by Anna Monardo
Natassia slipped her foot out from Mary’s hands, gave her the soft voice: “Mom, it’s okay.”
“I just don’t want anything bad to happen to you. I love you.”
Sitting there next to Natassia—next to her warm, bloody foot, and her safe, soft voice—Mary was working hard to try to hear Dr. Cather’s voice. Every time Cather talked about the good mother caught within Mary’s heart, saying shrink-type things like “We have to let that good mother come out,” Mary said to herself, Bullshit. But Cather kept coming back to that one fact: through all the years Mary was traveling, every night, every single one, from wherever, she always found a telephone and talked to Natassia, or at least left a message. Dr. Cather acted like she was amazed by this. “You can’t think of one night when you didn’t call her?”
“Hardly.”
“Hold on to that, Mary. That’s the core, that’s the heart of your mothering. It’s good and it’s constant.”
“Look, Dr. Cather, that and a token will get my kid on the subway. It wasn’t enough. I should have been there with her.”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t have been, and I’m not saying you should have been. I’m saying there was this one constant act of care that you performed. You did it. No one put a gun to your head. You extended yourself, Mary. Whatever made you do that, it’s inside of you. It’s something to build on.”
“Mom?” Natassia asked. “How come you say you just want to love me and then you throw a fit? It’s, like, so weird when it happens.”
“I don’t know, Natassia. All I know is, I don’t want you to go to that man’s place tonight.”
Natassia’s eyes widened into her grown-up, stern look. “Mom.” Straightening her spine, she looked into Mary’s eyes. “I know what’s going on here.” Natassia ran her hands through her thick hair several times, as if trying to gather her patience. “You’re jealous, Mom, aren’t you?”
As if a window had fallen shut, Mary couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk. She crouched on the carpet a second to get her balance. Inhaler. Standing, Mary picked the scissors up off the floor, laid them carefully on the desk, left the room.
“Mom, why’re you leaving? Where’re you going?”
From the hallway, Mary called, “Where does Lotte keep the train schedule?”
Natassia called back, “But we were talking, Mom.”
“Yeah, but you know what you want to do, so go ahead. Just be careful.”
“Well…”
Mary could tell from Natassia’s voice that she was standing at the end of the hallway, watching. “Okay, Mom, if you mean it. Good. Thanks. You know, Mom, all I want is to get along with you.”
Walking away, taking air in through her nose, blowing out slowly through her mouth, not looking back, Mary muttered to herself, “Little bitch.” In the kitchen she untacked the train schedule from the bulletin board. There was nothing more to do here. She’d been accused of being jealous of her own daughter; now Mary’s last option was gone. She couldn’t throw herself in front of the door to keep Natassia from going out. She couldn’t end up in an asthma attack. She’d look like a fool. The kid had won. Mary walked back into the bedroom. “Where’re my cigarettes?”
“Mom, you shouldn’t smoke.”
And you shouldn’t be fucking men old enough to be your father, Mary thought. She said, “Enough advice for one day, Natassia. Where’s my smokes?”
“I don’t know. Probably where you were sitting, on the window ledge.”
The cigarettes were under the radiator. Mary grabbed them and dug into her backpack for matches and her inhaler and enough money to buy a bag of pipe tobacco. “I’m going out.”
Still futzing with the strips of torn skirt, Natassia asked, “Where’re you going, Mamita?”
“I’ll be back before you leave.”
HALF AN HOUR LATER, Natassia was stepping into a royal-blue leotard when Mary walked into her room, sat on the floor, and spread out the Daily News. When Natassia said, “Oh, yippee, you’re back!” Mary said, without looking up from her newspaper, “Do you have any subway tokens? I’m getting the six-ten.”
“Just one, and I need it to get downtown, but, Mom, you don’t want the six-ten. That’s peak, it costs more.” Natassia’s hair was clean and damp and frizzing, hopping long and loose. With her body sleek inside the leotard, she crouched down next to Mary. “Look, can I show you something?” She opened a bottle of moisturizer, rubbed some onto Mary’s wrist. “Smell.”
