by Rae Meadows
When the first breast had produced four ounces—the left always outperforming the right—Sam wiped her hands on her already juice-splattered jeans and detached one side from the pump. The clock on the coffeemaker read 12:19. She still had four hours before she had to pick up Ella, which gave her plenty of time to start throwing. But this was a specious pep talk. She felt scattered, her mind pinging with worries that had nothing to do with clay. Talking to Theo had unsettled her, and there was the mouse-turded box sitting on the other side of the table. Maybe it was the prostitute who had made her feel like she was frivolous for worrying about her creativity, when the girl had to degrade herself to pay for a shitty motel. Or maybe it was that, out of sight, Sam didn’t think about Ella as much as she thought she would.
And there was always the first baby, the boy they would have named Charlie, the son who would have been three years old. She had wanted to forget—she and Jack never talked about it—but of course she found herself fondling the what-ifs, wondering what he would have been like, rooting out her tamped-down guilt. At the twelve-week ultrasound, the test to assess the amount of fluid behind the neck of the fetus had given the radiologist pause, but the measurement was on the edge of normal, and the hormone markers had been reassuring. She hadn’t even been worried about it when the large needle went into her abdomen for the amniocentesis. The results—delayed by a lab error—were delivered over the phone two weeks later by a doctor filling in while her own doctor learned to surf in Costa Rica.
Trisomy 21, an extra twenty-first chromosome. Down syndrome. Sam was the one in seven hundred. “Oh, and it’s a boy,” the doctor added.
Before she’d gotten pregnant, she and Jack had both been sure and emphatic about what they would do if she were carrying a Down’s baby, but of course they really had never considered that it might happen to them. When it did, she no longer felt such certainty. She had already felt the baby kick, though she tried to convince herself that the flutter was indigestion. Sam willed a miscarriage that didn’t happen. She’d had to go to an abortion clinic near campus—the hospital did not perform them—sitting with Jack among the college girls and their boyfriends in the waiting room, not allowing herself to look at her belly, not allowing any second-guessing, any recognition of the wavering, of the thorny moral brambles that surrounded her on all sides.
She had banked on that great myth of closure, but almost four years later she still came up short.
Her left breast was empty. Sam switched off the pump, eager for the silence. She put her bra and shirt back on. The refrigerator trickled and hummed. Squirrels skittered across the roof. The furnace switched on with a click and a ramp-up of blowing air. The sun warmed her back through the window. She wished she were already at her wheel, her left elbow braced against her hip bone, her wet hands forcing a hunk of spinning clay into a centered cylinder, that hypnotic physicality that took her out of her thoughts. But she couldn’t bring herself to get up, walk the six steps to the door of the basement, go down a flight of stairs, and dig her hands into the clay. Getting started seemed too high a hurdle.
Instead, she grabbed the opened cardboard box and dumped the mouse droppings and old wadded newspaper into the garbage can. She eased out the bulky wooden box from inside and set it on the table. It was quite beautiful, really, made of maple, she guessed, with a darkened patina of wear and oil. Sam admired its well-made, solid construction, with its close-fitting top and brass hinges. The underside of the lid was lined with fraying red silk, three rusty needles still threaded through the fabric. Iris had never been a sewer, but maybe she’d just liked the box.
Sam took a breath. Here she was with things her mother had saved and purposely packaged up to keep, yet had not realized, or had not cared, that they had been lost. Inside was a series of envelopes. Iris had always liked things to be contained. After the divorce, she had said that one of the things she liked best was living in an order that no one would mess up. At the condo, her sweaters were individually bagged, her coins were sorted by denomination in bowls—made by Sam—her refrigerator was a neat grid of Tupperware, and even the remote control for the TV had its own little basket. Sam picked up a manila envelope from the top of the box, bent the metal clip straight, teased open the flap, and spilled the contents onto the table.
