The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  “Okay,” said Thea, archangel Thea.

  “Honey,” said Caius, thumping down the stairs with his son. “Oliver has a secret to tell you.” Had she suggested the idea to Caius? Would she offer without even consulting him?

  Oliver wrapped his arms around his mother’s hip and whispered to her. She managed to bend and stay firm, holding my infant girl. Her hand cradled Malena’s head. Malena wasn’t crying. I tried not to watch too carefully.

  Oliver glowed, his beauty disarming beneath the sugar and dirt smudges on his face. Thea smiled, and she had it, too, though her features were adult, imperfect compared to Oliver’s uncanny balance. Caius had some of it, too. It was taken from each of them equally, like a pre-Mendel theory of heredity, and the whole was even greater than the sum of its parts.

  “My secret,” said Oliver, “is that there are enough cookies left for everyone to have two more.”

  At two thirty-three in the morning, I was nursing Malena on the couch because I didn’t want to wake Aaron. We had to wait for Saturday morning to check into the hotel—Caius’s idea again, but Aaron left us little choice. He was exhausted when he finally came home after midnight and apologized for missing everything—he had a new case, domestic abuse, which was horrible and consuming.

  He told me about it, a little bit. I let him talk but I didn’t want to hear any details. I nodded and pretended to listen for a while, but I fell asleep before he did, and when I woke to Malena’s complaint, I almost said, “I’m listening, really.”

  Their house looked different at night, smaller, more held in by its own arms. The hums and clucks of heat and refrigerator and clocks were more pronounced in the dark. It even smelled different, as if the lavender and cookies of the day were sleeping beneath a gentle reign of dust and night-blooming jasmine.

  I could do it, she’d said.

  I hadn’t told Aaron yet. I hadn’t technically said yes, but already I couldn’t imagine any other arrangement. Guilt edged my calm like frost on unfinished fall leaves. First we had moved in, eating her food and warming her couch with our expansive bodies, filling her kitchen with our noises, lying underneath her, a whole layer of her house made up with us, and now we were going to hire her away from her own children. She had Iris. Iris needed her and distracted her, and though I didn’t doubt she could manage, I wondered why she’d ever want to. If she wanted to, or if she had been temporarily intoxicated by the sweet scent of Malena in her arms, the impossibly small weight, the enormous, exquisite need. I had wanted to write her off after our discussion about how we lived our lives, but I couldn’t do it now, not if I was going to continue to need her. Pay or no pay, she was going to be part of our lives for a little longer at least.

  The stairs complained; the person walking down them was the biggest one in the house.

  “Hello,” said Caius.

  Malena was still nursing, and I didn’t move to cover my breast. It would be wrong to say it felt entirely unsexual, nursing. But it wasn’t about sex, it was simply of the same root, the way love and lovely were related.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t want to wake Aaron.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s good of you to let him sleep. Thea used to stay in their rooms sometimes. And you don’t have rooms. It must feel pretty horrible to have no house. Bereft.”

  He was wearing flannel pajamas, the same ones he’d worn the night they’d rescued us in the storm. I was bereft, and all along I’d felt that it was mostly because I was recovering from having a baby, from being in this milk-filled bubble of her need, every few hours, of waking and waking. It felt like I never slept. But in fact I’d lost something, I’d lost a sense of safety. Maybe that was why I had such a hard time letting myself imagine Malena safe with anyone other than me. Or else that was natural. Sometimes the natural was counterproductive.

  “You’re right,” I said, hearing my own voice crack.

  “You probably would like something to drink,” he said. “We’ll miss you, you know—it’s been nice to have a new one around.”

  I looked up from Malena; Caius was stealing a glance at my breast. It was almost chaste and almost covetous. I wondered whether he was like Aaron, entranced by the body when it was least accessible.

  Caius brought me a tall glass of orange juice, watered down the way I liked it. He watched me drink, and we were tranquil together. I didn’t ask why he was up, what he worried about. There was something solid and safe about not knowing, about assuming that Caius was simply the dad, the man who went to work and drove his son to the movies Oliver told me he loved. If Caius was blushing, I couldn’t tell in the grainy light. It felt good, the quiet attention.

