Mother Daughter Me (23 page)

I look back on that terrible mistake and I now see that it was almost preordained. The Al-Anon literature, which I had for years avoided so assiduously, describes adult children of alcoholics most tellingly: “We
are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment and will do anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to experience painful abandonment feelings.”

It would be too tidy to assign blame to Scott for the way things played out, to say that instead of seeing Zoë for the grief-stricken child she was, he punished her for it and allowed his children to do the same. That’s true, of course, but while every intersecting point went sour, while we all played a part in the drama, Zoë had a starring role. She hated seeing me in love with a man who was not her father. She hated watching him absorb my attention, which she believed by all rights should be hers and hers alone. I had no inkling that two years later I would see a repeat of that dynamic, as day after day passed without a word exchanged between my mother and my daughter. It would be some time after both of these disasters before I recognized my own complicity, saw that by always trying to follow the path of least resistance I made things worse for everybody. And yet it takes a tremendous amount of strength to break the patterns of a lifetime. I wasn’t there yet.

Zoë and I were alone again and just beginning to pick up the pieces of the past five years when, two months after Scott left, I got caught in a newsroom cutback and was laid off with no warning. I had dropped Zoë at school and was on my way to work when I got a call from the
Times
’s business editor, summoning me to the San Francisco Hyatt to meet with a “masthead” editor from New York, who was in town for a few hours to hand me my papers, on her way to other bureaus to do the same to a handful of other reporters.

Unemployment was everything it was cracked up to be: Horrible. And frightening. For several months I lost my footing altogether. I have no memory of this, but Denny told me later that when I called her the day I was laid off, through my sobs I said, over and over, “They’re going to take my child away. They’re going to take my child away”—as if, stripped of my livelihood, I would lose Zoë, who would be taken into protective custody, away from a mother who could no longer care for her.

I had never lost a job. And being laid off from
The New York Times
has a particularly cruel edge to it. Working for the
Times
is insidious that way. If you’re not careful—and most
Times
reporters aren’t—your
identity gets wrapped up in it. You forget where you end and the paper begins. When I encountered people I had met before who had trouble recalling my name, instead of “Remind me of your name,” they would nod in recognition and simply say,
“New York Times.”

The layoff also threw Zoë. She said she felt as if her father had died all over again, and her separation anxiety escalated into full-blown panic. We had been planning for months for her to go to a camp in upstate New York that summer, but as soon as I dropped her off, she started to have trouble. The camp had bad cell service, so if she wanted to talk to me—which was every minute of the day—she had to walk from her cabin to the dining hall to use the pay phone. If I didn’t answer the phone when she called, it caused a terrifying panic attack, and her mind filled with images of me flatlining in a hospital or being hit by a drunk driver.

When we did finally connect, she would feel anxious again the second we hung up. She had long been seeing a grief therapist, and after he spoke with Zoë to assess the situation, he told me to bring her home. We followed through with the next planned summer event, a two-week academic program for her in Oxford. But this time I went with her. We both bought cheap cellphones and stayed in constant touch during the day. Nights I spent with her in her dormitory room, sleeping in the narrow bed while Zoë slept on the floor beside me.

It wasn’t until December of 2008, seven months after I lost my job and nearly seven years after Matt’s death, that Zoë was able to make it through a day without calling me to make sure I was alive.

———

I
T COULD BE THE NAGGING PRESENCE OF ALL THE BOXES IN THE GARAGE
, still crowding my mother’s car, awaiting my attention, but Matt is on my mind. One night I dream he isn’t dead after all, that it’s been a huge mistake, the cosmic equivalent of a clerical error. The next day, with Zoë in the car, I say, “Last night I dreamed your dad was still alive.”

“I’ve had that dream like three thousand times,” she says casually. “He just comes to school to pick me up and everything is totally normal.”

