The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  Caius told me he wasn’t very popular in his high school; I thought probably he was beyond needing to be popular because he was smart and sufficiently entertained in the world of his own activities. He was captain of the debate team; he played rugby for two years and football for one, but he didn’t date cheerleaders. In college he took advanced business courses, as well as philosophy and history and political science. He told me he was mainly interested in entrepreneurialism back then; he drove students to the airport from the isolated midwestern town where the college sat squat on a flat square of cornfield. He called his venture Red Ride, because the old Volkswagen he had inherited from his mother was a deep maroon. It paid for his books and room and board. And he implied that there were always interested women—a fact I had no trouble believing, partly because of his height and manner, partly because he had a deep vein of shyness, which was social gold with smart girls who thought they might bring him out, discover what deep riches lay below the surface.

  I was right from the start, right to fall in love with him. He knew how to pay attention, he wanted to know people. He wanted to know me, even if usually the conversations we had now were about braces for Carra and something new and cute Iris said, about Oliver’s dietary habits instead of about our deepest desires and needs. Theirs were our most immediate needs now.

  That third afternoon, Aaron took a half day so they could visit day cares, and I relished the time to myself in my house. You are more complicated than you seem, I thought, remembering her audacity, still brewing a rich resentment. At a distance, her working-mom plan had seemed okay for her, but up close, couldn’t she see what I saw? She hated the idea of leaving her child, despaired of being torn apart too soon. She needed to give up her vanity, change her plan—she had an actual baby now, not just the idea of a baby but someone who couldn’t hold her own head up, someone who needed her mother.

  I had so much cleaning to do. I ran the dishwasher with white vinegar to get rid of the smell and mineral deposits; I packed up the camp stove and cleaned the toilets and changed the vacuum bag. I peered into the basement but decided against cleaning down there. It was enough to remove evidence of our guests from the upstairs: her juice stains, her long hairs all over the couch cushions, her maxipads stuffed in my wastebaskets without being wrapped in toilet paper, so they curled open like wounded animals as I dumped the whole receptacle into a big black trash bag. Iris trolled behind me, trying to help or get my attention. It was tedious. When Carra was born, we’d hired a woman to clean every other week, but she never did things quite right. I’d had to leave the house so I wouldn’t follow her around, noticing how she used Brillo on the chrome around the stove. But between Oliver and Iris, I’d taken over again. And most of the time, I didn’t mind. I detested the cleaning itself, but I liked being in charge, being the one who said where the orange juice went in the fridge. It was an odd sort of power, I thought. Household power. Power over the ordinary.

  I took Iris out for ice cream, bathed her, put her to bed. When Caius came home, I went out for an early evening walk, surveying the lawns. Sometimes I thought I should have a dog for the monotonous company, for the inspiration to leave my own house. It was as if the house had become an extension of my body, as though I needed the skin of walls and windows to keep the world at a distance. Amanda and Aaron’s car was in our drive when I got back home. From outside, I could see Amanda’s form as she lay on the couch with her baby. It looked as if they were sleeping, so I walked down the pebbly path into the woods. I hadn’t been in months, and the carpet of leaves was over a foot deep. The trees had mostly given up; the last few rainy nights had torn down even the recalcitrant unturned ash leaves. The sky was a clean gray, an early winter sky, crisscrossed by the naked branches. The stream sang with recent rain. I followed the main path, looking up and down, at puff-balls and a crested nuthatch climbing backward down the thick-barked trunk of a sassafras.

  I wondered what I had done with all my quiet time before, and what I’d do when they left and when Iris grew out of needing me. Chipmunks flurried the leaves, and I saw a flash of orange between tree trunks. Following a furrow in the blanket, I came upon a sort of clearing and suddenly found myself facing over a hundred pumpkins half-covered with leaves. Their stems were still thick with moisture, and most of their bellies still round. A few looked rot-soft and slumped in the corners. Squirrels had chewed a select few to bowls filled with black and orange crumbs. They were like a crowd, all huddled together. I shivered and looked for any other evidence. One pumpkin had mittens in front of it, crossed as if they contained a child’s restrained hands. Another wore a wool cap. I wondered whether this was the work of teenagers, which teenagers, and why; until now, I’d forgotten about Halloween’s mysterious vanishings. But some of the pumpkins were enormous, at least fifty pounds, and it was hard to imagine the sleepy town teenagers slogging though the woods with cumbersome orange burdens. I laughed aloud. The pumpkins looked cozy beneath their blanket of fallen oak leaves, sassafras, maple, beech, and sycamore.

  11

  Amanda

  It was our third day as homeless people. Aaron, driving and whistling, acted as if this were a normal family outing. Malena fussed in the backseat—an uneasy sound, slightly hungry—but she didn’t break into a wail, so I stayed in front, my stomach a wad of sick anxiety.

  “Mozart, isn’t that?” I asked, mainly to force his lips out of their energetic tune. Perfectly tuned. Aaron had unused musical talents. His mother had trained as an opera singer before she met his father, and she always encouraged Aaron with piano lessons and jazz saxophone, even in Kenya. He never practiced; he just kept his perfect pitch like a small stone in his pocket, something to take out and rub from time to time for its soothing surface.

