by Robin Romm
There will be more moms, I tell myself. As soon as our press release hits local papers, the moms will be lining up to join. Look at the trumpet vine, the herb garden, the fireplace. Look at the new dress Jack bought for Agnes. “To accentuate her goddess shape,” he’d said. With the cream chiffon she wore green malachite beads and a pale sage belt. She kept the crimson cardigan for the evenings. He’d even given Doreena a new outfit. He chose a soft flame-colored shirt for her that hung below her hips. With it, she wore peach culottes with fine green stitching. It was a beautiful project, our garden. The birds gathered on the roof of the shed, tilting their little heads to the sky as they twittered. Cats from the neighborhood prowled the fences, sunned themselves on the lawn.
Maybe if I gave the moms a unifying project—something to shift their focus. Jack had basic woodworking skills. We could make the back deck bigger, and with the money we got for Laurel we could install one of those wine barrel hot tubs. Then, at night, amidst a tangle of flowering vines, the mothers could soak in the starlight.
I open the refrigerator to get some juice and there she is, my mother, in her dark tunic, the garnet shining against her pale skin. She looks waxy with bright lips and a long, sharp nose.
Claire. Her eyes are fierce. What are you doing out in that yard? You’re acting like a nutcase.
I try to close the refrigerator but she locks her arm, holds it open.
“What are you doing here?” I say. For a while, after she died, she’d creep into my room some nights, sit quietly on the edge of the bed, touch my hair, but she hasn’t bothered to do this in years. “You can’t say anything about this!” My words bounce off the appliances. I dig my nails into my arms because pain makes ghosts disappear, but she stays and looks reproachful.
Then the front door opens and a teenage girl flies into the kitchen holding a pink leather purse.
“Where is she?” she says. I look around but my mother is gone. I shut the refrigerator and feel a little shaky. The girl gets right in my face. I smell her soap and perfume mingling, strawberry gum in a violet patch. Makeup cakes her skin, and her brown hair, carefully streaked with blond, sways in a sloppy ponytail.
“What are you, some kind of freak?” she continues. “Totally fucking unbelievable.” She jets out back before I can stop her and tugs on Laurel.
“Hey,” I yell. “What are you doing!” I rush over to slap her hands away.
“Get the hell away from us!” the girl screams. Laurel smiles smugly.
“This is my daughter, Taylor,” Laurel says.
“You can’t go,” I say to Laurel.
“Watch me,” she says. Taylor grabs a nearby spade and begins furiously digging out Laurel’s feet. A brown smudge works its way across Taylor’s short white skirt. The rest of the moms watch, hushed.
“No, actually, you have to stay,” I try again. “It was part of the agreement.”
“Oh, really?” Laurel says sharply. “Who exactly agreed?”
Taylor turns to me. “What, are you sleeping with my dad, too? Is that how you got involved? You look just like the last girl—all arty. Give me a break. Your shit stinks, too.” And with that, she grabs her mother by the arm and leaves out the side gate.
I walk over to the hole she left and kick some dirt over it. “Good riddance,” I say, but the three mothers cast their eyes down. “She was a handful, anyway.” Erika takes her hair and twists it into a coil. She tugs on her silk outfit.
“The energy has gotten a little bad around here,” she says. She looks at Doreena.
“I’m feeling like a shower at the homestead myself,” Doreena says. “All this sun has made me itchy.” They both lean down and begin to dig out their legs.
Agnes stands where she started, near the shed. I can feel her watching me. It takes almost no time for the mothers to be unearthed. Doreena retrieves their shoes from the basket by the porch. I shouldn’t have left them there.
“Don’t be mopey!” Doreena trills. “I’m sure I’ll see you again. When I come out next, I’ll take you and Jack wherever you’d like to eat. Maybe we can even try that place that Erika told me about. It sounded different.” She accidentally hits the bougainvillea with her elbow and her shirt gets caught on a thorn. Erika walks over and unhooks it.
