Milk (6 page)

“What about me?”

“You never say much about your childhood, for instance.”

“You know the facts, Theo. Middle-class upbringing. Worse than middle-class. My mother boiled the beef before she cooked it. She boiled canned vegetables, for God's sake.”

“So it was a very sterile environment,” I would say.

“Not a germ or a microbe anywhere.”

“I meant the emotional environment, Jackson.”

He was difficult to live with, no doubt about it. He contended that
I
was difficult to live with. Moody, opinionated, not very well organized. In his view, somehow, if it weren't for him, our house would fall down around us, we'd contract encephalitis, the Cold War would resume, and we'd starve to death. Disaster would strike, all because of some oversight on my part. I hadn't filled the car with gas. I hadn't paid the phone bill. I left the coffee pot on. I couldn't balance a checkbook.

“If you want the job done right …” he murmured once, removing the checkbook and calculator from me.

“Do it yourself.” I completed the sentence for him. “Jackson, it's just a checkbook! How am I ever going to learn to balance it if you won't give me a chance?”

“I have to know,” he said, “what our finances are.”

“We're solvent. Isn't that enough? Is it because both your parents died that the world feels so insecure to you?”

He could play the role of the poor orphaned I-don't-need-anybody child, artfully. Even I was convinced. But at times it would get annoying, how much he believed he didn't need other people—and how other people let him down on a regular basis.

“The world is no more insecure to me than it is to you,” he'd say. “If I have that problem, you must have it tenfold. Losing your mother as a child.”

Whenever he brought it up, I felt myself deadening inside, eviscerating.

Still, all might have been fine in the long run had it not been for Jackson's drinking. Might have been fine, though I suppose our problems went deeper. But it was Jackson's drinking that I could see, objectify, quantify, and it was enough to make me run from the marriage finally.

It got so I couldn't stand the pop of a beer can being opened; I could
hear
it going down Jackson's throat. Could hear beer bottles rubbing their cold shoulders together in the refrigerator. He'd go through one six-pack, and start in on another. He was never mean when he drank, just absent. He was there in the house, but not there.

Occasionally he'd try to stop, but he made it clear that it was on my behalf;
he
didn't have a problem. I did. Then I'd find beer cans in our Blazer, stashed in paper bags. I kept count. I couldn't stop counting. Whenever he left the house, I counted, lifting beer cans and bottles gritty with coffee grounds from the trash, lining them up on the kitchen counter two by two like school children, two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve.

I tried Al-Anon and hated it. Secretly, I despised my sponsor who had lived with her still-imbibing alcoholic husband for over forty years. In her lined face and gray hair I was supposed to see the serenity we all sought. What I saw was a doormat. What was I sticking around for, what was I doing with Jackson? What bound me to him?

Finally, Jackson went into another phase—last month, December, after his classes had ended—a kind of bender maybe, except he didn't leave the house. He didn't leave the couch. He didn't turn off the TV, nor did he watch it. He stared out the window day and night.

“What is the matter?” I asked.

He didn't answer. I'd seen him do this kind of thing before for a day or two, a black mood combined with drinking, but this stretched into a week, then another week. He seemed deeply depressed, even angry, but at whom I didn't know. Me? Had he guessed about my near-miss of an affair with Gregg four years ago? Had
he
had an affair? On top of everything else, I began to suspect I was pregnant.

“Jackson, what if we were to have a baby?” I ventured one afternoon, attempting to make room for myself on the couch where he lay. He barely moved his feet aside. “Would you still fall into these moods?”

“I don't want to talk about this now.” He fingered the remote, gazed past me out the window.

“Fine,” I said. “What sort of father would you be anyway?”

I was hoping to goad a response out of him, pick a fight if necessary. Anything but this lifelessness.

“What has set you off like this?” I said. “You won't leave the couch, you won't stop popping open beer after beer. Should I call a doctor? Do you need to go to the hospital? Please talk to me!”

“It's my vacation,” he said.

“Yes, that's true.” The college was out for a month, winter break. “What kind of vacation is this?” I said.

He shrugged.

