Janice D. Soderling

The leftovers are on the sideboard. The gravy has a glaze of fat. The mashed potatoes are cold and stiff as the remains of a love affair. The lettuce wilts. The peas shrivel. The pot roast, a small one, is a memory. Four carelessly stacked dessert plates drip sticky juices. It is one o’clock in the afternoon on the day known nationwide as Mother’s Day and both women, Catherine already forty, Joan nudging it, are mothers.

Catherine and her children have just finished their meal when Joan rings the doorbell in tears. Catherine’s kids, there are three of them, all teenagers, leave the table like it was on fire.

Catherine is displeased. She has planned the afternoon. Standing in the supermarket on Friday, she visualized a festive dinner, a family dinner, like old times.

“I must have been a pack mule in an earlier life,” she mutters to herself, trudging home weighed down with groceries. “Or will be in the next.” Her jokes keep her going. Catherine and Catherine, the comedy team; she is her own straight man and her own applauding audience.

She does not have a car. She once had a driver’s license, but it elapsed soon after she moved out with the kids and she didn’t bother to renew it. “Who needs a car? Who needs a driver’s license?” she asked no one in particular as she struck these items off the list of things she could afford and put them on the list of things she could do without.

Joan is doing all the talking, tearfully joggling her baby as she warms its bottle. Catherine is washing her fancy flowered Sunday dinner plates bought on sale. She handles them carefully. She does not have a dishwasher. She listens.

Catherine is an experienced listener. Years of dealing with customer complaints has taught her that most people just want to get things off their chest. She gives Joan half an ear, as she would a disgruntled client.

But she isn’t paid to be a listener on Sundays and she isn’t in the mood. She resents this intrusion into her kitchen, her space. Joan is only a friend of a friend and this tear-streaked face is spoiling her afternoon. Cathy has never been good at turning away people who need help. Vaguely, she blames her mother for this.

She wanted the kids to hang around after dinner tell her what they were doing in school, giggle over silly jokes. Ask her questions that allowed her to show off like when they were little. “Cats! Well, let’s look in the encyclopedia. What can we find out about cats?” A captive audience of three, wide-eyed and adoring. What the kids really wanted back then was to own a cat, not to know more about them. “No, sweetheart, cats are free spirits who want to roam in barns and fields. They’re not meant to live cooped up all day. It wouldn’t be fair to the cat.” Fair was a word she used a lot.

Three small, round faces clouded over with gloom.

Cathy said, rolling her eyes, puckering up her mouth, “Do you know that some people claim that anyone who hates cats has been a mouse in an earlier life?”

“Really?” Three small, round faces brightened up with interest.

She ran to the bathroom, took a roll of toilet paper and tucked a long strip into the back of her belt. “Now I don’t believe that myself, but I do know for a fact,” she paused theatrically, tearing off three more strips and tying one around the waist of each of them, making tails, “I do know for a fact that my boss’s wife, who once told me that she would like to see all cats dead, has big front teeth and teeny, tiny mouse whiskers at the corners of her mouth.”

She began marching around the room, saying in a high squeaky voice, “Oh, I hate cats. Oh, I do hate cats.”

They fell in line behind her, marching with exaggerated steps, holding their toilet paper tails in one hand like she did, screeching, “We hate cats. We hate cats.” Cathy began to sing and they picked up on the tune: “Four fat mice. Four fat mice. We hate cats. We hate cats.”

They got sillier and sillier until they fell on the floor shrieking and giggling. When they quieted down, Cathy jumped up and squeaked, “Cheese. I smell cheese. Who wants toasted cheese sandwiches for supper?”

“Me, squeak, squeak.”

“Me too, squeak, squeak.”

“Me too!”

And they all scurried to the kitchen screeching and yelling, “Cheese! I want cheese!”

The day was long past when she could manipulate her children with jokes and their favorite dessert. And she might as well admit it, the true purpose of the dinner today had been to celebrate herself. She’d hoped for admiration, not of the food dammit, but of the hard work she put into holding it all together.

The radio blares in the background, an old rockabilly song. Catherine likes hearing familiar voices that make no demands on her.

