• • •
I slept over at Anna’s house a lot the year Dad died. One time when I was there and couldn’t sleep, I got out of bed and started walking around. It was really late, past midnight, and the house had a quiet, hushed feel to it. I wandered downstairs and found Aunt Eve sitting on the sofa in the den, just staring off into space, a drink in her hand. She looked very far away, but then her eyes focused on me and she was back.
“Sweetie, are you okay?” she asked. And for some reason I told her all about how bratty I had been the last time I saw my dad.
“Oh, bless your sweet heart,” she said. And then she told me about how, during her wild, hippie days, she almost never came to Atlanta to visit and never saw her grandmother, who she was named after and who lived in a “darling” cottage on her parents’ property. And then one day her grandmother suddenly died, and it was too late. She had no choice whether or not to see her again.
“The death of someone you love is so, so painful. And what you’re going through is so real,” she told me. “But I promise, your father knows you love him and he knows what a good girl you are. Your daddy is looking down at you from heaven, and he is so proud of what he sees.”
“Do you really believe in heaven?” I asked.
“I really do, sweetheart, and I believe your father is there.”
I started crying, so relieved by Aunt Eve’s words. Whenever I asked Mom about heaven, all she could say was, “I don’t know, honey. I just don’t know.”
• • •
Anna’s neighborhood, Ansley Park, is really near ours, but it’s even nicer, with really big houses. I think Anna’s is the prettiest of all—it looks like something out of one of those Masterpiece programs Mom watches on PBS, tall and grand with huge front windows and columns. Mom says it’s “Georgian,” but Uncle Bob says that’s not quite accurate; it’s a “Georgian Italianate Revival.” In private, Mom says Bob is full of himself. When she’s feeling really mean she calls Aunt Eve a “limousine liberal,” but Eve doesn’t actually have a limousine or anything.
Mom and Aunt Eve have known each other forever, and Anna and I are always asking them to tell us stories about their college days. Our favorite is the one where Mom wasn’t let into any of the good sororities at Belmont because she’s half-Jewish and how Aunt Eve dropped out of the very best one, Fleur, to show how wrong it was that they wouldn’t let Mom in. The girls in Fleur were supposed to be her “chosen sisters,” but Mom was her “real chosen sister.” The next year the two of them transferred to Barnard, where Mom met my dad at Columbia.
Mom says that she and Eve drifted apart after she met Dad. She says she was so head-over-heels in love with him that she let a lot of things drop from her life, and she knows she hurt Eve’s feelings when she did. And then she was in law school, which she said kept her just as busy as falling in love with Dad had. Plus, Mom said that Aunt Eve was really wild for a couple of years, a “free spirit,” which is hard to imagine. She’s always so polished and put together. Eve says back then there wasn’t a protest march she didn’t join and that she “grew unaccustomed to regular bathing.” Eve always shakes her head when talking about her hippie days, as if she can’t believe she was ever like that, either.
• • •
Miss Ada has taken care of Anna and me since we were babies. She took care of Aunt Eve starting from when she was a baby, too. Aunt Eve says Ada is family, which I’m sure makes Miss Ada feel good, because Miss Ada lost her only son, Albert, in the Vietnam War. I once tried to interview her about him as part of my fourth-grade Forgotten American Notables Project. But Miss Ada said I was poking at a past that she didn’t like to talk about.
What Miss Ada does like to talk about are vegetables and how I should eat more of them. There is nothing she loves more than a vegetable! She says she practically has a whole garden growing in pots on the fire escape outside her apartment. She’s even in the “Green Thumb Club” at her church. Last summer she tricked me into eating a tomato. I told her I didn’t like them, that they were slimy and gross. She claimed that I hadn’t ever had a real one because all I had eaten were ones from the grocery store. She said a real tomato is sweet and tastes like stored-up sunshine. She said she’d share one of her homegrown tomatoes with me if I promised I’d actually try it and not just “turn your head after giving it a sniff.”
