All My Mother's Lovers

by Ilana Masad

  Before something close to guilt has a chance to set in, she’s up and running and opening the door to Peter’s study and demanding to know, “Why didn’t you ever tell us Mom was married before? Why didn’t she tell us?”

  Peter is reading another book of Iris’s, a woman’s silhouette on its cover, her ass shielded by the title Life Support. “Oh, that,” he says, his tone the same infuriating calm it was yesterday. No, not calm, she realizes. Detached. He’s just not entirely here. “Yes, it was a bad time for Iris. She didn’t like to talk about it much.”

  “Bad how?” Maggie sinks to the chaise, stares out the window to the flowering bush right outside and the lawn beyond and the quiet street, the absolute immovability of the neighborhood. It’s so solid, like a set piece.

  “He was a cruel man. And he made her feel like she didn’t matter,” Peter says, then leans back again with his book and adds, “Honey, it’s rude to interrupt when someone is reading.”

  “Are you fucking serious?”

  He turns the page. She can’t fathom what he’s thinking. It’s scary, like watching her father get pod-personed, taken over by someone else. Whoever is impersonating him is doing a terrible job.

  “You know we’re having a shiva?” she asks just before she leaves his room.

  “Oh, how nice,” he says without looking up. “Have fun, honey.”

  Jesus fucking Christ, she thinks, and repeats it over and over again as she paces the length of the hallway, the words tangling up, jeezus-fucking-christ jeezfuckrist jeefuckist. The hall goes from carpet near the bedrooms to square terra-cotta tiles as it opens to the foyer and living room and kitchen. This is a nightmare, she thinks, turns around at the front door, walks back, watches the knuckles of her toes bend and straighten, the littlest one disappearing into the shaggy off-white strands and curls. This is unreal, she thinks, and the words strike her as platitudeness, as meaningless as Leona’s offering of anything. She wonders if there’s a German word, one of those compound nouns that people like to share online, that could describe what she feels, this mix of anger and sadness and the fear looming above it all that nothing will ever feel normal again. She turns again, reaches tile again, feels the cool stone under her feet again. Back and forth, she tries to count how many steps of carpet, how many of stone, but loses track each time.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT TAKES MAGGIE a good long hour to drag herself out of the house. She showers and gets dressed and knocks on Ariel’s door to try to get him to come with her, but he tells her to go away, and Leona emerges for a moment with her T-shirt on the wrong way, with the tag sticking out in front, and apologizes for Ariel, tells Maggie that he is just heartsick and needs to rest. Maggie wants to puke. She starts writing a text to Lucia: While I’m trying to deal w/things, my bro is getting a pity fuck from this chick who’s prolly only into him cuz he’s all tragic. But then she glances up to Lucia’s latest text, from last night—Thinking of u, babe, hope tomorrow isn’t too rough—and deletes the message she was drafting, decides that Lucia’s implication in saying she hoped tomorrow, meaning today, wouldn’t be too rough is that she probably doesn’t want ongoing updates. Stop being so clingy, Maggie tells herself.

  The hospital, at least, turns out to be much easier a process than she expected, though she has to wait for what feels like forever. There are several people ahead of her. A string of mourners, all trying to identify their loved ones. None of them are alone. There are two men speaking Spanish softly to each other, maybe brothers, an older woman sitting, rocking herself, as they hover over her. One of the men is gay, Maggie’s pretty sure, his washed-out skinny jeans clinging to his muscled thighs, his T-shirt pink and tight, one of his arms sleeved in dragon tattoos. When she meets his eyes, he jerks a nod at her, a moment of recognition. Farther down the room full of plastic chairs, a hetero couple watches the muted TV, their hands clasped tightly on top of their adjoining armrests. Next to Maggie sits an old white man with wisps of fluffy hair above his ears and a younger man with a hooked nose and an abundance of dirty-blond hair. The only voices are the receptionist’s and the brothers’ softly curling words.

