Debbie Urbanski‘s short story, “Someone Like You,” is from MQR’s Spring 2015 issue. Her story collection, Portalmania, is out now.
You had an uncanny knack for describing the things you knew I wanted. The tractor rides for my son T. around the fields. The naps you said he took on a blanket outside in the shade beneath some ancient maple trees. The cows whose wet noses you said he loved to pet. You must have thought I would believe anything related to my family.
At the grocery store I ran into T.’s music teacher, who warmly greeted T., then asked was I the nanny. I laughed, explaining no I am the mother here! “Then who is that other woman?” she inquired. She described you in somewhat unflattering terms I won’t repeat and mentioned how you had introduced yourself as T.’s mom when you dropped him off at class. “I’m sure you must have misheard her,” I said. Only this happened twice more, both with the nurse practitioner and T.’s little league coach, until I thought maybe they were onto something. I confess I’ve pretended—wished?—he wasn’t my child at times. He is not an easy boy as you know. At a certain distance, I understand how children look like they might belong to anyone. Is this how you started, at such a distance, pretending my child was your child, and my family photographs were of your family, and my clothes—which wouldn’t fit you of course, but we’re pretending now—were yours, and my house, and anything in it, yours too?
When I was twenty or so, practically in another life, I lived for several months in a foreign city. Oh I know, when I brought this up to you before, you said you lived in a foreign city also, as if what’s the big deal, but you were talking about Canada, and I’m talking about Europe here. I went there with a student work visa and I lived in a flat by myself at a time when I was of that age. The age, you know, when every young person is beautiful, they don’t even need to try. Men stared at me wherever I went, because I was blond and of that age and I had my American accent. Women never approached me, only these men, who gave me their phone numbers and business cards, even if they were soon leaving town. As if I were a call girl. I can remember my palm being stroked with great care and adoration, and I allowed strangers to caress my cheek, and so forth.
This all makes sense to me: how, at a certain young age, before one chooses one’s eternal mate, we—or, rather, I—would once be throwing around one’s pheromones to attract all sorts of suitors. But this is supposed to be a temporary state. You’re supposed to find somebody and, when you find somebody, these games and glances from your youth are supposed to stop.
Because we’re being honest here—you, in your last letter, and me, here—I will confess my husband earlier in the year began asking me to switch off the lights when we were doing you know what and he also asked me to lie on my stomach so my face wasn’t turned to him. Was this supposed to be a clue? I was in the homecoming court, you know, Miss County Days, I used to remind him, trying to make light of it.
I’m not sure how much my husband told you about himself. Did you allow time for any chitchat? Even so, he tends to forget, like any of us might, who he used to be. When I first met him he was wearing thrift store clothing, not by choice, and he was always going on about his spartan upbringing. My mother took one look at him and said you will end up supporting that man. He insisted we keep our money separate at first. Instead of taking me out to dinner, not in his budget, he cooked pasta for me in his apartment. I thought how novel, the powdered envelope of cheese. He worked at a record store, among other jobs, back when people bought records, and wore a knit hat even while inside. He was the first in his family to attend college. Instead of attending college, his father told crude stories and swore, though when our parents first met, at a restaurant I picked out where one could eat sautéed rabbit with leeks in a private dining room, the entire dinner his dad didn’t say a word, for which I was grateful, as certain people can embarrass themselves in particular settings.
My husband became used to the money obviously. You might have noticed the cashmere he wears now throughout the winter, and how his linen shirts must be dry-cleaned once a week. Honestly I used to like his thrift store clothing, just as I liked the thin-walled motels and the polyester quilts where we once stayed while vacationing. But my husband plans all our trips now. He’s the one who chooses the all-inclusive resorts, where there are multiple pillow options, and staff who will act like servants if you request it, and there are no surprises.
I have no idea how it is for people like you, holed up in a tiny cocoon of a trailer, or a trailer house, or whatever you want to call your place. But in a house of our size, there are numerous rooms to wander into or out of. I want you to know my husband and I are absolutely fine now—no harm done!—though recently, when he began to snore, as if he had an obstruction lodged inside his throat, I told him he had to sleep somewhere else, and he picked the nicer guest room, the one with the view. It’s useful to have a few guest rooms for times like these. He said it feels like he’s visiting now, and when I asked if that was a bad thing, he said not really.
