by Diana Altman
We went to a local diner for dinner where everyone tried not to stare at the injured woman. Then we returned to watch the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes, and I had to feign sympathy when she didn’t win. Later I pulled out the sleep sofa in the living room and brushed my teeth in her one bathroom, where there were pills she was supposed to take and ointments with prescription labels on the tubes.
A real estate broker had said he had a house for Violet to see, so in the morning we got into my car and I started the ignition. “Put your seat belt on, Mother.”
“Oh, those silly things.”
“Put it on.”
“I don’t need that.”
“Yes, you do. Put on your seat belt.” She yanked it across her chest, made exaggerated jabs at the latch then let it snap back. “I don’t need that silly thing, Sonya.”
“Well, I’m not driving until you put it on.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Mother. Put your seat belt on. First of all, it’s the law. Second of all you’re not safe without it.” Who was this child I was with? She screwed up her face, yanked the seat belt down, jabbed again at the connection, acted as if making it work was as difficult as wiring a satellite, glanced to see if I would relent, saw that I wasn’t impressed by her mild tantrum, and pushed hard enough for us to hear the required click.
The broker tried to hide his dismay when he saw a woman with a blue bruised face and a patch over her eye come through the door of his office with a pregnant woman who was in that joint loosened stage when the walk is a waddle. He showed us his book of listings and neither of us made any outward show of surprise when we saw that the house where we used to live was now on the market. It was selling for much more than Mother could afford, but we wanted to see it so the broker took us there unaware that we were wasting his time. The gardens were gone, replaced by lawn. The hedges in front were no longer there so the front yard melted into the street. The apple tree was gone and the shutters, instead of being black, were now green. The sunporch windows, once a charming wall of small panes, had been replaced by a plate glass window too modern for the house. A slender young woman and a little girl holding a doll came to the door.
We entered a living room with the kind of comfy old furniture that feet were allowed on. The little girl said, “Mommy what happened to lady?” The mother whispered, “Shh.”
“She have blue face.”
The mother smiled an apology to Mother, picked up the little girl and said, “Let’s go play with your dollhouse, okay?” and carried the child out of the room.
Mother said, “I must look a fright.”
“Unlike me,” I said, “who looks absolutely gorgeous.”
We followed the broker to the dining room, and I had to catch myself before blurting out, “I remember this as so much bigger!” We stood gaping at the change, the different wallpaper, the different table, chairs, lights. The room was totally drained of us. The carpet was gone. It was a surprise to see that under the carpet there were hardwood floors.
The current owner returned without her child and stood next to us. “I don’t know what that hole is for,” she said pointing to a hole in the floor where my father’s chair used to be. “I can’t imagine why anyone would drill a hole in oak floors.” Mother and I were careful not to look at each other. We knew what that hole was for. We knew she was responsible for putting it there. It was what remained of the electric bell Mother installed so Seymour could summon the maid from the kitchen. My mother must have thought that this way of calling the maid was more discreet than tinkling a bell. The buzzer made a bump under the carpet next to Seymour’s chair. He had trouble finding it with his foot. He pressed here, he pressed there and when his exasperation was about to explode, Joan and I dropped under the table and hunted for the bump with our palms. The sister who found the mound pressed her palm on it and because the kitchen was not far from the dining room we could hear a rude raspberry blast forth from a speaker above the silverware drawer. To further rebel against pretension, and to get back at my mother for slights real or imagined, I came out from under the table and called, “Ruby! We’re ready!” thereby announcing that the unnecessary bell was silly and my mother was a fool.
Sometimes, when Ruby retreated to the kitchen after setting a serving tray on the table in front of my mother, my father looked at the meat and said, “Is that pork?” Pork nights were something visited upon us by Seymour at least once every few months. They began when Ruby was back in the kitchen. “Oh, Seymour,” Mother said, her shoulders already drooping, “You know it isn’t pork.”
“No. I do not know it isn’t pork. Nor do you. You give her the money and she goes out and buys whatever she wants. How do you know it isn’t pork?”
