Mother Daughter Me (12 page)

By the time I get home, the house is eerily quiet, with only subtle signs of the earlier carnage. All lights are on, the bathroom door flung open, its light ablaze; a few candy wrappers lie on the floor. The kitchen table is stacked high with red plastic cups.

My mother comes up from the basement, looking especially intense. And spent. She opens the garbage can, pulls out the vodka bottles, still full, and puts them on the table. Zoë enters the kitchen, looking just as miserable as my mother. I seat them at opposite ends of the table (why was one of my favorite espresso cups on the table with two Ping-Pong balls in it?), and my mother immediately launches in on Zoë, who starts crying—and screaming at her grandmother. It’s clear that all Zoë cares about at this point is her reputation at school. From whatever safe redoubt he has found for continuing the party, the kid whose liquor my mother confiscated is already sending angry text messages, demanding the return of his liquor. No, I tell Zoë, he isn’t getting it back. He’s
sixteen
. What they’re doing is
illegal
. What her grandmother did was the right thing. Does she get that? She stares at me piteously.

I take the two bottles of Smirnoff and three more big bottles of Bud Light downstairs and pour them out in the bigger sink in the laundry room. As I stand there, watching the clear liquid swirl down the drain and the beer foam collect, I think about the many times I did this very
thing when I was a young girl, or watched while Sarah did it. As we emptied our mother’s bottles, we knew we were risking her wrath, but we were too desperate to care. And only a few hours earlier, by plunging into a mob of partying teens, my mother did the same thing. And she was doing it for her granddaughter. I am grateful.

———

S
OME PEOPLE ARE SUCH QUIET, BENIGN DRUNKS, YOU’D NEVER KNOW
they’re smashed. My mother was not among them. Like many children of alcoholics, I was terrified of the effect alcohol had on her. My clearest memories of my mother’s drinking are from our time in San Diego. When she drank, she grew mean. She would emerge from her bedroom once or twice a day, looking bloated and terrible, to rail about something. Sometimes she was clothed but often she was not, and she neither noticed nor cared. Her fury usually took the form of invective hurled at my absent father. I’ve forgotten many of the specific charges but do remember one thing she said to me during a particularly ferocious attack of rage: that my father spent so much time at work, she had to beg him to come home to have sex with her so Sarah would have a sibling—not something a mother would usually tell a young child.

She didn’t plan the outbursts. She didn’t lie in bed and in her stupor have a thought that enraged her, then come sailing out of her bedroom on
a wave of fury. What she really wanted to do during those protracted binges was escape entirely—from the world, from us and our needs. But her own needs—for more liquor, to use the bathroom—brought her out. And once she was in the room with us, her inhibitions stilled by the alcohol, she let loose. Sometimes we’d hear her at night, going to the kitchen to fetch more wine. She drank stronger things, of course, but my main memories are of beer and wine. Cheap red wine. She had no interest in food, so we would make sandwiches and take them to her room. If she was awake she’d sit up, her eyes swollen half shut, her face ashen and puffy, and take the plate. If she was checked out, we’d quietly put the food on the floor next to her bed. When three or four days passed with no sign of her returning to us, we occasionally resorted to extreme measures. Sometimes we simply poured the wine down the sink, and sometimes we replaced it with water and red food coloring. Sometimes we hid the car keys. Whatever we did triggered explosive anger. She would demand the keys and when we finally gave in would drive herself—regardless of her state—to the liquor store. The sound of jangling keys and beer—even soda—cans popping open haunted me well into my adulthood. Sarah’s painful memories were contained not in a sound but in a smell. For years Sarah spoke of the stomach-churning effect that the acrid smell of our kitchen sponges had on her as a child. A sponge should stand for cleanliness. To Sarah, ours signified only squalor, neglect, and the lingering odor of liquor.

