The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  “Even though they were working for their country. We’re pretty hippocratical about things like that.”

  “Hypocritical,” said Caius.

  “Hippo-critical,” said Oliver.

  We ate spaghetti, and Caius held Malena while he dropped salad into his lap. I held her during dessert, a sticky-frostinged poppy seed cake he’d bought on his way home. Without Carra, and with Oliver playing a video game in the family room and Iris, for the first time in her life, I thought, calmly working on a big-piece puzzle on the rug, the house was peaceful; it felt ordinary. In balance. I almost didn’t want Amanda to come, but I was starting to worry. They ebbed and grew, my worries, and they were inexplicit. Something had happened: They’d simply run away, or they’d forgotten, even though I could never imagine being able to leave my child like this, all day and into the night, toward the witching hour, without nursing.

  I dialed her office, but hung up on the voice mail. I tried her cell phone, but again, no answer.

  I left the dishes; it was late. I took Iris up to bed, and during her story she didn’t jump off my lap and run for the door in protest of impending sleep. She was subdued, and I’d started to imagine we’d made that change, we’d shifted from the clinging stage. Perhaps having a baby around was a good influence. Maybe it had made her aware of what she really wanted.

  Then again, I was well beyond toddlerhood, and I still didn’t know what I really wanted.

  Perhaps I should tell Amanda about the bath, I thought. It was ridiculous, grown women keeping these secrets that held no harm, only a small power struggle.

  I had to give Amanda notice, I decided, quit in this moment of peace, before it was urgent. I’d do it tonight. I’d explain that I wasn’t able to keep up with my own parenting this way, that we’d never intended to keep our arrangement for more than a month or so. I’d give her three weeks’ notice. Three weeks, and then I’d be back to wondering what was next. But at least I wouldn’t be collecting money in an envelope for mothering, which felt wrong. And I wouldn’t be almost hoping she wouldn’t come back to get her daughter.

  “No calls,” said Caius when I came downstairs. He was standing over Malena stroking the fuzz on her head as she slept, swaddled and surrounded by cushion walls, on the chair. None of my children, even Oliver at his easiest, had slept through the witching hour at this age. The witching hour was the time between dinner and bedtime, the long evening when parents were weariest and needs escalated before the first collapse into sleep.

  “She’s great. I really like having her here,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” I said, and I kissed him. “I mean, she’s sweet, but I’m thinking they should hire another mommy—I mean, nanny, geez, that was weird—soon.”

  “Really?” Caius was still gazing at the baby. He looked very appealing all of a sudden. For once, I thought about sex. For once, Caius settled down on the couch and sighed.

  “Exhausted,” he said, as if anticipating my overture. So I wouldn’t do anything. I wouldn’t caress his neck. I wouldn’t want to be kissed. Besides, Malena might wake, or Amanda would come back. She had to, soon. Or Aaron might come instead. I started to worry a bit more earnestly. What if something had happened to one of them? To both of them? It was eight-thirty. Or—a little paranoia on my part—maybe they were having dinner together; maybe they’d conspired to defraud us of our own evening. I alternated, worried, then irritable.

  We sat on the couch, and Caius read the paper until his head tilted back in a nap, his print-stained fingers hooked behind his head. I’d often find Oliver in the same position.

  I tried her number at work, and her cell phone: voice mail, once again. What could I say, “Where the heck are you?” I tried Aaron instead, composing a message as the phone rang, trying for something calm; I didn’t want to break the peace of the evening with panic. But he answered, instead of his uber-professional voice mail.

  “Hey,” he said, recognizing my voice, “is everything okay?”

  “Amanda’s not home yet,” I said, listening to the word home in my own voice. Home. “And I was wondering if you knew anything, a meeting or something?”

  “God, no,” said Aaron. “I’d have thought she’d be there. I can come get the baby. There’s a train in twenty minutes.” I could hear paper shifting. His voice shifting, too.

  “Everything’s okay here,” I said. “Just kind of worried about Amanda.” At the same time, I was guilty of enjoying her absence. “I’m sure she’s fine, just running late,” I added.

