A Mother's Love

by Mary Morris

  The worst time for me was those days when the dust blew or when a winter’s freeze set in and customers were few. On those dreary days, when all I wanted was to be moving through the dark, timeless, womblike space of the casino, dropping slugs into one-armed bandits or watching my father’s smooth movements with the cards, I’d have to sit with my mother, stringing bows for bouquets, with Remlow Blevins staring out at U.S. 91, searching for trembling couples who wanted to be married.

  My mother sat with her thick black hair, putting rice into the Tupperware pitcher or wrapping ribbons around the stems of the bouquets, cursing my father for the life she led. She cursed him for having swept her away, though it seemed to be the one fond memory of him she had—the way he married her. Perhaps it was this memory that led her to work in a marriage chapel in Vegas. I knew my parents almost as long as they’d known each other. That is, she accepted his breathless proposal in a hot-air balloon three weeks after they met, and they were married a few weeks later. I was born nine months from the date of their marriage. Their love affair, from all I can gather, was an impassioned fling that managed to extend itself through eight years and the birth of two children before my mother took off.

  The hot-air balloon belonged to a friend of my father’s. My father was a handsome, compact man with a powerful way about him, but my mother, though not exactly virtuous, came from old religious stock and would not easily give in. The balloon he borrowed that day was yellow and red and green; the colors, when my mother spoke of them, made me think of the confetti of the losers’ tickets from the track that my father threw in my hair.

  It was a clear Saturday afternoon in the Los Angeles basin in the mid-fifties when my parents stepped into the small basket under the giant balloon and my mother looked up at all those colors set against the sky. My father’s friend released the sand bags before my mother could protest, and they sailed away. She told me how smooth the lift-off was, how effortless the balloon’s steady rise; she said she thought that life could be like this and they’d just go up and up forever.

  Then the balloon sailed over what had once been an unsettled land of relentless sun and barren earth, a land of boiling tar pits and hellish marshes, filled with animal remains. They sailed west, out to sea, toward Catalina, and then the winds brought them back, carrying them along the edge of the land and up the coast along the Palisades and out across to the Hollywood sign. They skirted the desert where purple flowers bloomed, and skimmed above Wilshire Boulevard, looking down on mansions with swimming pools, ensconced in cooling palms. They sailed the emerald cliffs of Malibu and above a turquoise sea until, when my father asked if she’d marry him, there was nothing my mother could say but yes.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK on a warm summer’s night I rang Mara’s bell. She opened the door, dressed in a short black cocktail dress, black stockings, and heels. She had her hair down but pulled softly off her face with gold clips on either side. I wore a black skirt and a white blouse, but Mara was much more dressed up than I. “I don’t think I can go out with you,” I said.

  She looked me up and down. “You look fine.” I pushed Bobby’s stroller in and Alana and Jason raced to take him. We had hired Viviana for the evening to baby-sit for all three children at Mara’s. She was already there, getting the children’s dinner ready. Mara leaned over and whispered to me, “Her hair is green.”

  “I know,” I told her. “It’s all right. I think I should go put on a dress.” It was months since I’d gotten dressed up. Mara had phoned a few nights before to say she’d been invited to a party for a friend of hers—a TV producer—who was giving a dancing party at some celebrity’s loft. A good band, Dead in the Water, was playing, and Mara had asked if I’d be her date.

  “It’s going to be pitch black in there, with loud music. No one’s going to care what you’re wearing. And besides,” she said, looking me up and down once again, “you look fine.”

  I went into the kitchen with Bobby, and Viviana whistled. “Don’t you look nice, um-huh. You might not be coming home tonight.”

  “I’ll be home.”

  “Stay out late. I don’t want to see you before midnight.”

  “What time do you want us home?”

  “You put me in a cab, I don’t care if it’s daybreak. Just don’t come knocking on this door early, because I won’t open it.”

  Mara looped her arm through mine. “Let’s go.”

  “Everything’ll be all right?” I asked Viviana.

