Milk (10 page)

“No, Aunt Lyla. No marriage counseling.” In fact Jackson was open to the idea, but I wasn't. I'd had enough therapy to last me two lifetimes, and what good had it done?

During dinner I'm struck with how much Aunt Lyla resembles my mother after all, not in specific features but an overall impression, something I can only glimpse for a moment, and when I do, it's like I'm having dinner with
her
, my mother. I tell Aunt Lyla this. My words come out knotted, pained.

“You still think about her, then,” she says.

I nod, unable to swallow the food in my mouth.

My aunt survived and my mother didn't. What I'd really like to say is: I wish my mother had had your strength. But there's no need to say it. Aunt Lyla is thinking it and so am I. All through her dinner of paper-thin beef and rolls and wedges of melon we are thinking it—every time we raise our glasses and every time she looks at me, and I look at her; it's my mother between us, sitting at the table toasting us with her glass of blood and bitterness, dust and milk, fear and death, with us as she's always been, shouldering us apart with her presence and her secrets.

Later, when it's time for me to kiss Aunt Lyla goodbye and say “Thank you for dinner,” I suddenly realize I've failed to mention my pregnancy.

It was one of my reasons in coming here, my main reason. Aunt Lyla is one of the people I feel I should tell. Like telling my own mother. In fact, I meant also to ask her about my mother. Direct questions that seem more important now that I'm going to be a mother myself.

“What is it, dear?” At the back door Aunt Lyla is about to lay a hand on my shoulder as though to draw me back inside, but at the last minute she doesn't touch me.

I decide to dive in, right here by the back door by the washer and dryer, the plastic bag of limes she's foisted on me hanging from my wrist. “Aunt Lyla, why did my mother kill herself?” The words creak out of my throat: I shouldn't ask, we don't talk like this. Shouldn't.

“She was unhappy, dear. You know that.” She's eyeing the washer.

I'm trying to get her to look at me. “Why was she unhappy?”

“Excuse me, dear, I just have to—” She picks this moment to open the dryer door and clean the lint tray, can't help herself apparently. “None of us will ever know why she did that, Theo.”

“You don't know why?” Why do I never believe them, the us she speaks of. “But you were her sister.”

“We weren't close.”

“What are you hiding?” There. I've said it.

“I'm not.” She's folding the lint into her hand, like a blanket. I have a memory of peeling it out of the tray myself as a child, thinking it was a blanket; where was my mother then?

“Why won't you tell me anything?” I say. “How she looked the last time you saw her, what she said—”

“Honestly, Theo. I don't remember.” That impatience with me she can barely disguise, especially about this, my mother; isn't this what her impatience stemmed from all along?

“Aunt Lyla, you don't seem to realize. I know nothing about her. Simple things. What her favorite food was, what music she liked, the books she read, what she talked about, the sound of her voice—”

“The sound of her voice. You were a child. How can you expect to remember?”

“Exactly. So I need you to tell me. Don't you understand? There's a hole. It's like I came from nothing. I don't know who my mother is, I don't know who I am! Can't you, in some way, give her back to me?”

“I didn't take her, Theo. I can't bring her back. I can't raise the dead.”

As if that's what I'm asking. As if my request can be reduced to this. I'm holding back tears. “I'm asking you to tell me more about her, as much as you can remember.”

“It was so long ago, Theo. I really don't remember. Frankly I don't want to. She's dead. She's been dead years. Isn't it time for you to go on with your life?”

She gives me one of her famous searching looks, the sort older, wiser people bestow on the younger and less experienced. My cue. I'm supposed to agree: we've had our little talk, I feel better now, and by golly, she's right; it's time for me to get on with the business of living.

“What are you saying, Aunt Lyla? That you can't remember or you won't?” The bag of limes swings on my wrist.

“Neither one, dear. I'm tired. Can't we call it a night?” A smile that's supposed to appear gentle.

“What about the baby, then? What about Charlotte? How come no one will talk about her either?”

If I'm not supposed to bring up my mother, I'm never, ever to mention Charlotte. A thin white arm, a cry—did she even exist? Aunt Lyla looks furious.

