I'm not sure when I started to notice that I was turning into
my mother. Idly checking myself in the full-length mirror one
morning, out of the corner of my eye I catch an ever-so-slight
thickening. Oh my God, those are my mother's ankles. Another double
take in the mirror a couple of years later: the shadow of my mother's
jowls. A blue pulse on the inner part of my left calf shortly
afterward: the beginning of my mother's varicose veins. A certain
interested, encouraging way of saying "Mmm-hmm" when someone was
speaking, an entire genetic code -- voice box, gestures, character
-- transmitted invisibly, silently, whole.
I was the oldest of what would eventually be my parents' six
children. The year I was in kindergarten, while my father built
our first house in Hampton, New Hampshire, we lived in an apartment
in the neighboring town of Newfields. It was in the right half
of a cream-colored Victorian, with a walkway from the street and
a sharp drop from the front porch to the ground. In the fall,
leaves piled high below and all around the house, and my older
half-brother and half-sister and the neighborhood kids the Floyds
(whose father committed suicide years later) and I would stand
on the stone wall fronting the street, our backs to the occasional
passing car, and jump: the sweet, smoky smell; leaves up to my
neck; the little shock, each time, that I'd let go and hadn't
been hurt.
In my memory, the sensations seem oddly sharpened. Letting go
and not getting hurt; leaves up to your neck; the sweet, crumbly
smell -- that age before you learn what it feels like to have
the cold hard ground of life rise up and knock the wind out of
you, before you discover that this happens not just once but over
and over again.
My next youngest sibling, Joe, was born when we lived in that
apartment, and my most vivid memory of that time is of coming
across my mother one afternoon as she leaned against the upstairs
banister and nursed him. Every passion known to Cain coursed through
my 5-year-old heart: bewilderment, jealousy, rage, fear, the terrible
unsettling knowledge that nothing lasts. I'm not sure I even understood
she was feeding him. What I did understand -- the way she held
her body, the dreamy, exhausted look in her eye -- was that some
secret, intimate bond was being formed and it did not include
me. I'd been banished from Eden, and, like all of us, I've spent
my life trying, one way or the other, to get back in.
From my earliest memories, people told me I looked like my mother.
As a child, this made me feel singled-out and secure, privy to
a world of thrilling womanly rites. The plain blue-gray coat,
made of sturdy broadcloth, she laid out on the table and brushed
against the nap. The pale pink Pond's Cold Cream, from a white
fluted-glass jar, she dabbed on her lips to make them shine. The
gold brooch from Woolworth's, a spray of wheat she pinned to her
blouse.
After the supper dishes were dried and the floor swept and the
laundry taken down from the line, folded and put away, she'd sit
down at the piano, arrange a few pages of dog-eared sheet music
and, with nails-bitten-to-the-quick fingers (the same as mine
are now, when I sit down at my own piano), play songs I didn't
realize were old even then: "Nola," "Blue Indigo," "Beautiful
Dreamer." I listened from the floor, stretched out with a book,
scratching the scabs on my knees, humming.
My mother grew up during the Depression, on a chicken farm in
a town called Hope Valley, Rhode Island. Whatever pain she suffered
there -- and between an emotionally distant mother and a father
who abandoned the family when my mother was 13, there had to have
been plenty -- she learned to bury somewhere deep inside. Around
the house, she was quiet, self-contained, uncomplaining. An accomplished
seamstress, she kept a scarred cedar chest in the cellar full
of patterns and pincushions and swatches of fabric: yards of scratchy
red wool for the shirts she sewed my brothers, a square of gold
brocade for when the sofa needed patching, odds and ends -- purple
velvet, pink dotted Swiss -- from dresses she'd made for me.
One afternoon when I was 8, searching for a scrap to make the
sky in a collage I was working on, I found a piece of exactly
the right color: a brilliant, peacock blue. I cut a couple of
big, irregular pieces, snipped and discarded and snipped some
more, glued on a perfect cloth sky, and ran upstairs to show my
mother. "Where did you get that material?" she asked. It was only
when she came back down with me and I held it up that I saw what
was left of the square neck, the nipped-in waist, the rows of
perfect pleats; saw I'd destroyed a fully made article of clothing.
"That was my wedding dress," she said quietly. She never mentioned
it again.
Perhaps part of eating of the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil is that you begin to see your parents as others see them,
or how you think they see them. When I entered adolescence, the
fact that I looked like or was associated in any way with my mother
no longer made me happy. I began referring to her hometown as
Hopeless Valley, scarcely able to imagine a more shameful provenance.
Suddenly everything about her seemed shameful. She got her hair
done down the street at Gladys's, who ran a beauty parlor out
of her ranch house; she went to church every Sunday; she believed
in making do with what you had and meaning what you said and letting
your natural light shine through instead of hiding it beneath
a trowelful of blush and a quarter-inch of black eyeliner.
