by Rae Meadows
As she buttered her muffin, the phone rang. It was her son, of course. He called every morning, dutifully, from the office. She imagined his daily to-do list: attend partner meeting, orchestrate bank merger, call dying mother. This was not fair, she knew, but he had grown increasingly patronizing as her illness progressed, spurred on by his fear of her death and his inability to do anything about it. But it was tiresome nonetheless. Iris sighed and picked up the phone after the fifth ring.
“Hello?”
“Mom? Are you okay? How come it took so long for you to answer?”
“Just having some breakfast, sweetheart. No need to send an ambulance.”
She could sense her son bristle at her making light of his concern. Iris pictured him at age three, marching around the kitchen, livid at the indignity of not being able to go outside in the snow.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, as if taking a deposition.
“Oh, pretty good today,” she said. “Your sister arrives tomorrow.”
“Listen, I wanted to talk to you. There’s this guy up at Mayo—”
“So you’ve told me. Theo, please.”
“I could have you on a flight this afternoon.”
“I know you could.”
“Mom.”
“Enough,” she said, with as much motherly force as she could muster.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll come down soon. A few weeks tops.”
“I’m not going anywhere. Love to Cindy,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound disingenuous. What he saw in her, Iris would never know. Her daughter-in-law was humorless and persnickety, though pretty, she supposed, and well maintained. So much effort went into appearances—Iris had never seen Cindy without makeup, even early in the morning—it seemed an exhausting existence. But maybe it was just because Iris recognized a familiar keep-up-the-façade streak in herself, and that made her critical.
She took a bite of English muffin, but chewing was an effort, and the toasted surface was sharp against the roof of her mouth. The rain began in fat drops. She breathed in the smell of the wet wood of her deck. She tried to think about what food might appeal to her—the other day she’d tried a McDonald’s cheeseburger, only to give up halfway through. Maybe one of her mother’s puddings or trifles, she thought. She’d been famous for them at bake sales and after-church socials. They had been too sugary and rich for Iris, but now a bite would be nice. What had she done with her mother’s recipes? When she’d cleaned out the farmhouse after her mother died, Iris didn’t save much. She kept her mother’s worn wooden sewing box, the rounded corners and dovetail edges so lovingly crafted by her father. Inside, under the sundry spools of thread and rusted scissors and fraying pincushions, she’d been surprised to find a little old Bible, as if her mother had hidden it there. But somewhere in the ensuing thirty years, Iris had lost track of the box. And, apparently, the recipes. She could envision that neat rubber-banded packet she’d found, oddly, in her mother’s top dresser drawer. Iris wouldn’t have thrown them out, even if she’d never used them, never even taken the rubber band off, for that matter—what was she going to do, make a Jenny Lind cake?—but she knew she didn’t have them here in Florida. She could account for everything here, part of the beauty of containment. Maybe Glenn had taken them; he’d always had a big sweet tooth. Glenn. It was amazing that she had been married to him for forty years. Forty years! For the most part they had been a compatible pair. They’d had disagreements but had never really fought. He had been providing and nice and a decent weekend father. She had never asked herself if she was happy, so she had never had to answer. But familiarity is not the same as love, she knew now, and when he’d finally left her—she’d known about Marie for years—and the anger and fear had settled down, Iris had felt unburdened.
It was time for the day’s first fistful of pills. Iris poured a glass of milk and pulled the amber plastic prescription bottles down from the windowsill, each with a clack against the lemon-yellow tile counter. Sanibel, this condo, this tile even, had been such a pointed turning away from the look of her former life. It was quite strange how all at once, after the divorce, she no longer cared about the trappings she used to: the Windsor chairs, the refinished chests, the oak dressers, the eighteenth-century mirrors, the colonial brick house, the North Shore country club. Her children misread her move—“A condo in Florida? You don’t even like the sun. What are you going to do, play shuffleboard?”—as sadness, running away, depression. Leaving Chicago for Sanibel was a type of flight, she conceded, but she had felt better here than she had for so long. She had found solace in the small, impersonal series of white-walled rooms she had filled with “Florida” furniture (pastels, bamboo, white lacquer) and artwork (seascapes and shell prints). She had felt content in the hotel-like austerity, away from the intrusive weight of memories and history, and freed from sentimentality. No one else’s schedule, no one else’s mess, no one else’s needs. People change, she had told Samantha and Theo. I have changed.
