The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  No one had ever asked that outright. And I was, I was so scared I didn’t want to admit it.

  “Yes?” I said. “But Aaron will be there….”

  “He’s charming, your husband.” I looked at her luminous face—I almost asked her to come with me when I delivered. I realized I’d had her standing on my porch in the dark this whole time.

  “Oh, do you want to come in?” She was dripping on the porch, a small rain beneath the roof.

  “No, thanks. I’ve got to get back to the kids—unless—are you okay? These blackouts can be a little spooky. You could come over.”

  I pictured a warm, yellow kitchen. Fresh-baked bread—probably pumpkin—milk in jelly-jar glasses. I needed to stay home, though. Besides, it was hard to tell when people were offering because they felt they ought to and when it was courtesy, even with Thea, who was so even and warm it felt authentic.

  “Thank you, but I need to unpack some boxes.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Nesting,” she said. “That usually means you’re in the homestretch. If you need anything—” She pointed toward her house, her arm a single soldier in a yellow raincoat, lit by the lantern. This way to safety. I leaned over the threshold and kissed her cheek, more grateful for a gourd than my ordinary self would allow.

  I was calmer after Thea’s visit, but I couldn’t stop digging for sudden necessary treasures. For three hours I sorted the contents of the remaining boxes in the basement by the waning penlight, until I found Aaron’s shirts packed in with his record collection. We no longer had a turntable, and the shirts were wrinkled.

  When Aaron came home I didn’t even hear him at the door. But as he started down the steps, calling for me, all the lights came back on, and the clock radios blinked and the CD player started playing Cecelia Bartoli singing “Porgi Amor” at top volume. I looked up at my husband and felt the strangest urge to get to the bathroom.

  “Honey,” he said, “what are you doing? Was the power off long? Are you okay? I tried to call. The train was stopped and they put us on buses. There’s a tree down at the end of the block, so I had to climb through someone’s lilacs to get home.”

  “My water just broke,” I said as the gush wet my pants, every inch of them, and filled my shoes with warm amniotic fluid, which smelled ever so slightly of almonds.

  November

  6

  Thea

  I shouldn’t have expected a call, but I somehow wished I could’ve been involved, could have helped. Amanda had seemed both tough and vulnerable—like most first-time moms—when I came with the pumpkin, and that ended up being her big night. She had driven to the city despite the storm’s mess to have her baby. I tried to imagine feeling so devoted to the place, to the tiny hospital rooms, to the gritty streets. I remembered how the subways smelled like rotted cabbage, even in the winter. Of course, her doctor was there, and that made sense. I’d moved from Manhattan and had all my babies at the hospital in Ridgewood, six miles from Sylvan Glen, where the doctors were perfectly good and where they’d delivered a dozen sets of triplets, hundreds of preemies, and one set of quints without incident. We’d gone there as kids for broken bones or swallowed objects; we’d each been born there ourselves. But when Oren was dying, we’d trooped into the city to the special hospitals where they were expert at prolonging his death, though that wasn’t what they called it. They called it experimental treatment.

  Jillian Martin was the first to tell me the Birth Story. She was watering her hanging pots, the impatiens mostly dead, the mums brown from overwatering. I could tell she couldn’t wait to share the news, starting in as I walked down the drive from the backyard.

  “It was a very, very long labor,” she called to me with vibrating authority, as if she’d been there. I wondered whether Amanda could hear her over at her house.

  “Oh, I didn’t know.” I was out for a quick breather, collecting fallen branches and twigs from the most recent downpour. I brought them to the curb. The sky was the bleached blue that comes after a squall and the air felt clean.

  “In the morning, two weeks ago, after that big storm,” she said. “Her water broke first. Her husband took her into the city.” She yelled this word like an expletive, and I put down the last of the debris and walked around to her porch.

  Two days after I brought Amanda a pumpkin, I’d seen the pink balloons tied out on their tree and supposed that was announcement enough. They were allowed to be private. And overwhelmed. Then everyone at my house got sick, so I hadn’t brought anything over. “A covered dish,” my mother used to say, “maintains a civil society.” I hadn’t really been out of my own house recently, except to go get soup ingredients and Children’s Tylenol and rental movies.

