Lies My Mother Never Told Me (30 page)

“Yes, sir!” everyone shouted but me.

“This is not an exercise class to make you thin and beautiful,” Mr. Bill continued. “Tae kwon do is a philosophy. A way of life. Understand?”

“Yes, sir!”

He talked and I listened, having no idea what he was saying.

“In our society,” Mr. Bill said, “we're taught not to yell. But yelling is good. It gets the anger out, it empowers you. And, most important, it frightens your opponent. See how lions and elephants they make themselves big when they gettin' ready to fight?” Suddenly he made himself big. “Why you starin' at the ground? Walk with your head up, not starin' at the ground like you have no self-confidence.”

I laughed emptily and grumbled, “Self-confidence. What is that? Okay, self-confidence.”

Mr. Bill shouted, “What is
okay?
A slave word!”

He bellowed that his uncle had been a champion boxer, a Golden Gloves winner who'd become a professional, and he himself was coming all the way from “uptown” to teach this class and expected our full attention. I presumed he meant Harlem but wasn't about to ask. Suddenly the air in the room went still. Not a sound.

“Yes, sir!” I shouted, catching on. That part wasn't hard for me, being that I'm the proud daughter of an ex-soldier. My dad first taught me to handle a pistol when I was five, then came the boxing lessons. After we moved to the States and no longer had a full-time maid, he taught Jamie and me how to wash and dry the dishes. Then he'd go around the sink with his index finger wrapped in a paper towel, checking for spots. He called it “the white glove treatment.”

Even if I could connect with the discipline, during the exercises I had that horrible feeling of blood rushing to my throat and head, my heart pounding out of control.
Klutz, klutz, klutz
. The kicks were the worst. I felt like I had two cement blocks for feet.

At the end of one of the most painful sixty minutes of my life, as we were walking toward the locker rooms, Mr. Bill kept me back.

“I think I made a mistake,” I blurted. “I'm a klutz. This is not for me.”

“You have excellent balance and hand-eye coordination.”

“I've quit everything I ever started,” I said. “I haven't had a drink in nine years, and I haven't smoked a cigarette in eight, and those are the only two things I ever quit that I'm proud of.”

“You don't look like a quitter to me,” he said, and slapped me hard on the shoulder blade. “You ain't gonna quit this.”

So stupefied was I from the experience, I walked out in front of a cab on Eighty-fifth Street. The cabdriver came to a gentle stop, smiled at me, and didn't even honk his horn. He waved me on, even though he had the light. I smiled back and thanked him. Tuesday's terrorist attacks had done something weird to New Yorkers. They were all being nice to one another. When I got home I found Kevin cutting a page-size U.S. flag out of the
New York Times,
which he taped to one of our front windows.

He didn't take it down until the day our country invaded Iraq.

 

Within three weeks, I'd learned the first form,
Ki-Cho
1, and was shakily practicing side and front kicks, high and low blocks, and shouting out deep, guttural belly-yells with my punches. I still felt like an absolute fool, but nothing was as terrifying, or paralyzing to me, as sparring. When confronted with a blow or a kick aimed in my direction, I cringed or giggled uncontrollably, and froze. I couldn't seem to get past this weird paralysis, which was similar to what I experienced when I felt under attack from my mother.

Once, I got a bruise the size of an orange on my bicep, from cringing in the wrong direction during a sparring exercise and accidentally encountering Mr. Bill's brick of a foot. I really liked that bruise. I wore T-shirts to show it off. And when other moms at Eyrna's preschool asked, “My God, what happened to your arm?” I responded proudly, “I got kicked in tae kwon do.”

After three months of attending twice a week, Mr. Bill told me that Eyrna and I were ready to test for our Yellow Belts.

The promotion test was on a Friday evening in early December, and the studio, which they called the
do-jang,
was crowded with people—grown-ups, children—from Black Belts to lowly White Belts. Kevin had to be in Las Vegas on business, so Eyrna and I went by ourselves.

