Saturday's Child (4 page)

At first, Aunt Sophie took care of me days, while Aunt Sally and Mommie got jobs working in the lingerie department of Lerner's, a small department store in Mount Vernon. Thirty years later, during one of Bella Abzug's political campaigns, one of her supporters, Judy Lerner—wife of the owner of Lerner's—actually remembered me as a child with golden ringlets, big brown eyes, a precocious intelligence, and a nonstop tongue. These assets didn't go unnoticed by others, because at some point during this period I was put up for modeling assignments and rather quickly became a successful tot model, both for photography sessions and for runway work in fashion shows. Aunt Sally convinced my mother that work was the best thing for a heart crushed by loss, so in an odd switch Faith kept her job at Lerner's, while Sally quit to look after me and my growing “career.”

Still, Faith claimed that motherhood was the hub of her existence, and I was never allowed to forget it. In fact, her two favorite stories were revealing as propaganda.

The first was the story of Cornelia's jewels. Cornelia, a second-century B.C.E. Roman matron, was the mother of the revolutionary Gracchi brothers, who led Rome's democratic faction. (Politically, at least, my mother was unwittingly prescient.) Cornelia became famous for her response to a visitor who asked to see a display of her jewels: “My children,” she answered proudly, “are the only jewels I need.”

The other story, which I can't recall Mommie's ever telling without brimming eyes, was the Greco-Roman myth of the mother-daughter goddesses
Demeter and Persephone. Persephone, sometimes called Kore (“slim ankled” Persephone, as Homer characterized her), is Demeter's beloved only child. Persephone's abduction by Hades—variously god of the underworld, the dead, or hell—devastates Demeter, who wanders the earth in search of her lost child and whose grief is so great that she, goddess of agriculture, curses and withers all growing things, inventing winter. Hermes, the gods' messenger, persuades Hades to free Persephone, who has meanwhile become transformed into Hecate, queen of the dead. But the release will hold only if she has eaten nothing in the underworld. Since Persephone has swallowed three pomegranate seeds, she is permitted to return aboveground only temporarily—but must redescend to Hades for three months each year. When she reemerges onto the earth, Demeter permits the world to wake and bloom again. Thus, the myth goes, did the seasons come about, a cycle perpetuated as Persephone redescends to become Hades' queen, then resurfaces as Demeter's daughter.

It wasn't a coincidence that the first serious poem I wrote began, “Go, rage, winter the world with despair,” phrased in the voice of Persephone rejecting Demeter, invoking some powerfully demonic Hades to sweep me up, abduct me to a darkly passionate hell, and free me from the bright glare of my mother's love.

I'm at one with my most of my generation in this: it was a given that my mother never understood me. How could she have, when she'd been kept from understanding herself? But at least I never doubted that she loved me. Much of the time, in fact, I longed for her to have mercy and love me a little less. But with hindsight—having known certain friends and lovers who grew up shuddering in a chill of unexpressed parental affection—I now can afford gratitude for the warmth, the intense heat even, with which her love radiated. Granted, some middle way would have been nice. But Faith was ignorant of moderation, though she did know how to display her love in myriad ways.

She was an artist with needle and thread. Never one for knitting or crocheting, she sewed her artistic creations without using a pattern. Such attention to detail! Exquisitely embroidered butterflies with silver-ribbon wings that lifted and folded back, resting as if newly alit on the handmade organdy pinafore to which they were stitched! Her vocabulary may not
have been terribly sophisticated, but she knew words like “baste” and “bias,” “peplum” and “rickrack,” “princess line” and “bolero jacket”—and of course “ensemble,” as in “matching ensemble.” When we shopped, it would be Best & Co. for me and Peck & Peck for her; well, at least that was the longed-for ideal. The more common reality was Klein's Bargains on 14th Street for her and the homemade frocks for me. But there she didn't stint. Her chosen fabrics, acquired on trips to discount fabric stores in Orchard Street—the Ashkenazic immigrant section of Manhattan's Lower East Side—were velvet and velveteen, organdy, taffeta, and linen. The hours, the fine stitching, the ironing all this required! From about age three until ten, I rarely sat down free from guilt: at creasing the organdy too soon—before the photograph, public appearance, or audition.

