Motherless Daughters (8 page)

MY FATHER BOUGHT the raccoon jacket for my mother in 1973. It was mid-thigh length with a sturdy brown zipper, and she wore it through the suburban New York winters of my childhood. She didn’t really need a fur coat, of course—wool would have served her just fine—but in the mid-1970s in Spring Valley, New York, a fur fell somewhere between the Cuisinart and the Cadillac. A few years after my mother started wearing the raccoon jacket, my parents put a swimming pool in the backyard. That was the order of things.

A raccoon jacket didn’t make quite the same statement as a full-length mink, but it was a fur coat nonetheless, and my mother wore it during the day and to informal social events at night. She was a tall woman, with wide, square shoulders, and she carried the jacket well. Its fur was the color of a graying brunette, almost exactly the color of her short, frosted hair, and against this monochrome, her splash of red lipstick always looked like a surprise. When she drove, I liked to sit in the passenger seat and rest my hand against the soft fur on her arm. Late at night when my parents came in from the movies or their bowling league or dinner parties at the neighbors’, my father drove the babysitter home and my mother came into my bedroom to say goodnight. I stood on the bed and pressed my face into her neck. The cold still clung to the fur collar, and I could smell the last traces of Chanel No. 5 on her skin. Chanel was her night perfume. She wore Charlie during the day.

A few of my classmates wore rabbit jackets to school, but all other furs were reserved for adults. Some of the women in our subdivision wore ankle-length coats of fox and mink that their
husbands had given them as anniversary gifts. These were usually the women who drove four-door Mercedes sedans. My mother drove an Oldsmobile station wagon. It was big enough to transport six of my friends at once, and I thought it was just fine, until everyone started wearing designer clothes in the ninth grade. I didn’t have any, and these things started to matter. My mother took me shopping one afternoon and bought me two pairs of Gloria Vanderbilt corduroys and a pair of Jordache jeans. She knew how badly I wanted to fit in, she said.

I was fourteen then and not yet embarrassed to be seen in public with my mother, but by the end of that year I had traded her company almost exclusively for that of my friends. I spent my hours in parking lots and other people’s rec rooms, willing to acknowledge my parents’ existence only when I needed a ride home. Yet somehow I still felt a sense of security and relief in knowing that although I had rejected my mother, she had not, in turn, abandoned me. One winter when I was in the tenth grade, I got sick in Spanish class and had to phone her to pick me up from school. I was lying on a couch in the nurse’s office when she arrived, wearing the raccoon jacket. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, and a designer handbag dangled from the crook of her elbow. I thought she was the picture of vibrancy and competence, as she hurried across the room to press her palm against my forehead and quickly signed the release form before taking me home. As we walked together through the wide halls toward the parking lot, I wanted to fling open the doors to all the classrooms and shout, Look, everyone.
Look at my young, pretty mother. She’s come to rescue me.

That was before she got sick. Later that year, after she had surgery and lost her hair and gained forty pounds from the white pills she swallowed every morning, she would cry when she looked in the mirror, and she started to spend more time inside the house alone. When I drove her home from chemotherapy treatments in the late afternoon, she would grip my arm to help her fight the nausea. She only had one more winter after that, and I don’t remember her wearing the raccoon jacket. In fact, I can’t remember her wearing anything during those sixteen months except nightgowns and bathing suits, although I know she had a closet filled with other
clothes. In my imagination, I dress her in stylish outfits as if I’m pressing two-dimensional dresses onto a paper doll. When memory slides into uncertainty, fantasy is often the result. It’s been more than two decades now, and every year I remember less.

And yet there are some things I would rather forget. I suspect I was not a particularly easy adolescent to raise. Caught up in the full-time job of declaring my independence, I had little interest left in family matters by the time I turned fifteen. I was occupied in other ways. When my mother was doing lunch and a manicure with her friends, I was trying drugs with mine. When her mah jongg group traded gossip and ivory tiles across the card table downstairs, my boyfriend and I were on the floor in the next room with his hand up my shirt. Typical adolescent fare for 1980, perhaps. But then, one day, it all stopped.

