Once a day I drive through town and watch, with a wicked sense of relief, the bulging rivers and the cornfields melting under brown water. Ionica’s concentrated suckle at my breasts, the delicious pull of his mouth at my nipples day and night, gives me a hold on reality, a fixed point in space and in myself. Everything seems very clear: the drip from the ceiling, the regular suck at my breasts, Andrei’s open mouth catching the drip, the words on the court papers and the signatures of lawyers and judges, the sound of the rain on the roof.
After a man with a long white beard who chews tobacco and calls me little lady comes to repair our roof, I sit with my two sons in the living room, happy that the roof is no longer leaking and that the sun is funny like an orange ball.
Soon after I start my new teaching job, Tom calls to tell me he is coming to Indiana to see Andrei and the new baby. I am anxious about the encounter and decide to scrub and clean the entire house, our rented house with a white wooden fence and an arborvitae in the front garden. I use up all the detergents I had brought from Chicago, and the recent smell of wet plaster from the floods and the leak in the roof is mixed with stinging Clorox and Windex smells and also with smells of baby puke and poop. I feel slightly queasy from the mixture of smells and the exertion.
Tom arrives in the evening and calls me from the local bed-and-breakfast to ask me if he can come over right now. He looks plumper than I remember him being, his hair is longer, and he is growing a beard. He walks into the living room confidently, pushing past the boxes with books and clothes and the new baby things, and Andrei jumps in his arms and screams, “Daddy, Daddy.” He puts Andrei down and turns towards Ionica, who is sleeping in my arms with his head on my shoulder, and strokes his cheeks, saying he is a beautiful baby, so beautiful. Behind Tom comes a slightly older woman with red hair and very tight jeans, who walks into the house with the same self-assurance as Tom, goes past me, and heads straight to Andrei, trying to kiss him. Andrei turns his cheek away and puts both his hands on his face as if to protect himself. I stand in the middle of our new living room, among all our boxes and things, holding Ionica, and I say to the woman, “Excuse me, who are you?” Tom lets go of Andrei and informs me this is his friend Sandy, and can I please get Andrei’s clothes and things ready for the road, since he plans to take him back to Chicago for a little while, Sandy can stay with him while he is at work in the morning. She doesn’t have to work in the morning, and I do, and with whom will I leave the children when I am at work?
He elaborates and says he would actually like Andrei to live with him and Sandy in Chicago, and I can keep the baby. “It’s a fair deal,” he concludes. I am starting to sweat profusely, and I feel my milk let down furiously in my breasts. Yes, let’s divide our children just like we did with the lamps, I think as I am trying to hold a steady point of balance in the middle of the room. You take the older child, and I take the little one. You take the green lamp from your mother, and I take the antique one with the iron stand. It seems to me rather improbable that I have actually married, lived for several years, and had two children with this man who is standing here in front of me saying such outlandish things. Sandy stares at me with an impertinent look, and I notice the thick black eyeliner around her eyes. She is attractive in what my mother would call a vulgar way. Feeling the tension in the room, Andrei comes to me and, clinging to my red knit skirt, says, “Mama, I want to go poopoo.”
I take this as a good occasion to excuse myself and gain some time. I say with exceeding politeness, “Excuse me, please sit down, I will be right back.” I push Andrei into the bathroom while still holding the baby. I sit on the edge of the tub while Andrei is sitting on the toilet, and I am thinking that maybe nothing that I ever did since that bloody train to Trieste was ever worth anything, that I would rather have had Mihai in my life even if he were to be secret police ten times over than find myself in this idiotic situation, this scene from a bad play: hiding in the bathroom with my two children while my husband, who has turned into someone unknown overnight, is laying siege over my life together with a red-haired woman who looks like a middle-aged hooker. But Mihai is dead, cold and hard as this marble here under my feet.
