The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  When we all lived in the house, my mother, my father, my four brothers—three older, one younger—we filled the rooms with the scents of half-peeled oranges and new notebook paper and the blue chemical odor of dittoed homework sheets. My mother had had us each two years apart—“regular as eggs,” she said. My father, a mathematician at Columbia, was often at conferences or at his office over the garage, where piles of papers leaned against each other like tired soldiers. He had chosen my name after Theano, the wife of Pythagoras, a mathematician in her own right. Still, she was mostly known as someone’s wife. My mother was mainly a mother, though even then I knew there were other things she loved: making small drawings she kept in a drawer and tending her roses and vegetable gardens.

  She talked about her garden all winter, about places she’d been and planned to take us: the brilliant blooming grounds at Versailles when the jasmine spread scent all over the green trimmed lawns; snorkeling among a riot of tropical fish off the coast of Israel. She talked about places she hadn’t been, sighing loudly, her chest and shoulders rising and dropping into brief defeat.

  Then my brother Oren died a few months before his twentieth birthday. I knew in some ways my mother, the first Iris, felt a failure for losing her son. Now that I was a mother myself, I knew my mother probably dug deep into the history of her child rearing to determine how it was her fault, what she’d done wrong. And a little part of her was broken, like a dead limb on an otherwise healthy tree, after he was gone. The rest of us were grown, or mostly grown, and her work was over, despite the undug soil and untraveled terrain.

  There was a lot of time before that, though, living in the house. I was a girl with four brothers, and my life was generally blithe. I was a little sister and big sister both, and I ran around with my brothers catching toads and holding them gently, feeling the pulse of strange cold life in my hands.

  It wasn’t until Tia moved in the summer before third grade that I realized I’d been missing something, a sister, girl company and competition. Her parents had just divorced, and her father had kept their apartment in the city. Tia pretended she’d been in the suburbs all along, as if she’d been living in her house before I lived in my own. When we played outside she invented histories—the secret spirits of the woods, the right way to catch a salamander, the house she knew had burned down with people trapped in the attic. And she knew that the junior high school principal was secretly gay, that our baby-sitter Leslie Chen’s parents were getting a divorce.

  We practiced kissing on each other; her tongue tasted like wood sorrel, a tangy green flavor. And of course Tia fell in love with my older brothers. First, she had a crush on Clark, who was six years older and looked like a man to us at sixteen, with his broad chest and long messy hair; then Lloyd, who was only four years older, but inaccessible as Dad, locked in the quiet of his own important thoughts, behind light blue eyes like Oliver’s now; then Fred, who was the most fun because he actually played hide-and-seek with us instead of asking us to hide and never coming to look, like Clark and Lloyd.

  By the time we went to college—Tia to Berkeley and I to Amherst—she had dated both Lloyd and Fred, and when Oren told me he had a crush on her, I told him to leave her alone and try for someone his own age. Tia gave him rides with us to high school; she burrowed her tricolored nails through his dark blond hair, and I pretended not to see the way he couldn’t look into her face, the way he gazed at her ear or her neck as if avoiding the blinding light of the sun.

  Iris stopped crying because I let her lick the batter from the beaters. She was so fleetingly beautiful, chocolate smudges on her nose, her forehead, her cheeks, her chin, that I looked around the kitchen, as if someone might be watching, and then cleaned her face the way she always wanted me to—not with an offending paper towel, but by licking her off.

  “Joshua Giraffe,” she said, referring to her favorite Raffi song. His mommy didn’t lick him. Most mommies in their right minds wouldn’t lick their children—what if she licked her friends on a play date to be like me? But she was my last, my most difficult; she was sweet and chocolatey and it kept her, for the moment, from protesting. We both changed clothes, putting on summer dresses so we would look like a welcoming committee, and I bribed her to be good by pilfering one brownie from the plate and putting it on the counter, “for when you come back after doing a very good job being a big girl.”

  “Mine,” she said, pointing to the plate. She started to sob again and wiped her wet face on the front of my dress as I held her. I took her upstairs and put her on my bed, where she chortled and hid under the covers, and I changed again. Jeans and a T-shirt. It wasn’t a dress, but nor was I naked or snot coated or chocolate stained for the moment. That would just have to do.

