by Miriam Sagan
“Is Monique there?”
“Mon-i-que!” she yelled.
“Hi,” from Monique.
“It’s me.”
The sound of a click as Monique’s mother hung up.
“We can talk,” said Monique.
“I read the clippings,” I told her, “the clippings in my father’s shoe box. She killed my mother with a little knife, a little Swiss army knife like anybody might carry around to open bottles with. I mean, first she strangled my mother, but then she cut me out with the knife.”
“Wow!”
“My mother didn’t fight. Why didn’t she fight? I just don’t understand it.”
“Maybe she was so frightened she couldn’t move,” said Monique. “Maybe she was just paralyzed by fear.”
“She didn’t try and save me.”
“She didn’t try and save herself.”
“I just hate her,” I wailed into the phone. “Now I just really hate her for letting herself get killed.”
“Come on.”
“Yeah.”
“What happened to the other one, the killer?
“I don’t know. I couldn’t keep reading. I had to go and throw up.”
“So go find out.”
“When?”
“Right now,” said Monique.
“Right now?”
“I won’t hang up. I’ll be right here. Come back as soon as you can and tell me. I’ll stay right here.”
I put the phone down. I did what Monique told me to do. At the entrance to my father’s closet a bitter metallic taste rose in my mouth but I fought it down. The bottom clipping in the pile showed what had happened to my other mother, the killer. Suspect Arraigned, said the headline. They had caught her. She cared; she wanted to take care of me. She had brought me down off the mountain and to make sure that I was all right. But right away they suspected I wasn’t her baby. No one had seen her pregnant. Her neighbor remembered that she had had a miscarriage a few months before, had seemed very depressed. My own mother was missing. It was not hard to put one and one together and to come up with the three of us.
“Motherhood Obsessed Her.” I read the subtitle into the phone.
Monique gave a soft little gasp. “What happened?”
“She was crazy, she wanted a baby. Wanting a baby made her crazy. So she went after me.”
“Wow,” said Monique.
“She’d had a miscarriage. Motherhood obsessed her. That explains it.”
“That explains nothing,” said Monique. “Plenty of people have miscarriages. Hell, one of my aunts had three, right between her second and third kid. She had to take drugs finally. She didn’t go out and kill anybody.”
“You’re right.”
“Rania, you’re kind of whispering. Can you talk a little louder?”
“You’re right!”
“What happened to her next?”
“They flew her body back and buried her in New Jersey.”
“Not to your mother. The other one.”
“Oh, let me read. There is another clipping. She was on trial. She said she couldn’t help it…the same neighbor testified…she got twenty years.”
“Prison?”
“No, a hospital for the insane.”
“How old are you?”
“So she’s been in for fifteen years…five more to go.”
“No, hang on a sec.”
“What?”
“It says here…hang on.”
“Tell me!”
“There’s another clipping. It says her sentence was commuted, or something like that…psychiatric observation … a once in a lifetime aberration, so she’s…”
“She’s free.”
“I guess so.”
“I wonder where she is.”
“Why? So we could go visit? Come on, she killed my mother, remember. That sort of thing can get in the way of a social call, don’t you think?”
“Grace is really your mother,” said Monique piously. “After all, she’s the one who had the trouble of raising you. Frankly, I think the murderer got off easy. They should have sentenced her to raise you; then she would have thought twice about all those joys of motherhood!”
“The murderer is welcome to take Grace, too.” I giggled a bit nervously.
“She can have my mother,” added Monique. “I’d certainly be better off as an orphan. Wait till I tell you what my mother said about my hair. By the way, next Friday is Halloween. Are we still grounded?”
“We’re grounded for the rest of our lives,” I said.
“No, it just feels that way. I added it up. Right after Halloween, we’re free, free again, and I bet they’d make a little exception. Maybe you could just come over for Halloween night. I have a great idea. We can cook.”
“Chili?”
“No, something better. Something I can’t talk about over the phone.”
“Oh come on.”