  I remembered the men who flirted with me when I was first married, at work or at parties, how I knew they knew, how there was something especially exciting about knowing you’d never act, knowing the flirting was only flirting.

  And now I felt like a big bag of milk, a great sea of mother, enormous, grown impossibly, grown uncomfortably. Aaron’s clothes didn’t even fit me, and sometimes, pathetically, though I’d never thought he was anything less than delicious and perfectly sized, I wished I had a big husband, so I could feel small beside him now.

  “It’s different for men and women, this whole thing.” He nodded at Malena, then took a sip from a brandy glass. The scent was sharp and warm. “I think men are kind of surprised, the first time around. And even the second. But women, well, you seem to know exactly what to do.”

  “Thea does,” I said. “But I’m still mostly at sea.”

  “Thea,”—Caius sighed—“is very good at this. But it’s good to work, too, to have something for yourself.”

  Sometimes, when Aaron said it, it didn’t feel important enough. When I said it, I felt as if I were trying to convince myself. But Caius wasn’t allowed. Not with his perfect wife who stayed at home to care for his beautiful children, who volunteered to hold the Principal’s Coffee in her yellow kitchen, all the milling mommies and daddies basking in the house’s cookie smell. Hah, did she know of his treachery? Sweet schadenfreude. He secretly wished she worked.

  Yet I wanted a Thea, someone to take over half the role, half the mommy job. And she’d volunteered. So why was I so uneasy? Why did I almost long for Thea to walk down the steps and interrupt our conversation, our mild form of subterfuge? I wondered what it meant to trust her, when the separation between us was dramatic as the wall that kept the night cold out and the grainy light and heat inside.

  12

  Thea

  I’d hatched the ludicrous idea on the spot, and who knew she’d agree, fingering a lock of her shiny brown hair and smiling so seriously? We said we’d try it for a few weeks, which grew after a week to a few months, which was how long they guessed it would take for their house to be habitable. It was an easy span to imagine—brief as a trimester. If I could stand Amanda that long; she’d become a bit of a tyrant when it came to Malena. How much did she eat? she asked, twice a day. What color was her poop? How long did you take her outside? Was she warm enough? How had I managed to let her become my boss? And whom was I rescuing—Malena or Amanda? When she was leaving my house, I thought I could go back to good-neighbor-at-a-distance status, maybe even a sociable acquaintance, but now we were too closely tied over a charming baby girl.

  I tried not to be overcritical about the fact that Amanda’s stains still graced my couch and every now and then I found a foreign brown sock that looked like a dead animal rotting in the corner of the basement bathroom. A wad of hair in the drain. A dirty diaper in the trash beneath the linen. Evidence of her occupation.

  They had moved to a hotel on Route 80, so Amanda brought the baby to me before work—a bustle, a nervous separation. But then Malena stayed with me all day, three or four days a week. She didn’t mind the bottle, and she didn’t seem to be searching for her mother until evening. Amanda was habitually late picking her up, but at least I knew to expect it.

  Malena was like an advertisement for a baby. She shifte
d—warm, exquisite, an object of need and fulfillment—against my chest in the Snugli. Her cry was rare and not at all grating; her requirements were easily met. She only fussed gently when her diaper was wet and she slept in her crib or in the car seat with equal ease. Because she didn’t cry for constant holding, I wanted to hold her all the time—around the house, wearing her in the Snugli, or holding her against me in the porch swing, both of us bundled in my old sleeping bag while Iris did the Dance of the Dead Oak Leaves. It was already December, and only the dull red fists of the Japanese maple’s finished leaves were left on the lawns.

  I will admit that at first I loved it, that it felt almost as sweet as the new love of my own babies, only better for Malena’s exoticness. Sometimes I dreamed Malena was mine. I woke content with having nursed her, with having sat on the porch swing in the summer while she slept, a baking loaf of bread on my shoulder, and it felt as real as our house, our floors, until Caius rolled over in his sleep and scratched my skin with a too sharp toenail. “Stop,” he’d mumble in his sleep, and I would look at him in the grainy light of six A.M. with a little too much contempt. It wasn’t his fault. It was my own for letting her settle into my heart, another valve.