“We don't talk about Charlotte because it's too painful, Theo. You should know that. It destroyed your mother.”

“Is that why she killed herself?”

“I keep telling you, I don't know why she killed herself. Charlotte was one reason, absolutely. She was unhappy, Theo, and there was her drinking too, and her pills. Can't you just leave it at that?”

“I can't leave it! It's what's been wrong with me all these years—I can't stay married, I can't settle down, I can't do anything.…” And, I'm thinking, I'm going to have a baby now besides. My child, my mother's grandchild. I want to tell this to Aunt Lyla, scream it at her, but instead I just leave, just walk out the door.

I don't trust her and I don't know why. Telling her about Jackson was a tidbit. I run to the car grateful that I've kept the one thing I care most about a secret. The baby, my baby.

T
EN

“Jackson? Did I wake you?”

I'm calling at nine o'clock in the morning and I know just how the winter sun filters in through the windows, backlighting the red butte across the narrow canyon.

“Theo?” Jackson says. The mattress, our mattress, squeaks as he sits up suddenly.

“I did wake you. I'm sorry.”

“I'm on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule this semester, so the other days, I …”

“Sleep in.” Code for hung over. All the little codes we used to have for everything.
Sleeping in
for hung over.
Do you want to keep me company?
he'd say, meaning did I want to get sloshed with him?
Going to the store
roughly translated to no beer in the house, if he said it; no food in the house, if I said it. Not all the codes related to his drinking.
I'm going to go read
meant I wanted to be left alone for an hour or so, after which maybe we'd have sex;
watching TV
meant Jackson wanted to be alone to drink. No sex.

“Why did you wait all this time to call me?” Jackson's voice is husky—how it sounds when he's close to tears—and I realize we've been waiting in silence, each of us, for the other to speak.

“I guess I wasn't ready yet.”

“You scared me, Theo. I didn't know where you'd gone, no one knew. You could've been injured, something could've happened to you. I had to call the police, I called your father—”

“So I heard.”

Neither of us says anything for a while.

“Would you at least tell me why you left?” he asks.

As if he hasn't a clue. The injured party. The last to know.

“Jackson,” I say as tactfully as possible, enunciating my words—or maybe it's that I'm filled with hurt and anger and distrust, incensed that he acts so in the dark. “You knew I was leaving. You saw me get the suitcase out, you just chose not to say or do anything.” I'd put in an item and wait. Pair of jeans. Wait. Blouse. Socks. Wait. Toothbrush, toothpaste. Wait some more. Jackson never got off the couch, never said a word.

“All right, you left. I let you go. Huge mistake. Is that why it's over?
Is
it over between us? As for my drinking, I'm quitting.”

“Quitting. That's a strange verb tense. Does it mean you're planning to quit or that you have quit already?”

“Ongoing,” he says. “In process. Anyway, Theo, it isn't just my drinking that broke us up. You know that.”

“I do?”

Another unbearable silence.

“So what now,” he says. “You're out there, I'm here. What happens now?”

“I can't answer that for you.”

“But you've already answered it for yourself?”

“For now,” I say, thinking of Gregg this morning in bed, how he rolled over onto his back in his sleep, baring his pale chest to me, his stomach. His soft parts.

“Theo, I have a question.”

“Ask.” A fleeting image of Jackson's face in the mornings—in direct contrast to Gregg's soft parts—his beard grown in overnight, the dark bristles shadowing his cheeks, how I used to ask him to put off shaving sometimes, until after we made love.

“Why Pasadena?” he says.

“It's not such an unlikely choice, you know. My father's here, my brother—”
Gregg is here
.

“It just seems peculiar considering you've spent your life avoiding the place. Is there some other reason?”

Defensively, I put my hand on my belly. “No.”

“Something to do with your mother?”

“No.”

“All right,” he says, “changing the subject. Yesterday I hiked down to your favorite part of the creek.”

