Mother Daughter Me (22 page)

In the immediate aftermath of Matt’s death, Zoë cried only twice. A few days after he died, she noticed that her earring was missing. It was a small blue glass ball, from a pair Matt had bought for her a few months earlier at a street fair in Berkeley. She sobbed inconsolably, harder than she ever had as a baby. And this sound was different from any I had heard her make: It was the profound cry of loss. Her keening propelled
me to action. Nothing could be made even remotely right until I found that earring. I hunted everywhere, until finally, on a hunch, I ripped open the vacuum cleaner bag, fished through a cloud of lint, dust, hair, and grime, and pulled out the earring.

The next time Zoë cried was at the public memorial service, which was held at UC Berkeley, for the university community. Zoë sat between Denny and me, blank-faced and still. Sergei, her cello teacher, performed two pieces. The first, which I had selected, was the last piece Matt had heard her practice—a jaunty Russian folk song, one of Sergei’s standard teaching tools. Sergei had chosen the second piece: the melancholy saraband from Bach’s second unaccompanied cello suite. When Sergei’s bow crossed two strings together in thick double stops, creating one high pitch, another low, it sounded for all the world as if father and daughter were in secret conversation, while Sergei and Zoë were momentarily united in grief. He was less than a minute into the piece when she began to sob into her grandmother’s chest.

There was also a private memorial, at a small church in Sonoma County whose architecture Matt had admired. My mother left Norm at home with the dogs and came by herself to both services. At the service on campus, she sat in the second row, behind me, Zoë, and Matt’s family. She stayed at Amy’s house and I didn’t see much of her, but when I did, she looked uncomfortable and lost. Her discomfort might have been caused by the presence of Dieter and Maggie, whom Dieter had married in 1977. It was the first time my mother had seen Dieter in years and the first time she had met Maggie. Vivienne was there as well. One of my stepbrothers had brought her to California from Massachusetts. Under any other circumstances, I’d have paid close attention to the exchanges between my mother and all these people whose connections to her were so complicated. But I barely registered their presence.

At the private service, I spoke. I had to. The other eulogies had been about Matt’s talents in writing, politics, and art. No one had talked about his most remarkable gift: his talent for loving. I wrote what amounted to a lengthy love letter and read it aloud. In it, I thanked my in-laws for the lesson of love they had imparted to their son and, by extension, to me. Denny was present, but Dick had stayed in Austin, too broken to make the trip. There was a small reception following the service, and as Denny
was leaving, she hugged me hard and said into my ear, “He loved you more than life itself.”

A short time later, as my mother was leaving, she requested a hug. “I want some of this love crap,” she said. I winced. This comment captured so much of my mother: her awkwardness, her jealousy, her need to be loved outdone by her talent for self-defeat.

A few months after Matt died, my grief condensed itself into one focal point: my throat. I had a lump that felt like a large marble in my throat, and when I tried to eat or drink I was unable to swallow. I called a good friend who is an ear, nose, and throat doctor in Minneapolis and he diagnosed the condition instantly over the telephone. It’s called
globus hystericus
. My friend explained that there is a sphincteric muscle in the throat that causes the lump sensation. It turns out to be a real condition but one whose cause is psychological, not unlike a stomachache that results from anxiety. Zoë and I called it my “grief lump.”

After a few weeks, the grief lump gradually disappeared, and a profound emptiness took its place. I didn’t know what to do with myself; without the three-legged stool that had been Matt, Zoë, and me, I developed an all-consuming fear of being alone. When I went back to work, I started going into the
Times
bureau in San Francisco in order to have people around me, rather than working from home. Zoë didn’t take it well. Every morning when I left her at school on my way across the bay, she said, “Don’t die.” My mother called me at least once a day, but I couldn’t tell her how scared I was.

———

P
EOPLE WHO LOSE A SPOUSE OR PARTNER ARE OFTEN COUNSELED BY
friends and relatives, therapists and self-help books, that when it comes to rearranging your life, do as little as possible. Set your engines to idle. Don’t go back to work too soon. Don’t move households right away. Don’t remarry too quickly—or even date for a while. And there are reasons for this. You’re not in your right mind. You will act out of loneliness or fear. And frightened people often make bad decisions.

