Her Mother's Daughter (3 page)

And she would never tell these things to anyone else. Not even her sister, who “doesn't know, she wasn't there, she didn't see what I saw, she doesn't remember, she thinks Poppa was wonderful, she doesn't want to hear anything else.” No, only I know this part of my mother, but it is her deepest part, the truest, the core. So when other people say things about her, I just look at them. I don't know what they are talking about.

A
ND OTHER PEOPLE DO
say things about her. She is a difficult woman. She is deaf or nearly deaf, and angry about that: she gets irritated with people who speak softly, and grimaces and turns her head away disdainfully. People who don't understand what is happening think she is bored and rude. It is risky to give her a gift. She receives gifts, as well as certain acts designed to please, as challenges to which she is more than equal: she will in some way make sure the giver knows they have not managed to please her.

She is worst of all in restaurants, especially if one of us, my sister or I, have taken her. The place is invariably too noisy: with her hearing aid on, she cannot filter sounds, and the scrape of fork on plate, or chair on floor, are as importunate as the sounds of voices on her receiver. Usually, the place is too cold as well. Beyond that, the food is never good. My sister strains her budget to take Mother to dinner for her birthday, and is—as always—gay and brittle over the clams casino, the mushroom soup, the medallions de veau. “Isn't this great?” she exhorts Mother. “Isn't it delicious?” Mother's mouth twists into a stiff smile. “Very good,” she obviously lies.

Later, to me, she almost spits her disgust: the clams were nothing but bread crumbs in margarine, the soup flour and water, the veal frozen. Later, my sister will be snapping at her children—why is the house such a mess, why can't they ever pick up their shoes, throw away their soda cans, empty their ashtrays. Glancing at each other, the children will ask how dinner was. “Great, really terrific!” Later, her husband will tell her she is chewing on the inside of her cheek. “Your mother upset you,” he will suggest, laying a kind hand on her back. Joy will flare up. “She didn't! It was a great dinner! If she didn't like it, that's her problem, I could care less! I can't worry about it. I could care less! I could really care less!”

Sometimes my mother whines, sometimes she sulks. She is enraged if my father is not at her side to help her at all times, but often when he puts his hand gently under her elbow to help her over a threshold, she will snatch her arm away and snap at him: “I'm all right, Ed!” as if he were coercing her into helplessness. She turns her cheek to the kiss he confers upon her before every meal, just after he has helped her into her chair. Often, she sits alone, idle and silent, on the porch of their house, a broad glassed-in room overlooking the lake. But she no longer cries, and she no longer locks herself for days in a darkened room claiming sinus headache, the way she did when I was a teenager.

For many years, she granted me a small power, one that bound me to her irrevocably: when I came to visit her, she would rouse herself, she would talk and laugh and sometimes even forget her sorrow. This power she granted also to my sister. But for my sister, the business of rousing Mother, entertaining her, trying to make her laugh, was hard work; whereas for me, it was in those days a pleasure. It made me feel strong and full of laughter to laugh with her. She does not laugh anymore now though.

She is very lonely but does not try to make friends, and if it is suggested, she snaps, “I don't feel like it!” Other times, when she is feeling better perhaps, she sits in her rocker gazing out at the lake and says, “There's no lack of drama in my life.” Then she tells me the latest scandal, the latest violence—for among themselves, the cardinals, the big blue jay, the robins, sparrows, ducks, geese, swans, rabbits, chipmunks, possums, squirrels, the neighbor's cat, the tiny red snapper that inhabit the lake, the woods, and the lawn behind my parents' house maintain a steady drama enacted it seems for her alone. This drama is full of war and murder and mothering and anxiety. Father ducks—she is sure they are father ducks—squawk angrily at mother ducks anxiously trying to extract their babies from the wire mesh of the neighbor's fence. Male geese—she is sure they are males because they are more aggressive and larger than the others—intimidate the females, and push themselves forward to gobble up all the bread she and my father throw out to them. Her arm is not strong enough to hurl the light crumbs out to where the smaller geese hover hopefully, so she turns on her heel in outrage and refuses to feed them at all. On and on, day after day, contests and resolutions. A family of birds settled in the birdhouse and made a nest, but they filled the entire house with twigs, so they could no longer enter it. My mother directed my father as he climbed the ladder and removed some of the stuffing. “But those birds were really stupid,” my mother announced in contempt. The eggs were all at the bottom of the nest, underneath the stuffing, and they were all cold. She shrugged: “It was a stupid bird family; it didn't deserve to live.”

