Nick Fancher, Untitled
Mothers and Widows
Allen Kesten
I lost three mothers by the time I was eighteen. The first vanished after placing me in a wine crate and delivering me to a firehouse: safe haven for a two-day-old infant in a box imprinted with Chateau La Confession, Saint-Emilion, 1997. She laid me at the feet of a fireman leaning back on his truck, observing the stars. I’ve often imagined the scene–the surprised look on the young fireman’s face, his moustache (or maybe a full beard) twitching with questions he wasn’t supposed to ask, my mother’s long, red hair tied in a ribbon (or maybe braided), tossing like a horse’s tail as she ran away. I’ve wondered what might have happened if there’d been a fire that night–no one left behind at the station to receive me?
My second mother, my adoptive mother, believed in birds, the mystery and consequence of their unexpected advent, the luck bestowed by a shed feather. She would do nothing to place herself in proximity to birds–no early morning bird watching trips to parks and forests, no feeders hung in the yard or stuck with suction cups like lizard feet to the windows. For birds to bring her hope and prophecy, their presence had to be unwilled happenstance.
She crocheted afghans in yarns as bright as parrots and placed them in every room. “We must protect against the chill that comes in through the windows and walls,” she’d say as she draped one over me. And I felt protected, as cherished as something rare, even though I was mindful of a world full of children endlessly replenishing the species, hardly extinct. I stared at babies–at the mall, in the library, in parks–and thought they should all be tagged like eagles or grey wolves so we would know when there were enough of them.
This mother died when I was twelve, after an illness so brief that the disbelief among all the adults around me that she could even be so sick hadn’t had time to wane. For weeks after, I shuffled and huddled around the house, wrapping myself in her soft throws.
My adoptive father was a local TV meteorologist on the morning and noon broadcasts. Through most of my childhood, he showed little affection for me and rarely spoke to me directly. Our interactions were channeled through my second mother, and after her death, became negligible. What would’ve been the point of allowing him to intrude on my grief?
As my body began to change, I hated the things that grew out of it: hair in new places, finger and toe nails lengthening as if in time-lapse photography, earwax, blemishes, and secretions. I clipped, shaved, and dug with cotton swabs as if trying to hold my body in stasis. At school, I knew another student who had been adopted. Lara scratched and marked herself almost daily, comets across her arms and stomach, the point of her geometry compass a favorite tool. I wondered if Lara’s birth mother would know her–a mutilated and scarred thing, instead of the smooth, flawless infant given over–if she came searching. (Lara was born in Central America. Her adoptive family was white. Instead of taking French like most of our group at school, we took Spanish. The language was a telegraph wire connecting Lara to who she might’ve been, and a piano wire around the neck of her adoptive mother when Lara and I spoke it to spite her.)
After a proper period of mourning, the man took a new wife, relieved I’m sure that he could totally ignore me after months of single parenthood. The woman seemed efficient in all rooms of the house. In gratitude, the man gave her diamond jewelry on special occasions. I ate and dressed well under my third mother’s watch. She steered me through high school with white-knuckled ambition. Her collection of cookbooks filled our kitchen shelves, and she prepared elaborate dinners to mark my achievements. Perfect grades, awards for my photography, solid College Board scores, and early acceptances to prestigious schools, all celebrated with unusual fowl and mile high desserts.
At my graduation party, she stepped into pictures taken of me, diamond earrings sparking odd rays of light that made me blink. She seemed happier for me than I was for myself. When people started to leave, I found her crying as she rinsed the punch bowl. I said a quick “thank you,” leaving her to decide for what. Then I headed out with Lara to another party.
The next night, the woman paced in the backyard, hands over her diamond-studded ears as if holding thoughts in or keeping some out. Later, I heard a muffled fight between her and the man. After a week or so, she pulled up to the house and unloaded a stack of flattened boxes. “You need to start packing for college. Don’t wait until the last minute to decide what you’ll take with you.” She left the boxes leaning against the wall outside my bedroom door. By the next morning, they had slid to the floor; I stepped over them to get to the kitchen and found it empty, no breakfast waiting.
