A Mother's Love

by Mary Morris

  “Yes,” Sam said. “It’s a banana split with the works.”

  Our mother sighed and took a bite with an imaginary spoon. “Oh, it’s very good.” She took another bite. “And cool.” She licked her fingers. She seemed to enjoy the taste. Then she gathered us into her arms. “My precious girls,” she said. “My precious little girls.”

  White Sands wasn’t far from the Dairy Queen, and one day my father took us there. He’d been out most of the day before, driving around looking for work. “Guess what?” he said when he came home. “I found something you girls are going to like.” There was a place along the highway where the sand had drifted. We pulled the car off the road, climbed over the fence, and raced across the ridges of what had once been the bottom of a gypsum sea.

  Before us everything was bleached white with no trees, no animals, no signs of life. Nothing but this soft, pristine mattress of sand, where we leaped, tumbling head over heels, but never hurting ourselves. I have pictures from this day. We are sun-drenched, flaming children against the shimmering white sands. Our faces are full of laughter, without a hint of what lies ahead.

  My mother is not in these photographs—though my father is, as he rolls down the dunes, his hair also blazing in the sun, sand flung around his face—so she must have taken them. The only trace of her is a shoulder turned away as she twists down an embankment.

  The one picture I have of my mother’s face is on a passport. My father burned the rest. There are two interesting things about the passport—other than the fact that it exists. The first is that my mother has lied about the date of her birth, making herself younger than her age, which wasn’t that old to start with. The other is that it is a virgin passport, unblemished, devoid of marks. The clean, blank pages of an uneventful life.

  Not many people can take a passport photo the way my mother did. She stares into the camera, dead on. Her dark eyes are set straight ahead as if she were daring the person to take her picture. An Ava Gardner lookalike, Dottie once said. A woman who could easily be mistaken for someone else. Sometimes I stare at the passport photo and try to decipher the enigma behind the eyes. I try to understand what moved her to get a passport anyway, when she was living in San Bernardino in a trailer with a small child, another on the way. Whatever could have prompted her to do such a thing, since she must have known she wouldn’t be going anywhere. Not for a while.

  In the photograph my mother still had long black hair. It was thick and silken, like the kind Rapunzel’s knight used to climb the tower. At night she would sit in front of a small, misty mirror in her room of the trailer and brush her hair for hours. When she brushed it, she got a dreamy look, as if she were listening to something far away.

  If I asked, she would let me brush it. “You can do it tonight, Ivy. I’m so tired.” And she’d hand me her brush with the soft bristles. I ran the brush through over and over again and she closed her eyes as if she were starting to sleep. When I put down the brush and rubbed her scalp with my fingers, she’d tilt her head back and moan. I’d rub her cheeks, her jaw. My mother rarely liked me to crawl into bed with her or curl up in her lap, but she’d let me brush her hair and rub her scalp for a long time.

  Once, in Vegas, Sam and I took all her barrettes and fine brushes and spent the afternoon fixing our hair the way she did. Often Sam and I did things we weren’t supposed to do, like walk into the desert late in the day, thrusting sticks down the rattlesnake holes. But usually when we were caught and punished, it was for something insignificant—watching television after school or dressing up in our mother’s clothes. Or using her combs and barrettes.

  My mother got angry about little things—if we left the light on or didn’t close a cupboard door. But what really enraged her was if we touched the objects that adorned her hair. For some reason Sam always got caught, and I seldom did. Sam would stand at the sink, tears streaming down her face, while our mother scolded her for something we both knew I’d done.

  This time she scolded Sam for the barrettes and combs I’d put in her hair. Sam cried but did not tell. I expected her to just blurt it out. Maybe she thought I’d confess. But Sam never told. She could fight for any resistance movement, I’m sure. Loyal, that’s how I’d describe my sister.

  As my mother stood over Sam, trying to make her confess, she held a spatula in her hand, not that she ever struck us—she wasn’t that kind of mother—and stared a terrifying stare, not unlike the one in her passport photo. She said something like “You better tell me why you did this, young lady. You better have a good explanation.”

