Her Mother's Daughter (117 page)

MARCH
10, 1978. Brightwaters. Mother is sick. She has emphysema. That's what's been wrong all this while, why she's had trouble walking, playing golf, climbing stairs. She can't breathe.

I realized this when we were in Florida. It was hard being with her—she walks so slowly, she has to be helped in and out of cars, up stairs. You can't move with pleasure when you're with her. It was especially hard on Franny, but she's such a good kid, she held “Gramma's” arm, she talked directly into her better ear in a soft voice. Mom is only seventy-four, but she moves and looks like a really old woman. Dad still bounces along like a boy.

I made a doctor's appointment for the week after their return, and went with her. But I spoke to Mina privately beforehand. Mina's first diagnosis was emphysema, but she took other tests, and yesterday all the test results came in. No cancer. I drove out here to “celebrate” with them. I tell Mom she should be relieved, all she has to do is give up smoking and she'll feel better. But she doesn't want to give up smoking. It's almost as if she'd just as soon die as not smoke. I understand, I'm addicted too. She is very depressed. She sits in the rocker and looks out at the lawn, the lake. Sometimes she calls me to her, and I go eagerly, thinking she wants to chat, play Chinese checkers or gin rummy, something. But she doesn't want to talk. All she wants is a puff of my cigarette.

Today is Dad's birthday and I took them out to dinner. This morning we went shopping for a present for Dad—it's hard to find anything to give him, he has everything he needs or wants. I ask him what he'd like.

“Just that Belle gets better, that's all,” he says, his forehead wrinkled with pain.

APRIL
1, 1978. Well, it's on! My first show! It is in a bright broad space, framed beautifully, it looks wonderful, the kids all came in for the opening, Mom and Dad came, we drank champagne, it was… No. It wasn't fun. It should have been. What's wrong with me?

Well, for one thing, the reviews bothered me. They were so full of hate, outrage. As if none of the reviewers had ever seen an angry, grim woman before, as if it were an offense against public decency to show women that way. Oh, they were praising too, they talked about the power of the show as a whole. I begin to understand why I put my mother-child photographs away in an envelope all those years ago. I knew.

M
AY
2, 1978. Alison has sold three-quarters of my photographs. This is spectacular, she tells me. We split fifty-fifty, but she is asking so much for them that even so, I'm becoming mildly rich. And moderately famous. Mom is very proud, she has hung the two I gave her right in her center hall.

J
UNE
4, 1978. The first photographs of women are in the June issue of
Woman,
which came out in the middle of May. They will run straight through November, and in December there will be a long summing-up essay. The pictures are very good, although the accompanying texts fudge the truth, just as Clara predicted. It's strange, this feminism that fudges. Is it conceivable that a socialist group would deny that capitalists were their main problem? Men have never hesitated to blame their problems on women. But men are somehow sacrosanct. I tried to bring this up with Lu, but it made her uneasy, she glided away from the topic.

Clara is intensely interested in this series. She wants to run a commentary on it, a piece about how and why women fudge the fact that men are their major problem. She wants me to write it. I won't. I can't. Whatever troubles men have caused me, my major problem is not men but the fact that I have become one of them, inexpressive and unable to feel, all tight inside like a sealed tank that threatens to explode if the safety valve is loosened. Clara says I suffered plenty from men and my refusal to admit it is another example of my mind dictating what I am permitted to feel, and ignoring what I really do feel.

“You know, you seem to believe you can't lament anything, that you have to be on top of everything—or seem to be. You say you just refused to be a wife so it's no wonder Brad divorced you, but goddamit, it had to hurt you when he changed, when he became a person you didn't like who didn't like you! He
betrayed
you, long before he had an affair: his father was the correspondent! Why don't you admit that? And Toni broke your heart leaving you like that, just before your fortieth birthday, my god, what a thing to do! And he seduced Arden! What a thing! It's scandalous! And what about Franny's distress after she saw Toni? You were very upset about that.”

