What My Mother Gave Me (5 page)

Plath's lifetime was an increasingly foreign land, the
crushed-in-amber
before
of my own twentieth century—
before
civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, Wendy Wasserstein's
Uncommon Women and Others,
Paul Mazursky's
An Unmarried Woman,
or Judy Chicago's
Th
e Dinner Party.

Her past, and my mother's as well, was another country, and the instant I read my mother's inscription on the flyleaf of the
Journals,
I understood that. For the very first time—the first of many, many times—I felt terrible pity for Sylvia Plath.

I had been in thrall to her for the power of her work, of course, for the force of her suffering and her tragedy, but I had not begun to comprehend the crushing paradox of being a smart, ambitious woman in the 1950s and early 1960s. All those social movements separating our two generations—and the women's movement in particular—had opened up the world for me in a way she never experienced. I inherited endless possibilities, and an expectation of equality with my male classmates, the male writers I came to know, and the one I married. She got the shortened horizon shared by all pre – Second Wave women, and the overhanging fear held by the gifted among them: of being thwarted by an environment hostile to women writers, or buried by the marriage and motherhood she also desperately wanted, or made invisible in any of the countless other ways women of her time were made invisible.
Th
e great burden she lived and worked beneath was something I had never felt, not for one instant. It must have been unbearable.

I HAD MET
Plath at a dangerous moment, when I might well have read the lessons of her life as a siren song of sadness and madness. But understanding that I was not obligated to suffer as Plath had suffered made it possible for me to admire, learn from, and move beyond the sorrow of her life. I would have gotten there eventually, I suppose, but without my mother's simple inscription it would have been so much harder and taken so much longer.

Nancy Milford's
New York Times
review of the
Journals
in 1982 ended with an image so powerful I have remembered it ever since: “She would be 50 this October. Instead she is forever caught in her 30th year, the fever heroine.”

In 2011, I turned fifty. Unlike Plath, whose work I still revere, whose life I still respect and whose death I still mourn, I have been able to live, write, and most important of all, watch my children grow up. My mother was right: I have been so much more fortunate than Sylvia Plath.

Th
e Unicorn Princess

KATHA POLLITT

A therapist once told me, “You never really had your mother,” but she was wrong. My mother may have been an alcoholic—well, no
maybe
about it; she died of cirrhosis at only fifty-four, when I was twenty-nine. She didn't teach me the things mothers back then were supposed to, like cooking (how could she when she could hardly bake a potato herself?) or cleaning or how to behave on a date. I don't remember her helping me with my homework or reading to me at bedtime. But she loved me, she was proud of me, she wanted me to be happy, and she wanted me to be myself. Since then, from decade to decade, apartment to apartment, drawer to drawer, I've saved one gift she gave me to remind myself of that.

My mother was a beautiful woman and loved beautiful clothes. She had a whole bureau dedicated to her collection of cashmere sweaters in deep, soft colors—butter yellow, forest green, periwinkle—and her two closets were full of treasures: Viyella dressing gowns (what other mother had more than one bathrobe?), Lilly Pulitzer sack dresses, straight skirts made of good wool, fully lined, and bearing labels from elegant department stores that no longer exist—Martin's, Peck and Peck, Bonwit Teller. My father loved to see my mother dressed up, but the money she spent on clothes drove him wild with rage. I used to hear him shouting in their bedroom when my mother's college friend Hope, who was a buyer at Altman's, would send over outfits “on approval.”

I wasn't sure which side of their money quarrel I was on. I idolized my father, the communist lawyer with his parade of impecunious clients—the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the dissidents from the painters' union, the mentally ill woman trying to get her son back from the social workers. But my mother worked, too, even in the 1950s. What's more, by the time I was nine or ten, she earned more than my father, selling brownstones in Brooklyn Heights, where we lived, which was just beginning its gentrification. She didn't like it much—she had wanted to be a journalist, a field virtually closed to women back then. But she was proud of herself for doing well. “I'm a real estate salesman,” she would say—not a saleswoman, a sales
man
. Still, nobody said she was noble or heroic, which was the family myth about my father—or maybe just the myth my mother and I believed in.

