The Good Daughters (17 page)

A Hard, Tough Place

A
FTER CLARICE WAS
denied tenure at the university, things changed. She had always been a fundamentally optimistic person, for one thing, and someone who saw the best in people. What happened when that committee judged her as morally unworthy to hold the position of full professor (though they remained happy to see her carry a heavy load of lower-level introductory teaching responsibilities) left her not simply angry but something painful to witness: bitter.

I had loved her softness and her open, trusting way of being with people, even though I was never that way myself. But there was a hard, tough place now in the woman I loved—a cynical edge, as if she was just waiting for the punch line of a joke, the moment when the clown would pop out of the box and yell “Gotcha,” and anyone who didn’t understand this was a sucker.

“I’ll go to work,” she said. “But all those years I spent staying late, talking with students, inviting them on trips to Boston to look at art with me—I’m finished with that. I’m strictly nine-to-five from now on.”

I might have been happy about that, knowing it meant more time for the
two of us, except I saw the effect on Clarice. More often than not now, I’d hear a sharp and brittle tone to her voice as she took off for work in the morning.

“Here we go again,” she said. “How many more times am I going to haul out my lecture on Leonardo da Vinci?”

She came home weary, and when I asked about her day, her answers came in single syllables. She’d get off the phone from talking with a student and sigh. “Who do they think I am, anyway? Their mother?”

I again raised the topic of adoption, which she had dropped after the tenure episode. “You don’t need a raise for us to afford a child,” I said. “We’ll work it out.”

“I’m probably too old now, anyway,” she said. I told her that was crazy. She was only forty-four.

“I don’t know if I’m up for it,” she said. “I’ve got this weird numbness in my fingers.”

That part was real. She’d seen a doctor, who said the problem came from poor circulation, and advised more exercise. The numbness did not go away.

“We’d be great parents,” I whispered, lying with my arms around her in our big brass bed. “There’s a child out there who needs a home, and we could give her one. Or him.”

“We’d probably be rejected for our lifestyle, anyway,” she said.

Taking Care

I
T HAD BEEN
one of the things that annoyed me about my mother, that she was always so maddeningly predictable. Then around the time she turned sixty, my father began to observe curious changes in her behavior. Always an early riser, who had gotten up at sunrise to fix coffee for my father and see him off to the barn, she began staying in bed until nine or ten, sometimes sleeping, sometimes just lying there. When my father or one of my sisters would ask if she was sick, she got angry.

“Can’t a person take a rest around here without getting the third degree?” she said.

Her cooking changed. Foods she’d prepared all her life—baked beans and corn chowder, anadama bread, chocolate chip cookies, turkey pot pie—started tasting different, and then someone would realize she’d left out a key ingredient like salt or flour, or put them on the stove, or she’d forgotten a dish she’d left on the stove until the smoke alarm went off.

She repeated herself. She left things in odd places—her glasses, her car keys, even her purse—and when she couldn’t find them she burst into tears.
One time she started out to the greenhouse to tell my father a salesman was there to talk about a new water pump. Halfway there she evidently forgot where she was going, and headed back.

“What was I supposed to do?” she asked the salesman. “It’s all so confusing.”

The moment we knew how bad things were came on Christmas, when our family had sat down to turkey dinner, and as usual, my father asked my mother to read the scripture passage. She opened the familiar Bible and put on her glasses, cleared her throat, and began.

But the words she spoke were gibberish. The family was too stunned and shaken to do anything but sit and listen until she finished.

The next week, my father drove my mother to the hospital where her doctor ordered an MRI. They found a tumor called a glioblastoma lodged in her brain. Inoperable. They told us she had six months to live. Eight at most.

At the point of my mother’s diagnosis, Jim, Elizabeth, and I were living in Boston. Though we lived an hour’s drive from the farm—an hour and a quarter, at most—I rarely called or saw my mother. I spoke to my father on the phone now and then—usually when I knew she’d be out at church. This was how I had learned about my mother’s strange behavior and, finally, the reason for it.

An odd thing happened when I realized my mother was dying. I wanted to go home to the farm. Jim was traveling a lot for his insurance business, and I was working part-time, with Elizabeth in preschool. It came to me that we should return to the farm and care for my mother.

Until then, I’d never had any reason to contemplate my mother’s death; her sturdy demeanor and unflagging good health had made her seem indestructible. Now I felt that time was slipping away, and I had to grab every second I could, in an attempt to make things right or at least (more accurately) understand why they had gone so wrong. And where always before she had seemed like such a powerful and frightening force in my life, the tumor revealed—for the first time—her frailty. She was no longer strong enough to hurt me as she once had.

