Through the living room window, Marilyn watches her two-year-old pedal her tricycle down the sidewalk, past the front yard. Suzie’s chubby legs pump hard in a blur that obscures the slap mark, a pink print of Marilyn’s long fingers on Suzie’s left thigh. Marilyn’s heart still pounds. On the couch below the picture window, her porcelain dolls lie scattered. She picks up Red Riding Hood, smooths a brunette curl, places her back in her box. Takes a deep breath. Then another. She never has enough breath these days.
She should have known better than to show Suzie her prized Storybook dolls. She had meant it to be a reward. A sharing. Something that might bring them closer together. She’d grown tired of trying to coax Suzie to sit on the potty. Tired of watching Suzie stick her fat, proud stomach out and say “No” every time she brought it up. That morning, in desperation, she had dragged out the stepladder, climbed up to reach the high shelf in the back of her bedroom closet, and taken down the precious polka dot boxes. “If you go pee-pee in the potty, you can hold Mommy’s dolls,” she’d told Suzie. “They are very, very special.”
Suzie had narrowed her eyes in a calculating way that seemed far older than a child of two. Whip smart, people said. And pretty, too. You are lucky. Marilyn always accepted the compliments. Always agreed. But what good was a child who used the brains God gave her to think up mischief, to rebel? What good was a pretty child who wouldn’t sit still for photos, who always seemed to pick her nose or pull her dress up or say rude things at exactly the wrong moment? She’ll grow out of it, Marilyn’s mother said. Give her time. But Marilyn was tired of waiting.
Marilyn had put the boxes on the couch and set Suzie’s potty on the floor nearby. She had opened the pink polka dot box and took out Elise Marley, with her darling blue felt hat decorated with a puff of feather. “Potty first, please,” she said when Suzie reached for the doll. Suzie pulled down her bright yellow playsuit, then her panties, plopped down on the pink plastic seat, and contorted her face so much that for a moment Marilyn thought her daughter was making a poo— and wouldn’t that be a breakthrough! But after no more than ten seconds, Suzie hopped off the potty. A few drops of pee gleamed in the bottom of the basin. “That’s it?” Marilyn said. “You had a whole cup of orange juice at breakfast.”
“No, I don’t have to go pee-pee now,” Suzie said. When did her sentences start sounding so complete, so mature? “I want to look at the dolls.” And because she was a fair mother, a good mother, and a bargain was a bargain, Marilyn had sat down next to Suzie on the couch and brought out the dolls, eight in all, given to her for birthdays, holidays, special days. She’d received Little Red Riding Hood for her kindergarten graduation. Elsie Marley that time she’d fallen ill and her parents feared it was polio. The June doll for her sixth birthday. These gifts were the physical evidence, the proof, that her parents loved her.
Suzie snatched and grabbed. She tugged June’s mohair locks so hard Marilyn feared she’d pull them right off the poor doll’s head. She yanked at the snap on Little Red Riding Hood’s cape. She pulled up the dresses, examined the pink bisque bodies, the legs with white painted socks and painted black patent leather shoes. She seemed intent on dissection, on inspection, on anything but showing those dolls the respect they deserved. “Is that their undies?” she asked, tugging on Elsie Marley’s white pantaloons.
“Be gentle,” Marilyn urged, feeling that familiar, horrible anger squeezing her stomach. Surely good mothers didn’t feel this way. “Gentle.” Suzie looked up at Marilyn, narrowed her eyes, held Elsie over the couch, and dropped her.
“Stop it!” Marilyn cried. She slapped her daughter’s bare pink thigh, hard enough to make white marks on the soft skin. The marks soon bloomed to red. Suzie’s eyes widened and filled. “Stupid, stupid Mommy!” she shouted. Marilyn wanted to shake her. She pressed her lips together hard, feeling her own her body shake. When she could trust herself to touch Suzie, she turned to her, arms open, and tried to pull her close for a hug. Suzie twisted away, making her body go limp in the same way those protestors on the evening news were always going limp— an affectation, Marilyn thought; and who had time to protest anything, anyway? Spoiled kids—and slithered off the couch. She scrambled to her feet and headed toward the front door. “Fine, go outside, then,” Marilyn said, as if she were giving permission rather than giving up.
Suzie is now past the brownstone apartment next door, the trike’s red-and- white handlebar streamers flying. Marilyn should follow, but surely Suzie won’t go far, just down to her friend Brian’s house at the end of the block. They’ll kick balls and stomp in mud puddles and hunt for worms. Brian’s mother wears her hair long and doesn’t bother to iron her clothes. She has three little boys and two dogs and a messy, messy house. And she’s cheerful in a way that shows she doesn’t give a damn what other people think. Happy. Marilyn’s anger begins to simmer. Suzie’s wearing her brand-new playsuit, of course she is, the playsuit Marilyn worked so hard to make, to create from yellow gingham and that darling pattern from Butterick’s. But Marilyn’s mother had eyed the inseam, the crooked buttonholes, and sighed. Took it from the sewing machine. Began again, carefully. Not once saying, “Can’t you do anything right?” She didn’t need to. Her words hung in the air, the invisible question mark rising, curling like her cigarette smoke.
Marilyn presses her lips together hard. She might as well send that kid outside without a stitch of clothing on because she’ll come back smeared in mud from Brian’s backyard, she’ll come back with her bottom and crotch soaked, urine dripping down her calves, staining the scalloped edges of her socks. Marilyn is sick of it—the messes, the battles, the defiance. Sick, and tired. She sighs, rubs the small of her back, then presses her taut, round belly. A limb, or head, or butt, slides past her hand, pushes hard. Boy. It has to be. She’s already got a tomboy; she wants a real one this time around. Needs a real boy because Rich wants one so badly. He’s never been one to rub her tummy, but he’s taken to calling the babyAndy. He came home from his most recent business trip with a tiny blue baseball cap and matching plush baseball for the nursery, newly painted powder blue. Marilyn feels a flash of fear. What if she has another girl?
To calm herself, she picks up the broom that leans against the wall near the front door. Suzie’s toy broom leans next to it. “Don’t you want to help Mommy sweep?” she asks her daughter every day. “No.” The same answer, always.