That same night I left Jackson, though I hadn't planned on it. I only went to the store, to get out of the house, away from Jackson, but I found I couldn't buy anything. I pushed the empty cart around: the fluorescent lighting made everything look dim and yellow, pasty and intestinal, churning. I felt the beginnings of nausea. I couldn't think of what we needed at the house—there didn't seem to be a
we
anymore. I left the cart in the middle of an aisle and drove home in the dark. It was only six in the evening, but black and tunneled as the middle of the night. What kept me from veering off the road was this idea of leaving, returning to California—
I'm pregnant
, I kept thinking.
Oh, my God
. I pushed away thoughts of Jackson. He wouldn't get up from the couch. And he didn't, not when I packed my suitcase that night, not when I walked out the door.
I'm pregnant and this is the course I must take. My mother
… I felt the unwanted chromosomal link snaking around inside me, connecting me to my dead mother like a poisoned umbilical cord.

F
IVE

Still, I don't call Jackson. Instead, I get ready to go out to dinner with Gregg. What do I mean by that? There's nothing to get ready—all I brought from Colorado were jeans. I try on different tops, fiddle with my hair. Hopeless.

I run down the stairs two at a time, my purse slapping against my thigh. I stop, remembering: slip off my wedding band. Run back upstairs to rub foundation on the spot, to get rid of the tan line.

Downstairs, I tell the balding man at the front desk, “I'm on my way out. I'll need the key.”

As usual he's reluctant to hand it over. “You sure?”

“Yes,” I say emphatically, “I'm going to be late. If you're so concerned about not having enough keys, why don't you make copies?”

“Not enough demand. Who goes out here?”

“Since obviously I'm the only one who does, why not just give me the key?”

“I only have the one.”

“Fine. I'll take it.”

“For tonight only, remember.”

I always mean to have a copy made while I'm out, but I never seem to find a locksmith open.

Twenty of seven, I'm clattering up the stairs of Bullocks, where my Aunt Lyla used to take me shopping. Clothes my mother would have approved of, clothes my father had to approve, since he was paying. I would model for him first one outfit, then another, while Aunt Lyla smoked cigarettes angrily. Didn't he think she knew enough to select clothes Marian would have liked? Conservative color-coordinated outfits: red sweaters, bobby socks, kilts. Dirndls, white blouses, dresses with peter pan collars.

Aunt Lyla, my mother's sister, from whom our entire family became distant. I envision her throwing back her gold-dyed hair, laughing nervously, lighting a cigarette. Aunt Lyla never liked my father, blaming him for my mother's death, and she found other reasons over the years to disassociate herself from him bit by bit, a slight here, a lapse there, until it's been maybe ten years since they've communicated. But why should they, when you think about it? Connected only by my dead mother, their lives spun off in different directions, Dad eventually remarrying Dorinne and further antagonizing Lyla—so this was her sister's replacement! (Not that others didn't share her dismay; Dorinne was difficult). Slowly the distance between my father and Aunt Lyla spread to us, me and Corb. Not surprising in my own case since my relationship with her had always been fraught with stiffness and misunderstanding. She adored Corb, however, although ultimately she was willing to sacrifice him as well, for reasons none of us ever understood.

For years it was Aunt Lyla's job to take me shopping, and we always shopped at Bullocks. It wasn't my kind of store then, nor is it now, but I'm afraid the Peppermill won't let me in dressed like this, and I can't think of another store right offhand, and there isn't time to dash across the parking lot to I. Magnins, so—

Quickly I find a baggy pair of black pants. Baggy except for the waist and stomach which are meant to fit tight, and do. Tighter on me: it's starting already, I'm losing my shape. Bullocks doesn't have the next size up, so I camouflage with a blouson top, remembering suddenly how Maggie and I didn't like it when boys put their arms around our waists, how we had to stand up straighter or reposition their arms to our shoulders for fear their hands might discover a roll of fat.

