* * *
—
Pain woke her up in the middle of the night, forced her out of bed doubled over, into the bathroom, where she pulled off her pajama bottoms. The misoprostol she’d inserted in her vagina before bed must be working then, moving things along, as the doctor had said. The on-and-off discomfort of the past week had become an urgent wrenching feeling, like something was trying to extricate itself. The fifteen minutes of online research she’d allowed herself revealed that the medication was often prescribed for do-it-yourself abortions. Somewhere, at this moment, another woman cringed on a toilet, praying that what she’d never wanted to happen would end here and now. In a hospital somewhere, a woman was laboring to push out a baby she already knew was dead. And a woman who hadn’t suspected that anything was wrong was wondering why it had emerged from her body without a sound, why she wasn’t hearing the inevitable crying of a naked newborn, stunned by sudden light and cold.
Cora heard a pop, felt a slippery shape, like an egg—she was shocked at the obviousness of it—slide out of her, and what followed was clear relief, a sense of having eliminated the obstruction. She thought about waking Elliott up and telling him, calling him into the bathroom with her as witness. But she realized she didn’t want a witness. After a while she got up and flushed the toilet without looking, though she wondered what it would be like to be the sort of person who would want to see, whose curiosity would overtake her fear.
When had it started, where had it come from—the belief that she had to keep all her muck, her mistakes, her failures hidden until some dream of a magical time when she might be old enough, graceful enough, smart enough, to leave all of that behind? As if perfection were a class you could sign up for, but every time she attempted to register, it was already filled to capacity. As if her marriage to Elliott was a competition she was losing, or some fraudulent scheme she’d pulled off, and when it was uncovered, he wouldn’t want to be with her after all. As if she wasn’t getting editing work because people had become such good writers now, they didn’t need editors anymore. They were sailing through reports and academic treatises, memoirs and novels—arriving at the last page and boom, done. Sentences, paragraphs, whole chapters: everything emerging fresh in the fittest incarnation of itself. Each punctuation mark beautifully in service to the effortless flow of syntax, each word the best possible word. As if you could set out to do something and get it right the first time, as if the whole of life wasn’t about trying again.
White Carnations
We didn’t have mothers anymore, nor were we mothers ourselves, so we got together on Mother’s Day at a down-and-out pub frequented by gay men and regular drunks. There weren’t any mothers there, as far as we could tell, and the day gave us that kind of radar. We knew who was a mother and who wasn’t. It was the third anniversary of our early May outing, and we all showed up on time, at two o’clock on this sunstruck afternoon, as if we couldn’t wait to get inside where it felt dark and smoky, even though smoking had been banned in New York City bars and restaurants for several years now.
The tradition started with Elaine and Lara, who worked together at a museum. When Elaine came back to work after her mother died, Lara took her out for a fancy lunch and made her weep over her plate of hazelnut-crusted salmon, followed by chocolate turtle cake with caramel beurre salé. Sometime after that, Elaine met Anne, a social worker, at a fund-raiser, and they ended up discussing how they both were motherless now.
Then Lara and I met at a party. It was the first party I had gone to since my mother’s death. I wore a red strapless dress and felt insanely cheerful and dangerously cavalier. I talked to women about bikini waxing and bed bugs. I found a way to touch every man I met: hand, shoulder, hip. At the punch bowl Lara introduced herself.
“What do you do?” Lara asked. I told her that I did program administration for a ballet school, where I used to dance myself. Before I had time to reciprocate the question, she asked, “And what do your parents do?” The snobbery surprised me from this woman in jeans and a ponytail, but I was prepared for all questions that night, prepared to hold myself apart from whatever was asked of me.
“I don’t know my father, and my mother is dead.”
“Yes,” Lara said.
I didn’t go home with a man that night. I drank spiked punch with Lara, who, it turned out, was not snobbish about pedigree or profession. Parental loss was her stock-in-trade.
