Louisa Meets Bear (3 page)

Jackie took a drag on her cigarette and blew out three silvery rings. “Well,” she said, “there's my gram and my two sisters, but they're both out of the house. And then my brother, but we're not sure where he's at.”

“Anyone else who lives here?”

“No. Sometimes my uncle sleeps over, but that's not too much. And my kids.”

Jackie looked at Denise. Her face softened.
She really is awfully pretty
, my mother thought about Jackie. As though sensing the shift in her mother's mood, Denise went over to her. She rested her head on her mother's knee. Jackie leaned down to pick up the child. She cuddled Denise in her lap.

When my mother finished writing down what Jackie had said, she moved on to the second question. “Who do you turn to when there's an emergency?”

“An emergency,” Jackie repeated.

My mother could hear Brandon starting to cry. For a moment she thought about telling Jackie that probably he needed a clean diaper after having drunk that bottle, but then she realized that Jackie would, of course, know this.

“Hold on.” Jackie put Denise down on the chair and walked to the back.

My mother looked over at Denise. She was reaching a hand toward Jackie's still-burning cigarette.

My mother jumped up. “No, no. Cigarettes aren't for children.” She put out the cigarette and carried the child and the soggy key ring that had slipped out of her mouth over to the couch.

The crying stopped and Jackie returned.

“I put out your cigarette. I was afraid Denise would burn herself.”

“Thanks.” Jackie patted her shirt pocket and pulled out the cigarette pack. She turned it upside down, but nothing came out. “Shit.” She covered her lips. “Pardon my filthy mouth.” She sniffed, wiggled her nose, and looked around the room as though willing more cigarettes to appear.

“You mind if I run to the corner and get a pack?”

My mother wondered if it was against the rules for her to be in the apartment without Jackie, but it was hard to think of what or whose rules and it seemed silly to say no. “Sure,” my mother said. “No problem.”

Jackie took a jacket from a nail near the door. When Denise spied her mother with her hand on the bolt, she wailed. “You stay with the nice lady,” Jackie said. “I'll be right back.”

Denise's wails turned to shrieks.

“Jesus, this kid's driving me nuts.” She picked up the screaming child. “Okay, okay, I'll take you.”

Jackie turned to my mother. “Brandon's out cold, but if he starts to cry, his bottle's on the dresser next to the bed.”

My mother nodded.

Jackie zipped the jacket so Denise was swaddled inside. “I won't be but five minutes.”

*   *   *

In fact, my mother's coming home was not the way my father's look that night suggested. She moved into the house the way a boarder might, taking the guest room, bringing only a few things with her: a trunk of clothing, two boxes of books, her typewriter. (She had, by then, decided to get her PhD in social work and was at work on the dissertation—a comparative study of the relationship between the availability of an array of social services and infant mortality in thirty-six countries.) She and my father talked to each other politely. Could he move the television into my room? she asked. Perhaps she might like to look in the attic for some rain boots? he wondered.

By the end of the first week, my mother and I fell into a routine. I'd wake to the sound of her typing or her chair making a squeaking sound against the floor, as she got up from the card table she'd set up as a desk, in search of a book. She'd break to bring me cereal and juice. At two, she'd stop writing and we'd have lunch together—me in bed, she seated in the armchair my father had carried into my room. After lunch, my mother would wash the dishes, change the sheets on my bed while I took a shower, bathe herself, and then, in the dove afternoon light, we'd talk.

While we talked, my mother knit—first a vest for my brother, then a scarf for me, and, in the last month, a pair of yellow booties. I'd never seen my mother knit, hadn't even known she knew how. My mother smiled when I told her this. How could you, she said, I haven't knit since I was pregnant with you. I knit matching hats for you and Louisa. Of course, I didn't know that my sister and I were both having girls, we didn't do amniocenteses in those days, so I made them both yellow like these. After that, with two young children, there was hardly time to brush my teeth. And then, well, I lost interest.

