A Mother's Love

by Mary Morris

  We went to a neighborhood Chinese restaurant where we instinctively selected our old favorites—General’s Chicken, Sesame Noodles, Shrimp with Snowpeas.

  “So,” I said once we’d ordered and a glass of free wine arrived, “how’s your work going?”

  “Oh.” Matthew cocked his head the way he did when he couldn’t admit to being disappointed. “I’m getting a lot of foreign assignments for magazines.”

  “And your own work?”

  Now he cocked his head the other way. “It doesn’t exactly pay the bills.”

  I nodded and we grew silent, neither of us wanting to mention the bills. Money was on my mind; I needed some if I was going to hire a baby sitter and return to work full time. Normally I would have asked him outright, but we were being tentative with each other, like distant relatives brought together over some delicate legal matter, which in a sense we were. I draped a napkin over Bobby’s head and tried, as I ate with my chopsticks, not to drop steamed rice on him. When Bobby woke and I had to nurse him, Matthew fed me with a fork.

  He ran his hand through his silvery curls. He looked older than I remembered, though it hadn’t been that long since I’d seen him. “Ivy.” He put the fork down. Like my mother, Matthew always said my name before he said anything else to me. And he pronounced it “IV,” the way she did, as if I were a form of life support. “My mother phoned the other day” he began. “Her voice was shaky. Her speech was slurred. ‘Matthew,’ she said, ‘whatever happened to that nice girl, Ivy. I always liked her.’ I could hear airplanes flying in the background. She lives right near this airport and planes are always taking off and landing. Anyway, she said, ‘Ivy was good for you. She was the best of the lot, because you were nicer to me when you were with her. You remembered my birthday, holidays …’ ”

  “I just kept a calendar by the phone,” I said.

  “Well, my mother thinks I made a big mistake.”

  “Does she know about Bobby?”

  He looked grim. “She knows. But she has trouble remembering. That’s what booze does for you.” He took a deep breath, then reached across the table for my hand. “When I was a little boy,” he said as if I’d never heard of it before, “my parents stayed in bed all day long on the weekends. They drank and screwed and stayed in bed. No one played with me. I learned to cook, take care of my things, play alone. My room just had a bed and a desk. Like a monk’s cell. No pictures on the walls. No toys. A few books. I had a fish tank with no fish in it. I was the only sober person around. I took care of myself. I had to learn to do that at an early age. I’m not very good at taking care of others.”

  I nodded. “I hear it’s an acquired skill.”

  “Maybe, but I’m not sure I’ve acquired it.”

  “Matthew.” I squeezed his hand, then pulled mine away. “You aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know. Do you want me to feel sorry for you?”

  “I just wanted you to know that I think my mother was right. I think I did make a big mistake.” And he leaned over and kissed me.

  Then we went home. When it was time for me to tuck Bobby in, Matthew stayed. “I should get going,” he said, but he didn’t leave. He stayed as I cuddled Bobby, nursing him and singing as I put him to sleep. Matthew went with me into the room where Bobby slept and watched as I put him down. Together we stared at the sleeping child. When Bobby slept, he breathed heavily, his chest heaving as if he were already a man. Little beads of sweat broke out along the rim of his dark hair, and Matthew and I stood watching our son.

  “Is he all right?” Matthew asked, listening to his breathing and touching his son’s sweat.

  “He’s like you,” I told him, thinking how much they did resemble one another. “You sleep just like this.”

  I pulled the covers up to Bobby’s chin, though Bobby—a warm-blooded creature like his father—would kick them off in the night. We stood silently, watching the child. Soon I felt Matthew’s fingers wrapping themselves around mine, as we remained side by side, looking down at the baby. I’m not sure how long we stood there before he said, “I love you, Ivy. You know I do.” And of course I did.

  He turned me to him and kissed me. His tongue reached deep into my mouth; his hands gripped my back, holding me firm. He was hard, throbbing against my thigh, and he held me to him for a long time, which I did not mind because I didn’t know what I wanted to happen next. My heart beat quickly, but not from desire. Rather, it pounded the way it did when someone jumped out of a dark corner and frightened me.

