Her Mother's Daughter (37 page)

The first things she washed were Ed's shirts; then the bed sheets and pillowcases; the white bath towels; then kitchen towels. Sometimes there was a white tablecloth as well. After washing these, rinsing them and wringing them, she heated starch in a pot over the gas flame. While it was thickening, she let hot water run into the shallow sink. She took the square of bluing from its package and inserted it, holding it in a net bag, in the water. When the water was sufficiently blue, and the starch sufficiently thick, she poured the starch into the sink as well. Then she put in the white clothes to soak while she filled the deep tub with hot water and soap and put in the colored clothes, underwear, and the printed tablecloth to soak. Then she wrung out the whites as hard as she could, straining her hands, and carried them outside in the enamel basin and hung them on the line. She loved the clean smell of them and the sound of the sheets flapping in the wind. Then she went back into the kitchen and scrubbed the colored clothes, rinsed them, and thinned the starch for Anastasia's blouse, Ed's underwear shorts, and Joy's dress, and her housedress. Each of them had three changes of clothing: Ed wore his white shirts for two days. On the rare occasions when they went to visit Jean and Eric over the weekend, he would have to wear a shirt three times, because he had only three of them and needed one for Monday morning. Around the house he wore old mended shirts. Belle had three cotton housedresses and one good dress. All her beautiful clothes were gone now—they no longer fit her since she had had the children, and besides, they were out of style. Some she had given away, some were packed away in the big trunk she kept in the children's closet.

After the colored clothes were starched, she hung them on the line too. Then it was time to make lunch for Anastasia and Joy. She would open a can of Campbell's soup and make a sandwich of baloney or peanut butter and jelly, or Velveeta cheese grilled in butter in a frying pan. She herself would have toast and tea, but the girls always had a big glass of milk. Anastasia hated milk, so Belle put Hershey's chocolate syrup in it from a can.

It was fun to call Joy in from play, to wash her little face and hands. Joy was always chirping about something, something silly of course, she was only a baby, but she made Belle smile. Anastasia was another matter: often she came in scowling and said little. She was so serious, so grown up. She never talked about silly things. But Joy adored her older sister, gazed at her as if she were from a higher world, and Belle saw that Anastasia often treated Joy with disdain. Sometimes Belle would reproach Anastasia for this:

“Joy is your little sister, and she adores you. She follows you around like a little puppy. She looks up to you. You shouldn't treat her that way.”

“I hate her!” Anastasia would flash back. “She crayoned all over my new book, the one I got for Christmas. She ruined it!”

“She's only a baby, Anastasia, and you're a big girl. You have to overlook things like that, she can't help them, she's just a baby.”

But Anastasia only sulked and frowned and said nothing. Belle knew that Anastasia was a special person, and lived in her own world, and she did not try to intrude upon it. Whereas Joy; cute and funny as she was, seemed to be happy by nature, like Dafna Dabrowski. Belle believed Joy was a Dabrowski and Anastasia was a Brez, brilliant like Michael, and difficult. Whereas Joy, like Ed, could be happy with so little, with nothing at all, really. They, the Dabrowskis, really had no standards.

After Anastasia had gone back to school, and she had led Joy upstairs to her new big bed for a nap, Belle finished the laundry. The last batch was the dark things—Ed's socks, a dark skirt of Anastasia's, and a dark print housedress of her own. The line was full now, so she had to wait until something dried before she could hang these things, but she was relieved when she finished with the washing, rinsing, and wringing, and starching. Then she could scrub the deep tub with Bon Ami, and replace the metal dish-drain that covered it. She sighed and sat down with a cigarette before starting the next step. She looked out at the yard and thought with pride that it looked neat and pretty—it was the prettiest yard on the block. She had dreams for it—maybe Ed could build some Adirondack chairs and she could sit out there next summer. Sit out in her own yard, just like a lady! In the air, in the sun, smelling the flowers! And maybe someday he'd build a table and benches for the children, so they could sit there in the summer and play, or have a little picnic lunch with fresh lemonade with mint in it—she had already planted some mint she got from Momma. They would have a childhood, they would not be like her. The thought of the children sitting out under the trees on a summer afternoon, drinking lemonade and playing—maybe they would do a puzzle, maybe she'd buy Anastasia a jigsaw puzzle for her birthday—made a picture that moved her heart, that ached it almost, like a long-forgotten wound she had suddenly, accidentally, touched.

