I wish now that I’d been kinder to her. I used to rib her about the fact that she couldn’t bear to watch certain scenes in movies or on TV shows. She couldn’t take scenes in which someone threw a party and no one came. She avoided movies about salesmen down on their luck. The specificity was what I found peculiar and amusing; I now see it as the mark of a deeply sensitive person. Her father was once a successful salesman whose career bottomed out. She witnessed her parents’ problems with alcohol and the insistent mime of merrymaking that went on too long. I see her vulnerabilities now. Her parents valued social success and dismissed signs of my mother’s quick, eager mind. She felt thwarted. She could be undermining and cutting in her remarks, but the older me sees that as a reflection of her own undercut self-image.
We swim or sink against our deficits in life, and she made it a point to encourage me in ways that she had not been. I remember that she dissuaded me from trying out for cheerleading in high school. “Don’t you want to be the one cheered?” she said. She thrilled at any of my academic or literary successes. When I was in high school, I came across a letter she’d started to write years before to Aunt Marilyn, my father’s sister, who was a theology professor and accomplished archaeologist. My mother was looking for advice on how to best encourage me as a young writer. “How do I make sure she doesn’t end up writing greeting cards?” she wrote. I thought of that question often in future years, during the many periods when I would have been ecstatic to be paid to write Hallmark greetings.
But I felt her expectations, the transference of hope, and I bristled. I both yearned for her approval and found her investment in me suffocating. She was both proud of the fact that she had raised a strong-minded daughter and resentful of my sharp opinions. It didn’t help matters that my generation was deep into analysis and deconstruction, and hers was not. My mother didn’t, or wouldn’t, navel-gaze in that way. I remember talking with my sister Maureen once about the severe short haircuts we all had as children.
“Doesn’t it seem like Mom was trying to desexualize us?” I asked. Maureen, the mother of three, suppressed a laugh mixed with irritation. “Wait until you have kids, Michelle,” she said. “Short haircuts aren’t desexualizing. They’re easy.”
THE NIGHT BEFORE MY WEDDING, MY MOTHER AND I HAD OUR biggest blowout. I was unemployed and adrift, not writing or doing much of anything, and I’d put a lot of time—too much, probably—into the wedding. At the rehearsal dinner, I seated small groups of people who didn’t know each other together; the only thing I told them was that they all had one thing in common and had to figure out what it was. At one table everyone had lived at some point in Minnesota. Another table was avid cooks.
In the middle of dinner, my mother came up to me as I was making my way toward the bathroom. I’d been avoiding her because a friend had made the mistake of telling me that earlier in the evening she’d remarked to my mother that she thought I was the best writer she knew. “Oh, I know. I think so too,” my mother said. “But don’t you think it’s too late for her?” Her words stung and batted around in my head all night.
I saw her out of the corner of my eye coming toward me. In retrospect, she was smiling. I could see she was pleased with everything; she was never good at giving compliments directly. I’m sure she thought she was being funny. She gestured at the tables.
“You have too much time on your hands,” she said. I turned and faced her with what I’m sure was a mask of pure rage.
“Get away from me,” I spit out. She was shocked and tried to explain, but I cut her off. “Walk away from me. Now.”
I went to the ladies’ room, locked myself in a stall and allowed myself to cry for five minutes, then went back out and pretended that everything was fine.
She was, by all accounts, devastated by my reaction. We never spoke of it, but shortly after the wedding, she wrote me a long letter detailing all the things about me that made her proud. We slowly rebuilt our relationship after that. In late January 2007, my parents decided to take a cruise to Costa Rica. The boat would leave from a port south of Los Angeles. The four of us—my husband, Patton, and I and my parents—had dinner the night before their trip. We laughed a lot, and I drove them to the dock in the morning. My mother and I hugged tightly good-bye.
A few days later, the phone in the kitchen rang at four a.m. I didn’t get up. Then it rang again, but stopped before I could get to it. I listened to the voice mail. It was my father. His voice sounded strangled and almost unintelligible.
“Michelle,” he said. “Call your siblings.” Click.
I called my sister Maureen.
“You don’t know?” she asked.
“What?”
“Oh, Michelle,” she said. “Mom died.”
My mother, a diabetic, had fallen ill on the ship due to complications from her disease. They helicoptered her to San José, but it was too late. She was seventy-four.
Two years later, my daughter, Alice, was born. I was inconsolable for the first two weeks. “Postpartum depression,” my husband explained to friends. But it wasn’t new-mom blues. It was old-mom blues. Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time. Sobbing hysterically, almost unable to speak, I ordered my husband to go down into our dank basement and find the letter my mother had written to me after the wedding. He spent hours down there. Every box was overturned. Papers littered the floor. He couldn’t find it.
* * *
SHORTLY AFTER MY MOTHER’S DEATH, MY FATHER, SISTERS, BROTHER, and I went to my parents’ apartment in Deerfield Beach, Florida, to sort through her stuff. We sniffed her clothes that still smelled like Happy perfume by Clinique. We marveled at her bottomless collection of bags, a lifelong obsession. Each of us took something of hers. I took a pair of pink-and-white sandals. They sit in my closet still.
Afterward the seven of us went to an early dinner at the Sea Watch, a nearby restaurant overlooking the ocean. We’re laughers, my family, and we told stories about my mother that made us laugh. Seven people laughing loudly create a scene.
An older woman with a bemused smile came up to our table as she was leaving. “What’s the secret?” she asked.
“I’m sorry?” my brother, Bob, said.
“To such a happy family?”
We sat agape for a few moments. No one had the heart to say what we were all thinking: we’ve just been cleaning out our dead mother’s belongings. We dissolved into more shrieking laughter.
My mother was, and will always be, the most complicated relationship of my life.
Writing this now, I’m struck by two incompatible truths that pain me. No one would have taken more joy from this book than my mother. And I probably wouldn’t have felt the freedom to write it until she was gone.
* * *
I WALKED THE SAME HALF MILE TO ST. EDMUND’S EVERY DAY, A LEFT on Randolph, a right on Euclid, a left on Pleasant. The girls wore gray plaid jumpers and white shirts; the boys, a mustard-colored collared shirt and slacks. Ms. Ray, my first-grade teacher, had an hourglass figure and a thick mane of caramel-colored hair, and she was always upbeat. It was Suzanne Somers herding a bunch of six-year-olds. Even so, she’s not my most vivid memory of St. Edmund’s. Nor, curiously enough, is any Catholic teaching or time spent in church, though I know there were a lot of both. No, St. Edmund’s will always be welded in my mind with one image, that of a quiet, well-behaved boy with sandy brown hair and ears that stuck out a little: Danny Olis.