That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

  “Just get some Similac, Rebecca. Make it easy on yourself. Enjoy being a mom. Go for a walk. Watch Days of Our Lives. Get your hair done. Take him to the zoo.” Doctor Anderssen closed the manila folder in his hands and winked at the baby. “He’s a lady-killer. Job well done.”

  There was a ticket from the Montgomery County police, as she knew there would be. It was only money. Rebecca buckled the belt over the seat, pulling and tugging to be sure it was firmly in place. Jacob looked at her like he’d never seen her before, like she was no one to him. She sat in the front seat, started the car, turned on the radio. Dionne Warwick was singing, that song about friendship that was also, somehow, about AIDS. Rebecca felt like she had a fever and she certainly had the chills. She began to cry.

  She forgot to remove the ticket from beneath the wiper blade, and drove to the hospital, and parked in a lot because she still couldn’t find a quarter. She took the elevator to the fourth floor, and eyes still a little teary, approached the woman at the desk—maybe she was a nurse, maybe she’d peered into Rebecca’s vulva and watched a baby emerge into life. “Do you know Priscilla?”

  Priscilla: (1) smiled in recognition, (2) recoiled in surprise, (3) procured an ice pack and secured it beneath the strap of the nursing bra, (4) pulled at Rebecca’s distended nipple and filled her own palm with Rebecca’s milk, (5) smoothed Rebecca’s bangs, brought her some ibuprofen and a plastic cup of cold water, (6) held the baby until he slept. The woman smiled so much that Rebecca cried, then, remembering Dionne Warwick and her song about AIDS, cried harder. Get your hair done? Did her hair not look nice, on top of everything else?

  “All those men in New York are dying,” Rebecca said, nonsensically. Imagine if your own blood was the thing making you sick.

  “The baby is fine,” Priscilla replied, equally cryptically.

  “I’m not a very good mother.” Rebecca prodded at the swell in her breast, cold to the touch from the ice.

  3

  IT WAS THE TWENTY-SEVENTH BUT TECHNICALLY CHRISTMAS WAS A season. It wasn’t too late! It was the thought that counted! Rebecca made a mandala of frosted cookies, wrapped the plate in plastic, taped beneath that an envelope; a gift certificate, which didn’t make any assumptions. As it was, Rebecca felt uncertain. What was the line between generosity and pomposity?

  “It’s my favorite visitors!” Priscilla stood as they entered the by now familiar room. “How are we today?”

  “This is a social call, for a change.” Rebecca felt suddenly embarrassed. “Jacob and I wanted to come. To give you this.” She thrust the plate at the woman, unable to summon the grace required of the gesture because there was another agenda, as was so often the case.

  “Well, my goodness. That was unnecessary. Thank you so much.”

  “There’s this, as well.” It was awkward to indicate the envelope taped to the plate. “Just something.” She sat on the rolling stool by the counter.

  “My goodness. Thank you.” Priscilla put the plate on the metal desk. “That’s very kind.”

  “I just . . .” Rebecca still felt too near tears too much of the time. This had never been her way before having Jacob. “I truly appreciate what you’ve done for me.”

  “That’s what La Leche does, dear.” Priscilla unwrapped the plate. “These are almost too pretty to eat.”

  “Not La Leche. You, Priscilla.” It was hard to tell it. “I’ve felt—”

  “A lot of women feel alone after having a baby. I know I did. It’s very common. It doesn’t make any sense, because you’re not alone. You never are again, not really. My baby is all grown up and I still don’t ever feel like I’m alone.”

  “It’s been . . .” Rebecca was at a loss. In the carrier against her chest, Jacob sighed. “You’ve been very kind.”

  “It’s my job, Rebecca! Now eat one of these.”

  “But this is beyond the call of duty. You’ve been a help. A friend. So I wanted to come again. To give you this, but to—finish the conversation we had. To make you an offer, officially.”

  “Rebecca.” Priscilla bit into one of the cookies. “I’m not sure it’s proper.”

  “Oh, who cares about proper?” Rebecca knew—they had covered this, the times she’d been to her—that Priscilla had lost her previous job as a nanny for a family that had relocated to the Middle East, a hazard of life in the District. A small stipend from the hospital had been arranged by her daughter, Cheryl. It was a temporary solution. “You’ll need.” It wasn’t about Priscilla needing money, though Rebecca assumed she did; it was that she needed Priscilla.

