Oh, shit. Because it never happens when you expect it, even when you’re expecting it. Here comes my husband. Oh, God, not with the kid. No.
Her hair is fair and young, it has only been washed six hundred times. It has never been submerged in the sea. It hasn’t been pulled or plastered to the scalp by sweat.
I want to touch her of course. But the live wires inside my fingers are off. I can see my fingers wanting to move, and if I concentrate, I can detect movement. But they won’t animate. I remember another time. I put ketamine up my nose with a boy named Rich in college. We baked the moonlight fluid in his microwave dish. After a few minutes it turned to chalk dust. Rich cut it into rails. I mean rails. My parents were coming in the morning. College mornings. They were sordid, then. Now I can remember only sunshine, pencils.
In Rich’s room, I levitated above myself. Ketamine is horse tranquilizer. I snorted so much, I could see my body from above. I didn’t know if I was man or woman. I was frightened but full of courage then. That was before I’d tasted death at all. Death has more flavors than that ice cream shop in Berlin, with bacon and egg. The point is, I watched my hands in Rich’s dank room that smelled of crying. With the framed photo of lightning striking the Space Needle. I bade my genderless hands to move but they did not. Back then, I knew they would move again. I was at least hopeful. Oh, I think I’m still hopeful now. After all, this might not be it it.
—Mama, says the kid. Mama, wakey.
My husband. Eyes shudder. Huh. Never saw him do that. Interesting.
I want to reach for his pants. The silver zipper gleams. Inanimate objects are the luckiest of all of us.
For the kid’s recent birthday—two—we went to the thoo. The gorillas gored my heart. The baby gorilla played by the glass, monkeying around for us. Picking up fresh branches of leaves and flipping backward. Then the mama came, big, sad, holding a shredded mauve blanket. Trying to wrap the baby and bring it away from us creeps.
But the baby persisted. The baby looked at my baby. I looked at my baby, smiling from between Peter’s jeans. What were they saying in their baby eye language?
—Their baby might be dead if they were in the wild, Peter said.
—I suppose, I said, we each of us have our homes. And we went back to ours. Smaller, actually, than the gorilla enclosure.
My husband puts the pads of two fingers against my wrist.
Not so fast, fucker, I want to say. I’m still here.
He waits, then produces a sound from the back of his neck. Unhh. His pain is so magnificent it makes me feel like a real shit, all those nags across the years. Walk the dog, dry the salad spinner. At last I can see clearly, he was not my servant.
He backs the kid off with his arm, like I’m toxic waste.
The kid perseveres. She is strong like me. She pushes forward, holding the croc named Dogma. Mama, she says, and pushes Dogma near my mouth. I smell Cheerios and saliva.
Peter allows himself a few heaving sobs. We didn’t think it would go like this, in the toothache of dawn with the kid around.
One moment I’m still inside myself, and then I feel something happen. Like flour dropping out of a sack. The desire to curse leaves me, alongside the desire to be beautiful.
I can still see but not out of my own eyes. I don’t know where I am, so I imagine I’m inside of Dogma. Dimly I realize I can be anywhere, but it’s easiest to inhabit Dogma, this crocodile from the zoo, bought that birthday afternoon.
Suddenly we are outside the bedroom. Me and the kid and the husband. But my body is still on the bed, wearing the Texas Longhorns T-shirt and the palm-frond pajama pants. I feel sorry for my body, full of cooling bones.
The kid is howling. The dog comes forward, his brown spine dipping down below his neck. That’s how he slinks when I am about to scream for muddy paws, and occasionally clock his rump. Occasionally harder than I should. Shh, I want to say. I can’t hurt you anymore.
The other week we went to our favorite spot in the East Village. Our waitress was from Alabama.
—I’m the weird Southern waitress who loves kids and cartoons, she said, kneeling down to the kid’s eye level.
The kid indicated the tubby tiger on her iPad.
—Who’s that?
Someone called for our waitress and she clopped off in her woolly clogs. The kid was left hanging. But the kid is cool. She made a face like, your loss, lady.
