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Orphans

LAST CHRISTMAS EVE MY FATHER TOOK ME BY THE ELBOW and whispered: “Your grandmother died ten years ago today. Be nice to your mother.” I had forgotten. He is a reticent and furtive man, but he remembers things. For years he would wait till a few days before Christmas and then hand me $20. “Go buy something pretty for your mother,” he would instruct, gruffly, and turn away.

That evening while we watched television, all lined up beside each other and chatting desultorily, my mother spoke abruptly, in a new voice. “My mother died today,” she said, wonderingly, as though she’d just been told. The television prattled on. She deflects expression and emotion by riposte and foil, deftly, and we exist in the cautiously defined spaces between. It is an inharmonious harmony, tense, with voices rarely raised.

She asked me what I remembered of my grandmother, and I told her of driving fifty miles out of our way on our last vacation just to see my grandmother’s house, the house where my mother was raised.

“Was the ivy still on the chimney?” she asked, for since the house was sold she hasn’t been back. The threads tangle while we talk, a tweedy web of shifting associations: my mother and her daughter, her mother and my grandmother, and around us father and husband, brother and children, their children, my children. This is her surprise for me, her secret: my mother yearns to be a daughter again.

My mother’s mother was a forbidding woman, stern and drawn, with an immaculate house and a tiny yipping dog that nipped at our heels from behind her calves. She would stand in the gleaming kitchen, hot in the summer morning sun, with a spatula raised as though to swat at the first sign of disobedience. It was a house of territories, borders, boundaries, permitted and forbidden places. I knew as an undeniable law that what I valued she often ignored; that she placed value where I couldn’t see it. I searched for snails in the rose bed, hid dolls in the mail chute. She waxed the kitchen floor.

Once in fury at her I sat on the concrete steps and tore apart her favorite philodendron, leaf by leaf, scattering the green shreds like dung, like ruin. The old straight-backed woman cried, still and trembling in the doorway. It was an enormous crime. I sat in the curious silence of shamed regret, curling inward, surrounded by pieces of something I couldn’t put back together again—and saw behind my grandmother my own mother’s stricken face. She had somehow permitted this crime, had failed, and become subject to her own mother again, through me.

And so I always found it odd, watching from the doorway, that my dour grandmother and stoic mother spent hours talking over a single pot of coffee, relaxed, girlish. These scenes are elongated and mysterious, one of the forbidden places. I sprawled on the huge rag rug, following its oval track from the center outward, from the outside in, while they laughed and gossiped. At night my sister and I lay in the soft guest bed, fighting over territory, and heard more talk, muffled, more laughing, and now and then through the magpie voices my father’s deep, short bursts of speech.

Now I have three children, and new appreciations. I call my mother, three hundred miles away, to talk about them, and she interrupts, anxious to return to her book, her television. She takes her cool pleasure in us from a comfortable distance, and our conversations are often short. She parries better than I can, and I forfeit. Hanging up in sudden discontent, I am all over them, passionate and physical, rubbing and wrestling and jouncing, whispering subliminal permissions, tiny pleas, in their downy ears.

I give up my common inhibitions, rules of conduct, when I hold my babies. It is a pleasure instinctive and heavy, and breathlessly free. Bit by bit time wedges us apart, forging separation, and amnesia. I love my parents because, after all, they are my parents, and my babies love me for the same good reason. We are bound in a loom of pulling away and pushing back, letting go and holding on. My children’s task is to pull away and they do, they do, tugging furiously at the leash I strain to play out an inch at a time. We hold back, let go; I still tug. A friend, telling me of her mother’s death, begins, “I remember when we were dying.”

