Domestic Affairs (2 page)

For nine years now, I have been reporting on and ruminating about domestic affairs. This book is the result: nine years’ worth of stories and reflections on the things I care about and think about, the things that move my heart. Finally, though, this is not a book about me or about my children. Because the reason for telling these stories, I have come to believe, is not that they’re so rare and amazing—headline material—but that they’re not. In my newspaper days I wrote chiefly about isolated events and extraordinary phenomena. Now I document ordinary daily life. And I think one of the chief pleasures in doing that comes from the knowledge that what’s going on here is not unique or rare. What I went through this morning to get my son’s sneakers on and my daughter’s hair braided was probably the same thing a million other mothers were going through at exactly the same moment. And while it’s often said that parenthood—motherhood, anyway—is a pretty isolating experience (and it’s true, I have never felt so lonely as I used to sometimes, home alone with a new baby), the opposite can also be said. Having children is one way of feeling a connection with the human race, and all the other inhabitants of this planet, who—however else their lives may differ from your own—are doing precisely the same thing you are.

I was in New York with Audrey a while back, and we were riding a crowded bus. Audrey (eight years old now) was carrying the turquoise purse she takes with her everywhere, that contains all of her greatest treasures. A mother and a little girl who looked just about Audrey’s age got on the bus and sat down next to us in the only two vacant seats. The little girl was also carrying a scaled-down shoulder bag, although hers was purple.

We had fifty blocks to travel. Audrey unzipped her bag, then (partly, I think, as a way of establishing silent communication with the child beside her) began taking items out to examine them. A handful of jelly bracelets, a couple of ribbon barrettes, a miniature Cabbage Patch doll, a bottle of pink sparkly nail polish. Her birthstone (amethyst), her address book, featuring the names of several dozen pen pals. Scissors, hair bows, glue, a Chinese fan, an eraser in the shape of a banana.

And then an interesting thing happened. The girl opened her bag, and without saying anything, began to do the same thing Audrey had been doing. It turned out she had a handful of jelly bracelets and a couple of fancy barrettes too. She also had nail polish and a little plastic figure, and a notepad, and a shell, and an eraser in the shape of a watermelon slice. The two girls (still feeling no need to converse) began to giggle. I found myself catching the eye of the other child’s mother, knowing the two of us had the same impulse: To see if we resembled one another as closely as our daughters did. And what I felt, observing the similarities between us, was not the kind of panic I can remember (when you discover someone else bought the same prom gown you did, in the same color), but a reassuring sense of kinship. We never spoke, that other mother and I—we didn’t have to. I knew some things about her life. She knew about mine. We are both adventurers in the same mysterious territory of parenthood.

I seldom feel like much of an adventurer—standing in this kitchen, pour cereal into bowls, refilling them, handing out paper towels when the inevitable cry comes: “Uh-oh. I spilled.” But sometimes at night the thought will strike me: There are three small people here, breathing sweetly in their beds, whose lives are for the moment in our hands. I might as well be at the controls of a moon shot, the mission is so grave and vast.

T
HERE IS NO WAY
to be somebody’s mother without having been, first, someone’s child; and the kind of mother I am is all wrapped up with the kind of mother I had. Some of what my mother did is precisely what I’ve chosen not to do. Some of what she did is imprinted on me so strongly that now and then I’ll hear myself saying to my children the very words that were once said to me. (Of cookies on a plate: “What you touch you take.” Or, to a child wailing over being sent to bed: “That just shows me you’re overtired.”) Some of those lines probably go back a generation or two before me, and probably one or two will survive, through my children, into the twenty-first century I think it wasn’t until I had children myself that I understood the power of inheritance and the meaning of heritage.

Of course I’ve rejected, railed against, and even cursed parts of my heritage, as most daughters have. But in the end, I guess I never for a moment questioned the essential belief my mother possessed (and possesses still): that there could be nothing more worthwhile and challenging than having and raising children. Fashions in raising of children dictate, now, that women leave their little girls more free to choose or reject childbearing. But my mother raised me to be a mother, and (though I’m always quick to say not “when you have children,” but only “if”) the truth is I am probably passing on a good deal of the same pattern to my children too. Patterns are hard to break. If I had to name one occasion on which I learned that, it would be this one. The year was 1979. Audrey had just turned one. I was twenty-five, my mother fifty-seven, my grandmother eighty-six. One day there were four generations. The next day there were only three.

