Motherest

by Kristen Iskandrian

  “Luck is pretty worthless,” he says. “I learned that from the stock market. Bye, Agnes.”

  Now there’s a person, I think to myself, who doesn’t really give a shit whether I’m pregnant or not.

  I put the key in the front door but it is already open—I had somehow forgotten to lock it. I pour a glass of water and sit at the kitchen table, feeling defeated but also oddly relieved. How interesting, how we put ourselves so squarely in the center of things, how we assume that we must also be at everyone else’s center, when of course, geometrically, it can’t work that way. I don’t have to walk to town, I think to myself. There was no reason for me to be there and I won’t be missed by anyone. I haven’t broken any promises. The cool air of the house feels nice.

  Dear Mom,

  I’m going to take the job with Dad. It will probably be boring but I honestly don’t know the difference anymore, between what is boring and what isn’t. I think I actually prefer boredom to other things I’m accustomed to feeling (like despair, anxiety, extreme fleeting happiness).

  The other day I went into Simon’s room for the first time since coming back home again. I just marched right in. Dad was at work and I had spent the better part of the morning on the phone with Alicia, who was talking me through her birth plan and trying to convince me to write one. She was saying that preparation is a key part of acceptance and that the reason I haven’t made any “plans” is because I have not fully accepted that I am a mother, and the reason I have not accepted that I am a mother is because I have not made any plans. Maybe she’s right, I don’t know. She’s definitely stirring something up in me.

  Anyway, so I hung up the phone and went upstairs and just walked into Simon’s room. I braced myself for that moment of horrific sadness, for the emotional shrapnel to hit me in all directions. Since he left us I have tried to imagine him in those last moments, his fear right before the collapse, right before the oblivion set in, what it must have felt like as each system shut down, what bile and metal he must have tasted as he prayed for the end to come faster, to come now. The tragic ironies of suicide, the body fighting for its life, the intense pain that must happen before the end of all pain is achieved. I will never stop grieving for Simon, not just for the loss of him, but for the secret agonies he felt his entire life that I’m only just beginning to grasp.

  I haven’t had control over much of anything in my life and I don’t really see that changing. I could have controlled this baby by aborting it, or I can control it by fooling myself (and it?) into believing that I know what to do, that I’ll always know what to do. I have done neither. I met a boy named Tea Rose and I think I fell in love with him and out of that came this and I am just letting all of it be. I am trying to just quietly be with the things that have happened to me and the things I have let happen.

  Anyway, for the first time, standing there with the light streaming brightly through the window, the room felt like a room and not a mausoleum. I sat down on the bed and after a while lay down on it, on my left side, my head on Simon’s pillow. There was no smell there. I had this sustained calm—I can’t describe it, so I won’t try. I got up after a while and closed the door and went back to my own room and two decisions came to me with the clarity and tonelessness of a telegram:

  1. I will start working for Dad.

  2. Simon’s room would make a good nursery.

  So, enough about me…

  Haha,

  Agnes

  On a Monday just shy of thirty weeks, the first alarm I’ve set all summer wakes me from a dream in which I was being pelted all over by BBs from an unseen BB gun, including in my mouth, which for some reason I couldn’t close. I get up gladly, opening and closing my mouth, but I stand too quickly and need to sit down again. Standing up too fast has become a new hazard. When I get my bearings, I move to the shower, brush my teeth, and get dressed in some of the maternity clothes Alicia forced me to buy over the weekend: a pair of gray trousers with an elastic waistband and a blue silky button-down top, cut to accommodate the belly. I find a black pair of heels that I haven’t worn since my high school graduation and put them on, surprised they still fit since Alicia keeps warning me that my feet and ankles will swell to twice their size. I twist my hair, which has gotten thicker and longer, into some kind of bun, and put some lip gloss and eye makeup on. I find my black purse from high school—another thing I never used this year, preferring big pockets—and go downstairs.

  “Good morning!” My dad, making the coffee, looks genuinely happy to see me. Happier than I’ve seen him look in a long time. “You look very nice!”

  “Thank you,” I say. I feel shy.

