Her Mother's Daughter Read online

  God knows I’ve known enough men, had enough lovers, friends, and acquaintances that the sex is not unfamiliar to me. I even have a son, rotter that he is. You think I shouldn’t say that, shouldn’t speak so about my own child. Blame it on my mother, she brought me up to be honest. He’s a conniver, what can I say? I didn’t raise him to be a conniver, but on the other hand, I can’t blame him for being one. Unlike me, he sees surfaces, sees them and understands the power lines so visible to those who look carefully. Why not? you say. Character sets itself gradually, like gel. His gel isn’t completely set yet, it can still be melted into another shape, but at the moment he does not make me proud, even if he’s fulfilling mothers’ dreams and going to medical school. I feel like my own mother when nice smiling ladies hear what my son is doing and turn on me in a gush of praise: “Oh how wonderful! You must be so proud!” I want to bite their lips right off their mouths so that when they smile in the future they’ll look like the sharks I feel they are. And to tell the truth, my daughters aren’t any better. Everything seemed okay until they grew up. Now, everything seems wrong.

  So when I’m not bursting into tears at the sight of a motherless child, a childless mother, or a dead father, I’m snapping around the house like a wet towel. I can’t seem to find a quiet heart, except when I travel, and nowadays I don’t get commissions that often. I can’t even get any sympathy. Last time I visited my mother, I came to feel very low as we sat around talking, and I told her about a fight I’d had with Arden. She’d been awful for a long time, hanging around the house smoking, glaring at me; playing the piano at its loudest, banging her way through every book of music in the house without bothering to correct the mistakes in any one piece; and refusing to help clean up, even to clean her own room. Not that the house ever really looks cleaned up even when it is, but with Arden around, it was beginning to look like a bus terminal. Then one night she opened the door to my developing closet even though the red light was signaling I was working inside and needed dark—something she’s known since she was an infant. She wanted the car keys, and for some reason I’d taken my handbag inside with me. But I screamed. She’d completely ruined a dozen negatives I couldn’t replace. I was a wild woman, I shouted, I yelled, I tore my own hair. She shrugged. “I needed the car keys. I couldn’t wait for hours until you came out.” She was sullen, surly, and I felt as if all the blood in my body had mounted to my head, and I slapped her, hard, across the mouth.

  That was unusual enough, since I was never given to physical punishment, but she took it as a declaration of war. She slapped me back, I slapped her, we hauled into each other, twisting arms, socking each other, slapping. I was quickly reduced to pinching and twisting, because my daughter, although shorter and lighter than I, had studied karate, and had twenty-five years less smoking to slow her down. She got me pinned: I couldn’t move: she shoved me backward, onto the arm of a stuffed chair.

  “I could kill you now!” she hissed.

  “Go ahead!” I yelled. “It would be a blessed release from living with you!”

  She let me go then, grabbed my bag and took the car keys, and stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her.

  This was the story I told my parents, and as I finished, my mother began to cry. I was astonished.

  “Why are you crying?”

  My father looked at me as if I were stupid. “She feels bad for you, Ana. Of course she’d cry.”

  Nonsense, I thought. She’s never cried for me in her life. I turned to my mother, and asked again, severely, “Why are you crying?”

  She was sobbing now. “Oh, I wish I could have talked to my mother like that! I never talked to her, I never told her how I felt, I never knew how she felt, and now it’s too late!”

  Well, that rocked me. Because in all the years I’d listened to my mother’s tales, there had been these two, my mother and her mother, two throbbing figures in a landscape of concrete, suffering suffering, separately yet linked, like wounded animals wandering through miles of silent tree trunks oblivious to their pain. Like a woman I saw once, walking down the street in Hempstead with a man on one side of her and a woman on the other, holding her arms. She was youngish—in her early thirties, and pretty, a little plump—but there was something in her face that made my heart tremble for her…. No one else seemed to notice anything odd, people walked past her, around her, and did not glance twice at her. But that night I saw her picture in the newspaper: she was the only survivor of a fire that had killed her husband and her four children.

