MONDAY Mom and Dad are here. They drove straight here, arrived last night. Mom is still tired from the drive, she’s napping now, Dad is walking along the beach with the boys and Arden, he wouldn’t do that if I weren’t here, someone here for her if she needs someone. Actually, she looks good, she looks terrific. Her hair is so pretty—she didn’t turn white but silver, and she is still gold, the two are mixed. Short and fluffy. And her color is good, and she’s pretty.
She hates the way she looks. I can understand that. It’s awful to get old. Dad of course always looks wonderful with that huge shock of white hair and his young face and body. But, oh, poor Mom. Weak as I am, when I saw them drive up I ran out to help her up the stairs.
WED Well, they’re gone.
FRI Black hole the whole fucking week. Today Arden said, That’s what happens every time you see your mother.
Can that be true?
SUNDAY Since she has known she has emphysema, Mother has become even more intensely focused on something dark and churning inside her. As if now there is nothing worth contemplating but death. Her gaze doesn’t stretch to the outside world, she looks only inward and sees only desolation. Everything outside her hurts her, like someone who has been horribly burned, whose skin is so sensitive that a touch causes agony, who can’t stand even the air brushing against them.
So even the children’s noises were painful to her, she kept turning off her hearing aid. She was taken with Sarah, but she didn’t feel up to spending time with her, talking to her, playing with her. She likes Arden—she’s always liked Arden, Arden impresses her somehow. She was impressed at her educating her own children. She even sat and watched for an hour.
She wanted me to take some trips with them. She is bored. She likes my company. She couldn’t seem to take it in that I have been sick, am still not entirely recovered. Or maybe she takes it in, but is angry about it—angry with me for being sick. We drove together over to the nature preserve, enough of a trip for me. She was furious that I would not go up to Palm Beach with them even for a few days. She said she was glad I had Arden here to take care of me, and off they went. She doesn’t like to be around sickness.
Hard for me to bear. But I guess I will have to learn, I, the favored child. The truth is she doesn’t see me. She doesn’t know who I am. And I, who love her so much, I have to accept that she does not love me. There is no room in her heart for me except when I am triumphant. She cannot tolerate me needing—anything. Probably because she cannot tolerate needing anything herself. She treats me the way she treats herself. The way her mother treated her. It is to weep.
MONDAY, 2/25 Clara called last night. She didn’t know I was sick. She met Franny on the street yesterday, and found out. She was extremely upset. Things are going very badly with the magazine and she’s broke, but she’s going to fly down here to see me, tomorrow. Tomorrow!
THURSDAY I can’t yet drive, don’t trust myself, the dizziness still overcomes me at times, so Arden drove all the long way up to Fort Myers to pick up Clara at the airport. She wasn’t nice about it. But oh the sight of Clara! Same as always, those huge eyes with so much longing in them, that utterly controlled manner, a study in contradiction. Just like me, she says.
We were walking along the beach when she said this, walking with our arms around each other. I couldn’t not put my arm around her, my hand on her sweet body. Still, she’s wary of me, I can see it in her eyes. Why shouldn’t she be? she demanded. I whispered in her ear: I love you.
But after she left this morning, I thought: suppose I let myself love her, love her fully, entirely, as she wants. And suppose she changes, the way Brad did? Or Toni? Suppose she leaves me? I couldn’t bear it, how could I bear it, I couldn’t stand that again. No.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 29. A leap year! It is 1980. I just realized that. I knew there was a new year, but somehow I didn’t think about it until now. It’s beautiful here this afternoon. Huge white cloud puffs, sharp-edged against the deep blue of the sky, gold-edged near the sun, as if someone had run a pen around them with golden ink; large and indolent and reflective, changing shape as they move, like dandelion white opening opening blowing dispersing in wisps, easily, like lying back in a pool. No friction, no reluctance. Surrender. Abandonment to what only looks like annihilation, but is really transformation.
