by Ann Beattie
Which was a trick esteemed by my mother’s generation,and passed on to mine. We were supposed to deal with complexity by taking the components and whipping everything together into a Jell-O mold. Once solidified, hold briefly under warm water and unmold. The triumph I felt when it slipped to the plate, perfectly shaped, prettily concocted. How could I ever have been so silly? By the time you caught on, all those Jell-O molds had relegated you to a life of service to others, so that you served your husband, and your children, and your parents—everyone. You’re tethered to the things you create, even when they’re as banal—maybe particularly when they’re as banal—as a Jell-O mold.
Oh, I lived in such earnest times. The war was over—that hard-fought, earnest war—and home came General Eisenhower, leaving behind his lover, Kay Summersby, the driver of his jeep, for his dull but proper wife, Mamie. And on his heels, soon to begin his lifetime of earnest apologies, Richard Nixon. They all shadowed each other: Nixon shadowed Ike; Pat shadowed her husband . . . Pat, always lingering in the background, except when she was trotted out in her good Republican cloth coat. Their little dog, Checkers, and Pat’s cloth coat. Which dog was the real subject of discussion? you have to wonder. There she sat, like a sphinx. Who could imagine what riddle she embodied—her whole marriage was one bigWhyriddle for the women of my generation. It had hardly been love at first sight between the two of them. He used to drive her to her dates with other men, back in the days when she had a lion’s head and a woman’s body, before it got switched and her wings never opened again, and she had merely a woman’s head on a lion’s body. Odd creature that she was, she didn’t prowl very far: no farther than the liquorcabinetfor much of their marriage, apparently. But imagine the spirit she must have once had, to let him drive her to meet her dates and ferry her home, afterward: a woman unafraid to take the devil as her personal duenna. And Pat’s little joys: Tricia and Julie. One so dark, the other so fair. In the Brothers Grimm, you’d know which would represent trouble, and which was intended to be the pretty, placid princess—but Nixon saw to it that life was no fairy tale, so nobody got to play their assigned parts. What a circus all of that was: Sputnik; the Cold War; Khrushchev banging his shoe.
I sent away one of Andrew’s first shoes to be bronzed. That was what you did in those days: the bronzed shoe was every baby’s personal bronze star. Some mothers put silk flowers in them, but more often they were empty, placed near the baby’s picture. We had our little shrine to Andrew: our gleaming shrine to the boy who had once been a gleam in Daddy’s eye. So had the baby I miscarried been a gleam in Frank’s eye, but I lost that baby when I tumbled down the stairs. That was just like Frank, to think that all the king’s horses—those sanctimonious geldings he worked with at his hospital—could put Mommy back together again. As a matter of fact, I did get put back together, but the Jell-O mold inside turned to mush. After that, I wasn’t allowed to drink when I had relations with Daddy—this was in those long-ago days when no one knew how bad alcohol was for unborn babies. He and I only had sex cold sober after the accident, and when we started to have cocktails every evening after Frank returned from last rounds at the hospital, sex became less frequent. But it was fortunate that Nina came along so quickly. He was disappointed we didn’t have another boy. Not so muchbecause he loved sons as because he’d already judged Andrew a failure, at the age of two. Andrew and his father were entirely different, temperamentally—which was a blessing for me, because I couldn’t have taken two tyrants. Andrew was quiet, and reasonable—later, Frank liked to torture me by insisting he was homosexual—and he was also my favorite child, because I had a better idea how to raise a son than a daughter. Which I think is because I knew I didn’t want my daughter to be a replica of her mother, yet I didn’t have a clear idea of what a girl could, or should, be; when you had a boy, that child was automatically different. All I had to do with Andrew was contradict Frank’s harshness, and hope Andrew would turn out to be more compassionate than his father.
