The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  In the early Seventies, before Molly’s birth, I’d belonged for a year and a half or so to a women’s group. We were organized by a self-proclaimed feminist, a woman with whom I sometimes played chamber music, a cellist named Cecile Clark. When we met in the women’s group, in various living rooms around Boston, one of the things we talked about was masturbation. I remembered being surprised when Cecile, who seemed to me one of the most sexually charged women I’d ever met, said she never had. “I mean, it’s not that I haven’t tried,” she said. She was tall and dark. She had thick eyebrows that nearly grew together in a line over her nose. When she frowned, as she did when she told us about trying to masturbate, the separation disappeared completely, her brows became a straight line bisecting her lovely face horizontally. “I really have. I mean, I’ve wooed myself. Wine, Chopin, candlelight. God. I wish Charlie would take the time.” Cecile was married, for the third time, to a violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He was obsessed with money, and she claimed he brought the business section of the paper to bed every night—his idea of foreplay. “But then I lie there and begin to stroke myself, and I can’t help it, every time I start to laugh. To laugh! Can you believe it?”

  We had all been intimidated by Lee, another group member, who’d talked about whole evenings spent in solitary erotic play; who loved to taste herself on her own fingers, who’d actually bought a vibrator to increase her pleasure. After Cecile’s confession, the others of us who didn’t or couldn’t masturbate for one reason or another found it easier to talk about why not.

  It was a shock to me then to realize that I simply didn’t have erotic feelings. Brian and I made love only occasionally. When we did, he was enthusiastic and experimental. But to me the positions he tried felt like just that: positions. Later, when I finally had a successful love affair, I thought of those same positions as feelings. But with Brian, I felt as absurd as Cecile felt by herself. He would lie next to me, his face buried between my legs, licking and licking; and I would stare at his swollen cock inches from my face, his brownish hairy balls, knowing that simple politeness, if nothing else, required that I take him in my mouth, but feeling no impulse to do it. Occasionally I came with him, a sudden small convulsion that took me by surprise; but for the most part, I was neutral towards the whole enterprise. And I never even registered an inclination to touch myself, to work towards anything like sexual fulfillment.

  When I said this to the group of women, a little silence fell. I realized that they felt sorry for me, that my offering was as beyond the pale in its own way as Lee’s had been. And that it would require some tempering remark in order for the discussion to continue. After a moment, Wendy offered one: she too had once felt that way. She’d really had to work to get through the asexual trip her mother had laid on her in order to be responsive. Others leapt in, blamed mothers, religious training, inept lovers. But they all had happy endings, I saw, even solitary Lee who sometimes spent Saturday nights alone, buzzing away. I felt as left out as I had in high school when the other girls had all seemed to know how to control boys and so I could never talk about what I was letting them do to me when the lights went out at parties.

  Now in my white room, whose dim light and bareness made me think of the inside of an egg, I felt that I was growing into the feelings everyone else had always seemed to know about.

  Of course, once I got up, once the day began and closed in on me with all its routines and demands, I’d forget it all, except for the occasional thought of my room, and the rush of pleasurable contentment its image would bring me, like the rush of feeling, later, I’d get at the thought of Leo in the midst of work or making music. It seems strange now to remember that I learned to have those feelings unconnected with anyone in particular. But it didn’t strike me that way at the time, perhaps because all my life my most intense feelings had been born of solitary joy or pain. But isn’t that true for most of us? Perhaps not, I don’t know.

  Molly and my work life took up almost all of my waking hours, especially once I got the rat job. I’d started off early in the fall thinking I could make it on the piano lessons alone. I’d had eleven pupils, but lost four when we moved to Cambridge—they lived in Boston and it was an inconvenient trip over the river and up through Harvard Square for them. That left me with seven. Four of them were beginners. They all played the same three- and four-note pieces, some with such lyrics—I, the jolly teacher, always sang along—as “CDE, CDE, tell me what you think of me.” Of the other three, one was an adult: Mr. Nakagawa. He played every piece very slowly and precisely in a dynamic range stretching from forte to mezzoforte. But every week, on his own terms, he mastered whatever I assigned him and played it soberly, loudly, exactly as he’d played whatever piece I’d assigned him the week before.

  The other two, Laura McEachern and David Humez, were both twelve. Laura was fat and nervously cheerful. Silences embarrassed her, so she talked incessantly whenever she wasn’t playing, a quick blush rising and falling in her face as her tongue wagged, as though she were ashamed to hear her own foolish chatter but was still unable to stop. Her fingers were like machines, all pudgy and equally strong. Set the metronome wherever you liked, prestissimo even, they’d respond. But rubato, expression, were beyond her.

  David cried every time I corrected him, so that I ended up apologizing for doing what his parents were paying me fifteen dollars an hour to do. “David,” I’d say gently. “You’re making such progress, it really is exciting to me. But in this piece” (his face would pucker slightly) “you have to lift your fingers between each note. See? They’re not like slowly accumulating chords, David.” By now his eyes would be luminous shimmery gates to his vulnerable soul; I would think of Molly when I spoke sharply to her about playing with her food or wanting me to help her change her clothes over and over. “They’re separate notes.” My voice would have become so apologetic that the words could have conveyed no meaning to him. With David there was no room to be a teacher without also being a monster.

