I finally called my mother, and when she arrived, I felt saner, mostly because it was hard not to feel like the most logical one in the room next to my mother, in her deep-V cashmere sweater, mascara tracked under her eyes. She had on a gold Magen David necklace, and the lowest point of the star pierced her right in the sun-freckled fold of her cleavage.
The first thing that she said: “You look a mess.”
“It’s harder than I thought, not having Ben here,” I said, and immediately she gave me the look I should have anticipated, the look of Try raising two girls without a father, try dating with two daughters at home, and by the way, has Dad been by to see the baby? I chose not to respond; Annie’s therapist had told her that the only way to stem my mother’s passive aggression was to force her to express herself overtly. We weren’t going to give her crumbs.
It was nice that Annie had a therapist. It was like having one of my own, only for free and without having to schedule appointments.
I watched my mother pull the headband she had bought for Clara out of a little pink gift bag, her French-tipped nails grating against the excess tissue paper. Why wrap something for a two-week-old? It seemed like such a waste.
My mother positioned the headband on Clara, who frowned at her. The little flower screaming girl girl girl and we wonder where we get the complex, the feeling that we’re supposed to fit into some schema. That we, the whole messy humanity of us, are supposed to fit neatly inside the elastic of a tiny pink headband.
“We should take her somewhere,” said my mother. “Where can we take her?
“We should take her to the beach,” said my mother. “We should take her to the zoo.”
The thought of either was unbearable. Sand gritting Clara’s diaper, a mouthy tiger watching me nurse. My mother had two daughters. She had done this twice, and she knew. But that was who she was, a woman in denial, a woman convinced that the truth of things was putty she could mold at will. This hadn’t served her well.
THE FIRST FEW months after my father left, my mother behaved as if he’d be back any second. She cooked enough for him to join us at dinner, waiting to set the table until well after the food had gotten cold, Let’s just see if Dad is walking through the door. There was no conversation, no explanation as to why Dad no longer lived with us. Annie and I placed bets on when Mom would sit us down and say “divorce,” how she would do it. Annie thought it would be solemn, the two of us squished onto the plaid basement couch, Mom on her knees on the carpet, a hand of ours in each of her own. I thought she’d just start feeding us at a more appropriate time, that she’d stop waiting to see if Dad would be home to give us baths or tuck us in. We still got baths, at that point. We still had bedtime. As the weeks went on, routine dissolved into a slow, fibrous stretching of time, a thinning scrim of what was acceptable. Because she was my mother, I didn’t think that this could hurt us. The whole point of your parents, to my childhood understanding, was to be pillars that would hold you up, bedrock you could return to if you crumbled. The family was an object, and subject to object permanence. When my mother got flickery, I had total confidence she’d come back into focus.
We found out Dad was back in town because one of Mom’s friends saw him at a grocery store. We came home from school one day to find Shelly Moretti sitting at the kitchen table with Mom, drinking a beer. My mother was pinch-faced and silent, and Shelly flurried us back into the yard, where we sat on the front stoop with our book bags, hungry and chewing our fingernails.
Thank god I had Annie. After Shelly, the stretched putty got progressively thinner, and then finally snapped through. Mom didn’t set her alarm, or set it for three in the morning, when she’d get up to clean the house top to bottom, including our bedroom.
“The vacuum waits for no man!” she would say, crashing the machine against our bed frames. Once she sucked up Annie’s spelling worksheet, had to paw through the clog port to get it back.
One night, after we were asleep, she set the china out for two and made spaghetti and molten chocolate cakes. She put out the tablecloth, cloth napkins, week-old flowers in a vase, long phallic candles. She lit the candles and passed out on the couch, and then woke up at two a.m. to suffocating smoke after a candle tipped over and the flame caught a napkin. She was calm when she came to wake us, which made me calm, despite the smoke wafting in when she opened our door. I rescued my math textbook. We slipped out of the house through the back and stood waiting in our bare feet for the fire trucks, Annie still wearing her headgear. She pulled it out when the neighbors came nosing, but had nowhere to put it, and I remember shying away from her hand, fearful of orthodontic slime.
