A Mother's Love (19 page)

She ran her fingers through her long brown hair. “You see, I'm in a very precarious position. If Dave doesn't pay me support, we have no way of living. It's odd, because we have this nice apartment and I make some money as a free-lance writer and I grew up in a nice neighborhood in the suburbs. But I married Dave out of college and I've never really worked. Basically, I'm one support payment away from welfare.”

“Wouldn't your parents help you out?”

Mara shrugged and the familiar look of sadness came over her face. “It's a long story. I don't want to be beholden, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded. “I guess I know.”

“What about you? Do you have family around? Anyone you can turn to?”

“Well, my parents live in Tucson. I work part-time for a jewelry store owner, but he's not someone I can turn to. Still, he helps me out by giving me work.”

“No siblings?”

I never knew what to do when someone asked me this. I didn't want to lie. Nor did I want to tell the truth. “No,” I said. “I'm an only child.”

Mara shook her head. “I had a sister,” she said.
“She died. Alana is named after her.” She spoke matter-of-factly, but there was something in her voice that told me not to ask any questions about her family, and she wouldn't ask about mine.

“So,” Mara said, trying to sound cheerful, “you probably need a baby sitter when you go to work.” I had told her that Bobby's father was not helping me out. “Here,”—she scribbled on a piece of paper —“this is a woman I know. She used to baby-sit for a friend of mine. She isn't cheap, but I hear she's very good.”

I took the paper and tucked it under a plant that sat on the table. When Mara got up to leave a few moments later, I said, “May I ask you a favor? If it isn't too much …”

“Ask,” she said.

“I need a few things at the store. Would you mind …”

She sat back down. “Take your time,” she said. “I'm not in a rush.” She picked up her scissors and returned to cutting out coupons. She laid them in front of her in a neat pile, then flipped through them as if they were a deck of cards.

I
AM DREAMING. I know I am dreaming because my mother is in the house. She is cleaning, dusting, baking bread. There are flowers in vases. My mother hums as she goes about her work. She reminds me of Snow White in the house of the dwarfs. These things, of course, never happened. But now I see my mother doing things other mothers do. Leaving cookies on a plate. Sewing name tags in my socks when I go off to camp.

My father comes home from work. He has a job selling furniture or he's a professional man, like a chiropractor. He plops down in front of the news and I climb into his lap. My mother hands him a drink, ruffles his hair. Then Sam and I fight over a doll, a sweater, and I hear my mother's voice: “Now, girls, cut that out. Help me get dinner.”

In the middle of the dream I am talking to myself. I say this is not my life. This is my life if my
mother had stayed. If she'd been a different mother altogether. We go to a store to buy a dress. We are trying on clothes. She slips easily into a size 8 while I struggle with a 10. We laugh at each other. My mother is slender and dark. Like a flamenco dancer. The saleswoman asks if we are sisters or just friends. We burst out laughing in the dressing room, doubled over.

Then I see myself married, only it is not to Matthew. If my life had been a different life, then the man I would have chosen would not be Matthew. I am pushing a stroller down a wintry residential street in Brooklyn. I have a husband with a briefcase in his hand. We board a plane and fly to Florida. The flight attendant gives a set of wings to Bobby. When we arrive, my parents greet us at the gate. They are healthy, tan. My father, wrinkled but robust, hugs me. My mother is gray, but she reaches out to take Bobby in her arms. She holds him above as if he were a kite she could fly.

In Florida Bobby rides a yellow tricycle. My husband—I call him X in my dream—wears jogging shorts, an orange sweatband. I see him only from the back as he pushes Bobby along. I pick small white flowers. Bobby will grow up to be a lawyer like his father. My parents will die and leave the Florida condo to me and Sam. We will sell it and buy a vacation home together in Maine.

I know I am dreaming, but it is all so clear.

