The quarter-turns don’t hurt. But the cumulative impact of this rapid elongation of her leg, soft tissue and bone, does hurt. Bending her leg at the knee—supervised by me, Michael, and the physical therapist who comes to our apartment daily—is terribly painful.
Eliana is missing all the classroom prep for the fourth-grade test. We hire a tutor to prepare Eliana for the high-stakes citywide exam in January, which determines where kids will be admitted to middle school.
Katherine is smart in a bookish way and attractive in a goth way. But she has, among other problems, a deeply embedded I don’t really like children, and I dislike their parents even more problem.
“We need to be alone!” she snarls, shutting the door and forbidding us to enter the living room. We mistake this for intellectual rigor.
At Katherine’s second visit, she hands Eliana four stapled pages just before she leaves. “Make sure Eliana completes these sample test questions before my next visit,” she says sternly, buckling her black leather coat before vanishing into the overcast, wintry afternoon.
“Mom, what does this mean?” asks Eliana, poring over Katherine’s printout.
“They’re sample test questions.”
“No, I mean the stuff on the back of the pages.”
I take the stapled packet from her. Good grief! Printed on the back is a pornographic story, graphically describing Katherine’s experiences as a dominatrix.
“Oh, my God! I can’t believe she gave this to you.”
“What does it say?”
“I can’t tell you what it says, it’s so inappropriate.”
“But it’s mine!” She grabs for the stapled pages, which I hold out of reach. “It’s mine! She gave it to me, Mom.”
Julia, home from Princeton for winter break, takes the pages from my hand and holds them even higher above Eliana’s reach.
“Oh! My! God!” says Julia, giggling as she reads. “This is unbelievable!”
“I want to read it!” says Eliana.
“No way!” says Julia.
No more tutoring.
WHY DID WE fix what ain’t broke? It’s certainly broke now.
“Nobody prepared me for this,” Eliana says, and I can only nod in agreement.
Her ambulatory skill improves, but she says the walker makes her feel like an old person. I understand. The sound of her tentative footstep alternates with the dull thud of the walker.
“I’m not myself anymore. I feel like I’ve lost myself and will never be myself again.” She wishes she could tear out the fixator. “I can’t be my real self with this thing in my leg.” She can’t roll over in bed. She can’t wear pants. Even the oversized, snap-up sports pants don’t cover the heavy strip of metal that extends several inches past her knee when she sits down.
There’s no turning back.
Eliana is depressed.
It seems terribly wrong for my eight-year-old to be depressed. Since I can’t do the pin care, I should be able to help her with her depression—I’ve been there, I’m the resident expert. But I don’t know what to do, other than listen when she talks, worry about her without telling her I’m worried, empathize with her, schedule physical therapy and doctor visits, dispense hugs and back rubs, lullabies and comfort and three meals a day, and comb her hair as gently as I possibly can. That’s not enough, is it? It can’t possibly be enough.
“Why isn’t that enough?” my mother asks, at my kitchen table. She’s very old, with a wobbly voice. Her wispy hair is completely white.
“Because she’s so unhappy.”
“Who wouldn’t be, under the circumstances? She has every reason to be unhappy. Why do you put such a premium on happiness?”
“Because she’s only eight years old, and she needs me.”
The kettle whistles. I fill the teapot.
“Well, of course she does. But let the girl be sad, or mad, or whatever she needs to be. This takes time. You can’t do a quick fix, or make it go away. And you can’t make it perfect.”
“Yes, you keep saying that.”
“Is there anything I can do for my little granddaughter? Or for—”
“I know you want to help, but I told you—”
“I can make chicken soup.”
“Eliana is a vegetarian.”
“How ’bout for you?”
“Mom.”
“You don’t have to do this alone, Sweet—”
“Please go away.”
She slowly fades away till there’s just her outline on the chair, like a stencil shape filled in with fog, and then she’s not there at all. The temperature drops. The tea is stone cold. I shiver. Suddenly, there’s a steamy hot bowl of chicken soup in front of me, with a sprig of dill floating on top. It’s delicious. I’m warm again.
