by Ann Beattie
The butterflies were hung so high I rarely looked up, so I let them hang there. I put the blanket on a shelf in the closet, cramming it in. All this was done without consulting her, but she never carried the plant back to the room, or asked where the blanket was. She gave no reaction at all, until she saw me removing the paint in the backyard. She got it then, I think. Before that, she might have pretended to herself that I wanted the violet to get better sunlight, or that because it was spring, I no longer needed the blanket. And then when she saw me taking the paint off the furniture, she knew that until that time, I’d only been having a laugh at her expense, with all my requests for so-called beautiful things; that I’d only pretended to care about the things she cared about. I looked up and saw her at the kitchen window, and I felt triumphant. Without ever having to say anything, I let her know exactly how much I resented her.
And then one day I realized my doll was gone. For months, I’d rarely taken her out from her hiding place, but then for some reason I wanted her and when I reached under the bed, there was no Molly. “You don’t play with dolls anymore. You’re an adult now,” she said. As she spoke, I saw that her eyes held the same resentment they’d revealed that day she saw me stripping furniture. She had thrown Molly in the trash. Fortunately, though, the trash had not been collected.Furious, I went into the garage and rooted through until I found Molly underneath newspapers and opened cans, food stains smeared across her chest. I was delighted I’d found her, but so angry that I flung her at my mother. I threw her hard, and Molly hit the wall behind my mother’s shoulder. She acted as if I’d hit her, as if I’d thrown a rock, rather than a doll. She cried hysterically, claiming that she’d always known I never loved her. She ran from the garage and didn’t return to the house for what seemed like hours, during which time I apologized to Molly over and over, giving her a bath in the sink and drying her with more towels than were necessary, cuddling her, her dampness as horrible to me as blood seeping from a wound.
Ask yourself: What sort of mother throws away her child’s beloved doll?
Ask: Should I have confiscated my son’s naughty magazines, or did he deserve some privacy—some respect for his secret passions?
Ask: Was it wrong to throw out my daughter’s ice skates, because deep inside I knew she must have stolen them?
What, exactly, determines whether it is fair to rush in and assert one’s will, regardless of consequences?
My mother’s retaliation took years, but she finally retaliated in a baroque way by finding the person she intended me to marry, knowing that that person would cause me unhappiness. She knew she had no power over me; I had become Daddy’s girl, and like him, I was headstrong, so she couldn’t have thought that I’d agree to an arranged marriage. Not many people would. But she was desperate to get me out of the house, as time eventually proved. So she gave me mixedsignals: she introduced me to Frank, but she pretended not to be too taken with him, though he, himself, told me later that his mother and my mother had decided we were meant for each other. Just like the Queen Mother and Diana Spencer’s grandmother! The old crones having their coffee klatch, planning ruin for everyone. Oh—we were hardly royalty. His mother was worried that Frank had never developed the right social graces. That he was blunt to a fault, with no idea of how to persuade rather than bully. She had tried to instruct him, but he had always had what she called “a hard edge”; rejecting the idea of having a childhood, he had spent his adolescence studying. He had started preparing for his career when he was still a child, playing with a toy stethoscope, taking his friends’ temperatures with a twig thermometer, studying anatomical drawings long before he could pronounce the words.
Frank’s father had been a dentist who died of a heart attack in Atlantic City, the week Frank turned seven.Everyone thought he was riding a wave when he bent suddenly and went down. When the wave passed, he was still floating. Frank had been playing in the ocean with his father, clutching his hand only a minute before. The waves began to roll in faster, and Frank became afraid. He couldn’t swim, and the game his father was playing scared him. He stumbled in the undertow. He urged his father to stop. He stood where his father floated, seizing his shoulder, screaming and attracting a crowd when his father would not respond. My mother said that so many times, people never recovered from such tragic incidents, and wondered aloud whether Frank would ever be a happy man. His intelligence, his scholarship, hisearning money were to his credit, as was—she said pointedly—his devotion to his mother. But my mother sensed the rage beneath his steady, hardworking resolve. There was also something else she couldn’t put her finger on. Something about the way he kept his distance, when after all, wasn’t he studying to go out among the people and be a doctor? She said these things to me indirectly, talking to my father in the front seat of the car, as we drove away from their friend’s house, her mission accomplished. She had known Frank’s mother for several years, but during that time Frank had been away at medical school; it was the first time my parents had met him. Of course she knew I was listening, in the backseat. She knew I never did what she wanted, so she was using reverse psychology in announcing her reservations about Frank. Or perhaps she believed what she said, but felt a last-minute desire not to throw me to the wolves. She was torn, and her desire to have me marry a doctor won out. A doctor was above judgment: her daughter would do well to marry a doctor. Any reservations anyone had, her own included, were just talk. In fact, if that doctor was not an easy person, so much the better, because neither was her daughter. I had sensed, myself, that his cordial manner masked his desire to keep his distance, but to a young girl, that had seemed intriguing. When he asked if he could call me before he returned to school, I said yes. He was handsome, and I liked the idea of being romantically involved with a man I knew my mother had mixed feelings about. My mother cared, above all else, how things looked. It mattered so much to her that people approve of her daughter marrying an accomplished man; it was just a continuation of her need to haveviewers look into the frilly pastel bedroom of her child and verify that her daughter was truly a princess.
