Her Mother's Daughter (123 page)

“A lot of good
that
did me!”

“You were always too angry with him. Probably because he denied that thing, that closeness.”

Her eyes filled with tears then, and I fell silent. She sat gazing over the Gulf. A few tears streamed down her cheeks. She wiped them away with her hand, like a child (twisting my heart). She blew her nose and I spoke again.

“But that's chemical, or biological, or who knows? maybe it's sexual. Maybe Freud was right. But it isn't true that I love Billy more than you. It was never true.”

She twisted her mouth.

“You made things hard. Maybe you don't remember. You were jealous of my relationship with Toni….” (And I thought it was Toni she was jealous of.) “The bastard!”

“And maybe I didn't handle things as well as I could. I didn't know what to do, that's the truth. But it's broken my heart that I lost you. I never wanted that….”

She jumped up suddenly. “Want some wine?”

I nodded and she went indoors. She came out with two glasses, but set hers down on the table and began to pace the deck, staring out at the water, the woods around us, the water again. She turned around, her hands behind her leaning on the railing, and looked at me with cold eyes.

“I came down here to take care of you.”

“Arden! I know! You know how I appreciate it!”

She ignored me. “I told Jake I had to do it, you were my mother and you needed me and all that crap. I don't know if he believed it, but he accepted it.” She licked her lips. They seemed to be dry and chapped. She reached for her wine and sipped it. “But that's not the only reason I came. I mean, I did want to help you. But I didn't feel I owed you anything. You hardly helped me at all when the kids were born….”

Oh, that bitter voice. I tried not to scream. “I tried to help! I came up when Jeremy was born. It was hard for me, Arden, to watch you trying to raise an infant without hot water, without running water for god's sake, having to go out to the outhouse in the freezing weather every time you wanted to pee—” I sipped my wine, trying to get my voice into control, trying to keep my face calm, still she would know I was furious, she always knew how I felt. “And you know, the meals up there, turnip, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, lentils every night, night after night….But even so, I would have stayed, I would have stayed as long as you wanted me if it weren't for the others, the way they treated me, the way they looked at me! It was like being white and living among black people or a Nazi living among Jews—only I wasn't, I didn't know what I'd done, but I knew I was hated!” My voice had risen by now, my face was hot, I couldn't help it.

She looked at me steadily, then dropped her eyes. “Well, if I ever have another kid, you can help me without worrying about hot water.” Her voice was sarcastic. “Jacob wants to leave the commune, he's a great big grown-up lawyer now and he wants to live in town. In fact, he wants to live in the city.”

“New York?” I couldn't help it: I was overjoyed.

She nodded. She sipped her wine again. She paced.

“But I'm not sure I'm going to go with him.”

Ah.

“But I don't know how I'll live if I don't!” Her voice was furious, her face a mask of rage. She breathed out a few times, then sat down on the bench that ran along the railing, at some distance from me. “I can't support us selling dried flowers and writing poetry,” she said bitterly.

“Won't Jacob support his kids?”

She shrugged. “You should know the answer to that. How much did Daddy contribute to our support? And what about that bastard Toni? Jacob's angry, he wants me with him, he doesn't understand why I don't want to go. He wants us all in a nice modern cardboard box in the city, living like all the other gentry. I don't even know him anymore. How much will he help and for how long? I don't feel sure I can depend on him anymore.”

“But what is this about, sweetheart? Is it that you want to stay on the commune? Or that you want to leave Jacob?”

Her grey gaze on me was no longer so hard, just cool. “Yes. That's the problem: I don't know.”

I thought about her life up there. It was hard. Their only heat came from the fireplace, and that required chopped wood; the women chopped it as well as the men. The women did most of the kitchen work. Arden's hands, long and elegant once, were thick and red now, scraped. Some of the rawness had faded since we'd been in Florida. No hot water for baths, for dishes, for laundry. A vegetable diet meant hours of chopping and pounding; they made their own bread, their own cheese out of the goat's milk. She had to boil the baby's diapers in a huge heavy pot. At least she didn't have to iron—they had no such thing. One task she was spared. It was cold there in the winter, hot in the summer. But she liked living there. I had to remind myself of that.

