Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  I didn’t want it this way, especially because I had come to adore my daughter, but adoration does not come with built-in confidence, of which I possessed, as a mother, very little. From my own mother I had learned . . . very little. I believed, I think, that my childhood had destined me to be an anemic sort of parent, lacking in essential instinct. When I look back into my past, I often cannot even see her face, my mother’s face, muffled by mist and then suddenly, swiftly appearing, like the sun burning brightly on an otherwise cloudy day, an instant of saffron brightness, and then gone. Gone! Who had been there, then? In truth, I was one of those kids raised on babysitters, so hiring one seemed absolutely natural to me. I was raised on the knees and by the sides of hired help. Corita taught me to sew; Jane nursed me through my illnesses; Angela, the Irish nanny, with hair the color of apple cider and a lilting way to all her words, Angela taught me to ride a bike, to pray (Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name), and to name the wildflowers, things I still do today, by instinct or, rather, by habit, echinacea with their bulging centers, columbine in the woods, the purple spikes of chive, and the weedy strawflowers that rise from the ground in August. In fact, yesterday, I went to the woods with my daughter, and we named the wildflowers, studying their leaves and their corollas, and it was Angela who was there, in spirit, my own mother nowhere near.

  And I was my mother’s daughter, of course, similarly stunted, serrated, and rageful. My mother, her fists, her hitting. My father had told us that before my mother had children she was “a different woman, really,” but the pressures and conflicts of motherhood had done her in, changed her irrevocably and for the worse. Indeed, early photographs show my mother smiling on a Cape Cod beach with a red scarf around her wind-blown hair; by the time my sister, her first, came along, her face had narrowed, her eyes small and fierce, screwed into her skull. I never knew exactly why having children caused her undoing, her mad chatter and terrible violence, but not knowing made it all the more potent, more possible.

  “You are the most like your mother,” my aunts always told me, ominous indeed. In order to avoid her female fate, I got a doctoral degree, published pounds of books, acquired prizes. I studiously avoided anything maternal, claiming a mannish incompetence, an inability to do baby talk and all of its equivalents. On the other hand, I held onto a sliver of hope, and my babies were born on this sliver.

  Our first nanny did not work out. She came to us three weeks before my daughter was born. She was only nineteen, whip smart but boy crazy. Within a few weeks of her job she met a man, got engaged, broke up, and then got engaged to someone else. Therefore, she was, of course, preoccupied, all this yes and no, back and forth. My husband and I had no specific complaints—she didn’t shake our baby or leave her thirsty—but there was something distracted in the sitter’s eye, something rushed in her ways. She could barely wait for five o’clock, at which point she would race out of the house, rouge swooped onto her cheeks and her bitten lips bright with carmine. We didn’t have to decide a thing. Within a month or so she left us, a white wedding gown over her arm, on her way to Pocatello, Idaho, to walk the aisle with a man she met over the Internet.

  Our second nanny, Ceci, came to us from a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. She was thirty-six—an excellent age, we thought—new to this country, with shoe-polish-shiny black hair and a beautiful face. She spoke very little English. Not long after she started, our newborn baby got sick. Clara corkscrewed her body and screamed. Her stomach felt hard and lumpy. We stretched her, thumped her, cycled her little legs, but still she screamed, her tiny tongue extended.

  I remember one night when I’d been up with her until the daylight came. Ceci was living with us in a room down the hall. The baby howled. I turned on the fan to block the sound so Ceci could get some sleep. The baby yowled, one long painful skein of sound; it just went on, and on. There is really nothing like being with a screaming baby dead in the middle of the night. Her room was lit by one small bulb, shedding shadows so that my hand looked huge raised between the light and the wall. I held up the baby, and she too looked huge, her mouth a flapping, monstrous thing, her arms like wings, going nowhere.

