The Mother Garden

by Robin Romm

  She says, “I just love your work,” and then feels stupid. She’s young and it’s summer. Her body is light and airy, no different from the heat off the building, the eggy air coming out of the vent they stand over, the white East Coast sky. She bums a cigarette and imagines that his hand doesn’t stop at hers, but reaches past her, grabs her behind her ribs, pulls her in. She feels his body—so much more substantial than Alice’s—his dick hard against her thigh, and the heat of the sky and warmth of her own blood conspire to make her look too deeply at him, woozily almost, as if they have already crawled in and out of bed a hundred times.

  They talk about the neighborhood, a Russian diner. They leave together, despite the guests inside, the paintings lit by expensive lights that shine down from the windows to the dark pavement. They buy a bag of M&Ms and a fifth of whiskey and start kissing in front of his building.

  Keys, a heavy door, a room with exposed brick and a ratty sofa. His hands are large and they slide around her, hoist her up against the wall.

  “You smell good,” he says. She’s wearing Alice’s Chanel—but under that she smells like an athlete.

  He carries her over to his sofa—the bed’s lofted, too hard to get to—and he slides off her moccasins, her jeans. She’s drunk. He’s drunk. It’s quick and sloppy but it feels good, slippery and exciting, no talking, no negotiating. They slide off the sofa onto his shag rug. “I’m leaving next week,” he tells her before he drifts off. He’s got a hand in her hair. “A fellowship. I’ll be gone a long time.” She shrugs. He sticks his fingers inside her to feel his wetness there. Again she is heat and headiness and the feel of her skin on a soft shag rug.

  For two days after I read the story, I didn’t hear from Kierny. It seemed to me that he was too much of a coward to call, but that’s not his version. His version is that he was giving me time to recover. When he finally did call, his voice sounded locked up.

  “How’re you doing?” he said. Was it guilt making him sound that way? Because in his tone I heard deep annoyance, as if I’d read that story against his will.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “I had to process it,” Kierny said. “What you were going through was hard on me, too. You know it’s fiction, it’s a fantasy—and I didn’t tell you because, well, I just kept putting it off. I didn’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry.”

  I looked at the crack in my ceiling.

  I don’t have a patent on death. I wouldn’t want one. Really, he can have the subject—the whole big feat of it. I’d love to write stories about surfing teenagers, international spies, funny grandmothers, dogs that fly. But death is my map, the thing I’ve been living next to for years.

  “Look, it would be easier to talk this over in person,” Kierny said.

  He arrived with a bag of groceries. A bottle of wine.

  He looked sheepish in the doorway, and for a moment I could see outside of my anger. One time Kierny and I hiked to a lake in the Sierras, both of us singing Beatles and Springsteen until our voices cracked, still singing while we swam naked in the lake. Then some teenagers came out of the woods and pelted us with pistachios. Another time I crashed his car into a pole in the parking garage and he flipped out and looked like a moose and I told him and he yelled at me and then we both started laughing and Kierny spilled his Coke.

  The baguette stuck out of the bag and he looked confused, like he wasn’t sure whether to challenge or console me.

  “I brought salami,” he said.

  She says, “You’re on your own now, kiddo.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “I’m gone.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t believe it.”

  “No, how can I? You were just here.”

  “I’m not speaking to you. You’re imagining this.”

  “Why am I failing at everything, Mom? Why is it all falling away?”

  She’s not in the sky, in my body. She’s not in her bones in the pine box in the grave. She is simply gone. My father—I used to try to look for him by attempting to track down old paintings, but he never became big—someone else probably painted his birds more successfully. I imagined them, the two of them, the feelings they once had—feelings that must have seemed consuming: they were hungry or tired or angry or ashamed. I imagined that night between them, the heat on their skin, the dizziness, the longing. And I reached for Kierny then, as he was eating a piece of salami. I pulled him in close, my hands behind his ribs.

  I could dump him the next day and write this story. There was time for that. But now there was pressure on my cheeks and nose, like the beginning of drunkenness or grief.

