The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  Over the weekend, I worked four or five hours each day, but we spent the rest of the time together, as though everything were all right between us again. Each afternoon, he stopped by in the truck to pick me up, and we drove out to Walden Pond. We hiked around away from the bathhouses, the crowded concrete piers, to the illegal beaches on the far shore. Even there, the beaches were full until four or five in the afternoon. But then the teenagers, laden with squalling boxes, would leave to get ready for the night; the families would pack up their squabbling children and cooler chests and foldout chairs; the solitary bronze sun-worshippers would put their tubes of coconut lotion into their leather bags, their Guatemalan baskets, and slip away, silent as Thoreau down the eroding paths, and there would be left only a reader or two still engrossed in a book, a few couples.

  Both days, Leo packed a picnic—wine, sandwiches, fruit, cheese. We would eat and swim, and lie next to each other again, the occasional train roaring past in the clearing far across the lake the only reminder of home.

  The water was nearly perfect. You could float on your back motionless on its tepid surface, hearing nothing, seeing only the high blue sky circled by the pointing dark fingers of the pines. Occasionally a stately cloud would ride across it slowly, nearly without changing shape from horizon to horizon.

  Leo and I didn’t talk much; but each day as dusk fell and the silent wardens circled the paths on horses big as nightmares; each day as we slowly packed the tinfoil and plastic cups and utensils into the basket; each day as we shook out and folded the blanket, backing away and coming towards each other as though we were performing some ancient dance; each day I felt a mingled sense of relief and dread. Relief that another marker was gone by, Molly’s arrival was that much nearer. Dread at the idea of another long evening to pass through with Leo, the false intimacy, the touching, the lovemaking bitter reminders of what it had all been like when I felt it, wanted it. He had tried the first night to go down on me, touch me, to do the things which had always brought me sure pleasure. I had stopped him, told him I was too distracted to come, and he seemed to accept that. Still, he was full of tenderness which I didn’t feel. It seemed to request an imitative response in me, and the need for that brought with it rage at both myself and him for my dishonesty.

  When he left late Sunday night, I felt such relief that I could not go back and lie down in the bed where we’d just finished making love. I stood in the doorway and looked at the sheets—rumpled, falling to the floor at the foot of the bed; at the pillow pulled into the bed’s center to raise my hips; at the wet stain near it. I turned and went back to the living room. For a while I rested on the couch. Then I went into Molly’s room. I pulled back the clean sheets I’d put on her bed and slid between them. Watched by the solemn unwinking glass eyes of her dolls and animals, I waited for sleep.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE PIANO STUDENTS STARTED AGAIN right after Labor Day, but I canceled them during the week we were scheduled to see the guardian ad litem. I had only three appointments myself, but Molly needed to get back and forth to his office an additional three times; and she was staying with me while all of us—Brian and Brenda and even Leo—took our turns talking with Dr. Payne.

  Muth had told me about the arrangements as soon as everything was “finalized”—Muth: my lawyer, my ally, my conduit. I’d come to rely on nearly daily calls from him, even if there was no news, or the news was just that he hadn’t gotten through yet to Brian’s lawyer. His voice on the telephone was gruff but gentle. In response to him, I became quieter, more dependent. I’d ask questions I already knew or guessed the answers to in order to feel the comforting expansion of his personality. That would, in turn, make me feel more genuinely as though I couldn’t possibly make it through all this without him. It was like the phenomenon that had occurred with Mrs. Harkessian. At some point I couldn’t tell the difference myself between the feelings I was having because they worked well in the situation, and the feelings I fully owned.

  With Leo too, I had this sense of artificiality, but it was perhaps more intense for being only slightly off from what seemed real. And he was the only one with whom I was aware of the impulse to say what I truly felt. Often I wanted to tell him how angry I was, how unresponsive sexually. Especially at those moments when I was washed by the old love, I’d have the sense that I could tell him, and sometimes I nearly would. But then there’d be the nagging what if: what if he got angry, what if he refused to testify, or testified in ways that would be damaging to me. What if he talked about our long days of lovemaking while Molly was in day care, or those moments—in the bathroom or the kitchen—when we’d come together quickly, listening to her playing down the hall.

