Her Mother's Daughter (118 page)

I remembered feeling tense, my stomach tight every afternoon as I walked home from school, never knowing what mood Mommy would be in, whether she'd be angry or not…. Is that how Franny feels?

Ah god.

What is the matter with me?

I thought I had reconciled myself to being what I am. And after all I'm fortunate. I
do
have Franny and she's wonderful and healthy and cute; and these days I don't even worry about money anymore. Offers have been flooding in ever since the show and the
Woman
series; and it is for the kind of thing I love to do. I have more work than I can take and I can charge top rates. I'm making three times what I earned at
World.
I'm really now what people call successful, I have
money,
money enough to buy Mom that mink coat I dreamed of getting her—too late. Now there is nothing she wants. The money sits. I should spend some of it. Fix this place up, maybe. But I don't have the energy.

The school term is almost over. I have to make up something to do, make up a life. I have an assignment to photograph a computer plant in California for an investment brochure. Boring, but much money, five times as much as I earned on the
Woman
job, women's things never pay, women have no money. There's no rush on this, so maybe I'll push it to the end of the month when school is out and take Franny with me and send the contacts back and go on to Mexico. She'd love the Yucatan, pyramids in the jungle, turquoise waters. It would be nice for her. And who knows? Maybe I'll get some pleasure from it.

AUGUST
30, 1978. Spent an evening with Joy. Out on Long Island to see Mother, who is mad as hell at life and everyone around her, but so grateful for a visit from me that I feel guilty I go so rarely. But it's depressing to be out there. They keep all the doors and windows shut, the air conditioners running, there's no air. They draw the blinds and drapes the minute it starts to get dark, close everything in. The two of them move silently around the stuffy house, encased by it like old tortoises in their dark prisons, pretending to a world of outer threats that they are rocks.

Mother's day: She gets up around eight, shuffles into the kitchen where Dad has made coffee and squeezed orange juice for her. She slumps into her chair, sips her juice, accepts a piece of toast which she breaks into tiny pieces as if she were not going to eat the whole slice. She butters each fragment, spreads a little marmalade on it, and slowly chews it. Her teeth are bothering her, she has continual trouble with her false teeth. Still, she eats almost all the pieces.

After breakfast, she helps Dad clean up the kitchen, and gets out the vegetable she intends to serve at dinner, peels it and sets it in cold water. Then, saying nothing to anyone, she disappears. She has gone back to bed. She gets up again around eleven and goes into the kitchen and peels the potatoes or a second vegetable for dinner and sets it in cold water.

Then, if the day is fair, she dresses and she and Dad go out for lunch and a little shopping. Each purchase requires a day to itself. One day they might go to buy new batteries for her hearing aid; on another they might drive up to the farm stand in Smithtown to buy some vegetables; on a third they might drive all the way out to Ronkonkoma, where a Polish butcher sells homemade kielbasa. On rare occasions, they will drive into Nassau, to the Five Towns, where there is a shop that sells high-fashion clothes at reduced prices. She always returns from these expeditions in a foul mood, on the verge of tears, because nothing fits her anymore, nothing looks good on her.

When it is raining or cold or snowing, she dresses and makes some lunch for them—scrambled eggs, grilled cheese sandwiches, tuna fish. Then she goes out to the porch and sits there looking out, doing nothing, for hours. Or some days she will have a project—to make a pot of soup the long careful traditional way, or a pot of stuffed cabbage to be eaten that night and frozen in small containers that hold just enough for the two of them. They eat little now.

But when they come back from an outing, or if she has cooked, or even if she has done nothing, around four o'clock she is exhausted and goes to bed. She sleeps for an hour or two, gets up and while she finishes the preparations for dinner, she sips a weak scotch and water. They eat on trays in the TV room, watching the news. Ed cleans up, she helps. She sits in front of TV for another hour or two, and goes to bed for the night. She no longer smokes.

Dad tries to keep busy. He doesn't work away from home anymore, she is afraid to be alone. He will not leave the house without her. When she sleeps, he finds things to do, cracks that need caulking, fixtures that need polishing, bushes that need pruning. He is nervous and restless, he tries to read but only flips through pages and sometimes falls asleep in the rocker. He waits for her to get up again, and is relieved when she does, but nothing changes. They speak little, but his eyes thirst for her. He thinks only of her, only of her.

