The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  I was stung. I sat for a long while in confusion, feeling attacked in spite of his politeness, and the interest which creased his ugly face, feeling completely at a loss for what to say.

  “Well, it’s an interesting question, isn’t it?” He smiled. “Perhaps you’ll remind me to start with it next time.”

  I still said nothing.

  He leaned forward, put his hands on his knees, elbows up. “I’ll look forward to meeting with you again on Wednesday then.” He smiled again. “This has been a good talk, a good discussion.” He stood up, and more slowly, I rose. I noticed as I shook his hand and moved awkwardly ahead of him to the door that I was taller than he was. That he was, really, quite a tiny man.

  But driving home past the wide lawns, the stately colonial houses of his neighborhood, I had the sense of him as large, as dangerous, more dangerous for me than anyone else I’d had to answer to. I began to plan what I’d say on Wednesday. A woman in shorts by a stop sign looked up from her baby carriage to stare at me, and I realized I was talking loudly, gesturing, to myself.

  I was at home, standing stupidly in the kitchen, before I thought of the shopping list I’d made earlier. I had to get back into the car and make another trip to the store for crackers, mozzarella cheese, popcorn, apples. Molly was arriving the next day, Tuesday. Brian would drop her off after her first visit with Dr. Payne in the morning. Three weeks earlier she’d stayed with me for the two long-awaited days the family service officer had stipulated, and it seemed then that there were already certain rituals that she wanted to be part of our new relationship. Food was important. She’d insisted on what she called “stretchy cheese sandwiches,” “Friday night supper”—popcorn, cocoa, and fruit. I filled the pushcart thinking of her; but thinking too, over and over, of Dr. Payne’s smiling ugly face.

  “Mumma! Mumma! Mumma!” Molly hollered, running up the long walk. I was startled, as I had been on the earlier visit, by how big she was. Her baby shape seemed to be dissolving. Her legs looked long and white and nearly skinny as she ran. Behind her, at the curb, Brian was fussing with a bag, something else. I squatted to take her in my arms, and she slammed into me. When I picked her up, I could feel the wiry grip of her knees at my waist. I twirled her around and around, and she leaned away from me, laughing. As we whirled, Brian came up the walk. He was watching us closely, I could tell. When I stopped and looked at him, he had set the suitcase down, and on top of it placed Molly’s old bear, Sleazy, and a new one I hadn’t seen before. He nodded to me. Molly’s body swung out to look at him too, her weight settled on my hip.

  “We’ll pick her up on Friday morning, about eight-thirty or so?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said. Our voices were cool, impersonal, but polite. I could feel Molly’s taut attention as she watched us.

  “There’s a list in the bag of everything, so her clothes don’t get mixed up,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  His eyes moved to her. “Can I get a kiss good-bye from you?” he asked. Even with her, in this situation, his tone was stiff. I set her down and, seemingly sobered, she walked over to him, raised her face and arms to his descending head.

  “See you Friday, lambie,” he whispered to her. “I love you.”

  “I know that,” she said, pulling hard on his neck. Then she released him.

  He straightened and walked down the path. Halfway down it he turned to wave, but she was already picking up her bears and talking to me. It was I who returned his wave. Reflexively he swung his hand out again; then caught himself and turned away, continued down the path. Molly and I gathered her things up and went inside.

  As she had on her first visit, she went straight to her room. I trailed her with the bag and her baby quilt.

  “My room,” she said.

  “Indeedy,” I answered. I set the bag down on her bed. “Do you want to get changed out of that fancy dress?”

  She shook her head. Her hair was long enough so that it swung slightly. When had it gotten so long? “No, this is my best,” she said. She held the skirt out and looked at it. “I want to wear this the whole day.”

  “It’s awfully pretty,” I said. It was new, expensive, a smocked pinafore of a light blue cotton, the same color as her eyes.

  “Brenda buyed it for me. She buys me everything.”

  “She knows what you like,” I said. “You clotheshorse.”

  “Silly,” she said. “I’m not a horse.” And she turned away.

