by JoAnna Novak
“Your body wants flan, something real. Not fake sugar, fat-free whatever. You can’t eat an entire thing of flan can you?”
“No.”
“So, get your mom to buy you good, real-deal ice cream. I don’t know, Moose Tracks. Ben & Jerry’s. Whatever lights your candle. Then you eat that, but only a little—measure it out for yourself, like, say, a quarter cup. That’s half the serving size, FYI. But if you love dessert, and you want to lose weight, you should eat that, slowly. You should enjoy every spoon.”
“Yeah. Sounds better too.”
“Duh. Now, let’s take your Before. Then get dressed and I’ll do your plan.”
··
We’d been standing in the foyer fifteen minutes. Already, I’d demonstrated proper V-up form, explained the notational difference between teaspoon and tablespoon, and given Rocyo a week of menus and exercise sequences and the last issue of Real Talk. There was a new five-dollar bill in my pocket.
Rocyo stood on tiptoes, looking through the liver-shaped window in the front door. She didn’t know it, but she was watching for a boxy Saab driven by a matchstick woman wearing black sunglasses, the gold arms etched with a quilted pattern; matte maroon lipstick, camel hair coat; black leather gloves.
“Where’s your mom?”
“She’s an artist—she’s late a lot.” I was impatient. I didn’t have a rapport with Rocyo, and we weren’t friends enough for silence. Anna was always on poet-time, but lately she’d been worse. After my pre-Christmas sleepover at Lisa’s, my mom had forgotten me. Lisa had gone to church, leaving me alone with her dad, who’d been slamming the double-brewed coffee and heavy cream mixture he called sludge. Thirsty? Mr. Breit had asked, skimming the Trib as I stared out the living room window. No thank you. Too strong? Trick is, you just swallow, Mr. Breit had said. I’d nodded, wishing Lisa had been there so I could make a “your dad” joke, which we’d invented since her mom was so awful you couldn’t even put her in the same sentence as something funny. Instead, I’d imagined Mr. Breit’s long, skinny-chubby body naked, hairy, slapping against … my mind stopped there. The porn had been the only thing I could think of; the girls swallowing a guy’s semen had looked the same as swallowing their own spit. Finally I’d trudged home, snow banks past my non-hips. I’d found Anna in her black silk robe: her knees were tucked mermaid-style and she was scribbling in her journal with a glass of red wine in front of an unlit fire.
“Just remember,” I said to Rocyo. “You can do this. You need anything, I’m here for you. Call me, pass me a note, whatever, hit me up on AOL: ElleGirl80.”
“What’s 80?”
No one had ever asked, even though my interestingness was a scarf wrapped around my neck for anyone to compliment. I blushed.
“My weight.”
“You don’t look like eighty pound. I weighed that in third grade.”
“Well, that’s a ho thing to say! I weigh eighty pounds—” I saw the rabbit-pellet shit I’d expelled that morning. “Probably less. If you factor in gym class and walking during the day and going to the bathroom—”
“All right, psycho. Calm down. Aren’t you here to help me? I need to be that thinny. We don’t go on vacation if I’m fat. My mom says.”
Mrs. Vazquez—Ethan Suva had called her plastica to Rocyo’s face once—fake boobs or not, at least she knew what was best for her daughter.
“You’ll be as thin as you need to if you follow the plan. Hey, speaking of … are you friends with Marissa Turner by any chance?”
“The plan, the plan,” squawked Anthony, his red wings beating. “El culo plan!”
“Huh?” Rocyo said.
I ran a finger along his cage. His black bead eyes, fish-egg eyes, viscid with clear goop and admiration or disdain, watched me. I smooched my lips, kissy kissy.
“Tch, tch, tch. Could you teach him to say Elliot? Ell-ee-it?”
“Maybe? He gonna bite you.”
Her eyes clouded. I wanted her to stroke my calves, lick my ankles, taste every inch of my lightness; instead she opened the door.
“Bye,” she blurted. She let me out to wait on the porch.
