Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  * * *

  • • •

  RICHARD IS KIND AND BEARDED and gentle, a jazz guitarist moonlighting as a vegetable salesman at Dean & DeLuca in SoHo, where I am working twelve-hour days as the book department manager. He hums Coltrane, he knows the difference between a San Marzano tomato and an Early Boy. He’s moved all the way to New York from Bend, Oregon, where his single mother, a devout Mormon, still lives. There’s another man on the other side of the store, Oren, an actor moonlighting as a cheesemonger, sweet and long-haired, half Italian, half Jewish, hooded eyes, small round wire-rimmed glasses, a cross between Wings-era Paul McCartney and Armand Assante.

  The vegetable man doesn’t talk much. He asks me out for a beer one night after work; I go. Three days later, we are in his bed in Brooklyn. We move together like a cymbal-playing windup monkey; sex is mechanical, a purely hormonal explosion between two people not yet thirty. Prime baby-making time for both of us. I come hard, violently, whenever he touches me, wherever he touches me, from the back of my neck to my knees. We barely speak. We have nothing in common and nothing to say to each other, but we do it everywhere we can: in the walk-in after hours, on the foldout futon in my apartment while Julie is on a shift, at midnight on the black linoleum floor of Manhattan Fruitier in the East Village, surrounded by shrink-wrapped holiday gift baskets and a massive gray-striped mouser who stares at me while the vegetable man’s head is between my legs. I close my eyes; I see Julie.

  * * *

  —

  “Shouldn’t you be married and having babies around now?” my six-year-old cousin Russ announces during Thanksgiving dinner with my father’s family. “Shouldn’t you be a mommy soon?”

  Even at six, he knows the drill. He knows what’s supposed to happen, what’s expected. The table gets quiet; Aunt Sylvia, my father’s older sister, the family matriarch not given to easy approval, is an arbiter of tradition, her tall, teased hair coiffed and sprayed into a foot-high caramel mousse, dressed in a blue-and-gold paisley silk dress. She repeats her grandson’s question. Shouldn’t you? Everyone looks over at me.

  It is 1988; a time of excess. Hair is huge, massive shoulder pads make svelte women look like Dick Butkus, drugs are everywhere and easily procured. After we close the store, my friends go out dancing at the China Club or Au Bar. They make out on the catwalk over the dance floor at the Limelight. The vegetable man and I drink longneck Bud Lights at the local Italian dive bar on Mulberry Street and ride the subway back to his place. We fuck for hours on his bare mattress on the floor, a candle stuck in an empty Chianti bottle. Tal Farlow plays on his stereo. We lie on our backs and share a joint. We drink a magnum of screw-top Mountain Rhine that makes my teeth ache. I ride the train back to my apartment alone. The next morning, I don’t recall how I got home: the train ride, the Chianti, the jazz, the joint. When I wake up, Julie has left for the hospital. A note written in her doctor’s scrawl sits on the dining room table, leaning up against a half-empty bottle of Corona. Your mother called three times, looking for you. Didn’t know what to say. May come to the store later.

  * * *

  —

  Unlike the vegetable man, Oren the cheese man, who never stops talking, looks at me and my knees quaver; our relationship is heavy flirtation in the locked basement stockroom we call the cage and cheap burgers after work. I don’t want to be alone with him; I can barely form words when I’m around him. When I see Oren, across the display cabinet housing the smoked fish and the white Italian truffles, my ears burn. Heat floats off my face in sheets.

  One night after I close out the register and lock the doors, I meet him at the Old Town Bar, where he is waiting for me, drinking stout from the bottle and watching the Knicks. He sees me in the massive mirror hanging behind the bottles of liquor, turns around, snakes his arm around my waist, and pulls me in to him. He smells rank, of ripe Époisses and olive brine, and I lean hard against him, as though I want him to take on the full weight of me, of my life. Oren and I drink English beer and Manhattans, sharing a bench in a quiet booth at the back of the bar. We eat fatty, wet burgers that drip melted cheese down our chins. We talk about music and food and Sting and Trudy Styler, and what a modern family can look like—men with men, women with men, longtime unmarried couples having babies—and the childbirth scene in Dream of the Blue Turtles, which, he admits, made him cry. We make out on the corner of Eighteenth and Broadway, my back pressed against the window of a sporting goods store, cars honking around us. Get a room. Oren flags down a taxi and kisses me and helps me in. I drive away, across town and back to Julie, who is dating an accountant; when I get home, I see that she’s left her Birkenstocks outside the bedroom door. It rattles in its frame for twenty minutes.

