You Cannot Mess This Up

by Amy Weinland Daughters

  I felt an immediate closeness to this younger Sue, but I innately understood that there was no way she could return my misplaced sense of intimacy. I was an unwanted stranger in her house as opposed to a person whose life had begun at the end of her birth canal.

  “What is your family doing for Thanksgiving?” Mom asked. “You have two children, don’t you?”

  “They are spending the holiday with close friends of ours in Ohio,” I said. “I have two boys, one seventeen and the other eight. I’m sure they miss me but, really I’m rarely gone if ever.” Mom nodded, but behind her casual look you could tell that this wasn’t an arrangement that would have been acceptable in 1978, especially not in suburbia, where everyone stayed home. Come to think of it, there wasn’t a mom on this block who worked outside of the home. How different that was from my suburban street in Ohio, where I was one of only two moms at home. In 1978, you would have been greeted with words like, “You work, really?” while in 2014 it would be more like, “You stay home, really?” What a difference those thirty-five years made for women in middle-class America. Was it their desires that had changed or, instead, was it expectations that had shifted? Either way, Mom and I were having very different experiences as mothers and wives, very different indeed.

  “You write, don’t you?” Mom asked, grasping at conversation straws. Without waiting for an answer, as if she had suddenly decided she was interested, she said, “I have always wanted to write but could never find the time.” I knew that about her and remembered her orange Litton portable typewriter with the black-and-red ink ribbon. She had dreamed of becoming a Hollywood History writer, “Nostalgia,” she had called it, especially interested in the stars and starlets who had passed away at a young age.

  She was gifted with words, but unfortunately lived in a time where the typical housewife was not expected nor encouraged to express herself outside of her obvious duties. She wrote funny poems and could always be counted on for a humorous quip or biting comeback. People thought I was a good writer, but she had entertained far more words than I could have ever hoped to meet.

  I couldn’t tell her that in my opinion, the only difference between my part-time gig as a writer and her unfound aspirations was the year we were born. First, this established the expectation that she wouldn’t have a side interest that generated income, and secondly, there was no internet to shrink the world and increase creative opportunities. Since I couldn’t explain the effects of the World Wide Web on the role of women in society, I said the only thing I could. “Well, you should write, maybe when the kids are at school, even for just a little bit each day. It is a release for me, and it’s not even about being good. Even if nobody reads it and you never get paid, it’s a part of you and an accomplishment in itself.”

  Mom finally looked at me directly. “You know,” she stated, “you’re right, I need to try that. Try something.”

  After a long pause, she smiled genuinely, leaning against the red countertop. “Do you like the holidays?”

  “I do,” I responded. “I have happy memories of the holidays as a kid.” Because apparently I was a truncated idiot completely oblivious to everything that was going on around me. “My immediate family is still close and even though we are all very different, we are lucky because we really do enjoy being together. You know, there is stress, it gets loud and people make unfortunate comments but, overall, it’s all good.”

  “That’s nice,” Mom said. “Frankly, the holidays tend to stress me out.” I couldn’t believe she was opening up so quickly, but, then again, she had no female contemporary at most of these gatherings. She didn’t have any sisters, and her brother, Frank, had died of cancer in his twenties. There was also a lack of cousins, or really any other extended family.

  Dad had only one sibling, a sister, Aunt Susie, and as far as I could remember, at this time, the 1978 one, her family would have just moved into the Houston area. I didn’t know why they weren’t here today, but I guess they must have gone back to Ohio, from whence they came, for the holiday. So as of now, Thanksgiving 1978, it was just Mom, her mother—whom she had her own challenges with—and her mother-in-law, who was a great lady, but was just that, her mother-in-law. Then, of course, it was the husband and kids, the people that she needed to talk about, not with. Maybe she was happy just to have someone, anyone, to talk to on this, the national day of stress and giblets.