  She checks Instagram while she waits and finds Ariel posted the same thing there as he did on Facebook, the requisite photo of nothing, just a blur with corners that might be his desk or the kitchen island. She goes back to Facebook to see his post has acquired more comments, love, expressions of solidarity. Her own feed is mostly shared articles about queer injustice, climate change, the threats to health care, events she’s checked into—most recently, the informational meeting in July for folks interested in serving on committees at the new Pride center that opened in January. There’s also an embarrassing amount of pictures and videos of pit bulls, her favorite breed of dog, which is, she believes, deeply misunderstood. It’s not an inaccurate reflection of herself, her life, but it’s incomplete, almost impersonal. She and Lucia aren’t Facebook official, for instance. They haven’t even posted a photo of themselves together.

  She begins to type something up, an announcement of her own, when her name is called.

  It’s quick, the medical examiner showing her a picture of her mother’s face, which is bruised and looks nothing like her. They also show her a picture of her mother’s collarbone with its splotchy birthmark which Iris always said looked like a koala bear clinging to a tree but which to Maggie just looked blobby. Still, it’s hers all right.

  “There’s one more thing,” the ME, a wide-faced man with a gold cross hanging around his neck, says. “Her clothes are in pretty bad shape, but if you want—”

  “No,” Maggie says quickly, the idea of handling her mom’s blood-soaked garments making her light-headed. “No, uh, thanks.”

  “Whoa, there.” The ME’s hands are gripping her arms, though Maggie isn’t sure how they got there, or why she’s against the wall when a moment ago she was standing three feet away from it. “You okay?”

  She must have almost fainted. She’s never fainted, ever, in her life. “Yes,” she says, her shoulders tensing, and he releases her.

  “There was also this,” he says, and reaches into the file-and-folder-filled cart next to them. He hands her a manila envelope, its flap folded back, unsealed. Maggie reaches in and finds her mother’s necklace, the silver chain with the raw amber pendant. The one she always wore when she headed on the road. A good-luck charm.

  Not a very good one, as it turns out.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  She signs the paperwork and asks about getting a copy of the death certificate to Mrs. Gershon, and whether she needs to do anything else to make sure the body gets to the funeral okay. She tries to forget about the clothes, to banish from her mind the image of her mother’s dead face, nose broken and bruised, eyes closed, mouth set low like the disapproving frown Iris wore whenever Maggie spoke about girls.

  * * *

  • • •

  MAGGIE DESPERATELY WANTS to get high. She wants to stop feeling so much one moment and nothing the next. It is uncomfortable, the welling up of emotion that keeps plaguing her, the intrusive internal mantra that her mother is dead, dead, dead. Dead before her time, dead before she should be, dead so suddenly, so stupidly.

  She hasn’t eaten yet, so she drives to an In-N-Out, the place she and Iris used to go to celebrate things together, when they were on good terms. Iris took Maggie there when she got her period, when she graduated high school, after her first year of college, when she got a promotion at the insurance agency. They’d usually get something from the secret menu, which Iris thought was “so cool,” as if it were a speakeasy and she was a naughty flapper indulging in the forbidden. Iris would always get the vanilla milkshake, Maggie the chocolate one.

  But she gets the vanilla today, and eats and drinks in the parking lot, sitting in the car, sucking the milkshake down until she gets a brain freeze and slams her fist to her head to make it
go away. Once it does, she wishes it were back. The physical ache seems easier.

  She calls Lucia. “I’m sorry,” she says. “For, like, being needy. I’m just all over the place.”

  “It’s not needy, babe,” Lucia says. “Your mom died. You’re allowed to reach out.” There’s loud noise in the background but she’s moving away from it.

  “Is someone like forging a sword over there or something?” Maggie asks.

  “Yes, actually. Well, sort of. Soo Min’s trying to replicate a spearhead for this project she’s working on, it’s interesting, actually—but anyway, babe, how are you?”

