Mother Daughter Me (4 page)

My more-skeptical friends had from the beginning expressed concern about how my mother’s presence would affect Zoë. But between my mother’s stated intention that she’d like to have a good relationship with her only grandchild and Zoë’s warm embrace of her grandmother upon her arrival, my optimism ran high. Deep down, though, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Zoë was a mommy-oriented child from the start. Even as a toddler, she disliked it when I paid attention to anyone other than her and was particularly sensitive when my focus turned to my mother. In retrospect, I realize that she didn’t react that way to my interactions with my father, my mother-in-law, friends, or strangers. It’s possible that Zoë was tuned in to something of which I was unaware: the almost umbilical hold my mother had on me, the emotional energy of unfinished business. She acted out. When she was two and my mother was visiting, as the three of us lay on the big bed in the master bedroom, watching
Sesame Street
, Zoë sat up abruptly and hit her grandmother on the arm, something I had never seen her do to anyone. My mother shrieked.

As for my mother, she has never really known how to be with Zoë. It’s a problem I’ve always written off as part of her general awkwardness around children. But perhaps she sensed the unusually strong bond between Zoë and me. Instead of delighting in it, as many grandparents do, she let it grate on her.

For a while, I chose to see the problem through the narrowest possible lens: My mother just needed a little coaching on the basics of interacting with young children, I told myself. “Try asking her questions,” I’d say to her on the phone before a visit to San Diego. “Sometimes that can help kick-start a conversation. Before you know it, you’ll have a chatterbox on your hands.”

“A question? Like what?”

“Well, try something easy, like ‘How’s school?’ or ‘What’s your favorite class?’ ”

So when we visited, my mother would lob Zoë a question, and Zoë would answer. Silence would follow, my mother unable to think of a follow-up query that might keep the conversation alive. And my heart would sink.

Then there was my mother’s reluctance to travel, which caused her to miss important events in her granddaughter’s life. The most notable milestone she missed was Zoë’s bat mitzvah. Her reasons for not attending: Religion wasn’t her thing; Norm couldn’t be left alone; Norm couldn’t be left alone with the dogs. In the end, who really knew? Grandparents Day at Zoë’s school was a topic I never mentioned, though each year when the day arrived I felt a vague sadness. The fact is, Zoë and my mother hardly know each other.

There was one area in which my mother did show great interest in her granddaughter’s life: her cello-playing.

From the time Zoë started to play the cello, at age six, Matt and I bought her progressively larger instruments until, finally, we found an exquisite eighteenth-century cello of unknown provenance, as dark and mysterious as some of the music Zoë was growing into. For years, we sent Zoë to music schools around the Bay Area. It wasn’t easy getting her to go. With few exceptions, kids hate to practice a musical instrument—it’s just no fun, and progress is excruciatingly slow. Our fights over practicing were epic. But whereas many parents decide the battle isn’t worth it, for some reason her father and I didn’t give up. And after Matt died, I kept pushing. I knew it was worth something, though I wasn’t sure what. She has no desire to become a professional musician. At the age of five she grew fascinated with the Discovery Health Channel and hasn’t budged since from a desire to become a physician. But I’m convinced that music saved her, perhaps not literally but by giving her focus and resilience she wouldn’t otherwise have had. Music was always the outlet for something she couldn’t express in words. Zoë must know this, too, because after a decade of scraping that bow across the strings, one day out of the blue Zoë told me how much she appreciated my perseverance. “That was a real gift you gave me, Mom,” she said. “Thanks.”

But Zoë is a self-conscious musician who dislikes practicing around people she isn’t comfortable with, and there’s no telling how the presence of my mother might inhibit her. A week into our new life, I go out to dinner with a friend, and as I leave the house I remind my daughter to practice while I’m out. She has an important audition the next day for the chamber-music program at the San Francisco Conservatory. Until she moved in with us, my mother had never heard Zoë play so much as
a scale. I can tell Zoë is queasy and tentative about practicing around my mother, but she promises she’ll do it.

