That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

  “I can’t.” She never got it all done and had little idea how other women did, leaving aside the question of a foreign tongue.

  “You remember Dr. Kline, he’s still practicing—I took her to see him. She’s got three kids, he saw all of them. They’d not been to a dentist, never, not once.”

  Rebecca hated thinking about teeth, but she liked thinking about her father playing the hero in his own small ways. He was a good man: what a great thing, to be able to say that. “Dad. That’s so great. I bet you’re their most popular volunteer.”

  He shrugged. “Well, I don’t know about that. But it’s nice, you get to be an old man and you stop feeling useful.”

  “Come on, Dad.” She and her sisters had prearranged this round robin as a way to exercise their filial duty efficiently. At the same time, Rebecca needed him, just as she had when she’d turned up on their doorstep, near thirty, highly educated but heartbroken, well versed in literature but little else.

  “Help me understand.” Her father’s eyes gleamed with mischief. “Are you checking up on me or am I checking up on you, I can’t tell.”

  The coffee was bitter but warming. She shrugged.

  “You’ve never needed much checking up on, though, have you?”

  “I’ve had my moments.”

  He’d forgiven/forgotten them. “You’re a great keeper of secrets, Rebecca. Of course, I’ve read your poems. I show them to everyone. You’d find it horribly embarrassing, I’m sure.”

  She shook her head.

  “I guess it’s all there,” he continued. “I remember that day the plane crashed. You and I were together, we sat and watched it on the television news.” He paused. “I was surprised to read about it again, all these years later. It clearly—it meant something to you. And I was there. I feel touched, somehow. Don’t tell me if I’m wrong to feel that way. I enjoy it, this feeling. Like I’m a part of your work.”

  If she’d been a chef, she could talk about flavor. If she’d been a painter, she could talk about color. If she’d been a lawyer, rhetoric; a doctor, the body’s systems; a physicist, the enshrined laws the entire universe obeyed. Rebecca felt she had to keep her work mostly to herself. “It was a terrible crash. That day, it was so cold, and those pictures—they were so terrible. A man running across the ice and throwing himself into the water, trying to save someone who had survived. I can’t imagine, surviving a plane falling from the sky. Or anything, I guess, surviving anything.”

  “The television has done something to us. To human beings. We can see so much, but maybe we weren’t made to see this much. Maybe it’s too much.”

  She was grateful that he’d taken the particular memory and made it philosophy. “I guess not.” That period, near a year, Rebecca had tarried in the house of her youth, unable to make a start in life. Poetry had felt like a vice, and she had sneaked off to the library, Saturdays, to photocopy her work (five cents a sheet), to clip self-addressed, stamped envelopes to the sheaf of papers still warm from the machine that she mailed off to the addresses she found in the library’s pristine copy of Writer’s Markets. She’d collected rejections, tiny slivers of mimeographed paper, that smeary purple ink, boilerplate apologias, those envelopes returning home insistently as salmon. It seemed not so long ago. She’d survived.

  “So, something is the matter.” Her father peeled an orange. The room smelled of it. “You’ll tell me or you won’t.”

  Rebecca felt a twinge of guilt, a desire not to tattle. “I don’t know.”

  Her father chewed. “Marriage is—not easy.”

  “It’s been bad. Dad, it’s been—” At the end of the previous summer, Christopher had tendered his resignation, and eight days later his mother had died alone in her Kensington duplex: a cardiac event, a slip, snapped bones, the ultimate failure altogether of the heart. Elizabeth had been eighty. This had quite near broken his heart. So months had slipped by in this discomfiting détente.

  “Well, of course, he’s had a hard time.” Her father knew it all. Morgenthau had secured indictments against the secretary and Bob, who, it turned out, left the bank with about six million dollars each. Christopher spent his days taking meetings, atoning while asserting his fundamental honesty. “He’s found a job?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “There’s money, from his mother. But there’s something else.”

  “A man’s job is his place in the world. Especially a man like Christopher. I would be the same, I think. I spent thirty-two years at my job, as you know. It mattered to me, what I did, every day. That gave my life shape. That and you girls, of course. Your mother. But the job, it mattered. It’s his pride. It’s his center. It’s like your poetry.”

