That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

  “It?”

  “I’ve noticed, I don’t know if you’re aware—a kind of maturity gap. It’s to be expected. As I said, I know he’s actually, literally, a bit younger than many of his peers.”

  “He’s nine. November 27, he was nine.” To Rebecca he seemed at once wholly grown and still her baby. He no longer wanted to be kissed good-bye if there were any other children about.

  “Of course. Andrew has a big brother at home, yes? I don’t know if you’ll remember how he was, at Andrew’s age. Of course, every child is different. They all grow up in their own ways.”

  “Yes.”

  “And surely Andrew is quite different from his brother.”

  “Sure.” Rebecca’s maternal skills were finely enough honed that she could hear such statements for what they were. Once, one of her colleagues at Hopkins had expressed surprise over Rita Dove’s Pulitzer. They had to give it to her. He’d chuckled meaningfully. Eventually, people reveal themselves. You had only to pay attention. What could she say, in that moment, to that man. My son is black? Nonsense.

  “He’s not where I had hoped he’d be, Mrs. Stone.”

  “He was having some trouble. We’ve been working on the math. I’ve got a reading tutor, she comes Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  “I’m not sure the trouble is academic. Though I’m glad to hear you’re mindful of that. The extra help can only help. In many cases, when there’s been a trauma, at home, it makes sense that there’s . . . a delay in achievement. But it’s not insurmountable.”

  “A trauma?” Ms. Melissa or Mrs. Gould was young, or maybe she wasn’t. Rebecca studied the woman’s unassuming navy dress, her cheap sweater. Rebecca had lost her ability to determine how old other women were. She didn’t know anymore how old she thought of herself as being. She was in middle age, was what she knew, that’s what they called it, once you slipped over forty, and she hoped it were true, that she’d be there until eighty-six, with her sons and her unfinished work. “Our divorce is ancient history. We’re all in a happy rhythm with it.” She didn’t say: We get along! We go on vacations together! I sometimes have fantasies about going to bed with Christopher!

  “Oftentimes, the children of adoption face some particular struggles, academically. I can recommend a book. Then, compounded by the question of his race. Racial difference.”

  “I don’t need a book. I live it. I’m not sure that I understand what we’re talking about.” The children of adoption, like he was a breed of dog. That was another thing: adopt as a verb shouldn’t refer to pets. The question of his race? There was no question! Look at him!

  “The issue seems to be mostly behavioral. Andrew disrupts. He talks. Well-meaning, not backtalk, but he can’t control himself. He needs to learn, better, how to understand the dynamics of a group. That sometimes it’s not his turn to talk.”

  “I see.” It was true. Andrew, he was a great talker. Rebecca found it horribly charming. Maybe they had been permissive, ever hanging on his words. Or maybe he was like his father and this was a complication of nature/nurture. There was no way to know, of course. It wasn’t as though Andrew was an experiment and Jacob the control group. They were her sons and Ms. Melissa or Mrs. Gould was full of shit. “He is a talker. I love that about him.”

  “I’m afraid we’ve been at the point, more than once, when Andrew was truly disrupting the class. I’ve had to have him pull his desk into the hallway so that the group can focus.”

  They send me to eat in the kitchen / when company comes. “You have him what?”

  “Group conversation is one of our fundamental techniques. We feel it’s good preparation for high school and of course for college. But we need the children to respect the dynamics of the group.”

  “Yes. The dynamics of the group are important.”

  “Andrew can just be very disruptive.”

  “Spirited.”

  “Yes, that, as well.”

  “I’m just trying to put a positive gloss on it, you see. Engaged. Curious. Enthusiastic. Perhaps he has a lot to say. Perhaps he has something to add.”

  “There’s something else.”

  Rebecca nodded.

  “I feel that some of his behavior to the girls in the class is. Troubling. A little.”

  “This is the first I’m hearing of this.” Andrew, holding hands with Ivy, the niece who was nearer his sister. Two years ago, he had mastered tying his shoelaces and Rebecca had found the two of them in the foyer, Andrew kneeling before the girl, patiently tying and retying until the fit was just right. Years before that, one of her favorite photographs, Andrew offering the girl his apple, the yellow fruit in his fist, the girl on her tiptoes, leaning forward, to bite into it, Adam tempting Eve for a change.

