by Danzy Senna
Back in her apartment, she’d unpacked her new cowboy hat and propped it on a shelf. She took a shower and put on her new turquoise nightgown.
It was over. She knew, sitting on the slim modern sofa in her Brooklyn walk-up, that it was over, this romance with herself. A love affair was ending. And she felt a new affection for her solitary life, the same affection that sometimes arises for the person you are about to leave.
She woke in the dark, to the sound of Dessa crying. The clock read 5:22.
She opened the door to the nursery to find Dessa standing in her crib, her face crumpled and red, screaming.
She picked Dessa up and Dessa stopped crying and hugged Livy around her neck.
“There, now, baby, Mama’s here. Mama’s here.”
It still amazed her how quickly the child’s mood could shift. She smiled and cooed on the changing table as Livy took off her wet diaper and put on a new one. The sky outside the window was changing too—it had gone from black to a heartbreaking pink in the time it took to put Dessa’s pajamas back on. She picked up the child and opened the door to the nursery. Ramona was standing there, holding her empty water glass.
“Oh God, you scared me,” Livy said with a laugh.
Ramona looked different. She was still wearing the cream-colored thong and a tank top, but she wore a silk bandanna around her head, and without her makeup Livy could see she still had a scar from the attack so many years ago, a faint, jagged line beneath her hairline.
“Guess what?” Ramona said, smiling.
“What?”
“I went.”
“You went?”
“Yep,” Ramona said. She followed Livy into the kitchen, where she refilled her glass. “I don’t know, maybe it was the massage, or maybe it was all the stuff the naturopath gave me the other day, but, girl, I’m completely empty.”
She leaned on the counter as if she was getting ready to talk.
“That’s great,” Livy said, shifting Dessa in her arms.
Dessa had been quiet, but now she began to whimper and pull at Livy’s nightgown.
“I have to go nurse her,” Livy said.
“Oh,” Ramona said. “Sure. I’m going to go out for a jog. I feel so light.”
Livy headed downstairs, where the curtains still shrouded the room in darkness. She slid into bed beside Christopher, placing the child between them. It was their usual ritual. She pulled down her nightgown and Dessa lay on her side and filled herself with Livy’s milk.
Christopher, half asleep, reached across the child to touch Livy’s hair. “Everything okay?”
“Ramona finally went,” she whispered.
“Went where?”
“To the bathroom. She finally took a dump.”
“Wonderful,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he was joking or sleep-talking, because in the next instant he was breathing heavily, asleep again beside her.
Mothers know this: Babies come into this world with their souls already forged.
Christopher had taken a picture of Dessa in those first moments after she’d been ripped from Livy, when she was just a nameless wet thing. In the photo she looks glistening and enormous, clean and somehow indignant, always and already the child she would become.
And sooner or later, all women know this: There is no way to do it right. You cannot have it all. Something has to give. You won’t know what it was you gave up until it is too late to recover.
The delivery hurt plenty, but nobody had warned Livy about the pain during the days following the birth, after the adrenaline had worn off. That was when the real suffering began.
Movies never show this part, the days in the hospital when you feel as if a Mack truck has driven out of you and left you a gaping bloody hole, and the thought of taking a bowel movement is so terrifying that when it finally happens you sit on the toilet weeping and it is there that you find religion, on the toilet, it is there you find yourself asking God to spare you this pain, but God doesn’t come to save you, only the shit comes and it is as bad as you have imagined, worse somehow than the baby, a reenactment of the terrible crime, but this time with no drugs to thwart it and no Lamaze breathing to distract you and no partner holding your hand and no baby’s glistening face to justify it, just the cold hospital bathroom, the squeegie bottle full of cold water, the tearing hard bowel movement opening the dirty stitches, and the hospital-grade perpetually soaked maxipad, fit for a female giant.
The nurse who checked her down there that night stared aghast at the situation between Livy’s legs. “That baby really tore you up.”
