Her Mother's Daughter (35 page)

She knew where they were. They had gone upstairs to Mrs. Thacker's house to play bridge. Mrs. Thacker was a retired schoolteacher, and Mommy respected her very much, Anastasia knew from the way she talked to her and about her, with reverence. Mrs. Thacker was an educated person; she had white hair that was sort of blue, and she was very nice, but she didn't like Anastasia, she liked Joy. Joy always smiled and Anastasia always frowned, that was why Mrs. Thacker didn't like her. But Anastasia couldn't help frowning, because…she didn't know why. Mrs. Thacker always smiled and held her arms out to Joy and took her from Mommy and said “goo” and “coo” and the other silly things people said to babies. That made Anastasia frown more. But she didn't really understand why, because Anastasia didn't want those things said to her.

Mrs. Thacker had a gentleman friend called Mr. Howells, and they sometimes played bridge with Mommy and Daddy. And that's where they were. They'd gone up there without her, leaving her alone, but they'd taken Joy with them in her cradle. That's what had happened.

Thinking about this made Anastasia cry. She called out Mommy's name, called and called, cried it as loud as she could, shrieked it. But no one came. Mrs. Thacker lived upstairs, directly above their apartment but on the third floor, and Anastasia was sure she could hear them all up there talking and laughing. They would have something good to eat. She could hear their forks scraping the china plates as they finished their pie. She could smell the coffee. She could hear the ice clinking in glasses of ginger ale. She screamed and screamed. She worked the crib as close to the window as it would go, and pushed her head back against the bars and screamed. Although at other times she could easily stand and get out of the crib—she was four and a half years old, after all—this night she could not find the courage to do what she knew she could do: get up, leave the apartment, climb the stairs to the third floor, knock on the door, and insist on being taken in.

She knew she could do this, but somehow she could not. Her fury mounted, with herself, with them, and she screamed without end for ten minutes or more, until her throat was sore. No one came. No one heard. Mommy loved Joy more than she loved Anastasia, because Joy smiled and giggled and was ticklish, and Anastasia frowned. Anastasia knew that her frowning made people dislike her. But she could not stop it, she would not stop it. To stop frowning, to smile as Joy did, she felt, would be some terrible act, an interior collapse. She kept screaming, until, exhausted, she fell asleep. But she heard Mommy and Daddy come in. Suddenly unafraid to sit up, she did, as she heard them talking in the living room and saw the lights come on again. When Mommy opened the glass door to the bedroom, Anastasia cried out reproachfully:

“You went out without me!”

“Oh, Anastasia,” her mother said in her tired voice, “we only went out for a little while. You're a big girl now, big enough' to stay alone for a little while.”

Anastasia lay down again and mulled that over. She was a big girl, practically grown up. She couldn't tell Mommy she was frightened, that she didn't want to stay alone, that she wanted some pie, that she was hurt that they took Joy and left her. She didn't know how to say any of those things, and if she said them, Mommy would think she was just a baby. And Mommy didn't have respect for babies, Anastasia knew that. She knew it from how Mommy said, “Oh, Joy is just a baby,” when Anastasia complained about Joy. To be a baby was contemptible. To be a big girl was good, deserving of respect.

Still, Anastasia didn't like being left like that, and she didn't know how to work that out. If you were a big girl, you didn't mind being left. She
could
have got out of the crib and gone upstairs. That was something a big girl would do, wasn't it? But she was too scared. Why was that? She was a scaredy-cat, Anastasia, a baby. She closed her eyes, her thin arms stiff along her sides, and fell into a dark haunted sleep.

When Anastasia was almost five, Mommy told her that Dr. MacVeaney had said she had to have her tonsils removed. To do this, she had to go to the hospital, to Mary Immaculate, the big hospital up there at the top of the hill behind the park. It wasn't far away, Mommy said, and Mommy would go with her.

Anastasia said no.

Mommy said that tonsils were things that grew in the throats of little children and had to be removed before they grew up. Had Mommy's tonsils been removed? Oh yes, but not until Mommy was a big girl, much older than Anastasia, and then it was terrible, it hurt so, and it left Mommy weak and sick for days. It would not be bad if Anastasia would go now, while she was still little.