Joan’s voice squeezes out words like grayish water out of a wet dishcloth and Catherine settles the dinner plates, one after the other, in the dish rack. She seems to hear her mother’s voice sighing softly in the brief pauses between sentences. Catherine is a child, sitting on the floor with her toys, in a forest of thickened ankles, listening to a murmuring wind in the topmost branches. Words fly like strange-singing birds out of the rustling leaves. Words like money and family way again and widowed young; later you would hear no money and cancer of the breast and laid off; words like egg money and my jellies turned to sugar, all ruined were more important than they might seem; then someone would say I declare or no respectable woman or mortgage. Like a woodpecker hammering against a hollow tree, some words seemed to be repeated over and over again: money, no money. Bitter and worn, the women she remembered from her childhood, women who leaned their heads close and spoke in low, hesitant voices as Joan does now.

The words Catherine hears now are different though. Newer. More modern. Ready to make a commitment and abortion and viable option and biological clock. Some were the same: money, no money.

“He says he needs time to collect his thoughts,” Joan repeats. “Are you listening? He says he intends to be completely egoistical. He says he doesn’t feel our marriage is working out. Working out!”

Catherine hears her mother’s curt laugh as she quotes from her stockpile of wisdom, “You get out of it what you put into it.” She stops short, because she doesn’t want to use her mother’s words, or speak with her mother’s voice. And anyway, it isn’t true.

***

Sometimes when Catherine is tired and angry, stampeding through the house, bellowing at the kids (pick this up, put that down, turn that off) she catches sight of a resentful face, her mother’s face, glaring from the mirror. The recognition dismays her far more than the sight of her changing body: the skin on the back of her hands forming a finely-meshed pattern, the veins blue and swollen, her thighs and upper arms dimpling, her posture more stooped than a few years before. She fears becoming a caviling old woman. It happened to her mother. Catherine has seen it happen too often. She wants, demands, more from life than bitterness and defeat.

As her mother grew old, as friends died away one after the other, she lost the little joy she had, deflated slowly like a balloon on a stick. She, who was never given to complaining, became querulous. Her standard opening line was: “So you finally found time to call, did you? Do you know it’s been three weeks since I heard from you?”

Resentfully, guiltily, picturing the old widow sitting stiff-backed, glaring balefully at a quiet phone, Catherine would retort, “In case you didn’t know it, Mother, Mr. Bell’s invention can be used for outgoing calls too. You don’t have to wait for somebody to call you.” When Catherine’s sister-in-law (not her brother, bad news was women’s business) phoned up to tell her of the death, she hadn’t spoken with her mother in over two months.

Once Catherine had asked, “Mom, isn’t it wonderful that you were born the year that women got the vote?”

And her mother replied scornfully, “What’s so wonderful about that?”

Joan raises her voice, making herself remembered. “It was so wonderful in the beginning.”

Our lives were supposed to be different, Catherine wants to cry out. It isn’t fair.

Cathy, sweet, sad Cathy, who promised you that life would be different. Or fair?

Of course it’s wonderful in the beginning. Everybody knows that. But it’s the end that counts, the bottom line.

***

Joan shakes the bottle, squirts formula on the inside of her wrist to test the temperature. She sits down to feed the baby.

Catherine’s thoughts unravel and tangle like a ball of yarn under a cat’s paws, snarled memories of when her own children were small. She sees Peter’s exuberant naked body sprawling, kicking on the wide bed, she leaning over him, propped on one elbow. How young she was then, and soon to be pregnant again. His little hands grasped and pulled in her loose-hanging hair as she drew it back and forth across his naked, sweet-smelling body: the smell of breast milk and baby skin and happiness. He kicks and coos as she kisses his nose, his ears, his neck, turns him over and kisses him from top to toe, his little bottom sweet as his cheeks, she lifts him up and holds him close, close against her neck, swaying and cooing back, wrapping him in her long hair and her boundless love.

And Nina, learning to feed herself, how delicate, how perfectly formed her small fingers were, how proudly she clenched them around the handle of a spoon, looking up to be praised, then throwing the spoon on the floor, turning the bowl of oatmeal upside down on her head, laughing as the milk ran down her neck, calling out one of the best words she knew, “Whoops!”