The rain had been brief, and now the darker clouds moved out to sea, a sliver of lightning in the distance. Iris knew she should walk on the beach or take her cold-weather clothes to the Salvation Army or write a letter to the granddaughter she would never meet. But all she wanted to do was get back to her book, back to the Ramsays in their tattered summer house by the sea, with the beautiful, self-absorbed, comforting, maddening Mrs. Ramsay trying to orchestrate the experiences of everyone around her. The incessant emotional recalibrations. Was that a woman’s curse? Iris thought. And whatever did Mrs. Ramsay see in needy, tempestuous Mr. Ramsay? Not to mention eight children.
One had been enough for Iris: her son, Theo. Ten years later—she’d been forty, for God’s sake—she’d discovered she was pregnant again. She’d sat in the front seat of the car outside the doctor’s office, as the snowflakes swirled and melted on her windshield, and wept. She cried more than she had at the news of her father’s death the year before. She felt betrayed by her body. Reentrenched in motherhood just as Theo needed her less and less. But abortion was illicit then, seamy, even dangerous. People she knew didn’t even use the word—“I heard Mary Jo Surrey had something taken care of by a doctor on the South Side”—and she wouldn’t have known how to go about it anyway. So Iris feigned excitement for Glenn, whose eyes turned dewy with the news, and as the weeks passed she waited for a miscarriage that never happened. Samantha was a calm baby who slept well, as if sensing she needed to be good to please her mother, to make herself easier to love.
As a toddler, Samantha grew increasingly shy, clinging to Iris, hiding her face. She would only go on the slide or the swings if the playground was empty, and only with Iris by her side. Even with Glenn, if Iris left the room, Samantha would collapse in a heap of tears. Iris wasn’t that concerned. She’d been a shy child after all, and part of her liked being so desperately needed.
“It’s not normal,” Glenn said.
“She’ll grow out of it,” she said. “It’s a phase.”
“Theo wasn’t like this.”
“Boys are different.”
“Take her to the doctor. Just to make sure.”
The pediatrician, old and stern Dr. Kimble, told Iris she coddled Samantha and that was the problem. “Give her less attention. Let her cry. She’ll get over it.”
So Iris signed her up for a music class held in a Sunday school room of the Presbyterian church. Carpet squares were spaced out on the linoleum floor. A picture of a kindly Jesus holding his hand out to the Samaritan was on one wall, a constellation of God’s eye crosses on the other. Mothers kissed their kids, told them to behave, and left. Samantha tightened her grip on her mother’s hand, pressing her body into her leg. Iris knew it was not going to go well. She knew Samantha would not settle down after she left. She knew it, yet surely the doctor knew better?
“No Mommy go out,” Samantha said.
“I’ll be right outside the door, honey. It’s going to be fun!”
“No Mommy go out. Sama and
Mommy go home.”
“Are you going to bang on the drum? Look at that. That’s a tambourine. Why don’t you go get it.” Iris pried her fingers loose and pushed Samantha forward. “Be a big kid like Theo, right?”
The teacher, with a helmet of tight white curls, came over and tried to usher Samantha to the circle as Iris walked quickly away. The sobs began before she got the door closed. Iris counted the seconds on her watch for two minutes before she marched back inside to the pitying eye of the teacher and swept up Samantha, who buried her burning, wet face in Iris’s neck. Dr. Kimble—even Glenn, for that matter—could go to hell. What did men know of mothering? She’d decided to ignore everyone and let Samantha come out of her shell on her own terms.
