TWO DAYS EARLIER, I’d brought up the possibility of my going to Iraq; I’d asked Irma if she thought the Gilmores, the other family for whom she worked, would possibly agree to allow Sam, their two-year-old son, to accompany her back and forth to my daughters’ school for pickup on the Mondays and Fridays that I would be gone.
Irma was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, carefully loading the pieces of the girls’ Operation game back into the cartoon body, setting off a loud buzz with every slip of the tweezers. “Doctor, will he live?” I’d said, knowing Irma, whose early knowledge of American life was gleaned from soap operas, would find this funny, but Irma simply dropped in the Adam’s apple, then the broken heart, remaining stone-faced and silent.
“Iraq? Why would you want to go there?” she said.
Coming from Irma, the question caught me off guard; she was not in the habit of asking why. Her queries were normally of the when/where/how variety, as in “When is the makeup piano lesson?” or “Where is the birthday party?” or “How do you expect me to pick up one from piano and the other from a birthday party at the same time?”
“What do you mean, why?” I said. “It’s an important story. I got an assignment. I’m thinking very seriously about going.” I could hear my voice tinged with the anxious conviction of a teenager. I was invited. All my friends will be there.
“And the girls?” She laid the tweezers down astride the slot for the spare ribs, setting off the buzzer once again. “Oh for goodness sake.” Then, quite uncharacteristically, she ripped the instrument from its cord.
“Irma!” I laughed. “Oh my god! I’ve been wanting to do that for—”
“What about the girls?” she repeated, staring down in mild shock at the frayed edge of the wire, as if suddenly realizing the depths of her power.
And I told her that the girls would be fine. Irma said she didn’t think so. I said I thought she was wrong. She said she thought she was right. And thus we continued, back and forth, lobbing the ball gently, politely, until I finally asked her why she didn’t think the girls would be fine. That’s when Irma raised her eyebrows so far into her forehead that I suddenly became defensive and muttered, “People who live in glass houses . . .” before instantly regretting it.
Irma had three children, several years older than mine and living with her mother thousands of miles away in Mambajao. Most of what she earned paid for their school tuitions, clothing, food, and her mother’s rent, while the rest covered her daily filet-o-fish, her Christmas visits back home, and a windowless room located a good thirty-minute walk from the nearest PATH train. I’d learned of her domestic arrangement when she first came to our apartment for her interview, back when Daisy was still joined to me at the hip, back when I was still naive to the rudiments of late twenty-first century American childcare. Unaware that this was the trade-off for many women in her field, I idiotically teared up and asked how it felt to be so far away from her children. Irma smiled politely and said, “They live with my mother. They are in good hands.” Then she promptly changed the subject back to Daisy’s nap and bowel schedules.
“Glass houses? What does this mean?” she was now demanding. As I sheepishly explained the origin of the phrase, she tightened her eyes into little knots. “I may be far from my children, yes, and believe me every day I know what I am missing, but I’m not holding a gun to my head while I’m gone.”
“IRMA, I . . .” I was now sitting on the bench inside our front door, watching Daisy search for her piano books, wanting to explain myself but finding it hard to formulate a thought, let alone voice it. I was struck by an unfamiliar scent. Of course. The bar of soap in the apartment had been Dial. Our family used Dove. I realized, with another sinking feeling, I’d have to shower all over again. And then, with yet another one, that maybe Mark wouldn’t even notice.
“Why don’t you stay here with the little one today,” said Irma, again seeming to sense my inner noise. “I’ll take Daisy to her piano lesson.”
“That’s a great idea. Thanks, Irma,” I said, suddenly wishing I could pay her twice her salary.
I threw myself into a guilt-induced state of maternal over-drive, playing six games of pick-up sticks with Tess and listening in rapt attention as she jumped from her surprise upon learning that Dr. Seuss was a man to her concerns about global warming to the plots of the last three episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants. But all the while, as I watched her mouth move, I couldn’t stop replaying the afternoon with Renzo, which ran like an endless loop on the movie screen behind my eyes. My clothing began to feel restrictive. I needed to be free of them. And, I suddenly realized, of my daughter.
