The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  I moved slowly around the kitchen preparing myself a fancier dinner than I’d planned—cold squash soup, lamb chops, minted zucchini. I set a solitary place for myself in the dining room, lighted a candle against the glare from outside, opened a bottle of red wine and poured myself a full glass. I ate slowly, and when I was finished, sat at the table sipping another glass of wine. I was imagining a solitary life for myself, a life in which I had only my own schedules, my own work and pleasures to consider. I was imagining this life with a sense of yearning strong enough to make me wish Leo away, even Molly, when the telephone rang. I remember that I got up and went to answer it with such eagerness, such gratitude, that I was conscious of feeling a kind of private embarrassment at my capacity for distortion. In this confusion of feelings, it took me a moment to recognize Brian’s slow voice. But he didn’t greet me, just began talking, began telling me about having tried to reach me all day.

  I interrupted. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  He laughed, an unfamiliar laugh. “Oh, not now. No, Molly’s fine, if that’s your concern.”

  “What is it then?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment.

  “Brian?”

  “I’m just calling to warn you.” His voice was flat, had gained a higher pitch. “I’m keeping her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s staying with me. With me and Brenda. She’s not coming back to you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You just ask your boyfriend. Ask him what I’m talking about.”

  “Leo?”

  “Leo. Yeah, Leo.” He said it venomously. “Yeah. Ask this Leo fellow why I’m taking Molly away from you.”

  “Brian,” I said. I could hear the fear in my own voice. I felt I was trying to conjure the Brian I knew, that this was some nightmare version I didn’t know how to talk to. “Tell me what you mean. Tell me what you’re talking about.”

  There was a silence. Then he said, “Right. You’ve got no idea what I’m talking about. Right?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Well then, Anna, I’m calling out of a sense of fairness. I’ve filed papers, there’ll be a hearing, you’ll get a subpoena fairly soon. I’d get a lawyer if I were you. Lots of people wouldn’t even have warned you, but I still have some feelings, I still have a sense of what we . . .” his voice caught, and I waited. He didn’t go on.

  “Brian,” I whispered. “Tell me what you’re talking about.”

  I had to wait for perhaps thirty seconds. His voice was calm, but thick, nearly unrecognizable to me. “He’s living with you?”

  “He has his own place, but he’s stayed here a lot, yes.”

  “You’ve left her alone with him?”

  “Brian, she’s known him for months now. She likes him. They have fun together.”

  “Ask him about the fun, Anna. Ask him how much fun he had with my little girl.”

  “What are you suggesting? That he did something wrong with Molly?”

  “He did, Anna.”

  “He didn’t.”

  Brian laughed bitterly. “That’ll be the argument, Anna. In court. In court.” His voice began to tremble. “And let me tell you. You better get someone good, because I’m going to win this. She’s told me, she’s told the shrink. He did it, Anna. You ask him.” I didn’t know what to answer. “And you let him. You’re in charge of her. And you let him.”

  “He didn’t do anything to Molly,” I said. “I know that.”

  There was a cold pure hatred, contempt in Brian’s voice. “I’m not going to argue this with you, Anna. I wanted to call you, and even this much was probably a mistake. But I’m telling you because I still . . . because I still have some feeling for you. Some pity for you. But I’m not going to argue with you over the phone. Just . . . just get a lawyer. Get a fucking lawyer.” And he hung up.

  I stood in the dark kitchen for three or four minutes, listening to the dial tone. When the wail that signaled I should hang up came on, I set the telephone gently in its cradle. Then, after, I think, a few minutes more, I went to find my address book, to look up Brian’s number. I remember stopping in the dining room to look at the table. The wineglass sat, still half full, in the candlelight. A crescent of blood beaded with butter congealed on the plate’s inner circle. I felt as though the person who had consumed that meal had been someone else, occupying another world. Yet I still didn’t accept any of what was going on as real. It wasn’t until I’d tried calling Brian six or seven times in the next few hours, sometimes waiting half an hour between calls, sometimes only a few minutes; sometimes letting it ring thirty or forty times, that I began to believe that he was going to do what he had said. And that he believed what he’d said about Leo.

