Carly Alaimo

A girl stands on the street holding a tray of cheese. It’s Ingrid, but I don’t know that yet. I’m a week out of art school, looking for a job to make rent. I approach her, say hello, take a sample and pop it in my mouth.

“It’s wax,” she says with an eye roll and points a jeweled nail to the marquee that reads WICK. I spit the gob on the sidewalk. We have our first laugh.

Ingrid likes me because I’m from the South and she was born here, by the ocean. As we package candles, she asks if I have a pet alligator and I tell her about the off-highway gator farms in Florida. I promise to take her to one someday. She likes me because when she’s hungry I buy her an egg-on-a-roll with extra cheese, even though I can’t afford it. She calls me generous, but really, I’m just buying more time with her. After our shifts at WICK we spend full days walking around the city. Ingrid seems to know everyone on the street and they’re all excited to see her. They call her Big Grid, Ing.

There is probably a better way to say this, but I’m addicted to Ingrid. Next to her, I feel new and improved, enhanced. With the pieces of Ingrid, I put myself together. I do my hair like hers, in hot rollers with dry shampoo. I buy the same white sneakers she wears to parties. Her stories become mine too and I remember every one: On Brighton Beach, she tells me about her great aunt’s apartment nearby, where the bathtub tap still runs with seawater. How her mother stuffed her junior prom dress down the trash chute. I buy us a bucket of clams and the knockoff Chanel eyeshadow she wants from a woman on the boardwalk. We belly laugh on someone’s shower curtain in the sand, our eyelids smeared in blue.

It’s safe to say that during this time I don’t paint, until she starts acting classes in the fall, and it’s all I can do to pass the time between seeing Ingrid and not seeing Ingrid. Then I get the show on Orchard Street through, of course, a friend of Ingrid’s. My canvases cover the walls in shades of blue. I call it the Water Series. Then Otis walks in wearing a business suit, buys it all for himself, and one day Ingrid says:

“What the fuck kind of name is Otis? Is he a musician?”

“Of course you get knocked up by the first bridge-and-tunnel bro who buys your paintings, you idiot.”

Our mansion in Short Hills is an enormous, glittering ship. Far from the frenzy of Manhattan, but close enough to the excitement, Otis and I say aloud, to anyone who asks. I should be happy here, but I am bored and pregnant and unfit to live in anything besides a rented room or a prairie house. Otis stuffs the rooms with recliners and televisions and covers the hardwood floors in frieze carpet. Off the kitchen, there is a nursery for Theo. The Florida room shares a wall with the nursery. This room is mine, for painting. Over time, I think of it as a mausoleum filled with my old work, the Water Series, carcasses of easels, immortelles of dried brushes, a kindling of drawing papers.

Ingrid comes to meet our daughter, Theo, when she’s five months old. Under our pergola, Ingrid says Theo’s 

 and gifts her a sand-bucket full of diapers.

 she stops visiting. By that time, we’ve exhausted the novelty spots I research for her drop-ins: the greasy spoons and the strip clubs, dive bars and roadside cemeteries. When I get too drunk, we fight in public. I’m always the one who sobs.

“It’s like nothing I do is good enough for you,” I tell her during a Haunted Short Hills walking tour.

“For me?” she says. “You sure you mean me?”

And I’m not sure what I mean because I’m wasted, all I know is that I want something from Ingrid that she won’t give me. Ingrid sparkles in the rain, tells me she’s headed back to the city, has to make a phone call.

“I’m calling Otis. Then I’m leaving you.”

Three months later it’s Ingrid’s birthday, the day before she leaves me for good. We’re in her new Chelsea penthouse. She’s shirtless, applying make-up in the glass of a floor to ceiling zebra-print mirror.

“There’s this place, Manuel’s. They serve drinks out of shipping containers or some shit. But we need to pace ourselves. I want you to meet everybody.”

 debut, so her backbone pokes out. She cups a brass clamshell compact in her palm like a eucharist. Dots of green cream pock her under-eyes.

“This stuff makes me look gorgeous. It’s real Chanel, if you can believe that shit.”

