Callie G. Mauldin
When I finally tell my mother about Danny, she says, “Freeze your eggs.” She swallows a large blue pill. She is sick. Her skin a ghoulish gray.
Most days, I don’t miss Danny. I miss the sound of someone else. Overnight, he collected his books and dumped his collared shirts into the back seat of his Volvo. An overdue fissure in many ways.
“You’ll want a kid someday,” she says. I realize then that she doesn’t remember my uterus is challenged, disordered, said my doctor. He’d made it sound like a Victorian-era disease, my body grotesque, improper, in some way.
“Can I move in for a while, until I get on my feet?”
“Stay as long as you like.”
We both look at the backyard, where the snow-swaddled feeders await their fair-weathered mistresses. I want to tell Mom that I understand now where longing lodges in the body. In your sacrum, near your duodenum, in your solar plexus. But I don’t.
When we first met, Danny and I took candlelit baths together. Back then, we could mend the rattle of arguments with our bodies. Eventually, our months, our years, ran to the beat of in-vitro, in-vivo, in-vitro, in-vivo. A makeshift lullaby.
***
Under the glow of holiday lights, I help my mother with chores. Washing dishes, sweeping the wooden floors, making beds, folding laundry, and changing light bulbs. I wonder how she’s managed alone for so many years. Of course, from what I remember, my father rarely helped around the house. When I was six or seven years old, and Mom escaped out of town with her sister Alice, he asked me how to work the vacuum cleaner. Then, he huffed and puffed and nearly threw the old appliance at the wall.
Outside, milky white icicles latch onto naked brown branches. Nights, under a round, pitted moon, the wind sounds like whistling, then crying.
On Christmas Eve, I hear from my friend Peg—Danny’s girlfriend is pregnant. The ink barely dry on the divorce papers, I think. Part of me—some primordial part—wants to run, bare breasted, into the snow-capped mountains behind my mother’s house, live the rest of my days in isolation, sparing the world my rage. Another part wants to sit so still I don’t feel anything, not even my heartbeat.
***
In the new year, mornings are victorious. Mom and I eat omelets. Sometimes, she calls me Alice, and I don’t correct her. We make faces, stick out our tongues, and mime Lucy and Ricky on television. One evening, we pour over picture albums, and watch as my grandmother, a tiny Irish woman, marries my grandfather at sixteen. We watch as she births seven children. Her stomach transforms from cantaloupe to watermelon-sized over and over and over again. I notice she never smiles.
“Did you know that female elephants raise their young with their mothers and their grandmothers,” I say, turning the page in the album.
“I worry for you,” Mom says, and adds, “Alone in the world.”
“I have you,” I say, and add, “And my teaching, and my friends.”
She squeezes my hand, and then cocks her head to the side, “You’re thirty-nine, Jenny.”
I blink away tears. I think about the last thirteen years married to Danny, the meals we cooked, the summer trips to the beach, the dinners with friends, and all those daily routines we performed side by side, like teeth brushing, nail clipping.
For weeks, Mom wears the same blouse with new stains and different pants. “The laundry basket’s a bitch,” she lies. Soiled diapers nest under her bathroom cabinets.
***
Spring is a veil that’s been lifted, shining a bright light into the dark. Snow becomes rain, glutting the grasses and gutters. Overnight, the frogs multiply. And multiply. I envy their ability to create, to procreate, do it again and again so easily, but Mom insists that they’re a plague.
We watch the exterminator from the kitchen. Then, Mom forgets, screams, “Burglar! Burglar!” I put my arm around her shoulders, tuck her in. I swaddle her until she is safe, sound.
Once Danny and I stopped trying for a baby it was over. A mutual story we stopped writing.
With the frogs gone, it is quiet.
Mom lies in bed.
“Tell me something,” she says.
I tell her that the average human can survive three weeks without food.
She nods her head.
I put her hands between mine, hold them for a long time.
When there is silence, I’m not sure why, but I tell her that I am pregnant. Finally. A little girl. I am due in the fall. She smiles again, a wide and stretching grin. A tension seems to release from her shoulders at my words. I run warm water over a washcloth in her bathroom sink. I place it on her forehead. I rinse. I wring. I repeat.
In the evening, I sit on the back porch and watch the sun set, a hot red ball melting into the cerulean sky.
In July, Mom dies. I sit cross-legged on the bathroom floor, a child again, and stare out the window. Rain blasts the house like a fire hose, wild, unruly.
Danny calls to ask if I want him at the funeral.
“I am sorry,” he says.
“I know.”
I stay in my mother’s house.
As temperatures soar, the frogs orchestrate my dreams. They are loud and constant and full of life. I miss the real ones. I imagine I will do things differently now, renovate the house, the yard. My head swirls with visions of paint colors. I imagine I will keep the frogs next spring, let them live.
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Callie G. Mauldin is a fiction writer from Birmingham, Alabama. Her stories have appeared in Phoebe, Jabberwock Review, Fiction Southeast, and Expanded Field Journal (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). She won the 2023 Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize in Fiction, was a finalist in Phoebe’s 2022 Spring Fiction Contest, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.