In A Country Of Mothers Read online

  “Cool,” Jake said.

  Outside of Flushing, Queens, they passed the skeletal remains of the 1964 World’s Fair. The car bounced in and out of potholes, across bad road joints, and eventually the expressway opened up: twelve-plex movie theaters, car dealerships, and fields of high grass instead of high-rise apartment projects. Claire opened a bag of Hershey’s Kisses and passed some back to the kids. At fifty-five miles per hour, traffic hummed down the island, forming a line that backed up half a mile at the traffic light in Southampton and continued in a hinged snake down through Watermill, Bridgehampton, Easthampton, and Amagansett.

  They turned right on Simon’s Lane. Ever since last January, when they’d arranged to rent the house, Claire had been repeating the address — Simon’s Lane, Amagansett — over and over again to herself as if it held some magical power, the promise of salvation.

  “Which one is it?” Sam asked.

  Claire pulled a photo out of her purse and compared it to every house they passed. “Matches,” she said, staring at a two-story gray-shingled house and then back down at the photo. “See, it’s the porch.”

  In the photo and in reality, there was a glassed-in sun porch off the right side of the house, four windows across the front, green shutters, and neatly trimmed hollies hugging the foundation. Sam pulled into the driveway.

  The house was larger and more run-down than Claire remembered. As she carried her suitcase up the stairs, she thought she saw something dart across the hall. She didn’t want to think what.

  Even though there were three bedrooms, she put Adam and Jake together in the one that was painted a boyish blue. The empty bedroom was a rich red, and Jake wanted it for himself, but Claire said no; she suspected the red would make him psychotic — not immediately but later, when, in his mid-twenties, he’d turn into a serial killer. The red was too much like birth or death, she wasn’t sure which; regardless, neither was particularly soothing.

  “We’ll save it for company,” she told Jake. “Besides, Adam really needs you. If he’s by himself in a whole new house, he’ll probably keep us up all night. Be a sport.”

  “You owe me,” Jake said.

  The master bedroom was a reassuring dark green that would hold them well in their sleep.

  A couple of hours later, as she was sitting on the sun porch resting a wrenched back, a tail flicked against Claire’s leg and she screamed. A cat ran across the room and hid under the sofa. Claire immediately called the real estate agent. A second cat slipped down the stairs and headed for the kitchen.

  “There are cats in this house,” she said.

  “Hold on,” the realtor said. “Let me check.”

  “One just rubbed against my leg, you don’t have to check.”

  “Let’s see, that’s Simon’s Lane … nothing on my card about cats. Are you allergic?”

  “No, but I don’t exactly love them.”

  “I’ll get rid of them, if you want,” the realtor said, giving the impression of the cats’ lives being drastically foreshortened. Claire didn’t particularly like cats, but didn’t want to be responsible for euthanizing them either. She’d rather go ahead, open a couple of cans of food, and deal with it. “Forget it,” she said.

  “I’ll arrange for you to be reimbursed for food and kitty litter. Just keep the receipts.”

  Kitty litter — yuck, Claire thought, and immediately wrote it down on the first line of a shopping list.

  On the first morning of their vacation, Claire woke up clutching the edge of the mattress and wondering where she was. She looked out the window at the sandy yard. She hated sand. Invisible to Sam and the boys, it would creep into the house, settle on the sofa, fill the bathtub, crawl up the stairs into their beds, and it would be her job to chase it out. She didn’t want to be on vacation. She wanted to be alone in her office with some poor pathetic person pouring out his or her soul. This was too much.

  Claire was expected to know everything. It was as if a mother, any mother, could without question be transported from house to house and always know where the forks were, how the stove turned on, and where the extra toilet paper was kept. She didn’t know anything. She didn’t even want to be here.

  She lay on the bed, facing the window. When Sam finally got up, she pretended to be sleeping. She heard the children moving around, their plastic pajama feet shuffling across the bare wood floor, the TV set clicking on and off, channels changing, volume going up. She heard the toilet seat flip up, bang against the tank, followed by the hiss of someone peeing and then silence.