  I feed the cats. I sit down at the dining room table and go through the mail. I pour myself a glass of wine, and then another. I try not to listen. I play the messages on our answering machine: It’s your mother. Call me as soon as you get this. Beep. I said It’s your mother. I demand that you call me. Bye. The rattling stops. My hands shake; my chest hurts.

  * * *

  —

  The day after my burger date with Oren, a customer wheels a baby into the store. Oren washes his hands and steps out from behind the counter, unbuckles the infant from his harness, and lifts him high into the air. The baby coos with delight. Oren coos with delight. I watch him from my station on the other side of the store, past customers and managers and the whir of a hand-cranked Italian meat slicer. One of the store owners sashays down the aisle with a Pekingese on each arm and says something to me that I don’t hear. I steady myself against the counter.

  “There’s someone I might like,” I tell my father that night.

  “Have you told your mother about him yet?” he says.

  “No,” I say, “I haven’t.”

  “Don’t,” he says. “She doesn’t need to know.”

  * * *

  —

  We’re out to dinner on the Upper East Side: Oren, my father, and his second wife, Shirley. I haven’t slept with Oren—excuses: a date with my mother; Julie is at home; our schedules don’t mesh—but I’m introducing him to my family. He gets up to use the men’s room. My father leans across the table, folds his hands, and smiles. His blue eyes crinkle at the corners.

  “We like him,” he says, smiling warmly. “Does he like children?”

  “He does,” I say. “Very much.”

  “Oh forgoddsake, Cy,” Shirley says, “stop pushing.”

  It’s okay, I say.

  “Babies look good on you,” he says. “You didn’t tell her yet, did you?”

  No, I shake my head. No.

  I don’t want my mother to know, but keeping it from her undoes me; it makes me ill. It feels cruel and spiteful and a vindication for a lifetime of psychic consumption. That a woman’s only daughter won’t share her joy with her feels wrong. But it will be engulfed, consumed. A partner will force me to choose; a baby will force me to choose. My mother or my child.

  * * *

  —

  After dinner, Oren brings me home to my empty apartment. Julie is away, visiting her family in Nebraska. He leads me into the bedroom and onto the bed and pulls my sweater off over my head. My body is shaking and screaming for him. I close my eyes; I see her.

  “Stop—”

  He reaches behind me and unsnaps my bra. I feel him against me.

  “Really—stop—”

  What, he whispers.

  “I can’t—”

  Yes, you can—

  “No—stop—I can’t—”

  Why? he whispers.

  “I can’t—stop—”

  We untangle ourselves. Oren steps into the bathroom. He emerges minutes later. He dresses in silence. He kisses me on the head, like a friend, and leaves.

  I see him at the store the next day and the day after that; we avoid each oth
er. We look away.

  I want to run, to settle down, to fall in love, to have a baby, but not with him. Not with Oren, or the vegetable man, or any man.

  I want to have a baby.

  I want to have a baby with her.

  * * *

  • • •

  “SO, ARE YOU SEEING ANYONE?” my mother asks. Her eyes are opened wide. She is unsmiling. She stares at my eyebrows while our server scrapes crumbs off our table.

  I’m dressed in my SoHo work uniform: pleated black Italian leather pants stuffed into soft, flat boots, an oversized gray sweater, matte makeup, nude lipstick. She and Ben have picked me up in front of the store on Prince Street where I’ve been waiting for them outside, still in my apron. She rolls the window of the Volvo down and shoos me back inside like she’s swatting a fly. Nobody but the help, she says, should be seen in an apron. We drive three blocks west and park around the corner from Raoul’s, where we eat at the VIP table in the restaurant kitchen. This irritates my mother, who would rather be in the front room, near the bar.