“It’s only raw food,” Erika clarifies. Then she adds, “This may be my real good-bye. I’m interested in checking out that ashram in Oregon.”
Doreena props the gate open with her white sneaker. Erika leans down and tugs some crabgrass out from the mulch and tucks it in her pocket.
“Are you sticking around?” she asks Agnes. Agnes shrugs.
The other mothers have left small disturbances in the mulch, little holes. All by herself, Agnes looks strange, standing knee deep in soil in the middle of the yard. She puts a hand on her hip and the garnet winks.
“I’ll stay for a bit,” she says. “At least for dinner.”
The house is very still.
“Your mom escaped,” I tell Jack’s voice mail. “And she took Erika. And Laurel’s been—stolen.” I wait for the right words to come—words that match the dark heavy feeling. The recorder beeps.
Out my bedroom window, I watch Agnes pick at a hangnail. Later I order Chinese for dinner and take her a plate.
The grass smells rich and sweet and we sit together in silence, eating.
“Why did you let them all go?” Agnes asks. She’s eyeing me with those wise eyes. Her fingers are oily. A little bit of cabbage sticks to her lip.
“I didn’t let them, they just went.”
“You let them go,” Agnes said. “You didn’t run after them.”
“What good would it have done?” I take a piece of roast duck from a box and begin to peel off the skin. “You can’t hold things against their will,” I say.
“Isn’t that Zen of you,” Agnes says. “Are you forgetting about zoos and jails?”
“This wasn’t supposed to be a zoo.”
“What is it then?”
“A garden,” I say.
Agnes reaches over and as soon as her fingers make contact I feel like I’ve swallowed a sting. She strokes my hair and her ring gets caught for a moment. I pull away.
“Claire-belle,” she croons. “You’re a little confused.” I can’t breathe.
She’s not there. I try to conjure her image on the backs of my eyelids—waxy skin, red lips, the sheen of her pendant—but I can’t do it. She won’t come. And when I open my eyes, Agnes is all I see. The blood of her stone, her dark curls, her crooning.
FAMILY EPIC
IT’S NOT THE FIRST TIME MY GRANDMOTHER’S COME, falling through the ceiling the way she does. This time she arrives just after my father calls to ask if he can stop by around dinnertime with his new girlfriend, Ariella. My grandmother takes off her plastic rain cap and instead of the red dye job—always jarring on her angled, olive face—her gray hair tumbles down her back. She tosses her vinyl handbag on the table and takes off her coat. She wears nothing but a slip.
Ariella, my father’s new flame, is my age, twenty-nine to his sixty. She and I went to junior high together. And though everyone says it has been three years now, he should get back in the saddle, I’d prefer he continue to stand next to the horse.
“I’m waiting for a call,” my grandmother says, blocking the phone. She holds up her gnarled hand. On it is the ring she always wore, the ring we have stored in a locked box at the bank. It’s a tulip made from tiny specks of diamond set flatly into white gold, the size of a dandelion, large for a ring. Her body is old; I can see her breasts stretched toward her navel, used-looking. But her face is the face of a girl. Her lips are painted opaque pink, her lids are smeared with blue. Around her neck hangs a tangle of gold chains.
How my father hated her. After she died, ten years ago, he and I were hiking through a meadow at the base of a mountain and he was, as he usually is, remote and silent. The sky perched so high above us—no clouds, a few birds diving and swooping. His terrier bounded afte
r a rodent, hindquarters quivering. I asked him, “Do you miss your mother?”
The question was hard to ask. But I realized that if he dropped dead that day, I would not be able to tell anyone a single thing that went on in his head. So I wanted to find out if he had a set of feelings, if he experienced a kind of longing. After all, he’d just lived through something terrible. His mother died in a bathroom, wailing in pain, covered with blood and bile.
“No,” my father said and started walking faster. The high grass whizzed by as I hustled to keep up. “I spent my life trying to get away from her.” When he said this, something happened with his shoulders, like brine in his chest rose up, turning all his parts turgid. Even his small ears were stiff.