  At five in the morning, when I hadn’t caught a wink of sleep, it started to get light outside. The air got grainy and gray, the lawns visible, veiled with dew, and far in the distance a radio tower blinking its red light on and off, on and off. I started to cry right along with my daughter. Perhaps I cried even louder than she, for Ceci heard, and came to get us. Mussed and sleepy, she said, “Here,” and held out her arms. I gave her the baby. She said, “Go get me some lettuce leaves,” which I did. She then ran a warm bath and told me to drop the lettuce leaves in. The water turned pale green; the leaves looked like lily pads, charming. She lowered my daughter in. “In our country,” she said, “we know if you put lettuce leaves in a warm bath, it calms the child down.” I thought this was sweet and very lyrical. Lettuce leaves! Who knew what other neat herbal cures lay in wait for us, delivered fresh from her Mexican culture—a bath of apple blossoms, a cup of hot pomegranate juice? I have never been a big believer in anything outside of Western medicine. But let me tell you this: Presto. The baby quieted down. A cynic would say it was the water, not the lettuce leaves. Who cares? She quieted down, and soon after, she fell asleep. From that day on, Ceci made our colicky daughter a bath of lettuce leaves, and from that day on the other mother, she took my baby in and always, always knew exactly what to do. She had a gift.

  It did not take long for Ceci to become famous in our neighborhood. Everyone wanted a piece of her. She was too good to be true, but let me tell you, she was true, the real deal, the best. It was not so much what she did—although she did a lot—but more who she was, her competence mixed with kindness, her sheer energy. In the five years she worked for us, she never once was late for work. She never took a sick day. Amazing. But perhaps she is best described by what she did outside of her working hours. Ceci took kickboxing, English as a second language, cooking classes. She was a gifted photographer and painter. She had her degree in marketing from the University of Mexico, but her interests leaned more towards the arts. She knit elaborate blankets, used a loom, could crochet a piece of intricate filmy lace. She found a beat-up bike in the trash and single-handedly restored it to working order. She loved jigsaw puzzles, huge four footers with thousands of scrambled pieces, and she had the patience to put it all together, day after day, until a coherent scene emerged. Once she was finished, she would spray her creation with clear glue, hang it whole on the wall. It always delighted my daughter, the image at once cracked and solid, a seeming impossibility, but there it was.

  I could go on. She was from a close family in a small town and had come to the States to learn the English necessary for her career. The oldest of five children, the only girl, she had been both a daughter and another mother to her siblings from her own youngest years. She was full of mystical folk cures but also common sense to the extreme. Once, my daughter had a high, high fever. She thrashed and muttered and tore at the air with her hands. I, new to all this, did not know what to do. My hands shook and I could not measure out the medicine. Ceci took the bottle from me, drew the liquid up, grasped my thrashing daughter’s chin, and squirted her mouth full of cherry, all in one seemingly seamless move.

  Months passed. The presence of Ceci in our family was like a light but firm hand arranging our shape in ways we could only see in retrospect. She was shocked to find out my husband and I celebrated neither Christmas nor Chanukah. My husband had been raised rigorously atheistic and anticapitalistic. I am Jewish by birth, but once I left my mother to live in a foster home, I soon lost touch with my family, and its traditions, for good. “No tree?” Ceci said that first year she was with us. “No presents? El niño. What about el niño?”

  “Clara doesn’t care,” I remember saying. “She’s only one.”

  “Clara cares,” Ceci said. And that afternoon she came home with a tree, tinsel, a plastic star, all thos
e silk globes. My husband looked uncomfortable, but then after a second, he smiled. By the week’s end we were all zooming around town, buying up toys and trinkets, festive bows, shiny wrapping paper. “I’m Jewish,” I kept saying to my husband; “I’m a communist,” he kept saying to me. Then we shrugged. We were on a roll, and loving it. On Christmas Eve, Ceci took us all to Mass in a tiny basement church in the inner city. The priest was bedecked in some kind of crown and glossy robes, waving his incense stick so the whole church filled with the smell of frankincense and myrrh. Clara could not take her eyes off the princely looking priest or the children in the choir, all of whom were dressed in bright red ruffles and whose ears were pierced with tiny hoops of gold. Music started playing, something salsa-ish, and then a clip-clop hip-hop version of “Deck the Halls,” and before we knew it the whole church was dancing, skipping after the skipping priest, who waved his wand of smoke high and low. We skipped too. The air was so thick and cloying I could barely breathe. I felt I would choke. On the other hand, it was a lot of fun.