“Wait. Please come back, Mom. I do want your help.”
She’s at the table again, in her nightgown, barefoot. I sit beside her and take both her hands in mine. Her wrinkled skin sags loosely from the bone, but her grip is strong. Her eyes are cloudy. She’s in her late eighties, the age she would be today. We whisper, so as not to wake Eliana, asleep in the next room.
“Eliana is depressed, and I don’t know how to help her.”
“Yes, you do, Alice. You have the unenviable advantage of first-hand experience.”
“Nothing like what Eliana is going through.”
“Think back. Do you remember your senior year of college?
“I’d rather not.”
“You got through it.”
“That was totally different.”
“Different. Not totally.”
It was my senior year of college, and everything was falling apart. I lived in a tiny dorm room, due to a housing snafu; my parents’ marriage seemed to be failing; my boyfriend Richard didn’t pick up his phone; and was I imagining it, or were my friends acting weird around me?
Early one morning, I let myself into Richard’s dorm room. It smelled of cigarettes, sweat, and semen. He and a girl were asleep, naked, a rumpled sheet half-covering them. They woke. The girl turned toward me. It was my friend, Maria. Nobody said anything. I felt sick. I walked out. It was raining.
I ran through the rain to the arts building on the other side of campus, drenched by the time I got there. One of my larger-than-life chair paintings from junior year was missing from the student gallery, and my environmental sculpture—made from two-by-fours, rope, marsh reeds, and a wooden chair—on display for the summer, was wrecked. The discarded ropes, boards and reeds lay in a heap. This was a nightmare. Did someone vandalize it, or did it just fall apart? Did my sculpture dismantle itself to teach me a lesson? What was the lesson? That I couldn’t build anything to last? If that was the lesson, I’d quit. Since all my artwork disappeared or fell apart, I should switch to an art form that’s meant to be ephemeral. Or was the lesson that I couldn’t complete anything? That I was like my mother, who could never finish her P-H-Phucking D? That was a terrifying thought. I couldn’t graduate from Princeton until I turned in a book-length senior thesis.
I was miserable. I wanted to leave school.
That night, I was lying in bed, in my crappy dorm room, when the phone rang. It was Tim, one of my housemates from this summer on Martha’s Vineyard, calling from Brown. He was having a rough time, too, so he’d decided to take a semester off from school to travel around Peru. He asked if I wanted to join him.
I called home and asked for permission to take a semester off to go to Peru with Tim. They hesitantly agreed, as long as Princeton would refund my tuition.
Mom stayed on the phone after Dad said good-bye. I was defensive, expecting her to rail about what a scumbag Richard was for cheating on me. I braced myself, prepared to shut down and stop listening to her. I was accustomed to Mom despising my boyfriends for flaws real and imagined. Now that she was pissed off at my dad about some real or imagined transgression, and immersed in her angry feminist, anti-man “Don’t get married until you have babies, and who wants babies” mode, she’d b
e even more likely to release her vitriol on my latest bad boyfriend.
Instead, she simply listened.
My mother listening and not talking? Lord Almighty, my mother was listening! This was unprecedented. She wasn’t raging. She let me cry. Let me be sad. Let me call Richard a scumbag, without trying to beat me to it. I could hardly believe that she was so understanding. I had no idea she was such a good listener. She called me Sweetiepie, Honeylamb, Darling—terms of endearment I hadn’t heard for years, which ignited a small flame of joy in me.
“Thank you, Mom. Thank you.”
But I missed the deadline for a tuition refund by one day.
“This is totally screwed up!” I shouted, which didn’t exactly endear me to the registrar.
I called home in tears.
“I’m so sorry,” said Mom. Again, she listened. She let me cry. I wanted to confide my feelings to her, which I hadn’t wanted to do for years.
“Why don’t we get together?” she offered. “Would you meet me in the City tomorrow?”