  Part of her is convinced that no matter how nice Lucia is being, she’s going to leave, because who wants to deal with a new girlfriend whose mother has just died, but for now Lucia is on the phone and talking to her. “How do people do this?” she asks. She hears Lucia heave a sigh.

  “I don’t know. We just do. We push through it.”

  “We?”

  “My aunt died last year. My grandfathers on both sides the year before.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  She can almost hear Lucia shrugging through the phone. “You didn’t ask, babe,” she says, and Maggie wonders whether she was supposed to. “You don’t usually like talking about pain,” Lucia adds, softly.

  Maggie thinks back to their conversations, the ones late into the night, the ones before and after they’ve ravished each other. They talk about politics a lot, about responsibility, personal and societal. They’ve told each other about prior relationships. Maggie loves listening to Lucia talk about her art, and her friends’ art, and Lucia asks Maggie to tell her funny anecdotes from work, and the stories from the podcasts she listens to. They talk about their respective friends’ dramas, amateurly psychoanalyze them—those Maggie shares making Lucia laugh, maybe because her close circle is older, mostly, their lives unnervingly adult; her best friend, Isa, had her second child recently. Maggie supposes Lucia is right; they don’t talk about their own pain.

  “I guess I don’t have a choice right now,” Maggie says finally. But she doesn’t say anything of substance beyond that. Can’t get the words moving out of the hole beneath her breastbone and into her mouth. They say goodbye.

  Still sitting in the parking lot of the In-N-Out, staring at a large SUV tearing out of the drive-through, Maggie remembers where the will Janice mentioned on the phone must be—in her mother’s filing cabinet, exactly where she told her she would put it. A few years ago, her mother had sat her down when Maggie was home for Thanksgiving that time it had overlapped with Chanukah. When Maggie visited, once or twice a year usually, she tried to time it around the Jewish holidays, because she had fond memories of going through the motions with her grandparents, and later, with Iris and Ariel, Peter hovering supportively in the background, whenever any of them remembered to pay attention to the Jewish calendar. Plus, practically speaking, tickets tended to be much cheaper during Chanukah and Passover rather than Christmas and Easter, which they didn’t celebrate. Peter was raised Catholic, but he’d long since declared himself agnostic and despised the corporate and capitalist quality of Christian holidays in the U.S.—he claimed that for the three years he’d lived in Germany, Christmas had been entirely different and much more wholesome and lovely.

  That year, when Maggie was home, with the big clay chanukia she’d made during a short stint of Hebrew school when she was in first grade taking up prime real estate on the kitchen island, Iris had explained that she and Peter were working on their wills since they were both almost sixty and felt they were overdue in dealing with them. Peter was chopping vegetables for a salad, and Ariel was somewhere else, clearly deemed too young for this conversation. Maggie remembers being incredibly disturbed by the matter-of-factness of it all. “But Mom,” she’d said, a knot forming in her stomach immediately, “you’re not sick or anything, are you?”

  “No no no,” Iris had soothed her, cupping Maggie’s cheek in that way she did. “No, we’re fine, honey, this is just to prepare, to be on the safe side.” Maggie had thought then, as she does now, that there’s nothing safe about being dead.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN SHE GETS home, Maggie goes right into Iris and Peter’s bedroom, into the walk-in closet that her mother transformed into a miniature home office. The file cabinet is neat, with folders for medical bills, legal things, taxes, and even a folder that’s titled, in the same block lettering Iris used in crossword puzzles, MARGARET AND ARIEL—CHILDHOOD. Maggie finds report cards, drawings, little notes she and Ariel wrote to their parents and to each other. There’s a drawing of Jasmine from Disney’s Aladdin, only recognizable because of the turquoise of her clothes and the orange and black striped thing by her side that’s meant to be her tiger. There are hearts all over the page around the misshapen drawing. Maggie’s very first crush. Did Iris know that’s what it was?

