Milk (11 page)

“Maggie?”

I'd forgotten about her smile, as dazzling as when we were teenagers.

We fall into each other's arms first, then talk for a while—how Maggie came to be a midwife of all things, and the circumstances of my move back to Pasadena. She asks about my father and I ask about her mother, technically an aunt of mine (or is it cousin?) through my mother's side. “Still alive and drinking,” Maggie says. Whatever our familial connection, it's so distant and convoluted as to be absurd. We don't resemble each other in the least.

At last we proceed to the actual exam, gentle as a sponge bath. Maggie places something called a Doppler on my belly; I hear for the first time the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of my baby's heart.

I don't want to leave.

Is it time for the knitting needles yet, Maggie and I used to say in high school. Code for, Are we pregnant? Knitting needles referring to either booties or abortions, depending on how you looked at it. Is it time for the K.N.'s? we'd say, counting on our fingers since our last periods, and when
it—
what we kept hoping were isolated incidents of sex
—
had occurred
.

We'd become friends in high school gym class while standing in the furthest reaches of the softball outfield, gloves hanging lethargically from our wrists. We talked while the balls sailed by: “Your turn,” I'd say or she'd say, and whoever's turn it was would stroll off after the ball while the pitcher hopped and screamed and cursed
.

I broached the subject of our cousinhood first
.

“Aren't we cousins or something?”

“Maybe,” she said, that ironic smile on her face. “Third cousins twice removed, or is it second cousins thrice removed?”

“Emphasis on removed,” I said
.

From there we progressed to sharing cigarettes in the parking lot, having found out we smoked the same brand, Larks. Then, we made the leap to sneaking out of our houses at night and meeting at St. Edmund's Chapel (where we'd both been baptized) for more smokes in the pew; and from there, somehow, to hitchhiking all over Pasadena, being sure to stop at Bob's Big Boy for milk shakes, french fries, and more cigarettes, laughing about the fools who'd picked us up, or tried to. We gave them names. Phil and Dan were Feel and Damn; Rich and Steve were Bitch and Heave
—
Bitch and Heave were painters; Feel and Damn were college-age transients living off their parents, sharing
—
what else?
—
a VW van, and listening to
—
what else?—Neil Young, Damn attempting to mimic him on his out-of-tune guitar and squalling voice while we listened, horrified
.

That very night I meet Maggie's boys, at her apartment in Pasadena. Maggie's changed into jeans, a T-shirt, old canvas espadrilles. I already know about her soon-to-be divorce, just as she knows about my separation, territory we covered earlier today.

“This is Willy,” Maggie says, her hand on the smaller boy's head. “His brother's name is Dylan. Say hi, Dylan.”

“Hi,” he says.

“Chucks,” says Willy.

“He mean truck,” Dylan says. “That how he talk, he just one.
I
two, I talk big boy. Car wash, Mommy.” He looks at his mother expectantly and, from beneath the kitchen sink, Maggie pulls out a plastic basket filled with toy cars and trucks, toothbrushes, rags and a couple of spray bottles. She spreads out a towel.

“Chucks,” Willy says, dumping out the basket.

“They spend hours doing this,” Maggie says as the boys bend over miniature cars and trucks, spraying them and going over them with toothbrushes, wiping them down with rags. “Car wash,” Dylan says to himself, singsong, “brushes go round and round.”

“They're cute,” I say, entranced, reminded of my nephews when they were little. Meeting these boys is a gift, even more reason for coming here, to Maggie's home, to the area where I grew up; to confront the ghost of my mother; to become a mother myself.

I stay for dinner. I help put the boys to bed, I read them stories, I stay the night.

E
LEVEN

My father didn't know how to make a lunch, in my opinion. He was never going to learn. Into my lunch sack he seemed to put the ugliest foods possible—black bananas, lunchmeats flecked with little white round things, limp lettuce. Things he wouldn't mind eating. (Years later, I watched him buy peaches from a roadside stand, take them back to the hotel room and cut one open … teeming with unborn insect life. He cut out the insects and popped the peach into his mouth.)

My father wasn't a mother any more than my mother had been and I despised him for it. He never knew what I was talking about. “A bruised banana
embarrasses
you at school? Why?”