I wish I could tell you that I held true to the word I gave to Zoë on the day her father died and focused all my energy on being her mother. And I wish I could tell you that I embraced each and every one of those unwritten rules of widowhood. But I can’t tell you those things. After Matt died, I went just a little bit insane. I was back at work within weeks. I sold our beautiful house, which Matthew himself had designed, and I bought another. But those missteps were nothing compared to the one I then took, a mistake that would have repercussions for me, yes, but mostly for my child, already reeling from too much pain too early in life.

Eight months after Matt died, Zoë entered fourth grade at a new
school in Berkeley, a tiny music school for string players. Matt and I had started her on the cello with the intention of having her apply to this small and special school. One of the last things he got to do before he died was watch Zoë’s face and hear her shriek of joy when she opened her letter of acceptance.

A few weeks into the school year, Zoë introduced me to Scott, the upper school English teacher, a kind man much loved by the kids. Tall and lean with large, penetrating blue eyes, Scott was handsome without vanity, intelligent without pretension. I suggested we meet for coffee, and after we did, he sent me an email suggesting we meet again.

In one of my first messages to Scott, I told him there were two things he needed to know about me: I was allergic to emotional pain, and my child came first. Of course, he responded. Zoë’s a great kid. You’re doing a great job with her.

He had two teenage kids, a son and a daughter, ages twelve and fifteen, who lived with him half the time. The other half the time he was free, and wanting to see me. The feeling was mutual, but I wasn’t yet ready to let Zoë know about our connection. A friend who was in favor of the union covered for me and came to stay with Zoë one night every week, for which my cover story to Zoë was that I was in Silicon Valley, working on a series for the paper. I spent those nights with Scott.

Having Scott come into my life felt like one enormous gift. In the morning, he brought me coffee and freshly baked biscuits in bed. Once, in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, he lay next to me and recited
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
, in its entirety, which took him thirty minutes. I was charmed. I had never read the epic poem and knew only enough about it to remember that “Rime” was spelled oddly. Scott had memorized it one summer while in college but had never recited it aloud to anyone before. I asked him why. “Because I hadn’t found the right person until now,” he said.

Scott and I revealed our relationship to Zoë one Sunday afternoon a month after we started to see each other. She went into her room, shut the door, climbed into bed, and pulled the covers over her head. Scott offered to talk to her. He sat on the edge of her bed and delivered a poignant speech: He would not be able to replace her father, of course, but
he would be there for her, and he would love her. After a minute or so, she peeked out from under the covers and offered both of us a tentative smile.

We introduced our children to one another, and it seemed to go well. Zoë was happy to have a special relationship with a teacher at her school, but she was also confused. Her father had just died, and even she knew things were changing again, perhaps too soon. And how should she conduct herself around Scott? Was he a teacher? A friend? A father?

Few of my friends thought that embroiling myself in a new relationship so quickly was a good idea. Candace was conspicuously troubled. And my wise friend Amy, who was quietly appalled, tried to warn me with these words: “It’s not just your relationship with Scott, or his relationship with Zoë, that you have to think about, but permutations of relationships among five different people.” I might have heard hints of doubt from others as well. If nothing else, I should have heard an inner voice reminding me of the colossally unpleasant years I spent with the “family” my father and Vivienne had tried to stitch together.

When Scott gave up his tiny two-bedroom apartment to move in with us, his kids were unhappy, especially his daughter. They weren’t particularly fond of my cooking, finding it too elaborate. They didn’t like my house and longed to be back in their cozy little place, which is to say they longed for the threesome they had had with their father.

Not only did our children have little in common, but Scott’s daughter grew openly contemptuous of Zoë. The one she really objected to was me, not because she disliked me per se but because I had disrupted the life she had for ten years so cherished with her father. But the safer object of open dislike was Zoë.

