Five Women

by Rona Jaffe

  “With Aunt Laura?” May said, and laughed.

  Then, the night before Gara and Carl were to leave Paris to return home, a phone call came from her aunt herself. Her voice was grave. May, the immortal goddess, the thorn in the side, the immovable object, the national monument, the wellspring of guilt, the adored and hated mother, the piece of unfinished business of the heart, had been struck down by a stroke and was in New York Hospital in intensive care, paralyzed and in very serious condition. So the food had finally won. Despite understanding that this had been inevitable, Gara was still in shock. She and Carl went to the hospital directly from the airport.

  To her vast relief May seemed much farther away from her demise than Gara had been led to expect. She was having great difficulty moving and speaking, with one side useless and a thick tongue, but she was very angry, and she was able to make her needs known.

  “Your mother is amazing,” the nurse told Gara. “I’ve never seen such determination.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “I want a knife,” May mumbled to Gara. “I want a knife.”

  “Who do you want to kill?”

  “Myself.”

  “You almost did. When you get well, and you will, and home, I’m taking you to Pritikin.”

  “You think I’ll get well?”

  “Yes,” Gara lied. Actually she had no idea, but she knew if May had to live in this helpless state she would rather be dead. “Listen to the doctor,” she said. And to the nurse, “Be careful, she might try to hurt herself.”

  She spoke to the doctor. He was an eminent specialist named Dr. Green, and he thought May was the sweetest woman who had ever lived. Gara wondered what her mother had done to him, but then she knew. This was the way May affected anyone who was not her daughter and who hadn’t known her for a long time.

  “This is a critical period,” Dr. Green said. “She could have more strokes. She’s extremely overweight, and her heart is not good and her cholesterol is high.”

  “I know,” Gara said.

  “She could be gone tomorrow, but if she has her way she’ll live forever. An amazing woman. Still, I must warn you, none of us are masters of our fate.”

  “I was hoping you were,” Gara said.

  At home that night, exhausted and jet lagged though she was, with resentful patients coming in the morning to remind her she had abandoned them, not knowing they might soon be abandoned again, and May possibly living her last hours on earth, Gara couldn’t sleep. All her life she had wanted to be away from the spell of her magical mother, the bad witch; and now that the fulfillment of her wish was at hand, she wondered how she would be able to live with the guilt. It’s not as if her stroke was my fault, she reminded herself. I am not the magical child, not the all-powerful; my anger doesn’t kill.

  She crept out of bed quietly so as not to wake Carl and went into the kitchen where she drank water from the refrigerator and thought about her mother. The worst part, Gara thought, is that she’s going to leave me before we ever make peace with each other. I never wanted a different mother; I just wanted the one I already had to behave differently. I was as stubborn as she was. We all are; we never give in, carrying the struggle into relationships with people who represent our mothers without our knowing it; and if we do give in we are more than defeated, we are lost to ourselves.

  People who have had happy childhoods with accepting, happy parents, have no idea what it’s like for the rest of us. They just know they love and are loved.

  I hate May for leaving me, and I hated her for tearing me down all those years, but if I ever let myself feel the love I have for her hidden somewhere inside my infant heart, I don’t know if I can stand the pain.

  My mother and I will never have our epiphany. We will not have our dramatic last act, our tearful confrontation with forgiveness and understanding. Not this mother, not with this daughter. I had to become the way I am to save my life, and so she lost as much as I did.

  Yes, Gara thought, May lost too. That’s the tragedy and, if I want to think of it that way, the revenge. We will spar and bicker for the rest of our time together, and she will claim she is being cheated of the daughter she wanted, but because she doesn’t know me she will never really know what a loving daughter she could have had.

  Gara found pieces of time to go to the hospital every day to sit with May and listen helplessly to her rage on about her helplessness and complain about the hospital food. At the end of the week they moved her out of intensive care into a private room. Things seemed better, so Gara told Carl she would slip out of the hospital early, meet him after work, and they would have dinner together in a neighborhood restaurant.

  “Oh? Where are you going?” May asked.

  “Just to get some Chinese food with Carl.”

  “Comb the back of your hair.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” Gara said.

  “Enjoy your life,” May said. Gara didn’t know if it was meant as a benediction or a complaint.

  The slip of paper in Gara’s fortune cookie read, “All great losses are also great gains.” At approximately the same time that she was reading it aloud to her husband in the restaurant, her mother died of a massive coronary, alone in her room at New York Hospital. It seemed a bizarre and frightening coincidence, and Gara wondered if it would have been easier if her fortune had been, “All great gains are also great losses.”

  She was an adult now, irrevocably. She had no parents, no siblings, no children. She stood alone, the oldest and youngest of her most direct, intimate bloodline. And she was only forty-three.

  Afterward, whenever she had to talk about May’s death, Gara would add sentimentally, “You know, the last thing my mother said to me was, ‘Enjoy your life.’”

  “Oh,” everyone said, “May loved you so much. She was always so considerate. Always thinking about you, wanting you to be happy.”

  “It’s too bad she didn’t enjoy her own life,” Carl said to Gara when they were alone.

