Of course, there were those of us who, in high school, simply didn’t give a rat’s rump what was expected of us. I was one of those kids, rebelling against the high school cliques and status quo, the mousy, rumpled kid who sat in the corner letting her dry-as-toast comments fly among her few trusted friends. That’s when I bothered to go to school at all. Given how depressed my mom was throughout most of my high school years—she was often out with a boyfriend, at work, or unconscious in her room—it was fairly easy to stay at home and watch MTV all day. Physically being in the school took too much energy. Most of my classes bored me and were easy to keep up with on my own time. As a “gifted and talented” kid, I was expected to constantly push myself for the sheer love of learning, but that took too much energy, too. I made no effort to challenge myself by taking harder classes.
Because of an admissions professional who must have been on narcotics, I was accepted to Allegheny College, a reasonably prestigious liberal arts college frequently touted as “Little Ivy League.” Allegheny is hidden in the nondescript town of Meadville, Pennsylvania, which is itself hidden in the nondescript central section of the state. Because they offered the most comprehensive financial aid package, I matriculated there. While half of the students’ parents were able to pay for four years in cash upfront and buy Muffy a new BMW to drive during her tenure, the other half of us came from modest means. Because of the number of grants and other help I had, my $80,000 education cost about $20,000, which I finished paying for a decade after graduating.
It was, however, worth every penny, even with the compound interest tacked on. When most of your classes contain fewer than twenty-five people, it’s hard to go unnoticed. Professors pushed me until I felt like I was sure to break, then pushed me a little more. Four years there were exhausting and rigorous and giddy fun. While my degree is useless on a practical level—I have a BA in theater—it was invaluable on a developmental level. I eventually understood that learning stuff could be cool when the people teaching you really enjoyed their jobs and had no qualms about firmly kicking your ass when you gave up prematurely.
What helped the most, however, was just getting away from my mother. By the time I was finishing high school, it seemed to me that my mom had pretty much checked out of our relationship, investing herself instead in a series of odd boyfriends—one was a pool hustler; another, a butcher—whose attention kept her misery at bay. By this point, we were also on our fifth or sixth dog. Each would last about eighteen months before it disappointed her in some way, by either growing out of puppyhood or peeing on the rugs. The last dog was a Chihuahua who liked to bite us if we startled it. And, for the record, Chihuahuas startle easily. I still have scars. Our life together had no real constant, given the parade of boyfriends and dogs and moods. You just never knew what you’d get when you walked in the door, the silence of a completely empty apartment or soul-wrenching sobs or wounded anger over a perceived slight, like not putting my cereal bowl in the dishwasher because I hated her. College was a refreshing change. I could breathe, finally.
The transition, however, both sucked and blew. My mom hated Pittsburgh but stayed because she couldn’t bear to take me away from my father, which always comes up whenever we talk about how miserable my high school years were. All of her bad moods and disappointments during her Pittsburgh years were my fault. We had to be there because I foolishly loved my father. Baptists can be martyrs, too.
All of my senior year, Mom went on about her plans to move to Central Florida, where her sister Linda and father now were. She didn’t delay, either. The night before my commencement, she and my aunt packed up the apartment. After my congratulatory postgraduation lunch, at which my parents were able to remain civil, she hopped in her car and drove away. As she hugged me. I couldn’t stop crying, even though by that point we were barely speaking to each other. My own mother couldn’t wait to get away from me, proof that I was the least lovable child in the history of children. I didn’t sleep at all that night, in my room at my dad’s, where I would live for the next few months, until college started. I spent the summer working at one of three jobs, saving up cash for school. It was a colorless time, like when Dorothy goes from Kansas to Oz, but in reverse. I filled the void with massive amounts of fried food and ice cream, one sometimes dipped in the other.
When I was a kid, the mother/daughter relationship was easy. Mom was the center of my life and I listened to her. I would hide under her pink gingham housecoat when I was afraid. Her legs looked like they stretched forever in the diffuse light and cozy warmth. In college, at first, I would have weeks where I wanted to do nothing but be back under there, safe in the knowledge that my mommy would protect me from the world.
No one key incident marked the beginning of the end of our talking. Most of it was just preteen stuff, the kind of puberty-induced weirdness that plagues all families but which my mother took personally. But there were small betrayals, too. One of her boyfriends was a real peach of a guy who drove a fast car with an automatic transmission.
I didn’t like him. My mother’s theory, which she borrowed from Phil Donahue or another great sage, is that I wouldn’t have liked anyone she dated because I felt a misguided loyalty to my unsupportive shit of a father. That’s really not it, I’d explain over and over and over. Grocery guy was just slimy. But she sticks to her piece of pop psychology and I stick to my assessment. Since everything I say to him is interpreted as sarcastic or over his head (which was not inaccurate), I’ve learned to not speak when I’m forced to go somewhere with them. I get labeled as sullen.
One sweltering late-summer evening, my best friend/next-door neighbor and I decide to hop the fence at our apartment complex’s swimming pool and take a clandestine dip in the pool to cool off. It was something other people frequently did and was tacitly approved of by the management. So we mention our plan to our folks—her parents and my mom and the aforementioned grocery guy—who give their approval and stand on our communal front porch to watch.
