Her Mother's Daughter (39 page)

And it seems to me now—and I must have had an inkling about this back then in 1951—that the relation of mothers and children is maybe more profound and important than anything else in life. If it is omitted from consideration by philosophy, philosophy is the less. In 1951, lots of psychologists were considering the relations between mothers and children, but mainly in order to indict mothers for everything that goes wrong with their kids. No one that I knew of then—or now, for that matter—really examined what it means to a woman to have a child, and to devote herself to raising it; or the real nature of that most profound bond of child and mother. When people write about bonds, they're telling people to break them. Yet in simple societies, mothers raise their children gently and lovingly, and the daughters often stay on with their mothers and have children of their own, and there is little conflict, and no one charges the daughters with failure to separate, to mature. In our world, we're all supposed to break all bonds, to be independent.

I don't mean to make great claims for myself. I wasn't thinking, when I took those photographs, in exalted theoretical terms. I wasn't thinking at all. I took them because I couldn't help myself. I used to wonder, when I saw all these pictures of rage and teary frustration piling up in my bureau drawer, that perhaps I was trying to console myself. Because of course never felt rage at my children. No steam emerged from my voice, seeped from my eyeballs. Like my mother, I never raised my voice. But maybe underneath that “insistent cheerfulness” that Brad later told me drove him crazy, there were other, negative feelings that I concealed from myself. Maybe photographing other women expressing emotions they were not expected or supposed to feel was a way for me to deal with what I did not let myself know I felt.

In any case, I was obsessed with doing this work, and I got better and better at it, coming after a while to know what kinds of situations led babies to relax—when a baby was simply too tired to continue, and should just be allowed to nap for a while. I derived considerable pleasure from these afternoons, far more than the few dollars I earned from them. I knew, I knew that kaffeeklatsching was a waste of time, a foolish occupation, and our conversation mainly trivial, but those trivialities came to seem very important, as if each little concern was really an emblem for a larger context of concerns. Mostly we told stories, made comic fictions of our lives. What we enjoyed most were stories of meddling mothers-in-law (mine, about the semen-stained sheet aroused no laughter at all, only hushed shock), overflowing washing machines, rice blowing up to fill the entire kitchen sink, pressure-cooker explosions, leaking basements. They were centered on things that spilled over boundaries, like mothers-in-law (in those days), like children themselves, like household appliances, like us, whose bodies had overflowed themselves to produce these angel-demons who tyrannized and controlled our lives.

I'd go home more cheerful than ever after these afternoons. I quickly earned enough money to buy the equipment I needed for developing, and all I could think of after a session was to develop the film and see what I had. I'd push, tease, kid, and laugh the children home, into baths, through dinner (as often as not, hot dogs, I'm ashamed to say), and put a couple of frozen dinners in the oven for Brad and me, but I was thinking, thinking, thinking. I'd blow up one print, crop another, my mind was almost entirely on the other prints I'd developed that week, and on waiting for everyone to go to bed so I could lock myself in the bathroom and set up my equipment.

Sometimes there was trouble. One night Billy started to cry when I was at a crucial point in the work and couldn't open the bathroom door. It was late, after midnight, and I knew Billy would wake Brad, but I thought, the hell with it, let him get up for once. Brad was not thrilled when he realized I was not answering Billy's cries, and a little later he began to pound on the bathroom door.

“Open up! Billy's been sick!” he yelled angrily.

“I can't open the door now, Brad,” I called out apologetically. “Can't you clean him up? Use the kitchen sink.”

“SHIT!” was his response. I heard his bare feet stalk off down the hall.

It was another fifteen minutes before I could open the door and see how things were. I peeked in our bedroom: Brad was in bed, snoring. I looked into the kids' room. Billy was lying in the middle of his crib, on a clean part of the vomity sheet. Brad had wiped his face—that was it. I picked him up, he was whimpery and needed cuddling. I took him into the kitchen—I had prints hanging over the bathtub—and sat him on the edge of the sink, pushing aside the dinner dishes I'd left to dry after washing them, and undressed him. His little pajamas were stinky and hard with vomit, and there was vomit caked in his hair. I talked to him gently, wiping him with warm water and soap, and he leaned against me, calmed.

