“This is a fine sophisticated city, not some dumb cow town. Don’t tell everything to everyone. Keep your own counsel. You talk too much.”
My irritation grows as I listen to her. She always hates it when I “argue”—which means saying anything back to her.
“I like being friendly. People are nice.”
“Don’t be silly. People are not always nice; you need to learn that.” Mother turns to face a brick building and ducks her head down to cup cigarette and match against the wind. She tries twice, frowns, then stands to take a deep drag when the tobacco finally catches. The wind sucks my breath away.
She blows out the smoke, her dark eyes fierce. “Besides, you have to listen to your mother. There’s a lot I haven’t had a chance to teach you.”
“I know, but I have to be myself, too.” Fearing I’ve spoken too boldly and will trigger her rage, I soften my tone. “I mean, I’m just a friendly person.”
She slaps me on the arm. “Quit talking back to me. Here’s the jewelry store.”
Like flotsam tumbling down Michigan Avenue, we are swept by the wind into the vestibule of a small store. Mother grabs my shoulder. “You stay by the door while I talk to the owner. Don’t talk to me or join me until I tell you to.”
“But Mother…”
“Shh… not so loud. And don’t call me that.” She smacks my arm harder, her face tight, angry.
Mother hauls open the door and we enter a quiet, brightly lit jewelry shop, display cases arranged up and down both sides. A middle-aged man stands behind a counter, inspecting something with a magnifying glass.
Mother starts her routine. “Oh, John, so wonderful to see you again.” Hips rolling a little, she turns on her high voice of tense attraction. The desire to be flirted with and admired exudes from her like heavy perfume.
I scrunch myself next to the door. Whips of wind driving through the gaps in the frame make me pull my coat close. I shrink into a ball of misery as the minutes pass and Mother ignores me completely. The man glances at me once, then quickly looks away. Why won’t Mother introduce me?
Scared of her anger and trying to be a good girl, I follow Mother’s instructions to the letter, standing there crumpled like an old leaf blown in by an unwelcome wind. The whole jewelry store becomes surreal like in some noir movie. My legs ache, and Mother’s flaunting, flirty cadence scrapes my nerves raw. Twenty minutes into my invisibility, she finally looks over. I open my hands as if to say, “What?” trying to convey polite impatience. It’s my usual dilemma—how can I be myself yet keep her from getting angry. Is it even possible?
Mother turns back to the jewelry man, juts her hip out, and says, “See that girl down there?”—I am the only other person in the shop—”She’s my daughter.”
The man laughs richly, deep in his belly. “That can’t be, Josephine. You’re much too young to have a daughter that age.”
Mother wriggles with pleasure and fixes her seductive eyes on the man. “Oh, really, do you think so?”
Smiling, I move forward a couple of steps to be introduced, eager to claim my status as her daughter. After all, she’s beautiful and desirable, unlike me, her ugly-duckling. After all, she is my mother. Mother turns her body away from me, huddling closer to the man, draping herself over the jewelry case, still swiveling her hips. I stand there, obediently, waiting for Mother to pick up the thread of conversation and return her attention to me. Thirty minutes pass, leaving me in a hell of isolation, feeling helpless and confused. Outraged. How dare she ignore me like this? My own mother is ashamed of me? I’m sick of watching her flirt with this greasy, cold man, his velvet voice calculated to make her buy more antique jewelry. I’m disgusted that she’s sucked into his fawning admiration.
I retreat back into the frigid pocket by the door, shamed by her snubbing and sick to my stomach over her outrageous flirting. The double fires of shame and anger temporarily warm me, simmering while Mother completes her performance and makes a purchase. Finally she leads me outside.
My shaking voice is gulped down whole by the wind. “Why didn’t you introduce me?”
Mother stops to light a cigarette, her body cupped against a brick wall. “Now, don’t you be like that. You have to understand—no one knows that I’ve been married. I’m ‘Miss Myers’ here. People are so nosy. If they knew I’d been married, they’d gossip horribly about my life; they wouldn’t respect me.”
“But I’m Miss Myers. That’s my father’s name.” The shock of her refusal to introduce me and her self-serving defense of herself leave me nearly speechless.