  “Is this the right thing?” I asked, pulling away.

  He stood back so that he could see my face. “I want you,” he said, “But more than that, I’d like to try again. I’d like to spend time with you”—he paused—“and with Bobby.” He looked down sheepishly, as if he’d just confessed to a pointless lie.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m not completely sure. I’m never sure of anything. I can’t make any promises.”

  I smiled, putting my fingers to his lips. “You never could.”

  I wanted to ask him to leave, but I was surprised by a wave that rushed over me, as warm and comforting as when my milk let down, yet with an urgency I hadn’t felt in a long time. Not since I was a girl, I thought, sneaking out of the house to meet boys I scarcely knew in places where I wasn’t supposed to be. There was something dangerous, something slightly naughty about what I felt. Now he pulled me close so that my head rested against his shoulder. Gently he touched my breasts, which were heavy and sore.

  We made love slowly as if it were our first time, and indeed it was the first time since I’d gone to his studio when I was four months pregnant. My body seemed huge, my breasts full, and the slowness suited my mood and my physical state. It wasn’t exactly desire I felt, for motherhood had sapped and supplemented much of that, but it was a kind of comfort I had not experienced in a long while. As he sucked on my breasts, the milk flowed and he told me it was sweet as coconut juice. This made him more tender with me. He entered me gently, careful not to cause any pain, and he stayed inside for a long time.

  Afterward we lay in each other’s arms until Bobby cried. “Don’t get up,” Matthew said. “I’ll go. You rest.” Matthew took Bobby onto his shoulder. I lay still, watching them. Matthew warmed a bottle on the stove as he clumsily cradled Bobby. He would grow accustomed to this. In a few months he would see. Life could go on. He would be a good father. It would come naturally.

  He gave the baby the bottle, but Bobby fussed, spitting out the milk. “It’s all right,” I said. “He wants me.” So Matthew brought him to the bed. Another warm wave rushed over me as milk filled my breasts. The sensation that had once caused me so much pain now came with intense pleasure. Matthew put Bobby next to me and turned out the light. We lay there, the three of us together. Bobby’s damp hair smelled like a puppy’s. A kind of peace came over me as I felt hands at my breasts, mouths sucking, unsure if it were my lover or my son or both, who touched, who suckled, and, somehow nursing both of them, I drifted in and out of sleep.

  After a while, I eased my way out of bed, leaving Matthew and Bobby on separate pillows. They lay like bookends, face to face, mirror images of each other, though I didn’t want to admit it. I went to the mirror and saw my body in the moonlight. It was a strange body, foreign to me, thicker than I remembered it. My breasts looked pendulous, like the hanging teats of stray dogs I used to throw stones at as a child. But now I could see the beginning of a waistline, the shape of my hips. I gazed at this body again as if it belonged to me once more, as if it were being given back, slowly, a little at a time.

  Putting on a robe, I went to the window and sat down at my work table with the collage—the desert at night, the Day-Glo stars. Picking up a pencil, I started to draw. But I felt as if someone were watching me, so I looked up. She was standing in her window, trim body pressed against the sill, her hair down to her shoulders. Perhaps her husband was coming to get the kids and she was watching for him. Perhaps a lover was coming
to visit and she didn’t want him to ring the bell. Then I feared that she was desperate, planning to jump. I waved a finger at her. “No, no,” I whispered. Now she looked my way. I put the pencil down and for the first time our eyes met. I’m not sure how long we stared at each other in this way.

  It was Matthew who had brought me east. I probably would never have come if he hadn’t gotten the teaching job at a respectable center for photography and said he was moving to New York. He had just done his Hall of Fame project. He’d driven around the American West for months (sometimes I went along), taking pictures of all the Halls of Fame in America—the Greyhound Hall of Fame, the Corn Growers, football, cowboys, stuntmen, American plastics industry, the Furriers of North America.

