Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (12 page)

With me, she was never cozy or intimate. I never remember her hugging or kissing me. Nevertheless, her presence was powerful. In all the ideas she had for our
lives. In the example of her life (the good version). In the structure—down to eggs and bacon for breakfast on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Pancakes on Wednesday, Saturday I forget, Sunday deli. No cereal. She was certain bran was bad for us. She never said or confided; she distilled and proclaimed. I lived my life by the Book of Mom.

One of her rules—“Your homework is your problem. I will never get involved”—had an exception: “But I will write your graduation speech.” And she did. She sat down and banged out my eighth grade graduation speech on her typewriter. Naturally I got chosen and delivered her speech. The theme was “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” and the last line was, “I will look beyond the blue horizon for a better and more peaceful world.” Which, for my mother, has an irony so obvious it hurts to point it out.

It mattered so much to her that I shine at graduation—vanity, probably, since it was one of the few events she attended and her daughters were part of her myth—she couldn’t entrust writing the speech to me (wisely, I think).

I was proud of her, too. Which is another reason it’s hard to write about her. “Never tell anyone what happens here.” It’s a plea:
Don’t diminish me.

So the daytime version of her: the most accomplished
woman in the room with a pride of daughters. She never even lost her temper. Nights she went to pieces, unable to process pain or anger except to spew it. She was unintegrated. Superego or id. Take your pick. Being that—think about it—how terrifying. What a phenomenal disconnect. My poor mother. I’m sure she terrified herself. She was disassembling nightly. She was human global warming—norms replaced by extremes.

My mother’s drinking was so overwhelming that I didn’t notice the obvious: that my dad was drinking, too. This staggering myopia resulted in the lifelong belief (I’m sure shared with other children of alcoholics) that, when I am looking left, something is coming at me from the right. I am always trying to look in two directions at once, which is impossible.

When everything went topsy-turvy, I constructed a narrative, a way to make sense of it, to understand. My mother was responsible. She was the guilty party. I simplified everything—the complications were beyond me. She was the aggressor: she got drunk, left her room, the fights began. She was genuinely scary—a shapeshifter—and my dad wasn’t.

Also, my dad was nice to me, interested in me, appreciative. (I usually think of my mother as my mother
and my father as my dad, and that tells you a lot.) I confided in him when I was upset about school or friends, and he sympathized. We hung out. I went to the grocery store with him to shop and to the deli on Sunday. We played tennis, he took me to tennis matches, I watched football with him. I was a tomboy and loved to play football. He always bragged that if I were a boy, I’d be a great end (not the block and tackle kind, the one that runs for passes). I became his confidante, his ally in their epic battles. I hoped he would leave her and I could live with him. I am sure, looking back, that I thought he loved me more than he loved her, which he did not. I was completely wrong about that. Love can be monstrous. Theirs was. They were George and Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Seeing that play was like hanging out with my parents in our living room at three a.m. My parents were proof of what a sick, screwed-up, perfect thing marriage can be.

How could I ever understand that? I was a kid.

Children of alcoholics are always in over their heads.

Thank God for my sister Amy. Amy was my partner, emotionally, and in the futile attempt to stop my mother from drinking. And them from fighting. Together we would sneak down the stairs and dilute the liquor
bottles. As if we had the power to stop them. How sweet. How innocent. That we thought there was something we could do to stop alcoholics full of rage, thirsting for battle.

Which is another reason it’s hard to write about my mother. I can’t separate her from my dad. Not this part. Not the sick part. My parents were fused.

Once my mother kicked me out. I was on his side, she said, which was true. “Go away and never ever, ever come back.” That sounds like a line from a children’s book. Maybe it is. I have blocked out exactly what she said. Maurice Sendak, whose work I love, understood the scary world of childhood. If your parents are drunks, however, there is no waking up in bed the way Max does
in
Where the Wild Things Are
. There is no realizing you are safe after all.

