The Mother Garden

by Robin Romm

  “I don’t understand,” Blithe says. “What’s it for?” Blithe’s breath smells like Lysol.

  “It’s a competition,” Uri says. He wants to say with my wife, but he’s too much of a coward. Blithe must know he’s married, though he’s managed never to bring it up. He doesn’t wear a ring. Neither does India. When they got married, India begged that they each tattoo a circle on their big toe. She thought it was more binding, not to mention more interesting. At that point in her life she was really caught up with being interesting.

  Blithe’s standing in the kitchen in only her bra and panties, the replacement egg held up like she’s about to sing a jingle. She looks confused and he feels doubly guilty—for being with Blithe in the first place, and then for letting her down.

  “I need another sock,” Uri says. Blithe sets the egg on the counter and goes to find one.

  It’s not that late, only eight-forty, when he leaves Blithe’s apartment, the new egg wrapped in Blithe’s nicest sock. He left the pink one there, drying on the faucet. Down the street he finds a drugstore and buys a Sharpie. Carefully, on the way home, he re-creates the face he drew. The little eyes, the horseshoe nose. He does a reasonable job.

  “Where were you?” India says when he walks in.

  “I went out for drinks,” Uri says. He bangs his leg on the trunk by the front door and when he leans down to rub it, he stumbles and catches himself on the molding.

  “Are you drunk?” India asks.

  “I guess, a little.”

  “Who were you with?”

  “Just Tom. And this new investigator.” He rubs his leg until he can feel a heat there, then takes the egg out from his bag and sets it on top of the trunk. His jacket covers the wet spot on his pants.

  “I got the egg a new outfit,” he says before she can notice. The sock he took from Blithe is cashmere—she made sure to tell him this as she dangled it in front of him—light cream with little blobs of blue in it.

  “Where’d you get a sock?” India asks, coming over to take a look.

  “I bought it at lunch.”

  “What happened to the pink sock?”

  “The egg didn’t like it.”

  “The egg didn’t like it?” India says, lowering one eyebrow. She looks like she’s about to push the issue, but decides to let it go. She runs her thumb and forefinger around the edge.

  “It’s cashmere,” Uri says.

  “I don’t have any socks this nice,” India says. “Lucky egg.”

  In the morning, India brings him coffee and toast in bed. “Why the special treatment?” he asks.

  “I want to talk to you,” she says, and immediately, her eyes tear. Uri feels his gut flip. How could she know? He reaches for her hand; her bones are thin under her warm skin. He has an urge to take this hand and squeeze, feel the bones bend and snap. His hangover threatens to drag his tongue back down inside of his body and disintegrate it. India stares out the window by the bed and Uri looks out too. Two squirrels squabble on the fence.

  “I was trying to figure out what my deal is,” she says. “And I think I’m just really afraid that I won’t be a good enough parent.”

  Uri relaxes. It’s nothing he hasn’t heard before. India’s mother is an alcoholic. When India was thirteen, her mother, in the middle of a rant about how India would soon be off “participating” with men, put on an Aerosmith record and cut off her own ponytail. The next day, instead of apologizing for the theatrics, she volunteered to show India how to make paintbrushes out of it. He pulls India toward him.

  “You’ll be fine,” he says because it’s true, but also because that’s his script; there’s nothing else he can say.

  “I just called the doctor. If you’re sure it’s what you want,” she says into his shoulder, “I’ll get the IUD removed today. They can fit me into a cancellation at four.” Uri nods and they make a quick plan: he’ll get off at three and meet her there. His heart beats in his chin and wrists and groin and he takes India’s hair, lifts it up so that her head rises with it and she starts to object, then presses her down beside him on the bed. He studies her face. She’s striking, not just pretty like Blithe. Her hair is black and her eyes are a pale, frigid gray. She broke her front tooth in a car accident when she was twenty and the dentist smoothed the jagged edge. When they first began living together he would look at her offhandedly when he was watching television and the sight of her, all weird angles and paint-smeared jeans, would send a watery rush through him. He rests his head on her chest for a while, then gets up to take a shower.

  He comes back to the bedroom to pick up the egg.

  “You don’t have to do that anymore,” she says. But he finds that he wants the egg with him.