Out came a rubber-banded set of yellowed index cards, recipes, written in a female hand, the loops long and fluid. Sam fanned through the cards—Charlotte Russe, Molasses Bread, Butterscotch Pudding, Tennessee Silver Cake, Jenny Lind Cake, the last a strange confection with brandy and raisins and strawberry jelly. The desserts were a peculiar bunch, dated and unrefined and very unlike Iris, whose signature dessert had been a flourless bittersweet-chocolate cake. Sam was intrigued by the antiquated formality of one of the names, Conserve of Roses, and pulled out the card to read the recipe:
Gather petals from bloomed (but not wilted) roses. Weigh them and set aside. Put an equal weight of sugar in a bowl and add only enough water to moisten, set in the sun until sugar is dissolved, then place over low heat. As soon as the syrup boils add the petals. Stir gently for ten minutes, then remove from heat. Cool and pack into jars.
Were these from Iris’s mother? Sam knew little about her, other than that she had been a farm wife in Minnesota, who’d grown up, coincidentally, somewhere in Wisconsin. It was hard to imagine the no-nonsense countrywoman she’d seen in photos bringing Conserve of Roses to church potlucks.
In another envelope Sam found a pocket calendar from 1965, a program from a middle school production of Cheaper by the Dozen with Theo playing the part of Frank Gilbreth (efficiency expert and father of twelve), purple marker scribbles on a piece of faded red construction paper (assumedly by Sam), some sheet music of Christmas hymns, a sow’s-ear purse losing its beading.
A tattered movie ticket stub from 1940 fell to the table: His Girl Friday, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. She tried to envision her mother at thirteen staring dreamily at the big screen. Iris had kept this reminder for almost sixty years. What did it really mean? Sam wondered. An artifact without context begged more questions than it answered. She used to think she understood her mother, but the truth was, in the end, Iris had become more of a mystery. It was as if when she had gotten divorced and then moved away, she had turned back into who she’d been before becoming a mother, a woman Sam never knew, or maybe she had become someone altogether different.
In Sanibel, Sam would sit her mother in the sun on the balcony on a chaise, a blanket around her fragile legs, and they would have tea and scones from the nearby bakery each morning, and they would talk as if she weren’t dying.
“You don’t know that I’ve become a reader in my old age,” Iris said. This woman whom Sam had only ever known to read magazines was reading To the Lighthouse, the plastic-covered book in her lap. “I never had the patience before, but it’s as close to meditating as I’ll ever get.”
“What made you choose Virginia Woolf?”
Her mother pursed her lips. “I suppose I should have solicited advice from your husband. But a nice young man in the library recommended this book. And I liked the idea of a family at a summerhouse, even if the initial cheeriness is deceptive. I hope I finish it before I kick the bucket.”
“Mom.”
“Have you read it?”
“In college, I think.”
“Well, it’s wonderful. Maybe you should take it with you. I don’t think the library will track you back to Wisconsin.” She laughed and then had to rest a little to regain her breath.
Sam found herself unable to tell her mother those things that she thought impending death would spur, like admitting that she had aborted the first baby. Why couldn’t she tell her? Now, of all times. If her mother said it was okay, that Sam had made the right decision, she might feel absolved. But Sam could not trust postdivorce Iris to say what would make her feel better. She could not trust that Iris would act as her mother.
“You’re looking at me like you want something,” Ir
is said. “I’ve got nothing for you. No platitudes. No great wisdom. You don’t need anything more from me, Samantha.”
She opened her book then as the sea air lifted her dark hair a little from her face, now gaunt and bluish but smoothed with an unfamiliar contentedness. The baby had rolled over and Sam had felt utterly unequipped for both the birth and death that were coming.
“You know what my mother used to say?” Iris had asked. “People think too much. And I’ve come to agree with her.”
“Mom?”
“Why don’t you pick yourself out something to read. There are some home décor magazines on the coffee table in the living room.”
