THE OTHER WOMAN by Kirstin Allio
My mother played piano, Oldies and Chopin. Twice a year she played Happy Birthday – once for me, once for my brother, on the mornings of our birthdays. She would wake up early for it – in order to wake us up, early. The one day she could tease us without risking her life, she said. Hah. You weren’t allowed to kill your mother on your birthday. Or get up on the wrong side of bed, geniuses.
Oh it really cracked her up, what her employer had told her. Did you know that Happy Birthday was the first song ever transmitted back to earth from a spacecraft? My brother wanted to know what kind of spaceship and my mother said, No Zack, no. That is not the question. You get a blob of information, Zack, and the question you don’t ask, is What’s this fucking blob of information?
I gave him a glare like naturally I agreed with our mother.
The way you do it, said my mother. You look. For the why question.
Professor Shemaria, my mother’s employer, saw the world through why-colored glasses. Professor Shemaria connected everything, declared my mother, in her classroom and her research, through why questions. What do you think I do all day, said my mother, empty wastebaskets?
Is that a why question? said my brother.
Zack’s key to life, said my mother. Act so dumb that when you act normal everybody thinks you’re a genius.
I hooked my toes on the back of his sneaker so that when he lunged he lost it. Flat tire, genius. We were vaguely – but vigilantly – out to get each other, the three of us.
Nan Shemaria was a professor of sociology. Everything she told my mother about the human race ended up being something bad, something snide, something derisive.
Or something doomsday. Professor Shemaria was politically childless, my mother informed us. You could do an end run around anything, said my mother, with the right term for it.
If why questions weren’t already anti-faith, anti-religion, Professor Shemaria’s end run around religious holidays was the inauguration of wine and cheese Fridays. On the Department’s nickel, reported my mother. Swiss, brie, butterfly crackers, chunks of unripe cantaloupe like something from a dermatology experiment. Adjunct faculty debated Head Start vs. stipends for home-tests administered by stay-home mothers, grad students dangled their theses like undergarments, a pair of precocious undergrads stuck their heads in, only to recoil when they gauged the naked distance across the room to the wine and cheese table.
Fridays my mother got home after midnight.
Our house was a one-story box, like the little green ones in Monopoly, but with a sun porch. My mother rented half the driveway to a neighbor for her son’s Yamaha motorcycle. My brother played on the bike incessantly, and my mother yelled through the louvered slats of the sun porch. We were right across the street from Our Lady F, Efraimia, where we did not go to church, because of questions handed down from Professor Shemaria.
“Happy Mor-tal-ity to you, Happy Mor-tal-ity to you! You act like a monkey, ’cause you came from one, too.”
Truthfully, was it Happy Birthday? Or death itself that was transmitted from outer space, I wondered. I thought of death beamed down from the same school assembly that divulged the news about the Challenger. The air-beyond-the-air that hosted Russian spy pods, and the stars like street lights on a foggy winter evening.
Anyway, my mother played it loud and raucous, on the mornings of our birthdays. She played with exaggerated fermatas, derisively, from the sun porch, not an ideal place for an instrument, and she winced and cursed when another mutinous key went flat, or the pedals jammed with humidity.
She sang along, but only in Spanish. Less sentimental to sing in Spanish. Condescending to sing in Spanish. We were basically Italian. Singing in Spanish made our birthdays part of the running joke on the banality of love in families.
My mother was tall and spidery, all transparent joints, high-waisted jeans with long tapered legs inside of which her own legs were pipe cleaners. Her cigarette leaned out of her mouth dangerously – she liked to scare us. She kept a big jar of pennies on the kitchen counter, glass with a thick glass lid, as big as those jars of jelly beans you’re supposed to count to win prizes. A gift certificate to Newport Creamery, a shampoo-color-cut-by-Trudy.
Trying to guess the pennies – it made your head spin, like an optical illusion.
My brother and I agreed: for a couple of reasons the pennies were almost impossible to filch. First of all, you didn’t have time to count to a hundred. Second, you didn’t steal a dollar, you stole a hundred times. A hundred counts of stealing; that was a lot of wrongdoing for a measly dollar! That was the point. That was the hard lesson. Another hard lesson was our father leaving, but our mother was glad, because it proved there was no love in families. Our mother was glad, because it was one more person accounted for by sweeping generalizations. The Alimony Asshole, our father.
Truthfully, he didn’t just vanish. That would have been something to talk about, something for which to raise sympathy. But our mother didn’t care for sympathy.
He worked at T.F. Green Airport. My brother used to think he built T.F. Green Airport. The unions squeezed him – same as my mother, he wasn’t a joiner. He was snuck on a construction site in Dorchester. Then there was a gig in Lowell. Each job a little farther from Providence.
We got a long-suffering, bearish stepfather after a while, who our mother teased mercilessly.
Whenever we found a penny – exempting in a public fountain (because Professor Shemaria had catalogued the “wishing well phenomenon”), but on the gummy floor of the supermarket, for instance – we were supposed to pick it up and save it for our mother. All the lost pennies in Providence belonged to our mother. Her eyes were copper. Green spots appeared with her illness.