9 ·· ANNA
I AM A WRETCHED MOTHER. This I think at 4:42, twenty-two minutes late picking up Elliot, when I’ve hit every red light between the college and the greater kneecap of suburban Chicago that constitutes our school district, when I’ve rushed from Building 13 to the faculty lot behind the old carriage house turned snow blower corral, slipped, fell on a patch of black ice, walloped my knee and road-salted my pants, limped to the Saab, its leopard hauteur—and I’m no animist—extra haughty and judgmental as I dauntlessly descended disheveled into the driver’s seat and listened to my voicemail. Fuck. And this, after I sat in my office, turning through blue books, skimming recollections of the places where my students feel most content: Gram’s iguana room—its white wicker, Uncle Jerry’s deer camp before dementia ate his brain, Mom’s yeasty kitchen when she bakes honeyed white bread, the Sears cabin at Lake Beauty, the ferric springs coiling under the bunk beds at church camp. I waited beyond the last minute for Rot, with the door closed, one hand between my legs testing my sensitivity (I was tingling), then door ajar, then door flung open after I left to gulp two Styrofoam cups of tepid, tea-pale coffee in the across-the-hall faculty lounge. I was hoping like I hoped—only for a moment—during pregnancy to lose the baby. A hard and wrong hope, like hoping to return and walk in on Rot, his feet kicked up on my desk, his Jordans dripping like red-and-black popsicles, hoping to catch him in wait, waiting on me. Dumb trumpery of my wants. And I am a bad mother not for what I have hoped, but for postponing El’s evening. I am keeping El waiting, and after I have received a doom-mongering voice message from Miss Troubaugh. I am bad because my daughter cut my apples, and conscientious, perfervid El has told me nothing about cutting herself.
··
Here, the on-ramp for a tollway out of Illinois. Badness incarnate, I contemplate veering across traffic, letting horsepower and acceleration stamp out all my heart’s base obligations (I should care more for my family, less for my fancy), disappearing into Indiana, where on Weko Beach I have twice felt the sort of inner peace and all-knowingness some readers seek in literature, why, yes, contentment, ENG 101’ers, listen here: Dr. Anna has, if not the answer, at least this one answer. I have meditated on Weko Beach, eyes closed, no mantra, lips parted, no makeup, palms sunward on my knees, a breeze lifting my hair like blackly gray Maypole ribbons, the clap of Lake Michigan frothing the beach, stones and twigs beneath my leggings, feet bare, Elliot launching herself into waves with her father, Papa, in this memory, rufous fur on his face and his chest, our family up in Michigan for a day, six hours, five years ago, when my daughter was a little girl.
My daughter matured when her body stopped curving: I appreciate her subversion.
And now she’s shielding me from her behavior or she’s afraid of my reaction or she’s not thinking about me. I have operated under the delusion that Elliot is me, and now, for the first time, truly truly truly she is not.
I do not turn onto the interstate. I leave COCC’s county and enter Park’s. The Montessori where El attended preschool winks at me. White Hen. McDonald’s. Hardees. Wendy’s. Kmart. Venture. My pathetic path. I am a dog turning around and around in its bed, appalled by my limited options, no place to burrow.
Burrowing defined my middle-thirties: down comforter burrowing, white burgundy burrowing, Mrs. Dalloway burrowing—I was a bad mother five years ago because I indulged in so, so, so, so, so postpartum depression. Nine years partum. Nine years when I felt, not only was I a scourge, but I was a scourge unto others. That year I began running; that year, I shallowed up, let my deep waters settle. That year I gave up on sadness and said what the fuck? En route to El, I am a bad mother not only because I have burrowed, not only because I am late, but because I have burrowed and kept quiet, because I am late and have not let her know.
I withhold my whereabouts, Elliot. And you don’t even kno
w about my mobile.
The car drives forward; I do not. Acknowledging I am a bad mother does not ease my passage. I am a poet and an adult, alive and thinking in 1999. Overanalysis is my kith’s Kool-Aid. We stir our red sugar and slosh the pitcher, steep and stew and store, turn over terms, infuse them with hard spirits, truckle them until they swell with imprecations and implications and incantations and glamour, the archaic, witch work, magic. I study badness until it becomes me. I am bad, I am late, I am so late El has come up with some nickname for my lateness—the aubade hour. Something.
Do my tardies thrill me? No. Will it kill my daughter to stand in a foyer? No. In my courses, partner projects always suffer from unbalanced efforts.