My mother called to tell me that my grandmother was dying. She had refused an operation that would postpone, but not prevent, her death from pancreatic cancer. She could no longer eat, she had been hemorrhaging, and she had severe jaundice. “I always prided myself on being different,” she told my mother. “Now I
am
different. I’m yellow.”

My mother, telling me this news, began to cry. So I became the mother for a moment, reminding her, reasonably, that my grandmother was eighty-six, she’d had a full life, she had all her faculties, and no one who knew her could wish that she live long enough to lose them. In the last year or so my mother had begun finding notes in my grandmother’s drawers at the nursing home, reminding her, “Joyce’s husband’s name is Steve. Their daughter is named Audrey.” She rarely saw her children anymore, had no strength to cook or garden. Just the other week she had said of her longtime passion, Harry Belafonte, “I gave him up.” She told my mother that she’d had enough living.

My grandmother’s name was Rona Bruser. She was born in Russia, in 1892, the eldest daughter of a large and comfortable Jewish family. But the comfort didn’t last. She used to tell stories of the pogroms and the Cossacks who raped her when she was twelve. Soon after that her family emigrated to Canada.

My mother has shown me photographs of my grandmother in the old days. Today a woman like her would be constantly dieting, but back then her stout, corseted figure was the ideal. She had a long black braid and the sort of strong-jawed beauty that would never be described as fragile. She was pursued by many men, but most ardently by Boris Bruser, also an immigrant from Russia, who came from a much poorer country family and courted her through the mail, in letters filled with his watercolor illustrations and rich, romantic prose. “Precious Rona!” his letters begin. “If only my arms were around you.” “Your loving friend,” they end (as little as one week before the wedding), “B. Bruser.”

My grandfather, like the classic characters in Isaac Bashevis Singer stories, concerned himself with heaven more than earth. He ran one failing store after another, moved his family from town to town across the Canadian prairies, trusting the least trustworthy of customers, investing in doomed businesses, painting gentle watercolors, while his wife balanced the books and baked the knishes.

Their children, my mother in particular, were the center of their life. The story I loved best as a child was of my grandfather opening every box of Cracker Jacks in his store, in search of the particular tin toy my mother coveted. Though they never had much money, my grandmother saw to it that her daughter had elocution lessons and piano lessons, and the assurance that she would go to college.

But while she was at college my mother met my father, who was not only twenty years older than she was, and divorced, but blue-eyed and blond-haired and not Jewish. When my father sent love letters to my mother, my grandmother would open and hide them, and when my mother told her parents she was going to marry this man, my grandmother said if that happened, it would kill her.

Not likely, of course. My grandmother was a woman who used to crack Brazil nuts open with her teeth, a woman who once lifted a car off the ground when there was an accident and it had to be moved. She had been representing her death as imminent ever since I could remember and had discussed, at length, the distribution of her possessions and her lamb coat. Every time we said good-bye, after our annual visit to Winnipeg, she’d weep and say she’d never see us again. But in the meantime, while every other relative of her generation, and a good many of the younger ones, had died (nursed in their final illness, usually, by her) she kept making borscht, shopping for bargains, tending the most flourishing plants I’ve ever seen, and most particularly, spreading the word of her daughters’ and granddaughters’ accomplishments.

On the first real vacation my grandparents ever took, to Florida—to celebrate their retirement, the sale of their last store and the first true solvency of their marriage—my grandfather was hit by a car. After that he began to forget his children’s names and could walk only with two canes. After he died my grandmother’s life was lived, more than ever, through her children, and her pride, her possessiveness, seemed suffocating. When she came to visit, I would have to hide my diary. She couldn’t understand any desire for privacy. She couldn’t bear it if my mother left the house without her. Years later, in the nursing home, she would tell people that I was editor of
The New York Times
and my cousin was the foremost artist in Canada. My mother was simply the most perfect daughter who ever lived.

