Her Mother's Daughter

  “Yes, we did go to Hong Kong, several times, when we had a four-or five-day pass,” Joy was saying. “It’s really great! The Peninsula Hotel! Mmmm! Yummy! When you first get your room they come in with this big basket of beautiful soaps and let you choose the one you want. They’re all done up in these gorgeous packages! You hate to open them!” Laughter.

  The tea tray was set on a large round brass tray table. Joy, her legs crossed neatly at the ankle, poured.

  “So what loot did you bring back from Panama?” Watch it: envy creeping into the voice.

  “They have the most beautiful linens, Anastasia. Made of rice cloth, I’ll show you later. Embroidered tablecloths, tea towels…oh, you know! I gave Mother a tablecloth for Christmas!”

  “Oh, yes, that was gorgeous!”

  “Oh! And these!” She dangled her tea napkin in the air.

  “Yes, I was noticing them. They’re Panamanian too? Beautiful!”

  Tea sipped. Strong, smoky Lapsang souchong. Silence.

  “So how are the kids?”

  “They’re great! They’re really adjusting! Jonathan went out for Little League this summer, and he’s the star of the team! He really loves it! Julie’s not so outgoing, but she made a friend last term, and she goes over to see her on her bike just about every day, and they talk on the phone, they’re never apart, I call them the Siamese Twins,” laughter, long long laughter, “so she’s okay.” Joy wiped her eyes, which were damp from laughing. “It’s just Jenny who’s having a hard time, but there are two kids her age just two blocks away, so she’ll be great!”

  The enthusiasm, the emphasis: to make what she wants to happen seem to have already happened.

  Carefully, Anastasia set down the delicate porcelain cup. Carefully, making her voice sound easy, relaxed, she asked, “And is Justin going to be able to get up to see the house?”

  Joy set her cup down too, and wiped her lips on the lace-edged linen napkin. “He’s in the middle of a big project, very hush-hush, some new plane they’re testing. He’s in charge of all the test pilots, it’s a big job. He’s always busy,” she finished, with an especially bright laugh.

  “How does he live down there?”

  “Oh, he lives on the base, they have quarters for unmarried officers, I mean officers without wives, I mean, if their wives are someplace else or they don’t have one. They eat at the Officers’ Club, it’s really great, they can have steak every night, their rooms are cleaned for them, and their laundry done, the Army is very good to their own, they take good care of the officers. He doesn’t miss me at all!” Protracted laughter, very bright.

  Or the children either? Officers’ quarters: is that why they don’t visit him there? He didn’t come last Christmas, well his tour didn’t end until the end of the year but surely they would have let him take the last week of December off, Joy came, alone, with the kids. She doesn’t want me to ask questions about him.

  Joy burst out, “And how is Arden? She excited about going back to college?”

  “Oh, very.” Try to think of something good to say. “She got a job in a fast-food joint and spent all her money on new clothes. Four pairs of jeans and twenty-five tops!” Anastasia laughed.

  Joy howled. “Aren’t they something?” She wiped her eyes. “She still at Cornell?”

  “Yes. She wants to be a poet. She has talent. But you can’t earn a living writing poetry.”

  “Well, once upon a time they might have told you you can’t earn a living taking photographs, and now look at you!”

  Anastasia smiled wryly, nodded. “Except I never imagined I’d earn a living taking photographs.”

  “But you didn’t want to do anything else, either, and you wouldn’t do anything else.”

  Anastasia gazed at Joy. “That’s right.” Profound. When had that happened, that Joy became profound?

  “And Billy’s a senior?”

  Anastasia nodded. “Going into his senior year this fall. And Franny’s going,” she shifted to a childish accent, “to kindergarten!” They both laughed then, together. Why am I laughing? Just the thought of her, so cute, looking up at you with those eyes, so serious and self-important. “She’s full of self-importance,” Anastasia went on. “She feels she is now an adult, going to school like her big sister and brother, she has a pencil box and a notebook, never mind that they’re going to make her cut out paper dolls.”

  Again the sisters laughed together.

  Got past Billy safely.

