“You’ve got me wrong. I want to do things right, and if that makes me different then so be it,” Mumma riposted. “Miss I’m-Smarter-than-the-Rest-of-You. You don’t know as much as you think you do, Beth.”
“I know that,” I told her. “How dumb do you think I am?”
“Not as dumb as you sometimes act, I hope,” Mumma said. “I hope I’m not wrong about you. I don’t think I’m wrong about any of you.”
MUMMA AND JO
Mumma had theories about her daughters. She had her ambitions for us, too: social ambitions, career ambitions, marital ambitions, character ambitions, and personal happiness ambitions; not to mention a list of the errors and misjudgments we were likely to make, all of which she set down before us at various times and from varying perspectives.
It was Jo’s future that she focused on, because given Jo’s emotional, impetuous nature, she might throw away future happiness to satisfy some impulse—get pregnant, get thrown out of school, get in trouble with the law. Or fall in love with a seriously wrong boy. Or become addicted to drugs, since she obviously had an addictive personality. Didn’t she refuse to stop smoking even though Mumma and the Surgeon General warned against it? Jo was first sent to talk with Olympia when Mumma realized how often she lied for her friends, both boys and girls, to cover up for them, to protect them from some hostility, sometimes even to give them undeserved credit for an assignment, an opinion or deed, although never, Mumma reminded us with satisfaction, to get herself out of trouble.
Mumma intended Jo to be happy in life, whatever that might mean, and she knew that the line between delusion and idealism could be wavery, unless of course a girl was an artist of some sort, an actress or writer, which Jo did not have the talent to be, of which Mumma was confident. So Mumma aimed for Jo’s happiness to be based on something solid. At the dinner table, appearing to talk to all of us, she offered advice to her second daughter: “You girls will never have to worry about money,” she promised us, then added to Jo, “So worry about what work you’re good at, so you can be happy in a job. Don’t ever think work is only about money.” She included the rest of us in the next observation: “Right now you think life is like watching some TV show, where you sit on the sofa and there’s nothing you need to do except watch what you’re going to be given, but life’s not like that. Unless, really, it’s like a TV show and you’re the director, which means,” she announced, “you have to make the choices. Think about it, especially you, Jo. You can’t daydream a life, don’t ever think you can. All you can daydream is a daydream.”
Amy, with her inherent practicality and her knowledge of French, Mumma pointed toward an economics degree. “There’s the World Bank, isn’t there, Spencer? Or the United Nations, they have plenty of committees for economics. But don’t ever think there’s anything wrong with staying home, especially you, Meg. Home is where the heart is, they’re right when they say that, and a heart needs to stay home.” In high school, Amy signed herself up for bookkeeping and business math, leading Mumma to dreams of having a CPA in the family, and Meg’s social and academic high school successes met with her approval. For Jo she needed a different kind of plan, more direct instruction. “You’re a communicator, really. Don’t forget that just because you think you’re in love. Not that I’m against love, or marriage. You know better than to think that. You could study psychology, even if college is still school and you know how bad you are at school, but I’m your mother and I’ve read everything. I can help you.”
Jo got to go back for a second round of Olympia’s counseling when, for the third time, her heart had been cruelly broken and her good nature abused by the kind of young man who is in trouble at school and at home, misunderstood and in existential crisis, also heavily into pot. “Not the right kind of boy for you,” Mumma told Jo. “You liked him,” Jo wailed at Mumma, who didn’t deny it. “But not for your boyfriend, I never said that.”
“You said he was interesting! You said he was gifted!”
“He was, he maybe is, how would I know a thing like that? But just because someone’s interesting, and maybe gifted, that doesn’t mean he’s a good person to fall in love with. I told you, Jo, I told you he wants someone who will spend her life making him feel important and I don’t want you to be that. I know you think you want someone who needs you, to take care of, but that’s just a big baby. You’re going to be bad enough with a real baby, if you ever have any which, if you ask me you shouldn’t.”
“But I told you I loved him and you didn’t say anything to stop me!” Jo argued but Mumma declined to accept that responsibility.