Sipping wine behind her, I trace my linea nigra in the mirror and say, “We have a shipping container thing in Jersey. Wonder if it’s the same owner.”

She flicks her eyes at me in the glass. “It ain’t a competition, Joann.”

The fireplace and the window trim all glisten white. A small collection of playbills and Nancy Sinatra records in moving boxes line the baseboards. There is a sandalwood credenza on backorder.

Above the wainscotting hangs one of my paintings, the boardwalk on Brighton Beach. It isn’t good, like something from a Brushes ‘n’ Booze bachelorette party, an out-of-place relic in this floating macaron box. I suspect she fished it from a broom closet before I arrived.

We enter Manuel’s through a back door to ditch the fan-mob out front. The place is brimming with TV people, as promised. I spot Big Joe talking to the Agnolotti twins in a curved mauve booth. They see us too, and yell, 

 and she is encircled in their starlight. As usual, I am eager to grip the tassels of Ingrid’s magic carpet. She can have the view, I’m just lucky to be here. We slide into the booth and a round of something bitter is passed. I toss one back, whisper to Ingrid, “Can you believe this is happening?” and she says, “Shut up. I know it.”

I’m introduced as The Ghost because I left town without telling anyone, then Ingrid adds that my artwork is the shit and that they could see it if my boyfriend didn’t own it all. More drinks are ordered and I’m grinning so wide I vibrate. There is a lightness to the evening, I think, and I’m having a feeling like things are getting back to normal. And do I sense a gentle energy in one of the Agnolotti twins? What’s his name on the show—Umberto? Billy? Thoughtful Umberto-Billy nods as I talk to him, smiles with his teeth and excuses himself to 

The rest of the night passes as though I’m blindfolded. Cool marble is pulled back from my cheek. Snow air, then warm car air. Wet on my lap and on my ankles. The wet is mine, I’m the wet one. Yelling. I’m being carried. Then I’m standing in wet, but hotter this time. Someone has my clothes. I scream 

 and a hand that isn’t mine moves over my skin. I know it is Ingrid. A silk pillowcase, my saltine mouth. I wake to fingernails clicking on a phone-screen. The slosh and pop of a water gallon. I turn to Ingrid in the bed. “Did you bathe me?”

They install her first billboard in the parking lot of Jay’s Liquor and Things when Theo is two, featuring mostly Ingrid’s face and ample breasts. She holds a shovel and a semi-automatic rifle. DON’T MAKE HER MAD, the billboard screams, MAD MONEY. SEASON TWO. It’s been a year and half since we last spoke. In my hand is a bag of raw chicken and a fifth of vodka. That night, I am to go home, put Theo down for bed and prepare dinner. Later in the evening, Otis and I are to eat together, drink vodka tonics, watch our shows and fall asleep under weighted blankets. This night is to be a safe night because I have a plan, unlike the days when Otis works late and we drop Theo at daycare so I can “paint,” which only means I doddle through the day’s tasks: make coffee, spill it in the sink, spray our Boston ferns, and organize my paints in the Florida room. When the work is done, that should be enough effort, I think, to fill a cup with wine through the afternoon and into the evening to get my juices flowing. In the late afternoons, I’ll start a new letter to Ingrid, another asking what I’ve done, what I can do to mend things, and isn’t it funny that Theo says her favorite color is 

, and that she still plays with the blue beach bucket from her first birthday?

But on Billboard Day, Ingrid has kicked my perfect night in the guts, this woman I love who refuses to speak to me, this goddess in the clouds framed in unknowable glamor.

Theo and I stand for a long while beneath the board. I clutch my bag, unable to tear my eyes away from Godzilla Ingrid. Theo drowns a trail of ants with her melting waffle cone.

“Lady,” she says. A horizon of sorbet caps her lip. “Yes, a lady from TV.”

Fifteen years later she’s still got a whopper sitting over the turnpike. It’s a giant photo of the Agnolotti family: Penelope and Big Joe stand with their backs pressed together, surrounded by their offspring. Everyone wears leather jackets and has slicked back hair. They hold up various tools for murdering: a power drill, a switchblade, a noose of neckties.

