by Edan Lepucki
I went with @muffinbuffin41 because @muffinbuffin was already taken. I wouldn’t use my real name. No one would follow me. I wouldn’t follow anyone.
I could have made my profile private, but where was the risk in that? This was an era of hypotheticals.
Dora the Explorer’s fat belly looks post-menopausal, I tweeted, and laughed aloud.
The Briton looked away from his pink paper, but only for a moment. I was nothing to him, and that was everything to me.
6.
There was a time when everything mattered to me, when life was grave, when I required that gravity to survive. Seth had just been born. I was getting up every hour or two to feed him, heating up his bottles in Marco’s dark galley kitchen. I still thought of it as Marco’s kitchen, even though I’d been living there for almost a year. The only thing in the apartment I considered mine was Seth—in the middle of the night I’d hold him close and mouth the words I love you against his still-soft skull. (Fontanel, Karl had explained to me when Devin was a day old, and suddenly those long-ago nights with Seth felt so close that the past version of me could have been sitting in the next room.)
Seth was all mine, but I didn’t breastfeed him because I was afraid of what it would do to my breasts, which belonged to me and also to Marco. Not that Marco was touching them in those months. His mother had been moved into hospice and he came home only to shower and change. He didn’t want to talk about it, and he didn’t want me to bring the baby to see his mother. Immediately after Seth was born, Marco realized what a muck of shit he’d gotten himself into, becoming a father. A grandchild was his mother’s dying wish, but in the back of his lizard brain Marco must have believed that a child would keep his mother alive. When Seth couldn’t do that, he failed his father’s only request.
The money was running out, and six weeks after Seth’s birth, I returned to the Actress. In those days, I’d strap Seth onto my chest to walk the Actress’s new Havanese (had she gotten Angela to replace me?), and during Seth’s naps I answered the Actress’s mail and booked her travel. The Actress loved Seth, and gave me a small raise. I could keep this going, I thought. The fear that I couldn’t, that my whole universe might collapse at any moment, was near-constant, but this same fear gave me the strength to get dressed in the morning when I felt too tired to move. I’d leave notes for Marco to find when he got home, and I thought I could tell when he’d read them, as if his gaze would alter the shape of my handwriting. It was my unspoken, shameful wish that Marco’s mother would finally die. Only then would Marco recognize his progeny as family, only then would he recognize me, period. We could be motherless together.
My mother, my mother. “It’s relevant, sure,” my editor, Anya, told me in a phone conversation a week before I hired S, “but remember, your fraught relationship with her is not the center of this story. This book is about your son.” I imagined the manuscripts piled on her desk, all the memoirs about fucked-up mothers. Poor Mom. People were always trying to peddle that story.
“But—” I said.
She sighed. “If you must write it, Lady, then write it. We can always see how to fit it in later.”
Anya wanted the origin story of Seth’s disability, as if my realizing he didn’t speak was akin to being exiled from the Garden of Eden. And “origin story” isn’t the right phrase anyway, because I don’t know why Seth doesn’t speak, only that he doesn’t. How to tell her too, that a single moment of revelation never happened, that it was instead a series of moments, which led, if not to his silence, then at least to my recognition of it? I would have to travel back, and farther back than that, long before speech was even expected of Seth, to understand it.
The first moment, then. Or an early one at least.
I’m at the Actress’s house, waiting for the pool man to arrive as I remove the deceased contacts from her giant Rolodex. Seth’s asleep in the bassinet I keep in the maid’s quarters, a room otherwise empty of furniture. The Actress is upstairs, napping with her cold cream smeared across her face so she looks like the Wicked Witch of the West. I wish I were asleep, I want to cry I’m so tired, but I’m only on the letter G, and the doorbell will ring at any moment. Besides, I can’t sleep on the job.
