A Mother's Love

by Mary Morris

  Halfway through the day my stomach growled. I hadn’t had breakfast and it was almost lunch-time, but I didn’t want to spend money on a mid-town sandwich. I should have brought something from home, not that I had much in the fridge. My stomach growled again, and I thought that lately I had the gnawing emptiness that I had not felt since my mother forgot to give Sam and me supper before bed. Alma looked over as I smiled an embarrassed smile. “Ivy, have you eaten? You’ve got to eat something.”

  “I’m okay. I don’t want to stop.”

  “But maybe you should stop.” She had half a tuna fish sandwich and a cup of coffee on her desk. “Here. Take these … if you don’t want to go out.”

  “No, really, I’ll be fine,” but she shoved the food over to my workbench. I took little bites, but I felt ashamed. When I was done, it was as if I hadn’t eaten at all.

  We divided the day, taking care of Bobby until Alma and Suzette had to go, leaving me at the bench, where I worked until past seven o’clock. I was growing weak with hunger, but I kept working. When I got home, I’d make something to eat.

  It was going to take me almost ten hours to complete a job that normally took six. As Alma was leaving, she’d said, “Ivy, let me give you a piece of advice. You can’t do this on your own. You have to hire somebody. And you need to take care of yourself.” I nodded; she was right and I would get someone to help, though I knew it would be weeks before I could afford it.

  When I was getting ready to leave, Mike, who was doing the books, handed me an envelope with cash for my day’s efforts. Two hundred dollars. “This is too much,” I said.

  “You worked ten hours; that’s what you get.”

  “Mike, half the time I wasn’t working. It was a six-hour job and you know it. I can’t take this money.”

  “Take the money; you need it.”

  “I’ll take pay for six hours’ work and not a penny more.”

  Annoyed with me, Mike took fifty dollars out of the envelope. “I’ll put this in my desk. It’s there if you need it.”

  “Thanks,” I said, tears filling my eyes.

  Exhausted and ravenous when I reached home at eight o’clock, I looked in the refrigerator and found some eggs, butter, a few slices of bread. While I heated a skillet, I put Bobby in front of the television; “Nature” was on with a show about hummingbirds. He seemed transfixed by the luminous colors, the beating of wings. As I cracked three eggs into the skillet, I heard the narrator explain that the female hummingbird raises her young alone and alters her body functions in order to do so. Her pulse increases, her body temperature drops to conserve strength. Some females, the narrator went on, die of exhaustion, in which case the chicks starve.

  I put my eggs on a plate and began to eat greedily, paying no attention to my son. Perhaps I could devise a way to drop my temperature, raise my pulse. I ate as if I were truly starved; I couldn’t get the food into me fast enough. It was a while before I noticed the stench, still longer before I paid attention to it. Maybe it wasn’t the smell but Bobby’s cry that got my attention. And then it took me longer still to see what was wrong. As I bent over him, I saw that his clothes were soaked, drenched in light brown liquid that oozed out onto his shirt, covering him.

  I picked him up and saw that he was soiled everywhere. Even his baby seat. I had to find a way to rinse the filth off him. A bath wouldn’t work because the dirt would fill his tub. And besides, where could I put him while I got the tub ready. I could take a shower, holding him in the shower, but all I wanted to do was eat.

  It occurred to me that I could rinse him off in the sink under the faucet. Then I could wrap him in a towel while I finished eating. Later I’d bathe him properly and dress him for bed. Peeling off his soiled clothes, I tossed them aside and ran the water in the sink, equal amounts of hot and cold. Balancing him in my hand, I let the water rush over his body, and rubbed a little soap on him. “Now that feels good, doesn’t it?” I said. He seemed happy to be washed and to feel the water coursing over his body. He cooed as I swished the water over his chest, his legs, his genitals; the filth that covered him was whisked away.

