Clothed, Female Figure

by Kirstin Allio

  “That should tell you something.” I heard condescension in her voice.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That should tell you something,” said Alex.

  “That should tell me I should have been there!” I was choking again. Stiff with rage—I was never agile as a fighter.

  Alex said evenly, “You were the dream daughter. Let go of it.”

  I turned out of the doorway, disgusted with myself, with Alex. Death was sickening.

  But then, all of a sudden, I got it. My mother’s strange silence on the topic of Phil and Alex, her suspension of derision. She had hoped these were the people who would take care of me.

  In the early evening I was to meet Phil at his mother’s department, at a dean’s tea where she was to receive an honor.

  This is years later.

  Alex was at the center of the coil, her olive-green eyes lit by the little amber-shaded university lamps on polished surfaces.

  I heard her bray above the usual modulations and I thought, Alex has spent her career practicing laughing louder than any man in academia.

  I watched her make her way to the cherry podium dollied in for the occasion. She seemed to sense me watching, and she found me in the crowd and nodded curtly. She had been hoping, I suppose, that Phil and I had come together. What were the famous feminist’s true feelings about the ramifications, in real time, of fifty-fifty parenting? When it meant that there was equal likelihood of Phil or I being held up at home, even absent, on a night like tonight?

  An X of a woman—cinched waist, flared, Victorian collar—was heading toward me. I hadn’t counted on talking to anyone. The woman’s features were deep notches, and as she came closer I decided she looked like Abigail Adams, first lady, with a beak chin and a sly, fetal old Englishness.

  “You must be the Double Swan,” she declared, holding her hand out.

  She was presumptuous, and I wanted to recoil. Phil’s private name for me, as Lebed, of course, is swan in Russian. So the woman must have had some intimate access to Alex.

  She had an overly firm grip. She shook my hand as if women had been doing it for ages.

  “Nan Shemaria.”

  It’s not too nineteenth-century to say I nearly fainted.

  Nan didn’t wait for me to recover. She waved and gesticulated to Alex, pointing to the crown of my head when she caught Alex’s attention. Alex lost no time zooming in on us.

  “So?” said Alex, taking both my hands in hers.

  “She looks exactly like her mother,” Nan said.

  Alex stepped back and squinted.

  I found myself standing very still for their inspection.

  “Shall we sit?” Alex directed us. I followed almost meekly. A grad student of Alex’s, effete and fawning, passed with a tray of wineglasses filled one-third with red-brown liquid. I traded in my teacup.

  We settled on a sofa. “Well first, here’s to you, Alex.” Nan raised her glass in the same way she had shaken my hand, as if toasting had always been women’s provenance.

  People were watching. My skin prickled. There was the dean, blundering toward us expectantly, burnished with alcohol. Alex rose to greet him. I cast my eyes around for Phil. What was keeping him?

  Nan exhaled loudly when Alex set the dean on his course. “Such an intimate setting.” The faux living room. “Alex, really. Congratulations. You do so deserve it.”

  Alex performed a sort of extroverted shudder.

  It had not quite dawned on me that such stagecraft was for my benefit. Pointing to my wineglass, Nan said, “You might want another one before you hear this.”

  God, I thought, gradually recovering, and anticipating how I’d tell Phil that the two of them had the bedside manner of 1950s male gynecologists.

  Nan said, “Alex and I have known each other for years and years.”

  Here came a grad student behind a platter of cheese, and suddenly I thought of departmental Gouda. My mother had brought home Friday leftovers under the thin shroud of a paper napkin. The cubes of cheese hardened back up in the refrigerator, or Zack would microwave a sandwich. The crackers were useless but I always buried them near the bottom of the trash. Even before my mother got sick I wanted her to think we were grateful.

  “Casablanca,” said Alex.

  Truthfully, she uttered it. And I wanted to laugh, perversely. What a ridiculous name, as if I’d almost forgotten it.

  “La Double Vie de Casablanca,” said Nan. “Drink,” she instructed. She was convincing. I thought I knew what was coming but nevertheless I brought the glass to my lips.

