The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  After the parade of visitors, it was only our little family. My mother hired a visiting nurse—what I wanted from her was something less expensive and more personal, but Mary did help. The visitors had been exhausting and a somewhat pleasant distraction. I’d fallen asleep against my great-aunt’s arm; I’d breast-fed in front of Aaron’s nervous group of coworkers, all prebaby husbands themselves. It made me feel daring and old, though generally I was too dazed to pay attention to anything.

  My mother, though: I’d paid attention to my mother. She visited when Malena was two weeks old, having canceled three times in the first week, leaving me nervous with the anticipation of who she would be when she finally came, now that I’d made her a grandmother. When we were little, her own parents came to visit only once or twice a year, filling the house with cigar smoke and the scent of gardenia hand cream. When she finally did visit on her way home from a conference in Philadelphia, my sister had to come out from the city, too, though she’d already met Malena in the hospital and had driven out twice to cook us dinner. On the first two visits, I was thrilled to have her chopping onions in my kitchen, thrilled even to have her onion-scented hands holding her niece. But coming for my mother’s visit was an obvious assertion of territory, clear-cut competition.

  Ultimately, it didn’t matter. My mom looked at Malena, her face stretched into an approximation of approval. She pressed on the baby’s chin to look inside her mouth, like someone inspecting a horse for sale. She kissed my cheek and her mouth felt cold.

  “I’d like some tea, please,” she instructed the nurse, who looked put out but went to the kitchen. Malena fell asleep on Aaron’s chest and my mother fell asleep on the couch and Jane and I nervously pretended to look through magazines—when I should have been sleeping myself. An hour later, my mother woke up, cleared her throat, and asked Aaron to take her to the train so she wouldn’t miss her connection back to Boston—in three hours at Penn Station. I didn’t protest; I was weary from waiting for the visit, weary from waiting for my mother to wake up, and most of all, worn-out from having grown and delivered a small human who woke every few hours demanding my milk. Aaron took my mother and Jane to the station and I tried not to feel too wistful for nonspecific grandmotherly attention for my daughter.

  “She’s not psychologically prepared to be a grandmother,” said Aaron, when he got home. “She’ll come around.”

  “I wish my father lived in the States,” I said.

  “He said he’d come in the spring, right?”

  “Malena will be driving by then.” I sighed. “She bought Malena a sled,” I said. “I don’t think our daughter will need a Flexible Flyer for about six years.”

  Four weeks had felt like a year. A good year. A torturous year. Aaron was back at work; it was our last day with the nurse service. I couldn’t wait to be alone in the house—not just alone, responsible—but it also terrified me. I was up every three hours at night, and then Aaron took one shift, bottle-feeding Malena before he left in the morning, and then the day was a blur of nursing, crying, napping, diapers. I could fall asleep nursing her in a hard-backed chair, and I did, only the nurse woke me, tapping my shoulder as if it were a recalcitrant IV bag.

  “You could drop her,” she said, taking Malena from me. “You go to sleep now and I’ll hold.”

  But by then, of course, I was nervously awake, my absurd fantasies of Mary the nurse dropping the baby herself, of sudden choking, of SIDS jittering my mind while my body ached for sleep.

  Mostly, the interruptions were horrible. I knew babies cried at night. I knew mothers nursed them back to sleep. I never looked at that equation, at the logical reality that mothers, or fathers, would be waking up to do that nursing or bottle-feeding, that they’d have to get up and manage in the middle of the night, that they’d have to interrupt dreams they had barely started. I felt as if my dreams were a story waiting to happen, the book I’d started six times and loved but left languishing on the nightstand because I couldn’t get back to it.