My mother was orphaned a decade ago, and she still shivers with loss, denied the requisite delights of regression. Nostalgia is its own reward, its own burden; it illuminates our imagined history. My grandmother lived in that house a long time after her husband died of cancer, long after she found out that she, too, had cancer. The house was sold, furniture parceled out. The tough woman in the kitchen became a weak bundle of pain, and I lifted her under her arms and swung her from the bed to the commode, commode to chair. She admitted no complaint. I could feel in her dried and sagging arms a most peculiar substance. I could feel, blushing, a twisted skin in the faces that watched us; my mother and her daughter, my sister and my mother’s sister and my grandmother’s granddaughters, all of us at once and together and almost wholly unaware of it: the clinging web that held us back and wouldn’t let us go.

My mother and my glacial aunt tentatively asked me to quit school and stay with her. I refused. I held back, and my grandmother let go. When the furniture was divided, my mother kept her bed; it’s where I sleep now when I visit them.

All my cross-grained, melancholy generations have gently collided with each other, as generations do, like bottles of milk rattling along, sliding up the track to jostle other bottles along. We wait our turn. My mother’s father is dead, her mother is dead, my father’s father and three stepfathers are dead. And between us my brother and sister and I have seven children jockeying for position by the fireplace, playing our old games. This Christmas my mother watches her grandchildren and her television from a hospital bed, where the tree used to go. She is dying of cancer, the same cancer that killed her mother.

Each year around my birthday the little ornamental cherry tree in front of her house bursts into bloom, luxuriant and top-heavy. I used to sit in its lap of low branches; now I pick blossoms off the top. The bubbling frog creek is a dry gully; the noisy park clean and quiet. I see strange faces in the streets, new shapes, house-peaks along empty hills. It is time to think things through, to follow the thread where it enters the knot until I find its exit. Time now to confess my tenuous hold on adulthood before I am orphaned in turn.

She has filled the drawers of my old dresser with her wedding albums and old baby pictures and clippings of my brother’s high school football games, neatly scissored. She takes with her where she goes a voice I’ve heard from birth, a step, a chime, the smoky car. A door closes, irrevocably, on rooms cluttered in certain ways by her passage, on a dusty piano, sun-dried towels, and certain plays of light on certain trees. Chipped crystal stays, without her use, and the dark bedroom and high dark bed, without her smell. I begin a definition of love made fundamentally of the familiar. These things and these places, the way a shadow casts in August and seamstress hands and the cool wet smell of the grass in the early morning, are not things I’ve used much for years. I have been inattentive in my turn and made another family, holding hers in reserve, available. She is dying and sad and scared to die, and takes with her the remnants and desires of my life till now. She lets go and I hold back, watching her grow weak and frail, disconcertingly familiar as she disappears from sight.

She was never the mother I wanted her to be. We have never chattered over coffee, grown girlish together while my daughter watched. For a long time I tried to change her, reproachful, and failed, not seeing how she had tried to change me long ago. She won’t change now; she is merely herself. So is my father, blustering and mad. He meticulously catalogs videotapes of old movies, John Wayne and Errol Flynn, their favorites, to watch alone half-asleep in the evenings after she dies. My silent brother and my shrill, half-panicked sister won’t change, not much, and neither will I. We are the gifts we were given. I sit by her bed in sadness, an unspoken summing-up held, like so much else, back. These are the people I am accompanied by, my escorts. We dance attendance on each other, as families do, and little else. There is little else to do.

And I go home, wherever it is, and confront a son resentful of my tight rein. He demands a faster adulthood, receiving power in unexpected shifts and abrupt shufflings. I grab the leash and run the other way. He is hurt by my mother’s coming extinction, blustering like my father, his grandfather, her husband. I grow dizzy in the sticky threads, resistance against the spin. He is letting go of me and I am holding back, for I know he has no idea, no possible idea of all the many surprises still in store.

Zyzzyva, Winter 1986–87

For more than thirty years I’ve been writing about the way family wraps around our lives. There is no escaping it, even when we escape—one way or another, we are made of it. This was one in a series of essays I wrote about the sticky threads woven around us by both parents and children—a web we create, long for, celebrate, and hate.