* * *
My high school yearbook voted me most likely to keep my figure. It wasn’t necessarily a compliment. It seemed to me you wanted, at that age, to spend your figure.
My mother was balancing on the kitchen counter on one elbow.
The counter was lemon yellow with sparkles – a 1950’s dessert, floating island. My mother said the sparkles were mica. Oh it cracked her up, too, how kitchens had evolved from the fucking fire of Prometheus. “You know?” she said. “The Early Peoples actually used three hundred and sixty degrees of their cooking fires.” My brother and I rolled our eyes behind her.
The pattern in the tan carpet was like worm tunnels in tree bark.
My mother was idly paging through my yearbook. I remember thinking: What if you were thirty-seven, instead of seventeen, when you graduated? What if you could calmly flip through your yearbook pointing, “Hah. That’s-Diane-Orabona’s-daughter. I-remember-when-Diane-Orabona-bled/peed/retched-in-gym-class.” Or, stabbing at a dumpy girl in a homemade anarchy t-shirt, “Look-at-the-birth-control-boobs-on-that-one!”
My mother talked fast, and she only ever smoked half her cigarette.
She said, “Didn’t they lower the hormone dosage? Didn’t I read that?”
I laughed nervously.
“In my day birth control was a fucking horse pill.”
What if you were a certified know-it-all (my brother added the certification), and you had something to say about everyone? What if, at thirty-seven, you had already had one scare, including chemo, one surgery, and one remission, and you could still say boobs? As if you still possessed them?
And how could I laugh with you when you said it?
“They couldn’t say anything about your grades?” my mother persisted, thumping the yearbook.
“Hah,” said my mother. “Nothing cute about straight A’s, is there. Nothing hot about a four-point-o, four years running.” That was, indeed, my grade point average.
Why did I choose this moment to notice that my mother had, since yesterday, become flat-chested? My mother, the employee of sociology, had apparently discarded the post-mastectomy bras the insurance company had paid for.
One Saturday morning I found her on the sun porch busy among stacks of papers. The sunlight through the slats blinked maniacally. My mother was kneeling, using the piano bench as a table. Papers were loosely fanned around her. She was furiously marking across the type, and in the margins of what could only be, I thought with horror, school papers. Her left hand was pulling out hairs, strand by strand, a habit of which she was so deeply ashamed my brother and I had never even mentioned it to each other.
“What are you doing?” I surprised her. She snapped back like a measuring tape into its metal locket.
“Maybe you’d like to help me here, genius.” She recovered quickly.
“Okay.” I didn’t move. She beckoned hectically, trying, I could see, to appear impatient.
I tried to look without looking, as if the pages were love letters or a diary.
“She’s having me grade papers.” My mother’s voice went up – she couldn’t conceal her excitement. “Intro to Sociology. Her TA had to go home to Argentina.”
My mother was grinning. She smacked the page in front of her. “Hah. Anybody could do this.”
I reached for one of the stapled packets and I saw that my mother’s impulse was to stop me. She caught herself. I looked at it without reading. A college paper. “What?” said my mother. “You don’t think I’m up to it?”
I said, “You were supposed to rest – more – I thought.”
“Do you see me on my feet?” said my mother. “I’m poolside, genius.” She let her big eyes close for a moment. She grabbed a handful of papers and made for the sun porch sofa. She rolled herself out luxuriantly.
“I could do this in my sleep,” she said, closing her eyes again, for my benefit.
“I can farm some out to you,” she called after me. I couldn’t recall ever having heard her so hopeful.
I could live at home and put myself through college. I could choose – two years, secretary, four years, teaching certificate. Never a nurse. I had done my fair share of nursing. Besides, those were girls who smoked since seventh grade, starred in slumber parties, and were now forced to smoke in the wind tunnel against the north side of the hospital annex.
I met Phil because we attended the same teachers’ conference in Providence, and he mistook my parked car for his Rent-a-Wreck.
He’d lost the keys and was jimmying ineffectually with a coat hanger. “You know there are demonstrations outside Planned Parenthood against that,” I said, sounding for all the world like my mother. He jumped. He made an embarrassing little sound and I blushed for him.
His quavering defense: “Who actually owns a – a – well a Taurus?”
“Girls from Rhode Island,” I countered, guessing correctly that he wasn’t a native.
Scattered about his feet was a dry fountain’s worth of pennies. I pointed. “A hole in your pocket?” I said rash things when I was nervous, I realized, just like my mother.
He ducked; he shook the pockets of his sport jacket; he came up underneath the pockets to gauge the sewing project (not that I knew then he did his own sewing); he stepped out of the constellation of loose change around him.
He gave a surveying look across the sidewalk, and smiled helplessly.
I had to smile back at him. I said, “I guess it won’t poison the pigeons.”
He laughed, but I could see he was baffled.