I let my children make of their rooms whatever they wanted. Neither really seemed to express anything about their personality in their rooms, though. If Nina had ever wanted a more girlish room, she never said so. And Andrew was oblivious to his surroundings. He had his toy box when he was young—as Nina had her box of dolls—but neither ever fixated on toys, the way so many of the other children seemed to. They were never the sort who asked for every new thing, and even if they had they quickly found out that pleading, in our house, got you nowhere. They didn’t care as much about toys as they cared about the games they played with each other, really. Until they got too old for it, Nina crept into Andrew’s bed almost every night. Frank absolutely would not have the children in our bed. Soon after Nina’s birth, we had separate bedrooms, anyway—but the minute she could toddle, Nina would head for Andrew’s room. Scared of the dark, like most other children. I didn’t mind that she did it—I was such a light sleeper; once awakened, I was awake half the night, so better she crawl in bed with her brother than with me—but when Andrew started kindergarten, I thought it best to make her sleep the night in her own room. I removed her from his bed the first few nights. I never had the right touch with Nina: I always woke her, and she always cried. It took Frank’s going in and overreacting—he could be relied upon to do that; he had no tact, whatsoever—to end it. Poor Nina, being lectured with words she didn’t even understand, in the middle of the night. Poor Andrew, too, who always got caught in the middle.
He was my favorite. I think he might have been afraid of the dark, too, but he would never want his mother to know that. By the time Nina started school, I would sometimes find him in her bed. He was so sensitive, he intuited that she needed him. I said nothing to Frank, because there would have been another awful scene. I pretended not to know, and let him creep around and do whatever he wanted. That made their bond indelible, I now see. They were together day an
d night. No sibling rivalry at all. Most parents I knew would have given thanks for harmony among their children—and I did give thanks, though I’ll admit I felt more than a twinge of jealousy. Neither ever depended on me. It was as if I was just another presence in the house, and they learned young to make an end run around me, as well as Frank. If I’d left him and taken the children, would they have gradually warmed to me? As it was, they both stood in judgment of me, knowing that by staying with their father, I was letting them down.
But maybe that’s not true. Maybe that’s my own guilt speaking. They were polite, but I always sensed it was the same form of condescension I had toward my mother. You want children who are polite, but when their emotion runs no deeper . . . ? How are you supposed to reallybethe mother, when they prefer to take care of themselves?
My own mother left my father the year I married. All along, she had been in love with the butcher. She had waited and waited. Waited for the moment she thought proper. I rarely saw her after she remarried. They moved to Ohio, and my father moved, too—to Albuquerque, where his half brother lived. All those years I’d thought I was Daddy’s girl, I had no idea his affection for me could simply come to anend. After their divorce, he sometimes sent me a card on my birthday, and on Christmas he might send some coffee-table book, but for all intents and purposes, I ceased to exist for him when his wife did.
What did their bedroom look like, in the apartment my mother lived in with the butcher?
What plant did she tend in her new life? Or did she let her plants become tall and leggy, always facing the sun?
To have parents who move away from you, physically and emotionally, makes for an odd situation. People ask you how they are, and you wonder, yourself, how are they? As a parent, you can explain, almost with pride, that your children have moved out of your orbit; people will nod knowingly, but when parents have lost touch with you, their adult child . . . people squint, as if they’re watching an eclipse.
Not that very many people asked. One time early in my marriage Frank and I planned a trip to visit my father, but he wrote back, saying it wouldn’t be convenient. Frank thought it strange, but instead of blaming my father, he wanted to know what part I had played in causing such a rift. That was Frank: always adding punishment to punishment.
Nina has some of his tendencies. Andrew is sociable and outgoing, but Nina is convoluted, like her father. I think that making only one attempt at a relationship has been a form of punishing herself. I understand that Nina loved Mac, but what can be assumed about a young woman cutting herself off from life so drastically? Like suicide, it was an act that also hurt everyone else. It hurts Andrew to this day, though he refuses to admit that. It hurtsme, but then, when would Nina mind that? Her narrow life is a reproach of me, for being sodeficient, so lacking in courage. She thinks I should have left Frank. Though naturally the idea of choosing is enticing to her—she, whom fate did not allow to choose.
There is something about me she deeply dislikes, but I’ve never been sure what that is. The drinking, the drinking, the drinking. I know that’s part of it. Numbing oneself is not conducive to good mothering. She probably thinks I should appreciate her for her outspokenness, for being the one who had the courage to ask me to stop.
Helen Fox was the only person outside the family who had the nerve to approach me about it. If you can believe it, she thought that her having had a child outside of marriage was much the same as my then-current state of drinking too much! Any sin women committed, in those days, got jumbled together with greater or lesser sins. We were all supposed to be pert and perky Doris Days. Our hair was never supposed to be windblown; our lipstick was supposed to brighten our lips even at bedtime—though it must never smear the white pillowcase. We were to go to church—try getting Frank to church!—and spend our spare time making our washes whiter and our brownies a yummy chocolate brown. Domestic perfection would save the world. And of course a girlalwaysgot married before she even thought of having a baby.