  “I don’t even like eating in my own kitchen,” she says, as the server clears our steaks frites, our tarte Tatin, our coffee. “Don’t they know how important you are?”

  “I’m one step up from stock girl, Mom—” I say. She winces.

  Ben goes outside for a cigarette. She waits for him to leave. She unclips her massive hammered gold hoop earrings and puts them on the table. She has a question for me. Is there a man. Because, she says, I seem different.

  “No,” I tell her. “I’m not seeing anyone.”

  I drain my glass; a good Côte de Beaune. Our server nods at me and brings another.

  “Why don’t you go to the Ninety-Second Street Y? Lucille’s daughter goes Israeli folk dancing there. She met a fella. Yaron. You could meet a fella.”

  “I’m not going Israeli folk dancing, Mom—”

  “You want to be without a man—”

  “I’m not going Israeli folk dancing, Mom—”

  She wipes her lipstick off on the linen restaurant napkin, hauls out her makeup bag, and dumps it on the table between us.

  “So you’d rather be without a man. That’s why you have no eyebrows and wear no lipstick. You want to be fat. In an apron. A fat woman in an apron with no eyebrows. Just to spite me. Because you hate me. I know exactly who you are. You don’t know—”

  “—Right—what you gave up. Tell me what you gave up,” I say. I suck down my wine.

  “Men only want women with eyebrows. I know the truth.”

  “Stop already, forgoddsake—” I say.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself—” she growls.

  “Of what? That I don’t look like you? That I’m not actually you? That I chose not to be? Please, Mother.”

  She is seething now; almost thirty years of fury bead on her skin like condensation. There is nowhere for it to go; her anger sits on the middle of the table like a bouquet of flowers.

  She reapplies her lipstick; she blots her lips with the linen napkin.

  “I gave up everything for you. I gave up my life for you. That you should spite me?”

  The server steps over and pours us water. Silence. We stare at each other. Who are we? How did we get to this place of such rage, of such relentless disappointment in each other?

  A young French couple come in with an infant and sit down at the table next to us. I force a smile. I’m exhausted. The baby, dressed in a tiny blue-and-white-striped shirt and matching pants, catches my eye. The baby smiles at me. He reaches toward our table and makes a grab for my index finger.

  “They like you,” my mother says.

  “I like them,” I say, smiling at the child.

  “Well, I hope you have a lot of money,” she says. “Because you know, they cost a lot of money.”

  My mother catches the child’s gaze—wearing mounds of shiny, clanging jewelry, she is often the object of baby stares. She sticks her tongue out at it, hard and far and long enough for me to see the muscles in her neck strain and pop. Her face contorts and twists. She’s being funny.

  The baby lets go of my finger and turns away, confused and unsure.

  20

  I WAS A SMALL BABY. The family story: My mother didn’t know she was pregnant for six months. When her fingers swelled and she couldn’t get her favorite antique garnet ring off, her sixteen-year-old niece suggested she see a doctor.

  In a blurry picture of my parents taken by Gaga in Carl Schurz Park, the evidence is barely noticeable: There is my mother, her blond hair tall and sprayed, the East River a ribbon of musty gray over her shoulder, industrial Queens behind her in the distance. Her wrists are so slender even in her ninth month that her charm bracelet, heavy as Marley’s chain, threatens to roll over her knuckles and off her hand. There I am: the incontrovertible affirmation of her pregnancy, and nothing more than a minuscule bump under her pink-and-white cotton blouse. My mother carried me to term, almost nine months from her wedding night. I weighed four pounds at birth, which, for scale, is more or less the size of an average supermarket chicken.

