Her Mother's Daughter (65 page)

I wonder sometimes what will happen to me when the children grow up and leave. There I'll be, after all those years of being central to them, years of feeling that my every gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, has an impact on them, a significance I may not intend—given my own history as a sensitive plant, how can I not know how important such things are to a child?—years of feeling responsible, and suddenly I won't matter or not in the same way. I'm not worried about being bored, about not knowing what to do with myself after the children are gone, the empty-nest syndrome that all the magazines castigate women for these days. No, that part's fine, I'll have more time to work. It's the other: by the time they're grown up, my reactions will be fixed. I will have been trained the way they say mothers who toilet-train their children very young train themselves, not their children—I'll be a creature that has been trained for eighteen years to anticipate and respond, to calm and console, to avert tears and anger, to spend my energies on the people around me, to be the axle, the selfless center that holds everything together. I'll do that automatically—I already do—but suddenly they won't
want
me to act that way, they'll feel I'm treating them like babies, they'll blame me for doing what now they would blame me for
not
doing. It's impossible to be a woman, you have to keep readjusting. Like sex: you're supposed to be cold as ice, chaste and inviolable until you're married, then suddenly you're supposed to be ardent. Oh, why am I thinking this way, it just makes me grouchy….

My day: yes. Then bedtime: making sure that teeth are brushed, bodies washed, windows open, blankets tucked in according to idiosyncratic tastes, kisses, hugging, much giggling now, settling them in, a sweet time. Yes. But then only a couple of hours of quiet when I can do some cropping or make entries in my records to get them up to date: last Saturday I photographed a stand of birch trees at 10AM, 2PM, 3:30PM, at these f-stops with these lenses, each example slipped into plastic and placed beside its data in the album, studied, thought about. You can't do much in an hour and a half, and by ten-thirty I'm yawning, exhausted, ready to shower and brush my teeth and check the kids, pink and warm with sleep, then slide into cold sheets, having set the alarm for seven….

But now into the middle of this life, this regularity, drops this event, something not to be anticipated or even imagined:
EMPLANED!
Nothing in my experience has led me to believe that you can love your children,
have
your children and still have this, feel the lift of heart that is like the lift of the airplane itself as it rises from the ground and tilts off into another realm, another life,
VROOM!

This is my first trip in an airplane except for my trip to Mexico for the divorce, but I was too numb to notice anything. But, yes, there was that ride over Floyd Bennett Field in a Piper Cub in 1939, my father in the seat beside me, both of us elated. His first airplane ride, too, and he tried to act protective and assured, to make me feel safe, but I didn't need calming, I wasn't afraid, I was soaring. And this is the first entry in the first journal I have ever kept.

I have written my name on the first page:
THE JOURNAL OF STACEY STEVENS.
A glamorous name, also fake: Stacey Stevens. The people at
World
don't like Anastasia, they think it sounds foreign, they didn't want me to use it. But to me, Stacey Stevens sounds like a movie star—blond curly hair, bright red lipstick, always plays a gal Friday, good all-round kid, cute grin, husky voice, good sport, ends up coupled with the second male lead.

Chapter 1, page 1 of a new blank book: Stacey is flying, Anastasia is emplaned!

Oh, the ascent, the engines accelerate so high I think they will explode, the plane gathers speed, the speed itself seems to make you rise, like water boiling up into the air, becoming air. And the earth tilts, moves farther and farther away, buildings get smaller, they are crooked like the cottages in children's picture books. Here I am, bold, adventurous, looking down at the tiny earth, low and dear, buildings like foolish little assertions, mounds carved by a timid earthbound species.

I am up here, above the earth! Like gods who can see earth and all man's works in perspective. And besides, we have seats that go back and neat little tables you can let down and write on, and then they push this cart through the aisles and serve drinks!

It's a slim book covered in marbleized paper—lavender, pink, purple; pale mauve lined sheets, faded watery blue ink in the large sprawling hand I had then, not so long ago was it? Twenty-odd years. Twenty years! How I filled those pages, dozens of them at a clip!