We ate robiola and taleggio and prosciutto and smeared lardo on ciambella. The setting sun lit up our glasses of wine. I was reminded of every tavern at sunset I’ve ever seen. Orange light, dark wood, burger grease. We all put on tiaras and the kid kept trading for one of ours. I found it humiliating that I still had a preference. It would be one of my last times in a crown.
I tattooed the kid’s hands with a grumpy pug and a loopy dachshund. Her eyes were bright, the blue so concentrated it looked chemical. My husband took too many pictures on his phone.
Toward the end of our meal, a young woman, thin as a snake, stopped by our table. She carried a book that I later looked up. It was self-help, on happiness.
—She is the most gorgeous child, she said to us, and you are the coolest family ever.
The woman had eaten alone at the bar. I liked her eyeliner, thick bars of ink. Her hair was dark and smooth. I, too, used to keep to myself and flirt only with strangers.
Neither Peter nor I said thank you, and we looked at the kid. The young woman left through the door. I heard her heels against the cold asphalt for longer than aurally possible.
The kid is loaded into the car. All her frequent things. The reusable stickers and the felt fruits and vegetables. The rubber newspaper, a dog’s squeak toy. She clutches Dogma, which means she is clutching me. It feels good to be held by my child like I am the small thing that needs her.
My body went in the ambulance. I heard the noise but didn’t see it go. I was with the child in the high chair. She ate whole-wheat squares of peanut butter and peach lavender jam. He cut the bread correctly, better than I did, but the milk mixture was wrong. More almond than cow.
In the car she says,
—Mama? and points to the house.
He turns on the radio and plays her duck song. So she forgets.
We had an au pair over the summer, who introduced the duck song. The diagnosis had come in March. By June I was no less despondent. It’s a very American notion, to make the best of what’s left. I began to read only Russian novels. I spent 12 percent of the kid’s college tuition on osetra. I wanted both to ravenously be with her, and to ignore her at will, when the unalterable fact of illness rested on my neck like a gargoyle. I locked myself in bathrooms and cried the way an ugly woman cries.
—The summer house has an extra bedroom, Peter said. Stop eating the caviar and we can afford a nanny.
—So you and I can take long walks on the beach? I said.
The au pair was tall, broad, and English, and dressed plainly. She wore longish skirts with suitcase wrinkles. Leela. She worked for us Monday through Friday, and we paid her a nominal rate; mostly the English and Irish girls came just to have a summer in the Hamptons, a sunny guest bedroom with a floral bedspread. Weekends she worked at a local farm, fertilizing tomatoes, picking arugula.
There was a little service industry clique in Bridgehampton, of which Leela quickly became a part. They were led by a handsome farmer chef, their pied piper, into the world of slaughtering your own lamb and selecting the finest emerald kale. They were cash-poor but rich in oysters, cheese, flowers. Leela would come home Sunday night, and the kid would run out to her mahogany Schwinn and help her bring in what she’d gathered. The kid learned to love mushrooms. I cooked them with garlic, sea salt, and olive oil. I was excellent at cooking mushrooms, but maybe everyone is.
After dinner each night Leela and the kid cleaned up, snuffed out the candles, mopped the grease off the rented oak table. I took an armload of books into the reading room. I didn’t want Peter with me necessarily, but I didn’t want him in the other room, with the cheer of the child and the laughter.
Leela knew the situation. I told her one night after drinking too much pinot blanc. She was on all fours on the tile floor, picking up puzzle pieces. She was respectful, always. She sighed and smiled. I knew she brought the mushrooms for me.
The only thing she did wrong—and it wasn’t even wrong, but it hurt me—was the duck song. It would be the last thing I’d see my daughter truly love. And it wasn’t me who taught it to her. So many fantasies fly out the window. Death was just something else at which I’d expected to be terrific.
So this is it, the drive. Is it actually possible he’s going to do what he said he would do? I no longer know, immediately, how I feel. I have these scales . . .
My daughter’s face is flushed from the cold. She’s wearing bright orange gloves. She likes to wear the gloves in the car. There was a woman I knew who wore gloves inside of restaurants. Not fine ones. Woolly, ugly cream ones, with crumbs and stink in them. This was during a love affair that was not going well. The man had a host of places he couldn’t bring her, for all of these reasons. I never told her what I knew. We aren’t ready to receive the news until it’s past the point that we can make a choice.
