Authors: Orson Scott Card
“Well of course you are,” said Rachel. “I never for a moment thought otherwise.”
“But you were worried when I reacted like I did about going home.”
“I was just afraid that there was some kind of rift in your family. I was worried about
you
. I know you’re a great mother.”
“Not lately,” said Sarah. “I’m just a mountain of flesh piled up on beds and couches made of stone.”
“Is that furniture uncomfortable?”
“Air pressure is uncomfortable when you’re this far along. I have no navel. But where it used to be, I have this patch of incredibly sensitive skin. And lately it feels like it’s spreading. Pretty soon my whole body will be nothing but one huge extruded navel. Touch me and I’ll scream.”
“I’ll remember not to slap you around so much.”
They laughed.
As they pulled into the garage, Rachel said, “Don’t you worry about what you told me. I won’t tell anybody.”
“Well, I hope you
will
tell your husband. I was hoping you would. So I won’t have to explain it.”
“But no one else.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“Hey, I was going to the kitchen anyway.”
That night, when Jared got home from a late night of grading finals with his grad students, Rachel told him about the conversation. She cried in telling it, all the more because Sarah hadn’t shed a tear. “Well, it explains one thing that I’d wondered about,” said Jared.
“What?” asked Rachel.
“Why Will was drawn to her in the first place.”
“Oh, Jared, he couldn’t possibly have known about . . .”
“I know that he fell in love with her because she’s a great person and
all that. But there’s a kind of frailty about her. She needs protecting. And Will needs to be a protector.”
That was true. They both knew that about Will. Unusual in a youngest child. He should have been the spoiled one. Instead he was always looking out for other people. All through Primary, he was the one who would never let anybody tease or pick on anybody else. What Sarah needed, Will was; what Will needed, Sarah was.
“But it’s more than that now,” Rachel said.
“I know that,” said Jared. “I mean, Will can’t be
too
protective if he calls her Streak.”
So they figured they knew everything, understood everything. Except Rachel still had a nagging doubt. There was still something wrong. Something in Sarah that made Rachel worry. Was it her spirituality? Hardly that. Rachel was always more, not less, comfortable around spiritual people. No, there was just an awkwardness. Sarah had told Rachel about the most terrible, intimate secret of her life, surely—and yet Sarah still seemed reticent and shy. Something was wrong, still.
On the 16th of December they had their traditional Christmas party for friends in the ward and stake, mostly people who had worked with Rachel in the Primary over the years plus some special neighbors. Everyone made much of Sarah and Will and their kids, and Hazel of course, but then it was time to put the twins to bed and Sarah insisted on doing that herself. “You go help her, Mother Hazel,” said Rachel after she was gone. “You know how tired she gets, and she wouldn’t ask for help if . . .”
“If her head was on fire, I know,” said Hazel with a smile. “Consider it done.”
About fifteen minutes later, Rachel realized that she hadn’t brought the candy up from the cold room in the basement. She tiptoed down the stairs in case the boys weren’t soundly asleep yet. Nobody could possibly have heard her come down. Which was why Hazel didn’t stop talking to Sarah when Rachel came within earshot. Surely she would have stopped if she had thought that anyone could overhear her.
“Of course you know that Will’s a special boy. They’re all special. All of Jared’s and Rachel’s children. Absolutely brilliant, every one of them. I’m in awe myself. But there’s a special burden to being the wife of a man like Will. He’s going to be a great man, like his father. The best of a good
lot, really. And a woman in your situation really has to keep on her toes just to avoid getting in the way.”
Rachel could hardly believe what she was hearing. Surely Hazel wasn’t trying to tell Will’s wife that she wasn’t up to snuff, was she? If she listened just a moment longer, Hazel would say something that would clarify everything and Rachel would see she had been silly to jump to such an awful conclusion.
Suddenly there were hands on her shoulders, sliding down her arms, wrapping around her body from behind. Rachel jumped—but such were her eavesdropping skills that she didn’t make a sound. She just turned around and faced Jared and touched her fingers to his lips. “Listen,” she whispered.
He seemed to notice his mother’s voice for the first time.
“It’s a special burden to take this family’s name on you,” Hazel was saying. “I know it—I wasn’t born with it, either. Rachel is a natural, she really was born to be married to a man like Jared, but I wasn’t that sort and neither are you. It’s just a fact of life.”
Sarah murmured something.
“Oh, don’t even
think
that you can ever measure up. No matter what you do, Sarah, people are going to look at you with Will and they’re going to say, ‘What does he see in
her
?’ The thing you have to worry about—the
only
thing—is making sure that
Will
never wonders that. I hope you’re using this time that you’re in Rachel’s house to study everything she does and learn from her. She is the perfect wife for a prominent man. But then, she has a real education herself, and she’s a professor’s daughter.”
“I’m going to stop this,” whispered Jared. But still he didn’t move. This was his mother, after all. One doesn’t just interrupt one’s mother. Or rather, Jared didn’t. Actually, nobody did. Not Hazel. Hazel wasn’t good at taking anything that seemed like criticism.
“You just have to cling to your children,” said Hazel. “
They
will never know that you aren’t really part of this family. For them, you’re the heart, even as Will is the head. So you mustn’t worry about a thing. When you have one of those awful times when you think everybody must think you’re a complete idiot, you just hold these little ones close to you because
they
won’t judge you and find you unworthy the way everyone else does.”
That was just too much for Jared. He strode into the bedroom where
they were talking, and in a fierce whisper he said, “Let’s come out of this room right now.”
Hazel and Sarah followed him out and he closed the door behind him. “I didn’t want to wake the twins,” he said.
