Her Mother's Daughter (61 page)

Arden nodded sullenly, “I guess so.”

“And isn't there a really smart girl in your class—the one that got a hundred percent the day you got ninety-nine percent on the arithmetic test?”

“Math, Mommy, math!” Billy corrected me with contempt.

“Yes, math.”

Arden shrugged again, pulling her shoulders close into her body as if I were pushing her inside herself. “Mmmm.”

“What's her name?”

“Joan Tebaldi.”

“And didn't you go to Joyce Lench's house to play one day last week?”

She nodded, even more uncomfortable.

“See? You're making friends.”

“She has friends!” Billy exclaimed, his face red with the strain of letting his anger out. “
I
don't! It's different for girls!” The word
girls
dripped with contempt. “They talk all the time, talk and giggle. Stupid!”

“Girls are more friendly than boys, usually,” I said, still calmly, trying hard not to smile. “But boys make friends too, just more slowly.”

“He'll never make friends!” Arden spat at him, returning contempt for contempt. “He's too scared!”

“I am not!” Billy was full red now. “You…” He began to rise from his chair.

“Calm down, Billy,” I ordered. “Maybe she's right. Maybe you're shy. But most people want to make friends. You have to try. You have to talk to them. They'll want to talk to you.”

“They don't! They don't! I have so tried! What do you know about it?” His eyes began to run, and his cheeks were splotchy, and he jumped from his chair, toppling it, and tore off into his room and slammed the door.

Arden watched him with fury. “Baby!” she muttered.

“So what are we going to do about your room, toots?”

“It's horrible. There's nothing you can do.”

“Maybe we can paint it. Or put up some posters.”

“Oh, Mommy!” Contempt and disgust.

“You know what we could do? We could paint a mural on the wall, the long wall beside your bed. We could paint a big window, with the sun coming in, and trees outside, and flowers, or whatever you wanted.”

“That's stupid! It's stupid!” She was near tears too.

“It would be fun!” I went on cheerfully. “You and I could do it together, and you
can
order anything you like to go in it. You could have houses, or animals, or children playing…whatever!”

“Train yards and factories! That's what
you
think is pretty! That's what
you'd
put in it!” She jumped down too then and ran into
her
room and slammed the door. The house reverberated with silence.

I cleaned the kitchen.

I was no more successful at finding a job. The only one available in the stores in the Lynbrook village was at the Kent dry cleaners, for minimum wage. I almost took it: almost let myself spend my days taking in soiled clothes and handing out receipts; handing out cleaned clothes and taking in money: for 85 cents an hour: but the hours available were 1–5 six days a week, impossible for me. (Saved!) In the end, I drove toward Rockville Centre, where the
Long Island Herald
offices were, and wheedled and wormed my way into a part-time job as file clerk, receptionist, and switchboard operator. I'd never worked a switchboard, but claimed I had, sensing it would be easy to learn. I couldn't claim to know typing, since my method when writing term papers was hunt and peck, and not very quickly, either. They too paid minimum wage, but were willing to have me 9–12 five days a week, and I was close enough to home to drive back hurriedly so I'd be there when the kids came in for lunch around 12:10. And I told myself that the job might help me get work as a photographer.

After taxes and deductions, I took home a little over eight dollars a week. I thought about my mother making hats. Maybe she had known more than I did. Still, the eight dollars helped: it paid, for instance, for the paint needed to decorate Arden's wall. She came home from school a few days after our talk and asked, “Well, when are we going to do it?”

“Do what?”

“Paint my room. I want the other walls pale pink, and the mural with a blue sky and yellow sun.”

“Oh!”

“You
said.
You said you would!”

“I thought you didn't like the idea.”

She sniffed a little and pulled her shoulders in, a gesture that remains characteristic of Arden to this day when she feels attacked. From picking and probing at her, I discovered she had mentioned my idea to some other girls, and all had oohed and ahhed and said they wished their mothers would let them do that. She'd started by describing the idea as stupid, but had listened to them and decided that maybe it would be all right. “They want to come and see it, so when can you do it? Today?”

