Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  “It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t. Mummie and Daddy always seemed fine. I thought all you had to do was get married and then that was it.”

  “And cloth diapers,” I said. “I remember you rinsing them out in the toilet, when Trace was a baby.”

  “Well, on Long Island we had a diaper man, at least. He took the dirty dipes away and delivered a pile of clean ones every week.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “No Pampers, no Prozac? No fucking way.”

  She nodded. “And no birth control. You and Pagan were both products of the rhythm method.”

  “Jesus, Mom. I’d’ve had myself committed, just to catch up on sleep.”

  She laughed and turned left, into the doctor’s office parking lot. As she looked for a spot, I thought about the end of her marriage to my father.

  In 1967, Mom discovered that she was pregnant a third time, and wept, and told Dad she didn’t know how they could handle having another child. There wasn’t enough money, and they were both so exhausted already.

  He asked around on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where he was an ill-paid fledgling broker at the time. Someone knew someone who knew where a woman could get an abortion—from a doctor in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for four hundred dollars cash.

  So Mom drove herself to Kennedy airport in the dark one morning, racked with such bad morning sickness it took her the entire drive and four-hour flight to finish one jelly doughnut. She ate it in little tiny pieces, trying to keep something in her stomach, some sugar in her system, so she wouldn’t throw up.

  When she arrived at the doctor’s office, the nurse told her the price had gone up to five hundred.

  Mom put her four bills on the doctor’s desk. “This is all I have. Please help me.”

  She drove herself from the airport back to our tiny rented house in Jericho, New York, arriving home around midnight—bleeding profusely, doubled over with cramps.

  She got into bed carefully, not wanting to wake up my father.

  He turned toward her in the darkness as she drew the covers up to her chin.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “If you don’t want to have my child, I don’t want to stay married to you. I’ve packed my bags and I’ll be leaving in the morning.”

  I was four years old, my sister two and a half.

  In my pediatrician’s parking lot, a gigantic Range Rover finally pulled out of a space.

  “No, Mom, really,” I said. “I couldn’t have handled the shit you dealt with when we were little. You’re fucking amazing.”

  We sat in the waiting room for twenty-five minutes, then the examining room for another ten before the doctor came in. Mom took the chair and settled Parrish in her lap. I sat up on the crinkly-papered exam table with India.

  “Do the girls need shots this time?” she asked.

  “Probably. It seems like they have to get a few more every time we come in. Hep B, DTaP, meningitis… endless.”

  Mom shivered. “Poor little things.”

  The doctor bustled in, clipboard in hand. “Mrs. Bauer?”

  Dare, I thought to myself, having kept my maiden name. But it seemed needlessly strident to correct her so I just nodded.

  “We’re behind on the girls’ vaccination schedule,” she said. “I’d like to get them caught up today.”

  Mom raised an eyebrow at me, having always been a proponent of the “I don’t think that really needs stitches” school of parenting.

  “Okay, I guess.” I mean, I didn’t want to leave my children vulnerable to typhoid, or whatever, right?

  Parrish wailed in my lap as she got an injection in each arm. I closed my eyes and stroked her hair, whispering shhhh in her ear. “It’s okay, sweetie… It’s okay. All done now.”

  India screamed next, struggling in Mom’s lap.

  I was just so damn tired. The pitiful sound of both children’s sobs made tears well up in my eyes.

  “Now, we find these shots are usually tolerated really well,” said the doctor, “but if the girls have any discomfort tonight, it’s all right to give them a little liquid Tylenol.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

  The woman grabbed her clipboard and race-walked out of the room.

  “What a bitch,” said Mom in a stage whisper the moment the exam room door had clicked shut.

  I snickered despite myself and turned to look at her.

  “Oh, Mom… you cried, too?” I said, handing her a wad of Kleenex from the doctor’s stash. “Your mascara’s running.”

  “I couldn’t stand it,” she said, sniffling and dabbing at her eyes. “Getting a shot in each arm? Horrible.”

