The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  I drove home and washed my face, dabbed my nose with an antiseptic which stung wildly and brought tears to my eyes. I went out on the back porch in the chill night air, and clipped my nails, watching the crescents drop in the light from the kitchen to the worn porch boards.

  I came in and was looking through a stack of music when the doorbell rang. The buzzer system was broken, so I went down the hall and stood outside my door at the top of the stairs.

  Leo looked up from the well at the first floor landing.

  “No,” I said, and started back in.

  He stood still. “I’ve got the key anyway, Anna. But I want you to let me in. No fighting, I swear, nothing bad.”

  I was silent. His face lifted up to me, white, vulnerable.

  “I know you were at my place today,” he said softly. “I know you took the gun.”

  “Come up,” I said after a minute. I turned and went into the living room. I turned on a light. I sat down on the couch. He came in and shut the door behind him. He stood in the middle of the room, wearing a jeans jacket, paint-spotted Levis. His voice came rapidly. “Anna, what are you doing? I’ve been trying to call all day.” Then his tone changed. “Look, give me the gun, first.” He held his hand out, as though I must have it on my person.

  “I’m O.K.,” I said. “I don’t have it.”

  “Where is it? What did you do with it?”

  “I didn’t do anything. I ended up throwing it away. It’s gone.”

  “It’s gone. You threw it away,” he said. I nodded. He sat down in the chair nearest him and put his head in his hands. “Anna, if you knew what I’ve been thinking . . .” He looked up at me. “What’s the matter with your face? What did you do?” He started to get up, but I waved my hand at him, I made him sit down.

  “I bumped myself, is all.”

  “Jesus, you better talk to me. I pull these bits of some note in your writing out of the trash, my gun is gone and no one has seen you, no one sees you all day. I nearly called your ex-husband, I want you to know, I thought . . .”

  “I know what you thought,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  He stared at me, evaluating my reliability, my sanity. “You want to talk to me?” he said.

  “I almost can’t,” I said after a minute. “I’m sorry. I just had had it, I guess. I’d been very contained and doing everything all right and looking on the up side, as everyone kept telling me to do. And then our fight; and I still don’t know about seeing Molly—I just went crazy. I came over to your place to leave you a note, and then I remembered the gun. But in the meantime I’d called Molly. Or I called Brian—this was from your place—and she answered. And it was just too much, to hear her. So . . .” I lifted my shoulders, as though I’d explained everything.

  “So you took the gun, to do . . . what?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  I sat with my mouth open.

  “Try harder,” he said. “Anna,” his voice was nearly a whisper. “I thought you were going to kill yourself.” He looked at me, asking for something. “I thought you were going to kill me, to kill Brian. I came so close to calling him, to warn him. I called here, I came here two or three times. I called Fisher, Ursula, John and Charlene. I mean, I’ve been going crazy.”

  I still couldn’t answer.

  “I mean, can you imagine if I’d done that?” he asked. “Called Brian?”

  I couldn’t think of what to say. It was like some wild disjuncture between us. I felt as though I’d waked from a long complicated dream, one it seemed as though he was still in. Oh, yes, I wanted to say. I remembered those things, but they weren’t what counted now, they weren’t real.

  Where had I put the gun, he wanted to know.

  “I buried it at Plum Island.”

  “Of course,” he said. “What else would you do with it?” Then: “Why?”

  “I thought I ought to get rid of it. I thought having it could get me in trouble.”

  He stared at me. “O.K., let me get this straight. You came to my apartment, you wrote a note, you tore it up. Then took the gun.”

  “In between I called and talked to Molly. That’s why I took the gun.”

  He just looked at me.

  “Her voice was so dear. I was going to get her. I can’t explain it. It was irrational. But I was going to fly down and the gun was . . . a backup, sort of.”

  “And then you drove to Plum Island instead?”

  “Yes. I’d started for the airport, but then I realized I couldn’t get the gun onto a plane, and I just drove north. Going to Plum Island was a whim.”

