The Mother Garden

by Robin Romm

  “Where on earth could they be?” she says. Then she sees the condom wrapper and picks it off the ground, sticks it in her pocket. She meets my eyes and blushes slightly. I feel emboldened.

  “Satan said you were a first-class broad,” I tell her.

  “Well isn’t that sweet,” she says. I study her face. Surely it’s going to fall into something other than that dreamy smile.

  “I told you, Liza, he’s special. I can sense it.”

  I jam the hook into my thumb a little harder.

  While Mrs. Capp goes through her jacket pockets, I try to imagine what my life would have been like had I followed Kevin up those stairs, into that dim apartment. He would have sulked for a while about his potential death while the sky outside darkened to black. I would have sat on the scratchy wool sofa, paging through a copy of some weathered novel Kevin kept on his bookshelf for show. He would have taken a shower, emerged wet and sullen, his brown hair sticking up in shiny cowlicks all over his scalp. Soon he would have nestled next to me, buried his face in my neck, forgiven me my lack of heroism, thanked God for sparing his life. We could have gone on like that, the scratchy sofa bothering our legs, into the great infinity. Would that really have been so bad?

  “Here they are!” Mrs. Capp says. If the keys had hair, she’d give it a good-natured tousle. “They must have fallen off the night table.” She clanks them in her palm. Little castanets.

  I sit down on the bed and smile. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” I tell her.

  She winks at me. “Oh, Liza,” she says. “You wouldn’t do anything.”

  NO SMALL FEAT

  IF I WRITE THAT MY MOTHER DIED OF CANCER, NO ONE will publish this story—cancer being too ubiquitous. So, for this story, let’s call it consumption. It’s a romantic idea, anyway—the air hunger, the weakness.

  My boyfriend Kierny is a writer, too. He claims to be a novelist, though apparently he also wrote a few stories while I was back in Idaho, adjusting my mom’s meds, switching her oxygen tubes around. I found out about Kierny’s story writing by accident. It was Saturday and I was in a bad patch, working and reworking the same fragments. A goose flying out of a woman’s mouth. A child hit by a bus. Nothing was going anywhere.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Olivia demanded. I’d picked up the phone on the first ring, assuming it would be Kierny.

  “What? What didn’t I tell you?” Liv was a friend from graduate school. Everything excited her. Her own ears seemed to make her shrill with joy, but in spite of myself I felt a surge of hope.

  “God, it’s like the best one in the anthology, Sarah. You must be so proud.”

  I had four stories published the year before my mom died—a few in really good places. I’d been on a roll. The magazines came to me in shrink-wrap, my name shining out in glossy black or blue or pink. Did an editor somewhere forget to tell me she’d submitted one for a prize?

  “It’s an incredible rendering of your mother. Just amazing. There’s even the way she did that thing when she ate—that thing with her teeth. Just a sec, you must know the scene. Here it is, page 239—”

  “Liv, what are you talking about?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” she said. “Kierny’s story in Best American…‘Consumed.’” I looked at the apple slices turning brown on my plate. “Sarah?”

  “I didn’t know about it,” I said.

  “Oh,” Liv said. “Oops.”

  Kierny didn’t pick up his phone, which was just as well; I couldn’t formulate a thought. I drove to the bookstore.

  It was probably a mix-up. Another Kierny. Another mother. Kierny had a competitive streak. Every time I had a story accepted he locked himself away for weeks, working to catch up. But we were honest. We’d been through hell together. The midnight phone calls after I wrestled my mother into bed—my anger the only thing available to me. He sat on the sofa those awful winter evenings, listening to me berate everyone—from the doctors to my closest friends—and he didn’t try to reason with me. When she finally died, he drove all night from California to make the funeral, showed up in a wrinkled gray shirt and borrowed slacks. He greeted extended family. He cried when I cried. He shoveled dirt into her grave.

  I could see the dust floating in the air of the bookstore. Huge skylights cut through the roof and the glossy paperbacks shone. There it was—on the wooden display table with the latest by Eggers, Chabon. Best American—its bright orange cover beckoning. I opened it. A few big names and then: Kierny McAllister…“Consumed.”

