by Kate Walbert
* * *
Liz clutches Caroline’s hand on the subway platform. There is work being done somewhere, and the trains are running intermittently, though a taxi or a bus is out of the question—the traffic insane. The twins have had their baths and are sleeping, Liz has heard from Lorna. Everything is fine, she has been told.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” booms the intercom. “This is an important message from the New York City Police Department. Remain alert. Keep your belongings in your sight at all times. Protect yourself. If you see a suspicious—”
“Did you have a good time?” Liz says, talking over the recorded voice, squatting so that she can be at eye level with the girl.
“Uh-huh,” Caroline says.
“Is Matilda nice?” Liz says.
“Uh-huh,” Caroline says.
“Does she like to play My Little Ponies?” Liz says.
Caroline pulls on the loose straps of her backpack, a filched Pinkie Pie, its tail braided, its eyes pocked by a pen point, now zipped into one of the many compartments.
“I don’t know,” Caroline says. She turns away from her mother and stares out over the empty tracks. “No,” she adds quietly, though who could hear anything for the screech of the approaching train. In the rush Liz teeters, grabbing Caroline into a hug, her hands gripping Caroline’s thin shoulders for balance. “But it was a gold-star day, baby,” she says as the crowd swells over them. “Wasn’t it?”
ESPERANZA
The point is she had almost lost Baby in Chile. They had jabbed a needle in her rear—progesterone or estrogen, testosterone, something—and the needle, true story, broke off. Broke! How they ever got the thing out she’ll never know because she fainted dead away. And Chile wasn’t then what it is now, no; dogs, mostly, scrawny, ugly packs of them on every corner. Children, too, little more than five, six, selling roped iguana and necklaces of dried corn dyed berry reds and blues, and one boy, she’ll never forget, with half a pack of cards splayed on the ground as if he were playing solitaire, but he was not: they were for sale. He had worked out an elaborate system of value; spades cost the most though she would have thought hearts.
Wouldn’t that have been poetic? Hearts?
She had offered him a quarter for a four of diamonds. It seemed a card of no worth and she didn’t want to deplete his inventory; plus a quarter then and so forth. The value. He spit on the coin and polished it against his ragged shirt. He was a beautiful child. He had those enormous Latin eyes. She had wanted to fold him up and carry him home in her pocket—women did back then. They simply took a child home. A friend’s brother was just a boy from down the street, a boy who had walked in—a prostitute sister, a drunk dad, something—and one morning the boy had just walked into her friend’s apartment, this is New York City, Hell’s Kitchen, the Irish, you know, anyway, the boy had walked in or banged on the door or something and her friend’s mother had offered him eggs and made a place at the table. You shared, was the point. You didn’t need written permission. Not like now. No. Compassion was the point.
But your father said no. Don’t steal the urchins, your father said. The vagabond of Mesoamerica. He said things he found clever and she did too though not in hindsight. Hindsight twenty-twenty and Dick still Dick even though and is this true? Did she hear correctly that he now prefers Richard? Changing at his age! Fathering twins! Outrageous when Baby clocked in at thirty-two.
“Thirty-three,” Baby corrects.
Thirty-three? Already? Thirty-three? That’s impossible. This is that many years ago? God knows the needle might still be in her rump, shrapnel from a war wound. Hah! She never saw them take it out but then again, how would she? She’d fainted dead away; felt the gurney roll as she hit the sheet and this is what she last remembers, the hormones surging through her body, buffering the pull that had come on too early for Baby to be born, the countergravity, perhaps, below the equator. Who knows? She had already lost four, remember? This might have been a big family instead of just the three of them.
“A perfect triumvirate of love,” Baby says.
What?
“Iris Murdoch. The writer. She was an only child. She called her family a ‘perfect triumvirate of love.’ I read it.”
Well, it wasn’t for lack of trying! She had always imagined a room full of children, a fire in the grate with some kind of weather, and woods to roam.
“I know.”
The first happened so early she hadn’t even noticed. In those days you didn’t keep such close track. The others were later, harder, after your father and I had already imagined them into children: a girl or a boy, brown eyes or blue, fair complexion most likely, given Dick’s coloring, mine, and athletes, of course. Intelligence mattered less then—things had a way of working out. Health, always health first: ten fingers ten toes, that sort of thing. This before they had the pictures. You couldn’t look in, couldn’t know anything for sure. You had to have faith and you did, my God! The truth is, in those days you might very well have given birth to a swan or a rodent. And listen to this: now they can even grade the embryos. They give you the odds based on one cell—there are eight and they take one and test it and then give you the odds about the embryo’s survival, its future, its earning power.
“I know.”
It’s not supposed to hurt anything, but how do they know? Might be the central trauma of the child’s life: its lost cell.
“Seven is a lucky number.”
The point is we got on the first plane home and my rump was so sore I had to sit on one of those inflatable cushions and traveling wasn’t then what it is now, no, and oh, you’re tired, never mind.