  “And Toni’s fine?” Joy poured fresh cups of tea, adding hot water to the strong brew from a beautiful little pewter kettle set on a stand with a candle.

  Where did she get that?

  Anastasia nodded, sipped. “He’s a little frustrated. All these years and he’s only published four short stories in little magazines that don’t pay anything. He’s talking about changing his style.”

  Changing his style: silk shirts and martinis before dinner.

  “What about that novel he was writing? About the Army or something? I remember he was asking Justin questions the last time we came home at Christmas…was that 1963? Did he ever finish it?”

  “He’s given up on that, wisely, I think.”

  Joy registered dismay. At the fact? Or at a wife criticizing her husband?

  “He just didn’t know enough about military life, war, any of it. He’s started another, about a boy growing up in a town rather like Dayton, Ohio, in a Polish family,” Anastasia grinned. “Not at all autobiographical, of course. But I like it, I think it’s really terrific. It is in a different style from the other one—spare, plain, no dramatics, there’s the continuity of chronology but it’s really a set of vignettes strung together, each one a pow in the eye, it hits you, hard, it’s true and powerful….”

  Joy was nodding her head with a fixed smile, glazed eyes. Enough of that.

  “And tell me what you’ve been doing! Have you been traveling?” Joy’s voice was strained; she emphasized each word as if she were talking to a child, asking about first grade. Why was that? “Where have you been recently?”

  “Oh—well, last week I was in Nigeria….”

  “Nigeria! Now where is that?”

  “Africa. There’s a war going on there….”

  “Oh, my! Did you see any of that?”

  Why did she sound as if she were speaking a part in a play?

  “Well, yes of course! I was sent there to photograph the war.” Why does my voice sound so tight, so angry?

  “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “A little. But they’re not especially interested in Americans, they’re fighting each other, Christian and Moslem, it’s terrible, it’s causing such starvation, you might have seen my pictures of Biafran children.”

  “Oh! Right! So Nigeria is the same as Biafra?”

  Change the subject. Change the subject. How, gracefully…

  “So those children…but it’s terrible! Terrible! Oh, my heart just ached when I saw those pictures! I just wanted to scoop those little babies up in my arms and pour milk into them, it was terrible….”

  “Yes.” No more. Change the subject. Put down the teacup. Yawn. Stretch. Look out the window. “How lovely the garden is from here.”

  Joy looked out, smiled. “Yes.”

  Forget jealousy. Forget anger. Think about her. “It must be comforting to you after all these years, to have your own home. A place you chose, a place you can fix up as you like.”

  Tears sprang into Joy’s eyes. She pressed her lips together. She nodded.

  “How did Mother like the house?”

  “We-el…you know Mother.”

  Anastasia smiled broadly. So did Joy.

  “She liked the house, she loved the garden, but she said it was too much for me. And she hated the kitchen!” Joy laughed. “Guess what she hated the most?”

  Anastasia considered the old-fashioned sink and stove, the cracked linoleum, the non-self-defrosting refrigerator. “The wooden shelves and counters,” she guessed. “My fa
vorite thing in the whole room.”

  “Right! I love them too! Why do you think she hates them?”

  “Because,” Anastasia announced authoritatively, “they remind her of the houses of her childhood. They didn’t have sinks and stoves and refrigerators and linoleum, they had cast-iron tubs and huge iron stoves and no fridge, but they did have wooden shelves and tables, scrubbed clean by generations of women.”

  “Wouldn’t you think she’d like them, then?” Joy asked, a puzzled look on her face. “I mean, they’d be familiar. And they’re so pretty.”

  Anastasia gazed at her sister. Did she know their mother at all? “She hated her childhood, so she hates anything associated with it. Like she hates antique furniture—all she sees is that it’s old.” She hated the tone of her own voice, superior, patronizing. Why did she sound like this?

  “Oh!” Joy breathed out slowly. “So that’s why she hated the kitchen table and chairs! You know, they’re Mexican, antiques, Justin and I bought them when we flew to Acapulco one time when he had a week’s pass. We rented a car and we drove out to the countryside and saw them in a little cantina and I fell in love with them and Justin bargained with the owner, and we bought them!” Great protracted laughter. “I love them. But she told me they should be heaved out in the trash, they were old and ugly.”

