A Mother's Love (13 page)

“Say cheese,” we shouted as the line of children began to collapse. “Say cheese.” Lights flashed, children wailed. We rushed to them, propping them up before they fell.

I
T WAS SHORTLY after my mother left that my father gave me the Night Sky. He'd gotten it in the gift shop on the desert road that sold things like cactus fertilizer and soil conditioners, owl rocks, rattlesnake eggs (rubber bands around a wire that made a rattling sound when opened), fool's gold, statues of tired prospectors, fake snakes that coiled, petrified wood with small carved animals on the top, dinosaur dung, rock concerts (rock animals with funny faces painted on them all glued together), and beautifully shaped stones with names like Apache tears, serpentine, fire agate. It also sold kits for the Night Sky, and for a long time I'd had my eye on one of them.

The shop was at the meteorite crater where I'd gone with my mother. I used to go inside when she was taking too long. They had a demonstration kit for the amateur astronomer with a paper
telescope you could make yourself, a star chart with a circle you turn to follow the sky at the different seasons and times of the day, a booklet on all the constellations, and a clipboard where you could write down what you saw. It also had a small plastic bag filled with stars and as you spotted them in the sky, the kit explained how to put them on your ceiling. It promised that in the dark, your room would glow like the Milky Way.

After my mother left, my father began driving around the desert the way she had, looking for her, I think. She liked to go to all the sights, especially the ghost towns. She'd stare for a long time into shacks where cribs and ironing boards still stood, and get a dreamy look in her eyes as she envisioned warm hearths, happy homes. Maybe my father thought he'd find her and Sam in a ghost town. Or at the crater. Sometimes I think he went because he couldn't sit still. He just had to drive. His love of the desert bewildered me. I have always preferred the mountains and the sea, the vistas and the heights, but the spaces seemed to fill him.

Unlike my mother, my father wasn't partial to canyons, to big empty holes in the ground that made me feel as if I'd start falling and never stop. But after my mother was gone, he would stand at the edge, which made me very nervous, since he was all I had. I'd watch him and think, that's it for
me. He's going to jump and there'll be no one to take care of me.

I had a friend at school named Buff who had dead eyes and lived in foster homes (one after the other), and I tried to imagine the foster homes I might live in. Some nice Mormon family where the girls wore purple eye makeup and everyone was so nice that it would terrify me. Or perhaps someone in the trailer park like Dottie would take me in. But then the state would take me away, saying I needed a proper home. I pictured myself in the hands of the law, with people asking, “Don't you have an aunt or an uncle somewhere? No next of kin?” They'd move me to California with religious fanatics who'd lock me in a closet when I was bad.

When my father took me with him to the meteorite crater, we'd stand at the rim of that giant pockmark, the wind blowing our hair flat against our heads, like two people who'd just made a successful landing on the moon. I'd look across the mile-or-so-wide crater and think I saw my mother, her tiny form, waving. He wouldn't walk the rim trail, for which I was grateful. Then we'd go into the souvenir shop. It was during one of those visits, when we were laughing, having forgotten who we were and why we'd come, that my father bought me the kit for the Night Sky.

He held it up. “Isn't this what you've been asking for? Isn't this what you want?” He looked at
the plastic bag of stick-on stars. He looked through the paper telescope. Even though it was the middle of the day, a full moon was out and he focused on that. “You really can see.” I looked, and in fact you could.

On the ride home, I took it apart. The telescope, the sky chart, the stars and planets for the ceiling. When we got home, my father helped me at first, but soon he lost interest, saying he had trouble figuring out where all the stars should go. I think he bought the kit to give me something to do while he was at work. I put it away for a while, because I wanted his help, but sometimes at night when I was alone and Dottie and her son, Jamie, weren't around, and I felt frightened by the night and by the fact that I was so alone in it and by all the things I did not understand, I would take it out and study the sky chart, the Amateur Astronomer's Guide. I put together a small scope, which felt cold when I pressed it to my eye. Once I understood how to translate what I'd seen in the heavens to what I could put on the ceiling of my room, I began to paste up the stars.