  It was for reasons like these that I felt enormously grateful to Ceci and continuously lucky to have her; she brought humor into our tight little lives. However, I also know that her confidence and kindness, the charm she had for children, her easy engagement with them, and her steadfast love of the things I did not love—the dressing, the hair combing, Chuck E. Cheese’s, and swimming pools—only deepened my belief in my own inadequacies. I allowed it to. I felt I simply could not compare.

  Here is a scene: It is early morning, and Ceci is brushing my daughter’s hair. She draws the bristles through in a single sweep, hefts up a skein of the champagne-colored locks, and braids them, her fingers flying. Moments later, Clara is ready for school, immaculate, clothes matching, her hair a complex series of plaits and twists all miraculously held to her head with only a single bright barrette. Later on, after school, I find Clara in her room and tentatively approach her. My own hair I have always worn in a mop, too busy for conditioners, just a quick scrub and a brisk, business-like rinse. “Let me do your hair,” I say. I say it softly, shyly, almost like I am in seventh grade asking a boy to dance. “Why?” she says. She doesn’t look up. She’s playing with a doll. “Because,” I say, and I don’t know how to go on. I pick up the brush with its flat-paddle handle and, standing over my daughter’s head, I see the pink seam of her scalp where Ceci has perfectly parted her hair. I bring the brush to it, drag down, and my daughter screams. She gives a loud, dramatic murderous yell and operatic tears fill her eyes. All I did was one tiny tug. I know, I know I haven’t hurt her. I stand there with the brush, frozen. She eyes me warily. I eye her right back. Then I cautiously slip from her room.

  It is winter, shredded snow falling everywhere, muffling the mountains, bandaging the winding slopes, the skiers in their bright-red parkas looking, from a distance, like tiny beads of blood sliding down. I am twelve. I am full of holes. From across the kitchen, my mother snarls at me for reasons I cannot understand. Suddenly, she flings a spoon in my direction; it bounces off my cheek and lands, clattering, on the tiled floor.

  Two years later we will sit together, my mother, father, and I, in a social worker’s office on the second floor of a psychiatric unit, where I have been temporarily placed, much to my relief. My mother’s left hand is badly bruised from where she put it through a wall. I, too, have various bruises, although the real problem, the relentless decimating daily humiliations, is harder to describe. The social worker tells me I will not be going home. My mother, who has become psychotically paranoid over the years, says, “You have abused me past what I can manage,” a classic example of projection. I nod, not knowing what else to do. Precipitating my removal from the home was the fact that my mother tried to push me down a gorge in Vermont. I survived, saved by the soft snow. I remember standing where I had slid, hearing the sound of her receding footsteps in the forest, tasting the cold on my tongue. I was fourteen then and had just begun to bleed. The trees were black, scarred. I saw them, and I understood that my mother wanted to kill me, that she always had. What was different, today, now, post-push, was that I wanted to kill her too. This, I saw, was what it meant to be a daughter, a mother. It is about blood and all the steep slopes.

  Children are not subtle. They throw their arms around you or haughtily turn away. They answer you or don’t. My daughter is no different. At the end of every day, during Ceci’s tenure with us, I would come home from work. My briefcase was always bulging, my mind cramped, my stomach aflutter from all I had left to do. I was, at that point in my life, working full-time as both a psychologist and a writer. I sometimes worked sixty hours a week, trying to outrun my history, building walls with words.

  I remember one homecoming in particular, not because it was better or worse, but simply because a single memory becomes emblematic, standing in for all the rest. It was winter, and when I opened the door a cold gust of air blew in. Ceci and Clara were absorbed in a book, Clara on Ceci’s lap, Ceci rocking the chair back and forth in time with the Spanish sentences. I could hear the words—leche, bebé, perro—but I did not understand. I saw my daughter’s sleepy eyes, how Ceci held her. “Hi,” I said, an interruption. Ceci smiled, beckoned me forward. Once she had brought me a beautiful blue vase from Mexico, and after my mastectomy, Ceci had filled my room with fresh flowers, helped me with my bandages. Now, I knelt down. “Hi, Clara,” I said, holding out my arms. Clara looked at me. “Go,” Ceci whispered, giving her a little push. “Besitos para mama.” Obediently, my daughter came forward and gave me a quick kiss.

