All My Mother's Lovers

by Ilana Masad

  The beach is also where Maggie first fell in love—well, what she thought was love when she was fourteen—with a surfing instructor. Pulling into the mostly empty parking lot, she wonders idly if Cleo still works here, but surely not.

  The sun is just starting to go down. It’s hot and orange and impossible to look directly into. Maggie takes her shoes and socks off for the first time since putting them on this morning back in St. Louis, which seems forever ago, and leaves them in the car. The sand on the beach is warm, but no longer hot, and there are cool spots where uneven dips and mounds have created pockets of shadow. She plops herself down close to where the tide is coming in. Some swimmers’ heads bob around in the sea, and there are a fair few people lying on blankets around her, but it’s quiet. No one is playing loud music from their cell phones or Bluetooth speakers, no one is playing volleyball at the nets—it’s as if everyone is choosing to respect this moment, Maggie thinks. Like they know.

  Her lips curl with a half smile, and she shakes away the dramatic sentiment. Pulling her phone out of her back pocket to get more comfortable, she sees a missed call from Lucia. She texts her: Hey I’m here safely just a lot going on and dad isn’t being helpful like at all.

  She doesn’t wait for a response. She figures Lucia can cut her some slack right now. And if she can’t, then screw her, right? It’s been too good to be true, anyway, Maggie knows. No one, until Lucia, ever made her feel like her parents felt about each other. She never talks about it, because it seems like an utterly ridiculous thing to complain about, what with people’s broken families and divorces and parents who drank too much or died too young or left or hit or hurled violent words, but she’s wondered whether seeing such a good example in her parent’s marriage has been detrimental, made her standards too high, her expectations over the top. Lucia is the first person Maggie’s been with who hasn’t made her feel inadequate, but surely that won’t last.

  A cloud partially covers the sun, breaking the light into the kind of rays that look like they belong in a Disney movie. It’s too pretty, Maggie thinks, and her eyes are burning, so she shuts them and listens to the waves instead.

  * * *

  • • •

  BUT SHE DOESN’T manage to stay at peace for long. Maggie ends up scrolling through her social media feeds instead of watching the ocean and the sunset. Lucia spent the day hard at work in her studio, it seems; there’s a picture of her hunched over her pottery wheel, a beautifully captured and sharply focused bead of sweat at the back of her neck. Maggie wonders who took the photo. She knows Lucia shares the studio with several other artists, but the couple of times she’s been there have been at odd hours—late at night after their third date, when Lucia showed her some of her work; an early weekday morning when Lucia realized she’d left her wallet there—and when there was no one else around. Maggie hearts the picture, then unhearts it, thinking it’ll look weird, like she’s thinking about her still-newish girlfriend instead of about the fact that her mother has just died.

  She swipes the screen down to reload the app and get fresh stories at the top, and a jolt runs through her when she comes across Ariel’s post from last night.

  An hour ago the cops came to my parents house to tell us my mom died in a car crash. I don’t really know what to do right now. My sister is coming home and my dad isn’t talking, he’s just sitting there not doing anything, if anyone has any advice on how to handle this kind of thing, let me know. Sorry to be a downer tonight.

  The post has been heavily loved, liked, teared over. Someone wrote “fuck the police” in a comment, to which Ariel replied, “sure, but irrelevant right now they didnt kill my mom kthxbi.” Most of the comments are sympathetic, with some overly long ones in which people share their own experiences with sudden death, or with long illnesses, or with anything that makes them feel like they’re doing something by commenting. At least that’s what Maggie assumes is the point. It’s not like any of this is really going to help Ariel feel better, is it?

  She wonders if she’s supposed to post something similar. If she’s supposed to reach out and tell the whole world that she has suffered a loss. But no, she thinks. It’s nobody’s business but her own. Ariel’s post at least explains how people already knew to send flowers.

  Hollow and numb, Maggie gets up. She pounds the sand off the back of her jeans as she heads to the car, ignoring the marvelous colors stretched across the sky behind her. So fucking what, she thinks, it’s all pollution anyway.