When I moved back home, I intended to stay only a couple of months, to
help my father and sisters take care of my mother. Once spring came, I could take Elizabeth out around the farm and let her do all the things I used to, back in the days I’d followed my father out to the barn—feeding the chickens, riding on the tractor. I told myself I was making this choice in large part for my daughter’s sake—so she could know the farm, and her grandmother.

Now, though, I realized how much I’d missed my home. My father, the land, the farm stand. In an odd way I even missed my mother, as judgmental and cool as she’d always been toward me. As deeply as she’d hurt me.

She was sitting on the porch when I pulled up. Her hair, which had been dark brown when I’d last seen her, was all white. Her body seemed to have shrunk.

“Tall as ever,” she said, as I approached, holding Elizabeth. She did not reach to embrace me, though she patted my daughter’s head.

“Hi, Grandma,” Elizabeth said. She had heard enough of my remarks about my mother to sense ours was not an easy relationship, and so remained, herself, protective and a little wary.

“What are you here for?” she asked. “I thought you were so busy with your job.” Art therapy, working with emotionally disturbed children, mostly, and sometimes Vietnam vets and other PTSD survivors.

“All those years you took care of me,” I said. “I thought it was time I did the same for you.”

So I cooked for her and my father. I took her for walks. I gave her baths and I read to her. My sisters focused on the farm stand, and I stayed close by our mother.

My reasons, in the end, were selfish. I wanted the slate clean. I had to know, once she was dead, that I’d done my best. I didn’t want the burden of feeling that I should have done more or differently.

Her decline came with alarming swiftness. Her face changed—this was the steroids—and though I tried to fix her hair the way she had always liked it in the past, she pushed my hand away, leaving a fine halo of thin white hair that spread out in all directions as if she’d put her finger in an electric socket.

I would have expected she’d want us to get her to church somehow, and I had enlisted Jim—who came up from Boston on weekends—to help me do it, but when I offered, she just shrugged.

“I’ve had enough of that stuff,” she said, with a little wave of her hand. Sixty years of living by the Bible, as—her term—“a God-fearing woman.” Gone in a flash.

THE TUMOR WAS LODGED IN
the portion of the brain that controlled language and speech, which meant that my mother’s words sometimes came out garbled, though never beyond recognition. But the harder part was this: the glioblastoma’s steadily growing presence was affecting my mother’s abilities to control her subconscious thoughts. This had the effect of removing virtually all inhibition.

Suddenly my mother, a woman who had lived her life with the strictest adherence to propriety, was making the most outrageous remarks. Only they weren’t outrageous, actually. She was now simply stating, out loud, the kinds of things she must have been thinking all the time, but keeping to herself until now. One central theme of which was sex.

Once she was sitting in the kitchen with me while I fixed dinner for my father and her.

“How often does he like to put his penis in you?” she asked, meaning my husband. “Do you actually enjoy it?”

I might have worried how to respond, except there was seldom a need to. My mother kept on talking.

“I never liked the act of intercourse myself, but maybe your father wasn’t doing it right,” she said. “I always wondered what the fuss was all about. I bet that Burt Reynolds did some things differently, when he did it with Dinah.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “Your father is a good husband. The only hard part was him wanting me to let him in all the time and pound away at me, like some old barn door slamming, when all I wanted was to be left alone.”

Another time I was making biscuits, rolling out the dough and cutting the
circles out and setting them on the tray to bake. Elizabeth ran through the room, in search of a peanut butter sandwich.

“It’s good you never had to worry about her hanging on your breasts all the time,” my mother said. “I never could understand women wanting to do that kind of thing.”

Though I would have loved to be one of them, of course. If I had been able to give birth, I would never have missed nursing my baby.

“I never liked my breasts particularly,” she said. “They just made trouble. But your father was always after me to let him do things to them.

“He could never get enough, you know,” she said. “Your father. I suppose you know he was hung like a horse, as the saying goes.

“Then again,” she said, her face darkening, “maybe it was my own father that ruined everything.” This was my Wisconsin grandfather she was talking about, the one we never visited, news of whose death, when I was little, had been received with barely a response. I sat there holding my daughter, taking in my mother’s words, feeling sick.

“I wanted to be a good wife to your father,” she said. “In the beginning I even thought I might enjoy it with Edwin. But from the first time we did it, all I could think about every time we’d start was my father.”

I shifted my daughter on my lap. I was holding her tightly, less because she needed that than for the measure of comfort it offered me. I wanted to ask my mother to explain, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what she might say if I pursued the question either.

“They wondered why I never wanted to go back to Wisconsin until after he died,” she said, sounding angry now. “Who would? If I never saw that fucker again, that would be too soon.”

