“Did they not tell you I was coming?” She lugged a duffel bag the size of a two-week vacation.
“Who’s in there?” I said, before I could stop myself.
“All homemade solvents.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Vinegar for the glass, grapefruit seed extract for the bathroom, hemp, aloe vera. I bring my own rags unless you want me to use yours. I don’t use paper towel.” She squatted down and began to unzip the body bag.
“Wait,” I said, and my voice curdled in my ears. Surely she hated me. For resisting? For everything.
That was it. I did not want her to hate me.
“The thing is,” said Sumi matter-of-factly, “I know this apartment. I can do it in under two hours. On this floor I do Harriet’s, the Kims’...” She trailed off. “If you want to ask anybody.”
I studied the view from the kitchen window: all angles and blocks, hues of brick slashed with shadow, baked in sunlight. Sky, brick, street. It was so easy not to see the people.
I tried not to watch her. I tried not to listen to the roar of the vacuum—Phil and I didn’t have one, but Sumi had let herself nonchalantly into “Harriet’s” (I didn’t know any of my neighbors) and borrowed “el Hoov.”
When she got around to the kitchen, I retreated to the bedroom. She had picked up all the clothes and folded them neutrally, neatly. She had opened the blinds. How had light found its way down a brick chasm and then L-shaped like a periscope into this window? I stood at the bared glass and looked slantwise toward another brickscape. My apartment was beginning to smell like a dewy garden. Was there anything to say to her, if I made it out to the kitchen? Was there anything not to say to her?
Now I know you can divide womankind by those who clean feverishly the night before and those who leave oatmeal parchment curling up the sides of a pot, not unlike dried semen.
Before Sumi’s arrival, I arranged flowers in casual mugs “here and there,” as if I had an easy, spontaneous relationship with my apartment. I brushed crumbs from countertops, stopping shy only of sweeping the kitchen. I lined up my expired acne creams even though I no longer needed them, being a Mrs.
She cycled around to me on Wednesdays, some time before eleven. I made our bed, even placed a thrift-store ashtray on the white coverlet. I hadn’t smoked since I was fourteen—behind the roller rink, just the once, with the girls who became nurses.
I always had the water boiling. While Sumi sipped her tea—cranberry, she had advised me, for urinary tract infections—I discreetly placed the two twenties half in, half out of her patchwork coat pocket.
We talked about Sumi’s childhood. Her parents had dropped out in the seventies. They were back-to-the-landers, a revised farm in the Northeast Kingdom. Vermont, I learned, which was a place I’d never considered. What was it like to pad across the cold crooked floorboards of a vintage farmhouse in the middle of the night to the unlocked door of the outhouse? To meet boyfriends by the pond for skinny-dipping? I imagined them all, the boyfriends, as carpenters, or traders from the nineteenth century.
Sumi’s wardrobe—I’d never seen anything like it. She wore anti-clothes, I decided, things that were ugly on purpose. But truthfully, was there anything more to style than purpose? Garishly crocheted shawls on top of leotards, peasant blouses stained from breastfeeding, a pair of drafty, unlaced high-tops. Her hair was thin and scabby from veganism, a practice in alignment with her political brand of poverty. She dyed it with a natural plant, and it was a righteous, premature gray at the roots. Sometimes she brought her baby, a little twist in tie-dye she called a sling, who swung like a third udder as she cleaned my apartment. “He was a persistent soul,” she said admiringly. “He’s been trying to get in on this world since I was fifteen.”
“What’s his name?” I asked gingerly.
“Goose,” said Sumi. I noticed the baby had red-rimmed eyes like she did. Was she making it up on the spot? Did she remember my name was Swan?
Of course there was something crackpot about Sumi, but she was so easy to talk to, and her gappy smile.
She took canned goods, loose change, toilet paper, a load or two of laundry detergent in a Ziploc bag like a tiny blue waterbed.