This all happened while Anna was away at summer camp in North Carolina. Anna wanted me to go with her, but Mom said that, while she had certainly loved summer camp as a girl, Anna’s was too expensive for our budget and too WASPy for her taste and that if I wanted to go to “socialist summer camp up north” one day when I was older she’d think about it. Then she made me promise not to tell either Anna or Aunt Eve that she had said that.
Ada held the tomato in her hand, her fingers thin and delicate, and had me smell it. I said it smelled like dirt, and she smiled, saying yes, it did, that it smelled like rich, beautiful soil.
“Course this is from a pot,” she said. “I used to have a proper garden, back when I had my house on Ormond. But a pot will do. Long as you’ve got enough sun and a place to mound some dirt, you can grow a tomato.”
Mom had told me all about Ada’s old house. It was downtown, in a neighborhood called Peoplestown, which always made me think of my Little People figurines. Mom said the Georgia Department of Transportation knocked down most of the houses on Ada’s street. Then they just built the interstate right on top of where Miss Ada used to live. Mom said that never would have happened if the people in Peoplestown didn’t happen to be mostly black and poor.
Miss Ada took two slices of Pepperidge Farm white bread, spread each one with Hellman’s, and placed a thick slab of tomato on one of them, seasoning it with salt and pepper before putting the other slice of bread on top. I was hooked the moment my teeth sank into the fluffy bread and bit into the firm, juicy tomato that Ada had somehow convinced me tasted like the sun itself.
Mom is not nearly as good a cook as either Miss Ada or Aunt Eve. Actually, she can make a few things that are really delicious—like her brownies, which are the same ones Katharine Hepburn used to make (Mom clipped the recipe out of a magazine)—but she doesn’t usually have the time. She says she’s more a “microwaver than a cook.” But tonight she fixed meatballs, which she served with Prego spaghetti sauce and noodles and that yummy garlic bread that you buy pre-made at the grocery store and just heat in the oven. Mom said there was something important that she needed to talk to me about. I thought she might say that she had decided I could apply to Coventry, the private school where Anna goes. I’ve been wanting to go there ever since Anna got to take creative writing for a whole semester (for an hour every day!) and got to write about anything she wanted as long as she used lots of action verbs and description.
Instead, Mom told me that she’s thinking about quitting her job at Henritz & Powers, where she’s worked since before I was born and where Anna’s dad is a partner.
“You’re not going to be a lawyer anymore?” I asked.
“Of course I am, sweetie. I just want to work with different people.”
“Will you make more money?”
Even though Mom said that she earned a decent salary, she was always worried about money.
She took a long sip of her wine. “Probably not. I’ve applied for a position at the Southern Center for Human Rights, where I’ll be helping defend indigent men on death row. If I’m offered the job and I take it, it will mean a pay cut. But the work I will be doing will be really important.”
“What’s ‘indigent’?”
“It means really poor. I’ll be helping defend men who didn’t get a fair trial in the first place, often because they were too poor to hire a decent lawyer.”
“And if you win, will the men pay you?”
Mom laughed. “God, no. These men have nothing. The Southern Center for Human Rights will pay me a salary. Not a great one, but enough to get by.”
“Are you at least going to be
working less?” I could hear my voice getting louder. Mom used to say that was a sure warning sign that I was headed for a tantrum. But I hadn’t had a tantrum for years, not since I was little.
Mom took another big sip of wine. From the expression on her face I already knew the answer.
“So you’re quitting your job and going to work for really poor people who can’t pay you. And you’re going to be working more?”
“I know, honey. It will be a sacrifice for both of us. But if there’s one thing your father’s death taught me, it’s that our time on this earth is short, and the only thing that really matters is that we make our lives count while we’re here. Even though the work will be hard, I’ll be happy doing it. It will really fulfill me.”