“I mean you can’t feed the ducks anymore because it’s complex carbohydrates,” I babbled. “You can’t throw an apple core on the highway because a skunk will risk his life for it.” He was staring at me, but not unkindly.
“Phil Lebed,” he said, holding his hand out. What a round face – and was he cross-eyed behind his glasses?
His hand was as soft as a kaiser roll from the supermarket. What was so odd about him? He talked like a white man, and he was shy like a white man, but his skin was the muted black of an old backyard tire swing.
“What’s your name?” he said finally, when I didn’t offer it, and – I knew, intuitively – at great cost to his temperament.
Before I could stop myself out came my standard. “Hey, that’s what people always ask me.” He only looked flustered.
“Swan,” I said. “I’m Swan.” I was not accustomed to speaking gently.
Between Phil’s thick eyebrows and mat of dark hair was a sweatband of tight forehead. His eyebrows kept edging the sweatband upward. “Swan!” he said, clearly delighted.
“Uh-huh,” I said, covering my bases.
He put up his arm as if to shield himself. I would have to be even gentler!
A meter maid beneath a baseball cap came sneaking along the sidewalk. I glanced down – yes, she had chalked my tires. I began to fumble instinctively in my pockets even as she stepped back and made to write out a ticket. The nerve. I put myself between her and the meter. Without looking up she said, “Better hurry.” I opened my mouth – I was going to lay into her – but out of the blue –
“It’s our car,” said Phil Lebed, outrageously.
To make a love story short? As of that very moment, I was no longer alone against all the meter maids of this world.
From Rhode Island to the island of Manhattan – Phil was, indeed, a New Yorker – was like jumping octaves. There were actual geological gorges – Phil was a geology teacher. Truthfully. Glacial ravines, used like garbage dumps. The train from Providence bore right through them. Once it stalled (the lights went out, and there was a sighing) and I saw a man sleeping under the pitted girder of the highway above us. He had hung a piece of plastic as a wall between him and nothing. The slope and the tracks made a perfect vortex for eternally blowing garbage. It was hard to shake that off, gliding into Penn Station half an hour later.
But there was Phil, so unguardedly glad to see me. His glasses were yellowed like calluses, his dark hair shiny with lanolin, packed on his round head like a yarmulke. His eyes were not crossed, it turned out, but magnified.
For Phil, I described the view from the train of water: slate and onyx, white birds like paper boats, tawny sea marshes. I told him about the real boats that looked like they’d been shrink-wrapped for the winter, and the beautiful old houses on the water – waterfront, the obsession of all Rhode Islanders.
I told my mother, over the telephone, which she was sharing with a dying woman pastor from the Olneyville projects, that Phil did the dishes.
“Do you cook suddenly?” bit my mother.
I hated cooking – just like my mother. Hah. The banality of inheritance in families.
Phil cooked, Phil did the dishes. I wanted to inform her: It’s not tit for tat, Mother. But I was immediately ashamed of myself. I knew she didn’t think that. I knew it wasn’t an even exchange, her giving me life and me using it.
She was ignoring me, talking to her roommate. Stupidly, I’d betrayed a trace of self-importance in my marriage, and I was paying for it.
“Hello?” said my mother.
I said, “How’s K.C.?” The pastor.
“Here’s a coincidence,” said my mother. A sudden shift – her voice was rich with feeling. “K.C. majored in geology!”
She didn’t say, of course, “Like your husband,” but I was fairly certain she was speaking of him – richly. And it suddenly occurred to me that my mother never said anything bad about my husband. My mother! Who founded entire generalizations on people she met for five minutes as well as on people she claimed to be friends with, would neither describe nor generalize my husband. She wouldn’t reduce him, she wouldn’t build him up on the scaffolding of some stereotype. No derisive comment.
I had to try her. “He overcompensates for his masculinity,” I heard myself saying.
But had my mother heard me? She cackled, and I could hear K.C. laughing in the background.
I told myself I didn’t see how Room 743 could be very funny.
I was leaning on the counter in Phil’s and my new co-op apartment. The countertops had no sparkles. They were white and showed every single ring of coffee. Phil had promised to take me to Bear Mountain on the weekend. There was a soil test kit in his backpack. I told my mother I wouldn’t be coming to Providence till the following Monday.
I hung up, pretending to be businesslike when a nurse stole her attention with tubes and cuffs, a bowl of ice cubes. I could hear the rustle and slump of a great pile of newspaper the nurse had pushed off my mother’s lap unceremoniously. My stepfather always left her the newspaper, which, as she said, deprived her of her only reason for a field trip to the hospital gift shop. At home, my stepfather used to read on his back, feet up, pages splayed across his privates. Sections would slide out for my mother to retrieve, the dog to skid on.
Phil read his newspaper at his desk, back rounded like a drumlin. In a halo of Pleistocene light he was a protective examiner.
* * *
Sumi was “handed down” to us.
As if it were a dowry, a slave auction, I imagined telling my mother, coolly.
