A Mother's Love (16 page)

It was a rainy day, and we headed to the cross-town bus. At the bank I stopped to get cash for the weekend. I withdrew fifty dollars and saw on the slip that I had about five hundred in checking and a thousand or so in savings. I figured we could survive for another two months with that and the money I was earning from Mike, but then I'd need to start making a real living. And I'd have to hire someone to watch Bobby.

At the bus stop the wind whipped my legs while Bobby banged his fists into the plastic rain cover. His face looked distorted as he pounded. No bus was in sight. I tapped on the outside and together we banged our fists until he began to smile, then laugh. For a few moments we played the punching game, both of us laughing.

Suddenly the bus pulled up and the driver opened the door. Others went on as I stood, struggling. I managed to get Bobby out of the stroller, but I couldn't fold it up because of the rain cover. Impatient New Yorkers glared at me, shaking
their heads. The bus driver, a dark man with tired features, watched. I saw him swallow a pill. “You can go ahead,” I said. “I can't get this thing to fold up.” The driver sighed.

He put his bus in park, got out of his seat, pushed people out of the way. He grabbed the stroller and carried it onto the bus. I clutched Bobby in one arm and the bag with our belongings in the other. Once on board, I fumbled with my change, dropping I don't know how much money into the machine, and looked for a seat, only to find there was none. I stood balancing stroller, baby, the shoulder bag, and myself precariously against a pole. Then the driver blared, “We are not moving until the woman with the baby has a place to sit.” A man rose, a sea parted as I made my way into the seat, which was reluctantly offered.

Faces stared down at me. Faces filled with fatigue or pity. Faces disgusted or wistful, etched with desire or the end of desire. The businessman with a scowl, the young woman with a blank look, the older woman in black who smiled at the baby. As the bus wound its way across town, my eyes closed, I fought to stay awake. What would happen if I did fall asleep? What if I dashed off the bus, about to miss my stop? I recalled the Lichtenstein image with the caption “Oh, God, I left the baby on the bus.” I could see how this might happen. You're weighed down. You're carrying too much. It's one more bundle, after all.

Or you go to a party, get drunk, leave the child asleep on your friend's bed. You don't notice him, sleeping there beside the pile of coats. You just forget, slip back into your former life, the life you had when there was just one person, not two or, for most people, three. How far would you get before you realized you'd left the party without your child? Out the door? Down the stairs? To the house of the man who was taking you home? The next day? Once, I read about a woman in Florida who put her baby in the car seat on the top of the car, packed the car for a vacation, then drove away with the baby on top. The baby was all right, but the mother—would she ever be the same again?

I managed to get the stroller folded just as the bus was coming to the corner of Seventy-Ninth and Fifth, where I had to get off. I pushed the buzzer for my stop and quickly made my way down. With Bobby in my arms and the rain coming down hard, I struggled to open the stroller. Bobby squirmed, trying to get his face out of the rain.

At last I tucked him in, though I didn't bother to strap him, since we were only going across the street. I prayed he wouldn't slip out. When we reached the Met, I didn't see the elevator for the handicapped, so I carried the buggy up the steps. Inside the checkroom the attendant glanced at me and said, “If you are planning to see any special exhibits, you must check your stroller.” I groaned.
I wanted to see the Impressionist exhibit, which included pieces from private collections that had never been seen before, so I had no choice but to check. I deposited everything but the baby and his diaper bag. Then I put Bobby down on the bank of seats and tucked him into his Snugli, where he went to sleep.

Slowly I made my way up the grand staircase. At the top I turned left, toward the exhibition hall, and found myself in a room of paintings of the early Christian martyrs and saints.

I was interested in the faces of those in pain, the expressions of the suffering. The martyred with arrows piercing their breasts, thorns cutting into their skulls. The saint standing in a boiling pot, being flayed alive. In each, the look of serenity affirmed that the suffering of the body could not touch the soul.

