A Mother's Love (2 page)

It was after midnight as I sat at the window, drawing. I had tried to go back to sleep, but I only tossed and turned. So I sat at my work table, as I did many nights, while the baby slept. I drew sharp lines, the curve of a face. Coloring it over with an oil pastel, I drew it again and again, scratching at it with a fingernail. I built layer upon layer, coloring, scratching, drawing again, until the face seemed to come from somewhere deep within the image. Carefully I cut features—a nose, lips in profile—out of the clippings I kept in a basket. These I glued down, then brushed with oil paint.

Pausing, I looked outside. The plaintive sound of a saxophone came from the upper floors of the building where the drug dealers lived. It was dark
in the ground-floor apartment of the old woman with the scrawny yellow Chihuahuas. Then she opened her refrigerator door, and I could see her naked body with its loose-fitting skin, dangling breasts. During the day she swaddled her dogs like babies in a confusion of rags and towels and rocked them in her window. Once in a store I saw numbers tattooed on her arm. Pablo's light was out, which was unusual, because he stayed up until all hours since his wife had died years ago. He too dressed his dogs and cat, only he had festive outfits for them—elf hats for Christmas, rabbit ears for Easter.

Then I noticed, walking up the street, the woman who lived across the way—the one who was about my age. She lived in the renovated building, next door to the drug dealers', that had gone co-op before any other on the block. Her apartment was directly across from mine, but one story up. It was late for her to be coming home, a sleeping child in her arms, another shuffling behind. Her hair was pulled back and she wore a black scarf around her head. With the child in her arms, too big to be carried really, she looked like a refugee in a war film. She had not always looked this way. For most of the six years I had lived in my building, I envied her all the things I thought she had.

Shortly after I'd first set up my work table at the window, the U-Haul van blocked traffic on the
narrow West Side street. For an afternoon I listened to the blare of horns as she and her husband carried in their cinderblock bookcases, their old brass bed, the stained mattress that looked as if it had been stolen from a dormitory room. He was lean then and had more hair. She was pregnant with her first, who was now picked up by a school bus, but she was still tall and sleek. When her husband spoke to her, she laughed.

I have always done my artwork at the window—the jewelry I design and repair by the piece, which pays the bills. In recent years I have begun the paintings and collages of indeterminate faces. I work with things I find. I have drawers full, all neatly labeled. Souvenirs from motel gift shops—Oz memorabilia from Kansas, flamingos from Florida. Tickets, trivia, broken watches, instructions from an earthquake emergency kit, packets of Day-Glo stars. I create collages by building image upon image, sometimes cutting them out of newspapers or old postcards. Others I draw freehand. In my paintings concrete forms—roller skates, a tornado, a coffee cup—rise out of the abstract, but beneath the surface there is the face.

A few years ago I had a one-woman show and a critic called the face my “ghost face.” He said the face, receding, elusive, was always the same. “Clearly,” he wrote, “there is some story hidden here.” After that review, I stared at my paintings, wondering whose it was, for it was not my mother,
nor was it Sam. Before Bobby was born, I worked eight hours a day for the jewelry store in the diamond district, where the Hassidim, with mischievous glints in their eyes, come in, reaching into their pockets and pulling out fistfuls of gems. But on weekends, I painted my faces and watched the woman across the way.

When her first child was born, I knew because the delivery trucks brought the crib, the playpen. The old mattress was tossed into the street. A new futon arrived. She supervised the changes with the baby dangling in her arms, and I admired her energy and her verve. They got a white-and-black spaniel. She had her hair cropped short and he let his grow long. He began to wear jeans, except when the limo picked him up a few times a year, and then he wore a tuxedo, which made me think that he was in the entertainment industry—a producer of commercials or TV shorts—and had to go off to an awards banquet or important screening. Often she went with him. She'd wear slinky sequined gowns, strapless. (She wore the same midnight blue gown on several occasions.) I hardly ever saw her go anywhere else, unless it was to the store with a child in tow. A few times she went out with what appeared to be a manuscript tucked under her arm. Then she wore a skirt and blouse, and looked rather conventional. But when she got dressed up, when she tossed her head back to laugh, there was something glamorous about her.

