The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  “I have a secret,” she said into Caius’s shoulder.

  I felt fear in my limbs again, as I had when I saw her in the woods. Panic rang in my cells like a thousand invisible alarm clocks.

  “Okay, Carra-my-faira,” said Caius. “Tell us.”

  “You can’t be mad,” said Carra, her face against the stripes of his button-down.

  “Okay,” he said again. I wanted to pull her face to mine, I wanted to inspect her for damage. Instead I held her hand. She let me.

  “I like a boy,” she said. She sighed with the great energy of youth. Her language wasn’t the language of someone having sex. I breathed. Deep in, deep out.

  “Have you kissed him?” I asked.

  “Yuck,” she said. “Of course not. Not yet.”

  Then she got up and flounced inside, twelve again. “Homework,” she said. “When’s dinner?”

  “Pizza, I think,” said Caius. “Later.”

  “She has,” I whispered to Caius.

  “Really?” He sat up straight.

  “Maybe she was working up to telling us that,” I said.

  “How do you know if she didn’t tell you?”

  “I saw her,” I said. “But don’t be mad.” I wasn’t sure why I was telling him that when I was mad myself. Then Tia walked up the driveway and saluted.

  All along I’d wondered how other mothers, no matter how distracted, let their daughters make mistakes—get pregnant, get diseases. All along I’d secretly believed I was better than them; bad things only happened to children whose mothers let the songs of their own lives drown out plaintive calls for help. But I’d been listening, hadn’t I? Now I knew how it happened: like that. She was going to be thirteen in a few weeks. Thirteen. Too soon to start lying to us.

  Still, by consensus, we decided to let Carra’s secret rest. Caius wanted me to tell and retell what I’d seen, and we stayed up that night deciding to confront her, deciding to wait until she came to us. It would be better if she laid her cards down one by one, if we didn’t pull them from her hand. It would be better if she trusted us as much as she could.

  “You have talked about, you know—sex?” asked Caius, as if sex wasn’t something we held between us that we relied on for connection more than the walls of the house. As if sex wasn’t how we’d had a Carra in the first place.

  “Last year, of course,” I said. “She isn’t going to be stupid. I don’t think this is going to go that far.” I believed it, too, though I would have believed she hadn’t kissed him if I hadn’t seen it.

  “If she doesn’t tell us soon, we tell her to tell us.”

  “She knows about birth control, too.”

  “But you said she isn’t having sex.”

  “No,” I said, “but she knows.”

  He groaned and rolled over and then rolled back to kiss the air in my general direction. Neither of us would sleep much, but we’d both pretend.

  “Why doesn’t Clark come down more often?” Tia asked, referring to my brother who lived in upstate New York.

  I was trying to talk with Tia; I felt we hadn’t really talked yet, five days into the visit. I stood on the lawn below the back porch, trying to keep Iris from pulling all the buds off the tulips; I’d let her take one, and she’d cracked it open, fascinated for a second by the pistil, stamen, by the unhatched red inside. But then she’d move on to another bud, and another. I told her not to pick them, grabbed her wrist twice and squeezed her fist into an open hand. Still, as soon as I started talking with Tia, she quit digging her hole in the corner of the yard, cast away her plastic spade, and started for the tulip buds again.

  “No, Iris, I said no,” I said, feeling oddly that I was making everything up. Then, “Clark? Because he’s busy. Because his wife doesn’t like us. Because he still wishes I hadn’t moved into the house. Though frankly, he was completely convinced and convincing at the time.”

  “I remember when we kissed in a tree,” she said. “He was so shy, his lips passed over mine like a butterfly. That tree in the Burtons’ yard, the beech?”

  “Not there anymore. The new owners cut it down and added on.”

  “It is kind of weird that you’re living here,” said Tia.

  “No, Iris, I said no.” Iris flung herself at my feet, the split bud of a looted yellow tulip in her hand. She cried a loud, fake cry, and I wanted for a quick hot second to slap her. I wanted the tulips, they were what my mother left me, fewer coming up each year, and I looked forward to them all through leaves and buds. I was furious with her for taking them right before the gift opened itself.