  Why hadn’t he told me about this? I flipped to his bio. Kierny McAllister is a North Carolina native living in Berkeley, California. “Consumed” is his first published story.

  The fucker, I said aloud. A woman with a toddler in tow shot me a look. I shot one back.

  The fucker.

  I brought the book to the cashier and slapped it on the counter. I couldn’t even read the first line. With the book in the trunk, I went to find Kierny. He was probably at his studio writing more stories about my life, more stories about my dead mother. For God’s sake, Kierny, I thought, get your own death. Get your own pain.

  Kierny’s studio belonged to the McDonald’s of art studios. A company bought up vacant lots around California and erected these cheaply constructed corrugated-metal buildings. Kierny had a spot on the ground floor next to a woman who made custom tarot cards and animal-shaped soap. Outside his open door sat a bench and a bunch of happy-looking poppies.

  He’d left his door ajar.

  “So were you ever going to tell me?” I said.

  Some kind of grease had worked its way across his glasses. Papers were scattered around him on the floor. He looked annoyed.

  “Hi, Sarah,” he said.

  I went to hold up the book, but I didn’t have it, so I ran back to the car, unlocked the trunk, and ran back. I held it like a little orange picket sign.

  “Look what I found! Someone named Kierny McAllister is writing stories about my mom!”

  “Sarah, Jesus.” Kierny turned back to his lit-up screen and saved his document. Then he calmly closed his laptop. It made a soft click.

  “So you read it?” he asked.

  My arm skin prickled. “No, not exactly, not yet.”

  “You haven’t read it and you’re this mad?” He raised his thick eyebrows.

  “I can’t believe you’d write a story about my mom dying, send it out, get it published—and never run it by me.”

  He pushed his hair off his forehead. “I was afraid you’d have a bad reaction,” he said. “And you are.” Kierny took a breath and held it, gazed down at the poppies. I moved my foot back to squish one.

  “It’s about death, Sarah, and I didn’t want to bring up more death stuff for you.”

  “You didn’t want to bring up more death stuff for me? Are you kidding? This is my mom you wrote about. For you this was a story, but for me it was real.”

  “Shhh. Sarah, there are people working here.”

  I’d always thought Kierny was adorable—his blackish hair and crooked nose. His way of leaning when he walked, as if it would make him less tall.

  Now Kierny looked a little anemic. I could see his wormy temple veins. And he had a cold. He looked plugged up.

  I turned around, went back to my car, drove home.

  With a tall glass of whiskey, I tried to settle myself long enough to read the story.

  I couldn’t do it. It was the middle of the day, too hard to read. I shut the blinds to approximate night. I turned on all the lights. I fed my cat. I washed the dishes. I felt dirty. I felt like crying. I turned on the shower and stood under it.

  All the stories I had written about my mom’s death had come back with little slips of paper. We just get so many stories about cancer (oops, I mean consumption), it’s impossible to publish another! We do admire your writing, though, so keep sending us work! Or The grief is palpable—you’ve allowed us to see it in a whole new way. No small feat! But we’re afraid grief isn’t enoug
h for us. We need a larger worldview. Maybe submit to our next theme issue: CLASH: Ugandan Politics and the New Urban Male…. One editor suggested I wait until I was in the next phase of my life before sending another story. It got so obnoxious that I stopped sending the stories out. No one wants to hear about mortality, I figured. Dead moms, dead dads—they’re a dime a dozen.

  I took a Xanax.

  I opened the book.

  I kept imagining what it would feel like to get closer to her—to hold her, undress her, run my hands over the strange rubber of her skin. Even if she was my girlfriend’s mother—my girlfriend’s dying mother, in that state—so near to death—she was magnetic.

  Okay, fine. She didn’t die of consumption, she died of cancer. And like most cancer deaths, it wasn’t pretty. Her breast turned purple, then black, then it ate itself. Her skin grew tough and red. Sores opened on her lips and forehead. The tumor grew so big it was like a globe pressing out of her chest. She smelled like fish and sweat and unflushed pee. She was delirious for weeks, coming in and out of this world.

