Her Mother's Daughter (2 page)

Sometimes I think I will die before she does. I don't want to. It might cause her pain. For myself, I don't care. I am living out years I would not have been granted had I been born a hundred or two hundred years ago. I am nearly fifty, an age not many women reached then. And I have bad habits. I smoke too much and drink too much and also I travel frequently by air. I often stay up late at night, I have to fight for sleep when the sounds of morning begin: car doors slamming, motors fighting to wake up in the cold winter stillness, the whine and grind of garbage trucks, the fucking birds. I like to spend the night out of bed, walking through the streets of foreign cities, arms linked with those of newfound friends, all of us uproarious, singing, laughing, making jokes about being arrested (in certain cities, anyway, like Zurich), going from pub to pub to after-hours clubs, ending in my hotel room (sneaked in past the desk clerk in Zurich, that proper city) where there is always a bottle, four or five of us sitting around on the beds, smoking, drinking, laughing, singing until dawn has given way to morning. My newfound friends and I swear love and fellowship which, next day, I will remember and they will forget. Still, if I meet those friends in two or three years, they will remember me but I will not recall their names, and perhaps not even their faces. The night we spent together will have gathered itself with the other soaring nights of my past, each of which stands discrete and distinct in my catalog of ecstatic moments, yet from all of which the faces have disappeared.

Because I always have to come home again. Who knows what those faces might have turned into had I stayed? I don't, on the whole, stay with faces. I seek moods. The faces that are constants in my life—well, I don't care to replace or repeat them. My children, with all their unending problems. My parents, with theirs. The only thing that endures is that line, blood, the people who can't be changed, exchanged, substituted for. Not that I want to change them, not that there's anything wrong with my life. Quite the contrary. My life is exactly as I want it, as I would have wanted it. I have independence, and—finally—enough money so that I don't have to worry daily about making ends meet. I have a career I love and some success in it. I get to travel all over the world, something I wanted to do from the time I was very young. I have everything anyone could want.

Except last time I was home, I went out to Long Island as I always do to visit my parents at the lake. They were sitting together in the glassed-in porch, on a wrought-iron sofa, gazing out at the lake and the birds, and each of them had an arm laid on top of the sofa cushions toward each other. And suddenly, gently, hardly noticeably, my mother's hand opened and surrounded my father's wrist. She reached toward him. She touched him. And my eyes filled with tears and I thought—the way odd thoughts just suddenly light up in your mind—I thought: oh, if only you'd done that years ago! It would have made all the difference!

Later, of course, I saw her gesture as a braceleting, a manacling of his wrist, this man on whom she so depended. Later, too, I wondered at my teariness: I never cry, never. At least, I never did. Because since then I find myself bursting into tears at anything at all—pictures of famished children on the television news, stories in the papers of lost children, reunited families, young fathers dead on duty—in fires, in police work, in the military. A television play about the incarceration of an old grandmother in a nursing home reduced me to a sniveling pulp, grabbing tissues by the handful from the box I finally put beside me.

Of course my strange emotional state does not interfere with my work. Many days I get up early in the morning and go out with my camera to photograph; many nights I work in the darkroom into the morning. I prepare diligently for my journeys, reading everything recent so that I will have some idea of how to approach the new subject. Usually I look for what no one else has found interesting. I don't like to add to a line of thought already developed, like a footnote to someone else's chapter. This isn't because I am egotistic, although I may be. It's because I figure that the lines of thought that are already developed are those that are acceptable, and if you want to change things, you have to look for what is illegitimate—in subject or in approach. This tendency has caused me great difficulty in my life: it is always easier, whatever your line of work, to fall in line behind those who have gone before, and add your little tot, than to say the hell with what's gone before, what about what hasn't? Such an attitude can keep you poor.

But I never felt I had a choice about this. I couldn't bear to look at anything as it presented itself to be seen. I didn't even really see the damned rocks but only what lay under them. And this is because of my mother, I know that even if I don't quite understand why or how. All those hours I spent at her feet. “Tell me about when you were little, Mommy. What was your mommy like? What was your daddy like?” I never stopped asking, not even when I was fifty. As if under the rocks that were her stories, there was something buried, something hidden, something I could discover if I persisted that would make all the difference.

All what difference?

As I said, my life is fine. Couldn't be better. Oh, well, could be, I suppose, if we lived in a different world. It would be nice, I suppose, to be able to love someone who loved me. I've gone beyond love, romantic love, all that stuff. Need and power struggle, that's all it is, and I have no needs. Truly. That is, I have no needs I cannot satisfy by myself. I don't know any successful woman with love in her life. Men can manage it, but not women. Disproportion in numbers, and besides, men are too threatened by independent women. They can always find one who will build up their ego. And I, we, independent women, can't find a man who doesn't need continual bolstering. Enough already. I've had enough.

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 days 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.