That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

  Perhaps his kiss would remind her what a kiss even was, and perhaps his hands would be rougher than she’d expect a poet’s to be. Jim looked capable, the kind of man who could fix a broken car. Perhaps she’d let him lift her to the edge of the bed, perhaps he’d get down on his knees and stare at her appreciatively. Perhaps he’d push her dress up around her waist, impatient, and tug at her underclothes, and fix his attention on her, and perhaps she’d feel self-conscious at the level of this particular exposure or perhaps she’d be delirious and not care. The simple trace of her own finger could move her; what would Jim be able to do? Perhaps she’d find out. Perhaps he’d bite her thighs. Perhaps his stubble would burn her skin. Perhaps they would slip into a collaborative rhythm like two sticks trying to make a flame. Perhaps they would laugh or cough or revise the scene, in the moment, removing errant hairs, excess flesh, unflattering angles. Perhaps they’d find something, something it took two people to find, and perhaps that would be enough for some kind of temporary relief.

  “Well, what does he know, your ex-husband? Your work is—well, you don’t need me to tell you what it is.”

  Her work was important. Midcareer meant more to go. She was forty-two years younger than Virginia Hamilton Adair. Many things could fit into forty-two years; Priscilla’s entire life had lasted that long. Rebecca was no longer the Younger Poet, but she was the better for it. “How is your own work going?”

  Jim talked about a project, something to do with birds. Rebecca barely listened; though this was the sort of conversation she often craved, given it, she realized that her fantasy left her wanting, that it belonged as fantasy. What she wanted was not to hear someone else talk, but to talk herself, of ideas, of the beginnings of things, of what she might make, when she found time. She thought herself lonely, sometimes, as did Karen, as did her sisters, but maybe what Rebecca lacked was not connection but an audience. Maybe she was just selfish.

  “You should be so very proud, Rebecca. The stars are aligning around you. It’s an honor for us to have you here.”

  “Please.”

  “I mean it. I know Hopkins will want to hold on to you even more, after this, but . . . Well, if you would ever think about relocating, we should talk.”

  “My boys are so young, still. Their father is there.”

  “They’re ten and thirteen, I thought you said? The big one will be applying to colleges before you know it.”

  It happened, just like everyone said, the leaps, the changes. Jacob thought like a child but looked, roughly, like a man. Andrew had grown fatter, and Rebecca knew what it was: the body building its reserves. Soon, he’d follow his brother, and his voice would deepen, his legs grow lean, and he’d want to sleep all the time, and not hug her. Andrew was the only person in the world who was still willing to touch her body, and soon even he would not. It was said the babies in orphanages in Bucharest went mad from not being touched. “I suppose. It’s hard to see into the future.”

  “It’s impossible!” Jim chuckled. “But you prepare. You try. You have a sense of what the future might hold, you organize your life to allow it.”

  “Maybe.” She had foretold this, once, one of those heady candlelit dinners when Christopher was still her boyfriend, or before, one of those illicit evenings in Isaiah’s marriage bed, or before, to herself, in the shower; but Rebecca had been wrong about what the future held, or hadn’t bargained on what she was capable of doing in between that present and the future that was still somewhere far off. Rebecca didn’t know that she was the kind of person who would take on mothering someone else’s child, make that child her own, change his life and her own and the lives of everyone around them. “We’ll see what comes next.” She wasn’t sure if she was the kind of person who said this sort of thing. “I’m doing my best work. I’ve never felt more energized. I want to get to it. I don’t feel midcareer, but if this is midcareer, it’s great. It’s bracing.” The boys would fly out of the nest and she would be truly alone and she would do something remarkable.

  “There’s no rushing it. My students all want to rush it.”

  Rebecca felt for Jim’s students. Handsome Tyler: she should have told him to go to law school. A bit of Christopher’s well-worn patter; With a law degree, all things are possible. “That’s what it is to be young.”

  “But I’m in a rush now, myself.” Jim was confessional. “For the first time. It seems like time. You teach, and you realize that the world is filling up with people younger than you, and that sooner or later you’ve got to make room for them all.”

  “I’m in a rush, too.” It felt good to admit. She welcomed what would come: Jacob and Andrew in high school, then college, then both men who would return to her, handsome and strong and happy and amazed at the things she’d done.

  Jim had to go. There would be, she knew, poets eager to discuss something with him at his office hours, poets supplicant, jealous.

  There was a museum near the hotel, Rebecca knew, because there was a brochure celebrating the place in the hotel lobby. There was an Oldenburg on the lawn, and a klatch of smokers, presumably art students, stained jeans and bandannas holding hair in place, in the relief of the April sunshine. It was one of life’s rarest gifts, to be in a strange place with no particular demands on your time. Rebecca went inside.

