Hot Flashes

by Raskin, Barbara;

  “Give me a break, Miranda,” Carol moans, looking up with a wild expression in her eyes. “Don’t come sucking around here now, after everything you’ve done. You probably helped kill my mother, so don’t put on one of your performances about what a great friend you are, okay? I’ve had enough of you.”

  Miranda recoils and staggers back against the counter. “I know you don’t mean that,” she says breathlessly. “You know I never meant to hurt anybody. I loved every one of you.”

  “With a friend like you, we didn’t need any enemies.” Carol delivers the line calmly.

  Now Elaine and Joanne walk into the kitchen. Already dressed in their dark fall cottons, they rush toward Carol, who rises to receive their embraces and politely thanks them for coming to Washington. But a few seconds later, unable to restrain herself, Carol turns on Miranda again.

  “Really,” she insists. “I don’t see any reason why you should be here or why you should come to my mother’s funeral. I think it would be a travesty.”

  Silently, Kate, Elaine, Joanne and I form a supportive semicircle around Carol.

  “I mean it,” Carol repeats coldly. “I don’t want you here.”

  Miranda looks at our clock of faces and then slowly turns to walk but of the kitchen. No one moves or speaks until we hear the front door close behind her.

  “My mother was hardly an angel,” Carol says fiercely, “but that bitch wasn’t good enough to wipe her shoes.”

  I see Elaine wince and then revert to form by beginning to make a fresh pot of coffee.

  “But everybody knows my mother had pretty bad judgment about everything. Especially people.”

  “That’s a rather rude thing to say in front of her friends,” Elaine remarks.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Carol apologizes as she reaches out to take Sukie’s purse from its place on the table. Scavenging through its contents, she extracts a package of Merits and lights one, which she then proceeds to smoke awkwardly, without inhaling.

  “My mother let that viper into our family. In fact, she actually invited Miranda into our lives.”

  No one speaks.

  I am silenced by bafflement. I cannot understand how the little daughters we adored—the little girls we dressed in forest-green velveteen party dresses with square, lacy collars, black patent-leather Mary Janes, with straps they couldn’t buckle, and white tights we had to tug on over the rosy apples of their buttocks—grew into censorious, unforgiving young women who often treat us as their primary adversaries. All too often, I, too, have been stung by the same kind of scorn from Loren and Lisa.

  “She was soooo possessive,” Carol continues. “She just couldn’t stand the idea of David and me traveling around Europe with Dad. It was driving her crazy.”

  When Rosetta, freshly composed and made up, reappears to put her kamishbrot in the preheated oven, Carol calms down for several moments in deference to her. But then she explodes again.

  “I mean, I think she died from her own jealousy. I think she got a cerebral hemorrhage because she couldn’t stop David and me from going.”

  Although Rosetta has her back to us, I can see her shrivel beneath the impact of Carol’s words.

  “If autopsies could show emotional causes for death, I bet that’s exactly what it would show.”

  “Stop it,” Elaine shrieks. “You don’t talk about the dead like that. This is your own mother you’re talking about and she’s not even buried yet.”

  Joanne, who consistently tried to maintain independent relationships with her friends’ children, now walks over to stand beside Carol in an effort to show some understanding of her anger. But Carol ignores her, an act of extreme hostility.

  Almost all our children honored our friendships over the years since they were always respectful of genuine articles. Often, as time passed, they even held us responsible for each other’s objectionable words or actions. At other times, they turned to us to help reconcile seemingly irreconcilable differences with their mothers. We were, in some way, all part of a great motherland.

  “Now, you all stop this,” Kate Constant interrupts in tones that are terrifyingly deep and authoritative. “This kind of family fighting hurt Sukie. No wonder she couldn’t ever get the time to take herself or her work seriously. Sukie was a fabulous woman, Carol, and you’re not going to talk about her like that while I’m around here. Shit. Wait till you see who turns up at her funeral. She was important. Important. And she loved you so much it was bor-ing, bor-ing how much she talked about you. You kids”—the you is a stinging racial slap—“don’t appreciate nothing.”