But Suzie is plenty old enough to help around the house. When she’s in the mood, she’ll pick up her toys, though sometimes she’ll throw them too roughly into the designated basket. Marilyn can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to help her own mother. And Suzie is old enough to use the toilet. That’s what Dr. Spock says. That’s what the other mothers in the neighborhood say—most of them, anyway; Brian’s mother just rolls her eyes and laughs when the talk turns to potty training. If Suzie comes home wet this time, Marilyn will make her wash that yellow playsuit and her flowered underpants and her white socks all by herself.
The baby kicks as she sweeps. Tears of pain spring to her eyes. For one long, red second she imagines cracking her own rib cage open, digging into her body with strong fingers, reaching into the very center of her womb and dragging that hurt out of her—boy or no—flinging it hard to the kitchen floor.
Why did she want children? She didn’t think it through. She thought Rich would be home more. That he’d help. She thought he’d be kind and funny like her own father, who didn’t live to see Suzie born. She never thought he would say, when she burned the pot roast for the fourth time in a row, “How hard can this be?”
Marilyn leans the broom back against the wall, next to Suzie’s. When she looks out the living room window again, Suzie and her tricycle are gone.
Now they are saying if you lose your sense of smell, it could mean you’ve got the virus. The minute I step into my mother’s townhome, I know I’ve got nothing to worry about. At least not about Covid. At least not today. When did her house start smelling like the house of an old lady? It hits me even through my mask: dirty cat litter, though her old Persian died a few months back, and competing room fresheners or cleaning solutions or maybe scented candles. A mix of floral and lemon and cinnamon and spice.
“I’m here!” I call, looking around. Where is she? She didn’t open the front door as she usually does when my car pulls in her driveway. The front hallway is dim, no light filtering in from the kitchen or living room, as if she’s closed every single curtain and shade. Unusual. The darkness makes the old lady smell seem stronger. Just as worry kicks in, my mother shuffles out of the kitchen, her back hunched, short white hair disheveled. Her fabric mask, blue with tiny cheerful yellow suns, has slipped below her nose. I don’t tell her to pull it back up. We’ve had enough pandemic safety battles. I never win. She sniffs, silent and red-eyed. I tell myself I’m still mad at her, tell myself that the less time I spend in her house the better—safer—for both of us.
“I’ve brought supplies,” I say, in my brisk, cheerful, Good Daughter voice. I hold up my box of heavy-duty garbage bags, packing tape, red and black Sharpies. “Let’s put a dent in this.”
She gives me a quick, downward wave, the “Oh, go fuck off ” wave of elderly women, and shuffles back into the kitchen. I head up to the second floor. The steep stairs are too heavily carpeted for me to stomp satisfactorily. Really, Jo? I ask myself. You really want to stomp like you’re ten years old again?
Turns out I do.
My mother is moving, two thousand miles away, closer to my older sister, Suzie. Two thousand miles away from me. She’s got dementia, though we don’t use that word, a word I’ve always disliked, a word that gives way to a mushy sound at the end, like what I imagine is happening to my mother’s gray matter. Turning to mush. Not one bit of this—her condition, her inability to live alone anymore, the pandemic—is her fault, but I’m mad nonetheless.
“So Mom threatened to throw out the family photo albums,” I messaged Suzie—Suzanne, I mean—a few days ago. “She said and I quote, ‘They are all going bye-bye.’”
“What? No, she can’t. OMG, don’t let her,” Suzanne texted thirty seconds later.
“Don’t worry, I’m on it.” Earlier this morning, I sent Suzanne another text.
“I’m going in. Wish me luck.” And added a picture of my Bitmoji avatar, a younger, cuter version of my middle-aged self, hands cupped around her head, mouth wide open in a scream, Edvard Munch’s blood-orange sunset clouds blazing in the background.
“Good luck,” Suzanne wrote. “Let me know how it goes.” And sent a picture of her own Bitmoji, similar to mine but blonde, holding a red-and-white striped box, tossing oversized pieces of butter-yellow popcorn into her mouth.
The photo albums are in the first guest bedroom on the left. The color of the bedroom walls is one more thing that annoys me. Why does she need two bright blue guest bedrooms in addition to a bright blue powder room? Her handyman Chad Bellinger, son of one of her church friends, whom I swear she likes better than Suzanne and me, helps her with these painting projects. For years, my mother has raved about Chad this and Chad that. Chad fixed her balky sump pump. Chad helped power wash her courtyard. What a nice man that Chad Bellinger is. So polite and such a hard worker! It seems Chad has also helped further her unspoken agenda to gradually turn the entire inside of her house blue. Cupcake frosting blue. Cotton candy blue. Baby toy blue.
The albums still line the two top shelves of her cheap bookcase. They are bulky, boxy, the kind you could find at pharmacies twenty or thirty years ago, with sticky pages and plastic pull-back sheets. Brown chemical stains creep from the edges of the pages toward the faded squares of the photos. I unfurl a garbage bag and pull the albums off the shelves and place them carefully, inside, resisting the urge to open them. I know those photos by heart. Mine and Suzanne’s baby pictures. Our tricycle. The neighborhood kids gathered for a group shot in front of the brownstone apartment building in the first neighborhood I knew. Summertime trips to the lake in northern Minnesota. Many of my grandmother, dead for almost thirty years. How could she?
“How tough is it for her to start boxing her things? She’s got all those extra bedrooms, she could use one for a sorting area,” I ranted to Suzanne. “We’re in lockdown. What else does she have to do?”
“Who knows,” Suzanne wrote back. “Drink tea? Play with that doll?”
I texted back an entire row of emoji screams.
