Stephen and I were ecstatic. For that whole summer, we were like newlyweds again. If the honeymoon had exposed some of the cracks in our partnership, the prospect of a baby sealed them all right back up.
I had always told myself that my obsession with food was really an obsession with health, and I used my pregnancy to prove it. I ate normally, and along with that I made sure to stay in the best shape possible. Whatever exercises were recommended for pregnant women, I tried them. When there were medical tests, I went into them with a conquering attitude, like I had stayed up all night cramming for an exam.
Right after I found out that I was pregnant, I read for a role in a movie called Sunset, a kind of old-Hollywood Western mystery that costars Bruce Willis and James Garner. The movie sounded a little chaotic, but it had a secret weapon: it was directed by Blake Edwards, who had made Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a movie that was almost like a religion for me. I couldn’t pass up the chance to work with him. When I got the job, I was beside myself. “Do you know who this is?” I said to Stephen. “I mean, really. Do you know who this is?”
Blake’s first act as idol and oracle was to order me to cut my hair. I wasn’t thrilled about that, mainly because it reminded me how superficial life could be: I felt completely disoriented with short dark hair, like a different person entirely. But even that different Mariel was thrilled to be working with Blake, and the rest of the cast was great. The movie was a strange beast, not exactly a comedy and not exactly a postmodern Western and not exactly a masterpiece. Bruce played Tom Mix, the famous actor, and James played Wyatt Earp, the famous Western lawman. In 1929, in the heart of Hollywood, the two of them were forced to become a kind of crime-solving team when they got mixed up in a web of murder, prostitution, and corruption. I was Cheryl, Wyatt Earp’s love interest, though the real Wyatt Earp had been much older and very married. Hollywood.
Sunset forced me to confront one of my greatest fears, one that had haunted me since I was a girl: vomiting. The pregnancy wasn’t problematic for the most part, but I had terrible morning sickness. Some days I would spend an hour bent over a toilet, panicked because I was thinking the unthinkable. I couldn’t be the kind of person who vomited. I had designed my whole life to avoid it. When I think about it now, it makes me laugh. I was focusing on the wrong part of the process. It was the baby who would change things, who would help to remake my life and my sense of myself—not the remnants of my childhood phobia of throwing up. But at the time, getting perspective on my morning sickness was as difficult as learning how to speak up in fights or to deal with my own anger, which is to say that it was impossible.
* * *
IN EARLY SUMMER, I had to take an AFP test, which let the doctors measure alpha-fetoprotein and look for abnormalities. It came back low. I have since learned I just test low for nearly everything, but this was my first baby, and the doctors were slightly concerned—low AFP can be a sign of Down syndrome. An amniocentesis was ordered as a follow-up test. Results would take three weeks.
Before I heard the results, I had to leave the country. It was July 1987, and the studio flew Stephen and me to London for the premiere of Superman IV. We had pride of place at the premiere and ended up sitting right next to Prince Charles and Lady Di. Diana was very reserved, the princess I had expected. But Prince Charles was friendly, even jovial. “Oh,” he said every time Superman appeared. “This is wonderful.”
“Well,” I said. “I’m not sure about that.”
“It’s perfectly charming,” he said.
“If you say so,” I said.
The third time he said something was wonderful or amazing or lovely, I turned to face him. “Maybe I’m going to get in trouble for saying this,” I said, “but I think this is probably the worst movie I have ever seen, and certainly the worst one I have been in.”
He blanched. “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s quite something.”
That night in the hotel, Stephen and I were laughing about the prince. Suddenly, Stephen’s face went rigid. “I just realized that we’re about to be parents,” he said. The thought really seemed to hit him hard. He set down his glass of wine.
“I know,” I said.
“And that test,” he said. “I hope everything is okay.”
“What if it’s not?” I asked him. “There’s no turning back now.”
“Not even if it comes back with bad news?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I can’t imagine getting rid of this baby. It feels like a person.”