She watches the soap opera of nature, over and over again: death and continuation. She finds some rest in this, and occasionally will lift the binoculars to her eyes to observe more closely. But she doesn't hold them long: they are too heavy.

My European friend Bertram, who speaks like a popgun attached to a cartridge belt, and who prides himself on his nonidealistic, nonsentimental view of the world, laughs at his mother. “I never took any shit from her,” he boasts; “she's impossible.” “It became clear to me at an early age,” he enunciates with only a trace of an accent, “that she loved me more than I loved her. I could walk out and she couldn't.” He did walk out too—many times. He went to prep schools, college, and university, all with the approval of his formidable mother and his kindly physician father. He became a geologist and screwed his way around the world. He doesn't mention, but I know, that he always returns to Mother in between journeys. He did not marry until he was forty—and he married then in order to give his mother a grandson, a task he performed efficiently. His wife having walked out on
him,
he remains, as he did before his marriage, in his small apartment on New York's Riverside Drive, just ten blocks from Mother and the use of her Mercedes. He and his son visit Grandma several times a week: their bond could hardly be tighter. He's proud of her too: since her husband's death, she has had two love affairs. Her hair is still black, although she's eighty years old.

Impossible, impossible. It is a refrain. Henri Laforgue overhears me talking about my mother and exclaims, “God save me from my mother!” Everyone at the table laughs. We are sitting in a restaurant in Paris, charming with dark wood paneling and the small high windows of a three-hundred-year-old building. The tables bear big bowls of flowers and superb food: the restaurant is unknown to tourists. Henri is tall and robust; his round face and its chins sit smugly on the immaculate collar of his custom-made shirt. He is, as always, surrounded by women—his wife, Adele, her colleagues Marthe and Martine, and me. All of them dote on him: they laugh when he laughs, direct their glances to him, attend devotedly to his needs before he says a word. His wife runs her own very successful business, a public relations agency, an unusual thing in France, but she also tends to their showpiece of a house, their three children, and Henri. He is away all week selling industrial chemicals, and wants to relax on the weekends. Adele sees to it that nothing upsets him, and she also manages to keep herself soignée. “Save me from my mother!” he cries again, laughing, and the others laugh too.

Save him from what? Of course he doesn't need a mother, he has all sorts of women dancing attendance on him everywhere he goes. Maybe his mother is like Henri, but being a woman, can't get the same service. I ask what is so terrible about her, but no one will tell me. They only laugh harder. I hug a certain resentment to me, like a stuffed animal. I am a mother myself: what is it in these mothers one constantly hears about that is so “impossible”?

Anyway, even if they told me, I probably wouldn't understand. They'd use some word that is meaningless to me. They might call her
proud,
or
overattentive.
They might say she was
cold.
Someone said that once, about my friend Lee. I knew this was a term of disapprobation, a judgment:
cold.
Yet I also knew Lee had depths of understanding and subtleties of perception far exceeding those of her critic. If her critic—a coarse but warm, outgoing woman named Aline—meant that my friend did not gush, and took her time about making new friends, why, I was the same way. Was I too cold? Was Aline really trying to convey disapproval of me? Or was she saying that my friend made her feel inferior? What was she saying? What was this coldness?