  “So I should be—understanding.”

  “Your work, your book, they matter to you.”

  “They do.” She stood and refilled her coffee, just for something to do. This was like talking to a therapist insofar as Rebecca felt trapped.

  “You’re my child, my youngest. Naturally, I want only what’s best for you. And there are my grandchildren; I want what’s best for them.”

  “I feel like—” She might as well say it aloud. “I feel like it’s my fault, his unhappiness. Like it began the day I woke up and realized that I could never let Andrew go. That I decided what our family life was going to be and that changed everything.” Maybe there was a finite amount of love in her and Rebecca had exhausted that supply.

  Her father was thoughtful. “But of course, the one has nothing to do with the other. Christopher found himself in a bad spot, which had nothing to do with him and nothing to do with you. It was bad luck.”

  She knew about bad luck. “But ever since then.”

  “Andrew is a blessing. You can’t think about what happened in any other terms. He’s your son. And Christopher’s, too.” He thought for a moment. “I know your sister had her reservations. I know your mother had her reservations. But I told her, Rebecca makes good decisions! And I stand by it.”

  “We barely talk.” Mornings, after dropping Andrew, Rebecca went home and Christopher went out. It was like she’d opened a window and chased out a moth. And Rebecca didn’t rue it; she sat down at her desk and she wrote. “Sometimes I don’t know what to say to him. Sometimes I imagine not saying anything to him, ever again, and what worries me is that I am able to imagine it. And it’s not even something I fear. Not for me, not for the boys. Lots of families divorce. It’s commonplace. It’s almost—nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing.” He shook his head emphatically, gathered the citrus peel into his palm. “But there are certainly worse things.”

  “I feel like I’m supposed to do something. Like we’re both waiting for something to happen.”

  “Aren’t we always, in life, waiting for something to happen?”

  Rebecca didn’t want philosophy; she wanted to be told how to proceed. She’d known it, so clearly, when it had to do with Andrew; now that it had to do with herself, she was at a loss. “I guess so.”

  “You could try counseling. It’s valuable, I think. Like taking the car in to be tuned. Responsible.”

  Christine and Tim did that, she knew, but Rebecca had always judged that a weakness. But as strange a purgatory as this was, she didn’t want to be without Christopher. Without him, she would be lonely, but of course, with him, she was lonely. “I don’t know what I want, Dad. Maybe it’s not important.”

  Her father stood and as he did, she realized, to her dismay, that his stance was shaky. He walked to the trash can and dropped in the discards from his fruit. He was an old man, her father, and she was not a girl, and though he was wise, he had nothing to offer her, because maybe no one did. She remembered with such clarity other, earlier days, in that same kitchen, with her father, who the years had transformed when she was not paying attention. That poem, it had taken up a whole page, but it had also taken up all those months, and there was something unfair in that exchange. Rebecca had a sudden desire, to take her father away, out of that house. To
go to Tastee Diner and order pancakes and conjure other, earlier visits to Tastee Diner to eat pancakes, to slip out of time into some kind of enchantment, and not look back, as Orpheus did, to be sure the spell would never be broken and that things would always be just as they were, however unhappy they might seem.

  27

  EASTER WASN’T SACRED BUT IT WAS SPECIAL. SHE AND CHERYL HAD decided it would be thus, that Christopher’s absence wasn’t to be an impediment and it wasn’t: it was barely remarked upon, because conversation could only progress so far with so many children about. They sat, Ian, Cheryl, Rebecca, the three kicking, fidgeting kids, and the meal that had taken Rebecca hours to prepare was finished in a matter of minutes, but that was how it always worked.

  “We can talk about it.” Cheryl placed the stack of soiled cake plates on the counter, breaking the silence Rebecca hadn’t even known she was invested in maintaining. “I’m just saying. Not trying to push.”

  There was no point in pretending she didn’t understand what was meant. “Where are the kids?”

  “They’re watching television. Ian’s got it under control.” Cheryl’s face was nothing more than empathy. She was so full of that particular quality you’d call her beautiful even if her face didn’t have the mysterious mathematical harmony that lands some women on magazine covers. It was in the sound of her voice, the straightness of her spine, almost in her scent, and beautiful seemed the best word for it.