  * * *

  • • •

  BACK HOME, SHE opens the door to Peter’s office and finds the food she left for him untouched. He’s moved from his chair to the chaise longue, where he lies on his side, knees curled up toward his chest. He looks very old and very young at the same time, and Maggie feels a rush of something that she can’t untangle, something that feels like love, pity, and also anger. This isn’t fair, she thinks. Life isn’t, her mother would counter whenever Maggie said that, whether it was about not getting roller skates for her birthday or having her rent raised every year. And Maggie would say that just accepting that doesn’t change anything, doesn’t make anything get better, ever. But maybe, she thinks now, Iris had a point; maybe accepting some things as unfair is as good as it can get.

  Maggie takes the old fleece blanket that lies at the foot of the chaise and spreads it over her father, who is shivering slightly, his arms wrapped tightly around himself like he’s trying to hold on to something. She kneels next to him and stares at his face, its expression so unfamiliar, so unlike the parental, caretaking mask she needs it to be.

  “Daddy,” she whispers. “We’ll make it okay. It’s going to be okay.” She doesn’t know how or why she’s making this promise—she has no idea how to keep it, what will make him okay. Once, when Maggie had another flameout with a girl she was dating, she’d asked Peter how he and her mother did it, and he’d vaguely talked about communication, about absolute trust, about giving space, about loyalty. Maybe they weren’t just platitudes, Maggie thinks now. The tense sadness radiating off him seems to highlight, perversely, just how much he loved Iris.

  She finds Ariel outside again, sitting at the eroding round metal table with its attached curved metal benches. It’s always been there, as far as she knows. They never fixed it or replaced it, even though it smells strongly of metal and rust and is impossible to sit on during the day because it gets too hot in the sun. Ariel is smoking a bowl, to Maggie’s immense relief. He hasn’t turned the outside lights on, and though he has an open book beside him, it’s flipped pages-down.

  “Hey,” she says. “Can I join?”

  He shrugs but holds out the bowl to her.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” she says, then positions the lighter he hands her above the bowl, and draws deeply. It’s weak stuff and tastes kind of old and stale and makes her cough. But she hasn’t eaten in hours, and she’s already in a strange emotional space, so she feels her head beginning to float almost at once.

  “Rarely,” he says. “Shit’s been in my room since last summer.”

  Maggie gets it; getting a little fucked up is as good a way as any to figure out what they’re supposed to be feeling right now. “You’re saving my ass here,” she tells him. “I almost tried to bring some on the plane.”

  Ariel says nothing, not really paying attention to her. He’s staring at the sky, properly dark by now, with some of the brightest stars visible despite the light pollution. They sit together in the cricket-filled quiet, Maggie taking another couple hits, trying to keep her mind occupied with the tactile habit of what she’s doing.

  “This can’t be real,” she says eventually. “I mean. It’s Mom.”

  Ariel picks up his book and turns toward her, and in the darkness she can see only the outline of his face and hair, the glint that signals the whites of his eyes. But his tone is unmistakably acid. “Cool. You think this isn’t real? Then you go identify t
he body tomorrow.”

  For a moment she is equally shocked by Ariel’s anger and the need to identify her mother’s body. But of course, she thinks, of course he is angry with her, his older sister who got five more years with their mother than he did; he’s probably angry at Peter, at Iris, at the whole damn world. And of course Maggie will go and identify her mother’s body tomorrow, and get the death certificate, and do all the unpleasant things that he certainly doesn’t want to do. He called the synagogue today and she didn’t praise him to high heaven for it, so now he’s pissy and resentful. Over something she would have figured out just as well and without boasting about it. And her father, falling to pieces at the worst possible time. How dare they, she wants to shout at them. How dare they grieve themselves into uselessness.

  Maybe, she thinks, taking another hit, maybe she does hate men after all.

  AUGUST 22, 2017

  It doesn’t get easier. When Maggie wakes up on Tuesday, it’s from a nightmare she can’t grasp the details of. She’s sweating in her childhood bed, the sheets soaked.

