And Again

by Jessica Chiarella

  I wonder, sometimes, why I came back here from L.A. when I got sick. It’s a puzzling sort of question because it would have been much easier to wither away in the warm sunshine of the West Coast than here, where the winters can just about kill a person without trying very hard. All I can think is, on some level, I must be like my mother. She was in New York when she got pregnant with me, and she dragged herself back here, to the city where she grew up, to have her baby and live out her years in a suburban trailer park and lament her lost dance career. Some part of us must still be wild, I think, like a wounded animal that drags itself back to its home to die.

  Linda

  The only recipe I can remember is my mother’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies. I used to make them when Jack and Katie were little, on rainy days or when February grew particularly cold and dreary, when I needed something to fascinate and occupy the little girl who sat with me on the kitchen counter, dipping her fingers into the bag of flour and delighting in the silky grit of its texture. Cookies are necessary now, I think. I need to make something sweet and simple and full of fleeting happiness. It’s the sort of task I’ve always associated with being a mother.

  I haul my big stand mixer out of the attic, where it sat collecting dust for the past eight years in a box labeled “Garage sale??” I wonder why Tom didn’t sell it, when it would have fetched an easy hundred or two from some neighbor on our street. I imagine all of my things, my only things, spread out on the blacktop of our driveway for neighbors to paw through. I wonder if Tom and the kids have made cookies since I’ve been gone. Somehow, I doubt it.

  In the kitchen, I whip coconut oil and sugar together with vanilla inside the stainless-steel bowl of the mixer, and the sound of it draws Katie down from her room. She glances at the frothy liquid spinning around the sides of the bowl, and then looks up at me. She’s nervous, I think. I recognize it, because it mirrors the clench I get in my stomach whenever my children are around. I think of this next child, the one I’m carrying with me, and wonder if she will feel so foreign to me as well once she’s born, or if she will be connected to this body in a way that Katie is not.

  “What are you making?” Katie asks. Her dark hair is pulled into a high knot, so slick and tight that I can see the shape of her skull underneath.

  “Cookies. Chocolate chip,” I answer, measuring out flour and baking powder and rolled oats into a separate bowl. I think of my daughter like a skittish cat, one who will dash off if I acknowledge her too directly. My reticence pays off after a moment, when she perches on a stool on the other side of the counter.

  “When we make cookies with Daddy they come out of a tube. But Jenny’s mom makes them herself. Only it doesn’t look like that,” she says with an artful expression of disdain and suspicion, motioning to the oil that has settled in a shining, sugary pool at the bottom of the stainless-steel bowl.

  “That’s because I use coconut oil instead of butter,” I reply.

  “Why?”

  I shrug. “My mother didn’t eat butter. This is her recipe.” Katie looks suspicious as I add eggs and beat them in with the oil and sugar.

  “Can I help?”

  I hand her a cup measure, and we’re off to the races. By the time I’m mixing in the chocolate chips with a wooden spoon, I’m pretty confident that only half the dough will make it onto the cookie sheet. And I’m nearly effervescent with my success, of luring my daughter into a solid half-hour of interaction.

  “You’re practicing for the basketball team?” I ask, rifling through what little trivia I know about my own daughter. I’m sick with it, the paltry knowledge I have of who this child is now, after knowing every bit of her for her first four years. Now I know more about the lives of the characters on Stratford Pines than those of my own children.

  “Junior league,” she replies, with such a swell of confidence I can barely imagine she’s only twelve years old, and not some capable young woman in full possession of her own abilities. “But Coach says when I’m in high school he can see me going straight to varsity. He says I’ve got speed.”

  I grin at this. “I used to have some speed myself. I ran track and cross country when I was younger, all the way through college.”

  “I know,” she replies, pulling a couple of chocolate chips out of the bag and popping them into her mouth. “Daddy says I’ve got your feet. Pegasus feet. With wings on them.”

  She plants one of her sneakers on the slat of her kitchen stool so I can see the little cartoon wing she’s drawn onto the heel. I think of my own collection of battered running shoes, the ones Tom threw away after my accident, with their identical little wings inked onto them. This girl is mine, I think.

  “What’s your favorite subject in school?” I ask.

  “Art,” she says, her face twitching from contemplation to dissatisfaction. “And Mandarin. Both of them are cool.”

  “You’re taking Mandarin?”

  Katie nods. “Daddy said I should. That it’s important.”

  “It is,” I reply, as if it were my idea in the first place. It was something we talked about, Tom and me, when the kids were little, how I regretted my youthful rebellion against my mother. I’d taken French in high school, despite the fact that I’d picked up enough Mandarin at my mother’s church and from listening to her talk to my grandparents on the phone that I was nearly conversational. I’m an American, I told her. I pretended it was endearing when kids at school called me a Twinkie. I never had friends over to my house because there was nothing worse than having a mother who was not only sad, but who also couldn’t order pizza without having to repeat herself.

  “Why didn’t your mother eat butter?” she asks, picking up another gob of dough and licking it from between her sticky fingers.

  “Being healthy was very important to her,” I reply.