“How’d you like to watch SpongeBob right now?” I asked Tess.
She looked at me as if I were insane. “What about homework?”
“You can finish it later.”
Her eyes widened even further. “But we’re not allowed to watch TV before dinner. That’s the rule,” she said.
“Well,” I said, picking up her birdlike body and plopping it on the couch, “That’s the great thing about rules. Sometimes they’re meant to be broken.”
“Really?”
I flipped on the cable box. “Really,” I said. I told her I’d be right back, that I was just going to take a quick shower.
“But you never take showers at night,” she said.
“Didn’t I tell you? Today is opposite day!”
“Opposite day? . . .” Tess was saying, scrunching up her nose, but she was already sucked in by the TV, and I was already halfway to my bedroom, throwing off my clothing onto the floor piece by piece, turning on the shower nozzle as hot as I could stand it. I scrubbed my body with the family brand of soap, vigorously rubbing my arms, my legs, my torso with Dove, trying to erase every last trace of Renzo and his Dial. Now I ran the bar between my legs, half mortified, half stunned by the swell of delicate skin there, still sensitive from the afternoon. I placed the soap back in its holder and returned to the same spot, my knees growing weak until it was all I could do just to lie on my back, the water hitting my chest like rain on a windshield, the cold porcelain tub growing warmer beneath me, until I was shuddering, crying out once more.
Of course Adele disrobed for Lenny Morton that day in her kitchen, it suddenly struck me, as I lay there under the warm water, drowning in shame. It was the only logical way for her to go on living. To prove to herself that she was, in fact, alive.
CHAPTER 19
“DO YOU DREAM about having intercourse with him every night?” asked Dr. Rivers.
I’d just owned up to what had happened between Renzo and me, after explaining how I’d spent the rest of the week in an agitated state, trying to decide whether or not to take the assignment in Iraq while madly screening and transcribing my footage of Mavis and Trudy; tracking down various manufacturers of Kevlar vests while simultaneously rereading through Dr. Sherman’s sessions with Adele; struggling to find the right moment to discuss the idea of couples’ therapy with Mark while dreaming nightly of Renzo, who’d emailed me upon his return to Rome:
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re:
Mon Eliza,
It was lovely to seeing you the other day. Too lovely, perhaps, and I will keep these souvenirs of our rendezvous in a safe place, as I hope you will, too. I am assuming you will not to join me in Iraq, but perhaps I am wrong. It seems to me that you have other things to which you must attend. I do not want to be of interference. I myself have complications. A baby who will to come very soon, as I explain, but other things as well. But not to worry. I will call to Bernie, and I will tell him I make this change of mind. (Jonesie is old horse, but he can still pull the wagon.) But I will also be pleased for your company if you decide to do the voyage. Please continue your other reportage. It is interesting to pursue, I think so, this mother in the woods with her children, so write it and perhaps I will get a chance to read it one day. Bisous, Renzo.
“Nearly every nig
ht,” I said.
Dr. Rivers looked at me, hard. “What do you think this man represents?”
“Oh, I don’t know. All the normal cliché things, I suppose. Freedom. Love. The path not taken. I’ve been ashamed to even admit it to you, much less to myself.”
The night I received Renzo’s email, I’d finally called Mark at his office to broach the subject of Bernie’s assignment, which, in my state of heightened agitation, I was suddenly leaning toward taking. At the sound of the word Iraq, Mark actually picked up the receiver without my having to ask him to get off speaker-phone. “Iraq!” he’d yelled. “Elizabeth, have you lost your fucking mind? Do you remember what you were like when you came home from that last trip to Kosovo? You didn’t get out of bed for three weeks. Three weeks! And what about the girls, huh? Have you thought about them?”