So when Mother’s Day came around, with its bouquets and dinner specials, Elaine invited Anne, and Lara invited me, and there were four of us. But I imagined that our numbers were secretly legion, that in windowless joints throughout the city, huddled groups of women gathered, not a mother among them. We weren’t quite commemorating, and we weren’t quite commiserating, though we weren’t in denial either. We spent hours together in the hard wooden booth, and we ate and drank, talked and laughed, and it was a kind of fun fueled by each of our particular experiences of death.
For Elaine’s mother it was Alzheimer’s. At the end, as if to prove to Elaine that she’d always favored her younger daughter, she could remember the name Janice, but not Elaine, though Elaine was the one who visited her mother more often, who had to explain over and over again why she couldn’t go back to her sweet little childhood house with the Victory Garden she and her mother and sisters had planted. Anne’s mother had died of cancer, the super fast kind, for which the relatives flew in right away to say goodbye. And Lara’s mother killed herself many years ago. Lara was twelve, away at camp for the summer. One morning she dropped a letter to her mother in the camp mailbox. That afternoon, her uncle came to take her home. The letter arrived a few days later. Lara retrieved it from the mailbox, lit a match, and burned it. When the paper was consumed, she let the flame burn her skin.
When you think about it afterward, there is always something, in addition to the death, that marks the occasion. My mother was killed in a car accident three and a half years ago. Taxi drivers are known for their death-defying skills: you lurch and you cringe, but you get to where you’re going sooner than the other guys on the road, except in my mother’s case. And what else happened earlier that day? I sat in my office at the ballet school and watched the gingko leaves glide off the tree outside my window, the way gingko trees divest themselves, stunningly, all at once.
At the pub, Lara and I sat on one side of the booth, Anne and Elaine on the other. I was the youngest at twenty-six, and Lara, thirty-three, was the second youngest. We both favored eyeliner that made our eyes seem darker and not entirely trustworthy. We wore jeans that skinnied our already skinny legs. Elaine was fifty-two, with the skin of a woman who swore by an excellent facial cream, her hair a pretty, well-maintained white. Anne was a determined blonde at forty, good-looking in a hard way, with the polished directness of an anchorwoman. Lara’s mother and my own had died before their time, by choice and by accident, and Elaine and Anne’s mothers had died in their seventies, a reasonable age to go. But all of us, their daughters, wanted to make ourselves attractive not just for partners or lovers or coworkers or one another. When we looked in the mirror, we wanted to place ourselves far away from our mothers’ fate.
Soon my body would escape the tight control I’d always imposed as a dancer. It had already begun, with inflated breasts and a slight slackening of my belly. I was three months pregnant, and though, five weeks earlier, I’d gone to an abortion clinic, I had left still pregnant. When I was stretched out on the table, waiting for the doctor, I was expecting a woman. I’d always had female doctors and I preferred it that way. When men tended to my body, I wanted it to be for pleasure. Women were the clinicians, women older than I was, who had chosen this depressing profession that seemed the opposite of dance. Doctors worked with the body immobilized, the body unhealthy and unbeautiful. I felt sorry for them in their white coats and sensible shoes.
The doctor came in. “Hi, Karyn,” he said amiably, as if
he knew me. He was tall, fiftyish, with grayish brown hair, good-looking in a mild way. With the nurse’s help, he began to prepare his instruments. Because I had never known my father, it was my habit to recognize him in a man of a certain age. His features, his voice, whatever task or gesture his hands were engaged in—I studied them all. I looked enough like my mother that lack of resemblance did not disqualify a man. I didn’t expect my father to be like me; I expected him to be as strange and remote as he was to my life. And vis-à-vis the inevitable converging paths of lost parents and children, well-documented in fairy tales and movies, here he was: my seventh-grade biology teacher, a proctor at the SATs, the college dance department advisor, a docent at the Met, the super of my apartment building, the doctor who was about to perform my abortion.
