Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “I see you brought something.”

  Only then did I remember the fruit basket. Mother was smiling. She knew it was a present and had probably been eyeing the bag from the moment I stepped into her house.

  “Some fruit,” I said, lifting the basket out of the shopping bag.

  “I like a nice piece of fruit,” Mother said, breathless at the prospect of a present. “I eat fresh fruit every morning.” She smiled wanly now. “I haven’t been well. Gilbert and Fred are worried about me.”

  She held the basket by its handles, seeming to admire the apples, the oranges, the plums, the tangerines, the bunch of grapes, the cluster of dates, the roll of figs, two small boxes of raisins, all of these snug in the deep green flutter of nesting shreds.

  Looking alarmed, Mother said, “So where’s the grapefruit?”

  That woke me. A big basket of fruit was not good enough, not full enough. The grapefruit was missing.

  “I thought there was a grapefruit in it,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” Mother said. “If there had been, you’d see it.” She poked and crunched the cellophane. “I have one every morning for breakfast.”

  The basket was on her lap, but it was so large that she had to put her arms around it.

  “Apples, though,” I said.

  “They must have made a mistake,” she said, still thinking about the grapefruit.

  “I’ll bring you a couple of them next time.”

  “Oh, please don’t, that’s too much trouble. I don’t want you worrying about a little thing like that.”

  But it had been big enough for her to mention in the first place. She was now being brave, though there was a slight pain in her voice.

  “I’ll definitely remember to bring some next time.”

  “You’re so thoughtful, Jay,” Mother said. “Dad always said that.”

  I had failed, Mother’s present was imperfect, and I was someone else’s favorite, not hers.

  “Was there something you wanted to say?” she asked me.

  By now I was on my guard. Her selfishness had turned into a warning, and a kind of rescue, but I was not as happy as I had been when I had first entered the house.

  “No,” I said. “Nothing.”

  Of course I went on visiting Mother, and I kept my love a secret. To share it as news, or to reveal it to anyone, would alter it. I wanted it unchanged. Being loved was like a spell of great health, it was strength and optimism, an irrational sense of being right, and of loving someone else’s life unselfishly. I could not wait to see Missy again. I soon forgot the fruit basket episode and wanted Mother to be as joyful as I was. But she was too watchful ever to be happy.

  Each time, Mother sensed my good humor, my bliss, as weakness or distraction. And when she did not look upon me as a distinct opportunity, a wounded animal, she glanced at me in a sidelong way as a possibility, the way a mugger sees a drunk and knows how easily he can be rolled, wondering merely, Is he worth it?

  All this is retrospective. At the time, I was smiling, holding a bulging bag full of grapefruit.

  “You shouldn’t have,” Mother said, gloating over the rustling bag of fruit shifting in the crepey tissue.

  She began to eye me narrowly, having noticed I was more restless than usual. I had arranged to meet Missy at the bank where she worked, to take her to a restaurant in Woods Hole that overlooked Buzzards Bay. Then, while the full moon rose and dragged the tide out and showed us the way, we would walk down the pebbly beach to the wet sandbank. There, in the bubbling clam flats, I would present her with a ring.

  A commitment ring—something new to me. The name made me smile, but it was Missy who first used it, speaking the words with a solemn trust. One of her coworkers, given a commitment ring by her boyfriend, was reassured and happy. My ring would serve to show Missy I was serious while allowing me time to assess our situation. The ring was not a date-setter; it was a solemn pledge shaped in gold. I knew Missy—and I hoped Madison—would be pleased.

  Still eyeing me, Mother said, “Do you have somewhere to go?”

  The woman’s prescience was uncanny. It was also provocative. Whenever Mother had guessed correctly what was in my mind, I instantly denied it in a high, unconvincing voice.

  “Someone to see?”

  “No one,” I said, and because my denial was so prompt, and in its way so absurd, I laughed.

  Laughter is often a case of nerves that means its opposite. Mother said, “I hope she’s nice.”

  She saw it all, knew it before I opened my mouth. I could keep a secret from her if I stayed five thousand miles away, but up close, as she sat with her serious square face of concentration, I was helpless. Also, I was love-struck; I wished the world well; I needed the world to wish me well.

  “Very nice.”

  “Someone special?”

  “Very special.”

  “Would I ever be allowed to meet her?”

  “I’m sure she’d love to meet you.”

  “Does she live on the Cape?”

  This was all going faster than my brain was working. I found myself tumbling forward, saying more than I had planned—much more, for I had planned to say nothing, and already Mother knew this woman was important to me, that I was in love.

  “I want to see you happy.”

  “I’m happy.”

  “I mean, for the long term.”

  I smiled again. I did not dare to speak.

  “Something tells me you’re planning to pop the question.”

  I hesitated, believing that I was equivocating effectively, and said, “I’ve got something for her.”

  “Is it a ring?”

  All this in the space of a minute or two, Mother’s questions coming one after the other, her sharp eyes a pair of pincers on me.

  “Not really a ring the way you’re thinking,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  As casually as my trembling throat would allow, I added, “It’s called a commitment ring.”

  “Oh?”

