by Jean Hegland
Martin Lee said, “Normally our hiring process is quite extensive, but under the circumstances—”
“I’m starfing,” Lucy said, scrambling from the tub to stand naked and dripping in front of Anna. “You said we’d have snack next.”
Anna shook her head at Lucy, grimaced fiercely.
“You said,” Lucy insisted. “Right after our bath.” Sucking her gut toward her backbone, she clutched her concave stomach and added, “I’m dying of hungerness.”
Anna said, “Excuse me just a minute. I’m sorry. I need to say something to my daughter.” Raising her mouth from the receiver and speaking in a tone she hoped sounded sweet to Martin Lee and stern to Lucy, she said, “Mommy’s having an important call. You go get dressed, and I’ll get you a snack as soon as I’m done.”
“But—”
“Now.” Anna glared so forcefully that—miraculously—Lucy skittered from the bathroom, trailing water down the hall.
“I’m sorry,” she said into the phone. “What were you saying?”
Professor Lee continued, “I know we’re asking a lot on such short notice, but I must tell you that if Arnie is unable to continue teaching, we’ll be looking for a permanent replacement. As visiting faculty, you’d be in an excellent position to apply.”
Your last show was four years ago, Anna told herself. You haven’t made a print in thirteen months. You’re going to sell your camera. She said, “I don’t know if Eliot told you, but we have young children. I’d rather not work full-time.”
“We would work around your schedule as much as possible,” Martin Lee said. “It would be good if you would attend department meetings, but we wouldn’t ask you to serve on any committees. Between your seminar and your other responsibilities, I wouldn’t expect you’d be on campus more than fifteen hours a week—maybe twenty at the very most.
“I wish I could give you more time to make a decision,” he went on. “But if you think you might be interested, I’m afraid I’d need to know by tomorrow afternoon. Otherwise, I’ll have to cast a wider net.”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Anna echoed. Beneath her growing elation, she felt an odd sense of doom, as if whatever she decided, all her failures would inevitably be laid bare.
Martin Lee said, “I do hope you’ll be able to say yes.”
Hugging Ellen like a teddy bear, Anna stared at the tubful of cooling water, at the strewn towels, the cluttered counter, the brimming waste-basket. “I’ll do my best,” she said.
EACH WEEK THE PROGRAM DIRECTOR MET WITH EVERY WOMAN IN THE shelter to review her job-searching skills and to discuss her plans and strategies for finding work, and each week Cerise had to report that all the nursing homes in Santa Dorothea were overstaffed, that all the bars and restaurants said they needed experienced workers, that there were no vacancies for housekeepers at any of the motels she could reach by bus.
“What else can we find for you to do?” the director asked after a month of fruitless searching. Pushing her broken glasses higher up the bridge of her nose, she studied Cerise and said, “How about child care?”
The alarms in Cerise’s head were so loud it startled her to realize the director didn’t hear them, too. “I don’t think—” she began, but then she stopped, afraid of what she might say next.
“You’re such a natural with the children here,” the director was saying. “Carmen and Tristan adore you, and I’ve never seen Mary act out when you’re around.”
“Mary’s a good kid,” Cerise answered with such fierce conviction that for a moment she almost forgot the danger that she was in.
“You see?” the director interrupted with her forceful smile. “Children are your genius. Have you ever had any experience working with them?”
“I—I don’t know,” Cerise answered, blundering in her terror. But though her whole soul screamed no, she could find no way of saying no that didn’t involve either lying or saying what could not be said, so finally, because the director was waiting with a puzzled expression on her face, she added, “Not working—not for money. But I did take some classes, once.”
“There!” said the director happily. “I knew it.”
The following Monday, Cerise was invited to an interview at an elementary after-school care program. It was part-time and for minimum wage, but it was close enough to the shelter that she could walk to work, and as the director pointed out, if she saved all her pay, by the time her stay at the shelter was over, she would have nearly enough money to afford a room somewhere.