* * *
Sam’s neighbor Ted, who lived next door in a tottering Victorian with a chicken coop in the back, approached the front door with his usual springy jog, and she was glad she’d put her shirt back on. Ted wore his white hair in a bowl cut and favored flannel shirts and bleached-out jeans. He’d gone to college at the university during the smoldering late sixties and never left Madison, now teaching math at the local junior college. Raking and shoveling were the usual occasions for conversation—Ted was an obsessive shoveler who made sure his sidewalks were iceless and perfectly edged—and Jack particularly loved to get him going about October 18, 1967, when Ted was one of hundreds of students who protested recruiters from Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm.
“We blocked the Commerce Building and then the cops rolled in. Motherfuckers whacked us with clubs. It was a bloodbath,” Ted had said, waving his hands in the air, the first time they’d met him. “Have you ever been tear-gassed? Well, avoid it if you can. It’s really scary. Awful. You can’t open your eyes, and it feels like you’re choking. Fucking cops.”
One of the things Jack liked most about Madison was living next door to Ted. He’d go out to shovel, and an hour later, when he came back in raw-cheeked and sniffling, he’d impart some new nugget of information, some new shading to the portrait of his neighbor.
“Did you know that Ted used to be a Teamster?”
“Did you know that Ted has a twenty-seven-year-old daughter who lives in Poughkeepsie?”
“Did you know that Ted’s hair went from brown to white in one year?”
Ted was a never-ending source of mystery. Why did he keep his TV on all day and all night? What happened to Mrs. Ted? What did he do with all that space in his large house? Sam and Jack loved to fill in their narrative about him, speculate, hypothesize, and always they would laugh, not out of mockery but of a shared mirth about Ted’s curious humanity. This was when Sam and Jack were good together. They didn’t laugh much anymore, or she didn’t anyway. Sam imagined Jack at work, charming it up in the English Department, relieved to be away from her. How could she blame him?
Ted cupped his hands to the window and, when he saw Sam, gave an animated wave, his eyebrows raised and his mouth smiling wide and open.
“Hi, Ted,” she said, opening the door.
“Howdy. Can you believe it’s fall already? Man, I swear it was just the Fourth of July. Where’s the kiddo?”
“She’s at a friend’s house.”
“That’s good, that’s good. Sorry to interrupt.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. Come on in,” Sam said, meaning it, happy to see him.
“Just for a second. Just for a second,” he said stepping inside the door. “I just wanted to tell you that you’re parked on the street-cleaning side. Didn’t want you to get a ticket.”
“I totally forgot. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it,” she said.
“Sure, sure, no problem. I don’t want anyone to fall victim to those overzealous parking nazis. I circulated a petition a few years back to change the signs since it’s not clear in the winter when you’re allowed to park where. Got twenty-one hundred signatures.”
“Wow. Whatever happened with it?”
“Nothing much. But I got to meet the mayor.” Ted danced a bit in exuberance, his white hair flopping. “You look like you’re in the midst of a project.”
“I was going through a box of my mother’s things from years ago.”
Ted puffed out his cheeks and shook his head. “When did she pass?”
What a funny euphemism, Sam thought, as if her mother merely walked by the window, out of sight.
“A year ago,” she said.
“It’s an adult rite of passage, isn’t it? My father was a hoarder, can you imagine? He had twenty years of Sunset magazines stacked from floor to ceiling. And a whole room full of coffee cans. I’m not joking.”
“What did you do with all of it?” she asked.
“At first I went through it, piece by piece, looking for clues, you know, something to help me make sense of the man.” He laughed. “But after two days I realized there was nothing there for me to find. I wouldn’t know if I came across something important without him to explain it and give it meaning, right?” He gave an exaggerated shrug, with bent elbows, his palms up to the ceiling. “So I rented a Dumpster.”
“Where was that, where your dad lived?” Sam asked.
“Los Alamos, New Mexico. Where I grew up. He worked on the H-bomb, but I didn’t know about it until years later. You can imagine we never quite saw eye to eye.” He clapped his hands once. “Okay then. I’ll let you get back to your business. It sure is a random collection, isn’t it? The stuff that remains after a life.” Ted pulled open the door and stepped onto the porch. “Just wacky,” he said, shaking his mop-top head. “Okay then, see you! I’m off to teach.”
