What My Mother Gave Me (20 page)

I get off the phone and wander through the gardens. I snap pictures. I sit down on a park bench in the same gardens where I once walked. And now I open my laptop and hook up to free Wi-Fi. Dappled light filters down.
Th
e Roman pines soar above me. When I was a girl, I thought these were a unique species of tree. It wasn't until I was much older that I learned that the Italians trim them this way—with no branches along the trunk, but bushy on the top. It is a paradox perhaps only Italians understand. You can keep the shade and still let the light in. And beneath the canopy, I see myself, my much younger self, avoiding the Italian men who call to me as I stroll among the shadows.

A
Th
ousand Words a Day and One Charming Note

LISA SEE

My mother, Carolyn See, is a writer. Her father was a writer. And now I'm a writer. My mother's best gift was the advice she gave me not just long ago but nearly every day since then: “Write a thousand words a day and one charming note.”

When I was a little girl, my mom was in graduate school at UCLA, getting her PhD in English. She read to me the usual kids' books, as well as what she was reading for her courses. (I could be wrong, but I don't think
Th
e Old Man and the Sea
is a typical bedtime story for a five-year-old.) My mom wanted to be a writer. She thought it would change her life, and it did. But it wasn't easy for her. Fifty years ago, there weren't many women writers who were being published. And there certainly weren't many women writers on the West Coast who were seeing their work in print either. I used to eavesdrop when she spoke with magazine editors on the phone, listening to how she would answer their mindless or impertinent queries and riveted by her strength and composure even when she was completely irritated with those men (back then editors were mostly men) on the other end of the line. I looked on as she revised articles, profiles, and books. I went with her sometimes when she interviewed people and listened to her caustic retelling of some of the idiotic things celebrities, such as James Garner, Linda Lovelace, and Carol Burnett, felt compelled to confide to a journalist. I heard her say to herself almost as a mantra, “A thousand words a day and one charming note,” time and time again. Many years later, when I was looking through her papers at UCLA Special Collections, I came across a letter from her father in which he said that the only way to become a real writer was to write a thousand words a day,
no matter what.

Maybe it's the
no matter what
that's the key. When I was growing up, I watched my mother curl up on the couch in our little house at the top of a steep and isolated hill in Topanga Canyon, open a black Flair pen, and then write a thousand words on a plain white pad of paper, every day, no matter what—even when my stepfather ran off with another woman, when brush fires burned around us, when the world told her that she couldn't get published, when some awful editor in a skyscraper three thousand miles away was so mean that after one of those dreaded phone conversations she'd go in the bathroom and cry, and when my baby sister wailed and I sulked and pouted like only a petulant teenager can. I also watched my mom write charming notes to editors at magazines and publishing houses.
Th
ese weren't just any notes.
Th
ese notes made me squirm not only from the audacity that she was writing to people who were so important but also for the nerve of what she put down on her pretty stationery with her black Flair pen.

“
Th
ey don't know who we are,” she explained. “We have to let them know we're out here.
Th
at this is
the
place.
Th
at we are
the
ones.”
She was bold, fearless, impudent, and endlessly funny in her notes. Who was chosen to be a recipient of a charming note? If his name made your hands sweat, then he earned a note. “I'll stop by your office to meet with you about some story ideas on March 3 at two o'clock,” she might write to someone she'd never met or spoken to, say, the editor in chief of
Esquire
or some other big-deal magazine of the day. She wasn't begging for an audience. She was just stating a fact in a positive way. Most times the editor would call and say, “Yes, come on by. I'll see you at two. Or would you rather have lunch? You live in Topanga Canyon, right? We've been so curious about what's been happening there . . .” But if he didn't respond quickly and with gusto, then my mom would send flowers or balloons or bottles of California wine until he did. She got a lot of her early magazine assignments on chutzpah and good cheer, but I have to say her notes weren't always charming. After one bitter rejection, she waited several months and then boxed up some of our goat's droppings and mailed them off to that snippy New York editor.

When people asked me, “Do you want to be a writer like your mother?” the answer was a big fat
NO
. It was too terrifying and disheartening to me and, at the time, I didn't see the rewards. I didn't want to be on the receiving end of those editing phone calls. I didn't want to be rejected. I couldn't see myself persisting in the face of great odds.