She began to bring in the dry things—the sheets and pillowcases, Ed's shirts and shorts. She let down the ironing board from the side cupboard where it was normally concealed, and got the high stool and the iron. Today she would iron only a clean shirt for Ed, for tomorrow. She was tired. She chose one, sprinkled it, and rolled it neatly into a loaf. Then she hung the rest of the wash on the line, put the starch pot in the sink and ran cold water into it, and wiped down the stove and sink with a damp dishcloth. She sighed. She was very tired, and she still had to cook dinner. Maybe tonight she'd make frankfurters and beans: everyone liked that, and it wasn't much work. She'd peel and boil some potatoes and pour butter over them. She'd send Anastasia up to the butcher for some frankfurters. She was just finishing ironing the shirt when Anastasia came in from school, and minutes later, Joy woke up from her nap. Anastasia seemed cheerful about something, but Belle was too tired to really listen. Her back ached when she bent to put on Joy's shoes and socks, and she did not speak, because she didn't want to scream at the baby. She never raised her voice to her children: she never had and she never would. Their lives would not be like hers.

OH, I REMEMBER THOSE
years, the total immersion in babies, the isolation and confinement. After Billy—Wilton Bradley Carpenter, Jr.—was born, almost all activities were too hard. Arden was only a year and a half old, and couldn't walk far or long. I had a seat that attached to the big carriage, so I could lay Billy inside it and sit Arden on top, but this made the carriage very heavy, and left little room for packages. Since I couldn't push it and pull a shopping cart at the same time, it was almost impossible for me to do the marketing at any one time. I complained about this to Brad, asking if I couldn't have the car one afternoon a week, but he said, with considerable self-righteousness, that I didn't have a license, was a terrible driver, and besides, he needed it. My mother would help me.

Before the children were born, we had been two kids in love with each other; even after I got pregnant, we'd been together, equally responsible for the pregnancy. But once Arden was born, and ever after that, the children were mine—my responsibility entirely. Brad didn't want to hear that things were hard for me, and if they were, that was my problem. He had his own problems, and although he never explicitly said this, he conveyed it—I was on my own. His responsibility to me ended when he handed me thirty-five dollars a week to pay our bills with.

I didn't question this, I accepted it. I didn't question the thirty-five dollars either. I knew he'd made a lot of money with the one sale, but he hadn't had a big one since, and I assumed he had put the money in the bank to draw on in leaner times. I was unhappily surprised to discover later that he'd used the money to buy an empty lot just off Merrick Road as an investment. In truth, that land helped to make him a rich man years later, but in the meantime, we were often hard pressed. Brad did a number of things in those early years, following his father's advice, that would make him wealthy later on, but being a first wife, I never saw any of the fruits of our early hardship. And it is true to my character, I guess, that I never managed to be anybody's second wife—I did everything the hard way. I was too vague about such things even to teach my daughters to be only second wives, never first ones. So now Arden is living in a farmhouse that doesn't even have a toilet. I tell her it's bad enough to repeat one's mother's mistakes, but unforgivable to regress. She only laughs. She knows I can't get serious about money.

I wasn't then either. Maybe that came from watching my mother's face harden into lines of worry and disappointment, watching, all those years, as penny added to penny eventually purchased a washing machine or got paid to the doctor. Part of the problem was real enough—she sometimes lacked money for food. If Joy was sick, as she often was, or if the winter was especially cold and we needed more coal than usual, or if a large purchase like a warm coat for my father was utterly necessary, why then she tightened her mouth and made stew from the neck and breast of lamb (the best kind, in my opinion) and gave us Jell-O for dessert; or maybe just soup and baloney sandwiches and canned peaches. We were never so poor we were
without
food. We were without a telephone, a car, warm winter clothing, luxuries of any sort. But my mother's anxiety was not about survival; it was about something else, and I didn't realize what until I saw that will of hers I burned.