“I believe in our life there,” she said finally. “I believe in the principle of it: living on and by the earth, shunning the artificial, avoiding commercialism, materialism, the hot shot and the main chance and the fad….I want to want to stay there….” Her eyes filled.

I waited.

“But things have changed. The people—well, of course there's been turnover, that's inevitable on a commune. But the way it is now, I hate it! I hate it!” She stood up and began to pace again, running her hand along the wooden deck railing. I wanted to say—don't do that, Arden, you'll get a splinter—but I shut my mouth and waited.

“It's so hard, and I don't know why, but the women end up doing most of the work, I mean, we help with the plowing and the sowing and the other heavy work. When we needed to repair a cabin last year, we all got up on ladders with hammers and nails. But when it comes to the kids or the laundry or the cooking or the dishwashing, the guys do fuck-all!…I work so hard! It was all right until the kids were born. It was still all right after Jeremy was born, there were three other women and Jacob helped then. But once he started law school, forget it. And then those women left, and the new women aren't like that….”

She plopped down on the railing bench, her body hunched over, her hair falling limp and greasy in her face. “And the schools are after us now, they're going to win of course, I'll have to send the boys to school next fall. And that's a horror story—I'll have to drive them down the mountain every morning at six-thirty to the highway where the bus can pick them up—and pick them up every afternoon. You know what it's like there. That will take hours out of my day, every day, and there's no one on the farm now who's willing to help me except…”

“Except?”

“There's this guy.” She flipped her cigarette butt, hard, into the sand. She pulled her face into a hard firm line, then turned to me. “Philip. He's new. He's really attractive, and he…well, he likes me. I could stay on. With him. But he's awfully young.” She looked keenly at me. Her face was ravaged.

I gazed steadily back. She turned away.

“I don't know what to do.” She tossed this vaguely, in the direction of the wind.

“Well,” I said firmly, “I know the first thing you should do.” Her head swung around. “Get a haircut.”

TUESDAY
Ten years ago if I'd told Arden to cut her hair she would have jumped up screaming that I am always attacking her, but this time she smiled, and today we went into town and she had her hair cut short and she looks years younger, so much better! And maybe because she looked better, she felt better and when I said I'd like to buy her some Florida clothes, she didn't snap that I was trying to turn her into a bourgeoise but went quite happily into some of the nice shops in town and we got her pants and shorts and tops and a couple of skirts and some shoes—she looks wonderful! I did mind my manners, though, and did not go so for as to suggest she toss those Indian print shmattas of hers into the trash….

I went further. I have to test my limits. We had lunch out, at a nice little place, hanging plants and windows facing the water. And I brought up a possibly unpleasant subject.

“I've been thinking about what you said yesterday, about wanting to want to stay on the commune because you like the principle of it. And I understand that. But—well,
principles
—I find that usually the people who uphold such principles are not the people who have to do the work. I've read my share of articles deploring commercialism, consumerism, deploring people's yearning for washing machines, refrigerators—and they're always by men. I mean—it is beautiful to see women washing clothes in a river, or at a communal well—but is it beautiful to do it? If you go to Greece or Turkey or India, it's the women who do most of the work, on the farm and in the house. I'd respect these ideas more if the men who urge them did the laundry or fetched the water or walked every day to the market. It's easy to have principles when you don't do the work.”

She gazed at me. She was considering what I had said. Arden has not done that since she was eleven. Since…Toni….

We came home and she gave the boys their lessons, and came out onto the deck with me for a four o'clock glass of wine. We sat in silence for a while, watching the swollen red globe of the sun lower itself in the sky. Then she turned to face me. “Have you loved a lot of men?”

