Motherest

by Kristen Iskandrian

  On the wall near the phone are several Post-its that have been accumulating over the past week or so: Sadie called again, call her back; Jenny called, call back; Phil called. I take them off the wall and stick them to my fingers. I imagine myself calling back, go so far as to pick up the phone and dial six of Jenny’s digits.

  But I hang up and go upstairs instead. I ignore the tightening in my gut—not baby-related—and push into my parents’ room. I kneel down in front of my mother’s nightstand and open the top drawer. I pick up a diary, one of several, the kind with the faux-leather cover and Diary embossed in gold, meant to put the owner in a mood of romanticized solitude and to appeal to the integrity of any would-be trespasser. But I’m not a trespasser so much as a daughter. I open to a random page.

  …as if I am drowning. He has been more attentive but it feels like it’s too late. I wonder if I should have ever had kids, whether I should have ever even married?! Every day I get the message that I’m supposed to be happier than I am, supposed to be feeling things that I’m not. Roseann tells me our kids bring us closer to God. I told her, half kidding, I guess it depends on the type of kid. I have the prescription but I can’t bring myself to take it to the pharmacy. I keep hoping that maybe after the holidays, something will

  I don’t turn the page. It always surprises me when I know when to stop.

  Two days later I tell my dad that I am meeting Jenny and Sadie at Squire Square, the outdoor mall. He seems excited that I have plans for the day. I myself can hardly believe it, that I called Jenny back, made small talk, agreed to meet up. I sit at the kitchen table with him in the grayish light of early morning, dunking a tea bag into a mug of boiling water. My dad sips his coffee and smooths his tie again and again.

  “Do you want to take my car? You could drop me at the train and pick me up later.”

  “That’s okay. I can take the bus. Or one of them can pick me up.”

  “Do they, ah, know? About? Your? Situation?”

  There it is. My situation. It has a name.

  “No.” I squeeze the tea bag with my fingers. I have always done this. My mother does this too. There is something about that quick burn to the fingertips.

  “Well, I guess they’ll find out soon enough.”

  We sit quietly, sipping.

  “Dad, do you want me to get a job?”

  I just want to give him an opportunity to yell at me, or express his disappointment, or tell me something that he thinks I ought to hear. He looks surprised. “Do I want you to get a job? Not…No, not necessarily. Do you want to get a job?”

  “I don’t know. I just feel like maybe I should, I don’t know, help out more?”

  He looks at me, his eyes suddenly misty. He looks like a house with a bad roof. “You’re really going to have…You’re really going to keep this…baby?”

  He says it like that, with a pause between this and baby. As though I am the baby.

  “I am.”

  He sighs, a deep sound. “It’s not money you have to worry about, Agnes. Money is not a problem. You know we—I—will always help, however I can. But what’s your plan? You can have all the money in the world but without a plan, it doesn’t do any good.” He pauses, as though trying to figure out where to go. Then, sounding defeated: “You need a plan.”

  I try to tell myself that this is good, that we are talking about it. We are having a frank discussion, and no one is leaving the room; no one is having a nervous breakdown. But my thoughts are addled by sudden crying.

  “Agnes, don’t…It’s okay…You don’t need to cry.” My father puts a hand on my hand. I look at both of our hands, resting on the table. They look nothing alike. I have my mother’s hands. “Or maybe you do need to cry. It’s probably good to, you know, get it out.” He takes a handkerchief from his pocket. My father always carries a handkerchief. I remember overhearing someone say once that a handkerchief was the most disgusting invention in the world, and I remember feeling offended. My father’s handkerchiefs are spotless, fresh, smelling like some combination of soap and tears.

  “Go have fun with your friends today,” he says now, and his eyes are so lost, so kind, that I cry harder.

  “I’m sorry,” I manage to get out. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m not even upset. I’m just, I don’t know!” I try to laugh and it sounds strangled, a bit insane. “I’m sorry.”

  My dad gets up. He puts his hand on mine once again, squeezes. He is not looking at me. “Try to have a good day.”

  Jenny calls as I am heading upstairs.

  “Do you need a ride?”