He nodded, but I thought I saw doubt flash in his eyes. It didn’t matter: within a few days the hospital contacted us say that everything was fine and that we would soon be the parents of a healthy baby girl. I was beside myself with joy. I wanted a girl. I understood girls. I was a girl.
* * *
AUTUMN IN NEW YORK WAS PERFECT—it had been my favorite season ever since shooting Manhattan—and in early December, we welcomed Dree Louise Hemingway Crisman. She was a long baby who looked like she would become a tall woman, and when she put her tiny hand around my fingers, or Stephen’s, she overpowered us completely. When we brought her back from the hospital, she filled the entire apartment. It was a new kind of spirit in the room.
The first few months of motherhood were bliss: difficult bliss, but completely transporting. My whole life was about this small person—feed her, clean her, change her, watch her—and that was a relief, not to mention instant focus. It cured the sleepwalking feeling that had come over me on movie sets, at home, in the street. When there’s a baby, you snap to it.
I had trained for films, and now I was training for parenting. I read books. I asked for advice. I did everything I could to do the best job possible. And it was my job—that much I understood. Stephen was preoccupied with the restaurants. By that point, we had a second Mahattan location, a larger space at the Equitable Building on 51st Street, and locations out of town too. That left me at home with Dree, which was just how I wanted it.
When I would talk to friends with babies, they would talk about how tired they were, and I nodded and agreed, but the truth was that I wasn’t tired at all. Motherhood rejuvenated me. In large part, that was because it let me rethink the process of taking care of another person. When I was eleven, when my mother had shattered her leg on the ski slopes, I had become a caretaker almost overnight, and my responsibilities had only intensified when she was diagnosed with cancer. Being put in that position was never easy, but I was so scared that if I didn’t do everything I could, my mother would die. I was enslaved by my own terror. Dree helped reset that circuit. Caring for her reawakened some of the feelings of taking care of my mother but also scrubbed them clean of resentment or confusion. When I spoke to my mother on the phone, I loved to talk about how occupied I was with motherhood, partly because I wanted to prove to her that I had matured into the healthy version of the eleven-year-old caretaker I had been.
In other ways, the specter of my mother’s cancer remained, a dark cloud over everything. One afternoon, Dree was in her crib, swatting at a mobile and laughing hysterically. Stephen was at the table, looking through some paperwork, his brows furrowed. “I’m never going to get sick,” I said.
“What?” Stephen said.
I shook my head. I hadn’t planned to say it. When I said it, I knew that I had made a mistake. I didn’t want to say it a second time. I mumbled something about a cold and how I had to make sure I had enough vitamin C. But it wasn’t about that. It was the other C, the one that had taken over my mother’s life.
When I was a small girl, my mother was engaged and focused. I wouldn’t ever have described her as warm, not exactly, but behind closed doors she could be wonderful and loving. After her cancer diagnosis, though, she became a patient more than a mother, and expecting her to be a source of comfort and support suddenly seemed unfair. At twenty-six, with a new baby, I was hanging in the middle between being the child who could remember the burden of a sick mother and the mother who vowed never to become that burden
herself.
The focus shifted away from me, from questions of my own happiness. The focus shifted toward Dree, toward her happiness. This was a virtuous cycle. During the pregnancy and the first year with Dree, I worried less about my own depression. I slept better. I was normal with food. I ate meat and carbs. I didn’t load up on fruit and caffeine. My body took care of itself. Mentally, I felt such relief. It was like being on a movie set, but even more intense: I had cues and lines and a call sheet a mile long.
* * *
FRIENDS WERE OVER at the apartment. We had finished dinner. I had cooked and now I was cleaning, doing dishes in the kitchen while people said final good-byes and collected their coats. “That was delicious,” a man’s voice said.
“Thanks,” Stephen said. “I agree.”
“Amazing,” a woman said. “Kiss the baby good night for us.”
