Her Mother's Daughter (97 page)

Belle had not. She didn't say much but the look on her face said everything. But what mother would be different? Would like the fact that her daughter had had a third child when her first two were nearly grown, with a boy eight years younger who couldn't support himself much less a wife? She said nothing. She simply withdrew from me, treating me formally, like an acquaintance. She did the correct thing: she visited me once in the hospital, and once at home, bringing a new bassinette as a gift—the old one had rotted out. She called to invite us to dinner once every month or six weeks. The following year, she got as far away from me as she could—she moved.

I suppose it is egocentric to imagine the reason she moved was because I had had a baby. She'd been wanting to move for a long time and she and Ed had looked at new houses. She wanted to live near water. But new houses were expensive, and Ed was to retire in ten years. They worried they might not then be able to afford large mortgage payments. So they stayed where they were.

Summers they went to Valeria, a resort in Peekskill open only to families with incomes below ten thousand a year. They played golf and took walks and drives and ate three large meals a day and chatted with other people like themselves, the genteel low-income middle class. Valeria also had a lake, rowboats, and canoes. Ed had always loved canoeing; they had taken a canoe trip up the Hudson on their honeymoon. With age and a touch of arthritis, Belle had become nervous about getting into a canoe—still, on one stay, she agreed to go.

She dressed for their canoe ride as she dressed for everything—in stockings and heels and a freshly pressed outfit—a stylish cotton dress with a heart neckline and a full skirt. Ed too was dressed well, in lightweight wool slacks and a freshly ironed sport shirt. (Belle always had Ed pack a travel iron when they went anywhere.) But he wore canvas shoes with rubber soles. He got in the canoe first, holding onto a pier rail to steady the craft. She was carrying her handbag and the camera he had handed her when he stepped into the canoe. She hung both over one arm, holding to a pier rail with the other, and put her stockinged leg forward tremulously. He cried out in alarm, angry-sounding, “Not there, in the middle!” and she looked up in terror and put her weight down where she was and the canoe tipped and she screamed and they both toppled into the water, along with handbag and camera.

After their return she told this story in an aggrieved tone. Anastasia laughed. Belle set her lips and silently determined never to tell her another thing. Anastasia saw her mother's face.

“But it
is
funny, Mom. Didn't you laugh when you got dunked?” She searched her mother's forbidding face. “I mean, it wasn't
dangerous,
Mom.”

Her face stiff with indignation, Belle almost sobbed. “We were sopping wet! We had to walk all the way back to our room sopping wet! Everybody who passed us laughed! They laughed at us! It was humiliating!”

“They were probably laughing with affection. Everyone knows how easy it is to go over in a canoe. It's probably happened to them too,” Anastasia argued, hating her own tone of voice, patient, tolerant, preaching.

“I was so humiliated. I've never been so humiliated. And Daddy's camera was ruined. I'll never get in a canoe with him again. If he hadn't yelled at me, I wouldn't have fallen that way. He knew I was nervous! Why did he have to yell?”

“Well, he shouldn't have yelled,” Anastasia tried to placate, “but he was probably nervous too….”

Belle glared at her. Betrayal.

“He always yells!” she cried, close to tears. “He didn't need to yell! Oh, such humiliation! I'll never get in a canoe again,” she concluded with grief-stricken resentment, as if he had taken from her one last pleasure.

The next thing she lost was Valeria itself: Ed's last raise put him over their limit. They began then to take trips—they drove to the Maine coast, through the Blue Ridge Mountains, explored the Poconos. When Ed was given three weeks' vacation they started to take winter vacations in Florida, exploring both coasts. Belle loved the sleepy shabby villages in the west, little low houses made of wood and screening, resting on a neck of land jutting out into a river, overhung by swamp trees. They priced them, and perhaps she pretended they would buy one but they could not afford two houses. Although they appeared to be well-to-do, Ed still did not earn a high salary. They lived as comfortably as they did because they knew how to economize.

Then, one spring, Belle got a job. She did not tell anyone she wanted a job or was looking for one; she simply announced she had one.