  “And she went for eight hours with no progress, so they started the Pitocin, you know, that drug that stimulates labor? But that didn’t help, so it was another eight hours, and then it was a C-section.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. Boy or girl?” I knew from the balloons, but I asked reflexively.

  “No shame in a C-section. My aunt had a C-section. They thought my cousin had spinal problems because of it but that wasn’t the reason.”

  “No, it probably wouldn’t be—”

  “Wasn’t your father a doctor?”

  “Mathematician,” I said.

  “I saw her yesterday—bringing the baby outside already? We waited a month at least. And anyway they already knew it was a girl.”

  “I have to go,” I said, wishing I were inventing the excuse. “Everyone’s home sick today.”

  It wasn’t even two weeks into November, and everyone—except me—had been coughing on each other, snuffling and moaning about for days. Caius had gone to work, but as I walked toward the backdoor I saw him lumping up the steps ahead of me like an injured giant.

  “Oh,” he said, smiling weakly. “I’m glad you’re here. I came home because I think I have a fever.” He pulled my hand to his forehead, as if that confirmed it.

  “Poor sweetheart,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was nurtured out. Caius was supposed to be the one person who didn’t need a lot from me.

  “Can you take my temperature?” he asked, as we walked into the house. He lay down on the couch and pulled the blankets all around himself.

  “Let’s just give you Advil,” I said. He was flushed, his eyes terribly blue.

  “But I want to know how bad it is,” he said, his face under the fleece.

  “It’s bad,” I said, sighing. “Would you like soup?”

  “Angie in reception said I looked awful.” He was relishing this. Caius was rarely sick, but when he was, he usually took to his bed. I thought of the last time I was allowed to convalesce: In the hospital, after Iris was born. It had felt like a vacation, not having to cook for two whole days, not having to help anyone else in the bathroom.

  I sat in the kitchen with my own headache while Iris pulled all the plastic containers from the drawer, sticking germs to them with eager little fingers. Caius started moaning something about wanting a cool cloth and a ginger ale. I pretended I couldn’t hear him. Sweet potatoes and the last of the corn and a smooth-hipped butternut squash sat in the basket on the counter. I had meant to start a new soup but I felt too exhausted, so instead I sat on the kitchen floor with Iris, pressing my thumbs into my temples, hoping to grind the headache away.

  “Dada,” said Iris. “Dada’s sick.”

  “I know, love,” I said. “But at least you’re feeling better.” Iris was fascinated that he was here; she wanted to go visit, she wanted to be the one to bring the ginger ale, the newspaper. And I didn’t.

  “Why don’t you bring this to Dada?” I creaked myself off the floor to give her a can of ginger ale for one hand, a straw for the other. The can was cold and Iris winced—she hated cold against her skin—but she didn’t drop it. She liked her mission.

  “Take it to the living room for Dada,” I said, feeling a little sly and temporarily relieved. Soon enough, I would have to make this soup fo
r everyone, soup they might or might not eat, and toast, and a salad, and probably someone would require a hamburger, someone who looked terribly hungry and made me feel like a wretched mother for suggesting vegetables and bread might be enough. Probably Oliver, but maybe Iris, who was learning how to play the mealtime game. I didn’t want to have a game. I wanted to take a nap.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” I felt Oliver touching the ends of my hair as if they needed surreptitious tenderness.

  “Why?” I asked, sitting up. I had fallen asleep on the linoleum, and I could feel a hot line where my cheek had been pressed against a seam. Dreams slid off me and my body felt heavy, but my head felt light. Asleep on the kitchen floor. I sighed, and Oliver stepped back and inspected me, as if he might be able to see where the pod person had faulted in replicating his mother. Then he grabbed an apple from the basket on the counter and bounced out the door.

  “Are you better?” I called after him.

  “Going for a bike ride,” was his answer.

  “Iris threw up,” yelled Caius, who’d gone upstairs to rest.

  Carra was next to appear. “Do you have my sick note?” she asked, standing with her hip pressed against the doorframe as if holding up the whole house. “I’m going back tomorrow.”

  I could hear Iris crying upstairs.

  “I’m okay now. And it’s Vivian’s birthday.” Carra looked pale.