  “I surely will.” She laughed. “My daughter works here. She pulled strings.”

  “I didn’t mean to assume.” Rebecca wanted to have her way. Hadn’t it been thus, her whole life? She wanted, and she received.

  “I don’t know how it might look. The hospital is my daughter’s employer. I need to keep things aboveboard.” Priscilla looked embarrassed. “It’s not that I don’t love Jacob!”

  “Of course. Perhaps I could—if you’re interested. I could speak to the hospital. I’m sure they can be made to understand.” It seemed very simple.

  “I don’t know that there are rules but there are . . . appearances.”

  “But who cares about appearances?” Rebecca rolled the stool back and forth until the baby stilled. “What can that matter?”

  “I should talk to my daughter—Cheryl. I would have to be certain that it won’t complicate anything for her.”

  “It won’t. Don’t be silly.” What were formalities but just that?

  “Well.” Priscilla picked up another cookie.

  “You’re a good mother. To think of your daughter.” Was she pushing? Perhaps. But she was motivated. She had a need, Priscilla had a need. It seemed straightforward. “Maybe I could speak to her. Cheryl? Reassure her that it’s all aboveboard. Maybe I could make a gift to the hospital? I should! To La Leche. You saved me, you helped me so much.”

  “It is a not-for-profit organization. So it’s tax deductible.” She sounded persuaded or maybe resigned.

  “Why don’t we do that.” Rebecca nodded. “And I can speak to your daughter, if it would put your mind at ease.”

  “No.” Priscilla shook her head. “I don’t think we need to go so far. But maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s not such a problem.”

  “It’s not.”

  “You drive a hard bargain, Rebecca.”

  “So that’s yes. You’re saying yes to me.” Rebecca was whispering, though the baby was quite asleep.

  “I bet most people do.” Priscilla smiled.

  “I know it’s short notice, but maybe you can start in January?”

  4

  SHE WAS AT HER DESK LOOKING AT THE NEIMAN MARCUS CATALOG. It was more engaging than the rejection letters she was supposed to file, including one from the esteemed magazine at her dear old alma mater, a very specific sort of insult. She knew some of the readers there, but of course they probably remembered Rebecca at her worst. She’d tarried too long in that city, intoxicated with her own liberty, thinking it viable to spend her time as a student and to spend her youth seducing (yes, that) a professor. Isaiah was unkind, and married, too, but she didn’t know much, younger Rebecca. She kept her poems close and took a job at a bookstore in Cambridge. Greg and Lorraine Brooks’s 1981 Christmas dispatch: Rebecca has finished her master’s at Boston University but can’t get enough of books!

  Now, older/wiser, Rebecca had perhaps had her fill of those. Why not pore over these silk scarves and ostentatious jewels and interesting shoes? It was said Mrs. Marcos had three thousand pairs! Rebecca had seen photographs, an intent woman with a clipboard, dwarfed by teak shelves, making an inventory of wedges, slingbacks, espadrilles, sandals, heels, now the property of the Philippine people.

  Rebecca wondered how many pairs of shoes she had. She couldn’t guess, in fact, felt done with them, with vanity itself. In the past months, she’d gotten dressed up once. Christopher took her to a dinner at the
home of someone he wanted to impress. He was called Bob and he was married to an actress of almost unreal beauty who had been on television, years before. Beside this woman, this wonder (towering heels, white dress, shellacked hair) Rebecca felt dowdy, exposed, as appalled at the loose skin as she was amazed at the fact that it was her body that kept her baby alive, and kept pulling her cashmere shawl tighter around her shoulders, wishing to swaddle herself just as Priscilla had taught her to swaddle Jacob, the constraint a comfort.

  Now, Rebecca made excuses. She sat at home in canvas sneakers and red corduroys and talked to the baby and Priscilla. The trousers had been maternity pants and they were quite loose. The weight had mostly melted away as Priscilla said it would, because of Jacob and his incessant need.

