You Can't Buy Love Like That Page 15

  When I consider the cultural milieu into which my mother was born and how that template gave her a definition of herself as a child, and then a youth emerging into adulthood, I feel how her sense of possibility was squeezed into a container the size of a thimble, even before the personal trials of her own life disrupted the natural course of expectations laid out for women.

  So I try to comprehend the emotional world of a smart little girl who grew up in the South with one older sister, a younger sister, and a baby brother. I try to imagine her shock at the unexpected death of her father when she was fifteen and why, in spite of her closeness to him, she rarely talked about him dying and never about the impact that had on her. She never said where she was when she heard the news; how she, her sisters, and her brother responded to the announcement; if anyone came to comfort them; or if her mother cried. Nor did she speak about the details of the funeral, what she thought about on the train ride to Kentucky where they buried him, who came to the service, or whether there were flowers. She didn’t tell us where they stayed or what the minister said as they laid her father to rest. She never said how long it took her to get over it or if she ever had. I was sure that sure my grandmother had never recovered by the vacant look in her eyes and the invisible shield of protection she built around herself like a sheet of emotional plexiglass.

  My mother also spoke sparingly of the experience of being shipped off to live with her aunt and uncle in Chicago for a year while she attended secretarial school. Noting a photo of her in her teens, I see a slim, willowy young girl standing straight as though at attention, her arms at her sides, curled fingers touching her dress that blows in the wind, unfurling like a flag flapping against her birdlike legs.

  I think about this wispy adolescent being dropped off at the Michigan Central Train Station in Detroit two weeks after her father died to travel by herself to a foreign city to live with people she barely knew. She appears in my mind’s eye entering the mammoth structure with vaulted ceilings and marble columns and massive chandeliers that hang in a line overhead through the center of the corridor like giant Christmas ornaments against a backdrop of stone etchings carved into the archways above. Row upon row of solid wood benches stretch the full length of the waiting area, like pews in a great cathedral, filled with passengers sitting in silence reading the Detroit Free Press or doing crossword puzzles instead of reading Bibles, oblivious to the grief and fear resting inside this young girl who sits alone, fingering the handle on her suitcase while waiting for her train to be called. Perhaps her eyes are focused on the enormous round clock that marks time above the ticket booths, everyone glancing toward it periodically, hopeful they haven’t missed the call to board their train.

  What could she have been thinking as she sat on the firm seat of the bench in the waiting area, dressed in her best clothes in early fall, as the chill of the Michigan air began to creep in through the open doors?

  I can imagine it was then, as a teenager in Chicago, that my mother first learned to push her feelings away, to lock them up in a small invisible container and set them just outside her heart, where they couldn’t run wild, tearing up her inner world like a bulldozer ravaging a virgin forest. Wherever it started, she nurtured a fierce kind of fortitude throughout her life that allowed her to endure the many hardships that ensued, while at the same time keeping me from knowing her more deeply. It was a territory that she adamantly refused to inhabit, just as it was the space I most fervently wished to explore.

  Her father’s death had catapulted her into the workforce. It was 1924 when she rejoined her family in Detroit, following her completion of school at the age of sixteen. She’d often recount the story of her first day searching for work, when her mother sent her out with a paper-bag lunch, a map of the city, and fare for the streetcar to find a job. This series of events marked the beginning of her transformation from a shy, introverted teenager into a plucky, resilient survivor—smart, sassy, and confident on the outside but still an elusive and complicated emotional being on the inside.

  Years of forced independence and the need to survive on her own created a woman who personified contradictions. While her Southern, Christian upbringing taught her how to be gracious and polite in all sorts of company, her real-life experience in the world cultivated an unnerving sense of confidence that made others assume she was indomitable, in little need of support of any kind.

  Beyond prompting me to be present more as a support to my mother, my dad’s death was also a grave reminder of the fragility of life. I began inching closer to coming out to her, not wanting to make the same heartbreaking mistake of omission I had with my dad. We started a monthly ritual of meeting for breakfast at the Big Boy restaurant midway between our two houses. Entering the diner at our scheduled meeting time, several weeks after the funeral, I spotted her in our favorite booth and noticed how sad she looked, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes staring blankly ahead. This was new territory for me. It seemed that nothing could keep her down—not the death of her father at fifteen, not having to quit school to support her family, not living through the Great Depression on rationed gas and rationed nylons, not my father’s disability of twenty-four years, not even her incessant worries about me. Looking back, I believe she was depressed, a concept I understood in theory but hadn’t experienced personally, in the flesh—least of all with my mother.