But here's the thing: I may have said I didn't want to be a writer, but my mom included me in the process from the time I was about thirteen. She showed me everything she wrote—from the smallest magazine article to all ten of her book manuscripts—to read and edit. What on earth did I, a sullen teenager, have to offer my mother in the way of editing? In those early days, I honestly don't know. Even today I don't know where the comma goes. But as she recalled the other day, “I trusted you. You were in the house. It was just you, your sister, and me against the world. Who else was there?” My mother taught me to look for words and phrases that get repeated, notice holes in the plot, and beware inconsistencies in a character. My mom was giving me the gift of words. What words work? What words are too powerful to be used more than once in 350 pages? What makes a character—whether real or imagined—do the things she does? How do you get a character from her front door to her car and on to her big adventure? I was my mom's apprentice, even though I didn't realize it back then. And still I claimed I didn't want to be a writer.

When I was nineteen, I left college and went off to Europe with a boyfriend. I thought I knew certain things about myself: I didn't want to be a writer, I didn't want to get married, I didn't want to have children, and I always wanted to live out of a suitcase.
Th
e big question with this imagined life was how I would support myself. I kept pondering this as I bummed around Europe on five dollars a day. Finally, we rented a small house on the island of Patmos for thirty-five dollars a month. Still, I was thinking,
How will I be able to pay for this “free” life I've envisioned for myself?
Th
en, one morning, I woke up and it was like a lightbulb had flashed on in my brain.
Oh, I could be a writer!

When I returned home many months later, I got my first two magazine assignments within forty-eight hours. A miracle, right? No, my mother gave me those, too. When a magazine called her and asked her to write a piece about sex on the college campus, she said that she didn't want to write it, but she knew who would be perfect—her daughter, who was just going back to college and had some experience on the topic. When an editor from a start-up sports magazine called and asked if she'd like to write for them, she said that she hated sports, which is true, but that her daughter loved sports, which was a lie, and that I would be perfect. She even suggested the topic: an article about my former stepfather's new wife, who then held the record in the woman's marathon.

Somewhere in there, my relationship with my boyfriend fell apart, and I moved into my mom's new house in Topanga. My rent? Ten percent of everything I earned. I was making something like five cents a word, but my mom didn't care. She was acting as my agent and teaching me to be a professional. So there we were—my mom, my little sister, and the newly arrived John Espey, the big love of my mom's life. Summer in Topanga is brutal. And we were all broke. One night we were watching a really bad miniseries on television. We looked at each other, and someone said, “We could do better than this.”
Th
at was the birth of Monica Highland—a pseudonym for my mom, John, and me. We wrote three books together. I held the pen and we all talked. John was a Rhodes scholar, my mom was a PhD, and I was the apprentice. We drank Château Topanga Champagne and laughed ourselves silly.

A thousand words a day and one charming note encompasses more than just those two tasks. My mother and I talk either in person or on the phone nearly every day about what we're working on, but also about editors, editing, bookstores, promotion, publicity, book tours, and just about every facet of what's happening in the world of publishing on any given day. And then there's the writing itself.

My mom was in the hospital recently. What was supposed to be minor surgery with a four-day admission turned into a twelve-day stay. We had lots of time to kill, and so we talked and talked. Inevitably, the conversation always came back to writing. “Suffering is the only authentic emotion,” she said one afternoon. We considered that idea for hours—how it affects us in our daily lives and how it's played out in our writing. On another day, we talked about motherhood. I said that to me motherhood is about sacrifice, courage, and loyalty. She laughed, and said she didn't have any of those traits. She was in the hospital, so I wasn't going to argue with her, but she was absolutely wrong. She's shown me that to be a woman, a mother, or a writer I must sacrifice, show courage, and be loyal. I must look for those authentic emotions. I can never give up or bow to people who tell me that I can't write because I'm a woman, that no one cares what I have to say, or that I'm worthless.

And if you think my worries are senseless in this day and age, then think again. Consider the balance of male writers to female writers on best-seller lists or how women writers are still paid far less than men. On a more personal level, I'll just say that the editor for my first book was very cruel and wrote things in the margins like, “What kind of a vacuous person would write a sentence like this?” It takes courage to write
deep
and it takes even more courage to fight to have your voice heard, even now.

Today my mother is considered the grande dame of West Coast letters. Sometimes I allow myself to step back, look at her in that way, and celebrate her accomplishments. But usually, she's still my mom.

Th
en
Th
ere Must Be a Story

ELIZABETH BENEDICT

“What a pretty scarf,” people often say when I'm buttoning my winter coat and it's draped around the collar, about to be knotted at my neck against the cold. “Where did you get it?”

