MOTHERS
Here she is, on the porch, all straw hair and slumpy joints and a crack that passes through her lip like she is dirt that has never known rain. In her arms is a baby: genderless, red, not making any sort of noise.
“Bad,” I say.
She kisses the baby on the ear and then hands it to me. I flinch when she extends her arms, but take the infant just the same.
Babies are heavier than you’d think.
“She’s yours,” Bad says.
I look down at the baby, who stares at me with wide eyes that shimmer like Japanese beetles. Her fingers curl around invisible locks of hair, and her sharp little nails dig into her skin. A feeling settles over me—a one-beer-deep feeling, a no-more-skittering-feet-after-the-trap-snaps feeling. I look back at Bad.
“What do you mean, she’s mine?”
Bad looks at me as if I am unfathomably stupid, or possibly fucking with her, or both.
“I was pregnant. Now there’s a baby. She’s yours.”
My brain doubles back on the sentence. For months, my head has been so fuzzy. Mail is stacked unread on my kitchen table, and my clothes are a giant mound on my once-immaculate floor. My uterus contracts in protest, confused.
“Look,” Bad says. “There’s only so much that I can do. I can’t do any more than that. Right?”
I agree, but something feels wrong about following her down this line of reasoning. Dangerous.
“You can only do as much as you can do,” I repeat anyway.
“Good,” Bad says. “When the baby cries, she could be hungry or thirsty or angry or cranky or sick or sleepy or paranoid or jealous or she had planned something but it went horribly awry. So you’ll need to take care of that, when it happens.”
I look down at the baby, who is not crying now. She blinks sleepily, and I find myself wondering if dinosaurs ever blinked in the same way, before they were incinerated into dust. The baby relaxes—putting even more weight into her body than I thought possible—and curls her head against my breasts. She even purses her lips a little, as if she thinks she might be able to nurse.
“I am not your mother, baby,” I say. “I can’t feed you.”
I am so hypnotized by her that I miss the receding footsteps, the crack of the slamming car door. But then Bad is gone, and for once, I am not alone, after.
Back inside, I realize I don’t even know the baby’s name. On the floor is a small cloth bag that I don’t remember receiving. I go into the kitchen, where I sit down on a sagging cane chair. I imagine the chair breaking beneath me with the baby in my arms, and I stand back up and lean against the counter.
“Hello, baby,” I say to the baby.
Her lids swing open again, and she fixes my face in her gaze.
“Hello, baby. What’s your name?”
The baby doesn’t respond, but she also doesn’t cry, which surprises me. I am a stranger. She has never seen me before. If she cries, it is to be expected, there are reasons. But what does it mean that she doesn’t cry? Is she afraid? She doesn’t look afraid. Perhaps babies are not capable of terror.
She looks like she is working something out.
She smells clean, but chemical. And behind it, an edge of milk, bodily and sour, like something tipped askance. Her nose leaks a little, and she does not move to wipe it.
There is a crash, a shrill wail. I jump. The baby has reached out her hand and caught a banana in the fruit bowl, and taken down half a dozen pears. The hard pears roll, and the overripe ones splat. Now the baby does look terrified. She howls. I kiss the soft spot on her baby skull and carry her into the next room.
“Shhhh, baby.”
Her mouth is an endless cavern, into which light and thought and sound descend, never to return. “Shhhh, baby.” Why didn’t Bad tell me her name?
“Shhhh, little thing, shhhh.” My head throbs with the sound. Identical tears slide eye to ear on each side of her face, like a picture of a baby crying and not a baby at all. “Shhhh, little thing. Shhhh.”
A brisk breeze whisks through the dust outside, and the screen door slams open. I jump. She screams.
When David and Ruth were married, they had a full Latin mass. Ruth’s veil covered her face and the hem bumped over the floor as she walked down the aisle. A sea of hats and veils covered up women’s updos, as per the request of the couple. The service was beautiful and old, connecting them to millennia.
At the reception, a woman in a cummerbund swept by me. I became very conscious of the way I chewed. I almost hadn’t noticed her—in the crowd of relatives and friends, she’d registered as a very slight man—but no, her high cheekbones and feminine way of crossing her feet on an invisible line that ran on the floor gave her away. I watched her as the party wore on—through the toasts, through the chicken dance, through Ruth’s twelve-year-old cousin doing a scandalous descent to the floor, butt first, upsetting her father—and when the dance floor cleared a bit the woman stepped out beneath the white Christmas lights wrapped in muslin, popped out her collar, rolled up her starched sleeves, and began to dance.
I’d always heard that weddings were supposed to make women horny, and for the first time, I understood. She moved with a flinty, masculine cool, such confidence, and I found myself unable to focus on anything else in the room. I got wet. I felt inadequate, too warm, inexplicably hungry.
When she approached me, my heart slowed. She spun me around like a good swing partner—assured, in control. I let myself go and laughed involuntarily. Gravity was gone.