Do you get tired of other people’s children? I ask this because, at times, as we are being honest here, I can become tired of my own child. “Look at me,” T. says. “Look at me, Mom. Look at me,” and I can act like the ideal mother for the first fifteen minutes—“Great, nice, that’s really interesting T., what do you like about it?” and then I can’t anymore. “I need a break, kiddo,” but if I’m not watching him, it’s as if whatever he does weren’t happening for him. “Look at me,” he says, repeating himself again and again as he follows me from the kitchen to the dining room to the foyer then back to the kitchen, while my impatience is mounting until I have to explode. This is not how I pictured motherhood to be. I had pictured satisfying evenings of board games and craft projects, but if we play a game that my son loses, if there are any rules he doesn’t like, he will throw the board across the room. I have wondered what would you do at times like this. Would you take the game, as I did, and hurl it off the deck out back into the pond? Would you have made T. cry until his face turned unrecognizable? It appears that my son is restless, and overly sensitive, and unhappy, and impulsive, and he dislikes T-shirt tags and the textures of whatever food I cook. I don’t think he acted like this with you. “I’m hot and cold,” he has whined. But what can be done about that? Every day there are bouts of rage from him. I have wondered, is something wrong with him? Or is it me. Or are we simply not meant for each other. In which case what am I supposed to do.
I think you fashioned yourself a better mother than me. There was nothing you would rather be doing than following T. around while he dropped pretzels onto the carpeting. While I, apparently more ambitious, have other needs. Maybe you thought you could have done a better job with my entire life. “Why do you look like this?” T. has asked me, scrunching his face into an ugly and severe expression. There is the possibility that my son will always need someone like you more than he needs someone like me.
Before we met you, we held appointments with potential candidates in our home. Not having children of your own, I don’t know if you can understand what a hopeless situation it can be, to interview a series of disappointing women as stand-ins for yourself. T. however was thrilled in the beginning at how such women appeared in our family room every hour, as if by magic, with the sole purpose of playing with him, though some of them did not play. Some sat on the edge of the couch with their legs crossed amid the chaos of toys, outlining their specific objections, such as not putting away our laundry. “I don’t like to touch the father’s underwear,” one woman said, and my husband responded too quickly, “Okay, okay,” like he had been thinking about it, about her touching his underwear. I’ll be honest, certain of these nannies I dismissed right away as being too young, too pretty, the tanned thin girls whose bodies haven’t done anything yet. Their tiny little tummies onto which you could go pat pat pat. They came smelling of perfume that wasn’t supposed to smell like perfume, it smelled like food. Vanilla, or chocolate, or berries. As if you were supposed to eat them up. These were the sorts of women I always assumed my husband liked.
Then you came along and, in the interview, I remember you scooping T. up in your arms and he laid his head on your shoulder and wrapped his arms around your neck like he thought you were someone he knew, or me. He hadn’t done that with anyone else before. When you leaned your head toward him and began to hum a song, swaying back and forth, I thought I glimpsed something in you that I could recognize. Or was it something I wanted. This automatic love for a child that came gushing out of you on demand. And when you looked up, when you looked at me, did you see something of yourself in me? I thought you did. Or what, likewise, you wanted? There was a connection in any case. Perhaps it’s why we keep writing to each other like this. It becomes necessary to be known by somebody, isn’t it? In any case, T. loved that song you hummed to him, I knew this right away by the little contented sounds he made. I said, what a beautiful song, and you offered your first correction: it was a hymn actually. At the time I liked how you wore an enormous cross around your neck and not like it was a necklace. I doubted, at first glance, with your tent dress and your cross, that you ever did things for style. During the interview, I asked, “Do you think your childhood has helped you become a good nanny, and if so, why,” and you responded, “This is a very emotional question. I can’t answer it without crying,” then you answered the question without crying, describing the bucolic landscape of your youth, in which your mother cared for the goats in the yard, and you rocked a single but beloved doll beside the wood stove, in a cabin surrounded by trees. Or so you said. It was a nice story. But equally important, and I’ll be honest again, because you must already know this, there is the fact of your looks: that you were heavyset, or large-boned, or substantial, whatever you want to call it. Though you might have been pretty once, it was hard to tell now. I’m not one to insist that looks, or their lack, can determine a person’s worth, but what I’m saying is that I was comforted by how you appeared.
