by Mary Gordon
“And when she stopped cooking, you weren’t angry?”
“I wasn’t living in the house. It was Jo and my father who paid the price. Only, they didn’t seem to be paying anything. Somehow they both learned to cook well enough, and they did it together, and they enjoyed that. It wasn’t fabulous, like when my mother did it, but it was, somehow, fine. And then on holidays my mother would produce, well, masterpieces.”
What he doesn’t say: that Beverly hated the holidays. She made fun of all the food, saying, “ ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ is Rose in action.” She’d go home and vomit in the bathroom and then say she had to stay in bed for days: she’d been poisoned.
“But you, Miranda, how did you come to it? Cooking, I mean.”
“I somehow started reading cookbooks. It could only happen when I stopped being afraid of turning into my mother.”
“Your mother was very kind to me. Do you remember, when I got mono and my mother was back in school, your mother would come over during the day and bring me the kind of food my mother never would have made me: Jell-O with real cherries in it, custards, very light foods that were exactly what I needed. And she was good about us, Miranda. She might not have been. The time she caught us in your bed. She might have made us feel terrible about it. But she just closed the door and never said anything.”
“No, she never mentioned it. Not a word. Not even to me. Never. And you see, that was a kind of agony for me. Because I never knew what she was thinking, or when she might, out of nowhere, mention it. Or whether she’d told my father, or someday wake up and think she had to. I never knew what she thought about it. What it made her think of me. Whether it changed the way she felt about me, whether she thought I’d become a different person, whether she couldn’t love me in the same way anymore. Oh, I know she loved me. But what the flavor of that love was or who it was she thought she loved—that I would never know.”
“You’re too exacting.”
“Well, if you like. But I never knew what her love meant, what it meant to her to love me. Was she excited by her love for me, made anxious, saddened, consoled, envious, ambitious?”
“Perhaps all those things. You know from the way you are with your own children.”
“She seemed afraid to touch me. Afraid of touching any of us too much. Maybe of touching anything: now that I think of it, she touched everything rather tentatively, rather fearfully, as if she were afraid of leaving a mark that would be somehow corrupting, hurtful. Perhaps diminishing. Her embraces were always abashed, they always felt provisional. My children’s bodies were always so delicious to me. I kissed them and hugged them all the time. I loved having their skin against my skin. I had to think about it carefully as they got older: they were boys, after all. What should my relationship be to these new bodies? The bodies of men. The soft skin growing coarser, the round limbs thinning, lengthening, the curls becoming straight. Oh, and the first signs: hair on the legs and then the cheek you put your lips on, expecting the old swoony pillow. Suddenly whiskers. Like your father. Like every other man. And then you know they are no longer yours.”
She stops, knowing it’s easier for a mother to speak this way of her sons than a father of his daughter. She doesn’t want to create a difficulty. But he seems not to have seen a boulder in the road.
What he sees is the statue of Giordano Bruno, at the far end of the piazza. He would like to talk to her about Giordano Bruno, who believed not only that the earth traveled around the sun but that the sun was only one of a number of stars, perhaps all equally important. Burned by the Inquisition. Adam takes in his austere unpleased countenance, his hands gripping his forbidden book, and thinks: Well, this is Italy, placing a monument to intellect in the midst of this celebration of the undiscriminating pleasures of the tongue, surrounding it by sugary pink and yellow buildings that suggest, not the life of the mind, but the succulence of fruit or the confectionary instability of some of the candies for sale in the open bins. The buildings’ lightness makes them seem insubstantial: how can they stand up to weather? And yet they have, they’ve endured, as the statue of Bruno has endured, suggesting entirely different things about the nature of the world.
He’d like to talk about this with Miranda. But he sees that she is entirely absorbed in the luxuriant array of fruits and vegetables, and that it would annoy her if he interrupted her delights to talk about a Renaissance philosopher. He envies her ability to lose herself in the physical world, to distract herself in the pleasures of what can be tasted, touched, smelled. It is one of the things he understands about himself: he has never been able to lose himself to this sort of distraction. His distractions come from music, which, as someone famously said, has no smell.
