What My Mother and I Don't Talk About

by Michele Filgate

  Peter eventually settled on a third-person narrative, hoping that a bit more distance might allow it to become something more like art, but then decided that the third person felt cowardly and evasive—so he switched it back. He rewrote the book in the middle of the Oregon woods, west of Salem, where he was helping to set up a commune. He sat at a desk in the communal workroom—surrounded by children and spare triangular tiles meant for an unfinished ellipsoid dome—and tried to bring in imagined first-person perspectives from the other characters, mainly my mother. If he was drawing from her experience, he felt he owed it to her to include her point of view.

  When I ask if he was worried that anger would color his portrait of my mother, he insists, “I wasn’t angry. Just enormously sad.”

  * * *

  The name Sheila feels so alien to my mom that she has sometimes wondered if it was an act of aggression on Peter’s part to name her that. I see her point: the name feels too golden, too frolicky, like it belongs to a perky woman in cutoff shorts. But her character in the novel struck me as a recognizable and clearly awestruck portrait—perhaps recognizable because it was awestruck. Like mine, Peter’s vision of my mother is bent and distorted by a kind of worshipful love.

  Sheila is competent, nurturing, and supremely attuned to other people’s moods, especially when they are upset or need to be drawn out of themselves. But she is also savvy about where these moods are coming from. At one point, she correctly deduces that Peter is simply framing his bad mood as being about his frustration with “authoritarianism,” when really he is annoyed that she’s not paying more attention to him. This is Peter—as author, years later—recognizing that my mother sometimes knew him better than he knew himself.

  But for all her nurturing, Sheila also comes across as disarmingly self-contained. She is constantly seeking space. That’s where the firm set in the corner of her mouth comes from. In certain ways, her character is a fantasy of how I’ve always wanted to be: craving and creating boundaries, rather than trying to dissolve or overrun them. That’s part of what Peter loved most about my mom, he tells me: that they were “so much together, but not merging.” It was also what allowed her to leave him.

  * * *

  When I ask my mother what she remembers from that summer full of acid trips, lust and intrigue, long nights of weed and scratchy records, she says, “I remember going to the library.”

  She explains about the Peace Corps: She and Peter had been assigned to Liberia that September, and she wanted to read as much as she could about it before they left. They’d originally been scheduled to leave for Bechuanaland at the beginning of the summer, but Peter had wanted to spend time in Berkeley, living as hippies, so they got reassigned to Liberia for September. In August, he said he didn’t want to go to Liberia, so they didn’t go anywhere at all. Looking back, my mom can see that Peter never really wanted to go to Africa—it was something he’d told her he was willing to do, or told himself he was willing to do, in order to convince her to marry him in the first place.

  When we talk about how there are always two sides to every story, we often imagine conflicting accounts of what happened. But more often, I think, the disagreement is about what belongs in the story at all. For my mother, the Peace Corps was a central part of the story of that summer. It was the first thing she wanted to talk about. For Peter, it didn’t even show up in his novel. It wasn’t the crux of what mattered. His marriage died on another hill entirely.

  Besides going to the library, what else does my mother remember from the summer of 1966? Lots of parties. Lots of weed. Lots of acid. Lots of really cheap red wine, much of it drunk in the communal house where she and Peter slept in a living room with a curtained nook. “That nook!” she exclaims. She definitely remembers that nook. “It’s where Rob and I went the first night we slept together, while Peter was in the room right next to us.” Earl from the novel was really named Rob. He and my mom and Peter all went backpacking together—trying to test the boundaries of openness—and dropped acid high up in the mountains, clambering naked over sparkling granite boulders in the alpine sun. They all got terrible sunburns. (In the novel, Earl’s sunburn from that trip is described as “Communist-China red.”)

  My mom says she was attracted to the risk of taking Rob into that nook, with her husband so close. They had an open marriage, but there was still something electric about the transgression. Looking back, she can see she was trying to break something that she sensed was already ruptured.