“He didn't seduce Arden. If anything, she tried to seduce him. She flew out to see him—she told me about it—she
planned
to have an affair with him after he left me.”

Clara's eyebrow went up.

I shrugged. “No, she didn't. She said once she wasn't involved with me, he wasn't all that appealing to her. She said he seemed to be—nothing. I told her she ought to think about what that meant about her feelings about me. She gave me a filthy look and stormed out of the room.”

“That kid is really something,” Clara said.

“It's my fault,” I said.

She sighed.

“And what about Franny?” This woman refuses to give up.

Yes. She didn't talk about him at all while we were traveling. What a delight she is, that kid! Everywhere we went she was snapping away at my side or off somewhere, taking pictures of places. She is fascinated by places more than people; all sorts of places—even Route 1, as I call it, or Main Street—the same everywhere: hundreds of hamburger and pizza joints, used-car dealers, stereo shops, neon signs. She finds something fascinating in housing tracts, decrepit farms, the streets of small cities. She came home with fifty rolls of film and made me teach her how to develop it. She got some very nice shots, and now she has a sort of travelogue of the United States. She plans to write short comments on the scenes—comments poking fun at the scenes or at teen-aged values and preconceptions—and submit the thing to a publisher as A Teen-Eyed View of America. I can't get over her! But maybe she's too old too soon?

It was after we came back, after I'd taken my mother to the doctor, yes, it was the night after we saw the doctor and got the diagnosis of emphysema. I was feeling lower than usual, and Franny saw it and suggested that we just call and have a pizza sent up for dinner, and we did. While we were eating, she looked over at me and asked me how I felt.

My throat filled. “I feel that my mother never had a life and now she's dying.”

“But she did, Mom,” Franny argued. “I mean, she's had you and Joy and Grandpa all these years. And she has that nice house.”

“That isn't what she wanted from life. She wanted—oh, she had dreams.”

Franny looked puzzled. “But if that isn't what she wanted, why did she have it? Why didn't she have something else?”

“Life doesn't always permit us to choose, Franny,” I said in my bitter monotone.

She regarded me for a while. Then, in a thin voice, “Is that how you feel? That you didn't get to choose?”

“God, no! I chose!”

“Then why are you so mad all the time?”

“Mad? Angry? Is that what you mean?”

She shrank. She stopped chewing. Silently, she nodded.

“Is that how I seem to you? Angry?”

She managed to swallow what was in her mouth. “Yes.”

I looked at her amazed. “Franny, do you feel I'm angry with
you
?”

“Sometimes. I'm never really sure.”

Oh my god.
Mommy, are you mad at me? Did I do something? Mommy, why are you angry all the time? You're always angry, Mommy! Why!

“Mommy?” Franny's voice was tremulous and it brought me to. I was leaning over, elbows on the table, my head in my hands. I raised my head.

“Yes, honey. I'm here. It's just a shock. I didn't know I appeared angry.”

“Well maybe it isn't angry exactly. It's sort of…tense…as if you're all coiled up inside, ready to explode. As if you're
looking
for something to get mad about. And, I mean, everything you say is so…so bad all the time, so…I don't know.” She was pink-faced now, and she pushed her plate away from her.

“Negative?” I suggested.

“Yes. That's it. Negative. Like Gramma. Like when she has a problem and she tells you about it and you say, why don't you do this or that or the other thing and to each thing she has an answer, nothing is any good, she just refuses to solve it. Like she
wants
the problem to be insoluble, you know?”

It was my turn to nod.

