Mother Land

  “It’s for you,” Mother was saying, now very cross, because in my angry reverie I had not taken the phone from her.

  Even if you were nearer the phone, Mother answered it. All calls were routed through her, so she was in the know. Mother had insisted on the short cord: we were all visible and audible on the phone.

  “A girl,” Mother explained to the rest of the table.

  Father answered his cue. He bit the meat off his fork and said, “Some dizzy blonde.”

  “Jay?”

  Mona’s voice was flattened, drained of vitality, but with an insinuating weight to it, just a desperate muscle of sound, clutching at me to listen. All that nuance in the way she said it, condemning me, making my name into a fault.

  “Hi there,” I said cheerily to throw my family off, because all eight of them were listening, holding their knives and forks upright, no longer chewing, so they could hear better.

  “I missed my period. It’s been three weeks. I don’t know what to do. I’m a wreck”—her voice began to falter and break—“and you don’t even care!”

  “Yes,” I said, my voice high and insincere, “I do,” and I could see Mother turning her head to hear better, “as a matter of fact.” All I heard was blame, that it was my period, my delay, my problem. But I kept smiling for the sake of the table. “I’ll see you in a few days.”

  “No! Tomorrow! It has to be tomorrow. This is serious.” Mona began to cry, snorting and croaking in a way that stung my ear and rang against the fragile skull box of my brain.

  Eight people were staring at my head and raising a hot blister of guilt on my neck.

  As I hung up, cutting Mona off in a yell of complaint, I prepared a smile for the table and turned to their silent faces. Even four-year-old Gilbert had stopped yammering. My eyes were glazed. I was shrugging, looking fatuous.

  “Who was that?” Mother asked.

  “Nobody you know,” I said. “Nobody special.”

  Floyd said, “Oh, sure. I believe that. Indubitably.”

  “Jay’s got a girlfriend,” Hubby said in the slow, wheezy voice of a husky boy with a throat full of food. “And I know why.”

  Franny, who often asked Mother’s questions for her, said, “Why?”

  “So he can look at her panties.”

  Rose said, “Don’t be fresh.”

  Mother smiled grimly at Father. “Are you going to let him get away with that insolence?”

  Father set down his fork with a click, and swung—and both Fred and Floyd leaned back so as to spare themselves, as Father caught Hubby’s head with the meat of his hand, knocking him sideways off his chair. As the blow connected, Father, overtaken by pity, reached for Hubby’s arm to break his fall, but in his frantic clumsiness crushed him against the radiator instead, so that Hubby scorched his arm and howled.

  “Kids wreck a marriage,” Father said, for Mother’s sake.

  “Eat,” Mother said to me, because I was goggling at Hubby’s reddened arm. “Your dinner’s getting cold.”

  In the moralizing voice of the eldest, Fred said, “I always tell people not to call me at mealtime.”

  “That’s the way it should be,” Mother said.

  I had the sense that they suspected something, that all the panic and shame showed on my face. But really, it was all too dreadful for even my family to guess.

  “Nobody special,” I had said, and in fact Mona had become nobody special. Until that moment of my hearing her voice she had almost faded from my mind. A month or so before, I had seen her for what I had thought would be the last time. She was two years ahead of me and rented a room in a big frame house at the far edge of the campus, across the road from the Homestead, where Emily Dickinson once lived. I had visited Mona to say goodbye. We made love as if in a joyless ceremony of farewell. I was so inept a lover I never feared the worst. Pregnancies were the result of passion and experience; I was too tentative and unconfident to accomplish such a thing. I always felt off-target and impatient, as Mona squirmed in frustration, barely penetrated, as though I were merely chafing at her, approximating the act.

  I had noticed her first in the cafeteria, walking fast, dressed like a scullery maid in a brown uniform and a brown cap and an apron. Later I saw her behind the counter, working with both hands, serving mashed potatoes with her right, ladling gravy with her left. The diners were all dormitory students, of whom I was one, a freshman. I loved her simple scowling good looks, a loose lock of blond hair at the rim of her cap, a neat narrow nose and skeptical lips, skinny shoulders, thin fingers. She was beautiful. I took her to be an unimpressed townie. Such a worker could seem to me aloof and unapproachable; even a scrubber could seem haughty. I had no idea she was a junior, two years older than me and an honor student. I watched her for a month or more. She never smiled. Her sulks aroused me.

