Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,83

skirts, but as they were walking toward the door, Ana stopped: “What did you mean, functional? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Ana,” she said, a quick, deep-voiced response that suggested Ana was right to press further. “It’s difficult to be a mother,” she paused. “Don’t tell James I said that.”

Ana shook her head.

“It is more than just giving up your freedom, or your marriage, in many ways. It’s a loss of an idea of who you are. And they will tell you: ‘Oh, you get an abundance in return, you get it back, it’s simply different.’ But that’s not quite true. What is true is that you are altered, and I suppose it depends who you were to begin with, if you have the kind of genetic structure that can withstand such change. Does it make sense?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” said Ana, caught in Diana’s unyielding gaze. “Did you feel like you’d been changed enough already before you had kids? By the war?”

Diana flinched and looked away, and Ana recognized a misstep on her part. They would remain in the realm of abstractions.

“Perhaps in some way,” said Diana. “I sympathize with you. I can’t say I regret my children. Of course I care for them. But I do sometimes wonder what was lost to me.”

Footsteps outside the door passed and Ana felt as if she was about to be caught in something illicit. James would never believe this; he always said that his mother had locked away the sentient part of life. She had once cut her hand on a can opener and strode into the living room where the boys were playing, a newspaper wrapped to her wrist, blood speckling the ground behind her. “There has been an accident,” she announced like a town crier, before dialling a cab with her other hand. Wesley loved to tell this story, but James didn’t see it as valour, the way his father did. He saw it as a way of defying her family, announcing that they were, for her, not a source of comfort. There was nothing she could possibly need them for.

And now this confession and warning by the kitchen door. What was Ana to do with it? The illness in her head bloomed.

The door swung open and Finn stood at their knees.

“Hungry,” he said. Diana moved to meet his hunger. Cupboards opened and drawers rattled and food came forth for the boy, pieces of cheese cut in tiny squares, which he placed in his mouth with chipmunk propulsions, humming cheerfully, oblivious to the eyes of the women. Ana watched her mother-in-law, imagining that she was seeing in Finn her own son in a different kitchen, and she, a young wife forever new in a foreign country where the cheese had the consistency of soap.

Ana looked upon the boy and rooted around for some kind of feeling. It was there, but not the texture or the size she sensed was required. Still, she could feed him if he was hungry. Not all women could do this. The apartments of Ana’s youth had had empty refrigerators, still slimy from the previous tenants, burnt out bulbs. As a teenager, she was often a dinner guest in the homes of her friends. Ana loved these evenings, revelling in the plates of chicken and bowls of vegetables, quietly taking in the large families with their regular seats at the table, the mother and father like dollhouse figures that had been placed at either end. (Who were those friends? What were their names? Ana had lost all of them, like a bough shedding ripened fruit, as she moved from school to school.) And then, out of fairness, she remembered sitting next to her mother in their favourite restaurant, against the banquette while the waiter flirted with them both. And Ana drinking her Coke, nestled against her mother’s arm, and the two of them content in their quiet.

There had always been food. A bagel wrapped in paper towel stuffed in her backpack. The remains from the donut store, or later, the catering company where she had worked as a teenager. Sitting on the couch late at night, eating pasta salad from takeout containers with plastic forks, her mother telling her about her Ph.D. that she would never finish. Poetry.

“I’m not feeling too well,” said Ana, and Diana nodded, as if it were a given.

“Come, Finneas,” said Diana, extending a hand. Finn got up from the table and walked past her hand, toward Ana. A small strand