Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories Read online

  There is some concern about those new neurons. Children form more and more connections until they hit puberty, and then the brain seems to sort through the connections and weed out some and reinforce others, to make the brain efficient in other ways. Nobody knows what will happen with Gus. And of course, the cause of the Alzheimer's still lurks somewhere. Maybe in ten years he'll start to deteriorate again.

  "I am so grateful to you" he says to Mila when William is gone. "You have been through so much for me."

  "It's okay," she says. "You'd do the same for me." Although she doesn't know what Gus would do. She doesn't know if she likes this new Gus. This big child.

  I would do the same for you,' he says.

  "Are you sure you wouldn't stick me in some nursing home?" she says. "Only come visit me once a month?" She tries to make her tone broad, broad enough for anyone to see this comment as a joke.

  But Gus doesn't. Teasing distresses him. "No," he says now, "I promise, Mila. I would look after you the way you looked after me,"

  "I know, honey;" she says. "I was just joking"

  He frowns.

  "Come on," she says. "Let's look at your homework."

  He is studying for his G.E.D. It's a goal he and the therapist came up with. Mila wanted to say that Gus not only had a degree in engineering, he was certified, but of course that was the old Gus.

  He's studying the Civil War, and Mila checks his homework before he goes to his G.E.D. class.

  "I think I want to go to college," he says.

  "What do you want to study?" she asks. She almost says, "Engineering?" but the truth is he doesn't like math. Gus was never very good at arithmetic, but he was great at conceptual math-algebra, calculus, differential equations. But now he doesn't have enough patience for the drill in fractions and square roots.

  "I don't know," he says. "Maybe I want to be a therapist. I think I want to help people.

  Help me, she thinks. But then she squashes the thought. He is here, he is getting better. He is not squatting in the hollyhocks. She's not afraid of him anymore. And if she doesn't love him like a husband anymore, well, she still loves him.

  "What was that boy's name?" Gus says, squinting down the street.

  He means the home health.

  For a moment she can't think and her insides twist in fear. It has started happening recently; when she forgets, she feels this sudden overwhelming fear. Is it Alzheimer's?

  "William," she says. "His name is William."

  "He was a nice boy," Gus says.

  "Yes," Mila says, her voice and face calm, but her heart beating too fast.

  Eight-Legged Story

  i. Naturalistic Narrative

  heap pens. My marriage is not going to survive this. Not the pens- I bought the pens because no pen is safe when Mark is around; his backpack is a black hole for pens- so I bought this package of cheap pens, one of which doesn't work (although rather than throw it away, I stuck it back in the pen jar, which is stupid), and two of them don't click right when you try to make the point come out and then go back. It's good to have them, though, because I'm manning the phone. Tim, my husband, is out combing the Buckeye Trail in the National Park with volunteers, looking for my nine-year-old stepson, Mark. Mark has been missing for twenty-two hours. One minute he was with them, the next minute he wasn't. I am worried about Mark. I am sure that if he is dead, I will feel terrible. I wish I liked him better. I wish I'd let him take some of these pens. Not that Tim will ever find out that I told Mark he couldn't have any of these pens.

  The phone rings. It's Mark's mother, Tina. "Hello?" she says, "hello, Amelia? Hello?" Her voice is thick with medication and tears. Tina is a manic-depressive and lives in Texas.

  "Hi, Tina," I say. "No word yet"

  "Oh God," Tina says.

  Get off the line, I think. But I can't throw Mark's mother off the phone.

  "Was he wearing his jacket?" she asks. She has asked that every time she's called. As if she ever noticed whether or not he had his jacket on.

  "He did," I say, soothing. "He's a smart kid."

  "He could have just turned his ankle," she says. "They'll find him." I offered this scenario a couple of hours ago, but she's forgotten I suggested it, and she thinks she is comforting me. I allow myself to sound comforted. She says she'll call back in an hour. I'm convinced he is drowned. I can see it; the glimmer of his white hands and face in the metallic water. I can't say it to anyone.

