Her Mother's Daughter (122 page)

But cruel, cruel to us who love her, who have tried. And self-centered, incredibly, nothing exists but self, that feeling. Bad, selfish, cruel, yet I understand it, I am just like her, I am being transformed into her, clutching
my
pearl of inconsolability. My mother combed
my
hair: I still remember how she pulled it, tears streaming down my face. Felt like hate. Her life wasn't mine. But I drank hers in, I made it my own, trying to lift its burden from her. Didn't help her, only ruined myself. Joke my struggling all those years not to be like her not to have her life.

All my struggle just the self-deluded squirming of a trapped worm.

THURSDAY
Well, I did it. I called her. I disgust myself. Such a coward! Telling myself not to call her because she'd be upset at hearing I am sick. Liar, dreamer. When the truth was I was afraid she'd hurt me by not caring that I was sick. “Oh? That's too bad.” Distant, cool, uninterested. Didn't believe I was so sick I couldn't remember her birthday. How is it that I know how she feels better than I know how I feel? I can see her sitting in the rocker staring out, sorry for herself, ruminating, chewing it over and over, her grief. Her grief: my grief. She keeps choosing it. Clara said so do I. How do I unchoose?

She said they are coming to Florida, tomorrow, driving down. I invited them here.

Arden said it's Valentine's Day today.

SAT
I keep trying to fight it off—the black hole. Pierce through the self-pity to my part in things. I don't know why I choose it, but maybe I can figure out
how
I choose it. Is that enough to enable me to stop?

This afternoon I took a walk along the beach with Arden and the children. The gulls were crying in the grey sky, the children cried out at their finds, collecting shells, running far ahead of us. A photograph. Can't shoot the cries and calls though, the music of the surround, you have to hear them in the photograph. In a good photograph, you can.

Arden held my arm.

I feel like someone who has had a life-threatening illness, come partway back from death, still on the threshold, I could still fall backward. But I haven't been that sick, have I? I wake like an invalid, my head heavy, hard to raise. I look out at the day, it is far away, a retreating sky, greyness. I get up feeling aged, I totter to the bathroom. I walk out into the world and it looks unfamiliar, I have been so long away from it. I have to learn to walk again, to talk, to think. I have to get my mind out of itself. I feel trapped there, locked into my mind. Imprisoned in repetition.

SUNDAY
Arden is cooking chicken soup for me. She makes great pots of soup every week—chicken, turkey, oxtail when she can get them, they're hard to find down here. All they have here is WASP food, everything filleted and neat, no bone no fat no flavor, the kind of food the Carpenters ate. Another life. Last week Arden made lamb broth with barley and vegetables—that was delicious. It is like being a child again—Mother always made chicken soup, beef soup, and lamb stew when we were sick. Arden doesn't make the lamb stew. I think she's right.

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 threatened. 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….”