In a way, my parents were a secular version of an old-style Jewish marriage. Instead of a wife peddling goods from a pushcart to support her husband, the Talmudic scholar, my mother, the capitalist, supported my father, the communist, though the rewards of being the breadwinner didn't apply to her. She still had to run the house, do the shopping, cook the food. Obviously, my father was the important one, in her eyes and also in mine. He was the person who thought about big things, like civil liberties and Stalin, and who looked so elegant in his seersucker suit. Still, I wondered as I got older, shouldn't my mother be allowed to have some fun with the money that was so hard for her to earn?

Because of these conflicts, I had trouble with the idea of spending money on myself when I was a teenager. I knew that if I asked for something, my mother would give it to me. But what if my parents couldn't afford it, like the clothes from Hope? And shouldn't I be less materialistic, anyway, like my father? After all, did communists get their bedrooms redecorated with a canopied bed, an antique secretary desk, and unicorn-printed wallpaper, which was something my mother had arranged for me with a decorator friend of hers, despite the inevitable fights with my father? “I want. Her. To have.
Th
at desk,” I can still hear her insisting, emphasizing every word. And I have it to this day, in my study, catty-corner to my real desk. Poor fragile, lovely thing, how can I ever give it away?

When my bedroom was finished, it was all too much. It felt obscurely shameful, a mark of privilege, of being spoiled and overprotected, too much like the princess in whose lap the unicorn rested its head.
Th
e truth was I loved girly things—my Villager shirtwaist printed with tiny flowers, my cousin Wendy's lavender bedroom (more tiny flowers), even the unicorn wallpaper—but I could see that they led in the wrong direction. Rosa Luxemburg was just a name to me, but whatever she had done to become a world-historical person, I knew she hadn't done it wearing dresses with little flowers.

By the time I was in high school, my mother had retreated into drinking, my father was keeping her company there, and I was a raging adolescent. My idea of fashion was to wear the same turtleneck for a week. So I don't know how my mother and I came to be shopping together, and in Manhattan, too, at Fred Leighton's high-end ethnic clothing store. She saw me hesitating over a very expensive lace Mexican blouse, picking it up, putting it down, walking away, coming back. It cost what seemed like the earth to me—maybe fifty dollars.

“Do you like it, darling?” my mother asked.

“It's gorgeous,” I said. It was a costume for the wallpaper unicorn princess, with alternating panels of cloth and lace, a scoop neck with lace standing up all around it, puffy elbow-length sleeves, and tiny mother-of-pearl buttons all down the back. “But it's so expensive.”

“You should always get the things you really want,” she said, and she picked it up, marched to the cash register, and bought it.

TH
E ODD THING
is that I wore the blouse only once or twice. It was too fancy for high school and much too virginal for college, and anyway, like so many things we fall in love with in the store, it didn't fit right. In the mysterious way of clothes, even without my wearing it, even as it sat in one drawer after another, it somehow acquired holes and stains. To me it represents my mother's unrealized life. Selling real estate had never been the plan: she was too unworldly and gentle for all that undercutting and competition and stress. She told me once that she had started drinking in order to deal with the anxiety of meeting with clients. Sometimes I think she would have been happy just sitting in the big yellow chair in the living room and listening to Bach, drinking coffee and clipping articles from the
New York Times,
going on the occasional peace demonstration, meeting her friends or my father for lunch on Montague Street. In a way she, not I, was the real unicorn princess, only instead of being sheltered from the world in a canopy bed, she had to do battle with it every day.

But the blouse represents something happier, too, and that is my mother's love. She wanted to do wonderful things for me, and sometimes she did—not over-the-top projects like the unicorn bedroom, but real things that helped me become myself. She never told me that I had to get married or have children, or gave me little life lessons about how to play dumb and lose gracefully to please boys. Instead, she read my poems, and when I fell in love with Latin in eighth grade and decided I wanted to learn ancient Greek, too, she found a classics major at Brooklyn College to come tutor me. She wanted to be close to me, but the drinking got in the way, and most of the time, I wouldn't let her be close, because I didn't want to end up like her. Not always, though. When I was thirteen, we went to Manhattan to see
Th
e Lovers of Teruel,
a surrealist French dance film at the Paris
Th
eatre, and ended up staying for three showings, we loved it so much—or was it only I who loved it so much, and she stayed for me? Sometimes on school holidays, I would meet her for hot turkey sandwiches at Sakele's, and something about our just being out of the house together, like a regular mother and daughter, would make my heart almost stop with happiness at the freedom and intimacy and fun of it. Sometimes I would come home after a sleepover at a friend's house where there had been some family tsuris, and I would feel such a sense of peace just to sit with her and my father in the garden, having a cookout like normal people, talking about normal things like school, or what a bastard President Johnson was. I'm trying to say: there were moments that shone through.

