Playing House (11 page)

I could go on. She was from a close family in a small town and had come to the States to learn the English necessary for her career. The oldest of five children, the only girl, she had been both a daughter and another mother to her siblings from her own youngest years. She was full of mystical folk cures but also common sense to the extreme. Once, my daughter had a high, high fever. She thrashed and muttered and tore at the air with her hands. I, new to all this, did not know what to do. My hands shook and I could not measure out the medicine. Ceci took the bottle from me, drew the liquid up, grasped my thrashing daughter’s chin, and squirted her mouth full of cherry, all in one seemingly seamless move.

Months passed. The presence of Ceci in our family was like a light but firm hand arranging our shape in ways we could only see in retrospect. She was shocked to find out my husband and I celebrated neither Christmas nor Chanukah. My husband had been raised rigorously atheistic and anticapitalistic. I am Jewish by birth, but once I left my mother to live in a foster home, I soon lost touch with my family, and its traditions, for good. “No tree?” Ceci said that first year she was with us. “No presents?
El niño
. What about
el niño
?”

“Clara doesn’t care,” I remember saying. “She’s only one.”

“Clara cares,” Ceci said. And that afternoon she came home with a tree, tinsel, a plastic star, all those silk globes. My husband looked uncomfortable, but then after a second, he smiled. By the week’s end we were all zooming around town, buying up toys and trinkets, festive bows, shiny wrapping paper. “I’m Jewish,” I kept saying to my husband; “I’m a communist,” he kept saying to me. Then we shrugged. We were on a roll, and loving it. On Christmas Eve, Ceci took us all to Mass in a tiny basement church in the inner city. The priest was bedecked in some kind of crown and glossy robes, waving his incense stick so the whole church filled with the smell of frankincense and myrrh. Clara could not take her eyes off the princely looking priest or the children in the choir, all of whom were dressed in bright red ruffles and whose ears were pierced with tiny hoops of gold. Music started playing, something salsa-ish, and then a clip-clop hip-hop version of “Deck the Halls,” and before we knew it the whole church was dancing, skipping after the skipping priest, who waved his wand of smoke high and low. We skipped too. The air was so thick and cloying I could barely breathe. I felt I would choke. On the other hand, it was a lot of fun.

It was for reasons like these that I felt enormously grateful to Ceci and continuously lucky to have her; she brought humor into our tight little lives. However, I also know that her confidence and kindness, the charm she had for children, her easy engagement with them, and her steadfast love of the things I did not love—the dressing, the hair combing, Chuck E. Cheese’s, and swimming pools—only deepened my belief in my own inadequacies. I allowed it to. I felt I simply could not compare.

Here is a scene: It is early morning, and Ceci is brushing my daughter’s hair. She draws the bristles through in a single sweep, hefts up a skein of the champagne-colored locks, and braids them, her fingers flying. Moments later, Clara is ready for school, immaculate, clothes matching, her hair a complex series of plaits and twists all miraculously held to her head with only a single bright barrette. Later on, after school, I find Clara in her room and tentatively approach her. My own hair I have always worn in a mop, too busy for conditioners, just a quick scrub and a brisk, business-like rinse. “Let me do your hair,” I say. I say it softly, shyly, almost like I am in seventh grade asking a boy to dance. “Why?” she says. She doesn’t look up. She’s playing with a doll. “Because,” I say, and I don’t know how to go on. I pick up the brush with its flat-paddle handle and, standing over my daughter’s head, I see the pink seam of her scalp where Ceci has perfectly parted her hair. I bring the brush to it, drag down, and my daughter screams. She gives a loud, dramatic murderous yell and operatic tears fill her eyes. All I did was one tiny tug. I know, I
know
I haven’t hurt her. I stand there with the brush, frozen. She eyes me warily. I eye her right back. Then I cautiously slip from her room.

It is winter, shredded snow falling everywhere, muffling the mountains, bandaging the winding slopes, the skiers in their bright-red parkas looking, from a distance, like tiny beads of blood sliding down. I am twelve. I am full of holes. From across the kitchen, my mother snarls at me for reasons I cannot understand. Suddenly, she flings a spoon in my direction; it bounces off my cheek and lands, clattering, on the tiled floor.

