The Real Mother

by Judith Michael

“No.”

  “Well, clean out your ears and then go upstairs and do it.”

  “I don’t have to do the dishes? I mean, isn’t it my turn?”

  “I’ll do them tonight; the next two nights are yours. Go on; do your homework. Do you need any help?”

  “Could you quiz me on my spelling words?”

  “Later. I’ll come up as soon as I’ve finished here. Go on now, get everything else done.”

  “What about dessert?”

  “There isn’t any. You can take an apple up to your room.”

  “An apple isn’t dessert.”

  “An apple is dessert tonight in this house. Do you want it or not?”

  “Sure.”

  Left alone, Sara stared at the gummy wads of bread Doug had pulled from his ears, the cold mashed potatoes and scattered bits of meat loaf on the plates to the left and right of her, the peas that had fallen to the floor, the two empty glasses of milk, and Abby’s water glass, decorated with a neat red lip imprint. She refilled her wineglass and drank slowly, letting silence settle around her. Her day had begun at five that morning; it would not end until the others were settled in their rooms. Reflexively, she glanced again at Mack’s empty chair, then away. What good did anger do? Nothing would fill that chair. And so she sat, too tired even to change her position.

  The dining room could soothe or oppress her, depending on her mood, but tonight it was soothing, with its dark, solid eighteenth-century English dining table, ten velvet-cushioned chairs, and a pair of matching, heavily carved sideboards. Her mother had furnished the house the year Sara was born, when there had been plenty of money and no hints of what lay ahead. Fringed Oriental rugs overlapped at angles on dark wood floors, the walls were papered in faded vines and florals, and brass and cut-glass chandeliers cast a warm yellow wash over oil paintings of still lifes, pastoral scenes and portraits, and tall, paned windows with weighty antique gold draperies held back by tasseled ties.

  Sara often wondered if her mother and father had created that feeling of sanctuary because of some nameless fear, something that led them to buy the hundred-year-old house and fill its square, high-ceilinged rooms with everything that proclaimed haven. Had they spent money easily and behaved as if the future were certain, yet still had a sense that everything would fall apart? She could not ask them. Her father was long dead, and her mother could not tell her.

  Abby peeked into the room, Carrie just behind her. “Is everything okay?”

  Sara sighed, wanting only to be alone. “Yes, thanks, Abby. Fine. You don’t have to—”

  “He didn’t mean it, you know. I mean, Doug sounds so grown up— he knows all these big words—but he’s really just a kid.”

  “I know.”

  “And you had a rough day. People are such shits a lot of the time.”

  “That is enough!” Sara pushed back her chair. She told herself to stop—Abby was a help to her, she had been thinking not so long before—stop, keep quiet, don’t do this—but, as before, she could not even slow down. “I’ve tried to be patient, but I’m sick and tired of hearing you talk like an ignoramus with a few choice words you plug in because you’re too lazy to think of good ones. I hear that kind of talk from ignorant, crude people in my work and I don’t have to hear it at home, too. You are to stop it right now. If you can’t think of a good word, keep your mouth shut.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “I know what you did and I’ve had enough of it! Do you know what shit means? Do you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “There is no but. When you’re talking about excrement, you can talk about shit. When you’re talking about people you don’t like, you have a few choices: ill-natured, brutal, uncouth, gross, unfeeling, mean, malignant, heartless, virulent, cold, callous, inconsiderate, malicious, malevolent, hateful, cruel, vitriolic, crude, coarse, brutish, barbarous. Shakespeare wrote about ‘sharp-toothed unkindness.’ That describes my clients today better than all your shits put together. From now on, if that’s all you can think of, we’d appreciate silence.”

  In a small voice, Carrie said, “I don’t think Abby could be a Shakespeare.”

  “Probably not,” Sara snapped. “But how about something between Shakespeare and cretin?”

  There was a long silence. Sara sighed and went to them, putting her arms around them. “I’m behaving very badly tonight and I apologize. Go on upstairs. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Abby and Carrie looked at each other. “I promise. I’ll be upstairs soon. I told Doug I’d quiz him on his spelling, and I’ll come talk to you, too. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Abby, and they left. Scuttled out in fear and trembling, Sara thought, hating herself. She began to pile dishes on the table.