“The lump is cancer,” my mother said one afternoon in the middle of the March before I turned sixteen. She had just returned from the surgeon’s office, and I rushed to meet her at the top of the stairs.

“What does that mean?” I asked, already stepping back.

“Oh, God,” she said, gripping the banister for support. “It means the surgeon has to remove my breast.”

She said more, I think, but that was all I heard. “No!” I shouted, pushing past her and down the steps, hurrying to my room. When, right behind me, she knocked on the closed door, I screamed, “Go away! Leave me alone!” I knew even then, as I lay on my bedroom floor, that this event would mark the end of my childhood more definitively than menstruation or my first kiss ever could. I called a friend from the telephone in my room—“My mother has cancer. Can I come over?”—and then ran a mile to meet her at the halfway point, where she was already waiting with two other friends. I ran toward them without restraint, leaping over the low tombstones in the cemetery I had to cross, pushing myself through space as if the sheer force of my motion could catapult me into another place and time.

After the mastectomy, when my mother sat in the kitchen squeezing rubber balls to strengthen the muscles the surgeon left behind, I learned to reshape anger into silence. The message
Do not upset your mother
was unspoken, but it was clear. So I played my music
low, spoke at the dinner table only when spoken to, snuck boyfriends in and out after dark through the window of my sub-basement-level room. I vacillated between resentment and fear, suspended in developmental limbo, afraid to stay separate from my mother (because what would happen to her if I did?), yet angry at her cancerous cells for trying to hold me back (because what would happen to me if I didn’t go?). Every time I felt confident enough to take another step toward autonomy, the scene at home firmly pulled me back. Oh God, it was a mess.

On July 4, two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I came home from a concert and stuck my head into my parents’ bedroom to announce my return.

My mother was sprawled in a reclining chair, idly flipping through TV channels, but when she saw me, she sat up straight and smiled. “How was the concert?” she asked.

Who was it that played?

That’s nice. For how long?

Two hours? That’s a long time. Was there an intermission?

Tell me—what was the audience like?

Her questions continued, and my irritation grew, until after five or six more I exploded—“What is this? The goddamned third degree?” —and stormed down the stairs to my room. My mother had been a classical pianist; she’d never cared about pop music before. Why the sudden interest in the concert? My father strode into my room without knocking a few minutes later. “Why the hell did you have to do that?” he said. “You’ve made your mother cry. She can’t go out herself. All she’s asking is for you to share a little of your day with her. Can’t you do even that?”

I forced myself to look at him, my cheeks warm with shame. He was so angry he was trembling, but he didn’t yell. That’s when I first suspected she was dying.

After the funeral, I packed up her clothing in boxes destined for Goodwill. “I can’t do it,” my father had said, calling from his office one morning in late July. “Can you, please?” I did it that afternoon, with my best friend sitting silently on my parents’ bed for support, and I did it deliberately and mechanically, carefully unfolding and refolding each sweater, waiting for the goodbye note she never wrote to flutter to the floor. I tried not to pause long enough to think about individual pieces of clothing. How could I? Each one had its own narrative: the green-and-white housedress she had worn while cooking dinners in the Crock-Pot, the red postmastectomy bathing suit we’d selected together, the purple velour sweater I’d worn in my tenth-grade school photo. I went through her drawers one by one, methodically from left to right, filling the large cardboard boxes that covered the bedroom floor.

When I had finished, I dragged the boxes down the hall to the coat closet, and then something happened—the phone rang, or I went to get a drink—and I never did empty that last closet. And so the raccoon jacket stayed in the back, behind my father’s old sheepskin coat and my sister’s ski overalls, until I left for college the following year.

