Mother Daughter Me (17 page)

I recall that my father’s face registered pure astonishment. Vivienne reverted to an annoying habit of drumming her fingers against the table.

“Where are you planning to live, for God’s sake, and since when are you so unhappy here?” my father asked Sarah, who in turn looked to Derek for support. But he said nothing.

“Well, we’re always yelling at each other, and you have such stupid rules. Derek’s smart, and he’s made me see that I can’t put up with the shit you guys feed me anymore. I need a life of my own with someone who really cares,” she said. She was crying. Derek remained silent. I despised him.

Now Vivienne spoke up. “Your father asked you where you were going to live, Sarah.”

“I guess I’ll live with Derek in his fraternity, right, Derek?” Derek nodded.

At this, my father exploded. “A fraternity house? You mean you want to go with this freeloader and be somebody’s girl in some frat house? You want to go off with this long-haired lump of nothing who doesn’t have enough goddamned decency to come into this house in clean clothes?” I was silently amused by his focus on Derek’s clothing. But I knew my father was right. Sarah had to stay, and someone had to persuade her.

“Sarah,” I said meekly. “You have to go to school.” She glared at me.

By now Derek was standing at the door. “Sarah,” he said, “you can either stay and listen to your old man spout garbage or you can come with me.”

Then, in contrast to his primal outburst of a few minutes earlier, my father grew formal and grave. He gave his daughter an ultimatum: “If you leave this house, you deserve no further support or attention from us.”

Vivienne was still tapping the table. I looked at her and instantly knew that my father wasn’t the bad guy here. It was my stepmother. She had long since identified Sarah as the troublemaker, and now she wanted my sister out of the house. My passive father was merely carrying out orders. Clearly he and Vivienne had discussed “the Sarah problem” behind
closed doors, and my stepmother must have been pressuring him to get tough with her.

Sarah hesitated for a moment, then followed Derek out. I wanted to run after her, but I didn’t. I had learned this much about growing up: Watch your back; let someone else get hurt; keep your own skin out of the game. Nothing further was said. My father went into his study and shut the door. I heard his typewriter. Vivienne went into the kitchen and started doing dishes.

I walked out of the house and across the cornfield, turned right on North Pleasant Street, and knocked on the Lyons’ kitchen door. Denny opened it. Matt was seated at the kitchen table, eating slices from a loaf of packaged rye bread. He looked up at me and smiled. Our first kiss took place a few weeks later, in the cornfield, not long after the combine had been through for the harvest, leaving behind a hay-strewn carpet. When autumn peaked, Matt and I, undeterred by the cold, met nearly every night after dinner in that pitch-black cornfield, the stars sprayed like foam across the night sky. Sometimes we had a perfect slice of moon. Both of us impossibly shy, we threw ourselves into our explorations with ample enthusiasm but few words. Every silent roving of our hands was a small pledge to each other. The quiet was filled with the nylon rustling of Matt’s down jacket, which he had bought with earnings from his after-school job at Watroba’s, the neighborhood market. That jacket kept both of us warm. When winter arrived, we moved to Matt’s upstairs bedroom and spent hours there. Remarkably enough, our virginity remained intact. Years later, I asked Denny what she was thinking during those evenings when she was downstairs in the kitchen and we were up in Matt’s bedroom with the door closed. “I wasn’t thinking, darling,” she replied. “I was praying.”

FOR SARAH, THE DAY
she left the house with Derek marked the onset of years of chaos and misery. Clouds of trouble followed her wherever she went. Her move to the Amherst College fraternity, Theta Xi, a brotherhood of dope-smoking hippies, was just the beginning. It was there, I believe, that she began to drink heavily. “Drunkards beget drunkards,”
observed the philosopher Plutarch nearly two thousand years ago. Contemporary scientists have confirmed that nod at genetic vulnerability with scores of studies. The bottom line is that alcoholic parents are four times more likely to have children who become alcoholics.

