Her Mother's Daughter (80 page)

Coming home was a letdown. I left Stockholm on a Friday, before noon, went to the lab from the airport, and didn't arrive at my house until after six. Pani saw me getting out of the cab and met me at the door with her hands clasped as in prayer. Sorry, so sorry, she said, she had told the children I was coming home this afternoon, but they had things to do, and no one was there but they would be home soon, she was so sorry, she knew they wanted to see me, she could not always get them to do what she wanted them to do….I knew this meant there had been trouble.

She apologized for the house—her legs were all swollen up with rheumatism (which is what she called all her aches and pains)—she had not been able to clean up. She lifted her skirt to show me her swollen, blue-lined puffy limbs. Tired as I was, I had to exclaim, to insist she go to bed and I would bring down some dinner for her. Oh, no, she cried, no no, you tired, she would be fine, she had already eaten dinner, she was sitting in her wonderful reclining chair watching the television, I was not to worry about her. I was relieved, I didn't want to worry about her. I was worried enough.

The house was a mess—stuff was scattered everywhere. I walked through it like a woman in shock, I'm sure my face looked like the faces of people you see in photographs, who return home after the enemy has bombarded their village. Only the kitchen was relatively neat, and that, I suspected, was because Pani kept cleaning it up. I could not see the floor of Arden's room, it was littered with dropped clothes, books, toys (although you're not supposed to call them toys when a kid is nearly twelve). Billy's was not as bad, but there were food-soiled plates on his desk and bed table and empty soda cans on the floor.

I went into my room. It was dusty, but neat. It looked as if neither of them had entered it in the last month—except for a deep dent in the middle of my bed, and a slightly disordered pillow. Someone had been lying there. My throat thickened. I couldn't swallow.

Billy came in at six-thirty. He smiled when he saw me, he hugged me, but his color was poor, he looked pale. I asked him how his exams had gone, did he know any of his grades? was he a great tooth, did people praise him? had he seen Daddy, had the baby been born? had he tried out for the Little League team? I got answers from between locked teeth—okay, no, okay he guessed, no one said anything, no, he didn't know, yes. Great, I said: and did you make it? He didn't know.

Since I'd put myself through the emotional upset of asking Brad to spend more time with them than usual, while I was away, I was upset at that answer. “You haven't seen him? Why not?” Billy just shrugged. He stood there looking limp, and when I, silent with dread, said nothing, he left the room. I sank down on a chair in the kitchen. I was trying to keep myself from pouring a drink. Then Arden walked in, cool and distant. She said hello as if she'd last seen me that morning, and we'd had an argument. I tried my questions out on her. She didn't even bother to answer. She glared at me, and started to walk out of the room.

“Arden, I'm talking to you!”

She stopped in the doorway and partly turned around. “Well, I'm not interested in talking to you. You go away for a whole month and don't even come to my dance recital or help me study for my math test, you leave us completely alone with just an old woman you pay to take care of us, and now you want to talk. I don't.”

“I had to go away! I was upset about it too! I called you! It's very expensive to call from overseas, but didn't I call you? I called you the day of your recital, and before your math test! I called Billy and gave him ideas for his social studies projects, didn't I?” I was near tears.

She didn't answer. She simply disappeared. I poured the drink. It got later, but I just sat there. I couldn't think. Around eight, both of them wandered into the kitchen. Arden opened the fridge door and rummaged around among the containers of leftovers. There was a package of hamburger sitting on a shelf—Pani had been considerate and bought some food—and something easy. But I couldn't think about cooking. Billy drifted over and peered over Arden's shoulder. She was eating something—leftover mashed potatoes, it looked like—with her finger out of the container.

“Aren't we going to eat?” he asked me.

I burst into tears. “I can't cook if you're not going to talk to me!”

Both children froze. They stared at me. I was sobbing in my hands. Billy's hand touched my shoulder, then slid around my neck. Arden put the mashed potatoes back in the fridge (with the cover loose) and came over and took my hand.

