Her Mother's Daughter (112 page)

I summoned up what heart I had and suggested they hold the wedding at Grandma and Grandpa's house out on Long Island. There was a broad lawn, water, it was lovely there, we could have a tent, maybe we could rent rowboats. Oooooh! That would be beautiful, would I help plan it, could she come down and stay with me next month to prepare? And would I check with Grandma to see if it was okay? I said I knew it would be okay but of course I'd call them. Fine: how much did I think it would cost? She and Jacob had only $350 in the bank, and now that I was out of work…Did I think Daddy would pay for it? That, I said firmly, she would have to discuss with him.

After that conversation—which occurred late in the evening—I dragged myself to bed and lay there unable to sleep, unable to think, feeling more alone than I had at any time in my life. Around eleven, I got up and dialed Billy. I hadn't called him yet. I don't know why. I kept putting it off. I wasn't worried about calling him late, I knew he studied every night past midnight even in summer school. But it happened I got him on a bad night—he was studying for an exam in organic chemistry and was tense. So I didn't tell him what had happened, I said I was just calling to say hello and I got off the phone quickly. He sounded really worried and I asked him to call and let me know how he did on the exam. He didn't call.

Days I hustled: I called people at photography agencies, ad agencies, travel magazines, even food and fashion magazines, I met them for lunches, dinners, drinks, coffee, I started to gain weight in my poverty. I picked up an occasional assignment, enough to keep me going if I kept on hustling. It was exhausting, but staff positions were not to be found. I spent many days sitting in the apartment. My office had never been so neat. I clipped and filed and catalogued things that had been sitting in manila folders for years. When I finished arranging my professional photographs, I started on the family pictures. There were hundreds of them. And there were boxes of memorabilia, junk, the tawdry remnants of the past that one cannot part with. I began to sort those too.

It was then that I began to keep a notebook. I'd kept journals when I first started to work as a photographer, but after a few years, they'd dwindled into mere expense accounts. This was different. It was a record of…what? An arrangement of thoughts. Paragraphs, not necessarily related to each other, in no particular order…a photograph album arranged randomly….

Franny was nine, which seemed to be a traumatic age for females in my family. My mother was nine when her father died; when I was nine, I fell in love with my father and my mother wooed me away from him with her stories, making me her confidante, then killed him for me with those stories. And Arden was nine when Brad and I divorced.

Franny—oh Franny was a brave spirit, she tried to comfort me. She was—like me—very adult at nine, but I remembered how I hid the child I was then. I tried to find ways to let her be a child. It didn't come easy for her. Nor was I able in any consistent way to be the mommy so she could be the baby. I had lost heart. I was a walking zombie. Something I know about sickness—it is utterly self-engrossed.

Franny was mature enough that I could count on her to evaluate fairly the women we hired when we first moved to Manhattan and lost Mrs. Czepiel. Together we had found the perfect person—she was Alaia Registrando from Grenada. She was a bit slovenly in the house (so was I), but she possessed an ample lap, a large laugh, and an accepting nature. And she was reliable. To find her was like finding a gift, like finding Pani many years before. I could relax, rest myself in the knowledge of her capacity. What would happen to the world, I wondered, when women were all like me and there were no more Alaias. Or Panie.

Franny went to a private school a few blocks from our apartment. Toni paid for it. He could afford it—he was a great success in Hollywood then, in demand—his movie had been a hit. I often wondered how he behaved out there. He couldn't have been the Toni I knew, delicate and tentative and sweet, and survived out there—could he? He called when he heard about
World,
offering condolences with a hearty assurance that I would be fine, I'd land on my feet, I always did. That's what everyone said. He went further, though: he said, in a swaggering voice, that if I needed help, I had only to let him know. It wasn't the offer, it was the tone that offended me. I countered with a tone as cold and haughty as I could manage, reminding him that I had bank accounts and investments of my own and would not need his help, thank you very much. There was a certain self-righteousness in
my
tone. You see? I was saying, you see how prescient I was when I invested my money and concealed it from you? Everything I expected has come to pass: you have left me, and left me with a child to support, the child you swore to care for always; and now I am out of work. Then I bit my tongue. I didn't really have that much—and I had burned a bridge, which someday I might regret. But I couldn't have done it—taken money from a swaggerer. Even if he was still legally my husband. Never. I left the phone and went into the kitchen to make myself some tea. My hands were trembling. I told myself what everyone else told me—that I would be all right, that I would survive.

