Mother Daughter Me (3 page)

“I have an announcement to make,” Norm said in a feeble voice, amid the general chatter. My mother, still tuned in to Norm as no one else in that room could ever be, was the only person who heard him. She asked everyone to quiet down and listen to what Norm had to say.

“I have an announcement to make,” he repeated, a bit more loudly.

“I don’t want—I don’t want—” he stammered. Had his mind suddenly snapped into focus? Would he tell the assembled group that he didn’t want to be in San Diego after all? That he had made a terrible mistake and indeed wanted to accompany his partner of nearly four decades in her move north? The room was hushed as all eyes rested on Norm. Finally he got the words out. “I don’t want any of the old
Playboy
s.”

MY MOTHER THOUGHT SHE
might be content in an independent-living place of some kind. That made sense, but it also reminded me that my elderly mother was now heading down that one-way road we all dread: first independent living, then assisted living, followed by planetary exit.

Finding a suitable independent-living arrangement was problematic. The San Francisco Bay Area is expensive to begin with, and growing old in comfortable fashion is even more so, as I was about to discover. A few weeks before I brought my mother to San Francisco, I consulted Anne Ellerbee, a woman who owns a business that places seniors in independent- and assisted-living communities. Anne and I discussed a few possibilities, and thick brochures from places with names like The Sequoias, Sterling Court, and Drake Terrace began to arrive in the mail. But they were all “buy-ins,” which means that you pay several hundred thousand dollars up front; in return, you get a “membership” of sorts. On top of that, you pay rent for your apartment, which can run as high as $6,000 every month. Who could afford this? Moms and dads of the Silicon Valley crowd, no doubt, but not my own fixed-income parent. Or me. As the search progressed, my mother began to get cold feet. Even if she found an affordable place, she said, she wasn’t sure she was ready to join a retirement community.

Next we explored the idea of finding her an apartment close to Zoë and me. Preferring not to get on a plane and come to San Francisco to
go apartment hunting herself, my mother entrusted me with the job. She requested a building with a doorman—a rarity in San Francisco. Nonetheless, I scored almost immediately, with a one-bedroom apartment in a building a mile from my own. The distance felt just right. The apartment itself was small but otherwise perfect. Pleased with myself, I sent my mother iPhone photos, including one of Abdel, the doorman. She didn’t like it; it was too close to the street. Nor did she like any of the other apartments I looked at over the next week.

With each day, her desire became clearer: She wanted to live not merely near me but
with
me. She didn’t say this outright, but I could tell it was where she was headed. While it wasn’t my initial choice, I began to warm to the idea. If I went out of town, she’d be there to stay with Zoë, a luxury for a single parent, to be sure. And I wouldn’t have to travel—even a mile—to see her. We’d need a bigger place, which would cost more, but she could help pay for it. These pragmatic advantages were nice, but there was something deeper: This was finally my chance to have a real family home—with my mother in it—making up for many years of lost time.

I decided that having her live with us was the solution. One afternoon, I called her to suggest it, and she was thrilled. For my part, I was guided by a combination of love, protectiveness, and, as I would eventually come to see, magical thinking. I believed we were as close to the mother–daughter ideal as two women could be. We often spoke several times a day. I confided everything to her. I told myself I had long since put any lingering anger about my childhood behind me, that I had taken the ultimate high road. And I had little tolerance for those who harbored bitterness toward their own mothers for transgressions far less serious than those my sister, Sarah, and I had had to endure. With a transcendent eye, I now see that it’s far easier to imagine a future we can invent than to reckon honestly with a painful past.

ONE NIGHT SHORTLY AFTER
inviting my mother to live with us, I found Zoë at the dining room table, flipping through homemade flash cards of
famous paintings she had memorized for an art history class the previous year.

“Wow, I can’t believe how much work I put into this,” my daughter said. “I wonder how many I still know.”

“Want me to quiz you?”

“Sure. No, wait. I’ll quiz
you
.”

She held up a card: four goldfish in a glass cylinder. That was easy—I’d owned the poster for years.