  But in general I was known for my skill with young students, for my enthusiasm, for my gift of finding metaphors they could understand for ways to move their wrists, to weight the notes. I was optimistic. I sent notices to the parents of all the students I’d had in the last several years, telling them that I was looking for new pupils. I called other teachers, friends. I walked into the little stores in the fancier neighborhood just south of us on Mass. Ave. and asked to post signs advertising myself, signs with the bottom border cut into little teeth, each tooth bearing my phone number. When I checked these, as I did several Saturdays in a row doing errands with Molly, many of the teeth were torn off, but the three new pupils I acquired all came from friends. It wasn’t my fault, one of these students told me. (Ursula Hoffman. An adult.) There’d been a drop in the birth rate. The children simply weren’t out there.

  “It’s because men have given up screwing,” she said, her fingers arched over the keyboard. Not knowing how skilled she was, I’d asked her to prepare a piece for our first lesson.

  “I didn’t realize that,” I said. “I’m out of the fray temporarily.”

  “They absolutely have,” she asserted. Ursula had a round face with full cheeks and a pudgy, ill-defined mouth and nose. It was as if someone had drawn them in charcoal and then smudged them slightly with a thick thumb. “All my boyfriend ever wants to do is go down on me. Sometimes I even say to him, ‘Let’s just screw. Remember screwing? Where the man gets the erection and puts it in the woman?’”

  I nodded, as though she were asking me, though my memory of it was dim.

  “He says he doesn’t.” She shook her head. “He says it’s because he’s Jewish.” Her hand had long since abandoned the keyboard. She stirred the air as she talked. Another talker, another Laura McEachern. “That he was raised eating salty, spicy foods, and so he has this predilection for oral sex. It makes him feel at home, like he’s being a good boy and cleaning his plate. God.”

  Though this was interesting to
me, I thought perhaps we ought to be using the hour differently. I shook my head sympathetically, sighed, and then I used the line I often used to shut Laura up. “Well, maybe it’s time to make some music,” I said.

  She nodded and turned back to the keyboard. With the first note struck, her foot slammed down on the loud pedal, and there it stayed, taking an occasional ill-timed breather, until the piece was over. The air swam with blurry notes. When she was finished she turned to me, tension like an unwelcome stranger in her moon face. I dealt first with her strong points, and then suggested she try it again, this time with no pedal.

  “Oh, that fucking pedal!” she said. “Did I have it down the whole time?”

  “Nearly,” I said.

  “I know, I know,” she wailed. “I drive the same way and someday it’s gonna kill me.”

  She turned to the keyboard and stared desperately at the music for a moment. It was a sonatina by Haydn, something Mr. Nakagawa might have played too, although in a different style. Little beads of perspiration dotted her forehead. I remember being surprised at how seriously she was taking it. She tucked her feet back under the bench and began again. Without the loud pedal, her mistakes were exposed, stunning in their frequency. She made a small animal noise each time she struck a wrong note. Even more than my young students, she reminded me of myself when I was learning, earnest and desperate to be good, to be better than I was or was going to be. Perhaps the truest defeat of my young life occurred when, early in college, I went back to piano lessons after a three-year hiatus, in spite of knowing that I would never be great, that I was probably preparing for the very career I wound up having: piano teacher.

  Through October, I had just Ursula and the nine other students. By our agreement, Brian was paying me extra money through the fall, but I knew that it would end after the new year; and sometimes in the middle of some activity—my arms up to the elbows in scummy dishwater, shifting the clothes into the dryer at the laundromat—I’d start to roll numbers around in my brain, adding, subtracting the figures which stood for our lives, Molly’s and mine, month by month. I could never make them come out right. I began to look in the help-wanted ads for something part-time crying out for my skills. But basically, as I discovered, I had none.

  Then the car broke down. The man at Bernie’s Garage told me he thought it would cost a couple of hundred dollars to fix it. I couldn’t afford it. Now twice each day I had the long walk back and forth from the day-care center in which to think about what I would do. It was a rainy fall, and by the time Molly and I were returning home, it would be dark. Bumping her insubstantial stroller over the heaved brick of the sidewalks, I could look into the dry, lighted lives in the big Victorian houses just south of our neighborhood. Sometimes I thought I’d made a terrible mistake, that I was doing what my grandfather later accused me of: willfully ruining my life and Molly’s.

  More than once I thought of calling Brian, of telling him that I’d been foolish to think I could manage on what we’d agreed on, that I needed more money from him. I knew he wouldn’t balk—he had essentially let me name the figure I thought was adequate for Molly’s support.

  But each time I’d talk myself out of it. At the day-care center I knew mothers who managed school and jobs and childcare entirely on their own, women who had far less education, less privilege in their lives than I. It seemed shameful to me that I couldn’t do it, and more shameful still to think of leaning for help on Brian, someone I’d been eager to leave behind.

