The Mother Garden

by Robin Romm

  I nod. I can’t stop it. The damage has already been done.

  Upstairs, Gwen lights a candle by her bed. Her body is warm, full of candles, full of light. The pain feels distant and a version of it travels down, ending in an ache between her legs. She looks at Neil, peels off her shirt, her pants. Again she’s naked in front of him.

  This time there’s no need to hide behind a plant. Neil lets Gwen take off his clothes. He runs his hands down her good breast, careful not to touch the other. Then with this in mind, he turns her around, lowers her onto all fours, lifts her butt into the air. He cups the one good breast as he situates himself inside her.

  I don’t feel like talking on the way home. Neil taps a song on the steering wheel with his thumbs. He cracks the window and his curls blow toward me.

  Neil hasn’t forgiven his mother. Mindy leaves messages on our voice mail during the day, when she knows he’ll be at work. Call when you want to, she says. I love you. He claims he’s through with her.

  I ran into her a few months ago at the grocery. She wore a sheer red top beneath her blazer. Her face shone with makeup. She stopped her cart near a wall of bread and gave me a long hug.

  “How’s Neil?” she asked.

  “He’s coping,” I said. Mindy’s cart held a whole roasted chicken, a bottle of wine, some flowers. As I stood chatting with her, a man with owl-framed glasses approached. His gray hair stuck out from his head like he’d just been licked by a giant tongue.

  “Darling,” he said to Mindy, “I couldn’t find that coffee.”

  That night, Winston jumps into bed. He looks deeply at Neil and Neil looks back. I take the newspaper and set it between us. Neil pets Winston’s ears.

  “Sometimes I see my dad looking back at me,” Neil says. I look at Winston’s dark eyes and for a moment, I can see Geoff, too. His silent pleading toward the end, when he could no longer talk, when he might have said anything. Finally Winston can’t stand it anymore and he hops off the bed to lie on the floor.

  If I focus, I can hear the watches ticking from where Neil has put them on the dresser. Neil never fixes the time on them, though he winds them before he sets them in their rows. Geoff must have glanced at those watches thousands of times. I wonder if he ever imagined their life after him.

  “I would never do that to you,” Neil says. “I know there’s part of you that thinks I would.” For a moment, I find this switch confusing. He scoots toward me, smashing newspaper beneath him. I try to pry the newspaper out but it’s stuck. Winston whines. He’s noticed an old bone under the dresser and looks to me for help or approval.

  “Do you believe me?” Neil asks.

  He crawls on top of me. I hold his ears, put my forehead against his, and feel the bone there.

  THE EGG GAME

  URI KEEPS THE EGG NEAR HIS KEYBOARD AS HE returns phone calls. Half of it sticks out of the hole India cut in the pink sock. “You think we’re going to lay down and die? Just like that?” the attorney screeches, his voice tinny through the receiver. Uri runs a forefinger around the spot where shell meets polyester. As the lawyer starts in on the points of his counteroffer (five hundred dollars instead of twenty-two thousand), Uri takes a red felt-tip pen and draws a little face on it. Two round eyes with long lashes and a mouth shaped like a heart. It doesn’t look like a baby; it looks lascivious. He takes the egg out of the sock and flips it to its clean side. This time, with a black Sharpie, he makes round eyes with little dots in them, a small horseshoe-shaped nose, and a smile. It’s no infant, but it’s an improvement.

  Blithe comes in as he’s hanging up. She’s wearing a red silk shirt with a plunging neckline. A little pearl buries itself in her cleavage.

  “Did I do this right?” she asks, placing a memorandum on his desk. She always wears her hair in a giant cascade. Locks of orange curls tumble over her cheeks and shoulders while the rest of her hair sits heaped on top in an arrangement of glittery hair clips. He can smell her shampoo—something with fruit in it—pear.

  “It looks good,” Uri says. (Why wouldn’t it? He e-mailed his template to her and she hasn’t changed anything.) He notices a run in her panty hose; it starts inside her little black heel, creeps up her inner calf and thigh, and disappears beneath her pleated skirt.