  “Oh. That’s all right, I can take the bus.”

  “Don’t be weird. You’re right on my way. I’ll leave around, I don’t know, eleven-thirty?”

  “Sure, okay. That sounds good. Thanks.” I am agreeable. I am overly agreeable.

  “Agnes?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you okay, honey?” Jenny peppers her speech with girl and honey and sweetheart. I once heard another girl from our high school say that it drove her crazy, but I like how it makes me feel now. Taken care of. Mothered.

  “I’m okay.”

  “I’m glad you finally got back to me. I left a bunch of messages with your dad. I think Sadie did too. You’ve been kinda incognito. Or wait—incommunicado. I get those two mixed up.”

  I laugh meagerly.

  “Have you…is it…have you heard from your mom or anything?”

  I’m surprised she asks this, and grateful.

  “No, I haven’t. But thank you for asking. Seriously. Nobody asks.”

  “I’m sure that’s really hard, girl!”

  “It’s okay. I mean, it’s…it’s fine.”

  “I mean, just, yeah. I can’t imagine.”

  Now I’m wishing she never said anything about it. Why did I agree to this, to friends, today? In taking a breath, I realize how I’d been holding it and promptly get the hiccups.

  “Well, I should probably jump in the shower. I’ll see you soon, sweetie. I’m excited to catch up.”

  Out on the front step in the bright sunshine, I sit waiting for Jenny. The flagstone beneath me seeps heat through my babydoll dress. When Jenny’s car pulls into the driveway, I stand carefully, positioning my messenger bag in front of me, across my abdomen. I walk slowly to the car and get in, my bag a shield between some terrifying moment of discovery and me. But Jenny is looking up her own nose in the rearview mirror.

  “HI! Oh my God, hi,” she says, still looking at herself but groping my arm with her hand. “I swear I just saw a hair poking out of my nose but now I can’t find it! It’s gonna drive me crazy.” She faces me now, wrinkling and unwrinkling her nose. “Can you see it?”

  Jenny is Greek with creamy skin, perky breasts, and a tiny waist. Her face is perfectly heart-shaped. She manages to be both exotic and completely ordinary, which has always made her very popular with boys.

  “No. I don’t see anything.”

  She rubs her nose vigorously a few times, in finale, before turning to face me. “Agnes! It’s so good to see you! It’s been, what, like five months? How was your second semester?”

  “It was…it was pretty good.”

  “Damn, girl, I’m jealous!” She says this staring pointedly at my breasts.

  “Oh, please,” I say, embarrassed, but not really. I refrain from saying how I have been occasionally turned on by the sight of them, in the shower or the way they swell, the sudden cleavage, beneath a certain nightgown.

  “Seriously, you look great!”

  “Well, actually, it’s—”

  “Stop being modest! You look hot! Hold up, I want to play you my boyfriend’s band’s CD. He’s the drummer. They’re called the Big Littles. Isn’t that cute?”

  She turns the dial on the car stereo and puts the car in reverse. I hear drumsticks clicking first—1,2,3—before guitar and trumpet blare through the tiny speakers. “The trumpet player is super cute,” Jenny is yelling over the music. “You woul
d love him.”

  We drive past things so familiar to me. Jenny mouths along to the music and shakes her head a little. Her eyes behind her sunglasses are lined in electric blue. Something about her soothes me. I feel more relaxed here, in her loud car, hiding behind my bag, which seems to shrink with every moment that I stay silent.

  I was very young when I identified a sensation that I later dubbed “the joy jab.” The feeling of happiness so acute that it pierces like a knife, cuts through the smog of whatever sad or humdrum present you’re in. It happens of its own accord, for no external reason, and it lasts only a moment or two. I feel it now, sitting in Jenny’s car, and I try hanging on to it, squeezing myself through the aperture it creates, seeing, for an instant, my life distilled to the basics: I have my health, my youth, my friends. Then it vanishes.

  “I told Sadie we’d meet her at Saladalley. She had to run some errands. That cool with you?”