I remember. I had gone to the film lab in Chelsea, the first time, to pick up film for my first assignment. And across the street was an office-supply store, long since gone, narrow aisles, metal shelves piled with pads, folders, envelopes, everything covered with dust. The floor creaked as you walked through the aisles. And I saw these books, they were dusty, I had to blow the dust off them. It was hard to find pretty blank books in those days, and I bought this one, on impulse, delighted with not having to watch every penny for the first time in my life….

You can't see much at this altitude. Sometimes the clouds break and you can see earth the color of clay, it looks close unless there's a building, and then you can tell how high we are, the building's only a spot. You can't tell from this land that it's January. Around New York there was snow, patches of it broken by dark soil. For a while we flew through a huge valley of clouds: we were at the bottom, the clouds were all around us, we were drowning in them. Like a picture in a children's book, cute, round little tots tumbling in a featherbed of clouds, screaming in joy as they careen in whipped cream, float in egg white.

Nature uses the same forms, the same materials over and over, clouds like islands, sky like sea. Mozart too reused themes, stole from himself. Now the clouds are hazecolor, white shot through with rainbow pastels. Ahead a wash of deep pink, we keep flying into sunset, it's dark behind us, we go west, young woman.

I hope people can't tell I am not cool and assured. There is no one sitting beside me in the middle seat. A man sleeps in the end seat. Every once in a while he snores. But maybe someone else is looking at me, the way I stare at them, surreptitiously. A
World
photographer should be cool and assured. I try to remind myself that I am a person not entirely without importance.

I'm glad I bought this book: writing in it makes me look professional,
busy.
I've never really been busy that way—it isn't considered busyness when the kids are in the tub splashing water all over the bathroom floor, the phone rings, and the pot on the stove decides at that moment to boil over. Now I look busy in the other way, the important way. But it's also helpful to have this book to write in so people can't see that I am terrified this plane is going to crash just so I won't be able to have a career. Funny I never realized before how utterly self-centered phobias are….

Career. Is that what I'm having? Eighty rolls of film they issued me, eighty rolls! Short rolls, twenty shots apiece, half black-and-white, half color. Do they really expect me to use it all? So wasteful. They must not care, they have money to burn. If we crashed we would burn….

We won't crash. Pretend you're in a boat. The clouds bump and rock the plane just as waves rock a boat, up down up down. All of nature is similitudes, people knew that once, the Middle Ages, all things connected, interlocked, significant. That's the rub, significant. God, my mind is racing, I feel as if I've been given an injection of something, all my pores are open and everything is crowding into them…. The world seems new, as if my eyes had been washed and I can finally see.

The truth is I
haven't
seen very much of the world: where have I been? I've had to imagine the world, or see it in photographs. The camera never lies. But of course it does, who knows that better than a photographer? The angle, the selection, the isolation—the camera shows what the photographer wants it to tell, children's game, show-and-tell. I don't know why I keep thinking about children's things….

Like that Indian woman at the airport. I thought I knew all about her: hadn't I read about women like her, seen pictures of them? I recognized the slender body, the meek posture, she'll have a dowager's hump when she's old, those large dark eyes. All those bundles and two children, one just a baby. She sat there bent over, listening to the man, her husband probably, give her orders over and over. She nodded, showed no impatience. The truth is
he's
nervous sending her off alone, and so he scolds her, peremptory as if she were a child or an idiot. Then he looks at his watch, he gets up, he picks up the little boy, hugs, kisses him, puts him down. He ignores the baby, he leaves. I look at her with all those bundles, those little children, I think—she needs help, maybe I can help her. But when the call comes to queue up, she gathers everything together swiftly, you can see she is used to doing that, and rises, she doesn't trip on the folds of the crimson sari, she almost runs. She charges the people in her way, elbows them, elbows me hard, she reaches the head of the line first.

