by Heidi Pitlor
Setti stood and came to me. She leaned in and whisper-sang “Freedom,” Richie Havens’s mesmerizing incantation on the state of being a child without a mother.
She returned to Nathan and wedged herself between his knees, her back against his stomach. He reached his fingers around her face to feed her pieces of grilled breadfruit. He wiped something from her chin and she jutted forward to lick his thumb and encase it with her mouth. Laughter rose from the waves, the sky now everywhere speckled black. Someone turned on a radio. Sugar Magnolia, blossoms blooming. People were smoking all manner of things—I swear I saw someone raise a lighter to a pineapple—and there came the smell of sour sweat. Something was thrown into the fire and it popped and spattered in the air. Singin’ sweet songs of melodies pure and true. I looked around and saw that I was the only child there now. Even my teenage cousins had gone. I was thrilled.
The wedding ceremony the next morning brought a small band, as well as a gangly friend of Nathan’s, a recently declared Marriage Officer whom people called Stone and who wore an orange silk shirt, linen pants, and flip-flops. It brought Nathan with his long hair brushed out and girlish and a sky blue button-down shirt and a heavy beaded necklace. It brought Setti in a green-blue wrap dress, her thick, pale hair in long waves around her tanned face, a soft sheen of nude lipstick, an unwavering smile. “I do,” they both said, and kissed in a way that made it seem to me they might ingest each other.
I later learned that they had only gotten married for my grandmother, who had stomach cancer and would die a month later. She had been pleading with Nathan to settle down. “If it hadn’t been for her, and if Nathan hadn’t met Setti,” I overhead my mother say to Ed. “I mean, really, he would have already knocked up every girl you see here.”
At the beach reception, a skinned, glistening goat hung on a pole. Young girls, a few with long, pretty dreadlocks, slow-danced in imitation of grown-ups. My mother and Ed remained seated at the table until someone pulled them toward the band. I watched them dance politely, and watched Nathan and Setti dancing, too, chest to chest, crotch to crotch, and then, only three songs in, they were gone. Back at the table, my mother said, “Why didn’t they just elope?”
I decided that when I grew up, I would live like Nathan and Setti. I would not become my mother—tired, muted, and resentful. I would not marry anyone like Ed—judgmental, moody. I might not marry at all.
Soon after we returned home to Lenox, I stopped brushing my hair in order to try to form dreadlocks. I insisted that my mother buy papaya and coconuts at the grocery store. At dinner one night, I told my mother and Ed that from then on, I would only answer to the name Marley. “Bob Marley was a Rasta reggae singer. Setti told me about him. She said he believed we are all holy and that people just need to relax and not worry so much about money and what everyone thinks of you, Mom.”
Ed let forth a slow leak of air from his mouth and said, “Ho, boy.”
My mother had reheated leftover meatloaf. Dinner as an only child with them had always been a quiet, utilitarian affair.
My mother said, “Meat okay?”
“Meat’s good, Lauren,” Ed replied.
“That’s all you have to say?” I asked. I thought of the dinners at my friends’ houses, when their brothers and sisters tussled with each other and slipped bits of food to family dogs. I thought of all the complaints, puns, jokes, the adults swapping double entendres, the kids pleading for dessert. “Why didn’t you two ever have any kids? I mean together.”
My mother looked at me. “Our family is just fine the way it is.”
“It’s not a family. It’s a few people.”
“Don’t say that,” she said in a hurt tone.
“I can’t help it,” I said. Jamaica was so far away. I had no idea when or even if we would ever go back. “I wish I had a brother or sister.”
“I’m sorry, but that is not going to happen, Allie,” my mother said, drizzling additional salad dressing on her lettuce.
“Marley,” I said.
“You’re not black, you know.”
I wanted to object, but how?
The rest of the meal passed without a word. “You can clear your plate if you’re done and start the dishes,” my mother said.
“I don’t want to. I don’t want to wash the dishes tonight. I don’t want to wash dishes ever again.”
“Pardon me?” my mother said.
