The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  I asked some chocolatey questions to break the silence. “Maybe you know which grocery store is best? Do you have a good pediatrician?” She just let me ramble on, looking clean and pretty. It was so sweet it almost seemed artificial. If I was going to live here, I was obviously going to have to employ a better-dressed, more-cheerful self. In Manhattan, the general approach to neighbors was courteous disregard. With the ones I liked, I exchanged greetings in the lobby; with those I didn’t, I just avoided eye contact if I met them when they left for their morning commute. Here, clearly, the distance between houses didn’t mean more anonymity but less.

  “Oh, my,” said Thea, smiling at Aaron, indulging my patter. “Just call me—I’ll leave my number. I’ve lived here a long time, so I can tell you all about those things.” I was intimidated by her ease. I guessed she’d gone to the same supermarket on the same day for the past ten years. Eaten the same brand of eggs. She and her husband had sex the same way every Saturday night. Stop being mean, I told myself. Welcome to Jersey: check your sarcasm at the GW Bridge.

  “You’re from the city, I assume?”

  I nodded instead of saying something cynical. “I’m going to miss all the restaurants,” I said. Aaron was eating a brownie; his chewing noise embarrassed me, the crumbs on his lips like a greedy six-year-old.

  “Oh, we have plenty of those, not that you’ll have any time for that.” She nodded toward my belly. I smiled but hoped she was wrong. Maybe she’d want to baby-sit.

  Aaron brought her a piece of paper—the invoice from the movers, I noticed—and a ballpoint pen with ink all over the barrel. She wrote her number and checked her fingers for smudges. The little girl was twirling through my rhododendrons, snapping off leaves. She picked the only zinnia, red, in the whole front garden, and tore the petals off, littering the lawn.

  “Iris, stop that!” Thea said, without making a move to bring her command to fruition. I waved my hand to say never mind. I could forgive them a flower. I could do this good neighbor thing, too.

  “Well,” said Aaron. “Thank you so much for coming.” He reached out to shake her hand, but Thea didn’t understand. She leaned in as if to kiss his cheek, but her mouth didn’t touch him. She walked out the door again. The air was thick with sidewalk steam, the rain trying its best to evaporate and rise before the sun set again.

  “Let me know if you need anything,” she said. “I’m right over the fence in the back.” The picturesque Iris had chocolate on her cheeks and chocolate-covered baby teeth, and she started singing about the ducks again. Thea took Iris’s hand, and even though her daughter resisted at first, she led her back down the walkway. The suburbs looked even better than I’d imagined—maybe Thea would have another baby and we could do strollercize together on the weekends. Maybe we’d have family picnics together and her older kids would take care of the younger ones and the grown-ups would go off to those myriad restaurants. It was such a generous gesture, so foreign to my experience; I told myself I’d make brownies if we ever got new neighbors. Of course, I’d be at work, but I could do it on weekends. Or holidays.

  Aaron shut the door against the early-evening sun.

  “Shall I make dinner?” he asked, pulling a whisk from a box by the steps. I sighed and reached for his waist. He rummaged in another box and pulled out a huge art history textbook. He held book and whisk triumphantly in the air.

  “Mmm, whipped rococo,” he said.

  “I think we’re going to like living here,” I said. “Let’s have brownies for dinner.”

  3

  Amanda

  After the move, I went in to the office two days a week. Perhaps I was still adapting to the commute, but the train ride felt interminable—I was sure I would vomit each time we passed through Hawthorne, Paterson, and Passaic. By Secaucus, though, I had usually settled in to thinking about something, dwelling even, the way I’d always focused too long on both things that mattered and those that didn’t: The strange ticking in the wall when we ran the kitchen faucet, the art that was late for our new hardcover series on ducks in the ocean, the little bump inside my hand that my friend Rosanna in the art department had assured me was a ganglionic cyst, which I could have drained after I was done “cooking,” as she put it. I was massaging the cyst on a too-hot September Monday, thinking it was maybe not a ganglionic cyst—maybe it was a tumor, maybe I needed to get it checked out today so I wouldn’t die before I saw my baby born—when a string bean of a man, curved posture, barb tail of black hair, said, “Um, you’re going to miss your transfer if you stay here.”

