The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  “I know,” I said.

  Iris threw the last of her food on the floor, having eaten nothing, and started to climb onto the high chair’s tray.

  “You forgot to snap her in,” said Caius, picking Iris up as if rescuing her from an evil stepmother.

  “You forgot to tell me you were actually coming.” I stood up, wiped my mouth, and took my plate to the sink, though I’d only eaten a single bite of burger and all I’d gotten was bun.

  Caius stood with Iris, defending the door to the hallway, the stairs, my escape.

  “Can we go to Hawaii?” Oliver was still sitting, his face wrinkled with worry. “So you guys won’t fight?”

  “We’re not fighting,” said Caius.

  “Yes we are,” I said. I stuffed my burger into the garbage disposal with a fork. I put my coat on over the ketchup-stained sweater and went out the back door. I wanted to tell Oliver it would be okay. I wanted to sit with him for the rest of his dinner, to give Iris her bath, to give myself the deep satisfaction of finishing the day with them, but I couldn’t be there with him anymore, in that horrible hot minute. I couldn’t bear all his freedoms, to come and go at will, to be beloved without being constantly required.

  I jogged a little, down the cul-de-sac and onto the woods path. I didn’t want to look at the house. Let him manage for a little while. My coat smelled of turkey burger and onions, homey and good. What if I stayed out all night? What if I went away for a few days? What would he do? Would they even get out of bed in the mornings, or would they all stay camped at home, eating what they had, complaining and wallowing and getting hungry with Oreo crumbs on their cheeks? I wanted to take Oliver to Hawaii, just Oliver and me, without anyone else to make demands or requests, or to throw carrots on the floor and squish them with bare feet, tracking orange onto the rugs.

  I wanted not to clean up after anyone. I wanted someone to take care of me; I wanted to quit. My mother had never seen any of my children, and it wasn’t fair. She would’ve adored them, and she would’ve helped me through the milk-blurred early days. Not once had Caius’s parents offered to help out, to take them so we could go off on our own. They had come to our wedding, had let my parents pay for it, offering at the end to settle the liquor bill in a grand gesture. I didn’t need any of them, anyone, my useless brothers all wrapped like burritos in their lives, all full of their own needs.

  Down the slope toward the river, my feet shushed through the thin brown blanket of last year’s oak leaves. The air smelled sharp and filled my lungs with its coolness. It was past dusk, but a little light lingered in the forest, not yet drained from the spaces between the new-budded branches. I was wearing clogs, and frost and the slushy green business of spring—shoots and roots and mosses—squished into the back beneath my heels.

  Spring was supposed to be fresh, but I smelled rot and the bitter sap of the pines attending to their wounds. The days were getting longer, determined. Any minute now the little maple fists would unfurl into green applause. The grass would grow slick and green; the woods would fill with the quiet music of growth. Soon it would be summer, with the sloppy schedule of schoolless days. We could go on a vacation after all. We could rent a house in the Catskills, the way we’d planned on doing every year, though we’d only gone two years in a row, between Oliver and Iris. Or I’d go on this trip in September by myself.

  I slipped on a wet patch and yelped as I slid down to the path by the river. The mud wet my thigh through my jeans. Hikers are never this unprepared, even in the woods behind their houses—they wear real shoes and eschew white sweaters made of silk and cotton for wool, warm when wet. A chattering complaint issued from the crown of an oak as a squirrel blamed me for all its missing acorns. Its voice was so loud and particular, it almost sounded like Iris, and I almost told it, Shush Jitterbug.

  I stood up and brushed myself off and saw the pumpkins. They were half-covered with leaves, some of the naked ones slumped with rot, some pale with age, some just stems, and a few still bright orange under the oak blanket. The maples and chestnuts around them shivered, shaking their bunched leaf buds. And over the river, on a tree bench, a fallen giant sleeping over the water, my daughter Carra sat swinging her legs, waiting for the boy who was scooting his way out to meet her. He didn’t walk along the trunk—he was cautious. I didn’t know him at all, didn’t recognize his black spiky hair, his full mouth, his skinny legs as he shimmied toward her.

