Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  When I was a girl, whenever there was a NASA rocket launch on television my mother made sure to wake my siblings and me in the early hours so we could watch it. Sitting there in our living room, bleary, dry-mouthed, and wrapped in blankets, my sisters and brother—and later, another brother—and I looked on as our mother celebrated the country's voyages into space, her hand pressed flat to her pink-robed chest. Before we got to trick-or-treat on Halloween, she had us walk around the neighborhood with UNICEF boxes shaped like pumpkins, asking for donations for kids in countries I'd never heard of. Down at some drafty warehouse on the edge of town, we loaded boxes for the needy on Christmas Eve. My parents regularly left us with babysitters to attend Jaycees or YMCA meetings or some philanthropist's ball. When I was in the upper grades of elementary school, my mother took a clerical job with the Idaho state affairs committee—within a couple of years she was administrative director for the legislature's most powerful committee and sometimes stayed at the capitol building until late, hammering out the details of a bill proposal or a hearing. During the months the legislature wasn't in session—and when my father was traveling for work—my mom would often get up on a Saturday and call her neighborhood friends for a come-as-you-are breakfast, the women soon gathering in pajamas and slippers with blue curlers stuck in their tinted hair. She held bridge tournaments in our living room, with borrowed folding tables and chairs from one wall to the other and icy bloody marys lined up on a tray. She volunteered at our schools and with our Girl Scout troops and drove us to our lessons and activities and over to friends' houses. She jammed every one of her suburban-life minutes to the hilt. And I could tell it was not enough for her.

  What would have been enough, I had no idea back then. But her longing for the nebulous something was obvious. Obvious in the way she plink-plinked two Alka-Seltzer tablets in a glass of water at night and settled down to watch Marcus Welby, M.D., and fold and iron clothes. Obvious in the way she might suddenly fly into our bedroom and shout about the messes we made, which she couldn't put up with anymore. Her laugh on the phone, full of longing.

  I didn't really comprehend the extent of yearning in my mother until she starred as one of the molls in a Boise community theater production of Guys and Dolls. On opening night I sat in a worn black velvet seat in the second row next to Cindy, Ron on the other side—Becky was off at the babysitter's, and my dad out of town again. My mother was beautiful. She had on a short lime green dress that swayed with black fringe from top to bottom, and high-heeled black tap shoes that made her calves and thighs taut and shapely under fishnet stockings. Her dark brown hair was piled in curls, dotted with sequins, and she—with the long line of other women on either side of her—kicked her legs sky high, singing, "Take back your mink, take back your poils..." Cindy leaned over to me and whispered, "What's a poil?" I shook my head because I didn't know and also because I didn't want to be distracted from the sight up there on the stage—what I read as a full-on display of my mother's desire for something more than she had.

  It didn't surprise me when I came in the door one day—a few years after Guys and Dolls—from Fairmont Junior High to hear the mewling of a newborn in the back of our house. No shock. I simply wondered what sort of project my mother had gotten involved with this time.

  It had been an uneasy few months between us. I was thirteen by then and awkward in every way that applies to a girl that age—gangly limbed and stumbling in front of other kids at the bus stop and dropping dishes in the kitchen for no other reason than my hands just didn't work sometimes, and ranging, constantly, through the spaces of my mind for some sense of myself. Something in me had turned temporarily sour toward my mother, turned like a river that suddenly cuts across its meander to become straighter and faster. There was an iciness I neither liked nor recognized, but that seemed out of my control as it coursed through my body. My suddenly oversensitive and indignant teenage self didn't like how she smelled—though she'd smelled fine just a month earlier. The noises she made when she ate made me run to the other side of the house. She seemed so old—thirty that year I was thirteen—and, I had recently determined, her presence was stifling to me.

  It was when we were in the car together—just the two of us on our way to my piano lesson or to the grocery store—that I would get especially sulky while she went on about someone else's child who'd brought home terrific grades or who'd won a 4-H ribbon at the fair or a prize at church. I wouldn't say anything out loud, though I had plenty of silent opinions: 4-H? I'd sink into my seat even further until she was asking me what was wrong and I was muttering, "Nothing."

  What felt wrong to me at the time was that I was my mother's average daughter. Not especially pretty, and not talented. My grades were fair but, until I reached college, unremarkable. I didn't come up on parent-teacher night as the student who'd written the paper most worth noting; my artwork wasn't featured on the bulletin board. I couldn't sew or play volleyball or swim with the splashless strokes of the adept and poised girls from my school. My beautiful and multitalented mother—the most social of the mothers and the most vivacious—was, I worried back then, heartbroken over my blandness. She had suffered her parents' bitter disappointment—the town's disappointment—by getting pregnant and having a baby in high school. She'd not been able to finish college because of the pressures of young motherhood. And for all that trouble, she got me? Not too many years later she and I forged a new friendship, and I felt cherished by my mother again. But the year I reached thirteen I spent a lot of teenage energy suspecting she'd replace me in a second if she could.