  “Are you sure?” Kierny asked, leaning in, his damp hands traveling up my back. His breath was meaty, spicy.

  I unbuttoned my shirt and let it fall away as I climbed on top of the table.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  WEIGHT

  WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, THE MOTHER I KNEW from childhood began to bury herself in a very different body. A beard of runny flesh grew below her chin and her thighs chafed as she walked. The clothes she wore, once tailored to show off her narrow waist and long legs, turned to large Tshirts, elastic waist jeans. Only her nose remained, fine and sharp, like a knife cutting out from dough. Four years later, my father left. I stood in the dark hallway after she told me and watched her cry silently into a washcloth. It’s your fault, I thought. You drove him away.

  When I went to college, I hung a photograph of her young and lean on my dorm room mirror. “Your mom’s pretty,” people remarked when they visited. “She looks like you.” The photograph was taken at my mother’s sweet-sixteen party in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, in 1965. She poses in a powder blue sequined dress, her bangs curled over her face, the rest of her hair piled above it in a hive of clashing swirls. She stands jaunty and sure, hand on the hip, one foot thrust slightly out. Her smile both radiates and challenges.

  If she’d married Joel Greenbaum—the short one with adoring eyes and a monobrow, who came to the party bearing the heart pendant I still wear (the one with the diamond so small, it looks like the gleam in a beetle’s eye)—I imagine her life would have taken a dramatically different turn. She would not have married my father, a stockbroker who left her sitting alone in a big house in California while he dealt with big accounts overseas. She would not have buried her howling loneliness beneath a buffer of flesh.

  It’s true that she wouldn’t have had me (or not exactly me, though who knows how souls get doled out). She might have other children, though—a son who organized unions in Manhattan, a daughter with good taste in furniture and the fertility of a rabbit. But Joel married my mother’s friend Mara instead. She’s the plain one next to my mother, in what looks like a handmade frock.

  Just after my thirty-first birthday, I put on a brown skirt, the one I wear when I know I’ll have a particularly rough day at work. It has feminine ruffles and calms even the most beastly attorney. It didn’t fit. The zipper strained nearly at its base and a thick mass of belly squished over the embroidered waist. I fought with that zipper for a good ten minutes. By the time my husband, Ed, came out of the bathroom, I was sweating the rank sweat of the distressed.

  “So you gained a few pounds,” Ed said, grabbing his trousers from the hanger. “You still look great. Get a new skirt.”

  “I don’t want a new skirt! I want this skirt!” And I tugged the zipper so hard I ripped it right out of the fabric. Ed snickered and went to kiss me, but I dodged him, horrified. My pants still fit, but they hung badly, and the impenetrable calm that made me the best mediator in the office vaporized. Over the big oak table that morning, a fight broke out. The complainant threw a water glass against a painting.

  My best friend, Kara, listened to me cry that night on the phone. “Lori,” she said. “You don’t get to have your twenty-year-old body for the rest of your life. Your metabolism slows. It happens to the best of us. I gained fifteen pounds when Cory was born.”

  “But my mom
was fat,” I said. “I can’t be fat.”

  “You’re not fat,” she said. “You’re not even close to fat. You were skinny and now you’re thin.”

  When she first got sick, I drove my mother to the doctor’s. “If you really want to know what I think,” the doctor said. He was small with an elfin face and silver glasses. “I think you should lose some weight.” My mother looked past him. “Cancer travels in lipids,” he said.

  We went out to dinner that night. Hoping to be a good influence, I ordered a spinach salad. She ordered the prime rib. “Cancer travels in lipids,” I said to her.

  “Leave me alone,” she said. Every time she took a bite of that steak, I grew more and more furious. She chose that steak over my father, over another year of life. She chose that steak over me.

