Women Without Children

It was the year 2000 and I was ten years old, living in a little working-class suburb outside the city, just across the bridge there. Before I was born my parents rented a house in that town, to be close to the medical testing center where my father worked, checking blood samples to see if people were sick or not. Mostly they were sick. My step-brothers were a bit older and saw themselves off to the bus stop every morning, while my mother drove me to the Catholic girls’ school some miles down the road. It was a Monday in January, a cool, damp, short day like any other, apart from the fact that my mother told me not to bother with my uniform. I put on a pair of blue jeans, a wool sweater and a jacket filled with goose feathers. She squeezed into a skin-tight dress, jumping to get it over her round ass. She was shapely and dressed to show off her body, my father always said. My mother couldn’t have even been thirty years old then. She must have been twenty-nine.

“The goddamn clothes keep getting smaller while I get bigger.”

She oiled up my face with Vaseline as she did each morning and pulled my hair back, bobby pins pressed between shut lips.

“When I was a girl,” my mother said, staring off over my shoulder, “I wanted to be an actress.”

My mother made wigs for a living. She sold them to Jewish ladies in the neighborhood and made a bit of money while she stayed home. She packed two of these wigs into her famously large alligator handbag, then flipped through her wallet, looking for some sort of confirmation. Once she had it, she nodded and put out wet food for the cat. We shut the door behind us. She crossed herself as she always did, before we stepped down the stairs and into the street. We walked past the car in the shared driveway, the rundown Nissan my father used to drive before he gave it to my mother so she could work part time at the Spanish salon in town, sweeping up hair and mixing dye. She quit that job, or got fired, but still drove the Nissan. My father didn’t trust my mother’s driving and asked that she call when she was going anywhere and then call when she got there, even when he was working at the lab.

I looked back at the car.

“We aren’t driving today,” my mother said, taking my hand.

“Why?”

“Because you aren’t going to school today.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because fuck school,” she said, waving her arms frantically at a taxi that slowed to a stop before us. Another thing about my mother was her language. She could curse better than anybody, but she always said, at the end of the day, that no one should make any mistake, she was a good Christian. My mother opened the yellow door and helped me into the taxi. She shouted to the cab driver to step on it, leaning her chest over the center console and getting up in his face.

We drove off. As we went, my mother looked out the window and spoke to herself, repeatedly, as though she were rehearsing lines in a script. She wrung her hands and smiled over at me every so often. I adored my mother. She was younger and more beautiful than the other parents at school. I watched her as she started up again, mouthing her lines.

The taxi slowed near the train station and my mother slipped a short wig over my hair. She placed the other wig on herself, adjusted it in the glass and sighed. It had long, brown barrel curls that hid her face. I didn’t ask any questions. I was glad to be around her. My mother bought two tickets. As we waited for the train, she checked her wristwatch a dozen times or more. We sat behind an elderly couple who played crosswords and did not say a word to one another. I caught my reflection in the glass and looked like a stranger. The conductor came by and punched holes in our passes, small exit wounds. 

“Where are you and your sister headed,” he asked me, winking at my mother. She laughed.

“I don’t know,” I said. The conductor smiled and told us to have a nice day, then he looked back at us. 

My mother adjusted her hair, she was antsy. During the forty-five minute ride, she found infinite ways to shift the stiff strands of her wig. At Grand Central, we squeezed through the doors of the train car, hand in hand. I stared up at the mural as we walked through the station, the old story in the placement of stars against the turquoise backdrop eluding me. I thought then of the girls in school saying the pledge of allegiance before mass and I was glad to be exempt, but wondered what my mother had planned. We got in a long line. When we reached the front of it, she bought two coffees, two donuts and a newspaper. She asked for extra cream and extra sugar in one, and handed that one to me.

“I’m too young to drink coffee,” I told her.

“You’re not that young,” my mother said. We ate our breakfast, shoulder to shoulder on a crowded bench in the corner of the station. Men were dressed for work. Women wore long dark coats and crossed their arms at their chests, holding their pocketbooks tight. My mother spoke to herself so quietly, I couldn’t hear her. She had a stern expression on her face, very dramatic. It occurred to me that, to a stranger, my mother might look insane. Then a darker thought, that maybe she really was. I drank my coffee.

“Finish up your donut, we have to hurry,” she said.

I wiped the sprinkles from my lap and told her I was ready. We went out into the street which rang with conversation, the hard sounds of traffic, music from storefronts still donning Christmas scenes. Snow started to fall and melted the instant it met the dirty sidewalk. My mother whistled; she whistled only when her nerves were bad.

