The Year My Mother Came Back

by Alice Eve Cohen

  THE RADIATION ROOM is cool. The lights are dim. Beep, beep, beep.

  “Please stay very still for ten minutes.”

  The labor room was cool. The lights were dim. Low, swooshing throb of Zoe’s heartbeat, and quick liquid pulse of Baby’s heart, whispered from the ultrasound heart monitor.

  “Hey Alice, I’m really glad you’re here,” said Zoe. She was propped up in bed, the blue hospital gown over her round belly not quite covering her hips.

  “Me, too.” I was the only one in the room with her. Brad was in the waiting room. She had asked me to be her birth coach. I knew very little about childbirth, and I felt unprepared. An hour ago, we got the call from our social worker at the adoption agency, telling us that Zoe was in labor, and we cabbed down. The social worker bent the rules of the confidentiality agreement by telling us Zoe’s last name, so that we could get into the hospital.

  At the foot of Zoe’s bed, a digital monitor displayed three wavy green lines.

  “The top line is my contractions. It goes crazy when I’m in the middle of one. The second line is my heartbeat. The bottom line is the baby’s heartbeat. Oh! Feel this.”

  Zoe grabbed my hand and put it on her round belly. I felt the baby kick. Then she groaned, gripped my hand, and described her sensations. She had opted not to have an epidural. Each contraction was more intense than the one before.

  “I’m gonna be sick.”

  There was no nurse in sight. I grabbed a bucket. I was channeling my mother. I remembered Mom taking care of me when I was nauseous, feeding me crushed ice and ginger ale, propping me up, holding a bag for me to puke in, cleaning me up. I fed Zoe crushed ice from a paper cup. I held the plastic bucket for her. One time, Zoe missed the bucket and threw up on me. I cleaned up both of us. As the night wore on, as her contractions became more intense, I felt more and more like Zoe’s mother, less and less like the baby’s mother. Zoe was twenty, and she looked so young, it was confusing.

  “Ready, Zoe?” asked the tall Jamaican midwife.

  “I didn’t know it would hurt this much. Can I have pain meds?”

  “Too late for drugs. You can do it, girl. It’s almost over,” said the midwife, as we wheeled Zoe into the delivery room, where Brad, in green scrubs, awaited us.

  Zoe pushed and pushed, until baby Julia dove magnificently into the world.

  “Look at Alice and Brad,” said Zoe, drenched in sweat but smiling. “They’re crying because they’re so happy.”

  Zoe chose me to be Julia’s mother. I hope I’ve lived up to her expectations.

  “Of course you have. You’re a fine mother,” says my mom.

  “Fine? Fine isn’t good enough.”

  “What’s good enough?” She sits on the stool by the radiation bed, running her fingers through her salt-and-pepper hair. I have a sideways view of her, with my left cheek pressed to the mattress.

  “Oh, God, that’s what I’m trying to figure out, Mom. I think about Zoe. I love that girl—I mean, she’s not a girl anymore, she’s thirty-eight. She gave birth to Julia and then, miracle of miracles, she gave her baby to me and Brad. Literally placed newborn Julia in our arms. The greatest gift imaginable. I’ve been thankful—indebted—to Zoe every day of Julia’s life. But now I’m worried that Julia will choose her over me. And Zoe might welcome that. Why wouldn’t she? So I wonder, is Zoe a good mother to Julia? Has she been a good mother all along? When she was twenty and single, she knew she wasn’t prepared to raise a child, so she made a carefully considered plan for her newborn. She chose loving parents for Julia, and disappeared from her life forever—anyway, that was her intent at the time. Until now, when she says, “Wow, Julia, you found me! Cool—I’m here for you.” So all this time, while she was waiting in the wings, was Zoe an ideal mother, in her own way? I think maybe yes. But mixed with my gratitude, I also feel a tinge of resentment. I can’t help thinking about The Little Red Hen.