  The place had a Mediterranean affect: pleasant, instantly transporting. Rebecca admired, as you were meant to do in a museum. She waited for that deeper, transcendent feeling to arrive, like a teenager who’s just tried drugs for the first time, nervously running mental diagnostics, am I feeling yet? She wandered, taking in the Cindy Sherman, the Beuys felt suit, hanging ghostly and unseeing over the proceedings. Rebecca barely looked and certainly didn’t see. Her footfalls echoed off the high ceilings. She was alone in the place, alone with art so valuable its worth couldn’t even be calculated. It was the nearest she’d ever get to church. Jim Dine had never meant anything to her.

  In a little gallery at the back of the building, there was a small exhibition composed of relics from the earliest era of photography. Such pictures often seemed the same to Rebecca, whose eye lacked imagination. She needed color, not these sober impressions in silver, though it was a thrill to look at people so long dead and realize they looked much as people now living did.

  She read the explanatory text on the wall: these were Hidden Mother photographs. An unfamiliar but not opaque term, a studio portrait of a child in which the child’s mother was hidden inside the frame. Junior would weep left alone before the camera’s eye, and needed to be stilled for the primitive camera’s long exposure, so he was perched on Mama’s lap, and Mama was draped in black, like a shroud. It was a photograph of two people that looked like a photograph of one. It was the baby because he was the only thing that mattered. It was the most literal erasure of women whom history had already wholly erased. The pictures were a game. Spot the woman! The contours of a body gone plush from childbearing, a slipped cloth laying bare a hand, an outline, an impression, an errant hair. There she was! Too easy a metaphor but learning something new was interesting.

  Rebecca had never intended it, she admitted to herself, only barely. She’d thought: two weeks, a month, maybe two. But she’d been naive, or impulsive. She’d loved Priscilla because she’d taught her something magical or something useful: Priscilla had taught her as much as or more than Princess Diana.

  If she’d lived, Priscilla, would they be friends? More likely that Priscilla would simply offer Rebecca’s name and telephone number to prospective employers, and Rebecca would have brief but excited conversations with nervous mothers. Hire her! she’d tell them.

  Oh, sure, the nature of motherhood was invisible. This was a C-minus as an idea, like Icarus. We all have one, a mother, in some fashion. It was something to talk about, the having of a mother, in a way that the act of being one was not. Her sons were her suns, her life hostage to their orbit. Let it be thus. Drape her with bolts of scratchy black wool and place Andrew or Jacob on her lap. Th
e baby was always the same. Cave painting, Christ on Mary’s lap, Cindy Sherman in the next room over, all babies, all the same. The baby was the only thing that mattered because the future was the only thing that mattered.

  She’d talked to Andrew about Priscilla. That was her responsibility. When he was smaller, and she’d insisted that he and Jacob called Cheryl Auntie, she’d simply plunged into it. “Cheryl isn’t your auntie, in the way that Auntie Judith is, or in the way that Auntie Christine is. Cheryl is your sister.”

  “But she doesn’t live in our house. And you’re not her mommy.”

  “That’s right. She’s a grown-up sister. She lives in her own house. And I’m not her mommy. But I am your mommy. You have two mommies.” She had improvised this one, then had the good fortune to remember to append: “You’re so lucky. Two mommies!”

  “Who is my other mommy?”

  This unanswerable question. Your other mommy, she’d told him, sidestepping what she knew people said and thought—your real mommy—is dead. But she loved you so much. You grew inside of her and she loved you just as much as Daddy and I love you and we are so lucky that we got to make a new family that includes all of us together, you and Jacob and me and Daddy and Auntie Cheryl and Uncle Ian and Ivy.

  “Why are we a family?”

  What was the answer? An impetuous impulse? Terrible happenstance? Pure chance, like bad Fluxus art? She couldn’t remember what she’d said, in answer to this, but the question echoed over the intervening decade, lingered in her ears even now. Impossible to explain to a child—impossible to explain to an adult—that we’re all just making it up as we go along.

  Rebecca had learned from Christopher that getting on a plane might mean never finishing your business. But she had got on that plane to Ohio without finishing hers, without saying to Cheryl, as she had to her sons, that she loved her. Every day brought a leap of faith: the plane to Ohio would not crash, the plane home would not crash. She would have years to finish that business.

  She went back to the hotel. Rebecca took a hot shower. She massaged the shampoo into her hair, she soaped her skin. She dried herself with a towel, used another towel to wrap up her hair. She was so callous with hotel towels, but that was one of the perks of a hotel stay, that brief interlude of pretending abundance. She wished there were music. She felt like a song, something big and silly and unembarrassed.

  Rebecca had packed something inoffensively chic for the evening’s dinner. Black trousers, the kind of simple you knew was expensive, and a black top, which telegraphed a certain coastal sophistication. They would want a celebrity more than a poet, and she would want not to disappoint. She’d packed heels, and she’d packed jewelry, some of the real stuff that her mother-in-law had given her. An emerald like the emerald used in metaphors, set in a sterling bracelet. She faced herself in the mirror, barely able to see herself because of the room’s poor light. She hoped that it would not rain, but knew it always rained in April.