A second child came, a boy this time. She grew pale and thin during the pregnancy, while her husband became rounder in the belly and balder on top. He began to smoke. She didn't laugh anymore when he talked. Now she planted flowers with a fury around the trees on the block and hammered up warning signs for dogs. In the morning she'd fling open the window and gaze down to check the flowers. The spaniel died and they got two new dogs—mutts that she never walked. They never ran or went to the park. She just took them to the curb, let them go to the bathroom right there, cleaned up after them, and took them back upstairs. The dogs, like her, were confined to the home.

When the little boy was toddling, she had her hair dyed an odd shade of gold, and I began to think something was wrong. She didn't want the second child. There was something else she wanted to do. A sadness that I'd sensed had always been there was no longer covered up with a smile. But soon her hair went back to normal. They put ski racks on the top of their car. She planted flowers around the trees the following spring. That summer they took their vacation as usual.

One day a few weeks before Bobby was born, as I worked at the window, her husband came to the door in a ponytail and jeans. He took a last puff from a cigarette and crushed it out with his heel, so I assumed she didn't know he was still smoking.
Then he rang their buzzer. He's forgotten his keys, I said to myself, surprised, because this had never happened before. She looked down with no expression on her face. A few moments later the children appeared, bundled in jackets, with small backpacks, ready to head out the door. He looked up at her, but she seemed unaware of his being there at all. He dropped his eyes to the sidewalk, shaking his head, and took each child by the hand, leading them away.

Since then, wondering how it was possible that I'd missed this, I have watched her more closely. Now she has a Russian wolfhound, a ridiculous brown thing. When she goes out with her children, she walks ahead of them. Once I heard her shout, “I've only got two hands!” It is just recently, as I've noticed her gazing in the direction of my window, that it has occurred to me that she has been watching me as well.

Bobby's cry startled me. While I was drawing, I'd almost forgotten he was there. Earlier I had nursed him in my bed, then left him there to sleep, thinking he wouldn't wake for hours. Now he had woken, but I wanted to finish what I was drawing, so I kept on, hoping he'd go back to sleep. His wail, though, grew more insistent. I pulled myself up from the chair and went over to the bed. He was shrieking as I touched his cheek, which was
moist and warm but not feverish. Gently I lifted him.

He was soaked and the bed was too. Placing him on the changing table, I pulled off his wet pajamas, flinging them into the corner of the room where the laundry was piled high. I took off the diaper and hurled it into the trash. Bobby was screaming, his buttocks raw, his body exposed, cold, naked. His mouth opened into a widening gap, moving it like a suckerfish. As I rubbed cream on his genitals, his bottom, he quieted. His face looked soothed as I cooed and diapered him. He seemed to smile as I hummed a tune to calm him.

I tugged the urine-stained sheets off the bed and blotted the mattress. Holding Bobby to my chest, I went to the linen closet, but there was only one top sheet. I threw this on the bed as I patted the baby with my free hand. There, I said. It's all right. I put a dry washcloth on the wet spot and tucked in the sheet.

Then I lay down with Bobby, like a lover, in my arms. His skin fit against my skin like a graft. Resting him on a pillow, I let him nurse. As he drew milk, warmth raced through my body. It was a soothing tug that made Matthew seem even farther away than he was—across the bridge in Brooklyn. But now I drifted from the city as if I were traveling to a warm place—an island with tropical flowers, birds soaring. A seascape rose before
me. Palms overhead. It switched to the desert, the place I've always known. Mojave. I felt myself walking across hot sand until my eyes closed and I slept.

I woke with a start. Bobby's head had slipped off my chest and was wedged between my body and the pillow. The nurse had warned me about pillows. I jerked up, thinking he'd suffocated. Gripping him, I pulled this creature of less than ten pounds back onto my chest. His breath rose and fell in rhythm with my own. His heart pounded against my heart, breath against my breath, and we stayed there through the night.

