Her Mother's Daughter Read Free Page B

relation to her mother as one of total, unswerving love and devotion. Certainly, that was all I had ever heard or seen. My mother said her mother was a saint, and a saint was what I saw too. Quiet, sad, Grandma would sit in a small corner of the couch when she visited and open her arms to me, and I’d sit beside her and she’d take my hands in hers—so soft, as if the wrinkles had changed the texture of the fabric of her skin—and smile with love, saying, “My Anastasia, my little Anastasia.” She and my mother would talk together in the kitchen in Polish, and my grandmother would laugh and nod her head. No anger ever came out of her voice or showed on her face. I can’t imagine her angry. She would just cry when her grandson, my cousin, kicked her when she tried to put him to bed. She never raised her voice. Once, when she was visiting us, she and my mother walked the two miles to the German pork butcher for chops for dinner, and the butcher’s wife said something to her husband in German. When they left the shop, my grandmother giggled: she was pleased at being able to understand their language without their knowing. What the woman had said was “What a gentle face that woman has!” She was talking about my grandmother.
    And whenever my mother spoke of her late at night, her voice would grow foggy and her eyes teary: “My mother was a saint.” Then her voice would thicken: “Poor Momma.” And then she’d go off toward one part of it, some part of it, the incredibly cruel man, the submissive woman, the brutalized children; or the poverty or the ignorance. All of it hurt her, my mother, equally, although when she came to the ignorance, her voice grew an edge, a bitterness that sometimes seemed almost ready to spill over onto her mother. But if I probed that, she would shrug: “What could she do? She knew nothing.” When she spoke of the other things, she spoke like a child: her voice was high and thin and her sentences simple. And through it all, the same shrug, the same sigh: “I was such a stupid kid. I didn’t know anything.”
    This is a part of my mother no one but me has seen. I know her as the nine-year-old she had been and in some way remains. My father would not want to listen to such grief; he doesn’t like problems unless they are solvable mechanically, like a broken clock or a stuck window. These he enjoys, and brings considerable ingenuity to solving. Nor does my sister enjoy harping on past sorrows. She likes to pull herself up and address the present, finding in present action the only solution to past loss. And I am like her in that—at least, I always used to be, or anyway, I thought I was. Yet what have I been doing all these years, sitting with Mother in the dimly lighted room as the clock hand moves silently toward four, smoke clouding the air? (My father, who in the days when he worked had to get up early in the morning, was forced to go to bed by one at. the latest, had gone sighing and grumbling upstairs. At two or so, he would get up noisily and go to the bathroom for a heavy towel, which he would insert in the crack between his bedroom door and the floor to keep the odor of cigarette smoke from rising into his sleep—his small protest and reproach to us.) My mother and I agree to have just one more drink, and I get them, although sometimes at that hour (this was long ago), my mother would insist on getting up herself and making our drinks. But I would always follow her out to the kitchen while she did it, and carry my own back to the little room she called the porch where we would sit and talk. What have I been doing, listening over and over, asking over and over, obsessed with something, unsure what? Listening, putting myself into her, becoming her, becoming my grandmother, losing myself, as if I could once and finally lose myself inside my mother, and in the process give her the strength and hope she needs.