THEY’RE BACK. GET MAD. It says, MAD MONEY. ALL EPISODES NOW STREAMING. Before I started taking backroads, I’d see it on my drive to the boutique and get rather distraught. Off-highway adds a half-hour to my commute, and sometimes I’m late, but I think it’s worth the trouble to avoid another accident. Today, I chance it because I’m feeling down, as I’m prone to feel after my monthly check-in with Otis.

“Theo’s a senior now, can you believe it?” I say aloud to Ingrid’s billboard as if it’s my mother’s headstone. “Time really has flown by.” And then she’s getting smaller in my rearview, her face, her body, her name, and then she blinks out of view.

 are, apparently, heating up. Although, Otis tells me Theo hasn’t been eating and I wonder if, since our separation, he’s learned to cook or still eats exclusively at restaurants, but I don’t ask. He also reveals Theo has come home with a bald head. 

, excluding the why and the how of it all. I’ve learned to expect little information from Otis when it comes to Theo, but I don’t criticize or push. After over a decade apart, we’ve begun warming to each other again, so I try to keep it just warm enough. Phone calls like this one are delicacies—to be earned and savored. And I’ll admit, after the accident with Theo, it’s a wonder we speak at all. He asks how I am, have I been staying busy, and I know what he really means. I want to confess: I slip up with the drinking here and there. But instead, I say, I’ve been so very busy, between the shop and stirring this enormous pan of paella, who has time for anything?

And lately, I’ve been doing my own digging through the roots of Theo’s melancholy by:

Reading the poetry journal left behind after one of our sleepovers. Here’s one, it’s called “A Heart Unseen:”

And who are you to toy with my broken heart that is split between two sides?

My heart, I shall go on hiding from you, from everyone.

On Wednesday nights, I press my ear against the bedroom door and can hear her whispering with the stage manager. Something about Theo kissing Ronnette and Chiffon at a thespian conference in Trenton. Seymour and The Dentist are boning. Someone sounds flat in “Skid Row (Downtown).” Jeremy was only cast because his mother sews costumes. And sometimes, after work, I attend her rehearsals in secret. There’s an unlit hallway in the high school that separates the band room and the theater that has a view of the stage through a rectangular pane in the fire exit. When it’s Theo’s turn to sing, I crack the door oh-so-gently to hear. A kelly green minidress exposes the funneling mass of scar tissue over her right leg, arm and shoulder. She performs “Suddenly Seymour” using only the left side of her body with imperceptible strategy. As she sings, her unmarred limbs are on full display to distract from the damaged ones, which she angles away from the key lights. She starts to lose her breath during the part where Audrey wants to learn how to be more of the girl that’s inside her. I imagine Theo is also tired of chasing this pipsqueak Jeremy around the stage. She turns to exit stage left. I watch the green wisp of her disappear through a wooden archway as the gels cool.

The idea comes to me after a phone call with David, an old friend from art school. “It’s a new gallery. Small. All goat heads and resin dicks at the moment,” he explains.

From my dim apartment, I lie to him, and set out ingredients for salt crusted snapper:

“Of course I have new work,” —bay-leaves-Meyer-lemon-kosher-salt—“but are you sure,”—cayenne-pepper-olive oil-cup-of-water-fish—“you want me?”

“Stop with the modesty! Your last show was a whole mood and then you just disappeared with that rich Chad who bought out the show! Mystery! Intrigue! I won’t let you say no.”

Later that evening, I sit down to email David the truth about my work— that I have nothing to show for all my years away from these people, no incubated wonders drying in a bathtub eager to show their feathers—when the banner ad appears atop my inbox. An advertisement for Ingrid’s one-woman Broadway musical, 

 Inside the box, a small video plays on repeat: A wind machine blows back Ingrid’s barrel curls. She opens her mouth, screaming “Enough!!!” I glance back and forth from my inbox to Ingrid. A way to see her again, even from a distance. And maybe Theo could come along. Perhaps, it would be therapeutic for her, even inspirational. Unsure if Otis will go for it, I purchase the two cheapest tickets anyway. And on a second whim, I begin an email to Ingrid, my first in many years.

