Lies My Mother Never Told Me (31 page)

“I'm not fat, Grammy! Don't say that!” Eyrna had already started to cry, her mouth contorted into a rictus of shock and despair. Kids have no defense. No defense at all, I thought. Her face, I saw with horror, mirrored exactly what I'd always felt and had learned over the years to hide so well—so well that I could no longer even recognize when I was in pain.

I heard Mr. Bill's voice in my head:
You can't fight angry. You gotta fight calm, without judgment.
“Why did you say that to her?” I asked my mother, trying to keep my voice under control.

“Say what?”

“Why did you tell Eyrna she was fat?”

My mother sat down in an old wicker rocker and looked up at me, perplexed. “I didn't tell
Eeer-na
she was fat. I was singing a song, that's all.”

“You sang that to me too, when I was little, and I didn't like it either.” My voice was tight, stretched like a rubber band about to snap.

“You just don't have a sense of humor,” she said dismissively, vaguely, and tamped her cigarette out in a large pewter ashtray. Her head was completely enshrouded in smoke. Yes, I thought, around my mother I am stiff, wooden, unbending, lazy, humorless—in fact, I'm the very person she always accuses me of being. And then it occurred to me that someone must have sung those words to
her
when she was little.

“No,” I said slowly, the brittleness gone from my voice. “No. That isn't just a song. You hurt Eyrna's feelings. It made her feel like you were telling her she was fat.”

My mother stared at me as if I were speaking Swahili.

“Who sang that song to
you
when you were little?” I asked her. Her eyes grew wide, suddenly anxious, as if, for a brief moment, a light had flicked on in her mind. My heart leapt with hope.

But just as quickly, her eyes turned vague again. “You're a pain in the ass, you know that?” she said. “You've always been a pain in the ass.”

“If you continue to overfeed Eyrna,” I said to my mother in my new, adult, calm, equable voice, “we'll go back to New York and stop coming out here to see you.”

Then I turned to Eyrna. “Come with me, baby,” I said, “let's go for a swim.”

 

The next day, I left very early and took Eyrna back to New York with me so we could attend Mr. Bill's noontime class. He could see I wasn't well. He sensed my self-recrimination and paralysis as he stood before me, looking me over like a drill sergeant. “Relax your shoulders.”

“I can't.”

“
Yes, sir
is the only answer I want to hear,” he corrected, his voice sharp.

Oh my God, did I not want to be here. “I can't, sir.”

“You got to relax in order to fight,” said Mr. Bill. I felt like Aurora in
Sleeping Beauty,
waking up from a hundred-year coma. Even my muscles were having trouble adjusting to Mr. Bill's demands.

“Yes, sir!”
the whole class shouted.

Relax in order to fight? That's an oxymoron, isn't it?

“You can't fight in anger,” Mr. Bill reminded us.

He's out of his mind, I thought. I shouted,
“Yes, sir!”

I thought of the fights I'd had with my mother over the years, how I always ended up capitulating, because I was so much angrier than she. Because she had always been a much better bluffer than I. Because I was too serious and too earnest and too weak. How come my brother was able to just laugh it off? How come everything she said just went straight through me like a poisoned spear?

“You're going to take your Blue Belt test in September,” Mr. Bill announced.

“What? I can't take my Blue Belt test in September! Sir. I've been away almost all summer.”

He pretended I hadn't responded, and strutted off, his back perfectly straight, his head held high.

 

Afterward, sweaty but calm, I left Eyrna in the children's park with her friend and her friend's mom, and I called Nora and asked her if she could meet me for coffee. She could probably tell by my voice that it was an emergency.

At Pete the Greek's, I recounted to her, stumblingly, guiltily, our last four weeks at my mother's.

She said, shaking her head with a laugh, “Still busy rearranging the deck chairs on the
Titanic.
”

After a moment, I laughed too. I'd met Nora when I'd been sober around two years. She'd been in exactly the same kind of relationship I'd been in with Dennis when I'd first stopped drinking. She couldn't see the forest for the trees. She'd been as jumpy as a cat in a cage surrounded by playful dogs.