“I often wondered where you got your physical exuberance. Your parents were both so reserved. You were always throwing your arms around people. Sometimes, they didn’t know what to do, but mostly, even if they didn’t know exactly how to respond, you made them happy.”
“Well, I’ve toned down now.”
He would like to say, That’s such a shame, but says instead, “Tell me about your garden.”
“Where I live, in Berkeley, things grow easily and well, though we have to be very careful of water. But the growing season is long. I have all sorts of things in my garden, oranges, lemons, tomatoes that are like, well, like they are here, but all colors, some called heirlooms, that’s funny isn’t it, as if you had tomato seeds on a shelf beside the ancestral bronzes. Broccoli even. And my roses: one is called Chrysler red. Like a great big splashy convertible among the delicate pinks.”
He’s thinking, she can see, of something else.
“Do you remember that Rilke poem we both liked?” he says. “We both liked it so much we set ourselves the task of memorizing it. The bowl of roses, how he described all the different colors, ‘the anonymous pink that picked up the bitter aftertaste of violet … that one made of cambrick, like a dress / the soft breath of the warm slip still clinging to it / both flung off in the morning shadows / near an old forest pool.’ ”
He’s embarrassed that he has said something that calls up the image of clothing cast aside. He says quickly, “A group of friends and I have agreed to memorize one poem a week. I guess that’s what I do instead of gardening. I read about flowers instead of growing them. I often wish I did more things that ordinary people do.”
“It was difficult for me to discover how to live an ordinary life,” Miranda says. “A life in a house that didn’t make me feel I was drowning. Or suffocated. There were so many things I didn’t want to do my mother’s way. The anxious way. I didn’t want to be always saying to my children, Be careful with that … wash your hands. Don’t sit there. And there was the other kind of domestic life, the Berkeley kind, dinner parties that were Olympic events. Decoration as a competitive sport. I didn’t want any part of that either. Particularly after I’d lived in places where there was so much hardship, so little comfort. Where each decision involving food and shelter had to be carefully considered. I remember my mother sent me some cans of tuna fish when I was working in India. I would wash out the cans and throw them away, and the people in the village were shocked: they could do twenty things with an empty tuna-fish can. To them it was a sort of treasure. So I began to think of things a new way. But I didn’t want that other kind of Berkeley way, that false renunciation. I think I could only live an ordinary domestic life after I had children. And after I’d known Yonatan. Being Israeli, so many things were just not issues for him. Food, clothing, shelter: they were important, and they were to be enjoyed. But not to be making any kind of point; simply for themselves.”
What she doesn’t say to Adam: One of the reasons I married Yonatan was that he seemed to find so few things difficult. He liked to say, “After the ’67 War, everything seems easy.” One of the reasons I married him was because he was so unlike you. But she doesn’t want to be bringing her husband too much into the conversation, too much into the space where she is, with
Adam, now. This hum and bustle of ordinary life. This celebration of what has been given, what can be taken. For the asking. For a price.
Instead, she says: “One of the things I had to understand about myself was how much I wanted an ordinary life. I had thought I would spend my life working in the developing world, in India or Pakistan or Bangladesh, all of which I’d worked in. But after I came back from India the last time, and I met Yonatan, I realized that I had grown weary and discouraged. That the kind of people who were good at that kind of work had the temperament to just do what they were doing and be satisfied that they were moving the mountain just an inch or two. They didn’t keep feeling crushed by the size of the mountain, as I did. So I had to live with falling out of love with myself, with falling out of love with the heroic person I had never really been, but only dreamed I was. And I wanted children, children whose safety and health I wouldn’t have to worry about every day. As most of the mothers of the world do.”
“You still feel bad about it.”
“Yes, I fear we will all be grotesquely punished for taking much too much of the world’s goods.”
“But cooking, and in your garden, and with your children, certainly you must think you are moving the mountain a little bit.”
“When they were younger, certainly I did. I was happiest when I had quite young children. I was tired, very tired, because I was working, too, but I never wondered: What will I do today that will make sense? Everything made sense. If I made a soup I could think: Well, I did something with the day that was a good thing. I nourished my children. I bathed my children. I put them to bed. And then I went to bed, and believe me sometimes I was weeping with fatigue. And yet in those years everything made sense.”
