The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  Now that I was home, full-time, I was supposed to lie on the couch and let the gravity of pregnancy overtake me. My blood pressure was up a bit, and my doctor suggested that I quit the commute entirely and only come in for appointments and soon, very soon, the delivery. Soon couldn’t possibly be soon enough, because I was a vast balloon with legs, enormous and weary and ready to have her out, to hold my baby, my real pumpkin, instead of carrying her inside, with her portable swimming pool beneath my freshly stretch-marked skin.

  Maybe it was my mother’s fault for mentioning it so often. For the first seven and a half months, I made it without a single red complaint on my belly, but the lines began to appear, bright as magic marker, right after I’d convinced myself I’d escape unscathed. It wasn’t that I was obsessed with my body. I was never thin, but I had spent lunch breaks and nights at the gym, keeping my body in check. The red cracks looked hideous, and there was nothing I could do about them; they itched and I despised them.

  She was worth it, of course, my still-indoors baby girl. Most of the time I believed myself when I said that, “Worth it, all of it,” about the vomiting and the stabbing pains in my lower back and the heartburn and, now, the lines. So I could only joke about how much I really detested pregnancy.

  “At least you get a big present at the end,” I said to the cashier at Rite Aid, who was kind enough not to comment on my prune juice, panty liner, and candy bar purchase.

  “Yeah, but you won’t sleep for years,” she said, and she looked like she hadn’t.

  Aaron and I had picked out the baby’s name, Malena Greenberg-Katz, as soon as we knew the gender from the amnio. We’d narrowed down our list from ten names we each liked—there was no intersection—and then I found Malena on the M page and remembered it was mentioned in a Hans Christian Andersen tale. We both liked it, at last, bleary headed from scanning the name books. It wasn’t after anyone, and we chose no middle name since the hyphenated last was so long. Because we didn’t want too many opinions, we told only one person each and made them promise not to leak. I told my sister, Jane, and Aaron told his best friend at work. I kept thinking of my mother’s reaction to New Jersey, and I was afraid she’d say something subtly damning, like, “Are you sure?” or “Well, that’s an interesting possibility.”

  Years before, when I first started my job—waking to the shrill complaint of the alarm, taking time for a shower and layers of makeup and hair stuff and a bagel with cream cheese from the shop one door down from my apartment and one block from the subway—I fantasized about a week to myself, all free, when I would sleep late, wake to eat, sleep some more, read books, and sleep.

  But now that I was plunked like a gigantic water balloon in the suburbs, with nothing to do but lounge, I thought about everything I couldn’t do, and when I tried to nap, I worried instead. From the living room couch, I could see out onto the front walks of half a dozen neighbors, and I knew that I was falling behind at this house-ownership game. There were tall bound sheaves of autumn wheat, festive skeleton and witch flags, pumpkins round with jack-o’-lantern potential, even a few scarecrows stuffed with the dried remains of summer grasses and dressed in red-checked shirts that once graced the broad suburban shoulders of men who climbed ladders to clean out the gutters with leather-gloved hands.

  I missed seeing Rosanna at work, getting lunch at the falafel cart and sitting on a bench gossiping, napkins covering our clothes so we wouldn’t come back covered with tahini sauce. Rosanna and her ridiculous office, a fire hazard, piles and piles of artwork, illustrations for books, manuscripts marked up for design. We never discussed it, but the only reason she hadn’t been fired for her extraordinary mess was because she was an utterly brilliant designer, sometimes too avant-garde but always original. She had tantrums when the art director asked her to “tone down” a book jacket where the title was illegible but the overall design was mesmerizing. She lost important projects in her piles daily, but she won awards. She also knew all the gossip. Since I’d been pregnant, though, we had less to gossip about. Rosanna was single and an exercise addict—she went to the gym before and after work every day, ran marathons, met men at Hudson River swims, and had never learned to drive. She said she’d come out to see me at the house, but I knew that might only happen once, when I had a baby to show for all the complaining I’d done. I tried to ration my calls to Rosanna, because I needed to have something new to say. I was sure our growing home-improvement list would be less than riveting.