I stare at the bathroom window and at the black walnut tree waving in the summer wind and fantasize about jumping out of the window with my two children and just starting to run across cornfields and wheat fields and among the majestic Indiana haystacks until I get tired and get to a different state – Kentucky, for example. Maybe in Kentucky, everything will get better for us. Ionica is shifting his position on my shoulder and is whimpering. I start nursing him to keep him from crying. I leave the bathroom to get the cordless phone in the hallway. I move stealthily like a thief in my own house, hoping Tom and Sandy will not hear or see me. They are sitting on the sofa in the front room, holding hands and staring out of the main window as if in a trance. Where did Tom find this woman, I think as I sneak back into the bathroom with the cordless in one hand and with Ionica nursing in my other arm, feeling like a circus acrobat. I call Marta. At first she says, “Ay, ay, the bastard, how could he do this to you?” But then in her typical practical and rational fashion, Marta tells me, “You know what they say, that possession is fifty per cent of the law. You have Andrei, querida, and the baby with you, just be firm and say he can’t do anything without you first talking to your lawyer, just simply refuse to let Andrei go with him. Don’t be intimidated, there is nothing he can do right now, there is no reason to take the child away from you, you’re a good mother. Be tough, you can do it.”
When I tell Marta about Sandy, she says, “At least he is not conventional, going after a younger woman, as other men would.” I feel much stronger talking to Marta, who, before we hang up, says one last thing, “Mona, honey, he feels crazy right now, this is how men are, they go crazy when they see themselves suddenly without a wife, with no child, their family suddenly gone. Remember, as hard as it is, you have the kids around you, your life is fuller. But he is now alone in that apartment. Give him time, it will all get better, you’ll see.”
I come out of the bathroom with the children and tell Tom very politely that we need to talk to our lawyers first about visitation and that Andrei cannot go to Chicago with him right now. Andrei says he wants to stay with the baby and starts crying and pulling at Ionica’s feet. Tom stares at me angrily, the way he did when he found out I had cheated on him, and says between his teeth: “You’ll hear soon from my lawyer, Mona. Just you wait.” I stare at him and Sandy and try not to say anything and not to be intimidated, as Marta has advised me. I just say, “Goodbye for now.” Andrei, who is also sad that his father is leaving, goes after him and says, “Daddy, Daddy, when are you coming back to see us?” My heart is pounding as I pull Andrei and try to keep him inside the house. I feel spent from the effort and the tension, and as their car pulls away, I throw myself on the sofa in the living room, holding my children close to me and wondering what else the future has in store.
Dragons and the Social Worker
A SOCIAL WORKER comes to have dinner with us to see how the children are getting along in my house, so he can testify in the divorce proceedings. The three of us are doing activities from a book. I go to the kitchen to prepare dinner. I just finished correcting one hundred and twenty-two exam papers the night before. Ionica woke me up three times in the night, one time to vomit the hot dog he had for dinner, another to drink some water, and then another to be changed because of his diarrhoea. I am tired to the point that the social worker, politely wiping his feet outside my front door, seems like an evil character from the Brothers Grimm stories I read to my children at night. Or maybe even the scaly dragon from the Romanian story my grandmother read to me, the story about magic golden apples. This dragon, who lives in a golden garden under the earth, abducts a beautiful princess. Eventually he gets chopped up into pieces by the youngest and smartest of the three sons of a king. The prince gets the magic golden apples in the end.
The social worker, with his neat
ly trimmed brown hair and a soft tweed jacket, with his nice-guy attitude as he tries to get the children to feel comfortable with him so they’ll open up, seems like a cross between a cartoon character and a dragon. I am hoping my children don’t bite each other’s bellies or smear each other with snot or spit at each other the way they do when I am too tired to pay attention to them. They get into fights about who took the string they found in the backyard or who’s a butthead and who isn’t. Ionica, who is now almost one and a half, has recently learned the word butthead in day care from a boy named Dante.
For dinner, I’ve made a Romanian cucumber salad and spaghetti with an Alfredo sauce I got premade in a pouch. The social worker likes the sauce so much he compliments me several times. When he asks me for the recipe, I tell him it’s an old Romanian recipe that’s too complicated to explain.