Musical Interlude #1
At this point, I’d like the page to burst into song, but pages don’t do that. So instead, imagine that you are a very small child. You are warm and drowsy in the bed you remember, the first bed you ever had. The covers smell like detergent and your pajamas twist uncomfortably under your arms. Your mother sits next to you and she sings in a warbling voice. She doesn’t know all the words to the song that she sings but your body fills with the peace of the noise, the way her voice is like the fur behind the cat’s ears: velvety. You put your fingers on her thigh and the sounds go round and round in their haunting way until she switches off the lamp. Then you are in darkness—that world with its monsters and devil men, and you feel something you can’t yet name—how dangerous it is to be small. So you reach out and put your tiny perfect hand on the thigh of a woman whose voice is imperfect and that is the thing you have holding you here, and it holds you.
My father’s hanky-panky, if I can still call it that now that my mother is dead, began years before she died. I press on my eyelids and see the white jiggling dots there. I like to imagine that these dots have power, that they’re tunnels to God. I picture my grandmother’s face etched onto one of them, Ariella’s on another. Go, I say to the dots. But they don’t know their own power and the lights dissolve into patterns of gray.
“I need to speak to my son,” my grandmother says. “I’m waiting for his call.”
“I heard you,” I say.
She opens her purse and takes out a cigarette. With it clasped between two fingers, she reaches under her slip to scratch her thigh. Her legs are blue and purple, textured as the skin of old nectarines.
“Why do you always come here? Why don’t you just go visit him?” I ask. She squints and lowers the bottom of her jaw so that her cheekbones look more severe.
“You were an ungrateful child,” she says. “You’re still that way.”
The fact is—though the fact comes at the end of a long story about pogroms, immigration, and the Great Depression—I have this woman’s money, the money she and my grandfather saved for decades and that he never allowed her to spend. My grandparents lived in a run-down Brooklyn tenement full of mirrored tables, ceramic figurines, and silver-bound prayer books. It smelled of cooking oil and bleach and in the bathroom my grandmother kept beautiful soap in vivid colors that no one was allowed to use. My grandfather wouldn’t permit her to buy a house. He wanted the money—the papery truth of it. A house could burn down. A roof could wear through. A yard would need tending. These things would take a stack of bills and make it smaller and smaller until he was nothing again, just a boy with a father who wandered the streets drunk, muttering to himself in Yiddish.
I spent this money the moment I got the check. I went out, found an extremely small house in this city—a house with a bad roof and a yard with weeds—and bought it. And now we stand in it together, my grandmother and I.
“I don’t think that’s fair,” I say. She takes another drag of her cigarette but there’s no smoke, no ember. It’s just a prop. The dead can’t smoke.
“Do you know all the things I gave up?” she says. “Do you know how life was before it was yours?”
The phone rings. She reaches for it and I reach for it and our hands touch. Her fingers are cold and damp, like sandwich meat. I shrink back and she claws at the receiver.
“Hello?” she screams. How her face expands, those pink lips opening. Her dentures are slightly crooked in a face that could be nineteen years old. And then she’s on the ceiling, her breasts hanging toward me like the rungs on the subway and she has the phone smashed against her face and I see she’s crying. “Hello,” she says again and she dissolves through the roof and the receiver lands with a thud on the wood floor.
Beyond immediate kin, I barely knew my family. My father moved us to Washington State as soon as he finished school. Everyone else lived in Brooklyn. If you held a gun to my head and told me to recite the names of my grandmother’s eight sisters, the sisters that meant everything to her, I wouldn’t be able to. They’re gone and lost, irrelevant.
There’s no one on the phone and I set it back in the cradle. I sit down at my desk and check e-mail. My coffee’s gone cold. I should clean the house before my father shows up.
Then she’s back, this time wearing a poncho.
“You thought you were rid of me,” she says. There’s a sofa next to my computer table and she sits on it primly. She has the slip on under her poncho and I can see the skeletal outline of her knee joint. “That happens sometimes, that floating.” She takes out another cigarette and sticks it in her mouth. “You should have children,” she says, the cigarette clamped between her lips. “I thought you were listening when I told you that.”