  I tried to think of who her good friends would have been at this time, and honestly I couldn’t think of anyone outside of our neighbors, a loose connection at best. I also couldn’t remember her ever going out for a girl’s night. That shocked me. Didn’t everyone do that? Maybe she had lots of close friends, but I, once again, wasn’t paying any attention to anyone but myself. Or, maybe she was so busy trying to survive everyday life, a marriage, and a family that there was little, if any, time for her.

  Either way, Mom and I were having very similar experiences as mothers and wives, very similar indeed.

  We definitely had our moments while I was growing up. We struggled with each other, especially through my teen years, well, I guess through all my years, including the ones that were going on right now. I guess that kind of stuff is typical of many mothers and daughters, no matter when they live in history. In fact, I knew that was true because I had plenty of friends with daughters. Conflict seemed almost inevitable.

  As I got older, I had always assumed it was just that our personalities clashed, or that somehow my place in the family wasn’t clear. Though I couldn’t confirm it, I was always left with an overwhelming feeling that I wasn’t her favorite, or even her number two. Sometimes I questioned if she even loved me, or liked me. Maybe I had made that up in my own mind, or maybe it was true, who knew.

  Did things happen the way I remembered them? And what was the value of revisiting any of it? Did it really matter how we dealt with each other thirty years ago as long as we could still manage to be in the same room, happily, back in the future?

  Mom had her fair share of baggage from her own childhood, stuff she couldn’t completely rid herself of. Perhaps alcohol numbed her pain. I had always assumed that, but I also understood that alcohol seemed to amplify her emotions, both good and bad. I never knew any of that until I got older, until I moved away and had an opportunity to compare my life at home to my life not at home.

  One of the benefits of being totally self-absorbed, or programmed to accept your circumstances as the way things should be, especially in upper middle-class America, is that you are, by nature, unaware of the unacceptable things going on right under your nose. Things had happened here, in this house, and I didn’t identify it as worth questioning until I was gone. Perhaps it’s also a mode of self-preservation—a subconscious choice not to feel everything as it’s actually happening.

  I had caught glimpses (as a young adult) at the harshness that could be suffered at the hands of my mom’s mother, and though I began to understand life isn’t always the way it appears on the surface, I never did a good job of connecting all the little emotional dots. It’s something I still couldn’t achieve at forty-six, so at ten it was bound to be a fruitless task. That is, if I ever even had a notion to think about anything like that.

  Things get even trickier in a culture where the adults never talk about the difficult stuff. The result is that reality is draped in a thick fog. Did everything I thought I remembered really happen, or did I make it all up? Things that aren’t discussed, over time, become almost surreal. The younger you are when it happens, the denser the fog.

  Maybe we were a lot alike, Mom and I, or, maybe we were totally different. The process of becoming a mother had made me realize how wise she really was. Wise, and then ridiculous, and then old. It came in stages. I knew she hadn’t always been right, I was damn sure of that, because I remembered some of it, a lot of it. And it was bad. But how was I so sure that I wasn’t wrong?

  And who held the keys to the real version of what happened if I didn’t?

  Rick and Kim das
hed through the room toward the garage. Apparently it was time for everyone’s next adult beverage.

  “Amy,” Mom said, “you should have the kids bring you another beer and sit down in the other room and relax. I’m almost done here.” I tried to tell her how happy I was, well kind of, to stay in the kitchen, and she briefly relented, drawing out what felt like a very few precious moments, harrowing, meaningful, and empty.

  Hell, we were both in our forties. We were both homemakers, we were both wives, we were both moms, we both had mothers-in-law. Everyone expected clean underwear and shiny toilets— we both probably thought that was crappy in a good kind of way. We were suddenly contemporaries. Yeah, there was the past, but there would always be the past, but here and now was worth trying to experience on its own merits. Even when here and now was the past.

  “Let’s go make ourselves social,” Mom said, sighing as she placed a dish towel back on the yellow sink. I smiled and agreed, following her out of the kitchen.

