“Well,” he said. “It’s about a pool shark, played by Paul Newman, who had so much skill it was hard to believe. He could sink a billiard ball anywhere on the table from any position. But he never won. He was a LOSER, and that’s what you are. I’ll be damned (he was getting pretty worked up) if it doesn’t look like you wanted to keep yourself from getting an A. You sail through so many questions—beautiful, self-respecting, comprehensive answers. The way you did the one on Ophelia was close to brilliant. Then you completely foul up a few as if you thought you were going along too well—as if you weren’t going to last. I don’t know. We’ll see you Thursday.”
Oh that man, if he ever realizes what he did to me…or for me?
I never did see him on Thursday. I dropped his course. I wasn’t going to mess around with someone who had me pegged. I had good excuses as I was two months’ pregnant and didn’t feel quite up to par when that eight o’clock class rolled around. But my beloved professor hit me right below the belt.
Her story devastates me. The thought of my mom, so young and pregnant, being pegged as a loser and feeling her only choice was to drop out of her first year of college. Surely this wasn’t what she wanted. My mom was exceptionally bright, and both she and my aunt received high scores on their IQ tests as young girls. In hindsight, I think my dad often mentioned this detail about her IQ because he wanted us to understand that while our mother didn’t always make the smartest decisions, she had the brains to do so.
While her sister went on to medical school to become a psychiatrist, my mom’s college years ended when she got pregnant with Jamie. But even with an incomplete education, she was smarter than all of us—at least that was how I felt growing up. If someone asked me about my mom, one of the first things I always mentioned was that she was brilliant and had a very high IQ.
Mindfully, I sift through her letters. I find a letter my mom wrote to my father but never sent. It appears tear-stained and unfinished.
Dear Jimmy,
This is going to be a very difficult letter to write in as much as I really don’t know what to say. You have been gone a month, and that’s a very long time to the one left behind. You left me in a hell of a spot in more ways than one. To me you were off finding your mind—to everyone else you had dumped all your responsibilities and had tooted off to see the world. I sort of came to the conclusion that since you had placed yourself as a free and independent person, so would I. I’d get a job, do whatever I wanted to do—but Good Lord how could I with Jamie??
It startles me to remember that my dad left briefly too, disappearing for a month when Jamie was nine months old. My mom had been unfaithful to him, and in a fury he took off and hitchhiked out to California. As I only know this story from my father’s telling of it, I eagerly keep reading.
Sure I could get a part-time job in the area while Jamie stayed at home but I don’t want that. I don’t want Jamie brought up by my parents or yours. I want him—but not on a “give him breakfast and kiss him good-night while he stays with some nanny all day” basis. So what can I do? It’s been a case of deciding what’s best for Jamie—to stay with him always and be miserable for lack of occupation, to get a job and subject him to no home life whatsoever, or give him up completely so he’ll have a home and I’ll spend the rest of my life wanting my little boy back.
Look, Jimmy, I failed you—failed you flat and, therefore, myself. I never made a pleasant home for you to come into, I’ve never taken the time to listen and understand your problems, I’ve never made an effort to help you with your work—I’ve never really, in a nutshell, tried. And you failed me in some ways, but not nearly as many. But my selfishness wouldn’t let me bend one bit, though I often wanted to at times. As far as Bill—he’s gone now. Just a memory to put in my memories—believe me. Over the summer I found that as long as I had other satisfactions—friends, job—to compensate for troubles on the home front, I didn’t give a damn about William. It seems as if he’s an escape—if I can think I still love him, I don’t have to think that I’ve made such a mess of things for nothing. So there! Your payment for desertion. Do you know that I could have had you arrested?
So she was still thinking about Bill. And from what I know, my dad got to California and picked up a job driving a Buick Riviera for Frank Sinatra and his celebrity pals at the Cal Neva Casino. He’d drive around town with Sammy Davis Jr., Trini Lopez, Gordon MacRae, and Bing Crosby. The tips were fantastic and the parties outlandish—until Frank Sinatra and the Cal Neva were shut down overnight for their associations with Sam Giancana and the mob. That’s when my dad headed back to New York, remorseful but committed to making things work out. Eden was born nine months later.
