The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  Because she was still talking about stretch marks, I interrupted my mother.

  “Did you save anything from when we were babies, Mom? Do you have any blankets or anything?”

  She was not distractible.

  “My dermatologist recommends the most delicious-smelling cream. Of course there’s the real stuff, Retin-A, but you can’t use that until after you’ve popped.”

  “Ugh. You make it sound so gruesome.”

  “It is gruesome, hon. But at least you’ll get your epidural as soon as you arrive. I only wish they had them for me.”

  “So, did you keep anything?”

  “I’ll look. Anyway, you can get the stretch-mark cream at this place in the city—I mean your city this time—”

  “I’m kind of not making a lot of special trips, Mom.”

  “And what about that nausea? Still chucking? I didn’t, you know. Not a single day, though I had horrible water retention. My feet swelled terribly, and they’ve never been the same.”

  “You did tell me, Mom.”

  “The stretch marks are pretty bad, but C-section scars are worse.”

  “I’m not planning to wear bikinis soon, Mom. You know, I’m trying to get my layette in order. I was wondering about nightgowns.”

  “Don’t put yourself down, darling, you have a perfectly lovely body.”

  My mother could say this because she was thin. And at the moment, thin was not only something I was generally not, it was something I was specifically miles away from.

  “Especially those little feet. I always loved your feet. Are they swollen?” She sighed.

  I looked down in the direction of my feet. They itched, but I wasn’t sure how I could get them somewhere I could reach to scratch, or even close enough to see whether they were swollen. All I wore these days were clogs. A knee or an elbow surfaced and ran along my belly like a shark’s fin cutting through surf.

  “She’s kicking, Mom. I can see. It’s incredible.”

  “My signal’s fading, sweetie,” said my mother.

  I wished my mother would send something, a nightgown, a onesie, a blanket. I wished most for something from my own infancy, which seemed as incomprehensible to me as a Mars landing. But three days later when I tore open the firmly wrapped, priority-mail package that arrived with my mother’s handwriting on the address label, I discovered she’d sent the special stretch-mark cream with no note. It smelled like coconut and made me hungry. I wanted to appreciate it, but like most other things in the last weeks of pregnancy, this not-quite-right gesture made me retreat to the beanbag in the basement where I could weep in my hormonal, self-sorry state without interruption from the carpenter.

  October

  4

  Thea

  Someone had been stealing pumpkins from the walkways and porches in the neighborhood, and it wasn’t the ordinary teen demolition, where the evidence would be smashed on the sidewalk, sad smeared orange skin and flesh, seeds spread like obscenities. Instead, the pumpkins were vanishing. It didn’t happen overnight, or in the evening, when I was out in the garden, mournful of the clamping hand of cold and the early dew and the last of the roses, their heads bowed with defeat. Someone had found some sliver of daytime when no one was around, and had taken the Turners’ giant pumpkin and the Martins’ stingy miniature gourd and the tall lean one they’d set at the base of a porch pillar.

  The second Wednesday in October, I carved our pumpkins at night, after cleaning up, and Caius watched from a collapsed posture in a chair and made suggestions while I tried not to resent the intrusion. When we were first married, we’d collaborated on a jack-o’-lantern for our apartment, each cutting an eye, an ear. Caius made the mouth and the nose was mine. It was ghoulish. Caius’s eye was an uneven slit; mine was enormous and round. The nose and mouth were inverted, a fermata. We’d smeared each other with the goop; we’d eaten burned roasted pumpkin seeds and made love still salty and squash scented, tasting each other’s autumn mouths in the deep inside of the city. The nest within a nest of our apartment. No kids had come for our candy, so we ate coconut chocolate and miniature bars of Special Dark and went to bed without brushing our teeth.

  On Thursday, our jack-o’-lanterns vanished. Sometime between picking up Oliver and bringing Carra to swim practice, while Iris chewed a crayon in the backseat, purpling her teeth, they went missing. I tried not to take it personally, noticing that my scarecrow, though slightly soggy from a storm, was still intact, corncob pipe and all.