  I wanted to fix the shed with the rattly glass window—actually, I thought we should tear the whole thing down, but Aaron loved the idea of a shed. “For our skis and your garden stuff and the kids’ Rollerblades and all the bikes that won’t fit in the garage!” he’d kvelled, even when I pointed out that we had a perfectly good garage. “Since when do I garden?” I’d asked, but he’d only kissed my intentionally sour face.

  I needed to find a lawn service, because our grass was an embarrassing forest where the bunnies hid. In the back, some animal had dug a hole under the fence. Aaron saw it on the third morning I was staying home, and he came upstairs to tell me about it at six-thirty, when the light on the window shades was still thin with ambition. He didn’t know what it was.

  “It’s huge and furry and kind of looks like a hedgehog or maybe not, because it isn’t spiky. Are there some kind of very small bears here? Or giant wild guinea pigs?” He smelled of aftershave, musky.

  “I don’t know, honey. I think we’ll have to get a field guide to suburban wildlife.”

  Aaron laughed. “Then we’d be able to identify all these massive cars, and we could tell roofers from landscapers from plumbers.”

  “I can tell. Just read their trucks.”

  “That’s cheating. Do you see it? Get up for a second, Mango, look out the window—it’s amazing and gigantic and furry.”

  “And you’re late,” I said.

  “Oh, man,” said Aaron. He looked at the clock and ran down the stairs. I heard the car start—the small car, a sporty Honda with low tires and ordinary seats, into which I could no longer easily fit—and I envied his quick escape. I envied his full, important day, so unlike mine, which was long and hollow and ornamented with physical discomforts.

  Still, I was curious, so I waddled down the stairs. By the time I made it down, I had to sprint to the kitchen sink to throw up. I rinsed my mouth and looked out the window, but didn’t see any small hairy bearlike beast. But finally, after Aaron called me from work, three times, to ask me how I was and had I seen it, I looked out the back window and saw the groundhog. I automatically knew what it was, but I looked it up online anyway, enjoying the photos of fat furries, the nickname (whistlepig), the details (groundhog gestation is only thirty days). Lucky fur balls. I hoped they didn’t wreck the yard with their tunneling.

  “Your bear, your invader, your wild thing,” I said to Aaron on our fourth call, “is a whistlepig.”

  “A whistlepig! What is that? Is it poisonous?”

  “I’m not planning to eat it, are you? A groundhog.”

  “Oh, just a groundhog,” he said. He was disappointed that it wasn’t something more exotic, he who had grown up with monkeys who stole dried-fruit provisions and hyenas laughing up the night. But he said he’d love going around his office telling people he’d seen a groundhog in his own backyard. Now that his intrigue had waned, mine grew. Was it burrowing under the house? Would it have babies of its own in the spring? Would it poop all over the lawn? Would it bite my baby, or could we make a pet of it?

  Instead of tackling my list of home improvements, I lay on the couch and thought about whistlepigs and tried to nap and finally called work, checking my voice mail and feeling weepy when I listened to a message one of my authors left about something I couldn’t do anything about from home. I tried to respond to anything I could—I called back, checked in with the design director and production, agonized over a project whose pub date had been bumped an entire list because the galleys were a wreck with the aut
hor’s alterations. I knew I ought to let it go. In a week or so I wouldn’t be able to do anything, at least for a few more weeks. My mother called and suggested I get a manicure.

  “It’ll be months before you can get out again,” she said.

  “I don’t like manicures,” I said. “Remember?”

  “And eat out,” she said. “And get yourself a haircut.”

  “What’s wrong with my hair?” I touched the even ends of my bob. Since pregnancy, my hair had gotten thick and heavy, and at night I sweated until my head was soaked.

  “Pumpkins,” I thought she said.

  “Excuse me?” I plugged my other ear so I could hear her more clearly over the chorus of leaf blowers outside.

