Motherest

by Kristen Iskandrian

  Joan calls one day while my mother is out shopping and my father is at work.

  “Hi! Oh my God, hi. I’m so glad you answered. Did you have the baby?”

  “Yes! A boy.”

  “Oh my goodness. Congratulations! How are you doing? What’s his name?”

  I laugh for the first time in a long time. What a relief, to laugh. “I don’t know. I feel like I might not ever know. Poor thing has his one-month checkup next week.”

  “Tea Rose Junior?”

  I feel the laughter blink out of my body. I had all but forgotten that my baby has a father, that every baby has a father. For what? I think, bitterness curling my edges like a flame on paper. I’m the only one here. I’ve always been the only one here. I’m the only one this child needs.

  “How is school? Did you find a roommate?”

  “School is fine. My classes are easy this semester. My parents agreed to pay the balance on the rent for the rest of the term. After that I’m on my own. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. Not having any roommates is pretty nice.”

  I am quiet. Everything Joan is saying seems like a transmission from another planet.

  I remember spring break, playing house with Joan. The coziness of it. Something about how she defined the spaces she inhabited—even the front desk at the music library, when she was working, exuded a certain quality. The feeling of I could rest here. I could have a quiet mind here. An aura of tea steam and soft light and throw blankets, even when those things were absent. I think about how in my one year of college, everything that could have happened, did. College, I realize, is not school. It is a backdrop.

  “What if I went back?” I ask, half to myself. Joan was in the middle of a sentence about the new director of the music library.

  “What? Where? Here? Here?”

  “My mother came home,” I tell her.

  “Oh my God. Really?”

  “It’s not, um, working out. I can’t seem to…be here. And she is trying to turn this baby into my dead brother.”

  A heavy sigh comes from Joan. “I know how that is.” Then, “I have a car, you know. It was my sister’s. It’s not mine to keep, the way nothing of hers can be. It’s like I’m borrowing from her soul or something. I constantly feel like I’m offending them by being alive.”

  We sit in silence for a minute.

  “Um, Agnes. The other reason I’m calling, besides the baby…” She trails off.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Tea Rose is, um, asking about you. A lot. He comes by at least a couple times a week, wanting to hang out. We had lunch twice, and I went with him to a party where he got fantastically drunk and talked about you the whole time.”

  “Wait. What about the—”

  “The girl? The love of his life? Yeah. She’s not in the picture anymore. Something about how she tried to steal from him? Or his family? I don’t know. It ended badly.”

  “Wow. So I’m, what, the rebound from the girl he broke up with me for?”

  “I don’t know. He seems pretty obsessed with you.”

  I have to laugh. “He’ll probably be obsessed with you soon enough, if you give him the chance.”

  “I still think it’s crazy that he has a kid and doesn’t know it.”

  “For all intents and purposes, he doesn’t have a kid. There’s no reason for him to know.”

  Joan makes a sound like she is huffing her breath onto a cold windowpane. “I love ya, Agnes. But I don’t know if I agree. I know I have no idea what you’ve been through, but doesn’t every kid deserve to know where she comes from? Like, even if they don’t end up having a relationship?”

  From the other room, I hear the baby stir. “I have to get going,” I say reluctantly. “Thank you for calling me.” I don’t really want to hang up. Talking to Joan feels like a place, a room with a view of weeping willows and sighing brooks.

  “Okay. Wait. Write down my number. In case you ever need a rescue.”

  * * *

  My mother has bought the baby a little bouncy seat. She insists on being the only one who knows how to put him in it.

  “Give him to me,” she says. “The straps are tricky.”

  I give in, because I am tired. Tired of fending her off. Tired of sneaking around. Tired of waking up multiple times a night, not to feed the baby, although I am waking up to do that, too, but to glance around the room and listen outside the door for her. Tired of seeing the containers of formula lined up near the toaster, the photocopied articles about feeding schedules and sleep training.

  One evening, we are sitting in the den. My mother crouches near the baby in his bouncy seat. He stares fixedly at the plush bumblebee suspended above his head. My father is lazily playing solitaire on the coffee table. It is a placid scene that evokes nothing but dread inside of me. That knot again, pulling tighter.

  “I’m thinking about going back to school,” I say.

  “Wonderful,” my mother jumps in. “You could come back whenever you wanted, to see the baby—weekends, breaks. I think it’s important to finish college.”

  My mouth opens and then closes. My father looks from my mother to me, lays down a card. “What, uh, were you thinking, Agnes? A local school? Like, community college? Or reenrolling in your old school…?”

  “Well, first,” I say, trying to stay calm, “I just want to say that whatever we decide—whatever I decide—I’m not going anywhere or doing anything without my baby.” I don’t intend the emphasis, but there it is.