  That day after school I followed the sounds of an infant crying to the back of our house, stepping just past the threshold into the sun-drenched room meant for guests and projects. A crib was set up in the corner. My mom was sitting in the rocking chair that she'd moved up from the downstairs den, where it had been when I left that morning. In her arms was a baby, wrapped in a pale pink blanket.

  "Look how small she is," she said when she saw me. She pulled back a corner of the blanket so I could peer down at an even pinker, and wrinkled, face.

  I set my book bag and wadded sweater on the floor and moved closer to the chair. "Who is she?" I said, putting both hands on the armrest and dipping my face near the baby's. A clean smell of spring and cloying baby powder filled my nose.

  "She doesn't have a name yet," my mother said. "What name do you think we should give her?" She looked at me expectantly, offering me this piece of engagement in her new project. But I shook my head—why was it up to us to name someone else's child?

  My mother's gaze returned to the infant in her arms. "She's going to be with us until they find someone to adopt her." Mom didn't clarify the they, and I didn't think to ask who would thrust a strange baby on our family on what should have been an ordinary Wednesday, with chores and meat loaf for dinner and my dad arriving late from New York.

  "How long will that take?" I said.

  "A few days, or a week maybe," my mother said, sliding the back of one curled index finger across the baby's cheek. The infant opened her eyes and blinked, looking out, though not at either of us. "She'll find a mommy pretty soon," my mother said.

  I don't remember how much time went by before someone came to get that baby, a day or two maybe. But it didn't take me long—that child's stay and maybe the next one's—to understand that this was going to be my mother's mission for a while. She would be a foster parent to foster babies. Our house would be a way station between birth and the rest of life. That's the way it happened, and indeed that's the way it stayed—while my father's work took him farther and farther from us and for longer periods of time—until my mother had taken care of over fifty children and, in the middle of the foster-child flow, we all decided we should adopt one of the babies ourselves, a brother. Then we were a family of five children instead of four.

  My mother happened to drive through Burns on her way to a business conference in the spring of 1995, and she arranged to stop and see Amanda and meet
the foster family she lived with. At breakfast the morning after I'd arrived with Mary and Mollie in late April—Donna serving us hamburger-and-egg casserole, bacon from their own pigs, and white toast—Donna gave me her version of meeting my mom. She talked about what a wonderful woman she was, about what a great conversation they'd had.

  My mother hadn't given me too many details about the couple of hours she'd spent in Burns—realizing the soreness of the subject with me—but she had slipped in a few nice compliments about Donna. "She's one of those down-to-earth women who's perfectly happy with her life," my mother said. "Isn't that refreshing?"

  Once Donna was finished with the conversation about my mother and had finished her plate of eggs and bacon, she asked Amanda to clear the table. "Just wipe them off and set them in the sink, then you can take a walk with your mom."

  The sound of her voice grated—a dull knife blade across ceramic—on me. Why did she think she could order my daughter around like this, as if she were the parent and I were the guest? But of course she had every right. This was her house, her rules, and Amanda was under her watch. I got up to help my daughter clear, crimping my lips together to keep myself from telling this woman to leave us alone. If Amanda noticed my anger or a tone of derision aimed at Donna, she didn't show it. It was as if she knew I couldn't defend her here in someone else's territory, nor could she defend me.

  Outside, the boys waited for Mary and Mollie to climb in the back of a small hay-filled wagon hitched to one of the family's several four-wheelers. The eleven-year-old son was about to drive this one out to a distant pasture where there were baby goats to pet. I went out to push Mollie to the far end of the trailer and to pack a bale of hay up at her side, then did the same with Mary, ensuring they wouldn't bounce out if the boy hit a bump going too fast. The other child, the ten-year-old brother, was already revving the engine of his own four-wheeler, and I had little doubt there'd be a race as soon as they were out of our view.

  "Hold on tight," I told Mollie.

  "Mom, they're fine," Amanda said, taking my hand and tugging at me. "Let them go."

  She and I stood next to a fence watching the ATVs tear over the rolling hills—Mary's hair flying backward like a flag—until they were out of sight.

  "I want to show you something," Amanda said. She led me around the other side of the gate and away from the house, where, I guessed, Donna stood watching us through the window. A breeze stirred a fine skiff of dirt and dead grass around our ankles as we wandered toward the ranch's gray outbuildings—small sheds in which Bill stored his tools and equipment, larger buildings to house tractor and combine, and low-roofed pens for livestock. Amanda took me to one of those pens. A few cows glanced up from the fenced pasture to see what we were doing. Pulling my cardigan tight across my chest against a wind scented with cowpie and cow skin, I followed my daughter into a dim interior, sunlight streaming through the cracks between slats of wood and dashing the floor in long, fluid lines.

