A Mother's Love (14 page)

She was right. It had become warmer. I took the blanket away and unbuttoned his sweater. He smiled, grabbing at my fingers.

“My name is Mara,” she said. “It's nice to meet you.”

“My name is Ivy,” I said.

She smiled. “Ivy.” She repeated it as if she were remembering something. “It's a pretty name. Come over sometime,” she said. “Come for a drink.” And then she walked away.

E
VERYTHING I DO is in doses. Measured restraint. Pieces at a time, as if I am fitting together a mosaic that is becoming more and more my life. A bit of reading, a snippet of conversation, a fragment of a film, a thought sliced like an onion. Memory is divided by feedings and wails. Cries in the night. Interruption has become a way of life: moments are cut into the portions of a pie.

I've been able to do more work at home. The Museum of Natural History has sent me some Native American pieces, and Mike has been sending me more projects than I can handle. He says we must be coming out of the recession because the jewelry business is back, and he seems to have plenty for me to do. “Stay home, Ivy,” he tells me over the phone. “You get more done there.” What he really means is that it's easier for everyone if I work at home.

For days at a time I don't go into the street. Whatever I need from the outside world I have sent to me, delivered by boys holding afterschool jobs. Chinese men with moist palms and no English appear at my door with steaming rice. Boys, earning their allowances, bring me videos at night. Hispanics now come for the laundry or drop off staples. Pizzas, Enfamil, bagels, entertainment; for the price of a tip, all this is brought to my door, to the door of a woman who was once accustomed to going anywhere at any time. The delivery boys eye me strangely, not with lust but with questions, as if I am a shut-in. Then they see the baby and they understand that this is true. I keep rolls of quarters by the door. Sometimes the only way I can be sure I am still in the world is the click the quarters make in their hands. I know them all by name. Tomás, Chen, Juan, LeRoy. The video store sends me either Jesús or Moses; I consider this to be a hopeful sign.

I have taken to watching mysteries late at night. Hitchcock, Christie, whatever I can order in. The man at the video store knows me and helps with my selections. “Mrs. Slovak,” he says, hearing the baby crying in the background, “this one you won't be able to figure out.” But I always do. The wife is the obvious suspect. Or the old friend. Or the husband trying to drive his wife insane. The lawyers who sleep with their clients; these I suspect right away. The red herrings, the twists of plot,
the missing links; I know them. I am so good at this it frightens me, as if it's a calling I've missed, a talent, an activity I have a strange propensity for.

As I feed Bobby, a woman kills her husband with the frozen leg of lamb, then serves it to the detectives. They devour the murder weapon, the woman having brought off the perfect crime. What would I do under similar circumstances? I ask myself. The fact that I am asking at all has me concerned. When I have gone through the classics, the modern whodunits, what will feed my imagination? What will I invent to get me through?

Night after night, when I quit my work for Mike, I stare at the painting of the face that rises out of the mountains, against the desert; it has been on my work table for weeks. But by nine o'clock I collapse, too exhausted to paint.

One warm Saturday I took Bobby to the park. We went to Strawberry Fields, where I put him on a blanket in the sun. We sat beside two women, one with a newborn and the other in dark glasses with a toddler. The woman in dark glasses said, just as I sat down, “Let's face it, once you have a baby, that part of your life is over.”

“What part?” I wanted to ask, but she was running across the field after her toddler. It was a warm, muggy day, unusual even for early May, and I stretched out on the blanket, staring up at the clouds, the trees overhead just beginning to
blossom. When she came back, I heard her friend say, “What's the most embarrassing place for your water to break?”

“At an art opening …” the toddler's mother said, breathless from retrieving her child.

“Of your own work.” Her friend laughed, patting her newborn. “That's where mine broke.”

I found myself laughing as well, then longing for an opening of my own work. I would have been happy just to finish the painting on my desk. Restless, I put Bobby in his stroller and walked with him through the park. The pavement felt warm under my feet and I knew I wasn't ready for summer. I took him over to Diana Ross playground and put him in one of the infant swings. Holding him by the shoulders, I let him rock back and forth. Around me parents sat, talking while children dug into a sandbox. Others pushed children who pumped their legs frantically on swings. I rocked Bobby, back and forth, and felt as if I were in a time warp, slow action. I stayed here for a long time.

