Five Women (23 page)

Chapter Twenty

G
ARA WAS GLAD
that her mother had always been very close to her aunt and uncle and their spouses, because after her father's death the burden of becoming her mother's constant companion would have fallen to her by default, and she didn't know how she could continue to be kind to and supportive of May when what she really wanted to do was fight with her. It was unconscionable to fight with the bereaved, Gara thought, although occasionally she reminded herself that she, too, was bereaved and deserved some consideration.

It was easier when she and Carl took May out to dinner at a restaurant, because her mother had good manners and even seemed a little cowed by Carl—after all these years!—and they were able to talk about a variety of things. Carl loved to hear her mother talk about how cute, how smart Gara had been as a child and was even now. Sometimes at these dinners the two of them clucked over her talents and foibles as if she were their child. It was a strange bond, but Gara liked it when they started their little routine. It made her feel warm. I may have married my good father, she told herself, amused, but it hasn't stopped me from sleeping with him.

But despite the encouragement of her aunt and uncle and their spouses, and her own greatly increased filial attentiveness, her mother did not want to try to have a life of her own, did not know how to, and Gara felt both resentful and guilty. There were the many phone messages from May when she knew perfectly well Gara was with patients and had turned on the answering machine, and there were the calls that reached Gara too early in the morning and too late at night, and there were the times when, knowing she had not been attentive enough, Gara had to put in the call herself and talk for an hour about nothing, and somehow always ended up defending herself about something anyway. They were in touch constantly now. It was not the calls she minded but their content. Her mother still managed to make her feel as uncomfortable as she had when Gara was growing up.

She knew her mother was lonely, but sometimes she wondered if her mother was that much lonelier than she had been before she became a widow. Gara wished she had not been an only child. If she'd had siblings they could have talked to her mother on the phone too on these empty evenings, watching their egos slipping away under the assault; they could have taken May out to dinner, her sisters could have gone shopping with her and asked for advice, and reluctantly—or perhaps willingly—accepted complete control.

Would these never-to-be-born sisters and brothers have gotten along with May better than she did? Would the configuration of the family have happily lightened the burden on her as the one, or would there have been rivalry, competition, even resentment? What if May had alienated them even more than she had Gara, and Gara had been left alone with her anyway? She pictured a selfish sister living in Europe (a sister who had fled for her life to a different continent), forgetting to call; a wandering, wastrel brother (a vulnerable boy struggling against his own parent-child bond that had been too strong) vanished somewhere on the West Coast, surfacing only to ask for money and introduce another grandchild they wouldn't see again for years. She would never know.

She talked to her best friend Jane about it. Jane's father had also died comparatively young, and Jane's mother, like Gara's, had never worked and didn't know how to fill her time. “Well, it's easier for me to deal with my mother,” Jane said, “because I have sisters and we share her.”

“I wish I did.”

“I know, it's hard for you. I really understand. You know, my mother is difficult but not nearly as difficult as yours is. Mine never really brought us up. She let us do whatever we wanted. So in a way she's always been the child. I mean, she's harmless.”

“Harmless . . .” Gara said wistfully. “How I would love and protect a harmless mother.”

“It's hard anyway,” Jane said. “Even with the grandchildren, although they do help amuse her. They adore visiting her because she dotes on them and lets them do just what we did when we were kids, run wild and have Twinkies for breakfast.”

“I could not imagine my mother being a good grandmother,” Gara said. “I always pictured her scaring them about all the perils in the world.”

“Oh, mine does that,” Jane said, and laughed. “We ignore her.”

Gara was surprised. “It never occurred to me that if I had children they and I would become a ‘we' to gang up against my mother. That doesn't sound so bad.”

“They gang up against me, too,” Jane said. “You only discover these things after you've had children.”

“So where were you to tell me this before it was too late?”

“It's not too late. You and Carl can still have a baby. That doctor who told you thirty-six was way off. Things have changed. Women are having them now when they're thirty-nine. You have a whole year to get on it.”

Gara smiled. “We're too content with things the way they are.”

Five years went by. May was her mother and May was the child Gara had never had, demanding constant gratification like an infant, suffering from separation anxiety like a four-year-old, insisting on winning every minor skirmish like an adolescent. When Gara and Carl went to Europe for their brief vacations May would panic. She kept calling, asking when they would be coming back, and because she wanted to be sure not to miss Gara she called in the middle of the night. It was not night for her in New York. Of course as soon as she telephoned, Gara was wide awake.

“Will you remember Passover?” May said for the third time. “It's going to be at Aunt Laura's this year, and she wants you and Carl specifically to know you're expected.”

“We'll be home next week,” Gara said, annoyed. “Passover is next month.”

“Just so you don't forget. Maybe you should bring her something nice from Paris. She likes Lalique.”

“I think I'll do Passover and then you can all bring
me
Lalique,” Gara said.

“Why are you always so nasty to me?”

“I don't know,” Gara said. “Do you think it's so ludicrous that I might have a family event at my place?”

“Go ahead,” her mother said, in that voice that meant:
You wouldn't know how.
Gara didn't know if she knew how or not, but she knew she would never do it as long as someone else wanted to.

“What kind of perfume do you want me to bring you?”

“Something we can share. Get a big bottle and we'll each take half. What about Shalimar?”

“I hate Shalimar,” Gara said. She didn't want to smell like her mother. “Is Shalimar what you want? I'll get you your own bottle.”

“That would be nice. And you know what else you should get? My friend Gertrude likes to buy a Hérmès scarf and cut it in half and stitch the hem, and then she and her daughter share it. They're too big anyway. Gara, buy a Hérmès scarf and then you and I will share it,” May said in all seriousness.

“Motherrr!” Her voice sounded to herself as if she were still fourteen years old. “People don't cut Hérmès scarves in half! That's destroying a work of art.”