As she walked the wet blocks to the interview, she tried to focus her mind on that room. She wanted it so badly—a room of her own that she could fix up as she pleased, with a ceiling to protect her from the weather and walls to shelter her from other people, with a window she could look out of when she felt like it and a door she could close when she wanted to be alone with her memories of Travis.
Lately she’d discovered that she could be with Travis without having to relive the hardest times. She’d learned there was a way, like holding her breath and leaping, or crawling quickly through a tunnel toward the light, that she could skip the awful parts, could return directly to how he’d been before the fire—his sunny curls and milk-sweet breath, his firm little shoulders and his smile as bright as light on water.
It was almost as if she’d discovered the place where he still lived, as if she’d found a way to live there with him, though she had to concentrate very hard to get there, and on the streets and in the shelter it was hard to find the privacy to do that very often. As she turned down the street toward the school, she forced herself to fix her thoughts on that room.
Even so, when she reached the school playground and heard the shouts and laughter of all the children, she nearly turned around. But a woman was waiting outside the front doors, and before Cerise could run away, the woman was holding out her hand and smiling. “You must be Honey,” she said as Cerise awkwardly offered her own scarred hand in return.
“I’m Ms. Martinez,” she continued, and Cerise could feel the tingle of her touch lingering in her palm as Ms. Martinez led her into the school. “I’m so glad you could come this afternoon. We need someone right away.”
Ushering Cerise into a room filled with picture books and blocks and tempera-splattered easels she added, “It’s amazing. This program is brand-new, and already we have a waiting list. Parents are so busy. The school day just doesn’t accommodate their schedules anymore.”
After she’d shown Cerise around, Ms. Martinez gave her an application to fill out, and Cerise sat in a tiny chair beside a knee-high table and answered its questions as carefully as though she were taking were a test. She panicked at the first one—“Name of Applicant”—but then an answer came to her, and she wrote, “Honey Cerise Johnson.”
After she answered all the questions, she looked back over the completed form and suddenly felt baffled. She had filled in every blank as accurately as the application allowed. She had written down her date of birth and her social security number, had given the street address of the shelter and the number of the message phone the residents were allowed to use there. She’d noted her nine years of employment at Woodland Manor, and the semester she’d completed at the junior college. But reading over her answers was like gazing into one of those mirrors that stretched and squashed her own reflection into a barely recognizable shape. There were no blanks on the application for that other set of facts—the secret set that said everything about who she really was.
She had a vague sense that it would be like lying or cheating not to mention those other things, and she cast an anxious glance at Ms. Martinez, who was busily pouring juice into a long row of paper cups. She hated to trouble Ms. Martinez or to take up her time, but even so she was fumbling in her mind to try to find a way to begin when a buzzer sounded so loudly, it made her drop her pen.
“School’s over,” Ms. Martinez announced pleasantly. “The children will be here soon.”
Suddenly Cerise was desperate to leave t
hat room before the children arrived. Wordlessly she rose and handed her application to Ms. Martinez, who scanned it, nodding. Looking up, she smiled and said, “I think you’ll do just fine. I’d have you start tomorrow if I could, but I’m afraid we’ll have to verify this first.” She gave Cerise’s application a quick tap and then tipped her wrist to check her watch. “And you’ll need to get fingerprinted. If you stop by the Office of Education this afternoon, there’s probably still time for them to print you today.”
“I’m sorry,” she added when she saw the wince of consternation on Cerise’s face. “Sometimes these new rules seem a little excessive. But these days, with things the way they are—” She shrugged helplessly. “We just don’t have a choice.”
“I’m not—” Cerise began, but Ms. Martinez was saying, “We should have you okayed by the end of the week. Why don’t you give me a call on Friday, and if you’re checked out by then, you can start next Monday afternoon.”
Ms. Martinez gave Cerise the address of the Office of Education, and Cerise escaped just as the first child was entering the room. She went to get fingerprinted only because it seemed easier for someone else to say she couldn’t have the job than for her to have to tell Ms. Martinez that herself. But the man at the Office of Education only gave her another form to fill out and then showed her where to wash her hands and how to roll her fingers one by one across the glass plate of a machine that looked like a photocopier. Cerise gazed at the computer screen, where the swirls and lines that decorated her fingertips were magnified to a monstrous size. She knew those patterns held the irreducible truth about who she was, and yet once again, she could not see herself in them at all.
