The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  I covered my paper. “Where’s our esteemed production director?” I asked her.

  “He’s gone on disability.” She smiled at my covered paper. Her eyes were extravagantly green, and I wanted to ask whether her contacts were colored, even though I knew the answer. “Bleeding ulcers.” How could she smile through those words? “He’s gone to San Diego to live on a boat.”

  Part of me knew the only way I’d ever be calm, sure of things, was if I were the one caring for my baby. But a bigger part of me knew I didn’t want to quit work, give it up; I’d never gotten much past a quick handwritten list calculating our requirements against Aaron’s salary alone. It was actually possible, and it wasn’t about money anyway. I’d only wanted that as an excuse: We couldn’t really afford to live on one salary. We could. But I couldn’t. I had to go out, to be a person alone with work to do—with deadlines and a paycheck and meetings, even loathsome meetings—and not just a mother. This was my new normal: juggling guilt and longing. Perhaps the women who stayed home just had more guilt in the mix and succumbed to it, women like Thea, who clearly had talents other than wiping noses and making suppers. But there was more to it than food and tissues. Of course there was: teaching them how to share, to wash their hands, how to tie their shoes. It was being an example, all the time. Even if I didn’t do it, there was nothing wrong with being at home, or for that matter, with being Thea.

  Of course I thought about how we’d kissed. It was almost as if it was something that had happened to someone else, in a movie. It was not a kiss of love. It was about comfort. And now that she’d quit on me, we had chilled to each other like jilted lovers. I saw her children in their yard on Saturdays and Caius driving off when I did in the morning, his wide shoulders and sure stance as he unlocked his car. Usually I was coming or going, all week I was only home before light and after dark. I was glad of the distance between our houses.

  Alternate Fridays were different. I worked at home every other Friday, and Carole only worked a half day, so by three o’clock I was lured outside to walk Malena in the stroller or sit on the lawn and let her see the sky as April swelled into spring. I felt that working on children’s books hadn’t prepared me, in any way, for talking to a child. She knew nothing, so I tried to tell her everything.

  “Precipitation,” I started, “is rain and snow and hail. Moisture in the clouds—” I looked at her. She was chewing on a fist and smelled like sweet bread dough.

  “Okay, never mind. That’s the sky. Sky! Those are clouds…”

  Obviously she didn’t understand any of it, but I pointed out cumulus and nimbus. I showed her the maple leaf and a blade of grass.

  Sometimes it was a little bit boring. Not Malena herself, but being always in charge of Malena, the fact of having to sit still or move, to rock or hum but not give my pure attention to anything else. I felt guilty for that, for wishing I could go back to the manuscript I’d brought home. I read in pieces, but it wasn’t the same. I tried to remember how all week I’d missed Malena, a dull and constant ache.

  Then Carole had to stay home sick, so I had to stay home sick. I wished Aaron could do it because he didn’t have an author meeting. He didn’t have anything urgent, but the assumption was that I would be the one to stay home. So I did, and I resented it and loved being with Malena.

  It was a Monday. I tried not to think about the rest of the week, to worry about prolonging my own fake illness.

  Malena couldn’t do much at the playground. I pushed her on the baby swings and she waved her arms. I put her in my lap and went down the slide, my hips scarcely fitting within the plastic parameters. The park smelled of cedar chips and sun-warmed metal.

  “She’s too young,” called a woman sitting on the bench. She had long brown hair and a sugary voice. “Don’t let her go down herself.”

  “Um,” I said. “I know.”

  “And honey, it’s much too cold to swing, the metal on those swings, you should be careful.”

  “I’m her mother,” I said, carrying Malena over to the giant tic-tac-toe game. I wondered why she was telling me what to do, and a small wad of guilt and worry formed in my belly, a whole planet of guilt, starting with a speck of dust and magnetically attracting matter. Magnetically attracting comments. It was as if I were wearing a sign: Working Mommy.

