A Mother's Love

by Mary Morris

  Bobby’s cry startled me. While I was drawing, I’d almost forgotten he was there. Earlier I had nursed him in my bed, then left him there to sleep, thinking he wouldn’t wake for hours. Now he had woken, but I wanted to finish what I was drawing, so I kept on, hoping he’d go back to sleep. His wail, though, grew more insistent. I pulled myself up from the chair and went over to the bed. He was shrieking as I touched his cheek, which was moist and warm but not feverish. Gently I lifted him.

  He was soaked and the bed was too. Placing him on the changing table, I pulled off his wet pajamas, flinging them into the corner of the room where the laundry was piled high. I took off the diaper and hurled it into the trash. Bobby was screaming, his buttocks raw, his body exposed, cold, naked. His mouth opened into a widening gap, moving it like a suckerfish. As I rubbed cream on his genitals, his bottom, he quieted. His face looked soothed as I cooed and diapered him. He seemed to smile as I hummed a tune to calm him.

  I tugged the urine-stained sheets off the bed and blotted the mattress. Holding Bobby to my chest, I went to the linen closet, but there was only one top sheet. I threw this on the bed as I patted the baby with my free hand. There, I said. It’s all right. I put a dry washcloth on the wet spot and tucked in the sheet.

  Then I lay down with Bobby, like a lover, in my arms. His skin fit against my skin like a graft. Resting him on a pillow, I let him nurse. As he drew milk, warmth raced through my body. It was a soothing tug that made Matthew seem even farther away than he was—across the bridge in Brooklyn. But now I drifted from the city as if I were traveling to a warm place—an island with tropical flowers, birds soaring. A seascape rose before me. Palms overhead. It switched to the desert, the place I’ve always known. Mojave. I felt myself walking across hot sand until my eyes closed and I slept.

  I woke with a start. Bobby’s head had slipped off my chest and was wedged between my body and the pillow. The nurse had warned me about pillows. I jerked up, thinking he’d suffocated. Gripping him, I pulled this creature of less than ten pounds back onto my chest. His breath rose and fell in rhythm with my own. His heart pounded against my heart, breath against my breath, and we stayed there through the night.

  In the morning the sun shone, a clear blue winter’s day. I made the bed. I pulled the single sheet tight along the edges, folded the blankets smoothly on top. Later I’d do the wash, the dishes, but for now at least I made the bed. It was a promise I’d made to myself. When my mother lived with us, there were unmade beds, dirty dishes stacked in the sink. In my dreams I saw her in a nightgown, the shades drawn, with ashtrays and cups of stale coffee surrounding her. I never remembered her dressed unless she had somewhere to go. My father says it was hardly ever like this. “Your mother was a very neat woman,” he said once, defending her. “She always got dressed and she kept a nice house.”

  This may be so, but it is not what I recall.

  TWO

  KINGSTON CAVERNS was a full day’s drive from Las Vegas, but once my mother took us there. I don’t remember much about the long drive, except for the tarantulas that we crushed as they raced back and forth across the road and the fact that Sam was with us. It was the only time she went with me and my mother on our excursions. Sam wore a pair of blue-and-red overalls that were too big for her. She wore this same outfit the whole time we were away, so I assume my mother hadn’t taken the time to pack.

  With her red hair, the same color as mine, and her birthmark, Sam looked like Raggedy Ann. She had a strawberry mark, like a star, on the side of her face. It wasn’t very big, but she kept her hand moving there as if it were a stain she could rub away. I liked to touch it, thinking it could warm my hand. After they were gone, I searched for Sam’s face in malls and airports. I knew this mark was the way I’d find them.

  My mother hated the tarantulas with their furry bodies. She thought they were poisonous, so no matter how much I pleaded, she wouldn’t stop and let me look at them. She wouldn’t try to avoid them as they scuttled across the road. Little devils, she called them, creatures from hell. The crunch of their bodies punctuated our drive. It was dark when we reached the motel in a town where everything looked like the Old West, complete with wooden sidewalks, saloon, and hitching posts. There was the jail, the post office, the general store. But it was all fake. Just façades. We ate dinner that night in a cafeteria that served platters of fried chicken, which Sam and I devoured while our mother sipped black coffee.