  What will happen to my marriage? When a child dies, divorce is pretty common. Two people locked in their grief, unable to connect. But I won't grieve like Tim, and some part of me will be relieved. I'm honest with myself about this. The secret in our marriage will slowly reveal itself. He will learn that I didn't love Mark, and how can you love someone who didn't love your only son?

  When I married Tim, Mark was only six. He was the child of a dysfunctional marriage. He was prone to angry outbursts. He was resentful. All they had were plastic glasses, and I bought cheap glass tumblers, but Mark didn't like them. He wanted "their" glasses. I made the dinners, and I hated the lime green plastic cups. I wanted to sit at a nice table.

  It was a classic stepfamily drama. It's in the books. I compromised. I used the ghastly plates from his mother, the ones with country geese on them, but insisted on the glass tumblers. It was our family table, I explained. A mix of old and new, like our family. Mark hated everything I cooked. I used the same canned sloppy Joe mix that his father had always used, and Mark sat at the table, a blond boy who was small for his age, crying silently into his sandwich. He hated sloppy joes.

  His father couldn't stand to hear him cry that he was hungry. I sat on the bed in the master bedroom. Maybe I should have given in. It was hard to decide. He was six years old, and he didn't have a bedtime, didn't dress himself for school in the morning. He lay on the floor crying while I put his socks on. I made his father put him in bed at nine each night. Before we'd married, Mark had terrible headaches, so terrible that his father had taken him to the hospital and they'd done CAT scans. After we got married and we started eating at a regular time and he had a bedtime, the headaches disappeared.

  I should have given in on the green glasses. But why should I have had to eat at an ugly table, when he had taken all the joy out of the dinner anyway? When it was always a screaming battle? What was I supposed to do? When was it important that he have his own things, and when was it important that he not get his own way?

  The phone doesn't ring. That's good, because when it does, it will be Tina.

  When they say they have found his body, I will comfort Tim. I'll just comfort him with my hands. I'll just be there. Not talking. Just there. Like something out of Jane Eyre. Actually, I'll get impatient, because I finally have him to myself and yet Mark will have him. You can't compete with the dead. I always thought that if we were married long enough, eventually we would get that time that people without children get when they are first married. We'll be fifty-year-old newlyweds going out to see a movie on a whim and not worrying about child care.

  I can't think about any of it.

  This is the last moment of my marriage. Or maybe my marriage is already gone.

  I have the sudden urge to get up and go out and get in my little beat-up eight-year-old Honda that I bought with my own money, and drive. I took the freeway to my first job, working in an amusement park for the summer when I was sixteen. I hated the job, and I hated to be home. I used to get on the freeway headed north and think that I could just keep going, up to Detroit, across to Windsor, Ontario and up to Quebec, where I would get a job at a fast food place and learn to speak French.

  The doorbell rings. It's Annette, the neighbor down the street. I like Annette, although I have always suspected that she disapproved of Mark and, therefore, of Tim and me as parents. Annette has two daughters, and when we all moved onto the street her daughters were five and seven while Mark was eight. Mark and the boys next door run around in hunter camouflage playing war and spying in wind
ows.

  She sits and has a cup of tea. Annette is a working mother. Here in the suburbs there are working mothers and there are housewives and there is me. I'm an architectural landscaper, and I work out of my home.

  "Funny that Tim is the one out wandering the wilderness," I say to Annette.

  "Yeah?" Annette says.

  "Well," I say, "Tim hates the outdoors, hates yard work, hates plants." Tim is an engineer. Computers are his landscapes.

  She laughs a little for me. "You're holding up really well, you know that?" she says.

  Of course I'm holding up well. If her daughter was out there, Annette would he devastated. If Tim had disappeared, I would he incoherent. I wish I was incoherent about Mark.

  The phone rings. I pick it up, expecting to hear Tina saying, "Amelia?"

  "Amelia?" says a man's voice.