  On cue, Mom, now much younger—black hair, red lips, slim waist—sits beside my bed and reads from my dog-eared storybook like she used to. The hen on the cardboard cover wears a yellow sweater and straw hat and plunges a spade into the ground with her strong chicken toes.

  “ ‘ “Who will help me plant the wheat?” asks the Little Red Hen,’ ” Mom recites, in her mellifluous bedtime-story voice. “ ‘ “Not I,” say all the animals in the farmyard.” “Who will help me grind the wheat?” “Not I!” ’ And so forth, and so on, blah, blah, blah . . .” Mom says, flipping pages to the end. “ ‘ “Who will help me bake the bread?” “Not I!” “And who will help me eat the bread?” “I will!” say all the animals.’ ”

  “Exactly. And I confess to feeling, ungraciously, like the Little Red Hen. I raised Julia for eighteen years, and now that the hard work of parenting is done, Zoe gets to—you know—eat the bread.”

  My young mother laughs, her smile so pretty. “Or you could say that Zoe planted the seed and baked the bread, and you’re the one enjoying the fruits of her labor—pun intended. Pregnancy and childbirth are hard work.”

  “Well, yeah, point taken.”

  “You don’t know what Zoe’s expectations are. Or Julia’s. She’s not dumping you, she just wants to meet her birth mother.”

  “I know, I know. I’m ashamed of being so ungenerous.”

  “Guess you’re not perfect, huh?”

  MICHAEL, ELIANA, AND I went to Florida for the weekend, a quick visit with my dad and Jean, his wife of twenty-three years. Dad is ninety-three. (I have longevity and shortevity in my family.) He’s slowing down. He has trouble walking, but he still plays piano every day, as well as he ever did, and he still has that charming, self-deprecating sense of humor. He even gets on a standing bike for ten minutes each morning, though he sometimes falls asleep in the middle of his workout. At ninety-three, he’s more content than he has ever been. I’m happy that he’s happy.

  Dad is gradually letting go of things—sailing, walking, salty food, macho detachment, hearing in the upper range, stubborn self-sufficiency, short-term memory. He’s replacing these old skills and habits with new ones—he’s newly able to talk about feelings; he’s learning to gracefully accept help; his memory keeps getting worse but it doesn’t bother him much; he talks less, but he’s more emotionally connected, more demonstrative; he cries easily. For the first time I can remember, he says, “I love you.”

  Oh, and yesterday, Zoe friended me on Facebook!

  JULIA IS HOME! She got back at one in the morning. Night-owl Michael was still up. I got out of bed and sleepily joined the conversation, in a bit of a blur. “New friends . . . messy dorm room . . . math-obsessed roommate . . . phenomenal freshman seminar with the renowned Cornel West . . . rowing . . . a role in Richard III.” She’s in her world. She’s happy and wildly enthusiastic about Princeton. I’m in a different place than she is, fretting about radiation and about Eliana’s surgery. Our worlds don’t yet mesh.

  I’m glad Julia’s here, but I’m distracted. She’ll sleep late today. This morning, Eliana woke up and climbed under the covers in Julia’s bed, and they hugged for a while. She went back to sleep when Eliana and I left for school. I’ll take her out to lunch when I get back home from radiation. I hope she and Eliana have some time to hang out together. This is such a short visit.

  Right before my senior year in college, I was briefly back home from an idyllic summer job in Martha’s Vineyard, where I was the director of art and theater programs at the Chilmark Community Center. I had spent the summer living with other college students in a rustic farmhouse at Bliss Pond, just as blissful as its name.

  There was a palpable but mystifying tension in my parents’ house. I didn’t want to know why. Icy chill between Mom and Dad. I could guess, but I didn’t want evidence—too much responsibility. I preferred to play dumb. I was selectively open to conversation with my parents. They were selectively revealing and withholding. We tacitly agreed to this balancing act.

  Jennifer had transformed, post braces, from Ugly Duckling to B
eautiful Swan. She was suddenly gorgeous! My parents’ rules and curfews, which I had deviously circumvented when I was in high school, were apparently no longer in place. Or my parents had given up trying to enforce them. Madeline had followed the rules. I expended great effort surreptitiously breaking them. Jennifer made up her own.