Suzanne and I discuss our mother at length. We ruminate. We analyze her failings and flaws. We talk about the Next Steps. Over the years we’ve offered theories we learned about in therapy and through our hefty diet of self-help books. Mom is a narcissist, we say. Maybe she had undiagnosed ADHD or a learning disorder. Maybe she never got over losing her father, who died of cancer when she was pregnant with Suzanne. Maybe she was simply born selfish. Maybe she demanded too much from Dad and drove him off. Maybe she started developing dementia around the time her grandkids were born and that’s why she often seemed so bored in their presence. Who knows? We ask questions we can’t answer. Why did she make those capes for us and then make us wear them to school? Did she not know what would happen? Why did she hit us with hairbrushes and wooden spoons? Why did she wash our mouths out with Ivory soap, a soap I have never bought, will never buy? What was with those Storybook dolls she never let us play with, that she never put on display? Why didn’t she and Dad keep trying for a boy if they wanted one so badly, if we daughters were such disappointments? Or maybe they did keep trying and she miscarried again and again and we never knew? And why did we never know? Is that why she always seemed so angry? Why was she always so angry? Were we really so difficult to raise? And so on. Marilyn is one of our favorite topics.
Once the first row of photo albums is off the shelf and into my bag, I sit back on my heels for a breather. In the corner, next to the foldout couch that no one uses anymore since my kids got too old for sleepovers at Grandma’s, sits a white dolls’ crib. I want to look inside, and I don’t.
“Your mother is using the photos as bait,” my husband told me this morning. “She won’t really throw them out. Go there and sit and drink a cup of tea with her. That’s all she wants.”
All I want, I hate to say, is to pass her off to Suzanne. To be free of her, and this house that doesn’t smell right, that doesn’t look right, at once too bright and too dark. To say that I helped, to score points for being, if not a good daughter, at least a halfway responsible one. All I want is to climb into my Prius and pull my mask down and turn my music up and drive out of the subdivision and onto the expressway, drive and drive and forget, for just a little while, about the pandemic, and all the tasks left to do, and all I can’t control and the questions that will never be answered, and the things I don’t want to know but will soon learn.
I glance into the kitchen on my way out to the car. My mother lurches around the small space, placing plates and crackers on the table, opening a cupboard door to take down a can of soup, her feet spread wide for better balance. She slams the can down on the counter. Is she angry? No, just clumsy from the rheumatoid arthritis, from age, I decide. In the kitchen, the citrus and cat food smell is stronger, mixed with the piney ammonia scent of scouring powder. At least she’s trying to sanitize, I think, then realize she never dismissed her cleaning service. Last week, yesterday, early this morning, who knows, the brisk Polish women might have bustled through this house, this hallway where I stand, mopping, scrubbing, disinfecting, yes, but also breathing, sweating, maybe coughing, maybe sneezing. I don’t know how careful they are. Don’t know what they believe about the virus. About wearing masks. My throat tightens. I realize I’m holding my breath.
“Would you like soup or tuna salad for lunch?” My mother has turned to face me.
“Mom, we’re not supposed to share food, remember? I brought my lunch. We probably shouldn’t even eat in the same room. I can sit outside in the courtyard, it’s warm enough.”
“Fine,” is all she says. But something slides shut on her face, though her expression doesn’t change. Her lips press together and I resist the urge to tell her to pull her mask up. Then she takes two steps towards me, widening her eyes as if she has just this minute noticed I am standing in her front hall.
“Good grief, is your hair long, Jo,” she says. “I didn’t know women your age wore their hair that way. And look at all that gray. My gosh, how did I get to have a daughter who looks so old?” She starts to laugh as if someone has told her a funny joke.
My throat tightens and then my stomach follows and just like that I can feel all of my younger selves, which still live inside me, layered over but sill vibrant, still ready to rise to life when my mother attacks me. “When did you get so fat? Maybe you should cut back on the ice cream,” my long-gone twenty-two-year-old self wants to shoot back.
“We’re in a pandemic, Mom. I had to cancel my salon appointment,” my depressed, insecure thirty-seven-year-old self wants to say.
My scared, pissed four-year-old says, “She’s mean. I want to go home.”
“I hear you,” I tell her silently. “I’ve got this.”
The kindest thing I can do right now, for me, for my four-year-old and all of my other selves, and for my mother, is to say nothing, to keep heading on out to the car. So that’s what I do.
“Lunchtime is in five minutes if you care to join me,” my mother says when I come back inside. “And please don’t take anything off that set of shelves near the bedroom door.”
Back in the bright blue guest room, I head straight to the forbidden shelves. They contain books: Agatha Christie mysteries, several essay collections by Anne Lamott, an old Methodist hymnal. The bottom shelf holds some photo albums, smaller, older than the ones she threatened to throw away.
I pick them up, sit down on the couch, and open the first one, which has a real leather cover, stiff black pages, and black-and-white pictures fixed in place with adhesive mounting corners. These are the pictures from my mother’s childhood. In one, my slim grandmother stands in front of her Chicago apartment building, wearing a long winter coat and heels. She smiles down on a bundled baby, my mother, Marilyn, her firstborn. I turn the page. Here is my mother as a little girl, wavy-haired and full-cheeked, wearing a cap and gown—kindergarten graduation, maybe?—beaming, holding a doll, one of her Storybook dolls, I think, though the photo is so small it’s hard to tell.
I close the album and put it aside. The second album is white, newer. The first picture: my mother in her short-sleeved wedding dress which her own mother, my grandmother made. She wears cat’s-eye glasses. Her hair is bobbed short. Her sister, my aunt Jean, stands next to her in a below-the-knee, full- skirted bridesmaid’s dress which I know was pale blue. On either side of them, her parents, my grandparents. stand and smile, all four of them, happy, hopeful. My parents’ marriage lasted twenty years, a length of time that seems to shorten as I age.
I stand up and shove the albums back on the shelf. A hot-pink Post-it note stuck to the side of the bookshelf catches my eye. In my mother’s new, shaky, old lady scrawl: “CALIFORNIA.” My gut understands first. It clenches and then waits for my mind to catch up. My mother is taking her childhood, her failed marriage. She’s leaving memories of her own children behind.
I cross the room to the other shelf, the discard shelf, pull out the album labeled 1970-74, sit on the couch, and open it to reconnect to what I know. I let the album fall open where it will. And here we are, Suzanne and me—Suzie and me—standing on either side of the old blue tricycle; our little hands—how could our hands have ever been so small?—each gripping a handlebar. We fought over that trike though Suzie was really too big to ride it and I was too little.
