Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey (18 page)

I find it interesting which friends I’ve kept along the way in my many moves. Kerri Remmel is a definite keeper. She already had her Ph.D. in speech pathology when I went to work for her, and she would later get her M.D. and do a residency in neurology. Reading all this, one would expect a very serious woman, but Kerri is down-to-earth and lots of fun—very pretty, with a great personality. She is also very brainy.

As a recent graduate, I couldn’t have gone to work for anyone better. Her clinic was well-appointed, with the latest equipment and an excellent library that I found most helpful. I worked with a variety of patient populations and speech disorders. The job was fulfilling, stimulating, and a definite step up in my career.

When Kerri first offered me the position, B. and I were already back in Atlanta, where he felt more at home. In fact, we were back in the same house we had lovingly rebuilt. The opportunity to work with Kerri was so good that I convinced B. it would be a good plan for me to get my own apartment in Shreveport. The idea, ostensibly, was that I would come home on weekends. I saw this as a practical way to ease into a permanent break. For the first time, I felt I had a viable plan of action.

At first, B. didn’t like the idea. But when I showed him, on paper, how we’d be saving money, he went for it.

My own apartment. For so long, it seemed like a crazy dream. In July of 1988 when I signed a six-month lease on a small, cozy apartment in Shreveport, it became a reality. But wait—before you start cheering for Betty Jane, let me warn you that I had a few more mistakes to make. Was I happy? Was the move toward independence everything I’d hoped it would be and more? No, not at all. I was scared and disoriented.

Nonetheless, that fall I finally broached the subject of divorce with B. He was battling any kind of permanent break. Understandably upset, he offered to pay for counseling for me—a very big gesture for a man with such a tight hold on the purse strings. I took him up on it, but after the second session the therapist dismissed me, saying, “Betty, you don’t need to see me. You’re healthy.”

I made a note in my journal at that time, “What an eye-opener.” It was a relief to have an outside person validate me and my feelings which I had allowed to become so squashed in this marriage.

This only reinforced my resolve to pursue the divorce, though it was soon clear that B. was going to be as ugly as he could about the division of assets. Now he wanted all of the house.

Again, those five stages of coping with loss—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—came into play. After years of being in denial about many of our problems, I was now getting in touch with my anger.

When Ellen and Vance heard that I was divorcing B., they both urged me to move to Los Angeles, and I would have done so had it not been for Mother’s deteriorating condition. Earlier that year, she had had to get an oxygen tank in the house. As much as I loved the idea of moving to California, it was too far away.

And so, after much deliberation, by year’s end I was making another drive—the seven-hour drive from Shreveport to New Orleans—my car packed full of my belongings. The good news was that the divorce was going through. The bad news was that I was moving in with my eighty-three-year-old mother.

Initially, this decision had seemed logical. I was living by myself in Shreveport, without much of a support system. Mother was ailing, living in her house alone, and my sisters and I were worried about her. We talked it over on the phone—with Audrey in Texas and Helen in Mississippi—and resolved that my moving in was the right thing to do.

I had barely unpacked my things when I realized it wasn’t the right thing to do, for either of us. As helpful as I was trying to be, Mother just plain resented the fact that she needed help. She had always been active, a real do-it-herself person who loved working in her yard and walking. Not that she was a complainer, but she just simply wasn’t used to being incapacitated. Bless her, Mother fought her debilitation all the way to the end. A few years later, when she could no longer leave the house, her priest came to visit her and said something about her being an invalid. Mother became quite indignant. She was hooked up to her oxygen tank twenty-four hours a day, but she most definitely did not consider herself an invalid.

Mildred Pfeffer was a darling lady, a true original. But she was not easy to live with. When I moved in with her, she had been living alone since Daddy died, for nineteen years, living her way all that time. A true creature of habit, she was naturally quite set in the way she wanted everything done.