As a young woman, I mistook Frank’s phenomenal ego for a positive quality. I thought it made him strong; the sort of man who could protect me. I didn’t have a very clear idea of what he might protect me from—the irony is: what would have been worse than Frank?—but my mother had communicated to me her fear of the world. Girls of my generation were given their suit of armor, but instead of shields and spurs, we were issued bras and girdles that went halfway down our thighs—even a slim girl, like me, wore a girdle with stiff stays and dangling garters to keep her stockings up. I wore stockings with sandals! Every extra membrane was important; every man a potential Tom Jones, leering and laughing as he tossed up the hussies’ layers of skirts. I was so reluctant on my honeymoon that Frank had to get me drunk on champagne—the first I’d ever tasted—before I’d even agree to lie down with him.
Those moments before losing my virginity stay with me. I remember the room spinning. It was like a moment in a movie when the transition is made from one scene to the next by some clever technology the audience knows nothing about: into the picture comes a little tornado, spinning everything into a blur, the whole scene rotated, riveting the viewer and disorienting you at the same time, eventually propelling you, like Alice, to the other side. “I’m late, I’m late” became Frank’s mantra. He was phoned in the hotel room, in the middle of our first sexual experience. Today doctors all wear beepers—or they have someone covering for them, so they can go into the world unencumbered—but then, the phone rang, and everything stopped. As Frank spoke with his calm, reasonable voice, which I would later realize was only a veneer to cover his rage, the day’s events began to regress. I went backward in time, back to the spinning scene, and from there, back to the church, and from there back to my parents’ home, which had always been—I had this revelation, there in the hotel room—it had always been the place you stayed until you could leave, a wallpapered version of the womb, from which you were ejected after a certain period of time. I had been pushed out at twenty. Gestating longer could have caused complications for my mother, who had married too young, herself, and who wanted to get on with things. My childhood was all about getting through my childhood, getting to the life that awaited me. That life began to evolve out of a boozy swoon in a hotel room, and was christened by my throwing up on the floor.
Ah, romance.
Mary Catherine, my clandestine correspondent, writesthat after all this time, Nina does, indeed, have a beau. Imagine it! The Ice Princess, beginning to thaw. Andrew mentioned the man to me, but of course he would lie to me outright to spare me unhappiness—so I had no reason to believe what he said about a romance in Nina’s life until someone I trusted corroborated it. Mary Catherine has not seen the man, though. Both of us are pleased that he exists; Nina’s life of mourning has gone on much too long—it has been so intense, and so exclusionary of others, that I think the capacity for lapsing into such a state must have existed before Mac died. Maybe calling it mourning only lends an easy explanation to her depression. If that’s the case, she inherited her proclivity for misery from Frank. So many of these things are genetically determined, we now know. Frank’s rages were fueled by alcohol, but I’ve become well enough informed that I believe the drinking was an attempt at self-medication. He couldn’t account for his mood swings, would never face the fact that he, himself, needed doctoring. With the alcohol he seemed to level out into being a petty tyrant, rather than raging one moment and trying to console the victim the next. How is it his patients were exempt from his behavior? When he apologized to me, I would dread the knock on the bedroom door because I knew it would be followed by tears, and more often than not, his dropping to his knees. It was so hypocritical, because Frank never believed for a moment in any greater being. He insisted that our marriage be performed by a JP, in my parents’ living room, rather than by a minister in a church. He would always become pious after one of his rages. I would not have known so many of the things he did to the children if he had not come into my room and droppedto his knee
s, confessing his transgressions, as if he had transported himself to a church.
My room was not like a church. Instead of organ music, my radio would be playing. I liked Billie Holiday, but I played a little game with myself, resisting putting her records on the turntable during the day so I could be pleasantly surprised when one of her songs came on the radio at night. I knew which channel to tune in, of course.
It was not a church because instead of stained glass, there was the ugly broken windowpane from the time he struck the window instead of striking me. He never hit me. But he bloodied his wrist, and broke the glass, protesting my plan to study nursing. He was so insecure, he thought having a nurse in the family would be competition. He had to be the important figure. He pretended shock and dismay that I would think about leaving the children. He told me that was reprehensible. That was his opinion, while I was supposed to think nothing about his sleeping with his nurse.