I ask Andrei if he remembers the tale about the salt in the food, a Romanian version of the King Lear story. The two oldest princesses tell the king they love him like honey and like sugar, but his youngest daughter tells him she loves him like salt. He gets so angry at her that he banishes her. She works for a year as a servant in a palace in one of the neighbouring kingdoms. The prince of this kingdom meets her, falls in love with her, and marries her. She invites her father to the wedding and prepares all his food herself – with no salt, just with honey and sugar. The king can’t eat any of his food, and he gets angry. His daughter, the princess bride, stands up and tells everyone the story of how her father had chased her out of his palace because she had told him she loved him like the salt in food. Then the father realizes that salt is more important than just honey and sugar, and he feels ashamed. The king and his daughter reconcile, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Andrei tells the story to the social worker during dinner. It’s his favourite story. Then Andrei tells the social worker one of the Greek myths he knows, the one about Hermes who stole Apollo’s cows. This, too, is his favourite. The social worker is more and more impressed, and he comments on the cucumber salad and the Alfredo sauce again. He wants more spaghetti. He says I really have to give him the recipe.
All I can think about is the report he’s going to give the court about the mother’s household. Andrei starts mixing Greek myths and Grimm’s fairy tales together until he’s talking about sharks that eat people alive. Ionica starts screaming in his high chair because he thinks he’s going to be eaten up by sharks, and I have to hold him and stand for the rest of the dinner to get him to stop crying.
I don’t remember much of what happens after that. I remember the tiredness spreading all over me after the social worker has left and I look at the sink full of dirty dishes. Three of those dishes were the social worker’s dishes. He is going to give recommendations to the court about Andrei’s well-being and our living arrangements. The social worker’s report, after one dinner with us, will determine whether I retain custody of my son. Exhaustion spreads through me like poison.
I want the blue snows of the Carpathian Mountains and their crystalline echoes. If only I could run away with my two children to the Carpathians and hide in some shepherd’s house in a pasture where sheep graze. I stand in front of the kitchen sink clenching my teeth and staring at the dirty dishes. We would be living in the shepherd’s cottage on top of the Carpathian Mountains where the air in the winter is so pure and so clear you can feel it with your fingertips. And we would eat goat’s cheese that is smooth and white and salty-sweet. My two sons and I would sleep on a high straw bed, under a huge blanket called a plapumă, filled with goose down. I would feel them, peaceful and safe, breathing next to me on the straw bed, under the down plapumă, in the shepherd’s cottage on top of a Carpathian mountain. Away from social workers and lawyers and judges and depositions and hearings and Alfredo sauce in plastic pouches. Under the stars of my own childhood, in the clear air ringing with cowbells and bleats of sheep and smelling of blue snow and dung and queen of the night. And I could speak the sweet, harsh sounds of my own language to my own children, without having to justify anything to a morose judge who mumbles his words into his beard.
The children start playing their cops-and-robbers game. I can’t bring myself to wash the dishes. I join the game. Andrei and I are robbers, and Ionica is the policeman. I carry a sword and try to escape from the policeman chasing me. At some point, Ionica dashes out of the house and starts running down our street with his own golden sword in his hand, trying to catch other robbers who might have got loose in our neighbourhood. I run after him with my sword, calling to him hysterically in the cold November air. A neighbour looks out at us from her living room window. I’m in my slippers chasing after my toddler with a toy sword in my hand, shouting at the top of my lungs in a language that has never been heard before in this midwestern town of seventeen thousand people.
Tom’s lawyer said in court that I habitually use obscenities to my children whenever I speak to them in Romanian and that is precisely why I use Romanian to speak to them in front of English-speaking people, so I can curse my children at will. Once, my own lawyer asked me if adultery is common in Romania. Is it a cultural thing, he wanted to know, and that’s why I did it? But I have plenty of English swear words I learned riding the el my first winter in Chicago, and I tell him Fuck you, mister, Romanians didn’t invent adultery, you know. At least my lawyer calls me by my family name, while Tom’s lawyer just points at me in court and says that woman. I turn around during the hearings to see who is this woman he keeps pointing at.