The scent was pine—clean and delicious—with musk in it. “Nice.” Mary felt Natassia’s energy, amped up and consolidated, just the way Mary used to get right before going onstage. When she gathered her focus, entered the zone, no one could mess with Mary, and now, staring at the newspaper, she couldn’t think of a damn thing to do to stop, divert, or disrupt Natassia’s plan.
“Isn’t this lotion great, Mom? He smells like this, you know, like, all the time.”
In the moments before curtain, Mary shed the world and got quiet, but some dancers turned chatty, the way Natassia was now. “I bought it for him, but I’m, like, This is so cool I’m keeping it for myself.” She dabbed moisturizer onto her wrists and ankles, then dipped into the scoop of her leotard and put the scent between her breasts, then on the tops of her thighs. “We do this thing,” she told Mary, “where he has to discover all the places where I have perfume on.”
“I’m not one of your girlfriends. You don’t tell your mother shit like that.”
“Yeah, but you’re cool, Mom. Much cooler than Mariah’s dysfunctional mother.” If Natassia were a different kid, Mary might have suspected drugs. The kid was so airy now, breezy, as if riding some potent whiff of smoke. Pulling on her jeans, Natassia asked, “Who was the best lover you ever had? Daddy?”
“Natassia.” Mary snapped over a page of newspaper. “That’s none of your business.” As she looked down at the newsprint, her eyes blurred.
An electronic watch or clock somewhere in the room beeped five-thirty. The only way Mary could get the early train now was to take a cab, and she didn’t have the money. There’d be no time in the studio today. She’d accomplished nothing.
Constancy, follow-up, follow-through.
Leave me alone, Dr. Cather.
You’re the mother, you have to be willing to be unpopular now and then. If you think something’s important, it probably is important. Stick to your guns. Trust yourself.
“This BS BF of yours, Natassia, is he married? Was he ever married?”
“None of your beeswax.”
Natassia’s jeans were now belt-buckled; her leotard scooped so low it was riding the curves of her freckled shoulders; her breasts were especially prominent in the leotard—blue, rounded, and held by a seamless bra. She was pulling her red cowboy boots on over her Daffy Duck anklets, an incongruous tease. It occurred to Mary that maybe the guy had no idea how young Natassia was. No, she wasn’t on drugs. Natassia was just high on herself, on her own potent young body, and Mary knew there was no way to interrupt that buzz.
“Does Lotte let you take the subway down there by yourself? Are any of your friends going with you?”
“No. He wanted just me.”
The BF’s gifts were wrapped and ribboned and packed into Natassia’s backpack, the backpack slung over her shoulder. Natassia tucked a subway token into the tiny front pocket of her jeans, walked up to Mary, who still sat on the floor, who wouldn’t stand up for a hug, so Natassia wrapped her big hands around her mother’s head, bent down, and kissed her hair. “I love you, Mom. Thanks for helping me get ready for his birthday. It means a lot.”
“I was not helping you.” Mary had reached the end of the News and was snapping the pages back toward the front.
“Are you okay? Come on, Mom, be okay. Listen, Grammy lets me see him, and I’ve been riding the subway for years. You know that.”
Mary stared at Natassia’s boots and caught a whiff of something like dog shit coming off the soles. The stink was strong enough to m
ake Mary feel nauseous. She got up, tossed the newspaper into the wastebasket, sat on the window ledge, breathed. “Natassia, why don’t I have any authority with you? That’s what I want to know. Why don’t I?” The muscles around her sacrum were fisting into pain.
Natassia laughed and turned to leave. “Mom, you’re so funny. How’m I supposed to know? You’re the adult. What’s wrong? Your face looks weird. Is your back hurting again?”
“That’s just my fucking point. I’m the adult. I know this thing with this man is not good for you. I’m the mother here.” Mary stood too quickly and had to breathe her way through a shot of pain in her lower back. “I know better. I know you should stop it now.”
“Why?”
“Any man who has you running around shoplifting, so desperate to see him happy—”
“Who’s screaming here?” Natassia, rushing, was dissolving, near tears. “Who’s really desperate here?”