While we had something to eat, Nora told me the following story.

Nora's father—a terrible drunk—had sexually abused her older sister, Mary, who was a year older than Nora. He then began to focus his attentions on Nora when she turned fifteen. Nora fled and never lived at home again.

Many years later, her older brother, Patrick, had two stepdaughters, twins of fourteen. Patrick told Nora on the phone from Vancouver that he'd sent both girls to spend a weekend alone with his father, in his cabin in the woods. Nora, apoplectic, asked Patrick how in the hell could he have left the girls alone with their father, when he knew perfectly well what had happened to Mary and Nora at that same age. Patrick, after a silence, re
sponded that he couldn't refuse his father's invitation, because the old man would throw a fit and fly into a rage.

Now Nora looked at me with her green eyes, which had seen way too much, and concluded with somber resignation, “My brother was more afraid of my father's anger than he was of his daughters getting abused.”

I felt a chill crawl up my back despite the blaring heat from Pete the Greek's grill. I began to feel like I wasn't getting enough air.

“Are the girls okay?” I asked in a murmur.

“I don't know if the girls are okay. Patrick died of a heroin overdose four years ago, in a public park in Vancouver. An eight-year-old boy found him. Patrick was leaning up against a tree with a needle sticking out of his arm.”

I was aware that two of Nora's three brothers had died from drug overdoses. But she had never told me this before.

At once the fog cleared in my mind and I saw a new truth: my mother had turned her relationship with Eyrna into a
Romeo and Juliet
—style epic tragedy, with Kevin and me as the evil parents keeping them apart. And she'd fed this romantic notion to Eyrna and conscripted her into her army of two. And I'd let it happen. Because I wanted to please her. Because I wanted her to be happy. Because I wanted her to love and respect me. Because I was afraid of her wrath. Isn't that what children are supposed to do, respect their parents and allow them access to their grandchildren?

And, of course, I was afraid that without Eyrna, my mother would drink again.

I went home, held Eyrna tight for a long time, then called my mother. Scared, my mouth suddenly dry, I told her we wouldn't be coming out for a while. There was a dead silence. She lit a cigarette and said pointedly, “New York City is no place for a
child
to be in the summer. It's
wrong
of you to keep her there, suf
focating in the heat. It's plain
wrong
.” I could hear her sucking on her inhaler. Jesus.

“We won't be here all the time; we're going to visit friends,” I replied weakly. Of course, this was an unnecessary statement on my part, because, after all, it was not in the least about Eyrna suffocating in New York City, but about my mother suffocating out there, alone, with no one to play with, with no one on whom to focus her attention. And why was I explaining myself to her anyway?
“No,”
Gianna used to say,
“is a complete sentence with a period after it.”

My God, I thought, what if she starts drinking again? It never occurred to me, not for a moment, that she'd been sneaking booze all along.

 

That night, late, I had a dream in which my mother's house crumbled in on itself and rolled down the hill in an avalanche of wood and bricks and cedar shingles.

I called Nora in a panic. “I feel so guilty,” I said.

After a moment of silence, Nora responded, “I presume you're not familiar with the saying:
If you feel guilty, then you're doing something right?”

 

We'd been back in the city only three weeks, recuperating from the summer, Eyrna having just started first grade, when my mother was once again rushed to Southampton Emergency. She had pneumonia and encephalitis and was completely delusional. There was a general panic as to what had caused the encephalitis and the delusions. Many strings were pulled by Barbara Hearst (now reinstated, to some degree, after her years of exile) to get Gloria admitted to a private room at New York Hospital. There, Gloria was put under the care of Dr. Paul Smith, an infectious diseases specialist, brought into the fray by the power of the Hearst name. Dr. Smith discovered that on top of pneumonia, Gloria had
contracted West Nile virus from a mosquito bite, which had apparently caused, or exacerbated, the encephalitis.

