Mothers and Daughters (11 page)

They looked at each other and then broke into giddy laughter.

“I know this situation is not ideal,” he said, “but I'm afraid you have made me weak in the knees.”

“I'm guessing your knees were not so sturdy to begin with,” she said.

“I've only had one replaced.”

“Would you like to come in?”

“I would like that very much.”

They didn't sleep together that day, or even very many times in the months that followed. Sex was almost beside the point. But what developed was an intimacy that Iris had never experienced. It was as if they had known each other long ago and had come back together without all the silly cares of youth or the anxieties of middle age. They were old, he even older than she, and that was part of the beauty of it. She didn't have to play a role or worry what she looked like or wonder if she was making him happy. She could just be, and that had been a revelation.

*   *   *

Sometimes she tried to make herself feel better about Henry leaving by telling herself she was spared his witnessing the wrath of her illness and her grueling, humiliating physical descent. That's some silver lining, she thought dryly.

Get yourself together, Iris. She stripped off her robe and her nightgown—the seagulls surely wouldn't mind her nakedness—and stretched her arms over her head with as deep a breath as she could muster. She walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower.

She needed to figure out how to see Henry one last time.

 

SAM

Sam would never get over the feeling that had rushed to the surface when she'd reached down and felt the top of the baby's head emerging. She'd almost laughed, it was so alien, so absurd. Ella was two weeks late, surprisingly unwrinkled and clean, her hair full and dark, her pink body more than nine pounds and long, her legs immediately folding back up like wings. And when the midwife placed the still-attached little body on her chest, and Ella looked up with blind baby-bird confusion, Sam felt, in her euphoria, that she had stepped into the continuous stream of history and humanity from which she hadn't even known she'd been excluded. Did all mothers feel this? Did her own? Sam remembered thinking that nothing would ever measure up—no experience, no achievement, no hope—to giving birth. All the stupid things she had worried about before! Even her career. Who cared if she sold another vase? How quotidian. She was a mother, and everything else was a mere subcategory.

There had been dark moments, too, that she didn't want to remember, those haunted late nights when Ella wouldn't sleep or be put down after hours of nursing, rocking, bouncing, pleading, crying, even praying in a glassy-eyed stupor, a cyclone of exhaustion and despair raging in Sam's head. She had felt broken by her baby's will, ready to leave her in her crib and walk away, out the front door. Jack had slept, oblivious, in their big bed while Sam eventually curled up on Ella's floor at dawn. Thankfully there had always been the morning, her mind restored by the daylight, her mother instinct righted, the corrosive fury of the previous night chalked up to sleep-deprived irrationality.

She stood in the doorway of her studio, a room converted from the cement-floored basement. For most of the year, a row of glass-block windows in the house's foundation let in a steady flow of light. It still smelled like clay dust despite the room's year of disuse. Sam moved her eyes from her wheel to her array of tools, like a medieval surgeon's, crude and sharp and strange, and her fingerbowl of chamois strips—now desiccated and brittle—for smoothing edges. Above them, her bulletin board was pegged with images of pots that moved her, that made her sigh with longing, from ancient Japanese to mid-century Scandinavian to Brother Thomas. Sam quickly looked away. Once this room had seemed like the answer to everything. She shut the door and went upstairs.

The box Theo had sent was on the table where she'd left it. She slid her keys through the packing tape, pulled open the cardboard flaps, and called Theo.

“Hey. Did you get the box?” he asked.

“Yeah. Thanks. Did you even go through the stuff in it? Or did you just send it?”

“I went through it. A little.”

“I just opened it, and there's mouse shit on top of the wooden box inside.”

“No. Really?”

“Theo.”

“Okay. I was too tired. I looked in but then taped the whole thing up again.”

Sam shook her head. Through the kitchen window, a large, furry, stump-legged animal waddled across the back patio and into the side yard. A badger? A hedgehog?

“Where was this from, anyway?” she asked. “The condo was bare when I left.”

“Dad's basement. He said he must have taken it with him by accident.”