Against my stepmother’s strict orders, I went to see Sarah at the fraternity. I stole food from our kitchen cupboard and took it to her. But I hated being there. There were empty wine jugs around the room, and whenever I went, Derek was nowhere to be seen. When I got home from those visits, Vivienne eyed me with suspicion. “You’ve been to see Sarah, haven’t you?” she once said. I denied it, but my lie was transparent. My stepmother could smell the place on me.

After a few months, Sarah moved to a foster home in a nearby town, where she lived with a family named the Sullivans. I rode my bike to visit her there, and she seemed happier than she had been in the fraternity. But the next thing I heard, from my father and Vivienne, was that Sarah had “seduced” the husband and had been thrown out. She returned to the fraternity.

Logic dictated that Sarah’s absence would prompt my father and stepmother to fight less, but they fought more. I took refuge from the strife at home by going to Matt’s house, where I quickly became a fixture. When the Lyon family went on camping trips in the Travelall, I went along.

Dick and Denny were friends, partners, lovers. Even then I could recognize that this was a couple better together than apart. Denny made Dick a better version of himself, and vice versa. I studied their behavior, so different from that of my own parents. When Denny spoke, Dick paid attention to his wife’s words with the respect he might give a colleague at work. When Dick listened to Denny, his body was perfect stillness. And Denny was the same. For many years after their quiet, esoteric teachings, Dick and Denny were the two people I thought of whenever I tried to conjure an approach to real love and marriage. Matt in turn taught me how to love. It was as if he noticed that I was missing a limb, which he was determined to find and reattach. Dick and Denny’s certainty about how to love trickled down to their children. I was befuddled as to why Matt Lyon, who had the pick of any girl at Amherst High School, would choose me.
But he did, and he was convinced we would spend the rest of our lives together.

The summer before my junior year of high school, however, I went to visit my mother on my own. She was living in yet another San Diego beach community, called Pacific Beach. Her binge drinking was out of control—a week of sobriety followed by a week shitfaced in bed. One morning, she totaled her car while trying to drive home from the liquor store. She was so discombobulated that she thought nothing of it and wandered back to the apartment on foot, bag of booze in hand. She was unhurt and, as far as I could tell, unfazed. When I asked her if something had happened, she just looked at me, confused, and mumbled something about her car.

Dieter was out of town, and he and my mother were going through one of their periodic breakups. I called a friend of theirs for help. He had a key to Dieter’s apartment and took me there to sleep for a night or two, then he returned to my mother’s, sorted out the car mess, and stayed with her until she sobered up. In retrospect, I should have gotten on a plane and returned to Amherst. Instead, I escaped to the San Diego tennis courts, where one day a fellow player who, at twenty, was five years older than I, tried to pick me up. Feeling vulnerable yet proud of my apparent powers of attraction, I reported the incident to my mother. Rather than offer me any guidance, any words of caution about being involved with someone so much older, she immediately took me to her gynecologist to be fitted for a diaphragm. The doctor was kindly and unquestioning. When I left the examining room, my little rubber dome packed tidily into its pink plastic case, I was excited to be a new pledge in my mother’s sorority, caught up in her thrill at the idea that I was going to lose my virginity.

Once deflowered, I promised the tennis player I would break up with my boyfriend back home. In a fit of selfish cruelty, when I returned to Amherst at the end of the summer, that is precisely what I did. Furious and crushed, Matt stopped speaking to me altogether. I wrote him letters over the eighteen years that followed, but he never replied, and I was sure he had tossed them out, perhaps without reading them.

Then, in early 1992, Matthew Lyon reentered my life. He hadn’t married, but I had, to a talented fellow reporter. The only real source of
disagreement in our marriage was children. My husband once told me that it wasn’t so much that he didn’t want children; he just wasn’t sure that he wanted to have children with me—someone as focused on work as he was—since he had no interest in sacrificing his journalistic career for the sake of being a parent. And he was right: Our marriage was fine day to day, but if children had entered the picture, it would have required long-term concessions that neither of us was willing to make.