She had told the story so many times. She could see she is boring her, anyway.
“No.”
Same old, same old.
“It’s like water, or waves: I find it soothing.”
What would she rather talk about?
“Nothing.”
All right, then: nothing. Quiet as a mouse.
* * *
Baby closes her eyes and shifts down in her chair. She wears the pale blue gown she’s been given on admittance, though gown is a charitable word. The cloth might as well be paper for its stiffness, the way it rustles. She wears the issued slippers. Next visit she might be able to receive certain things from home, her studio, a fifth-floor walk-up on Downing Street, where she’s lived for the past twelve years above the guy who practices the viola at 4:00 P.M. and the woman who cries. The woman who cries only cries on the weekends, early Sunday mornings. It is not clear she’s in trouble, but it is not clear she’s not. Baby has not known what to do with this and so has done nothing. This is one of the things she’s been talking about in session; she’s also been talking about the man who fell in front of the bus on Avenue A, and the pigeons she feeds when she sits on the bench outside the Little Red School House. She has not been talking about the burn marks on her arms or how, weeks before she arrived, she lit matches and scorched the ends of her hair, her tongue.
This is the room where they let them smoke, a room not unlike the clinic in Chile, apparently, windowless, barrack-like. Her mother has brought flowers she’s picked from the side of the highway, Queen Anne’s lace and some other wild something that grows in June, a geranium or maybe even a lupine, stalky and purple. She brought them in a mason jar she filled with water from the drinking fountain; but there’s nowhere to put them so she holds them in her lap, steadying the mason jar with both hands.
The cigarette burns down in the ashtray. Baby hasn’t smoked in years but she loves the look of the column of papery ash and she loves the smoking room for its emptiness, its quiet, its walls a color that might have once been bright, who knows? Anyway, she might smoke. She might reach out and pick up the cigarette and take a long drag to see the look on her mother’s face, but she won’t, just as she won’t interrupt her mother; won’t eat between meals; won’t stop scratching the itch; won’t stop plucking the eyelashes from her eyelids; she won’t.
* * *
* * *
Baby’s name isn’t truly Baby. It is Esperanza; ridiculous, given her Nordic ancestors and coloring, but Esperanza nonetheless. It just seemed the right thing to do considering the quick thinking of the Chilean doctors, the needle dose of hormone that prevented her from slipping out too soon and almost never being born after all the years her parents had waited for her. She was Espy at school, suitably short and vague in heritage—a name that made you think of white shirts and perpetual tans, summer sailing trips of the kind the family took in the years when they were flush, skirting the coasts of ravaged countries whose names ran together as the names of the muses or the many children of Zeus—mellifluous and full. Islands sprung whole from a woolly head, their namesakes the results of rapes or brutal kidnappings, the landscapes far too exotic and dangerous to enter but they would anchor off their rocky coasts and swim in the crystalline waters. They would fish for briny lobster or a local edible: a perfect triumvirate of love.
* * *
Baby shifts in her chair. The cigarette has burned to ash, the smoke dissipating then disappeared to nothing but its sharp smell. Her mother looks toward where a window might be if a window had ever been planned. Perhaps she is imagining what it might look out to: the industrial park off the industrial drive, the pretty apple trees planted in a semicircle around the hospital sign, the various persons wandering the grounds with their daughters—the facility for women, alone—some unsteady, some striding, manic.
Her mother is trying to be quiet as a mouse, Baby can see; but this is not her mother’s nature. Her mother sees her noticing and smiles, her hands in a jumble of wild flowers, her scarf bright. She has put on fresh lipstick just that morning, or perhaps in the car, in the rearview mirror, before getting out and locking the door, before walking in with the quick steps Baby always heard before any others, the quick steps of mother, the click clack of mother, the voice of mother.
It will be over in an instant, she says now: a chatty mouse. They put the things on and then they take them off.
Her mother smiles and steadies the mason jar in her lap.
There’s really nothing to be afraid of, she says.
Afterward, she strokes Baby’s hair, smooths it away from her face, which is puffy and mottled white, not an easy face to love—the drugs they’ve given Baby make her furry and dark, a mustache across her top lip, random hairs on her cheeks so she must shave with a razor every morning like a man. In family group, Baby says she wishes she had never been born, but here she is, here she is! Sleeping soundly at last. She will sleep for many hours, the doctor has said, and when she wakes up she will feel better. That is what’s been promised: Baby will feel better.
She fingers a small curl, staring at her child as she did when she was first born, as if she might swallow her whole. Then she could not sleep for watching Baby breathe: this miracle she had been given: this found girl.