My mother was a beautiful woman. But she fought weight all her life, and even at her slimmest tended toward plumpness, which she hid by the convenient fashions of the period, including longish full skirts and waists cinched by torturous one-piece corset-bras called Merry Widows. Her finely boned face, her long, slender neck, her clavicle and shoulders were the best features, and she knew how to use them to her advantage. The unblemished skin was a classic alabaster—creamy pale, with a faint natural glow. The eyes were large, sable brown, and expressive; the nose small and delicate; the mouth full, sensual. She had perfect teeth—white, even, sharp—and adored crunching things between them. Peanut brittle was ground to powder in those percussive jaws, ice cubes were fragmented, and chicken bones gave up their marrow to her loud crackle and suck. But when I was small, she was the loveliest woman in the world.

Yet she could embarrass me thoroughly (though never as much as Aunt Sally had), as when she'd flirt with headwaiters or coo seductively over the phone to her stockbroker. By adolescence, I felt ashamed of her yet ashamed at
being
ashamed of her, felt pity for her and disgust for her, and mostly felt mortified at her making of herself such a spectacle. All teenagers go through this, but in my case, you'd think I might've recognized misplaced rage at her making of
me
such a spectacle.

A spectacle I was, too—having segued from modeling into “fashion commentary,” where my memory and verbal facility served me well (“I'm sporting a pastel pink sleeveless cotton pique pinafore, buttoned down the back, with duckling design along the double hem and matching pink
Capezio shoes …”). Then there was my own radio show at age four, being a Juvenile Jury radio and TV panelist and, by age seven, becoming a TV fixture in the homes of America, as Dagmar, the youngest daughter of the popular TV series
Mama
.

It's impossible for me to remember a time when I was not already a consciously serious professional, aware of my responsibilities. The message was that our family—Mommie and Aunt Sally—depended on me for survival. The lesson at the core of the message, however, was that perfection was not only attainable but imperative. Furthermore, only the elect, of which I was one, were fit to accomplish it. Therefore, failure to do so, from sloth, self-doubt, or sloppiness, was perhaps the only sin. “You can do anything you set your mind to,” Mommie said and said, adding, “
there is nothing you cannot be
.”

By age four, I'd already experienced the ambivalence of being in charge while lacking any authority; of being considered abler, more privileged, talented, blessed—but therefore
owing
: owing luck or god, owing society, owing Mommie and Aunt Sally. Still, it has to be acknowledged that my envy of other kids' freedom was all mixed up with my secret glee at
their
envy of
me
—and a growing sense of what I couldn't yet name I felt about all these tangled envyings: irony.

To this day, despite my intellectual certainty and experience to the contrary, I remain haunted by the myth that I must be the most capable person in any given vicinity in any given circumstance and so must rise to the occasion. To some degree all women carry this spectral load, since we're raised to be caregivers. But I've taken the basic problem and run with it, as if it were my special role to find out whatever's wrong and somehow—by invention, self-sacrifice, or sheer will—make it right, heal it (“codependent with the whole world,” as one friend puts it). This can strike people as enviable self-confidence, which is even sometimes actually real. At other times, it's alloyed with a sternly self-righteous arrogance, a near-contempt of others for their perceived weakness or low standards (as compared to my lofty ones), and a martyr's resentful seethe at not being regarded with an intensity equal to that I've lavished on
them
.

Perfectionism and the accompanying severity carry a dubious benefit: one is less prone to self-pity (except in the secret depths of the soul). But that's only because one is so busy denying being any sort of victim whatsoever;
to do otherwise would contradict too dangerously the omnipotence inherent in being so capable and caring an Earth Mother.

Mommie taught me never to say, “I can't,” never to say, “No.” I was in my thirties before I dared put up a small handwritten sign beside the phone, reading simply “Learn to say
No
.” And I was in my early fifties before the canny words of a therapist friend, Carol Drexler, struck me with the full force of their implication: “How can anyone trust the ‘yes' of someone who can't say ‘no'?”