The idea for the drive had come in the first days of the prognosis. When the doctor—mustachioed, suburban—said six to eight months, I knew, and Peter knew, he meant precisely seven.
We laid in bed with the aromatherapy mister hushing eucalyptus into the air. We talked about the places I’d like to see. It’s funny when you have all the choice in the world, you settle on something close. You want to be near, in passion, to your mother. My parents were dead and his were terrible people. So we decided on the summer in Bridgehampton, where my mother had ridden horses for the brief period of wealth that my family enjoyed.
My mother did not love her horses more than me. But she loved some notion of freedom over me. She chose me over that freedom. Every horse hour, she took me, she taught me. I loved the smell of them, the brown smell, the hair smell. One day I was planning on telling the kid, Do you know my mother once told me I was too selfish to have children? I was probably thirteen when she said this. We would both laugh and then I would very breezily say, Do you, uh, agree?
After the summer, it would be the kid’s second birthday, and then it would be seven months, and then . . . that was when he proposed he and the kid would take the drive.
We took it seriously at the same time that we did not.
By the lighthouse in Montauk there was a wildflower farm that met the ocean at a steep cliff. A log fence corralled a trio of babydoll sheep. There were some ragged rows of cornflowers and cosmos. The petals were frayed, and the stems were bent by wind and the oat legs of the animals. Elsewhere ground ivy and helianthus covered the ground in permanent springtime. The sheep, the only ones of their kind I’d ever seen, wore silver bells around their throats, and when they moved, a dreamy tinkling filled the air. Peter proposed to me there, six months into our relationship. He was smitten. I swam in belt-colored oceans at night. I maintained my autonomy, so for a long time he feared losing me. I didn’t think he would ever care for himself again.
—The kid and I will drive there, we won’t even wait for the ashes. We will take a piece of you.
—My hat?
—Of course, your hat. And I’ll show the kid the sheep, and we’ll sit there and talk about murky things. I’ll tell her about the time you danced naked at Automatic Slim’s.
—I had a shirt on, and panties.
—And I’ll kiss her one thousand times, and another thousand from you. And then . . .
—And then?
—And then, we’ll get into the car . . .
—And then?
Here he made a simple plane of his palm, and whooshed it forward and down, off an imaginary cliff.
—And then we will be all together. We’ll have been apart just a few hours, no more. Your parents will come from their new digs, embracing you first, then cautiously peering around your shoulders to set their sights on their granddaughter. You’ll be jealous of how much more they’ll want to meet her than reconnect with you, because you are a terrible woman.
At this point I would be sobbing.
—I am so terrible!
—A witch. I’ll be happy for those few hours of reprieve.
Peter’s beautiful. When we used to make love, I imagined him fucking other women: young freaks, bartenders with inky hair completely different from mine, bangles, tattoos. After the diagnosis, I put an end to that. Lately I was Julie Andrews, he was Baron von Trapp.
In the car we pass the Millburn Deli. Their pastrami is the only one I ever liked. The first type of a thing you have usually becomes the favorite. This is truer of songs than anything. But also cheese spreads, canned peas versus frozen. That’s the reason I’ve been very careful with the first of everything I give the kid. I’ve tried to curate her appreciation.
We pass the Millburn vet, we pass old Jeannie Murphy’s house. She’s three hundred pounds, drags a silver oxygen tank wherever she goes. I knew her in bathing suits, at the Millburn Pool, leopard-print bathing suits, and her buttercream curls. She was still fat then, but she was young. Virginia Slims, tanning oil. She was a nice lady. I didn’t visit her once after I had the kid.
We pass Jeremiah Rack’s childhood house, small but pleasant, with the cubbyholes for shoes. His mother was hit by a bus. Five hours later another friend of ours who worked in organ donation was petitioning him to sign over her pale kidneys. He told her they were cancerous. But later he changed his mind. Our lives are little.
The kid is looking out the window and I’m trying to whoosh her my memories. Peter is not making any phone calls. If the roles were reversed, I’d be on the phone with all the relevant agencies, the funeral home. I’m a rule follower.
The kid brings me up to her face. She is looking into my eyes. I gulp with my crocodile throat—a long, green, lonely gulp.