During my years in east Texas and Shreveport, we had visited innumerable times. I knew, as well as I knew my name, that after each visit Mother washed the sheets on the guest bed. Yet every time, without fail, on the last morning Mother would say, “Bets, don’t make the bed.” It became our little joke. B. would say to me when we got up on that last day, “Bets, don’t make the bed,” only for us to hear it echoed a few minutes later.

For me to move into this highly structured situation was a disaster waiting to happen. I remember when Helen arrived for a visit and found Mother not talking to me. “What did you do this time?”

I shrugged my shoulders, bewildered. Helen understood that shrug so well. It meant that Mother’s feelings were hurt. It could have been something I said or did, or something I didn’t say or do. It could have been the distracted way I had said good morning. Whatever it was, I told Helen, “I’ve tried to apologize. It’s no use.”

Helen shook her head in dismay. She, Audrey, and I loved Mother, of course, and would never knowingly do or say anything to hurt her—and so we never understood why we were apologizing so often. Helen is, and has always been, the kindest person I know. Yet even she was not exempt.

In this particular case, I don’t remember how or when the issue was resolved, but it was, as always—until the next time.

To complicate the picture, I wasn’t especially happy in my new job. Though it was always possible to get work with a master’s in speech pathology, my job was as an itinerant therapist—who travels to clients on an as-needed basis—and not in my particular area of interest.

All of this made it entirely too easy to reconcile with B. This would probably fall under the heading of the bargaining stage of loss. Bargaining is another form of denial or rationalization: you convince yourself that the death or thing that was lost was your fault, you promise yourself to do better, and you expect that everything will be fixed. I’ll never know how I rationalized every aspect of B.’s behavior and our relationship that wasn’t right, but I did.

Remember that he was a salesman, and he was charming and sexy. After four months of misery in New Orleans, when he said, “C’mon, Betty, honey, come on home,” in his West Texas twang, I melted. The word “home” really got me.

And for a while, I was happy to be in my own home back in Atlanta once again. That stay proved not to be too long, as I soon procured an excellent job as speech pathologist on staff at the East Texas Medical Center Hospital in Tyler, Texas. So, doing the one thing that we did manage to do well together, B. and I packed up and moved to Tyler—a pleasant small town two hours east of Dallas—where we bought a house and began to put down stakes yet again.

On the one hand, my new work was fulfilling and I made a new circle of warm, supportive friends. On the other hand, an inner voice was telling me that going back to B. would never work. Somehow I told my inner voice to shut up and convinced myself that we deserved one more try. That was the bargain. And so it was back to the familiar pretense of normality—so much so that rather than just moving in together and seeing if we could make it work, we remarried. When someone suggested that we wait before tying the knot all over again, the first thing that came to mind was: Live in sin? What will people think? Or, more to the point, what will Mother think?

As
YOU READ
my story, at this point you are probably wondering the same thing that Ellen, Vance, Noni, my sisters, and my closest friends were dying to know: When is Betty going to leave that guy once and for all? What is it going to take to get through that thick head of hers?

Well, fret no more. By late summer of 1990, just over a year since we had remarried, the house of cards was about to fall. After eighteen years with B., a span of time that included a handful of separations and a brief divorce and countless moves and relocating, I really and truly finally prepared myself to walk with determination and finality out the door.

No one incident was the final straw. It was really a series of realizations that jolted me into action. The first fact I had to face was that, no matter how hard I tried, denied, negotiated, or bargained, I couldn’t get past the issue of his inappropriate behavior toward Ellen. My trust in him had died a long time ago. Somehow, the flame of love that had managed to burn in spite of that distrust had taken much longer to burn out, but now it was merely sputtering.

I had another revelation one day when B. and I were watching a news magazine show that featured a story about the Von Bülows. On the TV screen was a lavish mansion of the sort shown on
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,
and the narrator commented, “The Von Bülows lived in opulent decadence.”

“Where’s that?” B. asked.

