That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

“Leslie. Mama, though. But it’s Leslie. We get along. There’s Ivy. She gives you something to fuss over. Something to talk about.” Cheryl leaned forward. “She thinks stones have power. Energy. She gave me this purple crystal. She wants me to put it on the dresser in Ivy’s room. I don’t even understand what it’s supposed to do, but it doesn’t sit right with me. It’s not like it’s voodoo or something. It’s not scary. It’s stupid.”

  “One of those.” Rebecca didn’t know quite what she meant. She tried to imagine Leslie, mother of Ian, churchgoing lady who liked magical rocks.

  “You get it. Christopher has a mother. I met her. That year. At Jacob’s birthday party. She was so thin. That’s what I remember. She didn’t say much.”

  “She said enough.” Rebecca remembered that day. “But she’s harmless, in the end. Or well-meaning. I’m sure Leslie and her crystals are the same. We all want good things for the people we care about. And like you said, the children, they’re insulation. It’s harder to give in to your annoyance when you have children. Or I’m so busy caring about them that I don’t care so much about almost anyone else.”

  “Ian bought Jacob a remote-controlled car. I think he wants to play with it himself. You should have seen him at Toys “R” Us; he was like a boy again.”

  Cars were the only subject that held Jacob’s interest. Ian’s trade made him a hero. Jacob never questioned why Ian and Cheryl were associated with their family’s most special occasions. He relished the attention. “He’s going to love that. So much. I couldn’t stop myself buying Ivy a doll. There’s something about a little girl and a doll.” Lorraine had maintained a halfhearted feminist stance against Barbie but was overruled by the time she’d had Christine. Rebecca had grown up in a house overrun with tiny plastic purses and shoes, Barbies modified by haircuts immediately regretted, slender plastic bodies spritzed, when she wasn’t looking, with Lorraine’s Chanel. Rebecca had wanted an American Girl for Ivy, but there were no black American Girls despite the preponderance of black American girls.

  Upstairs, Andrew began to cry and Jacob called out for her almost simultaneously, urgent, that Mommy that traveled through walls and settled right on Rebecca’s spine. She righted the boys’ sleep-rumpled clothes as best she could, knowing there would be photographs. Christopher drifted into the general company from wherever he had been hiding—of late, he had been hiding—and Ivy and Ian came inside bearing pies and presents. Ivy sat on the floor by the fireplace and played; Andrew sat on the floor by the sofa and played. They mostly ignored each other, as a housecat does a guest. Jacob asked about opening gifts, or noisily impersonated a truck, or trotted between rooms in a futile search for something he couldn’t articulate. Christopher sat with Cheryl and Ian, clasped a tumbler of Chivas, and peppered them with questions Rebecca could not make out from the next room.

  Cheryl laid the table without asking Rebecca’s leave. This seemed to be right. Rebecca turned the lights down, just a bit, and the scene was picturesque, the food appealing, even if the reality was messy, Jacob fiddling and spilling, Andrew fussing and yawning, Ivy wanting to be held, Christopher going for a refill, Ian going to change a diaper. Only Rebecca and Cheryl sat at the table the duration of the meal, ignoring or soothing the children, and intent on actually eating their food, because motherhood was mercenary and you needed sustenance to survive it.

  24

  REBECCA STILL CALLED ANDREW HER BABY, BUT HE BARELY WAS ANYMORE. He was old enough to start at Woodley Park Montessori in only weeks. Jacob would enter first grade at Sidwell. Rebecca would be granted her days and was unsure what they’d hold as she’d already gone to the trouble of learning to write at night. That had cost her: no dinner with her husband, no nights by the television. But so what? Those nights were not silent—the boys in their beds, breathing, stirring. The school day would bring impenetrable quiet to the house on Wisconsin Drive; she used to wish for that most fervently and now she feared it.

  But that was the future and this was the now. She’d drawn the curtains to keep the August sun at bay, and dressed the boys only in their shorts, and turned up the air-conditioning, and gave them yogurt with frozen blueberries for breakfast. (Purple yogurt calcified on the table.) Andrew had pooped in his diaper but Rebecca hadn’t changed him yet, because he was standing contentedly behind the curtains she’d just drawn, no doubt getting purple yogurt everywhere. Rebecca was happy as long as he was happy. Jacob was watching the ninja turtles.