Sam waved and smiled. Some gems for the Ted file. She was warmed by the idea of presenting her new findings to Jack over dinner. Maybe she would make linguini carbonara and arugula salad and act like things were as they used to be. But then she remembered he was getting takeout and there was the looming commission for his colleague that she couldn’t start, and she wasn’t sure what being normal was anymore. She used to think she knew herself, but in the past year her certainty had fallen away.
The tree-roots guy. She’d forgotten. While she had been staking out the Sunrise Inn, he had come and gone.
* * *
How many opportunities there must have been to detect her mother’s cancer. It was already metastatic stage four when Iris was diagnosed. Cancer cells had spread from the original tumor in a milk duct to the axillary lymph nodes to what the doctor referred to as distant organs, in this case her bones, where they continued to grow and multiply, eventually taking over her liver and lungs. Months, years even, when she could have noticed a lump, gone to the doctor, taken care of it with a straightforward lumpectomy. Sam tried to block the persistent insidious thought that Iris had waited too long on purpose.
She shoved the laundry into the washing machine, making sure Ella’s tiny socks were at the bottom so one wouldn’t float out and clog the drainage tube again. She started the wash and then surveyed the basement.
One thing, she told herself, just do one thing, and the will to create will self-perpetuate. The clay trap she’d installed on the utility sink was full and black, the caught particles from rinsing her tools and sponges had turned into moldy sludge, so she squatted and unscrewed the plastic jar. But she’d forgotten to empty the spigot, so water and ooze splashed down all over her hands, a fetid pool that trickled toward the floor drain with the rank smell of organic decomposition. She had to laugh. After a cursory mop-up, she emptied the trap of old clay and washed her hands.
The ring of the phone jolted her into panicked mother mode—Ella, Ella, Ella—and she ran upstairs to get it.
“Hello?”
“Everything’s fine, don’t worry,” Melanie said.
“Ella—”
“Is asleep in the Pack ’n’ Play like you were sure would never happen. I checked in with Sarah ten minutes ago, and she had nothing to report, other than Rosalee saying shit when she spilled applesauce into her lap.”
“That’s great,” Sam said, trying to sound convincing. “I mean about Ella.” Part of her had wanted this babysitter
experiment to fail, she realized. She had wanted Ella to miss her too much. Sam had wanted to be summoned, to swoop in, to prove to everyone that she wasn’t crazy for not wanting to be apart from her daughter.
“You don’t fool me, Samantha. I know you were hoping you would have to come get her. But that’s the rub, isn’t it? They can actually exist without us.”
Sam could hear the click click of Melanie’s laptop keyboard. She wedged the phone between ear and shoulder, and looked into the refrigerator, grabbing a half bottle of Riesling—where it had come from she couldn’t say—and then a glass from the drying rack. She took them both to the kitchen table.
“I’m glad it’s working out,” Sam said. “I am. I mean, okay. I wanted to be missed. But now I’m glad. I swear.”
“How’s it going over there?”
“I couldn’t even manage to open a bag of clay.”
“That’s okay. I spent the whole morning reading celebrity gossip blogs and playing online Scrabble with my mother.”
“I’m stuck, Mel.”
“I know. The first year kicks all our asses. Go get a massage or something. Today is not the day to launch back into making stuff.”
Sam was thankful, then, for her friend, to whom she never gave enough credit. She pulled her favorite mug—a large egg shape glazed in a lustrous celadon—from the cupboard and poured herself a glass of wine.
“So the real reason I’m calling: we want to have you guys over for dinner next week. With Kelly and Michael. You met them at that barbecue we had over the summer. Thursday?”
“That sounds great. Let me check with Jack—”
“He’s clear. Doug already asked.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“But with one caveat,” Melanie said. “You can’t bring the baby. You have to get a sitter. If you don’t have one I’ll get you one. I mean it. If you bring Ella, she’ll be spending the evening on the front porch.”
