Scathed
My mother is painfully honest. I think I can say she’s the most honest person I’ve ever known. It’s an artless art skips that a generation; I take more after my dad. We “aspire” to acquire meaning; we’re focused on the way things should look, the way they should be. “Begin as you mean to go forward,” my dad used to say. “Don’t give yourself away.” It’s a form of optimism, really.
So it was pointless asking my father questions; you wouldn’t get a truthful response, you’d get an optimistic response. For actual truth, there was only Mom. “There are monsters,” she would admit. “But none of them are under your bed.”
That’s why the question posed by my sixteen-year old self should have been so easy to answer. I only wanted facts. “Mom, have you ever been to bed with anyone besides Daddy?” It was an adolescent question, asked in the hottest heat of the sexual revolution, and like many of the questions of adolescence, asked at exactly the wrong moment. She was headed up the stairs with an armful of laundry folded in her peculiarly haphazard way. It was not uncommon to find a diagonal crease right across the front of an oxfordcloth blouse or a pair of khakis rolled around sneakers. Fortunately at my high-minded progressive school we were above caring about such things. We wore other people’s shirts in sizes far too big for us, and painter’s pants with plenty of pockets for screwdrivers or chisels should we ever figure out what such things were for. Tight jeans didn’t come in till later, after the sexual revolution had already been lost.
Mom stopped on the stairs and turned around; “handling” the question. In my mind’s eye she is glued there forever like a figure on a toy bank; condemned to stagger and pivot when you put in a quarter.
She placed the laundry on the step. Then she picked it up again. She cleared her throat. Then she said, “I don’t want to answer that question. Ask me later. When we’ve both grown up.”
Did I imagine that last part, I wondered later, in my total surprise over the unanswered, easy question. This was not a multiple choice question. My adolescent mind was in the market for a Yes or No; not,“neither of the above”. I went back downstairs to pour myself another cup of strong black coffee that I was guzzling that summer, because I’d read that’s what inspired Balzac and Thackeray. And because it was summer, and because I was sixteen, and because I had nothing but time.
She hadn’t answered the question. She’d put me off; only to raise other questions. It wasn’t the first time my mother’s painful honesty exposed her as socially inept. At parties when people asked her what she did she always said, “I’m a failed sculptor,” because in a bay of our garage she welded nails into unhumanoid shapes of jagged metal she called “portraits.” No one alive wants portraits like that. In all matters of dating decorum and etiquette she was useless driving me crazy by refusing to lie for me on the telephone, as everyone else’s mother did. So if Donald Drip called she’d be sure to tell him yes I was home, doing nothing important; had no date for the dance and had certainly received all seventeen of his previous messages.
My mother. Poor mom. And she looked so strange. She hated buying clothes and if forced to make an effort somehow always got it wrong. I remember a particularly hideous gunmetal-gray ball-gown purchased because it was “on sale.” Of course it was; who wants to go to a party looking like a howitzer? Her favored everyday attire was “skorts” – those weird half-shorts half-skirt things women used to wear for golf.
But she was not unpretty; she had the most wonderful naturally curly hair I didn’t inherit (my sons have it) which she wore in a topknot with lots of escaping wisps like a French maid in a farce. She was simply not a social person. When my friends’ mothers tried to get her involved in group planning for fundraisers and round- robin parties she treated them like brain damaged supplicants speaking in tongues. Not a “party” person.
Her only friends were the women she’d been to art school with. Even though that school no longer existed they still met once a year at the Bellevue-Stratford. God help any of us kids if we had a conflict on that day; a teacher’s meeting, a part in a play, a National Merit Scholars award, thirty stitches in an emergency room – Mom was off to the Bellevue-Stratford. My mother will have herself wheeled there on a gurney from her deathbed.
My mother. So there I sat at the quartz-top kitchen table trying to figure out what refusing to answer my simple question must mean. Well, there was only one thing it could mean, because if the answer was No she would have just said No. I hadn’t even asked her aboutpremarital sex (a hot topic in those days) I asked her aboutsomeone else. And she wouldn’t answer. So the next question I had to ask myself was, did this interloper comebefore her marriage or after?
