The Godmother
By Abby Minot
It was only after Victoria withered to a skin-sheathed hairless skeleton that Margo was forced to admit to herself just how much she depended on her ally and sole confidante. A pit of loneliness opened inside her, excavated by the realization of the singularity of their friendship and the anguish its loss would unshackle. It was logical in the early days of Silicon Valley that the tiny number of women executives would stick together in the hostile soup of roiling testosterone, but Margo, who embraced the masculine model of competition, had, due to a serendipitous situation decades earlier, forged an enduring bond with only one female colleague: Victoria.
Margo had been a chief executive officer at a Fortune 500 company for over ten years. Stalwart in her autonomy, from the very beginning she rejected networking invitations from other women executives; she scorned anything that smelled of mushy femininity, and preferred to stay well away from the sentimentality that she believed molded and restricted the feeble gender to which she grudgingly belonged. Even when her company teetered on the brink of failure, despite being simultaneously awash with hormones from an early and dispassionately terminated pregnancy, she had never, ever cried. Her metallic impenetrability that showed up as brittle bitchiness in her twenties had weathered into majestic armor in her ripening fifties; she was still a svelte size two, with artfully low-lighted hair that gave the impression that she wasn’t trying to deny the gray but rather enhance and celebrate it with several other complimentary colors. Restrained employment of Botox and Juvederm convinced observers that she was simply genetically lucky; they knew she’d been around as long as the transistor that started the tech revolution, of which she was now a legend. Her appearance never prompted anybody to actually do the math equation whose sum would put Margo on AARP’s mailing list.
Hers was the kind of success that spawned an entire dream realm for younger women whose fantasies were fueled by her achievement. These modern young females stood on the shoulders of the women’s liberation warriors of the sixties and seventies, and unlike their heroines, they knew their power lay not only in their work, but also in their life creating power of motherhood. They planned their marriages and careers with that objective, choosing husbands who would share child-rearing tasks. The new gender-free corporate policies of family leave enabled them to work and parent and express emotions as if they were entitled to them.
Victoria’s cancer was fast moving. Margo carved out time from her crammed schedule to visit her nearly every day, and sometimes ran into her husband, Dave, and their daughter, Lauren, who was eight months pregnant. For all the evidence Victoria had provided about the insanity of combining motherhood with an executive title, it was piercingly obvious that the sight of her daughter’s swollen abdomen infused her ravaged face with joy. Margo’s abortion, so successfully repressed thirty-some years ago, was bubbling up through her metallic shell, forming an increasingly thin dome in the metal, not unlike the rounding protrusion of a growing fetus within its mother’s belly, and it was dangerously close to rupture.
Observing mother and daughter in the hospital room she was forced to consider the exact opposite: that motherhood had, in the end, been the deeper and more significant achievement in Victoria’s life. Granted, the circumstances surrounding each woman’s pregnancy had been different; Victoria was married to a man who cheerfully took on the role of house husband before the term was coined, while Margo’s pregnancy had been the result of an ill-advised post-merger dinner celebration with a considerably older, happily married chief financial officer. Rather than talk about the past with the one person who might understand, Margo chattered on about her current company’s power struggles and strategies, until Victoria slipped off to sleep. When she left, she felt frustrated and unnerved, and went back to the office to bury her confusing, distressing feelings in the familiar oblivion of work.
Cradled in a custom burgundy Herman Miller Aeron chair behind a sleek polished cherry desk, Margo was surrounded by cold smooth marble topped file cabinets and a credenza that reflected daylight from the huge corner windows. A museum scale Rothko oil covered the only solid wall visible from the desk. The surfaces held not a single framed photograph of any people at all, not even of her sibling’s progeny at the various stages of life. Conscious and uncluttered was how she saw her space, but her brother Charlie would’ve said it was a reflection of her barrenness. A few Christmases back his wife Margie sent a cherry wood framed photograph of his family, including the dog, all wearing holiday red sweaters. In it the two boys looked uncharacteristically serene and tidy, nothing like the sticky fingered, boisterous whirlwinds that dominated Charlie’s house when she visited. It was so noisy there she could barely make a phone call. The picture had been tucked away to make room for a massive flow chart several months before, but since she didn’t miss the vague feelings of discomfort it brought up, she had no impulse to reinstate it.