  “It’s nothing so terrible.”

  “You brought it up.”

  “I’m very attuned to where my students are.”

  “I am similarly attuned.”

  “I am fairly certain Andrew was . . . Well, one of our students, she’s just started developing. And Andrew seemed to be. Staring. At her breasts.”

  “They say it’s hormones in the milk. Does the cafeteria serve organic milk? It doesn’t matter. It’s in the water. People flush their pharmaceuticals down the toilet and it corrupts the drinking water.”

  “Mrs. Stone?”

  “You’re telling me that a nine-year-old boy looked at a nine-year-old girl and that’s why you make him drag his desk into the hallway to sit alone?” Andrew, her Andrew, thinking about a girl? Well, it was bound to happen, but it was a small heartbreak.

  “I think we’re getting the issues confused.”

  “I don’t feel confused in the least.”

  “Perhaps I should ask the headmaster to join us.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  “I want to be sure that you understand. Andrew is a wonderful boy. I just wish that he could learn to . . . restrain his enthusiasm.”

  Rebecca smiled. “I should think that an enthusiastic student would be the thing you most wanted.”

  “Well, there’s enthusiastic and there’s disruptive.”

  “And which is it?”

  “I thought I had made myself clear.”

  “I teach, you know. At Johns Hopkins. They brought me in as a guest writer. I took root. I know what it’s like, sitting in a semicircle of chairs, trying to foster a conversation. I know there are some people who won’t shut up and some people who won’t pipe up.”

  “I didn’t realize.”

  “You should. You know who talks in my seminars? The men. They won’t shut up, Ms. Melissa. Or Mrs. Gould. The men, they won’t shut up. Sometimes I just want to say, please, for the love of God, shut up, shut the fuck up. But you see, they’re men and their teachers, their Ms. Melissas and Mrs. Goulds, told them that it was great when they contributed. They were excited that they were enthusiastic.”

  The teacher fidgeted.

  “But of course, they were all little boys who looked like Conor and Kevin and Asher and Liam. They were little boys who looked like my Jacob. They weren’t little boys who looked like my Andrew.”

  “I’m not sure we’re understanding each other.”

  Rebecca laughed. “I am. Quite sure.”

  This was a kind of anger she couldn’t hold. It wriggled from her grasp, it wanted to be free. Rebecca freed it. It was cold, but she drove home with the windows open, the wind like a slapping hand hoping to revive her. Nothing seemed to matter even if everything did. She tried to remember the Hughes, couldn’t summon the final line, but she thought someday they’d see how wonderful her son was, and be ashamed. Maybe she’d send him back to Sidwell. There wasn’t quite money, but she could borrow from Judith. Christopher wouldn’t like that but it was a possibility.

  At home, peace reigned, temporarily. Jacob was shut up in his room, at the computer. Andrew was watching television.

  “Let’s turn that off now.” Rebecca was making a circuit of the rooms, sorting the mail, ri
ghting the pillows, trying to dispel the disarray that followed in the wake of her sons. “Come. Let’s make dinner together.”

  Andrew sighed, as only a nine-year-old boy can, bearing the weight of the world. Then, warmed to the idea, he skipped into the kitchen behind her. “What’s for dinner?”

  “A fine question.” She studied the contents of the refrigerator.

  “I know. Let’s have breakfast for dinner.” Jacob had joined them. He was especially attuned to mother and youngest, she thought, forever sensing collusion.

  “That’s an idea.”

  “I want bacon.”

  “I want bacon, too.”

  “The good news is that we have some.” She removed the slender envelope from the refrigerator. “Though you know what we could do? Instead of breakfast for dinner? Carbonara, which is basically the same thing. Bacon and eggs. Only with pasta instead of toast.”

  “Yes. That.” Jacob nodded seriously.

  “Oh yeah, I want that.” Andrew wanted only what his big brother wanted.

