Her Mother's Daughter (60 page)

Having no model for the new person I intended to become, I drew from the culture around me, which in my day contained figures like June Allyson and Doris Day. I would be cheerful, “relentlessly cheerful,” full of jokes and light of heart. I would be my mother's opposite: I would not care about the things that mattered to her, I would be sexual, open, full of laughter. I would also be intellectual and imaginative, I would give every part of myself full expression. I would allow nothing to depress me.

With such a determination, I puzzled my mother by being nonchalant about the fact that there was no money for me to go to college, despite her efforts over all the years. By my junior year in high school, I had begun to work every night, baby-sitting, and every summer as a telephone operator, and to save every cent I earned. I went to a local college, Riston, so I could live at home and save the cost of room and board. And once at Riston, I plagued the employment office until it found a job for me in a college office. Things were informal in those days, and every two weeks, when I collected the fruits of my labors at 50 cents an hour, I applied some dollars to my tuition bill of $250 a semester. My mother helped. She gave me $100 the fall and spring of my first year, and the next year she was able to give me $250. She worked extra hours to earn this money for me, long hours in the dim room with the white piles around her. Her fingers were often bloody and covered with Band-Aids. Her face was always pale and drawn. And even as I acknowledged, silently, with profound gratitude, her labors and sacrifices for me, I was repelled by them, I pulled away in a kind of horror, I didn't want to see, I didn't want to have to know, I didn't want to feel the guilt that drenched my body like the sweat from menopausal hot flashes, every time I thought about her.

I pushed it all away. I went off to college and became Stacey the wild girl. I never much liked that nickname, but it seemed too hard to ask Americans to pronounce Anastasia properly. One of the reasons I loved Brad right from the first was that he did pronounce my name correctly or shortened it to Stahz. But for most people I was Stacey, too classy and too smart to be considered a tramp, and thus requiring some new category—bohemian, rebel, free spirit. I rebelled in every way I could: I wore pants to school—still forbidden on many campuses—and my father's old white shirts over a cotton knit shirt. I refused to be involved with girls, and surrounded myself with boys, with whom I went out drinking beer, jabbing, telling jokes. Skinny, quick, nervous, contentious, I had a reputation but admiration as well; most of the other female students were frightened of me, which pleased me. I was not going to be a woman, I had decided that. Since I clearly was not a man, my only alternative was to be beyond sex, or at least gender. I deluded myself that was how others saw me too. The delusion didn't last long, though: it's hard to make a claim for being beyond gender when your belly is sticking out a foot in front.

Stacey grew almost independently, because later in life people again called me that. She became a finished product, in the full sense of that phrase: polished, and complete. She was finished at least a decade ago, and I have been living since in a dark little room behind the store that sells her replicas. I've been living like a body that has fallen from and is being dragged by a sled, pulled by the momentum of something I set in motion but am no longer a part of. But this time, I am old and too tired to manufacture a new me, to devise someone I'd like to be and try to become it. That takes an energy and drive I no longer possess. Yet the only alternative is to let myself live buried alive.

Clara says I'm depressed. I say I have damned good reason. It's an impasse.

W
E MOVED INTO THE
apartment in time for the kids to start school in Lynbrook. It looked shabby and bare, especially by comparison with the furniture store we'd been living in, and we were all a little irritable despite Mrs. Nowak's pot of stuffed cabbage, sent up for our first evening meal. I found myself concerned with the placement of furniture and knickknacks in a way I hadn't been since Brad and my first little one-room household—strange, given the little I had to work with here. It was almost as if having so very little to work with inspired me. I, who never in my life had been able to sew on a button once (it took two or three attempts before I got it sewn on the proper side of a garment), found myself shortening curtains and using old drapes to make swags for the living room and my bedroom windows. I suddenly began to pay attention to food prices and set myself challenges to make wonderful meals out of nothing—and succeeded, too. I was doing this for the children.

