The Good Mother Read online

  Dedication

  For Ben and Doug

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgment

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Tweleve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Sue Miller

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  I’m grateful to the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities for fellowships which gave me time to work on The Good Mother. I also need to thank a number of people who helped me. Reggie Healy and Diane Lund were generous with their time and willing to enter my fictional world with their legal imagination. They also loaned me two books I found indispensable: Custody Cases and Expert Witnesses: A Manual for Attorneys (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich), and Cases and Material on Family Law (The Foundation Press, Inc). Dr. David Hawkins helped me understand the role of the guardian ad litem in custody cases. I’m grateful to all of them.

  To Helen Snively who expertly deciphered and typed my still sloppy final draft; to Susan Monsky who listened to many readings of early drafts; to Maxine Groffsky who was reader, editor, friend, and constant support as well as my agent throughout the writing process; to Ben Miller who gracefully endured the lapses in my own “good mothering” and enlivened and brightened many frustrating days—my heartfelt gratitude.

  For all that Doug Bauer gave me, forgave me, and did for me I don’t know how to say thanks.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE POST OFFICE IN EAST SHELTON reminded me of the one in the little town near my grandparents’ summer home in Maine. In the days of that vanished post office, when I was small, my grandfather was usually the one to drive in and pick up the mail each day; but he almost always took one of us cousins along to row him across the lake, the first leg of the trip—even though at that stage he was still a strong man, a better rower than any of us. We vied for the privilege, the treat of a town visit. Now, as I watched my daughter mount the wooden steps in East Shelton and cross the long narrow front porch—her sandals slapping the boards noisily, her small legs flashing as she ran ahead of me, eager to be first through the door—I remembered the deep pleasure of entering that other post office of long ago; the same array of brass-trimmed letter boxes, the same worn wooden floors, nicked counters; the same grille across the opening where, when you rang the bell, the postmistress would appear from the similarly mysterious bowels of her house. If memory served me, and wasn’t being distorted by the push of the present, the postmistress here even looked like that other one. She was seventyish, skinny and stern, with gray hair and glasses and skin so white, so floury, you half expected her touch would leave powdery prints on the envelopes she slid towards you under the grille.

  Here my daughter would ask for the mail, because there was just our name to remember. In that other post office of my memory, after allowing me to ring the bell, my grandfather would greet the postmistress and then pronounce the three or four family names for whose members mail might be waiting. It was the cousin’s job, though, to distribute the mail after the long trip back to camp down the dirt road, across the lake.

  It would be lunchtime, the family gathered on the wide screened porch around several tables laden with dishes, food. The lucky mail carrier of the day made the rounds, reading aloud the names on the envelopes; and people with letters were expected to open them then and there and read relevant bits of their correspondence to the assembled group. It amazes me now to think of that strange innocent intimacy. Did none of those aunts or uncles or cousins have an illicit lover, a shady business partner, a possible secret? Apparently not. The letters, mostly to the women, were full of news of invitations, dinners, luncheons, marriages, deaths, births, gifts.

  When I pushed open the wooden screen door, the bell attached to its frame jingled faintly. Inside, the postmistress stood leaning forward behind her grille, listening to Molly. In her hands my daughter held a white envelope, but she didn’t turn to me with it yet. She was telling the postmistress about the movie we were going to see. Though the old woman was unsmiling, Molly liked her. Her attention was absolute, and she’d given Molly several presents—once a piece of hard candy, and another time a stack of change-of-address cards. She nodded to me as I approached the grille, and gestured to Molly to hand me my letter. Without interrupting her flow of conversation, Molly did. As soon as I really looked at the envelope, I knew it was about the divorce. There was something antiseptically formal about it, something which smacked of officialdom. I checked the return address quickly before I tucked the letter into my purse. Lloyd, Fine and Eagleston. Yes indeed.

  I was in no rush to open it. It couldn’t be anything urgent, since our court date hadn’t even been set yet. Molly and I talked with the postmistress for a while, and then set out on what was by now a routine series of adventures for the afternoon. I forgot all about the letter. We explored the playground on the town green and went to a grainy, light-struck version of Peter Pan, which Molly seemed to like, but slept through half of. It wasn’t until I reached into my purse to put my keys away at the Tip Top Café that I remembered the letter. I got it out and set it on the table, thinking I might read it while Molly ate. But she was in a talkative mood, it turned out, and all through dinner the envelope lay next to my silverware, rectangular and white, like an extra napkin; and I listened to my daughter.

  She was kneeling on the patched maroon vinyl booth opposite me—the crisscrosses of duct tape nearly matched its color—playing with the little jukebox attached to the wall above us. When she turned the red plastic wheel on its top, the cards advertising the selections flipped around noisily, so many small revolving doors. She liked this, and was taking a long time to finish what was left of her meal. I didn’t mind. Someone else in the Tip Top, someone with a penchant for country music, was feeding the jukebox, and I was enjoying its cheap emotionality. It reminded me of the music I had listened to in my teens—full of the disasters of love and marriage, full of longing, of heartbreak and betrayal, accidental death. That’s the way popular music had been in the late Fifties, early Sixties, before it got serious or political, or was allowed to be cynical about sex. And I had believed in that early cheap music, knowing nothing else about life. I had expected that these would be the consequences of love.