On Friday afternoon she had to ask at four different stores before she found a clerk who mistook her for a customer and allowed her to use the phone. Standing beside a display of leather purses dangling like heavy fruit from an iron rack, she held the receiver carefully in both hands and listened to Ms. Martinez say, “It was a little confusing at first, as you apparently went by your middle name for a while. But when the director at the nursing home realized who you were, he said you were the most reliable employee they’d ever had, and of course the rest of your check came back fine—not even a driving violation. We’ll see you on Monday at two-forty-five.”
After Ms. Martinez hung up, Cerise stood with the receiver still pressed against her ear, watching but not seeing a woman sort grimly through the purses. Finally, when the phone began to whine, she hung up and slipped out of the store.
It was strange how much the world wanted her back. It was strange that no one saw the truth of who she was. She knew there were laws she’d broken—welfare laws, at least. She’d quit her training program, had not reported her change of address or the decrease in the number of people in her assistance unit, and she felt sure she was a criminal in other, more awful ways as well. But Ms. Martinez had said her background check was fine. Ms. Martinez had said, We’ll see you on Monday at two-forty-five.
At some point she was sure that the other set of facts would catch up with her, and when it did, the little life that was accreting around her would crumble back into the dust it had been all along. But until then, nothing really mattered. There were things she was supposed to do—make her cot in the morning, keep her shelf neat, leave the shelter after breakfast, go to work on Monday at two-forty-five—and she would do those things because they were what was expected of her, because it was easier to do those things than not, like water following the simplest path downhill.
IT TURNED OUT THAT THERE WAS A NEW AFTER-SCHOOL CARE PROGRAM at Lucy’s school that Lucy could attend on the afternoons when Anna would be on campus, but it wasn’t so easy for her to find a place for Ellen. Over the next few days, instead of planning her seminar or moving into her office or talking with Lucy about how she might make friends, Anna examined day cares.
While Eliot hosted a symposium on the regeneration needs of cryogenically storaged fresh stone fruits, Anna studied newspapers and made phone calls and raced through the wet streets of Santa Dorothea, hunting down addresses. She visited places loud as kennels, crammed with kids like packs of clamoring puppies. She looked at homes so spotless it was hard to believe that children had ever stepped inside them until she read the lists of rules posted by their front doors. She went to houses as rank as caves, their blaring TVs their only spots of light.
Finally she found a place she hoped would be all right, in an in-home day care not far from Lucy’s school. Safe in Anna’s arms, Ellen had peered down at the other children with interest, and she’d even giggled a little when Mrs. Chauncy danced a Big Bird puppet in front of her. But on Monday morning, when Anna dropped Ellen off for her first half-day there, Ellen did not want to leave Anna’s arms.
“She’ll get over it,” Mrs. Chauncy said, reaching decisively for Ellen. But Ellen twisted away from her and burrowed her face against her mother’s shoulder.
“I guess she’s not quite ready for me to go,” Anna said apologetically. She reached down to give Lucy’s hand a quick squeeze of encouragement. “I wish I’d been able to spend a morning here with her before I had to start work.”
“She’ll never be happy about you going,” said Mrs. Chauncy briskly. “It’s up to you to go ahead and leave. A clean break is easier on everyone than a long good-bye.” Setting her hands firmly under Ellen’s armpits, she lifted Ellen out of Anna’s arms.
“Uh,” Ellen cried, twisting back toward her mother, her eyes wide, her face bewildered. She dove toward Anna with such force that Mrs. Chauncy had to struggle to prevent her from dropping on the floor. “You’d better go,” Mrs. Chauncy said, as her face clamped shut with the effort of keeping Ellen in her arms. “Before she gets any worse.”