  They didn’t see me. I sat on my slope behind an elephant-skinned sassafras, watching as this boy reached Carra, touched her twelve-year-old cheek in the almost-dark woods. The water wrapped night between the fallen sticks and stones, going on and on. I watched my daughter engaging in the surest form of separation from us, keeping the secret of love.

  It was a visceral pain, Carra’s betrayal, her growing into this young woman. I had always told myself I’d know her best now, that I’d be the one to help her through her secret times of adolescence, but this came too soon, and I’d neglected to notice its surest sign. Part of me wanted to run to her, to interrupt, and part of me knew I had nothing to give her that she wasn’t taking herself—freedom, separation. I’d need to say something, needed to tell her to be careful, needed to be sure she was safe—but if I pushed my way in, she’d push me right back out again. It wasn’t me she wanted; even if she needed me, she didn’t know it now. I no longer wanted to know who stole last Halloween’s pumpkins and put them in the woods, where they were huddled still, orange and rotted and hollow, passing neighborhood gossip between their stumped stems.

  I would tell Caius about Carra, but I couldn’t do it with Tia coming. I would tell Carra I knew, but I needed to think about how to do it. Suddenly Tia’s timing couldn’t have been more wrong. The busyness I’d told her about was all internal now, was all the hidden clock-workings of a family. And the animals, the dead animals—I was afraid she’d belittle my fears, or make them larger. She wasn’t my sounding board the way she once was. As much as I wished she was, she wasn’t safe.

  On the afternoon drive to the airport, with Oliver at a friend’s, Carra officially at swim practice but probably back in the woods for all I knew, and Iris asleep in her car seat with cookie crumbs on her shirt and a smudge of chocolate across her forehead, I tried to remember why I was still angry with Caius. We’d made up officially; we’d even had tender sex that morning at dawn before he got up for work. I hadn’t minded. I had sort of enjoyed it, though I kept wondering whether Oliver might wander in, whether Iris would call from her crib, or climb out, her new trick, drawn to the sound of something other than sleep in the house. She was going to be finished with the crib soon, and the high chair, and then done with needing me, just like her sister.

  Driving down the Garden State toward Newark, I got off on the Lyons Avenue shortcut through the cruddy neighborhood, turning right at the nudie bar, my minivan a red advertisement for affluence as we passed buildings with wounded windows, cracked glass and boards, gravel instead of grass for lawns. I power-locked the doors and stared ahead until I got back onto Route 78. Probably there were much worse areas in Paterson and Elizabeth, and I knew I probably had nothing to be afraid of but poverty, one building burned and another with windowless holes in the walls. I tried to clarify why I was angry with my husband, to make it solid when it kept shifting in my head. I didn’t want to resent him; I wanted to love him without reservation, as I had before children. We were different people then, but I ought to be able to love that way nonetheless.

  Sometimes it seemed I was the only one who was different now. Caius put them to bed sometimes; when they were infants, he’d done an occasional night feeding. But he never gave over his body, all his sleep, letting their rhythms determine his. Once in a while, he took half a Saturday. But if he needed to work, he worked. If he wanted to read a book, he did, and somehow he made it through the paper almost every day. On weekends, he even read the classifieds ads. Maybe I felt he hadn’t given enough up for us. And maybe it wasn’t about him but me inste
ad, my self swimming right below the surface of the family sea.

  As I turned back onto Route 78 East, Iris sighed in her sleep. A deep, lost sighing, her face obscured by her curls. Letting go of something that worried her. I adored her for her intensity. I forgave her all her tantrums. Watching her face in the rearview mirror, I wanted to sleep like that, to surrender.

  The traffic was making me late, and nervous. I wanted to tell Tia everything, out loud, all the things I was wondering; I wanted to hear myself making jokes about what motherhood really meant: having no time to go to the bathroom. Maybe Tia would understand after all. Even if we weren’t as used to each other, even if there was background to review. Iris woke, sounding her frustration at having succumbed to sleep in the first place. The car in front of me honked its horn, though there was no apparent source of the slowdown.