  That was my image of them, these two women, mommy and grandma. And I had never had any inkling that anything lay in the space between them except their shared knowledge of grief. It was blind of me, of course, it simply makes sense that there had to be more. All my life I had rejected prettied pictures of life, slamming shut the saccharine children’s books I was given at school, pulling wry faces in movie houses, questioning angrily people’s sweetened explanations for things. I was an offensive child, and perhaps am an offensive adult, responding indignantly to anything that seems facile, designed to conceal, smooth over, sweeten, a reality I know to be grim and terrible. I would insult my mother’s friends, announcing in outrage, “I don’t believe that!” or making faces at their gushing, swooping voices as they insisted that people were good and life was nice. Or the reverse.

  Yet here I had all these years simply accepted as truth my mother’s relation to her mother as one of total, unswerving love and devotion. Certainly, that was all I had ever heard or seen. My mother said her mother was a saint, and a saint was what I saw too. Quiet, sad, Grandma would sit in a small corner of the couch when she visited and open her arms to me, and I’d sit beside her and she’d take my hands in hers—so soft, as if the wrinkles had changed the texture of the fabric of her skin—and smile with love, saying, “My Anastasia, my little Anastasia.” She and my mother would talk together in the kitchen in Polish, and my grandmother would laugh and nod her head. No anger ever came out of her voice or showed on her face. I can’t imagine her angry. She would just cry when her grandson, my cousin, kicked her when she tried to put him to bed. She never raised her voice. Once, when she was visiting us, she and my mother walked the two miles to the German pork butcher for chops for dinner, and the butcher’s wife said something to her husband in German. When they left the shop, my grandmother giggled: she was pleased at being able to understand their language without their knowing. What the woman had said was “What a gentle face that woman has!” She was talking about my grandmother.

  And whenever my mother spoke of her late at night, her voice would grow foggy and her eyes teary: “My mother was a saint.” Then her voice would thicken: “Poor Momma.” And then she’d go off toward one part of it, some part of it, the incredibly cruel man, the submissive woman, the brutalized children; or the poverty or the ignorance. All of it hurt her, my mother, equally, although when she came to the ignorance, her voice grew an edge, a bitterness that sometimes seemed almost ready to spill over onto her mother. But if I probed that, she would shrug: “What could she do? She knew nothing.” When she spoke of the other things, she spoke like a child: her voice was high and thin and her sentences simple. And through it all, the same shrug, the same sigh: “I was such a stupid kid. I didn’t know anything.”

  This is a part of my mother no one but me has seen. I know her as the nine-year-old she had been and in some way remains. My father would not want to listen to such grief; he doesn’t like problems unless they are solvable mechanically, like a broken clock or a stuck window. These he enjoys, and brings considerable ingenuity to solving. Nor does my sister enjoy harping on past sorrows. She likes to pull herself up and address the present, finding in present action the only solution to past loss. And I am like her in that—at least, I always used to be, or anyway, I thought I was. Yet what have I been doing all these years, sitting with Mother in the dimly lighted room as the clock hand moves silently toward four, smoke clouding the air? (My father, who in the da
ys when he worked had to get up early in the morning, was forced to go to bed by one at. the latest, had gone sighing and grumbling upstairs. At two or so, he would get up noisily and go to the bathroom for a heavy towel, which he would insert in the crack between his bedroom door and the floor to keep the odor of cigarette smoke from rising into his sleep—his small protest and reproach to us.) My mother and I agree to have just one more drink, and I get them, although sometimes at that hour (this was long ago), my mother would insist on getting up herself and making our drinks. But I would always follow her out to the kitchen while she did it, and carry my own back to the little room she called the porch where we would sit and talk. What have I been doing, listening over and over, asking over and over, obsessed with something, unsure what? Listening, putting myself into her, becoming her, becoming my grandmother, losing myself, as if I could once and finally lose myself inside my mother, and in the process give her the strength and hope she needs. Return the liquids I drained from her, become a midge mother in return, mothering my own mother.