I graduated from college in 1978: confused, frightened, deeply,
deeply lost. Disdaining the Social Service degree my parents had
helped pay for, I waitressed at the Seagull Diner, I hitchhiked
across country, I moved to Boston, I drank alcoholically for the
next 10 years. Through it all I'd come home, where my mother would
be standing in the kitchen of the house where I'd been raised,
mashing potatoes, sprinkling paprika on a casserole of lobster
Newburg, wiping her hands on a threadbare dishtowel.
From my cockroach-infested "loft," I sent hotheaded letters
rehashing old wrongs I insisted she'd done me -- eavesdropping
on phone conversations, tracking me down at my friends' houses
as if I were a child -- drunken rambling self-justifying letters
that spiraled, then collapsed in on themselves, leading nowhere.
Her own letters, sober, mild, came back written in a hand so firm
the words formed a kind of reverse Braille on the back of the
page, or typed, error-free, on the Smith-Corona she'd had since
her first year in college, telling me that my sister Meredith
had just had a birthday, that the irises were in bloom, that Dad
had fallen off a ladder.
I didn't blame my mother for my drinking, but I wanted to be
saved, and it took me a long time to realize that no human being
could save me. In my increasingly addled state, it sometimes seemed
to me, in fact, that it was my mother who needed to be saved.
One minute I'd rail to whomever would listen that she was bossy
and overprotective; the next, that she was a milquetoast who never
stood up for herself. Because I needed so badly to be fixed I
assumed she needed fixing, too, and, even after I finally got
sober I sometimes continued to offer advice or silently pass judgment
on matters, especially family matters, that were none of my business.
When I was confirmed eight years ago as a Catholic, my mother,
a lifelong Protestant, sent me a rosary of weathered, sand-colored
beads and a tiny white leather-bound book called The Greatest
Thing in the World. It's love, of course, and maybe one of
our greatest illusions is that we have to be perfect to be loved,
when in fact nobody can really love us until they've seen our
failures and weaknesses. Nobody knows these better than a mother,
and it's a tribute to mine that she's so generously, consistently
overlooked the failures and forgiven the weaknesses. Kneeling
in the pew after making my First Communion, for the first time
in my life I didn't want to change a thing about my past. For
one blessed moment I was grateful for every bit of struggle and
misunderstanding and pain; grateful because someone had had enough
faith to bring me into the world; grateful because, miraculously,
all those imperfect days had somehow brought me to this one.
Our one family photo album, vintage 1953, has padded pink covers,
thick cream-colored pages and photos anchored at each corner with
black gummed caps. Leafing through it recently, I came across
a picture of my mother. It was taken when she was about 25, just
before I was born. She was wearing a full-skirted sleeveless dress,
in a floral print, and dark lipstick, and her hair was curled
back from her face. "Mom!" I called from the living room. "You
were so pretty!"
She is still pretty. She has a neat gray bob and clear blue
eyes; she wears carefully ironed roll-up sleeve blouses, and pants
with elasticized waists and a single piece of jewelry: her plain
gold wedding band, worn thin as foil after all these years. There
have been changes, of course. My father died in 1999; when I come
home from Los Angeles now, it's no longer to the family house
in North Hampton but to a condo in Stratham, the next town over;
and my mother is not 25 anymore, she's 77. But the medicine cabinet
still holds her Pond's Cold Cream (the white fluted jar plastic
now instead of glass), her tweezers, her ancient bottle of Jean
Naté cologne.
When I go back now, I want to hold those things to my heart,
want to look at and smell them forever, want to remember all they
say about not using more than you need, about beauty being only
skin-deep, about what's important. "Why didn't I pay more attention?"
I think, and "Why haven't I appreciated her every second?" Part
of getting older seems to be realizing that all the things you
thought mattered didn't, and all the things you thought didn't,
did, terribly. It's going from thinking, "How did I put up with
him or her or them?" to "How did they ever put up with me?"
When I called a few years ago to tell my mother I had breast
cancer, there was a long pause. When she finally said "Oh, Heather"
(is there any sound on earth dearer than the sound of your mother's
voice saying your name?), I could almost feel the pang in her
own breast: an electrical connection, like a shorted-out wire
running in reverse through a phantom umbilical cord and back up,
through the nerves and muscles and veins, toward her heart.
There's another thing you realize as you age: No matter how
close you get to another human being, you remain, at some level,
strangers. There's a part of ourselves we couldn't reveal even
if we wanted to because it's beyond our own reach. Maybe real
love, in fact, takes place in some realm entirely beyond our ken,
where the secret, most private part of one person communes, unbeknownst
to either one, with the most secret, most private part of another.
The other day I was talking to a friend, describing the way
the clouds had looked at a certain moment on an April afternoon
in the Sonoran Desert. "They had gold around the edges, and the
light was shining through," I was saying, and suddenly I noticed
my hand. It was drifting through the air in front of me, and the
dips and turns were my mother's dips and turns, my fingers were
my mother's fingers, the hand was my mother's hand. It was if
the person in whom I once lived had quietly taken up residence
in me: to bring me back into the circle, to lead me home.
Heather King is a commentator for NPR's All Things Considered
and the author of the forthcoming memoir Parched (Putnam
Penguin June 2005).
(January 2005)