  “I’m coming,” said Aaron. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Do you need anything? Groceries or anything? I can stop on the way back from the train.” As always he was shifting his attention to here, to now. I’d seen it those few days he was living here—when he came in from work, he’d unfetter himself of coat and briefcase and touch objects, the brass cat on the mail table, rooting himself in this world. And I often wondered how it felt to have lost his home, to have lost his apparent balance and calm, which he’d reclaimed as soon as he could, going right back to work, to daily life, to groceries and the law. Actually, I never minded having green-eyed Aaron around.

  Nine o’clock, still no Amanda, and Malena began to fuss in earnest. She wasn’t going to be put off by the bottle anymore; she wanted her mother’s milk. I put a little honey in her bottle to make it sweeter, but she only took a sip. Caius went upstairs to take a shower. He’d had enough of our baby-memory moment, and I felt a familiar distancing on his part when Malena grew tired of the pacifier, my just-washed pinkie, the special bouncing-swaying on the shoulder movement he’d perfected for his take-over moments when Iris was colicky. Colic, I thought then and now, was a term invented to make desperate parents feel better. But Malena wasn’t colicky, she wasn’t ridiculously particular, she was only making reasonable demands.

  I sighed and sang to her and turned off the TV, which Caius had left tuned to a show with inane laughter. It made me nervous. Iris called out and I hoped Caius would take care of her. It was a familiar place, alone and with a baby, downstairs while the others slept or got ready for sleep. But I was worried, and I had no one else to call. I thought of rummaging through their few leftover things in the basement, looking for her mother’s number. I could have dug up the phone bill for that, for all the unfamiliar calls from those few days—her sister, her parents, her friends, her assistant’s home number. Or the police. I should call the police. Malena rooted and the house ticked as the hot water cycled through the radiator pipes.

  Finally there was a scrabbling sound at the door. I got up, then sat back down on the couch. Malena had fussed herself back to a temporary sliver of sleep.

  Amanda flurried into the kitchen. She sighed even as she opened the door. She dumped a briefcase and a coat on the kitchen floor. Her face was etched with worry, and with something else.

  “I can’t do this, I can’t leave her,” she said. Just as I was thinking, I can’t do this, I can’t keep taking her. But didn’t say it. Amanda was crying. I’d never seen her cry, even on the night her house was crushed, even the first morning away from her baby, even with relief on the nights she came late to pick her up. But she’d never been this late.

  “Why are you so late?” I asked, more snappish than I’d intended.

  “God, Thea,” she said. She sat beside me and reached for Malena, unbuttoning her blouse. “There was a train accident. I tried to call but there was no reception and then my battery died. It was stupid, and I didn’t know what to do. Someone was hit by the train. Someone was so sad he jumped in front of the train. And the brake screamed and there was this thunk, even way back in my car. We killed him. I don’t really want to think about it, but I still looked, really quickly, when they finally let us onto the platform to walk to the shuttles. I won’t tell you what it looked like.” She gasped, sobbed a little more.

  “We had to wait for hours, and I was late to start with and then the bus got caught in traffic in Lyndhurst. It was so awful, his arm—I can’t talk
about this.”

  Malena had latched on, and Amanda’s face softened with the relief and pleasure of nursing. In her cream-colored suit with her blouse unbuttoned, she leaned to the side while she nursed, slumping toward me, then resting against me. It didn’t feel wrong. I wasn’t angry with her anymore. I was trying to be nicer, to like her more. That had been my first instinct, to like Amanda. She was certainly heavier than a child, but as temporarily wretched as a two-year-old who’s fallen off the bigger kids’ slide at the playground. I let her lean. I could smell her milk, sweet and grassy.

  “I can’t leave her. It isn’t worth it,” she said again, turning her face to me. There was a ghost of plum-colored lipstick on her lips. I’d never noticed how soft her mouth looked, how the top lip peaked in a perfect bow.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” I said, forgetting for a second that she wasn’t one of mine.

  And I don’t know who leaned in first, but I do know the kiss felt logical, felt reassuring and calm and not unsexual. We opened our mouths a little, and her short hair fell against my cheek. I do know she tasted a little bit like chocolate, and I felt a warm flesh moon against my arm, her breast, and Malena’s tender familiar form half in my lap, half in hers.

