Her Mother's Daughter (69 page)

And like water flowing through an opened tap, passion flows into my heart and flushes out the anxiety. The arrow-strikes turn into ripples of pleasure as I remember Mike's eyes caressing my body. A rosy memory of closeness, embraces, kisses, the body's memory takes over my mind. I begin to hum with the music. The ironing goes faster. I keep hearing him at our parting, promising, it seemed, eternal devotion, the kind of passion that could transcend three thousand miles and the fact that (I suspected) he was married. (I didn't want to ask because I didn't want to seem to be on the hunt for a husband. And he didn't say.) My mind—all by itself—begins to invent scenarios in which we meet at Idlewild Airport and clutch each other with the desperation of fated lovers.

By the time I picked up the kids, I had washed my hair and put on fresh clothes, nicer clothes than I normally wear around the house. I was humming. I was not fully present, I was floating in a romantic dream that required the continual accompaniment of Mantovani violins on the radio or in my head. The kids complained about the music playing on the car radio. I said they always got to listen to what they liked, that today was my turn. They made disgusted retching sounds as violins swooped up and shivered down, but I was impervious. They headed straight for the television set when we got home, and I let them. I went into my room and turned on my radio and began a careful survey of my wardrobe. It was apparent that there was not a single item there suitable for meeting a lover in Idlewild Airport.

Yes, well that was Sunday. Monday I woke up with anxiety clutching at my heart; the romantic dream seemed to have slipped a bit. I immediately turned on WPAT, and the kids looked at me as if they thought I had become peculiar. And then, at ten-thirty, the business phone rang. I let it ring three times before I picked it up; then my hands were so slimy that I dropped it, it clattered on the uncarpeted bedroom floor, and Russ Farrell's voice came on stiff and formal and my heart prepared to stop. But the words he was saying were
magnificent, spectacular.
He said he was going to give the pictures six pages in the March 12 issue,
with a byline for me
! Only the top people got bylines, the great photographers and men who'd worked for
World
for years. I soared. I listened as he discussed the photographs—which we should use, how, cropping, color, layout—but I just kept saying “Um-hm.” He told me he wanted me to come in for a picture conference. I had to write down what he was saying because it wasn't going into my brain.

Yes, that part I recall. I remember too how impressed they were with a device I used on that assignment—I'd do a close-up, then move the camera farther and farther away from the same person or object, gradually placing it in a larger perspective, giving it a broader significance. They loved that, and although they didn't use any of those sequences in this article, they asked me to keep on doing it. Over the years they printed many such sequences. I liked them myself: for some reason they gave me peace. I had done my best to make my pictures show truth.

I floated up from the bed and into the kitchen and turned off some kitsch music playing on the radio. I rummaged in the cabinets for a bottle, I wanted to offer myself a toast, but I couldn't find anything except apple juice, so I drank that. I wanted to call someone up. I tried my mother's line, but she was out. I tried Delilah's, but hers was busy. Then it occurred to me to call Mike. This led to a swift reevaluation.

First, I had no telephone number for him—I had the number of the main office, but Mike was probably out on the site, showing around some politicians or journalists. Then I thought: why should I call him? He doesn't really know anything about me: I was so careful to appear confident, assured, on top of everything, I wanted to seem tough, impervious: there is no way he could understand how important this is to me.

That made me sit down.

I forced myself to recall our…whatever it was. How he'd gotten himself quite drunk the next night (as he had the night before); how he knew hardly anything about lovemaking except screwing, and was utterly oblivious to my gestures, my murmured suggestions. How he simply leaped on top of me when he adjudged me juicy enough, lunged and came and rolled off and fell asleep with his arm across my stomach.

I slid out from under his arm and went into the bathroom and drew a bath and masturbated. I let him sleep for an hour then roused him and made him leave. I didn't want him coming from my room the next morning, and I didn't want to sleep in the same bed with him, either. The sheet had dried by then, but I put a towel over it anyway.

Next day he acted sheepish, as if he didn't remember exactly what had happened. He made a lot of jokes about getting soused. He wouldn't meet my eyes and acted distracted all day. That night, as he brought me back from the site, he apologized: he was tired and hung over from the night before and was going to grab a sandwich and go to bed. And this infuriated me.