“Only animals breast-feed,” said Catherine’s mother disapprovingly, propped full of the prudery and child-raising science handed down to her generation, “and it is not hygienic.” But Charlotte’s small mouth, like a rosebud, yes, there is no better word for it, like a rosebud, searched and sucked at Cathy’s full nipple. The baby’s eyes held recognition, they do you know, from the very first instant after birth, no matter what anyone tries to tell you. Lotte kept a steady gaze on Catherine’s eyes as she nursed, her own small eyes containing all the wisdom in the world. The thin-skinned, blue-tinged eyelids blinked, and fell, and quivered. A long, shuddering sigh and she was asleep.

Catherine’s memory has two key-keepers: happiness and hurting. She never knows which one is slipping stealthily down the long hall in front of her, unlocking and opening doors.

***

He never believed that she would really leave, though she told him so often enough during that final year. Scornfully he answered, ” Be glad you have a roof over your head and food on the table every day.”

That’s not what he said in the beginning, when she told him she was pregnant. He said, “We’ll have lots of children. I’ll buy a house. It’s going to be wonderful.”

They never did get a house, although one of Cathy’s favorite sarcasms was that they could have built one from the bottles he’d emptied. A house built of whisky bottles. A glass house. Throw no bricks. She did though. Lots of them.

Before she moved out, and afterward.

So did he.

Jobs were plentiful then. The economy boomed. Mothers crowded into the workplace, some under the banner of feminism, others because they had no choice.

He was bewildered when he saw she really was moving out. “That finishes my career. They only promote family men.” He went to the kitchen and poured himself another drink.

When the van came, she told the moving men. “Take the boxes marked with a C.”

“C as in cobra,” he said.

“C as in sober,” she shot back and he thought about that a while, weaving unsteadily on his feet.

“You can’t even spell,” he said finally.

The moving men pretended not to notice. They’d seen it all before.

He remarried a year after the divorce and disappeared into the fringes of their lives. No more phone calls in the middle of the night. The worst part of the brick throwing was over and the worst part of loneliness began.

Her body was always tired, but it cried out to be loved. Sometimes she eased it with her fingers behind locked doors, a lonely and thankless task, because she always cried afterward, pressing her tear-wet face hard against the wall of the shower, or the floor of the bathroom, or the pillow of her bed — wherever she happened to be. A disconsolate body is more easily soothed than a disconsolate spirit.

***

Long days turned into tired evenings. Short nights turned into groggy mornings. The children listened wide-eyed when she groaned, “Don’t talk to me yet. When I’ve had my first cup of coffee I will change from a wicked witch into the kindest mother in the world. Please, please, wait just five minutes. You’ll see.”

Her thirtieth birthday. Peter was six, Nina five, Charlotte four. The children sneaked into the kitchen early, all three of them, to fix her a breakfast tray. Charlotte set the plastic thermos jug on the stove to warm up the remains of the coffee left from the night before. Cathy woke up to the smell of melting plastic. They cried, all four of them in her narrow bed, as she kissed and hugged and told them they were the sweetest, kindest children in the whole world and she was the luckiest mother that ever was.

She persevered.

Catherine advanced to middle management, yes, she did, the first woman in her company to do so, and she telephoned her former husband to tell him, a triumph, lording it over him, he who had said that she would never make it on her own.” He interrupted her before she hardly got warmed up.

“Who cares,” he said and hung up.

No matter how many lists she made, there was always something vital she forgot to buy — milk or toilet paper or detergent. The windows were dingy and rain-streaked. Potted plants died soon after she brought them home. But being a manager, magic word, meant a little more money at the end of the month and a lot less time all the time, so she took the kids out of the day nursery and employed a nineteen-year-old mother’s helper.

All three children got measles the same week. The nineteen-year-old left two days later, leaving a long misspelled letter, each sentence punctuated with lots of question marks and exclamation points, key words underlined, telling Cathy how sorry she was for those poor children who had no real mother to care for them, and that if she ever had children of her own, she would never turn them over to strangers as Catherine had done.

P.S. What did you have shildren for if you don’t want to take care of them, poor little things???

Catherine found the letter on Monday morning, propped against the toaster. The girl had left in the night with a week’s advance in salary, two record albums and Catherine’s new blouse. They never saw her again. The red-spotted children were relieved and said she had pinched their cheeks when they wouldn’t eat.