  When she describes that climactic acid trip at her mother’s home, she says it ended in a terrifying attack of claustrophobia. “It makes sense that I met fear on the hill,” she tells me. “I was stuck in this place where I couldn’t control it . . . . I couldn’t believe that it was going to end and I was going to come out of the other side of it.”

  * * *

  A few months after reading The Parting of the Ways, I fly to Portland to give a reading at Reed, where my mom and Peter first fell in love in the early 1960s. I have invited my mom to fly up from Los Angeles, and Peter to drive in from Salem, so that I can hear the story of their beginning from both of them, together, with the landscape of their shared past as our backdrop.

  It’s a sunny midwinter day. Peter arrives wearing a leather beret and an oatmeal-colored cardigan sweater with a SAFE PLACE pin. When we sit down at the Reed campus coffeehouse—beside a girl with a fauxhawk reading Foucault and a long-haired guy reading The Odyssey—Peter tells me that the students remind him of the people he went to school with. As we walk to my mom’s freshman dorm, we pass a cardboard sign inviting people to submit audio recordings of their own orgasms to something called the Gallery of Sexuality. Looking up at my mom’s window on the third floor of Ladd Hall, Peter tells me about his own freshman-year roommate—a Muslim from Zanzibar, who brought out his prayer rug five times a day—and their next-door neighbor, who listened to the same Joan Baez album on loop for weeks. Peter knew every note.

  They take me downtown to Pioneer Courthouse, where they did their first protest together, against the House Un-American Activities Committee. The twee Portland all around us—full of backyard beehives, bicycle repair shops, and artisanal ice creameries serving flavors like fennel and zucchini—is not the Portland they knew, which felt deeply conservative and parochial. Peter tells me about the woman who balled up one of his flyers and spit on it. Another woman told my mom, “I hope your children grow up to hate you.”

  Peter sounds protective when he describes the woman who cursed my mom, and my mom remembers liking his protectiveness. One time when she got harassed by a stranger at a march, she noticed the tendons in Peter’s neck grow taut from anger because he wanted to hit the guy but was struggling to stay committed to nonviolence. When my mom remembers wanting to impress Peter with her political consciousness, he grins and leans over to touch her leg—so tender, so pleased. When he tells me about his first impression of my mom as “eye candy,” I feel like we’ve landed inside a strange, benevolent mode of triangulated flirtation: it’s as if Peter is still flirting with my mom, after all these years, and it’s somehow important I am their witness.

  My mom and Peter drive me to the empty lot on Lambert Street where their first house once stood. It was where Peter home-brewed beer in a big garbage can in the kitchen and buried three kegs under the floorboards; one exploded. A couple came to dinner one night, and after the meal the wife said, “If it’s okay, my husband is going to have dessert”—then he started breastfeeding right there at the table. It sounds like the punch line to a joke: How do you make two aspiring hippies feel like prudes?

  My mom points out the building where she got her first birth control pills, and where the doctor shamed her for getting them. They take me to their house on Knapp Street, where they lived after getting married, with a plum tree in the backyard and a walnut tree in the front. My mom cooked lentils with prunes, and Peter scoured the coupon pages to buy potato chips in bulk. My mom wrote her senior thesis about Havelok the Dane, a
French medieval epic, and Peter got a job as a door-to-door vacuum salesman, then quit after being forced to repossess a vacuum from a single mother with six kids who couldn’t make her payments. My mom loved him for that.

  * * *

  Both Peter and my mom agree that she wasn’t ready to get married. “Your mother had to be convinced,” Peter tells me. She says, “I ran out of reasons to say no.”

  He met each of her objections—she wanted to travel, to join the Peace Corps, to go to grad school—with a promise: they could do these things together. It was like trying to win a debate in a humanities class, he says. “I shouldn’t have talked her into it.”

  My mom says she was deeply in love with Peter but not ready to be married to anyone. She tells me, “I wish I could have understood that better then.”