If he had wanted to sleep with me again, I fully intended to refuse. So why was I furious? I wanted him to feel so madly desirous that he would not want to give up a single moment with me—especially since Wednesday was my last night there. I wanted him to feel that way even though I didn't. I didn't know what to call my attitude, except bad. Still, I wanted to get even, so when some of the managers invited me to eat with them and sit around in the bar after dinner, I took them up on it. I flirted my tail off, and so did they. By midnight we were all buddies.

Next day I had to work intensely—it was my last chance. I had to make sure I hadn't missed any opportunity for a terrific shot, and I wanted to retake certain shots in different lights. Mike was attentive and sweet, much as he had been before, but I had no time to worry about him. When he left me at the landing strip where I'd get the turboprop, he put his hands on my shoulders and looked deeply into my eyes, and murmured, lovingly, “Stacey, darling,” as if we'd been soul mates, deeply intimate. Then he kissed my forehead lightly and said he got to New York sometimes and would call me if he did and we'd find ourselves a fantastic steak.

This is what I'd used as the basis for a romantic dream.

How had I managed to convince myself, between Thursday and Sunday, that Mike Bostwick was the lover I'd been waiting for, the mate that fate had me created for? What's more serious, what worries me, is the question of how I'll ever be able to trust myself again if I imagine I'm in love with somebody. What would I have done if
World
hadn't liked the pictures, if my “career” had ended yesterday morning? Would I have turned
him
into my meaning, my success? Would I have wept on the phone to him every night, having leaped every hurdle to find his telephone number, confessing passion and need? Humiliating myself, embarrassing him?

Just the same, the romantic dream helped. It got me through Sunday. It slid me gently back into the old round of marketing, dishes, laundry, and cooking, which now seem even more tedious and puny than they did before. After all, I am a person who flies to the Coast, who climbs up on huge cranes to photograph dams, who meets important people, who has glamorous love affairs! My mind is a mess. It is full of delusions and even though I know it, I can't clear them away. I don't know which to mistrust more: my heart or my mind.

J
UNE 1948

Nothing left to hope for. It was in her, I knew it was in her, something special, something I wanted but didn't have, what I would have given to have it! and yet she let it go, and so young. It isn't as though I didn't warn her, she knew what my life was like, I told her what would happen, having to get married, the shame and then nothing, the end of your life…. We never spoke of sex in this house, but she knew, she knew what happened to me. And even so, she did it.

Belle's memory of desire was thin, like trying to remember what your mother meant to you before she grew old and senile. At least she had waited until she was mature, twenty-five, it was understandable that she would have…. But Anastasia was only eighteen, too young for a girl to feel desire. And the worst of it was it happened in the same month, February, the baby would be born the same month Anastasia had been born, it was as if her own fate had been imprinted on Anastasia, as if Anastasia herself could do nothing about it, it was destined.

Pregnant. Mom, I'm pregnant. What was there to say? Ed would have liked to scold, I wouldn't let him. How could he? How could either of us, given what we…I'll remember that priest in Washington forever, shrieking at him that he was depraved, filthy, a miserable sinner, a tool of the devil….The only time I saw Ed almost cry. Turned me against the church. So now she's married too, married the same way, furtively, a quick trip to someplace, even the date of it lost, why bother to remember, you don't remember the date your life ended. All that intelligence, so brilliant she was, talented too, she could have been anything, all her teachers said so—pianist, painter, teacher…. Not like me, no education, no culture, nearly deaf, blind in one eye, no chances…. I gave her everything, my whole life. Nothing, all for nothing.

Belle sits pleating hats. She is forty-four, but looks older. She is attractive with her fine pale hair, her delicate features, noble, even. Her face is the face of a lady, not a woman—important difference in 1948. But close up you can see how her face will age—how the ends of her eyes droop and fold into a pocket of puffy flesh, how the lines around her mouth are deepening and the hundreds of tiny lines slivering her fine pale skin. Her long fingernails are thick and yellow, ugly, she thinks. She keeps them coated with polish, a deep old rose. Pleating the hats wears off the polish from the tips of her nails. But her hands are still beautiful, the fingers long and slender and graceful. Her best feature.