He sat down by my stirruped feet, his gloved hands outstretched. “First I’m going to touch your cervix. It shouldn’t hurt. You’ll just feel some pressure.” I dug my nails into my palms. No, it didn’t hurt. I had heard that the cervix softened during pregnancy, and I wondered what that softness felt like to a practiced hand. The doctor disengaged himself. I watched his moderately handsome competence and I felt compelled to stop it.
“I’m sorry.” I scooted up the table to an upright position. “I have to go.”
The nurse looked at the doctor, and I wondered how common last-minute defections were, and if they scored it as a point for the anti-abortion gang.
“Are you sure?” the doctor asked.
“Yes,” I lied, blazing with embarrassment and freedom. I was sure I wouldn’t see him again, though perhaps I would make an appointment somewhere else, ask for a female doctor, keep my eyes shut.
“Okay,” he said, with a slight edge to his voice, the edge I imagined a father would have with his squirming child, reprimanding her: and why didn’t you go to the bathroom earlier, when I asked if you needed to? “We’ll leave you to get dressed.”
I let time pass. I did not exactly say to myself, I will keep this baby. I was waiting to see what would happen. In the early mornings I ran in the park, around the murky reservoir, fighting off exhaustion. At work I watched girls in leotards and tights, girls with sweet, silky skin practicing before class. I met friends for dinner and told them I was taking antibiotics and couldn’t drink. I thought of the doctor, who had known my secret and didn’t care, and, walking down the street, I fixated on other men of fifty or so who, allowing for a great accident of time and place, could have brought me into being, unbeknownst to them. I had always seen my father everywhere, but my mother I had not seen since a week before her death.
* * *
—
The pub menus were stained and familiar, with their selection of unwholesome food: bacon-cheese melt, clam chowder, fish and chips. The closest you could get to healthy was Caesar salad. Today we all agreed to enjoy things that tasted great and bad at the same time, that left us feeling bloated and satisfied.
“My neighbor gave me a white carnation this morning,” Anne said. “A nice gesture, but you know.”
“Ugh,” went Elaine.
“Why aren’t you wearing it in your buttonhole?” Lara mocked.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Carnations—the Mother’s Day flower,” Lara said. “Red for the living. White for the purity of a dead mother’s love.”
I wondered aloud how Mother’s Day got started anyway, and Anne said that a woman named Anna Jarvis had wanted to create a memorial to her mother. “It caught on and was declared a national holiday in 1914. But she got disgusted with it. The commercialism, Hallmark and chocolates—you know the whole bit. She ended up spending her family inheritance campaigning against Mother’s Day and died in poverty. She never married, never had children.”
Anne had been trying to get pregnant for years. She filled us in on her methods: basal thermometers, clomiphene, two rounds of IVF. She wanted a baby so badly, and I found the distressed energy she poured into the baby-making project unappealing, a mark against her for being so earnest and unsexy. It had bothered me to think of her and her husband having sex on designated days in the missionary position to allow the sperm the shortest trip to the egg—or worse, making regular visits to the fertility clinic, where sex was a matter of extracting and inserting the necessary material. Now I sat across from her, my womb occupied by an inhabitant I hadn’t meant to encourage. Looking at Anne’s carefully concealed frown lines, I felt guilty for my immature attitude. If that was what they wanted, why shouldn’t they do everything to try to have a child?
The waiter arrived with our drinks. A gin and tonic, a Manhattan, a Molson, and a root beer. I was prepared with my antibiotics excuse, but no one commented. Elaine began talking about her mother.
“Did I tell you she didn’t even recognize herself in the mirror? But when she looked at an old photo of herself as a young woman—oh yeah, that’s me. Smooth skin, long hair, and smiling on a bicycle seat. I could never figure out if she knew it was from the past, or if she actually thought that was what she looked like.”
“When she saw herself in the mirror, who did she think it was?” Lara asked.
