A Mother's Love (3 page)

We woke to some excitement as a nervous couple arrived to deposit their infant, who cried and cried as his parents were leaving. The Hispanic woman kept waving them away. “He'll be fine. Soon as you're gone,” she said, “he'll settle down.” The mother, who was very young, kept looking back. The baby did settle down after his parents left, but it wasn't much later when the couple returned. The woman looked as if she had been crying. They took their child away.

After that the day just dragged on. We went with the woman to take the dogs for a walk. “I don't think we'll miss your mother if we go outside for a little while,” she said, shaking her head. She clasped our hands and the dogs' leashes in one hand. The leashes left marks on our arms. There were three dogs—a large reddish-gold one and two little poodles. The big red one seemed to like Sam and me—because of our red hair, I reasoned—and he licked our faces and played with us. I hoped that its owner wouldn't come back and we'd get to keep it. But eventually we grew weary even of the red dog. Other couples came and went, collecting their sleeping infants. The woman kept looking at the clock and shaking her head. She had started to tidy up, perhaps wondering where to take us for the night, when our mother arrived.

She was flushed, and now her hair tumbled down her back. Now the woman rose in a huff and pointed to the sign overhead, which she read to my mother. It said something about taking your children if you plan to leave the premises.

“Oh,” my mother said indignantly, “I did not leave the premises. I've been visiting the caverns all day. I've been fascinated by everything I saw.” She began to talk about the bats that had flown by the millions from the mouth of the cave, about the green underwater pools and the colored columns of rock that stood upside down. She said she'd learned that a bat can locate its pups among a million
bats, just by their voices. She described for us a strange, underground world, a maze of caves in which you could easily lose yourself. At first I felt certain that she had seen all those things.

But my mother was different then from the way she'd been earlier in the day. Even though there was something relaxed and soothing about her, she wouldn't look Sam or me in the eye. Her blouse was wrinkled and the collar was smudged; she didn't have any lipstick on. I could tell she'd had a good time. I also had the feeling she hadn't spent the day by herself.

When we got outside it was dark, and I wanted to ask her more about the caverns, especially the bats she'd seen fly from the mouth of the cave, but something made me think better of it, and I said nothing at all. “So, you girls must be hungry,” she said, almost as an afterthought. “Do you want to go for dinner somewhere?”

We went to a diner, where Sam and I ordered hamburgers. My mother picked French fries off our plates, carefully dipping just the ends into catsup. She hardly ever ate. She said it was for her figure. She drank black coffee and smoked cigarettes and sucked oranges. During a meal, she'd nibble off someone else's plate. After dinner, we drove until my mother said she was too tired to drive any more. We checked into a dingy motel on Route 66. Almost all my mother's excursions were along Route 66. She liked this highway because,
she said, it could take you anywhere—wherever you wanted to be. The Mother Road, it was called. She used to joke about that.

Just before we went to sleep, I said to her, “Don't you think we should phone Dad? Let him know we're all right?” She looked at me in an exasperated way and I knew I'd failed some test I didn't know I was taking. That night Sam and I slept in the same bed, and she wrapped her arms and legs around me as if she were a monkey clinging to a branch. Often at home Sam would crawl into bed beside me, though I tried to kick her away. She'd hold on, no matter what I did to pry her loose. But in that motel room I let her cling to me as tightly as she ever had, and did not pry her away.

It was late the next day when we arrived back at the Valley of Fire trailer park. My father sat in a lawn chair on the porch, cigarette dangling from his mouth, a drink in a tall amber-colored glass clutched in his fist. He rushed to us when he saw the car. “Oh, thank God!” he cried, pressing me and Sam to him. “Thank God you're home.”

I don't know how many nights later it was when I woke to find my mother standing in the doorway of my room. The light from the bathroom shone behind her and I could see the curve of her hips, the outline of her form. She was naked and trembling. My mother had a trim, sleek body with breasts that were sturdy and taut, and she
often walked around the house naked. She seemed very strong physically, though she did nothing to stay in shape. But now she shook like a frightened rabbit. “Oh, Ivy,” I heard her say, leaning her body against the doorjamb, “I had a bad dream.”