“Ruby doesn’t buy pork.”
“How do you know? How do you know what she buys? Are you there with her? Are you? Are you?”
“It is not pork.”
“But you don’t know that. You can’t know that. Look at her. All she eats is pork.”
“Seymour, be quiet.”
“No. I will not be quiet. I do not eat pork.” Then he stood up and slammed his napkin on the table and shouted, “I do not eat pork!” and stomped upstairs to change out of his velvet smoking jacket. Wearing his flannel shirt, he stomped out of the house slamming the back door. Next, we heard the crunch of the gravel driveway and saw the dining room shades illuminated by the car headlights as he drove away to the deli on Main Street leaving his wife shamed over nothing and his daughters frightened.
I knew what pork nights were about. My father wanted a wife stirring at the stove while he sat at the kitchen table surrounded by delicious aromas. He didn’t want a maid to cook for him and he especially didn’t want to pay for one. The wife/mother was supposed to keep the home fires burning, not an unknown woman from Alabama who was afraid of him. Why should he have that presence in his house? He didn’t want it!
We followed the broker into the kitchen. The butler’s pantry had been removed and now the room seemed bigger. The broker said, “And here we have the kitchen.”
“I can see it’s the kitchen,” my mother said. “You don’t have to tell me it’s the kitchen. Any fool can see it’s the kitchen.”
We went upstairs. The little girl was in my bedroom, and I remembered when I too had sides on my bed so I wouldn’t fall out. Here was a different child looking out those windows at those same maple trees and, before drifting to sleep, tracing the cracks on the ceiling though they were probably different lines now. It all seemed to have shrunk, my mother’s former bedroom no longer a gigantic ballroom and my father’s big room now just a small office where there was a cluttered desk.
At the front door, which was not as heavy and wide as I remembered, we thanked the young woman and Mother said, “You know, everyone who’s lived in this house has gotten divorced.” The woman gasped. My mother’s lack of tact was mythic! The broker escorted us quickly to his car.
That night, instead of going out, we put Swanson frozen turkey dinners in the oven and took a Sarabeth’s cheesecake out of the freezer. Sitting at the kitchen table, I pulled the cover off the turkey dinner and steam rose up. Everything in the aluminum dish was neatly divided into separate little beds, the beans, the potato, the turkey mounded over the stuffing. I had just finished the last bite of stuffing when out of my mouth came, “Mother, remember that time you said you had a tumor? Were you pregnant?” The question just rose up and came out, almost like something my body had to expel.
“Yes,” she said.
“You were?”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“A boy.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you give him away?”
“Yes.”
“Who was the father?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember? How can you not remember?”
“I don’t remember.”
/>
Her tone warned that I was not to ask again. “Did he get adopted?”
“Yes.”
“You said you had a tumor.” I didn’t want the conversation to turn to blame. But there it was. She said nothing. Her cat Midnight, sleeping on his cushion, woke up then rose, stretched elaborately, and trotted away to the bathroom where his pan was. “How come you didn’t get an abortion?”
“I did.”
“You did?”
“Yes. But it didn’t take.”
“What do you mean?”
“It didn’t take. And then it was too late.”
“You mean you thought you were rid of it but then you weren’t?”
“Yes.”
I remembered hearing her sobbing behind her bedroom door. I thought she was crying because she was going to die of cancer. “So you went through all of that by yourself?” What I meant was how come you didn’t consider Joan and me?
“Oh, I’ve been through a lot of things by myself.”
“Do you ever think about finding him?”
“Who?”
“Your son.”
“My what?”
“Your son.”
“What?” Now she sat up straight and glared fire at me. “No! Never. That’s ridiculous.”
“You aren’t curious about him?”
“Don’t talk nonsense.” She got up and went to her bedroom where she turned on the television. She was done with me.