  The pictures varied, but usually they included the front of the building and a major organizer or representative. For example, for the Greyhound Hall of Fame he had a famous breeder and a very old greyhound—a scrawny thing with splotchy fur that had once had a great racing career. The Furriers stood in elegant fur coats, caressing small, nervous beasts. He was offered the teaching job right after that show, though not much has happened in his career since that.

  We had been together for a little more than a year in Los Angeles. Before I met Matthew, I had been with many men. My father and Dottie and I moved back to California when I was sixteen, and while they thought I was going out with friends, I was sneaking in and out of the arms of strange men on hilltops, in bungalows, on the beaches of Los Angeles. I was the perfect student. I got straight A’s. And at night I slipped out and smoked dope with the Mexican gangs on the Venice Boardwalk. It was a kind of fix, something I had to have, though I was always attached to the ones who drifted away.

  Then I met Matthew. I wasn’t drawn to him at first. We met at the art college where Dottie had sent me years before and where I returned to take courses from time to time. He was the second person—after Dottie—who’d taken an interest in my art. He commented on what he saw, telling me what he would change. How he thought I could improve a design. He made his suggestions simply, never pressing a point. Yet his instincts about my work were always right. We saw each other for weeks, often spending our time together at galleries and museums, before we went to bed.

  When we began seeing each other, he was punctual, always on time. Within five minutes of when he said he’d be there, the buzzer would ring. If he was late, he’d phone with an explanation. This was important to me, because I never wondered in the early months whether he would show, whether he planned to leave.

  But gradually, his behavior began to change and this tied me to him more and more. He arrived a little late. Ten minutes, half an hour. Then he’d show up on time. Then forty-five minutes late. There were always good reasons—a car breaking down, a client’s last-minute request. But I found myself at home, waiting to hear from him, afraid that he would not arrive. Fear began to rule my feelings. First I had wanted Matthew because I knew he would not leave me. Then I wanted him because I knew he would.

  When Matthew decided to move east, I told him I wanted to go with him. Nothing was holding me in California. My father and Dottie had already moved outside of Tucson so that she could be close to her son, Jamie, a management consultant, and her grandchildren, twin boys. “Do you want me to come?” I asked Matthew. At times he said yes and at other times no. He was going, no matter what. In the end he told me, “It’s a big decision. I want you to do what’s right for you.”

  We made the move smoothly enough. We put whatever mattered—a few duffels, cameras, tools, art supplies—into our two cars and caravaned across the United States. I liked traveling this way, actually; one of us was always just ahead of the other or just behind. We drove hundreds of miles a day, waving at each other. We used elaborate hand signals when we needed to stop for gas, to go to the bathroom, to rest. We signed to each other as I left behind everything I had known.

  There is a moment when you drive through a rocky pass on the interstate and find yourself facing nothing but a thousand miles or more of flat, yellow prairie, with the mountains now at your back. We reached that point—and the West was behind me. It was as if I had grown up while we traversed that divide, passed through a dimension of time, and I was surprised by how ready I was to give up all that had been my life. Still, the moment we arrived in New York, I wanted to leave. I felt certain it would never be a place I’d call home—not that I’ve ever had such a place.

  Matthew has a spot he calls home. It is a red brick house on a tree-lined street on the outskirts of Minneapolis. It is here he claims that hell was played out in the form of an alcoholic, abusive father and a passive, ineffectual, but also alcoholic, mother. But Matthew has a fierce attachment to this house and this suburb, and on our drive east we went some five hundred miles out of our way to see his home.

  We drove through Matthew’s neighborhood, which looked as if it had become an extension of the inner city. The river that flowed through the back of the town was littered with debris. A garbage dump had appeared along its banks. The school Matthew had gone to was scarred with graffiti. Matthew was bewildered by what he saw.