At a red light, the afternoon sun lists through the windshield, its Sémillon honey tipsying the day into night. One blade of the wipers drags its rubber, a black leg against the snow, falling again, those wet, pelting prick-your-skin flakes. I reach to the console for the ugliest gift Rolf has every bought me: a Nokia 5110. He gave it to me for my last birthday, six weeks ago, at the Sybaris Pools in Northbrook, first day of December. He had booked a couples’ massage and hot tub in the Chalet. That was when I knew we’d really bombed marriage: the suite, its white-leather globular armchairs, its cabana with Mr. Coffee, its waterslide, its twenty-two-foot pool, its king-size bed with tufted headboard, its nightstand full of red, white, and blue flavored lube, how none of that led to anything but good, old-fashioned, college-style talking, in armchairs, with plastic mugs of crappy coffee. I appreciate the ugly phone on which Rolf and I talk, but I don’t appreciate the ramble I received from Miss Troubaugh.
“Hello. And I’m sorry to be leaving this on an answering machine. But, this is Jill Troubaugh, I teach Phys. Ed. at Park, and I’m calling because, I wanted to speak with you about your daughter: Elliot’s been exhibiting some unsettling behavior. You might want to take a peek at her wrists. The cuts are … visible. Of course, we don’t like to see any girls—any students, for that matter—in distress, and well, not to discount your daughter’s problems, but we don’t want her starting a trend at Park. You never know which wildfire will spark Salem, if you know what I’m saying. We call this—a cry for help, Mrs. Egleston.”
Mrs. Egleston: that’s Rolf’s mom.
··
“How many minutes since now?” El’s first question: she was two. Good mothers remember first words—bad, first questions, the original opportunity to respond wrong.
“Now’s now,” I said. Newborn, holding my daughter in her pink infancy while I inhaled chapters: that brought me peace, a deep breath of talc and toast. At two, Elliot toddled and talked. I crouched, knelt, hunched, prostrated, an index finger marking my place in whatever book I refused to put down. I set a hand on her shoulder, like I was checking her temperature, though I was trying to slow her, settle her, still her into a nap. “No minutes since now.”
“Now. Now how many minutes since now?”
A million, I could’ve said. Time is a net we fall through. To know now is to strain stars through mesh. Now is a trapdoor. A dream. Now is the imaginary friend adults keep around to jounce the stodge of life. But motherhood frustrated me, even before the job fully began. I straightened my knees and loosened my glance from hers, looked at my book, resigned myself to letting her wander off.
“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
··
Good mothers would be grateful for Miss Troubaugh. I know good mothers, though when I first began teaching Cook County’s impecunious populace—impoverished not only of financial resources but those other wells sapped by compromised monetary freedom—foolishly I assumed I’d instruct Jerry Springer derelicts cast to the Island of Misfit Toys. I was wrong: plenty of my students have fantastic mothers, mothers as upright as Rolf’s—the real Mrs. Egleston. A truly good mother. If only Elliot had known her grandmother: carrot muffins with buggy Sultana raisins, hot cocoa scumming a saucepan on the stove, maybe Miss Troubaugh wouldn’t be calling. Rolf’s mom—her quiddity drove me berserk. Giver of thoughtful, wholesome gifts that would orienteer her son: when he was eight, a map so he could follow along on car trips to the Badlands. Hair unflashy, bobbed, teeth solid as dice, cavity-less, eyes on her flesh and blood until she, taciturnly, closed them. Stolid and jejune sound opposite, but in Ellen Egleston’s case, they were a spondaic match.
Good mothers, as with good teachers, appreciate when children, their pupils, entrust them with secrets. Good mothers like good teachers who, when pupils have outsourced said secrets, reveal those mysteries to perhaps-oblivious parents. Good mothers are good teachers, preparing their progeny to plumb the mines of life.
The student with a bad mother: teachers see her demented shadows, vagrant nightmares. The student who knows she has a terrible mother: teachers see her pounded pummeled putrid hell.
But Elliot doesn’t think I’m a bad mother. That is why she worries me.
The Saab’s blackness pours through the afternoon—the sky turns as fast as a Polaroid, the day darkened, dusky, corvine in January, a nocturnal beast that beats its wings after three. The tires slick the streets, and tsk: where are you going, why, why. I am off-course, demapped, delinquent. The tragedy of ignoring better judgment is that the gift of better judgment is yours to unwrap any instant, the cigarettes, whose carcinogens you curse every day, you still pay for and smoke. Why? Why do we wolf our hearts?