Her face grows stony with anger. “Be reasonable and keep your voice down. You should treat your mother with respect. When we got divorced it was easier to keep his name. I just said I was Miss, and that’s all there is to it.” Her hands twirl casually in the air as she leads me onward down the hard slabs of sidewalk.
There is a mighty roiling and misery in my stomach as I tumble into the deep, dark pit I know too well. I want my mother to save me, but I know she won’t. “You mean, no one in Chicago knows about me?” my small voice whispers from below.
Her voice is edgy with impatience. “I told you, they can’t know I have a daughter. They think I’m too young; you heard what John said. No one has any idea that I’m fifty. Besides, I can’t have a daughter if I’ve never been married, now can I? You’ve got to understand how it is for me. I have to live here, and I don’t want things disturbed.”
Her illogical logic burns all the way down, but I try to swallow it. For years when my mother came to see me in Oklahoma, I always sensed that she was eager to return to her city life as she boarded those trains in the middle of the Great Plains, but I never dreamed that in Chicago she’d erased me from her life.
Emotional shock waves send pinpricks all over my body. Here I am in Chicago with her, finally, after so many years of longing for my mother. I glance at her. Yes, the physically beautiful woman I yearned for, cried for, needed, imagined, rushed to hug and clung to despite her cool reception, stands beside me, but not the way I wanted her and imagined her all these years. Now that I’m in college three hours away, I could see her almost any time I want. I thought we’d do mother–daughter things together, to make up for those lonely childhood years. Didn’t Mommy want it as much as I did?
My dreams are crumbling as Mother rushes me along the gray streets, gum and cigarette wrappers flying at us like bats, people scurrying with frowns on their faces. Suddenly Chicago seems like a city of hard edges. In the café the waitress doesn’t care, splashes the coffee. Everyone is quick, curt, cold. My mother doesn’t see my disintegration. Tears pour down the inside of my body but don’t spill onto my cheeks. The fire of anger still burns in me, but I manage a fake smile.
The January day closes in as I try to comprehend how my mother can deny me, even when we’re together. My excitement has been spoiled by Mommy’s coldness. There is no way I can know now that her denial will follow me, haunt me through the coming decades, all the way up to her death—and beyond.
She sits across from me, flashing a quick smile. “Cheer up. No one wants to be with someone who has such a sour face. Don’t you think my new ring is beautiful?”
She lays her graceful hand across the table. I pause, caught up in my anger, then touch her hand. I’m surprised to find that the mere touch of her skin soothes the place in me that burns. I hold her hand, grateful for this flicker of warmth from her, ashamed of needing it, of accepting her on her own terms. The waitress returns to pour the coffee. This time she glances at both of us, her face flickering with a slight smile. I know she thinks we look alike, mother and daughter sitting oh-so-normally at a table in a café in Chicago, our secrets buried in each of us. My heart beats fast as I look at her, swallowing the hot coffee, swallowing everything.
Becoming a Mother
Four years later, I’ve finally entered an eagerly awaited stage of life—I’m pregnant with my first child. I focus on the doctor’s shiny bald head framed between my l
egs as I lie on the examination table. He removes his gloves and tells me to sit up. “You’re pregnant—about two months. The baby is growing nicely.”
Feelings of excitement and disbelief flood me. I sit up, a tingling like icicles all over my body. I’m ecstatic and Dennis, my husband, will be, too. Me, a mother? I never thought it could happen, figuring that because of my past I was destined to remain outside normal human experience. Yet now I am pregnant—a normal, pregnant woman.
The first time I feel the baby move, my life swerves into a cotton-candy dream. “Can this be real? I’m growing life inside me?” I feel powerful and awestricken all at once. My mother will become a grandmother, my grandmother will become a great-grandmother. I hope they will be thrilled by my news, but I’m not really surprised that their responses are less than enthusiastic. “You’re so young. Shouldn’t you have waited? Do you have enough money, with Dennis just getting out of grad school?” The subtext: Why are you making me feel so old by having a baby?