  “Flush, goddamnit!” she screamed, swinging her feet over the edge of the bed. Their laziness stirred her. They were sitting around in their pajamas acting like they didn’t know how to feed or dress themselves. The imbecile family. Her anger pulled her up and out of bed, barking commands. “Get dressed: pants, shirts, shoes, socks, no shorts, too cold for shorts.” She slammed containers of milk, juice, and cereal onto the kitchen table and glared at them while they watched her, bug-eyed. “Too cold, windy, cloudy to go to the beach,” she said, too tired to speak in whole sentences. “Daddy’s taking you to a movie.”

  When they finally left, after Claire had called the theater, written down a schedule for Sam, jotted down the name of a place to take the children for lunch, the address of a video arcade where they could go if all else failed, after she’d given them a complete itinerary and shoved them out of the house, she poured their leftover cereal milk into a bowl for the cats and lay down in the bed again. She would have to ease into the idea of vacation.

  The next morning was clear and still. They got ready quickly and walked down Simon’s Lane to Old Town Road. From a block away they could see the water, sparkling under the morning light. Worried about traffic, Claire held Adam’s hand. Strangers passed them on bicycles and said hello. Near the water, Claire turned the orchestration of the family over to Sam. The older the boys got, the less they were hers; the more pronounced the difference between male and female, the more they belonged to Sam.

  While she set up camp, Adam rode into the water, high on his father’s shoulders. Jake threw himself head-first into the waves, screaming “Dad! Look at me!” She was an outsider among her own. She sat back on the sand, watching them chase one another up onto the dunes and back down into the water, and thought of two things: Lyme disease and how badly they needed a house, a backyard.

  Claire closed her eyes, lay back in her chair, and let the whoosh and roar of the breeze and the waves sweep over her, as though the wind, the flying grains of sand, and the sharp, salty spray could erase an entire year’s worth of other people’s problems.

  That night, she snuggled up against Sam’s warm red skin and rubbed her thigh across his crotch. “What would you think about having a baby?” she asked.

  “You’re scaring me,” he said.

  “Scaring myself.” She ran her tongue over his neck, flicking his ear-lobe, tickling the gray roots of his chest hair. “It has to be a girl,” she said a minute later, as he rolled on top of her.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Two days later she got her period. Was it early or late? It didn’t matter anyway, though it did explain everything: why she was so tired yesterday, crabby last week, how come she was constantly a miserable bitch while Sam and the boys were always, if not cheerful, at least energetic and less than homicidal.

  Sam offered to take her out to dinner.

  “To celebrate?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “It was kind of impulsive.”

  The offer of dinner out, Claire puzzled, or the unprotected sex?

  The last time she’d gone to the gynecologist, she’d asked about the possibility of having more children. Claire had lain there, ankles at her ears, listening to a statistical recital performed from the space between her legs as if the doctor were speaking directly to her uterus, her ovaries, her sex. When he finished, he popped up and said, “If you’re going to do it at all, do it soon.” And she left with a pat on the leg, a refitted
diaphragm, and a pamphlet on mothering past forty stuffed into her purse.

  On the beach, in the still heat of August, suffering vicious cramps, she saw herself as a finished thing wringing the last of life out of itself, waiting to be discarded. Sam would leave her for a younger, sexier, more fertile woman. The boys would follow, not willing to be abandoned by their hero. The new wife would build them the perfect clubhouse, and every year they’d call Claire on her birthday, pick up three separate extensions, sing a chorus of “Happy Birthday”—including the ‘How old are you now?’ verse — and then hang up.

  She lay flat on the sand, her innards pulsing, beating out blood. Sam came out of the ocean and stood over her, dripping cold salt water onto her stomach. She sat up and everything started to go black.

  “I have to go back to the house for a minute,” she said.