Okay, listen, I say. Listen hard, do you hear me? First, don’t let him do this. When you get to the cliff, you do something beautiful. Something that makes life pink and fantastic. Ride the sheep, maybe. Dance with them. Yes! Dance with the sheep by the moonlight. Pirouette, like I taught you, among the sheep like they are your animal sisters. You must make your legs look like beautiful girl legs and tiny baby legs at once. Do you know how to do this? Mommy has tried to show you. Use the moonlight to your advantage. You start, first, by snaring your father, and then you will work on the rest. But first, don’t let him do this. I want you to live. Maybe, I need you to live. And second, this is very important, also. When you get home tonight, go to the basement. Pay attention. There is one envelope, a note from a four-star hotel in Tucson. The man was not important. Who he was, I am saying. He was no one. We never did a thing. I only kept him, a shirt on a clothespin. So that I might look out the window and see him waving there in the breeze, above the short grass. It’s because I loved your father too much. That’s what we have to do sometimes, to survive.
The kid hugs me to her neck. She smells of old fruit. She smells tired; she should still be in bed.
We are on the thruway. Holy fuck, we are headed to Long Island, to the farm at the cliff.
—Dada, the kid says.
Peter looks in the rearview mirror. God, he is so beautiful, my husband. Beard scripple. Green eyes. Handsomeness on a man is hard to glean. It’s not symmetry but everything at once, mountainous and boyish; seeing through trees to a plaid blanket over twigs, him. I got angry at him once for playing poker with a male friend at a table, while I was playing blackjack at another. Mohegan Sun, 2010. I have been jealous of the voice on his GPS, bright and commanding like a blond fighter pilot.
I often asked myself, Which could I stand to lose less, the kid or the man? It was the man every day until one day it wasn’t. I wonder if he asked himself the same question, and today was the day his own answer changed.
—Yes, baby? You wanna watch Daniel Tiger?
—Ducks.
—Duck song. Coming up.
Our last summer. Was it the best last summer possible? Warm teak. Faint chocolate ice-cream smell on hands. Lemons. Fucking mushrooms. Rented coffee cups. Felt good to break one and the sun on the wood floor highlighting dust I didn’t have to clean. The cool grass under our thighs as we ate dosas and uttapas and washed them down with mango lassi. Later those same evenings, the outdoor movies. The oaks and their fresh summer leaves. The kid, sleeping between my legs. Her small ears on my knees; I didn’t move an inch and I, who have not been present in any moment, could think only: more.
The other day I tried to introduce a new version of the duck song. Sung by an American and not a Brit. But it was no use, the kid liked the first one best. Leela’s.
The summer could, itself, be divided into two seasons—
Because, as a family, we were so quiet and down, we relied on Leela to set the tone, to carry it over from her other world with the bearded farmer prince who slaughtered animals in the most charitable of ways. And because the farmer prince was a chef, the seasons of our summer were demarcated by the changes in menu, his and ours.
The first, a didactic howl through the farmer prince’s life trajectory, was the season of indulgence—
Razor clams cooked over burning juniper branches, an imperfect history of lamb, chewy carrots, and spiny peas. These were plated aggressively at his restaurant, which Leela reproduced in our cottage. What do I mean? Raw, giant cherrystones, served without salt or lemon, lukewarm. Taste of the Sea, he called it.
This was the season in which I still pretended that, at any moment, the dire odds would spin in my favor. All my life I’d known that everything I did which had nothing to do with love was a waste, but I told myself that only after achieving a certain fame would I be able to appreciate the nothingness of it . . .
The second season I call the monsoon. Or, the season of the spotless organ. Leela made clean, thoughtful Asian dishes. This came after she knew what was inside my body, and was trying to Old-World it out of me. Never mind that her komatsuna was sandy. The pigs—my husband and the kid—didn’t notice.
And the night my husband almost killed me, he didn’t mean that either. We sat down at the table. Candles, white plates, rented placemats. Her ripe bright crowns of tatsoi, spliced with carrots younger than the kid, next to my crisp shitake mushrooms curled like chipmunk hearts. I said to my husband, Do you like her cooking better?
—Of course not. That’s nuts. They’re so different. Apples and oranges.
—But is hers sometimes better?
