This is still fresh two years later. We didn’t solve it. I had the baby and felt guilty. I sent them pictures of her the day after she was born. We slowly, gradually got back in touch. They’re still mad. She calls, though, and she says they want to see us, want to see the babies. They haven’t met the two-year-old. She offers to fly us down for the week of our spring break.
I don’t want to say yes and know that it won’t go well. My husband has work on Long Island and can’t come. I think vaguely that they’re my parents and I love them; I think maybe, if we’re together with my babies, with the sunshine and the ocean, with them at work most of the time and me trying to be better, that maybe this time it won’t all go as poorly as it has before.
There is no one story so much as lots of stories, a general way of being. There is not, in direct opposition to most of the books I read until I got to grad school, a clear cause and effect. There is we don’t know how to talk to one another, the general feeling that we’re all saying the right things, trying, except all of them are wrong. The general feeling that we think and say the same words, but they mean very different things to each of us.
My parents came from nothing and worked hard for their money, which also meant they thought anyone who was not also successful was not successful because they did not work hard enough. They loved us, tracked every grade and track meet, class rank and debate win, which also meant love was wrapped up tight with winning, that one’s value was variable and contingent and could fall short at any point. Food was good but not-thin was disgusting. Flaws were fine but not ever when others might see. It was a world phantasmagoric with declarations for which one had to track and measure meaning, under which lived conditions, contradictions, a whole world of contingencies.
I was depressed is a clear, clean thing that I can say that might explain things. That my dad probably was too was not ever discussed. My whole life, I’d watched as he got sad and quiet and my mom yelled at him and he left the room and did not talk again for days. It was normal practice then for me to go into his room and beg him to come back, to come back out and ask my mom to please be nicer to him so he didn’t throw another temper tantrum, to beg him later—when she yelled again and he walked out of the house, standing in the backyard, locking himself in the garage, pulling the car over so he could get out and walk along the highway—not to leave.
And then: I stopped showing up to track and stopped showing up to school and drank more. I got in three car accidents in four days my junior year of high school and was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning a few weeks after that. I refused to go to school and had to be withdrawn. I did not feel sick so much as I felt like I’d finally stopped doing what they wanted. I felt scared and tired and wholly out of control for a long time. None of this must have been easy to try to parent. Their reaction was half to not look directly at the aberrant child, to keep me hidden, half to lash out late at night when they didn’t know what else to do.
He played victim; she got angry. I might as well die if you don’t love me, he said to me. You’re a worthless piece of shit, she said. You’re ungrateful and fucked up. It was language that she’d thrown at him when I was little, that she gave me now.
They were scared and desperate; they yelled and threatened. I never knew if I was on their team or not. If I was, they would do anything, fight for me, defend me against coaches and teachers, take me to doctors, beg me to be better. If I wasn’t, there was no end to what they’d hurl at me just to win, every error that I’d ever made but all in order, recorded and recast to show my failures in their clearest form. The worst part was always the not knowing. Not knowing if I might try again to love them, if any hint of needing, wanting, asking, would be held against me later on.
It was slippery linguistic manipulation, trying to find words but none of them quite working, love me love me, not like that, just stop it. We love you, let us love you, until it feels like every word holds its opposite inside it too. At least with hate you know what you are getting. Love like that, you forget sometimes it’s not love, that it’s empty, all words and performance, and still sometimes you grab at it, thinking maybe it will give what love’s supposed to give.
* * *
I think now that if I met them on the street I would find them completely fine and bland, just people. I would find them stunted and a little sad. They wouldn’t make me angry. It’s only because they are the place where the word “love” was built for me that I feel such fury toward them, that each time I get too close, I get so mad.
* * *
At the airport my mom cries but no one talks about her crying. She picks up the baby and my father holds the four-year-old and I stand separate with the car seats and the stroller and our bags. I strap the car seats in my dad’s Range Rover and my dad loads the bags and stroller in the back. He places the four-year-old into her seat, then asks if I can help him with the buckles, and my mother, having not let go of the baby since she saw us, settles her into the seat. We say as little as we can without ever stopping talking the whole half an hour that we’re in the car together. They ask the children all the questions. I jump in to clarify or to restate the questions to the baby when she doesn’t answer. I sit between them in their car seats and I hold tight to each of their hands and stare hard at the horizon—flat green marshland and rows of scrub trees, tall thin palm trees—so I don’t puke or accidentally say something that I don’t mean or scream.
* * *
We spend a week not really talking. Every night, when I can’t sleep, I read Henry Green, Party Going—1939, a fog has fallen and a group of wealthy people meant to go on an excursion are trapped in a hotel together; an elderly aunt might be dying and there’s drinking; a young woman takes a bath; the hotel staff pulls down the gates of the hotel and locks them, so that none of the people outside can get in.