  She was hungry for more, her eyes darting, her thin lips flattened in concentration. She wanted me to explain—and I did, wondering with a sense of woe how I had gotten to this point of actually uttering the words “commitment ring” when all I had intended to do was drop off a bag of grapefruit. But Mother had complained of a loss of pep—pep was so important, pep was the world’s life force—and in the presence of someone unwell I became complacent and inattentive, because the ill are themselves inattentive.

  Before I knew what was happening, I was explaining the difference between a commitment ring and an engagement ring.

  Mother said, “I must be getting old and muddle-headed”—she smiled—“because I don’t see the difference.” She leaned over, crushing the grapefruit in her lap. “I think you’re going to surprise me. And that makes me very happy.”

  At the door, seeing me off, she kissed me. She felt fragile, like a bunch of slender twigs in the warm bag of her dress.

  “I feel better,” she said.

  Strangely, so did I, as if I had first come upon her and seen her as ailing, and had healed her. Yet as soon as I was in my car driving away, I felt I had made a terrible mistake.

  After two courtships and two marriages and two children and two divorces, it was hard for me not to think of a third attempt as hoisting myself back on the same long swaying tightrope where I had toppled before. It was not the fall that dismayed me; it was the missing safety net. And where my heart was concerned it was always a balancing act on a high wire. Instead of looking at the far end and trying to generate a glow of contentment at the sight of the platform, I was forever gazing down to make sure the net was in place. But the thing was always too far down to see, and so it was only when I fell that I realized it was not there, and went smash.

  That was what the ring meant to me—a way out. If for Missy it was a dream, the promise of a future, for me it was a visible token of indecision, a stalling strategy. Much as I loved her, happy as I was, I was weary. I ha
d set out on this high wire before, put one foot in front of the other, dancing back and forth, looking foolish, and I had fallen badly, twice.

  I loved Missy but I did not want to fail again. And after the first months of passion, wordless desire consuming us in the dark, Missy had begun to talk about all those necessary, sensible, but passion-numbing subjects: work, money, a condo, the future. And the first time she saw my house she did an odd thing, something that obscurely bothered me. She walked quickly to the porch, then stopped before a geranium in a pot and began grooming it, plucking the yellowing leaves, pinching off the blackened blossoms, taking charge of my plant, slapping at it, and flicking the withered bits to the ground.

  “I’ve taught Madison to do this.”

  Madison was not an easy name for me to use without a smile. The name was genderless, a college town, a famous avenue, an American president, a kind of brand. It did not announce a big-for-her-age girl, tugging at her hip-hop clothes and yelling into her cell phone or poking messages into it. Madison had just turned fourteen and was physically a woman, though emotionally a child, and not a reader. She was rebellious, a lazy student, and like many another lazy child, a fabricator, an excuse maker, an alibi artist. But “lazy” and “excuse maker” were not words I was able to use with her mother. I suggested “indolent” and “oblique.”

  “I can’t believe how judgmental you are,” Missy said. “Instead of talking to her all the time, why don’t you listen?”

  Two solid reasons kept me from listening. One, Madison sulked and seldom said anything at all, and two, when she did speak, grunting, using what linguists call verbal indicators or phatic speech—“Like, so what? Like, you’re like, trying to bust me”—she had nothing to say. There were tantrums, boys, unexplained nights out, mood swings, low grades, a sleepiness and arrogance. Often, out of calculated rudeness or sheer indifference, she yawned in my face.

  “Don’t you see she needs a father figure?” Missy said.

  “She needs to cover her mouth when she yawns.”

  Over dinner, Madison’s problems intruded, all the speculation. Missy said, “I’m worried that she’s dabbling with drugs, or maybe sex.”

  “Isn’t that what you and I are doing?”

  “I hate you for saying that.”

  A new stage in any relationship is the uttering, however casually, in a fit of irrational temper, of the unforgettable words “I hate you.”

  I wanted to say that once, in Africa, I went home with a woman. There was a child sleeping in her room. She woke him, he squawked and stumbled away, and after that I couldn’t perform. But I kept this from Missy. I also wanted to say that in three American states the age of consent was fourteen. But it seemed tactless to mention to a teenage girl’s mother, “In South Carolina she could be married, or getting laid every night.”

  “She never had a real father. Buzz Gearhart left me when she was six.”

  “Ever think sometimes it might be better to have no father than a bad one? Or mother?”

  She didn’t agree. Talking about money and work and the future and her child, Missy lost all her allure, became stressed and stringy, all urgency, a timekeeper, needing immediate answers. Well, she was naturally concerned about the child she loved, someone I hardly knew.

  But this evening in Woods Hole, after dinner, an hour or so after having seen Mother, I realized how deeply Mother had shaped my fears, had turned me into an excuse maker; how, when a certain mood was upon me, all women became like Mother—and I wanted to run. What Mother was all the time, my women friends were some of the time, and it terrified me.

  “Poor thing’s all alone, no siblings,” Missy said. She was talking about the hardship of being an only child.

