Mother Daughter Me (13 page)

Perhaps what I loved most, however, was the stability I thought it introduced into our lives. Once a week my mother was obliged to drive from Del Mar down the coast to the stables in La Jolla. And she picked me up too. I was sure that my regular schedule was the linchpin holding my
fragile mother together. Somehow I talked myself into believing that my desire to go riding every Saturday conjured up a sense of responsibility in her and kept her sober. Of course, the far more likely explanation for her sobriety during that period was Dieter, who had come back from Princeton for an extended visit. But I wanted to believe that I had some control.

My mother’s lengthy sober phase emboldened me to demand still more of her attention. More than anything, I wanted her to come join me for lunch at school and meet my teacher, Mr. Cook, for whom I nursed a small infatuation. Of the many teachers I had experienced in my short career as a student, Mr. Cook was the star. He had been Sarah’s teacher and, wanting everything my big sister had, I was overjoyed that he was now mine. I had my hand in the air constantly and quickly became his pet. I won the spelling bee almost every week. He threw math problems at us just to see how far our minds were willing to go, and I took the best of them home to my mother and Dieter to see how quickly they could solve them. My mother and Dieter sent me to school with math puzzlers for Mr. Cook.

Then I broke my leg. I was skateboarding down my favorite incline in the deserted parking lot behind our apartment building when a front wheel on my board hit a small pebble and jammed. I flew off. My leg was fractured in two places. A neighbor from across the courtyard put me in her car and drove me to the Scripps Hospital emergency room. She tracked down my mother and Dieter, both of whom materialized at once, or so it seemed.

A few days later I was back at school, and Mr. Cook was happy to see me. The first thing he did was use my accident to impart a physics lesson to the class. I had illustrated Sir Isaac Newton’s first two laws of motion: As an object in motion, I remained in motion (that’s the first law). Unfortunately, my skateboard, acted upon by a sudden external force, did not join me. Its rapid deceleration neatly demonstrated the second law.

What Mr. Cook didn’t discuss was how my accident was going to affect the equations I had devised to account for my mother’s relationship to alcohol. Although Life plus Dieter equaled Sobriety, I had come to believe that my weekly riding lessons figured into the equation too. With a cast on my leg, I was no longer able to take the lessons. Then
Dieter went back to Princeton and, with no Dieter and no weekly obligation to meet, my mother started a period of heavy drinking, the worst Sarah and I had seen.

Early one morning Sarah, now twelve years old, came into the living room and shook me awake. She was holding a bottle of pills in her hand. “She won’t tell me how many she’s taken.” Sarah was frantic.

I followed her into the bedroom. My mother had become one with the bed, as if she had fallen into quicksand and all but her hair was submerged.

I spoke to the head of hair. “Mom. How many pills did you take?”

“A lot,” she mumbled. I managed to get her to tell me that it wasn’t just pills but half a bottle of hard liquor as well. My sister took charge and called my mother’s parents in Boston. My grandfather said he would fly to San Diego at once.

What happened immediately thereafter is a blur. I have no memory of my mother being taken to a hospital. Nor do I recall exactly when my grandfather arrived. Whenever it was, probably no later than the next morning, he handled the situation with businesslike efficiency, focusing on logistics. Having concluded that my mother was in no position to care for Sarah and me, he had decided to send us to our father in Rochester, and he took us to our school to say goodbye and clear out our desks. Mr. Cook must have been surprised, to say nothing of my classmates, who watched the scene uncomprehending. As for me, I had grown accustomed to my friendships having a deadline. But it was an unspoken deadline, as I never knew when exactly I’d be leaving one group of friends and expected to find new friends at the next stop.

This time we would also be expected to fit into a new family, for my father had just remarried, to a British woman named Vivienne, who had three children of her own. When my mother took the pills, Sarah and I were still absorbing the news of the recent marriage, and now, never having even met Vivienne, we were about to move in with her. (Years later, Vivienne said that she and my father first learned of the events when my grandfather called and said simply, “The girls are on a plane.”) Sarah and I were each allowed to take one suitcase of possessions. Unsupervised in the task of packing, I chose not clothing, pajamas, stuffed animals, or toys but schoolwork. Into one small piece of luggage I
crammed the entire contents of my desk at school, along with more notebooks, ruled paper, pencils, vocabulary lists, my social studies book, and school photos. I was under the impression that I would be returning soon.

