The Best New Horror 2 (21 page)

Linda was talking to her. “Well, all I can say is, you better enjoy her while you can.”

She’d said that before. Julie smiled somewhat vaguely and put a spoonful of Diane’s orange Jell-o into her mouth. She was startled to discover something gooey in the middle and for a moment was afraid to know what it was. But then she knew, and it was only cream cheese.

Cautiously, she let the Jell-o dissolve inside her mouth. It left a thick film of cream cheese on her palette, like skin. Suddenly she was imagining that the cream cheese was fleshlike, and then it was hard to swallow.

Outside it was still raining; she was constantly aware of the rain. It rained a lot in central New York State, which might be why all the mothers she knew here had such pale and wet-looking skin. Julie glanced sadly at the fading watch-band stripe around her own wrist; since the baby had been born she hadn’t been able to catch even what few hours of sunshine there were.

This house they’d moved into on Cascadilla Street was long and narrow, like a coffin. From where she sat, Julie could sight along the pinkish-brown living room wall, which had tiny dots in it like pores; along the kitchen wall with its bulbous cream-colored flowers; and out the high windows that overlooked the street. The streets and the sidewalks were slimy with rainwater; the crowds were without umbrellas, because they were used to this weather. The green of the trees was nearly black, and they dripped with coagulated precipitation; leaves curled like lips, exposing their pale undersides. There were rivers and lakes and streams and gulches everywhere around here, like exposed veins or hungry stretched mouths. It hadn’t surprised Julie, though it had made her shudder, to learn that Cornell had one of the highest suicide rates of any campus in the country, particularly in the spring when the beckoning gulches were layered with heart-red and tongue-pink rhododendron.

Linda was still talking. “Like my mother always said, and of course I wouldn’t listen to her, it only gets worse as they get older.”

“I can hardly wait.” The intended sarcasm was undercut by a real excitement, a real eagerness to see her daughter grow up, which made Julie feel terribly vulnerable. She managed to swallow the last of the orange-flavored cream cheese, though it left a gummy patina on her tongue and on the backs of her teeth. Gelatin, she suddenly remembered, was made from cows’ and horses’ hooves; she wondered whether that was still true or whether nowadays it was chemically constructed, and didn’t know which she would prefer.

“This is great potato salad,” Linda said. The whitish chunks of boiled potato and egg in her mouth looked like broken teeth. “Who made it this time?”

“I did,” Julie admitted, almost shyly. She didn’t know any of the co-op mothers very well yet, but they’d all been nice to her, and Linda especially had taken her under her wing.

“
Great
potato salad.”

“Thanks.”

“Nobody ever listens to their mamas about kids,” Yolanda declared. Three-bean-salad juice dribbled from the corner of her mouth, looking like brown blood across her white lipstick and oddly colorless dark brown skin. When she wiped it off with a crumpled white napkin, it left a stain among other stains, and Julie looked away. “My mama had eight kids before she was thirty,” Yolanda was saying. “She
knew
what she was talking about. But did I listen? Did any of us listen? I got six kids myself, and my oldest sister’s got
twelve
!”

“Twelve children!” Julie whispered to her baby. “Twelve little monsters like you!”

In her lap, Megan was asleep, tiny fists balled at her ears and tiny jagged mouth wide open. Julie slid her index finger gently into the infant’s mouth. She could just feel the minuscule ridges along the gum line where before long teeth would erupt. She’d heard that some babies were born with teeth.

Softly she rubbed at her daughter’s nascent teeth, as though to push them back down. The baby opened her eyes, focused them directly on her, and clamped her mouth shut around her mother’s finger. Though there were no teeth yet for biting or tearing her flesh, the baby’s sucking was so strong that it hurt, and when she took her finger back it didn’t come easily. Julie felt a little thrill of maternal horror.

In a sudden panic, she yanked her hand away. Too hard: her daughter’s head twisted to one side, and she howled. Julie bent guiltily to kiss her, tasted the salt tears and the sweet-sour baby flesh. Fear that she had hurt her child, remorse that she had wanted to, clouded her thoughts like the fatigue that had been with her since the baby’s birth. She was, she thought suddenly and clearly, being eaten alive.

“My mama died when I was seventeen of acute anemia. Like us kids sucked the blood right out of her. Like we just ate her right up.”

Linda nodded. “That’s how it is when you have kids. It’s a matter of survival. Them or you.”

