The Mother Garden

by Robin Romm

  “You can do it,” I said. But he averted his eyes and studied the edge of the shag rug.

  “I told your mother that she disgusted me, that she looked like a cow, that if she didn’t stop stuffing her fat face I would leave her.”

  My scalp pulled tight.

  “She went on diet after diet, drank those shakes, and went to groups, but the whole time I wanted to marry Jana. I came home from London that year, it was nineteen eighty-nine, and I’d been gone for more than two months. She’d lost thirty pounds. Do you remember that? She looked so happy. And do you know what I thought? I thought she was doing it to try to trap me. That she knew about Jana and was torturing me by losing that weight.” He pressed his fingers into his jaw. “I told her I didn’t think she looked any different—and that I was leaving her.” My father’s face cinched up. “This isn’t what you came here for. You wanted me to tell you that you embarrass me, that I think you’re ugly or dim, but Lori, I’ve already been down this road.” He reached out and put his hands on my thighs. It shocked me to feel them there, their pawlike weight. “It doesn’t work,” he said. His hands slid off, back to his own lap. “I think you should like yourself, Lori—and try to be happier than your mother was.”

  I saw my mother, loaded on Valium and Fentanyl, two months before she died, walking unsteadily into the kitchen to get a handful of chips. But on the way back to the couch, the world swooped and she lost her balance, falling against the counter, bag of chips in hand. “Mom!” I yelled, rushing toward her. Corn chips scattered around us like dull confetti. With a kitchen rag, I stopped the bleeding from the side of her head. She would die, right there, in a pile of blood-soaked chips, I thought. And there was nothing I could do. She didn’t die; she put her hand to her head and told me to stop making a fuss. But it was too late. I already felt it: what it meant to be left utterly and terrifyingly alone.

  “You’re right—this isn’t what I came here for.” I grabbed my father’s hand and lifted up my shirt partway, enough to reveal the pad of flesh.

  “Touch it,” I said. He recoiled. I yanked on his arm and he loosened. I pressed his hand into my belly. His fingers felt cool and damp.

  “Lori, stop,” he said. I let him go. His hand looked shrunken on the bed. I waited to see if he’d lift it, but he didn’t move at all.

  I walked back to the closet, shaking.

  “Do it,” I said to him, slamming the door. The closet felt alive, buzzing with more than the motor behind the wall.

  “You look like a fat cow,” he said softly. “And if you don’t stop stuffing your face, Ed will leave you.”

  We sat with those words between us for a while. I wanted them. They soothed me. When I opened the door, carefully, slowly, he looked up at me.

  “What you must have been through,” he said. “With her sickness, her death. I can’t imagine.”

  “No, you can’t,” I said. “But this isn’t about that. This is about my diet.”

  “Lori,” he said. He looked both tired and afraid. “This is not about your diet.” We stared at each other, the way a deer and coyote might stare at each other in a field. Then I left.

  Ed listened as I ranted about it that night. His face looked closed, his teeth shut tight.

  “Would you be able to do that to someone?” he finally asked.

  “What? Abandon my daughter with her dying mother?”

  “No. Would you be able to lock someone up and berate them?” I had not touched my salad. The lettuce looked damp and cold.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know what you want from him.”

  “I want him to help me for once.”

  “You want to punish him,” Ed said. I squashed a piece of avocado through the tines of my fork. He got up and took the salad away, cleared the dishes. I stared at the cupboards.

  “I don’t want to get fat,” I said. “I don’t want to become my mother.”

  “Then don’t become her,” Ed said. “And don’t become your father either, while you’re at it.” He went outside to water the plants.

  My mother took me to the mall when I returned from my second year of college. We stood in front of the makeup counters and read the names of lipsticks. I glanced up to ask her what she thought of a shade and caught her looking at herself in one of the mirrored walls. She had painted her lips a garish red that brought out the broken veins in her cheeks. She shook her head. “Your fat, ugly mother,” she said, grabbing a Kleenex and wiping the red away. She smiled at me as if to erase the moment, but it wouldn’t go; it’s still right here, lodged in my memory.

