“Nothing, I didn’t mean anything.” Caius made a verbal retreat. I found it infuriating, even more than when he was direct in his complaints about my nature.
“You never mean nothing,” I said, shifting further from him in the bed. I wanted to go back to feeling warm, to wanting his touch, but at the same time there was something satisfying about the general sense of strife, at mining the thin silver river of complaint below the surface of our time together.
“I just mean you haven’t been so happy lately, and all I want is for you to be happy. That squirrel thing, it’s got you so riled up.”
“It’s just not that big a deal,” I lied.
“Well, if you want to, you could file a police report.”
“I don’t want to do anything.”
“Does that mean you want me to do something?”
“No,” I said. “I mean yes.” It was a guilty feeling, but I wanted him to rescue me, to find out who was doing this, to protect me. I was pathetic, but I couldn’t very well go over to my neighbor’s house and ask whether she was depositing dead animals on my porch.
“I just want it to go away.”
“The squirrels?”
“And birds and a groundhog. Everything,” I said, almost weeping.
“I’ll take care of it then. All I want is for you to be happy,” he said, with a horrible gentleness. Condescension.
“Argh,” I said.
“Please, Thee, please just listen. I was thinking you should try getting a baby-sitter, so you could have a little time to yourself.”
Of course it made sense. It was infuriating. Another accusation, the assumption that I wasn’t whole as things were, that I was silently brewing discontent, that he could smell my secret.
“Thee?” He reached for me again, and I let him touch my arm. I despised him for being slightly right. “Think about it from the outside for a second, from my point of view, if you can stand that.”
“Of course I can stand that. I’m not unhappy with you. Do you think I’m unhappy with you?”
“I think you deserve to be happier. It isn’t about me, it’s about you. You don’t like things to be about you.”
Of course I did, I thought. I didn’t often get the chance, but of course I did. I fumed and noticed how soft his fingertips were, how long his fingers, how his eyes had flecks of brown marring the infuriating blue.
“You’re a wonderful mother and a wonderful wife, and sometimes I think you could use a little time to think about who else you are, spend some time with your friends or go out, I don’t know—”
“Stop making suggestions,” I said. I tugged on his arm, bringing him closer. “I’m not mad at you, but I don’t want you to be mad at me, either.”
“Why would I be mad?” he pulled away slightly.
“Because I want to use that vacation time for myself. I want you to take care of the kids. I want to go on a trip, Outward Bound. I know it’s a lot of work to take care of the kids and it’s your vacation, but I want to go. Just five days. I plan to go. Is that okay?”
Caius sat further away from me and looked at me as if I were some mysterious object in his bed—a mermaid, a unicorn.
“Of course it’s okay,” he said. “This trip—it’s something you want to do? I mean, of course it’s okay.” He said, as if deciding. “You deserve a change. I can manage the kids easily. They have school anyway, right?”
“Some of the time. Most of the work will be Iris.” My hand was shaking under the blanket. I’d finally told him. This meant I was going.
“No problem. I’m their dad, after all. Iris is no big deal. Do you know some good sitters who might help me out?”
I laughed. Then I pressed my mouth against his collarbone and let the frustration beneath my skin, the relief and complication and new anxieties—I was going!—turn into want.
“Okay,” said Caius, letting me kiss him but not relaxing, not until I’d climbed atop him and we’d made love, speechless and fast, almost angry. Then he fell asleep, breathing the deep breath of satisfaction, of innocence, of being guiltlessly able to think about himself from time to time.
I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and put on Caius’s robe. I could still smell him, salty, the ghost of his aftershave on my cheek and my shoulder. My thighs were sore and it felt good, chapped by love. Usually, we talked things through and through. Usually I let Caius lead me to a resolution. But for this strife, for his wanting something else for me, as if I were too small to determine that for myself, for his genuine concern for the separate me, for the me who spent hours in motherhood that would become hours with myself when Iris went to school, a gradual loss and not obvious to someone not looking closely, sex was a satisfying temporary solution. A distraction. An attention. And I was going away. He was helping me so I could go away from them all, from him. He thought it was a good idea, even.