  I heard the door open.

  “Is she here yet? Good news—the contractor told me today we can move home this weekend. Only one bathroom and one bedroom, but we’re finally getting out of the Marriott. I brought you a cantaloupe,” said Aaron, as he deposited an I LOVE NY bag on the counter.

  15

  Thea

  Never mind that I’d kissed a woman, that it had felt good. Never mind that that woman was Amanda. It was just a momentary thing—I’d been so relieved to see her. I was exhausted and angry and so blurry with family I’d called her “sweetheart,” of all things. It certainly wasn’t going to happen again. The world kept its pace around the sun, even if I felt tilted slightly out of orbit.

  Over the weekend, Iris decided she always needed two sippy cups, one for juice and one for milk, and Oliver had a report due on the life cycle of a pond. We looked up eutrophication online. I found a half-frozen dead bird on the front porch and wondered what demented cats were hunting in winter, when they should be inside shedding and warming couch cushions.

  On Sunday night I went to a fund-raiser dessert party, which Belinda Crew had organized as part of her work for the Junior Women’s Club to benefit the Autism Society of America. My friend Vicky from the parents association would be there, wearing a jet-beaded dress she’d picked out after our last lunch together.

  Originally, Caius was coming to the benefit, and I’d hired the baby-sitter who lived down the block, a high school senior named Jasmine who had taken care of Iris once when Caius had a Christmas party at work and the other kids had sleepovers. That night I’d worn heels and the necklace he gave me for our tenth anniversary, jade with tiny gold beads, but he’d been as gossipy as a hen and had only noticed what other people wore. Or maybe he mentioned my dress, but it hadn’t been enough for me. I didn’t really enjoy his office Christmas party, all inside jokes and warm wine and catered chicken that tasted like the little propane burners they used to rewarm it. I remembered enjoying the first few because I’d been so proud of my important, clever husband. He was still important, I was still proud; it just didn’t seem like the venue called attention to those facts anymore.

  Sunday afternoon Jasmine called and explained that she hadn’t finished her paper on organ donation for AP biology so she couldn’t come. Carra said she could do it, Oliver winced; Iris threw up her lunch, but that may’ve been because she’d found some of Oliver’s hoarded Halloween candy and had eaten three stale marshmallow pumpkins after her fish sticks.

  “I guess I’m staying home!” said Caius, a little too happily.

  The benefit was held at The Manor in West Orange, and despite the circumstances of my solo trek, I felt glamorous as I parked the van in the lot and clacked up the stone walkway to the grand house. The air smelled clean, the lights beckoned. So I wasn’t with my husband; I was wearing eye shadow, wasn’t I? And mascara with primer I’d gotten in the give-away gift they just happened to be offering when I went to Lord & Taylor to replace my nubby lipstick. My friends were inside—women whose babies had gone to kindergarten with Carra and Oliver, women who had gone back to work or stayed at home, had weathered the third-grade recorder recitals and summer camp waiting lists in concert with me.

  “Oh, it’s Thea!” gushed Belinda as I opened the thousand-pound front door. Chandeliers, candles, a string quartet playing Mozart, a long table laden with pear tarts and chocolate-macadamia indecencies. I was suddenly very hungry.

  “How is your job?” asked the woman beside Belinda. I knew her, but I couldn’t remember her name. She wore a parrot-feather hat. Her lips were enormous. I was looking at a woman’s lips. I blushed.

  “Thea is a child-care worker now!” said Belinda to Roberta Cross, who was the head of the Junior League. Roberta blinked at me.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I’m just helping out a friend.”

  “You’re working at a day care?” asked Roberta. Belinda had already spiraled out of our orbit, off into the glittering crowd. The ladies looked elegant, a hundred little black dresses and requisite diamonds and pearls, and a vast and shimmery violet silk muumuu on Francine LaBlanc, who was a cheerleader in high school and who lived not two blocks from me in her mother’s house. I never saw her in town. Her wineglass was lipsticked and she was laughing with a gaggle of people I didn’t recognize.