I looked at him and then looked away in amazement. It this wasn’t a clue that he and I had absolutely nothing in common, I don’t know what was.

A week or so later, in late September, I arrived home from work and found B. waiting for me at the door. Without so much as a “How was your day?” he waved a bank statement in front of my nose and began to accuse me of stealing from him.

Because he was so miserly, I had opened up a small savings account in which I had been depositing a few dollars from each paycheck, so that I didn’t have to fight with him every time I wanted to send a gift to my kids or another family member. It wasn’t much, but it was mine and, as far as I was concerned, none of his business.

As calmly as I could I told him so, adding, “I contribute more than my share to our household; I’ve always pulled my own weight.”

That was the truth, and he couldn’t rationally argue with it. So he became irrational, threatening me by saying he would take me for everything I had—including my savings and my annuity, an investment I had made when I was single with money that wasn’t his and that he had no claim to.

You stingy bastard, I thought, but I said nothing. After all those years of thinking that he was so charming and attractive, I looked at him for the first time and realized he wasn’t at all appealing. In fact, as I stood there, just glaring, it dawned on me that he actually resembled Richard Nixon.

For the next several days, we waged a cold war—sleeping separately and hardly speaking. When that became unbearable for both of us, we finally broke our silence and behaved civilly. I think we both understood that we were at the end of our time together.

One last test took place in early October, when, as the marriage that wouldn’t die was on its last breath, I flew to Los Angeles alone for Vance’s wedding. Vance was marrying Mimi, a beautiful, bright young woman from a prominent Beverly Hills family. When I arrived, Vance went over all the festive plans for the days ahead—a cocktail party that Mimi’s parents were hosting for us, along with the rehearsal dinner that I was arranging and hosting, plus the plans for a very beautiful garden wedding. Elliott and Virginia, having moved to San Diego a few years earlier, would be there. It was then that all my fears of being alone at these events ganged up on me. Somehow the thought of going through such an important life passage as a single was too much to bear.

Or, as I explained to Vance, “I’m just not ready to fly solo.” So I went to the phone and called B., asking him to join me. For those few days, we put on a pretense of being a normal couple. We had the expertise.

The wedding was wonderful and elegant. As Mimi’s family is Jewish, the ceremony had many traditional elements that I found moving and interesting. Elliott, Ellen, and I stood together in the beautiful
chupah
next to Vance, Mimi, her parents, and of course, the rabbi.

Someone asked if I minded that Vance was marrying a Jewish girl. The thought had never crossed my mind. I had grown so far by this point that I not only accepted it but was thrilled that our family would become even more diverse. In fact, if you’ll forgive the cliché, it happens to be true that some of my best friends are Jewish.

At the rehearsal dinner which I had hosted the night before, I had a long, wonderful discussion with the rabbi and was highly impressed by his warmth and intelligence.

Clearly, Vance and Mimi loved each other, and that was what mattered to me. There were, unfortunately, some stresses on their marriage which had nothing to do with religious differences, but came from the fact that they were in different places in their individual and career journeys. As it turned out, they would not be married very long. Even so, they would part with love and mutual respect.

That was not unlike Elliott and myself. After eighteen years of having been divorced, we had gotten past our unhappy memories. Now, even though we weren’t together, we could still feel the immeasurable joint pride of parenthood as we beheld the beautiful, fine human beings our two children had grown into.

To our mutual relief, B. flew home after the wedding while I remained for a few days afterward. At long, long last, something inside me finally let go. That was it. The sputtering flame had gone out. No more denial, no more anger, no more bargaining. Inside I felt empty and very sad; in those five stages of loss, this would be typical of moving into the fourth stage: depression. I would stay in that stage for a while to come. But I knew with assurance that we were through. That chapter of my life was over, and it was time to make my plans accordingly.

“Do you really mean that?” El asked as she drove me to LAX for my early-evening flight home. She had heard this from me before, so, understandably, she was wary.