Wait Until Tomorrow (7 page)

“Mom,” I yell. No answer. “Mom!”

I wrest the remote control from under her slumbering body. She wakes and immediately feels guilty for stealing sleep from me.

I grumble back to bed, also feeling guilty. Fortunately, we are good at forgiveness. We need to be or else neither of us would survive the other. Sometimes my mother wonders whether she somehow caused me to become a drug addict in my youth. I honestly can't say. I was allowed to do just about anything I wanted to do my whole life. Perhaps she could have kept a tighter rein. Perhaps she could have provided more guidance. But I decided long ago to take responsibility for my own actions. I made bad choices then; I can make better choices now.

When my mother was young and planning to marry my father, her sister Hazel predicted the marriage would never work. “Who will
find the keys?” she asked. Hazel was right. They were not a good match. Not only could neither of them find the keys, they both needed to be the center of attention. This was easy for my mother. All she needed was a piano. She was famous for her improvisational style. You want to hear “Happy Birthday”? She can play it in at least five different styles from boogie woogie to horror movie. One of her friends told me that once he was listening to her play the organ during a church service. Which Bach cantata is that, he wondered. Then he realized it wasn't Bach at all. She had taken a Broadway tune and turned it into faux-Bach, and nobody was the wiser. Another time she composed some music that fooled knowledgeable people into thinking they were listening to some newly discovered piece by Mozart.

Brilliant as she is, my mother has always had a bit of the absentminded professor in her. There is the story, famous in our family, of the time she left the baby outside while she was practicing. She had completely forgotten about him until a friend showed up and wanted to see the baby.

“The baby?” my mother asked. She then realized with horror that she'd left him outside in his little swing, and now it was raining.

 

Like all mothers, my mother had a set of maxims that she thought were important to impart to me: if you can't say anything nice, then don't say anything at all (unless it's irresistibly funny); it's as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is with a poor man (a nice idea in theory); if you want to commit suicide, wait until tomorrow (advice which has, it turns out, saved my life).

My mother was fascinated by the idea of suicide when she was young. Then when she was a teenager, the woman next door hung herself, leaving behind her daughter, who was a close friend of my mother, and a grief-stricken husband.

“You not only kill yourself, you kill everyone who ever loved you,” my mother said. Suicide was no longer romantic. Not to say that she didn't later consider it. Once she told me she had merely been waiting for me to turn eighteen before taking her life. Then when I turned eighteen, I was in more trouble than ever and the timing for a self-imposed departure on her part wasn't good.

Still, the threat of suicide was a great controlling device. When I was sixteen and wanted to rent a beach house with a friend for the weekend, she threatened to kill herself to get me to back down. I did, of course, but it was a dreadful mistake on her part. That was one of the few friends I had who wasn't heading to prison or death by overdose.

SPRING 2004

As my mother transitions from elderly to “frail elderly,” my daughter is getting ready to make the transition from middle school to high school. They are both graduating, in a way. And I've got to figure out what the best next step for both of them is—and how to afford it.

Emmy is in the eighth grade and attends a small private school about thirty minutes from our house. There are only sixteen kids in her entire grade, and even though they have their cliques, they also like to do things in a pack—go to movies, amusement parks, parties, and dances. For the three years she has been there, I have written the school play. Emmy was the lead the first year but only because I was out of town and someone else gave her the lead role. After that I made sure that the plays were heavy on “ensembles” and light on leads. But there's no doubt that every time she gets on a stage, Emmy is riveting.

For the eighth grade play, I create a pastiche of Shakespeare's plays, and we ask the kids to audition by reading a short monologue from
Romeo and Juliet
. We've gone through all the kids when it's Emmy's turn. She comes in, all legs and elbows and big brown eyes. She doesn't have the sophistication of some of those other world-traveled girls, but when she's done reading the part,
my friend Kerry, who is directing the play, and I just look at each other. She's in another league entirely.

High school will be different. She will have to leave this warm cocoon. I'm thinking that now might be a good time to switch to the public school where her neighborhood friends go. It's been rough coming up with eight grand a year for this school even though they let me pay by the month and they're pretty lenient when those payments are late.

Emmy, on the other hand, decides she doesn't want to go to public school. She tried it once and said it was like jail. I know that the standard liberal approach is to send your child to public school for the diversity and all that, but maybe those other liberal parents did not have the same experiences I had with the public school system.

I went to elementary school in Jacksonville, Florida, where every day felt like an interminable sentence. I was bored beyond redemption. When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher warned us as we were preparing to take a field trip to the zoo not to sit on the public toilets because some “fat colored lady” might have sat on the seat before we did. I was shocked. My mother had taught me that bigotry was unacceptable. Of course, schools weren't even integrated at the time—a fact that hadn't quite registered in my consciousness. By fifth and sixth grades I started getting into trouble—shoplifting, scrawling bad words on my desk. Maybe it's the only way I could stand the tedium. Maybe those childhood traumas were beginning to make themselves evident.