  Why do I do that? I start out with such good intentions, and then—

  I didn’t mean to jump all over them—how awful, the way I practically buried Abby under a whole thesaurus—and Doug, before that— twice in one evening—more than usual. It was just that I had such a miserable day—

  But maybe they did, too. I didn’t even ask them.

  I’ll ask them when I go upstairs.

  She sat down again. She had wanted so desperately to be alone that her hands had been clenched as she tried to get the girls out of the room. Now she sat without moving, without thinking, her thoughts once again floating free, soaring like birds until they grew heavy and dipped down into one memory or other.

  She had been young and excited about a limitless future.

  Her father died, and her mother remarried.

  Abby and Carrie and Doug were born.

  (And Mack. But she never thought about Mack.)

  And then Abby and Carrie and Doug were left alone, and Sara was the only one to keep the family whole.

  What is a family? she wondered, sitting motionless in the dining room. Any group of people who love each other? Well, we do. But nothing else about us fits anybody’s definition.

  I can’t think about that now. I can’t ever think about it. It does no good.

  The minutes stretched out. She heard music from Abby’s room, and pictured her doing her homework while rocking to her music and dreaming of… what? Boys? Drugs? Clothes? Probably all of the above. Sara could only guess, and rely on hints and behavior. She was pretty sure there was not too much to worry about…so far. But she had no idea how strong Abby’s resistance was to the pressures of her friends, her group, the movies they saw every weekend, television, the very air she breathed.

  Too much to think about. So I won’t. It’s all unproductive anyway.

  And I won’t move. I won’t clean the kitchen; I won’t even go upstairs. I’ll stay here until it’s time to go to work tomorrow.

  But I promised.

  “Sara!” Doug shouted from upstairs. “Are you coming?”

  “In a minute.”

  What the hell, she thought, and stood up and resumed clearing the table.

  Doug heard the clatter of dishes and knew it would be more than a minute before Sara came upstairs. “She always says that,” he muttered. “ ‘In a minute, in a minute.’ How many zillion minutes does she think I have to wait around?” He kicked a pile of socks to the corner of his room. Sara had told him to do the laundry …when was that? A couple of days ago? No, yesterday morning, when he was getting dressed. Put a load of wash in before you go to school. Well, he’d meant to, but he had a lot on his mind yesterday and laundry just got…He looked at the pile of socks, and grinned. Kicked into the corner.

  Anyway, he had three sisters… why couldn’t one of them do laundry? They pulled rank, that was the problem, they were older, they talked faster. Three against one; it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t natural, either. What it was, was a pain in the butt, being the only man in a house full of women. Mack shouldn’t have left. That was the thing that really wasn’t fair. Mack wasn’t fair, walking out, leaving his only brother in the lurch, trampled on by women.

  Of course Mack got famous, at least for about fifteen minutes.
His picture in the DePaul Neighborhood Voice, with a whole story about him. A little one, but still, nobody’d ever written anything about Doug, and they gave Mack lots of attention.

  Mack Hayden, seventeen years old, a freshman at Roosevelt University—

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true; he’d dropped out once and been kicked out once and told he couldn’t come back.

  —has been reported missing by his sister Sara Elliott. Abby, Carrie, and Douglas Hayden say they do not know where their brother is. When asked, Douglas replied, “If he was going on a trip, he didn’t tell me anything about it.” Mack Hayden occasionally had filed sports-related stories to the DePaul Neighborhood Voice; the management of the newspaper is unaware of other jobs he might have had. He seems to have disappeared on November 3, and has not been seen by friends, family, or co-workers at the paper. His parents, Tess and Will Hayden, are dead.

  Not true, not true, not true. Doug hated that part. His mother was in a nursing home, in her very own room that Sara had decorated, and she loved them, she loved them passionately, she just couldn’t tell them in words that she did. He didn’t know where people got that idea, that she was dead; Sara had called the newspaper to tell them to take it back—run a correction, she’d said—but they never did. You couldn’t trust anybody to do anything right.