  I was never going to be a new mother again. Even if I dreamed it, it wasn’t what I wanted. Perhaps, I thought indulgently, once everyone is older, if I’m not fully settled into some work of my own, I can adopt another child. I certainly wouldn’t want to be pregnant again because, as my friend Vicky from the parents association said, “Pregnancy lasts but nine months, but hemorrhoids are forever.”

  Malena was the kind of baby who invited watching: when she was awake and taking in light, a plant turning her own hands slowly as if she could see her own growth; and when she was asleep, flying over the landscape of her own unconsciousness. I felt whole, I’m embarrassed to say. I felt necessary and satisfied, and I didn’t have to wake at night but I did anyway, as if she were calling to me across the miles. I loved it, the sleepiness like a pleasant painkiller, the days lit with necessity.

  But I didn’t want to forget the ones who really belonged to me.

  Iris was sometimes so affectionate with Malena I thought she’d have loved a little sister; sometimes, however, I caught her giving the car seat where Malena was sleeping a little shove, muttering, “I’m the baby,” or scowling when Malena cried. I was trying to have projects with Iris the way I had with Oliver and Carra: we’d ironed leaves in waxed paper, drawn a map of the neighborhood in red and purple crayon on a giant sheet of newsprint, planted tiny peat pots with lima beans and peas and set them under lamps to keep something green growing even in winter. But Iris wasn’t interested in looking at the different leaves; she only wanted to crumble them into dusty rain she could cast over the hibernating lawn.

  Carra had thought the projects were fun until she was five. Then she’d been busy with her own work. But Oliver still wanted to be part of what I was doing; he wanted to follow my hands as I tied a bowline to hang a hammock, copying, learning by imitation. Even at ten, he liked to crack one of the eggs in the bowl for baking and help me close the garbage bags and lug the recycling out to the curb, his short intent form carrying one bin handle while I stooped with the other. Oliver always watched things. He was mesmerized by the visual world, staring at trees, even as an infant, my angel. His changing table view looked up at the crown of a maple, and he’d been dazzled by the green light in summer, lifted his fingers as if to stroke the twigs in winter. His first word, besides the requisite da-da and ma-ma, was tree, and he made me feel blessed, even now, when he came home with a pussy willow branch snapped off, so I could touch the velvety feet. “I didn’t hurt the plant, did I, Mom? I mean, I only wanted a sample.”

  The May after Oren died, I was twenty-three. I read in the Appalachian Mountain Club newsletter about the visiting naturalists at the AMC huts. I didn’t imagine I was qualified, with only my undergraduate biology degree and my almost-finished Appalachian Trail excursion with Tia after we graduated from college. But I remembered how festive life at the huts had been when Tia and I had stayed there—skits for the campers and vast vats of oatmeal, happy gossip sounds in the lofts at night—and I wanted that, to be part of something instead of marooned and old, working at a bank and dating men who wanted to sleep with me or marry me, back in my childhood room with no fondness for its space and none of my brothers across the hall. So I sent out my letter and my résumé, composed at my dry metal desk at the bank, and less than a month later I was cramming my pack with rain gear and my mother’s wild-flower guide and writing a postcard to Tia, who had long since left New Jersey, telling her I was going to the Lakes of the Clouds.

  I loved the air there. I filled myself with the pure moistness of it when I was out with a group, pointing out the dwarf cinquefoil, the plants that grew to the size of a dime in a hundred years, touring the roped-off regions at the top of the world. My evening tours took us up to the rock with the best view of the stars scrolling over the sunset. Everything was extreme, the cold nights, the big winds that could pluck a hiker off a ridge like a great hand flicking a fly. The sky wrapped around the hut, and on nights when we had no visitors at all, weeknights in September, we sat out on a picnic table perched on a rock, higher than anything, with French toast for dinner, warming our hands in our sleeves and one another’s. On days off, I hiked out to Lion’s Head and the Alpine Garden, looking down at the world, refreshing my perspective from a height so great all plant life was shorter, smaller, took longer to grow against the great demands of their proximity to the sky. I made friends, but the crew shifted at the end of the summer, and no one was permanent.