“She’s gone,” the man called from the living room. “I guess she flew the nest before it emptied.” I peered through the kitchen cut-out and watched him light a joint. He raised the remote to the CD player and one of his first wife’s favorite folk songs began to play. For hours, the song continued on endless repeat, its tale of a racing pigeon feared lost in a storm en route from Rome back to Derby, to the West End of Derby, relentlessly told.
Widows and divorced women in town were soon competing for the abandoned weatherman, drawn by his minor celebrity and his diamond-giving reputation. I longed for summer to end, to flee the soppy concoctions of milk-soaked bread, chicken, and vegetables that the women brought to our door hoping to get time with the man–meals like bullets shot into his stomach that they might ricochet into his heart.
One day I came home to find a shattered casserole on the front stoop and a scrawny, striped cat lapping up the unbaked contents. A woman came running up the walkway, broom and trash can in hand. She explained that she had dropped the casserole while trying to ring the doorbell, her hands slick with butter. “I even had the instructions taped to the lid. I wonder where they’ve gotten to?” she asked as she searched the lawn in vain. We let the cat have his fill. Then I took him inside, leaving the woman to sweep up the remaining mess. As the door closed, I heard her sigh, “I guess that’s that.”
The cat stalked around my room until he found the old wine crate. It sat on the floor in a corner collecting socks and underwear that desperately needed to be washed. Through the open window, I could hear the woman sobbing. I wanted to tell her that in the end, it wasn’t so important to be chosen–it guaranteed nothing–but before I could, the cat raised his head from inside the box and looked at me with contented eyes. I reached for my camera. When he joined me in bed that night, I wondered if cats retain memories of their mothers. Would my new companion recognize his if he saw her years after being separated?
As the August humidity began to cover everyone and everything as if it were a coat of primer, most of the women removed themselves from the contest, having discovered, no doubt, that the man was not much of a prize and that our air conditioning was faulty. Two widows persisted; each lived just a few blocks away from us. Sometimes, when I passed their houses, I felt spied on by the women, but at other times, if our eyes met and they nodded their heads, I felt almost cared for. They waited by telephones or stood framed by their picture windows gazing out as if searching for a carrier pigeon, some note of encouragement affixed to its leg. Their phones rarely rang, for the weatherman was usually stoned and dozy when not at the television station.
Unlikely as it might’ve been, I began to harbor the thought that, of the two women, one might prove to be my birth mother, ready for a second chance with me. Had she led a life of loneliness, always hoping to be reunited with me? Did regret, like a bubble in her veins, circulate in endless relays to her heart, a wearisome irritant, a phantom pain? But which of the two women? Would it require some competition, some test out of a book, before she could be revealed and claim me?
One of the women had red hair like mine, and the summer sun made green patches of her freckles, the way it did mine. From the look of her nails, she chewed them as I did mine.
The other contender had black hair and a perpetual tan. If there was any connection between us, it was as impossible to see as the continent of Africa was when I stood on the beach near our town and aimed my camera past the horizon. (Feet in the sand, I dreamed of traversing ocean and time, lured by other lands and animals nearly extinct.)
“What did you want with me?” I asked the man one morning, after we had lived for nearly two months as magnets repelling each other, identical poles of abandonments we had suffered. That night the man called both widows and asked them to take me out, get to know me more. Was he setting things in motion for me to choose his next wife, another woman to take me off his hands?
The Dark Widow was the first to spend time with me. Carol took me to the circus. After the clowns and acrobats had performed, elephants entered the ring and walked in a circle. Loss and weariness filled the air until it seemed that only the giant beasts’ sorrow kept the big top aloft. An elephant with an orange headdress slowed its pace as it was near to passing Carol and me, its stiff rear legs pounding the ground like corner posts being sledgehammered into the earth. The elephant’s eye, lodged in a swirl of wrinkles like the low at the center of a wind and pressure map, found the Dark Widow and kept her in its sight, even as the beast slowly moved on, the great head turning.
When the show was over and we were back outside in the sunlight, we saw an elderly man in firefighter gear, heavy helmet and long rubber coat, staring up at the tent, an empty pail at his feet. He lowered his gaze and looked at the Dark Widow. “We must remember the circus fire of 1944 and be ever vigilant,” he said in a voice harsh from smoke.