  I stood, hovering in the door for a minute as she began to take her toys off the shelf, talking to me about each of them. I had to force myself to go to the kitchen to fix us some lunch. But even out there, I found myself listening for her, wanting her to call me. On her earlier visit too, I’d had to make myself back off. Otherwise I was unable to leave her alone, to behave as though our life together would go on and on.

  Then, she had seemed completely relaxed about me. But now, after only a few minutes, I turned to see her in the kitchen doorway, dragging her quilt behind her. Three or four animals were heaped on it.

  “Here I am,” she said.

  “How delightful,” I answered. I was slicing the mozzarella cheese, arranging it on bread for sandwiches.

  “I’m bringing these animals here because this is their house—I mean, I mean, my quiltie is their house. And they’re moving.”

  “There’s lots of room in here,” I said. “They could have their house by the back door.”

  “But I have to go back and get the rest,” she said. At the door she turned. “You stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  And in a few minutes she returned, her arms laden with furry creatures which she unceremoniously dumped on the quilt. “I forgot about these guys, Mom,” she said. “I didn’t even remember I had them.” And she sat on the quilt and started to arrange the animals around her, talking to them, then stopping sometimes to watch me as I heated the sandwiches, poured out the milk. I brought her lunch over to her and she sat on the floor and ate it. The back door was open, a train flashed past. Her eyes rounded, then she smiled. “That dummy train,” she said, and wrinkled her long nose. “It’s too noisy.”

  I talked with her over lunch about her toys, about her clothes, about the woman, Mrs. Reinhardt, who took care of her at Brian and Brenda’s. We planned our afternoon. After her rest, we’d go to the Raymond Street playground for a while, then get some ice cream and go throw rocks into the Charles. Before we came home, we’d stop in the Square and buy a new book for bedtime.

  “Do you still sometimes fall asleep at rest?” I asked. I was washing our dishes, setting them in the rack to dry.

  She shook her head. “I never do. All’s I do is lie there waiting and waiting and waiting for it to be time.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I curl up and pretty soon I’m out like a light, I’m snoring away, I’m sawing the big ones. Rest is the best.”

  “Mom,” she protested. And then after a moment she asked, “Do you really fall asleep, Mom?” The animals were fanned out in a circle around her, like the rays of the sun in a child’s drawing.

  “Sometimes I really do,” I said.

  “I hate rest,” she said vehemently. Then: “Where are you lying for rest, Mom?” Her voice had tightened.

  “I thought I’d lie in my bed,” I answered.

  “I don’t like that,” she said. “It’s too far.” I looked over at her. She was frowning.

  “I could lie down in the living room,” I offered. “Would that be better?”

  “Yah, that would.”

  “Why don’t you go and fix up your bed with your animals, and I’ll be down in about two minutes to kiss you and read you a little story. You could pick out a story, too, a small one, maybe one of those tiny books. You know the ones I mean?”

  “No, I want to wait for you,” she said.

  “I’ll just be a second, baby. Why don’t you go ahead?”

  “No,” she said, and looked away. I didn’t say anything more.


  When I finished putting the food away, we each took an end of her quilt and carefully carried all the stuffed animals back to her room. She went into the bathroom to pee, then I took off her pinafore—“But I can wear that again after nap, right Mom?”—and sat with her on her bed. I read her the story of Dorothy and the imaginary friend who did naughty things. Molly asked after each episode, as sh always did, “But it was really Dorothy, wasn’t it? She really did it, right?”

  When I pulled the sheet up and bent to kiss her, she asked, “Am I staying with you all the day tomorrow?” Her face was solemn.

  “All day tomorrow and the next day, honey.”

  “Two days more? Tomorrow and then the next day?”

  “Right, and then you go back to Washington.”

  “The next day after that?”

  “Yes. After two tomorrows.”

  “Am I going to that doctor with the toys again?”

  “Yes, but just for a little while each day. I’ll take you. Dr. Payne is his name. And then Debby”—her favorite sitter—“will have you for a little while each day when I talk to him. She can take you to the Common, where that big slide is.”