  I wrote letters to Tia. It felt like a conversation, like we hadn’t lost anything between us by moving apart. In letters I said everything I wanted to say, and as a reader, I assumed, she listened. Tia sent me her letters from Colorado, where she was skiing and falling in love with Bozkurt, who was from Turkey and wanted her to be more traditional. Traditional or not, she wrote, the sex was fantastic. I still hadn’t had sex. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, I just hadn’t found anyone I wanted to do it with. The men at the hut were too casual about everything. It wasn’t that I planned to marry the first man I slept with, but I didn’t want to watch him sleep with someone else the next night, a counselor whose campers were giggling in the bunkroom while I was banished, temporarily, from the loft.

  We had too many visitors one weekend night, a big group from Outward Bound and a couple on a honeymoon and two men who had neglected to make reservations—a management consultant from New York who wanted a break and was out with an adventurous client leaf peeping and hiking. In the chaos of the hut after a meal, the consultant, Caius Caldwell, introduced himself, holding out his hand with a sunny smile. He was handsome, with a square jaw and big teeth. His eyes were pale blue and his brows looked as though they could use a tiny comb to put them back in order. When he smiled, one cheek dimpled. There was a scar running along his chin, and I noticed an awful lot more as he kept talking. I walked outside, stunned by all that attention, and he followed. His voice burbled—I wasn’t sure whether he was responding to the mountain air or my fabulous talk about raptors during dinner. He went on about New York, how he’d grown up in Boston, which was much smaller, more provincial but comforting somehow, about the shades of the leaves, about the difference between working out in a gym and really being outside. The chatter surprised me and made me realize how lonely I’d been. We strode out into the great cold of just-past-dark together, and he asked me how I’d decided to be a hut naturalist, how I imagined my future.

  “I do like learning and talking about the plants and the ecosystem, but I’m not sure I could live up here forever,” I said, realizing I meant it, realizing I’d never expected to stay even this long. “I’m too attached to comfort.”

  “Comfort’s a good thing,” said Caius. “Most people don’t appreciate it.” His back was broad and he stepped surely into the dark.

  “I do, now. Mayb
e I should go back to school, study ecology. I don’t mind the practical, either. Don’t tell anyone here, but I was always interested in architecture. I’m definitely not cut out to be a biologist. Or an academic.” I shuddered. I told him about my father’s proofs, his webs of symbols and numbers, his way of learning by dissecting. It was his way, and it drove him. It didn’t work for me. I needed to put things together instead of taking them apart.

  “So much analysis—it’s a good way of seeing, I suppose. But I like the idea of building, too. Maybe I just want to be God.” I’d never said that. I sounded so casual and sure, I didn’t recognize myself. Brave words in the cold air.

  Caius laughed. “You could be a mom,” he said.

  I hadn’t meant that. Or maybe I had. I was too young to think about children. Of course I’d have them, but not for a while. I blushed in the dark. “What about you?”

  “It isn’t anything so profound, but in my job, they have me do both: take the whole place apart—theoretically, of course—and imagine how the pieces could better fit together. Businesses are not the world, though. They matter, but they aren’t everything. Anyone who prefers work to the world is running away—” His gloved fingers brushed mine; I felt the sweet shock through Gore-Tex and insulation.

  “Keep looking, Miss Thea,” he said. He had a slight Boston accent. “You’ll find where to use all that talent.”

  “Thank you, Professor,” I said, but I didn’t mean it so cynically. I meant, Thank you. Thank you for asking, and thank you for listening.

  We walked back into the hut, and my body buzzed beneath my coat. I wanted to sleep with this man. I wanted to undress him and taste him; I wanted to and I didn’t care if he was leaving in the morning. His body sang out to me, its mysterious shapes beneath all those layers of clothing. His words were good; his listening had changed everything. I wanted us to be the ones in the loft.