“If something’s gone as far as loving him, what can I do? I don’t know about you, Jo. I really don’t. You girls think love is like some boat that comes up to the dock to pick you up, and you step aboard and off you sail. I don’t know why I bother bringing you to live so close to the ocean if you can’t look and see what it’s really like. Or maybe, some ocean liner, the ocean liner of love, and you’ve got the movie star suite. But really, it’s a rowboat and you have to propel it yourself, or if you’re lucky you get to row in tandem. And you have to build it yourself, too. Unless it’s more like a canoe, because of how tippy canoes are. Some boys—don’t ever think this isn’t worth knowing, girls, and you especially, Jo—Some boys are leaky boats, their love is a leaky boat, and you’ll spend all your time patching it. Or working the pumps to keep from sinking, and I can promise you that’s hard work, but you’re afraid you might drown. So because you think you might drown you keep patching and pumping when really, you know how to swim, if you weren’t so afraid of drowning. Are you listening to this, Jo? Of course,” she continued, with a considering glance at her second daughter, “some people want to drown, with their death wish.” That was the perception that brought Olympia in for a second round with Jo.
MUMMA AND ALL OF US, AGAIN, UNTIL, EVENTUALLY, ME
Mumma didn’t talk to me about love, or boyfriends, or marriage. To me she talked only about aiming high. That I was not ambitious was a constant irritation to her, just as her many and various ambitions were a constant irritation to me. If I told her I’d like to be a nurse she would say, “Why not a doctor?” and if I gave in, agreeing to want to be a doctor, she would say, “What is it with you? What is this doctor business? Why not a surgeon?” It was Mumma who caused me to undertake an academic career, because—witness Pops—higher education removed you from her range. So I determined on a doctorate and a university teaching career, and in mathematics, which, as Mumma told anyone who asked, was always her weak suit. But she had Amy, didn’t she? To help her with the books and taxes, so she didn’t need math, and she didn’t see why I persisted in that field, either. Or why at least I wouldn’t find some practical use for it, like banking. And what did I have against the World Bank anyway?
Mumma never went after Pops about his work, but there were limits to her admiration for him. “Your father’s the smartest person I know, just—not about everything. But don’t any of you ever think I don’t respect your father’s intelligence. I wouldn’t think of telling him what to do. A man’s job is up to him if his wife loves him,” she told us.
“Right, and that’s why you made him leave Harvard,” I answered, having just learned that my father had given up a place at the most prestigious university I knew of, an institution to even the distaff side of which I had little hope of being admitted.
“You’re spending too much time with your grandmother,” Mumma decided. “It’s not good for a young person to spend so much time with an old lady.”
“I’ll remember that when you’re old. Besides, I like her.”
“That’s just the kind of thing I expect from you.”
It was clear to me, from early childhood, that my mother didn’t concern herself with me the way she did my sisters. It wasn’t neglect, because Mumma did fuss, but she fussed at me rather than fussing over me. I was accustomed to her lack of interest in my grades and activities, in my friends. Pops, on the other han
d, could talk to me about math, and all my school courses, too, which he did as if I were…not his equal, exactly, he was too honest-minded for that, but as if I were a gifted pupil. In return, I became a Latin scholar, doubling our areas of commonality. Mumma knew little about either of my two chosen fields, so I got to know my father without her interfering vision of him; I got to know his mind, how it worked, how he practiced his trade, what he valued, and how very deeply he loved his wife, aka my mother.
Besides friendship with Pops, there was another advantage to Mumma’s uncharacteristic lack of concern, and that was that I didn’t have her pushing her way into every corner of my life, as my sisters did and about which they frequently complained. Any boy any one of them got a crush on or dated or even simply had hopes of entered Mumma’s sphere of interest and had to be brought around for Mumma to get to know. Our friends mostly liked our mother, which I for one could never understand except that they didn’t have to have her for a mother. My sisters’ boyfriends all thought she was terrific. Mumma in her turn maintained that they were all in love with her, “especially that Alan.” Alan Penning, who dated first Jo and then Amy, and then hung around Meg although she was more than a year older than he, probably did do it to be around Mumma, not that he would ever have admitted anything like that, being a teenage male. “Your mom’s cool,” was all he said. “I can talk to your mom.”