Less forcefully, Anastasia said no.

Mommy said the doctor said she had to go. And it would be nice there in the hospital. There were lots of big ladies in white dresses called nurses who did nothing all day but take care of little girls like Anastasia. And afterward, when the tonsils were out, Anastasia would have ice cream.

“Could I have peach?” Peach was her favorite flavor, but she rarely had it because Dixie cups came in vanilla and chocolate, and pops were vanilla with hard chocolate outside, and even Mello Rolls only came in vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. To have peach you had to buy a carton of ice cream, the expensive kind where the man took a silver scoop and dug into a big tub and scraped the ice cream into a container and it smelled so delicious, and you took it home and scooped it into bowls. She had hardly ever had peach.

Mommy promised her she could have peach, but even then Anastasia was not convinced.

“Would I sleep in a big bed?” That she, at nearly five, was still forced to sleep in a crib was humiliating to her. They could not fit a bed into the bedroom, Mommy said. She had to sleep in a crib until they moved to a bigger house. But someday Anastasia would sleep in a bed, Mommy had promised.

Mommy said, “Yes, you will have a big bed.”

So Anastasia agreed to go to the hospital. They packed a little valise and Daddy walked her up the hill to Mary Immaculate while Mommy stayed with Joy. And then Anastasia found herself on a hard funny bed on wheels, and the room was cold, and they wheeled her into another room that was even colder and all white and it had big lights on the ceiling and Anastasia didn't like it. And they lifted her from the bed on wheels to another bed just like it, but without wheels. And then Dr. MacVeaney was standing over her, smiling and saying her name. There were ladies there too, in white dresses, but they didn't like little girls at all, Anastasia could tell. Mommy was wrong. But how could Mommy be wrong? She knew everything. She must have lied. The ladies wanted to put something over her face and she tossed her head so they couldn't, and Dr. MacVeaney stopped them. She loved Dr. MacVeaney then, and she thought she would ask him to take the straps off her wrists and ankles so she could move. But he said, “Anastasia, I want you to count to a hundred.”

“No!”

“Oh, go on. Do it for me.”

“No!”

“Oho!” he smiled. “I'll bet you don't know how!”

“I do so! I do know how!”

“Well, you're going to have to prove it to me.”

So, Anastasia, all against her will, had to start to count. But, you know, he was lying! He didn't care if she knew how to count to a hundred or not, because before she could get past ten the nurse had put the mask over her nose and mouth and she had to stop because she couldn't think anymore. And she wondered why he had challenged her if he didn't really want to know if she could count to a hundred or not.

When she woke up, Mommy and Daddy were sitting in chairs and she was lying
IN A CRIB!
She felt too sick to raise her head. There was a kidney-shaped metal dish beside her face full of blood, and her throat hurt. And she felt awful, but still, she raised her head and yelled, she screamed as loud as she could with her throat so sore, “You promised me they'd put me in a bed!”

And even though she was yelling, Mommy didn't get mad, she only smiled and said they'd move Anastasia to a bed the next day. But Anastasia didn't believe her, or only half believed her, and her head fell back against the mattress. Her throat hurt too much or she would have cried. She wanted to cry: she hated being little, why did people treat children the way they did, she wanted to be grown up, but she was helpless, sick, and her throat hurt and Mommy was laughing at her.

They never moved her to a big bed, but before she could protest, she came home. She was lying on the couch in the living room, and Mommy was bringing her a bowl of ice cream, peach ice cream, and Anastasia's heart leaped, oh that part was true, anyway. She sat up when Mommy handed her the bowl, and lovingly spooned some ice cream into her mouth. But her throat screamed at the coldness, it hurt so much she couldn't even taste the delicious flavor. She tried again, and then put the bowl on the floor beside her.

“I'll eat it later,” she said to Mommy. “My throat hurts.”

