"Can they fix it?"
"Amelia," he says, exasperated, "it's almost eight, and there isn't a mechanic here. I have to call a tow truck and get it towed to a garage and then see. I can't get home tonight."
You left me. You left me here with your child. "Okay," I say. "Will you tell Mark?" Otherwise he will blame me. Seven year olds blame the messenger.
"Sure," he says, resigned.
"Mark?" I call. No answer, although I can hear Ernest on the TV. "Mark?" After a moment I say to Tim, "Hold on," and I go downstairs. Mark is sitting on the couch, deaf to the world. "Mark!" I say loudly.
He starts. "What!"
"Your dad is on the phone."
He jumps off the couch and runs for the kitchen phone calling, "Dadddyyyy!" It is artificial. It is the behavior of a child raised on sitcoms. It sets my teeth on edge.
I go back upstairs and hang up the extension.
Mark is sobbing when I come back downstairs. He hands me the phone and runs and throws himself face down on the couch.
"Amelia?" Tim says. He sounds tired. He is standing out in the cold; he doesn't know how much the car is going to cost him. I've been a shit, of course. "I'll call you tomorrow," he says.
"Okay," I say.
I go in and I rub Mark's back. After a while he turns his tear-stained face toward the TV and watches, and I go back to my book.
Saturday morning I sit on the steps while he tells me about the car. The phone cord is stretched from the kitchen to the foyer.
In a tiny, whining little girl voice, I say, "You have to come home." Mark is watching cartoons, and I don't want him to hear me crying. "You have to come home."
"I can't," he says. "The car wont be fixed until late today, if at all today."
"Can't you rent a car?"
He hasn't thought of that. "I don't know," he says.
"You have to come back," I say. I whisper. I can't think of anything else to say. Who am I? Who is this insipid woman whose voice is coming out of my mouth, begging, sobbing?
"I'll come home," he says. "I'll call you back."
When he comes home, I can't talk to him. I'm afraid that if I open my mouth, toads and beetles and worms will pour out, and I will say something. Something irrevocable.
Mark has been lying on the couch. At one point he was screaming because he said he wanted his daddy and he wanted him right now, but his father was only about halfway home. Well, only about halfway to our home. His daddy doesn't live here anymore. The house is up for sale. We will leave at the end of December.
I wanted to tell Mark that if it wasn't for me, his daddy wouldn't have come home this weekend at all. But I don't say anything. I close my mouth so that no ugly thing will come out.
I am good. I am trying hard to be good.
4, Correspondence
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Friehotf,
Mark is a bright child, fully capable of doing the assigned work. He is often a charming child. He has quite a sense of humor. However, he has poor impulse control, does not stay in his seat, talks out inappropriately in class, and lilts other children when he is frustrated. His grades reflect his inability to control himself.
He has been referred for screening through the guidance office, however, I don't think that Mark suffers from hyperactivity or ADD. He is maturing emotionally and physically more slowly than he is intellectually. Children mature at different rates, and this isn't cause for alarm.
Please call me to set up an appointment. I'm best reached between 12:15 and 12:50 or after school ...
5. Authorial Intrusion
It is important to note that this story is a story of particulars. Most stepchildren live with their mother, so the situation in this story is unusual, although not unique. There are three common reasons why a court will grant full custody to the father, and these are: a) abandonment by the biological mother; b) significant and documented mental instability in the mother; or c) a history of substance abuse in the mother.
The greatest threat to stepchildren is the adult partner of the biological parent. Boyfriends account for a large proportion of child abuse. I would cite the source on this, but I read it in NicCall's or Better Homes and Gardens while I was waiting at the HMO to have my prescription filled, and I didn't feel right taking the magazine. Stepmothers account for a significant proportion of child abuse cases, too, I'm sure.
What isn't documented is the affect on the child of living with someone who does not physically abuse or neglect them, who is apparently a decent, caring parent, who goes through all the forms of parenthood without ever really feeling what a parent feels. This is not abuse, it is just fate. If anyone is at fault, it is the adult, but how do you force something you don't feel? What is the duty of the adult? What is the duty of the child?
6. Choices
Tim calls home from work at four. Mark gets off the bus at three thirty. "Hi Sweetie," Tim says. "How is everything?"
"Okay," I say. "Mark got a two." Mark gets a note every day at school rating his behavior on a five-point scale from poor to excellent!. Two is one notch above poor. Call it fair.
"What did you say?" Tim asks.
"Just the usual. You know, 'What happened? Are you sure it's all Keith's fault? Did you have anything to do with it? Is there anything you could have done to keep it from happening?' That stuff."
Tim sighs on the other end of the phone. "What's he doing now?"
"He's supposed to be doing his homework," I say. "I think he's playing with the cat."
"Oh. Let me talk to him."
"Mark!" I call down the stairs. No answer. There never is. "Mark? Your dad's on the phone." I listen for a long moment. Just about the time I decide he hasn't heard me, Mark picks up and breathes, "Hello?"
I hang the phone up gently. I sit on the bed beside the upstairs phone and wonder what they are saying. I smooth the wrinkles out of the crimson bedspread. I want to tell Tim about the school open house, and if I don't tell him now, I'll forget to tell him tonight. I'd forgotten every evening all last week.
