Her Mother's Daughter (125 page)

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17, 1980. Income tax time over. Ugh. Tax on everything, goddamned tax on breathing. That's what I told Clara. Yes, I want her, I want what we have together, despite our disagreements. But what about my kids? I finally have them back, we're close again, first time in years and years, and I don't want to blow it.

But then I thought: that's blackmail. If I deny my love for Clara, if I give her up so that Arden will not get jealous—and who knows? Franny might get jealous too, they're so used to having me all to themselves….Yes, if I do that, then I will never again be able to be involved with anyone, it is giving in to a pressure that ought not to be brought. Because, after all, Arden has a husband of her own, and someday Franny…

It is like the time Brad tried to threaten me into giving up Toni.

I suppose Clara and I could be secret lovers.

No, Arden would know, she would see it the first time she saw us together.

Besides, that's cowardly.

No.

It is May, a nice month in New York. The trees have a green tinge and soft edges. Central Park looks like a pale green lake from here. People walk jauntily along the sidewalks of the West Side, their jackets unzipped, blown open. And the wind gusting in from the river along Riverside Drive has lost the sting of winter.

Anastasia has just returned from China, where she went to do a set of pictures for a publisher who's rich enough to do anything he feels like doing—and he wanted to do a book on women in China. She was away for six weeks, it was glorious, her eyes are full of rice fields and mountains, everything on earth tinted the colors of earth—gold and sepia and the palest of blues. Tiny figures carrying parasols, walking slowly through the rice fields, which they weed with their feet; ancient houses of adobe, with red-tiled roofs darkened by time into sienna, gardens filled with sunflowers, a duck pond, children leading water buffalo.

On the way back she stopped in France, where she was given an award for her photographs of French woman authors, and treated as an honored guest. She enjoyed this.

She says to Clara: “I like being old.”

“You're not old.”

“I'm old enough. I have twinges of arthritis in my thumbs, I can't carry my camera bag as far as I used to, my hearing is a little faded, and I need eyeglasses to read the telephone book. I'm twenty pounds heavier than I ought to be, and you know I'm not going to get any younger.”

Clara puts her hand on Anastasia's face and strokes it. “You're more beautiful than when you were young. I was looking at your photograph albums while you were gone. It's true.”

“Well.” Anastasia tries to pretend she isn't pleased. “But that's not what I mean. I mean—when I was young—all through the early years—I was walking around in terror. Not of anything in particular, just of my own ignorance. I felt I didn't understand anything, how the world worked, why people did and said the things they did and said, how I should act, what would happen if I risked or didn't risk, whether I could afford—in myself, I mean—to live out my life; or whether I could only afford to live through it.

“But now…everything is still uncertain, always changing…but I feel I understand why things happen, why people act as they do, up to a point. I feel I
know.
It's wonderful, it's calming. I know my expanses and my limits, and I am content with them.”

Clara raises an eyebrow: “Have you been to see your mother lately?”

Anastasia smiles: this is a rhetorical question. Clara and Anastasia know exactly what the other does every day. No day passes that they do not speak together, if only for a few minutes. “You know I have,” Anastasia grins. Anastasia goes to visit her mother immediately after she returns from a long trip. Always.

“I've been waiting for the reaction,” Clara says, teasingly, smiling, trying not to arouse anger.

“I came home and hit the wall forty times. Then I went about my business.”

“I don't believe it.”

“We talked. About growing old.” She turns to Clara. “Do you see how teary I am these days? It's all your fault.”

“Better outside than inside,” Clara says shortly.

“I told her that of the two states, youth and age, I preferred age. She said, ‘Things are better now than in my childhood—oh, the not-knowing, so terrible!' But she didn't like age either. I said, ‘But here you are, loved, comfortable, you have beauty around you.' And she turned away from me, her face was angry. I said, ‘What, Mom?'

“‘Oh, Anastasia, how can you ask?'

