Her Mother's Daughter (106 page)

We survived. In the fall of 1966, after a hellish year—late nights, marijuana, failing grades pulled up at the last minute—Arden went off to college. I felt it was a miracle that she got in to Cornell with her grades, but she had a high IQ and high SAT grades. Many youngsters were failing in those years, drugs were becoming rampant in the schools, and she wanted to be a poet, so maybe they judged her by less rigorous standards than, say, science majors. Before she went she was happy with me: I was buying her clothes, I was helping her pack, I drove her up to Ithaca.

Still, I breathed out when she was gone. Even the good times between us were poisoned, because I never knew what would set her off, could never forget that she could be set off, so I was always edgy with her. It is hard to live with hatred. But after she'd been gone a month or two, I convinced myself that all that was wrong was that she needed a space of her own, and college gave her that. Things would be fine in the future, I thought: because she called me regularly, she sounded cheerful, happy, there was love in her voice. And she was excited and loving when she came home for Thanksgiving and for Christmas—for a few days. Then things deteriorated—as if she went around a corner and found herself suddenly in a sharp dark place, or fell over an edge—she'd lash out and move into a morose rage, in which she took every remark addressed to her, every plan that involved her, every reference to her, or any omission of her, any plan that didn't involve her, as a slight, an attack, darts aimed at her, lethal. Then she would retire to the corners of chairs using her eyes to shoot poison darts of her own at all of us, especially me. And these states would last for days, would not end until it was time for her to leave again.

In the spring of '67 I went up to visit her at school. She stayed in my motel while I was there and we sat up late at night talking, laughing. She had gone for a diaphragm by herself, and had tried sex many times by then, each time out of desire, she said. But something always happened, she didn't know what it was, the enchantment faded—fast. She averaged two weeks with each new boy. I tried to understand this. I remembered my own high desire at eighteen, my belief that love and desire should be untrammeled, free. Still, something felt wrong. But by then I was totally intimidated by my daughter, afraid to say a critical word lest she go into one of her black moods. I didn't know this then, I couldn't have said it in those words. I was still in the place where my thinking was entirely practical—what to do about…I never examined myself, I simply tried to cope.

She didn't come home that summer. She had met a new man, Bill, and at the end of her freshman year she moved with him to a commune way out in the country. It was a small farm without electricity or running water or a toilet. There were eight other people there, some living in a main cabin, some couples in smaller ones. They made music and wrote poetry and raised vegetables. They kept goats and a cow and a horse, and ate only vegetables and cheese and bread, and smoked pot and participated in antiwar demonstrations. She wrote me long passionate philosophical letters, sometimes with a poem enclosed. She was studying wildflowers, and becoming an expert on herbal brews and how to dry flowers, and she picked up spending money by selling bouquets of dried flowers and herbal teas on a grassy corner of Ithaca.

I hoped Billy would stay home more after Arden left. Arden and he hadn't got along well for the last year or two. But he didn't. I didn't think much about it. I was immersed in my career, which was really soaring in those years, and the truth is, I was grateful for the rest, the space. It is arduous work, being a mother—you are constantly overwhelmed by the voices, needs, weeping, arguing, demands of others, you have little or no space of your own. With Arden gone and Billy away from home most weekends, there was some space, some silence in the house. There was only Franny. Toni too was quiet in those years, spending most of his time in his little room near the kitchen, typing, erasing, tearing up papers, typing again. And Billy did spend some time with Franny, he adored her. He taught her to ride her tricycle, how to tell time, and he often read to her. Franny missed Arden, who used to take her for walks and talk about trees and flowers and the look of houses and people, and make up songs about them. But she was a happy kid—she'd had four mothers, and still had three.

Arden came home for a couple of weeks at the end of the summer, but she brought this boy with her, Mike, and expected me to let them sleep together in her room. I said Mike what's-his-face had to sleep on the daybed in Toni's study. Toni was pissed at that because the boy didn't wash, he smoked pot in bed, and he smelled up Toni's study, and besides, he didn't get up until eleven and Toni couldn't work. So I told the boy he'd have to sleep on the living room couch, and even though he sneaked up to Arden's room late at night (I knew this but pretended I didn't, learning through parenthood to be a hypocrite), she was angry at my treatment of him and wouldn't speak to me…oh, it was disgusting. The two of them left in his battered car, Arden and I not speaking. Yet when she called me a month later, affectionate and light-hearted, she'd broken up with Mike, was with a boy named David, and had forgotten the whole thing….