After I'd cleaned him up, I carried him back to his room. I had to turn on the light to find a clean pair of pajamas and a clean sheet, although I knew that would waken Arden, and I'd get little sleep tonight. I remade Billy's crib, all the while talking to him, trying to find out if his tummy was still upset or if he was better—difficult because he couldn't talk yet. But he seemed okay, so I put him back in his bed, gathered up the soiled sheet and blanket, and covered him with one of my jackets because I had no other blanket. By this time, Arden was sitting up in bed asking what was the matter and why had Daddy yelled and why was Mommy locked in the bathroom. No way she was going back to bed. So I let her get up, turned out the light so Billy could sleep, and took her into the kitchen with me and fed her cookies and milk while I waited for my prints to dry. We discussed photography and its effect upon daddies. Arden informed me that Daddy didn't like my taking pictures. I don't know how she had gleaned this, because I hadn't. But it turned out she was right.

I thought Brad was pleased with what he called my “hobby.” He'd taken some prints, blown up and framed and hung them in his office—the one of Arden with the butterfly, and the one where she is holding out her hand to help Billy up, and another, a close-up of Arden with the sun shining through her hair. He didn't seem to be interested in photographs of Billy. He complained about my housekeeping and the meals I served, but that had been the case before I began taking pictures. So I wasn't prepared for the explosion that occurred the next day.

I started it, at breakfast, the one meal I cooked. He was eating eggs and sausages and English muffins with cream cheese and I was drinking coffee. The kids had had their breakfasts and were playing in the living room, still in pajamas. I closed the kitchen door. I said, in a low voice so the children wouldn't hear, “Brad, what you did last night was really rotten—to leave that kid in vomity pajamas on a vomity sheet!”

He threw down his fork. “What did was rotten! What about you? What kind of mother doesn't go to her kid when he cries in the night? Won't come out of the fucking bathroom even though he's sick? You and your goddamned photography! Who do you think you are, Margaret Bourke-White? You're a stupid housewife earning some pin money by taking stupid pictures of stupid babies and their stupid mothers! And
that
is more important to you than your own child! What kind of mother are you, anyway! I'll tell you! No mother at all! You're still a spoiled brat kid who refuses to grow up and accept her responsibilities! Giving the kids hot dogs for dinner practically every night! And if I see another TV dinner, I think I'll puke! I want that photography equipment, that fucking developing equipment, your camera, all of it, out of this house when I come home tonight! I don't want to see it again, I don't want to bump into another clothesline full of prints, I don't want to hear the word photography again! Is that clear?”

My face felt as if it were 110 degrees and my heart was pumping too hard. If he'd stopped short of the final command, I would have been in trouble. I wouldn't have known what to answer. I knew it was my job to clean the house and provide decent meals, I just couldn't stand doing it. But I felt guilty about that. But his order to remove my photography equipment had carried him over the line from being right, or anyway justified, to being dictatorial. I stood up.

“How dare you!” I whispered, in a whisper that I could see penetrated his marrow. “How in hell dare you talk to me that way? Who do you think
you
are? If you want to spend your entire stupid life in a stupid job like selling real estate, and immerse yourself in numbers and dollars for twenty-four hours a day, you are free to do so. But don't for a minute think you can dictate what my life will be!”

He had stood up too by this time. “Who I think I am is the breadwinner of this family! I earn the money that supports your stupid hobby, and I have the right to order you to stop it!”

“You may earn the money, but I do everything else,” I countered, undaunted. “I wash and iron your fucking shirts, just like my fucking mother. I scrub the floors and cook the food and raise
your
children….”

I knew the minute it was out of my mouth that that was a tactical error.