  On the train, Uri shuts his eyes and focuses on a shape. It’s something India does that he thinks is dopey, but it seems to work for her. He picks a circle. Once it’s lodged in his mind, he tries to let his thoughts fall away. Then he asks himself how he’s feeling. The circle is black, then it slowly turns silver. It bends into a sperm shape, then bends back. The train’s crowded; Uri’s holding onto the rail. He’s bad at meditating. At the next stop, a very pregnant woman gets on and a young man stands to let her sit. The woman glances at Uri and gives him a bland smile. He turns away and imagines her standing up, a big puddle of water forming beneath her. The nasal sound of her bleating in pain. He imagines the way she will smell as her insides start to come out—blood, mucus, chains of membrane—and the coffee he drank on an empty stomach sloshes miserably.

  Blithe is wearing a dark pantsuit and somber barrettes; Uri takes this as a sign that she has an investigation out of the office. He’s right. She comes by at nine-thirty to tell him she’s going to Fairfield to look into a race complaint at the city’s sanitation facility.

  “Did you work out the egg thing?” she asks.

  “Yeah, it’s all fine,” he says. She bites her top lip and taps a finger on his door frame.

  “Can I come in for a sec?” she asks. She closes the door behind her. “I just wanted to check in with you about last night. I mean, it seemed like you left in a rush, and—well, I guess I like you and I just—I didn’t mean to freak you out.”

  It’s absurd to see her in a suit now that he’s seen her almost naked. It’s a little like her satin bra and panty set are etched on top of the blazer and trousers. A panty phantasm. And what’s more, the older she tries to dress, the younger she looks.

  “Blithe, I’m married,” he says. She looks briefly stunned.

  “Oh God,” she says slowly. “I’m a horrendous idiot.”

  “No,” he says. “No one’s an idiot.” Blithe puts her hand on the doorknob. “Can we be friends?” he says, giving her the hangdog, boyish look he hasn’t given anyone in years. The words linger around the office like a fart and Blithe looks at him coolly. She opens the door and leaves.

  The miserable attorney calls again to screech about money. Uri says he’s sorry, but he thinks he’s coming down with the flu and needs to reschedule.

  Three o’clock comes slowly. It has taken all his energy not to call India’s cell phone to tell her to forgo the appointment. He tells himself that they still have a ways to go; she’s not pregnant yet and if it’s not meant to be then she won’t get pregnant and they can maybe get another egg or a dog or just volunteer at a preschool.

  The trains are delayed and India is already in the examining room when he gets there. The receptionist, a pear-shaped woman with thinning hair, takes him to her. India’s got a piece of waxy paper draped over her lower half. She’s on her back on the table with her feet in stirrups. He has the egg box with him and he sets it down on top of India’s folded clothes. Before he can say anything, the nurse raps on the door and enters. She’s tiny with a severe hairdo.

  “I’m Nurse Practitioner Wu,” she says to India. “I just need you to relax and scoot up on the table a little bit.” Nurse Practitioner Wu snaps on latex gloves, gets out a tube of KY, and smears some on the metal speculum.


  It’s a quick procedure—a tug and a yelp.

  “That’s that,” India says. Her face is pale. Uri smooths back her hair.

  It’s all happening a little fast, this bright road to fertility. Uri still feels fragile from drinking too much last night, but he buys a six-pack of beer on the way home. Sitting at the kitchen table, he opens one and gazes at the egg in its box. It smiles stiffly. India comes in and grabs a beer. She straddles a chair and sits on it backward, resting her chin on the high wooden back. She tosses the bottle cap onto the table, then reaches out and touches Uri’s cheek. She’s going to try to seduce him. She’s pursing her lips. How can she not have noticed that the egg is different? When Uri looks at it, he can tell. He can see that the nose is way bigger than the nose he originally drew. The smile is wiggly, too. And what’s more, the old egg was a small egg and Blithe’s eggs were jumbo. This is a jumbo egg with a crooked smile and India is not noticing. She gets up off the chair and tilts her head back to take a swig of beer. She hiccups and then tosses herself in his lap, pressing her cold nose against his jaw. He slides his hand under her shirt for a minute, lets her start to kiss the side of his head.

  “I’m not into it right now,” he says, moving his legs so she’s not as close to him. India stops.