  It seems like Peter has been up and about the house during the night. The mac ’n’ cheese she’d bought on her way home from the beach last night and left for him in the fridge has been eaten. Ariel must have found the tofu nuggets she’d gotten him, since those are gone too. No thank you, no nothing. Feeling spiteful, she makes just enough coffee for two cups, both for her.

  She calls the police, keeps getting transferred, only to find out that she has to go to the hospital but that she won’t need to see her mother’s dead body, only look at a photograph. She begins to cry, for the first time, and it’s humiliating, that this is when it happens, on the phone with someone deskbound who probably has to talk to dozens of bereaved a day, but the androgynous voice on the other end of the line says nothing, waiting her out. This is surprising. Though there is clearly bureaucracy at work, the people she’s spoken to have all expressed sorrow for her loss, their tone shifting when she tells them what she’s calling about. She’s read horror stories online, of funeral directors making fun of the dead person’s name, of police officers imitating rigor mortis positions, of hospital staff betraying boredom or impatience—maybe that’s where her nightmare stemmed from, she thinks, the articles she was reading before bed. She wonders how much of the niceness from strangers she’s experiencing has to do with her being a native English speaker with a flat accent, with her and her mother’s names signaling whiteness. She wonders if the reason she’s so suspicious is just that she wants to pick a fight with someone.

  The doorbell rings, and she expects it to be more flowers but instead finds her brother’s friend, Leona, on the stoop. “Oh, hi.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Leona says, and rushes into Maggie. It’s awkward, the force of the hug intrusive, unnecessary. “How is Ariel?” she asks when she lets go and Maggie gestures her in. Her eyes are wet with tears, which Maggie finds distasteful; it’s not her loss to cry over.

  “He’s not great,” Maggie says, though she doesn’t know if this covers it. Ariel hasn’t been out of his room yet.

  “Oh my god, yeah,” Leona says. “Look, if you need anything.” She doesn’t say what Maggie should do in that case. Just leaves it hanging there, her eyes wide and weepy, then turns her back on Maggie and goes to Ariel’s bedroom. He opens the door for her, not quite as hangdog as he usually looks at this prenoon hour. He’s smoothed his hair down and is wearing jeans rather than the gross gray sweatpants or boxers he usually sleeps in. He’s had a crush on Leona forever, something Maggie finds slightly pathetic, especially as she’s pretty sure it’s always been one-sided, because Ariel’s basically a good kid with so-so grooming habits and he’s probably too safe or too nice for Leona, whose vibe Maggie recognizes because she used to be like her in college.

  Then again, she concedes, as she watches Leona subject Ariel to the same hug she greeted Maggie with, she doesn’t know anything about this girl, this woman really. Maybe she’s just projecting, remembering that when she was that age, anyone within reach, who actually liked and respected her, just wasn’t good enough, exciting enough. But why should Leona be anything like her? Iris always said Maggie was judgmental. Maybe she was right.

  Before Ariel and Leona close themselves away in his room, Maggie asks her brother for Mrs. Gershon’s number. “I’ll text it to you,” he says.

  Maggie finds evidence of her mother all over the house. A sweater still hanging from the couch cushions where she must have been reading the day she died—the day before yesterday, how is it still so recent—and, in the bedroom, her mother’s Filofax lying on her nightstand, the physical daily calendar and planner she insisted on keeping into the internet age. It’s full of her mother’s tiny, neat handwriting—Maggie has to swallow hard against the rush of emotion brought on by the familiar shapes—with shorthand notes she doesn’t really understand. Things like Call P.??? and Caterers—again! In the back are all the people her mother knows, the phone numbers and addresses and emails, transferred over from one year’s Filofax to the next, year after year, some pages so old they’re yellowing, the ink fading. She finds the number for Janice, the lawyer, and calls.

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” Janice says when Maggie explains. “This is truly awful.”

  “Thanks,” Maggie says, because what else is she supposed to say? The line stays silent for another moment, and she finally asks, “So what do I do?”

  “I have the will here,” Janice tells her, “but I believe the original is at your home. I’ll check to make sure and get back to you. How about we meet next week? There’s no big rush on this stuff, honey.” They make an appointment for the following Tuesday.