This made my mother furious (and then guilt-ridden that she felt that way, when of course she owed so much to her mother). So I harbored the resentment that my mother, the dutiful daughter, would not allow herself. I, who had always performed specially well for my grandmother—danced and sung for her, offered up my smiles and kisses and good report cards and prizes, the way my mother always did—stopped writing to her, ceased to visit.

But when I heard that she was dying I realized I wanted to go to Winnipeg to see her one more time. Mostly to make my mother happy, I told myself (certain patterns being hard to break). But also, I was offering up one more particularly successful accomplishment: my own dark-eyed, dark-skinned, dark-haired daughter, whom my grandmother had never met.

I put Audrey’s best dress on her for our visit to Winnipeg, the way the best dresses were always put on me for visits twenty years before. I made sure Audrey’s stomach was full so she’d be in good spirits, and I filled my pockets with animal crackers in case she started to cry. I scrubbed her face mercilessly (never having been quite clean enough myself to please my grandmother). In the elevator going up to her room, I realized how much I was sweating.

For the first time in her life, Grandma looked small. She was lying flat with an IV tube in her arm and her eyes shut, but she opened them when I leaned over to kiss her. “It’s Fredelle’s daughter, Joyce,” I yelled, because she didn’t hear well any more, but I could see that no explanation was necessary. “You came,” she said. “You brought the baby.”

Audrey was just one year old, but she had already seen enough of the world to know that people in beds are not meant to be so still and yellow, and she looked frightened. “Does she make strange?” my grandmother asked.

Then Grandma waved at her—the same kind of slow, finger-flexing wave a baby makes—and Audrey waved back. I spread her toys out on my grandmother’s bed and sat her down. There she stayed, most of the afternoon, playing and humming and sipping on her bottle, taking a nap at one point, leaning against my grandmother’s leg. When I cranked her Snoopy guitar, Audrey stood up on the bed and danced. Grandma couldn’t talk much anymore, though every once in a while she would say how sorry she was that she wasn’t having a better day. “I’m not always like this,” she said.

Mostly she just watched Audrey. Over and over she told me how beautiful my daughter is, how lucky I am to have her. Sometimes Audrey would want to get off the bed, inspect the get-well cards, totter down the hall. “Where is she?” Grandma kept asking. “Who’s looking after her?” I had the feeling that, even then, if I’d said, “Audrey’s lighting matches,” Grandma would have shot up to rescue her.

We were flying home that night, and I had dreaded telling her, remembering all those other tearful partings. But in the end, when I said we had to go, it was me, not Grandma, who cried. She had said she was ready to die. But as I leaned over to stroke her forehead, what she said was “I wish I had your hair” and “I wish I was well.”

On the plane flying home, with Audrey in my arms, I thought about mothers and daughters, and the four generations of the family that I know most intimately. Every one of those mothers loves and needs her daughter more than her daughter will love or need her someday, and we are, each of us, the only person on earth who is quite so consumingly interested in our child. Sometimes, when she was a baby, I would kiss and hug Audrey so much she starts crying—which is in effect what my grandmother was doing to my mother all her life. And what made my mother grieve, I knew, was not only that her mother would die in a day or two, but that once her mother was dead, there would never again be someone to love her in quite such an unreserved, unquestioning way. No one to believe that fifty years ago, she could have put Shirley Temple out of a job, no one else who remembers the moment of her birth. She would be only a mother, then, not a daughter anymore.

As for Audrey and me, we stopped over for a night in Toronto, where my mother lives. In the morning we would head for a safe deposit box at the bank to take out the receipt for my grandmother’s burial plot. Then Mother would fly back to Winnipeg, where, for the first time in anybody’s memory, there was waist-high snow on April Fool’s Day. But that night, she fed me a huge dinner, as she always does when I come, and I ate more than I do anywhere else. I admired the Fiesta-ware china (once my grandmother’s) that my mother set on the table. She said (the way Grandma used to say to her of the lamb coat), “Someday it will be yours.”