  Perhaps because I was tired and hungry, because I could not think, I stood holding Bobby under the faucet, wondering how I could turn the water off and still hold the baby. I seemed incapable of just letting the water run while I got the towel and wrapped him up. So, clasping Bobby firmly in one hand, I turned off one of the faucets with the other. Suddenly his face turned red, then shaped itself into a howl of pain. It took only an instant before an actual sound was uttered and I grasped what I’d done. I had turned off the cold water, leaving the hot to flow over my child. I stared into Bobby’s gaping mouth. It was the first time I had seen him in pain, let alone pain that I had brought upon him. I pulled him away from the hot water.

  His face was red and wrinkled as he screamed, like an old man’s. I held him up to the light. He was not burned, but he screamed and screamed. I have scalded my child, I thought, crushing him to me. I am like her, I said, and this proves it. I am just like her.

  SEVEN

  MY MOTHER sat at the door of the trailer, sketching—something she liked to do. She sketched mountains, valleys, the clouds, the scene from the window of our trailer. Even as a child, I knew her drawing wasn’t very good, but she didn’t seem to care. Neither did I. I sat watching her for a long time. As she drew, her tongue moved in her mouth like a lizard’s. It was always strange to me that when my mother wasn’t talking or eating, her tongue kept moving, twisting, flicking.

  I used to watch the lizards on the rocks near our trailer, and I saw how their tongues flicked even when they had no insect to grab. The connection between my mother and lizards fascinated me and I began to think about these cold-blooded creatures—their nocturnal habits, their love of warm rocks, the swiftness of their movements when danger was near. But none of this gave me any clues to understanding my mother. It just seemed as if they both flicked their tongues even when they had nothing to land on. Nervous tongues with nothing to do.

  That day my mother must have grown impatient with me hovering at her side. “Here,” she said, motioning, “you can take some colors.” She had a box of crayons with forty-eight colors in them, something I had coveted for a long time. “You can draw.”

  I drew a pink sun. A blue cow. “Oh, no, not like that,” she said. “That’s not right. I’ll show you how.”

  “I know,” I said. “I can do this.” I drew a purple chimpanzee, rainbow rocks, bushes that burned red.

  “That’s not right,” she said. “The colors are wrong.”

  “I like it this way,” I replied.

  “You think you know everything, don’t you? You think you know it all.” I was six years old and I stood there, crayons clutched between my fingers, but she grabbed them from me. “Well, that’s not right, that’s not how you draw.” And she broke the crayons I’d been using, every single one.

  A week later she bought me my own box of crayons, but it had only sixteen colors. This was her way of apologizing. “Here, now we don’t have to share,” she said. “Now you can draw with these.” I stared into the box, then stared at hers, for she had bought a new one for herself, the same big box with the forty-eight colors. She gave me the box of sixteen, but it wasn’t like hers. There was no silver, no flesh, no gold.

  EIGHT

  I BEGAN MY SEARCH again. Periodically over the years I have searched for them. Hired detectives, run ads. I knew it would be useless. Even if I found them, what would I discover? Still, I began again. What is the point of looking for someone who left of her own free will? Who had been gone so long? What did I hope to find? But how could I expect to be a mother without finding my own mother? The two became inextricably linked in my mind; it seemed impossible that I could be the former without finding the latter.

  I read somewhere that a person spends two years of his or her life searching for things—objects misplaced. Receipts, a screwdriver, the missing mate to a sock. The everyday searche
s that make up our lives. In the end we devote two solid years to such banal quests. In my case I wondered each time I looked for my mother and Sam what the numbers would be. Ten times that? Or more?

  I found myself staring at the faces of the missing on the post office bulletin board. Children snatched from supermarkets, an elderly woman who left on a snowy night. I used to read the tabloids, thinking a familiar face might appear. I began again to read whatever I could get my hands on—clippings from newspapers, articles Patricia sent. Some simply amused me, such as the sweet Polish couple who took off with their savings and their children’s inheritance to live it up in the islands for their last years. Others—like the story of the woman who every year since 1973 on her daughter’s birthday took out a classified ad in dozens of newspapers across the land, “Barbara, happy birthday, darling, please, come home”—moved me to tears.