  “But isn’t she dead?” Katie doesn’t see me flinch, but she looks up at me when I don’t answer right away. “I mean, I remember going to her funeral. Me and Daddy and Jack.”

  “Yes, she is,” I reply, trying to focus on my work instead of dwelling on the past. The trick I learned in the hospital. Pretend you’re born the day before. You have no history. No history. It occurs to me then, that maybe I learned that trick well before the hospital.

  “So I guess she wasn’t that healthy then, huh?” Katie asks. “If she died so young?”

  “She didn’t die from being sick,” I reply. “She died from being sad.”

  “Daddy said she got sick,” Katie says, and I can tell she’s looking at me even though my head is down, my eyes are on the batter clinging to my spoon. My mother’s recipe.

  My mother was always fragile, the kind of person who could be tipped over by a careless word. She’d met my father in Wuhan while he was teaching English and she was working in a restaurant near the university. He was an American boy through and through, though his parents were both Chinese, and there must have been something exciting in that for her because he’d badgered her into coming back to the States with him when his visa expired. I sometimes imagined my mother as a young woman, back when she could still fool herself into believing she had the fortitude to uproot herself from ancient, familial soil and travel somewhere new. By the time she realized the truth, by the time she must have finally admitted to herself that she should not have come to the other side of the world, she was already a wife and mother to an American child.

  I’d spent most of my childhood protecting her, trying to fend off the world, warding off all of its unkindnesses, like keeping a lion at bay with a whip and a chair. She seemed to carry the distance with her, as if she were far away from everything because she was far away from home. I remember thinking what a good mother I’d be one day because I had learned so well how to care for someone. Because I would never be the sullen sort, the kind who escaped into her head, the kind of mother whose children couldn’t reach her. The reality that I’ve become like her, just like her, makes my hands shake to the point where I must put down the spoon so K
atie won’t notice.

  But no, I’m not just like my mother. I have more resilience than she did. She was so easily bruised, so easily discouraged, the sort of woman who would dump a half-cooked omelette into the trash if it began sticking to the pan, or burn the drapes in the fireplace when she noticed her hems weren’t straight.

  It was not such a great shock to me that my accident was a tragedy she could not handle. It was not so great a shock when Tom came to me in the hospital and told me that she’d taken pills and walked off the end of the dock near our family’s house on Lake Michigan, her pockets filled with stones. I’d hated him for telling me. He could have lied, could have made up an entire life for my mother and I would have never known. He could have created a different death for her even, cancer or blood clots or pneumonia after a fall. His honesty felt cruel, more for him than for me. That was when I began to be born yesterday. To have no history at all.

  “I guess she did, in a way,” I reply. My nose is running a little. I go to the sink and dab at it with a paper towel. “I guess she did get sick.”

  “Too bad she couldn’t get a SUB like you,” Katie says. “If she was still alive maybe you could have gone to live with her.”

  I turn back toward her then. “Why would I go live with her?” I ask. “You and Daddy and Jack are here.”

  “I just mean, maybe you’d be happier with someone you know, that’s all.”

  “What makes you think I’m not happy?”

  She avoids my eyes. “But you’re not, are you?” she says. At first, I don’t know what to say. I can’t answer her, and she nods, as if I’ve only confirmed her suspicions. As if she’s somehow let me down, as if my sadness is her doing.

  “Katie, don’t you want me to be here?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says, the pitch of her voice rising, as if I’m accusing her of something. She gets up fast from her stool. “What if I don’t?”

  “That’s all right,” I say, but it doesn’t stop her. She’s off, running up the back stairs to her room. I hear her door slam. I want to tell her that she’s not required to be happy that I’ve come back, and come back altered. I can’t begrudge her hating me a little, just like I always hated my mother a little, no matter how much I loved her. But I can’t tell her that, because of the little bit of something, the little pea of tissue that’s combusting with life in my stomach. It scares me too much to think that I’m the same as my mother. To think that I could hurt these kids the way she hurt me, through her own weakness. And still, still, I find myself dumping the cookie dough out in the trash instead of baking it because it has been ruined, this afternoon, and more, perhaps much more along with it.

  David

  Hannah shows up at the worst possible moment. I’m on the phone with Beth because David Jr. broke his arm jumping the fence into the neighbor’s yard this afternoon, and she seems to think that the bone will heal faster if I hop in my Audi and drive up there immediately. Ignoring the fact that the kid will have been asleep for hours before I’ve even crossed the state line. Ignoring the fact that I technically shouldn’t be driving. And I’m right at the point of really needing a drink, at the point where Beth’s words bounce off me like hot little pellets of asphalt, where everything in me is dying to call her a spoiled cunt and throw the phone across our well-furnished living room—that’s the moment Hannah arrives.

  She shows up this time with a bottle, something with pink frosted glass. Fuck.

  “Hey,” she says, before I can cover the mic on my phone, and then Beth is in my ear asking who the hell is coming over at this time of night. Hannah takes a sip as she slips off her coat, leaving it in a soft puddle on the entryway floor, her mouth on the neck of the bottle doing something vaguely pleasant to my spine, setting off a little thrill there.