  The train had stopped, and I was just sitting. I’d seen string-bean man before—he boarded at my station. I thanked him and waddled over to transfer to my train, at first worrying that he was one of those weird men who became obsessed with pregnant women, and then realizing I was being absurd and that he was probably just a dad who lived in my town, who kissed his three kids and wife good-bye before he left. His wife was an optometrist, I decided as I huffed up the steps to my platform, looking out at the tangled root ball of train tracks leading into the station. They were probably as friendly as my new neighbor. This friendliness thing was going to take some effort to master. And I would have to switch it off once my train reached the city.

  I was only a little late, and I was sure no one would notice. It had taken approximately a half hour to go six blocks from the PATH station to the office. Six sticky-skinned, achey-ankled blocks. The baby banged around inside me, her sharp ends asserting themselves against the spongy resistances of my liver, bladder, spine.

  “You’re late,” said Neethi, walking past my office bearing a thick brown binder. I knew that binder. I remembered that binder from sometime last week. It had nothing to do with books, though—why couldn’t I remember why that binder was important?

  “We’re due in the conference room to start this thing now.”

  “Of course,” I said, ducking into my office. I had one of those binders, too, buried under the horrible pink stack of messages (They were supposed to forward calls home! How could I have so many messages? It had only been since Thursday!) and a loveseat-sized black portfolio that was hopefully the art for the ducks-in-the-ocean book. I grabbed my brown binder and took it to the conference room, hoping whatever thing this was wouldn’t last more than an hour.

  It did.

  We had signed up for the Franklin Day Planner training day about seven months ago, when I’d imagined somehow I could reschedule, or that I might accidentally miss it; when I wasn’t thinking about how devastating the loss of an entire day’s work might be. That I might start crying if I didn’t get to work today.

  “Let’s get started,” said the oddly perfect-featured man in a dark blue suit who was animating the conference room with his picket-fence-white smile. His nose was narrow, not too long. His lips were embarrassingly bowed. His eyebrows were a few shades darker than his sleek russet hair.

  “We’re going to transform your lives today—together. We’re going to improve how you work and how you play. This is a place of work,” he continued. It almost sounded like place of worship to me. I looked around the conference room. Three editorial assistants. The director of production, two designers. Neethi, someone from accounting, someone from legal—our in-house council. I recognized her from the single legal issue I’d dealt with in eight years in publishing. Maybe her job was perfect—one lawyer among book-makers. I should get a job as a publications director for a law firm. One bookmaker among lawyers. I think she mostly was left alone in her glassy corner office. I knew she had kids.

  “So.” I’d already missed a few Power Point presentation slides thinking about the in-house council. What was her name? Aliza?

  “We’re going to start with the personal before we move to the professional. I want you to write out a list of hopes and dreams. We’re going to start here and work into concrete goals. But think big here, think personal.”

  “Um, Neethi?”

  Neethi glared at me. She had a smudge
of jelly on her collar and I thought, Doughnut.

  “May I borrow a pen?”

  I wrote out my dreams—wrote them down! Right in the room with Neethi and the director of production! I wrote: Healthy baby. Easy delivery. No more barfing. Good sex again. Keep my job. That was all I wanted, I thought. Then I added: Become editorial director. Have own imprint. Plumber finished by the time I get home.

  “Now we’re going to share them.” Everyone groaned. I cupped my hand over my list. No way. “You have to open up and dig deep to change your life,” said Mr. Perfect. He smiled, big teeth.

  “I want to live on a boat,” said our director of production, looking down at his paper, then out the window. “I always have.”

  Neethi gasped a little, then looked at me and smiled conspiratorially.

  “I want a better job,” said one of the editorial assistants, looking at the man as if he held the power to get this for her. “I want her job,” she said, tilting her head toward me. The other assistants tittered, and the in-house council yawned.

  When it was my turn, all I could say was, “I want to get back to work soon after the baby.” It made my throat close up to say it. I wasn’t a liar. “I mean, part-time at first—” Then I covered my mouth, not because I was afraid to say more, but because I had to run from the room to throw up. When I came back, it was coffee break time.