  “Not if you don’t leave,” she replied.

  “It’ll be all right. It will be fine.” Mara smiled, tossing her head back the way she did when she felt at ease. “We’re going to have fun.”

  Half an hour later we walked into a loft building in Tribeca. The building on the outside was dingy, and we took the service elevator, with dozens of other people, to the twelfth floor. The door opened onto a huge open space, dark except for a strobe light, hard rock blaring. “Act as if you know someone,” Mara said, squeezing my hand. “Be brave.”

  I took a deep breath and followed her into the room. My breasts were heavy, my body round, and I felt like a wallflower being introduced by an insistent relative. “Whose place is this?”

  “I’m not sure,” Mara said. “I don’t even see my friend here.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Just try to have a good time, Ivy. You owe it to yourself. It will make you a better person.”

  The room was filled with people in black T-shirts and black stretch pants or short skirts, and Mara was right: no one cared what anyone else was wearing, or what anyone else looked like, for that matter. The air was permeated with the smell of body sweat and sour wine and the pungent scent of cheese puffs and stuffed mushroom caps. “I’m getting old,” I said.

  “No, you aren’t. That man over there is going to ask you to dance.” We were leaning against a railing, drinks in hand, and I glanced in the direction she was pointing. An attractive man with a mustache was looking our way. “No, you’re his type,” I said.

  “Oh, Ivy, you don’t know your own power.”

  “I’m just going to call Viviana,” I said, feeling suddenly unsure. “I want to be sure everything is all right.”

  “It’s all right,” Mara said, catching me by the arm. But I pulled away.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, waving. I walked down a hallway in search of a phone and finally came on one in a room full of jackets. A woman in black tights and a black halter top with six rings on each earlobe was talking; it appeared from her hunched-over posture that she’d be on for a while. Besides, I knew Viviana would only scold me for calling, so I decided to go back and find Mara.

  I must have left the room by a different door, because I found myself wandering down a long, narrow corridor; it was dark and smoky, filled with people drinking, kissing, and I was lost among them. I turned up a vestibule that opened on to another end of the loft, into a large room with a fireplace and a mirror.

  Dancing couples, dressed almost exclusively in black, cast looming shadows on the wall. They all looked like the woman who’d been on the phone, except that the flashing strobe made them seem to be writhing, as if they were in pain or burning in hell. I searched for Mara, but couldn’t find her. Feeling unsteady and uncertain in the crowd, I thought I’d check my appearance in the wide mirror on the wall. I moved closer to see if my hair was in place, if I needed to put lipstick on, but when I was actually standing in front of it, I did not see my reflection at all. Instead, I stared at the room, the gas fire in the fireplace, the black dancing figures. But I wasn’t there, and the space where I stood was blank.

  Then I saw Mara, waving at me from what appeared to be the reflection in the mirror—the place where I was not. It took me a moment to realize that I was not looking into a mirror, but rather into a large window set in a wall that connected two identical rooms. The fake gas fires, the stark black furniture, even the dancing figures dressed in black, were all the same. Mara becko
ned to me from where my own image should have been, and I made my way around the wall to join her.

  “I thought I’d never see you again,” she said.

  “Me too,” I told her.

  She was standing beside a man who was well dressed, a bit too well dressed, in a padded almost Armani jacket and beige chinos, a dark gray shirt and cranberry tie. He introduced himself as a psychologist of loss, “one who specializes,” Mara informed me, “in the physiology of the body’s responses to a loss. The loss of body parts,” she said.

  “Oh, nice.” I smiled. He smiled back.

  “You know, how you feel after an appendectomy, a mastectomy. Cosmetic surgery. There’s more postoperative depression with cosmetic surgery than with any other kind.”

  “Interesting,” I said. I tried to keep smiling. He and Mara were obviously in the middle of a conversation; he resumed talking about the rush of blood to the limbs, the release of the bowels. Under extreme physical distress, I heard him say, the colon will dry up, causing decay.