The only other person at school whose lunch was as weird as mine was Betsy. Her mother believed in organically grown fruits and vegetables, thick brown breads, and animal meats that hadn't been shot up with antibiotics or chemicals; even the family dog ate pure, raw liver, not canned food. Each morning before we walked to school, Betsy would have to swallow a spoonful of cod liver oil.

I thought this very glamorous and sometimes Mrs. Cramer would let me have a spoonful, too. It tasted terrible but I knew it was good for me and all morning long, tasting cod liver in the back of my throat, I felt protected against misery and cold.

Betsy's lunch usually consisted of an ungainly sandwich made with lettuce, tomato, and leftovers from last night's dinner; an apple or orange (no bruised bananas); a slice of heavy brown cake made with honey and no icing. Betsy never complained, although both of us looked longingly at the other kids' lunches: white bread spread with peanut butter and jelly, Ding-Dongs, candy, bologna and cheese.

Betsy's mother didn't approve of processed sugar, of course. It was bad for you. I adored the way she said
bad for you
, her face downturned and sweet, woeful and beatific. I was in love with Mrs. Cramer, though she wasn't really beautiful. Mornings she wore a plain bathrobe and old furry slippers, as she stood at the kitchen counter, making Betsy's lunch. She never sat down in the mornings and in fact there was a period of time she had to march in place because she'd had an operation for varicose veins, thick ace bandages that I thought were lovely wound up and down her legs.

“Don't forget your lunch, Betsy.” March, march. “Betsy? Your lunch. Now, girls …” March, march. We were halfway out the door. “Cross at the crosswalk, girls, and look both ways, remember.” March, march.

I lived to hear her call us
girls
. I felt I belonged to her in some way, if only for a moment. And just as I longed for her to feed me a spoonful of cod liver oil, I fantasized she would cook me breakfast, fix me lunch. I would be glad to eat her strange, clumsy sandwiches and mushy apples and brown honeyed cakes and sticky raisins.

“We have to change what we eat,” I insisted to my father.

“Why?”

“Because it's not good for us!”

I told him to call Mrs. Cramer and find out where she shopped, that we should buy the same, that white flour and sugar were bad for us. So were the vegetables and fruit—they were sprayed with insecticides—they were
poisoned
, didn't he get it?

“You know I don't do the shopping, Theo.”

“Make Evan shop somewhere else,” I said. Evan was our housekeeper who came afternoons to be here when Corb and I got home from school. She cooked our dinner, left it warming on the stove, and disappeared minutes after my father arrived home from work—she had to go home and cook for her own family.

“Well, I'll mention it to her,” my father said.

I knew he wouldn't. “You have to make her,” I said, pulling on his long, hairy arm. Didn't he understand anything?

“You have to realize,” my father said. “Evan has her own way of doing things. I can't tell her what to do.”

I didn't see why not. She worked for us, didn't she? Although, I had to admit, it was difficult
making
Evan do anything. I shopped with her myself; I knew. It was my job to push the cart up and down the aisles and put into it what she told me. We always bought the same things. Round beef for Swiss steak. Ground beef for meat loaf. Mushroom soup and chicken for a casserole. Frozen vegetables, iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, fruit. Milk, juice, jello, paper towels, detergent, wax paper, furniture polish, tin foil … While I pushed the cart after her, Evan added up items on a little red plastic thing made to look like a miniature cash register. She complained ceaselessly about the prices and told me again and again how important it was that I learn how to go grocery shopping. I was going to need it someday, she said. When I got married. When I was running my own household.

“Evan,” I said. “Instead of here—” I gestured at the whole refrigerated white bread mausoleum of Safeway—“Why don't we shop at Healthco?”

“Healthco, what's that?” She paused in front of the canned fruit, put on her reading glasses that hung from a loop around her neck, glanced at her list. “Pineapple, Theo, two four-ounce cans.” I tossed them into the cart. “I'm going to make us a pineapple upside-down cake,” she said. “How about that?”

“It has sugar in it,” I said with disgust. “Can't you make it with honey at least?”

“Recipe calls for sugar,” she said.