“This girl is A++,” read the note, with her name, (which I wouldn’t forget), and telephone number. It was scribbled on the back of a receipt from Love Drugstore. The previous owner of our co-op had purchased Dramamine, Gatorade, and shoe polish.
“Look at this, Phil,” I waved it – it crackled – across the blond and shiny stripes of floor board. The windows were cubes of white electric, and giant squares of light fell on the bare wood beneath them. As newlyweds we only had a few boxes.
I found Phil in the would-be bedroom, looking happily and blurrily about him. His good glasses had been misplaced in the move and these backups were from a high school prescription – thick, milky, safety-goggle plastic. They say when one of your senses is compromised, your other senses kick in to compensate. Not in the case of my husband. He was packed in cotton. He couldn’t see, hear, taste (all we’d had for the three days preceding the move was Chinese take-out), or smell (our pores were Chinese. Our clothes and the two towels we’d kept out till the last minute).
I spent part of every week in Providence. I kept the house up for my brother and my stepfather, meaning I made one stop for milk, dog food, toilet paper. Then back on the train, most often with an empty seat beside me on the aisle, as weekday mornings were not a popular time to travel. I was a private capsule, privy to everything. Trackside backyards bearing a family’s series of “big purchases,” a series of disappointments, aboveground pool, trampoline, boat on blocks, pre-fab tool shed with a single, barren window box. My fleeting association with sandy scrub, folded paper birds on the low water was part of the all around sadness.
One morning while I was on the telephone to my mother – (and the woman pastor, I complained to Phil later) – there was a loud knock on the door of Phil’s and my apartment. I hung up, apologetically (although my mother hung up before I could apologize, quick as ever to slip out beneath the weight of emotion), and rushed headlong to answer it.
I peeked through the spy hole to see a woman’s face, distorted by the miniature lens, nose first, huge, dilated. I retracted. Could she tell I was looking? Had she heard my eager footsteps, and then the appraising silence as I put my eye to the tiny glass circle?
Somebody must have recognized her and let her into the building. I couldn’t tell her from an ax murderer, but I opened the door anyway. I, who could barely cross the street in New York City without blushing, sensed immediately that I must act casual and – somehow – generous with my apartment.
“Sumi Creech?” she said, as if I was to approve a password.
She was white as Elmer’s Glue, with tomato-colored blemishes along her cheek bones. She smiled – a space between her small front teeth – but she wouldn’t be the type for a conventional handshake. She wore a jersey skirt and an oily-soft, drapey t-shirt beneath which her abdomen showed like a week-old balloon, or the lax pouch of an out-of-work belly dancer.
“To clean your apartment?”
“Oh!” I said, ratcheting up my sisterly smile. “Come in. I was just – ”
She moved in on my little apartment.
I shrunk back toward the white counters. There must have been a hundred rings the color of henna, quite beautiful if you didn’t think “coffee.”
“Did they not tell you I was coming?” said Sumi. She lugged a duffel bag the size of a two week vacation.
“What’s in there?” I said, before I could stop myself.
“All homemade solvents.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Vinegar for the glass, grapefruit seed extract for the bathroom, a lot of hemp and aloe vera. I bring my own rags unless you want me to use yours. I don’t use paper towel.” She squatted down and began to unzip the duffel.
“Wait,” I said, and my voice sounded so petulant and superficial that I hated myself as I felt she must hate me – for resisting.
That was it. I did not want her to hate me.
“The thing is,” said Sumi matter-of-factly, “I know this apartment. I can do it in under two hours. On this floor I do Harriet’s, the Kim’s . . .” she trailed off. “If you want to ask anybody.”
I studied the view from the kitchen window: all angles and blocks, hues of brick, brick slashed with shadow, baked in sunlight. Sky, brick, street. It was so easy not to see the people.
I tried not to watch her. I tried not to listen to the roar of the vacuum – Phil and I didn’t have one, but Sumi had let herself nonchalantly into “Harriet’s” (I didn’t know any of my neighbors) and borrowed “the beast,” as she called it.
When she got around to the kitchen, I retreated to the bedroom. She had picked up all the clothes and folded them neutrally, neatly. She had opened the blinds. How did light find its way down a brick chasm and then L-shaped like a periscope into this window? I stood at the bared glass and looked slantwise toward another brickscape. My apartment was beginning to smell like a humid garden. Was there anything to say to her, if I made it out to the kitchen? Was there anything not to say to her?
Now I know you can divide womankind by those who clean feverishly the night before, and those who leave oatmeal parchment curling up the sides of a pot, not unlike dried semen.
Before Sumi’s arrival, I arranged flowers in casual mugs and tucked them in private, inconspicuous spots as if I had an easy, spontaneous relationship with my apartment. I secretly hoped she would pilfer some of my expired acne creams – I no longer needed them, being a Mrs.
She cycled around to me on Wednesdays, some time before eleven. I made Phil’s and my bed up like a hotel room, even placed an ashtray on the white coverlet. I hadn’t smoked since I was fourteen, behind the roller rink, with the girls who became nurses.