She has no shame, Anastasia. You'd think she'd be miserable, humiliated that people were talking about her. You'd think she'd walk about with bowed head and cry, like her, like Belle. Jean had sighed in sympathy, “Oh, Belle,” as if Belle were the one in trouble. It was humiliating to have to tell them, their daughters would never get in trouble like that. Eric, of course, immediately reminded them that he had told them not to send Anastasia to college. Ed should have put his foot down and insisted she go to work, she was such a willful girl, it had been a waste to send her to college. Girls
will
get married, he said. It's nature. She'd hated him at that moment, sitting there smug and self-satisfied, pronouncing about nature and girls as things that he would never have to worry about, safe and superior in his impregnable body. And what about
his
children? He gave them everything money could buy and she'd bet he'd send them to college too. Looks down on us, one law for him, another for us. Ed might not be as good a provider as Eric, but he'd never say a thing like that.

Girls! What about boys? Anastasia didn't do this herself. But she did seem—how could she be?—happy with this Brad, unstable boy, funny eyes, pale, that don't seem to see what they are looking at. No shame at all, you'd think she wanted to be pregnant, end her life so young. She even acts delighted with that stifling little one-room attic apartment, you have to walk through a stranger's living room even to get to the stairs, horrible, she wouldn't go there. No wedding, no wedding gifts, nothing to start life with. They didn't even have a toaster, and when Belle lamented this, Anastasia laughed and said you could just as well make toast on the gas ring.

Horrible. Her life will be one long slavery. When she could have married a big doctor, a big lawyer, she's attractive, she plays the piano well. If she had just…Well, at least they have their own place, that's more than I had, but no money, Brad not even finished with school, the only decent maternity dress she has is the one I bought her.

Belle's head ached. She set the hat down gently on the pile of finished work: ten, she thought, then counted them again. Yes, ten. She rose and went into the bathroom and swallowed two aspirin. She avoided her face in the mirror. She went back to the bedroom and lighted a cigarette. She sat down in the chair she worked in, but did not pick up another hat.

I'll just have a cigarette. A little break.

Ten. And it was only eleven-twenty. She could finish forty hats today, although her fingers got sore from the pleating after a while, despite the calluses that protected the tips. Pleat ten more, then sew on ruching for an hour, prepare another twenty. Then cut out some fabric, size 6, to work on tomorrow. A decent day's work. At this rate, 200 this week. Except she had a dentist appointment on Thursday, that would be time lost. Maybe 190. Not bad. Since her raise…what would that be? She couldn't multiply 12 1/2 cents in her head. She set the cigarette in an ashtray and picked up the pencil that lay on her vanity. 190 x 12, she scrawled swiftly: $22.80. Then half a cent each on 190 caps, that would be 95 cents. $23.75.

What would that be by the hour? Minimum wage, they said on the radio yesterday; there was a minimum wage. How many hours do I work?

She laid the pencil down. She wasn't going to keep track of her hours, she didn't want to know.

Suppose it was terribly little, way below minimum wage? Better not to know.

So now there were just the bills, keeping things afloat until something happened. Save some money for Joy, if she wants to go to college. She probably won't. Likes to have fun, be with her friends, throws up when she has examinations, not a student. Cute and funny though. But she doesn't have what Anastasia had. Wasted. Three years yet before Joy would need it. Unless she too…

No. She tamped out her cigarette with grim mouth. No, it was Anastasia who was destined to repeat my fate, not Joy.

J
UNE
1951

When they moved in Joy had loved the little wall fixtures in the bedrooms, two in hers and Anastasia's, three in Mother and Daddy's. They were made of porcelain Mother said and they had flowers painted on them and little etched glass chimneys enclosing the light bulb. But now she hates them because they cast so faint a light, they make shadows on her face when she looks at it in the mirror, like now, and they make her skin look yellow, but she isn't really yellow, Kitty and Linda said she wasn't, and she made them swear they were telling the truth, too. Anastasia had put all kinds of lamps in her room, four of them, it looked silly, six lights in one little room, of course they were all small, two on the bureau and two on the old green metal kitchen table Anastasia used for a desk, Anastasia hated darkness. But Anastasia had taken all her lamps with her.