I return home at around 10:00
P.M.
to find both mother and daughter already in bed. The house is calm and peaceful; I settle under the covers on the couch and fall into a deep sleep. I’m awakened by a tap on my back. It’s Zoë. She’s crying and asks me to come into her room.

I climb into her bed. “Sweetie, what’s wrong?”

“Grandma Helen said I suck at the cello.”

“What?!”

“She said I have good technique but my intonation sucks. She said I should take up the piano.”

“But she has no ear!” I say into the dark. “How can she know if you’re playing in tune? Ignore her.”

I should have seen this coming. My mother had cornered me the day before to make the same pronouncement. “Zoë has excellent technique,” she said when she caught me alone, after hearing Zoë practice. “But I think the piano might be the better instrument for her. On the piano you don’t have to worry about getting the intonation just right.”

Clearly, she had been thinking about this and considered it her solemn duty, after a week of living with us, to influence the course of Zoë’s musical future.

My antennae had gone straight up. This was a topic my mother was going to sink her teeth into, and I knew I needed to say something before she inflicted real damage.

“Mom,” I said. “Zoë’s music is Zoë’s and my thing.” I thought I was being clear and that she had heard me. But she hadn’t. Or she had chosen not to. Either way, she waited until I had gone out to dinner before raising the subject with her granddaughter. And now here is my child, distraught and unable to sleep—on the eve of an audition.

“Don’t listen to her, sweetie,” I tell her again. “You’re a wonderful cellist.”

But it’s too late. My kid is spooked. I’d like to think this is an isolated incident, but I know it isn’t, for it has reminded me that my mother is incapable of keeping her opinions to herself. I am enraged, and for an instant, in a disturbing surge of emotion, I hate my mother with every fiber of my being. I recall in a flash that many years ago, while still married
to my father, my mother took cello lessons but quit after getting up from her practice chair one day, cello in hand, to answer a ringing phone. According to family legend, as my mother rushed through the narrow doorway, the instrument broke into some number of pieces. With that, the lessons ceased. As I remember this now, I wish my mother had tripped and been impaled by the instrument’s long, sharp endpin.

THE NEXT MORNING, MY
mother is making her breakfast drink, an awful-looking concoction of instant coffee, hot water, nonfat Lactaid, and four or five packets of Splenda, mixed together in a tall drinking glass (a facsimile of a Starbucks drink, she tells me).

Struggling to find a calm voice, I ask my mother what she said to Zoë.

She’s shocked by my insinuation that she might have given Zoë anything but the highest of compliments. “What? I told her she plays beautifully, that she’s a marvelous technician!”

She insists her intentions were only the very best. She omits the part about telling Zoë she found her ability to play in tune wanting, along with her suggestion that Zoë switch instruments after having labored for so many years on this one. Not wanting to argue with her, I leave the kitchen and go tap on Zoë’s door to get her up. When she tells me she doesn’t want to go to the audition, I summon every ounce of parenting wile I can and finally talk her into it. A few days later, Zoë gets a call from the conservatory telling her she hasn’t been selected.

———

K
IERAN AND CREW HAVE DELIVERED MY MOTHER’S FURNITURE TO
the new house. The most ungainly of the objects to move, of course, was the Steinway. My mother has always loved piano music and hungered to play. When she was in her early sixties, she retired from her job as a computer programmer so that she could devote herself more fully to the piano. As she had done with her dog obsession, she took her piano education to an extreme. She bought not one, not two, but three pianos. One was the beautiful Steinway B, a small grand piano she purchased with a modest inheritance left by a friend of her parents’. She photocopied all her music in a larger size so she could see it better and mounted it on manila folders. She practiced for several hours every day. When she wasn’t practicing the piano she was talking about the piano. When we spoke on the phone, I heard about the difficulty she had keeping time to a metronome; about Erika, her German piano teacher; and about her shortcomings as a duet partner. I had to hand it to her: She had finally
found a passion that moved her beyond the world of Norm and the dogs.