  I pored over accounts of reunion, of untold joy. The man who located his boys after a search of nine years. The Chinese mother who’d never stopped looking until the daughter, stolen from her at birth, was found. The one that intrigued me the most—the one I carried in my wallet for years—was about the missing sea captain. His ship had arrived back in port in Baton Rouge without the skipper on board. The authorities as well as his crewmen were perplexed. He was too happy to have killed himself. He was popular and unlikely to have been pushed. He was too good a sailor to fall into the sea. There was a possibility that he had taken off on his own. One wet suit was missing. But he had been a doting father, a loving husband. He had only a $37,000 life insurance policy. Fraud was ruled out. To this day his case remains unsolved.

  I know something about finding a missing person. You start with a name. Take my mother’s name, for instance, Jessica Hope Holmes Slovak. You take all the parts of the name and you turn them around. Or you take grandmother’s maiden name (Anderson in my case). This is the strange truth about people who are missing of their own free will: it is difficult to leave yourself behind. It is not that you can’t change your name, say, from Jessica Hope Holmes Slovak to Angelina Fallachino, move to the middle of South Carolina where you know no one, invent a coherent history for yourself (born in Portland, Oregon, of Italian-American parents who were killed in a car crash). It is just not what people tend to do.

  What they are likely to do is hold on to a piece of the past. They move back to a town where they once lived. (One man searched the nation for his wife and daughter for seven years, only to run into them in the produce aisle of the supermarket near his house.) They create a name that has a part of their previous name. They get in touch with just one person they once knew. Eventually they’ll need to register a car, enroll in school, take out insurance. So perhaps my mother became Hope Anderson, moved to a part of California where we used to live. This is the likely scenario, because most people have neither the courage nor the imagination to reinvent themselves completely.

  Patricia helped me get new lists of detectives who might handle cases like mine. Missing persons, abandoned children, runaways. I am comfortable in the world of detectives, for it is not so different from that of gamblers, with its seedy side, its smoke-filled rooms. Men living on the underside. I call and say I’m trying to trace my mother and sister, and the detective will dutifully take down all the information, fill in the missing person’s report.

  We breeze through the “last seen where” and “what is your relationship to the missing person.” Then they get to the “how long have they been missing,” and there is always a palpable pause. The more professional detective refrains from saying, “You’ve got to be kidding,” but a few have said that, and worse. One said, “This is a joke, right?” Twenty-five years. It feels like a joke, except of course it is my life.

  Sometimes the detectives are nice and say things like, “Lady, I’m not sure I can help you much with this.” One even said, “Listen, let me give you a piece of advice. Get on with your life.” I’m going to have a child, I explain, and this child has a grandmother and an aunt out there, and maybe they’re even looking for me.

  Just before Bobby was born I took my meager savings and hired a man named O’Malley. An ex-Marine, he worked out of a second-floor office on the Lower East Side, the kind of office you’d see in those 1940s’ cult films. Name painted in black letters on the frosted glass door; Peggy, the secretary, who wore bright red lipstick and nail polish. No pictures on the wall; paint chipping; papers piled everywhere. O’Malley was huge, with watery blue eyes. Peggy handed me a cup of instant coffee with Dairy Creamer when I sat down. I don’t know if Peggy did this with everyone, but she looked at me with sad round eyes.

  O’Malley specialized in marital cases. His office was riddled with evidence and clues—envelopes labeled “Strictly Personal,” photographs, gloves. “More men hire detectives than women,” he told me right away. “It’s not often that I get a woman. Maybe women expect men to cheat.” Male pride, he said; that’s what kept his business going.

  He’d done a murder case or two, your usual missing person, custody. “You know, one guy took off with his two little girls. That was six years ago. The mother hasn’t been the same since. Can you imagine?”

  O’Malley called Peggy over as I handed him a picture of a five-year-old girl. “Isn’t that what you need?” I asked. “The distinguishing mark.” He looked at the picture of the girl squinting in a bathing suit, and saw what appeared to be a shadow on one side of her face. “That’s her birth-mark,” I said, “a strawberry mark. It can’t be removed, not even with a laser. It’s in the pigment. You can find someone who looks like that, can’t you?”

