by Robin Page
“So, you never really celebrated Christmas or birthdays?”
“Sometimes Gladys would put something on layaway and get it out after a long time. Then she’d sell it to a neighbor or a dealer for drugs or just take it away. Nothing belonged to us. We learned not to get excited.”
“Did that bother you? I mean not to ever get anything from your own mother, on your birthday, let’s say.”
“Yes,” she says, lying.
It didn’t bother her. It was worse when there was a gift. A trick. Power. Things they never wanted. A theme even. Once, in June, there were blow-up toys, bats, balls, a clearance sale of beach things, a naked blow-up doll to embarrass William with. Where it came from, they couldn’t tell, but Uncle Al found it funny.
He and Gladys had been at a thrift store all day. A thrift store in Norwood. Just white people there, Gladys saying. Uncle Al saying, Hey! I’m white. They were high. Gladys and Uncle Al had a look of conspiracy in their eyes.
She and Ycidra and William were still as stones, all staring at the table, at the stale things they’d brought back. Not wanting any of it. Just wanting to go back into the room that they shared. Can’t trust your fucked-up ass with your sisters, Gladys would say, but all of them knew that William hadn’t thought of a girl in that way his whole life, much less his sisters.
“We thought you could hit the dogs with them,” Uncle Al said seriously, his eyes glassy, his mouth wet. “They need a bit of training.”
Jocelyn remembers the looking away, the floor falling out beneath her.
There were no dogs at the apartment in Winton Terrace, but Uncle Al rented a house in North College Hill. Jocelyn hated to go there.
There is this cold place for us, she used to think.
Jocelyn feels it now, as she felt it as a child, sitting at that table. It is weighty, the taste of copper, a tightness always in the shoulders and the neck, a cowering. The dogs behind gates in the yard—a concrete slab under bald bellies. The space, three by five at most. They were large dogs. A ground full of piss and feces. Stink in the air. Always there were smells when she was young, smells that she couldn’t get away from.
She has seen them many times in her mind, but she cannot bring herself to talk to Dr. Bruce about them. They are pack animals that are afraid to socialize. As a child, Jocelyn loves them for a second before she realizes she cannot love them. They exist behind secret memories of their own that do not allow them to lift their heads. They do not make eye contact when Uncle Al is in the yard. He parades their fear to the children. When they please him, they are beaten. When they rebel against him, they are beaten. On occasion, there is the soft touch for absolutely nothing. Their confusion makes them docile and isolated. They push their bodies into corners, crawl along the floor. Jocelyn tells Ycidra that she loves the dogs the first time they go and see them. The blow-up toys come later, months and months after.
Do not love them, her sister says. You can love me. You can love William.
“Which one of these do you like the best?” Uncle Al says, fondling the blow-up bat. He throws the beach ball at William’s face. There is glee beneath his question as he shows off each item. He walks behind Jocelyn’s stool, and she feels his erection, as hard as a broom handle, against the back of her head.
Gladys lights a Newport.
“Jocelyn?” Dr. Bruce says, gently.
“Can I get a glass of water please?”
Chapter Sixteen
Claudette
1
SHE HAS ALWAYS HAD A CONTENTIOUS RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD, AND pregnancy makes it worse. At fifteen, she intentionally starves herself in the hopes of getting her mother’s attention. Her breasts, her butt, the pad of skin that feminizes her waistline shrinks away, leaving rib bone, tailbone, and a feathery coat of hair. Her father takes her to the doctor, but there is nothing they can do. She likes the glassy look of her eyes, the sharp peak of her cheekbones. She likes how wispy she is, and loves the meticulousness required to enact her eating plans. It takes wit and intellect to starve herself and yet stay alive. It is power. If she can do this, then there is nothing she can’t do.
She counts calories, she pins her pants. She peels her grapes. In the morning for breakfast she has twenty flakes of cereal. She drinks loads and loads of water. For lunch, she has two saltine crackers, carefully picking the kernels of salt off them. Water retention is the nemesis of the scale.
Her mother does not set down her coffee cup though. She drinks the vodka and Diet Coke she always drinks. Her mother remains as emotive as a houseplant.