  Anastasia caught her breath. “Oh, I’m sorry, Joy. She can be so cruel. They’re beautiful,” she offered sincerely. Why did she feel responsible for Mother’s behavior?

  Well, that certainly sounded as if she and Justin were getting on, no bitterness of a cast-off wife, which Mother is sure she is, or a wife who’s left her husband, which Anastasia thought she was.

  Joy’s face was a little twisted—anger? grief? She was looking down at her thin hands twisted into a knot. Anastasia looked at them too: they were clenched, white with tension. Oh god.

  “She just always tries to make me feel—oh, I don’t know—as if nothing I have is any good, as if…” She raised her eyes to her sister. “And she’s always praising you, like bragging, really.”

  “Oh, Joy!” Anastasia cried. “You know what my house is like!”

  “It’s not your house. It’s your career, your book, the famous people you meet…”

  “She criticizes me, too. All the time. My house, with my money, why don’t I have something grander, my furniture, why don’t I have fancier furniture. My clothes. My cooking,” Anastasia grinned.

  Joy gazed at her. “I know.”

  She knows. So Mother criticizes me to her, just as she criticizes her to me. Yes. But we both know something else, something that cannot be spoken. Whatever she has to give, she gives to me, not Joy. Oh, Joy! Her hands clenched and white in her lap, long nails digging into the flesh, just like Mother’s hands. And Arden’s! Arden’s!

  “She said I’d need twenty thousand dollars to fix this house up!” Joy exploded with laughter. “Can you imagine?” Laughter, hard, stiff, forced-air, tears on the cheeks. Was laughing a way of crying?

  It would cost that much. But Anastasia laughed as if the statement were ridiculous.

  “Oh, my!” Joy wiped her eyes. “But she really was wonderful while I was moving in. She and Daddy came over and helped me put things away and get settled. And she took Jenny home with her for a couple of days, until I got everything in order. And she takes her whenever I ask. She’s really great! Jenny’s there now. I’m going over there for dinner tonight, after the kids get back from the pool, and pick her up.”

  Relieved, Anastasia sank back against the chair back. “That’s great.”

  “But I feel so bad for her. She’s so miserable. I think she’s just bored, I keep telling her she should get out and make some friends. I’ve been telling her and telling her, I’m sick of it! I swear I won’t say anything, and then, the next time I see her, it just comes out of my mouth, Mom, you need to get out.”

  “I know,” Anastasia sighed. “Now she’s stopped piano lessons.”

  “I know,” Joy sighed. “She tells you about it as if she were telling you somebody died.” She sat up brightly. “How about a drink? It’s nearly five.”

  “Sure.”

  The two women rose and carried the tea things back to the kitchen. Anastasia sat on a high stool watching Joy mix drinks, as they complained of and bemoaned Mother, their favorite subject, the person who ripped them apart, the person who bonded them, the only thing in the world that told them they were sisters.

  XIII

  1

  NOW ACCIDENTS ARE OF TWO KINDS: NECESSARY…AND NON-NECESSARY…ALTHOUGH PRIVATION IS AN ACCIDENTAL PRINCIPLE, IT DOES NOT FOLLOW THAT IT IS UNNECESSARY FOR GENERATION. FOR MATTER IS NEVER LACKING PRIVATION: INASMUCH AS IT IS UNDER ONE FORM, IT IS DEPRIVED OF ANOTHER.

  Thomas Aquinas, The Principles of Nature, II, 9

  This quotation is the backbone of my life. I have typed it on a three-by-five card and pasted it up over my desk. I read it every day. I use it to calm myself, to make myself firm, to keep myself from crumbling. Arden saw it one day—years ago—and asked me what it meant. She could not understand its abstract language. So I made a joke of it; I told her that inasmuch as a carrot is a carrot, it cannot be a celery. The carrot may crave to be a celery; it may wilt and sag in its singular, lonely life, and long to live pressed tightly to its fellows the way celery stalks do: it may sicken with the desire to live above ground in the light, and to have pale green delicate leaves; but it will never have them. It will have, instead, dark green feathery lacy leaves, and spend its life in the warm dark earth, a creature of darkness and isolation. It can have only what it has, be only what it is. Always. Until it dies.

