Because I Said So (11 page)

It is almost four weeks that they have traveled together, without a break, and they are separating further with each passing day, while the daughter, on the brink of adolescence, is separating from them both. The wife watches her child’s new detachment with mingled regret and fascination. Just a few weeks ago this was a slouchy, baggy pants–and-T-shirted American girl. Suddenly her grungy offspring is watching herself in the shop windows of Seville and Cordoba and Madrid, Barcelona and San Sebastian and Segovia.

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And men, for the first time, are noticing her. Thirteen, but with a graceful body, her rippling dark hair twisted and clipped up, rather than tightly braided, as it is at home. Thirteen, but in Spain, she is wearing her clothes differently; she stands erect, walks with a new self-possession. This physical change is mirrored in the café by how she divorces herself from her parents as they sit, fuming in their isolation, their rage and despair. They are a couple of old people with their own problems.

On their return to America, the husband and the wife separate. The girl is not surprised. After what she has seen, she would have been surprised had they stayed together. The husband moves to a beachside town. The wife exhales. The yelling is over, the criticism, the second-guessing of every decision. She and the daughter sit across from each other at the dinner table. They are free now—to make decisions, to make mistakes, to collude, to negotiate, with respect. Free to grow into something neither of them can yet imagine.

She had been ready
for her husband to leave for years. What she had not considered was how it would feel seeing her daughter pack her suitcase, her toothbrush, her teddy, and leave with him for the first time. She did not do one thing until her daughter returned on Sunday night. There were things to accomplish, a book to write, friends she could have called, relatives, errands, and chores, and yet, she did none of them. The shock—that she would lose not only her husband but also her daughter, at least part of the time—was something that had never entered her consciousness.

The separation, which had begun in Spain and which was naturally a part of her daughter’s movement into adolescence, would not stop now.

She thinks,
half the world has gone through this,
but now it was her turn to discover what it meant to be a single mother, to construct a new life with her thirteen-year-old daughter. Thirteen.

That is an important fact. Keep it in mind.

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• • •

It occurs to her
that she doesn’t know how to do this—head a household, make a family when it is just the two of them. The husband provided most of the structure in their family life. Vacations, mealtimes, chores, homework. Now that it’s just the two of them, how very fluid their world becomes. They don’t know when to eat, what to eat, how casual it should be, when Thirteen should go to bed, do her homework. How clean to keep the house, how often a child of thirteen should be left alone in the evening.

She feels how lovely it is, absolutely liberating, this freedom to construct a life tailor-made for them alone. It will give them a chance to be absolutely themselves.

On the other hand, she has to admit that, as the weeks go on, the responsibility is a creeping anxiety. What does it mean if she goes out again, the third time this week? What does it mean to reheat last night’s dinner, or to microwave something from Trader Joe’s? How far can a family break down and still be a family? Is two a family?

But the months go by,
and they find their rhythms. Spain is a lasting influence—they find they like to eat late, sometimes nine o’clock, even on school nights. But it’s a real meal, cooked fresh and eaten together in the dining room. The woman discovers that just picking up whatever and eating on the run feels wrong. She knows that people do it all the time—it’s the modern condition—

but the lingering sense of dropping the ball infuses her with a subtle depression, which, somehow, is relieved when she cooks a decent meal and sits down to eat it with Thirteen, even if it is nine o’clock on a school night. It makes her feel like a mother taking care of a daughter, not two coyotes scrounging in an alley. Like they’re still a family.

Thirteen goes to bed late now, too, as late as she needs to. She knows when she’s tired. This is new too—the woman trusts her daughter to know how she feels. In Spain, both of them took sies-58

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tas and easily adjusted to the late nights, dinner at midnight, fla-menco at two A.M., and now, it seems, Spain is still teaching them what is possible.

Thirteen is frighteningly able, tremendously generous, matter-of-fact in her adaptation to their new life. The woman is grateful, but also worries about relying on this too much. Thirteen can cook for herself if necessary; she can put herself to bed. She does her homework on her own. She uses her spare time to write her monthly ’zine, play the guitar, cut up and refashion her clothing, make collages, or draw her cartoon strip.

But how much time alone is too much time? The woman begins dating. She worries that she is taking advantage of Thirteen’s competence, her ability to use her time alone, her lack of concern when her mother goes out. The woman keeps her cell phone on, tries to stay in the neighborhood; she can be home in five minutes. She asks Thirteen, “Is this too much? Would you like me to stay home tonight?” “It’s fine, Mom,” Thirteen says, with that thirteen-year-old exasperated sigh. But how much faith to put in that?

Both the benefit and the trouble with their new life is that it’s all experimental. No one can tell her if this is all right. Neither of them knows how the experiment will turn out. They can do what they want, what works for them both, custom-made and newly minted just for them. On the other hand, the woman worries that what might seem all right now might not be good in the long run.

And how can she ever know?

She thinks about her marriage,
whether they should have separated earlier. But she knows, deep in her being, that she wouldn’t have left him any earlier. She has to admit to herself, she is a coward and a shirker. She knows many women who are raising young children on their own, and doing a fabulous job of it. She considered it—when Thirteen was two, when she was nine. But if she is honest, she knows she couldn’t have done it—worked full time, kept a roof over their heads, dealt with the discipline and heavy interaction of
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early childhood, and continued to write serious fiction. Suicide would have looked like an attractive option.

But at thirteen, her daughter has turned a corner. Her bat mitzvah, where she proclaimed, “Today I am an adult,” was no big deal to Thirteen.

The woman, however, took it surprisingly to heart. In some fundamental way, she began to see her daughter as having come of age and capacity, more entitled to make decisions for herself, no longer a child. It doesn’t seem odd to her in retrospect that this would be the year her husband and she would divorce.