Phil’s mother, Alex, was the famous feminist. I had seen Phil scuttle for cover when our neighbor, Harriet, a lawyer who wore a margarine cardigan over her tennis dress, struck out down the hall ahead of us: Alex had put into Phil a fear of women. She didn’t believe in marriage: it had the “unmistakable contour of oppression.” But what mother believes in the marriage of her only son to the wrong woman? Alex had sculpted, hooded eyes that she blinked slowly (her eyelids had a color all their own—bloodless, lilac), and her burnt-looking hair fizzled at the ends like tassels of an ancient prayer rug. I couldn’t decide whether she was ugly or beautiful. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted her to be ugly or beautiful.
But I thought I knew what she wanted—if only I were a bona fide hayseed, pure and oxidized. No. I came from a dissipated line of White Zinfandel drinkers, bulk soda in the garage, tracksuits out of T. F. Green to no place farther or more tasteful than Disney.
I was traditional without being original, poor without being salt-of-the-earth or spendthrift. I was guilty of putting a post-wedding stretch limousine on plastic. I had whined until my stepfather caved on a real live pianist.
I didn’t correct Alex. Truthfully, I hoarded it—the fact that my mother had moonlighted for Professor Nan Shemaria. Had capably—brilliantly?—graded Professor Shemaria’s papers. From Professor Shemaria’s office windows you could look down over the whole settlement that was Providence. My mother had described the barnacled tenements on treeless streets, the state buildings set in over-large parking lots, honeycombed on the inside with countless bureaus of busywork, with sleazeballs and pension-plodders staring out of nicotine-stained single windows.
Professor Shemaria studied Azorean immigrants. She staked my mother out at City Hall, where my mother was a regular Studs Terkel. She had no problem killing time with peroxided Marie Antoinette hairdos on coffee runs and the like while she waited for her subjects. Azoreans were forced to surface at City Hall eventually, in defense of a plat and lot number, a lush vineyard, perhaps, that thrived inside a city square of chain link, painstakingly trained and clipped up over a carport.
Professor Shemaria gave my mother a reporter’s notebook. It wasn’t necessary to be scribble-scrabbling as they spoke, she said, but it was also easy enough to stick the thing in a coat pocket. My mother might feel more natural herself if she engaged first and took notes later, Professor Shemaria suggested.
I used to imagine my mother was recording words of wisdom, social prophecy in broken English. Once I found the notebook set carefully on top of the piano. My mother was taking a shower, and I swiped it almost without thinking. My thumb rifled the pages and a receipt fluttered out. I bent to retrieve it and saw it was for $2.83, from Dunkin Donuts. Suddenly I could hear the wall of street noise, loud static of car engines, horns, jackhammering in the background. I imagined air brakes, a city bus, a near accident. I felt my mother’s gaze on me. There she was in the doorway.
“Gendered attitudes toward indigenous agriculture,” said my mother dryly. Her long wet hair had soaked her shirtfront. I tried to shoot the notebook toward her. She took it almost graciously. A half smile: “It’s not what they say but why they say it.”
Alex was right about the hired pianist: poor taste.
My mother had always wanted to play at a wedding.
Oldies? Chopin?
She used to joke that she would wear black so you could tell her from the bride. At Phil’s and my wedding she was in a supposed period of remission. But she came in late and sat at the back of the church, a promiscuous ghost among the distant cousins and old neighbors.
At the reception she sweated through her mascara like a maudlin prostitute. I made sure she and Alex did nothing more than shake hands with each other.
Alex never wore makeup. She smelled like her own sweat
. A patchy, backyard smell—raking leaves, flaccid November grass coming off on your sneakers. I thought about mother animals rejecting their young after the cubs or the kits had been handled by humans.
I couldn’t seem to tell my mother about Sumi. I told myself I was thrown by my mother’s take on Phil, her uncharacteristic lack of judgment. But I decided to come clean—about Sumi—to Alex. She was grading papers at her kitchen table as Phil prepared a dinner of stir-fried vegetables.
“Safe, Swan?” she said. “Vegetables?”
There’d been a little hullaballoo the week before. The noodles were made of the same thing as brown paper bags, I’d claimed. And I’d gone on, ridiculously, at my mother-in-law’s table, that such noodles were “an insult to spaghetti.”
To my surprise Alex said lightly, now, and without looking up from her papers, “That’s too bad. I wanted to give you Ana Maria.”