  Mara winked at me and I excused myself. At the long Formica bar I ordered a vodka. The man with the mustache who Mara said had been looking at me was doing so again. He came over until his body almost rested against mine. “Would you like to dance?” he asked with a foreign accent.

  “No.” I smiled. “I have to call my baby sitter.”

  He thought about this for a moment. “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  He smiled. “Well, when you come back, would you like to dance?”

  Thinking about the woman in black who was probably still on the phone, I told him we could dance now. He said his name was Hans and he worked in production design for a small independent film studio. He was from somewhere in Scandinavia and we danced for a long time, first to disco music and then to some slow numbers when it got late, and he pulled me to him. Mara disappeared again in the crowd as we sailed away, though I saw her waving from time to time. He was drunk and so was I and I didn’t care when he pressed his body against mine. It had been so long since I’d felt a man’s body, since I had felt desire rising within me.

  He held me in the dimly lit room and his breath was warm against my throat. Again I let him press himself against me, and I knew that I would go on. That other things would happen in my life. “I’ll call you,” he said when it was time to go. “Give me your number.” I wrote it on a slip of paper I had in my purse and gave it to him. I never heard from him again.

  It was midnight when we staggered out, my head spinning, my body still warm from being held. Mara looped her arm through mine, and I wasn’t ready to go home. “I’m hungry,” I said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  Mara nodded. “God, I’m hungry too. I’m famished.”

  “I’m drunk,” I said.

  “I am too.”

  “We’ll pay for this tomorrow, won’t we?”

  “Yes, we will.”

  A diner was open across the street. It had bright pink and blue neon in the window and small cacti on the sill. We made our way to a red booth where the vinyl screeched as we slid inside. We both ordered cheeseburgers with the works, French fries, cole slaw, and Diet Cokes. “I could eat a horse,” she said.

  “So could I.”

  “It’s good to get out. You know, I hardly ever do it. Not since Dave and I split. Before, when we were together, well, we went out a lot. Especially when Dave got nominated for his Emmys.”

  “I know. You wore that blue sequined gown. The strapless one. And you put your hair high on your head.”

  She looked at me oddly, then laughed. “That’s right. I don’t think I could get into that dress anymore.” Then she cocked her head. “You have been spying on me.”

  “Well, not exactly spying. I just watched you. When I did my work. I saw you with manuscripts under your arm. I imagined you were publishing romance novels under a pseudonym.”

  Mara got a distant look. “Yes,” she said, “that would be nice. I wrote a few scripts, actually, for television, but nothing much happened. Now I just do health and fitness articles, not that I know a thing about health or fitness. Not what you imagined, is it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So have I surprised you? Or disappointed you?”

  I thought about this for a few moments. “Yes, I suppose you have. Surprised me, that is. You aren’t quite what I imagined.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Someone tougher, less vulnerable. Stronger, I suppose. You’re really a nice person. But that’s not how you look. That day when I just arrived at your house, I thought you’d throw me out. Most sane people would have, but you were very nice. I must have been out of my mind, but you were kind to me. It wasn’t what I would have expected from watching you. I’ll never forget that.”

  “Something must have let you think you could come to me.”

  “I don’t know. You seemed so …” I searched for the word. “Hardened.”

  “Oh, you saw my carapace. Isn’t that the word—the shell of a crustacean? I learned that in biology, my first year in high school.”

  “That was the year you grew your carapace?” I asked. I ate my cheeseburger slowly, my eyes fixed on her.

  “It was the year my sister died.” She said it carefully, deliberately. “We were studying crustaceans in biology. Lobsters, crabs, that kind of thing. I thought I wanted to be a doctor. In fact, I did want to be a doctor, so I took this elective biology course. Advanced Placement. Then Alana got sick. She was well one day, and the next day she was sick. We were just two years apart. She was very pretty. She had long hair like honey and she sang folk songs like Joan Baez, Sixties’ stuff. Anyway, she was my best friend. She was fine, happy, healthy. One day she didn’t feel well, and six weeks later, she was dead. Pancreatic cancer. Just like that. You’re fine, then you’re gone.”