“We'll talk to you, Mom,” she said. Billy's face was wet against mine.

“Don't cry,” he whispered.

“Well, will somebody tell me what's going on around here?” I yelled. “I know you're mad at me! But I love you, and I have to do what I do, I have to have some kind of life too, I need it! Can we please be normal again?”

We cooked dinner together—cheeseburgers on buns, creamed corn out of a can and salad made of iceberg lettuce, a grainy tomato, and bottled dressing. We all drank Coke. (I could hear my mother's voice in the back of my head: “Is this what you feed your children, Anastasia? Carbohydrate, fat, sugar? Do you realize that in America they put sugar even in salad dressing?” “Shut up!” I roared silently. “I can only do what I can do! I know you would have managed somehow to cook a good meal for them, but you wouldn't have talked to them! Would you!”)

The children talked a little warily. As things went on, I understood that they wanted to avoid certain subjects. Most of all they did not want to talk about their father, and we never did. They also didn't want to admit, to me, but mostly to themselves, how they counted on me without even knowing it. It mattered that I was there to kiss them good night, to tell them they were good and wonderful children, to listen to their daily litany of miseries.

At that time I felt they—I—none of us should have miseries. Weren't we fortunate? Weren't we living in greater ease and comfort than our parents, well, my parents had? What right had we to feel miserable about our small misfortunes? Only because they were children did I let them have sorrows. I smoothed their foreheads, I told them things would look brighter in the morning. (You can see why Brad called me Pollyanna: but the truth is, things
do
look brighter in the morning.) But this luxury I allowed them I did not allow myself. I had no right—after all, look at me, the most fortunate of women imaginable!—no right to be anything but pleased with my life.

It is Clara who made me see this, who has been trying these last months to make me see that everyone has the right to feel bad about the things that happen to them, the right to complain and even cry about them. I haven't quite managed to accept it though. For me, the only people entitled to cry about their lives are my mother, my grandmother, and people whose lives were as miserable as theirs.

And maybe even though I was allowing my children to complain and cry, maybe in some subtle way I was also telling them they were being childish and petty. So what if Arden was the only girl in the dance recital, and Billy the only child in the play, whose mother did not show up to applaud, to hug afterward, to bestow praise, to beam? (I should have been there, of course. I wish I had been there.) Life is hard all over, and they
had
a loving mother, even if she wasn't present. They had enough to eat, a decent place to live, and they weren't abused, beaten, or even yelled at.

What I said was, “I told Daddy to come and see you. I told him it was important.”

“Well, he didn't.” Not only had he not attended their play/recital, but he hadn't taken them to dinner except for the first week I was gone. He had said then he might be busy for a while, and when they asked him why, he'd evaded them. Arden had said “Because Fern's having a baby, right?” and he'd been startled and suspicious.

“Who told you that!” he glared.

“Our eyes,” Arden said.

He admitted it then. She was due in a week, and because she was nearly thirty, the doctors were worried about her. He'd see them if he could, but he couldn't promise. Then silence. He never so much as called the rest of the month.

“Did you call him? Did you call him Tuesday night to see if he was taking you to dinner on Wednesday?”

Two heads shook no.

“Did you call him after that to ask him where he was and why he hadn't come?”

Two heads shook.

“Why not!” I screamed, something I rarely did. And strangely, they understood, because they did not get upset at my screaming.

I was shocked. I understood Brad had been punishing me for going away, but that he would take it out so cruelly on them passed my line of understanding.

There were tears in my eyes when I said I was sorry—sorry that Daddy wasn't there, but sorry most of all that I hadn't seen them, that I had missed seeing them at a moment of their lives that would never be repeated. I don't think they understood what I had lost, but they understood that I was grieved. I wiped my face and cleared the table. I proposed a hot game of hearts. I promised them we'd go away for a vacation in the summer, and told them to think about where they'd like to go.