  I should’ve been flattered that she thought I was the young baby-sitter, but I wasn’t the baby-sitter. I was the person who had endured all-day morning sickness, I’d felt the contractions like tsunamis of pain, I’d pushed and I had been cut, I’d been stitched, I’d made milk. I still belonged to Malena at night. I still belonged to her all the time; when I was away, I might forget temporarily, but my cells knew, the strange passion of motherhood was just behind my calm office mask.

  I put her back in the swing to spite the bossy woman on the bench, and because it made Malena giggle. I pushed her in an arc, her feet purple exclamations in the sneakers Carole had picked out at the baby store in town. We left an envelope of money to pay her back; somehow it felt like an illicit transaction. I was still unused to having someone else living in my house during the day, someone else who rummaged in the fridge for lunch, someone else spooning sweet potatoes into Malena’s bird mouth. When I wasn’t there, I could let myself stop thinking out the minutes of her day. I liked coming home and letting Carole leave, taking my baby and shifting the evidence—moving the mail to the table where I sorted it, pushing the toy chest to the other corner, holding and bathing Malena to erase Carole’s smell, a sort of salty perfume, and cover it with my own, invisible to me.

  I was the mommy pushing the swing, and I tried to savor it, an orange taste on my tongue. I tried to imagine doing it every day. I would be bored. Still, I let myself go there. She could hold up her own head, she could sit, and she could eat, but she still required a whole person, absolute attention. Helplessness scared me—it was my job to take care of Malena, and I had hired someone else to do this job for me.

  I parked the stroller in the backyard and put Malena out on a farm-scene mat to watch the sun and wind particularize the locust leaves. April still grew cool when clouds covered the afternoon sun. I sat on the steps by the shed and a chill seeped from the concrete through my jeans. It would be quiet to be a mother alone, quiet except for the occasional cry, for the mowers and blowers evacuating the neighborhood of excess green. I’d be lonely. I was a little lonely; squeezed by home and work, I’d forgotten how to just be with Malena, with anyone. Wind rattled the glass in the shed door, a little rhythm, fix-a-me, fix-a-me. I didn’t have the energy to fix anything. I looked at Malena; she was wide eyed as she rolled onto her front and did a wobbly half push-up.

  The phone rang inside the house, but I didn’t feel like running in to get it. Squirrels harassed each other around an elm—maybe they were mating, but it looked almost vicious, the way they nipped at each other, screamed and bristled. Through the open back window I heard Carole’s voice on the machine, her cough. It was wrong to begrudge her this, but I wasn’t always sure I wanted this other person in my life.

  I tried to enjoy the afternoon. Changing Malena, I thought about how a parent maintains a baby’s body—inspecting, cleaning, observing the absurdly fast growth, touching and tasting the incredible new skin. I could see how someone wouldn’t mind it as a job, even if the baby they cared for wasn’t their own. Being with Malena for the day reminded me of the things Carole did for her, the details, the greatest intimacies, and how Carole was taking care of me, how I appreciated her, despite not wanting to think about her too often.

  “You are amazing!” I said to Malena, who had just burbled and peed into her new diaper so I had to start again.

  The second day, I didn’t enjoy “our” sick day nearly as much. I felt as if I were in a tunnel, scrabbling through roots and stones in an unknown, clearly wrong direction. It was only a little time at home, but all my calm and ordinariness, all my day-to-day balance of being an editor and being a mother, being a woman who works and one wh
o watches her daughter’s fingers open and close, ferned around themselves, wound into a snarl of what I could do and what I should be doing.

  Then there was the third day. I was missing the production meeting. You didn’t miss a production meeting unless you had a funeral or an author’s hand to hold or a heart attack. One woman in production had felt sick one Wednesday morning when she had to present some specs for her book. She stayed at work, only to be found writhing under her desk right before the meeting started. Acute appendicitis. The EMTs took her down the elevator on a stretcher. Then the meeting convened without her.

  I thought about my own mother, tried to remember what she’d done when we were sick. I remembered her brushing my hair once when I had a fever. It hurt and felt delicious. Probably, Dad had been the one to stay home. Had Mom felt this guilty? Maybe it was her fault; maybe she’d transferred the guilt onto me. All along I’d faulted her for taking the easy way out, for working all the time. It was easier, and it was harder; it was awful. I was a ball of tangled twine, and I felt pulled and knotted from within and without.