  “I know.” She played her mother’s last words over in her head. There had been bitterness in May’s tone, whether because Gara was deserting her or because she knew Gara’s life was and always would be happier than hers had been. “Enjoy your life.” A complaint or a benediction?

  Perhaps the whole point of their mother-daughter struggle was that the message had always been mixed. It made Gara feel better to understand that. It was no one’s fault, it was just the way it was.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  EVE WAS LIVING in New York with Nicole now, in a small apartment on St. Mark’s Place in the Village, a neighborhood Eve considered sleazy and too reminiscent of the Sunset Strip in L.A. where she had started out. She wondered when she would ever be able to afford to live somewhere decent, in a big apartment overlooking clean streets, where everyone in the building was an adult and wore nice clothes, instead of here where they looked as if they dressed from pushcarts and were young and druggy. Nicole was in first grade at public school, and after school she was in day care at a nearby church. Even though Eve was half Jewish and half Baptist, she had never been brought up in any religion, and neither had Nicole, and Eve couldn’t care less, church or synagogue, as long as it was affordable.

  “Baby Jesus loves me,” Nicole said.

  “That’s nice.”

  “I can talk to him when I’m lonely.”

  “Yeah, well, just don’t start hallucinating,” Eve said.

  She was working as an office temp all over the city, going to casting calls and auditions on the side. She wished it had been the other way around: pursuing her career and working part time to pay for her subsistence, but having her child with her was a great deal more difficult, she was realizing over and over again every day, than sending money to have Nicole live with Grandma.

  There were clothes, books, toys, doctors, the dentist, and groceries. It was necessary to hire baby
sitters. A child was as expensive as an adult, except that an adult did not grow out of things the way a child did. At least Nicole didn’t need much food. She had strange eating habits: she refused to eat anything for supper but graham crackers soaked in a bowl of milk. Eve hoped she wouldn’t get malnutrition. She sneaked children’s vitamin drops into the milk, the way you would with a kitten, and felt maternal for having thought of it.

  A child also demanded time. After crying for her grandmother and her former life for two solid months Nicole adjusted and seemed like her old self, or the part of her old self Eve knew about. Nicole was irrepressibly chatty, and she didn’t like to be alone. She wanted Eve to help her with her little homework. She wanted to sleep in Eve’s bed. She wanted to have play dates. As often as she could Eve parked her in front of the television set, the way she had spent her own time as a child.

  “Watch this good movie,” she’d say. “Godzilla, made in Japan for two cents. See how phony the sets look? This is from the genre of el cheapo horror movies.”

  “Like King Kong, Mommy?”

  “No, King Kong was the best they could do at the time. They thought it was terrific.”

  “I’m going to be an actress like you,” Nicole often said, although she had never seen her mother work.

  “No, you’re not. You’re going to be a producer and hire me.”

  In her spare time Eve was looking for a kind and sexy boyfriend to replace Juan, to help with the rent and be around for sex and company so she wouldn’t have to hire a baby sitter so often and go out. So far the men she had met were unreliable, unemployed, unattractive, and unacceptable. The four U’s. It was a vicious circle, Eve thought; if you went to a lively local bar restaurant to drink and meet people, you met the kind of men who couldn’t afford to go anywhere better, and she didn’t have the money yet to go to places where she could make the contacts she wanted.

  New York cost too much. The prices on the menus sent her into shock, and now that she had sold her car she spent so much on taxis she could have rented a car instead, but where would she park it? If she put it in the street it would be wrecked, vandalized, or stolen, and a garage cost as much as her apartment. Baby sitters charged so much they must have thought it was a real job. She had been in an off-off-Broadway show, but it paid so little it was as if she weren’t working at all. In some irrational way she blamed Nicole for everything that was frustrating or difficult in her life, even though a lot of this was in no way Nicole’s fault.

  Her mother sent her a picture postcard of a luxury hotel on a beach with palm trees, whereon she wrote that her new life was everything she had hoped. Eve felt like sending her one back of Times Square, saying that her new life was everything she had dreaded.

  But despite everything, Eve loved New York. It was exciting, it was composed of many different little villages, and you could walk. She bought a ratty fur coat at a thrift shop for the cold winter and didn’t mind the weather at all. She was basically a hot-blooded animal, and she had found her place. Even the sticky summer didn’t really bother her. This was better than where she had grown up.

  I’m a New Yorker, Eve thought, after the first year. The city and I have the same energy. I belong here. This is where I will become a star. For all that the city beat you down it was also a place where it was possible to be an optimist. She was pleased to see that her daughter, still at the adaptable, imitative age, had finally lost the speech patterns of her roots and had become a New Yorker too.

  Eve met her next live-in boyfriend, Mack, in a way that she considered typically New York. On a pleasant spring day she had stopped in front of Rockefeller Center during her lunch hour to watch a street mime. He was tall and thin and supple, with curly red hair, dressed like one of the usual Marcel Marceau clones, in whiteface with a daisy in his hand; but he had a sense of humor about him and an inordinate gracefulness that set him apart from all the others she had seen. She thought he was good enough to be professional. He was also very cute.