I always had the water boiling. While Sumi sipped her tea – cranberry, she had advised me, for urinary tract infections – I discreetly placed the two twenties half in, half out of her patchwork coat pocket.
We talked about Sumi’s childhood. Her parents had dropped out in the Seventies. They were back-to-the-landers, a revised farm in the Northeast Kingdom. Vermont, I learned, which was a place I’d never considered. What was it like to pad across the cold crooked floorboards of a vintage farmhouse in the middle of the night to the unlocked door of the outhouse? To meet boyfriends by the pond for skinny-dipping? I imagined them all, the boyfriends, as carpenters, or traders from the nineteenth century.
Sumi’s wardrobe – I’d never seen anything like it. She wore anti clothes, I decided, things that were ugly on purpose. But truthfully, was there anything more to style than purpose? Garishly crocheted shawls on top of leotards, peasant blouses stained from breast-feeding, a pair of drafty, unlaced high-tops. Her hair was thin and scabby from veganism, a practice in alignment with her political brand of poverty. She dyed it with a natural plant, and it was an angry, premature gray at the roots. Sometimes she brought her baby, a little twist in tie-dye she called a sling, who swung like a third udder as she cleaned my apartment. “A persistent soul,” she said, admiringly. “He’s been trying to get in on this world since I was fifteen,” she explained to me.
“What’s his name?” I asked gingerly.
“Goose,” said Sumi. I noticed the baby had red-rimmed eyes like she did.
Of course there was something crackpot about Sumi, but she was so easy to talk to. “I’m like a little ant who was born to hump sand from one hill to another,” she said with her gappy smile. How could you be both earnest and cracky? But I was won over.
She took canned goods, loose change, toilet paper, a load or two of laundry detergent in a Ziploc bag like a tiny, blue water bed.
* * *
Phil’s mother, Alex, was the famous feminist. I had seen Phil scuttle for cover when our neighbor, Harriet, a lawyer in a margarine colored cardigan over her tennis dress, struck out down the hall ahead of us. Alex had put into Phil a fear of women. Alex didn’t believe in marriage: It had the “unmistakable contour of oppression.” But what mother believes in the marriage of her only son to the wrong woman? Alex had sculpted, hooded eyes that she blinked slowly (her eyelids had a color all their own – bloodless, lilac), and her burnt-looking hair fizzled at the ends like tassels of an ancient prayer rug. I couldn’t decide whether she was ugly or beautiful. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted her to be ugly or beautiful.
But I thought I knew what she wanted – if only I were a bona fide hayseed, pure and oxidized. No. I came from a dissipated line of white zinfandel drinkers, bulk soda in the garage, track suits on the airplane out of Providence.
I was traditional without being original, poor without being humble or spendthrift. I was guilty of putting a post-wedding stretch limousine on plastic. I had whined until my stepfather caved on a penguin of a pianist in a rental tuxedo.
I didn’t correct Alex. Truthfully, I hoarded it – the fact that my mother had worked for Professor Nan Shemaria. Had capably – brilliantly? – graded Professor Shemaria’s papers. From Professor Shemaria’s office windows you could look down over the whole settlement that was Providence. All the barnacled tenements on treeless streets, the state buildings set in over-large parking lots, honeycombed on the inside with countless departments, single windows like fingernails taped to nicotine-stained chambers. Professor Shemaria studied Azorean immigrants. She had my mother staked out at City Hall – my mother was good at striking up conversations with tax drones and coffee-and-donut girls with peroxided Marie Antoinette hairdos. The Azoreans were forced to surface at City Hall eventually, in defense of their lush vineyards which grew miraculously inside a city square of chain link or trained and clipped over a carport.
Professor Shemaria gave my mother a tape recorder with a tiny bud of a microphone. It wasn’t necessary to be devious, declared Professor Shemaria, but it was also easy enough to stick the device in a coat pocket. My mother herself might feel more natural if she didn’t see it, Professor Shemaria suggested.
I used to imagine that my mother was recording words of wisdom, social prophecy in broken English. Once I found the tape recorder set carefully on top of the piano. My mother was taking a shower, and I swiped it almost without thinking. My thumb squeezed the play button. The tape squealed and clicked off. I fumbled with the little box to turn the tape over.
There was a wall of street noise, loud static of car engines, horns, jackhammering in the background. Where was the dial for volume?
There was a woman’s voice, in Portuguese, but I couldn’t tell if she was a passerby or a subject. There was another woman cutting in, shrill, “Lena!” I imagined air brakes, a city bus, a near accident. I felt my mother’s gaze on me. There she was in the doorway.
“Gendered attitudes toward indigenous agriculture,” said my mother dryly. Her long wet hair had soaked her shirt front. I tried to shoot the tape recorder toward her. She took it almost graciously. A half smile: “It’s not what they say but why they say it.”
Alex was right about the hired pianist.
My mother had always wanted to play at a wedding.