She was headed down the hallway, turning the dead bolt on the apartment door, was halfway out, and Mary was yelling behind her, “I want to know where you are going, Natassia. I have no idea where this moron lives. I at least want a phone number.”
Natassia stepped back in from the hallway, held the door closed and whispered, “There are people at the elevator listening to you scream. He doesn’t have a phone. The frigging phone company disconnected him last month. Oh, Mom, please, let’s stop fighting.”
“Yes!” Mary hissed back. “Why don’t you stop fighting me?” Staring at each other, they stood there. Damn it. Mary had always been so sure that Natassia would use her intelligence to keep herself safe. But Natassia wasn’t herself anymore. Grown-up and tall and good-looking, sexy now on top of it. As sure of herself as ever, but acting as dumb as a brick, moving toward trouble so huge and inevitable Mary could almost see the shape of it, could feel its ugly heartbeat, and yet she could not think of one way to keep Natassia from craving it. A real mother would know what to do. “Just…please.” When Mary spoke, her voice was nothing. “Can’t you give me an address?” But the door was closing.
Then the door opened again and Natassia’s head reappeared. “Mom, why don’t you just stay in town tonight? You can sleep in my room, in the AC. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
AFTER NATASSIA WAS GONE, Mary went into the bedroom and looked through the drawers for new notes from the BF, but she didn’t find any. She found a black lacy camisole and stringy black underpants, that’s all. True, Natassia had been riding the subway without an adult since seventh grade, when Lotte sent her to a self-defense course, quizzed her on the subway map, and said she’d be fine. Lotte always knew when Natassia was ready for the next step, Mary believed that, and Lotte seemed to be letting this BF thing just happen. Mary ate a bowl of cereal, then curled into a ball on Natassia’s floor to stretch out her lower back. I should have followed her, tailed her all the way downtown. Why was Mary pretending she didn’t know what to do? It was like pretending for years that dance wasn’t wrecking her body, pretending it was okay to dance through injuries, pretending she could breathe without breath. Her back was so tight she had to ease herself up by leaning first on elbows, then shifting back onto knees. Then she had to hustle to catch the 9:02 Express back upstate.
LATER THAT NIGHT, back in the greenhouse, Mary lay on her futon with an ice pack tucked under her, and the dusty telephone crouched next to her. Smoke from her pipe did sad turns up toward the ceiling, toward the three cedar beams that joined the two sides of the A-frame. All summer, during long, empty evenings lying there and staring up, Mary had visualized herself dancing on those beams. Tonight she imagined a kind of circus act happening within the big tent of the A-frame, saw herself crossing the beams doing spins and flips, the kind of moves that would probably cause injury if she performed them on the floor. In the air, they’d mean certain disaster.
Mary’s skin still felt trembly from the aftershocks of the afternoon—Natassia ripping up her clothes, playing hide-and-seek with that lotion all over her body. You’re jealous, Mom, aren’t you? Who’s really desperate here? Mary really did feel she was at the end of what she knew how to do with Natassia. Maybe tonight was the night to get up on the ceiling beams and try the dance steps that would finally break all her bones.
“No,” Mary said to the urge to pick up the phone and call someone. Turning onto her side, she told the wall, “No fucking point,” but still she found herself organizing the events in her head, preparing her defense for the inevitable day when she finally would be called in—to court? to the police station? to a TV talk show?—to account for why she was a lousy mother. All I wanted to do was find out who this guy is. I go down there, the kid won’t talk. She’s dressed like a slut. She tells me I’m jealous. Who would want to hear it?
She rolled onto her back and looked up again, into the ceiling’s high arch, built like the cathedrals in Italy, those offerings to God to help get you straight to heaven. Mary remembered that from the art-history course she’d taken in Rome. Explain that to the lawyer, the judge, the TV audience: The kid was conceived on a dare and was born at the end of spring semester, my junior year in college. While I was dancing professionally, going to classes, rehearsing—
And why would a dancer make such a selfish choice?
