Milk (31 page)

Other days I had my doubts, a sense of loss as never before. Beginning with the simple immutable fact that my own mother no longer walked the earth; she could not be there for me. She
hadn't
been there, not to break the news of my pregnancy to, or to offer advice and annoy me with phone calls about whether I was eating right, and had I thought about baby names.

She wasn't there for the birth, or there to knit booties and sweaters. Or to tell us from whom you had inherited your nose, or that you hated the sun in your eyes, just as I had. She wasn't there to argue with, to tell us we were burping the baby wrong, or to inform us that in her day there wasn't so much pampering of babies.

She wasn't there, not to soothe us, care for us, or cook us supper when we were exhausted. But that sort of mother wasn't
my
mother anyway.

What remained of her, my real mother? Her tortured letters, her terrible deeds against Charlotte and myself. I couldn't think about this when you were first born.

For your father and me, then, there was no sense of family history or continuity, no rituals. It was freeing in a sense, but lonely, like being settlers in a new world. So we would tell each other, standing at the ocean's edge at sunset, your father's arm around me, and you against my shoulder or attached at my breast, the undertow sucking our feet down into the sand, deeper and deeper, as if trying to root us that way.

So for me, mothering wasn't something handed down, from generation to generation, mother to daughter; like nursing, it was learned behavior. If I liked the way somebody talked to her baby, I copied it. Whatever made sense to me in books and magazines, I adopted, developing my own philosophies along the way. I became a student of mothering, from the very basics to ideology. Not that I treated you like a project, but I listened to your cries, tried to read them. When I didn't know what to do, I looked into your eyes and watched and listened.

There were some things I just plain didn't know that had nothing to do with philosophies or ideology. Giving you a bath, for instance. The first time, your father and I actually followed instructions from a book. We had two books, in fact, that weren't always in agreement.

“Step one,” I read out loud. “Start at the head. Wipe each eye from the inside out with two separate corners of the washcloth or two cotton balls.” It had been a week and we hadn't given you a bath yet, terrified we'd do something wrong. “Use cotton balls,” I said, “all right?”

“It said we could use a washcloth.”

“Yes, but the other book specifically says cotton balls. They're sterilized. We're talking about Gena's eyes, Jackson.”

Step two: ears. The books didn't agree on this either.

“Theo? Would you mind using a washcloth instead of Q-tips? I'm afraid you'll puncture her eardrum.”

“She's asleep, how can I possibly miss?”

“What if she wakes up?”

“Okay, you have a point. God this is nerve-wracking!” My face was perspiring even more than usual, rivulets of sweat rolling down my hot cheeks. I proceeded to wash your face, step three, with plain water, no soap (although this was optional in one book, a no-no in the other). You stirred for a moment, grimaced, then fell back to sleep. At step four we reached an impasse: my book said to wash your hair next, your father's said to wash your body first
then
your hair.

“I vote we wash her hair first,” I said.

“Won't she get chilled?”

“But Jackson, she has on a tee shirt.”

To our surprise you seemed to enjoy your shampoo, completely relaxing into my hands. Washing your body was another story. Just as I suspected, you hated it, first squirming, then stiffening up into a loud wail. “Hurry,” I told your father. “Get the towel. Get two of them! One for now, and one to put her in after she's dry.”

“Do you think she's hungry?” he asked.

“Who knows,” I said, opening my shirt that was drenched with milk, sweat, water. “All right, all right. Here I am, Gena. Have at me.”

From sponge baths we graduated to tub baths, once your umbilical cord fell off. You slept during the shampoos, screamed through the rest, so that I took to nursing you
before
the bath to make sure you didn't get hungry
during
. I nursed you right after, too, to soothe you from the bath itself, and I nursed you again after you were dressed, which also seemed to upset you. It was instinct, nothing I'd read in a book and anyway, it worked.

We thought of ourselves as birds. Parent birds with a baby bird. Division of labor. Some things your father did: kept the nest warm and dry and clean (more or less), went out and got food (take out), filled the car with gas, and put baby equipment together.

I nursed.