Oldies? Chopin?
She used to joke that she would wear black. What a joke. At Phil’s and my wedding she was in a supposed period of remission. But she came in late and sat at the back of the church, a promiscuous ghost among the distant cousins and old neighbors.
At the reception she sweated through her mascara like a maudlin prostitute.
Alex never wore makeup. She smelled like her own sweat. A patchy, backyard smell, raking leaves, flaccid November grass coming off on your sneakers. A foreign smell. I thought about mother animals rejecting their young after the cubs or the kits had been handled by humans.
I couldn’t seem to tell my mother about Sumi. I told myself I was thrown by my mother’s take on Phil, her uncharacteristic lack of judgment. But I decided to come clean – about Sumi – to Alex. She was grading papers at her kitchen table as Phil prepared a dinner of stir-fried vegetables.
“Safe, Swan?” she said. “Vegetables?”
There’d been a little skirmish the week before. The noodles were made of the same thing as brown paper bags were made of, I’d claimed, pushing my plate toward the center of the table. And I’d gone on, ridiculously, at my mother-in-law’s table, that such noodles were “an insult to spaghetti.”
To my surprise Alex said lightly, now, and without looking up from her papers, “That’s too bad. I wanted to give you Ana Maria.”
Twice a week, I learned, Ana Maria let herself in to Alex’s apartment in the Village. Her shadow was a wafting blue mist of Windex, her tracks were white as soap flakes. As if by magic, bagels and milk were replenished, the thick dandruff of cat hair dealt to the throaty vacuum, bathrooms transfigured. “She was here today, I think,” said Alex.
I excused myself. Indeed, the bathroom shone, all traces of Alex vanquished.
I had to admit I was morally stymied. I had seen the cash Alex left for Ana Maria on the kitchen table – blunt and rumpled.
Maybe, I thought, trying to excuse Alex, being a feminist just meant being busy. But oh, the contradictions. Alex considered her single motherhood a religion, but called herself an atheist. Phil’s dad was “a friend of a friend’s friend” who agreed on a whim, claimed Alex. And yet hetero sex was never whimsical! It was grave, said Alex. Even violent.
Phil had the same hooded eyes as his mother, luminous gems for pupils, but his skin was dusky instead of halvah. To suppress his rather unmanly giggle, he had the sweetest way of pressing his grape-colored lips together.
He smelled like pie. He was heavy boned and barrel chested. He closed his eyes when he took off his glasses. I rubbed gently around the bone, impossible, in love, to call it an eye socket.
So maybe feminism was just another word for contradiction. I sounded like Alex. Alex would say women were shape-shifters, fluid. If you wore high heeled shoes, you were hobbled by the male race, but there was no race worth running but the male race. High heels or squishy sneakers? Alex would say the question itself was the kernel of feminism. Alex, wryly, “Feminism is all kernel and no flower.”
You passed off your broom, your rags, only to enslave another woman. Or were you saving her? From rice and beans in Tijuana? Phil copied his mother, careful to use the name of the city. You never said, Mexico.
Once I heard Ana Maria retching. Alex stood in the doorframe of the bathroom in enormous slappy sheepskin moccasins and a man’s dress shirt that came to her kneecaps. Her bare knees were dark and oily-looking with arthritis. Ana Maria’s broad back pitched forward so that Alex had to brace herself to hold her. Now my husband he say no more times. Always you losing the baby. They lurched like mating insects, hybrid, awkward.
Later Alex told me, “She sat down on the toilet and the baby came out like a pomegranate.”
I guess I imagined we were in cahoots, Sumi and I, sharing the load of womanhood. I made the tea while she took a toothbrush to the shower grout. She did my laundry while I made confessions.
For instance, I’d gone off birth control. That was a confession. So many milestones of womanhood have had the taint of shame, secret, I said to Sumi. God, I couldn’t bear to remember first menstruating, couldn’t even use that word without feeling squeamish. “Sat on a berry?” my mother had said, off-handedly, without looking, or looking elsewhere, so I had followed her gaze across the room instead of to my own body.
Sometimes I lay upon the marriage bed, and listened to the sounds of sweeping and spraying and vacuuming like they were the ocean. By the way, I said once, to Sumi, there was no surf in Rhode Island. It’s all bay where I’m from, fish heads and tampon applicators washed up on gravel beaches.
Sometimes I helped her with the other apartments on our floor – inconspicuously – we might have been a coffee klatch or a book club. I pretended I had to keep my hands busy polishing the silver picture frames on Harriet’s display shelf. Waterskiing, with a blonde sister (or mother?) in that same tennis dress, a boyfriend with a dinosaur jaw, Washington Square Park – law school graduation. Sumi called her the lawyerette and I laughed conspiratorially, stopping short of telling her how she still terrified Mr. Lebed.
Of course, I had cleaned the house for my mother, I told Sumi. My mother’s weakness came in waves. My mother said, with nothing short of disgust, that the nausea was like morning sickness in pregnancy. She said she never wanted to be found dead with her head in the toilet.