I need you to understand that things have to be different when you come back and that I very much want to learn how to do things through love and for love. Oh, there are so many things we both must understand and they can’t all be explained in a letter. So Jamie and I await your arrival by the 13th. Jamie has been just fine except for last night when teeth kept the whole house up all night. These will be 7 and 8, you know! Even in a month he’s gotten to be such a big boy.
This letter gives me such a rare glimpse into my mom and dad as a couple. It also turns my head and heart in different directions. I never knew that my mom called him Jimmy. In her own words, she claims she couldn’t stand to have Jamie left with a nanny on an all-day basis. That if she gave him up, she’d spend the rest of her life wanting her little boy back. But could she have ever have imagined that she would someday leave three children behind? What caused her to break away from us and choose the path she did?
NOW
thirst
It is close to two in the morning when I sneak downstairs to the kitchen. I look through the refrigerator and open all the cupboards searching for something to fill me up. I wonder if a beer or a glass of wine would help quiet my addled mind. But as much as that might feel good right now, it feels wrong to drink in this house where alcohol has been my mom’s death sentence.
Drinking has never seduced me in quite the same way as it has the rest of my family. I am the only one among my brothers, my mom, and my dad, who doesn’t have a DUI on my record. It’s one of those facts that would make Jamie laugh and then he’d say something like, “You always were the goody-two-shoes of the family, Sis.”
I was twenty when my mom went into rehab and became sober for the first time in my life. She sent me newspaper clippings and articles about the genetic factors and the hereditary curse of alcoholism, and I hoped that this would be the beginning of a closer relationship with her. Alcoholism and addictions killed all four of my grandparents, she explained. She said there was no escaping it.
“You gotta face the facts, Liddy Bumpkins,” she told me. “I’m an alcoholic. Your dad’s an alcoholic. Your brother is an alcoholic. Your other brother is definitely a drug addict. Our genes are a bloody mess. Even you’d better watch it.”
I felt like she was being honest with me, and I wanted to trust her and believe her. I was proud of her recovery. She went back to college, stopped hanging out at the town tavern, and met the man she would later marry. She seemed happy.
I was the opposite. Though I was seeing a therapist at the time, I was all over the place emotionally. I was struggling with my body image and in a hellhole of starving and bingeing. I hated every physical inch of my body. Some days I couldn’t get off the floor of my basement apartment. Staring at the dark ceiling beams, I felt a strong thread of connection to my family. I gathered an image of the huge hole in all of us and began to connect the dots, seeing how we each needed to fill it with something: drugs, alcohol, sex, food, whatever.
Maybe I wasn’t so different. As I lay there sprawled on the floor, I desperately wanted to let my family know that I was messed up too. That even though I hadn’t succumbed to the siren call of alcohol, I was no better than any of them. I was as thin as a snowflake—silent, falling, disappearing. It w
as my way of coping, of obsessing, of having my own secret addiction. Maybe if they saw I was damaged or really in trouble, there would be something to save.
When I went to see the therapist one afternoon, I told her about a dream that was bothering me. It was one of those dreams in Technicolor that feels entirely too vivid and real. In it, my mom and I are at the beach together having a picnic in the fog with all kinds of delicious cheeses and French baguettes. My mom pulls a bottle of red wine out of the picnic basket and pours a glass for me and a glass for her.
“But Mom,” I say, “I thought you didn’t drink anymore.”
She laughs and says it is “all okay now.” I watch her guzzle down the wine.
“You can’t do that, Mom. Please.” I reach to take the bottle away from her, but my body freezes and I can’t lift my arms. I try to tell her to stop, but my voice is gone.
The therapist looked at me as the pause became long and uncomfortable. “You’re afraid of losing your mom again, aren’t you?”