—Never better. Sometimes, it’s more . . . alive.
All men, you see, should die.
Turn around! I am screaming from inside of Dogma’s pink mouth, I can feel my noise broom over his white felt teeth. I am not actually screaming, is the problem. I’m doing that fake, hoarse scream, where you don’t actually mean for the world to hear.
I have a list of all the plays I want her to read. Miss Julie, the toxic romance of a Midsummer’s Eve. I want her to beware the manipulation of men. I want her to never be Miss Julie. But mostly, may she never be Kristin. And of course, J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea. I want her to understand grief. It is the only way to be a person in the world.
—Mama, thoo? She is asking if I am at the zoo, waiting for her. Jesus Christ. With the gorillas. There’s fruit jelly on her chin. The sun is in her face. She hates the sun in her face. My husband is better at making sure it isn’t. He can manipulate the shade even while he’s driving. I, on the other hand, have been known to let her cry.
My own mother let me cry. She locked me out of her room some nights. I still remember banging on the door, scratching the wood. She called me a sentinel. She called me insidious. I assume the kid will forgive me, as I have forgiven my mother.
Part of me is thinking, Do it. The drive. Spill yourselves over the cliff. Come to me. It isn’t bad here, this other plane. Eventually I will imagine a settee in the corner of my mind, worn damask. Green lamps. Poetry books and dramaturgy and fine marble horse bookends.
But I am also thinking, What if I’ve been resuscitated at the hospital? And I wake to find everyone gone? Mostly I am thinking, What is the best thing for me? Even in death, selfishness does not leave; horrifying thought: perhaps it just doesn’t leave me.
Finally, he cries. Finally.
—Mama is . . . resting, he says through his sobs.
—MA-MAHHHHHHH!
I love her voice. I have loved it in the middle of the night, when I wanted nothing but for it to stop. She comes from me, my passion that no one knows about. There is nothing like a child to show the world what is inside her mother.
Give it to me, I screamed. The night we made her. In a wooden room in a tree house on an island with so much poisonous fruit. With goats tied to trees by the roadway.
And how did it go from Give it to me to Get me three spring onions, not scallions, did you hear me? NOT scallions. Thinking, idiot, under my breath. But it always goes like that. Decomposition is the meaning of life.
What you find is that some of the things you miss the most are already gone. Your parents. The eighties.
I won’t miss the seaside resort towns; I’ve seen them all. The Santa huts on the old connubial lakes. I won’t miss my mother-in-law. I won’t even miss hating her.
He puts on the “Five Little Ducks” song. I am always lowed by it. Five little ducks / Went out one day / Over the hill and far away / Mother duck said / “Quack, quack, quack, quack.” / But only four little ducks came back.
And on it goes until no little ducks come back.
Of course, at the end, there is a reprieve.
Sad mother duck / Went out one day / Over the hill and far away / The sad mother duck said / “Quack, quack, quack.” / And all of the five little ducks came back!
But I can’t get past that first part. She has lost them all. That is the truth of it. The last verse is heresy. The American lie.
The car comes to a peaceful stop. It’s mid-March but snowing outside. The kid lifts Dogma to the window, as if she knows. I see a road I don’t recognize, but it looks like Montauk. We are outside a small farmhouse.
There is a cow in a small pasture. The skirts of the pasture are black with trees, gray with snow. Now I see, too, a white pig with charcoal feet.
Beyond the farmhouse, there is a very small guesthouse. In resort towns in the winter, nobodies can afford to stay in guesthouses like these.
Next to the door, there is a rusty bicycle, collecting a mustache of snow.
One night I am remembering suddenly—it was in fact Midsummer’s Eve—we were going to dinner at the farmer prince’s restaurant. Leela put on a long dress with open shoulders. Soft navy, with white stripes. She looked fine, the way a woman looks on her best night of the summer. Seeing her in regular loafers, I went to my closet and brought out a pair of handmade sandals from Capri. Wear these, I said, and she nodded.
At the table the farmer prince came out to greet us, placing his hands on Leela’s bare shoulders. He was handsome, if you didn’t mind beards that stunk. His sensuality was built up by all the boys and girls that followed him around. He chopped down trees for farmhouse tables and threw candlelit dinners and showed stop-motion cartoons on a canvas at his farm.