  I sit at the table and when the coffeemaker beeps, I start to get up. “Let me get it for you,” my dad says. “Cream and sugar?”

  “Yes, please.” I have not had much coffee during this pregnancy but I somehow don’t want to do anything that will disrupt this new continuity between us.

  “How about something to eat? Some toast? Or an egg maybe?”

  This has been the third straight week of feeling constantly hungry but not craving much in particular. I have been subsisting mostly on buttered noodles, baked potatoes, and raw vegetables dunked in ranch dressing, along with frequent fistfuls of arugula, parsley, and fennel seed, the combinations of which allay my still-fierce appetite for chalk and silt.

  “Toast would be great. Thanks.”

  My father moves spryly around the kitchen with the air. He brings butter and marmalade to the table. When the toast is ready, he brings a plate with two pieces over to me and sits down with his own.

  “So,” he says, like a father about to give a pep talk, “you nervous?” He scrapes butter onto his bread.

  “No, not nervous really. I mean, you’ll be there,” I say. I butter my toast and spread marmalade to the edges. The rim of the jar is sticky and I refrain from asking whether it’s been in the refrigerator since before Mom left. It tastes sad.

  “You’ll be fine. Nancy will show you the ropes. She’s in the middle of trying to put all of our paper documents and files into a new database, at least from the past five years, so you’ll be assisting her with that. The room where we keep the files has gotten pretty jumbled over the last couple of years, so you’ll be doing some organizing and weeding out in there too. It’s not the most interesting work, but you’ll be paid what we’ve paid our temps, which is decent enough.” He brushes some crumbs from his beard with his napkin.

  I feel suddenly queasy. “I’ll be right back,” I say. I go to the bathroom and hover over the toilet. Then I sit on the toilet. Nothing happens. I take some deep breaths and return to the table.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Sometimes these waves just come over me.” My coffee and toast are more or less untouched. Dad reaches out and gingerly pats my hand. “Agnes. We’ll see how this goes, okay? Obviously this is not a long-term thing. But I think it’ll be a good way to occupy yourself and make a little money until, you know, the time comes. And who knows. Maybe after the, ah, baby gets a bit older, we can find a way for you to work part-time and take some classes part-time. Your education is important.” I’m nodding and next, crying.

  “Okay. Take it easy, sweetheart. We’ll figure it out.”

  He hasn’t called me that in a long time. Sweetheart was always Mom’s word, and she used it at the beginning of exasperated sentences. Dad’s kinder, gentler appropriation of it makes me mad at her, makes me ache for her, makes me unable to look at him. Which is fine since he is not looking at me either. Our eyes can’t meet because we cannot face the mirror image of our suffering, or is it the mirror image of our love, or is there ever even a difference?

  I pull myself together by biting the underside of my bottom lip. “I’m okay. Thanks, Dad.”

  He clears our dishes and runs water over them. “Ready?” he says brightly.

  “Sure.”

  We drive in silence and I think about Surprise; by now she is surely on the pill
or outfitted with a diaphragm. Knowing Surprise, she might go for both. Surprise will not get pregnant at nineteen, nor at twenty or twenty-one. After college, she will begin to establish some kind of a career, to prove that she can, and then she will get engaged. She will not get pregnant until after the whitest conceivable wedding. She will be a mother whose children’s clothes will be folded in neat rows in drawers, and these rows will significantly inform their views about the world and how it is supposed to work. My mother folded our clothes and left them in haphazard piles on her bed, for us to retrieve and put away. If we didn’t get to them in time, she left them outside her closed door.

  Soon we arrive at the squat tan offices with the 1950s signage that Dad chose when they moved to this location, right before I was born. It was always a thrill for me to see our last name in metal, suspended on the side of a building, visible from the street: Fuller & Gerstley, LLC. I loved the ampersand, which reminded me of a treble clef. Once inside, though, I remember all the things I didn’t love—the low ceilings with fluorescent lighting; the chilly, manufactured air; the beige everything. Nancy, my dad and Mr. Gerstley’s secretary for over two decades, is on the phone when we walk in but hurriedly hangs up and comes around her desk.