“No.”
“Rania, really, I can’t. You’ll understand. And you’ll just have to wait. It’s a surprise.”
And I heard Monique’s deep, throaty laugh just before the dial tone hit my ear and she was gone.
CHAPTER 7
Mary Rose
AFTER THE SECOND MISCARRIAGE, Bud told Mary Rose that he would teach her to shoot a gun. Bud was away more and more in the evening, and he thought it would be a good idea for Mary Rose to know how to use a gun. It wasn’t exactly that the neighborhood was bad, but you never knew. He bought her a lady’s Saturday night special and took her out into an empty field of red dirt, cholla cactus, and dry weeds. Then he lined up tin cans on a fence post. He told her not to squint but to allow her good eye to lead. She pulled the trigger. The noise and the smell startled her the first few times, but she soon got used to it, and to not anticipate the kick.
The morning of the second miscarriage, Mary Rose had found a red thread lying on her side of the bed. There was also a tiny tear-shaped stain on the blue-flowered pillowcase on Bud’s side. Under the bed, she found a dead hornet, green and desiccated. Spring was coming. Ants began to move tiny loads of red dirt from the center of the earth to the top of the anthill in the front yard. The ants turned up glass crystals, bits from broken bottles that shone diamond and topaz in the sun.
Mary Rose felt the cramp, which she believed and did not believe. It was early yet, and this time the blood was no more than a heavy period, full of clots, a blackish purple. In the next few weeks, Mary Rose found many more mysterious signs throughout the house. There was a pink shell in the driveway, spiral snail, no bigger than her thumbnail, a thousand miles from the sea. A bobby pin appeared on the anthill, black, not her color. On the way home from work she saw a baby shoe, just one, in the middle of Central Avenue. Women passed by pushing strollers. A pregnant woman holding a toddler’s hand smiled at her over the milk and cheese section.
Bud brought her hot house daisies. The gun lay, unloaded, in her underwear drawer. Mary Rose got pregnant again, almost immediately. She sewed three squares on the quilt: a climbing rose pattern, a pale green solid, a scrap of purple velveteen.
The third miscarriage landed her back in the hospital. She’d gotten out of bed and just doubled over, bleeding down her leg. Bud had bundled her up and half carried her to the car.
“Babe, you’re bleeding something wicked.”
“No, I won’t go.”
“Come on.”
“They’ll take my baby away, just the way they took my other babies. They’ll take my baby away and you won’t care at all.”
Bud said nothing and ran two red lights. When Mary Rose woke up after the anesthesia, she knew that something was gone. It was more than the child. They had cut out her womb.
“We saved your life,” said the doctor. “We performed a hysterectomy and now you can go home and not worry about this business anymore.”
“Will I be able to have children?”
“Of course not,” he said impatiently. “We took out the whole works: your uterus, yo
ur ovaries. Now you don’t have to worry about cancer, or getting your period, or anything.”
“I won’t be able to have children?”
“Why don’t you adopt,” he said. “Or consider some volunteer work. Something to take your mind off it.”
The three dead angel babies held a garland of paper flowers over Mary Rose’s head. The fake roses alternated, first red, then white, then red. When her strength returned, Mary Rose took to strolling aimlessly along the local highway strip past motels, turquoise stores, and pawn shops. She was going nowhere, thinking nothing. One afternoon, she looked in the window of the THREE GOLDEN BALLS PAWN OR TRADE. A green parrot sat on a perch, grooming its feathers. The door squeaked as she went inside. There were no other customers in the store. A glorious pile of antique Navajo squash blossom necklaces lay in a jumble under the glass counter. The whole place smelled of dust and a kind of neglect, of things once loved and then left behind.
But it was the knife that caught her eye. It was a red Swiss army knife, barely used, in perfect working condition.
“Guy never came back for it,” said the proprietor. “Kid off an oil rig. Said he’d be back in a week. That was five, six months ago. Guys like that, who knows, run off after some woman, shot up in some bar. Maybe just forgot, too drunk to care. You want it?”
