Her Mother's Daughter (105 page)

Teeth clenched, she hissed, “The way you're doing this I'll never get done. It will take all day! I want to go out this afternoon! To meet my friends!”

“You'll go. As soon as this room is clean.”

I had hoped we would move, through conflict, to harmony—as we might have six months earlier, after she'd become a slob but before she decided she hated me. I had anticipated giggling comparisons of her smelly socks with Billy's, or long martyred descriptions of her wardrobe, ending with an extracted promise of a new pair of boots. Then, good feeling restored, we could have thrown ourselves down on the newly made bed and I could have talked to her about boys, sex, and birth control. This was my plan.

That isn't what happened. She worked with me reluctantly, angry, white-faced, throwing things in drawers, slipping them over hangers so sloppily that they immediately fell off, then turning in fury on me when I pointed out that the newly hung blouse was now on the floor. At one point, when I pointed to some dirty socks stuck in sneakers, she strode to the closet, pulled the socks out furiously, tossed them on the dirty-clothes pile, and put her hands on her hips. “If I miss that movie, I'll never forgive you.”

“It's up to you whether you miss it or not, Arden. Not me.”

She began to scream, yelling that it was
me
making her do this on this day at this time,
me
who was preventing her from going, and therefore my fault if she missed the movie. She didn't—not then, not yet—suggest that she was going to the movie whether I liked it or not and what could I do about it? Was I going to restrain her forcibly? And how could I, when she was stronger than I from playing hockey? No, she didn't say that then, that came later—another year? Six months?

There was a limit to the neatness I could demand. Her drawers were her own: at least, she felt they were and so did I. Despite her hurling of the clothes replaced in them, it took hours to complete the task—to dispose of all the clothes, mop and dust and vacuum the room, put fresh sheets on the bed, wipe up spilled talcum powder and mascara stains from the glass top of her vanity table. They were cold silent hours, the only sounds my nagging—because I had to nag—and her occasional outburst, under her breath, “Shit!” At last she turned on me with clenched teeth: “May I go now please? I'm already half an hour late.”

“The movie doesn't start until two,” I snapped. “It's only one-thirty.”

“We were going to have lunch first! And I'm filthy, I have to take a shower and change my clothes.”

I let her go. She banged around for a while, washing and dressing. I went into the kitchen and hung over a cup of coffee. After she'd banged the door—yelling, “I'm going!” no goodbye, no kiss—I dragged myself upstairs and looked at her room. Dirty clothes were scattered on the floor and there were fresh mascara stains on her dressing table.

She didn't come home for dinner. She called, the kids were all going out for pizza, could she go? Her tone said it would be a criminal act to deprive her of this and I had no desire to, but…“Be home by midnight, Arden,” Mother said firmly.

She wasn't home by midnight. Or by one. At two, Toni wanted to get in the car and drive around to all the pizza parlors in the area. I shook my head. I told him to go to bed. He sat up with me. At two-forty, the front door opened.

“I think it would be better if I talked to her alone,” I whispered to Toni. He nodded, kissed me, walked out to the hall and met her.

“You mean you actually came home?” I heard him say.

“I had to. I have nowhere else to go!” I couldn't see her but I saw her in my mind, eyes flashing at him, furious. He started up the stairs. She began to follow him. He turned. “First, lock the door. Second, your mother is waiting for you in the kitchen.”

She locked the door. She stormed down the hall and flounced into the kitchen. “Yes?”

I was sitting at the table drinking tea and pretending to read the newspaper. I looked up slowly. I didn't know how to be. Should I be angry, yell? Should I try an understanding approach? What was the best method of dealing with this child? I decided to talk about myself: “Arden, do you realize Toni and I have been worried out of our minds? You were supposed to be home by twelve, and it is nearly three o'clock.”

“I couldn't help it. Jill got sick and Len took her home early and so I had to wait until the other kids were ready to go and they don't have these stupid rules and they dropped off Doris first and then Binky, so I just got here now.” (Indignant.)