The next day when we looked at houses she was short with the broker. “Why show me such rinky dink houses? Don’t waste my time.” That evening at dinner, we talked about nothing—whether Marlon Brando would win best actor for the Godfather, how we couldn’t stand looking at Lisa Minnelli’s giant mouth, how the lawyer who was prosecuting Vice President Spiro Agnew was one of the smart boys in Joan’s class at New Rochelle High, how Uncle Alan was trying to sell the foreign holdings of Greenstone Enterprises. “He’s not half the man Dad was,” Violet said. “He’ll run Greenstones right into the ground.”
I drove home the next day, waited until I knew Joan’s children would be asleep, and phoned. “Are you sitting down?”
She inhaled, held down smoke, and said in a choked voice, “Alone, at last.”
“You will never guess. I asked her about Louisville.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
“You mean that time she had a tumor?”
“She didn’t have a tumor!”
“Yes, she did.”
“Joan! She didn’t have a tumor.”
“Then why’d she say she did?”
“Joan! She was pregnant!”
Dead silence. Then a small voice, “She was pregnant?”
“I figured you knew.”
“How come she told you and not me? Nobody ever tells me anything.”
“I asked her.”
“She was pregnant?”
“I assumed you and your therapist talked about it.”
“No.”
“You never talked to her about that time Mother left us alone in high school?”
“Yes. I said she went to Louisville to have a tumor taken out.”
“And what did Joyce say?”
“Nothing.”
“Your therapist said nothing when you told her your mother went to Louisville to have a tumor taken out?”
“What should she say?”
I couldn’t reply because all I could think was that Joan’s therapist wasn’t very astute.
“What was it?”
“A boy.”
“A boy? You mean we have a brother?”
“I guess so.”
“What’d she do with it?”
“Gave it away.”
“Who to?”
“I don’t know.”
“I always wanted a brother,” Joan said. I heard her inhale, hold the smoke, then exhale.
“Me too.”
“A baby brother.”
“Well, not such a baby. In his teens now.”
“Do you think I should ask her?”
“If you want to.”
“Do you think I should?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“What should I say?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean I can’t just say did you have a baby.”
“That’s sort of what I said.”
“Anyway I can’t ask her.
I’m so mad at her.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ve raised my rent and, instead of helping me out by babysitting or letting the kids stay with her for a weekend so I can have some peace and quiet, our mother tells me I should be more careful with my money. My money! What money?”
“She was so adamant about not wanting to see him. Her whole body changed. She really doesn’t want to see him.”
“Who do you suppose the father is?”
“Maybe it was a one night stand.”
“Do you think maybe she was raped?”
“Raped?” Why did Joan think such a violent thought? How could Joan think of our little mother being attacked and violated and left to lie broken and bruised? Was Joan more realistic than I because she lived in New York City and I lived in peaceful Newton? “That would account for her not wanting to see him,” Joan said. “Should we try to find him?”
“Without telling her? Suppose he’s a criminal. Suppose he’s a psychopath. He could stalk our kids. Or maybe he’s some homeless person, and he’d ask us for money.”
“Rots a ruck with that, buddy,” Joan said. “You know how much Raf owes me in child support? Sixteen thousand dollars.”
“No!”
“Yes. So the lawyer tells me I can take him to court and the judge will garnish his wages.”
“Garnish his wages?”
“They take the money out of his paycheck. Or they sell his car.”
“Right. Then your kids say Mommy took away Daddy’s car.”
“Exactly.”
We were quiet for a while. Then I said, “How would we do it?”
“I could ask Celia. She went looking for her mother. Celia said her mother didn’t want to be found but then she changed her mind. Celia said it wasn’t worth the effort. She liked the woman who raised her much better. You think it was that Applebaum guy?” Joan was quiet then I heard a loud fart. “Ahh,” she said, “what a relief. We have to wait til she’s dead.” She sniffed in an exaggerated way. “Doesn’t smell. I am so bloated. Every day at work someone brings in cookies or popcorn or something. I said would you please not bring this crap into the studio? Do they listen to me? Celia’s the size of a house.”
“I mean maybe there’s a way of finding out about him before we contact him, so if he’s in prison or something we can just stop pursuing it.”