“He didn't notice it for eight years? Fucking Dad.” Sam knew she sounded like a bratty teenager. Theo brought it out in her.

“Come on, Sammy.”

Sam rarely spoke with her father. He and his second wife, Marie, twenty years his junior, lived in a tract home in a suburb of Las Vegas. When Glenn had been married to Iris in Chicago, he had been an estate lawyer, conservative and dignified. Now Marie had turned him into a parody: a golf-shirt-wearing, country-music-loving retiree. He even wore sandals. It smacked of life crisis to Sam, and she found it insulting to her mother. She missed him, but she couldn't bring herself to smooth it over just yet.

“No wonder it took him so long to find it. They've been so busy traveling around to NASCAR events,” she said.

“They happen to be in Canada at the moment,” Theo said. “Don't be such a snob.”

“I'm sure Cindy would be thrilled if they pulled the RV into Georgetown.”

“Cindy likes Dad.”

“That's not the point.”

“What is the point? That you're still angry at him for leaving a loveless marriage and finding happiness with someone else? Mom liked her life after Dad. He did her a favor.”

“You don't know shit about Mom,” she said, with melodramatic flourish.

“Here we go. You were the martyr who took care of her for a month so now you have proprietary insight. Let's not forget I had ten more years with her than you did.”

“That's mature.”

“I have to go. I have a meeting.”

“Ella's up anyway,” she lied. “Say hi to Cindy for me.”

“Tell me what you find in the box.”

“You wish.”

Whatever was in the box had waited this long so it could wait a little longer, Sam thought, jittery with hunger. From the refrigerator she pulled what was left from last night's roast chicken and set it on the kitchen table, then returned for the orange juice. But she knew she had to pump first. The bovine indignity of milking herself was yet another reason to leave Ella as infrequently as possible. How did women do this at work? She took off her shirt and bra and sat at the table, strapping the funnellike attachments to her breasts. The motor whirred and thwunked, and her milk dribbled into the bottles as she tore off a chicken wing and gnawed at the skin. She ate and ate, pulling every last piece of meat from the bones with her fingers, digging underneath the carcass for anything she had missed, and chased it with orange juice straight from the carton, her greasy fingers slipping as she set it down, spilling some into her lap. She hoped that the mailman would not come early. What have I become? she thought.

When the first breast had produced four ounces—the left always outperforming the right—Sam wiped her hands on her already juice-splattered jeans and detached one side from the pump. The clock on the coffeemaker read 12:19. She still had four hours before she had to pick up Ella, which gave her plenty of time to start throwing. But this was a specious pep talk. She felt scattered, her mind pinging with worries that had nothing to do with clay. Talking to Theo had unsettled her, and there was the mouse-turded box sitting on the other side of the table. Maybe it was the prostitute who had made her feel like she was frivolous for worrying about her creativity, when the girl had to degrade herself to pay for a shitty motel. Or maybe it was that, out of sight, Sam didn't think about Ella as much as she thought she would.

And there was always the first baby, the boy they would have named Charlie, the son who would have been three years old. She had wanted to forget—she and Jack never talked about it—but of course she found herself fondling the what-ifs, wondering what he would have been like, rooting out her tamped-down guilt. At the twelve-week ultrasound, the test to assess the amount of fluid behind the neck of the fetus had given the radiologist pause, but the measurement was on the edge of normal, and the hormone markers had been reassuring. She hadn't even been worried about it when the large needle went into her abdomen for the amniocentesis. The results—delayed by a lab error—were delivered over the phone two weeks later by a doctor filling in while her own doctor learned to surf in Costa Rica.

Trisomy 21, an extra twenty-first chromosome. Down syndrome. Sam was the one in seven hundred. “Oh, and it's a boy,” the doctor added.

Before she'd gotten pregnant, she and Jack had both been sure and emphatic about what they would do if she were carrying a Down's baby, but of course they really had never considered that it might happen to them. When it did, she no longer felt such certainty. She had already felt the baby kick, though she tried to convince herself that the flutter was indigestion. Sam willed a miscarriage that didn't happen. She'd had to go to an abortion clinic near campus—the hospital did not perform them—sitting with Jack among the college girls and their boyfriends in the waiting room, not allowing herself to look at her belly, not allowing any second-guessing, any recognition of the wavering, of the thorny moral brambles that surrounded her on all sides.