  Three days a week I was supposed to work at home. So three days a week I hid upstairs or on the old beanbag chair in the half-finished basement, hoping not to encounter Mark the carpenter, who smelled of cigarettes and old cheese, or Ronnie the plumber, who was replacing lead pipes with some fancy new plastic ones, which would probably turn out, in fifteen years, to be more hazardous than lead. They weren’t awful; I was simply intolerant of anyone in my space, and they always had questions. Ronnie had an assistant he called Wheeze, who actually was awful. He habitually requested root beer, as if I were the operator of a soda fountain. Wheeze left half-crushed soda cans behind the toilet and open potato chip bags on the mail table like a cat’s carrion gifts. He never flushed.

  On the Wednesday after the Franklin Day Planner Time Suck Day that made me think about what I really wanted, that made me break down my goals into small, attainable tasks—really nice stuff, except perhaps for the fact that breaking down labor into small, attainable moments of anticipated agony wasn’t going to help much—I was trying to work in the bedroom. I lay on the bed letting the light from the windows cast beams on my legs. The walls, freshly painted, were pale green and soothing. I brought the cordless phone in with me, a svelte black dolphin with a hideous, sharp ringing sound. It rang all the time, sometimes waking me from a terrifically uncomfortable sleep during which I firmly believed I was editing the Rose manuscript, a young adult novel about a girl who becomes a world-class rock climber. Sometimes the phone was work. Assistants with questions, bosses with questions, marketing managers with questions. They were letting me be, they each said, they just had a quick issue. The quick issue often turned out to be checking to see whether I was really working and not wastefully lounging with the whole ocean inside me, gobbling Halloween candy a month in advance.

  Even more often than work, the phone was my mother, my sister, my friend Rosanna, who was technically from work but only called to gossip, or Aaron. Aaron called six times a day, with not much to say, but always with a special ring of anticipation in his voice. I hated to disappoint him with the bland news of my discomforts. “Threw up again…yes, twice…I have an incredible charley horse…. Can you pick up more Tums on the way home?” When it was my sister, I felt as if I ought to woo her with interesting details. “Oooh, that was a kick,” I’d say, sometimes even when I felt nothing.

  When we were little girls, Jane was the one who played mommy all the time. She diapered her stuffed animals with paper towels and Scotch tape. She had triplet dolls she named Dolora, Adora, and Mora, whom she spoon-fed and offered milk, and whose naptime inspired fervent hushing sounds. I, on the other hand, was busy designing dioramas of Salem after our witch-hunt unit at school. My friend Diana came over and we held tiny trials with paper dolls. At her house we tapped at the hornets’ nests under the giant rhododendrons in the backyard. We climbed the pine trees that secluded her family’s deck and ate peanut butter sandwiches while talking about boys. I didn’t spend a lot of time practicing for motherhood.

  But despite marrying Cornelius years before I’d even met Aaron, Jane had put her child rearing on hold. At first we never talked about it, because it wasn’t interesting to either of us. But once I knew I was pregnant, it was the magnetic core of my universe. All other topics swirled around with the dull import of cold stones. Pregnancy, babies, details, and due dates were hot and dazzling. So after I told Jane, I’d waited through weeks of conversations for her to say something about herself. And I’d waited more. And now I was in my third trimester, and the ridiculousness of being just a vessel made me brazen.

  “So, Janey, when are you going to make a cousin for my baby?”

  “Oh,” she said, “so that’s what you’re after.”

  We’d just finished talking about her newest research paper, on symbolic metallurgy in Dracula. Jane would be up for tenure at Columbia, where she taught literature and feminist studies, in a year. While personally I felt that Dracula was a good story that had been absurdly overanalyzed, Jane was an academic, always looking for minutiae to reconstruct and reconstrue, to own and give to others as a gift, wrapped in polysyllabic discourse. Jane would probably get tenure. Her papers were published, her dissertation had been made into an academic tome, and her students adored her, leaving questions on the subtext of heroine worship in cramped blue pen on quartered sheets of notebook paper under her office door.

  “No,” I said. “I just thought we were done talking about Dracula. But I guess we’ll never be done talking about Dracula.”