  “No one is to be sick anymore,” I declared, still sitting on the kitchen floor. “I hereby declare it—the sickness allowance is now bankrupted.”

  “Iris threw up again,” said Carra. “And I don’t think you can bankrupt an allowance.” She sneezed twice and started up the stairs. Iris cried a long stream of indecipherable grievance. I felt a curse inside my throat—a good, satisfying goddamn, the kind of word that would have sent my mother into a tizzy. Now that I was the mother, I didn’t say those words, either. But sometimes they sat in my throat like half-swallowed bread.

  “I’m coming,” I said. I got up and followed Carra to take care of Iris. Mop, bathe, soothe, feed, read, cuddle, read, get drink of milk, get drink of water, read again.

  That night after the soup, and grilled cheese for Carra and Caius, and peanut butter and jelly for Iris, I went out to the garden in the dark. I was beginning to have a fever myself and could feel the scratchy throat that meant I would lose my voice in a day or two. I’d have to croak to my children and would not have the luxury of an afternoon in bed, the way Caius did. I went outside anyway. I surveyed my garden, where I hadn’t readied anything for winter, where the mums I’d ordered from the girls’ field hockey fund-raiser and the cabbage plants from Carra’s swim team plant sale sat in their plastic containers, despairing of water and new homes for their pot-bound roots.

  It all made me sad: November, the early dark, Iris’s surrender to sleep, Caius holding his feverish head and taking over with Oliver and his catch-up homework; the good continuance made me almost as sad as the gray-nipped ends of things. I loved to watch things growing dormant, though, the trees settling in for sleep between leaves, their sap slowing. The plants that quit aboveground and crept silently through the winter, growth as unostentatious as the body’s aging. I wanted everyone to be well. I wanted to take Iris to town to pick out a beautiful outfit for our neighbors’ infant, to bring it over with homemade food, to hold the baby and smell that inexplicable glorious perfume of the newly born. These pleasures would come soon, I consoled myself.

  Iris would go to preschool next fall. She’d start to choose her own friends, bringing home stories about the toughest boys or the shy ones, exerting her self in her choices. She’d be three and independent; she’d learn things I hadn’t taught her, my Jitterbug. It was a relief and a despair. That was when I started thinking of more, inevitably, of more children to dilute the pain of loving them each too much even as I had to let go. I secretly loathed the parent-teacher conferences, resented hearing who my children were without me, even as I was proud of them. Or I was resentful of the teachers for not noticing the same talents I saw. It was like long division, and I was the number being divided as they grew in steps, as I broke myself apart to let them loose. But having another wasn’t the answer anymore; I wasn’t sure it had ever been. Each letting go was equally intense.

  I’d never discovered what happened to the pumpkins. Halloween had come and gone, Spirit Night first, when the kids played hide-and-seek in the woods and shaving creamed the stop signs and toilet papered trees. Amanda never carved hers, but she had had a baby, so I probably shouldn’t have noticed. It was just that I felt a mild proprietary interest in the gourd I’d given her. Down the street, Mike Reading instructed his thirteen-year-old son, Joey, to shaving cream only his own house, to use as many eggs as he’d like, keeping in mind that he’d have to clean up the next day. Oliver was invited, though he was three years younger, and he went as cheerfully to the cleanup as he had to the mess making. He came home with a store-bought orange-and-black-frosted cupcake from Mrs. Reading, shaving cream crusted on his jeans, and a great grin.

  “I used a squeegee,” he said. “You should have seen how clean I got the windows.”

  “You can wash Daddy’s car anytime,” I said. “Or mine.”

  “No way.” Oliver said, running upstairs.

  Now that it was November, the pumpkins were gone or eaten into rinds by the relentless squirrels. I’d made pumpkin pie and pumpkin soup and pumpkin bread, and Caius and Oliver had pitched the spent and nibbled jack-o’-lanterns into the compost heap with grand flourish. The shops had started in on Thanksgiving displays, and the outlet on Route 17 was already selling Christmas lights and wreaths and candy canes. We’d have Thanksgiving ourselves again; all my brothers had other plans. Maybe a stray single or couple from Caius’s office would come, but no family. I was a little disappointed and a little relieved. The few times my brothers had come, they’d appeared uncomfortable in the house, as if my family were somehow usurping their memories of the place. My mother had always managed to make everyone’s favorite dishes, to serve everything warm, to orchestrate the kind of strifeless joyful family gatherings that usually only occurred in nineteenth-century novels. There was singing, and my father’s face was rosy with uncomplicated pleasure and turkey and wine. My holidays could never compete, even with the same kitchen, the same dining room at my disposal.