  “I mean, is it weird to have sex in your parents’ bedroom? Not just once, but all the time?”

  Tia was more annoying than my daughter. “No,” I said, looking down at Iris, who was dissecting the yellow flower and smoothing her fingers along the petal. I bent down to kiss her delicious forehead.

  “Who is sex?” asked Iris.

  “Christ,” said Tia. “I didn’t know she was listening.”

  “She’s always listening,” I said. Iris got up and skipped across the lawn before I had to answer her. I knew we’d come back to the subject.

  “You and Oren had that thing you did with bottle caps, that collage or something?”

  “You’re right, the collage, I’d forgotten.” In the back corner of the yard, behind the forsythia and beneath a mottled sassafras grown wild from the woods, we’d used bottle caps to make a sort of mosaic floor beneath the trunk. Oren had come home, thrilled with his newest finds, an orange from orange soda, the sharp reds and silvers from beer bottles. Our mother had found it and was worried we were drinking the beer.

  I couldn’t remember when we’d stopped. I’d lost so many pieces of history, reinventing how my life had evolved, how my brothers had lived, how my mother had raised us, how my father’s math had taught us measures and proof, by telling it as stories to friends, by giving it to Caius when we were in the mountains together: my dowry.

  “Hey, Iris, baby, can you find the collage?” Tia’s voice lilted with the fake soprano of an adult unaccustomed to speaking to a child. “Your mommy made it with your uncle when they were little kids. Look back there.” She pointed to the back corner of the yard, then the other corner, at the forsythias that framed the south end of the property.

  “Mommy?” Iris reached her arms up for me.

  I lifted her. She smelled of grass and crushed flowers, delicious. May you never lose a brother, I thought. Or anyone. I shivered. One of the hardest things, having children, was the fact that there were more people you could lose, more dangers. When Carra was first born, I’d realized how awful the world really was, and I’d thought I was the only one who could keep her safe. But for all I knew now she wasn’t at school; she could be off in the woods with the stolen pumpkins, she could be opening her mouth for that boy as we spoke.

  “Lemme go,” said Iris, pointing at the ground. I put her down and let her scamper off in search of the mosaic.

  “Here,” said Tia, patting the step beside her.

  I sat down, watching Iris as she went, wanting to follow after her but wanting more to prove to Tia that I could pay attention, if only for a sliver of time.

  “So,” said Tia. “I’ve been waiting for the right minute to tell you, but there aren’t very many right minutes. You’re so booked.” She touched my arm and I felt a flood of familiar warmth. We once knew each other, knew everything. Maybe it was possible to catch up, or at least to weave fifteen minutes together, to overlap, if temporarily.

  “I know,” I said. “Mommyhood.”

  “So I don’t even plan to tell my Mom—not that I ever tell her most important things.”

  For that second, her face luminous with secrets coming to the surface, I thought I might guess. She was getting married. She was pregnant. Something big. I had expected this moment all along, the time that would feel like old times, the times that were almost romantic. And I knew it was absurd, that we’d never be Carra’s age again, collecting
leaves for spells and building forts out of sheets, making Tia’s mother furious because we used the good blue-striped sheets—we took a whole pile of them out of the clickety-doored linen closet, pulled them out into a muddy day.

  It wasn’t innocence I wanted, it was the deep selfishness of childhood, it was being able to tell your best friend anything. The pillow of the future.

  “I had an affair with a woman who came on a climb,” Tia said.

  “Oh.” I started to make a sentence but swallowed the words before they strung together in any meaningful way.

  “I’m kidding,” said Tia. “I just wanted to see what you’d think. The truth is, it was a married man. I’m one of those awful other women. It’s such a cliché. And I don’t even think I love him, but there’s no one else, and I’m bored, and I probably should leave him. He came on a trip to Utah, and then another to Joshua Tree. And then another one right into my sleeping bag. There aren’t any kids or anything—I probably should leave him.” She tilted her head toward the house.