  “Sure.” Saladalley is a salad-only restaurant, where “salad,” as I once wrote in a restaurant review for my high school newspaper,

  is interpreted loosely. It consists of many tables and an eighteen-foot buffet filled with everything from traditional salad fixings to vaguely Asian preparations of noodles and meat. Also, fruit, desserts, and soups. I think of it not only as my favorite place to eat, but also objectively as ‘the best’ place to eat, because there are no menus and therefore no decisions to make, and no limits on how much you can eat, and because of the variety of foods represented. It’s never crowded, which tells me I’m in the minority but not that I’m wrong. In my view, Saladalley is the future of dining out.

  (Mrs. Steeple, newspaper moderator, circled “the future of dining out” in red on my draft and wrote “not so sure about that” with a smiley face in the margin.)

  The light goes green, a song starts playing (“if you told me to/I’d move a mountain for you”), Jenny’s head resumes its bobbing. We find parking close to the restaurant, a low, brown-awninged building. Through a window we see Sadie, already seated. She taps the glass, smiling and waving furiously. Jenny and I are a tangle of waving back, unbuckling seat belts, getting our bags. I am holding my breath. I have to get out of the car, I think to myself. I have to get out of the car. I have to stand up, and be standing, and walk, and I can’t hide behind this bag forever.

  Jenny gets out first. I open my door, keeping my bag at my middle, and swing my legs outside. I am protected from sight, for this moment, by the open door. Jenny is waiting at the front of the car, less than five feet from where Sadie sits behind the glass. They are mouthing a conversation that seems mostly to consist of “Hi!” and “You look so cute!”

  Sadie beckons from the window: “Hurry up!”

  “You coming, Agnes?” Jenny asks.

  My dress sticks to the back of my thighs as I push the door open as far as it will go and stand up. I edge away from the car and shut the door. I face my friends, bag at my side. Sadie reacts first, her face half frozen in a smile as she stares at my middle. Jenny is fidgeting with her face again, pushing her sunglasses on top of her head, but then she takes me in, eyes roving down my body, eyebrows launching way up to her hairline.

  I take a deep breath, ready to get this over with and restore, if possible, our carefree salad time.

  I make myself walk toward Jenny, toward the restaurant, and Jenny takes a step or two forward, grabs my arm, to steady herself or lend support to me, I’m not sure which. “Are you…?”

  “Yes. I am. Twenty weeks.”

  Sadie is wildly summoning us inside.

  “Let’s go in,” I say.

  Jenny follows me wordlessly. The hostess, a blond whisper of a girl, whispers, “Have a seat anywhere” at the same time I say that we’re meeting a friend who’s already here. The restaurant is mostly empty.

  We join Sadie at the table. She gets up and hugs me around the neck, her body arcing away from mine. Then Jenny says, “Oh my God, I still haven’t hugged you,” and does it for real, her arms around me tightly, and it feels so good that I just want to stay there. She gives me a reassuring squeeze right before we pull away and I scoot into the booth next to her, across from Sadie. I take longer than is necessary to find a place for my bag, my mind racing with my friends’ unasked questions, their unspoken relief to not be me.

  “Agnes, oh my God, just oh. My. God. Like, what? I mean, I’m so excited for you! Right? I mean, it’s exciting! But crazy! I’ll be like kind of an aunt! Who is the…I mean, like, are you and the father, um, together?” Sadie’s horror is real, bordering on hysteria.

  Our server comes over, a gangly boy with patchy facial hair and those earrings that stretch out the earlobes so they’re big as nickels.

  “Can I get you guys something to drink?”

  “Unsweet iced tea,” Sadie says.

  “Diet Coke,” Jenny says.

  “I’ll have a Coke. Or…actually just water. Water’s fine.”

  “Free re on all drinks,” he says, with either a wink or an eye twitch, I can’t tell.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “You still just want water? Even with the free re?”

  Why, I’m wondering, is this boy still standing here, dangling over our table like a spider plant?

  “Yes. Water. Thanks.”

  “Okay. Up to you.”

  Sadie and Jenny are giggling without actually giggling. That girl thing that’s more agitation of air than sound. The waiter finally leaves.

