Mother Daughter Me (5 page)

I’m mulling Candace’s perceptive words when I hear my mother climbing her stairs. As she enters the kitchen, she acknowledges something that has gone unspoken all day.

“It’s Sarah’s birthday,” she says, as if simple verbal recognition might lessen the unhappiness we both feel.

“I know.”

We say nothing more about my sister or the feelings either of us may be having about her absence from our lives. My mother hasn’t spoken to Sarah in years, and my own contact with her has been sporadic, long spells of silence punctuated by brief periods of sisterly closeness. Sarah didn’t become a mother but has always had an easy, relaxed way with Zoë. Her self-absorbed eccentricities can be endearing and funny. She makes the FedEx guy wait while she tries on shoes purchased from Zappos.com, in case she decides to send them back on the spot. She’s an extreme hypochondriac: At one point while in her twenties, she was going to the emergency room so often she would call ahead to ask how long the wait was. She inherited my father’s dry humor and can make me laugh like no one else. Yet our periods of closeness invariably end with flare-ups—the catalyst for which can be something as trivial as my failure to return her phone calls promptly enough—leading in turn to extended intervals of estrangement that can last months or years. This most recent period of mutual silence has lasted more than a year, and, as always, I feel like a traitor to our bond,
especially now that our mother has moved in with me, a fact I have yet to reveal to Sarah.

Instead of dwelling on Sarah, my mother and I choose to distract ourselves with what surrounds us in the here and now—several dozen boxes filled with kitchenware. I usually enjoy setting up a new kitchen, but this has become a joyless and highly charged task. My mother and I each have our own set of kitchen boxes, which means that if there are two cheese graters between us, only one will make it into a cupboard. The other will be put back in a box or given to Goodwill. Each such little decision has the weight of a Middle East negotiation.

At first, it was fine enough. As we put away bowls and plates, salad servers and toast tongs, my mother turned to me and said, undiluted joy in her voice, “We’re co-mingling!”

I shuddered, perhaps even panicked, which is why I’ve now turned churlish.

While her kitchenware is serviceable, I’m a sucker for the high end: All-Clad saucepans and Emile Henry pie dishes. Before long, I’m shaking my head at pretty much everything my mother removes from her San Diego boxes. She takes each rejected item as a personal slight—which in fact it is. I begrudge her even her lightweight bowls, which she can lift easily with her injured hand.

I’m determined to stake my claim as the expert at equipping and running a kitchen, which is, after all, the focal point of domestic life. But there’s something else at work too. Here she is, a fragile old woman barely able to bend down as she peers into a low cupboard, looking for a place where she can share life with her grown daughter. At such a sight my heart should be big, but it’s small, so small that when I see her start stuffing her serving spoons into the same drawer as my own sturdy pieces, lovingly accumulated over the years, it makes me crazy. Suddenly I’m acting out decades of unvoiced anger about my mother’s parenting, which seems to be materializing in the form of her makeshift collection of kitchenware being unpacked into my drawers.

When I became a mother myself, I developed a self-righteous sense of superiority to my mother: I was better than my mother, for having
successfully picked myself up and dusted myself off, for never having lain in bed for days on end, too blotto to get my child off to school or even to know if it was a school day. By sheer force of will and strength of character, I believed, I had risen above all that she succumbed to and skirted all that I might have inherited. This, of course, is too obnoxiously smug to say in words. So I say it with flatware.

———

I
N 1952, WHEN SHE WAS TWENTY, MY BRILLIANT MOTHER, WHO HAD
been studying physics at Radcliffe College, dropped out in her junior year to marry my father, who was thirty. Eleven years later, when I was five and Sarah seven, my mother went on a trip. She was gone from our home in Rochester, New York, for several days. But she was often gone—not always from the house but missing from our lives nonetheless. Then one day Sarah and I returned from school to find her standing at the door, a piñata in her hand, smiling her spellbinding, I-am-overjoyed-at-the-sight-of-you smile. Now when I imagine that scene, my mind’s eye puts a sombrero on her head, but I doubt she was wearing one. She had just come home from a trip to Juarez, Mexico, where she had obtained a quickie divorce. She told my sister and me that she was taking us to live in Florida. We had no idea where—or what—Florida was.