  I was sitting in the kitchen. Somehow I hadn’t wanted to turn the lights on, so I’d brought the candle in from the dining room. It had burned nearly all the way down. The purplish white glow of the lights over the train tracks seeped into the kitchen too. I had no sense of what time it was. The time I’d existed in since the call had all been framed as the time until I got through to Brian—the real Brian, the Brian who would explain everything.

  Abruptly, though, in the midst of one of the calls, listening to the ring of what I understood now was probably an unplugged, unringing phone, listening to that sound which wasn’t really a sound anywhere in the world, I realized I wasn’t going to get through. And that the reason I wasn’t going to get through was that Brian didn’t want to talk to me. And suddenly I began to think about what Brian had said about Leo. I stood up, hung up the phone, and turned the kitchen lights on. Squinting, feeling as you do when you’re abruptly wakened from deep sleep, I moved nearly automatically to pick up my dirty dishes; ran the water and squirted in the thick white soap, viscous as come.

  A dozen images of Leo and Molly together swelled and faded in my mind. One evening I had gone into the labs after dinner, and come home to find them both asleep on our bed, Molly hugging close a stained rag doll she had named Veronica, a book fanned open on Leo’s belly, its upright pages waving delicately as palm fronds with his slow breaths. Leo, holding Molly in the water at Walden Pond earlier in the summer, his big white hand stretched across her chest and belly, obliterating them, his other hand supporting her invisibly under the water. “I’ve got you,” he’d said. “Pretend you’re taking a snooze here, ’cause I won’t let you go.” And she’d lain back in absolute trust, looking up at his face while he, the magician, levitated her body horizontal and motionless on the surface of the clear brown water. Leo bathing her, Leo wiping her bottom, Leo gently toweling soap out of her eyes during one of her disastrous biweekly shampoos. Leo dancing her around the living room, her tiny bare feet desperately gripping his sneakers, the two of them twirling and twirling to Johann Strauss. I realize now that I was examining these pictures as though they were maps of Leo’s subconscious. At the time, though, all I felt was a terrible tension as they rose in my mind. My hands had clenched tight under the flow of the water. I made them relax. It was impossible. He hadn’t done anything. I knew it. I knew it.

  But Molly had told Brian he had. So something must have happened. Something she misunderstood, or perhaps something she’d seen go on between us that we hadn’t been aware of her knowing, something she’d played out in her imagination. I wanted to call Brian again then, to call him and explain to him about Molly’s imagination. About the time her teacher had told her how big, how grown-up she was getting; and Molly had burst into hysterical tears because I’d told her when she was grown up she’d move away from me and have her own house. About the time I’d called the woman on the first floor a witch because she objected to our music; and Molly claimed she’d seen her in the night floating outside her window, with a pointed hat on.

  Perhaps Molly had imagined some sexual contact with Leo. She did have romantic feelings about him, Oedipal feelings. She’d told him she wanted to marry him when she was big. “Then you’ll be
the daddy and I’ll be the mommy,” she’d said.

  “Great,” he answered. “And what can your mom be? The refrigerator?”

  We’d all laughed.

  “Leo,” she’d said, trying to bring him back to earth, her earth.

  We’d had her in bed with us from time to time. And of course, there was the night Leo had stayed inside me after she’d climbed up next to us. But she was asleep then. I had been holding her, had felt her deep relaxation. And always, I thought, there’d been some final clear boundary between Molly and whatever went on with me and Leo. Always.

  When I finished the dishes, I stood for a moment looking down at the kitchen floor. It was black linoleum, with speckles of red on it, as though someone had dropped a bucket of paint, or blood. I could see food spills, sticky spots here and there too. I got out the mop and bucket and washed it. It was almost midnight when I was done.