One morning, tired and pressured, Cathy threw her toothbrush into the toilet bowl as she tore the paper cover off a tampon and smeared toothpaste on it. Then she sat down on the edge of the bathtub and cried for fifteen minutes. She pulled herself together, washed her face, put on her make-up and arrived at the office half an hour late.

She was late for work often. Now and then Human Resources would call her in for a lecture about punctuality.

Squinting behind his thick glasses, the HR manager said that he understood that Cathy had a lot on her plate, but wasn’t it, really, just a matter of getting organized?

Then Catherine would go home and shout orders like a drill sergeant at boot camp. Sometimes she stuck to her resolutions for a whole week, setting the breakfast table and laying out clothes before she went to bed, writing lists of weekly chores that she portioned to the kids. Many chores assigned, but few completed. In the end, of course, she did the urgent jobs herself, muttering to the mirror, “I know, I know, consistency in child-rearing, but who wants to go to history as a termagant. I want to be remembered as a loving mother.”

You wish!

***

Joan’s lamentation continues while Catherine does the washing up, lost in her own thoughts, but making appropriate noises now and then.

Catherine pulls the plug and the dishwater gurgles down the drain.

Joan lifts the baby to her shoulder. “I don’t know what to do next. I don’t think I can manage on my own. Catherine! Are you listening?”

“Yes, it’s tough,” Catherine answers finally. ” Sometimes it seems I’ve been a mother all my life. Sometimes it seems Peter was born only yesterday. Now they are nearly grown and will soon be leaving home. Thank goodness.”

Joan’s words trip over each other in coy defense. “Oh, but I’m glad I have my baby. I wouldn’t want to be without him, would I, my itty-bitty sweetie pie. I love him.”

“I love my children too. That doesn’t mean I want to mother them forever. I’ve never understood women who won’t let go of their children.”

“Oh,” Joan says in a simpering voice, “you’ll be just like everyone else. A mother is always a mother.”

“Not me. I’m going to move to the South Seas and drink coconut wine all night.”

“That’s a dreadful thing to say!”

“Is it?”

“You’re a mother!”

“I’m disguised as a mother. Inside I am Catherine. All my dreams on hold.”

Wiping the table, she glances up at Joan, stops talking. Joan isn’t listening anyway. She is joggling the baby, trying to get him to burp. Sour liquid runs down over her blouse. She says, “I love him. Deep down he loves me too.”

Catherine briefly debates a common-sense reply, then says lamely, “Well, maybe things will work out.” She knows that’s not what Joan wants to hear, but it isn’t in her power to promise a rosy future.

Joan gives a nervous laugh, or sob. She says, “I thought maybe — after all it is Mother’s Day. I thought — I didn’t expect a big ceremony, but he could have shown some sign that he cared about me, about us.”

She lowers the baby into its buggy, arranging it like a centerpiece, rubs a towel across the sour puke on her shoulder. “He didn’t get up until eleven. Then out of a clear blue sky he said he was moving out. I couldn’t stay and watch him pack. I don’t want to be alone again, Catherine. Everybody says you cope so well. Tell me what to do.”

Catherine remains silent. The practical consequences of advice always fall on the person getting it, not the person giving it. “Of course you don’t,” she says finally, then, in a cheerier tone, “Let’s go for a walk.”

“He might change his mind.” Joan’s voice falters. “I’m going home. He might still be there. For the baby’s sake. For my little sweetie-weetie’s sake.”

Catherine watches from the kitchen window as Joan determinedly wheels the buggy across the street. An elbow in the air shows she is wiping her eyes.

The flowered plates are back on the cabinet shelves. Catherine covers the leftovers and puts them in the refrigerator, starts to mentally plan the meals for the coming week.

Suddenly she is very tired. She decides to take a midday nap, what luxury. She used to do that to recharge her battery on Sunday afternoons. The kids would tiptoe around quietly so she could sleep. “When the big hand of the clock moves to here, one hour will have passed. Then you can all come in and wake me up and I’ll read you a story. No fighting now. Stay out of the knife drawer and don’t touch the stove. Mommy is so tired. One hour. Be good.”

“Mother’s Day,” she mutters, turning down the bedspread. “What a day.”