  On the desk of Mom’s study, next to her old typewriter, was an imposing stack of feminist books. Our Bodies, Our Selves was on the bottom, the foundational tome. Open Marriage was conspicuously displayed on top of the pile.

  I picked up the book and said, in the most raised-eyebrow, jokey tone I could muster, “So, are you and Dad into open marriage now?” which I immediately regretted, because she was going to respond as if it were a serious question.

  She pushed her glasses up on her head, pursed her lips, tense and irritable, looked out the bay window at the great blue heron coming in for a landing on the salt marsh, and launched into a monologue.

  “I wouldn’t mind an open marriage,” she said, “as long as it’s equal, but there is no equity in marriage. There’s a history in our culture—as there is in every culture—of wives getting the short end of the stick in every imaginable way. Income and property, for starters. Women’s status in marriage hasn’t really advanced since the Middle Ages.”

  “That’s what my feminist theory professor says.” I offered, hoping to steer the conversation into more neutral territory, to no avail.

  “Your professor is right. For example, your father owns this house, not me. I own nothing. Nothing. I’ve worked for thirty-five years, I’ve taught at universities and earned money for thirty-five years, and what do I have to show for it?”

  Her voice got louder. She was no longer talking to me. I sat on the saggy daybed by the window and listened to a large moth flying into the screen, over and over, trying to get out. Mom paced the room, carrying Open Marriage and gesticulating with it.

  “Even though I helped support our family, and even though I paid for your father to go to graduate school, and even though I did all the childcare and housework so that he could build his business, I’m not a stakeholder in this marriage. The whole institution of marriage is designed to keep women financially dependent and subservient. And when it comes to sexual politics? Please, don’t get me started!”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  But she’d already started, and there was no stopping her. I didn’t know where she was going with this, but she was mad at men in general, and my parents weren’t getting along. I was pretty sure Mom wanted to confide in me about something. I feared it was about my father having an affair. I hoped he wasn’t, but if he was, I didn’t want the burden of knowledge, even though I suspected it myself. Mom wanted my loyalty, but I wanted to be loyal to both Mom and Dad.

  She plunked down next to me on the daybed, which bounced and sagged, knocking me off balance. I leaned on my right elbow.

  “Suffice it to say—and you can draw your own conclusions—after I had cancer, after the double radical, my husband no longer saw me as a woman. Because, Alice, that’s the way men are. And to tell you the truth, I no longer felt like a woman. We’re trained to believe that our womanhood is defined by our external appearance. And when you lose your—Well. So. I’ve never talked about this with you before. It was excruciatingly difficult, still is. And your father . . .”

  Her unfinished sentence was the open door for me to enter and invite her to tell me everything. I was torn. She’d never shared so much personal stuff with me. We hadn’t been close for a very long time, and it was very tempting to step through that door and become her friend and confidant. She obviously wanted to tell me a secret, and that secret was undoubtedly about my father. But then I’d have to take sides, and I didn’t want to side against Dad. The thought of it made my heart hurt.

  She flipped through the pages of Open Marriage, without reading them. “Well. Hmm. You want my advice, Alice?”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t get married.”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  “Don’t get married unless you want babies. And who wants babies?”

  “That’s weird advice, Mom.”

  “I’m kidding. I love my children.”

  “Glad to hear that.”

  “But if you do get married, do not put your husband through business school.”

  “O . . . kay . . . ?”

  “It simply reinforces the status quo of financial inequality in this lousy institution. I was supporting our household, paying for my husband’s tuition, taking care of babies, being a housewife, washing dishes. The dishes. The dishes! The goddamn dishes! No wonder women don’t succeed.”

  “Wonder Women don’t succeed?”

  “What?”

  “It’s a joke, Mom. Wonder Woman. The comic superhero? Never mind. You were saying?”