The previous nanny we had for only a summer before she moved to Rochester. She played with T. in the family room while I was upstairs in the attic working on my art, so I could hear him gurgling, or singing. You said you were a different type of nanny. You said you’d rather get out of the house and expose T. to the fresh air. You took those sounds away from me, leaving me with the silence and static which became T.’s early years. What I’m asking here—is a mother’s love recognizable to anyone? That is, was my love for T. the same as your love for him. Could he even tell the difference. Or was your love somehow better. Or at least less complicated. What exactly is love for a child anyway? Are there permanent strings attached or is it more of a light that leaves a person then scatters? What do you have to excavate or dig out or blow up to get at more of it. Should it matter who loves a child as long as they are loved.
I have so many of these questions.
There are children, I know, who are uncomplicated bundles of joy, they are outpouring beacons of happiness. I know this because I’ve seen such children holding hands and laughing their heads off at the playdates, but my child is not one of these, at least not around me. Perhaps I was born with a deficit which he senses. Maybe I should have walked away and turned it all over to you. It meaning my life.
When you were holding T., I was supposed to see myself holding him. It was supposed to be the same thing. You were supposed to be a part of me.
I know there actually was no farm. No “Farmer Joe” in B-ville, no herds of Holsteins or Jersey cows that nuzzled my son’s cheek. I’ve since driven up to where you said the farm would be, where you said you took T. once a week at least, and no one there remembers you, and no one there knows of a place like the one you conjured up for me, with tractor rides, and fragrant bales of hay, and children napping on a blanket in the grass, in the shade, waking to bowls of yogurt and apple slices.
I have a memory of this farm that never existed, a picture in my head of T.’s delight as he sat, far away from me, on the imaginary farmer’s lap and steered the imagined tractor across the dreamy fields, when in fact my son was doing—what? He does not always remember. He was very young when you began with us. Because of you, he already possesses several secrets. At one point he began drawing crosses coming out of everything, out of his rocket ships and his flowers, and every house he called a church, do you remember when that was all happening?
When T. told me how in your church—where he was not supposed to go, because I told you not to take him—there was a table in the far back corner just his height and a box of books, and in every book, Jesus was holding hands with the other children. I asked what have you been teaching him, do you remember? You said when T. says “church” he actually means the library. That “church” = library. How we laughed about that! At the funny mix-ups children can make with words. Did you let them think T. was your child? Recently, as in last week, T. described for me the choir singing, and he said the singing was like the birds. He said this with a dreamy look on his face like it had been the prettiest sound he ever heard. Then he said the water they almost drowned him in was cold. But he didn’t actually drown, he said. You must imagine hell filled with people like me, with children like mine. At least you could save one of them from your imagined suffering. Is that what you thought? You called my son a little angel, as if my son could be something I can’t believe in.
God, your God, not being the judgmental sort, will forgive anybody. This is what you told me once. How convenient, I remember thinking at the time. So he might not care one bit about what you did, or also what I did. It must be nice to be loved no matter what choices you make.
Let me give you some advice here. If I were you, I would stop using religion as a crutch for the world’s disappointments. If I were you, I’d stop taking care of other people’s children and would make up my own children to take care of. If I had to take care of another’s child, I would think up activities that didn’t require foam or enormous amounts of pipe cleaners. I would make crafts that are small and functional, like a bowl that holds loose buttons. Women who hire nannies are looking to hire themselves. Obviously I failed in that, but if I were you, I would go on a diet and act more like my employer next time. I would ask my employer for advice about their kids. I would pretend not to know things that I think I know.