All those years of reading out loud to us from her Bible, never missing church, washing our mouths out with soap if we said “darn” or “hell.” My new mother—the one I got when she was dying—had a mouth like a drunken sailor.

“Then he was dead, and I thought I could finally talk to my sisters about
it,” she said. “Rode the bus all the way to Milwaukee with my girls. Get to the depot, my sister says, ‘Just one thing I want to make clear. We’re not opening up any old Pandora-type boxes, Connie. Pop’s dead and gone. We’re leaving well enough alone.’

“I just wanted to ask my mother why she let it happen,” my mother said. “A girl’s mother is supposed to protect her.”

I could have said plenty here. Did she think it was protecting me, going all the way to British Columbia to confront the one man I ever really loved and take me away from him?

How she had accomplished this I had never understood—how she convinced a man who said I was the love of his life, too, to say good-bye to me. How a woman who believed that life began with conception could have taken her daughter to an abortion clinic. This she had managed. God only knew how. Here was my last chance to ask her, but I couldn’t.

Even now sometimes, as I was laying her naked body on the sheet and running the warm sponge over her skin to bathe her, memories would assault me, and I would have to fight the small, mean impulse to scrub a little too hard, or force the brush through her hair without slowing down to untangle the knots. The urge to inflict pain—registered, though resisted—came to me when I remembered my mother beside me in the waiting room, filling out the forms because I was crying too hard to do it myself. The nurse handing me the gown. Feet in the stirrups and my mother saying, “I know what’s best for you.”

I saw the taxi to the airport. The long flight home. Letters to British Columbia, returned unanswered, no forwarding address. Even when she was on her deathbed, I blamed my mother for this and burned to ask her,
How could you have done it?

GIVEN ALL THE OTHER THINGS
my mother said those last few months, it’s surprising that she said as little as she did about Val Dickerson. For thirty years it seemed as if one of her main focuses in life had been this other family with the
daughter born the same day as I, but at the end of her life, my mother seemed barely to think about the Dickersons, though one day and one only she spoke of Val.

“I do wonder what it would be like to have been pretty, like her,” she said. “Men always nipping at her heels, no doubt. You can’t really blame a fellow, if he wants to lift the skirts of a woman like that and give her a whirl. Those long legs and all that blond hair. Down below, too, no doubt. I suppose you’re the same.”

This was how it went with my mother now. An endless monologue whose contents made me get the queasiness you might feel turning over a rotting log and discovering a mass of slithering insects and worms—so long hidden from the light—scrambling out from under. For hours I sat beside her, grateful for those times my daughter came to settle in my lap, where she fell asleep sometimes. After all my mother’s dark commentary on the human condition, it comforted me to hear the sound of Elizabeth quietly snoring in my arms.

“When all’s said and done,” she said, “what does it really matter, anyway? How long does the whole sex thing last? Five minutes? Ten maybe. The part that matters isn’t getting the baby, it’s raising her. That’s what I did. More than anything in the world I wanted to be a good mother.”

“You did the best you could, Mother,” I told her. Even at such a moment, there was a limit to how much I could reassure her or pretend she’d done a good job. I could feel a tight, hard place in me that, even in the company of a dying woman, withheld the thing she wanted most to hear.

It was winter when her symptoms sent her to the doctor for tests and early spring when she was diagnosed—crocuses pushing through the last of the snow. By the time the lilacs bloomed her walking had become unsteady. “I hope I’m still around for strawberries,” she said.

One of the things she asked me during those last weeks was if my birthday sister knew that she was sick. After so many years it still irritated me to hear her asking about Dana.

“We could call her if you wanted, Connie,” my father said. He was sitting at
her bedside for a change, drinking coffee, putting in a rare daytime appearance. It was hard for my father to see my mother this way. I would stand at the window sometimes now and watch him in the field, staying out even later than usual, circling the rows until the last rays of sunlight were gone. I knew he didn’t want to return to the house. It was the only summer I never heard him whistling.

Nobody ever did call Dana Dickerson, but as it turned out, she came by anyway, just around our Fourth of July birthdays. My mother had hung on until then, though just barely. By the last couple of weeks she was sleeping most of the time, barely speaking anymore—which was a relief, given the kinds of observations she’d been making lately.

Dana was living not far away then, on a farm of her own, raising organic greens and goats. She maintained the ritual of paying a visit to the farm stand during strawberry season, even though she now grew strawberries herself, just to discuss issues of farming with my father, evidently. Speaking with one of my nieces out at the farm stand, she’d learned about my mother, and asked if she could come up to the house and pay her respects.