Alternate Side(39)
Nora had felt sometimes that she should be grateful for her mother’s vague and cordial disengagement. Jenny had shocked her by offhandedly telling stories of how her mother was always slapping her face, putting her on punishing diets, flirting with her boyfriends, how she had looked at one college rejection letter and said, “I never understood why you thought you’d get in there in the first place.” Nora had come around to thinking that it was better to bear no marks at all than claw marks. The most resonant memory she had, for some strange reason, was of her mother leaning toward the bathroom mirror, patting her face lightly with a pink chamois powder puff over and over again as though she were somehow comforting herself.
While many of her friends had agonized about hiring help for their children, nailing themselves to the cross of motherhood and learning to resent their kids in the bargain, Nora had not thought twice about engaging a nanny—because of her own childhood, and Mary. For cookies after school there was Mary, and for help with sharpening pencils, and for soup on winter vacation days and ice pops on summer ones. Mary made cinnamon toast when they were sick, sewed the badges onto their Girl Scout sashes, and stacked the cotton underpants in their top drawers. For cuddling under the covers and talking about this and that, the two sisters had each other. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” Nora had said one evening to Rachel, when they were huddled under the lavender duvet talking about how mean the new girl in the fourth grade was. “I don’t think my mother ever got into bed with me or my sister.”
“I wish I had a sister,” sighed Rachel, who hated being told how lucky she was. “I love Aunt Christine.”
Nora believed that her sister was a better mother than she was, or at least a more natural one, and she knew why this was so. When Nora was ten but her sister only six, their mother had died. She had done that in the same halfhearted way that she had been a mother, fading out over the space of a few winter months, propped in bed in a lilac-colored housecoat surrounded by magazines. “She should be in the hospital,” Mary said, and for the final weeks she was, so that she disappeared from both their lives overnight, and then, after Mary had cleaned out her closets, almost completely. There remained the hand-tinted wedding portrait hanging at the end of the upstairs hall, in which both of their parents looked stiff, a little uncomfortable, almost as though they had not yet been introduced.
Nora always thought that her story was the opposite of every other dead-mother story she’d heard since. A year later their father had gone to Christine’s parent-teacher conference; six months later, when school was out for summer, he had married the second grade teacher. Of course everyone talked about how, in what seemed like an instant, the universally liked Miss Patton had become the second Mrs. Benson. When Nora and her friends would go into the game room at the tennis club for sodas it would sometimes fall silent, like a thud, and she would know that’s what people had been discussing at the card tables. And naturally, since she was eleven, the beginning of a time when, Nora now knew from experience, girls are as mean as sleet and should be cryogenically frozen and then reconstituted later, Nora had done her best to torture her stepmother: to begin with, she insisted for months on calling her Miss Patton.
She had refused to let herself be persuaded of the reality until one day when she had come home late from field hockey practice. The house had a rich brown smell that turned out to be pot roast, and in the den her sister and her sister’s former teacher were sitting close together on the leather chesterfield, reading Anne of Green Gables. On the coffee table was a plate of brownie crumbs and two mugs that had held cocoa. Cocoa with marshmallows—not the big ones that made an unwieldy lump in the cup, but the tiny ones that melted into soft, little, elevated puffs of sugar. Mary worked only part-time now, so the pot roast, the brownies, and the cocoa had all been produced by Miss Patton, whose name was Carol. “You can call me Carol,” she had said when her father had suggested “Mother.” But Christine already called her Mommy. Carol was more of a mother than their own mother had ever been. When Nora was in high school she had heard Carol and her father talking in the living room one night when she came downstairs to get herself a banana from the bowl of fruit that always stood now on the kitchen counter. “Did that honestly never occur to you?” Nora heard Carol say, and her father said, “I think it’s a coincidence. Stella wasn’t literary enough for something like that.” The sentence hadn’t meant anything to her until college, when one of Nora’s suite-mates, a drama major, had said to her, “How weird—you and your sister have the same names as the two main characters in A Doll’s House.”
“Do you think it’s possible that our mother named us after characters in an Ibsen play?” she’d asked her sister during semester break.
“You knew her a lot better than I did,” Christine said apologetically. She always said that. Christine worried that Nora resented her closeness to Carol, the notion that, in a way, they had had different mothers.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Nora said.
She supposed it had shaped her view of marriage as well as motherhood. In the way that children always did unless there was screaming and hitting involved, she had thought her parents were perfectly happy, watching her father drape a mink stole over her mother’s narrow shoulders, seeing her mother tap her father on the arm when she thought he was going on too long about work. But then her father had married Carol, and she had seen what happiness really was. When she was a little girl Nora had gotten a party favor that was a tiny, undifferentiated nugget of sponge. The instructions said to put it in a bottle and add water, and sure enough, it grew, swelled, became identifiably a bear. That was what had happened to her father. Carol was the water. At their twenty-fifth-anniversary party, when Nora’s father had stood to give a toast, his daughters had seen him cry for the very first time.