V.
“Daddy told me you’re pregnant,” my pregnant daughter says on the phone. I’m in my mother’s living room, trying to start a woodstove fire with wet logs. This is the first time Rosie has wanted to talk in weeks. “I can’t believe we’ll be mommies together!”
It is not just black widow spiders that kill their mates. The female praying mantis often bites off the head of the fellow who has just impregnated her, and some snails, too, get so furious they lash out, albeit slowly. In the honeybee population, the male can’t even be trusted to be a member of the hive, and if one should survive the breeding season, he is kicked out in autumn to freeze to death.
“I’m forty-seven, honey,” I say.
For starters, I could say the occurrence of miscarriage in American women my age is over fifty percent, or that the chance of chromosomal abnormality is one in eight. But it would only get her worrying about her own potential complications, so I keep the stats to myself. Instead I say, “Things might not work out the way you hope.”
“I’m sure you’ll be fine. Daddy said you never had any problems with the four of us. And you’re built sturdy. You’re strong, I mean.”
A honeybee queen’s daughters are worker bees, loyally attending to their mother. Unlike human daughters, I think, as my daughter moves on from calling me sturdy to imagining aloud how fun it will be for our children to grow up together. When I was pregnant before, I had a few pregnant friends to go through it with, but my daughter seems to have no such allies. She’s felt alone living out of town with her boyfriend, she now admits, and she’s been scared. She also admits she is losing rather than gaining weight going into her fifth month—but it’s okay, she insists, because she was overweight to begin with. She refuses to go to what she and the boyfriend call a Western doctor.
In the honeybee hive, a queen is not inclined to fuss over her daughters. She is drunk on royal jelly, lost in a fog as she pushes out egg after egg, fertilized by the six million sperm she’s been storing in her spermatheca since the day she lost her virginity. No honeybee daughter can hope for indulgence. And yet, who makes that mind-numbing jelly? Who feeds it to her from their own mandibles and proboscises? The only goal for those daughters and their mother is reproduction.
At a certain age, the queen bee is past her prime, and there’s no denying it. Her wing edges fray, her branched hairs lose their sensitivity, her many leg joints ache, and her pheromones grow faint. She no longer has the strength to push out one more blessed egg. At this time of supersedure a daughter must be groomed for the job, stuffed with royal jelly, and sent out to collect new sperm. If all goes well, her sisters will dance around her and hail the new queen.
And if the old queen doesn’t pass the torch graciously, the same daughters who fed her, groomed her antennae, and massaged her sore birthing muscles will cluster around her to radiate an unbearable heat that will kill her. You might find her desiccated body on the ground under the hive. It’s a wise queen who retires willingly, who doesn’t cling to that old joy and pain.
WHEN I GET home from the women’s clinic, I find Julianna on the couch beside Nana, reading a book about horses. Seeing me, Julianna turns the book upside down and smiles, seems to know I’m feeling shattery and a little weak, and I sit beside her to tell her a story. Alex has fallen asleep on the floor of the closet in which he sometimes hides out with a flashlight. My mother said he opened and closed the door for about an hour and demanded to know where I was. “And where were you, by the way?” she asks.
As soon as the kids are packed up and sent home with their mother, I head up to the henhouse with a stack of quizzes I have to grade for tomorrow and find the broody hen no longer sitting on her nest. For days I’ve suspected she’s been up and around way too often to hatch anything. I lay my open hand across the dozen small cream-colored eggs—they’re cold. On this day, nineteen of twenty-one, she’s made it clear she’s rejoining the flock.
“You poor thing,” I tell her. She looks so naked without her breast feathers—I wish I could fashion her a sweater vest. I grab hold of her at the feed dish and then sit cross-legged in the straw, where there’s less poop, and hold her on my lap and pet her. “You had it easy, though. You just had to get up and walk away.”
The Silkie is not inclined to snuggle. She makes a purring sound and claws at me until I let her go. She picks her way back to the food, her gray head feathers bouncing.
