A Mother's Love (5 page)

The last time I went was when I was four months pregnant. It was a muggy September night, and he made dinner—a summer salad, poached salmon, orange juice spritzers. Matthew was an excellent cook; he did all the cooking when we were together. He cooked and I cleaned up. The best meal he ever made was when we were staying in a cabin in Maine, the night we conceived this child. We bought vegetables at a farmstand and two bottles of wine. We caught rainbow trout in the river outside our cabin. Then we sat under the stars, eating the crispy fried trout, drinking. All night long I could smell the fire and taste the trout. Even now I can taste it.

After dinner the night in his studio before Bobby was born, Matthew said he wanted to take a
walk for some ice cream. So we walked down a street that stank of garbage, excrement, decayed meat. The air was thick and yellow, and I felt as if I couldn't breathe. “I'm not sure how to say this,” he stammered after we bought the ice cream and were heading home. “Maybe I've already said it. I love you and I want to stay with you, but I can't be father to this child.”

“You'll feel different after it's born,” I said.

“Maybe I will and maybe I won't, but, Ivy, I'm already feeling different about you.” He paused, taking a deep breath. “You should have ended it … when you had the chance.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I didn't.”

“You mean you couldn't.”

“That's right. I couldn't.”

“And why couldn't you?”

I shook my head. “I don't know,” I said. And at the time, I didn't.

“Have you thought”—he paused again, choosing his words carefully—“how you'll manage?”

It was the first time I realized he wouldn't be with me. With us. I began to ponder the tasks I'd have to do for myself. Morning coffee, food shopping, the cooking. When we were together, Matthew took care of those things. And then of course there was the baby, the money, the long nights. “I'll manage,” I said.

When we got back to the studio, we were hot and sticky, and I felt heavy and tired. For a moment
I stood in front of the industrial-size air conditioner, which did not cool the entire loft, and let it blow on me. When I stepped away, I was still hot. I knew I had to leave, but I kept hoping he would ask me to stay. I went to stand behind him and run my hands through his hair. He had beautiful hair, thick silvery curls, like an aging Botticelli angel. When friends saw us side by side, me with my flaming red and Matthew with his cool silver locks, they called us “fire and ice.” “I'm going,” I said. “I think it's for the best.” Still I let my hands run through curls. “Do you want me to cut your hair?” I asked, whispering into his ear.

Matthew prided himself on the fact that he had never been to a barber. Only women cut Matthew's hair. It was a vestige of his youth. His mother had always seemed complacent and sober, “almost normal,” Matthew said, when she cut his hair. After his mother came Serena, then the girlfriend before me, and now me. “Yes,” he said, kissing my hands, “I'd like that.” So he sat in the chair, towel draped around his neck, while I snipped, letting the silken hair tumble to the floor. Matthew was the first man who looked at a painting of mine and said, “This is good,” who fed me when I was hungry, who took care of me. I wanted to gather his hair, keep it in a Ziploc bag in the back of a drawer.

When I was done, he turned ever so gently and reached for me. He pressed his face to my belly,
running his hands up and down my swollen breasts. “Are you sore?” he asked. “Am I hurting you?”

He pulled me to him, thrusting my head back and kissing me. His tongue searched deep within my mouth, and I didn't pull away as he tugged at my T-shirt, my bra. Without turning on the light, he led me into the bedroom, where he pulled off my clothes and his and made love to me slowly, letting me come over and over again. Then he thrust himself into me, hard, not so slowly, and I pulled back, recoiled. “I want you,” he said, “I really want you.”

He thrust himself deeper. Our bodies stuck with sweat as he pushed himself deeper and deeper, straining, I could tell, so that he would not come. I watched him pushing, his face grimacing in the moonlight, and I saw that this was not the face I had known. I shoved him away. “Are you crazy,” I said. “What are you trying to do?”

But he held me down and thrust faster and harder, even as I struggled and tightened beneath him as if I were protecting my child. At last he came, a solitary, lonely ejaculation, as I tried to move him off me and away. He fell, weeping, into my arms. “I can't help myself,” he said, his body heaving against mine.