  I was tired of feeling inadequate as Mary changed or swaddled Malena. I was embarrassed that she’d helped me with my “lactation issues”—she’d squeezed my nipple to show me how to express milk as unceremoniously as she might wash and dry dishes. And I was nervous to let her go, because it was an enormous relief that she was there to let me nap and to do a bottle-feeding when I was asleep. Four hours slipped past as fast as ten minutes. And she did wash and dry dishes. She concerned herself with food, too, when I was ravenous and I didn’t have a clue how to scramble an egg. Nothing had ever been this difficult. I thought I was awake, sitting on the couch, but I wasn’t, and I woke up feeling as if a gray fuzz coated my eyes. I put on my glasses to see where Malena was—with Mary—and the world was far too bright.

  But Malena. It hurt to love like that; it reminded me of how it felt when Aaron was first in my life, when I wanted to think about him, when thinking about him filled me enough that I had no time to think about anything else. But that sort of love had made me sharper, and barely one month into motherhood, I was blissful, exhausted, and afraid I was irrevocably dulled to the rest of the world.

  Mary recommended not going outside with her until four months, and then, since Malena was a fall baby, she didn’t recommend going outside until spring.

  Packing up to leave, she said, “Hon, you have a nice place here. Set up your fort. Keep her warm. Not like that—” She adjusted my hold on Malena, though the nursing felt fine to me. “She’s hardly getting anything.”

  Apparently Mary had a direct line to Malena’s stomach. She could see things no one else could. But she also made me pancakes. And that very afternoon, after Malena fell asleep in my arms and Mary relieved me of my perfect burden and rested her in the mostly unused bassinet, Mary had brushed my hair.

  “You could use it, hon,” she’d said. And I didn’t mind that she meant I looked awful, because I did. And because it felt delicious, the brush tugging through my hair, short strokes, gentle and sure. Then at last, she was gone.

  The first thing I did when Mary left for good was to go outside with Malena. It was the second week of November, and our backyard was mowed and leafless and trimmed now, though I’d never connected the hideous drone of mowers and blowers to the people I’d hired right before my water broke. That had been then, when I’d had a whole lapful of time to complain about my physical state, to obsess about stretch marks and heartburn; and this was now, when my body no longer belonged to me. Instead, I had temporary ownership of a new and fascinating body, one that hadn’t been budded with sexuality yet, one that was only doing the work of waking to the world.

  No more Mary, at last. Outside, five o’clock was vaguely lit by a fading sun. The trees tilted against the sky and the landscape looked like a movie screen’s grainy vista, a pan of New England with the house lights still on. But it wasn’t New England. We had two patchy-skinned sycamores in the backyard, and the air smelled of mostly finished roses. Still, the cold backing the last of the light was unmistakable. No more autumn. Winter twining its fingers in the night’s hair.

  Grainy clouds marred the final smudge of afternoon blue. Over the fence I heard children yelling. Somehow, they seemed unrelated to my Malena, a different species, so rough and big. Malena’s mouth opened in her sleep—she was rooting for a nipple. I touched the tiny bow of lips with my pinkie. If Mary were here, she’d be watching; she’d remind me to wash my hands before touching her.

  The yard looked so bare; our groundhog was gone, and I worried for it. Was it just hibernating or had something eaten it? What ate groundhogs? I made myself feel almost sick, imagining a hawk swooping up baby groundhogs in my own safe backyard. I was so lost in my baby that everything was about babies now.

  Something tapped my head, and though I couldn’t reach up to test, it felt like a raindrop. I looked at the sky, where a bank of dark gray had blocked out the thin new moon. Rain. I held Malena close and scuttled back inside.

  The phone was ringing as I settled
in on the couch to nurse. In my last life, I might have answered it, but now that I was a mother, now that I belonged to someone else’s needs, I let the machine answer. The whole house buzzed, and the lights went off, on, and off again. The storm was a few miles away; I counted between thunder and lightning, one mile per “one Mississippi.” Malena started to cry. The last storm had been her birthday. To what backwater had we moved? Why did we have so many power outages in New Jersey? I settled Malena to my breast as I sat in the grainy evening light. The maroon upholstery smelled of milk.

