The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

At first we just kissed and held each other’s forearms, stroking gently, as if there was a whole language to discover in the texture of the skin there. He put his hands inside my shirt, and I pressed mine inside his, my mouth tasting his skin, breathing the sharp, exquisite scent of exertion and arousal. But Caius didn’t want to have sex. He stopped my hands, gently.

  “I’m going,” he said. “I have to go tomorrow. I couldn’t stand to be with you and then just go.” He whispered this, suddenly quiet.

  “I couldn’t either,” I said, pretending.

  We feigned sleep, entwined. Caius slept a little, but I was awake the whole night, wanting.

  The next day, he and his client went on; Caius left me his card, and though I knew I’d never call, I put it in my journal and ran my fingers over the raised letters of his name. I wrote a letter to Tia, making it all sound casual, feeling tragedy blooming like a bruise under my breastbone.

  I was still mooning the following day, while I led the Outward Bound group on a hike. The soldier lichens were redder than I’d ever seen them; the reindeer lichen silver in the late-afternoon light.

  “This tiny thing, Salix planifolia, is a willow.” I pointed. “Rhododendron lapponicum, Lapland rosebay.”

  “Is that a tree?” A young woman with a pointed face and cropped black hair asked, pointing at something smaller than the smallest bonsai.

  “Gray birch,” I said. “Dwarfed.” I felt dwarfed, my voice snatched by the wind and sudden bursts of rain as I spoke. I wanted to be down the mountain; I wanted to be with the man I’d just met. I felt tragic and marooned. My cells were growing too fast for this severe environment, spreading spots of all-new skin where we’d touched.

  I was leaning over a web-shaped patch of lichen, explaining, “the first thing to grow in a stony landscape, the first life,” when I saw the shadow of a new form joining the group. Raincoats shushed as arms shifted to let him move to the front.

  Caius joined us, grinning at me madly.

  “Hey,” he said, “want to teach an old man some new tricks?”

  “A symbiotic relationship of fungus and algae,” I continued, unable to say anything else.

  “Sorry”—Caius nodded to the group, earnest teens with worry in their bodies—“but I have to borrow the teacher.”

  After that afternoon, I was the one having sex in the loft. Caius had let his client leave without him, though he was sure the firm would mind. Despite living in a city, I discovered, the backs of his knees smelled mossy, and his long legs were strong. I loved how they felt around mine—oaks among birches.

  He stayed for three days of unclaimed vacation. He told me he was dating a woman in the city, nothing serious, he said, but he wanted me to know, and he would break up with her as soon as he got back. I didn’t mind that I hadn’t known before. We had just started, and I vowed not to care about history, even though I already felt a vague sense of ownership, of belonging. We kissed outside against the complaints of the wind. We fed each other oatmeal as if it were ambrosia. He told me he would wait until I was ready to come home, meaning ready to come to him.

  We had a few months of passionate letters, letters with sex in the tiniest details, the meals he’d eaten without me, the scent of his pillowcase, the city’s sounds. Then we had a winter visit to a resort hotel in Crawford Notch where I wanted to spend most of the afternoon in the shower, rinsing off the dirt of hut living. Caius scrubbed me until the hotel cloth was gray and called me his dirty girl. He fed me overpriced crab legs, expertly cracking the exoskeleton and prying the meat from the shell. Even the sweetest bit in the small of the claw came out intact, and he pushed it onto my tongue.

  Sometimes I missed the Lakes of the Clouds, the living half-outside, the sense that I was more of the natural world than other people. Now I depended on it all, electric lights and heat, the cooked chicken from the market. Sometimes I missed the clouds in my hair, clouds around my head, like a cartoon. One morning Malena and Iris both napped—Iris falling asleep on Oliver’s closet floor, gripping her rubber frog. I sat down at the computer and typed in Outward Bound. Need to Get Out? the website asked me. I did, I needed to get out. I scrolled down the list of trips. Two weeks in Costa Rica. Ten days in Alaska. It was hard to imagine what it would feel like to heave on my pack. I felt brittle, snapping my joints just to turn in the chair and check on Malena in her Pack ’n Play. Then there were one-week trips for women. Women over thirty. When had I become a category? Without thinking too hard, I filled in the online form, requested a brochure. I knew I’d never do it, but maybe I’d like looking at it, thinking about it. Maybe I’d enjoy my walks in the neighborhood more, remembering what it felt like at the top of the world. Maybe I had to get to Iris, who was wailing upstairs, causing Malena to stir as well, two bodies desperate for attention. I would need to make snacks quickly, to coax and carry them from their half-sleeping states back to reasonability.