  Mom’s eyebrows seem to birth new eyebrows. “What do you have in mind, exactly?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. But I think I could try to enroll for next semester, go part-time, get a job. It wouldn’t be easy but it wouldn’t be impossible.” I didn’t really have a plan before I started talking, but what I’m saying feels right, and it gives me a flicker of hope, and until I feel its feeble warmth, I don’t realize what a sad person I’ve turned into.

  “Agnes, be sensible. Who are you thinking would pay for college? Let alone child care?” My mother sounds insulted.

  “You helped me pay for college this whole past year! And I worked, and we had financial aid! I don’t understand what’s changed.” Seeing my mother’s face, I add, “I mean in terms of the financial stuff.”

  “What’s changed,” my mother says, her words gathering like a summer storm, “is that you got pregnant at nineteen and had a baby. You will not be able to manage without help. You’re still a child yourself.”

  “Who says I won’t have help? I could have help. I have…friends. I could hire someone. I will figure something out!”

  “Friends? You think friends are going to help you raise your baby? What, on their way to the bar? If the father wasn’t willing to stick around, don’t be so sure your friends will.”

  The baby wriggles in his seat and begins to cry. My mother beats me to him and turns the seat to the “vibrate/music” setting. A music-box version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” loudly fills the room, the interstices of our anger. My son cries harder. My mother unfastens the straps in what seems like an exaggerated way and bounces him in her arms. He quiets down. She gives me a look, a look meant to prove something to me. My father looks helplessly on, and I find myself pitying him. He doesn’t deserve this. I feel as though he’s eddying down the drain of this house, this house that has become like a living drain ever since Mom returned. For a while, we lived in the still, shallow water. Now we are being pulled under.

  The difference between Dad and me is that I want to get out and dry off. He wants to get the going under over with, to start a new life down there beneath the one he used to know. Good or bad, he just wants to get where he’s going and know it swiftly and entirely so that he can stop having to feel things. I wouldn’t call my aspirations lofty but I still want to believe in an up, a reaching toward.

  The baby begins to bleat quietly, and then louder, and I tell my mom that I need to feed him, and she pretends not to hear me, so I say, “MOM. PLEASE
HAND ME MY SON.”

  She gives me a flinty look and kisses his head languidly before handing him to me, in the manner of a mother handing her child to someone she does not one hundred percent trust. I take him upstairs and find a revenge-tinged satisfaction in nursing the hell out of him. He finishes on one side and then the other, and when I burp him, he vomits all over me. I clean him up, change his outfit, wrap him up snugly, and lay him in his crib. His eyes flutter and he gives me a look—not quite a smile, almost a smirk, a charming, flirty look, the look, I realize, of his father.

  Without changing my shirt, I find the portable phone and carry it outside. A stiff breeze hits my vomit-soaked chest and I shiver, with cold and excitement. I dial Joan’s number.

  Dear Mom (Hi Dad),

  I know you’re probably still mad. I hope that in time you won’t be mad. I’m not writing to change your mind about being mad, but I did just want you to know that we’re fine, in case you’re worried. I can live with your anger more than I can live with your worry.

  I know it wasn’t a good scene, our goodbye. I know you want to blame Joan, too, but she’s really not at fault. I told her to come. I know it seems irresponsible and juvenile. But I can’t be at home, in your home, at least not right now. One day I will come back, and it will be because I want to be there. Maybe Thanksgiving. Maybe Christmas. I can’t keep you from coming here but if you do I hope you come knowing you will not change my mind, knowing that my son and I will not be driving home with you.

  I have to figure out what home means now, because the home I left became alien to me, and I lost all footing. Joan feels like home to me. And she really loves the baby already. She helped me find a pediatrician. She is probably the most caring person I have ever known. The baby’s father is here, but so far I have not seen him. It’s a situation I’m treading lightly around.

  The registrar granted me an official leave for fall semester, no penalties to my existing credits. It’ll take me longer to graduate but that’s okay with me. I will start taking classes in January, just two. Joan is trying to get me a job in the music library and if that doesn’t work out I may be able to work in the dining hall again and if that doesn’t work out I’ll find something else. She is going to babysit when I have to be away. I trust her as much as I trust myself. Sometimes it’s easier to trust her than myself.