Her father though, is her father. A man of deep love and notice. They are close, even during these years of adolescence, these days of starvation. Even at fifteen, at night, most nights, she and her father still read together. They have had this habit since she was a small child, beginning with Stellaluna and Green Eggs and Ham. He stutters and cries when they finish The Secret Garden. This is the magic, she remembers him reading. This is the magic. She is nine.
He sits at the edge of her bed in the years of her anorexia. They are reading Achebe. He holds her slim self against his own muscular body when it is time to say goodnight. He is gentle with her, as if she really were a bag of bones.
“Eat,” he says, the glimmer of tears in his eyes. “Will you eat for me, my dearest one? Will you eat for your father?”
2
NOW SHE TRIES TO EAT FOR THE BABY, BUT IT DOESN’T WORK. SHE LAYS the food out on the counter, all of it clean. Raw cucumber, heirloom tomatoes. There is kale to tenderize, to massage between her fingers with sea salt and olive oil. Her sense of smell is magnified, so meat is out of the question.
At the university, while teaching, she is certain she can smell the dried sperm that crusts the inside of Landon Hill’s underwear. She leans down to help Allison Wray with her rhetorical strategies and smells the sour scent of yogurt—rhubarb and raspberry, mixed with her morning toothpaste. She is like those bees that can sense cancer in the body, dogs that catch sweating criminals in bushes, or pigs that dig for truffles that have been held in the earth for hundreds of years. The smells send her gagging to her desk. She steps outside the hallowed, heavy, wooden doors of her freshman comp room to throw up into a bag that she’s brought for just this kind of emergency. In her office, the clear scent of bile and phlegm is present no matter how much she cleans. She’ll have to tell the dean she is pregnant soon.
When she goes to the doctor’s office, she explains that she cannot eat, because she smells everything. The doctor says she is dehydrated, that she will be hospitalized if she doesn’t find a way. She explains that she is trying, but he knows her history. I would never put my child at risk, she says, but he looks at her with disgust—a baby killer, a woman with deep-seated issues. A crazy lady who still thinks she’s fat.
She explains that food alights on her tongue and then, like a projectile, shoots out when she swallows it. She can look at vegetables, handle them, but all she can eat, in very small doses, is citrus, grapes, and grape juice. That’s better than nothing, the doctor says. He hooks her to an IV, rehydrates her, and tells her to come back in one week.
She leaves the office. At home when her husband is at work, she undresses, looks at herself in the mirror. She cannot help but gasp with habitual pleasure: She is starved and yet alive. She is slim and yet full. She stands on the scale countless times, but nothing changes except her belly. The baby lives on air. A sparrow, a snipe, dipping and pecking, eating the fat from her brain. It grows into a tiny ball.
At the appointment one week later, the doctor warns her of anemia.
“I cannot eat meat,” she says. “No way.”
He sighs, insists, but the slick surface of a raw chicken breast makes her stomach turn. The texture is muscular, uterine even. It recalls a memory—camp, a girl, the two of them touching each other inside a tent. Claudette’s fingers inside the other girl, pressing, feeling. The texture, the walls of the girl’s insides, until this moment, absolutely forgotten.
Chapter Seventeen
Jocelyn
1
ON WEDNESDAYS, JOCELYN VOLUNTEERS IN LUCY’S CLASS. HER SHIFT starts after lunch and ends at dismissal. She has time on these volunteer days for tennis and sometimes time for Kate at the Palisades Inn. Their habit is expensive, more than three hundred dollars a week. Nothing in the Palisades is cheap, and Jocelyn doesn’t like that they have to stay local. She is afraid that someone will see them. Kate reminds her that she has to be close enough to work. She snickers at Jocelyn when Jocelyn suggests the Culver Hotel or the Ritz-Carlton in Marina Del Rey. She calls her a kept woman, and reminds her that she has to work for a living. They pay cash, but must show IDs. They leave in separate cars, in good moods, not guilty anymore. Kate heads back to the club, and Jocelyn races to school to pick up Lucy or to volunteer. The scent of Kate is on her fingers, her clothes. The secret of Kate swells inside her. She feels light and young when she sees Lucy and the other children. It takes a minute to become the woman who is a mother again, a wife, a protector.