  Although she never wasted money, she was moved enough to drop a dollar into the hat he had placed on the sidewalk. Then she continued to stay, while passersby stopped and went on again, some of them leaving money, and to amuse herself she tried to make eye contact and rattle him. He was her age, and she wondered what he was like in real life. Then he finally gave in and started making eye contact with her.

  “Coffee break,” he said, stopped still, and then shook himself as if he were shaking off a dream. “Want to have coffee with me?”

  “Real coffee or make believe?” Eve said.

  He swept up his earnings and they disappeared into his pockets. Then he bowed and offered her his arm. “Real.”

  “All right.”

  He led her to the corner where there was a street vendor. Since there was no coffee he bought her a Coke. “My name is Mack.”

  “I’m Eve. I’m an actress.”

  “Well, I’m an actor, in case you didn’t guess.”

  “Do you like being a street mime?”

  “Actually it’s fun.”

  “I was a clown once,” Eve said. “I hated it.”

  “In the circus?”

  “In Beverly Hills. Same thing.” She smiled at him. She wondered what he would look like without his makeup.

  They talked for a while and then he made a dinner date with her. He went back to his miming and she went back to her office. That night she recognized him without his makeup and liked what she saw. He was straight, single, serious, and from Maine. He was attending acting class and his family sent him money. They had pizza, and afterward Eve took him to her apartment and let him stay all night. It was the first time she had done that with Nicole living with her, but she couldn’t live her life for her daughter forever.

  “Slack Mack,” Eve said to him, laughing. He was completely boneless except for the bone that counted. They had sex three times. At breakfast he mimed for Nicole and made her giggle. He said he had a little niece just like her. That weekend he moved in.

  It had always been that way for Eve where men were concerned: instantly or nothing. They either liked her energy and power or they didn’t. Since she had no idea how to tell the difference, when she wanted something she went after it, and her scattershot technique had worked often enough for her to feel she had a certain irresistible appeal. Now that she had Mack to share the responsibilities of her life she could concentrate on her career.

  It was during her relationship with Mack that Eve found out she liked to tie men up in bed. She was just kidding around with him one night and it came to her that it would be fun, and the next thing he knew he was spread-eagled on her thrift-shop four-poster bed with his hands and feet tied to the bedposts with her scarves. Loosely, of course, at first, but later she began to tie him with knots he couldn’t get out of. She was good at it. Slack Mack was supple, but he wasn’t Houdini. She liked to sit on top of him and ride him when he was helpless like that, and obviously he enjoyed it too because he got very hard and went insane. Sometimes Eve wouldn’t let him move.

  “You’re mine!” she would hiss at him, impaling herself on his penis with such force it seemed she was impaling him. “You can’t get away, you’ll never get away. Stay still!” She always came with greater intensity when she enacted this little scene than she ever had in the boring missionary position.

  She bought pretty silk scarves to tie him up with. Her favorite was red, the color of fire, her color. She anointed him with oils. She dribbled Nicole’s Yoo-Hoo chocolate syrup on him and licked it off.

  “My hands are falling asleep,” he sometimes complained.

  “That’s the only part of you that is,” Eve would answer.

  Once Mack jumped on her, pushed her down on the bed, and insisted on being the one on top. He held her wrists with his strong hands and Eve remembered that whatever she had done to him had been with his implicit permission and therefore she was not
as in control as she had thought. She felt as if he was raping her. When he tried to kiss her she bit him.

  “Don’t ever hold me down again,” she told him afterward.

  “You’re very sick, do you know that?” he said, looking in the mirror at his lip where it had begun to swell.

  “Oh, am I? Well, I have news for you. You’re the sick one.”

  She didn’t like to admit that she hated men, but she knew in a way she did. What did they expect? Look at the way my father behaved, Eve thought resentfully. She had never known a nice man growing up who could be a role model, who would care about her. Even her teachers had been women. But the funny thing was, even though she didn’t like men, she needed one anyway. She was trapped by her heterosexuality. Or perhaps just by her sexuality.

  “Why can’t you be like other girls?” Mack asked, a little plaintively.

  “I’m a woman,” Eve snapped. “Not a girl.”

  “Why can’t you be like other women?”

  “It takes two to tango,” she said, and turned her back on him.

  She knew he would never go away until she was ready to dismiss him.

  The next year, at long last, after all her miserable part-time jobs and penny pinching and rejections and humiliations, both their careers turned around. Both she and Mack got jobs on soap operas in New York. Her soap was called Brilliant Days, and she played Xenia Braddock, a villainess. Xenia was always doing inventive terrible things to the women she was jealous of, and taking their husbands or boyfriends, or even, in one story line, their baby.

  Eve was excited because it was steady work with a contract and promise of publicity and millions of viewers and fans, but she was also somewhat displeased because a soap wasn’t what she considered art. The stage was art. Even some movies were art. Close-up head shots in little bitty scenes with almost no time to rehearse and work on her character was not art, and she thought most of her lines were stupid and the story was worse; and of course her part wasn’t big enough.