Because I Said So (12 page)

So here it is again—the benefit and the difficulty of this kind of freedom. Whose needs get met, who takes priority? Thirteen has already been accepted into a school nearby, a good school, but perhaps not as sensational as the one across town. Anyone who has ever visited Los Angeles and attempted to drive between Silverlake and Santa Monica during morning rush hour understands that this is not something a sane person would even attempt four times a day.

Oh, she reasons with herself, she could make it work. Find someone who goes to UCLA or Santa Monica City College and pay him or her to drive. She could carpool, do the heinous thing three times a week. But having Thirteen over an hour away, staying away until seven or later each night, busy with school projects, developing a whole new set of friends whom she will never
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see—the whole idea makes her fretful and sleepless. She remembers her own adolescence, and how little her parents knew. For herself, she would not want Thirteen that far away, physically or emotionally.

So whose needs? Which need? Her need to be a good parent, or her pleasure at being part of a deeply satisfying community?

She prays that Thirteen is not accepted to the school of the distant commute, or ultimately decides on something closer in.

But she finds it interesting to consider the possibility of the move, the way it is interesting to torment a decaying tooth. She has the opportunity to be the mother that her mother was not, did not know enough to be.

She thinks back on all the times she has been bewildered upon learning that one of her neighbors was moving to some suburb of the “better school.” It had always upset her to hear of one more woman scuttling her own satisfaction to provide for someone else’s. First, as a daughter, to be a good girl, to please the parent; then, as a mother, shortchanging herself for the children’s sake.

And when is it going to be your turn?
she always wanted to ask.

Now she thinks of her own mother, a woman who has in later life emerged as the grandmother from heaven, but who, back in the day, considered a child’s place secondary to the needs of the adults in the family. The urgency of livelihood. It never occurred to parents of that day to ask, “What is it you need from me?”

“How can I help you?” Pressed for time and energy, they kept their heads down in the battle zone and soldiered on. If someone had suggested that a mother could do more to support her daughter’s unfolding self, that mother would have stared in blank incomprehension.

The woman once wrote
a book about a mother and a daughter, and in the process considered long and hard the question
What is it that makes a good mother?
As far as she could ascer-tain, it seemed to boil down to a fairly simple set of issues. A lousy mother was someone who looked at her kid and said,
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“Here’s who I want you to be” and “Here’s what I’m going to give you.” A good mother was the one who looked at her kid, really looked at her, and asked, “Who are you?” and “What do you need from me?”

How many children are ever really seen? How many, on the other hand, are given what their parents want to give them—

things they need like an Inuit needs an icebox? Things that leave a child frustrated and furious, like getting the Christmas present that’s just what the giver wanted. Violin lessons when a child is an artist. Restriction when she needs encouragement. Stoicism when she needs a soft shoulder. And how many future neuroses can be traced back to those misfires?

So why is it so bloody hard for mothers to turn to their own children and look them in the eye and say, “What do you need from me?”

Now the woman knows why: Because then you know, and have to respond. It might not be convenient. It might not be what you wanted to give.

She remembered something
that happened when Thirteen was younger. She’d saved a box of books from her own childhood—

the best-loved, treasured, and carefully preserved—for the time she would have her own daughter. She had just got to the best of them all—
King of the Wind
by Marguerite Henry—a book in which she had lived for several crucial years of her unhappy but imaginative childhood. She worshiped that book, she became that book.

But when she finally opened that cherished volume and began to read it aloud to her child, her daughter groaned and said, “Oh God, not another sad horse story.”

What fury, what frustration—at having saved those books for some idealized child who would appreciate just how wonderful they were, and then, instead, having this real little kid who didn’t like sad horse stories. That ungrateful brat, trampling the mother’s cherished fantasies of sharing these books with an appreciative daughter, connecting the then with the now.

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Fortunately, just as her temper began to erupt, she had one of those blessed moments—perhaps there
are
angels or ancestors who do come to our aid—when you step outside yourself and see the reality of that little person. She had a daughter who did not care for sad horse stories. She didn’t need what her mother wanted to give her. She needed something else.

Thank God for
King of the Wind
. It had been worth saving after all.

What does Thirteen
really need from her? Not a good book, not even a soft shoulder to cry on, not kiddie art classes or even the benefit of her often shaky wisdom. She needs her to ante up.

She needs a mother willing to cross a city for her, a mother watching, listening. Willing to know.

There are only four more years that she will have Thirteen.

The girl won’t need her hair brushed, won’t want to play stuffed animals. She won’t even necessarily be aware of what it is she needs. But the clock is running. The woman knows, has known since Spain, that there is not much time left. There will be time to live exactly the way she would like, many years for that.

But as an artist, she knows as she has always known, that the pleasure of creation takes precedence over any of the more passive pleasures. With her own child, she is creating a work of passion, all the more exciting and terrifying because it is utterly improvised. That day, at the table in León, she had seen what she wanted: relationships that continued and replenished themselves, like the couples walking in the evening arm-in-arm. And when the separation that had begun with Thirteen in Spain is complete, this is perhaps the best that she can hope for—that the mistakes and the negotiations and the trials and the errors of these freelance years have resulted in a mutual respect that will only deepen with time. And that they will always be able to muster a conversation over their coffee cups in a small foreign town.

On Giving Hope

M a r i a n e P e a r l

The storm is over,
and it feels as if the elements are coming back to their senses. Paris bathes in a soft spring light, and my father is taking me for a ride on one of his seven motorcycles. I pride myself on being a perfect passenger. I am only eight, so I cannot stretch my arms around my father’s waist, but I grab his jacket and follow faithfully the curves of his body when he makes a turn. The roads are still wet, but soon the sun will warm us through our black leather suits.

