Years later, Mom helped me again, with a different kind of start. She helped me plant a garden around my beautiful new raw property in upstate New York. “You must plant line material,” she said, “not just flowers.” So we planted dogwood trees and lush viburnum bushes. She taught me about ornamental grasses; we planted them in front of big gray boulders along the drive, and in the banks of the creek. We planted ground cover and ivy and clematis. We reminisced about our beautiful house in Greece, and I wanted to plant jasmine, but Mom said it was too cold in the Northeast and I would only be disappointed. So, we planted other flowers: daffodils in the fields, hundreds of them, hoping they would come back year after year, anthurium and lilies and tulips, lilacs and wisteria, and forsythia. Forsythia was the first bush Mom helped me plant when I bought the raw property in the Catskills. We planted forsythia because it was one of the earliest bloomers and it would greet our guests with a little pop of yellow on an otherwise drab and gray day. We planted it on top of the hill as you approached the driveway, its great droopy arms stretched out into a gesture of welcome, with the background a hundred-acre lake. We planted it to cover the electrical box at the top of the hill, and the electrical box behind the barn. It bloomed in Texas in late March, but in New York in late April/early May. It reminded me of stargazing, yellow soft star petals on a long arching branch. Each small blossom a shooting star that would quickly open, and explode its flame of golden light down, down, down the arc, illuminating a brief moment in time, and then, snuffed out.
I think of my mom whenever and wherever I see forsythia now. It is one of those flowers that I wouldn’t have really known about had it not been for her. Not like the common rose or tulip, or chrysanthemum. It’s a vine, line material, and only blooms for a short burst. It’s not much of a looker during the rest of the year, but in that one moment of bright yellow crescendo, it is magnificent. I make wishes on these blooms—wishes for my mom, that she might fly in the heart of God.
My mother is an orange hibiscus in a brown coffee cup
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE cold and dreary New York winter of 1991, I booked two seats on a flight for New Zealand. I had it planned perfectly: My boyfriend and I would leave just as winter was at its freezing peak in the States, which would mean summer was at its hottest peak in New Zealand! We would escape the New York cold and return with a tan! We would bask in the warm sun; I would introduce him to all the new friends I had made in New Zealand several months before when I had shot the film Crush; and we would hike and have picnics. He would play the bagpipes on the heath, the sound rolling across the waves, and we would hold hands as we climbed volcanoes and be one with God. We would be in love and romantic, and he would probably ask me to marry him.
The only problem was, I had just broken up with my bagpiping boyfriend, or rather, he had broken up with me, and he had timed it perfectly so that I would be deprived of a companion on this trip. It was fitting that I was supposed to be doing post-production on Crush: I was, indeed, crushed. Crushed, bereft, and angry. Who would I bring to New Zealand? What had gone wrong? Didn’t my boyfriend appreciate that I was taking him to an exotic wonderful place? How dare he exercise this power of abandonment over me!
Trudging to the West Village several times a week, I had undergone copious therapy sessions filled with my crying and railing at the unjust outcome of my breakup. Finally, my therapist suggested I bring a friend, perhaps my best friend, on the trip.
“Arrgh! But . . . but . . . but . . . my best friend is my mother!” I said. “Do you hear me? My mother! How can I bring my mother instead of my boyfriend? It won’t be romantic at all. How can I even think of traveling to New Zealand with my mother when I was supposed to hike and tramp the beaches with my boyfriend ? What a big fat zero I will be!”
Mom and I sat side by side on the plane. She was looking out the window with girlish glee as the huge aircraft plunged through the clouds, suddenly exposing lush green hills and crystal blue waters, beckoning us toward the black sand beaches of Auckland. I pretended not to notice her excitement as I stared straight ahead, refusing to even glance at the looming countryside. I realized I was punishing her for replacing my boyfriend, and I realized it was small and immature of me, but I couldn’t stop feeling sorry for myself. I was still angrily wiping tears away with my fists as we landed. Mom reached out and patted my wet hand, and said in her soft, understanding voice, “It’s going to be really fun, honey. Thank you for bringing me.” That just made it worse, her being so nice about it, and I embarrassed myself with barely disguised sobs as I thanked the flight attendants for taking such good care of us on the interminable trip.