Still, Sarah and I didn’t know enough of life to understand that our own could be better. After leaving Rochester, I came to see our downhill spiral as part of the natural course of things, which is perhaps the way many kids try to square themselves with the world. Of course, we knew that not everyone’s mother went from having a husband to having a series of boyfriends. And we knew that other people’s mothers were more, well, predictable. The books we read in school featured mothers in ruffled aprons cinched tight at the waist, baking cookies with which they greeted their children upon their return from school. In my main daytime fantasy, my mother wore the same half apron around her waist, and she bore a plate of chocolate chip cookies. Always chocolate chip. Now I wonder if every child of a messed-up mother nurtures an apron-and-cookies fantasy. As an adult, I chanced on a letter written by the poet Anne Sexton to her daughter Linda, four months before Sexton killed herself: “You and
Joy always said, while growing up, ‘Well, if I had a normal mother …!’ meaning the apron and the cookies and none of this typewriting stuff that was shocking the hell out of friends’ mothers …”

Even as I sensed I was being deprived of something important, I also sensed that my mother was in the grip of something very powerful. Who could look at the effects of alcohol on her and possibly conclude anything else? Alcohol’s most hideous quality is the viselike grip with which it seizes its victims. And I believed then, as I do now, that my mother had no intention of being the agent of sorrow and hurt, that she was doing the best she could, that she wanted to take care of her girls but got tripped up—by the burden of expectations, by a marriage that wasn’t what she thought it would be, by the hardship of raising two kids on her own. Once alcohol entered the mix, she didn’t stand a chance. And neither did we.

MY MOTHER HADN’T BEEN
in the UC San Diego mathematics program for long when she brought home a new man for us to meet, a fellow grad student named Dieter. He was very tall, especially when viewed by imps like us, and when he stood next to my mother she had to crane her neck to meet his eyes. Those eyes contained a twinkle of mischief, the mischief of an overgrown child. Sarah and I could tell at once that he was nothing like the men she had known in Florida. For one thing, Dieter was more than a decade younger than my mother. For another, within an hour, he seemed to want to spend as much time with Sarah and me as with our mother.

There was far more than age and height separating my mother and Dieter. She was a thirty-four-year-old divorced Jewish woman with two children, he a twenty-two-year-old mathematics exchange student from Germany. But they seemed to have a deep connection from the very beginning. He had probably never met anyone like her—quick, funny, and full of life. His English was halting, and Sarah and I giggled like maniacs while coaxing him through what he was trying to say. He called my mother Helainchen—little Helen.

Within a week of our first meeting, we were a tight foursome. Dieter kept his apartment in Pacific Beach but spent most of his time at our place. He lived for adventure. On an impulse, we’d all pile into his VW
bug and head off. We went horseback riding. We went to see the observatory on Mount Palomar. We drove east to the desert, north to Disneyland and south to Tijuana. When my mother’s sister came to visit, we all got in the Buick and drove to Las Vegas. Suddenly life was good, even glamorous. We were poor but didn’t know it, or maybe we did know, but we didn’t care, because my mother had stopped disappearing into her bedroom.

Years later, it was these periods of sobriety that allowed me to construct a magical view of the mother I could have had, for during the best of the Dieter Years I had glimpses of her. She still didn’t prepare meals, and there were still no cookies waiting for us when we returned from school. But if Sarah or I—or both of us—entered a room, we itched for the moment her eyes would find ours, because it was in that instant that her face would light up with love for her daughters, and she would open her mouth into a huge smile, as if seeing us was the happiest surprise of her life. From across a room she sometimes shaped her mouth into a kiss and sent a loud and extravagant smooch straight at us. Those were the times we lived for, and when Dieter entered our lives, those times became our norm. Dieter was fun, but he was also strict, and he pushed us to do our best in school. Anything less than an A on a report card and he raised an eyebrow. He hung a small chalkboard on the wall next to the kitchen table, and at mealtimes he quizzed us on geography and math. We loved it.

My mother and Dieter were a good match intellectually, and together they gravitated to computer programming, a brand-new field in 1966. They learned Fortran, the programming language of the day; our apartment was strewn with IBM punch cards and large printouts with lines of Fortran and assembly language, even binary code (the ones and zeroes a machine can understand). They were a duo of early geeks.