“That depends on how you define love. I've loved a lot of men for the moment, maybe even for a month or two. But I've been able to maintain love only a few times.”

“For Daddy, Toni, and who else?”

“A man named Grant. You never met him. A reporter.”

Her eyebrows rose. “You fooled around?”

“I did, Arden.”

She smiled. “I'm glad.”

“I am too. I would have regretted not doing that.”

“The trouble is, it's not enough.” She didn't look at me. “Love. I couldn't understand when you and Daddy divorced, I thought love, true love, lasted forever. By the time Toni left—well, I blamed
him
for that, not you. He was seduced by Hollywood, rotten values, money, it was disgusting….”

“That isn't fair. It isn't understanding. Toni did what he had to do. Or feel self-contempt. And he knew I was fooling around. To blame him for leaving me is like blaming me for Daddy's getting involved with Fern. You have everything upside down.”

“Oh, Mom, when you and Daddy divorced, I was a kid, of course I blamed you for making my father go away. And anyway, what is this wronged-wife act I hear? You weren't unhappy when Daddy got involved with Fern.”

I grinned. “You saw through me.”

“Well, so does he, for god's sake! Why do you think he goes around bad-mouthing you all the time? He'll never forgive you for railroading him.”

“Listen, Arden, I'll take only so much blame! I wasn't happy in that marriage and I knew if I left him he wouldn't support you kids. I just refused to become the kind of wife he wanted or thought he wanted and sat back and let things take their course. I'm not fucking omnipotent!”

She laughed. “Okay, okay! Sorry. But you're my mother, and mothers always seem omnipotent, right?”

“And you're wrong to blame Toni too. He had to get away from us, from me. He had to grow.”

“Nonsense. He could have grown with us.”

“I don't think so. Our relation was too fixed—I was too—I'm not blaming myself, it was just what it was—dominant. There was no room for him to grow.”

She considered. “You mean I have to revise my moral categories?”

“Maybe not your moral categories. But your judgment of people. If you're not generous to others, how can you allow yourself anything?”

She gazed out toward the water. “When I was little, I adored you. I wanted to be just like you. And then when you and Daddy divorced, I determined I wouldn't be the kind of mother and wife you were, never wanting to cook, never wanting what Daddy wanted, always playing—that was fun when we were little, but it was scary too, as if we had a sister, not a mother. And then, when I was a teenager—I don't know—I went crazy—or the world was crazy—you seemed wrong, all the time, you felt oppressive. And I was angry with you for always being away….”

“I was away a week a month!” I protested. “Except for a few long trips!”

She pondered. “I guess that's right. It didn't feel like that.” She lit a cigarette and turned around to face me. “I didn't want to put anything before my children.
They
would be my life. But, oh god!…”

I kept absolutely still.

She turned around again. “It's just not enough, is it,” she said in a whisper. “Not even them.”

“Not without work,” I said quietly.

“But even work isn't enough. If you work, you want success. God, what are we, what are we! We want everything!”

You want everything, Anastasia!

“Why shouldn't we? What's the sin in wanting to experience all you can, wanting to use all of yourself?”

“It seems so…so selfish!” she shuddered. “Especially when you think about all the people in the world who have nothing….”

“If you are prepared,” I spoke sharply, “to spend your life helping people who have nothing, then do it. If you are not, then drop it!”

“No middle ground?”

I shrugged. “Oh, of course. Checks sent to appropriate agencies. Avoiding waste. Eschewing complacency.”

“You're probably right,” she sighed. “Okay, I want everything. And part of what I want is success. And I don't
get
it.” She bent forward as if she were in pain, and looked at the floor between her legs. “I think I'm good. Now. I think I've learned my craft. I publish a fair amount of stuff.” She raised her head. “What do you think?”

I nodded. “The poems you've sent me over the past couple of years have been good…”

“But?” Sharp.

“Good,” I repeated, more strongly.