  Suddenly, in the middle of her outburst, my mother sighed, as if she’d lost interest in what she thought Sam had done. As if none of it really mattered. And maybe it didn’t. She lay down and asked us to bring her a wet washcloth. “This heat is killing me,” she said. We brought her a cloth, which she pressed to her forehead. After a while, she pulled back the curtain and gazed out into the desert. “Just look at that ocean, those city lights, the Avenue of the Stars.” Sam and I gazed with her down the empty streets of a dusty gambling town, watching the glamorous people my mother saw parading by.

  One night shortly after we’d returned to Vegas from our summer on the road, I was brushing my mother’s hair and she made me stop. She took the brush away and stared into the mirror as if she saw something that made her afraid. She ran her fingers over her eyes, her mouth. “I’m getting old,” she said. I took back the brush and stroked her hair longer than before. I took thick strands, pinning them high on her head.

  A few days later she came home with her hair cut off. It was up to her ears and there was nothing for me to brush or braid. She never again asked me to rub her head or touch her. Later it occurred to me that she had sold the hair—hair like hers still went for about $200 a braid, even then. It was the money that helped finance her escape.

  Shortly after she cut her hair, I was invited to a party, and my mother said I should have a new dress. She seemed suddenly to have cash to burn, and told me I could have whatever kind of dress I wanted. I said I wanted a blue dress with flowers, so she took the day off from the At First Sight marriage chapel, where she was working at the time, and we went to a store in the shopping center. I was to take my time, she said, and try on all the dresses until I found just what I wanted.

  She was very patient with me that day. I tried on dozens of dresses we had no intention of buying—green chiffon with a satin bodice, a flowing red that made me look like a dance hall girl, a black cocktail dress for a woman three times my age, a pink ruffled thing for the young and innocent. I tried them all on until I found the one I liked—blue with a white crinoline and blue flowers.

  The saleswoman carefully folded the dress into a box, which we carried to a place called Buffalo’s, where we had ice cream. I ordered a double banana split with whipped cream, the kind Sam and I had pretended to make when we lived in the Dairy Queen. It came in a boat-shaped dish, looking as if it could sail away. I expected my mother to light a cigarette and talk in choppy, nervous sentences. Usually she asked question after question, never waiting for my answers, which floated in the air. Her attention span always seemed to be about the length of a cigarette, whether she was smoking or not.

  But this afternoon she leaned on her elbows, looking at me intently. There was something sad about her, something wistful, and it seemed to me that, perhaps for the first time, my mother wanted to listen. That she heard what I was trying to say. She sipped her Coke and now and then put her finger in my whipped cream, slowly licking it off.

  She said, “You’re going to be the prettiest girl at the party.” She said it again and again, as if she were giving me instructions that I was to commit to memory. “You are going to be the prettiest and all the boys will want to dance with you.” But by the day of the party my mother was gone, and the dress hung in my closet, unworn, for years.

  TWELVE

  MATTHEW didn’t want to attend the Lamaze class reunion. He said what’s the point. He hadn’t attended any
of the classes, not that I had attended that many myself. It would look odd, he said. And Jake, my longtime friend and birth coach, whom the class had assumed to be my husband, was out of town. When they phoned me for the reunion, I was surprised, since I’d made it through only two classes. A woman named Irene, whom I had no recollection of, phoned to say that she and her husband were hosting the reunion at their place on Central Park West and wondered if Jake and I would attend.

  “You disappeared,” Irene said on the phone.

  I was taken aback. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You were there, then you were gone.”

  “My baby came early.”

  “Nobody talked about you,” she said in a whisper. “It was as if you’d died. Mrs. Volkan wouldn’t mention it.”

  “I had a caesarean.”

  “Oh,” Irene said, pity in her voice, “that’s why.”

  The reunion was being held on a Saturday afternoon, and I didn’t want to go alone, but Matthew didn’t think it would be appropriate for him to accompany me. “I mean, who would they think I was? Wouldn’t it look strange?”