Two years later we will sit together, my mother, father, and I, in a social worker’s office on the second floor of a psychiatric unit, where I have been temporarily placed, much to my relief. My mother’s left hand is badly bruised from where she put it through a wall. I, too, have various bruises, although the real problem, the relentless decimating daily humiliations, is harder to describe. The social worker tells me I will not be going home. My mother, who has become psychotically paranoid over the years, says, “You have abused me past what I can manage,” a classic example of projection. I nod, not knowing what else to do. Precipitating my removal from the home was the fact that my mother tried to push me down a gorge in Vermont. I survived, saved by the soft snow. I remember standing where I had slid, hearing the sound of her receding footsteps in the forest, tasting the cold on my tongue. I was fourteen then and had just begun to bleed. The trees were black, scarred. I saw them, and I understood that my mother wanted to kill me, that she always had. What was different, today, now, post-push, was that I wanted to kill her too. This, I saw, was what it meant to be a daughter, a mother. It is about blood and all the steep slopes.

Children are not subtle. They throw their arms around you or haughtily turn away. They answer you or don’t. My daughter is no different. At the end of every day, during Ceci’s tenure with us, I would come home from work. My briefcase was always bulging, my mind cramped, my stomach aflutter from all I had left to do. I was, at that point in my life, working full-time as both a psychologist and a writer. I sometimes worked sixty hours a week, trying to outrun my history, building walls with words.

I remember one homecoming in particular, not because it was better or worse, but simply because a single memory becomes emblematic, standing in for all the rest. It was winter, and when I opened the door a cold gust of air blew in. Ceci and Clara were absorbed in a book, Clara on Ceci’s lap, Ceci rocking the chair back and forth in time with the Spanish sentences. I could hear the words—
leche
,
bebé
,
perro
—but I did not understand. I saw my daughter’s sleepy eyes, how Ceci held her. “Hi,” I said, an interruption. Ceci smiled, beckoned me forward. Once she had brought me a beautiful blue vase from Mexico, and after my mastectomy, Ceci had filled my room with fresh flowers, helped me with my bandages. Now, I knelt down. “Hi, Clara,” I said, holding out my arms. Clara looked at me. “Go,” Ceci whispered, giving her a little push. “
Besitos para mama
.” Obediently, my daughter came forward and gave me a quick kiss.

Lest it be misunderstood, I love my daughter. I love her with my whole damaged heart. Her face has always filled me with a sense of the miraculous, for it is a beautiful face, fair-skinned, green-eyed; her limbs are lithe; she seems the expression of all that could be good in me, all that I have that is healthy. At night I often dream of my daughter. We are carrying flowers towards each other, big armfuls of fragile lupine.

Years passed this way. Clara spoke Spanish before she spoke English, and when Ceci’s friends came over they laughed and remarked, “She sounds just like a little Mexican,” my blonde-haired, green-eyed girl. Even so, I had moments with Clara, many moments, that were easy and unfettered, moments writing poetry together, a story called “Ick I’m Sick,” discussions about stars and god, Linnaeus and reptiles. We bought a vinegar-propelled rocket and shot it off together, our heads tipped back as it nosed straight into space. But her first love was not for me. Her first love was for her father, and when it came to women, her first love was, in truth—is this the truth?—for Ceci, and while I really grieved that, I also understood that I had set it up that way, a safe distance, space between mother and daughter, this dyad dangerous, rife with rejection, sick. And yet, it hurt my heart. It hurt my chest, my breasts. When Clara was three years, they found my ducts were crammed with cancerous cells. I had both my breasts removed, tiny, squishy saline bags slid into the sagging spaces left. In clothes I looked fine, but naked I looked maimed. Ceci, on the other hand, was whole and healthy. I know my daughter knew that. Sometimes she would come to me, pull down my shirt, peer in. “Ceci has nipples,” she would say. “And you don’t.” I’m sure this was just a statement of brute fact, but I could not help hearing it as more.

And so we went on. My husband, I hesitate to say, did not help the situation. He sided with Ceci, unconsciously, subtly, giving her his credence and confidence. For this I have not decided whether or not I will forgive him. Of course, I am largely to blame, for I had impressed upon him my image of myself: the ratty foster child, the progeny of insanity, the work a defense against it all. At one point my second-born developed a pustule-like rash on his tongue and palms. Ceci hypothesized an immune response due to a recent fever. My husband agreed. They stood in the kitchen talking together while I watched from the sidelines, and they decided that if it got any worse, they would call the doctor tomorrow.
Give it a day
, they said. “Are you kidding me?” I said. “It’s on the
tongue.”
I called the doctor immediately. “My child has white oozing spots on the tongue,” I said.
My child
. The pediatrician diagnosed hoof-and-mouth disease. For me, this was a twisted triumph.

