The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  I opened the beers. “I remember your talking about him.”

  “Remember that he said it was ’cause he was Jewish, was raised on salty, spicy foods?” She rested her chin in her jeweled hands. Her eyes were big, innocent.

  “Mmmhuh,” I said. I’d begun to pick the anchovies off.

  “Well, right after that I started going out with this other guy, very straight, very WASPy, no insult intended. I mean, he wore like lime-green trousers, if you can believe it. I was really trying to prove to myself that I shouldn’t be so judgmental. I mean, why should I go around judging someone by the pants he wears. Can you imagine if people judged me by how I look?” She raised her eyebrows. “Anyway, he was an all-right lover, but he wouldn’t go down on me. And I was thinking, you know, it’s either feast or famine here, what is this? I mean, I’d even ask him to, and he’d still sort of avoid it, or do it for two very unsensuous seconds, you know what I mean?”

  I told her that I thought I did, yes.

  “So, one time we’re sitting in this restaurant—oh, thanks!” she said, as I heaped extra anchovies on her triangle of pizza. “And I ordered Caesar salad. And he ordered Caesar salad too, but he said to the waitress ‘Only skip the anchovies’; and I said, ‘What is a Caesar salad without the anchovies?’ And he said he hated anchovies, that if an anchovy had even been on his Caesar salad and was subsequently removed he wouldn’t be able to eat it.

  “So I’m sitting here opposite this guy, listening to this, looking at his green pants, at the crocodile on his shirt, and I’m fondly remembering Levine, and I realize I probably have in front of me a fairly accurate test for women who’d like to know before they get into bed with a guy what the routine is going to be. And I’ve checked it out since then and it’s pretty reliable. Isn’t that fabulous?”

  “A nifty theory,” I agreed.

  “Better than that.” She took a big bite and pulled back, grabbing the strands of cheese with her fingers.

  “The old anchovy test for oral sex.”

  “I’m going to patent it,” she said with her mouth full. “But till then, I’m just sharing it with close friends whose best interests I have at heart.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ll use it any time soon.”

  “Well, you’ve got Leo,” she said.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  She stopped chewing and raised her eyebrows. One cheek was full, and she looked, for a moment, like one of the rats with a food reward. She chewed a moment more, swallowed, and then said, “Explain?”

  “There’s not much to explain. Just that this is hard for both of us. We try not to blame each other, but we do. I do anyway. And then I’m angry at myself for that. And sexually, it seems.” I shrugged. “It’s just not possible for the moment.”

  “But you love Leo.”

  “That doesn’t make everything all right, Ursula.”

  “But you yourself told me it wasn’t his fault.” She popped an anchovy into her round mouth.

  “It wasn’t. And I don’t really blame him. It’s just that its having happened . . . changes things, changes everything.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “You’re the same people.”

  “But I thought something was possible with Leo. . . . It’s that I blame myself too, for thinking something was possible with him that’s not. Some kind of . . . life without limits or something. And it’s not. It’s just not. It’s as though I was dreaming, and now I’m awake. This is real. Brian’s real. He’s really Molly’s father. And having to cope with this stuff.”

  “It is not. This stuff is crazy,” she said. “All these weirdos messing around in your life. Who else do you know that it’s happened to? What you and Leo had, have is what’s real.”

  Suddenly what I most wanted was to stop talking about this. “You just want someone to have true love, Ursula, so you can believe in its being out there somewhere.” I sounded irritable even to myself.

  She looked at me levelly a moment, then shrugged, capitulating. “Oh, I know,” she said. “You’re right. You bear the burden of all my cheap and shallow dreams, which I probably have in the first place so I can go on being a slut. Let other people have love, just let me fuck around.”

  “By the way,” I said. “I told Leo I wanted to be alone tonight, so I’d appreciate it if you can avoid talking about seeing me.”