  I went into my bedroom and pulled the shade against the train lights and lay down. But sleep didn’t come. I kept reviewing what I’d say to Brian, to Leo, how I would make everything all right. Sometime around two, when the lazy rumble of a late-night freight mocked me by gently rocking the bed, I got up. I heated up some milk, poured in a slug of bourbon, and ran myself a hot bath. But even after two trips to the kitchen to refill my mug, I couldn’t derail my brain. It kept running around the same track, trying over and over to arrive at the same destination, to establish the inevitability of that destination. I lay in the tub and watched the steam rise and thought that I just needed to get through to Brian, to explain how impossible it was, how wrong he was. I imagined flattering him, cajoling him, suggesting I fly down to Washington and meet him for lunch. At four in the morning, I stood dripping in front of the bathroom mirror, alternately wiping the rising steam off the cool silvered glass and applying makeup. I had taken out an old collection of partly used up lipsticks, pencils, eyeshadow sticks. Somehow I had it in my mind to try to reproduce what had been attractive for Brian when he first loved me. I remember that I was neither ashamed nor embarrassed to be doing this. In the desperation I know now I was pushing away, it seemed the perfect answer. I was using it, I think, to give me direction, motion. And I was moving fast. In a kind of frenzy of purpose, I picked up a peeling bronze tube and opened one end. Inside was a tiny stump of cold metallic blue. I leaned over the sink towards the mirror and stroked the color on my eyelids. I lined my eyes, top and bottom, with black. I smeared on foundation and painted my cheeks with a color called Dusty Rose, my lips with something called Lickety Pink. I took out the electric curlers I hadn’t used for months and heated them up. When I extracted them from my hair, it fell into something like the curls I’d worn early in our marriage.

  I walked naked into the bedroom. From the back of my closet I pulled out three or four dresses I’d worn when we were married, dresses Brian had liked. Two I rejected as being old-fashioned, outdated. But I tried on the other two, back and forth, over and over. I finally settled on a black silk shirtwaist, the kind of dress I’d sometimes worn to the symphony, or to a dinner given by someone in Brian’s law firm. I put on panty hose, heels; then spent some time deciding what jewelry to wear.

  When I was ready, I opened the closet door and looked at myself in the full-length mirror. I was nearly unrecognizable, someone pretty and brittle and utterly cold. Somehow, this satisfied me at the moment. I went into the kitchen to get some wine. Abruptly and nearly without consciously deciding to do so, I dialed Brian’s number again. It rang and rang. I hung up. I took the wine into the living room. I sat on the sofa, sipping it rapidly. Outside, the sky was whitening fast, the beginning of day. I got another glass of wine and drank it, and then another. I lay back, just to rest a moment on the couch, and almost instantly, gratefully felt the dizzying slide away that I knew would be sleep.

  I awoke with complete alertness several hours later, as though startled by a loud noise. The odor of the makeup I was wearing was like the scent of misery. It brought back the feeling before I remembered why I should have it. I got up and turned off the lights I’d left on—nearly every light in the house, except in Molly’s room. I thought of how it must have looked in the night to a stranger’s eyes—a lone rider on an unheard train, someone walking by himself down the dusty street—blazing brightly, lit for disaster.

  In the bathroom I looked a long time at myself in the mirror, trying to remember the impulse that had brought me to this: the rumpled dress, the flattened fake curls, the smeared makeup ringing my eyes, flaking on my dry lips. The foundation I’d put on had formed a delicate white tracery in the tiny creases on my face, like a photographic negative of my own growing old.

  I washed it all off with soap and a washcloth. Then I changed into jeans and a shirt. Numb with lack of sleep, but feeling a little restored to myself, I went into the kitchen and called Brian’s number again.

  Brenda answered.

  I asked for Brian.

  She said he wouldn’t talk to me. Her tone was calm, absolute.

  “I need to talk to him, Brenda. He’s wrong about this.”

  “He really can’t talk. I didn’t even want him to call you last night. It’s just not kosher in this situation.”

  “He’s wrong about this. I can explain it to him. Let me talk to him.”

  “I can understand how you feel, but I can’t let you talk to him. We’ll all talk in court.” She was not unkind, just secretarial, impersonal.

  I tried to keep the same quality in my voice. “Look, Brenda. What he thinks happened, whatever he thinks happened, it just didn’t. I know that. It just didn’t happen.”

  She didn’t answer, and after a moment, the line went dead.

  I pushed the button down and dialed again. She answered.

  “It’s Anna again, Brenda. I’d like to talk to Molly.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said crisply.