  Something Christopher had said to Rebecca, when they were looking for houses, stuck with her. “The right amount of money makes anything possible.” Words to live by. Priscilla started on the first Monday in January, the sixth, more than one kind of epiphany, the end of holiday festivity. But Rebecca, opening the door to her, felt Zing! go the strings of her heart, just like Judy Garland sang. Priscilla in her belted sweater and tan pants, with her strong hands and their soft palms. Jacob always went to her without fuss.

  “You have a beautiful home.” Priscilla kicked off her shoes in the foyer.

  “Oh, we wear our shoes inside.” Rebecca was cradling Jacob close to her chest, her knees bent and rocking side to side gently. Priscilla had shown her this trick during one of her visits. Priscilla said it reminded the baby of being in utero, the constant motion of the mother’s body.

  “I’m making myself at home.” Priscilla did not laugh often but seemed often to be joking. “Besides, they say taking your shoes off at the door reduces the germs in the household. Where can I wash my hands?”

  Rebecca led her into the kitchen, where Priscilla washed her hands, and took the baby from Rebecca. “Let me show you.” She propped the baby’s back against her chest, her breasts cradling his lolling neck like those inflatable pillows favored by frequent fliers, one hand under his knees, still bent by habit. With her other, Priscilla made a circle of thumb and forefinger and wrapped it around his ankle. “This is how they do it in the pediatric wards. If the baby wiggles away, you can’t drop him.”

  Rebecca sat with them for twenty minutes that first day before Priscilla cleared her throat and sent Rebecca away. That was why she was there, so that Rebecca could go away.

  The office was a purgatory. Nothing happened there. Or it was a church: nothing happened there but you pretended and it seemed like something might. Rebecca opened the mail, did a crossword, responded to a letter, skimmed the newspaper, studied the contributors’ notes in various journals, angry or irritated about this person’s appointment as the Whoever Whatever Professor of Creative Writing or that person’s undeserved grant. She’d do this for ninety minutes, then Priscilla would knock and bring in Jacob, and Rebecca would sit by the window and nurse and Priscilla would sit at the desk and chat with her. Then Priscilla would take the baby away, and there would be ninety more minutes or so of quiet, and then she’d knock once more, and then Rebecca would leave the office and sit with her in the kitchen and eat a tuna sandwich and then Rebecca would go back to the office for another ninety minutes and then be interrupted once more, feed the baby once more, then give up and sit in the living room with Priscilla and the baby, and drink a cup of tea and listen to Diane Rehm and laugh and discuss nothing at all. Rebecca wasn’t writing, but everything felt different and better. Perhaps she’d been struggling not with the baby but with the loneliness of spending all her time with someone who could not talk to her.

  Priscilla rapped at the door, neither urgently nor meekly. Rebecca had known it was time, could feel that sense of trickle or tickle. She closed the catalog and put some papers on top of it. “Yes.”

  Priscilla came in, Rebecca took the baby, who smelled vaguely of Priscilla, who smelled vaguely of vanilla extract, and sat, holding the baby with one arm and undoing buttons with the other. She was adept at this now.

  “How has the morning been?”

  “We played. We read. He napped. I think later we might walk to the library. It’s almost balmy outside, did you know? Thank goodness. I always get to this point where I can’t bear to look at my winter coat anymore.”

  Rebecca murmured her assent though she had in fact got much better at holding conversations while feeding the baby. At this point she was used to his presence, his pull, his nearness. Sometimes she liked to bask in it, savor it, as the reverberations after an orgasm or the lingering taste of a strong red wine, but Rebecca liked talking to Priscilla and was hungry for the opportunity because she had so many questions and these had to be folded into longer conversations. “Where did you grow up, Priscilla? I don’t know!” Rebecca shook her head as though this were not to be believed. “You know I’m from Greenbelt. I’m used to this weather, winter too long, summer too short. Sometimes I’m tempted to move to Phoenix or something, so I can feel warm more often than not.”

  Priscilla tidied the papers on the edge of Rebecca’s desk. “Prince George’s area. Well, Charles County. Port Tobacco. You won’t know it. It’s country, compared to this.” She shook her head decisively. “There’s no reason for you to ever go there.”

