Her Mother's Daughter Read Free Page A

ever really looks cleaned up even when it is, but with Arden around, it was beginning to look like a bus terminal. Then one night she opened the door to my developing closet even though the red light was signaling I was working inside and needed dark—something she’s known since she was an infant. She wanted the car keys, and for some reason I’d taken my handbag inside with me. But I screamed. She’d completely ruined a dozen negatives I couldn’t replace. I was a wild woman, I shouted, I yelled, I tore my own hair. She shrugged. “I needed the car keys. I couldn’t wait for hours until you came out.” She was sullen, surly, and I felt as if all the blood in my body had mounted to my head, and I slapped her, hard, across the mouth.
    That was unusual enough, since I was never given to physical punishment, but she took it as a declaration of war. She slapped me back, I slapped her, we hauled into each other, twisting arms, socking each other, slapping. I was quickly reduced to pinching and twisting, because my daughter, although shorter and lighter than I, had studied karate, and had twenty-five years less smoking to slow her down. She got me pinned: I couldn’t move: she shoved me backward, onto the arm of a stuffed chair.
    â€œI could kill you now!” she hissed.
    â€œGo ahead!” I yelled. “It would be a blessed release from living with you!”
    She let me go then, grabbed my bag and took the car keys, and stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her.
    This was the story I told my parents, and as I finished, my mother began to cry. I was astonished.
    â€œWhy are you crying?”
    My father looked at me as if I were stupid. “She feels bad for you, Ana. Of course she’d cry.”
    Nonsense, I thought. She’s never cried for me in her life. I turned to my mother, and asked again, severely, “Why are you crying?”
    She was sobbing now. “Oh, I wish I could have talked to my mother like that! I never talked to her, I never told her how I felt, I never knew how she felt, and now it’s too late!”
    Well, that rocked me. Because in all the years I’d listened to my mother’s tales, there had been these two, my mother and her mother, two throbbing figures in a landscape of concrete, suffering suffering, separately yet linked, like wounded animals wandering through miles of silent tree trunks oblivious to their pain. Like a woman I saw once, walking down the street in Hempstead with a man on one side of her and a woman on the other, holding her arms. She was youngish—in her early thirties, and pretty, a little plump—but there was something in her face that made my heart tremble for her…. No one else seemed to notice anything odd, people walked past her, around her, and did not glance twice at her. But that night I saw her picture in the newspaper: she was the only survivor of a fire that had killed her husband and her four children.
    That was my image of them, these two women, mommy and grandma. And I had never had any inkling that anything lay in the space between them except their shared knowledge of grief. It was blind of me, of course, it simply makes sense that there had to be more. All my life I had rejected prettied pictures of life, slamming shut the saccharine children’s books I was given at school, pulling wry faces in movie houses, questioning angrily people’s sweetened explanations for things. I was an offensive child, and perhaps am an offensive adult, responding indignantly to anything that seems facile, designed to conceal, smooth over, sweeten, a reality I know to be grim and terrible. I would insult my mother’s friends, announcing in outrage, “I don’t believe that!” or making faces at their gushing, swooping voices as they insisted that people were good and life was nice. Or the reverse.
    Yet here I had all these years simply accepted as truth my mother’s