Mother Daughter Me (6 page)

“Why did she do that to me?”

He kept his gaze sailward. “I don’t know, Katie.”

And that was all he said. At the time, his answer struck me as a cop-out. I wanted his sympathy. But sympathizing with me would have been more of an acknowledgment of his wife’s cruelty—and his own imprisonment—than my grandfather was willing to express. It would be years before I was able to imagine how horrendous being raised by such a woman must have been for my mother.

WITH PERFECT ENTRANCE EXAMS
, my mother was accepted at Radcliffe, declaring herself a physics major, in the hopes, she told me years later, of getting her father’s attention. But that was not to be—until she took up with my father, a brilliant and shy young physicist from the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

The same way some women are addicted to shoes, the women in my family were addicted to male attention. Going through life alone wasn’t considered a sign of strength but of failure. From an early age, my mother instilled in me the belief that life wasn’t worth living—at least not with any pride—unless you were the object of a man’s attention. She picked this up from her own mother, and, of course, from society’s ceaseless cues about the importance of beauty in the pursuit of men.

Looks mattered. A lot. While her own mother was a natural knockout, my mother worked hard at her looks. She struggled to keep her hair free of frizz. For decades, in pursuit of a slimmer waist, my mother monitored what she ate. She was a saccharin trailblazer in the 1960s, when the artificial sweetener became popular among dieters. Throughout our
early years, Sarah and I witnessed our mother’s pursuit of physical perfection as we accompanied her to get her hair frosted, watched her exercise along with Jack LaLanne on television, and spent hours with her at Merle Norman cosmetics stores.

I have a clear childhood memory of one outing we took while visiting my grandparents in Boston. My grandmother drove and my mother sat beside her in the front. My aunt and my sister were in the back with me. At some point, the conversation turned to everyone’s figure. Once the three adults had exhausted the topic of their own shapes, they focused on the two little girls. My grandmother remarked that Sarah, age nine, had a lovely figure. As for me, she said, she was skeptical. She commented on our bodies as if those bodies would determine our futures. I still remember the feeling of inadequacy that washed over me. I was seven and already thinking,
I’ll never get married
.

When my mother was a teenager, her breasts blossomed into wondrous lobes—freakishly large against her small frame. Men loved them. Although my mother cursed her breasts for giving her bad posture and for generally getting in the way, she also knew they added to her allure. Even as small children, Sarah and I were aware of the effect our mother’s looks could have on those around her. Years later, Sarah put it well when she said that our mother’s beauty was so radiant that looking at her was like staring straight at the sun. When we lived in Rochester, my mother took up the can-can with a dozen or so other faculty wives. When the local newspaper photographed the dance troupe in action, even with a dozen women lined up and my mother far from the camera, the lens might as well have been trained on her alone, so completely did her slender legs and perfect face dominate the frame.

As soon as my mother opened her mouth, this brunette bombshell with the doe eyes became the object of resistless fascination. She wasn’t merely smart—she was smart about
science
, and gifted in mathematics. For men of a certain type, the beauty–brilliance combination was an attraction like no other.

My mother and father met in the summer of 1950, when both were working at Brookhaven National Laboratory. My mother was almost nineteen, my father thirty. She has told me that her friend Mariette von Neumann (the first wife of John von Neumann, the famous mathematician)
had warned her that this Everett Hafner fellow was quite the ladies’ man. My mother was intrigued. She met the handsome playboy in question one day while out sailing with friends. My father had started out with one woman as his designated date, and by the end of the excursion, he was climbing off the boat with another—my triumphant mother.

Both of my grandparents disliked their daughter’s choice, considering my Brooklyn-born-and-bred father inferior in social rank to her (or, rather, to them) and a bit of a dilettante. Horrified at the thought of such a union, they did their best to torpedo it. But their tactics backfired. My father traveled to Cambridge and stayed at the Sheraton Commander, where he and my mother carried out their trysts. Then they eloped.