  I leaned down and kissed her on the cheek before sitting across from her.

  “I spent the weekend at Hank and Bet’s,” she offered. These were her sister and brother-in-law who lived in a town fifty miles away. She talked of how my aunt became crabbier the longer she lived with my uncle.

  On Saturday morning, Bet had barged into my mother’s room, yelling at her, “Aren’t you going to get up and eat with us? You know Henry needs to take care of his sugar.” Her hovering, worrisome nature had been exacerbated by his diagnosis of diabetes years earlier.

  “It hurt my feelings the way she screamed at me,” she finally confessed.

  It was unusual for my mother to share her feelings about anything, and I felt compassion for her as I sat up straighter in the booth and met her gaze. “I am so sorry, Mom. I can really understand how that must have made you feel. She used to be such a warm and generous person until she married him.”

  “I don’t know what happened to her, but it’s really kind of sad.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “Oh, I just ignored it and got up and made my own breakfast.”

  “Well, didn’t you talk to her about it?”

  While my mother was very direct when it came to settling an account at the bank or questioning a charge that didn’t look right on a restaurant bill, when it had anything to do with family, she tended to avoid conflict. Instead of answering my question, she turned toward the window and said, “Oh, look. It’s snowing outside. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Mom, we’re not talking about the snow,” I said in the calmest voice I could manage. “We were talking about how Aunt Bet hurt your feelings.”

  She turned toward me and said, “Tell me more about you, honey. What did you do over the weekend?”

  Exasperated, my empathy rapidly slipped out of reach. I replied, “Oh—I forgot, we don’t talk about feelings in our family. We look out the window and talk about the snow. We talk about what’s for dinner or where we bought our shoes.”

  “Oh, Carol, don’t get so emotional. What did you do over the weekend?”

  Experience said this was a battle I couldn’t win. While many of my mother’s letters suggested she desired depth in conversations, our definitions of meaningfulness differed broadly, and while she could talk about the prospect of such closeness in writing, it was almost impossible to achieve it in real time. She would divulge a morsel of information about a feeling and then immediately drop into superficial conversation, as if she had said nothing of importance.

  Silently, I chided myself: You can do this. You are pursuing a graduate degree in psychology. You
have traveled across Europe for two months by rail with only a backpack. You were dumped in California by your boyfriend and survived. Surely you can go for half an hour and talk about nothing with your mother.

  I finally told her I had gone to see Nanci Griffith at the Ark, a local music venue. Dismayed by my inability to engage her in meaningful dialogue, I walked off to the buffet to pile cubes of cantaloupe and strawberries, extra-crispy strips of bacon, and a dollop of eggs onto a plain white plate. As I rounded it off with a half piece of well-done rye toast, a familiar heat crept up my spine; an old pressure weighed on my chest. I pierced a few grapes with my fork and piled them on top of everything, as though I could kill the feeling inside by attacking fruit with silverware.

  I sat back down at the table, where my mother continued her surface talk. “I love the way they make their eggs here—just the right amount of butter with a dash of pepper.”

  This determined equanimity had been her fallback all her life. What did it cost her to keep it up? What would fall apart and what would be born, for her and for me, if she ever let it go? I pressed. “I know you don’t want to speak to Bet, but let’s just imagine—if you were going to, what would you say? I’m curious.”

  “I don’t know.”

  You’ve got to be kidding, I thought to myself. So connected was I to my internal panorama of feelings that it was hard to imagine she didn’t know anything about hers. I pushed the soggy eggs around my plate with my unbuttered toast and waited for her to respond. Instead of playing the make-believe game I had offered, she countered with, “What do your friends think of you and all your questions?”

  I thought carefully before responding, “I think my friends actually love me and chose me as a friend because of my curiosity and interest in their lives. My questions make them feel cared for.” I didn’t go into my further belief that she too had chosen me, long before my birth, and that in my emerging cosmology, it made sense that, from the vast array of souls available to incarnate into her womb, she was involved in the selection. That point, I kept to myself. “Furthermore, getting to what’s important for people and seeing beyond the surface is what made me successful as a teacher and will hopefully make me a great psychologist.”