We walked a while, then climbed down into the subway station, rode a few stops, then came back up to the street. My mother looked down at me as we hurried down the avenue.

“There’s still hope for you,” my mother said, running her slender fingers through my wig.

“I can’t save the boys, your step-brothers, too late for them,” she said, “They were small and now they’re men.”

“Yvonne, you’ll understand one day,” she said, and she only said my name, Yvonne, when she was saying something I should remember. “You’ll move far away and never call me and get pregnant and fat and give up all your dreams, then you’ll understand.”

“O.K,” I said.

We came to an angular building that jutted out into the street. Teenage kids walked out of the double doors in streams, carrying instruments on their backs. My mother pulled a piece of paper out of her purse and looked up at the building again.

“This is it,” she said. My mother squeezed my hand until the color drained from my skin. We went inside. A receptionist asked what business we had there. I wondered the same. My mother said she was there for an audition and handed the woman the slip of paper. 

“I had to bring my daughter,” my mother said, “I couldn’t find a sitter during the day.”

“Couldn’t she have gone to school?” The woman asked in a slight accent, her short, glossy bob swung from side to side as she turned her head.

“I want her to see her mother try to do something with…” my mother trailed off. The receptionist smiled politely then told us to follow her. We rode the escalator up to a room lined with wood, where other people sat and stood, talking to themselves too. We spent a long time waiting to be called, my mother growing increasingly nervous, now almost chanting, like a holy person, surrounded by others doing the same. The other people in line were much younger than my mother and she checked them out just as I did. 

My mother’s name, also Yvonne, was called. She pushed the heavy doors into the next room and I followed closely behind her. There was a row of older, serious-looking people sitting below the stage, wearing glasses, at a long black table with an untouched pitcher of water and they looked bored. We were up on a stage with awkward light bouncing against us, burning me through the heavy wool sweater. I sat off to the side by the drawn curtains and my mother stood center stage, her wig crooked in the spotlight.

“Whenever, you’re ready,” the woman on the far left said, pencil in hand.

I watched my mother in profile. She trembled, stepped forward, opened her mouth and said nothing. For a long while, she was quiet. The people at the table were annoyed, impatient. It was clear she’d need to do something or leave. But she did nothing at all, just stood and shook, as the light came down, revealing something I’d have preferred not to see. Eventually the judges told her she needed to go, her time was over, she was cutting into the next auditioner’s slot. She turned her head and looked at me, cleared her throat, then reached her hand out toward me. I went up to my mother and we ran out of the room.

Outside, the snow came down hard, issuing a warning. No trains leaving Manhattan, they told us at the station. She tried to check us into a big hotel, bickering with a concierge sporting a fake-looking mustache. He told her loudly that the credit card was declined and she flipped through her wallet, looking for another to try. Finally, the card went through. We went up to the hotel bar, which overlooked the street, and my mother ordered a gin and tonic, plus a plain tonic water for me. She took off her wig and held it in her lap. I smiled at my mother. The drinks came and she told me I could take one sip of hers, just one.

“Do you like it?” she asked. I puckered my lips, shook my head no.

“Good,” she said, “You’re a good girl.”

Then my mother started to cry. I took my wig off too. The bartender came over and poured her another shot.

“Your father’s going to kill me for letting you skip school today,” she said.

“I won’t tell him,” I said. I wanted more than anything, wanted it then and now, to protect my mother. She took her shot and stuffed the wigs into her shiny handbag. We went up to our room and ordered burgers over the phone.

While we ate, my mother pointed out a figure moving through a yellow window across the street, through the snow. A thin woman dancing in her kitchen, to music we could not hear.

“Look at all those little apartments,” my mother said, “for women without children.”

 We slept through the storm. In the morning, I woke up to the sound of the concierge unlocking the door. My step-brothers and father stood at the foot of the bed, looking panicked. They gave me a change of clothes. My mother was gone and she never returned, though I’ve heard about her in hushed tones throughout the years. She calls on rare occasions, like when she learned I got married and again when she heard I had been divorced. She rings from locations she will not disclose, the number always unknown. I keep her on the line as long as I can, which is never very long. She tells me she is thinking of getting into commercials, if only she can find an agent. She has alluded once or twice to being overcome by troubling moods and recently admitted to harboring the desire to jump off a bridge. 

“Which bridge?” I ask, hoping it will give me some indication of where she has been living. 

“Just the one by my apartment,” she says, then goodbye.