Afterward I said,
—Are you and him . . . ?
She smiled. The flush of summer sex was all about her. I was not jealous of her and the farmer prince, or of life and vitality and all the things she had yet to try. But I was jealous of the time I was letting her spend with my daughter, time she both did not deserve, or even really want.
By the end of the summer it was over, the farmer prince was flying to Japan with another acolyte, to learn the art of sushi. I held Leela when she cried. She said,
—I feel so stupid crying over nothing, when you—
—Shush, I said, it’s all relative. I held her to me, deeply. There was an ounce of concern, of course, but mostly it was selfish. Because as I held her shoulders, shaking, I was imagining she was my kid, all grown up, crying over her first real love. I was trying to alchemize the moment into an experience I would never have.
I look out the window, I can feel my soul shaking inside the felt bowels of the crocodile.
Why are we here? What is this? This feels wrong. This is not right. Where is the farm, with the sheep? Who is this pig! All around me I search frantically, Where is my hat! They’ve forgotten my hat!
—Dada, where going? asks the kid.
—Come on, he says.
The notion of the drive, did he tell it to me like a fairy tale he knew he would never enact? All along, he knew what he would really do. Or, he didn’t know. He only decided this morning, what to do. This was the only place he could think to go. Because there was nobody left. He didn’t know he would do this, but he knew he would not do that.
This might be the worst actual thing that could have happened, in my life. Like in Synge’s play when the woman Maurya finds that her last son has died, six total and now the final one, subsumed by the sea. The thing she has feared the most has come to pass.
The door opens. I shut my eyes, I keep them shut. I want to be blind. Blind! I hear her voice, the Liverpudlian dipthong, cheap and warm.
The kid puts me down to leap into this other woman’s arms. She has put me down on my crocodile face. My eyes go into a smelly, powdery carpet. Febreze, or something even cheaper. I see nothing, but I hear a game on in the background. English football. Why are the sounds of games so near to the sounds of life? When my father was dying in the hospital, intubated and the color of newspapers, my brother watched the Jets game “with him.” I was disgusted. The crudeness, of playing something so alive as someone is leaving the world. The gall of the living.
I hear my husband say, Thank you. I hear him sobbing. And I hear the woman say nothing, which means the woman is embracing my husband.
I think of her hair, clean as bok choy.
I think of her ovaries, robust as English roses, and full of pearls, like blessed clams.
In Riders to the Sea, when the woman Maurya has found her last son is dead, when the ladies in red petticoats bring the boy up on pine boards, clacking, and the body wet and silver from the sea, there it ends. It’s over. The pain is low and red and black, but it’s over. At last, she can rest.
An hour later—maybe more, maybe less, time is nobody to me now—in the au pair’s kitchen, something rich and sweet and brown is deglazing in a pan. It smells hearty but lively. Mushrooms, if I had to guess, to fold into mint love letters, with tongue. I see that the farmer prince might have stolen her heart, but she absorbed his style.
Next I hear the au pair humming the duck song, and I hear my daughter laughing. The honey of her laughter, unspoiled, sweet and creamy like champagne mangoes. I will never, now, be able to screw it up.
Soon the smell of the mushrooms faints from my nostrils and is replaced with a green shimmer of nothing. No, not nothing; I can smell pond. Brine, sweetness. The pond by the cliff, though not the barny smell of the sheep. I can smell the movement of the lily pad, the silky slipper in the middle.
For a long time I can’t sense anything at all, beyond this—this warm, wet, quiet nothing—as though I am traveling through water. Water and nothing and a long blue canal, as the inside of a woman. Finally, I smell horses. My own mother. Her hay-blond hair, the warmth of her neck. Au revoir, I say, to the live wires, but nobody is listening. It’s better this way, though of course we will always need reminding. 
Lisa Taddeo is a two-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize (2017, 1019) and winner of the Andrew Lytle Prize in 2018. Her debut nonfiction, Three Women, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2019, and her debut novel, Animal, and debut short story collection, Ghost Lover, are both forthcoming from Simon and Schuster. She received her MFA in fiction as the Saul Bellow Fellow from Boston University.