  In the morning she was in a hurry to get going. She told us to dress quickly, though Sam could barely dress herself. She looked at me helplessly as she fumbled with her buttons and tried to pull on her shoes. My father always dressed her, so I had to sit on the floor and tie her shoes while our mother stood impatiently at the door.

  We took the winding road to the caverns. The road was bumpy as it rose through canyon country where the rocks were pink and green. I thought my mother would take us with her into the caves, but she pulled up in front of the cinderblock house where the woman who ran the caverns sold soda and postcards. The house had a room off to the side that served as the nursery and kennel. “It’s too far for you girls to walk,” she said. “I’ll pick you up later.”

  The place smelled of urine, and there were anxious dogs with a desperate look in their eyes. The dogs, which could easily have roasted to death inside their cars, howled and whined in their cages. A partition separated the nursery from the kennel. In the nursery a few infants dozed. The only carpeting on the cool cement floor was a small circle with blocks on it.

  “All right,” my mother said, tapping us on the head. “I’ll pick you up later.” The woman, who was Hispanic, looked at us askance but said nothing. I believe we were too old for this facility.

  “Now you girls behave,” our mother said, waving good-bye. She looked very young and pretty in a white blouse and blue skirt, her black hair piled high on her head. “Do what the lady says.”

  “Don’t worry,” the woman said. “I’ll take care of them. Enjoy yourself.”

  “I will,” my mother said. “I will.”

  Sam whimpered and began to cry. She always was that kind of child, given to shifts of mood, sudden drops into despair. She was like our mother in this regard, laughing one moment, weeping the next, and I found myself annoyed with her. I was more like our father, carefree and fun-loving. At least I was until my mother left for good. But now I comforted Sam. I put my arms around her until she stopped crying. I held her to me and she sobbed into my chest.

  The woman, who had pockmarked skin and greasy hair pulled back from her face, led us around by the hand. We spent the morning on the floor, playing with a block set. I built a city for Sam, complete with roads and buildings, places to hide and play, and eventually Sam picked up blocks and helped me. We built a series of tunnels where moles could live and a rocket ship to outer space. The woman listened to a Spanish radio station and read us a comic book. She gave us juice and oatmeal cookies for a snack. Then she had us lie down on clean white cots. Sam went right to sleep, exhausted from her efforts not to fall apart, but I told the woman I was not a napper. I had never been a napper, I insisted, a fact of which I was proud. So the woman rubbed my back until I fell asleep.

  We woke to some excitement as a nervous couple arrived to deposit their infant, who cried and cried as his parents were leaving. The Hispanic woman kept waving them away. “He’ll be fine. Soon as you’re gone,” she said, “he’ll settle down.” The mother, who was very young, kept looking back. The baby did settle down after his parents left, but it wasn’t much later when the couple returned. The woman looked as if she had been crying. They took their child away.

  After that the day just dragged on. We went with the woman to take the dogs for a walk. “I don’t think we’ll miss your mother if we go outside for a little while,” she said, shaking her head. She clasped our hands and the dogs’ leashes in one hand. The leashes left marks on our arms. There were three dogs—a large reddish-gold one and two little poodles. The big red one seem
ed to like Sam and me—because of our red hair, I reasoned—and he licked our faces and played with us. I hoped that its owner wouldn’t come back and we’d get to keep it. But eventually we grew weary even of the red dog. Other couples came and went, collecting their sleeping infants. The woman kept looking at the clock and shaking her head. She had started to tidy up, perhaps wondering where to take us for the night, when our mother arrived.

  She was flushed, and now her hair tumbled down her back. Now the woman rose in a huff and pointed to the sign overhead, which she read to my mother. It said something about taking your children if you plan to leave the premises.

  “Oh,” my mother said indignantly, “I did not leave the premises. I’ve been visiting the caverns all day. I’ve been fascinated by everything I saw.” She began to talk about the bats that had flown by the millions from the mouth of the cave, about the green underwater pools and the colored columns of rock that stood upside down. She said she’d learned that a bat can locate its pups among a million bats, just by their voices. She described for us a strange, underground world, a maze of caves in which you could easily lose yourself. At first I felt certain that she had seen all those things.