There is a quality of attention you can pay to yourself that makes you more sensitive to other people. Egotism, selfishness, these words should be discarded. Everything I learned when I was young was lies. Because the way Mother feels, the way I feel when I am in the black hole, is totally self-involved, yet there is no self in it, but an absence of self, an absence of love, abandonment to the ecstasy of feeling abandoned. And the absence of self is a punishment of others: I know this, I feel it.
Whereas when you start to think if you can think if you can let yourself think about how you are and how you act and what you want and what you like and don’t like—suddenly other people jolt into color, pop into relief like a movie film suddenly brought into focus.
Clara made me see this. She had to go back, she could only stay a day and a half, but we sat holding hands on the big rock down the beach, and talking, and looking at each other, and I don’t know how I let go of her….
Her voice is balm on my spirit, her eyes make me want to reach out and hold her forever. Why is it so hard for me to tell her that?
But why must I tell her that? I never told Brad, I never told Toni. They knew, they could feel it. She can’t feel it. Not her fault: you cannot feel much from a dead person.
Half-dead.
Arden was in a fury while Clara was here—she was the old bad Arden, the thirteen-, fourteen-year-old child. And suddenly I saw her in a new way too, saw something about her I had not realized. Why was she so angry? Because she had to share me, she was jealous of whatever was happening with Clara, she could feel it. But if she was jealous, she doesn’t hate me. All the while I had been thinking she hated me, she’d actually been jealous of my attention.
For years—how many? whenever I looked at Arden I felt a pang of what I called sorrow—but wasn’t it self-pity?—at my loss, my emptiness of her, her distance from me. But my very sorrow kept her away from me, was a punishment. All of this came to me last night after Clara left. I couldn’t sleep, and today I had a long talk with Arden. We went to the market en famille, I took us out to lunch, poor Arden, she’s been cooking three meals a day all this while, it’s too much. And I bought a pack of cigarettes, I know I shouldn’t but I do love to smoke. And after we came back and Arden had finished teaching the kids, and had set them to their “homework” (which they do religiously), she came out and sat with me awhile. She was still pissy, but I ignored that and chatted easily about the kids’ lessons, the weather, the poem she’s been working on. And in time, she softened and talked without an edge.
Then I said, “It has been hard for you, taking care of the children and me, doing all that cooking, the laundry, teaching them. I want you to know I appreciate it. Very much. More than I can say.”
And my eyes filled with tears. Tears: I was so grateful. It was like getting my period for the first time—I was so old, so much older than the other girls, fourteen nearly fifteen, when the others had started some of them at nine, and I was grateful for that flow, it made me what I was supposed to be, it made me normal, human. I haven’t had tears in my eyes in years.
She laughed. “You know, there’s a washing machine and a dryer here and a dishwasher. And you don’t have to fill the lamps every few days, and water comes hot out of the tap. And the stores are only a couple of miles away and we have a car that starts when you start it! God, it’s luxury, Mom!”
I burst out, “Oh, Arden, it broke my heart when I was at the farm, watching you do the laundry, filling that huge tin tub on top of a wood stove, scrubbing the clothes on a washboard! Oh god, Arden!”
Mother at the washtubs, Mother at the stove, Mother running out to pull the sheets off the line when a storm threatene
d. Mother sewing late into the night—spring coats for us, sunsuits, clothes for a doll, my first and last.
She laughed again. “Yes. But I didn’t mind. I loved living there.”
She doesn’t have my memories.
She is still laughing. “I really did,” she concludes.
Did.
MARCH 1. Mother is sick. Dad called last night. She felt ill a few days after they left here and insisted they drive back home. All that way for a little more than a week’s stay! She has a bad flu, she thinks she caught it from me. Is that possible?
MARCH 2. Something she makes me feel, something I let her make me feel: if Mommy doesn’t love me no other love is worth anything. Christ.