“Like that time in Florida,” Franny was gaining enthusiasm now, speaking with energy. We were off the subject of me. She took another slice of pizza and pulled her plate back. “She said she wanted to have a brunch and invite the whole family but it was too much work for her. And you said she should serve some prepared foods, coleslaw and potato salad from the deli, cold cuts, things like that. And she said she wouldn't serve food like that in her house, she hated it. So you said, well, you could have a ham, that's no work, and make macaroni and cheese the day before. And she said she wanted to serve baked beans, her own baked beans, and they were a lot of work. And you said, so make them a few days before. And she got really annoyed with you and said ‘Oh, Anastasia, I know how to plan a meal! Besides, it isn't the cooking I mind, it's the cleaning up.' And you said, and now you were being very careful, ‘Why don't you hire someone to help you?' And she said, ‘Who would I hire?' And you said look in the telephone book, there were services for waitresses and people to clean up. And she got impatient, she waved her hand at you, she said, ‘Oh, those people are no use, I'd have to show them everything, it would be more work than without them.' And you closed your mouth.” Franny whooped with laughter.

I laughed too. “What do you think she really wanted?”

“She wanted you to go out and help her.”

“That's what I thought too.” I got up from the table and went into the kitchen and poured coffee for myself. I carried the cup back to the living room and sank into an easy chair.

“But you didn't want to,” Franny grinned wickedly.

“No. I've done that. Lots of times.”

“I know.”

“I don't want to be her alter ego anymore.”

Franny's face looked hurt. “I wasn't attacking you, Mom.”

“I
know
you weren't!” But I'd heard my voice too. “That's what you mean? By angry?”

“Yeah.”

I considered. I don't feel angry, I feel sad. Why does it come out that way?

“I don't feel angry,” I said. “I feel sad.”

“But why?”

You can't tell a child that every choice brings pain, can you. You can't send her out into life believing that. You can't tell a person of fifteen that what everyone inevitably discovers in life is that they are alone. So I tried to laugh a little. “I think I inherited my sadness.”

“From your mother?”

I nodded.

“You have what you want, don't you?” she pleaded. She rose and came toward me, she dropped onto the footstool in front of my chair. She leaned forward. “Don't you?” She wanted, it was important, she needed to believe that life can be beautiful, that there are happy endings. “You have your work and you love that. And now you're making lots of money again. And you have Arden and Billy and me.”

“I have you, yes, sweetheart,” I said, leaning over, pulling her close to me, enfolding her. For how long, though, I thought. I had never let myself feel about Franny as I had about the other kids, that she was mine, part of me, that we were bound together forever. I treated her like a gift lent to me for a while. Regularly I would look at her and wonder when it would begin, the turning away, the hatred….

“Franny,” I hugged her, “I'm really sorry if I seem angry. I guess if I seem angry I must be angry but I didn't realize…sometimes I'm so blind. I love you, I'm almost never mad at you.”

“Except when I don't clean my room, or don't come home at the time I'm supposed to,” she smiled.

“Well—that's not profound anger.”

“I know,” she said indulgently.

She was sprawled across the footstool, her arms around me, I leaning forward with my arms around her, and she dropped her arms and leaned her head against my breast and said, “I feel sad about Daddy.”

I stroked her forehead. “You do, baby?”

She nodded. “He seems so…lost, somehow. Like he's always running to catch something he never gets. I mean, maybe he gets the thing he's running after, but it isn't what he thought it would be. He's always disappointed. He was telling me about the lady he married after you got divorced, Lydia? And his voice got so…husky, as though…and he felt so sorry for himself. You never talk that way about Brad or about him. And he's always complaining about money, but he has that house and lots of expensive clothes and that Porsche, and he eats in such fancy restaurants….” She sat up suddenly. “Oh! He took me to The Brown Derby, did I tell you?”

She babbled—a child again, briefly—about this momentous experience, then stretched herself and stood up. “I think I'll go start writing my commentary.”

I smiled at her. “It must be hard for you. A lost father and an angry mother.”

“Yeah,” she agreed yawning. “But everybody has something. I'm pretty fortunate compared to my friends. They think so, anyway.”

“You've discussed this with them?”

“Sure. We all talk about how things are at home.” She turned suddenly. “You don't mind, do you?”

“I don't mind. It's good. I wish kids had done that when I was a kid,” I said. She drifted away, I sat there, and an echo sounded like a wind chime, my mother saying “I wish I could have talked to my mother like that.”