  Peter describes the end of their marriage as the breakdown of a certain youthful faith. “I grew up thinking I could do anything I wanted,” he says, “and here was something I really wanted and I couldn’t make it work.”

  Hearing this, I get a flash of pride at the fact that Peter wanted to be with my mother more than she wanted to be with him. This pride comes from the same internal place as the delusion I spent much of my young adulthood believing: that it is better to be the one desired more, rather than the one doing more desiring. As if love were a contest; as if desire were fixed, or absolute; as if either position could insulate you from being harmed or causing harm; as if being in control could insulate you from anything.

  * * *

  It’s not quite melodrama to say that the world fell apart after Peter and my mom’s divorce. The end of the sixties saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, race riots all across the country, billy clubs at the ’68 Democratic National Convention, and Nixon’s secret treason—all set against the unrelenting heartbreak of bloodshed in Vietnam.

  Amid all this, because of all this, Peter decided to commit himself fully to formal training in nonviolent resistance. He founded his commune in the Oregon woods. It was meant to be a place where urban activists could come for a few months to decompress in the wake of major actions.

  After my mom pulled out of her depression, she met Lucy, her next serious romance, and then traveled to London to be with my aunt, who was pregnant at nineteen. Eventually my mom and Lucy went to follow the crop season in southern France, even organizing a strike among their fellow olive pickers to protest long workdays in the cold. Back in the States, once their relationship had ended, my mom fell in love with a young professor of economics at Stanford: my father. They moved into a house on campus, and within the next two years, she’d have two sons—my older brothers.

  Two roads diverged in a wood: one led to a commune, and the other led to faculty housing.

  * * *

  My mother has been married three times. After Peter, her marriage to my father lasted twenty-three years and ended when I was eleven. He was exciting, successful, and as she always told me, “never boring.” He was also chronically unfaithful, and often out of town. After I left for college, she met Walter, a retired ketchup salesman, through their social justice work in the Episcopal Church. They became grandparents together and marched through the streets to protest the second war in Iraq. The stories I told myself about these three marriages eventually distilled into three primal male archetypes: the brash, idealistic young dreamer; the restless, intoxicating, difficult soul mate; and the stable partner to settle down with after all the drama was done. I clung to this distillation.

  Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that part of what I found fascinating about The Parting of the Ways was its portrayal of Peter as a character navigating various archetypes of masculinity—the “straight” man, the cool man, the lover, the protector, the provider, the protester—and trying to find his place among them. He constructs his character with an endearing awareness of his own fumbling, his contradictions: he’s the guy who gets high at a dinner party and pretends to be King Arthur, pulling a knife out of a stick of butter—but he’s also the guy who whispers to two strangers sharing a needle to shoot speed, “Haven’t you ever heard of hepatitis?” While Peter the character falls into long-winded monologues about his quest to discover himself, Peter the author gently pokes fun at his pretensions—having another character, at one point, doze off during one of his rants. But Peter’s obsession with coolness, and later, his interrogation of that obsession, are really expressions of a deeper and more universal hunger: the fantasy of an utterly authentic self, unfettered by norms, absolutely free.

  My mom remembers being frustrated that Peter didn’t want to go to graduate school, and telling him that she didn’t think he had the rigor to handle it. “He did, of course,” she tells me. “And it’s an unfair thing to do with anyone, to lash out like that—it was an expression of my frustration that he wasn’t using his gifts to live the kind of life that I wanted to lead.”

  It’s eerie to hear my mom talk about her disappointment at the ways Peter didn’t live up to the ambitions she’d projected onto him, because it reminds me so fully of the ways I have projected ambitions onto my own partners for years. It hasn’t been ego extension so much as a desire to dwell in states of awe—to feel inspired and somehow bettered—but it can also feel like callousness, or distance. It feels like company to hear my mom articulating her own version of it.

