Anywhere But Here (74 page)

We did something around here that my dad had started and all the neighbors took it up, too. When a baby was born, you planted some kind of bush. If it was a boy, you planted a bush that would have berries, if it was a girl, a bush that flowered. With Hal, we planted raspberries, with Benny, currants. Those raspberry bushes are still here, they’ve spread. The idea was for the kids to be independent. When they were children they could go outside and eat the berries and pick the flowers. My father always thought of things with big ideas; he thought if worst came to worst someone could live on nuts and berries. And then when someone died, we planted a tree. I don’t know why a tree. For my father, my mother wanted two; a hickory and a birch.

When my father died, he left money in his will for me to get my nose fixed. He wrote a letter with it that said he had had a big nose all his life and he’d never done anything about it, but that he’d been the one to give it to me and he wanted me to be able to get mine fixed.

And I did. Here I was already married and with a five-year-old son and I went on the train to Chicago alone to have the surgery. There wasn’t anyone who did it in Bay City. It was sort of a scary thing. I thought I’d better have a picture to give the doctor an idea of what I’d like; at the Harper Method we’d always told people to look through the magazines so they could show us what they had in mind. So I had my photograph folded up in my purse. It was a
picture of Katharine Hepburn. I thought if I was going to get a new nose, I may as well go for something really good, huh? Why not.

Well, I went and it was really awful. Chicago seemed very different from what I remembered of it during wartime, and I was just alone and out of uniform. I couldn’t just go anywhere like I did then. And I suppose, I was older.

I remember the night before, I ate dinner in my hotel room because I had no idea where else to go. Then, I still didn’t know what to do, I had the whole night ahead of me, so what did I do, I sat down and wrote a letter to my mother. Oh, I was such a goody-good. I really was. I was really too good.

Then the next morning I woke up and I was so scared. All of a sudden, I liked my nose, and I thought, what if I end up with something worse? But I had the appointment already, the doctor was all lined up and I didn’t know if I’d even have to pay him anyway, if I didn’t come. So I left the hotel and on the way to the hospital, I walked by such an arcade. They had one of those booths where you put in a quarter and it takes your picture four times and they come out in a strip like an up-and-down cartoon. I took my picture. I decided I wanted four pictures of my nose. I still have them. It really wasn’t too great a nose.

The funny thing about the operation was that the doctor put me under, but I could still hear him working—I wasn’t completely asleep. I heard crunching noises, like the way my dad ate chicken, he cracked the bones with his teeth and sucked the marrow. Then I heard a clipping, like with a shears.

I’d given him the picture beforehand and he said he’d do his best. He told me he had to work with what was there. And I think he did a good job. I’ve always been glad I did it.

Still, I’ll never be pretty like your mother. She has those long legs from Granny. And one thing I have to say for her, she always did keep up her figure and dress herself nice. She has a knack for that, anything with colors. She has that and my mother and Granny had it, too, but I never did. I’ve never been good that way. I never could just put things together the way they do. I’ve always had to buy the whole outfit.

And Adele always did the exciting things, too. She’s been all over, she mixes with the real rich people. She’s never been happy with just the ordinary. I don’t think she ever really liked Bay City.

She called once when she was in California and said she was going to a party where she was going to meet George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn. Jimmy talked to her, he answered the phone. We didn’t know who George Cukor was until she told us, but we knew Katharine Hepburn.

“Katharine Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn!” Jimmy was yelling. I think he’d already had his gimlet. “You know your sister has her nose!” Adele remembered the story, too. And she called the next day and said, yes, she had met Katharine Hepburn and that she was a very icy person, real aloof, and all night she’d sort of stood apart, but then Adele had gone up and said, Excuse me, Miss Hepburn, but I wanted to tell you that my sister has your nose. Adele told the whole story, about me working at the Harper Method Beauty Shop and taking in a picture and all and she said, for the first time that night, Katharine Hepburn smiled. So thanks to my sister, somewhere out there Katharine Hepburn knows that a Carol Measey in Wisconsin has her nose.

I
don’t plan anymore. I used to. I used to try to control. Now I just sort of let things go with the flow. I live in The Now. And I find, everything just comes the way it’s supposed to.

I’ve learned To Give Is to Receive. And when I can, when my billings are up, I look around for things for her. Even when I shouldn’t, I do. I saw an adorable Calvin Klein black and white evening dress at Robinson’s. It isn’t cheap, but it is ADORABLE, it would be just smashing on her, and she needs to have one or two good things. It’s fine to be the intellectual, but once in a while, you should dress up a little, too.

I even thought of it for me, I drove out at noon and tried it on, but my arms are just too old for it, you need a young arms and back. So I put it on lay away for her, she may as well wear it now when she’s young. When you’ve still got the good arms. And those little white outfits I sent her like mine, they’re two twenty-five, two fifty, actually, no, they’re two seventy-five.

