In Spite of Everything (4 page)

Nana was the first to see it. “This child is a redhead,” she declared, on her first visit. “And she has blue eyes.” My mother stiffened, irritated by her mother’s hubristic prophecy. “Oh, Mother, don’t be ridiculous,” she sniffed. “She has black hair and brown eyes, like all the Susan Gregories. And look at her legs—she’ll be tall, too.” Nana shook her head. After a few weeks, when my true coloring began to emerge, it became obvious that Nana was right: I was a blue-eyed redhead. And, as it turned out, I was compact and athletic. Just like my dad.

Second, it wasn’t just that I wasn’t the baby my mother was expecting that compounded her anxiety. It’s that I
was
a baby. People try to tell you what it’s going to be like to have one, but there’s no way you can understand it until you yourself have your own—whether you give birth or adopt. Some people are totally gaga over babies right away and squirm gleefully at their every belch and wiggle. Some people regard the newborn period as an endurance trial and are much more relaxed and happy once the baby can sit up, at around six months old. Some people are just not into babies, period. I’m not sure into which bunker my mother thought she would be slotted, but she found out right away that she was not only a member of that last troop, but also its leader. My mother was not, is not, a baby person.

For starters, there was the whole physicality of it. For a tall, physically
unfit woman, pregnancy is extra hard on the back; she had to take pain medication for it. This may be why she didn’t breast-feed, but she probably wouldn’t have considered it at any rate. It would have felt unpalatable and unseemly to her. She may have been a grad student at Berkeley in the late sixties, but make no mistake: Pixie Thomas was, is, no earth mama. While she is no society matron either, my mother likes the fancy (as do I). She is a strictly Ferragamo flats, Yves Saint Laurent knit top, and Chanel lipstick woman. My mother was just plain different. Different from me, different from the other moms.

For one thing, she not only worked, she also did not really cook or bake unless there was a grown-up dinner party. For another thing, she didn’t look anything like anyone else’s mother. Where I grew up, near the Berkeley Hills, it was not the hippie but the cute tennis-skirt-wearing woman who was the reigning benevolent despot. My mother was the anti-Californian: intense, intimidating, anxious, bookish, hyperbolic, unathletic. She was not an officer of the PTA. She did not have a straight blond bob but obstreperously cork-screwed black hair. She was nine miles high of blindingly reflective white skin in a bathing suit, which was, like the hair, black. As a child, I sensed that the other California moms regarded her with an uneasy combination of inferiority, discomfort, and mockery. I figured that’s how they must view me, too (minus the inferiority).

Although my parents did host festive dinner parties to which children came, we did not have many children over to our house outside of the close friends who lived down the street. But even so, ours was definitely not the “play” house. The walls were not decorated, like those of other Berkeley houses, with abstract artwork or Latin American wall hangings but were lined, floor to ceiling, with books—not ordinary paperbacks but, as my friend Ben said, “smart books.” And it was messy. One of my mother’s favorite, or at least one of her oft-cited, mottoes is “One can’t pay enough for good help.” This wasn’t some perverse entitlement of the upper class. It was simply the dictum of a housework hater.

Indeed, my mother came from a long line of bookish women who hated pretty much every facet of domestic life. Cooking, laundry, mopping, washing dishes, tidying, and organizing (unless it was in relation to books) were not their bailiwick. Such busywork drained the mind and the soul; plus, they just weren’t good at it. True, my nana did love needlepoint, and she always worked at embroidering lovely, functionless little pillows until in her later years her gnarled, arthritic fingers forbade it. But she was using the time spent in handiwork to think through Aeschylus, or what would have become of Christianity if the Greeks had gotten hold of it rather than the Romans. Ask my grandmother if you might have a little lunch, and what you got was a sliced apple matted with cinnamon powder, or maybe Campbell’s beef consommé in a tempered glass mug ringed with the translucent flecks of whatever viscous pabulum it had last contained. She hired a cook to serve any group of more than four people. Nana’s own mother, as well as her maiden aunts, had been the same way.