  “All right,” she says, but it’s a hurt all right.

  He stays in the kitchen, working his way through the six-pack. He rolls the egg over. No little red mouth. That egg is gone. He’s tired from drinking, from Blithe’s rebuff, from the knowledge that he will have to go to work every day now in a state of semi-shame. And that’s not all. From the lawyer’s screaming, from the sight of India in stirrups, from the hurt way she walked out on him a half hour ago.

  There’s no way he can go through with it. She was right; he’s ruined the barbecue and he’s ruined the egg and he’s basically ruined his whole goddamned life.

  He goes out to the back deck and looks at the sky. It’s late fall and the days have gotten shorter. The backyard is becoming shadow and silhouette, navy and gray. The long leaves of the eucalyptus tree shudder. He brings the egg to his nose; it smells like Freon and plastic, like the inside of a refrigerator. He aims it at the eucalyptus and misses. The egg falls to the ground and cracks.

  Uri thinks of a farm out where his family used to vacation. The angry, cold eyes of the chickens kept there, the dank smell of bird shit in soil. He and Alvin used to swim in a nearby quarry. When they were old enough, they’d borrow his dad’s truck and speed down dirt roads. The dust streaked Uri’s skin and made his hair coarse. He thinks of Alvin running and plunging into bottomless gunmetal water. The way he would cry out, the splash and then the silence.

  India comes onto the porch.

  “What’s going on?” she asks, touching his back. She follows his gaze to the egg. He turns to her, ready to plead—for what, he’s not quite sure—when he sees that she’s laughing. “Oops,” she says. Her dark lashes shine in the last light of dusk.

  THE TILT

  IT’S DAY TWO OF OUR FIVE-DAY VISIT TO MAINE AND Nick’s stepmother, Anna, has barely uttered a word to us. She sits in the center of the braided rug in lotus position, her body draped in a faded violet sweat suit. The room used to hold a giant loom, but it’s been moved to the garage. Now the room is empty save for a few low benches where candles burn and bundles of leaves sit, wrapped in embroidery floss.

  “Just ignore her,” Nick says. I follow him up the shiny wooden staircase to the bedrooms. He’s not ignoring her. He’s learned to live with all of this silently, but if I reached out to put my hand on his shoulder right now, he would feel as tense as a snake drawing back to bite.

  The whole scene is wrong. It’s been wrong from the beginning. When Nick was twelve and his father, Gray, left his mother for Anna—that was wrong. It was wrong that Nick’s mother had to live alone in that run-down rental on the outskirts of town, drowning the noise of the neighbors with her radio, while Gray and Anna woke to views of rolling hills. The world has continued to spin like this, tilted poorly on its axis, and it’s worn a lopsided groove in the universe.

  Despite the sun streaming through the skylights and the white, clean walls, there’s no peace here. The door to Milo’s bedroom is shut, but I know that if we opened it, the bed would be unmade, the snowboarding poster would still hang on the wall above it. Anna will not allow the room to be emptied or cleaned; it’s a battle she’s been winning for years.

  The windows in Nick’s room open to the garden. The air is cool, spring, eastern wood air—the sweet smell of old leaves and new buds. It’s a tiny room. There’s hardly anything in here—an antique dresser with an old porcelain pitcher on it and a stiff-backed chair next to the bed. No trace of Nick as a child. Milo, age seven or eight, grins from a speckled silver frame. On the wall hangs a framed crayon drawing—Milo’s, certainly.

  “What do you want to do today?” Nick asks. He wriggles out of his thick brown sweater. It’s not really warm enough to be without a sweater, but I admire his optimism. The trees outside shine in the brightness of the day. In the distance, you can hear the bleating of the sheep, occasionally, the squawk of a chicken.

  Nick and I used to come up to this big house on long weekends, but I haven’t been back in the three years since Milo’s funeral. That day, we came up to this room, climbed into bed, blind with shock and exhaustion, and Nick told me that someday he would really understand love, but that he didn’t think he did then, he didn’t think he ever really had—at least not with me. Under the thick quilt his body altered, became solid and separate in a way I hadn’t known before. His knees were sharp, his legs selfish. Inside my own body—which was already still with grief—a deeper silence landed. I closed my eyes and the darkness was particulate, full of spinning shards and gyrating orbs, but my blood and heart had stopped moving.

