Her Mother's Daughter

  MARCH 10, 1978. Brightwaters. Mother is sick. She has emphysema. That’s what’s been wrong all this while, why she’s had trouble walking, playing golf, climbing stairs. She can’t breathe.

  I realized this when we were in Florida. It was hard being with her—she walks so slowly, she has to be helped in and out of cars, up stairs. You can’t move with pleasure when you’re with her. It was especially hard on Franny, but she’s such a good kid, she held “Gramma’s” arm, she talked directly into her better ear in a soft voice. Mom is only seventy-four, but she moves and looks like a really old woman. Dad still bounces along like a boy.

  I made a doctor’s appointment for the week after their return, and went with her. But I spoke to Mina privately beforehand. Mina’s first diagnosis was emphysema, but she took other tests, and yesterday all the test results came in. No cancer. I drove out here to “celebrate” with them. I tell Mom she should be relieved, all she has to do is give up smoking and she’ll feel better. But she doesn’t want to give up smoking. It’s almost as if she’d just as soon die as not smoke. I understand, I’m addicted too. She is very depressed. She sits in the rocker and looks out at the lawn, the lake. Sometimes she calls me to her, and I go eagerly, thinking she wants to chat, play Chinese checkers or gin rummy, something. But she doesn’t want to talk. All she wants is a puff of my cigarette.

  Today is Dad’s birthday and I took them out to dinner. This morning we went shopping for a present for Dad—it’s hard to find anything to give him, he has everything he needs or wants. I ask him what he’d like.

  “Just that Belle gets better, that’s all,” he says, his forehead wrinkled with pain.

  APRIL 1, 1978. Well, it’s on! My first show! It is in a bright broad space, framed beautifully, it looks wonderful, the kids all came in for the opening, Mom and Dad came, we drank champagne, it was… No. It wasn’t fun. It should have been. What’s wrong with me?

  Well, for one thing, the reviews bothered me. They were so full of hate, outrage. As if none of the reviewers had ever seen an angry, grim woman before, as if it were an offense against public decency to show women that way. Oh, they were praising too, they talked about the power of the show as a whole. I begin to understand why I put my mother-child photographs away in an envelope all those years ago. I knew.

  MAY 2, 1978. Alison has sold three-quarters of my photographs. This is spectacular, she tells me. We split fifty-fifty, but she is asking so much for them that even so, I’m becoming mildly rich. And moderately famous. Mom is very proud, she has hung the two I gave her right in her center hall.

  JUNE 4, 1978. The first photographs of women are in the June issue of Woman, which came out in the middle of May. They will run straight through November, and in December there will be a long summing-up essay. The pictures are very good, although the accompanying texts fudge the truth, just as Clara predicted. It’s strange, this feminism that fudges. Is it conceivable that a socialist group would deny that capitalists were their main problem? Men have never hesitated to blame their problems on women. But men are somehow sacrosanct. I tried to bring this up with Lu, but it made her uneasy, she glided away from the topic.

  Clara is intensely interested in this series. She wants to run a commentary on it, a piece about how and why women fudge the fact that men are their major problem. She wants me to write it. I won’t. I can’t. Whatever troubles men have caused me, my major problem is not men but the fact that I have become one of them, inexpressive and unable to feel, all tight inside like a sealed tank that threatens to explode if the safety valve is loosened. Clara says I suffered plenty from men and my refusal to admit it is another example of my mind dictating what I am permitted to feel, and ignoring what I really do feel.

  “You know, you seem to believe you can’t lament anything, that you have to be on top of everything—or seem to be. You say you just refused to be a wife so it’s no wonder Brad divorced you, but goddamit, it had to hurt you when he changed, when he became a person you didn’t like who didn’t like you! He betrayed you, long before he had an affair: his father was the correspondent! Why don’t you admit that? And Toni broke your heart leaving you like that, just before your fortieth birthday, my god, what a thing to do! And he seduced Arden! What a thing! It’s scandalous! And what about Franny’s distress after she saw Toni? You were very upset about that.”

