Her Mother's Daughter (52 page)

When Mother came home, she spoke little. Sometimes she talked about the ladies she sold hats to, and what they wore. Or about the buyer, or the assistant manager. She took some of Anastasia's sketches to show the assistant manager: Belle thought Anastasia could be a fashion designer. But he said she had to learn fashion perspective: in fashion illustration, the body was far longer than the head, and not in realistic proportion. Also, he said to be a fashion designer, you had to know how to sew. Since Anastasia's two efforts at sewing dresses, in the seventh and eighth grades, had to be ripped apart and completely resewn by Mother the night before they were to be handed in, Anastasia thought that there was another career that was not for her.

Mother would ask how school was, and listen as Joy and she gave their tiny bits of news, but her mind was elsewhere and they could feel that. The dinner table was silent. Even on the nights when Daddy was home, as he sometimes was on weekends, there was no talking. And on the nights when he worked late, Mother would go out to the porch after Joy and Anastasia were in bed, and sit in the dark smoking. Anastasia knew this. She lay in bed, her stomach churning. There was nothing she could do any longer to please her mother, no way to make her smile, or even talk. Anastasia began to feel her mother had betrayed the intimacy she had initiated. Belle had abandoned her.

This recent depression of Belle's felt hard, angry, unyielding, like a door shut in the face of the whole world. Anastasia's stomach twisted, and her throat constricted; she felt as if there were lumps in her that had to come out or she would die: in her throat, in her stomach, under her armpits. She was weary, yet could not sleep; she read in bed, not caring if her mother discovered her. But she could not get far enough away to forget.

One night, lying there like that, she thought she had to speak or explode. She leaped up from her bed, and without thinking, ran barefoot down the uncarpeted stairs and into the porch. Her mother did not hear her. She was outlined against the window, the tip of her cigarette red in me dark room, but only for a second. Anastasia could hear her mother exhale the smoke.

“Mommy,” she began, and Belle turned, startled.

“Oh, Anastasia, you startled me! What's the matter?” Irritable.

“What's the matter with you? You never talk anymore, you're always angry, you're always in a bad mood, you sit here night after night in the dark smoking. What is it? What is the matter?” Anastasia herself could hear there was no warmth in her voice, no love: only anger.

Belle turned her head away from Anastasia. “Go to bed,” she said in a cold voice.

“I won't! I won't! Not until you tell me what's the matter! It's not fair! You act as if you were dying, you treat us horribly, and you won't say why!”

Belle stood then and walked toward Anastasia. In the dark, she was a darker form, outlined against the window. “I told you to go to bed.” Icy.

“No!” There were tears in Anastasia's voice now. “You're horrible! You're mean! You don't love us!”

Then Belle raised her arm and struck Anastasia, struck her over and over. Belle knocked Anastasia to the floor. She lay there sobbing. Part of her wanted to get up and sock her mother back, hard. But she didn't. “I hate you! I hate you!” she sobbed.

Belle returned to her chair and lighted another cigarette. After a few minutes, Anastasia picked herself up and went back to bed.

In the spring of 1943, Daddy's company had a day's outing for its employees: a boat trip up the Hudson, and a picnic at Bear Mountain. Belle bought flowered pink chintz and made the girls identical pinafores, and a sundress for herself. All the big bosses were going to be there, she said. It was an important occasion.

They drove to Manhattan, to a pier on the West Side, where the Day Liner was berthed. There were hundreds of people circulating around the boat, and some of the men came up and spoke to Daddy and called him Mr. Dabrowski. Anastasia deduced he was their boss, and she felt proud. Then Daddy said, “Belle, there's a very nice woman I think you might like, somebody to talk to, she works in my department. I'll introduce her to you.” And Anastasia felt something. Something felt bad, something was going wrong. And Daddy led them up the gangway, and up to the higher deck, and straight toward a group of women who were sitting together, just as if he knew where they'd be. And Daddy seemed nervous and excited, but he would be, because he never did anything like this for Mommy. But Mommy was like ice, and Anastasia was annoyed with her.

