Her Mother's Daughter (103 page)

“
My
kids?” I roared. “You can cash checks whenever you want, what is this about an allowance, for all I know you've been cashing checks for more than you need and socking money away in a bank account of your own all these years! You had one when we got married, I never asked you about it, I didn't demand to know what you had!”

“You're damn right. And I have. Been socking money away. Whatever was left over at the end of the week. All these years. Just like a housewife.”

“You bastard!” Then I laughed. “How much do you have?” I asked, wiping my eyes.

“Not as much as you.” He grinned. “But I have got twelve hundred dollars.”

“Oh, you bastard,” I moaned, still laughing.

We sat smiling at each other across the room for a moment until he recalled his other grievance. “So how many have there been?—lovers. Do you screw everyplace you go? Are you a regular little whore?”

“Don't you dare call me names, Antoni Nowak, I won't stand for it! I do what I do, I live as I live, I like living that way! I've never pretended to be anything but what I am!”

“And that makes it all okay?”

“Toni, do I ever check up on what you're doing? Do I ever ask you to account for your time? You could be having affairs with all the women on the block for all I know.”

“You forget the kids,” he lashed out. “
Your
kids. And yes, they are
your
kids. They're not mine.”

This really hurt. “You love them!” I cried, and blew my nose.

“Whether I love them or not, kids are the greatest impediment to fucking around ever invented. That's why guys who screw around all the time when they're away from home can leave home with total impunity—they know their wives can't do fuck-all because the kids are there, there, there!”

I peered over my handkerchief. “Sounds like you've felt the itch.”

“Whether I have or not, I haven't acted on it. I can't. Couldn't. Even if I wanted to. But I
didn't
want to, damn you!” Now his nose was full, his voice was thick. “I love you, I've loved you so much, I couldn't even think about another woman, no one else ever swam into my eyes the way you did.”

Silence.

I thought about Grant. I loved him, I couldn't bear to give him up. I didn't want to give up spontaneous sex either. It was
important
to me. I couldn't explain this to anyone. It was so contrary to the accepted code of morals for women, especially for a married woman…yet I knew that if I had to give it up I would not just feel deprived but would dwindle into grey aridity, I would die. “I'm really sorry,” I said.

He sighed and lighted another cigarette. “I don't know what to do.” He raised his eyes to mine. “I suppose it would be useless to ask you to give it up.”

“I could try. But if I didn't succeed, I'd feel guilty and angry at you. And if I did, I'd hate you for it. I really would. I don't know if I could forgive you.” I blew my nose again.

“I guess we could pretend we had one of those open marriages, where both people do what they want,” he said tentatively.

My heart jumped right up in my chest: a way out? “What do you mean
pretend
?”

He leaped then, his small muscular body tight as a fist, and flailed out at the coffee table in front of him, sending everything on it to the floor with a huge crash.
“Pretend
because I won't be doing it and you will!
Pretend
because I, one, don't want to do it, and two, can't get away from the kids in order to do it!”

“My kids are hardly ever here. It's
your
kid who is. The one you wanted. The one you swore you'd take care of. Don't lay that on me!”

He fell back onto the couch. He was white and drained. I got up and went over to him. His face pained me. I sat beside him, I put my hands on his cheeks, I kissed his forehead.

“Ah, Toni, I'm sorry I am the way I am. I'm sorry I hurt you. I do love you.”

He started to cry. “When I think about the way you acted seven years ago, how jealous you were, how possessive. I thought you adored me!”

I fell away from him. “Jealous! Possessive! Me? What are you talking about?”

“One night Drew Linden was here, don't you remember? Your friend, with that pompous asshole husband, Courtney. They moved. You said she was putting the make on me and I was eating it up. Don't you remember? And you cried, and you said if I ever had an affair with her it would kill you. Don't you even fucking
remember?”

