The Woman Upstairs (7 page)

“You’ll do your art either way,” she said. “Your art doesn’t depend on a degree. To be honest, your art lives in a realm where degrees are meaningless.”

“Then why go to university at all? Why not just go and make art?”

“Look, Mouse”—my mother called me Mouse; nobody else did, not even my father, and when she lost her ability to talk I felt that she looked the word at me with her eyes—“you’re only sixteen years old. You’re not old enough to vote, or to drink, or to sign a lease on an apartment. You’re barely old enough to drive. You can go away to college or you can stay at home with us and make your art in the garage and scoop ice cream all day down the road. Your choice, but I know what I’d choose: get out of this stodgy little dump! See the world.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Get out and see the world.”

“Oh, Mouse”—she stroked my hair, which was long then, so that stroking it meant caressing, too, the greater stretch of my back. Like a cat, rather than a mouse. I loved it. I loved being her child. I remember looking at her and thinking she was the most beautiful thing in the world. “I’ve had my moment, sweetie. Maybe another will come. But for now, I’m needed right here.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t you know, I make a house a home? That’s what mothers do.”

“But I’ll go and then—”

“I love your daddy. He needs a home, too.”

And then we were back to the college question, and it seemed that art school wasn’t really a choice, because there wasn’t any money—barely enough, even with loans, to get me to university at all—and it mattered to my mother that I be employable at the end.

“You’re such a baby, you can go to art school afterward and still come out even. Get a master’s in Painting on top of your B.A., and you’ll be ready for all of it. I want you to have it all. It’s not like when I was a girl, the MRS degree and all that. You won’t live off pin money, off any man, no matter how much you love him. You won’t depend on anyone but yourself. We agreed, right?” And there was that edge to her voice, which I thought of then as darkness, and recognize now as rage, the tone that came in her intermittent phases of despair. And so I went to Middlebury.

I always understood that
the great dilemma of my mother’s life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price. She was of the generation for which the rules changed halfway, born into a world of pressed linens and three-course dinners and hairsprayed updos, in which women were educated and then deployed for domestic purposes—rather like using an elaborately embroidered tablecloth on which to serve messy children their breakfast. Her University of Michigan degree was all but ornamental, and it always seemed significant that it stood in its frame under the eaves in the attic, festooned with dust bunnies, among a dozen disavowed minor artworks, behind
boxes of discarded toys. The first woman in her family to go to college, she’d cared enough to frame her diploma, only then to be embarrassed about having cared, embarrassed because she felt she hadn’t done anything with it, had squandered her opportunity.

The transition from pride to shame took place sometime soon after my birth, I think: I appeared in ’67, and by 1970, her two closest friends in Manchester had divorced and moved away, reborn into the messy and not necessarily happier lives of the liberated. My brother was born in ’59, when Bella Eldridge was but a tender twenty-three-year-old: he was what she did with her precious education.

As far as I could tell, she didn’t burn over the consuming demands of motherhood the first time. In those days, all the young women around her were doing the same thing, discussing Jane Austen over coffee while their cloth-diapered brats wriggled around on the floor, the women themselves still almost students, glad to be absolved of worry about money and still blithe in their belief that life was long, would bring more to them than wall-to-wall carpet and a new Crock-Pot, with the occasional dinner at Locke-Ober or the Copley Plaza in Boston as an anniversary treat. She was young enough to be hopeful.

There are abundant home movies and antiquated slides of baby Matthew, with his slightly Frankensteinian square head and his bright blue eyes—he looks, somehow, like an infant of his time, has an all-American aspect that babies seem not to affect these days—and in the background, my mother grins, her face all angles, cigarette in hand. She grins at the swing set, she grins by the Christmas tree, she grins behind the picnic table, with its blue gingham cloth, on the Fourth of July.

In the later pictures, the few that remain of my own infancy, even the daylight looks darker. Maybe Kodak had changed their formula; or maybe the world had moved on. I was a smaller, more somber child, born three weeks early, weighing less than six pounds (“always impatient, that’s my girl,” my father used to say), and with thick black hair that subsequently fell out and left me near bald for months. I look like a befuddled frog gussied up in pretty dresses, a fat foot peeking from beneath the hem, and my brother, a strapping eight-year-old with buckteeth, eyes me askance from the corners of the picture frames. My
mother is hardly in these pictures at all, anywhere. She must have been taking them. There’s one Christmas snapshot of the three of us, my father behind the camera: it was the year, she said, that Matthew and I both had the flu, and all of us have high color, cheeks like painted dolls’, including my mother, whose long hair is a ratty mess, and whose dotted pinafore is falling off her shoulder. Perhaps because of the fevers, our eyes are forlorn—even Matt’s eyes look black, and my mother’s mouth is open in a half sneer, as though she were about to tell my father to cut it out and put the damn thing away.

I don’t remember my early childhood as unhappy—to the contrary; the only thing I feared was my brother, who was pinching mean when he had the chance—but the record, such as it is, suggests that my mother was suffering. She was only thirty-one when I was born, but had done it all already once and knew what she’d have to give, and knew, too, that like Sleeping Beauty she’d waken from the baby dream to find that years had elapsed, and herself pushing forty. No wonder she later threw herself into her harebrained schemes—the cooking, the sewing, the writing of children’s books that nobody would publish, that she didn’t even really try to publish, all of them intended to catapult her to something greater, to a world beyond Manchester, to some early fantasy that lingered still at the corners of her eyes. But when she signed up for classes—Mastering the Potter’s Wheel or Conversational French—it was hard to believe even then that she took them seriously. The only paying job she ever held when I was young was at the local bookstore over the holidays, when they took on extra staff—a couple of college kids and my mom—for the Christmas rush. She did it several years running and grew adept at making pretty packages, with perfect edges and curlicues of gilded ribbon.