  “He didn’t seduce Arden. If anything, she tried to seduce him. She flew out to see him—she told me about it—she planned to have an affair with him after he left me.”

  Clara’s eyebrow went up.

  I shrugged. “No, she didn’t. She said once she wasn’t involved with me, he wasn’t all that appealing to her. She said he seemed to be—nothing. I told her she ought to think about what that meant about her feelings about me. She gave me a filthy look and stormed out of the room.”

  “That kid is really something,” Clara said.

  “It’s my fault,” I said.

  She sighed.

  “And what about Franny?” This woman refuses to give up.

  Yes. She didn’t talk about him at all while we were traveling. What a delight she is, that kid! Everywhere we went she was snapping away at my side or off somewhere, taking pictures of places. She is fascinated by places more than people; all sorts of places—even Route 1, as I call it, or Main Street—the same everywhere: hundreds of hamburger and pizza joints, used-car dealers, stereo shops, neon signs. She finds something fascinating in housing tracts, decrepit farms, the streets of small cities. She came home with fifty rolls of film and made me teach her how to develop it. She got some very nice shots, and now she has a sort of travelogue of the United States. She plans to write short comments on the scenes—comments poking fun at the scenes or at teen-aged values and preconceptions—and submit the thing to a publisher as A Teen-Eyed View of America. I can’t get over her! But maybe she’s too old too soon?

  It was after we came back, after I’d taken my mother to the doctor, yes, it was the night after we saw the doctor and got the diagnosis of emphysema. I was feeling lower than usual, and Franny saw it and suggested that we just call and have a pizza sent up for dinner, and we did. While we were eating, she looked over at me and asked me how I felt.

  My throat filled. “I feel that my mother never had a life and now she’s dying.”

  “But she did, Mom,” Franny argued. “I mean, she’s had you and Joy and Grandpa all these years. And she has that nice house.”

  “That isn’t what she wanted from life. She wanted—oh, she had dreams.”

  Franny looked puzzled. “But if that isn’t what she wanted, why did she have it? Why didn’t she have something else?”

  “Life doesn’t always permit us to choose, Franny,” I said in my bitter monotone.

  She regarded me for a while. Then, in a thin voice, “Is that how you feel? That you didn’t get to choose?”

  “God, no! I chose!”

  “Then why are you so mad all the time?”

  “Mad? Angry? Is that what you mean?”

  She shrank. She stopped chewing. Silently, she nodded.

  “Is that how I seem to you? Angry?”

  She managed to swallow what was in her mouth. “Yes.”

  I looked at her amazed. “Franny, do you feel I’m angry with you?”

  “Sometimes. I’m never really sure.”

  Oh my god. Mommy, are you mad at me? Did I do something? Mommy, why are you angry all the time? You’re always angry, Mommy! Why!

  “Mommy?” Franny’s voice was tremulous and it brought me to. I was leaning over, elbows on the table, my head in my hands. I raised my head.

  “Yes, honey. I’m here. It’s just a shock. I didn’t know I appeared angry.”

  “Well maybe it isn’t angry exactly. It’s sort of…tense…as if you’re all coiled up inside, ready to explode. As if you’re looking for something to get mad about. And, I mean, everything you say is so…so bad all the time, so…I don’t know.” She was pink-faced now, and she pushed h
er plate away from her.

  “Negative?” I suggested.

  “Yes. That’s it. Negative. Like Gramma. Like when she has a problem and she tells you about it and you say, why don’t you do this or that or the other thing and to each thing she has an answer, nothing is any good, she just refuses to solve it. Like she wants the problem to be insoluble, you know?”

  It was my turn to nod.