I try not to feel too disappointed by their letters. Reluctantly I’ve adjusted to their cynicism about me and about happiness in general. At least my father is excited and congratulatory. He actually looks forward to being a grandfather! I imagine frequent visits with him in Arizona, where he has retired. Daddy and I will make up for my lost childhood by playing with the baby, going to the zoo, doing all the things we never did together.
The day I first feel the baby move, I’m standing in the living room of our apartment in Portland, wearing a maternity dress that I made myself, a red print with a white cotton collar. My fingers gently search for the little protrusion, a leg or an arm, tiny round bumps rolling across my belly. I grab at one of them to say hello. The baby tucks in to escape my probing, as if to say, “Hey, that’s my leg! Be careful up there.”
I look in the mirror to check out my voluptuous new figure. Before pregnancy I was flat-chested and knobby and weighed less than one hundred pounds. Now I’m curvy everywhere and getting rounder every day.
Dennis and I have moved to Oregon, where he is an assistant professor. Though we’ve been married nearly two years, I’m still adjusting to being married and happy, no longer at the mercy of Gram and Mother bossing me around. I look up to Dennis and count on him to be the typical 1950s husband, despite our ’60s ideals. I kiss him goodbye when he goes to work each morning. For the first time in my life without work or school to concern myself with, I’m trying to fit myself into the identity of homemaker. It’s fun to throw myself into cooking, making fancy desserts that take hours, pouring over gourmet cookbooks, learning from the rulebooks of the ’50s how to win your man and keep him. I learn how to cook Italian cuisine from Mama Leone’s cookbook, spending hours making ravioli from flour and eggs, filling and crimping. I make sauce from scratch only to see my eight hours of labor disappear down the throats of our guests. We play pinochle late into the night, or attend professorial dinner parties, to which I bring more exotic dishes, holding onto my New Identity. I am Normal, how are you? My crazy childhood is a bad dream. I’m fine, thank you, content as can be in my happy, wifely bubble with Dennis.
We’d known each other for only two months before getting engaged when I was twenty-one. My virginal state was easily dispatched, thanks to the pill, Black Russians, and Bob Dylan. As I lay next to Dennis afterward, I wondered: Why the hell was I taught to fear this? Why the big fuss that Gram and the Baptist Church created about sex?
Dennis and I were buddies, got along well, and genuinely liked each other. Why not get married? Being unmarried at twenty-one made you an old maid. We were wed during the worst snow and ice storm in Illinois history, in January 1967. My mother and father both missed the wedding because of the storm. Gram was too angry to come, still furious that I had left her to move to Illinois. She sent me clothes and a cool, short note. I tried not to care, knowing I couldn’t make her happy. Still, it made me sad. As always during my childhood, Aunt Edith and Aunt Grace were there for me. After our wedding at a little Episcopal church in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, I pinched myself to see if it was all real. I’m finally a Missus, I thought. I’m married now; I belong to someone who’s nice to me, who wants me. He’ll protect me from the raging insults of Gram and Mother, as a husband is supposed to do.
After a pregnancy in which my body amazes me by growing to huge proportions, I’m finally in labor. Bright lights nearly blind me and unbearable pains take away my breath as I writhe on the bed at Kaiser Hospital. The nurse tells me to get a grip, it’s gonna get worse. I’m by myself for this, because Dennis insisted on scheduling an interview in Oklahoma on the baby’s due date. I’d taken him to the airport only a few hours before my water broke—he waved cheerily, saying that babies never come on their due date. The pain slices through me; screams bounce off the gray walls in a voice I realize is my own.
I’d done everything right, visited the Kaiser pediatrician every month, devoured books on the subject of childbirth and labor, but found few exact details. The focus of both the books and the doctor was on having a saddle block to help with labor. Nothing has prepared me for this relentless pain. An angry nurse rushes in after a screaming-hard contraction and shouts in my ear: “Look here—you have to learn to count through it. It will be at least nine hours more! Count with me—one, two, three, four…” I shout the numbers with her, apologizing and crying. When I get quieter, she tells me I can yell and count all I want, as loud as I want, it’s all right with her. Apparently the famous saddle block is available only toward the end of labor. It’s a long, long night for me, in pain, desperate for any kind of comfort. I feel betrayed, abandoned. Bitterly, I tell myself I’m destined to be without family for every important event in my life. The rest of the night passes in a haze of Demerol.
