The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  “What will you do?” he asked now.

  I shrugged. “Sit. Try to take it in. Think about what comes next.” He nodded, as though that seemed reasonable. I was turning down my street. The Vietnamese family near the corner was gathered on their porch, squeezed into a diminishing patch of yellow sunlight. Solemnly they watched us drive past. Every time I saw them they seemed to have one or two more babies, sober, uncrying.

  “If you want anything, if you need to talk or anything, you’ll call me?”

  I nodded. I couldn’t wait to get away from him. If he asked another question I thought I’d scream. Just let me get alone, I prayed. I could hardly bear to look at him for more than a few seconds.

  “Shall I lock it?” he said, as we got out of the car.

  “No, don’t bother,” I said.

  We stood for a moment at the end of the walk back to my house.

  “I’ve got to go in,” I said. I’m sure he could hear the desperation in my voice.

  He nodded and reached out to touch my arm. His fingers were sweaty, and when he let go, it felt cold where they’d held me. “I’ll call,” he said, and I bent my head as though to agree and turned down the walk. When I looked back from the front door, he was still standing there. I lifted my hand and went inside.

  Upstairs, I walked immediately down the long hall back to my room, not even looking at the closed door to Molly’s room. I shut my door behind me and lay down on the bed. Nearly instantly I was weeping.

  The decision was final, Muth had said. Later, if there were changes . . . He had jumped up and come around the desk when I started to cry. He had supplied tissues and bent over me, rubbing my shoulder. It was just the luck of the draw, he told me. Judge Sullivan was strict about sexual issues. He’d known it when we went in, Payne had known it. He’d said nothing to me because he didn’t want me to worry, perhaps unnecessarily; but he and Payne had talked about strategy. They’d talked, they’d done their damnedest. It was his considered opinion that if they’d had any of the other judges, the decision would have gone the other way. I’d been great, Payne had been great, Cutter had done as well as he could. Now we were just stuck with it, we had to focus on the positive. He’d talked to Fine, they were being easy about visitation, he was going to get me lots of time. Things would be all right, we were going to make the best of a crummy, crummy deal. His hand rubbed my shoulder over and over. I checked my tears quickly and asked him sensible questions, got his reassuring answers. When he walked out to the elevator with me and said again how sorry he was, I felt my throat tighten, but I didn’t let go.

  Now I curled under the covers and wailed, shouted, like a lost child. I thought of Molly, imagined her more clearly than I had this whole time, imagined having her back, living with her, touching her. After a while, my sorrow seemed to run out of violence. I just cried, let the tears slide from my eyes. Sometime as it was getting dusky, I fell asleep.

  The phone trilled distantly in the purple dark. I could feel the thickness of my eyelids as they opened and I remembered everything. I lay and listened to the muffled noise. When it had stopped, I got up and started towards the bathroom. I had no idea what time it was. I made my way down the dark hall. As I fumbled at the doorway for the light switch, a sudden dizzying pain clutched at my head, and I had to bend over and let the blood gather behind my eyes in order not to fall. The pain swelled, faded. I stood up and turned the light on.

  In the blazing white of the bathroom I sat on the toilet and peed. That my body could still function seemed a kind of betrayal to me, and the act felt as unfamiliar, as beyond my control, as it had the first time I’d been able to urinate after Molly’s birth, nearly a full day afterwards. I sat hunched in the white-tiled world for a long time after I was done.

  My face in the mirror was puffy, as swollen everywhere as pregnant Celia’s. I washed it in cold water. As I was drying myself, the telephone began again. On the tenth or eleventh ring, I started back towards the kitchen. The ringing continued, regular as breathing. I turned the light on, watched the telephone for a few minutes, then picked up the receiver.

  It wasn’t Leo. Ursula’s baby voice began talking: she was so upset, Leo had told her, did I need someone to be with me? She’d just come and sleep on the couch, she wouldn’t say a word if I didn’t want to talk.

  Alone in my kitchen, I almost smiled at the impossibility of the suggestion. I told her that I really needed to be by myself.

  “Are you sure?” she said. “I couldn’t stand it, if I were you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to think through my options.”

  “Yeah, but what are they?” she asked. “Leo told me you can’t appeal or anything. What choices do you have?”

  “Well, I need to figure out what I should do to see more of Molly.” I hadn’t consciously thought of this before, but now a logic unfolded in my brain. “I think it might make sense to move down there.”

  “To Washington?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah,” she said thoughtfully. I could imagine her puckering brow, her open mouth.

  “Yeah, but what about Leo? What about your job?”

  “My job isn’t much,” I said. “I can get another job, I suspect.”

  “Hey, I got you that job,” she said. When I didn’t respond, she turned thoughtful again. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” There was a little pause. “You know what,” she said abruptly, “I bet old Fisher could get you something, some research thing or other. He’s got connections up the wazoo. Then you could be right near her and really see her almost as much, I bet.”

  “Almost,” I said.

  “You gotta stay as up as you can, honey,” she said softly, after a minute.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Don’t you think I should come over?” she asked.

  “No, I’m going to sleep now,” I said. “I’ll take a Tranxene or something. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “I’m counting on it,” she said.

