Mrs. Dee’s
My mother was a distant presence at best. Still she was a dutiful parent, enrolling us in summer classes like swimming and arts and crafts. Each summer I would take lessons at Mrs. Dee’s Swim Club. The bathing suit I wore, a one-piece sailor’s suit with its white pleated skirt, navy-blue bodice and bright red belt, excited me to no end. I loved any excuse to put it on and strut about the house during the hot months instead of wearing the obligatory frowsy dress.
I was not a good swimmer. In fact, I was lamentably bad. Deluded about my talents, at the end of each summer I would wait for the swim club bathing suit patch to arrive, commemorating that year’s achievement. This was always anti-climatic. Before even opening the transparent waxy envelope, I would make the unhappy discovery that I never seemed to advance. The stitched image of a bathing-capped beauty diving into water that arrived in the mail was always a beginner’s patch.
One afternoon I recall waiting for Mummy after swim class, the air strongly scented with chlorine. The last parent to arrive, a blur of pink lipstick and glossy dark hair, she appeared through the sunlit aperture of the doorway, a striking silhouette.
“Come on!” she commanded loudly in her accented, high-pitched voice. Her tone was distant. Disembodied. I understood that she was different from the other mothers. Though I could not have understood why.
The classics
Beyond early schooling, our mother didn’t interact with us much. She may have simply found us children poor company. She was always so eager to get us to sleep. Most nights, even during those sun-filled summer evenings, we were squirreled off to bed, often as early as 5 p.m. We were also required to take two-hour naps during the day. To a young active child, this felt punitive. Anti-social. Foreboding.
Often my mother implored me to read “the classics.” These were her childhood books that she kept for me on the top shelf of my spare closet. While she had perhaps intended that these musty, hard-backed keepsakes would be a sentimental gift, they symbolized for me a senseless captivity. My room, painted a gender-specific pink, was almost entirely bare. These books were its chief adornment, and for some time they were anathema to me.
One late afternoon, bored of empty midday hours spent alone in my room, I maneuvered a small wooden chair inside the closet to procure a book from the shelf. To my surprise, I discovered my mother’s books were magical, rich and engrossing, not the turgid, joyless tomes I had feared. These were mostly late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century fairy tales, coming-of-age tales, or adventures, the standard fare of mid-century children’s literature: Little Women, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The Three Musketeers, Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Secret Garden.
While I lost myself in books, my mother was transported by internal rhythms of her own. Naked in a see-through pink nylon negligee and strappy heels, my mother swung her firm alabaster legs high in the air as she traversed the many rooms of our open-plan house, enraptured, humming and snapping her fingers in a clumsy syncopation.
1970–1972
Knowing something was wrong in our household, I chalked up most problems to my mother’s poor character. She often attacked me for small infractions of household rules. And she held my father to similar impossible standards. My parents fought a lot in those days. I remember listening to her accusations after they returned home from parties, work parties usually. These arguments lasted long into the night. I wasn’t flirting with her. —You were. —I wasn’t. —I saw you. My mother wouldn’t let up, and the misery of her relentless recriminations countered by my father’s soft-voiced pleas was interminable.
After a time, I wanted my father to leave my mother, to go, maybe to an expensive hotel and recover his dignity. I believed she was in the wrong, and he the put-upon victim. My father was mild mannered, generally, and didn’t have the time or the inclination to harangue his spouse. My mother harangued us all, often.
A year or so into these wearying bedroom wars, my father started threatening to leave. Late into the night he would make a show of packing his bags. My brother and I would marshal our forces, seizing his packed bag from the landing of the second floor of our home, squirreling his things back into the spare room as a strong declaration of love for him and some sort of misguided hope for our family unit. His case hidden, Dad would have no means of escape. As the fighting continued I grew more and more unsettled. It was demoralizing, and I felt embarrassed for him. Finally I had had enough and no longer orchestrated the hiding of his suitcase (my attempt at reconfiguring the domestic argument into a family hoot —Where did you hide it? Ha, ha.) During one of the last pretenses at separation, my father peered up at me from the bottom of the stairs, brown suitcase beside him on the black tile of the foyer, packed and ready to go.