We started it over the weekend, but didn't finish for a month. Then there began a parade of ten-year-old girls marching through the house to view with awe the large window on the wall beside Arden's bed, a tree outside and the sun pouring down from above, billowy white curtains on either side of the window frame, a beagle (like Joan's), a cat (like Joyce's), and some flowers. After this was done, Arden stared at it thoughtfully. “It needs something here,” she pointed to the horizon on the right. She was right. The tree dominated the left foreground.

“What would you like?”

She wanted some factories, squat buildings with tall smokestacks rising from them.

“Why would you want things like that?”

“You seem to think they're pretty, you keep taking pictures of them,” Arden said haughtily. “So maybe they are.”

Eventually, Arden's irritability diminished, although she was not the carefree child she had been. When I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she said billowy white curtains, like the ones in the mural, for the window in her room. So I went shopping with my mother and bought white organdy, and made, yes
made,
broad billowy white curtains on Mother's sewing machine (and with her help). I also painted the bookcase and bureau in her room white; and made a billowy white skirt for her inner spring, and bought her a red-and-white-patterned quilt. By the spring term, it had become a mark of great favor to be taken home by Arden Carpenter. And she would often say to me, “You know, I was lying on my bed thinking last night, and…” whatever. And I told her how I had lain on my bed beside two windows, staring out at moon and clouds and the patterns they made, and the occasional star.

“I wish I could see the moon and the stars,” Arden mused, not complaining.

“Maybe I could make it do that.”

“You could!” Mommy was turned heroine.

I drove to Brooklyn, to a discount art-supply store, and bought a roll of heavy blue film; then I went to a hardware store and bought fixtures for a toilet paper roll and a heavy-duty stapler. I went to a lumberyard and bought a three-foot wooden cylinder one inch in diameter. I stapled the film to the cylinder, attached the toilet paper holders, and slid the cylinder into their openings. I attached a cord to the bottom. Then I began to paint.

This was really hard because I wanted to paint the film on the wrong side, but what I painted had to match what was already on the wall—perfectly. I shadowed in the animals; I put in a moon just emerging from gold-edged clouds; and a few stars; and I added dots of light around the factories. When the shade was down, it showed the tree and plants eerily, just as they look at night. It wasn't the sturdiest job in the world, even if it took me hours and hours to finish. It didn't last: of course, it got a lot of wear, being pulled down and raised many times every day. In two years, the film had torn and shredded. But that was all right. Art had served its true purpose: to nurture. By then, Arden was the most popular girl in her class.

Things were harder for Billy. He remained friendless, surly, and sulky. I kept (cheerfully) making suggestions: Boy Scouts (Nah! Boring!), my old stamp collection (that occupied him for a few weeks), basketball (there was an old hoop still attached to Mrs. Nowak's garage, a remnant from her sons' youth. That was a successful idea until the hoop, rusted with age, slipped to one side. Several requests that Brad put a new one up for Billy went unregarded). Finally, I suggested music lessons: “Maybe you could play in the school band.”

This appealed, I don't know why. Billy went to see the math teacher, who doubled as bandmaster, who received him with open arms and handed him a sousaphone. A sousaphone! Billy was given a free lesson every week, and was allowed almost immediately to play in the band. All that was required was that he and I manage to shove, stuff, and slide the monster into the back seat of my two-door car every Thursday and Saturday; and that I listen daily while Billy practiced. It did not seem to me that my son was a budding musician. But I was patient. I never complained. And if I was grateful when, the following school year, he decided to switch to the trumpet, I did not let him know it. By then he had found a couple of friends, and played basketball in front of their garages every afternoon, and practiced his instrument hardly at all.

If I've been implying that things improved, I don't want you to think it was a steady thing. With kids, things never improve, they just change form. You never know what's ahead, and if you allow yourself to fall into complacency, you will be disappointed. For instance, there was Christmas, the first year after our divorce. We had to split the kids—which split us. I took them Christmas Eve, the traditional time for my family's celebration, and Brad took them Christmas Day. We had reinstituted Santa Claus on Christmas Eve when the children were born, my father playing the role for my children and Joy's when she got home for Christmas. But we had Santa arrive at eight, and served a supper around eleven. There were only a few of us, far fewer than in the old days when Eddie and Martha and Wally and Jean and Eric and their children had all waited for Santa with our family. But the children were just as excited.