When I got home, I sat down to paint while Bobby took his nap. I looked at the picture and saw what I wanted to do. I wanted to deepen the lines around the face, make it recede farther into the picture. I wanted the road and the snake and the fence to look like snapshots or clippings from a magazine. The photorealist elements of the piece. I had begun to paint when Bobby woke. He was
feverish, tossing. I gave him some Tylenol, but he stayed awake, fitfully, in my arms.

That night I dreamed I was in a room with a rat, a huge rat, and the rat was barring the door. Keeping me inside, threatening to bite.

When Jesús came over from the Video Connection with a horror film, I asked him to help me get down a box from the top of the closet; it contained my summer clothes. After he did this, he looked around. He saw the unmade bed, the pile of dirty clothes, a plate of half-eaten food. “Mrs. Slovak,” he said after a long pause, “this place is kind of a mess.” I stared at his face. He was young, perhaps not more than twenty, and he had olive skin and dark silky hair combed straight back.

I glanced around. “Yes, it is; I try to keep it together, but I've got so much to do.”

“What about your husband? Does he work late?”

I smiled at Jesús. “I don't have a husband. That's why I can't get everything done.”

He looked down at his feet. “You seemed kind of alone.”

“I'm all right,” I said. “Really I am.” I wondered if he was going to leave or just stand there and stare at his feet.

“Well, if I can help you out again,” he said, “just ask for me, or if you just want someone to share a slice of pizza and watch a good movie, let
me know.” I stood there, nodding like a wind-up toy, and pulled my robe tightly around me.

“I will,” I said. “I'll let you know.”

I offered him his usual tip, but he refused it. When I closed the door, I found myself slightly breathless. I thought of calling him back, but I didn't. Although I still wanted videos delivered, I knew I would stop calling for them.

After he left, I tried to watch the movie he'd delivered. But Bobby would not sleep. His eyes were fixed and black like my mother's when she was angry. Though I always thought his eyes and hair took after Matthew's, now it occurred to me that he looked like her. He started to cry. “Don't,” I told him because tonight I didn't think I could handle it. I started eating a slice of vegetarian pizza and sipping a Diet Coke, though I knew this wasn't good for my milk. “Don't cry,” I said, but he wouldn't stop. I was afraid that if I picked him up, I'd crush him.

He went red and stiff. I had to walk away. Then I wondered what his first memory of me would be. Of my back. Of me standing above him, a finger raised. My first memory of my own mother is fuzzy because I have so many memories of her, but they are not clear the way this one might be. I remember myself in a sink, my mother's black hair above me like a net about to drop on a wild animal. Or I see her at the window, her face pressed to the glass.

At last I walked over and picked him up, and he fell asleep in my arms. When he slept he was lighter than when he was awake. Lighter than air. I could have carried him forever when he was asleep. It was as if the spirit had abandoned the body, as if he had achieved weightlessness. Perhaps it is not the body that carries the weight. The body is mere gristle and bone. It is the spirit that weighs us down.

When I was certain he had settled down, I put him in his crib and went into the bathroom, but there was no toilet paper. I opened the refrigerator and found I had no juice, no milk. There was nothing for me to eat but the leftover pizza, and I was down to two diapers, barely enough to get him through the night. It was late, almost eleven o'clock, but the store on the corner was open. It wouldn't take long, fifteen minutes at most, for me to dash out and get just the necessities. No more. I could take Bobby with me, but it would mean waking him, getting him dressed, and it had taken so long to put him down.

Instead, I plugged in the nightlight in his room. It was a prism that cast a small rainbow on the wall. With my finger I traced its arc. Then I went into the kitchen and warmed a bottle. I placed a small stuffed giraffe beside Bobby's head and the warm nipple near his lips. On the cassette player I put on Brahms. Touching his brow to be certain he was asleep, I pulled the covers up to his chin, put
on my coat, and headed out the door. I dashed down the stairs and into the street.