“What did you dream about?” I asked. Her long black hair was disheveled. She was waiting for me to invite her in. Sam, who slept in the bed next to mine, stirred slightly. I was happy to be the elder, to have my mother confiding in me. She came in, pushing my legs aside, and sat down on the bed.

“Oh, I don't want to tell you. It was about my early life.” I knew little about my mother's past, and what I did would come after she was gone, from my father, though his past was also vague. It seemed then as if my parents had come from nowhere, and later, when I learned about spontaneous generation in school, I thought they had sprouted from the soil.

Now she began to weep. Dropping her head, she sank onto the pillow beside me. I didn't know what to do. I put my arms around her and she nestled into them. Her flesh was soft and smooth, and she smelled of perfume and liquor, cigarettes and soap.

“No matter what happens, promise me, Ivy, promise me,” she said, “that you'll be a big girl. You'll be strong.”

“What's going to happen?” I asked.

“Nothing. I don't know.” She clasped my hands. “You know what I hope? I hope that when you're grown up, we can be friends. We can take walks and talk about everything that's happened to us.”

Tears welled up in her eyes and she pulled me to her. Her breath was warm against my face; her nipples pressed into my chest. I stroked her hair. I don't know how much later it was that my mother fell asleep and I sat up beside her, hovering the way I'd once seen a dog in a movie beside his dead master, not letting anyone near.

P
ATRICIA CAMPBELL sat at her kitchen counter, making gazpacho in a blender and Heloise's boric acid roach balls in a bowl. “That looks good,” I said, pointing to the roach balls as I walked in. She handed me the recipe. Sugar, flour, bacon fat, onions, boric acid.

“The roaches love them,” Patricia said as she mashed the mix, stuffed it into small aluminum-foil boats, and tucked them into drawers. “I haven't seen you for a while.” She tossed her blond hair off her face with the back of her hand. She stood tall, regal, like a figurehead on the prow of a ship.

“Well, it's not so easy for me to get downtown these days,” I said with a laugh, pushing the stroller into a corner and dropping Bobby's bag, filled with his bottles, diapers, change of clothes. I rubbed my shoulder where the bag had been.

Patricia reached for an armful of wet clothes and tossed them into the dryer. She dropped another load into the washer. I glanced into her living room: magazines were neatly stacked in corners, the books were in alphabetical order. When she opened the refrigerator, it sparkled with fresh fruit and vegetables. The roaches were a part of life in New York (the neighbor's roaches, really, Patricia said), but everything else was clean, white. I thought of the dishes I'd left in the sink, the pile of newspapers by the door. The cartons of take-out food in the fridge that I dipped into for dinner. “Some days,” I said, “I don't even get outside.”

“I can imagine,” Patricia said, making me wonder if she could. “I'm overworked too. It's not that easy to get together anymore.” Patricia and I used to see each other almost every week. We'd meet somewhere midway for a quick dinner or a six o'clock film. But since Bobby was born, she had come uptown only twice—once to the hospital and another time shortly after I brought him home. Though we spoke often, we hadn't seen each other in several weeks.

She'd gotten home late and was rushing to fix dinner. Brown rice was already cooking, and she grabbed some carrots and broccoli, slicing and dropping them into a steamer. When she took out two white fish fillets, my heart sank. I was so hungry these days. I had to eat frugally to save money. Still, I was eating, but it seemed I could never get
enough. Even though I hardly ate—and couldn't afford—red meat, I had been hoping for steak, lamb chops, something to fill me up. Instead, I munched on the cheese and crackers, and sipped the seltzer Patricia had placed before me.

She moved quickly through the motions of salting the fish. She hadn't had time to change after work, and she still wore a skirt and sneakers. Patricia was one of those women who walk home as if they are on military drill. “I'm always late,” she complained. “The city brings me down. I'm always in a hurry, but where am I going?”

