Her Mother's Daughter (30 page)

Then, after five days, they sent me home. I stood up from the wheelchair they had pushed to the front door of the hospital, and they handed me this bundle wrapped in a blanket, and there I was. Brad held my arm as we walked to the car. I got in on the passenger side, not looking down at the bundle, and Brad started the motor, and we drove off and I sat there as stiff as a cardboard figure trying not to think, not to think: what do I do now?

For the first weeks, I treated the baby like some precious breakable possession—holding it gingerly as I fed it, changed it, bathed it. It cried often, usually at night, and it never took its whole bottle, and then it would wake up two hours later screaming, I thought from hunger, and I would have to warm up the bottle again, and it would take an ounce and fall asleep again. I had refused to nurse it: the humiliation in the hospital had been all I could handle, I couldn't go further in “animal” ways. I got little sleep and never looked in the mirror, and walked around in a daze.

But after a month, I was more used to it, and it seemed to cry a little less, and I got more sleep and fell into a routine. Adeline had been stopping over with one of her friends two or three afternoons a week, always when I was napping with the baby, and I finally told her she had to stop. I think that was the final straw between me and her; she was never more than coldly polite to me again. But my life improved a little. And then my mother would come, once a week, on Thursdays. She'd drive up and I'd run down with Arden and the plastic bag stuffed with clean diapers, extra bottles of milk, water, and orange juice, a pacifier, a bib, an extra blanket, and dump them on her lap and run back up and get the great white laundry bag, the car seat, and a suit of Brad's to go to the dry cleaner, and put those in the back of the car, and then run back up again for Arden's little folding bed, a bag of soda bottles to be returned, and my purse. It was like going to Mass or something, every Thursday we went through this ritual.

Then Mom would drive me to the dry cleaner and the A&P, where I'd drop the bottles and buy stock items that were hard to carry, jars of baby food, canned vegetables (Mother would purse her lips at them), paper towels and toilet paper, and six-packs of beer and Coke for Brad. I no longer drank anything but coffee and tea, quarts of them every day.

Then she'd drive me back to her house and I'd feed Arden and lay her in the folding bed, and do the laundry in Mother's machine, and hang it out on the umbrella-shaped clothesline in her yard, and then we'd sit in the kitchen, looking out at the yard and the wash flapping, and gaze at the baby asleep by our feet, and drink coffee and eat grilled cheese sandwiches and talk. She'd ask how Brad was doing, if he'd sold any houses yet, and I'd ask how Joy was doing, and conceal my envy at her popular high-school-queen life, and then we'd talk about her, Mother, just as we always did, about her grief, her unhappiness, and her fears—she went through crisis after crisis thinking she had cancer in various forms—until I could get her laughing. Then we'd pull out the Chinese checker board and play ferociously for an hour until Arden woke up and it was time to put away childish things and change her and feed her and give her her bottle, and then we'd pack everything back in the car, the laundry neatly folded and back in its heavy white bag, the car bed folded up, Arden, head lolling with sleepiness, slumped in the car seat, and Mother would drive me back to Lynbrook, and I'd repeat the process of running up and downstairs, and then I'd kiss her good-bye and she'd drive off, and I'd slowly climb the stairs one last time, carrying Arden close to my body and feeling utterly desolate.

B
ELLE CHANGED AS ANASTASIA
grew. From a clamorous lump needing feeding, changing, and bathing, the baby had become a personality, a being, herself, someone to be reckoned with. She watched people around her, she smiled, she pouted, and she cried, but now her crying seemed human, as if there was a reason for it, not being any longer sheer animal expression. So Belle felt. Now—at three months, four—Anastasia seemed a small creature who was in some way independent. She had a strong will of her own and no inhibitions to expressing it. Belle thought about going back to work.

But she decided that she did not want to do to Anastasia what had been done to her, she would not let her child spend her childhood in a house empty except for a servant girl who hit and yelled and did not ever smile. Oh, that terrible empty house, no books or paper or crayons, no music, no toys, nothing: no. She set her face firmly in its fine lines and smiled, and decided to remain with her child and bring her up herself.