  The night she died, I called the mortuary and two greasy young men in black suits came with a gurney. The darkness outside swirled into pink dawn. I filled out forms and answered questions. They lifted her body off the bed and headed toward the front door, but when they tilted her down the steps, one of them buckled under her weight and almost dropped her. I saw it: my mother slowly wedging against the wall, the three of us squatting, trying to roll her over. “Sorry,” the man said. I could see a trace of laughter flit across the men’s faces, but they quickly sobered, heaved, and off she went.

  The night of the skirt incident, Ed slept peacefully beside me. His hairline receded slightly and the shine of his large forehead gave me a moment’s reprieve. Then I felt all the facts in my life boil down to one: I needed to lose this weight. Not within a season, not within a month. I needed to lose it as quickly as it appeared: overnight. And if I didn’t, the future was a dark black cavern and it had no words.

  I found my slippers and went into the study. It took me two hours of reading and scrolling, typing various phrases into the search engine and registering in chat rooms to find it: the diet known only to a few gray-faced girls; a diet that, if followed correctly, the girls claimed, not only made you quickly thin, but made you stay thin. It was a little odd. But every testimonial sang its praises.

  I lost ten pounds in a week and NOT just water weight! OMG what a lifesaver!

  My boyfriend says I look sexy as hell!

  My size 00 is baggy :)

  On and on the girls went, posting pictures of their midriffs, measurements of their arms and thighs.

  Their method was unorthodox, sure. But I could do it for the short term, get back into my skirt. Then I’d stop the diet and start running again.

  I told Ed about it in the morning.

  “You’ve lost your mind,” he said.

  I tried to explain that I just needed his help for now, that I felt urgency because of my mother’s early death. That to be fat was the worst fate imaginable, worse even than cancer because at least cancer earned you pity. Ed cut a banana into a bowl of cereal and turned to face me.

  “Listen to yourself,” he said. “You want me to lock you in a dark room and cause you some deep, twisted humiliation because a website says it’ll make you thin? I’m Ed, by the way. Nice to meet you.” He didn’t kiss me when he left that morning and I got dressed alone in my closet, imagining my old stomach, flat as a book.

  The rules of the diet were as follows: you ate very little for breakfast, then before lunch someone you loved locked you in a dark space, like a closet, and berated you. This ruined your appetite. The girls complained of sleeplessness and wild emotional ranges, but in terms of its effectiveness, the diet had no rival.

  If Ed wouldn’t do it (I had not expected him to; he counsels teenagers for a living), then I had to resort to someone else.

  A little over a year ago my father came to my apartment with a gift certificate to an outdoor store and told me that he knew it had been wrong to leave like that, that he did not expect me to forgive him, but hoped that I would allow him to be part of my life.

  I held the gift certificate as I listened. He’d clearly prepared this speech, and when it concluded, he had nothing more to say. And in the complicated way of abandoned children everywhere, I tried to find ways of excusing him. He didn’t get what he needed from his own parents. His mother cried daily, kneading a handkerchief with red fingers. His father’s arms jerked from drinking. And my mother—I imagined him trying to make love to her, trying to find that jaunty, sequined girl who intoxicated him with her particular blend of slyness and naïveté. But she was lost inside that thick case of skin. Generosity lasted only so long, though, and inevitably my forgiveness turned to rage.

  I never spent the gift certificate. I taped it to the refrigerator with bills that needed to be paid and a photograph of Kara’s two-year-old, his face smeared with peas. I told my father he could call me from time to time, but I let the machine pick up his messages and rarely returned his calls.

  He owed me one.

  I called him from work, before my first mediation. He sounded relieved, as if a heavy parcel he’d been negotiating had momentarily vanished.

  “I was wondering if you could help me with something,” I said.

  “Of course! What do you need? Money?”

  And from there, I explained the skirt situation and the diet. I reminded him of Mom’s problems, her untimely death, how obesity had complicated her treatments—

  “I know,” he snapped.

  “It’s just temporary,” I said. “If it’s as effective as people say it is, I’ll have all this weight off in less than two weeks. Ed won’t do it, so I’m asking you.”