  And she would never tell these things to anyone else. Not even her sister, who “doesn’t know, she wasn’t there, she didn’t see what I saw, she doesn’t remember, she thinks Poppa was wonderful, she doesn’t want to hear anything else.” No, only I know this part of my mother, but it is her deepest part, the truest, the core. So when other people say things about her, I just look at them. I don’t know what they are talking about.

  3

  AND OTHER PEOPLE DO say things about her. She is a difficult woman. She is deaf or nearly deaf, and angry about that: she gets irritated with people who speak softly, and grimaces and turns her head away disdainfully. People who don’t understand what is happening think she is bored and rude. It is risky to give her a gift. She receives gifts, as well as certain acts designed to please, as challenges to which she is more than equal: she will in some way make sure the giver knows they have not managed to please her.

  She is worst of all in restaurants, especially if one of us, my sister or I, have taken her. The place is invariably too noisy: with her hearing aid on, she cannot filter sounds, and the scrape of fork on plate, or chair on floor, are as importunate as the sounds of voices on her receiver. Usually, the place is too cold as well. Beyond that, the food is never good. My sister strains her budget to take Mother to dinner for her birthday, and is—as always—gay and brittle over the clams casino, the mushroom soup, the medallions de veau. “Isn’t this great?” she exhorts Mother. “Isn’t it delicious?” Mother’s mouth twists into a stiff smile. “Very good,” she obviously lies.

  Later, to me, she almost spits her disgust: the clams were nothing but bread crumbs in margarine, the soup flour and water, the veal frozen. Later, my sister will be snapping at her children—why is the house such a mess, why can’t they ever pick up their shoes, throw away their soda cans, empty their ashtrays. Glancing at each other, the children will ask how dinner was. “Great, really terrific!” Later, her husband will tell her she is chewing on the inside of her cheek. “Your mother upset you,” he will suggest, laying a kind hand on her back. Joy will flare up. “She didn’t! It was a great dinner! If she didn’t like it, that’s her problem, I could care less! I can’t worry about it. I could care less! I could really care less!”

  Sometimes my mother whines, sometimes she sulks. She is enraged if my father is not at her side to help her at all times, but often when he puts his hand gently under her elbow to help her over a threshold, she will snatch her arm away and snap at him: “I’m all right, Ed!” as if he were coercing her into helplessness. She turns her cheek to the kiss he confers upon her before every meal, just after he has helped her into her chair. Often, she sits alone, idle and silent, on the porch of their house, a broad glassed-in room overlooking the lake. But she no longer cries, and she no longer locks herself for days in a darkened room claiming sinus headache, the way she did when I was a teenager.

  For many years, she granted me a small power, one that bound me to her irrevocably: when I came to visit her, she would rouse herself, she would talk and laugh and sometimes even forget her sorrow. This power she granted also to my sister. But for my sister, the business of rousing Mother, entertaining her, trying to make her laugh, was hard work; whereas for me, it was in those days a pleasure. It made me feel strong and full of laughter to laugh with her. She does not laugh anymore now though.

  She is very lonely but does not try to make friends, and if it is suggested, she snaps, “I don’t feel like it!” Other times, when she is feeling better perhaps, she sits in her rocker gazing out at the lake and says, “There’s no lack of drama in my life.” Then she tells me the latest scandal, the latest violence—for among themselves, the cardinals, the big blue jay, the robins, sparrows, ducks, geese, swans, rabbits, chipmunks, possums, squirrels, the neighbor’s cat, the tiny red snapper that inhabit the lake, the woods, and the lawn behind my parents’ house maintain a steady drama enacted it seems for her alone. This drama is full of war and murder and mothering and anxiety. Father ducks—she is sure they are father ducks—squawk angrily at mother ducks anxiously trying to extract their babies from the wire mesh of the neighbor’s fence. Male geese—she is sure they are males because they are more aggressive and larger than the others—intimidate the females, and push themselves forward to gobble up all the bread she and my father throw out to them. Her arm is not strong enough to hurl the light crumbs out to where the smaller geese hover hopefully, so she turns on her heel in outrage and refuses to feed them at all. On and on, day after day, contests and resolutions. A family of birds settled in the birdhouse and made a nest, but they filled the entire house with twigs, so they could no longer enter it. My mother directed my father as he climbed the ladder and removed some of the stuffing. “But those birds were really stupid,” my mother announced in contempt. The eggs were all at the bottom of the nest, underneath the stuffing, and they were all cold. She shrugged: “It was a stupid bird family; it didn’t deserve to live.”