TO DO
Her mother had been a beauty, a green-eyed blonde who wore a long braid down her back in high school and then college (Vassar ’53), New York, and her job in the typing pool at Westinghouse (Katie Gibbs ’54), before she was asked (actually, told) to change to the more stylish updos of the time. She refused, her boss accusing her of hysteria though the origin of the word (do you know this?) is the once-belief that the uterus could reach up its bloody hands and grip the throat.
Constance addresses the mostly silent women, colleagues from her department, gathered in the Antler Bar on Elm, near the Loop, for the new Storytelling Wednesdays, the audience’s silence not silence but agitated, bored distraction as Constance closes with a recitation of her mother’s to-do list, one of many she found among her mother’s things last spring upon her mother’s passing, she’s explained. Cirrhosis of the liver but that’s another story.
This list was picked at random from one of the drawers in the condo kitchen, her mother in one of those retirement communities haunted by women and men at the end stage, although who ever saw the men? The men were parked in different hallways—narrow, wallpapered corridors lined with geraniums, Constance says, miles and miles of geraniums, she says, the wallpapered walls hung with Wyeth and Rockwell and Turner prints, the corridors labyrinthine, windowless. I was always lost, she tells the silent women. The staff gave me three weeks to clear everything out. Presto pronto, Goodwill hello. No condolences. And these lists. Everywhere: on the backs of envelopes and cardboard coasters, pharmaceutical notepads, Post-its in different colors, and scraps of watercolor paper, she likes to paint, liked to paint, and anyway, everything. So much to do. Lists and lists.
The crowd’s silence is the same weight she senses in class sometimes when she wanders to a different topic, or at a dinner table when she’s had too much wine.
“I call it,” she says, clearing her throat, “To Do. I hope everyone will get the picture,” she adds as someone scrapes her chair back and angles toward the bathroom. The others watch her progress, riveted.
* * *
A few performers later, Beth, Constance’s colleague, stands bare-chested, center stage, spoons balanced on her nipples, her medium essentially visual, she had said. We would do it at football parties, she said. It was a thing. And now here a visual reimagining of my lost youth, she said, unbuttoning, killing the same crowd, the women wildly applauding as Beth looks up, her face flushed even from this distance or perhaps it’s the lights: they flood the makeshift stage, flood Beth, the glare of them casting Beth as something other, something more. Is she wearing face paint? Has she grown a third eye? One silver spoon drops to the floor and the crowd, collectively, gasps.
* * *
Her mother’s To Do went something like this: bleach; yarn; Q-tips?; blueberries?; call Constance; organize girls; ask William. Constance had read each item slowly, deliberately, clarifying a few details—William her mother’s ex-husband, Constance’s father, long deceased; girls she and her younger sister, Sally, she supposed, all the while thinking, even while reading, What was I thinking? What was I thinking?
Her performance had lasted no more than a few minutes but the weight had solidified into a rock you might split open with a hammer and chisel.
It all had to do with saying something, Constance had told herself; continuity and mothers; lists and identity. In short: are we the sum of what we’ve crossed off? Or, are we only what we still have left to do? Her mother’s death wasn’t the point. People died every week at that place, every day of the year. Mothers. Fathers. In her mother’s retirement community they printed—embossed—the names of the newly dead on ivory card stock each mor
ning and propped the card as if a menu on a tiny easel outside the dining room. Dinner specials, her mother had called them. Death du jour.
When Constance visited, which she did less often than she would like to admit, she steered her mother clear of the easel and wheeled her straight to the employee who manned the dining room door. “We have a standing reservation,” her mother would say, a joke, or, coquettishly, “Table for two.”
Now Constance gestures to the waitress for another drink; she wants it quickly before the loudly applauded Beth returns, although Beth appears to be going nowhere, the audience whistling as if to summon dogs. Earlier Beth had ordered a green tea and a warm quinoa with kale. Protein and grains, she explained, and no to wine, thanks—one glass will make her fuzzy-headed in the morning and Beth wants none of that, she’s having none of that, apparently. She had smiled. Sorry, she said. I’m a boring date.
Where is camaraderie? Constance wants to know. What happened to camaraderie? To nights out? To bonding? To drunkenness? All these young women so lean and muscular and accomplished at thirty, ivy leagued, Brazilian waxed, thonged, tattooed. She pictures even her little sister, Sally, thonged, tattooed, bending down to wipe the chin of one of her numerous children. Tattooed! Sally! Jesus!
* * *
Antlers is a university bar, odd downtown, off the Loop with its streets of neon pizza establishments and old Polish restaurants, marble-floored, near-embalmed waiters, odd so close to the lake, where on certain nights, such as this one, the wind tunnels down Sheridan, up Oak, pummeling the glass-wrapped new condos and bending near to snap the pear trees planted in boxes on Oak, and Willow, and Maple. Here Antlers’s many-mullioned windows seem oblivious to weather, the glass plastered with peeling team mascots and political stickers, the walls dense with important persons in black and white, most already forgotten, their capped smiles wide and white, their hairstyles the decade: a visual medium.
