A Good Distance

by Sarah Willis

  Michael lowers himself to the floor. “What is it?” he asks softly. In his arms, Peter has started crying, and now Jennifer can be heard wailing from her crib.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I just don’t remember trying out for the role of the pretty brunette housewife with three kids.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. Then, “Three?”

  “Oh, hell,” she says. “I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh. That’s great.” He takes just a second to put the right face on, to get the tone right. He’s pretty close, and now she does cry. Michael shifts his position on the floor, and hoisting Peter onto one hip, he pulls out a white handkerchief from his pocket, handing it to her. “But, are you sure?”

  She can’t blame him for asking. She can’t believe it. She nods.

  “Well, that’s wonderful. Three kids, all so close in age. They’ll be great friends. What a crew we’ll have!”

  She just closes her eyes. Leans against him.

  “Are you okay? What did the doctor say?”

  “I haven’t seen a doctor yet.”

  “Why not? Don’t you need to?”

  “For what? I could do this in my sleep—if I could sleep.” She laughs, and cries. He kisses her wet lips.

  “We’ll do fine. What’s a few more diapers? I’ll just have to direct more plays.”

  That’s not what Rose wants to hear. She can’t imagine what she wants to hear. That she go back to work and he stay home with the kids?

  Peter has stopped crying in Michael’s arms. He does this: cries, then stops, distracted by any little thing. He touches her face and plays with her tears like finger paints.

  “I can’t stand more diapers,” Rose says, a hitch in her voice, hysteria just around the corner.

  “Then we’ll move somewhere warm and leave them all outside naked.”

  “Okay,” she says. “All right.”

  He draws her head to his chest with Peter trapped between them in a warm, wet hug. In the next room, Jennifer screams her lungs out.

  Rose opens a window and kneels down to rest her arms across the windowsill. Immediately she realizes her mistake; the small house they are renting in Jackson, Florida, is cooler inside than the day outside.

  With her eyes closed, Rose imagines she’s back in Cleveland, a spring day with a breeze; she’s ten and waiting for the ice-cream truck.

  A gush of sticky, hot water runs down her legs.

  This baby is three weeks too early. I will just stay here on the floor for three weeks, then get up. I’m sticking to the plan. But the first wave of a strong cramp makes her moan. Jennifer and Peter are both taking a nap. Holding the windowsill, she rises, careful not to slip on the slick surface of her broken water. She’s dizzy with the thought of swimming in cool water. Help me, Lord, she thinks, then spits out the window. Something tastes bad in her mouth.

  Michael has just left for work and won’t arrive at the theatre for another ten minutes. They have been in this town for less than one week. She walks out the front door and looks around at the row of identical stucco houses along the narrow street. She turns right for no particular reason, walks over to the next house and rings the doorbell. Avon calling, Rose thinks. She’d laugh, but she’s having a hard time breathing right now.

  A woman opens the inner door and takes one look at Rose. “Oh, my God, honey, come inside.” She pushes the screen door open, but Rose is standing too close to the door. She has to think to step back.

  The woman is around forty, with wrinkles around her mouth of a longtime smoker. Rose wants a cigarette and almost asks this lady for one, but then remembers why she’s here. She steps inside. It’s hotter than her own house.

  “Hi, I’m Rose, your new neighbor. I have two children asleep next door, and my water just broke. I need to get to the hospital. Do you know where the hospital is?”

  “Oh, honey. Let me call you an ambulance.”

  “Okay. Call me whatever you like, but could I sit down?” She smiles. Damn it if she’s going to have this baby now. What she really wants to do is sit down and tell good jokes. This lady could be her friend. She looks friendly.

  “Sit down. I’m Betsy Tarken. Sit down anywhere. I’m gonna call you an ambulance and your husband, and then I’m gonna go over to your house and watch your babies while you go off and have this one. My son’s sixteen and don’t play with me no more. If he comes home for dinner, I’m lucky. I won’t mind being with your babies at all. Trust me, okay?” Rose slips into a lounger and thinks she will never be able to get up again. Betsy dials the phone and tells someone the address and to hurry up.

