by Ariel Leve
When Ariel is alone with me, or alone with people she trusts, she is a gem. A happy little girl. There is no problem. But Josie knows that Ariel doesn’t have full faith in her anymore. Josie said, “Ariel knows her mother spent thousands of dollars to get me back. New dishwasher, redecorating my room, full paid vacation in cash. She says I can’t really love her if I had to be bought back.”
I KNEW JOSIE was not fully on my side. I knew, at seven years old, that her allegiance was compromised. She would not have returned if it hadn’t been to her financial benefit. It was a job. I was a job. To put up with my mother, it had to be worth it.
THE FIRST NIGHT Josie moved back into her room, I climbed into her bed and slept next to her. I asked her to promise never to leave me again. But she told me she couldn’t promise me that. She had to wait and see if my mother “shaped up.”
For a few weeks after Josie returned, my mother stayed on her best behavior. She was a changed person. Only it didn’t last. Josie got fired again or quit, and this went on for the entire twelve years that she was with us.
14
Surf. Wake. Kite. Wind. These are the words on the flag that flies outside where Mario works. I am sitting on a wooden stool. Bright-colored photos of wakeboarding and kitesurfing action shots adorn the wall. Surfer girls in bikinis. Tan bodies in board shorts. T-shirts and sunglasses and beers are for sale. The view is of the beach. Life is easy. No stress. The talk is of wind and knots and weather conditions. It never gets old. The mood is upbeat. Reggae music is playing. The white surf at the reef breaks. The sun shines.
THE GIRLS ARE running toward me. They are wearing their one-piece Speedo swimsuits and they shout, “Ariel!” in unison because they have just spotted me and they are happy to see me. They are smiling, with wide gaps where their two front teeth used to be. It is late afternoon and they have been there all day, playing on their own. I haven’t seen them for a few hours.
“I missed you!” one of them says as her arms wrap around my waist.
“I missed you, too.” I respond without hesitation.
“Will you come swimming with us?” Her eyes are expectant.
WE PLAY IN the ocean. The tide is low and I crouch down on my haunches so that my shoulders are underwater and my feet are flat on the sand. I pretend to be a turtle and they take turns riding on my back. We float for a while and then we are mermaids splashing around. Our hair is tangled in seaweed. Small waves wash over us and the salty water gets in our mouths; we spit it up into the air in an arc. Then we dive beneath the surface and burst up again, like dolphins.
I NEVER WANTED to be a mother. When friends would speak about their desire to have a baby, I realized that I didn’t share this feeling. I didn’t crave it or need it or feel that my life would be incomplete without it. There was never a fear that I would miss out.
I was not against having a child, but I wasn’t seeking it either. What I had instead was ambivalence. And this ambivalence was so muted that it wasn’t even acknowledged or explored. It just existed in me like a virus that was asymptomatic.
HOWEVER, MY AMBIVALENCE was silently guiding my decisions and choices. Because if I had felt compelled to have a child, I might have been galvanized into doing all sorts of things I didn’t do. I would have had to take inventory, to examine my options and determine what I wanted. Did I want a family? Could I have a family? Were having these connections in my life important? These were questions I didn’t ask myself. Wanting to love and be loved didn’t assume a specific shape or form.
I didn’t dream about specifics. Marriage or children—there was no blueprint for that. One day I wouldn’t feel trapped. That was the aspiration. Other than that, adulthood was an empty road.
IF I’D THOUGHT about specifics, I would have been forced to scrutinize decisions in a way that accounted for the biological reality. Instead, I indulged in procrastination, an indulgence of deferment. It was a carelessness that didn’t require alcohol or drugs, because altering reality with substances wasn’t a temptation. Reality had been altered enough.
TURNING FORTY FELT the same as turning thirty or twenty. The goals others had for chronological or material milestones were irrelevant to me. Interior goals took precedence. Where did I want to be at forty? I wanted not to feel stuck.
I didn’t know how to get there. I had no fear about getting older because I lived in an arrested state, where there was only a floating timelessness.