  Blithe hasn’t figured out that this is a dead-end job. She’s twenty-five and uses her government paychecks to buy manicures, lip gloss, and a wide variety of silk shirts. She keeps her plastic federal investigator badge on her desk, propped up like a holiday greeting, and bought the fanciest gold-embossed business cards—the ones with the federal seal that cost extra. All the guys in the office want to do her, but no one says it. They can’t say it. They work at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That would be in direct conflict with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You cannot discriminate on the basis of sex. If you want to fuck Blithe, you better want to fuck everyone, regardless of gender. You better want to fuck your stubborn wife in those baggy pants she refuses to take off and that terrible shapeless pink sweater.

  “You want a mint?” Blithe asks, holding out a small tin. Then she sees it. “What is that?” she asks. “An egg?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  Blithe sucks on her mint and casts a dubious glance at the egg.

  Uri hates fluorescent lighting, preferring to work under a lamp in the shape of a goose, a present from his wife. Sometimes when Blithe comes in she leans over to touch it as if it might be alive.

  Now she asks, “Did the goose lay it?” Uri closes the document on his computer. “Nice smiley face, anyway,” she says. “Is it for lunch?”

  “I didn’t bring lunch,” Uri says, rolling his chair back. This segues into a conversation about good lunch spots in the area, then into a plan. They eat at the pasta shop a block away. Blithe orders a salad and eats demurely. When he casts his eyes toward his pasta, he can glimpse a tiny bit of black lace through a gap in her shirt buttons. He allows himself to imagine her breasts, freed from their lacy harness. Her nipples would probably be light in color, girlish. She’d be sweating, but only slightly, only enough to make her gleam. Then a tomato slides off Blithe’s fork and lands on her skirt.

  “Oh damn,” she says, picking it up with her fingernails. “I’m such a slob.”

  Blithe’s originally from Atlanta. She’s got a faint southern lilt that’s immediately endearing. She tells him about her new apartment—a studio, small but just redone. She mentions the man she went out with a few times who turned out to be gay. “He was just double checking. That’s what he said, I swear.” Recently she’d broken things off with another man she met at a party who seemed perfect, an attorney at a big firm downtown. He had a cabin up at Tahoe and a purebred weimaraner that brought him his newspaper in the morning. “His wife left him for a transsexual—that’s the right term for someone who’s in the process of changing, right? Before I moved here I didn’t know anything about this stuff. Anyway. He had anger issues. One time his dog peed in the hall and he lost it—hit it over and over and over again with the newspaper until the dog was just quivering.” She presses a glass of water against her cheek and it leaves a small wet spot. “This city’s a joke for regular girls.” Blithe sets her fork down and clasps her hands in her lap. She pushes her feet against the floor so the chair tips back. “You must get tired of all the ladies chasing you around,” she says. She lets the chair slam back to the ground and leans forward so that her face is close to his. Her eyes flash.

  India is meditating when he comes home. The dark living room feels overly warm. She’s on a folded blanket, her dark hair frizzing in a triangular shape around her head. Slowly she turns, stretches. They have a pact that he won’t talk to her for ten minutes after “her quiet.” Usually he doesn’t mind, but today it irritates him.

  “How’s it going?” he chirps. He sets the egg down on the coffee table. India shoots him a disapproving look. He shrugs off his raincoat and goes to the bedroom to lie down.

  “What’s the matter?�
� she asks. At least she’s out of those pants. She’s wearing the stretchy yoga pants he likes, tight around her thighs and butt.

  “Nothing,” he says. He doesn’t mean it to sound peevish—in fact, he’s just about to hold out his hands to her when she rolls her eyes and leaves.

  Uri knows how they got here. He’s not dim like his brother, who never seems to know why he’s fighting with his wife. Uri and India are fighting, and have been for weeks, because Uri said that he was tired of her excuses, that she was thirty-five years old and he was thirty-seven and if they wanted to have a baby—to have the two babies they’d agreed to when they got married—they needed to hop to it. India said he had to be patient. She wanted to finish her book. When he asked how long that would take, her nostrils flared, her voice soared to a very high pitch, and she accused him of lacking a critical kind of faith in her. Then Uri read part of the novel.

  “You read it?” she gasped when he told her. “It’s a draft! It’s not ready for anyone to see!”