“I won’t go, Claire, if you don’t want me to.” My father’s bright blue eyes bored into mine, pained and almost pleading.
This wasn’t the outcome I had envisioned. I wanted my mother proven wrong. She couldn’t harass us this way. But instead, I was being asked to thread together a family I naively wanted dissolved. In a willed tone of girlish need, I enacted for my father the words he wanted to hear: “Don’t go, Daddy.” And the suitcase was promptly put away.
Point Pleasant Beach
My father and I were born on the same day—April 18. Despite our similarities in some characteristics, we did not share the same proclivity for long, unrestrained conversation. From as young as five, I remember badgering my father on outings for answers on all conceivable topics. But why Daddy? Why? Why? Ignoring my ceaseless inquiries, he would drive on in silence. Later on, I tried engaging my father in passionate review of football, a sport he routinely tuned into on weekends, positioned a few feet in front of the black-and-white television in a velour, swivel bucket chair.
Daddy, I would ask, hoping to cheer on a favorite team, Which team to do you want to win? The black team or the white team? Sharing in an emotional identification with my father was a vain hope. It doesn’t matter, he would answer in a barely detectable English accent, long legs neatly stretched out before him, eyes nearly closed.
In the summers, he often took us children to the Jersey Shore, the scent of which I readily confused with that of the oil refineries along the Jersey Turnpike. The window of our vehicle cracked open, I would inhale deeply the acrid smell, almost swooning. Ah, the beach! I would exclaim giddily, my father always quick to correct me.
The mile-long Point Pleasant Beach, with its kid-friendly boardwalk and dynamic waves, was where we would play Skee-Ball, buy delicious clouds of cotton candy, and duck and dive under the waves close to the shore. When it was our father’s turn to exercise, I would sit hunched on my towel and watch him swim out far beyond the waves in his light blue swim trunks, pale arms slicing through the Atlantic until he faded from view. A half-hour later Dad would return dripping wet to relax on his worn, brightly-colored towel. Stealthily I would observe the distinctive scar that ran the length of my father’s lean torso, the result of a severe burn that he had incurred at eight years old when his younger brother tipped him in his chair too close to the fire. A mesmerizing scar that licked at his ribs like the dazzling rays of the sun.
Alter ego
During this time, my terahertz-wave pioneering father was almost always at “the labs,” a term I confused readily with another oft-used term, “the lav;” an English colloquialism for the bathroom, someone in our household could be going to either the labs or the lav.
Joy, I’m leaving now for the labs. I won’t be back until late. The close association of these terms disturbed me. Did my father work in a large porcelain toilet bowl?
In the high-ceilinged corporate brick building, my father participated in open discussions with Nobel laureates that led him to the invention of a radio receiver able to detect elusive elements in the interstellar medium. While my father’s ambitions for success were being met at every turn, my mother’s boredom and frustration was acted out upon her school-aged children
. Like my father, she too had been educated at Oxford, yet her career aspirations remained unfulfilled.
Sometimes at night when I was meant to be in bed reading the Brother’s Grimm or books by P. L. Travers, I would sneak downstairs to snatch glimpses of prime time television, and the myriad performers who entertained my father when he took those short breaks between long ten-and twelve-hour stints at Bell Labs. I was transfixed by one popular singer dressed in bell bottom pants and a button-down shirt of monochrome black who clasped a shiny silver bulbous microphone and belted out the lyrics of his latest hit song: What’s new, Pussycat? Woah, woah, woah.