  Nick waits for me to say something. He leans against the dresser, crossing his arms. His eyes are the impossible green of old Coke bottles and shine with a cool, glassy clarity. I could walk across the room and put my lips against his neck and he would put his hand on my back absently and I would stand there breathing the soapy smell of his skin.

  The mattress sags when Nick sits. We’ve only been back together six months. Nick got a job in San Francisco, heading the archival sound department at the public library. He called me once he took the job. We met in Golden Gate Park, went to a bar, then back to his apartment with the futon on the floor and his clothes in low crates. We drank hot toddies and I wouldn’t let him touch me. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You have to believe me.” And I haven’t forgotten about the way he left me, the girls he plugged the absence with until I didn’t want to talk to him anymore, until whatever passed between us just felt like a joke, some adolescent clinging we never should have engaged in.

  “How long does Anna do that for?” I ask. Nick sits up straighter.

  “Oh, Becca,” he says, putting a hand over his eyes. “Let’s not get into this now.”

  “We’re not getting into anything. I’m just asking a question.”

  “This isn’t the worst of it,” he says. “There’s a group that comes on Sunday nights.” Outside a car whizzes past on the main road with a horse trailer. A bunch of geese rise off the small pond and disappear over the house. “They channel the dead,” he says. He turns to face me, smirking. Does he really think I can’t see it—the broken look that’s particular to this older Nick? A mild shifting in the facial muscles that might be mistaken for aging?

  “How many are in the group?”

  Nick sighs. “I don’t know, about five.”

  “They meet here?” I ask.

  “Sometimes here, sometimes at other people’s houses.” He cracks the knuckles of his left hand. “Let’s go get the bikes.”

  But on the way out to the shed, Nick’s father, Gray, barrels up the driveway in his old pickup. He pulls up next to us.

  “Becky!” he shouts. Nick kicks the gravel behind me. Gray’s been on call
since we arrived, so this is the first time I’ve seen him. He swings himself down from the cab; he’s dressed in scrubs and white running shoes. Some of his neck hairs scraggle up around the vee of the shirt. He looks older, as if he’s worn a hole in his body somewhere and the water in his skin has leaked out.

  “Welcome!” he shouts. I’d forgotten how tightly wound he is. A dad on fast-forward. He talks as if someone’s put a time constraint on his life. “It’s been too long! Too long!” He thumps me on the arm, then grabs it and pulls me into an awkward hug. He smells strange, like the inside of a film canister.

  “You always were a pretty one,” he says, winking at Nick. Nick grimaces. “What are you two up to?”

  “We’re going to the reservoir,” Nick says, and I can feel his body gravitating toward the shed. Part of him is already on that bike, fleeing down the gravel road.

  “Oh, no. Come inside and we’ll make a pot of coffee. Becky, I want to hear how you’re doing—Becky, Becky.” He shakes his head. “And Nick, I was hoping you could pull up some chairs from the basement for dinner tonight.”

  “Dinner?” Nick asks.

  “Anna invited some people over.” Nick tenses. I step backward into him, but he doesn’t soften or put his hand on me. Gray fishes a bag out of the bed of the truck. He swats me on the arm again as he walks into the house.

  While Gray makes coffee, Nick and I go down to the basement to find the folding chairs. They’re under a bunch of tarps and old paint cans, and Nick begins to dig them out.

  “You okay?” I ask. His hair falls over his eyes.

  “Mmm,” he says. “He put this damn belt thing over the chairs. Why would you do that?” Nick yanks on the belt and the chairs, which sit on wheeled palettes, roll toward him slightly. “It’s like he’s afraid even the fucking chairs are going to try to get out of here.” Nick kneels over the strap and starts to wiggle the metal clasp. I hoist myself up to sit on a workbench. Above my head the shelves are stocked with Ball jars of pickles and jams. The three freezers whir and hum. I like it down here. It’s organized and spotless, and there’s a feeling of abundance. At Thanksgiving, every dish Gray and Anna serve they’ve grown and prepared themselves, including the turkey. There’s something romantic about it, even if it is self-righteous, as Nick says.