  2

  Amanda

  All my moving-into-our-first-house fantasies were tempered by the vomiting. It was Saturday, September second, hot and drizzling, and Aaron directed the moving men like Moses parting the Red Sea. Arms overhead, his voice majestic and vibrant with authority, he ordered them through the silty spray. Aaron liked exerting authority. He sent the living room couches into the family room and the office bookshelf and night tables into the living room and the wardrobe containing his suits into the basement, and somehow there were eight boxes of books in the front hall bathroom. Which is where I spent the entire day, pressing my hands against the cream-colored tiles, trying to find a cool spot even though everything was hot and humid and nauseating. I knew this room best of all already, the single cracked tile by the southwest corner, the faint scent of sanded oak, the window’s webby paint, the bubble in the wallpaper behind the tiny sink. The yellow-flowered wallpaper itself was cheerful enough on our first visit, months ago, when we decided to bid on the house. Years ago it seemed now, when I was still ordinary, before my hormones set about their work in my body, like a contractor ordering building and landscape work everywhere. I was sick all the time; my wretchedness became the unsolicited center of my universe.

  Everyone lied to me about morning sickness. The TV and movies lied, showing a quick purge and then laughter; the books and doctors lied, saying it would be uncomfortable, yes, but it would surely pass by the end of the first trimester. The mild precautions were laughable, but I tried them: Get out of bed slowly, eat a cracker before you get up, avoid strong smells. Try sniffing a lemon, try sucking a lemon, try thinking about a lemon. Try seasickness pressure points, try staying in bed, get up, try exercise, take it easy. There was nothing easy about it. I was in my seventh month, and I still fumbled from bed to toilet as soon as I woke and sometimes twice in the middle of the night. I was sick everywhere, all day: On the train I’d given up trying to be discreet with my plastic bag and gravelly retching; in the office, I no longer fumbled to start the sink water running before slamming into the too-small stalls. I had a favorite stall almost everywhere, the one with the quickest lock or least disgusting floor.

  I threw up at movie theaters and restaurants, when I was still trying to go to restaurants. I threw up in the employee bathroom at the gourmet foods store while clutching the smoked, braided mozzarella I’d needed, desperately, just moments before, until the salty smell reached my nose. I hated crackers—I hated people who mentioned crackers. I imagined a snow of crushed crackers falling on them, salting their heads as they spoke.

  The receptionist at my dentist’s office—where I had to leave my appointment because I couldn’t keep from gagging with rubber-gloved hands in my mouth—told me when she was nauseated and sick three decades ago, her doctor told her it was her fault, that she was clearly feeling ambivalent about the pregnancy.

  “It was planned,” she said, holding her hands in the air. She was about my mother’s age and still remembered her own sickness with a grimace.

  “That doctor should have had court-enforced nausea,” I said, appalled.

  “He’s dead.” She offered a diminutive smile. “And things are better now.”

  Yes, I thought, but I’m still sick.

&nb
sp; I wasn’t even pregnant yet when we found the house, just trying. The widow who sold it to us, Mrs. Larkspur, had Alzheimer’s disease and was moving into a retirement community across the woods. You could see the roof of the Bergen Sunset Home if you stood in our backyard by the slanted little shed with a rattly window. Her daughter, who lived in California, had hired the real estate agent and organized the sale. On our first visit, Mrs. Larkspur appeared perfectly ordinary, her freshly dyed brown hair curved into a short, sprayed bob. But the second time we visited, with our earnest money, she had lined up more than a dozen pairs of shoes on the front porch, and she was arranging stones in a spiral on the living room floor. We waited by the open front door for the agent, watching as she patted the stones—round granite, chunks of quartz—and mumbled happily to them.

  From my crouch in the bathroom I could hear the moving truck starting up. The late afternoon had smeared into an ambiguous gray, but the rain had stopped. I got up, slowly. I heard shuffling, then Aaron’s sigh.

  “It’s safe,” he said. “If you can come out, Mango, come on out.”