  Carol, a member of a generation that is totally colorblind, ignores Kate’s blackmail.

  “Believe me,” Carol insists, speaking directly to Kate, “it was easier to be my mother’s friend, and see her only once in a while, than to live with her like we had to. I mean, living with her was a real trip.”

  Now the door swings open again and David, Max, and a tall blond young man clamor into the kitchen.

  David is wearing jeans, sweatshirt and blue running shoes. He has inherited Max’s best features—the deep-set denim eyes, the dark hair, and the boyishly open expression that makes him look much younger than eighteen.

  Glancing at each of us in hot confusion, David first rushes to fling his arms around Rosetta and wail, “Where’s Grandpa?”

  “He’ll be here in a few minutes, honey.” Rosetta clamps David against herself in an effort to absorb some of his pain. “Before ten, he said. In just a few minutes.”

  For a moment, David rests against her sturdy frame. Then he frees himself to rush across the kitchen and tumble into my arms.

  What tears me up is that I can feel him trying to acknowledge my loss while struggling with his own.

  “Diana, she died. She’s just … dead,” he announces, gripping me with quivering arms. “The day after we left for Europe. All by herself. With nobody else around.”

  It is clear that David has turned his grief inward upon himself. All I can do is hold him carefully, like a baby bird fallen from a nest, and hope my hug communicates a promise of myself to him in reparation for the loss of his mother. I know he still needs maternal support and I want to help him—to talk him through his first year of college, to welcome him to my apartment over holidays, to be there for him. But at this moment, all I can do is hold him tight.

  Sukie always thought David’s generation was the first of really “new” men in America—men who genuinely liked and found women interesting. Certainly David understood the dear dependencies of his mother and her friends and accepted our network as a serious and legitimate one.

  “Why right now?” he demands, pulling back so he can see my face. “I needed her. I still … wanted her.”

  David, like Carol, feels that the timing of Sukie’s death is her ultimate betrayal and he is challenging me to defend her defection.

  “She never took care of herself,” he continues fiercely. “She smoked and drank and ate greasy food. She didn’t care if she left us alone.”

  “Oh, David, that’s not true. She would never have wanted to leave you. And you’re not alone.”

  He is my height. Our eyes lock.

  “I don’t think it hurt her too bad, do you, Diana? I think she died too fast to feel any pain or anything.”

  “I do too, Davey,” I moan. “Don’t think about that.”

  “Come, David,” Rosetta says briskly and firmly. “Let’s walk out and go meet Grandpa, huh?”

  Eager to submit to her mothering, David pauses only long enough to put a leash on Happy before following Rosetta out of the house. Then Max, aware of the residual tension in the kitchen, tries to distract everyone by introducing Carol’s boyfriend.

  Neil Scott is a tall, pale young man who peers out at us from behind horn-rimmed glasses. He clearly senses something has gone wrong since he and Carol parted less than an hour ago and he moves quickly to stand beside her.

  Max is looking anxiously at all of us. His dark hair is
rumpled and his eyes, framed by the pleats of previous smiles, look strained. He is sweating. His shirt is glued to the flat plane of his chest, showing the shadow of dark hair beneath the damp cotton. His khaki pants are creased angrily around the crotch. His fatigue and distress create a sense of looseness and license about him.

  I have to look away.

  “What’s going on?” he asks. “What’s happening?”

  No one responds.

  “Don’t tell me there was a fight already,” he says threateningly, looking at Carol.

  Neil Scott puts his arm around Carol’s shoulder and pulls her closer. I glance at Carol to see if she’ll absorb some comfort, but anger is still scribbled across her face. She is silent now only because the one person in front of whom she won’t complain about Sukie is her father.