Christmas 1971. Here we are in matching red-and-green flannel PJs, holding up our Ernie and Bert puppets. Suzanne had Ernie—of course she did, Ernie the funny one, the extrovert—while I was given serious, wet-blanket Bert. In the photo, my jealous eyes cut sideways toward Suzie’s toy.
And here we are, Suzie and I, ages six and nearly nine, standing in the front yard, wearing our capes, mine a bright, blood-red, Suzie’s white with squares and rectangles of red and blue, those hooded capes, those mysterious, dangerous capes that we, Suzanne and I, have discussed at length over the years. The capes our mother made for us, out of the blue, and then made us wear to school.
Why? we’ve asked each other. What possessed her to pick out the patterns, sail the tissue paper shapes over the dining room table—those filmy, ghostly premonitions of what was coming our way—straight safety pins pressed between her lips? What possessed her to work for hours at the sewing machine, the staccato drill of the needle racing, then slowing, tentative and erratic? Our mother hated to sew, usually started something and messed it up and our grandmother had to repair the project, rip out seams, begin again. Grandma made most of our clothes. Homemade Halloween costumes, sewed by other mothers, were passed around the neighborhood; we kids never got a say. Once Suzie outgrew a costume, I wore it: Little Bo Peep, the Jolly Green Giant. A red devil jumper which our mother said suited us both.
But it wasn’t Halloween, or any holiday, not even a birthday. An ordinary school day. And Suzie and I had not asked for those capes. “You girls look darling,” our mother said, or something like that, as we shivered in the chilly April air. The heavy fabric—corduroy, maybe—was lined with something slippery that held no warmth. “Betsy Ross and Little Red Riding Hood!” She beamed, made happy by her accomplishment, I saw even then, not with us. My scalp ached from braids pulled too tight, from barrettes clamped too closely to my skin. She made us pull our hoods up for the photo, though soon they’d fall, soon they’d be flapping against our shoulder blades as we ran. In the photo, I smile because my mother said to and it did not occur to me to disobey. But my smile is faint, tentative: I’m trapped by attention I don’t want and don’t understand. Suzie’s blue eyes behind her plastic-framed glasses stare my mother down. Her lips curve grimly into a defiant, not-quite sneer. And her shoulders lift, she’s up on the balls of her feet. Poised to run.
The boys caught us at the corner. My red cape must have drawn them. As we walked to school, we heard their high shouts from down the block, then their feet pounding on the sidewalk. We took off, then, Suzie soon out-sprinting me. I could see her white-blonde braids flying behind her, growing smaller, like the streamers on the handlebars of our trike. “Wait for me, wait for me!” I called, but she wouldn’t. Fear spurred me then, a primal fear. I ran faster than I ever had, my Hush Puppies, hand-me-downs from Suzie, rubbing against the backs of my heels, rubbing them raw. I reached the corner where Suzie had stopped, waiting for a car to pass, when they surrounded us. The neighborhood boys, six of them, Brian Waters, Suzie’s old playmate, among them, and Gary Patterson, who at the beginning of the year had said he wanted to marry me, left me love notes carefully printed on school notebook paper and then folded and placed in our mailbox, Gary Patterson, who turned into a different person, a different animal, when he played with the older, bolder boys, boys whose names I barely knew, whose names I can’t now remember. Their faces were flushed, they breathed hard, excited by this new sight. Their voices rose, circled, swooped, and jabbed all around Suzie and me. “Hey, Little Red Riding Hood! Where are you going, Grandma’s house? Better watch out for the wolf!”
One boy grabbed at my school bag and I snatched it back, whirled around. Another boy grabbed the hem of my cape, tried to lift it. I jerked it away, met Gary’s wide dark eyes. He looked away.
“Leave us alone!” Suzie yelled. “We’ll report you.” An empty threat, we all knew. Telling teachers did nothing. Reporting the boys would only mean we’d have harder walks to and from school.
Those boys had dogged us all year. For some reason they had it in for Suzie. She was the smartest in her class, in her entire grade, probably, and she wasn’t afraid to win, to beat them at spelling bees and math tests, to tell them off when they called her names. Maybe that was why or maybe it was something else, something she never shared with me. Whatever the reason, the boys chased us to school and they chased us home from school and sometimes on particularly unlucky days, they chased when we walked home for lunch. Six long blocks between our small Georgian and the red brick school. Sometimes the boys did more than chase. Sometimes they pulled our hair or grabbed our books. Often they pushed us, shoved too hard. We complained to our mother. It did no good. “They’re doing it because they like you!” she said. “It’s just how boys behave. Take it as a compliment. You should be flattered.”
But we never felt flattered.
On this day, the cape day, we walked and ran to school while the boys swarmed and swirled around us, while they teased and taunted. I’d never before heard some of the words they shouted at us, slut and bitch and cocktease and later it occurred to me that maybe those boys didn’t understand those words either, were maybe merely repeating what they heard from older brothers and cousins and neighborhood boys: words tossed back and forth like a basketball during after-school playground games, words overheard as they hovered at the edge of someone’s driveway watching the teens pop wheelies, silently mouthing their new vocabularies, claiming something ancient and dangerous.
A block away from school, one last street left to cross, Suzie finally tired of saying “Shut up” and “Leave us alone” and broke into a run, not grabbing my hand and dragging me with her, not even looking behind. I started to run, too, but my heels hurt and I faltered, my run slowing to a halting trot. A hand shoved me from behind and I lurched, fell sideways into a prickly juniper bush which broke my fall but scratched my bare leg above my knee sock, a long red line. My cape billowed and caught on the branches. I struggled to break free. My chin wobbled and tears spilled and soon I was crying too hard to breathe. I couldn’t look at the boys who stood in front of me, blocking my way.
“Come on, guys.” Gary’s voice. “I think we’ve scared her enough.” When the others sidled off, he stayed. Walked me the rest of the way to school and to the nurse’s office which smelled of disinfectant and floor polish, stayed while my scrape was cleaned and bandaged, then disappeared into the before-school hallway crowd. And avoided me for the rest of the year.
We told my mother about the boys, about the capes. Said we didn’t want to wear them. She didn’t understand. “But you look so darling,” she said. “And I worked so hard.”
