All My Mother's Lovers

by Ilana Masad

  Send me a pic, she types. Plz bb. Plz plz plz.

  Lucia obliges, and Maggie can tell from the picture that she’s at her studio, doing work. She often stays there late, forgetting to eat dinner until ten or eleven some nights. The image is subtle, possibly taken in the company of her fellow artists; just Lucia’s lips and teeth biting down on a pencil, but to Maggie it’s impossibly erotic. Tell me what to do to myself, she texts. Ill do anything.

  The three dots that show Lucia’s typing start and stop several times, and Maggie gets a little spooked. Will Lucia ask her to do something complicated? The idea turns her on, even if it’s something like masturbating on the living room couch or using something in the room to pleasure herself with. She’s much higher than she meant to get, she realizes—what Gina gave her is potent, but it’s probably got more to do with being so tired—because she would never really do these things in someone else’s home. It’s just the idea of it, the wrongness, the disrespect that would morph quickly into shame . . . all of it is appealing.

  Finally, the bubbles resolve into text. Do nothing, Lucia writes. Don’t touch urself. Wait until ur alone somewhere and we’ll do it together. Promise bb?

  Maggie’s pelvis is still straining, but a heat spreads across her chest and words she’s never said in a romantic context strain to come out. But no, not over text. I promise, she writes. After hesitating, she sends a heart. Green, not red. She doesn’t want to spook Lucia. With a strange mix of unfulfillment and fullness, she falls asleep.

  AUGUST 25, 2017

  The birds wake Maggie up. She half falls out of the bed and shoves the curtains open, their tracks making a click-click-clicking noise. It’s sunrise, she sees, and there’s a tree right outside the window. She pushes herself back under the covers and lays there for a moment, trying to hold on to a dream. She’s pretty sure Iris was in it, that they were both running to or from something, but the details are all gone. Was it a nightmare? She isn’t sure, but it doesn’t matter, because all she can think of is how she can’t call Iris and tell her about it.

  She and her mom had a tradition, which Iris said came from her own mother; whenever they dreamed about each other, they let the other know as soon as possible. Once, at some point during Maggie’s teenage years, Iris woke her up in the middle of the night just to tell her she’d dreamed that Maggie wanted to kill herself. “You don’t, do you?” she’d asked, urgently, kneeling beside Maggie’s bed. She’d shaken her shoulders, utterly panicked. “Maggie?!” It wasn’t as if there was a right answer; Maggie wasn’t happy during that time. She was realizing she liked girls, and worse, realizing she always had, and even worse than that, realizing she was in love with her best friend at the time, Sarah, and didn’t know how to tell anyone or who to talk to about it. So yes, the thought had crossed her mind. But she told her mother no, no, she didn’t want to kill herself, everything was fine.

  Things certainly aren’t fine now, and she can’t tell Iris about it, and she can’t go back to sleep because she’s crying and very awake and the birds are screaming.

  Sometimes they’d try to reconstruct dreams together on the phone. When Maggie was a senior in college, she had a late-morning class every Friday, and it became her Mom-call time. She and Iris almost always ended up talking about their dreams when they ran out of pleasantries.

  What does it mean, Maggie thinks, to dream about you but not remember anything? Do you know what it means, Mom?

  The house is quiet, but not for the reason she thinks. She tiptoes, worried about waking Abe and Junior, but in the bathroom she finds a note taped to the mirror, the handwriting tall and long, kind of like Abe himself. It tells her Abe is driving Junior to baseball training, but that he will be back soon if she’d like to talk more, and that if she doesn’t, that’s quite all right as well. Maggie puts the note down and brushes her teeth, remembering how perplexed she’d been with Sarah—that best friend she was in love with—about her choice to spend her summers, like Junior apparently, being an athlete. Like nine months out of the year weren’t enough.