  Lest it be misunderstood, I love my daughter. I love her with my whole damaged heart. Her face has always filled me with a sense of the miraculous, for it is a beautiful face, fair-skinned, green-eyed; her limbs are lithe; she seems the expression of all that could be good in me, all that I have that is healthy. At night I often dream of my daughter. We are carrying flowers towards each other, big armfuls of fragile lupine.

  Years passed this way. Clara spoke Spanish before she spoke English, and when Ceci’s friends came over they laughed and remarked, “She sounds just like a little Mexican,” my blonde-haired, green-eyed girl. Even so, I had moments with Clara, many moments, that were easy and unfettered, moments writing poetry together, a story called “Ick I’m Sick,” discussions about stars and god, Linnaeus and reptiles. We bought a vinegar-propelled rocket and shot it off together, our heads tipped back as it nosed straight into space. But her first love was not for me. Her first love was for her father, and when it came to women, her first love was, in truth—is this the truth?—for Ceci, and while I really grieved that, I also understood that I had set it up that way, a safe distance, space between mother and daughter, this dyad dangerous, rife with rejection, sick. And yet, it hurt my heart. It hurt my chest, my breasts. When Clara was three years, they found my ducts were crammed with cancerous cells. I had both my breasts removed, tiny, squishy saline bags slid into the sagging spaces left. In clothes I looked fine, but naked I looked maimed. Ceci, on the other hand, was whole and healthy. I know my daughter knew that. Sometimes she would come to me, pull down my shirt, peer in. “Ceci has nipples,” she would say. “And you don’t.” I’m sure this was just a statement of brute fact, but I could not help hearing it as more.

  And so we went on. My husband, I hesitate to say, did not help the situation. He sided with Ceci, unconsciously, subtly, giving her his credence and confidence. For this I have not decided whether or not I will forgive him. Of course, I am largely to blame, for I had impressed upon him my image of myself: the ratty foster child, the progeny of insanity, the work a defense against it all. At one point my second-born developed a pustule-like rash on his tongue and palms. Ceci hypothesized an immune response due to a recent fever. My husband agreed. They stood in the kitchen talking together while I watched from the sidelines, and they decided that if it got any worse, they would call the doctor tomorrow. Give it a day, they said. “Are you kidding me?” I said. “It’s on the tongue.” I called the
doctor immediately. “My child has white oozing spots on the tongue,” I said. My child. The pediatrician diagnosed hoof-and-mouth disease. For me, this was a twisted triumph.

  Clara started pre-school. Here is where things took a distinctly downward turn. At the end of the day, while I was still at work, Ceci would pick her up and take her to a museum or to Chuck E. Cheese’s, and bring her home at five. Eventually this became common enough that Ceci no longer needed to tell us her plans ahead of time. Autumn turned into winter. One day, their usual arrival time of five o’clock passed, and they hadn’t come home. Ceci had been with us nearly four years then. The afternoon ticked on into evening. Where were they? Cars rumbled by on the road outside my study, but none of them stopped. The day grew dark. Frantic, I called my husband at work. “Clara and Ceci aren’t here,” I said, and I think I heard just the tiniest pause before he said, “They’re fine.” I called the school. It was closed. The church bells gonged. I thought crazy thoughts about Ceci: How do I know who she really is? Would she kidnap my girl? Of course not, dummy! But how can I know? And indeed, how could I? We had hired her years ago, based on a reference check and gut. It suddenly seemed careless, negligent; I pictured telling detectives, “She comes from Mexico,” but not being able to say more. Hometown? “Cool-ya-can?” Something like that. Address, copy of passport, visa, we had none of it. On a deeper level, I realized we knew almost nothing of her. Her plans, her hopes, her fears, her lovers, her enemies, nothing. We knew Ceci intimately, day after day, year after year, we knew her laugh, her voice, her hands, her hair, and yet we knew her not at all. This, I believe, is common.