“Matisse.”

The next one—a famous fifteenth-century masterpiece that gives the mistaken impression of a shotgun wedding—was easy too.

“Van Eyck.
The Arnolfini Portrait
.”

Zoë smiled. “Which Van Eyck?”

“Jan,” I answered.

“Yeah!” said Zoë. I was eating up her praise.

Next came a sculpture of two figures in a sinewy embrace.

“Henry Moore?”

“Nope. Rodin.
The Kiss
.”

“Uh-oh. I’m an idiot.”

“No, you’re
good
!”

With Zoë in such a cordial mood, this seemed as opportune a moment as any to ask her how she felt about having her grandmother live with us.

“Sweetie, Grandma Helen might move in with us. How would you feel about that? We can live in a bigger place, because she’ll help with the rent.”

Zoë had been present during many of my phone conversations with my mother and didn’t look surprised. She nodded. “And we’ll have a grandparent right here with us,” she said.

She was quiet and fanned out the index cards in her hand. Then she said, “I think she
should
come live with us. That would be nice.”

I was relieved.

At that moment, encouraged by my daughter’s easy acquiescence, I chose to disregard the risks. I knew my mother was free with her opinions, that she took up a lot of psychological space in a room, and that she
and Zoë hadn’t exactly bonded over the years. I also knew that Zoë was a teenager living the full complement of her age group’s psychodramas. And then there was the fact that I was working hard to make a living, and this new arrangement could be a distraction. But I wasn’t aspiring to turn us into the Huxtables. I was just trying to take these remnants of a family and weave them together as best I could.

After a few more minutes, Zoë asked, “So if Grandma Helen lives with us, what will happen to
us
?” I knew exactly what she meant. For the past eight years—since the day Matt, her father, died suddenly of a heart attack at age forty-five—Zoë and I have been tiptoeing together through life. We have grown remarkably close. Zoë doesn’t simply tell me everything, she entrusts me with her fragile heart, much as her father did. Other mothers say they envy me, but I wouldn’t wish on anyone the circumstances that bound my daughter to me this tightly. Since Matt’s death, Zoë has worried that I, too, will die, leaving her an orphan. More than once, I have awakened in the middle of the night to see my daughter’s eyes large in the dark, inches from my head, checking to make sure I’m breathing.

So the “us” she was referring to was the us that had managed to get her through the past eight years without her father—the us that saw her through the grief of losing him; the us that struggled through my disastrous remarriage to a man who first embraced, then rejected, his stepdaughter with breathtaking completeness. It was the us that emerged on the other side of all that, a unit as close as two wounded people can be.

But she also meant the everyday us—the us that flips through her old art cards; the us that goes to In-N-Out Burger on a whim when nothing else will do; the us that watches
Desperate Housewives
every single Sunday night, no matter what; the us that loves to listen to Christmas music in the car year-round, especially Eartha Kitt singing “Santa Baby.” How would my mother fit into that us?

My answer to her was that we wouldn’t be any less us than we ever were. Zoë and I knew how to be a family. Now we would have a chance to show my mother what we knew, to show her the true meaning of family, to show what I had to learn on my own, without her.

—–

I FOUND THE PERFECT
house for our little threesome, a tall Victorian from the late 1800s, yellow with white and gold-leaf trim on a rare flat stretch of Pacific Heights—an important requirement for an older woman unaccustomed to steep hills. The fanciest neighborhood in San Francisco, Pacific Heights embodies every tourist’s vision of the city: block upon block of mansions built in a hodgepodge of dazzling architectural styles—an Arts and Crafts cheek by jowl with a Dutch Colonial; a Queen Anne confection next door to a Georgian fortress—many with postcard-worthy vistas of the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge. Pacific Heights has the signs of contented wealth stamped all over it. It’s long on boutiques and short on gas stations. You’ll trip over day spas and specialty pet shops, but don’t go looking for Walmart.