And my kids were happy with the event. The first year after the divorce, Arden got a doll from Grandma and Grandpa, and another from me (her wish) and a book; she got a doll's crib (her old one had broken) from Joy. Billy got a cowboy outfit complete with boots and hat from my parents and me combined; Joy gave him a gun and holster. Fine. They went to bed late, I admit it. They were tired and cranky when Brad honked his horn at seven the next morning—his parents liked to have Christmas at daybreak if possible—and he was cranky about having to come in and sit in the messy kitchen and drink coffee while waiting for them to get dressed, and he yelled at them because he wasn't allowed to yell at me anymore (one benefit of divorce), and they got crankier. I admit all that.

Still, the reason they came back glazed and incredibly irritable that night was not just tiredness. I think. Brad had to make four trips to carry up all the stuff they'd been given. There were a football, football shoes and pants and helmet (Billy hated football); a set of trains; an erector set; new roller skates; several games; a punching bag; two pairs of school pants, two pairs of pajamas, and two shirts. That was for Billy. Arden whined in with three more dolls (two replicas of those she'd received), a doll carriage, another doll's crib, a doll's highchair, a suitcase of doll's clothes, a jigsaw puzzle, ice skates, a skirt, blouse, and matching sweater, a nightgown and slippers. These children were unspeakable to; and next morning, as I tried to slog through toys to raise the living room shades, so was I. Oh, and an ironing board. She got. Arden. But no iron. She whimpered about that, but she didn't even want what she got.

They played on the floor with their new toys, shrieking at each other regularly, trampling things. Billy's plastic submarine (I forgot to mention that) broke the first day. He didn't care. He carried it to the kitchen and dumped it into the garbage. There was no room in our house for this many toys. I secreted two of the dolls, and one crib, intending to try to return them. Still, I praised their gifts, trying to make them appreciate the onslaught.

Arden turned her (even then) noble head on her neck and said quietly, “He tries to buy us.” Then she kicked the doll carriage. “I hate it all! Everything!” and stormed to her room. When I looked in on her fifteen minutes later, she was sleeping. Billy fell asleep among the trains, which he couldn't quite manage to set up by himself, and which I hadn't the energy to help him with. It took them several days to recover. By that time, I'd gotten the trains set up, but Billy had lost interest in them. That was the way it was. It was like that every Christmas afterward, too, until they were grown up.

I just sat there, the night of the day after Christmas, and stared at the mess. Even with the lights turned down, the room was hulking with things. Waste, I thought, and tried to avoid a spasm of jealousy. Here I was, down again to two pairs of underpants, and there was this floor full of waste. I'd packed away whatever I could salvage before it was crumpled, but even so, all I'd be able to get would be a credit against more toys. Unless I took them to a department store—and bought myself some underwear with the credit. I decided to do that, but it didn't comfort me.

I'd spent Christmas Day alone. I'd chosen to stay home. I sat in that apartment staring out at the grey winter sky and drank coffee and let things wash over me. I'd been so busy being cheerful and a good mother that I hadn't let myself think about myself at all in months. What kind of life did I have? Was it any better than when I was married? Mindless work five mornings a week; afternoons spent doing laundry, marketing, cleaning the house, errands; evenings at home at home at home until I thought I'd go buggy. Some of the guys at the
Herald
flirted a bit with me, but most of them were married, and I still had scruples. There was one younger guy who was single, but he was ugly—no chin, pop eyes—and callow to boot. I really loved one of the editors, but he was fifty and had a potbelly, and I loved him for his character, not his body. Besides, he never asked me out. The others did, occasionally, but I always refused, as gracefully as I could. I mentioned my children. Continually. That is a great deterrent with men, I've found. Anyway, it wasn't sex I craved. I felt no desire. My body was numb.