The School for Good Mothers(57)

“We were just trying to support the others. We weren’t bothering anyone.”

“I know you miss Harriet very much. But why torture yourself?”

The mothers have been in uniform for almost three months. Frida tells the counselor that February has been different. The day Harriet turned twenty-three months old, there was zero pinching. She persuaded Emmanuelle to chew and swallow six pretend green beans. She doesn’t mention that she’s been gazing longingly at the bell tower, that she’s wondered about using a bedsheet. If she tried to hang herself, she might only turn into a vegetable, kept alive at grave cost to her family.

What does she need to do to regain phone privileges? How high does she have to score on the next evaluation? Food and medicine skill sets are being tested separately. For cooking skills, she scored third out of four. Her counselor tells her to be more ambitious. Not last is not good enough. Try for the top two.

“And what if I can’t do that?”

“I find your negativity very troubling, Frida. There is no can’t. Do you ever hear us talking about can’t? You have to tell yourself, I can! I can! Take can’t out of your vocabulary. A good mother can do anything.”



* * *



Despite everyone’s abysmal performance during feeding mastery, lessons proceed on schedule. High chairs and splat mats have been moved to storage. Rocking chairs and cribs have been moved back into the classroom. The mothers are learning to nurse a sick child back to health.

“A mother’s love can cure most common illnesses,” Ms. Khoury says.

They must heal their dolls with loving thoughts. The instructors will take the doll’s temperature in the morning and at day’s end. See who can get their doll down to 98.6 degrees. Break the fever.

Given the personal nature of this exercise, each mother’s loving thoughts will be different, the instructors say. They should feel free to anthropomorphize the illness. Picture themselves doing battle with the infection.

Frida pursues the illness lessons with vigor. She was a sickly child. Asthma and allergies. Bronchitis every winter. Doctors, she knows. Medicine, she knows. The lessons make her think of Popo. The square of cloth her grandmother kept tucked into her cleavage because she always felt cold there. Her grandmother’s lipstick and hair spray.

She used to help her grandmother dye her hair, touched up her roots with an old toothbrush. She sometimes helped her bathe. The only socks her grandmother wore were flesh-tone nylon knee-highs from the drugstore. Until the very end, she wore full-body girdles, even beneath velour pajamas. The texture of her grandmother’s skin is as vivid in her memory as Harriet’s, tight and shiny on her shoulders, on her hands, loose and silky like fabric. After her grandmother’s lung cancer was diagnosed, Frida sometimes slept over. They shared a bed again as they’d done when she was a child. Her grandmother requested that someone sleep next to her, and the whole family took turns. She always scolded Frida for not taking better care of her hands. She’d startle Frida awake with a wet, cold plop of lotion.

Frida missed saying goodbye by twenty minutes. Her taxi was caught in traffic. She crawled into bed with her grandmother, held her as rigor mortis set in, felt the warmth leaving her body, saw the cancerous lump below her collarbone. It was hard as stone. The size of a child’s fist.

Emmanuelle has a temperature of 103. Her hair is matted with sweat. She shivers. Frida takes a blanket from the crib and folds her inside it. “Mommy will make you better. We can do it. I can do it.”

The counselor would tell her to stop thinking, stop doubting. It doesn’t matter that love can’t break a fever, that love can’t be measured. Anything can be measured. They have the tools now.

Linda undresses. She holds her doll against her bare breasts. Meryl and Beth copy her. Frida doesn’t want anyone to see her body. She’s been eating three meals a day but can’t keep the weight on. She’s now smaller than she was in high school. She has the sharp jawline she always wanted, the cheekbones, the gap between her thighs.

The instructors nod approvingly at her classmates.

“Try it,” Ms. Khoury tells her.

Frida sets Emmanuelle in the crib and unbuttons her uniform, reluctantly pulls off her T-shirt and bra. “Here, I’m ready for you. Come cuddle with Mommy.”

Emmanuelle’s heat against her bare skin is startling, uncomfortable. Harriet has never been this hot. When she first held Harriet, she worried she’d kill her just by sneezing nearby. She washed her hands incessantly. Each day, she searched Harriet’s face for signs that death was imminent.

There must be people who thrive under pressure, but not Frida. Maybe she shouldn’t be trusted with any kind of life. Maybe people should have to work up to children, from plants to pets to babies. Maybe they should all be given a five-year-old, then four, then three, then two, then one, and if the child is still alive at year’s end, then they can have a baby. Why did they have to begin with a baby?



* * *



The classroom is quieter than it should be. From fevers, they’ve moved on to stomach viruses. Days of projectile vomiting has dampened their enthusiasm and slowed their motherese. The instructors want to know why no one is making progress. The mothers should know the correct sequence of embraces, kisses, and kind words to nurse their doll back to health. The love that awakens the spirit and heals an aching body.