Eyrna was not afraid to test; but me—my heart was pumping too fast, my mouth dry, hands sweating. I watched Eyrna stand up and take her place with the other children. I couldn't believe how brave she was. Where had that courage come from? Not from me, that's for sure. Before I quit drinking, I couldn't give a reading without taking Inderal, a beta-blocker prescribed to me by Dr. Ellen. I called it Endure-All. I wished I had an Endure-All now. I wanted to run away.

Eyrna passed her Yellow Belt test with a plus mark and sat down coolly beside me, crossing her legs. Then it was the adults' turn.

“I'm scared to death,” I whispered to Eyrna. “I feel like I'm going to throw up.”
You could quit right now, walk away
. This comforting thought kept running through my mind, and I was seriously contemplating it. But what would my daughter think?

“What are you scared of, Mommy?” Eyrna asked.

Now I felt my throat tighten, my eyes beginning to sting. “I'm scared of failing. I'm scared of making a fool of myself. I'm scared of being a klutz.”

“What's a klutz?” Eyrna regarded me with her luminous eyes.

“A klutz is a person who's not good at sports,” I explained, swallowing hard.

“You're not a klutz, Mommy. If I can do it, so can you.” She squeezed my hand. My palms were wet with sweat. It was also trickling down my back. I was starting to hyperventilate. God, please don't let me fuck this up, I thought.

“You're right,” I said.

“White Belts!” shouted one of the stern-looking Black Belt judges at the front. He began to read off names from a list.

When my name was called, I stood up quickly and ran to the second line, in front of the Black Belt judges, six of them, and bowed. There was Mr. Bill, his face quiet as a mask. Dr. Richard Chun, Twelfth Dan Black Belt and onetime Olympic champion, owner of the
do-jang
, sat straight-backed and unsmiling in a black suit and somber tie, taking notes behind a table covered in a white cloth.

Mr. Bill turned his eyes toward me and blinked once, almost imperceptibly, and I remembered to breathe.

I didn't ace the test at all, but I did pass.

 

Elated, we went home and called Kevin in Las Vegas, then my mother.

“Guess what, Mom? Eyrna and I passed our Yellow Belt test!”

Silence. “You're nuts,” she finally said. “And don't you think that's dangerous? She could get hurt, you know.”

In Adult Children of Alcoholics parlance, calling my mother on this occasion was like going to the hardware store for oranges. And maybe I
was
nuts. As Gianna had once told me,
insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

Recently, I had dinner with my good friend Beverly Donofrio from the Columbia writing school, and we talked about my relationship with my mother.

“Your mother was
mean,
” she said to me. How strange, I thought. When Bev knew Gloria, my mother and I were getting along pretty well. During graduate school, I had become my mother's best drinking buddy. I knew I could only go out to dinner with her on nights when I didn't have a morning class because the next day would be a total loss.

Then Bev reminded me of this story, which I'd completely forgotten.

When we were graduate students at Columbia, in the summer of 1982, Bev came out to Sagaponack one weekend. The house was filled with people—my mother's beau, Walker; my brother and his friends; the cousins; and even a famous courtesan visiting from France. During dinner the first night, under the grape arbor, my mother turned to Bev and said abruptly, “Why are you friends with my daughter? She's at least ten years younger than you.”

Bev, stunned, stared Gloria down and said, “So what?”

My mother recognized an Italian fighter when she saw one and immediately backed down, for while she loved to antagonize people, she was loath to get into direct confrontations.

The next day my mother got it into her head to drag Bev and me to a dinner party at our friends the Woods' in Watermill. They had seven wealthy, erudite, and well-traveled sons and step
sons whose ages varied from mine to Bev's. The last time I'd been to a party there, I'd gotten plotzed and ended up in the pool house with a French count, a misadventure I was not fond of recalling.

“It'll be good for you,” Gloria assured us.

God, did I dread those parties. I always felt sick afterward from drinking too much, and from comparing myself unfavorably with every successful person at the scene. But I didn't want to antagonize my mother. After all, it was only Saturday, we still had to get through Sunday. After bracing ourselves with several margaritas, Bev and I piled into the back of the car, Walker behind the wheel and Gloria riding shotgun.

As we were driving along Montauk Highway, my mother turned to us in the backseat and said, “Girls, here's some advice. Catching your first millionaire is the hardest. After that, the rest come easy.”