  "Yes?" I say, only realizing afterward that it's Tim.

  "We found him," he says. "He's okay. A little hit of hypothermia and a little dehydrated. We're going into the clinic to have him checked. Can you meet me there?"

  Tim sounds normal.

  I start to cry when I hang up the phone, because I'm terrified.

  2. Exposition

  An eight-legged essay is a Chinese form. It consists of eight parts, each of which presents an example from an earlier classic. Together, the parts are seen as the argument. The conclusion is assumed to he apparent to the reader. It is implicit rather than explicit. It's not better or worse than argument and conclusion, it's different. It is more like a story. This is not an eight-legged essay. If it were, I would use examples from the classic literature. Once upon a time there was a girl named Cinderella. Once upon a time there was a girl named Snow White.

  We enter into all major relationships with no real clue of where we are going: marriage, birth, friendship. We carry maps we believe are true: our parents' relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst. Dysfunctional families breed dysfunctional families. Abuse is handed down from generation to generation. That this is the stuff of twelve-step programs and talk shows doesn't make it any less true or any less profound.

  The leap of stepparenting is one of the worst, because it is based on a lie. The lie is that you will be mom or you will be dad. If you've got custody of the child, you're going to raise it. You'll be there, or you won't. Either I mother Mark and pack his lunches, go over his homework with him, drive him to and from Boy Scouts, and tell him to eat his carrots, or I'm neglecting him. After all, Mark needs to eat his carrots. He needs someone to take his homework seriously. He needs to he told to get his shoes on, it's time for the bus. He needs to be told not to say "shit" in front of his grandmother and his teachers.

  But he already has a mother, and I'm not his mother, and I never will he. He knows it, I know it. Stepmothers don't represent good things for children. Mark could not have his father and mother back together without somehow getting me out of the picture. It meant that he would have to accept a stranger whom he didn't know and maybe wouldn't really like into his home. It meant he was nearly powerless.

  That is the first evil thing I did.

  The second evil thing that stepparents do is take part of a parent away. Imagine this, you're married, and your spouse suddenly decides to bring someone else into the household, without asking you. You're forced to accommodate. Your spouse pays attention to the Other, and while they are paying attention to the Other, they are not paying attention to you. Imagine the Other was able to make rules. In marriages its called bigamy, and it's illegal.

  At the hospital, the parking garage is a maze. I follow arrows to the stairs and down past the walkway to the front entrance, which is nearly inaccessible from the street. The walkway is planted with geraniums paid for by the hospital auxiliary, and the center of the front drive is an abstract statue surrounded by the ubiquitous mass of daylilies, Stella d'Oro. The building front is all angles, and the entrance is a revolving door. How do they get wheelchairs out a revolving door? But angled so that people like me won't see it right away is a huge sliding door for accessibility.

  The elevators are nowhere near the receptionist. I am trying to decide how to compose my face. I can't manage joyous. Relieved? I am relieved, but I'm not, too. Mark doesn't handle stress very well, even by nine-year-old standards. Things are going to be difficult after this. We'll get calls from the teacher about his behavior at school. I pass a Wendy's (in a hospital? But then it seems like a pretty good idea and the gift shop and turn left at the elevators.

  Mark isn't in a hospital room; he's asleep in some sort of examining room in a curtained-off bed. Tim is sitting on the edge of the bed wearing his baseball cap that says "Roswell Institute for UFO Studies." I bought him that as a joke.

  "He's okay," Tim whispers. "We can take him home whenever."

  "Are you okay?" I ask.

  "I'm okay," Tim says. "Are you okay?"

  I say I'm fine, and we float becalmed in a sea of "okays."

  We hug. Tim is six feet tall.

  "I think in some ways you were more worried than I was," Tim says. "I know you care a lot for him. I think more than you know."

  I smile a lie.

  Mark is sleeping like a much younger child, abandoned to exhaustion. His mouth is open slightly, and he has one fist curled next to his cheek. Tim picks him up, and he stirs to rest on Tim's shoulder but doesn't wake.