  “My silly cell phone—I said, perfect, your hair is perfect. But you won’t have time to have it done, later. No time whatsoever.”

  It had sounded like pumpkins to me. I went out to the front porch to sit in the late-afternoon light, the soft orange cool. For a minute, all was peaceful. I was going to have a baby, miracle of miracles. Leaves rose in drifts on our unmowed lawn. Down the street, I saw a lone figure negotiate a walkway, then another. The person appeared to be inspecting the porch pumpkins, and I wondered whether this was some strange suburban ritual I hadn’t learned growing up in Massachusetts. Down the block, three teenagers laughed and walked along—hunched, furtive, nervous, but mostly just adolescent. They stepped up to a neighbor’s scarecrow and one guy chucked it on the head, but even the hat stayed in place. Then they jogged off down the cul-de-sac toward the woods.

  I worried about the woods. Who knew what was going on down there, what rituals and leaf fires and what dangerous play in the creek? There was a rope swing over the water—I’d seen it dangling, nooselike, when we took a reconnaissance trip down the path before we put our bid in on the house. Then it had seemed like a quaint place, like a respite from the evenness of lawns. But now I felt menaced by all those trees, all that cover for lurkers or meanderers, so close to home. Aaron said I was being silly and it was probably just pregnancy hormones at work again.

  The pumpkin inspector crossed the street and started down the cul-de-sac after the teens. I couldn’t tell, for the big sail of a hat, whether it was a man or a woman who shuttled, quick but awkward, toward the woods.

  The orange light collapsed into a chilly evening. It was sudden that way here, and I felt mournful for long summer evenings, though I’d grown weary of the heat, the slovenly spray of the summer rain. What was left of the light showed a spot of dark gray advancing from the east above the roofs. In the city, you never saw a storm coming this way—either there was bad weather, or there wasn’t; the buildings seemed to hold systems between them. And sometimes I was inside so much that I didn’t have time to notice it was raining until it was finished, and I went out into slicked streets and lamps haloed by the steam of heated water rising from the concrete.

  I shivered and went inside, relinquishing the magic of the outside world. Even though it was too late, I had to do something; I got out the yellow pages and left messages for a landscaper, for Bobby the painter, and for the Chipper Cleaning Service! Bonded! Licensed! First Visit Free!

  I called Aaron, got voice mail. “Come home soon,” I said. “Stop spreading groundhog rumors. It’s too quiet here.”

  I noticed the baby had stopped moving as much. I’d grown used to her kick turns at the end of the womb pool, to internal battering or quick flicks of limbs. Sometimes her butt pressed up against my ribs and the pain was sharp, like heartburn, which I also had, constantly. Aaron called and said he wouldn’t be home for dinner. I looked in the fridge and took two bites from a block of cheese. Then I leafed through the half-eaten bags of pretzels in the cabinet and decided I really needed to eat the canned baby corn. The tiny kernels felt good against my teeth, but after three miniears, I felt very green and didn’t want them anymore.

  As night settled in, the storm crept closer, the thunder like a band playing in the next town. I waited for the sound on the roof, and I waited for the baby to move. I gave up on TV and tried to read the manuscripts I’d brought home from the slush pile, something I usually left to my assistant, but something I could do, with no time limit, at home. The first was a young-adult novel set in New Orleans about a child who witnessed a murder, and I sighed. I didn’t even want to assess the writing. The world was far too full of dangers to invent more peril in the world of fiction. I turned on the CD player and turned The Marriage of Figaro up loud, giving the baby a dose of classical music, giving myself a manageable drama other than my own.

  The storm finally reached the house, and the air split with the cracking sound of thunder. I liked it and how it made my blood race into my fingers, pulsing in my throat. The baby still didn’t shift, and I put my hands on my belly, willing her to let me know everything was okay. I thought about calling my doctor, after-hours, on his special number for labor or important questions, but I wasn’t that kind of patient. All along I had planned to be brave and to be no trouble, to tough out labor or have an epidural if my body told me to, and if Dr. Papageno thought it was prudent; to nurse immediately, as La Leche League and all my books recommended; to show Malena the view from the hospital window and tell her that this was New York City, where she had been conceived. Forever she would write NEW YORK, NEW YORK, on forms that requested place of birth.

