A Mother's Love (15 page)

Now I lay, listening to Bobby's cry. “Please, don't,” I pleaded with my infant son. “Please, don't wake me again.”

I picked up the phone and called Tucson. I was relieved when Dottie answered, her voice groggy with sleep and thick with her cigarettes. “It's me,” I said. “It's Ivy.”

“What is it? My God, what time is it where you are?” I heard the rustle of sheets, the flattening of a pillow. My father's voice was muffled. “Who is it, Dot? Who's calling at this hour.” She shushed him. “It's Ivy.”

“What's wrong?” I heard my father say. Tears filled my eyes.

“I'm going to put the baby up for adoption,” I told her. “I can't take it anymore.”

“Don't, Ivy.” She sounded frightened. “Promise me you won't.”

“I can't promise. I made a mistake.”

“Send her a plane ticket home,” my father said. He grabbed the phone away. “Either I'll come there or you come here. Those are your choices. Period,” he said. I knew he meant it.

Somehow I didn't want anyone going anywhere. I didn't know what I wanted. “Don't do it,” Dottie said. “You'll regret it all your life.” She knew what she was talking about. “We'll send you money for a baby sitter, a plane ticket, we'll take the baby for a few months, whatever you want.”

I thought of them out there in the desert. The cactus, the miles of white sand. My father got on the phone.

“You're not a quitter,” he said. “That's not the Ivy I know. You know, I folded the laundry and cooked for you for all those years. It wasn't easy, but I did what I had to; that's all.”

“I know you did, Dad.” I could see him at the Laundromat, the racing page on his lap, his pockets full of dimes for the machines. “I've been thinking about her lately,” I said.

“Don't waste your time, Ivy.”

“I've been thinking about why she left.”

“Forget the ones who left,” he said, his voice filled with irritation. “Think about the ones who stayed.”

There was silence. This had always been his point. At last I said, “But maybe I'm like her.”

“You aren't.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you think about it, because it worries you.” His voice rose as he spoke. “Your mother never thought about anything … except herself.”

“Lately I seem to remember everything.”

“The only thing you need to remember is that Dottie and I love you very much. We love you and we love Bobby. And we're proud of you.”

“I can't work,” I said. “I can't get anything done. Did you ever think”—I was trying to keep from crying—“did you ever think about giving me up? When things were difficult?”

He paused. There was a long sigh. “Sure, I thought about it. Given my situation, I would've been crazy not to think about it. But thinking about it and doing it are two different things. You were my daughter, Ivy. You always will be.”

Now the tears were running down my cheeks. “Thanks, Dad. I'll be all right.”

“I know you will,” he said, his voice cracking. “You'll be fine.”

M
Y STEPMOTHER'S NAME was Dorothy, but my father called her Dot, which only served to remind me in the early years of how small and insignificant she was in our lives. I called her Dottie from the start because she asked me to, though in my teens I began to call her Mom. Because she also had red hair—though hers came from a bottle—most people assumed she was my mother and almost no one asked.

Once, however, a teacher during a conference asked me in front of my parents where I got my brown eyes, and I replied, “From my mother.” The teacher stared at Dottie, with her brilliant blues, then at my father, then back at my chocolate browns. “From her mother's side,” my father said.

Three years after my real mother left, my father divorced her
in absentia
and married Dottie. He did it for me; I knew that. But when he married
her, I ran away from home. I'm not even sure what came over me, because I knew Dottie well and I even cared for her. But the day they went down to the Hitching Post on the Strip, I packed a small bag with some clothes, a baloney sandwich, several Nancy Drew mysteries, and left. I got a ride first with a drunk who was hauling pigs. When I couldn't stand the smell of him or the truck, I asked him to let me out, and he put his hand on my thigh. I was ten years old, but I shoved his hand away. I thought he was going to kill me. Instead, he told me to get out of his truck.