“I think we should wait until she’s dead.”
“But he could be dead by then.”
“Or we could be.”
“But how would you even begin to know where to look?” The baby inside of me kicked, and I could see the outline of its foot. “Joan! I can see its foot! It has a little foot!”
“Little cutie head.”
I stroked the tiny foot outline. “There are probably birth records in Louisville,” I said. “How do we even know she went to Louisville? She was probably lying about that too.”
“Oh, my god,” Joan said. “I can’t believe we have a brother. I love him already.”
Just as the ghost of the dead baby Sebastian hovered around Grandma Greenstone so did the presence of Violet’s secret baby hover around her, a constant low hum, irritating like the sound of air conditioners. Sebastian had a name, age, personality, regret, and love attached to him. My mother’s baby, once amorphous like mist, now took shape in my imagination, sometimes Oliver Twist holding up his bowl for more, sometimes a faceless felon unrepentant in his prison cell, sometimes a playboy laughing on his yacht.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Tossed by hurricane winds, slammed against
boulders, my intellect useless, my self reduced to nothing, I howled like a beast in the jaws of a trap. Then rested. Leo, next to me, watched my face and said, “Here comes another one.” I can’t stand this anymore, I thought, I can’t stand this wave rolling toward me again, drowning me in agony as I huff and puff and huff and puff as taught in birth preparation class where the word pain was not spoken. Leo next to me saying, “Now it’s receding, now it’s going away, now it’s gone.” He said he could see it in my face. I was on our bed where the mattress was protected with newspaper and plastic sheeting. The midwife said, “Now push.” I was pushing. Couldn’t she see I was pushing? “Push!” But if I pushed, I’d break apart. The thing inside was too big to get out. It would rip me apart. “Push goddammit, Sonya!” and she slapped me on the thigh and that brought me back and I pushed and pushed while animal growls and shrieks burst out of me until what felt like a boulder was dislodged at last and I sank back against the pillows. “It’s a girl,” the midwife said. I sat forward and saw a baby on the bed between my bloody thighs, a bluish pinkish baby with white goo on her scalp and a nose flattened by the effort of squeezing out of me. “Oh, she’s so beautiful!” In my arms, she stared up at me and I’d never felt such overwhelming love in my life. Leo and I examined her fingers, toes, little knees, little elbows, teeny ears.
My breasts were swollen udders. Push up bras, low cut dresses, tight sweaters, Playboy centerfolds, how absurd! This was what they were for! I could feed her from my own body. I was a perfectly designed mammal. Hannah kneaded them like kittens do on their mothers, and for her sake, I endured the pain as she sucked. I was grateful to Mother Nature when nursing stopped hurting so much.
Hannah’s closet began to fill up with tiny dresses that Grandma Greenstone sent from Florida. She went to the baby clothes outlets with her friends. Grandpa’s death released Grandma from a kind of imprisonment, and we saw that she was not a person incapable of friendship but the opposite. She played canasta, had luncheons, enjoyed going to the movies with friends who lived in her building.
Nothing existed except my baby. When friends came to visit, I listened to them at first then fell to staring at Hannah as she slept wrapped in her baby blanket, a little cap on her head. Lost in her, I’d remember there was company and snap to attention and apologize. I felt sorry for Leo because he lost his importance. I needed nothing but my baby. Sometimes I wished he’d just drop his paycheck in the mail slot. At the same time, I loved those moments when Leo and I stood by her cradle and watched her sleeping, and I was grateful for those times he carried her around, so I could pass out from exhaustion. He took care of both of us for a week then got in his car and drove away to his office. This was when I felt the terrible difference between male and female. He could go, and I had to stay. The one with the milk was the one who stayed. College be damned! My head was just an accessary stuck on top. I phoned a friend, “But what do you do all day?” She replied, “I don’t know. Do the laundry?” Panic erupted as it dawned on me that I was totally isolated in a house in the suburbs and couldn’t go out when I felt like it. If the baby was asleep, I had to stay there.