Her Mother's Daughter (109 page)

Joy stares at Anastasia. “What do you mean?” She hands Anastasia a glass, sips her own drink. She leans against the sink.

“Think about it. Think about yourself. You don't look too great right now, you're worn out, but you're still terrific-looking. If you were alone, you'd hie yourself into the city, get a high-paying job as a supersecretary, get yourself a neat little apartment, buy some great clothes, have fun. You make friends wherever you go, you might even meet another man.”

Joy closes her eyes. “I never thought about it like that. If I were alone, if I didn't have kids!” She thinks for a moment, then shakes herself, shaking it off. “Oh, what's the point of thinking about it? I can't even imagine it. I
do
have kids.”

Anastasia sits silent, staring at the sink.

Joy moves. “Let's get out of the fucking kitchen! I
hate
the fucking kitchen!” They return to the living room, sink into couches, light cigarettes.

“So what happened?”

Joy breathes deeply. “Well. Let's see. It's hard to remember the order of things. Where was I? Yes, so I wouldn't sleep with him and he was furious, and all I could do was cry because I couldn't tell him how I felt…you can understand that….” She glances up, and Anastasia nods.

“And I said I was confused about things and he had to give me time to think and I didn't know what to do.” A frown settles on her face, meditative. “You know, the
kids
had forgotten him too! They didn't like the way he talked—barked—at them, the way they couldn't talk at the table, I let them talk at the table, it's crazy, what is the matter with him? Why shouldn't they talk? So they were acting strange with him too. They looked at him as if he was…an
enemy.

“And I guess it finally got to him, maybe he finally felt it, noticed the way they looked at him, I looked at him. He doesn't usually pay attention, it's like we're all subordinates to him, he doesn't care if his men like him or not as long as they obey. But he sort of had to notice that I wouldn't sleep with him, or that the kids kept forgetting he was there and breaking into conversation at the table….

“He had a ten-day pass, but he left the day after Christmas; he had five days left but he just packed his bag and went to Iowa.”

“So
that's
why Amy descended on you last month! What did you tell her? I mean, how did you leave things, what was her understanding of the situation when she left?”

Joy stares listlessly across the room. “I don't really know. She talked and I listened. I didn't argue except to say that the kids needed a home, some permanence, some continuity in their lives. I told her a little about how they'd been getting….”

“How
had
they been getting?”

Joy's mouth tightens. “Oh, I don't know. Sort of jangly and nervous, always arguing. Oh, they still do, I guess all kids do, but the last couple of years there's a different quality to it, a feeling of…I don't know…hysteria. They still are like that,” she adds, staring across the room, her face deeply furrowed, tight.

“It happens when parents aren't getting along, when there's a divorce, when things around them start to fall apart,” Anastasia says authoritatively. “My kids did that too. Took them a couple of years after the divorce to calm down.”

“Oh. And Jenny bursts into tears at the least thing….”

“Franny does that too, since Toni left.”

“Yeah. And other problems…school…things like that. Getting along with other kids.”

Anastasia murmurs sympathy, falls silent.

“I can't figure out whether it was our moving around so much, or whether it was Justin, the way he treated them, the way he was. Is. But you think it's our separation,” Joy concludes in a cold voice.

A spasm of irritation crosses Anastasia's face. “No.” Irritation in the voice as well. “That's not what I said. I think all of it contributes, anything that gives kids a sense of instability. There isn't anything you can do about it, Joy. It isn't your
fault,
for god's sake! Most families experience problems, dislocations, crises at some point. Kids just have to learn to handle them, same as we do.”

“Oh.” Fists unclench. “Would you mind if I had another cigarette?”

Anastasia tosses the pack across the table to Joy's lap. “Help yourself.”

“I'm smoking so much. I shouldn't. But most days I only have two or three cigarettes, some days I don't smoke at all. Like tomorrow, I won't smoke at all. But then, in one night I can smoke a whole pack. I hope I'm not leaving you short.”