I had become resigned to Billy's absence from home and the knowledge that he was with Brad. I couldn't speak to him about it anymore, I had such contempt for him. I couldn't get over the fact that my little prince had turned into a toad. To think I'd have a son like that! Oh, I wanted him to go to school and be a doctor if that's what he wanted. But it appalled me that he had such a slimy character. How had such a darling boy become a toady, a slimy calculating ass-kisser? Why had my sweet fiery girl turned against me so that nothing I said or did failed to arouse her rage? Like every other mother I know, I concluded all this had happened because of something I had done—or not done. In rage and guilt, I crawled further into a shell.

It turned 1968, the beginning—I know now—of a period when domestic conflict seemed just part of all the other terrible things that were happening out in the world, as if we were all experiencing an earthquake so huge that it shook the entire globe and toppled, not buildings and hillsides, but ways of life. I wasn't so attached to our traditional way of life that I fought to preserve it, but on the other hand, it was all we knew, and we didn't know what to put in its place.

That fall Billy joined Arden at Cornell. She'd come home for a few weeks at the end of that summer too, wisely alone. I drove them both up to Ithaca, vainly trying to calm the furious squabbles that erupted throughout the trip. The first one was over whose baggage occupied more space, and it set the tone for the rest:

Billy: Arden has too much gear, there's no room for mine, she has lots of stuff up there already; I'm going up for the first time! It's not fair!

Arden: I don't have that much and I need everything I'm taking. He's the one with all the junk!

Billy: Yeah, you need that guitar!

Arden: And you need all that stereo equipment! At least a guitar is a musical instrument, something artistic, whereas a stereo is just another concession to bourgeois consumerism.

Oh? cried Billy. And what was that rug she was taking back with her,
Mommy's
rug that she took right off Mommy's floor!

Arden bristled into fury then, screaming about the cold floor of her cabin, and that Billy wanted her to develop pneumonia (the same argument she'd used, more quietly, to persuade me to give her the rug). There was a long argument about where to stop for lunch, and Arden pouted and refused to eat because we could not find a vegetarian restaurant. After that no one spoke at all. Arden sat in the backseat smoking furiously, as angry with me as with Billy. Billy and I spelled each other with the driving, silent.

We planned to drop Arden off first, at the commune, and have tea and cake there. Following her directions, I turned off the main road at a place unmarked, a narrow rocky dirt road, and bumped along it steeply uphill. After a couple of winding miles, we came out into a green plateau surrounded by hills, with four or five old wooden buildings set randomly among trees. It was beautiful, I could see why Arden loved it. There was a fenced meadow for the horse, another for the goats; and in a sunny field protected by a high fence, there were corn and potatoes and cabbages and lettuce and tomatoes and green beans.

As we got out of the car, some young people drifted out of the house. They greeted Arden without enthusiasm, except David, who bounded out of the house and ran and hugged her. The others stood staring at Billy and me. Billy and I looked at them and—I could feel his feelings—drew back into ourselves. It wasn't the men's beards or the women's long tangled hair, the shabbiness, even filth, of some of their clothes, or the long print skirts the women wore, their headkerchiefs, their plain, unmade-up faces, all suggesting a kind of submissive role—no. It was the way they stood, the way they looked at us, with angry suspicion, wariness, as if they believed that we were there to destroy them or at the least, disapprove. They were embodiments of the paranoia Arden felt when she was in her black moods. Was it generational, then? Or had a group of paranoiacs simply found each other? Was Arden mentally ill?

We didn't stay long. Arden did not seem disappointed that we decided not to stay for tea. She did not kiss either of us good-bye. As we drove back down the dirt road, Billy and I looked meaningfully at each other. We both had the shivers, and once we were back on the main road, we got quite silly, joking and giggling the way we used to. We went straight to the campus and I helped him settle in his dorm room—hang drapes, make up his bed, hang some pictures on the wall. When we kissed good-bye, we clung together. All the way back to Lynbrook, I felt dead around my heart.