  * * *

  —

  A mother and a daughter are an edge. Edges are ecotones, transitional zones, places of danger or opportunity, says Terry Tempest Williams in her memoir, When Women Were Birds. Williams’s mother, a Mormon, left her daughter her journals when she died, as Mormon tradition dictates; they were blank. Williams searches for her mother, for her mother’s voice, for the edge they shared. Edges are places of danger or opportunity; why can’t they be both—danger and opportunity? To unpack a maternal disconnect that would result in a mother’s not knowing she was pregnant for six months—that she was carrying a life inside her own life—is to court peril. Danger and opportunity coexist in our life, side by side. She carried me. She was pregnant. An ecotone: a region of transition between two biological communities. How could she not know that she was carrying another life?

  “Because I just didn’t,” she tells me over breakfast one day, not long before the accident. We’re sitting at a diner. I ask her to confirm whether the story is apocryphal, a conjured-up tale by an errant cousin with no particular love for her beloved uncle’s new wife.

  “But didn’t you miss your periods?” I ask.

  “Who pays attention to such things?” She shrugs and pulls a silver tube of lipstick and a plastic green compact out of her purse. “I started retaining water. Then I knew there was a little problem.”

  A little problem: a big deal that will foretell the future. A predictor that she should have paid attention to and perhaps didn’t. My father sent her a ten-dollar bill rolled up in a gold pinky ring after running out of cash on their first date. A little problem with money. She started retaining water. A little problem. An unplanned baby.

  My mother pats the space between her rib cage and her navel. She winks. Retaining water. She pulls apart a roll. Bits of it fly everywhere.

  She peers into the tiny compact, purses her lips, snaps the compact closed, and puts it back in her bag. She stops and lifts a finger to add something; her eyes narrow as though she’s trying to focus on something in the distance. A sudden memory, and then a pronouncement.

  “I got sick after a while. I started bleeding.”

  She leans forward across platters of overcooked egg-white omelets, no potatoes, no cheese. The gap between us closes.

  “I almost lost the baby,” she whispers.

  “What?” I say.

  “The baby—I almost lost the baby.”

  “You almost lost me?”

  “The baby,” she whispers again, emphatically, peering from side to side. She nods.

  “So I had bed rest,” she adds. “And then the baby was fine.”

  She flips open her cell phone and checks her home machine.

  * * *

  —

  My
mother speaks of me, prebirth, in the third person, disconnected from her and from the being who grew into the little girl who became the woman sitting opposite her sipping an Americano. I almost lost The Baby—the source of her water weight and her sickness, her fat ankles and her swollen fingers. Shame coils around us as we sit in the red Naugahyde booth staring at each other; like cancer, no one dared talk about such things fifty years ago. Women became pregnant, went into the hospital, had babies, and came home. But my mother was as divorced from the workings of her own body, and from who and what she was carrying in her womb, as an amputated limb. Over the years, the disconnect will repeat like a loop: She will have kidney stones and not know it, cystoscopes and colonoscopies without sedation, stitches around her eye without lidocaine, an explosive ankle fracture and want a single white Tylenol. She will carry a growing baby in her belly—another life; a life inside a life, nested like a Matryoshka doll—for six months and not know.

  Congenital analgesia: the inability to feel pain, to feel life, to feel joy, to feel death. The ability to will it away, to live a world in suspension. The mother-daughter connection gossamer, flimsy as a crepe.

  Like many women of her generation, my mother smoked while she was pregnant: at the six-month mark, after getting the news about her condition, she dieted to excess to retain her pre-pregnancy modeling weight. And then, on a Saturday night at New York Hospital, she gave birth to The Baby, narrow and small, extracted from the birth canal with forceps, the way one might remove stuffing from a turkey.

  In keeping with the Jewish custom of naming a child after someone long-lived, they decided that my first name should start with an E, for Esther, Gaga’s mother, and my middle with an M, for my father’s grandmother Mary. My father’s eldest niece, Maida, had died young, and his family insisted that my M should be in honor of her. The first family fight: Would I be named after someone who lived into her late eighties or someone who died in tragedy at fifteen? My mother threatened to walk out. Gaga reminded her of the vagaries of raising a child on her own in the sixties. My mother stayed.