The next day, and every day until it grew too warm for capes, Suzie and I wore them only until we were out of sight of our front picture window. Then we yanked them off and stuffed as much of the stiff fabric as we could into our school bags. We considered hiding them in a bush, but Suzie ruled it out. If someone stole them, we’d be punished, she said.
“That was some fucked-up shit,” I wrote to Suzanne last spring. She agreed. “Mom just wanted to dress us up like dolls,” she wrote. “She didn’t think at all about the consequences.”
“No, she didn’t,” I wrote back. I didn’t ask Suzanne, “What about me? Why did you run away? Why did you leave me behind?”
And when Suzanne told me our mother had given her a choice, first dibs on the fabric patterns, and she had picked the red-white-and-blue print because she knew the plain red would be deadly, when she said “Sorry,” I wrote back, “It’s okay.” I chose to focus on our mother, on everything she did wrong, on her internalized misogyny, her bias. “Why did she side with the boys?” I asked, and Suzanne said “Yeah, I know, can you imagine us raising our sons that way, ‘boys will be boys’ and all that, what a bunch of horseshit.” And then I said, “If either one of us had ever been raped, she would have blamed us. Or said we should be flattered.”
Silence. Suzanne didn’t write back. A week passed, and then another, during which the daffodils bent their heads and gave up, tulip petals withered and fell, heart-shaped redbud leaves began to crowd out the blossoms which sprinkled our front walk, and my youngest son informed me his preferred pronouns were now “they” and “them.” As I processed this information, I worried about Suzanne, worried I had said something wrong. Her moods could turn. She could show compassion for our mother, drawing from some deep inner well I seemed to lack. I thought, too, about the physical distance that separated us: mountains and plains and deep, wide river. I wondered when I would see her again, when she would visit, when we would stay up late and drink wine or whatever beverage our bodies could tolerate these days and laugh about crazy Marilyn until we cried.
Just when I decided I should reach out to her again, to clarify, apologize, check in, my laptop pinged with a new message.
“If either one of us had ever been raped,” Suzanne wrote, “we never would have told her.”
My breath caught. My throat tightened. I stared at the laptop screen. When? Who? One of the neighborhood boys? One of the boys in the small Iowa town where we moved the fall after the cape incident? Had she been in high school, college, grad school on the West Coast? I thought of her blazing anger the first time she returned home during her freshman year of college, anger that, if it had a color, would be white-blonde like her hair, anger directed at our mother, our father, not at me, me she merely tolerated that winter. I thought of everything I did not know about Suzanne, everything I never thought to ask, the small damages to our relationship made by time, distance, neglect. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what, if any, words she might want to read from me. I stared at her words for a long time, then I clicked on the emoji box, sent her a single blood-red heart.
I claim to be more enlightened than I actually am. Years of therapy and meditation have shaped me into a more compassionate daughter, I’ve told Suzanne. A better mother. Have helped me forgive the past. Some days that’s true; other days it’s bullshit. Somedays what I think is forgiveness is actually avoidance. It’s easy to think you’ve forgiven someone when you keep them at a distance. As I stand here in my mother’s house, staring at the photos, the evidence she wanted to destroy, forgiveness leaves my heart, my body. Leaves the whole building.
I close the photo album, put it in the garbage bag on top of the others. Then I step over to the white crib in the corner of the room and look inside. It’s always a surprise, the first time you see it. Your brain tells you it’s not a doll. Tells you it’s real. A newborn baby, lying on its back, dressed in a powder blue sleeper, matching cap on its head. Eyes closed. Dark lashes resting on pale pink cheeks. Perfect bud of a mouth. Tiny fingers curled into tiny fists. Giving off that newborn essence, that magic that somehow lasts only a few days, no matter how you try to hold on. Beauty so achingly true it is like gazing at a full, rising moon or finding a perfect shell on an empty stretch of beach.
Mom bought the doll last year. She called me, bubbling, excited, to tell me about the party she and some of her church friends had attended. A woman in the parish was selling life-sized, lifelike, replicas of infants, dressed in hand-sewn outfits. Mom and her friends each bought one, “just to give Brenda the business,” she’d said, but her giggles told a different tale. I could picture the scene, women well into their eighties—maybe their grandchildren grown or living several time zones away, or maybe there were no grandchildren at all—cradling the dolls. Humming lullabies under their breath. Pretending their hearts weren’t cracking open or cracking apart.
Suzanne and I made fun of the Creepy Doll Party, of the giggling old ladies. “Mom’s carrying on as if she went to a sex toy party and came home with a vibrator,” I said.
“Or a different kind of doll,” Suzanne shot back. Then added, “Maybe she should have gotten an Andy instead of having us. A baby that never wakes up and never grows up would have been just her speed.”
In the following weeks, my mother began talking more and more about Baby Andy. “There’s a darling craft shop downtown that sells homemade doll clothes. I bought Andy a little knit sweater with matching booties. You’ll have to come see him in it. It’s the cutest thing.”
And later: “Did you know you can buy doll furniture at Target?” And the disturbing: “I think Andy likes to ride up and down the stairlift with me! He’s such a good boy!”
“Mom, do I need to cart you off to the old folks’ home?” I had said, keeping my tone light; for years we joked about those mythical nursing homes as if she would never actually need one.
“Oh, I’m just having a little fun.” But there was something unsettling about the way she worked the doll into every conversation, like a teenager who can’t stop talking about her crush.
“If I ever start going gaga over one of those things,” I emailed Suzanne, “just shoot me.”
Now, I reach into the crib and pick up Andy. It, I correct myself. Not Andy. Not him. It. A doll. But I’m startled by how lifelike it feels, the exact shape and weight of an infant limp with sleep. Instinctively, I cup the back of its head in my left hand, lending support to the wobbly neck, as I did with my brand-new sons. Through my mask, I can smell Johnson & Johnson baby lotion, original scent. Something smooths and softens in my chest. It’s so easy to be fooled.
I carry the doll out of the bedroom. On the way down the stairs, I hold it away from my body and jiggle it, then give it a hard shake, just so my brain knows what’s what. Andy’s head flops. This isn’t real, I tell myself. But it feels wrong. I never felt tempted to shake my infants. It was a different story when they grew older. Dev had a temper and could push gentle Jasper to the brink. Soon they’d be throwing their wooden trains at each other, pulling hair, pummeling. I yelled plenty in those days—“What is going on in here?” has become a family joke; my sons can imitate me to perfection. I never hit my boys. But man, there were some days—many days—I wanted to. Wanted to pass on the hurt that my mother had doled out to me. To Suzanne. Which I am now doling out to the doll.