I rushed into the kitchen, grabbed a sleeve of Saltines, and headed out the back door. I thought I would spend the night in the woods at the end of our street and hatch a plan to leave these two polite adults and this tidy, passionless house, and even return to Jamaica. I would somehow, in some way, become Nathan and Setti’s child. I moved swiftly past the other townhomes and cars.
After a short while, my mother found me sitting in a patch of ferns. “Come on, Allie—I mean, Marley. You know, I wouldn’t call myself that at school. You might offend some other kids.”
“You offend me by being so conformist,” I said, full of assurance and ignorance.
She rolled her eyes. “Honey. I’m tired and I have to make a few phone calls and then I want to go to bed.”
“You have to call your friends?” She had a small group of well-off summer friends, administrators or volunteers at Tanglewood who spoke daily on the phone about their husbands and each other, and it incensed me. I still cannot say why. She herself worked in the gift shop at Tanglewood, as well as for a local caterer. “You never answered me. Why don’t you have more kids?”
“I’ll be inside when you are ready to behave again.”
“That’s going to be a LONG time because the last thing I want to do is behave like some prissy little doll for you.”
“I don’t think anyone’s worried about that happening.”
“Cunt.” It was the worst word I knew. I had overheard my babysitter speak it once to another girl on the street, a real snot of a girl who went limp at the sound of it.
“What just came out of your mouth? You do not use that filthy language. My daughter does not say things like that.”
“I do now,” I said, maybe glad to see any light go on inside her.
“You really want to know why you don’t have a brother or a sister? Ed can’t. Edward is unable to have children. You happy?”
I swallowed. “Then why did you marry him?” I was not ready to admit defeat.
“Because I loved him,” she said.
“Fine,” I snapped, but a part of me wondered if what she loved most was his ability to keep us housed and fed.
“Listen, Allie. You need to start calling that man your father. He’s not going anywhere. I married him almost eight years ago. He is your father now. You hurt his feelings, still calling him ‘Ed.’ ” She did not wait for a reply before turning and storming back home.
I was furious. Why did she not care about the feelings of her own child, or betraying my real father? The man inside would remain “Ed” to me long after it would have been more natural to call him “Dad”—and of course, I would remain Allie to them. Even now, my eleven-year-old’s obstinance remained surprisingly accessible in their presence.
When Ed pulled the car into my driveway, I saw the basement light cast a small stripe on the side lawn. Kurt had returned, and I was glad not to come home to an empty house.
We stepped out of the car and as I scooped an almost sleeping boy into my arms, I said to my mother, “I guess this is when we say goodbye.”
“I’ll miss him,” she said and reached for Cass’s head. “I’ll miss you both. Go, get him to bed.”
Ed stepped forward. “We’ll talk.” He engulfed us in a hug.
“This isn’t goodbye,” my mother said.
“It isn’t?”
She licked the pad of her thumb and wiped something from Cass’s face.
The two made their way back inside the car, these people now in their seventies, these medium-sized, careful, essentially kind people who had raised me, who had loved me and Cass t
he best that they could, these people who were now closing the car doors and driving away.
Chapter Four
I sent Lana a draft of the first chapter. I had filled the pages with data about the disproportionate physical, psychological, and economic impacts of pregnancy and childbirth on women versus men. Childbirth was of course an overwhelming prospect for any woman, so I tried to infuse the chapter with hope for an experience free of dogma and guilt. I included a quote from the writer Elizabeth Noble: “However much we know about birth in general, we know nothing about a particular birth. We must let it unfold with its own uniqueness.” And I closed on a note that I hoped communicated wonder:
We carried our new son into our home for the first time—and only then did this massive endeavor come into focus for me. We had created Norton Breban-Harding and brought him into the world, but now we had to lead him through it. We had to teach him how to eat and sleep, how to sit and crawl, how to be kind and respectful, how to navigate this patriarchal American society and resist getting co-opted by the patriarchy, no matter its appeal. No matter how it would punish him for resisting, or how it would reward him for conforming again and again. But for now, Norton was just a baby asleep in his bucket seat and we were just two new parents. I set him down, and went to Lester.