Because all the things she had listed in her will were expensive—dishes, glassware, sterling silver flatware—things that people had if they were members of the middle class. We were not in the middle class, but we had them just the same. They were wedding gifts. She also had a silverplated coffeepot and a tray for it; she had bought these herself before her marriage and planned then to fill out the set with a cream pitcher and a sugar bowl, but she was never able to do that. Jean had a full set like this, only in a fancier pattern, on her dining room buffet, and when I grew up, I saw them in other people's houses: coffeepots with pitchers and sugar bowls, like emblems of class or money. They were always hideously ugly, and a pain in the neck because they had to be polished regularly. And our set was really silly, because it had only a coffeepot and a tray and Mother could never set it out anywhere—it looked naked. Anyway, we didn't in those years have a dining room buffet; we didn't even have a dining room. The Haviland Limoges, the crystal goblets, the silver service for eight, sat in their boxes and were brought out only two or three times a year, or maybe only once—around Christmas, when visitors came.

But that was what my mother's worry and her anger were all about: entering into the middle class. That was why the lace-edged tablecloth came out when a neighbor came in for coffee; and why we had piano lessons; and why she worked so hard to dress us with taste. What I thought and felt to be a struggle for survival was really a struggle for status. And status was beyond my father's ken, beyond or rather outside his aspirations. He probably had almost no sense of class except for manners: he was concerned always to behave like a gentleman, and he always did. But he could be happy with franks and beans, with work and dinner and bed and work and dinner and bed because he didn't imagine a whole entrancing life beyond those, a world in which the basic terms of existence were different. And my mother's rage against my father, which grew and grew during those years of my childhood, was rooted in this difference between them. She wanted something
more,
imagining that it would be different. He only wanted a car.

I don't know why, because I suffered from not having middle-class appurtenances, but when I was a young woman, these things meant nothing to me. Status be damned! I was a bohemian, an artist, I didn't care about middle-class values. And money—well, I refused to worry about it as long as we had food and a roof and a bed to sleep in. And in a weird reversal, Brad felt the same kind of contempt for me that my mother had felt for my father because of my indifference to dining room sets and even dining rooms.

If I was unhappy when the kids were little, it wasn't because we had little money, but because I hated my life. I hated my life even though I had a washer-dryer in the corner of the kitchen, and we, if not I, owned a car and sometimes went out on Saturday night. I hated my daily life, day by day by day. Sitting alone over a cup of coffee, feeling very grown up (what else did mommies do?), I decided I had to change it. But I didn't know how: I hadn't a cent left over, ever, of the money Brad gave me. All my underpants were torn, and I kept mending them and putting in new elastics, but I couldn't even afford to buy a new pair of underpants. (That was all right. I knew Brad's mother would give me three new pair of Lollipops—pink, blue, and yellow—for Christmas. She gave us both underwear, and she bought Brad a new suit: every year.)

I discovered the public library. And what I found I was drawn to, after I had exhausted its collection of the novelists I wanted to read and its few art books, was books on photography. The library hadn't many in those years, but I studied those it had. I'd had a camera, and taken pictures since my ninth birthday. I picked up the first photography book accidentally, but found myself fascinated by the differences among photographers. After I'd examined, over and over, the books in the library, I'd squeak out seventy-five cents every once in a while to buy a photography magazine. I discovered Man Ray and Cecil Beaton and George Rodger; Cartier-Bresson, and Eliot Porter, and Walker Evans. And then, oh heavens! I'd known about Margaret Bourke-White, but now I discovered Imogen Cunningham and Berenice Abbott, and Eve Arnold!
WOMEN!
Lots of them, not just one Cécile Chaminade, the way there was in music, a fact that so disheartened me when I was eleven that I abandoned (wisely) my ambition to become a composer. I became very friendly with the librarian at the little local library, and convinced her I was writing a book on photographers, so she got me books on photography from all over Nassau County, and sometimes even from larger New York State libraries.