“Gertrude and her daughter don't mind.”

“I'll buy you your own scarf. What color would you like?”

“You don't know by now what my favorite colors are?”

“All right, I'll surprise you and you won't like it.”

“I always like it,” her mother said, offended.

Gara remembered the “silver” pin but said nothing. She also remembered the scarves, the bracelets, the gloves that were never worn, not exchanged, simply put away like a reproach.

“Put Passover in your calendar,” her mother said.

“It's there,” Gara said. “The calendar comes with it.”

“With Aunt Laura?” May said, and laughed.

Then, the night before Gara and Carl were to leave Paris to return home, a phone call came from her aunt herself. Her voice was grave. May, the immortal goddess, the thorn in the side, the immovable object, the national monument, the wellspring of guilt, the adored and hated mother, the piece of unfinished business of the heart, had been struck down by a stroke and was in New York Hospital in intensive care, paralyzed and in very serious condition. So the food had finally won. Despite understanding that this had been inevitable, Gara was still in shock. She and Carl went to the hospital directly from the airport.

To her vast relief May seemed much farther away from her demise than Gara had been led to expect. She was having great difficulty moving and speaking, with one side useless and a thick tongue, but she was very angry, and she was able to make her needs known.

“Your mother is amazing,” the nurse told Gara. “I've never seen such determination.”

“Ah, yes.”

“I want a knife,” May mumbled to Gara. “I want a knife.”

“Who do you want to kill?”

“Myself.”

“You almost did. When you get well, and you will, and home, I'm taking you to Pritikin.”

“You think I'll get well?”

“Yes,” Gara lied. Actually she had no idea, but she knew if May had to live in this helpless state she would rather be dead. “Listen to the doctor,” she said. And to the nurse, “Be careful, she might try to hurt herself.”

She spoke to the doctor. He was an eminent specialist named Dr. Green, and he thought May was the sweetest woman who had ever lived. Gara wondered what her mother had done to him, but then she knew. This was the way May affected anyone who was not her daughter and who hadn't known her for a long time.

“This is a critical period,” Dr. Green said. “She could have more strokes. She's extremely overweight, and her heart is not good and her cholesterol is high.”

“I know,” Gara said.

“She could be gone tomorrow, but if she has her way she'll live forever. An amazing woman. Still, I must warn you, none of us are masters of our fate.”

“I was hoping you were,” Gara said.

At home that night, exhausted and jet lagged though she was, with resentful patients coming in the morning to remind her she had abandoned them, not knowing they might soon be abandoned again, and May possibly living her last hours on earth, Gara couldn't sleep. All her life she had wanted to be away from the spell of her magical mother, the bad witch; and now that the fulfillment of her wish was at hand, she wondered how she would be able to live with the guilt. It's not as if her stroke was my fault, she reminded herself. I am not the magical child, not the all-powerful; my anger doesn't kill.

She crept out of bed quietly so as not to wake Carl and went into the kitchen where she drank water from the refrigerator and thought about her mother. The worst part, Gara thought, is that she's going to leave me before we ever make peace with each other. I never wanted a different mother; I just wanted the one I already had to behave differently. I was as stubborn as she was. We all are; we never give in, carrying the struggle into relationships with people who represent our mothers without our knowing it; and if we do give in we are more than defeated, we are lost to ourselves.

People who have had happy childhoods with accepting, happy parents, have no idea what it's like for the rest of us. They just know they love and are loved.

I hate May for leaving me, and I hated her for tearing me down all those years, but if I ever let myself feel the love I have for her hidden somewhere inside my infant heart, I don't know if I can stand the pain.

My mother and I will never have our epiphany. We will not have our dramatic last act, our tearful confrontation with forgiveness and understanding. Not this mother, not with this daughter. I had to become the way I am to save my life, and so she lost as much as I did.

Yes, Gara thought, May lost too. That's the tragedy and, if I want to think of it that way, the revenge. We will spar and bicker for the rest of our time together, and she will claim she is being cheated of the daughter she wanted, but because she doesn't know me she will never really know what a loving daughter she could have had.

Gara found pieces of time to go to the hospital every day to sit with May and listen helplessly to her rage on about her helplessness and complain about the hospital food. At the end of the week they moved her out of intensive care into a private room. Things seemed better, so Gara told Carl she would slip out of the hospital early, meet him after work, and they would have dinner together in a neighborhood restaurant.

“Oh? Where are you going?” May asked.

“Just to get some Chinese food with Carl.”

“Comb the back of your hair.”

“I'll be back tomorrow,” Gara said.

“Enjoy your life,” May said. Gara didn't know if it was meant as a benediction or a complaint.

The slip of paper in Gara's fortune cookie read, “All great losses are also great gains.” At approximately the same time that she was reading it aloud to her husband in the restaurant, her mother died of a massive coronary, alone in her room at New York Hospital. It seemed a bizarre and frightening coincidence, and Gara wondered if it would have been easier if her fortune had been, “All great gains are also great losses.”

She was an adult now, irrevocably. She had no parents, no siblings, no children. She stood alone, the oldest and youngest of her most direct, intimate bloodline. And she was only forty-three.

Afterward, whenever she had to talk about May's death, Gara would add sentimentally, “You know, the last thing my mother said to me was, ‘Enjoy your life.'”

“Oh,” everyone said, “May loved you so much. She was always so considerate. Always thinking about you, wanting you to be happy.”

“It's too bad she didn't enjoy her own life,” Carl said to Gara when they were alone.

“I know.” She played her mother's last words over in her head. There had been bitterness in May's tone, whether because Gara was deserting her or because she knew Gara's life was and always would be happier than hers had been. “Enjoy your life.” A complaint or a benediction?