Conjuring their experience had been a challenge, and not only because Lana had told me so little. From pee stick to ultrasound to the various discomforts, indignities, and joys of pregnancy throughout the onset of labor with Cass, I had been alone. I had hoped for a natural birth, but at the hospital I had quickly folded in the face of eviscerating labor pain. When I first carried Cass inside my house, Ed, who had borrowed a friend’s video camera, yelled, “Hold on! Don’t move. The goddamn lens cap won’t come off. Christ almighty. Okay, now go back outside and bring him in again.” I did, and this time, the record button was stuck. “Ed! Jesus, Ed,” my mother said when he realized the batteries had died. In the time that it took to get his camera working, a bolt of pain shot through the scar across my abdomen, Cass grew unbearably heavy, and I crumpled to the floor. Thankfully my mother was able to catch him before he hit his head. This was the only moment of Cass’s entry into the world that had been caught on camera.
How different it might have been if I’d had a partner or the psychic energy to pontificate about my son’s role in the world of boys and men after returning home, where unlimited help awaited us.
I was proud of none of my self-pitying thoughts. If nothing else, I was at least used to envy and self-pity. I had been a ghostwriter long enough to know that I had to elbow past these things in order to get the job done.
Unfortunately, I had been unable to think of a way to feminize or Americanize Lana’s first chapter. Was I supposed to provide recommendations for makeup that would not run beneath the sweat of labor? Describe how to keep from moaning while pushing the equivalent of a bag of potatoes from one’s embattled birth canal? Integrate a love of country into the whole thing—write her, what, pledging allegiance as she held her new son? I had done the best that I could with so little.
In the days that followed, I googled Lana in order to learn what she was doing other than reading the chapter and responding to me. She spoke in Chicago at a summit of CEOs about gender balance in the workplace, and at Wellesley College and MIT. Apparently she had also spent some time in a salon. I was saddened to see that, in the footage of her in Chicago, her signature blue hair was now a flat, dark brown.
The next day in Washington, D.C., she introduced the president of NARAL at a fundraising luncheon. My mother would have been so impressed; she leaned more left than Ed, and had once attended a NARAL fundraiser with a group from Tanglewood. I set up a Google Alert that would notify me each new time Lana’s name appeared online.
I began To the Lighthouse once again. “ ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.” I read slowly, letting myself float along the pleasant ambiguity, the absence of a linear plot and consistent narrator. I had always found reading Virginia to be a good exercise in mindfulness.
A week passed.
In addition to Connor, Maggie had a younger son, Liam, who was Cass’s age, and although there was little chemistry between the two boys—not that we had ever openly discussed this—we decided to meet up at a playground that Monday. Liam raced around with some other kids, swinging easily from rung to rung on the monkey bars, striding up the long metal slides, climbing to the top of every structure. Cass remained in the sandbox, building a kind of fortress around a toy bulldozer.
“I’m sorry he’s not interacting with Liam more,” I said.
“Don’t be! We can never get Liam to stay in one place. He’s an animal.” Fifteen years younger than I, Maggie had waist-length red hair, and today she wore a Bohemian wool wrap atop black leggings. She wandered over to talk to the mother of two older boys who were now, alongside Liam, chasing a squirrel in a nearby field.
Thirteen days had now passed since I had sent Lana that first chapter. I began to worry that she had in fact read it and hated it. I imagine that for most writers, the time spent awaiting the first reactions to a new piece is filled with anxiety. But when a ghostwriter anticipates the first reaction of a client, she awaits answers to different questions: “Did I sound enough like you? Did I portray you as you wished?” Or in the case of Lana’s book, “Did I guess right? Did you in fact give birth in a hospital?”
One of Liam’s new friends was now in the sandbox with Cass and looked ready to demolish his fortress. Cass appeared terrified. “Hey!” I yelled over. The ruddy, rabbit-faced boy lifted his sneakered foot and in less than five seconds, stomped out the entire thing. I knew what was coming, and it did: Cass burst into tears. “Hey!” I called again and marched over to them. “Cass, it’s okay, you can build another one.”
