After the Fire (2 page)

Are there important mother-daughter issues behind much of my early poetry? Absolutely. Those same issues are at work in some of my novels as well, but in this particular poem, the cigarette was what made all the difference. The woman in the poem and I both drink coffee, but because she smoked and I didn't, I was able to distance myself from her. I was not the frustrated housewife and mother pictured in this poem. She and I weren't one. Her unhappiness and mine didn't mesh and mingle.

Now I know otherwise.

This is the time when, according to the media,

She is supposed to settle back and relax

Over a cigarette and a second cup of coffee,

Receiving a much-deserved rest after bundling

Children and husband off to school and office.

What Madison Avenue cannot know

Is how bleak and empty

The day stretches out through

The steam of that second cup of coffee,

Filled with mindless tasks,

Endlessly repeated.

Is this all?

In 1968 I was still smarting over my husband's decree that I not rewrite the manuscript for my children's book and submit it for publication. Of course, had I really been the fire-breathing feminist I thought myself to be, I would have told him to take a hike. Instead, I bowed to his wishes and put the manuscript away. (That story was eventually rewritten, and published in 1985 under the title “It's Not Your Fault” as part of a children's personal safety series.)

I began writing poems on those long, solitary nights and stowing them away before I went to bed. Instinctively understanding how explosive my illicit writing was, I never showed any of my poems to my husband. Looking back, I believe that's about the time my anger began to build, too. In this poem in particular, I can almost smell the smoke from that slow burn of resentment that would smolder for the next dozen years before finally bursting into flame.

They say that living well is the best revenge. At the time of this writing, in the spring of 2013, my forty-fifth murder mystery has debuted at number 12 on the
New York Times
Best Sellers List. In 2000, the University of Arizona, where I was once denied admittance to creative writing classes on the basis of my being a “girl,” granted me an honorary doctorate of humane letters. These days, that once bitter fruit has a much sweeter taste, and there is more than enough irony to go around.

But there is someone else's story hidden in the background of this poem—that of a friend, a Native American woman with several small children and a ne'er-do-well husband (I could see that her husband was bad news!), who wanted to have her tubes tied but couldn't have the procedure performed without her husband's written permission, which he, of course, refused to grant.

It is a slow dawning,

This realization of existence

On a leash.

                  Of making excuses

For thoughts and actions

That were never really executed.

But with the dawning, the realization,

That you, a newborn Eve, have tried

The bitter fruit

                  Of knowledge,

Can you then, content, go back

To live the plastic lie you were before?

No.

I was a girl who grew up in the 1950s. The vast majority of women from that era came complete with a panoply of mixed messages. This was a time when girls who wanted to become doctors became nurses; girls who wanted to become engineers became high school geometry teachers; girls who wanted to become ministers became ministers' wives; and girls who wanted to become writers married men who were allowed into creative writing programs that were closed to women. We saw the inequities, but for the most part we went along with the program, kept our mouths shut, and did what was expected—which is how, after being locked out of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, I ended up being first a high school English teacher and later a school librarian.

In the 1960s I began reading those dangerous consciousness-raising books, and eventually things did change. So, yes, I did burn a bra—a nursing bra. When you burn a bra, the whole idea is to have it blaze up in a satisfying conflagration. Due to my own ambivalence, however, I didn't toss my bra onto the barbecue grill until
after
I had finished cooking dinner. By the time I got around to making my political statement, the coals had cooled down. Instead of flaming up and incinerating, my bra simply charred around the edges of the foam rubber, which pretty much detracted from the desired effect.

At the time I was chagrined that the bra didn't burn. In retrospect, I see that charred hulk as a reflection of the terrible dichotomy in my life—a longing to be set free of the old ways while still standing mired knee-deep in the muck.

The old adage is still true: You can't have your cake and eat it, too. In this case, more fittingly, it would have to be: You can't cook dinner and burn your bra, too.

The danger lies not as the broadcasters

    would have you believe,

In the burning of a few extraneous and uncomfortable

    undergarments.

And come together in friendship to speak, console,

    and even love

Each other as they have never done before.

    Now they can

We're back to the mother-daughter issue again. My mother dropped out of school in seventh grade because her vision was bad. She needed glasses to see the blackboard, and there was no money in her family for glasses. She went to Minneapolis to work as a maid for a cartoonist and his invalid wife. Later she married my father and raised seven children—washing clothes, ironing, and cooking three meals a day at a time when there were no automatic clothes washers or dryers and no dishwashers or microwaves, either.