  During all of this I felt sometimes as I had in the period of my adolescence when I’d stopped making music and started letting boys touch me: there was that same nauseous sense of falseness in myself as I woke next to Leo, felt his waking arms reach for me, or as I dialed Muth’s number and prepared myself for the comfort I felt at the sound of his voice. But then I’d think Molly, and put those hesitations aside. If this worked, it was worth anything. It would make my need for what I thought was truthfulness seem self-indulgent.

  I’d gone downtown to Muth’s office to prepare for the talks with Dr. Payne—the shrink, as Muth kept calling him. We went over the strategy together, and Muth coached me again in his possessive, comforting way: “Now what we wanna do here,” “Now, what we’re not interested in . . .” I set out for the sessions feeling high, feeling I would manage it all, whatever question Dr. Payne asked me.

  After the psychiatrist had poured me a cup of coffee and set it on the table near me, he sat in his swivel chair, tilted back, and smiled at me. He was a short, ugly man—beetle-browed, dark, with oily skin and the shadow of a beard making his face look unwashed. When he smiled, he revealed big gaps between his teeth. I looked away, picked up my cup. I wondered whether Molly would be afraid of him. He looked like a Maurice Sendak monster in one of her books. Then, as I swallowed the overperked coffee, the powdered milk, I realized that I was afraid of him, of the patience with which he sat waiting opposite me. He was giving me no cues. I didn’t know what to say, what to do. I looked over at him and smiled back.

  “People probably say it all the time,” I said, “but Payne seems an unfortunate name for a psychiatrist.”

  His smile broadened. “They do say it all the time. And then I always say that it’s a kind of truth in advertising, after all.”

  There was a little silence.

  “And it gives people a way to begin talking,” he said. “That’s a help.” His gaze was steady on me from under his thick brows. Like a little ape, I thought. Though the smile had faded slightly, he still had the attitude of expectancy. Behind him, on shelves along the walls, a collection of dolls, puppets—toys he’d use to find out from Molly what had happened to her—seemed to wait, too.

  “I don’t know how I’m supposed to begin,” I said.

  He put his arms up behind his head. “Why not just tell me about the events that brought you here?”

  “That could take a long time, depending on where you want me to start. My whole life got me here, in a certain sense.”

  He laughed. “It was a pretty dumb question. O.K. Well then, let’s start with your little girl. Molly?”

  “Yes, Molly.”

  “Tell me about Molly. What kind of kid is she?”

  “She’s bright, imaginative. But kind of private.” I shrugged. “That’s pretty general, I know.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, tell me, for instance,” he swung his chair around, “which of these toys do you think she’ll pick out when she comes in here?” He gestured at the shelves crammed with bright objects.

  I looked. “It’ll be a toss-up, I’d guess, between the bear—she has one like him—and the tea set. She likes little things, lots of parts. Arranging them.”

  His head bobbed. “And what would she do with the bear?”

  “Well, in some sense
the same kind of thing she’d do with the tea set. She’d be the boss, and then also the bossee. If you put them all together, for instance, I can imagine her bossing the bear around about the right way to drink coffee, or juice or tea. And then being the bear, refusing and being bad. That kind of thing.”

  “Yes,” he said, and nodded, as though this were a keen observation on my part. Then after a minute, “She was in day care while you worked?”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said.

  “Did she like that?” he asked.

  I stiffened. “She seemed to, very much.”

  “She get along with other kids? Have special friends?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Everything was normal.”

  “Normal?” he said, and frowned. “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

  “Well, nothing unusual,” I said. “She liked the other kids, they liked her. She played at their houses some, and they sometimes came over to our house.” I shrugged, but my mouth was dry. Muth had told me Payne was the key to keeping Molly. Now I sat opposite him in his windowless basement office and felt I was failing some test. What did he want from me?