I am not heading to Rocyo Vazquez’s house, where Elliot is working on a project, something that will probably necessitate the purchase of a tri-fold board, the practice of blunt motor skills. Cut. Paste. So my daughter may become a computer. No, though the Vazquez’s gauche terracotta roof blights a five-minute-away sky, I turn into Saddle Drop, one of the few remaining ungated subdivisions, immediately beyond Park, past the creek.
Families new to the area don’t want to live so close to the woods, not quite forest, but trees, enough of them, oak and willow shaded in the daylight, dense treachery at night. Owls noise and possums lurk. Coyotes have been reported, Pekinese maimed. New families are frightened of natural threats more than the old woes: Christian daycares, arsenicked Snickers. It’s a shame: the Saddle Drop homes are solid and stately, like the judicious older man I picture whenever any of my students—against my preference—call me professor. Stone griffins guard the drives, and, up until the first frost, in the lawn of one, peacocks wandered like Latinate words on a flat blank page.
Rot lives next to the peacocks. His home—his family’s home—I aim to spot. Ten or fifteen times, I’ve driven here before, alone always—to crawl by with Elliot would be to ask her to replace the batteries in my vibrator. I have, only once, dropped him off.
Though I’ve never been inside, I have imagined the grounds—namely, the backyard, invisible from the street: a cache of catkins; an unruly scrub from which Rot has fed the next-door birds tiny, wild raspberries; the large in-ground pool in which Rot, with much friction, eradicated his virginity (“water sucks” he told me, after our first, frenetic fuck, and I, ever inquisitor, asked him about his deflowering), where these days he enjoys smoking or sniffing and sipping—vodka and Squirt.
Today I don’t think swimming. I want to return the coke, see where that leads—an excuse, a reason to make contact. I feel adolescent, lawless, and, frankly, wonderful.
I park on the shoulder along the peacock’s lawn, an escarpment dressed in snow. No birds now. Somewhere on the grounds, warmed by an artificial sun, they must coop in fulvous hay, resting, necks crooked like swans. Do they dream of strutting in glitz the way I select clothes? Fetishize isn’t too strong a word, Anna the Pavonine on Michigan Avenue: how much sumptuous black can one woman own? Baby alpaca, Cucinelli cashmere—how much guilt can one woman stomach?
“Beauty will save the world,” said Dostoyevsky. Frippery won’t save El: I began her college fund—now I deplete it. She’s smart, capable, in COCC dialect, “scholarship material.” Other mothers have done worse, I think—a home renovation—and
then I remember our bathroom. Rolf and I have never aired the laundry about money.
“If the ill spirit have so fair a house”—well, Rot’s home is nicer than mine.
The black leather glove on my right hand, $275 in that orange box: I unsnap the cuff, pull it off, open my palm and reveal, keen as a scimitar, Rot’s home phone number.
This is a development. A step. An alteration to which I refuse to assign value: not more or less, better or worse. I witness. I call a thing a thing: our communication up to this moment has been restricted to Rot’s pager. Simply: I am creating change.
What you do matters, my yoga teacher preaches, and, Pavlovian, my knee aches from slipping in the lot. Tomorrow, I won’t run: I’m getting on the mat, moving through vinyasa.
I turn off the Saab’s lights. The mobile phone is gray, cold from all-day in the glove compartment, Game-Boy-ish in my hand. I dial and wait.
What I want is for him to pick up. To cut me off before I can finish hello. For him to run out to the street, no coat, to tumble into the passenger seat, to grip my shoulders and press me back against the seat and clamp his mouth over mine, to knee my legs apart and, after I’ve gulped hard and tipped my neck and wound my hand around his back and up and around and cupped his cock, after that I want him to slit the baggie with a razor and line the torus of my collar bone with powder and snort me up and up until my skin numbs, and in the Saab, all over my body liquefies just thinking about him. Clench fists glutes calves toes eyes jaw ears cheeks stomach shoulders biceps—more, more—okay: let it go, this is yoga before down go the lights and out comes the lavender oil to anoint our temples, before we are permitted corpse pose. I am stuck outside final rest in the hiemal clench of cold as the phone rings.