The next guy who picked me up had a truck-load of grapes. On the seat beside him he had bunches of green and purple grapes. His fingers were purple from plucking them. He was very fat, with snakes tattooed up and down his arms. The grapes must have been sprayed with pesticides, because I itched all over and my eyes burned. I think when I fell asleep he radioed the troopers, because they came and got me when we were at a truck stop having a Coke. He gave me a key chain with a little truck on it. I still use it for my keys.

When the troopers brought me back, my parents wept. Dottie was still wearing her apricot wedding gown and was putting out cigarettes into platters of uneaten cold cuts. I thought they were going to hit me, which they never had, but instead they embraced me as if I were some blessed being and not a runaway kid.

——

“The first time I ever laid eyes on Ivy Slovak,” Dottie often said, “it was like she was on fire. Wild eyes, burning red hair. And there was something else about her—like she'd explode with the tiniest spark. It was left to me to tame her.”

Dottie told this to anyone who asked about us. She seemed to love telling it, whether I was in the room or not. It was how she explained herself and everything around her. “First I took care of the girl,” she said with a laugh. “The father came later.”

My mother and Dottie used to sit for hours in the late afternoon on the plastic lawn chairs, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Dottie usually had her hair in brush rollers. (She never wore them to sleep because Ralph wouldn't let her, she confided in my mother with a suggestive cackle that came back to me after Ralph died, even after my father and Dottie were together.) Ralph dealt poker, though he wasn't a gambler, not like my father. It was just what he did. He was a simple man, not good at much, but he loved his family. He died of throat cancer before he reached forty.

Ralph and Dottie had a boy named Jamie. Jamie and I used to take off our clothes and display our private parts to each other for hours, but no one seemed to notice. Later, when we were adolescents and stepbrother and stepsister, this would embarrass us so much that we had difficulty being in the
same room. Jamie was fair, with blue eyes like his mother, and two years my senior. He turned out to be a relatively successful management consultant and now lives with his wife and two children out west.

My mother and Dottie would sit up in the evening, smoking, sipping Cokes, talking about what it was they imagined their lives would have been if they'd done things differently. In those years Dottie had a nice Airstream, and they lived in it through several states, but mostly in Reno and Vegas. Jamie had been born in that trailer. So my mother and Dottie talked about their lives and about what would have happened if they hadn't married and had children. How they would have become models or dancers or whatever it was they thought they wanted to be. At times I think Dottie felt guilty, as if somehow she'd planted ideas in my mother's head, seeds that had given her the idea to run away, but I always told Dottie this wasn't true. Even before she met Dottie, my mother was gone.

It was Dottie who saved me. “I began with food,” she said. “Cooking things kids just can't say no to, like fried chicken and hot dogs, grilled cheese, and thick malteds you eat with a spoon. My own mashed potatoes and biscuits. Not that her father didn't feed her; he did. He just didn't make the things children love.” From food she moved on to schedules. A time to get up, a time to eat, to study,
to take a bath. Everything for Dottie was done by the clock. “Ivy,” she'd say, “it's six-thirty; you should be doing your homework now.”

Dottie didn't move in right away. It was a process that took place over many months. First there was Jamie to think about, and then there was me. And of course Dottie was not stupid, and living with my father had its drawbacks. I'm not sure, even now, how she put up with it, because we all knew that if my mother walked in the door, even years after she had gone, he'd have taken her back.

Shortly after Dottie came to live with us—which was about two years after my mother was gone—she told me the story about the child she had given away. When Dottie got pregnant by her childhood boyfriend in the rugged farming community where she'd grown up, outside Bakersfield, the boy acted as if he didn't know what she was talking about. In fact, they had been making love in the back seat of his father's pickup since they were fourteen. During her pregnancy the boy didn't seem to know her. Dottie gave up the little girl when she was three days old and thought that was the end of it.

But one day five years later the boy, who was now a grown man with a family of his own, phoned in tears to say that the people who had adopted their little girl had given her back. He sobbed as he spoke, begging Dottie to forgive him. He told her that the child was defective somehow
and the people had returned her, the way you would a car that was a lemon. He knew this because a friend of his family heard about it, but they didn't know where the child had been taken.

