What My Mother and I Don't Talk About Read online

  Later, she finds me curled up in the fetal position in my room. “Don’t worry,” she says. “He was only joking.”

  * * *

  On an afternoon several years earlier, I step down from the school bus. The walk from the end of my block to my driveway is always full of tension. If my stepfather’s tomato-red pickup truck is in the driveway, it means I have to be in the house with him. But today there is no truck. I am alone. Deliciously alone. And on the counter, a coffee cake my mother baked, the crumbled brown sugar making my mouth water. I cut into it and devour half of the dessert in a couple of bites. My tongue begins to tingle, the first sign of an anaphylactic reaction. I’m used to them. I know what to do: take liquid Benadryl right away and let the artificial-cherry syrup coat my tongue as it puffs up like a fish, blocking my airway. My throat starts to close.

  But we only have pills. They take a lot longer to dissolve. I swallow them and immediately throw up. My breath comes only in squeaky gasps. I run to the beige phone on the wall. Dial 911. The minutes it takes the EMTs to arrive are as long as my thirteen years on Earth. I stare into the mirror at my tearstained face, trying to stop crying because it makes it even harder to breathe. The tears come anyway.

  In the ambulance on the way to the emergency room, they give me a teddy bear. I hold it close to me like a newborn baby.

  Later, my mother pushes the curtain aside and steps next to my hospital bed. She’s frowning and relieved at the same time. “There were crushed walnuts on the top of that cake. I baked it for a coworker,” she says. She looks at the teddy bear still cradled in my arms. “I forgot to leave a note for you.”

  * * *

  I’ve spent enough time in Catholic churches to know what it means to sweep things underneath the rug. My family is good at that, until we’re not. Sometimes our secrets are still partially visible. It’s easy to trip over them.

  The silence in the church isn’t always peaceful. It just makes it more jarring when the tiniest noise, a muffled cough or a creaky knee, echoes throughout the sanctuary. You can’t be wholly yourself there. You have to hollow yourself out, like a husk.

  In high school, I’m the opposite. I’m too much myself, because the too muchness is a way of saying, I’m still here. The me of me, and not the me he wants me to be. Anything can set me off. I run out of biology class multiple times a week, and my teacher follows me to the girls’ room, pressing tissues that feel like sandpaper to my cheek. I hang out in the nurse’s office whenever I can’t handle being around other people.

  * * *

  Here’s what silence sounds like after he loses his temper. After I, in a moment of bravery, scream back at him, You’re NOT my father.

  It sounds like an egg cracked once against a porcelain bowl. It sounds like the skin of an orange, peeled away from the fruit. It sounds like a muffled sneeze in church.

  * * *

  Good girls are quiet.

  Bad girls kneel on uncooked rice, the hard pellets digging into their exposed knees. Or at least that’s what I’m told by a former coworker who went to an all-girls Catholic school in Brooklyn. The nuns preferred this kind of corporal punishment.

  Good girls don’t disrupt the class.

  Bad girls visit the guidance counselor so frequently that she keeps an extra supply of tissues just for them. Bad girls talk to the police officer who is assigned to their high school. They roll the tissues in their hands until they crumble like a muffin.

  Good girls look anywhere but in the police officer’s eyes. They stare at the second hand on the clock mounted on the wall. They tell the officer, “No, it’s okay. You don’t need to talk to my stepfather and mother. It will just make things worse.”

  * * *

  Silence is what fills the gap between my mother and me. All of the things we haven’t said to each other, because it’s too painful to articulate.

  What I want to say: I need you to believe me. I need you to listen. I need you.

  What I say: nothing.

  Nothing until I say everything. But articulating what happened isn’t enough. She’s still married to him. The gap widens.

  * * *

  My mother sees ghosts. She always has. We’re on Martha’s Vineyard, and I’m stuck at home with my younger brother—a de facto babysitter while the adults go out for fried clams and drinks. It’s an unusually cool August night and the air is so still, like it’s holding its breath. I’m next to my brother on the bed, trying to get him to fall asleep. Suddenly I hear someone, something, exhale in my ear. The ear turned away from my brother. The windows are closed. No one else is there. I shriek and jump off of the bed.