“There is such a thing as a telephone.”

“I didn't have any money left after the pizza and the movie.” (Implicit reproach: insufficient allowance.)

“You do have friends from whom you could borrow a dime,” I said, exasperated.

“I didn't think of it.” (Leg thrust out, hand on hip, mouth angry, patience fading fast.)

“Arden, do you want us to be unhappy, fighting all the time? I don't like it. I don't want to live this way. If there is something bothering you, why can't you tell me instead of acting like an irresponsible child?”

When her patience went, it went all at once. What trigger did I press? For she was screaming suddenly, incoherent, teary: “I don't like lots of things! What good would it do me to tell
you?
You don't care about us! You go away when you want to and come back when you want to! Why can't I? I'm
not
irresponsible!
You're
the one who tries to keep me a child with your stupid rules and regulations, you act as if I was eight years old, you just do it to be mean, you hate me, you hate us both, you're worse than Daddy!”

At which she raced from the room, up the stairs, and into her room, completing the scene with the obligatory door-slam.

Oh, that simmered down too. A week or two later, six months even, she might be teasing me, lying at the foot of my bed watching me drink coffee on a Saturday morning, or cuddling next to me as I sat in bed—I never got over the habit of working in bed—adding up my expense account, or transferring notes I'd scrawled on bits of paper, about f-stops and light and shutter speed, to permanent record books. Toni would be downstairs writing, he wrote all the time then, he rarely came out of his study except to pee or get more coffee.

It would be late morning: a sweet light filtered through the trees outside my bedroom window, and it was quiet. All I could hear was the clatter of birds, Billy and Jonas throwing baskets out in the driveway; I could hear the ball hit the backboard, the boys yell scores, the ball bounce on the concrete garage apron and the shudder of the backboard again, and the call, over and over, like surf.

And Arden chatting and giggling, a cozy domestic scene, it made me happy…confiding in me (the boys all like Binky best they like Jill too but not is there something wrong with me I don't think they like me as much sometimes I feel jealous of Jill and I hate myself because she's my best friend and I don't want to feel jealous of her I love her do you think I'm ugly homely pretty
really
pretty, really? and it makes me mad that she's so popular and I'm not but I don't want to be mad at her I hate feeling jealous why do I am I awful do other people feel jealous do you think she feels jealous of me is that why she said because that really hurt me why does that happen and what can you what can I what do grown-ups do about it?).

During those times I could occasionally get her to dry a dish or clean her room a little at least and she went to school every day and even did some homework. And then I'd go away and come back and she'd be terrible again and I couldn't understand it because here she was almost sixteen years old and acting this way, you'd think she'd be used to my traveling by now, what was the matter?

I asked her. She blinked, she shrugged, she denied she was angry about my traveling—she just threw that at me when she was angry about other things. She denied that she behaved badly after I'd been on a trip, denied that she was difficult at all. The only thing she didn't deny was that she was in love with Toni. She told me about this one evening, it was after her sixteenth birthday, Billy was doing homework in his room, Toni was working, and she asked if we could talk and she turned off the television and we poured Cokes and took them up to my room and sat on the bed and she began to discuss her sweet sixteen birthday party, who had said what and done what and what she felt and what did I think that meant?

So I was able to ease the conversation toward her feelings about boys in general, Toni in particular, and sex. Arden was describing Jill's relations with Len and Carey, and I listened carefully, and then said, “It sounds as if you're telling me that Jill is having sex with Len.”

My directness took her breath away for a moment. She tried to read my expression. “What if they are? Lots of kids do it. You know, things have changed since you were young, Mom.”

“But, Arden, how much do you all know about what you're doing?”

Look of disgust. “Oh, Mom! We all know everything.”

“Really? That's amazing. I don't think
I
probably know everything.”

“Really? What don't you know?'

I just looked at her and we both broke into hysterical giggling.