I WAS WEARING red lipstick, high heels, and a black dress that my friend Laura had endorsed. We’d gone shopping together weeks earlier in New York when I found out I’d been nominated for the award. “We have to find you a dress!” she’d exclaimed, and I wished I shared her enthusiasm. I stood barefoot outside the dressing room, wearing a fifties-style prom dress after having modeled half a dozen different options for her approval. “I’ll get this one,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“Aren’t you excited?” she asked. I shrugged. I wanted it over with.
The night of the British Press Awards I got dressed alone in my flat in London. I looked forward to returning, taking off the makeup, getting into my pajamas, making a cup of tea, and going to sleep. At thirty-eight years old, I should have been. I should have been happy. I should have been proud. I’d done good work and it had been recognized. I was living in broad strokes and headlines. It was an autopilot existence.
“I don’t want to be here,” I said. That was my greeting to him when we ran into each other in the lobby on our way in. He’d arrived separately.
He smiled. “Well, you look lovely.”
We couldn’t be seen together as a couple. It was a public event and assumptions would be made that would be accurate and it would cause trouble for him, for me, for us. From the beginning he had told me we had no future. That I couldn’t expect more—and I accepted that. But not really. Our life was a secret. I was a secret. And because of this, there was no advancing forward. More didn’t feel realistic. It was enough that I had devotion, attention, time, and care. And episodic joy.
The ceremony was about to begin and we would be in the same room, at separate tables. He wasn’t one to accept defeat, and as we stood lingering for a few moments surrounded by colleagues, he tried to lift my spirits. “Cheer up, sweetheart,” he said. “It’s gonna be your night.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. I could say anything to him, and often did. How could it be my night when I couldn’t hold his hand?
I sat at the Sunday Times table, a place card with my name on it in front of my poached salmon. He sat on the other side of the room, but if I tilted my head to the left and squinted past hairdos and tuxedoed shoulders, I could spot him. Whenever I did this, he would spot me, too. We would stare at each other for a few seconds and silently share the experience. Solitary confinement, with company.
The night went on. My name was called. Infinite possibility was by my side, a dozen tables away. I was holding hands with him as I walked to the podium, invisibly connected to his intelligence and strength.
As I was being congratulated, I could move through it all and participate. But there was always somewhere else I wanted to be. Only that place didn’t exist.
MY MOTHER SAYS, “Don’t let work be your whole life or you’ll miss out on having a child.”
When she says this, I feel as though I am drowning.
She reminds me, “You need to have balance. The way I had.”
DEADLINES FOR PERSONAL choices weren’t overlooked. They weren’t postponed. They were nonexistent. They must have been. Or I would have considered the outcome before making that phone call. Before responding to that email that I should have ignored. Before saying yes when I should have said no. Seemingly inconsequential actions with predictable outcomes. Actions that added up and left me in a holding pattern. Hovering above the runway of trust without ever having to land.
MY MOTHER SAYS, “I hope one day you will have a child of your own so that you can understand the pain I go through.”
If I
wanted a sleepover at a friend’s house, it was a mission.
“You know I don’t want to be alone,” she tells me. “You can have her sleep over here.”
The negotiation began. “But it’s a slumber party. All my friends will be there.”
She tells me to stop whining.
“Invite them here.”
She explains that I should be grateful to have a mother who loves me. “Or would you prefer I don’t care? You’re lucky you have an attentive mother who wants you around.”
“WHO DO YOU love more?” my mother asks, stepping out of the tub, with suds clinging to her belly. “Your daddy or me?”
I say, “Don’t ask me that. I can’t choose.”
But she didn’t listen and as she toweled herself off and powderpuffed her naked body, she asked it again until I gave her the answer she wanted to hear.
“You,” I say.
Loving anyone more than her would have been a betrayal.
