Authors: Elizabeth Berg
“I didn’t really understand them,” my mother says, “but the illustrations were so graceful, and the writing seemed so wise and compassionate. Those books told me there was a logic to everything—maybe it was beyond my comprehension, but there was a logic, a reason for things happening. It made me see that humans are very small and insignificant; that all our triumphs and errors don’t really amount to much at all. There are times that notion can scare you, or depress you; but there are other times when thinking about it can help you sleep. Things like—well, I would read something like the first law of thermodynamics, and just find it enormously comforting. I still do. Think of it, the notion of nothing ever being lost, of it just changing form.”
“Is that the first law?” Sharla asks.
“That’s what it suggests.”
“What’s the second law?” I ask.
“Beats me,” my mother says. And then,
“Is
there a second?”
For some reason—the level of alcohol in our blood, perhaps—we find this all very funny, and we laugh long and loudly.
Then, “Mom?” I say. “Whatever happened to Jasmine Johnson?”
A rich silence. Then my mother says softly, “Oh, well,
Jasmine and I lived together for two years. Then she had to move again, and I didn’t want to go with her.”
“Was her husband some gangster or something?” I say.
“Maybe. All I knew for sure was that he was someone very rich and powerful and that he liked to smack his wife around, keep her under his thumb. Jasmine knew he would never give her a divorce. So she just ran from him.”
“Her poor son,” I say. “God, he was cute, that Wayne.”
“You knew he was her son?” my mother asks.
“He told me.”
“Huh. That was dangerous.”
“I think he also knew that his mother was a lesbian,” I say. “But he was very cool about it. Which was quite a thing for those times.”
“What did you say?” my mother asks.
“That he knew. That Jasmine was a lesbian.”
“But she wasn’t.”
I sit up, look at her. “Come on, Mom.”
“She wasn’t! I knew her very, very well; and believe me, she was not. She was different from most women, yes; she was … a sensualist, she believed in people doing a lot more than they allowed themselves to do ordinarily; but no, she was not a lesbian.”
Sharla sits up now, too. Her eye makeup is smudged beneath one eye, her impromptu hairdo completely off kilter. “But Mom, you … Weren’t you and Jasmine—?”
And now my mother is sitting up, too. “Were we together? In that way?” She laughs. “Oh God, no!”
“I was sure you were,” Sharla says quietly. “I was
sure
you were. I told
Dad
you were!”
“Well,” my mother says. “I think he was
very
well aware of the fact that Jasmine’s sexual preference was for men.”
“What do you mean?” I say. My chest hurts. I am finding it hard to breathe.
My mother picks up a chopstick, threads it through her fingers. “He did sleep with her,” she says quietly.
I look at Sharla, who is staring wide-eyed at our mother. “Mom,” she says. “This is serious. It is so important that you tell us the
truth
now.”
My mother looks at Sharla with a fragile weariness. “Yes,” she says. “I know. Once everything started, I always tried to. But I could never tell you about Jasmine and your father, not when you were so young. Not when I had just moved out and you were so vulnerable, so dependent on him. And then things just … fell apart.”
I lie back down on the sofa. I think of my father, whom I loved so much. I cannot tell him anything, now. I want to dig him up and shake him.
“Oh, my God,” I say, finally. And then, “So is that why you left, Mom?”
“Oh no. No. That was part of it. But him doing that just forced the issue. I mostly left because I wasn’t living a true life. I had something in me that needed out so badly. There was a night your father and I had a terrible fight and I—”
“We were awake,” Sharla says.
My mother looks at her. “You were?”
Sharla nods.
“Oh, I’m so sorry you heard that; what must you have felt? I was so confused. I thought after I got straightened out, I could come back for you. I thought my leaving
would be like a break in the circle of you girls and me, that I’d come back and still have a place. But the circle closed, and I was on the outside, and I couldn’t get back in. And then you were just … gone from me. And frankly, it began to seem to me that you would be better off without me. The times I saw you, I could see how uncomfortable you were with me. No matter how I tried to explain things, I only confused you, hurt you. Well, I was so confused myself—best friends with a woman who had slept with my husband!”