  We carried the girls back out to the parking lot. India was asleep before Mom had finished fastening the straps on her car seat.

  “Why don’t you go up and take a nap when we get home, Madeline?” said Mom. “You look exhausted.”

  “That would be my idea of Nirvana,” I said, right before Parrish projectile-vomited all over me.

  I was looking for clean clothes for Parrish once we’d gotten back to the house.

  “I’ll do all that,” said Mom. “Don’t be silly.”

  “But you shouldn’t have to—”

  She took me gently by the shoulders and turned me toward the staircase.

  “Go upstairs,” said my mother. “Wash your face. Put on a clean shirt.”

  I just stood there for a minute, then glanced back over my shoulder.

  Mom had already somehow stripped Parrish down to just a diaper and laid her gently on the sofa. “I think she’s finished throwing up, poor little thing.”

  Even so, the cushions beneath her were now miraculously, tautly sheeted with several clean towels.

  I shook my head. “How did you get—”

  “Go upstairs,” said Mom, shaking a crook’d finger at me. “I’m the mother, and I say so.”

  When I reached the landing, I heard her call my name from below.

  “Yeah?” I said, peering back down over the banister.

  “Turn your dirty clothes inside out and throw them down here once you’ve got them off. I’ll start a load of laundry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And then I think you should run yourself a bath.”

  “Okay.”

  She stepped into sight beneath me. “After that you can go to sleep.”

  I bowed to her in gratitude, knocking my forehead three times against the banister.

  I’d just gotten out of the bathtub and wrapped myself in a big towel when Mom came upstairs.

  “Is Parrish okay?” I asked, reaching back into the tepid water to yank out the plug by its chain.

  “I gave her some apple juice and she kept it down. She might go to sleep for a while.”

  “Do you think I should take her temperature?”

  “I think you should take a nap.”

  I padded down the hallway toward Dean’s and my bedroom, my skin not even damp anymore.

  “It’s so weird,” I said. “You barely even need towels at this altitude. It’s like going through the dryers at a car wash.”

  I put on a bra and pulled a clean T-shirt over my head.

  “The clasp broke on these pearls you got from Mummie?” asked Mom, lifting the string of cultured orbs from the jewelry box atop my bureau, my third of what had been her mother’s triple-strand necklace.

  “The clasp is fine,” I said, rubbing my wet hair roughly with a towel. “The thread snapped, right near the end where it attaches.”

  She nodded. “I’ll take the girls out for a walk later and let you nap. We’ll have a little adventure and find a jewelry store to fix these.”

  “You sure Parrish is okay?”

  “Just go to sleep for a while.”

  I felt so refreshed after the bath I didn’t think I’d drift off, but I blinked my eyes a couple of times and the next time I opened them the bedroom walls were tinted blood orange, reflecting the sunset.

  Downstairs, Mom
had made dinner for all four of us.

  Parrish woke up around three that night, weeping and screaming. She was hot and sweaty and crying as though she were in great pain—or being chased by rabid wolves.

  I gave her liquid Tylenol and carried her downstairs and held her as I walked slowly back and forth across the moonlit living room floor. I buried my nose in her sweet, alfalfa-smelling hair as she shrieked in my ear, humming softly until she exhausted herself back to sleep once more.

  Sitting with her cradled across my lap for another ten minutes, I gazed at her dear little face in the blue moonlight.

  She made a fist and raised her thumb to her mouth, dark lashes grazing her cheeks—so beautiful it made me ache.

  Lucky, lucky, lucky. Yes I am.

  4

  Most days I woke up brimming with a sudden terror—that I’d forgotten to do essential things, that I’d never make friends in Colorado, that my appearance as an adult in the world was only a thin candy shell hiding a tiny, rattling center of incompetent thirteen-year-old or, worse yet, nothing at all.

  That morning I was too tired to care. I came downstairs in my underwear and my favorite black EAT THE RICH skull-and-crossbones T-shirt, toting a just-awakened child on each hip.

