Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  Livvy became more concerned with her comfort. Instead of looking like the figure of a fetus carved by some depressed Impressionist, she began to squirm in the cramped cradle, change positions, occasionally to stretch out on her back, legs over the bottom rail. Soon she was napping in her bed during the day. Finally she abandoned the cradle for the bed.

  Pablo’s extraordinary patience became spotty as she seemed to be getting better but she wouldn’t speak to him (or to anyone), and recoiled if he touched her.

  Leon confessed that until she’d begun to sleep in the cradle, he had allowed himself not to know how bad it was. He thought I was wonderful, and when all this was over he was going to take me to “the Caribbean for a week.” I couldn’t imagine being away from Donna for that long. In my good dreams, Livvy and Donna were my two adoring daughters. In my bad dreams, I was taking care of Donna when she was snatched away and a rag doll was left in her place.

  Each week saw some small improvement. If Donna might still have been an object dumped in our midst and requiring a detour, Livvy began to exchange a few words with the rest of us. First me, then Ovvy and the girls, then Leon, and finally Pablo. I told Pablo, who was hurt when he was the last, that maybe it had to do with the order in which she’d known us, that he still mustn’t react as though she were grown up. I had almost used the phrase “in her right mind,” and of course I was glad I’d caught myself. But it was somehow more accurate. If a stranger might now have spent a little time with her without noticing anything amiss, she was not yet in the mind that a friend or relative could recognize as Olivia’s.

  When my parents asked what I’d like for a Christmas present I said, “A menorah.” This is the candelabrum the Jews use on ceremonial occasions—or so I’d thought. There had always been one in my parents’ dining room.

  Everyone laughed.

  “Terrific,” Leon said. “For Christmas.”

  My father, with mock gravity, said it was about time I was getting a little religion and Leon was not to make fun of me. Now, which kind of candelabrum did I want?

  I looked at him blankly.

  He smiled gently. “Haven’t you ever noticed, dear, the menorah in my study, the one my parents brought over with them, has seven branches, one for each day of the week? But the one in the living room, the chanukiah, which is used for Chanukah, has nine, one for each day of Chanukah and one to light the others?”

  What could I say? I had never noticed. I considered for a while, in spite of the difficulty of doing so with Leon grimacing at me.

  “I want the everyday kind,” I finally said. “I don’t like that whole business of being Jewish once a year, for Chanukah.”

  Leon wanted me to know, my parents were his witnesses, that if this was the first step in a gigantic conspiracy to get him to go to schul or observe the Jewish holidays, I should forget it. I assured him that schul would feel no less strange to me than to him and I’d never developed much more feeling than he had for the holidays. It wasn’t about religion. I was looking for a meaningful way to mark time, physical incarnations of that meaning, other than food. It was about finding a way to live when there was no crisis. A way that had something to do with something else, that wasn’t just about that day or week or even year. There was no reason to think Pablo and Livvy would leave soon. We were three adults, one girl hovering between infancy and adulthood, a teenaged girl, an almost-teenager, a boy of eleven, and a baby, and I wanted to find some meeting ground, a way to live that would give us some sort of stability through all their comings and goings during the years. For starters, I wanted to reinstate our Friday-night dinners. Nobody had objected to the idea when I’d first proposed it, but we hadn’t exactly stuck with it either. Now I wanted everyone to be there unless there was some really good reason. Friday night was a natural time to come together. The end of the work week. We would eat together downstairs, talk, relax, get things off our chests. If I knew perfectly well that Friday night wasn’t simply a logical choice but contained an effortless echo of the Jewish sabbath, this wasn’t what mattered the most. If everyone liked the idea of lighting candles, we’d do it. If not . . . Maybe I’d do it, anyway.

  When my parents asked what I thought Livvy would like for her present, I said I thought perhaps some clothes, or money for clothes. She still wasn’t going out, except to see Doctor Weinberger, but she had to wear either a maternity dress or, more recently, the black turtleneck and jeans she’d lived in toward the school term’s end; her pre-pregnancy clothes didn’t fit, yet. They decided to give her a check. I gave her a couple of crewneck sweaters and some turtleneck T-shirts she immediately began wearing. She put away the check from my parents. Shopping was not a possibility.