  “Or hemorrhoids,” said Jane.

  “Fair enough.”

  The phone buzzed with empty seconds between us.

  “Okay,” she said. “We are waiting until after tenure review. You can’t tell Mom. And even then, I’m not sure; I might want another few years to try for full professor. I want to able to be home with a baby, if I have a baby. Sabbatical or something.”

  “Oh, Jane!” I took this as a big yes, soon.

  “Subject closed.” she said. “Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  The phone clicked in a second of truceful silence.

  “So,” I said. “I have this great new neighbor.” I’d been wondering when I’d see Thea again. We’d finished the brownies, and I knew I should return the plate. “She brought welcome food.”

  “Wow,” said Jane. “Stepford wife?”

  “Don’t be mean,” I said.

  “Does she work?”

  “I would guess not.” I said. “Three young kids.” I was proud of myself for not following that up with anything sarcastic. My graciousness campaign continued.

  After we hung up, I fell asleep again and drooled on a particularly exhilarating rappelling scene in the Rose manuscript. I dreamed my father came to see my house. Dad had remarried six years ago and lived in a London suburb with his wealthy widowed wife and her two children, the boggy Diana, who was too sad for even my sister to ridicule, and hyperactive Henry, to whom Jane referred as Henry the Eighth with a surprising snideness. Mom and Dad divorced amicably, a sort of truce that frightened both Jane and me, because despite their very different ways, we’d never imagined they’d been anything but happy in their separate worlds of the marriage.

  Now retired from teaching, Dad volunteered as a tutor at Henry the Eighth’s prep school. I missed him and his quiet presence. I called him when I learned the news about the baby, and he had sent a giant teddy bear with HARROD’S printed on its chest. I hadn’t been able to find it since the move—yet another unimportant detail that plagued me.

  The phone woke me again. I gagged but recovered, picking it up.

  “Darling,�
� my mother said. “I’m on the cell. I’ve got half an hour until I have to be in the city.”

  “You’re in New York?”

  “Of course not, I’m home.”

  “You said the city.”

  My mother sighed. “Boston is a city, too,” she said. “Darling, do you have stretch marks yet?”

  Once upon a time, I’d been a Boston snob, too. I thought New Jersey, even the name, was a joke, unless you were talking about milk or tomatoes. I grew up in the suburbs, and my first real city experience was in Providence, Rhode Island, where I rented an apartment off campus and felt cosmopolitan. After Brown I thought about graduate school, but instead I moved to New York City with two other English majors, and we all got jobs in publishing and argued over whose turn it was to buy toilet paper.

  I started in magazines and found the frenetic pace and emphasis on personal attire exhausting. One of my roommates worked in children’s books, so I made the switch. For the first few years, I imagined this was a temporary job, that I’d get a degree in something else, but after a while I got promoted. The corner offices and the senior editors’ correspondence files stuffed with author endearments and discussions of tense, or the symbolism of red hats, or reading level, looked fascinating. The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bologna beckoned. When my boss, Neethi, returned, aglow with the marvelous projects she’d acquired, the party gossip and agent lunches and author parties scheduled like bright lights through the gray tunnel of winter, I knew I wanted to keep doing this until I became her.

  It wasn’t only the glamour that drew me, it was the books. I fell in love with them, especially picture books, the marriage of a slim little bride of a tale or a flamboyant bride with unusual adjectives and leaping syntax, and a groom, artwork, plain and clean or dazzling with color, shape, excitement. Silver dragons, zinnias with silky purple petals and secret faces.

  Some projects didn’t actually seem to be for children; they were really for parents who had to read aloud every night, stories built with morality and double entendre and, often, a wildness bordering on sacrilege. Children, though, were part of the vision for me; the words were meant to be read aloud, the details of the art highlighted by a questioning toddler finger. But the wholeness of the project—buying a manuscript, simply words printed out on a sheet of paper, and pairing it with someone’s fanciful, purposeful style of painting or drawing, someone’s interpretation—was a thrill. It was as mysterious and chemical as baking: ingredients and temperature were just the details, the outcome as miraculous (and potentially disastrous) a convergence as chocolate-orange soufflé.