And so was my mother. She was the go-to person for a trenchant parsing of Jonson’s “Cary Morrison Ode,” but the kitchen and laundry basket rendered her powerless. She couldn’t get things organized, or even tidy. Lurching stacks of books and papers were permanent architectural features of our dining room table; we ate in their shadow, in the small enclave described by their colonnade. The chieftain of the refrigerator was the old stoneware pitcher, whose primitive maw glistened with a mucilaginous brew of tap water and frozen orange juice concentrate. The bottoms of Pyrex baking dishes were mosaics in brown. That much went unnoticed. The rest had to be taken care of, so my mother always allotted a respectable portion of the household treasury to a cleaning crew. But such was her genuine detachment from the mores of housekeeping that she never realized that the crew was phoning it in. The top layer was attended to, but the by-products of human detritus remained in perpetuum. Had the cleaning crew been headed up by a stern Russian or Caribbean woman telegraphing her disapproval, my brother and I
might have gotten the idea that someone was in charge. Even if we had felt a little embarrassed, we might have felt that even if there was no order in our home, Order itself did exist in Homes. As it was, I don’t think either one of us gave it a second thought. Home was where Mom metabolized books and daytime television simultaneously.

In fact, it was also unclear to us who was in charge of the house. My mother’s penchant for outsourcing domestic life had always called for a pageant of live-in babysitters. They lived in the garage out back, which my dad had refurbished into a one-bedroom apartment; they were there when we came home from school and, often, were the ones to put us to bed. Some were warm, attentive, and interesting. Marilyn, for example, was a fellow graduate student of Mom’s, and she had a big gray cat named Luther, for Martin Luther, on whom she was writing her dissertation. I loved Marilyn; she was smart, snuggly, and reassuringly competent, and she called me her “little Susie” until she died when I was in my late twenties. Then there was Hilary, a choleric, overweight hippie who, when she wasn’t getting mad at Ian and me, wrote very interesting, thoughtful poetry. She wore long, bustling patchwork skirts and asked her fiancé’s daughter and me to be the “flower children” at her wedding, where we were supposed to leap around interpretively and fling flowers into the congregation (we were too embarrassed, so we ended up handing them out like canapés at a cocktail party).

But some of the babysitters were abusive. The most egregiously so, Bonnie, was also the prettiest and most charming: a raven-haired, ruby-lipped fairy-tale wicked stepmother. Bonnie would take us to parties at which she and her loser, handlebar-mustachioed boyfriend left us to range around bedraggled Berkeley communes while they smoked weed and watched porn with their creepy friends. She used to thrash Ian with a wire hairbrush, threaten me with worse when I impotently tried to intervene, and terrorize both of us to protect her secret activities. This went on for more than a year before I summoned the courage to out her. Though it was hardly a moral awakening:

The reason I outed her was that she offered me 25 cents to babysit my brother and myself one night, and by that time, we were so inured to her cruelty that my response was not to tell her how scared or hurt we were by her proposition but to demand that she up the ante by 15 cents. When she balked, I groused about her scroogeyness to my mom. I was six years old; my brother was four. Although she canned Bonnie posthaste, my mother was mystified. Not only had it never occurred to her that a “professional” would behave in such a way, but she had never had the slightest indication that anything was off.

Off is, however, what things were, albeit not always in such harrowing ways—just in the weird ways particular to my family. Take weekly allowances. To earn theirs, my friends were charged with making their beds, setting the table, helping to weed the garden on the weekends. I had to memorize and recite poetry selected by my mother, as well as the entire lineage of the kings and queens of England. When friends did come over, my mother was not perkily interviewing them about what snacks they liked or what their favorite part of school was, but was propped up, robed and bespectacled, in her ancient four-poster bed—with
Hamlet
, various volumes of the
Oxford English Dictionary
, and the criticism of Harold Bloom layered in steppes.
Guiding Light
or
The Rockford Files
would be on in the background.

We were the weirdos. There was no point in trying to convey this to my mother. She was so consummately, unequivocally herself that she either would have said something like “Well, dear, that’s just how our family has
always
been” or “The people you call ‘weirdos’ are usually the most interesting people,” or she just wouldn’t have known what I was talking about.