Growing up, I was a bookworm. My mother read magazines—when she had time, that is. With all the unyielding arrogance of the young, I was contemptuous of her for not sharing my love of books. By the time I reached high school, my two older sisters had both married, one during high school and one immediately after graduation. Hoping for a different result, my mother encouraged me to take a heavy class load—six solid credits, as they were called back then, and one non-solid, music. My mother's encouragement came in the form of a bribe. She said that if I took extra classes she would exempt me from the household chores she had required of my older sisters.

I was six feet tall and wore thick glasses, which set me well outside the in-crowd of my high school's “cool” social circle. I was also bookish and more than a little lazy. I didn't think twice before accepting my mother's offer, one which set me on an academic track in high school and led, eventually, to a scholarship and to my admission to college.

I wouldn't be where I am today without having had the advantage of what my mother did for me back then. When I wrote this poem, in my midtwenties, I was not yet a mother and had no real appreciation for what my mother had done for all her children through the years.

Now I'm a mother and a grandmother, too. It's safe to say I'm over it. Not over the need to demand equal rights and responsibilities for everyone, but over being blind to women's very real contributions to society whether in or out of the workplace.

By the way, if you have read my Joanna Brady books, your suspicions are hereby confirmed. Yes, you have met my mother—a version of her anyway—in Joanna Brady's mother, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield.

My hopes and fears are alien to her.

When we speak, it is as though our words

Come from two different languages

With no hope of finding an interpreter

To reconcile them.

I see her as “just a housewife”;

See her years as mother a waste

Of human potential, of intellect, of being.

Until we both can look at one another

With minds washed clean of prejudice,

Until we can see the difference and the value

Of both separate lives, it will be

Impossible for my mother and me

To be sisters.

I was a smart girl at a time when being smart and female wasn't a particularly good idea. I figured out fairly early in the game that I was smarter than my first husband, who also happens to have been the first man I ever dated. Not wanting to rock the boat, I tried not to make an issue of it. For his part, my husband did what he could to keep me in my place.

In his defense, I have to say that my husband was living according to the script he had learned at his own mother's knee. She told me once, when I was single-handedly supporting the family by working as a district manager in the life insurance business—that “it's all right if a woman works to help her husband support the family, but it certainly isn't all right if she makes more money than he does.”

Given that kind of background, it's hardly surprising that her son was less than enthusiastic about my getting my master's of education degree in 1970. One way of showing his displeasure was to take the position that graduation ceremonies were stupid and were to be avoided at all costs. Deflated by his lack of enthusiasm, I skipped commencement and received my diploma by mail. When I started taking classes toward my CLU (chartered life underwriter) designation in the insurance business, my husband always managed to provoke some kind of crisis right around the time I had to be either attending classes or taking an exam. Several of his nine stints in rehab happened either before or immediately after scheduled exams.

Is the next poem about us? It wasn't consciously at the time I wrote it, because I was still doing “art.” In retrospect, I can say absolutely that we were the subject.

Incidentally, years later, when the University of Arizona awarded my honorary doctorate, I was there to pick it up. The rest of my family was there as well, including my then eighty-five-year-old mother.

She wore ambition like a double-breasted suit,

Well-tailored but a little long.

She sought her chosen goal with firm resolve,

Detouring at times, but never straying far.

But he, without her clear-eyed vision and determined air,

Grew weary when her beacon failed to dim.

He counted treachery among her notes and books

And hated every study she pursued.

For eighteen years I deluded myself into thinking I was woman enough to keep my man.

I didn't find out how wrong that assumption had been until much later. Five years after my divorce, I discovered that, despite the fact I had been faithful during my marriage and celibate after it ended, I was suffering from a sexually transmitted disease.

Given all that, one would think that the next poem is about me. Again, it wasn't—at least not consciously so.

To my way of thinking, I was writing “Best Friends” about a friend from college—a woman whose marriage to one of our classmates had recently collapsed into divorce due to the fact that her husband—who could well have been a clone of my own spouse—was fooling around with other women, including one of his wife's best friends. With the benefit of hindsight, it's possible to see that this poem was about both of us. Unfortunately, it reflects the experience of far too many other women as well.

Did you say he was the first?

So what? Is that why you're still hanging on,

Pretending that he's everything you want?

Your virgin loyalty has led you down

A primrose path and kept you bound

Beyond the call of reason.

My younger sister came to visit, bringing the unwelcome news that she was dropping out of college to marry her boyfriend. With the unerring fallibility of our mother's daughters, my sister's first choice was a troubled piece of humanity who wasn't worth the powder it would have taken to blow him up. Looking at him, I could clearly see that she was casting her pearls before swine. Of course it was easy for me to see everything wrong with her future husband and nothing at all wrong with mine. My husband was perfectly fine, but I didn't want my sister to mess up her own life by making some idiotic mistake.