Twice a week, I learned, Ana Maria let herself into Alex’s apartment in the West Village. Her shadow was a wafting blue mist of Windex, her tracks were white as soap flakes. As if by magic, bagels and milk were replenished, the thick dandruff of cat hair dealt to the throaty vacuum, toilets transfigured. “She was here today, I think,” said Alex.
I excused myself. Indeed, the bathroom shone, all traces of Alex vanquished. I couldn’t resist touching up my hair in the mirror polish of the toilet handle.
I had to admit I was morally stymied. I had seen the cash Alex left for Ana Maria on the kitchen table, blunt and rumpled.
Maybe, I thought, trying to excuse Alex, being a feminist just meant being busy. But there were contradictions. Alex considered her single motherhood a religion, but called herself an atheist. Phil’s dad was “a friend of a friend’s friend” who agreed on a whim. And yet hetero sex was never whimsical! It was grave, said Alex. Even violent.
Phil had the same hooded eyes as his mother, vein-colored eyelids. But his skin was dusky instead of halvah. He had the sweetest way of pressing his grapey lips together to suppress his giggle.
He smelled like pie. He was heavy-boned and barrel-chested. He closed his eyes when he took off his glasses. I rubbed gently around the bone; impossible, in love, to call it an eye socket.
So maybe feminism was just another word for contradiction. I sounded like Alex. Alex would say women were shape-shifters, fluid. If you wore high-heeled shoes, you were hobbled by the male race, but there was no race happening but the male race. I cringed when she tried to sound black. High heels or fleet sneakers? Alex would say that question was the kernel of feminism.
You passed off your broom, your rags, only to enslave another woman. Or were you saving her? From rice and beans in Tijuana? Phil copied his mother, careful to use the name of the city. You never said Mexico.
Once I heard Ana Maria retching. Alex stood in the doorframe of the bathroom in enormous slappy sheepskin moccasins and a man’s dress shirt that came to her kneecaps. Her bare knees were dark and oily-looking with arthritis. Ana Maria’s broad back pitched forward so that Alex had to brace herself to hold her. Now my husband he say no more times. Always you losing the baby. They lurched as a single form, a weird rocking horse.
Later Alex told me, “She sat down on the toilet and the baby came out like a pomegranate.”
I guess I imagined we were in cahoots, Sumi and I, sharing the load of womanhood. I made the tea while she took a toothbrush to the shower grout. She did my laundry while I made confessions.
For instance, I’d gone off birth control. That was a confession. So many milestones of womanhood have had the taint of shame, secret, I said to Sumi. God, I couldn’t bear to remember first menstruating, couldn’t even use that word without feeling squeamish. “Sat on a berry?” my mother had said, offhandedly, without looking, or looking elsewhere, so I had followed her gaze across the room instead of around to the seat of my own nightgown.
Sometimes I lay upon the marriage bed and listened to the sounds of sweeping and spraying and vacuuming like they were the ocean. By the way, I said once to Sumi, there was no surf in Rhode Island. It’s all bay where I’m from, fish heads and tampon applicators washed up on gravel beaches.
Sometimes I helped her with the other apartments on our floor. I believed my service was inconspicuous. We might have been a coffee klatch or a book club. I pretended I had to keep my hands busy polishing the silver picture frames on Harriet’s display shelf. Waterskiing with a blond sister (or mother?), a boyfriend with a dinosaur jaw, Washington Square Park—law school graduation. Sumi called her the lawyerette and I laughed conspiratorially, stopping short of telling her how Harriet still terrified Mr. Lebed.
Of course I had cleaned the house for my mother, I told Sumi. My mother’s weakness came in waves. My mother said, with wry distaste, that the nausea was like morning sickness in pregnancy. She said she never wanted to be found dead with her head in the toilet.
When I thought of my mother now, my every motion became obvious, garish. Like finding yourself on very thin ice, in the middle of a lake, in the middle of a nightmare. Even the decibels of your voice crying for help can break it.
My mother’s illness? I said to Sumi, my tune suddenly cool and catchy, trying out the verdict. A long siphoning of housework, love, money for college.
I had an ancient snapshot that a maternity ward nurse had taken after my birth. “No breastfeeding in Rhode Island!” I declared, as I handed it over to Sumi. Did I want her to feel sorry for me?