  Another splitting sound, a tear in the wet fabric of the air, and the lamps all went out at once. I sat in the dark for a second, thrilling. But after three more seconds, with Malena quiet inside me, I got nervous. What if Aaron’s train couldn’t make it home? What if everything in the fridge spoiled? What if marauding bandits took advantage of the storm and came barging right through the front door to steal our cash and Aaron’s undiscovered boxes of dress shirts? I was absurdly nervous, both sweating and cold. Then Malena shifted slightly. Relief—at least she was okay in there.

  The dark grew increasingly malevolent. I groped in the kitchen until I found something I thought was a flashlight, but it was the turkey baster. Finally I found a match, and then, in my purse, the penlight I always kept for emergencies. Was this an emergency? The phone was dead, so I couldn’t call Aaron’s cell phone to see if he was on his way. I’d left my own cell at the office by mistake.

  Then, as I stood in the kitchen shining that feeble light onto the items in the cabinet, I was ravenous for almonds. Rummaging through the olives and the rice and ancient jarred macadamias we’d brought from our minuscule kitchen in the city, I found a pristine can of cocktail nuts. I opened it and sifted through it for the almonds, which were the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted. And for the first time since my first few weeks of pregnancy, I felt good.

  The storm had stopped crackling and thunking, and now only a thin drumming of rain punctuated the night. A bird sang inexplicably, joyous and doodly, as I finished the almonds and started in on hazelnuts, which were not as good but certainly better than Brazils or piddly peanuts.

  Someone thumped on the door.

  A burglar. Someone who wanted to steal the silver. Or worse.

  Thump-thump.

  Burglars didn’t knock.

  I went to the door armed with the nut-jar lid and my penlight and steeled myself to open it. There was the sunny face of Thea the neighbor. She was holding something orange, about the size of a soup pot, and in front of it she gripped an old-fashioned hurricane lantern, the light so bright I couldn’t look directly into her face.

  “Hello,” she said, as my eyes adjusted. “I’ve meant to bring you this for days now. It’s been so busy.”

  It was surprisingly warm outside, with cold close on the storm’s steamy heels. The air smelled of torn green and soil and worms.

  Thea’s hair had escaped her raincoat hood and lay in slick blond strings around her face. I’d forgiven her for asking about work with that look on her face. Maybe I’d imagined the look. Everyone asked. Besides, if I could be as content and fulfilled a stay-at-home mom as she appeared to be, I�
��d probably do that, too. But that wasn’t me—it wouldn’t ever be me.

  Thea held out a pumpkin. I almost loved her.

  “Oh,” she said. She put it down on the porch instead of into my open hands. “I didn’t mean to make you lift. I came over because of the storm. I mean, is everything okay? Do you need anything?”

  “To get this baby out of me,” I said out loud, before I had a chance to think. My mouth felt crusty with salt and nuts.

  “Um? I’ll just put this here.” She pointed at the pumpkin.

  “Thank you so much. I wanted to get a pumpkin—I kept meaning to—it seems like pumpkins are essential here.” I gripped the doorframe. “But I couldn’t go out to get one.”

  “Bed rest.” She smiled knowingly. “It’ll be done soon. I know, I always hated the last few weeks.” She stood for a second, looking picturesque: Her casually soaked hair, the pumpkin she’d placed on the stoop like a sentry. Probably I should invite her inside, I thought, without moving. This was a neighbor, a real neighbor. And unlike anyone I’d ever only just met, I trusted her.

  “Were your labors tough?” I knew I shouldn’t ask, for my sake more than hers.

  She smiled, but the joy was reserved. “It seems huge, but it’s over very quickly in the scheme of things,” she said. “Are you scared?”