I took the train from Princeton and met her at the Museum of Modern Art. I needed to get off campus. I’d been feeling horrible. I forced a smile when I saw her outside the museum. When she put her arms around me, I closed my eyes and crumpled against her chest. It was a warm, breezy September day. We sat outside in the museum’s sculpture garden and sketched the sculptures: Maillol’s voluptuous, larger-than-life nude bather, dipping her hair in the reflecting pool; Matisse’s Backs, four monumental bas-relief sculptures of a female figure, the surface of her body like a craggy mountain, getting progressively more abstract and geometric in each iteration.
I asked Mom to pose for me. She sat on the edge of the fountain, tightened the scarf over her hair, and held down her wraparound skirt, which kept flapping open. She turned her face toward the bronze bather, while I drew her.
I hadn’t really looked at her, not for a very long time, not closely like this. She looked different. I observed a softening in her face that I hadn’t noticed when I was home in August. I drew her eyes; her large, warm, brown eyes. I sketched her jaw, more relaxed than I’d remembered, and her curly hair, grayer now. Did she look softer because she was getting older and her flesh was more flaccid, the skin more wrinkled? Yes, but there was also a gentleness that hadn’t been there before. Her feelings for me had softened.
“I love your drawings. They’re beautiful,” she said.
Again, that small flame of joy. Then I remembered that I wasn’t a visual artist any longer. I told her that I quit last week, because all my artwork falls to pieces. “If I’m going to be an artist at all, I’ll make performance art that only lasts for the duration of the performance.”
“Whatever you want,” she said, wistfully. I would miss having Mom praise my drawings. The museum was closing. I hugged her, holding back tears. I didn’t want to say good-bye.
The sun was going down when I got on the train back to Princeton, back to my crappy room, to my ruined artwork, to the humiliation of Richard and Maria’s affair, to Tim’s postcards from Peru, to the train wreck of my senior year.
I was so unhappy at Princeton that I went to the student counseling office. They referred me to a Jungian psychologist in town named Dr. Winterbottom, a ridiculous name for a shrink. I bicycled to her office and told her my dreams. Dr. Winterbottom explained that there was a war going on between my anima and animus. I thought this therapy might be bullshit.
The dour thesis adviser listened to my unorthodox senior thesis proposal—a theater piece exploring the commonalities between the rituals of animal behavior and human social rituals. My confidence waned as her scowl waxed.
“You need a new epistemology,” she said dismissively.
I couldn’t respond, because I had no idea what “epistemology” meant.
“The anthropology department expects your senior thesis to be a book-length dissertation.”
I knew what a dissertation was. It was something you worked on your whole life and never finished. It was the family curse.
When I looked up epistemology that night, I was even more confused: “the theory of knowledge, esp. with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. The investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.” How the fuck would I get a new one of those?
Mom laughed when I told her on the phone about my thesis advisor.
“What’s so funny?”
“Academics can be such jerks. She’s threatened by your creativity.”
“Maybe so, but I’ll need to come up with a new thesis topic.”
“First, you have to find a new thesis advisor.”
“Really?”
“I think so. Find an advisor who’s more attuned to your interdisciplinary approach.”
This was new: Mom giving me good advice. And me trusting her. She seemed to intuit just how I felt and how to make me feel better. I hadn’t felt this way about my mother since I was a little kid. I could tell she enjoyed helping me.
I switched advisors and decided to write an academic thesis on theater and ritual—using the renowned anthropologist Victor Turner’s theory of ritual to analyze contemporary experimental theater as ritual of social change. My new advisor, Ellen Basso, was able to introduce me to Turner, her mentor. He was so enthusiastic about my ideas that he invited me to apply to the interdisciplinary PhD program he headed up: the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought.
“That’s marvelous! I’m so proud of you,” said Mom. I glowed.