But you couldn't say No to Faith, the manipulator with the eyes of god. You couldn't say No because she was Demeter, the life bringer, the opposite of death or hell—although you suspected she was all three (another reason you didn't say No). You didn't say No because you sensed that disobedience is evolution and you'd learned to be afraid of whatever lay beyond the vastness of her distant boundaries, much as you longed to go there. You didn't say No because she established herself as the epicenter of your child's universe, as your first and basic preoccupation, as the beloved for whom you would nurse a lifelong passion, staggering under its burden, sometimes of bitterness or fear but mostly of merciless love.

A lifetime of fleeing her, being caught by her, escaping her, reclaiming her; supporting her emotionally, financially, and physically; organizing her liberation, dancing and singing or speechifying and organizing hundreds of thousands of women who were her and never her, all to win her love. Small wonder that to this day I adore eating pomegranates.

TWO

Suffer the Little Children

Of course you appropriated me. But too much
.

—W
OLFGANG
A
MADEUS
M
OZART
,

IN A LETTER TO HIS FATHER
, L
EOPOLD

No child is an island. My childhood, like everyone else's, was experienced in numerous overlapping contexts, among them culture, place, historical time, and that other unique time/space dimension of
being
a child. It's important to glance at some of these contexts, even if we need to pause for a moment in the personal story in order to do so.

For starters, it's crucial to understand that childhood is a new invention. That is, regarding childhood as a distinct phase of life is a fairly recent event in Western culture. The historian Philippe Ariés, in his pioneering work
Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life
,
¹
argues that until the close of the Middle Ages, the child, almost from the moment of weaning, was regarded as a small adult who mingled, competed, worked, and played with full adults. Such demographic changes as
the lengthening life span, the shift in social emphasis from the community to the family (and eventually, in the twentieth century, to the nuclear family), and the spreading concept of formal education as a necessity all influenced the birth of the idea of childhood.

In many, perhaps most, parts of the world today, childhood still is only a vaguely accepted idea, and adolescence a nonexistent one, although the spread of Western practices, largely through entertainment media and multinational corporate culture, is changing that (distinct “age groups” yield more targetable markets). Adolescence can be particularly absent for girls: when you can be betrothed in infancy, married by age nine, and a mother at fourteen, where
does
adult womanhood begin? One of the priorities of the Nepalese Women's Movement, for example, has been the plight of cloistered child widows in that Hindu-fundamentalist society—girl children as young as eight who, having been married off to men in their seventies, are then widowed but not permitted to leave or remarry, spending their lives as perpetual mourners and human property, serving their husbands' families.

Our own culture, claiming to cherish children, worships youth, which is altogether different. But it
sentimentalizes
children: all that cloying rhetoric from politicians about “the nation's future” and “for the sake of our young”; all the rants from the Christian Right preaching “the sanctity of our pre-born children” while opposing welfare rights, head-start programs, gun control, or the teaching of evolution and sex education in school.
²
This, in the United States, a country so rich that children are considered a major consumer market—while one in every four of them goes to sleep hungry each night; a country so reverently observant of “family values” that one in every three women and one in every seven men has survived some form of childhood sexual, physical, or emotional abuse.

Unfortunately, the United States isn't unique in its hypocrisy. Every nation trots out tots to curtsey, smile, and offer bouquets to visiting dignitaries (this is the unthreatening aspect of a welcome ceremony; troop review, planes streaking in formation, and cannon salutes constitute the
threatening aspect). East European countries became notorious for plucking their youngest athletes and dancers early on, then training them with a rigor tantamount to boot camp for marines, with a few steroids thrown in for good measure. China's idea of impressive spectacle invariably involves thousands of children in some square or stadium—berouged, lipsticked, pigtailed, and regimented in rows, singing, dancing, and twirling ribbons or flags. “Cultural relativism” is usually the defense for these practices—that same handy justification once employed for pogroms, slavery, polygamy, purdah, foot binding, and other quaint customs. In this case, though, since the children are smiling, they must be loving it—so where's the harm? Besides, they're so
cute
! Most adults seem willing to perish from diabetic shock brought on by megadoses of cuteness. Perhaps they never knew or conveniently forgot the etymology of “cute”: the word is a shortened version of “acute,” its original meaning having more to do with intelligence than with treacle.