Bev turned to me, her eyes wide, and after a moment, she burst out laughing. I started laughing too, nervously, for I feared my mother wasn't joking in the least, and in her opinion, my inability to
catch
a rich man was a major character failing on my part.

I
N
F
EBRUARY
2003 I'
D HELD
a Yellow Belt for more than a year and had no intention of moving up. That's when Mr. Bill told me I could skip the next level, High Yellow, and test for a Green Belt.

“You can't be serious,” I replied, quickly adding, “sir.”

“Serious as death,” he said. “For your test, you'll have to break a board just like this one.” He gripped a three-quarter-inch-thick pine board vertically in his hands and said, “Break it with a side kick.”

“You must be joking. Sir,” I replied.

“Do I look like I'm joking?” His tone turned hard and scary. “Look through the board to the end of the movement. Practice once. The board is not there. Don't judge yourself,
do
it. Yell.”

I stood back. I breathed. I imagined the side kick passing through air between Mr. Bill's hands. I practiced once, aiming and setting up. I felt adrenaline pumping through me, and I'd never felt anything like it, except for the time in Paris when I fell through the plastic skylight of Sterling Hayden's barge, seven feet down, to the kitchen floor.

Bam. The board split easily. The outside edge of my foot ached. Mr. Bill handed me the two pieces. “Keep it,” he said. “Don't talk back. Relax your shoulders. If I tell you you can do it, you can do it.”

I took the split board home to show Kevin.

 

For the test, I performed four forms by myself. I also had no trouble with the self-defense moves and kicking and punching combinations. My troubles, naturally, began when it was time to spar, and I couldn't stop myself from freezing up and giggling like a fool. Yet I passed my Green Belt test with a plus mark. Now I started considering the possibility that I might want to move forward, aiming for higher and higher belts.

The Tuesday after the test, Mr. Bill told me I was judging myself and that was why sparring was so difficult for me. He explained that when we judge ourselves, we can't react cleanly. “Face every obstacle without fear,” he said, “because obstacles are gifts of learning.”

His words stayed with me all day. I did not feel free of self-recrimination, but at least I was now aware of its constant presence.

 

After class once during the early summer, Mr. Bill asked Eyrna and me if we'd like to have lunch with him and George, another Green Belt, who was in his midfifties.

We went to Pizzeria Uno downstairs, one of Eyrna's favorite places in the world because they have an extravagant dessert of brownies topped with vanilla ice cream, Oreo cookies, and hot chocolate fudge. Before we even ordered lunch, Eyrna wanted to know if she could have this dessert. I said no, it was too much, but Mr. Bill volunteered to split it with her, and winked, and George said he'd help too, so they were now her new best friends, and she gave them one of her smiles that could melt an iceberg.

As lunch went on, Mr. Bill told us a few things about himself. His family had come from St. Croix three generations ago. His uncle's name was Lee Canegata, aka Canada Lee. He was a boxer turned actor, who'd played Bigger Thomas in
Native Son
on Broadway, and was in Hitchcock's film
Lifeboat
.

“My God, he's famous!” I said. “My dad saw Canada Lee in
Native Son.
I remember him talking about how great he was.”

Mr. Bill told us that early on in Canada Lee's boxing career, an announcer, while introducing a fight, couldn't pronounce Canegata, and kept stumbling over the PA system, “Lee Cana…Lee Caga…Ladies and gentlemen, Canada Lee!”

Mr. Bill lived uptown with his mother, Evadne, who for forty years had been a customs agent at JFK Airport. “You couldn't get
nothin
' by that woman!” Mr. Bill said with a laugh. She was now in a wheelchair and needed constant care. After lunch, he told us he was off to buy adult diapers.

I went home and looked up Canada Lee on the Internet. Canada Lee refused to bow down to racism and fought against it all his life. He wouldn't enter the theater through the back door like he was told to. In the Hitchcock movie
Lifeboat,
he changed his dialogue because he refused to be made into a two-dimensional, humorous stereotype. He wouldn't give up his left-wing politics, even when the producers pressured him. He ended up in jail several times and was on all the FBI pinko watch lists. He died just before he was to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, his honor intact.

 

That evening, my mother called.

