Living Out Loud (31 page)

I once talked to my grandmother about these fears, and she said the primary differences between now and then were that in her youth people didn’t talk about what other people died of, they didn’t think too much about what went on inside themselves, and they didn’t expect to live so long. There were no warnings on cigarette packages and no oral contraceptives then, no chemotherapy and no television commercials about eating fiber to beat the Grim Reaper. When her parents died, my grandmother was grieved but not incredulous, for death was the natural corollary of life and doctors could do just so much.

Doctors now can make babies in petri dishes, and the natural corollary of life is retirement in Florida. I suppose that is what
is so incongruous about what we are going through. Fresh from the gym and the sauna, I stand in the supermarket checking food labels for preservatives and wonder if there is a secret inside me, a little bit of something waiting to spring into action.

T
he two women are sitting at a corner table in the restaurant, their shopping bags wedged between their chairs and the wall: Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s, something from Ann Taylor for the younger one. She is wearing a bright silk shirt, some good gold jewelry; her hair is on the long side, her makeup faint. The older woman is wearing a suit, a string of pearls, a diamond solitaire, and a narrow band. They lean across the table. I imagine the conversation: Will the new blazer go with the old skirt? Is the dress really right for an afternoon wedding? How is Daddy? How is his ulcer? Won’t he slow down just a little bit?

It seems that I see mothers and daughters everywhere, gliding through what I think of as the adult rituals of parent and child. My mother died when I was nineteen. For a long time, it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vest-pocket description of my emotional complexion: “Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes—I have
long brown hair, am on the short side, have on a red coat, and my mother died when I was nineteen.”

That’s not true anymore. When I see a mother and a daughter having lunch in a restaurant, shopping at Saks, talking together on the crosstown bus, I no longer want to murder them. I just stare a little more than is polite, hoping that I can combine my observations with a half-remembered conversation, some anecdotes, a few old dresses, a photograph or two, and re-create, like an archaeologist of the soul, a relationship that will never exist. Of course, the question is whether it would have ever existed at all. One day at lunch I told two of my closest friends that what I minded most about not having a mother was the absence of that grown-up woman-to-woman relationship that was impossible as a child or adolescent, and that my friends were having with their mothers now. They both looked at me as though my teeth had turned purple. I didn’t need to ask why; I’ve heard so many times about the futility of such relationships, about women with business suits and briefcases reduced to whining children by their mothers’ offhand comment about a man, or a dress, or a homemade dinner.

I accept the fact that mothers and daughters probably always see each other across a chasm of rivalries. But I forget all those things when one of my friends is down with the flu and her mother arrives with an overnight bag to manage her household and feed her soup.

So now, at the center of my heart there is a fantasy, and a mystery. The fantasy is small, and silly: a shopping trip, perhaps a pair of shoes, a walk, a talk, lunch in a good restaurant, which my mother assumes is the kind of place I eat at all the time. I pick up the check. We take a cab to the train. She reminds me of somebody’s birthday. I invite her and my father to dinner. The mystery is whether the fantasy has within it a nugget of fact. Would I really have wanted her to take care of
the wedding arrangements, or come and stay for a week after the children were born? Would we have talked on the telephone about this and that? Would she have saved my clippings in a scrapbook? Or would she have meddled in my affairs, volunteering opinions I didn’t want to hear about things that were none of her business, criticizing my clothes and my children? Worse still, would we have been strangers with nothing to say to each other? Is all the good I remember about us simply wishful thinking? Is all the bad self-protection? Perhaps it is at best difficult, at worst impossible for children and parents to be adults together. But I would love to be able to know that.

Sometimes I feel like one of those people searching, searching for the mother who gave them up for adoption. I have some small questions for her and I want the answers: How did she get her children to sleep through the night? What was her first labor like? Was there olive oil in her tomato sauce? Was she happy? If she had it to do over again, would she? When we pulled her wedding dress out of the box the other day to see if my sister might wear it, we were shocked to find how tiny it was. “My God,” I said, “did you starve yourself to get into this thing?” But there was no one there. And if she had been there, perhaps I would not have asked in the first place. I suspect that we would have been friends, but I don’t really know. I was simply a little too young at nineteen to understand the woman inside the mother.