I looked at it again, over Sumi’s shoulder. There was a crease, white and soft, the stuffing of the photograph, right across my mother’s abdomen.
My mother was propped up on the cot, self-possessed enough to have composed a scowl for the camera. The streaked johnny was more or less pasted to the front of her. My father was peeking out from behind her, clutching the paper bag she breathed in to stop hyperventilating. She puked in it later, she once told me.
To Sumi’s credit, she studied the picture longer than was required of a housecleaner.
“No one’s holding you, Swan,” she said finally. I grabbed the picture. I suddenly didn’t want her to say anything woo-woo about hospitals. Anything midwifey. Sure, I wished my mother could have died in my lap in a creaky farmhouse in the Northeast Kingdom.
But it was true. In the picture, I’m apart—above my mother, as if I haven’t even been called down yet. From the heavens—is that how it works, really? Was I a “persistent soul,” like Sumi’s baby? Was I to take that to mean many abortions? I’m stranded on my back, on what looks like a metal steam table from a basement cafeteria. I’m a miniature monster. My red mouth is stretched at the corners, my bluish face contorted.
I imagine my mother rising from the cot coolly. Affixing a pad right to her jeans, no panties, like she always used to. Twisting her black hair off her neck first, then smoothing it from her forehead.
Okay, she says to the nurse who snapped the picture. I’ll be back later.
My mother’s funeral was the October after my marriage. My brother, living at home, watching football with our stepfather, eating our stepfather’s red sauce, which he called gravy, came through, meaning he arranged it.
Alex offered to go up with us. She said, “Breast cancer is politics.”
“Is she going to make a speech? Is she going to run for president of breast cancer?” I asked Phil later.
Phil told Alex we’d go by ourselves. She gave him two pink ribbons to pin on our funeral attire. I stuck mine onto my stepfather’s dog’s collar. I couldn’t help it.
As if he hoped I would remember our meeting, Phil rented a Ford Taurus.
Alex lounged on Phil’s side of the table, books on theory between them. Sometimes she asked me questions thinly disguised as conversation—I knew better than to answer by now if I didn’t want to be a case study. I got up and cleared the Saturday lunch away.
In the kitchen I opened my refrigerator in a grand sweep. “Professor Lebed,” I called. “Can I get you something?”
“Jam, Swan,” came
her tuneless voice. She always put it in her tea, like her Russian parentage, slyly asserting herself in my dominion.
But she was striding into the kitchen. I could hear her breasts lapping from side to side, her hair crackling with static. She kept a bowl of homemade jam in my refrigerator. Now she pulled it out and sniffed the uncovered surface.
“You don’t know what to call me, do you,” she stated.
“Well, Mother’s a little awkward.”
“The Other Woman,” she said. She moved to toss the spoiled preserves in the garbage. I lunged.
“I was saving it.” Of course, I wasn’t.
Her eyebrows went up.
“I told Sumi to cover it,” I said peevishly, before I could stop myself. Alex gave a short, harsh laugh. I stared hard at the flap of a mole on her chin. Once a month the single hair would have curled out long and wiry enough to hopelessly distract me.
I took a long time doing the dishes. “Swan!” called Alex. I came to the doorway. “What was the name of the professor your mother worked for?” I looked at Phil, whose forehead was working. I couldn’t be angry with him for explaining me, or defending me, to his mother. But somehow, I’d wanted her to go on thinking I was tracksuits and spaghetti.
“Oh, shoot,” I lied calmly.
“Not by any chance Nan Shemaria,” said Alex.
I had to cough to unchoke myself. “Truthfully, I never paid much attention.”
The moment I said it I knew I was damned if I was lying and damned if I wasn’t.
I was certainly reeling, though. I’d gone from orphan of a janitress to devious daughter-in-law in an instant. I’d lost my cover, my mother uncovered...to get all academic about it.
Alex was looking up at me very carefully. “It was a frustrated life, your mother’s.”
Suddenly I wanted to beat my mother’s life into Alex. I made a desperate grab for my wits. “My mother was always more interested in my life.” It was meant as a rebuke, but it came out pathetic.
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