by Danzy Senna
She picked up the phone and dialed the number that Mandy L. Doheny had left for her.
A young woman answered on the second ring. “Hello?” she said. She sounded tired. Lara could hear a television in the background, the wild applause of a studio audience.
“Hello?” the woman said again. “Who’s there?”
Lara could hear the television more clearly now. It sounded like a rerun of Oprah. Oprah’s earthy, familiar voice was saying, “I want you to meet Gracie. She’s got a story you won’t believe.”
“Hello?” the woman said once more, and then Lara could hear that she was turning down the volume on the television until it was silent. In a whisper, sounding as small and sad and desperate as she had on the answering machine, she said, “Is that you?”
Lara hung up.
The fighting next door was getting louder. Lara picked up the remote and turned on the TV to block it out. Oprah was wiping a tear away from her face while she held a young woman’s hand, nodding her head and saying, “You’re very brave.”
Lara watched Oprah but didn’t really see her. Her mind was filled with an image of Mandy sitting on a sofa in a dark apartment somewhere in New Jersey, watching this very same show, this very same exchange. Lara imagined not her face but her silhouette from behind, a young woman, thin and lost, framed by the light of a giant television set. She felt a tug of sadness, like loss or remorse. She wished she had said something to clarify the situation, like “I’m not your mother,” but she had not been able to force the words out.
In the middle of the night she woke to the bed shaking, the room shaking, her heart beating. The rattles. The fragments of a terrible dream cluttered her mind. A baby under a bed, crying. A dimly lit room, a table with stirrups, a smear of blood on a tiled wall. Her own voice as a child yelling, “Momma! Momma!”
The next morning Lara stood in her bedroom in front of the long mirror, staring at her naked body. She was thin, muscular, pale. She had small breasts, a swatch of dark curly hair between her legs. Everything about her body was tight and lean, and although she wasn’t a virgin she had never had an orgasm. The last man with whom she’d had sex said she looked like a virgin, and indeed it hurt when he entered her the way it always hurt when a man pushed inside of her. Hers was not a body that had given birth to anything, ever.
And yet? She wondered. It was a crazy thought but it kept floating back to her, like some piece of rotten driftwood you can’t swim away from. The summer of her thirteenth birthday was the same summer Mandy had been born and put up for adoption, a summer Lara remembered as dreary and lonely and hot. The summer her parents had had the kitchen renovated by Doug, a carpenter in his late twenties so blond and boyishly good-looking that all the mothers in the neighborhood wondered aloud why he wasn’t taken. Once he entered the bathroom while Lara was taking a shower and pretended to wash his hands for an inordinately long time while he watched her reflection in the mirror. She didn’t remember anything else about that moment, only lying in bed afterward, still wet and shivering, feeling shame. And then somehow she had gained weight and had gone into the hospital for what they’d told her was appendicitis. The doctors knocked her out and afterward she lay around the house eating Fudgsicles and watching a lot of Three’s Company. She had not seen many friends and she had cried herself to sleep at night, but for what, she could not now remember.
It was a rainy day and the subway smelled of wet bodies. There was a young woman across from her with a child in a stroller. The stroller was covered with plastic to keep out the rain or the germs or both. The child was maybe five, brown-skinned and wiry, with dreadlocks. He was sucking his thumb hard and staring listlessly out at the press of people beyond the plastic. His mother, alarmingly young, was talking to the girl beside her, saying in a thick, gruff voice that didn’t match her own baby face, “That motherfucker tried to tell me it was just eczema. On his dick. I was like, naw.”
Lara watched the girl’s glossy lips move and thought that was the strange power of motherhood. No matter how badly, carelessly, halfheartedly, or unhappily one did it, you remained a mother. Bad mother, good mother, here mother, gone mother. The adjectives changed but the noun remained the same. You were a mother. There was no changing that.
Iola Brooks had changed her mind.
