Mother Daughter Me (8 page)

A few days into this, Cheryl lets me know that my mother’s attempts at exerting control are not lost on her.

“How do you handle it?” she asks me quietly one day, while in the kitchen helping me organize a cupboard. We’re sharing a rare moment without my mother present.

I struggle to find an answer to Cheryl’s question, then give up. “I have no idea,” I say.

By late that afternoon, I’m feeling frayed, overwhelmed by the mountain of boxes in the house and on guard against the growing tension between my mother and my daughter. So I’ve retreated to the garage. I’m surveying the collection of boxes out there when my phone rings. It’s Bob, a man I’ve been seeing for the last couple of months. He’s in the neighborhood and wants to know if I’d like to meet for a drink. I’m free until 7:15
P.M.
, when I’m meant to give Zoë and four of her friends a ride to an 8:00 comedy show she told me about two weeks earlier. It’s nearly 6:00
P.M.
, but I figure there’s plenty of time.

I walk inside and shout up the stairs to Zoë, “Sweetie, I’m going out. But I’ll be home in time to drive you downtown.”

“Where are you going?” she shouts back.

I haven’t clued Zoë in to Bob’s existence, so my response is vague. “Just out. I’ll be back.”

Next I go to the top of my mother’s stairs. She’s downstairs with Cheryl.

“Mom, I’m going out,” I call down. She, too, knows nothing about Bob.

“When do you think you’ll be back?” Then she does something that has begun to annoy me, as it has gradually dawned on me that I am now living my whole life in front of my mother. Without waiting for a reply, she offers her own estimate. “In about an hour?”

“Something like that,” I answer, and set out on the ten-minute walk to meet Bob.

Bob and I met through mutual friends. An academic physician, Bob is teddy-bearish, and his looks reflect his easygoing personality. Our first date, dinner at one of Bob’s favorite places, was a small disaster. I liked him instantly, but I’m not accustomed to dating. When it comes to relationships, I’m binary: married or not married. In fact, I’ve never done much traditional dating, which is guided by many unspoken rules. One of those rules, I gathered after my first date with Bob, is that on an initial encounter people usually steer clear of intimate or painful topics. Bob hewed closely to the first-date protocol, offering a brief, polite, and well-rehearsed description of his twenty-year marriage, a union that sounded singularly joyless.

But in the first fifteen minutes of our dinner, even before the wine had been poured, I gave Bob an entire data dump of my convoluted life so far—divorced parents, alcoholic mother, waiflike childhood, dead husband, disastrous marriage on the rebound. Reporting the facts felt like the right thing to do. But partway through my soliloquy, I noticed that Bob looked uncomfortable. Still, I plowed ahead. He told me later that he wasn’t merely uncomfortable but was seeking a polite excuse to leave. At the same time, he was taken with my lack of guile, and apparently the latter reaction won out over the former, because since then we’ve gone out several times.

We’re growing on each other. We know people in common beyond
the couple who set us up on that first blind date. Bob was a medical resident with Carolyn, one of my closest friends. He’s devoted to his two sons (one in college, the other Zoë’s age), and he’s funny. He’s also pragmatic—even programmatic—in his approach to life. When we established the connection to Carolyn on our first date, he suggested, in all earnestness, that I call her for a “reference,” which I found endearingly businesslike. Also that evening, he told me that in the two years since his separation he has gone out with thirty-two women, and keeps a spreadsheet containing each woman’s name and age, children’s names and ages, and other pertinent information, mainly to ensure that he doesn’t repeat himself on subsequent dates. I was at once appalled and impressed and made a mental note to myself:
Should Bob and I ever grow close, ask to see that spreadsheet—not just my own entry but those of the thirty-two others
.

Bob travels a lot, mostly to give talks on preventing medical mistakes and on hospital medicine (he helped create the “hospitalist” specialty, which refers to internists who see only hospitalized patients). Dating someone who’s out of town a lot is fine with me. Having recently climbed my way out of a swamp of pain, I’m more than content to be seeing someone whose frequent absences will make a deep romantic entanglement a challenge.

Unaware of my shuttle-service obligation, Bob has decided we should scrap the drinks and go for a full meal. I say nothing to him about the tight timing. I love the idea of a meal with Bob, and things are so new between us that I’m not ready to confess I’m a slave to my child. We go to a neighborhood Italian restaurant known for its homemade pastas. But the math isn’t adding up. By the time our food arrives, it’s already 6:45. When Bob orders a second glass of wine, I know I’m sunk. So I carry out a small rebellion—against the tether of Zoë’s constant stream of needs and requests, their intensity compounded by her separation anxiety. I ignore both the time and my phone, vibrating from somewhere deep inside my bag.

By 7:20, Zoë is placing her fourth or fifth call to me. I see this only by accident, when I reach into my bag for something else. I answer the call.

“Where are you??” she yells.

“I’m in a restaurant.”

“What? I told you we had to leave by 7:15!”

My jailbreak isn’t going well. How I expected to get away with this I am currently at a loss to explain, even to myself.

Bob has yet to meet Zoë, and until this moment she hasn’t been much more to him than an entry under “Children Y/N” in his dating spreadsheet. But he’s going to meet her now, because I tell her to walk down to the restaurant.

Bob’s seat faces the door, and ten minutes later he looks up to see a sudden squall in the form of an enraged teenager sweeping into the quiet restaurant. Zoë doesn’t say hello to Bob, since he, at this moment, is merely a prop in the drama, at least to her. Perhaps I should introduce them—my potential new boyfriend and my crazed teenager—but even in my delusional state of mind I can see that events are overtaking any possible attempt at normal etiquette. And it has just now occurred to me that telling Zoë to come to the restaurant made no sense, because I left my car at home. It also made no sense because, in general, if one is going to have a scene with a fuming child, it’s best to do so out of view of innocent bystanders, to say nothing of new romantic interests. With Zoë standing six inches from the table, my utter boneheadedness is unspooling before my eyes. I sheepishly mention the car problem to her, and—in case I thought things couldn’t get any worse—she starts to scream.