  “Could this be Agnes? Oh my STARS! Look at you! Just look at you!” Nancy has dyed blond hair and very floppy fishlike lips that have been coated in the same bright coral for as long as I’ve known her. She is effusive without being warm, ebullient without seeming happy. I can’t begin to imagine how old she is. Fifty? Sixty-five? She is wearing a knee-length silky floral dress with buttons at the top that gently strain against her ample chest, nude stockings, and no shoes.

  “Hi, Nancy.”

  “Good morning, Nancy,” Dad says. “I’ll get Agnes settled in, and then maybe you can give her an overview of what she’ll be helping you with.”

  “Of course! I’m ready when you are!”

  I follow Dad down the narrow corridor to his office. The entire space consists of two offices, his and Mr. Gerstley’s, the front desk/reception area, two bathrooms, a walk-in storage closet where the files are kept, a conference room, and a kitchenette with a small table and a few chairs.

  My dad’s office is exactly the same as I remember it: diploma and CPA certificate framed and hung on the wall, along with two old family photos that Mom removed from our house after Simon died. Even now I can’t bring myself to stare directly at them. One of them hangs on the wall behind Dad’s desk, so he sees it when he walks in, and the other hangs on the wall in front, so that he can only avoid it if he keeps his head down or keeps the door to his office open (he does both). Two generic wingback chairs flank his desk from the front. The room feels windowless but there is a window, adjacent to the desk, that looks out onto the parking lot. On his desk are lamp, blotter, telephone, pen holder with pens, and three framed pictures: one of Mom at the Grand Canyon, taken before we were born, and then Simon’s and my high school graduation photos. All three look dusty. Off to one side is his computer, looking rarely used. The room seems as though it could belong to anyone, to anyone’s sad dad.

  “Do you need anything?” Dad asks.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “I figured today we’d order take-in for lunch, but you might want to start packing yours. I usually make myself a sandwich over in the kitchenette, which you’re welcome to do.”

  “Okay,” I say. I feel a crushing despair that seems to emanate from the walls.

  “I’ve got a client meeting in about thirty minutes that I should prepare for. Why don’t you go out and get started with Nancy. She’ll probably have some paperwork for you.”

  I go back up front and Nancy is on the phone again. Again, she hangs up quickly and gives me a bright, blank smile.

  “Let’s get you all squared away!”

  She hands me a clipboard with a few pages on it. “This is for payroll. Your dad says you’ll be here three days a week to start. Your pay is hourly, and you’ll get your check every two weeks.”

  I sit in the waiting area and fill out the forms. When I bring them back to Nancy, she has just put the phone to her ear. She motions for me to leave the clipboard and holds up her pointer finger in a “one moment” gesture. “Just listening to my horoscope,” she stage-whispers. I nod and smile.

  “Okay!” Nancy says brightly after about two minutes. She hangs up the phone and comes around the desk. “I just can’t start the day without my horoscope. Coffee and my horoscope! Speaking of which, there’s a pot in the kitchen. I just made it before you got here. If you drink the last cup, please make another pot.” We walk past the kitchen. “You’ll see all my little Post-its hanging around in there. Mostly common sense, but you know.”

  “Sure,” I say as we head down the hall. “So what sign are you?”

  “Who, me? I’m Aquarius Sun, Sagittarius Rising, and Aquarius Mars,” she says. “Very high vitality. What about you?”

  “I’m a Pisces.”

  Nancy gazes at me sideways, still smiling, always smiling, but with just a hint of pity. “That’s a good one too.” She looks as though she might say something else but then just opens the door to the storage closet and flips on the light. In the corner is a beat-up desk with an old computer on it. The rest of the space is boxes and filing cabinets, with very little room to move around.

  “So basically we need to enter most of what’s in all of these folders into that computer.”

  I have been nodding almost the whole time she has been speaking. This job would probably be categorized by most people as horrible, but I am oddly excited. It seems so straightforward, so monotonous, like a long, waking slumber. The last thing I want is a challenge.

