by Kate Jacobs
In another lifetime, Dakota would have found these weekend escapes to be just the thing to get away from an over-involved mother. Once she no longer had a mother, all she wanted to do was stay home—she and James moved quickly into a spacious apartment and she painted and redecorated and did everything she could to re-create the sense that she was still living just above the shop—and try to brain-storm a way to make things turn out differently. If only she could go over every moment, every event, and understand completely what had happened, would she then be ready to live it all over again and get it right this time. Sense her mother’s pain and get her to the hospital sooner. Or, better yet, in her favorite revisionist history, she would do a project in elementary school on the importance of going to the gynecologist and convince her mother to get checked out much, much sooner. Crisis averted.
Going through these different retellings provided an unexpected, private solace. All she had to do was be alone and think think think how to save her mother. These imaginings brought with them a sense of control, easing her fears. Her grief, which ebbed and flowed, remained always there. Lurking.
There had been a space of time, in her freshman and sophomore years of high school, when Dakota was so busy with schoolwork and visiting her grandmothers and going to endless grief-counseling sessions at James’s insistence—although he never went—that she felt as though everyone was keeping her from spending much time in the store. The one place she wanted to be. And from the club. When she was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, she had felt a certain relief to be with the women from the group. A link to her mother. And they were funny! Also illuminating as they opened up the adult world in a very non-glamorous way. Without discussing it or making some sort of measure of appropriateness, all of them—from Lucie to Darwin to Catherine to KC to Peri to Anita—had stopped editing their conversations to protect her little ears. And so they treated her as one of the group. Dakota heard about work struggles, relationship challenges, the best place to buy designer shoes half off (thanks, Peri!). She was the only teenager whose best friends were, at a minimum, a decade older. And typically much more. Anita had told her then what she knew to be true: She’d always be wherever Dakota needed her to be.
Eventually, the frantic schedule settled down, and James’s mother Lillian didn’t cling to her every time she was about to leave and take the train back to the city, reluctant to let her surprise granddaughter out of her sight. After a while, even Georgia’s mother, Bess, began to relax and let go of the fear that Death was going to steal yet another person she loved. That was one of the strange things Dakota had grown to understand in the years since Georgia died: Just because Bess hadn’t been the style of mother Georgia wanted didn’t mean Bess wasn’t heartbroken to lose her daughter. She was. Everyone was. And only a smile from Dakota could make it all better for all of them. They needed her to be happy.
It was a tremendous burden.
Anita had talked through all of it with her. Whereas previously she’d never been a fan of long conversations on the phone, Anita had twisted James’s arm—not really, she’d just made a pointed suggestion in her elegant and insistent Anita manner—and purchased a set of cell phones so she and Dakota could be in constant touch. Anita was better than a high school confidante: she had no curfew and never got in trouble for receiving text messages during school hours. Seeing as she didn’t, of course, actually have classes. Day or night, she never once reprimanded Dakota for contacting her when she was supposed to be doing something else, whether homework or dishes or minding the register at the shop. And if Anita was up in the middle of the night, she was quite likely to text back a reply, gamely attempting her own version of text shorthand.
Now that Dakota was at NYU, Anita often called to say she was in the neighborhood. She seemed to be in the Village often lately, and though Dakota suspected she was making special trips just to see her, she didn’t mind one bit.
The two would meet for a coffee over at Dean & DeLuca on Broadway, or just sit in Washington Square Park to the side of the arch and watch passersby. Anita’s one rule was that they only say nice things about strangers, ignoring Dakota’s smirks, and so they would compliment all the random folk who walked by. Not to mention the older woman seemed to have an endless appetite for discussions about professors and classes and annoying habits of new roommates. And so the bond between Anita and Dakota had grown even stronger.
“You okay?” Dakota asked now in the shop. “Is it the reno? Does it bug you that much?”
“No, dear,” said Anita. “I just got distracted.” She leaned forward to Dakota, who was so tall now that Anita felt tiny as she sat in the chair. The worst thing about babies growing up and getting older was that it invariably meant it was happening to her, as well. She resented the lack of control she had over time. There remained so many things she wanted to do, to say.
“I’m not losing my mind, you know. I was lost in thought.”
“No worries,” said Dakota companionably. “Besides, I don’t think you’re going senile. But I’ll tell you how to test if someone does: Do something fairly outrageous—rude, even—and see if people still treat you kindly. If they do, you’re officially an old bat.”
Anita looked startled, and then laughed, as she always did, at Dakota’s frank nature. Sure, there were parts of the young woman that seemed to be lifted directly from her mother—the huge smile, and her willowy frame—and other parts, such as her ability to charm, that were all about James. But so much of Dakota was simply herself: her boldness, her candor, her deadpan sense of humor. The babyish edges of her tween and teen years had been rubbed away and what was left behind was an almost polished, statuesque, eye-catching young woman. She was a bit of a firecracker, that one, with her smart-aleck comments. And the anger that she tried valiantly to suppress. It could be difficult to appreciate what you had—a father, a supportive group, friends—when what you’d lost was so huge. Anita knew this, and she understood.