  The truth was, though he was nicer than this to her face, the novel was terrible. It was about two sisters after they lose their father. India’s father died a year before she started writing and versions of her childhood memories came whizzing from the mouths of ten-year-olds.

  The fight has since changed direction. India now claims that Uri isn’t responsible (for example, he left the barbecue out half the winter and now the little piece around the starter is rusted) and that the baby will require more selflessness than he anticipates.

  “You couldn’t just leave a baby on the coffee table,” she says to him when she comes back in the bedroom.

  “Really?” he says.

  “In fact,” she says, “you couldn’t just take a baby to work like that. It would cry.”

  “It’s not a baby, India. It’s an egg.” She shoots him a withering look.

  “Maybe we should attach an alarm clock to it,” she says. “It could go off like every twenty minutes and you’d have to feed it through a tube coming out of your shirt.”

  “What’s this about?” Uri says, sitting up. “Do you not want to have kids?”

  “I want to have kids,” she says. “But I want to be sure you’re ready to be selfless. I don’t want to give over my entire life like Melody and Kim. I don’t want to stay at home watching my husband go out for beers with friends while I wipe green poo off my fingers and rub cream on my chapped nipples. I like my nipples. I like my life. And I want to finish my book.”

  When he first met India, she wore her dark curls trapped in thick braids, bound with silly plastic doodads. She drank vodka and cherry Coke at three in the afternoon. To celebrate their second anniversary, she made him a scavenger hunt. She painted small clues on little circles of paper, hid them around the neighborhood, and at the end seduced him in a grass field behind the supermarket. He thinks of her drinking her weekend coffee with vanilla ice cream floating in it, chattering about the movie reviews, the cold weather outside, her split ends. Despite her charms, it’s hard not to strangle her.

  For dinner India makes a frittata. He notices that she’s left a pile of eggshells in the sink. As he spears the frittata with his fork, he fights back the urge to say, “You couldn’t cook a real baby, India. A real baby would die.”

  That night as a peace offering, Uri rummages through the closet and finds a shoe box. He folds a couple of rags and then, in a particularly inspired moment, fills the rest with cotton balls. He sets the egg on top. It looks like it’s floating on a cloud. He brings it to India while she’s drinking tea in the study.

  “Look,” he says, setting the box by her keyboard. Her face goes blank.

  “That’s sweet,” she says tentatively. “It’s like a little bed.”

  “It is a little bed,” Uri says. India nods.

  In the bedroom, Uri sets the egg on the nightstand and waits for India to finish brushing her teeth. The egg’s face is growing on him. The more he looks at it, the more he thinks he can see something sentient. A sparkle in the dried ink. A texture to the shell similar to the fine hairs on human skin. India comes in and takes off her yoga pants and top. She stands in front of the mirror looking at her body. Sometimes she turns and asks him if he thinks she’s beautiful. It’s amazing that she does this; she speaks with such derision about women (like her sister) who need constant affirmation. Tonight she doesn’t ask him, though she scrutinizes her profile before grabbing her nightgown from the drawer.

  She looks at the egg for a minute before she turns off the light.

  “It looks like Groucho Marx,” she says.

  “It looks nothing like Groucho Marx,” Uri says. “It doesn’t have a mustache.”

  “Well, it looks like a weird old man,” she says. Uri can smell her coconut face lotion and the rich unwashed oil of her hair. He thinks of Blithe. He thinks of pears.

  Blithe trots down the maroon carpets of the office in a short wraparound dress. She’s wearing sheer stockings and the same little black heels. She disappears into the file room and Uri imagines following, pushing her face first against the wall. She’d gasp and reach behind her to feel him, hard through his khakis.

  Instead he goes into his office and flicks on the light, takes the egg, and sets it next to his phone. Then he thinks better of it and sticks it in his drawer.

  He’s halfway back to Berkeley that evening when he realizes he’s left it there. Rather than face India’s wrath (“You left it at work? Imagine what would happen if you forgot a baby?”), he gets off the train in Oakland and takes another train back to the city. He sits next to an elderly Chinese woman clacking her dentures sloppily. As he disembarks, she takes out the teeth and stares at them as though a stranger left them in her mouth.