I’m starting to get hungry, but, more than that, I’m feeling hungry to feed my pregnant daughter. She always loved banana bread with walnuts, and I’m wondering if I can change the recipe, substitute vegetable oil for the butter. But how will it taste? And how will the whole thing hang together without eggs?
I take my phone out of my jacket pocket and hug my knees as I text my husband, who is probably just getting ready to leave his office: I’m in the henhouse if you want to talk. I’ll wait for you here.
I haven’t decided yet what I’ll tell him. I wish I had it in me to lie and say I miscarried. Maybe that would be easier for all of us to live with. I look up at the cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. They are astounding creations, falling upon themselves like layers of ghostly theater curtains, thick with dust, smoky-looking, almost completely obscuring the roof joists. My husband’s so tall he’ll get them in his hair. When he shows up, I’ll skip the science and move right into telling him a story about the magical powers of cobs, mysterious beings who enter the coop at night and whisper stories to the hens. If he gets the webs tangled in his hair, I’ll motion for him to bend down, and if he brings his face close to mine, I’ll brush them away.
Somewhere Warm
Sherry started working full time at Meijer when her freckle-faced daughter went into first grade and her son into third. After his shoe repair shop closed, her husband struggled to find regular work that suited him, and though Sherry tried to be unfailingly supportive, he complained, “You make me feel damned inadequate every day of my life, woman.” When her daughter, Isabelle, went into fifth grade and her husband was in chemotherapy, Sherry knew that getting fired would mean losing the benefits her family needed, so she only missed a couple of days cashiering, when her husband was too weak to drive himself to appointments. She went back to perfect attendance after her husband left her for a woman he met at his cancer survivor art expressions workshop and moved with her to New Mexico to escape what he called “the cold hell of Michigan winter.” Sherry knew he hated winter weather, but she was taken by surprise when he said his life with her in Kalamazoo had been stifling and oppressive, and she told herself that when the surgeons were hacking out his tumor, they must have nicked his heart. Sherry kept him on her health insurance, telling herself that her unwavering love was like radiation, that it would eventually heal his deranged heart and bring him back to make their family whole.
Her husband had been in New Mexico for three years when Sherry began dating a much younger dark-eyed truck driver who delivered housewares to Meijer. She didn’t intend to invite him to live with her in the little two-bedroom house, but when he changed companies and gave up his apartment in Florida and took up sleeping in his truck in her driveway a few nights a week, she consulted seventeen-year-old Josh and fifteen-year-old Isabelle, and they all decided to give the novel arrangement a chance, though Isabelle couldn’t resist reminding Sherry that she wasn’t actually divorced.
Sherry was surprised at how much she enjoyed having the truck driver around, not just for his helping out with the bills or his slightly raucous lovemaking—good thing her kids were heavy sleepers—but also for his strong physical presence around the house. He opened jars with ease and cheerfully lifted the end of the couch where her son Josh slept so she could sweep beneath it. He didn’t drink at all, said he just didn’t care for alcohol, which was a relief, since Sherry had grown up in a house with too much drinking, along with too much shouting and fighting. Though he was only twenty-five, he seemed solid at the kitchen table during dinner, solid in the recliner while watching
television, solid snoring on the bed when she left to work at six a.m., an all-around reliable person, deserving of her overflowing affections. He lit her cigarettes, and when he pulled her to him and kissed her, she felt like a heroine in a movie romance. She began to think she would be okay even if her husband did not return to the family.
When the lingerie sale came at Meijer, she bought on layaway several scallop-edged push-up bras that presented her breasts as a gift to the truck driver in the evenings should he care to unwrap them. (She found the money in her budget by cutting way back on cigarettes.) She’d also picked up elegant panties (requiring hand washing) and lace nightgowns that she arranged in ways that minimized her thighs, which had rubbed together since she was a young woman despite her continual dieting. There were candles, perfume for the sheets.
