Her Mother's Daughter (124 page)

“What is it?”

She's so acute, I thought. Always wanting to know everything, even the worst. Like me. But Arden wasn't like me. Or maybe she was. “They are good, Arden. Only, they come from someplace protected, safe…from a walled garden.”

She leaned back against the railing.

“Look, you shouldn't ask me. Lots of poets write like that—complacently. Look at late Auden. Lots of poets offer moral lessons learned from nature, instruction in harnessing passions and bending to necessity, learning to live with depression. It's perfectly acceptable. I just don't happen to like it. Or respect it very much.”

In the silence that followed, I reheard my own words. When I let go, I really let go. If I could call my words back…

“I think the kids are awake. I should go in.” And she did.

Damn it. And we were getting along so well.

MARCH
6. 2AM: A few minutes ago Arden knocked on my bedroom door. I was writing in my journal. I closed it and slid it under my blankets, picked up a book and opened it, and called to her to come in.

She had been in bed, she was tousled and puffy-faced. Maybe she'd been crying.

“Mom?” Her voice was exactly as it had been when she was twelve or fourteen, a little-girl voice, a cry. “I know they treated you like shit, Mom. The guys at the farm. I'm sorry. Really. It had nothing to do with you, it's just the way they were…are.”

“They?”

“You mean I was the same way? Maybe I was. We were rotten. I don't know why. It was the times. It made sense then. But I'm sorry.”

I stretched out my arms and she came into them. She perched on the edge of my bed and we embraced each other, in silence, for long minutes.

“Now go to sleep,” I whispered, kissing her ear.

First time Arden has apologized to me since she was twelve. And after I'd offended her. Is it possible we can quarrel and make it up? Then we can be real with each other.

MAR
. 7. I have been walking, every morning, to the wildlife reserve. I set up a tripod and my camera and wait—for the anhingas, the alligators, the herons, the giant tortoises. This is a joy to me. It is so clean: animals live without moral searching, so, without a sense of corruption. For animals, pain is physical only. Or is that all a projection, a delusion?

MARCH
8. I feel recovered, I feel strong. I can carry my camera bag and walk for several miles through the reserve. I think I am getting wonderful photographs. I haven't developed them yet. Maybe I am healed. To some degree, anyway. The black hole still happens to me. I fall into it some nights—or rather, I suppose, it flashes through my brain, an image of letting go, of death as rest and peace and no more pain, as
freedom….

M
AR.
10. Arden came into my room late last night again—carrying a tray with a bottle of brandy and two glasses.

“Up for this?”

How could I not be, no matter how I felt? And no matter that brandy upsets my stomach. It was only a little after eleven. I was sitting in bed reading. I patted the bed beside me, but she sat on the chair, pulling it forward so we could see each other clearly.

“I've been thinking,” she began. “I think I have to leave the farm. There are only five people left there, besides Jake and me and the kids. The times, they are achangin'.” She grinned. “It's not right for me, even if I still feel it's the right way to live. It's too hard. And maybe at some point that kind of life is too isolated for the kids.

“And Philip…he's cute, I'm attracted to him, I wouldn't mind going to bed with him. But I can't base a life on that, not now. I did once—I went to the commune in the first place because of a guy. But now I have the kids, I have to be more responsible. And Philip is sweet now, but who knows what he'd be like once we were lovers, they're not
his
kids, after all, and he's so young, only twenty-two….

“But I'm not sure how I feel about Jacob. Do you think it would be morally wrong for me to go with him and try it out, knowing that I don't feel the same way about him that I used to? Knowing that I probably don't love him anymore?

“I can't figure it all out…” Her voice petered out. She had begun so bravely, so confidently, so logically.

I leaned back against my pillows. “Arden, I have no clear moral rules. I know only one thing: it is immoral to violate yourself. I mean—if you do something that makes you feel rotten, makes you feel corrupt, or dirty, or like a user—it is wrong. It isn't much of a guide, I think.”

She looked troubled.

“How do you feel about going to the city with Jacob?”