  Slowly it became clear that I was going to have to get a full-time job. I spoke to the staff at the day-care center and they were willing to increase Molly’s hours whenever I found something. I typed up a résumé and mailed it to all the schools in the area. Some wrote back to thank me, and that was that. In the meantime, I thought it only fair to warn my students that I might be giving up the lessons on rather short notice.

  It must have been Ursula’s fourth or fifth lesson when I broke the news to her. “Oh, you can’t do that,” she said. She was wearing a loose-fitting dress covered with leopard spots, and leather boots so tall they disappeared under it. I’d given her pieces several grades easier than the one she’d first played for me, and we were trying to use the pedal minimally. “Just when I’m starting to get good.” In reality, she had gotten only a little better. She never had time to practice, though each week she vowed things would change. But she was writing a book on female infanticide, and had reached what she called “the good part.” It was hard for her to take time off. “What kind of job are you looking for?” She was sitting on the bench, a short piece by Clementi open in front of her. In a small glittery heap next to the music sat the six or seven rings she wore, which she ceremonially pulled off at the start of each lesson. The whole pile rocked and clicked delicately when the trains rumbled past.

  “The usual dream,” I said. “Part-time, no real skills, absolute flexibility in terms of hours. One I could bring my daughter to every now and then if I had to.”

  “I’ve got it for you,” she said. “I have it. I’ll tell you about it as soon as we finish this fucking Clementi.” She turned to the keyboard and launched herself, whimpering and groaning.

  And so I began running the rats for Dr. Fisher. He was a colleague of Ursula’s at B.U. Mournfully, at my interview, he told me he knew I was overqualified and wouldn’t stay long. It was not intellectually challenging work, he said. I was simply to run the rats through T-mazes, recording how many trials it took them to learn in which direction a food reward lay. Ten correct guesses in a row meant they really understood which side the bread was buttered on. I could come in any time, day or night. I could test five rats in a row, or just one. He wanted about thirty hours a week from me, but which thirty hours didn’t matter in the least to him.

  “Do rats bother you?” he asked. Dr. Fisher was himself a little ratlike. A white whiskery mustache bisected by a red-tipped, pointed nose. Small red eyes swimming in stripes of different widths behind thick trifocals. His sweater was worn through at the elbows and had a little food spill on the front. I thought about it. Had a rat ever bothered me?

  “No,” I said. “Not that I’m overly fond of them. My daughter had a gerbil once,” I volunteered, “and I liked him fine.” A lie. I hated him from the start. And what’s more I’d had to kill him. He’d escaped from his cage and I’d stepped on him in the kitchen one morning, mortally wounding him. I had to use the frying pan to finish him off.

  “Gerbils,” he said, tragically, “are more endearing than rats.”

  This turned out to be true. Especially of the mood the rats were in when they arrived. They were shipped to Dr. Fisher’s lab in big boxes full of potatoes. Potatoes were their beds, their food, the medium in which they lived. In the lab they were dumped into separate drawerlike cages in what looked like an immense file cabinet along one wall.

  “They’re disturbed when they arrive,” Dr. Fisher had said. “It’s a terrible experience for them, the trip.” He shook his head, and I could feel my own head swing involuntarily in sympathy.

  I was to wear heavy leather gloves that pulled up to my elbows when I handled them the first few weeks. The reason for this was apparent to me as soon as I opened a drawer and extended my hand in to pick up my first rat. Even before I saw him he was attached to my wrist, his teeth sunk in the leather as deeply as he could manage. My heart seemed to slam randomly around inside my ribcage, but I remembered my mission.

  “What you want to do,” Dr. Fisher had said, “is to get them used to the human touch.” He looked down at his own hands, locked in each other’s grip on his desk. “To accustom them to handling, to . . .” he cleared his throat, “love, in a certain sense.”

  With my other leather gauntlet, I reached into the cage and gently stroked the rat trying to kill me. I stroked him and stroked him. “Nice rattie,” I whispered, I crooned, as his jaw’s grip seemed to loosen imperceptibly. “Nice good rattie,” I said. He looked up at me. He blinked and sniffed. He let go of
my wrist and turned his head slightly to get a better view of the giant who was trying to be his friend. I began to understand how what I would accustom him to was indeed, in a certain sense, love. Or at least the misconception that he was loved. Close enough, for a rat.

  The truth was, I grew to like the work, though I tried not to think about what happened to the rats after they’d passed my test. (I put an X on the cages of rats I was done with, and the next day, they were gone.) I also tried not to look at the animals in rooms along the tiled corridors I walked through on my way to the rat room, some of whom had had various kinds of experimental surgery performed on them or electrical implants fixed permanently into their brains.

  When I turned the lights on in the rat room, my animals would begin to rustle impatiently in their cages, and some would call to me. I patted each of them every day, fed them, refilled their water, dumped out their dropping trays, then tested the ones that seemed calmest to me. At this stage I could handle them without gloves, and sometimes I found myself encouraging them for a correct choice in the same loving tones I used with my students. Occasionally I worried about screwing up the test results with it, but in the end I decided that was grandiose. Love just didn’t have that kind of power.