  When Betsy asks Rose the number to call her husband, Rose says she doesn’t know. “It’s on the phone table, by the couch.”

  “I’ll go get it. What’s his name?”

  She has to think a second. Romeo she wants to say. There’s a stabbing pain in her lower back. “Michael. Michael Morgan.”

  “I’ll call him. You just rest there.” When Betsy comes back, she says Michael wasn’t at work yet, but they’d tell him to go right to the hospital. “What’s your babies’ names?” Betsy asks.

  “Jennifer and Peter.”

  “What a lucky lady you are,” Betsy says.

  “Thank you.” She has been taught to say thank you to compliments. “I’ll name this one Betsy, if she’s a girl.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” Betsy says. But she’s smiling like all get out, and Rose decides she will have a girl, come hell or high water.

  She does. And she names the baby Betsy, even though it’s a silly name. She said she would.

  Michael finds a job directing his next play in another warm place, another town in Florida. The lawn is only a few feet deep and the street so busy there is no way in God’s green acres Rose can let her children run around out there, naked or not.

  Making love is never the same again. She’s not a good Catholic anymore, but still can’t face the idea of using a diaphragm. She marks the days on the calendar that might be safe; a few days on each side of her period—which she gets now every month, relishing even the cramps and inconvenience—and even then, on these safe days, she’s scared; she makes him pull out before he comes. Sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes she allows him this because he’s such a good father, but those nights are sleepless and she holds a grudge against him until she gets her next period. But she still gets horny; she still thinks of the things they do, the way she puts her mouth on all of him, tastes all of him, the way he tells her to move this way or that, to bend over—the things they say in bed. When she thinks of making love, her arms ache, her back gets tight, and she will snap at Jennifer for any little thing, or ignore Peter as he calls for her from his crib, or forget to heat the formula for Betsy, and then, knowing what she’s done, she cries as she makes it up to them, she cries as she pushes Jennifer on the swing, she cries as she gives Peter a cookie, she cries as she holds Betsy against her breasts, and sometimes she cries as she makes love. But she always cries silently, and they don’t know. They think she is just wonderful.

  One night, after all the children are asleep, Michael asks her to sit on the couch with him. He tells her that he’s been offered a job running a small theatre.

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “It’s a year-round theatre, in the Finger Lakes. I’d be the executive director. I’d pick the plays, cast them.”

  “We’d live there year-round?”

  “Yep. What do you think?”

  She doesn’t know. Moving around isn’t easy, but it still feels like an adventure—and she still pretends it’s her job. What will she do? She rolls her eyes and holds back a laugh. Raise kids, apparently.

  “I guess it’s okay.” She shrugs. “Sure.” They kiss, but it feels more like a handshake.

  Chapter Seven

  I come downstairs after getting my mother settled back into her room, and now the memory of Todd and me at the back door makes me feel guilty and ashamed. How can memory change what really happen
ed? It was good, what we did, and now I want to crawl under a rock and hide from myself.

  “She okay?” Todd asks. He was in the basement when she fell, cleaning out the dryer vent. He can’t tear down walls, so he does the small things. He’s running out of small things to fix.

  “I guess,” I say. “I can’t believe I left her in the car like that.”

  “You kept your eye on her. It was an accident.”

  He’s not using this “accident” as another reason I should put her in the nursing home because I have a few hours of grace after doing that thing by the back door. I look down at my feet.

  “I’m going to Ron’s to watch the game. That okay with you? I got the chicken. It’s in the fridge.” He rolls his head around on his neck. I hear things pop.

  “Sure, go,” I say. “Thanks for getting the chicken.”