  My mother was trained in classical ballet. She stood erect and held her head high. Before she got sick, she used to coil her thick hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. Men smiled at her in grocery stores. Students filled every dance class she offered.

  She was sick for eleven years. The treatments and steroids made her hair change texture. It fell out and came back wiry, streaked with a dark, flat gray. Then it fell out again and came back in patches. Her skin took on a chemical glow. She gained weight. She wasn’t magnetic in her death state. Kierny could barely stand to be in the same room with her. When she was in the final stages, moaning, balling her fists, rolling back her eyes—he wouldn’t even visit. He stayed in California, apparently imagining all this, working extra hours at his magazine job.

  I was alone when she died. As her body morphed, swelled, and rotted, I held her hands. I wiped the oozing. I don’t have any siblings. And my father, he’s not around.

  I’m straying. I’m writing about death again. Damn it. It’s become a habit. Is the key to insert sex?

  Gratuitous Sex Scene #1

  The night after my mom died, Kierny arrived in Boise. I don’t remember very much about that evening. There was whiskey and beer and lots of casserole. Some of my mom’s friends had arrived and were answering the phone. Dinnertime passed, then it was night. We went upstairs to my childhood bedroom.

  He held me and I tried to relax. My body wouldn’t settle. I felt violent. I wanted to throw the little porcelain box off my bureau and watch it shatter, hurl books through the window, leave bloody scratches up my own arms. And so I pulled away from him, pushed him down on the bed, undid the button of his jeans.

  It wasn’t sex I wanted, not really. I wanted to watch him under a spell. I wanted to control him.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. I untied his shoes, pulled off his boxers, looked at his pink penis, lying a little lopsided across his stomach. I took it in my hands, then in my mouth. It pulsed and quivered. Finally he started panting. I went faster, pulled at the base—and then he came all over my quilt.

  “Oh wow,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  But I still felt violent.

  Kierny, you might be interested to know, has both of his parents. He’s from Chapel Hill. His dad is a physicist. His mom is a pediatrician. He has a sister named Wendy who is happily married to a veterinarian. His younger brother Anton is at Yale.

  Kierny is a well-adjusted person. In fact, Grover Edgar, a student in our graduate workshop, once said you could tell from Kierny’s prose that he hadn’t felt a whole lot of pain in his life. “It’s like what an alien might imagine human pain would feel like,” he said. At the time I’d thought Grover was kind of an asshole. His dad killed himself when Grover was young and it was all he could write about.

  “Red Rover, Red Rover, help Grover get over it,” Kierny joked.

  …in that state—so near to death—she was magnetic.

  You want more of Kierny’s story? Well, go buy it. It’s under copyright. I’m only providing a synopsis.

  The story takes some funny turns, Kierny being a funny guy. He’s with Terri (the fictional me) and Lucinda (my fictional mom) while Lucinda is dying. Terri is having a lot of trouble managing the daily tasks—administering meds and doing laundry—because Terri is obsessed with yoga and detox diets. (I am most certainly not obsessed with yoga or detox diets.) Terri watches yoga videos on the television in the basement, leaving the male character, Theo, with plenty of time for monkey business.

  Of course, Lucinda and Theo never actually have an affair. But they do have numerous meaningful conversations on the nature of life and death. Pithy ones, even. But a particularly stunning scene involves Lucinda fantasizing about having a one-night stand.

  “I was too well behaved in my life,” she says to him. “I wish I’d broken a few more rules.” In this scene, she’s just been bathed by a nurse. She reclines in the bed, her hair wrapped in a turban. (Hair? A turban?) She won’t tell him the details of her wishes, but in her eyes he sees a film strip: a dark house, white linens, soft light, and the deep line down a woman’s spine.

  He feels a powerful pull and says, “I think I need to get a beer.” Lucinda rubs her dry feet together suggestively.