“I was pregnant with Daisy,” I said. “I was tired. As for the girls, I have two words for you: Christiane Amanpour. She’s been in and out of there, and she has a son.”
Which he’d countered with, “Well I have three words for him: years of therapy.”
I hung up the phone and peeked in on my daughters asleep in their room, feeling that familiar ache, like a cavity, in the center of my chest. Tess was lying on her back, her mouth half open, her cheek nuzzling the blanket in which she’d been swaddled as an infant. Daisy was smiling, even in sleep; there were times at night when I’d actually hear her giggling, out loud, middream. Would that continue if I left? What about if I never came back?
I wandered into their room and sat down on the toy-cluttered floor, where I watched, by the light of Daisy’s lava lamp, with a mixture of fascination and revulsion, Tess’s gerbil John Lennon trying to traverse the length of the cage with nine babies attached to his underside.
The hairless, blind, pink-brown creatures had been deposited from John Lennon’s uterus into the far left corner of the cage in the wee hours of the morning. The pups spent the next week alternating between squeaking and sleeping, with frequent visits to John Lennon’s nipples in between. We’d spent the next weeks watching them. We watched them sleep upon our waking and wake upon the girls’ arrival home from school. We watched hairs sprouting on backs and eyes opening up, first the left then the right, or sometimes the right then the left, depending on the pup, which frightened Tess at first until we Googled “gerbil babies” and discovered that a twenty-four-hour delay between eye openings was normal. We watched each one take its first tentative steps away from the warm pile. We watched John Lennon playing Sisyphus while trying to keep order in the cage, or at least a majority of the pups in the same general vicinity as the others, as he ferried them in his mouth, one pup at a time, from one end of the cage to the other and then back again.
But mostly we watched John Lennon nurse. Or rather, I watched John Lennon nurse. I watched him nurse in the morning, while helping the girls get ready for school. I watched him nurse during working hours, when I should have been either time-coding my footage or at least drumming up paid work to subsidize the whole endeavor. I watched him nurse an hour a day, two hours a day, three and sometimes four hours a day, watched the little bodies of John Lennon’s offspring squirm, writhe, and wiggle under his still-swollen belly, while he sat there, patiently, and I sat there, transfixed, on the floor of my daughters’ bedroom, squishing Daisy’s water yo-yo ball in the palm of my hand, squeezing the liquid in it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until one morning its rubbery surface sprang a pinhole-sized leak, sending a fine stream of liquid in a great arc.
I watched that furry, fluffy, formerly male gerbil, whom I still wasn’t able to connect with a female pronoun, even though clearly he was a she, nurse and nurse and nurse and nurse until my eyes were blurry and red, until I was interested in nothing else, until even Dr. Rivers, who was initially intrigued by her patient’s identification with a lactating rodent, became alarmed. “What do you think this avoidance is all about?” she asked, and I shrugged it off, like an alcoholic dismissing the severity of her affliction. “It’s not like I look in on him that often,” I said. “You mean her.” “Huh?” “You said him. You meant her. The gerbil’s a her.” “I haven’t been able to make that transition yet,” I snapped.
John Lennon was struggling that night I received Renzo’s email, the weight of the pups pulling him down as he hobbled along toward the exercise wheel. He’d never tried such a feat before, never tried to move from here to there while suckling the pups. Ringo Starr might have been running around the cage at top speed, hopping on and off the spinning wheel like a kid with ADD, but John Lennon was always sitting there perfectly still, perfectly quiet, patiently nursing.
And now, here he was, the mother of nine, trying to make his way across the cage. And as he struggled to take each step, I found myself rooting for him, willing him to make it to the wheel.
“Go!” I whispered. She—she!—was halfway across the length of the cage, when a few of the pups lost their grip and fell off, freeing her to move more quickly to her goal. Now she was less than an inch away from the wheel, with only five pups remaining on her teats. And then she took her snout and nudged it into the remaining suckling pups, until each and every one of them were, once and for all, unsuckled. Triumphant, she hopped up on the wheel and started to run, unencumbered and free.