Zoë began to act out at school, which put Scott in the awkward position of needing to discipline her. It was unfair—to Scott, of course, but mostly to Zoë. That’s because a child’s grief is ineffable, complicated, unpredictable, expressed in ways that are completely different from an adult’s grief. Adults do predictable things: We cry; we have an unfillable hole in our hearts yet we are able to articulate that; we express our pain, our anger, our guilt. We carry out our need to tell people how it happened, and with each reenactment we are working our way through to
the other side. If we are in a fog, we are conscious of our fog. And most of us, however bloodied and raw we are inside, get up in the morning, make coffee, get dressed, brush our teeth.

A child does none of that. Her insides roil, too, but in a way she can’t comprehend or confront. So she does other things. She talks back to teachers. She hides another kid’s backpack. She kicks up a fuss about where she’s been placed in the orchestra. In doing these things, Zoë was clearly wearing her grief on her sleeve.

The day after Matt died, my daughter turned to me and said, “Now everyone is going to think I’m adopted, because I don’t look like you.” Then, a few months after Matt died, as we walked down the street and saw an ambulance speeding by, I said, “That’s what took your dad to the hospital when they were trying to save his life,” and she replied, in anger, “Maybe if you hadn’t had him cremated, they could have saved him.”

Still, I was determined to make a new life with this man whose mind I so admired, who recited poetry to me and brought me coffee in bed every morning. And I was determined to successfully blend two families as no one in my experience ever had.

By the spring of 2003, only fourteen months after Matt died, Scott and I had decided to marry. My mother was one of the few advocates. She had quit her alcoholic binges nearly fourteen years earlier, and I had long since lifted my ban on phone calls. No longer worried about what state she might be in when she answered, I called her whenever I pleased and confided in her often and in detail. When Matt and I had had troubles, I told her about them, knowing full well that by then she had no special affection for him; he returned the sentiment, finding her opinionated and meddling. Matt had no interest in trying to endear himself to my mother, and his indifference annoyed and hurt her.

When my mother met Scott, however, she was thrilled. Already inclined to like him because of the tenderness she heard in my voice when I spoke of him, she was in awe of what she considered to be Scott’s physical superbness, his powerful intellect and trenchant humor. They were united by a love of dogs and a discomfort around people. And as the years passed, surely they bonded over their shared inability to relate to Zoë. Scott never wavered from his attentive ways with my mother.
After we married, on a few occasions he and his two children even drove to San Diego on their own to visit my mother, Norm, and the dogs.

I know beyond doubt that Matt would have been confused by my remarrying so soon and definitely enraged that I had chosen a man who would hurt our child. I’m not a believer in the paranormal, yet sometimes I saw what I could only interpret as signs of his anger. I was driving to meet Scott one day, shortly before our wedding, when I heard an explosion and looked over to see that my side-view mirror had shattered—spontaneously. Still, I went through with it. Denny, for her part, kept a distance and refrained from judgment. I can only imagine she was horrified by the hasty move. I assured her that Scott was wonderful with and to her granddaughter. She insisted on coming to the wedding. My mother and Norm came, too, but they left the wedding before dark—not long after it started—lest they lose their way back to the Holiday Inn.

Soon after the wedding, Zoë’s behavior at school grew worse. Scott began to view her as the source of problems large and small. I took her out of the school and enrolled her in a different music school. Now that he no longer viewed her as his, he stopped speaking to her altogether. Zoë and I lived not so much with Scott as around him. If she and I walked into a room where Scott sat, he greeted me but did not acknowledge her presence. He attended her concerts and recitals, only, he told me, because I wanted him there. After a while I stopped asking him and went alone. Once when I asked him to pick Zoë up from school, his daughter accused me of “using” him.

It wasn’t until I tried to make my own blended family work that I appreciated the effort Vivienne had put into the undertaking years earlier. My own attempt ended just as badly. In early 2008, after more than four years of agonizing failure at trying to merge our two families (Zoë once remarked that it was as if the five of us were put in a blender and someone forgot to secure the top before pushing the “on” button), it finally, mercifully, ended. Zoë and I eventually moved in to our small, comfortable apartment in Pacific Heights. For the first time in many months, Zoë told me, she felt as if she was free to breathe.