I ran my fingers through his silver curls. “I know,” I muttered, wanting to get away. “I can't help myself either.”

——

At 103rd I almost missed my stop. Grabbing the stroller, I raced off the train. It was nearly midnight, and the platform was deserted. The stench of urine sickened me and I held my breath. Bobby woke and shrieked, hungry. I patted him and pushed on, and he quieted with the motion of the stroller. As I traversed the platform, I heard noises behind me, heavy footsteps on the cement.

Turning, I saw the black man who had been staring at me on the train, now walking behind. I picked up my pace, but so did he. I was almost at the turnstile and he was about twenty feet behind. If I could just make it out, I'd be all right, but he was gaining. I pushed through the iron gate, turned to the stairs. Before me were about thirty steps and behind me was the man and we were the only people in that subway station. As I bent down to pick up the stroller, I felt his body bending over mine. I looked up into his red eyes. He was sweating and perhaps he had been drinking. I don't have anything, I wanted to say.

I stared at my sleeping child. I'll snatch him, I thought, then dash up the stairs. “Lady,” the man said softly, “can I give you a hand?”

Tears rose in my eyes. “Yes,” I said, “I suppose I could use a hand.”

With a grunt, he hoisted the stroller into the air and carted Bobby, whose head bounced up and down, to the top of the stairs. The man was straining,
breathing heavily, until he put the stroller down on the sidewalk. “Are you all right now?” he asked me gently. “Can you make it from here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can make it from here.”

“Okay, then. Well, you take it easy. Good night.”

“Good night!” I shouted. “Thank you!” But he was already gone, disappearing into the shadows of the night, the stranger whose intentions I had misconstrued. Miserable and ashamed, I made my way home. At last I reached my door. I stood in front of the brownstone and saw that no lights were on. Everyone slept. I stared at the darkened house. There was no one to go to. It was late and cold.

I carried the buggy up the stoop and into the entranceway. I didn't have the strength to carry it further. I pushed it into a corner and hoped that no one would steal it in the night. Scooping Bobby into my arms, I carried him. Together, we climbed the stairs. After fumbling for the keys, I finally walked in and stood in the darkness, catching my breath. Then I turned on the light.

It was late as I nursed Bobby and lay down beside him. I was just falling asleep when the phone rang. The ringing pierced the quiet. “Hello,” I said, hoping it was Matthew on the other end. Perhaps he too was having a change of heart. I still slept on the side of the bed where I'd slept when we were together, our bodies curled up
like a pair of sixes—a lucky number, I always said. Sometimes I reached, thinking I'd find him stretched out there. He still had a set of keys. “Hello.” But I heard the crackling of long distance—the sound of mountains, rivers, empty terrain. “Who is it?” I said, and then, “Is that you?”

It seemed to be more than just a wrong number, because the person on the other end paused, as if wanting to hear my voice. So I asked, just as the phone went dead, “Mother?” as if this were suddenly possible. “Is that you?”

The phone call had awakened Bobby, and I could not get him back to sleep. He cried and cried and would not be comforted. “Please,” I said to him, “don't.” I paced, carrying him in my arms, but he wouldn't stop. “What is it?” I pleaded. “What do you want?”

I sat down at my work table, cradling Bobby as he screamed in my arms. I should have been working on the free-lance jewelry settings Mike had sent over—priceless diamond earrings that, if I'd hocked them, would have paid all my bills for months, an inlaid pendant that was out of style, a ring that was being reset for someone's fiftieth wedding anniversary—but I pushed them aside. Balancing Bobby on my shoulder and trying to rock him, I shuffled through my postcard collection. I'd been mulling over an idea for a long time—a ghost face in a desert scene at night, ensconced
in images I would copy from my postcards. The World's Biggest Apple, the Dinodiner, the Corn Palace, a Vermont cow. I arranged the postcards on the work table as best I could next to a preliminary sketch for the face. The composition had eluded me, but now I saw how the face could fit slightly off center, encircled by some of these images, as if it were rising out of the hills.

