Her Mother's Daughter (104 page)

I closed my eyes. Isn't this what I had wanted? that they should see their father for what he is but love him at the same time? Why was I so ripped with jealousy? Jealous and possessive, Toni had said. I didn't recognize myself in those words.

I looked at Billy's face; there were tears in his eyes, his expression was as tender and sweet as a lover's. I was stricken. Could it be that I was turning into one of those jealous possessive mothers who want to hold on to their sons forever, who find in the son a satisfaction they have never found in any other man? I smiled at him and let him go. He was more cheerful after that, but as time went on and he was never home—now he was having dinner with Brad and his family once or twice a week at “The Club,” Brad's country club (oh, how Arden and I mocked him about “The Club,” which we saw as the height of pretension), besides playing golf…and then school started, and I thought it would end but it didn't, he spent every weekend working for his father.

I simmered, I seethed, I developed a bad stomach from all the grating going on inside me, and maybe I showed how I felt; in any case, Billy felt uncomfortable around me, I could see that. I attributed his discomfort to his guilt not at the fact that he was moving away from me, but the reason he was. For I attributed his wooing—that's how I saw it—of his father to a calculated campaign to get Brad to pay for the many years of training ahead of him.

I also noticed his attitude toward Toni had changed—he was distant with him, almost hostile. But Billy buried his hostilities so deeply they didn't show as anger so much as inwardness, withdrawal, depression. Still it was perceptible. I blamed it on Brad, who, I was sure, was brainwashing my son, the child I had raised alone, with little financial help and no emotional help from him. My bitterness seeped into my face, my voice. Here I had done all the hard work and now that Billy was nearly grown, Brad was taking him away from me—and Billy was letting it happen.

Still, all that occurred gradually and it didn't feel as bad as it sounds because I didn't know then that I was really going to lose him: when you don't know the disease is lethal, your suffering isn't so acute. And other things were going on too, like Arden's new attitude toward me. That probably started even earlier than Billy's defection, maybe even in her sophomore year of high school, but I was less aware of it. There were just flashes, now and then, of rebellion, that I took to be normal for a girl her age—she'd always been passionate, fiery. They became more frequent, and reached the point where everything I said was a challenge to battle. Yes, now that I think of it, the problem with her started way back, at the very beginning of what I was a minute ago, like a blathering idiot, calling the “happy years”: oh my Pollyanna soul!

Yes, at first just childish rebellion. She started to wear jeans to school, even though that was not permitted. She was sent home. She participated in a student strike over dress rules. They won, an unusual victory in those days, but a harbinger of the permissive era that was beginning. It was a long time afterward that she stopped putting soiled clothes in the hamper, insisting on wearing the same filthy jeans every day. For a long time, she was a slob about her room, but would clean it under my pressure; and left messes around the house and had to be nagged to help with the housecleaning, or to throw her own empty soda cans in the trash; then she refused to clean her room at all, refused to do anything at all in the house. Even Toni, whom she adored, couldn't get her to wash a dish or rake some leaves or put her soiled underwear in the washing machine. And my kids had been trained to help around the house.

“Arden's getting difficult, isn't she?” I asked Toni one night. We were in bed, having a nightcap. I was leaning against pillows stacked against the headboard, he was stretched out across the foot of the bed, stroking my feet. “And she's peculiar around you, too. Tonight she sat down right in your lap. You were embarrassed.”

Toni's glance was wary and a little absent, as if he were considering some other subject.

I sat up alarmed. “What is it?” But of course, as soon as I asked, I knew. There had been hundreds of tiny signs. I sank back, my face sagging I guess, because he looked at me in sympathy and said, “Honey, she'll get over it.”

“What does she do when I'm not around?”

He squirmed. “It's like…like she tries to be you when you're not here…she does the things you usually do, you know, like she makes the salad. She dries the dishes when I wash them.”

I sat up outraged. “You mean, she
helps
when I'm not here!”

He laughed. “Well, more than she does when you are.”