  By one o’clock Iris had recovered from sleeping, and Malena was ready to sleep again.

  “My baby,” Iris said, holding her hand up toward the Snugli on my chest. We were walking down Edgewood, and Iris pushed her baby doll’s stroller in front of her, proud of her work. She stayed on the sidewalk. She didn’t cry to be carried herself; she didn’t flail and sit on the ground after three sidewalk squares. I felt an even happiness, things were going so well, minute to minute, the way they had not been for a while. The way they often did when the children were new.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Chen, stepping out of her car in a woolly red coat. “I didn’t know, how could I not know?”

  “My baby,” said Iris.

  “It’s Malena,” I said. “I’m taking care of her for Amanda.” I nodded toward her house, where several massive trucks and soda cans blotching the lawn indicated the slow work toward repair.

  “She’s already back at work?” Mrs. Chen looked surprised. “I don’t understand why women do that if they don’t have to.”

  “I don’t either,” I said.

  “It’s such a shame. I would’ve been there for all of high school if it weren’t for the divorce. They need you. Even when they pretend they don’t.”

  I nodded.

  “You’re not like that,” she continued. “You’re a good mother.”

  On cue, Malena’s voice rose, a small star of sound.

  “Feed me,” said Iris, pointing to Malena with a long-dead, rust-colored mum she’d plucked from Mrs. Chen’s walkway.

  All the way home, offering my pinkie finger for Malena to suck, I tried to decide what reason Amanda really had for going back so soon. She loved her job? But not more than her child. They needed the money? Not sure about that. I didn’t know all that much about Amanda’s finances, but I did know everything was a choice—a smaller house, sharing a car. She didn’t want to do the hardest work in the world? Still, who was I to judge? I had made my own choices, or at least, they’d been made.

  By late afternoon, the weather of my occupation had changed. I had to strap Iris, whining, into her car seat, and clip Malena, who fussed as if to prove a point, into her car seat, and I forgot the bottle of formula to feed her while we waited in the parking lot of some school in Passaic County where Carra had a swim meet.

  “Blankie!” Iris yelled in the backseat.

  I kept the engine running. It was too warm in the car, but Carra would be wet from practice.

  “Cookie!” yelled Iris.

  Malena fussed. I reached back and stroked her cheek. She turned toward my fingers, but I had no food.

  “No do that!” Iris grabbed at my fingers.

  “Stop,” I said, over the noise of the two of them. “It’s ‘Don’t do that.’ Carra’s coming.”

  Finally, after a dozen other girls, Carra ran out to the chaos of the car, her hair still slick and the chlorine scent rising off her cold-coated-but-hot-from-exertion body like a chemical perfume.

  “Mom,” she said, ignoring me as I leaned toward her for a kiss. “Why don’t you come to my meets? All the
other moms were there.” She pulled a box of chocolate-covered graham crackers from her backpack and started eating.

  “No do!” Iris kicked mud onto the back of the front seat, regressed, wailing for cookies or for blankie or for God knows what, just wailing, and Malena was ready to be held, her fusses escalating into a serious complaint.

  By the time we arrived home, Carra had grudgingly relinquished two from the box of cookies she’d stolen from the top shelf, Iris was chocolate coated and cranky, still, and Amanda was hovering inside the door, eager to nurse and go back to her hotel, annoyed with me for making her wait.

  I knew it made sense for her to have our key, but sometimes, even though she entrusted me with her daughter, I didn’t fully trust her with the key to my house. I was embarrassed to admit it, even to myself. I suppose it was our fundamental difference in belief—that hole in her heart by which she let herself leave her daughter—that made me unable to relinquish my suspiciousness. Sometimes I came home and she was there; I noticed the mail had moved on the table, the cupboards were open. I wanted to be generous, to share without reservation, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of invasion.

  Whenever the phone rang, it was for Carra, or it was Amanda, which meant it wasn’t for me but for Malena through me.