  “Women don’t succeed, because we’re up to our elbows in dishwater.”

  “I know what you mean, Mom.” I felt a pang of guilt, suddenly remembering that time, years ago, when we gave her a broom and a dustpan for Mother’s Day. How could we have been so stupid?

  “By the time you three babies were out of diapers and I finally got back to writing, so much time had passed that what I had written was out of date. Every time I read over a new draft, I’d outgrown the damn thing. The goddamn dishes keep us from writing fast enough to make a mark in the world.”

  “Wow. That’s a really interesting concept.”

  “We make a pittance while our husbands get rich. When the woman gets older and the sexual attraction is gone, what was all that sacrifice for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Exactly! So my advice, Alice, is don’t get married unless you find someone who doesn’t buy the old rules, because the old rules stink!”

  “Got it. And that’s good advice.”

  She got up and paced the room again, glancing at me to deliver her main points, as if this were a lecture hall and I was her only student. It was dusk, and the crickets were singing.

  “I used to be called an eccentric. Now I’m called a feminist! It’s a wonderful thing. For the first time, I’m professionally valued for my life experience as a wife-slash-mother-slash-housewife-slash-perpetual PhD candidate. This new role legitimizes that which previously was assigned zero value.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “I gave a talk to a group of women at the library last week. I said, ‘I had an epiphany on the tennis court! My husband and I have always played tennis together. Whenever a new racket came on the market, he bought the new racket and I got his old one. His game kept getting better. Mine stayed the same. This year, my husband got a Prince and his game improved dramatically. And I said, impulsively, “Ira, I want a Prince.” After a moment’s pause, he said, “Okay.” And I bought a Prince. Voila! My tennis game improved.’”

  “What was your epiphany?”

  “That all these years, I could have been improving my tennis game, like my husband. And I began to think of all the areas of my life where I have settled for leftovers, hand-me-downs, second bests, and how much I could have improved—and still can improve—if I stop settling.”

  “That’s great. Mom. You always taught us to challenge the status quo. I’m proud of you.”

  She sat on the creaky daybed again and looked at me. My heart hurt again.

  “I thought I might talk to you about something . . .” she said, pausing long enough for me to consider saying, What do you want to talk about, Mom? You can tell me anything. But I didn’t say a word, and the unspoken something remained suspended in the ellipsis, until the moment passed and the silence became awkward.

  It was getting darker. She got up, turned on a lamp, and rummaged around the clutter on her desk. “Alice, did you see where I put my glasses?”

  “They’re on your head.”

  “Ah.”

  This was my chance to open up to her, invite her to talk to me. She initiated this, and now the ball was in my court. It could be a turning
point for us, a new beginning. But then I might have been obligated to reject my Dad, and I didn’t want to take that risk. Anyway, Mom had close friends her own age she could confide in.

  The moth was still throwing himself into the screen, ping, ping, ping . . .

  “I should start packing for school.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  At the end of the week in the new house—which would never feel like home, because I had hardly lived there, except for a couple of weeks each summer before college—I went back to school.

  My sisters swing by after work to say hi to Julia before she heads back to school. Madeline, Jennifer, and I are best friends, even closer as adults than we were as children, and they’re both stellar aunts to my girls. Madeline has been consulting with Eliana on her Halloween costume. She has a master’s degree in costume design and I can barely thread a needle, so I leave the execution of this project to them. They disappear into Ellie’s room to add the finishing touches, while Julia, Jennifer, and I make dinner and schmooze in the kitchen.

  Eliana emerges to model the craziest costume I have ever seen—“I’m half Voldemort, half umbrella.” Her long hair is tightly pulled back under a white bathing cap, and her face is painted white, with black slits for Voldemort’s serpentine, noseless nostrils. She wears an umbrella hat and a long black robe, with an aluminumfoil umbrella handle sewn on the front. Hilarious and creepy. She takes a bow. We applaud and laugh and agree that while there will be loads of Harry Potter characters trick-or-treating tomorrow, she’ll be the only Voldebrella.