On the stove, an egg is set to boil. When it’s ready, I plan to unpeel this egg and then roll it in salt and bite into it like an apple as I stand over the sink. (Was the egg the serpent’s fruit, then?) Marco hasn’t poached an egg for me in months, and I know a hard-boiled one is a poor substitute, that instead of the drippy yolks of yore I’ll be left with a crumbly gray and yellow ball that will stick in my throat. I know too that a year before I had a tiny egg inside of my body and that it found Marco’s sperm and became Seth. Egg to bird to standing by a stove, hungry and exhausted. The water is slow to boil and I sit back down, Rolodex before me.
The pool man arrives and I lead him to the backyard, explaining the clogged filter in the deep end. Then I go get Seth, who stirred at the sound of the doorbell. He’s lying on his back in the crib, gazing up at me with his dark eyes. Like Marco’s, they are spaced wide apart, but the effect is exacerbated because his head is so small. He reminds me of a dinosaur, something prehistoric. Even so, I like looking at him, and I do so every chance I get; it’s as if there is a magnet pulling me toward his tiny body.
He is only four months old. If he had spoken then, it would have scared me.
I decide to take him into the den to feed him his bottle. We will sit on the glider. I know I shouldn’t, it’s too comfortable for someone as tired as I am, and yet I can’t resist, it’s like a giant hand that will cup and rock me.
Seth sucks down his bottle, and as I burp him, my mouth saying a soundless I love you into his skull, I slide into a deeper part of my brain, its sunless basement. It’s not that I’m sleeping, my eyes are open. But I’m not seeing.
Something is beginning to smell at the back of the house, it has a chemical singe to it, but from the basement of my mind I assume it’s a chemical the pool man is using to clear the filtration system. I am thinking of the plastic flap of the pool filter, how it opens and closes like a mouth, water in, water out, just as the glider moves back and forth, back and forth. To the left of the pool filter, right above the line of the water, shiny black tiles spell 6 FT.
Did the doorbell ring before I noticed the stink, or right after? At the time, the stink and the sound nudged at my consciousness simultaneously. At the sound, or maybe it was the smell, Seth lifts his head from my shoulder, pulling me out of my reverie.
“Coming,” I call out, my voice full of phlegm. The smell seems to be getting worse, and now there’s a new sound too. A crackling.
I don’t look to see who it is before I open the door. Why not? It’s a question that will needle me for a long time. Had I known who was on the other side, I wouldn’t have opened it. Or I would have put Seth down. I would have hidden him.
It’s her. (“It is she,” I can imagine her saying. See also: Karl.)
She stands on the wide steps of the Actress’s mansion, hands on her hips. The gate is still open for the pool man. It used to close automatically; it’s on my to-do list to call Ernesto to come fix it. The Actress calls Ernesto “the groundskeeper,” as if we’re inside an episode of Scooby-Doo.
It has been almost two years since I’ve seen my mother. She looks the same: same halo of honey-colored curls, same painted lips, same eyebrows, thicker than the fashion of the times, but groomed by a professional. I don’t recognize her gray shift dress, but I do recognize the pumps, vaginal pink. They’re her post-office shoes: expensive, but comfortable, ideal for errands.
“I see,” I say, looking at her shoes. I hold Seth to my chest; I hold in my breath.
“Mark gave me the address,” she says.
“His name is Marco.”
“Of course it is.”
“His grandfather was born in Belgrade,” I say.
I imagine my mother talking to Marco. But how? She doesn’t have our phone number. She must
have tracked him down at the Bagel Broker. And when she found him, he hadn’t withheld a single thing. He probably thought she would give us money.
I feel myself start to cry, and I put my hand on the heavy doorknob. The acrid smell asserts itself once more. It seems like it’s coming from the back of the house, but perhaps it’s the stench of my mother’s soul. She is a spiritual landfill in heels.
“You have to go,” I say. “I’m working.”
“I’m here to meet my grandson.” When he leans forward I cover Seth’s face with my hand.
“Lady, don’t suffocate him.” She wants this to be mean, but concern creeps into her voice.
“How did you find out?”
“I told you. Marc-oh.”
“But how did you know about Seth?”
“Seth. So that’s his name,” she says. Marco hadn’t revealed that, he’d left it to me to botch things.
I wait for the criticism, but before it comes, I hear the Actress scream from the kitchen. She must have gone down the back staircase, the servant stairs, she calls them.