Dakota was as cute as she’d always been, with her smooth complexion and her bright white teeth shining when she flashed a grin, her long, trim legs that rarely wore anything but jeans. Just like her mother, thought Anita. Always with the jeans. Dakota was the best of Georgia.
Only now she was all grown up and so much harder to protect.
three
Looking after her little girl drove her mental. There. She said it. Not to anyone in particular, mind you, but at least she could admit it to herself. Ginger, darling cutie-pie Ginger, was a royal pain in the butt.
“I’ve created a monster,” said Lucie to her production assistant, who nodded and smiled and took notes on every utterance she made. “My daughter is out of control.”
On any given day, Ginger fought against waking up to get to kindergarten, or she suddenly hated her breakfast cereal. She wouldn’t wear ankle socks or she’d wear ankle socks only in pink and no other color. Her shrieking scream when she didn’t get her way was louder than an ambulance siren and got a lot more attention from passing New Yorkers than an emergency vehicle in the street. During the day, her energy never waned: Ginger kept up a steady banter all day long with her stuffies, her mother, her teachers, her classmates, until she practically keeled over at night, a five-year-old drunk from exhaustion, and had to be carried to bed.
In another lifetime, Lucie had cried herself to sleep because her desire for a baby—a sweet-smelling, cooing, cuddling infant—had pulled at her heart. Now she cried herself to sleep from fatigue and confusion and, in her darker moments, regret.
She’d always imagined that not having children would be a terrible fate. But she’d managed to find something much worse: screwing up as a mother.
It was a never-ending guilt spiral.
Lucie let out a whoosh of air to blow her bangs out of her eyes; she’d dyed her hair brown the week before with a drugstore brand thinking it would somehow fade into the background and be one less thing to think about. But she’d seriously miscalculated the shade and had managed to turn
her hair to an ugly facsimile of mud, necessitating that she find time for a trip to the salon to fix things—to go back to the reddish highlights—before she left for Italy in a few weeks. Even though her mother had been born there, Lucie had visited only a few times in her forty-eight years. Her mother’s family had emigrated after the war, and Rosie fell for an Irish-American vet, causing a mini-scandal that no one cared about anymore. Times and ideas change, sometimes for the better.
She loved the idea of seeing her cousins if she had any extra time, not that she’d recognize them, and of eating huge plates of pasta, and maybe even sneaking in a little sightseeing. Summer in Italy sounded perfect. On paper. But once the thrill of being a very-much-in-demand music video director—at her age! with her background!—had started to wear off, Lucie was left juggling a lot of egos and tense production schedules. She’d earned a reputation as being a bit of a Ms. Fix-It and was often brought onto sets when the previous director had been fired or quit, or when the costs were running over budget. She was known, quite frankly, as a ballbuster. She micromanaged her sets to the point of driving away anyone not willing to work as hard as she did, and she coaxed and cajoled the talent into wanting to work all day and all night to wrap things up. No one said no to Lucie Brennan.
No one, that is, except for her kindergartner daughter, who never said anything else.
Ask anyone: Ginger Brennan was darling. She named the furniture at Walker and Daughter—the sofa was called Old Softy—and told stories to the skeins of yarn about what they might be knitted into. “I think you’ll be a jewelry box,” she told some inexpensive cotton, raising its hopes beyond a dishcloth future. She was tremendously attached to Dakota, who’d been her babysitter for years, and the two of them giggled and laughed the afternoon away. And she was a looker with her soft, plump cheeks, her strawberry-blond waves, and those deep green eyes that dared you to defy her heart’s desire. Those she must have gotten from her father. About whom she’d begun asking questions just after her fifth birthday last fall.
“Why don’t we have a daddy in our house?” she’d asked at Thanksgiving. Previously, Ginger had enjoyed horsing around with Lucie’s older brothers, and chasing her cousins in the backyard for endless games of hide-and-seek. But she’d been thoughtful over turkey, sucking on her thumb even though Lucie reminded her several times on the way over that she was too big for such behavior and Lucie’s mother, Rosie, clucked her tongue and looked meaningfully at Lucie. When Rosie was on, she was in charge; when she grew tired, she walked out of the bathroom and left the faucet on, forgot what she was talking about in the middle of the story. Grew confused as she watched the TV news.
Ah, yes, thought Lucie as she met her mother’s eyes, another speech over dessert about why I’m a bad mother. (“Not bad,” Rosie would say. “Just not as good as you could be.”) But then Ginger had popped out that wet, wrinkly chubby little-girl thumb from her mouth and let her question fly.
For once, the Brennans fell silent. Her very Catholic older brothers, who’d always disapproved of her single-mom-by-choice life decision, flushed with triumph. (Or rather, they’d disapproved of her single-mom-via-sexual-reproduction choice; they’d have cheered her on if she’d adopted an orphan. That would have been A-okay. What they resented was being forced to explain to their children exactly what Ginger had just asked her own mommy.)