Lucy’s teacher, Mr. Baird, is always happy to see her. He is very obliging. He is a good-looking man with straight brown hair and clean-shaven skin. He is very tall, as Lucy said. He keeps a friendly classroom, filled with art and tiny desks and the alphabet. Little Wanted signs for fairy-tale creatures hang on laundry lines that run down the center of the ceiling. He seems like a decent man, but Jocelyn knows better than to trust him.
Today, he has given her the task of making papier-mâché globes with the children. She sits in the back of the classroom and calls each child up to help her with the newspaper and liquid starch. Some of the children are squeamish, especially the boys, who do not like the slimy texture of the starch. As she greets each one, there is the feeling that she is seeing the same child over and over again—blonde and blue eyed, white and skinny. They all have a whisper of wealth behind them. Lucy is the only girl in the classroom who isn’t white. And yet she is white in a way, Jocelyn thinks. Just not in this country.
As early as kindergarten, Jocelyn has heard other little girls starting sentences with, “No offense, Lucy, but my hair is blonder than yours,” or, “No offense, Lucy, but my skin is more like Claire’s. Your skin is darker, so we’ll be sisters and you’ll be a friend.”
Lucy doesn’t seem to notice or mind, but Jocelyn’s heart breaks when she hears it. She is thirteen again and wants to tell the pale white girls that they’ll pay for skin like Lucy’s one day, that they’ll wrinkle and shrivel and scar years before her daughter will. That the stringy blonde hair they have now will dull and grow brown as they move into puberty. You’re an ugly white girl, she whispers to Brooke Borman one day after she overhears her tell Lucy she can’t be in their family. And when the child’s face drops, Jocelyn tells her she’s looking a bit big. She doesn’t worry when the girl starts crying. If Brooke’s mother or Mr. Baird asks what she’s done, Jocelyn will just lie. Adults lie about children all the time.
She keeps an eye on Mr. Baird while she volunteers. She is compelled to assess him. Does he really need to read with one of the girls right next to him? Does he touch Lisbeth Salen’s leg unnecessarily when he bends down to tie her shoes?
At the end of the day, the children line up to hug him goodbye. One after another, he lifts them up in the air above his head. They giggle, and sometimes the girls’ skirts float up, revealing the smallest line of panty before he places them back on the ground. Does this mean something? she wonders. She isn’t really sure. If it were obvious, she could stop worrying. She could act. She will not miss the opportunity to protect Lucy as she missed the opportunity to protect Ycidra, William, herself.
When it is Lucy’s turn in line for a hug, Jocelyn tenses up. Her daughter is dancing while she waits, shaking her hips with the excitement of the end of the day. Lucy and her best friend, Ali, squeeze each other’s hands in anticipation—of what? Of anything, Jocelyn realizes, and she earnestly wishes she could keep Lucy right where she is: happy about almost anything.
She studies her daughter to see if there is any sign of the flaw that she and her own siblings have inherited, but it is still not there. Jocelyn looks quickly at her own reflection in the classroom mirror. She cannot see it in herself today either, but it’s in the blood. Her mother has taught her this. She worries that maybe it is invisible in Lucy too. Is it a seed, waiting to bloom? Has she been gone too long from Winton Terrace and all that survives there to still see it clearly? All she sees in the mirror is a wealthy woman with good hair, good makeup, good boots. She is carrying the python bag from Conrad.
Mr. Baird picks Lucy up, and her daughter squeals with laughter. A flash of Gladys comes to her then, but why?
“She’s trash,” Gladys said to Conrad when he asked for Jocelyn’s hand in marriage. Uncle Al was long gone by then, but Conrad had insisted on being ridiculously romantic, as if his urge, his own sense of the importance of taking Jocelyn as his wife, would make Gladys rise to the occasion. One more time Jocelyn had been shamed.
“Why her?” Gladys had asked through an exhalation of Newport smoke, “when there’s so many girls in the world?”
The hurt is still there. Its persistence, miraculous. Gladys is dead, she says to herself. My mother is dead.
Lucy runs to her, hugs her tightly, brings her back to joy. They go to collect her things—the tiny backpack, the water bottle that’s the color of the Caribbean sea. Outside the classroom door, she sees Maud. They air-kiss and smile at one another. Jocelyn is grateful that she and Maud are friends. Maud helps her navigate this world.
