Sixteen
YOUR SIXTEEN CENTS
I might be forced to have Frances committed way earlier than previously planned. The woman’s got a crazy case of “grandbabies.” In her room, nailed up on the wall opposite her bed, is a f*cking baby christening dress, white, lacy, and with a satin bow in the middle. Its hem is a little dirty, most likely because she found it in a trash can or maybe stole it off an unsuspecting baby at a baptism—either way, it ain’t mine and it ain’t hers. I refuse to ask about it because the answer might make me an accomplice. A white baby prom gown that needs a good spot-clean is tacked to a wall in my mother’s bedroom like how a teenager puts up posters or prisoners a pinup. I just thought that needed repeating.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened—the metaphysical and temporal shift in my mother’s mind when I went from being her prized only daughter to her only hope for progeniture. When the name Helena became synonymous with her dashed hopes.
It had to have been last fall, when I turned twenty-eight and spent a stimulus check on a purebred named Miles. Her first response was, “You girls nowadays would rather get a dog than a baby!” Significant because it was the first time I’d heard her say the word baby with such craving, such conviction—as if it were a prophecy being revealed to me in pieces she’d been hiding. The word was magic I just didn’t know yet. Each side now revealed, we both laughed that nervous laugh, and I changed the subject to something more suitable for mothers and their adult-ish daughters—boys.
Jake, yea that Jake—the porno pizza deliveryman of my dreams—and I were “dating.” Turns out the tension was sexual that night we sat on my sofa watching Seinfeld and typing on our laptops. He just really had a lot of work to do. And me, well, you know. I’m a work in progress. Anyway when I told her that formerly “just friends” Jake and I were something more than, she screamed. Like this undulating Amazonian mating call type scream.
“But he doesn’t want to have kids anytime soon, woman,” I said, ripping off her baby Band-Aid.
“How do you know?” she shot back. “Right now, of course not. But laaaater.”
When I told Jake this, he laughed, remembering the time his own mother showed up at his house with a “lap protector” after watching something on the news about how much damage a laptop’s heat can do to a man’s spermies. Maybe things would work out between us, after all. Grandbaby-crazed mothers? Check. He’d found out from Google how much a temporary vasectomy would cost, and I considered the fee nominal.
A month later when I almost broke up with him because he works like a maniac, leaving him precious little time to be obsessed with me, Frances screamed again. This time at me. Said I was being selfish.
We were on opposing teams again, and I should’ve seen it coming. Around Christmastime, my mother’s baby craving became impossible to ignore. My cousin’s oldest son—the first kid I babysat for free—had just had his own son. Right. The baby was the first member of our family’s sixth generation, and apparently the first baby ever. My mother cradled her great-great-nephew, looking down at him—and across the room at me, expectantly.
The next week, it all came out in the open. We were on our way to Gina’s great-grandmother’s house to eat gumbo for good luck in the New Year. Randomly, between radio commercials, Frances admitted that she could not, in all fairness, harass me about having a baby, since she was almost thirty years old when she decided to have me.
“Ma, you know I’ll be twenty-nine in less than a year, right?” I asked, immediately regretting that decision.
“Oh,” she paused. “Right.”
Then, to either shock or silence her, I said it wouldn’t be the end of the world if an alien life form decided not to invade my womb for nine months. It wouldn’t do irreparable damage to my self-worth or anything. “Lots of women are childless, and somehow they find a way to go on,” I said. We rode the rest of the way talking about everything but the ten-pound hypothetical baby in the backseat. I thought the issue was tabled until she announced, unsolicited, at Gina’s great-grandmother’s dining table that she’d never have her own grandchildren—ever.
“Do you know what Lena said in the car…?” Gina and I thought it wise to hide in the kitchen.
If you’ve ever been to a wedding, funeral, or father-daughter purity ball, then you’ve sat—perhaps teary-eyed—through John Mayer’s “Daughters,” basically the sound track of every Lifetime movie in existence. It’s about how some girl got so messed up by her parents that now she can’t truly love the man standing on her steps with his heart in his hand or whatever.