Iris rolled slowly over onto her side to relieve her sore hip. Hogwash, she thought. The truth was a lot less flattering. She had always feared that somewhere in Samantha’s cells, or in her limbic brain, perhaps, she knew she had been unwanted, that Iris had wished her away. And Iris wouldn’t force a separation because of her own guilt. Within a year, Samantha had become an independent little creature who never seemed to need her much at all. Or maybe that was a myth Iris had spun to make herself feel she’d been a better mother than she actually had been. Did it matter now?
* * *
Iris awoke on the couch, her book fanned across her chest, a black, meaty fly buzzing in a circle around the room. Her joints ached. Her head felt too large for her body, blood pounding behind her eyes, and she felt she could not lift it. She lay for a moment trying to fill her lungs, knowing she was late for her pills by the way her skin hurt.
She had awakened thinking of her mother at her father’s funeral, one of the last times Iris had seen her. It had been so windy at the graveside. That was the most visceral memory Iris had of that day in 1965. She had to keep one hand around her hair, to keep it from whipping across her face, and the other on her skirt. She couldn’t hear the old Lutheran minister’s slow, hushed words above the rush of air, the rattle of poplar leaves. For such a stoic man, her father sure knew how to make an exit.
Iris stood next to Glenn—solid as a tree trunk in his dark suit as leaves whirled around him on that early fall afternoon. Her mother stood alone, dry-eyed and stolid, her hands clasped in front of her dress, an ill-fitting black jumper she’d bought in town the day before. Glenn tried to urge Iris forward.
“It’s her husband’s funeral. She’s your mother,” he said, right into her ear so the wind wouldn’t carry his words away.
“It’s not her way,” Iris said, dried salty streaks crisscrossing her face. She knew how uncomfortable all the attention and well wishes and country hugs were for her mother. She knew she wanted to be alone.
Iris grieved for her father, but it had been so long since she’d been home or even talked to him—he didn’t talk on the phone, his wife acting as the go-between—he’d been a distant figure for most of her adult life, and it felt like she had been mourning him since she left Minnesota. Later, at the farmhouse, she traded tight smiles with old neighbors as they circled the dining room table laden with hotdishes and lutefisk brought by the Sons of Norway. Mrs. Ingebretson, the ancient church secretary, had made a kringle. Iris had bought two apple pies on the drive up from Chicago, which sat untouched on the sideboard. She overheard Glenn talking to the mailman, who’d asked, “What will she do now?”—as if being alone made one’s life stop, which annoyed Iris even as she knew it was a genuine concern—and went looking for her mother. She waded through the rooms of the house she’d grown up in, glided through them really, knowing the layout in the memory of her muscles, and then she ventured outside behind the house. The wind had died down some, the day mild and clear with the smell of woodsmoke, old hay, and pig shit in the air. She found her mother in rubber boots, a large canvas coat over her mud-splattered dress, raking out one of the pig stalls.
“Mother?” Iris stepped on her toes in her pumps, trying to avoid the soft rain-soaked patches in the yard. “Did you get something to eat?”
“I don’t know why I bother with this,” she said. “He’s just going to kick it all up again as soon as I let him back in.” She stopped, leaned the rake against the wall, and brushed off her hands. The two pigs snorted, and then one of them, pinker and hairier than the other, threw its weight into the pen divider. “Elsie, you behave.” She looked squarely at Iris. “I wish you’d brought your boy. It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen him.”
“He’s with Glenn’s mother,” Iris said. “I thought it best.”
Her mother nodded and wiped her wrist across her forehead. “I have something for him. A scarf. Make sure I give it to you before you leave.”
“Okay. Do you want to come inside?”
“Lord, no,” she said.
Iris rubbed her arms, aware that in her chic black sheath she looked profoundly out of place, yet that was part of it, wasn’t it? To be the city girl, returned. She looked out at the grassy field of newly sown winter wheat behind the barn, owned by the Jensens now, and she was sorry that she didn’t feel a loss for the land itself. It was shameful, she thought.
“I think the guests would like to make their condolences,” Iris said.