  I start talking, aware that I have been asked things, desperate to preempt any pity. I talk as much to calm myself down as to explain myself to my friends, to quell my old urge to shriek, rip off my ill-fitting clothes, and run into the street.

  “I’m not with the father, no. We were together. Or…we had a thing. It was really intense. I think we loved each other. I think. But it was not, like, sustainable. It felt like it could never be sustainable in the ‘real world.’ It felt like we only existed when we were alone. Maybe. It just…yeah. It was complicated, or at least it always felt that way. But we—he—met someone. It’s fine.”

  Jenny is nodding encouragingly. “So…does he not know?”

  “No,” I say. “He doesn’t know. There’s really no point. We’re not gonna, like, play house.”

  Sadie looks traumatized. The waiter comes back and sets our drinks down, along with the bill. “Help yourselves to the salad bar,” he mumbles, walking off. His job is done.

  Lucky duck, I think.

  “Do you guys want to get food?” I ask, standing.

  We file over. I’m the first one there. There is a pressure that comes from being the first one in line at a salad bar. My choices will be seen and, especially given my condition, analyzed, however briefly. My instinct is to overload. I heap my plate with almost everything, the mayonnaise-soaked salads (Neptune, Waldorf), the oil-soaked salads (three-bean, pasta), heavy cucumber coins, tomato wedges, cottage cheese, canned fruit (where I lingered as I tried to fish out the cherry half hiding under the anemone-like pears and peaches, ultimately succeeding), sunflower seeds, croutons. I drizzle ranch over almost everything, doing my best to spare the fruit. I fill a shallow bowl with the soup of the day, broccoli cheddar, first using the long ladle to knock apart the film on top. I hold my salad plate in my left hand and the soup in my right and move slowly back to our seats. Two pumpernickel croutons fall. About two feet from the table, I feel my grip on the soup bowl start to waver, my thumb sliding in some thick wetness that sloshed around the rim. I make it to the table, spilling only a little as I set the bowl down. I am sweating. It is too hot for soup.

  Sadie and Jenny sit down nimbly with their nimble, sensible plates, as I am still working on seating myself. My underwear feels tight and part of it has bunched up inside me. My thighs are moist where they now rub together. My belly seems to have grown a few inches since morning. I feel out of control, here under the scrutiny of well-meaning friends.

  Sadie chews a lettuce leaf, her mouth like a rabbit’s. “What did your da
d say? And does your mom, I mean, like, have you heard from your mom?”

  I have finished my soup and I am sweating visibly. I dab at my face with one napkin and then another. I eat a crouton with my fingers. “My dad doesn’t really know what to say. He wants to have an answer but there’s no answer. If he can’t fix something immediately, he kind of just hides.” I don’t have anything to say, not here, not now, not to Sadie, about my mother.

  Jenny looks nervous. “Agnes, I think you’ll be a great mom. If…that’s what you want, I mean.”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s what I want, no.”

  There is silence, as viscous as the stuff pooling in my plate.

  “I guess I don’t feel I have any, um, choices. It’s weird. It was like, the second I found out, the only two options became kill myself or keep the baby. And the first one, well, you know. So that left the only other thing. I just want to do the least damage possible. I feel like I’m a bomb and I’m trying to figure out how to contain the blast.” I’m still sweating and my face and hands feel greasy. I take a big gulp of water. “I’m trying to be a very responsible bomb.”

  Sadie is vigorously putting on ChapStick. Jenny is trying to be nice, and she is nice, dear Jenny. She has always been soft, and kind, and sympathetic. In third grade she stuck up for the boy with the speech impediment. After Simon died, when the rest of the class sent a single signed card, she wrote me a heartfelt letter.

  “That makes sense, Agnes, totally,” she says now. “And, like, we are here for you. If you need anything.”

  Sadie is smashing her lips together nervously. Her eyes dart around, not landing on me, inscribing a circle around me. “Totally,” she says.

  I dig into my bag for some money. We get busy settling the bill. We are using this time, this task, to steady ourselves. Finally, we get up. On my plate is the cherry I had worked hard to fish from the fruit vat, now drowning in salad dressing.