Her Mother's Daughter (102 page)

“Right! I love them too! Why do you think she hates them?”

“Because,” Anastasia announced authoritatively, “they remind her of the houses of her childhood. They didn't have sinks and stoves and refrigerators and linoleum, they had cast-iron tubs and huge iron stoves and no fridge, but they did have wooden shelves and tables, scrubbed clean by generations of women.”

“Wouldn't you think she'd like them, then?” Joy asked, a puzzled look on her face. “I mean, they'd be familiar. And they're so pretty.”

Anastasia gazed at her sister. Did she know their mother at all? “She hated her childhood, so she hates anything associated with it. Like she hates antique furniture—all she sees is that it's old.”
She
hated the tone of her own voice, superior, patronizing. Why did she sound like this?

“Oh!” Joy breathed out slowly. “So that's why she hated the kitchen table and chairs! You know, they're Mexican, antiques, Justin and I bought them when we flew to Acapulco one time when he had a week's pass. We rented a car and we drove out to the countryside and saw them in a little cantina and I fell in love with them and Justin bargained with the owner, and we bought them!” Great protracted laughter. “I love them. But she told me they should be heaved out in the trash, they were old and ugly.”

Anastasia caught her breath. “Oh, I'm
sorry,
Joy. She can be so cruel. They're beautiful,” she offered sincerely. Why did she feel responsible for Mother's behavior?

Well, that certainly sounded as if she and Justin were getting on, no bitterness of a cast-off wife, which Mother is sure she is, or a wife who's left her husband, which Anastasia thought she was.

Joy's face was a little twisted—anger? grief? She was looking down at her thin hands twisted into a knot. Anastasia looked at them too: they were clenched, white with tension. Oh god.

“She just always tries to make me feel—oh, I don't know—as if nothing I have is any good, as if…” She raised her eyes to her sister. “And she's always praising you, like bragging, really.”

“Oh, Joy!” Anastasia cried. “You know what my house is like!”

“It's not your house. It's your career, your book, the famous people you meet…”

“She criticizes me, too. All the time. My house, with my money, why don't I have something grander, my furniture, why don't I have fancier furniture. My clothes. My cooking,” Anastasia grinned.

Joy gazed at her. “I know.”

She knows. So Mother criticizes me to her, just as she criticizes her to me. Yes. But we both know something else, something that cannot be spoken. Whatever she has to give, she gives to me, not Joy. Oh, Joy! Her hands clenched and white in her lap, long nails digging into the flesh, just like Mother's hands. And Arden's! Arden's!

“She said I'd need twenty thousand dollars to fix this house up!” Joy exploded with laughter. “Can you imagine?” Laughter, hard, stiff, forced-air, tears on the cheeks. Was laughing a way of crying?

It
would
cost that much. But Anastasia laughed as if the statement were ridiculous.

“Oh, my!” Joy wiped her eyes. “But she really was wonderful while I was moving in. She and Daddy came over and helped me put things away and get settled. And she took Jenny home with her for a couple of days, until I got everything in order. And she takes her whenever I ask. She's really great! Jenny's there now. I'm going over there for dinner tonight, after the kids get back from the pool, and pick her up.”

Relieved, Anastasia sank back against the chair back. “That's great.”

“But I feel so bad for her. She's so miserable. I think she's just bored, I keep telling her she should get out and make some friends. I've been telling her and telling her, I'm sick of it! I swear I won't say anything, and then, the next time I see her, it just comes out of my mouth, Mom, you need to get out.”

“I know,” Anastasia sighed. “Now she's stopped piano lessons.”

“I know,” Joy sighed. “She tells you about it as if she were telling you somebody died.” She sat up brightly. “How about a drink? It's nearly five.”

“Sure.”

The two women rose and carried the tea things back to the kitchen. Anastasia sat on a high stool watching Joy mix drinks, as they complained of and bemoaned Mother, their favorite subject, the person who ripped them apart, the person who bonded them, the only thing in the world that told them they were sisters.