“She was not looking at me, she was not looking at anything. Her face was tragic, all its lines sinking down, the eyes like my grandmother's eyes, clouded with sorrow. ‘I used to ask myself, Why am I so depressed? Other women have less than I. All women's lives are miserable, I'm better off than most. But…' and she turned toward me then, ‘there's such a great void in me. The lack of accomplishment….'

“It broke my heart,” Anastasia says, thickly.

“She could have done something!” Clara says sharply. Clara has no tolerance for despair. “She had years and years after you were all grown! She could have gone back to drawing, painting, something!”

Anastasia looks at Clara. Clara does not understand that fifty years of training in self-sacrifice cannot simply be thrown off like a shabby shawl. Clara has no children, will never have children. Anastasia lays her hand on Clara's. She understands that Clara's sharpness comes from pain.

They are having a drink in Anastasia's apartment. They are talking about living together. They have become lovers, but Clara wants greater intimacy. Franny is uncomfortable with the idea, and Franny still lives here. Franny has gone to bed.

Franny is going to be graduated next month, and after all the work she and her mother did last September, filling out college applications, now she says she doesn't want to go to college, she wants to stay with her mother in New York, she wants to be a photographer, and will apprentice herself to her mother.

“But I'm going to insist. She's been accepted at Oberlin, and that will be a good place for her. She can take her camera. She can study photography there. I don't want to repeat the mistake I made with the others.”

“Good!”

“But do you know? Now she's starting! She's yelling at me. Franny! She says I never wanted her, she feels like an intruder in life and it's my fault, she says I left her all through her childhood and now I owe her my presence!”

“She can never get enough of you,” Clara sighs.

“There is never enough mother.”

“I had enough of mine. Years ago!” Clara laughs.

June days in the city are golden and bright, people walk along the streets humming, carrying their jackets over their shoulders, or tied around their waists. Anastasia is busy. She is planning parties. First there will be a graduation party for Franny, to be held in the apartment. It will consist of pizza and gelato.

And Billy is about to finish his residency and to marry Livvy. Then they will go off for a honeymoon to Somalia. Everyone laughs at that, although Somalia is no laughing matter. But they are happy about it.

There's a hum in Anastasia's head. She's thinking about how many pizzas and what to give Billy and Livvy for a wedding present, and the best way to hang the new show. She considers whether she should really fish out those old pictures of mothers and babies, as Alison Tate has asked, for a show next year. They're old, fifties' photos, just right, Alison says, a comment on the period.

Anastasia thinks the fifties weren't that different from 1980. Look at poor Arden, forced to go back to Jacob because what else could she do? Feeling compromised, corrupt. He too, maybe. They're trying but they are strained with each other, the children are showing the tension, Jeffrey acting up so wildly. Can't protect them, ever.

Anastasia is thinking, I can't ask Clara to move in the minute Franny leaves for school, she'd feel usurped. Maybe I should move to a bigger apartment, but they're so expensive and now that this building is going co-op, I have a chance to buy this one so cheaply….

Anastasia doesn't know what she should do.

In July, Anastasia picks up her journal again. She writes:

Graduation party for Franny a huge success, and she's gone off with Jillian to wait table at a resort in Maine, anyone who can get those two gigglers to work has my respect. She's still a giggler, a baby, despite school in New York. I'm glad.

And Billy and Livvy, a beautiful wedding, her parents are not ostentatious, I was worried they might be. Such sweet kids, they both glowed. And went to Capri first, on the way to Somalia, for five days of luxury before the deprivation that awaits them, the heartbreak. But they won't be heartbroken because they will feel they are doing something, that they are not helpless.