And Mommy took the bowl and put it on top of the piano and said Anastasia could have it later. Anastasia slid down on the couch and fell asleep. She knew she would never have the ice cream. By the time she was feeling better, Daddy had eaten it. He had to or it would have melted, Mommy said. Anastasia could have ice cream some other time. Peach. But she never did, not until much later, when she had almost forgotten the tonsillectomy. And she already knew all this when she slid down on the couch and went to sleep; she was thinking that it was so and that she had always known it was so: that grown-ups lied to children, that you could not trust them, that they all lied all the time. She hated that, and she hated them, and she hated being little, a child, a person who could be lied to. She would never forgive them, any of them who lied to her. And when she was grown up and had children, she would never never never lie to them, never.

A psychological theory published long after Anastasia had become an adult asserted that trust must be developed early in life or it never would. By the time she read this, Anastasia had forgotten all about tonsillectomies and cribs versus big beds; even her own children were past such concerns. She decided, as she read Erikson, that all the qualities necessary to a full rich adult life existed in her. It was true, she recalled, that she had had moments of distrust; but she had just as many, far more, even, of trust. After all, every afternoon when she came home from school, wasn't her mother there? (Except one terrible time during a hurricane, and then she was out searching for Anastasia.) Wasn't there always food, wasn't there always a warm house, didn't Daddy fix things that got broken? She knew she had hated her parents at some time, but that was merely adolescent rebelliousness, they were good people and had given her all they had to give. It wasn't their fault if they could not give more, was it? And anyway, all children had complaints about their parents.

It was Easter Sunday, 1964, and Anastasia had prepared a big dinner for her parents, her children, Toni, Pani Nowak, and some friends, in her small apartment. They had had to eat in the kitchen, but thank heavens, Toni and Arden and Billy had helped with the cooking, and her friends said the meal was wonderful. Mother rarely praised a meal. After dinner, they had embarked on a series of games.

It was Ellie who led this. He knew all the games there were, and some no one else had ever heard of, and he had Lee and Drew and Courtney and Toni and Arden and Billy and Arden's friend Kai, and even little Franny totally involved. Dad never got involved in games, he just sat on the sidelines listening. He'd participate only if they needed a timekeeper or a referee. Mom wanted to play, but she couldn't hear, so she would wave them away with her mouth pressed together tightly, but her eyes looking superior and aloof. By the time Anastasia had got the kitchen in some kind of order, and dried her hands and come into the living room with a fresh drink, Mom was yawning and Dad was looking at her to see if she was ready to leave. But she didn't look up at him, and she hadn't yet stood up.

Ellie was talking about trust games that they played in his psychodrama classes—where you lean back and hope someone catches you, or jump up into their arms. And there was Drew, all four feet nine of her, standing with clenched teeth ready to catch Courtney, whose six-foot-two lanky frame was slowly bending backward dangerously. Everyone was howling already, even though it hadn't yet happened, and when it did, when Courtney reached the point of falling, Drew managed to push herself up against his back and hold him there, her shoulder against his spine, her arm thrown over his stomach. And everyone clapped except Mom and Dad, who gazed on this the way nursemaids might gaze at their small charges playing in mud, with glazed eyes expressing amazement at the things people will do.

Then Mom yawned, and Dad stood up immediately. “Ready to leave, Belle?” he inquired solicitously, and she nodded without looking at him, and he went into the bedroom for her coat and hat. No one else noticed, they were still playing the trust game. Now Arden was falling back against Billy, but she couldn't let herself do it, and the friends were making catcalls and urging her on and laughing, and only Anastasia saw her mother frown with anxiety and speak to Ed, and notice him leave the room. She followed. “Mother's glasses,” he said.

“Which ones?”

“The reading glasses—you asked her to look at some pictures,” he said with an edge of reproach.

They found the glasses and he carried them to Belle as if he were making a votive offering, bending as he handed them to her, expecting, wanting, praise and thanks. Got none. She put them into her bag and stood up so he could help her with her coat.

Heads rose. “Leaving already?”

“The fun's just started.”

“Aw, don't go yet,” Ellie begged.

Belle offered him a purse-lipped smile, murmured something about “the old folks” needing their sleep, and tottered toward the door.

Arden was sitting cross-legged on the floor. “You haven't even played the game, Grampa,” she argued sweetly.