Mother Daughter Me (25 page)

Once we get home with the groceries and the odor neutralizer, Smokey barks at us for a while, then calms down, but my mother doesn’t. Not surprisingly, she has strong opinions not only about the dog but about Bob’s shortcomings as his owner.

“He told me Smokey flunked out of dog school,” she says. “Dogs don’t flunk out of dog school. Their owners do.”

I glance over at Zoë and up wells the unwelcome memory of one of my mother’s dogs, a large animal named Tavi (short for Don Ottavio from
Don Giovanni
). During a visit to San Diego when Zoë was four, my mother and Norm decided they should help Zoë get acclimated to Tavi by having her feed him treats. A moment later I saw a hundred pounds of dog lunge at my child’s face, heard my mother shriek, and saw Norm pull the dog back. Luckily for Zoë, while her face would be bruised for a few days and she would be left with a small permanent scar on the inside of her lip, the dog hadn’t actually sunk his dagger-sharp fangs into her skin. I was furious. Not long after Tavi lunged at Zoë, he attacked a couple of dogs at the park. My mother had him put down, a decision that devastated her.

While I have no doubt that my mother is a dog expert, recalling her
massive lapse in judgment with her own dog makes me want to change the subject. But my mother wants to stick to the topic of Bob. “He’s very solid, he gives you a tremendous sense of stability, but he’s also arrogant and dull.” I suspect that my mother’s real objection to Bob isn’t his “arrogance” but his apparent indifference to her. I let the conversation hang.

Smokey’s dinnertime rolls around and, busy cooking, I ask my mother to feed him. But she refuses, because apparently this would signal to Smokey that she is his caretaker. I try to point out to her that I doubt Smokey will form a lifelong attachment to her if she pours some food into his bowl. She still refuses.
Just act normal and feed the goddamned dog
, I think. But I don’t say anything, and I feed him myself. After he has eaten, Smokey paces. He’s definitely a nervous dog. Is he looking for something to herd? I pat his head. “Calmer,” my mother says, “more gently.” I do as she says and he grows still.

When Bob and Benjy show up, Smokey barks vigorously, already on to his new assignment of protecting my mother and me. Benjy whoops and hollers at his dog, and I have to restrain myself from telling him to be calmer with him. Because my mother is right: This is an anxious dog in need of calming input.

Bob, who possesses a fine musical ear that my mother and I both envy, likes tinkering on the Steinway, and he sits down to the piano and plays a little Billy Joel. Zoë, hearing the hubbub, joins us in the kitchen.

Over dinner, Benjy tells me he’s been on Amazon.com, checking out my books. The one that interests him the most is
Cyberpunk
, a book about computer hackers I wrote twenty years ago. My mother turns to Bob. “You’ve read
Cyberpunk
, Bob?” she asks. Her question seems unfair. It’s been so long since I wrote that book, I doubt I’ve ever mentioned it to Bob. He says nothing, but I can see he’s beginning to simmer.

The tension my mother has succeeded in introducing quickly gets defused by the next topic: television. Bob, Benjy, and Zoë do a thumbnail review of their favorite shows:
24, Modern Family, 30 Rock
. As Bob and Zoë discuss Dr. House’s recent reference to Jack Bauer, I silently wonder whom to thank for bringing this man to us.

When the conversation grows especially animated, Smokey gets excited
and starts to bark. Benjy pats his leg vigorously to signal Smokey to come to him, and my mother jumps in. “That will just scare him,” she says, and makes a clicking noise with her tongue against the side of her hard palate, to demonstrate how it should be done. So much of my relationship with Bob is going well, but the boyfriend–mother relationship is spiraling in the wrong direction.

Once Bob and Benjy have left, Zoë goes upstairs to do homework and I clear the table while my mother starts washing the dishes.

“They have no business being dog owners; they know nothing about dogs,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“Smokey barks and they get loud and frantic themselves.” She’s waving her Playtex-gloved hands in the air. “And that only makes him more frantic. Smokey needs to be with people who can really work with him. I’m constantly telling them what they’re doing wrong, even though I know I shouldn’t be saying anything. He’s a great dog in spite of them.” She has made her assessment.