She kept trying to escape from her hospital room, rolling herself out of the bed and falling, so they strapped her down. Jamie and I stood helplessly by her side. Her face would change quickly, the muscles going from placid to pinched and belligerent, focusing suddenly on me with intense and vicious rage, as if I were the one who had somehow gotten her into this condition, and strapped her into a straitjacket with my own hands.

“Because of you I'll be remembered as a drunken bitch. You're a nut,” she said with finality.

My mouth opened to speak, but I couldn't. The needy child voice inside me said,
If she says you're a nut, then you must be a nut. She's your mother, the one who always tells the brutal truth.
But then the fighter, the rageful furious one awakened, and I felt in my gut the first prickly sparks of an explosive rage igniting. I could feel its cold fire burning down the fuse within me. Who would pay?

“You're in the hospital, Mom,” Jamie said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “You really need to calm down.”

I kept thinking of that scene in
The Exorcist
when the old priest warns the younger Father Karras not to listen to a thing the Devil says. “The Demon is a liar,” he tells him. Father Karras enters the room, and on the bed, the child has assumed the voice of his dead mother. “Why you do this to me, Dimi?” she says plaintively, in her heavy Greek accent. “Why?”

My mother's blue eyes had ceased roaming and now turned on me once again with the intensity of a helicopter searchlight. “That's a nice sweater. Cashmere? Too much black, though, you need to put on some jewelry.”

I went home and looked at myself in the mirror. “Do you think I wear too much black?” I asked Kevin.

“I think maybe you should call the therapist,” he said.

 

Gloria spent three weeks in the hospital, half the time strapped down in the straitjacket.
“You fucking cunt! You whore! You're never going to get my money! Help! Help! My daughter has kidnapped me!”
She looked at me with such venomous hatred it made me shudder. Was it me she was seeing? As much as I logically understood that she was sick and her brain was not functioning properly, I felt certain that she truly despised me and would annihilate me if she could.

Dr. Smith told me one morning that my mother had attacked her nurse's aide from St. Lucia with racial epithets. “Your mother is a racist.”

My mother? A racist? “She's…out of her mind,” I stammered. After all, this was the woman who'd marched with James Baldwin for civil rights!

That night, she had a mild heart attack, and they rushed her up to the cardiac care floor. For several hours, my brother and I stood at the foot of her bed, watching the heart monitor beep above her head.

“How
dare
you do this to me? How dare you…I know you're trying to kill me.” Tied down to the mattress, with straps at her hands and feet. “You're a nut.” She was looking straight at me.

What I couldn't understand was, why
me?
Why not Jamie or anyone else?

I'm not trying to kill her, I thought guiltily. But I want her to die. Is that the same thing?

God, I prayed, let it end now. Let it all be over.

 

After two days, she was moved back to Dr. Smith's floor. He stopped in during his rounds. “How are you today, Mrs. Jones?”

Betty Comden was visiting. Well into her eighties, Betty had her own private attendant and was sitting in a wheelchair beside my mother's bed. Gloria was not in the straitjacket this day and seemed almost lucid, except if you looked too long into her eyes.

“You have no idea who I am,” my mother said to the doctor, her chin jutting out. “And you have no idea who this lady is, I bet. Because you're too young and you don't know anything. This is the most famous lyricist in the world!”

Betty protested but giggled delightedly at my mother's accolades.

Dr. Smith, pale with exhaustion, checked Gloria's chart and then stepped out into the hall. I followed him, so I could ask about the West Nile virus. Eyrna and I had spent the summer with Gloria, and if she was infected, perhaps so were we. Dr. Smith rolled his eyes and sighed deeply, then lit into the media for causing a completely unnecessary panic over this virus, which was absolutely no danger to anyone, except people who were already debilitated by illness, or had severely compromised immune systems. In other words, people like my mother.

Slowly, he lifted his hand and patted me on the bicep. “You poor thing. How did you survive, with a mother like that?”

I was stunned, for no one had ever said such a thing to me before. My first reaction was to jump to her defense. “She…” Then I just gave up. “I don't know,” I said.