The old black maid who had washed white people’s clothes her whole life, only to give—poignantly, with a spirit of saintly forgiveness and goodwill—her entire life savings to the southern formerly segregated college, the old black lady who had traveled around the country, making appearances on Oprah and Good Morning America in her starched white church dress, her Bible held together with duct tape—that old black spinster with her meek “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am” and “I want to go to San Francisco and see that golden bridge,” that same Iola Brooks had, at the last minute, before the final forms were signed and the money was handed over, rescinded her offer.
There was a message on Lara’s machine when she got to work. It was from a weary-sounding university public relations officer, telling her to call the cover story off. Iola Brooks had decided to keep the money until she died, and when she died, what was left of her savings would go to her cousin Dionne and Dionne’s three kids.
Lara called Iola Brooks to get the story from her directly. She answered on the third ring, and groaned, irritated, when Lara told her who she was.
“Lissen,” she said, “I told those fools at the university I done changed my mind. Why won’t they just leave me alone? They been calling me off the hook. Trying to convince me how this is gonna do something to change the world. I spent sixty-five years scrubbing the shit out their britches, why I owe them a cent?”
Lara let her ramble on. She knew the article would be cut. The Charitable American was meant to inspire people to give to the needy, and now any article on Iola Brooks would be about something else altogether.
Still, she had one more question.
What would Iola Brooks do with her remaining years on earth?
“Maybe I’ll go on a cruise,” Iola said. “Or maybe I’ll buy me a new car and some pump jemsons.” She went on to list all the things she might buy, now that she was not giving to charity. A Clapper. A set of Ginsu knives. A Chia Pet.
Finally Lara thanked her for her time and wished her the best of luck with her purchases.
“Finish the edits?” It was Fitz, leaning over her cubicle wearing a white smile and a polo shirt with the collar turned up.
“Kill the piece,” Lara told him. “Iola Brooks has seen the error of her ways. She’s decided to keep her money to herself after all.”
She spent the rest of the afternoon in a story meeting, brainstorming with Fitz and his staff of dilettante friends about what might replace Iola Brooks on the cover. Fitz wouldn’t look her in the eye and she got the feeling he was upset with her, as if she was somehow to blame for the old woman’s change of heart. In the end, he assigned the new cover story—on the estate of Jerry Falwell—to somebody else.
At five o’clock she headed back to Brooklyn on the D train. It was only when she unlocked the door of her apartment and stepped inside and felt Tinker rub up against her ankle that she realized it had been with her all day, like a dull headache—the girl, that is, Mandy L. Doheny. She went to the answering machine, barely breathing. She saw that there had been two missed calls but there was no message. She didn’t bother turning on the lights but sat in the dark with Tinker on her lap, stroking her soft fur. She tried to imagine what Mandy L. Doheny looked like, what she had looked like. She imagined a little girl—seven years old or so—small and dark and smiling as she ran toward her across a playground, a lunch box banging against her thigh. She imagined herself opening her arms wide to welcome the child into them.
She was crying now. Alone. She was crying alone in the dark. She felt the tears roll down her cheeks. They tickled, like crawling bugs, but she did not rub them away.
Lara had gotten an abortion her sophomore year in college. I
t was nothing shocking, nothing unusual. Everybody she knew had gotten one at some point, even more than one. She barely remembered the procedure. What was more vivid to her was the party she’d gone to a few nights later, the boy she’d refrained from having sex with only because she was still passing blood clots. That she remembered.
And she recalled her friend Karen, beautiful, tawny, strident Karen, who told her she was brave for going through with the procedure. A few months later, Karen had invited her to protest the local Domino’s Pizza, because it had just come public that the owners were anti-abortion. After the protest they had gone and smoked a joint in Lara’s dorm room, and after that they’d called Domino’s and, laughing so hard they could barely get the words out, tried to order a pizza with fetus topping.
Lara was shivering now, cold, though she was still wearing her damp coat and the cat was hot and purring, its little heart beating, oblivious to the sobbing of the body beneath her.