Different as they are, Zoë’s and my dreams point to the trouble we both have when it comes to carrying Matt’s memory with us. And I now see that I mean this in a material as well as an emotional sense. There have been things of his that I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, part with. This includes not only no-brainers like his personal correspondence and his writing but even his favorite boxers and T-shirts. The down jacket we
warmed ourselves in when we met in the cornfield during our high school years, now faded and torn, hangs in my closet, next to my own clothes. Very occasionally, I bury my nose in it.

Through eight years and four moves, I have carried around some two dozen boxes filled with these tangible memories. But in the process of culling my own things during this last move, I have begun to see that Matt’s boxes have taken on a distinct, mulish character of their own, refusing to be much more than a burden. I resolve to sort through them, box by box. I had already sent Matt’s family the things they wanted. The goal, I decide, is to end up with a much smaller collection of things that will ultimately pass to Zoë, although Zoë, now sixteen, claims not to care. “Mom, I don’t remember him. Why would I want his old stuff?” Of course she remembers him, but she needs to minimize her connection to him. For me, the boxes are comforting; they help assuage my sense of loss. But Zoë is still working her way toward acknowledging that loss.

I probably wouldn’t have mustered the energy for this winnowing process had it not been for Cheryl the downsizer, who knows that sorting through tangible memories can be more difficult than grappling with the intangible ones. Objects, in their very concreteness, tell a more relentlessly truthful story than memories do.

I had started to think about what to do with Matt’s possessions when Cheryl was helping us move in to the house with my mother. While I focused on unpacking the household boxes, Cheryl went at Matt’s things in the garage—not to edit them but to make sure they were properly stored. Over the years the boxes had crumpled, which bothered her. She wanted to honor him, she said, and bent boxes simply wouldn’t do. She washed and folded all the clothes (she told me that some had actually collected mold), then repacked everything into uniform labeled boxes, which she placed in their own little section of the garage.

Now, in mid-December, I’m finally ready to weed the boxes. But I don’t know where to start, and I call Cheryl. She carries a map of the entire garage in her head and can tell me where every box is located: artwork tucked against the far wall; his writing—college papers, speeches, correspondence—immediately above; clothing adjacent to that, et cetera. What I really need to know is not where it all is, however,
but how to decide what to keep, especially in light of Zoë’s apparent indifference. Cheryl weighs in with some wisdom that will become my guidepost in the days that follow. “I don’t know if you even have to think about what Zoë might like,” she tells me. “Instead, think about what Matt might want Zoë to know about him, or what you want her to know about him.”

Every morning, I take my coffee out to the garage to work on the boxes. One morning I pull down a box labeled
DOCUMENTS
and begin digging through it, with a recycling bag at my side. A third of the way into the box, I come upon a bundle of letters, dozens of romantic missives from a parade of ex-girlfriends. They’re postmarked Los Angeles, Amherst, Connecticut, Boston, and Austin. I try not to read them but get sucked in. There was one ardent marriage proposal (from the girlfriend) and a fraught reference to an abortion. I wince. I knew about most of these women, had even become friends with two of them. (But who was
Nikki
?) Why would I want Zoë to see these? I throw them into the recycling bag.

Then I feel disgusted with myself. Here I am, standing in my garage, playing God with Matt’s life, editing out the fact that other women had loved him and that there were other women he had loved. I stop for the day. That night, a friend calls and I tell her about the letters. She offers this: “The only relationship with a woman Zoë really needs to know about is his relationship with you.”

The next box I open is far easier to deal with. It contains a lot of work papers, only a few of which strike me as important keepsakes. Matt’s political work was mainly in speechwriting, and the man had a gift for it. I tuck the most eloquent speeches into a Z
OË
box.

Just as I’m working my way to the bottom of the work-related papers, Zoë pokes her head into the garage. She’s all attitude. “Why are you wasting your time with this shit?” she demands.

Her coarse language is a jolt. “Zoë, do you have to use swear words?”

“Oh, come on, Mom, everyone does it. You wouldn’t believe the language in high school.” She stops, but only to catch her breath. “And, besides, what would you suggest I say instead?”

“I don’t know. ‘Crudbuckets’?”