Then comes more commentary. “They sure do watch a lot of television.”

“Yes, they do.”

She shakes her head while piling plates into the dishwasher.

She’s just getting started.

“I know Bob’s a lot smarter than I am—”

Surely she knows this isn’t true, and I try to interrupt her to tell her, but once she has the floor, she isn’t about to yield it. “And I know he really cares about you, but …”

I can tell where this is heading: straight to Scott, who took in my mother’s most recent German shepherd, and whom she visits regularly. And I’m right. “I don’t know if it’s that he’s trivial in comparison with Scott,” she says. “Scott is just so smart, and everything he says is interesting.”

Oy.

I sense an urgency to her objections to Bob. “If I were about to win a Nobel Prize, he’d be nice to me, but I’m a person of no consequence.”

I get as far as saying, “You’re not a person of no consequence—” before she cuts me off.

“I’m not making a statement about me. I’m making a statement about Bob.”

Oh.

She continues: “And you know what my father thought of doctors. He thought they were barely scientists. He thought even less of them than he thought of mathematicians.”

“Well, he sure needed doctors in the end,” I say, “for all that heart surgery.”

“Yes, but he needed them the way he needed a plumber.”

She’s quiet for a few seconds, then adds, “Do you really want to be with him? He’s such a lump.”

A lump? Lumps don’t invent entire fields of medicine or crisscross the globe giving speeches to packed conference rooms. I could point this out but I don’t, because I’m no longer going to involve my mother in my relationship with Bob, which means letting go of any investment in her opinion of him. My silence doesn’t register, and she continues. “He comes into the house and barely deigns to speak to me. I guarantee he made his ex-wife feel like a fixture.” Where this came from I have no idea, but she says it with such conviction you’d think she’s privy to information I don’t have. “And in two years he’ll be doing that to you. And you’ll be saying, ‘Mom, you were so right.’ ”

And with that she circles back to the man who turned her granddaughter’s life into an uninterrupted misery. “You know who I think the man for you is. He’s everything. I’ve always thought that. He’s the man of every woman’s dreams. If it weren’t for Zoë, I’d tell you to go back to Scott now. But you could wait until she goes off and has twelve children of her own and has her own life, and then go back to Scott.”

To my astonishment, her voice is breaking. “Things are so different than I had expected,” she continues. “I had it all plotted out, with my friend DeeDee, before I even left San Diego, that Zoë and I would get along and start spending a lot of time together and you and Scott would get back together.”

I nod, a signal that I’ve heard her. Then, to my own surprise, instead of letting her words hang in the air unaddressed, instead of seeking a distraction or changing the subject, I speak. “Mom, I know you’re sad
that it didn’t work out that way,” I say. “I understand that you think my relationship with Scott was the better relationship for me, but that’s not my experience. My experience is that the relationship with Bob is the better one, for me and definitely for Zoë. You have, and can continue to have, a good relationship with Scott. But your relationships with Scott and Bob are separate from my relationships with Scott and Bob.”

Then I’m quiet, and so is she. She’s scrubbing a saucepan that has mozzarella affixed like glue to the bottom.

“Do you want me to try to get that off?” I offer. “Mozzarella always does that.”

“Yes, it does,” she says. “I think I can get it.” I can see she’s determined to clean that pot.

I put soap in the dishwasher, turn it on, say good night, and head for the stairs.

THAT NIGHT, I DREAM
I’m at my old desk in
The New York Times
’s San Francisco bureau, working on a story with an impossible deadline. I’m typing frantically, with my mother seated next to me. She understands neither the story nor the pressure I’m under. Nevertheless, determined to help, she keeps chiming in with proposed wording, and no matter what I say, she won’t stop. She’s so close to my ear that I find myself writing down her words, taking dictation, until suddenly I stop and scream at her. Then I strike her. We’re both stunned.

The dream is so disturbing and vivid that I wrestle myself awake. I know it’s a reaction to her unremitting impulse to interfere. And I know it’s telling me that I need to find a way of coping with that impulse of hers, of drawing the boundaries that Lia has been talking about since our first session. I began to absorb this message in a more visceral way a few months ago, when my mother’s comment about co-mingling our kitchen dishes made me actually shudder. But the true implications of it are just now settling in.