“Of course,” she replied and thanked him for his service. Then they exchanged smiles.
“I believe it’s your destiny,” said the fireman, “that all who come to love you will know that they’ve found something rare and precious, like an exotic flower.”
We returned to the house and found the man sitting at the dining room table, tie loosened, just a roach from his latest joint in the plate in front of him. Carol sat down at the table, while I hung back and wondered what might happen next. When she uttered her first word, a grain of rice fell from her mouth. As she told of our afternoon together, the elephant’s eye trained on her and the old fireman with his surprising prophecy, more rice fell, until small hills rose across the tabletop as in a magical landscape. I picked up a grain of rice and held it in my palm. It reminded me of one of my cat’s claws. The man, despite his stupor, stood up and opened his eyes very wide, as if he suddenly remembered his youthful fascination with snowdrifts and shifting topographies. He went into the kitchen, retrieved a dough scraper and a pot. Bending over the table, he slid mounds of the grain into the pot and then carried it back to the kitchen. I followed him, watching as he added water to cover and then lit a flame on the stove. The grains grew whiter as the water simmered. All at once, the rice began to turn orange-red as threads of saffron appeared in the water. The house filled with the scent of the spice: honey, hay, and journeys across land and sea from Spain, the crocus fields of Spain.
Together we ate the brilliant sunset-colored rice from white bowls: The Dark Widow, the man, and I. A sudden, summer storm burst above us like a crisp sheet snapped across our sleepy neighborhood, and the man’s eyes flashed with lightning as he ate, more awake and present than I’d seen him in years.
The next morning, Lara called, and I told her about my time with the Dark Widow. “She sounds asombrosa,” Lara said. Then she added, “Be careful of your heart.” After the call, I put on my best shirt and prepared to spend the day with the Red Widow. I tried to imagine a great reveal, my birth mother returned from her journey, back from the night and the storms. And the Dark Widow eclipsed.
“Who needs smelly animals and sentimental clowns? He’s too old for such things,” the Red Widow said to the man after he told her about my day with Carol, his tongue still stained orange from the saffron rice.
Bonnie took me to the art museum. In a gallery of nineteenth century paintings, I stopped in front of a portrait of a boy wearing a satin shirt, bright white brushstrokes floating like cirrus clouds across the grey folds of his sleeves where they caught the light. In his lap, a blue and white bowl of soapy water, a finger over the edge troubling the surface. His raised hand held a straw to his lips. A soap bubble clung to the other end of the straw, blue edged and glistening, like an eyeball staring out from the painting. A tabby cat sat on the floor by the boy staring up at the orb. As I looked at the painting, I reached for Bonnie’s hand. Immediately embarrassed, I turned and whispered, “Sorry,” but discovered that I was alone in the gallery. I moved through other empty galleries, a mocking bleat echoing in my head, until a guard escorted me outside. I looked down the museum’s granite stairs and saw the Red Widow milling about with lots of other people. There were fire trucks in the street. Firefighters, the yellow and silver stripes on their black gear reflecting the sunlight, hurried in and out of the entrance behind me. Just as the Red Widow reached me, one firefighter stopped and asked me, “Didn’t you hear the alarms going off?”
“The boy’s head is in the clouds,” the Red Widow said with an exaggerated sigh.
“All the more reason you should’ve kept better track of him,” scolded the firefighter. The man’s cheeks blazed as if he carried the burning embers of a thousand fires within him. “If it were in my power,” he said to the Red Widow, “I would let all who are tempted to care about you see what you see when you look at them.”
Bonnie hurried me away. On the drive home, I stared at her hands tight around the steering wheel, the blue veins under the sunburned skin.
She rushed past me into the house. The man sat in his recliner, stripped down to T-shirt and boxers. The Red Widow spoke, and with each word a shard of mirror flew out of her mouth. A chandelier of jagged mirrors formed in the air as she praised the paintings we’d seen, claimed she’d nearly risked her life for me, faulted the museum’s security, and declared the firefighter presumptuous and confused. No matter where the man, roused from his chair, stood, or where I, circling the room, paused, not one shard reflected either of our faces. Only the Red Widow’s face, multiplied hundreds of times, could be seen.