The kids swim in the pool and at the beach and I go for long runs in the sand before they wake up. I run the same stretches of beach I’ve run my whole life, barefoot; I get blood blisters on the first couple of days, on my big toes and the balls of my feet, and I pop them and they harden over and the pain goes away. The water’s warm and I take off my shirt and shorts and there are hardly any waves. My parents go to work each day. In the morning, before leaving, dressed in her suit, wearing the lotion that she’s always worn to match her perfume, that I could smell three thousand miles away, my mom lays out cereals and fruit and bread and makes me a cup of coffee. She dotes on us. She’s bought every food I’ve ever mentioned that the children might like: cheese and chicken, avocado, fig bars. The temperature inside the house is perfectly controlled.
We drop my mom at work so we can have her car to drive around, to go to the zoo, to get lunch. Three of the five days that we’re there I drive my mom’s car past Sasha’s. Once, when the kids are both asleep and I’m just drained enough by the sun and weary, I almost pull into Sasha’s parents’ driveway before I remember she’s not there.
I hardly shower the whole time we’re there and stay salty all day, traipsing sand over my father’s perfect floors while he stays quiet, mostly, wincing as our girls climb on the couch that I know no one sits on most of the time. He sits, usually with the TV on, while the children choose their cereal, while my mom makes dinner at night, while we all work not to fight.
I love Florida and I hate it. It’s warm here even though it’s still wet and cold in New York, and the beach goes on for miles with almost no one there. The stretch I run each morning is my favorite stretch of beach, my favorite stretch of land, maybe, in the world, so gorgeous and familiar, elemental to me; it’s a thrill to share it with my girls. Every other part of this place, though, makes me anxious; my parents talking makes my body clench and I feel the children’s bodies clench because mine is. They get worn out from the sun and throw tantrums. They can tell I’m not quite steady and they cling to me all day, crawl into bed with me at night.
* * *
I keep thinking I’ll ask my parents for money. I think vague
ly, when I said yes to coming, that this was why. I keep thinking: Their house is so big, and our older daughter keeps asking why they have so many bathrooms. It’s lots of open space, dark wood, and blues and whites. They’ve gotten better over years at being wealthy. Neither of them grew up with money, but now they hire the right people to teach them how to spend what they have.
I was twenty-one when I told them that I did not want their fucking money. I was just out of college, stupid, privileged. What I was saying was I dare you. Try to find some way to love me in the way that I need loving. It was one of their favorite things to hold against me: my brand-new car and college education, the years that my sister and I got to ride horses on the weekends when we were small. I wanted them not to have this particular ammunition, to see what other forms of loving they might be up to instead.
What was most embarrassing was that when it came time to need, it was the thing I’d thought was not enough, it was their fucking money, that I wished that they would give to me.
Now, I want them to see my need, but I don’t ask and they don’t offer so instead I’m mean in small ways and then feel awful afterward.
They have to go to bed, Mom, I say, when she plans a movie night with my cousin and her children. Don’t make all that food, I say, when she goes to cook an extra pound of fish. All she wants to do is cook them food and give them gifts and take their pictures so that she can post them on the internet. She wants to get some of the pictures printed and put into frames that match the frames that hold the pictures of my sister and me when we were children and put them on the mantel so she can look at them while she cooks dinner or gets dressed to go to work.
My father hardly speaks the whole time. There’s a TV in every room and he watches CNBC. He looks scared when he looks at me, like the mess of me might somehow get on him and he won’t ever be able to get clean.
Once, he asks about my job and I start to tell them but then my mother says, Those kids are so lucky to have you, and I look down at the food she’s made me, then over at my children who’ve stopped eating and are playing, and I say, No they’re not, Mom, and the three of us turn back toward the TV.
* * *
On the last day, my mother plays with our girls out on the porch. Both of them have come to love her. My father sits on his computer and I stay as still as I can in a corner of the couch. My mother pulls out all the toys that she’s bought for the children and that we have no room for in our apartment—that I can’t, by myself, carry back home on the plane.
We have to go soon, I say. They’ve gotten us a car to the airport.
My dad looks at his watch, and my parents look at one another.
Not yet, my father says. His ankle sits on his knee, and he opens up a file on his computer.
My mother’s small eyes flit from my daughters to my father and back to me.
Watch this, my dad says. I move closer to him. You have to watch this before you go, he says.
His arms are crossed; so are my mother’s. They’re both attorneys. My whole life, their arms have been crossed.
He starts the video and there’s laughing, yelling. It’s me, my sister, my older cousin. I’m five or six, my sister two behind, my cousin two ahead. We’re romping around the large house we lived in most of our early childhood. My uncle, who’s visiting from far away, films. There’s music playing and we’re dancing. We’re a little bratty, laughing, singing. We change our clothes. We romp and squeal. My little sister emulates our cousin, flapping her hair in front of her face and laughing, her nose close to the screen. I wear pigtails, the same pigtails I wore every day—my mother braided them, all dressed for work in heels and suit, black coffee, Estée Lauder lotion and perfume—straight up to middle school.
My father watches me—the grown-up me, not the one that’s laughing, singing.