I was a virgin myself at sixteen, a virgin with a boyfriend, so I had a big stake in the answer. Virginity was a hot topic too in those days, and although I went, as I say, to a progressive school, they were strong believers in virginity in many areas of life, including, alas, the financial. Lack of preparation was their idea of preparation and my parents were all for it. They aimed to graduate girls “unscathed”; free of imprint or complication of either brain and body.
As my mother’s only daughter I took a deep interest in her life when she was my age, but she was stalwartly unhelpful. To hear her tell it, her home life was dreary and her school days unmemorable. Art school was her end-of-the-rainbow, and come to think of it, Daddy must have been her lucky pot of gold because her parents certainly weren’t. She married at seventeen – seems young, but think of Juliet – and Daddy, who was on the board of the art school, said of course she could continue, even while having three boys in a row (one set of twins). So either she got it on with the boy next door before meeting my Dad – which seemed so unlikely – or the unthinkable:Mom cheated on Dad. Although she attended an all-female art school, (probably why it went out of business) there were some male artists hanging around, and we all know what artists are. I could only assume she and some scruffy Bohemian had lunged at each other and it was all best forgotten – I was fairly sure my poor optimistic father didn’t know.
And that’s where the question stayed until the mid-seventies, when Rape was discovered. I was home with infants during this period and had lots of time for thinking vengeful, crazy thoughts. Everyone had been raped at one time or another, so it seemed, even me if you counted that time I was too tired to say no to Jeff Scovis (and I did count it.)
Maybe my mom had been raped. It would certainly explain the way she didn’t answer the question. The poor thing! Some delivery man had forced his way in and had his way with her, misinterpreting the “skort” thing entirely. If I been gentler and more thoughtful, instead of an idiotic sixteen-year-old virgin with no idea how the world actually works, I could have helped her to higher consciousness and subsequent catharsis. We could have cried in each other’s arms (a first; I had never seen my mother cry) instead of me crying alone, now, on the cradle-cap of my colicky infant son.
In the eighties when my marriage broke up I became a lot more cynical. I found out my husband was cheating on me with my so-called best friend. Everyone was cheating, or so it seemed; I being the only one (that goddam school again) who had missed the memo. Why was my Mom so nice to that awful Donald Drip who pursued me so hopelessly throughout high school (and whose real name I could no longer recall)? It must be because they were “getting it on” in the fourth bay of the garage, AKA her “art studio”. A true-but-tired tale; the horny teenage boy and the lonely older woman whose husband is always away on business trips. That was probably what happened. “Rape” once again assumed its proper perspective -- if a delivery man had tried to rape my mother she would have attacked him with her welder’s torch.
In the midst of my divorce and custody crisis, Daddy died. Optimism rendered him a classic Type A, “do your best” which meant working non-stop and yourself with bacon and beer. Everyone said he was setting himself up for a heart attack and for once everyone was right.
My mother retired to our lake house, which seemed crazy to my brothers but not to me. It was lonely but beautiful, with plenty of room and she was having it winterized. I couldn’t leave the state until the custody crisis was resolved and my disheveled resume received few accolades, so when she invited us to live with her it seemed an excellent idea. So I, who’d sworn I’d find a “really smart” school for my kids that would actually teach them something, put them on a bus for the public school twelve miles away where all the dads played ice hockey and drove snowplows and all the moms worked in convenience stores and wore tattoos.
My mother had changed. Her hair was white now, and a completely different texture. The curl was gone and so was the topknot. She wore it so short that from the back she looked just like a little old man. And she’d lost weight too, seemed she’d shrunk inside her clothes. The “skorts” were long gone in favor of flannel shirts, down vests and canvas pants.
That first morning we put the kids on the bus we were sitting there afterwards, gorging on coffee and cigarettes, in some kind of horrible unplanned reprise of my teenage years. Me in an Indian pregnancy blouse that was the only thing that would fit after my post- divorce eating binge, my mother hunched over like a little witch-doll, the pair of us in a room smelling strongly of insulation and raw wood. That’s when that old, old, question came back to me.
“Do you think we’re both grown up now?” I tried to joke.