My mother isn’t to blame for this. I feel a solid little click of understanding. My mother butts into my life because, for years, by “taking dictation,” I have invited her to do so. I feared that if I set boundaries,
I’d sacrifice closeness, maybe even lose her. But the opposite is true. By failing to separate myself from her, by failing to take firmer control of what brings us together, I’ve only created more opportunities for conflict. Now I see that I can—and must—have a different relationship with my mother. My mother needs to move out.

———

M
Y MOTHER IS THINKING THE SAME THING. WE’RE SEATED AT THE
kitchen table, she with her decaf—Splenda concoction, I with a cup of regular coffee. We agree that we cannot live together. The immediate and face-saving reason we agree upon is physical. Her knee is giving her a lot of trouble, and each trip up and down the stairs of the house has become a painful chore. But she and I also know that, for all three of us, the emotional effluvium is contaminating the very air we breathe. So far, our “year in Provence” has been half a year of hell.

We’re both matter-of-fact about this new development, and clearly relieved. What to do next? My mother wants her own apartment, but we’re also both curious about independent-living places that don’t require a buy-in, and we decide to go look at a few.

We’ve imagined these places, and we both know she isn’t ready for a euphemistically named “assisted-living” facility, or at least not our picture of what life there would be like—soft, bland, pabulum-like meals served in an institutional dining room; drab, poky apartments;
activities and outings geared to the elderly. Still, it seems wise to take a look at what’s available. I contact Anne Ellerbee, the placement specialist I consulted when my mother first decided to move to the Bay Area, who says she’d be happy to spend a day taking us around. She has a few communities in mind and suggests as a first stop a place called Vintage Golden Gate, which is on the west side of town, on 19th Avenue, the busy artery between the San Francisco Peninsula and the Golden Gate Bridge. My mother is predisposed against visiting Vintage because she’s already been to the website and the first thing she saw was prominent mention of its dementia unit. She shot off an email to Anne, saying she hoped she was still several years from needing a dementia unit, which appeared to be the principal part of the business. When Anne assured her that “memory care” (there seems to be a happy-talk term for everything) was just a small part of Vintage’s offerings, my mother relented, and we set off.

When we arrive at Vintage Golden Gate, I realize I’ve passed this sprawling brick building many times and never thought much about it. Vintage Golden Gate is the former Shriners Hospital, renovated and reconfigured for seniors. From the outside, it looks prisonlike, and I mention this to my mother, who agrees.

Once we’ve parked and started to approach the entrance, passing well-manicured flower beds, the grounds look more inviting. Anne is waiting for us in the lobby with a colleague, Susan, as well as a young Vintage employee who introduces herself as Elma. The patterned carpeting that lines the long hallway we start walking down is pleasant enough to the eye. But there’s no ignoring how institutional everything is—from Elma’s plastic name badge, printed in eighteen-point font, to the instrumental version of “Some Enchanted Evening” being piped into the public areas.

Elma tells us she’s taking us to see a one-bedroom, and my mother stops. “I want two bedrooms,” she says. Elma looks flustered. There are only four two-bedroom apartments at Vintage, she says, and they’re all occupied. As it turns out, there’s a 98 percent occupancy rate at Vintage.

My mother asks Elma about the demographics. She tells us the average age is seventy-four, and my mother seems to like that answer. On small ledges next to each front door, people have erected shrines to personalize the entrances: plastic flowers and ceramic animals, framed photos of family
members, sports trophies from times long past, even the occasional craft room creation. We arrive at the one-bedroom apartment, and, despite the fact that it overlooks a sunny courtyard, the rooms themselves are dark, unwelcoming, and small. With five of us in there, the place feels particularly confining. I make a stab at a generous estimate—part question, part small talk.

“Six hundred square feet?” I ask.

“A little over five hundred,” says Elma.

The kitchenette area is minimal; the refrigerator is half-sized, and I notice there is no stove, nothing even remotely resembling a cooktop. I point this out to no one in particular. Elma explains: “It’s a safety hazard.”