I
BORROWED MONEY from my father—something I'd resisted so far. “I thought you'd never ask,” he said. Then I spent days interviewing half the Caribbean—women from Puerto Rico, Belize, Trinidad, and other parts of the third world. Women who were paying other women, perhaps women darker than themselves, to watch their children while they watched mine. There was the nice lady named Luz from Guatemala who had a brain-damaged child back in her country, and she had to send money home; otherwise they would put him in an institution. And there was the woman from Brazil whose child had called 911 because he was cold. (It had taken her two months to get him back from Family Services.) And Marisella, whose brother, a cook, had been laid off. Now he watched her twin girls while she looked for work.

Luz tiptoed around me, whispering whenever she spoke, as if someone were asleep. When she touched the baby, he seemed to be crystal she was struggling not to drop. The woman from Brazil talked all day long, to me, and then to herself as I tried to work. Marisella worked with her Walkman on. Another was watching soap operas when I returned from the store. I was at the point of despair when I remembered that Mara had given me the phone number of a woman she knew. I found it still tucked under the plant where I'd put it the day Mara came over.

The next day Viviana walked in. She wore a floral skirt and a neat white blouse, carried a dainty purse, and complained about her aching back and the thugs on the subways. She was a compact Jamaican woman whose hair was tinted pale green, and she had blue eyebrows to match. She looked at me and said, “You're pale. You need to get out more.” She glanced around the apartment. “And I can only work nights.”

“Nights?”

“That's right. My husband, he works days. I work nights. Keeps the marriage going,” she said with a cackle. “I can arrange to work days, but it will take some doing. For the moment I can work twelve hours, six to six if you want, but it's not cheap and I never work weekends.”

“I suppose nights would be all right for now …”

“Maybe I could change to days down the road, but I've got to fix it with my husband. Because of the kids.”

“How many kids do you have?” I asked.

“A few more than you've got.”

I nodded, feeling uncomfortable about hiring someone in the first place. “I can't pay more than two hundred a week,” I said, hoping she'd leave. “Maybe two-fifty,” which was my week's income if I worked full time for Mike—if he had the work for me.

“I'm used to getting three hundred, sometimes more.” She frowned. “Who recommended me to you anyway?”

“Mara Lange. She lives across the street. She's a friend of …”

“I know her.” Viviana was walking away. “Let's see the baby.” She looked around the apartment, at the four crammed rooms, the studio by the window.

“I'm not married,” I told her.

“Doesn't bother me.” She shrugged.

“About the money …”

“Don't worry about the money now. Where's the baby? Are you hiding him?”

I pointed to the bedroom, where Bobby was lying in his crib. She touched his cheek. “Oh, he's a cute little fella.” She cackled again as she picked him up. I expected Bobby to squirm, but he didn't.
She touched his cheek. “He's got a rash. No big deal. Got some A and D ointment?”

“A and D ointment?”

“Just get some. Oh, he's very cute. Nice. You and me, we're going to get on just fine.” She tickled him until he laughed. Then she began taking his clothes out of the drawers of the changing table. “He can't wear this anymore.” She held up a pair of small pajamas. “And he can't wear this.” She rummaged through the other drawers. “I've got references if you want them.”

“No,” I said, “that's all right,” thinking she wouldn't be with me long. Besides, Mara had recommended her.

She looked at me, shaking her head. “It's up to you.”

“I'll look for someone who can work days, but nights are fine for now.” Though the arrangement seemed a bit bizarre, I was used to working in the evening and at night. I could get a lot of work done then and sleep in the early hours while Viviana watched Bobby.

“Whatever you want is fine with me.” Then, looking into the mirror, she apologized because her hair was turning green. “I told that woman not to use that strong rinse on me.” She said nothing about her blue eyebrows, though later when I commented she said, “Blue? Am I using blue?”

The first night, Viviana sat in the living room,
watching me paint. “I don't feel comfortable,” I told her, “with you sitting there across from me.”

“So I'll go into the bedroom, but you got the baby sleeping in here and I'm supposed to watch the baby, right?”

“Maybe you could just come when he cries.”

Viviana snorted, put her hands on the portable crib, and pushed Bobby into the bedroom. “I'll move him out later. Poor child.”

“I've never done this before,” I said. “Hired someone to work for me. I don't feel very good about it, I suppose.”