  She put the boys to work. Andrew filled the large pot with water but couldn’t maneuver it; his brother helped. Andrew poured salt into the cold water. Jacob wielded the knife over the garlic. Andrew ran the rock of cheese along the grater, but Rebecca finished the job. A certain harmony prevailed. It was rare enough that Rebecca was afraid of spoiling it. But this kind of busy work had the effect of a certain kind of gas: you could get the truth out of them, while their minds were mostly elsewhere. So she asked, the maternal questions it was her duty, her right, her responsibility, to ask: about homework, about friends, about soccer, about whatever it was Jacob found to do on the computer.

  She tried so hard to remember the details, the names of all the players in their lives. It was harder and harder to do this, maybe age or maybe distraction. She would ask herself which had come first, Elvis’s death or the accident at Three Mile Island, and have to think long and hard but be unable to answer with any certainty. Her work required her mind and there was only so much mind to give over.

  “We need a vegetable. Some kind of vegetable.”

  “Spinach!” Andrew liked spinach.

  He pulled the brick of it from the freezer and Jacob unwrapped it and dumped the whole thing into the boiling water. The boys moved around each other in practiced steps, having spent their whole lives sharing this room. This felt like something, the extraordinariness of an ordinary Wednesday. It felt like the thing she had always wanted. Oh, she complained: the picking up, the errands, the folding and washing, the ferrying here and there, but that was so stupid, wasn’t it, so predictable, just patter. You were expected to lament the minor debasements of motherhood because what else was there to make conversation about, or how could conversation communicate that learning to tease milk out of your own nipple was outweighed, ultimately, by watching one son help the other open a package of spinach?

  Andrew laid the table without even being asked to. Rebecca opened a bottle of wine, because it felt like wine was warranted, like there was something to celebrate. They ate dinner and talked about whatever it was families talked about.

  33

  SHE KEPT THE BLACK BANANAS IN THE FREEZER, WHICH WASN’T even thrift but simply common sense: the boys ate that much. They rattled around behind the ice cream, ungainly parentheses that fit nowhere. You had to exercise care: opening the door often upset them, so the black bruised fruit fell to the floor, and sometimes on your foot, which hurt like hell. They were so cold to the touch they were hard to handle, but Rebecca tugged at the resistant skins to get at the mealy flesh, which fell into the silver bowl like excrement, no way around that metaphor. Dust thou art, et cetera.

  Baking had become bête noire; banana bread her compromise. To be a mother was to bake. Cupcakes, cookies, fund-raising sales, classroom celebrations, the soccer team, oh, the mathematics of it all, the ¹⁄³ tsps., Rebecca had ceased to find diverting. The most base alchemy and besides, the kids didn’t care, but the parents did. If you showed up with Rice Krispies treats your peers looked askance. Did you not love enough? Anyway, this recipe was so simple she could do it in her head: a half stick of butter, melted in the microwave, sugar, four of the bananas, flour, a teaspoon of baking soda, salt, the magic egg, chocolate chips if she didn’t care, blueberries or raisins if she did. This day, she didn’t care, or cared more, celebration was in order, so chocolate chips, why not. She sprinkled sugar in the buttered pan, so the bread would have a crust of the stuff. This was how much she loved her children, how much she loved herself.

  The phone had rung in February, Jim Willis on the line from Ohio to inform Rebecca that she’d won 1999’s Ruth Jameson Award. So she’d gone from being Younger to this. She’d happily exchange youth for one of poetry’s richest prizes, endowed by the estate of that dotty dowager. Jameson had died with a town house full of stuff. Her Chagalls had been liquidated for the New York City Ballet. Her correspondence (oh, but she’d known everyone) endowed a seat at the University of Chicago. Her early-twentieth-century dolls had reaped more than a million dollars and that was set aside for this particular purse, an investment in a poet who might prove to someday be truly great. Jameson’s money—her father’s, truly—was like the tufts of dandelions, blown across the country, thousands and thousands of small rewards for people like Rebecca. Now she wouldn’t need to ask Judith for money to send Andrew off to a new school.