Margo’s office was more obviously occupied by a human than was her home, where the refrigerator rarely held more than soda water and a doggie bag or two, the couches were not inhabited enough to create a crease or smudge in the upholstery, and the dust was pitilessly wiped away by her housekeeper twice weekly, well before it became visible. Years earlier she’d had a florist deliver fresh blooms weekly, but stopped when she realized she couldn’t remember a thing about them: not their scent, nor their form, nor their color. She was often out of town on business, or so late coming home that she’d barely have time to wash her face and brush her teeth before she collapsed into her down-comforted bed, her only acquiescence to comfort and sensuality.
Even her bed was becoming a torture chamber of sorts. Until recently, she did not remember her dreams, or if she did, it was only for a brief moment between sleeping and waking, and by the time she was in the shower they dissolved as fleetingly as the shampoo lather that ran down the drain. For the past six months, coinciding with Victoria’s illness, although the connection between the two events would never have occurred to Margo, that moment between sleeping and wakefulness had stretched into a purgatorial prison, an elongated interlude where the dream felt more real than did her daily life and she was held there, unable to move forward into the day or backward into the blissful unconsciousness of sleep. The dream returned, and every time it did, she was more rattled by it, and parts of it began to stick in her tortured psyche.
It started at the seaside, where she felt the warm sand beneath her and the gentle heat of the sun above her. The sound of the surf grew louder and louder, until it roared in her ears, and she was catapulted inside it, tumbling and falling and unable to find air. As she struggled to save herself her attention was arrested by a high-pitched, mewling whine that eclipsed the intensity of her fear with a purpose; it was a helpless child, caught in the maelstrom with her, and saving its life became more compelling than saving her own. She struggled to reach it, gauging her progress by the increasing volume of the heart rending cry, her vision obscured by turbulent watery froth, until after an excruciatingly long time her hand touched slippery skin. She awoke, clutching her iPhone, her face wet with tears and her hands slick with sweat, her hand cradling the rubberized sheath so aptly titled “skin” in the advertisements, while a repeating question hammered in her head, “Was it a boy or a girl?”
The next day, at the hospital, that identical phrase popped up, suggesting that the real world was issuing from the dream world, and not the other way around, which made Margo jolt to hear the nurse ask Lauren, “Boy or girl?” From her seat in a no-frills stackable chair placed at the foot of Victoria’s bed, her view of her friend was half hidden by Lauren, whose sizeable form occupied the vinyl upholstered wooden visitor’s chair, her legs splayed out to help support the weight of her middle. Lauren laughed with her mother about how she could only wear slip-on shoes because she couldn’t reach her feet to tie laces. Imagining life with a bowling ball belly repulsed Margo to the point where she couldn’t join in the joke. She smoothed her manicured hands over her flat abdomen and forced a smile.
Her first contact with Lauren as an infant was on a weekend, when she’d gone to Victoria’s house, to get her signature on a contract. Victoria was consumed with the tiny organism who was wailing, red-faced, and miserable with colic; her husband was uncharacteristically absent and there was no nanny available. Margo was shocked and irritated by the extent to which the child monopolized Victoria’s attention. At one point Victoria handed the screaming bundle to Margo, who was astounded by the sheer volume such a small being could emit, unnerved by its squirming rage, and undone by the panic its plaintive tone evoked in her; all these combined to cement within Margo the decision to forego motherhood.