  “Do you want to make lunch and bring it back for us?”

  She shook her head. “There’s your lunch,” she said, pointing to the beach stand a few hundred yards away.

  “Do you have money?” he asked.

  She handed him ten dollars.

  He waited for more. “This is Easthampton,” he said.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” she said, adding another ten. Then she raised her hand for Sam to help her up and walked slowly back to the house, the hot sand burning her feet, her head light and eyes half-blind, concentrating only on the swollen pain at the bottom of her stomach. She walked down the road, sure she was leaking blood down the insides of her thighs, leaving a trail drawing dogs and curious busybodies out of their houses to watch a middle-aged woman who, despite being almost thirty years into it, still had no grip on this woman business. A woman running home like a stuck pig.

  In the cool shade of the house, she checked, put her fingers between her legs, pulled them out, and looked. Nothing except the white Tampax string. She spent the afternoon alone in a cool coma, sandwiched between the sheets of their rented bed.

  If she had a daughter, if her daughter were there, she would’ve come back to the house with Claire. She would have curled up with her and spent the afternoon reading magazines and eating frozen yogurt. If her daughter were there, they’d take off in the car and go shopping in Sag Harbor, to all kinds of antique shows and craft fairs. They’d go out for lunch and leave Sam and the boys to fend for themselves.

  By the end of the week Sam and the boys had friends. They knew the names of everyone up and down the street and were regularly hopping into shiny cars and riding into town with strangers, acting as though they were best friends simply because they’d rented houses on the same block. Claire felt as though she was constantly being forced to smile, to say hello, to make chitchat. As much as possible, she stayed alone. When Sam asked what the problem was, she said, “My job is listening to people’s problems. To me a vacation is silence, not having to talk all the time.”

  “Couldn’t you just be civil?” Sam asked.

  Claire didn’t answer. She walked to and from the beach, up and down the lane briskly, with the brim of her hat pulled down over the wide rims of her sunglasses.

  To make Sam happy, she agreed to go to one party. “Just one,” she said. “You pick it.”

  He chose cocktails at the home of an entertainment lawyer he knew from Columbia.

  “His wife has the money,” Sam whispered as they stood on the rear deck of the Sagaponack spread, looking out across the length of the pool to the salt pond, the thin strip of beach behind it, and the ocean in the distance. Three different waters; three colors against the twilight.

  “Great view, huh?” Sam’s lawyer friend said. “Let me get you a drink — what’ll it be?” He clapped his hands together hard, exploding the air like a shot.

  “Scotch,” Sam said.

  “Absolut and tonic,” Claire said.

  “That’s my drink,” he said to Claire, winking. “Twist of lemon, twist of lime. Be right back.”

  Claire stood at the edge of the deck and let Sam schmooze. She sipped her drink, listening to the whispering rustle of the reeds and cat-o’-nines in the salt pond and watching the night sky fall and the ocean slip from view.

  When her glass was empty, she carried it into the house for a refill. Modern jazz was blaring on the CD player. Every light in the house was on. Right and left people were yelling in order to be heard. Claire moved quickly, got a fresh drink, and hurried back outside, stopping only when the wife of someone Sam knew touched her elbow and said, “Hi, Claire, how are you?”

  “Good,” Claire said. “And you?”

  “Super.”

  How good can you get? Good, better, best? No, super! Claire headed for the cool darkness of the deck, where bits of conversation drifted over and landed around her like debris.

  “Long story short, she told him to get out. And she made him take the kids. He didn’t even want them.”

  “Sell. That’s all I have to say to you. Not another word. Sell. Are you hearing me? Sell.”

  “You really should go back on Valium. I know it’s gotten bad press, and there was that Jill Clayburgh movie all those years ago, but nothing else does the trick. Half a blue one and it’s all fixed. I took one tonight before we came here. I don’t know how you live without it.”

  Drink in hand, Claire lay back on a padded lounge and dreamed.