  “What?” I asked. “Sorry what?”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “She’s my child. I want to talk to her.” I could hear my voice get strident.

  “She’s not here now,” Brenda said.

  “When will she be back?”

  “Anna, I can’t let you talk to her at all until this is settled. Surely you can understand that.”

  “No.”

  She paused. I could hear her expel air. Then: “Look, Anna. I don’t want you to call again. If you call again, we’ll have to take some action on the calls themselves, do you understand? We’re in adversarial positions here. There’s no possibility of communication between you and Brian or you and Molly. It’s just out of the question. Do you understand?”

  I said no and she hung up.

  After a minute I dialed again. This time Brenda’s very pleasant tape-recorded voice came on saying they couldn’t come to the phone right now, but if I wanted to, I could leave my name and number at the sound of the beep.

  I hung up.

  For a while I stood in the kitchen. I have almost never again had the feeling I had then. I simply didn’t know what to do next; and it seemed to generalize, the feeling, so that I didn’t know even whether I wanted to go to the stove and fix coffee; or to try to go to work; or to sit for a while, or to raise my hand, or to close my mouth. I’m not sure how long I stood like that, feeling I had to do something but not knowing what. Then I was aware of a sharp pain in my throat. Tears began to slide down my face. In the release of some absolute tension, I sat down on the clean kitchen floor and wept—as much, I think, out of terror at that moment of powerlessness as out of the thought of the seriousness of the situation.

  But I only let myself cry for a few minutes. Some other kind of terror seemed to wait in that direction. I wiped my face. Then I got up and made coffee. Once again I reassured myself, was conscious of reassuring myself: it would be all right, because it was all right, because nothing had happened, and we could clear it all up. Everything would be fine, everything was fine, really. I think I may actually have been talking out loud. At any rate, suddenly I wan
ted some other noise, a voice. I turned on the radio, and listened for a few moments to the deep self-satisfaction in Robert J. Lurtsema’s voice, caressing every syllable even of the record labels he had to announce, Deutsche Grammophon in this case, the conductor also Germanic and delicious to Robert J. The music was Schubert. I sat down at the kitchen table with my coffee and tried to let it seal me off from my world. For a few moments I succeeded; but then I resisted. I remembered that I’d always objected to this answer in my musical friends: hum a few bars and the problems of the world slipped away. I thought of a woman I’d played with in a weekly sight-reading group just after college, Susan Van Dusen—she’d inexplicably held on to her maiden name. In one of the last fights she and her husband had before they split up, a fight during which she actually turned away and started to play Vivaldi, he broke her viola and hit her with one of the pieces. She showed me the marks the strings had made as they whipped across her arm. But even as I looked at the thin red stripes and clucked over his brutality, I felt some compassion for him. Rome could have burned down as she deedled away. I turned the radio off.

  My address book was still lying on the kitchen counter by the telephone. I flipped through it, found my lawyer’s number. I let it ring as I had Brian’s telephone the night before, over and over. Then I realized I was using the hollow noise to feed a feeling of helplessness in myself. In disgust, I hung up. I had his home number. If I really wanted to reach him, I told myself, I could bother him at home. If it was real, if Leo really had done something, I could call him, now, at home. If it wasn’t, I could wait until Monday and call him at his office, tell him Brian had gone off the deep end. I found my car keys, put on some lipstick, and left for work.

  At B.U., the long corridors were deserted, the doors locked, though the animal smell, just to the right of barnlike, leaked out and hung in the antiseptic halls. Today I felt a tremendous distraction as I handled the rats. I made errors. Two of them I simply lost count on, failed to record a couple of trials. I had to discard their data, return them to their cages and put the ominous X on their feeding charts. One animal I dropped; and though he wasn’t hurt, it took me a long time to coax him out from under the cages. I knelt on the floor with my head down and we looked at each other. I made gentle noises to him, kissing sounds. Finally I set a little trail of pellets. He came out, nibbling, and I scooped him up. I sat on the floor for a little while, petting him and watching him eat in my hands before I discarded him too. As I slid his drawer back in, I realized I was again near tears. It made me angry at myself.