Helen had been sent to a home for unwed mothers. All the time she was there, they worked on her to agree to give the baby away. That was what was thought best. It was such an American notion: make a mistake, invent a new identity, go on from there. Lucky for Helen, she had a strong will, and even trickery could not make her sign her baby away. Luckierstill, the janitor—the janitor!—took a fancy to her, and not a month out of the home for unwed mothers, he tracked her down, going to considerable trouble to do so. It really was so romantic. He proposed marriage. She left her parents’ house that day with the baby and never looked back. Or at least that was the way she told the story. In any case, Mr. Fox became devoted to her, even wanting to give her daughter his name, though some sort of perverse pride prevented her: Helen liked it when people asked about her daughter’s surname; she was eager to tell her story to anyone who asked.
I first heard her story in the corridor of the high school, during a parent-teacher conference. I had never been to a conference before. Of course, Frank did not accompany me, because at the last minute his lover—that fat, oversexed nurse—called and pretended there was a patient emergency. He had her do that regularly: call and lie. But that one time I did go, and Helen and I struck up a conversation. We started by discussing the advantages our children had that we had had to do without. “More awareness,” Helen said, opening the way for our discussion. I felt sorry for her. Her husband was right there, and she was telling me, as if she saw the absurdity of it herself, that the janitor in a home for unwed mothers had fallen in love with her, and there they were, this many years later, with Patty and three other children, and she pursuing a career as a florist, and her husband in a white-collar job at the hospital. She and I agreed that “awareness,” as she euphemistically put it, was good. She told me that her daughter had eating problems and was very shy, even though she and her husband loved her and had provided a good home. “You think it may be God, visiting acurse on those you love, which can be even more painful than putting the curse on you,” she said. I took note of her mention of God. I was not an atheist like Frank, but still: I was wary of people who talked outside of church about God.
I ran into her a second time at the liquor store. She was there buying a bottle of wine—nothing I ever developed a taste for—and a package of cigarettes. Outside, she offered me a Lucky Strike. We sat in the front seat of her car and smoked and talked. She told me that she gave thanks every day that her life had been saved. What she meant was that had she lost her daughter, she would have died. She had such depth of feeling for her husband and for her children. I felt uncomfortable; I cared for my children—by then, I did not care much for Frank, because I had lost almost all respect for him—but my children were not people I would speak in hushed tones to someone about, as if they were somehow sacred. Truth be told, they seemed like two other adults who lived in our house. I had to remind myself that they were children, they were so self-sufficient, and they kept their lives so private.
What Helen thought, though I did not find this out until another day, was that my son and her daughter would make a perfect couple. I laughed and told her about my mother’s machinations, implying that things had not worked out well. She seemed to understand what I was saying, and let go of the idea. I was surprised, though, how well she seemed to know Andrew. It was because she had gone to some of the sports events, and to Parents’ Day, which I always overlooked because Frank never went. I was amused that she had her eye on Andrew. I knew my son could take care of himself.Andrew never in his life did anything other than what he was inclined to, with the exception of things said or done to placate Frank. I liked Helen Fox. She was a modest woman. Not self-centered. She wore her hair in a ponytail, and her fingernails were clean but unpolished. Her wedding ring was her only piece of jewelry.
When she had a drink with me at the house a month or so later—when I invited her over, after an unexpected phone call she made to me—she was a different woman. It seemed her doctor had recommended that Patty be sent
away. It was Helen’s worst fear, really; after having been so traumatized all those years ago, fearing she might not be able to keep Patty, Patty had developed a problem and was going to be wrenched away from her, after all. In those days, anorexia was not a word you heard. I doubt whether doctors even thought it was a disease. She did not use the word with me. She described Patty’s wasting away. Her low energy. Patty’s hair had begun to fall out. What was it? she asked me fearfully, though her doctor had already told her it was a nervous disease.
We sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee. Isn’t it funny: I can remember the salt and pepper shakers—plastic ears of corn—and the little can of condensed milk on the table near the sugar bowl. Frank would allow sugar in the house, but no butter. If I’d wanted to offer her a bit of buttered pastry, I couldn’t have.
Buttered pastry. Who am I kidding? If there was bread in the house, it would have been moldy.
“She’ll be fine,” I remember telling Helen Fox. “If the doctor thinks it’s best to send her to a hospital—”
“No. Not a hospital. He wants her to go away for the entire summer. The minute she gets out of school. He’s sending her to some camp a hundred miles away!”
Camp? It was the most peculiar thing. Someone who was ill, going to camp? But that must mean she was not terribly sick, after all. I said that to Helen Fox. She was so distracted, she wasn’t listening. She wanted to discuss Patty’s problem with Frank, it turned out. She did not want to offend their doctor, but she wanted a second opinion.
I assured her that she could and should speak to Frank. But the woman had no self-confidence, at all. She wanted her husband to speak to him, so she wouldn’t misunderstand whatever he might say. All right, I told her; that could just as easily be arranged. Naturally I felt I could ask him to offer advice about our children’s schoolmate’s problem.