  “Probably,” I parroted. The joke about the woman wasn’t funny. I thought about kissing Amanda. I would get so bored, she’d said of my life. She was irritating, even if she was a little bit right. Like remembering a bad dream, my mind jumped to the animals. I would have to do something about that after Tia left; I had to stop them coming, somehow.

  “Is that what you think, Thee? You always had such good advice.”

  I didn’t know why I wasn’t more focused on Tia’s problem. I supposed I thought it was time for me to get the good advice instead of giving it, or perhaps because Iris had disappeared into the forsythia and I was almost panicked with the desire to follow her and to stay. No matter how hard I was trying, I was weary of listening instead of telling. Never telling. I started by shifting the subject to me. “Sometimes it’s incredibly hard, being a mom. Sometimes I wish I could take a vacation, be Thea for a while.” Right away I felt fake and selfish.

  Tia nodded. “Why don’t you?” she asked. It was too plain a question. Too bald. Too clear that the gulf between us was only growing wider, a continental drift.

  “You deserve better than a married man,” I said, afraid of what was sitting in my mouth.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “So, it wasn’t really serious, and I don’t think it meant anything, but you know that neighbor I told you about, the woman in your mom’s house? You know how I said she went back to work and I took care of her baby for a while after that horrible accident with the storm?”

  “You’re not having another one,” said Tia. “The thing is, with David, that’s my married man’s name, he wants to have kids and his wife doesn’t. But honestly, I’m not sure I could do it, either.”

  Probably not, I thought. You’d have to give up so much vanity, so much time.

  “No, I’m not having another baby. The thing is, we kissed.” Why was I telling her this instead of about Outward Bound? Why did kissing Amanda even matter? I was done with their family, after all. Even if I did think of Malena often, even if I did wonder whether she was sitting up, whether she’d started to babble.

  “Excuse me?” Tia put her hand on my thigh, the gesture almost an exclamation.

  “And now I’m not taking care of her baby—I quit, I couldn’t stand her bossiness anymore—and there have been these dead animals, and I keep thinking—”

  “What, like Fatal Attraction or something? Ooo, you better lock up the pet rabbit. I thought I told you to be careful where you put your lips.”

  “Never mind, it’s probably just a cat leaving them. Just squirrels, mice.”

  “Doesn’t sound like just a cat.” She gave me her best Cheshire grin, enjoying herself.

  I already regretted saying it. It had sounded like it meant more than it did. Perhaps I’d been sucked into her melodrama. Perhaps I was trying to compete. But I knew in my heart it wasn’t a cat. That was why I couldn’t let it go.

  “Babe, it’s no big deal. I’ve been with women, too. I mean, even back in high school when we were talking about Jerry and when I was going out with Clark, remember how he bit his lip so much it was all chapped? Anyway, even then I’d, you know, experimented with girls.”

  “With who?” Why not with me, I thought, jealous not of sex but of friends I didn’t share. Of experiments without me. My cheeks hurt with tension and I exhaled, hard, trying to let go.

  “Oh, at Lizzie’s birthday sleepover—that was when you went away to camp that time—we all practiced kissing, all girls, French kissing and then kissing necks and down…well, anyway, it got a little hotter than that.”

  “No way,” I said, jealous of history, jealous of something that happened twenty years ago. I could see a flash of Iris’s yellow overalls through the green and failing yellow of the forsythia.

  Tia licked her lips, as if remembering the taste of the girls’ bodies. Girls we’d made fun of, girls we’d pretended to disdain. “You’re probably bisexual, babe. Most people are. I can’t believe you never tried it out before. It’s great, it’s natural, it’s really only another means of expression.”