  Rebecca was not thinking beyond the shitty diaper to the day they were about to have. The key was not to do this for too long. The boys would get impatient and she would get flustered and then she would have to improvise and improvisation mostly failed. She sipped her iced tea. Judith had a pool, but that meant a drive long enough that both of the boys would get crabby. Rebecca was tallying pros and cons so feverishly that she was not wholly conscious of hearing the garage door engage, slide up, the mechanical shudder it gave when it had done its work, nor was she conscious of the engine being turned off, or the door opening. Christopher came into the kitchen.

  Rebecca felt in flagrante delicto; all she was doing was thinking, and thinking didn’t look like anything, or more to the point: it looked like nothing. “Christopher.” This was unusual but the boys barely seemed to notice, diverted by the television.

  Christopher put his bag on the floor.

  He was on the verge of saying something, so Rebecca said nothing, just looked at him, though she did, absurdly, stand, as though royalty had entered.

  He held up a finger, pointing at the ceiling. “I just need twelve minutes. Twelve minutes. And I know it’s half ten in the morning, but I’m having a drink.” Christopher took down a glass. He looked at once wild and placid.

  “OK.” Rebecca did not know what else was called for.

  “I’m going to have a cigarette, too.” He had waged his war. The gum, the transdermal patch, acupuncture. This was a cessation of hostilities.

  Why hector? She could only nod. “We were going to go to Judith’s. I thought maybe, a swim? I was just about to call her.”

  “Call that girl. The one next door, what’s her name?”

  “Stephanie?” She was the rather dim Nebraskan cousin of the McKinneys at the end of the cul-de-sac. She was staying with her aunt and uncle until she started at Catholic University in the fall and had sat for them a couple of times. Rebecca was suspicious of her, because who would go to Catholic University if not someone with suspect opinions?

  “Tell her to come. We can pay double if she comes now.” Christopher filled the glass with Chivas. “For Christ’s sake, it smells like shit in here.”

  It took more than twelve minutes, naturally, but Rebecca cleaned Andrew, pulled shirts over both the boys’ heads, filled thermoses with iced water, and pressed forty dollars into Stephanie’s hands. She said to try the public pool or a movie. Rebecca barely cared, in that moment, choosing to trust Stephanie, not picturing, as she did in her worst moments, a car accident, one of those drownings in two inches of water people were always warning about. Sometimes you had to believe that all would be well.

  Christopher was sitting at the backyard table, suit and tie despite the heat. There were two cigarette butts bent and bruised, the teak of the table smudged black. Rebecca sat. She had known him for one-quarter of her life. She knew enough to not say anything. She sipped her tea.

  “This morning the secretary and Bob resigned.”

  She thought to wait. But he waited too long—hung fire, and she yearned for the fire. Let it burn. Tell me. Rebecca waited.

  “I heard it from the receptionist.” Christopher lifted the glass but did not drink. He put it back down. “They didn’t bother to tell me to my face. Then, I saw Bob—he was walking out, just walking away from the whole thing. He looked me in the eye and told me I could refer any inquiries to Hill and Knowlton. Just like that. Any inquiries, Chris, it’s Hill and Knowlton.”

  The Chris not Christopher, she knew, was insult to injury. “So you
were right to suspect something bad.”

  “Hill and Knowlton are publicists, the ones you call when the shit hits. Damage control.”

  “Bob is an asshole.” Rebecca had come to hate him. They’d spent the Fourth of July together at the Congressional Country Club, a grandiose name for a place that had nothing to do anymore with Congress and its particular delusions of grandeur. You did sometimes see a member who was a member, anonymous men, pallid in golf clothes. The fireworks had gone off and the babies had started crying. His wife had leaned her beautiful head toward Rebecca’s and said, I don’t know how we do it. It was supposed to be sisterly, but Rebecca had enough sisters. “He called you Chris?”