And Daddy said, “Oh, there she is,” in his happy voice, and he started to say, “Belle, this is…” when Mommy turned on her heel and walked the other way. And Anastasia was shocked into stillness. She looked at Daddy: he was running after Mommy, calling her. Joy was looking at Anastasia, who took her hand; they walked after their parents. And Mommy stopped and Daddy spoke to her, but whatever she said was as if she had hit him and he reeled backward, and she looked over to them and said, “Come, girls,” and Joy dropped Anastasia's hand and ran to her mother, and Daddy just stood there, and Anastasia walked slowly up to him and stood with him.

And all the rest of the trip, Mommy stood with Joy at the railing of the lower deck, and Daddy stood by a column, seventy feet away, staring at her. Anastasia stayed with her father. He hardly noticed it. Several times he said to her, “Why don't you go with Mommy, she feels bad that you're not with her.”

“No, I want to stay with you,” she said.

He was not consoled by her presence. He looked intently, unwaveringly, at Belle, gazing at her standing seventy feet away as if she were behind glass in a museum, untouchable, unattainable, the object of his intensest desire.

That moment—it may have lasted an hour or two—is engraved on my memory. I don't recall how the day ended—obviously, it did. There must have been hamburgers and hot dogs and orange soda and trips to the toilet. There must have been walking together to the car and getting in it together and driving home together. I remember none of that. And in fact that day did not end for us. We returned to a grey tension in which a dropped fork could startle the whole room of us. We went back to live for months, perhaps, in a silent house in which no one ever raised their voice and no one ever smiled.

That was the one occasion in my life when I took my father's part against my mother. It was the first time in my life I ever openly blamed my mother for anything. And there is no question that this seriously disturbed me: I must have felt terribly guilty, because during that summer, on a horribly hot night when I slept with my head at the foot of my bed so as to get whatever breeze there was on my face, I dreamed a dream so vivid and clear that it remains with me still. I was lying there, with my head at the foot of my bed, when the curtains that shielded our room from the little landing were pulled open. A figure stood there in a long white nightdress, outlined against the light on the landing. It approached me, a pale faceless form in the moonlight, a woman carrying a knife. She came to stand just beside me, and then raised her arm and prepared to plunge it into my heart. I screamed. I kept screaming. I woke my mother, who came in.

“What's the matter, Anastasia?” Annoyed angry voice.

“I had a bad dream, a nightmare,” I whimpered. “A woman was going to kill me.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” she exclaimed. “Did you wake me up for something that stupid? Go to sleep!”

But I couldn't go back to sleep, I was too terrified. I knew the figure had been my mother, but I couldn't accept it. Why should I dream so about my mother, my good mother who gave me everything, the mother who had bound me to her by sacrifice, whose wish was my wish, whose will my will.

Yet another strand of thought lived in my head, out of touch with this one, like two different people inhabiting the same space but never touching. For I knew why I had stood with my father. It wasn't even really that I was standing with him, because part of me knew he'd prefer to have me go to her: he didn't want her to be any more angry with him than she already was, and he knew, he utterly knew her jealousy, her possessiveness. (How? This man so emotionally dead?) I stood with him for myself. I stood with him because I had somehow understood that he loved the lady on the boat, and Mother was angry about that.

It was stupid for him to introduce her to the woman; he humiliated her. But she humiliated him in return by walking away so abruptly, by making him beg, by forcing him to recognize who was primary in his life. All that—his gaucherie, her revenge—seemed secondary, even unimportant. What mattered was that Belle did not love Ed and turned a cold cheek to him every night of his life. Every night of my life since I was a small child I watched her do this; and every night in all those years, my stomach had churned at the sight. I knew how he felt. (How?)

So he had found someone else who would love him: why not? Mother couldn't help it if she didn't love him, but she didn't have the right to keep him from finding love with another lady. And that lady's face had lighted up when she saw Daddy, she was smiling with her eyes as well as her mouth. Mother didn't have to love him herself, but then she had to let him love somebody else. That was the way it seemed to Anastasia.