“What? How are we supposed to get there? What the hell are you thinking? You didn’t tell me you were going out on a
date
!”

I start to say it’s not so much a date as a spontaneous rendezvous, but I sense that my splitting of hairs won’t go over well, and I stop myself. She’s as furious as I’ve ever seen her.

“Why weren’t you answering your phone?”

Zoë’s perfectly reasonable question stumps me. I’m unable to give her a plausible explanation for my actions. I seem to keep burying my head in the sand, hoping that when I surface all will be well. It’s not working.

“Where are your friends?” I ask lamely.

“THEY’RE OUTSIDE!”

I look behind me, and, sure enough, four lanky, long-necked high school boys are standing awkwardly out on the sidewalk, craning for a view of the ruckus inside.

As a doctor, Bob is clearly accustomed to managing crises involving distraught patients and their families. But I’m guessing he had no med-school rotation in how to handle heat-of-the-moment dramas between enraged teenage girls and mothers who have gone temporarily insane. Still, he chimes in calmly with a suggestion. Since his car is parked outside, he’ll drive the five of them to the theater while I stay, finish my dinner, and pay the bill. Zoë accepts his offer but makes it clear I’m not off the hook.

“I expect compensation,” she says.

“Compensation?” I make the mistake of asking. “What kind of compensation?”

“Money.”

I’m mortified, and Bob looks amazed. He isn’t charmed. I know I’m to blame for setting this whole hysterical episode in motion, and I also know that Zoë’s behavior is execrable. But were I to say anything to her at the moment, it would only make matters worse, so I’m silent.

Zoë shoots me a look and they leave.

I don’t know what to do. I look down at my pasta, now cold. Bob cleaned his plate, but his second glass of Chianti, which arrived minutes before Zoë did, is still full. I toy with the idea of chugging his wine, but instead I pay the bill.

As I shuffle home, I see that Bob has sent me a text:
Mission accomplished. She calmed down and friends were delightful. Glad to be of service
.

Wow
, I think.
Nice guy
.

When I get back, my mother is in the kitchen. I offer a brief version of what has happened.

“Zoë’s behavior is extreme,” she says. Once she has my ear, she seizes the opportunity to offer more of her unsolicited view. “I’m very worried about Zoë. She never seems happy. Shouldn’t she be happier?”

“She’s a teenager,” I say quickly. Anticipating a rebuttal I have no desire to hear, I take the unusual step of cutting my mother off. “Mom, you’ve never raised a teenager.”

We’re both a little stunned as we take in the implications of what I’ve just said. Then she looks me square in the eye. “You’re right.”

———

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, TWO OUT OF EVERY
three Americans lived on farms, and the vast majority of those households contained multiple generations. That made sense, given the continuity of the farming life, the seamless passing of land to the next generation.

Until World War II, roughly one in four American households contained multiple generations. Over the years, as the number of family farms dwindled, so, too, did intergenerational living. With no farm to inherit, there was little reason for adult children to live at home. Some sociologists argue that even when such living arrangements were commonplace, they weren’t what people really wanted. Financial hardship was the determining factor. In the 1950s, as the nation recovered from the privations of the Depression and World War II, Americans began to associate nuclear households with affluence. Added to this was a strong societal emphasis on “maturity” and the desire for young couples who
were starting families to strike out on their own. Accordingly, the multigenerational American household fell out of favor. At the end of the twentieth century, fewer than 15 percent of people age sixty-five and older lived with their adult children.

While contemporary survey-takers have found that a majority of baby boomers consider it their responsibility to take in an elderly parent who needs help, few actually do it. And when they do, it’s usually because of the elderly parent’s financial duress. Never has a social scientist cited cockeyed optimism as the motivating factor. This makes my mother and me statistical freaks. So surprised are people when we tell them what we’re doing that I’m beginning to guess that for every ten thousand households of combined generations, only one is a threesome of white middle-class females carrying out a misguided experiment.

This is because most people know better than to try what we’re trying. They know—as Lia warned—that everything can turn into a tug-of-war, that battlefields can be as small as a utensil drawer, plump with meaning. They know that after a while you start to hate yourself, as you see yourself revert to age six, or ten. These are the same realistic and sensible people who say, “I’m fine visiting my mother or having her visit me. But forty-eight hours is the most I can stand.”

Sure enough, as quickly as my mother appeared in our daily lives, that’s how fast things have begun to unravel.
Really
unravel. Zoë, who only two months earlier cleaned the apartment and greeted her grandmother with flowers, has begun to keep a wary distance from her, which, of course, hurts my mother’s feelings. But Zoë is hurt too. She thought she’d have a warm, fulfilling relationship with her grandmother and was unprepared for my mother’s hastiness to judge, her circumlocutions, her tone deafness around kids. And, having heard nothing but carefully worded encouragement for years, Zoë was particularly unprepared to have her cello-playing criticized by my mother.

Zoë has now stopped practicing her instrument altogether. It lies in its case in a corner of the living room. She doesn’t give it a second look. She stays in her room most of the time, on her computer. I hope it’s schoolwork, but I suspect it’s Facebook. As for me, I haven’t done any actual work, the kind that brings in money, for the past few weeks. I’ve taken on a fascinating assignment researching and editing a book for a
well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He pays me by the hour, and if I don’t work, I don’t get paid.