  The new neighbors’ porch was empty, and I wondered whether their pumpkin had been stolen or whether, pregnant as she was, she had overlooked this detail. Perhaps they were the kind of people who got their pumpkin on October thirtieth. I didn’t really know what kind of people they were and kept wondering whether I was supposed to visit or keep my distance. She’d asked so many questions—did she expect me to stop by with the plumber’s number? I saw her bundling off to the train many mornings, but this afternoon the car was parked in the drive.

  When I’d stopped by with the brownies, I’d been struck by her particular kind of attractiveness—not at all typical, she was zaftig in the best sense. Her short, dark hair was rich; her smile was opulent and ironic. Of course, she was pregnant, but there was something about her body’s roundness that made me see why men might like to watch her. As someone who had often been called pretty—a plain word, actually, almost a minor put-down—I felt as though I recognized a different kind of beauty in her, or maybe it wasn’t beauty, maybe she was just plain sexy. Or maybe I was jealous of her pregnancy, though I ought not to be. Perhaps when she wasn’t holding someone else inside her skin she was ordinary.

  I watched Iris dig at the edge of the fence—close to their property—while bread baked in our kitchen. Maybe Amanda would come out to the fence. Maybe I was being overeager. I had friends, after all, and she probably did, too. But she was new here, and having her next door seemed so auspicious.

  “Don’t dig there, Jitterbug!” I called out to Iris. “Want to come inside?”

  The sky was bright and suddenly it was cold enough for a sweater. I wondered what had changed—the wind, the intensity of the sun? It was a matter of a few degrees, like everything else, like the zone of fertility, like the waking of yeast, short sleeves to sweater.

  “No, Mama,” said Iris. She looked me in the eye and started to eat the dirt.

  “Iris, love, that’s yucky,” I said, sweeping her up. She wailed but wasn’t fully committed to a tantrum, at least not yet.

  Caius hadn’t really wanted three. We had our heirs, he joked, the boy, the girl. I had, though; I had needed to refill my arms as soon as Oliver left them. Now, I surely didn’t want four, but sometimes I wondered if we ought to have one more, partly to clear our mouths, like sorbet, after the heavy meal of Iris’s infancy. Ridiculous—who was to say another baby wouldn’t be as difficult as Iris, or even more difficult? I was staring down thirty-seven. It was getting late; my body was getting tired of the great feat of growing babies. We didn’t have room, we didn’t have that much money for college, and I surely didn’t have the energy. But I thought it anyway. If I got pregnant now, we’d have our own new one next summer, right before Iris headed off for preschool. She or he could play with the older baby next door. I wiped my hands on my jeans, ridding myself of the ridiculous idea.

  “Fog!” yelled Iris. I’d just rested her on the back steps to open the door, but she darted down again and scrambled across the lawn, chasing something, a bunny perhaps.

  “Not dog. Bunny?” I asked.

  “Fog,” said Iris again as she ran to the fence, then recommenced digging in the cold dirt like a puppy.

  “Don’t dig,” I said.

  “Fog,” she said. I scooped her up to bring her inside. My knees cracked and ached. Transitions were never easy. It was hard for Iris to give up on what she was doing for what I decided she would be doing next. For several months I tried giving her warnings, since that had worked with the other two, but Ir
is invariably tried to escape as soon as I told her my plans. Change was hard for all toddlers, but especially Iris, who started screaming and kicking. Her sneakers thumped my thighs as I held her tight. My hip ached. I didn’t like transitions myself. It was the least I could do to make her feel strongly held, even if she had no choice about when she had to come inside.

  From the back step I could see the “fog” of her exclamations. A pudgy groundhog shuffled and sniffed the air in Amanda’s yard. I wondered how Iris had named it—I didn’t remember ever seeing one with her, except from the car, since they loved to graze alongside the Garden State Parkway. It had squashed itself under the fence from our yard to Amanda’s, where probably the grass was sweeter with possibility.

  “Hi lady!” Iris yelled across the lawn, forgetting her dramatic sorrow. “Hi!”