  I saw her in a bar one night—she was drinking with friends—and spoke to her. Her friends left us. Drinking seemed to make us equals. She said, “You think you’re so smart,” when I expressed an opinion. I was reading and quoting Les Fleurs du Mal—Baudelaire was my hero then. But she liked the fact that I worked on weekends at the university chicken farm, scraping and hosing down the cages. “Everyone else is at the football game,” she said, sharing her contempt with me. Drink made her sullen and resentful, yet I could see that for all her severity she was on my side, a fellow worker.

  A week or so later she sneaked me into her room. We lay on her bed, looking at Emily Dickinson’s house, and I recited “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” We made love. She could tell I was new to this. When she found out that I was so much younger she berated me—she had been drinking—and said I had deceived her. Still, we met a few more times in her room (“Wild Nights should be / Our luxury!”) before deciding not to see each other again. That was before Thanksgiving. Now it was almost Christmas, which was why her phone call had been so unexpected.

  She lived in a suburb of Boston, a long bus ride and then a meander through streets of dirty ice and soot-crusted snow. I had thought seeing her might improve matters, but no. She said, “I haven’t told anyone. I can’t tell my parents—they’d kill me. You’re the only person who knows. You have to help me.”

  This desperate little speech became an unwelcome refrain. Each time I saw her after that, I expected a reprieve, but the news was always bad, and got worse. When she called, which was almost every day (“It’s her again,” Mother said), I hoped for her to say, “At last!” But she never did. Her frequent letters (“Another one for you,” Mother said. “Is it her?”) were long and gloomy and blaming and self-lacerating. Why did I ever let myself get involved with an upstart like you? My precociousness was like a devious fault. I was still technically a teenager. Baudelaire’s boasts mocked me with their cynical worldliness. I burned Mona’s letters.

  More weeks passed. It was January. Mona was two months along. Every phone call and letter raised my hopes and in the same instant sank them. In my dormitory room I woke up each morning dazed and sometimes happy until I remembered that my predicament was not a bad dream but a fact. I prayed for good news and found out, always after a suspenseful delay, that nothing had changed. And it was worse by far for Mona, though only I knew that. I was her solitary confidant, burdened by her misery.

  Fred was at law school in New York City. New York was the wider world; people had the solutions to pregnancies there. I visited him in February. I did not tell him why I had come. I stayed in his apartment and haunted doctors’ offices—just dropped in. Do you have an appointment? I had no idea how these things worked; I knew that abortion was illegal. Without an appointment I never saw a doctor, which was probably for the best, because how would I ask the crucial question?

  “Oh, God,” Fred said, “oh, Jesus,” when I told him. He held his head. His haircut looked frivolous in his whitened fingers. He said, “You’ll have to tell Dad and Ma.”

  “No,” I said.

  Fred’s helpless panic frightened me.

  “They won’t be
able to help,” I said. “They won’t know what to do. They’ll go nuts.”

  Mother would blame me, Father would rage. I knew that. I could hear them. I knew every word of accusation they would utter.

  Inert, scandalized, terrified by what he knew—feeling complicit, because he knew everything—Fred suggested that I leave New York. Though I was hurt, I was not surprised. This was my problem. And it was painful being in New York, where I envied and hated the rich, who were easily able to solve these problems with a wink and an envelope of money.

  Sometime in March I moved in with Mona, her little room off campus at the top of the big frame house.

  She was kinder to me when we were together. She said, “I need you now. Please help me. I can’t depend on anyone else. See me through this and I’ll never ask anything more of you. Do you understand? I don’t want to marry you. I just want to have the baby.”

  “And then what?”

  “Give it away,” she said, blinking at her tears. “Put it up for adoption. There are agencies.”

  I was not shocked. This was simple desperation, like crime. The main challenge was that you had to get away with it.

