She Wasn’t Their Mother

by RISA MICKENBERG

FICTION | VOL. XXVI NO. 3 (WINTER 2013)

The parents were in the kitchen with the hostess, drinking wine from plastic cups, eating hummus, talking about the drought. The aunt stood in the living room, a safe distance away, running her hand through her niece’s hair, which was flecked with sparkles and bits of grated cheese.

A boy with purple lips stared.

“Are you her grandmother?” he asked.

He was wearing a fake coonskin cap and eating a popsicle.

“No,” she said. “Are you?”

He laughed, then sang, in a whisper, “Barney stole my SUV so I stuck a shotgun up his nose.”

He marched past the parents, out the kitchen door.

“Come outside,” said her niece, pulling her hand.

She followed them.

The parents didn’t seem to notice.

***

Outside was dry grass and dirty plastic toys fenced into a yard. They followed the boy through a slack swing set and a rotting picnic table into a thicket of saplings at the back of the lot.

In a clearing, three little girls sucked popsicles by a plank of wood leaned against a high fence like a ramp.

The littlest girl clutched a naked, snarled-haired Barbie wrapped in a washcloth. “I’m not scared,” the littlest girl was saying. “I just think it’s dangerous and I don’t want to do it.”

One of the bigger girls said to the aunt, “She says she’s going to tell the parents we’re climbing the fence.”

The boy ran up the plank. It bowed and rattled.

“Don’t!” the littlest girl said, and looked at the aunt.

The aunt had no idea if what they were doing was dangerous or not. She decided she didn’t feel like telling them what to do; she wasn’t their mother.

The boy looked over the fence.

“What’s there?” said one of the girls.

“Prisoners,” he said, dropping his popsicle stick onto the other side.

He turned and jumped down, falling on his knees. His coonskin cap fell off. The aunt considered picking it up for him, then decided not to.

He stood, brushing off his knees, looked at her, then picked it up himself.

“Wanna see our secret fort?” he asked.

“Absotively,” she said. “Posilutely,” she said to herself, following the boy through a rut behind the skinny trees, brown leaves clinging to their trunks all from one direction. There must have been a flood before the drought. The other girls walked behind them, the littlest one last.

They came to a circle of rocks: the fort. The boy stood on the largest rock.

The aunt sat. The littlest girl handed her the Barbie and asked, “Can you make her a braid?”

The Barbie’s hair was snarled and stiff. It took a few tries to get the braid right. The aunt re-wrapped the washcloth around the Barbie’s body until it made a good dress.

She handed the Barbie back to the girl who smoothed the braid and admired the dress.

Through a gap in the slats of the fence, the aunt could see a parking lot and the apartment complex where the prisoners lived.

The boy got up and stuck a finger through the slats like a gun.

“I could shoot a water pistol through here,” he said.

“I like your thinking,” the aunt said.

The boy picked up a stick. “Where are your children?”

“I don’t have any,” the aunt said. “Do you?”

“I want a rat.” He whipped a tree with the stick. “But they won’t let me. Stupid,” he said.

She nodded. She agreed.

The older girls were climbing into the crotch of a thicker tree.

“Help us spy on the grown-ups,” the boy said to the aunt.

She said, “What do you want me to find out?”

“Find out…” the boy kicked clumped-up leaves. “Find out…”

“These popsicles are magic,” one of the older girls said to the aunt, from the tree.

“How are they magic?” the aunt asked.

“When you eat them, they make you happy.”

“I want one of those,” the aunt said.

“But you’re already happy,” said the boy.

Sadness settled in her like cement.

“I guess they work when you watch people eat them too,” she said.

She picked up an old pie plate that had a butterfly wing stuck to it.

“That’s where we keep our treasures,” the boy said.

“Hold my popsicle,” her niece said, handing her the popsicle and climbing the tree. Skinny limbs on skinny limbs.

“There’s no room,” said one of the other girls to her niece.

The aunt didn’t interfere. She sucked the popsicle.