Of course, she should have been first, it is only right, but she warred her way, she was prepared to fight the world, and I'll bet she never fights like that with her husband. From a distance she looks so graceful, the sari outlining her body in an
S,
emphasizing its flexibility, the softness and submissiveness of the woman. Lie. She's a fury with a ring in her nose. Doesn't a ring in the nose betoken subjection? On the other hand, there's not much difference between a ring in your nose and one in your ear, is there. Still, she
is
meek, too.

I can still feel it where she elbowed me. I'll bet I have a bruise. I'd like to look, but I can't do it here.

I am drinking. I am having a Bloody Mary, I figured I could spend 75 cents of the expense money
World
gave me. But I am getting a little drunk on it and my excitement. And now they are wheeling the foodcart through and handing people dinner trays covered with foil, there is a smell of food. Isn't this neat? It comes all by itself, you don't have to cook it. Such a neat little tray! How wonderful, how ingenious, oh I love it all!

It is embarrassing to have evidence—for I certainly don't recall feeling this—of once being excited by airline food. This whole account is embarrassing. What a naif I was! It's humiliating. I can't believe I was so horribly bubbly, that I could be excited by such stupid things.

Still, that girl sounds happier than I am. I was just a girl, even if I was thirty. God, ignorant. Did I really sound that way? Did I see life as a great adventure waiting to be discovered? Expected Elysian fields I suppose. Got the Slough of Despond instead. The question is: Does everyone? Are there people who do find Elysian fields?

Well, it wasn't very good, but it was fast.

Before I left, I tried to give myself a cool assured appearance. First, I cut my hair. It used to hang down to the middle of my back, usually in one thick braid, but now it ends where my ears end and flies out sharply when I turn my head quickly. Delilah liked it and so did Mother. But the kids were horrified. They said they liked my hair long—but they never said that when it was long. They say the short hair makes me look like their sister.

But then they've been rotten about everything. They were not even nice about my getting this job. Not that it's a real job, I'm not on staff, I'm a stringer, but god I was happy, I couldn't contain myself, it meant so much to me. But I don't really have words for what it meant to me and besides, if I tried to tell them, it would have sounded as if they were not enough for me, as if they weren't my whole life. Well, they aren't. But they expect to be, that's what they think children are to mothers. I couldn't tell them that I felt I'd suddenly been recognized as a person, as a human being and not just a woman, a mother, which is to say, nobody at all, a cipher….

I can't concentrate, my mind refuses to stay in one place.

They dashed my happiness. There I was dancing around the damned ironing board I'd pressed my blouse on that morning, to wear into the city, and they stood leaning against the sink, both of them, staring at me with eyes so hard you'd think they were Puritan judges about to sentence an adulteress. I tried to think of what
they'd
get out of this, and told them we'd have more money now. They showed no interest whatever.

“You said you'd have to travel. Who's going to take care of
us
?”

“Pani. You love Pani,” I pleaded.

They glanced at each other, their faces expressionless. They were out to punish me, and I felt guilty enough to let them.

“You're going to go away?” Billy asked, incredulously. “You're going to leave us alone?”

“You won't be alone. Pani will be with you.”

“Will she sleep up here? Or downstairs?”

I hadn't thought that one through. “Up here,” I decided swiftly.

He turned away from me as if I had already abandoned him: martyred, tragic, little boy blue. Selfish monster is more like it. Arden crossed her arms and began to question me like a drillmaster about whether Pani knew she was allowed to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons, and have a soda afterward, and to do her homework in the afternoons with Joyce on the living room floor. Miserable creeps. Not in the least concerned about me, or what this job meant to me.
Their
little privileges and rights,
their
well-being, that's all they cared about. Monsters!

I started to fold the ironing board up, to put it away. I slammed the legs down and caught my finger between a leg and the board and cried out in pain. Neither child did more than glance at me. Little bastards. Horrible brats! They acted as if I'd done something wicked to
them
when I cut my hair. What do they want me to look like, for god-sake? Good god, I'm only thirty! They want me in a rocker with a shawl over my shoulders and an amplifying horn held up to my ear. Damn them!