During Lauren’s youth, there were numerous occasions when Victoria had been compromised by her child. Margo pitied Victoria when she was forced to perform motherly tasks. Repeatedly she’d counted herself lucky, assessed herself wise, for choosing the abortion; and for one-upping her friend by also avoiding the slippery slope that led to reproduction: intimate relationships with men. But that day, in the hospital room, Victoria’s radiant smile gave an onlooker no clue at all of the previous regret and resentment raising her daughter had caused and that observation undermined Margo’s certainty about her own irreversible decision.
Margo’s Patek Philippe watch ticked away seven minutes. The memory of baby Lauren brought her dream back to the front of her consciousness and she felt nervous, not sufficiently self-aware to sense that underneath she felt jealous, frightened, and excluded. The nurse hovered, to protect Victoria’s strength; the window for attention from her friend diminished with each moment the daughter lingered. The young woman’s lustrous chestnut hair shone in the usually unflattering fluorescent light, and her face was nearly iridescent with third-trimester glow. Lauren was thirty-two; as automatically as her timepiece ticked away, Margo’s inner calculator determined that her unborn baby would have been twenty-nine. To chase the discomfort from that calculation, she dug into her handbag for her iPhone to see what emails had come in, a reflexive action she used to restore her machine-like demeanor when emotions loomed.
One name on the list of unread email provoked a wave of antipathy and irritation, it seemed, but it was a decoy on the deep and murky pond of suppressed anger about how she had consistently abandoned her personal life in favor of the noisier, flashier, and financially rewarding demands of work during her entire adulthood. A few quick taps showed there was a voice message from the same scapegoat e-mailer, ratcheting up Margo’s anxiety to the point where she left the room without excusing herself. Normally she would have let the pest fester. Margo was seasoned enough to know that a subordinate was more likely to figure out a solution when left alone, and communicating with somebody who was flustered was generally a waste of time. She punched the return call button, got voice mail, and hung up without leaving a message.
Lauren emerged from Victoria’s room as Margo was taking a breath. Their cool, polite smiles bounced off each other in passing, and Margo went to take possession of the still warm chair at Victoria’s bedside. Her friend’s eyes were closed, and she blamed Lauren for using up all her energy. There was nothing left for Margo, who had finally worked up the courage to tell Victoria her dream, not because Victoria would understand, or do anything about it, but because Victoria was the only person to whom she had ever revealed distress and vulnerability.
For a moment Margo just sat there blankly, the wheels of her mind immobile and locked against the obvious fact that was evidenced by Victoria’s shriveled face: life was limited, death was stealing closer day by day, and the colleagues who had been her team, her troops in the stress-filled trenches of corporate warfare, were too busy with the next product launch, or funding crisis, or assimilation of acquisition to schedule a non-business excursion to confront an associate’s mortality, much less their own. Victoria’s pale blue veined hand brushed Margo’s knee and dragged her thoughts back into the room, and the two women’s gazes met: Victoria’s irises of pale aqua encircled with a thin navy line, the only thing about her that remained familiar, with Margo’s, of deep brown, solid and illegible. A poisonous little knot of tense fear was all she sensed, not able to identify it as a worry that she would be in her friend’s place one day, but without a daughter, or husband, and possibly not even her brother, to sit by her.
“I hope I can live long enough to see the baby.” Victoria’s voice was soft and raspy, scarcely resembling her former healthy podium voice of resonant power.
“Of course you will. These Stanford docs are the best in the world.”
Victoria reached and squeezed Margo’s wrist.
“Promise me you’ll look after the baby, and Lauren.”
The request irritated and confused her. Margo’s intention to tell Victoria about the dream vaporized.
“If she asks you to be the godmother, promise me you’ll agree.”
Having no idea of what that would entail, and assuming it was a lowly feminine chore for which she was undoubtedly over qualified, Margo said yes, of course. Of course I will. Don’t worry.
Victoria’s grasp loosened and her head sunk into the pillow, the strain of speaking having used up her last reserves. In less than a minute, her breathing became audible and regular, and her facial muscles relaxed into sleep. Margo moved the hand from her wrist, back onto the bed, and, placing her weight on the balls of her feet, she prevented the points of her heels from making any noise as she left the room.