“My mother gave it to me,” I begin and mumble the rest, disappointed the answer is so inelegant, and that I don't have a shopping tip to offer: “She bought it from a vendor at the assisted-living place where she lived.” I'm more than disappointed that I don't know where to buy another if I lose it, the last gift my mother ever gave me, two or three years before she died. Twice I couldn't find it—once when she was still alive and once after.
Th
e second time, I went into a full-fledged panic, the sort I feel when I think I've lost my purse.

It's a six-foot-long piece of black wool cloth, more than a foot wide when extended, made in India, and decorated at each end with a wide band of embroidered flowers in yellow, gold, light pink, and light blue threads. It's the vibrant pastel-colored stitching, the way it stands out against the black, that catches the eye so often.
Th
e flowers are boxy and stylized, not real looking, and I have never seen another scarf like it.

Last winter, getting ready to leave a restaurant, a woman I don't know well paid it a compliment and asked where it came from. “My mother gave it to me,” was all I said, but she must have heard something in my voice—something tentative.

“Oh, your mother,” she said kindly. “
Th
en there must be a story.”

TH
E STORY IS
her sad story and my sad story, and the tender place where these stories collide—or do they run together? Are we like oil and water or like the cream in each other's coffee? My sister would not have to wonder which metaphor to pick. She was crazy for my mother, loved and needed her unquestioningly all her life, all the more so, since her relationship to our father was miserable. He was short-tempered and she snapped at him; he bullied and she bullied back. My mother was her life raft.
Th
ere was altogether too much fighting in the family, and I was the one who checked out at an early age: precocious, bored, eager to find other families that suited me better, and independent in the way of New York City kids. I picked out an alternate mother when I was nine years old: she was bold and beautiful and lived in a fittingly glamorous apartment downstairs from ours. It would be years before the irony of my choice became apparent to me; alcohol ruined her—and her own mothering—many times over.

Detaching came easily to me. I'm not as high-strung as my sister, and my father and I had a few good years when I was young, before alcoholic nastiness seeped into his pores. And there was this: my father was ambitious and nervy and out in the world, where he wanted to be very successful—and was, for quite a few years. My mother was nice, meek, depressed, and abjectly in love with him. She was a gifted painter and had gone to art school instead of college, but painting, and then sculpting, would always be a hobby, a passion she could sometimes make time for while trying mightily, in later years, to support herself. I didn't particularly need her to protect me from our father, as my sister did, so it was easier for me to want to be more like him than like her: strong, not weak; nervy, not gloomy; cynical, not sentimental.

We were a 1950s-style nuclear family. When my mother got up the nerve to leave him when I was thirteen, she took my sister and me with her back to our hometown far from Manhattan. When she returned to him a few weeks later, having lost her nerve, we knew that he, not she, was the bad guy. Five years later, when they were about to call it quits, my sister and I cheered her on, encouraged her to finally make the break, even though she knew he would not help her financially—and she was right.
Th
ough the last thing I wanted was to become a woman like my mother, it was not possible to take his side in our domestic dramas.

I KEPT MY
distance from both of them. I moved to California and changed my name, had a ton of therapy, moved back East, wrote several novels that were—beneath a kind of surface glitter and glibness—fundamentally about women who had a hard time expressing their deepest feelings. Once I got through those, there were several other novels about people in crisis—very fictionalized versions of the crises in my own life.
Th
e mothers in my novels, though, had no relation to my mother, except in a later one, where she has a walk-on part as a mom losing her memory, which seemed generic enough to mask the more complicated truth.

She didn't appear in my fiction because I had no way to describe—or do I mean to disguise?—the distance I felt from her. When certain popular books or magazine articles about mothers came to my attention, it didn't occur to me to read them. I no more identified with the community of women and their mothers than I identified with Queen Noor of Jordan—an American woman about my age who had grown up in the United States and then married a Middle Eastern king. Sure, we had come from the same place—but we ended up on different planets. When I looked around at my closest women friends, almost every one had a tragic mother story, one more heartbreaking and unbelievable than the next. I knew I was comfortable with women who'd had damaged mothers, mothers who had never been quite all there for them.

And when it came to the matter of my wanting or not wanting to be a mother myself, I wavered for years. During the childbearing years in which I was married, I always had a book to finish; when I decided I wanted a child, I was in my late thirties. We tried for several years, and attempted various kinds of intervention. Had things happened naturally, I would have been a mother. But when I had to choose between injecting myself with weeks of hormones every month or not, I chose not to. When I had to choose between adopting a daughter—the social worker called to tell me one was available—and leaving an unhappy marriage, I left the marriage and gave up the quest for my own child. Since then, I've been lucky in that department. I now have a wonderful stepdaughter and a wonderful niece who is like a daughter, since her own mother, my sister-in-law, died three years ago. Better still, these young women are first cousins, and close. Very lucky indeed.