Our girlfriends said the same thing, but it was the boys that Mumma, being Mumma, preferred. She welcomed them and enjoyed having them in the house, in the kitchen, in front of the TV, at the dinner table. “Don’t try to tell me you’re the kind of boy who’s afraid to taste eggplant,” she challenged, and they rose to the challenge, those eaters of hamburgers, hot dogs, fried chicken and steak, when she set a moussaka down on the table in front of them. Or if they had come to pick up a date not yet dressed and ready, it was, “Sit with us, have a cappuccino, you’ll like it, it’s Italian,” or “Sit, sit, have a cup of Earl Grey, it’s one of the smoky teas,” and they, who in most circumstances would drink only Coke, or beer, with the occasional bold foray into V-8, which was rumored to make a good bloody mary, sipped cooperatively. Mumma liked to think of herself as broadening their horizons. “That boy needs his horizons broadened and you’re the girl with the mother to do it.”
I am the only one of the four of us who had only Mumma and never Olympia to counsel me. I had only Mumma, and I learned from watching her with my sisters that she was an unreliable counselor—or, at least, a counselor so intrusive and authoritative that seeking her advice gave her permission to ooze all over all of your life, and enlisting her aid was tantamount to having sworn knightly fealty. Mumma, of course, denied that she was anything but supportive and helpful. “You can’t boss me around like you can the rest of them,” I told her, more than once.
“You’ll see,” she warned me.
“See what?”
“See where it gets you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Mumma’s style of parenting involved looking ahead to dismal possibilities and then warning us, individually or collectively, about them. “The wind will change and your face will stay that way,” she predicted when we were little and pouting, or whining, or making faces at a dinner plate, or being too wildly happy or too obviously jealous. It was Jo whom she first warned that fast girls get pregnant and Meg to whom she pointed out the pitfalls and shortfalls of romantic love. “Nobody can be as perfect as you think he is. Don’t ever try to make some other person perfect, Meg, even if you know how to do it. And you don’t know how, don’t ever think you know that.”
For all of our girlhoods, she advised us what to look for in a man. Some of it was old chestnuts, “Handsome is as handsome does,” or, “Why would a man get married if he can get what he wants for nothing?” She also made economic predictions (“That boy will never have two nickels to rub together”) based on family histories (“They don’t have a pot to piss in, excuse my French”) or on character analysis (“A man with that kind of twinkle in his eye, don’t think he’ll be faithful”). “Marry the one that loves you the most,” she advised Amy, when the choice arose in Amy’s senior year at Smith. (Amy married neither of them.) “I’m going to see to it you have a college degree,” she told Jo, when our family doctor reported to Mumma that unmarried Jo wanted to go on the pill, “but the rest of your life is up to you and I hope you remember that I warned you.”
“Don’t be in such a hurry,” she counseled Meg, when for the sixth time Meg arrived home from Tufts displaying an engagement ring or a fraternity pin. “You aren’t in love with these boys, don’t ever try to fool me about love. You’re just husband hunting. If you’re just hunting for a husband, a husband is all you’ll get.” But Meg went off and married Jack Cartenbury in the fall of her junior year, dropping out of school to follow him to Los Angeles and fame and fortune. Mumma couldn’t decide which to dislike the most, the abandoned degree, the youthful marriage, or Jack Cartenbury; she settled for vacillating among the three. However, and to her credit, Mumma never said I told you so when things went wrong, nor when they went the way she had predicted, which two eventualities were often the same.
These conversations, like the many conversations with Mumma when we were girls, in which she talked and we nodded our heads, took place in one or another of our bedrooms. Mumma liked to climb up onto the twin bed—we each had a set of twin beds, for convenience when having friends for the night—and lean back against the headboard, her neck propped by a pillow, her bright red hair exploding around her face. “What’s wrong between you and your sister? And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” or, “We have to talk about your social studies grade,” or, “Polly tells me you…” At about the age of eleven (“I was thirteen,” Meg corrects, “and I’d had the curse for almost a year by then”), we would come into our room and find the two thin hardbound sex education books propped up against the pillow.