It was not a church because instead of a crucifix was hung a print of a Norman Rockwell painting. Nothing Norman Rockwell ever painted symbolized suffering. My picture depicted two children, a boy and a girl, sitting on counter stools, sharing a soda. Frank ripped that from the wall in a rage, then began apologizing. He eventually replaced it with a picture of a boy and his dog, kneeling to pray. By then, though, we had reached such a point in our marriage, and with our family, that I despised such images for what he had made me see, through his actions, was their false, cloying sweetness. Our children avoided both of us and were devoted to each other—they were never two cute youngsters down atthe soda shop having a treat. As hard as I tried, it was almost impossible to say where they were, because they would go off on their bikes the minute they got home from school. Before they were old enough to do that, they’d hidden in the house or played games in the vacant lot behind our yard. I was so preoccupied with Frank’s infidelity—I would have left him, if only I hadn’t had children—but at the same time, I hated myself and I blamed myself for his faithlessness. It became a vicious circle: he would not sleep with me because I’d been drinking, but I was so upset he preferred other women that by late afternoon I would wonder when he was coming home and begin to drink. Our marriage was a sham. I found out he was sleeping with many women, not just the nurse, so I decided I would no longer go through the motions of pretending to be the doctor’s devoted wife. Let him create his own lovely home. Let him have his own Christmas parties, if that was what he thought necessary to keep up appearances. Let him shop for the children himself, if he found time to have affairs whenever he wanted. Let him plan their birthday parties. Let him cook his own breakfast. Theirs, too. Let them see that a problem was a problem, without their mother rushing in to fix it. In the long run, that would stand them in good stead. What good had it ever done me to have my mother pretend my entire childhood was nothing but a pleasant waiting period until the day when I’d walk down the aisle.
My parents—my mother, particularly—did everything she could to make sure I married well. That, I think, is because when I was gone, she wanted to feel no more responsibility toward me. Marrying well—what did that mean? Toher, it had to do, entirely, with whether or not the man could earn a good living. Obviously, she did not think that she had married well. Her parents had to come to their rescue any number of times. My father was a salesman, and worked hard, but his life was filled with disappointments. All day long, doors were shut in his face, and then he would come home to find my mother’s door shut. I thought I would never behave that way, but what recourse does a woman have? To scream like a shrew, to let everyone know her shame? Like my mother, I retreated into silence—which, I came to see, allowed you to retain a certain amount of power.
I pride myself on not being the bitter woman I might have become. I learned in childhood to create my own world and to dwell there peaceably. All children do that, but my world didn’t close down when my crayon stopped coloring, or when the time came that I had to stop singing my cheerful little song. My mother, who cared so much about appearances, was only too happy to decorate my bedroom with lace curtains and a pink rug in the shape of a giant strawberry. There was even a violet plant—a real, dark purple violet, that she alone was allowed to water. When there were things she wanted me to have that they could not afford, she went to my grandmother. I had the softest deep pink blanket. I wonder, now, if it might have been cashmere. It was laid across the bottom of the bed. My mother folded it so meticulously, with the corners tucked under. I shivered some nights rather than undo it and have her berate me for not refolding it perfectly in the morning. When anyone visited, she would insist on showing them through the house, and my room was always the culmination of the tour. My best dolls were kept onshelves low enough that I could reach them, but because they were my least favorite dolls, I rarely took them down. There was also my mother’s butterfly collection, which she passed on to me. Year after year, on my birthday, I would feign surprise and delight. The butterflies were hung higher than the dolls’ shelf, because touching their frames, even if you were very gentle, might shake the butterflies from their mounts. There was a yellow-and-black butterfly, and a small white butterfly flecked with different colors, which I liked more than the others, though that one was the hardest to see because it was hardly bigger than a grain moth. My books were on a bookshelf my father had built when he was a boy, working with his grandfather. He was upset when my mother painted it pink to coordinate with the room because he felt it was wrong to paint over wood that was inherently beautiful. But the room was my mother’s creation, and nothing could stop her.