  The house itself was run-down, the shutters in need of painting and repair. Broken toys and pieces of a lawn mower were scattered across the lawn. A mangy dog lay on the porch, which was missing some boards. Matthew stood in front of the house for a long time, looking toward the river, the river on which he had skated as a boy with his friends. He drew his strength, he told me as we leaned against a tree in front of the house, from here.

  I have no such place filled with the images of my youth. No large tree with the boards of an old tree house in its branches, no broken-down school covered with racial slurs, no memory of a river to make it all seem real. There is no single place to which I can attach the importance of all that has been. Once in a while I used to stop near the bungalow in Venice where we lived for a few years, or drive past the Valley of Fire trailer park when we were in Vegas, but I always felt as if someone else had lived there.

  My childhood was lived among rocks and insects, and under the canopy of stars. The strange, twisted cacti, the lizards who bite and will never let go unless you chop off their heads. I used to flick scorpions away with my fingers. There was a small bug I collected and kept in jars. The one everyone thought was poisonous, but it wasn’t. Child of the Earth, it was called. It was a cricket, but it had the bald, smiling face of a child. When you stepped on it, it screamed. That was home to me.

  ELEVEN

  MUCH OF WHITE SANDS is a missile range that the army uses for target practice. Trinity Site, where the first nuclear bomb was detonated in 1945, is here. So is a range of mountains called Jornada del Muerto, the Hills of the Dead. When you drive west from Alamagordo, you can hear missiles whizzing across the highway. But the day when we snuck in, it was quiet.

  It was the summer my father locked the door of the trailer, saying he had to find work, but probably because he had to leave town. We spent much of the summer driving through the Southwest—into Arizona, across the Navajo and Apache and Zuñi reserves. My father was very good at fixing things—refrigerators, toasters, old TVs—and the Indians had plenty of those appliances, which they had picked up cheap from gringo traders and which often didn’t work. We’d eat a meal of fry bread and beans while he fixed a woman’s washing machine. While my mother sat fanning herself in doorways, Sam and I played with the Indian children, who lived on dirt floors and had runny noses.

  My father put a sign on the side of the Dodge sedan he drove, a car that probably had a hundred thousand miles on it when it finally gave out. I CAN FIX ANYTHING, it said. When we got into the car to leave Vegas, my mother had sneered at the sign. “You can fix anything except what matters,” she said.

  It was stifling in the car. Sam and I tried counting red cars or blue cars, but lost ourselves past ten. Our mother sat in the passenger seat, which was not her preferred locale (since she was somewhat addicted to driving), smoking cigarettes in silence, letting the ashe
s blow into the back seat, where Sam and I batted at the dying embers. One landed on Sam’s arm and left a small black burn. She rubbed it for miles.

  A scorching breeze blew and we found respite for only a week when we moved into an abandoned Dairy Queen outside Rincon. Even in the heat of the summer, the freezer of the Dairy Queen where Sam and I slept was nice and cool. The freezer had had its door ripped off, and we could enter that soothing darkness whenever we wanted to rest. At night Sam and I cuddled in a sleeping bag inside the freezer which smelled faintly of old chocolate and peppermint.

  Sam and I loved the red and white of the Dairy Queen, the soda machines. We spent our afternoons pretending I was the soda jerk, since I was the older, and Sam was the customer. We asked our mother to be the customer, but she refused. Instead, she sat in a chair that had been left behind under a juniper tree, watching cars speed up and down the highway. She kept her hand over her eyes like a sea captain, searching for land as the cars disappeared, dwindling to nothing. The desert even looked like an ocean, a rippling sea. Once a man with his kids in the car, seeing us there, stopped. He was hot and desperate as he tried to order ice cream cones. “What flavor, mister?” my mother said as she laughed and laughed.

  Sam ordered the usual things from me, like strawberry floats and black cows, which I pretended to make with complicated gestures. Sometimes I let Sam concoct things. We made a huge banana split in a boat with whipped cream heaped high like a castle, a rosy cherry bleeding from the top. This we brought out to our mother as she sat beneath the juniper tree. She stared into our empty hands. “There’s nothing there,” she said.