The truck driver seemed to have a calming effect on her son and daughter, both of whom stuck closer to home after he moved in, and Sherry figured it was the effect of the love in the house expanding—her feelings for the children were unwavering, but now there was even more love in the air. When the four of them watched a television show together, joking and passing around bowls of snacks, Sherry thought she would burst with pride. Once she said, “The four of us make a beautiful family, don’t we?”
“We’re not a family,” Isabelle said when the truck driver got up to use the bathroom. “You already drove Dad away with all your creepy cloying talk. You’ll drive him away, too.”
“Hush, Izzy,” said Sherry. The girl was wrong, Sherry knew. Love brought people together—it was a rule of the universe, the guiding rule. God was love, and so people should follow his example and love in imitation of him. The framed needlepoint sampler on the living-room wall, from Corinthians, read, Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.
Isabelle waited until the truck driver was back in the recliner to say, “I wish I could have my teeth straightened. I look gross, and the other kids make fun of me.”
“Nonsense, you look beautiful, Izzy,” Sherry said, feeling a little sick, as she did whenever Isabelle raised the topic of the braces they could not afford. “And the dentist said it’s not interfering with your bite, honey.”
“I guess love can’t fix everything,” Isabelle said and sighed theatrically.
ONE AFTERNOON AFTER her daughter was caught skipping summer school—which she was enrolled in because of skipping too much school before the truck driver moved in—Sherry hung up the phone and let her arms fall helplessly to her sides.
“I’m so ashamed. I don’t know what I did to make you skip school.”
“I just hate school, Ma. It’s not your fault. The teachers are assholes.”
“If I was a better mother, you’d love school. And you wouldn’t swear.”
Isabelle growled like an animal and shouted, “Skipping school is not about you, Ma. It’s about me. You don’t see anything before your eyes, do you? Why do you got to be so stupid?”
The truck driver reached out, as naturally as shaking another man’s hand, and he slapped the girl’s face.
Isabelle’s mouth fell open. She put her hand to her cheek and turned and walked into her room and slammed the hollow door so hard it bounced.
“It’s true, though!” she screamed through the door. “She thinks everything is about her and her love. Well, it’s not!”
Sherry grabbed the truck driver’s arm to stop him from following the girl to demand an apology. “Never do that again,” she told him.
Sherry couldn’t look her daughter in the eye the rest of that day. Like her daughter’s harsh language, that slap belonged in another world, a desperate place without restraints, like a battlefield or a barroom, or the bitter place where Sherry grew up, where people humiliated one another, where the power of love did not hold sway. Neither Sherry nor her husband had ever raised a hand to the children—that was something they had agreed on before Josh was born, when they were just kids themselves. Though the girl had become more and more belligerent in the last few years, Sherry had never even raised her voice, but instead worked to lure the girl back to the path of decency by cooking her favorite foods, by letting her stay up late to watch special shows. Sherry sneaked into her daughter’s room that night and got down on her knees and said, “Forgive me, Izzy.” She offered to send the truck driver away, offered to sacrifice anything, kept offering until her daughter said, in a deflated voice, “It’s fine, Ma. Don’t worry about me,” and Sherry knew she had won. After that day her daughter stopped skipping summer school, and this meant she miraculously passed the ninth grade.
In September, Josh left for basic training. After much crying and hand-wringing, Sherry let herself be reassured that joining the army was a good thing for him, and she let herself feel proud that her flesh and blood was serving the nation. Unlike Isabelle, Josh had always gotten along well with his teachers and coaches—Josh was a peacemaker, had the easy way his father had with people, and Sherry would miss him terribly. He told her he loved her every day until his day of departure, assured her that he felt prepared for the world outside their home.
SOON AFTER JOSH left, one morning while Sherry was at Meijer stocking cosmetics, the truck driver was awakened by Isabelle. The girl, who was supposed to be at school, crept into her mother’s room and crawled into the bed in a tank top and underpants. The truck driver wasn’t even completely awake as his hands traveled over the lean body and eased off the shirt and panties. His eyes were closed and her smooth coppery hair smelled like her mother’s, or so he told himself. After all, they used the same almond-scented shampoo.