In the weeks after the birth, the world turned inside out. Black became white. Day became night and night became day. Lovers became fathers. And Livy found aging mothers—the heavyset women with the weathered faces and the weary eyes, their soft bulging bellies like ghosts of long-gone pregnancies—to be the most beautiful creatures on the planet. The young, childless women, with their taut skin and flat stomachs and anticipatory smiles, were not ugly to her, just meaningless, their beauty like grape juice to wine. She fell in love with mothers everywhere. How had they done it? Livy was bewildered, humbled in the face of the question. She felt slain by childbirth. For a moment, at least, it equalized everything. White women, black women, yellow women, brown women, poor women, rich women—mothers, all of them. They met in waiting rooms and buses and toy stores and playgroups and one of them always asked the first question—How old is the baby?—and then took it from there. They talked about milestones and nursing difficulties and those last ten pounds they couldn’t lose and peanut allergies and diaper rashes, and yet beneath the pedestrian chatter Livy felt overtaken with love of a religious magnitude for all of them. She felt the daughter-self, young and vain, dying, and the mother-self, huge and sad, rising up in its wake, linking her to nothing less than history.
Until you are a mother you are blameless. Now you are on the other side of history, Livy thought, staring around at the weary faces of the other mothers. Now you are dirty.
In the sunlight, beside her in the Jeep on the way back to the Old Hotel, Livy saw Ramona as she had always seen her, as perhaps she had always been since she came, wet and screaming, into this world. Her spirit was like a hummingbird, an always-moving, half-here, half-gone thing. Even now, she was two places at once: here, with Livy in a Jeep in Santa Fe, and at the same time back in her life in New York, with her life-coaching clients and her love interests.
She was talking about Lizette, her client, who had called her the night before, crying, saying she’d broken her diet and was on the verge of quitting her six-figure job. “That woman is a hot mess. She needs me. The work just feels so exciting. I’m really making a difference in her life.”
The airport shuttle van was already there when they pulled into the hotel parking lot. Livy helped Ramona with her bags.
Ramona chattered on, upbeat. “I had a fabulous time, girl. You’re doing so well with all the changes. You promise me you’re going to take better care of yourself? Use that spa. Buy some nice lingerie. Splurge.”
“Okay.” Livy said, no longer offended by the advice. “I’ll do that.”
“We should do this again. Maybe every two years we should meet in a different place.”
“That sounds great,” Livy said.
“Next time let’s go to Costa Rica. I have this client who owns a resort there—” Midsentence, Ramona went quiet, squinting into the distance at the mountains. When she looked at Livy her face was a bare frightened thing.
“Was I just blind? How did I miss it?”
It took Livy a beat. Julian. They had returned to Julian.
“Nobody saw it coming,” she said. “He had issues. They had nothing to do with you.”
“Seven years,” Ramona said. She bit her lip, her eyes welling up. “Can you imagine?”
“Hey,” Livy said, taking Ramona in her arms, patting her back. Ramona smelled like the city itself, something floral and hard, and yet she felt frail and limp as a child in
Livy’s arms.
“Don’t be afraid,” Livy whispered. “Be brave. You have to be brave.” As she said it, she imagined once more the old self, the one who sat in the leather chair, facing Ramona and Julian, the couple on the couch. She missed the old Livy like a lost sister, missed and loved the brave little sister, saw her in the dark Brooklyn night, walking toward her ice-coated car, head turned down against the cold.
When Ramona pulled away, she was smiling. “Hey, did I tell you I have a date tomorrow night? The one from the gym. He’s kind of young, but fine—” She stopped, let out a short laugh, and then she was walking away through the bright maze of cars, turning back to blow a kiss before she climbed inside the van.