“I have another pack. You're lucky not to be addicted the way I am.”

Joy's face relaxes a little. “Yes, I am lucky.” She lights the cigarette, exhales deeply, lets her face smooth out further, and leans back luxuriously as if the nicotine were a shot of relaxant. “Anyway, I don't know what Amy thought. She's really terrific, Amy, but she…well, of course she adores Justin—he's her only son. And Jane lives so far away, she's lived in London for years. I don't know what she sees when she looks at him—she probably still sees him the way he was, her baby, you know. She was sweet, she kissed me and hugged me when she left. But she probably left feeling that I wasn't going to change my mind.

“So then Justin writes saying he wants a divorce, he doesn't intend to spend the rest of his life living in quarters, he doesn't want a frigid wife and kids who treat him as if he were a monster, what have I been doing to them brainwashing them to hate him…stuff like that. Oh, it was awful! And he said since I was working and not staying home like a proper mother, he wasn't going to support us anymore unless we all lived together and he gave me a month to decide.”

She stubbed out her cigarette, lighted another.

“It's so ridiculous! The amount I earn is ludicrous, thirty-eight hundred a year, what can you do with that? I can't even pay for our food, and after taxes it's even less!”

Anastasia bursts out angrily, “Oh, that's terrible! Why don't you get a job in the city? Secretaries earn decent salaries in the city!”

“Oh, Anastasia! I'd be gone from seven in the morning until seven at night. I'd have to spend money on clothes and I'd have commutation….I just can't be away from the kids that long, and in the end I probably wouldn't have that much more money either!” Joy calms a bit. “It won't be like this forever. In another two years, with the credits they're giving me from Hilton Academy, I'll have a degree, and I can teach. Teachers start at seven thousand. That's why I'm putting myself through this ordeal.”

Anastasia grimaces. “It's ironic. He blames you for working, saying it isn't proper for a mother, and here you work for slave wages so that you
can
be a decent mother! They've always got you, coming and going. It's always been like this for women!”

Joy stares at the redness on her thumbs. “My hands are all broken out,” she murmurs. “Nerves, I guess.”

Anastasia waves her hands; Joy tosses the cigarette pack back to her. She lights a cigarette. “Did you answer his letter?”

“Yes. I wrote that I could understand how he felt but I wasn't going to move the kids again. And that I'd give him a divorce if that's what he wanted, but he'd have to support his own children. And that I never tried to turn his children against him. You know, An, I never say a word against Justin! I never have, no matter what I felt. Even when he was strapping Jonathan for some little thing, and Jonny was only a baby, he was four or five, I didn't say a word in front of them. I've always supported him!”

“That's true.” At what cost, too: so brittle, edgy, you were.

“Anyway, I haven't heard anything since I wrote. It was only last week. I don't know what's going to happen. But he didn't send me the usual check on the first of the month—he only sent me a few hundred dollars. Not that he's been sending me what he agreed to before I came. He says it costs him more to live than he thought—so the hell with us. It's been tight ever since I bought the house.
Don't tell Mother!
That's why I got the job in the first place. And I figured things weren't going to get better with him, so I started school—I can't go on working for such measly wages. But this month I couldn't pay the mortgage. I told him in my letter—after all, it's his money we put down on this house, does he want to lose it? But I haven't heard anything.”

“It may be time to hire a lawyer.”

“Oh, Anastasia, how would I pay him?”

Anastasia's mouth is grim. “I know. Christ! Always the same fucking story! All they're good for in the end.”

“What?”

“That's what Mother thinks. She never says it straight out. That all men are really good for is to bring money into the house. That's their entire function once they impregnate women.”

Joy lifts her head, laughs. “It's true, she does believe that!” She wipes her eyes, sighs, folds her hands in her lap. “I hope she's not right,” she says in a small voice.

“It's what she thinks, it's not how she lives. Dad is more to her than a paycheck.”

“That's true.” Joy frowns. “At this point, though, I'd settle for a paycheck.”