Falling silent, she looked at the man, eyes imploring, and then at me, lips parted, expectant. Still, just her face in the mirrors, taut as a mask.
I stood behind Bonnie and reached out my hands. Taking her by the shoulders, I turned her around so that she had to really look at me, see who I might be. With her eyes trained on me, I glanced away for a moment, looked into the limitless repetition of her face, but didn’t see myself, not even as a shadow. My hands released her. She turned and stared into the glittering tiers of her refracted face, now stricken, slack. As if by way of excuse, she said, “I never had a child, you know. Wasn’t in the stars, I guess.” The words fell, clear marbles, and rolled across the floor.
That night, my bedroom door closed against the flickering light of the mirrors turning to sand down the hall, I sat on my bed holding the cat. Mothers, like a nuisance of birds, gathered in my head. My first mother wasn’t coming back; none of my mothers were. I tried to picture being away at school, independent, the path to my future clear. Yet I could sense the possibility of a terrible dip in the highwire I had to traverse.
In the morning, before breakfast or a shower, I grabbed the broom and a pail intent on sweeping up the sand in the living room. The phone rang and the man called out, “I’ll get it.” An orange tie around his neck, he nodded at me before answering.
I bent down to push the first pile of debris into the dustpan. The man said the name Carol, dropped his voice, and left the room. The contest of widows had a winner it seemed. Another woman would likely move in. I sat on the floor, a child in a sandbox, and felt a loosening in my body. Could I let go of the idea of a mother and accept Carol, her gifts raining down on us? What did it matter? I was leaving soon. But perhaps, if I called from college, after a stumble or stunned by jolts of doubt, Carol would answer, the sound of her voice a net to catch me.
Author’s Note:
This story takes inspiration from “The Three Little Men in the Wood” by the Brothers Grimm. And when she opened her mouth to tell her mother what had happened . . . a toad jumped out of her mouth with every word she said, so that everyone was repulsed by her.
Allen Kesten
I lost three mothers by the time I was eighteen. The first vanished after placing me in a wine crate and delivering me to a firehouse: safe haven for a two-day-old infant in a box imprinted with Chateau La Confession, Saint-Emilion, 1997. She laid me at the feet of a fireman leaning back on his truck, observing the stars. I’ve often imagined the scene–the surprised look on the young fireman’s face, his moustache (or maybe a full beard) twitching with questions he wasn’t supposed to ask, my mother’s long, red hair tied in a ribbon (or maybe braided), tossing like a horse’s tail as she ran away. I’ve wondered what might have happened if there’d been a fire that night–no one left behind at the station to receive me?
My second mother, my adoptive mother, believed in birds, the mystery and consequence of their unexpected advent, the luck bestowed by a shed feather. She would do nothing to place herself in proximity to birds–no early morning bird watching trips to parks and forests, no feeders hung in the yard or stuck with suction cups like lizard feet to the windows. For birds to bring her hope and prophecy, their presence had to be unwilled happenstance.
She crocheted afghans in yarns as bright as parrots and placed them in every room. “We must protect against the chill that comes in through the windows and walls,” she’d say as she draped one over me. And I felt protected, as cherished as something rare, even though I was mindful of a world full of children endlessly replenishing the species, hardly extinct. I stared at babies–at the mall, in the library, in parks–and thought they should all be tagged like eagles or grey wolves so we would know when there were enough of them.
This mother died when I was twelve, after an illness so brief that the disbelief among all the adults around me that she could even be so sick hadn’t had time to wane. For weeks after, I shuffled and huddled around the house, wrapping myself in her soft throws.
My adoptive father was a local TV meteorologist on the morning and noon broadcasts. Through most of my childhood, he showed little affection for me and rarely spoke to me directly. Our interactions were channeled through my second mother, and after her death, became negligible. What would’ve been the point of allowing him to intrude on my grief?
