My mother has long assumed she’s immune to the ravages of mortality, but an investigation of the recently discovered lump has meant a whirlwind of tests and doctor visits, a diagnosis of breast cancer, and, finally, yesterday, a left-side mastectomy, to be followed by a three-day hospital stay, during which she is very cranky and during which I have to watch my two grandchildren, as usual. My oldest daughter, who works as a physician assistant in an office across town, relies on me for babysitting Monday, Wednesday, and Friday because I teach three sections of biology only on Tuesday and Thursday and so must have loads of free time, and this would be the case if I didn’t assign any homework or write lectures. She smiled dismissively when I said last week that I would really like to finally finish my PhD in zoology. While the children and I are waiting in the lounge for the nurse to finish torturing my mother, I sort through the Scholastic books on the kid pile to find The Encyclopedia of Animals. Julianna points excitedly at the tigers, but I flip the pages until I find a brown-and-gold tree snail with a speckled foot.
“I don’t like snails,” she says. “I like the tigers. And horses.”
“That’s because you don’t understand snails,” I say. “Let me tell you a story.”
“You never tell the story in the book. You make things up.”
“Listen, Julie,” I say, and I turn the book upside down in my hands. “Most terrestrial pulmonate gastropods are hermaphrodites.”
Eight-year-old Julianna stares at me dully, as though I am speaking a foreign language. What kind of science do they teach kids in school now? For all I know, they’ve just thrown in the towel and gone back to the Bible. At this age my youngest daughter loved science, and it has only been in adulthood that she has followed every crackpot theory the wind blows her way. She says she believes that toxins can be drawn from the body by pure thinking, that quartz creates a healing aura. Or is it a healing force field?
Alex, who is four, has found a toy consisting of spools that slide along curved plastic-coated rods, and he is working at it with an unsmiling intensity. I put my arm around Julianna, though she seems disinclined to snuggle. “Why does the book have to be upside down?” she asks.
“Snail mothers lay eggs containing only daughters,” I continue. “And everything is fine until those daughters start thinking for themselves. They get it into their knuckle heads to grow penises. Can you believe that?”
Julianna looks up at me in alarm, as do two graying women sitting nearby, who resemble each other enough they could be sisters. When Alex can’t get a spool to slide onto a certain peg, he pounds it with a hardcover volume of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.
“Even the freshwater non-hermaphroditic gastropod mollusks change sex now and again,” I say, and Julianna sighs. I do miss conversing with my brilliant husband, sharing the language of science, more than I miss living in his high-ceilinged house on the hill, which has never quite felt like home to me. The walls are painted pale green and yellow to harmonize with the Audubon and Ernst Haeckel prints. We both love scientific investigation, but I have always taken pleasure in the messier aspects of the natural world, the anomalies that lie outside the usual patterns.
“Apple snails change from female to male, but you will notice they always come back again,” I tell Julianna.
The women look at one another, and I wonder if they might be a couple. In a few years, my hair will be as gray as theirs.
“When snail eggs hatch, the daughters are transparent, almost invisible, and so you can’t blame their mothers for not noticing them sneaking out at night. The daughters whisper to one another, tell a story about a single glass slipper and a handsome snail prince whose shell features all the colors of the rainbow.”
“I wish I had my unicorn,” Julianna says. “Can we go home and get it?”
“But mother snails move too slowly to prevent their daughters’ foolish behavior. Snail mating takes twelve hours, but there’s no sense giving a girl a talking-to when she is already in the back seat of somebody else’s shell.”
The women have come around and are now smiling. I address them when I say, “Snail mating doesn’t look erotic unless you speed up the film. And then, wow!”
One of the women gets up and stops Alex’s pounding by gently removing the hardcover book from his hand. When I see my mother’s nurse walk by, I put down The Encyclopedia of Animals and take the children’s hands and lead them back into my mother’s hospital room.
“Did you know that the French keep their snails in cages woven of wine-grape vines?” I ask my mother when we run out of conversation. She is switching television channels as if trying to switch me off. She’s got a drain tube full of watered-down blood showing through the armpit of her gown, where they removed her lymph nodes.