There was something in the eyes that I wanted to capture, to reproduce. I had never quite seen it in this way before, but now I did. Those placid, questioning eyes turned upward. A look I had seen in the eyes of the homeless, the impoverished, the desperate. Fumbling in my purse, I found a pencil and a small notepad and I began to draw, my arms wrapped around my baby's head.

I wandered through the galleries, moving from the Middle Ages to Byzantium, then coming out slowly through the Renaissance, and I was about to go into the Nineteenth Century when Bobby woke
up. He began to fuss, so I found one of the two restrooms in the Met, where a line snaked along the wall. Though stalls were emptying, the line was long. A group of frail old women wearing little name tags was resting against a wall. There were young mothers with children jumping up and down, clearly in need of going to the bathroom. Behind me was a pregnant black girl who could not have been more than sixteen. When I was pregnant, I had seen them—black, white, Hispanic—still children, really, round as basketballs, about to have children of their own. This girl swayed back and forth, sighing, her bladder about to burst as she rubbed her aching back. I turned and she looked at me, then at Bobby, with inscrutable eyes. I told her to go ahead. I was waiting for one of the handicap stalls.

I'm not sure when I began using the handicap stalls, but it was before I got pregnant, before Bobby was born. When I got pregnant, of course, it made sense, because I was large and, toward the end, felt looming. And with Bobby it made sense, because being with a small child was a kind of handicap. People held doors for you (or they were supposed to); they gave you their seats. They lifted things you couldn't lift. And with Bobby in bathrooms where there were no changing tables, I had to change him with his head dangling in the sink and in front of makeup mirrors, where women stared at his often erect penis and testicles—for I
must say that he was born well-endowed, as if his manhood were somehow already formed. I had changed him on the floors of museums and restaurant bathrooms, wondering what diseases he would pick up. Little girls peered down; other mothers grinned knowingly. Yes, their nods told me, I know what this is. I've been there.

It was the space I liked in the handicap stalls, space I missed elsewhere. The way you could stretch out, not get your purse and bags and coat all bunched up in a tiny cubicle. Often I was loaded down with art supplies, cameras, purchases I'd made (I was always making purchases, little things—socks, mittens from street merchants, those men with foreign accents who shouted “Gloves, four dollars” on the street). Sometimes I would splurge and buy food I could not really afford—pumpkin tortellini at Fairway, a certain walnut bread in SoHo.

Perhaps it all began when I was trying to please Matthew, bringing him what I thought he'd like. A comforter if the weather suddenly turned. A pastry he loved. Or, when I could afford it, which wasn't often, a free-range chicken from the Jefferson Market. Why I felt I needed to please him at all was a mystery to me; I didn't really think about this until after he was gone. Matthew seemed to like everything. In fact, he liked everything equally. He liked flowers or no flowers, walnut bread or Wonderbread. He liked to be warm, but
he never minded being cold. He liked a new sweater or no sweater at all.

People always said—people who worked with him, like his assistant Walter, or friends like Patricia and Scott, or Jake—that Matthew was easy to get along with. No one doubted that. He was an easy person to be with. Our friends also said to me sometimes when we were having trouble, and especially toward the end, that Matthew was a difficult man to know. He was easy, but he was unknowable. And now I was trying to decide whether this was true. It wasn't only that I was trying to please him that made me weigh myself down with so many packages and use the handicap stalls. I wanted to see him react. What if I came home with black hair, my red locks cut off, would he say something? Would he notice?

It had all burdened me. Loaded me down with boxes, packages, small items. So I'd stop by museums and use the handicap stalls. I'd wait patiently while old women in diapers made their way into the special stalls. I listened as arthritic limbs settled down. Listened to the groans of the elderly trying to pee or defecate as sagging sphincters, weakened limbs, swollen joints refused. Or I'd watch children in wheelchairs, damaged at birth, children who struck terror into me when I was pregnant, children who had not gotten the oxygen they needed, whose spines had been twisted in the birth canal, whose hips had been snapped from the sockets.
Children whose brains and limbs had been addled before they knew what it was to have them.