Because they were a couple of wrecks. They squabbled all the time, burst into tears at nothing, were surly and sulky and as relentlessly grouchy as I was cheerful. I tried to jolly them out of the blues, to make an adventure of poverty, but they were having none of it. They came near to killing each other in arguments about whose T-shirt got accidentally tossed into the dark wash and turned pink (they both wore the same size), or whose nickel it was that was found in the hall on the floor outside the bathroom. Their worst fight was over who would take which of the two small bedrooms; one was a little lighter than the other, but the other had a closet: The choice was impossible.

And there was I, only I, alone. I knew the divorce was my fault—it doesn't matter how you try to work things out on a moral scale of judgment—my feelings, my behavior, had cost them a father and a nice big old house with a huge yard full of big old trees. Most of all, it had required them to leave a school they knew and enter a new one as strangers, to make all new friends, to suffer the initial loneliness and fear. Everything was my fault. They felt that way, and truthfully, so did I. It was up to me to make things better for them, however I could. I tried; I violated the old Anastasia as far as I could imagine. No longer a wife, I finally became a domestic.

Still, although I learned to be firm and quash their vituperation of each other, I couldn't touch their unhappiness. I could keep them quieter, but not content. Billy would come home from school every afternoon scowling and turn on the television set; when I forbade watching television in the afternoon, he went into his room and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. (I could remember doing that, feeling unloved and unhappy; so when he did it, I would go in there and put my arms around him and ask him what was wrong and tell him I loved him and kiss his cheek: but he'd turn away, turn his back on me and whine at me to go away and leave him alone. And I thought of my mother giving us what she hadn't had, and our finding it insufficient; here I was, giving them what I hadn't had and they wanted something else, domestic security, a father, popularity, whatever…and I felt a turn of despair in my stomach.) Billy would lie there all afternoon, unless I scolded him and made him do his homework. He'd usually do it, but not until I scolded; and then insist he be allowed to watch television. I'd let him.

Arden stalked home early too, at first, and would walk in with her head high, eyes glaring, a surly answer to my sweetsie cheerful “How was school today, honey?” She'd refuse even Oreos and milk. She'd go into
her
room and slam the door (they'd ended by Billy taking the lighter room and Arden taking the one with the closet) and sit and read all afternoon, another thing I remembered doing. I'd knock on her door and enter at a growled (insofar as a ten-year-old can growl) reply, and sit on the bed and ask
her
what was the matter. Proud head still, “You wouldn't understand,” she'd shoot at me. “Try me, I was a kid once,” I laughed, but she was having no laughing. Glaring eyes: “I don't care to discuss it!” And that was that.

The house seemed very empty after they'd gone to bed, though: odd, since they'd barely been in it while they were awake. I missed them after they were sleeping. I guess it was when they were sleeping that I could conjure their old selves, and miss those. I'd be reading, or looking through some old prints; sometimes I'd get out my equipment and do some cropping. But the house got quieter and quieter, and colder too: Mrs. Nowak went to bed at ten, and turned the heat down when she did. And finally I'd get up and go into the kitchen and pour myself a rye and soda and carry it back to the living room and turn out all the lights except the one over the desk, and sit down by the window (wherever did I learn that?) in a soft old armchair I'd found at Goodwill, and try to think things through.

I was overwhelmed by how little I had done for my children. Here my mother, with zilch money and little education, had thought to and managed to take us kids to the Prospect Park Zoo and the Bronx Zoo, the Barnum and Bailey Circus, and the opera. She persuaded my father to drive us to Floyd Bennett Field, and paid one dollar apiece for us to go up, with Daddy, in a two-seater Piper Cub airplane, first me, then Joy. Belle herself stayed on the ground. She took me to Carnegie Hall to hear Nelson Eddy sing, and to Town Hall to hear Ruth Sczlenzinska play. She'd saved enough one year so that we went to the Catskill Mountains for a week, staying in a tiny cottage that was the equivalent of today's motels. We swam in Silver Lake, crowded as it was, when we could. Mostly we sat in the cottage, because it rained all week, steadily. Belle cooked on a kerosene stove while Joy and I lay on one bed, playing memory, and my father fiddled with something that was broken, and she opened cans and put food on plates and the smell of kerosene permeated the tiny room and made me ill. Another year she got us to Washington, D.C., for two days, and my father drove us to see the monuments and the Capitol.