  “No.” He stopped, but only for a note or two. “Sibelius.” He resented another day away from work, but I couldn’t do this alone. Later in the evening he’d shut himself in the bathroom to go over some briefs by phone.

  “I hope it’s not awful. It might be awful. Maybe I can get another month of leave. Maybe this is the wrong thing to do.” My eyes felt dry and itchy from lack of sleep; my head a sandbag. Everything hurt, and I was tender and vulnerable when I was supposed to be in charge. A parent. Someone who is supposed to know all the answers, even when she forgets to brush her teeth for two days and neglects to tie her own shoes.

  “We won’t know if we don’t go,” said Aaron. He stopped whistling altogether, but instead of feeling relieved, I wanted the sound back for distraction. Malena, oblivious to the angst of everything, slept in the backseat in her own private nighttime.

  Tot Time was in a new brick-and-clapboard building inside a fenced-in compound, with a parking lot so fresh it stank of tar and felt spongy as moss. We had to be buzzed in at the lot, and again at the gate. Before the tree wrecked our home, before I’d lost my sense of safety, I might’ve been able to see the order, the cleanliness, to see the place for all its good features. If I could sleep for more than thirty minutes at a time; if I didn’t wake clammy and sweating. But in my current state, I reviled the cheerful woman at the desk who handed us brochures and made us sign in and showed us the monitors that displayed what was happening in every room at every moment. Malena started howling, so I sat down on a kiddie chair in the hall to nurse her.

  “The tour,” said a perky young teacher with a blond, starched face, wearing a Tot Time polo shirt and a big badge that said LIBBY—ONES. She stretched out her hand for us to follow, as if I didn’t have an infant attached to my breast.

  I stuck my pinkie finger between Malena’s mouth and my nipple, bore her sweet, quick cry, then held her close and stood up.

  “Shirt,” Aaron whispered, pointing. My breast was still exposed in the orange fluorescent light of Tot Time.

  “You go, I’ll catch up.” I said.

  “Oh, no,” Libby said. She tossed her hair, only it was sprayed into place so it didn’t budge. “We have security measures.”

  She sai
d “may-shures,” like a midwesterner, which made me grin a little.

  So I made them wait, and then Libby—Ones led us around Tot Time. The actual tots appeared happy enough, in the yard on the little slides and in the bright rooms, finger painting on an enormous sheet of newsprint. But in the infant room, the faces hurt me—tiny infants looking up from their swings, seats, and cribs with such anticipation, such open hunting, that I knew I couldn’t do it. One woman, older and billowed with fat, rocked a child so tiny she looked too small to have been born. That child was cooing, looking deep into her caretaker’s face, and I thought that this, though better for the baby, was even worse for me to see. Replaced. Malena’s eyes searching someone else’s in the waning months of our deepest attention to each other. It was impossible, and I started crying.

  “My wife…,” said Aaron. “It’s hard.”

  “We understand, here at Tot Time,” said Libby, but her face said, Get me away from this ridiculous hormone-crazed mom and back to the ones, who appreciate their juice.

  “Okay,” said Aaron. We were sitting on Thea’s couch after our afternoon of tours. Oliver was yelling to a friend in the dusk outside. In the driveway a basketball thumped.

  The couch was thick and cozy. Even though I sensed Thea’s condescension and resentment now, I had started to feel a little like it was my couch when Thea wasn’t there because it smelled slightly of milk, because I’d fallen asleep there, and because despite the fact that she might actually loathe me for my choice to work “outside the home,” her house was welcoming, comfortable, a grand lap. All the rooms on the first floor—I still hadn’t been up to the second, though I was curious what her bedroom was like, especially whether it had flowery window treatments and a matching Laura Ashley duvet and pillowcases—smelled faintly of lavender and faintly of chocolate chip cookies. Comfort and more comfort. Girl and mom all at once. But was it all artificial? Did she really disrespect my choice to work? Did she respect me at all? One more day and it wouldn’t matter what she thought.

  Aaron continued. “So, we don’t like Tot Time or Pear Tree or Becky’s Day Care or the Early Childhood Center. We don’t like any of them.” He finished running his fingers down the list, which he’d typed on his computer at work. There were addresses, phone numbers, references, and I wanted to wrench it from his hands and fling it away from us.

  “You don’t like any of them,” he continued. “I think Early Childhood’s pretty nice.”

  “They didn’t have room anyway.”

  “They have a waiting list.”

  “Shh,” I said. “You’ll wake her.” The whole conversation revolted me. Aaron’s breath was bitter.

  “Mango, why don’t you ask for another month off; you’re clearly not ready.”

  “Why don’t you take a month off? Why is this a woman’s job? Why is it me who has to choose?”

  “You don’t have to choose.” He took my left foot in his hands and started massaging the arch. It felt delicious, and it tickled. I wanted him to keep doing it, but I didn’t want him to know that. “But I’ve got nothing on your lactation skills.” He leered. Or maybe he just smiled. It was all so complicated. Had I said that to Thea—had I really said she was more complicated than I thought? I hadn’t meant it in a bad way. I’d meant everything looked too easy. That I was jealous.