  “As distinct from everything else you did.”

  I laughed, and Leo looked startled. Then he smiled back at me.

  “Anna, I was so fucking worried,” he said.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  We sat across the living room from each other, silent.

  “So tell me how you banged up your face,” he said. “You look like you’ve gone fifteen with Marvin Hagler.”

  “That part’s silly,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it. I just got frustrated and hit myself.”

  “Self-inflicted wounds,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll be even prettier tomorrow, I suspect.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Can I stay tonight and watch them changing colors?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I put a nightgown on before I came to bed, and when I slid under the covers next to him, he looked at it, but didn’t say anything. We talked for a while, about when I might move, about what kind of job I wanted to get in Washington. Then he began caressing me, stroking my body gently through the gown. He lifted it, he pushed it up over my breasts and touched them, making slow circles. He kissed my mouth, my shoulders. I turned to him and held him. His hips were thrust forwards against me, and I could feel the gentle pouch of his genitals against my leg. But he didn’t get hard, and after a while we fell asleep, holding each other for comfort like two worn-out children.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  URSULA HELPED ME MOVE TO WASHINGTON. It took us two long days to make the drive because we were afraid of straining the Valiant. There was a large-sized U-Haul trailer hooked on behind us, and it swung and bucked at every bump in the road. It was November, and it wasn’t so much raining, as that the air was made of a cold dampness that penetrated everything. The Valiant’s heat roared inaudibly as we drove slowly along, parching our nasal passages. But as soon as we stopped the car, the cold and the moisture seemed to rise again from somewhere nearly within us.

  On the first day Ursula drove. We hardly talked at all, and I slept most of the way. I’d been up until late the night before packing what I had thought would be just a few last small things. I was grateful to Ursula for her energy, but even more for her silence, her discretion. It was hard for her, I knew. She had slipped once after I’d found out I’d lost custody, exploded with anger about Muth, Brian; told me she thought I’d mismanaged things. “You were just so passive, Anna. You never fought back or anything. You should have told them all off from the start.” She’d come over to help me pack, and was wearing an unusually conservative outfit for her: jeans, a gray sweatshirt.

  “I thought I could get Molly this way.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t, did you? It didn’t help. You played along with everyone and it didn’t help.”

  “What was I supposed to do, Ursula?” I was folding clothes, all the dresses I never wore.

  “Tell them off. Get witnesses. Me. I would have testified for you. I’m a psychologist. In some cultures, kids watch their parents screw all the time. Even in our culture, artists, creative people, have always been deviant. Those fucking rules they were talking about apply to a tiny percentage of the world’s population. They were dealing with an incredibly narrow definition of right and wrong.”

  “But I knew that. I knew those were the terms.” I tried not to think of Ursula on th
e stand in my behalf.

  “Yeah, but why should they have been? Why shouldn’t you have insisted on other terms?”

  “Because the judge wouldn’t have listened to a discussion on other terms.”

  “But you never even tried, Anna.” And then she heard herself. Her mouth made a little O of remorse. She came across the room, grabbed my hand, and said she was sorry. “Oh, God. Some friend. Here I am blaming you, and you’re the one who’s hurting.”

  Now, in the motel, she chattered about everything else. About other long drives she’d taken across the country—as far north as the roads went into Canada, through all the pueblo villages in New Mexico. She told me about a fight she’d had with a lover on that trip, a fight about how to set their tent up. They were camping next to a stream, and it started to rain. They got out of their sleeping bags naked, and began to argue about where the tent poles should go. She said she got so angry at him that she punched him as hard as she could, right in the face. He hit her back reflexively, and they both started to swing wildly, ineffectually, at each other. “There we were,” she said. “It was pitch dark, we couldn’t see a fucking thing, and we were soaked, we had nothing on, and we were both crying, and just hitting each other and hitting each other. I don’t think either of us ever understood it. When we stopped, we just put our clothes on, got back into the car and he drove me to the bus station in Santa Fe. It was the middle of the fucking night. I never saw him again.”