I DECIDED TO go winter camping over Christmas break—two weeks in the Adirondacks, where it was currently twenty degrees below zero. Some grad student had organized the trip and put up a flier. I’d signed up out of desperation. My depression hadn’t improved in three months. It was worse. Nothing had helped: therapy, art, books, classes, food (which I’d been eating too much of, trying to numb myself). I had a hunch that a survival trip might break the curse. I wanted it to scare me out of my depression. It worked with hiccups.
We drove upstate in three cars loaded with backpacks, tents, sleeping bags, army-surplus leather snowshoes, warm clothes, cooking pots, stoves, canisters of kerosene, matches in Ziploc bags, peanut butter, chocolate bars, and instant ramen noodles. We hoisted our sixty-pound backpacks and hit the trailhead in a snowstorm. Soon, we all looked like snowmen, covered with fat white flakes.
For fourteen starlit nights, we stayed warm by square dancing in snowshoes around the campfire. By day, we hiked in snowshoes, stripped down to our T-shirts and sweating, even as our breath formed white clouds. One day, I saved a fellow camper from frostbite by thawing his foot on my warm stomach; that night he and I shared a tent, and it felt like it might be the start of something. After fourteen sub-zero nights, after the excellent camaraderie that comes from living together in the wild, lining up our sleeping bags as close as possible to share body warmth—my depression was lifting. Life in the snow reformulated the equation, shifting the calculation toward optimism.
I rang in the New Year, 1976, at home with Mom, Dad, Madeline, and Jennifer, feeling better than I had all fall.
MAY ARRIVED, AND my mom proposed a visit. “This is very last-minute, and you’re probably busy with your senior thesis. But I have the day free, and—”
“Yes, Mom, come visit! I turned in my thesis yesterday, so I’m not busy. And the weather is gorgeous.”
I met her at the Princeton train station. She stepped off the train, carrying a picnic basket. She was wearing a paisley kerchief, denim wraparound skirt, and a button-down pale blue shirt. I was wearing an embroidered peasant blouse and jeans. It was two weeks before my graduation.
We sat in the grass and shared Brie cheese, French bread, and ratatouille. Our conversation was awkward. We were cautious with each other, unsure whether or not we were friends. Over the years, we’d become habituated to the glacial chill between us. It was different now. It was warming up. The beginning of something new. We were reinventing the mother – daughter rules, building
a foundation for the years ahead.
“Did you hear from the University of Chicago?”
“I got in!”
“Congratulations! What did you say?”
“I said I was honored by the invitation, but I turned it down. I don’t want to go into academia, Mom. I want to make theater. I’m starting a theater company with some other Princeton students.”
She sighed, tilted her head, and looked at me with her thoughtful brown eyes. “Just as well. You won’t risk spending your life trying to finish your PhD dissertation, like I did. Which reminds me, I’m about to start a new job—a full-time faculty position at a brand-new college. It’s exciting to be there at the start of something new.”
“Congrats, Mom, that’s fantastic!”
We stashed the picnic basket in my dorm room and strolled around the campus. It was an awesome spring day after several rainy weeks. Everybody was outside, sunbathing, reading, and playing Frisbee. I had my camera with me, and I snapped pictures of campus, which was starting to look good to me again. I was graduating soon. I wanted to remember all this.
“Hey, Mom, I don’t have any photos of the two of us together.” I handed my camera to a classmate who was passing by. “Would you mind taking our picture?” We posed in front of the formal garden and smiled for the camera, with our arms around each other.
“Do you want to spend the night, Mom?”
We stayed up late, talking in the dark. It didn’t matter what we talked about. The essential thing was that we were talking. Mom on the bed, me in a sleeping bag on the floor; telling stories, confiding in one another. I wondered how we ever lost each other for all those years. And how did we find each other again on this balmy night in May, at the end of my senior year of college? Our words and laughter filled the void, replenished the empty well, cool water bubbling up from deep below, splashing over the dry slate walls and filling us up, filling us up, filling us up.
The Year My Mother Came Back Page 13