“What the hell do people watch on TV?” my mother asks. She doesn’t have a television at home. She stops clicking only when the nurse brings her lunch, some kind of whole-wheat pizza, a banana, and two cartons of milk.
“Listen, Mom, true story. Frenchwomen pay big money to lie on the ground inside the snail cages and have the snails crawl over them. Beauty slime is the great secret of Frenchwomen. They take their daughters to snail farms on their fifteenth birthdays.”
“When you were fifteen, I dragged you out of that van parked in the driveway,” my mother says, and I can feel how hard she is working to muster the energy to harass me. Her voice has grown more gravelly over the years from working as a horse show announcer and for a while as an auctioneer. “Remember? I kicked your ass, but it didn’t stop you from becoming a teenage mother.”
“I remember,” I say. When my own youngest daughter was fourteen, I dragged her out of a guy’s car and afterward made her sit and talk to me at the kitchen table. I didn’t tell her father, but she said she’d never forgive me for embarrassing her in front of the boyfriend, and after four years she still hasn’t, though that boyfriend is long gone. If I’d kicked her ass, would I be forgiven by now?
“Did you bring me a shot of brandy?” my mother asks.
“During World War Two,” I say expansively, using my teaching voice, “in some of Europe’s densest forests, both Allied and Axis women fended off starvation by eating the common garden snail, cornu aspersum.”
Alex squirms out of my lap and runs into the bathroom and slams the door. I hear him turn on the water in the sink and the shower. Julianna looks up from her crayons and paper to stare out the window into the old Catholic graveyard. She’s holding a little stuffed bear close to her chest, but I can feel how she regrets this morning’s decision to choose the bear over the unicorn. The rule with this grandma is one stuffed animal per kid per day—it’s all I can keep track of.
“They say women who ate snails were able to remain calm during even the worst of the bombing.”
“Escargot,” my mother says. I have tricked her into showing an interest.
“Some hallucinated about world peace,” I say. “Others hallucinated about melted butter.”
“Snails probably taste better than the crap they’re feeding me here,” my mother says. “They call this pizza?”
“You seem to be eating it,” I say.
“This milk is skim, tastes like water. Go find me some salt, will you? And a couple shots of brandy.”
“You’re not supposed to have salt.”
“I’m not supposed to have cancer, either. If you don’t bring me some brandy, I’m kicking you off my property.”
“It’s my trailer, Ma. You can’t kick me out of my own shell.”
I extract a little airplane bottle from my jacket pocket and hand it over—she’s been asking for brandy since last night. I give it to her not because of her threats, to which I’m as immune as my four daughters are to mine, but because, as she says, she’s not supposed to have cancer. Just as I’m not supposed to have what I have. She secretes the little bottle under her blankets. When she continues to stare at me, I hand her the second bottle, plus a few packets of salt I swiped from the cafeteria.
The smell of liquor has made me sick lately, and even the sight of the bottles makes me gag.
“You should go back to your museum and your husband. He called this morning, just to check on me. He’s a charming man.”
“He’s charming, all right.”
My mother refers to our house on the hill as the museum because of the way the prints are all framed and the way the wood floors shine. Her house is all knotty pine with dusty horse-show posters thumbtacked in place, seven-foot ceilings, and clutter that’s lain unmolested for decades.
“What did he do to piss you off so much?” she asks.
I kneel down beside Julianna and borrow her crayons to draw a picture of the brown-and-gold tree snail, and then I draw a slug, pressing hard with brown and then purple to suggest a dense, moist blob of a body. Pity the slug with no house on her back, no camping trailer in which to hide—she is all sex and no safety. And the semi-slug as well, whose ancestors were snails, but whose shell has shrunk over the generations until she sports nothing more substantial than a jaunty calcified cap. Neither slug nor semi-slug has any protection against another slug following her glistening trail, and that is why you will often find a slug with a love dart sticking out of her head.