But because he was a man, there were things he wouldn’t ever understand, things of the body. Like being a mother. And with someone like Amanda, for whom the initiation of absolute belonging was fresh, the motherhood was raw and visible. I supposed that was part of what attracted me to her, what made me feel something close to empathy but mixed with sympathy and some jealousy. She was a mother, and she had found a way to keep some of herself, too; she let work reel her in from the sea of her child’s needs.
As happened whenever I thought of Amanda, I also thought of the dead things on my porch, and the loop of suspicion made my heart race—I would never get to sleep. When had these horrible gifts started arriving? I’d thought it was recently, but when I thought of my sketch pad I remembered the first bird—and realized it had been going on since winter. I was shocked it had gone on so long: since one winter day after one winter night—the day after Amanda came home so late, the day after we’d accidentally kissed.
I went into the living room, hoping I wouldn’t wake anyone, but found Tia on the couch. She was drinking scotch; I could smell it across the room, a sharp, unpleasant smell. Caius always said it was warm, buttery, but I could never get past the terrible stench of alcohol.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to bother you to ask.” She shook the glass at me. No ice, muted sloshing in the grainy light.
“It’s Caius’s. You can drink it all.” I laughed.
“Do I sense strife in the castle of marital bliss?” Tia sipped her drink.
“No, actually. It isn’t about us. Or him. I’m just…thinking…,” I said, letting the sentence peter out.
“Ah, thinking. I used to do that sometimes. I’m kind of more into doing these days.”
“I hate having dead things on my doorstep,” I said.
“What does Caius think of your dead animal problem?”
“He actually thinks we should file a police report.”
“Really? Why don’t you put up a spy camera?”
I laughed, but actually it had occurred to me. I wanted to catch someone in the act. I wanted to stop feeling attacked. Even if I minded being treated like a child, I didn’t mind that Caius said he’d take care of it. Whatever that meant.
I sat on the couch by Tia, almost touching her, happy to have her, happy she’d be going. I realized what I really wanted was to have all my choices back, to know when I decided each thing—marrying and having babies and moving back to this house where who I was before followed me around like an out-of-synch shadow.
I could feel Tia’s heat beside me on the couch.
“It’s hard to imagine what it’s like for you,” she said. “I’m here and I’m watching, but I don’t really know.” She sighed. Then she started talking about her married boyfriend and the second of clarity was gone. It was all right not to tell her my own news, it was all right to plan something that might change me alone in my family, somewhere I’d lived for a long time.
As I drove Tia to the airport, she recounted our times in the woods behind the house. I was feeling guilty and relieved because she was almost gone—I could go back to being a mother and a wife an
d an abstract friend, not the kind who listened with absolute attention, but one with license to be distracted.
“And acorns! We had something with acorns! I think it was a spell about our parents, something about them doing everything we said—”
“Did it work?” Oliver asked. He and Iris were in the backseat, hearing everything as usual.
“Oh.” Tia slipped out of her shoulder belt and turned around. “Your mom’s parents were tough. So tough. You don’t realize how easy you have it. You should have seen all the chores she had to do.”
“Really?” Oliver was restless, shifting in his seat, kicking the back of mine. His voice was loud with unexpressed physical energy.
“She had to milk the cows and ride the horses.”
“Horse! Horse! Neigh says horse!” said Iris.
“That’s right,” said Tia, laughing. “You never told me about this part of motherhood.” She touched my arm.
“No way,” said Oliver. “You had cows?”
“No,” I said.
“And we used to play hide-and-seek on Spirit Night, and your mom was never afraid of the boys with shaving cream and eggs, like me.”
“I think you’ve got it backward,” I said to Tia.
“Nope,” she said, turning away from my children to look out the window at New Jersey. “Your mom was never really afraid of anything.”