“So you-all think you're old enough, and know enough. But then why did you put it the way you did, asking me what I thought? I don't believe you're so sure of yourself. And tell me this: how many of you know anything about birth control?”

She shrugged. “Jill's on the pill. Her mother took her to the doctor and got it for her. And Binky has a diaphragm. Her mother doesn't want her to go on the pill so young. But,” here Arden lowered her voice and her tone became hushed, awed, shocked, “Gloria Caron, a girl at school, you don't know her, she had to have an abortion last year.”

“And what about you?”

“Well,” she was scratching a mosquito bite on her leg. “I tried it once. With Len. One time when he and Binky had a fight and weren't speaking, and he was depressed and he begged me. I told him I was afraid Binky would get mad at me, but he said she wouldn't. But she did. She wouldn't speak to me for weeks until I cornered her one day and said we had to talk and we did, we went to the soda shop and I told her how it happened and that I didn't want to try to take Len away from her, that she was more important to me than Len, and she cried and said she was terrible because she was blaming me instead of Len and she knew that was wrong and she'd try not to, and after that we were friends again. Anyway, it wasn't much,” she concluded.

“That's too bad.”

“What's too bad?” Wary.

“That it wasn't much. I would have liked your first experience of sex to be beautiful.”

Suspicious. “It can be?”

“It can be. But it has to be right.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, it
doesn't
mean screwing some boy to make him feel better about his girlfriend. Or doing any boy a favor.” She stopped scratching. “It is right when
you
want it, want it very much, and trust the boy you're with and know that you aren't going to get pregnant as a result of it….”.

She pondered. “Yeah.”

“Frankly, I think you're a little young for sex to be right.”

Straight back, angry eyes. “Mommy! That's not true! All the girls are doing it!”

“I doubt if
all
of them are doing it. And even if they are, that doesn't mean they are really enjoying it. I don't know if this is true, but it seems to me women develop desire later than men. I'd bet most of them are doing it to please the boys.”

“Mmmm.”

I had her. It was a tricky business, capturing her interest and trust, and I couldn't be sure I'd keep it, but I tried by remaining honest. So I was able to convince her—not that this was made explicit—not to have sex unless she deeply, profoundly,
wanted
to have sex. I was able to extract a promise that she would let me know if she were seeing someone she desired so much that she would really enjoy sex with him, and we would go together to get her measured for a diaphragm. Things
had
changed, even young girls could get them now. When I was young, you had to be married.

In time, I moved us on to the subject of Toni. She was relaxed now, my old little girl, lying across my legs, fiddling with her hair.

“Yeah. I do, you know. I love him so much. And he's so cute. I think about it a lot. And you know?” she sat up and smiled at me with astonishment, “I think I could do it, I could get him if I tried. I think he loves me too, and would like to!” Showing the delight of a little girl who one day realizes she is attractive, I thought. I did not let myself think about how I felt about all that.

“I'm sure you're right. He
does
love you,” I smiled.

“But,” she sank back down again, “then I think that if we did I'd keep thinking about who was better, you or me, and that would drive me crazy.”

“That's an extremely intelligent perception,” I said, every inch A Mother. “That's exactly what would happen and it wouldn't be good for you, it would make you anxious.” Not a word about how it would be for me, or for Toni, or whether he even could under such circumstances, or would, although I suspected that if I gave him tacit permission, he yes he would have, no wonder he didn't want to screw around, he had all the turn-on he could handle right at home. Arden was beautiful.

We got through that, and afterward Arden seemed to flirt less with Toni. I think. We got through everything in the sense that we went on living together, getting up and going to bed, banging on bathroom doors, eating meals together, talking, cleaning up. But the feel of things changed, was changing, the texture of our lives, the color. Because nothing dramatic happened, we told ourselves—or maybe it was only me—that things were all right. Yet beyond my thought, beyond my awareness, things pulled at me, wore on me like weights; it's more than time that pulls down the facial muscles, the flesh inside the upper arm. It isn't just age that makes you walk more slowly, slump when you walk, look weary.