by Kyra Wilder
Anyway, that was the end of the parties. But we set up the village, in our new apartment. The Christmas village. Actually, if you want to know, Mother put a board over the black metal bed frame in her room. A big pine board that she found in the parking lot behind our new apartment complex, that was better, she said, than our old house, because it had a pool and a community game room, and she set the village up on that, on the board I mean. We sprayed the board white one afternoon, soon after we moved in, and she brought out the Christmas box as a surprise and set up the little houses even though it was July, and said, See? We can live like we want to now! We can do anything! Anything is possible now. Now that we are here. We slept in sleeping bags together underneath the bed with the Christmas village on top of it for months and months and months. We even left the lights on in the houses all night long so they would speckle the dark walls in the new apartment. We loved to fall asleep to the whirring of the ceramic children skating on the plastic ice. We were waiting you see, for everything to happen.
You mustn’t imagine, my mother said to me once from our hiding place under the Christmas bed, you mustn’t imagine that I’m not any fun. You mustn’t imagine that we can’t now have wonderfully good times right here. I can remember her voice, the way she said it to me. The way it sounded exactly as if she was asking me to give her something back.
There’s something about December for me I suppose, it seems like a place, an island maybe, and January means leaving and February means having left. And here we are. I only wanted to tell you I suppose, because of that.
It seems silly, to talk about Christmas parties, about my mother. Maybe you think so too. Maybe you think it’s quite silly. I tried to tell the doctor about the Christmas parties, about my mother, the village, the dress, but he wouldn’t listen. I said, and I was trying to be funny, But aren’t you supposed to talk about your mother in places like this? But he didn’t laugh. He didn’t laugh so much that it was the opposite of laughing. What is that? I can’t think of the word for it, for the opposite of laughing, but it’s something isn’t it, that leaves one quite alone. He said, clicking his black and gold Montblanc pen, that there were other things to talk about and I said, I was only making a joke! And he said this is not the place for jokes and I said, Honestly! And he said, Honestly.
11
I had the gift for the baby on the table by the door. The gift was just right. M would be home after dinner tonight, I could feel it. I was so certain that he would.
I boiled water for pasta and didn’t walk away from it for a single second while it came up, while it was a dangerous thing. I watched it like a good mother, well I was! I gave E a bowl of warm strozzapreti with tiny slices of tomato and carrot sprinkled on top. Here we are, I said when I set the bowls down on the table and I could hear the way my mother would have said it. The way she had said it a thousand thousand times.
After E went to sleep, after B had been fed and put into his crib, I cleaned the counters and wiped the dirty places underneath the refrigerator. I wiped down all the doorknobs with vinegar and water. I cleaned the sink in the guest room and turned the plant a quarter turn, gave it a little water. I couldn’t understand how it could breathe in there, shut up in that dark little room that should be so different, that would be, after I had made it right.
I wanted to be awake and dressed and ready to talk to M about his day when he came home. To ask a question maybe, how was this or that going. Had this important thing happened? Or that?
When I had first stopped working, when E was a baby and I found myself suddenly at home all alone with her, saying goodbye to M at the door, I found myself wondering, during the day, if I should pick up his socks, do his laundry. If I should now, if I was now obligated to. Only when the paychecks had stopped coming in the mail, flimsy funny things and not ever for very much money but printed anyhow with my name on them and no one else’s, did the weight of them become, to me, clear. Not until they were gone and I no longer had to get dressed or even go outside really. Until I just had to stay where I was every second and make sure that the baby wasn’t killed in one of the many many ways I had been told it was possible for such a thing to happen.
Once, when E was four months old, she reached for something, a toy, her stuffed octopus maybe, and got it in her hands. It was the first time she’d ever done that, reached for something and grabbed it. My heart leapt outside of myself. It was the most amazing thing, is the most amazing thing, I have ever ever seen. My daughter doing this, and I grabbed my phone and called him, called M at the office with tears in my eyes and tried to explain the thing that had just happened but as soon as the words left my mouth I saw that I never should have done it. Should never have called him like that.
Wow! he said, That’s great, but his voice was soft and I kept trying to explain what had happened even though I’d already told him, even though he already knew, even though I could hear the sound of keyboards tapping in the background. Even though I was seeing with creeping horror how silly I was showing myself to be, how tiny and bathrobed and silly and alone, and he said more quietly, That’s great, we’ll talk about it tonight. I’m so sorry, I have to go, he said, I love you. He said all these things that were of course exactly right and it was only me who was silly for calling. Yes, I said, of course, I said, and I was so angry for showing myself in that way. For allowing myself to be seen as I was.
I put on an impractical skirt, an old shirt that almost fit, and sat in the kitchen and sipped a brandy until it was so late that being dressed and waiting felt ridiculous. Then I was relieved that he hadn’t come back after all and I changed back into my apartment clothes and crumpled up in some corner or other. After a while of steady breathing I fell into something that was not quite sleeping but resting. Dreaming in a half dreaming sort of way. There was, in my dream or out of it, the something again, the something in the apartment with me, the something that wasn’t M, that was like a cross between a child and a toad. A thing that maybe could laugh a high little laugh and hide in all the corners of the apartment.