So, he says.
My mother watches too.
I know better than to talk right now.
This must be why you hate us? he says. This part?
We’re still laughing. Five-year-old me has changed into a bathing suit and is running out to dive into the pool.
He says, Is this the childhood that made you do such awful things to us?
I want to ask them if they’re serious. I want to stand up on this couch and yell and scream. There are twenty-nine years to fill the gap between this video and this day. I don’t— I say, but then I stop. I can’t tell him that you can’t make a video of notness, that there’s no way to record all the ways they weren’t there.
This must be the part, my father says.
I dive into the pool on the screen.
Please, I say.
My mom stares at me: this must be the face she gives opposing counsel when she feels she’s shut them down.
We have to go, I say.
My daughters look at me.
I’ve asked them not to do this when my girls are with me. I asked them to promise not to fight with me. They’re not yelling now, though; they’re just reminding me quietly, just by looking, of all that I’ve done wrong.
We’re leaving, I say.
I pick up our two-year-old and she starts to scream. She arches her back. Her soft, round belly pops out from underneath her shirt.
My mother stands.
My father’s ankle comes off his knee and his feet are even on the floor.
I grab hold of our four-year-old’s hand.
She’s fine, my mother says. The four-year-old looks at me, then her, then me. She keeps hold of my hand.
They follow us to the front door. We leave the toys and all the clothes my mother bought them. I have our two small bags. We sit, quiet, on the driveway and the baby nurses and the four-year-old flips through a book until the car comes to pick us up.
* * *
Coming home: the plane lands and I pull the bags out from the overhead compartment and the two-year-old cries most of the time because I can’t hold her and our luggage and the four-year-old wets her pants as we get off the plane. Both of them want to sit in the fold-up stroller, so I put the four-year-old in first and then her sister on her lap and tell both of them to hold on tight; an old woman shakes her head at me, mutters loud enough so I can hear that I am being reckless with those precious babies, and it takes all the strength I have not to yell in her face. Out near the baggage claim, close to the exit, my husband, rumpled, no bag, coat unzipped and open, lets the children sit a minute longer, lets them fight about who gets to hug him first and roll out of the stroller onto the dirty airport carpet, takes all the bags off of my shoulders and puts them on the floor next to the children, arms around me, holds me, hugs me, whispers in my ear, You’re home.
THERE’S BEEN A spring snowstorm and I’ve called in sick to my day job to attend a day of faculty development at the university.
It’s a long message, almost a minute. I see it when I’m exiting the train. I get coffee from the coffee cart, milk and two scoops of sugar. I climb the stairs, which have gone icy, up to campus. The hand that doesn’t hold my coffee clutches the cold rail. I take my left glove off to slide open my phone and listen to her voicemail. Her voice is shaky. She drives a convertible; I think I hear the wind around her in her car.
I just … she says. Maybe it’s the lawyer in me, she says.
The cardboard cup is thin, and bends, the plastic cover comes undone and drops of coffee fall onto my coat. I’ve misplaced my winter boots and my feet are numb inside my leather shoes.
I pass a colleague, then another. I smile at them, nodding.
I’ll do whatever you need me to, my mother says to my voicemail. I’ll come up there. She’s frantic. Her voice quavers. I worry, though, about you. I talked to your father about maybe calling someone. I want to make sure. She stops. I hear the wind and other cars driving past her. What’s most important, says my mother, is those little girls.
I grab hold of the railing of the steps that lead to our department office as I almost slip.
I don’t want you to lose your litt
le girls, my mother says.
I’m standing in front of the building where we’re meant to be meeting.
Colleagues pass me. I climb the six flights of stairs up to the auditorium to avoid talking in the elevator as I listen to the message two more times. I know what this is because it’s happened once before this: they’ve suggested I’m not equipped to be a mother. She has. She has threatened to call authorities, to check in. This was just after I cut off contact. She has walked me through, via email and then in long voicemails on my phone and once my husband’s, the various ways a child might be taken from a parent if the parent is not properly equipped. I’ve thought before this that these threats were empty. They don’t, I tell myself, really think that my children should be taken from me. They just want me scared. Still, there is her voicemail here now and all the emails from two years ago that I have saved and pull up now on my phone.
Your little girls, my mother says, and I can see them, smell them, from this morning, sleep hair in their eyes and French-toast breath; I throw my coffee in a close-by trash can, worried I might throw it up.
* * *
I tap my pen through the first four hours of presentations. I slip my feet out of my shoes. I sit in back. I came in late and waved to my friends sitting together, walked up the steps to the last row so that no one would be behind me. They’ve brought in a guest lecturer to speak to us about arguments and Greeks. She’s corpulent, short-haired, almost funny. She picks at her sweater, to keep it from tugging at her middle, as she speaks. She rubs her hand along the back of her neck and leans her head back when she loses hold of her train of thought. She makes self-deprecating jokes about herself that it’s clear she only half believes.
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