That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

  “Our children are special even if they’re not. Yes, mine are princes. I’m a princess, but that didn’t matter, in the end. I’m still dead.”

  “Cars still crash.” Rebecca began to cry. “They’re away, now, my family. My sons, my ex-husband. The traffic is terrible, these long weekends, so many drunk drivers. Sometimes I torture myself, imagining what kind of a life I could have without them. None. If they died in a car accident, I would have to kill myself. What if that’s what this is, that you dying is just an omen?”

  “I’m more than just an omen.” Diana turned back to the window again. “I’m a real person.”

  Rebecca was quiet. “I’m sorry.”

  Diana shrugged. “I’m no one, to anyone. You didn’t know me at all.”

  “I do that. I’m sorry. I—tell stories, to myself, about people. I imagine or I lie. Priscilla, I tell myself I knew her but what if I didn’t, what if I’m deluding myself, what then?”

  “She’s the other mother. The black boy’s mother.”

  Rebecca looked at the framed picture on the table, Andrew’s school photo, his chubby cheeks, his hilarious missing teeth. “I’m his mother. And she’s his mother. It’s complicated.”

  “Sounds simple.” Diana sat. She smoothed out her smart white pants. “Maybe, you might consider, none of us knows anyone, not really, not at all.”

  “I used to think I was doing her proud, raising her son. But this isn’t what she wanted—what she wanted was to live, to have the life that she had, with her daughter, and her son, and it would have had nothing to do with me.”

  “No one’s life has anything whatsoever to do with yours. You think you know everything about me. My divorce was announced in Parliament. But you don’t know anything, and neither do those MPs.”

  “I adored her. I love her. How could I not—she gave me my son, my life.”

  “You adore me.” Diana crossed her legs and studied Rebecca. Her eyes were very blue.

  “I do. I did.” She hesitated. “I want to be like you. I want to be good.”

  What if Rebecca had been wrong, all this time—what if Diana was a spoiled, empty-headed creature, given everything, asked for nothing, besides two sons, whom she delivered? What if she touched the hand of the man with AIDS then wept in the washroom, scrubbing herself with hot water and soap? What if she had been a cruel wife and a rude daughter-in-law, what if she had been a pretty brat in nice dresses?

  “God, it’s hot in here.” Diana fanned herself lazily with a hand, frowned.

  “I don’t know anyone, do I? Not even myself.”

  “You do.” Diana walked behind the sofa and put her hand on Rebecca’s shoulder. A bit of grace. A regal gesture. She squeezed it lightly. Rebecca still felt it, the pressure of Diana’s hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t look up, just continued staring at the television until it was quite late in the day.

  31

  SO, DIANA WAS FINISHED, BUT SO WAS “DIANA.” REBECCA PRINTED the four pages of it and sent it off to Alice Quinn. They whittled away at it. It turned out to be multiple poems, and the magazine published one and then the other, and in due course there was a letter from Knopf and a modest check and a book with a Titian on the cover. There was the short list for the biggest award—she didn’t win, but it was enough, in the end, to be at a dinner with Charlie Williams and Louise Glück. Hopkins was pleased enough to offer her a sabbatical though it wasn’t, technically, her turn. A reporter from the Post came to visit Rebecca in her office on campus, and Andrew was delighted to see his mother in the newspaper.

  “You know you’re set now.” Karen and Rebecca shared an office, a dusty, forgotten place near the handicapped restroom that was imbued with some secondhand chic whenever Karen was in attendance. Karen always wore the same Tony Duquette necklace, with a gemstone the size of a cockroach. It had been a gift from her loving husband, Mohammed, an Iraqi oddball whom Rebecca had met at various departmental functions. Other than that: black pants, black turtlenecks, a black coat, a black pashmina. Karen was precisely the kind of person she seemed to be, the type with a loud laugh, interesting earrings, heavy perfume, quick to write a check if the purpose was noble and to tell a meandering anecdote with no particular point.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.” Rebecca shifted the papers around on her desk, a pantomime of work. She did know, of course, that she was set. She’d come back from the ceremony in New York feeling like a superhero, able to leap tall buildings, and known the world over. Not a celebrity, what poet is, but celebrated, which was actually far better. When the admissions office revised the college’s promotional material, her name would appear in bold type, her nomination would be mentioned. Would-be poets would track down her books, Galatea and Diana, and arrive in Rebecca’s classroom having formed opinions about how she handled line breaks and allusion.