Mom had been looking at her wedding album, and it, too, burned that night—the kind of metaphor you’d scoff at if you saw it at the movies. When we came back to the house in the morning, Annie and I pierced the chocolate cakes, and instead of spilling out, the liquid centers sat gelatinous and trembling. Annie said it was a shame Mom had never gotten good at cooking; maybe we should get her a recipe book for her birthday.
My mother went away for a bit, after that. We stayed with Dad, first in the apartment he was sharing with Claudia, his twenty-year-old girlfriend, and then the three of us moved back into the house once it was cleaned. We went to school, we came home, we ate boxed macaroni and cheese. I had a class field trip to the planetarium, and when I brought Dad my permission slip, he seemed very proud to sign it, almost possessive, though he wouldn’t volunteer to be a chaperone. Some days he’d offer to play catch in the front yard. Some mornings we’d be pouring our cereal, and he’d slip in the front door with a wink and a Styrofoam coffee.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he’d say, and we’d know that he had spent the night with Claudia. He spent the night with Claudia more and more often.
The doctors let Mom come home once the life that she wanted came closer to the life that she had, the Venn diagram no longer two completely separate circles.
Mom didn’t get electroshocks to kick-start this new era. She didn’t get cold-water baths. They gave her CBT and pills, they talked her down from the delusions. Like my father, Mom was back three months later, standing there at throwing distance, hugging us, holding our hands. But also, like my father, she was never really back.
“LET’S TAKE CLARA to the zoo,” said my mother.
It was the next day, not yet twenty-four hours after I’d explained how futile the journey would be—how hard it always was to find parking, how Clara couldn’t see anything, how she’d have to be breastfed, how she’d mostly be asleep. “I’ll pay to put the car in the lot.”
I’d always liked the zoo. As a kid Annie had a vendetta against it, talked about the brutality of keeping animals in cages, how they should all be roaming free. Typical bleeding-heart teenager stuff. But the animals had indoor space, and outdoor. They had ready food and an audience and a purpose. My only issue with the zoo was the smell of the primate house.
“Okay,” I said, because I knew that as long as Mom was with me, she’d keep pushing it, because I knew that otherwise I might never get out of the neighborhood. Go out into society, said Mrs. What-to-Expect’s SouthernMamma613. Lately I was obsessed with the What-to-Expects. I checked the message board religiously, emotionally invested in both OHbaby243’s failing marriage and SierraXGrace5’s pregnancy scare. There was a perversity to my attraction, a quiet shame; each time I typed out a response, I’d get embarrassed and immediately delete it. I couldn’t find Clara’s message. The moderators had probably deleted the thread; they probably didn’t want any other October Moms feeling threatened. But the message board was obviously a conduit to Clara, and I liked the idea of her as more than just a thing I had to tend to, the idea of her having a mind. I couldn’t figure out how she connected, but I thought if I just kept refreshing the feed, I’d come across some sort of clue. Meanwhile, I scrolled through, collecting wisdom. Don’t dress your boy in yellow clothes unless you want him to have sexual performance issues later. Buy a wipe warmer. Go out into society. I wouldn’t mind seeing some tourists for one afternoon. I said, “Let me walk Solly while you get Clara ready.”
Solly was thrilled to have my full attention, to be stroller and bunting and carrier-free. She peed freely and often, rediscovering each fence post and tree. On our way back up, she bounded past our landing, heading up the stairs to the roof. Heading toward the turquoise door. Sitting patiently outside it.
I hadn’t been to see the door since Ben left. I was afraid to show it to Clara—afraid she’d respond to the fur room with its adult child-sized chairs and its proliferation of flowers. Afraid she’d be her same impassive self. Afraid I was wrong about who it was inside; afraid I was right. I did wonder if Margaret had finished building Michael’s house, how her terrier was doing. I knocked.