N
OW ACCIDENTS ARE OF TWO KINDS: NECESSARY…AND NON-NECESSARY…ALTHOUGH PRIVATION IS AN ACCIDENTAL PRINCIPLE, IT DOES NOT FOLLOW THAT IT IS UNNECESSARY FOR GENERATION. FOR MATTER IS NEVER LACKING PRIVATION: INASMUCH AS IT IS UNDER ONE FORM, IT IS DEPRIVED OF ANOTHER.

Thomas Aquinas, The Principles of Nature, II, 9

This quotation is the backbone of my life. I have typed it on a three-by-five card and pasted it up over my desk. I read it every day. I use it to calm myself, to make myself firm, to keep myself from crumbling. Arden saw it one day—years ago—and asked me what it meant. She could not understand its abstract language. So I made a joke of it; I told her that inasmuch as a carrot is a carrot, it cannot be a celery. The carrot may crave to be a celery; it may wilt and sag in its singular, lonely life, and long to live pressed tightly to its fellows the way celery stalks do: it may sicken with the desire to live above ground in the light, and to have pale green delicate leaves; but it will never have them. It will have, instead, dark green feathery lacy leaves, and spend its life in the warm dark earth, a creature of darkness and isolation. It can have only what it has, be only what it is. Always. Until it dies.

I did not tell her what it meant to me. I try to tell myself that I have much. And must be reconciled to having what I have, being what I am and nothing else, until I die. Because all things being under one form are deprived of all others.

Still I find it hard. It is hard while you are alive, breathing, sentient, to know that your heart is dead, that it has died inevitably because you are what you are, that you cannot resuscitate it.

Clara says, “You're just like your mother. You don't see alternatives. You close down shop and cry, instead of opening the door and looking around.”

“For what? At what?” I counter. “And,” angrily, haughtily, “I never cry.”

Looking back, rummaging through these dusty boxes full of old photographs, letters, bits and pieces—the children's class photos, a certificate decreeing Arden Carpenter of the fifth grade winner of the Poetry Prize for Linden Street School, a scrap of newspaper, saved…why? Toni's and my marriage certificate, two yellowed report cards for William Carpenter, grades two and three—looking back, my memory triggered by these fragments that would be meaningless to anyone else, mere detritus, I remember good years, I remember happiness. What happened to change it, and when it changed, I can't figure out. I suppose it didn't end, but just ran down, the way my mother gradually slid into her present state. No way to mark even the beginning of the end: when was the first time Arden was sullen and furious with me and I looked in her eyes and saw real hatred? or noticed that Billy was rarely home, and realized he was spending all his spare time with Brad? Or the first time I noticed that Toni—but, yes, I do remember that.

We had become prosperous enough that we could afford a woman to come in and clean, do the laundry, iron, straighten up a little—always a hopeless task in our house. It relieved me to pay someone to do this work. I hated doing it myself, but I felt squeamish and guilty about Toni doing so much housework. I don't know if I'd have felt that way if he'd been a woman and I a man. But as it was, I did.

And one week Mrs. Landors had to leave early, I don't remember why, some appointment, and she didn't have time to put away the ironed clothes. So I did it. I am no housekeeper, but I love ironed clothes, so there was a stack of them, pajamas and tablecloths and knit shirts, and blouses and shirts hung on hangers. I was happy that day, I remember, I was humming with the record player, Billie Holiday, “He's My Man,” as I went from room to room putting clean fresh pressed clothes away in closets and drawers. I avoided Arden's drawers, they were a mess, I just laid her things on her bed (after making it), and went into our room, into Toni's chest of drawers to put away some knit shirts, and there, glistening and luxurious in a pile in the bottom drawer, were three silk shirts.

Nowadays, that might not be shocking, but in those days you could still buy a fine men's white shirt on sale for two ninety-five, whereas silk shirts cost seventy-five dollars. And Toni never went anywhere much—we occasionally spent an evening with neighbors, or went to a party, but he didn't go to work, to business dinners or cocktail parties, to events that required such formality. So why these shirts? And how did he get them? I ran downstairs and looked into my desk and pulled out the charge statements for the past few months. I paid all the bills, but I didn't check them over. And there it was—Lord & Taylor, three silk shirts, two hundred and twenty-five dollars plus tax.