That night, after they were asleep, I called Brad, I screamed at him, I told him he wasn't fit to be a father. He said I wasn't fit to be a mother. I told him he was cruel, he said I was. I told him he'd better pay some attention to them fast or I'd see a lawyer about denying him visitation rights. He laughed. He said no visitation, no child support. Then I cried again: I asked him how he could do such a thing to them. He said he'd been busy, okay? He had a new daughter and a sick wife to worry about. I said maybe the kids would like to meet their half sister, and to be reassured that even though he had a new baby, he still cared about them. That seemed to surprise him. I guess he never thought about how things seemed to them, how his behavior affected
them.
I hated him.

School ended, the kids got their report cards, and they did well except that Arden had dropped from a 95 to a 70 in math. Billy got into Little League. And one Sunday, Brad came and got them and drove them back to his house to meet Annette, their new little sister. They came home quiet and pale, although they were enthusiastic about the baby—so little, such tiny fingernails, so beautiful, so cute, so sweet, she kept smiling at Billy and clutching Arden's finger. They said nothing about their father.

I made arrangements to rent a little house on the bay side of Cape Cod for August, when Little League would be over. Slowly, the children healed. Only their rooms stayed a mess. I had wanted to charge in like a field marshal ordering a mop-up operation, but guilt or love stopped me. Their rooms stayed sties until we came back, all of us tan and strong from swimming and horseback riding and playing ball, to get ready for their return to school. And then they cleaned up their rooms without my saying a word.

A
LL THROUGH THAT SUMMER, MY
stomach worried. I knew that I could not again leave the kids for so long a time; but the best assignments, the major ones, often involved staying away a month or more, sometimes three or four months. It was conceivable that I might take the kids with me if I were going to be away for four months, but how was I going to explain that to
World,
which didn't know they existed? And I knew how hard it was to work when they were with me.

My anxiety wasn't serious—it was just that I'd find myself chewing the inside of my lip at odd moments, or I'd have indigestion after eating a perfectly innocent pizza. I'm not writing a heroic tale, a tragedy or an epic. I'm trying to recount a life, my life, a woman's life—and lives are made up of small events that wear us down. It is not great crises that mark us, that make us what we are, but the small details of ordinary living that stiffen us into shape gradually. And the shape once formed: can you change it? That's the great question for me now. Not then: I hadn't yet been molded, molded myself.

After my return, we had a good, easy summer, marred only by one problem. I discovered it on a Tuesday night (no date in the journal, just “Tuesday.” But it had to be sometime in July).

I'd made a good dinner for a change, a lamb stew with big chunks of carrot and rutabaga and potato and the cheap cuts of lamb that are my favorites, breast and neck, and we'd all eaten too much and were dallying at the table talking and joking, when Billy made a nasty crack to me, and I flailed out to slap his hand. His remark was a signal, telling me he wanted to play our old game. We hadn't played it since Brad and I got divorced. My flailing out at him was my acceptance of the challenge.

We both leaped to our feet; Billy darted to the other side of the table; I lunged for him. He darted in the other direction, and I reversed mine. Around and around we went, both getting dizzy, beginning to howl with laughter, panting. He took off for the living room, me in hot pursuit. Once I caught him and began to tickle him; he let out a bloodcurdling scream and eased out of my grasp, running back to the kitchen, tossing chairs as he went, to impede me. We darted back and forth at opposite sides of the table again, then, by faking my direction, I caught him again and grabbed a handful of his hair. Again he let out a wild shriek, escaped, and again headed for the living room. By this time, we were both laughing so hard we had trouble running at all. Of course, at any time Billy could have darted into his room, or the bathroom, and locked the door, but the point was not to end the chase, but to prolong it. This game of ours always ended the same way—I'd catch him, and bend his middle finger backward—not hard, not enough to hurt him, but just enough so that he felt legitimate in crying out “I give up! I give up!” and then we could cease, our hearts pounding, our cheeks red, our stomachs aching from the laughter. Billy would throw himself on the floor panting, and I'd lean on a chair to catch my breath.