  “He has all those toys ’cause he likes kids.”

  “Yeah, I saw the toys. They were neat.”

  “Were you there when my dad was there?”

  “No, I was there another day. The day before. But I thought he had great toys.”

  “He does have great toys.” Then she frowned. “But I don’t like all those”—she patted her cheek gingerly, while her features wrinkled in disgust—“all those little black dots he has.”

  “They’re just his beard, honey.”

  “No, not a beard, Mom. Just all those little,” she patted again, “yukky black dots.”

  “The dots are called a beard too. They’re all the little hairs that are too short, too tiny. But if he grew them longer, they’d be a beard.”

  “I hate that,” she said.

  “All men have that. Dad has it too, but his aren’t so dark.” I didn’t mention Leo. Neither of us had mentioned Leo. “That’s why he shaves in the morning.”

  “I hate that men have that,” she said violently. “Dr. Payne should shave and shave and shave in the morning.”

  “Why don’t you tell him so, next time you see him?” I said. I stroked her hair back from her forehead. When I turned at the door to blow her a kiss, her eyes were sober on me. “Stay in the living room, Mom,” she said.

  “I’ll be right here, honey,” I said.

  I checked her in twenty minutes or so. She was asleep, breathing quietly and evenly. I lay down on the living room couch and looked out at the cloudless sky for a while, wondering whether she had been this clingy, this tense, with Brian when he was the visiting parent. It saddened me to feel how changed with me she already was.

  At some point I fell asleep too. I was wakened by her crying. It was nearly three-thirty. She’d been asleep for two hours, a long nap for her, and she’d wet her bed. I peeled back the damp sheets and held her. She smelled of sweat and urine, and she was inconsolable. By the time I’d finally calmed her down and bathed her, it was after four, and we decided what we needed most of all was ice cream.

  “How’s your visit going?” Dr. Payne asked, as he poured me more coffee. We’d been talking for the first twenty minutes or half an hour about my life, my background, my feelings about achievement, how I integrated Molly and work. I felt I was doing well.

  “Wonderful, of course,” I said.

  “No problems?”

  “That’s not quite what I said.”

  “I know. I’m asking though.”

  He straightened and brought the cup over to me. A light scum of the powdered milk floated on its grayish surface.

  “Thank you,” I said, setting the cup on the table next to my couch.

  “It sounds like you had a nice day yesterday,” he said. He sat in his chair and leaned back. “Molly enjoyed it.”

  “She did. I did too. It’s just that . . . she’s very tense, I think. Nervous about letting me out of her sight. She wet the bed at nap-time, and woke two or three times in the night. I think she was confused about where she was, and worried that she’d do it again. Wet the bed.”

  “So you’re both tired today.”

  “Do we seem so?”

  He nodded. “She seemed much less resourceful here today than yesterday. In a way though, that’s good. It helps me see her more clearly. Her defenses are down, as it were.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “I think I got to see a lot of her worries.”

  “Did she talk about Leo?” I asked.

  “A little,” he said. “She likes Leo, as you said.”

  I felt relief.

  “And maybe we can talk for a minute now about that hypothetical question I’d raised the other day, about what you might have said to Brian if he’d called to talk about Leo.”

  I had thought about this, had had time to construct my answer. I took a few moments, inhaled, exhaled slowly, trying to remember what I’d decided I would say. “Well, of course,” I began, “I didn’t know that Molly had touched Leo at the time she told Brian about it.” It was a mistake Leo made, Muth had told me over and over. “So I would have had to check with Leo about it.”

  I thought a pinch of annoyance squeezed his eyebrows slightly closer together. He folded his arms across his chest. “Well, let’s just forget that part then,” he said.

  “Forget it?”

  “Yes, let’s just focus on your allowing her in bed with you while you were having intercourse.”

  Once again I felt the dizzied sense I’d had before with Dr. Payne, of his unpredictability, of being surprised and therefore attacked by him. And as usual, I looked up to find him smiling at me.

  “You seem to be attacking me,” I said after a pause.

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know. But I hear you. Blaming me.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not. I just want to hear what you have to say.”