  The motel was a Howard Johnson’s, in northern New Jersey. Ursula had bought some wine before we checked in, and she was drinking it and polishing her toenails. She had on a T-shirt that said I GOT SCHROD AT LEGAL SEAFOOD LAST NIGHT, and under it, flashing brightly every now and then, pink underpants. Her long, heartbreaking legs were expressive as hands as she sat on her bed and talked to me. She had inserted little cotton balls between her toes. She was working on her left foot.

  As I watched her from my large bed, I suddenly realized who Ursula reminded me of: Babe. That same vibrant energy dissipating itself over the smallest things, energy I’d always wanted for myself. She made me feel—as I had with Babe as a child—parsimonious, careful. It was people like Ursula, like Babe, like Leo I admired.

  “Oh, God,” she said, looking up over her knee at the television. I looked too. Leslie Howard had appeared on the screen. “Oh, what a lovely man he was. God, he’s so impeccable. Why doesn’t God make men like that now? I mean who are we kidding with fucking Burt Reynolds?” She reached to the nightstand for another shot of wine.

  I told her I didn’t know, and slid a little further under the covers.

  “You gonna try to sleep?” she asked. I looked at her. Her moon face rested on her knee. Washed clean of makeup, she looked like a little boy.

  “I’m awfully tired,” I said. “I don’t know how you’re still doing it.”

  She waved her miniature brush. “‘Cause I’m dumb,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll hate myself in the morning.” She sprang up, limped to the TV, holding her left toes off the ground. “I’ll turn down the volume anyway.”

  But she was awake in the morning before I was, and drove more than her share even the second day. She said it made her feel macho.

  The apartment I’d rented was in Georgetown, the third floor of a townhouse. The couple who owned it lived below, and had just bought it. They’d renovated the attic hastily, cheaply, so they could rent it and pay their mortgage. The windows were tiny casements; the only stairway up wound in a lazy, narrow spiral off the kitche; There was no way to get the piano in; I’d left it with the women in Cambridge indefinitely.

  Molly was to have the bedroom. I would sleep in the living room on a foldout couch. The kitchen was a little prefab unit in a corner of the living room; the bathroom had been installed in a deep closet. There was no tub, just a shower stall. Even so, I was paying more for it than I’d paid in Cambridge. But it was near Molly’s neighborhood. I could get her to and from her nursery school, her friends’ houses, her life, easily. I thought I was lucky to have found it.

  Ursula was noisy in her enthusiasm. On every trip up with a box or a piece of furniture, she found something else to admire: the way the windows swung out, the hand-held nozzle in the shower. “Can you imagine the sexual pleasure possible?” she called out.

  She helped me assemble Molly’s bed, and then we drove off with the empty trailer bouncing behind us, to pick up the convertible couch I’d bought the same weekend I’d found the apartment. Everett, the young husband from downstairs, had to help us get it in, finally. It was nearly too big. We lifted it slowly, from stair to stair, perched as vertically as it would go. Ursula was in good form, talking to the couch, encouraging it upwards by calling it a motherfucker, a cheap cocksucker, a ripoff piece of dogshit; and Everett didn’t stay for the glass of wine I offered him when we finally got it safely in.

  I drove her to the airport the next day, a Sunday. I’d bought her ticket back, over her protests, and insisted on giving her money for drinks. She pressed most of it back into my hands—“One is all there’s time for on this flight, Anna,” she said woefully. I stood watching her plane until it disappeared into the cloud cover. When I came back and let myself into the tiny apartment, still crammed everywhere with boxes of books, piles of clothing, I felt a sense of loneliness so overwhelming that without bothering to move the boxes that would have made it possible for me to open out the bed in the living room, I went in and lay on Molly’s bed, where Ursula had slept the night before. Through the walls of the old house, I could hear Everett’s and Renata’s voices as a dim alternating vibration. The attic light was gray, leaden and heavy, the air smelled of heat from the new electric units. Slowly, hugging myself, I fell asleep. When I awoke, it was black, quiet. I got up, had some yogurt and leftover Chinese food from my tiny refrigerator, and started unpacking. By the time of Molly’s first official visit with me the following Tuesday, the apartment looked settled, cheerful.