I hadn't. I did now. Vaguely. “I cried? I asked you not to have an affair with her?” That part was gone. I remembered them making goo-goo eyes at each other all night, and her kicking his foot under the table, I remembered my disgust. Not the rest.

“Oh, Anastasia,” Toni wept.

We made it up. I don't know how, it wasn't through words, it was through our bodies, which still clung to each other apart from our wills. And, I suppose, Toni was trapped. He adored Franny, he couldn't bear to leave her, but what would he do, how could he leave and take her with him? He couldn't move. And his novel was nearly finished, and it was very good, he knew that, and he'd have trouble finishing it if he went out and got a job to make himself independent of me. He was in the situation of a married woman with children. And I, god help me, was in the situation of a man.

I went to visit Mother. Toni's father had a heart attack and he went out to Dayton for a few days. I wasn't on assignment, and the kids were on vacation, so I packed us all in the car one summer morning, and drove out to Suffolk prepared to stay a couple of days. I saw my mother rarely and the kids liked to go there, it was near the beach and they could play croquet on the lawn and eat Grandma's wonderful meals. Every night Mother and I stayed up late and talked.

I asked her about her life, over and over, asked her for stories I'd heard many times before: how her father threw the creamed spinach, how she'd known how to cook without being taught, how she'd worked in the box factory, how she had been sent home from school the first day because she couldn't speak English. Her stories came late at night, after we'd both had quite a few drinks, when she was willing to go back into the place where those stories were buried, the place where the tears were.

But early in the evening, she would ask me and I would tell her everything about my life. She was avid for stories about my “social life.” She loved hearing about my travels, any compliments I'd received, anything at all that could pass for a triumph, and the men in my life, especially Grant. She always asked after Grant, and always in an approving tone of voice. I could see she hoped I'd divorce Toni and marry Grant—he was older and had a prestigious job, she thought he must have money; in any case he'd have more than Toni.

One night—I'd been there a couple of nights—we watched the evening news and there was a story about Elizabeth Taylor: she was marrying number, oh, I don't remember, one of her many husbands, and I said, “I wonder why she marries them. She must be a romantic, she believes in marriage.”

“She lives like a man,” Mother pronounced.

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “Like a man. Men aren't satisfied with one woman, they want more, more, more. They always want another woman.” She turned to me. “Like you.
You
live like a man.”

I had been feeling bad about my character, but when she said that, everything became clear to me. I was built, constituted, the way men were. I couldn't help my sexual urge, it was built-in. And like men, I was clogged and tied down by the domestic, the day-to-day. I wanted freedom, total freedom. Maybe everybody did, women as well as men. Maybe it wasn't that I was like a man, but that only men were permitted to live out their desires. I turned to my mother.

“Would you have liked that? To live that way?”

She shrugged. “How would I know? I always lived like a woman.”

“So how am I different from you?”

“Oh, you!” She slapped at me in the air.

“Well?” I was amused.

“You,” she sighed, “you always wanted everything.”

“Well, how about you? Would you have liked to live like that?”

She tilted her head; she inclined her eyebrows; was there a tinge of a fraction of a glint in her eye? “Oh, I don't know, Anastasia,” she said in that voice that told me I'd gone as far as she'd let me—any further and I'd get the disgusted, “Oh, Anastasia!” I was so used to, and she'd get up and go to bed, abandoning me to my questions. I dropped the subject.

Driving home the next day I kept imagining what she would have been like if she'd been sexually free—and what it would have been like to have a mother like that. On the whole, I decided, it would have been good for her but not for us. Situations like this make me wonder about nature's economy: why had nature planted so much desire in us if it harmed our children.
Did
it harm our children? I didn't consider the effect of my behavior on my children, because, after all, they knew nothing about it, they never had to witness it.