She wasn’t, in any practical way, ambitious. The friends she had who were ambitious made their moves strategically, went to law school at night, or studied for the realtor’s exam, and then they took steps away from the hearth, out into the world. She both admired and resented them, the way plump women both admire and resent their successfully dieting friends, trying, all smiles, to force upon them a slab of chocolate cake. She didn’t keep close to the ones who went back to work, or who divorced and moved into the city: she celebrated them with
lunches and sent them on their way, as if they were off on a dangerous mission from which safe return was—as indeed it was—impossible.

Do you remember the ladies’ lunches of those days? The table set first thing in the morning. Cold poached salmon and Waldorf salad, pitchers of iced tea, sweating bottles of white wine, everything served on the best china, and the ladies all still there in a blue fog of cigarette smoke when I came home from school, as though there were nothing, nothing to call them away. And the knowledge, which I had even then, that once they left the charmed circle, they were gone forever.

When I was about seven, in the week before Christmas—before, it must be said, the bookstore years; and it only now occurs to me that they were a direct result of this incident—my mother broke down in tears at the A&P, her face a map of blotches in the sallow supermarket light. I’d asked for something extra—a jar of chocolate Koogle, maybe, which the more indulgent mothers of the day allowed their children to take as school sandwiches, on white bread with butter: your dessert as a main course! The world gone haywire!—and her features crumpled.

“I’m so sorry,” she blathered, all moist and shamefully public, as I tried to push the cart along and her with it, and kept my eyes to the floor, “but there’s nothing for you or your brother. Nothing at all. I have nothing for you for Christmas. There’s just no money left.” She let out a small wail; I cringed. “I had to have the dishwasher fixed, and then that stone hit the windshield on the highway, and to replace the glass—it’s all so expensive and you see, you see, there’s nothing. And I can’t ask your father. I can’t ask him for more. So there’s nothing for you at all. I am so sorry.” My mother, you understand, lived on an allowance from my father—or a salary, if you prefer: he had a bank account and she had a bank account, and each month he transferred a fixed sum from his account to hers, and with this sum she managed the household. She had spent the housekeeping money on housekeeping, and there was nothing left over for gifts. Even though I was still small, I understood the basics of this arrangement.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, trying to console without causing further embarrassment. “I don’t care about presents.” Although I did care, and was disappointed, not least because I was still supposed to believe in
Santa Claus, and this outburst seemed like the Wizard of Oz emerging from behind his curtain, an unconscionable breach of propriety and of our necessary hypocrisies. “Really,” I said again, “it doesn’t matter.”

And suddenly, then—inexplicably to me as I was, but in a way so obvious to me now—she turned viperish, rageful, a temper as shameful in the A&P as her earlier tears. “Don’t ever get yourself stuck like this,” she hissed. “Promise me? Promise me now?”

“I promise.”

“You need to have your own life, earn your own money, so you’re not scrounging around like a beggar, trying to put ten dollars together for your kids’ Christmas presents. Leeching off your father’s—or your husband’s—pathetic paycheck. Never. Never. Promise me?”

“I already promised.”

“Because it’s important.”

“I know.”

And that was an end to it. She’d dried up and put on her sunny smile by the time we reached the checkout, the only sign of her distress a slight smearing of her mascara. We were served by Sadie, the daughter of my old first-grade teacher, a girl who spoke very loudly and slowly as if she, or we, were deaf. She wore her brown hair in a single pigtail on one side of her head and it looked like the handle of an old-fashioned water pump.

“Mrs. Eldridge,” she bawled. “So good to see you! As always!”

“You too, Sadie, dear.”

“Looking forward to the holidays?”

“You bet! Isn’t it the best time of year?”

“The best. I love it. Don’t you love it, Nora?”

I was too busy watching my mother to answer. As she stacked the groceries on the conveyor belt there was an expression of such impassioned nostalgia on her face that she looked like a Norman Rockwell portrait. I could see her genuinely believing what she’d told Sadie, believing that it was the best time of year. Someone else had wept and yelled at me minutes before, and Bella Eldridge would never have recognized her.

My mother wasn’t a weeper and I rarely saw her cry; but there was one other instance of impromptu tears that has stayed with me. It was just before Matt went off to college—in the summertime, because I remember we were freezing in the air-conditioning at the Hunan Gourmet. My brother was surly, wishing himself already gone. My father, typically mild, was oblivious to the tension at the table, to my mother’s tight brightness and her habit, throughout the meal, of reaching for Matt’s sleeve and then pulling back before she touched him, a ghostly sort of tic. It seemed as though I was the only one watching, the only one who could see the four of us in our leatherette armchairs, leaning over the soy-spattered synthetic tablecloth (it rucked with every human movement, then slid oilily back into place), father and son chatting in a desultory way about the upcoming football season and how my brother would have to throw his heart behind the Notre Dame team, now that he was going there, all the way to Indiana. My mother, who loathed sports, kept trying to change the subject, picking at possible threads (the campus? The journey? Matt’s friend Busby’s choice of Bowdoin?) like a glassy-eyed magpie: thwarted, persistent, quick. It was an evening in which I said nothing—it was like that with our family, because Matthew and I had so little relation to one another beyond his occasional insult or a quietly hostile tousling of my hair. Even when we were all four together, our parents were being either his parents or mine, in one mode or the other, able to deal adequately with only one of us, two children who merely happened to share the same accursèd progenitors. And that Hunan Gourmet outing was a Matthew Eldridge night.