Mother Daughter Me (30 page)

My mother wants to slough off the past, not recall it. Lia and I have been trying to plumb a depth my mother has no desire to reach. For all these months, I’ve been acting on a perverse impulse to demand my pound of flesh. And Lia has considered it her role as mediator to help get at some kind of essential truth. But my mother has felt cornered, and that’s just plain unfair to her—and, I now appreciate, unhelpful to both of us.

It dawns on me while we’re talking that since the phone has been our most comfortable mode of communication in the past, perhaps it will allow me to ask her the questions that have long been simmering.

I start with a tiny matter-of-fact speech. “Mom, it didn’t all happen fifty years ago, it was still happening well up into my twenties. And the reason I know this and you don’t is that, when you’re an alcoholic, there are a lot of things you don’t remember.”

As I say this, I realize we’ve made some progress after all, because my mother now freely acknowledges that her problem was alcoholism and doesn’t protest when I refer to her as an alcoholic. I go on. “I’m glad we’ve gotten to the point you can tell me that you have chosen not to know. But maybe you can understand that there are things
I
want to know, that maybe you could help me understand.”

I take her silence as tacit permission to proceed. I begin asking questions of her, as I might someone I’m interviewing for a story.

“I’ve never been all that clear on when you started to drink. Or why.”

I’m hoping that perhaps this neutral, professional tone of voice will help dispel her reluctance to talk about the past. And it seems to work.

“I think I started around the time I got a divorce,” she replies. “I don’t remember going on benders before that. But I don’t understand what was going on with me that I felt it was necessary to start drinking.”

She falls silent. A rookie reporter would jump in with the next question, but I know better. I use the silence as I have hundreds of times in the past with interview subjects—to invite her to keep speaking. After a long pause, she continues.

“Part of it was that it was the early sixties and the cocktail culture. Everyone was drinking cocktails all the time. I was totally frazzled, and it led to the overdrinking. I couldn’t wait to have a drink at five.”

That’s not true
, I think. She wasn’t the kind of drunk who got quietly plastered on martinis every night, then rose the next morning, living for the five o’clock bell in her head, when it was socially acceptable to start that evening’s slow, numbing drip. That was not my mother. My mother drank herself senseless on those cocktails. There was no waiting until five and certainly no getting up the next morning.

She’s read my mind. “But I was a binge drinker,” she says.

“I know.”

She goes on, and as she talks I hear profound regret in her voice—regret not over what she didn’t get from life but over what she failed to give. “That was the most irresponsible time of my life. There I had children, and I was gone. I was out to lunch; I was a terrible mother. I felt so insignificant and so worthless, and just so …”

Now she brings up her childhood. As a twelve-year-old, she says, with servants taking care of her, she was happy. “We lived in apartments in New York City, and I think that’s why I’m so happy in this apartment. It brings back a happy time of my life. When I was out at dance classes all the time, it was good. I was never in the house. And then we moved to Boston, and I was devastated. I had lost everything. And after that, I only remember being shouted at and screamed at by my mother.”

Ricocheting among many different time periods in her life, she recounts that when she was in her fifties and being interviewed for the job she got at Digital Equipment Corporation, she needed a government security clearance, which required that she go through hearings about her drinking. She relived that experience recently, she tells me, when she and Cheryl were going through old files. “We shredded all those papers.” The papers are gone now, but in the course of choosing what to shred, she must have come face-to-face with a lot of painful memories. My mother may not want to replay the wretched parts of her life in Lia’s office, but it’s now clear to me how much she has been confronting on her own time.

We’ve talked all the way through my preparation of the tzimmes, and it’s nearly time for me to go pick her up for the trip across town to
Carolyn’s. I’d hoped Zoë would join us, but since she knows my mother is coming, she opts to stay home and do schoolwork.

This time, I park just a few dozen feet from Carolyn’s house. And it also helps that this time my mother is psychologically prepared for the hill. Knowing there will be at least two doctors present tonight—Carolyn and her husband—my mother jokes as she inches her way up the sidewalk: “Do these doctors do stretchers?”