Now that it’s just her
and Thirteen, it’s so comfortable, so casual; she can see how easy it would be to move from a parent/child relationship into a sororal one. Best buddies. They could go shopping together, see movies, hang out, have their hair done, exchange clothing even. Like girlfriends.

But she has seen that kind of mother/daughter interaction at close range, and there seems something brutalizing in it, the mother using a child as a girlfriend instead of truly being a mother. “We do everything together,” one such mother says with a giggle. The daughter is a horror—so angry she cannot follow a request or even eat the food she is served, the terror of birthday parties and school days—and the mother blames everyone but the child and herself.

Now, however, the woman can understand how it happens, how seductive it is—especially when Thirteen is so deliciously wise and fun. She makes an easy co-conspirator, she can be indoctrinated into the mother’s point of view, she’s companionable, yet the mother still calls the shots. Such an easy buffer against adult loneliness.

The woman knows she must resist this temptation, the monstrous ease of sliding into “just us girls.” Thirteen has friends. She needs a mother. What is appropriate is the separation the woman first saw in Spain. Her job is to support that and encourage it, and remain the parental figure, a fixture with a dignity and weight and a
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center of gravity from whom Thirteen can push off into the world.

The girl needs the woman to stay back and let her emerge into her own space and her own style. But at the same time, she still needs the woman to set boundaries, to know that she is still being held, even when they’re making it up as they go along.

This is what the woman senses in the importance of the formal-ity of dinnertime. Even if they could just as easily order a pizza and eat it in front of the TV. It would feed her daughter’s body, but would it nourish her spirit, make her feel held? No, it would not.

The woman can’t escape
the irony and humor in dating again just as her daughter is beginning to look up and notice boys in the world. She feels under a tremendous obligation to do it right, to set a good example. She hates leaving her daughter alone at night to go out with a man, but at the same time she feels she’s showing Thirteen that you can have a bad experience and move on and find joy and pleasure in life again; these things don’t have to leave you bitter.

On the other hand, she doesn’t want Thirteen to get to know her steady date too well, because she wants the freedom to end it if it becomes necessary. At the same time, she doesn’t want her personal life to be mysterious either, leaving her daughter to worry and wonder what Mom is doing and who she’s doing it with. So every time the man comes to pick her up, she asks Thirteen, “Do you want to meet him?”

For a month or so, the answer is no. The woman talks about him, casually, hoping to get Thirteen used to the idea that there is someone special, but someone not very different from her other friends. Finally, one evening, when the man comes to pick her up, and she asks Thirteen, “Do you want to meet him?” the girl shrugs.

“I guess I can say hi.”

The man comes in, shakes her daughter’s hand, and gives her a CD he’s made—The Clash and Joe Strummer’s last; he has a Thirteen, too. And that is that. How simple it is, and yet big. Her mother is not her father’s wife anymore. And she’s not going out with Axl Rose or Pee Wee Herman.

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At her age, the woman discovers, the men who date have kids, too. She meets the man’s daughter—it’s surprisingly easy, natural. His daughter is accustomed to this, meeting her father’s dates. But she resists the idea of getting their kids together. She is reluctant to make mistakes. It seems a big step, too much. Her husband has a girlfriend now, and she learns he is planning for Thirteen to get together with the girlfriend’s family on an upcoming ski trip. Thirteen admits she is dreading it. The woman suggests she tell her father; Thirteen doesn’t have to do anything she finds uncomfortable. But she also makes a note to herself:
Don’t
rush the family thing
.

The woman and her steady
have their first major conflict.

She comes home dragging ass, and tells her daughter she thinks they are breaking up. Thirteen is wonderful and funny about the whole thing—talks to her as if she is one of her friends breaking up with another eighth-grader: “It’s all right, Becky. You’ll get over it, you’ll see,” she says in her perfect Keanu Reeves/Ted of San Dimas imitation. “You’re a great girl. Look how much you’ve got to offer.” It makes her laugh, but the woman has to pull herself together, pull herself back.
This is my child, not my girlfriend.

It isn’t up to Thirteen to console her, even as Ted of San Dimas.

Such a fine line, though—she lives with Thirteen, the girl sees her ups and downs, she can’t turn herself into an Easter Island statue. When the woman is bummed, Thirteen cares, she’s sensitive, she wants to make it better. And yet the woman cannot lean on her. She recites it over and over as a mantra:
It’s not a child’s
job to make a parent feel better, to make them take care of you.

It’s a child’s God-given right NOT to care about your personal life.

Thirteen is applying
to high school. Of course, the school she likes best is an hour’s commute from their house. Before, during her marriage, it would have been out of the question to move, to uproot the family so that one member could go to the school of her dreams. In fact, had the woman and her husband stayed
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together, Thirteen probably would not have been allowed to apply to this school. The family had a center of gravity then; it wasn’t a traveling show.

But now it is just her and Thirteen. They could just pick up and move.

And there it is, the frightening rub of this new life.

She lives in a particularly congenial neighborhood, interlaced with friends, colleagues, neighbors, and many of them are, like her, work-at-home writers and artists; theirs are relationships she has nurtured for fifteen years. They drop in, have coffee, see one another at Trader Joe’s, meet at parties, at the clubs. Where she lives has been part of her identity; it knits her life together, like the layer of fungus that holds together the forest floor. The idea of moving an hour away fills her with unnameable panic.

But she looks at Thirteen, back in her braids and baggy T-shirts—

Spain’s sartorial influence has faded somewhat—and is reminded how time-sensitive kids are, that they’re a product with a short shelf-life. She feels the weight of her responsibility to this particular item. She has exactly four more years with Thirteen, to have some kind of impact, to help make her life most closely approximate what this growing person would like for herself, to help her unfold into the young woman it is possible for her to become.