  I took out all the money from my savings account because I’m going to need it until I pin down a job. I have already used some of it to set us up here. The baby and I are sharing a room and it’s very comfortable. We have a bed and a crib. Also a small rocker that I found on the curb. We scrubbed it down and Joan made a slipcover for it in less than two days. I know I’ll need more stuff eventually but we’re okay for now. He sleeps well and feeds well and has started to smile. My love for him is exhilarating. I keep waiting for it to be hard, like everyone says it will be. I know it will, one day, be hard. Maybe once it gets hard it will only get harder, and I’ll never know this ease and joy again, and I will disappoint him and he will disappoint me in irrevocable, unthinkable ways. I know things change. But until they do, I am enjoying each day for what it is bringing me: peace.

  I hope you stay, Mom. I hope you and Dad can be happy there, or maybe somewhere else, but together. I will always be your daughter and my son will always be your grandson. I didn’t leave to rebel. I didn’t leave because I was angry. I have to be a mother to this boy and I couldn’t do that under your watch.

  I am grateful for everything you’ve done and tried to do for me.

  Dad: whenever I was in your office as a kid, I used to read that “Footprints” plaque that someone—Nancy, I think, which seems crazy to me now—gave you. I loved the punchline of God carrying that man on the beach. And then as I got older it started to make me furious—the schmaltziness, the idea of this beachy God announcing his good deeds, glibly solving the mystery of why some of us make it and some of us don’t, why some of us stay on the sand while others hurtle themselves headlong into the sea. The only thing that stupid plaque gets right is that it is impossible to know sometimes if you’re being carried. God never shows up in my dreams to tell me if I have. But that I’m here, with this baby, is proof that someone or something did. You did, Dad. You carried me through this most impossible year, even when I had no idea you were doing so.

  In my closet, behind the stuffed animals, is a box of letters. It’s for you, Mom. The letters are in order. I still want so badly for you to know me. And I want so badly to know you too. Let us try from a distance. I think we’re better from a distance.

  Yours,

  Agnes

  PS: His name is Daniel.

  Many people loved this book into being. Heartfelt thanks to my agent, Emma Patterson, for her always-astute advice and guidance, from which has sprung a real friendship. To my whip-smart editor, Libby Burton, who saw the book inside the manuscript and made it hum; and to Sean Desmond, Paul Samuelson, and the rest of the team at Twelve for taking such good care of it. A debt of gratitude to Jennifer Pitotti MD, for her obstetrical fact-checking in key passages of the novel.

  To the women: Jenn Blair, who rooted for Agnes from the very beginning. Porochista Khakpour and Laura van den Berg, for their gifts of early enthusiasm. Melissa Broder and Lorian Long, my virtual coven. Sabrina Orah Mark, whose work has changed me, whose friendship has sustained me. Jennie Marable, my longtime co-conspirator, for accusing me of being a writer long before I felt like one.

  To the places: The weird and wonderful town of Athens, Georgia, where I learned and unlearned so much. The Wingate Hotel on Route 280 in Birmingham, Alabama, and my room overlooking the Dumpster, where I spent several scattered weekends away from my regular life in order to finish this book.

  And to my family—my first, toughest, truest teachers: Greta and Ami Iskandrian, Basil and Kimberly Iskandrian, Susie and Brendhan Buckingham. I love you. Thank you for loving me. Mom, thank you for showing me always to seek. Dad, thank you for showing me always to strive. For the immense support of my Connell family, too—how lucky I feel to have gained you.

  To my daughters, Beatrice and Simone, for reinventing my world. And to Brian—for everything, everything.

  Kristen Iskandrian’s work has been published in Tin House, Zyzzyva, Crazyhorse, EPOCH, and Denver Quarterly, among other places. Her story “The Inheritors” was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 as a juror favorite. She has a BA from the College of the Holy Cross and an MA and PhD in literature and creative writing from University of Georgia. Born in Philadelphia, Kristen currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband and two daughters.

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  Motherest

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  Kristen Iskandrian

  Discussion Questions

  The author includes two epigraphs:

  O children, O my children, you have a city

  You have a home, and you can leave me behind you,

  And without your mother you may live there forever

  —Euripides, The Medea

  I broke a mirror, in which I figured you.

  —John Berryman, The Dream Songs

  How do these epigraphs inform Motherest? How did they affect your expectations or feelings going in?

  The first issue Agnes raises in regards to her relationship with her mother is that of privacy, of “rummaging in her nightstand” and being reprimanded for it: “Do you know what private means?” [pg. 3] How does privacy—as a concept and as a device—function throughout the novel?

  In a letter, Agnes writes “I guess I have a natural aversion to endings too.” [pg. 7] How is this sentiment illustrated? In what ways does Agnes not let things end?

  “I think about writing a letter. I think about leaving. When I can’t do the second thing, I tend to do the first.” [pg. 55] Agnes frequently refers to herself, her family members, and other people in her life as “leaving,” either literally or figuratively. What effect does this have on your understanding of Agnes as a character?