I scowled. “What about this lap business.”

“No,” he frowned, “not at all. She…well, she sort of flirts…but it's sweet, she's sweet, it's fine. She never sat in my lap before. She does hug me, but she's always done that. It isn't that so much. It's everything else—I think she cuts school. She doesn't seem to do homework. She won't clean her room. And sometimes…” he looked at me guiltily, “she doesn't come home when she's supposed to.”

“At night?”

“Day and night. You know, she's supposed to come home afternoons when she has an orthodontist appointment, but sometimes she forgets. Well, you know, she plays hockey and the girls all go for a Coke afterward—you can understand it. But sometimes—well, you're not often away on weekends, but when you are and she goes out, I tell her she has to be home by one. That's what you said, right? And she isn't. Sometimes she doesn't come in until after three.”

“What do you do?”

He shrugged. “What can I do. I reproach her. She just grins at me. Sometimes she hugs my arm and begs, ‘Don't tell Mom, Toni.' And I don't.”

“For god's sake, why not?”

He rolled his body up and sprang to his feet. He liked to use his muscles. “I don't know.” He went to his bureau and found his cigarettes and lighted one. “It's hard. You know, I'm in a funny position. I feel almost as if…the kids and I, the four of us…are conspirators or something. Like I'm one of them, not of you.”

“All kids together. You're their big brother, not their father.”

He looked alarmed. “I don't feel that way about Franny. I scold her, I discipline her. Not that she needs much, but when she does…like the time she decorated the living room wall with lipstick.”

I pondered. I knew he was asking me for permission to act like a father—to scold, punish, discipline my kids as well as his own. The idea was a stone in my throat. I couldn't get the words out. Why? I wondered, sitting there looking at this beautiful boy—well, he was a man now I guess, he was twenty-six—whom I loved and who loved us, and yet…

I moaned, “Oh, god, Toni, what am I going to do?”

“I think you should beat her.”

“WHAT?”

“That's what my father did. We were terrified of him and that kept us in line. We were a wild bunch in my family, four boys, we drove my mother crazy. But when my father was around, we stood straight.”

“I can't believe you're saying this! You did
not
stay in line, you and your brothers were always in trouble, probably in rebellion against his brutality! And you hate him now! And besides, you can't
start
beating someone at the age of fifteen who's never been beaten before, it wouldn't work, it's a crazy idea, it's stupid, I can't believe you're saying that….”

He shrugged. “I don't know what else to do.”

I considered. “I'm glad she loves you. Especially since she hates Brad so. She needs to like one man she looks up to. I don't want you to become a big bad wolf, a Father…. But, oh god, I'm worried about her.”

He sat up and turned away from me.

“What? What?” I sat up again. “What are you telling me?”

He put his head in his hands. “An…oh, hell, I don't know.” He got up and started to leave the room. At the door he turned. “You want another drink?”

“No. I'm exhausted, I'll just finish this and sleep.”

I heard the light ripple of his stockinged feet running down the stairs—such a young, buoyant walk he had—and I looked at my fingernails thinking I had to give them a good brushing and I knew, suddenly, what he was going to tell me. So, to save him the agony, I said, as soon as he walked back in the door,

“You're going to tell me you think she's screwing, aren't you.”

He stopped dead, stared at me. “You knew?”

“No. It just figures, somehow.”

His body was rigid. “I didn't catch her….”

“Catch? No, of course…why do you think she is?”

He kept watching me as if he expected me to spring up and murder someone. If I hadn't known better, I'd have thought
he
felt guilty. But I knew he was terrified of my response because of what he knew his father would have done if he'd “caught” his sister at such an activity. “Oh, sit down, man, I'm not going to explode!”

He relaxed back onto the bed. He shrugged. He gulped a huge mouthful of whiskey. He's drinking too much, I thought. “Just the way she looks when she comes in at night, like on a Friday night when she's been to the movies with her pals and comes in around two in the morning. She looks…you know, her eyes are big and liquid…she looks…voluptuous.”