This sends her into gales of laughter. “
Crudbuckets?
Are you kidding? You mean like, ‘I got a B minus on my history paper. Crudbuckets!’ ”

Now we’re both laughing. Then she stops and points at Matt’s passes from the 1984 and 1988 Democratic National Conventions. Her eyes light up. “What are those?” she asks.

When I explain, she asks me to keep them for her. Suddenly she’s interested. She spots a photo of Matt from the early 1980s. She walks away with it and reappears ten minutes later. “Mom, look at this.” She holds the photograph up for me to see, and next to it she holds a recent photograph of herself. Perhaps this will help her remember her father, this astonishing resemblance between the man in his early twenties and his daughter at sixteen. Later I see that she has tacked up the photos side by side on her bulletin board.

I feel as though something has shifted in Zoë, allowing her both to connect more deeply with her father and to acknowledge the feelings of loss she has been avoiding for so long. When I eventually get around to sorting through Matt’s clothes, she latches on to one of his sweaters, a nubby and soft blanket of a garment.

Over the days and weeks that follow, I develop a keener sense of what else might really matter to Zoë—and to Matt. I find another box of letters, and mixed in the stack are all the letters from me, dating back to the late 1970s after we had broken up, letters he didn’t answer. He had kept all of them. He had also kept our more-recent correspondence, including a postcard I sent to him on his birthday in 1992, shortly after we were reunited. On the front was a photo of a dozen or so antique Steiff teddy bears, staring at the camera with their beady little button eyes, the way small children often do. I had clearly been fantasizing about what our children might look like: “Will they be like this?” I wrote on the card. “Blond hair and brown eyes? I hope so. Happy birthday, dear Matthew. You’re right. Life is long. And big. Isn’t it?” We were so wrong. Life might have been big but it wasn’t long, at least not for him. I take the postcard and all my other letters to Matt and add them to the box that contains all the letters he wrote to me, which I’ve kept in a drawer of my bedside table.

By the end of my time in the garage, I’ve made my way through everything,
condensing the palimpsest of Matt’s life into a tidy handful of boxes for Zoë to take with her someday. This much, I think, we can manage to carry around with us for the next few years. A few of his sweaters, including that old brown one Zoë likes, live with us in the house. When Zoë wears it, her hair, now blondish-brown and really just a longer version of Matt’s, flows down her back, blending into the wool. And whenever I see her in that sweater, I think that maybe life is long after all.

THE FITS AND STARTS
with which Zoë grapples with Matt’s death are in evidence again a few weeks later, when, for Christmas, I take her on a trip to Whistler, a ski resort north of Vancouver, British Columbia. At passport control at the Vancouver airport, the guard takes my passport, then Zoë’s, and notes the different surnames. Perhaps he also sees that we look nothing alike, because he asks, “What is your relationship?”

“I’m her mother.”

“And where is the father?”

In unison, Zoë and I reply, “He’s dead.”

I’m both surprised and impressed that she has said this so matter-of-factly and without resorting to euphemisms to soften it, like “passed” or “deceased”—fine words to use when filling out a form requiring information about both parents, but not, I believe, when asked a question as direct as the one posed by the border guard.

In the days that follow, we bask in the old rhythms of our mother–daughter dyad. We focus our conversations on Zoë: her skis, her ski lessons, her ski boots, her helmet and goggles, her hungers and thirsts, her friends, her teachers—and boys. I let her know that she should feel free to talk to me about boys. She doesn’t brush me off, nor is she entirely forthcoming. I recognize this as the start of the natural—and necessary—process of separating from me, and it feels right. It’s perhaps the first time in her life when she will no longer allow me to know her fully. The reverse has always applied to me as well, which has also felt right. I’ve never spoken with her about my sex life, and Matt and I were discreet. As a little girl, Zoë liked to crawl into bed with us in the morning but never came close to doing so at an inappropriate moment.
Years later, I asked her how she timed her entrances, and she said, “I would lie in bed and wait until I heard you talking and laughing.”