“Because we don’t need one,” Lucie replied. “So eat your carrots.” Inside, Lucie was regretting every moment she’d opted for another story at bedtime instead of anticipating her daughter’s questions and answering them before they even became an issue. But it had been too awkward and confusing, even for her. After all, she was the one who set the process in motion. “Once upon a time, I was in my early forties and freaked out that I’d never find you,” she thought to herself when she imagined how she’d tell Ginger about her conception. “So I went on a dating rampage and slept with a bunch of guys until somebody knocked me up.” Not exactly the most comforting scenario. Was the most important lesson for Ginger that she was wanted? She’d heard that on TV one time, but it didn’t seem to her as though Ginger wanted reassurance. She was refreshingly confident. No, what that one wanted was info. Just the facts, Mommy. Just the facts.
And besides, it’s not as though she’d even done a very good job of explaining the basics of reproduction to her daughter, having overheard Ginger explain to her grandmother that babies were born when people rubbed bums together. That nugget also brought a look of consternation from Rosie.
“What? I told her and she got it a little mixed up. So what?” said Lucie to her mother once Ginger had left the room. “You were the one who told me babies were found under cabbage leaves.”
“Pfft,” said Rosie, pushing air out of her lips to show what she thought of that claim. “We didn’t know any better in those days. Now you have to tell them the facts of life so nobody gives them the funny business. Haven’t you seen Dr. Phil?”
In all the ways that Lucie was cautious and conscientious and matter-of-fact, she had neglected to consider the one truth of motherhood: she genuinely had no idea what she was doing. And the books, well. Whatever. They didn’t work on her daughter. She was too smart for psychologists, that was for sure. There was no one-size-fits-all manual for children. She knew. She’d looked for it at the library.
The minute—the second—Ginger could talk she had begun to gain the upper hand. When Lucie shut her eyes at night, finally feeling the knot of anxiety that she carried with her at all times begin to ease as she listened to Ginger’s snorty sleeping breaths, she continued to hear in her mind the “No, Mommy” and “I will NOT!” and “No, you do it!” phrases Ginger uttered all day long.
“I’m being manipulated by a two-year-old,” she used to tell Darwin when the two friends met for coffee. Her career was just beginning to heat up back then. Later, as Ginger turned three, four, five, she became only more skilled at getting what she wanted. And Lucie, exhausted from the job that excited and interested her mind, spent from using every spare moment chasing Ginger around and trying to get her to sit still, would give in. She bought peace. It was on sale at the toy store. The doughnut shop. The market, and the movies.
“I love Ginger,” she confessed to the members of the club one tearful Friday night. “But I like her best when she’s asleep.”
She thought of explaining to Ginger that she was a donor baby, which she was, in a way. In the sense that the man who fathered her had willingly shared certain parts of himself. Of course, he hadn’t been planning on making a baby. That had been all Lucie, from the very beginning. Getting donor sperm the old-fashioned way: she seduced.
Well, not really. She’d liked Will Gustofson a lot. He was a nice guy. Smart. A researcher at Sloan-Kettering when they’d dated. He was attractive. Even fun. But Lucie, who’d been burned in love a few times, had not wanted to work on a relationship. She’d grown tired of waiting, didn’t want to gamble with her biological clock. The only relationship she was certain she wanted to commit to was one with a baby. And she got it. But then that baby grew into Ginger. A little person with a lot of opinions. And suddenly Lucie found herself with much, much more than she’d bargained for.
She was still waiting to figure it all out. To know what to do with an aging Rosie and how to discipline Ginger. Her biggest problem before her daughter was born was the sense that her life was in a holding pattern. And yet somehow that sensation had crept back into her days: All she had to do was make it to first grade, to high school, to college. All she had to do was keep it together and try not to be buffeted between a kid going into elementary school and a mother settling into her golden years. When was it going to make sense? When was she going to wake up and not feel tired? When was it going to feel all right?
KC looked at her alarm clock—three a.m.—and felt sick. Not to her stomach in the sense she had the flu, all achy and tired. But sick with disgust. Horror. Embarrassment. It did not matter how open people were to talking about it these
days. The damn truth was that it was tremendously unpleasant, waking up in the middle of the night covered in clammy sweat, dripping through her pajamas. She tried cotton nighties. She tried sleeping naked. She tried sleeping in the bathtub. But it was always the same: nights interrupted by sudden soakings. Or a spike in temperature during an important meeting at work in the afternoon. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. And her periods! Weren’t those damn things supposed to vanish? Well, not before they made their last hurrah, heavier and more frequent than ever. She was spending a fortune at the drugstore these days, buying tampons and pads in Super Plus Plus Plus.
You’d think her reproductive organs could just shut down quietly and mind their own business. After all, she’d never used them. Just let them hang out while she lived her life, tried out a couple of husbands who didn’t quite fit right, and focused on her career. It’s not like she ignored them, either, getting regular checkups to make sure the pipes were working. Especially after Georgia’s illness. And what did she get? Nights of misery and a big, bad headache.