  “That’s such crap,” I said, almost beside myself, but amazed at my rage. “I grew up in a family of seven children. Have you any idea what hell that is? We hated each other. We fought constantly over nothing, because we had nothing. I was always in the wrong, always teased, never rewarded or praised. I could never please my mother—and I tried. I worked. I raked the leaves. You ask Madison to rake leaves and she sighs, ‘Oh, Ma,’ and doesn’t do it. She’s manipulative the way children can be, instilling fear in you. I would have been slapped for behaving like that, but I never resisted, I never said, ‘Oh, Ma.’ I obeyed. I was a mediocre student because my mother demanded I get a job. My mother had favorites and I was not one of them. I was expected to share everything I had—to negotiate, always asking permission. It was crabs in a basket. There were too many of us. And you sit there telling me that it’s hard to be an only child? Are you kidding? It’s heaven!”

  “You’re shouting,” Missy said. She had stopped listening. She was wincing, glancing at the other tables in the restaurant in shame.

  “I’m being emphatic.”

  I was breathless with anger and indignation. I had the sense that in this outburst, intending to discuss her daughter, I had instead told her for the first time who I was and where I’d been.

  “You’ve never shouted at me before.”

  “Just taking it to the next level, as Madison says.”

  She smiled at me in pity, and with a hint of triumph, saying, “Once you say things, they can’t be unsaid.”

  So everything I had said was indelibly scratched into the ledger, unerasable, never to be forgotten.

  She continued, “It is not crap. Madison is troubled. She’s not manipulative. She has issues. Her father was a drinker. I’m afraid she may have inherited that addictive personality. She’s showing signs of it. Plus, she’s got a body-image problem.”

  While Missy was talking, while I was not listening, I was thinking: Who ever thought about me in this way? Who ever worried that I might not be happy or that I might have a body-image problem? Who ever took the trouble to please me? At fourteen I was already a hardened savage, convinced that no one cared and that I needed to keep secrets, needed to make my own life as a hunter-gatherer.

  “I agree with everything you say,” I said, because I hadn’t been listening. That was enough of a response. Missy was moved. Another lesson I had learned in childhood: you submit and then all is well.

  “It’s still early,” Missy said.

  “That’s part of the plan.” I had picked her up after work and rushed her here as the tide was ebbing. I called for the check. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  We left the restaurant and strolled past the harbor to the walkway above the beach, where a flight of stairs led to the shore. The moon just risen across Vineyard Sound lighted the foreshore, the tangled mass of kelp at the tidemark, the broken shells, the shiny bearded mussels in clumps on the mounds of pitted rock.

  “Where are you leading me?” But she wasn’t objecting. She was pleased that I had taken charge.

  “Over there.” I pointed to the end of the jetty, its pillars studded with barnacles and periwinkles, jewel-like in the bluish moonlight.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  When we got there, our shoes sucking in the sandy mud of the clam flats, I took out the little box, and the ring, and slipped it on her finger.

  The women I had known before had been stern believers in symbolism, votaries in a religion of the heart. I was trusting in that knowledge, how symbols had been real to them, how the symbol of a promise or an emotion was the thing itself.

  Missy began to cry. Just as I thought her tears were subsiding, she wept onward, and I had to hold her. I had been happy at her first tears, but now as her sobs came harder I was troubled.

  I did not say, “This is a commitment ring.” She knew what it was. She knew what it meant. But she was so moved, I suspected I might have misled her.

  “For Madison’s sake—and work-related situations too—this has got to be a secret,” she said. “I mean, for now. Later, I want everyone to know how happy you’ve made me. But at the moment, I need you to go on loving me and to be real patient with Maddy.”

  Except for a nod, I did not react. I concealed what I
felt. That obvious concealment always fooled someone who was straight; a truthful person had no reason not to believe this demeanor. But in my first indication that Missy had been lied to in her life, like the members of my family, she became alert, suspecting my bland assurance to be evasive.

  “Did you tell anyone?” she asked quickly, summing up the empty smile I gave in response.

  “Only my mother.”

  She hugged me. She was a mother. She understood: a mother was a friend.

  13

  Visits

  Even as a small, chalky-faced boy with bitten fingernails and muddy knees, crouching in my pup tent on the back lawn on a summer night, aching to know what would become of me, and fearing that it would be all wrong, I used to think: I will be swallowed by this family.

  To save myself, I had a habit of taking two mental steps to the right, placing myself outside the force field of Mother’s power and the clamor of my brothers and sisters, at the far edge of the jungle of Mother Land. Usually I was able to see them more clearly at a safe distance. I saw myself too, the pretender, the daydreamer, the fantasist, as though in a role of my own devising, in an amateur theatrical, looking exposed and faintly ridiculous, going through the motions, guided by my reverie.

  That was how I was able to verify what I had done in the misty days and weeks of October that followed the clumsily improvised ceremony of my handing over the ring to Missy in the moonlit mud of the shore of Buzzards Bay. I breathed more easily. Her trust had freed me. Happier, more relaxed, she allowed me some peace. And one day she offered me the hearty encouragement, “Madison says she likes your blue shirt.” It seemed we had a future, so we had more time. I had solitude again too, a good thing, for the pressure she had exerted before getting the ring was subtle but steady, like a screw tightening in my soul. Now there was less urgency. She had what she wanted, for the time being.