Mother Daughter Me (35 page)

My mother wants to go for a walk. I jump up from the couch to go with her. Zoë says she wants to come too. Wanting to give us space, Bob remains behind. While the three of us walk around my block and through the small park in front of Grace Cathedral, we say very little.

When we come home, my mother says she wants to get something to eat. I doubt she’s hungry, but I can tell she’d rather do anything besides sit still. Zoë wants to come as well. The three of us drive to a little pasta restaurant my mother has never been to. She says how happy she is to
discover a new place to eat. She isn’t ready to talk about anything else. We focus on the food. We’ve all ordered minestrone, and Zoë says she likes my minestrone soup better. Zoë is solicitous of my mother and asks her if she’s eaten enough. After we eat, my mother wants to go home. She insists she’ll be fine by herself.

After dropping her off, all I can think about is what John must have felt when he returned home from the hospital. Their four cats. The bed left behind in a cloud of panic and pain. The kitchen with dinner dishes still in the sink. The movie they were watching still in the DVD player. I can imagine every detail of what he faced when he walked in that front door.

I call my mother to see how she’s doing. She’s subdued. She tells me she’s having trouble believing it.

“It’s the first time you’ve lost someone you really love,” I say.

“That’s true,” she says. There is no talk of dogs. She knows this is different. Sarah was her child. My mother is clear-eyed about this. She has spent months on the other end of a phone line, letting Sarah know she would never again desert her, until the day she died. And now she is the one left behind.

JOHN DECIDES TO WAIT
until the spring for a memorial service. My mother sees no reason to travel east until there’s a formal service, and my friend Carolyn suggests that my mother and I hold our own small West Coast shiva service. Michael Lezak, the gentle rabbi from our reform synagogue who presided over Zoë’s bat mitzvah four years ago, will come to our home.

I turn the apartment into a forest of framed photographs: Sarah at age eight at the Cape house, cross-legged and folding origami; a series of photos with Sarah and me in matching sunsuits, my arms wrapped around her; another two or three years later, and I’m still looking up at her with all the adoration of a younger sister while she stares straight at the camera; the two sisters as adults, walking down a street in Manhattan, Sarah’s arm around my shoulder; a joyous Sarah at her wedding to John; and old black-and-white photos of my glamorous mother posing with her two small children.

On the night of the service, Carolyn and two other friends show up early with platters laden with food. Half a dozen or so of my mother’s new San Francisco friends come—all of them lovely people, most at least eighty years old.

Rabbi Lezak starts the service. Zoë is seated next to him. After leading a few prayers, the rabbi asks people who knew Sarah to speak up and tell stories. There’s silence. Many of my friends know one another, but none has ever met my sister, who seldom left her little New England town. Candace is the only exception, but she’s eight thousand miles away, on a business trip to Qatar.

I speak. I talk about how much I adored Sarah when we were little. Although we grew apart, I always felt her there. I tell one funny story that doesn’t strike me as particularly symbolic until I’m halfway through it: One summer, when we were sixteen and eighteen, we took a Greyhound bus across the country from Amherst to San Diego to visit our mother. We were pretty worldly in some ways but naïve in others. Without knowing what we were doing, we boarded a local bus. On what should have been a three-day cross-country trip, we took four days just to reach Chicago, at which point we finally figured out that we needed to catch an
express
bus. People chuckle. Then I talk about Sarah’s quilts covered with fanciful houses. I had looked for Zoë’s baby quilt to show the group but wasn’t able to find it. So I describe that quilt—one of dozens Sarah sewed over the years, adding up to hundreds and hundreds of nothing but houses, cut and stitched together.

My mother speaks next. If Sarah were here, “she would have been making faces” during the prayers and “I would have been telling her to behave.” This is what a mother would say to a small child, as though Sarah is fixed in her mind at age ten. Our mother missed so much of our growing up.

I’m surprised when Zoë speaks. She delivers a touching little speech about the boxes Sarah had sent the previous year and the eccentric collection of items they contained: the remainder-table books, the hair clips, a kimono. But the five seasons of
Weeds
were the best, Zoë says. She would always be grateful to her aunt Sarah for introducing her to the television show.

Afterward, people mingle and eat. Bob leaves to catch a plane for a
work trip. One of my mother’s friends stands fixated before a photograph of my mother when she was young and married to my father. In it, she’s holding her two small daughters on her lap. The friend takes me aside to express her awe at my mother’s beauty, and I’m delighted that someone noticed. My mother was stunning at age twenty-five and remains beautiful to this day. I wish Sarah could be here with me, be at my side, see what I see.

SARAH’S DEATH MAKES ME
redouble my commitment to our mother, on my sister’s behalf as well as my own. In the days following, I call her at least twice a day to check in. A week after Sarah’s death, my mother takes me out for a late birthday dinner—to the same fancy Italian restaurant I had taken her for Mother’s Day. This time, Zoë comes along. “I’m so glad we found a favorite restaurant,” Zoë says during dinner, “for when the three of us want to go somewhere special.” The next day, my mother calls to tell me how happy she was to hear Zoë say that—“the three of us.” I’m happy, too, but I’ve learned not to expect too much, too soon.

That morning, my mother also wants to talk about Bob, not to harp but to recant. On the day Sarah died, Bob rose so admirably to the occasion, she observes. And my mother has seen that when it comes to Bob’s clinical manner, he’s consistent.

“He doesn’t effuse about anything,” she says. “He doesn’t treat you any differently than he treats me. And with Zoë, he’s just the same.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I say. “That’s Bob.”