  I hired him at a cost that was dear, and he searched. He went to California and filed endless expense reports. He went to plastic surgeons and sent me lists of women who had tried to have such birthmarks removed. He actually found a California-based poet of a certain renown who matched the description of Sam, but her happily married parents lived in Nebraska, in the same town where they’d always lived. They were relatively confused by their daughter’s literary success and thought the detective was from the press.

  O’Malley called me after this and said, “Listen, lady, give it up. I know people who can’t answer the phone or open a door or go to the mail and not think this is it. The letter I’ve been waiting for. The unexpected return. I know people, good people, nice upstanding individuals, who’ve made themselves sick.”

  After spending hundreds of dollars, I agreed that O’Malley was right, and I dispensed with his services. The day I let him go, Peggy took me aside, her coffee breath close to my face. “Don’t give up,” she said. “They’re out there somewhere.” When I phoned to tell my father, he was enraged. “You’re going to need a baby sitter,” he shouted. “So you hire a detective. Does that make any sense?”

  No, of course it didn’t. But I could not help myself. How, I kept thinking, can I be a mother if I do not know my own mother? And the way to my mother was obviously through Sam. As I told O’Malley the day I decided to terminate his services, “You know, one day I’ll walk into a mall, a crowded theater, an airport, and there she’ll be. I’ll see her. If it’s going to happen, it will be like that.” And O’Malley, a nice man, really, with a family of his own, nodded as he showed me to the door.

  The nights are longest. Until the child learns to sleep, I imagine a thousand or more like this. Nights awake, that come out whole. Or tumbling into hard slumber, only to be awakened by a child’s cries. What sleep there is comes in snatches—an hour here and there. A pause in the endless fabric that makes up my nights as a mother alone. So often I find myself gazing into space, peering into the apartment of the woman with the number tattooed on her arm who swaddles her Chihuahuas day and night. Or of Pablo, with his costumed pets. Or, of course, of the woman across the way. I follow her comings and goings; I detect her moods. I can tell now when her ex-husband is coming for a visit, because her face grows tense and she is impatient with her kids.

  Often I bring Bobby into bed with me. I bring him so
that I can nurse and hold him and sleep, my life having reduced itself to the primordial needs. How long will I keep this up? Until he is three or six? Until people start to talk? It is at night when Bobby wakes me and I am lying in bed nursing him that I imagine what my mother’s life and Sam’s were like after they left. Did they wander around? Or did they just go to a trailer park on the Pacific Palisades and stay put? I have this image of my mother dragging Sam around from mall to mall.

  My mother loved to shop; she loved to pick her way through piles of sales items. But her favorites were accessories. Costume jewelry, blue kid gloves. “You can dress anything up or down with a scarf,” she’d say. And she’d buy whatever she could afford—things she’d never wear in the middle of the Mojave Desert. When my mother left, the only thing she didn’t take were the drawers of accessories—the things she couldn’t carry that we never knew she had. Snakeskin belts, alligator bags, elegant silk scarves with painted birds or tropical flowers on them. My father divided these between Dottie and me. I have enough accessories for a lifetime.

  Once she gave me thirty dollars and told me to go shopping. “Pick out something nice,” she said. “Something for yourself.” I rode my bike to the mall and bought purple shorts, a blue top. I bought a pale green shirtwaist dress with a white ruffled bodice. When I got home, my mother said, “Let’s see them.” Nervously I tried on the shorts, the top, the dress. Her tongue clicked as she shook her head with each item. “No,” she said, “these just aren’t you.” We took them back and my mother got a thirty-dollar store credit, which she tucked into her purse.

  Probably she is still well dressed, living in a California bungalow with a small lawn, close to the sea, where she always wanted to be. She’s had a few face lifts, but her body’s in great shape. Still single, no one in her life. There hasn’t been for a long time. Not much of a change, really. But for Sam I see different things. A subdivision near the sea called the Ocean Breeze or Mediterranean Shores in a town like Laguna or Newport Beach. She has had some new technology laser surgery on her birthmark so that it looks as if she’s got a touch of sunburn on one side of her face. I wouldn’t recognize her anymore. She’s got a husband who’s a junior executive for Database, two kids.