  Tia was waiting outside baggage claim, a lost look on her face that was not entirely erased as she got in the van. She had a single, chic black bag; she was thin and older and her nose looked different. My tall friend, with her widely spaced brown eyes, which she’d always wished were blue. She was finally in my car; I was finally bringing her home. And though we kissed cheeks, her smell like the ocean apparent beneath the awful scent of airplane travel, I was still nervous, as if I were on a date. It almost felt good.

  Back on the Garden State, Tia was mostly the one talking, and I was listening. Iris had found her way back to sleep when we started moving.

  “So I wasn’t sure they’d even give me my seat,” said Tia. She turned on the radio and started tuning, and I tried not to be annoyed, to mention the sleeping child, the price of waking her.

  “God! I can’t believe the stations are still the same! I can’t believe this place, all the green. It’s all brown in California. They call it gold, but it’s really brown.”

  I turned the radio down, a gravely singer complaining about love. I wondered whether I’d pay for Iris’s second nap, whether she’d wake inconsolable when we got home, or worse, before we arrived.

  “My God, look at this town,” she said, as we approached downtown Sylvan Glen. “It’s like Lincoln Logs! Lego Land! You know all about that, little mommy.” She was grinning. I would let her call me that. It felt warm. I’d stopped sweating and started feeling ordinary again. Calm. The town did indeed look like a child’s miniature village.

  We parked in the lot by her mother’s retirement home. Iris sighed again, waking.

  “Why haven’t you made it out to see me?” asked Tia. Her voice sent familiar waves through my chest. My best friend. An adult body, the young woman’s face set inside like a cameo. Tia’s cheeks were tan and lightly lined. Her light brown hair was streaked with gold. It was long and slightly ragged, fashionably ragged. Her eyes looked tired but that same brown; this was the face I’d told my secrets to.

  “I guess because of the kids…” It felt good to be able to look at her, though still I thought of Carra, of letting her be in love, of all the dangers she had let loose from the box.

  “Silly,” said Tia. She spoke a different language. She didn’t have any kids of her own. “You should get Caius to take care of them. Or get a baby-sitter or something. You should come see the left coast.”

  Of course she was right, and of course she had no clue what she was asking for. She got out, waving, and went to see her mother. I brought her slick black bag home, feeling forlorn despite the fact that she was here at long last.

  And looking up at my front porch, I saw there was another one, more regular than the newspaper. I felt a wave of disgust, then fury. I looked over at Amanda’s house and thought I saw someone slide the curtain away from the window to see me. To see my reaction. Something dead and furry waited on my bricks, and I felt as though I were in a horror movie, afraid to leave my daughter in the backseat while I disposed of it. Then a cat darted out from behind the Martins’ and I sighed, shivered slightly with my own raging paranoia. I would wrap it in a bag, chuck it in the trash, and tell Caius all about it when he got home.

  April

  18

  Amanda

  Carole was a mom, but her daughters were grown, one living at home and attending the community college, the other working at a bank, not finding a husband, not producing grandchildren. Carole had taken a job at the bank herself for a while, but she hated the cleaning-fluid smell and the impatient gum clacking and knowing too much about her daughter as a grown-up. Her mother lived in Boca in a retirement community, where she belonged to more clubs than Carole had ever heard of in her life: Art Appreciation, Dazzling Widows, Window Decorations, Canasta, Tapestry. She told me all these details in ten-minute morning installments while she swayed with Malena in her arms and I got ready for work, forgetting my hat, searching for my keys.

  “My little love!” she said to Malena. “I missed this, being needed. Are your keys by the door?” She looked so calm. I was going to miss the train.

  “All my customers wanted was to make a deposit, cash a check, get the heck out of line so they wouldn’t be late getting back to their own desk. Sweetie pie,” she cooed to Malena.

  Had she said heck or hell? I wondered. Should I worry about bad words? I said them all the time, but now Malena was getting older. I found my keys in the pocket of my coat and kissed Malena and darted for the door, sweating in my silk blouse.