  “Hello?” I said one Wednesday afternoon, balancing Malena on my bent knee. She was propped in a sitting position, chewing on her sleeve with a profound look on her face, which meant she was probably about to poop. Amanda was an hour late on her half day.

  “So, I can visit next week?” said a slightly husky, familiar voice. I tried to place it but then wondered whether this might be a wrong number. “There’s a conference. It isn’t mine—it’s my, well, significant other’s—but I can get a free plane ticket. I’d have to crash with you—”

  “Tia?”

  “Who do you think this is, Princess Diana?”

  “Tia,” I said. “Next week? Wow. That would be great. We’re kind of busy, though, with swim meets, and I’m taking care of this baby—”

  “Uh-oh,” said Tia. “You’re not thinking of having another, are you? Isn’t it getting kind of late in the game? And seriously, I mean, three is a crowd already.”

  I bristled. Malena felt me stiffen and fussed quietly. Who did Tia think she was, calling me out of the blue and commenting on my fertility? Was I thinking about having another? I was getting too attached to Malena.

  As if prompted, Amanda turned the key in the lock.

  “You are so welcome to come, Tia. We’re busy, but that doesn’t mean we can’t squeeze you in. I’d love to see you. It’s been—well, almost three years, right?”

  “More than three years, babe. Squeeze away. It may be next week—or the week after—not sure of my dates yet. Aren’t you going to ask me about my significant other?”

  Amanda bent to pick up her baby, looking at me sternly. I knew she disapproved of my being on the phone. My phone. Malena curled into her arms like an infant monkey. It was so beautiful it hurt a little to watch.

  “How’d she sleep?” Amanda asked, sotto voce. She smelled the baby’s behind. “I hope she doesn’t have that hideous diaper rash again.” She winced, holding the stained bottom up in the air.

  “Can I call you back, Tia?”

  “Sure. You’ll need the number—I’m at a hotel—” She wanted me to ask why, ask more, she wanted to pick up the unplugged cord of our conversations and get instant electricity. But Amanda was standing there. And besides, I wasn’t ready for Tia, wasn’t ready for her brusque, honest questions. It felt like an assault after all this time.

  “Hi,” I said to Amanda after I hung up. She sat on the couch as if she still lived there.

  Amanda was kissing her daughter’s neck, unwrapping the poopy diaper on the couch without a cloth underneath.

  The phone rang again. I knew before I picked it up that it would be Tia, impatient as always, and that I’d take it upstairs for privacy. That by the time I’d insisted yes, visit, and fended off the questions I didn’t want to answer, hoping we could have a real conversation in person instead, I’d come back downstairs and mother and daughter would both be gone.

  January

  13

  Amanda

  At the beginning of January, we drove to my mother’s apartment in Cambridge for a late Chanukah dinner. Since she’d moved from the big house in Auburndale, I’d always felt uncomfortable in her space, and the feeling intensified when I was there with Malena. Out the huge cold windows, I could see the Charles River lined with naked trees. Traffic on Storrow Drive hummed by, and the sky and river were the same gray. The kitchen was marble; the toilets were faux marble, and the bathroom fixtures real brass: furnishings my father would’ve felt uncomfortable around, until he remarried into money. The floors were clean wide oak, the tables sharp-cornered glass; there was nowhere to safely rest the baby. My mother’s couch sported thin cream-colored wool on a dark mahogany frame. It bruised me as I sat, and I couldn’t look up for the intense halogen track lights that broke the room into universes with tiny unbearable suns.

  My mother, who had let my father do most of the cooking when they were still married, made beets and brisket. She bought the rest of the Chanukah items from a fabulous gourmet shop in Porter Square, except the because-you-missed-Thanksgiving, out-of-season strawberry-rhubarb pie, which my sister Jane and Cornelius made together, an event I could hardly imagine. Once Aaron and I had cooked together, but now the idea was laughable. Who’d hold Malena? Who’d be able to stay standing long enough to roll a crust? The edges were meticulously crimped and Jane’s hair smelled of coconut shampoo and sleep when I hugged her.

  This is my family, I thought, sitting at the table with an unfamiliar ornate crystal goblet in my hand. The wine tasted rich and good—just a few sips, I promised myself (and Aaron, who had developed an annoying habit of mentioning how much I liked to “get the baby sauced” whenever there was alcohol in our midst) as we toasted another year.