  Rebecca switched off the faucet, tugged at the rubber gloves.

  “Maybe a glass of something.” Cheryl poured what was left of the chardonnay. “I think—I think maybe it’s just what you need.”

  Rebecca took the glass. She sat on one of the tall stools. Already, for no reason, she could feel herself wanting to cry. “It’s nothing, Cheryl.” This was feeble she knew, even as she said it.

  Cheryl’s mouth was lopsided, disapproval and doubt. “So, Christopher’s in Denver. For work?”

  “He is!” She felt it was important that she hadn’t actually been dishonest. Christopher had taken a position at the National Transportation Safety Board in March. There’s a whole structure of diplomacy that exists between the government and our corporate citizens, he had explained, excited. The work renewed him. “They have a field office there.”

  Cheryl had not poured her own glass of wine. “It’s funny timing, I guess.”

  “It’s been coming, Cheryl. You can see that.”

  “Have you guys—”

  Christopher had come home, that first day, suited and smiling, then after dinner had sighed and begun with something along the lines of We should talk. He mentioned unhappiness, he mentioned the children. He mentioned that this was all quite normal, in this day and age. “A separation.” That was the noun they’d used. “We’ve talked about what it’ll look like. What it will involve.”

  Cheryl looked struck. “Rebecca, I am sorry.” She waited. “I can’t say that I’m surprised. Maybe it’s even been a long time coming. Maybe there’s some relief in that. But that doesn’t make it—it’s still sad.”

  That night, after that conversation, they’d found each other in bed, which was sort of predictable, wasn’t it, the embarrassing and fleeting consolation of orgasm. “I don’t know, you deal, right? You don’t have time, for sadness, not that much.”

  “Sure, life must go on, I get that, but . . .” Cheryl looked doubtful. “It’s just us, talking, you don’t have to put up a brave front.”

  “I am fine. I swear.” She meant it, the tears some kind of side effect, a measure just of heightened feeling. She was inured to Christopher’s unhappiness, and absent that was left surprised that she didn’t have quite as large a measure of the stuff. “Is that terrible?”

  “What happened?” Cheryl leaned back against the counter, her head framed by the cabinets. She looked taller. She was intent, she wanted them to get to something.

  “It wasn’t one of those big dramatic things. It was just—you’re one kind of person, years pass, you have a kid, you become a different kind of person. Then you look around and you’re not the one your husband fell in love with and maybe he’s not the person you fell in love with and it’s just like—what are we doing here?”

  “I guess in the ideal situation you’d both change, together. In the same ways, or complementary ways. But what about you, Rebecca? Do you still—is this what you want?”

  What could she say: that thus far, what happened to Diana happened to Rebecca, so she’d known, on some level, that it was coming? Diana was Rebecca’s big sister, role model, example, she was everywoman, cautionary tale, fate personified. “It makes sense, I guess. He’s less than happy. His work. His world. Maybe I haven’t been the best, at paying attention. At being a wife, the kind of wife a man like Christopher needs.”

  “Well, that’s a two-way street. Has he been what you need?”

  “What if I don’t—” It was so cruel to hear it aloud. “What if I don’t need him? What if. I’m happy, in other ways. The boys, my work. My life. It’s selfish but I’m happy, and I don’t have it in me, maybe, to make him happy.

  “Fair.” Cheryl nodded. “From the outside, from where I sit, he has it all. You both do. He always seemed to be so delighted in you. And you, too, in him. I know you can’t tell from the outside, I know it’s not that simple. But it’s sad. You should allow yourself to be sad about it.”

  “I guess I just feel like we’re dodging the real bullet here. Like we’re not forcing ourselves to get to that point where we hate. I don’t know. You probably don’t understand.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You, Ian. It’s so perfect. Not a fairy tale, those fairy-tale marriages are bullshit. But like—a meeting of the minds.”

  “Well, we have our problems, too, Rebecca.”

  “You do?” This was a surprise.

  “We’re normal people. I don’t see why you’d find that weird.”

  “It’s just surprising.”