I was appalled. But I didn't know what to do. Toni and I never discussed money. We had a joint checking account, I put a regular sum in it. When he needed money he cashed a check, and he carried our few credit cards—this was before people lived on them—because he did most of the shopping. I had never said to Toni, you may spend only this much, or you may buy this and this but not that. How could I now say to him what in fact I did say when he walked into the room,

“Why on earth did you buy silk shirts!”

He looked at me in a way he never had before—can't describe it—
distant
—as if he didn't know me. Pale.

“Why were you snooping around in my drawers?” is what he answered.

“Snooping! Snooping!
I was putting your fucking clothes away for you, you shit!”

He turned and left the room. He went into the kitchen. I followed him like a fury. “Toni! I asked you a question!” He turned away from me and went back to the living room, sat on the couch, and started to leaf through a magazine, casually, as if he were unperturbed. But his body was taut, I could see he was ready to spring. He'd sprung before when we'd had fights, leaping up and throwing a glass across the room, smashing a vase.

I sat down across the room from him. He lighted a cigarette. I lighted a cigarette. “Toni,” I began in a quieter voice, “you buy whatever you like. You know how much money we have. But do you need silk shirts? At seventy-five dollars a throw? When we're still paying Arden's orthodontist? Why?”

“Do I?”

I stared at him.

“Do I know how much money we have?”

My face grew hot.

“Or do you have money stashed away in accounts in your own name, money in investments you never bothered to mention to me?”

“You went in my desk!”

“It was an accident. Like your going into my drawer. I was looking for the orthodontist's bill, he called, he was annoyed, he claimed we still owed him four hundred dollars. And I find all this stuff—bank accounts, investment reports, everything mailed to you at
World
so I wouldn't see it.”

I sank back in my chair.

“I didn't say a word when you bought this house and put it in your name. Or when you made the kids the beneficiaries of your life insurance. Those things made a kind of sense to me. And I wouldn't even mind your having bank accounts in your own name, or investments…I mean, there's a kind of logic, you earn the money and I'm not a wife even if I do the work of a wife….I could have found a way to accept everything, if you'd told me about it. You didn't.”

“No,” I admitted miserably.

“Why?”

I could feel that my face was all scrunched up. “Oh, I don't know.” I did, of course. But I couldn't say it. How could I say: you are not really an equal partner, you do not take equal responsibility. Everything is up to me. So everything is going to be in my control, not yours. I temporized. “You know…you're young…you're a male. We got married under pressure…. I guess I never believed it would last, never really felt married….”

His taut body sprang forward, his face ghostly. “Is that why you take your diaphragm everywhere you go?”

I was dead. I just sat there. After a while he got up. I heard him moving around in the kitchen. He came back with a drink, it looked like straight Wild Turkey. He sat, gulped it.

“I've had to do a lot of thinking these past couple of months,” he began.

“How long have you been sitting on this!” I cried out. I couldn't bear thinking he'd been feeling this way about me, knowing these things and hating me and still making love to me….

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh,
I'm
the villain?”

I got up too then, went into the kitchen, and fixed my own fucking drink. I plopped back down in my chair. I was pissed. “Look. You're angry with me and you have a right to be. But I won't be played cat and mouse with. I'm sorry if you feel bad about the money, but it
is
my money, I earned it, and I am going to save it or invest it as I see fit! You were screaming you wanted a sports car! Who knows what you'd decide to want if you knew there was money for it! I'm in a tricky profession. I don't know how long this job will last.”

“Ditchwater! They love you there. Is that what you think of me? I don't think I want to be married to someone who thinks my pretty little head isn't smart enough to understand money, who can't be trusted with it! Who gets a little allowance to buy food and clothes and gas for the car and everything else!”

“You don't buy clothes out of weekly expense money! You use the charge accounts!”

“And what about my work? You used to pay me for watching your kids, but after we got married you stopped. Once you're a wife, your labor is free?”