  We walk through the lobby; the happy family, the family that brushed disaster and escaped.

  3: Fairy Tales- Beauty and the Beast

  Before Mark gets lost, we are living in another town. We are both employed by the same firm. I am studying architectural landscaping. The firm that employs us is a large company that sells many different products: detergents and diapers and potato chips.

  In March they call our division together and say that the company will be restructuring, but that they don't intend to lay anyone off. As we walk out of the cafeteria where the meeting has been, Tim says, "That means layoffs for sure." I laugh, and he starts calling headhunters.

  They lay one hundred and fifty people off four months later. They ask some of us to stay during the transition and offer Tim and me positions as contractors with a rather lucrative bonus for staying until December.

  Tim finds another job in September, and moves four hours away.

  After Tim has gone, on Fridays Mark and I go out for pizza. Mark is seven. We go to a pizza place where the middle part of the restaurant is shaped like the leaning tower of Pisa except that it's only three stories tall. It's called Tower Pizza, and the pizza is mediocre but they have it special children's room where they play videos of Disney movies on a large screen TV.

  It is snowing, so it must be November or so. The video is of Beauty and the Beast.

  "This sucks," Mark says. "They always show this one. I hate this one."

  "Do you want to sit in the regular part of the restaurant?" I ask.

  "No," Mark says. "This is okay."

  He wants a Mountain Dew because it has the most caffeine. "Caffeine is cool," he says. "When's Dad coming back?"

  "Late tonight," I say. "First pizza, then we'll get a video, and you can take it home and watch it, and we'll wait for your dad:"

  "I wish Dad were here now," Mark says.

  "So do I," I say. "How was school?"

  "I hate school." Mark says.

  "Did you have gym today?" I try to ask specific questions that will elicit a positive response. "How was school" is a tactical mistake, and I know it as soon as I've said it.

  "Bad," he says. "I'm not hungry."

  If I take him home, he'll be hungry five minutes after we get in the car, and nothing I have at home will be what he wanted. What he really wants is his dad, of course. "Just have some pizza," I say. "You'll be hungry once you taste it."

  He doesn't answer. He's watching the little broken teacup dance around. "Can I go over by the TV?" he asks.
r />   "Sure," I say.

  I read my book while he watches TV, and when the pizza comes I call him. Pepperoni pizza. I don't really like pepperoni pizza, but it's the only kind that Mark eats.

  "How much do I have to eat?" he asks.

  "Two pieces," I say.

  He sighs theatrically.

  After pizza we stop and get a Christmas movie about a character named Ernest. We had seen the first Ernest movie, the Ernest Halloween movie, and the movie that involved the giant cannon and the hidden treasure. Ernest is terminally stupid, and this is supposed to be funny. At least Ernest is an adult, and there aren't the usual clueless parents in this one.

  "Will you watch it with me?" Mark asks.

  "Okay," I say. I sit with him and read my book and wish I could go to bed. By Friday I'm so tired I can't think. Tim will get home about eleven. It's seven thirty. I have three and a half hours, and then he'll be in charge.

  "Can I have some popcorn?" Mark asks.

  "You just had pizza' I say.

  "I'm hungry." his voice rises.

  "No," I say. "If you were hungry, you should have eaten more pizza."

  "I wasn't hungry then" he says, "but now I'm hungry."

  "Why is food always a battle with you?" I say because I'm tired.

  Mark starts to cry.

  I slap the tape in the VCR and go upstairs. I sit on the bed. I think about going downstairs and saying I'm sorry. I think about smacking him.

  The phone rings, and I run for it. It's Tim.

  "Amelia?" he says.

  "Where are you?" I say. He should be about halfway home.

  "I'm not even out of town yet. My car broke down," he says. "I'm at a BP on Route i6. You remember the Big Boy where we had breakfast? It's right there. I had to stand on the highway for half an hour. It's snowing like a son of a bitch."