Carole Maso - Mother and Child - A Novel

And then they are gone. They do not come back again. A year passes, and the mother opens a newspaper and reads about a woman from Punjab who moved to New York when she was six, grew up, walked in the American summer, had a son, and one July morning, distraught, killed the baby and then herself. The mother is horrified when she reads this, but she is also a little bit relieved. She gets on her knees. She feels an inexplicable gratitude. Because of what the shadow mother from Punjab has done, this mother will not be required to.

She and the child will be spared.

THE CHILD IS running toward her with such velocity that she has broken the sound barrier. She is shouting something to the mother, but the mother can’t hear her. Her arms are open, and she is filled with joy. No one has taken them away. No one has asked them to leave or to die. Nothing else matters but she and this child running through the breathing world. The child does a little song and dance. She loves her Fippy. It was the favorite part of her body — perfectly pink, and a little slippery. The child does a Fippy Dance.

Dance, the mother says, for there is not one day that is promised to us.

THE CHILD TOLD her mother that she had been invited to a swimming party to celebrate the end of summer. The mother pictured the beautiful blue cavity and the children jumping into it again and again and again. When she closed her eyes she saw before her a continuum of jumping children. All the usual suspects would be there: the three schoolgirls, the Boy in the Glen, the Boy with the Elephant Trunk, the Girl with the Matted Hair.

The mother supposed they too could go. She much preferred children under the water than above it. The children looked to her like flowers underwater: graceful and silent, their tendrils elongated, undulating.

SHE TOOK THE child in her arms. She thought of a blue chalice that held time, floating, suspended overhead, protecting and holding them. For a moment in this radiant Valley, time seemed elongated, and everything stayed exactly the same. She knew it would not last long — possibly only for as little as a fraction of a second. It was a strange feeling. They made their way up the hill for the last time of the season. The summer now was winding down. Soon the blueberries would be gone, and the apples would appear.

WHEN THE CHILDREN were small, they would often play their grave resurrection games back behind the prickle bushes at the Winter Bear Montessori School. Each day after graceful walking and practical life and blue line work, the two girls would venture out after snack to begin once again to concoct the Mother Potion from scratch. The potion, as the Girl with the Matted Hair said, would save once and for all the mothers who had died or were dying. Otherwise, the Girl with the Matted Hair said, they would die for good, and they would never come back. As it was, the Girl with the Matted Hair’s mother had died when she was a toddler, and ever since then, she had worked night and day to find the cure for that.

This sort of project enthralled the child, and every day at recess she and her friend collected and assembled a wide assortment of ingredients and charms: rose thorns and wishbones, robin’s eggshells and goose’s eggshells, scrunchies and ribbons, knee scabs and matted hair (for DNA, the child said), chestnut casings, glitter glue, butterfly wings, birchbark, and other forest charms. Ten dandelions — nine discarded, the last placed in a vial of rosewater; eight hairs from the tail of a black cat dipped in clay then burned to an ash. Chewed grass from the grave of the schoolmaster. They sewed a magnet into a mother’s dress and slipped fish lures into the hem. They obtained a dead wren and sent away a black lamb, for a little black lamb foretells mourning garments within the year. They tied mint around their wrists while skipping. They mixed chamomile and mud with salt and silt and tears into a poultice and stirred it with a Hawthorn branch. Spells and banishments were many. The child carried elf stones in a velvet pouch and waited for a four-footed beast to pass in order to animate the charm. Before the magic words were spoken into the well, they covered it with a wool shawl. Lavender plucked on a Sunday night they pounded with a stone that never was moved since the world began. When the child, who was gathering thistle, had her back turned, the Girl with the Matted Hair snuck up on her and sank her teeth into the child’s arm. There, she said, the blood of a child! The child screamed and drew a circle on the ground and said the magic words, and a fire rushed up from the earth and a flood of water, pure and bright, sprang from her side creating a mote, separating now the child from the ring of fire. It all occurred so fast that the Girl with the Matted Hair at first did not know what had happened. That was fantastic! She shouted and began to applaud. She had always suspected that the child carried the water charm inside her, and now it was verified.

Sometimes the child would carve a little figure out of a carrot from her snack for her friend, and the Girl with the Matted Hair would put it in her pocket. Together they wandered past the prickle bushes through the vale of tears, over the river of sleep. They crossed the bridge and saw Billy Goat’s Gruff and the place of the trolls, the witch’s den, and they went down to where Rumpelstiltskin and Rip Van Winkle slept, and past that to where the mothers slumbered.

Awake! the Girl with the Matted Hair commanded at the Place of the Slumbering Mothers.

AS IT HAPPENED, the Girl with the Matted Hair’s mother died when she was only eighteen months old. She had been so young that her age was not even counted in years yet. How is that fair? she asked, and a fury filled her.

Some days, the Girl with the Matted Hair forces everyone to pet the dead crow on the path, to pet the feral cat or the mange of the dog — to put their faces close to the white moths that come from its bark — its circus of fleas, its clown cone collar, its disturbed sleep, but the child refuses. How is that fair?

Shunned by her mother, forsaken, on these days the girl felt mocked. She held a bouquet of crow feathers in her fist.

YES, BUT I do not have a father, the child said. All I have is a Glove!

True enough, the Girl with the Matted Hair says, but a father is not an Absolute. No one absolutely needs one. The Girl with the Matted Hair looks to her forlorn white-maned father on the periphery. And it was true in the Valley that with each passing year, there were fewer and fewer fathers to be had. Sometimes a Glove is enough, she said. Sometimes a Glove will suffice. A father isn’t a Necessity. A father isn’t a Requirement. The child shrugs. The potion: shed skin of snake. River water taken at the place it changed from fresh to salt, the rind of the elder tree, the carcass of the crow, the blood of a child. She ran a silk ribbon through a bowl of milk and then suckled the tether.

THE GIRL WITH the Matted Hair had already begun going far off in an attempt to assuage her grief by the time the child met her at the Winter Bear School. Soon enough, Resurrection Science would become all the rage, but it wasn’t yet. In certain ways, it could be said that the Girl with the Matted Hair was in the forefront of such science.