  But my mother was different then from the way she’d been earlier in the day. Even though there was something relaxed and soothing about her, she wouldn’t look Sam or me in the eye. Her blouse was wrinkled and the collar was smudged; she didn’t have any lipstick on. I could tell she’d had a good time. I also had the feeling she hadn’t spent the day by herself.

  When we got outside it was dark, and I wanted to ask her more about the caverns, especially the bats she’d seen fly from the mouth of the cave, but something made me think better of it, and I said nothing at all. “So, you girls must be hungry,” she said, almost as an afterthought. “Do you want to go for dinner somewhere?”

  We went to a diner, where Sam and I ordered hamburgers. My mother picked French fries off our plates, carefully dipping just the ends into catsup. She hardly ever ate. She said it was for her figure. She drank black coffee and smoked cigarettes and sucked oranges. During a meal, she’d nibble off someone else’s plate. After dinner, we drove until my mother said she was too tired to drive any more. We checked into a dingy motel on Route 66. Almost all my mother’s excursions were along Route 66. She liked this highway because, she said, it could take you anywhere—wherever you wanted to be. The Mother Road, it was called. She used to joke about that.

  Just before we went to sleep, I said to her, “Don’t you think we should phone Dad? Let him know we’re all right?” She looked at me in an exasperated way and I knew I’d failed some test I didn’t know I was taking. That night Sam and I slept in the same bed, and she wrapped her arms and legs around me as if she were a monkey clinging to a branch. Often at home Sam would crawl into bed beside me, though I tried to kick her away. She’d hold on, no matter what I did to pry her loose. But in that motel room I let her cling to me as tightly as she ever had, and did not pry her away.

  It was late the next day when we arrived back at the Valley of Fire trailer park. My father sat in a lawn chair on the porch, cigarette dangling from his mouth, a drink in a tall amber-colored glass clutched in his fist. He rushed to us when he saw the car. “Oh, thank God!” he cried, pressing me and Sam to him. “Thank God you’re home.”

  I don’t know how many nights later it was when I woke to find my mother standing in the doorway of my room. The light from the bathroom shone behind her and I could see the curve of her hips, the outline of her form. She was naked and trembling. My mother had a trim, sleek body with breasts that were sturdy and taut, and she often walked around the house naked. She seemed very strong physically, though she did nothing to stay in shape. But now she shook like a frightened rabbit. “Oh, Ivy,” I heard her say, leaning her body against the doorjamb, “I had a bad dream.”

  “What did you dream about?” I asked. Her long black hair was disheveled. She was waiting for me to invite her in. Sam, who slept in the bed next to mine, stirred slightly. I was happy to be the elder, to have my mother confiding in me. She came in, pushing my legs aside, and sat down on the bed.

  “Oh, I don’t want to tell you. It was about my early life.” I knew little about my mother’s past, and what I did would come after she was gone, from my father, though his past was also vague. It seemed then as if my parents had come from nowhere, and later, when I learned about spontaneous generation in school, I thought they had sprouted from the soil.

  Now she began to weep. Dropping her head, she sank onto the pillow beside me. I didn’t know what to do. I put my arms around her and she nestled into them. Her flesh was soft and smooth, and she smelled of perfume and liquor, cigarettes and soap.

  “No matter what happens, promise me, Ivy, promise me,” she said, “that you’ll be a big girl. You’ll be strong.”

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I don’t know.” She clasped my hands. “You know what I hope? I hope that when you’re grown up, we can be friends. We can take walks and talk about everything that’s happened to us.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes and she pulled me to her. Her breath was warm against my face; her nipples pressed into my chest. I stroked her hair. I don’t know how much later it was that my mother fell asleep and I sat up beside her, hovering the way I’d once seen a dog in a movie beside his dead master, not letting anyone near.