My problem with Billy started sometime during his last two years of high school—1967, 1968, around then. Billy worked hard, he had to, because he wanted to get into medical school: he had to do well at calculus, physics, organic chemistry, subjects that required study. He had few friends. Several afternoons a week a boy in his class who lived near us would walk home from school with him and they'd throw some baskets in our hoop for an hour or two; and sometimes they'd go to a movie on a Friday night. But he didn't hang out with a crowd the way other boys did, and he never dated. I worried about him a little, but remembered being shy and unsexual in high school myself, so I told myself to wait and not to worry.

He was still close to me, although not as close as he had been. Billy was always my baby. That was, perhaps, an accident. Brad had more tolerance for the girl than for the boy, and when he was kind or playful, it was always with Arden. And his parents had not had a daughter and had wanted one—so they lavished attention on her, at least when she was little. And my mother seemed only to
see
girls, boys somehow didn't really exist for her. So no one paid much attention to poor Billy, and I tried to make up for that, picking him up, holding him, nuzzling him, kissing him more than I did Arden. I tried to make him feel as loved as I knew she already felt. Or thought I did.

Oh god.

Anyway, he
belonged
to me,
adhered
to me in a special way. He wanted to go with me no matter where I was going: a trip to the supermarket with me was for him a happy occasion, and when we walked together we had a closeness hard to describe—as if there were only one will, one heart between us, as if whatever I said or did or wanted was his most fervent wish.

It was when he entered puberty that things began to change. When his voice began to crack and deepen. He'd always been a sore loser at chess, but now he played it in a savage way, almost as if he hated Toni, whom he had loved the year before. He didn't stop going to the supermarket with me, or going shopping and out to lunch together on days when Toni was immersed in work; but when we were together there was a certain strain in his face and body, a self-consciousness. I could feel him wanting to touch me as he had as a child, to hold my hand, to lay his head against my body, to throw his arms around my waist—but restraining himself. I missed the old ease, the innocence. I missed my baby, my sweet good boy, my darling. But I knew it was right, even necessary, that he should move away from me a bit. I even—I could stab myself remembering this—urged him to get to know his father better. For a long time, he made no such move. He went on seeing Brad once every week or two, usually having dinner with him, with Arden or alone, on a Tuesday night. (Tuesday was a bad television night, the kids said. Maybe Brad thought so too.)

It must have been near the end of his junior year when he told me his father had offered him a summer job. Real estate boomed in the spring and summer, they always needed people. Billy could help out with the paperwork, Brad said, and answer the telephones when the salesmen were all out. He could learn about the business.

“Why should you need that?” I bristled. “You're going to be a doctor, not a real-estate salesman!”

Something inside of him shriveled at my tone, I could see it on his face. “Med school's expensive, Mom. I just want to earn some money,” he mumbled.

Still, I couldn't be gracious about it. I didn't like it, I didn't want it. But I had nothing better to propose. So I mumbled consent, and that summer I hardly ever saw Billy. He grew golden from playing golf with his father mornings—Brad even bought him his own clubs. Trying to turn him into himself just as his father did to him, I thought, and set my teeth. Of course I knew Brad wanted him to go to medical school, was enormously proud that he wanted to be a doctor, everyone wanted their sons to be doctors in those days, I don't know why except doctors made a lot of money, but I couldn't get over the feeling that Brad wanted to…brainwash him…to wean him away from me…to turn him into…a
Republican.

Brad opened a bank account for Billy, and one day he showed me his passbook—he'd saved most of what he'd earned over the summer and had nearly a thousand dollars in the account.

“You've earned that much? What is he paying you in, gold bars?”

“Oh, Mom.” He slumped. I went up behind him and put my arms around his waist. I lay my head against his back. “Don't pay any attention to me, honey. I'm just jealous.” He turned around and put his arms around me. He pulled my body against his. “Don't be, Mom.”

“I'm just stupid, I guess. I keep feeling he's trying to turn you into him, and I don't want that to happen.”

“It can't, Mom,” he said quietly but with such conviction that I couldn't doubt it. “He's my
father,
Mom. I don't want to be like him, I see what he is. But I love him.”