I turned my head away and looked out the window. It was overcast. Blackbirds dotted the wires between telephone poles. I wondered if the current inside the wires keeps their feet warm.
“It makes sense,” my therapist continued. “If she ever goes back to drinking, you might lose her again.”
I shook my head. This time would be different.
• • •
A year later, my mom came down to San Francisco for a visit. We were driving through the rainbow tunnel just beyond the Golden Gate Bridge when she turned to me and said, “Just so you know, I’m having a glass of wine now and then, and it’s okay.”
I was certain I had misheard her. That as soon as we made it out of the tunnel, she would turn to me and say, “I’m joking, of course.” But she didn’t. Instead she said there was new research claiming that having “a little bit of wine” was okay—that even some longtime AA drinkers could handle having a glass now and then.
I watched her hand dig deep into her purse for her pack of cigarettes with a plastic lighter tucked inside the cellophane wrapper. I watched her lips form a seal around the tan filter as she inhaled the lie she was telling herself.
The problem was, there was no such thing as “a little bit of wine” for my mom.
For the rest of the weekend I watched her drink like I had never seen her drink before. She got staggering drunk and then pulled everything out of my kitchen cupboards looking for anything with alcohol. I sat on the tile floor with her as she sobbed and consumed handfuls of Good & Plentys and cried out, “I lost my babies. You have no idea what that was like.”
A migraine crawled up my neck and settled in my temples. Everything she said confused me. What did she mean by “lost”? Was there something I didn’t know? She seemed angry at me for not understanding her pain—and of course I didn’t fully understand. I didn’t have children yet. How could I possibly know about the complexities of being a mother or what it would be like to “lose” a baby—or three?
As she continued to rant about the loss of her babies, I knew I should be furious at her for laying all this crap on me. Here was my mother, an inconsolable child, and I had to comfort her because I was afraid she might hurt herself. I wanted to help her out of the addiction she was resurrecting—but I knew I had lost her again. I made her warm tea and got her a blanket when she finally exhausted herself enough to sleep.
“You’ll see,” she said before drifting off. “I’ll make up for it when the grandchildren come.”
I had decided that if that time ever came, I would remind her of this promise.
Now as I sit in her kitchen while she drifts away, it’s clear she won’t be able to keep that promise. For a brief minute, I wonder what it would have been like if she had fully disappeared from my life, never to be seen again. And then a memory skips through me and drops me off in Mrs. Holman’s fourth-grade class.
THEN
just off center road
When I walk into my classroom, I notice right away that something is different. Todd Majors is wearing a tie. The girls are all in colorful skirts and dresses. I look down at my square-toed suede boots and want to kick myself. I forgot it was picture day.
My boots are caked with layers of mud from feeding the chickens this morning—but it’s not so much the boots as what I threw on in a hurry before running down Center Road to get to school on time. My worn gray T-shirt with “St. Lawrence University” in large, red block letters on the front, my old jean jacket, and my shark-tooth necklace seemed just fine when I left the house. Nobody has to tell me this is not a good choice for picture day. I remember the notice that went home, how it said to wear bright, cheery colors and be “well-groomed.” I didn’t even make time to tackle the thick knots in my hair this morning.
I sit down at my desk and run my hands along its smooth surface. Even Carmen La Goy is wearing a dress. I stare at her in her blue-and-white-checkered dress with puffy sleeves. She shoots me a dirty look. I can tell she is not happy wearing that dress. Carmen La Goy, with her silky black hair and a shadow of a mustache above her lip, is the toughest girl in fourth grade. She swears and fights and gets sent to the office frequently. My brother Jamie and his friends call her “La Goy the Boy.”
She’s usually nice to me though. She tells me I need to toughen up and start swearing, especially since I have brothers. Carmen has two older brothers, and she says she has to fight them all the time. I believe her because she’s come to school twice with a fat lip and a purple eye.