“Are you coming to dinner tonight? Third Friday of the month.”
“Oh crap, I forgot,” Jocelyn says. “If Conrad will come home, I’ll be there. Otherwise I’m out.”
“You can drop Lucy at my house. The kids can play. Aurora is there. You know she’s great.”
“I’ll let you know,” Jocelyn says, knowing she’d never leave Lucy with a stranger. Not even a stranger whom Maud recommends. When you least expect it, expect it, she thinks. They’re out there, everywhere.
2
“GO,” CONRAD SAYS, PUSHING HER OUT THE DOOR.
“Go, Mama!” Lucy says, and then there is the carpeted hallway, green waxy plants. The shiny stainless-steel elevator doors that reflect her image back to her—a good outfit, a sparkle from the diamond ring on her finger.
“Papa?” she hears her daughter say, as the doors of the elevator slide open to swallow her. “Let’s play, Papa.”
THE RESTAURANT IS EXPENSIVE. IT IS POSITIONED RIGHT ON THE WATER, before Coastline Drive and along Pacific Coast Highway. Parking is horrendous. Jocelyn leaves her car a quarter mile away and walks back to the restaurant, avoiding the speeding cars that come very close to her. By the time she arrives, her hair is a swirling mess.
“Where’s the valet, for God’s sake?” Maud says in a huff, catching up with her.
“That was so tiring,” Theresa says.
“We’re so spoiled,” Jocelyn says, and they all laugh.
There are five of them out for an MNO, or “Mothers’ Night Out.” They do it monthly. They talk about parenting strategies, about ways to do things better than their own parents did, which is laughable in the case of Jocelyn. Jocelyn has fictional parents for dinners like these—there is no Gladys. No Uncle Al.
She and the other mothers are seated immediately at a table by the window. The water from the sea is close enough to leave the residue of spray along the windows, which are foggy, dirty even. Jocelyn thinks the restaurant seems a bit shabby. She goes to wash her hands.
When she returns, the waiter is there, and Jocelyn orders a vodka with soda and lots of fresh limes. It is the drink of the hour—low calorie and potent. The others order variations on it. When the drinks come, Erica gets the meeting started. It is her turn to lead. Her turn to pick a significant topic.
She clears her throat. “Let’s talk about how we can protect our children,” she says. “How can we keep them safe?”
Jocelyn doesn’t speak. She hates subjects like this. She instantly thinks of Mr. Baird but knows not to bring it up. She wishes the mothers could just talk about the weather, gossip, get drunk.
“Safe from what?” Maud says. “We live in the Palisades. We don’t even have a police force. Get real, Erica.”
Jocelyn grins at Maud, loving her.
“Well,” Erica says in a pissy tone. “You never know what’s out there.”
Jocelyn takes a sip of her drink. It is strong. Her phone buzzes. She looks at it. It’s Simon. She’s surprised.
SIMON: Wanna come over and watch the men’s finals?
JOCELYN: Would love to. Am in boring mother’s meeting. Can’t escape.
SIMON: I will save you. Tell them your neighbor is locked out of his apartment.
JOCELYN: I can’t. I’ll stop by after. Very briefly. Can’t make Conrad jealous.
She sends a winking emoji with it. Conrad is never jealous.
“What do you think, Jocelyn?” Erica asks. “About safety. I mean, if you’re done texting.”
Jocelyn feels put on the spot. She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t want to talk about safety. Safety is a tricky thing. All she knows how to do is to be with Lucy, to interrogate anyone whom she feels suspicious of, to not allow sleepovers. Ever. Even then, the perpetrators might outsmart her. Even then, they might ruin her child. She has the sense that this isn’t something she should say. It might expose something in her. Present Gladys and her smell. Gladys and her leering. The answer feels as if it might take the form of a spotlight and announce her childhood secrets. Her differences.
“I’m not really sure,” she says. “I’m a bit distracted. Sorry. My neighbor locked himself out of the house. I’ve really got to go. I don’t mean to be rude, but well.”
“I’ve got to head out too,” Maud says. “Thank God for your neighbor,” she whispers in Jocelyn’s ear.