  I wondered whether I could ever bear to have another child—whether it was possible to sustain this intensity of having and giving up. Whether another child would be Malena’s friend and frustration and greatest competition, the way Jane and I had been. I thought about Aaron standing by the hospital bed, telling me to breathe and concentrate on my focus object, his braided metal bracelet. Of course, in the end focusing hadn’t been enough, and I’d had the C-section—the hard light, the quick sensation of being unzipped, and it was done. I hadn’t seen him wearing the bracelet since, and I felt a completely unnecessary pang of nostalgia. If his bracelet had gone missing in the hospital, was he still the same man who wanted roots after childhood peregrination? Would he tell Malena his monkey tales and all about the Hawaiian rainforest? Did he still have any explorer left in him? Did I?

  I woke up because the lights were on and the doorbell was chiming. Upstairs, our stereo was making unnecessary music; I didn’t remember leaving it on. Though I’d learned about leaving the phone unanswered, I still couldn’t bring myself to ignore the door. What if someone spied me through the window? I tried to get up without separating Malena’s sleeping mouth from my breast, but of course she woke and cried as I carried her to the door with my robe clamped closed with one elbow.

  “How hard it is, being born,” said Thea when I opened the door. She was wearing lipstick. I would never have time for lipstick again.

  There were two children with her, a boy and the little girl, and she held out a foil-covered casserole. The rain had stopped. Her daughter clung to a gift wrapped in paper with pink clouds.

  “Vegetable lasagna?” she offered.

  In the city, no one would stop by with vegetable lasagna. My boss, Neethi, might have sent some bagels, but she wouldn’t have come to the apartment. In fact, she’d messengered a scratchy, frilly pink dress Malena couldn’t wear for two years at least to New Jersey on the company dime.

  “And this is for the baby—” Thea wrestled with her daughter for a minute, trying to gain possession of the gift. The silver bow tore off in the girl’s hands.

  “I would have come sooner,” she started, before commanding, “Enough, Iris,” as she put her hands firmly around the gift.

  “Mom-eeeeeeeeeeeeee,” said Iris. But she let go of the package and ran down the walkway in the dusk, gripping the bow in her teeth.

  “Oliver, can you please…?” Thea had such a yielding voice, a mother voice, even when she was scolding. She smiled at me. “Is everything okay? I mean, did your power cut out, too?”

  “Yes,” I said. The boy caught the little girl’s hand and held tight while the girl sunk down to the sidewalk and whined.

  “She’s gorgeous,” said Thea. I looked down at Malena, who had stopped fussing and was looking out at the world with that enormous expression of hers, a wide-eyed recognition, a sort of wise gaze. I also noticed that my breast was half out of my robe like an offering from my open-flapped nursing bra.

  “You’re nursing?” said Thea.

  “Yes,” I said, covering myself. “Though we supplement.” I didn’t know why I was volunteering this information. Iris stopped struggling and got up to see what all the fuss was about. She ran over to me, to Malena, and pointed one fat finger at Malena’s face.

  “Sorry,” Thea said. She reached down herself then and stole a short stroke of Malena’s cheek. I kept hearing Mary’s voice, “Visitors must wash hands,” as she had instructed Cornelius and Jane; my friend Rosanna, who brought the baby her very own Janson’s art history tome and brought me a silk shirt that wouldn’t fit me for months, if ever; my aunt Ronnie; even my doctor mother, guiding them to the powder room and the antibacterial pump soap. But Thea knew what she was doing; surely Thea meant no harm. She probably washed her hands at home. I hoped.

  “Shall I put this—” Thea gestured toward our dining room table with her gift and food. I didn’t want to let her in to see the mess, but I didn’t have a free hand for the loot. And I did appreciate it. I was suddenly famished. I could smell good cheese from under the foil, aged Cheddar or Gouda or something. I nodded. Iris ran a circle around her mom, and I couldn’t help noticing her nose was crusty with a cold.