I pick up the phone, and Tim is saying, "... and don't upset Amelia."
"Okay," Mark breathes, as if this is a familiar litany.
"Tim?" I say.
"Amelia," he says. "Okay Mark, hang up."
"I wanted to tell you about the open house Thursday."
"Mark," Tim says, "hang up." I hear the strain in his voice.
"Okay." Mark hangs up with a clatter.
I chatter about the open house, about how I keep forgetting to tell him. Tim promises to be home in time. "I'll pick tip Mark and then we'll get some fast food and go to the open house."
"I'll go with you," I say.
"If you want," Tim says. "You don't have to go."
"It's okay," I say.
You really don't have to," Tim says. "He's my kid." Before he finishes, I hear someone say something in the background, his manager, probably irritated that Tim is spending time on personal phone calls. Tini cups his hand over the receiver and says something. "Gotta go," he says to me.
"Okay," I say. I stay on the phone after he has hung up, listening for a moment to the empty air.
7. Pillow Talk
At open houses you don't get to talk to the teachers. You just sit with a bunch of other parents, and the teacher tells you all what school is like. In a month there will be parent-teacher conferences. Tim grimly writes down the dates for the conference in his organizer. I suspect it will be a familiar experience. "Mark is a very bright boy, but he has trouble staying in his seat. Did you know he cries very easily?"
Mark likes the novelty of having us at school. "Do you want to see the gym?" He leads us purposefully through the low-ceilinged halls. The hallways always seemed so big when I was a child. He takes us to the art room. He likes art. He has a papier-mache fish on the wall. It is huge and blue and green, with an open mouth and a surprised expression. A big, glorious fish.
"It's great," I say. "It's really neat."
Mark is bouncing on his to
es, not appearing to have heard me.
Tim says, "Mark! Stand still!"
I touch Tim's arm. "It's okay," I say. "He's not bothering anything"
That's who Mark is, and maybe we should ease up on him a bit. Asking him to be still is asking him to do something he's wired wrongly for.
I will try, I promise myself, to give Mark spaces where he can vibrate a little.
At home that night Tim, and I crawl into bed. We haven't made love in a month, and I don't suggest it now.
"Do you mind if I watch the weather?" Tim asks.
I turn on my side with my back to him and try to sleep. The news flickers when I close my eyes, like flames. Like ... something. I don't know what. I want to cry.
"Do you ever feel pulled?" I ask.
"Is this a talk?" Tim says. It's a joke between us. He says the worst words a woman can utter are, "Oh Tim, we have to talk."
"Do you feel pulled between making me happy and making Mark happy?"
"Sometimes,' he says.
"Are you afraid of me?" I ask.
"Afraid of you?" Tim says. He laughs.
Not that way," I say. "I mean, afraid about how I'll act with Mark. Afraid I'll be mad at him or something."
Tim is silent for a moment. Finally he says, "I'm afraid you'll get so tired of my rotten kid you'll run away."
I am thinking that I cannot live like this. I cannot be the one that everyone fears. I am thinking that if I leave, Mark will have been abandoned again. I am thinking that I am coming to understand Mark, like tonight, at the school, in ways that Tim cannot. And Mark needs that.
I am thinking I am trapped.
Think of it like a prison sentence, I tell myself. In nine years, Mark will be eighteen and he'll be gone.
I despise myself.
8. Perspectives
We are meeting with a counselor, as a family. It's Tim's idea, based on the teacher's note about Mark possibly being an ADD child. It seems to me that ADD is a description of personality. The therapist is a woman named Karen Poletta. I like her; she's middle-aged and a little overweight. Professional with kids without being a kind of mother figure. I like her gray hair: straight, smooth, and shining. I like the way she looks right at me.
By the year 2010, there will be more stepfamilies than, than, what is the right word, natural families? Nuclear families? Normal families? It's a vaguely comforting thought. I can imagine an army of us, stepmothers, marching across the country. Not marching: creeping. I can't imagine us marching.
I am saying some of my concerns. "I don't trust myself," I am saying. "I don't trust my reactions." Tim is watching me. Karen Poletta is watching me. This is a session without Mark, who is at my mother's. I look at the bookshelf with the Legos and the Puppets. Family counseling. I'm glad she hasn't had Mark do anything with puppets. "I don't know if I'm being too strict, if I'm just getting mad. I don't know if, for example, I'm letting him stay out too late in the evening because I don't want him around because it's quieter when he's not around. So I try to see what the other parents do, and do what they do."
Karen Poletta looks thoughtful. "How is that different from a biological parent?" she asks. "Particularly when you have a child like Mark, who is a difficult child. You're not the only parent of a difficult child who wants some relief. I think some of the things that you think are because you are a stepmother are stepmother issues, but some of them are just parent issues."
It's not, I think, it's not the same. I don't love him. I don't like him.
Karen Poletta is talking about how much better off Mark is with us than with his mother. That sometimes things aren't perfect, but they are good enough. That Mark has a safe and stable home.
But suddenly, I'm not sure. What if it is the same, some of it? Parent issues?