Anyway she does love me. In her fashion. In the only way she knows how to love. As she was loved by her poor mother. All the generations of mothers, anxious, angry with their daughters, terrified for their survival, but knowing what their lives will be if they do survive. God.
MARCH 3. I’ve been walking, even running along the beach with the kids. I carried my camera! I took pictures of them!
This afternoon they were so tired from romping on the beach that they all took naps and Arden sat with me for a while. Her hair is long and droopy, it hangs in her face. She has some color now, but she’s still very thin, and she hunches over when she sits. Her clothes—long old-fashioned things, modest and drab—are all shabby, faded. It hurts me to look at her: my proud, fiery beautiful daughter looking like a bedraggled slavey. She looked too weary and weak to be attacked, but I couldn’t keep quiet another day. So I did it: I asked her why she’d been estranged from me for so long.
She said, “I just decided to protect myself.” Thin hard voice.
“From me?”
She eyed me. “Who do you think?”
“Arden, I don’t understand.”
“Oh!” She tossed her head and I had a glimmer of what she used to be. “You are so blind! You see nothing! How you favored Billy, sweet Billy, dear Billy….” She turned her head sharply away from me.
“Arden, I don’t believe that.”
She swung back. “Believe it! Whatever he did was wonderful, fine; whatever I did was wrong. I was always the bad one, always the troublemaker!”
I considered. “But you were.”
“Oh!” She tamped out her cigarette and stood up. “There’s no point in talking to you!” She headed for the sliding door that led to the living room.
“Arden, please sit down. For once in your life, see an argument through. You have been storming out of rooms as long as I can remember. Can you sit and talk and tell me more about this? Because—” I continued as she reluctantly, resentfully sat, “I know that there is something that Billy and I have that you and I don’t have—some kind of closeness. I always felt you had it with your father….”
“A lot of good that did me!”
“You were always too angry with him. Probably because he denied that thing, that closeness.”
Her eyes filled with tears then, and I fell silent. She sat gazing over the Gulf. A few tears streamed down her cheeks. She wiped them away with her hand, like a child (twisting my heart). She blew her nose and I spoke again.
“But that’s chemical, or biological, or who knows? maybe it’s sexual. Maybe Freud was right. But it isn’t true that I love Billy more than you. It was never true.”
She twisted her mouth.
“You made things hard. Maybe you don’t remember. You were jealous of my relationship with Toni….” (And I thought it was Toni she was jealous of.) “The bastard!”
“And maybe I didn’t handle things as well as I could. I didn’t know what to do, that’s the truth. But it’s broken my heart that I lost you. I never wanted that….”
She jumped up suddenly. “Want some wine?”
I nodded and she went indoors. She came out with two glasses, but set hers down on the table and began to pace the deck, staring out at the water, the woods around us, the water again. She turned around, her hands behind her leaning on the railing, and looked at me with cold eyes.
“I came down here to take care of you.”
“Arden! I know! You know how I appreciate it!”
She ignored me. “I told Jake I had to do it, you were my mother and you needed me and all that crap. I don’t know if he believed it, but he accepted it.” She licked her lips. They seemed to be dry and chapped. She reached for her wine and sipped it. “But that’s not the only reason I came. I mean, I did want to help you. But I didn’t feel I owed you anything. You hardly helped me at all when the kids were born….”
Oh, that bitter voice. I tried not to scream. “I tried to help! I came up when Jeremy was born. It was hard for me, Arden, to watch you trying to raise an infant without hot water, without running water for god’s sake, having to go out to the outhouse in the freezing weather every time you wanted to pee—” I sipped my wine, trying to get my voice into control, trying to keep my face calm, still she would know I was furious, she always knew how I felt. “And you know, the meals up there, turnip, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, lentils every night, night after night….But even so, I would have stayed, I would have stayed as long as you wanted me if it weren’t for the others, the way they treated me, the way they looked at me! It was like being white and living among black people or a Nazi living among Jews—only I wasn’t, I didn’t know what I’d done, but I knew I was hated!” My voice had risen by now, my face was hot, I couldn’t help it.
