Mother Daughter Me (15 page)

The drive home is excruciatingly tense, and mostly silent. As soon as we’re in the door, it’s as if the boxing referee has clanged the bell; each of the battered combatants retreats to her corner of the house. Feeling helpless, I take refuge at my computer, and within minutes an email from my mother pops up in my in-box. She wants to know when, exactly when, I told Zoë about her past.

I go downstairs to talk to her and find her seated at her computer.

“If you told Zoë about my terrible past recently, after that sweet reception she gave me, then some of the hostility might make sense,” she says. “But if she knew about it before then, why the warm welcome?”

“Mom, Zoë has known these things for many years,” I say. My mother seems to think that the person she was no longer exists, that the past should remain past, and that by sharing information I had betrayed her and poisoned my daughter’s feelings toward her.

“Your past
isn’t
just your own business,” I say. Zoë has always known about my childhood, I tell her, because my story is part of my daughter’s story, just as my mother’s story is part of mine. Whether we like it or not, we carry these narratives with us, either explicitly or implicitly, and pass them on, along with the family china, the recipes, and the antique chests. I had chosen to make the story explicit, in the belief that Zoë needed to know about the forces that had shaped my life, because they would in some way continue to resonate in hers.

“When Zoë got to high school, where kids really start to drink, I educated her about her heightened risk because of the genetic component. There are a lot of people on both sides of her family who’ve been
alcoholics, and there’s a good chance that Zoë could have inherited the tendency. So I’ve told her what she needs to know so she can make better choices. She needs to know that she might not react to alcohol the way other kids do.” As for Zoë’s warm welcome, I tell my mother, I believe it was genuine, but it faded when Zoë began to feel jealous and territorial.

My mother has been sitting quietly, listening as I speak. But what is she really hearing? What I don’t tell her is that I think Zoë was hoping for a real relationship with her grandmother, that she would have treasured a net gain in the relatively small universe of people who make her feel loved and cared for. Instead, my mother’s inability to connect with her, her hastiness to judge, and the claims she has made on my attention have all left Zoë feeling that she has lost rather than gained something with this new arrangement. My mother’s jaw is set tight. And at that moment, I know the two of them are not going to work this out.

———

I
N 1968,
THE YEAR SARAH AND I BECAME STEPCHILDREN, THERE WERE
eight million American stepchildren under the age of eighteen. By the end of the 1990s, that number had risen to fifty million, and the re-divorce rate among remarried parents had risen along with it.

Blended families face a number of challenges that nuclear families are spared. Everyone in a stepfamily is recovering from a loss. The adults have no prior investment in their stepchildren, and the stepchildren usually have no history with one another. There are bound to be rivalries and resentments, accusations of favoritism, with or without foundation, and the pitting of stepchild against stepchild, parent against stepparent. All those evil-stepmother prototypes that populate our literature have deep psychological roots in our collective experience—though, of course, there should be evil-stepfather figures too.

For those reasons and more, when Sarah and I arrived on their doorstep out of the blue, the good people living at 460 Oakridge Drive in Rochester, New York, must not have known what hit them. Suddenly,
by no one’s choice, we were a family of seven, and all five children were already in, or close to entering, the dreaded teenage years. My new stepsiblings, two boys and one girl, were so close to Sarah and me in age that the five of us spanned only five years, from ten (me) to fifteen (my stepsister).

The dynamic was difficult from the start. The fact that no one had time to prepare for the new arrangement was the least of it. Vivienne’s three children, particularly her fifteen-year-old daughter, were going through their own adolescent trials. And my father had little patience for Vivienne’s sons, who were indifferent to school and insolent to him. For my part, I was beginning to develop a protective ability to distance myself, which made me much more adaptable to new situations than Sarah was and turned me into a lifelong observer. The ability to stand outside a scene eventually helped me become a journalist. At the time, however, it simply helped me survive. Sarah had no such talent for distancing herself, and she paid the price. At twelve she was entering puberty. She would develop into a beautiful swan, but as a preteen with bad acne and frizzy hair, she had no way of knowing this. Sarah missed our mother and was miserable living with four strangers.

