The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  When I got hungry, I couldn’t bear the thought of eating alone at the machines. I decided to go to Kenmore Square to a delicatessen. The Red Sox were playing at Fenway, and the square was thronged with honking cars, with people pushing past each other, buying hats, peanuts, Red Sox banners. I sat in a booth by the window in the delicatessen and drank three or four cups of coffee with lunch, watching the crowd until it thinned to normal levels. Then I went back to the lab. I stayed there until evening again. Whether it was the coffee or not, I found myself able to concentrate now. I pushed everything else out of my mind, and focused on the rats, the choice they had. I was supposed to punish them for a wrong choice by dropping a trap door behind them, shutting them into a tiny dark space with no food, no way out. They were to stay there for one minute as negative reinforcement, then be released, petted, and started again. In the morning, one of the mistakes I’d made more than once was simply to forget the rat in the box for several minutes. A couple were panic-stricken, too upset to go on by the time I got them out. One had tried to bite me.

  Now I was machinelike and efficient, my eye on the clock, my hands poised to open the maze. I handled the rats smoothly, reassuringly, even several very stupid rats who took an hour or longer to complete the task.

  When I drove back over the B.U. bridge to Cambridge, the sun was setting over the river in garish hues that would have put Maxfield Parrish to shame. A lone power boat made its way up the river, its wake cutting the glassy pink into a furious roil that stretched into even ripples wide behind it. I descended into the shadowy residential streets below Central Square and passed the large Victorian house which contained Ursula’s oddly shaped apartment, full of windows you had to prop open with sticks, floors which tilted towards the corners. She was away now too, visiting her mother who lived in New York. It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of her, hadn’t missed her since the call from Brian. I would be ashamed to discuss it, I realized, even with her. For some reason, this frightened me momentarily.

  As I got closer and closer to home, I felt a powerful resistance to going there, to being alone in that space. What I saw in my mind when I thought of it was Molly’s room, the telephone, the piano. I drove past my street and parked on the side street by Leo’s studio. I went up the dark hallway and let myself in. The spotlights overhead burned at my eyes, made me squint. I quickly turned on the little lamp on the kitchen table and switched them off. I stood and surveyed the room. With so much of Leo’s work gone, the studio seemed especially vast, the walls dirty and bare. I got some crackers and cheese out of the refrigerator and sat at the table to eat, looking with fresh eyes at the familiar things around me, curiously charmless in the new arrangement and without Leo.

  When I’d finished eating, I washed my few dishes. Then I crossed the room and bent over a box of papers by his worktable. I began by telling myself I just wanted to go through his work, the things he hadn’t taken with him—his earlier drawings, for instance—to see what they were like, how he’d changed; to comfort myself by being close to the things he had made. But very quickly I stopped pretending. I was asking myself whether I really knew him. How well I knew him. I was looking at his things to see whether he had secrets from me. His apartment, his possessions became a kind of adversary from which I wanted to wrest a kind of answer. Are these the things, the creations, the belongings, of a man who would molest a little girl, my little girl, Molly?

  There was no storage space in the studio, but pushed against the walls, under the tables, into corners, were wooden boxes—orange crates, crates that had held olive oil, Chinese food—and they were all jammed with papers, photos, sketches, letters, notes from other people, from Leo to himself. I worked my way up to a secretarial speed rifling through them. What had been an idle flipping through the leaning canvases, the boxes of sketches and papers, became methodical, then frenzied. I opened old mail, bills. I looked through photographs, box after box of early drawings, notes, lists. I opened his drawers and pushed his clothes around. When I slid the top drawer of his tall bureau open, I was startled momentarily to see the gun he’d bought when I first knew him. It was still folded into the white handkerchief it had been wrapped in when he’d gotten it; but its muzzle stuck out, shiny and black in the dim light.

  And in one of the boxes there was a folder of pornographic photos and sketches, but I’d known about those too. Leo was fascinated with the inability of painting, print, to convey a sense of the pornographic in the way photography did, and with what that suggested about the visual imagination. He had done a whole series of preparatory works for a painting he was going to call Olympia. He was working with images from pornography. I picked up one 8 x 10 glossy—a woman on her hands and knees, her open cunt, ass towards the camera, her head staring upside down at the photographer from under her dangling breasts—that made me remember abruptly the posture Molly had assumed one night, after her bath. We’d been in the living room talking, and she was running in and out naked. I’d asked her four or five times to find her pajamas, but she was clearly enjoying the way the air felt on her flesh. When she bent over and looked at us from between her legs, what she’d said was, “I see you.”

  “Yeah,” Leo said. “And I see you.” We’d all laughed at our different jokes. Now I put the picture back in the stack, next to the woman playing with herself, the two women licking each other.

  “I think what it is with photography,” Leo had said, “is that everyone gets off on the idea that the real woman was there, was willing to do that. Nobody thinks about the photographer. Whereas a drawing, a painting, is always in some sense about the artist, the way he thinks. And that does something else for some folks, but it doesn’t turn anyone on. I think.” But he’d tried playing close to that line, to where, he said, the image was pure, impersonal, was lifted nearly without translation from photography. And he had reviews from his shows which indicated that his work struck particularly some feminists as pornographic. But, he argued, they were focused in a knee-jerk way on content, not on effect. “Take your average group of sleazy guys,” he said, “and they’ll tell you loud and clear that’s not pornography.”