In late 1991 I published a piece in
The New York Times Magazine
that caught Matt’s attention. He was thirty-five and living in Austin. Dick and Denny were in Austin now, too, and Matt was at their house for breakfast one Sunday when he saw the article. “Is that our Katie Hafner?” he said to Denny.

Certain that we were meant to be together, Matt got in touch with me, and when he heard that I was having misgivings about my marriage, he wooed me fervently. At the time, I was commuting every few months between New York and Berlin, where I was writing freelance pieces for
The New York Times
and researching a book. Over a period of months, Matt sent a postcard or letter to Berlin every day. An inveterate clothes shopper, he shipped off dresses and blouses he hoped I’d like. When I was home in New York, he sent a large bouquet of yellow tulips; written on the card was just this line from an e. e. cummings poem: “love is the whole and more than all.”

It’s no accident that in middle and old age people often circle back to their first love. It’s a way of returning to a time when we felt safe, before real life intervened, before there was any true intimation of mortality. There’s a voice in our head—irrational, but there nonetheless—that whispers,
If only you had stayed with this person, life would have remained simple. None of the bad things would have happened
.

While Matt was trying to win me back, he came to New York, and we spent one intense weekend together. On his last night in town, we sat in my car and for a full hour he wept, mostly over his older brother, Christopher, who had died three years before, at age thirty-four, of a melanoma caught too late. He was also crying over what it felt like to be together again: His heart was back in a dwelling place that he had once believed was meant to be. And the same was true for me. Matt had offered stability where there was none, and here he was again, offering
that and more. Not only did he want children, but he had always assumed I was the one with whom he would have those children. In this life we love who we love. That Matthew felt this with such clarity took my breath away. And for that very clarity, I loved him back. Why not deposit my own uncertain heart into the hands of someone so sure of his own? I was once again in love with Matt Lyon and began to wonder if there was ever a time when I wasn’t.

Before finally deciding what to do about my marriage, I asked Matt to come with me to San Diego, to meet my mother for the first time. For years, I had been telling her about my relationships with men, and she never shied from telling me what she thought. I knew that she had no special affection for my husband the journalist. When I had told her the news of our engagement, her response was, “He’ll make a great first husband.” After we married, she grew increasingly unhappy about him, and he returned the feeling. He once sent a signed copy of a book he had written not to my mother but to my grandmother (who, ever the snob, worshipped him because he wrote for
The New York Times
, years before I did). This was a slight my mother never forgave.

The San Diego visit went splendidly. Matt arrived bearing lovely gifts, and as my mother and I stood at the baggage-claim carousel, watching the handsome Matthew wait for his bag, my mother looked at me and said, “You hit the jackpot.”

I got divorced, moved to Austin, married Matt, and promptly got pregnant. Dick and Denny welcomed me back into the fold. When Zoë was born, Denny told me that her job as Zoë’s grandmother was to spoil her, not with things but with love and attention. I returned to work after just a few weeks, and for the first several months of Zoë’s life, Denny spent the days with her only granddaughter. She brooked no contradiction to her method of infant care. One day when Zoë had a cold, I came home to find my daughter swaddled in blankets. “I’m sweating it out of her,” Denny announced. Had anyone else mummy-wrapped my infant in ninety-degree heat, I’d have objected, and strongly. But since it was Denny, I didn’t question it, and, of course, Zoë’s fever broke that night. Denny remains convinced that those early months created a special bond between them, and I agree.

For many years I believed that Matt and his family saved me. And
for years I’ve thanked whoever or whatever it was that summoned those Lyons back into my life. But I’ve gradually come to understand that it wasn’t just Matt’s family that saved me. Matt and Denny and Dick and the rest of their big brood were there, but it was I who knew to seek them out. So in a way, I saved myself. Even—or perhaps especially—when things were at their most chaotic and painful, my natural tendency was to gravitate to sanity, while my sister tilted toward tumult and chaos. Who can know what combination of genes, neurotransmitters, birth order, phase of the moon, or divine intervention determines such things? But I was clearly the lucky one.