My mother came to the airport with my grandfather to see us off. I remember that she looked beaten down and miserable, but I have little memory of my own condition. Did I cry? Was I sorry to be leaving my mother? Relieved? I don’t know. Nor do I know what happened to my mother after we left her with her father. Years later, Sarah recalled that my mother was furious at her for calling my grandfather. It’s unlikely that my grandfather, who hardly spoke to my mother even when she was well, said much of anything to his sorry mess of a daughter before returning to Boston. It could be that he told her to get herself into a rehabilitation program. And did she? Or did she go back to bed? I don’t know. And I doubt she does either.

Sarah and I flew across the country alone. Because of my broken leg, the flight attendants took pity on me and moved us to first class, where we sat at a round table and played cards. My father and new stepmother picked us up at the Rochester airport. Vivienne was tall—nearly six feet—blond, and striking. She wore heavy mascara, a thick layer of blue eye shadow, and large hoop earrings. For the six years I lived with Vivienne, I never saw her come to breakfast without having first applied her makeup.

Years later, for a writing workshop she was taking, Vivienne produced this description of the day we entered her life: “The two girls looked so lost and bedraggled and pathetic in ill-fitting clothes as they struggled down the steps of the plane. Katie looked even more forlorn than Sarah, as she had her leg in a cast. They really looked like a couple of waifs and I had a horrible feeling that they had been quite neglected. I was terribly unsure how to go about trying to relate to them. They appeared to be quite dazed and Everett seemed even more ill at ease with them than I was. My heart immediately went out to them and I resolved to do my very best to try to make things better for them.” For the first week in Rochester, Vivienne wrote, I didn’t speak.

———

“
H
AVE I EVER TOLD YOU WHY I LOST CUSTODY OF YOU AND SARAH?”

A week after the Halloween incident, I’m waiting in the customer lounge of the local Toyota dealership, where I’ve brought my car for maintenance, and my mother has just called my cellphone. This is a real bolt out of the blue.

“I know why,” I respond, and I lower my voice. “But we can talk about it later. I’m at the car place.” In environments like this, where the other people in the room are quietly reading newspapers and tapping on their computers and iPads, a cellphone might as well be a megaphone.

“No, I’d like to tell you now.” While I struggle with what to say to stop her, she interprets my silence as an invitation to continue. “It’s because I had a man in my bedroom.”

“Mom, this is really not a good time; can’t we talk about this later?” She agrees, and I hang up.

I’m not ready to have a conversation like this. Even if I was, how are we ever to talk about those events, given how skewed her memory appears
to be? It’s true that when she lost custody, men and bedrooms figured into it. But she says the words “man in my bedroom” so innocently, as if the guy were there to hang a light fixture. It would be like Nixon’s saying he’d lost his presidency because of “some fellows in an office building.”

It isn’t until a few days later, when we go see Lia, that my mother and I pick up where we had left off. Perhaps we both know we need to wait until we are in neutral, safe territory, operating under professional supervision, to have such an exquisitely painful conversation.

Until now, neither of us has dared kick loose so much as a small rock from the rubble that is her—our—past. My mother and I have both lived under a mutually agreed-upon, unspoken pact that we never discuss what happened, which allows us to pretend that nothing actually did happen. But ever since she brought it up when I was at the car place, I’ve felt like something big is about to crash down on top of us, and now, in Lia’s office, I’m nearly certain of it.

Sensing the same, Lia rolls her chair back an inch or two, as if to retreat from the very question she is about to ask.

“You’ve said there is history,” she says. “I was hoping we wouldn’t need to get into this, but I think we should. I’d like to know more about what happened in the past.”