“There will be oranges there,” she said. “They’re everywhere. You can reach up and pull them off trees.”

None of this was supposed to happen. My childhood in the house on
Chelmsford Road in Rochester was much like any other suburban kid’s. I was in first grade at Council Rock Elementary School, mischievous and addicted to candy. Sarah and I rode tricycles up and down our long driveway. My father, whom we both adored, had augmented the pedals with wooden blocks so our stubby legs could reach them. We dug our way to China in the backyard. We made pot holders out of yarn loops. We had a cat named Penelope and a dog named Dido. The dog died and we got another cat. And this, I thought, was as my life would remain—uncomplicated, with two parents, a big sister, always a pet or two, snowy winters that made going outdoors a complicated production, and a bedroom to myself on the second floor of a big stucco house set back from a quiet leafy street.

A month or so before my mother’s trip to Mexico, or maybe it was six months, or maybe a week, I had heard about this thing called divorce. It had happened to kids down the street—the same kids who had taken a kitchen knife to their cat’s tail. I had come home that day and asked my mother what divorce meant, and when I heard her explanation, it sounded like the worst fate that could possibly befall a family. I decided that it must have been punishment for what those kids did to the cat. This dark assumption made me feel safer, since I had never committed such an act and never would. Still, as added insurance, I made my mother promise to never ever get divorced. And she promised. Now the same horrific thing that had happened to those other kids was happening to me. We were to be taken away from our school, our friends, our father. Yet everything was going to be all right because we would have all the oranges we could eat? That was her consolation? All I could think, for years to come, was
You broke a promise
. But why?

At the time I had no words for it, but I remember being stunned by what felt like the sheer arbitrariness of what was happening. Now I think of my search for a cause as a five-year-old’s crude version of the famous butterfly effect: Did a random butterfly clinging to a vine somewhere in the Australian outback flutter its wings at some moment in 1953, so that ten years later two little girls in Rochester, New York, were sent down a path of no return?

In fact, there was nothing arbitrary about what occurred that day in 1963. The foundation had been built long before we entered the scene.
In her memoir,
The Architect of Desire
, the writer Suzannah Lessard suggests that family history can be seen as similar to architecture in certain ways. “Like architecture, it is quiet. It encompasses, but does not necessarily demand attention,” she writes. “Like architecture, too, family history can suddenly loom into consciousness.… One can go about one’s life with no thought of the past, and then, as if waking from a dream, be astonished to see that you are living within its enclosure.”

Such was the case with our family and the thread of behavior that had remained consistent through generations, reverberating powerfully down into my brief life. I can document this only as far back as my maternal grandparents, but it almost certainly began long before they showed up. My mother’s parents were both scientists, she a biologist and he a physicist. They had lived their lives for themselves, not their two children, modeling a form of narcissistic behavior that my mother would in turn emulate. When I was in my twenties, I once asked my aunt, who is eleven years younger than my mother, whether her father had encouraged her in her studies or, later, her profession. “My dear,” replied my quick-witted aunt, “he hardly encouraged me to draw breath.”

My grandfather’s ancestors had first come to the United States from Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century, part of a tide of Jewish immigrants escaping the laws in post-Napoleonic Europe that severely limited the occupations in which Jews were allowed to engage. They settled among some two hundred other Jewish families in Jacksonville, Florida. By the time my grandfather was born, the family was well-to-do and packed with musicians. My grandfather himself gravitated first to engineering, then to physics. He went to Columbia, where in his junior year he met my grandmother, a sophomore at Barnard who was already a serious biologist.

They married in 1927, when he was twenty-two and she twenty. My mother was born four years later. By 1937, both of my grandparents possessed PhDs and not a shred of self-doubt. As my grandfather once recounted to a biographer, for one job interview at Princeton early in his career, he stood at a blackboard, drawing diagrams and formulas, then turned, looked the great Albert Einstein straight in the eye, and asked, “Is that clear?”