What could happen in fifteen minutes? He could wake up and put his head through the crib bars. A fire could break out in the electric socket in his room. He could wake up and be frightened to death. But sometimes it takes me five, ten minutes to reach his crib. I tried to imagine the night with no toilet paper, no juice, nothing to eat or drink. Not enough diapers. What are the chances of something happening if I went to the store? Infinitesimal. Hardly anything at all.

Three or four people were milling about in the corner store. It is run by Arabs, who are never very eager to do business. In their back room, they run a bookie operation. Here, men in kaftans make money change hands. They are never in a hurry. I began to grab things off the shelves—juice, milk, formula, diapers, butter, a bag of noodles, crackers, some Campbell's soup. The toilet paper and paper towels were up high, and I had to wait while the man at the counter rang up an order. Still he did not come, so I stood on a milk crate with a stick in my hand, batting away at the paper goods until they tumbled into my arms.

I raced to get in line, but a woman and drunk with a six-pack were ahead of me. He was fumbling with his change; he couldn't get the coins out. I looked at the clock. My heart was beating wildly. I never should have gone out. I should
have wrapped Bobby and taken him with me; I should have waited until dawn. I'd been gone twelve minutes, and I was certain Bobby was awake. He's screaming. The neighbors have called the police; the police think—know—I am abusing my child. Child welfare is on its way to take my child away from me. They would be within their rights to do so. They are breaking down the door, and when I race up the street, arriving with the groceries in hand, they are standing there, ready to arrest me.

The drunk spilled a handful of change on the floor; he bent over, trying to pick up a quarter. His fingernails were dirty. A cigarette burned in his mouth. The woman in front of the drunk ordered a sandwich—salami and Swiss on rye with mustard and mayo and a pickle. How long would it take the proprietor to make her sandwich? Fifteen minutes have gone by. I should put my items back. The police are there; the child is dead. In just a matter of minutes, I have made the mistake I will pay for all my life.

“Excuse me,” I pleaded with the woman. “My child is home alone. I need to hurry.” Everyone looked at me with disdain. The woman, sizing me up, made a space with her hand and I moved to the head of the line. The man at the register, who knew me, said, “So where's the kid?” All eyes were upon me; everyone was ready to dial the police.
“Asleep; a neighbor's watching him. But I've got to hurry.”

He nodded. He didn't care if it was true or not. I paid quickly, fumbling, not unlike the drunk, with my bills, and dashed out the door. I ran up the street. It was eleven-thirty and I looked to see if flames leaped from my window, if the rescue squad had arrived. But the building was quiet. There were no screams. As I slipped inside, my downstairs neighbor, a closet homosexual who speaks lovingly in Greek with his mother on the phone, was coming in with a male companion. “So,” he said, “how's it going?” Always the same friendly smile. Upstairs I heard the laughter of the two girls who sublet the apartment across from mine from the actress who has yet to make it big on the West Coast.

I turned the key—and was greeted by darkness and quiet. Not a sound. Half-expecting to find Bobby gone, I raced to the crib. He lay on his back, his chest rising and falling. I collapsed on my bed, exhausted, and fell into a deep sleep. But it was not long before I heard Bobby's cry. “Please,” I heard myself saying, “please, not now.”

Toward the end my mother would interrupt my sleep. She'd come into the room while Sam and I slept. We had been tucked in by our father, who told us stories about a black swan with heavy wings that took us to a land of chocolate lakes and gumdrop mountains. But she'd come in and shake
us, bringing us abruptly back. Her hair hacked off, short, hideous. Her features pinched, fierce.

She came to us first with her dreams. Dreams of empty houses, no one there. Dreams of missing people and strange beasts. Her breath smelled of cigarettes as she shouted into our sleep, her sadness turned to rage. “Do you know what it's like for me, living here? I come from Pennsylvania. My family had money. We lived in a big house.” Often she was naked, her body trembling. The first few times it happened, I thought the house was on fire and we had to flee. “I was somebody else,” she'd shout. “I was somebody before.” She'd wake us four times a night, then not at all for a week. She shook us until our father staggered in and led her away. For years I never really slept, feeling that at any moment I could be awakened.