She had banked on that great myth of closure, but almost four years later she still came up short.

Her left breast was empty. Sam switched off the pump, eager for the silence. She put her bra and shirt back on. The refrigerator trickled and hummed. Squirrels skittered across the roof. The furnace switched on with a click and a ramp-up of blowing air. The sun warmed her back through the window. She wished she were already at her wheel, her left elbow braced against her hip bone, her wet hands forcing a hunk of spinning clay into a centered cylinder, that hypnotic physicality that took her out of her thoughts. But she couldn't bring herself to get up, walk the six steps to the door of the basement, go down a flight of stairs, and dig her hands into the clay. Getting started seemed too high a hurdle.

Instead, she grabbed the opened cardboard box and dumped the mouse droppings and old wadded newspaper into the garbage can. She eased out the bulky wooden box from inside and set it on the table. It was quite beautiful, really, made of maple, she guessed, with a darkened patina of wear and oil. Sam admired its well-made, solid construction, with its close-fitting top and brass hinges. The underside of the lid was lined with fraying red silk, three rusty needles still threaded through the fabric. Iris had never been a sewer, but maybe she'd just liked the box.

Sam took a breath. Here she was with things her mother had saved and purposely packaged up to keep, yet had not realized, or had not cared, that they had been lost. Inside was a series of envelopes. Iris had always liked things to be contained. After the divorce, she had said that one of the things she liked best was living in an order that no one would mess up. At the condo, her sweaters were individually bagged, her coins were sorted by denomination in bowls—made by Sam—her refrigerator was a neat grid of Tupperware, and even the remote control for the TV had its own little basket. Sam picked up a manila envelope from the top of the box, bent the metal clip straight, teased open the flap, and spilled the contents onto the table.

Out came a rubber-banded set of yellowed index cards, recipes, written in a female hand, the loops long and fluid. Sam fanned through the cards—Charlotte Russe, Molasses Bread, Butterscotch Pudding, Tennessee Silver Cake, Jenny Lind Cake, the last a strange confection with brandy and raisins and strawberry jelly. The desserts were a peculiar bunch, dated and unrefined and very unlike Iris, whose signature dessert had been a flourless bittersweet-chocolate cake. Sam was intrigued by the antiquated formality of one of the names, Conserve of Roses, and pulled out the card to read the recipe:

Gather petals from bloomed (but not wilted) roses. Weigh them and set aside. Put an equal weight of sugar in a bowl and add only enough water to moisten, set in the sun until sugar is dissolved, then place over low heat. As soon as the syrup boils add the petals. Stir gently for ten minutes, then remove from heat. Cool and pack into jars.

Were these from Iris's mother? Sam knew little about her, other than that she had been a farm wife in Minnesota, who'd grown up, coincidentally, somewhere in Wisconsin. It was hard to imagine the no-nonsense countrywoman she'd seen in photos bringing Conserve of Roses to church potlucks.

In another envelope Sam found a pocket calendar from 1965, a program from a middle school production of
Cheaper by the Dozen
with Theo playing the part of Frank Gilbreth (efficiency expert and father of twelve), purple marker scribbles on a piece of faded red construction paper (assumedly by Sam), some sheet music of Christmas hymns, a sow's-ear purse losing its beading.

A tattered movie ticket stub from 1940 fell to the table:
His Girl Friday
, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. She tried to envision her mother at thirteen staring dreamily at the big screen. Iris had kept this reminder for almost sixty years. What did it really mean? Sam wondered. An artifact without context begged more questions than it answered. She used to think she understood her mother, but the truth was, in the end, Iris had become more of a mystery. It was as if when she had gotten divorced and then moved away, she had turned back into who she'd been before becoming a mother, a woman Sam never knew, or maybe she had become someone altogether different.