  Livvy began going upstairs frequently, though she was still afraid to come down the inside way and used the building’s staircase. The first time she went up on her own, I was writing at my desk in the baby’s room. Donna was sleeping in her crib. I knew Ovvy was home because he’d come by to get some cookies on his way. (He now favored Coke with his cookies but he’d get the Coke upstairs; I’d explained that my love for him stopped at helping anyone drink Coke with cookies.) I made the decision not to speak or follow Livvy lest I be interfering with some move toward independence. She came down about half an hour later, but in the following weeks spent more and more time upstairs, always after Ovvy had come home.

  It became clear that she and Ovvy had a secret. I began to think it had to do with Ovvy’s computer; once or twice I heard them speaking that awful language I’d not been able to train myself to use, and then I’d noticed Livvy glancing through a hacker magazine Ovvy had gotten for Christmas, along with his own computer.

  She began walking with me when I wheeled Donna around the neighborhood or down to the Village. She noticed a dress she liked in a store window, then became concerned about the weight she’d gained “over the holidays.” She began to discipline herself in the matter of how much she ate. She was not interested in seeing how far the check from her grandparents would take her toward buying some new clothes. She had another use for the money but didn’t want to discuss it. She began to race-walk and became impatient when I couldn’t keep up with her because of the carriage. She forged ahead and waited for me at corners. By a few days later she was taking off on her own and meeting me back at the house. The first time this happened I was frightened, uncertain I would find her waiting there. She became willing, if we were together and I had to go into a store, to stand outside and hold on to the carriage. This, too, made me anxious the first time, and I kept checking her from inside the store, though I didn’t let her see me.

  By the end of January, Donna was sitting up, Livvy and Pablo were going to the movies together, and I was beginning to feel human. Livvy was spending a lot of time upstairs even when Ovvy was in school, and at a Friday-night dinner, she confessed bashfully that he’d been teaching her the computer.

  “She’s getting real good at it,” Ovvy announced. “I even let her use it when I’m not there.”

  Livvy smiled, looked down at her napkin.

  “Aha!” I said. “So that’s what you’ve been doing upstairs all these afternoons!”

  “I didn’t want to learn it when I was in high school,” she admitted shyly. “I thought it was just for the kids who didn’t like real subjects.”

  “She can type much better than I can,” Ovvy said. “She could get a job.”

  With Livvy’s improvement, the other girls had grown a little impatient with the attentions and privileges accorded her. Now Rennie got Annie’s attention and raised her eyes to the ceiling to mock the notion that typing fast was a big deal. Leon sent a warning look and the moment ended but the feeling didn’t.

  I had long since made up my mind that when Livvy was ready to go back to school, I’d do whatever was required of me, as long as she confined herself to New York. It was clear that whatever else was true, she’d be ready to think of herself as a student before she felt like a mother. In January, I added to my pa
rents’ gift the substantial amount required to buy her the computer that felt like a first step on her way back to school. To my surprise, she was happy to have me move my own computer from the desk in Donna’s room so that hers could occupy it. We moved mine to a smaller desk outside, next to Donna’s playpen, which occupied the spot where the cradle had once been. But we had no reasonable place for the cradle.

  This was a weightier problem than it might seem. The stairwell had eliminated more than half of the upstairs foyer. Whatever my old fantasy about a hat-and-glove cradle, there was no place for such a piece downstairs, where there was no entrance hall. It was out of the question to fit the long cradle into the baby’s bedroom, which was crammed with my old queen-sized bed and my-now-Livvy’s desk (a door-top resting on files) as well as the baby’s furniture. Attempting to prepare Livvy for the possibility of moving the cradle out of the apartment, I brought up the matter of space and made some joke about whether anyone had ever seen a cradle rocking on a ceiling.

  Livvy shrugged. “All we have to do is get rid of the bed.”