  He sighed. “I gave them my time. My reputation. Now, where do I go from here? As you can see, I decided the answer was to go home.”

  “They’re jerks. And, evidently, crooks.” She felt vindicated, like her personal distaste had a moral dimension. “Obviously, you didn’t do anything wrong.” She knew this mattered. Christopher believed in the system. They’d once walked hand in hand spinning wishes for the future: she’d imagined some future president would ask her to bless his administration by reading in front of the crowd, he’d imagined he’d do good on behalf of the world. Now here they were, just another couple in the suburbs.

  “I just did my job, which, you know, was to lie, apparently.”

  Money was boring, money was idiotic, money was abstract in a manner that was even more irritating than poetry. Rebecca had shitty diapers and summer days. “Well, not to get all Marxist about it, it is a bank. So I’m not sure what you’d expect.”

  “What to expect.” Christopher frowned at his glass, twirled it to rattle the ice. “A few months back. Morgenthau, the district attorney in New York, the one who took down BCCI, his name came up, and I said, Oh, should we be worried? and they said, It’s a front in the Intifada. Morgenthau is after the Arabs, not the Americans. Laughter. Like the district attorney was a pesky younger brother.”

  This was like poetry; the spaces in the conversation, the gaps, were where the information was. It was what you made of it. Maybe everything in the world was subjective. “So they’re racist as well as corrupt.”

  Christopher laughed. “Maybe so.”

  “I’m sure it’s not so bad.” She hesitated because it sounded quite bad, actually; if he was telling her, it had to be.

  Christopher lit a cigarette theatrically, but it was a gesture impossible to execute without some flair. He exhaled noisily. “It’s plenty bad. This is what’s out there, you know, in the world. Bad. You wouldn’t know, though.”

  Not really a question, but an assessment, the candor of drunk at eleven in the morning. She sat up. “I wouldn’t?”

  “You know your poetry, yes. But you don’t know much about how the world actually works.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I’d like to switch places, sometimes, you know that? Think about poetry, poetry about nothing. Your poems, they pretend to be about Ovid but they’re all just about poetry itself. It must be nice, I think. Not to think about the way things are, in the world.”

  She crossed her arms in front of her. She knew his anger was for being made to look a fool. He’d been proven to be not important enough to be told the truth. “Maybe I know what’s out there, in the world, as you say. And maybe I’m happier doing what it is I do.”

  “Last year, Bob comes to my office.” Christopher broke the cigarette on the table. The tip smoldered. “I need you to take this meeting. What is there to say but yes? He’s no one, he says. He was at the LSE, so were you. He’ll come in, you can talk about the bank. It’s thirty minutes. I need you to do it, he’s someone’s cousin. Someone’s cousin, I say. Gaddafi, he says. He laughs. Then goes white. Someone’s cousin, he says. It’s nothing. Do this for me and the secretary. A personal favor.”

  Christopher usually spoke in euphemism. Their marriage was small talk. It was like a party. Maybe Christopher’s life was like a party. She was not used to hearing stories from work or maybe she was not used to paying attention. “So maybe you’re the one, then. The one who can’t see what’s right in front of you.”

  “Gaddafi. He said it, and he’d said too much, and we both had to pretend it hadn’t happened. I sat in my office with this chap. He wanted to meet the higher-ups, but I couldn’t introduce this person to the former secretary of defense.”

  Rebecca had never truly cared that the man had once been the secretary of defense. That did not seem so important, nor so difficult.

  “It’s always someone’s cousin. Someone’s cousin wanted an invitation to be wherever Diana was going to be,” Christopher said. “Now someone’s cousin wanting to meet some powerful men. But who is that someone? And how many steps away from someone criminal do you need to be in order not to be a criminal yourself?”

  “What did you expect? That you could work in the embassy, work in a bank, and the things that were being done—by the government, by the bankers—those things wouldn’t affect you somehow?”

  Christopher leaned back and surveyed the yard. “Was it naive to think so? That I could be a man near power, a man with some power of his own, and that power would be used for the greater good?”

  “We’ve done what we wanted, mostly. We’ve made this life.”

