Kinsey and Me (21 page)

part two

. . . and me

introduction

D
URING THE COURSE
of an interview once, I was asked about the influence my father, a mystery writer
himself, had on my writing. I talked about what he’d taught me of craft, about surviving
rejection, coping with editorial criticism. When I finished, the journalist looked
up from her notes and said briskly, “Well now, you’ve talked about your father, but
what did you learn from your mother?” Without even pausing to consider, I said, “Ah,
from my mother I learned all the lessons of the human heart.”

One of the benefits of growing up as the child of two alcoholics was my lack of supervision.
Every morning, my father downed two jiggers of whiskey and went to the office. My
mother, similarly fortified, went to sleep on the couch. From the age of five onward,
I was left to raise myself, which I did as well as I could, having had no formal training
in parenthood. I lived in an atmosphere of apparent permissiveness. I read anything
I liked, roamed the city at will, rode the bus lines from end to end, played out intense
melodramas with the other kids in the neighborhood. (I was usually an Indian princess,
tied to the stake.) I went to the movies on Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and
again on Sunday. There were few, if any, limits placed on me.

My sister, three years older than me, spent a lot of time in her room. She and my
mother clashed often. I was Little Mary Sunshine, tap-dancing my way through life
just to the left of stage center, where the big battles took place. Discipline, when
it came, was arbitrary and capricious. We had no allies, my sister and I. When life
seemed unbearable, my father, to comfort me, would sit on the edge of my bed and recount
in patient detail the occasion when the family doctor had told him he’d have to choose
between her and us and he’d chosen her because she was weak and needed him and we
were strong and could survive. In such moments, at the ages of eight and ten and twelve,
I would reassure him so he wouldn’t feel guilty at having left us to such a fate.
My father was perfect. It was only later that I dared experience the rage I felt for
him
. Not surprisingly, I grew up confused, rebellious, fearful, independent, imaginative,
curious, free-spirited, and anxious. I wanted to be good. I wanted to do everything
right. I wanted to get out of that house.

By the time I was eighteen, I was obsessed with writing. I was also married for the
first time—twin paths, leading in opposite directions. The writing was my journey
into the self, the marriage a detour into a world I thought I could perfect if I were
allowed to make all the choices myself. I was convinced I could construct a “normal”
household, unaware that I possessed only the clumsiest of tools. I was determined
to have a picture-book life, and was dismayed to discover my efforts were as amateurish
as a child’s. How could I have known I hadn’t yet finished growing up when it
felt
like I’d been running my own life since I was five?

In the years between eighteen and thirty-seven, when I began to fashion the “personhood”
of Kinsey Millhone, writing was my salvation—the means by which I learned to support
myself, to face the truth, to take responsibility for my future. I have often said
that Kinsey Millhone is the person I might have been had I not married young and had
children. She is more than that. She is a stripped-down version of my “self”—my shadow,
my projection—a celebration of my own freedom, independence, and courage. It is no
accident that Kinsey’s parents were killed when she was five. My father went into
the army when I was three. He came back when I was five and that’s when the safety
of my childhood began to unravel. Through Kinsey, I tell the truth, sometimes bitter,
sometimes amusing. Through her, I look at the world with a “mean” eye, exploring the
dark side of human nature—my own in particular.

If Kinsey Millhone is my alter ego, Kit Blue is simply a younger version of me. The
following thirteen stories were written in the decade following my mother’s death,
my way of coming to terms with my grief for her. I realized early in the process of
the writing that I could take any moment I remembered and cut straight to the heart
of our relationship. It was as if all moments—any moment, every moment—were the same.
Every incident I had access to seemed connected at the core; that rage, that pain,
all the scalding tears I wept, both during her life and afterward. All of it is part
of the riddle I think of now as love.

a woman capable of anything

K
IT SAT IN
her mother’s rocking chair, watching her mother smoke. Her mother lay on the couch
with a paperback novel which she’d put facedown on her chest so that she could light
her cigarette without losing her place. From where Kit sat, she could see the top
of her mother’s head, the pale hair disarranged, the length of her mother’s body,
wasted and thin. Her feet were bare except for the nylon peds she wore and her toes
occasionally made a lazy circle, idle movement in that otherwise still frame. The
hand which rested on the rim of the coffee table made the journey from the ashtray
to her mother’s mouth and back, cigarette glowing, ash increasing until Kit strained
at the sight, expecting at any moment, cigarette, ash and ember would tumble. There
were already ridges burned into the table, black scars on the rug where fallen cigarettes
had eaten away the fibers. Her mother’s hands were bony, fingers long and thin, the
fingernails as tough as horn. Kit bit her own nails. Her fingernails were soft and
ragged and she needed to work them with her teeth, gnawing at the skin at the tips
until they were raw. She was fascinated by her mother’s nails, gnawed at them sometimes,
taking her mother’s bony fingers, testing their mettle against that anxious hunger
of hers. She had sucked her thumb as a child until her mother painted her thumb with
something fiery hot. Her mother had even tried painting her own fingertips to keep
Kit from putting them in her mouth but Kit had a taste by then for that acid heat
that ate into her tongue like liquid ice.