“We managed, didn’t we?” my adult sisters always remind me.
“She was nosy. She wanted to know everything we were doing, everything we were thinking,” I say. They protest, “She wanted to be the best mother ever. Your memory is a little skewed, Beth, because, when I think about it, Mumma was way ahead of her time, just like she always said. She understood about adolescent girls. The kinds of stresses and pressures. Think about it, Beth. She just wanted us to find good husbands, like she had.”
“She wanted you to. She was always talking about the kind of man you’d marry, all of you—all right, not you, Jo. But you she talked about the kind of man you should love. She never did any of that about me, not to my face and I bet not behind my back either.” They don’t argue, since I’m right, and also because we all know that whatever else Mumma did, she would never say something behind your back she wouldn’t have already said to your face. “She didn’t think I’d even get married. She didn’t think anyone would fall in love with me.”
“You didn’t date,” they remind me.
“Yes I did. I just never let my date pick me up at home. I’m not dumb,” I say.
“We wouldn’t dare even think that,” they assure me.
“You know what I mean,” I say.
“She knew what you were doing,” is what they prefer to believe.
I know better. Mumma, having decided that I was the studious one, decided further that, like Pops, I was socially immature as well as being not the kind of girl boys wanted to date. To threaten, that is, with all of dating’s concomitant dangers. I also wasn’t the kind of girl a man would want to marry, not any man with any brains about him, given how quarrelsome and opinionated I was, how determined to get my own way even when my mother, who knew better, advised against it. When I announced that I wanted to attend Saint John’s College in Annapolis—and not even apply to Radcliffe, Smith or Bryn Mawr, Wellesley or Wheaton, and not even Swarthmore, which was coeducational even at that time “and a really good school besides”—Mumma threw up her hands, literally and rhetoricall
y. “I throw up my hands,” she said, “I wash my hands of you. My hands are tied, if your father thinks Saint John’s is a good school. I’ve never heard of it.”
“She can learn Greek.” To my father, this was a major advantage.
“Oh, well, that explains it. But Spencer, there are no majors. It’s just like you, Beth, to go to a place where there are no majors and how are you going to earn a living?”
Even though I knew better, I tried to explain. “I can study Euclid from the Elements, and then work out the same problems Ptolemy solved, and everybody else will be doing the same thing, so there will be people to talk to about what I’m interested in.”
“I’m throwing in my hand,” Mumma said.
This was a much calmer conversation than the kind we were given to enjoy throughout my childhood, from the age of seven to about sixteen, when I at last got my driver’s license and all of the lovely sense of freedom, if not actual freedom, that accompanies that achievement. Our earlier conversations tended to be heated and irrational. It seemed clear to me that whatever I did, my mother got angry at me about it. “You’re always mad at me,” I would tell her. “You’re projecting,” she’d tell me, and I hadn’t at that point read Freud, which happened also to be part of the Saint John’s curriculum, so I couldn’t make any counterclaims about systems of denial.
Everyone agreed that Mumma was relieved when I at last went off to Saint John’s. “I don’t know what will come of you,” she said to me in farewell.
Neither did I.
“Don’t make it too hard on yourself,” she advised. “You catch more flies with honey.”
“That’s good advice if you want to catch flies,” I told her.
I thought that, having left home, I would no longer be the person I had been all of my life, the stubborn, uncooperative person my mother had had to deal with. In many respects I was correct in that assumption, and so, for the first time in my life, I invited a boy to come visit my home. This was George, who was a junior when I met him at the end of my freshman year and a senior when we started dating. Mumma took to George right away. On his part, from the first moment, he took her on, calling her by her real name, Elfrieda. “It’s good to meet you, Elfrieda.” Mumma glared at me—How else could he know this?—but George didn’t notice; he was moving on to Pops, “And you, too, Spencer,” holding his hand out for them to shake, first Mumma, then Pops. “Beth never says very much about you two, and I have to admit I’m curious,” George said, and I glared at him.
By Any Name Page 18