I, on the other hand, always eager to be accepted and craving stability, was ready to try out Vivienne as a possible mother substitute. Not long after our arrival in Rochester, I told Vivienne I was going to start calling her “Mom,” and she was touched. Sarah had no such intention. She knew exactly who her mother was, and she told me that if I began to call Vivienne “Mom,” I would be betraying both her and our real mother. Before long, Vivienne was back to being “Vivienne.”

Only a saint could have loved and cared for us as if we were her own children. And we certainly didn’t make things easy for Vivienne. Whether it was the food she made (classic British dishes like shepherd’s pie and Scotch eggs), the regular mealtimes to which everyone was summoned every night, or her other expectations about what constituted proper behavior, it was all foreign to us and we often balked.

We stayed in Rochester just long enough for us to finish the school year. That summer, we all moved to Amherst, Massachusetts. As much as my grandfather disliked my father, he respected him as an educator and recommended him for a job as one of the founding deans of Hampshire
College. In August 1968, our blended family of seven set off in a beige VW van and drove the six hours from Rochester to Amherst. On my lap was a Florsheim shoe box, a dozen holes punched through the lid. I had developed a fascination with cocoons and was hatching not butterflies but, for some strange reason, tent moths. During the six-hour ride, I kept my nose buried in
The Borrowers
, a five-volume children’s book series I was tearing through, about tiny peoplelike creatures who lived in the crevices of houses belonging to human beings. They lived on borrowed time, in constant fear of being discovered. I could relate.

As we drew close to Amherst, the van tooling up and down the gentle hills of western Massachusetts, I put my book aside and took in the scenery—Grandma Moses villages with white churches, town commons, and classic Colonials separated by acres of farmland. The plan was for us to meet up with the Lyon family upon our arrival, in a parking lot in the center of Amherst. My father and Dick Lyon had already met, and the two men wanted their wives and children to get to know one another, since, as family members, we were all going to be part of this exciting new experiment in higher education. Dick was to be the first overall dean of Hampshire College, my father its first dean of natural science and math. It was in that parking lot next to the Amherst Town Hall that I first set eyes on the six Lyons—Dick and Denny and their boys: Christopher, Matthew, Jeremy, and Alex. The Lyons pulled up in their International Harvester Travelall, and everyone piled out of both vehicles, with the exception of Sarah, who, growing unhappier by the day, refused.

Under my arm I held my shoe box, which I was guarding carefully; Denny told me years later that the instant she saw me climb out of the VW bus with that shabby box in my hands, she loved me as her own. The adults started chattering away and we kids stood awkwardly, waiting for them to finish. The four Lyon boys were close in age, except the much younger Alex, an outlier in age as well as temperament. They were all energetic, but Alex had an unruly streak that kept his mother on constant watch. Twelve-year-old Matt, blond, beautiful, and shy, was the quiet one.

My father and Vivienne bought a big comfortable house just north of the town center, and the Lyons moved in to a house right across a cornfield
from us. The two families grew close. The Lyons were different from most families. Instead of “Mom” and “Dad,” the four boys called their parents “Dick” and “Denny.” The entire family intrigued me, but Denny held me spellbound. I had never known anyone like her. A dancer and a potter, she seemed the most exotic person I’d ever met. She kept her potting wheel in the basement of their sprawling house, and she made tortillas by hand; that skill alone would have been enough to put me forever in awe of my future mother-in-law. Sarah and I thought we understood Mexican food. We had come from San Diego, after all. But the Mexican food we knew was Old El Paso—preformed corn tortillas and taco seasoning in the yellow-and-red cans and packages. A Texan by birth with a little Native American blood mixed in, Denny made the dough for her tortillas from scratch, then flattened it in a tortilla press. And she had a cupboard filled with exotic spices. Her kitchen was like an artist’s studio, her spatulas and wooden spoons, her whisks and her ladles, standing up like so many paintbrushes in the large ceramic pots she had made herself.