Mary had no idea. Taking a deep inhale on her pipe, she closed her eyes, then exhaled, coughed. Her back pain was easing up, but there really was no way to get this slimy feeling out from inside her. She would not call Cather to set up an extra appointment. It cost too much and couldn’t change anything anyway. Mary would not under any circumstances call Ross and let him hear how small she’d become.
“No fucking way,” she said out loud. But a little while later, she lifted the receiver and hit the auto-dial button for Ross’s phone number in Spokane.
CHAPTER 6 :
AUGUST
1989
Ross Stein was sitting alone out on his back deck reading two books—an illustrated volume of ancient Egyptian erotica, and a manual on how to put up cedar siding—going from one book to the other to try to keep himself awake. He wished he could just go to bed, but it wasn’t worth it. He had a patient in labor. Sometime soon he’d have to go to the hospital. He held a mouthful of sugared coffee in his mouth and remembered how he used to like to suck on his bourbon before he swallowed it down.
Harriet’s calico cat jumped onto Ross’s foot, and he kick-tossed the cat deep into the dark yard. The cat hissed. “Die, you beast,” Ross muttered. Two years he’d been living with Harriet, and he still went around thinking to himself, Damn that woman and her cat. Something about that wasn’t right.
The cat came back. Ross kicked it again, farther. Then he remembered that he’d forgotten to feed it. When Harriet had left for the hospital that afternoon, she’d asked him to feed the cat. Ross went inside, looked in the fridge until he found the fresh turkey pastrami, tore up a few slices, and set out an extra-large portion on the cat’s plate. Into the cat’s water dish he poured black coffee. He liked to watch the cat jazzed up on caffeine.
Ross had just sat down again, was lifting his feet up onto the wooden railing, when the remote phone rang inside the pocket of his khakis. “Yeah,” he answered. “Stein here.”
“Hi,” Mary said, “it’s me.”
“Hi, you.”
“You busy?”
“Yeah, I’m waiting for the labor room to call.”
“Okay, I’ll call you later.”
“No, it’s all right. There’s Call Waiting. You’re up late—it’s two in the morning there.”
“You and I have to talk about something,” she said.
We haven’t had this conversation for a while, he thought. He asked, “What’d I do now?”
“Did you know Natassia’s got a boyfriend?”
“Hey, what are you smoking? I hear you sucking on something.”
“A Camel, what d’you think I’m smoking?”
“An intern gave me some weed last week. It was terrible shit. He gre
w it. I threw it out.”
“I thought you quit everything.”
“I did. That’s why I threw out the pot. We tried one joint, took a hit—”
“How’s Harriet?”
“She’s fine. She’s at the hospital.”
“On call?”
“Yeah. God, I wish I didn’t have to go in tonight. I’m out here on the deck. You know what I still can’t get over? There’re no bugs out west, not even at night, not even when it’s really hot. Imagine Fire Island with no bugs.”
“Have you talked to Natassia lately? About this guy?”
“The guy who swiped my shirt from my parents’ apartment?” A star shot by over Ross’s garage. He should get Natassia out here more often, so she could see stuff.
“You know, Ross, I have totally bad vibes about this guy.”
“Yeah? Sounds like he’s into art. She told me he takes her to galleries. Is she coming here for Christmas? Tell her I want to see her for Christmas. You want to come?”
“Thanks, I can’t. But, yeah, she’s coming for her whole winter break.”
“So what’s wrong with her boyfriend?”
“He turned her into a dimwit.”
Ross laughed.
“Don’t laugh. He did.”
“How dim?”
“Completely. She’s lost it. She’s not herself. She’s slimy, like a cat.”
“Slimy?”
“Everything’s a secret. Meanwhile, she’s lurking around town dressed like a slut, she won’t tell me where she’s going to meet him. She won’t even say his name. Nothing.” Ross was pretty sure now that Mary wasn’t calling to nail him about anything, but her voice had a panicky edge that wasn’t her. After so many years and so much mess between them, he thought he knew her whole repertoire of moods. “She doesn’t talk to me, Ross. Does she talk to you? Oh, shit.”
“Hey, Mar, you’re not crying, are you?” Damn. She never used to cry. Never.