In A Country Of Mothers Read online

  “No, Ma, I just missed you.”

  “Well, I miss you too. But I’m very busy right now. In a couple of weeks we’ll be driving to California together. We’ll have all that time in the car to talk.”

  Jody stretched out on her futon and made lists of things to take to California. She called the girl she’d sublet the apartment to, reminding her that the toaster oven, the mini-microwave, and the coffee maker wouldn’t be there when she moved in. Jody went around the corner to the liquor store and got boxes. She made three trips, filling her apartment with empty cartons of vodka, scotch, and wine coolers. The apartment wasn’t much, but it was the first and only home she’d made for herself. The apartment was proof that she could function independently in the real world, the first indication she was a real person. And now, after only two years, she was turning her home over to an NYU medical student who’d probably put dissected body parts in the fridge and formaldehyde in her coffee cups. She made a note to leave only the really ugly dishes that used to belong to her aunt Sylvia.

  Peter Sears was on top of Jody. The room was dark. Her eyes were closed. She was concentrating on enjoying herself. She figured she’d try one more time.

  “Fuck me, you fucking bitch!” he growled.

  Jody opened one eye. She wanted to see his face, to make sure he was kidding. He wasn’t. His body was contorted, writhing. The whiteness of anger had met the pink flush of desire.

  “Fuck me, you fucking bitch!” he said again.

  And he had a limited vocabulary, which somehow made Jody less frightened. She figured she could win over anybody who had to repeat the word “fuck” in a short sentence.

  “Eat me,” Jody said.

  And Peter did.

  Regardless, Jody swore she’d never invite him over again. In case for some reason he just showed up, she’d warn him that he was persona non grata.

  Peter’s head was in her crotch, his fingers squeezing her nipples too hard. She looked down at him. He seemed caught in the strained posture of a swimmer doing the butterfly stroke. She decided that he was in fact doing some sort of butterfly on her. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. She wanted to come at least once before she left for Los Angeles.

  At first she didn’t know what had happened — a flash of pain and the hot sting of shocked flesh. Jody supposed something had fallen on her. Something had lifted itself up off the dresser on the other side of the room, flown over, and dropped itself down on her. She opened her eyes, but there was nothing except Peter on top, grinding away. While she was looking, his hand rose up against her cheek. Jody screamed and the hand fell hard against her.

  “Fuck me, you fucking bitch!”

  No one had ever hit her before — not like that. No one had ever. Horrified, she opened her mouth and only a grunt came out. He got harder inside her. She felt it.

  “Asshole,” Jody finally said. “Fucking asshole. Get off.” She wiggled under him, trying to get out. He liked that. He held her down, raised himself up, and pushed deeper into her. He swore. She closed her eyes. It was too late to fight. Fighting would only make things worse. There was no such thing as screaming for help. There was no such thing as rape when you were already having sex. There was no such thing. He spit on her chest, and she threw up all over him.

  18

  July 31, the last session; both Claire and Jody fighting against images of finality. It would be better if they weren’t in this alone, if they had something more than each other.

  “We really haven’t had a chance,” Claire said.

  “‘It seems we just get started and before you know it,’” Jody sang, “‘comes the time we have to say so long.’”

  “‘So long, goodnight, everybody,’” Claire added. They both laughed.

  Outside, the gears of a truck ground down. A police car raced by, a cop barking “Get outta the way, outta the way, pull to the right,” over the speaker.

  Within the hour, Claire’s life would be her own again. She’d go away with her husband and her sons. For the next month she’d be making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pouring apple juice into insulated thermoses, and rubbing endless quantities of sunblock onto chests, shoulders, noses, and legs.

  She handed Jody a thin, flat envelope. “I thought you might need this.”

  “Did you plant a tree in Israel for me?”

  “You’re not dead, you’re just moving,” Claire said, knowing that she’d spend the four days between now and when she left for the beach in a funereal daze. She’d spend them packing for Adam, Jake, Sam, and herself; the act of packing somehow reinforcing the sense of being left, of ending.