“Just some old lady, I think. Another woman who happened to be in the room, like a roommate. But the one good thing about it all was that as soon as she started losing her memory, she didn’t care who Nancy was anymore. It seemed plausible to her that Nance was just a friend I’d invited over. Then eventually she didn’t recognize either of us. So maybe we should give all the homophobes just a little bit of Alzheimer’s.”
Elaine and Nancy had been together for years, as had Anne and Robert. It was incumbent upon Lara and me to provide the dating stories. When she wasn’t at parties, bobbing for orphans, Lara was online. She liked the way you could scrutinize a guy, pore over photos and read into chats, before actually meeting him. My boyfriends, flings, and one-night stands were usually men I met by dancing with them, feeling first the tension in their arms, the concentration or abandon of their faces near mine. Since I’d stopped dancing ballet in college, I went to clubs with bump-and-grind music. More and more, I went alone. Sometimes I brought men home, and who was around to tell me that I shouldn’t?
In January I’d met Philippe that way. He wasn’t a great dancer, but he was determined, keeping up with me for three hours, his clammy fingers stuck in mine. He was French, from Nice or Nantes, I forgot which. A gawkily handsome man, he would probably seem a boy until he was forty, and then he’d start retreating into bony limbs and wrinkles.
“Do you live here?” he asked, when it was clear that we were dancing with each other and wanted to keep on doing it.
“You might say that,” I said. “I come here often.”
“But in New York, do you live?” I liked his accent. I liked that it made him seem both sophisticated and unsure.
“Yes,” I said. “For my whole life.”
“Great. Do you love it?”
“I try to love it,” I said, but I think the qualification was lost on him.
Philippe was visiting the East Coast, with a backpack and an English pocket dictionary. He’d gone to D.C. and Philadelphia. After New York, he was on to Boston and Vermont.
“Vermont in January. You know it’ll be really cold.”
“Yes, all the snow. Like a fairy tale. I want to see it.” He pulled me closer, and I thought of the romance: New York for the first time. And I would be a girl he had met there, who used to be a dancer, and who danced him into her bed.
Since my mother had died and left me some money, I could afford to have my own place. It was on the border of the Upper West Side and Harlem, in a building with a Christmas tree in the lobby six months out of the year. In the elevator there was a black-and-white framed picture of somebody’s son from long ago, with pomaded hair and pink cheeks painted on. My apartment was white and empty, bare walls, no rugs on the hardwoods, though I’d been told when
I moved in that New York City law required carpeting on eighty percent of the floors. When he came up occasionally to fix my toilet, the landlord glanced around but didn’t comment. I kept the place clean and the neighbors didn’t complain. In the elevator we smiled at each other and then studied the door. A storage unit held most of the things I’d saved from my mother’s apartment. An old oak stereo and boxes of records, dreamy folk songs I used to twirl to as a little girl. A series of antique lamps we’d hauled onto the subway. An armchair she settled into in the evenings. I sometimes found her there in the morning, with a mystery novel nearing the end of its mystery, her thigh a prominent bookmark. Sometimes I thought about renting a truck and furnishing my apartment with those things that were gathering dust in storage. But I left them there. I had always loved the gleaming bareness of the dance studio, free of the oppressiveness of stuff. No stuff could survive on the dance floor. It would be pliéd and pas de deuxed and jetéd aside.
My bed was high and firm and piled with white blankets. Philippe pulled me on top of him. “You are all so pretty,” he said.
This moment when sex began with an almost stranger was always something of a puzzlement. Why do this, of all things, with a man whose name was still new on my tongue? But by then it was too late. Our limbs were artfully arranged, our chests pressed together, our mouths hovering near each other with embattled breath. I liked it. I wanted it. If on some level I also disapproved, so be it. I had trained for years to keep my body in alignment, to follow strict orders, to perform on command. Let my mind stumble and stagger about. Let it simper and second-guess. My body would carry on with its amorous work.
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