  “No,” I started, but Roberta was already gone, dragged inexorably into Belinda’s wake.

  I couldn’t find Vicky. Roberta had said, “Oh, she’s coming, I’m sure she’ll be here,” but an hour into the event, still no jet-beaded dress. I ate a slice of cappuccino cake, though I’d regret the caffeine later. I circled the tables and pretended I cared about the women I air kissed. It was a worthy cause. And the desserts were wonderful. When I finally sat down at my assigned table with two plates—because I had nothing else to do but try everything—half the chairs had been removed, crowded around other tables, and the only people sitting with me were the two husbands in attendance. They hovered over a tiny portable TV watching basketball.

  “Where’s Caius?” asked Belinda’s husband, Jim, without looking up.

  “Baby-sitting,” I said, tucking into a coconut-lemon square.

  I ate a rum-glazed chocolate tart, a raspberry–white chocolate layer cake, tiny handmade chocolates with real candied violets in their crowns. I thought about crowding around another table like the rest of the women, but I felt as though everyone was working so hard to belong, I just didn’t have the will. I drank coffee, supposedly decaf but it made me jittery, so I tried talking with the men.

  “How’s the game?” I asked Jim.

  “What?” Jim looked over his shoulder.

  “Want some?” I held out a plate I’d filled with chocolate-covered strawberries. I felt a little sick but was unable to stop eating.

  “Yeah,” said Jim. “Thanks.”

  “You’re still with Mattel?” I asked. He made no eye contact, though he’d plucked two berries by the stem.

  “Oh, no, left three years ago,” he said, eyes bonded to the tiny screen. “Toys R Us.”

  “Fun?” I asked.

  “Pays the bills,” he said.

  There was a speaker, a college junior who’d been diagnosed with autism as a child and who was managing well enough to go to Princeton. A handsome young man, fidgeting with the button on his jacket while he read from a printed speech. I knew how lucky I was: three children, no disabilities, no illnesses. At least none yet. Just thinking myself lucky could be the punishable sin, I thought. I didn’t stay for Belinda’s bit; my stomach hurt. Maybe it was all the dessert, all the abandon of eating, all the abandon of feeling like an outsider. Maybe Iris had the stomach flu and I’d gotten it, too.

  I’d wrapped a cheesecake brownie in a napkin for Caius, but I dev
oured it on the way home, despite my stomach. I carried my heels inside, tearing my stocking on the frozen ground, and Caius didn’t get up from his lounging spot in front of the TV as I unlocked the door.

  “How was your little escape?” Caius called from the couch. I could hear him picking his teeth with a card from a magazine—something I wasn’t even sure he knew he did. I knew. Sometimes I knew too much.

  “It was a benefit,” I said. “Not an escape.”

  On Monday I trekked over to Amanda and Aaron’s half-habitable house to pick up the baby at seven, because Amanda didn’t have time to deliver Malena to me if she was going to make her train. I crossed the months-old POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape, which hung from the yews like leftover party streamers. I rang the bell, nervous that we’d kissed, wondering whether she’d hug me when she answered, wondering whether it would be strange. Or arousing. Or annoying.

  Once, when Tia had visited her mother with a boyfriend from Colorado, Dav—“no e,” he said, “not David”—a man whose dark brown hair looked expensively shellacked to his head and who stayed at the same level of unshavenness day after day, I’d leaned over to give him a perfunctory kiss good-bye on the cheek, the way one might kiss a brother. But Dav turned to face me and got my lips, full on. He blushed, I blushed, but I wasn’t sure he hadn’t done it intentionally. He’d held up the newspaper he gripped in his hands as if in explanation. Waved it a little, like a laconic fly swatter. I’d had to force myself to wait to wipe my mouth until I made it out the door. It wasn’t that Dav was entirely repulsive, he wasn’t. There was a certain charm in his flat vowels and goggle-eyed adoration of Tia. It was that I was not supposed to kiss him. It had been an accident.

  Iris ran loops around the dogwood on their front lawn, tripping over a loose brick, saving her howl until I turned with the baby and sixteen items of urgent necessity in my arms.