Mom clutched her flower books and garden magazines as we went through customs, letting me lead the way. “Why is she letting me lead?” I wondered grumpily. She had traveled all over the world, hauling five kids to so many different countries, but for some reason she was now following me instead of the other way around. She seemed to think I was the strong one. Well, she was wrong. I didn’t feel very strong. I felt discarded. Couldn’t she see that? Fittingly, given my movie (or mood?), she wore a red “crush” skirt, the kind with wrinkles already in it and perfect for traveling because it was loose and didn’t look wrongly wrinkled, just textured. She had on a red T-shirt-type top, walking shoes, and a gold necklace. I wore black. We didn’t have computers or cell phones, so we lugged her big camera in my little rolling bag, and I offered to balance her heavy bag of books on top. She refused, smiling: “If I pack it, I better carry it!”
The officers did a double take as they compared my serene black-and-white passport picture to the contrasting swollen red nose and teary eyes I presented, and they seemed to smirk in disbelief when I said I was a “film actress” returning to finish my work. I left Mom in baggage claim while I snuck a cigarette behind a cement post on the curb. I pondered smoking out in the open, being just who I was, being just who I would have been with my boyfriend, but decided not to. I didn’t want to see the hurt look on her face; her mother, Coco, had died of emphysema, and she hated that I smoked. I hurried back as the bags arrived so I could pull them off, I didn’t want to see her struggling with the weight of them. She pretended not to notice that I stank of smoke, and she followed me with a smile, each of us rolling our own suitcases to the taxi stand.
Over the next few days, as I introduced Mom to various film friends and put in the hours at the sound studio looping the necessary sound repairs, she and I settled into a pleasant sort of balance. I didn’t curse in front of her, I snuck my cigarettes, watched my p’s and q’s along with the number of evening drinks I consumed, and I even dressed in a slightly more conservative way than I had during the months before when I had been filming on my own in New Zealand. Mom thought everything was “marvelous,” a word she used a lot, and she drawled the A sound: “Maaarvelous!” We were a bit stuck in our roles as mother/daughter. We didn’t quite know how to travel as friends, so this was new and slightly formal territory for us. It was odd, and my friends felt it, as if they were seeing a watered-down version of me. (“It would have been totally different with my boyfriend !” I silently fumed.) We rented a car, and it was disconcerting driving on the opposite side of the road. Mom never took her foot off the imaginary brake on the passenger side, and she kept her hand on the glove compartment to brace herself, clicking her perfectly oval nails unconsciously. We drove up to the famous hot springs of Rotorua, hoping to be educated in true Maori culture. I knew she would like the bubbling mud pools and geysers and sulphur lakes, the bizarre and barren landscape. We took sulphur baths, laughing at how our skin smelled like rotten eggs and questioning how this was supposed to be good for us.
We were honest and open with each other—sort of. It all seemed quite fun on the surface, but underneath, bubbling away in Rotorua hot springs, was a little tug-of-war of change. In small ways, she would test me, and me her. Silly things. For example, before we got to a particular tourist spot, she would ask me where the restroom was. I would respond that
I didn’t know, as I had never been there before. Or at a restaurant, she would ask if I thought they had coffee. I would respond, “Probably. Let’s look at the menu.” It got under my skin; she could answer those questions for herself, I didn’t understand why she kept deferring to me.
But for the most part, we were pretty good tourists together, Mom and I. We loved to learn, to stop and read the roadside plaques. We visited the cultural center and watched with concentration as the Maori performed for the tourists. We compared the cultures of New Zealand and Japan, and the Maori to Native Americans. She carried her little Japanese pruning shears and often cut off interesting pieces of branches or exotic flowers when no one was looking, and she arranged them in the hotel room coffee cups. She even decorated the car with a freshly cut orange hibiscus, and put it in a “borrowed” brown coffee mug set tightly in the coffee holder. We talked about the brilliant pohutukawa tree, with its red myrtle blossoms, grateful that we were there shortly after Christmastime when they were still in bloom. But it was during the drive south toward New Plymouth that New Zealand proved to be a turning point in our friendship.