  But Mack was gone, that part was true, he took off on November 3—three years and six months ago—and he’d actually said good-bye, in an e-mail he sent to Doug. And some guys at school, Doug found out later. “The time has come,” he wrote in red capital letters. “This is for everybody, all you little bitty blobs of chicken fat in school and college la-la land. You can keep oozing on your own little plates until you get old and wrinkled and congealed, but I broke the plate, broke the mold, and I’m standing up and moving out. You know what happens to old, moldy chicken fat; it ends up in the garbage, ground up and buried. That’ll be all you guys. But I’ll be on my feet, on my way, nobody grinds me up. Have a greasy time, guys and gals; I’m out of here.”

  By the time Doug read that, Mack was gone.

  And he left me stuck here. A little bitty blob of chicken fat. While he’s having adventures.

  Doug kicked the socks out of the corner and they slid across the floor and came to a stop at Sara’s feet in the doorway. “For me?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I forgot to do the laundry.”

  “I noticed. I did it.”

  “But—” He looked at his socks.

  “When you run out, you’ll wear dirty ones or you’ll do a load of laundry. There’s really no rush.”

  Doug glowered at her. “There’s three women in this house to do laundry.”

  “And they do.”

  “Not all of it!” he yelled.

  Sara sat on the edge of his unmade bed, pushing aside the bunched sheet and blanket. “I know it’s not fun, it’s not what you want to do, it’s not your line of work. We all feel exactly the same way. If we could afford a maid, we’d have one. I’m sorry we can’t. I’m sorry I have to ask you to help out. I’m sorry you’re not happy. I’m sorry you don’t have a man in the house. Is there anything else you’d like me to apologize for?”

  Doug bit his lip. “You always make me feel little.”

  “I do?” She stared at him, her eyes filling with tears. “Do I really? I don’t mean to. Oh, Doug, I am sorry. I love you and I think you’re wonderful and I never want you to feel little or bad or—”

  “Don’t! Don’t cry! I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean anything! I’m sorry!”

  They looked at each other and began to laugh. “We’re the most sorry people in the world,” Doug said happily, and Sara held out her arms and he leaped into them, hugging her with tough, wiry arms. And in a few minutes, as if nothing had happened, Sara began to quiz him on the next day’s spelling test.

  Everything was okay, Doug thought later. He hated spelling tests— he hated thinking about spelling at all—but this time he got all the words right, Sara loved him, she’d hugged him again when she said good night and went to her room, his sisters were in their own rooms not calling him dumb or anything, and nobody would bother him if he stayed up for a long time, doing IM with his friends, and reading his new mystery in bed, all night if he wanted; everybody else would be asleep.

  It was a slow night for instant messaging; most of his friends said they were still doing their homework, and after a while he gave up trying. But before he shut down his computer for the night, he opened the e-mail from Mack. He read it every night before he went to bed.

  I’m standing up and moving out.

  …nobody grinds me up.

  Doug looked across the chaos of his room and he could see Mack, as clear as if he were really there, sprawled in the armchair the way he always did, in the work shirt and khakis he always wore, legs crossed at the ankles, hands folded behind his head, grinning, the way he always did. “You have to know all the rules, little bro, so you can know which ones to break. Well, actually, eventually you break all of them, that’s the goal, anyway. Rules are like that bunch of nerds down the street—the Nevinses?” Doug nodded, feeling uncomfortable; he liked Oliver Nevins; he liked the whole odd family. “Losers. The kind that stop at red lights, eat vegetables, make the bed every day…you name it. Too scared to step out of the box. We’re different, aren’t we?” Doug always nodded, though he was never sure exactly what he was agreeing with.

  I wish you were here, Doug said silently. I could ask you what you meant, exactly. Like, what does that mean—to get out of the box? Which box? And where am I when I’m out of it? And which rules should I break? I mean, Sara gets mad at the way Abby talks, and she got mad at me tonight for something I said, I’m not even sure what I said, well, I mean, I know what I said but I don’t know why it made her mad, but I don’t want to make her mad again, and if I don’t know why she was mad tonight, how do I know which rules I can break that won’t make her really mad some other time? It isn’t worth the chance. You know?