  Finding our seats, I glanced at the TV long enough to realize that the Redskins were playing the Cowboys in Dallas. I looked for a score and realized that there would have been no such tally permanently affixed to the screen with sports updates scrolling endlessly beneath. This was pre-cable, pre-ESPN, pre-up-to-the-second information overload. Honestly, it was pre-historic. I wondered how these people dealt with not knowing what was REALLY going on.

  “What’s the score?” I asked, proud that I could offer up something audible to the entire group. Maybe I was blossoming into this role, maybe Mary was right—maybe it would be all right.

  “It’s the second quarter,” Granddaddy answered with pleasure, “and Dallas is up thirteen to nothing.”

  Great, I thought, my team can’t even win in the past. Just then, through the grainy reception, my spirits dropped even further as Roger Staubach flung a long pass to Drew Pearson, who scampered into the end zone for a fifty-three-yard Dallas touchdown. This followed by a Rafael Septien extra point made the score twenty to zip in the second quarter.

  I never liked Rafael Septien.

  The small Cowboys contingency, consisting of Granny and Granddaddy (who both grew up in Dallas) and my dad (who as the host was being hospitable, but couldn’t, wouldn’t root for Dallas in real earnest) were elated, while the Luv Ya Blue Houston Oilers fans, consisting of everyone else with exception of both versions of me, seethed with apathy.

  Here’s the deal—if you were from Dallas, you didn’t root for a lowly Houston team, and if you were from Houston, you would never in a zillion years cheer for those snobby Dallas teams. Those folks thought they were the epitome of fashion, oil and banking. When in reality, what was going on up there was nothing more than a few half-decent-sized skyscrapers trimmed in green neon, a ridiculous glass ball on a stick, and a waft of cow patties from the Stockyards.

  It’s something that nobody seemed to remember—until the wind shifted.

  I could really sink these Cowboys fans’ ships if I told them that their precious “America’s Team” was destined to experience a crushing loss to the Steelers (which both Texas fan bases hated) in the Super Bowl. At least there was that.

  On the flip side, I could shock the Oilers’ supporters by spinning a wild tale of turncoat-Houstonian Bud Adams yanking the team from H-town, leaving for Nashville, Tennessee, over a new stadium squabble. Suddenly, what we had once proudly heralded as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”—the Astrodome itself—wouldn’t be good enough for the powder-blue-suited traitor. It would be a long wait, but these chosen football people, assembled here on this national day of thanks, were destined to become … Texans fans.

  Drop the mic.

  Mom slipped away back into the kitchen. While the guys continued to watch the game, I noticed that my paternal grandmother, Bee, was making continual, almost desperate attempts to engage my maternal grandmother, Ruth, in conversation. Despite her efforts, she couldn’t manage to squeeze more than a few polite words.

  “Did anyone read about that doctor from Houston involved in the mass suicide?” Granddaddy asked, during a commercial break, apparently intent on keeping it real.

  “Yes!” Grandma said, moving to the edge of her seat, relieved that someone was willing to talk. “One of the survivors saw him mixing the poison into the juice before it was served.”

  “Good Lord!” Granny said.

  “He graduated from Lamar High School,” Granddaddy continued, “in River Oaks.” He emphasized this part because, I guessed, a former student from the most exclusive neighborhood in Houston would be an unlikely candidate to use his hard-earned medical license to give hundreds of people an express lane to cult-driven suicide.

  I hadn’t known there was so close a personal connection to Houston.

  “Dick,” Granddaddy asked Dad. “Do you have yesterday’s paper? It was in there.”

  Dad retreated to the kitchen briefly and then reappeared behind the cast-iron fence in the formal living room. He returned down the steps, while reading aloud, “The guy’s name was Dr. Larry Schacht, he graduated from Lamar in 1968. His brother is Danny Schacht, who lives in Montrose.”

  “How in the world can that happen to someone with such a solid upbringing?” Granny asked.

  “I suppose,” Grandma stated with some level of caution, “money doesn’t always equal decency.”