After sixth grade I went to the newly built Episcopal private school for the next three years. By then I was already on the path to ruin, but at least I learned a lot. In the seventh grade I memorized a huge section of Hiawatha just to impress our lovely young English teacher. In eighth grade, a teacher named Mr. M., who only liked a few of the handsome older boys, taught us “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot and changed my life forever. I had never known that such music or despair could be conveyed by mere words. He also made us read
Great Expectations
, and I've been a slave to stories ever since.

My mother was fairly hands off when it came to my schooling as were most of the parents of the time. I think she found school superfluous to education. When she was in high school, she often refused to go to school on Wednesdays. Instead she took the bus to town and educated herself in museums and libraries or by going to the courthouse to watch trials.

“Five days of school a week seemed a bit excessive to me,” my mother often told me.

My mother did come to my elementary school once when I had refused to eat the cafeteria food. To this day I shudder to think of those grits that you could stick a fork into and raise up above your head like a dead jellyfish, or those cold foul-smelling little orange fish sticks. It was lunchtime when my mother came to speak to the principal.

“I notice you aren't eating the cafeteria food,” my mother said to the principal who had a deli sandwich on her desk. “Why would you expect a child to eat that garbage?”

 

Now Emmy's in the eighth grade, and we have to figure out where she'll go to school next year. This is almost like getting ready for college. Everyone signs up for open houses at the “big three”—the three powerhouse private schools where Charlotte's elite send their children. I'm still holding out hope for public school, but some strange instinct draws her to the one school I would never have imagined for her. It's a large private school where the “old money” families send their children.

We take a tour of the campus. The “athletic center” is better than those at most colleges. The classes are small. The teachers,
top of the line. The fine arts building is state of the art. I try to keep my inner roughneck in check as we smile at the admissions counselors and the other moms whose every movement reeks of money and privilege and impeccable three-story homes.

Not only does Emmy like the place. They like her. I realize that even though we are white, we are the diversity that the school seeks. Most of the other students have gone there since kindergarten. Emmy is fresh blood. She might as well be from another planet compared to those kids with their perfect hair and their trust funds. A few weeks after we apply she gets an acceptance letter and something even more startling—a scholarship. Not for the whole thing, but enough so that if I watch my pennies I'll be able to make the payments.

When we lived in Tallahassee, she went to a very small “handson” learning school, like Montessori only with a little more structure. It wasn't a particularly expensive place, but I was even poorer then so I split janitorial duties with another mother to get half off the monthly tuition. Mopping those wooden floors where my daughter and her friends had been playing, pouring Lysol into toilets, scrubbing sinks and wiping down tables in the evenings in the empty school house—those were the most meaningful jobs I ever did.

As eighth grade comes to a close, Emmy and I are prowling through the mall, searching for the ear-piercing place. I know it's un-American, but I'm not much of a shopper—especially these days when checks always seem to be in the mail but not in the mailbox. I may buy new clothes for Emmy, but for myself, it's usually
Goodwill—or some discount place if I'm feeling extravagant. We find the boutique (hair bows, cheap jewelry, and lots of stuff that is pink and plastic) beside the food court: “Ear Piercing—Free.”

Inside a young woman whips out a cardboard tray with tiny birthstone earrings, and my daughter locks on the fake emeralds. The piercing is free. The earrings cost thirty-five bucks.

Emmy sits on a stool and the young woman uses a ballpoint pen to mark the spot where the hole will go. The girl offers my daughter a mirror, but Emmy just wants to get it over with. She's petrified.

“Do you want me to let you know when it's coming, or just do it?” the girl asks.

“Just do it,” Emmy says with a tight smile. A few seconds later, a green stone sticks out of her earlobe on a gold stem.

 

We had intended to do this a week earlier on her fourteenth birthday, but those plans were ambushed by a well-meaning science teacher who told her that in spite of her “remarkable” gift for engineering (her rockets went higher than anyone else's) and how much she had impressed him with the self-propelled car she had built, she would not be getting the science award at the end of the year. Her right-brained tendencies (terrible organizational skills and an inability to get homework turned in on time) had exacted a heavy price. She would not be eligible.

When I picked up my child from school that day, I had not been expecting this storm of grief. It was her birthday, after all, and I'd just been there a few hours earlier with pizza and cupcakes. But now she was inconsolable.

“Everyone thinks I'm an idiot,” she sobbed. “It's always the same ones who always get the awards. No one knows that I'm smart.”

It was not a minor issue. The birthday plans I had mapped out
went down the drain, and I spent the rest of the day comforting my brokenhearted girl.

So a week later, the day before her eighth grade graduation, the day before the dreaded awards ceremony, we are finally strolling out of the mall with a couple of pretzels and a pair of newly adorned earlobes.