“What?” Her voice was more gravelly now, with all that smoking. She was trying not to smoke around
my kids; of course that only made her want it more. She lit one cigarette from another with an addict’s intensity. Planning for the next before finishing the one she’d got.
“Remember that time I asked you who you’d had sex with, besides Daddy? You said you’d tell me when we both grew up.”
She turned a dull red. I had forgotten that she used to be a blusher. I guess I inherited that from her; I’m a blusher, too.
“I’ll tell you now, if you want to know,” she said.
I felt that same weird amazement I’d felt at sixteen, it was like we were characters speaking lines in a play. This wasn’t me, this wasn’t her. It felt like something you have to get through so you can get somewhere else.
“So there was someone else.”
“There was. One time.”
She made a heavy point of the qualification.
Sounded like my rape hypothesis might be coming true. The awkward questioning reminded me of the cross- examining counsel in my custody case, who paced back and forth while prying truth out of me. I longed to emulate him to release the pressure, but I didn’t dare. My mother quivered like a deer approaching a hunter’s blind. I held my breath to keep from scaring her away.
She said, “At your brother’s funeral.”
Funeral? I had to repeat the word to myself; as if Id forgotten what it meant. Nobody has funerals any
more. My father had a memorial service. My brother’s funeral was a long, long time ago. I was no more than four or five. It was the Summer of Unexpected Death, one of my twin brothers drowned in a freak swimming accident and then my aunt fell off a roof. I recalled details only vaguely.
“Uncle Jack,” said my mother.
“Uncle Jack?“ My father’s youngest brother. A figure from long ago. Didn’t Uncle Jack live in Mexico? I barely remembered anything about him. The face that did come to mind was black and white, like the photographs I’d seen.
All I could say was, “Why?”
She smiled dreamily. “He was the most like Rafe."
My dead brother. “But where?” Unbidden came a picture of frantic humping behind the coffin...
the coats.”
“Upstairs in the guest room. Where we put “But anyone could have come in.”
She smiled. This was a memory she liked
thinking about. “But no one did.”
A complete adjustment of my already desiccated worldview. The question I needed to ask concerned not a funeral frenzy-hump but the meaning behind that smile.
I tried to recall what had happened to Uncle Jack. Why had he disappeared? He went to Mexico and stayed there, after his wife died. Aunt Fee. She was called that because Aunt Ophelia was too big a mouthful. Aunt
Fee ‘s death I recall better. She died later, on the fourth of July. I was there. She fell off a building where we’d gone to see the fireworks.
I was coming up the stairs and as soon as I got to the top the adults forced me to go back down. It seemed so unfair at the time. I recall my rage very clearly. Weren’t they still having the fireworks? So why couldn’t I see them? But instead I was forced to go to the hospital where there was nothing to be seen. Aunt Fee didn’t make it. But if there was another funeral, I didn’t attend.
“You went to Mexico, too!” Now I remembered that. My father linked it to my brother’s death, said my mother needed a vacation. I was an uncomprehending little girl; didn’t understand how my mother could leave me behind. Maybe my extra sympathy for my father – or my distance from my mother – started from that moment.
“Were you there with him?” She wasn’t long gone. She came home before the leaves fell.
“He wouldn’t see me.” She hung her head, shamefaced. “I thought he didn’t want me because he was married to Ophelia, but even after she was dead—“ Her face collapsed, crimped, puckered like an overdone soufflé. Throw that one away. She wailed, “He told me to leave.”
Darkness fell, in the middle of the day. Just us, just coffee and cigarette smoke and the snow falling outside. Turned out I wasn’t grown up enough, after all. All I could think about was lunch. Did we have the makings for lasagna? I finally knew which question to ask, but I was too hungry to ask it. Binge eating had forced me
back into maternity clothes, to my ever-lasting shame; but it was an unproductive maternity.
But shame doesn’t stop people from doing things. I had to know. So the same mouth that eats, asked, “Weren’t you on that roof?”
She nodded her head up and down, waiting, readying herself for the next, inevitable question.
If we didn’t have meat I would have to go to the store. Because wasn’t I finished being vegetarian, wasn’t I done with going without? So I didn’t ask her that last, important question. I didn’t ask her because I know she would have told me. My mother is painfully honest.