The purpose of our expedition is to visit the tunnel of a subway station. More specifically, to see the layers of torn and peeling posters that remain on an advertisement panel. When we get to the Metro station, my father goes straight to the booth and buys two tickets, as if we are indeed visiting a museum. Inside, above the track, I see my father’s discovery: a giant kaleidoscope of colors in an otherwise dark and unappealing tunnel. Whatever information these posters had to give, whatever pictures were once there, have been hollowed out, ripped off, and covered over and over again, leaving an arresting patchwork of half-formed images and vivid colors. It’s a jumbled puzzle. But my father sees public art. “Amazing!” he cries with childlike enthusiasm.

• • •

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My father is a scientist,
an intellectual, an original. A man living counter-clockwise, sleeping in the daytime and working at night. Lately he has been inventing a new method to play bridge, one of his passions along with riding motorcycles. He does not have a job. Our family is running out of money.

I love my father but I hate being different from other kids at school who have working and functioning dads. I want him to come back from work in the evening, put on his slippers, and watch the news on TV. I want to climb onto his lap. I want him to ask my mother, “What’s for dinner?” and to scold my older brother, Satchi, and me when we eat like little pigs.

My father has applied for an engineering job at a company that manufactures toothpaste. He has the right profile for the job, and my mother has optimistically bought him new clothing. He looks handsome in his three-piece suit, with his green eyes and curly blond hair, when we see him off for his interview. Three hours later, the doorbell rings and the three of us run to the door to greet him and congratulate ourselves on our new life. But when the door opens, my father is standing there gripping his attaché case as if it is his last grasp on his role as the head of our family. He is still handsome, but in his green eyes I see despair. He goes back to his room at the end of our three-room flat and stays there.

This is two years after the 1973 oil crisis. Our mother tells us about how countries in the Middle East had stopped exporting oil to France and other Western nations to punish them for their support of Israel and the Yom Kippur War. “People worldwide are losing their jobs,” she says. I try to pretend I understand what on earth she is talking about and how this relates to my father not getting work at the toothpaste place. Meanwhile, we are living off the money my grandfather sends us. The more money my dad’s dad sends, the more my own father loses his self-esteem.

Summer 1976,
a year later. It’s August but we haven’t left Paris yet for vacation. On a sunny afternoon, my father summons me to his room. My father’s room is forbidden territory, a sort of
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cavern where he reigns like a bear; even my mom doesn’t sleep there. Sometimes she joins my father in his hideout, and we hear them, my brother and I, screaming at each other until late at night. “We weren’t screaming at each other, kids,” my mother tells us in the morning. “We were just talking about politics.”

My father hasn’t left his bed for the last few months.

Apprehensive and shy, I open up the door into an impressive mess that is revealing of my father’s personality. Old copies of
Le
Monde
are scattered on the floor. Sheets of paper torn from a sketchpad are covered with small handwriting in black ink.

Words are compacted, pressed against one another, hastily jotted down without space or punctuation, as if my father’s hand could not keep pace with his head. There is a dirty plate on the floor.

My father’s fingertips are yellowed by nicotine. He is lying on the unkempt bed, putting out cigarette butts on the floor between the bed frame and the wall. The smell of cold tobacco seems to leave him undisturbed.

“Sit down,” he says, and I feel that this moment is solemn without knowing why. All he tells me, though, at least as I remember it, is that he finds me a bit overweight. And he makes me promise that when I grow up, I will go on a diet. I say, “Oui, Papa.” I’d do anything to please him.

“Now that’s a good girl,” my father says and he extends his hand to caress my cheek. It is an unusual gesture. My father is not cold; he is just usually absent, half gone in a world without intimacy except with his own thoughts. Most of the time, physical contact seems to feel too real for him. His skin is rough, but there is an infinite sweetness in the way his hand lingers on my face while his green eyes penetrate my soul.

My brother is then called in. My father is usually stricter with him, and when Satchi closes the door behind himself, I am a little worried. He can’t possibly put Satchi on a diet; he is much too skinny. What kind of promise will our father ask of him? Their visit is as short as ours was. When Satchi comes out, he seems intrigued but proud of this unexpected exchange, just as I am.

The next day, our mother tells us we are leaving for the south
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of France, where we will visit one of her women friends. The rest happens very fast. My mother, my brother, and I leave for Marseille. My brother and I are given color pens. My mother goes back to Paris almost immediately. What should she bring back for us, she wants to know. “Scrabble,” says Satchi. “Bring back Daddy,” I tell her. Four days later, she is back. She hasn’t even stepped into the apartment where we are staying when I hear her say, “It’s over, kids. Your daddy has died.” My mother takes us to a bedroom and the three of us lie on a double bed. My face is wet with tears—mine and my brother’s and my mother’s run together in indefinable grief. We hold one another for a long time and fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon.

While we are sleeping, I dream about my father. It is foggy and he is boarding a plane. I see his back, but he doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t say goodbye. I see his curly head disappear into the belly of the plane and the fog closes in around it, removing any trace of him from my sight.

Satchi wants to go home,
but there is no more home to go back to—at least not the same home. With the help of friends, my mom has already moved us. We return to Paris, to a new apartment. It is in the same building as the old one, but it is smaller, for just the three of us. There is no mysterious room at the end of the hall; there is no scent of cigarettes or scraps of scribbled paper.