And I stood there in the kitchen gazing out the window at the back wall of another apartment building, sipping tea, and it struck me with some force that I was a peculiar person, and had been, all my life. Things that seemed large, even absolute to other people were utterly unreal to me. Like cultural rules about sex; or the rules of the institution of marriage; or rules about the proper relation of parent and child. I didn't know if any of those rules were written down anywhere, part of a code, but they were binding and powerful for most people. But I had always had trouble remembering that I was not supposed to feel free about my feelings, about desire; and being married or not being married seemed to me a state of mind. I'd only been married once, according to my state of mind, and Toni was no more my husband now than Brad was, even though a piece of paper said he was. And I wondered if my troubles had come to me because I had ignored the rules.

Grant called often. He still had a job, and once I moved to the city and let him come to the apartment to pick me up, he understood that however I had been bound before, I was no longer. We had dinner, we went to some plays. He talked about marriage. But…oh, I don't know…. I didn't feel the same way about him, or maybe it wasn't him, maybe I didn't feel the same way about myself. Thing was, he was fine as a lover—I enjoyed his moony sensitivity, his eloquent depression, his alienated stance. I loved, when we were in a foreign place, to hear him talk about things as if he were a resident of the moon, looking down on a psychotic planet. His attitudes seemed utterly right. Things were, as they say, bad all over. The world seemed to reflect his personal state, his depression seemed justified—all the assassinations, the war, My Lai. Grant was sent to My Lai to do a story. Of course there was nothing there—some rubble, the dirt, the wind. Like Theresienstadt, which I photographed, barely able to see through the lens which reflected only my own damp eyelashes: some skeletons of barracks and the spread of brown plains, the wind…No sword shining high in the sun as testimony that God had seen and would remember. No god, no memory. All of that bore in on me when my own personal world fell apart. I couldn't even remember the girl I'd been, the girl I saw in my early journals, full of enthusiasm and energy, certain that her country and her government were benevolent, that happiness was part of what people could expect from life.

But if Grant made a wonderful wry feeling lover—not so great in the sack, of course—he would be impossible as a husband. Who could live with that depression day by day? The same hopeless shrug he took to My Lai would be brought to the washing machine when it broke down, a crying child, to my despair about my children…. Besides, I had no desire to marry again. Why should I? What did I need from it? Only financial security, and it was not possible for me to marry for that. It wasn't my principles, it was my heart that kept me from doing that.

So I'd see him once in a while, and we even went to bed occasionally, but I felt nothing at all. Little by little, I stopped seeing him. He got married a year later, suddenly, to someone he'd just met. I didn't care. I didn't feel anything.

My life was hustling, an occasional assignment, Alaia, and Franny. Franny would think up things for us to do together. She'd pore over the newspaper searching for a ballet or a movie or a play she might enjoy and I could tolerate. She suggested walks and bike rides, a trip to the zoo. I always hated zoos. I saw in her the same despair I'd felt as a child, as a young woman, felt still if truth be told, trying to get my mother to give over her clutched melancholy, her hopelessness. At the same time I felt just like my mother, inconsolable. And I saw our inconsolability—mine, hers, her mother's before her, as the natural consequence of being alive for forty years as a woman. It was inevitable. The only choice was to feel it or not feel it, admit it or not.

Still, I didn't want to engender these feelings in Franny, so I pretended to be cheered up. Her efforts touched me as much as anything could touch me. She must have known—well, now I know she knew—that nothing could touch my cold hard core of sorrow, but she kept trying, and I kept loving her, caressing her sweet nine-year-old cheeks, that face full of yearning…. But the world humped onward in its stumbling progress toward its termination, and I slumped every day further toward my own.

“It's easy to do that,” Clara swoops. “Blame your depression on the world. Why not try your mother?”