In the morning the sun shone, a clear blue winter's day. I made the bed. I pulled the single sheet tight along the edges, folded the blankets smoothly on top. Later I'd do the wash, the dishes, but for now at least I made the bed. It was a promise I'd made to myself. When my mother lived with us, there were unmade beds, dirty dishes stacked in the sink. In my dreams I saw her in a nightgown, the shades drawn, with ashtrays and cups of stale coffee surrounding her. I never remembered her dressed unless she had somewhere to go. My father says it was hardly ever like this. “Your mother was a very neat woman,” he said once, defending her. “She always got dressed and she kept a nice house.”

This may be so, but it is not what I recall.

K
INGSTON CAVERNS was a full day's drive from Las Vegas, but once my mother took us there. I don't remember much about the long drive, except for the tarantulas that we crushed as they raced back and forth across the road and the fact that Sam was with us. It was the only time she went with me and my mother on our excursions. Sam wore a pair of blue-and-red overalls that were too big for her. She wore this same outfit the whole time we were away, so I assume my mother hadn't taken the time to pack.

With her red hair, the same color as mine, and her birthmark, Sam looked like Raggedy Ann. She had a strawberry mark, like a star, on the side of her face. It wasn't very big, but she kept her hand moving there as if it were a stain she could rub away. I liked to touch it, thinking it could warm my hand. After they were gone, I searched for
Sam's face in malls and airports. I knew this mark was the way I'd find them.

My mother hated the tarantulas with their furry bodies. She thought they were poisonous, so no matter how much I pleaded, she wouldn't stop and let me look at them. She wouldn't try to avoid them as they scuttled across the road. Little devils, she called them, creatures from hell. The crunch of their bodies punctuated our drive. It was dark when we reached the motel in a town where everything looked like the Old West, complete with wooden sidewalks, saloon, and hitching posts. There was the jail, the post office, the general store. But it was all fake. Just façades. We ate dinner that night in a cafeteria that served platters of fried chicken, which Sam and I devoured while our mother sipped black coffee.

In the morning she was in a hurry to get going. She told us to dress quickly, though Sam could barely dress herself. She looked at me helplessly as she fumbled with her buttons and tried to pull on her shoes. My father always dressed her, so I had to sit on the floor and tie her shoes while our mother stood impatiently at the door.

We took the winding road to the caverns. The road was bumpy as it rose through canyon country where the rocks were pink and green. I thought my mother would take us with her into the caves, but she pulled up in front of the cinderblock house where the woman who ran the caverns sold soda
and postcards. The house had a room off to the side that served as the nursery and kennel. “It's too far for you girls to walk,” she said. “I'll pick you up later.”

The place smelled of urine, and there were anxious dogs with a desperate look in their eyes. The dogs, which could easily have roasted to death inside their cars, howled and whined in their cages. A partition separated the nursery from the kennel. In the nursery a few infants dozed. The only carpeting on the cool cement floor was a small circle with blocks on it.

“All right,” my mother said, tapping us on the head. “I'll pick you up later.” The woman, who was Hispanic, looked at us askance but said nothing. I believe we were too old for this facility.

“Now you girls behave,” our mother said, waving good-bye. She looked very young and pretty in a white blouse and blue skirt, her black hair piled high on her head. “Do what the lady says.”

“Don't worry,” the woman said. “I'll take care of them. Enjoy yourself.”

“I will,” my mother said. “I will.”

Sam whimpered and began to cry. She always was that kind of child, given to shifts of mood, sudden drops into despair. She was like our mother in this regard, laughing one moment, weeping the next, and I found myself annoyed with her. I was more like our father, carefree and fun-loving. At least I was until my mother left for
good. But now I comforted Sam. I put my arms around her until she stopped crying. I held her to me and she sobbed into my chest.

The woman, who had pockmarked skin and greasy hair pulled back from her face, led us around by the hand. We spent the morning on the floor, playing with a block set. I built a city for Sam, complete with roads and buildings, places to hide and play, and eventually Sam picked up blocks and helped me. We built a series of tunnels where moles could live and a rocket ship to outer space. The woman listened to a Spanish radio station and read us a comic book. She gave us juice and oatmeal cookies for a snack. Then she had us lie down on clean white cots. Sam went right to sleep, exhausted from her efforts not to fall apart, but I told the woman I was not a napper. I had never been a napper, I insisted, a fact of which I was proud. So the woman rubbed my back until I fell asleep.