  When my mother walks through the door, I tell her right away.

  “You’ve always had an overactive imagination, Mish,” she says, and laughs it off, like a wave temporarily covering jagged shells on the beach.

  But a few nights after we leave the island, she confides in me.

  “I woke up one night and someone was sitting on my chest,” she says. “I didn’t want to tell you while we were there. I didn’t want to scare you.”

  I sit in my writing spot on the floor in my bedroom that night, the red knobs of the dresser pressing into my spine, and I think about my mother’s ghosts, about her face, about home. Where the TV is always on, and food is always on the table. Where dinners are ruined when I’m at the table, so my stepfather says I have to eat on my own. Where a vase is thrown, the shattering like soft but sharp music on the hardwood floor. Where my stepfather’s guns are displayed behind a glass case, and his handgun is hidden underneath a stack of shirts in the closet. Where I crawl on my knees through the pine trees, picking up dog shit. Where there’s a pool, but neither my mother nor I know how to do anything more than doggy-paddle.

  Where my stepfather makes me a box, and my mother teaches me how to keep my secrets inside.

  * * *

  Now I buy my own Benadryl and keep it on me at all times. These days, my mother and I mostly communicate via group text messages along with my older sister, in which my mother and I reply to my sister, who shares photos of my niece and nephews. Joey in his Cozy Coupe, grinning at the camera while he holds on to the wheel.

  One day, I tried to reach out.

  I’m going to Nana’s this weekend. Maybe you can come down and visit me while I’m there?

  She didn’t respond.

  I text rather than call her because she might be in the same room as him. I like to pretend he doesn’t exist. And I’m good at it. She taught me. Like with the broken baubles in my old jewelry box, I just close the lid.

  I wait for a text reply from her, some excuse about why she can’t get away. When Nana picks me up from the train station, I secretly hope my mother is in the car with her, wanting to surprise me.

  I check my messages and think about disjointed collages I used to piece together out of old National Geographics, Family Circles, and Sears catalogs; an advertisement for Campbell’s tomato soup pasted next to a leopard, attached next to half of a headline, like “Ten Tips for.” Even as a child, I was comforted by the not-finishing, the nonsensicalness of the collages. They made me feel like anything was possible. All you had to do was begin.

  Her car never appeared in the driveway. A message never appeared on my phone.

  My mother’s farmhouse, two hours away from my hometown, was built by a Revolutionary War soldier with his own hands. It’s haunted, of course. Several years ago, she posted a photo on Facebook of the backyard, lush and green, with tiny orbs appearing like starlight.

  “I love you past the sun and the moon and the stars,” she’d always say to me when I was little. But I just want her to love me here. Now. On Earth.

  My Mother’s (Gate) Keeper

  By Cathi Hanauer

  In a way, this is a story of love. One version of love, anyway. For better and worse.

  First, the prologue.

  My mother and father met, in 1953, at a party in South Orange, New Jersey, at the home of someone named Merle
Ann Beck. My mother, a high school junior, knew her vaguely, and my father not at all, but long story short, they both made the list. Hearing that list, my mother liked my father’s name, Lonnie Hanauer—something about all those smooth-sounding ns. She asked about him and learned that although he was only seventeen months her senior—she was sixteen and a half, he newly eighteen—he was already a sophomore at Cornell, pre-med. She was intrigued, and though she was a quiet, studious “good girl” who helped lay out the school paper and sometimes worked in her father’s dry-goods store, she sought him out at the party. They talked and danced; she found him sophisticated and funny. Later that night, she told her mother she’d met the man she would marry.

  Three years and eight months later, at his family’s country club—pristine blue pool and a golf course that rivaled those of the WASP-y clubs nearby—she did just that. He was twenty-one and a half. She had just turned twenty.

  That was sixty-one years, four children, and six grandchildren ago. I am the oldest of those children, and the one who, it seems, is always looking for answers, especially about my mother.