But then she took it away, the stretch of warmth that had grown across my collarbone, the forgiveness, the connection.
“Now your grandmother,” she said, turning to her diminutive audience, “didn’t like much mess or bother.”
“Oh, she wasn’t that fussy,” I said, feeling my defenses in my fingertips, my heated cheeks.
“You know”—Tia turned to me—“My mother never liked your mother. You know that, right?”
“I do not,” I said, affronted not only by the content but the context.
“Thought all those flowers and children were a bit too perfect.”
Right in front of my kids. I repressed the urge to shush her. Instead, I drove on toward her departure.
May
20
Amanda
“I am going to be fat forever,” I said to Rosanna, leaning into the receiver and picking through my in-box as if there was anything I didn’t already know about in there. Didn’t already know about and hadn’t already avoided all day. I felt tender, exhausted, irritable.
“You’re just PMSing,” said Rosanna. “Come to the gym with me after work.”
Of course she knew better. After work I would run to make the earliest PATH. I would almost fall asleep on New Jersey Transit and would be woken by some young turk screaming into his cell phone.
“I should join the gym again,” I said, but the very idea exhausted me. Rosanna and I had had exactly one lunch together since I’d been back, because if I ate lunch at my desk I could leave earlier, and I always needed to leave earlier—earlier than Neethi, earlier than Jessica Gravitas, earlier certainly than Rosanna, who came in at eleven and left around ten P.M., with long breaks in between for workouts or cocktails in the bar below street level on Broadway that I’d heard about for six months. But hadn’t seen. Who needed bars, anyway? What I needed was a diet and a personal trainer. Or else a masseuse and a long, long nap.
“Babe,” said Rosanna. “I’ve got something I want to show you for the Rose book. It’s gorgeous.”
“Did you settle on a photo composite?”
“No, just come see it.”
Her office was still a shock, each time I entered. Piles and piles of paper, canvases leaned up against her floor lamp, one or two square feet of floor space clear in the entire room.
“I couldn’t say on the phone,” she said, as I stepped over to her light table in anticipation of a slide, “but I think I may be in trouble here.”
“Rosanna?”
She closed the door. “I have to clean up my office. I don’t think I can. But this time they actually mean it.”
“Annual review?”
“Yep. Here’s the jacket art.”
She held up a purply sheet, a photo of a woman climbing right out of the frame, the jagged rocks in the background, the title set like cairns in the background. It was gorgeous, perfect, and suddenly I thought the Rose book was going to be big.
“Wow. Who’s your freelancer?”
“Me. Will you help me clean this place up?”
“Yes,” I said, knowing I would lose the rest of my afternoon now, that she’d do the same for me, and that it would be just as awful in a day or two.
I took Thursday at home instead of Friday, because Carole had a doctor’s appointment in the morning. I took Malena out for a walk in the stroller after Aaron left, hoping to “tire her out with the fresh air,” as my mother suggested. I was also calculating how many calories I would burn by walking, but I stopped in town for a café mocha, thereby making the point moot. I called Rosanna from my cell phone on the way back, but she wasn’t in the office—or else she had already lost her phone under the paper. As I carried the carriage up the steps, I noticed a strange odor coming from behind the planter that still held last fall’s dead mums. It was not the odor of a dead plant but a dead animal. We kept the spare key in that plant, in a fake rock. For a minute, I was afraid when I saw it, a tuft of incongruous fur, twitching, but only from the breeze, not from any extant life. A big, fat squirrel. It stank. I took a few tissues from my pocket to grip the thing and walked to the back of the yard with it, flung it over the fence and into the woods.
All out of kilter, I was willing Malena to nap in the Pack ’n Play in the living room when I saw the letter come in the slot. It wasn’t time for the mail yet; Betty, the postal carrier, usually came around four, and UPS was midmorning, but it wasn’t even ten yet. Just one envelope, just one pale hand reaching into my house to deposit it. I knew those fingers, those particular spade-shaped nails. It was Thea, dropping something into the slot in my door, probably assuming I wasn’t home. And since I didn’t particularly want to talk to Thea, I waited, standing like a startled animal, until I heard her steps leave my porch.