By the time I step into the kitchen, I’m dangling Andy by one foot. My mother turns from the counter. “Surely you don’t have room for this doll and all its things,” I say, holding Andy high. “Is he going bye-bye, too?”
“Stop it!” she yells. She lunges toward me and yanks the doll away before I even realize what’s happened. She bends over him, protective, maternal, then looks up at me, and it’s always a surprise, every time I see her, how much she has shrunk. “Bad girl!” her voice is the voice of a much younger woman. The mother of my early childhood. She raises her hand to slap.
“Mom,” I say, stepping back. “Mom. Stop. I’m sorry.”
She lowers her hand. Then not looking at me, she sits at the kitchen table, hunched over Andy, inspecting him for dirt or damage, I suppose. I can see the pale pink skin of her scalp through her wispy hair. I want to cry, and then sadness mixes with jealousy. I can see how it would have been if she’d had a boy. She would have fussed over him and I would have been shunted off, ignored. Called a bad girl if I grew jealous of the baby. I am watching a scene from the past she wanted rather than the one she got. She longed for a boy, not a second daughter. Not me.
My mother looks up at me, then away. She puts her hand to the side of her face as if to shield herself from me, hide her shame.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say.
She sniffles a bit. “Oh, I know I’m being a silly old lady.” She rocks the doll gently in her arms. “Bye-bye, Andy,” she half whispers. “Be a good boy.” Then she holds him out to me.
“You’re right,” she says. “I won’t have room. You can have him. Or maybe your kids might want him. No wait, they’re too old.” A look of confusion crosses her face. “Well, their kids might like him someday.”
“Mom, it’s okay. I was out of line. You should keep your doll.”
But she insists I take him. She holds him out to me as if she is handing over a treasured living child. Once more I feel his lifelike heaviness in my arms, against my chest—the shape and weight of my guilt. I step into the living room and set him on the couch, where my own boys would sometimes nap when they were younger.
Back in the kitchen, my mother is eating tomato soup. She doesn’t offer me any. I retrieve my lunch bag from the corner of the front hallway and sit across from her at the table. Pull down my mask. I should sit out in the courtyard. It’s warm for March and I brought my winter coat and the sun is shining. But what the hell. We may have already endangered each other.
So I sit with my mother and eat my veggie wrap and try to repair the damage. The situation sucks, I tell her. This is not how any of us wanted her to move away. “We should have had a going away party, invited your book group and all of your church friends. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to bring the boys. We’re just trying to protect you.”
“I know, sweetie,” she says over and over. “It’s okay.”
We discuss the retirement community near the university where Suzanne teaches. My mother’s first-floor apartment has a patio with enough room for a small table and chairs and potted plants and a bird feeder or two. Hummingbirds abound. Flowers bloom practically year ’round in the Central Valley. I envision this looming future that I will not be part of. Suzanne leaned heavily on our mother to move near her and for reasons I don’t fully understand, our mother recently agreed. Suzanne will score points for picking out and planting the patio flowers. She’ll be the one to drive our mother to doctor’s appointments, read her childhood books, as her mind continues to dissolve. Suzanne will also be the one to manage our mother’s final years and months and days, which, I understand as much as I am able, will be more horrible than anything we are capable of imagining. In her headstrong insistence that she be the one to oversee our mother’s care, Suzanne has both excluded and spared me.
“I have some stuff for you,” my mother says as we’re finishing lunch. “My, I’ve been having such fun going through my old things!” I feel a flash of impatience, thinking about the unassembled moving boxes in the front hallway, the empty garbage bags and unused rolls of packing tape; her full dresser drawers and brimming closet; the cluttered basement, the cluttered garage, the shelves still full of books.
I follow her into the dining room. The table is piled high with knickknacks, dishes, books, and boxes, as if she is prepping for a garage sale. In the middle of the table sit two familiar polka dot boxes.
“Maybe your kids might want them someday,” she is saying. “No, wait, they’re too old. I knew that. Well, maybe their kids.” I don’t tell her my boys have said they don’t want children. The earth is already overpopulated they say. “We’re going to have a hard enough time surviving the climate apocalypse,” Dev told me not long ago. “Why bring a kid into that?”
I open the lid of the blue polka dot box. And stare, stunned. The dolls are broken. Her prized Storybook dolls, dolls she never let Suzanne and me play with, dolls she took out only a few times as a so-called treat for us, then squawked at us the whole time to be careful, those dolls now lie in a broken, tangled jumble of disembodied heads and limbless torsos and arms and legs, half-covered with ancient, yellowing handkerchiefs.
“What the hell, Mom?” I say. “Who did this? Did they come alive and start beating on each other?”
“You can’t have the broken ones,” she says, reaching for the box. “They are going bye- bye.”
“You’re throwing them out?” I say, picking up one headless torso. Little Red Riding Hood, it looks like. “Why? They are antiques. Maybe we could find one of those doll hospitals. Find someone who can repair them.”
“No, they have to go bye-bye.” My mother lifts an armless, legless doll from the box, wraps it in one of the handkerchiefs. “Bye-bye, Elsie,” she says in the voice of a child. She presses her lips to the doll’s face.
I can feel the hair rise off the back of my neck. I begin mentally composing my next email to Suzanne. “It’s like she’s possessed,” I will write. “Something changes in her face and she morphs into someone else. She starts talking in a little kid voice. You can almost see her synapses snapping. Good luck.”
I take the doll from my mother’s hands, pick up the box. “Jesus Christ, Mom, just give me the dolls. I’ll figure out what to do.” Before she can object, I carry both boxes out to my car.
When I return to the dining room, my mother is talking on her cell phone and beaming. Her voice sounds chipper. Normal. “I’ll see you soon, then,” she says, pushing the “end call” button with far more force than needed and setting the phone on the table.
“Who was that?” I ask.