While my father went off on the night shift at the Glass Slipper—he arrived before it got really dark and was home by first light—I learned the constellations and licked stars to the ceiling. I began slowly with the Big Dipper and Orion, working my way up to Scorpio and Taurus. I'd take the
telescope and study what there was to see. I measured carefully, charting my placements.

It was not long before the ceiling of my room glowed with golden stars, each carefully pasted; I hardly had to go outside at all to see the sky. It became a kind of obsession—the tracing of distances, the arrangements of the constellations. I'd mark the spots with pencils, and then glue on the stars. Sometimes I'd spend the entire night just tracing them from the moment my father left until I'd hear his car pull up.

After a few months I could turn out the lights and lie back on my pillow and see the Milky Way glowing over my head. I'd make wishes on the stars in my room, asking for a new bicycle or a move back to California. I never wished for their return. Instead, I wished for practical things, things that might have a chance of coming true.

I
T WAS A WINDY DAY as I made my way down Broadway to the Chinese laundry where I'd dropped off some clothes three months before. I thought I'd be back in two or three days, but then Bobby came early and for a while I forgot about them. I couldn't even recall what I'd left there. Some shirts, cotton sweaters, a dress or two for spring. When I'd dropped the clothes off, I was preparing for a new season when the child would be here. Now it was months later. I couldn't find my ticket, though I looked everywhere—on my bulletin board, where I usually tacked such things, in pockets. But they knew me at the laundry. I'd been going there for years.

The wind blew across the West Side. Debris—dust, scraps of paper, fliptops—were in the air. I draped a cotton blanket loosely across Bobby's face, thinking I should go home. Save this for another
day when I really needed whatever it was I'd left at the laundry. But this was what I'd planned to do. It was my outing for the day.

I walked a few blocks and noticed that Bobby was squinting, despite the blanket. I thought of pushing him backward, his face away from the wind, but instead I pulled the blanket higher. “It's all right,” I said. “We're almost there.” I looked at the list in my hand. The things I needed to get done. Groceries, stamps, a few art supplies, the laundry. Already I knew I'd have to pare it down.

At last I reached the laundry where for the past five years I had taken my things, except that now the laundry had a sign on the door:
NO CARRIAGES ALLOWED
. It didn't even say “please” or “sorry.” Just this abrupt notice. I liked this laundry because it was especially good with stubborn stains like tomato or salad oil, and I seem to have a tendency to stain my clothes. I felt certain the sign wasn't there before, yet it looked yellow and torn. The tape was peeling around the edges.

I debated what to do. I thought of leaving Bobby for just a moment, keeping an eye on him through the window. But it didn't seem right with this wind. I could leave the stroller outside and carry Bobby in. Get the laundry, pay for it, carry it and Bobby outside, put him back. But my arms already ached from heaving him and his stroller up and down the stairs. It seemed too burdensome,
so I decided to ask if I could, just this once, bring it inside.

I waved at the middle-aged Chinese woman whose store it was, the woman whose ancient mother, until she died, had hobbled on bound feet that made my heart go out to her. Now she smiled, waving back to me. Then I tapped on the glass, pointing to the carriage. Her smile faded, turning to a frown. She shook her head. She did not seem to recognize me even as I made a pleading sign with my hands, creating a sleeping pillow under my head, then pointing to the baby. She raised a finger, shaking it no.

Unsnapping Bobby, I lifted him into my arms, careful to bring the blanket with me. He groaned and let out a shout, because he was half asleep. “Don't worry,” I said. “We'll go where there's no wind.” I went in. The woman did not smile. She shouted something in Chinese to her thin, pimply son, who spoke English better than she did.

“I'm sorry,” I explained, “but I can't find my ticket. You see, I had this baby and now, well, things are confusing, and I just can't find it.”

He shook his head, pointing to the mountains of sheets, towels, men's shirts—parcels to the ceiling, neatly wrapped in brown paper. “Very busy,” he said. “Not today.”

“Slovak,” I said, very precisely. “The name is Slovak.”