  I couldn’t help realizing as I went through Leo’s things how they would strike someone else, how they would strike Brian. There was dope in the refrigerator, the gun in the bureau, these photographs and drawings. The room still had beer bottles, glasses with cigarette butts floating in them stashed here and there from the party, though Leo, Peter, and I had all picked up a little as we moved the paintings out. The toilet, permanently stained and scarred, hunkered close to where we fixed meals. I saw all this with clear eyes that night, with the eyes of a social worker, a lawyer; but I still would have defended it, and Leo. Because although Leo was keenly aware of the way he lived as having a seedy romance, though he cultivated his own bohemianism, it was at the same time the honest outgrowth of a balance he had struck in his life having to do with the importance of his work to him. It was familiar to me, dear to me, like the price you paid for music, though most of my friends who’d made it in music had passed earlier out of this stage. But Leo had started later because of where he’d come from, his background; and he’d only slowly taken in what he needed to change. And here he was. The only real alternative to begrudging his work the poverty it cost him was his flamboyance in enjoying it. So, although I could understand that some of the poverty, the weirdness, was self-indulgent, self-willed, I saw even that as connected to his work, and I admired and envied him for all of it.

  No, the things I was surprised at, disturbed by, were other. There was a slim sheaf of letters held together by a fat dirty rubber band, letters from Leo’s father. I read the top one without taking the band off. In a child’s careful script he asked Leo for money, told him about a convention for cotton brokers he’d been to in Dallas. Leo always spoke of his father with such contempt that I was startled that he’d keep letters from him. It suggested a vulnerability he wouldn’t have acknowledged to me.

  And there was a
whole group of photographs of Leo with other people in someone’s studio, probably in New Haven, where he’d known so many artists. He’d described his life there as a kind of continuous rotating studio party. In three or four of these pictures, Leo had his arm around the same girl, a pretty girl with burned-out eyes. I recognized her. She was moderately well known in the New York art world now. I knew that Leo had known her in New Haven too, but the pictures argued for a different kind of relationship from the one he’d described. There was no reason for him to have made clear to me whether or not they were lovers. And maybe they hadn’t been, after all. Or maybe it had been brief, unimportant, an affair that lasted for a week, or a few months, for a few parties in different studios. But not to know, to be surprised by anything at all about Leo right now made me uneasy. I thought of calling him in New York—I had the number of the friend he was staying with. But then I remembered: today was his opening, his party. Even if he was back at his friend’s house by now, he’d be high, he’d be surrounded by people, he wouldn’t be able to give me what I needed: reassurance that he was exactly as I thought he was.

  When I stopped rifling through things, it was on account of a wave of fatigue as dictatorial in its strength as the relentless energy which had kept me up nearly all night the night before. I crawled into the bed. It still smelled of beer. For the second night in a row, I fell asleep with the lights on.

  On Sunday, my first thought on awakening was that Leo would be home that night. As I got up, washed my face, I held that in my mind: he would be home, he would tell me it was a mistake, he would help me get Molly back. I went to my apartment to change my clothes. I moved through it quickly. I avoided looking at her toys, her books, the photographs of her everywhere. I realized how little I’d thought of her, purely her, since Brian had called. I’d imagined scenes with her and Leo, but I’d not let myself miss her, think of her, think of my life with her, for fear that it would bring slamming after it the panic of the possibility of life without her. That was not possible. I didn’t even look into her room while I was home; and I went out for breakfast, to a little basement restaurant in the Square. I sat for a long time over the paper, pushing my way slowly through articles I’d find myself reading sections of six and seven times in a row. A woman who worked in the day-care center came in and sat down at a table near me. She nodded at me, but was with a man who talked loudly and steadily to her about the efficacy of co-counseling for as long as I sat there. Others in the restaurant looked hard at him, rustled their papers, turned their bodies away. Oblivious, he rolled on enthusiastically, talking about human potential, about how he’d successfully gotten out of what he called his “victim space.” Helpless, she listened and nodded politely.

  I finally left. I’d begun to yearn for the silent company of the rats. At the door, though, the day-care teacher caught me. She was plain, with long flat hair, and she wore thick glasses. I remembered that they slid down her nose when she bent towards the children. “I wanted to ask,” she said breathlessly, making a kind of apologetic gesture towards the air behind her, “about Molly, how she’s doing at her father’s.”

  “Oh, that’s nice of you,” I said. “Fine, I think. I’m supposed to go see her this weekend.”

  “Oh, neat,” she said with absolute sincerity. “Please say hi to her. Tell her we miss her.”

  “Sure,” I said, and started to turn.

  “It’s Maggie,” she said. “My name. In case you forgot.” And she went back to her aggressively empathic friend.