  “Beth, I’ve gotta go,” I say, and I don’t even wait for an answer before I end the call, dropping the phone into my pocket. My anger evaporates at the sight of Hannah. She doesn’t have much on under her coat, it looks like silk in the darkness, a little pearlescent slip that shows off her breasts wonderfully, insubstantial as they are. The lace at the hem of it slides up and down her thighs like a tide as she leans back to sip from the bottle. This was the sort of girl I’ve always known would be my undoing. Not as elegant as Beth, or as staggeringly, pristinely beautiful as Connie. A girl who didn’t instill the kind of hesitance that those other women would, the subtle, almost unintelligible fear of marring them in some way, as if the blunt instrument of my body could strip them of some of their perfection. As if I could be made to want them less, by having them.

  My sexual fascination with Hannah runs no such risks. This is a girl with sharp teeth, hard as bone, standing there with my other favorite devil clutched in her hand, wafting off her breath.

  “What’s the matter?” she asks.

  “You brought your own refreshments.”

  She giggles a little. “It felt like that sort of night. Maybe it’s a full moon. Who knows?”

  “Wine coolers were never my favorite,” I say, stepping toward her. She steps back a little, teasing in the dark, silhouetted by the orange glow of the streetlights on the window shade.

  “What was?”

  “Scotch, mainly.”

  “And you haven’t had a drink since the transfer?” she asks. I shake my head. “Well, then I’m not sharing with you.” She takes another sip. She’s unsteady on her legs, I can tell, because she stumbles a little, raising that scrap of silk even farther. My self-control is in tatters.

  “Yes you are.” I take a few steps toward her, and she retreats again.

  “Nope.”

  I chase her around the room, taking advantage of the moment when she bangs her shin on the glass coffee table to divest her of the bottle. She doesn’t seem pleased as she reaches down to rub her leg, which is already starting to bruise. “Asshole,” she says, in a voice that tells me she’s not even close to kidding, but I’m not listening. I’m holding the bottle, looking down its neck as if it were a wading pool positioned beneath the towering ladder of a high-dive. I take a sip and it’s sugary and sort of floral-tasting, with a harsh bite underneath. Not what I remember, not even close. I wait for that report of pleasure within my body, that familiar click of a switch flipping, opening all of my channels at once. But still, there’s nothing.

  “Well?” Hannah asks, straightening up, her hands on her hips. I shrug.

  “It’s not very good.”

  “It cost seven dollars. It’s not exactly Chateau Margaux.”

  I take another swig. The burn of it is sort of pleasant, like easing into a hot tub. “Why do you keep coming back here?”

  “Do you not want me to keep coming back?”

  “My chief of staff certainly wouldn’t.”

  “And what’s his name?” she asks, closing the distance between us and popping the buttons on my shirt, one by one.

  “Jackson.”

  “Jackson.”

  “Is it because you can’t paint?”

  Her hands drop, finding their way back to her hips.

  “Chatty tonight, aren’t we?”

  “Explain it to me. There are a million ways to make it rich in this country, take it from me. You don’t have to be able to paint.”

  “Getting rich wasn’t the point,” she says, dropping back onto the couch and crossing her legs in front of her. “It was about being extraordinary at something.”

  “And being ordinary . . .”

  “Is just about the worst thing I can imagine,” she replies, making slow circles with her ankle. She’s wearing heels. It seems absurd to me now, because I’m pretty sure it’s pouring outside tonight. Everything about her is suddenly a mix of sadness and absurdity. “But you can understand that, can’t you?”

  Of course I can. We are so much the same, this girl and me. I take another drink. The trill of my phone’s ringtone goes off in my pocket. I glance at the screen, and it’s Beth. I silence the call, and then shut my phone off.
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  “Who was that?” Hannah asks.

  “Concerned citizen,” I reply, unwilling to get off-topic, like the politician that I am. “So what are you going to do now?”

  She shrugs one shoulder, making her collarbone appear and disappear beneath the smoothness of her skin and the strap of her slip. “Maybe I’ll marry a congressman. A Democrat.”

  Clever, this girl, I think, even as I’m striding toward her and hauling her up by her wrists. I forget the bottle on the glass of the coffee table. I forget everything for a little while.

  Hannah

  David calls me on a Tuesday morning. Early. I ignore the call at first, afraid that it’s Sam, again, leaving a voicemail that I will again delete, unheard. I try to get back to sleep. But when I realize the effort is completely futile, I check my phone and realize it’s David who called. He picks up on the second ring.

  “What if I’d been on a ledge when I called you?” he says, without even a greeting. “What if I was calling so you’d talk me down? You really think you could live with yourself if you left me hanging?”

  “Are you on a ledge?” I ask, yawning.

  “No, I’m in the middle of a conference call with the CEO of a fertilizer company. If that isn’t enough to make you want to off yourself, I don’t know what is.”

  “I don’t know, isn’t dealing with excrement something that you’re used to as a member of the Republican Party?”

  David laughs on the other end of the line. “Ouch, Reed. You really know how to hurt a guy.”

  “How exactly are you talking to me if you’re on a conference call?”

  “I have the linkup muted. You’d be surprised how much this guy has to say about fertilizer.”