She looked at me steadily, then dropped her eyes. “Well, if I ever have another kid, you can help me without worrying about hot water.” Her voice was sarcastic. “Jacob wants to leave the commune, he’s a great big grown-up lawyer now and he wants to live in town. In fact, he wants to live in the city.”
“New York?” I couldn’t help it: I was overjoyed.
She nodded. She sipped her wine again. She paced.
“But I’m not sure I’m going to go with him.”
Ah.
“But I don’t know how I’ll live if I don’t!” Her voice was furious, her face a mask of rage. She breathed out a few times, then sat down on the bench that ran along the railing, at some distance from me. “I can’t support us selling dried flowers and writing poetry,” she said bitterly.
“Won’t Jacob support his kids?”
She shrugged. “You should know the answer to that. How much did Daddy contribute to our support? And what about that bastard Toni? Jacob’s angry, he wants me with him, he doesn’t understand why I don’t want to go. He wants us all in a nice modern cardboard box in the city, living like all the other gentry. I don’t even know him anymore. How much will he help and for how long? I don’t feel sure I can depend on him anymore.”
“But what is this about, sweetheart? Is it that you want to stay on the commune? Or that you want to leave Jacob?”
Her grey gaze on me was no longer so hard, just cool. “Yes. That’s the problem: I don’t know.”
I thought about her life up there. It was hard. Their only heat came from the fireplace, and that required chopped wood; the women chopped it as well as the men. The women did most of the kitchen work. Arden’s hands, long and elegant once, were thick and red now, scraped. Some of the rawness had faded since we’d been in Florida. No hot water for baths, for dishes, for laundry. A vegetable diet meant hours of chopping and pounding; they made their own bread, their own cheese out of the goat’s milk. She had to boil the baby’s diapers in a huge heavy pot. At least she didn’t have to iron—they had no such thing. One task she was spared. It was cold there in the winter, hot in the summer. But she liked living there. I had to remind myself of that.
“I believe in our life there,” she said finally. “I believe in the principle of it: living on and by the earth, shunning the artificial, avoiding commercialism, materialism, the hot shot and the main chance and the fad….I want to want to stay there….” Her eyes filled.
I waited.
“But things have changed. The people—well, of co
urse there’s been turnover, that’s inevitable on a commune. But the way it is now, I hate it! I hate it!” She stood up and began to pace again, running her hand along the wooden deck railing. I wanted to say—don’t do that, Arden, you’ll get a splinter—but I shut my mouth and waited.
“It’s so hard, and I don’t know why, but the women end up doing most of the work, I mean, we help with the plowing and the sowing and the other heavy work. When we needed to repair a cabin last year, we all got up on ladders with hammers and nails. But when it comes to the kids or the laundry or the cooking or the dishwashing, the guys do fuck-all!…I work so hard! It was all right until the kids were born. It was still all right after Jeremy was born, there were three other women and Jacob helped then. But once he started law school, forget it. And then those women left, and the new women aren’t like that….”
She plopped down on the railing bench, her body hunched over, her hair falling limp and greasy in her face. “And the schools are after us now, they’re going to win of course, I’ll have to send the boys to school next fall. And that’s a horror story—I’ll have to drive them down the mountain every morning at six-thirty to the highway where the bus can pick them up—and pick them up every afternoon. You know what it’s like there. That will take hours out of my day, every day, and there’s no one on the farm now who’s willing to help me except…”
“Except?”
“There’s this guy.” She flipped her cigarette butt, hard, into the sand. She pulled her face into a hard firm line, then turned to me. “Philip. He’s new. He’s really attractive, and he…well, he likes me. I could stay on. With him. But he’s awfully young.” She looked keenly at me. Her face was ravaged.
I gazed steadily back. She turned away.
“I don’t know what to do.” She tossed this vaguely, in the direction of the wind.