  Though some of our daughters sided with their fathers during our breakups—teaching us that daughters and divorce don’t mix—and often bad-mouthed us to their friends as well as to ours, few (to our knowledge) betrayed us in front of their fathers or their fathers’ new wives. Although Martha’s daughter Jessica agreed to “stand up” for her father’s new wife (his former secretary) as maid of honor at their wedding, and went to Saks where she charged a $559 dress to Martha’s charge account without asking permission, she refused her father’s invitation to join them on a honeymoon trip to China, so as not to leave Martha alone at Christmas.

  When I bumped into Carla’s biological husband, Conrad, on Madison Avenue, he told me he still felt terrible about leaving Carla—after twenty-eight years of marriage, right when she was stricken with multiple sclerosis—and that he always thinks about her in the evening while watching the sunset in Pago Pago, where he currently lives with his new bride. Stunned by his words, I had the presence of mind to tell him not to worry about Carla since their daughter, Emily, is a selfless angel in terms of caring for her, and that we all pitch in to do Carla’s grocery shopping and other errands.

  So while divorce offers a perfect opportunity for daughters to express any innate distaste for their mothers, essentially they don’t betray us in any ways that really matter.

  Pouring myself another cup of coffee, I think of all the times Sukie and I exchanged helpless looks, silently conceding the daughters of strong women often feel compelled to resist or even reject us in order to achieve their own autonomy. I remember how often we suffered estrangements from the daughters we adored because they despised the very strength that generated our passionate maternal love. And though we couldn’t have loved them more, we were often unable to lessen our key disagreements or modify their disapproval of us.

  Some of our daughters have been quite difficult.

  When Sarah’s daughter Cindy came home from college for Thanksgiving vacation and decided to make it with her high school boyfriend for old times’ sake, she simply went into Sarah’s bathroom and borrowed her diaphragm. When Sarah discovered it missing, Cindy simply apologized for neglecting to return it. There then ensued an argument during which Cindy accused her mother of being unwilling to “share” because she was jealous of Cindy’s more active sex life. When Sarah explained that her diaphragm was a 75 and probably too large for Cindy, Cindy said that her mother had a “humongous” body-image problem. Several days later in a restaurant, Cindy said that if it was true what Sarah had always said about “being what you eat,” Cindy, by all rights, should turn into a spermatozoan.

  When Arlene’s daughter had a miscarriage, she brought home “the product of conception” in ajar and left it on Arlene’s bedroom windowsill.

  When Phyllis’s daughter Liz was a senior in high school, she discovered her boyfriend in bed with her best girlfriend and simply walked outside and set her boyfriend’s father’s Mercedes on fire. Liz was on probation for two years, and Phyllis had to get a waitress job to pay the damages. She wore her full-length sable to work at the Pizza Hut near their $400,000 suburban house because it was the only coat she owned and she didn’t have the money to buy a cheap one. Her cash-flow problem was monstrous, but she laughed when her electricity was cut off because she thought she looked younger in candlelight and she’d begun seeing the Pizza Hut manager at home on weekends.

  It is difficult for us to admit that our children—the linear descendants of Hippies and Yippies—are now the Yuppies of the 1980s. Apparently the confusion and chaos of our broken families frightened them into a kind of conformity we spent our lives avoiding. They like their brand-name clothes with the labels on the outside so as to expedite their identification of each other and remain very selective about the messages on their T-shirts, carefully avoiding any metaphysical overtones. But despite their quirks, our children have decent instincts and we believe that eventually their designer jeans will recede and their genetic ones triumph.

  Our daughters’ lives, though enormously different from ours, are also difficult because in many ways the feminist revolution further convoluted male-female relationships. None of our daughters will date men they consider chauvinists (defined as any male who must be reminded to do his share of the chores), and they genuinely despise scoundrels (those very men their mothers most coveted). Our daughters only like considerate young men incapable of making any commitment—which is sad, because many of these attractive young women would probably postpone their careers if Mr. Right came along and consented to marriage and the production of bumper-to-bumper, post-Boom babies with them.