This happened during the day. I was about sixteen, and by this time the nights had begun to bleed into the days (Hyde was taking over—Hyde was the bad one, in case, like me, you get him and Jekyll mixed up). When she kicked me out, I walked to my friend Stephanie’s, which took about a half hour. Stephanie lived with her mom and brother (her father had died) in an apartment south of Olympic. In Beverly Hills, this was considered the other side of the tracks. Stephanie had a really nice mom. I was crazy about her mom. The difference in our
families was a classic lesson in how money can’t buy happiness. After two days at Stephanie’s, I went home. My mother said nothing, neither did my dad. Alcoholics don’t have a lot of follow-through.

I can’t help notice that, in writing about my mother, I keep sliding into me. Into what she did to me. What I’m writing—my intention to get a grip on her—keeps spinning out of control, the way life in that house did. I keep trying to make this essay “neat,” bend it to my will, make it track, but I can’t. And I keep waking up at two in the morning with my mother on my mind.

Sleeping through the night—because I rarely did after age eleven—is one of my favorite things. Once I moved out, I became a champion sleeper. Now my mother’s back, jolting me awake, rattling my brain.

This awareness is hyperfocus at work. Here I am writing about my mom at the same time trying to analyze what’s going on while I am writing about my mom. My brain is in overdrive, over-thinking. This analyzing upon analyzing puts layers of distance between myself and her. Which is how I like it. Although it’s not surprising that in writing about my mother, I’m writing about me. Because: Who is the mother here? Not my mother. Not if Amy and I are trying to keep her safe by diluting bottles of Scotch.

She was chic, stylish. Wore suits with a gold bow pin on her lapel—the bow studded with tiny rubies had a large rectangular topaz dangling from it. Her jewelry, like her style, never varied. I have the pin. It looks terrible on me because it’s big, but it’s absolutely her. She always looked smart, with her wavy hair brushed back off her face, little or no makeup.

She loved to give parties. Any event meant a party. Election night, the Academy Awards, the Rose Bowl. I remember so fondly the scrambled eggs she made for forty people at halftime. My mother thought you should cook eggs slowly. I have a feeling Nora’s written about her eggs, but don’t have the patience to look it up. Congress could have passed the budget in the time it took my mom to scramble eggs. They were delicious and pretty, a very buttery yellow—she used almost more butter than eggs. Thanks to her, I believe the best kind of party to throw is one where everyone comes over and watches television. I’ve thrown parties to watch ice skating championships.

All this went on while my mother descended further and further into madness. My parents wrote several more funny, light, charming movies, including the adaptations of
Carousel
and
Desk Set
with Tracy and Hepburn. They
collaborated on a Broadway play,
Take Her, She’s Mine
, based on Nora’s leaving for college, ostensibly about our family but in fact having absolutely nothing to do with what went on at home. My mother wrote a play of her own. It was extraordinary that she kept going given how messed up she was—extraordinary that she kept working and that they kept collaborating given their hellish relationship.

Eventually, however, they did stop, because times changed, what they wrote wasn’t relevant or wanted, and because alcohol took over.

I bumped into my mother on the street once when I was in my early twenties. I was walking with a friend on New York City’s Upper East Side, which is where my parents eventually decamped, and there she was. We chatted a minute about absolutely nothing in particular, and my friend and I walked on. I don’t remember who I was with and I don’t remember what my mother and I said to each other except that it was so impersonal that my friend was stunned by it. If I hadn’t said, “Hi, Mom,” my friend would never have known we were related.

The day version of her was a great gift—a sense of destiny, identity, structure, discipline, drive. As a woman she was far ahead of the curve. To the night version of
her I owe free-floating anxiety. I am no longer a child in an unsafe home, but anxiety became habit. My brain is conditioned. I worry. I recheck everything obsessively. Is the seat belt fastened, are the reservations correct, is my passport in my purse? Have I done something wrong? Have I said something wrong? I’m sorry—whatever happened must be my fault. Is everyone all right, and if they aren’t, how can I step in? That brilliant serenity prayer: God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. To all children of alcoholics I want to say, Good luck with that. If I don’t do it myself, it won’t get done (this belief is often rewarded in this increasingly incompetent world). Also, I panic easily. I am not the person you want sitting in the exit row of an airplane. And distrust. Just in general, distrust. Irony.