“Chad. Chad Bellinger. You know, Charlene’s son from church. He’s coming over now, to fix the leaky faucet in the powder room. And I told him he could have his pick of the tools in the garage.”
It is her matter-of-fact tone that angers me, as if we both knew all along that Chad Bellinger was coming over, as if I had not carved out an entire afternoon to help her.
“Well, I have to leave, then,” I say. “I can’t be here when Chad comes. It’s not safe.”
“All right,” she says, cheerful, smiling, unconcerned. I don’t say, “Why didn’t you give me and my family first dibs on the garage, we are all more interested in tools than dolls.”
“Maybe Chad can help you pack some boxes,” I say, imagining pleasant, paunchy Chad emptying the contents of my mother’s underwear drawer. But she doesn’t take the bait. Chad is a man. He repairs things and picks out tools. The empty packing boxes will sit right where they are until my next visit.
I finish loading the car, hug my mother goodbye. I have gotten what I wanted: my escape, for starters. Chad and I could keep a safe distance from each other in the spacious townhome, but the pandemic offers an excuse. And I have rescued the photo albums and the dolls, though why the dolls mean anything to me when they were not part of my childhood, not really, I can’t say. I’ve left Andy on the couch for my mother to find. With any luck, she’ll forget she ever wanted to give him to me, forget the whole scene. She stands at the front window. We wave. As I back out of the driveway, my trunk filled, I feel both heavier and lighter. I pull off my mask, turn up the radio, and point the car toward home.
Marilyn watches Jo’s Prius back out of the driveway. That car is so quiet. It sneaks up on you, just like Jo. You turn around and there she is. Barging into your house and startling you. Staring. Looking at you like she wants to ask a question, but then she never asks. Jo stayed slim; she was built more like Rich than Marilyn’s side of the family. Suzie was the one who inherited Marilyn’s height and heft. Marilyn sighs as the Prius glides down the street, out of sight. Little Jo. So many times Marilyn would be busy disciplining Suzie, dealing with some sort of tantrum or demand—so many demands over the years!—and when she had finished, she’d look for Jo and Jo would be gone. Hiding in her room, or a closet, or behind the tool shed. Nose in a book. Never present, not really.
Soon Marilyn will have to say goodbye to Jo. For good, maybe. A sharp sadness pierces her. Her chin wobbles, rubs against her mask. She pulls the mask off. Stupid to have to wear these things. So many stupid turns of events these days. When did everything get so silly and complicated and stupid? She turns away from the front window. Back in the dining room, she eyes the piles of clutter on the table, tax papers and stacks of paperbacks her friends said they’d look through when they got a chance. Jo said she would help her pack, but it seems to Marilyn Jo spent more time stomping around the house and trying to provoke her than actually helping. What did she ever do to Jo? She’s asked herself that question many times over the years. What went wrong with Jo?
Something is missing from the dining room table. What’s missing? She remembers that game, she used to play it with Jo and Suzie and some of the neighborhood kids. The mothers would take turns babysitting for a few hours so the others could run errands or clean house uninterrupted. When it was Marilyn’s turn to watch the children, she would put several objects on a tray. Toys, mostly. A car. A ball. A peg-like Fisher-Price figure. She’d let the kids have a good look and then she’d move to another room, take something off the tray, bring it back for them to inspect. What’s missing?
What’s missing from her table? The boxes, of course. The dolls. She feels a flash of anger. Jo took them. Took them without asking. And she won’t be careful. She won’t treat those dolls with respect. Marilyn forces herself to breathe. Steady, she tells herself. Steady. Shouldn’t rush to conclusions. Shouldn’t accuse. Or Jo will get mad at her, and somehow Jo will be right. She’s forgetting something that happened. Something with the dolls.
But it’s not her fault she forgets things. “Just write it down,” Suzie and Jo say, more and more frequently, it seems. Her friends have begun saying it too. “Didn’t you remember today was our lunch date? Book group? Do you have a good desktop calendar?” Well, she does have a perfectly good calendar, which she keeps in her front office, on top of her desk. The problem is her phone. Her goddamn cell phone which her daughters insist she carry everywhere because what if she took a fall? “And really, Mom, you should get a Life Alert button. But since you’re so stubborn about that, at least carry your cell with you.” So she does. She does not want to break her hip, alone, in the dark basement laundry room. But that means when her phone rings, she might be a flight of stairs away, a long stairlift ride away, from the organizer Suzie got her for Christmas. If the person on the phone says something she’ll need to remember, she grabs whatever is handy—a receipt, a junk mail envelope, a pad of Post-It notes—and writes it down in her bad, shaky writing; her hands are so shaky now! Then she must remember to transfer the note into her organizer. But she usually forgets that step. And so, she’ll look at a scrawled note later and won’t be able to make heads or tails of it. Doctor. Ten a.m. But which doctor? Rheumatologist, podiatrist, general practitioner? And which day? Nothing sticks anymore.
But: “just write things down, Mom,” her daughters say. As if it’s that simple. As if they have it all figured it out. As if she weren’t trying.
Marilyn reels her thoughts back in, takes a breath, puts her hands on the back of a dining room chair to steady herself. The boxes are missing from the table. Jo took them. Of course she did. Marilyn gave the dolls to Jo, even the broken ones. Jo will wonder what happened to them. Well, let her wonder. She will not tell Jo about the terrible night not that long ago—six weeks ago? Six months? Marilyn had taken the boxes from their place in the back of her bedroom closet. She kept them on one of the lower shelves. She wasn’t so foolish as to climb stepladders anymore; she did have good common sense, despite what her daughters thought. She sat on her bed and opened the boxes. There they were, Red Riding Hood and June and Elsie Marley and all the rest. She hadn’t looked at them in years. She’d been meaning to save them for her granddaughters, but then her girls went and had boys, four in all. And despite her hints and loaded jokes that at least one daughter should try for a girl, neither daughter had tried. Jo once said—quite rudely, Marilyn thought—“Drop it, Mom.”