I was the driver, and she was the navigator. We quickly began to discover that the spacing of signs in New Zealand was at a very different rate, or rhythm, than the spacing of signs in America. I needed a sign that read X NUMBER OF MILES [OR KILOMETERS] TO LAKE TAUPO, which we were planning to visit before heading on to Tongariro National Park, at least every half hour, especially on the winding roads—many of which had no signs at all as you passed the sheep and rural farms—and I found the markers to be very few and far between. And when there was a sign: it was in the native language of Maori, so we would whiz past places like Taumarunui and Kaimanawa headed to Whanganui, barely able to read, much less pronounce, the names. And to complicate matters further, the WH was pronounced F, so it would be “Fanganui.” I was in a bad mood. (“If my boyfriend had come, he would be driving and I would be deciphering the map!”) Mom seemed tense, and hesitant, and oddly fragile about navigating. She had always been the navigator in our family, so it irritated me to witness this confusion from her. Which naturally only made me gruffer, and at someplace along the road near Mangakino, we got lost. She had her reading glasses on and the sun was beating through the window as she tried to read the map, folding it back on itself and peering at the nearby town names of Whakamaru and Tirohanga. She refused to pronounce the F of Whakamaru because then it sounded like Fuckamaru. Which irritated me even more. So she said, “We are looking for Whakamaru! I think we passed it!”
We turned the car around to retrace our steps, and I said, “We already passed Fuckamaru? Fuckamaru, Mom?” I said Fuckamaru several more times, in the correct pronunciation. It was mean of me. It was intended to toughen her up. It was an effort to be myself. To curse as I liked to do. Which my boyfriend had also hated, and was one of the reasons he had broken up with me, because I cursed and it wasn’t very Christian of me. He was very Christian, in a way that I wasn’t. Because I cursed, for one, and for two, because I couldn’t say that Jesus was the only way to God. I thought there were a lot of ways to get to know God, but in order to be a “true” Christian, I had to be able to say that the only way to God was through Jesus. Which I couldn’t do, because then I would know that God would know I was lying. I certainly didn’t want to lie to God, and I really didn’t want to be a true Christian if it meant excluding so many others . . . which is why Mom and I ended up in a car together lost somewhere near Whakamaru. I mean Fuckamaru.
So on the road to New Plymouth, I used the Maori pronunciation to curse and make my points, and we drove back the way we had come for several miles but saw no signs, only sheep. I roughly swung the car back around and retraced our steps again, and then we began to really argue. All the while she was trying to read the map with the small print, and I was driving on the New Zealand side of the road, looking for signs that we were headed in the right direction. In between directions and arguing about where we were, we argued about who we were.
“There goes Whakamaru again,” she said.
“You mean Fuckamaru?” I asked. She ignored me, and adjusted her glasses.
“Okay, honey, we’re looking for Poihippi Road.”
“Well, how far away is it, Mom? How long till I should see a friggin’ sign?”
She didn’t like my bullying, she told me as she squinted at the map. She could feel that my anger and irritation were controlling the mood of the car, and I felt that her timidity put me in charge all the time, which I didn’t want to be. I had to be stronger for both of us the more timid she was.
“Honey, wait, we’re coming up to Whaihaha.”
“FAIhaha, mom! FAIhaha!”
I wanted to be myself, and I told her that now that we were traveling as friends, I wanted to be like I was with my friends. I wanted to have a beer and smoke and curse because that’s who I was. I wasn’t dainty like her, and I wanted her to love me anyway and not make me feel dirty because I wasn’t dainty.
Meanwhile, she clutched the map, and we passed another road with no sign. I slowed down.
“Wait—wait—Mom! Do we want the road to Turangi or Tongariro?” I barked.
“I don’t know! I can’t tell!” she squealed.
“Why can’t you tell? Mom, it’s on the map! Shall I pull over to read it myself?”
“No!” she yelled. “Just drive, Marcia! Drive! Tongariro! Tongariro! Go right to Tongariro!”