I recognize this as a ploy: Jackson's appealing to my love of Stonewall Creek. He's referring to the place where the creek diverts around a bend of rock. It's hollowed out, the rock, the underside of it eroded by water, producing an echo, like a hidden grotto, and you can't see how far the water spreads, how far back under the rock it goes, if it's a pool or a lake, or just an illusion.

“Did the horses follow you down there?” I ask.

“They seemed to be looking for you. Butting their heads up against me, looking behind as if you might be there after all, hiding.” He laughs, then stops short, the way he does, biting it off at the end; today, though, he sucks in air and his laughter merely quits, a somber halt.

“I'm sure the horses have forgotten all about me by now,” I say, and in case Jackson takes this as any kind of wistful remark, I add, “I have to get off the phone now. We need to say goodbye.”

My next visit to Dr. Grimes yields a surprise: he's at the hospital delivering a baby and can't meet with me today, but I'm told there's a midwife in the office now. How about an appointment with her?

“Dr. Grimes has a midwife working for him?”

“Or if you prefer, we can reschedule you with Dr. Grimes,” the receptionist says, as if she doesn't care either way, but I can tell she's uncomfortable with the midwife option. Rather, she thinks I'm uncomfortable.

“A midwife is fine.” I suppress a smile, remembering my last visit here: being swathed in white sheets, Dr. Grimes' cow talk, the nurses adorned in those old-fashioned starched caps kept in place with hairpins.

“Have a seat, then. It will be a few minutes.”

I sit next to a woman wearing some kind of sling, indeed, with a baby inside.

“How old?” I ask about her infant.

“Six weeks. We're here for our six-week checkup. My checkup, I mean.” She laughs. “Everything is
ours
, now.”

“A girl or a boy?”

“A baby girl.”

She looks like a girl. Pink, a soft stubble of blond hair. The baby begins to fuss a little.

“Hungry,” the woman says and adjusts the sling a little, begins to nurse.

“How neat,” I say. “The sling. Where'd you get it?”

“From a catalog.”

“Really? Which one?” I'm on familiar ground, mentally writing copy.
Close, cuddled, safe. Our sling allows mother's hands to be free, though her heartstrings are tied
. Awful!

“Which catalog,” she says. “Hmm. Either Sensational Beginnings or, you know, the other one.”

“Which one?”

“They usually keep some copies here. You can check that table over there.” She points.

I stay right where I am. “I have a lot to learn. A lot to buy. I don't even know what to get.” Alarm: the first time I've thought about this aspect. What I don't have. Diapers, baby clothes, mysterious ointments and balms—can you buy a crib from a catalog? I can write about this stuff, but I know nothing, nothing! What I don't have, and what I'll need to get. What I won't have: a husband. Or I could have one, at a price. Then there's Gregg. Would he like to step into Jackson's shoes? Images collide: young fatherly sort steps into a staged nursery shot, crib, mobile, changing table, bright lights—
One hundred percent cotton, machine washable, sling comes in an array of colors
—his arms held out for a baby with makeup on who screams at the sight of him.

“Plenty of time,” the new mother assures me. “We're still pretty unequipped—actually it never seems you're equipped enough. How far along are you?”

“Almost twelve weeks.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Nauseous. Starving. It's beginning to seem normal.”

She laughs, rises to her feet and rearranges her baby in the sling, having just been summoned for her appointment.

I try to concentrate on the form I'm filling out, one I thought I'd already filled out last time here; evidently I left out a few things. Epilepsy? No. Heart disease? No. Yes, I've had mumps, chicken pox, German measles. Nervous breakdown? Not yet. Baby's father's name? the form politely requests. I leave that blank.

Soon after it's my turn and I follow the nurse down the hall.

“Theo? Is it you?” The midwife—at least I think she's the midwife—hurries into the exam room checking her clipboard, frantic for some reason. Oh great.

“It's me all right.”

“Theo, Theo, look at me! Don't you recognize me?”

I stand up suddenly: woman in a white coat, long stringy blond hair, about my age. Then I notice her eyes, blue and iridescent. I always used to think she looked like one of those Nordic Madonnas you'd find in an art museum, from the early Renaissance period—haloed and blond, sapphirine eyes.