Louisa Meets Bear (2 page)

Through the letters, I learned that my mother was doing her social work internship at a state prison, where she provided substance abuse counseling to first-time offenders. I learned that my mother was living in a small apartment in Oakland. (That's where the Black Panthers are based, my brother would later say, knowingly.) I learned that my mother had taken to the California landscape: that she had driven north to Mendocino County to see the redwoods and the wild, rocky coastline and then south to see the sequoias and Kings Canyon; that she and a friend were planning a five-day backpacking trip into the more isolated parts of the Tuolumne Meadows. I learned that every Sunday she took my cousin, Louisa, out to lunch and that sometimes Louisa would bring Corrine, her babysitter when she was younger and now her best friend, and the two of them would go shopping afterward at the vintage clothing stores on Telegraph Avenue.

In the letters, my mother invited us, my brother and me, to visit her, anytime, well, anytime except April or May or December or January—then, she wrote, she'd be too preoccupied with her exams and papers to really show us around—but neither of us did. The first summer after she left, she came east for a month, staying with my grandmother in Hartford, but I refused to see her, refused to even discuss it with anyone, and although I heard hushed conversations between my father and her over the phone, I surmised that she'd decided I was old enough to decide for myself if I wanted to see her, an awareness that left me even more miserable than had she or my father insisted.

My mother's second visit, prompted by my grandmother's hip operation, came the fall I began college—having managed to graduate from high school a year early by taking senior English and honors calculus in summer school but then, secretly afraid of going too far away, following my brother to Yale. Jay must have received our mother's letter a day before me because I remember hearing from him first about her request to visit the two of us in New Haven. It was a hot Indian summer afternoon, the kind of day when complexions look oily and sallow, half the campus still in sandals, the other half with long-sleeved shirts stuck to their backs, and my brother and I were having coffee together at Naples, sitting in one of the worn wooden booths etched with initials, a fan whirring above, the smells of oregano and pizza dough wafting around us. I must have been silent in a sullen, aggrieved way after Jay told me about our mother's request, because he spoke to me sharply, saying something about how it was time to cut the crap—Christ, Lizzy, can't you give her a break?

The words of my usually unflappable brother fell like a slap, and I remember him reaching for a napkin from the dispenser for me to wipe my eyes and ending up with a wad two inches thick and then, a few weeks later, sitting in the same booth with my mother and brother, the three of us sharing a pizza while Jay talked about his plans for a semester in Grenada and I tried not to stare at my mother, who in the three years since I'd last seen her seemed to have grown younger—thinner, with her hair cut short in a way that elongated her neck, golden against a white peasant blouse—and who, I could tell, was using every ounce of self-control not to stroke my arm or push my hair off my forehead.

After that visit, I took to answering my mother's letters and she took to writing separately to my brother and me, and even though things were not what any of us could call okay, it seemed that we were on the path to rediscovering some kind of connection and even planning for me to visit her the following Christmas. Which I would have done had I not, the fall of my sophomore year, gotten pregnant.

*   *   *

How and why I got pregnant at eighteen the first time I had sex, the unbeknownst father the husband of my history professor—Benita Frosch, a brilliant German woman with wild hair secured on top of her head by lacquered chopsticks, whom I worked for as a research assistant and who had pushed her timid husband, Hans, on me so she could pursue what was, I learned later from my brother, a scandalous affair with a female graduate student—has always seemed to me less significant than what ensued. Dumbly, I let two months go by, missing two periods, chalking up the nausea to nerves, finally taking a pregnancy test, which came back falsely negative, then waiting another week for a blood test, the results arriving in my eleventh week.

My roommate, Miriam, a modern dancer with a pointy nose and an obsessive crossword puzzle habit, came with me to the appointment at Planned Parenthood.

You're cutting it close, hon, the abortion counselor told me. Another week and we wouldn't be able to do a D&C.