  He was frowning again. “I guess what I’m really asking here, what I’m wondering, is how she was—how she is—special. What you see as particular, or characteristic of her, that might be different from other kids.”

  I looked at him. He seemed only curious after all. Maybe he really just wanted to help me begin.

  I started talking about Molly, giving him examples of her intense involvement in her play, of what I thought of as her unusual compassion for other kids. Through it, he sat and listened intently, always with a slight smile. Sometimes he’d repeat a word I’d used, interrogatively, to get me to expand on an idea; or he’d ask what I meant by something; but mostly he listened. Once or twice he redirected me: “Tell me whether you noticed changes in her play around the time of the divorce.” “I’m wondering whether you’re the kind of mother who really likes to play with Molly, or who’d rather watch, let her run her own games.”

  I had just finished a long description of the way Molly had played with a particular friend from day care, a Korean girl who had no English when she started, but who’d liked what Molly called acting silly. He sat smiling, looking at me. I actually felt relaxed, I’d taken such pleasure in the memory of the two little girls laughing together. In the same posture and without dropping his gentle, gap-toothed smile, he said, “Tell me about Leo—his background, his life.” And he leaned back, as though expecting I would be as expansive on this topic.

  I drank a little of the cold, terrible coffee. After a moment I asked, cautious again, “What would you like to know about Leo?”

  He shrugged, generous. Anything, his smile said.

  “I don’t know what you’re aiming at,” I said. “His work? His relationship with me? Or Molly?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “His credit rating?”

  “Not his credit rating,” he said.

  “O.K.,” I said. I sat up straighter. “His relationship with Molly. It was good. It was wonderful. It was a source of infinite gratification to me. He loved her. She loved him.”

  He looked at me, tilted his head quizzically. “And his relationship with you?”

  “Much the same,” I said quickly.

  “Much the same?”

  I felt he’d tricked me. “With the obvious differences. We were lovers,” I said. “But it was a good relationship.” We sat in silence again. I remembered Muth’s assurance: He’s gonna like you. You just talk clear and articulate, and he’s gonna hear that you’re more concerned than anyone about her welfare, that the thing with Cutter was strictly his mistake.

  “I don’t know what you’re aiming at,” I said again. “I want to help. And obviously, I want Molly back, but I don’t know. . . . You have to help me more.” My voice was trembling.

  “Well, that’s fair,” he said. “You didn’t ask to come here. Or to have your life probed this way.” His voice was steady, gentle. “But let me say I’m not aiming at anything.” He smiled at me. “That has a hostile ring to it, and it sounds as though I’d already formed a judgment on the whole thing that I’m just trying to get you to confirm.” He shook his head. “Not so. I’ll meet Leo, and I’ll meet Molly and Brian, and I’ll get to know them. All of them. So you don’t need to feel entirely responsible for what I think of them. Or responsible at all. What I’m interested in today is knowing you, and part of that is knowing how you see them.” He shrugged. “Pretty simple.”

  “It’s simple, yes,” I said. “But high risk for me. Everything is right now.”

  He nodded. “I understand your feeling that way. But I hope you don’t think there’s any process like one false move and you’re dead. That’s just not how it works,” he said. He waited.

  “I know that,” I said reluctantly.

  After a long pause, in which I was shaping my answer about Leo, he said, “Tell me why you think Mr. Dunlap’s doing this. Trying to get custody.”

  I felt nearly dizzy. How had we gotten here? “I’m sure he thinks it’s right,” I blurted. “He’s a very careful man, a caring man in lots of ways. I mean, I can imagine him hearing whatever it was Molly said and just freaking out.”

  “Did he call you after she’d talked to him? Ask about it? About what you knew about it?”