It’s next Wednesday. I watch Theo push a venison steak from her dinner plate, onto the floor of my kitchenette. I set down my utensils and close the shine of her right hand in my two damp ones. I tell her that I, too, retire to bed restless, unable to forgive myself for the things I’ve done. That I know the mental torture of love lost, the closed loop system of shame and regret. That whatever she’s going through, she can talk to me. I love her. And her bald head.

Her gray eyes roll back; two pumice stones afloat in their sclera.

“I want you to meet someone. An old friend from New York. She can help you with your breath work.”

“And how do you know I need help with my breath work?”

“You’re losing your breath right now! We can see her show, meet her at The Rum House after! Then cannoli at Veniero’s?

“I just want to see where CBGB used to be.”

Sometimes, when she senses I’m being more of a girlfriend than a mother, she calls me Joann. It’s like someone jabbing at the air in front of my nose with a broomstick. Back off, rat, it tells me. There’s nothing here for you. So, I concede and scurry backward to my hole, blinking through the smoking dark until the next scrap drops.

Meeting Ingrid onscreen every week for the past seventeen years has formed in me a stirring I cannot pin down. Part of it is longing, I suppose. The blue center of it, I know, is a chronic pain, one that presents as a dull ache upon waking, fading when the body is in motion so it’s easy to ignore for a while. But lately, I’ve felt the wearing down. To manage it, I’ve tried my best to do the following:

Steer clear of the electronics sections at Target, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy.

There’s nothing like seeing your ex-best-friend’s beautiful face on twenty television screens at once when you can barely cope with seeing it on one.

This one’s hard, because I do love TV. And I still watch 

 sometimes. Like the billboard says, there are reruns streaming on the Modern Classics app after work. And I’ll tune in to Ingrid’s interviews on talk-shows. And there are the other times when she wins awards. I watch those too, because I want to hear if she mentions me in her acceptance speeches. 

And to Joann, the one who encouraged me to go to acting school in the first place. Wherever you are, I love you

. She’s never said this, or hasn’t yet, I should say. Besides, soon, I know, this incessant grinding on the brain will level all protective tissue. And then, one day, contact. Bone meets bone. A body facing itself. And who wants to know that pain?

Living alone, I do spend a lot of time in the darkness of my living room. Here, Restraint and I argue. We do our nocturnal dance, beginning with a bicker over the remote, our preferred programs. We linger by the door of my apartment when nothing good is on, turning the keys over and over in our palms. When the desire for a drink is truly crushing, we sip plain seltzers and plan absurdly complicated dinners for one: Smoked goat neck topped with gold flaked cherries. Fennel bulbs braised in boar fat. A chocolate dome filled with saffron rice pudding. With these diversions, we consume our time. We think about Theo, Billboard Day. Maybe this will be the night she calls just to talk. We can at least agree on one thing: She is worth the angst. Always, we go to bed early, hiding in slumber from the hollowness that invades after a certain hour of night. We know this is our danger zone. Slits of daylight bring salvation. Time to move in the brightness, to go somewhere we are needed.

With one eye on the burned mesh of my daughter’s right arm, Ingrid blots her lips against a napkin and slides it to the edge of our table.

“Honestly, Theo, over the years, I’ve seen many artists burn out.”

I watch a busser snatch it and run off with my tulip of demi-sec. I flag the server for a new glass. Ingrid leans forward and taps Theo’s shaven head with one of her acrylics, says something like, “—all I know, is the artists that make it, they can hear beyond the noise up here.”

Then Ingrid says another thing, and another, in a voice that has been fed through an electric juicer. I let the two of them talk. In my head I’m busier than ever picking through pomace for scraps of old Ingrid. I peck around for the spiky bones of her accent, the knuckles of cartilage from her old nose. I’d heard the thing about burnouts, hadn’t I? Did she mean me? It’s hard to focus on one thing with everyone looking. Some people in the bar take pictures of Ingrid. Others sit at a slant, scavenging for morsels of our chit-chat, for a memory to stick in a candy dish back home in Tyler, Texas. A not-so-mysterious fan in a 

“For you, Miss Miller.” The server slides a martini glass under Ingrid’s chin implant. “It’s a Cosmopolitan.”