It’s the most important, beautiful, fulfilling thing I’ve ever done in my life, being a mother. And I look at her and think, Hey, I didn’t do such a bad job. But she holds in her fear and her anger, she hasn’t learned to let go yet of her fear and just love, the way I do. I have no guilt. Not anymore. I’m living in The Now. I’ve found a real inner peace and nothing can really disturb it. She hasn’t learned to forgive yet. But, you know, I look at her and think, If I was such an awful mother, the way she paints me out to be with her friends, she LOVES to play the poor child, the
martyr, POOR, POOR Ann, then she wouldn’t be so great, what she is.

I see the kids right here in Beverly Hills where the mothers were too busy with their manicures and their thises and their thats, they never took the time to give the real total love, the emotional closeness I did. I see it, I see it all the time in the convalescent homes. I have two girls, one is nineteen, the other’s twenty-six, and neither will ever walk again, from the drugs.

And I started from scratch, from nothing, she saw the house and the dead-end road I grew up on. I was on my own, raising her, when I was her age, who does she think helped me? When I think of what I grew up around, the old mink sheds, a dead-end road—nothing, and I look at what she’s had. Beverly Hills High School, college. And the lessons. And the clothes.

I think to myself, How did I get out of there. Other people just stay in the same rut all their lives. It must be something in the genes, our genes, that pushes us ahead. My sister is the totally opposite of me. And yet, it’s the gene characteristic that’s so incredibly, magnificently universal. That makes me believe there has to be a master plan, a universal power. Something in the genes way back, whether it’s centuries ago—and here we are that we, a few of us, all these chromosomes meet and become something. We’re all only electromagnetic particles. And so is a rock, a fish, a bird, a butterfly. And that’s how you know. That’s how I know, that I’m more than just this lifetime.

I’m part of all that went before and all that went after me. These are my beliefs. They’re very strong and very deep. I was always different. From the kids I grew up with. I was the same and yet I was different. But then everyone feels that.

Everything was meant to be and if she has to rebel to find her own independent self, then I can let her. And I know what I’ve done, I know it in my heart, in myself, I know she’ll thank me someday.

She could have been a poor nothing girl in a factory town in the midwest. And here she’s in with a great crowd, going to the best schools, she can go anywhere, mix with anyone. Absolutely anyone. She’s really a member of the intelligentsia, the real
cream, the upper crust. And she’s there because I got her in when she was young enough to learn. I was already thirty-nine when we moved here. I was young and good-looking. Sure, she’s smart and she’s pretty and talented—the works, she’s got it all, the best of everything, I tell her—but I’ll tell you, there are plenty of them there in the midwest who are the same and you’ll never see them, because they’ll never get out and rise up. Like Lolly. They just sink.

They tried—to make me and more than that, my child, into their mold. I had to let myself and my daughter go free. And mold in another way. I didn’t see the joys and the happinesses I felt life offered. If only to look at a sunset or to look at an owl on a fence or to see the glories of Yosemite. I think the real ordinary is just to be simple with yourself. But they weren’t simple. They were highly complicated people. They lived by the negatives, rather than love and joy.

My mother could have come out once and visited me. Never once did they think that I could need. That has hurt me. But I also know it was Carol’s doing. How selfish people can be! To think they don’t have to do anything.

It’s very hard to change social classes after a certain age. I have friends, the Swans are lovely really, and Bert Keller, they’re very good to me, having me up for parties and dinners and screenings, brunches, whenever I want, really, but I’ll never be in the way that she can. You really need the man and the house. And you don’t just find a man at my age. They’re all looking for a woman who has money. And like Nan Keller used to say, if you don’t learn your tennis before a certain age, before you’re twenty, you’ll never get your form just right. But I’m practicing, with tennis I don’t agree, I am learning.

She’ll have the big house someday and the husband and the beautiful yard, all of it. And, I’m hoping, grandchildren. I’m ready to be a grandmother. I think it’ll be one of the most satisfying emotionally, I mean, beautiful things. I don’t worry about getting old. You’re as old as you feel and I feel young. I’m ready for grandchildren right now.

I’m happy here in my little place, I’ve fixed it up cute. Some
day, I’d like to buy, I’d like to have a little house where I can see the ocean and the mountains, real choice. But it has to be the right spot. I’m looking. I’m looking all the time. I’m going to move pretty soon. I’m saving. LA has gotten too big and too busy. I’m sick of all this driving.

And her going to Wisconsin, her doubts, all this playing up how she was poor, working class—I tell her, Honey, you were NEVER working class, your mother always had an MA, that’s not working class—at the time, it hurt me, it really just hurt me right here in the heart, when she wouldn’t dress up, even once, she wouldn’t put on the clothes I sent her FOR ONE DAY, just to please me, but now I understand that was all just rebellion. And I’ve learned to be patient, not to try and change people. And when you do that, they come around by themselves, quicker than if you try to influence. And she’ll never go back to Wisconsin. Never in a million years. She couldn’t go back, after Brown. I couldn’t either, now. I really couldn’t. There’s nothing for us there anymore.