All so long ago, yet it feels almost as if time were suspended there interminably, as if that moment had never passed. In a sense, perhaps it hasn't, for me. It passed for them long ago. They have forgotten or forgiven, whichever it is one does. But I have not. I have to laugh at myself, standing there courageously, standing opposed to my mother, standing for body and hugs and warm closeness, standing for sex. For I no longer stand for those things. I have become my mother. I am just like her now: I pull away from embraces, I offer quiet smiles and coldness emanates from my body. I am the ice queen of my fairy-tale book. I am stiff and yield to no hugs. I do not want it anymore, closeness of any kind.

Oh, I tried it. But I gave it up. My mother just gave it up earlier in life than I did. I know all about love and I don't want it. It hurts too much.

I
T WAS WHEN HE
didn't eat his dinner that she knew. All those nights he ate his dinner when he came home, no matter how late it was. She had never known Ed to pass up a meal. Even if he'd had a sandwich at five-thirty, he was happy to see a plate piled high with steaming food when he came home at midnight. So it was ridiculous of him to claim that the reason he wasn't hungry was because he'd had a sandwich at six. He knew that she knew he often had a sandwich and still ate his dinner. The only explanation had to be that he had already eaten a full dinner, and how did that come about?

She'd had suspicions. He wasn't as…importunate. Of course, he was tired, working these long hours, but that hadn't made much difference in the beginning. He was still always at her. Until recently. And a couple of times, she had tried to figure out his pay envelope: fifty-six dollars a week, with time and a half for overtime. It didn't work out right, and when she asked him, he just shrugged. He said maybe they didn't pay him for all his overtime, and she started to get indignant, to tell him to complain, but then she stopped. She fell silent.

She began to sit in the porch in the dark, smoking, waiting for him. All these years. Anastasia was twelve. Scraping and scrimping, pinching pennies to put a good meal on the table, to give them decent clothes, to keep the house looking good. All up to her, all of it. He handed her his pay, that was the end of his responsibility. In all those years, he'd never once taken her out to dinner, or even to lunch, but now he could afford to take someone else out….

All this shabbiness all these years. Oh, how I hate it! How I have tried to ram him full of my dreams, my energy, so he'd get out there and make something of himself, always your humble servant, no get-up-and-go. And I haven't complained, I just went on stretching every dollar to hold a palmful of rain. I slave and he hums and goes outside and works on his car, tinkers from dawn to dusk, he doesn't care, he's happy. He gets what he wants.

All of what he wants. What's the matter with him that he doesn't know I know? Five nights a week he “works late,” and three of those nights he comes home and eats the dinner I keep warm for him, and twice a week he doesn't. So he's taking her out to dinner twice a week. How could I not know?
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH HIM?

So what I am now is a maid in a housedress who cooks for him, keeps his house clean, irons his shirts and underwear shorts and pajamas and handkerchiefs, irons them beautifully and lays them carefully in his drawers like precious things. And watches him and worries and tells him when he needs a new suit, and goes with him to pick it out because he has no taste.

No taste, only appetite.

Maybe I could even understand that, forgive that. I know I don't feel the same way he does. It's one thing for him, he's always so full of it, but it's another thing for me, look where it gets you, I can't do it without remembering, without feeling it all again, the shame, the awfulness of having your body blow up like that, then the baby, crying, crying…and who had to take care of it? Not him. And no matter how many there were, it would be my job to find a way to feed them while he went on happily doing his little job, bringing home his little pay, handing it to me as if it were the crown jewels….

And anyway, how can you do it, let yourself feel it, when you're sick with worry about the bills; they turn off the gas and the electricity. And poor little Joy, so sick, so sick, her face flushed with fever smiling up at me, “Hi, Mommy,” and so weak I'd have to hold the bowl of chicken soup myself and feed it to her by spoonfuls. I thought she'd die. The good die young. But that can't be true because my father died young.

He doesn't care about the girls, like all men, only interested in his own fun. Grumbling at them, their little faces turned up to him so hurt, so pale. He'd be just like my father if I'd let him. They mean nothing to him. If I died, he'd probably abandon them, mistreat them. He'd find another woman, that would be all that would matter and she'd abuse them, use my good dishes and my crystal goblets and my silverware, not caring. He wouldn't even notice, and if they were unhappy, he wouldn't care. Only for a hot meal and a woman in his bed.