As my body began to change, I hated the things that grew out of it: hair in new places, finger and toe nails lengthening as if in time-lapse photography, earwax, blemishes, and secretions. I clipped, shaved, and dug with cotton swabs as if trying to hold my body in stasis. At school, I knew another student who had been adopted. Lara scratched and marked herself almost daily, comets across her arms and stomach, the point of her geometry compass a favorite tool. I wondered if Lara’s birth mother would know her–a mutilated and scarred thing, instead of the smooth, flawless infant given over–if she came searching. (Lara was born in Central America. Her adoptive family was white. Instead of taking French like most of our group at school, we took Spanish. The language was a telegraph wire connecting Lara to who she might’ve been, and a piano wire around the neck of her adoptive mother when Lara and I spoke it to spite her.)
After a proper period of mourning, the man took a new wife, relieved I’m sure that he could totally ignore me after months of single parenthood. The woman seemed efficient in all rooms of the house. In gratitude, the man gave her diamond jewelry on special occasions. I ate and dressed well under my third mother’s watch. She steered me through high school with white-knuckled ambition. Her collection of cookbooks filled our kitchen shelves, and she prepared elaborate dinners to mark my achievements. Perfect grades, awards for my photography, solid College Board scores, and early acceptances to prestigious schools, all celebrated with unusual fowl and mile high desserts.
At my graduation party, she stepped into pictures taken of me, diamond earrings sparking odd rays of light that made me blink. She seemed happier for me than I was for myself. When people started to leave, I found her crying as she rinsed the punch bowl. I said a quick “thank you,” leaving her to decide for what. Then I headed out with Lara to another party.
The next night, the woman paced in the backyard, hands over her diamond-studded ears as if holding thoughts in or keeping some out. Later, I heard a muffled fight between her and the man. After a week or so, she pulled up to the house and unloaded a stack of flattened boxes. “You need to start packing for college. Don’t wait until the last minute to decide what you’ll take with you.” She left the boxes leaning against the wall outside my bedroom door. By the next morning, they had slid to the floor; I stepped over them to get to the kitchen and found it empty, no breakfast waiting.
“She’s gone,” the man called from the living room. “I guess she flew the nest before it emptied.” I peered through the kitchen cut-out and watched him light a joint. He raised the remote to the CD player and one of his first wife’s favorite folk songs began to play. For hours, the song continued on endless repeat, its tale of a racing pigeon feared lost in a storm en route from Rome back to Derby, to the West End of Derby, relentlessly told.
Widows and divorced women in town were soon competing for the abandoned weatherman, drawn by his minor celebrity and his diamond-giving reputation. I longed for summer to end, to flee the soppy concoctions of milk-soaked bread, chicken, and vegetables that the women brought to our door hoping to get time with the man–meals like bullets shot into his stomach that they might ricochet into his heart.
One day I came home to find a shattered casserole on the front stoop and a scrawny, striped cat lapping up the unbaked contents. A woman came running up the walkway, broom and trash can in hand. She explained that she had dropped the casserole while trying to ring the doorbell, her hands slick with butter. “I even had the instructions taped to the lid. I wonder where they’ve gotten to?” she asked as she searched the lawn in vain. We let the cat have his fill. Then I took him inside, leaving the woman to sweep up the remaining mess. As the door closed, I heard her sigh, “I guess that’s that.”
The cat stalked around my room until he found the old wine crate. It sat on the floor in a corner collecting socks and underwear that desperately needed to be washed. Through the open window, I could hear the woman sobbing. I wanted to tell her that in the end, it wasn’t so important to be chosen–it guaranteed nothing–but before I could, the cat raised his head from inside the box and looked at me with contented eyes. I reached for my camera. When he joined me in bed that night, I wondered if cats retain memories of their mothers. Would my new companion recognize his if he saw her years after being separated?
As the August humidity began to cover everyone and everything as if it were a coat of primer, most of the women removed themselves from the contest, having discovered, no doubt, that the man was not much of a prize and that our air conditioning was faulty. Two widows persisted; each lived just a few blocks away from us. Sometimes, when I passed their houses, I felt spied on by the women, but at other times, if our eyes met and they nodded their heads, I felt almost cared for. They waited by telephones or stood framed by their picture windows gazing out as if searching for a carrier pigeon, some note of encouragement affixed to its leg. Their phones rarely rang, for the weatherman was usually stoned and dozy when not at the television station.