Mary Rose nodded.
“I’ll give you a good price.”
Mary Rose nodded and felt for the wad of grocery money in her pocket. Bud would never know or care.
Mary Rose paid cash. The knife made a satisfying weight at the bottom of her pocket.
CHAPTER 8
I DIDN’T THINK THAT MY PARENTS would let me go to Monique’s for Halloween. If I was officially grounded until Monday, then I was officially grounded until Monday. My father in particular was a legalist. His sharp, unforgiving mind made him money in the trucking business, and he was not about to change for me. But I knew a way to get under Grace’s skin. All I had to do was mope. And I was an expert at moping. At dinner I looked into my mashed potatoes and tried to visualize my mother being strangled. That worked pretty well.
“Whatever is the matter with you? Are you getting sick?” Grace asked.
I just shook my head.
My cheeks were burning and my forehead pale. I speared a clump of broccoli and thought about the war in Vietnam: babies being napalmed, soldiers bayoneting women in black pajamas, coffins draped with the American flag. And then I visualized a scene that was, for some mysterious reason, the saddest thing I could imagine: a long deserted street stretching away in the rain. Maybe it was a photograph I had seen somewhere. But that wet street always reduced me to tears, no matter how close I really was to a fit of giggles. Suddenly Grace’s cool palm was pressed to my forehead. I felt bad. I remembered all the times I had been sick with the mumps, chicken pox, scarlet fever and how she’d always brought me ginger ale with a bendable straw to sip it slowly. There was a time, not so long ago, when I hadn’t minded Grace at all for a mother.
“Rania, what’s the matter?”
“I don’t think I’m getting enough … I just need some fresh air.” I bolted up from the table and knocked my chair over. My two brothers stared as I fled.
“Take this child out for a walk,” Grace told my father. “She doesn’t look well. She needs some fresh air. Besides, it has stopped raining. And it isn’t even really dark yet. Take her down to the river or something and put some color in her cheeks.”
My father got up slowly, pushing his chair back from the table. We didn’t talk in the car, or on the short drive up the hill and to the top of the Palisades. The Palisades were granite cliffs, cut by some glacier that ground out the Hudson River in its maw. The cliffs were covered in trees and mossy grass. In winter, the waterfalls froze in mid-motion, but this time of year the rock was exposed, the trees were bare.
“So, Rania,” said my father. He drove slowly down the winding road to the boat basin and parked by the side of the river. To the south, high above us, rose the George Washington Bridge, that gorgeous suspension of steel and hope. I remembered the night the lower level opened and my father drove us across it. Grace threw a summer rose out the car window. We always called the lower level Martha—it was a New Jersey joke. Tonight the double humps of the bridge shone, two pyramids etched on air.
“So,” I said.
“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Rania, is everything alright?”
“Well, you’re in a new school.”
“I’m doing okay.”
“I just hope you have friends.”
“I have Monique,” I said, too fast.
“I meant friends besides Monique, a variety, maybe someone interested in sports.”
“Sports?” Did this man even know who I was? “I don’t care about sports.”
My father fell silent. We walked towards the bridge. I could hear the river lapping at the shore. This part of the Hudson River was not a real river at all; it had no source. Its source was the sea, which flooded at each high tide. An estuary, it smelled of salt, garbage, and a falling dark.
“Dad,” I said quietly.
“Yes?”
“Tell me about my mother.”
“Your mother? Grace…”
“Not Grace. My real mother.”
“Honey, Grace is your mother. She raised you. I can’t imagine what I would have done without her. You were just a tiny baby. A baby needs a mother.”
“Tell me.”
He sighed. His hand fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette, even though there was no pack. He’d quit smoking months before. “Your mother…” It was an exhalation.”
“Yes.”
“Your mother…was a kind person. She liked to go church; I never did, but she never minded. And she loved animals. She always wanted to get a dog, but I said the apartment was too small. We would have to wait. Sometimes I wish…she was kind, gentle. We were so young, Rania.”