When I was in fourth grade, my mother and Dieter decided not to live together, exactly, but to move much closer to each other. As a very proper young German, Dieter believed that cohabitation was too much of a step, but de facto cohabitation was okay. If he had his own apartment, at least nominally, he wouldn’t have to tell an outright lie to his straitlaced mother back in Hanover. But instead of waiting for the school year to end or finding something in the same school district, my mother took us out in the
middle of the school year to move ten miles up the coast to Del Mar. This just when we had managed to stay nearly two full years in one elementary school, and one we both liked at that. This time I made a fuss. But my mother and Dieter hardly heard me. Once again, Sarah and I said goodbye to classmates and we all moved in to a drab little apartment complex, where my mother and Dieter rented two apartments side by side and threaded an intercom system through the adjoining wall. Dieter and my mother stayed in one apartment, and Sarah and I were next door. In the ultimate display of nuclear family togetherness, we got a puppy, a Scottish terrier we named Angus.

Our apartment building was surrounded by empty lots, which were all that separated us from the ocean. Within a couple of decades, those stretches of undeveloped land—prime coastline real estate—would be built upon, with upscale apartment complexes and million-dollar houses with ocean views. But in 1967, those barren lots were our magnificent private playground. I had a tomboy streak and recruited neighborhood boys onto an ad hoc softball team. Dieter and my mother installed a tetherball pole, which acted as a magnet for kids in the neighborhood. For the first time in years, we were enjoying what felt like a normal, quasi-suburban existence, with us at the center of everything—the popular kids with the endless playground.

My mother began pushing for marriage, but Dieter wasn’t ready. To buy himself some time and some space for reflection, he followed his graduate adviser, who was moving to the math department at Princeton. Once Dieter was gone, Sarah and I longed for him, but loss and change were now familiar to us, and we had gotten pretty good at it. We soon came to realize, however, how central Dieter was to my mother’s stability. Within a few months of his departure, she fell apart. She took up with a physicist from UCSD we didn’t like, and we moved out of the apartment with the walls adjoining Dieter’s into an apartment upstairs. She resumed her drinking. We were devastated. Sarah and I came up with a signal. The first one home from school would check to see if our mother was at work or at home and in bed. If it was the former, the blinds were opened, an invitation to bring home a friend. If the blinds were closed, the message was this: “It’s bad in here. Keep outsiders out.”

Dieter was now in and out of our lives. Sometimes he left because of studies that took him elsewhere, but more often it was after one of his and my mother’s frequent breakups. When he went to Ohio for more graduate work, he took Angus with him. We treasured Dieter’s presence for many reasons but mostly because, when he was around and he and my mother were happy, she stayed sober. I came up with my own little set of equations. Life plus Dieter equaled Sober. Life minus Dieter equaled Drinking. And it was an equation we could rely on. So whenever trouble between my mother and Dieter started to brew, Sarah and I braced ourselves, because we knew that soon we would lose not just him but her as well.

My mother and Dieter eventually split up for good. In 1974, after nine years of emotional storms, my mother met Norm and left Dieter. But it turned out that I did not lose Dieter after all. Although he severed all contact with my mother, he remained close to Sarah and me, and I often turned to him for advice in the years that followed. Dieter stuck with programming, started a computer graphics company that grew successful, and became a wealthy man. When I was in high school, studying Latin, he’d insisted I drop the dead language and pick up German. If I learned German, he said, he would send me to Germany, which is how I came to spend a year there, learning to love the language as well as the art and literature. Two years after my time in Germany, he paid for my journalism school. Dieter eventually married, and his wife Maggie accepted me with grace and ease. After Zoë was born, Dieter assumed I would ask Maggie and him to be her godparents—and I did.

I ALWAYS BLAMED MYSELF
for the binge that ended with our swift removal from San Diego. I was ten and taking horseback-riding lessons on Saturday mornings. I loved the routine of it, the smell of the stables, the horse named Butterscotch I rode every week, the extra hour of riding that I talked my mother into.