Chapter 2 #7
Kate points to my athleisure leggings, the only pants that fit me right now.
They don’t look great with my blazer and blouse, but beggars can’t be choosers.
“In five years, I have never seen you in anything less than tailored trousers on a workday.” She throws her arms around me.
“I’m gonna be an auntie!” she shrieks, and then, “I’m going to kill Jesse. Why didn’t he tell me?”
“We were waiting. Until, you know. It felt . . . safer.”
Kate nods. “Ah,” she says. “That.” She takes my hand, pulling me into the empty studio. She leads me to the stairs and sits, patting the spot beside her. “Did you know Gary and I had a miscarriage?”
I shake my head. Jesse never told me. Maybe Jesse didn’t know.
“It was before we got pregnant with Anna. And we’d been trying for years, in vitro, with donor eggs because mine were fried by chemo and radiation.
I was so worried about my body sabotaging me again.
But the doctors told me everything was good .
. . until it wasn’t. So naturally, I assumed it was my fault that fetus died, just like my sister had. ”
I stare at her, shocked. “Neither was your fault.”
“Yeah, but logic kind of goes out the window when you’re pregnant.
Which is not what you want to hear, I’m sure.
You came to hear everything’s going to be fine, and even though I hope it will be, that’s not a promise anyone can make.
But what I can tell you is that if it isn’t fine, if the worst happens, you’ll wake up the next day and the day after that, and that’s not nothing. ”
“That’s why you tried again?”
Kate shakes her head. “I didn’t want to.
I really thought it would break me if I miscarried a second time.
But Gary convinced me, and we got Anna. I couldn’t love her more, but I still think about the sibling she won’t get to grow up with.
I wonder if he would have protected her from bullies on the playground.
Or maybe he would have tried to feed her a quarter in her bassinet—-that’s what Jesse did to me. ”
I stifle a laugh, because it’s so Jesse, and Kate takes my hand and squeezes it. “That’s all motherhood is, you know. Knowing you’d trade your life for someone, if it meant they’d still be here.” She looks up at me. “I understand my mother and her motivations a lot better now that I have a kid.”
When Anna had sued her parents for the right to her own body—-to not donate a kidney—-Kate’s mother, Sara, had dusted off her law degree and fought her in court.
It had created a schism between Sara and her husband, Brian, and even though bridges had now been rebuilt, there was always the uneasy sense that they could falter again.
I touch her arm. “Thank you.”
Kate snaps to attention, standing. “Enough gloom and doom. Let’s pivot to wild congratulations and unsolicited advice about heartburn and epidurals.”
“Yes,” I say, getting to my feet. “Let’s.”
As I follow her into the studio kitchen, I wonder if my mother felt the same way as Sara Fitzgerald, as Kate. If on that bright, blue September morning, her last moments were not spent worrying she was going to die, but rather, relieved that I was not.
Know Thyself—-my mother’s senior art project at RISD—-looks exactly the way Evie said it did.
The dean had emailed me a photo from a student newspaper, a two--page PDF covering the senior projects of several students, one being Eloise Mills. I click on the first picture, the art installation captured in black and white.
It was a five--foot--tall heart--shaped mirror fashioned of glass shards tightly fitted together; although the surface looked seamless, the reflection was warped.
But if you looked closely, you could make out the intentional cracks between certain pieces in the shape of the venae cavae and aorta, ventricles and atria.
On the second page of the PDF each of the artists gave a short explanation of their project. I read my mother’s: There are patterns we have worn like ruts into our lives. It’s much easier to tell ourselves we are moving forward, and not in circles.
I wish that there was a recording of her, reading these words out loud. I wish that someone had captured video when she presented her project, so that I could watch her mannerisms, her posture, her expressions.
Instead, there is only a blurry photo with all the seniors crowded together. The only way I can even tell that one of the students is my mother is the ribbon in her braid.
It’s 5:00 p.m. Jesse will be home soon. But I find myself scribbling a note to him, then driving to RISD.
From context clues in the photographs, I know where my mother’s mural must have been.
It was situated between an archway and a magnolia tree.
The archway is gone now, replaced by a dizzying pedestrian bridge made of braided wire that is likely someone else’s senior project, but that magnolia remains, leafless and full--figured, a goddess with a crown of branches.
My mother’s mosaic has been replaced with frescoes.
Instead of going back home, I find myself driving toward Barrington. When I pull into the driveway of my childhood home, my father is outside fashioning little cardboard tents over his azalea bushes to protect them for the winter. He smiles when he sees me. “Hey, you! How’s my grandkid?”
When I finally told him I was pregnant, he couldn’t speak. He kept thumping his chest, as if he were trying to unclog the words trapped inside.
“You should be wearing a coat,” I say, pulling my own sweater around me. “It’s freezing out here.”
“Look at you, already acting like a mom,” he says. “Did you get your days mixed up? I thought you two were coming over for dinner tomorrow night.”
“We are, but I wanted to ask you something.”
“And here I thought we had phones for that.”
Why hadn’t I called him? I didn’t really have an answer, except that I wanted to see his face when we were speaking. If Jesse has taught me anything with his expertise in lie detection, it is that what’s said out loud by a person does not always match what their body is telling you.
I follow my dad inside to the kitchen and sit while he pulls a sleeve of Oreos out of the bowels of a cabinet, hidden from Evie, who thinks he eats too much sugar. “Do you remember Mom’s senior project?” I ask.
He blinks at me, sliding into a chair. “A heart, right? It was a long time ago.”
“What was she trying to say?” I ask. When he looks at me, baffled, I recite the words from the RISD student newspaper. “What were these ruts she didn’t want to keep falling into?”
“Hang on,” my father says. “You went to RISD to see her senior project? Molly, why?”
“Because I have so little of her,” I blurt out.
He looks at me as if he is about to respond to that, then shakes his head. “I don’t remember it very well . . . but it was meant to be biblical.”
“Know Thyself?” My brows shoot up. “Was she religious?”
My father runs a hand down his face. “You know how I told you that your grandparents were dead? That was half--true. My parents were gone by the time you asked. But your mom’s . . . well. For all I know they’re still living in Alabama.”
“Alabama?”
“That’s where Eloise was from. Her dad was an Evangelical minister and her mother was . . . an Evangelical wife. So yeah, she was raised very religious.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ve never met them.”
“Not even at the wedding?”
His lips twist. “Absolutely not at the wedding. She refused to tell them she was getting married. When she was pregnant, she made me promise that I’d never invite them to New York to meet you. I think she was afraid . . . that they’d do to you whatever they did to her.”
My head is spinning. This is more information about my mother than I’ve accrued in a decade. “Which was what?”
My father shakes his head. “She wouldn’t talk about it. All she said was that God broke her heart.”
Know thyself.
Was it a warning? A condemnation? A promise?
I’ve spent twenty--five years fleshing out my mother, but this changes everything.
How old had she been when she turned her back on her family, and forged a new life?
How had she ended up at RISD?
Had she rebelled like the prototypical preacher’s daughter—-sex and drugs and alcohol?
Was she drawn to mosaics because she felt like a whole made of broken parts?
Was she drawn to my father because he was an engineer, and proof surpassed faith?