Her mother shrugged. “They’ll live.” She unlatched the metal gate. “Here, hold this. I’m going to let Elmer back in.”
The mottled pig had made a low grumble and heaved itself onto its tiny feet. Iris had held the gate, unsteady in her high heels, trying to spare her dress the filth.
“You look like you’re cold, Iris,” her mother had said. “Why don’t you go on in. I’ve got this. Get yourself some tea. I’ll be fine.”
* * *
Iris folded her book and set it down on the floor, her arm shaky with fatigue. Her mother was always fine, even when she wasn’t, and Iris had never bothered to distinguish between the two. It had been easier to believe in her mother’s stoicism than to risk a glimpse of her vulnerability. I’m thirty years too late, she thought, rolling onto her side.
Through the window she could see patches of sky through the shifting clouds, the air warmer now, the rain forgotten. She slid her feet off the couch and onto the floor. Get up, Iris, get up, she told herself. Don’t wallow. Don’t waste the day. I’m a dying woman, she answered. I’m allowed to do as I please.
SAM
She would start by making the pound cake. With Ella breast-feeding, Sam could easily eat the whole cake by herself. She could not eat enough these days. By the time Jack got back from campus, all that would be left would be a nondescript, homey baking smell, enough to make him wonder at the source but not enough to ask about it.
She pulled out the flour and sugar and then checked the refrigerator. She had a little less than a pound of butter and nine eggs. How was she to weigh eggs? Or flour and sugar, for that matter? She closed her eyes hefting the butter in one hand and the eggs in the other. Close enough.
She rummaged through a cupboard for the bread pan she inherited from her mother’s kitchen, along with the Mixmaster and the velvet-lined chest of silver that had begun, the last time she had looked, to tarnish. Sam had dumped the rest of her mother’s belongings into boxes and delivered them to the Salvation Army in Fort Myers, along with the furniture, the seascape paintings, and the driftwood frame mirrors. She had saved only a yellow glider chair and a white dresser that were both now in Ella’s room, along with a few other odds and ends she carried in her bag on the flight home. When Sam’s parents had divorced, her mother had gotten rid of all the antiques she had spent her married years collecting, the refinished chests and colonial rocking chairs and iron beds. She had left Chicago, moved to Florida—to Sanibel Island—and bought a condo, where she had lived until her death last year, four months before Ella was born.
The pan wasn’t anywhere. How could that be? Sam thought. She’d last used it to make pumpkin bread for some English Department thing. She bristled. Jack must not have brought it home. Domestic details were not part of his frame of vision. She was pre
tty sure that in the five years they had been married he’d never once bought toilet paper, garbage bags, or laundry detergent. Or soap. Or toothpaste. You chose to put your baby’s needs and the home first, she said sometimes, to calm herself. But she knew it wasn’t really a choice. Sam still felt at the mercy of her biology, and sometimes she quietly raged against not having a say about the intensity of feeling she had for Ella. It was like she had given birth to one of her own vital organs, requiring a subversion of her self that was instinctual, non-negotiable, complete. “You’re postpartum, Samantha,” Melanie had said. “Obviously.” Maybe she was right. Or maybe everything was just different now.
Sam grabbed her keys and pulled the front door shut behind her, nearly tripping on a box on the landing. She wondered where it had come from, given the hour. But then again, she hadn’t received a FedEx package since moving to Madison. By the blocky left-handed scrawl of the address slip, she knew it was from her brother, Theo. Something for Ella, maybe, though that would be uncharacteristically thoughtful. He left such duties to his wife. Sam slid the box closer to the door with her foot—what in the world could be so heavy?—and went to the car.
They lived on the Eastside near the north shore of Lake Monona in a funky-shabby neighborhood of old Victorians and Craftsman bungalows, a few blocks from a food co-op and a vegan coffee shop, a soup kitchen, and a single-room-occupancy residence. The area had gentrified, its dilapidated skid-row roots smoothed over, but it still retained a leftover seediness that Sam appreciated. She was glad to live away from the university and the too-pretty and suburban Westside.