Finally the nurses wheel me into the delivery room where they give me the saddle block and tell me to push. They gang up to press on my abdomen with all their might, trying to move the baby down, discussing me and my baby as if I’m not in the room. Finally, the doctor uses forceps to pull out the baby—a boy, I hear the nurses say. There’s no crying, and I wonder if he’s alive. I lean on my elbows, trying to see across the room. Without my glasses, I see a pink blur that is the object of the nurses’ attention; they make bets about his weight. “Nine pounds, two ounces,” they announce.
“What is nine pounds? Is he okay?” I’ve got to be too skinny to give birth to a huge baby.
“He’s doing great. Your baby weighs nine pounds! Congratulations!”
A nine-pound baby from me? Wow, I really am a mother. Welcome to the world, Andrew.
Six weeks later, in the quiet of the early morning, the only sound is Andrew’s nursing. It should be a sweet moment, but sorrow rises up in my throat and I break into a sweat. This is motherhood? I’m bone tired after weeks of no sleep. Why didn’t anyone warn me? So many long days alone with a baby I can’t comfort no matter what I try. His wails rise to the ceiling of the small apartment, grinding at my nerves. I seem to be helpless with this tiny, mewling creature, completely inadequate. At six weeks, after no REM sleep for that long, I’m desperate for rest, and give in to bottle feeding, though that doesn’t solve everything. When a nipple of one of the bottles gets clogged, I smash it against the wall and collapse in tears. Unable to bear any more baby screams, I wonder why I can’t comfort him the way mothers on the Johnson’s Baby Powder ads do, all serene and humming to their beatific, sleeping child.
Eventually Andrew outgrows the colic and turns into a smiling, good-natured baby. He still doesn’t sleep enough, but we manage to get by on a few hours of rest. I know that I’m destined not to be a good-enough mother. I’ve already failed miserably. This inadequacy must be inherited.
That summer Dennis, Andrew, and I meander through the western states in a camper, stopping to see my father, Dennis’s folks, and my Iowa family. While we’re staying with Edith and Willard in Muscatine, Mother arrives on the train. My childhood of railway stations and mother-longing isn’t over—the same old feel
ings sweep over me as I wait on the platform—a bone sadness, an ache that only deepens when Mother steps off the train and changes from the mother of my imagination into her actual self.
“Here’s your grandson.” I proudly lift Andrew up to her. He’s a cherubic baby who belongs in a Gerber ad. I should have expected it: Mother doesn’t take her grandson; she barely even looks at him. Instead she pulls out a cigarette, saying in her haughtiest tone, “I told you, don’t call me grandmother. I’m much too young for that.”
Edith blinks in shock along with me, and protests as we walk to the car. “But you are a grandmother. You should be proud.”
Mother’s high-pitched squeal grates on all of us. “Don’t use that word, I tell you. Can’t you listen to what I say? What’s the matter with you?” Mother glares at me and jumps into the car. I’m stunned at her behavior, but why should I be surprised? She doesn’t want to claim my child any more than she wants to claim me.
I get in the car, smothering in her smoke all the way back to Edith’s. Andrew bobs in my arms, warm against my chest, his sweet baby smell and soft skin melting my heart. He’s the next generation in the only family I have. I have to keep trying, I tell myself; I’ll get her to change. Maybe when she falls in love with Andrew, she’ll claim us all, and the barrier will come down at last.
That evening, after the usual Iowa dinner of fried chicken with gravy and corn on the cob, we all sit under the trees in the dusky glow, as we have for the last twenty years. The Mississippi River suffuses the air with its history. Between puffs on her cigarette, Mother glances at Andrew, who gives her a big smile. “He is kind of cute,” she says, before turning away to blow out her smoke. Edith grins behind her hand at this, and Willard winks at me.
Fireflies begin to twinkle in the velvety darkness. Edith holds the baby while I sit on the edge of Uncle Willard’s lap. “I’m not too old, am I Uncle Willard?” Still raw from Mother’s denial and coldness, I need his comfort.
“You’re never too old to sit on my lap,” he smiles. Just as we did together so long ago, we grab at lightning bugs.
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