  Our new neighbor looked up and waved lightly, a noncommittal sort of wave. I felt the rush of change. Suddenly I wasn’t alone with Iris, I had an audience, I had company. Adult company, maybe a little understanding. Little girls are so temperamental, I said silently, raising my eyebrows.

  “I like what you’ve done,” I called to her, walking over to the fence, relinquishing a squirmy Iris. Amanda stood with her back to me, running her fingertip over the pickets of the fence they’d had put in on the other side, between their lot and the Martins’. The wood looked raw, ready to suck in rain or paint.

  “Well,” said Amanda, turning to face me as if we always talked across the lawns, “I didn’t want to say anything, but…well…are they”—she jutted her elbow in the direction of the Martins’ house—“are they always, um, territorial?”

  I laughed. I’d wondered what it would be like, moving in beside the Martins, your first house. When Tia had lived there, we could hear the Martins arguing from her bedroom, through layers of glass and wood and the spindly fir trees. They’d yelled often, at each other, at their children; they’d yelled when alone on the telephone. Usually I couldn’t make out the words, but Tia said they fought about “how stupid they are—she tells him he’s an idiot and he calls her the B word.” Still, they sometimes held hands when they were walking the rat terrier they had for two years before Jack Martin crushed it backing out of the driveway in one of his trucks.

  “You know,” I said, leaning as far as I could over the fence. “He has a plate in his head,” I whispered. I felt childish saying it this way, but it was true. Perhaps it would help to know. “He was hurt in a machinery accident at work—”

  Amanda waded closer to the fence; she was wearing a nightgown under her coat.

  “Oh, are you on bed rest?”

  She looked at me sharply. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. Well, you really shouldn’t be up if you are, I thought, worrying for her.

  “I just got up for a minute. To see the fence. We wanted to get it painted before it gets cold.” She looked at the red-slashed maples.

  “Oh, I know. I hated bed rest. So anyway, the Martins aren’t that bad—but they aren’t that good. What happened with the fence?”

  Amanda leaned on the post. She smiled a little. “We went over to tell them, because we had the survey done when we were inspected? Anyway, we wanted to tell them we were putting in a little strip here, and that we’d match their fence if they wanted. They have a piece in the back—”

  I knew this. I knew the inside of her backyard from a dozen years ago. More.

  “—though theirs is facing the wrong direction so we thought it might be ours. You’re supposed to face the smooth side out. And when we did the survey their fence was on our property. Three feet in, actually. Aaron wanted to have it moved, but I thought that might be too much.” She ran her fingers through her hair, a five-pronged comb. Her hair was thick and brown, with gold and red glints in the sunlight.

  “Anyway, we said we’d match their fence and he said, ‘You’d better not be getting a dog. I don’t like dogs—’ and he did this thing with his hand, like a gun! Can you believe that? Like he’d shoot a dog if we had a dog? God, I had no idea people would be so hostile. We were just trying to be polite. Then when my fencing contractor was here, he came out and argued with him about the posts. We did it inside the survey line but he accused my contractor of lying—I couldn’t believe it! I stayed inside and steamed, but I really wanted to come out and tell him off. I wouldn’t. I just wanted to. I’m supposed to be on bed rest.” She patted her stomach, as if I didn’t already know.

  “They’re not the easiest neighbors,” I said, laughing lightly. “But they’ll leave you alone.”

  “As long as they don’t shoot my dog,” said Amanda.

  “You have a dog?”

  “No,” she smiled. I knew that smile, the secret smile of feeling wretched and also able to fight dragons. Of having to pee every six seconds. It was a brief communication, her smile. We both knew what it was like.

  “Are you going back to work after the baby?” I asked. Something flashed across her face, too quickly for me to tell what emotional lightning it was. I was only asking; everyone asked this question, didn’t they?

  “After leave,” she said.

  I nodded, hating the awkward pause.

  “Well, welcome to the neighborhood,” I said. I couldn’t decide whether she made me nervous or comfortable—there was something about her, something almost aggressive. Maybe it was just her city skin. Or maybe I was being defensive; after all, I had had the same neighbor almost all my life.

  “Ha! Thank you. Glad you’re the one on the other side.”