  “Any special reason for not wanting to see him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” I said. Then, “Yes I do. They’ve made it a condition of my seeing Molly that he not be around. And I just couldn’t face telling him tonight.”

  She opened her mouth a little. “Jesus,” she said. “Can they do that?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “But for good?”

  “I don’t think so, for good. I talked to Muth for a little while afterwards, and he said it was unlikely they’d set any conditions permanently, that if I got custody it’d be because they agree nothing so bad happened. Except maybe therapy, something like that.”

  “Don’t say if. You’re going to. Nothing so bad did happen.”

  I looked away, out the window over the tracks. She reached over and patted my hand. “Take it from a slut like me, honey,” she said. “I know bad. This is all gonna work out.”

  I looked down at her hand. Painted down the middle of each fuchsia fingernail was a jagged lightning bolt of black.

  Ursula stayed until about ten. She had started down the stairs, carrying her heels so the clumping wouldn’t wake my neighbors, who were sunk in deep silence below us, when she remembered the drugs. She came running back up, rushed past me. In the hall she fumbled in her purse. She pulled out a baggie and dumped its contents on the table. Whimsically colored, like the pieces of one of Molly’s plastic toys, the pills bounced and rolled across its surface. Ursula bent over them, started drunkenly to sort them by color.

  “Some are Librium, these black and greenies, and there’s about a dozen Valium,” she said. “And then these beauties”—she indicated the bright blue and red ones—“Tranxene. They’re absolutely the best, and guaranteed nonaddictive. I take one every night.”

  “They’re gorgeous,” I said. “It’s like getting a bouquet of flowers. Only I really don’t think I’ll use them.”

  “Oh don’t be such a Protestant,” she said. “It’s a chemical age. And you might as well do this as sit up drinking all night.”

  “I’m just an old-fashioned girl, I guess,” I said.

  She scooped them back into the bag. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll put them in the medicine chest for a rainy day.” She ignored the half-dozen or so rolling silently to the distant reaches of the dark hall, and disappeared into the bathroom. I heard the medicine cabinet slam. Then she trooped silently back on her bare flat feet.

  “You make me feel like a pusher, Anna,” she complained. She picked up her shoes and hugged them to her chest, then grinned at me. “But someday you’ll thank me for turning you on,” and she started down the stairs again.

  After she left, I somehow had the buoyant sense that everything would work out. I hummed as I brushed my teeth. I slept well. And in the morning before I left for work Muth called to say he and Brian’s lawyer had spoken earlier. Brenda was coming to Boston the following Monday for a couple of days’ work. She’d accompany Molly on the plane, and I could pick her up at the airport in the morning, and return her there late Tuesday afternoon, if that was agreeable. I said it was and he gave me the flight times.

  “Now remember,” he said. “Cutter’s got to be completely out of the picture. That could really foul us up here.”

  “I know. There’s no problem.”

  “You don’t want me to talk to him about it or anything?”

  “No, it’s clear to both of us,” I lied.

  “O.K.,” he said. “Enjoy. And I’ll be in touch about the arrangements for the guardian stuff. Might be a couple of weeks. Your ex-husband wants to arrange a kind of
marathon, you know, so he can just come up once with Molly and get it all done in a few days. So it might be quicker than we thought.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Not good, not bad. You just need to convince the guardian whenever that you’re a responsible mother. You known, concerned, involved. Pull out all the stops: the children’s museum, music lessons, the aquarium. You get the picture.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But I’ll talk to you anyway before you go in, a day or two before, you know. And you call me if you get worried about anything.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “But don’t let Cutter near her next week.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Great,” he said, and hung up.

  I called Leo before I left for work and invited him for dinner.

  When I answered the door that evening, I was dressed as Leo liked to see me. I was wearing the blouse he had given me and a soft white skirt that swung against my legs when I moved. I’d put on my eye makeup carefully. There were three bottles of white wine in the refrigerator, the chicken was marinating in oil and wine and rosemary and garlic in the kitchen. I’d washed the lettuce, made a salad dressing. I’d set the hibachi on top of Leo’s inverted tub on the back porch, and started the coals.