  My mom tells me she hopes Peter doesn’t remember their hard conversation about graduate school. I remind her there’s a version of it in the novel. But while my mom mainly regrets the cruelty of her comments, Peter’s version of the conversation is more focused on his anger in response: “My voice is not loud, but there is so much violence in it that Sheila is stunned for a moment. I pause for several heartbeats, savoring the drama of the situation, savoring the feeling of power.” Both Peter and my mom remember being the one who inflicted pain.

  When my mom tells me about a revelation she had during one of their acid trips that summer—realizing that her father was never going to be a world-famous engineer, that her outsize sense of his importance didn’t match his standing in the world—I can’t help but think her feelings about her father shaped her desire for Peter to pursue a kind of worldly success and her eventual marriage to my dad, just as my feelings about my father have shaped my own ambitions and the ways I have sought ambition in my partners, or projected my ambitions onto them.

  Peter never went to graduate school. “The commune was my graduate school,” he tells me. He learned how to take care of whatever needed taking care of. At one point, when they desperately needed money, a nearby farmer offered to pay Peter to help him get his chickens off to slaughter. There were thousands of them. At first, Peter imagined he would carefully cradle each chicken in his palms, treating them with dignity and compassion. But by the end, he’d started to handle them more like troublemakers. He understood how prison wardens might feel. As hard as we try to fight the structures we find ourselves inside of, we are all still shaped by them. At a certain point, in all their bawk-bawk-bawking, he started to hear the animals calling his own name.

  * * *

  My mother and Peter finally saw each other again near the end of their twenties. He came to visit her at Stanford, on his way from the commune to see his parents in Southern California. My mom doesn’t remember it as a happy reunion. Peter made it clear he thought she had betrayed all their young values. A business school professor? When I ask whether Peter made his judgment explicit, or if she could just sense it, she tells me, “He made it pretty explicit.” He gave her a hard time about having a dishwasher. What could be more bourgeoisie?

  As she tells me this, I think of how Sheila is always in the kitchen of their communal house in Peter’s novel—making a beef stew, or a Jell-O dessert, or dream bars. Even during their years of free love, someone had been doing the dishes. Now she just had a dishwasher. I feel defensive on her behalf.

  When I ask if she felt misunderstood by Peter, she shakes her head. “I didn’t feel misunderstood
. Just hurt. Back then I didn’t have a plan for everything that would happen later.”

  It wasn’t that she envied Peter’s life on the commune. In fact, he had a habit of telling people what to do—and how to do it—and she could imagine that it might get a bit tiring to live in a commune that he’d founded. But at least his life had a certain clarity, an unmistakable moral urgency. Perhaps the specter of unlived lives—the life with Peter, or the one he was living without her—held even more force because her own life was still coming into focus. Perhaps I project false confidence onto my younger mother because it’s uncomfortable for me to imagine her in terms of uncertainty. For me, she has always been the source of inviolable love, the definition of devotion, the absence of contingency.

  * * *

  How does Peter remember that Palo Alto visit? At first, he simply echoes my mom’s sentiments. It was uncomfortable. He didn’t like my father, but it was hard for him to untangle whether it actually had to do with him or the fact that he’d ended up with my mom. But when I ask Peter whether he remembered judging my mother, whether he’d really thought she had betrayed the shared ideals of their youth, he pauses for a long time. “Okay,” he says finally. “She did a very strange thing at that meeting. We never talked about it, and it still mystifies me.”

  He tells me that she came out in a very sheer negligee as she introduced him to her new husband. Peter couldn’t understand what she was trying to communicate. For years, he would have killed to see her come out in that negligee. For years, he had been waiting for some sign from her that maybe there was hope between them. But at that point, he didn’t know what to do with it. My mom has no memory of wearing that negligee. She doesn’t remember trying to send him any signs at all—though it’s also true we don’t always remember the signs we once tried to send, or weren’t even aware of trying to send them in the moment.