In the reflective glare of the family’s small black-and-white television, I had discovered an alternate reality. This full-throated baritone with the coiffed head of dark curls was none other than my father. My reserved English father had ditched his commoner threads, the Marks and Spencer brand polyester pants and shirt sent to him all the way across the Atlantic Ocean by his mother, for the glamorous attire of the world renowned Welsh stage singer, Tom Jones. This was my father’s alter ego. The two men even shared the same first name. This electrifying sight confirmed for me an unspoken truth—when my father was away from home, he led a glittering life, hips gyrating to the delight of a predominantly female audience.
The other Toms
There was a third Tom, or to be perfectly chronological, a second Tom. This second Tom sat at a desk in our dusty two-car garage selling homes in our subdivision. We were the first homeowners on the block, and my mother was very proud of this fact, citing it often. She was equally proud of an acquisition that set our property apart, the extra eighth of an acre of land. This forested, wild bit of earth, with its dense and overgrown blackberry bushes and dozens of mature trees separating our home from our neighbors was my mother’s pride and joy.
During the warm summer months of our first year living in Berkeley Heights, my mother would often make her way from the kitchen into the laundry room in a colorful shift, raven-colored hair styled in the same flipped fashion as Marlo Thomas in That Girl, to present the handsome outsider ensconced in our garage with an icy can of Coca-Cola. As the mild flirtation flourished between housewife and contractor, I sensed in my mother something buoyant, almost delighted.
1971–1972
In this dream, I am in my father’s large sedan. I am in the backseat, and he is in the driver’s seat. The car is in motion when suddenly my father thrusts open his door and climbs out of the car. I panic, unsure which pedal is the brake and which is the gas. I am six or seven years old when I start having this dream.
For some reason, no matter how often I rehearse the mechanical knowledge of driving a car when I am awake, I am never able to translate this to my dream. Night after night, I am abandoned in a car that I cannot control.
Queen’s Gate
Moving to New Jersey was not my mother’s first migration, but her second. At eleven years old, her parents had sent her from Rhodesia to Queen’s Gate, an elite all-girls boarding school nine thousand miles away in England, notably attended by the Redgrave sisters. Soon after, her two younger sisters followed. Because of the prohibitive expense of traveling back and forth between England and southern Africa, my mother rarely returned home, spending the better part of holidays with family in the U.K.
Over the years, I grew to think of my mother and her sisters as belonging to a strange cabal. Their mere existence suggested something vaguely troubling concealed beneath the suburban reality to which they aspired. They looked alike, with broad faces and distinctly shaped noses. Spoke in accents unlike anyone else’s I knew. This southern African accent embodies an incomparably violent history. Influenced by years of English and Dutch settling and plundering of this Bantu-speaking region of Africa, it is a non-rhotic accent, one in which the phonemes, depending upon their placement, are not always pronounced.1 For example “r” consonants are not always pronounced. The “r” of hark becomes “ha:k”, and the “r” of car becomes “ca:” My name pronounced by my mother sounded something like “cla:.”
Sharing a common destiny, one by one after college, these three women immigrated to America so their husbands could find jobs and they could start families. Staying close to each other was not the determining factor. The impetus was economic. My mother’s youngest sister moved to Staten Island with her husband, a Zionist and a doctor, who passionately taught his three children Hebrew in their refurbished basement. The middle sister moved to Houston and then Dallas with her French husband, also a doctor. My mother had been the first to arrive in the U.S., settling in New Jersey. Growing up, I felt certain that she, as the eldest, held the key to this family’s destiny. Perhaps she did. But it was not the one I imagined.
1944–1985
Of the three sisters, my Aunt Anne was considered to be the prettiest. From the warm tone of my father’s voice, whenever he spoke of her I knew that he liked her best, maybe even more than his wife. Once, after visiting Anne and her family in Texas while on business, he told me that I looked like her. At six years old, I took this to be a compliment and also a terrible omen. I had just learned that my aunt had lost one of her legs in a car door. This triggered in me great confusion. I would speculate on possible scenarios while seated in the back of my parents’s station wagon, wondering why no one had come to my aunt’s aid. I became mordantly afraid of this vehicle with its outlandish powers. How was it even possible to lose a leg through the simple closing of a car door? You couldn’t possibly do that to yourself, could you? And if someone else were to close the door on your leg, surely this someone would hear you scream out for help. It was bewildering to say the least.