Billy behaved in college as he had in high school; he was quiet, hardworking, with few friends. Arden wanted nothing to do with her brother. Neither of them told me this, but I could hear it in Billy's tone of voice if Arden was mentioned when we spoke on the telephone, and hear it in hers on the (now) rare occasions when she called—I couldn't call her, there was no phone at the commune. She ignored him, she never invited him to the commune—not that he wanted to go there. And since they were in different colleges of the university, they rarely met on campus. That hurt me. It hurt him too.

Two weeks before Christmas, Toni had his thirty-first birthday and I gave him a party, invited some of our friends from the neighborhood, served dinner, champagne. He was withdrawn and abstracted all evening, and after we finished cleaning up, he told me he was going to work for a while longer. I didn't see how he could work after six glasses of champagne, but I went to bed. When I woke at three and he still wasn't in bed, I got up and went downstairs. The house was cold; the air hung cold, still, and fetid from the cooking, the smoking, the spilled drinks. It was dark, and I tripped against a chair entering the living room. Toni was hunched up in a corner of the couch, smoking.

I went over and sat beside him, put my arm around him. He put his hand over mine, draped over his shoulder. We were silent. We sat there for a long time.

“It was a nice party. It was sweet of you to have it for me,” he said. “It isn't that.”

“I know,” I said. We sat on.

“You can't solve anything now. Come to bed,” I said. And without a word he rose and followed me.

He had finished his novel a year and some months before. It was good, I thought it was good, I thought it was
very
good, and he did too, so far as he could judge his own work. He probably thought it was a masterpiece. And who knows? Maybe it was. I had inquired about agents among my journalist friends, and he sent it to a man named Jay Waxman who was reputed to have excellent taste. Jay was enthusiastic about it, but it had been making the rounds of publishers ever since. When Jay first took it, Toni was elated—Jay's enthusiasm fired his own: he was sure he'd be published and acclaimed in mere months. But the novel plodded from office to office, and he sat waiting for the phone to ring, and he lost heart. One day he got up wearily and went into his study and closed the door. Every day after that he went religiously to his study; there would be a furious spate of typing, then a palpable silence. Three hours later he could come out angry at a noise, an event (garbage collection, a neighbor at the back door) that kept him from concentrating. He would remain sullen and unspeaking for an hour or more afterward.

After some weeks of this, he stopped trying to write, and spent his days in the living room reading men's “adventure” and Western magazines. He bought them by armfuls. Research, I thought. Despair. Soon he returned to his study and was clacking away on the old noisy portable Royal that he'd had since college. He told me he was writing stories, but he did not seem cheerful and did not offer to show them to me. Finally I asked him what he was writing.

“Trash,” he said bitterly. “If I can't sell my novel, I'll sell trash. I don't care.”

But he didn't seem able to sell “trash” either.

Then—it was three days after his thirty-first birthday, three days after his bad night (was it suicidal? Had he thought of dying, or just of leaving me?), Toni's novel was accepted by a New York publisher. And while he was still elated by that, he got a phone call from
He-Man,
one of the magazines he'd been submitting stories to: they loved his work, were going to publish the story he'd sent them, and wanted more.

He floated. He walked through a doorway into the Big Time. When I suggested that achieving a degree of worldly success did not make you a different person (it hadn't me. Or had it?), he looked at me as if I was crazy. He began to go into the city regularly—for lunch with his editor in an East Side restaurant, for lunch with Jay in an East Side restaurant, for lunch with the editors of
He-Man.
Jay was sending his stories to film agents, and that excited him more than anything. He talked wildly about what he would buy with the money he was earning. The stories—he sold five of them in three months—each earned him more than the novel that had taken five years of his young life to complete. I read only one. He snatched the pages out of my hand after I'd finished reading it, before I had a chance to say a word. He snarled: “So it's crap! So what! It sells! You think what you do is so exalted?”