“Lady!”
I turn away from the door. “Coming!” I call out, running with Seth toward the kitchen.
My mother is behind me.
I turn around to hiss, “I didn’t invite you in!” I keep moving, leaving her in the dark hallway.
I push open the swinging door, my other hand on Seth’s tiny back.
The large room is filled with smoke, and the Actress stands over the sink, running the faucet over whatever has been on fire, smoke rising. The Actress has cleaned the cold cream off her face, but I know if I get close enough, I will see some of it trapped in the wrinkles by her ears.
The egg. I forgot about the egg.
“I was cooking—”
“Well, you almost burned the house down! The water must have boiled away long ago. The pan is scorched and you can forget about the egg!”
I hear the door swing open behind me. “It sure is smoky, isn’t it?” my mother says. Her voice is singsongy, and I realize she is addressing Seth.
The Actress doesn’t like to be seen without due notice, and she looks up, alarmed. Her hand goes to the nude stocking cap stretched over her almost bald head.
“I’m sorry to intrude,” my mother says. “I’m Simone, Lady’s mother. She wasn’t expecting me.”
“We shouldn’t be in here,” I say, and lean over to open the window. The egg sits black and charred in the drain.
I know the Actress is stunned. She turns to me, speaking softly. “Lady, I thought you said your mother died when you were in junior high.”
“That was Royce,” my mother says, shaking her head. “Her father.”
It never occurs to my mother that I pretended she was dead. She chalks up the mistake to the Actress’s age. My mother hates old people. The Actress is sharp enough to realize I’ve lied, and plays it beautifully.
“Oh but how wonderful,” she says, “to still have your mother.”
I lead them out of the kitchen. And then, because I know how much it will hurt my mother, I ask the Actress to hold Seth. “While I walk her out,” I say.
My mother isn’t savvy enough to overstay her welcome with grace, so she lets me take her moisturized elbow, and walk her outside.
“I’m frankly surprised you didn’t get fired for that,” she says once we’re standing by her car.
“She cares about me.”
“She’s your employer.”
“Marco and I don’t want to hear from you,” I say.
She sighs and adjusts her dress. “Let’s be adults for once. I am sorry you were upset by what I said about Marco. But that was months ago.”
“But you aren’t sorry you said it.”
“Honey, he sells bagels.”
“He’s a screenwriter.”
“He’s never sold a script! And the tags on that truck are expired.”
“His mother is dying.”
“And yours is long gone, apparently. Besides, he’s short.”
“Marco’s just under six feet!” I think of the Actress’s pool: 6 FT. “He’s taller than Royce.”
“And look how that turned out.”
“I’m alive,” I say.
“Barely,” she says. “Look at how thin you’ve gotten.” But I know by her look that she’s jealous of my thin arms and my stomach, concave as a contact lens.
“I just don’t know, Lady…” she says softly, and trails off.
I remember I leaned in then, as if she might say something kind to me. That Seth was cute, even if he wasn’t.
“You don’t know what?”
“Can you really do it? Take care of a person?”
—
The actress was waiting for me when I went back inside. “Your mother is so pretty,” she said. Everyone said that.
“She used to be a catalog model,” I replied, taking Seth from her.
“When Seth’s older, you’ll understand.”
“Understand what?”
“All parents fail their kids.”
“Just because she’s pretty doesn’t mean she isn’t a witch.”
“Did she molest you?”
“No!” (Later, Anya will pose the same question, as if this were the litmus test for parental cruelty.)
“Then you must forgive her,” she said. “For Seth’s sake. A grandmother’s love is so pure.”
And then she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. “Let’s take the day off and get lunch. You need it. Think we can get a table at Kate Mantilini?”
—
I tried to tell this story to my agent. “So—what?” she said. “You think Seth inhaled the burnt egg smoke and it impaired him?”
“What? No—you don’t understand.”
“So help me then.”
“It was my mother…” I said.
She laughed so long I had to wait for her to finish. “I’m sorry, Lady, but you are bat-shit crazy. You think your mother’s visit is somehow responsible for this?”