As Marilyn looked at the dolls that night, something shifted. Something slid. Something happened in her brain or her vision or maybe to the dolls themselves, she could not say. But the dolls turned strange, changed into objects she couldn’t name, did not recognize. She picked one up, felt its hard, bisque body beneath the satin dress, though in that moment, she did not know the words satin or bisque or even body. She turned the doll over and over in her hands, marveling. She yanked at snaps, fingered frizzy hair, lifted dresses to inspect yellowing pantaloons and painted-on socks and shoes. She tugged at the arms of the doll with the pale blue hat. A small snapping sound and then the arms fell away and then the legs. Looking back on it, she couldn’t understand what possessed her to dissect those dolls. It was as if she needed to take them apart in order to remember what they were.
She held one of the smaller dolls, the one with the red cape. Her fingers, knobby-knuckled and swollen with arthritis, pinched the porcelain neck as she tried to turn it. A word had come. Doll. This was a doll. And dolls’ heads were supposed to turn, weren’t they? Suzie and Jo’s dolls did, those squat, rubbery dolls they loved, Liddle Kiddles she would remember later. The heads of those dolls could rotate all the way around like owls. Could this one, too? Then crack. The doll’s head between her finger, the body in her left hand. A ragged edge of white rough porcelain, a dark hole at Red Riding Hood’s neck. Marilyn stared at what she had done, what she destroyed. She remembered, then. Remembered the end of kindergarten. Remembered her shiny, slippery graduation cape. No not cape, gown. She held Red Riding Hood who wore the red cape. Such a happy day! Her mother and father so proud of her as she stood and smiled for the camera with her brand-new doll. She remembered sitting on the bed of her childhood home, her first home, her best home, the home she will long for the rest of her life, playing so carefully with Little Red Riding Hood and the rest of the Storybook dolls.
Marilyn had looked up then, had gazed around her bedroom, which seemed strange and wrong, too big and clean. The bed far too large. Where had her first bedroom gone? Where were her mother and father and little sister? Where was their love? Why was she sitting in this big room, alone?
Then she saw she was not alone. An old woman stared at her from an alcove above the dresser. A plump woman with short white hair, rolls of crepey fat under her chin, eyes staring and strange. Who? Marilyn wondered, anxiety rising. Who was this in her room? Was this her room? She peered closer. Mirror. Not alcove. Mirror above the dresser. Then that face was her own. Marilyn looked and looked and the woman looked back at her just as intently, and Marilyn could not recognize any familiar features. Did not know her own face.
That was when she heard the noise outside the window. She hadn’t closed the curtains and the pane was a rectangle of black. Pitch black. Something out there in the dark scratched at her window, tried to get inside. Squirrel, she would think later. A squirrel jumping onto a branch that scraped against the window. Or maybe one of the wild turkeys that roamed the neighborhood had flapped up into her tree to roost. But what filled that moment was a strange sound and a strange room and a stranger in the mirror and a darkness outside the window as dark as the hollow insides of the dolls. Terror seized her. “Stop it!” she cried, flinging Red Riding Hood at the window. The doll hit with a crack, dropped to the floor. “Stop it!” she cried again, throwing the dolls one by one at the rectangle of black. When the boxes emptied, she looked around the room, at the woman in the mirror, shaky and tear-streaked, no longer a stranger. Looked at the broken dolls scattered on the floor. Put her face in her hands and began to cry.
The next morning, she had called Suzie. “I want to move,” she said. “Tell me more about that retirement home.”
Baby Andy lies on the couch where Jo left him. A peace offering Jo rejected. Marilyn is glad. She crosses into the living room, sits on the couch, gathers Andy into her arms. Breathes in his baby scent, soft and soothing. She considers taking him upstairs, putting him back into his crib before Chad arrives, but a trip upstairs is an undertaking. She wants to stay on the first floor so she’ll hear the doorbell. If Chad finds the sight of a lifelike doll in the living room strange or silly, he will be far too polite to comment on it. Marilyn rocks back and forth slightly, the motion calming her. She hums under her breath, “Brahms’ Lullaby.” She doesn’t remember the words. Did she ever know them? Did she ever sing lullabies to Suzie and Jo? Jo claims she didn’t. Just one more silly thing Jo holds against her. But she might be right because Marilyn can’t remember ever singing to her babies. A cloud of fatigue descends, fills Marilyn’s head as it does every day after lunch. She regrets inviting Chad. She sighs as she looks around the first floor, at all the things left to do. Jo should have stuck around to help. Surely Chad doesn’t have Covid. Jo was just looking for an excuse to bolt, to skip out without helping—her old pattern. If Jo were not so aloof, if Marilyn could count on her more, she might have stayed in the area. Aged in place. But that would have meant taking a back seat to Jo’s family, Jo’s husband and boys, who adore Jo, who treat her as if she were the finest of fine china, a porcelain doll. Marilyn can’t understand it. Jo is a good woman, sure, but there is nothing exceptional about her. Suzie was—is—the one with the brains and the beauty. Jo quit her job when the boys were little and never quite found her footing, shifting from one part-time job, one volunteer position, to the next, nothing ever quite sticking. Depression, she once told Marilyn, her tone suggesting it was a word Marilyn were unfamiliar with. As if Marilyn had not also struggled. As if Marilyn were to blame. At any rate, for whatever reason, Suzie has always been the more nurturing daughter. It’s as if all the knock-down, drag-out fights she’d had with Suzie over the years, all the words they shouted back and forth at each other, had formed cords between them, tight and comforting as a swaddling blanket.
The doorbell rings, a cheerful sound in the empty house. Marilyn rises, smiling, to greet the man who will help her. As she passes through the dining room, she glances at the table, at the empty space where the doll boxes had been. She’s glad to be making some progress. Despite the pandemic, despite everything. The table looks a little lighter, a little clearer, and that’s certainly something. But when she looks at the space left by the polka dot boxes, when she realizes she will never see her dolls again, she feels a pang. She shouldn’t have turned them over to Jo so readily. Jo doesn’t care for them. Doesn’t understand. She should have taken the dolls with her to California. She should have given them to Suzie.
Gail Wallace Bozzano is the author of Supposing She Dreamed This, a winner of the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook Contest. She is a recipient of the Ragdale Rubin Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Solstice, Grub Street, Cagibi, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. A former journalist, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. She lives with her husband, three children, and two cats in Northbrook, Illinois.