The November air is fresh and chilly, and Ionica, with his plump little body and blond hair, running ahead of me on the crimson and orange carpet of leaves, is a beautiful apparition. It seems impossible to catch him. My steps are heavy, and he looks as if he might take off and soar into the chilly November evening with his golden toy sword held up to the sky, like the Romanian king Michael the Brave, holding his sword against the invading Turks, who must still be guarding the square where my parents lived the night I was born.
Then he stumbles and falls and begins to wail. Fear grips my heart, fear that neighbours are watching and will report this bizarre scene of child abuse to the police, fear that men in dark suits are going to walk into my house and take away Andrei and Ionica, fear that time is snatching minutes away from their childhood, rushing them away towards some unknown American future. I run to Ionica still holding my sword and carry him back into the house. He has somehow gone from crying to laughing in less than a second, and his face is red from the cold night air. He speaks to me in the language of Romanian shepherds, little sweet and harsh words, making the r’s into l’s, as all Romanian children do when they first start speaking. Romanian r’s are hard and round like cart wheels on cobblestones. It takes Romanian children a lot of hard work before they can pronounce their r’s, but once they do, they know the permanent delight of rolling the language over and over on their tongues, little rapid wheels, rrrrr, hard and ticklish. Ionica can say only l, and he sucks his thumb all the time. He can run faster than either his brother or me.
Andrei helps me clean up and offers to wash the dishes. He uses too much soap, and the sink overflows with mountains of suds. He looks at me as if I’m going to scold him, but I just roll my eyes. A mountain of Palmolive suds is a more beautiful sight than the social worker’s dirty dishes. Suds spill all over the kitchen floor. Ionica thinks they are marvellous. Andrei put suds on his cheeks to make a white beard, and his round blue eyes seem even bigger than usual. I wish again that we could all live in a shepherd’s cottage in the peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. Instead, I tell them a bedtime story about shepherds living in little cottages on very high mountains, wearing huge coats made of sheepskin and carrying heavy sticks to protect themselves from hungry wolves and sheep robbers. Ionica asks me for a shepherd’s stick to take to day care so he can fight with Dante, the boy who taught him butthead. We all sleep in one bed together tonight, with our gold and silver swords beside us for protection.
Indiana, Crossroads of Ame
rica
I HAVE CHOSEN to live in the flattest, most boring landscape of the American Midwest, and I could call myself happy living in a university town where I teach drama and theatre. I love the flat, flat, wide, endless cornfields, where the sun rises and sets with a vengeance every day, having no mountains, no valleys, no undulating earth to hide behind. This space soothes my heart. I have the illusion, in its straight immensity, that my native land is just over the horizon. Just beyond that stretch of cornfield is the garden of my aunt and uncle’s house in the Carpathians.
I bought my house on a whim, because it matched a white straw hat I was wearing one day when I was walking down that street and saw its FOR SALE sign. A delicate white house built at the turn of the century, it had round thin columns and a wide front porch. I imagined myself in it, in my white straw hat and in my pink linen dress, like an American midwestern woman in the 1920s, writing love letters on a rosewood escritoire. It made me want to have an American woman with an American past –a woman in a linen dress and straw hat sitting at a rosewood desk and daydreaming – as my great-grandmother. A woman who had been spared dictatorships, who never rode on cattle trains searching for refuge during the war or saw bloated bodies floating on a flooded river. I gave her a name: Jessie Gibbons. She had bobbed thick black hair and dark brown eyes, and skin so soft and white you wanted to touch her face when you looked at her. The European wars were just a distant rumour to her. Her immediate concern was the ball at Ricky Danford’s mansion on Sycamore Road. She wanted to wear the fuchsia satin low-cut dress, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it.
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