IF I DIDN'T
keep that blouse, how would I remember them?

White Christmas

ANN HOOD

When I was nineteen, a junior in college, my mother gave me a very expensive, very ugly, all-white outfit for Christmas. Pants. Jacket. Shirt. Lots of white on white patterns. Hideous.
Th
is was 1976, and Izod shirts in sherbet colors were all the rage. Pink and lime and lemon yellow, with that tiny alligator grinning out at the world. Beneath them we wore brightly striped turtlenecks without folding the necks down. Over them, a different sherbet-colored sweater. In my Dorothy Hamil haircut, I walked around in a blur of color. And into this, my mother brought white, an outfit that was slightly disco when preppy had taken over.

Even worse than the trend faux pas was the way the outfit matched. With my dizzying array of colors, I worked hard to not match. In the morning I grabbed a turtleneck, whichever Izod shirt was clean, and threw a sweater over it all. Green, blue, pink, white, yellow, all thrown together.
Th
is haphazard dressing and combinations of colors suited me. Or rather, the girl I longed to be, the one who would lead an unconventional, mismatched life.

But my mother, she loved for everything to match.

I had been the only second grader who had matching shoes and purses for everything I wore. My mother would spend hours at the mall finding the exact shade of green accessories to compliment the stripe in a sweater, the socks that would reveal the identical color of my blouse when they peeked out from beneath a hem. And she didn't stop at outfits, my mother matched everything.

On many Saturday mornings, I would wake up to the sounds of boxes being dragged up from the basement, ladders squeaking open, and my mother ordering my father to put something higher or lower. Downstairs, bedlam.

“It's Saint Patrick's Day next week,” my mother would say.

Or Easter or autumn or Flag Day. And with each of these, our entire house was converted into a theme park. Pots of shamrocks everywhere. Green curtains hung, a green and white tablecloth on the table. Porcelain leprechauns peered out from behind vases and lamps. No room was safe.
Th
e bathroom shower curtain had a shamrock pattern, the hand towels revealed rainbows with tiny pots of gold at the end. Green soap. Green candles. Silverware with green handles. Shamrock-printed paper napkins beside our green dishes. My parents even sipped their coffee out of green mugs.

Th
e next week, everything turned yellow. Instead of leprechauns, baby animals stared out at me. Daffodils sat where the shamrocks had been. Our breakfast table was ablaze with yellow. “Spring!” my mother announced over her lemon-colored coffee cup.

Th
en it was on to Easter and then Memorial Day and then end of school, summer, Fourth of July, an endless parade of occasions to match everything around us anew.

I spent the summer I was fourteen stringing beads to make a curtain for my bedroom doorway. My father even indulged me by removing the actual door to let my creation hang there.
Th
at curtain kept the order outside my room from penetrating.
Th
e ever-revolving cast of throw rugs and pillows and curtains stayed out there. Behind my wall of beads, I taped political cartoons to the walls, burned cones of incense, and played Crosby, Stills and Nash albums loud. My mother wouldn't let me use the Indian bedspread I had bought at a small shop in downtown Providence, insisting that I keep my matching sheets and comforter. All that gingham and the white, gold-trimmed matching French provincial furniture did not keep me from plugging in a lava lamp or painting the white lamp shades in imitation Peter Max. I was a rebel, wasn't I?

In my interior life, I was a folk singer, a poet, a war protestor.
Th
ere, I lived a messy life with lots of boyfriends whom I walked barefoot with along rocky beaches. I filled notebooks with these fantasies, writing them as haiku and sonnets and tragic short stories.

“What are you doing up there?” my mother would call to me.

I couldn't answer her.
Th
ere were no words to describe this yearning that itched at me, this aching to be disorderly and mismatched.

“Nothing,” I'd grumble.

“
Th
en come downstairs.”

I'd close my notebook and cap my purple pen. Sighing, I'd part that curtain of beads, and enter my mother's world.

