The Mistress's Daughter (20 page)

 

It was the death of my grandmother that compelled me to try to have a child of my own. Motherhood was something that terrified me. I have a great fear of attachment and an equally constant fear of loss—I am not sure if this is true for everyone, but for me the ghost of the dead brother still and always looms. When I was younger I always thought I would adopt a child, but after Ellen's death and then my grandmother's, I felt I wanted a biological child, and so it was something that I decided to do. It had never occurred to me that it would be difficult to get pregnant. I started at thirty-nine, and in the end it took two years, thousands of dollars, the best of medical science, and two miscarriages before my daughter was born.

“What's the matter?” my mother asked. “Isn't adoption good enough for you?”

“Of course it's good enough,” I said, but it wasn't that—I felt compelled to try my hardest, to issue a biological echo, to see myself before myself, writ large and small and as fully related as one can ever be.

 

Months after my grandmother had passed, my mother called and asked if I would like my grandmother's table.

“I know it's big and that your house is small, but I think it would be nice if you had it.”

The table came in through the side door, carried by four men, carefully wrapped.

“These are tables of great weight,” one of the men said, and he was right, but the weight was not so much literal as emotional. I inherited much more than an object—it was a mandate to live and work as hard and with as much grace and style as she did.

At first the table looked out of place, lost. I oiled it. I rubbed it with a soft cloth, moving my hands over the surface and noticing the richness of the tone—the lived-in marks that Nakashima called Kevinizing after his son Kevin. I thought of the spiritual life of the wood, what it gave beyond a surface.

The first time I used the table, I invited a friend over for lunch. I took my usual spot. Instead of looking at a painting on my grandmother's living room wall, I was now looking out a window at a bird feeder. I set two places at the table, hers and mine. My friend sat in my grandmother's place and something felt strange.

“I need to change places with you,” I said.

The friend looked at me oddly—she didn't understand.

“Could we switch?” I asked, and then I slid into her seat.

 

When the table gets dry—thirsty—its surface looks pale, parched. I rub it with oil; it drinks and then glows. And while it is only a table, an object made of wood, it is a perfect and constant reminder of how to live, how to stay connected. It was in this little house—which I wouldn't have bought without my grandmother's nod and a gift that helped with the down payment—that I got the phone call from my mother saying my mother had died. It was in this house that I first miscarried and that, a year later, I celebrated my child's first Christmas and Hanukkah. It was in this house, at this table, that I sat alone unpacking the four boxes from my mother's house in New Jersey. It was this table that could hold those boxes.

The table is the centerpiece of our family life. It is where on the weekends my young family gathers—my daughter draws her pictures here; together we make cookies and decorate them. Each time I sit here I remember myself in my grandmother's kitchen, in awe and admiring her spice rack, her jars of cookie sprinkles and cinnamon hearts. Now, sitting in what was my grandmother's seat, I watch my daughter sitting in my spot to my left. I watch this girl, who more than anyone reminds me of my grandmother. She carries the same facial expressions, the same gestures, the same simultaneous compassion and judgment. I witness the way she moves through her life, the confidence with which she carries herself. Like my grandmother, she takes great pleasure in making sure that others are taken care of. And as I am thinking this, she gets up from her spot, comes over, and gently pushes me out of my seat.

“I need your chair,” she says, climbing up, filling the vacated spot.

 

I am my mother's child and I am my mother's child, I am my father's child and I am my father's child, and if that line is a little too much like Gertrude Stein, then I might be a little bit her child too. Most important, now I am Juliet's mother, and that brings with it a singularity of love and fear that I have never known before, and for that—and she is truly a blend of all four family lines—I thank all of my mothers and fathers, for she is my greatest gift.

 

Did I choose to be found? No. Do I regret it? No. I couldn't not know.