Mother Daughter Me (32 page)

That’s not far off, for Bob is constitutionally incapable of taking life—or himself—too seriously. He has the gift of teasing out the lighter side of nearly everyone he meets. He certainly does that with me, but it isn’t all he does. He supports and loves who I am without needing to be any of that. (Once, when I told him I’d like to send him poems, he responded,
“Okay, but not too often.”) And, amazingly, he reads my moods like no man I’ve ever been with. We warp and woof our way through the days, and there’s something about that oddball synergy that just works.

A friend of mine who knows Bob sent me an email recently about another man we’re both acquainted with, a brilliant writer who loves language and languages, loves to read, loves poetry, is passionate and deep, and would
get
my Kafka obsession. His intensity is a wellspring for all that exquisite writing. In her note, my friend said that she saw this writer, or someone like him, as the more likely match for me. I wrote back to her and said that there was a time when I would have agreed. But I now think the opposite is true. If I were with a man like our writer friend, I’d be dragged down by the deepness. What I need is not someone whose darker sensibilities mirror my own but someone who lightens that load for me.

ONCE BOB LEAVES, CANDACE
and I start putting some loose papers into a tall, bulky wooden file cabinet with sticky drawers. It’s an object that belonged to Matt, and I complained about it constantly when he was alive. But he loved it, and now I refuse to part with it. I’m going through a box of papers when I stumble upon the old papers from the custody hearing forty years ago, the documents I took from my father’s house after he died. There’s something about the lure of primary sources I can’t resist, and before long I’m engrossed. Candace sees me and gets curious. I hand her some papers to look at too. She knows all about that time in my life, and she starts to read through them.

I see her lingering on one, then focusing on it intensely.

“Katie,” she says, “your mother got screwed.”

She hands me a few of the papers. One is a legal pleading my father wrote to the court two weeks in advance of the hearing for my mother’s lawsuit demanding custody and back alimony. The eleven-page document makes for fascinating reading. In it, my father described his unhappy marriage to my mother, the “conspicuous” attention my attractive young mother received from men during their eleven-year marriage, and the pitiful condition Sarah and I were in when we arrived in Rochester in the spring of 1968. In his pleading, my father sought not just
custody of Sarah and me but “release from all contractual obligations” to my mother, including all payments he might owe her in arrears, as well as any future alimony.

Candace has pulled out the same jovial lawyer-to-lawyer letter I read more than ten years ago while sitting in my father’s house after the plane crash. After commenting on the theatrical potential of their day in court, Brooks Potter, my mother’s lawyer, told my father’s counsel, “I am convinced that Judge Cook was patently wrong in his decision to … suspend future alimony, and because of that, I find it necessary to appeal from that part of the decree.”

I had gotten it all wrong. It was true that my mother had no plans to appeal the custody decision. But a decade earlier, when I saw that letter for the first time, I had managed to misunderstand what it was my mother was actually asking for, thinking she was trying to get him to pay child support after we were no longer living with her—which was what my father and Vivienne had told us at the time. My mother’s lawyer was not contesting the discontinuation of child support but the alimony.

“She got completely screwed out of money she was entitled to,” Candace says. She walks me through the documents. On the day in 1968 that Sarah and I arrived in Rochester from San Diego, my father had stopped all payments—not just child support but alimony too. So for the two years we were with my father and Vivienne, my father hadn’t paid my mother a penny in alimony, and she had taken him to court for that money. During their marriage, my mother had hurt my father repeatedly, but to discover that he had been so niggardly about paying back alimony that he legally owed her disappoints me.

In the blurry aftermath of the plane crash, I had read those documents too quickly, come away with only a fragmentary understanding, then taken them home and never glanced at them again.

