Milk (18 page)

During Maggie's mother's funeral, I think of my mother's braces. What happened to them when she was cremated? Were they removed beforehand? Did she wear clothes? I pictured the people who worked there, dressed in white aprons, gloves on their hands—death's bakers. They rolled her in, waited. For how long? Later they scraped her out, into a box. Was the box placed in my father's hands? Was he present when it was buried?

How little I know.

If Charlotte was cremated, for instance: I've had the idea all these years that my parents wouldn't allow it. Couldn't bring themselves to cremate her.

My mother's braces. They float before me, her mouth open, then closed. What, of the human body, burns?

The minister drones on about Maggie's mother: a devoted wife before the tragic loss of her husband; a loving mother.… Maggie fixes her gaze at the top of a hymnal and I imagine she pictures stubbing a cigarette out on its pages. Nearby sits her brother, extremely good-looking now. As a boy he was a toad. Jailed last year on a drunk driving conviction, he nearly killed an elderly woman. Now he works in a CD store, Maggie has told me, but he wants to be a pharmaceutical salesman. She doesn't see much of him, nor did she see much of her mother, whom I remember as always wearing shorts. Tanned long legs with pachyderm-like baggy knees. Her blinking, tipsy gaze; her smoker's hack. To think she was my aunt!—a subject that never came up between us, though many a time I examined her features for a trace of family resemblance. The eyes, the nose? She didn't look anything like my mother's side of the family, so the fact of our being distantly related would return to the realm of conjecture, although I knew it was true. No one in our family ever denied it was true. They just didn't discuss it.

The chapel is surprisingly full. Neighbors, friends—people I recognize from years ago. The ongoing drunken party at the Devoe's house. Maggie and I would walk in tripping on acid, watch their drunken faces and the pores of their skin, so pitted, so craterous. We laughed and laughed—we could've peed on the floor, no one would've noticed.

Now I reach for Maggie's hand. We touch fingertips, the fingers of my hand meeting hers, then we press our palms together, something we used to do as teenagers, in a kind of combined prayer, each of us contributing a hand.

My mother's funeral: I'm sitting in the front row crying. Today I can see myself back then, the stiff pointed shoulders of my navy blue dress. My father doesn't cry, my brother doesn't cry. No one but me is crying, it seems, and I am crying loudly. I don't think I'm supposed to cry this loudly. It's the middle of the day but it's dark outside, overcast. I am crying so hard that Aunt Lyla picks me up and carries me from the building, and I sob into her chest, pulling away suddenly. It's as if she knows what I'm thinking.
You're not my mother
. She never forgives me, nor I her. Following the funeral, there is a reception at our house, a party. People smile, then stifle their smiles. Cocktails and a few haphazard bowls of mixed nuts, pretzels, candy. I eat so much I make myself sick. There is no one but my brother to play with, no other children have been allowed to come, and it is he who informs me that our mother is actually dead. No, no, I tell him. She is asleep forever—that's what Daddy said. Sleeping Beauty, that's how she looked on her bed, her skin a delicate shade of blue, like the throat of one of her lilies. Waiting for a kiss. I kissed her, her cool cheek, then shook her hard while Corb ran for our father. I search for him now in the tall gray figures of adults standing about our living room, the trousers of the men like tree trunks, the ladies' stickpins in the design of leaves, flowers, their diamonds like ice, their slender arms branching out to one another.

Of Charlotte's funeral I remember less, I was only four. But what I do remember is very vivid: my mother's white-gloved hand, enclosing my own; that the hand in this glove is warm and trembling.

Later, as Maggie and I drive past the Church of our Savior, I remember my mother's face, as she's about to enter the church to be married, from the photo in the wedding book. Her arm through her father's—what is the look on her face? One of dewy triumph: she is almost free.

I tell Maggie I need to stop at my mother's and Charlotte's graves, since we're a little early. She waits in the car.

It's sunny out, humid for Southern California—like damp silk on my skin. My feet easily find the way, although I haven't visited in years. Part of me is afraid I'll find nothing there, no marker, because you can't see it from a distance, but of course it's still there, plain, flat granite, the letters grayer and darker than the rest.

Marian Greer Mapes

February 13, 1924–May 21, 1964

And beside it:

Charlotte Anne Mapes

January 20, 1959–April 15, 1959

I get to my knees and blow off the grass clippings, wishing I'd brought flowers, that I could go back to our old house and clip some from the shrubs my mother planted. In my head, I say a little prayer.
Send me a sign
.

Of what?

Charlotte is a cipher, a tiny disintegrated skeleton, dust. I try to picture my mother instead, not her ashes or the braces on her teeth scorched to black bits, but her. The Marian of her photographs: hair the color of my own, her glorious smile … instead, I feel fear.

“I'm pregnant,” I say. I can't call her ‘Mother,' not ‘Mommy,' though I probably did as a child. I don't know what to call her now. “Marian,” I say, “I'm going to have a baby. Your grandchild.”

I start to weep.
Come out
, my unspoken prayer goes on.
Show me. Not how to be a mother, you don't know about that. How to survive—you don't know about that either. Show me. Something. You must have something to teach
.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a form kneeling—the way my mother comes to me at night. The shame. Hands over her eyes. “Not that,” I whisper, angry, and there really is someone kneeling in the distance, kneeling at a grave as I am now.

“Show me something else. Show me.”

The church bell begins to toll. One, two, three, languorous and piercing; my eyes and heart sting, tighten with tears. Four, five, six, seven, my heart cracks and I am hot, sweat on my face and hands. I lick my fingers, salty, expecting blood. I'm twitching, as though being shaken from the outside, a plane or a helicopter flying low, fuselage breaking open, my heart splitting. The bell tolls on and on—it's noon and I'm fighting with my mother. I'm a woman, not a child. I'm a woman protecting my own child. My mother won't let me go and I don't know what she wants.