Mrs. Holman tells us to line up at the front door because we are going to the auditorium to have our pictures taken.
I approach her desk and say, “I forgot it was picture day.”
“I can see that,” she replies. I stand at her desk waiting for her to say something more, but she turns abruptly and goes to the front of the line with the “well-groomed” girls, giddy in their flowered dresses and velvet headbands. She huddles around them like a hen. I step back so that I can be at the end of the line. So does Carmen.
Carmen says I’m lucky that I get to wear what I want. “My mom made me wear this stupid spic dress,” she says.
I tell her I forgot it was picture day. Then she grabs the sleeve of my jean jacket and says, “Hey, chica, we ought to sneak out right now and switch outfits in the girls’ bathroom.” Her dark, almost black eyes scare me. I don’t want to tell her that her dress is a little too frilly even for me.
“I’d love to piss my mom off,” she pleads, still hanging on to my sleeve.
I’m grateful when Mrs. Holman escorts us out of the room so I don’t have to answer her. On the walk outside to the auditorium, Carmen pulls the barrettes out of her hair. She spits into the oleander bushes and tells me that Mrs. Holman “is pure evil.”
In the afternoon, Mrs. Holman calls me and a girl named Tracy Jane up to her desk. I’m certain that she’s going to say something about my picture day outfit. But she doesn’t. Instead she says, “You know that you two girls have something in common?”
I look at Tracy Jane in her red velvet dress, with her brown curls and shiny white shoes. She seems too large for a fourth grader. Then again, next to Carmen La Goy, I am the shortest in the class. What did I have in common with Tracy Jane?
“You two both live with your fathers,” Mrs. Holman says. “You ought to play together sometime.”
I shoot a quick look at Tracy, and she eyes me. But then I switch my gaze to the plastic bottle of pink lotion on Mrs. Holman’s desk. She is always applying that lotion to her hands—all day long like she’s addicted to it. As I watch her pump a wet glob into her palm, I think about how I didn’t know anyone else who lived with just their dad. I often picked friends with divorced parents, but none of them ever lived with their dad. Maybe Mrs. Holman isn’t so bad. Maybe she is trying to keep me from hanging out with girls like Carmen La Goy.
Tracy and I don’t talk to each
other like Mrs. Holman suggested. But I catch her looking at me from across the room. Or maybe she is the one who notices me staring at her. It’s not until Mrs. Holman pairs us up for tetherball that we start talking. Tracy hits the ball hard at me and asks me if I like horses.
“Like horses? I love horses,” I say, hitting the ball back.
“I’ve got a whole shelf full of Breyer statue horses in my room,” she tells me.
“Do you have Man O’War?” I ask.
“No, but I want him. My newest one is Midnight Sun.”
I know exactly which one she’s talking about. Midnight Sun is a black Tennessee Walker with red and white ribbons streaming from his mane.
She says she’s not allowed to go over to other people’s houses, but that maybe I could come over to her house after school sometime to see her horse collection. “Sure,” I tell her, “My dad doesn’t mind.”
We don’t talk much more after that, but I make a plan to go to her house two days later.
• • •
On Thursday after school, we walk together down Center Road toward Tracy’s house. Everything in our town seems to be just off Center Road. I’m thinking of all the questions I have for Tracy. As it turns out, she lives on the same court as Carmen La Goy, who races past us on her silver boy’s bike without saying a word. We pass Storybook Court and Stanford Court. I’d like to live on one of those cul-de-sacs where all the kids play together in the evenings—where they have streetlights between the houses. The long driveway that leads to our yellow house turns into a pitch-black alley once the sun sets. It’s the reason no one ever comes trick-or-treating to our house on Halloween.
As I walk with Tracy, I step over the lines on the sidewalk. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, I say to myself. I want to ask Tracy about her mom. I’m wondering if maybe her mom lives in another state too. I’ve already imagined how much we have in common, how maybe our moms even know each other.
Pieces of My Mother Page 9