It was my mother who always determined how long these conversations would last, sometimes half an hour, sometimes two or three, the house growing dim around us. There seemed to be no pattern to when my mother would signal the end—stretching her thin arms over her head, arching her back, rolling her neck, and then saying, depending upon the hour, I better get to the store before it's too late, or, My goodness, your father will be home any minute, time to start dinner—and I'd be left, still flat on my back, to think over the things my mother slowly told me.

*   *   *

We circled backward and forward—backward to my mother's childhood in Hartford, she and her sister left to entertain each other while their mother retreated with her migraines to a room with the dusty velvet curtains drawn closed. Their father had worked as an insurance actuary, thirty-nine years with the same company and
never
a sick day, a point, my mother said, he often repeated, as though the mere fact were a virtue. He'd insisted upon no talk during meals due to his belief that silence aided digestion.

We circled forward to my mother's Berkeley life and her new friends, each quirkier than the next, in whom my mother seemed to take pride, and then back to the numb, really desperate, my mother said, state she'd been in when she'd left my father five years before.

My mother looked up from her knitting. It was May and the sweet, tickly smell of lawns cut for the first time of the season wafted in through the open window. I was in my seventh month, my legs swollen like zucchinis left too long on the vine.

Of course, my mother said, I didn't realize then that I was depressed.
Clinically
depressed, as my friend Harold would say. I just thought I was losing my mind. I felt like I was someone else, like I was floating above looking down at this other woman scooping food onto plates. It got so bad, I'd wait for you and your brother and father to leave in the mornings so I could crawl under the desk in your father's study, all balled up with my arms hugging my knees, trying to squeeze back into my body.

In my eighth month, I began bleeding again and the doctor banned even bathroom trips. I wept when he told me that I would have to give up this last thread of autonomy: the toilet and shower to be replaced by bedpans and sponge baths. Driving home with my mother, me lying on the back seat, still sniffling, I complained that I felt like a junked refrigerator.

A beached whale, my mother countered from the front seat.

A paralyzed elephant.

Mount St. Helens, she said.

That eight-hundred-pound man who could only leave his apartment lifted out the window by a crane.

Although my mother managed the bedpans with no more fuss than she did my trays of dishes, although she knew not to talk as she sponged the lower half of my body, beyond my mountainous belly and out of my sight, it felt, nonetheless, like a terrible intrusion. Perhaps in recompense, I began asking her bolder questions, which she, perhaps also in recompense, seemed to feel obliged to answer.

Do you have a lover? I asked on a hot June afternoon.

My mother reached for one of the tall glasses of herbal tea. Ice clinked as pink splotches of embarrassment rose above the neckline of the old football T-shirt of Jay's she was wearing. Not now, she said. But I did.

Before you left Dad?

No, after.

And then, on another afternoon, Did you love Dad when you got married?

Of course, she said. Of course I did. My mother paused as though trying to remember. She ran her fingers through her hair. Her lids fluttered. Your father was terribly handsome and bright and filled with promise. Like a young Jack Kennedy.

When did you stop loving him?

She squinted as though peering through time. I don't think I stopped loving
him
, she said. I just stopped loving.

My cheeks burned with nearly unbearable suspicion: My mother hadn't come home to take care of me. She'd come home to make me, roped to this bed, listen to her explanations for why she'd left. My temples throbbed. I closed my eyes, the thought dissolving, like a drop of colored oil in a pool of water, into the pounding in my head.

When? I asked the next day. When did you stop loving?

My mother furrowed her brow. Her hands rested on the yellow booties, done except for the heels. Your father thought it was when my sister died. But the truth is, it was long before.

When? I demanded.

You were five, she said. In kindergarten. Your brother was eight.

*   *   *

After Jackie left, my mother sat perfectly still as though there were a store camera pointed at her, watching what she would do.
Don't move
, my mother thought, and then,
That's ridiculous
, but still she felt odd as she got up. Just stretching my legs, she said to herself as she headed toward the back of the apartment.