  But there was no answer. There never was an answer from Mack. Except—

  I’m moving out.

  A sudden yawn stretched Doug’s face so that it hurt. He put on his pajamas, dropping his clothes on yesterday’s clothes on top of a forgotten sundial kit he’d gotten for his birthday a month ago that was on top of the unicorn he’d carved last week and then discarded because he had an idea for an elephant like the one he’d read about in a book on India, and crawled into bed, opening the new mystery Sara had bought him on her lunch hour. After a minute, he groaned and slid out of bed, and went to the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face.

  “Doug, why are you still awake?” Sara asked from her room down the hall. Her light was on and Doug knew she was reading on the chaise next to the window, the glass shade on her lamp spreading peacock colors all around the room.

  “On my way to bed,” Doug shouted briskly. He closed his bedroom door firmly behind him, crawled under the sheet, and picked up his book.

  To bed, but not to sleep, Sara thought, smiling. She imagined him propped against his pillow, knees up to hold his book, intent on the story even as his eyes began to droop, sprang open, then drooped again, and, finally, stayed closed. In about half an hour she would go in to put the book on the night table and turn off his lamp and kiss him on the forehead, closing the door behind her as she left. The next morning, when she would knock on his door to awaken him for school, he would be sprawled under the twisted sheet, hair standing almost straight up, and neither of them would say a word about his late-night reading.

  Never would I stop anyone from reading, Sara mused the next morning as she drove to work. There are so many times parents say no to children, why would we ever do it for wanting to read?

  Anyway, she thought lightly, I’m not a parent, I’m an older sister, and I can do sisterly things.

  Except that she had to do everything a parent had to do, and she had to go to work, and she could only hope this day would be better
than the one before. And, in fact, it was, from the beginning. The client was waiting in his hotel suite when Sara met him; he knew he wanted to buy a house, and he had faxed a list of preferred neighborhoods a week before, a vast improvement, Sara thought, over other days and other clients.

  “Reuben Lister,” he said, his handshake firm and cool. He was tall and lanky, slightly stoop-shouldered, his face long and narrow, his dark hair and neat dark beard streaked with gray. His brown eyes were almost overpowered by horn-rimmed glasses. They should be wire-rims, Sara thought, but, watching his firm mouth curve into a smile as cool as his handshake, she thought he looked so formidable that probably no one gave him advice about his glasses, or perhaps anything else. Maybe he’s a lawyer, or a corporate raider, or a spy.

  “I’ve been reading about Chicago,” he said as they sat at a conference table in the living room of his suite, “so I’m pretty confident about the neighborhoods I chose. But you may have other suggestions.”

  “No, your choices are good; you’ve done your homework.” Sara took the fax from her briefcase. “You want a house, not an apartment; you want to be in the city, and you want to be close to your office in the Hancock Building. I have four houses in mind, but perhaps we can narrow that down. How soon do you need to move in?”

  “By the end of the month. Someone in the mayor’s office named Donna Soldana said I should talk to you instead of a Realtor and decorator. Do you really take care of everything?”

  “Within reason.” Sara smiled, liking him because he had remembered Donna’s name, which meant working people were real people to him.

  “But you have a staff.”

  “I have people I can call on. Are you afraid everything won’t get done on time?”

  He contemplated her and smiled. “I’m sure you can handle any job you accept, or you wouldn’t have accepted it. What can I do to make it easier for you?”

  “Tell me what you like.”

  “Easily done.” He opened a folder. “A large house, not modern, with large rooms, high ceilings, one or more fireplaces, at least four bedrooms, an office or a room that can be converted to one, a library, a large kitchen, not necessarily new—I don’t mind renovating, in fact, I enjoy it.” He spread out pages torn from magazines, photographs, and computer printouts. “I like fine antiques: rugs, furniture, lamps. These caught my eye in Europe; I don’t expect to find the same things here, but this is the idea.”