  Mona pushed her fists against her eyes and became stern. “If my family finds out, I’m dead.”

  And so am I, I thought.

  Mona stopped going to classes. She got a job in a greenhouse, where they grew roses, in the countryside beyond the campus. In this way she kept out of sight. I studied, I did my work. I hated Baudelaire and developed a mind of my own, based on our predicament, and I worried all day. Mona and I lived as a serious couple in her small room.

  Though I still attended lectures and wrote papers and read the required books, I did so in a detached and almost disembodied way, as another person, younger, much simpler than the fellow who woke appalled each day and comforted Mona. Writing home, repeating platitudes about the weather and my studies, I was someone else again, very guarded, and yet an earnest member of the family.

  That was three people. But I was another man, too: the asparagus picker. Studying was unproductive, and Mona was working at the greenhouse, so I got a job on a work crew harvesting asparagus. I heard about this from another hard-up student and was welcomed by the farmer, who needed men. The crop was early, and it looked strange to me. Eight-to-ten-inch spears had begun to appear in clusters all over the wide bare fields; no foliage, just these slender, sharp-pointed shoots. I crouched with a dozen fieldworkers, poking my cutter into the earth, severing the spears a few inches below ground level. I thought: This is real and raw. Someday I will put this odd work into a book.

  All the workers were Spanish-speaking men, most of them young. They cut the asparagus, muttering among themselves, sometimes laughing, as they loaded the boxes and swung them onto the flat bed of the trailer. They did not talk to me except when we were riding in the back of the truck, being taken to a new field.

  They said they were from Puerto Rico and spent eight months doing this, as migrants moving north from Florida and Georgia, where they harvested whatever was ripe—oranges, peaches, blueberries, sweet corn, tomatoes. They bantered with each other and were polite and pleasant to me when they found out I could speak some Spanish.

  Puerto Rico seemed remote, exotic, sunny. They cut cane and picked pineapples there. They missed their wives and girlfriends, they said. In September or October they would go back with the money they’d earned.

  “Isla bonita,” I said.

  “Isla barata!” one man replied. And the others joined in, giving me examples of how cheap it was to live in Puerto Rico.

  I picked asparagus every morning for three weeks until, in late May, Mona, who was swollen and obviously pregnant, said, “My parents are asking when I’m coming home. They might visit. We have to get out of here.”

  We took a bus to New York, where I phoned Fred. I had not dared to call ahead, fearing that he would have time to think of an excuse and might rebuff us. We had nowhere else to go. Two days there proved to me that Fred didn’t want us. He did not want to know this much. He was fretting again, worrying me with his fear.

  He said, “See, what you need is a plan.”

  I saw an airfare on a store window: San Juan $49. That seemed simple. I had the money. I remembered all the shouts of Isla barata, muy barata! We flew there and felt safe, living in a cheap hotel for the first few nights, then got a room with a balcony in a tall house in Old San Juan. It had been a rash decision, but it was workable, as though we had dreamed it.

  Away from Fred and our families in the United States we felt like people with a plan—older, independent, unobserved. It was my first experience of the way travel turns you into a new person. I understood, too, that by going far away we had removed ourselves from a dreary reality of intrusions into our private world. When people ask you questions you can’t answer, I thought, it’s time to leave and find new people who don’t ask. On this distant island of Spanish speakers we were secure. We had enough money to last a month. In the meantime I would look for work. We felt safer, almost happy in our remoteness, among people who seemed worse off than we were, in a disorderly place that matched my mood.

  I’m working on a freighter, I wrote home. We’ve just docked in San Juan.

  That was another person, the deckhand. And Mother accepted this lame explanation. Because I was not asking her for anything, she was complacent, or perhaps preoccupied—all those children. She had no curiosity about me. She was probably reassured that I was taken care of and didn’t need anything.

  I’ll be home in August or September.