We shared the bathing, traded off on diaper changing, me taking over for your father when he felt especially overwhelmed—when poop had gone up the back of your shirt, gotten into your hair, landed on the walls somehow, not to mention our own clothes. Sometimes when you pooped we all needed changing.

Spit-up was something else. There was the bad kind, which also necessitated a full change of clothes all around, or the medium kind, which required a simple change of shirts. Then there was the kind we hardly noticed anymore, just a line of white stuff down our backs.

Birds didn't have extended family. Neither did we. We tried not to think about it, the fact that we were doing this all alone. The fact that we had to get instructions out of a book on how to give our baby a bath. Later we wondered why we hadn't at least hired a nurse for a few days, to help us make the adjustment. But a nurse, I think, would've only reminded me that I didn't have a mother of my own: I had to hire one. I preferred to pretend—not that I had a mother, but that not having one didn't bother me.

It did and it didn't. Having you made me feel rooted to the ground and for the first time in my life, I could cast off my mother, not be haunted by her shadow. I was free of her at last. Yet I felt a blackness lurking around the edges, as if I'd better not stray from the center of this life I was building. I stood here, the blackness there, not two feet away. Better not run my hand, not even my little finger, through that blackness on the other side, the blackness that was my mother. All of this—my daughter, my husband and I newly returned to each other—all of this—could be ripped from me in an instant. Gone.

T
WENTY
-N
INE

E
PILOGUE

The thirtieth anniversary of my mother's suicide and we're about to have a party
. Not a party exactly—friends over for dinner. I didn't plan it this way, the date creeping up on me as it always does, or maybe unconsciously I
did
plan it this way, but here we are, Jackson throwing tortilla chips into a bowl and setting out his homemade salsa, while I take our daughter onto my hip and head upstairs to dress. Though I showered earlier today, I'm barefoot and wearing a Rockies T-shirt down to my knees, my hair up in a knot coming loose. Gena's still in her pajamas.

She's two and we're back in Colorado where we belong, where we moved after the riots, the earthquakes, the drought, the flooding.

But that was after Gena was born. For a while Jackson and I lived in separate rooms in his apartment, though we spent every minute together—a newborn to care for. No time to talk, not about us, not at first. Maybe it was better that way. Jackson had continued to attend AA meetings and was thoughtful, edgy, emotional. He tended to his business, I tended to mine, and together we tended our daughter, and if we learned anything, it was that we sometimes talk too much, picking at our wounds unnecessarily.

My own wounds: that was a different matter. I'd wake up kicking, thrashing in bed, and couldn't talk enough—to Jackson, to Maggie, and especially to my therapist in Pasadena, whom I began to see a few months after Gena was born, driving up there once a week, with Gena of course, who was lulled by freeways and hysterical on surface streets. At stoplights I had to keep the car in motion, in forward and reverse, a few inches up, a few inches back, because once she started screaming, there was no end. To have her along was soothing to me, screams or not: no matter what happened in therapy—and it was hard work, like dredging up a corpse from a lake, a slow and reluctant process with ugly results—at the end of it was Gena, waiting for me at Maggie's house, hungry to nurse and be with me.

I'd see my therapist for an hour, followed by lunch with Maggie. Then I'd check in on Dad at the Grove. Never exactly overjoyed to see his granddaughter, or me, he always assumed we had better things to do than visit him and seemed eager for us to be on our way to do those things, whatever they were. As a grandfather he was inattentive, as I knew he would be, but I also knew he loved us, if mostly in theory.

Corb and I didn't see much of each other during that time, only now and then so that he and Diane wouldn't be total strangers to Gena. His only response to our mother's letters had been to eventually mail them back to me, no comment. I pictured him drying up in the Southern California heat, and I came to believe that the cancerous growth in his cheek had been a rotten fruit that nonetheless bore the seeds of possibility. A missed chance, the chance all survivors have—survivors of near-fatal accidents, illness or tragedy. One should walk away from the wreckage radiating life in the open palm of one's hand, and much as I loved Corb, for the simple yet elusive reason that he was my brother, his fist was closed tight.

