Louisa Meets Bear Read online

  Miriam packed my things, and my brother and his roommate Tom, a theater kid from New York whom I’d had a bit of a crush on but realizing that he knew everything about my situation could now hardly look in the eye, loaded my things into my brother’s car. Good luck, Lizzy, Tom said after my brother had settled me into the back seat with a pillow. He gave me a little salute and then a deep bow.

  Jay and my father carried my boxes to my old room. Although we had talked about what I might do when the baby came—my father had arranged for a possible adoption, the cousins of one of his partners, a nice childless couple from the city, the husband a Yale graduate too, as though that somehow linked us in one big family, just an option, my father said, careful not to push me, you’ll have up until the delivery to decide—this newest flat-on-my-back twist had come too quickly for me to think further than getting home.

  We ate dinner, the three of us, in my room: me lying down with my dishes on a bed tray, my brother and father on chairs with their plates on their laps.

  What the hell are you going to do on Monday? Jay asked. Who’s going to bring you food while Dad’s at work?

  I looked helplessly at my father. I imagined him leaving a bowl of food by my bed.

  My father cleared his throat. Afterward I thought maybe his eyes were damp. Your mother, he said. Your mother’s coming home.

  *

  Although my mother had known that Jackie was eighteen and black, one of the few black families in the largely Puerto Rican neighborhood, my mother was, she would tell me (I was by then in my eighth month), taken aback at the sight of the girl—tall, with big arms and broad hips, a burnished Rubens, all volume with beauty and delicacy delegated to her almond eyes and bow lips. She’s so young, my mother remembered having thought. And yet, the girl with her lushness, her full body and taut skin, seemed to my mother more fecund, a closer replica of Nature’s Madonna than herself.

  My mother extended her hand. Should she introduce herself by her last name or her first? Uncertain, she used both. “You must be Jackie,” she added.

  “Yeah.”

  “And this must be Brandon.”

  “That’s the little bugger.”

  My mother leaned down to coo at the baby. Yellow crust rimmed his nose. The baby looked away, uninterested in my mother’s feeble sounds.

  Jackie led my mother in and motioned her toward a brown plaid couch with tufts of foam sticking out through the fabric. My mother caught herself about to dust off the spot where she would sit.

  Jackie lowered herself into a metal folding chair facing the couch. From the back of the apartment, my mother could hear music like she’d once heard in a nightclub on a trip with my father to a hotel in San Juan. The toddler carried her bag of Fritos over to my mother and began dropping the chips one by one into my mother’s canvas tote.

  “Denise, you stop that or you’ll get a smack,” Jackie said. The child kept on with her game. My mother reached down and lifted the tote onto the couch. She touched the little girl’s arm, and then fished around in the bag until she found her keys with the fuzzy animal ring. (You’d given it to me for my birthday, my mother told me. That was when you still thought that if you liked something, I would too.)

  The child picked up the key ring and wandered over to show it to her mother. Brandon had started to cry, and Jackie put a bottle in his mouth. Denise yanked on her mother’s pant leg.

  Jackie jerked her leg back. “Girl, you been getting on my nerves all morning.”

  Now Denise was crying. Feeling somehow responsible—really, she thought, the only adult in the room—my mother leaned forward and beckoned to the little girl. “Come, you can sit with me. Mommy’s busy with Brandon.”

  Denise next to her, my mother took out a legal pad from the tote. Folded into the pad was a sheet titled “Family Relations: Interview Assignment.” My mother glanced over the list of questions she’d so carefully reviewed the night before: Who do you consider to be the members of your family? With whom do you discuss your problems? Who do you turn to when there’s an emergency?

  Brandon had stopped sucking. His head rested now on Jackie’s shoulder. She reached into her pocket for a cigarette pack.

  “Before we begin,” my mother asked, “do you have any questions?”

  Jackie lit a cigarette and inhaled. For a second she closed her eyes and an expression of calm passed over her face. “Yeah, who’s gonna see what I say?”

  “No one. I mean, no one outside my class.”

  “My caseworker ain’t going to see this?”

  “No. This is for my educational benefit only.”

  “You mean like homework.”

  “Yes. It’s one of my assignments.”

  Jackie leaned back in the folding chair so that her shoulder blades rested against the metal back and her legs, crossed at the ankles, stretched in front. Brandon lay belly-down on top of her. “Just the Welfare thinks that my gram watches the babies. She does a lot, but like today and some mornings she cleans this lady’s house.”

  From the casework report, my mother had learned that Jackie, her two sisters, and her brother were raised by their mother’s mother, Faith, after their own mother had disappeared. Now this gram at fifty-two had a third generation of kids in her home. “So, who watches the children?” my mother asked.

  “I do, mostly. Or when I was going to school, I’d leave them with the girl downstairs.”

  My mother wondered if she should ask more, but child care was not on her list of questions and it seemed like prying to inquire further. “Well, maybe we should start,” she said. Clearing her throat, she began reading aloud the lines typed under the heading “Instructions to Participant”: “These are all questions about family relations—how you and your family work as a unit. Answer them as honestly and completely as you can. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers.”

  Jackie rubbed Brandon’s back with her free hand. Denise sucked on the fuzzy key-ring ball. “What’s relations mean?” Jackie asked.

  My mother struggled to find a way to explain. “You know,” she said, “it’s like relationship, how people get along.”

  Jackie looked bored already. “Sounds okay. I’m just gonna put the baby down first.” Jackie got up with Brandon and walked toward the back of the apartment. The music stopped and then my mother heard the familiar rattling of crib rails lifting.

  When Jackie returned, she took the cigarettes out from her shirt pocket, turned the pack over, and tapped another one out.

  “All righty,” my mother said, embarrassed at how unnatural her voice seemed. (Something about the way that all righty came out, my mother told me, sounded like the Mr. Rogers imitations your brother used to do. Do you remember? He’d tease you, going on and on in that singsong voice, until you were so overexcited you’d start to cry or pee in your pants.) “Could you list for me the members of your family?”

  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 th
e 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 st
ill 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.