There's air in the room, and I realize I am taking deep breaths. Big, gulping breaths.
"But he needs a mother," I say, interrupting.
"And he doesn't have one," the therapist says. "But he has a father and a stepmother."
It is what we have.
The Beast
was thirteen. It was spring, the barren time in March when you cannot be sure if it is really warmer, but you are so desperate for change that you tell yourself the mud at the edge of the sidewalk is different from winter mud and you are sure that the smell of wet soil has suddenly a bit of the scent of summer rains, of grass and drowned earthworms. And it has, because it is spring and inside the ground something is stirring. I was wearing a yellow linen dress which my mother had picked out and which I therefore disliked although I knew it flattered me. My shoes were white and I was concentrating on keeping them out of the mud. My father and I were going to mass- my mother did not go; she was Protestant. My father put his hand on top of my hair, his palm on my head, and I could feel the bone of my skull and my skin and his hot palm, so dry and strong. When I was a little girl, he did that often, and called me Muscles. He had not called me Muscles or put his hand on my head for a long time. I could not help arching my back a little, I wanted to push against his hand like a cat but the instinct that comes with being thirteen, the half-understood caution that makes a girl timid, or wild, the shyness told me to just walk. I wanted to feel the rough edge of the pocket of his coat against my, cheek, but I was too tall. I wanted to he seven again, and safe. But I still wanted to push against his hand and put my hand in his pocket and steal the leather palmed glove, that secret animal.
Instead I went into the church, took a Bulletin, dipped my finger in Holy Water and genuflected. The inside of the church smelled like damp wood and furniture polish, not alive at all. My father took off his coat and draped it over the edge of the pew and when I came back from communion I stole his glove. The paper taste of the wafer was still in my mouth and I took a deep breath of the leather. It smelled like March.
We walked back through the school because it was drizzling, my father tall in his navy suit and my shoes going click on the linoleum. There were two classes of each grade, starting at the sixth and going down to the first. The hall ended in a T and we went left through the gym, walked underneath the bleachers and stood next to the side door, waiting for the rain to stop.
It was dark under the bleachers. My father was a young man, thirty five, younger because he liked to be outside, to play softball on Saturday and to take my mother and me camping on vacation. He stood rocked back on his heels with his coat thrown over his shoulders and his hands in his pockets. I thought of bacon and eggs, toast with peach jam out of the jar. I was so hungry.
The space under the bleachers was secret and dark. There were things in the shadows; a metal pail, a mop, rags. Next to the door was a tall wrought-iron candle holder-the kind that stood at either end of the altar. There was no holder and the end was jagged. On the floor was a wrapper from a French Chew. They were sold at eighth-grade basketball games on Friday nights. The light from the door made the shadows under the bleachers darker, the long space stretched far away.
I heard the rain and the faint rustle of paper and smelled damp concrete. I did not go near my father but kept my hand in my pocket, feeling the soft leather glove.
There was a rustling on the concrete and the drizzle of soft rain. I wondered if anyone ever went back under the bleachers, if there were crickets or mice there. The rustling might have been mice. I wished the rain would stop. I wanted to go home. I made noises with my heels but they were too loud so I stopped. Something else clicked and I tried to see what it was but couldn't see anything. It wasn't as loud as my heels. My father cleared his throat, looking out the door.
I imagined a man down there in the dark, an escaped convict or a madman.
It had nearly stopped raining. In fifteen minutes we would be home and my mother would fry eggs.
I heard a noise like paper. My father heard it, too, but he pretended not to, at least he didn't turn his head. And there was it heavier sound, a rasp, like a box pulled over concrete. I looked at my father but he didn't turn his head. I wished h
e would turn his head. There was a click again and the rustle, and I could not think of what it could be. I had no explanation for the particular combination of sounds. No doubt there was, some two things that happened to be making noises at the same time. Once in a fever I heard thousands of birds outside my window and I was terrified that they would fling themselves through the glass and attack me, but it was only the rain on the eaves.
Since then I had learned that the world was more regular than I had supposed; birds did not amass outside windows, preying mantises did not become tall, there was nothing under my bed except dust, and escaped lunatics did not crouch under the bleachers at the Catholic school. But I heard the sound of the box being dragged again. My father did not turn his head and I could not think of what it might be except suddenly there was a smell like wet dog.
The clicks sounded like a dog's toenails on concrete, then there was the rustle again and the dragging sound. Looking at my father I said, "Is it a dog?" and he finally turned his head.
And it was there. It was tall and had an absurdly small head, a bird's head with a beak hard and short like a sparrow's except the tip curved cruelly down. The feathers on its head were yellowed and it had gnats in a cloud around its golden eyes. It had a body like some big tan furry animal, fur thinning over its sharp hips, not like a horse, maybe like a lion, and feet scaled like a bird's. Except they were thicker and stronger, the cabled tendons darkening from gold to satiny gray and the feet ending in thick graphite claws. It was as tall as my father.
It stood there, one forepaw raised, and its black bird tongue moved as it panted. Its breath smelled like wet dog. I thought it would speak. I couldn't stand it if it spoke. I wondered if this was the end of the world, but I wasn't ready.
Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories Page 20