“But why can’t I fulfill you?” I asked. “Why isn’t it fulfilling enough to be my mother? Why do you care more about men in prison than you do about me?”
I was too upset to stay at the table. I ran out of the kitchen and to my room, where I slammed the door and lay on my bed, trying to remember how to breathe.
Mom didn’t come after me. I knew she wouldn’t. She said that she learned a long time ago that when I was “all worked up” I needed some “Sarah time” to get myself back together. She was right. I couldn’t stand it if people tried to talk to me—or, worse, touch me—when I was upset. I just needed to lie on the bed and count my inhales and my exhales like Mom taught me to do: in for four, and out for four; in for four, and out for four.
Why would Mom give up a good job when she was already so worried about money as it was? Why would she want to take a job that would make her have to think about the death penalty all the time? A couple of times a year she went with a group from the Unitarian church to the prison in Georgia where they execute people. They would go on the nights when there was an execution, and they would hold candles and pray until it was over. She would always come back from those trips so sad. She said she would be happy in her new job, but how could that be? She was going to be sad all of the time, just like she was during that first year after Dad died.
Why couldn’t Mom just be happy being a mom, like Aunt Eve was? Mom had told me that back during the Vietnam War, Aunt Eve went to protests, just like Mom and Dad did. But now her number one job was being Anna’s mother. Now she was always thinking about Anna, was always so concerned with how she was doing. Like how she immediately hired a tutor when Anna made a B-minus on her math test. And she still sits down with Anna every night after dinner, just to see if she has any questions about her homework. And every year she plans Anna’s birthday party for months and the parties are always perfect. I still remember the party Anna had when we were in second grade, a “doll party” based on our very favorite book at the time, The Best-Loved Doll. We each brought our favorite doll, and there was a miniature cupcake for each of them and a big-sized cupcake for each of us. There were even miniature teacups and party hats. And at the end, Aunt Eve gave us all paper dolls she had made that looked like us. Mine looked so much like me that Mom put it in a frame.
I wished we could switch moms—just for a little while, like in the movie Freaky Friday. If I had Aunt Eve for a mother and Anna had Mom, it would be so great! Anna could walk anywhere she wanted; she could read every single Lois Duncan book; she could go see Poltergeist and whatever other scary movie she might want to watch. I wouldn’t care about stupid movies or not being able to watch something on TV; I would just soak up all of Aunt Eve’s attention. I would appreciate every surprise gift, every tennis lesson, every vacation to Sea Island or retreat to North Carolina for summer camp, where I would live in a cabin in the woods with seven other girls and learn which tribe I had been assigned to for Color Wars.
All of a sudden and without even planning it, I was willing my soul out of my body, willing my soul to travel to Aunt Eve’s house in Ansley Park, thinking, somehow, that maybe Anna and I wouldn’t have to trade places. Maybe I could just share Anna’s body with her. Anna was always so generous; maybe she would let my soul just sort of slide in next to hers. I wouldn’t stay for long, just for a little while. I was picturing Anna’s room, picturing her high-framed bed, the bumper stickers she had pinned to the corkboard on her door, including the one Uncle Bob bought for her that she thought was so funny but that never made sense to me that said: “Don’t steal. The government hates competition.”
My body began to shake, starting with my toes and working up through my legs. And then everything locked up. I could not move a single muscle even though I was straining with all of my might to do so.
I was paralyzed.
I don’t know how long I was frozen, but with a jerk I could suddenly move again, and I sat up fast but then had to lean back against the headboard because I felt dizzy. I was having trouble breathing. I couldn’t seem to get enough air in my lungs. I started crying, which only made it harder to breathe, but still I cried louder and louder, my sobs becoming more and more choked.
And then Mom was beside me on the bed, letting my body slump against hers, holding me in her arms. “Breathe, baby, breathe,” she said, repeating those words until I once again could.