  So, naturally: a party. A party for herself, an excuse to gather them all under one roof, the people she loved in this world, and to eat banana bread and have them say that the thing she’d been doing, shut up in that little office, or off at Johns Hopkins, was worthwhile. That she was their mother, sister, daughter, former spouse, friend, incidental family, and that she was a success. Rebecca had invited Cheryl and Ian first, picturing a simple celebratory dinner, but Cheryl, upon hearing her reasons, had assumed control of the operation.

  “We’ll make a party of it, Rebecca. Your sisters. Your mother. Christopher?”

  “Yes,” she told Cheryl. A family from Jacob’s class was going through divorce as mutually assured destruction. Poor bespectacled Brandon, it was impossible to tell what was adolescence and what was battle scar. Rebecca felt proud that they’d done this so well.

  “Who else?”

  “We should have Karen,” Rebecca said. Yes, she was odd, and could be difficult, but it wasn’t until meeting Karen that Rebecca had understood her own loneliness. There were the occasional three-dollar coffees at the Starbucks near the grocery store with Jessica, a mother from Jacob’s soccer team, the linger-in-the-foyer conversations with Courtney, whose son Liam was in class with Andrew. But those weren’t friends, merely colleagues in the business of motherhood.

  Rebecca was taking the banana bread out of the oven when the doorbell rang.

  “I hope you’re ready to celebrate.” Cheryl kissed her on the cheek and pushed past her into the foyer. “It smells so good.”

  “I made a banana bread.”

  “I told you to leave everything to me.” Cheryl fixed Rebecca with a look of maternal disapproval. “And you’re not dressed.”

  She went upstairs like a penitent teenager, put on the green dress she’d been saving for this occasion. She lingered over her preparations, her potions, hearing the doorbell ring and the house fill with voices, familiar but distorted by the distance. She emerged, feeling faintly ridiculous, like it was a surprise party and she was meant to feign shock.

  “There she is. The woman of the hour.” Christopher was in the kitchen with Cheryl, putting olives into a little bowl.

  “You look lovely.” Lorraine touched Rebecca on the shoulder and in that instant, it fell away, temporarily, the years of maternal disapproval. Once her mother had corrected her gait, encouraged her to do better in algebra, needled her for being less popular than her sisters. Now it was decades later and such things were forgotten.

  “Thank you.” Rebecca nodded, knew that she did look lovely, in that particular bright green. Sh
e looked at the room, all that industry: Cheryl filling the bucket with ice, Judith stacking napkins on top of plates. “Everyone is here.”

  They sat at the dining table. Christine told a story from their childhood, one of those anecdotes worn smooth as a rock by the sea: when Rebecca, nine, on a visit to their father’s mother, had put salt instead of sugar into her tea, and politely sipped it anyway. No one could remember just how their father had realized the girl’s mistake, or they all remembered it differently, as happens, with history.

  Uncle Tim took the cousins (they lumped Ivy into this category as well, naturally) into the backyard to play. Jacob shook off his sullenness and kicked a soccer ball with his cousin Jennifer. Andrew demonstrated his remote control car (from Santa, he pretended, though they knew better by now) for his cousin Michelle. Ivy and Michael were in the tree house, conspiring. Steven talked to Christopher about investments. Karen talked to Christine about her upcoming trip to Damascus. Lorraine talked to Cheryl about the blueberry crumble cake she’d brought (Lorraine wanted the recipe). Rebecca sat beside Ian and was silent.

  “You’re quiet.” He stirred his coffee.

  “Taking it in, I guess.”

  “It’s all for you. Must feel nice.”

  “I was thinking it feels nice, the whole family together without its being Christmas. No gifts. No particular obligation or reason.”

  “But there is a reason. Isn’t there? You’re the reason.”

  “Nominally. But it becomes bigger, doesn’t it. When I see Andrew and Ivy and Jennifer and Jacob and Michelle and Michael—well, you feel nice, don’t you, or better about the state of the universe, seeing all the children at play. Seeing that they can still play like children even if they spend so much time trying to be adults.”

  “Ivy wants to wear makeup. Makeup. She’s barely ten.”

  “That’s how it is, in the classroom. The girls talking about who their boyfriend is going to be, the boys all stumbling on the playground like apes.”