“You did it!” I said.
I trudged, lead-footed, into the kitchen. I poured myself a small glass of wine and fumbled around in the back of the battery drawer until I found a pack of stale cigarettes and lit one. It tasted wretched. After a few puffs, I laid my head on the table and gave into the blackness, my chest convulsing up and down without restraint.
When I’d finally calmed down, I opened my laptop and composed my reply.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: re:
Dear Renzo,
Yes, it was lovely. Too lovely, you’re right. And there’s no need to call Bernie. I’m going to call him tomorrow to turn down the assignment. But when you come back . . .
. . . if you come back, I thought to myself, erasing the last fragment. I paused for several minutes before composing the rest, knowing what I wanted to say, but petrified by the thought of actually typing the words.
But if you ever make it back to the States, I would like to see you again. I’m not sure how that can happen, or if you even want that to happen, or if you have any plans to be back here anytime soon. I just wanted you to know that the possibility of spending another afternoon with you is something I could hold onto, even if it never comes to pass. Love, E.
I hit “Send” before I could convince myself not to. Then I erased both his message and my reply.
“So do you think you love him?” said Dr. Rivers. “Or do you think you love the idea of him?”
“I could answer that if I were rational right now,” I said. “But I’m not feeling rational these days. In fact, some days I feel completely paralyzed.” Besides, I thought, Renzo never even bothered to write back. Not that I expected him to do so, just that I still held out hope that one day he’d become the kind of man who would. “The other night Daisy walked into my bedroom when I thought she’d already gone to sleep, and she caught me crying into my pillow. Then she asked if maybe I was thinking about killing myself, like the woman in my documentary.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“I told her of course not. Of course I would never kill myself. But . . .”
“But what?”
But, I wanted to say, it felt a little bit like a lie. “Nothing. I lost my train of thought.”
After a long pause, during which neither of us spoke, Dr. Rivers asked how my editing was going.
“Okay,” I said, perking up a little bit. “Not great, but okay.” On the one hand, I told her, it was nice being able to edit the material right on my computer. Plus the footage I’d shot of Dr. Rivers’s office—slow pans and zooms and rack-focus shots of her couch, the walls, her Eames chair, the r
ustling trees outside the window—wound up working really well under the dialogue between Adele and her psychiatrist, which I’d hired two actors to read. On the other hand, the two main interviews I’d shot so far didn’t cut together well at all: the segues between Mavis and Trudy were jarring, ill-flowing. And frankly, each of their explanations as to why Adele killed herself and her children seemed predominantly influenced by their own biases and experiences. “I’m just not sure it’ll hold together. Everyone’s versions of what happened are different.”
“Of course they are.”
“I know, but it just means there’s no central voice. No reliable guide through the footage. I mean, I can’t be the guide, because I have no idea what happened. But if I let the characters tell the story themselves, Rashomon-style, they all, well, it’s not that they lie, per se, it’s just . . . I want it to be true.”
“As in factual.”
“No, as in true.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
I’d taped my first-grade class photo up on the wall facing my desk, to remind myself of the task at hand: to find out why April Cassidy never made it into that photograph. But of course to answer that question, I had to try to imagine the mind-set of her mother, and it was there, in the realm of the imaginary, where I kept stumbling. Worse, the harder I worked at finding my way into those woods, the more times I sat in front of the footage and tried to splice it together into a cohesive whole, the further away from the “truth” of the story I felt. I didn’t want to judge Adele, though I sometimes did, or to castigate her, though I couldn’t help doing so, or to create a polemic attacking the crime, though the first introductory paragraphs of voice-over I’d written were just that. I wanted, more than anything, to understand her: to crawl under her flesh, to feel her heart beating in my chest, to see a world turned hopeless and dim through her own eyes.
“You want to empathize with her,” said Dr. Rivers.
Between Here and April Page 17