You Are Free
The writer had misspelled her name on the envelope the way people usually did—as “Laura” rather than “Lara” (her mother’s idea of exotic). Inside, the letter itself was written on ruled paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook, the curly edges making a kind of fringe. The letter began:Dear Ms. Barrows,
Please don’t throw this letter out until you have read it and heard my side of the story. I was put up for adoption in 1983 when I was two days old. Ever since I turned eighteen, I have been looking to find my birth mother. Recently, a change in the law has allowed me to see the records. This new information has led me to the definite conclusion that you are the person I’ve been searching for. I was real happy to see that you lived so close by. Don’t worry. I’m not angry and I’m not blaming you for what happened. I’m sure you have your reasons. I don’t know if you want to meet me after all these years. I understand if you don’t. I really do. But please write me back.
Sincerely, Mandy L. Doheny
Under her name was an address in Paterson, New Jersey, and a phone number.
Lara tossed the letter on top of her other mail—a DMV notice and a Star magazine—and began to make herself dinner, a packet of ramen noodles with shrimp flavoring. She considered whether to write the woman back and tell her she’d made a mistake. She sat down to eat her noodles in front of the TV.
Later, she ran a bath and lay in it in the dark, trying to relax. She’d read once that people who took baths lived longer than people who took showers, so she took a bath every night. After she dried off, she slathered on lotion, then put on sweatpants and a T-shirt and went to watch the news. The letter still lay there on the coffee table. She picked it up and stared at it.
She wondered how the woman had gotten her name, and how she’d found her address. Lara had an unlisted number. She had just had her first byline, but it was in an obscure magazine called The Charitable America, which had published only one issue so far. The magazine was the brainchild of a young man named Timothy Fitzgerald, known to all as “Fitz,” who had gone to journalism school with Lara. The Charitable American was geared toward the top one percent income bracket, whom it was supposed to inspire and educate on giving their money away. Fitz had called Lara and invited her to be on staff. Her official title was contributor, which meant she got no health insurance or retirement plan. She was essentially freelance, which was just as well since she didn’t expect Fitz’s magazine to last. It was just another niche magazine, like Plumpers or Vacation Yachts; it wasn’t even sold on newsstands, but was given away for free in doctors’ offices and at promotional events. She figured it would last a few issues and get some press until Timothy’s stepfather, who was funding the entire venture, realized nobody really wanted to read about giving money away and pulled the plug. In the meantime, Lara would pick up a few monthly paychecks.
That night Lara tossed the letter from Mandy L. Doheny in the trash, on top of the remains of her ramen noodles with shrimp flavoring. Then she closed the lid and went to bed.
She sat in her cubicle in the corner of the fifth floor of a building in midtown Manhattan, trying to finish the story she’d been working on for weeks.
An eighty-five-year-old black woman from Tennessee named Iola Brooks, who had worked her whole life as a washerwoman, had saved every penny she earned in a secret bank account. Recently, with no children of her own and no husband, Iola Brooks had decided to give the entire amount—$150,000—to the local university. The media had gone wild for the story. The Republican state senator and the university president were milking the publicity for all it was worth, and had been flying the old woman around the country to appear on talk shows and to be interviewed by newspapers and magazines and on the radio.
Iola Brooks would grace the cover of the next issue of The Charitable American. Lara would get her first cover byline.
Lara had interviewed Iola Brooks a few weeks earlier in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. Neat as a pin, with straightened white hair pulled back in a tight bun, she’d answered Lara’s questions in a meek, soft southern drawl.
“Is there anything you still want to do with your life?” Lara had asked before they parted ways.
Iola looked out the window of the bar at the stream of business suits marching past. She seemed wistful. “I want to go to San Francisco,” she said, “and see that golden bridge. I sure would love to see a golden bridge.”
Lara had not had the heart to tell the old lady that the bridge was not really made of gold.
She finished the story at the eleventh hour and went out for a drink with her friend Jose.