We continued to argue. She also didn’t want to be portrayed as prissy just because she was dainty, she said that that wasn’t fair of me, and we agreed that we should travel as friends and let each other be who we were, but she nevertheless said that she felt my anger and humor were crass, and that she had a right to that opinion.
“Left or right, Mom?”
“The car is too bouncy, Marcia. I can’t read it.”
She didn’t want to disappoint me by being critical, but she also didn’t want me to act like Dad. We passed a sign in a blur, and I, too, was thinking how I didn’t want to act like Dad . . . “Marcia, slow down . . .” She was trying to read the map, and the curves were making it hard. We passed a national park sign. “Honey,” she squinted at the map, “are we going into the national park? Or around it?”
“Mom! What did that sign just say?”
“Marcia! Are we going into the park? Are we going to see the volcano?”
“Yes! Mom, which way do I turn?!”
“There’s a sign! Slow down, Marcia Gay!”
“Yes, there’s a sign, but what does it say?!”
“Hold on: Whakapapa! It said Whakapapa!” She pronounced the WH, not the F.
“Mom.” I glared.
And then, she really snapped. “OKAY . . . I mean FUCKAPAPA, OKAY? FUCKAPAPA! It said FUCKAPAAAPAAA!”
She said it maybe ten times. With the map clutched in her hands. Jabbing at the window where the sign had just whizzed past. “FUCKAPAAAAAPAAAAA!!!”
We began laughing so hard that we did have to pull over, and we peed hiding behind the car in the middle of New Zealand’s North Island on the road to Whakapapa, with not a car in sight, only sheep, and wind, and lots and lots of green.
Later we stopped at a pub to get a beer. I wanted to smoke a Marlboro Light, but I still didn’t want Mom to see it, so I quickly ran to the back of the building and lit up in the wind. It wasn’t enjoyable at all. I smoked it really, really quickly, blowing the smoke straight up into the sky so that I didn’t stink, sucking in the air too quickly because in truth I just wanted to be in the warm pub with Mom, drinking our beer and laughing about Fuckapapa. She had brought her ikebana books with her into the pub, and some New Zealand geezer was flirting with her; Mom was bouncing her brown curls and flashing her big white teeth and describing the difficulty of driving in New Zealand. She even said “Fuckapapa” and laughed at how risqué it was. The geezer guffawed admiringly.
Mom and I were rarely spontaneous, and our travel in New Zealand had generally been well planned
-out. But tonight, we threw our plans to the wind and decided to spend the night at the pub, as they had rooms upstairs. So we ate and had another beer while joking with the men, and then climbed the stairs to our queen-size bedroom. All of our anger had now dissipated in the laughter and ridiculousness of the day, scattered like the sheep on the hills. I mean, how could we have been angry when we had both had our bums hanging out in the wind while peeing behind the rental car?
We had turned a corner in our relationship, and the facades were now down. We could be ourselves, talk candidly about sex and loneliness and age and how we felt about each other, and we could be honest. Really honest. It felt warm and easy. It felt overdue, yet it was only a subtle difference. It was the difference of true acceptance, and for me it was a kind of growing up, accepting that my mother loved me and wouldn’t judge me.
But that didn’t necessarily mean she had to like everything that I did. It was the first time I began to understand how I unwittingly bullied my companions with my moods. And I felt deep shame that I had bullied my mom. I had always been rather proud of my transparency; if I were mad, you would know it! If I were happy, so much happier the room! But this drive with Mom made me reflect on the power of a bad mood (hadn’t Dad dominated the house with his moods?), and it made me respect the ability Mom had for control and reserve. Perhaps it wasn’t timidity at all . . . but simply . . . self-control?
Entirely humbled, I watched her unpack her flannel nightie and toothbrush. The toothbrush and toothpaste were in a plastic bag so the toothpaste wouldn’t accidentally squeeze out into her cosmetic bag (that’s how I packed, too!!!) and the nightie, as well as all her other clothes, was neatly rolled in the suitcase so it wouldn’t wrinkle (I did that, too!). She set her books on one side of the bed—“Do you care which side you sleep on, honey?”—folded down her sheet in a triangle, then disappeared into the shower.
The Seasons of My Mother Page 8