Why did I take it with me? Surely, I didn’t think I could sneak it away without notice, but that’s what I tried to do, stuffing it into a trunk I shipped to Chicago. No one in the family ever mentioned that the jacket was gone. Maybe they didn’t notice. Maybe they just didn’t mind. I don’t know. In the Midwest, I hung it in the back of my own closet, first in a dormitory room and then in an off-campus apartment, where I lived for the next three years. I had no clear plans to wear it, but I suspected I would, someday.

It was curious, the response I got from roommates who saw that I had my mother’s fur coat. The morning she had died, I’d gone into her jewelry box before dawn and removed her wedding ring, which I wore on my right hand for years. “How beautiful,” people sighed when I told them what it was. The raccoon jacket provoked a different reaction, usually of surprise or disgust. A friend tried to explain this to me once. “A wedding ring represents your future,” she said. “But dead raccoons? That’s like wrapping yourself in the past.”

I never tried to explain that the dusty old jacket gave off a warmth that was timeless to me—who would understand? And I never told anyone that sometimes during those first few years I would lean into the closet and stick my face into the fur, trying to find the patches that retained the faint scent of Charlie perfume.

In the four years I kept the raccoon jacket at school, I wore it only once. My college friends were hardcore campus liberals, and before long I joined them as they gave up meat, signed petitions, and attended rallies for animal rights. Indignation and resistance were impulses I knew well. In an odd way, they kept me feeling close to my mother, or at least to the last days we’d shared, and I continued rebelling for far longer than I needed to, after she died. I moved through college tallying grievances the way my sorority sisters collected add-a-beads, defining my personal politics only by the dramatic contrast between black and white. It didn’t even matter whether the facts I pointed to were true, as long as I could identify and side with an obvious victim—preferably myself—every time.

When I was a junior, I heard that in downtown Chicago people like me were throwing red paint at fur coats, or maybe that was just a rumor. Either way, whatever material attraction I’d once had to fur had long since faded by then. One day, I was reorganizing my closet for the winter and sprang back in horror when I saw a pile of dead animals in the back. Then I realized what it was.

I’m almost ashamed to admit I didn’t get rid of the coat then. I kept it for another year. And then one day, without premeditation, I pulled it from the closet before classes and shrugged it on. It was a brutally cold morning along Lake Michigan, which somehow seemed justification for wearing fur. But after I’d walked only two blocks toward campus, I realized how incredibly foolish I felt. Standing on a street corner surrounded by L. L. Bean parkas and ankle-length down coats, I understood that I could not wear that coat again. It had nothing to do with mink farms, or the fear of red paint. A fur coat is serious business—the business of women and wives and mothers, of dinner parties in February, and opera in New York. The kind of business, I realized, that had everything to do with my mother and very little to do with me. With enough time still to make it to class, I rushed back to my apartment. I put the coat in the closet.

Two weeks later, without any fanfare, I finally packed it into a bag of clothes destined for Goodwill, and gave it away.

 

Sometimes I still wonder what losing my mother would have been like if I’d spent just a few more years with her, or if I’d known her for a few less. Would we have been spared the years of antipathy and argument? Would we have had time to become friends? Women who lost their mothers in early childhood often look at me with envy, seeing the years they never had; women who were in their mid-twenties tell me they never could have survived it at seventeen. Is it better to have a mother and lose her, or to never have had one at all? I can’t answer that question. I do know that mother loss is difficult at any time, and at any stage. Regardless of our age, we yearn for a mother’s love throughout our lives, reaching for the security and comfort we believe only she can provide at times of illness, transition, or stress.

So much has been written about the mother-daughter relationship, but comparatively so little about mother loss, that the natural impulse is to look at what exists when a mother is alive and then expect the inverse to be true if she’s gone. But it’s not that simple. To say that a mother helps her child develop self-esteem doesn’t necessarily mean that a child without a mother has no self-esteem, but instead that she must develop it in alternate ways. That’s why her age at the time of loss is important. It indicates which developmental tasks she’s likely to be working on, and which emotional and cognitive tools are available to help her cope with the stress of the immediate crisis, and guide her into the next stage of her life.