The School for Good Mothers(11)

“I’m ready to be unselfish,” Gust said. “Aren’t you?”

She hasn’t been outside today. Renee told her to stop calling Gust and asking to FaceTime with Harriet, to wait to talk to the social worker. This morning, she wallowed in the nursery for hours, touching Harriet’s toys and blankets. Everything needs to be washed. Maybe replaced, when she can afford it. The men didn’t leave any marks, but they left bad luck. Harriet can never know that her nursery was treated like a crime scene.

Sitting in the rocking chair, Frida wept, angry that she had to fake it when she had no tears left. But no tears would suggest no remorse, and no remorse would suggest that she’s an even worse mother than the state imagines. So she grabbed Harriet’s pink bunny and squeezed it and pictured Harriet frightened and alone. She nursed her shame. Her parents always said she needed an audience.

She stands and walks over to the sliding glass door. Opens it and peers into the neighbor’s yard. The next-door neighbor on the north side is building a trellis. He’s been hammering all day. She’d like to flick a lit match over the fence just to see what would happen, would like to burn down that tree that drips fuzzy brown tendrils into her yard, but she doesn’t know if he was the Good Samaritan who called the police.

Her fridge is emptier than it was at the inspection. There’s a container of sweet potato wedges starting to mold, a half-consumed jar of peanut butter, a carton of milk that expired three days ago, packets of ketchup stashed in the door. She snacks on some of Harriet’s string cheese. She should prepare a nutritious dinner, show the state that she can cook, but when she considers walking to the grocery store, considers how the camera will note the time of her departure and return, her methods of food preparation and how gracefully she eats, she wants to roam further afield.

She’ll leave her phone here so they can’t track her. If they ask, she’ll say she went to see a friend, though Will is more Gust’s friend than hers. His best friend. Harriet’s godfather. She hasn’t seen him in months, but during the divorce, he said to call if she ever needed him.

The cameras shouldn’t detect any suspicious behavior. She doesn’t change into a dress or comb her hair or apply makeup or put on earrings. She has faint stubble on her legs and underarms. She’s wearing a loose red T-shirt with holes and denim cutoffs. She slips on a green windbreaker and sandals. She looks like a woman who can’t be bothered, a woman with little to offer. The last woman Will dated was a trapeze artist. But she doesn’t want to date Will, she reminds herself, and she’ll return at a decent hour. She just needs company.



* * *



By any reasonable estimate, he shouldn’t be home on a Saturday night. Will is thirty-eight and single, an avid online dater in a city without many bachelors his age. Women adore his gentle demeanor; his tightly curled black hair, now flecked with gray; his thick beard; the pelt of chest hair that he jokingly claims is evidence of his virility. He wears his hair tall at the crown, and with his tiny wire glasses and long nose and deep-set eyes, he resembles a Viennese scientist from the turn of the twentieth century. He’s not as handsome as Gust, has a softer body and a high voice, but Frida has always loved his attention. If he’s not home, she’ll consider herself lucky. She’s not sure she remembers the cross street or the house number, somewhere on Osage between Forty-Fifth and Forty-Sixth, but desperation is its own beacon, leading her to the correct block, to a parking space a few doors down from Will’s apartment in West Philly, where he rents the first floor of a crumbling Victorian in Spruce Hill. His lights are on.

They used to joke about his crush on her. The time he told her, in front of Gust, “If it doesn’t work out with this guy…” She recalls his compliments as she climbs his front steps and rings the bell. The way he’d touch the small of her back. The way he flirted when she wore red lipstick. As she hears footsteps, she feels hope and despair and a surge of wildness, a terrible wildness that she thought was gone forever. There’s nothing alluring about her except her sadness, but Will likes his women sad. She and Gust used to chastise him about his terrible taste. His broken birds. An aspiring mortician. A stripper with an abusive ex-boyfriend. The cutters and poets with their bottomless wells of need. He’s trying to make better choices, but she hopes he’s still capable of one last mistake.

He answers the door, smiles at her, bewildered.

“I can explain,” she says.

They used to tell him that he’d never land a decent woman if he kept living like a college boy. There’s a visible layer of dog hair on the couch and carpet, only one working lamp in the living room, piles of newspapers and mugs, shoes kicked off in the doorway, change strewn across the coffee table. Will is on his third advanced degree, a PhD in cultural anthropology, after master’s degrees in education and sociology and a brief stint in Teach For America. He’s been in the doctoral program at Penn for nine years, plans to stretch it to ten if he can get funding.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” he says. “I would have—”

Frida tells him not to worry. Everyone’s standards are different, and if she had standards or scruples, she wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t say yes to a bowl of lentil stew or a glass of red wine, wouldn’t sit down at his kitchen table and tell him, in rambling gushes, about her very bad day and the police station and losing custody and the men coming to her house and touching everything and installing cameras, how for the last few nights, she’s hidden under the covers so she has some privacy when she cries.