There were tears in Sarah’s eyes. Tears on her cheeks. She didn’t cry when she told Rachel about her awful childhood experiences, but she cried listening to Hazel tell her she would never be worthy of her husband. Rachel wanted to slap her mother-in-law. She had never slapped anyone since she grew past that phase in her quarrels with her brother, but apparently she still could conjure up a real lashing-out rage even after all these years as a Primary leader with a permanent smile plastered on her face.
“What’s the emergency?” asked Hazel.
“You, Mother,” said Jared softly. “You’re the emergency. I overheard what you were saying in there, and—”
“You were
eavesdropping
?”
“Yes, Mother, I was. I’ll be made a son of perdition for it, I know. Me, Cain, and the devil. But yes, I heard what you were saying to Sarah and I couldn’t believe those words were coming out of your mouth.”
“I was only reassuring her that—”
“Reassuring her! ‘Oh, don’t even
think
that you can measure up.’ That must have been a real comfort.”
“Sarah understood what I meant,” said Hazel.
“Is that why she’s crying?”
“Watch the way you talk to me, young man,” said Hazel. “I may only be an old woman who’s good for nothing at all anymore, but I’m still your mother.”
“Yes, you
are
my mother. The very same woman who used to weep for days before her mother-in-law came to visit and then weep again for days afterward. And why? Because dear old Mattie was always judging you and you never measured up. That brought you so much joy, of
course
you had to plunge Sarah into—”
“Please,” said Sarah. “She didn’t make me cry. I was already crying when—”
“No, there’s something you have to understand,” Jared answered. “You have to know that when I was seven I came in and found my
mother sobbing her heart out and I said, ‘Why are you crying, Mother?’ and she said, ‘Because Mattie’s right, I should never have married your father, I’ve ruined his life.’ And I knew then and there that this was wrong, it was evil,
no
woman should
ever
make another woman feel unworthy of her place in her own home.”
“Are you suggesting that I am anything like my mother-in-law!” Hazel was furious now.
“I’m suggesting that what you were doing in that bedroom was
exactly
what Mattie Maw did to you when you first married Dad. Remember the story you told me? How Mattie called you in and sat you down and explained to you that there was a special burden placed on women who married into that family? Mattie’s father, after all, was an apostle, and her husband’s father was a great colonizer and his mother was famous in the Church as the general president of the Relief Society—”
“The YWMIA,” said Hazel coldly.
“And,”
said Jared pointedly, “she had always thought that her sons would marry within their social class. Daughters of general authorities, presumably, or people with enough money to move in those lofty circles. Of course that was the 1930s, I’m sure things are different now, but she was full of stories about how her marriage to Grandpa was
the
event of the season in Salt Lake City, and her oldest boy had married the daughter of another apostle but it was beyond her how Dad—she said Alma, of course—could have lost his senses to such a degree as to pick up with a girl whose father was—well, no one even knew
where
he was, and there was certainly no money and less breeding and I think the exact phrase she used was, ‘Try as you may, Hazel, you will never be one of us. All you can do is just stay out of Alma’s way.’ That was a terrible thing for Mattie Maw to say and it caused you more pain than anything else in your marriage and now here you are saying it to Sarah and it—”
“Yes, it caused me pain,” said Hazel. “But as you condemn me you’re forgetting one tiny little fact.” Suddenly she burst into tears. “Every word she said was true!”
“No it wasn’t,” said Jared.
“Oh, even
you
know it’s true. Look at you, Mr. Professor with all the brains, pointing out to the poor daughter of a scrubwoman that once again she’s . . .
blown
it!”
“It was never true, Mother. I can’t believe you still believe it!”
“I knew it before she ever said it. And so did Sarah! We’re just alike, Sarah and I. We both married up. Too far up, and it made us sad all the time. I dragged my husband down. I wanted to help Sarah do better than I did! And she wants to. She asked
me
for advice!”
“She asked
you
?”
“Oh, is that so incredible? Is Mr. Genius-with-Atoms really so stunned that someone might actually ask his poor ignorant non-college-graduate mother for some advice about something besides the best way to get a stain out of wool?”
Rachel could see Jared retreat from his mother’s onslaught. Rachel had only caught glimpses of this side of Hazel before. But she was beginning to understand why it was that people had always been careful to “handle” Hazel. “Mother, don’t do this,” said Jared quietly.
“Oh, is this something
I’m
doing? Is crazy old Hazel having another fit, is that it? You come in here and accuse me of something truly awful, but if I dare to express the tiniest objection suddenly
I’m
doing something bad? Oh, we must calm Mother down. We mustn’t let other people see how badly Mother behaves when somebody
hurts
her, when one of her children
stabs
her in the heart in front of her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter-in-law—”
“Mother, listen to me—”
“Oh, I know, I’m busy not measuring up right
now
, aren’t I? I’m proving Mattie was right once again, aren’t I? Now poor Rachel has to face the fact that she’s taken a screaming fishwife into the house with her and—”
Rachel spoke up. “Mother Hazel, I don’t think—”
“I’ll have you know something, Rachel,” Hazel lashed out at her. “I
hate
hearing anyone but my own children call me mother. He can call me mother because his body came out of my body, but you came out of someone else and she’s the
only
person on God’s green earth who should ever hear the name ‘mother’ from your lips. And do you know the worst thing about it? It’s knowing that since you call me ‘Mother Hazel,’
he
must call
your
mother ‘Mother Amy.’ Or no, it’s probably ‘Mom Amy,’ isn’t it? And she has no
right
to hear him call her mother because she didn’t bear him and she didn’t raise him and cook his meals and clean up his sheets for all those years he was a bedwetter and—”
“Mother!” Jared said.
“Oh, haven’t you told her you were a bedwetter?”
“Mother, of course I did, the tendency is hereditary and I told her and all my sons who were bedwetters after me. It’s one of many family traditions that we have proudly passed along.”