Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Author:Bonnie Jo Campbell [Campbell, Bonnie Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Family Life
ISBN: 9780393248456
Google: LetwBgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0393248453
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Published: 2015-10-04T11:00:00+00:00

III.

“Thank you for talking to me,” my husband says a few hours later when my mother hands me the phone from her hospital bed. “We really do need to talk. Mailing me a photocopy of your pregnancy test is not the same as talking.”

“I’m not ready to talk to you yet. Especially not here. Or on the phone.”

“Humph. Your mother sounds relatively upbeat, says her prognosis is good.”

“Invasive ductal carcinoma,” I say. “They took it out before it was too invasive, before it had arms or legs or a heartbeat.”

“Humph,” he says again, which is what he says when he is moving past something he doesn’t want to hear. “Good thing you got her to the doctor when you did. Turns out we all have a lot to be grateful for this year.”

“I suppose you think it’s just a myth that black widows kill and eat their mates,” I say. I have avoided talking to Gregory in person or on the phone because I’m not ready to be reasonable and positive with him—his reasonableness and positivity can feel like a kind of bullying. Face-to-face the man can cajole me into anything. I have always loved his clear, intelligent voice, but being away from him has given my mind a vacation, a license to roam grumpily from idea to idea all day. I’m not ready to even think about divorce, but lately I wonder if I wouldn’t rather be his student than his wife—I’d listen for a few hours, take notes, then be free of him until next week. Or maybe I just need a few more months alone in my trailer. Or I need counseling. Or a punching bag with Gregory’s face drawn on it with a crayon. Tomorrow I’ll ask Julianna to draw Grandpa for me. She is now drawing a purple unicorn, like the one she left at home.

“Why are you talking about spiders?” Gregory asks.

“I’m teaching spiders. The black widow males are skinnier than the females, and they grin too much. Maybe that’s why they get eaten.”

“Humph. I’ve always suspected the phenomenon has something to do with being observed in a terrarium in a science lab.”

“The Heisenberg uncertainty principle?”

“The observer effect. My students confuse those all the time.”

I flush with embarrassment, because I know the difference. It is a little-known fact that pregnancy lowers your IQ—it is a phenomenon too dangerous to study.

“Gregory, you can’t deny the facts. They really do devour their mates. If only by accident,” I say, though I seriously doubt it’s an accident. Practical-minded spider mothers teach their daughters to spin silky threads as strong as steel wires and sticky enough to capture prey. Surely these mothers tell their daughters that if they do happen to liquefy the internal organs of a mate, they should go ahead and drink up that protein-rich soup, for in this way the male can help create stronger, healthier eggs. What father wouldn’t want each of his hundreds of offspring to have all the advantages?

“Let’s stop with the spiders?” Gregory says, in a tone he’d use with a student disrupting his class.

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