  I did not tell her what it meant to me. I try to tell myself that I have much. And must be reconciled to having what I have, being what I am and nothing else, until I die. Because all things being under one form are deprived of all others.

  Still I find it hard. It is hard while you are alive, breathing, sentient, to know that your heart is dead, that it has died inevitably because you are what you are, that you cannot resuscitate it.

  Clara says, “You’re just like your mother. You don’t see alternatives. You close down shop and cry, instead of opening the door and looking around.”

  “For what? At what?” I counter. “And,” angrily, haughtily, “I never cry.”

  Looking back, rummaging through these dusty boxes full of old photographs, letters, bits and pieces—the children’s class photos, a certificate decreeing Arden Carpenter of the fifth grade winner of the Poetry Prize for Linden Street School, a scrap of newspaper, saved…why? Toni’s and my marriage certificate, two yellowed report cards for William Carpenter, grades two and three—looking back, my memory triggered by these fragments that would be meaningless to anyone else, mere detritus, I remember good years, I remember happiness. What happened to change it, and when it changed, I can’t figure out. I suppose it didn’t end, but just ran down, the way my mother gradually slid into her present state. No way to mark even the beginning of the end: when was the first time Arden was sullen and furious with me and I looked in her eyes and saw real hatred? or noticed that Billy was rarely home, and realized he was spending all his spare time with Brad? Or the first time I noticed that Toni—but, yes, I do remember that.

  We had become prosperous enough that we could afford a woman to come in and clean, do the laundry, iron, straighten up a little—always a hopeless task in our house. It relieved me to pay someone to do this work. I hated doing it myself, but I felt squeamish and guilty about Toni doing so much housework. I don’t know if I’d have felt that way if he’d been a woman and I a man. But as it was, I did.

  And one week Mrs. Landors had to leave early, I don’t remember why, some appointment, and she didn’t have time to put away the ironed clothes. So I did it. I am no housekeeper, but I love ironed clothes, so there was a stack of them, pajamas and tablecloths and knit shirts, and blouses and shirts hung on hangers. I was happy that day, I remember, I was humming with the record p
layer, Billie Holiday, “He’s My Man,” as I went from room to room putting clean fresh pressed clothes away in closets and drawers. I avoided Arden’s drawers, they were a mess, I just laid her things on her bed (after making it), and went into our room, into Toni’s chest of drawers to put away some knit shirts, and there, glistening and luxurious in a pile in the bottom drawer, were three silk shirts.

  Nowadays, that might not be shocking, but in those days you could still buy a fine men’s white shirt on sale for two ninety-five, whereas silk shirts cost seventy-five dollars. And Toni never went anywhere much—we occasionally spent an evening with neighbors, or went to a party, but he didn’t go to work, to business dinners or cocktail parties, to events that required such formality. So why these shirts? And how did he get them? I ran downstairs and looked into my desk and pulled out the charge statements for the past few months. I paid all the bills, but I didn’t check them over. And there it was—Lord & Taylor, three silk shirts, two hundred and twenty-five dollars plus tax.

  I was appalled. But I didn’t know what to do. Toni and I never discussed money. We had a joint checking account, I put a regular sum in it. When he needed money he cashed a check, and he carried our few credit cards—this was before people lived on them—because he did most of the shopping. I had never said to Toni, you may spend only this much, or you may buy this and this but not that. How could I now say to him what in fact I did say when he walked into the room,

  “Why on earth did you buy silk shirts!”

  He looked at me in a way he never had before—can’t describe it—distant—as if he didn’t know me. Pale.

  “Why were you snooping around in my drawers?” is what he answered.

  “Snooping! Snooping! I was putting your fucking clothes away for you, you shit!”