The sound of a key turning in the front-door lock startles them. The door opens, both women focus on it, alert. Jonathan enters, his face pink and puffy. He glances into the living room, sees his mother and his aunt, turns away, and starts for the staircase.

“Jonathan! What is it? Why are you home so early?” Joy cries.

A muffled voice retreats up the staircase. “I got sent home. I got expelled!”

Joy rises, white-faced. Anastasia rises, moves to Joy, puts her hand on her arm. “Wait. Don't get upset. It could be nothing. Arden was expelled a couple of times, just for a day or two, an argument with a teacher, lateness, they may just want him to apologize, it may not be serious.”

Joy turns her drained face toward her sister. She utters a tiny moan. “It doesn't matter. It's one more thing and god, I'm so tired. I can't take any more. I don't understand how I got into this mess. How did I, Anastasia?”

“By caring about the kids,” Anastasia says bitterly.

W
OMEN: CARING ABOUT THE
kids or ending up with them, somehow, willy-nilly, refusing to leave them. We cannot give them up. So rare is it that when we do newspapers report on it.

Like me, lying on my bed wondering why I ever got married to anyone at all, and my kids informing me sweetly that if I hadn't I wouldn't have them.

I scoffed, but that was cynicism. I adore them, I would not be without them. Then and now: I still…what can I call it? Not love. More than love and not excluding hate. My heart is tied to them with unbreakable cord. The cord is scarred, pulled thin, has been hacked at, but it does not break, it is a towrope stronger than what it is attached to, strong enough to rip apart the heart before it breaks.

There we were, the two of us, my mother's daughters, not yet her shame (but that would come: “What did I do that both my daughters are divorced? No other children in the family are divorced. Is it something about me?”). We were already bitter, even before we knew that Joy had only a few months left in her beloved house: Justin refused to pay for its upkeep and she had to sell it, give up the one prize she had garnered from what was it? fifteen, sixteen years of marriage.

Then she had to tell her mother. But Belle did not judge her, raise eyebrows, ask prying questions; she and Ed closed around Joy as if our family were celeries instead of carrots, clung to her tightly to keep her up, to keep her children up, helping her with money (all they could spare) and child tending and moving to a small apartment—Belle washing and drying all the dishes and putting them away in the tiny kitchen with its few cabinets (“Well, at least these have doors, Joy”), Ed putting up curtain rods and pictures, moving chairs from one side of the living room to the other as Joy, face strained, voice tense, trying to fit the old dream into a shrunken reality, says, “Well there will be less housework now,” and sells off whatever she owns that is of value. Within months, we are both recognizably, publicly, without men, raising children on our own.

But I knew already, that February, about Toni.

I know that Toni isn't coming back, no matter what he says or thinks. I imagine he tells himself he is because otherwise he would lose all self-respect. He does not intend to be a bad person, he does not want to feel like a bad person. He is having fun and does not want self-contempt interfering with his pleasure. Toni is out in Hollywood writing a screenplay, earning hundreds and hundreds of dollars every week, driving his red Corvette, living in a rented house on the beach in Malibu, he's on top of the world, his family is even speaking to him now, now, suddenly they're proud of him.

Trouble brought Joy and me closer too. Finally one day she asks
her
question and gets answered truthfully: “How long did you say it takes to write a screenplay? He's been gone an awfully long time.”

So I tell her. The truth. For the first time in our lives, we are telling each other the truth. Will this last?

I told her about the day Jay called and told Toni Paramount was picking up their option and would like him to write the screenplay. I'd just come back from a longish trip, and I was doing my laundry. I heard the phone ring and when I came up from the basement Toni was standing in the kitchen with his back to me, he was staring at the window, and I asked who had called. He turned around, the light behind him. His hair was on fire, his eyes were like flares. The only time I'd ever seen him look like that was the first time we'd embraced each other, the first night we made love: burnished. Rose-gold. Body taut, afraid to move, afraid a shift in position will shake the dream loose.