Lara was thirty-three years old—the same age as Jesus when he was hung up to die. She was thirty-three, the same numbers that showed on her clock radio when she woke at 3:33 each morning with what she called “the rattles.” She’d been getting the rattles for as long as she could remember. She would wake up to find the bed shaking ever so slightly. It wasn’t a ghost and it wasn’t an earthquake. It was the vibration of her own heart, which at that hour felt strong enough to shake the foundation of the bed.
“You finish the story on that old black lady?” Jose asked, scanning the bar over her head for fresh meat.
“Iola Brooks?”
“Yeah, the old coot who gave all her money away. Why’d she give her money to a bunch of good ol’ boys who wouldn’t even accept her as a student back in the day? Fool.”
Lara sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe she wants to be remembered. Maybe she wants to get into heaven.”
“Whatever. Ignorance must be bliss,” Jose said, his eyes still on the door behind her. “If I had a hundred thou? I’d go to Barneys and buy me that Prada coat. I’d buy an apartment in Tribeca and have it furnished by somebody with taste. I’d throw a big motherfucking party just because I could.”
A handsome older man with expensive silver hair sidled up and slid his arm around Jose’s waist, whispered something in his ear. Lara promised herself, for the umpteenth time, that she would not hang out with Jose in gay bars anymore.
“Can you excuse us for a moment?” Jose said. “I’m going to take this dance.”
Lara took a cab home to Brooklyn, ignoring the driver’s exasperated sigh when she told him he had to cross the bridge.
Tinker, her cat, mewed when she walked in the door. She flipped through the mail. Nothing. But when she pressed the button on her answering machine, a young woman. She didn’t introduce herself by name, but she didn’t have to. Lara knew that voice—it was as if she had always known that voice.
The woman had a working-class accent and spoke in a whisper, clear and insistent, but a whisper nonetheless. She sounded on the edge of tears, desperate and beseeching, so much so that, as Lara listened, she stepped away from the machine and crossed her arms and watched the black box, not breathing.
“I’m sorry to bother you again. I guess you got my letter. I been waiting to hear from you. I been hoping I can see you in person. I promise I won’t mess up your life. I won’t get in the way. I just want to know who you are. All my life I been wondering who was my mother and why didn’t she want me. I just want to know why you gave me away. I’m sure you got your reasons. I don’t blame you or nothin’. I just want to know. And then I will leave you alone and it’ll be like nothing ever happened
, if that’s the way you want it to be.” There was a pause, and Lara thought she could make out crying, the sound of a gasp, heavy breathing, then, “I don’t want to be a pest. I just want us to meet. Please call me back. Okay?” She rattled off a phone number, then paused and said, “Oh yeah. I forgot to say. This is Mandy, your kid. Um, bye.”
Lara stepped up to the machine and pressed Play again and went to the couch and sat listening to the message all over again.
Mandy sounded young and she sounded rough, like somebody who had struggled.
Lara listened to the message a third time. This time she was prepared and jotted down the number.
She fingered the paper and listened to the neighbors fight, adult voices speaking harshly, the man in an unfamiliar language. Behind them, a child cried, a toddler. The kid didn’t seem to be abused, exactly, but Lara had once seen him out on the porch at five in the morning, wearing diapers and a dirty T-shirt and wailing his heart out. It was a temperate day and he was safe enough, but they’d kept him out there for almost an hour, wandering in circles, clutching the rail, and staring down at the street. Lara knew because she fell back asleep and when she woke up an hour later he was still out there, sitting on the floor and rocking back and forth, his voice hoarse and his face crumpled. Lara called the police and waited by her window until they showed up. When they rang the doorbell, the father pulled the kid inside the apartment. Lara had tried to go back to sleep then, but she kept hearing the kid crying, as if he were still out on the porch.
She sat in the dark now, listening to the muffled misery next door. She’d seen the parents. They were unfriendly. The man was burly and foreign and unemployed. The wife was pale and thin, with bleached blond hair and a distracted, nervous air. The kid was cute enough, but wouldn’t be for long.