Chapter 25
I couldn’t sleep. I was agitated, incensed by Tom’s peaceful presence beside me and the regularity of his breathing, his scent that gathered fog-like in the dark bedroom as he slept.
I sat up, staring at his unruly eyebrows, his mouth gaping open as if he were a corpse.
I went upstairs, walking in bare feet through the crypt-like cold with reckless disregard for scorpions.
How dare he suggest that I would crave a mother?
I, who had surgically removed her presence from my life.
If anything, I told myself furiously, huddled on the living room couch, she was a harmless shadow, a discarded photo negative, the inverse of all I was and had made.
I had scrupulously banished in myself all the qualities I detested in her: the physical coldness and withholding; the inability to access joy; the refusal to ever apologize; her mutability, adopting a different persona with each new lover—the cop who gave her a speeding ticket, her boss, the husband of a friend.
Perhaps more than any of these qualities, though, I abhorred her inability to react decisively to protect herself and me.
Her bewildered smile, her feigned naivete putting me on a Greyhound bus alone to Boston every other weekend beginning when I was Ida’s age.
Often my father wasn’t there when I arrived.
I would sit at the terminal among prostitutes and homeless people and addicts asleep in their own piss, trembling like an abandoned dog.
Equally troubling to me, and more vehemently repressed, were the moments of shared happiness.
The summer afternoon spent at the Central Park Zoo, watching the seals.
We had moved in with a man named Damian, a doctor who’d recently left his wife for her, to a beautiful house on a lake an hour outside of the city.
I was nine and already felt too old for zoos.
Still, we stood watching the seals the whole morning, laughing at the sounds they made to cajole one another, as though an innocence we’d so long ago lost had unexpectedly been returned to us.
When we returned home, the lake was quiet; no one else was outside.
By some unspoken agreement, we pretended to be seals.
We had gone in without our swimsuits—something I never did, intent on guarding whatever remained of my innocence.
But this day, to be a seal with her seal mother, for once, I swam naked, the two of us venturing into the middle of the lake, barking and diving and cresting up out of the water.
We swam like that for hours, cleansed of the physical awkwardness between us, the dirtiness we’d witnessed in one another.
I’d been reticent toward Damian at the start of their relationship, disapproving of his being married with a young daughter.
Patiently, slowly, he’d won me over, bringing gifts that hinted at a respectability I’d never encountered.
A set of grosgrain-ribbon headbands; a small leather coin purse holding three silver dollars; a photo book wrapped in shiny red paper of “Old New York,” places he would show me one day, he promised.
He began to spend weekends with us, cooking elaborate meals, driving us to New York for concerts at Lincoln Center.
And then the beautiful house beside the lake.
He and his wife had not been good together, he confided to me as we were unpacking one of his many boxes of records and books.
They hadn’t ever felt like a family, not like us.
On Valentine’s Day, he gave me a gift along with my mother: a small garnet-studded heart on a chain that I wore every day to school.
I wondered only fleetingly if he had given one to the other girl, too, a few years younger than me, whose picture he had shown me, whom his wife would not allow to visit.
When he decided that spring to reconcile with his wife and his real daughter, I suffered the betrayal personally. But I reserved the bulk of my rage for my mother, for having been unable to keep him.
For her part, she obsessed about winning him back. “I want you to write him a note saying you’re not upset,” she instructed. “He’s worried you’re angry with him. You have to tell him you miss him, and everything will be fine between the two of you if he comes back.”
I wouldn’t do it. As long as I could remember, words had been a private refuge—children’s books, song lyrics, the stories I made up lying sleepless in my bed or on the long rides to and from my father’s—a way of comprehending my reality or else escaping it.
More than that, though, it was the fact that I had allowed myself to love him that kept me from doing what she wished.
For days, we were locked in a stalemate.
She sat at the side of my bed imploring or berating me; she invited me for breakfast before the start of school in order to resume her crusade, gripped by a desire to get him back that eclipsed everything else.
“We have to look ahead,” she would say. “We have to imagine the reality we eventually want.” We were living in a small house then, near Albany—Damian must have arranged it.
One evening, she arrived home flushed and excited.
She had been with him. He was close to coming back.
I watched her pace in the kitchen like an animal enflamed by scent, gaunt, her hair disheveled, the sharp report of her heels striking the worn linoleum floor as she strode to a cabinet, took out a sheet of paper, a pen.
Better than her face, which I grope toward in dreams, I remember her body with its lean limbs, her way of moving when she was agitated, all efficiency and strike.
“Here,” she said, setting the paper and pen onto the kitchen table where I was sitting, the car keys she’d been gripping, smiling tensely. “Here you are; write to him.”
“No.”
Her smile quivered. She sat down beside me, announcing with forced cheer, “I’ll start with you.
There, see? See how easy it is?” She had given me the pen and, taking hold of my hand, moved it jerkily over the page, intoning the syllables, Dear Day-Mee-Unn, that bore no relation to the jagged shapes we were producing.
Tears pooled in her eyes, her lip trembled, her hair falling over her face.
I resisted. I pressed my lips together as if to hold in the words she was bent on extracting, my heart beating frantically.
I bore down on the pen, ripping a line through the paper.
As a girl, I was like Ida. Unyielding, opinionated in a way that sprang not from my thoughts but from a more unassailable source, the summative self that precedes and outlives us.
Did I recognize that here was the principal battle of our lives?
The war that had been waged between us since my infancy, in which she endeavored not to make me lie, but to make me become the lie, the story she’d invented on my behalf.
Her face had tightened into ugliness, her mouth. “Goddamn it! Just do it! Say you love him!”
“I don’t,” I replied with icy calm.
With a jerking motion, she pushed her chair back, snatching up her car keys as if to abandon me.
Halfway to the door, she halted and, without warning, turned and threw them at my face.
I remember closing my eyes and willing them to strike me; a second later, the sound of them clattering against the floor behind me.
“Life is funny,” she said breezily several months later, when, in a moment of calculated cruelty, I’d recalled to her the hurling of the keys.
We were driving to the bus station. Summer break had just begun.
I was going to see my father. “I really ought to thank you for not writing that note. I’ve met someone so much more wonderful.
He’s going to take me on a marvelous trip to the beach.
” There was a note of triumph in her voice.
I didn’t respond. I held my gaze out the window, scrupulously keeping myself from her, my shoulders folded into my chest, my breath shallow.
I hadn’t yet learned to lose my temper, to throw things as she did, to rant and cry.
I only knew to swallow, to withhold, to spitefully make myself into nothing.
The rest of my things arrived at my father’s a week later. Two smallish cardboard boxes, securely taped shut. I never met the wonderful new man. I never saw my mother again.