  She wanders through the house, peeking into Junior’s room—neater than she’d expected it to be—and into Abe’s—messier—before she goes back to the guest room. She sits on the bed and idly swipes through pictures on her phone as she tries to think. Is there anything left to say to this man who loved her mother? Who wanted Iris to leave Peter for that matter? In the bright light of day, after a deep, restful sleep, she isn’t sure she can stomach it. No, she thinks. He did her a mitzvah by letting her stay, she thinks, the word coming into her head unbidden, something Iris would say about unearned kindness. But Maggie’s done one too, in giving him the letter, and she’s fulfilled her duty to Iris to boot.

  She decides that it’s enough, that Abe will understand that she had to leave. So she clicks the front door shut behind her and gets back in Peter’s car. It’s going to be a long day’s drive.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN SHE GETS near Oxnard, she starts regretting her late-night decision to visit her parents’—no, her dad’s house for a bit before driving down to LA. It’s late morning and she’s taken the faster route, the duller one, alternating between true-crime podcast episodes and music, with stops every hour and a half to pee and buy iced coffee. The heat of the day has risen with the sun, and even with the A/C going in the car, she feels sticky.

  Halfway through town, the anger returns—at herself, at Ariel, at her dad. She feels she needs to visit home, she reasons, because she doesn’t trust that they can keep shit together. What if they’ve done something awful to the house? Or offended the people coming to pay their respects? Maybe Ariel is just shut up in his room and Peter is reading or being all comatose and they’re ignoring the doorbell or their appetites or their need for sleep and bowel movements. A horrifying image of the house strewn with her father’s and brother’s piss and shit comes to mind. But why doesn’t she trust them? They’re grown-ups, aren’t they? Grieving, yes, but still. If she can’t leave them alone for a few days, will she ever be able to leave again?

  This, she realizes, is what she’s really concerned about. The idea of needing to move home to take care of Peter. She knows why, too, though she hasn’t thought about it in a long, long time. When she was fourteen and Ariel was nine, Peter left home for six months. It was strange but fun to have Iris around all the time—she ordered a lot of pizza and cooked a lot less than Peter. But after a while, Maggie started to miss him. Not just the meals but spending time with him while he made them, learning a little from helping out. And it wasn’t just the food, of course. Peter had a way of pulling the details out of her and Ariel when they got back from school—the first answer was always “Fine” when he asked “How was it today?” but unlike Iris, who seemed to accept that her children didn’t want to share anything further with her, Peter needled them by asking about details they’d let slip some other time. He’d ask how the math quiz was, and whether Mrs. McKitrick gave the book reports back; he’d ask whether Dan Gonzales was still in the lead for student body president and whether Ariel traded any good Yu-Gi-Oh! cards at recess that day.

  Peter always sounded chipper when they talked to him. At first, he and Iris sold it to the kids as Dad needing to travel for work for a while, just like Mom. But Maggie was old enough to understand that if that was all that was happening, her father wouldn’t be spending an hour on the phone with her mother every night. She remembers listening to Iris pick up the phone at around ten, Ariel fast asleep by then, and not saying much, mostly “Mhmm” and “Oh, love” and “Peter, I’m so sorry.” Finally, one night, Maggie snuck into Peter’s office and carefully lifted the receiver. It took her a minute to understand that Peter’s voice sounded full and snotty because he was crying. “I can’t take it, Iris, I want to kill him half the time,” she heard him say, and then Iris countering with, “Oh Peter, I know. But you’re trying to be a good son, and it can’t be much l
onger now, can it?”

  Maggie had always known that Peter didn’t talk to most of his family anymore. He had two stepbrothers he talked to occasionally, when one or the other or both of them visited the West Coast. They were the sons of the woman his father married for a brief time after Peter’s mother died when he was a teenager, and were in business together, taking over their own father’s industrial vacuum cleaner distribution operation. All this was information that had dripped down to Maggie over the years, but Peter’s family was largely a mystery to her, one she’d never taken an interest in. But as she listened to her parents talking, she began to understand that Peter was with his father somewhere in Massachusetts, taking care of an old, senile man who had no one else left. She hung up the phone carefully when her parents began saying good night, and tried to sneak back into her room, but Iris’s voice—not the one she used on the phone, but clearly addressing Maggie—came loudly from the living room.