  “I do.” Karen lit a cigarette, though this was technically against the rules, perching by the window that could only be forced open a couple of inches, admitting the chilly November air but doing nothing to mitigate the scent of her slender brown Mores. “It’s damn lucky, is all. The tenure committee loves a star.”

  Rebecca was accustomed to the woman’s rudeness, which she disguised as forthrightness. Karen wrote brittle, minimalist short stories about divorce and death, with bleak final sentences where stage direction substituted for denouement, as if casting eyes at a mirror approached catharsis. Harper’s and the Atlantic had liked a couple of them well enough, but it drove Karen mad with jealousy that Rebecca had been offered first refusal by The New Yorker. What artist didn’t have their madness? Rebecca liked having someone to sit and chuckle with, someone who understood. “Books of poems sell fifty copies and they’re considered a hit. Finish your novel. Anyway, you already have tenure.”

  Karen stubbed the cigarette out, impatient. “True, true. You know. I want to stay in the dean’s good graces.” Karen was adept, far more than Rebecca, at the business of being a writer, which in the academy entailed lots of receptions with wine of dubious vintage, handshakes, and air kisses with the administrators’ wives. She didn’t have children, herself, so there was plenty of spare time.

  “You’re the master of good graces, Karen.”

  “Perhaps I should be more difficult. That’s one way to assert your artistic worth, I think. Act like a complete pill. People just assume it’s because you’re terribly smart.”

  “Maybe.” That hadn’t been Rebecca’s way, of course. She served on the committees no one wanted to. She did all that she could. She had taken the job principally because it was on offer. To get paid, as a poet—what a hustle. But she now rather liked it, even the needier students, the sheer amount she was always charged with reading, the long drives back and forth. The boys were old enough to be left alone and, besides, it was nice to be wanted. “It seems to work for Stephen, anyway.”

  Karen’s laugh was smoky and loud. Stephen was their much-hated, deeply entrenched colleague. He wrote poems about fishing. “That fucker. Seriously, though, you’re so famous, are we still going to share an office? I would be lonely without you. I would have no one to read the worse sentences aloud to.”

  “You’re awful. I’m not going anywhere. You overestimate the speed at which this university operates. You overestimate everything. People care now, but let’s discuss in April when I’m back to being the only person in the department who knows how to refill the copier.”

  “I know how to do that. I just have no interest in doing it. Listen. I told you about Bilal? We need to get that going. I want you two to meet.”

  Karen brought up this Bilal once every ten days or so. He was a Lebanese banker who was friends with Karen and her husband, and she was eager to play matchmaker. “You know this time of year. It’s a quagmire.”

  “What, precisely, do you mean by that?”

  “Thanksgiving. The boys’ birthdays.”

  “Your National Book Award.”

  “Nomination.”

  “Well, he’s
very handsome.”

  For the most part, Rebecca thought herself too busy to be lonely. Lonely seemed a luxury, an indulgence. She had her sons, her students, her work; to mourn that she did not have (what was the word? romance?) a man seemed silly. There was not a person alive who had everything they wanted, and so much that she had once hoped for was now hers. The silence of the house, the couple of afternoons weekly she was there and the boys were not, that long-elusive silence: given that, how could she ask for more? What good was handsome, anyway? It was so odd, if you interrogated it for even a moment, this desire for physical beauty. It had nothing to do with anything but guided most of our more important decisions. “It is a busy time. This time of year. I know we’ve—well, I wonder if maybe in January—”

  “Christ, Rebecca. You do not know how to look out for number one.”