As he should have, the judge ordered my father to pay the back alimony. The question of continued alimony was something else entirely. In his statement to the court, my father argued that because my mother was perfectly capable of working, she wasn’t entitled to future alimony. Since the court order isn’t among my father’s papers, the reason for the judge’s decision to deny my mother any further alimony—a decision that reversed the financial terms of their divorce agreement, under
which my father’s legal obligation had been quite unambiguous—can’t be known with certainty. Perhaps the judge agreed with my father’s argument. Or perhaps this New England puritan had concluded that my mother’s unfitness as a parent and a wife made her unworthy of support. The judge seemed determined to make an impression on this wanton young woman, cutting off all financial help—as if losing two children weren’t punishment enough. My mother never told me about the revocation of the alimony agreement, or, if she did, she must have done so during one of her liquor-soaked rants, when I often found a way to block out her words.

I now understand more clearly than ever why money is such a charged topic for my mother. Given her experience, of course she has reason to distrust my motives for bringing her to San Francisco. As for the piano, while I might have viewed her selling it as reneging on a straightforward promise, when it comes to my mother and issues involving anything of monetary value, nothing is straightforward. It’s time for me to let go of my resentment about the piano once and for all.

THAT NIGHT, UNABLE TO
sleep, I go back to the file cabinet, pull out the custody folder, and spread its contents across the dining table. I see a letter dated July 20, 1972, from a Hampshire County social worker to my father’s lawyer, and from the lawyer to my father, the sheets held together with a rusted staple. Sixteen-year-old Sarah—fresh from her ill-conceived move into the Amherst College fraternity house—was at the foster home, and both the social worker and the lawyer were having trouble reaching my father. Mrs. Eleanor Bolotin, the social worker, had written to Mr. Paul Rogers, an attorney in Amherst, to tell him that Sarah had two requests of her father. The first was for some money for clothing and other items. These are “expenses normally incurred by parents of any teenager,” she wrote. The second was Sarah’s request for “some form of psychotherapy.” The lawyer sent a letter to my father the day after receiving the social worker’s note. “I have tried several times to reach you via telephone and have been unsuccessful,” he wrote. What could my father have been so busy doing that this wasn’t a priority for him?

A full month passed before my father finally wrote back to Mrs. Bolotin.
He did not say that he would do all he could to support his daughter. Instead, he had questions of his own. “I think we must clarify the nature of her current sources of support,” he wrote. “Sarah was able to afford an expensive new bicycle, without as far as I know selling her old one. I hesitate to put forth extra allowances in a situation where she is clearly obtaining money from others.” Someone—my mother, my grandparents?—was giving Sarah money, and that’s what my father chose to focus on. Of Mrs. Bolotin’s question about the psychotherapy, he said nothing at all. It was still about the money. My father wanted to know who paid for her bicycle. I had spent my life picking and choosing the parts of my father I adored and turning a blind eye to all else. But now, perhaps for the first time, I see that he, too, was a charter member of the bad-parent cabal that had upended Sarah’s life.

AS THE DAYS GO
by, with each of us in our separate apartments, my mother and I are growing closer. Mother’s Day is approaching, and I tell her I’d like to take her out to dinner. She loves the idea, and when I ask her to choose the place, she names one of the few nice restaurants she’s been to in San Francisco, which has become her favorite.

I start to look for Mother’s Day cards, and at the local card store I flip through a few and read the messages inside:

Hmmmm … I eliminate those candidates, then finally buy one with a neutral message and augment it with my own. I say that I know it hasn’t been our best year but that I love and respect and admire her. I hope this will pass muster with her, that she won’t feel any implied criticism.

On Mother’s Day, Zoë suggests we go downtown for a shopping spree—for me, not for her. Her unhappiness with my dressing habits of
late has made her determined to preside over a makeover. I’ve taken to wearing a pair of cotton pants I would describe as loose-fitting and Zoë says are “like scrubs but worse.” On my feet I usually wear my trusty Asics running shoes with a hole in the top of the left shoe.

“Mom, you can still be comfortable and look nice,” she says. “You’re beautiful. Take advantage of your beauty before it deserts you.” Once again Zoë’s uncannily adult tone takes me by surprise.