I tried to cheer her up. I chatted all one night and she managed to stay up past midnight, she was lively and curious; the next morning Franny showed her her photographs. That afternoon we played Chinese checkers for a couple of hours, and I took them out to dinner that night. She doesn't complain about the restaurant, no matter how bad it is, if she has chosen it. When we returned, she asked me to help her decide where to hang some photographs I'd had framed for her. She'd been withdrawn and surly all afternoon, and barely livened up even for dinner. We talked about places, and decided on the TV room. Dad was sent for tape, hammer, hooks, and agreeably fetched them, looked eagerly toward her. “Where do you want them, Belle?” he asked in that loving solicitous tone that sets her off so dependably. “Oh, I don't know, Ed!” she snapped, and I jumped up and pointed to the height. We went through the ritual—stepping back, how is that? Too high? A little to the right? and finally Dad was able to mark the height. Then he measured carefully for centering. He takes a lot of time. He is extremely precise. He does a beautiful job. But Mom was tired, or bored, or irritable, whatever, and she sighed irritably, “All right, Ed, you're not hanging a chandelier!” and he expostulated, sputtered, “Well, I have to center it, I can't just hang it anywhere!” He murmured further, defending himself under his breath. He tried to hurry, and as he went to hammer in the hook, it slipped from his fingers, it fell, it rolled, and he burst out cursing, “Goddamn it to hell, goddamn nail, goddamn, sh—sh—!”

Shocking. I stood up and went to him, I put my arm across his back, I said, very calmly, “It's all right, Dad, we'll find it.” I bent down with him searching for the tiny nail, stroking him with one hand all the while. There were tears in his eyes.

By then I was exhausted too—from the pain of seeing her like that, him like that. I had nothing left to offer. I couldn't stand any more. The next day I drove up to Joy's. I haven't spent time with her alone in several years, and we had a lot to catch up on—as we both said when we greeted each other, determinedly cheery as ever. She is home, on vacation.

She is still living in the apartment, which looks cute now; she has been able to spend some time on it. When she finished college, she got a better-paying job, still local so she'd be near the children, who were nearing college age but still needed her presence, she felt. College was going to be a problem: Justin was unwilling to contribute toward the kids' education, but he earned a decent salary, so they were not qualified for financial aid. They would probably not have gone if Joy had not been utterly determined that they should. She unhesitatingly admits she drove the kids so they would be able to get scholarships.

“I don't care what they say about pressuring kids! They had to, they had to! I told them, do you want to work in a garage, be a waitress all your life? If not,
WORK!”

How is it her children still love her so much?

They got into good schools, they got scholarships, but even so, the expense was too much for Joy's woman's wages. So she wrote Amy, who sent checks whenever she could. It was not easy for Amy either; her husband had been retired for years, and although they were well-to-do, James Selby, true father of his son, was incredibly mean with money.

Years ago, late at night when we were a little high and silly, Joy and I would make up stories about James dying. He would die and leave his large estate to Amy; she'd get out of Iowa and have some fun. We invented wonderful lives for Amy the widow—we had her in rickshaws in the Orient, logging in Alaska, spending winters in Monaco, and falling in love with a prince. Small p. But it was Amy who died first, in 1976, of pancreatic cancer, a cruelly painful way to go. The next year James remarried, a woman in her forties—he was close to eighty—who will no doubt inherit the lot.

“There's no fucking justice, An,” Joy said, frowning.

I was shocked by her language. Joy never used to talk like that.

Joy didn't hear about Amy's death until a month afterward, when James finally wrote her.

“Justin, the son of a bitch, could have let the kids know their grandmother had died, couldn't he?” Her face was thin, ravaged. She was starting to get grey. Well, she was forty-four. I'd blown up into a moonface, Joy had burned away to a wand, charred and electric. “But I couldn't have afforded to fly out for the funeral anyway, and besides, Justin would have been there….” She fished for a cigarette, then suddenly threw the pack away from her. “Damn! Why don't I stop? When I look at Mother…Oh!” She lay her hands beside her on the chair. Her fists were clenched tightly. Her voice was thick with phlegm. “You know, Amy flew out here to see me once, years ago.”