  She calls Mrs. Gershon next, who says Maggie can absolutely help out if she wants, but that everything is being taken care of. Mrs. Gershon adds that she and Anya, Iris’s assistant, already got obituaries with the funeral information printed in the Tri County Sentry and a couple of LA papers, since many of Iris’s friends and colleagues and clients are based there. At the word “obituary” Maggie feels another surge of panic—she forgot it had to go in fast if anyone was going to make the funeral, Jewishly early as it had to be. “Good,” she says, relieved. “I mean, thank you. I totally should’ve done that yesterday. Or, I mean, Ariel was going to. But thank you, Mrs. Gershon, really.”

  “Of course, dear. And please, call me Dena. You know,” she goes on, “I’ve known, I mean, I knew your mother a long, long time. Since her first marriage, if you can believe that.”

  “Oh,” Maggie says. And then, as the words sink in, “Wait, what?”

  “Yeah, you know, I worked for Shlomo, her first husband, that . . . well, I shouldn’t talk ill of him, he was very respected in his community, a very good rabbi, but really, he turned out to be such a putz to your mother. And his second wife too, they got divorced maybe a year after they married. Iris laughed at that one, she was so pleased. We both thought he deserved to end up a miserable old man, all alone with the things he’d done.”

  All of this is moving far too fast for Maggie. She knows her parents married relatively late, in their early thirties, that she was born when her mother was thirty-six, and Ariel, a miracle baby of sorts, when Iris was forty-one. But . . . a first marriage? How could Maggie not have known about that?

  “Mrs. Gershon,” she says, “I’m sorry, I have to go. Thank you for taking care of things. What time should we be there tomorrow?”

  “Oh, you won’t be coming here, dear. The funeral’s at the Jewish cemetery in Simi Valley, it’s the nearest one, you know. About nine would be good. The service will start at ten, and then we’ll direct people to your house for shiva after.”

  “I’m, uh, I’m not sure we were going to do one of those,” Maggie says. She hasn’t talked to Ariel or her father about it.

  “Nonsense. You must, dear. You’ll get to hear stories about Iris, she was so loved, she is so loved
, and besides, people will feed you, and your brother said your father wants this.” Peter expressing anything of the sort is news to Maggie, and again she feels out of control, like she’s not needed here, not useful, except she is, she’s fed them both, Peter and Ariel, hasn’t she, and she’s keeping it together and—

  “Okay. Okay,” she says, trying hard not to lose it as her heart pounds and pounds and her hands begin to shake again. “Okay, thank you, bye.”

  Maggie begins pacing back and forth in the kitchen, wanting to sit, to lie down, but scared that if she stops moving she won’t get up again, and there’s still so much to do, even without this revelation about her mother. Why didn’t Iris ever mention her first husband? But no, it doesn’t matter, Maggie thinks, clearly the man wasn’t worth talking about, or he was just so awful that her mother couldn’t . . .

  The thought of Iris as a survivor of something has never occurred to Maggie, and this is what finally makes her sit down, slowly, in the big armchair in the living room, the one no one ever really uses because it’s so deep that it’s not really comfortable. A memory pops into her head, a time she and Iris were in total agreement. A family dinner sometime during her prime Myspace years, so she was probably fifteen or sixteen, Ariel ten or eleven, a rare night with everyone at home all at once, no sleepovers or work keeping anyone away, and Ariel was talking about the weird new kid at school, how everyone said his dad hit his mom all the time, and why would she let him do that. Iris banged her cutlery down on the table just as Maggie turned to Ariel and called him something devastating like “you goat scrotum,” because she was into weird swears then. Iris hadn’t told Maggie off, which was shocking enough, but then she also asked Ariel in her calm-but-stern-voice if he let Chad Nelson hit him last year, and when Ariel said no, she said that most people don’t let anyone hit them and that goes for grown-ups as well as children, and that he should get people at school to knock it off. Maggie remembers saying “Go, Mom,” because it wasn’t something she ever said, and because she was so rarely impressed with her mother, who never seemed to her very political or opinionated, traits Maggie was beginning to hold in high regard.