“I’m not too old yet,” I say.
My grandmother checks her lipstick in the reflection of a silver lighter. “Your mother was too ambitious,” she says. “I never did like her.”
And then my mother appears in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit, though she’s neither Catholic nor a girl—she is about the age she was when she died: forty-eight. She too has opaque pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. There must be a paucity of good makeup in their world.
“Mom.” I reach toward her. But she doesn’t acknowledge me.
“Eve,” she says to my grandmother. “You’re a cunt.” My grandmother slowly crosses one leg over the other and I can see she has a bruise the size of my hand on the back of her calf. Her tulip diamonds glitter vehemently in the afternoon sun.
“Extraordinary,” says my grandmother, raising her brows.
My mother shakes her head.
“Look at my son,” my grandmother says. “He hasn’t been happy in as long as I can remember. See what you did to him?”
“Did to him? What did I do?” my mother snaps. “I married him. I had his child. I worked like a dog. What do you want from me?”
“You worked like a dog on that career of yours—as if he couldn’t support you, as if his hard-earned money wasn’t good enough,” my grandmother says. “What was he supposed to do? You got fat like a cow. You were always too busy. So he did what any man would have.”
“God,” my mother says, smashing her fists into her hips. I can see a roll of cellulite where the short skirt ends. “You live in a little dark hole, Eve. All his life he was running from you.”
“Mom,” I say to her. She glances over at me and for a moment there it is, the warmth and recognition, but she turns quickly back to my grandmother.
“If you think that when he dies he’ll come running back to you, you’re an idiot.”
My grandmother’s chin rises up toward her nose. “When he gets here,” my grandmother says, “I’ve found him a new girl from Queens.”
“You’re too late,” I say and for a moment, my mother turns silver.
And then my grandfather falls onto the couch next to my grandmother, smiling wildly, his head fuzzed with gray curls. He reaches for her sagging breasts, puckering his mouth like he’s going to suckle.
“Get away from me,” she screams at him. And he does; he’s gone in a flash.
“Please go,” I say to my grandmother.
“Tss,” my grandmother says to my mother. Her eyes are metal now, ready for a fight. “And look at this da
ughter of yours. With these same ridiculous ideas.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my daughter,” my mother says. “She’s beautiful and talented.”
“Your daughter,” my grandmother says, “is spoiled. A writer, she wants to be, as if God gave her some precious little song that only she can sing.”
I leave them then, to go outside and look through the mail.
When I return, my mother is sitting on the sofa. She’s taken a wineglass down from the cabinet and sips from it, though it’s empty.
“That was draining,” she says. “That woman’s like a nasal drip. You can ignore her for a while and then—wham—she’s too much.”
“Mom,” I say to her and my eyes get hot, my throat clamps. She looks surprised by this and carefully sets the glass down on the floor. And disappears.
Musical Interlude #2
Another urge for song. Maybe it’s that I’m telling this story on a bright day and it has been a rainy, terrible winter. Now the sun is out and I have this mothering desire to put my hand on your hair and pet it, and this time I would sing you an upbeat number. Imagine you are in the car. It’s hot. A heat wave and it’s the 1970s and the car’s seats are beige vinyl. You’re alone in the backseat because you, for the purposes of my story, are an only child. So you are pretty much always alone back there and to keep yourself entertained you store small objects in the little pocket behind the driver’s seat where other families keep road atlases. In here you have an agate, a toy mouse missing some fur, a coin from Africa, a snail shell with pink inside of it, a doll bonnet, and a plastic giraffe. Your parents are filling the two seats up front. They are both still alive and locked into their routine of arguing.
“I said turn right all the way back on Sixth,” your mother says. “But you don’t listen.” She reaches over his lap and presses the turn signal as he turns. “And you never use your blinker. Someday you are going to kill us all.” To which your father says, “Stop your self-righteous wankering.” And she says, “Wankering? What kind of word is wankering?”