When I thought of my mother now, my every motion became obvious, garish. Like finding yourself on very thin ice, in the middle of a lake, in the middle of a nightmare. Even the decibels of your voice crying for help can break it.
My mother’s illness? I said to Sumi, my voice hoarse, suddenly, trying out the verdict. A long siphoning of housework, love, money for college.
I had an ancient snapshot that a maternity ward nurse had taken after my birth. “No breast-feeding in Rhode Island!” I declared, as I handed it over to Sumi. Did I want her to feel sorry for me?
I looked at it again, over Sumi’s shoulder. There was a crease, white and soft, the stuffing of the photograph, right across my mother’s abdomen.
My mother was propped up on the cot, self-possessed enough to have composed a scowl for the camera. The streaked johnny was more or less pasted to the front of her. My father was peeking out from behind her, clutching the paper bag she breathed in to stop hyperventilating. He puked in it later, she once told me.
To Sumi’s credit, she studied the picture longer than was required of a mere employee.
“No one’s holding you, Swan,” Sumi said finally. I grabbed the picture. I suddenly didn’t want her to say anything new-agey about hospitals. Sure, I wished my mother could have died in my lap in an authentic farmhouse in the Northeast Kingdom.
But it was true: In the picture, I’m above my mother, as if I haven’t even been called down yet. From the heavens – is that how it works, really? Was I a “persistent soul,” like Sumi’s baby? I’m stranded on my back, on what looks like a metal steam table from a basement cafeteria. I’m one human wail. My red mouth is stretched at the corners, my bluish face contorted.
I imagine my mother rising from the cot coolly. Affixing a pad right to her jeans, no panties, like she always used to. Twisting her raven hair off her neck first, then smoothing it from her forehead.
Raven! Okay, she says to the nurse who snapped the picture. I’ll be back later.
* * *
My mother’s funeral was the October after Phil and I were married. My brother, living at home, watching football with our stepfather, eating our stepfather’s red sauce, which he called gravy, came through, meaning, he arranged it.
Alex offered to go up with us. She said, “Breast cancer is politics.”
“Is she going to make a speech? Is she going to run for president of breast cancer?” I asked Phil later.
Phil told Alex we’d go by ourselves. She gave him two pink ribbons to pin on our funeral attire. Breast cancer awareness. I stuck mine in my stepfather’s dog’s collar.
As if he hoped I would remember our meeting, Phil rented a Ford Taurus.
Alex lounged on Phil’s side of the table, books on theory she was sharing with Phil between them. Sometimes she asked me questions thinly disguised as conversation – I knew better than to answer by now if I didn’t want to be a case study. I got up and cleared the Saturday lunch away.
In the kitchen I opened my refrigerator in a grand sweep. “Professor Lebed,” I called. “Can I get you something?”
“Jam, Swan,” came her tuneless voice. She always put it in her tea, like her Russian parentage, slyly asserting herself in my dominion.
But she was striding into the kitchen. I could hear her breasts lapping from side to side, and her hair crackling with static. She kept a bowl of homemade jam in my refrigerator. Now she pulled it out and sniffed the uncovered surface.
“You don’t know what to call me, do you,” she stated.
“Well, Mother’s a little awkward.”
“The Other Woman,” she said. She moved to toss the spoiled preserves in the garbage. I lunged. Her eyebrows went up.
“I was saving it.” Of course, I wasn’t.
“I told Sumi to cover it,” I said peevishly, before I could stop myself. Alex gave a short, harsh, laugh. I stared hard at the raised mole on her neck that she neglected. Once a month the single hair would have grown long and wiry enough to hopelessly distract me.
I took a long time doing the dishes. “Swan!” called Alex. I came to the doorway. “What was the name of the professor your mother worked for?” I looked at Phil, whose forehead was working. I couldn’t be angry with him for defending me. Or explaining me, to his mother. But somehow, I’d wanted her to think I was only track suits and “spaghetti.”
“Oh, shoot,” I lied, calmly.
“Not by any chance Nan Shemaria – because she did some early work – ”
“Truthfully, I never paid much attention.”
“Well, no,” said Alex, now looking up at me. “You shouldn’t have. It was a frustrated life, your mother’s.”
I couldn’t argue with that, although I wanted to beat my mother’s life into Alex. “She was always more interested in mine,” I retorted.
“That should tell you something.”
“Excuse me?”
“That should tell you something,” said Alex.
Suddenly, I was livid. “That should tell me!” I was choking. Stiff with rage – I was never agile as a fighter. “I should have been there, Alex!”
“No, you shouldn’t have, Swan,” said Alex evenly. “You’re the daughter, not the attendant.”
I turned out of the doorway, disgusted.
But then, all of a sudden, I got it. My mother’s strange silence on the topic of Phil and Alex, her suspension of derision. She had hoped these were the people who would take care of me.
* * *
In the early evening I was to meet Phil at his mother’s department, at a Dean’s tea where she was to receive an honor.