“Don’t!” her niece said to her.

“It jumped into my mouth. I’m trying to get it out.” She pretended to try to pull the popsicle out of her mouth.

The kids laughed. They were an easy audience and the deadness inside her pretended it wasn’t there.

The sound of crunching on the leaves came from the thicket.

“Uh-oh,” said the boy.

The hostess climbed through the trees and looked at the aunt, sitting on the rock, popsicle in her mouth, holding the pie plate.

“Let’s not play back here,” the hostess said, talking to the boy, smiling in a tight way. “Let’s come back to the party.”

The aunt stood and brushed leaves from her butt.

The girls jumped down from the tree. Her niece took the popsicle back.

As they followed the hostess through the trees, the aunt whispered to the boy, “What should I find out from the grown-ups?”

“Find out…” he said. He whacked a stick against a tree. “Find out…”

But he didn’t say.

The girls ran ahead across the yard to the parents at the picnic table.

Her niece climbed onto the bench, grabbed a handful of grated cheese from a plastic bowl and put it in her mouth.

The aunt didn’t say anything. She wasn’t her mother. She sat at the table and was given a paper plate of spaghetti and a plastic fork.

The boy stood on the picnic bench. “Barney stole my SUV,” he sang, “So I stuck a shotgun up his nose.”

“What did we say about singing that song?” his mother, the hostess, said in a firm, soft, annoying voice. “Look at me.”

The boy looked at her, chin raised.

“What did we say about that?” his mother asked.

“Sit down at the table,” said the man who must have been the boy’s father.

The boy sat and put a handful of spaghetti in his mouth.

“We don’t use our hands,” his mother said, in her tone.

“She did.” He pointed at the niece.

The boy’s parents looked at each other.

The aunt poured herself a cup of wine.

She could still taste the popsicle.

The parents talked about Jazzfest and litigation, schools and bicycles, triathalons and raised garden beds. Drones. The drought.

The kids went into the house.

The aunt drank more wine. A mosquito swirled in her cup. The spaghetti stuck to itself. A nut fell off a tree onto the table.

Barney stole my SUV so I stuck a shotgun up his nose repeated in her head.

Her niece was back, whispering in her ear, smelling like mint and dirt, “Come into the house.”

The aunt climbed off the picnic bench without excusing herself to the parents and followed her niece into the house, through the scuffed, cluttered hall, into the boy’s bedroom, where the kids were standing next to the littlest girl who was wearing a mask they’d made from a paper plate, tied to the back of her head with a string.

The mask she was wearing was a boy, with brown magic marker eyes, red eyelashes, pink smile.

“This is your son, Matthew,” her niece said, pushing the little girl in the mask toward her. “He was late to the party.”

The little girl in the Matthew mask ran her fingers over her smiling paper plate face.

“Hello, Matthew,” the aunt said to the plate face.

“Tell the grown-ups Matthew wants a popsicle,” said the boy.

“Okay,” said the aunt.

“Grape,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

From the kitchen came a screened door bang and the sound of parents talking.

The boy led the aunt out, with her “son,” Matthew. The other kids followed.

“What did you find out from the grown-ups?” the boy asked, holding her arm.

“Nothing,” the aunt said. “They didn’t say anything interesting,” she said.

He nodded.

***

They went into the kitchen where the parents were helping the hostess clean up.

The aunt held her arm around “Matthew’s” shoulders. Matthew adjusted his paper face with its fixed pink smile.

“This is my son,” the aunt said to the hostess. “Matthew. He’s sorry he was late and he wondered if he could have a popsicle.”

The adults stopped talking and kept helping.

“Grape,” said the boy.

The hostesses’ eyes flickered over the aunt.

“I’m sorry, Matthew,” the hostess said, banging spaghetti into the garbage can. “We’re done with the popsicles for tonight.”

“Matthew was at the zoo,” one of the girls said.

The children laughed.

The aunt said, “He meant to come earlier, but he was detained at the reptile house.”