At first, when I was a child, I liked the things she bought, but when I grew older I sensed there was an edge to it—that some drama was being played out in my bedroom that I didn’t understand. I tried to get her to stop. That was impossible. She continued to look through magazines, make lists of needed things, insist that she and I browse, even though we did not have the money to actually purchase things. Finally, I withdrew from her frantic pursuit of more and more things. I wouldn’t go to the stores with her; if she liked something in a catalogue or magazine, I said that I did not. When she bought the things anyway, I realized it was best to take a different attitude. I began to tell her I wanted things I didn’t want, just to see if she would get them. I soonlearned that asking for a fish in a bowl was futile—not that I’d wanted a fish, or any pet; pets are dirty and require too much care—I just felt the need to test her. If I asked for rosettes to tie back the curtains, though, or for an elegant little clock carved from ivory, or any number of other small frivolities, she was actually pleased I’d thought of them. I knew that the room was very important to my mother—it seemed more important to her than I seemed, and certainly more important than my father—though I really couldn’t have told anyone, even if I’d had friends back then, why she took such an interest in it, and why I found that so torturous. She could have fixed her own room differently—put some nice things in there—but she never did. My parents’ room contained twin beds with pale yellow bedspreads that were hand-me-downs from her mother, not patterned with flowers or pretty in any way, and two chests of drawers with peeling veneer. There was a large wardrobe in the corner. Except for a torchère and a table lamp my father had made from an old blowtorch on the night table, that was all the room contained. Nothing hung on the walls. There was a water stain on the wall by the windows, where rain had leaked through the roof. There were shades at the windows, but no curtains. It was a utilitarian room. Not even a rug on the floor. You would think, then, that my mother was living out her fantasies through my highly decorated bedroom, but the truth was—and it took me years to understand this—she did not like my bedroom any better than I did. She pretended to think it was unique and gorgeous, but in fact, it upset her. It was as if she’d created a monster that lived and breathed, whose four walls and ceiling and floor demandedher vigilance. She was always there, dusting and sweeping and polishing and fluffing pillows, turning the violet so it wouldn’t grow lopsided, leaning toward the s
un. The more she brought into the room, the more she tended it, the more she complained about how difficult it was to be conscientious about indulging a child without spoiling her. She would say to friends who admired the room that it was not easy to raise a daughter who had such high expectations. I didn’t have high expectations. I thought the room was embarrassing. The froufrou things that proliferated, the crystal fan pulls and beaded lampshades, seemed to me so ridiculous, though so obviously representative of her taste that I couldn’t resist letting her create her garish world.
When I was in the room with my door closed, I usually sat on the floor and played with my rag doll, Molly. Though my mother knew she existed, I kept her under the bed, the way a dog hides a favorite toy. When cleaning, my mother would take Molly out and put her on the windowsill, or on my dresser. For whatever reason, she would never put her back in her place under the bed. She never propped her up, but made her lie flat. I suppose she thought that if I was going to have such an ugly thing, no one should mistake it for something worthy of display. I would talk to Molly about how silly the room was—what I was really saying was how unhappy and pointless my life was—reassuring her that when I grew up, I was going to have a room with blue walls—blue was both Molly’s and my favorite color. In that room, I planned to place her in the center of the bed, with her head resting on a pillow.
By the time I was a teenager, I no longer wanted blue walls,and one day I took the violet plant, which had grown leggy in spite of my mother’s good care, and put it on the kitchen counter, without comment. At my insistence, my childhood books had been put in boxes, and I had asked my father to carry the bookcase outside so I could strip the paint off—I had done it with his blessing.