Unlikely as it might’ve been, I began to harbor the thought that, of the two women, one might prove to be my birth mother, ready for a second chance with me. Had she led a life of loneliness, always hoping to be reunited with me? Did regret, like a bubble in her veins, circulate in endless relays to her heart, a wearisome irritant, a phantom pain? But which of the two women? Would it require some competition, some test out of a book, before she could be revealed and claim me?
One of the women had red hair like mine, and the summer sun made green patches of her freckles, the way it did mine. From the look of her nails, she chewed them as I did mine.
The other contender had black hair and a perpetual tan. If there was any connection between us, it was as impossible to see as the continent of Africa was when I stood on the beach near our town and aimed my camera past the horizon. (Feet in the sand, I dreamed of traversing ocean and time, lured by other lands and animals nearly extinct.)
“What did you want with me?” I asked the man one morning, after we had lived for nearly two months as magnets repelling each other, identical poles of abandonments we had suffered. That night the man called both widows and asked them to take me out, get to know me more. Was he setting things in motion for me to choose his next wife, another woman to take me off his hands?
The Dark Widow was the first to spend time with me. Carol took me to the circus. After the clowns and acrobats had performed, elephants entered the ring and walked in a circle. Loss and weariness filled the air until it seemed that only the giant beasts’ sorrow kept the big top aloft. An elephant with an orange headdress slowed its pace as it was near to passing Carol and me, its stiff rear legs pounding the ground like corner posts being sledgehammered into the earth. The elephant’s eye, lodged in a swirl of wrinkles like the low at the center of a wind and pressure map, found the Dark Widow and kept her in its sight, even as the beast slowly moved on, the great head turning.
When the show was over and we were back outside in the sunlight, we saw an elderly man in firefighter gear, heavy helmet and long rubber coat, staring up at the tent, an empty pail at his feet. He lowered his gaze and looked at the Dark Widow. “We must remember the circus fire of 1944 and be ever vigilant,” he said in a voice harsh from smoke.
“Of course,” she replied and thanked him for his service. Then they exchanged smiles.
“I believe it’s your destiny,” said the fireman, “that all who come to love you will know that they’ve found something rare and precious, like an exotic flower.”
We returned to the house and found the man sitting at the dining room table, tie loosened, just a roach from his latest joint in the plate in front of him. Carol sat down at the table, while I hung back and wondered what might happen next. When she uttered her first word, a grain of rice fell from her mouth. As she told of our afternoon together, the elephant’s eye trained on her and the old fireman with his surprising prophecy, more rice fell, until small hills rose across the tabletop as in a magical landscape. I picked up a grain of rice and held it in my palm. It reminded me of one of my cat’s claws. The man, despite his stupor, stood up and opened his eyes very wide, as if he suddenly remembered his youthful fascination with snowdrifts and shifting topographies. He went into the kitchen, retrieved a dough scraper and a pot. Bending over the table, he slid mounds of the grain into the pot and then carried it back to the kitchen. I followed him, watching as he added water to cover and then lit a flame on the stove. The grains grew whiter as the water simmered. All at once, the rice began to turn orange-red as threads of saffron appeared in the water. The house filled with the scent of the spice: honey, hay, and journeys across land and sea from Spain, the crocus fields of Spain.
Together we ate the brilliant sunset-colored rice from white bowls: The Dark Widow, the man, and I. A sudden, summer storm burst above us like a crisp sheet snapped across our sleepy neighborhood, and the man’s eyes flashed with lightning as he ate, more awake and present than I’d seen him in years.
The next morning, Lara called, and I told her about my time with the Dark Widow. “She sounds asombrosa,” Lara said. Then she added, “Be careful of your heart.” After the call, I put on my best shirt and prepared to spend the day with the Red Widow. I tried to imagine a great reveal, my birth mother returned from her journey, back from the night and the storms. And the Dark Widow eclipsed.