Once I'd wondered who the group was that had lobbied for the ramps and special entranceways. Access was their word. The alternatives to revolving doors. The buses that dropped low to the pavement. The bathroom stalls I'd used first out of a sense of spaciousness, then out of necessity. When was it that I began to need the ramps, the special entranceways—that I had joined the ranks of the invalids?

Patricia's apartment was filled with good antiques—both English and American. She had chests of cherrywood and pine and a maple hutch that held the china she had registered at the best shops when she became engaged to Scott, years before I met them. She was the only person I knew who had real silver. In her kitchen hung shiny copper pots without a trace of tarnish. Everything about her house was ordered, regulated, neat. And shimmering. How impeccably she ran her life, as if this sense of order was her greatest source of pride.

Patricia stood at the sink, chopping broccoli and carrots, while Scott sat in the living room in front of the TV, headphones on, remote in hand, flipping channels. She gave me a hug, poured me seltzer with lime, and told me to make myself at home. “You'll sleep in the living room. You and Bobby can sleep together, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Listen, I really appreciate this. I mean, I'm grateful for your letting me stay here.”

“Oh, it's no problem. Just make yourself comfortable. How are you? How was your day?”

I began to describe it to her. The early morning struggles to leave the apartment, the exhaustion of just getting to the Met. “But then it all changed. I don't know. Wandering through the museum, being out for the day. I felt very …” I didn't know what I wanted to say, but I noticed that Patricia didn't seem to be listening. She was chopping vegetables, preparing dinner. “Well, it made me feel better. As if I could start to do things again. Do you understand?”

She smiled but said nothing.

“So,” I said, deciding to change the subject, “what's the crime this week?”

Patricia hesitated. “Well, it isn't exactly a crime. It's a tragedy, really. It came over the wires this morning. At first the police thought there might be foul play. In California a woman's car stalled on the railroad tracks. Her three children were in the car. They were very small and a train was coming. So the woman leaped out of the car and tried to flag the train down. But it couldn't stop in time.”

“My God!” I said. “That's terrible!”

“It's so sad, isn't it? I can't imagine how that poor woman must feel.”

I shook my head and looked at Bobby, who was awake, smiling. It wasn't a crime, that was true,
but somehow the story didn't sound right. I felt as if Patricia were telling me a riddle, and I've never been good at solving riddles. “I don't know,” I said. “Something's not right about it.”

“How can you say that?”

I shrugged. “I just know that something's wrong.”

Patricia looked at me, her face set hard, as if she were blaming me for something I didn't do. “The woman was distraught,” she said. “It couldn't be helped. That's what the police decided.”

Unsettled by the story, puzzled by what felt like a missing piece, and not wanting to get into an argument with Patricia, I took Bobby into the living room to change him. The news was over, and Scott had a basketball game on. He was also playing a video game in his lap. Bugs Bunny scrambled to eat a carrot. Five carrots and he won. Scott pecked away at it until dinner was served, gleeful whenever he won.

We ate steamed vegetables, brown rice, fish, while listening to a CD of Brahms. Scott kept one eye on the basketball game—Lakers versus the Celtics—he had not turned off, though there was no sound. Patricia had a rule about television. He could watch it, but she didn't want to hear it. “So,” Scott said, his eyes wincing at a bad play, “have you been getting back to work?” Then he grimaced; another play had gone awry.

“A little. I'm going to have to do something soon. Money's getting tight.”

“Well, what about Matthew? Can't you hit him up for some?”

“Scott,” Patricia said angrily, “we've discussed this. You know what the situation is.”

“Pretty rotten, if you ask me.”

“It was my choice,” I muttered.

“Still pretty rotten.” Scott hit his fist against the table. A jump shot had succeeded.

“Big game, huh?”

“Big game, little game,” Patricia said. “He watches them all.”

Suddenly, after dinner, I realized how tired I was. I had walked a great deal that day and been out for hours. And besides, I could think of nothing to talk about. If I went to bed, I'd feel better in the morning. Reluctantly, Scott turned off the television and went into their room. Patricia opened the sofa bed. There was something official about her movements, as if I were a renter in a boarding house. She brought in some sheets and towels.