Now that it was clear, I wanted to draw it, but Bobby would not stop crying. Perhaps he was exhausted, overtired from the trip downtown. Or hungry, but for what I could not tell, because I had nursed him before he slept. Maybe he was just frightened and upset at being awakened. Whatever it was, he would not settle down. Suddenly I found myself trembling with rage, and I had to put him in his crib. He would have to cry himself back to sleep. A few days before in a New York hospital a child was found in a lavatory, a note pinned to her jacket. “Please take care of my child. I don't want to hurt her.” I could see what had made the woman do that.

I went back to my work table, listening as Bobby's cries diminished. Picking up a pencil, I tapped it on the table. But instead of drawing, I began to map out a budget. Periodically I made a list of expenses—$550 for rent, $50 a week for food and diapers, $50 a month for phone. (When I called my father, it was collect.) As it was, we were just getting by. I had no idea where the money for
a baby sitter would come from so I could go back to work. I couldn't think about clothes for Bobby when he outgrew his newborn things.

With a sigh, I put the pencil down and stared out the window. The light was on in the apartment of the woman across the way. It was a small light in the living room, but she didn't usually leave her lights on, so I assumed she too was unable to sleep. She was upset. I could feel it, wishing there was something I could do.

Even though I didn't know her and we had never spoken or even said a casual hello, I felt as if I knew who she was and what had happened to her. I knew the plot of her life. What had brought her to this place. Even how she felt about it. It was a clarity that shocked me, an inevitability that surprised me. It was as if I had written the first word on a page, drawn the first line on a canvas, and the other words and images followed, of necessity.

I remember my own early life the way you remember a clearing in the woods that you passed at dawn, only to return in the late afternoon when the light shines on it in a different way—the movement of the light altering its surface—so that you're not certain whether it's the same clearing, the same woods. It looks familiar. But you can never be sure. So it is with my life.

What is memory to me but a story I have told over and over, embellishing it each time, making it
better or worse, depending on the listener. It never comes out the same way twice, and now I am not even sure of what really happened, for I have lost the line between what occurred and what I have made up. In this sense I have come to resemble the woman across the way. It occurs to me at times—and my father says this is so—that I have remembered my past all wrong. Once I read a study that said that creative people tend to recall their childhood as unhappy experiences, no matter how filled with tenderness and love they may have been.

My father says that everything was fine until I was seven years old and my mother, Jessica Hope Holmes Slovak, went crazy, as her own mother had. She was twenty when she had me, twenty-seven when she left. It was in her genes, my father said, which hardly made me feel better, since I share those genes. When she left, America was poised for change. Soon Kennedy would be elected—and assassinated—the Beatles would sing on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and flower children would arrive in the Haight. But already my mother believed she wasn't leading the life she was meant to lead. In a sense she was ahead of her time.

The light of the woman across the way shone in the darkness and I sat, transfixed by its glow. Even the drug dealers had gone to sleep. At last Bobby grew quiet and soon settled into sleep. I breathed a sigh of relief as I gazed outside. Perhaps a phone
call had also awakened her. A child had a bad dream. Now a silhouette passed through the room. Suddenly the light went out, the room went black. There was a poignancy to this, the thought of her alone in the dark, struggling to go back to sleep.

T
HE GLASS SLIPPER, where my father worked, was on the Strip. Children weren't allowed, but once my mother dragged us there. She drove in our beat-up Dodge from the Valley of Fire trailer park and parked it beside all the fancy Mercedeses with the California plates. She wore tight gray slacks, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. Her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

My mother clasped our hands in hers, almost pulling Sam off the ground. Red welts swelled on my wrists, and Sam cried, “You're hurting me,” until she loosened her grip. Whenever she was angry, I saw it in her eyes. They were dark but shiny, like two pieces of coal just plucked from a mine, and her face went stark white, all the color draining from her lips. Her tongue, which was always moving in her mouth, moved ferociously now, yet
her eyes were set straight ahead like a ferret's on its prey.