  The differences between our generation and our daughters’ are extreme. While we carry “notes from underground,” secret feminist samizdat, and Swiss Army knives in our Gucci handbags, our daughters have to purchase and carry slippery packs of condoms and sickly rubber medical gloves in their purses. Also, because of the way we raised them, they find it difficult to “be nice” to men just because they are men—which is good, but which of course causes problems. So our daughters have problems, and some of our friends have really horrendous problems with their daughters. No matter how bad Sukie and I occasionally felt, we always knew we were fortunate with the girls we’d raised.

  “Come on,” Max says, loud and angry. “I want to know what the hell’s going on here now.”

  “Oh, knock it off, Max,” Elaine answers, raising her voice. “You don’t get any input on this one. This is for women only.”

  “Oh Lord,” Kate Constant moans to Elaine. “You really do have an at-ti-tude. A serious attitude. You’ve got a real problem. You all do, as a matter of fact. Sukie did too. You expect so much from your men. You’re all so spoiled. I mean spoiled. If your old man doesn’t want to wash the kitchen floor or listen to you read what you wrote that day, you freak out. I’m not saying your men do the right thing at the right time at the right place. But the fact is you expect them to. And that’s crazy!

  “Because you ladies don’t know what it’s like when there ain’t a man around. Not a man within miles. Not a one. Not a daddy or an uncle or a grandpa or a boyfriend. And a husband? Are you kidding? Hey. I grew up in a world without men. Shit. I was afraid of men until I was fifteen. I thought they talked too loud. Their voices scared me and I didn’t know for sure if they were really talking English, because I never heard much English spoken by a man before I was four. I didn’t recognize it as the same language. So when I tell you ladies you expect a lot, you’d better believe it. Now let’s just knock off all this shit and get serious.”

  Mau-maued, I stand shamefaced while Kate, the black woman, defends Max, the white man. Seconds later a hot flash rips through me. The white women of our generation are compelled to listen to the black women because they often speak truths of which we’ve lost sight. In the arena of human emotions, they frequently remind us of lessons we’ve learned but, unfortunately, forgotten.

  It’s then that I notice Max motioning to me and Joanne. After a few puzzled moments, we understand enough to follow him outside onto the back porch.

  “Well, did you get it last night?” Max asks Joanne, after closing the door behind us.

  Caught off
guard by his phraseology, Joanne begins to blush profusely and remains silent. Max immediately grasps the reason for her misunderstanding of his question. Her silence is an admission of its accidental accuracy and he erupts with rage.

  “Ohhh. I don’t fucking believe it,” he groans. “This is too much. Aren’t you getting tired of quickies yet, Joanne? Haven’t you had enough of them? Isn’t it time you grew up, for Christ’s sake?” Especially the night before Sukie’s funeral? With her boyfriend?”

  Then Max whips around and thunders down the backstairs into the garden. His hands jammed angrily into his pockets, he walks around looking at the late bloomers and early fall flowers that Sukie so erratically but successfully raised. Max clearly feels that both Joanne and I compromised and betrayed him. Obviously he dreads facing Manny Smilow without some resolution regarding the manuscript.

  I am left alone facing Joanne on the Victorian latticed wooden porch.

  I watch her face begin to crumble from this last great insult. The shrine of her hopeful lovemaking has been sacked with an attack of obscenity that she both does and does not deserve. She begins to cry. I can think of nothing to say to comfort her, so I just hold her in my arms while she sobs, and rock back and forth a bit to quiet her.

  After a while, I lead Joanne to a narrow bench set against the latticed wall of the porch and leave her there so I can return to the kitchen where everyone has regrouped to stand around in unalloyed grief and unresolved conflict.

  CHAPTER 19

  Eventually Max and Joanne reappear, separately, from the back porch, but the general uneasiness is intensified when Jeff Conroy suddenly comes stomping down the hallway to enter the kitchen. Although he has changed his jeans for clean chinos, he still looks slightly disreputable, which helps to deflect any general realization that he has again let himself into the house with his own key. It is so preposterous a thought that no one thinks it. Under one arm he is carrying a recycled box clearly containing Sukie’s manuscript.