Five Things I Can't Live Without (25 page)

“Hey, Mom, you just missed the exit,” I said, pointing.

“That’s not our exit.” She had a Cheshire grin that chilled my blood.

“What do you mean? That’s the exit for the train station.” Oh, no. Anything but that. Not one of her surprises. When I was growing up, she made terrifying dinners, food that was surpassed in its awful taste only by its inexplicable texture. She made huge portions because she liked to freeze the leftovers, often in single-serving containers that she wouldn’t label. Then she’d microwave an individual container for each of us, and I wasn’t told of the contents, and once she’d given me one, she would never trade. She called this abusive practice “Surprise dinners!” She always said it just that way, too, with her voice shooting up an octave with feigned excitement.

“I wanted to surprise you,” she said. “I’m going to drive you back to JFK. You can help me navigate. I put the road atlas under your seat.”

Don’t react yet, just breathe. Calm and contained.
Okay. On the one hand, as far as she understood herself, she was doing this to spend more time with her daughter. On the other hand, she had to know that her daughter would not want to spend four hours in the car with her, hence the surprise. It was a surprise assault, was what it was. It was blitzkrieg. But as angry as I was fast becoming, I couldn’t tell her I would never voluntarily submit to a four-hour car ride with her. Though she obviously did know that, in the same way she knew I didn’t really want to eat her leftovers. “Surprise,” in my mother’s vocabulary, was an underhanded way to get what she wanted. Still, her aims were always fundamentally sound: she wanted to spend time with her family, or take care of them.

I wasn’t just angry that she was essentially kidnapping me. I was also angry that she was placing me in the same bind she always did: she worried and she manipulated, which drove me away and drove me crazy, and she did it because she loved me. I never questioned my mother’s love for me, but it was such a sticky love that I tried to think about it and engage with it as little as possible.

Now I was trapped in a car with her for four hours. Four hours! And that’s if we didn’t hit traffic. This could be a five-, even a six-hour odyssey.

“You really should have checked with me first,” I said. If I stayed calm, I could convince her to turn around. It was best to treat this like a delicate hostage negotiation. “On the train, I know just how long the trip is going to take. But in the car, it could take another hour. It could take another three hours, who knows.”

“I did a practice run of the route at just this time of day,” my mother said. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

“Then why would I need to look at the atlas, if you already know the route?” I asked triumphantly. I finally had her, the slippery old broad.

“I said you could help me navigate, I didn’t say I needed your help. I thought it might be fun for you, like when you were a little girl and you’d try to read the maps.”

“Mom! I’m not a little girl!” I fumed. “I want you to turn this car around. I want to take the train!”

“If you’re not a little girl,” my mother said smoothly, “why are you acting like one? We’re just taking a little trip.”

So there’d be no negotiation with terrorists. “This is sick. No, this is a felony. I am a grown woman. If plans are going to be changed, I should be consulted. And right now, I’m so angry at you that there’s no way I’m driving with you to New York.” I almost crossed my arms over my chest, but realized how petulant it would look.

My mother kept driving; then she actually started humming “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” again. Did she think this was a joke? I was livid.

“Mom, turn this car around. I’m not kidding.”

“Nora, please. Calm down. A ride back in a Lexus is much better than sitting on a crowded train. We could even stop and get some lunch, if we’re making good time. Or maybe I could get something to eat with you at the airport.” She seemed completely unfazed by my reaction. I narrowed my eyes at her. She was unfazed, because she expected it.

“If you wanted us to spend more time together this trip, you should have said something. But this is total bullshit!” She hated when I cursed. At least I got the pleasure of seeing her flinch.

“If I’d asked if I could drive you back to the airport, what would you have said?” she asked.

“I’d have said yes,” I lied.

“Nora.” She said it in that despicable I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself tone. “You would have come up with some excuse, the same way you come up with excuses to get off the phone with me.”

At this point, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to catch my train. My mother had planned this, and she was committed to it. Now I just needed to figure out how I was going to get through it as painlessly as possible. I took a deep breath before responding. “I don’t want to talk about that,” I said. “You have succeeded in making me miss my train. You have succeeded in making me feel like a powerless child. You can drive me to JFK, but you can’t make me talk to you.”

She pressed her lips together tightly. Now she was mad. “That’s fine. If that’s how you want to pass this time—this limited time that we have together—we’ll just do that.” She reached over and shut the radio off. I smiled privately, thinking that she was the one who’d suffer from that little maneuver.

Five minutes later, she started talking again. “I’ll tell you what’s bullcrap, Nora. It’s the fact that you have no use for me, and when I try to be a part of your life, you shut me out. That’s the bullcrap.”

I gritted my teeth and said nothing. This was my power, right here. My power was silence.

Another five minutes, and then she said, “You think I don’t know that you screen my calls? You haven’t picked up a phone in two years. I know you’re not that popular. Every time we talk, it’s like pulling teeth. All I wanted was a nice car ride with my

daughter. I wanted us to talk like people. Like regular people. And you’re sitting there staring out the window, acting like I’m not even here!” I wasn’t looking at her, but I knew she was tearing up as she said, “I don’t understand why we can’t just talk. I’m not so hard to talk to.”