“Wonderful!” cried Anastasia. “Where?”

There was a plant in Rockville Centre that packed and distributed sheet music. In one large airy room of this plant, a dozen women sat on high stools from eight to four five days a week for minimum wage, folding and packing sheets.

“Oh,” said Anastasia. “Do you like it?” Incredulous.

“I
love
it!” Belle glowed. “The women are so lovely! We have such a good time. They know I'm hard of hearing, and they just speak up, and they laugh all the time.”

Anastasia tried to picture it: her mother in her expensive outfits, matching shoes, bag, and gloves, driving up in the four-year-old but new-looking Cadillac, parking beside the plant, entering, laying aside her coat or jacket and putting on a smock, sitting on her stool. How did the women greet her, how did she behave to them, poor women, large of body or very skinny, greying hair pulled back in a bun, or frizzled with a permanent, wearing cotton housedresses and slippers, some missing front teeth, some unable to speak English. What did they think of her, the grande dame? They must like her or she would not be so happy there. And if they liked her, that meant she was not putting on her grande dame act. She was comfortable enough with them to tell them about her hearing.

She was back in the sweatshop, back with the women she'd known in her youth, women she understood and did not fear. For all she had acquired the armor that characterizes the middle class—the neat house in the expensive suburban town, the fine clothes, the well-tended hair and skin, the polished nails, the Cadillac—nothing had changed inside her head, she was still the big gawky shy girl in the sweatshop.

Whenever Anastasia visited her, she would talk about “her ladies.”

“So skinny, and she works so hard, and that boy! Now he's in the hospital, he may lose his leg. And Josephine has worked so hard for him, he's her whole life! He
had
to have a motorcycle! She's heartbroken. Boys, they're so wild, it makes me grateful I never had a son….”

“Sophie doesn't talk much about her husband—well, I think he drinks. She doesn't say so, but he's never home, and he's Polish—you know. She has such a sweet face, she reminds me of my mother, she pulls her hair back in a bun like Momma, of course Momma was never that fat—not while she was working. But Sophie is always smiling, nodding her head, so agreeable, Momma was like that too with the women she worked with. Even though things are hard for her, she is trying so hard to earn enough to send all her boys to college. She hides her money, the other girls tease her about it, she has to, I guess….”

“Awful, hardly any teeth in her mouth, she lets her own teeth go so she can save money for her daughter, she's really talented, Katie brought in pictures of her, she's very pretty, in her tap outfit. Twelve years old. She needs dancing shoes and costumes and the lessons, of course…. It's hard for Katie, her husband drinks and plays the ponies, that daughter is all she cares about, she talks about her all the time….”

These were the same women we'd known in South Ozone Park, the women she'd always known and understood. Did she too show pictures of her daughters? Boast about the famous photographer for
World,
the well-married one living in the Philippines, waited on by seven servants? Did they envy her that her children were grown, that she didn't have to worry about them anymore? That her children were
safe:
that's what all the women wanted, I knew that, I understood it, I felt it too. Absurd: as if the possession of a mate and a job, a place to live, children of their own, somehow put them over a line, within the paling, protected for eternity, armed against their own fragility. As if your children could ever be safe.

Occasionally Belle was invited to visit one of her “ladies” at home. No nasty comments about the scantiness of food offered, the thinness of the sandwich filling, the store-boughtness of the cake, the lack of taste displayed in the furnishings. Yet their houses must be poor, shabby enough, but maybe the food was good and plentiful—the poor are generous with food, it's the middle class who aren't. These women were in a different category for Belle, not to be judged as middle-class women were judged. I understood that too: these women had no pretensions.

Then she quit.

“But why!”

“Dad and I want to go to Europe this summer, and they wouldn't give me three weeks off. I only started in March, they said I could have a week in October. So I quit. You can't work and take vacations when you want them. You know, we want to go to Florida next winter again. So,” she spread her hands.

“You'll miss the women.”

She nodded. But she never mentioned them again.