“I remember.”

“I told you? Did I tell you what she said?”

“Generally. Something about a wife having to be solid and strong and uphold her husband in everything no matter what he was like. Duty, devotion, that sort of thing.”

“Yes.” She pondered, then looked up, a sweet child's face again for a moment, the Joy I remembered. Then the moment passed—an aged child's face it was. “An, do you think she was right? I think about it, I wonder about that a lot.”

“No, of course not! She was lovely, you could see her character on her face, and she was sweet, I remember her although I only met her once, at your wedding. But her way of thinking—well, she was trained in it, she believed in it, but it seems crazy to me. I mean, what is the reason women are supposed to sacrifice their own lives—you know, to
not
say what they think and
not
argue for what they want and believe—why should they? Why, what is the reason they are supposed to support men in whatever men want to do? It's a kind of slavery.”

“She kept her family together.” She raised her hand to wipe her nose with a tissue, lowered it mechanically, a plebe eating square meals. Dull phlegmy voice, a tissue crumpled into a ball in her tense fist.

“Well, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. It's true her husband didn't leave her, her son still phones on Christmas Day. But god knows what James was doing all those years, she may have been dutiful but he didn't treat her well from what you say, and he sure didn't wait long to remarry. More important, I wonder how he was to her when she was sick, when she was dying. …

“But the other way of looking at it is to see that her submission enabled her husband to go on being the bastard he is, and maybe even become a worse one. It also gave her son an example he has not seen any reason not to follow. After all, you've kept your family together too.”

“I've paid a horrible price. I'd hate to tell you how my life has been these past ten years. You know,” she gave a short hard laugh, “it's really charming. I spend the first fifteen years of my marriage with Justin a nervous wreck, I was broken out all over, all over my body, I had a bad stomach, I was so tense, well I was miserable, I see that now…so I leave him. Great, huh? So then I spend the last ten years in hell, worrying about the kids, about money, about how we're going to survive.
If
we were going to survive! The only good thing about the last ten years is that Justin wasn't in them.

“I'm forty-four years old and I don't know anything. I don't know what's right or wrong, what's smart or stupid. I feel like a blind person. Whose life was worse, Amy's or mine? See, she said—I've never forgotten it—she said, ‘Joy, dear girl, this world belongs to men. Women are here only on sufferance. It is essential that you recognize this. I urge you to do your duty as a wife, not because I believe that it is right that you do so, but because I believe it is necessary. If you do your duty, then no matter what Justin is or does, he will respect that. You have the right, and he knows it. And if he tries to leave you, or refuses you support, the law will support you. But if you abandon Justin—well, he is my son and I love him, but he is very like his father, and I know…I know,' her voice broke then, and she was so dignified, so controlled, I was really shocked, ‘I tried to raise him differently, he was a sweet little boy, but I don't know what happened, it must be the nature of the male ….”

“She stopped to blow her nose and clear her throat, she had a lace-edged handkerchief, I remember that, I couldn't get over that, I don't even own a handkerchief. It was blued and ironed and everything! That's what she did, that's what was in her life….”

“Like Mother.”

“Even Mother doesn't blue her handkerchiefs anymore. She washes and irons them, but she doesn't blue them.”

I laughed. “You're right.”

“Anyway, after a while she continued, she said, ‘I don't know exactly what he will do but I am sure he will make you suffer. I don't know exactly how because I never took such a risk. But my vision, my nightmare—is you and the children penniless, homeless, in desperation.'

“I was crying by then, and she came over and put her arm around me. ‘I hope that will not happen. I love you and I adore my grandchildren,' and she started to cry again. ‘And I sense I will not be allowed to see much of them if you and Justin—if you cannot make it up. But if you can't,' and by then she was sobbing, ‘let me know. Write me. I always see the mail first in the morning, even when James is home. I can help you, a little, and I will. I have my own little nest egg. I may seem totally subservient to you…'”