  “Okay.” I braved the doorway. Our doorway. Our house. No rent, no elevator, no neighbors sharing walls, no crazies shouting out the lost pieces of their minds on the street below our windows. I was exhausted, but Aaron, standing there looking strong and fine in his cutoff shorts and frayed green law school T-shirt soaked from shoulders to midchest, was wearing a spectacular grin.

  “So, shall I carry you over the threshold?”

  “Um, I’m kind of heavy. And I’m already inside.” I wanted him to, part of me really did, but I was also afraid we’d sprain his back.

  “I could,” he said.

  “How about we christen the bedroom, like good Jews.” I felt suddenly romantic, having watched him at his finest, directing traffic in Our New House.

  “Do you think the neighbors will hear?” Aaron was already halfway up the stairs. I was trying to convince my legs to take a single step while the baby twisted and pounded, doing laps and flip turns in the womb pool.

  I looked at Aaron as he pulled me by my arms into the bedroom. My gigantic ship of a body followed. Nothing was imperative these days, no matter how much I wanted him, wanted to feel as urgent as we had before, wanted to look down at his face as he concentrated, waiting for me to give him permission. Here we were, in our box-furnished room, where one dresser lay on its side below the window and the mattress was crammed into a corner, half-obscured by disassembled head-and footboards, a left-behind industrial packing strap that smelled of motor oil, a wooden dowel which belonged to I did not know what piece of our furniture—or someone else’s—and a little bamboo tea strainer resting on the single rescued pillow.

  I began the elaborate crouching and bending required to get my body down to the mattress, and Aaron, his eyes incandescent green, took my arms and lowered me down like a crane laying a steel beam to rest. I tried not to notice the baby’s sloshing, but it was everything, being at the center of my body.

  “Our house,” sang Aaron, “is a very very very fine house.”

  “No more super! No more laundromat! No more takeout from Mr. Garlic’s Pizza,” I finished, slightly sad.

  “I’ll garlic pizza you,” said Aaron, starting to kiss me, tasting my cheeks and lips, letting his fingers measure my collarbone. I shivered despite my distraction. I started to cool and heat, a geothermal map of the possibilities of passion.

  “Do, please,” I said, reaching as far as the fabric allowed up his cutoffs. Sometimes I couldn’t believe he still found me desirable in my gravid state, a vast vessel, redistributed material with the purpose of procreation. Aaron loved my breasts, loved to trace and squeeze, to taste and heft them. But in the last few months, they were unbearably tender and enormous due to their upcoming employment. I hated it; they were too sore for much handling, but he said in some ways, it made him more eager when I pushed his hands or mouth away.

  “Can I?” Aaron tugged at my voluminous flag of maternity shirt. He pulled it up and pulled my skirt down over the dome of my belly.

  “The baby’s den.” He patted me. I cooled a few degrees. I did feel like a building.

  “May I,” I said.

  “What? Of course, whatever it is.”

  “No, I mean, you said ‘Can I?’, but you should have said, ‘May—’”

  “Shh,” said Aaron. “Tell the editor to take a nap. And the baby, too. It’s you I’m interested in.” He slid down below my belly, so I couldn’t see where he was kissing. But I felt it. It was as if he was trying to melt chocolate in his mouth, and I was trying to let myself be melted. It was hard to relax, hard to let him do everything. It was hard not to be able to see him while I felt him, his hands inside my thighs, the damp spot of the T-shirt he was still wearing. I tried to imagine us in our apartment, my own body as it used to be, and the way he used to lift my dress up and open the top buttons so I was still dressed and entirely exposed. The way he used watch me as I opened my lips around him, though since the morning sickness I couldn’t take him in my mouth without gagging. I wanted this pleasure for me, but even more, for him. He could tell when I pretended, as I’d done the last few times, and though he didn’t say anything, I knew he felt it was a small failure on his part.

  I felt like solid wax. I breathed deeply and felt a jab at the bottom of my lungs. Aaron loved me, and some orderly part of him wanted everything to be fair, couldn’t sleep as easily if he knew I hadn’t been as satisfied as he had.