“Yes?” Her voice was raspy, with a mid-century pretension. “The door is open, just come in.”
Inside, I saw no sign of the heat or the anger. Nothing was melting. Nothing was forcing its way in. The dog was asleep, and he stirred a bit upon hearing us enter, but did not acknowledge Solly. Margaret was seated at a desk, wearing an elegant green blazer, writing with an ink-dipped quill.
“Oh, you good girl,” she said, and Solly went right to her, stubbed tail wagging. “What a sweet, good little girl.” She leaned down to cup Solly’s chin, and her wide-linked gold bracelet slipped down over the back of her hand. I stood in the doorway. In the corner of the room a small round table had been set for two: long candlesticks, champagne flutes, folded napkins. A chaise longue with a cigarette burn was piled with cashmere blankets. A calendar with paintings of dogs hung by the picture window: two red setters in profile, February 1944. Without looking up from Solly, Margaret chastised me: “You’re letting in the cold.”
I closed the door, and Solly settled at her feet.
“I only have a minute,” I said. “We’re going to the zoo.”
“With the dog?” she said. “How silly.”
“No, with the baby.” Also silly.
“Oh, the baby,” she said in her low, gravelly voice. “Why didn’t you say?” And all at once I was nervous to be in this room that was not a room, in this house that was not a house. There was a smell to it that I couldn’t quite place, a combination of the sea smell from before and something gamier. Margaret seemed amused. She cocked her head at me, her hair falling jaunty at her shoulders. She smiled, and then turned back to her work. Her dog was still sleeping.
“You’ve tired Crispian out,” she said without looking up. “All of that screaming.”
“What?”
“He’s very excitable.”
Are you actually her? I wanted to ask. Are you Margaret? What are you doing here, why have you chosen me? Instead I picked at a scab on my elbow. How do you ask a breathing body if she’s actually a ghost? How do you say, You are a secondary figure in my graduate school dissertation, I’m sorry that I’ve abandoned you, I did just have a baby, to be fair. Is life easier, here in the 1940s? Where did you find dahlias out of season? What are you doing in my home?
“How’s the house?” I asked. “Is it coming along?”
“The house?”
“The one for . . . Michael?”
“Ah,” she said. “We’ll have to see. I’m hoping to persuade her it’s worthwhile. She’d rather summer in Bar Harbor. She has very good taste, very expensive, and won’t suffer inconvenience. It’s always a challenge to win her completely, which is why it’s so satisfying when one does.”
“It seems like a lot of work for someone who might not even be grateful,” I said.
“Well, she won’t show the gratitude,” said Margaret. “That doesn’t mean it won’t be there.”
“Of course,” I said. Margaret frowned and brushed the feather end of the quill against her cheek. I put my hand to my own cheek in sympathy. There was a fire in the hearth. Polished brass bars supporting the whispering logs, a brass basket holding the logs not yet burned. A collection of fire tools, leaned against a curved brass sculpture. A blue clock on the mantel. Goodnight, goodnight. I wasn’t reading to Clara yet, although we had books. At my baby shower we’d been gifted some obscure Curious George books, Count to Sleep Chicago, Sandra Boynton. Everyone assumed I’d already bought the classics. I hadn’t.
This room was small. It was not green. It seemed as if the fire was flickering in stop-motion, not fluid in the usual way of fire but moving in segments, like tissue-paper flames blown by fans on a stage. My life was moving in segments, shifting in front of me. My eyes were forever peeled open, and still I was missing the meat of things. When I moved closer, the fire was hot, the blaze translucent. I thought about Clara grown up, and I started to cry.
“You wouldn’t want to be late for the zoo,” said Margaret, and I knew that she was sending me away. I took a breath and wiped my nose on my sleeve, and by the time Solly and I were back downstairs, my eyes were dry.
MY MOTHER HAD said she’d pay for the lot, but when I turned in to the entrance, she balked.
“It’s so expensive,” she said. “I’m sure there’s something free and closer.”
“There won’t be,” I said.
“Let’s just check.”