  “To possibilities,” my mother said. I looked at my husband and daughter and felt right and proud.

  “Can you take her now?” Aaron asked. He started leaning Malena on my shoulder before I could answer. She coughed a little white blotch onto my black sweater.

  I watched Aaron spooning kugel into his mouth and envied his taste buds the little burned bits.

  “So, darling, you know I’d have you here for a while, what with your disaster and all,” said my mother. She paused for a big mouthful of latke. Sour cream. Applesauce. I wanted to eat, but all I’d had time for in my baby-free shift was that single sip of wine and one forkful of beets. I tried to hold Malena and reach the brisket at the same time. Impossible. I managed a big wad of bread but swallowed too fast and felt the lump, an antelope in an anaconda’s belly. I was a slob for having hunger.

  “Oh, or we could have you.” Jane’s face was rosy. She held Cornelius’s hand under the table; I could tell from the way her body overlapped his.

  “You’re pretty cramped in your apartment, Janey,” I said. Malena’s breathing deepened. “But thanks.”

  Malena sighed, a satisfied, gorgeous little sound, and grew heavy with sleep. As Aaron passed the plate I attempted to grab a slice of meat without waking her. Maybe I could come stay with my mother and she’d take over a night shift and she’d be so gentle with Malena I’d feel that surge of love for my own mother I’d had, deep and true, a few minutes after my daughter was born. But she’d done nothing to cultivate it; she’d done nothing, really, except make the brisket. Which I couldn’t quite reach with my fork.

  “I know,” said Jane, as if she’d never offered anything.

  “But I’m just so busy, and you’d never see your hubby,” my mother finished.

  I wasn’t sure why they imagined I could just up and leave work.

  “She is busy,” said Jane, looking conspiratorial.

  “Can you take her?” I asked Aaron. He turned to me with his mouth full and made a plaintive expression.
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  I knew it had only been about ten minutes, and he needed to eat, too.

  “Fine,” I grumbled, despite my reasonable thoughts. “I’m going to sit on the couch.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said my mother. “I’ll take her.” She didn’t get up. She had sharp objects at her plate, a carving knife, and breakable glass.

  “You don’t have to,” I said. But I walked over to her just the same and tried resting Malena in her lap.

  “Will your nanny want to celebrate Christmas with Malena?” My mother touched the baby’s soft spot.

  “I hardly think it matters,” said Aaron, his mouth full.

  “Oh, it matters,” said my mother.

  “An announcement,” Jane interrupted, and I tried to thank her with my eyes.

  I continued standing beside my mother, though Aaron gestured with a fork that I should eat while I had a chance. Suddenly, I wasn’t hungry.

  “I’m up for early tenure.” Jane had a dot of sour cream on the corner of her mouth. Cornelius leaned in and kissed her.

  “So maybe I can make a cousin for Malena sooner than I thought,” said Jane.

  “We,” said Cornelius.

  “No need to rush, darling,” said my mother. She patted Malena’s back in a short, brittle motion, and my daughter startled and began her hungry cry. I wished I was disappointed when I took her back, but really I was relieved. I didn’t even mind that the brisket was cold by the time we finished nursing on the stiff couch and I made it back to the table. I thought of my own house the whole time we were there. Scaffolding, the cold coming in, the knitting of bones before we’d have it whole again.

  I had been working in publishing for almost nine years; I’d been to ALA and BEA and had sat at awards dinners and author roundtables and a science-fiction conference. I’d been on panels where, all too often, the questions’ underlying message was: Please publish my book. I’m an author. Okay, I want to be an author. I haven’t quite finished my book yet, but I know it will be amazing, and also, I don’t want to give an agent a cut of my advance. It will be a big advance. I am tired of my read-and-critique group, which thinks juvenile fiction is, well, juvenile. I know I’m going to hit it big. And all too often I answered their actual question, “Do you read unsolicited manuscripts?” or “How often do you buy new manuscripts? Do you have time after the panel to look at something, because I have something with me…?” with a firm no, followed by a little talk on craft, or the way we try to work illustrations together with words in a picture book, or the changing shape of the young-adult audience.