It was always so embarrassing going places with Evan. First of all, she talked loud and second of all, she talked to everybody. She told them everything, about her operation for hemorrhoids and about her flat feet and that she was allergic to perfumes and deodorant, and that my mother had passed away and so she, Evan, was working for us now and that
I
thought of her as
my
mother. Which was sort of true and not true. Somebody had to act as my mother, and there wasn't anybody but Evan. I didn't have a choice. But did she have to be announcing it all the time? Did she have to carry that big fat white purse that she shined up with shoe polish? Did she have to wear a nurse's uniform? She was entitled, I guess, she was a nurse; she'd been my mother's nurse originally, that's how she'd come to work for us in the first place. But couldn't she dress like a normal person? Not to mention her hair, a bouffant: teased and colored brown this week, auburn the next … she actually wrapped
toilet paper
around it at night, to keep it looking nice, she said. She'd stayed with Corb and me once or twice when our father had gone out of town on business and it was true, a few times around with the toilet roll, topped with a hair net.

“Healthco,” I informed her now, “is a health food store. Mrs. Cramer shops there and I think we should, too. They don't use pesticides on their fruits and vegetables, and they have wheat germ bread, and they don't use beef from cows that have been shot up with antibiotics and God knows what.” I myself was impressed with how knowledgeable I sounded; how could she not agree with me?

“There isn't anything wrong with the food here, Theo. I'm a nurse.” As if I didn't know. She was forever reminding me.

Evan and I were to attend our first mother-daughter tea. For two weeks in advance I prayed she would fall sick or that some last-minute emergency would come up in her large, extended, accident-prone family, as was sometimes the case. We'd get a call at seven in the morning. “This is Evan. We're having a crisis over here.”
Cry-
sez was how she pronounced it. Somebody in her family had had a car wreck or a collapsed lung or double pneumonia or had been burglarized or had nearly sawed off their hand, Frankie, Ernie or Arnie—all the males had names that ended in ‘ie'—or Ava, Marilyn, April or June—all the females had movie-star names, or were named after a month. In our family we knew the names of everybody in
her
family, though we'd met so few of them.

I'd hoped to attend the mother-daughter tea with Betsy and her mother: Mrs. Cramer in pearl earrings and a soft, pretty, pastel dress, making soft, pleasing conversation, me attached to her somehow, literally holding onto her dress and Betsy's hand.

But no, there was no last minute phone call, no
cry-
sez. All that day at school I worried—what would Evan wear? Her uniform, her white elevator nurse shoes? Worse. “I'll show you what
I'm
wearing,” she said when I got home from school. There, on a hanger over a chair, was a dress the color of lime sherbet with a splash of flowers across the front; next to it, a hot pink purse and matching shoes; and on Evan's long, sagging earlobes, daisy earrings the size of silver dollars.

We got dressed together, which was sort of fun—it's what I imagined other girls did with their mothers—Evan buttoning up the back of my dress (fortunately she didn't pick my clothes, Aunt Lyla did that), fussing with my hair, gentle on the tangles, pulling her own dress up over her girdle, and finally, me waiting on the edge of the tub for her while she applied a thick coat of pink lipstick in the mirror. She smacked her lips and blotted them—breaking the spell of my fantasy. This was Evan all right, not my mother. My own mother had been beautiful. All the pictures my father had hidden in drawers confirmed this, even if my memories didn't.

“Let's go,” Evan said, sorting through the compartments of her big white purse—wads of Kleenex, coupons rubber-banded together, several combs and brushes, makeup bag, cracked red wallet, stray curled-up pieces of paper used for shopping lists, phone numbers, all of which she crammed into her hot pink purse. “We're gonna be late!” Evan was nervous, misplacing her keys, forgetting her lipstick, searching for the invitation with the address on it. Nervous and excited, eager,
thrilled
to be going to a tea where she could show me off as “her” daughter.

The thing was, she really did love me. When I got sick, she was there, coming to our house the whole day, canceling all else; if I got sick on a weekend, she came to nurse me, refusing to accept money from my father. She told me she loved me, held me when I cried, kissed me hello and goodbye, told me stories, played with me.…