My son made a weird sound, a cross between a hiccup and a sob.
The boy, who had to be about nine or ten, began to snicker into his palm. He had feathery, unruly eyebrows.
“You want to tell me what your problem is? Where’s your mother? Where’s your grown-up?” I added, remembering the correct term.
He shrugged and kicked a bunch of sand onto Cass.
“Quit it,” I said, but he just stood there, smirking down at Cass, who was now whimpering and picking sand from his hair. I looked the mean boy in the eyes. “You feel big and tough now? You want to go terrorize more innocent squirrels, you little turd?”
Maggie approached us. “Allie, he’s just playing.”
Cass stepped out of the sandbox and moved beside me. “We don’t have to tolerate this sort of playing, do we?” I said.
“I think we kind of do. They’re boys. They like to destroy things.”
“Not all of them,” I said. I brushed the rest of the sand from Cass’s shoulders.
“That is true. And thank god, right? We need at least a few to be kind so they can grow up and become artists and doctors and—” Her voice trailed off. We watched Liam and the mean boy begin to joust with large sticks. “Liam can turn literally anything into a weapon. The other day, he and Connor stuck some of those corncob holders into the tops of our pool noodles. Then they loaded up their Nerf guns with pebbles and almost murdered each other. Liam’s left butt-cheek is totally black and blue right now. I’m so proud,” she said.
Although I knew she meant her last comment sarcastically, there was a hint of pride in her voice. After all, as she herself had said, this sort of thing was not abnormal, and for most parents, myself not always excluded, normalcy was a kind of holy grail.
Thunderous pounding at the front door shook my house. I had just come out of an icy shower and I scurried, naked and swearing, around my bedroom, searching for clean clothes. The pounding continued. I pulled on a T-shirt and pajama bottoms.
Jimmy Pryor stood in an unzipped raincoat and too-small Patriots shirt on my front stoop, the rain soaking the world behind him. “Where’s Kurt?
He told me he’d start painting my shed today. It’s nine fifteen. Don’t either of you work? You know it’s a freaking weekday?” His Boston accent mashed down his consonants.
“It’s pouring out there.” I ushered Jimmy into the front hall and shut the door behind him.
“He can work on the inside of it,” Jimmy said. Drops of rain ran down his face.
“He’s painting the inside of your old tool shed?”
“You want to hand over the rest of this month’s rent, Al?”
I had finally gotten my first payment for Lana’s book. After Colin had taken his cut and I set aside a chunk for taxes, after I paid for a new fridge for Bertie—given how little I paid her to watch Cass, it was the least I could do once hers broke—and everything else that I owed, it was far more prudent for Kurt to work off half the rent than for me to pay it outright. But now, Jimmy Pryor—who watched dogfights on YouTube and blew God knows how much of his tenants’ rent money on regular trips to some casino in Schenectady—had gained dominion over my life. Why had I let this happen?
“I’ll go wake Kurt,” I said at last. “I’ll send him over when he’s ready.”
“Trashman left your box on my lawn again,” he said.
“Bin,” I said. “It’s a recycling bin.” Cass had come up and was hiding behind my legs.
“Call the town. How many times do I have to ask you? Register a freaking complaint.” Jimmy reached forward and tweaked Cass’s shoulder.
“When’s he going to leave?” Cass asked. “I want breakfast. I’m star-ving.”
“Don’t be a girl,” Jimmy told him.
“Hey. Don’t say that,” I snapped.
“Why not?” He screwed up his face at me. “You tell Kurt I came.”
Cass and I watched Jimmy move through the downpour across my front yard, a sway on one side of his body and his arm that swung low on the other to compensate. Jimmy lived alone with Bruin, who now required daily insulin shots. This was about the fourth time over the years that he had agreed to barter for rent. It was difficult, though not impossible, to stay angry with him.