It takes me several weeks to remove all the photographs of Sarah. Late one night before going to bed, I do a sweep of the apartment, removing the framed photographs. But there’s one I don’t put away, because it has always lived on my hall table. It’s a large black-and-white print of Sarah and me on our trikes, in front of the Rochester house, at ages five and three. Sarah the free spirit is barefoot, and I’m in a pair of well-worn but sturdy saddle shoes. Sarah is wearing a white blouse and full skirt; I’m in a plain plaid dress with short sleeves, stiff white cuffs, and a white collar that suggests a future in the clergy. But it’s Sarah who looks the more angelic. She directs a tentative, vulnerable smile at my
father’s camera, while my own expression is noncommittal and earnest, Platonic in its blankness—like I’m taking it all in, already learning to observe, not engage. Sarah is looking straight at the camera, but she’s also whispering something to me, something intimate and promising.

I’ve passed that photo several times a day for years, but until this moment I haven’t bothered to look at the background. We two sisters are on the long driveway; there’s a carefully trimmed hedge behind us, and two young trees. I take the photograph and put it next to my computer on the dining room table. I type the address—122 Chelmsford Road—into Google Maps. Up pops the house. I zoom in on the photo. There’s the big stucco house, set back from the street. And there’s the long driveway, as long as I remember, and the very same hedge, now unkempt, and the trees, now matured. Those two little girls on their tricycles have long since been plucked out of the picture. No doubt there have been many other kids, in strollers and wagons and on trikes and pogo sticks, bicycles and skateboards, then hand-me-down cars, traveling that driveway in the forty-seven years since Sarah and I left the scene. I look at the photograph again. We’re going somewhere on those trikes of ours, we just don’t know where.

THE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK OCCURRED TO ME IN NOVEMBER 2009, NEARLY
three months after my mother and I began our experiment in multigenerational living. I started out with no clue as to what might happen in the next week, let alone the next year. Nonetheless, Jim Levine, my agent, thought that whatever happened, it was bound to be interesting. Susan Kamil and Beth Rashbaum, my editors at Random House, agreed—and they never wavered, even as the story took unexpected turns. For that, and much more, all three have my considerable gratitude.

For friendship, hospitality, editorial input, and unalloyed honesty, I am grateful to Susan Alexander, Sam Barondes, Josh Benditt, Tony Bianco, Mara Brazer, Louann Brizendine, Teresa Carpenter, Julie Beckett Crutcher, Bill Davidow, Dan Farber, Sheila Fifer, Laura Fisher, Tina Frank, Joe Freda, Sarah Glazer, Denise Grady, Anisse Gross, Alison Gwinn, Bobbie Head, Michele and Steve Heller, Brigitte Hesch, Mollie Katzen, Paulette Kessler, Carolyn Klebanoff, Dan Kornstein, Rosanne Leipzig, Steven Levy, Denny Lyon, Nancy Miller, Carol Pogash, Diana Raimi, Jessica Raimi, Adele Riepe, Richard Rockefeller, Robert Saar, Marlene Saritzky, Tiffany Shlain, Amy Slater, Blair Stone, Candace Thille, Deborah and Brooke Unger, Abraham Verghese, Andrea Wachter, Bernice Wachter, Murray Wachter, Cathie Bennett Warner, Meredith White, Lori Wolfson, and Jeremy Zucker.

Many thanks to D’Vera Cohn at the Pew Research Center, Steven Ruggles at the University of Minnesota, and Rebecca Plant at the University
of California, San Diego, for their insights into multigenerational living. Chris Chorazewski and his colleagues at the London Library provided me with a quiet place to sit and work.

Beth Rashbaum and Susan Kamil, editors nonpareil, are every writer’s dream. They pushed, prodded, suggested, commiserated, and inspired—all in the right mix and always at the right times. The manuscript also benefited from the keen and careful eyes of Kathleen Lord, Diana D’Abruzzo, Loren Noveck, and Benjamin Dreyer. Many thanks, too, to Sam Nicholson, Susan’s assistant. In addition to Jim Levine, thanks to Kerry Sparks, Beth Fisher, and the other skilled hands at the Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.

Judith Wallerstein, who died in 2012, greatly influenced my thinking on the lasting effects of divorce on families. I was so taken with her work that I went to visit her at her home in Marin County while I was writing this book. She was warm and welcoming, and we became friends. Were she alive, I would thank her deeply for her contributions to the study of the psychological effects of divorce and loss.

My thanks and love go to Bob Wachter, for claiming never to tire of reading the manuscript in its various stages of completion (the number of times he read it far exceeds his golf handicap), for demanding “more cowbell” at crucial points, and for being so wonderfully Bob throughout. Little did I know when I began this book that I’d be chronicling not only a relationship among three generations of women, but also one between me and an exceptional man, who also happens to be a damned fine writer and editor.

I have changed the names of several people, including that of my mother, the central character of this story, which describes not only the problems that cropped up between us during a critical time of transition, but her triumph in making a new life for herself in San Francisco. While she has been less than thrilled to be featured in her daughter’s memoir, I hope that she will ultimately see this as an honest portrayal of a brilliant and complex woman whom I continue to love and who, I believe, did the best she could at a terrible time in her life. I know there is much in the story that she would rather not relive, but I hope she understands that in the process of my reliving it through this book I have come to admire her all the more.

It can’t be easy for a teenager to see her life put out there for all to read. But Zoë Lyon, my infinitely wise and generous daughter, has been unreserved in her encouragement. She instructed me from the start to write the book as I saw it—and she didn’t change her mind. Zoë, thank you not only for being my darling daughter, but also for reminding me every day of the memory of your father. I love you more than my arms could ever stretch.