  “She’s the right one,” Aaron said in the evening, sighing happily over the long notes she left us, telling us Malena had pooped twice and had eaten six spoonfuls of strained peas. I pictured her opening her mouth like a perfect little chick. I tried not to mind that Carole wrote number two for a bowel movement.

  Still, back at work, I looked at Malena’s photo and traced her perfect tiny mouth and worried that, although Carole was confident and calm when I was around, it was an act. That once I left she was simply letting Malena sob in her crib. I cut and trimmed and arranged a bouquet of horrible thoughts: She was putting her on her front to sleep because that was what she learned with her own kids, twenty years ago; she was secretly diabetic and might succumb to coma, or worse. She was slapping the baby, she was pinching her, she was stealing and suffocating and screaming, unable to take it, psychotic, angry. Now that Malena was old enough to eat, she’d steal the food from her spoon. She was pushing her carriage down the middle of the street, letting it fly into traffic. She was using a knife to…All the horror movies I’d ever seen melded with my terrible imagination. That, and maybe my own secret sense of the pressure of being the caregiver.

  I knew better, I’d always known better. Once I weaned Malena, my hormones began to readjust—but I wasn’t normal yet. If I was ever going to be normal again.

  I had a blister from my pumps when I walked into work with a thousand things on my to-do list—call an illustrator whose work had been lost when an intern sent it to a ranch in New Mexico instead of a farm in upstate New York, convince Neethi that I really wasn’t the right editor for a series of hideous imports she’d fallen in love with at Frankfurt that featured Nordic mythology, find out why I could hear a maddening muted alarm going off on some other floor or maybe in some other building every afternoon at two that no one else in the office could hear, go over the galleys for the Rose manuscript, which was finally on the fall list.

  “You’re late!” Neethi was marching down the hallway, her vast gold hoop earrings swaying like life preservers on a sinking ship. She carried the binder. I felt a horrible swoop of déjà vu.

  “No, it’s only eight thirty-two!”

  “It’s at eight-thirty,” she said. And, in case I hadn’t noticed the binder, “The six-month follow-up. Get your FDP and get up to the conference room on sixteen.” She smiled. It was an unusual sun-burst of sympathy. “I don’t want to waste the day, either, but—ah, well, it’s the price of corporate-level organization.”

  I didn’t remind her that the Franklin Day Planners had been her idea in the first place.

  In the conference room, Aliza the in-house council was chewing on a cutic
le.

  “Now that we’re all here,” announced the russet-haired man with the bow lips, “we can get started. I know you don’t want to waste a single day.” He smiled. He looked older. “But that’s exactly what we’re after. Long-term planning.” He wrote on the white board: What Have You Accomplished? I wanted to tell him he really didn’t need to capitalize each word.

  “Every six months,” he pronounced. “When I return to these places of work, some dreams have become realities, souls soar—”

  Sore souls, I thought. His face was ruddy, and I wondered whether he was an alcoholic or just had a skin condition.

  “—and other dreams still need more work. More Planned Advancement. Let’s start by looking at those first lists—you have kept them?”

  I had mine, stowed in the back of the binder, folded into halves, quarters, eighths, so it was a private lump. “Healthy baby,” it read. “Easy delivery. No more barfing. Good sex again. Keep my job. Become editorial director. Have own imprint. Plumber finished by the time I get home.” I laughed aloud. What had happened to us, Aaron and me—the boy from Africa and the woman who fell in love with books? We lived in the suburbs and I obsessed about plumbing and he was chewed up by his job. Though maybe there were things he loved about his job. And I supposed there were things I loved about the suburbs. Certainly not my neighbors, though.

  “How’s yours look?” asked the editorial assistant next to me. No, now she was an assistant editor, I’d forgotten. Rumor was she had courted the senior VP on the fourteenth floor by doing extra projects for him, and she’d ditched her editor, just a senior editor, as soon as the VP needed a new assistant. I kind of admired her. No one wanted to stay an editorial assistant, not even for the requisite one to two years. The other two assistants from the first FDP training had quit.