It was a railroad flat with two small bedrooms behind the front room where my mother had been, and then a kitchen and bathroom at the rear. The first bedroom was small, with a linoleum floor and a window that faced brick. There were two single beds, a dresser, and a curtain rod mounted between the side of the dresser and the wall for hanging clothes. From the items that hung there—plaid shirtwaists, two white uniforms like nurses' aides or cafeteria workers wear, a nightgown, some cardigan sweaters—it seemed like the clothing of an older woman, probably Jackie's grandmother, Faith. In the back bedroom there was a crib where Brandon lay and a mattress where, my mother supposed, either Jackie or Denise must sleep.

I was so taken up in those days, my mother said, with the struggles with your father about his belief in a natural division of labor between men and women, I think I was looking for clues to bring home about how they lived together, Faith and Jackie. Who was in control? Who decided who'd bathe the children, or did it just happen: the children cried, wet their pants, got dirty, and someone then scrubbed or did not scrub a tub before drawing water?

In the kitchen, my mother opened the refrigerator: milk, cookies, peanut butter, a plate covered with wax paper with what looked like chicken underneath. In the bathroom, she opened the cabinet, examining the vials and reading the prescription labels. She cracked the smoked window and peered into the alley of trash cans, the acrid odor floating up to the top floor. She closed the window and went back to the room where Brandon lay in the crib.

My mother felt dirty, as if she needed to scrub grime from behind her ears and soot from the bony protrusions of her ankles. She could hear her mother instructing her the first time she'd spent the night at a girlfriend's house, Don't touch anything, don't open any of the people's drawers, don't snoop, as she leaned down to look at Brandon, to inspect him too.

The baby lay facedown. He was perfectly quiet.
He's small
, my mother thought,
really very small for three months.
Hardly bigger than her own children had been as newborns.

My mother put her hands on Brandon's sides to pick him up. Lifting him, it was as though he had no muscle tonus, as though only the part of him that touched her fingers yielded, the rest heavy and limp.

Not until my mother had Brandon turned toward her and fully in her arms, his head resting on her breastbone, did she realize she could not feel or hear his breath. Her heart pounded, hard, hard, as she jerked Brandon away from her body until at arms length she could see his open motionless eyes.
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God
, she heard herself saying, and then she pulled Brandon back to her chest and began banging on his little birdcage of a back, small sharp thumps with the flat of her hand.

There was still no breath.

Holding the baby tight to her chest, my mother ran to the front room. She pressed her nose to the window,
Please, please, Jackie, be there in the street, on the stoop, footsteps on the stairs
, but there was no Jackie and then my mother remembered that there was no phone. She dropped to her knees, laying the baby on the floor, and tried to breathe into his mouth, her thumb pumping the spot she best guessed to be near his tiny heart in vague memory of a lifesaving course she had taken years before when she was pregnant with my brother.

My mother could not say how long it was that she knelt over Brandon, her mouth over his, whether it was two minutes or five, only that her breath floated up over her cheeks, bathing her own face, the baby refusing to drink in her air, and that at one point she jumped up, grabbed her raincoat from the couch, wrapped it around and around Brandon, and ran down the stairs.

She screamed when she reached the street, “Help! Help!” but, whereas before it had seemed like there were people everywhere, now there was only a little girl bouncing a ball.

“Telephone, I need a telephone, an ambulance,” she yelled at the girl, but the girl looked at her uncomprehendingly, picked up her ball, and ran.

My mother clutched Brandon to her and ran too. Wrapped in the raincoat, he felt more like a sack of flour or a bag of gardening soil than a baby. She ran to Lexington, short mincing steps in her pumps and narrow skirt, panting from the pressure in her lungs and the weight of the baby in her arms, a small sound like a whimper or a yelp coming from her throat.

At the corner, she paused to look, and then ran left toward a storefront.

Jackie will be there
, my mother thought,
Jackie will be there hanging out in the store, smoking cigarettes and joking with the other young people. She will take Brandon, unwrap him from the raincoat, and once in his mother's arms, he will breathe.