The front door opened. The front door closed. I finished with the dishes and turned around. Stephen was sitting on the couch, a glass of wine in his hand. He was still going from the party, smiling broadly. “Did you have fun?” he asked. “I think we did great. I felt bad that we talked so much to Mary. Susan and David really wanted to talk to us.”
“It was fun,” I said. I went to the couch and sat next to him. A silence opened up in the room and widened. He wasn’t saying anything now. His smile was still there, but it seemed more inward somehow. He was smiling into the glow of the memory of the evening. “What do you want to do now?”
He didn’t answer. I got a magazine and started to page through it. He sipped his wine silently as I replayed the evening in my head. Stephen had been a good host, warm and welcoming. But when the party started, he got boisterous. He made lots of sexual jokes. It bothered me, because I thought people could see right through them. I thought the jokes were like a sign that said “They Don’t Really Get Along. This Is For Show. They Don’t Even Have Sex That Often.” My mental picture of the evening thinned until it was transparent, and then it was superimposed over the picture of another evening: my parents, twenty years earlier, after a dinner party of their own. I knew that Stephen and I were different from my parents. Voices weren’t raised. Bottles weren’t thrown. Dree, in her crib, had no reason to be afraid. There would never be a loud fight that would make her pull the covers tight around her shoulders. My parents hadn’t gotten along. They couldn’t communicate. Stephen and I were doing better than that, weren’t we? Maybe he was right. Maybe we were great. Maybe friends couldn’t wait to come over and spend time with us. When I surfaced from thinking, Stephen had already left the couch.
14
THE SISTERS IN THE KITCHEN
MY MOTHER HAD BEEN DYING for years. She was always spending the day in bed because she was too weak to go downstairs to eat, or going downstairs because she felt better, but laboring under the grim knowledge that another day in bed was only a few weeks off. It was like extending a thick gray line: no month was worse than the month before it, but no month was better either.
Stephen, Dree, and I were living in Idaho, in a house about two miles from my parents’, and I went to see my mom every day. The baby cheered her up.
Most days, my mother was as she had always been: sharp and judgmental. “This tea is too cold,” she said. “The television isn’t getting good reception. Where are my slippers?” She had aged out of stylishness and mostly wore Madras-print skirts with elastic waistbands. “I don’t need anything,” she said, “which is good because your father doesn’t spend money on me like he used to. But that’s fine with me. He can have the fancy car.” My father’s fancy car was an old Peugeot: my mother drove an anonymous Taurus and never passed up an opportunity to mention it. “It gets me from place to place,” she said. “What else is a car for?”
One morning, Dree was playing on a blanket in my mother’s bedroom. My mother was sipping from a glass of water. She raised the glass, lowered it, and looked at me directly. “You’re good,” she said.
I looked up, surprised. I wasn’t even sure she was talking to me. “What?”
She rotated the glass slowly in her hands. “You’re a good mother, I mean,” she said. “And Dree is a very lucky girl.”
It wasn’t a long speech. It wasn’t especially emotional. But receiving that kind of compliment from my mother was remarkable. “Thank you,” I said. I drove home on a cloud.
When the phone woke me the next morning, and I heard my father’s voice, and I saw that it was still dark outside, I knew instantly that my mother was dead.
I drove over to the house. My father met me at the door. We walked upstairs in the quietest house I can ever remember. My mother’s body had fallen off the bed, and that was all that there was anymore: a skinny little body straight and hard on the floor. I don’t think she had even screamed or called out a name. My father had heard a single thump and that was all. I stood over her and felt no fear or repulsion. She wasn’t in an awful position, physically or spiritually. There was a peace to it. The coroners came and did whatever they do—made sure she was gone, checked out the scene. And then men in uniforms took her out in that empty bed.
