Mothers and Other Strangers

by Gina Sorell

  Raped. It was Ted who first made me say the word, and after all this time, I still couldn’t bring myself to use it. I still preferred to think that Philippe had had his way with me, forced himself on me, and as a result I developed issues with eating. Rape happened to innocent girls walking down the street late at night in bad neighborhoods, by depraved strangers who wanted to hurt them. It didn’t happen in the safety of your own home by someone who tells you that they care about you and want to help you. That couldn’t be rape, it had to be something else, a misunderstanding, an event better left forgotten. This is what I’d told myself whenever the “r” word crept into my brain. But Ted had made me see otherwise, and even though I tried my best to forget, there would be no forgetting. Eventually I found the courage to tell my mother, and she told me that my mind had been poisoned by my own jealousy, and I’d say anything to destroy her happiness.

  As Mrs. David placed her hand on my shoulder and squeezed it, I shut my eyes tightly, trying to block out the memory of Philippe’s twisted, grunting face, his hot breath on my skin, and his stupid chant about healing me. Even though I now knew what a manipulative prick he had been, I still felt ashamed, still worried that it had been my fault, that the signals I’d sent with that first kiss said yes even when I’d said no. It didn’t matter how much therapy I got—a part of me would always blame myself.

  “Breathe,” she said. “Breathe. You’re going to be okay.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. She sounded so certain, and looking into her face, I saw that she meant what she said.

  “I don’t know. I believe. You need to believe too.” She leaned forward and placed her hand against my cheek, then turned and walked back to her apartment.

  What did I believe? That I could actually move on without knowing the truth? My mother had said it was up to me to decide whether or not I wanted to open the box or bury it with her, but she must’ve believed that I would want answers, and she was right. I looked at the book in my hand and studied the photo of Henri. Father and son. Both of them had resurfaced in the past twenty-four hours, and now I knew that Henri was alive and well and working with the Seekers. He should be able to tell me why my mother, who was so important to the group, had died alone. And if he couldn’t, then he could lead me to Philippe, the one person I believed knew my mother better than anyone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ted and I had agreed to meet at the house. I waited by the attic window for his car to pull up and tugged at my sweater. I realized it was one he had given me many Christmases ago when we were still married, and had started to take it off, but then felt stranger about doing that than wearing it and decided to leave it on. I tended not to throw clothes out, but rather keep them as reminders of times and places and also as a way of measuring myself as I aged. My hair was loose around my shoulders, and I automatically fished the elastic off my wrist and started to twist it into a bun and then stopped. Ted had always loved my hair down, teasing me that my days as a ballet bunhead had never really left me.

  I stepped back from the window as I saw his Range Rover pull into the driveway. I turned on the radio and checked myself in the mirror. The bags under my eyes were larger than normal. I’d dreamt of fire again last night, the dream now set against darkness instead of daylight. This time, as I watched Lafina go into the house, my mother took me off her hip, pushed me away from her, and yelled run! Her eyes were wide and full of fear, and as soon as her hands left my body, her heart burst through her chest and exploded into a million fireworks that showered down on me and set the ground alight. I turned and ran as fast as I could, barely keeping ahead of a trail of fire that snapped at my heels and tried to twist around my ankles and pull me back. My blood was pumping so loudly it rang in my ears, and in a panic I realized I had no idea where I was running to. And then I saw the giant tree that Lafina and I used to sit beneath extend its branches toward me, and I tried to move but the flames had caught up with me and were wrapping themselves around my legs. Run, I heard the tree yell, but it was too late, and I was consumed by the fire. I woke up when I accidentally kicked Shadow off the bed, my dream shifting to reality as the cat hissed and hollered at being thrown onto the floor. Run! Where was I running to? And why did I sense that it wasn’t just the fire that I was running from? There had been no going back to sleep after that.

  I pinched my cheeks and tried to put some youthful color into my face, but there was no denying that I looked my age. No matter how thin or genetically lucky I was, thirty-nine did not look like twenty-nine. I heard Ted open the front door and call out my name, and I slipped the ivory ring off my finger that I’d taken to wearing for safekeeping and put it in my pocket. I didn’t need to remind him that my mother had owned something so valuable and had chosen to consign it rather than leave it to me. I waited until he was just outside my door before opening it.

  “Elsie.” He had a way of sighing when he said my name that I loved, and today was no exception.

  “Hi.” I smiled back, my hands in my pockets, dying to fly out toward him and hug him. “Thanks for coming, especially after the other night. I shouldn’t have just shown up like that.”

  He held up his hands to stop me from talking. “Yeah, you should’ve.”

  We stared at each other for a moment, neither of us moving or saying anything, until Ted broke the silence.

  “It’s good to see you.” He closed the gap between us, his tall frame towering over me, and then wrapped me in his arms and lifted me off the floor, making me smile. “It’s okay for divorced couples to do that, I hope,” he said as he put me back down.

  “Yes, it’s okay. Come in. It’s your house,” I said, making us both laugh. “Coffee?” I asked, scooping a couple of teaspoons of instant into the two cups I’d laid out for us.

  “Instant coffee, who can resist?”