  * * *

  Ten or so years ago, when I was in my forties and my parents just over seventy, my mother got her own email address. This might not seem like a big deal, but in her case, it was huge. Before that, since the days of AOL and “You’ve got mail!” my parents had shared an email address. So did many of their friends, couples who didn’t have the internet or email until their sixties and probably thought, at least at first, that it was similar to sharing a regular mail address or a land phone line. But unlike most other couples, when people emailed my mother—her daughters, her best friend, her brothers—my father not only read the message but also often answered it. Sometimes my mother answered, too, and sometimes not. She seemed to think this was how it worked.

  The same dynamic was true with phone calls. When you called the house, my father answered. As you said hello, he’d yell, “Bette! Pick up!” and then the click, and she was on, too. I learned long ago that if I asked to speak to my mother, he’d say, “She’s listening. Go ahead”; if I said that I meant privately, he’d say something along the lines of, “Whatever you tell her, you can tell me.” It didn’t matter if I pleaded or reasoned or raged; he stayed on. Then he often talked for her. If you asked, “How do you feel, Mom?” after she’d been sick, he might say, “She feels good. Her fever is gone and she just had some toast.” If you then said, “I asked Mom how she feels. Mom, how do you feel?” she’d offer something innocuous and upbeat: “I’m much better,” or “I’m fine.”

  If you asked about something specifically female that a daughter might ask her mother—how she first knew she was pregnant, what to give someone for their wedding, how to make her famous blueberry tart—often he would respond, even if he didn’t know the answer. “She makes it with apricot preserves. Right, Bette?” Or: “It’s crass to give money; buy something, so they remember you when they use it.” If he truly had nothing to say—if you asked her, say, about a book she was reading—he might turn up the baseball game on TV, then comment on it loudly: “Goddamn it, Martinez! Catch the fucking ball!” Or he’d tell you what he and my mother had done the past few days—dinners out, movies—and then give you his opinion of those events. “Have you seen X yet?” he’d ask, and if I said no, he’d say, “I gave it three stars.” (His top rating is four.) He’d then tell you how cute the adolescent female lead was and, finally, a spoiler about the end. When I complained, he’d say, “Hamlet dies at the end, too, you know.”

  This, his phone and email behavior, for starters—combined with my mother’s enduring it all without a peep—was a frustrating mystery to me. Didn’t she consider this an invasion of her privacy, or realize how annoying it was to others? If so, why didn’t she speak up? There were other egregious things, too. When, with a carful of people, he drove like he was on the lam in a game of Grand Theft Auto, whipping around speed bumps, blowing through stop signs, blaring his horn at anyone in his way. Or when he caused a scene on their trip to a national park because he didn’t like the tour—too much birding, not enough hiking—until finally he had to be escorted back to headquarters, my mother in tow, while everyone else waited.

  When he yelled at her if she fed the dog when he’d wanted to, or, ever thrifty, ate leftovers while serving him a fresh meal she’d just made (he didn’t like it when she deprived herself). Sometimes, especially on the phone, his whole act was so unbelievable—so comically obnoxious, like a parody of itself—that I actually laughed. I’d say, “Thank you for telling me how Mom feels / thinks / makes her blueberry tart.” Then he’d laugh, and then she’d laugh, too, in that way she always does when someone makes fun of her, which is how you show affection in my family. He’ll laugh when he reads this—which he will, since he reads everything I write, generously and proudly. Being able to be criticized—made fun of, even—is one of his admirable qualities. Also, though, he has no shame about any of these actions. “Why should I?” he would say. “I’m a safe driver, and that tour guide was a jerk. And your mother shouldn’t eat so many leftovers.”