  No, I thought. You have no idea. You’ve never been married, you’ve never had children, you’re dating a married man. Not dating, sleeping with. It isn’t about sex, I thought, and realized what a relief that was. The kiss hadn’t been about sex. It was all right to need something, from Amanda, from someone—but it wasn’t all right for it to be about sex. Sex was what Caius and I shared, and that was enough. Sometimes, more than enough, sometimes not at its best. But most of the time, he was exactly who I needed, the way he folded me into him, the way his sweat smelled of burned sugar and limes. With Amanda, it hadn’t been about sex. It had been about our differences or a temporary peace—now vanished—about what we need and what we never get. I sighed.

  I let Tia go on about what she’d done with girls, with women, with her married man; I let it roll over me and I didn’t care anymore, though I still loved her. She owned her own stories. We’d shared a branch, like trees grafted together in an English Fence, but we each owned our own roots, our own leaves and buds.

  “Mommy! Mom-ma!” Iris ran, a yellow line of light across the yard. “Look at this this this!” She held up a rusted orange bottle cap.

  “You’re right, I’m sure,” I said to Tia’s last statement. I kissed her cheek and let her sit alone as I stepped down from the porch to examine Iris’s find.

  The night before I drove Tia to the airport, we went in to talk with Carra, Caius and me, together.

  She answered her door with a pen in her mouth, chewing the end, a little blue ink on her lips, like a child. She was a child. We’d promised each other to be careful how we spoke to her; we’d promised to respect her but tell her what we knew.

  “Your mother was in the woods—,” Caius began. “I mean, we wanted to tell you that we know you’re, well, actually dating.”

  “My mother was in the woods? What does that mean? What were you doing in the woods anyway, Mom?” Carra examined her homework without looking at us.

  “I just wanted you to know you can tell us anything, sweetheart, that we know you’re getting older—”

  “Duh. Like this is some brilliant deduction. You’re getting older,” she mimicked me, her face sour. “There’s so much you don’t know.”

  “So much we don’t know?” said Caius, drawing himself up so he was taller. It was a strange thing; I’d never seen him do it around our children, only around people he was trying to intimidate or impress.

  “I’m not having sex, so don’t get on me about that. I’m not doing drugs, so what do you care? I’m okay, okay? Just butt out.” Carra looked at me then, defying me to get angry. She wanted that. And Caius might give it to her, but I couldn’t. My mouth ached to kiss her head, my arms to make her small, protected. It was ridiculous; I’d never imagined wishing my daughter would not grow up, but this was sooner than I’d planned. If I ever planned anything. Tia had made me feel lost in history, lost in m
y own present, as if my life had happened to me with no driving of my own.

  “Don’t,” said Caius. “You’re too young. And you’re bringing him to meet us,” he said. “Or else you’re not going to see him anymore. We meet all your friends.” His voice was louder than necessary. I was afraid he might wake Iris. At the same time, I was moved by his fear and assertion. By his simplification of something so tangled and impossibly tenuous.

  “Fine,” said Carra. “You can meet him. Mitch.”

  Of course it would be Mitchell, Belinda the actress’s little boy, the one whose nanny took him to kindergarten. Our town suddenly seemed very small, and our children, who’d been in strollers about a minute ago, were dating among themselves without regard for their parents’ readiness.

  Later, when Caius and I had put the issue to bed—he was beautiful to me, fathering, saying what I couldn’t—we sat up with unread books, talking more about other things, about the world outside our home.

  Having Tia visit, having someone else in the house gave it an energy, the drama of possibility, and we stayed in our room at night—except when Iris woke up—restless and physically close. Something about having people in the house warmed Caius with sexual energy, and he turned to me, not always interested in the actual act, but instead interested in my body, in touching, in spreading his energy across my skin like frosting.

  “So, it’s her last night,” he said, his fingers light on my forearm, stroking the inside of my elbow. “Are you sad she’s going?”

  I put my book down. “Actually, not really.” I touched his fingers with mine.

  “I thought it was good. I mean, I thought having a friend here made you happier.”

  “Excuse me?” It sounded suspicious, accusatory. I sat up and rubbed my arm where he’d been stroking, pushed his hand away. “What do you mean happier?”