I went home, fed Dree, cleaned up the kitchen, and went on a three-hour walk by Eagle Creek. I walked down to the very end, by the avalanche area, and then just sat on a rock for an hour trying to cry. I couldn’t. Tears wouldn’t come. I had cried about my mother so many times over the years, mourned her in my mind so many times, that the reality of it was numbing. I played through her entire life in my mind, or at least the life I knew about: her childhood, her first marriage, her years with my father, the difficulties with Muffet, her illness. Beneath all of that, there was a loving woman, a woman I loved. And then one specific memory surfaced: the time I had brought Stephen home, after we had been to the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, and how she had narrowed her eyes at him and pushed by me in the kitchen with a cutting remark about how I had let him come and sleep with me the night before. My whole life had been a process of warding off that woman while I tried to find my way through to the woman underneath, the calm and quiet and loving one. I thought back to when I was a teenager, and how I had wished that other people could see my mother’s good side—the side that looked at you lovingly, that hugged you when you needed comfort, that laughed when you made silly faces in front of the television. She kept that side close, didn’t let it out often, which hurt others but also hurt her. I wondered if that secret self, the one she hid from others, was hidden from herself too. A tear or two finally fell.
They say that grief happens in the strangest places. Years later, when I would watch movies, some older woman would remind me of my mother, and I would burst into tears. It was rarely a woman who looked like my mother, or acted like her—Diane Keaton in The Family Stone was an especially powerful trigger. I think I missed twenty minutes of that movie from sobbing.
* * *
IN SOME FAMILIES, grief is a rallying point for the survivors. In my family, it was more of an opportunity for people to retreat to their corners. Muffet’s meds were so intense that they had dulled everything about her. Her response to my mother’s death was medicated, almost as if she were operating with a mute or a baffle. “It’s sad,” she said. “But she had a nice life, and she lasted for a long time after she was sick.” She was sweet but not visibly sad. She sounded like she was narrating a documentary about my mother.
Margaux was the opposite. “I’ll be right there,” she said when my father called her in New York. She flew in the next morning, and I met her at the airport. The drive back was like every drive back with Margaux: a long and not entirely successful process of assessing how much she would try to refashion the situation so it became about her. The whole time she was home, she tried to tell stories about her relationship with my mother, things only she remembered. Some of them were true. All of them went on at length. “I can’t hear that now,” I said. We weren’t very nice to her. But we didn’t want her to take the focus away from where it needed to be.
After the funeral, we h
ad a small event at the house. Friends came to the backyard, and my father spoke. “She had years of struggle,” he said. “I think she’s good where she is.” He was quiet otherwise, very contained. He was sober, and in sober times he knew his limits and his losses. And while he wouldn’t have said it, he was really relieved. He had cared for her for two decades, even though there may not have been a true love at the root of their relationship. We had all cared for her. And even though we had cared for her, she had suffered mightily, and the end of her suffering meant that a weight had been lifted—from her, from us all.
* * *
THE SISTERS were in the kitchen, gathered around a table of things.
My mother had spoken, over the years, of what would end up where. “I want you to have the china,” she would say. “I want Margaux to have your grandmother’s necklace.” Now chains and rings that somehow represented my mother—that were all the evidence that remained of her—were arranged on the dining room table in Ketchum, and Margaux and Muffet and I were dividing them up.
Muffet went first. “I’ll take these,” she said, pointing at the costume jewelry. After she came back to Idaho, much of her life seemed to be about playing dress-up. She liked gaudy things, bright scarves and funny shoes. They lit up a life that was in danger of becoming flat and gray. “These are just lovely,” she said, gathering them up. “Wonderful.”
Margaux was next. But Margaux didn’t want to be next. “You go ahead,” she said to me. She stepped back into the corner of the room and watched.
There was one ring I liked, a tiny platinum wedding band stamped with the date of my parents’ wedding. That was the thing I wanted, so that was the thing I took.
“Wait,” Margaux said. “Why do you get that ring?” That was her way. She lived with the idea that she was being overlooked. Being less important meant that she needed to engineer her survival. She would never have noticed the ring except for the fact that I had picked it, and suddenly it became the most valuable thing in the room. I had miscalculated.
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