  “It wasn’t her weight,” my father said to me. He had shown up outside my apartment after dinner in a light raincoat and freshly pressed pants. A few drops of rain glittered on his hair and shoulders. Wet wind blew in from the covered breezeway. I hadn’t noticed the rain as I argued with Ed, but now I saw it, the sky clogged and gray. “I left because I thought I could be happier with someone else. And it wasn’t true.” He stood framed in the doorway, the silver-black night behind him. “I loved your mother,” he said.

  The night she fell, I cleaned up the chips from the floor and blamed them for the loneliness, for my father’s absence, for her failing body. I piled them on the counter and crushed them to bits with my fists before throwing them in the trash. I didn’t speak to her the next morning. She had no memory of falling, though, and so my tactic was unsatisfying.

  “Why are you mad at me?” she asked, drugs smearing her focus. She sat over a bowl of cereal and watched the frozen strawberries bob. I didn’t answer.

  “There’s no time for this,” she said. “We don’t have time to argue.”

  And whose fault is that? I wanted to scream. We would have had time if you had not eaten that steak, if you had been stronger! If you hadn’t given in to this!

  It rained that day, too. Her gaze turned from the strawberries to the driveway, the pavement growing darker from the water.

  “I hope someday you can forgive everyone,” she said. “Including yourself.”

  My skin hid all the things going on beneath. But for a moment, I feared my father could see through me—that my body had the acetate pages in an anatomy book—a woman in a shirt and skirt lifts to become the vascular system, skeletal system—and then finally just a shell: her uterus, lungs, intestines.

  “Can I come in?” he asked, brushing rain from his hair. A few cars sped past, their headlights flickering. I thought of slamming my palms on the thick of his chest, pressing him out into blackness. I thought of shutting the door on him—the way he would look, forlorn. But he didn’t wait for me to do these things; he just walked in, my father, out of the rain.

  CELIA’S FISH

  THE GOLDFISH CELIA CHOOSES SEEMS TO LEAP INTO the little green net, then into the bag from the net. Gerard wonders if it has some sort of mental problem. The fish is fat, fatter than its counterparts, and there’s something mean and angular about its face. All the other fish look blank.

  “Here you go,” the kid with the net says; he snaps the rubber band around the top of the bag and hands it to Celia. The kid has rubbery skin. When he talks, it sounds like his tongue’s engorged. His rs don’t come out. Celia is eight. She holds the bag tenderly and delivers it to the counter. Gerard follows his daughter, extracting some change from his pocket.

  Mandy’s Pet Oasis is in the back of a drugstore, located next to racks of cheap flip-flops and mirrored sunglasses. It’s been here for years, though before today, Gerard had never been inside. Most of the lighting comes from the fish tanks along one wall, giving the whole store a gloomy, cinematic feel. Behind shelves of dog bowls, cat litter, and plastic fish castles, a few world-weary puppies stare through the wire of their pens. According to the laminated signs tacked above them, they’re twenty percent off.

  “You got a tank?” the kid asks. “’Cause we got it on special today. Tank, filter, pebbles, food, castle, treasure chest, and pH stuff. All together.” Gerard
notices that a little knob of silver glints from the kid’s mouth. The kid gestures to a tank on a card table, filled with colorful plastic castles and reeds, wrapped in cellophane.

  “We have a bowl,” Gerard says. It’s not true, exactly, but Marsha said she’d bring one over later. The fish is a dollar. It glares at Celia from the bag, but she’s examining kitty collars on a wire tree next to the register.

  “You got your fish?” Gerard asks her. She nods and drags the bag off the counter religiously, as though it’s full of golden powder.

  Gerard watches his daughter as she walks out of the store. She’s been dressing herself lately. Today it’s grape-colored shorts that have gotten too tight and a wrinkled pink shirt. She’s a strange girl, pale and brooding. And lately she’s taken to walking crookedly, touching her shoulder to a wall, bouncing off it, then finding the next available surface to touch. She’s got her mother Ellie’s hair—or at least what Ellie’s hair used to be—white blond, fine. It hangs straight down her back, ending in wispy curls that dissolve into the air.

  “Hang a left, Celia-bean,” he says. A display of beach balls has distracted her. She doesn’t look at him, touches her shoulder to the display, and then heads diagonally out of the small complex of stores, cradling the little bag in the crook of her elbow.