But it did not escape my notice that when the choice was mine, I eschewed motherhood. Other women I know took hormones for years, adopted when marriages were falling apart, adopted without marriage. I wanted to be a mother—but not in that all-out fashion. In 2004, after my parents were both gone, I shucked the disguises of fiction and began researching and writing a long essay about a famous murder in my mother's family that happened months before my parents got married. I spent a year on it, and in the course of those investigations into my mother's past and my own, I came to understand the other reason I had felt such ambivalence about having children of my own: at some very deep level, I didn't want anyone I loved as much as I knew I would love a child to feel as remote from me as I'd felt from my mother; I didn't want anyone to want to flee from me as I'd wanted to flee from her. It was a shocking realization, and it explained a lot.

WHEN MY MOTHER
began to lose her memory in a drastic way, and we moved her in with her sister, to an assisted-living community in White Plains, my sister was devastated by the loss. She asked me often how I felt, hoping for company. Mom now is like Mom before, I said, only more so.
Th
en and now, she had not been there for me. She and my sister liked to shop for clothes, and I didn't.
Th
ey didn't care about the news, and I did. Before, when I visited my mother in her apartment, I didn't know what to talk to her about. I tried to be dutiful, to be nice, generous, the things she wanted me to be, what is expected of a grown daughter with a kind, needy mother who worried about money and sent checks for a dollar to nearly every charity that solicited her. We shopped for food, watched TV, visited her friends, and went to the shop in her little town that displayed her beautiful marble sculptures, pieces my sister and I were happy to inherit. Often the visits felt like a strain to me, but I hope they did not to her; they are a strain to remember because I wish I could rewrite them, wish I had been closer, kinder, more easygoing, more comfortable—though maybe, just maybe, she had no complaints. Maybe I was the one with all the complaints.

At the assisted-living place—a quasi-luxury apartment building in downtown White Plains—my mother and aunt were sociable and well taken care of. I was in charge of their finances, and I visited often. It must have been her first Hanukkah there that my mother gave me the beautiful scarf, purchased from a vendor who probably spent a day or two selling jewelry and holiday tchotchkes to the residents. I don't remember the moment she gave it to me, whether it was wrapped, what she said. I just started wearing it around the collar of my navy coat and getting compliments quite often.
Th
e wool isn't heavy but it's long enough so that I can wrap it several times around my neck and halfway up my face, and it's real protection against the cold.

Th
e more I wore it and the more compliments I got, the more attached to it I became. I couldn't think of another gift she had given me in years that I had liked as much—that was as pretty or as useful. I was not “into clothes” but this was beautiful. I never wore pastels, but these pastel threads were stunning against the black wool. And the scarf was there all winter long, keeping me warm.

Th
e scarf didn't literally glitter but it had a glittering effect, or so it felt to me. It caught people's attention often for many months every year, for the next three years in which my mother declined, and then declined precipitously. She was ten years younger than her sister, but she died a year before. It is painful to remember the years after she gave me the scarf, the journey from the assisted-living building to the nursing home, from the floor of “OK” residents to the floor of the decidedly not OK. I spent a lot of time visiting her and my aunt, who remained on the OK floor until she died. I can't bear to remember the actual names of the floors, the conditions they referred to.

Before the worst of it, visiting was heartbreaking, but also strangely tranquilizing. I sometimes stayed for hours, just sitting with my mother and aunt watching TV, eating meals, sometimes taking my mother to the art studio, or walking past the electric train set and into the gardens that overlooked the Hudson River.
Th
ere were musicians who came to sing and play the piano, and a kindly rabbi who conducted services and knew everyone's name.

One of the last times I pushed my mother's wheelchair to the end of the hall, to take in the breathtaking view of the George Washington Bridge over the water, it was late afternoon and the sky was a dozen shades of orange. “Liz, did you make that?” my mother asked. She meant the landscape she saw against the window—a modern-day Hudson River School canvas. She still knew my name, but she had me mistaken for a painter—when she was the painter in the family.

“No, Mom, God made that.” It was not what I usually thought or said about landscape or anything else, but it must have made sense in that moment.

TH
E YEARS OF
caretaking softened my hard edges and rubbed away a lifetime of distance between us, and the scarf, the beautiful scarf that everyone notices and asks about, does a motherly job year in and year out: protects, warms, and reminds me, as though I could forget, that she is taking care of me.