  “But you’re suggesting . . .”

  He tilted his head to one side as he studied me. “You may have heard blame, accusation, in what I said. But I can assure you, Anna, that all I expressed was curiosity, was my concern to know.”

  “Well, I felt . . . I honestly didn’t feel, with Leo, that there was the need for all the rules, the lines. We were all—Molly too—we were all happy. We had been naked around her, it’s true. We had her in bed with us when we were naked. And to me, it was part of this whole world that Leo had opened up to me where . . .” My throat burned. Payne watched me, saying nothing. “Where I was beautiful, and our sex together was beautiful, and Molly was part of our love, our life. You have to understand,” I said, leaning towards him. “Brian and I stopped having sex a long time before we split up. I was frigid with him. I’d always been frigid.”

  He nodded, as though he’d known this.

  “And with Leo, that changed. My life changed. I changed. I became, in every way, more expressive. And it was good for Molly. I know that. I was . . . I was busier. Less focused on her, but we were like a family. We had fun. I didn’t fuss as much about her every little . . . You know.”

  “You relaxed your vigilance about her life.”

  “Yes. I just didn’t spend as much time as I had right after the divorce imagining her every feeling, worrying about her. And so. Well, that night, when she came in, Leo was just gently still inside me, lying behind me from her. And I held her, and she fell asleep. And he was in me. But I’m sure, I’m convinced, she didn’t know. And so, yes, we had her in bed with us, but it’s not this. It’s not the picture that’s somehow been painted, of her lying there watching us banging away. That’s not what happened.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “And it was in that context, that same kind of context, that Leo let her touch him. Because he . . . Misunderstood. What the boundaries were. She asked, she was curious, and he said yes. And both
of us, in retrospect, both of us should have been clearer. And Leo shouldn’t have let her. It was a mistake. We both made mistakes.”

  After a moment Payne said, “It’s interesting to me that you say that at this time you were less focused on her. Because Molly mentioned to me a time, some incident, when, as she described it, you got lost. I was struck by that way, her way, of perceiving it. By her sense of your absence, as it were. She said, I think, that she had to wait in the car a long time, until you found her. She told me that—these are her words—she cried so hard her mouth almost broke.”

  I raised my hands to my face.

  “Can you tell me what incident she might be referring to?”

  I nodded, but had to sit a few moments to gather enough self-control to talk. Then I described our summer holiday just before the divorce went through, and the morning I’d left her asleep in the car. I told him how she’d looked, the raised stripe, the eyes swollen nearly shut.

  “You sound very upset with yourself,” he said after a minute.

  “I can’t forgive myself,” I said.

  “It’s something it’d be hard to forgive yourself for.”

  I nodded.

  “You blame yourself,” he said gently.

  I was weeping.

  “It’s terrible, I know, to have hurt a child, your child, someone you’re responsible for.” He held out a box of tissues to me. I grabbed one and blew my nose. He leaned back and didn’t talk for a while. Then he cleared his throat. “What seems most on Molly’s mind, to me, is that very theme, of absence, of your not being there for her. There is some anxiety about sexuality. But my feeling is on that score, she’s most anxious that something she said about Leo upset her father as much as it did. And,” he bounced his head back and forth as though weighing one side of it against the other, “maybe a little interested in how much attention it got her. We all enjoy that, and she’s not above being a little manipulative.”

  “You mean she’s making things up?”

  “No no no,” he said. “Not what I said. Just that she’s keenly aware of all the attention focused on her right now, especially from her father, whom she usually doesn’t get to see an awful lot of. No, what I’m really suggesting is that for Molly the resonant emotional issue is feeling that you were pulling away from her. But,” he shook his head, “we all have our adult lives to live too. And sometimes that means having less energy for a child. And what’s hard for kids isn’t necessarily in the long run, bad for them, either. I think you were distracted, withdrawn in a way she could feel.” He paused, and wrinkled his brow. “But I see you also as very hard on yourself. You say I blame you, but I don’t feel I have to say very much before you supply the blame, the guilt.”