I try to climb the fence first. And don’t make it over because, by this summer, I am well into my food-is-comfort phase and have moved from husky into full-blown fat. Coupled with this is my natural lack of athletic prowess. At best, I am graceless under pressure and trip over lines on the linoleum if I know anyone is watching me walk across the room. I knew they were all watching me fail. And I could hear them laughing.
So I waddle back to my mom, seeking a moment where I could metaphorically hide under her housecoat. “You’re just a baby elephant,” the boyfriend says. He’s laughing so hard, he’s crying. My mother says nothing.
Variations on the scene play out for the next decade or so. It adds up. I don’t talk because everything I say makes it worse. She never stands up for me. A thousand betrayals without apologies. Neither one of us is happy with what’s here but neither one of us can let go. It’s like we’re locked onto each other’s wrists, spinning in circles, faster and faster. If one lets go, we’ll both fly off into oblivion. We can only define ourselves by this constant tension of being trapped and dizzy and without recourse. It’s a hell of a way to grow up.
Many years later, a good friend of mine, Steph, and I were dishing about a third friend, Shelley. Steph and I both are products of indifferent mothering. Over coffee one morning, one of us brought up Shelley, about how she and her mom have a relationship that is truly loving and supportive. They hug and kiss and talk. They honestly enjoy each other’s company. And Steph says, “It’s like watching an exhibit at the zoo.”
2
The closer I come to having my baby, the family curse, which my husband and I have joked about on many occasions, becomes less funny.
We’d always intended to breed but had not found the right time to do so during the eight years of our marriage. Two years previous, we had earnestly started talking about it, and so I’d weaned myself off of antidepressants. It seemed like a wise move before having a baby, and I was feeling more or less okay, psychologically. The dark moods and heart
-clenching anxiety that had haunted my early twenties had been pushed out by minor career coups and a move to Tennessee. Besides, Scott and I had been together for more than a decade. We owned a house and good china. We flossed regularly. We were adults, finally, and not getting younger.
But the events of 9/11 pushed us over the edge. Scott and I are not unique in our reaction to that national horror. Something about the thought of life ending so stupidly, about the constant threat of opening an anthrax-laced letter inspires thoughts of procreation in the minds of the country’s couples. When newsmen tire of reporting on the tragedy, they focus on the baby boomlet that is brewing. Color us trendsetters.
On Scott’s October birthday, we decide to start trying, figuring that it’d take a year or so for me to actually conceive. Our hopes aren’t high, given all of the infertility horror stories floating around on the network news and in women’s magazines. We think this will take years and heroic measures and test tubes and white coats and profound despair and epic struggles, but we will put on a brave face. We can, at least, say we gave it our best.
Four weeks later I am about to enjoy my annual Pap smear. I’d skipped out of work early to go on a Wednesday afternoon, the one usually dead time at the scrappy weekly paper where I was writing and editing. All it took to get the time off was the mere mention of gynecology to the boss man. Had I brought up speculums, I could have gotten a raise. Sometimes, being one of the few women on the editorial staff has its advantages. So I take off before lunch with promises to be back before a 2 p.m. meeting.
“I think I might be pregnant,” I tell the nurse, who stops pulling sample bottles of KY jelly out of a drawer. I’m sitting on the table in a paper gown, which tears every time I shift and exposes my bottom a little more.
“Did you take a home test?”
“No,” I say.
“Isn’t the suspense killing you?”
“No,” I say. And it wasn’t. My attention span has always been less than epic. I find it hard to finish a box of cereal before I get bored with it. Both the spouse and I are baffled by the fact that our relationship has lasted more than a decade, since I tend to wander off when any novelty fades. Four weeks into the baby-trying and the bloom was off the rose. Thoughts of a baby were inducing knee-locking terror, frankly, and I was pondering calling off this little biology experiment.
Signs had already begun, however. A few days earlier, at a friend’s wedding, my first sip of wine had almost come back up and I surrender the glass to a coworker. My stomach roils all evening, soothed only with cake, pumpkin risotto, and fresh air. I’d been exhausted all week, yet couldn’t sleep and would lie on the bed like a woman at sea, woozy and rocking on invisible waves. I start to down Pepto-Bismol, but it doesn’t even touch the malaise.
“Do you want to be pregnant?” the nurse asks, timidly, as if a woman who doesn’t want to breed shouldn’t admit it in public, like I was farting at my grandmother’s funeral. She sends me to the bathroom to pee in a cup. I put my clothes back on, first.
She comes back in, clutching a book and a stack of yellow paper. “Congratulations!” she beams.
“Now I have to go through with this,” I start to say, then catch myself. I should say something memorable, like “one small step” or “I’ll be back” or “thousand points of light.” Something. But nothing comes. I sit there, in that antiseptic room on the table with the stirrups, and stare at the nurse, who is smiling like she’d just won the lottery. Eventually, she gets uncomfortable and leaves.
My doctor, a petite woman with a mass of curly brown hair, comes in. “Is this good news or bad news?” she asks.