But staring at her struggling daughter, and torn precisely in two by her need to meet her first seminar on time and her need to comfort Ellen, Anna froze.
“It’s always hardest on the mothers,” Mrs. Chauncy said as she edged Anna and Lucy out of the living room. Opening the front door, she added, “In five minutes she’ll have forgotten all about you.”
“Maaa,” Ellen wailed, reaching piteously for Anna. She looked as though she knew what Anna did not yet understand, that if they parted, they would never see each other alive again.
“Good-bye,” said Mrs. Chauncy, raising her voice so that she could be heard above Ellen’s wails. “Have a nice day.” She closed the door, leaving Anna and Lucy standing on the front porch, facing the brass knocker and listening to Ellen’s disembodied screams.
“Ellie’s sad,” Lucy said, a little furrow of worry on her forehead.
“She’ll be okay,” Anna answered. “It’s only for a few hours,” she added to herself. She squared her shoulders and took a bolstering breath of rain-soaked air.
“Mrs. Chauncy’s right,” she continued as they climbed back into the car. “Ellen won’t be sad for very long. In five minutes she will have forgotten all about us.”
There was a silence while Lucy buckled her seat belt, and then, with a kink of puzzlement in her voice, she said, “I wouldn’t want Ellie to forget about us.”
“Oh, no,” Anna answered as she turned on the ignition and put the car in gear. “She’ll remember us when she sees us again. I meant more—like you,” she fumbled, “how you can get so absorbed in what’s happening in school, that for a while you forget about what goes on at home.”
“I don’t get so ’sorbed,” Lucy answered forlornly. “I never forget.”
“That’s too bad,” Anna said, trying to keep her voice light, “You might be happier if you could forget a little more.”
“But what if I forgot to ever ’member you again?”
“You wouldn’t,” Anna answered, twisting around in her seat and backing out of Mrs. Chauncy’s driveway. “When I came to pick you up, you’d remember me then.” She hoped that Mrs. Chauncy was being patient with Ellen, hoped she wouldn’t leave Ellen in her crib to cry it out. Anne remembered Ellen’s dark newborn body dan
gling between the doctor’s hands, and for an unhinged moment she imagined Mrs. Chauncy shaking Ellen or punching her or smothering her with a pillow.
“But what if something happened,” Lucy was saying, “and you never came?”
“Nothing like that will ever happen,” Anna answered, holding tight to the steering wheel and resisting the impulse to return to Mrs. Chauncy’s and beat down her front door.
“It could,” Lucy insisted. “You could die.”
“I won’t die,” said Anna.
“How do you know?”
“I just do. I’ll always come back to get you,” Anna claimed, though even as she spoke she felt a twinge of superstition, for what if she had a heart attack or died in a freeway pileup that very day? What if she had just made the one promise she couldn’t keep?
And then it all became so complex. It was impossible to guess which was worse, pretending to Lucy that their safety could be assured, or admitting that no future was certain, just as it was impossible to know whether being at Mrs. Chauncy’s would, as Sally promised, make Ellen more resilient or whether, as Anna sometimes feared, it would crush some deep part of Ellen’s emerging heart.
As she pulled onto the street and drove off through the dreary morning, Anna thought of how fervently she loved her daughters, how she would do anything for them, if only she could know what the right thing was. She remembered the heroic deeds other mothers had performed for their children. She thought about the Russian woman who, trapped with her son in the rubble of an earthquake, had kept him alive by having him suck blood from the cuts she gouged into her fingertips. She thought of the women in Vietnam who used their own bodies to shield their children from the soldiers’ bullets, and of the Eskimo mother who, in the darkest part of winter, made her starving children promise to eat her frozen body and then slipped out of the igloo to lie down in the snow. Anna had no doubt that she, too, would give her life for her daughters as easily as a drifting snowflake, as simply as a petal falling from a rose. In extremity she would know exactly what to do and she wouldn’t hesitate to do the hardest thing. But there were times when dying seemed so simple, so clear and unequivocal compared to what was required of an ordinary mother, day after day.