“I cook a little, but I don’t enjoy it. It always seems to take so much time and then everyone eats it so quickly.”
She doesn’t say, Does your wife cook? Is she a good cook? She knows her own competitiveness and she doesn’t want to create any areas of competition. She prefers thinking of, talking about, his mother.
“What I felt in your mother’s house, what I wanted for my children, was a place of safety and expansiveness. I think my mother would have been better off if she’d just set the house on fire and run off with only what she could hold in her hands or in her pockets. She seemed so trapped, so frightened. I didn’t want an entrapping, fearful house. I wanted a house where everyone was free and happy.”
“Did you do it?”
“Who’s happy? Who’s free?”
“Freer and happier, then?”
“Freer and happier than I was in the house when I was growing up? Freer and happier than my mother was? I think so, yes.”
She doesn’t ask him about how he lives in his house. She doesn’t believe it’s important to him. And she knows that in at least one of the houses of his life, tragedy happened. Horror. Does he still live in the same house? She doesn’t want to speak about that yet. Not here, in the Campo dei Fiori. Instead she says, “Let’s buy some of these grapes.” She buys what seems to him an excessively large bunch: dark purple, nearly black. She holds them to the light.
Friday, October 12
THE VILLA BORGHESE
“I Suppose You Find That Music Sentimental”
They are sitting by the puppet theater, a rough, unpainted bungalow that looks provisional and out of place among the serious official buildings that are also a part of the park, that remind you that it was once the estate of wealthy and powerful men who moved the world with their little fingers. A sign says that the show will begin in an hour and a half. Some instrument—it sounds like a player piano—is producing music that could be the accompaniment to a silent film. Miranda can’t identify the melody, but she knows it’s from a time when songs were required to be innocent: girls on bicycles built for two, or kissing boys in a rowboat. The music, which she has no wish to judge, pleases her, and she’s about to lean back into it, like an accommodating but perhaps untasteful chair. Then she remembers whom she’s with. She is with Adam.
“I suppose you find that music sentimental,” she says.
Adam puts both hands in his pockets, as if he’s hiding something from her. “Does it matter whether I do or not?” he says. “What would it mean to you if I said yes, I think it’s sentimental.”
“Now it doesn’t matter. But once it would have made me very angry. And I would have been scared, and then insulted and then angry, yes, scared, insulted, angry, all at the same time that I might be accused of being sentimental. Now I think: Yes, I am, in some things, sentimental, and so what?”
“What do you mean by ‘sentimental’?”
“It implies, I’d think, excess,” she says.
“Excess of what?”
“Sentiment.”
“By which is meant?”
“Emotion. Feeling.”
“But what would ‘excess’ mean? Is there a fixed, a proper, amount of it that mustn’t be overspent?”
“I do know there is such a thing as sentimentality,” she says, “and it makes you physically sick with that sickness that tells you something’s wrong. Hallmark cards. Hummel statues.”
“But my mother loved her Hummel statues and I loved my mother.”
“And I loved your mother. And I loved how she loved her statue of the little girl feeding the sparrows, the one of the little boy playing the violin.”
“I would never have begrudged her that pleasure.”
“But me you did begrudge. You didn’t know what to do when you had to support me walking out of West Side Story because I couldn’t walk by myself, I was crying so hard.”
“It was the middle of the day. I didn’t know you very well. I was sixteen. I was afraid of what my friends would think … not that I really had any friends, but the friends I imagined I might have if they knew I had a girlfriend. I was wrong, of course, but I was young. Only sixteen years away from being born, from nonexistence. Sixteen years ago, at forty-three, I was a recognizable version of myself. A teacher, a husband, a father.”
Once again, he seems to want to speak in a way she does not.