  “We could make up a story. How you were off somewhere and I didn’t want to explain …”

  “Ivy”—Matthew squeezed my arm—“it’s just not my kind of thing.”

  “It’s not my kind of thing either,” I said.

  On Saturday I arrived late at the building on Central Park West. The austere, pasty-faced doorman announced me as I entered the marble entrance-way, Bobby in his stroller. He carted the stroller up the two steps, making me wish for the first time that I lived in a doorman building. The elevator, which moved effortlessly between floors, was lined with gilded overhead mirrors and recessed track lighting. Muzak filled its hollow space. Bobby cooed to the sounds of Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” I could live in this elevator, that’s how nice it was. Bobby was soothed by the music, bobbing his head now to an old Beatles song, and I stared at my face in the mirror in the flattering light, thinking that I looked well; my eyes seemed to sparkle, my skin glowed.

  The door was open, so I walked in. Through the entranceway my feet glided as if on a cloud of creamy white carpet with pink trim as I made my silent approach across a long stretch of thin blue industrial into the living room, with its wall-to-wall yellow shag, dense and flowing as prairie grass.

  Irene’s husband, Hal, was in the carpet business, I recalled as she greeted me on the yellow shag, holding up Alissa, a perplexed blond child with peach-fuzz hair. Alissa, who was a few weeks younger than Bobby, wore a kind of elastic headband with a pink bow that was causing a ridge to rise on her pale skull. She kept reaching up, as if trying to pluck it away, and Irene kept pushing her hand down. “Oh, we’re so glad you could make it. Oh, isn’t he cute.” She tickled Bobby under the chin. “He looks just like his father, doesn’t he?”

  “His father?” I asked dumbly, wondering how she knew.

  “Yes, Jake, your husband. He couldn’t make it?”

  “Oh, Jake. No, he’s away on business. He has a lot of accounts in the Orient.” I stared at Bobby, trying to determine if he looked like Jake.

  “Oh?” Irene looked perplexed. “I thought he was a sociologist.”

  I mumbled something about his being a sociologist who advised foreign governments, then followed her into the den, with its dark green dirt-resilient carpeting, on which a dozen new additions to the human race lay. Standing in their midst was a gigantic wooden rocking horse, looking life-sized, its runners grazing perilously close to the tiny, fragile skulls. “Oh, aren’t they cute!” I exclaimed as six couples who had made it to the reunion, all evenly matched, beamed at me. I made number thirteen as I entered the room.

  The children lay in various states of confusion, this being the first party for those who had not been publicly circumcised, immersed in water, or shown off to an endless parade of doting relatives. What was it like to be so small and see all those lights going off in your face? To see this giant horse hovering and all these giants ogling you, tickling, pinching?

  Bobby seemed to resist such displays. At first he grew passive and limp in my arms, the way some animals do under attack, when they surrender by playing dead. He had no interest in the limelight, even the flash of his reluctant father’s camera. He was a more self-contained type, happy to gaze into space for hours, to watch a sudden flight of birds. Once I saw his eyes moving against the sky, and I put my head where his lay and saw what my son saw—the clouds rolling by. This entertained him for a good hour, impressing me with his attention span.

  Now he took one look at the huge rocking horse, the half-dozen “rug rats,” as my father referred to babies, helpless on the floor, the parents beaming all around—and screamed. “There, there.” I patted him. “It’s all right.” The parents stared, sad smiles on their faces as I tried to calm my tormented child, the only one who had made a scene thus far. Without their name tags on, the parents were all just faces. I couldn’t tell Donna and Dick from Marian and Martin. Who were the microbiologists? The advertising executives with their own firm? Their vacant stares made me think I had been brought in to entertain them—the party act.

  The first time I had laid eyes on any of these strangers—people with whom I would never have been in the same room had we not somehow booked passage on the same cruise—was for my first and next-to-last Lamaze class. Jake had accompanied me as I walked into the room holding his hand, staring at nine couples, all of whom looked as if they sold municipal bonds. (Several did.) Well-pressed yuppies, blissful in their prenatal state, had gaped at me that night as I ran sobbing out the door. “Hormones,” Jake had explained as he rushed out. He caught up with me on the sidewalk. “Tell me your doctor’s name, your due date, what hospital.” “Glickoff, Valentine’s Day, Lenox Hill,” I told him. Then he took me back to the only class in my life from which I could consider myself a dropout.