In the next few weeks, the panic from having agreed to do something for which she was totally inexperienced hit Margo, and, as if godmothering was a work project, she began to research parenting on the web the minute she got home, with the furtive, slightly guilty feeling a husband would have, looking at pornography while his wife watched television in the next room. Her immersion was so deep that when she was forced to get up for a glass of water or a trip to the rest room, she’d notice she hadn’t even removed her overcoat or high heels. Many were the times she would entirely forget to eat, or she’d munch down a small pile of crackers, consuming just enough to dampen the hunger pangs that distracted her focus. What room she was in, the time of day, the month, the season, none of these registered as part of her surroundings. Her world was the glow of her computer screen; the history tab on her browser tracked her path and recorded the progressing creation of a new paradigm with a new ethos. With the fervor once applied to outsmarting rival companies, she designed and executed her own crash course in everything from teething to toilet training, tasks that would never directly concern her as an auxiliary parent, but subjects that she felt were important to understand, at least perfunctorily. The body of knowledge from which she had insulated herself for more than half a century became her obsession: Lamaze classes, bottle vs. breast feeding, to circumcise or not, pacifiers and their effect on teeth alignment, household baby proofing, educational trust funds, childhood diseases and vaccinations, autism, and sudden infant death. Her obsession spilled over into her work day; the citadel which had heretofore been all work, all the time, became violated by her burgeoning parental identity. During the day she worked like an automaton, making decisions quickly, handing out terse instructions and allowing her subordinates to do their jobs without her characteristic monitoring. Between meetings, sometimes even during conference calls, she sneaked back on the web to absorb new information, her thirst as insidious as an alcoholic’s. Her brain was ignited in a way that it had not been since she scaled the career hurdles of her younger days. She agonized over what exactly to get for the baby: a crib with all the trimmings, stock in growth companies, or several hefty gift certificates. Her head was filled with scenarios of a baby learning to say her name, a child dressed in an adorable European coordinated outfit, playing on a swing, or holding her hand while walking on unsteady legs. These imagined snapshots released her quarantined heart, and loosened the jealousy and competitiveness she’d felt towards Lauren when she was a child. Now she saw Lauren as an agent for her new role, in the way an infertile woman hires a surrogate mother, but without appreciating the enormity of the gift.
The day Margo left for a two-week business trip in Asia, Victoria was moved to a hospice. The time difference and the intense work schedule barely allowed time for sleep, and insulated her from the full impact of grief. She stayed in touch with Dave and Lauren by email, and spoke with Dave on the phone once. She left messages for Lauren, and received messages back, but Lauren couldn’t be reached at the times Margo could call. In her mind, anything less than voice contact would be inappropriate for something as significant as a godmother request. The conditions being what they were, she resigned herself to accept that it would have to wait until she got home. It calmed her somewhat, when she ordered what she intended to be the first of many gifts: a silver baby cup, fork, spoon, and teething ring from Tiffany & Co., sure that receiving such a quantity of shining sterling would impress Lauren.
The baby was born six days before Victoria died, a girl, named Phyllis Victoria. When Dave asked for her assistance in contacting Victoria’s work friends for the memorial service, he mentioned how sleep-deprived the new parents were, which helped to further dampen the twinge of anxiety Margo felt about not having spoken with Lauren.
Victoria’s memorial service was a week after Phyllis’ birth, the day after Margo returned. Still foggy from jet-lag, Margo thought Silicon Valley Congregational Church looked like a child’s paper airplane, twisted and pinioned by surrounding mature oaks. The stained glass front doors were a rounded geometric design reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose sparse prairie aesthetic continued in the interior, where simple pine benches angled invitingly inwards, and a tall inverted V shaped roof line contained a massive unembellished wooden cross behind the altar. She found it well suited to the technological community, free of any blood-dripping, thorn-crowned Jesus depictions that would reference too graphically the ancient and raw aspects of Christianity.