And what had I done? These past four years or so Brad had earned a lot of money, but the only trips I'd taken my kids on were to the railroad yards or the backs of shopping malls. I hadn't even taken them to a zoo—well, I hate zoos, I can't bear seeing animals in cages—although Belle and Ed had. They'd taken them to the circus, too, and reported, on both occasions, that the children were not very interested in anything except what they would have to eat. They wanted frankfurters and orange soda and cotton candy, and had got them. I had given my children piano lessons, but that was all. I let them go to the movies on Saturday afternoons with their friends, but only in the past year or so. We'd never taken them on vacation—well, that was Brad's doing, he didn't want the hassle—and anyway, we'd barely gone on vacations ourselves. A three-day trip to Niagara Falls, and another to Lake George—that was all.

I had been selfish and self-involved. I was a rotten mother. I was a rotten person. Such thinking made me squeamish with self-hatred and I tried to find ways to comfort myself. I had always been affectionate with them, physically and otherwise; I had always listened to them. I had answered their questions. Wasn't that worth something? I hadn't sighed, or turned away from them; I hadn't treated them as troublesome burdens. That was good, wasn't it?

From the looks of them just then, it didn't seem so.

I couldn't even really fall back on blaming Brad, because my mother had managed all of what she'd done without much help from my father. But at least he had been willing to spend his weekends driving children to Floyd Bennett Field, or to the slums, or the beach. Brad had always worked weekends, and had been unwilling to go much of anyplace en famille except to his parents or mine.

It stared at me, my failure of them. And now what was I to do? The money Brad sent was barely enough to keep us alive. I wasn't even sure I'd be able to keep the car, because I had nothing set aside for the insurance which would come due next year, and no way of setting anything aside. Even if I now had the imagination to come up with some project that would cheer up my miserable children, I couldn't afford to realize it. Nor did I see much point in appealing to Brad. He didn't have time for them what with his new wife and selling the house and buying another, one with Greek pillars and a pretentious front lawn (never used) and no yard, in Garden City this time. He took the children out for dinner once a week, to a place where they could get hamburgers and french fries, and they always returned from seeing him more irritable and taciturn than usual.

I had to do something. Having had no luck talking to them separately, I would talk to them together. Maybe being together would give them the courage to speak. I waited until Sunday morning, after making them a nice breakfast of waffles (which they barely touched. Why hadn't I got them the kind you make in the toaster, as I usually did, they wanted to know). It was raining out, a coolish day in early October, the leaves just beginning to turn. And now being driven from the trees by wind and rain, so we would not even have the little beauty that resides in that part of the year. I poured myself another cup of coffee.

“You know, kids, you've both been awfully grouchy and unhappy since we moved. Since Daddy and I got divorced. Would you tell me what's bothering you?”

Silence. Hostile stares.

“Do you miss the old house? Your friends?”

“No, of course not,” Billy drawled sarcastically. “It's fun to have to make all new friends in the third grade. And have a room without any closet and hardly any room for my toys.”

“I hate my room!” Arden announced.

“I'm really sorry,” I said sincerely. “Sorry you don't like your rooms, and sorry you have to start in a strange school. But you know you will make new friends. It's hard, but you will.”

“I won't!” Billy exclaimed. “I hate all those kids.”

“They're stupid!” Arden agreed.

“They're not all stupid,” I said calmly.

“Yes, they are,” Arden said authoritatively. “The kids in Rockville Centre are smarter because there are more Jews.”

“Where did you hear that?”

She shrugged. “Everybody says so.”

I knew “everybody” probably had a name like Joan or Eileen, but I didn't probe. “There are some Jews here, too,” I suggested. “What about the Lench children? Aren't they Jewish?”