The School for Good Mothers(31)

Floodlights switch on as they pass each building. Frida keeps her thoughts to herself. She shuffles into the dining hall, wondering if this is what it’s like to land on a new planet. When the bell rang this morning, she had no idea where she was.

She fills her tray with a bowl of oatmeal, two pieces of toast, a cup of coffee, a cup of milk, a Granny Smith apple. The food seems cleaner and fresher than it did last night. This will be her first real breakfast in ages. She’ll make herself finish everything. Hopefully, the women in pink lab coats will notice. Perhaps if she’d eaten normally this fall. Cooked more. Kept her fridge stocked. It would have been easy to present a better picture. She pauses with her tray. To no one’s surprise, the mothers have self-segregated. There are tables of Black mothers, tables of Latina mothers, white mothers in twos and threes, a few lone wolves.

Seeing Frida approaching an empty table, Ms. Gibson steers her toward a group of young Black mothers. “Mealtimes,” she says, “should be used for community building.”

The mothers look like cool girls. Several are remarkably attractive. They don’t look as haggard and defeated as some of the older women. As Frida. Some cast withering glances in her direction. One whispers behind her hand.

Frida’s cheeks burn. She sits and empties packets of sugar into her oatmeal. The mother across the table, a wiry young woman with a nearly shaved head, wide-set eyes, and an inquisitive manner, comes to Frida’s rescue. She’s a dead ringer for early-career Lauryn Hill, though Frida doesn’t mention the resemblance. She’s probably too young to get it.

“Lucretia, endangerment.”

“Frida, neglect and abandonment.” They shake hands.

“Hi, Frida,” the mothers mumble without looking up.

“Frida, like Frida Kahlo?” Lucretia asks. “She’s one of my favorite painters. I love her style. I dressed as her for Halloween a few times.”

“My mom picked it out of a baby-name book. It was either going to be Frida or Iris.”

“You’re not an Iris. I mean that as a compliment. I’m going to call you Frida Kahlo, okay? You can call me Lu.”

Lucretia has an easy laugh that seems like it belongs to a bigger woman. She wears her uniform with the collar popped, touches the nape of her neck as she talks. She tells Frida that she cut off her twists just before coming here, figured it would be easier but feels naked with her hair so short. Short hair without earrings isn’t cute.

“What did you do?” Frida asks.

“To my kid?”

“For work. Before this.”

Lucretia’s smile becomes strained. “I taught second grade. In Germantown.”

“I’m sorry.” Frida wants to ask if Lucretia will return to teaching next year, but the table has resumed gossiping. About the guards and the women in pink lab coats. Their roommates. How they miss their parents and sisters and boyfriends. The phone calls they wish they could make to their children. The stupid fancy plants around the campus.

If the school has money for landscaping, they should turn up the heat. They should let the mothers wear their contacts. They should be able to room by themselves.

Someone asks who’s the worst of the worst, the baddest bitch. Lucretia points out a chubby, baby-faced Latina mother sitting alone near the exit. Linda. From Kensington. A friend of a friend of Lucretia’s cousin used to fuck her. Lady stuffed her six kids into a hole in the floor. Found some secret passage to her building’s basement. Their lungs got fucked up from black mold. They got bitten by rats.

“You should have seen them walking down the street,” Lucretia says. Her kids are all different shades of brown. Different dads. Total freak show.

“I feel sorry for them,” Lucretia says. The mothers stare and whisper. Linda is round all over and prettier than her transgressions would suggest. She has a high, clear forehead, a proud set to her shoulders, wears her hair scraped back into a tight bun, her eyebrows plucked into exaggerated arches.

“Used to be hot,” Lucretia says. “That’s how she got so many kids.”

They gossip uncharitably about Linda’s body, making crude circles with their hands. She must be like taffy down there. Like a water bed. Imagine her stretch marks. Her stripes.

Frida tears at her toast, feeling like a spy, an astronaut, an anthropologist, an intruder. Anything she could say now would be wrong. Tone-deaf. Offensive. She’s never met anyone with six children from six different fathers, or anyone who’d put their kids in a hole. Some of her nastiest fights with Gust and Susanna were about brands of water filters.



* * *



Classroom assignments have been posted to a bulletin board outside the dining hall. Mothers push and jostle. Women in pink lab coats distribute campus maps. Buildings for training mothers of daughters are marked with pale pink dots; buildings for training mothers of sons are marked with baby blue. The majority of mothers have children under the age of five. There are four cohorts of mothers in the daughters, twelve to twenty-four months, category.

Frida runs her finger down the list. Liu. Morris Hall, Room 2D. Setting off alone, she soon encounters baddest bitch Linda, who follows her out of the building and shouts hello until she turns.

“You’re Liu, right? Nice glasses.”

“Thanks.” They’ve been assigned to the same cohort. Frida forces a smile. They proceed in the direction of Morris, up Chapin Walk, noted on the map as the allée. They pass the bell tower and the stone courtyard.