My mother is painfully honest. I think I can say she’s the most honest person I’ve ever known. It’s an artless art skips that a generation; I take more after my dad. We “aspire” to acquire meaning; we’re focused on the way things should look, the way they should be. “Begin as you mean to go forward,” my dad used to say. “Don’t give yourself away.” It’s a form of optimism, really.
So it was pointless asking my father questions; you wouldn’t get a truthful response, you’d get an optimistic response. For actual truth, there was only Mom. “There are monsters,” she would admit. “But none of them are under your bed.”
That’s why the question posed by my sixteen-year old self should have been so easy to answer. I only wanted facts. “Mom, have you ever been to bed with anyone besides Daddy?” It was an adolescent question, asked in the hottest heat of the sexual revolution, and like many of the questions of adolescence, asked at exactly the wrong moment. She was headed up the stairs with an armful of laundry folded in her peculiarly haphazard way. It was not uncommon to find a diagonal crease right across the front of an oxfordcloth blouse or a pair of khakis rolled around sneakers. Fortunately at my high-minded progressive school we were above caring about such things. We wore other people’s shirts in sizes far too big for us, and painter’s pants with plenty of pockets for screwdrivers or chisels should we ever figure out what such things were for. Tight jeans didn’t come in till later, after the sexual revolution had already been lost.
Mom stopped on the stairs and turned around; “handling” the question. In my mind’s eye she is glued there forever like a figure on a toy bank; condemned to stagger and pivot when you put in a quarter.
She placed the laundry on the step. Then she picked it up again. She cleared her throat. Then she said, “I don’t want to answer that question. Ask me later. When we’ve both grown up.”
Did I imagine that last part, I wondered later, in my total surprise over the unanswered, easy question. This was not a multiple choice question. My adolescent mind was in the market for a Yes or No; not,“neither of the above”. I went back downstairs to pour myself another cup of strong black coffee that I was guzzling that summer, because I’d read that’s what inspired Balzac and Thackeray. And because it was summer, and because I was sixteen, and because I had nothing but time.
She hadn’t answered the question. She’d put me off; only to raise other questions. It wasn’t the first time my mother’s painful honesty exposed her as socially inept. At parties when people asked her what she did she always said, “I’m a failed sculptor,” because in a bay of our garage she welded nails into unhumanoid shapes of jagged metal she called “portraits.” No one alive wants portraits like that. In all matters of dating decorum and etiquette she was useless driving me crazy by refusing to lie for me on the telephone, as everyone else’s mother did. So if Donald Drip called she’d be sure to tell him yes I was home, doing nothing important; had no date for the dance and had certainly received all seventeen of his previous messages.
My mother. Poor mom. And she looked so strange. She hated buying clothes and if forced to make an effort somehow always got it wrong. I remember a particularly hideous gunmetal-gray ball-gown purchased because it was “on sale.” Of course it was; who wants to go to a party looking like a howitzer? Her favored everyday attire was “skorts” – those weird half-shorts half-skirt things women used to wear for golf.
But she was not unpretty; she had the most wonderful naturally curly hair I didn’t inherit (my sons have it) which she wore in a topknot with lots of escaping wisps like a French maid in a farce. She was simply not a social person. When my friends’ mothers tried to get her involved in group planning for fundraisers and round- robin parties she treated them like brain damaged supplicants speaking in tongues. Not a “party” person.
Her only friends were the women she’d been to art school with. Even though that school no longer existed they still met once a year at the Bellevue-Stratford. God help any of us kids if we had a conflict on that day; a teacher’s meeting, a part in a play, a National Merit Scholars award, thirty stitches in an emergency room – Mom was off to the Bellevue-Stratford. My mother will have herself wheeled there on a gurney from her deathbed.
My mother. So there I sat at the quartz-top kitchen table trying to figure out what refusing to answer my simple question must mean. Well, there was only one thing it could mean, because if the answer was No she would have just said No. I hadn’t even asked her aboutpremarital sex (a hot topic in those days) I asked her aboutsomeone else. And she wouldn’t answer. So the next question I had to ask myself was, did this interloper comebefore her marriage or after?