I occasionally pass by one of those restaurant tables and I hear the bickering about nothing: You did so, I did not, don’t tell me what you did or didn’t do, oh, leave me alone. And I think that my fantasies are better than any reality could be. Then again, maybe not.

M
y grandmother was rather vain, and I loved her for it. Her favorite stories concerned her own charms: how she weighed ninety-six pounds until the third of her eight children was born, how some man tried to pick her up on the street even though she was pushing a baby carriage with a toddler on either side of it, how the nicest boys clamored to date her, particularly August LaForte, he of the wonderful manners and fine clothes. Once I asked her why she had chosen instead the rather dour young man, as she described him, who was my grandfather. “I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t think I could have hardly stood him at all if he hadn’t played the piano.”

She was born Kitty O’Donnell, and she had what the nuns in school used to call a smart mouth. The older she got, the smarter it got. “How do you think your brother looks?” she asked my father several weeks ago, lying with her
eyes closed in a hospital bed set up in her bedroom. “He looks fine, Mother,” my father replied. “He should,” she shot back, “he doesn’t do anything all day.”

She would have been eighty-nine years old last week, but she died on April Fools’ Day. The joke is on me. I accepted the inevitable disintegration of age without realizing how bereaved her death would leave me. She was the last of my grandparents to die. Concetta was gone before I really knew her. Caesar left me with only the enduring feeling that it was possible to not have much money or education, and yet to be a gentleman to the starched tips of one’s white shirt collar. My grandfather Eugene, the one who bested the natty Mr. LaForte, died when I was in college. He was often stern and always undemonstrative. I loved him blindly. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with him as he read my first newspaper story, a serviceable feature about someone’s hundredth birthday. I watched him run his finger over my name, his name, at the top of the story, and I felt as though I might keel over with happiness.

Perhaps no four people have meant as much to me as they have, not only because they persuaded me that I had a past and a future, but because their affection and pride were rarely tinged with the perils of ownership. They were close enough to feel the satisfaction of blood in my successes, but not so close that my failures made them doubt themselves. This is the familiar dance of the generations, the minuet in which the closer we are the more difficult relations become. We are able to accept, even love, things in our grandparents that we find impossible to accept in their children, our parents. The reverse is true, too: in us they can take the joys without the responsibilities. In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.

I realized this when I had children of my own. When I began to think of my father as my children’s grandfather, I
began to look at him differently. And he began to behave differently. During the summer he took my three-year-old fishing, a pursuit my father finds sacramental. It was a great rite of passage. But the ocean was rough, the boat dipped, plunged, rolled, and the little boy cried and turned pale. His grandfather turned back immediately to the quiet of the bay, not to embarrass the child by putting him ashore, but to find a quiet backwater where he could go crabbing and save face. It was a lovely thing done in a lovely fashion, and I am ashamed to say that I tried to cajole my son to remain out in the rough waters, for two reasons: I had more of my ego tied up in his behavior, and I could remember a small girl who didn’t want to stay at sea, either, but whose father insisted she do so. That father is cut out to be a wonderful grandfather. He is funny, irreverent, rather eccentric, and a bit childish. He is a character.

My grandmother was a character, too. Despite the rosaries and the little clicking sound she made when someone told an off-color joke, she was no saint. I loved her for that. I never tired of hearing the story of my grandmother’s career as a world-class shopper, of how one of my uncles was amazed to find himself first on line outside my grandmother’s favorite department store the day of a big sale, then flabbergasted to hotfoot it up to the menswear department only to discover his mother peeking at him from the end of a rack of suits. Or the one about my parents bringing my grandmother home after a night on the town and trying to convince her that there was no place to get a nightcap at that hour. My grandmother grandly led them to the Irish War Veterans headquarters and knocked on the door. “Hello, Mrs. Quindlen,” said the son of a friend she had known would be in charge that night. He let them in.

Now I am the meat in this family sandwich. Already, my elder son has invested his grandparents with a special aura; they are people who are very close to him in some magical way, but
not too close for comfort. They get all the calls on his play telephone. That was what my grandparents always were to me.