  We look at each other for a moment. He doesn’t watch Sunday games here much anymore. I miss the sound of football, sitting next to him, asking what’s happening. But sitting in the TV room, listening to the roar of the crowds, blocks out the sound of my mother. She could be doing anything. Once, I thought she was sleeping and I sat down to watch a game with Todd. She tossed all her medicine and cups down the laundry shoot, then anything she could find that would fit, and then things that couldn’t fit. Most Alzheimer’s patients wander, but not my mother. When she gets really lost in her head, she stuffs things into small spaces, like the curtain into the toilet. Maybe she thinks she’s packing.

  “Have a good time,” I say.

  He kisses me goodbye on the lips, with just a hint of tongue. He wants me to know he still loves me, still finds me sexy, thank me for the thing by the door, hint I’ll get mine later, and say he’s sorry for leaving. I smell the scent of dryer lint on him, and touch his Sunday stubbled face. I’ve seen pictures of him with mutton chops. I’m glad he got over that phase. “Be good,” I say. I’m pretty sure he really is going to Ron’s. He’s wearing sweatpants. You don’t wearsweat pants off to have an affair, do you?

  “Love you,” he says.

  Todd’s gotten enough chicken for a week of chicken dinners, and I freeze most of it, leaving just enough for tomorrow’s dinner. The lasagna in the freezer will have to do for tonight.

  It was my plan to take some more photos up to my mother’s room this afternoon, to get on with building her life brick by crumbling brick, resurrecting the dead if I have to. I’m wary now of any such ambitions, and worried I might hurt her even more. I go into the living room and sit down with one of the albums I haven’t taken up yet.

  Here’s a photo of my brother Peter and me, when we were three and four years old. We’re playing with pots on the floor, banging them with wooden spoons. My brother’s hair has just been cut within an inch of its life and sticks up like short, neatly trimmed brown grass. He looks frenzied. Attention deficit disorder they would call it now. An active little boy, they said then. The wooden spoons are raised high; he’s ready to hit those pots with all his might.

  The next picture is of my father holding my baby sister, my brother and I looking over his shoulder. I remember her at that age as only a tug on my sleeve. And here’s my mother, in a white-and-blue-striped dress, sitting on a patchwork quilt on the lawn, the three of us children arranged around her, so perfectly placed that I can almost feel my father’s hands directing my arms and legs into smooth and lovely shapes, hear his deep voice say, “Now, hold still . . .” And I do miss him, this man I swore I would never forget.

  And here, out of sequence, is their wedding picture, taken at the courthouse: my mother in a blue A-line skirt and matching jacket, a corsage with a yellow rose pinned too high, near her shoulder; my father in his gray pin-striped suit, a huge grin on his face. The photo is black-and-white. I add the color.

  My mother used to tell the story about meeting my father. Girl finds the man of her dreams after waiting for so long. Stayed a virgin until her honeymoon, then had three perfect children. But I believe my mother wanted a man, not children. As she told me once when she was drunk and furious with me for something, “If we’d had the pill back then . . . I would have used it, Pope or no Pope.” This quick succession of children was the beginning of her fight with God. The death of my father was the straw that broke God’s back.

  I remember what I can, without her help. This is my story now, not just hers.

  When I am four, my father gets a job running a small repertory theatre built along the shore of one of the thinnest of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. During the winter they do a few dinner theatre plays, but it’s the summer, when the “name” actors come, that draws the tourists. I meet Joel Grey and Dom DeLuise. I am too young to be impressed; later in life I will throw these names around as if they were my best friends.

  We rent a farmhouse on a country road, with acres of mowed grass surrounded by deep woods. My mother finds she does enjoy this, too, this staying still for a while. The refrigerator is the same damn refrigerator that she put that bottle of ketchup in a whole year ago, and she opens the door just to peer at the sheer wonder of it all. She gets a cat and names it Eleanore.

  When I am six, she shows me how to pick up a baby kitten and hold it to my chest so it can hear my heartbeat. The kitten purrs like a tiny motor and I am in love with it. I ask my mother if I can hear her heart, and she lets me climb in her lap and put my ear to her chest.