  Gerard watches Celia navigate through the sparse parking lot. She touches her shoulder to each car as she walks toward their blue Honda. Gerard unlocks the passenger door and Celia slides in with a grimace. The car is hot, airless, and it hurts Gerard’s legs to sit on the black vinyl. He rolls down his window but there’s no breeze. He glances at the fish on Celia’s lap. It’s still glaring, this time at his leg. And as he turns the key, he imagines that someone has planted a car bomb beneath them, the entire car will burst into flames, and they will explode with it, body parts flying, hair burning, fish turning into a demon bird and fluttering off into the sky.

  It’s a short drive up to the hills where they live, and Gerard doesn’t feel like talking. Marsha’d mentioned once that it was easier to have difficult conversations in the car—you couldn’t see the other person’s face—and sometimes when he’s driving Celia around he thinks he should say something to her. I know how hard this must be for you. I don’t know what to say to make this better. We’re a team, you and me, and we’ll get through it. All the words sound stupid in his head and he can’t bear to say things he doesn’t mean. Maybe somewhere in that eight-year-old mind, she understands the whole situation better than he does.

  Gerard pulls into the garage and Celia bolts out of the car.

  “I’m showing Mommy the fish,” she announces, and with her side crammed against the railing, she runs, leaning into the wall so that it looks like she’s being lifted up the steps by a magnetic force. When Gerard follows, only minutes later, he finds Celia in his bedroom, stuck by the dresser. Ellie looks terrible; she’s been crying and her face is blotchy through the sweat and grayish sheen. Her eyes are too wide. Vomit is cooling in the pan they keep near the bed.

  “Hey, baby,” she says to Celia, her voice quivering. “It’s okay, you can come in.” Ellie tries to smile but her lips look stretched and tight. She gestures to Celia. Then she convulses into a round of violent dry heaves. Celia inches toward the dresser, the bag dangling.

  Ellie’s head scarf is on crookedly and as she’s heaving, it falls into the pan. Gerard puts his hand on Celia’s back and maneuvers her out of the room.

  “It’s going to be okay, sweetheart,” he says to her, crouching down to smooth her hair out of her face. She doesn’t look upset. The look in her dark eyes isn’t childlike at all, but jaded and distrustful. Celia jerks her shoulders and edges away from him. She’s holding the bag so tightly it looks like it’s going to pop.

  “Let’s put the fish in the kitchen. We’ll acclimate him.” Gerard stands, puts a hand on the thin bone of her shoulder, and steers her down the hall. The fish’s head looks large—it’s the way she’s squeezing the bag. He pulls a Tupperware container out of the drawer and fills it with tap water, holds it out to her. She sets the bag into it.

  “This way he won’t be shocked when we put him in new water,” Gerard says. Celia chews on the inside of her cheek and watches the bag float. “Can you entertain yourself for a bit, Bean? I’m going to go help Mommy.” Celia shrugs. What’s with her shrugging lately? Every question seems to get one.

  “I’m traumatizing her,” Ellie says when he comes back in the room. Tissues are wadded everywhere, collecting in the spaces between pillows. He takes the pan away and goes into their bathroom to wash it out. The counter is littered with orange bottles. There’s an amazing variety; he has no idea how Ellie keeps track of them. She’d better keep her acuity for a while longer because there’s no way he’ll remember the order, the right amount of pain medicine, steroids, blood cell enhancers, anti-inflammatories, anxiety pills, antidepressants, sleeping pills…Jesus. He wets a washcloth and goes out to sit next to her. He puts his hand on her greasy hair and strokes it as she stares dumbly at the wall.

  This round, she’s been able to keep her hair. One of the drugs a few months back made it fall out and it grew back grayish and curly. Sometimes he looks at her, her hair in corkscrews, short, wiry, and uneven (it never quite came back at her crown), her face puffy and pale, her skin starting to hang off her body—though she’s only thirty-six, too young for this sort of age, and he doesn’t recognize her. She’s a reminder of Ellie, like someone with the same manner in a crowded restaurant.