At the end of every day, when I returned home and opened my arms to my son, you would say loudly and clearly, “Here is your mommy, T. Your mommy. Mom-eee,” as if this were a foreign word which needed to be reintroduced as you nudged T. toward me. It seemed you believed my child might forget about me. It seemed you believed my child might forget about me and remember you, though I was there every morning, and every evening, and quality should trump quantity, should it not? Numerous parenting books written by the experts, who I imagine might know more than you, declare a mother need only set aside a fifteen-minute block each day to play mindlessly with her offspring. “You read too much,” you used to complain. “If you keep reading so much, you’re going to forget things that you actually should know.” You thought I should learn from you instead, I suppose. The way you told me stories, they were like parables, and all your stories were the same, concerning how little you possessed growing up, and how such deficiencies made you strong and happy, implying, because of the size of our house perhaps, or the amount of toys piled in the various rooms, that I was raising T. to become a monster who would go forth and gobble up all the resources of the world. On more than one occasion, T. has called me by your name, but I want to you know that yesterday, on the drive home from his preschool, I asked him who he wanted to have his snack with that afternoon, you or me, and guess who he chose.
Your husband may have already mentioned this. Or did he not? I don’t know him well enough to say whether he’s the kind of man who tells you everything. But since we are being honest with each other, when I found out you know what, I drove over—not right away, but in a day or so—to where your husband works, I know where he works, and I waited for him in the parking lot behind the trees. Don’t worry, I didn’t let the cat out of the bag. But I did think an eye for an eye. I won’t tell you what exactly I was wearing but it was revealing, or meant to be. And your husband is a handsome enough man, in that working class sort of way, and I remember all the flowers standing at attention because it was spring, the purples and yellows, and then more of the same, purple, yellow, green. Your husband was kind, kinder than I would have been. He removed my hand from his leg or wherever I had placed it. He was younger than me by years so I questioned him: wouldn’t the attentions of an older, more experienced woman be flattering to most men? At least I had read that somewhere. Or seen it more likely in a movie. Your husband said he hadn’t seen such movies but maybe he would check them out someday. Then he thanked me for the blessing that was T., for giving T. to you, as he mentioned you couldn’t have children of your own. I hadn’t known this about you. Still, I corrected your husband. “I didn’t give T. to anybody.” Though this wasn’t exactly true. Then he told me to go on home.
I understand there are different attractions for everybody. For every person who likes green eyes, there is somebody who likes blue. For every man who likes a fit well-educated woman who has a lot of money, there is a man who likes a female who’s overweight, who barely finished high school and believes a simple life can be a happy one. “She’s actually happy,” he once said about you, like your happiness was a dangling pretty thing you hung between your breasts, and maybe it was, and I just couldn’t see it. Are you the person my husband wishes I were? The nature of attraction is unchangeable, he told me early on when he first met me, his head then full of books and other people’s ideas, but I think this one is true. That there is supposed to be an imprint in your head, an image to which you will compare everything. Nobody knows how such images get there. It’s not like we can choose them. So it is nobody’s fault. I never asked him to describe his. All along I just assumed I must be that image.
Such assumptions made me a bad detective for a while. Mysteries are a lot more fun in books, when you can read about them while lying in bed with a glass of wine (or, in your case, tea?). But if the mystery is you, it loses all its charms. You can’t flip ahead to see whatever will happen. You’re not sitting there hoping for a sequel. At first I tried to deny there was something going on. Then I took out a notebook and wrote down everything I suspected and the supporting evidence. Then I drove to where your husband worked (see above). Then you said you found a new job elsewhere. All of us were speaking in code at this point. Honestly sometimes I didn’t understand what we were saying to each other. When I told my husband, “The squirrels are f-ing around in our garage again,” what did that mean? I didn’t mind the squirrels. Likewise when my husband makes promises and pushes my hair back so gently like I am about to break, what is he trying to tell me? That I am fragile? Or that I will never break? To an outsider, it must all look the same, a group of people (us) staring in different directions. I think it’s been told before. I think it’s time we move on and become better parts of a different story.