I was a virgin myself at sixteen, a virgin with a boyfriend, so I had a big stake in the answer. Virginity was a hot topic too in those days, and although I went, as I say, to a progressive school, they were strong believers in virginity in many areas of life, including, alas, the financial. Lack of preparation was their idea of preparation and my parents were all for it. They aimed to graduate girls “unscathed”; free of imprint or complication of either brain and body.
As my mother’s only daughter I took a deep interest in her life when she was my age, but she was stalwartly unhelpful. To hear her tell it, her home life was dreary and her school days unmemorable. Art school was her end-of-the-rainbow, and come to think of it, Daddy must have been her lucky pot of gold because her parents certainly weren’t. She married at seventeen – seems young, but think of Juliet – and Daddy, who was on the board of the art school, said of course she could continue, even while having three boys in a row (one set of twins). So either she got it on with the boy next door before meeting my Dad – which seemed so unlikely – or the unthinkable:Mom cheated on Dad. Although she attended an all-female art school, (probably why it went out of business) there were some male artists hanging around, and we all know what artists are. I could only assume she and some scruffy Bohemian had lunged at each other and it was all best forgotten – I was fairly sure my poor optimistic father didn’t know.
And that’s where the question stayed until the mid-seventies, when Rape was discovered. I was home with infants during this period and had lots of time for thinking vengeful, crazy thoughts. Everyone had been raped at one time or another, so it seemed, even me if you counted that time I was too tired to say no to Jeff Scovis (and I did count it.)
Maybe my mom had been raped. It would certainly explain the way she didn’t answer the question. The poor thing! Some delivery man had forced his way in and had his way with her, misinterpreting the “skort” thing entirely. If I been gentler and more thoughtful, instead of an idiotic sixteen-year-old virgin with no idea how the world actually works, I could have helped her to higher consciousness and subsequent catharsis. We could have cried in each other’s arms (a first; I had never seen my mother cry) instead of me crying alone, now, on the cradle-cap of my colicky infant son.
In the eighties when my marriage broke up I became a lot more cynical. I found out my husband was cheating on me with my so-called best friend. Everyone was cheating, or so it seemed; I being the only one (that goddam school again) who had missed the memo. Why was my Mom so nice to that awful Donald Drip who pursued me so hopelessly throughout high school (and whose real name I could no longer recall)? It must be because they were “getting it on” in the fourth bay of the garage, AKA her “art studio”. A true-but-tired tale; the horny teenage boy and the lonely older woman whose husband is always away on business trips. That was probably what happened. “Rape” once again assumed its proper perspective -- if a delivery man had tried to rape my mother she would have attacked him with her welder’s torch.
In the midst of my divorce and custody crisis, Daddy died. Optimism rendered him a classic Type A, “do your best” which meant working non-stop and yourself with bacon and beer. Everyone said he was setting himself up for a heart attack and for once everyone was right.
My mother retired to our lake house, which seemed crazy to my brothers but not to me. It was lonely but beautiful, with plenty of room and she was having it winterized. I couldn’t leave the state until the custody crisis was resolved and my disheveled resume received few accolades, so when she invited us to live with her it seemed an excellent idea. So I, who’d sworn I’d find a “really smart” school for my kids that would actually teach them something, put them on a bus for the public school twelve miles away where all the dads played ice hockey and drove snowplows and all the moms worked in convenience stores and wore tattoos.
My mother had changed. Her hair was white now, and a completely different texture. The curl was gone and so was the topknot. She wore it so short that from the back she looked just like a little old man. And she’d lost weight too, seemed she’d shrunk inside her clothes. The “skorts” were long gone in favor of flannel shirts, down vests and canvas pants.
That first morning we put the kids on the bus we were sitting there afterwards, gorging on coffee and cigarettes, in some kind of horrible unplanned reprise of my teenage years. Me in an Indian pregnancy blouse that was the only thing that would fit after my post- divorce eating binge, my mother hunched over like a little witch-doll, the pair of us in a room smelling strongly of insulation and raw wood. That’s when that old, old, question came back to me.
“Do you think we’re both grown up now?” I tried to joke.