IF I WANTED independence in any way, I was hurting her. Her feeling that she was being abandoned would trigger her aggression. Her behavior threatened my safety. I deserved it. I was out to get her. I’d been poisoned against her. I wasn’t smart enough to get it. I wasn’t appreciative of who she was and what she did. I was special, brilliant, and talented. All she cared about was my happiness. I love you meant nothing. I hate you meant nothing. She meant all of it. I felt none of it.
By the time I finally grew up, I was exhausted.
I WAS FORTY-FOUR years old and having dinner with a friend one evening in a Greek restaurant when she said, “The role of a parent is to prepare the child and give them tools to go off in life and expect nothing in return.” I sat there. I reached for my notebook. “Can you say that again?” I asked. The words were liquid mercury spilling off the table. I couldn’t grasp them.
Sometimes the invisible failures are not understood until it’s too late. And what prevails is the sense of unavoidable destiny. Standing in the pit of a crevasse, with a rope to safety just inches away and out of reach. If only I was half an inch taller. There is always that wish for the impossible. For the sick parent to recover, the impulsive parent to have self-control, the unpredictable parent to be consistent, the irrational parent to respond to logic; the profoundly disturbed parent not to be profoundly disturbed and to give unconditional love.
MY ADULTHOOD HAS been about recuperating. There was no compulsion to give life to anyone else because I was depleted. There was nothing to give.
When someone said to me, “You would be a good mother,” he or she were speaking about a possibility so distant, it didn’t merit reflection. As if he or she had said, “You would be a good teacher.” Or “a good person to travel with.” I took it as flattery, nothing more.
By forty-five, I had accepted that I would not have children. And this didn’t feel like a loss. My mother desperately wanted to have a child. She wanted someone to cleave to her. Having a child was insurance. A lifetime of companionship.
THERE IS A story my mother told me throughout my childhood. Whether I wanted to hear it or not. It was about what had happened to her when she was a little girl, and I listened with attentiveness and curiosity. But it was never edited for the audience of a child. It was brutal, and when I got older I realized she wasn’t telling it to me, she was telling it because she had to. It served one purpose. The listener should feel bad for her. It was repeated again and again, and still to this day she tells it because it is the excuse for her behavior and the explanation for why she is who she is. It is the story of her victimhood. The story of her abandonment. The story of her life.
WHEN SHE WAS seven, her mother and father, whose marriage was over, placed her in a boarding school that she hated. Her father—street-smart and a hard worker—had no time for her. Her mother—intellectual, friendly, cultured, a teacher—married another man. In my mother’s story, the other man is the villain, lacking any redeeming qualities. He forced my grandmother to choose. He wanted a new family and he didn’t want my mother to be a part of it. Her mother married Joe and they moved to a house and lived in the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, specifically in Park Terrace. Joe and Mae, my grandmother, had three children (my mother’s half-siblings) and my mother was thrown away.
And so my mother’s mother left her in the Dickensian boarding school and went on to have a loving family that she wasn’t a part of. She was discarded, in this sad story, alone at school over holidays when neither her father (who was working) nor her mother (who was busy with her new husband and family) cared to include her.
My mother would point out how fortunate I was to have a mother who wanted me around. “At least I don’t throw you away,” she’d say. Pain was her province. My grandmother, as my mother repeated frequently, scarred her for life.
IT COULD HAPPEN at any time. I would hear my mother shout, “Do you want me to end up like Aunt Moll?” I knew then that my mother was on the phone with her mother. Aunt Moll was an alcoholic. I never met her. She died before I was born. She was my grandmother’s sister and I knew that she had a sad life. That she had fallen or jumped out a window, from an apartment building in New York.
When my mother needed my grandmother to tend to her, she threatened to jump out a window, like Aunt Moll. She could always get to Grandma with that one.
“Is that what you want, Mae? Because that’s what will happen.”
My mother called her mother by her first name during these outbursts. It was a verbal slap. Spoken with bitterness. “Mae” was the horrible mother who owed her and who would have to pay with infinite time and attention. “Mom” or “Mommy” was the patient obedient mother whose cheerful personality was admired and adored—the mommy she could laugh with until they were both in tears.