  Rebecca sometimes heard in Priscilla a trace of an accent, a tendency toward Southernness, a courtly affect, a slackness around the vowels. This seemed to answer something. “Charles County.”

  “I hope you’re getting some work done, what with our interrupting. You could always pump. That’ll make it easier for you to write or get out of the house. Of course, the schedule will change before you know it. Babies keep you on your toes.”

  Rebecca knew that when Priscilla talked about babies in the abstract she was talking about particular babies—Jamie and Lauren, who had been her charges a couple of years ago, and before that a little boy named David, before that a little girl named Theresa, and before that, of course, her own daughter, Cheryl. The bulk of what Rebecca most wanted to know concerned Cheryl, and this nagging question: How old was Priscilla? It was impossible for Rebecca to tell. Rebecca would herself turn thirty-one in two months. She’d had a baby so much later in life than her sisters had, than you were supposed to, but she had a feeling that Priscilla had done the inverse. Because she was full of a certain kind of wisdom, Priscilla seemed much older, but Rebecca sensed this wasn’t the case. Still, she didn’t trust her estimates, because Priscilla’s blackness was a complication. Hair and skin are the giveaways, but Rebecca didn’t understand black hair or black skin. She listened for cultural references, a when Kennedy was shot (Rebecca had been at school; her third-grade teacher was named Mrs. Warner), any suggestion that Priscilla was feeling old. “To tell you the truth, I like it when you come to visit.” The you here was understood to be plural but may as well not have been.

  “What are you getting done, if I can ask? I’ve never known anyone who wrote for a living.”

  “It’s generous of you to call it a living.” Rebecca grew hot. It was hard to remember, but imperative not to forget, that Priscilla was in her employ, that jokes about money were not seemly. Even among her sisters, money was a subject broached but never boarded, because of the obvious: Judith and Steven had it, Christine and Tim wanted it, Rebecca had gone from having none to having more than she deserved by virtue of luck instead of intensive education. Christopher’s parents had invested wisely in London real estate. “I try to think. I read. If I understood my own work better, I suppose I’d do more of it. Or be better at doing it.”

  “I’ve never read much poetry, truth be told. I read a lot of mysteries. But I’d like to read some. To understand what you do.”

  Rebecca was philosophical (OK, flattered). “I don’t know.” She looked at the baby at her breast, then out of the window. The trees were still bare, but the sunlight did seem stronger. “It’s just . . . The thing I like about poetry is that it can mean whatever it is
you want it to mean. There’s what the poet means, what the writer means, but I’m not sure that matters, ever, and less so even than normal with a poem. It’s just you, assembling the words and the images and the ideas and thinking about your own life and the things you know and the meaning is there, somehow, in you, and not where you think it is, on the page.”

  Priscilla considered this. “Are you thirsty?”

  Rebecca shook her head.

  “It’s interesting. I have this idea about poems rhyming or sounding a certain way, but I know that’s not the poetry you write. I read your poem, in that book in the living room, from the University of Nebraska.”

  The baby had fallen asleep. This was not uncommon; Rebecca rubbed his ear gently, and he suckled, then did not, then did, then did not. She removed her nipple from his mouth, which puckered around the air, a little frown she wanted to kiss.

  “Let it dry. Get some air.” Priscilla was vigilant.

  The best way to forestall blood. Rebecca left the nursing bra unlatched. She felt like Gauguin’s Tahitian, in the blue sarong, her single exposed breast somehow more noticeable than her companion’s, resting on a bowl of flower petals or fruit. No one, possibly not even Christopher, had seen Rebecca’s breasts as often as Priscilla. “I wrote that so long ago. I should be writing more. I thought I’d have a book by now. That’s how it seemed, when I was twenty-two—that by the time I was thirty I’d have a book, instead of a couple of poems in a couple of journals that no one reads.”

  “It’s interesting, what you do. It seems interesting, to me.”

  “I could give you some books. Poets I think you might like. I think you’d like Nikki Giovanni. Or there’s some very pretty Wallace Stevens.” Rebecca was grasping. She did like Giovanni but was surprised to hear herself say it aloud. Was she recommending Giovanni because Giovanni was, like Priscilla, a black woman? This seemed so idiotic but maybe true. She did think Priscilla might like Giovanni.