A shrill sound. Ringing. The phone. Lara scrambled to her feet. Tinker, tossed to the floor, meowed in outrage.
She picked up the receiver. “Hello?” she said, gasping.
The voice that came back was like an echo, somebody else crying in the dark—a woman’s voice, familiar as honey to her now.
“It’s me. Why won’t you see me? Don’t you even care? Don’t you even want to know what’s happened to me?”
Lara said, “Okay. Yes. Okay.”
She changed her outfit three times before she left the apartment that Sunday morning. Her heart beat with anticipation, even though she knew it was crazy. She had never had a baby. She would have remembered it. Lara was thirty-three and childless, manless, the case study of shrill magazine articles declaring the crisis of American women. She spent her Saturday nights with a cantankerous gay wit named Jose and sometimes his nebbishy sidekick, Lou. She ate her lunch with a copy editor named Francis, a person she knew on paper was a woman but in person thought of as an “it.”
She was one of a million mid-thirties New Yorkers who had come to the city precisely to get free of family, free of suburbia, free of lawn gnomes and barbecue equipment, and whom now family life had passed by. It was getting late in the day for her to incorporate family into her life. She was a childless woman, and she suspected she would always be so. That was her fate, and she was trying hard to love her fate.
And yet. Here she was, all dressed up and going to meet a girl named Mandy L. Doheny, a girl who claimed to be her daughter.
She realized as she started out the door that the trepidation and doubt were not real. She had felt obligated to have those emotions. But they were false. She was elated. She felt giddy with the knowledge that she had a child out there. She had always thought of her life like a road, a straight road that stretched out ahead of her, beckoning her to the finish line, the grave. But now she knew she had always been a mother, and this fact made her life story look more like a circle than a road. She was moving forward and backward at the same moment. She had a family—a child—and the knowledge of this made her feel complete, though she knew she was not supposed to buy into such retrograde logic.
Mandy had suggested they meet at a Starbucks across from the Port Authority. She said she’d be sitting in the back of the café near the windows.
The subway was nearly empty except for a few early risers, immigrants with scrubbed faces and stiff outfits, on their way to church. Lara sat watching the underground darkness fly past out the window. She imagined the girl she was going to meet, imagined a young woman who looked just as she had looked at the age of twenty, a vague, almost fetal imprecision to her features, like somebody not yet fully born.
A teenage boy stood behind the register wearing disposable gloves and placing small slices of pastry into paper sampling cups.
And in the back of the café, yes, a girl was seated by the windows. There was nobody else it could be. She sat beside a baby stroller, and was pushing it back and forth with one arm while she gazed out the window. And so this meant that Lara was not only a mother but a grandmother. She walked toward the girl, who was heavyset, with dirty blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. As Lara got closer, she saw that the girl had thin lips and thin eyebrows that had been plucked so many times they were almost gone. She didn’t have any drink or food on the table in front of her.
When she looked up and saw Lara, a slight, hopeful smile crossed her lips.
“Are you the one?” she said, rising from her seat.
She was heavier from the waist down, with a bulge at her belly where a baby had recently been. Lara glanced into the stroller and saw an infant, only a few months old, snuggled in blankets, asleep. The girl wore a white Adidas tracksuit and a thick gold chain around her neck with a nameplate that spelled out MANDY in bubbly cursive.
Lara stepped forward, held out her hand, trying to sustain her belief. But it was inescapably clear to her that there had been a mistake. This girl was no more her daughter than the pimply kid working the register. And she knew too that it was indeed her appendix she’d had removed in the summer of 1983. She didn’t remember the summer or the surgery clearly, but that was what they’d removed, not a child, never a child.
She had to get it over with quickly so the girl would stop smiling at her like that. “Yes, I’m Lara, but there’s been a mistake. I’m not your mother.”
Mandy pulled her hand away, wiped it on her jeans, looked out the window, expressionless. “Why’d you come here, then?”
Lara looked down at the table. There were pieces of shredded napkin scattered all over it. “I thought there might be a chance.”