“I miss
Urna
. I love her more than I've ever loved any child in my life,” my mother admitted, and my first reaction was to chuckle. Then I suddenly realized I had no air left in my lungs. At once I felt a pang of guilt for not calling her more often, for not having visited her in a month. “Since you're teaching out here this summer anyway, just stay with me and put
Urna
in a summer camp. It's much, much nicer out here. Why stay in the city if you don't have to?”

I told her I'd talk to Kevin about it and let her know. “We'll come visit as soon as we can,” I said.

Then I listened to a five-minute accounting of her health problems. She was having trouble breathing again. When she'd been drinking, she had terrible sinus allergies and infections. I had been convinced, and had told her years ago, that she was allergic to alcohol. She had not wanted to hear that. As soon as she stopped drinking, her breathing cleared and the infections stopped.

But she wasn't drinking. She hadn't had a drink in four years, so what could be wrong?

 

After hearing Mr. Bill's advice, I began to try to fight in earnest, but only against him, defending my space with my best kicks and punches, which sometimes he'd allow to land against his stomach. Kicking him was like kicking a closed door. He told me not to look into my opponent's eyes, nor at his arms and legs, but at the whole picture, the circle of space around him. He said people attack out of fear, and freeze out of fear. One must train the mind to turn to stone, to allow no fear, no judgment, no thought to penetrate. To learn to watch is the goal.

“You can't fight angry,” he told me. I stared at him, speechless. Was there another way to fight? Was there even any other
reason
to fight?

 

Kevin thought that moving out to my mother's for the summer was a terrible idea. I kept insisting that my mother needed us. She was showing signs of her age. She was suffering from her old sinus infections and breathing problems. I was worried about her. Maybe having us around would ease her ever-growing anxiety and loneliness.

I'd been invited to teach a four-week summer course in the MFA program at Southampton, and to be a teacher at the weeklong intensive Southampton Writers Conference. It seemed logical to stay out there for at least that period of time, and Kevin did
not argue with me. Much later, when I asked why he hadn't tried harder to stop me, he cryptically said, “You had to do what you had to do.”

He came out on weekends and worked on the garden, trying to hold at bay the engulfing weeds that had again grown as large as trees between the 150-year-old lilac bushes. The house was in such disrepair that it would take much more than us to begin to tackle the problems of rotting window frames, broken wooden steps, moldering cedar shingles, and angry wasps' nests.

On the first night of the summer session, I had to go to a reception at the college, so I rented
The Sound of Music
for my mother and five-year-old Eyrna. I remembered seeing the movie with my mother in Paris when I was a little girl. We'd both loved it then. I figured, long movie, Julie Andrews, good for kids, what could go wrong?

I put on a pale blue linen dress, cut on the bias, calf length, and sandals, and walked out of my room. My mother and Eyrna were sitting in the library in front of the TV as I passed.

“That's a terrible dress,” my mother said. “You look like a fat old lady in that dress.”

“I'll be back around nine,” I said woodenly.

“And you're a mean fat old lady too,” Eyrna said to my mother.

“You're right,” my mother said to Eyrna. “That was a mean thing to say.”

I kept walking, struck dumb by this exchange. I never would have stood up for myself like that. And my mother never would have admitted to being mean—not to
me
.

At times I'd heard her say mean things to Jamie, such as, when they were getting ready to play poker, “Sit down, you dumb shit, I'm going to kick your ass.” If she'd said this to me, I would've retaliated with some abuse of my own. But Jamie would just giggle delightedly in his charming way and reply, his eyes shiny
and his face pink with mirth, “Watch out, old lady, in a minute I'll have you whistling ‘Dixie'!”

I admired and was astounded by his ability to step away from her jabs. Me, I took them all head-on, chin first, or right in the chest.

When I returned three hours later, Eyrna came running toward me through the long kitchen. “Mommy! Mommy! You know those Nazis?” I saw my mother approaching through the doorway behind her.

“You mean the Nazis in the movie?”

“
All
Nazis!” Eyrna explained. “They're a pain in the ass!”

 

One afternoon I heard Eyrna screaming in the living room and ran from my bedroom to find my mother standing in the middle of the bald, piss-and-mildew-stinking Persian rug, cordless phone in hand, and Eyrna a few feet away, sitting on the rug, gripping the side of her head, howling.