  “Oh yeah, right, I’m moving,” Jody said, opening the envelope, pulling out a map of the United States.

  “Are you going to be all right?” Claire asked.

  “I have to do it,” Jody said.

  “You can do it.”

  Jody shrugged.

  “You really can. I have faith in you.”

  Jody shrugged again. “Anyway,” she said, “there’s no point in talking about it now.”

  “Has this been helpful at all?”

  “It’s been fun,” Jody said. “Interesting.”

  Claire smiled. “Write me if you want to. Call me when you get back.”

  “I will.”

  They were silent, lingering in the sensations of being in a room with that one person, that most specific person, with whatever it was that made one person different from the next, that made a living person truly alive. They spent the hour in near-silence, soaking it up, holding it in, unwilling to risk ruining the moment with misplaced words.

  And at the end Claire said, “I’ll miss you.”

  “Thanks,” Jody said, standing up and shaking her hand — a very Jody thing to do. “Bye. Nice knowing ya.”

  She turned to leave and Claire squeezed her shoulder. “You’ll do well. Have a great time.”

  “You too,” Jody said. “Have a good vacation.”

  Jody was out the door, alone in the hall. She took a breath and pushed the elevator button, glad she was going, glad she was leaving Claire.

  Claire sat in her office, in Jody’s still-warm chair, flipping through her appointment book. It was over.

  BOOK TWO

  19

  Jody lay like a corpse on the twin bed of her childhood. The bed was too narrow, too short, too small, not unlike a coffin or a crib. From her window she could see her mother and father in the driveway, packing the car. She figured they would have to load her in along with all the old furniture they’d dredged up from the basement; furniture too good to throw out, too terrible to bring upstairs, perfect for Jody’s new home. There wouldn’t be room, and so they’d have to decide what to tie to the roof, Jody or the big old coffee table.

  “It’s exactly what you need,” her mother said. “And in a couple of years, when you’re finished, you can leave it there. You don’t have to bring it back. Who could ask for more?”

  Jody could. If she wanted to live in a room with her parents’ rejected housewares, she’d simply move into their basement. She didn’t have to drive 2,605 miles to do it. According to the Triple-A Triptik sitting on the front hall table, it was exactly 2,605 miles. The Triptik was as thick as a book, with miniature foldout maps, page after page of America, laid out with a thick green line marking Jody’s route. She wasn’t looking forward to it.

  She watched her father reach into the car and beep the horn. “Jody,” he called. “Jody, come on out.” Through the carport, the windows, the house, the door to her room, his voice sounded thin, tired, like he was getting too old and trying too hard.

  Jody lay on the bed. She wasn’t ready.

  Her mother came into the room. “Daddy’s checking the tires,” she said. “I’ll drive first so you can rest. Look, I have something for you.” She pulled her hand out from behind her back and showed Jody an economy-size bag of M&M’s.

  Did they think Jody could be bribed? Would they lay a trail of candy fr
om her bed to the car and hope she’d follow it?

  “I made a whole bag of sandwiches. And there’s a six-pack of Coke in a cooler. It’s going to be fun. I haven’t been on a real car trip in years.” She took her other hand from behind her back. “Pepperidge Farm cookies,” she said, swinging a bag of Milanos back and forth hypnotically.

  Jody wasn’t hungry.

  “You don’t want to go,” her mother said, and Jody was thankful for the words spoken. She nodded. “Give me your hand.” Her mother took Jody’s hand and pulled her up. “Now go arid wash your face.” She led Jody to the bathroom, pushed her in gently, and closed the door. “I know this isn’t easy for you,” she said through the door, “but it’s what you wanted. You’ve been talking about UCLA ever since junior high when you got that crush on Steven Silberberg.”

  “Spielberg,” Jody said. “I got over it. He looks like a truck driver now — beard, baseball cap. They have truck drivers everywhere, I don’t have to schlep to California.”

  “And I don’t have to either, but I’m doing it,” her mother said. “You never liked change. The first day I took you to nursery school you didn’t want to go, but I mustered my strength and left you there and you were fine.”