  Christopher laughed. “I’ve made this, for us. This money. And you just don’t care, do you, how it’s happened.”

  She could not recall being so mad at anyone, ever before, not even Isaiah, love of her youth, the day he’d sat her on his face, pulled apart her ass with his soft hands and sighed and said, The ugliest part of you is the most beautiful to me. “I don’t see what our lives have to do with—”

  “Let’s say they were working with the Libyans. I don’t know whether they were banking for Gaddafi, but I know which of the three of us sat in an office with the man’s nephew, making small talk.”

  “Small talk. You did as you were asked.”

  “Not much of a moral defense. Doing as you’re asked.” Christopher seemed calmer. “Anyway, to discover that the whole thing was some sort of illusion, that maybe they were up to no good. I feel insane.”

  “I hate him.” It was satisfying to say this. “I hate her, too. But I hate him more. He said to me, you know, at that dinner, for whoever it was, he said to me, We think it’s just beautiful what you’re doing. Just beautiful. You’re going to give that child a beautiful life. What the fuck does he know about beautiful lives. You don’t get a medal for loving a black person.” Her mind went to Stephanie, Catholic Stephanie, whom she did not know at all, and she hoped she’d not driven off the road.

  “I guess I thought everything would be different.”

  “But it’s not so bad. The way things turned out. We have each other, we have our sons, we have this life.”

  “This is criminal, you realize. Maybe it’s insider trading. Hell, maybe it’s treason. I knew—I knew they were no good, but I suppose I imagined that I was.”

  He was a good man, he was her husband, distressed and sweating in his suit. “We’re good people.” It had never occurred to her that they were anything but.

  Christopher stood and took off his jacket. “Every fucking asshole I’ve met in this city is a lawyer and I cannot think of a single one I can call.” He tossed the jacket onto the table, covering the now empty tumbler, the cigarette butts. “You’re the one of us who has it better, Rebecca. To stay here, at home, with the boys. That’s real. That’s good. There’s nothing good out there in the world, is there?”

  She pushed back in her chair and stood. “Come inside. Change out of your clothes. Take a shower. We’ll discuss what comes next.”

  Christopher kissed her, softly, gently, then more roughly, his tongue touching hers. “I’m tired of discussing what comes next,” he said.

  25

  WITH THE BOYS OFF AT SCHOOL, REBECCA WAS FREE AT LAST, YET she missed them. Motherhood was idiotic. She put a television in her office to replicate their consta
nt chatter, and there was John Major among the MPs, the lot murmuring discontentedly, in keeping with the long national tradition of crabbiness. How could work hold her interest given this?

  “Madam Speaker, the House will wish to know that the decision to separate has no constitutional implications. The succession to the throne is unaffected by it. The children of the prince and princess retain their position in the line of succession. And there is no reason why the Princess of Wales should not be crowned queen in due course.”

  Diana’s due course: impeccable clothes, those beautiful sons, that irreducible quality that was part glamour, part grace, part show, part pomp, part something impossible to define that was hers alone, maybe the weight of the hopes and fantasies of every woman (they were all women) who was forever looking at the princess. Diana was unique in the world. In her weaker moments, Rebecca still thought of herself that way: as unique. Most moments, she knew better.

  “Madam Speaker, I know there will be great sadness at this news. But I know also that as they continue with their royal duties and with bringing up their children, the prince and princess will have the full support, understanding, and affection of this house and of this country.” And me! Rebecca wanted to add. What did Diana need of Charles, anyway? Fish and bicycles!

  Rebecca set aside whatever portent was in it. Her due course was work and because it had been a job well done, she didn’t mind giving in to the television’s seductions. She had it right there: the evidence. The New Yorker, folded open to the page (page! in its entirety!) given over to Rebecca Stone.

  It had been months in the making, months of rations, energy a finite resource (only so much zooplankton had rotted into petrol) and Rebecca neglecting the laundry, relaxing the rules re: daily baths, avoiding even the marital bed. A poem was the fruit of something near paranoia, and it was time-consuming. She had earned this, a day in her office, television turned up loud, distracted and reliving her own success.