Denny was my idea of a tribal elder. It was as if when I met her she had already been alive for hundreds of years. At age ten, I had yet to encounter anyone who could have been described as spiritual, and here she was, her long brown hair framing her narrow face. She was only thirty-seven, but wisdom and clarity of purpose were already etched in her features. Denny swept me off my feet every bit as much as her son would a few years later. This was the woman who, together with Matthew, would show me, a refugee newly arrived from a land of turmoil, not just how to love but how to love big and deep.

Denny and all her boys were artistic and handy with tools. Dick, on the other hand, was, like my father, a pure intellectual. Like my mother, Denny had dropped out of college to marry. She followed Dick to Cambridge, England, where he was studying philosophy. They were married in All Hallows by the Tower in London. Theirs was the first American wedding to take place in the church since 1797, when John Quincy Adams married Louisa Catherine Johnson. Once they returned to the States, Dick became an itinerant academic—one university for his master’s, another for his PhD, another for a job as a junior faculty member. When I first heard about their constant moves, I thought,
Are they like me?
But, no, this family was different. Rather than feeling up-rooted
every time they moved, the happy, stable Lyon boys welcomed each move as a new adventure.

By the time I entered sixth grade at Crocker Elementary in Amherst, I had attended seven different schools in four different states, and I had mastered the difficult art of being the new kid, which meant I had perfected the art of ingratiation. At my new school, I became a sixty-pound heat-seeking missile, quickly identifying the popular kids and securing a spot among them. Soon, my life settled into something resembling normal. I not only grew used to my stepmother’s cooking but came to treasure the routine of a dinner eaten every night at roughly the same time with the same people. Even the weekly household chores she assigned us seemed part of this reassuringly regular life.

In Amherst, when she was in ninth grade, Sarah blossomed and I was more in awe of my big sister than ever. I sat in our room and watched while she set her hair, put on makeup, got ready for dances, and talked on the phone with a series of boyfriends. Having lost so much of her childhood being a surrogate mother to me, she was no longer paying me much attention, but that was fine. What I didn’t understand then was that what seemed to be normal teenage-girl behavior was in fact the start of Sarah’s gradual shift into a full-blown pathological obsession with men.

While I bobbed like a cork on a stormy sea, Sarah got smacked by every wave and continued to pine for our mother. She phoned her frequently and reported to me that my mother’s voice was often cheerful and steady. Perhaps with her daughters out of the way, my mother had found the wherewithal to pull herself together.

IN THE SUMMER OF
1970, when I was twelve and about to enter eighth grade, Sarah and I went for an extended visit to San Diego. My mother had moved to a tiny bungalow in Mission Beach, a gritty little place on a finger of shoreline. Her sandy dwelling was surrounded by similar houses inhabited by surfers and beach bums with lean, tanned bodies and hair as light as the sun itself. Sarah brought along her friend Dina for the first part of the summer. There wasn’t much for us to do but go to the beach and ride bikes up the boardwalk to Belmont Park, the local amusement park. Every day, Sarah and Dina put on their bikinis, went to the
beach, and flirted with older boys, who invited them to parties. I was beset by envy and begged for inclusion, especially when it came to the parties. So they stuffed tissues into my size-A bra and took me along.

That summer, we reverted to our old eating habits. Instead of Vivienne’s roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, we ate butterscotch pies, Minute Rice, and fried bologna. Oddly, my mother gave in immediately to my pleas for a kitten. Like most children, I wasn’t thinking about what having a kitten actually meant or what would happen at the end of the summer when it was time to leave. I was simply thrilled to have it.

To our profound relief and delight, our mother remained sober that summer. She was in good spirits, even though she and Dieter were very much on-again off-again in those days. Since he was away for that summer, they were definitely off for the duration of our stay. But instead of falling apart, she was calm and happy. She even engaged in all the rituals we associated with a functioning mother: She frosted her hair; she dieted, put ice cubes and saccharin in her black coffee, did her Jack LaLanne exercises, and played her Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary records. When she and Sarah were out together, strangers thought they were sisters, which never failed to put a big smile on my mother’s face.