  “I do, I’m only—”

  “It would be good for your poetry is the thing. To get fucked, well and good. He has green eyes. Beautiful, like a cat, only sexual. And you should see his hands. Rebecca. Big, thick fingers. They’re capable hands, you can tell just by looking at them. That, right there, is my muse.”

  “You and Mailer.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “It’s just a bad time. It truly is. I’m not just saying that to say it. Let’s talk in the winter, after the holidays. We can set something up.”

  Rebecca thought of this Bilal, whom she’d never seen, as she drove home, tried to imagine his—or anyone’s—capable fingers on her, tried to decide where it was she most wanted those fingers to land. Years ago, Christopher had taken her to see Kissin at the Kennedy Center, and though the music was lovely, the blur of his fingers had transported her. What must it be like, to have hands that could actually do something? What would it be like if those hands belonged to someone who didn’t look like she did, didn’t look like Christopher did, didn’t look like Isaiah had, but someone who looked like how Mohammed looked, someone with a name so foreign, someone from a country so far away?

  She could drive with less urgency, now. Jacob would be twelve in only a week; was old enough to be trusted, but not so old to be reckless. He could walk home from school, and he was there in time to meet his brother’s bus. The boys whose bottoms she’d spent years dutifully wiping were now self-sufficient, or enough to be able to get their own glasses of milk, unwrap a banana, turn on the television, pretend at doing their homework. They wouldn’t burn down the house or get into the liquor cabinet. This was such a marvel that Rebecca stopped at the Giant on the way home, bought milk and cereal because they always needed milk and cereal.

  She could hear the screaming from the garage, even over the noise of the automatic door. It was urgent enough that the milk and the cereal were forgotten, for the moment, as were the many student pages waiting for her benediction. She hurried into the kitchen where Andrew was weeping and enraged.

  “What on earth?”

  “Leave me alone!” Tears poured from Andrew’s eyes, as he was still young enough to cry with fervor. His nostrils flared, and though he was still her baby, he looked quite surprisingly like a man. Even his voice, strained, had a masculine huskiness to it.

  “You stupid idiot. You little brat.” Jacob was vengeful. He stood on the far side of the kitchen island, angular and agitated, his cheeks pink and his hair mussed. “You’re always messing my stuff up. Always. And I’m sick of it.” On this last, he, too, screamed, and it was girlish, but he was so angry he didn’t seem to notice.

  “What is going on here?”

  “You’re so stupid, Jacob. You are so stupid.” Andrew choked. At last he seemed to notice that she was home. “Mom.”

  “Baby, what—”

  “Oh, great.” Jacob was still screaming. “Baby, baby. He is a baby. A stupid baby. A—fucking baby.” He hesitated on this, the worst possible word. He was still testing the limits of his own vocabulary. Rebecca remembered, suddenly, that though it had been Jacob’s favorite meal at five/six/seven, he’d often struggled to remember the word carbonara.

  “Jacob!” It felt silly but important to scold for this particular profanity. She didn’t care, really, but you were meant to, as a mother. “Watch it.”

  “Yeah, take his side, take the baby’s side, your baby.”

  “No one is taking anyone’s side. Please stop screaming and tell me—”

  “Mommy, Jacob hit me—”

  “Jacob—”

  “Mom, it’s not fair. He does it on purpose.”

  “I do not—”

  “Will everyone please calm down, and lower their voices, and talk like human beings?”

  “Mommy.” Andrew gave in to his tears, threw his body against hers. It still felt good, this, and it was so much rarer now, that she was on some level pleased for the tears, the scene, the emotion, because it returned her baby to her.

  “Great, now your baby is going to act like a baby and you’re going to yell at me.” Jacob was still enraged and spat this last word, and strangely, he, too, seemed on the verge of tears. Rebecca couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her oldest son weep.

  “No one is yelling. Well, you’re yelling.”

  “Because you do anything for Andrew and nothing for me. Because he’s always the baby and I’m always not. Because you love him more. And he’s not even a part of our family.”

  “Jacob!” This was too far, at last, worse than his fucking, the worst possible thing. This threat had been there, from the beginning, and now, here it was. She genuinely did not know how to proceed.

