#3 The Children
The
children are three: Polly, Adelaide, and Lawrence, called Laurie. They are
getting older now: Adelaide has gone away into her adult life. Laurie and Polly are
still at home—Laurie going to the college, Polly a senior at the high school.
They come home to claim their mail and their meals and to sleep, most nights,
in their same narrow, childhood beds though Polly’s gang have countless study
nights and slumber parties, and Laurie has his fraternity and sometimes, too, a
mystery girl. Susa has stepped back from this situation; she has, more or less,
laid down her weapons in her battle to keep her children. When they were small,
they would gather around her on the bed in the master bedroom, clamoring for
the next chapter in the chosen book, begging Susa to read the parts in funny,
high-pitched or stuttering voices. They wore soft pajamas and clean socks;
their cheeks were rosy from the bath. This is how Susa recalls it. She fails to
remember their exhausting energy, their fighting words, her own weariness and
fantasy of escape.
Now they
come and go as they please, leaving beds unmade, dishes unwashed, their pajamas
(no longer soft, rarely cleaned, faintly sexual) strewn on bedroom floors. They
read beauty magazines or thin volumes of poetry and fashionable philosophy;
they assume Susa has no understanding. Only Laurie will still sometimes read
with his mother—now he is the reader, she the listener. He reads to her from his perch
on the kitchen stool; she listens while stirring pepper into sauce, while
grating cheese onto the casserole for their dinner. She half listens to her
son, half marvels at his presence; he seems too large to have emerged from her.
Here he is before her: Laurie, in his worn Dockers and plaid shirt, his skin
finally clear, his face a handsome, slightly sorrowful face. He reads to her
from his history and political science books; Susa half listens, half struggles
with every single moment from her life as a mother, each memory crowding in,
interrupting until she is here, until the memories combine to create this: her
twenty-two year old son with unshaven face and baritone voice explaining the
complexities of the Bolshevik Revolution to his mother. This is Laurie.
This is
Polly: seventeen, uncaring, a few pounds overweight, loving in random snatches
and rushes of affection. Polly is her father’s champion. Once, in the aftermath
of the worst fight, Polly found Susa on the back porch, cigarette in hand,
attempting to talk herself back into function. Polly sat beside her mother. “Daddy doesn’t like you smoking,” she
reminded in her little girl voice.
Susa
watched the cigarette in her fingers. “I know,” she said, bringing it to her
lips. Polly sidled closer and tucked her hand in the crook of Susa’s elbow.
“I won’t
tell,” she said. She laid her cheek, still cushioned with baby fat, against
Susa’s shoulder. “You said you were going to leave,” she said.
“I was
fighting,” Susa said. “I was angry at Daddy.”
“I love
Daddy.”
“I know.”
“I know.”
“But if you
leave,” Polly said, “I won’t love you anymore.”
Susa
studied the top of her child’s head.
She studies
it still, when Polly isn’t looking, when she’s fallen asleep in front of the
television, or when she’s bent over her school books at the dining room table.
She thinks, no matter how long she tries, that she won’t be able to get to
what’s inside this head. She will always feel a slight alienation from her
youngest child. She will always watch her a bit more closely than she watches
the others, prepared for what, she cannot know, but prepared nevertheless,
cautious.
And Adelaide.
Adelaide was the first born, and the first to leave home. She went 100 miles
away when she went, to live in a city, in a downtown studio apartment with her lover. This was
Adelaide’s word, not Susa’s. Lover. It
was the modern word; no one dated or went steady anymore. So they lived,
Adelaide and the lover, in a fifth floor walk up on a cobblestone street,
walking distance from the university they both attended with other children
and their lovers. At least, Susa comforted herself, there was that—there was
learning along with the loving (or the sex, which was what the situation was
mostly defined by. And later of course, the lover would change his mind and one day walk away for good, and this would be part of Adelaide’s learning, along with the
lessons about grocery shopping, housekeeping, modern art and medieval females writers).
To her oldest daughter, Susa could
offer nothing but checks sent through the mail and a sympathetic ear, pressed against the
phone, when a crisis occurred. They happened often; the lover would leave in a
fury only to reappear again with a paper bag of rose petals or Indian takeout.
Their love was always in doubt, yet it seemed to always reappear, given enough
time apart. There were grand plans made with the lover: a year in London, a
jaunt to Mexico, a plan to cut all wheat and dairy from their diets. Money or
ease of execution was rarely considered, and the plans rarely came to fruition.
They lived
in a one room flat, Susa’s daughter and this man; they slept together on a
mattress on the floor. How often did Adelaide change the sheets? Susa wondered.
Did the man wear pajamas when he slept? Or did they fall to sleep naked, the
both of them, after bouts of love making? Susa imagined the man to be
dark-skinned, with long, slender limbs and a full mouth. She could imagine his
body amongst the clean or unclean sheets, but she could not imagine Adelaide’s
body there beside his. This child she had birthed and bathed and comforted—she
could not place her in bed beside a man.
Adelaide was tall; she had knobby
knees and a strong jaw line. When she was at home she hummed show tunes while
she did chores around the house. She was a gentle soul, and the lover, Susa
feared, would slowly wear away this tenderness.
One day in
a springtime Adelaide called Susa up around the cocktail hour. Susa was in the
middle of fixing supper. “I’m done with this city,” Adelaide declared. “I’m done with him and all his moods.”
Susa imagined a long-limbed, dark man combing the streets, a bag of Indian takeout in hand, inexplicably moody. “Well,”
she said, grating cheese, “your father and I would love to have you home.”
“Oh
mother,” said Adelaide, sighing, “the world is wide.”
Susa nodded
and listened, though she was unsure as to what this statement might mean. For Susa, the world then was a three-bedroom house and dinner to be served at seven; it was a husband watching golf in the den; it was a sullen daughter studying Algebra in the dining room; it was a stolen cigarette on the back porch, after the kitchen had been put away for the night. Susa was stirring cheese into sauce for scalloped potatoes. This was her world. But while she stirred, she listened, and she let her daughter teach her this lesson.
Thanks for reading.
Beth