Whenever Dottie spoke of the girl she'd given away, and then of her years going from orphanage to orphanage in eastern California, trying to track her down, I'd curl against her body and let her stroke my hair. Dottie would lie with me and smoke, blowing thin blue circles around my head. “Ivy, I'm glad I found you,” she'd say, “because you've come to replace the one I gave away.” I was like a gift, she told me, that had been given back to her, and I had to admit that I felt as if I'd been found.

Sometimes when she tucked me in, I'd ask her to tell me the story again. I made her tell me about the pleading faces of children, their trembling lips, hands that held her. About the ones who ran to her and said, “Mommy, Mommy, please take me home.”

T
HE APARTMENT needed to be fumigated. “Pests,” the landlord said. The whole building was infested. He suggested that I go away for a few days, stay with friends. They would spray on Friday, and I could return after the weekend. I called Patricia at her office, and she said, somewhat hesitantly, that I could stay at her place. I decided to visit museums and see some special exhibits, something I'd been wanting to do anyway, until Patricia got home from work.

The exterminators were coming at around ten, and I wanted to be out before they arrived. But first I had to feed and dress Bobby. I nursed him early and laid out his clothes. I wanted to shower, so I pulled his portable crib near the bathroom and turned on the mobile. It would play for five minutes, enough, I hoped, for me to jump into the shower. I could hear him cooing, then fussing.
“Mommy's coming,” I called. “Mommy will be right there!”

The water felt good as it poured over me, hot and relaxing. I closed my eyes and thought that I could stay there a long time. My body, which had been dormant, seemed to wake, and I ran my hands over its length. It was weeks since I'd told Matthew I wouldn't see him until he signed Bobby's birth certificate. But now as I tilted my head, letting the water flow over my face, the thought of him came back to me. I could walk out of the shower, and he'd be there, sitting on the bed, aroused. Or, perhaps, impatient for me, he'd open the bathroom door, pull back the shower curtain. He'd take off his clothes and join me, soapy hands coursing over my skin.

The mobile stopped and Bobby began crying, so I leaped out, covered in suds. Giving the mobile a twist until the plastic giraffe, elephant, and dog turned again to the tune of “It's a Small World,” I jumped back in the shower to rinse off. When I got out, Bobby was pounding his fists into the mattress. I took off his diaper, and a stream of urine rose, stinging my eyes so that I could not see.

Wet, naked, with burning eyes, I pinned Bobby to the table and grabbed the towel on my head to wipe my face. I hummed a song my father used to sing, about poor little lambs who'd lost their way, but it was no use. He was in a rage, so I nursed him again, wondering what the exterminators
would think when they arrived. Greedily he sucked at my breast.

At last he grew still, and I raced to fill a small duffel with the changes of clothes we'd need for the weekend. I packed only a few toys. A rattle, a plastic teething ring. A book whose pages were soft, like the fur on a bunny. A sketch pad and novel for me. I could stick this duffel under the seat of the stroller or strap it around the back. Then I filled Bobby's diaper bag with bottles, soft blankets, as many diapers as could fit. I tried to remember which museums permitted strollers and which ones made you rent a backpack or use a Snugli. I didn't want to use the Snugli, because Bobby's weight made my shoulders ache and because I needed to carry all those other things, but I stuffed it in anyway. The Met and the Modern both permitted strollers on off-peak times, so I decided to make my way to the Met.

I still had to dress Bobby. The flannel playsuit I tried to put him in was too small; the top barely closed. The bottoms rode up at his ankles. Reaching down into the changing table drawers, I pulled out other playsuits, a cotton running suit, pajamas, but they were all the same size. He'd outgrown the presents he'd received when he was born. Already I'd have to buy him new things.

I found a playsuit slightly bigger than the others, but as I started to put it on, he began to cry. “There, now, hold still.” I wished there were
someone I could hand him to, someone who would dress him, clean him, brush his hair, and give him back to me when it was all done. Once again I found myself wondering what had ever made me want this child or made me think I could handle him alone. Again, it seemed that I could crush him with my hands. Instead, I held him down firmly with one hand as I struggled to pull his pants up with the other.