  “A single mom with no education, recurring breast cancer,” she faded off, shaking her head. “We women.” I could see that she meant to cry but she had to reckon with her immense self-satisfaction. “I had no idea,” she said, “that Casablanca was a cleaning person.”

  “It took us a while to piece it together!” said Alex. “That she passed herself off to Nan as some kind of—”

  “Post-doc!” cried Nan. Again, wondering, “Post-doc. It never occurred to me to check out what—transcripts? W-2s?” She looked at Alex. “Our bubble, right?”

  Alex nodded.

  “It involved an extraordinary number of hours,” said Nan, “my work. Casablanca’s work.”

  Professor Shemaria really was shocked. I had to give her that. And Alex—it was unlike her to be overwrought. Was she? Was this the first time I had noticed her translucent skin, dark-edged features?

  “Nan calls her Lucy,” said Alex, then. “I just call her the Ur-feminist.”

  I waited. How they longed for my shock in return. For my approval of them in their discovery.

  Truthfully, I hadn’t known the extent of my mother’s deception. I washed and ironed those smocks, and the navy-blue uniform slacks, several times a week. Her nametag said C.B. I imagined her swiftly, surreptitiously, stuffing the uniform in her locker, changing into jeans and a cheap blouse.

  I heard Alex swallow. I had to swallow too, my laughter.

  I had to swallow my mother’s laughter.

  “Either of you geniuses been digging around in my pennies?”

  My mother is cawing. She’s holding the big glass jar up like she’s about to smash the clay tablet. Not just her voice, her whole face is hoarse.

  I’m stricken for a long, awful moment. Did I do it or did I only dream I did it?

  “This other woman at work?” says my mother. The jar is too heavy to hold up over her head much longer. Like an old freight elevator it jerks and drops down to the counter. “Fresh from the fucking Azores. Skinnier than I am.” She pinches her waist, which is like a windpipe. “She doesn’t have papers—she’s covering for her aunt. That’s the word. They all cover for each other. We’re in the big closet in Tabor Hall together. I have to show her how to change the mop head. Tina, I say. We call them all Tina. She’s dragging the Medusa out of the gray water. Her people are fishermen. It’s like she’s hauling a whale. She says to me, ‘Back in the Azores have I small sons and daughters.’ How old is she—thirty? ‘I’m savin to bring em hea-ah. I’m workin and savin.’”

  My mother pats the counter till she bumps into her cigarettes. “I can’t do that weird accent.

  “But you know, geniuses?” Her voice rises. “Wait till she gets a load of this piggy bank.”

  ANNOUNCEMENTS

  The idea for a baby is an inner light. Never before has Elena sensed her spirit. As if the white mist/fire of it were cloned? Divided?

  She gets a little queasy when she thinks about that speckled ovum, like a red-checked tablecloth waiting to be laid with a picnic.

  Tim says, Whoa. Elena.

  The conversation drops off a cliff and they can hear its tiny ring-ping-ping when it hits the metal bottom. What kind of cliff is like a sink, stainless steel?

  But she can’t help herself. Since when has life offered such perfect resourcefulness? Since when has life collected all its lost buttons and suggested: two eyes, a nose, a mouth...

  They�
�ve joked before about women friends who quit their jobs. When the babies come, their faces look like pansies and their fists like fleshy clubs. Both the babies and the mothers.

  It’s not that, says Tim, determined.

  I’ll stay home and pair socks! Make authentic pita between feedings!

  She hears herself say “feedings,” and it gives her courage and a kind of musical machismo, like she used to get from dancing drunk.

  Or I’ll go back to work and drop—him? her?—off at a daycare that keeps the babies in pens till they soak through their pants like a Romanian orphanage.

  Rumanian, Tim corrects her.

  At work she tells Sheri and Anita. They take her out to lunch and insist she order a virgin margarita. Sheri insists; it’s what she wishes someone had done for her, she says, dangerously plaintive.

  Anita says: In other countries, where they don’t have, for instance, a certain family-values recovering-alcoholic president, tequila does not impact the future neuro-psych test scores of your baby, Elena.

