Susan’s computer pulls up acronyms. Message-Oriented Middleware. Metal-on-Metal, as in hip surgery. Milk of Magnesia. Made of Money. She puts her finger to her brow the way Alda does when she’s stumped.
***
It’s 1979 and Susan has just been born. Her grandparents give her mother, Alda, sweaty in her hospital gown, gold earrings in a velvet box. Alda sounds tired as she accepts the gift and twists her neck to meet her fingers, the careful trigonometry of fitting the stud through her skin. Susan can’t remember this, she was only hours old then, but sometimes if she closes her eyes she can see the fluorescence of the hospital through her lids.
***
Things Alda brings with her to visit her daughter in the city: two cans of pepper spray, Vaseline, a paper map, The Valley of the Dolls book on tape, an ace bandage, raisins in cardboard, three colors of lipstick, super glue, lucky rabbit’s foot, and a carefully-hidden hundred-dollar bill. Susan looks through the purse while Alda showers.
***
Alda has told Susan two stories about her childhood. The time her mother beat her with the telephone. Cord wrapped around knuckles, the receiver bleaching the room with sound. How heavy the base was in hand, the tartness of the sherbet scooped when the punishment was finished. And then: how she went swimming in the pond by her house, the water so green you couldn’t see your body beneath it.
***
Here is the photograph that Susan uses as a bookmark: they are at the zoo, and Alda asks a stranger to take the picture of them squatting before the lions. He is tall and kind. The lions look bored. He follows them through the rest of the zoo, making Alda laugh.
***
Although Alda has lived in the Bay Area her whole life, this is her first time in Palo Alto. Susan takes her mother to her favorite restaurant, her favorite bookstore, her bus route. To the corner with the man who passes out handwritten notes that say things like “Knowledge grants you salvation better than any God,” and “Access the things they asked you to hide,” and “The Internet will always exist.”
***
The man who was Susan’s father moved to Alberta before she was born. He sent a check every month, little blue envelopes with the slope of his writing spelling her mother’s name, not hers. At twelve she writes him a long ranting letter and sends it to the numbers and letters tucked in the corner. The next month—a check, same amount.
***
Later that night, Susan takes Alda to a coffee shop to listen to a friend’s band play. It is loud and muffled—the music is a blanket around them. Instead of coffee, they order two glasses of red wine and sit in the dark corner under leafed bulletin boards. They clap when the music stops, and Alda cheers louder than anyone in the room.
***
When Susan was in her twenties and first living on her own, she Googled her father in the following variations: Jack Macedo, Jack Macedo Alberta, Jack Macedo Santa Cruz, Jack Macedo father/brother/employee. On a spreadsheet, she kept track of what she found, looking for patterns in movement and location. When, still, her data told her nothing, she tried one more. Jack Kilpatrick dead. She found him, smiling, holding a fish, dead at the age of forty-seven.
***
After the music, they go to a smoky bar and Susan keeps looking at Alda for the subtle signs of distress she has catalogued. The way Alda lowers her head when she is tired. How the corners of her mouth anchor down. But she is smiling, talking, sharing herself with Susan’s friends, drinking Guinness quick enough so the cream liquor won’t curdle. The bar is old wood. Susan has forgotten that her mother is a person who can get drunk. They dance together and switch their shoes. On the way to the patio, Alda pushes a glass off a table and the pieces go everywhere. They take a cab home, a luxury afforded by the folded currency Susan fishes out of her mother’s purse. Alda: how did you know I have that?
***
Of course I knew, Alda tells Susan. An old friend wrote me a letter. He was the father of my child. But that doesn’t mean he deserved you. This way, the driver takes a turn and she rolls up against her door and looks out the window, he can be whatever you want him to be and nothing else.
***
Alda sleeps in Susan’s bed while she sits at her computer. Her friends are all offline, the chatroom empty. It’s late after all. The echo of something that happened once, but doesn’t happen now. She gets up and leans on the doorframe to her bedroom, listens to Alda’s breathing, low and steady. In the morning, Susan will walk to the corner for coffee and bagels. She will shake two aspirin out onto her palm. She will wake Alda the way she used to be woken for school: the soft palm on forehead, the sweeping back of hair, the light soaking into absolutely everything.
© Lindsey Baker
[This piece was selected by Rachel Wild]