To the Mother-to-Be at the Diner
You held one hand to your belly, swollen with your choices. He stared at you across the table, and both of you looked at me, the three of us the only ones in the diner that night.
Maybe you were having a girl. Did the thought of her one day sitting at a diner alone, barely pieced together, scare you?
The plate of food in front of me was the first real meal I had eaten in weeks. I’d spent nearly all my cash on a bus ticket. With what remained, I’d bought Snickers bars, Snyder’s pretzels, and a single pack of Marlboros. My backpack was empty, save a few articles of dirty clothing and the notebook I always carried with me. I ordered a BLT with extra fries, and a chocolate milkshake, which was served in a tall, fluted glass with a swirl of whipped cream and a cherry on top. It was a kind of pleasure I had forgotten existed in the world. I pushed the stained cuffs of my yellow hoodie up to my elbows and ate the fries, slathered in sweet ketchup, three at a time, pulled napkin after napkin from the chrome dispenser on the brown formica table top. I felt you noticing me, felt your warmth—or maybe your pity. I hid my face.
“Could I change my name and disappear and start riding horses until I rode my way out of this nightmare and into some other kind of life? Ketchup dripped down my chin. ”
You couldn’t have known my wallet was empty, that I was on a layover between two places, neither of them home. You couldn’t have known that not long before we met, my trust in people had been shattered. You couldn’t have known the scene I replayed obsessively in my mind. The concert venue. The drinks. The way the night disappeared after that and I did too, only to emerge in a cloud on the other side of dawn in a place I didn’t recognize, beside a man I didn’t know. How I dressed myself quietly and slipped out the door onto that Portland street and kept my eyes on the ground. How it felt like everyone I passed was watching me, like they knew somehow, and maybe they blamed me, too.
I couldn’t bring myself to go on living in my college dorm room, to pretend like I was the same or, worse, to speak aloud the ways in which I was not, so I left. I tried to outrun myself, down the West coast until my car broke down and I continued traveling east to the mountains where I met a man who offered me a ride. Eventually, tired of running, I bought the bus ticket that landed me in that diner with you.
I buried my head in the newpaper’s job postings. The options were slim, but I imagined myself in each of these lives: working in the mine, answering the phone at its headquarters, trading horse care for a place to live above the barn, serving tables at a diner like this one. Could I do it? Could I miss my bus on purpose and find work here, in this Wyoming town, and with my meager wages, find some place to live? Could I change my name and disappear and start riding horses until I rode my way out of this nightmare and into some other kind of life? Ketchup dripped down my chin.
I ate. You watched. Until, at last, you stood, and he stood, and he held the small of your back the way I ached to be held—with tenderness, with purpose. Not once did I question whether you were worthy of this kind of care. Your body was not a transaction, some exchangeable tender, and you carried yourself as if you knew this. I couldn’t keep my eyes off you. A film settled over me, or maybe it had been there all along but I noticed it then, and I wondered if you could see it too. My dirty hoodie felt all of a sudden shameful. I wanted to scrub my skin clean. I watched the door close behind you, your exit marked with the gentle ringing of a chime.
I gathered my courage and rose, walked to the cash register. The waitress, do you remember her? Her hair was wiry and light, tied in a ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her face held deep crevices, lines that belied a life of laughter. I stood in front of her, unsure what I would say. How I would lie. I forgot my wallet on the bus, I’d say, or I’d pretend that I lost a credit card that didn’t exist and feign worry.
She slid her hands across the counter and held my hand with both of hers. They paid for your meal, sweetheart. Maybe those deep lines were the lines of hurting for others so they don’t have to so much.
When I walked out of the diner, the two of you were pulling away in your red conversion van. You rolled the window down and stopped. You asked me if I needed a ride somewhere. I wanted a ride. I wanted a ride with you desperately, but I had already burdened you—what right did I have to ask for more care? I told you I preferred to walk. You reached your cupped hand through the rolled-down window and dropped a handful of quarters in my palm, then passed me a book, and told me it had been given to you in the early days of your pregnancy—an anthology of letters written between mothers and daughters—and you said, Call your mom.
