Her Mother's Daughter (119 page)

Joy broke off. “Remember how he used to snap his fingers at her at the dinner table when he wanted something?”

I shook my head. “I never saw that.”

“Well, he did. Totally subservient!” She shook her head as if she were trying to shake a flea out of her ear. “Yes, well, she said she wasn't. She said she had her own way of protecting herself. She said that tight as he was, she was able to put away a few dollars in a bank account every week, and that she'd been doing that for thirty years. She used to hide her bankbook in with her Kotex pads, because she knew he'd never look there.”

Both of us giggled.

“But after she went into menopause, it was a real problem where to hide it!”

We both burst into laughter.

Joy laughed long and hard, a laugh that moved into hysteria. Tears came into her eyes, laughter-tears. Then she stopped, wiped her eyes, and continued: “So she said, ‘So my dear, I have something, and I want it to go to you and the children. Promise me you'll let me know if you need it. Promise!' I promised. I was sobbing by then, we were clinging to each other. I felt as if we were conspirators or something, I felt that we could have been living in 1600 or 1000 or anytime at all in the past, that it was always like this for women, that we were simply repeating what had happened a million times before…it's always the same, it never changes.”

“And did you? Ask her to help?”

Her ravaged face sank further into tiredness. “I had to. I didn't want to. But I had to.”

Amy had helped, just as Mother and Dad had helped, and Joy's kids went to college. But Amy died before they finished.

“By then, the kids were in gear. They
knew.
They had summer jobs and part-time jobs, and they managed to work themselves through.”

There was a provision in Amy's will that her savings were to go to her grandchildren, but when she died there was nothing left in the account. James did not offer to help his grandchildren. It was as if they were not his grandchildren. Justin by then had married again and had a new baby.

“That money was for her protection—in case James left her, or left most of his money to Justin,” Joy whispered, “and she broke herself helping me.”

“Someday,” she was blowing her nose now, “I told the kids we're going to drive out there and go to the cemetery and say good-bye to her properly. And lay roses on her grave….”

Another bout of nose blowings, clearings of throat. “She loved her grandchildren more than Justin loves his children! I can't get over that!”

I pondered. “The thing is, you got out. Amy didn't. So you went through hell for twenty-five years; she went through it her entire married life. A different kind.”

“I suppose.” She didn't sound convinced. She stood and poured more coffee in our cups. She spilled it, her hand was trembling. “Mom and Dad have been wonderful to me too. Great. Terrific. Couldn't be better. It's sort of reconciled me to…everything.”

“Reconciled you?”

She shrugged. “It made me feel she cares about me after all. Maybe even loves me. You know, I never felt Mother loved me very much. I was like Daddy. There was Mother and you—and Daddy and me—and we were outside.”

“Yes.” I couldn't lie. “Mother isn't great at loving anyone. She wasn't given love—oh, that isn't true, I know Grandma loved her, I remember how she used to look at her—but she wasn't given something, she wasn't given emotional sustenance I guess. And so she couldn't give it to us. Like the baby rat that isn't washed clean, you know?”

She didn't.

“Well, if a female rat has a baby, the first thing she does after it is born is lick it clean. But experimenters have taken away the baby rat before the mother has a chance to do that…”

“Cruel!”

“And if the baby is female and has babies of her own, she won't lick
them
clean. They're imprinted so early! Anyway, I guess what you don't get you can't give.”

“I didn't get it and I gave it.”

I stared at her. This was true. “But you had problems. Remember, years ago, after Julie was born, you asked me once if I was afraid I didn't love my children? And I said no, I was afraid they wouldn't love me?”

She laughed. “But that was before Jenny was born.” She stretched her arm toward me and I handed her a cigarette. She leaned back and lighted it. Her face was calm, smiling. “My kids were so wonderful! I didn't know how to love them, really. I was always anxious, like I had to be told what to do, how to be a mother, or read it in a book, because it didn't come to me naturally. But when Jenny was born, my kids—well, they'd spent summers with Amy, often, and she loved them…so they'd learned, I guess. Anyway, the kids just loved her up, they held her and cooed over her and played with her and loved her so much and I watched them and I saw…and she loved them back, oh god how her eyes would light up when they came in from school! That's how I learned, I learned from my kids. Thank god I had a third child, I never would have known….”