“Look, you've got to work and I've got to work, so what difference does it make if I work for you?”

I had seen the baby sitters lined up in front of schools or on park benches—the blacks, the Hispanics, the European au pairs. I had watched them chattering among themselves with varying degrees of attention and caring toward the children. Some were loving; others seemed indifferent. I had a friend whose daughter spoke with a slight West Indian accent, the result of spending more time with her nanny than with her parents. Once I saw a nanny slap a child in a sandbox and I wondered what would happen if the mother knew.

But most of the nannies with whom white New York women involved themselves in this neocolonial relationship simply had their own children to support. I'd read that the infants of wet nurses
often starved to death in England, because their mothers gave all their milk to the children of the rich.

On a trip out west with Matthew we observed a herd of buffalo grazing. Apart from the herd, off to the side, was a small contingent of sleeping baby buffalos and two or three grownups—what appeared to be an aged female and two pregnant females—watching over them during their nap. A day care center, it looked like. Even animals must find the way to watch over their young. I read an interview once with the wife of a Mormon polygamist; she said that polygamy was the perfect arrangement for a working mother because there were so many potential caretakers.

So I too found myself forced into this symbiosis. I hired Viviana because I liked her and it seemed clear that she would do her job, albeit at night, and not mince any words. That evening I nursed Bobby and went to my work table while Viviana sat in the light of the bedroom, her green hair shimmering like the harvest moon.

Despite my desire to be up by seven, I woke at almost nine o'clock to the smell of coffee brewing. I wandered through the tiny rooms of my apartment and saw that all of Bobby's clothes had been washed and were hanging up to dry. Bobby was asleep, swaddled and clean in his crib, and Viviana was putting on her coat to leave.

“You did all that wash while I slept?”

“That and more,” she said. “He should sleep for at least two hours. See you tonight.”

She came each night, and when I woke in the morning the chores were done, the house spotless, Bobby was clean, and I could work for a few hours before he rose from his morning nap. She would wake him at about six and keep him up for a few hours until he got his bottle and morning nap. I was able to work until midmorning. I began to feel like a person again. “Viviana,” I said to her one night, “I don't know how long I can afford to keep you.”

“Doesn't matter. Keep me as long as you can,” she said, pulling at a strand in the mirror. “God, my hair sure is green.”

One morning I woke to a pouring rain. A deluge of biblical proportions. I crawled out of bed and saw Viviana holding Bobby up to the window. “Look at that rain, young man,” Viviana said to my four-month-old son in her hands. “You'd better cancel all your appointments.”

“Viviana,” I said, sitting on the arm of a chair in my nightgown, “can we talk?”

“Sure, we can talk. What do you want to talk about?”

“I want to talk about days. I'd like you to work for me days.”

She shrugged. “I don't know. Arnold won't like it.”

“Look, I need to go back to work. I can get a full-time job and I'll be able to pay you a little more. I want you to stay with us.”

“I'll think about it,” she said.

The following week Viviana began work at nine in the morning. I called Mike and said I needed a full-time job. “I have a baby sitter, so I can put in more hours. I need to make some money.”

That morning I got up early and showered. When Viviana arrived, I was supposed to head out the door. Instead, I found myself straightening up, sorting through papers. I kissed my son, hugged him, played with him until Viviana said, “Why don't you go to work?”

“Will you be all right? Look, here's the number. Call me if there's anything at all. Do you think he'll be all right? Do you have enough milk?”

Viviana looked at me harshly and said, “One of us is walking out that door, and it's either you or me, so you decide.”

I left with a sense that I'd forgotten something I needed to do. But what it was eluded me. Emergency numbers were taped to the wall; the bottles were all prepared. Viviana had keys and knew where to reach me. Yet as I walked toward the subway I wondered whether I had interviewed Viviana enough. I had, after all, never before left her alone with Bobby. I had hardly left anyone alone with him. What would happen to Bobby
while I was gone? I had left him with someone I hardly knew. A person who came into my life and began to care for my child. But what did I know about her, really?