“
My
children! So you say! Who the hell ordered them from the stork, I'd like to know. It certainly wasn't me. You ruined my life, you forced me into marriage and this career, and if you don't like it, lady, lie in the bed you made!
I
have to!”

He shouted this, and I was only grateful the kids could not possibly understand that he was denying his parentage of them, if they heard him, which they could not have avoided doing. Then he slammed open the kitchen door, stormed down the hall for his coat, and slammed out of the apartment.

I sank down in a chair again. My hands were shaking so hard I needed two to pick up my mug of coffee, and even so I spilled it on my leg and it was hot and I cried out, it burned so terribly, everything hurt so terribly. And the kids heard my cry and came running in to see what was wrong. I explained I had spilled my coffee, but Arden looked at me with a wizened little face, as if she were fifty instead of two and a half, and contradicted me: I was being punished, she said, because Daddy didn't like the way I made the bed.

I had an appointment to photograph that day, but I called and canceled it, saying I had the flu. The way my voice sounded after my crying backed up my lie, and we made another date a week off. After that, I just collapsed. I couldn't move. I let the kids play in the living room; they knew they were being given some sort of license, and were running up and down the narrow hall to the bedrooms, shrieking and laughing hysterically, still in their pajamas.

I sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and smoking. I was trying to think, but it was difficult, because I had to work so hard at not crying. I didn't want the kids to see me crying, I didn't want to cry, I didn't want to be so vulnerable that I needed to cry. But I was. Suddenly, my old feelings for the old Brad washed over me like a huge wave that surprises you, coming from behind as you stand in knee-deep surf, and knocking you down. I remembered, oh I remembered. And I didn't want to remember. I didn't want to hold up our past against our present. I above all didn't want to
think
about what our lives had become.

The overriding priority was not thinking about what we had just said. Because I didn't see how, having said such things to each other, we could ever live together again. And I didn't know how I could manage to separate from him. I wanted to: I wanted to pack up our things and march us out of there and never go back. But how? I had—I checked—$11.38 in my wallet, and there was $145.68 in our checking account. (Brad had another checking account for business dealings—something I didn't know then.) Even if I drew all of that out, it wouldn't get me far. And how would I go? By baby carriage? I didn't have a car.

All I had was a mother.

I picked up the phone, and tried to sound casual. Mom was pleased: since I'd been doing photography, she hadn't seen much of me. She'd be glad to drive over and pick me and the kids up and take us back to her house for the day. That was fine.

I jumped up then, to prepare us, and was ready when she arrived. At first I didn't tell her anything about what had happened. We went back to her house and had lunch, and the kids went in for naps, and we played Chinese checkers and talked idly, and then we had a drink, and the kids woke up and I put them out in the yard to play. And then I told her, my voice shaking, that Brad and I were not getting along, that he had said unforgivable things, that he had suggested the kids weren't his, and that I didn't see how I could go on living with him.

We were sitting on the porch, both smoking and sipping scotch and water.

After I told her how things were with Brad and me, she was silent for a while. Then she said, “I never thought he was stable.”

“You never said anything about it.”

She shrugged. “When you set your mind on something, Anastasia…Besides, what else could you do but marry him?”

I was silent then too, remembering the other Brad.

“What will you do?” she asked at last.

“I thought I could go back to Jimmy Minetta's…he'd let me set up a counter of my own, I'm sure he would. I'd work part-time for him and part of the time I'd take photographs of children, the way I do now. But I'd charge a little more.”

“How much could you earn?” Her tone was discouraging. “You couldn't earn enough to support yourself and the kids.”

“Maybe not.” I let my voice trail off, waiting.

She heard what I was not saying. “I suppose you'd like to come back here to live.”

I didn't take heart from this. Her tone was too negative.

She sipped her scotch. “But you know, I feel that I raised my children, I've done my duty. I'm tired.”

I felt utterly shut out, felt the breeze as the door slammed in my face; but I also felt the justice of her feelings. She'd done it once, and once is enough.