The show a great success again, again despite the critics. They scream: why does this woman photograph only women? When for the ten years I was with
World
I photographed only men and no one complained about that. But they're lying about what upsets them, it isn't that I photograph women, it's the kind of women I shoot: Chinese women sweeping the street, women working in a corset factory in Queens, women carrying fardels in Greece, working in the fields in India, cleaning public lavatories in Penn Station. They like shows featuring women if Richard Avedon does them: images of the impossible, women who transcend body: stark black poles with a white blur of a face, frozen whipped cream caught in space, big black blurs for eyes, women who don't exist, for even the models don't look like that in life, they are made of flesh and blood and muscle and bone and when they move their blouses pull out of their skirts, and when they laugh their mascara runs, and they can't walk in those heels without falling.

Whereas my women are a little gross, not gross enough to be grotesque (that would be all right), just enough to seem real. And they probably wouldn't have minded so much if I'd concentrated only on women in Turkey or Greece or India—it's the American women they are offended by.

Still—someone must like them, my pictures, because they're selling.

AN UNDATED ENTRY
: Mother pours a glass of water and sips at it for a half hour. Then she puts it in the refrigerator. I ask her why she does this. “Why waste it?” she asks, surprised at my question.

Franny opens a can of soda, takes a few swigs, and leaves it on the kitchen counter. If I don't pour it out, it will remain there for days, along with all the others she will have opened in that time. I tell her she should visit Billy and Livvy in Somalia. She doesn't understand.

How can a woman with such a mother have such a daughter?

It is November 1981. Anastasia is packing. She is going to the Middle East on an assignment for UNICEF. She is excited. She imagines sailing down the Nile, riding over bumpy sandy roads to dusty little villages in Morocco, in Egypt, in Algeria. She would like to see Isfahan, she has always wanted to see Isfahan, to stand awed at the ancient carvings, the mosaics, the towers rising miraculously in the sand in the middle of miles of barren land. But Americans cannot go to Iran now. And women cannot go unescorted to Iraq, so she will not see Baghdad either. Someday, she thinks.

Still, she will see bent brown peasants pulling carts as they have pulled them for centuries, and women walking along the roads, wraiths in purdah, yet proud, their carriage belying their status. She is going to photograph those women, to talk to them, perhaps even photograph their faces. She thinks: Faces and bodies tell everything about us. What kind of state is it that does not allow women's faces and bodies to speak? I want to let them speak.

She is hungry for it, the new, the strange, that which she must learn to see. She is happy to be on the road again, doing, riding in the wind, drying up under the desert sun, collapsing exhausted in a dusty hotel, or on a sleeping bag laid beneath palm trees, the smell of camel dung on the air, the camels' squeaks and grunts punctuating the silence of blackness, night as night never comes where she lives.

She picks up her journal, wondering whether to take it with her. Her bags are already too heavy for comfort. She looks at her watch: it is after midnight. She is almost finished, she can do the rest tomorrow. She takes a pen from the desk and sits down on her bed. She pulls her legs up with a wince—a twinge of arthritis—and leans back. She opens the book and writes.

I am off again. A wonderful assignment! Three months in the Middle East photographing women, women and children. For UNICEF. Strange—I got the assignment largely because of my last show. With the outcry it created, I didn't expect much. Feminists, nonfeminists, antifeminists united in outrage: women are
not
like that, motherhood is
not
like that! Mothers don't hate, feel rage at tiny babies! Mothers don't feel jealous if a father pays attention to a child! Still, thousands of people came to see the show and many of them bought pictures. And this job came out of it.

My stomach is in a knot, though. Clara is angry that I am going. It
is
a long time. I said, Come with me. She says, How can I? I have to work. I said, I will support you, Clara—forever. She says she can't do that. She says she cannot tolerate all this travel. She says not to be surprised if she is not here for me when I come back.

I can't bear to think about that.

I can't not go.

Clara says my mother wins after all: I choose aloneness, as she wants me to, because then I am entirely hers. I don't know. Is that true? I went to see Mother two days ago, stayed overnight with them. She was sad, not angry this time. I took her some albums I'd made of pictures from my major projects. She was very impressed with the assignment. She doesn't understand that I am not trying to impress her, that I don't think this trip, or any trip, is
impressive
—
just fun.
The life I wanted.