In my dream I was running through the rooms of the apartment. E and B were asleep. I was running to the door, the front door that would let me out, but I was never going to make it because I wasn’t fast enough, because I was carrying the plant in my arms, because its thick green tentacles were slowing me down, slithering along the floor, catching on things. I tripped on something, a toy or a bowl of lemons and fell to the ground. The plant turned to sand in my fingers. The clay of the pot. The thick green stalks. It all melted into the same mess, running through my fingers until there was nothing left.
I woke breathing hard, light slipping in through the shutters. It was yet again and always again and more and more another morning and I’d hardly slept at all. I was losing track of things. Also I was angry at my dreaming self and disappointed.
My dream-self was, I supposed, a terrible mother, no kind of mother at all. My dream-self had been running for the door with the plant in her arms. My dream-self had been leaving her children. Who could have said what would happen if she had gotten her fingers on the handle of the door? Or really I knew. I could have said. I would have been gone.
The morning raked across my exhausted face, there were fresh bruises on my knees and shins. Maybe I had been really running, really stumbling, last night when I had or hadn’t been sleeping.
I ran to the bathroom to take a shower. I felt that if I was not, at that moment, able to rip off all my clothes and jump into the shower and wash away all my sweat and terrible mother dreams I would begin to scream and if I began to scream I felt perhaps that I would never stop.
When I was a child I remember loving to play house which meant mostly playing that I had many babies, at least three or four, to look after. I would wipe their mouths with soft little squares of fabric that my mother cut for me from old clothes and I would change their diapers by tying and untying other squares of fabric around their moulded plastic bottoms. The babies were always almost asleep
in my games, always equally ready to be put down and left or picked up and cuddled. They were always girls, dressed in pink with names like Diamond, Rainbow, Butterfly, depending on my mood.
I was so patient with them, telling them the names of things, pointing out to them what was important, what mattered, what should matter. I thought of the way we would be when the babies were older, we would all be young and beautiful together, like sisters, only with me the most beautiful, the most loved. We would all have long hair that I would comb and braid. Our hair would be thick and golden. We would all be the same height, we would all have the hard, concave waists of dolls.
It was a bit like I, as a child, had thought it would be, when E was born. I taught her all the names of things. Everything about her was a gift from me, from my body. I had made her out of nothing. When she got older though I saw already that I was quickly being broken down for parts. I saw also that I was not the one who would choose my useful pieces. My hands, which were only months ago the hands that brought the world to her, which shaped it and allowed it to exist for her, were suddenly only good for sorting laundry, for scrubbing the hardened crust on a forgotten dish. Well and why should anything be any different. Mothers were mothers, whether we were lying down, torn apart, in a heap of scraps, or tall and standing and all in one piece. Either way, the hands that scrubbed the dishes were loving ones.
When I was pregnant with B, I slept all the time, and when I dreamed, I dreamed of girls standing on the edge of a lake, peeling off pieces of themselves like sweaters and sealing them up into neat little packages and setting them on the surface of the water and with a breath, whoosh, sending them away. Sometimes I could see even when I was awake, the surface of a lake covered with tidy floating boxes. Pregnancy does strange things, I was told by my doctor, to the body. He cautioned me that I must smile and behave cheerfully around E, that I must avoid being nervous, that I must avoid eating tuna, that I must avoid undercooked meat.
I braided my hair while I waited for E and B to wake up, even though I was too old to wear it in braids, as if I were a girl. Even though it made me look older still than I was, bringing out the shallow wrinkles at the corners of my eyes, the deepening lines around my mouth. The bruise on my cheek was yellowing, making my face look like a map for tiny boats to sail on, my eyes becoming the inlets or maybe the whirlpools, safe havens, or maybe something else.
Perhaps the braids made me look chic. Perhaps I would wear my hair like this to give the baby gift this weekend. I would of course have to wear foundation to cover the bruise. It was Friday morning, we would have to go tomorrow. M and I and B and E to the apartment on the other side of the lake. It was Friday which meant that M would surely have to come home tonight.
I took a bottle of pills out from the medicine cabinet and swallowed one or two, I had certainly, only just a moment ago felt a headache, or the shadow of a headache gathering, I almost certainly had. It was good to take care of these things as soon as possible. I cleaned my teeth then opened the bathroom door to screaming and ran off forgetting the braids and the headache to make breakfast, then lunch, and snacks and dinner. Tonight would be different, M would be home. Today I could cook dinner and clean the apartment and love the children and be just the thing that would make everything right. Like a wonderful vase that sets a room off in just the right way. I could be the vase and also the person who cleaned it. If I worked hard and loved the children and M came home to us, everything would be right.