Alex was at the center of the coil, her olive green eyes lit by the little amber-shaded university lamps on polished surfaces.
This is years afterward.
I heard Alex bray above the usual mounds of conversation. I thought, Alex has spent her career practicing laughing louder than any man in academia.
There she was, leaning on the cherry podium some “work study personage” – I could just hear her – had dollied in for the occasion. She seemed to sense me watching, and she nodded curtly. She had been hoping, I supposed, that Phil and I had come together.
An x of a woman – cinched waist, flared, Victorian collar – was heading toward me. I hadn’t counted on talking to anyone. The woman’s features were deep notches – I imagined when she fit her face to another face it would sort of lock in for the duration. Like mating for life, now that was a picture. As she came closer I decided she looked like Abigail Adams, first lady, with a beak chin and a kind of sly, fetal old Englishness.
“You must be the Double Swan,” she said, holding her hand out.
The Double Swan! What Phil called me. Lebed meant swan in Russian. She had an overly firm grip. She shook my hand as if women had been doing it for ages.
“Nan Shemaria.”
Of course, I started. Nan looked for Alex. She waved and gestured – pointing to the crown of my head – when she caught Alex’s attention. Alex was already striding toward us.
“So?” said Alex.
Nan’s nose and chin squeezed together like pincers. “You look exactly like your mother,” she informed me.
Alex stepped back and squinted.
I stood very still, under their consideration.
“Shall we sit?” Alex directed us. I followed with my teacup to a university upholstered sofa. A grad student of Alex’s – effete, fleet, and fawning – passed by with a tray of wineglasses filled one-third with red brown liquid. I traded in the teacup.
“Here’s to you, Alex.” Nan raised her glass in the same way she had shaken my hand – as if toasting had always been women’s provenance. People were watching. These two small women were heavyweights in their fields. My skin prickled. There was the Dean, blundering toward us expectantly, burnished with alcohol. Alex rose to greet him. I cast my eyes around for Phil. What was keeping him?
Nan exhaled loudly. “Such an intimate setting.” She waved at the faux living room. Now, pointing to my wineglass, “You might want another one before you hear this.” God, I thought. The two of them had the bedside manner of 1950’s male gynecologists.
Then Nan said, “Did your mother ever mention our relationship?” She couldn’t help herself. I raised my eyebrows.
“Casablanca,” said Alex.
Truthfully, she uttered it. And I wanted to laugh, perversely. What a ridiculous name. People called her Cas – her driver’s license said Catherine.
“It amazes us, Swan,” started Alex. “That a cleaning lady – a janitor – a single mother, would volunteer in Nan’s early research.”
“No, I’m sorry, she begged,” Nan interrupted. “I was always working late, you know, tripping over her vacuum, and one night she just pleaded.”
“Come on, Swan. She must have told you something,” said Alex.
“Passing herself off to her own family as my – what did she call herself? I’d be so curious . . . My secretarial assistant? The same house – she must have stowed her uniform in the lockers. Or paid another girl to take it home and wash it?”
“The contraband uniform,” said Alex.
Nan snapped her fingers, remembering something. “The uniforms all had name tags!” Nan patted her breast to show the location.
“Nan calls her Lucy,” said Alex, with a little stain of a smile. “I just call her the Ur-feminist.”
I waited. How they longed for my shock, and my remorse at not having known my own mother.
“We didn’t call her Casablanca,” I said, finally. “And I used to wash and iron the uniform.”
The two women professors were silent.
Truthfully, Nan gawked and Alex swallowed. I had to swallow too, my laughter.
I had to swallow my mother’s laughter.
* * *
“Either of you geniuses been digging around in my pennies?”
My mother is cawing. She’s holding the big glass jar up like she’s about to smash the clay tablet. Not just her voice, her whole face is hoarse, full of catches.
I’m stricken for a long, awful moment. Did I do it or did I only dream I did it?
“This other woman at work?” says my mother. The jar is too heavy to hold up over her head much longer. Like an old freight elevator it jerks and drops down to the counter. “Fresh from the fucking Azores. Skinnier than I am.” She pinches her waist, which is like a windpipe. “She doesn’t have papers – she’s covering for her aunt. That’s the word. They all cover for each other. We’re in the big closet in Tabor Hall together. I have to show her how to change the mop head. Tina, I say. We call them all Tina, I don’t know how it started. She’s dragging the Medusa out of the gray water. Her people are fishermen. It’s like she’s hauling a whale. She says to me, ‘Back in the Azores, I have small sons and daughters.’ How old is she – thirty? ‘I’m savin to bring em hea-ah. I’m workin and savin.’”
My mother pats the counter till she bumps into her cigarettes. “I can’t do that weird accent.”
“But you know, geniuses?” says my mother, her voice rising. “Wait till she sees this piggy bank.” My mother nods at the glass jar. “Not that she’s going to be able to lift it.”
Kirstin Allio is the author of the novel Garner (Coffee House Press, 2005).