  “What’s this song?” Molly asked, pointing to a title behind the bulging plastic case. I leaned over and looked past her small finger. Her hands and breath smelled of the French fries she was eating.

  “It’s called ‘In the Mood,’” I answered.

  “Why?” she asked. I noticed that when she removed her finger from the case she left a tiny streak of grease. I wiped at it with my napkin.

  “Because when someone wrote that song he was in the mood to call it ‘In the Mood.’”

  “Why?” she asked again. She moved back over to her plate and drank some milk. It left a mustache across her top lip. Napkin still in my hand, I resisted the temptation to dab at it too. It would only offend her keen, recently developed sense of independence.

  I shrugged. “Who can explain moods?”

  “Who can?” she asked. She scuttled on her knees over to the jukebox again and flipped several of the cards around. Whack whack. Then she looked at me, impatient. “Who can, Mommy?”

  “I don’t know, baby,” I said.

  “Mommy,” she pro
tested. A tiny crease appeared in the smooth skin between her eyes. “I’m not a baby.”

  “That’s true, honey,” I said. “I’m wrong again.”

  “Ethan is a baby,” she said, naming an infamously immature friend from day care. “But I’m not.”

  “Right,” I said, and had another swallow of beer. “You’re much bigger than Ethan.”

  The song playing on the jukebox stopped and there was a sense of suspended time in its wake, an absence of tone. Voices in the Tip Top dropped, until from the speakers studding the tiled ceiling a female voice started an a capella lyric. Tammy Wynette. The bass joined in, then violins again.

  The Tip Top was full tonight, but we were distinctly the early shift—families with kids, couples on their way to the movies or shopping. No one working very hard at getting drunk, although the Tip Top had a promisingly seedy atmosphere and a little area of bare floor cleared for dancing in front of the upright jukebox at the end of the room.

  “What’s this song, Mom?” she asked. I looked again.

  “It’s called ‘Love Is a Rose,’” I said.

  “Why?” she said.

  I had some more beer. “Well,” I said. “I suppose that someone thought you could compare love to a rose: that love is nice, like a rose, and love smells good, like a rose, and love can grow, and love can die.”

  She looked at me soberly and long to see whether I was making a joke. Her eyes, like her father’s, were opaque and milky blue, unreadable. “That’s silly. Isn’t it, Mom?” She didn’t really know; she wanted me to tell her.

  “If you think it’s silly, then it is,” I said.

  She sat back for a moment. I could see only her head and shoulders over the scarred formica between us. She was blond, paler blond than I. Even though she’d turned three a few months before, her hair was still really nothing but wisps clinging to the shape of her skull. But her body was sturdy, and she had delicate, completely regular features. Except for her nose, which was unusually long—strong, I liked to call it—for a child her age. We had called her the Schnozz when she was an infant, in order to mask our fears that she’d grow up to be ugly. Now I couldn’t tell anymore if she was ugly or not. I never tired of looking at her. Sometimes she’d find it annoying, as though I were taking something from her by loving her so greedily with my eyes. “Don’t look at me, Mommy,” she’d say, and cover her eyes with her hands as though then I couldn’t see her anymore.

  “You know what?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Who’s what?”

  She was blank for a moment, then got it. “Mom,” she protested. “That’s not what I was talking about.” Her voice was prim, disgusted.

  “Okay,” I said. “What were you talking about?” The waitress walked by, looked over to see if she could take our plates, and Molly defensively rose to her knees and grabbed another French fry.

  “That I can make love all by myself.”

  This interested me, even though, or maybe because, I doubted she could mean what I at first thought she meant. “Fantastic,” I said. “Incredible. Tell me how you do it.”

  She solemnly ate another French fry, allowing me a full view of her small grayish teeth at work. “L,” she said slowly with her mouth full. “O,” she chewed. “V, and E.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “That’s just how I do it too, but I leave out the and.”

  “Sometimes,” she said grandly, “I leave out the and.”

  For a few minutes she munched silently. I thought again about opening the letter. But then she stood up to look at the young couple in the booth behind her. They had, for a while, pretended to think she was cute. They’d used a game of peekaboo with her over the top of the booth to charm each other with their playfulness. Now they’d forgotten her, though, and they seemed impatient when she’d pop up to say hello again from time to time, unaware that her usefulness to their relationship was over.

  “Molly,” I said, before she could start.

  “What?” She didn’t turn around.

  “I want you to sit down and finish supper now.”

  She looked at me, not sure yet whether she’d choose to be cooperative. Her eyes were flat and cold. We might have been enemies.

  “Would you like a swig of this here beer, dear?” I asked quickly.