You drove away and I stood in the parking lot, bathed in the golden buzz of incandescent light, and the world around me was dark. I started walking, and once out of the diner’s glow, I looked up. There were so many stars.
With the quarters you gave me, I called my mother from the payphone at the Greyhound station. For weeks, I had called home at times when I knew no one would answer, when I could leave the imprint of my voice on the answering machine tape, which I believed would be evidence enough of my safety without having to fabricate a lie. But she knew—she must have—that something wasn’t right. She asked only essential questions: where are you, are you safe, how can I help. I wept also, at the relief of being cared for, and I answered: Wyoming, yes, I want to come home. I slid the cool metal coil of cord between my fingers and begged. Please, bring me home. My hand lingered on the receiver after I hung up, my fingers barely able to bend from the cold. I wiped my face and tucked my hands in my pockets and returned to the platform to wait for my bus. A week later, I was home. My mom held me and I dropped my bags to the ground and let her.
I thought of you daily after that, of the mother you had become. When I walked into my childhood bedroom to find my mom had dressed the bed in fresh linens and stacked books on the nightstand, I wondered about your daughter’s nursery and what kinds of stories you read as you rocked her to sleep against your chest. When I was down with the flu and my mom brought home matzo ball soup from Benji’s Deli, I wondered what remedies you would provide your daughter, what healing tonics your own neighborhood had to offer. Whenever my mother asked me what happened before I called her from the Greyhound station, she always followed with, When you’re ready. I was never ready, not in time anyway.
“She needed to live long enough to know I would be okay. She held me while I healed, and I held her while she died.”
A year later, she learned she would die. Not like I know I will die, or like you know you will die, but that she would be dead within the year, they said. She defied all odds, lived for seven more, but it was difficult to tell how much of that was mercy and how much was torture. She told me once she had no choice but to try the experimental treatments, enroll in the clinical trials. She needed to live long enough to know I would be okay. She held me while I healed, and I held her while she died.
The anthology you handed me sat untouched for years on my bookshelf. I was too afraid to read it at first, worried that in those pages I would find evidence that I failed the person who loved me best of all. When I finally read it, what I found inside were ordinary accounts: a mother who shares the story of her own mother’s death with her daughter, and wishes her good health. Another who writes to her daughter on the day she graduates high school and details the difficulties of letting go. The letters are signed: You’ll always be my sweetheart. Or I love you eternally. Or Thank you for being the joy of my life.
Under my bed is a box that contains letters from my own mother. They are accounts of what is happening at home: she has raked the leaves under the oak, a tree came down in a storm, tonight she will be dog-sitting for the neighbor. In one letter, she tells me of a coat she found at the thrift store. In another, she apologizes for the simplicity of a care package and promises a gift of her baking in the next one. The letters end: Take care of yourself, my special little one. Or I miss you, my darling. And always, I love you. It is unexceptional, all of it, and yet it is as if she is beside me as I read them, her cursive preserved on paper, sonorous almost, her voice rounded and held in the open loops of her vowels. Do you write your daughter letters? And if so, how do you sign them?
It was twenty years ago, when you and I met. Was it your daughter’s heart thudding in your womb that prompted your kindness? Does she know that once, in a diner in Wyoming, you held her in your swollen body and saved a woman from an edge that terrified her? Your quarters in my hands were the permission I needed to stop running, to ask for help, and to receive it. You gave me the final years of my mother’s life. You gave me back my own.
About the Author
Elizabeth Grey's work has appeared in literary magazines including Eastern Iowa Review, Beaver Magazine, and others. Her memoir, Migration, is currently under consideration for publication. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Read Elizabeth’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha.
Header photo by R. Mac Wheeler.