  Mom was in the kitchen drinking Postum, having already put away last night’s dishes and started a second load of laundry for me.

  “Does it bother you if I clean when I’m here?” she asked.

  “Are you fucking kidding?” I said, buckling the girls into their seats. “You are the goddess of the world.”

  “Daddy used to always straighten the pictures when he and Mummie came to visit. Then he’d polish the silver. Drove me crazy.”

  “Well, I kiss the hem of your garment.” I shook my head, starting to slice bananas for Parrish and India. “Besides which, your father was the most anal-retentive man who ever lived.”

  Mom smiled.

  I scooped up the bananas. “Whereas I am anal-intentive… I always mean to clean up, but never quite get around to it.”

  I knelt down to pile bananas on the girls’ respective little yellow plastic trays along with sturdy dry helpings of Life cereal, then tied on their bibs and let them have at it.

  By the time I’d filled two sippy cups with milk, Parrish had half a slice of banana up her nose and was busy mashing the remainder against India’s chubby left cheek.

  “Another fine day, my beauties,” I said, patting their silky heads.

  Mom put a yellow receipt into my hand. “I forgot to give you this last night. Your pearls should be ready Tuesday. The people in the store were very sweet.”

  “Didn’t your mother used to say that you should always make a jeweler restring them while you watch, so they can’t switch any of them out?”

  “Only for natural pearls. Doesn’t really matter with cultured,” she said.

  I boggled yet again at all the useless knowledge we’d accrued as a family since my four great-grandfathers left their childhood farms for robber-baron ascendancy in textiles, banking, bonds, and shipping, respectively.

  We could arrange flowers, navigate deb-party receiving lines, replace divots in polo fields between chukkers, and write charming thank-you notes on good stationery. Fat lot of good any of that did us now, three generations down the pike with everyone broke as shit.

  I mean, my poor mother got shoved into the 1960s wearing a hat and gloves and seamed stockings and a Bendel frock, having been educated to gracefully oversee a husband’s household’s staff. Preferably during the reign of Edward VII.

  She’d ended up on the outskirts of Big Sur smoking dope in our living room with a lot of Black Panthers—gracefully.

  So, okay, I also knew how to get food for striking AFL-CIO farmworkers through a Salinas police line, tie-dye T-shirts, wring every last dime out of any educational institution’s financial-aid office, sing the word-perfect entirety of “Alice’s Restaurant,” and fire off a deeply authentic, heartfelt black-power salute.

  But I’d married an alpha farmboy with a fine head for business.

  Go figure.

  Does that make it sound as though I wanted to be rich again, ride on Dean’s coattails, put a yoke around his neck?

  Wrong. I wanted to reboot everything back to scratch, start over, tabula rasa—yes, abso-goddamn-lutely. But the point was to shoot for kindness instead of glory and power and bloodthirsty bullshit this time around. Teamwork. Good talk and sharing books and time to laugh. Long fine dinners around a big table with all the people we loved. Maybe a little safety, comfort, and education for our children. Just enough to go around, to share, to live without being dogged by fear. Give peace a chance.

  “What time does Ellis get in?” asked Mom.

  “Noon, I think.” I tucked the pearls receipt into my shorts’ pocket and staggered toward my hideously orange kitchen counter to stoke the espresso machine for my own much-needed sustenance.

  “Are we picking her up at the airport?” she asked.

  “Too many car seats to fit in the Galant, with Hadley and Peregrine. Ellis is renting a mini-van or something.”

  A mini-van. Jesus. What the fuck happened to us?

  “I can’t imagine her married,” said Mom.

  “Yeah,” I said, laughing. “Neither can she.”

  “Do you straighten up the house before Dean gets home?” asked Mom, taking another sip of Postum as she surveyed the five overflowing baskets of laundry still listing to starboard alongside the washing machine.

  “Sure,” I lied. “Right before I greet him at the door in a freshly starched French maid’s costume and patent-leather thigh boots, bearing a monogrammed sterling shaker of chilled martinis.”