  She grinned and nodded and knelt again. I held the mug out across the table. Her hands cupped around it and tilted it into her mouth. She took barely a sip. As she swallowed and released the mug, her eyes filled with tears. Beer, which she loved, always made her eyes water, and this surprising taste for something obviously painful and difficult for her touched me.

  “And then after we’re done,” I said, “I thought we’d go and get some ice cream.”

  “Ice cream,” she said, and smiled a dreamy smile.

  This wasn’t as much a bribe as it would have been normally. We had ice cream nearly every day during those weeks. There was nothing to do but exactly what she and I wanted to do; there was no one to be with but each other. And though I occasionally got tired of being a character in her games, of answering her endless questions, I was, for the most part, happy. The previous four or five months had been ones of real strain for me and her father, though we’d managed to be kind to one another; and this was a reprieve, a retreat, before life began again.

  We were staying for three weeks in a rented cottage about ten miles outside the town of East Shelton in New Hampshire. Even the town seemed a part of our suspended reality. It was tiny, unfashionable, unchanged for several decades. When we sat down with our cones on the wooden steps in front of the ice cream store, also the town’s only drugstore, we could have been models for some bucolic calendar scene out of the Forties. I felt a sense of deep nostalgia sweep me as we sat there, Molly with strawberry, I with chocolate, a nostalgia which was absurd: I’d grown up in a large town and a city as unlike East Shelton as they could be. Where did this yearning for a past I’d never had come from?

  We finished the cones and rinsed our hands at the granite drinking fountain on the corner. Molly was alert even during the ride home. Her nap in the movie seemed to have fueled her for a long evening. The sky was still light, a bright, even, pale blue above us as we turned down the steep dirt driveway to the cottage. But in the shade of the pines which surrounded the house, it seemed dusky. We went inside, and while the water thundered steamily into the deep tub, I squatted in the house’s twilight and took off Molly’s clothes. Her body seemed insubstantial, gleamed white as a dream as she jumped around naked. When I switched on the yellowing light in the bathroom and she returned, herself, her skin rough and gray on her knees and sunburned pink on her shoulders, I was startled by her solidity. Dust from the worn earth under the swings in the playground was imbedded between her small, wormlike toes.

  She played a long time in the bath I’d run for her, while I put away the groceries we’d bought earlier and washed the dishes left from our lunch. The bathroom was just off the kitchen, and her monologue, her tuneless singing floated in to me on the humid air, seemed, like the air itself, the clear medium through which I moved. My face and shoulders were reflected in the window just over the sink, bending, turning, reaching in the shadows under the shaded bulb on the wall, bringing order to the tiny world in which Molly and I were living. I stood motionless for a moment, looking at my warped reflection in the crazed panes of glass. Molly was singing a song her father had taught her about a bullfrog teasing a bulldog. I wanted to freeze the moment, to make myself remember everything about it. It seemed one of those momentary revelations of the harmony and beauty that underlie domestic life, a gift.

  I left the dishes to dry and went to wash Molly. The tub was the old freestanding kind with claw feet. Kneeling on the floor next to it, I reached in and rubbed her body with the soapy washcloth. She was quiet, getting sleepy at last, I thought, probably a little drugged by the warm water. She turned her body lazily this way and that when I asked her to, or sometimes just in response to the motion of my
hands. But just as I reached down to wash between her legs, she asked abruptly, “When will I see my daddy the next time?”

  I stopped, and sat back on my heels. In the low light of the room her pupils were enormous, her eyes dark with the swelling black. I understood. Brian had always been the one to bathe her. Sometimes if he was late getting home from work, I would fill the tub and undress her, help her in; but almost always he was home in time to wash her. They had special songs, special rituals they’d worked up together. She was missing him.

  “Do you remember what I told you?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Can you tell me?”

  “That Dad’ll come to see me right when we get to the new house in Cambridge. Right the day when.”

  “That’s right, honey,” I said. I leaned forward and began to splash water gently on her soap-slicked body.

  “But Mom,” she said. I stopped.

  “But Mom, how will he find us in the new house?” The little worry line creased her forehead.

  I leaned forward and pulled her to a standing position in the tub. As I got a towel and bent to pick her up, I said, “Daddy always knows where to find you, honey. Daddy knows right where the new house is. I don’t want you to worry about it.”

  I carried her wrapped in a towel down the long hallway to our bedrooms, and dressed her for the night. Mosquitoes and moths danced outside the screens on Molly’s bedroom windows, tapping them lightly over and over as I read her a story. She leaned against my breast while I read, and her head moved slightly with my every breath, as though she were still part of my body. With one tiny forefinger she rhythmically flicked at the button eye of her stuffed bear, and from time to time she removed her thumb from her mouth long enough to ask about something in the story. When it was finished, I kissed her good night and gave her her pacifier. I turned the lights off and lay beside her in the dark. Outside it seemed to grow lighter and lighter as she fell easily into sleep. Stars, the shapes of trees, the occasional erratic flight of a bat emerged in what had been the blackness behind the screen. When her breathing was completely regular, I got up and walked down the long wood-smelling hallway to the living room.