She lighted a cigarette. “I don't know.” She sipped her brandy. She does know, I thought.

“I don't like Jacob anymore,” she said finally. “I have liked him less and less since he went back to school. Law school. It did something to him.”

“How would you feel about living with him?”

She made a face.

“And the kids?”

She frowned. “The kids love him. That's the problem.”

“And how is he to them?”

“He's good to them. When he's around. In New York—I just imagine he isn't going to be around much.”

“Does he know how you feel?”

“I don't know.” Lost faint voice.

That sounded like a finished marriage. But who knows? Some people renegotiate. It's not a talent I am familiar with. But I am doing it with my children, am I not?

“I used to think that love was cowardly if it didn't come from strength. Couples who clung together in mutual dependency seemed to me weak, contemptible. I thought truly adult love was an overflowing of energy and affection emanating from a powerful spirit in control of its own fate. And I think part of me felt that any need, any dependency, was contemptible. No compromises. No surrender to another….”

Arden was sitting starkly straight in her chair. No slump.

“I believed freedom was independence, needing no one, having your work and doing what you damn well wanted to do.” I sipped brandy. “And that this was what the heroic man—or woman—did, this was how they lived. And if you ended up lonely, then you lived with that. Because being with people was a compromise, a deference, a dependency. You gave up what you wanted in order to have their company. And that was second-rate. That's what I felt. Until very recently,” my voice broke.

“But then,” I managed a choked laugh, “I am a child of the fifties. But now…”

“…that you're old and wise,” Arden laughed, and I too.

“Yes. Now I think that no one is emotionally self-sufficient. That you can only pretend to be, and if you pretend well enough, you will get sick—in your mind or in your body.”

Arden raised her eyebrows at me. “Is that what happened to you?”

I nodded.

“And when you need, you make compromises, you have to make compromises to get along with another person and if you need them, you will. Even though, for some of us…for me…making compromises is difficult, makes me feel…corrupt, somehow, weak. I'm never sure whether I'm giving up too much or not enough.”

She stared at me. “So what should I do?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” I sighed, “I can only tell you what I know.”

I am Arden's mother. She will remember me always the way I remember my mother. My mother is dying in such a way as to make us all feel we have failed her. She is furious with us because she is dying, because she never lived the life she wanted. This is not fair to us. I want to do better. If I can. For Arden, for Billy, for Franny, whom I love, I love, I love….

MARCH
15, 1980. I've been neglecting my journal. But things have been happening. Jacob called and summoned Arden home. That did it, I'm afraid. She's going back, but with weapons drawn, and she looks like a goddess, tan and tawny-haired and strong…. She's gained a little weight and she doesn't slump anymore. He won't recognize her.

I'm going to drive her and the children to the airport, but stay on here myself for another week or two. It will be dismal without her. I've grown used to being with my sweet girl.

MARCH
20. Clara came down shattered:
Outsiders
is bankrupt. She is devastated. She came to me because, she said, “When you're in agony, you go to the person you love, whether or not she loves you back.” She is so touching, she is like a child in her hurt, every time I touch her or do something kind for her, she curls up against me like a baby.

It comes to me what it is with us: we
mother
each other. I don't know if that is how all women are with each other, but we are. That's why she was always yammering at me about my mother, I guess. Telling me I could get mothering—better mothering—elsewhere if I would just look, reach out my hand.

She's too distraught right now to be sexual, so I haven't had to make any decisions about that. We are talking about possible futures. Maybe we'll start a new magazine together, one with photographs and fiction and poetry as well as analysis. Arden might like to be part of it. But I'm afraid it would take more money than I have.

Clara and I are going to stay on here for another couple of weeks and try to decide what to do.

It is April, and the city is still cold and very windy. The wind blows through the old ill-fitting windows in Clara's apartment. She has nailed plastic over the windows, but the wind is so strong it inflates the plastic, it billows out, it seems alive.