At the mall, Zoë takes me into a store she knows that sells “age-appropriate” form-fitting dresses. We both pick out a few that might suit me, and I try them all on. Zoë is in high spirits, having just received prom invitations from two different boys, and one of her Mother’s Day gifts to me is a moratorium on her usual impatience. She sits happily outside my dressing room and waits for me to model each of the dresses. I settle on one, and Zoë is thrilled to see how good I look in it. So am I.

Over lunch at the food court, Zoë tells me she can’t stop thinking about the incident with Gwen, which made her lose respect for her friend. “I don’t think drinking is cool,” she says. “I don’t like the taste and I don’t see what people are trying to prove to each other, just by showing how much they can drink. People are ugly when they’re drunk. And knowing the effect it has on your body, it’s disgusting. Did you know alcohol crosses the blood–brain barrier?” More intent than ever on becoming a doctor, Zoë has been accompanying Bob on rounds at the hospital lately. Tagging along with him and the teams of young residents he works with hasn’t merely reinforced her desire to be a physician; it has made her determined to become a hospitalist, like Bob. As for me, I don’t know what the blood–brain barrier is or why the traversing of same would be a bad thing, but I nod anyway, surprised and impressed by the mix of clinical detachment and passion with which she delivers her speech. Although I wish there had been a less unpleasant way to underscore the point, I’m also relieved by Zoë’s revulsion for heavy drinking.

I say nothing to Zoë about joining my mother and me for Mother’s Day dinner, she doesn’t ask for an invitation, and my mother has also been mum on the subject. For this I am grateful. I’m no longer trying to yoke these disparate elements together, and I guess they’re as relieved as I am. Just before going to pick up my mother for dinner, I drop off a
miniature rosebush with the card at the restaurant and ask the maître d’ to put them at our table.

Once we get to the restaurant, and my mother sees the plant waiting for her at the table, I can tell she is touched. When she opens the card, she seems almost overwhelmed and begins to cry. I order a glass of wine, a delicious red from Portugal that I select whenever I go to this restaurant. My mother and I start to chat and I notice right away that we seem to have found a new ease with each other, perhaps a consequence of our no longer living together, or maybe it’s the fact that we’ve finally put the issue of the piano behind us. We talk about how much we both love our new apartments. My mother tells me about a new organization called San Francisco Village, which helps seniors figure out ways to stay in their homes as they age. The idea of building networks of friends, family, and service professionals to help people “age in place” is catching on, and San Francisco Village is one of a dozen or so such communities sprouting up around the country. My mother is apparently so happy in her new apartment, so intent on remaining there for as long as possible, that she recently even paid a $600 annual fee to join San Francisco Village.

My wine arrives and I savor every sip. I tell her I just watched
Up in the Air
, the George Clooney movie about a hatchet man who flies around the country laying people off, and I didn’t like it much. My mother says she not only stopped watching the film less than halfway through but had to take it out of her DVD player and return it to Netflix immediately because all she could think about was my own layoff from the
Times
.

I tell her about the incident with Gwen and Zoë’s reaction to it. She listens carefully, and even a topic that could have turned heavy doesn’t. The vomiting from too much alcohol, yes, she says, she knows about that. “That’s a problem I never had,” she adds. Her drinking is now something we can talk about, in general terms, and treat like an unwelcome visitor from the past that we’re well rid of.

Every topic we touch feels as light as air—with one exception. She tells me that she now talks to Sarah three or four times a day, which is to say that Sarah calls three or four times a day and my mother picks up the phone every single time she sees it’s Sarah calling, whether she feels like it or not. This, she tells me, is the way she can finally give something to
Sarah, who seems to need her so much. I’m listening to this, nodding, and wondering how long this dance between Sarah and my mother can go on before the collapse. But that’s probably beside the point, for I also sense that for now, at least, this is a good thing for both of them. My mother clearly believes that she is helping Sarah, and it’s equally clear to me that she is helping herself. These phone calls are a balm for her guilt.