  “Hmmm …” Granny almost snorted. “But it doesn’t equal criminal activity either.”

  She looked over to Grandma, as did everyone else brave enough to lift their eyes away from the burnt-orange rug. I guess Grandma had started it, but she wasn’t going to let it go any further. That didn’t surprise me, but even the hint of conflict certainly did.

  I was sitting between my two grandmothers, people I had seen in the same room a hundred times, including at my graduation, my wedding and in the hospital room where I delivered our first son, their first great-grandchild. In all that time, I had never noticed conflict. They must have shielded us, the kids, from it.

  As Grandma turned back to the game, the room fell silent.

  I scanned everyone’s faces quickly, almost manically, trying to figure out what I was supposed to look at. It was too much. Too freaking much. Feeling something touching my hand, I looked to my right to see Granny’s thin, almost bony fingers.

  “So,” she asked carefully, with a sweet drawl apparently reserved for strangers and grandchildren, “Sue tells me that you are a writer?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said with as much respect as I could muster. I knew that kind of stuff mattered to Ruth MacCurdy, plus I had to prove that I wasn’t just another half-cocked Midwesterner. She had opinions about Northerners, Yankees—a viewpoint I had once shared, that is before I had moved away, back and then away again. There were good and bad people everywhere, in every city, every country, and even in this room—with a giant antique pedal organ, an instrument that my dad loved with all his heart, and my mom hated with every ounce of her soul. She would sell it for $125 in 1991. He would re-acquire the exact same model in 2013 for $1025.

  “I mostly write about sports,” I said, “but I also like to think of myself as an author of unpublished books.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Sports … That’s interesting …” Even though she obviously wasn’t totally on board with skirt-wearers posting football stats, she didn’t push it, instead shifting her body toward me in a way that made me feel wholly legit. “I write too!”

  What? She wrote? Like me? That is where it had come from? I had always thought I was more like my “other” grandparents, the ones who seemed easier to connect with.

  “Yes,” she continued, settling back, but still maintaining a ladylike posture in her red pantsuit with wide white checks. “I wrote for the Waco News-Tribune.”

  “Really?” I asked. I had thought my deep connection with Granny had ceased when we both grew out of watching nighttime soaps. It had never seemed the same once I was a teenager. Then, well, there was the ugly incident after my wedding. Her neighbor a
nd lifelong friend had graciously sent us a gift, and I had exceeded the three-month rule on sending a thank-you note. I could have done better, that’s true, but she handled her disappointment aggressively.

  It was one of those “lightbulb” moments. Mom had always hinted, not full-on described, that her mom could be a real pain in the ass. I had always seen her as my beloved grandmother, nothing more, nothing less. Being here, in 1978, and watching my ten-year-old cluelessness combined with the adults’ “let’s shield the kids from reality” stance made me understand how this worked. I guess in this case it was OK to sacrifice honesty for peace? Even if that was so, the peace was nothing more than a cover-up. It made what happened fifteen years from now, in 1993, even easier to understand.

  Granny had called me at our apartment in the Woodlands. Without pausing for any niceties, she ripped me up one side and down the other. She called me an “embarrassment” and told me she couldn’t believe that I had not taken the time to send a thank-you note when her friend had gone out of her way to send me such a nice gift. She told me she had always thought more of me, and would have never, in a million years, thought I would have done something like this.

  Could I really be her granddaughter?

  She didn’t know, but she was sure she didn’t want to see me, or speak to me, anytime soon. And I had better write the thank-you note, and any others still outstanding. Now.

  I was devastated.

  And this time I told people—my new husband Willie, my dad (who told my mom for me) and my sister, who had the decency never to really forgive Granny.

  If nothing else, I had just been treated to the version of Ruth MacCurdy that Mom experienced through her entire life. Once the dust settled, and that took a while, I understood my mom, and some of the things she did, a little better. That said, it would never explain everything, because eventually, perhaps inevitably, things would spin totally out of control. Of course we never talked aloud about that. Never.