  At the bar, which he goes to alone in Terri’s truck, he meets a young undergrad, Fiora. Fiora’s a biology major. She’s got dark skin, long dark hair, and a small diamond in her nostril. She’s nothing like poor Terri (who’s milk and honey pretty, but who’s turned a little stringy and dour during these hard months). Fiora’s eyes are coy, her lashes shine. She laughs at Theo’s jokes and her fingers travel up the inseam of his pants.

  Outside, on the gravel of the parking lot, he bites at her jaw. She smelled like oatmeal and coal, Kierny wrote.

  (Kierny once told me about a girlfriend he’d had at summer camp when he was fifteen. She smelled like oatmeal, he’d said. And when I said that was kind of a dumpy thing to smell like, he disagreed vehemently, saying oatmeal was about as earthy as you could get.)

  What do you think happens? Yes! They sleep together! At her dorm. Beneath a large tapestry with camels on it.

  Terri doesn’t find out, and, strangely, Theo doesn’t feel guilty. He feels more in love with Terri and more alive than he’s ever felt. Tenderness overwhelms him, and so, a week later, he tries it again. Only this time, it’s much more dangerous—it’s with Diego, the nurse.

  (Now, caretakers are not a sexy lot. In Idaho, we got a lot of women with dyed red hair and smoker’s coughs chattering endlessly about cats and car payments. Some of them were expert crocheters, crossword puzzlers, or cardsharps, but none of them—not one—exuded sexual magnetism.)

  Diego is a svelte biracial man, paying his way through a graduate degree in English by working nights caring for hospice patients. He’s got—these are not my words—“skin the color of burned butter” and “eyes one shade paler than teal.” Theo is not gay—he had one “experimental” experience in college during a spin the bottle game when he was trying to impress a bisexual coed. But Diego is flaming gay—and unmistakably sexual. He has a gay man’s flair for fashion. Even while making house calls to dump commodes and wipe sores, he’s wearing tight Tshirts and form-fitting pants.

  At one point Theo almost tells Lucinda what he’s done, he wants her to see him in a new light: a man with free will, able to live out her fantasies. He wants them to have a virtual affair. But before he says anything she takes his hands and he feels an opening in his body, as if she already knows, blah blah blah.

  Eventually, Lucinda dies (she just closes her weary eyes and kaput! she fades). Theo realizes that she is gone, but her spirit is everywhere, lives inside of them all, and this gives him a kind of peace and a renewed zest for love and life.

  It’s an annoying story, isn’t it?

  So palpable! So felt! I imagine the editors said. You’ve helped us to see death in a new way! No small feat!


  I don’t get it. I truly don’t. Which is why I’m going to write this story, call it fiction, and then apply to law school.

  I didn’t sleep the night I read that story. Instead, I sat up with a photograph of my mother, taken three weeks before she died. In it, the two of us are sitting on the brown overstuffed sofa. My arm is around her shoulders. Her face is gray and the oxygen tubes drape over her chest. One of her eyes is drifting. My face is close to her ear, like I am whispering something to her.

  Don’t die, I’m saying—you can see it in the way I’m clutching her nightgown with my hand.

  Gratuitous Sex Scene #2

  (Or, “A Brief Story of My Conception, August 1977”)

  It’s New York—Soho. And this is the night my mother will meet my father. My mother, Brenda Oberlin, has just turned twenty-three. She’s long and thin and wears tight jeans and flowing tunics.

  She doesn’t know it yet—that this night will be fateful. She knows this: she is not a lesbian, as much as she likes Alice, as pretty as Alice is with that sly face, shiny lips, and shocking black hair. She’s been sleeping with Alice for three weeks, trying to feel the energy. They’ve come to this art opening because Alice is a painter. She’s friends with a friend of the artist. It’s a large room and it smells like dust with something sweet mixed in—nail polish or turning meat.

  The artist is a skinny man with a grin that makes him look like he’s got food in his mouth. He’s less handsome than Brenda’s usual boyfriends—less handsome but more talented. She likes the strange birds he paints, their beaks menacing but their eyes patient and all-knowing. He’s wearing a strand of purple beads over a linen shirt. He’s drinking beer with a straw.

  She stands near Alice in the corner, eyeing him as he greets guests. And then, when he backs out of the room for a cigarette, she follows.