My mother starts to tell her version of the story. Because I’m sure she’ll either get it wrong or answer incompletely, I jump in to take over. Then I stop myself. “No, you go ahead,” I say.

“I lost custody of my children,” my mother says. “I was divorced from Katie’s father. And when they were eight and ten they went for a visit.”

When we were
eight and ten
? When we were first taken away from her, which was a full two years before she officially lost custody, I was ten and Sarah was twelve. How could she have allowed precious years with her children to slip straight out of her memory bank? I start to correct her. But then I stop myself again and let her finish. “They went back to visit him, and he sued for custody, and I lost custody on the grounds I had been sleeping with a man.”

She’s finished. She and Lia both look at me. I say in a voice close to a whisper, “That’s not what happened.” They both look surprised.
And they wait for me to say more. Resting my gaze on my lap, I start to tell the entire story, and it’s like a dam break: the days in bed; the ups and downs with Dieter as the barometer of her drinking, and her moods; the horseback-riding lessons and the broken leg; the incident with the pills that caused us to call our grandparents for help. And we hadn’t gone to Rochester for something so benign as “a visit.” We’d been airlifted out like embassy employees under siege, and sent to live with my father and Vivienne, who immediately enrolled us in school there.

The entire time I’m talking, I am thinking that I don’t want my words to hurt her, that I want to protect my mother, to let her know it wasn’t her fault. At the same time, there’s no stopping me, because another part of me wants her to hear every word of this. To
make
her understand. How can the story of my childhood, the story I’ve told to friends, to the men in my life, to therapists over the years, be so different from the version she has chosen to carry with her?

By now I’m sobbing, and I can hardly speak. So I stop.

I look up at my mother. Her face is a terrible crumple, her mouth forming the small breathless “O” people sometimes wear when hit with bad news.

“Katie,” she says. “I am so sorry.”

And with that she is telling me something else:
She doesn’t remember
. Forty years have passed, and for all of those years I thought that this crucial chapter of our lives, which has dogged Sarah and me every day since, was one that my mother and I simply chose not to speak of. Now it turns out that these are events she can recall only in their roughest outline; the more granular aspects are beyond her. I had guessed there were parts she might not remember, or that her recollections might differ from mine, but it’s only now that I understand how deep my mother’s memory loss runs. This recognition comes to me like a sudden strong breaker onto a beach. It’s part of the legacy that alcoholics leave their children. Children often remember not merely every detail of the binges but also the events leading up to them, to say nothing of the wreckage left behind. For the parent, however, the episodes may be just one big cognitive blackout.

It’s time for the session to end, and we shake ourselves back to the
reality of where we are. It is 2009, not 1968, and we are not in Del Mar. We are in a therapist’s office in Berkeley. Lia says quietly that she hopes we can talk about this a little more next time. I welcome the distraction of digging through my handbag for my checkbook, while Lia pulls out her calendar to set a date for our next appointment.

In the car, my mother and I are mostly silent, acting as troubled married couples often do following an explosive therapy session. When we do talk, we focus on trivia.

“Do you need anything at the store on the way home?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “No thanks.”

“Do you mind if I stop for gas?”

“No, that’s fine.”

In the blank space between these polite exchanges, I’m thinking not about my mother and me but about Sarah. I wasn’t the only one who lived through that maelstrom of a childhood. Sarah was present, too, for all of it. Did she remember what I remembered? Has she, too, sat in the office of a professional listener, weeping as she recounted the events leading up to the day my grandfather put us on a plane for Rochester? And why have we never compared notes?

As soon as we get home, I send my sister an email to let her know that our mother is now living with Zoë and me, that she’s been through a lot but is basically fine. It’s the first I’ve told my sister about the events of the past six months.

Sarah was an alcoholic for years, starting as a teenager. Eventually she beat it back and stopped drinking altogether when she was in her late twenties. She even published a book titled
Nice Girls Don’t Drink
, a poignant compilation of interviews with women who were recovering alcoholics. Like my mother, my sister tried A.A. but didn’t last long. Sarah’s interviews are with women who, like her, got sober without A.A.