  I hung up.

  I did take a Tranxene, but I still slept only intermittently. I waked every couple of hours and made myself hot milk and tried to think about whether it made sense to move to Washington. When I finally got up for good, at around six, there was no longer any question of deciding. It was clear. And that nearly passively made decision kept me going for the next three or four days. Muth was arranging visitation rights with Brian’s lawyer. I called him once a day. And I made lists. With obsessive precision calculated to keep my panic at bay, I thought up and broke down into minute steps the process of quitting my job here, subletting the apartment, selling my furniture, and moving to a new life.

  Leo called me several times a day, checking on how I was, wanting to see me when I was ready. I was always cool and evasive. I told him nothing about what I was doing. I wasn’t conscious of misleading him. I imagined I’d tell him when everything became clear, as if only when all the elements of the plan were in place would it really be a plan. Until then, what I said was that I needed time to think. I was doing O.K., but I wasn’t ready to be with anyone.

  I’m not sure why I didn’t want to tell him. In part, maybe to avoid the fight that we ended up having when he finally did find out. But I think I felt, too, that he would try to dissuade me; and that if I had all my plans carefully set, he would be less likely to be able to.

  Because I had a sense that I might be dissuadable. Some part of me was busy trying not to think of how painful it was going to be to stay involved with Molly. I felt that I could never have back what I’d had with her, and that that would always make whatever we did have seem too little, something lopped off. That feeling, which I was barely conscious of, which I kept pushing away, made me want to do what would be easy: to give up, to see her only occasionally and make what I could out of what was left with Leo. The work of those three or four days alone was pushing that temptation away. And to do that I needed to stay away from Leo.

  During the time between Brian’s warning call and my final v
isit to Muth—all through the psychiatric sessions, the legal discussion, the trial—my feelings for Leo had swung from something like the old loving warmth occasionally, to hateful anger. We had stayed lovers, and I pretended that things were the same because I knew my anger was unfair; and because I hoped that if I got Molly back, the sense of exposure and shame, and the spurts of hatred that came with them would vanish or change, that there would be something to recover with him, something different we could have together.

  Now that seemed impossible to me. I knew that as long as I was trying for a real life of some sort with Molly, I’d feel some irrational hatred for Leo in my heart for having smashed everything apart.

  When I had told Leo that I didn’t blame him, didn’t hold him responsible for what happened, I meant it. There was no one I blamed as much as myself. I understood that what he had done was exactly what he would have thought I wanted. I could remember clearly the vision I’d had of the three of us in a kind of boundariless Eden, all part of each other. And I could see how that vision and my behavior had led directly, irrevocably, to Leo’s letting Molly touch him, even to his getting hard when she did. It was a chain of events set in motion by me, by my euphoric forgetfulness of all the rules. But even so, talking to him on the phone now, thinking about him, filled me with rage, with hatred. I knew rationally that it was wrong, that it was just the measure of the anger I felt for myself, but I couldn’t get near that anger. I knew it would be as crippling as self-pity to let myself feel it. So I made my lists, did my errands, and avoided Leo.

  I put a sign up in the day-care center about the apartment, and the same evening, three people called to arrange to look at it. By nine o’clock I had rented it to two women. They were both newly separated from their husbands and they were living together to help meet their expenses. They brought their children with them when they came over, two boys, one of whom Molly had known at the day-care center. I showed them around and explained the peculiarities of the apartment, as I had to Brian the first time he stayed with Molly.

  The little boys liked the place immediately. They ran up and down the long hallway and thumped on the piano. Then they disappeared into Molly’s room. After they’d left—the women gave me a check, postdated until they’d have the money—I looked in where the boys had been playing. They had gotten Molly’s Legos down, dumped them all over the floor, and built a few tiny cars. Steeling myself against any response, I crouched in her room as I had hundreds of times before, and picked up all the little pieces.

  I had put up notices about the furniture, too, both at the day-care center and the laundromat, but the women wanted it; they were willing to pay me five hundred dollars for everything I wasn’t taking. The piano could stay, they said, until I had a place to move it to.

  My lists got longer: Call U-Haul, check car for towing, pick up liquor boxes. And always, call Muth, call Muth, call Muth. I was still running the rats each day, but now, when I finished, I’d do errands; and when I didn’t do errands, I’d fill the empty liquor boxes with dishes, with books, with Molly’s toys. If I couldn’t sleep, I’d take one of Ursula’s pills and pack some more, till the chemical began to sing softly in my blood.

  On Thursday, Leo came over without calling. I was in Molly’s room and I heard his key in the lock. I stood in her doorway and watched the front door swing open, watched him walk in. He was wearing jeans and a big navy sweater. His skin had whitened to translucence since summer’s passing, and my heart ached with loss to see him.

  He saw me and stopped, then shut the door behind him. For a long moment we stood just down the hall from each other, each framed by a doorway. Then he spoke.

  “Ursula tells me you’re leaving town.”

  “She shouldn’t have. And I’m not going for a few weeks anyway.”

  “When did you plan on telling me?”

  I shrugged. “When it all seemed really final, I guess.”