  “Like that time in Florida,” Franny was gaining enthusiasm now, speaking with energy. We were off the subject of me. She took another slice of pizza and pulled her plate back. “She said she wanted to have a brunch and invite the whole family but it was too much work for her. And you said she should serve some prepared foods, coleslaw and potato salad from the deli, cold cuts, things like that. And she said she wouldn’t serve food like that in her house, she hated it. So you said, well, you could have a ham, that’s no work, and make macaroni and cheese the day before. And she said she wanted to serve baked beans, her own baked beans, and they were a lot of work. And you said, so make them a few days before. And she got really annoyed with you and said ‘Oh, Anastasia, I know how to plan a meal! Besides, it isn’t the cooking I mind, it’s the cleaning up.’ And you said, and now you were being very careful, ‘Why don’t you hire someone to help you?’ And she said, ‘Who would I hire?’ And you said look in the telephone book, there were services for waitresses and people to clean up. And she got impatient, she waved her hand at you, she said, ‘Oh, those people are no use, I’d have to show them everything, it would be more work than without them.’ And you closed your mouth.” Franny whooped with laughter.

  I laughed too. “What do you think she really wanted?”

  “She wanted you to go out and help her.”

  “That’s what I thought too.” I got up from the table and went into the kitchen and poured coffee for myself. I carried the cup back to the living room and sank into an easy chair.

  “But you didn’t want to,” Franny grinned wickedly.

  “No. I’ve done that. Lots of times.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want to be her alter ego anymore.”

  Franny’s face looked hurt. “I wasn’t attacking you, Mom.”

  “I know you weren’t!” But I’d heard my voice too. “That’s what you mean? By angry?”

  “Yeah.”

  I considered. I don’t feel angry, I feel sad. Why does it come out that way?

  “I don’t feel angry,” I said. “I feel sad.”

  “But why?”

  You can’t tell a child that every choice brings pain, can you. You can’t send her out into life believing that. You can’t tell a person of fifteen that what everyone inevitably discovers in life is that they are alone. So I tried to laugh a little. “I think I inherited my sadness.”

  “From your mother?”

  I nodded.

  “You have what you want, don’t you?” she pleaded. She rose and came toward me, she dropped onto the footstool in front of my chair. She leaned forward. “Don’t you?” She wanted, it was important, she needed to believe that life can be beautiful, that there are happy endings. “You have your work and you love that. And now you’re making lots of money again. And you have Arden and Billy and me.”

  “I have you, yes, sweetheart,” I said, leaning over, pulling her close to me, enfolding her. For how long, though, I thought. I had never let myself feel about Franny as I had about the other kids, that she was mine, part of me, that we were bound together forever. I treated her like a gift lent to me for a while. Regularly I would look at her and wonder when it would begin, the turning away, the hatred….

  “Franny,” I hugged her, “I’m really sorry if I seem angry. I guess if I seem angry I must be angry but I didn’t realize…sometimes I’m so blind. I love you, I’m almost never mad at you.”

  “Except when I don’t clean my room, or don’t come home at the time I’m supposed to,” she smiled.

  “Well—that’s not profound anger.”

  “I know,” she said indulgently.

  She was sprawled across the footstool, her arms around me, I leaning forward with my arms around her, and she dropped her arms and leaned her head against my breast and said, “I feel sad about Daddy.”

  I stroked her forehead. “You do, baby?”

  She nodded. “He seems so…lost, somehow. Like he’s always running to catch something he never gets. I mean, maybe he gets the thing he’s running after, but it isn’t what he thought it would be. He’s always disappointed. He was telling me about the lady he married after you got divorced, Lydia? And his voice got so…husky, as though…and he felt so sorry for himself. You never talk that way about Brad or about him. And he’s always complaining about money, but he has that house and lots of expensive clothes and that Porsche, and he eats in such fancy restaurants….” She sat up suddenly. “Oh! He took me to The Brown Derby, did I tell you?”

  She babbled—a child again, briefly—about this momentous experience, then stretched herself and stood up. “I think I’ll go start writing my commentary.”

  I smiled at her. “It must be hard for you. A lost father and an angry mother.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed yawning. “But everybody has something. I’m pretty fortunate compared to my friends. They think so, anyway.”

  “You’ve discussed this with them?”