The children laughed again.

The hostess said, more sharply, “I’m sorry, Matthew. We’re not having popsicles now.”

The parents were wrapping things in plastic and throwing things away. None of them were talking, and none of them looked at her.

The aunt bent and held her son’s shoulders. She looked into his paper plate face.

“I’m sorry, Matthew,” she said. “You came too late.”

The Astronomer's Wife - Published in Del Sol Review

by Risa Mickenberg

The strongest force in the universe isn't gravity. It's jealousy. At night, my husband is always out, bouncing radio waves off the stars, looking through a telescope into the deep past. Seeing what man has never seen. While I sit at the kitchen table reading the back of a Celestial Seasonings tea box. The box quotes George Washington Carver: "Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough." And I see: I'm jealous of my husband's relationship with the universe.

Nights, he works at the Very Large Array, an astronomical radio observatory. Twenty-seven giant radio dishes in a Y in the desert, in-between Socorro and Pie Town, New Mexico, an hour from each and next to nothing: that's why we're here. He needs to be away from interference.

***

If you want a laugh, take a Google Street View tour of Socorro by day: motor lodges and Bank of America, liquor stores and parking lots, the Mission, the Circle-K supermarket and the Sonic and, boom, you're back on the road, surrounded by dead volcanoes.

***

That is, if the Street View works. Often, the picture breaks up into a digital bouquet of fiber optics. One of the world's most powerful radio observatories fucks things up on earth. I can tell you that.

***

The Circle-K is cold and it's somewhere to go. In the meat aisle, I see a sign that says Special Flap Meat. I take a picture of it with my phone so I can try to make him laugh. Maybe I'll surprise him with it for dinner.

Judging from the air-conditioned aisles at the Circle-K, it seems like people here survive on cheap meat and rice and beans and Slim-Fast and frozen things that melt in your car on the drive home.

There's precious little around here in the way of fruit or leafy greens but there's uranium and silver and coal and gold and coal and crude and pumice and potash and mica and the mining college and the reservation and the border police and pit bulls tied up in yards.

***

When I met my husband, the idea of dating an astronomer seemed sexy. It was beyond my grasp: all of it. The atomic weight of anything, the awesomeness of our insignificance. That I knew none of that didn't seem to matter to him in the salad days, back in Providence, in the beginning.

***

Back at our rental home, I put away the groceries. My contributions to our marriage: my folded garbage bags, our vacuumed carpet, cleanliness of our sheets, the cleanliness of our temporary housing house, they're my in-his-face sacrifice. He can't eat and sleep without feeling it: the blatant, wasted human potential of me.

My husband's on a quest for extraterrestrial knowledge and I'm on a quest for attention. Both make you feel small, but his insignificance seems to suit him. He's never been happier. More radiant. More distant. I hate it.

***

Sometimes I Google map other places at night- view the Street View of places we could have lived instead if he hadn't "lucked out" by being here: Berkeley. Even New Haven.

By day, I paint screen grabs from my laptop while he sleeps. Gouaches on paper of my computer desktops: cluttered and text-heavy with too many open windows of ugly web pages and photo landscapes of other places and cheap, colorful icons against a NASA screen saver.

***

The sunsets here are spectacular in terms of their disappointment: he wakes up and gets in the shower to get ready for work and his mind is already elsewhere.

The local Socorro weekly rag tries to paint the town as having a "thriving art and music scene."

Before we moved here, I thought I might partake, but early on, I found myself grossed out by the long-haired jam sessions and gallery openings with their inevitable sagebrush landscapes. I long for the civilized world of the artificial.

***

I've developed a bitter taste for Milky Ways. At night, while the real thing emits radio waves for his viewing pleasure, I bite my fun-sized version of it, hard from the freezer, and never enough. He either doesn't notice I'm getting fat or he doesn't say. Measurements are his thing, so he ought to know, if he were paying attention. Maybe I'm testing him. Maybe marriage is just a test.