  He looked around. Along one wall of the hallway were lined up the taped, labelled liquor boxes.

  “This looks final to me.”

  I turned away, looked back into Molly’s room where I’d been packing her toys away, tucking the few fragile things in among the boxes of soft animals, putting all the parts into coffee cans. “I guess I was waiting to hear from Muth about the visitation arrangements.”

  “And then you were going to tell me.”

  I was silent. I didn’t want to lie to him again. “I don’t know. I don’t know when I was going to tell you.”

  He raised his fist level with his waist, then slammed it back down against the door. My hands flew up involuntarily at the noise. “Ah, what the fuck does it matter anyway?” he said.

  After a minute, I said softly, “I don’t suppose it really does.”

  “No, I don’t suppose,” he answered. He sounded utterly defeated.

  “Would you like a beer?” I asked, after a long silence.

  “Sure,” he said, as though giving something up.

  I started down the hall. He began to follow, and I stopped and turned. “Why don’t we sit in the living room?” I said, and gestured beyond him in that direction. “The kitchen’s kind of a mess.” I didn’t want him to see the yawning drawers, the emptied-out shelves.

  “Sure,” he said, and lifted his shoulders.

  He backed down the hall for a few steps, then turned and disappeared into the living room.

  In the kitchen, I got two beers, found some glasses I hadn’t packed in the rack. When I returned, Leo was sitting on the couch. I looked around quickly with his eyes. I hadn’t done too much in here yet. The two women were going to keep most of the furniture anyway. But the bookshelves next to the fireplace were empty; the pictures had been taken down and the exposed hooks were black and winged on the walls like tiny insects landed among the repeated figures in the wallpaper.

  I sat at the other end of the couch from him. I poured the beers. He was looking out the dark windows to the ugly streetlamp. Abruptly he turned. He picked up his glass. His voice was forced, cheery. “So, when are you leaving?”

  I tried smiling, but he only stared back. His white skin looked pinched around his nose and mouth. I noticed that his hand holding the beerglass was shaking.

  “I guess what I thought is that when a visit is cleared, I’d go down and see Molly and find an apartment. So it’s all a little iffy. I just keep calling Muth, and he says any day now.”

  There was a silence. He reached forward and set his glass on the table again, placed his hands on his knees and rubbed them back and forth.

  “The women who are taking the apartment don’t need to get in until November first.”

  “The women who are taking the apartment,” he echoed.

  “Yes,” I said, and looked down at my beer quickly.

  “Now that sounds kinda, what I call, final, Anna banana,” he said slowly. I could feel him staring at me, the heat from his eyes.

  Suddenly I was afraid of his anger, and of my own, which I’d pushed so far away. I felt a little of it kick in, a shot of adrenalized pulse, quickened breath. I didn’t want it now. I was on another course. I looked away, breathed in and out slowly. “If you want to fight,” I said, “I’m not interested.”

  “But I don’t want to fight,” he said. “I just want to know what the fuck is going on.” His hand punched his leg with fuck.

  I set my beer down on the table and closed my eyes. “What’s going on,” I said—I could hear the tremor in my voice and tried to control it—“is that my life is wrecked and I’m trying to find a way to put it back together. It seems that simple to me.”

  “And that means I’m out,” he said.

  “It means whatever it has to mean about you,” I burst out. “I’ll do what I have to do.”

  We stared at each other down the length of the couch. I was breathing hard. It was all I could hear in my head.

  His head swung back and forth slowly, the curls moving with their own life. “A lie,” he said. “A lie. There’s n
othing about me you have or have not to do. It’s all your choice.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Isn’t that true?” he persisted. “No one’s making me part of any condition at this point. It’s all up to you.” He was waiting, tense, poised.

  My eyes stung suddenly. “Can’t you leave me alone?” I said. “What good is this doing? Are you trying to argue me into loving you again? Do you think this will make it all go away?”

  “Tell me my choices, Anna.”

  I said nothing.

  “O.K. I’ll tell you my choices. I can do nothing, because I feel guilty, because I feel responsible, because I respect your grief. I can do nothing and lose you for sure. Or I can struggle, and impose on you when I have no right to, and fight with you, and maybe not lose you. Either way I’m in the wrong in some way, but at least this way I’m trying.”

  I said nothing, didn’t look at him. We sat for a long time in absolute silence. All I can remember is wanting him to go away, wanting to get busy again. Some curtain had fallen in my mind, and behind it all was all my feeling for Leo, all the power he had for me, over me.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” I finally said. I could barely remember what I was referring to. My mind was working hard to stay away from all this.

  “In other words, drop dead,” he said.

  “You said that.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Let’s try this one, then. Roll over, play dead. Is that more like it?”

  I looked at him, feeling hate.

  “Well, I already did that number, Anna. I played dead for you and that asshole lawyer of yours. I agreed: I’m the pervert, I’m the criminal. I took the rap, while you sat up there and pretended I was just some . . . accident that had happened to you. . . .”

  “Do you think that made up for everything?” I asked shrilly. My hands were clenched in my lap, and the nails, untrimmed because I hadn’t played in weeks, bit into my palms.