“You don't think she's on drugs!”

“No, no!” Heartily. “Oh, no, sweetheart.”

I
was
exhausted. I was still jet-lagged from a four-day stint in California, taking the red-eye, going on to the
World
office without sleeping. “Well,” I leaned back against the pillows again, putting my glass, not yet empty, on the bed table, “I'll have to have a talk with her.”

I turned out my light. It was early, not yet eleven, and Toni went back downstairs to watch the news on TV. I was exhausted, but I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking that I couldn't do what I had to do alone, that I needed a partner, that Arden needed a father. It never occurred to me that this father could be Toni. He took care of the kids when I wasn't there but I never thought of him as their stepfather, as someone
responsible
for them, who shared with me the weight of worry, the need to act—for them, about them. I never thought of him that way and I never allowed him to feel that way: he took care of them but they were
mine.
He was not
allowed
to reprimand them, and that wasn't fair, since he took care of them.

But what could I do? How could I trust him to know what was good for them, give him the right to scold, to impose punishments? How could I trust someone so young? Oh, it wasn't just that—I hadn't trusted Brad, and he was old enough to be their father, he
was
their father, and so of course he didn't need my permission. Maybe I didn't trust any man to raise children. But hadn't my mistrust been justified? Hadn't Toni just said his idea of dealing with a recalcitrant child was to beat her? And I knew lots of men, I'd heard them talk about their kids, I heard the toughness in their voices, the rough expressions as they bragged that
they
knew how to keep kids in line. There were men I knew far older than Toni who would have said what he said.
Brad
might have said the same thing, for god's sake.

The truth is I felt men were unfit to raise children. It was a belief I had imbibed young: my mother felt that too. On the one hand, I've always thought it was convenient for men to be so lousy at parenting, maybe they even play up their incompetence, so the women will dismiss them, tell them to go away, and deal with the mess themselves. Then they can go out and play golf or poker or whatever other game they liked to amuse themselves with. They can have fun or make money while the women do the dirty work, deal with the really hard stuff, like this. On the other hand, I also believe—it's strange, I never realized this until that moment—that women
are
more selfless, more sympathetic, more empathetic, more sensitive, more fun—all the things you have to be to raise kids—and that it was just as well that men kept their noses out of it. I didn't want to believe these things. I hated believing these things. I didn't want them to be true. But when I looked around me at the world I knew back then in 1964, they seemed true.

I finally fell asleep and didn't even wake when Toni came to bed. The next day was a Saturday, the kids were home. Billy was going to a baseball game with Brad at Shea Stadium, and I asked Toni to take Franny to lunch at the carousel. Arden was angry—she was always angry when Billy was to do anything with his father, she snorted contempt all around—at the furniture, the food, the
air
—anything Billy passed or touched. He raced out of the house, eager to get away from her. I told Arden she had to clean her room.

She “Oh, Ma”'d me, she groused, she banged things, she stormed. She was supposed to meet her friends and go to a movie that afternoon. I insisted her room was going to be cleaned that day or she was not going out. It was only eleven, there was plenty of time before the movie. I added that I would help her, which calmed her a little—enough so that she sidled into the room behind me when I called and watched me pick things up off the floor. I had to order her to do each task.

“Pick up that sock over there.”

“There are crumpled papers under the dresser. Pick them up and put them—no, Arden, don't
hurl
them,
put
them in the wastepaper basket.”

“Start on that pile of clothes in the corner. Pick up each thing, shake it out. If it needs to be washed, put it in this pile here on the floor—
this
one, Arden, are you looking? If it needs to be dry-cleaned, lay it on this bench, like this, neatly, so I don't have to unroll it before I take it to the cleaners. No, spread out and folded, not in a heap. If it is clean but wrinkled, put it in a third pile. You can press these things tomorrow.” This direction was entirely too complicated for the 150+ IQ of my daughter, and she gave me a look of the most appalled disgust.