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “I don’t think so. Not yet. Well…wait…is the computer pretty self-explanatory? I mean not the computer, but the program where I put all the information?”

  Nancy grins with what seems like extra fishlip. “Look at you—nervous on your first day! Don’t be. Trust me, I don’t like technology either but this couldn’t be easier.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind technolo—”

  “You just turn it on with this button back here and this one down here.” Nancy brushes past me, skimming my belly, and starts fiddling with the machine. “It takes a minute to warm up. Okay, so here it is.” She opens a file that’s on the desk. “Sometimes you have to dig through these to find what to put in each of these areas,” she says, pointing to the screen. “But they’re almost always in here somewhere. The database is identical to what’s here on paper. See?”

  “Yes. Great. Thanks. I’ll come find you if I have any questions.”

  “You really shouldn’t, but if you do of course that’s fine,” Nancy says, pushing herself up from the desk and straightening her dress. The gaps between her buttons seem to be expanding. “I’ll leave you to it. Mr. Gerstley usually comes in around ten and stays a little later in the evening. He also doesn’t work on Fridays. He’s retiring in very small steps, such a dear man. Okeydoke, good luck! Happy first day!”

  Relieved to be alone, I grab a stack of folders from a box and sit at the desk. I wonder what will happen to the sign outside when Mr. Gerstley retires all the way. I open a folder and start typing in information. It’s pleasant, doing something, as opposed to being home or wandering around town. In two weeks I’ll get a paycheck. There is this folder and then the next one and then many more like it, and that thought soothes me.

  When my father pops his head into the room, I have no idea how much time has passed. I have been in a rhythmic reverie and I’m sorry, actually, to see his sad, hopeful face. I want to stay in the blank.

  “Hey, Agnes,” he says. “Well, look at you now. One morning in and you’re already an expert.”

  It occurs to me that it’s better for him, probably, when I am sitting, and he can temporarily forget that I am pregnant.

  “Just came to see what you might want for lunch.”

  “Oh,” I s
ay, as a wave of pressure engulfs my bladder. “Let me just run to the bathroom, okay? Sorry.”

  I barely make it to the toilet and pee for what seems like thirty minutes. I’m surprised to see my dad standing in the exact same spot when I get back.

  “Did you think about it? How about sandwiches?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Sandwiches would be just fine.”

  Lately, in my dad’s presence, I imagine that I’m dying and that he needs to choose which one of us—me or the baby—to save. I keep wondering what he would do. My father stands there awkwardly. I wonder if he can read my thoughts. I’m itching to go back to the folders, to actually crawl inside of them, live among the straight rows.

  “I’ll have tuna fish, if they have it. And chips, please. And an iced tea.” I know I am not supposed to eat tuna fish.

  “You got it. I’ll have Nancy pick it all up and bring it back.” He pats me clumsily on the shoulder. “Are you having an okay first day?”

  “Yes, everything is good so far.”

  A half hour later, Nancy brings back the food and we all eat our sandwiches politely in the kitchen. I return to my desk in the storage closet and pick up exactly where I left off, as if I had never left off. I work steadily until my father appears again in the doorway, this time holding out one of those small, slim cans of pineapple juice. I take it and thank him and drink the whole thing in four gulps. It is ice cold and astonishingly sweet. As soon as I finish it, the baby starts pummeling me so hard that I have to stop what I am doing. It’s impossible to do anything with this kind of activity happening from within. It’d be like trying to walk a dog while flying a kite, I think to myself, waiting for it to subside. Eventually it does, and I resume my work. Sometime later, my father appears for the third time, like some visitor from a folk tale. He tells me it is time to go home.

  Two days later, a Wednesday, I go back for my second day, which is much like my first. Friday, my third day, is much like the first two. I pack lunches for my dad and myself. It feels not wholly unnatural to do this. I start playing a game at work, where I keep track of how many files I can complete in an hour and try to beat it. The most I’ve done is eight but usually I get stuck at six. On Tuesday I read from my mom’s copy of Anna Karenina and do laundry. On Thursday Alicia comes over and insists on painting my toenails, a bright pink called “Juicy Melon.”