“What?” Her voice was more gravelly now, with all that smoking. She was trying not to smoke around
my kids; of course that only made her want it more. She lit one cigarette from another with an addict’s intensity. Planning for the next before finishing the one she’d got.
“Remember that time I asked you who you’d had sex with, besides Daddy? You said you’d tell me when we both grew up.”
She turned a dull red. I had forgotten that she used to be a blusher. I guess I inherited that from her; I’m a blusher, too.
“I’ll tell you now, if you want to know,” she said.
I felt that same weird amazement I’d felt at sixteen, it was like we were characters speaking lines in a play. This wasn’t me, this wasn’t her. It felt like something you have to get through so you can get somewhere else.
“So there was someone else.”
“There was. One time.”
She made a heavy point of the qualification.
Sounded like my rape hypothesis might be coming true. The awkward questioning reminded me of the cross- examining counsel in my custody case, who paced back and forth while prying truth out of me. I longed to emulate him to release the pressure, but I didn’t dare. My mother quivered like a deer approaching a hunter’s blind. I held my breath to keep from scaring her away.
She said, “At your brother’s funeral.”
Funeral? I had to repeat the word to myself; as if Id forgotten what it meant. Nobody has funerals any
more. My father had a memorial service. My brother’s funeral was a long, long time ago. I was no more than four or five. It was the Summer of Unexpected Death, one of my twin brothers drowned in a freak swimming accident and then my aunt fell off a roof. I recalled details only vaguely.
“Uncle Jack,” said my mother.
“Uncle Jack?“ My father’s youngest brother. A figure from long ago. Didn’t Uncle Jack live in Mexico? I barely remembered anything about him. The face that did come to mind was black and white, like the photographs I’d seen.
All I could say was, “Why?”
She smiled dreamily. “He was the most like Rafe."
My dead brother. “But where?” Unbidden came a picture of frantic humping behind the coffin...
the coats.”
“Upstairs in the guest room. Where we put “But anyone could have come in.”
She smiled. This was a memory she liked
thinking about. “But no one did.”
A complete adjustment of my already desiccated worldview. The question I needed to ask concerned not a funeral frenzy-hump but the meaning behind that smile.
I tried to recall what had happened to Uncle Jack. Why had he disappeared? He went to Mexico and stayed there, after his wife died. Aunt Fee. She was called that because Aunt Ophelia was too big a mouthful. Aunt
Fee ‘s death I recall better. She died later, on the fourth of July. I was there. She fell off a building where we’d gone to see the fireworks.
I was coming up the stairs and as soon as I got to the top the adults forced me to go back down. It seemed so unfair at the time. I recall my rage very clearly. Weren’t they still having the fireworks? So why couldn’t I see them? But instead I was forced to go to the hospital where there was nothing to be seen. Aunt Fee didn’t make it. But if there was another funeral, I didn’t attend.
“You went to Mexico, too!” Now I remembered that. My father linked it to my brother’s death, said my mother needed a vacation. I was an uncomprehending little girl; didn’t understand how my mother could leave me behind. Maybe my extra sympathy for my father – or my distance from my mother – started from that moment.
“Were you there with him?” She wasn’t long gone. She came home before the leaves fell.
“He wouldn’t see me.” She hung her head, shamefaced. “I thought he didn’t want me because he was married to Ophelia, but even after she was dead—“ Her face collapsed, crimped, puckered like an overdone soufflé. Throw that one away. She wailed, “He told me to leave.”
Darkness fell, in the middle of the day. Just us, just coffee and cigarette smoke and the snow falling outside. Turned out I wasn’t grown up enough, after all. All I could think about was lunch. Did we have the makings for lasagna? I finally knew which question to ask, but I was too hungry to ask it. Binge eating had forced me
back into maternity clothes, to my ever-lasting shame; but it was an unproductive maternity.
But shame doesn’t stop people from doing things. I had to know. So the same mouth that eats, asked, “Weren’t you on that roof?”
She nodded her head up and down, waiting, readying herself for the next, inevitable question.
If we didn’t have meat I would have to go to the store. Because wasn’t I finished being vegetarian, wasn’t I done with going without? So I didn’t ask her that last, important question. I didn’t ask her because I know she would have told me. My mother is painfully honest.
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