I encounter such problems regularly. The first time someone said I was “sensitive,” I knew she meant that I was to be forgiven for some response, although I wasn't sure why. What did that mean? That I was acute to nuances? Or got my feelings hurt easily? A shrink I know told me that I felt more deeply than other people, and I asked him what kind of instrument he had for measuring such a thing. Because I suspect that people have great dark abysses in them, things they rarely show. No one knows what people feel when they are alone in dim rooms as the light just begins to come up, the greyest time of day. I was utterly shaken when a man once told me I was “somethin' else.” I'm embarrassed to report that I replied, “What else? Else than what?”

Some years ago I went to Poland, alone and without tour guides or acquaintances. It was a shattering experience, partly because of my inability to read anything or understand more than about fifteen spoken words. People helped me, but I felt like an infant; they led me about by the hand, refusing to allow me to go out by myself—it seemed to them too dangerous for someone who could not read or speak even the simplest things. But that was an alien tongue. I have this problem with my own.

I remember one of the first times I was aware of this confusion about ordinary language. I was about eight, and walking the long empty blocks home from school alone as always, in my high brown shoes and white socks that kept slipping down into the shoes and disappearing. I walked strangely too, toeing in so extremely that sometimes I tripped over my own foot. I used to make up stories as I trudged what seemed a long weary way every morning and afternoon, stories about my family being saved by a sudden inheritance, or a fairy godmother, or my father's getting a better job. I'd think about where we'd live and about the kind of person I'd be.

A bunch of the rougher girls from my class came running down the street behind me, and I shrank into myself, terrified. I thought they were chasing me, and they were much taller and heavier than I, being two years older and considerably more developed. As they came nearer, I tried to disguise my fear, both out of pride and out of some intuitive awareness that fear is provocative, and I held my neck taut, my chin high, and plastered my face with hauteur. But they were simply playing some—to me—rough game, and passed me laughing, until one turned around and pointed, crying in great gasps of laughter—“Look at Dabrowska! Oh, conceited!” And the others turned then too, and laughed, brayed at me, “Conceited! Conceited!”

I maintained my dignified pace and did not change my expression. They tore off down the block and through the empty lot, leaping over abandoned rusting gasoline drums, bedsprings, and other litter, laughing. And my heart squeezed itself together, wanting to force a tear into my eye, but I controlled it. I went into my house through the back door, as always. My mother was mopping the kitchen floor with an instrument I particularly disliked, a mop with long spaghetti-like strands that swished around uncontrollably as she pushed the handle. I did not tell my mother about the girls. I don't know why. Although I told her many things other children would conceal, I concealed much, very selectively. I would have been ashamed to tell her about the girls: I wanted to appear in control of my away-from-home life. I waited on the threshold as she finished the last swipes with the ugly mop. “If you take off your shoes, Anastasia, you can walk over to the table and I'll give you some milk and cookies,” she said kindly. I set my books on the table, which was near the back door, and removed my hated shoes, and did as she said. She brought me a glass of milk and some Oreos, and then sank into the chair opposite me, sighing. She lit a cigarette and crossed her legs: she was in her stocking feet.

“How was school today?”

“Fine. I got a hundred in the spelling test, and ninety-nine in the math test. It wasn't my fault that I got ninety-nine. The teacher thought my seven was a one on one problem. I told her it wasn't, but she said it was okay.”

She smiled. “That's very good, Anastasia.”

“And in recess, we danced in a circle and I got picked three times.” This was an utter lie. I was almost never picked when we danced in a circle, and I knew it was because of my ugly high shoes. But I also knew that those shoes cost my parents a great deal of money they couldn't afford, and that they sacrificed to buy them for me so my flat feet would grow straight. Or whatever they were supposed to do. But this was a lie I frequently used because it seemed to make her happy. She smiled very broadly: “Oh, how nice, Anastasia! You're popular!” When she smiled like that, I could almost believe it had happened, that I had been chosen, that the children did like me.

We fell into silence then. I finished my cookies and swept the crumbs into a little pile. Mother rose and got a dishcloth and wiped them up.

“Is it okay if I walk on the floor now?”

“Yes.” She tamped her cigarette out and sighed again. “I'm so tired.” I glanced at her sympathetically. She was always tired. I knew her life was very hard.