  “What’s that?” He stopped for a second.

  I looked at the boxes and felt the baby shifting. I tried to ignore my stomach as something—an elbow or a foot—lumped along the surface.

  “Don’t stop,” I said.

  “Um, I think that’s the doorbell. Do you think they want their strap back?”

  “I don’t give a shit about their strap,” I said, sitting up with great effort and leaning on my elbows. I pulled my maternity shirt down over my chest, as if I could cover myself with anything short of a tall-ship’s sail. Sex was not going to work. Especially if Aaron wasn’t going to pay attention.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Aaron, bouncing up, wiping his mouth. His percussive steps irritated me. Down the stairs to the door’s demands. I resented him for wiping his mouth of me, for stopping, and most of all, for his ease.

  I listened. Birds were congratulating themselves on the banquet of drowned worms left by the rain. Aaron’s voice, words indistinguishable, lifted and dropped with his mesmerizing friendliness. When I heard him laugh, I knew I had to forgive him. It took three tries to heave my body up. I saw he’d forgotten the strap; if we weren’t going to finish our business, at least someone should get what they needed. I lurched back into my clothes. As I started down the hall the other voice came clear, a bright, bell-like woman’s voice—not the movers. I clutched the strap and waded my way down the stairs.

  Aaron was leaning against the doorjamb, casual and sexy, his earlier intentions still visible in his posture, his thickened lips. He was talking to a beautiful woman, her hair sunlit, her body pale and small in a skinny black tank top and jeans. She was a little bony, and she had a lantern jaw, but these idiosyncrasies made her lovely. I envied her small chest, the quirky mole by the corner of her mouth, her ordinary state. A toddler with red Botticelli curls knitted herself in and out of the door, and in and out between her mother’s long legs. Perhaps she wasn’t the mother; she could be a nanny. She offered Aaron a big glass plate covered with foil, and I hoped it was something delicious, though I didn’t really want to think about food. And when she smiled, I couldn’t help liking her.

  “Brownies,” she said, pushing the plate into Aaron’s hands. He didn’t see me, so I cleared my throat.

  This was good, I thought, recovering from my snit. This neighborhood has stunning, friendly neighbors who bring chocolate. “We thought you were the moving men,” I said, wading down the last of the stairs.

  “Oh, wonderful!” She held her hand ou
t toward my belly as if introducing herself to the baby, letting me be special. “I’m Thea—from over the fence,” she said. “Iris is my third.” She waved toward the little girl. No chance she was a nanny; probably a stay-at-home mom.

  “My best friend used to live here,” she said, glowing at me again, and even though I wasn’t looking for a friend, I felt deeply comforted. Was she for real? Never mind sex, this was a welcoming committee. If I needed help when the baby was born, I might even call this perfect, calm mother next door.

  “Brownies,” said Aaron, holding onto the plate with an almost-religious reverence. Before we moved in, he’d constructed a lot of what-ifs for us. What if our neighbors brought us a pie? What if the people next door were expecting, too? What if our kids could all play together? What if we had barbecues in our backyard all summer? What if we lived next to born-again Christians who hated kids? I’d added, but I was laughing. Aaron held up the egg of suburban possibility with greater thrill than anyone I knew. He’d never really had it, a solid, predictable place to live, and even though he’d loved the adventures of his childhood, he imagined something calmer for his own children.

  “Yes, I see,” I said. “We’re Amanda and Aaron, and thank you.” I took the brownies from Aaron and set them on a box. The thick cocoa scent made me hungry, not nauseated, and I reached under the foil. “Want one?” I asked the toddler, who was singing about baby ducks going over the hill and far away as she bounced and wove. I started eating when she didn’t answer, but then offered another when she came over with both hands up.

  “Say thank you, Iris,” said Thea.

  “Thank you Iris,” said the girl.

  We three adults stood still while Iris ran and shed crumbs. Outside, the birds continued their proclamations, and inside, our quiet filled the room. I watched Aaron trying not to stare at Thea. Iris didn’t stop moving. I appreciated the welcome, but now I wanted to lie down. With or without Aaron. Just eating the brownie had exhausted me.