It was a combination of her tears (which made me sad) and her absurd contention that she wasn’t hard to talk to (which annoyed the hell out of me) that weakened my resolve. I finally spoke. “Yes, you are. You’re impossible to talk to.”

Maybe it was her relief at finally hearing me speak that caused her to actually consider what I’d said. “I
can
be difficult,” she amended.

“You’re always difficult! You call and you ask me the same questions every time, like you think I’m hiding how badly I’m doing. Then I ask you questions, and you clam up. You’re the one who acts like you’re hiding something.”

“You don’t need a girlfriend, Nora. You need a mother.”

“And what do you think that means?” It was such an antiquated notion that I found myself curious despite myself.

“You need someone to look ahead for you. You need someone who won’t just pretend everything you do is wonderful.”

“Well, then, you’re a great mother.”

That stung her. I was actually thinking of backtracking when she said, “I guess you got the mother you deserved then.”

After that exchange, we both withdrew for the next hour. Part of me wanted this to be an opportunity for reconciliation, but the rest of me knew how preposterous that was. My mother and I had practically never had a conversation that didn’t leave me feeling like a suspect or a lunatic, and I couldn’t imagine that we were going to start now. I wondered what she had hoped to accomplish during the ride, and at first I thought she just wanted to ask me the usual questions while glancing at my profile to gauge my truthfulness. But she had known I would be angry, and she had clearly prepared herself for it. That made this particular surprise an unusual addition to her oeuvre.

“Why did you do this?” I finally asked.

She looked at me quickly, then returned her eyes to the road. “I don’t know,” she said. She sounded tired and sad.

“I mean, what did you want to talk to me about?”

She shrugged, as if in defeat. “The usual things, I guess. You’re right. I’m no fun to talk to. I understand why you don’t want to take my calls.”

It didn’t seem to be a ploy. She just looked too demoralized for that. And even though I might have implied otherwise, my mother is not a liar, except to herself.

“Well, you could be more fun,” I conceded. “If you’d stop acting like the Grand Inquisitor and tell me some things about your life, I wouldn’t screen my calls so much.” The second I said that, I wanted to take it back. It sounded too much like a promise.

“I can try,” she said, sounding more hopeful. “I really hate being screened.”

“I’m still going to screen you sometimes. I have a live-in boyfriend, you know.”

“Oh, Nora!” A look of distaste passed across her face, which made me laugh.

“I’m an adult. I have sex with the man I live with.”

“Now you’re just being mean,” she said, but she smiled a little bit. “So what do you want to talk about?”

“How are you and Ed doing?” I asked mischievously.

“We’re the same. We’re old. Nothing new happens.”

“Mom, you need to try. We’re turning over a new leaf here.” I made a show of patience, waiting for her answer.

“Well, we’re in the new house.”

“Seriously, Mom, what’s with the new houses every few years?”

“It’s not me. It’s Ed. I wouldn’t care if we stayed in the same house for five years.” She said it like five years was an epoch.

“Don’t you get tired of moving? I hate moving.”

“You know I like a project. It must be why I like motherhood. It’s like a lifelong project.”

There it was, in black-and-white. The one story my mother told over and over again was how all she’d ever wanted was to be a mother, and that marrying Ed was a gift because she got to quit her job and be a mother full-time. That passion for motherhood had been invoked as a defense for her meddling in every aspect of my life. I remembered when my mother told me she was getting engaged to Ed, and my first thought was: “Please, just let her keep her job.” The last thing my mother needed—well, that I needed—was more free time for snooping and prying and painting the world dark.

“You’re good at projects, too, Nora. That’s why you were so good at that animal job.”

I hadn’t expected that. “How do you know I was good at that job?”

“I’ve read your little paragraphs, you know, the ones about the dogs and cats. You did a nice job with those. They were very—succinct. When you read them, you really had a sense of each animal’s personality.”

I found myself on the verge of tears. I’d never known that she read my bios. “I always thought you should keep trying to be a writer. That one year just wasn’t long enough, I think,” she said.

There it was, the criticism. I should have known. “The year I tried to be a writer, you told me constantly that I should get into advertising. ‘Something that pays,’ that’s what you kept saying. Oh, and you also said, ‘It’s one in a million, getting published, and I love you, but you’re not one in a million.’ Do you remember saying that?” My cheeks burned at the memory.

She shook her head, and the sadness was back. “No, I don’t remember saying that.”

“You’re really critical, do you know that?”

“I get worried, and then I get critical. But you need to stick with something. Even if I criticize it, you just need to stick with something. It’s just not healthy for you, all the switching around. You don’t want to be someone who can never really apply yourself to anything. Some dilettante. That’s the worst thing to be.”

I didn’t even know my mother knew that word. “You always said the worst thing is to be a penniless failure.”

My mother considered and then said, “You’re right. That’s worse.”

Chapter 16

I
actually dated that guy. Briefly. He’s lying about his age. He was thirty-three when I knew him. I didn’t even think men lied like that, given that there’s no shelf life on their reproductive organs. It’s just pure vanity. Peter was one vain son of a bitch.