  Leo followed me to the kitchen and I poured us both white wine. We walked single-file back down the hall to the rickety porch off the living room, where I’d set a table with crackers and cheese.

  It was with the best of motives and the worst of motives that I’d done all this—I did want to cushion the blow I had to deliver: that the court had ruled he couldn’t see Molly; that I’d accepted that. But I also wanted to signal that perhaps now he and I could find a way to be kind to one another again, even to be ourselves with one another. I had missed him, I realized when he stood in the evening air on the porch and looked down at me.

  There was no roof over the porch. It opened out to the pale evening sky, yellow with gases over Boston, bluing as the eye lifted. Children yelled distantly in the street far below us. “You’re looking very beautiful tonight,” he said. The light in the sky was behind him, his face slightly shadowed.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I worked at it.”

  He swung his head away, then looked back sharply. “I meant it, Anna.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to be flip. It’s just that I was conscious, when I got dressed and everything, of wanting you to think that. That I was beautiful.” I shrugged. “I was confessing.”

  He was silent a moment, placated. “All you had to do was accept it. You are,” he said. “But I’m glad you wanted me to think so.”

  “Tell me what you’ve been doing the last couple of days,” I said after a moment.

  “Not working,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s been fine actually. I spent one day with John and Susan in Newburyport, and then I’ve been trying to assemble this grant-application stuff for the Mass. Council. Slides and stuff. Besides, I feel like I need to lie fallow a while after that big push last month.” He sat down and we sipped our wine. “I’ve sold three so far. Mady called today.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said.

  “And there was another good review.”

  “Fantastic.”

  He made a muscle, flexed it. “Stick with me, baby.”

  I smiled.

  His face sobered. “I’ll have some bucks, Anna. I could help a little with this stuff.”

  I was already shaking my head, “No, no.”

  He turned in his chair, set his glass down, hunched towards me. “No, look,” he said. “I know we said no before, but I’ve been thinking about it, and Anna, it would help me. It would make me feel better.” He held his hands out, palms up, in front of him. “For God’s sake, I feel like shit watching you go through this and being so powerless to help you. No, listen to me,” he said as I tried to interrupt him. “Maybe it’s crass, and maybe it’s self-serving, but I feel as if, if I can do something, even if it is just money—and it seems like that’s about it—I want to. You’ve got to let me Anna. I don’t see how we can rescue anything between us if you don’t, if you won’t let me.” He was sitting on the edge of his chair, leaning towards me.

  I looked out over the variegated asphalt rooftops of North Cambridge, the listing brick chimneys. “There’s an awful lot you’re going to have to do anyway,” I said.

  He shifted back. “I don’t care about the testimony. Or the shrink.”

  “Muth thinks it might get pretty ugly,” I told him.

  He shrugged. “I can imagine,” he said. “But frankly, I think they’ll believe me. I don’t know why. I just think they will.” He made a face. “My eminently trustworthy mug or whatever. And I’m going to get a haircut.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t cut your hair for that.”

  “Why not? It can’t hurt.”

  I shook my head.

  “Don’t get a haircut, don’t give me money, don’t borrow a jacket and tie, don’t do any of it!”

  He stared at me. “What’s wrong, Anna?” he said at last.

  I set my glass down. “I get Molly for two days on Monday,” I said. I held up my hand to stop the happiness that started to lift his face. “But one of the conditions is your absence. You can’t come anywhere near here, or us, or her.”

  After a moment’s silence, he asked, “And who worked out this deal?”

  “Leo,” I said.

  He didn’t respond. I looked away, then, after a moment, back to him.

  “It’s the recommendation of someone called the family service officer. It’s a compromise she worked out, on her own.” I couldn’t see his face, turned away from me in the night air. “Leo, I didn’t do anything yesterday. I didn’t even testify. It was all this big machine working, and this is what popped out.” I waited for him to respond.

