The School for Good Mothers(87)

In class, having covered fire and water safety, they learn how to rescue their dolls from oncoming cars. They practice in the parking lot beside the football field. Meryl would have enjoyed being outside with her doll, Frida thinks. She liked the campus more than she let on. Meryl often said she should’ve been born on the West Coast. She thought she would’ve become a different person if she’d grown up near mountains, believed that where you grew up determined your destiny, that growing up in South Philly doomed her.

“Why do you think I named my kid Ocean?” she said.

The driver starts his engine. Emmanuelle wants to know who the man is. She’s unsatisfied with Frida’s promises that the man won’t hurt her.

The school has hired professional drivers. The instructors have marked the driver’s target with an X, giving him room to accelerate across the parking lot.

“You have to pretend we’re crossing the street,” Frida tells her. “Streets are full of cars. Cars are dangerous. They can kill you. You have to hold my hand, okay?”

She tells Emmanuelle that crossing the street carefully was one of her father’s great obsessions. “I have a father. And I had grandparents. My grandfather died when my dad was little. In a car accident. My dad was only nine. Isn’t that sad?”

Emmanuelle nods.

“He still gets nervous when I cross the street. When we were traveling in China, he held my elbow at every single crosswalk. Like I was a kid. Parents always think their children are little kids, no matter how old they are.”

She was twenty-one when he last did that. She was once a daughter who traveled, whose father worried about keeping her alive.

She tells Emmanuelle that her father turns seventy tomorrow. Emmanuelle wants to know what China is, what seventy is, why Mommy looks sad.

“Because I wish I could see him,” Frida says. “And because I should have been nicer to him. We’re supposed to be nice to our parents. Seventy is a really big birthday.”

Beth has been listening. “Be careful,” she cautions. They’re not supposed to burden their dolls with too much personal information.

Frida thanks her for the warning. She returns to the subject of pedestrian safety. She shouldn’t have let her guard down. She must keep her real life separate, her real heart separate, must save her feelings for November.



* * *



In the house where the light comes in sideways, Frida adds rooms. In these rooms, the mothers will braid hair and tell stories. Tucker will serve them tea. Meryl will be there with Ocean. She’ll be a terrible houseguest. Roxanne will be there with Isaac. Roxanne’s mother will be healthy. Margaret will be alive. Lucretia will find them.

They should have a mother house. A mother town. She remembers reading about an island off the coast of Estonia that was all women, where women did the farming and carpentry. Women served as the fishmongers and electricians. They wore different-colored aprons depending on their roles.

“Wait for me,” she told Tucker at the dance. After November, she’ll need a new term of endearment for him. The man who let his son fall out of a tree will become the man who got his son back. Her one very bad day will be in the past.

In class, they watch videos of plastic children being run over by cars. Frida teaches Emmanuelle about opposites: danger and safety. Safety is with Mommy. Danger is apart from Mommy.

They continue practicing in the parking lot. One afternoon, a storm sends them back to Morris. They change their dolls into dry clothes, but themselves remain soaked. Emmanuelle plays with Frida’s wet hair. She laughs at Frida’s fogged glasses.

The thunder and lightning continue for hours, scaring the dolls. Ms. Khoury tells them that a tropical storm is moving north from the Carolinas. The basement of Pierce floods that night. There are downed trees along Chapin Walk. On Saturday, after the sump pump has removed the water, cleaning crew is told to deal with the debris. They’ve never been down to this basement before. The storage area is disappointing, ordinary. They grumble about the smell as they remove damp boxes of papers, uniforms, shampoo, toothpaste.

They’re nearly done for the day when Charisse gets lost, and during her attempts to rejoin the group, finds a locked room. The others wait for her at the base of the stairs. Frida tells Charisse to hurry up. Ever since Charisse joined cleaning crew, she’s slowed them down.

Charisse shrieks. She calls to the group. After the mothers find her, they take turns peeking through the keyhole.

Someone says she’s not sure what she’s looking at. Frida is one of the last to look. She expects to see doll parts, rows of heads, maybe a pile of broken infants, the boy who threw himself against the fence and melted, Lucretia’s doll, even the doll belonging to her first roommate, Helen. As her eye adjusts to the dark, she sees a body. The body is on a cot, the woman’s face turned toward the door. One of the mothers.

Frida squints.

“Who is it?” Charisse asks.

While they’re talking, the woman opens her eyes. She sits up and peers at them, then runs to the door and starts banging. Frida and Charisse jump back. The woman shouts. Frida recognizes her voice. It’s Meryl.

Frida raises a hand to her mouth.

A guard hears the noise and tells the mothers to go upstairs. Meryl continues banging on the door and pleading.

Meryl has been gone for three weeks. In her head, Frida lists the reasons why she can’t help. Harriet, Harriet, Harriet. Being the roommate of a quitter and a runaway. Two trips to talk circle. The watch list. The hug. But Meryl is afraid of the dark. She slept with teddy bears all through high school. The basement walls are damp. She could get sick.