  That afternoon, thumbing through a local paper, she’d seen a series of photographs taken at “the wrap party given by Soho art dealer Christopher William at his Watermill estate, celebrating the completion of director Harry Birenbaum’s new film.” In attendance were three young Kennedys, George Plimpton, the actress Carol Heberton, several rock stars and their model wives, a fistful of famous young artists, and Birenbaum himself, looking every bit the beached whale Jody said he was.

  If Jody had been in New York instead of en route to Los Angeles, her picture would’ve been in the paper too, Claire was sure of it. And if Jody had been there, she would’ve invited Claire along to the party. Jody would have taken Claire’s hand and led her around the room, stopping at the edges of all the good conversations, introducing her to all the right people.

  Claire looked out onto the night. Down by the pool, a heavy man draped in linen was holding court. Claire imagined it was Harry Birenbaum. He was surrounded by an eager gaggle of men and women content to listen to him pontificate, to duck his wild gesticulations. Claire sat staring until she realized the crowd around the man had thinned and now the man was staring back. In her dark corner she blushed. She finished her drink and put the glass down next to her chair.

  “Have we met?” the man asked, sliding into the next chair, his linen drapery moving with a soft windy whisper.

  “No,” Claire said.

  “I feel like I know you,” he said, extending his hand, holding Claire’s for a moment too long.

  Claire smiled. “Perhaps you know my daughter, Jody Goodman?”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said and then paused. “But I’m sure you and I have met before. Are you at Paul Weiss?” he asked.

  “No,” Claire said, spotting Sam in the distance, excusing herself, and walking away unevenly. When she slipped her hand into the crook of Sam’s elbow, he turned from his conversation and put his hand on hers.

  “You’re like ice,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Are you all right? Do you want to go home?”

  Claire let Sam guide her back through the crowd, through the house, out the door, and down the long driveway to their car.

  “Everything okay?” he asked, taking off his jacket and wrapping it around her.

  “Fine.”

  Later, after the baby-sitter was paid, the porch lights turned off, and her dress returned to the closet, Claire drew a deep breath and sighted.

  “It wasn’t that bad, was it?” Sam asked.

  Claire slipped between the cool sheets and snapped off the light on her side of the bed. “Don’t forget to hang up your blazer,” she said. “I don’t have a
dry cleaner out here.”

  On the second Monday morning, Sam left on the six a.m. train and Claire felt like a suburban widow, a woman without a husband until the weekend.

  Late on the rainy Tuesday that followed, safe and dry inside the Easthampton library, while Adam sat on the carpet with a dozen other children listening to a story and Jake picked through sports biographies, Claire decided to do some digging.

  “How would I look up adoption?” she asked the librarian.

  “Information on how to adopt?”

  “Searches. Parents and children looking for each other.” She might as well have been a twelve-year-old researching menstruation, sneaking around like a spy.

  The librarian led Claire into the stacks and, using her index finger as a pointer, sc

  anned the shelves, fingernail clicking against the spine of every volume. She pulled down several books and handed them to Claire. “You might also want to look in the subject guide to Books in Print and the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature.”

  “Thanks,” Claire said.

  “You might also want to go to a bigger library,” the librarian added.

  “This is fine, thank you.”

  Claire sat in a chair by the window, shivering. Outside, it was thundering, raining, and raw; inside, the air conditioning was blasting. It was like being in a refrigerator. She hoped the kids wouldn’t end up with sore throats.

  One of the books the librarian gave her had a resource guide in the back, a list of organizations and addresses. Claire went through her purse and all her pockets, rounding up change.

  “Have you got any change?” she whispered to Jake. “I’ll buy it from you.”

  “Sixty cents for a dollar,” Jake said, holding out the money.

  “Thanks,” Claire said, giving him a dollar. She Xeroxed the pages, rolled them into a tube, and slipped them under her raincoat. On the way home, she stopped at the drugstore, bought a pad of writing paper, a box of envelopes, and a Monopoly game.