I was hoping, since I'd last seen him four years ago, that Gregg might've grown fat or sloped or stooped, that he'd be wearing polyester—it'd make this easier. But he hasn't even lost any hair. Only his complexion has changed, gradually, from the pale sleepy warm tint of our college days to a more olive cast. All due to living here. You can't help but turn a shade or two darker just walking down the street; even Gregg, a musician, who never rises before noon.

I watch him from my car, watch him go inside, without following. In case I want to change my mind.

It's just dinner, I tell myself. He's an old friend. Perfectly innocent. Never mind what happened the last time we got together—what almost happened.

Now he's standing outside the Peppermill again. I wave, honk. My heart's pounding and I swear, I feel a pounding, almost like a pulse, in my belly, as if the baby knows what I'm up to and doesn't approve.
That isn't my father you're honking at
.

Gregg strolls over and points to my window. “Roll it down,” he says. I do and our fingers touch, the beginning of a handshake (already I'm checking for a wedding band, don't see one). I roll down the window further and he leans in, catching me on the cheek with a kiss. Technically innocent, though let's not deny it, the kiss landed a little close to my mouth.

“Gregg …” Now I'm out of the car and we're hugging. Well, isn't that what old friends do when they haven't seen each other in years? So why is his leg almost between mine? He's turned sideways, ah, that's why. I back off.

“I'm starved,” I say. “Let's go eat.” A line females have used for years in this parking lot, no doubt: it's one of those restaurants. Red leather booths, white linen tablecloths, candles so dim they're about to drown in wax. The place is dripping with false romance.

“Follow me,” the host says, a man with a handlebar mustache I seem to remember from twenty years ago, the last time I was here.

He loads us into a booth, hands us oversized menus.

“What made you pick this place?” Gregg asks.

We burst out laughing.

S
IX

Bay of Pigs. Pigs drowning, heads bashed together in the waves, bodies slick with brains and blood. Not pigs, you dummy, says Corb, four years older than me; soldiers, boats, Commies. Cuba. We're sitting on the wood stairs in our basement, knees to our chests; beneath the stairs are spider webs, dust, curled-up worm larvae, maybe worse, who knows … we once found a dead cat in our basement, must've gotten in through a grate and died, been there for days, stinking and bloated.

Our mother is making us sit here, amid cans and cans of food stacked up everywhere: according to my fragments, the memories I've sewn together. She is somewhere else in the house. I'm not sure why we're sitting here. Something to do with Cuba or bombs; or is it that Corb and I are being punished? Cans of food with red, green, and yellow labels—pictures of beans, tomatoes, beets, and yams. Smaller cans of tuna, minced ham, spiced beef. Huge cans of juice and bottled water. Towels. Blankets.
Nobody played war better than me
click-click
gun to my head, somebody wants me dead
click-click.

I'm eating cottage cheese sprinkled with sugar at the kitchen table, alone. No,
she
is there, my mother, in the room somewhere, but I'm alone. Or I'm scuffing up and down the hallway in her cast-off high heels. Again, she's around somewhere, but not with me. Possibly standing in my bedroom doorway watching me play with my dollhouse, but she is a distant, punishing presence. When she is watching, I play one way, nicely. The dolls sit in the living room, the house is immaculate. They don't know what to do with themselves. Phone rings, somebody answers, “Hello? Just a minute, please.” The dolls stare at each other politely, warily.

My mother leaves the room. The dolls destroy the house, rip the tiny sheets off the beds. Throw towels, food, little china plates and tea sets, vases. Throw whole tables, chairs, lamps across the room. Hit each other with the vacuum cleaner, the phone, alarm clocks. Stuff each other's heads down the toilet. One doll has hard black high-heeled shoes—she kicks the doll whose hair is missing, whose job it always is to clean the house.

Sometimes when my mother leaves the room, I shut the doll-house doors, lock the dolls inside. I rock the house side to side, faster and faster. Worried I'll break something, I can't stop, I shake the house until I can't anymore. Then I open it up, look for bodies in the rubble, dig out the doll whose hair is missing and make her clean the mess.

My mother is dead. Days and days of a fuzzy white space. Some nights I wake up staring at a wall in my room. I'm sitting straight up in bed with the light on and I can't remember how I got there.