“You just … forgave her?” Sharla asks.
My mother smiles, a faraway look in her eyes. “In an odd way, I ended up being happy she’d done what she did. She forced me to do something I wanted to do, gave me an excuse for doing it. And, she … had a way. You couldn’t resist her. You remember, don’t you? Anyway, I floundered about so badly for so long, while your father was basically very stable and kind. He loved you very much; he had a fine job; he could give you a good home. He ended up marrying a nice woman, at least she seemed like a nice woman. I saw you a few times with her and you all seemed happy.”
“You saw us together?” I say. “When?”
“Shortly after he married her. I would go to places you went—restaurants, movie theaters—hoping to run into you. And I would see you, sometimes. I knew you didn’t want me in your life anymore. I just … I had to be sure you were all right.”
“I don’t think I can stand this whole conversation,” I say. “This is ridiculous. For one thing, you … Mom, are you really sick? Are you?”
She comes to sit beside me, takes my hands. “I know
how strange this all feels. Yes, I am sick. I have ovarian cancer. But there’s every chance that I can survive for a while with the treatments they’ll give me. But just in case I don’t, I wanted to try to see you two. I had to.”
I look at Sharla, whose expression is curiously blank.
“So?
” I say to her, meaning, What next?
Now
what do we do?
Sharla shrugs. “So it’s two in the morning—later for us. I guess we just go to bed.”
In fact, that is exactly what we do.
In the morning, I wake up alone. I go out into the kitchen to see Sharla and my mother sitting at the table, looking at a tattered book together.
“Good morning,” my mother says.
I nod irritably. My mouth is stuck to itself and I have a headache that makes the bright light unbearable. I pour myself a cup of coffee with hands that want very much to shake.
“Hangover?” Sharla asks brightly.
“No.”
I sit at the table and Sharla slides a bottle of aspirin toward me. I take three without looking at her.
“What’s that?” I ask, gesturing toward the book.
“It’s something you two used to love,” my mother says. “Your clown book. You used to fight over it.”
“I remember that! Let me see.” I flip through the book, and each illustration is so familiar to me. I can’t help smiling.
“She has lots of them,” Sharla says.
“Our old books?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s where they went!” Years before, I had searched the house, looking for the books I’d been read as a child. I’d wanted to read them to my own girls. But I couldn’t find them.
“I’m sorry,” my mother said. “I took them when I moved. I suppose I hoped I’d read them to my grandchildren someday. But then, everything got lost.”
“Not lost,” I say. “Only changed.”
“Well.” She smiles.
“I know,” I say. “I told someone on the plane I hadn’t seen my mother in thirty-five years and she was absolutely incredulous. And so was I, when I heard myself.”
“Oh, it … happened,” my mother says.
For a moment, the only sound is from the wind in the trees outside.
“I would have been a good grandmother, though, I think,” my mother says. “I was always good with babies.”
Some wall inside me breaks. “Jesus,” I say, my hand to my mouth. “I’m so sorry.”
“You didn’t do it,” my mother says. “It just happened. I’m the one who didn’t stay around to fight for you. I gave up. At that time in my life, it seemed like the right decision.”
“Maybe it was,” Sharla said. “We’re all right, we turned out all right. We’re happy.”
“Are you?” my mother asks, and her voice is as wistful and plaintive as a young child’s.
I nod my head. “Yeah.”
“Ah,” my mother says. “Then.” She sighs deeply, closes her eyes, opens them. “I have wanted to know that for such a long time.”
She goes to the window, looks outside. “Want to take
a walk? It’s beautiful here; I have a certain way that I go. Would you like to see it?”
And because we are finally, finally ready, we tell her yes.
I
t’s the same captain on this plane going home that I had coming out; I recognize his voice. And once again, he is pointing out things we should look at: in this case, Lake Michigan. But I don’t bother to open the shade.
I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and her reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent-teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up a forty-seven-year-old, looking in the mirror to count age spots.