  Irene took me by the arm. “This is Ivy,” she said. “You remember her, the jeweler. Now she’s Bobby’s mother.” They all smiled as they tried to remember me, relaxed now that Bobby had stopped crying. “The baby came early,” Irene offered as an explanation. Everyone was introduced, the children first. I met Alexis, Nathaniel, Angelica, Whisper. (I had to ask twice. Whisper? Her parents grinned, proud of their choice. “No one else will have that name,” her father said.)

  Next, the parents were introduced again, but they had become, for all practical purposes, Alexis’s mother, Angelica’s father. We were no longer adults with a past, not real people anymore, but the products of our own progeny. Everything that had happened before in our lives was suddenly obliterated—our jobs, our quirks of personality, our yearnings and passions, even our names. None of that had any significance in this new world to which I was suddenly being initiated, the world in which I would be Bobby’s mother for the years to come. In Lamaze class I had felt we nine couples were like those in a war, thrown together in the trenches for no reason other than our common fate.

  We looked at one another solemnly, strangers linked by fate. The reason for being in the same room had come into the light. Irene and Hal had set up a small buffet of cheese, crackers, cookies, apple juice, milk in paper cups—children’s food, though our children were much too young to enjoy it—and the parents milled about.

  “I remember. You did leave after a couple of classes,” an attractive blond woman said, an actress who lived in Connecticut.

  “Bobby came early. I had a caesarean.”

  A hush came over the room. “Premature?” someone spoke hesitantly.

  “Oh, no, just early,” I said cheerfully.

  But again I got the troubled stares, for I had said the word that had been like an expletive or insult to our teacher, Mrs. Volkan, the Austrian woman who never let it be uttered in her classes. It was strictly verboten. It had the same impact as phrases like “terminal illness” and “all-out nuclear war.” It was the word to describe those who, despite themselves, had somehow failed.

&nb
sp; Now we began to talk openly about our plights. Three of the women had had C-sections. Out of the four who’d had natural childbirth, two said that they had forgotten their breathing once the real pain of transition set in. “You know what Michele did,” said the man married to the actress. “She bit her labor room nurse. I tried to warn her, but the nurse just said, ‘Oh, balls.’ ” We laughed, then looked guiltily at our children, because the word had fallen on their ears. “You should have seen the nurse when Michele went for her arm. I told you, I said …”

  As they talked about their deliveries, I wandered from the den down a short corridor until I came to a bedroom. It contained a four-poster bed with a white gossamer canopy; the carpeting was a thick blue acrylic. On the desk sat Hal’s picture, circled by a ring of rainbow carpeting, with the caption “Why is this carpet laughing?”

  I picked up the phone and called Matthew at his studio. “I don’t think I can take this.”

  “You mean the reunion?” he asked. I heard a baseball game in the background. “So go home.”

  “No, I mean us. Either you’re with me or you aren’t. If you’re with me, then we have to do this kind of thing together.”

  Matthew sighed. “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “Just be patient. Give me time.”

  “I can be patient about some things …” I wondered if it would always be like this. Me taking Bobby to birthday parties, helping him with his homework. “But when are you going to do anything about the birth certificate?”

  “I don’t know. I have a lot to think about.”

  “I want him to have a legal father. If anything happens to me, I want your name on the certificate.”

  “I’ve got to think about all of this,” Matthew said again, with a sigh.

  “Then call me when you have.” My hand gripped the receiver. “But not before.” I put down the phone, not exactly slamming it, but not cradling it either. My body shook. I was dressing Bobby to take him home when Michele, the woman who’d bitten her labor room nurse, came in. “I need to go. Matthew, I mean Jake, is coming home from Tokyo today.” She seemed confused by my confusion. My life sounded so pathetic, even to me. “But you must stay,” she said, “for the group picture.”