“Not exactly, no. It’s not the whole story. It’s the first in a series of—”
“Let’s keep ‘the witch did it’ out of the proposal for now. This isn’t a ghost story.”
7.
Except for the fog, I didn’t miss much about the Bay. My dad was still living up there but I could call him whenever I wanted. He picked up 99.9 percent of the time and texted almost every day to report what kind of pizza they were serving at the Cheese Board, which he called his pied-à-terre even though it’s a restaurant (“And fromagerie!”) a mile from his house. He wrote on my Facebook wall so often that I threatened twice to block him. Right after I moved back to L.A., he sent me (and, by proxy, my mom, aka his ex-wife) a bouquet made of strawberries and chunks of pineapple. It was called an Edible Arrangement but on the card he’d written, “Here’s your Oedipal Arrangement!” which my mom thought was gross. I just laughed and texted him a picture of me with the basket balanced on my head. No less than ten seconds later he texted back: Selfie!!!!!!! which, by the way, on a circa-2006 flip phone, is no afternoon nap.
My argument is that my dad was available, even with more than three hundred miles between us. The fog wasn’t. The marine layer in L.A. is pantyhose compared to the heavy white shawl that hangs over the Berkeley Hills. And don’t even get me started on the fog across the water in San Francisco; that shit is so dense you could open your mouth and take a bite out of it. And chew. It’s the gnocchi of weather. Everett, my old boyfriend, or whatever-he-was, said that.
Before we broke up, Everett and I would drive up to my dad and Maria’s place off Grizzly Peak to walk their dog. On foggy days we wouldn’t be able to see anything beyond Ritz’s dark fur. I loved it; it felt like my very limbs were disappearing in the heavy white mist. “Amputation by fog,” I said once, and Ev laughed. I said that I loved painting it, and he laughed again.
Too bad the fog was the only thing I missed about the Bay; otherwise, I might have stayed. Why not? I could have fo
und a job; maybe not one that covered both my rent and my student-loan payments, but a job nonetheless, one I liked, and I could defer and defer on the college debt. Plus Everett was long gone; he was headed to the Yale art program, middle fingers pointed to the sky. But I couldn’t make myself stay. Even if I’d fallen in love with Berkeley, which I certainly had not, I had to return to L.A. It was home. It was where my mom was. And, more important, it was where Esther Shapiro wasn’t.
Ugh, Esther anything—I did away with that name altogether. When I returned to L.A., I started using my mother’s name, Fowler, and became known as S. I’d always hated the name Esther and shortening it to a single letter felt like sloughing off so much dead skin. A psychic facial.
S Fowler was done with all the frivolous shit that Esther Shapiro had gotten herself into. Including, and especially, her art.
My last project had come to me the same day I concocted a flimsy plan to get a master’s in psych. Everett had already left for Connecticut and we hadn’t been talking for weeks anyway. I was subletting a studio apartment in West Berkeley and temping at one soul-sucking office or another in the city, usually as a receptionist. I felt like I’d never paint again. What was the point? There was a reason I’d majored in something other than studio art: I didn’t want to be an artist.
But then, I was walking down Shattuck with one of those obvious GRE practice bibles under my arm, ready to tackle trigonometry, when it hit me: I would never open the book. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to be a therapist.
A few feet in front of me stood a woman in her late fifties, maybe early sixties. Between her thumb and index finger she held a bank receipt as if it were precious. Or rotten. She wore a sun hat, typical for the neighborhood: waterproof, reflective, breathable, and with a strap under the chin like a fucking baby’s bonnet. She was only a little older than my mom, but she was unlike my mom in almost every other way. This stranger was careful, whereas my mom was carefree. Or careless. I hadn’t seen my mom in a few months; instead I had to see this woman.
Maybe because of that, she pissed me off. Or maybe it was just her bad hat. I squeezed my GRE book and kept watching. You, I thought. You are probably a therapist. At the very least she’d been to one that day. I bet she had original art in her California Craftsman bungalow. An unremarkable landscape over the fireplace.