I was tired that afternoon beside the pump and almost asleep on the blanket with B when Nell came to the park. She looked tired too and different than she normally did. Her hair wasn’t brushed to its usual gloss. The strap of her dress was slipping off one shoulder in a way she didn’t seem to want it to. She was patient still with the children. She passed them the toys from her pockets when they asked but she sat listlessly on the side of the blanket and picked at the frayed edges of it when they weren’t looking.
I could answer questions now in French, simple ones, but I couldn’t ask them. The formulations were too hard. I was too liable to get lost inside the sentences. She had new shoes on her tiny feet, yellow ones with a pattern pricked into the leather that I would have had to be quite close beside her to really see well. She had dark shadows under her eyes that rested there like moth wings. What I mean to say is that they were delicate, the shadows, all done up in various soft greys. I expected to see bruises, honestly I was looking for them, but there wasn’t anything to see. Nothing besides those delicate shadows. I wanted things to make sense but I couldn’t piece them out.
I left the pump before she did. I was busy, I had dinner to make, a table that was hungry for it. The other mothers sensed it too, and we all began gathering our things, our ears twitching like deer, moving as a herd, all of us feeling the ropes and strings and pulleys connecting us to our pots and pans and washing machines grow taut around our wrists. But Nell only played with the baby’s hair, handed things to the boy, as I hurried off with the other mothers.
I made pasta for dinner, a sauce with fresh tomatoes and basil, M’s favourite. The apartment smelled like a hot hill in Tuscany. I opened a bottle of red wine and let it breathe. E fed her animals sesame seeds one by one, dripping them carefully into their plastic mouths as if they were tiny drops of milk. They spilled on the floor and I saw this but didn’t chastise her like a hateful stingy mother would but smiled at her and loved everyone.
I thought we could make cookies for Daddy! I said to E, who didn’t look up, so I said it again to B and squished my nose up against his, wrinkling it in exactly the way I had done in a picture that I loved of myself from when I was eighteen. B gurgled at me and I turned back to the kitchen to get the dough ready. It was so hot in the apartment that the butter was melting already, slumping, oozing out across the counter in a bright slick.
I scooped the whole mess into a bowl and added flour and eggs and sugar and stirred it with a wooden spoon in exactly the way I had imagined I would. The dough smelled good and was soft in my hands. I pinched off a piece and ate it. I crushed the sugar crystals between my teeth and ate another piece, then another.
B began to cry, he had been crying and crying all afternoon and now he was crying again. I felt suddenly choked and instead of turning to pick him up, I took a big handful of dough, almost all of it really, and mashed it into my mouth. For a second I couldn’t breathe. I wondered if I would choke to death but it passed, the giant gob of dough, down my throat and I ran fast to get the baby. I sat with him whoosh down on the sofa and slipped my nipple into his hungry little mouth. Good mother. Bad mother. Good. Bad. A coin flipped high in the air, spinning up and up and up.
I brought my fingers across my forehead to smooth away the wrinkles, to bring my face back in order. I used one hand to relax my jaw while I held B in the crook of my arm. I could hear myself breathing, a heehawing sound that I realized was strange even as I couldn’t stop myself from doing it. I realized I was crying and also that I was still wearing my hair in the braids, that I had gone around all day looking like some terrible doll with an old woman’s face, all lined and wrinkled. I realized this and then felt silly and pulled my nipple out of B’s mouth, set him down on the carpet and went to see what was left of the cookie dough. Just enough. I put it in the fridge to firm up and went into the bathroom to undo my hair and put it up in some way that was less terrible, some way that made it clear that I knew what I was.
B was crying again but I found this time I could smile and walk to him without shaking and pick him up and hold him and sing a song to him without the words coming out of my mouth too loudly or too quickly. He smiled at me and I hugged him and I felt again saved from something ghastly and there we were rocking and singing and ready to be watched again, ready to be seen.
When I was little, maybe four, maybe five, I had a butterscotch coloured mouse and I would cuddle it and play with it and carry it with me around our house in the pocket of my shirt. It would sit on my shoulders sometimes and
make a nest in my hair and I could hear it hiding and chewing and squeaking a little. It had a cage with a blue ceramic bowl for its pellets and a water bottle that I decorated with stickers. I didn’t play with it when I was alone though, I wasn’t old enough. My mother watched me.
Until she didn’t, until one day she wasn’t there and I got out the mouse and played with it and it bit me so hard that I squeezed it and it went limp in my hands and I put it back inside its cage and left it there and waited for it to wake up. Of course it didn’t, and we buried it under the plum tree in our front yard. The whole summer I watched the plums on that tree fatten, turning from green to dark purple to almost black. In the late summer, when we ate them, they were the most delicious plums we’d ever tasted. The best that had ever grown on that old tree. Perhaps my mother and I decided then that we were forgiven and who anyway is to say forgiveness isn’t a thing we all deserve? The plums were so good that we ate them for months, in pies, in jam, and fresh too, all on their own, sitting at the base of the tree with the juice running down our cheeks, our chins, our arms.