  It’s hard not to imagine her dead—even now, running his fingers along her warm scalp, her rib cage expanding with her breath, her face damp, her fingers pressing into his leg—he feels her growing stiff. Sometimes at night he wakes up, certain that the time has come, that she’s stopped breathing. There’s something amazing about it—the way he rises out of himself, riding a tide of awe—and fear, too, but mostly awe. He feels relief when he puts his hands on her hot face but also dread that this will continue, on and on, that he will wake up every night of his life thinking about death—and the selfishness of this thought dissolves the dread into shame.

  “Oh,” Ellie says. She lays her head back against the pillow. “Oh. Fuck. The twisting again.”

  “Can I get you anything?” Gerard says.

  “No,” Ellie says. “I think I just need to rest.”

  Ellie decorated the living room. Gerard stares at the abstract painting above the mantel—an odd choice for Ellie, who usually preferred nature prints and antique photographs. The colors—big strokes of olive and gray, red bleeding out of dark spaces, made the piece look brooding. But the rest of the room is cluttered with Ellie’s grandmother’s basket collection and two old rocking horses, piles of blankets, pillows, magazines. Everything in this house has Ellie’s stamp on it; Gerard never cared for decorating. And when she’s gone, Gerard imagines that all these objects will cry out for her, like dogs abandoned in a field. He’ll have to get rid of everything—right down to the royal blue duvet that she bought him one winter when he complained the old comforter was too small. And then what will he do? Move himself and Celia to the backyard? Spend a year in a tent?

  There’s a knock at the door and the sound rescues Gerard from what would surely have become a stupor on the sofa.

  “Hi, dear,” Marsha says, leaning over to kiss his cheek. She smells strongly of vanilla and the blood rushes to his head. She wears her gardening clothes—dirty jeans and a white tank top. Her red bra straps peek out, bright against her freckled shoulders. She’s brought a wide-lipped fishbowl—not what Gerard expected. It’s low and large and looks like someone sat on it while the glass was cooling. It’s full of peaches.

  “I stopped by the farmers’ market on my way,” she says, walking past him, into the house. Celia appears in the hallway.

  “Celia, baby!” Marsha says theatrically. She stops, props the bowl on her hip. A small bit of her side shows where the tank top lifts. “How are things?”

  “Oka
y,” Celia says, shifting her weight to one foot. She’s gripping a pad of paper and from her back hangs an empty backpack; it’s unzipped and the flap hangs down. “I’m kind of busy, though.”

  “Well, don’t let me interfere,” Marsha says and winks.

  Celia disappears into her bedroom. Gerard follows Marsha into the kitchen.

  “That fish is ugly,” she says, peering at the bag. She runs water over the peaches.

  “Celia chose it,” he says. Marsha shakes her head.

  “How’s Ellie?” she asks. Her short hair is glossy and mussed. She’s growing it out, she claims, and so she keeps the sides pinned up in funny bobby pins. Today they have little pink daisies glued to them.

  “She’s having a bad day,” Gerard says. He walks up behind her, too close; he can feel the warmth of her body through her clothes. The vanilla is mixed with another smell, something warm and magnetic, almost spicy. He presses his nose against the side of her head. She keeps rinsing the peaches, but he can feel the tension shooting through her. He’s encouraged and puts his hand on her ass, slides it down between her legs.

  “Should we bring some of these in for her?” Marsha asks. “We could cut them and put a little yogurt in a dish.” She reaches up to the shelf next to the sink for one of Ellie’s handmade bowls and he can’t resist, he slips his hand under her shirt and turns her around to face him. She leans away and looks at him with that familiar danger in her eyes, coy and a little cold. He kisses her, openmouthed and sloppy; she runs her fingertips down his chest.

  “Not right now,” she whispers, and he untangles himself. She turns back around and opens the silverware drawer.

  “Hey, sugar,” Marsha says, sitting on the side of the bed.

  “Hi, Marsh.” Ellie’s still propped on the pillows but it’s clear she’s been dozing. The room smells sharply of bile and old sweat. “What did you bring me?” she asks. She raises her hands to her hair and smooths it with an expert caress; it’s a gesture left over from the old Ellie, the pretty, vain Ellie with a long mane of shockingly blond ringlets. On the new Ellie it looks wrong, a grotesque impersonation. She pulls the cover up to her armpits and holds it there.