The neighborhood runs along a series of hills so steep that the population remained sparse until the late nineteenth century, when the construction of a new cable-car line finally made the area accessible. After the 1906 earthquake—then fire—that destroyed the grand homes on Nob Hill, many of the city’s wealthy families migrated to Pacific Heights and built new mansions. Many of those old families—the Hellmans of Wells Fargo, the Haases of Levi Strauss, and the descendants of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty—are still there. But there are plenty of ten-thousand-square-foot estates to go around, and since the 1960s, when the computer industry started churning out millionaires, a steady stream of new wealth has arrived in Pacific Heights. The neighborhood also has an abundance of apartment buildings, as well as apartments carved from single-family homes, which brings a measure of economic—if not racial—diversity to the neighborhood. It was Zoë’s choice of high schools that had first brought us to Pacific Heights, and we were living in a cozy and quiet two-bedroom apartment close to Zoë’s school when I started searching for a place with room for the three of us.

Stately and commanding, the house I found on Sacramento Street, in Lower Pacific Heights, was an architectural jewel; tour buses drove down the street several times a day and the guides pointed out our Victorian “painted lady” not just for its curb appeal but also for its
lucky survival of the earthquake. Meticulously renovated, the house had a layout that I was sure would work perfectly: a three-room suite on the lower level with a bathroom and laundry room for my mother, living space on the next level, and, on the top floor, bedrooms for Zoë and me. The master bedroom was large enough to double as my office. Moreover, it seemed symbolic that we should find a three-story nineteenth-century Victorian, whose original intention was to house multiple generations. Set back slightly from the street, the house had the additional, and much desired, perk of a spacious two-car garage. When Zoë saw the house, she begged me to rent it. We could never have afforded to buy it, but, thanks to the recession, the rent had already been reduced twice, and with my mother paying half, we could swing a year’s lease. My mother couldn’t have been more pleased. She started calling our experiment “our year in Provence.”

Bringing my mother to San Francisco made perfect sense to me, if not to others. “Isn’t this all happening kind of quickly?” asked Candace, my best friend, who knows me better than I know myself. I explained to her just why it would work. I described the house I had found, with kitchen, living room, and dining room on the middle level, serving as the buffer floor between my mother’s domain and Zoë’s and mine. I emphasized the word “buffer,” as if I could use it to erase any lingering doubts Candace might have about my moving in with a woman whose behavior three decades earlier—on a night when Candace had witnessed my mother in a flat-out vicious alcohol-fueled rant against me—had horrified her. Candace remained unconvinced that a buffer floor was enough, but she stopped questioning it. She saw that I had made up my mind.

In the face of naysayers, I chose instead to embrace the reaction of another friend, who was living in Beijing: “How Chinese of you!” she said upon hearing the news. When I told my mother, she was delighted. “What have the Chinese got on us?” she declared. And I agreed. The Chinese revere their elderly. If they could live happily with multiple generations under one roof, so could we. And then almost instantly, it seemed, my mother’s house in San Diego was in escrow and I was behind the wheel of her white Honda, bound for our new life.

———

A
LL THREE OF US ARE IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER FEELING DISPLACED
. With my mother now in my bedroom, my domain is the couch; Zoë’s life has gone slightly sideways; and my mother is living out of a half dozen or so paper bags. Despite her altered routine, my mother is overjoyed at being with us. She tells me she has fallen in love with San Francisco, the city’s beauty, its friendly people, its convenience. She says that being able to walk across the street to buy a container of orange juice is a miracle. She says she never wants to live anywhere else. In fact, she has a lot to say. Has she always talked so much, I wonder?

For the first couple of days, Zoë seems happy to have her grandmother around. While I pack up the apartment, Zoë tends to my mother’s every request. And those requests are many: My mother needs things from the hardware store; she needs a mailbox with late pickup times; she needs a smaller towel, a larger pair of rubber gloves.

“Mom,” Zoë says, “it’s like babysitting a little kid.” Her tone is good-natured, but I can tell that the novelty and excitement are quickly wearing off. I remind Zoë that her grandmother is going through a difficult
transition and that in a few days she’ll have fewer needs. “Just hang in there,” I tell her.