  “It’s faster.” I poured the boiling water into the cups. I added milk and sugar for Ted and pulled a stool around to the other side of the counter so we were sitting across from each other.

  “You look good,” I said. It was true. The lines around his eyes were a little deeper now, and there was gray in his stubble, but the worry lines I’d put in his forehead and around the edges of his mouth had been replaced with the kind of softness that one gets after a good night of rest. If Julie was helping him sleep better now, I was grateful.

  “So do you,” he said, reaching across the counter for my hand and giving it a quick squeeze.

  “It’s not true, but I’ll take the compliment anyway.” I took a sip of my coffee and decided to get straight to the point.

  “Ted, I’m going away.”

  “So soon? Julie was kind of hoping we could have you over to the new house for dinner. She’ll be so disappointed.”

  “Not after the other night, she won’t.” I laughed knowingly. “She’ll be relieved. Trust me. She’s just too nice to tell you so.” I tilted my head forward to look Ted in the eye, and he looked away.

  “She is too nice,” he said, staring at the table and fiddling with the sugar bowl.

  “She’s great. She’s perfect.” This time I reached over and held his hand. “And that’s a good thing, you deserve it.”

  “So did you, but you didn’t think so.”

  We were here again, Ted believing my leaving him was somehow more painful than my staying would have been.

  “Yeah, but you weren’t perfect,” I said, squeezing his hand and hoping for a smile, and when I got one, my heart leapt in my throat and I had to stop myself from holding his face and kissing it.

  “Ah, right. My mistake,” he said, squeezing my hand back and not letting go.

  “Not true. You didn’t make any mistakes.” I let my hand linger, intertwining my fingers with his.

  “Sure I did, I let you go. I never should have agreed to the divorce.”

  I gently removed my hand from his and reached for the sugar bowl. I didn’t actually want any, but I was afraid that if I let my hand linger in his any longer I woul
d start to cry.

  “Like I was saying.…”

  “You’re going, I got it.” He ran his fingers over his stubble and sighed. “Look, Else, I just got here, can we at least catch up before you run off again? I’m really worried about you.”

  “I don’t want you to worry about me.” I tugged at the hem of my sweater.

  “It’s a hard habit to break,” he said, and smiling in the way that always told me that he was going to crack wise next, “and I got a lot of practice.”

  “You’re welcome.” I relaxed enough to laugh a little as I headed back to the counter and put the kettle on again. No matter how blue I got, Ted could always make me smile, and I was grateful. “Okay. But you talk first.”

  I heard about the new house outside of the city, with the extra room, the bigger backyard, and the safer streets. I heard what he didn’t say. Ted was acting less now, having successfully made the move into directing episodic work and movies of the week. It was what we’d always planned, a more stable life with more income and time to spend with the family we never had. Ted was going do what he was doing now, and I was going to move into choreography after my dancing career ended. Our plan worked for a while, but it was a full-time job keeping my dance company going, and I was always applying for grants and hosting fundraisers like the one where I met Ted, and when I was no longer able to dance onstage from all the injuries I had acquired as a professional dancer, all the effort hardly seemed worth doing for someone else.

  But I didn’t go gracefully. I missed performing, missed losing myself in the movement and sound of carefully choreographed conversations. The inadequacies I had in my life offstage, I more than made up for onstage. I could live with my flaws and anxieties, and my bouts of depression, as long as I was able to express myself day in and day out in wordless flight. Without dancing I felt more exposed, unsure of myself in the real world. I was just like everyone else, only worse. I had hoped choreographing would fill the hole left by no longer being able to perform, but it didn’t.

  And then one day as I was leaving the studio, one of the dance teachers who rented space from me had a family emergency and asked if I could please cover her class. I’d had a rough rehearsal day already and began to say no, but she cried that it was too late to reschedule, her father was sick, and I gave in. I figured I’d wait until she left and tell her students that class was canceled and they’d be refunded for the day. But then they started to arrive in their little leotards and tights, faces bright with purpose and a desire to please, and I melted. Children. I had no idea that it was a class for children, and as they took their places on the bar, shoulders back, heads held high, waiting for my instruction, I was filled with a desire I hadn’t had since leaving the stage. I wanted to teach them. I wanted to share with them and pass on everything I loved about dancing and communicating with my body. They danced with such focus and intensity, hanging on every word of my instruction, foreheads frowning when corrected and faces exploding into grins when I complimented them. I was gentle and patient, and I found myself encouraging them, as I had once been encouraged by Arden’s mom. I attached imaginary strings to them at the bar, to raise elbows higher, and ran my fingers along the backs of their necks to the tops of their heads, leaving my hands smelling of honey shampoo. I raised their chins, marveling at the softness of their skin, and lost myself in their tender faces. When I finally ended the class, fifteen minutes later than I was supposed to, I wrapped my arms around every last one of them and didn’t want to let go.

