Study in Perfect (21 page)

Laura the timid one, the make-a-fort-in-the-closet girl, the girl who never wore shorts much less a bathing suit?

As a teenager, I was pure ham: spoke, sang, even whispered at high volume. No matter how subtle or insignificant the emotion, I embellished it, stealing from performances I'd seen on TV, exaggerating until my audience was drawn in. At sixteen, I told my mother everything and opened my heart to anyone else who would listen too. Because in my mind, a kept secret was a festering thought, dangerous to my health.

My mother was a guardian of secrets, gentle soldier at the kitchen sink, doe with ears twitching. Always a listener, ever
available, her own dark thoughts settled deep, pushed there by the flutter-kick of family. When it came time for my college lift-off, things went smoothly. A long drive west on the pitted Pennsylvania turnpike, then Ohio, steaming in late August heat. I remember this: Luggage in hand, we approached Cory Hall, my dorm for a semester. What an eyesore—tattered vinyl sofas in the lobby, graffiti on the cinderblock walls, gray-green drapes half up, half down. Something evil and stinky dripped from a balcony above. We had to dodge it to get in. “Oh, Sarah,” my mother said, her voice drooping. But this midwestern hippie school was my choice and it had to be a good one, so I chirped, “It's OK!” And I followed two longhaired boys up the stairs. When I glanced back, she was gone.

I see my mother's orange VW bus pull into the driveway and she enters the house again. There on the counter, the smoked turkey I love between two slices of Wonder Bread. There my jeans with their U.S. flag patches that caused such an argument. Now the hairclips, Prell shampoo, and mildewed camping equipment. Wandering from room to room, she gathers up the debris. She soaks up the silence and wonders why the storm that was her daughter's adolescence felt so difficult to navigate.

But I am just imagining things. Perhaps she simply turns to the next child, Nancy, with less than two years to go.

Laura has lost her sculpture, which at first glance resembles a stone thumb. Upon closer inspection, it's actually quite moving—a tiny figure stooped in prayer or under the weight of a great burden. She kept it in a shoebox on the stairs, but now
only the sandpaper and tools are in evidence. She's frantic and of course it's all my fault, “Your incessant cleaning, Mom. Tomorrow the sculpture is due in 3D art!”

Turns out the dog carried it outside and is happily gnawing on the little penitent. We approach him and he rumbles low in his throat.

Laura in the backseat, complaining about Cézanne. “I think his paintings are ugly. He's way overrated. His portrait of the Alps looks like a big lump of ham.” My husband suggests she look at his other work before she condemns him completely. “Yeah, yeah,” she drones. “I'm sick of the Impressionists. Public schools love them. Humanities and Impressionism. French and Impressionism. Art and Impressionism. Blah Impressionism Blah.”

Poor little melon, tossed in with the black turnips
.
—
CHINESE PROVERB

Years earlier, while Laura “napped” in her big-girl bed, we'd hear a complex drama in several voices, high and low. “Jesus, I'm making a lot of noise,” she remarked. Later, when she began to read, the theater went deeper inside. Folded up like a frog under her kindergarten desk, she breezed through all of Roald Dahl. Her teacher reported this with a wry smile, then added generously, “OK with me, as long as she's reading.” By early adolescence it was
Sanctuary
,
Laughter in the Dark
, and
Light in August
. At twelve, she showed us her first short story, “Climbing Out,” written for an English class, about a girl who leaves a bad relationship with her boyfriend. We were surprised by its sophistication—the wry, clear voice from one so young:

Eric stood up and climbed into the back of his '97 Ford pickup truck, his jeans clinging to the Tommy Hilfiger emblem on his boxer shorts. I had been dating Eric for over eight months and not once during that time had he ever used a belt. His idea of good conversation was a discussion on the gayness of our history teacher, Mr. Higgens.

“Hey Liz, what about his new toupee, is the horsehair real or faux do you suppose?” he called from the truck.

His pointed smile reminded me of the Trix rabbit. “Go stand in the snow,” I replied.

She'd never even had a boyfriend, as far as I knew.

My mother had a literary life. I know because I discovered her thesis, red-leather bound, carbon-copied on onionskin—Peggy Aring's analysis of Melville's
Billy Budd
. I know because of the pencil marks in her Modern Library edition of Frost and Dickinson, her poems around their poems. She read widely—Rexroth's translations, Snyder, Williams, of course. She leaned toward the aesthetics of haiku master Takahama Kiyoshi, who believed that when a poet's sentiments are overly visible, the audience grows uncomfortable. Better to write simply and only what is
there
in a scene, to make a connection by calling on a reader's imagination. Her pencil crossed and recrossed phrases that struck her as sentimental or melodramatic.

One day a tall, gangly, middle-aged poet named Donald Petersen showed up at our front door. In his book from Wesleyan University Press, which he was carrying, he called her his muse.
“And did you know she wrote too?” he said to me. My mother flushed and wished him away. The poor man never made it inside the house, though he had traveled for several hours.

She wouldn't want me to tell you. But for the life of me, I can't keep a secret.

My husband, a collector, purchases a “safety pen” circa 1904, its case sterling, about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. It looks like a fancy cigar tube, but twist a knob at the base and the fourteen-carat gold nib emerges from the chamber. Twist again, and it spirals back, undetectable.

An hour of solitude in my house occupied by teenagers. It's three in the afternoon. I'm relishing
Carmen
on my radio, an arrangement for flute and piano. It speeds up my thinking, makes me want to dance. Laura is just now waking up.

She appears puffy-eyed at my study door in her Cabbage Patch pajamas. “Mom.
Mom
. MOM. Would you turn that music off? It sounds like ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.' Why would you wanna hear that first thing in the a.m.?”

By dinner Laura has noticed it's Mother's Day and has finally pulled something together. She swipes one of my greeting cards and attaches a tulip, snipped from a bouquet I purchased that morning to cheer myself up. Later, feeling a little sheepish, she leaves a pot of petunias on the front hallway floor. “Is this for me?” I have to ask.

I scour the literature. Romain Rolland: “The child absorbs such a lot of lies and foolish nonsense, mixed in with essential truths, that the first duty of the adolescent who wants to be healthy is to disgorge it all.” What Rolland and others neglect to say is how well adolescence readies the
parent
for separation. As if every transition from one stage of life to another demands a trail of stones and potholes, crests and gorges to be truly effectual. Here's one verse to that song: “Why are you always harping on me? Do you have to eat right next to me? Why don't you make Bonnie walk the dog? Why do you have to chew so loud?”

In Chinese characters
woman
drawn twice signifies “quarrel.”

Laura is working at Baskin-Robbins four days a week, despite her intention to “be as irresponsible as I can this summer.” Spare time is spent sleeping, on the computer IMing her friends, shopping at thrift stores. Obligation to family or chores gets short shrift. So too, eating. The bowl of muddy milk left on the living room floor—Cocoa Krispies and skim—is the only evidence she's had any sustenance at all.

The pendulum begins to swing.
Back
. My mother was ashamed of her body.
Forth
. I kept a list of lovers in a little black notebook.
Back
. My mother picked at her food, content with the turkey back, the wing.
Forth
. I claimed the white meat, ate ravenously. Now, I stand guard over Laura to make sure she finishes her dinner. I thump pointlessly on the bathroom door, the only place she can lock herself in.