  THREE

  PATRICIA CAMPBELL sat at her kitchen counter, making gazpacho in a blender and Heloise’s boric acid roach balls in a bowl. “That looks good,” I said, pointing to the roach balls as I walked in. She handed me the recipe. Sugar, flour, bacon fat, onions, boric acid.

  “The roaches love them,” Patricia said as she mashed the mix, stuffed it into small aluminum-foil boats, and tucked them into drawers. “I haven’t seen you for a while.” She tossed her blond hair off her face with the back of her hand. She stood tall, regal, like a figurehead on the prow of a ship.

  “Well, it’s not so easy for me to get downtown these days,” I said with a laugh, pushing the stroller into a corner and dropping Bobby’s bag, filled with his bottles, diapers, change of clothes. I rubbed my shoulder where the bag had been.

  Patricia reached for an armful of wet clothes and tossed them into the dryer. She dropped another load into the washer. I glanced into her living room: magazines were neatly stacked in corners, the books were in alphabetical order. When she opened the refrigerator, it sparkled with fresh fruit and vegetables. The roaches were a part of life in New York (the neighbor’s roaches, really, Patricia said), but everything else was clean, white. I thought of the dishes I’d left in the sink, the pile of newspapers by the door. The cartons of take-out food in the fridge that I dipped into for dinner. “Some days,” I said, “I don’t even get outside.”

  “I can imagine,” Patricia said, making me wonder if she could. “I’m overworked too. It’s not that easy to get together anymore.” Patricia and I used to see each other almost every week. We’d meet somewhere midway for a quick dinner or a six o’clock film. But since Bobby was born, she had come uptown only twice—once to the hospital and another time shortly after I brought him home. Though we spoke often, we hadn’t seen each other in several weeks.

  She’d gotten home late and was rushing to fix dinner. Brown rice was already cooking, and she grabbed some carrots and broccoli, slicing and dropping them into a steamer. When she took out two white fish fillets, my heart sank. I was so hungry these days. I had to eat frugally to save money. Still, I was eating, but it seemed I could never get enough. Even though I hardly ate—and couldn’t afford—red meat, I had been hoping for steak, lamb chops, something to fill me up. Instead, I munched on the cheese and crackers, and sipped the seltzer Patricia had placed before me.

  She moved quickly through the motions of salting the fish. She hadn’t had time to change after work, and she still wore a skirt and sneakers. Patricia was one of those women who walk home as if they are on m
ilitary drill. “I’m always late,” she complained. “The city brings me down. I’m always in a hurry, but where am I going?”

  “It’s true,” I agreed. “I used to feel that way too, that I didn’t know where I was going. But now, well, I think I know.” Bobby began to whimper and I tried to distract him with a rattle, but he cried in earnest and my milk started to flow. He stared at me, angry at being denied, through his black eyes—his father’s eyes. It was difficult for me to look at him and not think of Matthew, though I tried not to. In some ways it might have been easier if I’d had a girl. I could not bathe Bobby or change him—I could not look at his naked body—and not think about the man who fathered him.

  Tentatively I picked him up, undoing my blouse. Bobby moved his head up and down as he struggled to reach my breast. “I wish you’d come to see us more,” I said to Patricia.

  “Oh, I try, but you know. Everyone’s so busy. Our lives are so demanding.” I nodded, then frowned. Bobby clamped down, his mouth firmly on my breast. Lately I didn’t seem to be so busy anymore.

  Patricia saw me wince. “It hurts?”

  “A lot,” I said. “They just don’t put it in any of the books.”

  Patricia nodded as she set the table, sorting through the knives and forks. Patricia had nice things. She had real silverware and porcelain plates. She had silver spoons for ladeling gravy and soups. She had things that had belonged to her family. Antique furniture from her aunt’s farmhouse. Her bed was the one her grandmother was born in. When she married Scott, her mother had given her the family linen, the chest that had held her own trousseau. On her dresser were pictures of large groups of people—the extended family—taken at their annual reunions. In some a yacht was moored in the background, waves lapped a Maine shore. Other reunions were held on the family farm, the one they still owned upstate. It had a name. Shady Creek. “This weekend,” Patricia would say, “we’re going to Shady Creek.”