My mother abandoned her flowers, moved toward me, put her hands on my shoulders, her eyebrows furrowed, her lips pursed, she looked, genuinely—I bowed my head to avoid it, this most genuine look of affection pocked with pain. “Honey,” she said, “look, honey, I know that this is—wait, honey, let me get this out.” Her grip tightened. “I know this is—well actually I don’t know much of anything because you won’t tell us what happened”—her voice sharpening—“but I know this must”—softening again—“I know this must be so hard, just so hard for you right now, and I want you to know that if you need anything, if you—now wait, don’t shake your head yet, you don’t know yet, you don’t know. You might need something, and if you, if you do need anything, now, or maybe later, if you need anything, your dad and me, we’re here for you, you know that right?” Pause. “You know that, right?” Small nod. “And if you’re worried—I mean I know you must be worried about a lot of things, I don’t know exactly what because you won’t—but, look, I want you to know that of course we loved John, me and your dad, of course we did, from the moment we met him he was just so nice, nice to you, so nice to me, not like—but I, we, we want you to know that we love John, but you’re our daughter and you come first, whatever happens, whatever happened, whoever—whether it’s your fault or—we just want you to know that you always come first, okay? So, you know, if you’re worried that we—just know we love you and that you can come to us, okay? If you need anything?” The heat of my mother’s body, her standing so close to me, I could feel it, also the smell of her deodorant mingling with the smell of her body wash mingling with the smell of her laundry detergent. Hot outside, must have been. If I looked up, I was sure that if I looked up, I would have been able to see a light sheen of sweat on my mother’s upper lip. “Come here, baby.” My mother wrapped her arms around my back, leaned my torso into hers so that I had to stand on my tiptoes, so that I had to clench my stomach to keep my balance, my body rigid beneath her hands. My mother was shorter than me and I could feel her nose against my neck, the puffs of air it was expelling. She loosened her arms, stepped back. “Honey, maybe after you’ve had that nap, you might consider taking a shower.”
* * *
—
I woke up hours later, hungover. It was eight o’clock, dark, the sun already down. There was a tall glass full of a cloudy liquid, pale orange, on my bedside table. A braver woman, a more passionate, a more foolish woman, a woman more honest with herself, more in touch with her feelings—anyway a different woman would have opened a window and poured the damn drink out. But I am the woman I am. I am practical and I do not like waste, and I was thirsty. I drank it.
Fresno, 2014
“The game,” I said, sip of wine, grimace, “is, one: we go around in a circle; two: we tell each other when it happened.”
This was the situation: the babies were down and the moms were drinking. It was me and Sandra and Dominique and Fran, single girls, hair unwashed, breasts leaking. Not Fran’s. Fran’s kid never figured out the latch and her milk dried up, breasts shriveled. Well, shriveled. Fran weighed ninety pounds at nine months, not an ounce more, hips so narrow you wondered how she got a tampon in never mind a child out. (C-section.) Even hard and full and heavy her breasts had never been bigger than satsumas. Smoother skin, probably. Not that I’d seen them, Fran’s breasts, but you’d think, you’d have to hope. She was a washed-out blonde, hair and skin the same lemon-yogurt color.
Dominique and Sandra and I were legal secretaries at the same firm. A big firm but still, some kind of coincidence. Eight months between Dominique’s daughter and my son, Sandra’s daughter in the middle, and not a father in sight. Sandra and Fran lived in the same apartment building, a water-damaged dump northeast of downtown, a few streets up from Shaw. They’d met in the laundry room. Fran had been folding a onesie. I recognized her, Fran said. Not from around the building, I mean I saw her and I knew she was a mom. Just knew. I rolled my eyes. We didn’t call ourselves a book club.
I wasn’t drunk but I was drunker than they were. When I suggested the game, I mean. The conversation. Eight months of pregnant sobriety and another twelve breast-feeding and not trusting myself to pump and dump and now one glass of wine was enough to get me tipsy. Two and I’d be spilling secrets, trying and failing to wink. Not that I didn’t trust myself to pump and dump properly. More that I didn’t trust my body, suspected it might keep some alcohol in reserve, hide the ethanol in my ducts, release it when next my son fed. It seemed like something a new mom shouldn’t be allowed to get away with, drinking with her friends while her baby slept. Louche was the word that came to mind. Also lazy also bad. I wasn’t raised Catholic but I had somewhere acquired the sensibility. Anyway I imagined it was wrong and that my body would therefore find a way to ensure I didn’t get away with it.
But I’d recently weaned my son and one of the moms, Dominique probably, offered me a glass of wine and why not. Dominique was French and so carried with her a particular air of authority. In her presence excess was authorized, encouraged. She’d eaten raw fish and soft cheeses all nine months, drunk red wine, and look at Élise, she was fine, perfectly fine. That air of authority: it also prevented me from asking how a French girl had ended up in the ugliest part of California farm country.
Yes, it must have been Dominique who poured me that first drink, Dominique not taking no for an answer, telling me it would loosen my shoulders, help me sleep, and then I was halfway through my second glass of sour white and I was clearing my throat and saying, “What if we played a game.” Dominique looked at me, one eyebrow raised, and it occurred to me that her encouraging me to drink, in part it was a perverse curiosity. And why not, sip of wine, grimace, let her have her fun. Fun here was hard to come by if your hopes soared higher than the second story of an air-conditioned shopping complex. We single mothers more or less had to make our own.
“When what happened?” This was Sandra. Sandra was slightly older than the rest of us. Not that the rest of us were young, mid-thirties, late thirties, but Sandra was in her early forties, married twice and divorced twice, thought she was too old to get pregnant, got sloppy with birth control. Or so I imagined. It was in her apartment that we gathered, and sometimes, though not on this occasion, she furnished snacks, thin, greasy blondies, crackers and sweaty chunks of mild cheddar cheese. Effort marked her difference as much as age. Not that the rest of us had given up, just that you could see her trying. Or so I assumed because we did not, though some of us had known each other for years, though we had been gathering in Sandra’s apartment for months now, putting our babies down in her spare bedroom, the babies arranged in a circle around Sandra’s single baby monitor, despite all this, we did not, did not ever, discuss our lives before. Not who the father was, not our relationship with him. Not our mothers and their eagerness to spoil the baby versus their desire to judge us. Not siblings or first loves or difficulties dating or which members of our families did and did not help with babysitting. Dominique and Sandra had been at the firm when I was hired and I didn’t know where they’d worked before. I didn’t know where Fran worked, period. Sandra’s two marriages, her two divorces, I was just inventing. Anyway, I was tipsy and it seemed suddenly not just odd to me but wrong, this not-knowing.