Aunt Lyla I saw only once during those months, admittedly out of curiosity as much as to show off the baby. More nervous than usual, she frittered about serving me yogurt and juice and did the baby want anything, she kept repeating. Rice cereal, a little mashed banana? She's nursing, I said, too young for solid foods. “Whatever, dear,” she said, but I got the impression she thought I was a little too devoted to Gena, that I coddled her. She asked if I wanted to put her down. She's not sleepy, I said. But you can put her down, she said. In the other room. Why would I want to do that? I asked. Oh, she said, I don't know. When Gena pooped, she whisked her out of my arms in order to change her for me, the same efficiency with which she kept house, cooked, wrote thank-you notes and accessorized her outfits. “Children have to be managed,” Aunt Lyla advised me. In her day—my mother's day—babies were trained, is how I saw it. Trained not to cry by being left to cry, trained to go to sleep when they weren't tired. Trained to entertain themselves. Trained to be good. Trained not to need.

“There, now,” Aunt Lyla said, handing Gena back to me; I could smell the powder beneath her diaper.

“Did you ever read my mother's letters, Aunt Lyla?”

She startled, as I knew she would, stopping in the tracks of her stiletto heels, about to light a cigarette.

“Well, did you?”

“I read them and then I burned them. I suggest you do the same.”

“I'm not about to burn my mother's letters!”

“Oh stop being such a warrior, dear. All I meant is that it might give you some closure, as it gave me.” She smiled obliquely, adjusting her earring for a brief vulnerable moment, before crushing out her cigarette.

Good old Aunt Lyla. Still capable of a vogue word now and then. Closure:
I
saw a closed door. I saw my mother's ashes and the tiny decayed body of my infant sister. I saw my mother's sister, my aunt, glancing at me furtively with all the love she was capable of. She was at peace. Not a peace I would choose for myself, it seemed to me a compromise of sorts. What peace wasn't? Hammered-out agreements and concessions and everybody walking away from the table with a scrap of paper, a bit of land. When would I achieve peace, the palm of my hand radiating life?

I had more than a scrap of paper, a bit of land. I had my daughter. But I'd made a pact with myself the day she was born, that she was here for herself, not me.

The day after she was born, Gregg came to the hospital. His face was drawn.
Why didn't you call me?
He couldn't say it out loud, anymore than I could say,
You know why
.

He wasn't good around the baby, his hands knotted in his pockets. “She's pretty,” he ventured.

It broke the tension at least and we both started laughing: tiny Gena—so gorgeous to me—squashed face and pointy-headed, her diaper at that moment filled with black tar.

It was a test, I realized, calling Gregg here. How would he act toward the baby, toward me? Here was my answer: absolutely wooden. He looked at her as if confronted by an animated melon.
What is this? What do I do with it?
He kept his hands in his pockets, not offering to hold her, and I knew it was over between us. She wasn't his, even Gena seemed to sense this. I nearly ordered him out of my room, I was so disappointed. Instead, I closed my eyes, and through my tears, told him I was sorry. He said he was sorry too, and kissed my forehead. We parted as we had begun, romantic friends.

An hour later Jackson visited, his second visit since Gena's birth the previous night. Thrilled with her, gently jogging the bundle that was Gena, he'd remember me, his smile fading. What were we going to do? Tears in his eyes, in mine.

What would we do?

I was beginning to think I knew, swabbing at Gena's sticky black, prolific bottom (I had just changed her!) until it was clean. A bottom that could fit in the palm of my hand, with room to spare. I got her into a diaper, a new tee shirt, and rolled her up in her blankets somehow. She was slightly premature but at six-and-a-half pounds, not a preemie.

I sat down on the bed and flung open my hospital gown. With Jackson watching, I nursed our daughter.

The thirtieth anniversary of my mother's suicide …

I tried a support group for incest survivors, since something of the sort had apparently happened to me. I disliked the women, some of whom seemed bona fide crazy: in and out of hospitals, off and on antidepressants and tranquilizers; obese, alcoholic. One had been imprisoned for prostitution and another, a teenager, was still living in the same house as her perpetrator.