  * * *

  I spent decades trying to fight my father’s behavior, first toward me, later toward both me and my mother—his temper and volatility, narcissism, need to control and dominate—but also trying to get access to my mother, to be with or even talk to her without him in the way. This was not only because I wanted to understand her, and her relationship with him, but also, admittedly, because I wanted a piece of her, too; she was my mother, after all! My tiny, gentle, silver-haired, gardening, cooking, dog-walking, composting, eighty-one-year-old mother, who has WELCOME! signs in her garden and pictures of her grandchildren on every refrigerator inch, who reads and critiques all my writing, who never forgets a birthday or anniversary and sends a card featuring a photo she once took of the recipient; who’s devoted her life to teaching children with disabilities along with raising her own four; who always remembers to ask about you. Who wouldn’t want some of that? As a child I shared her with my first sister, along with my father, from the time I was nineteen months old; by the time my second sister came along, and then my brother, she was never without a gaggle of kids and dogs as she bustled about, food shopping, carpooling, making macaroni and cheese and waffles, leading Brownie troops and sewing us Halloween costumes or matching pink-and-white-checked maxiskirts. She did not lounge, or “lunch,” or have coffee or cigarettes or afternoon cocktails. She ran around, tending to everyone’s needs, until my father came home, and then she tended to his.

  For a long time after I grew up, I had no more access to my mother than I’d had as a kid, and probably less. I had moved to Manhattan after college, and when I went back to visit my parents in New Jersey—an evening after work, a weekend every couple of months—my father was always either there or on the way home. Sometimes my mother and I had a few minutes before he arrived, but then the garage door cracked open and his white Mercedes sailed in, radio blaring an opera or the news, and my mother rose to get ready. Or later, in the kitchen, she and I might clean up together while he read or watched TV in the den. But soon he’d come in to read her an article, or he’d call her to watch something on TV. He seemed unable to be without her—or maybe he just didn’t want to leave her with me, a feisty, self-supporting feminist saying things that he probably felt threatened the status quo in his house.

  Did she mind that he picked all their Friday-night movies or Sunday TV, demanding that she watch with him? As a woman who has always needed autonomy in my own relationships and marriage, I could not imagine feeling, always, so required. (I would think of that song from Oliver!: “As long as he needs me / I know where I must be.”) But it also frustrated me, the constant claims on her time. I’d think, “What about me?” Though sometimes I also thought, “Maybe she doesn’t want to hang out with me.” After all, I can be intense, talky, opinionated, too, like my father—though, as a reasonably self-aware female and mother, also very different. I like to ask questio
ns, to dig deep. Are you happy with your life? If you could change one thing, what would it be? But my youngest sister, who’s less talky and probing, also sometimes felt this way about my mother: unsure of what she wanted. Was it us? Her? Him? She was a mystery.

  * * *

  By the time my mother got her private email address, I had been communicating with my parents by email for a long time, having found this the best way to talk to my father. I was in my thirties when email became popular, with two young children and a living to make, and I could write my parents when I had time and privacy. Plus, email traded the stress of listening to my father on the phone for the relative ease of reading what he said, which I often liked—he is intelligent, sometimes funny, and up on everything: news, politics, entertainment. If he knows you’re interested in something, he’ll find articles and send them to you. Same, though, if he knows that something offends you. “That bitch Mattress Girl just wanted attention. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have—” Delete! Done, without having to put my mother in between us.

  This pissed him off, my switching from phone calls to email—it took away his ability to hold forth loudly, with both my and my mother’s attention—and for years he protested, but by then, thank you every therapist I’ve ever had, I didn’t care or back down. But when my mother got her own address—something he also protested once he found out (and he didn’t right away), but that, surprisingly, she held firm on . . . well, that seemed to be a game changer.

  While I had long understood my father by this point, my mother still baffled me. Who was she, beyond the energetic, green-eyed teacher, tutor, friendly neighbor who, despite being barely five foot one and ninety pounds soaking wet, lived on black coffee and thin cheese sandwiches, one tablespoonful of yogurt each morning with exactly two walnuts on top? Beyond the woman who dutifully got into bed every night with my father but hours later snuck into my late brother’s room to read novel after novel? What were her dreams—or did she not have any, beyond the comfortable, practical, admirable life she was living? Kids and grandkids who loved her, a lively dog from a shelter, a tidy, well-maintained house and garden, a position on the board of the school that she’d helped build from the ground up. A marriage that had lasted more than six decades, enough money to age comfortably. Did she think about my brother, adopted at six weeks old because my parents (my father?) had wanted a fourth child and a boy, and who had died in his thirties, following a troubled young life, after a horrifying accident caused by drug use and inebriation? Did she have regrets? What would she change about her life, if she could change anything?