  “Yes I do. If I take another month off they’ll think I’m not really meant to ever be an editor in chief. They’ll give my best books to Jessica Gravitas, who is only twenty-six and whose main talent is having a famous poet grandfather and who will never get married because she’s so mean.”

  “People don’t have to be married to have children.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “Fuck you for not having to choose.” Even as I said it I felt as though I were reading a script from a daytime soap. This was not my house. This was not my life.

  Aaron was still holding my foot, but he looked up. Thea was in the kitchen; I could hear the low hum of her voice. I wondered how long she’d been there, how much she’d heard. It was exquisitely clear she didn’t approve of the day-care idea any more than a nanny. Part of me felt like mentioning it in front of her all the time, as if I could prove, somehow, that it wasn’t bad and wrong by talking about it, by bringing the words into her house. Part of me thought it was bad and wrong. Especially now that I’d seen what day care looked like. It looked awful, it looked damaging. Even if it was clean and safe, it looked very selfish.

  “Smells great,” said Aaron, calling into the kitchen a little too loudly.

  “Hmm? Oh, thanks,” said Thea. Clearly, she’d heard everything.

  That night after dinner, I called a nanny agency and arranged a day of interviews. I couldn’t wait another day until we’d be in the hotel—by then it would be Friday evening, and a whole wasted weekend would be unbearable. Thea said she’d be out all morning anyway, and Aaron promised to come home early for the last few. So many people were ready to work it made me suspicious; if they were so capable and experienced, why were they unemployed?

  Aaron took Malena downstairs after I’d nursed her to sleep. I could hear her little animal noises of protest, but I let him try to settle her, though my instinct was to bring instant contentment down after her. I had to practice letting go—just a little—giving her to Aaron. I’d never meant to be the only, the primary parent; I’d meant to be one of two, equal in our worship and responsibility.

  Instead of going where my body leaned, I helped Thea with the dishes. She protested, as usual, but I hoped to move past our little spat, if I could. End our third—and almost last—day with Thea on a peaceful note. The younger kids had gone to watch TV, Carra had clomped off to her room to do whatever she did there, and Caius had gone upstairs to finish up some work in his office. Having not been upstairs, I hadn’t seen his attic office, either; I imagined big leather furniture and a ridiculously manly pipe odor. So I was left with Thea, and she was left with a mess. I was determined to do something right, to show her I wasn’t all lounging and profanity. My mostly healed stitches weren’t so itchy, and though I was exhausted, dishes suddenly seemed like a novelty.

  “You don’t have to; I know you’re tired,” she said for the third time.

  “We’re going to the hotel tomorrow night,” I said, though she already knew. “Just the interviews, then we’ll be out of your hair.”

  “How will you manage in a hotel?” She tugged a strand of hair from her mouth and left a thin swipe of dish soap bubbles across her cheek. She looked tired, too. I took the dishes she prerinsed and fit them into the dishwasher.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said, feeling like she’d lost the right to discuss this with me.

  “No.” I wasn’t sure whether she meant the hotel or my dish loading. Thea took the dishes out after I put them in, rearranging. My placement looked perfectly fine to me, but I moved away anyway. I started on the drying rack, toweling off serving dishes, pots, the wine glasses with their pregnant glass bellies.

  “What are you going to do, leave the nanny in the hotel?” She didn’t look up.

  One more day. We could check in tomorrow night. After our discussion about child care, I’d tried unsuccessfully to find somewhere for Aaron, Malena, and me to go right away, but everything within a thirty-mile radius was full. I’d tried to find something in Westchester, even in the city, but everything was booked. Aaron told me to suck it up. I told him he had no idea what it was like to suck it up, he was off having a fabulous time in his comfy office where the only obnoxious person was the scary secretary who wore gold appliqués on her talons. He told me I’d forgotten about the senior partners and the lobby attendant who pretended he didn’t know you and wouldn’t let you in if you forgot your ID badge. It didn’t cheer me up, but it made me laugh a little.

  As I tried to find homes for the serving dishes, Iris sprinted in from the TV room and started crawling on the floor, pretending to be a dog. Thea didn’t protest, though I knew it was well past her bedtime. Mine, too.


  “Ma,” said Oliver, lighting the room as always with the sharp contrasts of his face, the brilliant blue eyes, the dark lashes. I started stacking placemats the way she always did.

  “I need cookies for tomorrow. I forgot. I signed up.”

  “What?” said Thea. “What kind of cookies? Maybe we should buy Oreos.” I was surprised to see she was grinning. “Maybe we’ll get the lard-o-rama special at the bakery, the kind with that weird frosting in the shape of Mickey Mouse.”

  “It isn’t lard, Mom,” said Oliver, but he sensed her fun.

  “I could make them,” I said, feeling cavalier.

  “I make!” said Iris. She climbed a stool by the counter, tugging on the flour bin at the back. Napkins rained on the floor as she reached.