  “You want me to berate you?”

  I straightened some files on my desk, cleaned lint from my keyboard. The light for the other line lit up.

  “How much weight is it?” he asked.

  “Maybe five pounds,” I said.

  “Can’t you just go jogging? Cut out dessert for a few weeks? That’s not a lot of weight.” The red light on the phone flashed, flashed, and finally ceased.

  “It’s not like I’ve asked you for much in the past,” I said. From the silence, I thought maybe he’d hung up.

  “Fine,” he said curtly. “I can try.”

  All of the furniture in my father’s condo had been purchased in the months following his third divorce. He’d hired an interior decorator with a preference for modern lines and the place looked like the waiting room in a posh European salon. For a while, we sat on his white leather sofa and he asked me polite questions about Ed and my job, blinking fast as he did so.

  In his mid-sixties now, my father still looked dapper. He walked with a swagger and his hair grew glossy and thick. Even though he’d retired, he wore an Italian dress shirt with lines of color so thin they disappeared when he turned from side to side. He’d never had trouble attracting women. Kara, in high school, thought I didn’t notice when she followed him around the kitchen, flipping her blond hair. She listened to him talk about how women in France took care of themselves and allowed him to refill her glass of fizzy lemon soda. “Your dad has a way of making women feel beautiful,” she remarked in the darkness of my bedroom. But I knew this father appeared only for other women. He looked right past my mother and me.

  After the awkward talking, we migrated to his spare bedroom, where the closet sat empty save for a folding chair. The sports coats, ski equipment, and scuba gear he stored there were stacked on the bed.

  He scratched the back of his head as I shut myself in. A line of light came in around the door. My high heels burrowed into the plush carpet. I imagined what it felt like to be a baby, swaddled in blankets, shielded from the bright lights of the outside world.

  “Okay!” I said. The hollow closet door did nothing to buffer sound and I could hear the bed roll on the wood floor as my father sat.

  The young women on the website rarely elucidated the details of the berating. “Obviously, the sessions are private,” one of the administrators wrote. “The most effective subjects are those closest to your heart.” She suggested various topics, in case your loved one had difficulty finding ways to sha
me you. “It’s always better to find your own path,” she wrote. “But in rare cases, this proves too difficult and dieters get mired in a lack of creative topics. General insecurities can be unearthed: body size, body odor, body hair, quality of voice, etc. Specific instances of embarrassment or disappointment might be utilized (e.g., have you been made a fool in public?). Sexual issues often provide good fodder: abortions, infertility, and sexually transmitted disease.”

  Until then, I had not considered what my father might say. This tire of belly felt like an omen, the gateway to a familiar, unwanted future, and the goal of losing it shined so bright, it blinded me. I took it in my fists and squeezed until my fingers left small imprints of ache. Something close to my heart? Would he, this man absent for most of my adult life, have the information necessary to make good on this plan? Did he have an arsenal? A list of ways I disappointed him, the things I did that drove him away?

  The feeling of being swaddled turned into a feeling of being bound. My father cleared his throat.

  “You look so much like your mother when she was your age,” he said. “It can be a little disconcerting.” A motor behind the wall began to whir, making my chair vibrate slightly. I crossed my legs and my arms. I wanted it—the feeling of being shot from a cannon, hurtling out into open sky. I wanted the shock and blinding pain of whatever he would say if it would lead me toward a life of discipline and resolve.

  “Dad?” I said. He didn’t respond. When I cracked open the closet door, he looked ashen.

  “I’m getting older, Lori,” he said. He placed his hands on his knees and bowed toward them. I sat next to him on the bed.

  A small tear dribbled and fell off his cheekbone, getting lost in his dark stubble. He wrung his hands.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” he said.

  Never once, in my memory of him, did he make my mother dinner or take her, spontaneously, to look at the robins nesting in a tree out back. My mother made dinner. My mother noticed the robins. I had asked him one thing, one simple thing in thirty-one years, and he could not provide even that.