“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Katz,” the letter read.
It has come to our attention that some repeated vandalism has occurred at our residence. Perhaps you are aware that carrion, or dead animals, have been repeatedly deposited at our doorstep. This is to inform you that we are going to turn this matter over to the police, as the acts appear to have malicious intent. If you have any information to report, please contact us within the next twenty-four hours, as we plan to alert the authorities after that time.
Sincerely,
Mr. and Mrs. Caius Caldwell
“What?” I said aloud, but then I felt ferociously sick. I ran to the kitchen, thinking I might actually vomit. They thought we were putting dead things on their doorstep. They thought we were that pathetic.
I called Aaron twice at work but couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I was too confused. I wanted too much to talk about it, and there was always someone in his office, someone holding on the other line. By the time he got home, I was sure I should be really, really angry, but I just handed the letter to him, before a kiss, before handing him Malena, before saying hello.
Aaron looked at me, then the letter. He put his briefcase down and read it standing. He smelled like the train, a strange mix of bergamot and exhaust. His face looked strange, then lit. He finished, smiled at me, and laughed. He laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I asked. “They think we’re committing malicious deeds.”
“They don’t say that,” said Aaron. “Technically.” He laughed again, and this was why I loved him. Because he laughed.
“I found a dead squirrel today,” I said.
“Two mice,” said Aaron.
“You didn’t tell me,” I said.
“Didn’t think it mattered,” he said. “And a bird.”
“Yuck.”
“Carrion, or dead animals,” he intoned, grandiose, and chuckled
again.
Then, of course, he worked himself into an impenetrable fury. He kissed Malena and she cried, sensing his mood. He didn’t change his clothes; instead, he went into the office and drafted his own letter in legalese. It said we were now aware of the problem; that they should indeed go to the police, because we’d had the same problem ourselves, though we hadn’t leaped past the obvious conclusion that someone’s cat was overzealous.
I slept badly that night and went downstairs rather than wake Aaron with my restlessness. I read the letter twice, then peeled back the curtain in the living room before I settled in to try to sleep on the couch. I glared at their house, amazed that they could carry such a thing so far. Thea, whom I’d kissed, who’d held my girl in her own arms, whose cookies I’d eaten. I thought she must be a very sad person indeed, and wondered if this was the cost of spending too much time in your house—you might begin to think people were setting siege upon your castle when really they were just trying to live their lives with as many of the ordinary pleasures as possible and keep a respectful distance from their neighbors.
For three weeks, I did as Aaron suggested and let it go. He never mailed his letter—said we shouldn’t escalate matters. But each time I drove up to our house and saw theirs, that fortress of ill-directed blame and buttery guilt, I seethed. It hurt my gut; Rosanna told me I had to stop taking Mylanta or I’d ruin my chi.
“I’ll ruin her chi,” I told her. Rosanna crossed her arms in that neat way she had, folding herself up like a bird, holding warmth to her breast while suggesting the possibility of flight.
“You should save that anger for something more worthy, like Neethi’s postponing Rose from the list again.”
It was a kind attempt at distraction, but it didn’t work. The only thing that made me feel any better was imagining my revenge. First, I thought of confrontation, of going to her house wearing a threatening black suit and carrying her letter and something bulky in my pocket that could ostensibly be a gun. I’d never actually handled a gun, but I’d watched enough spy dramas on TV to have learned the gun-revelation gesture, hand in pocket, sly grimace. Of course I wouldn’t have a gun, but I’d scare her, I’d threaten her, I’d let her sweat out her worst fear, that someone might actually be angry with her and actually face up to her. With a weapon, to boot. I knew from living with her that she was afraid of confrontation, of facing what she had done. Which was why so much of what she did was beyond reproach. She was aggressively nice. Until now.
The Other Mother Page 23