  “Does supplementing mean formula?” Thea was standing in my dining room, and Iris was picking things up: unopened gifts, the mail, the breast pump briefcase Mary had packed up for Aaron to return to the rental place at the drug store in town. Her pink slicker dripped with leftover tears from the trees and shrubs.

  “I gave up on the pump. It was awful,” I said, tilting my head to ease a neck cramp. I wondered what planet she was from—everyone knew what supplementing meant, and some people, the breast police, Aaron called them, seemed to think it was a crime. Tough luck for them. I sincerely hoped Thea wasn’t one of the breast police.

  “Iris, will you help me?” I wanted to be generous. I pointed to the gift, and Iris smiled and helped tear open the package, revealing a heaven-soft yellow blanket with Malena’s name and birthdate—all correct—and a matching cap and booties. Iris tried to wear the hat. It was so wonderful I almost wept, but stopped myself by offering everyone shortbread cookies from a tin I’d received.

  Under her unzipped raincoat, Thea wore a tank top and her husband’s old button-down tucked into her jeans. She looked like something out of a catalogue, casually elegant. And part of me wanted to hand her Malena, to run upstairs and take a shower and get right into bed. If anyone knew how to care for a baby, this woman did.

  “Would you like some tea?” I asked, because I was going to be nice to this lovely woman if it killed me.

  “Absolutely not,” said Thea, closing the cookie tin, to Iris’s disappointment. “We’ve exhausted you enough.”

  She knew when to come, and when to leave.

  After they departed, the two children still chewing cookies, I washed my hands and ran a washcloth along Malena’s cheek. She squirmed, then fell asleep, and for once, she didn’t wake up when I transferred her to the bassinet. I would survive without Mary after all. I stood at the dining room table with a fork and the lasagna, thinking I should have been more gracious, more thankful. It was overwhelming when she came with her kids—and that was just two of the three. Would I ever be that calm again? Had I ever been that calm to begin with?

  The food was delicious. I was ravenous, and I was an enormous, lumpy, milk-engorged, stitched and sleepless blob. Thea and her husband were probably having fabulous sex. Their children slept in their own beds, I was sure, slept as peacefully as babies in television commercials. She probably tiptoed in with her husband and looked down on their angelic faces before their own blissful bedtime. They never were tainted with formula; she probably breast-fed them all until age four and grew her own organic vegetables to make her own organic baby food. I could never compete. But then, I didn’t really want to be her, I just wanted her to mother me.

  As usual, right around the time Aaron came home, Malena entered a sort of witching hour of inconsolability. If we were lucky, she’d nurse for an hour or so and I’d be sore, but we’d have some peace while she sucked. But more often, she settled and unsettled in her bassinet, then whimpered until we picked her up, rocked, walked around the room. And for almost an hour, she’d yell, or whine, or hoot her baby noises no matter what we did. But if we put her down again, she’d scream, a pure, angry, open-mouthed newborn rage.

  When she cried, Aaron got very calm. When she cried, I felt helpless unless it was nursin
g she wanted.

  I ate two thirds of the giant pan of casserole before Aaron came home. He was whistling, his eyes dark with exhaustion, and the minute he put his keys on the table, Malena woke up.

  “That looks good,” he said, despite the crying. “Did you make it?”

  Do I look like I have time to cook? I thought, but checked myself. “The neighbor, Thea,” I said.

  “She’s really nice.”

  Of course she was. She was nice and perfect and gorgeous, and I remembered how he’d looked at her, a happy, tiny assessment, when she’d first come to our door. I envied him for getting to be the father; I envied him for being allowed to think lustful thoughts about the neighbor.

  “But she’s kind of skinny,” he said, clearly thinking I was brewing the bitter potion of jealousy. The baby’s fuss turned to a thin wail.

  “Not really,” I said, feeling full enough to remain serene.

  “I’ll get her,” he said, picking up a fork and Malena at the same time. I watched him eat the rest of the cold vegetable lasagna, a speck of oily spinach stuck to his chin. Malena spat a little yellow blob on the shoulder of his white dress shirt.

  December