  “So now you know,” she said. Maggie stopped in the hallway, wincing, sure she was about to get in trouble. “It’s okay, sweetie, come in here,” Iris said. So Maggie did, and she sat on the couch next to her mother as Iris wrapped an arm around her and twisted a lock of Maggie’s long hair around her finger. “Dad didn’t want you and Ariel to know because he’s scared you’ll be curious about his father, and he hates the man more than you would believe possible.”

  “But why?” Maggie asked.

  “That’s for him to tell you, if he wants to.” Iris kissed Maggie’s forehead and sent her to bed. When Peter got back a couple of months later, he sat her and Ariel down and explained to them that his father was given a terminal diagnosis some months ago, that his third wife had left him when she found out, and that a neighbor had discovered his father wandering along the road without shoes one day and called Peter. So Peter went to take care of him until he finally passed. He told them his father was a bad, mean-spirited man but that Peter felt it was his duty to do this. He was sorry he hadn’t told them beforehand, but he didn’t want to burden them with the knowledge. He thought it would be easier this way. He’d hugged them both until Ariel squirmed and asked to go back to his PlayStation.

  But Peter, Maggie thinks, chose to do that. He could’ve paid someone to care for his father, couldn’t he? He hated his dad, and he still went there himself; what does that say about her, that she doesn’t want to need to do the same thing for a father she loves?

  She’s too young, she thinks, pounding the steering wheel with her fists at a stoplight, emitting an accidental toot of its horn. She’s too young to think about moving back home to take care of an ailing parent—Peter was in his forties already when he did that. But no, maybe it’s not about how young she is—after all, Allison’s mom died when she was in college, and her dad two years later, by suicide, and Gina still lives at home, has been caring for her father ever since her mother up and moved to North Dakota shortly after he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s a few years ago. Fact is, Maggie just doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to move back home; she doesn’t want to leave her life for good, a life that finally feels stable, a part of her steadier since Lucia came along. She doesn’t want it all derailed.

  But what she wants doesn’t matter—it might get derailed no matter what she does, so she might as well do something she wants before that happens. And she wants to deliver these goddamn letters.

  On her street, she sees two cars in the driveway, which is a good sign. She parks next to a fire hydrant in front of her house—the cops almost never come by to give tickets—and texts Lucia, Kept my promise last nite ;). Going to check in on dad and bro and then back on the road. how r u? She watches the screen for a moment, but the message stays unread, so she puts her phone away and Lucia out of her mind.

  The front door moves at her nudge, apparently unlocked. She’s not sure what she’ll find, and her heart begins to thrum with the fear of disaster, but when she comes in, she sees the kitchen island is full of food, like it was on the first day of the shiva, and it doesn’t appear to be the same food, since it isn’t buzzing with flies or anything horrible like that. In the living room, she finds Peter and Ariel side by side on a couch with three women sitting around them, passing photos from hand to hand.

  “Maggie!” Ariel jumps up from the couch and runs to hug her. She’s surprised by the gesture until he hisses in her ear, “Fucking save me.”

  She pulls away. He looks haggard, and his beard is growing in. She’s always surprised, though it’s been years now, that he’s old enough to have facial hair. “I’m leaving soon,” she warns him. “I’m not done with the letters yet. But go take a breather. And a shower, dude, yuck.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” he says, and runs out of the room.

  “Hello,” she says to the people who’ve all turned toward her, except for Peter, who’s gazing at the photographs in his hand. “I’m Maggie, Ariel’s sister.” She isn’t sure why she says it this way. Why not Peter’s daughter? Or Iris’s daughter, for that matter? But somehow, calling herself a sibling feels like it allows her to be a little less responsible, like she’ll be able to flee when she needs to, just like Ariel has.

  As she approaches the couch, the women introduce themselves and shake her hand. Two of them are her mother’s age or thereabouts but they have such perfectly straight and uniformly deep, teddy-bear-brown hair that she realizes they’re wearing wigs. Only then does she notice that they’re also dressed in long skirts and long sleeves—frummishly, Iris used to say. These two are named Leeza—Maggie isn’t sure of the spelling but that’s how the woman pronounces it—and Hannah. The third woman, who seems younger, though not as young as Maggie, is wearing jeans but also a long-sleeved white shirt that’s closed at the neck and a head scarf covering most of her hair with some wispy bits coming out. Her name sounds like it’s in Hebrew and has an unpronounceable letter or two in it.