IN MY FAMILY
we opened our Christmas presents on Christmas Eve after we ate a three-hour-long Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes dinner. Stuffed with calamari,
baccalà,
snails, eel, lobster, anchovies, and shrimp, we all squeezed into our tiny living room. Every year, my father had to remove furniture to fit a giant Christmas tree, which we decorated with animated ornaments: trains chugged through its branches; birds popped out of silver eggs and chirped; the entire cast of a tinny “Twelve Days of Christmas” hid in bulbs and emerged out of synch, the lords a leaping and the maids a milking while the song played on and on.

Every year I made a careful list of books and records that I wanted, gifts that my mother considered futile indulgences. Yet she did fulfill my wish list, and with each box wrapped in shiny foil that was handed to me on Christmas Eve, I hoped it was my full set of John Steinbeck books, or the Lovin' Spoonful double album. I would also get a bottle of Chanel No. 5 that lasted the whole year, and a cashmere sweater. I knew, too, that there would be clothes—outfits—that my mother had picked out, that reflected her taste, that would match right down to the buttons. Over the years, I had perfected the sigh of delight I gave when I opened these boxes. How could I tell my mother that I found these outfits dreadful? It was easier to thank her, fold them up, and tuck them away somewhere, unworn.

But this Christmas, when I opened the box and pulled the piles of white from the tissue, the desire to please and the desire to be my true self collided mightily. I pulled first the jacket—stiff, heavy white cotton-polyester blend, with a busy white pattern and large white buttons down the front—and then the pants—as stiff and heavy and white, with the same pattern—from the large white box. I stared.
Th
e outfit stared back.

“It's fitted, you know. It will show off your figure,” my mother announced. “
Th
e girl said it's very popular.”

I tried to duplicate my well-rehearsed sigh of delight, but instead a strangled sound came from me.

“You could wear it dancing,” my mother added.

Dancing for me was done in fraternity-house basements where boys swung me around to “Rosalita” or pressed me close while Boz Scaggs sang “Harbor Lights.”

I chewed my lip, the white suit heavy on my lap.
Th
e time had come, I realized.

Th
at white suit, the awfulness of it, gave me the courage to announce myself: a young woman who wanted to experience a world in which anything could happen, where pandemonium took preference over order. But I didn't want to hurt my mother's feelings.
Th
is was the woman who, when Peter Hayhurst broke my heart, drove me past his house just so I could gaze at it and maybe catch a glimpse of him. When I was nine, she told me I could marry Paul McCartney if I set my mind to it. She encouraged my love of reading, and read the stories I wrote. In fact, I took all of my carefully coordinated outfits to college with me just so she wouldn't feel bad.
Th
at was why I had boxes of scarves and socks in every color imaginable in my closet, beside the boxes of holiday theme items she sent me: the orange towels and ceramic pumpkins, the cornucopia and the pilgrim statues.

But that Christmas, I took a deep breath and announced myself. I was not someone who would wear this white suit, I said. I did not want to match, I said.

My mother, dressed in Christmas red from head to toe, smiled.

“Not your thing?” she asked.

I shook my head, studying her for signs of betrayal or disappointment or hurt. But found none.

“Bring it back,” she said easily.

She went to the drawer where neat files held receipts and cancelled checks, pens, paper clips, stamps. Everything in its place. She handed me the receipt for the white outfit.

“Now,
I
would wear this if I was younger,” she said, folding it perfectly back into the box.

I could never fit things into the box from which they had come. I could never get a map back into a rectangle or match the corners of a fitted sheet.

Behind us, the train circling the tree's branches blew its horn and the endless rendition of “
Th
e Twelve Days of Christmas” played.
Th
e lights blinked on and off, sending blues and green, red and pink into the room.

“But then, you're not me,” she said.

Th
e way she said it, I understood that she had known this all along.

A mother's love is like that. I know this now that I'm a mother. We give our children the best of ourselves so that they can find the best of what is in them.
Th
e day I rejected the gift of the white suit, I got the best gift of all. My mother let me know that I had finally become that person I'd dreamed of becoming: a girl who spoke her mind, who was independent and opinionated. A girl who knew who she was and what she wanted. A girl who would not wear an all-white pants suit. And by recognizing that, she gave me permission to go into my own mismatched future. What a gift.