  Scarred for life, Jody thought.

  “You’ve never liked new things. You’re not very experimental. If there’s one thing you should work on while you’re out there, it’s trying new things.”

  “Mom, if you don’t stop talking, I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “I’ll be waiting in the car.”

  Jody had been out of New York less than a week and already she missed everything and everyone. She missed working on the movie, watching people watch Carol Heberton, watching Harry’s chin wiggle when he laughed. She missed the teasing, the repartee. She missed Ellen and Claire.

  “Now, listen,” her father said, pulling Jody aside, slipping a roll of cash into her palm. “Enjoy. Go slow, stop at decent motels. Don’t eat on the run. Sit down, have a meal.”

  “Dad,” Jody said.

  “Have a good trip and good luck out there.” He hugged her, patting her back.

  His hand felt smaller, more fragile, than she remembered. Little red blood spiders hid beneath the surface of his cheeks. “Thanks,” Jody said, kissing her father goodbye and hating the sandpaper texture of his skin.

  Her mother backed the old Saab out of the driveway and simultaneously started crying. “Find me a Kleenex,” she said, sniffling. “In the glove compartment.”

  “Stop crying,” Jody ordered.

  “I’m just so proud of you.”

  Jody sighed. She felt like she was riding to her own funeral, awake and annoyed.

  The end of the driveway, the stop sign at the bottom of the hill, the ramp to the highway — everything marked the beginning of the final stage; she was being chauffeured to her death.

  The whole way around the beltway, her mother kept blowing her nose, blotting her eyes, and handing balled-up Kleenex to Jody, who stuffed them between the seats.

  Despite her mother’s sniffling, despite the Triptik on the dashboard, despite the pile of maps at her feet, despite the sensation of impending doom, Jody had somehow convinced herself they were just going for a pleasant ride on a sunny day, no big deal. Sunday-drive material, up through Skyline Drive to Luray Caverns. She remembered a stalagmite that looked like a fried egg. She’d seen it once a year every year, usually in the fall, until she was about fourteen and stopped going places with her parents.

  “Did you ever go to Luray without me?” Jody asked.

  “No. We did it for you. Don’t you remember? Every Sunday we took you somewhere.”

  Mountain views, vegetable stands, apple picking, historical sites, houses of the famous and dead, battlefields — the stuff of field trips.

  “I remember,” Jody said. “But what did you do after I left, when I was in college?”

  “We visited dead Grandma.”

  Dead Grandma as opposed to living Grandma. Dead Grandma, her father’s mother, used to be in the nursing home that Jody was too petrified to walk into. She’d tried to once, but got dizzy in the lobby and had to wait there while her parents went upstairs. She sat for an hour in front of a huge sign that said TODAY IS: Sunday March 15 1984. TONIGHT’S DINNER IS: Pot Roast and Apple Pie. IT IS Sunny OUTSIDE.

  All of a sudden Jody didn’t know where she was.

  “Where are we?”

  “On the road to Mandalay. Let’s switch.”

  What the hell is Mandalay? Jody mused. Her mother pulled off the road and Jody went around to the driver’s side.

  They kept the doors locked, the windows rolled up, the air conditioning on high. Their only contact with the outside world was in gas stations, when the thick August air flooded the car quickly and silently. “Fill ’er up,” they said to the attendants, and took turns going into dark, clammy bathrooms and squatting over the toilet, trying not to touch anything.

  “Did you wash your hands?” her mother would ask every time Jody got back into the car.

  Nashville, Tennessee, in the dark was not quite a million miles from home, but far enough. A Holiday Inn, a hot shower, a grilled cheese sandwich, a glass of milk. A phone call to Dad, a message left on Ellen’s machine. All’s well that ends well. Network television. “The Tonight Show” and, finally, sleep.

  “I’m going to Graceland, Graceland.” Paul Simon on the cassette deck.

  “Mom, please — I always wanted to go to Graceland.”

  “Why?”

  “To see the other people that go there, maybe buy an Elvis head in one of those things you shake up and the snow falls. You know, Elvis with dandruff.”