  “It sounds awful,” I murmured, “to lose your sister like that.”

  Mara shook her head. “It wasn’t just that I lost my sister,” she went on. “That was bad enough. I lost my whole family, really. They just fell apart. Don’t talk to me about families,” she said. “Nobody’s had one quite like mine.” I thought of saying something—of telling her the truth about my own—but Mara looked so brittle that I wondered how it was that I’d ever imagined she was strong. It was the toughness I saw in her face, but that was something learned. An acquired skill. I should have known it all along.

  “My father used to go to flea markets every Saturday. He loved to take us with him,” she went on. “He brought home all kinds of junk. Mugs with porcelain frogs in them, old bottles, tattered lace doilies. Once he brought home the burning bush from a rummage sale. It sat in our living room for ages. He was a kind, fun-loving guy and then Alana died and it all stopped. We had this umbrella in the backyard on the patio and my parents sat under the umbrella the whole spring and summer into the fall. They stayed until the leaves fell on the umbrella. They didn’t do anything. My father never went to work. There were no meals. I don’t know what he did about his job. They just sat. I tried to do things to make them happy. I cooked them special meals. One day I made a picnic, but they wouldn’t go anywhere, so I put the food on the patio table under the umbrella and they picked at it, but they wouldn’t eat it. Nothing helped. It didn’t matter that I was alive. That I was fifteen. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared. I even went through a wild period—drugs, sex, you name it. My grades fell. My parents gave me these halfhearted reprimands, but they weren’t my parents anymore. Did you ever see that science fiction movie about the giant pods that take people over …”

  “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” I said.

  “Well, it was as if they’d been snatched.”

  “I can’t really imagine what that would be like …”

  “No, I guess not. You’ve never had a sibling. You’ve got your family in Tucson. I guess it’s pretty difficult to imagine.”

  I wanted to tell Mara then about living in an abandoned Dairy Queen and pretending that my fa
ther was a cartographer, about my mother and Sam leaving when I was seven years old, but I had lied to her and told her I didn’t have a sister and that my parents lived in Tucson. I was afraid that she wouldn’t like me if I suddenly blurted out the truth. Or if she learned I’d lied. So I just said, “But I’ve had a child and his father doesn’t want to be married to me. I can imagine loss.”

  “Yes, I suppose you can.”

  “I don’t think I’ll see him again, not if I can help it.” I laughed nervously. “There’s no point. But it hasn’t been easy …”

  “No, I imagine it hasn’t. With Dave it was easier because I was ready. It wasn’t that he was seeing other women or didn’t have much time for the children; somehow I was able to ignore those things. It was when he began to sit around that I couldn’t stand him anymore. When he was waiting for work or when something went wrong, and he just sat. I said to him, ‘I’ve seen enough of that. I’ve lived with that before.’ ”

  I grinned. “Well, you are tough the way I thought.”

  “I used to see you at the window,” Mara said. “I used to wonder what’s a nice girl like that doing with that egotistical guy.”

  “You watched me too?”

  “Not exactly.” She cocked her head. “Not consciously. There was something about him—don’t ask me what. Not that I spent much time looking at you. I really didn’t, but I’d see you in the window and you looked kind of dreamy. And he seemed so sure of himself. I don’t think he was right for you.”

  I smiled. “Well, I’m glad to hear that. I don’t think so either. But it’s nice to hear it from someone else.”

  “I’m glad you said hello to me that day.”

  “I’m glad I did too.”

  We paid our bill and walked outside. Mara took my hand as we crossed the street to hail a taxi. Two men whistled at us, thinking we were gay. Mara gave them the finger, tossed her head back, and laughed. The night had a remarkable clarity, unusual for New York at any time of the year. The sky was cloudless and you could almost see stars, or the promise of stars. There was a half moon. I looked up and took a deep breath. “It’s a beautiful night,” I said.