When we walk in the door, people are already milling. My mother and I both latch on to a college kid who says he wants to be a computer programmer. Together, we find ourselves telling him that my mother had been one in the 1960s.

“She was the real deal in those days,” I say proudly.

“What were computers like back then?” he wants to know.

“As big as refrigerators,” my mother says. He had no clue about any of this, and his eyes grow round. He starts asking questions, and I can see my mother relishes the chance to tell of her adventures as a programmer, especially programming in machine language, which brings the coder so close to the machine.

The formal part of the seder is pleasant and brief, and at dinner I look over and see my mother laughing and enjoying herself. She’s radiant, and just as on the evening of her birthday six months ago, when people clustered around her, I think,
Now, here’s a woman who still knows how to light up a room
.

———

“
S
EE THAT CVS OVER THERE? IT USED TO BE A GROCERY STORE,
and I used to shoplift there.”

“Mom!” Zoë is shocked. “You shoplifted?!”

“I did. It wasn’t good, I know. It was a gang of us in eighth grade. We did it all over town. And then one day another girl and I got caught and we all stopped.”

Zoë and I are parked on a downtown street in Amherst, Massachusetts, doing the spring-break college tour around New England. One privilege I am determined to give my child is the college of her choice. When I was a teenager, my college plans barely qualified as an afterthought for the adults in my life. I drifted through high school, amassing good grades but no knowledge. I graduated at sixteen, a year early, for no particular reason. Ever the iconoclast—and tightwad—my father claimed to be opposed to college, despite the fact that he was a college
dean. As it turned out, my father hadn’t saved a dime for his girls’ college education, and my grandparents weren’t about to chip in. (They did once offer to pay for Sarah’s college tuition if she agreed to cut off all relations with our father, but she refused.) “Live with me for four years,” my father said to me, “and I’ll teach you everything you need to know.” Vivienne took no interest in my post-secondary education either.

My mother had little to say except that I should apply to the University of California at San Diego. Her reason had nothing to do with me and everything to do with her. It’s true that UC San Diego had fine departments in science and math, and perhaps she thought I shared her love of those subjects. But I lacked both interest and aptitude in those areas, a fact that would have been lost on her, since by then she knew almost nothing about me. Nor did it occur to her to tell me that other UC campuses—UC Berkeley, for one—existed, with tuition as low as UC San Diego’s and excellent departments in writing and journalism, the areas I did want to explore. So I followed my mother’s suggestion and ended up at UC San Diego, where the modest in-state tuition was subsidized by an academic scholarship and earnings from an on-campus job.

Zoë’s experience is to be different. I’ve worked hard to save for her college education, and I’m happy to indulge whatever desire she expresses about exploring schools.

Zoë is starting to show signs of wanting to spread her wings. She has signed up for a six-week summer trip to Brazil, and I can’t imagine how I will cope for that long without her. If I can’t face putting her on an airplane for a six-week trip, how will I handle a college drop-off? I’ve joked with her that after she says goodbye to me on freshman move-in day, she should check under the bed in her dorm room.

I’ve spent weeks planning an hour-by-hour itinerary for our trip, shuffling Post-its around on a road map of New England. Having recently gone through this process with his older son, Doug, Bob weighed in with a few practical considerations and rearranged my Post-its to help me maximize the number of schools we could visit in the allotted time. I’m nearly a caricature of the modern parent helping his or her kid do the college thing. Of course, my eagerness and industry are partly to
compensate for my dread—I will become an empty nester in a blink, and I’m not looking forward to it.