The family was on the left. In the front row was Dave, looking gaunt and years older than he had the previous year, before Victoria had been diagnosed. Next to him was Lauren, her pale face hiding behind a wall of luxuriant russet hair, hunched into her tissue filled hand, and beside her, the handsome father holding the pink swathed baby. Margo sat on the right side with the work friends, a conglomeration of faces that were more of an old home week reunion than any college or high school could’ve been. Adept at name recognition, Margo turned around from her seat in the front row and silently ticked off the names of the business colleagues she recognized in the crowd, and categorized them: the ones that worked with Victoria before the web was world wide, the ones that were the core group that all became millionaires when GoBuy.com went public eight years ago, and a sea of younger ones, women, mostly, whom she did not recognize, but whom she surmised to be Victoria’s current crew of admirers.
As the service progressed, to dampen her fear of crying in front of so many people who recognized her, she concentrated her thoughts on the future of the tiny girl on the other side of the church, as if welcoming the new life could circumvent her simple human need to grieve the loss of her closest friend, the person with whom she had shared more intimacy than any other. At the end of the service, various associates grabbed her attention, using the event as a free pass for direct contact with her to which they were not entitled, under normal circumstances. After the crowd thinned, she made her way to the front of the church, where Dave, Lauren, and her husband were accepting condolences. Margo quickly searched her memory for the husband’s name, a common, two-syllable name, Richard, or Robert, and settled with certainty on Richard.
She held her hands out to grasp Dave’s, but he put his arms around her shoulders and hugged her. She withdrew, grasped his elbows, mindful that her tears not disfigure her makeup, and said something about new birth being the best antidote for sorrow. Lauren’s husband stood next to Dave. Margo courteously turned to include him, stretched out her hand to be shaken, and said, “Richard, I’m Margo.” “Roger”, he corrected, and Margo winced. “Yes, Roger, of course.” Lauren was deep in conversation with a blond woman of her own generation who was holding the baby. Margo, finally able to lay eyes upon the object of her desire, stood expectantly near the two women, until Lauren broke focus.
“Margo, this is Becky, my roommate from college, and baby Phyllis.”
Margo peeked into the bundle and beheld the tiny face. It was the first time she had looked at a baby she cared about, and she was flooded with longing and love, sensing the potency and possibility inherent in this new life as a path towards her own rebirth; this child would miraculously provide her the means to redress the errant decisions of her unenlightened youth. Baby Phyllis was the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen.
“May I hold her?
Becky smiled widely as she held the infant towards Margo.
“I don’t know if I want to give her up, she’s my first godchild.”
Margo reeled with shock that paralyzed her body while her thoughts raced, seething with outrage and formulating an all out attack to stop this deluded interloper. Who did this grinning pipsqueak think she was, usurping her rightful title? This was insane, outrageous, a crazy misunderstanding, a horrible mistake. She repeated to herself, Victoria told me, Victoria promised, Victoria wanted me to be the godmother; I’m the godmother, not you. With a stabbing gush of realization, it registered that it was she who had made a promise to Victoria. A flaming blush rose up from her belly, along her neck, and into her face: the choice of godmother belonged to the mother, and not the grandmother. She felt colossally naive, ridiculous, betrayed and mortified. Shrunken to utter insignificance by her brazen foolishness, she saw her months of preparation reduced to delusional mania.
She lowered her head towards the baby, praising her arms for their steadiness, a steadiness her head did not share. Blessedly she was saved from the gaze of the younger women, whose attention was consumed by the continuing parade of emotive mourners. At that moment, when nobody was observing her, she observed herself, as if from the height of the cross at the highest point of the arched ceiling. She saw tiny Margo, with infinitesimal Phyllis. She had everything she wanted, and nothing, in the same fraction of a second. She had no idea how much time went by, perhaps it was a minute, perhaps less. But eventually, unknown faces were stooping over the baby in her arms, and before she knew it she had transferred the weight in her arms to the next adoring embrace that waited.