  I walked home that day thinking about Arden and her child. With Ramon and I continuing to dance in the same company for years after she left, I’d see her at our performances with their daughter. Over time, we exchanged polite hellos and goodbyes, although our friendship never returned to what it once was. We both saw there was no going back. For Arden, that also meant her dance career. By the time she tried to return, she was too out of shape, too out of practice, and too old in comparison to the new dancers, who seemed to get younger and younger each year. I’d been right that she couldn’t have it all, but I wasn’t sure it really mattered. Every time I saw Arden’s face light up at the sight of her daughter running to Ramon after a curtain call, I knew she was happy she’d kept the baby. With her jet-black hair, brown eyes, and long limbs, she was the perfect combination of her adoring parents. At the end of it all, Arden had a family. It was more than I had when my career ended.

  That day in the studio with the children, I knew I was done with choreographing. It was too hard spending my days working with dancers who had their whole careers in front of them, and I resented having to work overtime to provide them with the opportunity to do what I no longer could. I’d let myself become bitter about the one thing I’d always loved, forgetting the pure joy it had brought me ever since I was a child. The kind of joy those children had. It didn’t matter if any of them would go on to be professional dancers or not. They did it because they loved the way it felt to spin around in a pirouette or fly across the floor in a grand jeté. And I loved it when they rewarded me with huge smiles and hugs on the way out the door after I recognized their efforts. When I got home and told Ted I was done with my dance company and I was going to start my own classes for children, he’d kissed me and hugged me tightly.

  A year or so later, we moved to LA so Ted could work on his television show. I had just turned thirty, and we decided that with the money he’d be making, I could stay at home and we could start a family. I read countless books on parenting so I’d be ready when the time came. I bought a yellow cotton onesie with bananas on it that said, Bananas for Mommy, and I kept it in my dresser drawer. I taped a list of baby names to the fridge—Isabelle, Benjamin, Clara, Jack—and tried them out with Ted to see which one felt right. And at night we’d lay in each other’s arms and wonder whose nose, eyes, and mouth the baby would have.

  We started trying right away, and after two years we began seeing a fertility specialist. It wasn’t that I was old, but after years of peeing on sticks and making love right when I ovulated, I wasn’t pregnant. At thirty-three we enlisted the help of a naturopath, a doctor of Chinese medicine, and a positive visualization-coach; there was no shortage of people in LA to help us with my problem, for it clearly was my problem. My hormone tests indicated that I should be able to conceive, and yet I wasn’t. So I drank alkaline waters, stayed off coffee and alcohol and wheat, built a baby shrine in the baby’s room, wrote letters to my unborn child telling it how much I wanted it in my life and what a great mother I would be, and then, as I had been instructed to do, planted those letters in the garden next to the roses and watered them both to grow.

  I turned thirty-four, and my hormone levels plummeted. I started hormone therapy, injecting myself regularly and watching as my body morphed into something I didn’t recognize. Suddenly the skin I was in was not my own. It got acne and swelled, everything ached, and my once-moody self became volatile, my temper flaring with the slightest provocation. After years of being able to control my body, I was helpless.

  At thirty-five, after our attempts to conceive via artificial insemination had failed, I wanted to call it quits. But Ted was sure there had to be another way. The first American test tube baby had been born the year before, and although our doctor warned that the rates of success were low and the chances of miscarriage high, there was always a chance. Ted heard “chance,” while I heard “miscarriage.” I couldn’t do it. We’d used up all of our insurance and had started going through our savings, and I wasn’t prepared to risk everything we had on one test tube baby. After endless hours of discussion, Ted agreed to a temporary reprieve on the question of in vitro fertilization, even as he continued to read every new article on the subject, and we looked to adoption. We got on the lists and waited. But we weren’t exactly ideal candidates; we were both artists, without steady incomes and stable careers, Ted was now forty, and I had a history of bulimia and depression. But still, there was a chance. So I called the adoption agency every week for a yea
r with no luck. There always seemed to be some family that had been waiting longer or that was a better candidate, and finally, I stopped. I couldn’t risk any more heartbreak.

  “Where’d you go?” asked Ted, reaching out and touching my arm.

  “How far along is she?”

  Ted hung his head down and exhaled slowly. He was quiet for a long time.

  “She’s not yet. But…we’ve been trying.”

  “It’s okay Ted. I mean, you’ll make great parents.”

  I saw his shoulders shake first and then heard him cry. He covered his face in his hands to muffle the sound, and I walked over and wrapped my arms around him and pulled him to my chest, rocking him slowly.

  “I’m so sorry, Else, I’m so sorry. It should’ve been you. It should’ve been us.”

  “I know. But it wasn’t.”

  And there was no reason that it wasn’t. I had asked a thousand times. I had looked for answers, I had prayed, I had talked to doctors, I had consulted psychics, and nobody could tell me why our efforts didn’t work. I drove myself crazy trying to think of a reason. My mother’s twisted logic had me believing that I’d done something to deserve it, that I was being punished not just for events in this life but for events in past lives as well. I hated this way of thinking, but it was the only thing I could think of that made sense. I needed someone to blame, and years of living with my mother had taught me that the easiest person to lay the blame on was myself. But Ted wouldn’t allow it; he refused to let me take responsibility for my barrenness, and then one day, I finally found a therapist who put it all in perspective and said what no one else was willing to say to me.