  “How is this a compromise?” he asked finally.

  “That I get to see her at all,” I answered. Then, in what was a nearly unconscious manipulation, a demonstration to him that I was suffering too, suffering more than he was: “Brian keeps her till it’s all settled, till the court date, early October.” He looked up at me, as I’d known he would. “He gets that, and he gets the protection from you. And I get to see her on a regular schedule, to be arranged.”

  “Jesus, that’s no compromise.”

  I shrugged. “She’s at risk. And I’m the one who put her there, by their lights.”

  We sat together. The street lamp had come on with a hard nasal hum, and it was already darkening in the street below us, but the sky overhead was still light.

  “By loving me,” he said at last.

  It took me a moment to answer. “Yes,” I said. I swallowed the last of my wine.

  “Anna,” he said suddenly, then stopped. “Now don’t get pissed off, but isn’t there another way to do this?”

  “To do what?”

  “Well, what I mean is, do you have to just, let this happen, all of this stuff? Isn’t there a way to, some way, to fight it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But this way, Jesus.” He stood up, held the peeling railing, looked down to where the children were still playing. He shook his head and turned to me. “I can’t believe you have to allow it, just let it roll over you like this.”

  I waited a moment, feeling my anger. “It depends on what you want, I think. I just want Molly. I don’t care about dignity, or pride, or any of that stuff.” My voice was trembling audibly, was sharp with adrenaline. “I just want Molly.” I stopped. “I’ve got to put the chicken on,” I said. “Or we’ll never eat. Will you pick some music?”

  We ate in the living room with just two candles burning and the music around us, as though we were at the beginning of something. And if someone could have ignored the loud despondent silences that fell between us, we might have seemed like people at the brink of love, so kind, so interested were we in each other
. And I really did feel that way. I was grateful for Leo’s easy acquiescence to the conditions Mrs. Harkessian had imposed; for his not arguing with the lie we were all perpetrating about him—that he was dangerous, that his presence was pernicious, and therefore that mine was perhaps less so. I wanted to make it a pleasant time. And after a while, I think we both began to. enjoy ourselves. At some point late in the evening I went into Molly’s room to get some cards—we’d decided to play gin rummy—and looking around, I felt for the first time since she’d left a sense of happiness. She’d be here soon, sleeping in the bed, lifting the toys off the shelf, spreading the pieces all over the floor. I’d be able to hear her from the kitchen, the living room, humming, talking to herself, calling out to me: Mumma, where are you? Mumma, I need you to show me this. Mumma, when will you be done in the kitchen? Mumma, I fixed this all by myself.

  I found the cards, went back to the kitchen for another bottle of wine. When I returned to the living room, Leo was lying stretched out on the couch. The wine and our friendliness had relaxed him, and he looked the way he’d looked to me earlier in the spring and summer. In the candlelight his eyes seemed entirely black, his white skin delicate, thin, all of a piece, like some fine fabric stretched taut over the long nose, the sculpted cheekbones. My hands were full, but on an impulse I bent and kissed him.

  His lips, then his body, responded. His arms circled me, pulled me down. I could feel in his quickened breathing, his corded arms how much he wanted this, how much he read in it of forgiveness, of reconciliation. I set the wine and the cards on the floor by the couch, and we made love, fueled by his energy. I felt as distant from it, from him, as I had with Brian near the end. Yet I responded, I arched against him, helped him, moaned aloud. When he began to come, I recognized the pure relief in my gladness. I saw that what I was doing was binding him to me, ensuring his cooperation. I felt somewhere in me still the deep hateful anger, the fear of his anger at me, at what he could do to me and Molly with that anger. I watched myself lift and move my hips as he cried my name in loving abandon. I was glad his eyes were shut, and I turned my face away when he slid forward onto my shoulder.