  It was a terrific idea except it made no sense to get rid of a bed we sometimes used in order to keep a cradle we didn’t.

  I asked my parents whether it might fit someplace in Westport, but they had no garage and the new rooms, not to speak of the crammed older ones, weren’t of a size to accommodate such a piece of furniture.

  In the meantime, it had been moved to the space between the downstairs entrance and the circular stairs. And on a Friday night when Rennie was late for dinner, she came running down too fast and, at the bottom, tripped over the crossbar at the foot of the cradle, which didn’t quite clear the stairs. When she fell, one elbow banged into the cradle’s nearest corner and it was that bang, more than anything else, that made her scream out as she landed on the floor, “Motherfucker! Why don’t you get rid of that asshole motherfucking cradle!”

  Then she collapsed into tears.

  Pablo ran to help her up, Leon and the other kids being momentarily thrown by her language, which wasn’t generally heard in the house. Livvy began buttering a piece of bread with inordinate care. Pablo helped Rennie to her seat, on one side of Leon’s. She was still crying. When Leon asked if she was all right, she began a tirade about how we didn’t need the cradle blocking the stairs, why didn’t we get rid of it, we weren’t going to have any more babies around.

  I glanced at Livvy, who now watched Rennie with the purest sort of hatred on her face.

  “I don’t know why it has to be there, Daddy,” Rennie said, still crying as he looked at her right knee, which was bleeding. “We always have to watch out for it so something won’t happen!”

  He took her to the bathroom, as much to calm her as to clean her bruises.

  Leon was wonderful, although our lives, of course, were different than we’d thought they would be. If he occasionally chafed at my being so busy with Donna, he grew fond of her, so that the irony attached to my being a full-time mother substitute when he’d not wanted me to be a mother grated on him less than it might have. It was Leon who solved the Great Cradle Dilemma by arranging with a young woman doctor at the hospital who had inherited a huge West End Avenue apartment and was expecting, that she would use the cradle for her baby, then store it in one of their three “maids’ rooms” for as long as we wished.

  We staged the moment when Leon would announce to Livvy, not in the presence of his children, that he had found the cradle a good home. We had no idea of what her reaction would be.

  She appeared not to have one.

  By the time he’d explained about the apartment and joked about visiting privileges, she’d picked up a copy of Computer Shopper, Ovvy’s and her current favorite magazine, and was absorbed in it. The two spent an unbelievable amount of time discussing the merits of various computers, hardware, software, networking possibilities, and so on.

  But the cradle episode was the identifiable beginning of a feud between Livvy and Rennie that occasionally threatened to turn our Friday-night ritual dinners into something resembling primal scream therapy. Livvy displayed her first sign ever of interest in Donna when she came out of her room one night to find Rennie holding the baby on her lap, turning the pages of Donna’s favorite cloth picture book. She came to the kitchen and said she didn’t want Rennie to hold Donna, she didn’t trust her.

  I said, looking intently at the plum sauce I was experimenting with for our spareribs, never having succeeded at making a satisfactory one at home, “Well, why don’t you just tell Rennie you want to hold her for a while.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Livvy stalked over to the sofa and, without a word, snatched the baby from Rennie’s lap. Donna, frightened as she would have been even if she’d ever had contact with her mother, began to cry. I turned off the light under the plum sauce and moved toward Livvy even as she came to the kitchen, thrust the bawling baby into my arms, and retreated to her room. She refused to come out for dinner, but the next day, Friday, she had a session with Doctor Weinberger, whom she now saw three times a week. That night, at our ritual dinner (I never made pork on Friday nights; Leon teased me about the way “Jewish stuff” was edging into my brain; I always replied that it had begun with chicken soup and matzo balls) Livvy spoke haltingly, as though trying to remember learned words.