The parcels were in chronological, not alphabetical
order, so I tried to remember when I'd brought it in. “Eight weeks ago. Maybe more. Look down below.”

Now Bobby began to howl. “Too busy,” the man said. “Come back tomorrow.”

I shook my head. “I'm sorry, I can't come back tomorrow. It's possible I can't ever come back again, so I'll just wait until you find it.”

I sat on the windowsill. Bobby was still crying, hungry in my arms, so I opened my coat, pulled up my sweater, and began to nurse. I smiled at the young man and his mother, who looked at me in disgust, then turned away. “Don't hurry,” I told them. “I'll wait.”

The man now scurried up and down the ladder, pushing parcels aside, making room, finding nothing. At last near the top he found what he thought was mine. He tossed it down as I continued to nurse. When Bobby was done I examined the package. It was thin and did contain a few shirts, a pair of jeans I wouldn't fit into for a long time, my last links to the outside world. I gave the man twelve dollars and he handed me my change.

The breeze died down as I headed home, but it was getting late. I knew I should get Bobby home, yet I dreaded going there. Once I was inside, I was inside for good. Prisoners, invalids, mothers with newborns, we are all confined in this way. In an hour or so it would be dark, and then the only
people I would see were the delivery boys who came and went, bringing me what I needed. Instead of going home, I decided to walk south to the post office. Maybe down to Shakespeare's to browse. Maybe I'd run into someone I knew.

I passed Pablo, my neighbor, who was walking his cat and dog bedecked in Easter bonnets. As I headed south, I looked at the faces in the crowd. Faces shielded from the wind. If Sam was among these people, I wouldn't be able to tell. The birthmark would be covered. Perhaps even my mother walked these streets, her face one I'd no longer recognize, riddled with age, for all the years that had gone by. Or would I? We went down Broadway, Bobby and I, with our faces in the wind, scanning the crowd. Then I saw, coming toward me, the woman who lived across the way. She was walking in my direction, her children trailing behind her.

Bobby fussed, and I stooped down to tuck his blanket round him. When I looked up, she was there, staring at me. She wore a teal blue jacket, which made her eyes all the more piercing. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, making her look severe, thin and drawn. I felt her bearing down as if she had something she wanted to say. “Hello,” I said. I'm not sure why I said anything at all, but it seemed to be the right thing to do.

She looked annoyed, then surprised. “Hello,”
she replied with a questioning voice, as if she'd never seen me before.

“I live across the street from you,” I said. “I work by the window. Maybe you've seen me there.” I pointed back toward my street.

“Oh, yes,” she said, like someone starting to wake up. Her eyes brightened for a moment and I saw her as I had years ago, when she was alive with possibility, young and very pretty. “Yes, I've seen you.”

There was a pause, a long moment in which neither of us knew what to say. “I've just had a baby. Only a few months ago.”

“Yes,” she said, pondering my circumstances. “My husband left me around then,” she said flatly.

“I noticed,” I said. “I mean, I see things from the window when I work. I noticed that he was gone.” There was another awkward silence. “What happened to the dog?” I said, realizing that I'd not seen her with a dog in some time.

“Oh”—she waved her hand as if swatting at a fly—“it was too much.” She put her finger over her lips and whispered. “We gave him away.”

I nodded somberly and found myself staring into her face, which close up was less pretty than from a distance. Her lines were more sharply drawn, her eyes set deeper than I had imagined. It was as if she had somehow sunk into herself. I looked away, down at her children. She held them with thin wrists, tiny bones I could have wrapped
my fingers around. Her children tugged at her, and it seemed as if they would snap those bones in two.

There was something I wanted to say, but I wasn't sure what it was. I wasn't even sure why I had introduced myself. But because I had been watching her for so many years, I felt as if I knew her. As if I could say anything, though at the moment I was at a loss for words.

She looked at me oddly, uncertain of what was expected of her, then at Bobby, who squirmed. “You've dressed him too warmly,” she said at last. I looked down at Bobby, in his flannel playsuit with a heavy sweater, the blanket still around him. “It's spring,” she said. “He doesn't need all those clothes.”