Always efficient, Miriam took notes on everything the counselor said.
A long tube connected to a vacuum aspirator is inserted into the cervix. You'll hear a sucking sound for about five minutes. Imagine it as a mini-vacuum cleaning out the tissue attached to the walls of your uterus.

I came back to my dorm room with pamphlets and mimeographed instructions. The
procedure
, as it was called in the pamphlet, was scheduled for two days later.
Don't eat anything that morning. If the cramping and bleeding continue for longer than three days,
immediately
contact your doctor. Bring payment in full in
CASH
.

Miriam and her premed boyfriend disappeared into Miriam's room. I flopped down on the couch in the suite living room, the pamphlets perched on my stomach, my arm sweeping the floor for distraction. Then, in one of those coincidences that seem too fantastical to be true but that determine more of our lives than we would like to think (years later, when the evolutionary biologists would rewrite Darwin, moving randomness from background to fore, I knew from my own minuscule experience in the stream of evolution that they were right to give chance marquee billing), I picked up one of Miriam's boyfriend's books, dropped in a heap on the floor.

Perhaps it was not, in fact, as creepily uncanny as it seemed. Perhaps I had registered subliminally that it was a human biology text—not an accident when my hand landed on that book rather than the paperback of Machiavelli's
The Prince
or the organic chemistry text between which it was sandwiched.

Flipping pages, I reached the chapter on embryonic development. Seven color pictures showed the fetus at various stages. In the eleven-week photo, the fetus rested on its back in an orb that looked like the sun. Little hands played with a nose. A black eye stared out from the page. At three months, I read, the fetus is the size of a mouse.

I sat up. I felt queasy. They were going to vacuum something the size of a mouse out of my belly and into a bottle labeled medical waste?

The bed creaked in Miriam's room. Miriam, I feebly called. Can you come here? Please come.

*   *   *

When I started to bleed in my fifth month, the doctor I'd been seeing in New Haven ordered bed rest. I really should insist on a bedpan, he told me, but I'll let you get up to go to the bathroom. Otherwise, flat on your back. I withdrew from the spring semester, and the deans, encouraged by Benita Frosch, in whom I never confided the paternity of my baby but who must have suspected, granted me a leave of absence.

Miriam packed my things, and my brother and his roommate Tom, a theater kid from New York whom I'd had a bit of a crush on but realizing that he knew everything about my situation could now hardly look in the eye, loaded my things into my brother's car. Good luck, Lizzy, Tom said after my brother had settled me into the back seat with a pillow. He gave me a little salute and then a deep bow.

Jay and my father carried my boxes to my old room. Although we had talked about what I might do when the baby came—my father had arranged for a possible adoption, the cousins of one of his partners, a nice childless couple from the city, the husband a Yale graduate too, as though that somehow linked us in one big family, just an option, my father said, careful not to push me, you'll have up until the delivery to decide—this newest flat-on-my-back twist had come too quickly for me to think further than getting home.

We ate dinner, the three of us, in my room: me lying down with my dishes on a bed tray, my brother and father on chairs with their plates on their laps.

What the hell are you going to do on Monday? Jay asked. Who's going to bring you food while Dad's at work?

I looked helplessly at my father. I imagined him leaving a bowl of food by my bed.

My father cleared his throat. Afterward I thought maybe his eyes were damp. Your mother, he said. Your mother's coming home.

*   *   *

Although my mother had known that Jackie was eighteen and black, one of the few black families in the largely Puerto Rican neighborhood, my mother was, she would tell me (I was by then in my eighth month), taken aback at the sight of the girl—tall, with big arms and broad hips, a burnished Rubens, all volume with beauty and delicacy delegated to her almond eyes and bow lips.
She's so young
, my mother remembered having thought. And yet, the girl with her lushness, her full body and taut skin, seemed to my mother more fecund, a closer replica of Nature's Madonna than herself.

My mother extended her hand. Should she introduce herself by her last name or her first? Uncertain, she used both. “You must be Jackie,” she added.

“Yeah.”

“And this must be Brandon.”

“That's the little bugger.”