Before we left our mother’s house, Sharla and I presented an abbreviated version of as many life events as we could recall: our graduations and weddings, our children’s milestones; and smaller things, too: my bout with mononucleosis at age sixteen, for example. “Did you wrap a warm washcloth around your neck?” my mother asked.
“No.”
“Oh well, that can feel so good when your throat hurts. I would have done that for you. And made some soup.”
A long silence. And then, “What kind?” I asked.
“Well,” she said. “We would have had a conference. On paper. Because I wouldn’t have wanted to make you talk.”
“I suppose I might have written ‘split pea,’” I said.
“All right,” my mother said. “So first I would have gotten a good ham bone.”
This is what we did, Sharla and I, on our walks with our mother. We gave her our life events to reconstruct so that she could put herself there. The three of us stood at the edge of the Pacific and our mother told us how she would have told Sharla’s boyfriends that she wasn’t home on the days she wanted to avoid them. In the woods, we lay on soft beds of pine needles and my mother told me that children walking after age one doesn’t mean a thing.
Did this help? Did it matter? Yes, and yes. In the way that it could.
For now, we are full of promises to stay in touch, to have our mother visit soon, to meet her grandchildren (“My grandchildren!” she’d said, with her hand to her throat). We’d talked about the wisdom of introducing our children, old as they are, to someone who may very well die soon, and concluded that so might any of us.
I am thinking again about Wayne, too, remembering how easily I let him into my life, then out of it. I am thinking of how right he was when he said that people want to be deceived. I have learned the truth of that notion over and over; but I never admitted to its obvious
presence in my own life. After all, I claimed I did not need my mother. I said I had replaced her.
Mostly, though, I am thinking about the notion of forgiveness, wondering if I always forgave my mother or if I never did, even now. I am wondering what it is that we ask of our mothers: what do they owe us? What is it that we owe them? Before I left, I wanted to tell my mother, “Look. You were an artist, living in an oppressive atmosphere. You did what you did in order to survive. I know you never stopped loving us. I felt it.”
But I did not say that; even now, I cannot say that. I expect too much from the role of mother, both as a daughter and as a mother myself. Georgia is more of my idea of how that role should be played. It is she I modeled myself after. But what do my own daughters think of me? They haven’t told me. They probably don’t even really know, yet. But they will. And although God knows I don’t like to admit it—that in fact I never have, until now—God knows that when they tell me what they think of me as a mother, I am going to take some serious hits.
I suppose what I now believe is that we owe our mothers and our daughters the truth, and the truth is that my mother was forgiven in the way she was not forgotten. If I tried to shut her out of my mind, there were reminders of her, anyway: the odd way I crook my little finger when I write, as she does. The way I laid my hand across my babies’ backs, which is the way I remember her laying her hand on me. I hear her inflections in my voice; I see her knees emerging from my bathwater. All my life, when I ate certain things, walked certain places, witnessed certain events, there she would be. Close your
eyes and draw a silk scarf past your ear: that is the whisper I heard. That is the soft presence I felt.
For so many years, when I thought of my mother, I thought of her tortured looniness before she left us. I thought of her callous disregard of our obvious needs. I thought of her unspeakable differentness, and was ashamed.
But now, sitting on this airplane on my way back to the life I went on to fashion after she left, I think of her differently. I see her so many ways: sitting back on her heels at the side of the bathtub, singing softly as she washes Sharla’s and my backs; watching at the window for the six o’clock arrival of our father; wrapping Christmas presents on the wide expanse of her bed; biting her lip as she stood before the open cupboards, making out the grocery list; leaning out the kitchen window that last summer to call Sharla and me in for supper. Most clearly, though, I see her sitting at the kitchen table, in her old, usual spot. There is a cup of coffee before her, but she doesn’t drink it. Instead, she stares out the window. I see the sharp angle of her cheekbone, the beautiful whitish down at the side of her face, illuminated by the sun. Her hands are quiet, resting in the cloth bowl of her apron. She sits still as a statue—waiting, I see now; she was always waiting.