  Anita, of the amazingly slender flanks, like a greyhound, has three children. Elena realizes with some shock that she has never thought of Anita as a mother until this moment. In fact, she’s never thought of women in general as mothers, and she takes a quick glance around the restaurant. It makes her woozy to imagine all of these dowdy office types in poly shells and rusky skirts—well—having the same inner light as she does.

  The margarita is a slushy bowl of fruit punch. The corn chips in the basket are greasy, unsalted, and Elena already feels like a cow craving a salt lick.

  Anita: So, are you going to find out?

  Elena says she doesn’t think there’s anything surprising about being surprised by the gender.

  I used to think it took nine months for the baby to decide for itself, says Sheri.

  Do you have names yet? Sheri is like an eager little calico, ready to knead your leg if you let her jump in your lap. But it’s not kneading—of course!—it’s nursing, thinks Elena.

  We’re scaring her, chides Anita. Elena pushes the salad in a deep-fried shell toward the center of the table.

  Then Sheri says: I had to give up my first.

  All three women are silent. Needlessly, and helplessly, Sheri says: Baby.

  Is this some kind of initiation? For ten years now, Sheri and Anita have been her best friends at work. Elena is suddenly furious. Why has Sheri kept her dirty secret?

  Then Sheri says, genuinely embarrassed, I don’t know why I just told you.

  Elena doesn’t think the ball should be in her court. After all, it wasn’t her idea to have lunch at a Mexican restaurant.

  But Anita is fluent: Was it your parents?

  Sheri sort of breathes, Yes, and adds, Another lifetime. There’s a flare of recognition between the two coworkers. Elena is left out of it.

  Most days she takes the MBTA home, to its last stop: Providence. A couple of times a month, when her timing is off, she takes Amtrak. It’s twice as quiet and five times as expensive.

  There’s the canyon of colonial houses, the tall white point of the oldest Baptist church in America, the golden dome of the Old Stone Bank. The train station is right against the statehouse, which she used to call the Taj Mahal when she first moved here, for grad school. It strikes her that every day she makes these same tired observations.

  She says: I broke the news at work. Anita and Sheri.

  And? Tim says guardedly.

  They approve, I guess, says Elena.

  Tim’s already told a few people. He hasn’t told anyone that Elena had been insistent in sex, not exactly aggressive, but as if she were at some sport. Perhaps rowing. But he has said that they were sure about the due date. And he’s told his brother how Elena had wanted the lights out, a first, as if she were going to be able to actually see a conceptual spark in the darkness. And then he’d been embarrassed, sensing his brother’s embarrassment.

  When Elena is six months pregnant she hangs a rainbow-shedding prism in the clerestory window above the bassinet of the future infant. Little pixels of color will twinkle over her baby’s skin like non-denominational haloes.

  It’s a Saturday in September and she calls her mother. Whimsically she says, What’s it going to be like?

  Her mother replies, Joy is an acquired taste, Elena.

  What? cries Elena, laughing incredulously. It’s not the first time her mother has issued warning. Elena understands it’s mitigating, almost superstitious. Since when has Elena become ridiculously, heartbreakingly optimistic?

  The baby’s room is on the fourth floor of a typical triple-decker on the East Side of Providence. Quadra-decker, Tim calls it, the attic converted to make a duplex apartment, a small study under the eaves for Tim, and an alcove for the baby. Elena and Tim have lived here for eight years. Unmarried, except for the last three months. Tim’s colleague married them, and the oriental rug in his living room shows up in all the “wedding” pictures. Tim and Elena trading rings, raising modest glasses of apple cider. They had walked home along the brick sidewalks, up and down over tree roots, holding hands, wondering separately at love’s sudden practicality.

  In the ninth month, December, Elena gives her notice. Not three weeks of paid maternity leave, but goodbye forever to the deliberate clatter of her high heels bisecting the commuter rail platform. She doesn’t tell Tim for a full week afterward. Not because she’s being devious, nor does she dread it, although he will be shocked and he will have to hurry up and finish his eighth-year dissertation so he can earn their keep.