Such are the makings of wrongheaded marriages. My mother once told me that she had married my father only to defy her parents. My grandparents, for their part, redoubled their efforts to shun my father. When my parents, newly married, went to Tobey Island to visit, my grandmother locked the sails away to keep my father from using the boats.

My father, kind, warm, and charming, but also emotionally stunted, had lived in his head most of his life and was no doubt at a loss when it came to dealing with my beautiful mother. She was restive from the start. My father was equally ill-suited to marriage—at least to a woman like my mother. He was in love with my mother but didn’t know how to love her. She could bring a room to life merely by entering it, but my father failed to make her feel special. He was a master at telling jokes and stories. Sarah and I always found the jokes hilarious, and Sarah inherited his gift for pacing, for reading an audience, for perfect delivery of a punch line. But my mother resented my father’s jokes. For years after the divorce, my mother told me that she used to feel like just one more member of the audience. Individual attention was something she craved, perhaps because it was denied her as a child. My father reacted to her unhappiness by retreating into work, which only angered her more. It wasn’t long before my mother began to find the attention she longed for by taking lovers among the Rochester faculty.

When Sarah and I were little, one of my mother’s favorite novels,
Zuleika Dobson
, told the tale of a femme fatale in Oxford, England, whose
beauty cast a spell on the entire student body. My mother became the Zuleika Dobson of Rochester, attracting not undergraduates but faculty members. Her tastes were interdisciplinary: a physicist, a mathematician, and an economist. But, unlike Miss Dobson, my mother was married. As such, she followed her parents’ example. Even more than the narcissism, and no doubt connected to it, the penchant for affairs was handed down from one generation to the next. My mother’s parents modeled infidelity for her, and she in turn modeled it for us. The way my mother handled her affairs was bizarre. In Rochester, she had an affair with the husband of one of her best friends, and when we got a cat, we named it after her lover. We named a parakeet Malcolm, after another. And about the unsuspecting wife of a professor named Edgar Falk, who was in love with my mother, I remember chanting over and over, “Regina Falk is a bum bum.” What to others might seem like a hideous violation of the trust between parent and child was our version of normal. For all we knew, the neighbors across the street and our teachers at Council Rock Elementary had similar extramarital pairing habits—and pets whose names bore witness to them.

After my mother’s return from Mexico and before the dreaded move to Florida, my father moved out. For a while he stayed on a friend’s couch, and we went to visit him. I remember how out of place he seemed away from our house. Still, I was sure that wherever Florida might be, it couldn’t be far from him, because life for this five-year-old by definition had my father in it.

Although my grandparents had openly detested my father, when my mother finally announced that she was divorcing him, they were appalled. People of their ilk held their heads high and carried on, no matter what. Lesser people divorced. But my grandfather did reach back to friends from his home state to help my mother find a job in Florida teaching high school math and physics. (She’d finished her undergraduate physics degree while living in Rochester.)

In late fall 1963, I said goodbye to my classmates in Rochester. The next day, my mother put Sarah and me and the two cats into the black Nash Rambler station wagon and set out for the land of sun and oranges. I can still see her small frame elevated by a cushion as she drove headlong into years of tumult and torment. My sister and I were just along for the ride.

—–

I DO NOT RECALL
having eaten a single orange while living in Florida. And while I must have seen many groves of trees bearing the fruit, I have no memory of them. What I do remember is the bungalow my mother rented in a grimy neighborhood in Melbourne, a city on east central Florida’s Space Coast. The house was dark and cramped. A family named the Browns lived across the street, in a slightly larger but equally run-down rattrap. Because she had to leave the house earlier than we did, my mother started sending us over to the Browns’ every morning before school. The father regularly beat his children with a belt. I was spared, but Sarah wasn’t. What my sister’s transgression was, I have forgotten (if I ever knew). It could have been as minor as a public belch or a refusal to eat the vile creamed eggs on toast Mrs. Brown made for us. Whatever it was, I remember watching as Mr. Brown took Sarah to a front room, removed his belt, and delivered what must have been stinging pelts to my sister’s behind. Luckily for Sarah, it happened only once.