  She watches the soap opera of nature, over and over again: death and continuation. She finds some rest in this, and occasionally will lift the binoculars to her eyes to observe more closely. But she doesn’t hold them long: they are too heavy.

  My European friend Bertram, who speaks like a popgun attached to a cartridge belt, and who prides himself on his nonidealistic, nonsentimental view of the world, laughs at his mother. “I never took any shit from her,” he boasts; “she’s impossible.” “It became clear to me at an early age,” he enunciates with only a trace of an accent, “that she loved me more than I loved her. I could walk out and she couldn’t.” He did walk out too—many times. He went to prep schools, college, and university, all with the approval of his formidable mother and his kindly physician father. He became a geologist and screwed his way around the world. He doesn’t mention, but I know, that he always returns to Mother in between journeys. He did not marry until he was forty—and he married then in order to give his mother a grandson, a task he performed efficiently. His wife having walked out on him, he remains, as he did before his marriage, in his small apartment on New York’s Riverside Drive, just ten blocks from Mother and the use of her Mercedes. He and his son visit Grandma several times a week: their bond could hardly be tighter. He’s proud of her too: since her husband’s death, she has had two love affairs. Her hair is still black, although she’s eighty years old.

  Impossible, impossible. It is a refrain. Henri Laforgue overhears me talking about my mother and exclaims, “God save me from my mother!” Everyone at the table laughs. We are sitting in a restaurant in Paris, charming with dark wood paneling and the small high windows of a three-hundred-year-old building. The tables bear big bowls of flowers and superb food: the restaurant is unknown to tourists. Henri is tall and robust; his round face and its chins sit smugly on the immaculate collar of his custom-made shirt. He is, as always, surrounded by women—his wife, Adele, her colleagues Marthe and Martine, and me. All of them dote on him: they laugh when
he laughs, direct their glances to him, attend devotedly to his needs before he says a word. His wife runs her own very successful business, a public relations agency, an unusual thing in France, but she also tends to their showpiece of a house, their three children, and Henri. He is away all week selling industrial chemicals, and wants to relax on the weekends. Adele sees to it that nothing upsets him, and she also manages to keep herself soignée. “Save me from my mother!” he cries again, laughing, and the others laugh too.

  Save him from what? Of course he doesn’t need a mother, he has all sorts of women dancing attendance on him everywhere he goes. Maybe his mother is like Henri, but being a woman, can’t get the same service. I ask what is so terrible about her, but no one will tell me. They only laugh harder. I hug a certain resentment to me, like a stuffed animal. I am a mother myself: what is it in these mothers one constantly hears about that is so “impossible”?

  Anyway, even if they told me, I probably wouldn’t understand. They’d use some word that is meaningless to me. They might call her proud, or overattentive. They might say she was cold. Someone said that once, about my friend Lee. I knew this was a term of disapprobation, a judgment: cold. Yet I also knew Lee had depths of understanding and subtleties of perception far exceeding those of her critic. If her critic—a coarse but warm, outgoing woman named Aline—meant that my friend did not gush, and took her time about making new friends, why, I was the same way. Was I too cold? Was Aline really trying to convey disapproval of me? Or was she saying that my friend made her feel inferior? What was she saying? What was this coldness?

  I encounter such problems regularly. The first time someone said I was “sensitive,” I knew she meant that I was to be forgiven for some response, although I wasn’t sure why. What did that mean? That I was acute to nuances? Or got my feelings hurt easily? A shrink I know told me that I felt more deeply than other people, and I asked him what kind of instrument he had for measuring such a thing. Because I suspect that people have great dark abysses in them, things they rarely show. No one knows what people feel when they are alone in dim rooms as the light just begins to come up, the greyest time of day. I was utterly shaken when a man once told me I was “somethin’ else.” I’m embarrassed to report that I replied, “What else? Else than what?”