I said, Mommy, please. I’m certain that I begged. I always begged with her. I felt safe enough to beg. I knew she would always be my mother. It wasn’t like the feeling I’ve had with some men, with ones like Big Sky where I thought any sign of need on my part would send him running in the other direction. But I’ve since realized that such fears stemmed from nights like that one, begging my mother, crying until I was heaving. But she stood her ground. I could not sleep with her that night. She wanted to be alone. And I needed to learn how to sleep by myself. Those were the reasons she gave. I couldn’t argue with the latter, but the former burned a hole in me. When I close my eyes, I can call up the exact pitch of her voice. The way her accent formed the word alone.
Alunn.
I was forced to slink back into my room, closest to the stairway. I lay on top of the covers because I still harbored the hope that she would come for me, scoop me into her smooth mother arms and carry me to her bed where we would cuddle and she would kiss my tears away. I would rear my butt back until it was tucked into the curve of her hips and thighs. She would hold me tighter than she ever had before.
I lay on top of the covers for hours like that. I imagined my grandmother’s rape. I imagined the man ripping her nude pantyhose off. I could hear her scream very clearly in my head.
By that time I was already obsessed with sex. It would only get worse. But by that evening in the Poconos I was preoccupied with it. Only recently have I been able to trace it back to a fuzzy memory from when I was five or six. I was sleeping in my parents’ bed, as I always did at that age. I had seen a movie about werewolves and was convinced they were going to come for me in my sleep. Every few months my mother tried something. New bedsheets, even a new bed. But nothing could get me into my own room. This one night they tried very hard. They began to prep me at dinner. Over pastina, naturally. My mother made it sound like I would be disappointing her very much if I didn’t at least try. And so I did. I tried for an hour and when I finally fell asleep I dreamed of a plush gray carpet in a room with a mirror, and I was looking in the mirror when suddenly the mirror cracked in half and I saw a stripe of black blood across the carpet. I heard the howl of a wolf. I woke in terror and ran into their room. My mother held me and I fell asleep easily. Hours later I woke again, this time to movement. It was a king-size bed and sometimes I would wake up not knowing where my mother was, and if she was in the bathroom, I would wait restlessly until she returned. This time she was not to my right, but she was on the bed. She was on my father’s side and he was moving on top of her. I turned slowly back to the other side of the bed and saw her bra and underwear and nightgown on the floor. I suppose I lay there until it was over and I fell back asleep, but I can’t remember. I blacked that part out. Though it definitely happened—my parents fucked in bed beside me.
That night in the Poconos my mother didn’t care if I slept or not. My grandmother had been raped and my father had gone home to be with her, perhaps to hunt the rapist in the streets of Orange, New Jersey. Yet there was something else my mother suspected my father of doing that was the reason he didn’t take us with him. Now that I know most of the story, everything makes sense.
All of that aside, I still don’t understand why my mother wanted to be alone in her bed that night, why my body beside her would be anything but helpful. To this day it’s the same chemical burn in my heart that I cannot cool.
23
THE TWO WOMEN SAT QUIETLY at my kitchen table. I asked if anyone wanted an iced tea. I wondered if Alice could tell I was trembling or whether she’d noticed the way the girl was keeping her hands inside the pockets of her pullover. Eleanor, meanwhile, was projecting the same fearful rage that I’d witnessed so many times on her father’s face. He would be angry at me for lying about something, some nascent love affair, but he couldn’t show it. So he had to conceal it through clenched teeth. There was also the fear that I’d see through him, recognize his rage, and leave in disgust.
Alice said that she would love a glass. At the beach that magnificent day, I’d told her I didn’t think anything could grow inside of me. She touched my belly and said she was sure I was wrong. I said I didn’t want anything to ever grow inside me.
—I had a miscarriage once, she told me. I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I’d skipped two periods, but I was an idiot. My boyfriend was French. We were fifteen at a hiking camp in the Dolomites. I told him, I think I’m having a miscarriage. He didn’t know what to do. So he fell asleep. He didn’t sleep on a sleeping bag, or with a cover, and in the morning when it was over and I’d returned from washing myself in a creek, he told me he’d slept uncomfortably all night. That was his gift to me. His night of discomfort.
—Something came out of you?
—You don’t have to look at it. I remember how badly I wanted my mother. Do you miss yours?
—No, I lied. I only wish my aunt were still around.
—Your aunt raised you? How did your parents die, Joan?
—Gosia, yes, she raised me. Or she let me raise myself.
—Tell me about her, Alice said. And happily I described Gosia to her, her smells and clothes and furs. Her large black Mercedes and how, every time she spoke to me from her car phone, I would hear the seatbelt chime and I would say, Gosia, put on your seatbelt, and she would say in her heavy accent, Shut up! Tell me, how you are feeling?
I explained to Alice how it had been calming that Gosia wasn’t my mother, that I didn’t have to care for her in that way. That I didn’t have to know everything about her. There was no backstory through which I had to sift. Her own history only served as a lesson for me. She mined it when she had to give me advice.
I thought of Gosia then in my kitchen, what she would tell me to do. What mental strategy she would instruct me to employ. She always thought that anyone who hurt me should be punished severely. She wanted me to destroy Vic’s life, tell his wife. I told her that he had children and Gosia said, I don’t care about this man’s children. You are child. Look what he is doing to you.
I’d seen pictures of Eleanor. I never wanted another child to hurt the way that I had. The truth is that even then, in my kitchen, I felt sorry for her. I didn’t feel fear. The only fear I felt was that I would lose Alice. Already I had the premonition that Eleanor’s presence would push Alice away.
Eleanor was what my mother would have called a poor soul. She’d suffered so much. I couldn’t decide which parent had been crueler to her. I thought of her little brother in the tub. The last moments of a child’s life. I pictured him looking at his mother, the only thing in the world he knew to trust, looking at her wild eyes as she made that decision. It was easier for Eleanor to blame me than to blame her parents.
I took the glass pitcher from the refrigerator. The fragrant mint leaves floated at the top. I selected three wineglasses by the stem and handled all of them with the skills I’d learned as a waitress at an all-glass restaurant on the marina in Jersey City. That terrible winter I slept with two clients, one of whom—the married one, though I didn’t know that at the time—asked if he could fuck me in the ass the very first night he came to my apartment. We had been fucking for barely five minutes when he asked. The next night he came into the restaurant, this time with his wife. I lifted the rubber bar mat and poured the evening’s spillovers into his Long Island iced tea. Then I stirred it with a knife that had just deboned a raw chicken.