“My sons are on your side about West Side Story, by the way. They tease me about it. They hum, ‘There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us …’ and they hand me a box of tissues they’ve hidden behind their backs. My son Jeremy likes to tell his friends that his mother cried over a yogurt lid. A yogurt lid, it’s true. One day I read the lid on a Dannon yogurt carton, and it told the history of Dannon, which is the story of a Jewish immigrant who brought the recipe for yogurt with him when he had to flee Fascist Italy, and he named the yogurt Dannon after his son, whose nickname was Dannone. And I cried.”
He wants to say, Did you cry because your husband and your sons are Jewish? But he says instead, “They seem like nice boys, your sons.”
“They are nice boys. You were a nice boy, Adam. A very nice boy. Only sometimes you weren’t so nice to me about music.”
Neither of them says what they are both thinking: that what was done to Miranda by Adam, what Miranda experienced at his hands, was far outside the category which could be appropriately described as “nice.”
“You kept saying to me, ‘There are certain standards, Miranda.’ I sometimes thought you used music to hurt me.” She doesn’t say: Because of you I have not listened again to serious music in a serious way. Because of you I have left a kind of consideration of what you called great art. I take my children to Yosemite instead of the Louvre. Neither of them has had a single music lesson. If I asked them if they knew who Shostakovich was, they might look at me in puzzlement and say, in unison, “Who?” This, Adam, is because of you.
“I never meant to hurt you,” he says, and they both pretend to understand he’s talking about music. “I don’t think you ever knew how frightened I was all the time. That I would be discovered not to know what the standards were. That I’d be exposed as the impostor I knew myself to be. That they’d take away my place at the table. Which in the end, I gave aw
ay myself.”
No, Adam, no, she wants to say. We will not talk like this. Not yet. “Do you remember our terrible fight about Janis Joplin?”
“No.”
“I adored her. You said that she was fat and ugly, that she shrieked and howled, that she was the embodiment of everything coarse. You rarely spoke that way, so harshly. But it made me terribly angry. I said she was telling the truth about everything you and your musical friends wanted to keep hidden, that they worked to hide.”
Now it is he who doesn’t want to follow this line of talk. “This music, coming from this puppet theater, this music you’re afraid I’m going to call sentimental, well you’re wrong. I’m enjoying it very much.”
“Oh,” she says, not knowing how to understand this.
“But I know you’ll want to leave before the puppet show. I’m assuming that you still hate puppets.”
“More than ever,” she says.
That he knows this about her, that he remembers that she hates puppets, makes her eyes fill. And she doesn’t want him to see. She pretends to tie her shoe. To stop her tears, she thinks of her sons, for whom her tendency to cry too easily is a good joke. Her sons: tall, strong, happy, or, perhaps better to say, neither for the moment unhappy. An old woman once told her, “You can only be as happy as your unhappiest child.”
“You know, I liked West Side Story,” he says. “I thought it was Bernstein’s best work.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was afraid even to say it aloud. In the circles in which I moved in those days, it was impossible to say you liked West Side Story.”
Saturday, October 13
TRASTEVERE
“Some Things in the World Have Got Better. It’s Important Not to Forget That”
They plan to meet in the Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere. She has no memory of it. Perhaps they never came here, or perhaps she has forgotten: it was nearly forty years ago. But no, she couldn’t have forgotten this perfect space. The joy of a perfect space makes her feel like a creature made of lightness; almost, she could fly. But why this sense of joy … because of the color of the buildings, all beautiful, crowded against one another? Peach with green shutters. Dove’s wing blue-gray, ocher. Burnt sienna. Did the names of those colors come to her mind because she encountered them first in her box of Crayola crayons? The box she had to be old enough to deserve: a reward, a sign of growth, maturity, responsibility perhaps, even expertise. In those days, just seeing the words—“ocher,” “raw umber,” “burnt sienna”—was exciting. Not knowing why, she knew the words naming those crayons promised a larger life. In that large box was one crayon whose name was “flesh.” The assumption: all flesh is the color of pinkish chalk. She wonders if the Crayola people have become sensitive enough to have some different name for that crayon now. Maybe “chalky peach.” In the center of the piazza is a fountain around which tourists sit: disconsolate, regretful. Do they just, she wonders, want to be back home? The water sings, how can it not enliven them. But they are not enlivened. They are fagged out, spent.
