she gave him up.
Her surrender left her shattered. She broke down, slept around, wound up in the gutter. Some friends, seeing she was courting early death, got her drunk (to calm her fear of flight) and packed her off to San Francisco. The change of scene could not heal the wound of losing her child, but it did revive her. By the time she met Wulf in Los Angeles, a couple years later, she’d pulled herself together.
This story of Arol’s son—passed to me by one of her confidants—did not serve the Farm’s creation myth. So I never heard it, as a Zendik. Instead, watching her lurking hurt reverberate through Rayel’s first years of motherhood, I assumed that Rayel, playing out a Deathculture script, had brought her pain on herself.
By the time Rayel gave birth, in 2001, she’d seen Arol separate a number of mothers from their babies. Arol would convict the mother of bad mothering, then turn the child over to other Zendiks, usually for one or more stretches of multiple months. Rayel had delayed getting pregnant in part because she’d feared such treatment (which Swan alone had escaped). Choosing to risk childbearing, she’d let herself hope the pattern would break.
It didn’t. After bombarding her with charge after charge, Arol forbade Rayel to care for her infant. In the two months they were apart, Rayel sank into desolation so deep that Arol assigned her the therapeutic task of weaving baskets.
I could have gathered, from watching Rayel, that Zendik motherhood was a cliff to be approached with caution, if at all. Instead, riding high on Arol’s approval, I let my A-student arrogance prevail. Hadn’t I won the highest grades in the history of Dominican Academy? Hadn’t I been the first of its graduates to spend every single quarter on the Principal’s List? As in high school, I thought, so in child rearing: I would succeed where others had failed, because I was smarter and I would work harder.
I grinned back at Arol, bursting with pride and excitement.
“Yeah,” I said. “It would be wild to try to have kids.”
Arol waved to Kro to take off his headphones and come to the top of the stairs. He nodded at her, descended a few steps, nodded at me.
“What do you think of being a father?” she asked.
Kro backed into the railing and scrunched his nose into his eyebrows, as if working to merge what he’d just heard with life as he’d known it a moment ago.
“Let me get this straight,” he said, staring down at me. “You wanna have a baby?”
Maybe Kro knew, better than I did, how little my desire to have a baby had to do with having a baby.
“Yes. I do. I mean, I don’t know if it’ll happen, but I at least wanna try.”
He shook his head and shrugged. Arol and I had already hatched a plan. He could resist—or give in.
He glanced at Arol, then back at me, with a tiny, puzzled smile. “Okay,” he said, shifting his gaze between us. “If that’s what you want, I guess I’ll go along with it.”
In Arol’s embrace I felt I’d gained a great height—a subpeak, at least, in my climb to enlightenment. From here I saw further than my peers. This, it seemed, qualified me to steer them past snags in their lives.
One midsummer afternoon, I glimpsed a chance to inflict guidance.
I was in the Addition kitchen, winding down a counseling session, when Ethik—one of Swan’s ex-boyfriends and the Farm’s head carpenter—dropped in for a drink of water. Arol asked him how it was going with Eile. They’d had a few dates, in the past month.
Ethik sank into a seat at the table. “I like getting together with her,” he said, “but whenever we make contact outside of that, she acts all skittish, like a spooked horse. I can’t get her to calm down.”
Arol nodded. “Yeah, I’ve seen her get like that, too. She needs some kind of therapy. Something to ground her.”
I knew what Ethik and Arol were talking about. That summer I’d noticed a high, tinny tone to Eile’s laughter, a manic insistence on staying in motion. None of us linked her agitation to the break she’d recently been forced to make with Lysis, her longtime boyfriend. Had it come up, we would have dismissed it. They’d needed to separate. The fever between them had threatened their ardor for Zendik.
In addition to Ethik, a number of other men had hit Eile up for dates since her breakup. Often she said no. Sometimes her suitors waited a week or two and tried again. Maybe they were thick, or hard up for targets; maybe she hinted there was hope. In my story, warped by envy, she was enacting a plan to string men along: flirt, reject, flirt some more, reject again. I’d always wished to be the Girl With the Most Hit-Ups, not the Girl Most Likely to Hit Up the Guy Herself. Clearly, the swirl of pursuit around Eile was fucking her up.
As I listened to Ethik and Arol dissect Eile, I twisted my take on her state into a cure. Then, with Arol’s permission, I delivered my diagnosis—and my prescription: “I say, guys stop hitting her up. She has to hit on a different guy each week. That way, she can’t hook anyone into hoping she’s gonna say yes next time, or be his girlfriend.”
Arol nodded. “Sounds good to me. Why don’t you go let her know? You can keep an eye on her to make sure she follows through.”
With that, I became Eile’s warden.
Sometimes captives strike back.
The first mark Eile chose was Kro.
When he agreed to a date with her, I feigned indifference—recalling, with relief, that she’d have to try someone new the next week.