  Me, too, I thought. I was going to enjoy having a baby next door.

  “Don’t worry about the Martins. Once you’re established, I don’t think they’ll bother you much. They’re too confined by the storms of their own small systems of strife.”

  “Yikes, how poetic.” Was she serious or sarcastic?

  “That’s the suburbs for you,” I tried.

  Amanda rubbed her belly and didn’t meet my eye. My phone rang; I said good-bye, scooped up Iris, and went inside feeling slightly puzzled but flushed nonetheless with the briefest moment of neighborly bonding.

  5

  Amanda

  Less than a week before Halloween, there were pumpkins out on everyone’s porches except for ours. I couldn’t bear a trip in the car, not to mention heaving a giant gourd into the trunk, and I hoped Aaron would volunteer to go. But when he finally got home from work, after a long stretch of my pretending to myself I wasn’t waiting for his company, he had things other than Halloween decor that required his attention. Like unpacking the groceries I’d had to leave in the car, and making dinner, and finding his dress shirts among the remaining boxes. And sleep. His slouch and the down-turned corners of his eyes made him appear even more tired than I felt, so I didn’t bring up the issue of porch decorations. I wondered who we were becoming; I was beached on the couch and he was a work zombie. When I’d met him, Aaron was already working for the firm, but he’d still been different—still been a man who didn’t quite belong where he was, who held foreignness in his smile, an attractive otherness.

  Aaron and I met at an author’s vacation house in Vermont one winter weekend; I drove up in a rented car in time to watch him grappling with too many logs from the well-stocked woodpile, spilling most of his load onto the path and wiggling his slipper-shod feet like a cat to shake off the snow. The author was having a weekend-long book party, and she hadn’t told me she’d invited Aaron, her husband’s lawyer. I saw him and laughed as I sunk the car’s wheels too deep in a crusty snowbank. I thought, nice Jewish New York boy, probably born and raised on the Upper West Side.

  My instinct was wrong: Aaron wasn’t from New York, though he looked as prissy about the splinters and woodpile cobwebs as the best city boy. He was a year younger than I was, and he had been born and had spent his first decade in Kenya, where his father was working for a hospital and his mother was learning not to feel too guilty about dirt cheap domestic help. Then they moved many times: Hawaii, D.C., Brazil, the French Congo,
and ultimately, as I’d guessed from my faulty first impression, New York. NYU under-grad, NYU law school. Aaron tried to make up for his childhood peregrinations by staying put in his adult life. He still spoke a few words of Swahili and wore a braided metal bracelet on the weekends, and the cultures of his childhood wove through his perspective like a gold thread in an ordinary gray suit.

  “You should do a book on spiders,” Aaron said to the author, sitting on her couch and looking at me, enough, not too much.

  “I was bitten by a brown recluse once,” I said.

  “Can’t blame him,” said Aaron, his forehead revealingly flushed.

  “My, my,” said the author, smiling at me. She had long gray hair and attractive big teeth. “You’ve got an admirer,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m afraid I killed her,” I said. “It was a girl—she had eggs.”

  “As long as you’re not so rough with all your aficionados,” said Aaron. He got up to clear our plates of lemon cake, comfortable in the task. I admit, I watched him walk away and knew he knew I was watching.

  I found myself thinking about him all the time when I got back to the city.

  Aaron called me cute things, things I wouldn’t have let other boyfriends call me: Manda, Panda, Mango. He sang “Brown-Eyed Girl,” a little bit out of tune; it was gorgeous. When we were first living together, he brought me small gifts from his day—a cookie from his client lunch, wrapped in a cloth napkin stolen from some posh restaurant and taped with masking tape from his desk; Post-its with my name doodled during a meeting; tiny origami birds he made with exquisite expensive papers from Dokument, a gorgeous, expensive little stationery shop near Sutton Place. He brought me the last bite of his cake, he brought me matchbooks and, instead of hotel soaps and shampoos, the sewing kit from every place he’d had to go on business without me. Which was very often. I kept the little threads wound and intact, the tiny scissors folded. A catalogue of sewing kits rested neatly beneath the knee-highs in my drawer.