The last two lines of the hook are something like a eulogy: “Girls become lovers, who turn into mothers. So mothers, be good to your daughters, too.” Why not “girls become lovers who turn into…” something other than mothers? First ladies, maybe. Whatever, I get that it’s hard to rhyme and be politically correct, but since when did the act of becoming a mother become the last rite of passage between a mother and a daughter? As if handing down the ability to procreate is somehow confirmation of a mother’s love, or perhaps a job well done.
Funny, Stella’s definition of womanhood is also tied to work. Having broken up with Eric for real this time, she says she’s good on “pushing a baby out of my body like a damn animal. I’m a professional.” Adrienne thinks because she’s a lawyer she has to have a baby “like two years ago,” but admits she’d go bat shit if she were ever to actually be with child.
Gina just wants cash. Her dad, Carl, gave all the women who qualified $50 for Mother’s Day last year. Much like her womb, Gina’s card was empty.
“When I complained that he was incentivizing pregnancy, he gave me sixteen cents out of his pocket,” she told me later. “I informed him that that was not on par and that I was going to get preggers just to rectify the situation. I mean, what the f*ck?”
I wished I knew what Frances was thinking sometimes. Maybe then I’d know how to respond when she says something like, “Well you know you could always just adopt a baby from Africa like Madonna or that skinny girl, what’s her name?”
“Angelina Jolie, Mommy”—even when being downgraded from a daughter to a diaphragm, I still want to help.
“Yep, that’s the one.”
My theory, when I really think about it, is that my mother—being a lesbian and hippie, and having never been on the “right” side of society’s norms—probably just wants me settled, safe. She wants to make up for convincing me that Darin the lovable stalker wasn’t a complete whack job or for not being there when I was on a cold clinic table not having a baby at nineteen. When I was a kid, Frances always introduced me the same way—as her “first and last.” It made me proud. Made me feel important. Still does. So for right now, I like being a daughter—only.
And that size-12-months baby prom dress on her wall? The one she seriously said was for her “granddaughter,” after I finally got the guts to ask about it? It still creeps me the f*ck out. But then again, it gives me something close to hope.
Acknowledgments
This is the hard part. Or should I say the “most likely to get me into deep shit with whomever I fail to mention” part. So despite lacking the luxury of an Oscar podium to hide behind, I’m still going to go off the cuff and pretend like I didn’t know this was about to happen.
First off, thanks to Gina, who in 1996 wrote in my yearbook, “You and you’re [sic] men, or boyz [sic] or whatever they are. You need to stop jockin’!” Words to live by. And thanks to the other two women I’m totally gay for—Adrienne and Raquel. One for screaming, “finish the effin’ book!” as a matter of routine, and the other for getting me drunk on a routine basis and therefore necessitating the demands of the former. Next item on my mental napkin is 1902 9th Street NW, the headquarters of my disillusioned adulthood. Thanks to the rats, the bums, and the heartbreakers thereabouts.
Without the Gail Ross Literary Agency—Howard, Gail, Anna—this book would still be in my head. Without my editor at HarperCollins, Jeanette Perez, some might wish it had stayed there. Also, I’d like to pour some out for the folks at Collins—Serena and Bruce—who after hearing my spiel said something along the lines of “you’re the most awesome person ever,” which despite being obvious helped a great deal. Big shout-out to Ryan Grim, who told me writing books was a “good side hustle.” Liar. And Sherly Chun for calling me a Korean taxi for that one meeting I had (I’m a woman of my word).
Lastly, there is no synonym of thanks that is great enough to be applied to my mother, Frances Vernell Andrews. We knew each other before there was an us to know. I am a writer because she saw the fake Chinese hieroglyphics Sharpie penned on the dry-erase board and instead of having me committed bought me a journal. I am grateful. You are the greatest.
About the Author
HELENA ANDREWS is a graduate of Columbia University and has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times and Marie Claire. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is currently working on the film adaptation of Bitch Is the New Black with the creator of Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, Shonda Rhimes.
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