My voice came out low. “I was too jealous of you to love you like that when you were little.”

“Well, you would be!” she flared. “Given the way Mother is. She sets us against each other—you know, she praises you to me and me to you. She's really possessive of Dad. You know for a while there, he was coming over here all the time to fix things for me, just for something to do, you know, he's so bored. And she'd come too, but she couldn't stand it. He was so happy, and of course I was very nice to him, I made a fuss over him, well it is great the way he fixes things….”

“Yes.” When I was nine years old, I began to love my father….

We sat in silence.

“Mother loves you,” I said finally.

“I know. She just makes me feel I'm shit. All the time.”

“Well. If it's any consolation to you—I'm not sure it is, I'm not sure anything could be—there's a cost for what she gives me. She has me in this bind: she wants me to do things for her, be something for her, but if I become attentive, if I go out often and stay for a few days, she gets as nasty to me as she is to Dad. And whatever I do is not enough, she makes sure I know it is not enough, it can't help. And I die, it does something terrible to me to look at her looking at me that way: saying did you imagine this could help? Well, you know.”

“Yeah. Like that dress you gave her for her birthday. That dress is gorgeous! What is it? Feracci or something?”

“Lucca Ferelli. I mean, I knew it was very dressy, but I thought she'd have something splendid to wear on Christmas, or some special occasion, and I knew from the cut that it would fit her.”

Joy twisted her mouth. “It was really beautiful. And what did she say? ‘What do I want with this?' Something like that.”

I nodded. “She said, ‘What do I want with this?' as if it was a piece of shit. Then she saw my face and said, ‘Where would I ever wear it?'”

Joy sighed.

“But she keeps asking me in her own silent way, to do something, to save her… and I want to, I would if I could. But she's inconsolable. Oh, I love her. You know that. You love her too. We all do. Profoundly. She doesn't know what she does to us. She thinks she doesn't matter, she is sure she doesn't matter to us. And so she makes you feel it doesn't make any difference to her that you love her…. And it doesn't—her sorrow, her desolation, are all that exist…. She lies cold in the center of my heart like a gravestone.”

“She does in mine too,” Joy said quietly.

But does Joy lie in bed at night whirling down down into a black abyss of pain? Does she lie there wishing to get to a place where nothing matters, where she can sleep deeply, restfully, and never wake up? Does she spend her nights fighting off the desire to die and her days pretending she doesn't feel it? Does she whirl down into the black hole, lie there in that pain, that incredible pain, sharp and aching at once, piercing every organ starting with the heart moving outward through the body, flowing into the arms and legs, penetrating the genitals, shoots of pain, of aloneness, knowing the aloneness, recognizing it, it is familiar from childhood, it is the only thing that feels safe….

It seems unfair that even after you lose the capacity for pleasure, you go on feeling pain.

Maybe she does, though. Maybe I should ask her. No. She doesn't. No. No.

OCTOBER
20. Dinner with Clara. Very upset. I had too much to drink. So did she. She wants us to be lovers. She loves me, she says. I can no longer love, I have no love left in me. I told her that. I've told her that before. She says I'm sick and won't help myself. I shrug. How can I help myself?

But it pains me to see her tormented for something she feels I could so easily give her. But I couldn't, easily. How can I offer desire I don't feel? Promise to compromise, to have a life together, when I am so rigidly committed to doing what I want to do when I want to do it?

I love Clara, in my fashion. But whatever I feel nowadays doesn't go deep, the way my feelings used to, before—when I was young, when I was in love with Brad, when I was falling out of love with Brad, when I was falling in love with Toni. In those days, emotion was so overwhelming that nothing mattered beside it, it was a whirlwind, a tornado. Now my feelings are swift birds skimming the surface of the water but never plunging in, vanishing, colorless, into the grey sky.

The only deep feeling I have is sorrow.

She says, “You want to die first. Before your mother.”