  She still had no words. She was receiving the Ruth Jameson Award in Contemporary Poetry because she was good at words. She ran the wand over her lips, trying to will herself to see them, as though light were something that could be willed.

  “Thank you so much, to the Ruth Jameson Foundation, to the college, to the Department of Creative Writing, to my friend and editor Jim Willis. This is an astonishing honor.” No, that was an overstatement. This was her due. “This is a great honor. I am truly honored. I am deeply honored.”

  She frowned into the mirror and her nostrils flared.

  “I am so grateful to Ruth Jameson. I am so grateful her grandfather was a huckster who sold soap powder and cocaine as a headache remedy and prophylactics and whatever other crazy things he did. I’m so sorry they poisoned the people in that town in India.

  “Ruth Jameson was born in 1909 in Saint Louis. It’s ninety years later and I’m standing in Ohio and accepting a check from her.

  “My thanks to the Ruth Jameson Foundation, to the college, to my friend and editor Jim Willis for his tireless support of my work. I am glad that people have liked my poems. I have tried, in some small way, to say something. That I get to be allowed to do so, it feels like pure luck, but I am a woman who has had good luck, dumb luck, great good luck, all my life.

  “Ruth Jameson was born in 1909. It is 1999. The millennium approaches, you all know. We will turn the page of history.

  “The future has arrived. And tonight, I feel good about that future. The world, it is getting better. Because how can we let it get anything but better?

  “Ruth Jameson was born before the start of the First World War, which was called the Great War because they didn’t know there would be another. We live in a time of no war. We have forgotten about war, and if we had one now, we wouldn’t know what to call it. We are lucky. We are blessed, that war is forgotten. When Ruth Jameson was born, William Howard Taft was the president. I don’t know anything about him. For the women in this room who are pregnant, or whose daughters are, when their children are born, Al Gore will be the president. I look forward to that, personally. I trust him to do something about the hole they say is opening in the sky.

  “The planet is in disarray, but the right people will do something about it. I’ll stay at my desk and write poetry about it, and other things, or about poetry. It doesn’t matter.

  “Poets are not oracles. But I know the world is improving. You can see it all around us. Good men will do good things. We’ll never have a war good enough to be called great. My black son will be judged the equal of my white son.” She fitted the silver bracelet around her wrist with a snap. The stone was so beautiful it was ridiculous. She studied her face and tried to see the whole. She liked the emerald, because it made her think of Diana. Rebecca looked nothing like Diana, and Diana was dead now, anyway. “It’s 1999.” She lost her train of thought.

  “The millennium is looming. But history always is. I believe we will do history proud. I believe we will heal the hole in the sky. I believe we’ll create a world in which my black son and my white son will be judged equals. I believe in a world that will be better even than the one we now share, which is quite wonderful.” She thought, fleetingly, of Christopher, of her sons. She would call them, before leaving, make sure they’d been to the allergist, that their homework was being seen to, that they knew she loved them, even from the distance of Ohio. “It’s 1999,” she said again, unembarrassed, aloud, in her clearest, most oratorical voice. “It’s 1999 and I believe a better world is coming.”

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to everyone at Ecco; Megan Lynch and Sonya Cheuse deserve special thanks. Thanks to Julie Barer and her colleagues at the Book Group, and to Julie Barer and Colson Whitehead for their generosity. Thank you to Rebecca Cross, Lynda Dougherty, Samantha Turner, and others who have educated me on motherhood. Thanks to Laura Larson for her beautiful book Hidden Mother, and to Lindsay Hatton, Karen Good Marable, Celeste Ng, Meaghan O’Connell, Danzy Senna, Rufi Thorpe, Robin Wasserman, and especially Lynn Steger Strong. And profound thanks to superb husband/father/person David Land.

  About the Author

  RUMAAN ALAM is the author of the novel Rich and Pretty. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Elle, New York magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, the Rumpus, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He studied at Oberlin College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  rumaanalam.com

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  Also by Rumaan Alam

  RICH and PRETTY

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  THAT KIND OF MOTHER. Copyright © 2018 by Rumaan Alam. All rights reserved under International and Pan-Amer
ican Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Cover design by Allison Saltzman

  Cover photograph © Thomas M. Scheer/Eyeem/Getty Images

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Alam, Rumaan, author.

  Title: That kind of mother : a novel / Rumaan Alam.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Ecco, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018000165 (print) | LCCN 2018002136 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062667625 () | ISBN 9780062667601 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062864383 (softcover) | ISBN 9780062667618

  Subjects: LCSH: Race relations—Fiction. | Motherhood—Fiction. | Nannies—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life.

  Classification: LCC PS3601.L3257 (ebook) | LCC PS3601.L3257 T48 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000165