“Did she look like me?”
“A little.”
“Did you love her an awful lot?”
“Of course,” he said. “It was a long time ago. A long, long time ago.”
“But she was my mother. And she’s dead. That woman killed her. Did you ever understand? I mean, how…”
“Grace is your mother,” he said firmly, turning back towards the car. “Grace is your mother now.”
Then he drove me to Carvel ice cream and said I could order whatever I wanted. I got a large chocolate ice cream cone covered in chocolate sprinkles. I licked it very slowly, cold on my tongue.
I thought about my father and Grace. They were not bad people. They clothed and fed me; they were even kind to me and probably loved me. My father took us for ice cream all year round. He wasn’t one of those fathers who limited ice cream to the summer. They didn’t hate me the way Monique’s mother hated her. But my father and Grace didn’t seem to know enough about human life. Or at least they did not know enough to help me.
And so at home, I went back to moping.
After three days of this treatment, Grace was ready to let me go to Monique’s for Halloween. We were too old to go trick-or-treating in any case. But I made myself up just a bit, put on Grace’s old broomstick-pleated skirt from Mexico, wrapped an orange chiffon scarf in my hair, added big screwon gold hoops, some red lipstick, a touch of blush, black tights, and a pair of sequined bedroom slippers that had once belonged to my grandmother.
When Monique greeted me at the door she was dressed like a Gypsy, too. “Cross my palm with silver,” she intoned.
I said, “Trick or treat,” and she dropped a small Milky Way bar into my hand. There was a huge crystal bowl full of candy on the table by the front door.
Even though we were both Gypsies, I looked a little silly but Monique managed to look fabulous. Her scarf was jangly with little gold coins and her eyebrows were marked thick and black. Her skirt was three-tiered and shot with silver thread. On her feet was a pair of Turkish shoes with toes that pointe
d towards the ceiling.
“Hey,” said Monique, in that overly cheerful voice of hers I had come to fear. “My parents have gone to the movies to see the new James Bond. We’re all by ourselves, and in charge of the trick-or-treaters.”
When the doorbell rang, we started handing out miniature packages of M & M’s to the small crowd of ghosts and hoboes who appeared. By about eight o’clock, though, the crowd had thinned. There were just a few of the older kids, out for more trick than treat, in a minimal attempt at costume: an eye patch, a helmet with a peace sign, a cheap mask. Finally, Monique turned out the porch light, cradled the bowl of candy in an affectionate manner, and headed upstairs.
“Come on,” she said. “We don’t have much time.”
It always meant trouble when Monique said come on.
“I thought we were going to cook.”
“We are…in a way.”
Up in her room, Monique ceremoniously took a Tampax box from her top dresser drawer.
“Look.”
“Tampax, so what?”
“Silly.” Monique opened the box and dug around until she came up with a wad of tin foil. The box had a pretty pink scene of a lady in an evening dress floating down a disembodied staircase.
The box reminded me how when I first got my period, Grace had slapped me on the face. That was to keep off the evil eye now that I was a woman. Deep in her heart, even Grace believed in things that had come from a far-away dry place with distant mountains. Grace had slapped me across the face, but I forgave her. We shared a notion that to be a woman was dangerous.
Monique unrolled the tin foil and held up a chunk of brown stuff for me to smell. It was unmistakable, hashish. It smelled of resin and muddy roads and a tickle in the throat. It smelled of tents on the wide blue steppes and of girls traded for mules and camels. It smelled of tea in samovars and guns smuggled through mountain passes. It smelled of what half the world called home.
Buried deeper in the box of Tampax was a little pipe, green and enameled with blue and yellow flowers, the kind you could buy at any corner head shop. Tampax and drugs somehow went together. You could take the paper off a tampon and roll a joint with it as easily as you could use rolling papers printed with the American flag. You could even fashion a pipe out of the cardboard Tampax, using a bit of foil as the bowl.