“She hit me with the phone!”

“She wouldn't shut up,” my mother said. “I'm on the phone here.”

“Are you crazy? You can't hit a child in the head with a phone!”

I picked up Eyrna and carried her back into my room, and eventually outside to the swing set. Once she had calmed down, I drove us to a clothing store to get Eyrna some new shorts.

“Eyrna, what's going on here?” I said, angry and flustered as I tried to snap shut the size 8 shorts. At five years old, she suddenly couldn't fit into a size 8. I had to go get a size 10.

“What are you eating with Grammy that I don't know about?”

“Grammy says you're mean to me. Grammy says you're much too strict.”

“That's not true, and you know it.”

“Grammy says she loves me more than you do.”

Suddenly I had the urge to smack my daughter. I forced myself to walk out of the changing room and breathe for a solid minute before I was calm enough to face Eyrna and resume being a good mom. All right, I thought, I'm the adult here. My mother is trying to get between us. I am not the child here. I am the mother. I can handle this.

But, five minutes later, having entirely forgotten the incident, Eyrna tried to hug me, and I turned away from her.

 

“What's going on with Eyrna's weight?” Kevin asked me the next Saturday. He wanted to know what I was feeding her. I was feeding her exactly the same foods she ate at home—vegetables, fruit, a little chicken, fish, rice, and pasta once in a while.

Gloria came into the kitchen and told us she was taking Eyrna to lunch in Sag Harbor and then to the toy store.

“Thank you,” Kevin said, “but we're going to the beach.” My mother left in a huff, without saying another word.

At the beach, Kevin said: “You can't let her take Eyrna to the toy store and to lunch every day. I mean, look at her.” Compared with all the other children cavorting in the shallows, I could see now that she was much too big around the middle, her belly hanging over her bikini bottom. Why hadn't I noticed this before? And why did we never go to the beach anymore?

“Are you okay?” Kevin asked me searchingly.

“I don't know,” I said.

“Why don't you come back to New York with me?” He took my hand and held it in his. His hands always felt a few degrees warmer than mine, and usually this was hugely comforting, but today, on the beach, I was too hot and I felt trapped. I pulled my sweaty palm away.

“We paid for camp. She's got two more weeks.”

Kevin didn't say anything.

On Sunday evening, he went back to the city, and I felt bereft. I wanted to leave with him. But I was afraid of angering my mother.

On Monday morning, after I dropped off Eyrna at camp, I approached my mother in the kitchen, calmly and reasonably, about Eyrna's weight. “You can't let her eat anything she wants, Mom. She's too little to make those kinds of decisions.” My mother didn't respond.

Ten minutes later, she knocked on my door to tell me she'd pick up Eyrna after camp, since she would be in Sag Harbor anyway. I had to go to Southampton College to hand in my grades, so I didn't say no.

Later that afternoon, Eyrna came home with three Barbie dolls in their colorful boxes, and had chocolate all over her face. “I had a hamburger and french fries and then we went to Carvel and I had an ice cream dipped in chocolate,” Eyrna told me. “And we had two Hershey bars.”

I felt as though a giant wave had knocked me down. Exhaustion took hold of me. As if caught in a sudden riptide, fighting to get my bearings, to get air into my lungs, I felt like I was being pulled under. I wanted to go lie down in my cool room and sleep.

My mother meanwhile was having an asthma attack, leaning against the butcher block island in the middle of the kitchen, a hand to her chest. She took out her inhaler, pumped two big shots into her mouth, then lit a Marlboro Red. Like a sleepwalker, I walked out of the kitchen and through the little vestibule-hallway whose walls were covered with family photographs.

I heard my mother say to Eyrna, “What's the matter with you? Don't
tell
her, you dope.” Then my mother chanted in a high-pitched, teasing voice,
“Who's Fat, Fat, the Water Rat?”

A memory came charging back from my own childhood, and all at once I was seized by rage. My vision began to close in on me as I remembered that miserable chant—that teasing, hor
rible voice! I charged back into the kitchen, a bull drawn by a red cape.