  The Caribe Hilton in Puerta de Tierra was fairly new and looking for employees. I applied for a job as a lifeguard, but hearing me speak English, the personnel manager suggested that I work in the newly opened restaurant. The customers were mostly English-speaking tourists. I got the job. I worked from six in the evening until midnight, when I took the bus back to Old San Juan. Now I had a salary. Mona signed up for Spanish classes. She was too big, too hot, too uncomfortable to attempt more than that.

  The Puerto Ricans were kind to us. They had two faces: a dutiful, solemn, and submissive one they presented to gringos—Anything you say, boss! I recognized this from the asparagus fields. The other, a noisy, mischievous, teasing, helpful face, they saved for each other. They treated Mona and me as members of the family. Accustomed to messy problems, they were people who did not ask for explanations. I was grateful, though it took me a while to understand that the reason they were kind was because they saw a young, pale, pregnant woman and her even younger man—probably not her husband—riding the buses, sitting in the plaza, eating ice cream, entering the stairway in the old building near the expensive Zaragozana restaurant, where we never ate. They sympathized.

  Still, every day I woke up from the peacefulness of deep sleep and remembered our predicament. Contemplating it numbed me like a drug.

  My family believed I was working on a ship. Mona had told her family she was teaching school in New York City. No one would find out the truth. We were too far away. Mona’s mail went care of Fred in New York; he forwarded it to her in weekly bundles.

  And so two months passed.

  I was fine, helping Mona through this, yet whenever I remembered my family—Mother, Father, inquisitive siblings—I grew worried, because there was so much to tell, all of it hidden, all of it incriminating. I knew what everyone would say; I winced, seeing Mother’s face. I had no response other than agreeing that it was all my own goddamned fault.

  The strangeness of San Juan consoled me and seemed an effective form of concealment. The rough kindness of Puerto Ricans was a reassurance, because they were taking us on faith; not a single soul knew us here. I loved that anonymity, which was also a sort of innocence. I was blameless, just a skinny boy who lived in a room on Calle San Francisco with a pregnant young woman, and who set off at five from the plaza each evening on the bus to Puerta de Tierra and the Caribe Hilton. We had canned soup almost every meal. At night, when we switched on the l
ight, glossy purplish cockroaches scuttled on the floor. Dust and noise filled the air, the street seemed to pass through the tall windows of our upper room, even the sea brimmed at our windows. But no one knew us, so there was no shame, only the tedious struggle we shared with everyone else.

  Now and then it rained hard, the brief summer downpours. I carried an umbrella and wore a Panama hat. These were affectations; I was pretending to be seedy. I was off Baudelaire and reading Graham Greene and Lawrence Durrell. I learned enough Spanish so that I seldom needed to speak English. I practiced the Puerto Rican accent, meemo for mismo, Joe for Yo, and called the bus the guagua and money chavo. I felt that no one saw me until I got to the restaurant, and I discovered that, working there, I was almost invisible too: I was just my uniform jacket and shirt and bow tie. My job was to take reservations over the phone, to show diners to their tables, to distribute menus, to wish them a pleasant evening. For this I was paid enough to cover rent and food for Mona and me, and to put a little extra away for our return. Now I understood how a rash decision could become a whole irreversible life.

  Mona grew weak and unsteady, as though her pregnancy was an illness, and she looked at our little room with homesick eyes. She woke in the middle of the night and sobbed. Her ankles swelled. She developed heat rash. Now and then she raged at me: “How did I ever get involved with you!” Or she said, “You are all I have. Please don’t leave me. Just see me through to the end.”

  They were like lines in a play I had wandered into, one of those anxious dreams of the deep end. I seemed to be leading someone else’s life, as in that same dream when everything that occurs is unexpected yet absurdly logical.

  One day I was late for work. I said to the restaurant manager, “I’m sorry I’m late. My wife is sick—she’s pregnant.”

  He was from Peru, and his beaky nose, hard jaw, and hooded eyes gave him the look of an Inca chief. He stared at me with a seriousness that made me uncomfortable. Then he tapped my shoulder.

  “Don’t say ‘I’m sorry.’ Never say ‘sorry.’” He wagged his finger. “A man doesn’t say ‘sorry.’” A few days later he said, “How is your wife? Better, I hope.”