She cackles and claps and hands it back to him. “I’m from Brooklyn, son.”

Someone has ironed Ingrid’s hair into two sheets of black ice. Picked down the center is a bone-white part with no visible endpoint, straight as a mercury thermometer. I treat myself to more champagne from the bottle, relishing the familiar tickle on my teeth, the fullness clouding my ears and jaw. I look over at Theo’s pale, bony face absorbing one of Ingrid’s stories and recognize my own in hers. I suppose this is her first time being around someone so famous, and then I think there is no way for me to know if that’s true. Theo doesn’t tell me about her life. At our weekly Wednesday sleepover at my apartment I warm up, rambling about my shifts at the watch store, list the prices of the Breitlings, the Omegas, the Patek-Phillippes 

—no, she never can, and this is my opening to ask, 

. After dinner, she sponges the dishes in silence with her earbuds jammed deep into her head. While I crumb the table, I can hear the music playing inside them—the muffled cries of teenage banshees, trains diving from their rails—and am pleased that this girl is my daughter, and though it pains me that I do not know her well, she seems to know herself. Dishes done, she retires to my room for the night and I’ll take the couch in front of the TV where I battle with myself until my mind is shushed to sleep.

In my fantasies about Theo’s life, she’s had a star-sighting in line at a Starbucks, maybe someone from 

 or one of those rock shows Otis says she sneaks off to with her theatre friends. But then again, those kids are small-time famous. Ingrid is big-time. I think, this is a good thing I’ve done, arranging this meeting between Theo and Ingrid. This is a thing a good mother would do. To congratulate myself, I sip champagne again and again.

“Well, you know, it’s high school, but having 

Ingrid places her hand over heart, shakes her head. “I die for Ellen Greene. Fabulous.”

“Same,” says Theo, and I wonder if she’s trying to impress Ingrid. I interrupt them.

Theo cuts her eyes at me. “Yes. God. Anyway, Ingrid just said I should imagine a rubber ring around my waist when I sing. Helps with projection.” Theo hangs her head, elbows my side.

I laugh, embarrassed because I wasn’t listening, and elbow her in the ribs, too hard. “Are you writing all this down?” Theo confirms my mistake with her usual daughterly grumbles and slides her stool closer to Ingrid, who I’ve clocked finishing her third ice water. I continue with some slurry commentary, saying meaningless things in bitter, birdbrained chirps:

“No one’s touched their champagne! Bottle’s starting to sweat! Guess I’m drinking the whole damn thing, 

It’s also in this moment I realize that beyond a brisk hug hello in the bar entryway, Ingrid and I have yet to address one another. From the both of us, there has been a noticeable ping- ponging of questions directed at Theo. Upon sitting, I’d urged her to take out the notecards she’d prepared for Ingrid; lists of questions about theatre, character building and breath work. Ingrid had at once shoved the cards aside and taken Theo’s hands in her own. I’d flinched at their hands entwined on the tabletop; Ingrid’s gleaming paws wrapped around my daughter’s burn scars. I’d expected Theo to pull away, but instead she looked straight into Ingrid’s blazing lapis eyeballs and smiled.

“Let’s talk like friends,” Ingrid whispered to her, “no cards.”

Now I hear Ingrid still talking about art. Theo is meerkat-like, at attention, the notecards shoved somewhere in the folds of her studded jacket. I drink more. I am chain-lifted over Ingrid’s scalp, in a sort of coaster car. My belly sparks as I peer beyond canyons of hair to the dark hills of her shoulders. I notice some things haven’t changed. Her cheekbones still jut out like shelves. Knowing my way, I ease along their ledges. Ingrid has a face that can grow full with too much wine, yet nothing clings to those gorgeous bones besides her skin, the kind that glows the way famous people do. My coaster drifts into the belfry of her right ear and my head is nearly swept off by a hoop earring I recognize. The gold ones with her initials engraved on the curve, an apology gift from an ex-boyfriend.

Carly Alaimo

Carly Alaimo

Fiction

Spring 2024

A Good Mother