Mother: a splinter in the heart that cannot be extracted. I cannot think about her without pain. I think about what I can do, what I can give her. I drive out there with offerings. They are accepted with that grim smile, the one that says what makes you think this can fill the void? Love. The hardest thing, no wonder philosophers urge against it. Much harder than hate, anger, aggression. They are cheap, facile, next to it.

But it isn't just Mother. The kids pain me just as much. All except Franny. Billy finished medical school last year, and I thought he'd come to New York for his residency. He did well, he must have had some choice. But he took an internship at Mass General. These years I see him at Christmas and for a few days in the summer. He is never going to come home again. It is not their physical presence that I need, but their presence in my life. Home is where the heart is, and their hearts are not with me.

DECEMBER
29, 1978. Billy was here! He had five days off for Christmas, and he came and stayed here! He left this morning. He had to be back at the hospital at noon.

I didn't expect him. He spent Christmas Eve with our family, out at Mother's. I did what I have been doing for the past few years—since she likes to have Christmas at her house, but it is too much for her to prepare it—I go out there with Franny a few days before and we do the cooking with Mom's help. This doesn't entirely please her either—she likes to be in command of her own kitchen. But she prefers it to driving all the way into the city and sleeping in my room, in a double bed with Dad; and Joy has to prepare Christmas Day dinner and can't do both. So this seems the best compromise. But Mother doesn't like compromises, and she was grouchy with me for getting her oven messy.

Billy came out to Long Island the night before Christmas Eve. Oh he is beautiful, tall and slender and sweet-faced. We played bridge that night and he teased Mother out of her ill humor; the next day he and Franny went out for a long hike, and came back red-cheeked and bright-eyed and he made cocoa for them. He is a sweet boy. I was tousled and pink in the face myself, from cooking, and he made me sit down and he finished the sauce for the seafood ragout. I've graduated to things like that, hot dogs are no longer my only accomplishment.

Christmas Eve was nice enough, although as usual, I was in pain because Arden wasn't there. But Billy was so sweet it almost eased the Arden-ache. The next day he went to the Carpenters', taking the train, and we went to Joy's. We drove home, got here around midnight. I didn't expect to see Billy again, I thought he'd go straight from the Carpenters' to La Guardia and back to Boston. But at one in the morning the buzzer sounded and the doorman said one William Carpenter was below. My heart hasn't zagged up like that since…I don't know when. Maybe not since I realized that Toni loved me.

“SEND HIM UP!”
I cried, and went to meet him at the door. Then it occurred to me I should be cool, not show too much emotion: I might embarrass him. I took deep breaths, and then opened the apartment door to wait for him. He smiled so broadly and easily when he saw me standing there, it was like the old days when no shadow fell on our love for each other.

He came in, easy, casual with his knapsack. “Had a couple of days off and thought I'd spend them with you,” he explained. “See a little of the city.” Did he want to be sure I knew he wasn't here because he wanted to see me?

“Sure, terrific!” I couldn't help myself. “I'm glad you're here,” I kissed him.

Franny had been in bed, but heard something and came bounding out in her long-john pajamas and leaped up directly at him, arms and legs spread apart. He caught her, grabbing her around the waist. She was astride his front and they whirled a little.

“What have you been eating, stones?” Billy laughed and put her down, red-faced from exertion. “You're getting too heavy for this.”

Franny mock-pouted. “Mommy!” she complained, “I don't want to get big. I don't want to grow up! Do something, Mommy!”

“What can I tell you? You could diet.” She
was
a little pudgy.

“Give up hot-fudge sundaes? Never!” she announced haughtily, and threw herself like a five-year-old into an armchair. “Hey, Billy, you gonna stay here?”

Yes, he announced, and sat down on the floor, leaning against an armchair, facing her. I sat down on the couch. The kids talked, bantered, we all talked, saying nothing substantial, just chatting. I was basking in his presence, it didn't matter what we talked about. Every time I looked at him my heart would give a ping—who knows what to call it, pleasure, pain, ecstasy? It was love, whatever else it contained. The room looked golden to me, sepia, like the old rotogravure sections of the newspaper, soft warm light cast by this boy's body—man, really. He was twenty-eight.