  “Try to enjoy it,” said Aaron. “It’s like a day off.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you had to stay home.”

  “If I didn’t have to go to Atlanta, I would, you know I would.”

  I didn’t know that. At least he hadn’t been able to prove it yet. I did know his flight left at 8:25 A.M., and at 5:10 A.M. we were all up, Malena and me in the bed, Aaron stuffing extra socks into his garment bag.

  At work, things were gnarled and gossipy; the trade division was up for sale, and everyone was worried. I was worried. When there was turnover, there was the inevitable overthrow of miscellaneous thrones; there were the pet projects placed in other people’s chairs, and the higher your position, the more vulnerable you were. I knew I hadn’t brought in as many well-reviewed or award-winning or unexpectedly best-selling books in the last year—Wild Aunt Safari was old news—in no small part because I hadn’t been at work for a hefty slice of the last year.

  Morning sickness felt as if it was years ago. Finding Carole felt like years ago. All the trouble with the house felt like years past, the horrific crash, the tree settling in like an unwanted guest. The nighttime anxiety I’d had just afterward—sometimes ghostly reminders briefly inhabited my body when I woke to Malena’s cries, and my heart pounded horribly. But mostly, I remembered the rain on the living room rug, snow drifting into the kitchen through a big black plastic flap. Unadulterated winter sunshine on the blond wood floor. Workmen cutting and sanding and pounding.

  “I think that’s your limo,” I said. We lived in a town so quiet I could hear the idle of an unfamiliar engine over the miniature orchestra of cardinals and black-capped chickadees.

  “You’ll be okay?”

  “She’s my daughter, I know what to do.” I rested Malena’s sleeping head in the crook of my neck.

  I called Neethi early and left a message, sniffling as convincingly as I could, hoping she wouldn’t call back, but of course she did, just as I was spooning rice cereal into Malena.

  “Are you really sick, or is it your child?” she asked, forgoing the ordinary salutations. Malena smeared her cereal on my arm.

  Surprised by her outright attack, I forgot my sniffling and said, “Oh, um, we both have it?”

  “I thought you had contingency arrangements,” said Neethi, cruel and quick.

  “Oh,” I said, remembering that I’d lied that my sister could take over in a pinch. Neethi had offered me the name of an emergency nanny agency in the city, which charged only one hundred dollars an hour to cover when your own live-in had to go back to Guatemala or wherever to help an ailing mother-in-law. I coughed, anyway.

  “Yes, my sister’s away. But really, I wouldn’t want to be hacking on everyone there—I do have it, too.” Too little, too late. I knew she was wearing her scarlet production meeting lipstick and matching suit. The new director was supposedly both a tyrant and a fox, but I hadn’t met him yet.

  While Malena took an afternoon nap, I called my mother, unsure of what I wanted to say. That she had done me wrong, that she had been good. When I got voice mail, I hesitated.

  “I just,” I said, hearing the dead air. “I just know more now.” I wondered whether the recording had stopped. “Thank you.”

  I stared at the phone for a second, surprised.

  I was making hot chocolate when she called back. I’d wanted it the way I wanted things when I was pregnant—with a longing that was almost disgust.

  “It feels like the hardest thing in the world, doesn’t it?” she said, and for a minute, I wondered whether someone was impersonating my mother. Did no one introduce themselves anymore? Did caller ID mean no one needed to start with hello?

  “Mom?”

  “Like you can hardly stand it, like it is sickeningly important and like you’re making all the wrong choices.”

  “Not that bad.”

  She chuckled. I could imagine the corners of her mouth, the new wrinkles I’d noticed back at Chanukah, folds that made a smile almost unhappy. “Well, it doesn’t get any easier.”

  “Excuse me? I thought you were supposed to finish up with a platitude.”

  “That’s my Amanda, always looking for a summary. It doesn’t, really. Gets less big, but it never goes away.”

  “Are we talking about my postbaby belly or motherhood?”

  “Both,” she said. “Must go, I’ve got a meeting, but you’re welcome.”