Irony, according to the dictionary, is the use of comedy to distance oneself from emotion. I developed it as a child lickety-split. Irony was armor, a way to stick it to Mom. You think you can get me? Come on, shoot me, aim that arrow straight at my heart. It can’t make a dent because I’m wearing irony.

But she did get to me. My most powerful memory is of going downstairs in the middle of the night to where they were battling, throwing myself on the floor (I was a teenager), and screaming, flipping out. And my mother
said, cool as can be, “Get up, you’re faking.” So I did. I stopped and got up.

For many years, I thought she was right: I had been faking. But I don’t think so.

•  •  •  •

When my mother was dying, my friend Susan went to visit her in the hospital. Susan was my college roommate, and we shared an apartment for several years after graduating. I had no idea Susan visited my mom. She confessed it only recently.

Susan had often accompanied me when I went to see my parents. For protection. Well, more for moral support. My mother was mean to Susan, too, chiding her (although Susan was brilliant and found it, she claims, ridiculous) that she wasn’t so smart and couldn’t even do a crossword puzzle, which my mother was great at—that and the
New York Times
acrostic. Susan went to visit her in the hospital, and my mother said to Susan, “Bring me a bottle of Chivas.”

Susan did, figuring what did it matter anyway.

So, last words:

“Take notes.”

“I hated crocheting.”

“Bring me a bottle of Chivas.”

How did it come to that? How did it, for that incredibly accomplished woman, all come down to wanting one more drink?

What I know: My father cheated. I didn’t know it then. When I was a kid and the fights were raging, I thought—gleaning from what I overheard—that my dad had kissed another woman at a party. In retrospect, this seems woefully naive, but truly it was one of the few facts I could pluck from the chaos. Facts were not easy to come by at our house. As I remember, although I am not sure about this, I viewed this betrayal as minor, more a curiosity than a cause. It only confused me: How could that cause this? As I said, I was a daddy’s girl. Still their fights, as I heard them/recall them, didn’t have narrative. A coherent plotline. Logic. This accusation surfaced only now and then. Reality was obfuscated. There was no apparent evidence that my dad was out gallivanting. My parents were always together. When my dad wasn’t with my mom, he was with us. That’s the way it seemed.

Then, long after she died, he wrote a garbled confessional memoir that he gave to my husband with the admonition not to show it to me. I read it anyway. A depressingly familiar Hollywood story—a weak man let loose in a candy store. Success and a modicum of fame
and glamour screws up a lot of people. Am I letting him off the hook even now? I don’t know.

And I don’t know how much my mother knew. Still, when she said “I hated crocheting,” was she settling a score, my misplaced loyalty to my dad, or was she simply scattershot mean, or did she just not really like me?

Did she just not really like me?
I wrote that so easily, and yet, more to the point: Did she not like me when she was drunk, but like me when she was sober? Who was she really? The night mom or the day mom? Will the real mom please stand up?

My dad’s memoir was not the story of a man who had character, that’s for sure. Or any self-awareness. Do I think it was true? In the overall. His other book
, We Thought We Could Do Anything
, however, was a well of misinformation, including the year I was born. Over time I heard him change his Hollywood stories, the ones he loved to tell about stars he knew or what happened on the set. As a result I never believe anyone’s Hollywood story, because the point of it, at least for my dad, was not the story, but being able to tell it:
I know this, I was there.

Does my father’s cheating explain my mother’s self-destruction? Not to me. President Clinton humiliated Hillary time and time again. She became a senator and then secretary of state. Her husband cheated and she
traveled to 109 countries negotiating things like treaties. My mother’s beloved brother died when I was eight or nine or so, I’m not sure exactly. Did that contribute to her alcoholic collapse? Maybe. Maybe not. Cause and effect? There is no inevitable. Nothing neat and simple. My mother had a whopping genetic predisposition to alcohol and demons I can’t begin to guess at.

Which is why I can’t write about my mother. I have no idea who she was.