  “Watch her,” Muth had said to me about Molly in our last discussion before I moved to Washington. “You notice signs of real change, real upset with this situation, we can take another shot at it, if you want. As long as we got grounds.” Grounds, he told me, would be radically altered behavior. If she lost her toilet training, for instance. If she suddenly became aggressive at school, or withdrawn. If she became excessively fearful, had extreme sleep disturbances. And a few times I did think momentarily of what was happening to Molly as grounds. Because she was distressed.

  I tried to fit myself smoothly into the life Brian and Brenda had structured for Molly. I’d talked to Dr. Payne once after the decision had been reached, and he’d told me that the more our life together seemed an extension of Brian and Brenda’s the easier it would be for her. But even though I made all kinds of small shifts towards their orderliness, even though everything in my life centered around hers, she still showed the signs that Muth had talked about. More than once I had to carry her, sobbing, limp, or else kicking in rage, into school on Monday because she wouldn’t get out of the car, refused to walk. Sullen, furious, she hunched in the front seat. I would squat in the open door on her side, trying to persuade her to get out, to leave me. Around us, other mothers greeted each other, the children shouted and ran around and walked in on their own. Sometimes one of them would stop to try to talk to Molly, or to watch us. A mother would descend, whisk the child away: “This isn’t a good time for Molly to talk”; “Silly, Molly’s mommy’s trying to talk to her now.”

  And I was. But to everything I’d say, Molly would say, “No”; or worse, say nothing.

  “Molly, it’s time now,” I’d say. “All the other kids are going in. Please, honey, you’re going to have fun.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve got to go to work now, Moll. And I’ll see you in two days” (or five days, or three days).

  “No.”

  “I want you to be thinking hard of two good things that we can do together on Saturday.

  “Molly, I’m going
to wait for one minute, so you can get ready to say good-bye to me, and then we’re going to walk in together. I’m going to start to count now, so you get ready.”

  “No.”

  The teachers got used to her desperation on those mornings. When I’d push open the door, the head teacher, Mrs. Malone, would cross to me, her arms open, and take flailing Molly from me; and I’d leave, hearing her wails, her shrieks, as I walked back out to the car, hearing them over the next interval apart from her as I went through the motions of my days.

  Sometimes she talked openly about it. She’d try to negotiate the terms of her life. Why couldn’t she live with me, she’d ask.

  I told her I wished she could but that a judge had helped us all decide together that it was best if she lived with her father.

  “Why?” she’d ask. Her hair was in thin braids, but wisps pulled out, and now, by the end of the day, she looked as frazzled as she had when it was first growing in.

  “Because he can take care of you better. He has Brenda to help, and Mrs. Reinhardt.”

  Molly was sitting up in bed. She folded her arms across her tummy. “Brenda is a dummy and Mrs. Reinhardt is a dummy.”

  “I don’t think you really think that, Molly. Sometimes you love them.” She wouldn’t look at me, but she said, “I can’t love them when I miss you.”

  “But Molly,” I said softly, “I have to go to work every day.”

  “I can come with you,” she said. She turned to me.

  “Honey. That would be silly. There’s nothing for you to do there. It’s boring. You’d get tired of it in about one second.”

  “I wouldn’t, Mom. I’d be good.” She was eager now. She had genuine hope. She imagined a toehold here. “I can be so quiet. I can just draw, or bring my dolls.”

  “Molly,” I pleaded. “We already decided, honey. This is the best way.”