  The security guard buzzes him in. It’s nearly six o’clock and all the government workers have fled. The building is strangely muted. When he presses the door code he’s met with the reassuring smell of reams of paper and printer toner. He’s never thought of coming here to relax, but it’s nice. Orderly.

  “Oh,” says Blithe. “I thought you’d gone.” He’s in his office, egg in hand. He quickly slips the egg into his trouser pocket. It bulges. He tries to dangle his hand in such a way that she won’t notice. Her hair is falling out of her clips; she’s distracted.

  “I was just stood up,” Blithe says. “It’s the second time this guy’s stood me up, and it’s my birthday.”

  “Oh. That sucks,” Uri says. Blithe stands there, looking miserable. “Happy birthday.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Uri’s heard Blithe complain about how much harder it is to make friends out west. No one’s reliable and no one knows how to drink. He guesses it’s true. Most of his buddies are from elsewhere: New York, Louisiana. India’s from Detroit. Blithe looks like she’s going to cry. India works late on Thursday nights and then she has a meditation class until half past nine.

  “I can take you for a beer,” Uri says. Blithe looks grateful.

  They take the train to the Mission. Blithe knows a new tapas bar and they get a table near the window. Outside, a young woman with layered hair is unraveling a scarf as she yells into a cell phone. Next to her, two elderly women close up shop. They bring in a table of mangoes and plantains.

  Blithe’s face is so expressive. When she mimics her father’s new girlfriend, a cattle dealer he met online, she expands her nostrils, widens her eyes, and talks without moving her tongue. Apparently, the woman has some kind of speech impediment. After two drinks, Uri’s told her about growing up in Providence, his rocky relationship with his brother, Alvin, Alvin’s ridiculous trophy wife, Bev (who insists on wiping down restaurant seats with disinfectant before she’ll sit). Blithe laughs easily.

  After the third round of drinks, Blithe leans close. She tells him her apartment is just around the corner, he should come see the watercolor her father sent for her birthday.

  He shouldn’t go. It’s obvious where this is headed. He looks at his watch. It’s eight. If he swings by,
gets her home safely, he can make it back to Berkeley before India’s class gets out. They leave the restaurant and he’s careful to hold his bag over the bulge in his pocket. As they walk, her hand brushes his forearm twice and lingers. He breathes in sharply, getting a dizzying whiff of that pear shampoo.

  Blithe’s studio is IKEA tidy. Everything has a little red cabinet of its own. Her bed sits stately in the middle of the room, heaped with throw pillows in rich, dark colors. She has a little lamp with a beaded shade that throws gold light all over the covers. There’s no other place to sit. Blithe goes to the little kitchenette, takes out an open bottle of bourbon, and pours them each a glass. Her squat, square tumblers have little Georgia peaches etched into them. She gestures to the painting on her bookshelf.

  “I like the red in it,” he says.

  She faces him. They haven’t had dinner and they’re both sufficiently drunk. Uri takes a big swallow. The bourbon’s terrible—cheap with a sharp burn—but there’s a nice numb heat spreading over his chin.

  “I’ve had so much fun with you tonight,” Blithe says. Her mouth is open slightly; her teeth look strong and clean. “You’ve made my birthday.”

  Blithe waits, but Uri doesn’t say anything. And then she smiles slyly, reaches for the tie at her hip, and undoes it. The dress falls open. Only the lace on her bra is black. The rest is a rich, silken cream. Uri takes her by the waist and pulls her toward him, sliding the dress off her arms with his palms. Then it’s like watching a tree fall in slow motion: she barely bends, just falls on top of him, willingly, sloppily, and as she lands Uri feels a crunch against his thigh; wetness starts to ooze.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” he says, pushing Blithe off him. All the gold shards of light on the sheets are just India’s intelligent eyes, watching him silently as the egg makes its way into his pubic hair.

  Blithe gets another egg from the refrigerator, but she doesn’t have a Sharpie so he can’t draw the face. And what’s more, there’s a wet, sticky mess in his pants pocket and all over the sock the egg was wrapped in. He rinses both things out in the sink—but how will he explain to India that the egg is now faceless, when she clearly saw that he’d drawn on it, and that the sock is sopping wet?