Her mother’s cigarette went out, but the hand remained, resting on the edge of the
table, poised while her mother drifted into sleep. Her breathing slowed until Kit,
watching, wondered if she were dead. Often she sat and stared at her mother that way,
wondering if she would die like that, on the couch in the cool of the day. Maybe alcoholics
died from never waking up or died from lying down too long. Kit hated her with a kind
of resignation, patience, servitude. Kit sat with her mother, talked to her, fixed
toast for her or a cup of tea, and all the while, she felt like some ancient doctor
with a dying thing, a zombie lady or a skeleton. How could she love what was not even
alive?

Kit had seen other mothers in the world. She had seen women who were sober all day
long, bright-eyed and talkative, who dressed up in high-heeled shoes and went to country
clubs, who cleaned their houses, cooked meals, drank coffee in the afternoons and
laughed, women who joined the PTA and took their daughters to department stores to
buy them bras. Kit’s mother could hardly go anywhere. She drove the car from time
to time, a black 1940 Oldsmobile with Hydra-Matic drive, perched on a cushion and
even so, not tall enough to see with ease. Her mother drove slowly, hugging the right
side of the street and sometimes Kit caught her breath at how close her mother came
to skinning parked cars. Her mother ordered groceries from the corner store, ordered
liquor from the drugstore four blocks down and in that manner managed to live most
of her life in the living room, stretched out on the couch. In the kitchen, colored
women would iron for hours and in the yard, the grass was mowed by colored men. And
all the time, Vanessa lay there, saying nothing, moving not at all except to smoke.
What went on inside that head? What could her mother think of hour after hour, day
after day? Kit could remember that her mother had once played the piano and when she
was angry, she’d sit there pounding the keys, the thunderous chords announcing her
displeasure to the rooms upstairs. What was the woman angry about? In those days,
they had at least known, that she felt
something
. Now, no one was sure. The anger had been sealed off and burned in silence now: frustration,
defeat, whatever it was she felt. Kit had seen that veil come down across her mother’s
face. When she was angry now, she just withdrew, her facial expression fading, lids
coming down to shield those telling eyes. No one would know if there was pain or tears.
She was like a secretive child, stealing away to a world she had locked up inside,
like an animal nibbling from some secret store. It was hard to love a lady who couldn’t
cry. It made Kit feel too much power, too little care. Kit wept bitterly, scalded
at times by the loathing that welled up like tears. There were times too when she
felt a great rush of pity, of shame and love and regret. Whatever else she was, Vanessa
was the only mother Kit had, the only place Kit knew that was really home, however
silent, tortured, and chill.

Sometimes Vanessa’s condition deteriorated to the level of disease and then an ambulance
came, attendants lifting her mother from the couch to the stretcher, wheeling her
out to the street, where the neighbors would stand, full of sympathy. They liked her
mother, who in her better days had been their friend, who’d listened to their aging
ills when she called them up on the phone. Now in silence they watched her ride away
and they would question Kit afterward about how Vanessa was getting along. Within
a week or ten days she’d be home, that miraculous change having taken place. Vanessa
would be back on her feet, exuberant, energetic, and gay, and each time, Kit’s heart
would fill with hope. Vanessa would plan the meals, would chat in the kitchen with
Jessie or Della while they ironed, would supervise the black men in the yard, make
cheery phone calls to everyone. Maybe they’d go out to dinner again on Sunday nights,
the four of them, Vanessa and Daddy, Kit and her older sister, Del. Maybe they’d go
to some basketball games or to
Holiday on Ice
or maybe they’d walk to the drugstore at night to buy comic books. The burden would
lift and the world would puff up like a colored balloon and even though it wasn’t
perfect, it would be all right.

And then she would see it again in her mother’s face, the first signs of defeat, the
faint slur, exaggerated walk, the little silent trips to the pantry, where the bourbon
bottles were. Vanessa would sink back down to her day-long dream and Kit, when the
time came, would sit in her mother’s chair, keeping that vigil of hate and hope, wishing
her mother would die or that she’d go down again far enough so that someone would
come and take her away and make her right. Kit had seen it there, the evidence of
the woman who was, the light in the round face, quick bright eyes, something nervous
and splendid pouring out of that body from her very bones. This was a woman capable
of anything, the woman who had been Kit’s perfect mother once but was no more. This
was the woman whose life was failing her right before their eyes, whose year was made
up of secret cycles which lifted her first and plunged her down again, full circle,
beginning, middle, and end. And each time she rose and each time went down again until
she could rise no more. And Kit sat in her mother’s rocking chair, caught up in a
cycle of her own, of love, of pity, of hate. And she knew that her mother was lost
and strong and she knew that somewhere the thunder rang from chords still sounding
inside. But how would this woman ever be free and how would she let Kit go? How would
any of them be whole again when they’d gone down together so often into that little
death?