“Good,” I say, and it is. “I’m just surprised.” I explain the whole thing, how we didn’t expect it to happen so quickly and the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon and the threats of imminent attack and the second thoughts.
“Same thing happened to me,” she says (for a brief instant I think she’s pregnant, too), “when my grandfather died. My daughter is eight now. Best thing that could have happened.” She outlines the dos and don’ts of the next few weeks. Don’t touch cat litter. Don’t eat runny cheese or cold cuts or take hot baths. Stop the round-the-clock Pepto. Do eat a balanced diet and take prenatal vitamins. Baby is due at the beginning of June. All of this is on the yellow sheets of paper, which I dutifully gather up, along with a book that has a soft-focus cover image of a naked and radiant new mom and her naked and radiant babe. There are a couple of free magazines, which also feature radiant new moms, but no nudity. And so begins my initiation into the cult of motherhood. Radiant appears to be the password.
I don’t really remember the drive from the hospital, where my OB’s office is, back downtown to work. My first stop was my office, where I called my husband.
“So?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Wow,” he says.
And then we don’t say anything for a bit.
“How do you feel?” he says.
“I don’t know,” I say. And I don’t. I should be jumping up and down and kissing strangers. Instead, I’m staring out the window, phone to my ear, and watching the pigeons on the ledge. I ponder going out to sit with them, my legs dangling into the October chill. Instead, I go to a meeting, where I avoid everyone’s eyes while we talk about editorial budgets and local gossip. I know I’m sitting on a nugget of info that will eventually make the gossip rounds, if only in a small way. My life has never been interesting enough for the local rumor hounds to sniff at my heels. I am boring on so many different levels.
I start reading everything I can get my hands on, from What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which makes me feel guilty because I’m not existing solely on a diet of unprocessed brown rice and free-range carrots, to The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy, which leaves me laughing so hysterically that I can’t always stop. I also can’t read past the chapters on the first fourteen weeks. If anything, my reading has convinced me that most pregnancies are doomed. Mine feels doubly so since it happened so easily. This baby should have been something I had to earn.
By Thanksgiving, my all-time favorite holiday because it is based around my all-time favorite foods, my stomach will tolerate only five items: mixed nuts (which have to be Planters’ vanilla roasted), cranberry juice, canned tuna, butter, and bread. Everything else either violently comes back up or makes me so queasy that I wish it would violently come back up. The prenatal vitamins are the worst. I’ve taken to choking them down before bed, opening the cap while holding my breath because the mere smell triggers gagging. All night, the vitamins lie in my belly like rocks.
Shortly after turkey day, a big-name magazine editor calls to give me some good news. An interview that I had pitched on Alton Brown, food show genius, is a go. If I play it right, this wee little interview might be a springboard to future (and lucrative) freelance projects for this publication and its sisters. I’d never really intended to become the sort of writer who could churn out sassy bites of information for obscene amounts of money. I fell into the business, in fact, because I didn’t get into grad school (twice) and dropped out of massage therapy school (once). While the act of writing itself has never been easy, it is quite possibly the only thing that I’ve ever done that feels like the right thing to be doing while I am doing it. I have never felt guilty for taking the time to write—notable because I feel guilty for almost everything else I spend my time on, from reading to cleaning to eating. Plus, every now and again, perhaps when Jupiter aligns with Uranus, the act of writing is also rewarding on some mystical level.
Every now and again it is also rewarding on a financial level. The Alton Brown piece would certainly buy a lot of diapers. There’s only one problem: in order to do the interview, I’m going to have to drive down to Atlanta. It’s only four hours from Knoxville, but it seems like an insurmountable obstacle when I can barely keep down cranberry juice. By the morning of the interview, I’m a mess and sit on the edge of the bed shaking, a symptom of queasiness and dizz
iness, from the shame of no longer being a competent adult who can drive a car for four hours.
The Hub takes pity on me, calls in sick, and drives the car. I spend the trip freaking out about meeting a TV ministar and then about how I will keep from throwing up on his shoes. Once we make it to a fabulous restaurant in the nouveau riche section of Atlanta, I escape to the bathroom to gather my scattered wits. It’s a tasteful little room, all done in black Labradors and plaid. I can’t imagine the ladies who use the facilities even tinkling on these pristine commodes, much less leaning their heads on the cool porcelain and dry heaving. I can no longer even pretend that I know what I’m doing.
The interview, however, goes smashingly well, mostly because Brown is a damn nice guy who has a knack for setting twitchy reporters at ease. There is a small contretemps when I refuse his generous offers of bites of his food. I’d picked the blandest items on the menu and could just barely look at his exotic seafood club without heaving. I want to explain the whole thing, that I’m not really like this, that this sweaty, jumpy woman isn’t really me, that I’m pregnant and queasy and overwhelmed. Brown would understand. He’d give me a hug, pat me on the back, let me rest my head in the nook of his shoulder, and tell me it would all be okay. And I’d believe him, because he is a TV food guy and, therefore, trustworthy and infallible, much like the late Pope or the equally late Peter Jennings. I say nothing, instead, and secretly wonder if I am going to be this needy for the duration of the gestation.
Hillbilly Gothic Page 3