I was grateful that I had escaped Mr. Brown’s brutality, but that fact made little sense to me at the time, for in my mind my sister and I were one and the same. Throughout my early childhood, I possessed no viewpoints of my own. I took in the world through the prism of my older sister. Her desires and preferences instantly became my desires and preferences—so much so that it would be years before I was able to distinguish between Sarah’s perceptions of the world and my own.

On our first day of school, I cried inconsolably after my mother dropped us off, and I refused to let anyone near me except my sister. Someone took me to Sarah’s third-grade classroom, where I sat in the back until class let out. Every morning thereafter, I cried until someone took me to Sarah’s classroom. My mother pulled us both out after a week or two and put us in a different school. I cried less at the new school yet still demanded to be taken to my sister.

It was in Florida where Sarah and I first identified alcohol as a culprit.

In Rochester we had been mystified by my mother’s occasional absences, mostly because we were protected from their cause—by my father, by my parents’ friends, by various babysitters. But once we’d been
in Florida for a few months, we knew there was a link between the bottles and the smell of her breath—we came to associate the combination with her bouts in bed.

She began to ricochet between involvements with various men. There was a dentist whose first name I forget but whose last name was Cain; he had a dog named Nova, which Sarah and I thought was a laugh riot. Next came Joe, who seemed nice enough and might have lasted a few months, or maybe even a year. Then there was a fellow science teacher with an exotic name that might have been Ivar, who owned a nine-foot Indian python definitely named Sheila. The snake once disappeared (my memory gives her the run of the house, but she must have lived in a cage), and we eventually found her, safe and warm behind the refrigerator. The men didn’t live with us, but, for the duration of their relationship with my mother, they were fixtures. Each breakup brought a succession of sodden days, my mother in bed. With each new man, Sarah and I grew warier. We stopped greeting them as potential new fathers and started keeping our distance, bracing ourselves for what would happen when the affair ended.

We didn’t stay long in the Melbourne house. As my mother told the story years later, my grandparents came from Boston to visit and, horrified by the neighborhood we were living in, demanded we move to a nicer area—without, of course, offering financial help. My mother found an apartment in a complex in a nearby town called Satellite Beach, close to Cape Canaveral. In Satellite Beach, Sarah and I were liberated from the Browns, and my mother found a woman to look after us for a few hours in the afternoons until she returned from work. But much of the time it was Sarah who took care of me. She prepared meals for us, or at least an eight-year-old’s idea of meals. Breakfast was usually a Hershey’s bar, Jordan almonds, or licorice twists. Sarah got me ready for school, and we walked there and back together. We became the closest thing I can imagine to urchins. We seldom wore shoes when not in school, and we spent so much time outdoors we turned a golden brown.

My sister and I were allied not so much against our mother (we both loved her desperately and craved her attention above all else) but against the alcohol that kept her from us. During the periods when alcohol was her central organizing principle, our needs went unmet and often unseen.
On the good days, my mother came home from work and prepared dinner. On the bad days, we came home to find her still in bed, just as we had left her, and we fended for ourselves. Often we turned the stove’s electric burner on until it glowed a bright red, and we roasted marshmallows.

Neither Sarah nor I enjoyed returning to our small, sandy apartment after school. While we waited for our afternoon babysitter to arrive, we watched TV and kept ourselves busy with our stovetop marshmallow roasts. And we ate prodigious amounts of candy, which we purchased at a convenience store across the parking lot from our complex. In our way, we were content. After all, we had each other. When my mother went out and stayed out until very late, we knew there would be the same pungent smell as when the bottles were around. And we knew the next day would be bad. On those nights, I got into bed with Sarah and hoped she had some nickels. With enough nickels, we could stock up on candy until things got better. Sarah always had the nickels. She never let me down.

———