  Tonight I noticed that Mrs. Martin had put out her snowflake flag, which was flapping in the November night. Iris would love the flag; one of her rare easy enthusiasms was for holiday decorations. I started to dig in the cold earth with a spade, hoping I wouldn’t disturb a tulip for a measly purple cabbage plant. I thought about Iris’s new two-year-old tricks and my battles with her. Iris’s will was different from the others’—it demanded that I pay attention, full attention. She wouldn’t tolerate my weeding or cooking or even dressing while we talked. She hung on me or grabbed the spade or spatula or hairbrush. And part of me resisted this need and part of me knew it was just for now, that she’d grow up soon enough and I’d have mornings to myself, and then afternoons, and in November the garden hardly needs a full day. But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to belong entirely to her the way I could with the others. I had less, but I needed a bit more time, for my weeding and mulching, for the seedpods snapped off the irises, for pruning the forsythias, wintering over the strawberry beds.

  7

  Amanda

  Four weeks after Malena was born, my body was completely unprepared for sex of any kind, but I kept thinking about it, longing for it, the old languorous days, partly craving the accoutrements—unbuttoning, socks kicked off under the sheets, the salt of Aaron’s skin right above the hair on his chest, his taste on my tongue, the tender green smell of him, the thick sleep afterward—the way one longs for a bath when it’s really the smell of almond soap and not the hot soaking itself that sings a siren song. My senses were sleeping, lost in weary, milky baby mode, and when I watched my husband knotting his tie, adjusting the ends, and tucking in hi
s shirt, I envied the shirt. I wanted sex because I wanted normal, self-indulgent life in my body again. But I couldn’t imagine I’d ever have that back, exactly, and I couldn’t imagine we’d have sex for a long time either. Even though it appeared when was mostly up to me—even if the traditional version would have to wait for more healing. How of any variety seemed too unbearable in my bruised and sutured state. So I longed and said nothing and went about the excruciating, delicious stream of hours caring for Malena.

  I had actually been ambivalent about children in our early days; it was Aaron who knew he wanted kids, always knew he wanted them, and more than one. That was our first argument; he’d asked me, over chocolate cake with gold leaf and a single, surgically sliced raspberry at Le Cirque—our one-month anniversary dinner—how many I wanted.

  “Oh,” I said, surprised because the look in his face had been so intense, almost like the look he got when he climaxed. I’d felt a shock of embarrassment that he’d get that look in public, but then, no one else at the restaurant knew what it meant.

  “I mean, I always wanted half a dozen,” he said. “Before I learned how much private colleges cost.”

  “Oh,” I said again, trying to excise the gold leaf with my fork. I couldn’t bear that face again.

  “I guess—” I started, but then he put his hand over mine.

  “It doesn’t have to be that many,” he whispered, his tone suddenly subdued.

  “No, I mean, I was never completely sure I want any at all,” I said. But then the thought of seeing the grief I knew was there if I looked up made me add, “Until I met you, of course.”

  I had lied. He knew and I knew, and the sex was dulled and I sniped at him for little things like leaving his underwear in my bed. And he started to work more and kiss less, and I was afraid we were lost. The anticipatory grief gripped me, twisted me—I couldn’t lose him. So it didn’t take any thought to tell him that I would never rule it out, that I was on the fence, but that he could ask me again in a year if we were still dating. The grief vanished. In a year, we were engaged. Two years later we were both fully committed to having a little one and even to living in the suburbs. We had sex at least once a day, and even though my friends told me getting-pregnant sex could be a chore, it wasn’t. We took the project seriously, and we were both people who liked to succeed. It was a marathon, and our earnestness reminded me of our earliest days. It worked within a month. Because of Aaron, I’d lost my ambivalence—what we had together was too good not to expand.