My students never believe me at first about the love dart, the gypsobelum, that needle-sharp arrow made of calcium or cartilage. A snail or slug will shoot the dart from its body like a hormone-slick porcupine quill to subdue the object of its desire. Sometimes they don’t believe me until the quiz, though I’ve drawn love darts on the board and explained how they can be long enough to pierce a semi-slug’s foot, pinning her to the ground. A love dart can take an eye out. In all fifty states, it is against the law for a person to shoot anything resembling a love dart at another person, but there is no such law protecting the daughters of the animal kingdom.
“What’s that thing sticking out of the snail’s head?” Julianna asks, pointing at my picture.
III.
“Thank you for talking to me,” my husband says a few hours later when my mother hands me the phone from her hospital bed. “We really do need to talk. Mailing me a photocopy of your pregnancy test is not the same as talking.”
“I’m not ready to talk to you yet. Especially not here. Or on the phone.”
“Humph. Your mother sounds relatively upbeat, says her prognosis is good.”
“Invasive ductal carcinoma,” I say. “They took it out before it was too invasive, before it had arms or legs or a heartbeat.”
“Humph,” he says again, which is what he says when he is moving past something he doesn’t want to hear. “Good thing you got her to the doctor when you did. Turns out we all have a lot to be grateful for this year.”
“I suppose you think it’s just a myth that black widows kill and eat their mates,” I say. I have avoided talking to Gregory in person or on the phone because I’m not ready to be reasonable and positive with him—his reasonableness and positivity can feel like a kind of bullying. Face-to-face the man can cajole me into anything. I have always loved his clear, intelligent voice, but being away from him has given my mind a vacation, a license to roam grumpily from idea to idea all day. I’m not ready to even think about divorce, but lately I wonder if I wouldn’t rather be his student than his wife—I’d listen for a few hours, take notes, then be free of him until next week. Or maybe I just need a few more months alone in my trailer. Or I need counseling. Or a punching bag with Gregory’s face drawn on it with a crayon. Tomorrow I’ll ask Julianna to draw Grandpa for me. She is now drawing a purple unicorn, like the one she left at home.
“Why are you talking about spiders?” Gregory asks.
“I’m teaching spiders. The black widow males are skinnier than the females, and they grin too much. Maybe that’s why they get eaten.”
“Humph. I’ve always suspected the phenomenon has something to do with being observed in a terrarium in a science lab.”
“The Heisenberg uncertainty principle?”
“The observer effect. My students confuse those all the time.”
I flush with embarrassment, because I know the difference. It is a little-known fact that pregnancy lowers your IQ—it is a phenomenon too dangerous to study.
“Gregory, you can’t deny the facts. They really do devour their mates. If only by accident,” I say, though I seriously doubt it’s an accident. Practical-minded spider mothers teach their daughters to spin silky threads as strong as steel wires and sticky enough to capture prey. Surely these mothers tell their daughters that if they do happen to liquefy the internal organs of a mate, they should go ahead and drink up that protein-rich soup, for in this way the male can help create stronger, healthier eggs. What father wouldn’t want each of his hundreds of offspring to have all the advantages?
“Let’s stop with the spiders?” Gregory says, in a tone he’d use with a student disrupting his class. But then he softens his voice. “I’ll admit I’m feeling giddy at the prospect of being a new father again.”
Uncertain what noise a black widow makes, I utter nothing. My mother watches me intently, and I’m pretty sure Gregory hasn’t spilled the beans.
“I know you’re still mad, Jill, but it’s time to come home. We’ve got to work this out together. I don’t know if you can imagine how sorry I am about what I’ve done.”
“I can imagine,” I say and sigh. My mother smiles.
“I think,” he says. “No, I’m sure this baby will be good for us. I’m ready to spoil you completely, more than ever before. And I’ll start by making you those cheese crepes with raspberries.”
He did spoil me in the nicest ways whenever I was pregnant. I’m trying to stay angry, but his weeks of apologizing have worn me down. His bubbly nature makes his students love him from the first day of class, and even after all these years, I’m not immune. He’s still the delighted boy who’s been out trapping green frogs in a wooden box and who calls the whole neighborhood over to marvel at a deformed specimen with an extra set of back legs.