Clara started pre-school. Here is where things took a distinctly downward turn. At the end of the day, while I was still at work, Ceci would pick her up and take her to a museum or to Chuck E. Cheese’s, and bring her home at five. Eventually this became common enough that Ceci no longer needed to tell us her plans ahead of time. Autumn turned into winter. One day, their usual arrival time of five o’clock passed, and they hadn’t come home. Ceci had been with us nearly four years then. The afternoon ticked on into evening. Where were they? Cars rumbled by on the road outside my study, but none of them stopped. The day grew dark. Frantic, I called my husband at work. “Clara and Ceci aren’t here,” I said, and I think I heard just the tiniest pause before he said, “They’re fine.” I called the school. It was closed. The church bells gonged. I thought crazy thoughts about Ceci:
How do I know who she really is? Would she kidnap my girl? Of course not, dummy! But how can I know?
And indeed, how could I? We had hired her years ago, based on a reference check and gut. It suddenly seemed careless, negligent; I pictured telling detectives, “She comes from Mexico,” but not being able to say more. Hometown? “
Cool-ya-can
?” Something like that. Address, copy of passport, visa, we had none of it. On a deeper level, I realized we knew almost nothing of her. Her plans, her hopes, her fears, her lovers, her enemies, nothing. We knew Ceci intimately, day after day, year after year, we knew her laugh, her voice, her hands, her hair, and yet we knew her not at all. This, I believe, is common.

At six o’clock I heard a key in the lock, the dogs barking, and when I raced downstairs I saw them standing together, mittened-hand-in-mittened-hand. “Where were you guys?” I said. I was nearly wheezing with panic.

“Field trip,” Ceci said.

“Field trip?” I said.

“To Foss Park. I chaperoned. It was fun, wasn’t it, Clara?”

And Clara looked up, smiled, nodded. “Fun,” she said.

“But I didn’t . . . You didn’t tell . . .” And then I stopped. I held tight to the banister. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Aren’t parents supposed to sign a permission slip before their kids go on a field trip?”

“Yes,” said Ceci, and if she thought her next comment was strange, she betrayed it not a bit. “I signed that slip weeks ago,” she said.

I did what any woman at once indebted and enmeshed would do. I said not a word to Ceci. The next day I called the school. “All permission slips,” I said to the teacher, “must be signed by me. Not Ceci. Me.” I paused. The teacher didn’t say anything. Her silence sounded accusing. Where was I at the end of every day, during pickups? Working. Working. Working. Where was I? “I’m Clara’s
mother
,” I said, and I heard it echo down the line.

When I became pregnant with Lucas, Ceci, who had lived with us for four years, moved out. She found a fantastic apartment in Harvard Square, just minutes away. It was not a big change. She left most of her clothes, her bed made, her pictures up on the walls. “What are we,” I said to my husband, “a storage facility?”

“You’re just jealous,” he said.

“Picture it,” I said. Suddenly, I was speaking slowly, newly aware of an anger. “Picture it. You and I have a child. We hire another man to move into the house and be the nanny. Your child falls in love with the man-nanny, this other father. I come to love the other father too, and I listen to all his child-rearing advice.”

“I don’t listen to all her child-rearing advice,” he said.

“If I think she has an ear infection and has to go to the doctor and Ceci doesn’t, you always agree with Ceci.”

“I’m just being polite,” he said. “She’s still a guest. You’re my wife.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly my point. I’m your wife. I’m Clara’s mother.”

“Clara loves you a lot,” he said.

“Of course she does,” I said.

“You have to have more confidence,” he said.

“You tell me,” I said, and I was surprised by the depth of my anger. “You tell me how you would feel having another father around for your kid.”

“I would hate it,” he said thoughtfully. “It is something I would never allow.”

It was full-blown winter when I gave birth to my son, the trees splashed and mottled, my newborn’s face patchy with different hues of reds and blues. When I looked into his brand-new face, I saw nothing of my mother and nothing of myself. In part because of gender, in part because of experience, I approached my second with much more confidence, lifting him up by his armpits, swaddling him deftly, bathing him both swiftly and softly, and he felt it, my calm hands. He stopped crying whenever I picked him up. I picked him up as often as I could. Ceci seemed to like him less. “Boys,” she’d say and sigh. “Girls are fun,” she’d say. “The clothes . . . Boys are . . .” And then she wouldn’t finish. From his earliest days Ceci dressed him in little baseball shirts and high tops. She called Clara “
mi amore
” and Lucas “señor.” “It’s a cultural thing,” my husband said. “It’s Latino machismo.” Sometimes she let Lucas cry and cry. “Oh,” Ceci said to me one day. “Oh, he is a big bad boy. He has a terrible temper.” At the time, Lucas was two months old.