  “Let’s not make it take too long.”

  Graceland: home of weeping women with high hair and polyester pants. Jody and her mother loved it. They spent seventy-five dollars on chotchkes. “Don’t ever tell your father,” Jody’s mother said, handing over the Visa card. “Don’t tell anyone.” When her mother wasn’t looking, Jody bought a gold-colored chain and locket complete with a picture of Jody and Elvis posed together courtesy, of modern technology and Polaroid film. She gave it to her mother late that night in a hotel room in Little Rock, Arkansas.

  “I love you, Mom,” Jody said. “I really do.”

  “I love you too, sweetie, but I never thought I’d be in Arkansas.”

  They were in a fake-wood-paneled room, in twin beds, trying to fall asleep, trying not to let the blankets that had touched a thousand strangers touch them.

  “I hope you realize that not every mother would do this.”

  Jody didn’t say anything. She got up to check the chain on the door.

  “Bring me two Advil, will you?” her mother said. “Everything is killing me.”

  The next day, in Oklahoma, her mother insisted on singing Woody Guthrie songs all the way across the state. “This land is your land. This land is my land.” Oklahoma was six hours long — six hours of history, of her mother explaining about the dust bowl, the depression, migrant farming practices, all the reasons she’d refused to buy iceberg lettuce and green grapes during the majority of Jody’s youth. By the time they hit Texas, Jody felt as if she’d memorized and memorialized John Steinbeck, had been indoctrinated into and expelled from every left-wing political movement since the turn of the century.

  The worst night fell in Amarillo, Texas. In the green tile bathroom of a motor court Jody’s gut was twisted by barbecued corn chips, root beer, and some sort of shredded meat sandwich her mother had pushed on her. Pained and delirious, Jody kept confusing Amarillo with armadillo, with the iguana in the Tennessee Williams play, with Richard Burton in Mexico. Was an iguana an armadillo? What was an armadillo, and why did they name a city after it?

  “I have some Kaopectate in my toilet kit,” her mother told her. “It’s not so bad — you don’t have to drink it anymore. It’s a caplet, you just swallow it.”

  The idea of swallowing anything made Jody even more nauseated
. In a cold chill, goose bumps breaking out on her arms and thighs, she sat immobile on the toilet.

  “Are you all right?” her mother called. “If it doesn’t stop, you’ll have to do something.”

  “If it doesn’t stop there’s a reason,” Jody said. An hour later she came out of the bathroom, weak, thin, the odd green tile permanently tattooed on her eyes.

  “I’m dying,” she announced.

  “Does that mean I can go home now?” her mother said.

  “Just make the funeral arrangements, then you can leave.”

  “Go down the hall and get a cold ginger ale out of the machine. It’ll settle your stomach. You can bring me a soda too, something diet.” Her mother rummaged through her suitcase and pulled out her nightgown. “I’m going to take a bath.”

  “Be careful in there,” Jody said, nodding toward the bathroom. “You might want to wait a bit.”

  Her mother took the nightgown and her own personal can of Lysol and went into the bathroom. Jody heard a long hissing spray, closed her eyes, and slowly inhaled a long pull of germicide.

  In the middle of the night, Jody woke to the sound of people fucking in the next room. Big sounds: out-of-control verbalizations, grunting, tortured bedsprings, Texas dirty talk. She hoped her mother would sleep through it.

  “Santa Fe,” her mother said, reading the road signs aloud. “I didn’t realize we’d be this close. Can we stop?” she asked, taking the exit before Jody answered.

  While her mother shopped for artifacts — Georgia O’Keeffe look-alike stuff — Jody bought postcards. Ever since they’d left home, she’d been thinking about what Claire would be like in the car, on the road. She kept trying to choose between Claire and her mother; and now she tried to envision the three of them in the car together, but it didn’t work.

  From a pay phone Jody called Ellen, collect.

  “Where are you? How’s L.A.?” Ellen asked.

  “I’m not there yet,” Jody said. She heard a strange noise in the background. “Are you in the middle of something?”