  “I used to be your mom’s sister-in-law,” the head-scarf woman, who stood up to shake, says. Maggie yanks her hand away without meaning to. She’s still wrapping her head around the idea of Iris being married before Peter, let alone having a sister-in-law. The woman seems taken aback, but smiles again, tentatively, and sits back down, glancing at Hannah and Leeza.

  “Right,” Maggie says. “Uh, I didn’t actually know. About her other husband. Until, like, this week.” Peter exhales loudly and looks down at his hands, which are twisting an orange rubber band around and around.

  Maggie sits where Ariel was, picking up the stack of photos he left behind. She wants to ask about the man who used to be Iris’s husband, but she doesn’t know where to start, or what would be too rude to ask, or whether Peter wants to hear any of it. So she flips through the pictures, and for a moment, she sees herself in them. Herself as she was at eighteen or nineteen, wearing big flowy skirts and little halter tops that bared her stomach. But no, this isn’t her, because she never wore clothes like that. She’s always detested skirts, even more than dresses, because at least with a dress it’s just one easy item of clothing; if she’s going to clad her top and bottom half separately already, then why would she ever choose a skirt? No, this is how Iris used to dress, she understands. A young Iris. A vulnerable-looking Iris, with an open face, mid-laughter, barefoot on the grass with her crooked toes, which she hated, out for the world to see.

  “Wow,” she says. “Dad, look.” She leans over to show him, and he nods, but she notices that he isn’t empty anymore. He looks angry, in the only way she’s ever seen him be contained and teeth-gritting. He never used to let loose on her or Ariel. If he was mad at them, he would tell them to go to their room and would talk to them when he calmed down. Once, she discovered him in the kitchen banging with a wooden spoon on pots and pans when he thought she wasn’t home; he’d told her it was his way of releasing anger without harming himself or anyone else. “The pots deserve it, cheeky bastards,” he’d joked. Maggie never heard her parents fighting loudly e
ither, never having arguments. The one time she thought that they were, the way her friends with divorced parents described fights, she’d spied them having a tickle-match on their bed, the shouts and yells all down to wrestling, a four- or five-year-old Ariel giggling and dancing around nearby, cheering them on. So seeing Peter angry like this, knowing him as she does, in this company, means something is very wrong. But she doesn’t know what. “When are these pictures from?” she asks the women. “You said you were her sister-in-law?”

  “Yes, Shlomo is my brother,” the head-scarf woman says. “She was such a precious one, our Iris.” She smiles, but there’s a shiver in it. “We missed her so much when she decided to leave us. But,” she sighs, her bosom rising dramatically under her white shirt, “she had her reasons, didn’t she.”

  “What do you mean?” Maggie asks.

  “Well,” the woman says, glancing at Peter. “My brother . . . He had a lot of problems.”

  Before Maggie has a chance to ask what that’s a euphemism for, Leeza jumps in, changing the subject. “We also worked with her,” she tells Maggie. “We hired her at our synagogue!”

  “Yes, when she and Shlomo split,” Hannah adds.

  “And the pictures,” the head-scarf woman says, “they’re from when your mother first met Shlomo. I found the album a while ago when I was helping him move; she must have left it behind years ago, I’m honestly shocked it survived. They were both so young when these were taken. It was so long ago. You look just like her,” she adds, and leans forward, touching Peter’s knee with a finger. “Doesn’t she?”

  Peter glances at the spot where the woman’s hand touched him, then looks away, nodding. Not for the first time, Maggie thinks about how awkward adults are. How when she was a kid, she thought being an adult meant being certain of yourself, sure with your body movements. But what she’d thought then was confidence was just size—adults were simply, for the most part, bigger than she was at ten or eleven. But now that she’s a grown-up herself, she knows that there’s no innate dignity, only people more or less competent at playacting.