Years later, I heard stories from other relatives about how my aunt had lost her leg. The first story was that at eighteen years old she had fallen in love with a Christian boy. Grandpa Mike, a reverent Jew, prohibited the relationship. In despair, she swallowed an entire bottle of aspirin and hid inside a boudoir, inadvertently falling asleep for over twenty-four hours, cutting off the circulation to one of her legs. Years later, I was told by other cousins that after being denied the opportunity to leave southern Africa for college in England, she had threatened to commit suicide. When her parents left for a two-day research trip, she attempted to make good on her promise and consumed the bottle of aspirin.
1970–1971
Not all was discord. I remember those first years living on Dorset Road when our mother seemed almost content.
There was a neighbor my mother was willing to spend time with, Betty, who lived in a two-story Colonial at the end of our cul-de-sac and had three children, all boys with whom I loved to play. Her oldest son, Johnny, was a troublemaker of the first order and my idol, routinely chastised for his bad boy hijinks like smashing the neighbor’s garage windows with rocks. Once while playing in the half-built foundation of a neighboring construction site, he smashed his brother Bobby’s hand with a brick, nearly severing his three-year-old brother’s pinkie finger from his hand.
That unforgettable spring afternoon, my mother was enlisted to drive Betty and her brood to the emergency room. No one cried, no one carped. A glorious drive then ensued with everyone piled into our sky-blue Ford station wagon, Betty and Bobby in the front seat, his partially severed finger wed delicately to his hand with a small hand towel, Johnny and the middle brother squeezed in back with my brother and me. I remembered being proud of my mother for doing her part without the fussing or tension that minor problems typically presented. However, this sociability and relative calm was not to last.
1 Demirezen, Mehmet. “Which/r/Are You Using as an English Teacher? Rhotic or Non-Rhotic?” Egyptian Journal of Medical Human Genetics, 1 Sept. 2012. Web.
2
the creeping in the patterns
A deferred career
In 1972, when the Equal Rights Amendment passed the U.S. Senate 84–8 and appeared on its way to being ratified, my mother became insistent that our family return to England, after living in New Jersey for just over five years, so
that she could pursue a deferred career in law.
My mother liked to boast that my father would never have taken the research position at Bell Labs without her prompting. This job that would launch a rewarding career and a twenty-five year professorship at CalTech, where he observed suborbital space in NASA airplanes and directed one of the world’s first sub-millimeter telescopes; this job, which culminated in working with the European Space Agency to send experimental equipment into deep space to detect dark matter, would have been unwittingly passed over by my father if it were not for my mother’s preternatural wisdom and clear-eyed practicality.
Summer 1972
He must have guessed something would be irrevocably lost. That summer our father acted to change the dynamic. Out of the blue he turned up one afternoon to arts and crafts, the summer program in which our mother had enrolled us. He was seated in his green Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, disconcertingly dwarfed behind the steering wheel of its long front end.
“Get in,” he called out the window.
He was there to take us on an impromptu family vacation. This was a first—encountering our father in the middle of the day. Aside from trips to the beach on weekends or occasional visits to England, we rarely traveled. That night our family left by car for Montreal, a weekend trip that was destined to end almost as soon as it began. A minor disaster from the get-go, we spent half the night driving up and down the same unfamiliar stretch of highway, continually missing the off-ramp for our hotel, until my five-year-old brother pointed it out to my beleaguered father.
The hotel room was a prescription for terror. Located on the tenth floor of a newly erected skyscraper with mesmerizing floor-to-ceiling windows, I could not make my way beyond the midpoint of the room due to an extreme fear of heights. The following morning at breakfast before we had even begun our sightseeing, my mother declared her need to study. We had to return home, then and there. My father looked crushed, any hope of familial normalcy completely dashed.
A Room with a Darker View Page 2