“It's true,” I agreed. “I used to feel that way too, that I didn't know where I was going. But now, well, I think I know.” Bobby began to whimper and I tried to distract him with a rattle, but he cried in earnest and my milk started to flow. He stared at me, angry at being denied, through his black eyes—his father's eyes. It was difficult for me to look at him and not think of Matthew, though I tried not to. In some ways it might have been easier if I'd had a girl. I could not bathe Bobby or change him—I could not look at his naked body—and not think about the man who fathered him.

Tentatively I picked him up, undoing my blouse. Bobby moved his head up and down as he struggled to reach my breast. “I wish you'd come to see us more,” I said to Patricia.

“Oh, I try, but you know. Everyone's so busy.
Our lives are so demanding.” I nodded, then frowned. Bobby clamped down, his mouth firmly on my breast. Lately I didn't seem to be so busy anymore.

Patricia saw me wince. “It hurts?”

“A lot,” I said. “They just don't put it in any of the books.”

Patricia nodded as she set the table, sorting through the knives and forks. Patricia had nice things. She had real silverware and porcelain plates. She had silver spoons for ladeling gravy and soups. She had things that had belonged to her family. Antique furniture from her aunt's farmhouse. Her bed was the one her grandmother was born in. When she married Scott, her mother had given her the family linen, the chest that had held her own trousseau. On her dresser were pictures of large groups of people—the extended family—taken at their annual reunions. In some a yacht was moored in the background, waves lapped a Maine shore. Other reunions were held on the family farm, the one they still owned upstate. It had a name. Shady Creek. “This weekend,” Patricia would say, “we're going to Shady Creek.”

I'd met Patricia, who was now a reporter for “Crime Time” (“Crime Time on Prime Time,” the promotions read), in my condo conversion class when I was getting a real-estate agent's license. “Look where we'd be now,” Patricia liked to say as we watched the market bottom out. She enjoyed
her job in television. She had tried various things, such as real estate, catering, and now “Crime Time,” where she was a researcher. She called up police officers and asked them what their favorite crime was that week, and they always told her because they weren't fools and they wanted to be on television just like everybody else.

Patricia liked to call me with the horror story of the week. She said that Americans couldn't get enough of horror. Children stuffed in plastic bags, old women bludgeoned to death for their makeup kits, retarded people locked in closets for years. It wasn't sex, she liked to say, that gives America its kicks. It's blood, terror, the unthinkable crimes. “Americans love dismemberment, especially if it comes in sequence,” Patricia told me once over a cup of tea. Serial crime and mutilation; those were the biggest things. Randomness helped. Perhaps, I mused, because we lead such fragmentary lives.

Once she had tried to work out a segment based on me. She had stared at the picture I keep on my dresser in a small silver frame, the one of me and Sam at Lake Meade the year before she disappeared. Two little girls in bathing suits, arms locked around each other. “You never know, your sister might see it. Mysteries have been solved this way.” But the producers balked. It wasn't exactly a crime and it had happened too long ago.

“So what are you working on now?” I asked
innocently as Bobby quieted down. I stroked his black hair.

She grimaced. “You don't want to know.”

I shrugged. “Tell me.”

“Organ theft,” she said.

“What?” This was something I had not heard of before.

“Oh, it's a big thing. A man goes into a bar, orders a beer. A beautiful woman sits down beside him. Soon he leaves with her. Three days later he wakes up in pain in a warehouse on a slab. He makes his way to a hospital and finds out that one of his kidneys has been surgically removed.”

I shook my head. “This isn't possible.”

“But it is.” Patricia smiled; something about her relished these stories. “A kidney is worth ten thousand dollars. It's capitalism,” she said, “supply and demand. People will pay good money.” She paused, gauging my reaction. I stared at her, incredulous, shaking my head. “There are worse stories, but I don't want to upset you.”

“Like what?”

She gazed at Bobby. “Oh, children in some places in the world”—she spoke hesitantly—“are being sold … for spare parts.” I could feel the look of horror spread across my face. “But think of it, Ivy. If Bobby needed a kidney, a liver, eyes, what would you do? Wouldn't you buy them if you could? No questions asked?”