So we circled the free spots along the park three times, checking, me clenching my jaw, my mother ooh-ing and oh look–ing and pretending to be useful.
“There’s a family up ahead just leaving.” With a sharp manicured fingernail she pointed at a couple pulling a stroller from the trunk of their car. “Or maybe this group here?”
I was frustrated, but mostly just tired. My mother showed me who she was twenty years ago, had shown me every day since. I knew better than to think I could depend on her. I used my credit card to pay for the lot and then my mother stood tapping her foot as I hefted the stroller from the trunk of the car, detached Clara’s car seat from its base and snapped it onto the stroller. “What a process,” she said as I unfolded the handles and unlocked the brake. “When you were little I did things the normal way.”
Mom wanted to push our stroller, and kept telling me that people passing by probably thought she was the mother, not the grandma. I let her have this illusion.
“Look at the seals,” she said to Clara. “Look at the leopard.”
“It’s a cheetah,” I said.
“No need for sass.”
Mostly Clara slept, or stared up at the sky with those blue eyes that kept darkening. I hunched over on a plastic bench to feed her, cold despite the nursing cover, cold from the way my mother kept waving her scarf in an attempt to provide “modesty” that actually attracted more attention. The hot chocolate that we bought from a cart was cool.
When Clara cried, my mother picked her up and rocked her, wrapped in the scarf, holding her up to the fabricated savannah to look at the lions’ half-eaten lunch. The zookeepers served the bloody carcass in a large cardboard box, folded up like a container of Chinese takeout.
I had the feeling someone was watching us, that something dangerous was coming. I pushed the empty stroller along the enclosure, and kept whipping around to catch the owner of the eyes that I felt on my back. Was it because my pants were too loose in the waist? I was fifteen pounds of child and water weight down, but still carrying twenty. I wasn’t going to spend money on clothes until I knew where my body would land.
Mom was holding Clara up to the lions, out over the rail. The zookeeper was standing nearby, watching them. Wet leaves decoupaged the stroller wheels, which felt like the zoo laying its claim on us. I couldn’t decide if this meant we’d been fated to come here. Across the concrete expanse, by the seal pool, a toddler in an unzipped coat hung from her nanny’s leg, hysterical because the seals were underwater.
“No!” she kept wailing, “I need them on top.”
“It hurts,” Clara had written on the message board. Or had she? Had I dreamed Clara’s first real communication? If it wasn’t a dream, how wonderful that her thoughts could be so clearly transmitted, how awful that they’d be so much like mine.
About a hundred feet down the walkway toward the birds of prey, an old lady bought popcorn from a vendor. She had on an odd blue straw hat and a long trench coat. My mother still showing Clara, what? Her future? Her domain? Anything the light touches. Or was it everything the light touches? Popcorn grease was dirtying the lady’s white gloves, and when she turned, I could see that she was watching us through a veil draped across her wide hat brim. My mother held Clara farther out, palm supporting her neck. She was saying, “Can you see, little bird? Can you see?”
The lion tearing into the carcass, his mate sunning herself on the far hill.
“Little bird, can you see?”
WE GOT HOT dogs from another cart, and I ate mine one-handed, splattering mustard on my coat. Clouds amassed, the afternoon fading. I knew we should leave—Clara would have to eat again, Solly was waiting. But I felt that I was waiting for some cue. Nothing had happened, there’d been no splash to break the surface of our day.
Clara was back in her bunting. My mother’s eyes wandered, flitting from visitor to visitor. The veiled lady had followed us to the café, and sat with a hot cup of something, looking down at her feet. A popcorn kernel had stuck in the veil’s netting, hanging like a spider on a web. It must mean something. I half expected her to stand up with a big reveal and announce that she was what I had been waiting for: the warning sign, the storm. To stand up and announce that she was angry, and must be let in.
But she just sat there with her tea, and we threw away our silver wrappers and folded up the stroller and clicked the car seat back into its base. On the way home we got every green light. Maybe that was my sign.