  “No. He moved.” He looked blank, shook his head. “I mean, he saw a lawyer. But that’s who he is, after all.” Then, suddenly, it occurred to me that I might appear to be acting, to be pretending to be understanding about Brian’s response, that Payne might think this was all a posture, a lie. “Not that I’m not enraged at him about it all,” I said. “It’s just . . .” I felt dizzy again, and put my hand along my face. “It’s just I can so perfectly imagine him, even imagine him zipping around his apartment or whatever, deciding which lawyer, getting the phone number, being terribly efficient.”

  “I see,” he said, and nodded. Then he frowned. “But, why do you think he wouldn’t have called you? I understand from your lawyer that you had a very amicable divorce, and good relations around custody and visitation up till now. Why didn’t he call and say, ‘Gee, Anna, Molly’s saying some strange things to me about this guy you’re dating. What do you know about it?’ Wouldn’t that have been in character in some sense too?” He waited. “Or not?” he said, after a minute.

  I hadn’t asked myself this before. As I thought about it, I had two simultaneous responses. One was an honest consideration, an open asking: why hadn’t he? The other had to do entirely with whether the answer could somehow turn to my advantage.

  “Well, maybe things weren’t so entirely amicable,” I said. “They seemed amicable, but I suppose there was a lot going on underneath the surface.”

  He watched me. I felt for the first time that we were collaborating, as Muth and I had. I felt a kind of rising excitement, a sense of discovery. “I mean, we both wanted the divorce, but he wanted it more, right at the time, because he’d met his present wife.”

  “She was the reason for his wanting the divorce?”

  No, I explained. No. And I tried to describe the year Brian and I had spent agonizing over our marriage, working towards leaving each other, and how Brian had resolved everything, all his feelings about me, by getting involved with Brenda. “But it seemed to me,” I said—and even in saying it I was seeing how it might be true—“that in spite of that, or maybe because he moved so fast into that relationship with Brenda, that he still had some . . . unresolved feeling about me. And he wasn’t comfortable about my dating. I mean, he took an interest in it that didn’t have any connection with Molly, with the question of how it might be affecting her, a kind of, maybe, possessive interest.”

  “Does that seem unnatural to you? Did you have no interest in his affair with Brenda?”

  “No. I was interested. We actually talked some about that. But we were still married then.”

  “You mean, you felt you had more right
to be interested?”

  “Well, more right to talk about being interested anyway. By the time I was dating, he’d remarried and moved away. He was supposed to be attached to someone else.”

  “But you never actually talked to Brian about your dating.”

  “No. And not about Leo. But if I was going out, he’d notice how I was dressed, and sometimes comment. And once or twice he asked me in a vague way, but—I can’t describe it. Anxiously, I guess. ‘Seeing anyone these days?’ That kind of thing.”

  “And how do you connect that with his response now?”

  A long silence. I didn’t want to be responsible for offering the interpretation. Finally I said, “Is it possible that he’s jealous in some way? He’s getting back at me?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Well, I hadn’t thought about it before, but it seems as though it might be . . . feeding his response now, anyway.” I looked at him for the friendly yes, but he was blank, though very interested. I panicked. Show remorse, Muth had said. “Not that he didn’t have good reason to be wild. I’m not saying that. Just that there might have been other steps he could have taken. Even if he got to this one eventually. He might have called, as you suggested.”

  “Did I?”

  “Didn’t you?” I asked.

  He looked at me a moment, then smiled gently. “I did ask why he hadn’t, I think. Yes. I did.”

  I looked away quickly, over at the toys.

  “I’m curious,” he said. He leaned back in the chair and tented his hands together, his stubby fingers arched against each other. “If he had called, if he’d asked about all this, if he’d said, ‘She says she’s been in bed with you and Leo while you were naked, while you were having intercourse: she says she’s touched his genitals’—if he’d asked you about that openly and directly—” He paused, frowning, concerned. “What would you have said to him? How would you have defended, explained, what happened to Molly?”