She knew that Momma would be thrilled to have Anastasia to herself, and would care for her as she had never been able to care for her own children. But at this thought, her mind clanged shut like a metal door on a vault. Something rose inside her, hot, liquid, furious, adamant: Momma and a baby,
her
baby: no. She thought about the baby, who was changing every day. She was learning, Anastasia, she was quick. Belle would help her, teach her, provide her with culture, scrape every penny to make sure her childhood was richer than Belle's.

Anastasia was so grown up. She looked at the people around her almost as if she could understand what they were saying, what they were feeling. She was five months old and already sitting up. Evenings, Eddie and Wally would sit her in the middle of the living room floor and talk to her and tease her, tease and taunt, and she would glare at them until suddenly she would roll over on her side, and they would all howl. For she was already so fat from Momma's constant feeding that she could not sit without support. Jean thought she was adorable, and Momma adored her, but Belle knew she was a fierce baby, there was something hard and wary in her, she held herself to herself. And Belle was awed. She had been so vague, timid, terrified really, as a child, that she was awed to see this tiny infant hold her own as she did. She looked at all of them straight, without wavering, as if she were judging them. She rarely smiled. No cooing or cuddling pleased her, and she would wriggle and squirm to escape from embraces, from wrapped arms. She watched the adults as they jumped around trying to please her as if they were monkeys in a zoo and she a calm observer. Belle frequently at such moments repeated the story of the day she was wheeling Anastasia in her carriage and two shabby middle-aged women stopped and peered at the baby and chucked her under the chin and cooed at her and Anastasia glared at them as if she scorned such childish acts. Belle knew Anastasia did not like them because they were shabby. She explained this to her sister and brothers, who would gaze at Anastasia as if she were a miracle. She was their entertainment, their toy, and all of them were pleased with her contempt, her scorn, her outrageousness.

Only Ed disapproved of her, but he was rarely home. He disliked her for crying, for needing to be fed, changed, bathed. He resented Belle's attention to her. He wanted to see his beloved on an ivory throne edged with gold, himself on his knee before her, offering chocolate, and her hand on his head, accepting it, appreciating it. It was how he saw her, how he treated her, his beloved, and he was deeply hurt when she pulled sharply away from his touch and said the baby needed…whatever the baby needed. Still, on Easter Sunday, Belle and Ed dressed in their best clothes, and Belle dressed Anastasia in her new pink silk coat and hat, and Ed took his camera out and they sat on the front stoop of the Manse Street house and took pictures of each other with the baby, a fat disagreeable face done up in fancy clothes. And Jean's boyfriend, who was sometimes in the house Sunday nights, thought Anastasia was spoiled and sullen and said so, or when he didn't, simmered with anger toward her.

By now, Belle slept only an hour or two in the afternoon, and woke up when Anastasia did, and changed her and carried her downstairs and gave her a bottle, and Momma put crumbs of pie or
chruściki
in her mouth. Then Belle carried the baby out to the front room which they called the porch. It was narrow, the width of the old couch that spanned the side wall; and had windows all around. It was connected to the living room by glass-paned doors, and had a window seat in the front. Belle always sat on the window seat and laid Anastasia on the cushion beside her. Then she would look at her and talk to her. She would tell her that she, Belle, was Mommy, and that Grandma (whom Anastasia seemed to search for with her eyes) was in the kitchen baking good things for Anastasia's dinner. She would tell Anastasia about the life she would have: she would wear pink dresses and live in a beautiful house and sit under the trees. She would play the piano beautifully and draw beautifully and be very smart in school. The baby would listen, rapt, and follow her mother's face as it moved minutely with her speech. Belle felt Anastasia could understand her.

Belle began Anastasia's education when she was six months old. She would prop her on her lap at the piano and open the illustrated book of nursery rhymes that Wally had bought, and begin to play and sing. Anastasia never squirmed. Her eyes followed the marks on the page as if she could understand them. Sometimes she would bounce in Belle's lap and grunt, and Belle would stop and hand her the book and she would turn the pages until she found “The Owl and the Pussycat,” then return it to her mother to play.