  My mother plants a vegetable garden with neat rows and generous spaces between, not a weed in sight. The vegetables are healthy, well fed, thick. She picks some spinach and puts it straight into her mouth. I do the same, as if I know exactly what I am doing. The taste is strong, and dirt sticks to my teeth, but it is good for my dry mouth. Tiny drops of hidden water escape; spinach holds on to the rainfall like a miser.

  Someone driving by will see my mother bent over, a bright yellow hat shading her face. She carries a small bucket of water she drops insects into. They make a tiny splash and hold tight to the surface of the water. Marigolds border the garden; short soldiers. Their smell keeps the scaly bugs out. My brother, Peter, sits in a rusty red wagon. “Pull me. Pull me,” he bleats, lost in the repetition of his own voice, five years old and lonely for friends.

  She decides the peas are ready and fills the basket with them, one pod at a time. Her hands are covered with thin red scratches and her nails are black with dirt. At the kitchen sink she washes her hands until they turn pink from the hot water. She says peas are a special pleasure, tiny wrapped gifts. She is happy to pop them open while sitting at the table. Our cat plays with the ones that fall to the floor.

  My father walks in and they kiss. They always kiss. Quickly though; my father does everything quickly. At a young age I learned to walk fast.

  “I have to be back at the theatre by six,” he says.

  “All right. Do you want tea?”

  “Yes, please. And something sweet.” He winks at her.

  It is a code, I think. I need a decoder ring.

  “Hello, honey,” he says to me. “What did you do today?”

  I don’t know why he even asks. He’s had our only car all day. This house is miles from anywhere.

  “A bull jumped the fence and chased Peter,” I say.

  “Really?” he asks my mother.

  “No,” she says.

  But it was my day he was asking about. Maybe it did.

  She hands him a cup of tea. “Dinner will be soon,” she says. He will leave again right after dinner, and won’t be back until past midnight. After the final curtain, after the stage is swept with the green sand, he will go to a bar with the actors and discuss the show. This short time now, with the tea, is theirs. He tells my mother that there’s trouble with Act Two.

  “Ken can’t build the anger slowly enough. He needs to justify it before he starts to yell at Miriam. He can’t seem to get it.”

  “He will,” she says.

  I am sitting on the steps. Another kiss will mean dinner’s ready. My brother plays with two trucks in th
e gravel driveway. He smashes them together, yells, and smashes them again. I wait for the bull to jump the fence.

  Grandmother Francine comes for a visit. She is my mother’s mother and very strange. She lives all alone in a house in Cleveland. I never met my grandfather. He’s dead.

  My mother warns us to be good. “Treat Grandmother Francine nicely.” We smile, a bit nervous. We never know what will happen. Something will. Last time Grandmother busted her hip. She jumped from a chair. No one knew why. Sometimes she washes dishes that are clean, but my mother will yell at her if she does that. My mother doesn’t always treat Grandmother Francine nice, but we are supposed to.

  This time Grandmother shows us her mole, under her left armpit. It’s big, with hair growing out of it like a little head. Peter and I have friends over. She shows everyone. We stare, then laugh; embarrassed by the size of the bra we see as she lifts up her pink angora sweater. Acres of white elastic, bursting with spotted flesh.

  My mother walks in. “Put down your sweater, Mother.” She doesn’t yell. Or laugh. Or cry. She wants to, though, to yell and shake Grandmother Francine like a bad child. I can tell. “Go outside,” she says to us, mad, as if we had encouraged her to perform. Maybe we had. It would be so easy.

  “How could you do that?” she scolds Grandmother Francine.

  “It’s so big, don’t you think? Should I see a doctor?”

  “Yes, do.”

  My mother has patience. Her mother will leave soon. She won’t be back for a year. She may never come back. She’s old and has strange spots on her skin.