My mother leaned down to coo at the baby. Yellow crust rimmed his nose. The baby looked away, uninterested in my mother's feeble sounds.

Jackie led my mother in and motioned her toward a brown plaid couch with tufts of foam sticking out through the fabric. My mother caught herself about to dust off the spot where she would sit.

Jackie lowered herself into a metal folding chair facing the couch. From the back of the apartment, my mother could hear music like she'd once heard in a nightclub on a trip with my father to a hotel in San Juan. The toddler carried her bag of Fritos over to my mother and began dropping the chips one by one into my mother's canvas tote.

“Denise, you stop that or you'll get a smack,” Jackie said. The child kept on with her game. My mother reached down and lifted the tote onto the couch. She touched the little girl's arm, and then fished around in the bag until she found her keys with the fuzzy animal ring. (You'd given it to me for my birthday, my mother told me. That was when you still thought that if
you
liked something, I would too.)

The child picked up the key ring and wandered over to show it to her mother. Brandon had started to cry, and Jackie put a bottle in his mouth. Denise yanked on her mother's pant leg.

Jackie jerked her leg back. “Girl, you been getting on my nerves all morning.”

Now Denise was crying. Feeling somehow responsible—really, she thought, the only adult in the room—my mother leaned forward and beckoned to the little girl. “Come, you can sit with me. Mommy's busy with Brandon.”

Denise next to her, my mother took out a legal pad from the tote. Folded into the pad was a sheet titled “Family Relations: Interview Assignment.” My mother glanced over the list of questions she'd so carefully reviewed the night before:
Who do you consider to be the members of your family? With whom do you discuss your problems? Who do you turn to when there's an emergency?

Brandon had stopped sucking. His head rested now on Jackie's shoulder. She reached into her pocket for a cigarette pack.

“Before we begin,” my mother asked, “do you have any questions?”

Jackie lit a cigarette and inhaled. For a second she closed her eyes and an expression of calm passed over her face. “Yeah, who's gonna see what I say?”

“No one. I mean, no one outside my class.”

“My caseworker ain't going to see this?”

“No. This is for my educational benefit only.”

“You mean like homework.”

“Yes. It's one of my assignments.”

Jackie leaned back in the folding chair so that her shoulder blades rested against the metal back and her legs, crossed at the ankles, stretched in front. Brandon lay belly-down on top of her. “Just the Welfare thinks that my gram watches the babies. She does a lot, but like today and some mornings she cleans this lady's house.”

From the casework report, my mother had learned that Jackie, her two sisters, and her brother were raised by their mother's mother, Faith, after their own mother had disappeared. Now this gram at fifty-two had a third generation of kids in her home. “So, who watches the children?” my mother asked.

“I do, mostly. Or when I was going to school, I'd leave them with the girl downstairs.”

My mother wondered if she should ask more, but child care was not on her list of questions and it seemed like prying to inquire further. “Well, maybe we should start,” she said. Clearing her throat, she began reading aloud the lines typed under the heading “Instructions to Participant”: “These are all questions about family relations—how you and your family work as a unit. Answer them as honestly and completely as you can. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers.”

Jackie rubbed Brandon's back with her free hand. Denise sucked on the fuzzy key-ring ball. “What's
relations
mean?” Jackie asked.

My mother struggled to find a way to explain. “You know,” she said, “it's like relationship, how people get along.”

Jackie looked bored already. “Sounds okay. I'm just gonna put the baby down first.” Jackie got up with Brandon and walked toward the back of the apartment. The music stopped and then my mother heard the familiar rattling of crib rails lifting.

When Jackie returned, she took the cigarettes out from her shirt pocket, turned the pack over, and tapped another one out.

“All righty,” my mother said, embarrassed at how unnatural her voice seemed. (Something about the way that
all righty
came out, my mother told me, sounded like the Mr. Rogers imitations your brother used to do. Do you remember? He'd tease you, going on and on in that singsong voice, until you were so overexcited you'd start to cry or pee in your pants.) “Could you list for me the members of your family?”