In late spring, a new family moved in across the street—a young couple with two daughters and a baby just about Anastasia's age. The young woman, Elvira, was very tall and voluptuous. She was just Belle's age, but had married when she was sixteen, and had a nine-year-old daughter and one six. The baby was called Terry. Belle and Elvira made friends, and every afternoon the two young women would go for a long walk together, each wheeling a carriage, and they would talk, talk, talk. Elvira thought Belle was very well-dressed, and admired her for that, and Belle admired Elvira's way with makeup. Like girls, they sometimes suggested new hairdos for each other. They told each other their life stories. Like Belle, Elvira had gone to work at fourteen in a sweatshop. She liked it, and planned someday to leave her husband and support herself again in the corset factory. Unlike Belle, Elvira had had a wonderful rough-and-tumble childhood. She had adored her father and had always been crazy about boys. “Oh, I always loved the men!” she'd announce in a joyous booming voice, and laugh her deep rich chuckle.

She'd married Rollo, an intense and passionate man some years older than she, an electrician. But once she was pregnant, he left her alone all the time and threw tantrums if she saw anyone—even her family. So she left him, left her baby with her sister Bridget, and went back to work. Rollo followed, blustered, pleaded. She liked his passion if not his jealousy, and reached an agreement. She would return to him on the condition that she could see other men. But within a few months of their reconciliation, she was pregnant again.

“What good is an agreement once you're pregnant?” Elvira complained. “They've got you where they want you then.”

As soon as her second daughter was walking, Elvira left again and descended on Bridget—who had three children of her own, but was always willing to take her sister's as well. Again, Rollo pursued.

“He wants me when he hasn't got me, but when I'm there, he's out all the time. He just wants me there, in the house.”

This time she refused to return and Rollo went quite mad. He sat on the front porch of Bridget's house—Elvira wouldn't let him in—and beat his head against the uprights and moaned. Finally, Elvira wrested from him an agreement to which he had to testify in front of Bridget and her husband Chick, that she would return to him but each of them would live their own life with no questions asked.

“He agreed, but he didn't keep his word,” Elvira confided to Belle. “He was always wanting to know where I'd been, and whether I had a boyfriend. But I didn't care, as long as I could get out. I can't stand being stuck in the house. And then”—she pointed to the carriage—“guess what! Oh, I cried and cried when I found out I was pregnant again. And Rollo wanted it, when he can't even support us as it is.”

By now, Bridget had six kids of her own, and Elvira's girls were in school. “I just can't pick up and go, and I have no one to leave Terry with. I can't stand it, Isabel, I really can't.” It wasn't the work that bothered her: for all her weight, she had great energy, and kept an immaculate house and was a superb cook. She couldn't stand the confinement. But she had plans. One of these days…

Elvira was wondrous in Belle's eyes because she said whatever she thought. Belle had never met anyone like her before. And her honesty allowed Belle to be honest too—as honest as she could be. Elvira knew exactly what was wrong with her own life: too much confinement and not enough sex. Everything else was fine. She loved her daughters and adored Terry. But she wanted to roam the world in search of fun. She had a rich hearty full-throated laugh, and she laughed often. “Oh, I always liked a good time!” she'd explode, laughing, concluding the story of one of her adventures, and wipe tears from her cheeks. Belle laughed with her, a thinner, more refined, politer laugh. She felt almost happy with Elvira and if she would not choose to be like her, she felt very grown up and sophisticated to have such a friend.

The two young women would walk into Forest Hills Gardens, where the lovely houses were, and Belle would imagine what it would be like to live in one of them. When she was with Elvira, she felt almost as if there were something ahead of her, as if she had not already died. She would imagine living in a lovely stone house in Forest Hills Gardens with a man something like the men Elvira told her about—dark, mysterious, sexual. She knew it was only a daydream, and she never connected the mystery man with her own dark, sexual husband; she didn't want any of it to come true. She just wanted to imagine it. She could imagine herself different too, when she was with Elvira—sophisticated, experienced, free. Her mind danced with Elvira, and she felt she was getting better. She hardly ever cried anymore. And that December, after Anastasia's first birthday party, as the two women pushed their babies together through the little parks that dotted the neighborhood, Belle saw a pale pink rose blooming, right in the dead of winter.