  A cow stood in the middle of one pen, her udders bulging between her back legs, with two calves bawling at her side. Amanda leaned against the railing, reaching her hand over and clicking with both her fingers and her tongue at the babies. One stopped crying and blinked at her, moving his feet a few steps as if considering her request to come closer. This one was big-eyed, with long black lashes, and his smooth coat was brown with a few spots. But the other calf, hunkered behind the cud-chewing mother cow, was sickly, with a rough coat that looked as if it had been combed in the wrong direction. His legs were skinny and not quite straight.

  "What's wrong with it?" I asked Amanda. I draped my own arms over the wood pole barrier, overwhelmed by the animal smell in the closed-up room—the smell of rotting flesh. I lifted the edge of my sweater and held it over my face like a veil.

  Amanda, who seemed to have no such discomfort with the stench, pulled her arm back to her side. "His mother's sick," she said without looking at me. She explained how the cow in front of us had given birth to twins a few days earlier, and how one of those babies was stillborn, wet and sticky and lifeless. Amanda had helped Bill dry it off and wrap it up, placing the body behind the shed. A few hours later, Bill happened upon a newborn calf out in the field—the sick one now in the pen—trying to suckle from a milkless mother. He'd brought the half-starved one in and, fast as he could, skinned the dead calf's coat from its body, then grafted it onto the live calf's back—a quick stitch or two to hold it in place.

  The decomposing skin, the source of the odor of death, hung on the sickly baby like a bad toupee.

  "Bill's going to give it another couple of days," Amanda said. "He's hoping the cow will still recognize the smell enough to take this one on as her own." She reached her hand out again, this time calling to the sick calf. He stayed in place, head low and a breathy, mucousy bawl coming from his open mouth, while the large cow next to him continued her chewing and tail swishing, her nonchalance. Amanda watched for a second, then put her foot up on the rail in a cowgirl stance I hadn't seen from her before.

  "But I don't know," she said. "It doesn't look to me like it's working."

  That afternoon I drove Amanda, with Mary and Mollie in the back seat, to the small shopping center in downtown Burns to buy her new socks and makeup and a couple of fashion magazines that she could put under her bed and keep for herself only. We walked from shop to shop nearly out of things to say, all of us beat. No one had brought up Stephanie's name, and I had a feeling if I did, the goodwill that quivered so tenuously between Amanda and me would be ended too soon. In the hour or so since we'd left Bill and Donna's, a new impatience over this foster-care plan had bubbled up in me. It seemed as if Amanda was at an end with it too. She'd tamped down her anger for over three months, but I knew rage was still in her—if anything, her time in Burns had added to the heat. And if anger came blasting out of her one day, what would happen then?

  My intolerance of the deal with the ranchers had kicked up when Donna pulled me aside before we left on our shopping trip to tell me she'd intercepted several "disturbing" letters from Stephanie. Some of Stephanie's notes proposed a getaway plan—she'd hitch a ride to some small town in Montana, she'd wait for Amanda to get there, and then the two of them would disappear where we couldn't find them.

  "What?" I said to Donna. "May I see those letters?" Richard and Jane didn't read Stephanie's mail, coming or going—they found the idea ridiculous. Steph had been mostly happy in their family, sullen and difficult sometimes, but even during her bad times these friends treated her as if she were their own loved child rather than a ward or a prisoner. So Donna's claim confused me. Stephanie might have had no problem running from me, but I couldn't believe she'd run away from Richard and Jane. These were people she adored, and she had to know that they'd probably saved her from her own set of ranchers.

  Donna shook her head, refusing my request to see the letters. She'd already sent them to the psychologist at the wilderness-therapy program. "I had to show him how serious this is. These girls aren't even close to getting over this thing," she said. Along with that packet of mail, Donna had penned a note of her own proposing to the psychologist that July was too soon—that she was going to need the summer at least to turn Amanda around.

  "No," I said as she described this plan to extend Amanda's stay. "This is over in July."

  Donna opened her mouth, as if she were about to tell me to mind my own business—that she and the experts had this figured out, and I was only getting in the way. But I stared her down and she didn't say another word.

  Now, as I watched my daughter pick through baskets of on-sale lipsticks and try on cheaply made earrings—the only junk available in these junky stores—I wondered how much of Stephanie's plan for escape, if it was true, Amanda was in on despite the intercepted mail and the monitored phone calls. How had I let myself become so blind, and so dumb? I got it now: Stephanie wasn't waiting patiently in Montana for the day she could rejoin her happy family. She was champing at the bit to go, to vanish, and
she was going to make sure Amanda was with her.

  By the time we got back to the car, I'd made up my mind. Amanda couldn't be a foster child any longer. I wouldn't let her. This experiment with a remedy had gone on too long and had divided us too much, and I wanted Amanda home and settled and happy and unified with me before Stephanie saw her again. My oldest daughter needed to fit somewhere, to make friends and find companionship, to do some kind of work that satisfied and fulfilled her. As soon as I could, I was getting Amanda out of Burns.