“A baby will be just the thing for us,” he says. “A newborn is a new start, another chance at perfection. You always felt great being pregnant, after the morning sickness was over.”
It’s true. In my twenties, I did feel great, knowing I was built to be a mama. My body surged with hormones so thrilling that I could ignore most of my discomfort and the way I forgot things. His excitement is infectious, and I think this might all be okay after all. Gregory cooked me sumptuous treats all those years ago and never mentioned my weight. My skin and hair glowed, and when I complained of morning sickness, mostly it was to get attention or to make a joke. I wonder if there’s a vegan version of those cheese crepes with raspberries we could make for our youngest daughter, who is on the verge of becoming a big sister as well as a mother herself.
“We might have a boy this time,” he says. “The chances of having five daughters and no sons is only one in thirty-two.”
“Still a fifty-fifty chance for each,” I say, glad I can be the reasonable one for a change. I’m feeling butterflies in my stomach, as I did when I glimpsed his handsome face in the hallway at school yesterday. For the record, it’s the egg-laying female butterflies who appear to be fluttering aimlessly. I slipped around the corner so he didn’t see me.
“And if you have to stop teaching for a while maybe you’ll finally have time to finish your PhD.”
“You mean while I’m nursing?” I look down at my poor breasts beneath my sweater, which is stuck with bits of hay, and I imagine my breasts swelling with milk again—the swelling had been nice. “While I’m walking the baby around at night trying to get her to sleep?”
“Or him,” my husband says. “Think positive. Assume this will be an easy baby. We’re awfully experienced.”
“Yes, awfully,” I say, but he is right. We could be smarter parents this time.
“It’s a big surprise, Jill, but I’m excited. Aren’t you?” he asks. “Of course, there are risk factors, just because of your age, but we�
�ll get all the testing. We’ll be very careful about this.”
My mother is screwing up her face, listening from her bed. She can’t see that all around her left shoulder the sheet is now smeared with diluted blood. Only after I get off the phone do I realize how I am smiling. I didn’t even think to say to my husband, You’re no spring chicken, either, pal.
Carrying an infant around at night through a silent dark house is another experience I’ve secretly enjoyed, so much so that some nights I stared at one or another of my baby girls in her crib, wishing I could pick her up without waking her. But the baby my arms have been longing to hold is my daughter’s new child, not my own.
IV.
My mother is just home from the hospital when the veterinarian, Lola Hernandez, shows up to castrate Jack the donkey. My mom remembers the appointment only when the late-model white pickup pulls in the driveway.
“Let’s put this off until another time,” I suggest.
“If that horny son of a bitch breaks down the fence and breeds Drew Anderson’s mares, that man will sue me for the cost of a half-dozen show horses. Not to mention poor Chrysanthemum. Just go give Lola a hand. Or else I will.”
Gregory has taken issue with the language my mother and I use about castration, in saying we are “fixing” the male animal. For eighteen years he has also avoided discussion of having a vasectomy. The talk makes him squeamish, he says, and he smiles a charming smile.
“Grandma, what are you going to do to Jack?” Julianna asks me.
“Your nana will explain it.” I can too easily imagine my mother dragging herself up to the barnyard in her nightgown, trailing her drainage tube, so I put on my boots to go outside.
“Don’t let him go down,” she shouts when my hand is on the doorknob. “Keep him on his feet and make him walk around afterward. It’ll be hell getting him back up, and he needs to keep his juices flowing.”
Though I have tossed male chicks into the pigpen like popcorn snacks, though I can ignore the squealing as I extricate the little bitty testicles of little bitty piglets, and though I absolutely do not want the one-year-old donkey Jack to mount and breed his old mother, Chrysanthemum, I still feel bad when Lola sets Jack’s balls in my open hand. They are as big as my fists, veinous, and coated with white mucus. I forget whether we’re supposed to eat these or bury them.
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Page 12