The School for Good Mothers(61)

“Gabriel would want you to eat,” Beth says. “I’m here if you ever want to talk.” She passes Linda an apple, which Linda devours.

Linda looks sheepish, pitiful. Frida feels embarrassed for her. They’ve never seen Linda blush before.

Frida is the only one of her classmates who hasn’t made contact yet. Calls were brief and unsatisfying. Goodbyes provoked meltdowns. The dolls kept interrupting. Mothers of infants had it easy. Baby dolls stayed in their carriers and they cried, but they couldn’t move or say “Mommy” or grab the phone. Mothers of older dolls had to prevent death, accident, escape, and fraternization, all while connecting with their real children.

Rumor has it that some teen romances began in the doll factory. Frida saw a teenage girl doll rolling around at the base of a tree with one of the teenage boys. They had their hands down the front of each other’s uniforms. They didn’t seem to know how to kiss, were instead licking each other’s faces. The boy bit the girl’s shoulder. The girl stuck her finger in the boy’s ear. The boy flipped the girl over and began stroking her blue knob through her uniform.

Their mothers were nowhere to be seen. Frida worried that the boy would undress the girl and unscrew her knob and try to enter her cavity. The opening is wide enough for a penis. She didn’t know if the boy could become erect, if the activity was consensual. Emmanuelle thought the girl was hurt, that the boy was hurting her. The girl was moaning. Frida made Emmanuelle close her eyes as they passed.

After lunch, Frida is tempted to call Will but resists. She’d want to tell him the truth. She dials her parents’ number, starts crying before they pick up. Her father asks to use FaceTime. Frida agrees, though she wishes they didn’t have to see her. Her father’s hair has thinned dramatically and gone completely white. Her mother looks frail. Her father cries for several minutes, though her mother, at first, remains stoic. But her expression soon changes. Frida knows her mother wants to comment on how different she looks. She was hoping that they’d never see her in uniform, worried about the memories it would trigger. On rare occasions, her father told her stories from his childhood—men in dunce caps who were paraded through his village, children pouring urine on their grandparents’ heads, old people kneeling on glass during struggle sessions.

They talk over each other frantically. Her father has been writing her letters every day. Her mother has been buying clothes for Harriet to wear when she’s three. Every day, they watch Harriet videos and look at her pictures. They have her photo on the dining table to keep them company during meals.

Frida holds the phone close, so they can only see her face. She asks about her mother’s birthday, her cousin’s wedding, their doctors’ appointments.

“You’re too skinny,” her mother says. “What are they feeding you? Are they starving you? Has anyone hurt you?”

“Should we call Renee?” her father asks. “She should do something.”

“Don’t do that. Please!”

They ask if she’s been able to talk to Harriet. Gust has sent them a few updates. They wish they could send Harriet a birthday gift. A card.

Between sobs, she tells them that she’s fine. She has to go soon. “I’m sorry,” she says, “for everything.”

Who is the baby crying in the background? “It’s a recording,” she says, giving Emmanuelle her free hand.



* * *



Frida is too excited to sleep. Everything will be different after she speaks to Harriet. If she ever tells Harriet about this year, she won’t tell her how often she thought about death. Harriet doesn’t need to know that her mother is lonely and scared. Harriet doesn’t need to know that her mother thinks of rooftops and bell towers. Harriet doesn’t need to know that her mother often wonders if this might be the best use of her life, the only real way to protest the system.

When she was a child, she thought she’d live only until thirty. She planned to wait until her grandmothers passed but didn’t care about hurting her parents, wanted to punish them. She thought constantly about death when she was eleven, talked about it so often that her parents didn’t take her seriously.

“Go ahead and kill yourself,” her mother said, exasperated.

Gust cried when she told him about the year she wanted to die, but she didn’t admit that those thoughts returned when she was pregnant. She worried endlessly about the what-ifs of the genetic testing. The possibility that something might go wrong during labor, that anything that went wrong would be her fault.

But the tests were fine. Her baby was healthy. Her healthy baby will grow up to have a healthy mind. Better and purer than her mother’s. She has Harriet’s future to consider now. The girl she can become if her mother is living, the girl she’ll never be if her mother takes her own life.



* * *



The air is still damp from last night’s rain. Mist rises along Chapin Walk. Frida finds an empty bench beneath one of the magnolia trees in the stone courtyard. She and Emmanuelle talk about the flowers, identify the colors—pink and white. She asks Emmanuelle to notice how the colors blend.

Frida breaks off a leaf and hands it to her. “Don’t eat it. Listen, sweetie, you’re going to hear me talking to another little girl this morning. I’m going to talk to her a few times, and I need you to let me. It’s confusing, I know. But don’t worry. I am still your mother.”