“How do you know it’s not true?” Mandy said, facing Lara now, but her eyes focused just slightly to the left of Lara’s face.
“I just know.”
The girl wanted to be sure. She showed Lara her documents, rumpled official forms, a nameless birth certificate from 1983, and a more recent letter from a Catholic charity that revealed the identity of her real mother, someone named Laura Barrows from Queens, who had been twenty-six at the time of Mandy’s birth, not thirteen.
Mandy didn’t cry when Lara pointed out the discrepancy. She just pursed her lips and nodded her head and said, “I get it, you ain’t my mother,” like somebody who was more accustomed to disappointment than to pleasant surprises.
Lara, just to be polite, asked the girl a few questions, and learned that she lived with her boyfriend, Jervey, in Paterson, New Jersey. The baby in the stroller, who was still asleep, was named Jermajesty. He was Jervey’s kid. She had another child too, from an earlier relationship, a three-year-old girl named Destiny. She learned that Mandy worked in a Subway sandwich shop. She learned that Mandy had been raised in foster care.
Mandy asked if Lara would watch the baby while she went to the bathroom. Lara nodded and Mandy excused herself and was gone. Almost as soon as the heavy metal door had closed, Jermajesty woke up, screaming. He was a tiny baby but he could make a lot of noise. Lara looked around but the boy at the register didn’t seem to notice and she saw he had earphones in his ears as he cleaned an espresso machine with a white cloth. Lara pushed the stroller back and forth, hoping the motion would calm the baby, but he kept screaming. She’d forgotten how much she disliked being around babies. It was their weight and their ferociousness, rather than their smallness and vulnerability, that scared her. They were strong and they were tenacious.
She looked toward the bathroom door, willing Mandy to come out, but after a few minutes, when the door remained closed, Lara picked the baby up and held him against her shoulder as a friend with a baby had forced her to do every time she visited, until gradually she’d stopped visiting at all. “There, there,” she said, hearing the strangeness of those familiar soothing words. “There, there.” After a moment, Jermajesty began to calm down, and then he stopped crying entirely. She was afraid to stop moving, so she kept walking back and forth, patting the baby’s back.
As she paced, she thought about Iola Brooks, and how Iola wanted to vi
sit “that golden bridge” before she died. Lara had gone to college in San Francisco, not far from that bridge. It was in that very landscape she’d gotten pregnant and in that place she’d undone what was growing inside of her. She had only a moment’s doubt the night before the procedure, when she’d woken, suffused in a state of premature grief. She’d smothered her sobs into her pillow for fear of waking her roommate, but was dry-eyed and enthusiastic when Karen came beeping outside the dormitory in the morning in her dented Volvo sports coupe.
The bridge they crossed that day was not golden. It was made of steel and painted orange. They drove over it on the way back from the procedure. Karen chattered about a psychology exam and a boy named Cricket. Lara, bleary and cramping beside her, looked out at the water and the cliffs in the distance, repeating a mantra, words aimed at somebody who didn’t exist: You are free, you are free, you are free.
The door opened and Mandy stepped out. Her eyes looked puffy and red, like maybe she’d been crying.
“I gotta get back,” she said. “Jervey’s no good with the other one.”
Roughly, she took Jermajesty from Lara’s arms and put him back in his stroller, covering him with blankets though it was warm inside the café. He started to cry again but she put a bottle of formula in his mouth and he went quiet.
“Took me two hours to get here on the bus,” Mandy said, eyeing the pastries behind the glass. “Wasted the whole morning on this.”
She was trying to make Lara feel guilty and it was working.
“Can I get you anything? For your bus ride home?”
“A Frappuccino, I guess.”
Lara nodded. “Sure.” They went to the register and Lara ordered the girl a Frappuccino. As she pulled out her wallet to pay, Mandy asked if she could get a piece of coffee cake with it, and an orange juice. Lara added the coffee cake and the orange juice to the order.