Part Two:

The Dollhouse

E
IGHTEEN

There are the parrots. A flock of them flies by on a regular basis, pausing at our phone wires to argue and do tricks, hanging by their claws and poking their heads between their legs—sort of a skin-the-cat routine. They used to belong to somebody, I learned from a neighbor, but they escaped and are flourishing in the wild, if a suburb in Arcadia could be called wild. Originally there were four parrots. Now there are almost a dozen.

Maggie found this place for us both after I moved out of the Alta Vista finally, a house for rent in Arcadia with a paved-over pool, neglected for years and then damaged so severely in the last earthquake that the owners decided to get rid of it once and for all.

I live in the former pool house, while Maggie and her sons, Dylan and Willy, live in the main house.

My pool house is one room, two if you count the bathroom, but it's large with a sliding glass door. Overlooking the paved-over pool, of course, and surrounded by overgrown bamboo and banana trees that squeak incessantly, as if communing with unseen beasts and insects.

The birds that really sold me on the place, though, are the peacocks. They come over from the L.A. County Arboretum; how, without being hit by cars, is anybody's guess since they can't fly very well. Descended from Lucky Baldwin's peacocks, brought over from India at the height of his fortunes in silver and real estate, each spring they hop the fence and strut up and down the streets, the males shaking their tail feathers violently while the females pretend to pick at the lawns.

At nights they land on the roofs and scream their heads off. An unnerving sound, but one that I like for some reason.

It's a bizarre neighborhood, architecturally speaking. East meets West: Swiss chalets cut off at the knees, shingled and low to the ground, broad dichondra lawns dry around the edges from drought, and banks of tough green ivy. The streets curve around gently and rather uselessly, as if to steer one's attention away from the area's other famous neighbor besides the Arboretum: the Santa Anita Racetrack. Every day of the week you can hear the races, the mariachi bands, crowds roaring amid tinny bugles and the drone of the announcer.

And in my mind, I can hear the echo of other people at Santa Anita, people long gone. It was a way station for Japanese-Americans on their way to internment camps during World War II, according to Jackson. He told me during one of our short, friendly, civil phone conversations that Japanese-Americans were put up in horse stalls barely hosed down for the occasion. It's those people I think of at the Santa Anita racetrack, clutching whatever belongings and suitcases they were allowed to bring.

I keep in the pocket of whatever I'm wearing (maternity clothes invariably have pockets) a copy of my mother's death certificate. Sent to me by the hospital, attached to my mother's hospital records, this is my last and final record of her:

Maggie and I spend a lot of time at the kitchen table talking about pregnancy, kids, dead mothers—a subject I am mostly silent about. For comic relief Maggie tells me about working in Dr. Grimes' office: the semi-military environment complete with out-of-date medical information that Maggie is always trying to correct with the few patients allowed her—no, it is not necessary to scrub the breasts with a disinfectant before breastfeeding; no, one does not need to be strictly horizontal to deliver a baby, and so on. Another of our favorite subjects is going over what went wrong in our marriages.

“I just don't understand Ed,” Maggie says, biting into an iced animal cookie. “Umm, I'd forgotten how good these are. Do you like the pink or white best?” She pushes the open bag across the table to me.

“I can't tell the difference, can you?” I say, reaching into the bag, only about a dozen left.

“Pink,” she says, chewing. “Pink is best.”

That's the other thing we do—eat. We eat Dylan and Willy's cookies and graham crackers and kid yogurts and we've both rediscovered macaroni and cheese. We eat bags of baby carrots and sliced up-apples with the skin peeled off. Vegetables and dip. We also eat a lot of cheese—cheese with crackers, cheese sticks, melted cheese on tortillas or toast—and milk, jugs of it. For dinner we eat whatever the kids are having, scrambled eggs, peas with butter and salt, pizza cut up into little squares, chicken nuggets and ketchup. Better this than adult junk food, we figure, as we munch on Nilla wafers and tiny cookies shaped like teddy bears. A passing phase, we tell each other, this eating.

“The thing is, Ed really is a decent father,” Maggie says, “though he's high most nights. He didn't mind reading the boys books. Book after book after book. He reads nice and slow. So I don't understand,” she says, munching another animal cookie, “how Ed can be a pretty good father—”

“And be such a lousy husband,” I fill in. She says this frequently. It's either this or she switches the subject to me, almost in my third trimester of pregnancy now; what am I going to do once the baby's born? Have I talked to Jackson lately? She's fascinated by him, his dilemma as the biological father of this child, a fact I don't like to be reminded of.

What Maggie doesn't understand is how I've allowed myself to get into the mess I'm in now.

“Sooner or later,” Maggie says, “actually, sooner rather than later, what with the baby coming, you and Gregg are going to have to decide—”

Dylan wanders in carrying a toy toolbox, followed by his brother. “What you say, Mommy?”

“We're talking about babies, sweetheart. What a big job they are. How some people have no idea.”

“True,” I say.

“Where my orange screwdriver?” Dylan asks.

“Chucks,” Willy says. He's not big on talking, Maggie says. His other favorite words are ‘ball,' and ‘gaga' for dog.

“Your trucks are in your room, Willy,” Maggie says. “Maybe Dylan will help you look for them. And the last time I saw your screwdriver, Dylan, it was in the living room. Under the chair.”

“It
not
there. I look there.”

“Are you sure?”

He takes a plastic wrench from his toolbox. “I fix you,” he says, first going to Maggie, then me. “I a fix-it man.”