“Oh, please,” I say, laying down my fork. “If you get on that again, I'm going to get up and leave this restaurant.”

Her eyes fill with tears. “I'm trying to save you!”

“Do I call you Jesus or Adonai?”

She paled, fell silent.

“Sorry.”

She looked up at me, damp-eyed. “I love you,” she said.

We survived. All of us. They were hard years. Joy lost everything. Justin eventually followed through on his threat, and filed for divorce on grounds of abandonment. He was punitive about the child support. What else is new? Is it any wonder so many women believe women must insist on virginity and outlaw abortion, in order to force men into marriage and support of their families? But it is incomprehensible to me, one of the world's great mysteries, why men don't care about their children. But men, many men as I've known—known well, because all kinds of truths are uttered over the pillow—men themselves are a mystery to me. How can they get satisfaction from the games they play? How can they enjoy being violent, aggressive, and so utterly isolated?

Of course, I'm isolated myself now. Like a man I put all my worth into my career, and when I lost it, I lost everything. I lived like a man and I guess I'll die like one.

Anyway, Justin sent Joy two hundred dollars a month to raise three kids, offering her the alternative of his taking the kids and raising them.

“Look at him and tell me if any sane person would put helpless children in his hands! He'd teach them to be robots, just like him!” she raved.

We saw each other frequently until I moved to the city, we became friends. Sort of. I don't think I was a good friend to anyone then, not to her or to Mother or to my women friends in the old neighborhood, even though after
World
folded, I saw them regularly. I knew what was happening in people's lives, I told them what was happening in mine, if anything. But sometimes when people called and said how's your life, I'd say what life? Yet I was alive, I must have experienced something.

Joy moved into an apartment complex in Huntington—the rents were high there, but she was adamant about giving her kids a sense of permanence. I don't know how they got through those years. Mom and Dad helped her, and she had friends by then, who did what they could. She did not finish college until 1973. Her kids were giving her problems too—the high school was rife with drugs and Jonathan had been experimenting with them, well, at least with marijuana and mescaline. And Jenny was doing poorly in school. Joy's laugh grew more brittle. But she still laughed. That was more than I did.

And my mother was—what was it in those years? Was that when she told me she was going blind? Or when the arthritis got more severe? Or when she developed gout and had to stay on a rigid diet which curtailed her only remaining pleasure? She was miserable, got more miserable as the years stretched out. She lamented. I listened to everything as if between it and me lay the roar of the sea, as if I heard it over a transatlantic line with rhythmic rushes of static that sounded like wire being brushed by the tides back and forth, back and forth across the ocean floor.

My life ended when I was forty. Oh, I went on breathing and drinking coffee and preferring stew to steak. I even, sometimes, wanted things—a new pair of safari pants with lots of pockets, a neat pair of walking shoes. Once, when I was very broke, I bought a beautiful little velvet evening purse in an antique shop. I didn't need it, I had nowhere to carry it, it was anyway too small, but I bought it, I had to buy it. But wanting was faint in me, the weak cry of a sick infant, a mewling, easily ignored, easily stifled. It was a memory, a habit.

I would sit up at night—why sleep? There was nothing to get up for the next day—and try to recall the passions that had driven me. But I could recall only
facts,
not the feelings of things—my passion to save my children,
save
them from Brad's malignity, for instance. I could recall protecting my kids, I could remember my sense that they were threatened, my belief that I needed to embrace them to carry them away to someplace safe warm safe loving…. I recalled that I had felt envy in the years of my youth when I heard about someone who was going to travel abroad, or had gone to the theater, or was having a show of their photographs. The most difficult things to remember were the feeling of loving, the conviction that I was loved; and the overwhelming possession of passionate sensuality. I could recall the burning heat in my groin, the pulsing of blood down my thighs, up to my breasts, the sense that if I did not have the person who was standing there (oh, beautiful!) I would die. But I could no longer get hold of those feelings—the clutch of envy, the unbearable pulsations of desire, hollow hungry devouring
WANT
—they receded tantalizingly like the events of a dream the next morning. Only I knew
about
them the way you know about crops and industry in a country you have visited for twenty-four hours in the middle of a long journey.