Chapter 14
CREDIT
Atlanta, 1983
For years, Daniella believed that if she gave everything she had to the firm, made herself absolutely essential, she would one day be made a partner at Henritz & Powers. It wasn’t so much the financial gain she craved—though the security would have been nice—but the recognition of her effort and skill. But no matter how hard she worked, no such payoff came, only empty platitudes and last year’s request from Bob to bring her “wonderful brownies” to the firm Christmas party, which was catered, making the request even more infuriating. So she plotted her escape and applied for the salaried position at the Southern Center for Human Rights.
She was stunned by how upset Sarah was when she learned that the new job at the SCHR would pay less than Daniella’s current position. It would be a significant pay cut, yes, but it wasn’t as if her new position was going to put them in the poorhouse. It wasn’t as if she and Sarah were at risk of going hungry. She owned the Morningside house outright, and the rental income she received for the basement studio helped offset the property taxes. And Sarah was at a good public school where she was in the Gifted and Talented program, excelling in her classes, and where she was certainly learning more about the diverse makeup of the city than Anna was at the posh, protected Coventry School.
Was it normal for a ten-year-old to be so focused on money? Perhaps it had been a mistake for Sarah to have spent so much of her childhood with Eve, Eve who seemed to feel that any outing with the girls that did not result in the purchase of a “little happy” wasn’t worth making. Had the exposure to so much wealth and excess taught her daughter the wrong values?
She thought of what Pete would say. She talked to him sometimes—to his spirit, his memory. She talked to him most often in her bed late at night when her mind raced with worries. Surely he would tell her that Sarah was not inherently selfish, that her hysterical response to the news that Daniella would be making less money was completely normal, a big reaction to a big change. He would remind her that for Sarah, who had lost her father so unexpectedly, change was inherently scary. She’s a good kid, he would tell her. You’re doing a good job.
Pete had always possessed more faith in their parenting skills than she had. Of course, it had been easier for him to assume they were doing a good job; he wasn’t breaking any rules when he became a father. It was absolutely expected that he would enjoy both fatherhood and a career that gave him some vestige of authority in the world. But the same assumptions did not apply to Daniella. For her, the choice not to quit when she had Sarah, or at least cut back on her hours, was unorthodox at best. So from the moment she returned to work full-time, when Sarah was three months old, she was going off script, at least for a woman from her upper-middle-class background. Working-class women, of course, always went back to work.
Daniella felt certain s
he was a good lawyer, but she was not always so certain that she was a good mother. The self-doubt could be intense. At her worst moments she accused herself of pawning Sarah off, letting a black woman do the thankless task of childcare while letting a rich white woman spoil her.
Well, there was some truth to that.
• • •
Funny that she hadn’t even considered taking Sarah to a therapist until more than three years after Pete’s death, when Sarah had what Daniella assumed could only be a panic attack upon hearing that Daniella planned to change jobs. She supposed that in those first few years of widowhood she was too lost in her own grief to think about finding professional help for Sarah. And honestly, until lately Sarah had seemed okay. She brought up her father easily and often, and she loved to look through old photo albums, studying the pictures of him, particularly Pete and Daniella’s wedding album, when the two of them were so very young. Weren’t such reactions normal and appropriate—even healthy?
Daniella had consulted the guidance counselor at Sarah’s school for the name of a good child psychologist. She was told that Dr. Ruth Stein was the best. Dr. Stein (who had told Daniella during their first phone consultation to “call me Ruth”) was an attractive woman in her late forties or early fifties with shiny, dark chin-length hair. Daniella only met her briefly before Sarah’s first session, when Ruth appeared in the waiting room outside her office to shake Daniella’s hand and usher Sarah in. Sarah spoke with Ruth alone during her first three visits and didn’t offer much to Daniella about the sessions other than to say that she liked going to them. (After that first appointment, Eve volunteered to drive Sarah to see Ruth.) But for the fourth visit, Daniella was asked to join. She took the afternoon off work to do so.
We Are All Good People Here Page 18