Anastasia and Clara are curled up on the sofa with blankets around them. Anastasia is upset. She is telling Clara that Arden and Jacob had a terrible fight, he stormed off and left her at the commune, “without a car, Clara! Can you imagine being stuck up there without a car! So of course she ended up getting involved with Philip after all, well, there they were and they were attracted to each other…. I can't fault her. I know how useless principle is against desire.”

“Oh! I thought you knew more about the uselessness of desire in the face of principle.”

Anastasia punches Clara lightly on the arm. Clara smiles then gets up and fetches the wine bottle. They are visiting at Clara's tonight because Anastasia's apartment is full of people: Arden, Jeremy, Jeffrey, Sarah, and Franny. Arden has left the commune and come to New York with the three kids and eighteen bags, bundles, and boxes containing their entire worldly possessions. She has to stay at Anastasia's, she has no place else to go.

“So what is she going to do? She can't stay with you indefinitely.”

“What can she do? They don't pay you for writing poetry. She could be a waitress. But what about the kids?”

“She can't go on staying with you in that little apartment.”

“Clara—I told Arden that I would buy a loft somewhere and we could divide it and all live together.”

“No!” Clara swings around. “What about us, Anastasia! You promised me, you promised me you'd think about being with me! You promised! How can we be together? She doesn't like me!”

“Clara, she's my child!”

Clara pulls away from Anastasia, lights a cigarette.

“Anyway, she turned me down.”

Clara turns. “She
did
!” Incredulous.

“She was very serious and responsible. She thanked me, she said that would be wonderful, the solution to her problems. But she said—well, she reached over and laid her hand on mine, and said, “Thanks, Mom. Really. But you know—our problems, yours and mine, yours and Billy's—mostly they arose because we were too close, too much together. I don't want to repeat that.'

“‘Too close?' I cried, ‘I thought we were too distant!'

“She shook her head. ‘No, Mom. All those years. Before Toni, even after Toni…even when we were still living with Daddy…it was the three of us against everybody, the three of us together.'

“'I wanted it to be like that! I wanted us to have a sense of being a family!'

“‘I know. But it wasn't good. Oh, it was good in some ways. And I know you meant well. But we were too tied together, too
bound.
'

“I began to cry. Arden rolled her eyes. She patted my shoulder, she handed me tissues, she said, ‘Come on, Mom.'

“‘I'm all right,' I sniffled. Then burst out in a voice that sounded more angry than pathetic: ‘I just wanted to protect you! From your father's ill-temper! His anger! And from anxiety, you didn't know how poor we were, how hard things were for me! I wanted you both to feel secure, loved, close. I didn't want you to suffer the way I did as a child, from my mother's distance, her anger!…' I cried some more.

“Franny came in from school then. She dropped her books on a chair and ran over to me. She darted a furious look at her sister, exclaiming ‘Arden!' and put her arms around me.

“‘What's the matter, Mommy, little Mommy? Don't cry.'

“And I began to laugh, and so did Arden, and Franny, hurt and bewildered, glared at both of us, and we both reached out to hug her at the same moment. And I said to them, ‘See! I've unleashed a monster. I got back my feelings, and now I bawl!'”

Anastasia laughs.

Clara looks troubled. “It pains me the way you put your children before me. When it comes to them, I'm not even second-best.”

“Oh, Clara,” Anastasia wails, “what can I do?”

They have given up the idea of founding a magazine. It was more than they could manage, and Clara, the expert money-raiser, was not able to find a backer. She did find a job, however, scouting feminist books for a group of foreign publishers. She gets a small retainer from each of them—enough for her to live on, frugal as she is—and a percentage on the books they accept. And she gets to read everything she is interested in. She's a little depressed, but not despairing; she's even content, for the moment. Anastasia is having another show: the first was so successful that Alison Tate asked to see the pictures Anastasia has taken for herself over all those years. She has decided to do another show featuring these pictures. Anastasia is pleased, but wishes she could do something for her friend. Anastasia thinks Clara should write a book on feminist theories. Clara sighs, nods. It wouldn't make any money for her anyway, she says. Then she sighs again and says, Someday. Anastasia caresses the top of her head.