I love pianos, too, and wrote an entire book about the life of one piano, a Steinway owned by the renowned pianist Glenn Gould. And I shared my mother’s love for her piano. During phone conversations, I listened raptly as she told me about the instrument’s cross-country adventures. The action—the keyboard and its associated works—had been removed and sent to the East Coast for a full overhaul. When I visited her in San Diego after the piano’s return, I was struck by how buttery the action felt under my hands.

I once mentioned quietly to my mother that I hoped the Steinway would stay in the family and someday pass on to Zoë. Shortly thereafter she told me she would add a codicil to her will specifying that upon her death the Steinway was to go to me. I was touched by her gesture, even after she added that she was doing it in part to keep the piano out of the greedy clutches of Norm’s daughter. A gifted pianist, Paula was withering about my mother’s playing.

Before bringing the Steinway north, my mother had mentioned that she was considering selling it. I was surprised, but instead of reminding her that, last I knew, she was setting it aside for me, I said nothing, unable to utter the simple words, “But, Mom, don’t you remember your promise?” If I did, it would be a way of asking for something, and asking my mother for something was always dangerous because of the risk of disappointment.

Once I see it installed in my living room, I’m reminded how much I like it and I choose to dismiss the earlier talk of a sale as idle chatter. I’m comforted by the thought that the piano will someday be mine, then Zoë’s.

Now we’ve been in the house for two weeks, but we’re not really
in
it yet. Boxes are everywhere. Part of the problem is that for eight years and through multiple moves I’ve been carrying around my late husband’s possessions, thinking that Zoë will eventually cherish them as much as I do. But now Matt’s boxes are feeling like a burden. Each is filled with things I know I should sort through, but I can’t bring myself to start.

Late one afternoon, as I’m considering just how brutal the move-in process is going to be, my cellphone rings. It’s my friend Candace, calling to check in. Sometimes you don’t know what’s missing from your life until it falls into your lap. That’s what happened in 1977, when I met Candace. Although we’ve both made close friendships with others over the years, we view our best-friend status as sacred. This is how it often works with best friends: Something happens to cement the friendship, and after that you’re inseparable. In our case, Germany happened. We were both there for our junior year in college, and we met soon after arriving, on a bus during a field trip. I was knitting a sweater, racing to get it done and mailed off to my sister in time for her birthday. Candace, also a knitter, sat down next to me. Her mother owned a yarn shop near San Francisco, she told me. And she began to chat. By the end of the bus ride, we knew we had something special.

Our bond remained strong, even during years when we lived thousands of miles apart. As adults we saw each other through romantic reversals and breakups, Candace’s reassessment of her sexuality, the births of our children, the death of my husband. Candace knows how to call my bluff, as only a best friend can. She also protects me, as only a best friend will.

It’s hard to get Candace down. She must have been born with endorphins coursing through her veins. She inherited her good spirits from both her parents: her persistently jovial father and Ramona, her calm, good-hearted mother, who is now eighty-three. When Candace’s father died, she moved Ramona closer to her and Julie, her partner of many years. I love watching Candace and Ramona together and envy the calm waters on which their relationship has glided for the three decades I’ve known them. They’ve always done things together. They both bleed orange and black for the San Francisco Giants, and they travel as a pair to spring training in Arizona. Ten years ago, when Ramona was seventy-three, she and Candace ran a 5K together.

“How’s it going?” Candace asks, referring to my newest housemate.

“It’s been a little bumpy,” I reply. I tell her about the cello incident.
One of Candace’s two sons, a serious violist who is Zoë’s age, is, like Zoë, still reckoning with the tricky business of performing, or even practicing, where others can hear. Candace knows only too well how fragile young egos can be, and she’s appalled.

“Oh, Katie, what a sucky thing to do,” she says. “Did you tell your mother to back off?”

“I tried,” I say. “I’m not sure she got it.”

“How’s Zoë doing?”

“Miserable,” I say.

“I can imagine.”

Candace has to run, but before hanging up she says, “Your mother doesn’t understand the effect she has on other people.”