  Through the afternoon I carried her image with me. Maggie. Molly had liked her, though she wasn’t the head teacher, wasn’t there every day. Once in the fall when I was doing parent time at the day-care center, I’d watched her in the bathroom with a group of Molly’s friends. She got the two girls settled on the toilets, then helped unsnap and unzip the three little boys. As they stepped together up onto the platform which made the urinals their size, Maggie had paused, poked her thick glasses up her nose, and then said, “O.K., you guys? Ready? Aim . . . fire!” Two of them squirted each other, turning to her to laugh at her joke.

  It seemed talismanic, a good omen to have seen her. For the first time that weekend, I let myself think about Molly, about how of course I’d see her the next weekend, about what we’d do. I imagined her compact and smooth body, its belled-out stomach and stubby legs. How she smelled, how her thin straight hair felt on my cheek, like a delicate expensive fabric.

  I had fewer rats than I’d thought left to run, and I was finished by about five. I went home and took a bath, put on fresh makeup. When Leo wasn’t there by seven, I walked down to Christopher’s and ate nachos. There was a rerun of Psycho on the big TV over the bar; and when Anthony Perkins approached the shower curtain with his knife, the bartender rang a bell so no one would miss watching Janet Leigh die. I was glad to be absorbed in anything. I watched the black blood disappear down the drain and drank a beer. When I’d finished, I called my apartment, then Leo’s studio, on the pay phone. There was no answer in either place. I had another beer.

  I went home around nine. I read a story in the magazine section of the Globe about the Museum of Transportation. When I was finished, I read it again. At eleven, the weight of the weekend hit me. I went into Molly’s room. The room smelled of her, a kind of delicate sweatiness that made me think of the back of her neck, her sturdy legs. Her things were set out on a low shelf I’d installed along one wall in the first weeks we’d lived in the apartment. Nearly all of them came in little pieces, or had parts. There was coffee can after coffee can of Legos, of Mr. Potatohead, of marbles, of shells and rocks. Her dolls, her animals sat among them, with blank eyes, maliciously innocent. I stood by the bed. I could not lose her, I thought. Let me not lose her. I looked at her dolls and thought I was going to cry; I left the room.

  I went into the bathroom, stood there. Where was Leo? I needed him. I needed him to tell me it was fine. As I got ready for bed, I began to make equations. If he came home now and said it was fine, it would be fine. Molly would come back, we would be happy again. I washed my face, changed into a nightgown.

  Leo didn’t come.

  I told myself magical thinking was dumb. There were reasons why he wasn’t there which had nothing to do with Molly, with whatever Brian thought. I told myself to remember the faith that I’d kept through almost the whole weekend that Brian was just wrong, that we would simply clear this up. I heated up some milk and took an Actifed to make myself sleepy. I looked at myself in the mirror just before I went to bed. Under the bright light in the bathroom, my face looked haggard, old. I saw tears welling in my eyes. I reached up and pulled my cheek, hard. No drama. I went and lay down, rigid, in my room. The bright light from the train track flooded everything with a horrible light. A few tears slid down into my ears, but I held my face hard and concentrated on the ceiling and stopped them.

  When Leo came, I was deeply asleep. He smelled of the night, of cool air, of everything but me. He was kissing me, and his breath, his saliva tasted sweet and real. It was all I could think of. I wanted to drink and drink him. His hands were cool on me, lifted the nightgown, nested where I was damp and sweaty and tired of being alone. He was claiming me, clearing everything else away. I felt him slide in me, like a dream I was having of how it could always be like this. We pushed against each other. I reached to touch him past the bundled clothes, our limbs. “Ahhh,” he said, and held away from me to let me. And then I placed him again, lower this time, by my ass, and pushed a little. His face above me was startled, foolish with unbelieving eagerness, like a high school boy’s. He was still. He let me push. It hurt, nearly too much, and I thought I wanted to stop, no matter what. Through the drug and my fatigue, I could feel some deeper consciousness, some other pain, returning. But I eased against it, against him, opened to him, and then slowly, it didn’t hurt anymore. It was easier and easy, and Leo pushed too, but gently. He slid the nightgown up and over my head and looked at me, my legs swimming in the air around him. I
wanted this, just this. I wanted it lasting forever. Then he tilted back into the purplish light and I couldn’t see his face any more. We moved slowly, and when he began to cry out, I felt myself shake from somewhere in my spine, I felt only him, only him, it was a different thing; and then the same; and then he bent gently towards me, he lay on me and kissed my neck.

  I felt him slip away into sleep lightly, just as I moved sharply back into the world, just as everything returned.

  “Leo,” I said.

  “God,” he answered, his voice whispering slowly, dreamily. “What other wonderful ideas did you have while I was gone?”

  “Leo,” I asked. “Leo, did you ever touch Molly, her body I mean. Did she ever touch you? Wake up,” I said.

  His fingers reached towards my face, felt my wet hair, my open mouth. We lay in the garish silence a minute.

  “Yes,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WHEN I CALLED MY LAWYER ON MONDAY, he was reassuring. This kind of thing happened all the time, he said. Threats about custody, they were like a post-divorce sport. It would probably turn out that Brian was negotiating for something—less money, more time, something like that—and was introducing the issue of custody as a red herring, just to soften me up.