Later, we danced so slowly we might as well have been standing. She bent her head toward my ear.
“You have the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen,” she said.
I called her two days later, never having believed more firmly in love at first sight, in destiny. When she laughed on the other end of the line, something inside of me cracked open, and I let her step inside.
This baby’s head is bothering me because it’s like a piece of fruit gone bad. I understand that, now, in the middle of this endless desert of sound. It’s like the soft spot on the peach that you can just plunge your thumb into, with no questions asked, with not so much as a how-do-you-do. I’m not going to, but I want to, and the urge is so serious that I put her down. She screams louder. I pick her up and lean her against me, whispering, “I love you, baby, and I am not going to hurt you,” but the first thing is a lie and the second thing might be a lie, but I’m just not sure. I should have the urge to protect her, but all I can think about is that soft spot, that place where I could hurt her if I tried, where I could hurt her if I wanted to.
A month after we met, Bad was packing a glass bowl as she straddled me, poking the weed gently with her finger. When she tipped the lighter to it and inhaled, her body shuddered along an invisible curve, and the smoke crawled out of her mouth one limb at a time; an animal.
“I haven’t done this before,” I told her.
She handed me the pipe, cupped her hand around the bowl, and lit. I inhaled; something flew into my windpipe and I coughed so hard I was certain there’d be blood.
“Let’s try this,” she said. She took a hit and put her mouth on mine, filling my lungs with heady smoke. I took it in, all of it, desire shooting straight through me. As we languished there, I felt my whole self loosening, my mind retreating to a place somewhere around my left ear.
She showed me around her old neighborhood, and I was so high that I let her take my hand and guide me like a child, and then we were in the Brooklyn Museum, and there was a long table that never seemed to end, suggestive and flowering plates for the Primordial Goddess, for Virginia Woolf. We were somewhere in Little Russia, and then a drugstore, and then a beach, and all I could feel was her hand and the warm hug of sand around my feet.
“I want to show you something,” she said, and she walked me across the Brooklyn Bridge as the sun fell away.
We took some days. We drove to Wisconsin to see the Jellyman, who as it turned out was dead. We turned and drove to
the ocean, an island off the coast of Georgia. We drifted in water warm as soup. I held her, and in the levity of the water, she held me.
“The ocean,” she said, “is a big lez. I can tell.”
“But not one of history,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “Of space and time.”
I considered this. My legs gently scissored through the water. My lips tasted like salt.
“Yes,” I said.
In the distance, gray humps rolled out of the sea. I imagined sharks, and the mincemeat of our bodies.
“Dolphins,” she breathed, and made it so.
We sank. She was so much older than I was, but rarely reminded me. She slid her hands high up my thighs in public places and told me her darkest story and asked about mine. I felt like she was seared into my time line, unchangeable as Pompeii.
She would shove me down onto the bed and hold herself upright with my pelvis. And I would let her be there, want her to be there, feel the weight of her, the clarity that settled over me. We’d peel off our clothes because they didn’t belong between us. I would look over her smooth, pale skin, the pink shock of her labia, and kiss her mouth in a way that sent quakes straight to my fault lines, and think, Thank god we cannot make a baby. Because she seized something inside of me that delivered me straight from her bed, from her mouth, from her cunt and her angles and low voice and dropped me into my first domestic fantasy, our first joint daydream: the Uptown Café on Kirkwood, wiping soft little gnocchi pieces from the gabbling chin of a baby, of our baby. We would joke and call her Mara, talk about her first words and her funny hair and her bad habits. Mara, a girl. Mara, our girl.
Back in Bad’s bed, in the good bed, as she slid her hand into me, and I pulled and she gave and I opened and she came without touching herself, and I responded by losing all speech, I thought, Thank god we cannot make a baby. We can fuck senselessly and endlessly and come into each other, no condoms or pills or fear or negotiating days of the month or slumping against bathroom counters holding that stupid white stick up for inspection, Thank god we cannot make a baby. And when she said, “Come for me, come in me,” Thank god we cannot make a baby.
We made a baby. Here she is.
We were in love, and I dreamt of our future. The home in the middle of the Indiana woods. An old chapel that once housed a cloister of nuns, nuns who prayed with their shoulders pressed against each other, and who took vows and called each other Sister. A stone exterior, dried mortar pinched and oozing. Narrow paths winding through old gardens, a new garden where we have turned the earth and put things into it, things that will grow if we care for them. A large circle of stained glass, as tall as me, depicting a pouting bleeding heart in slender slivers of smoky rose glass, two of the panels cracked from age.
Then a kitchen with dark wood cabinets that open to reveal long-stemmed wineglasses, teak boxes full of cloudy silverware, a stove littered with twenty-gallon pots and pans, a collection of six dozen mugs that we have found beautiful or ironic over the years, stacks of plates with chipped edges, a good set for company that we never have. Nearby, a small table with an empty wicker basket, an assortment of solid, unpainted chairs, and catching the light from the window, a collection of glass jars, the labels peeled away, bands of glue rubbed off with a persistent finger, all with the intent of reuse.
Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Cather and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; the Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Kahlo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion.
In the fridge: pickled cucumbers and green beans crowding ridged jars, two glass containers of milk, one good, one sour, a carton of half-and-half, birth control from the age of men that I still haven’t thrown away, a near-black eggplant, ajar of horseradish the shape of a bar of soap, olives, sweet Italian peppers tense as hearts, soy sauce, bloody steaks hidden away in the dry fold of paper, leaking shamefully, a cheese drawer with balls of fresh mozzarella floating in their own milky-water broth, and salami with a dusty white tubing that smells, Bad swears, like semen, rotting leeks that will be added to the compost pile, candied onions, shallots the size of fists. In the freezer, cracked plastic ice trays with cubes swollen past their banks, pesto made from the basil plants in the garden, cookie dough that will be eaten raw despite health warnings. The cupboards, when opened, are cluttered with extra-virgin olive oil, half a dozen bottles, some full of forests of rosemary and fat bulbs of peeled garlic, sesame oil whose glass bottle never seems to lose the greasy sheen on its outside, no matter how many times it is wiped clean, coconut oil half a waxy white solid, half like plasma, cans of black-eyed peas and cream of mushroom soup, boxes of almonds, a small sack of raw organic pine nuts, stale oyster crackers. Eggs on the counter, brown and pale green and speckled and irregular in size. (One of them has gone bad, but you can’t tell from the outside; you’ll only figure it out if you put it in a glass of water and it floats like a witch.)
In the bedroom there is a queen-size bed, a raft in the middle of a great stone ocean. On the dresser rolls a light bulb that, if held close to the ear and agitated, would reveal the broken filament rattling in the glass. Necklaces rope old wine bottles like nooses, frosted stoppers silence glass decanters. A nightstand that, when opened, reveals—shut that, please. In the bathroom, a mirror flecked with mascara from when Bad leans in close, the amoeba of her breath growing and shrinking. You never live with a woman, you live inside of her, I overheard my father say to my brother once, and it was, indeed, as if, when peering into the mirror, you were blinking out through her thickly fringed eyes.
And outside the door, nature. The spinning, breathtaking cathedral of the sky arches above the trees, trees that bend lush and neon green in spring—all buds, then bloom. Sudden rain breaks the tender leaves from their stems and lays the floor thick with a bright carpet. In the tangle of branches, baby birds—the gray and pink of half-cooked shrimp and with bones like dried spaghetti—scream for their mothers.
Then the hazy buzz of summer saunters in, and the air screeches and hums. Cicada-killing wasps catch the weakest and stab them motionless, hauling the weight of their bodies and their glass wings up and up and somewhere else. Fireflies drunkenly dazzle the dark. The leaves are full, dark green, the trees dense and folded in on themselves, catching secrets, and only the violent tear of thunder and the bleach-burn of lightning can pull the grove apart.
And then autumn, the first autumn, our first autumn, the first squash dish, the sweaters, the burning smell of the space heater, never leaving the heavy blankets, the scent of smoke that reminds me of being a Girl Scout and being twelve and camping with girls who hate me. The leaves catch fire, color burning away green like a disease. More rain, another carpet of leaves, yellow as dandelions, red as pomegranate skin, orange as carrot peels. There are strange evenings when the sun sets but it rains anyway, and the sky is gold and peach and also gray and purple like a bruise. Every morning, a fine mist coats the grove. Some nights, a bloody harvest moon rises over the horizon and stains the clouds like an alien sunrise.
And then the dry and curl, the slow approach of death on trillions of radial feet, peristalsis-perfect winterbeast, t
he ground more exposed than we thought possible, the trees alone, the howlgroan of the wind, the smell of the coming of snow. Blizzard throughout the night, illuminated by nothing out here in the woods and in the darkness, except for a flashlight beam from the other side of the window, which catches the fat flakes descending before they vanish beyond its reach. Inside, parched and itchy skin, cool lotion whorled onto backs. Fucking, muffling the cries, holding each other in a pocket of warmth beneath the quilts. And in the morning, we shove open the door, two bodies wrapped and huffing to free themselves into a world where they do not want to go. Snowdrifts turning the nuances of nature into bumps, reminding us to keep perspective, reminding us that everything has a season, reminding us that time passes and so will we, one day. And at the edge of the clearing, mittens turn our Mara’s tiny hands into cartoons, her puffy jacket is zipped up to her small nose, and a woolen hat protects her fine brown hair, and we are reminded that we are alive, we love each other all of the time and like each other most of the time, and that women can turn children into this world like breathing. Mara reaches out and up, not for us but for some unseen presence, a voice, the shadow of a once-nun, un-ghosts of a future civilization that will populate this forest with a city long after we are dead. Mara reaches up, and we walk over to her and take her hand.