I would come to realize later in life that my mother belonged to a select tribe well known to English majors everywhere: the female English Renaissance scholar. At thirty, when I saw
W;t
, the play about a Donne scholar who is forced to see that everything is
not
a metaphor when she is struck with actual cancer, I did not see the fabulous,
heartbreaking, childless character that my friends saw: I saw my mother. If you didn’t see
W;t
, think back on your college days, recall that English lit class—Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell—and if your professor was a woman, you have the gestalt of my mother in clear sight. The long line at the grocery store was not just a pain in the ass; it was a Chau
cer
ian pageant of
souls
, winding its way to
repast
! The fig salad you ordered at the yuppie bistro wasn’t just skimpy on the figs. The salad was
chary
of figs, and actually
fig
, interestingly, was connected with the word “sycophant,” which meant “showing the figs”—from the ancient Greek words “fig” and “to show”—and was used in ancient Athens to describe those who
snitched
on illegal fig exportation to gain favor with high government officials, so perhaps
we
might appeal to the
chef
in sycophantic
terms
for a greater representation of figs in this otherwise most
elegant
of
salads
. Ta da!

No amount or type of life experience could knock the metaphor out of Mom. Every comment was elegantly footnoted, every moment linked to linguistic constructs or literary precepts, tropes, and conceits. In this, my mother was clearly not the typical Baby Boomer parent to my Gen-X child. She was not, like my friends’ mothers, so preoccupied with finding herself that she either shunted off the kids’ feelings with “I can’t deal with this right now—there’s too much on my plate!” or derailed a conversation into a monologue about what
she
was going through with her boyfriend right now.

But Mom was no less self-absorbed. Perhaps because nothing really happened
to
her but was, rather, strained through that scholarly, metaphysical membrane, my mother did not relate to direct experiences or feelings. She loved drama, loved talking, loved
discussing
, loved words. But she could not understand personal affect. All was simile, pumped up for maximum amplification. I was not actually struggling with a problem; I was
like
Jacob wrestling with God! I was not angry at people who made fun of my younger brother, Ian; I was
like
Antigone, defending my brother on pain of death. After my parents divorced, I was like Iphigenia, sacrificed
for her father’s ego; I was not a girl whose father had left. End scene. Whereas many X girls got the clear message that it was not they themselves but their Boomer mothers who were the protagonists in their lives, I understood that I was a dull facsimile of the tragic figures of ancient and Renaissance drama—and that my mother was the director. We were all understudies in someone else’s theater.

Of course, as all readers discover sometime in adolescence, literature, poetry, and plays are the magical keys to the kingdom of human condition. We read literature to understand ourselves, to elevate the nobler ends of experience. By indoctrinating me in this habit, my mother gave me the skeleton key, for sure, but she imparted this gift to anyone smart enough to listen—most especially to her students. She was, is, a spellbinding teacher. If there was an award to be won, my mother won it; a grant to be awarded, my mother was awarded it; a teenage student in trouble, my mother was always the adult in whom she confided. Wherever she works, my mother is exalted.

But when you’re the daughter, you just want your mom. You just want her to listen to you, to see you, to get what you mean. You want her to draw comparisons that help you understand her better, that help her understand you better—that help you understand yourself better. You don’t want
Antigone
. Children, as it has been said, are literal thinkers.

M
y dad, when I was little, was as literal as a star. His delight in me was manifest. When I was born, he placed a tiny armadillo stuffie inside my bassinet and slept on the floor next to me. While my mother was writing and researching, my dad took me on climbs in the mountains, papoose-style. One of my favorite pictures is of me, at three months, and my dad nestled in an icy alpine cave, all bundled up. He’s set up a tripod and is tenderly feeding me a bottle. There are other pictures, also rigged by tripod. There is one of Dad and me,
just over a year old, taking my first step, on rugged terrain atop Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. There’s Dad and me, age two, at nearby Stinson Beach, holding hands, his free hand pointing out at the gray, roiling Pacific, mine swinging a pink and yellow Easter basket. There’s Dad and me on my first Halloween in conscious memory, age three.