“My mama did not know how to protect herself,” Yolanda said sadly. “The doctors told her to eat raw liver, but she couldn’t do it.”

A small fair-haired woman named Kathy or Katie wrinkled her nose and made a delicate gagging sound. Kathy’s skin was so fair that it seemed barely to cover her flesh, and the makeup around her nose
and mouth was grainy. She had an odd, halting way of speaking, as if she could hardly remember one word after the next. Her blonde hair was firmly sprayed, but it still straggled around her face and neck so that it looked as if it were falling out, and her chipping nails had been painted with thick variegated polish, as if to hold them together. Her entire face and body looked rebuilt, reconstituted for viewing. “Probably,” she said in her breathy voice to Yolanda, “it was”—she paused for a long time before she could collect her thoughts—“stress that killed her. Stress and fatigue and”—she stopped, ground her teeth across her lower lip—“and not knowing where she stopped and her children began.”

“Occupational hazards of motherhood,” Annette observed, and a glob of coleslaw slid out of her mouth onto the front of her gray business suit. Apparently she didn’t notice, since she made no move to clean it off. She had announced at the beginning of the co-op meeting that she’d have to leave early for a lunch appointment; Julie tried to imagine her making corporate decisions with coleslaw and baby spittle patterning her vest. “It’s certainly done us all in,” Annette said.

“Not all yet,” Linda said. “Julie still looks alive.” She patted Julie’s knee.

“I love my child,” Julie said automatically. Megan was crying again, but half-heartedly now, and there were no tears, only noise.

“We all do,” Linda said.

“You know all—those things you swore you’d never—say to your kids?” Kathy passed a hand over her face, jagged fingertips massaging at her own flesh as though she had a headache. She was sitting in the pale blue bar of light cast by the fluorescent fixture over the sink, and her teeth looked fluorescent themselves, and sharp. “I can’t—help it. All that—stuff just flows out of my—mouth like milk flows out of your—breast when your—when your baby’s born. I—can’t help it.”

“She’s forgetting the words,” Linda explained to Julie, quietly but with no real attempt not to be overheard. “We all do that sometimes, but Kathy’s been at it longer than the rest of us. She’s one of the organizers of the co-op. Her children are all grown. Her mind is going.”

“Sometimes I have fantasies about these awful things I’d like to do to my kids,” Annette said conversationally. “So far I haven’t done anything really awful, but only because they’d take my broker’s license if I did.”

“I swore I’d never”—Kathy closed her eyes and allowed a long painful pause before she finally managed—“Spank. Or—eat. I swore I’d never do—what my mother did to me. But I do.”

Yolanda nodded. “I swore none of that would ever happen to me.”

“Well,” someone said, “at least
you
didn’t die of acute anemia, did you?”

“Close. Even though I did eat raw meat. Still do, right?” There were some knowing chuckles around the room. Julie’s stomach churned, and indignantly she demanded, “Why’d you all have kids if you don’t like raising them?”

Megan was regarding her with a murky blue gaze. Julie often wondered what she saw. Part of the baby’s self, probably. An extension of her own mouth and her own bowel and her own lungs. A gigantic umbilical cord attaching the world to Megan.

Julie wondered if Megan would always see her like that. She thought of her own mother, emptied now by Alzheimer’s, but still able sometimes to make fried chicken and chocolate chip cookies better than anybody.

Suddenly she realized that the lanky and very pregnant young woman on the sofa next to Yolanda, with even darker skin and an underlying pallor thick as chalk, must be Yolanda’s daughter. Embarrassed by what she’d said about Yolanda and the others not wanting children, Julie added feebly, “I mean, six kids are a
lot
, no matter how much you love them.”

“Actually,” Yolanda said, “I had seven. One died.”

Julie caught her breath. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the only reason I’m here to tell about it. One more would’ve done me in for sure. There’d have been nothing left of me for the others. So the baby died for a good cause. ‘She gave her life that others might live.’ Right, Regina?”

She reached to pat the tall girl’s hand, then her huge belly. Regina’s coppery gaze, flat as the pennies on the eyes of a corpse, followed her mother’s hand, and her lips pulled back from her teeth a little as if she couldn’t control the muscles of her face. She said nothing.