Nearby, the government tests explosives. They blow up vans for first responders. They make pipe bombs and explode fertilizer. We are a hundred miles from where they did the Trinity test.

***

People celebrate chemicals in their town names here. Visit scenic Vanadium, New Mexico. Pack a lunch and explore what's left of Old Chloride. Watch missile trails in the sky.

Predator drones fly overhead at night, looking for border jumpers and drug smugglers, not finding enough to justify the cost but, in Congress, they're so popular, local Republicans say you could elect a drone president.

I sometimes watch my husband when he sleeps during the day. His back: that expanse that I love and hate, simultaneously. Shades down, sheets kicked off, his body sometimes twitching like a dog's, dreaming of chasing black holes and white dwarves, I imagine, and I feel him pulling away from me and I think about how it's all a mystery. I am not a down-to-earth person, but he makes me one. He doesn't mean to, I know. It's a big world but it's a bigger solar system, a bigger galaxy, a bigger universe. And it's lonely as shit when you think about it; when you're in a space where that's all you have time to do.

***

I've read that Einstein had theories first and proved them later. Loneliness either makes you intuitive or superstitious. I hate that I read my husband's horoscopes. I hate that he probably doesn't even know my sign.

Pre-Copernicus, astronomy, and astrology were the same thing. Then astronomy was proven measurable, and astrology became just an unproven belief: that the stars have some effect on mundane matters of the heart. Even if astrology can't prove it, I'm here to tell you that they do.

***

I find myself believing in signs. Road signs that say things like It's Time For A Change: Jiffy Lube. Handwritten on a pump: We Are Out Of Gas.

Spouses of astronomers are no fun at parties. We're all bright; you'd think we'd connect, but we never do. While they discuss the "previously unimaginable smallness" of the planets orbiting Formalhaut, we eat hummus and talk about television. Other peoples' kids tug at other peoples' sleeves, wanting to go home. I tug at his.

I am a distraction to the ecstasy of understanding. I cook meat and watch him bang out the door and I am left with the Tonight Show.

It sucks to try to make a life in the outposts of great observatories, in the middle of nowhere, among nuclear testing sites and mineral mines and the darkness of army bases.

Sometimes, when he comes home, he tries to tell me what he's seen. He's ecstatic. I can't possibly react the way I should. I know how impossible it must be to come home, after what he's sees every night, to little old me. At least he tries.

I fall asleep on the sofa. I don't remember what I dream.

***

There are these once-in-a-lifetime occurrences; that's part of what he's looking for. I respect the hell, and the heaven, or the heavens, out of it. However you'd say it. I do. I respect his powers of observation. So when he comes home this time, and I wake at the sound of the screened door, and, for the first time in a long time, he pulls me off the sofa and down onto the carpet that I keep meaning to steam clean and he shows me he still has imagination and longing and that I'm somehow involved, I understand that I matter.

We try to connect, not just collide. We keep our eyes open. I feel him trying to take me somewhere, trying to meet me somewhere beyond space and time, where only we could go, where no one else and nothing else could interfere. Where we were part of everything and all that jazz. He still had it in him to try to take me there, god bless him.

I try to put my petty, domestic resentments on the back burner, but sex is still the place for us where I am unable to make myself less than understood.

It's clear: there is something bigger out there for him. Something that doesn't try to bring him down and spend time wishing he would think about things as mundane as sour sponges in the sink, or us, or T.V., or me.

Like the planets orbiting his precious Formalhaut, I was smaller than I could have previously imagined. I was ashamed and properly insignificant. I don't know why I wanted to be the brightest star in someone's sky.

He came outside me. He knew I wanted him to. We were never going to reproduce. It was never his thing.

In the daylight of the bathroom, under the powerless shower, I knew it was over. I knew, and I knew he knew, and it was fine, and I knew that he knew that too. On earth, there's no lonelier life than to be an astronomer's wife. That much wasn't beyond his comprehension.