Afterward, he sat with his head in his hands on the edge of the bed.
“You can’t make me go to school now, you know,” the daughter said, surprised at how easy her conquest had been. She turned on her side, reached past him, and slid a Pall Mall out of his pack. “Don’t feel bad, though. When I turn sixteen in six months, I’m dropping out, so I wouldn’t graduate anyway. Then I’ll just get my GED and start my life. I’ll go off somewhere warm like my dad and Josh.”
The truck driver imagined the girl’s ma was suddenly behind him, but it was only the scent of Sherry’s perfume on the pillows. He turned to study the daughter lying naked, smoking, beside the tangle of sheets and the flowered comforter. Her body was covered entirely with freckles. He returned his face to his hands and remained in that position for ten minutes before gathering the strength to move. When he finally lit his own cigarette with a shaking hand, he looked again—the girl had turned on the TV with the remote control and was blowing smoke rings that traveled the length of her legs. Her body exuded a sunny warmth.
“Is that why you came in here like this?” he finally asked. “So you could get away with skipping school?”
“Partly. And I think you’re cute. And I can tell you’re thinking about breaking up with my ma.”
“Well, we shouldn’t’ve done this. It’s wrong. It’s about the wrongest thing I’ve ever done.” The truck driver’s gut-wrenching regret and determination to repent lasted much of the morning, but by early afternoon he concluded that once you’d done something as bad as what he’d done, there wasn’t really any going back. As the weeks passed, the truck driver found that he loved lying in bed with this foulmouthed, freckle-faced, cigarette-stealing school-skipper more than anything. She was funny in her belligerence and smart-aleckiness, so alive and surprising. At fifteen she was a year closer to him in age than Sherry was at thirty-six. He’d come to know exactly what to expect from Sherry, what positions, what gestures and sighs, what bowl of dry-roasted peanuts or pretzels before dinner, what casseroles and baked meats would show up on the dinner table.
The truck driver didn’t break things off with Sherry as he had indeed been planning to do, a
nd he continued bringing her gifts—occasional pieces of jewelry in addition to the paperback horror novels and videos he had always brought her from the truck stops—and he started bringing her flowers, though he knew she might have gotten fresher ones cheaper at Meijer with her store discount. He hoped it made up for the lack of sex. The girl’s ma thanked him for making the bed each day, not knowing how intently he’d first searched the sheets for long, straight copper-colored hairs.
One Indian summer Sunday morning in October, the truck driver pulled into the driveway, got out, and leaned against his rig. Sherry came out of the house in a yellow tank top, and he noted the loose flesh on her upper arms as she approached him, directing the beam of her smile like a sword. Her lipstick looked absurdly orange in the natural light, and her makeup was too thick for outdoor wear. As he kissed her hello, he saw freckled Isabelle over her shoulder, coming out of the house scowling, wearing stretchy white hot pants so short, he choked a little and brought the kiss up short. He wanted to push Sherry out of the way, reach out to grab the girl’s biceps in one hand and hook the other thumb into a belt loop and give the shorts a yank, up or down, he didn’t care. The truck driver winked at the girl, and she stuck out her tongue at him. “Asshole,” she said.
“Be nice, child,” Sherry said.
“He doesn’t deserve me to be nice. He should be glad I’m not kicking him.”
The truck driver put his arm around Sherry again, but kept watching Izzy, and was surprised to discover the head-on guilt was not unbearable. Instead, it made him giddy, made objects around him sparkle all the rest of that day. Lunch tasted as good as filet mignon, though it was just fried bologna, the school-skipper’s favorite—fried bologna on untoasted white bread, slathered with melting salad dressing. At dinner, he devoured a good amount of Sherry’s macaroni-with-ham casserole before it could even cool.
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Page 13