For our week in the east, we have only one fixed date. My stepmother, who still lives in western Massachusetts, has a doctor’s appointment on Thursday of the week that we’re going to be back east. I’ve remained close to Vivienne through the years, in part because my default setting is loyalty, and in part because I know that although she didn’t love me as her own, she took us in when she didn’t have to and did her best by us—or at least by me. Had she refused, it’s likely we’d have gone into foster homes or—perhaps worse—to my mother’s parents. I also stayed close to my stepsiblings, especially my stepsister, Julie, who, as Sarah drifted further from my orbit, remained a steady presence. I’d like to take Vivienne to the appointment and offer my stepsiblings, none of whom live nearby, another set of eyes and ears. This also turns out to be very convenient, because the independent-living place where Vivienne now resides is in South Hadley, the town where Mount Holyoke is located. Had I been able to attend college in New England, I’d have put Mount Holyoke high on my list, and I tell Zoë she should really see the college. She shrugs indifferently and says, “Okay.”

On our first night at our hotel in southern Connecticut, I check my email and find a cheerful note from my mother, who has been busy nesting in her new apartment. “Things are good,” she reports. “Day is glorious.”

The next day, we visit two campuses in Connecticut. The first calls to mind a collegiate version of Vintage Golden Gate, one of the senior communities my mother and I visited in February. Classes are in session, but we see only a handful of students. During the tour, Zoë sends me a text from five feet away:
h3LL@ d3pPr3$$!Ng
. She’s also madly texting back and forth with her classmates.
ALL ASIAN
reads one text from a friend visiting Yale.
This is where fun goes to die
, reads a missive from Wellesley.
Too pretentious
is the report from Brown. We head next to Boston, and Tufts, where the group of prospective students and their parents is so large that as we follow our tour guide, it feels as if we are an advancing army, sending our backward-walking guide in retreat.

That afternoon, as we’re driving to Amherst, which isn’t far from Vivienne’s place, Zoë says, “Mom, can we please not reminisce?” She has heard me talk about Amherst enough to warn me that she’d rather not hear it all again. She does allow me to show her two things: the McDonald’s on Route 9 where I worked (“Really? You worked at McDonald’s?”), and the parking lot next to the town common where I first laid eyes on her father (“That’s pretty cool”). Then, once we’re parked in the center of town, I spot a pharmacy that used to be Louis Foods and is now a CVS.

I’ve used up my reminiscing chits, but I know I can cheat because I’ve got a doozy for her, and I bring up the shoplifting. After my brief confession, I say nothing more about it, and neither does she. But as we’re driving down South Pleasant Street to our B&B, my life of crime passes before my eyes. We pass the hippie clothing store, where I stole a pair of corduroy pants, and the former site of John’s Mini-Mart, where Vicky White and I got caught after stuffing panty hose and candy bars under our jackets. John himself caught us and called Vicky’s parents. Vicky was grounded for a month. Every day for weeks afterward, whenever the phone rang, I ran to pick it up, hoping to intercept Mr. White’s dreaded call to my father and stepmother. Until then I had been nothing but the perfect child, the one with perfect grades who never rocked the boat. Had they found out that I was a little thief, who knows what would have happened? But for some reason Vicky’s parents never called, and, while mystified, I was also infinitely grateful for being spared the wrath of my parents.

Had I lived in a stable home and not a dysfunctional one, I’d have known that whatever punishment I got was because my father and Vivienne loved me. But even then I knew that punishment doled out against the backdrop of my warring family, with its ceaseless conflicts around whose child was more “trouble,” had nothing to do with the child in question and everything to do with the turf battles of the adults. Now I think that this may be why I had such anxiety over what seemed to me like Matt’s bad-cop approach to parenting. Having grown up in an intact, happy family, he was simply more comfortable with imposing discipline than I was. Matt possessed the basic confidence that allowed him to see punishment as something that loving parents mete out to their
children to guide them. That had not been my experience of punishment; erratic and irrational as it was in my own childhood, it only frightened me.

We drive to South Hadley to pick up Vivienne at her independent-living place, several miles from town in a very rural area. When she opens the door, she hugs me and holds on tightly. My stepmother is not a woman given to hugs, particularly lingering hugs, and I read a great deal into her reluctance to let go of me.