IN THE STORY of my mother’s life, her salvation was becoming an artist—a poet. She unshackled herself in her poems, met my father, and had a child. The one true miracle of her life.
I was born to erase her past. There was a vacancy that had to be filled. Having a child was driven by a need to quell the emptiness. She couldn’t have known this at the time.
“You won’t know what it means to love until you have a child,” she says.
I am in my forties when she says this. I stay silent. Holidays, her birthday, weekends—denying her time with a grandchild would yield epic conflict. I couldn’t see how to avoid it. Other than to cancel it out entirely.
WE ARE ON the bottom of the ocean in a canyon of coral. Mario hugs me from above and holds my arms in place in a way to force me to be still. There is a narrow passageway that requires neutral buoyancy. To pass through, we need to have a straight propulsion from his fins. This does not allow me to move or flail about. This hold also keeps the equipment together so nothing will get caught on the coral. At the end of the passage, he discovers the regulator is not in my mouth. The tube had gotten snagged and was yanked out, and when this happened, as we continued through the passageway, I held my breath. It didn’t occur to me to put the regulator back in. I couldn’t breathe, but I thought I was supposed to hold my breath and that he had knocked the regulator out of my mouth on purpose.
“Why would I do that?” We have come up to the surface and there is a horrified look on his face as he says this, because it would mean he was trying to kill me. But I don’t see it that way. I’d thought he was trying to protect me.
He is upset because I could have died. He can’t believe that I didn’t know I would need air underwater in order to breathe.
MY SURVIVAL INSTINCTS come to the surface in other areas. Spotting the cracks so I know where I can tread. This is my reflex. There is no instruction booklet. Only I know how to fend her off, hold her back, back her down —and these impulses are automatic. Will it be a good day or a bad day? I am graceful at sidestepping perilous eventualities.
I had no choice but to exist in the sea that she swam in. It was a fragile ecosystem where the temperature changed without warning. My natural shape was dissolved and I be
came shapeless. A plankton drifting in the current of her expectations. Unable to swim against it. And any attempt to swim away would harm her.
NOW THE GIRLS are beside me. We are floating. The water is still, and one of them begins moving away. She reaches over and places her hand on my upper arm to prevent this from happening. I move her body around so that our heads are touching, and when the other one sees this, she joins in. The three of us rest on the surface of the sea, eyes closed.
15
From 1973 to 1977, I spent every summer living with my father in Bangkok. For two and a half months, I would enter my other life. I slept in my other room with my other stuffed animals and played in the pool with my other set of friends. These friends were the children of expatriates. Kim from Australia, Philip from New Zealand, Justine and Rebecca from America—their father was a journalist for The Washington Post. In July we celebrated my half birthday—seven and a half, eight and a half—because my father was unable to be with me for my actual birthday in January. So every year I had two birthdays. My New York birthday and my Bangkok birthday. My Bangkok birthday was the one I looked forward to. As part of the celebration we would go to the Wat Pho temple and see the colossal gold-plated Reclining Buddha. Outside the temple, there were little birds sold individually in tiny wooden cages, and as my father explained the Buddhist idea of making merit, he would take out ten baht and purchase a bird in a cage. Then I would hold it up toward the sky, open the latch, and set it free.
Sometimes we would go to a congested neighborhood for sticky rice and chicken satay. Live chickens would walk along on the semipaved sidewalks. We’d go to the floating market, where rickety canoes piled high with tropical fruits—mangosteens and rambutans, pyramids of bananas and tangerines—drifted along the canal. The boats floated along the khlongs, guided by women in pointed straw hats. We took weekend trips to the south. Pattaya was an untouched beach with only a handful of hotels, and Chiang Mai, up north, was where elephants and giant hippos outnumbered people. My father had a sky-blue Chrysler Valiant and a driver. The driver taught me to say “stop here” in Thai. It sounded like jaw teeny, and I would blurt this out while he was driving until my father told me not to do that because it confused the driver. I’d do it anyway and it made me giggle.