  I spooned one mouthful of hot chocolate from the pan, burned my tongue as I swallowed, and poured the rest in the sink. Malena started to cry.

  When I was four and a half, I wanted to learn to tie my shoelaces because Jane could already do it. My father was grading tests. He showed me twice, distracted, how to make a loop and wind the second lace around, but I couldn’t copy what he’d done after he went back to the papers at his desk. All night, I thought about my shoelaces, passionate to know how to tie them. In the middle of the night, the rooms were washed by the gray-yellow glow from the street lamp outside my bedroom window, and I crept downstairs to find my sneakers and try again. My mother was at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of wine, wearing a robe. She looked soft and exhausted and she’d missed dinner and bedtime because of a conference at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. I expected her to tell me to go upstairs, but she took me into her lap and showed me how to make two loops and cross them.

  “Daddy said one loop,” I said, trying to copy what her hands had done. Her breath smelled sweet and grapey.

  “Sometimes different methods work for different people,” she said, taking my small hands in hers and leading me through.

  So, she taught me to tie my shoes, but she hadn’t been around. Was I going to be around? There had to be a compromise.

  19

  Thea

  Oren was the one I’d fought with the most. In the years since I came home from the trail, after he had died, I hardly remembered that, preferring instead to remember how he was golden, how he was good. He would have been the uncle who came to visit, playing horsy and bearing quirky things that could be played with instead of sending big plain presents that didn’t really matter, like the ones from my surviving brothers.

  I predicted in the impossible past tense: Oren would have brought a cheap Chinese kite to the birthday party. He’d get ice cream on his elegant nose. The next day he’d have gone to the broad green hill by the lake at Ramapo Reservation with the birthday child. He’d have untangled the silky string, attached the lion’s head to the dragon body, launched the kite to the sky with his own sprint, brought the tether to Oliver’s hand, or Carra’s, or Iris’s.

  But having Tia here reminded me that being closest in age had meant we were closest in competition, too, that Oren had been the one hanging on my mother’s other leg, that he’d gotten Dad to come to his baseball game instead of my viola recital by means of charismatic and insistent begging. Sometimes I’d wanted the attention he got, even though he wa
s younger. Sometimes I’d wanted everything he had.

  On the second night of Tia’s visit, after I’d convinced myself I hadn’t knocked on Carra’s door to talk with her about what I’d seen because my friend was visiting, Carra brought her secret to us when I didn’t expect it.

  Caius came home early. Tia was out with her mother buying clothes. “She’s so batty now, she wears the weirdest things,” she’d told me. “This weird dirndl dress and pants and a sweatshirt all at once.” I didn’t like hearing Tia call her mother batty, though she’d probably done it twenty years ago as well. Caius and I were sitting on the front porch swing listening to the birds arguing over the first crop of insect hatchlings, the house creaking with the memory of living wood.

  “I’m thinking about what you said,” I told him, my heart hammering. “About going out and doing something for myself?”

  “Good,” said Caius. “Have you found us a place to go for that vacation in September yet? The kids have those Jewish holidays off, right? I can take three days in August, too. Did I tell you about the settlement on the Steinberg account?” His questions were laconic, as if he’d been drugged by the early evening light.

  “Yes,” I said, though he hadn’t. “I wanted to tell you about something. Well, two somethings,” I said, as Carra, the buds of her body invisible under a sweatshirt, came out of the house with a cookie in her mouth and another in her hand.

  “Mommy,” she said. She sat on my lap, leaning her head against Caius’s shoulder. The swing creaked with our collective weight.

  Carra let me stroke her hair, glinting with red. Her skin was so young; she still had the scent she’d had as a baby, apricot, beneath the chemical smells of her makeup, chlorine, beneath the cotton and high school hallway smells. It hurt to love someone like this, someone who was letting me go every time she walked away.

  She finished her cookies and leaned into us. I looked at the enormous length of her arms, thought about the bones beneath, grown from baby bones, grown from the first tiny person I’d birthed. Sometimes she was separate from that person, but at this minute she was the same, needing us, Caius and me, needing our bodies for comfort despite her own capabilities, despite being taller and stronger than I’d ever be.