  Mom tsk-tsked.

  I yawned so hard that tears started leaking down my cheeks, then crossed my arms on the heinous autumnal Formica and slumped down to glare at the trickle of rocket-nectar leaking all too slowly from the espresso machine’s steel teat.

  India squealed with glee and threw a piece of banana in my general direction. I left it stuck to the side of my thigh, intent on pouring adequate sugar and milk into a pint glass with my now-finished double espresso.

  The washing machine buzzed and Mom started moving wet clothes to the dryer.

  “Thank you, dearest Mummie,” I said, toasting her with my flagon of Light Sweet Crude. “You are indeed the bestest ever.”

  When Mom had shoved the dryer door closed and hit START, she glanced at my bombed-out living room.

  “Madeline,” she said, head shaking slowly, “promise me you’ll never have pets.”

  “Wilkommen,” I said some hours later, skipping down the porch steps as Ellis rolled her rented vanlet’s side door open. “Bienvenue. Céad míle fáilte.”

  My svelte gamine pal flashed me a wide wicked grin. “How’s tricks?”

  “I’m fat, my marriage is tanking, and I want to run away with the circus,” I said. “Which is remarkable because I’ve always despised circuses. You?”

  She rolled her green eyes skyward. “I just want to be a widow. Is that so wrong?”

  “Scorpio’s in the House of Suckbag again at your place, too?”

  Our husbands had been born on the exact same day in 1962, and we’d long since discovered that their sine waves of biorhythmic testiness were perfectly synced.

  She unlocked the straps on towheaded little Hadley’s car seat. “We married beneath us.”

  “All women do,” I replied, making my way around to the car’s street-side door to release Peregrine.

  He was four years old, the spitting image of Ellis, and immediately sank his teeth into the meatiest part of my forearm.

  I yanked all appendages beyond reach of the kid’s fangs to check for blood and gore. He’d broken the skin, but only just.

  “No worries,” said Ellis. “He’s had his shots for distemper.”

  “Imagine my relief.”

  She pointed at the back of Mom’s little Chinook camper. “Nice bumper sticker.”


  The slogan was affixed beneath a window box brimming with road-weary plastic geraniums: POSSUM, it read, THE OTHER OTHER WHITE MEAT.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  Hadley laughed, smacking her mother audibly upside the head with a Cookie Monster sippy cup.

  Ellis sighed. “Now I know why tigers eat their young.”

  5

  We spent the morning of my daughters’ birthday driving north in the mini-van to Rocky Mountain National Park, an expedition cut short when Ellis reached into her diaper bag for a camera and Peregrine took the opportunity to bolt away across thin ice toward the thawed center of a pond.

  The surface gave way when he was fifteen feet from shore, Ellis already sprinting toward him, smashing through the frozen surface up to her knees with each frantic stride.

  The frigid water only came up to his waist, thank God.

  “That child is a menace,” said Mom once we’d exhaled our panic-stilled breath.

  “No shit,” I replied, thankful once again that I’d had girls.

  Ellis threw Perry over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry and slogged back toward shore.

  “If we’d brought the camper,” said Mom, “I could have wrapped them both up in blankets.”

  “The camper has nothing to hook the car seats to, though,” I said. “So we would of course have driven off a cliff on the way home.”

  Mom shook her head. “A little time airborne might be just what that boy needs.”

  Ellis stepped back onto dry land, Perry already blue-lipped and shaking in her arms.

  She looked at me.

  My eyes must have mirrored everything so plain in hers: exhaustion, self-recrimination, and the profound gratitude one always feels in the aftermath of sheer-adrenaline maternal terror.

  “I have considered calling the child-abuse hotline,” she said. “For tips.”

  I gripped her shoulder. “On the bright side, he can’t drive yet.”

  “Try telling him that. We’re on our third garage door.”

  I opened the van and she bundled Perry into a spare set of warm clothes—claiming not to be a bit cold herself—then posed us all beside the shore for photos with the cracked ice clearly visible behind us.