  Elena has to admit she doesn’t tell him because she’s superstitious. Just like her mother.

  When the day comes, Anita and Sheri watch her pack up her desk from a respectful distance. They make a show of being strictly professional about it. Sheri has since apologized for her outburst over lunch: For stealing your thunder, Elena. She was sixteen and she was sent to a home for wayward adolescents. Sheri lets her starched blond hair sheath her face as she—bravely? pitifully?—finishes. Elena thinks maybe Sheri hasn’t told enough people this secret. It seems as if there’s a threshold for secrets.

  Then Sheri says: I live for that day I hear a knock, though.

  And the light inside Elena gyrates like the beacon of a lighthouse.

  Anita says, Is it all the propaganda about breast milk?

  Elena shakes her head, mute, as she passes under the office mistletoe. It’s plastic, and the berries look like tiny egg sacs.

  Because you can pump, one; and two, some babies just don’t take to it.

  The day she comes home with her briefcase and a tote bag stuffed with personal effects, she says to Tim: I broke the news at work.

  And? Tim says, to cover for himself—he’s not sure what news she’s talking about, but he sees the bursting tote bag.

  She waits for him to make sense of it.

  He bends down and cradles her belly that is not a belly anymore it’s so freakishly distended. When he stands up his face is glowing from the contact. You’re not a Mayzie, Elena, he says in all seriousness.

  She laughs uncertainly to hold the place where laughter could be inserted.

  No nanny/elephant sitting on your nest. Producing a kid who’s half kid and half nanny, Tim pronounces.

  They’ve always had a sense of being together because they’re different from other people. But maybe it’s no more than a biological trick to get them to couple, thinks Elena.

  Tim is tall and fair, verging on redheaded. He bicycles to his university office. He will always harbor a little disappointment he can’t wear black turtlenecks—he looks like a corpse—but he consoles himself with a real tweed jacket he bought in Scotland. People like to think he’s Scottish.

  Elena has been described as gorgeous, because she’s dark and dramatic, with first-class, movie star eyebrows, and as Tim said once, eyes that talk. Her mother says: Isn’t it wonderful. People are comfortable these days with ethnic.

  Elena’s mother would never dare call a daughte
r of hers gorgeous.

  The linden tree in front of their triple-decker is skuzzy with pollen and the metal stair rail is sticky with sap. There are young flies all over it. Even the sky seems yellow-green.

  The baby is three months old, and the baby is three hundred years old, and the baby could care less about arithmetic. There is only—as in, in this world only—the bassinet in the converted attic. Because now that Elena knows the searing hypnosis of pain, the slick catapult of a full-sized dolphin shooting through her entrails (stomach is the least of it), the kinetic energy of the bare wet worm on her blood-spattered chest, she would never leave this baby alone for an instant. Not to mention the panic she felt when they brought the baby home and the entire triple-decker—not just their apartment, but the apartment of the urology resident, and the apartment of the downsized retirees from Maine with their vanity plates (NVR2LT)—was cast in utter darkness. So she sleeps in the gliding rocker by the bassinet, watches the linden tree outside the three-quarter-sized attic windows, reads through his naps in the same rocker with her varicose lower half propped up on the changing table.

  The baby is three months old and Elena has the sense that Time itself has a three-month-old’s consciousness. Time cannot, for example, roll over, and Time’s blue eyes are still bleary, even flat, marked by a previous universe. She supposes Time can hear—her baby passed the hearing tests—but can’t or won’t pick out the words of her specific pleas, spells, sentences. It seems irrelevant to say Time is going slow, or Time is going fast. Time, like her baby, moves spastically, with a startle reflex.

  Anita visits. She takes one look around the overheated apartment: Elena. As if staying home were a still life, and going back to work? Some kind of action-adventure movie?

  Just ask people to touch his feet, says Anita. Anita herself squeezes the baby’s tiny white tube sock.

  It takes Elena an hour to get ready to leave the apartment. Anita pretends to be very patient. Elena tries to do everything with the baby strapped to her chest. Finally Anita says, Here. Let me hold him while you brush your teeth.