  “He’s always doing this. I’m online, Mom. And he picks up the phone and he breaks the connection and he thinks it’s funny.”

  Andrew wept on Rebecca’s stomach, and she pulled him nearer. His body’s ambient heat was remarkable. He was so alive, Andrew. She hoped that in his tears, in his emotion, he had not heard what his brother said. “I’m sure that’s not the case.”

  “You’re sure. You always take his side.” Jacob was holding the cordless telephone in his hand, and he threw it to the black-and-white tile of the floor. “Always!” He hesitated, perhaps regretting the drama of the gesture. Then he turned, slowly, and stomped through the foyer and up the stairs.

  Rebecca held a paper towel under the running faucet, dabbed at Andrew’s wet eyes and sticky nose. She ran her hand over his hair until the sobs subsided, sat him on one of the tall stools at the island. She told him to tell her the whole story, but she couldn’t listen to his evasions, his attempts at recall, his transparent play for her sympathy. He knew her too well, and the story didn’t matter much, your typical brotherly scuffle, meaningless in the long run. Unless it was meaningful, and someday Andrew would recount this to a therapist in a book-lined office, how his brother declared that he did not belong. Was Jacob right—did she always take Andrew’s side? And if she did, was it because he was younger or was there some other reason? And if there was some other reason, was that so wrong, truly? There was no guidebook; there was no What to Expect. She had to go upstairs and talk to Jacob, that was clear, but he needed to calm himself, regain himself. The boys would have forgotten this by the morning, but her throat was dry and she wished for Christopher, for someone else to turn to for validation or advice or at the very least someone with whom to have a glass of wine. Andrew continued to sniffle, miserably, for a few minutes, then he ate some of the leftovers she had designated for dinner.

  When the younger boy had been fed, had his bath, was in his bed, Rebecca knocked tentatively at Jacob’s door. He was deep in the shame of emotion, she knew, so she told him only to be sure to eat something for dinner, to not stay up too late on the computer. She went to bed herself, for whatever reason so exhausted that she quite forgot that she’d left the gallon of milk in the front seat of her car.

  32

  EVERY SCHOOL SMELLED THE SAME. WHAT WAS IT? BODIES, PROCESSED food, feet, sweat, and that peculiar scent of a child’s neck, multiplied, intensified. Rebecca shifted and the wooden seat creaked beneat
h her. It was too small but not uncomfortable. Christopher ought to have been there, too, but there was a meeting “on the ground” in Seattle and what could be done? The note in Andrew’s backpack was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Stone. Why bother changing her name back at this point in her life?

  To the kids, their teacher was Ms. Melissa, but in truth she was Mrs. Gould. This left Rebecca uncertain how to address the woman, so she tiptoed around it as you might a word you weren’t sure how to pronounce.

  “I’m glad you were able to come in.”

  The teacher perched on the edge of her desk, in a studied, we’re-all-friends-here way. Rebecca was not fooled. She crossed her arms against her chest. “Of course. I’m always available when it concerns my children.”

  “I do have some concerns, in fact. So it’s good you’ve come.”

  Did you ever shake it, this fear of authority? The school itself made Rebecca nervous. The other parents’ casual prosperity, all that talk of the stock market and renovations. It was a public school, but theirs was a tony zip code. Rebecca knew how well off her family was, so it was ridiculous to be so bothered; she knew she was a success so it was ludicrous not to feel like one. Amid these mothers, mothers in Mercedes station wagons loaded down with tennis rackets, mothers in minivans plotting playdates, mothers in smart running clothes, mothers lingering in the parking lot because there was nowhere all that pressing to be, Rebecca felt like an impostor ever on the verge of being unmasked. Surely some of them were attorneys; surely some of them were painters. Rebecca didn’t covet their car phones or their personal trainers, she just wanted to be back at her desk. “Well, let’s talk about it.”

  “Well, Andrew just had a birthday, correct? So he’s on the young end. Most of our fourth graders start the year already nine, at least that’s how it’s seemed to work in this class. So that could explain some of it.”