“Who needs smelly animals and sentimental clowns? He’s too old for such things,” the Red Widow said to the man after he told her about my day with Carol, his tongue still stained orange from the saffron rice.
Bonnie took me to the art museum. In a gallery of nineteenth century paintings, I stopped in front of a portrait of a boy wearing a satin shirt, bright white brushstrokes floating like cirrus clouds across the grey folds of his sleeves where they caught the light. In his lap, a blue and white bowl of soapy water, a finger over the edge troubling the surface. His raised hand held a straw to his lips. A soap bubble clung to the other end of the straw, blue edged and glistening, like an eyeball staring out from the painting. A tabby cat sat on the floor by the boy staring up at the orb. As I looked at the painting, I reached for Bonnie’s hand. Immediately embarrassed, I turned and whispered, “Sorry,” but discovered that I was alone in the gallery. I moved through other empty galleries, a mocking bleat echoing in my head, until a guard escorted me outside. I looked down the museum’s granite stairs and saw the Red Widow milling about with lots of other people. There were fire trucks in the street. Firefighters, the yellow and silver stripes on their black gear reflecting the sunlight, hurried in and out of the entrance behind me. Just as the Red Widow reached me, one firefighter stopped and asked me, “Didn’t you hear the alarms going off?”
“The boy’s head is in the clouds,” the Red Widow said with an exaggerated sigh.
“All the more reason you should’ve kept better track of him,” scolded the firefighter. The man’s cheeks blazed as if he carried the burning embers of a thousand fires within him. “If it were in my power,” he said to the Red Widow, “I would let all who are tempted to care about you see what you see when you look at them.”
Bonnie hurried me away. On the drive home, I stared at her hands tight around the steering wheel, the blue veins under the sunburned skin.
She rushed past me into the house. The man sat in his recliner, stripped down to T-shirt and boxers. The Red Widow spoke, and with each word a shard of mirror flew out of her mouth. A chandelier of jagged mirrors formed in the air as she praised the paintings we’d seen, claimed she’d nearly risked her life for me, faulted the museum’s security, and declared the firefighter presumptuous and confused. No matter where the man, roused from his chair, stood, or where I, circling the room, paused, not one shard reflected either of our faces. Only the Red Widow’s face, multiplied hundreds of times, could be seen.
Falling silent, she looked at the man, eyes imploring, and then at me, lips parted, expectant. Still, just her face in the mirrors, taut as a mask.
I stood behind Bonnie and reached out my hands. Taking her by the shoulders, I turned her around so that she had to really look at me, see who I might be. With her eyes trained on me, I glanced away for a moment, looked into the limitless repetition of her face, but didn’t see myself, not even as a shadow. My hands released her. She turned and stared into the glittering tiers of her refracted face, now stricken, slack. As if by way of excuse, she said, “I never had a child, you know. Wasn’t in the stars, I guess.” The words fell, clear marbles, and rolled across the floor.
That night, my bedroom door closed against the flickering light of the mirrors turning to sand down the hall, I sat on my bed holding the cat. Mothers, like a nuisance of birds, gathered in my head. My first mother wasn’t coming back; none of my mothers were. I tried to picture being away at school, independent, the path to my future clear. Yet I could sense the possibility of a terrible dip in the highwire I had to traverse.
In the morning, before breakfast or a shower, I grabbed the broom and a pail intent on sweeping up the sand in the living room. The phone rang and the man called out, “I’ll get it.” An orange tie around his neck, he nodded at me before answering.
I bent down to push the first pile of debris into the dustpan. The man said the name Carol, dropped his voice, and left the room. The contest of widows had a winner it seemed. Another woman would likely move in. I sat on the floor, a child in a sandbox, and felt a loosening in my body. Could I let go of the idea of a mother and accept Carol, her gifts raining down on us? What did it matter? I was leaving soon. But perhaps, if I called from college, after a stumble or stunned by jolts of doubt, Carol would answer, the sound of her voice a net to catch me.
Author’s Note:
This story takes inspiration from “The Three Little Men in the Wood” by the Brothers Grimm. And when she opened her mouth to tell her mother what had happened . . . a toad jumped out of her mouth with every word she said, so that everyone was repulsed by her.