  “Sure. We all talk about how things are at home.” She turned suddenly. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “I don’t mind. It’s good. I wish kids had done that when I was a kid,” I said. She drifted away, I sat there, and an echo sounded like a wind chime, my mother saying “I wish I could have talked to my mother like that.”

  I remembered feeling tense, my stomach tight every afternoon as I walked home from school, never knowing what mood Mommy would be in, whether she’d be angry or not…. Is that how Franny feels?

  Ah god.

  What is the matter with me?

  I thought I had reconciled myself to being what I am. And after all I’m fortunate. I do have Franny and she’s wonderful and healthy and cute; and these days I don’t even worry about money anymore. Offers have been flooding in ever since the show and the Woman series; and it is for the kind of thing I love to do. I have more work than I can take and I can charge top rates. I’m making three times what I earned at World. I’m really now what people call successful, I have money, money enough to buy Mom that mink coat I dreamed of getting her—too late. Now there is nothing she wants. The money sits. I should spend some of it. Fix this place up, maybe. But I don’t have the energy.

  The school term is almost over. I have to make up something to do, make up a life. I have an assignment to photograph a computer plant in California for an investment brochure. Boring, but much money, five times as much as I earned on the Woman job, women’s things never pay, women have no money. There’s no rush on this, so maybe I’ll push it to the end of the month when school is out and take Franny with me and send the contacts back and go on to Mexico. She’d love the Yucatan, pyramids in the jungle, turquoise waters. It would be nice for her. And who knows? Maybe I’ll get some pleasure from it.

  AUGUST 30, 1978. Spent an evening with Joy. Out on Long Island to see Mother, who is mad as hell at life and everyone around her, but so grateful for a visit from me that I feel guilty I go so rarely. But it’s depressing to be out there. They keep all the doors and windows shut, the air conditioners running, there’s no air. They draw the blinds and drapes the minute it starts to get dark, close everything in. The two of them move silently around the stuffy house, encased by it like old tortoises in their dark prisons, pretending to a world of outer threats that they are rocks.

  Mother’s day: She gets up around eight, shuffles into the kitchen where Dad has made coffee and squeezed orange juice for her. She slumps into her chair, sips her juice, accepts a piece of toast which she breaks into tiny pieces as if she were not going to eat the whole slice. She butters each fragment, spreads a little marmalade on
it, and slowly chews it. Her teeth are bothering her, she has continual trouble with her false teeth. Still, she eats almost all the pieces.

  After breakfast, she helps Dad clean up the kitchen, and gets out the vegetable she intends to serve at dinner, peels it and sets it in cold water. Then, saying nothing to anyone, she disappears. She has gone back to bed. She gets up again around eleven and goes into the kitchen and peels the potatoes or a second vegetable for dinner and sets it in cold water.

  Then, if the day is fair, she dresses and she and Dad go out for lunch and a little shopping. Each purchase requires a day to itself. One day they might go to buy new batteries for her hearing aid; on another they might drive up to the farm stand in Smithtown to buy some vegetables; on a third they might drive all the way out to Ronkonkoma, where a Polish butcher sells homemade kielbasa. On rare occasions, they will drive into Nassau, to the Five Towns, where there is a shop that sells high-fashion clothes at reduced prices. She always returns from these expeditions in a foul mood, on the verge of tears, because nothing fits her anymore, nothing looks good on her.

  When it is raining or cold or snowing, she dresses and makes some lunch for them—scrambled eggs, grilled cheese sandwiches, tuna fish. Then she goes out to the porch and sits there looking out, doing nothing, for hours. Or some days she will have a project—to make a pot of soup the long careful traditional way, or a pot of stuffed cabbage to be eaten that night and frozen in small containers that hold just enough for the two of them. They eat little now.

  But when they come back from an outing, or if she has cooked, or even if she has done nothing, around four o’clock she is exhausted and goes to bed. She sleeps for an hour or two, gets up and while she finishes the preparations for dinner, she sips a weak scotch and water. They eat on trays in the TV room, watching the news. Ed cleans up, she helps. She sits in front of TV for another hour or two, and goes to bed for the night. She no longer smokes.