  There are two slim baby books tucked into this folder as well, one for her and one for Ariel. All their early statistics are there: weight and length at birth, first smile, first laugh, first crawl, first step, first word. Maggie’s was, apparently, “boots.” She smiles. She still loves boots. The first thing she’d bought herself with the money she made babysitting when she was fifteen was a pair of Dr. Martens. She was such a baby gay cliché, she thinks. And, apparently, a pretty gay baby too.

  The will. That’s what she needs to find now. She puts the folder full of nostalgia back and keeps looking, but it’s not in the top drawer. She opens the bottom one, which is almost empty, save for two folders. One is labeled OLD MENUS, which looks like it’s full of exactly that—takeout menus graying with age, edges crumbling. Maggie has no idea why her mother would save those. Behind it is a folder that reads, simply, WILLS. There are two files inside, and Maggie leaves Peter’s alone, opening her mother’s. The blur on some letters suggests it’s a photocopy, or maybe just a bad printing job.

  She skims past the legalese, some of which is familiar to her from work—the shalts and theretos and mentions of estates, rests, and residues not as daunting as they’d been before she learned how to read and explain the contracts she was having clients sign—but most of it seems standard, the surviving husband, Peter, being the beneficiary. Her eyes lock on a section titled INSTRUCTIONS that mentions Iris’s request that the letters enclosed be sent out in the case of her untimely death. Maggie checks the folder again, but Peter’s will is the only other thing there. She leans up and looks into the drawer again, and yes, there they are, a small stack of letters at the back, under the hanging organizer. She takes them out and turns back to the will. On the next page, under the section that reads SPECIFIC BEQUESTS, she sees that her mother has left Ariel her engagement and wedding rings. She’s left Maggie the amber necklace, the one that’s still in her pocket.

  She’s not sure how long she sits there on the floor, cross-legged, staring at the brief paragraph. Blood drums in her ears; she can feel her pulse at the base of her throat; she’s furious. Of course Iris left the rings to Ariel, valued his prospects of marriage over Maggie’s. It’s 2017, she wants to shout at Iris, I can marry whoever I want! I can propose to a woman and marry a woman and we can have children together! But no, of course, even beyond the shadow of the valley of death or whatever, her mother is disapproving of Maggie’s quote–lifestyle choices–unquote. But it’s worse, really—until now, Maggie has never had a committed relationship. And Iris didn’t know about Lucia. Could she have smelled something on Maggie? An inability to commit? A failure at love? She tries to push this away. Iris knew nothing about her.

  And the necklace. What is that, she thinks, some kind of pity gift? She knows it was her grandmother’s, but it’s nothing special, just a stone and chain without a story. She never even saw Bubby wearing it, Maggie thinks, bitterness rising in her esophagus. Just an arbitrary good-luck charm her mother wore on trips, a charm that failed spectacula
rly during Iris’s last and extremely brief one. It’s so gendered too, Maggie fumes, like what, boys can’t wear necklaces? But no, apparently, the big, obviously expensive rings are for Ariel to bestow upon his future boring bride so he can have future boring kids in boring suburbia.

  Iris never made a secret of her discomfort with her daughter being gay, but she’d stopped being so overt about it in recent years, which Maggie took as a sign that she’d given up trying to change her. There was still an edge to her mother’s tone when she asked Maggie if she was dating “anyone,” always the implication being that perhaps, just once, the anyone would be a man. But still, Iris had listened without obvious judgment when Maggie told her about the occasional work she did with queer youth in St. Louis, the college-prep tutoring at an affirming church and the local LGBTQIA2S+ suicide-prevention hotline she volunteered with for a couple of years before they merged with a larger, national organization. She even sounded mildly interested when Maggie told her about the Pride center opening. But now Maggie realizes that Iris was preparing for this spiteful act the whole time. It had all been a sham, Iris just biting her tongue rather than actually accepting any of it.