  “I know . . . This has been a very difficult time for me. Maybe for everyone. I don’t know. I’ve been . . . sort of . . . out of it. But now I think I’m ready . . . I mean, the baby . . . She’s my baby. I don’t even want to call her Donna, because I didn’t give her that name. I mean, Pablo and I didn’t give her the name together.” She’d obviously talked to Pablo in advance and now she clutched his hand. He was supportive of her, if slightly embarrassed about the rest of us. Everyone but Rennie was looking at her; Rennie was looking down at her lap. “Now everyone has to get used to the fact that she’s mine. And if I—” She’d run out of prepared words and the next ones came out in a frantic rush, their hostile message belied by an increasingly frightened little-girlish manner. “If I don’t want her to hold my baby, she’d better not, because I’m her, I’m her—” But she couldn’t think of precisely who she was to the baby, or maybe she just couldn’t say it, and she ran to her room.

  Poor Rennie. Leon had told her we had to be patient as Livvy recovered, but why did she have to be the kid of whom the most patience was required? For a few weeks she refused to come downstairs for meals, and when she began joining us, she made it a point not to be there on Fridays. She told Leon there was no reason to come if she was the only one who wasn’t allowed to get anything off her chest. In fact, she seldom came downstairs for any reason and never went near the baby.

  Nor did Livvy display further interest in Donna. She began speaking frequently of Doctor Weinberger, the wonderful man who was her therapist. She thought he was probably a genius, certainly he knew everything, though he liked her to find out things for herself. Doctor Weinberger understood her desire to give Donna “my own name,” though he hadn’t been willing to suggest one himself. What bothered her about the name Donna, she said, was that it didn’t mean just woman, after all, but maid. She had this picture of Rennie taking Italian someday and finding out that donna meant maid and trying to get Donna to clean up her room. When I objected mildly to the notion that Rennie might do such a thing, Livvy ended the conversation.

  Barring such moments, it was becoming possible to believe that my daughter was recovering her self. That self wasn’t a woman who could care for a child, but appeared to be at least as rational as the seventeen-year-old who had given birth to a baby five months before.

  It was during an afternoon in February that I came out of Donna’s room and realized that Livvy, on the sofa, was reading one of her old college brochures. Others were scattered on the coffee table in front of her.

  It would be a shame if she was getting interested in going back to school just when it was too late for the spring term.

  She continued to read the brochures
but didn’t refer to them, and I was relieved because this suggested that she didn’t feel anxious. Her medication had been cut back slightly and the doctor had asked me to be aware of any real changes in her behavior, as opposed to just some increased anxiety.

  On Saturday, as I prepared lunch in the kitchen and Donna sat in her playpen knocking two stuffed animals together, Livvy looked up from a magazine or brochure and asked Ovvy, who’d just come downstairs, the date. He said he wasn’t sure, so she asked me.

  I said I thought it was February 18.

  She said, “It can’t be. I wouldn’t have graduated yet.”

  I smiled uneasily. Surely she’d noticed the dates on papers and magazines, even if she hadn’t paid real attention to them.

  “That was last year that you graduated, sweetheart. Ninety-two. This is Ninety-three. Remember?”

  She bolted to her feet, extremely agitated.

  “No!” she exclaimed. “Doctor Weinberger would’ve told me!”

  Ovvy, frightened, muttered that he’d forgotten something and ran upstairs.

  “I guess,” I said carefully, “it never came up.”

  She marched to the phone—I suppose it was a measure of her sense of urgency that she didn’t even bother to go to her own room but came to the kitchen—and left a message with Doctor Weinberger’s service, then hung up, uncertain of what to do next. She finally settled upon berating me—loudly.

  “I can’t believe you were letting me read a bunch of stuff from 1992 when we’re in 1993! Everything’s going to be totally different!”

  In her playpen, Donna began to cry.

  “Not totally,” I said, trying to appear calm. “Some things’ll be different, you’ll be looking at different schools, but we have plenty of time to get the new brochures and—”

  “Plenty of time! I don’t believe you!”

  And as I stood at the counter watching her, not wanting to pick up Donna because I couldn’t tell what would happen next, my daughter stalked out of the room with her old, angry energy, convinced that having been forgiven so many earlier crimes, I had committed the unforgivable one of stealing a year from her life.