In front of the mirror, my mother’s first eyes stared back at me, the ones that were exiled for growing old and sad. Or maybe it was not sadness, but rage that she was trying to disguise. Rage at my father for filling his days with work and his nights with other women.
You marry your father, this is what they tell us. This is what you pray will be untrue. I sometimes think of Sam on all his business trips, so much time to squander while the baby and I are marooned here alone, left to our own devices and wicked ways. He has a history, to put it mildly, a habit of straying. But I dare not mention it. I dare not reveal any concern that he is not what he says – a different man over here, a better man. What do I care, anyway? And what right do I have to judge him. I am no innocent myself.
I am no innocent in anything.
I stood and watched my bare chest heave and shake, the breasts undulating, pendulous. Lower than before, bigger and rounder. Sam strokes them with adoration.
Mother’s breasts now, he says, as though their divine purpose has been revealed at last.
I breastfed the baby for six full months, tortured milk from my cracked, engorged nipples. Sometimes the pain was so great I had to scream. The baby did not notice.
In the hospital right after he was born, the nurses wanted me to hold him, to bond him to me, flesh against flesh. Latching. Suckling. Feeding. Everything primal and exposed. You are an animal like you’ve always been.
Cow, sow, bitch; bloody and ruined.
In my arms, the baby kept rooting for my nipples, pink and downy like a truffle pig.
The milk would not come. The body would not comply. The nurses brought different pumps and a lactation consultant called Eve. She gave me little white pills to swallow. She told me to keep holding the baby close, to keep his skin on my skin, to keep his toothless mouth in proximity to my milkless breasts.
How am I here? Still I don’t quite know. I feel something leaking out of me daily, slow wafts of weightlessness and life. A little here, a little there. Sometimes it’s in response to something benign, like Sam’s ceaseless enthusiasm for these shiny new lives, or his tireless adulation of the baby and his latest smile or almost-comprehensible word. Other times it’s a moment, a glimpse of my life reflected back at me through a window or a mirror. This is you. This is your life. This is your allowance for happiness and joy. There’s nothing wrong with the picture except everything.
If I close my eyes, I see nothing.
No. I see Frank.
So clear, so sure of herself in so many ways. Sharp about the edges. A woman defined. And me, just a blur. A frame that will not hold.
And yet. It is Frank who has always given me shape. A way to see myself clear. Because from where she is standing, the view is spectacular. Something to covet. Something to yearn for, with that deep, guttural longing that knows it can never be properly filled. Best friend. Yes, she really must be.
In the living room, I sat and wrote out a list of everything I’ll need to do for her visit. New bed linens, soft-touch pillows and throws. Some woven baskets and succulents in stone pots to warm up the room. Maybe a framed print or two, something graphic and abstract, or an ink drawing from one of the designer homeware stores around Söder.
From the wall, I felt six extra pairs of eyes on me, Sam’s masks, hollow and terrifying. I checked them once, for hidden cameras. Those nanny cams that people use to spy on their babysitters. I’d had a sudden flash of an idea, that Sam might be watching. Might be making even more certain to miss nothing of my parenting skills. He does like to be in control. I took them off the wall and examined them closely, the faint whiff of decay coming from the wood. There weren’t any cameras behind the masks, but still, they never fail to unsettle me. To remind me that I am always under scrutiny. And now another set of eyes will be on me.
It was time for the baby’s lunch. In his room, he held his arms up to me, fraught with expectation. I looked at him, as I do. Waiting. Hoping to feel something.
I wonder if it isn’t somehow inherited. Maternal instincts, or the lack thereof. I cannot remember Maureen ever holding me. At six months old, she left me with a nurse so she could go off on a monthlong weight-loss program in Switzerland. As a child, any time I cried, she’d roll her eyes and say, It gets worse, Merry, trust me.
It was Frank’s mother, Carol, who showed me what it meant to be loved. To be mothered. How I adored her. The smell of her kitchen, the sturdiness of her body, its ability to hold you firm and rock away any number of sorrows. My mother would deposit me at Frank’s house as though it were a day-care center, waving to Carol from the car because she didn’t want to endure stepping inside their shabby Brentwood living room. They’d met through the husbands. My father, surgeon in chief at Cedars, and Frank’s father, Ian, a gynecologist.
I’d barely be out of the car with my little overnight bag and my mother would be reversing away, hurrying off to lunch with the girls or some act of maintenance. Hairdresser or nail salon or day spa; sometimes it was for a stretch of a few days while she recuperated from a procedure or detoxed at one of her retreats. You’re just the best, Carol, my mother would sing, but any time they bumped into one another at a social event, she’d pretend not to know her.
I longed for her never to return, so that I could stay always with Carol, wrapped in her arms, comforted by the sound of her soft southern drawl, safe and warm in the only place that ever felt like a home. My mother always came back for me, and always we regarded each other with that first brief look of disappointment: You again.
In his crib, the baby had turned his attention to Bear. The two of them appeared to be deep in conversation.
I watched. I imagined Frank, seeing my son for the first time, the soft curls starting to collect behind his ears, the gummy smile punctuated with sharp points of new teeth; those sparkling eyes, the fat belly he loves to have tickled. Those pudgy hands that grab and pull at everything in sight. The smell of him newly bathed or sound asleep, the milky sighs and wet open kisses, the tiny arms that reach around your neck to hold you in warm, exquisite embrace.
My child. My son.
I lifted him up into my arms and showered him with all the love I had.
Oh, Samson, you can’t honestly tell me that you’re happy over there.
My mother on the phone, calling from the States.
Samson, I know you.
I’ve told you, Mother, it’s wonderful here. I wish you’d come over and see for yourself.
She won’t, thankfully.
It’s a long flight, she said.
You’ve never even met your grandson.
Even this is not enough to persuade her. She cannot get over the fact that I left. She wants to punish me for it. Or maybe this is the extent to which she loathes Merry. She doesn’t even want to meet our son.
She sighed. That goddamn Ida, she said.
She left me a house, I said. She was a nice woman.
Please, she hissed. It’s thanks to her I’m alone and you’re a million miles away.
You’re being mean-spirited, I said.
Ida was a manipulative bitch, I always said so. Only married my father so she could stay in the country. And then she does this, leaves my son a house so he’ll move to the other side of the world.
Anyway, she said, they’re