“Fiber,” I said, and turned back to sleep.
BUT THEN OUR RELATIONSHIP WAS ALWAYS FRAUGHT. MY SISTER Maureen remembers coming home when I was around two and finding my mother pacing the front porch. “I don’t know if I’m crazy,” she said, fighting tears, “or Michelle.” My mother was forty then. She had endured alcoholic parents and the death of an infant son. She was raising six kids with no help. I’m sure I was the crazy one. Her lifelong nickname for me, only half-jokingly, was the Little Witch.
We button-pushed our whole lives. She stonewalled. I glowered. She scribbled notes on envelopes and slid them under my bedroom door. “You’re vain, thoughtless, and rude,” a notorious one went, concluding, “but you’re my daughter and of course I love you very much.” We had a summer cabin on Lake Michigan, and I remember one afternoon as a kid playing in the waves as she read a book in a chair on the beach. I realized that the waves were just high enough so that I could remain underwater and then rise for a quick breath when the wave was at its highest, shielding me from view. I let my mother straighten up and scan the water. I let her put down her book. I let her stand. I let her run toward the water preparing to scream. Only then did I pop up nonchalantly.
I wish now that I’d been kinder to her. I used to rib her about the fact that she couldn’t bear to watch certain scenes in movies or on TV shows. She couldn’t take scenes in which someone threw a party and no one came. She avoided movies about salesmen down on their luck. The specificity was what I found peculiar and amusing; I now see it as the mark of a deeply sensitive person. Her father was once a successful salesman whose career bottomed out. She witnessed her parents’ problems with alcohol and the insistent mime of merrymaking that went on too long. I see her vulnerabilities now. Her parents valued social success and dismissed signs of my mother’s quick, eager mind. She felt thwarted. She could be undermining and cutting in her remarks, but the older me sees that as a reflection of her own undercut self-image.
We swim or sink against our deficits in life, and she made it a point to encourage me in ways that she had not been. I remember that she dissuaded me from trying out for cheerleading in high school. “Don’t you want to be the one cheered?” she said. She thrilled at any of my academic or literary successes. When I was in high school, I came across a letter she’d started to write years before to Aunt Marilyn, my father’s sister, who was a theology professor and accomplished archaeologist. My mother was looking for advice on how to best encourage me as a young writer. “How do I make sure she doesn’t end up writing greeting cards?” she wrote. I thought of that question often in future years, during the many periods when I would have been ecstatic to be paid to write Hallmark greetings.
But I felt her expectations, the transference of hope, and I bristled. I both yearned for her approval and found her investment in me suffocating. She was both proud of the fact that she had raised a strong-minded daughter and resentful of my sharp opinions. It didn’t help matters that my generation was deep into analysis and deconstruction, and hers was not. My mother didn’t, or wouldn’t, navel-gaze in that way. I remember talking with my sister Maureen once about the severe short haircuts we all had as children.
“Doesn’t it seem like Mom was trying to desexualize us?” I asked. Maureen, the mother of three, suppressed a laugh mixed with irritation. “Wait until you have kids, Michelle,” she said. “Short haircuts aren’t desexualizing. They’re easy.”
THE NIGHT BEFORE MY WEDDING, MY MOTHER AND I HAD OUR biggest blowout. I was unemployed and adrift, not writing or doing much of anything, and I’d put a lot of time—too much, probably—into the wedding. At the rehearsal dinner, I seated small groups of people who didn’t know each other together; the only thing I told them was that they all had one thing in common and had to figure out what it was. At one table everyone had lived at some point in Minnesota. Another table was avid cooks.
In the middle of dinner, my mother came up to me as I was making my way toward the bathroom. I’d been avoiding her because a friend had made the mistake of telling me that earlier in the evening she’d remarked to my mother that she thought I was the best writer she knew. “Oh, I know. I think so too,” my mother said. “But don’t you think it’s too late for her?” Her words stung and batted around in my head all night.
I saw her out of the corner of my eye coming toward me. In retrospect, she was smiling. I could see she was pleased with everything; she was never good at giving compliments directly. I’m sure she thought she was being funny. She gestured at the tables.
“You have too much time on your hands,” she said. I turned and faced her with what I’m sure was a mask of pure rage.
“Get away from me,” I spit out. She was shocked and tried to explain, but I cut her off. “Walk away from me. Now.”
I went to the ladies’ room, locked myself in a stall and allowed myself to cry for five minutes, then went back out and pretended that everything was fine.
She was, by all accounts, devastated by my reaction. We never spoke of it, but shortly after the wedding, she wrote me a long letter detailing all the things about me that made her proud. We slowly rebuilt our relationship after that. In late January 2007, my parents decided to take a cruise to Costa Rica. The boat would leave from a port south of Los Angeles. The four of us—my husband, Patton, and I and my parents—had dinner the night before their trip. We laughed a lot, and I drove them to the dock in the morning. My mother and I hugged tightly good-bye.
A few days later, the phone in the kitchen rang at four a.m. I didn’t get up. Then it rang again, but stopped before I could get to it. I listened to the voice mail. It was my father. His voice sounded strangled and almost unintelligible.
“Michelle,” he said. “Call your siblings.” Click.
I called my sister Maureen.
“You don’t know?” she asked.
“What?”
“Oh, Michelle,” she said. “Mom died.”
My mother, a diabetic, had fallen ill on the ship due to complications from her disease. They helicoptered her to San José, but it was too late. She was seventy-four.
Two years later, my daughter, Alice, was born. I was inconsolable for the first two weeks. “Postpartum depression,” my husband explained to friends. But it wasn’t new-mom blues. It was old-mom blues. Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time. Sobbing hysterically, almost unable to speak, I ordered my husband to go down into our dank basement and find the letter my mother had written to me after the wedding. He spent hours down there. Every box was overturned. Papers littered the floor. He couldn’t find it.
*
SHORTLY AFTER MY MOTHER’S DEATH, MY FATHER, SISTERS, BROTHER, and I went to my parents’ apartment in Deerfield Beach, Florida, to sort through her stuff. We sniffed her clothes that still smelled like Happy perfume by Clinique. We marveled at her bottomless collection of bags, a lifelong obsession. Each of us took something of hers. I took a pair of pink-and-white sandals. They sit in my closet still.
Afterward the seven of us went to an early dinner at the Sea Watch, a nearby restaurant overlooking the ocean. We’re laughers, my family, and we told stories about my mother that made us laugh. Seven people laughing loudly create a scene.
An older woman with a bemused smile came up to our table as she was leaving. “What’s the secret?” she asked.
“I’m sorry?” my brother, Bob, said.
“To such a happy family?”