That summer they took a three-week tour of six European countries, including a cruise among the Dodecanese Islands. Belle was pleased that their tour entitled them to a superior double accommodation on the ship. But one night, the porthole in their cabin accidentally swung open and seawater washed in, drenching their clothes, all their possessions, and frightening them both. Belle swore she would never get on a boat again.

The ship stopped at Santorini, where the tourists would ride donkeys to the top of the mountain. Belle was afraid to get on the donkey. She did not even consider it, she shook her head hard, “No!” Ed offered to remain with her, but she urged him to go, and he was eager; he laughed as he mounted, his camera slung around his neck. She could see he was a little frightened too.

Belle sat on a stone wall and watched the procession wind up and up around the steep curves of rock and out of sight. It was a little after ten. It was hot. How long would they take? An hour up, an hour back? They should be back in time for lunch. She sat, looking around her. The scrubby hillside, the stone wall; off in the distance some white houses with red-tile roofs. And down that way, a street with cafés and shops.

He was so eager to go, he just clambered on that thing, he didn't even worry about what she would do, where she could go to get out of this terrible sun. She was glad she had thought to wear her golf hat but it didn't make her any cooler. What time was it? She should have worn a watch. But she hated watches. It seemed an hour had passed, they should be back soon.

It seemed that hours passed. She was nearly crying with thirst.
They
had canteens with them, she'd seen them. They probably stopped to drink along the way. And at the top, too. Suppose it took two hours to climb! Suppose they had lunch up there! Why why why had she urged Ed to go? Why had he gone? Why hadn't he thought about her? She wanted to cry. She gazed toward the main street with longing. There were cafés, they looked so pretty with their striped awnings, the green chairs and tables. They might have drinks, orange juice, lemonade, coffee, oh, how she longed for some lovely ice-cold lemonade! They were not far away. She thought about going, but her legs felt wobbly, she felt faint, she was not sure she could walk that far, a block and a half, she was too hot and upset. And she could not speak Greek and she was afraid to walk down a Greek street, to sit in a Greek café How would she order? Suppose they asked her a question? She wouldn't hear. She couldn't explain to them that she was hard of hearing. They might humiliate her, insult her.

Hours and hours passed. The sun had passed the zenith. It was afternoon. Belle's stomach was tight and growling, she was starving. It must be one o'clock, and not a bite since breakfast, and she only had orange juice and a tiny bit of roll with butter and coffee in the morning. She wanted to cry. To go off like that and leave her, helpless, knowing she was helpless, terrible, terrible, how could he do it? She bit her lip to keep from crying. The…
selfishness
of him! thoughtlessness! He hadn't even given her any Greek money! She couldn't buy anything if she wanted to try! He hadn't even found out where there was a toilet for her. Suppose she had to pee! The sun was so hot, she felt dizzy, faint, she thought she would collapse….She would collapse and they would have to fly her home and she would never get to see Constantinople, all that money for nothing, such a waste!

The scene blinked and spun under her vision. She would have lain down on the wall, but she would have been embarrassed, tourists kept passing by, strolling along the walk, coming from the shops with packages, sticks of souvlaki, ice-cream cones. Oh, what she would give for an ice-cream cone! Deprived and helpless, she watched them.

She was seeing spots now. Maybe that was the caravan, coming back down the mountain. She could not keep her eyes on the spots, they shimmered in the sun. There were dark little explosions in her eyes. She was losing her vision! She looked away. She wanted to die.

But next time she looked, she saw the caravan returning. Her lips set.
He
had had a good time. It was long past lunchtime. He'd had
his
lunch; she was starving, she had had nothing. The spots got bigger and bigger: she could make out the leader with his wide-brimmed hat with the colorful band on it. She couldn't see Ed.

Then, somehow, she turned around, and Ed was standing there at her side, smiling broadly, his arms open.

“Hallo, Belle!” he cried out, settling a kiss on her cheek. He was cheerful, he had had fun.

She wouldn't look at him. “What time is it?”

He checked his watch. “Four, Belle. Twenty minutes after four.” He looked at her. “I didn't know it was going to be so long. I wouldn't have gone. Did you get some lunch?”