My grandfather would later go on to develop advances in radar that
were used during World War II, then to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project, where he headed a division that engineered precursors to the atomic bomb. My grandmother stayed behind with her two daughters. While separated, they each had conspicuous affairs, my grandfather with a secretary at Los Alamos, my grandmother with a Russian physicist named Sergei Feitelberg. My grandmother was a domineering woman, an emotional tyrant who gave free rein to her opinions, most of them biting and belittling. She was especially judgmental of her older daughter, my mother. But my mother’s childhood in a large apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was a happy one, she has told me many times, because she was raised not by her cold mother but by a kindly black woman in my grandparents’ employ, named Anna. And she liked Sergei, whose presence softened her hard-hearted mother and who promised to take my mother dogsledding in Alaska. (The adventure never materialized, but Sergei’s promise alone was enough to win my mother’s lasting affection.)

When she was twelve, my mother started ballet. She was late to it but dedicated, practicing several hours a day. And she was talented enough to catch the eye of George Balanchine himself. My mother was crushed when, in 1946, just three years into her dancing career, my grandfather returned from Los Alamos to reclaim his wife and daughters and move them to Boston, where he had been recruited into the physics department at MIT. The move put an end to my mother’s dancing. While at MIT, my grandfather built the first atomic clock (a more stable and precise tool for measuring time than any that preceded it), served as a science adviser to President Eisenhower, and helped transform the teaching of physics to American high school students. My grandmother worked as a research biologist at Harvard Medical School, and with her limited free time she built a rich social life for herself and her husband. But when it came to their child-rearing instincts, neither appeared to possess one nurturing or attentive bone.

My grandfather started a company, then sold it for a substantial sum. My grandparents became discerning collectors of books and art, buying rare first editions and original works by Marc Chagall and M. C. Escher. Their Steinway, a majestic ebony grand, occupied a
corner of its own in the living room of their large, stately house in Belmont, just outside Cambridge.

In the 1950s they expanded their domestic domain with the purchase of a mansion on Tobey Island in Cape Cod’s Buzzards Bay. Theirs was one of four homes—compounds, really—on the small private island. The other families, the Jacksons and the Emmonses, had been there for generations, and my grandparents weren’t merely the only newcomers, they were also the only Jews. I was a small child when we made regular visits there, and one of my clearest memories is of my grandmother as the island’s resident bully. Tobey Island was joined to Monument Beach, the adjacent town on the mainland, by a small bridge followed by a saddle of road, with a marsh on one side and the bay on the other. If my grandmother spotted someone she didn’t recognize walking even a hundred feet along the unpaved road on the Tobey Island side of the bridge, she chased the interloper in her car, rolled down the window, and said in a withering voice, “May I help you?” Invariably, it turned out that the trespasser had set out on an innocent stroll from Monument Beach, but this made no difference to my grandmother, whose stinginess of spirit always managed to find its full expression in the presence of someone she considered beneath her—which was just about everyone. She would turn off the car’s engine and wait until the hapless stranger had made an about-face and was headed back over the bridge.

My grandmother ruled over both her houses with absolute power. She was rigid about rules: Bathtubs must be scrubbed clean after each use; utensils must be removed from the dishwasher by the handle. One day when I was about eight, during a summer visit to Tobey Island, something I did or said incited my grandmother’s wrath. She stopped me in the dark downstairs hallway, placed both hands firmly on my shoulders, and scolded me. Her words were razor-sharp, intended not to instruct me on how to be better but to make me feel ashamed of who I was. Her message: I was a bad child, hardly worthy of her lecture. There were other people in the house, but they must have known to give this scene a wide berth, because it felt to me as if she were the only person for miles around. For the several minutes that she held me by the shoulders—her fingers pressing so hard against my bones I would be
left with small bruises—I didn’t look in her eyes and focused instead on a prominent blue vein snaking up her left temple. I remember thinking that I had never noticed that vein before. When the ordeal was over, I went to look for my grandfather in his study. He was at the other end of the house but must have known what had happened, because he suggested we go sailing out on the bay in the smaller of their two boats, just the two of us. He invited me to take the tiller, and as we skimmed along the gentle water, watching the sail’s luff, I asked him the only question I could find the words for.