  “All people have problems.”

  “But what—”

  Cheryl looked up at the ceiling as though the answer were written there. “He wanted another. Wants. Another child.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “He’s one of seven. He’s used to it. The chaos, the noise, industrial-size dinners.”

  “But you don’t—”

  Cheryl was quiet. It was a silence with something stoic in it. “You can understand why.”

  Rebecca waited. “I guess I think of you two as having the best marriage. That kind of perfect marriage. Did you watch The Cosby Show, Cheryl? You must have.”

  She laughed. “Must I have? I watched it, sure.”

  “Did you see the last episode? A year ago, I guess?” She was not guessing; she remembered. That trial in L.A. had ended, those policemen exonerated though everyone had seen them hit hit hit hit hit hit hit that man. They needed a little comedy.

  “Maybe.” Cheryl was noncommittal.

  “It was during the riots.” Rebecca had a point to make. A year on, a riot still didn’t seem like something that could happen there. It was the kind of thing that happened in places where there wasn’t enough food. Here there was enough food; Rebecca threw plenty of it in the garbage. “It was the last episode, which was too bad. I enjoyed that show.” Also: Andrew needed that model of being black, Bill Cosby and his silly faces, his beautiful wife in her smart clothes. This is the man I want you to be, Rebecca was telling him. I want you to be Bill Cosby.

  “I remember the riots. I think that’s what we mostly watched. CNN.”

  “So it was the last episode, of this show, this groundbreaking show.” She felt ridiculous, talking about television. “And the last scene, it was so lovely. Cosby and his wife, dancing. That show, it was such a fairy tale about romance. Like you could have four kids and still be . . . in love.”

  “They had five kids.”

  “Anyway, they dance, and the lights come up, and they just dance off into the audience. They run
out and you see the whole thing—it’s all pretend. The house is just a set. The books are just props. It’s just fake.”

  Cheryl laughed. “Rebecca. It’s a television show. Of course it’s fake.”

  Rebecca was hurt. “I know that! But maybe it’s good, to remember that, that happily ever after is for television shows. Real romance, real marriage—life has so many little disappointments, all these paths you never thought you’d take.”

  Cheryl lifted the stack of dirty dishes and set them into the sink. “You’re dodging the question, I think, Rebecca.”

  “Am I?”

  Cheryl shrugged. “It’s OK if you don’t want to talk.”

  “I just don’t know what to say is all. If I had an easy answer, some simple summary of why it’s not working, why it’s time to—I know we took a vow. I get that.”

  “I know life is more complicated than arbitrary vows.”

  “I’ll probably feel sad, later. Truly sad.”

  “Probably.”

  “Christopher—when he gets back from this trip, I think we’re going to sit the boys down and explain it to them.” She had no sense of how that might play out.

  “I’m sure that won’t be fun. But it’s got to be done.”

  Rebecca pushed aside the glass of wine. “I don’t feel like anything’s ending, if that’s what you want to hear. I feel like it’s changing, and maybe it’s a change for the better.”

  “You really are an optimist, aren’t you, Rebecca?” Cheryl looked at her with either amazement or pity.

  Part Three

  28

  NEW YORK WAS HOT AND FETID. IT HAD BEEN CHRISTOPHER’S IDEA, New York: when they’d put it to a vote (that or Ocean City), the boys had sided with their father, as they were moved by some general feeling toward him, perhaps pity. Rebecca had thought it might be nice to sit on the beach. But the kids of broken homes deserved family vacations, too.

  Rebecca didn’t even chafe at the small stuff that usually drove one crazy in a divorce. She could sit through a meal without wondering why Christopher chewed so loudly. It was good she didn’t hate him; Jacob was Christopher, again. Of course, they had to believe that biology didn’t matter, but it sort of did. Rebecca watched: the way Jacob scratched his head when he was bored was Christopher; the way Andrew loved tart things (marmalade pickles sardines olives) was her. It was DNA versus monkey see, though you couldn’t say monkey, no matter how much affection you put into it, if the baby was black. Younger Jacob had worn a pair of soft pajamas emblazoned with monkeys. Rather than hand these down, Rebecca had thrown them into the garbage.