Distant thunder shook the house in a regular beat like a pulse, and rain bled against the windows. Carefully cradling Megan against her own impulse to drop her, Julie got awkwardly to her feet and walked through the line of rooms to the windows. Cascadilla Street was filling up with water and with people; she could see that the crowd was entirely made up of mothers and children, some few of them garbed against the weather but most of them bare-headed, bare-faced, hair streaming, clothes adhering to the contours of their bodies which seemed to dissolve into the rain.

In the odd play of light between gray sky and shiny rising floodwaters, some of the mothers and children seemed to be gnawing at each other, tearing at each other’s flesh or at each other’s reflections. Through the thin cold glass, which was wet even on the inside when she put her free hand against it, Julie could hear them and she was
sure Megan could, too, wordlessly shrieking at each other in the wind, moving closer. She shuddered and fumbled for the curtain cord, drew the heavy curtains, turned away from the windows.

She looked at the other mothers one by one, trying to decide whether they’d all known about Yolanda’s sacrificed child. Probably they had, since she understood that the co-op had been going for some time, and since no one seemed surprised.

No one said anything, in fact. Yolanda’s little confession lay in the room with them like the unburied corpse of her child. The mothers were eating. In the brief, companionable silence, Julie was surrounded by the wet sounds of the mothers chewing and swallowing, by the busy gurgling of Linda’s digestive system so close beside her that it could have been her own, and by the blending white noises of the rain and the gathering crowd and the kids downstairs.

“It would be terrible to lose a child,” Julie said aloud. Her cupped palm hovered just above her daughter’s tiny head, where she could feel the hole that opened like a halo onto her brain.

“Sometimes,” Kathy said, “it’s either lose a child or lose— yourself. I mean, I—love my kids, but they were killing me.”

“I don’t think I could stand it,” Julie said.

Linda looked at her, and Julie felt a chill pass through her even before Linda said, “We’ve all had a child die. Every one of us in this room has lost a child.”

“And all our mothers did as well,” Annette added.

“And all our daughters will, too,” Yolanda finished. She put her arm around Regina, who tried feebly to pull away, then gave up and snuggled her enormous bulging body as best she could against her mother’s scrawny one. “Guess you could say it runs in the family.”

“It’s one of the reasons this group formed,” Linda said. “It’s one of the things we have in common. It helps to be with other mothers who understand.”

“How—how do you live through it?”

A look passed among the co-op members, a sisterly smile. It was Linda who said, “We don’t, Julie. We didn’t.”

Julie laughed a little, experimentally, waiting for Linda and the others to join in, to explain the grisly joke to her. No one did. Finally she managed to say, “I feel that way sometimes myself. Raising kids is hard.”

Kathy nodded. “When the baby cries all—night and you don’t know what’s wrong and you—know you’re a terrible mother.”

“When you just gave her a bath,” Yolanda suggested, “and she shits all over herself again, and you’re trying to get ready to go someplace.”

“When she’s two and you have to keep an eye on her every minute so she doesn’t hurt herself or destroy your house,” Linda said. “When
she’s six and the bully in the third grade keeps beating her up, or she’s in the third grade and she bullies the six-year-olds.”

“When she’s twelve and failing seventh grade algebra and you have to go talk to the teacher again about her attitude.” Annette shook her head appreciatively.

“When she’s eighteen,” Yolanda said pointedly, “and pregnant.”

“I didn’t like being pregnant in the first place,” Julie said, her own resentment suddenly rising to meet theirs. She looked at the baby in her lap and tried to think of it as a stranger, an alien, an intruder. But the baby was part of her. As strong as the resentment was a huge hot love. “And labor was a bitch. They say you forget the pain, but you don’t.” She saw Regina’s frightened look and was immediately sorry, but could think of no way to soften what she’d said. “I don’t know why any of us have kids,” she said.

“Oh,” Kathy said airily. “I do. I—love my kids. You just have to—learn to cope, that’s all.”

“I don’t know how.” Julie’s eyes were so full of tears she was afraid she’d drop the baby. She laid her down on the couch. Megan did not protest.

Yolanda had started talking again. Yolanda’s voice was rough, as though her throat hurt. It was painful to listen to her, and she did talk a lot. “I was already way pregnant when my mama died, and after that she didn’t have much to say to me, even though she did talk all the time. I wasn’t a bit older than Regina is now when I had her. Barely eighteen. Now here she is, look at her, following right in her mama’s footsteps but not listening to her mama at all. Look at her. Tired all the time. Sick all the time. The baby’s eating her alive.”