  She shook her head and twisted uncomfortably on the vinyl bench. “I don’t know, honey. I think you should just let some things be.”

  I sat there and watched the snow falling outside, just as she’d invited me to. I felt helpless against the perennial wall separating me from her. I looked at her again. The overhead lamp muted her features—her beautiful hands, the way she balanced toast between her fingers, and how her polished nails always matched her lipstick. She was searching my face for comfort, acceptance, for simple presence. I remember our conversation unfolding like this:

  Everything in me softened before I spoke, my sarcastic tone replaced with a loving voice. “It’s like this, Mom. Let’s say that you’re kind of an artist, and one of your gifts is to help people see things more clearly or to help them believe in themselves. Everywhere you go, your friends and coworkers appreciate and love your art—they write you thank-you letters and comment on your insight and wisdom—they ask you to share your art with other friends or colleagues because they see value in what you offer. And the one place you would like your art to hang is in your mother’s house. And even though she loves the artist, she just doesn’t like that kind of art.”

  She seemed to be considering what I had said, and I waited for her to speak. I no longer felt the need to push her to respond in some way that was important to me. Finally, she said, “It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s just that it’s too painful.”

  I understood something in those words I had never fully grasped before. For many years, I thought my mother just didn’t want to talk about anything that would reveal her true feelings— as though it wasn’t normal for people to be angry or disappointed or hurt by the everyday experiences of life. Because she spoke so matter-of-factly about her early years, without revealing the pain she’d endured, I had grossly underestimated the immensity of grief she had covered up for decades, as a means to survive her many losses. And though her words were hard for me to hear, I knew they were true, and I was deeply grateful she’d helped me see this profound reality.

  I had intended at this breakfast to come out to her. Clearly she wasn’t ready for that conversation—nor was I.

  chapter

  14

  finding freedom

  It had been two years since my father died, and I had graduated and become a school psychologist in the town where my mother lived, making it easy for me to stop by on my lunch hour or pop in after work. My relationship with Kathy, while brief, was the beginning of finding my identity as a gay woman. I was not alone in this arena, as many people (gay and straight alike) were investigating all kinds of sexual freedom, getting away from rigid and oppressive attitudes about sex—a long-lasting gift from the Puritans. It was a stimulating and refreshing time for those bold enough to plunge into the experimental fray.

  I started attending women’s dances at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, where I met lesbians of all types and sizes dressed in many different styles. Gone were images of butch and fem, replaced by a plethora of real-life alternatives. There were women like me—committed to professional careers, intelligent, and fun loving; there were women who inspired and challenged me with vibrant discussions about politics and women’s roles in the world. More important than their being gay, these were feminists who wanted to make a difference through taking on roles beyond that of being a mother, a housewife, a secretary, or a teacher. Not that those weren’t noble pursuits when chosen by the women themselves, rather than imposed or prescribed by men, who, until now, had set the standards for what women should do and who they could be.

  I had also returned to my love of athletics and joined a women’s softball team sponsored by the Blind Pig, a local bar in town. This early summer day, I was recovering from a pulled muscle in my leg, injured during practice the night before. Linda, one of my teammates, had dropped off a heating pad at my apartment afterward and was stopping by this evening to pick it up. I was a little surprised she had gone to the trouble, since we didn’t know each other well, but I opened the door and invited her in for a drink. It was a reasonable gesture, since she had come all the way across town to check on me. We sat on the floor in my small living room, leaning up against pillows, a bottle of wine between us. After a few minutes of small talk, she got right to the point. “I’ve been watching you play ball for the last two years, and I’ve always been attracted to you.”

  I choked on my wine, and my eyes widened—had I heard her correctly?

  She continued, “You know, I’ve never been with a woman, and I might get nauseous if you kissed me, but I would really like to go out with you.”

  Gulping my wine now, I was shocked and intrigued. “But I thought you were married,” I said, though the look on my face alone must have expressed my confusion.

  “I am, but my husband and I have an open marriage.”

  It was 1977, and open marriage was one of the latest fads for heterosexual couples. I slugged down the rest of my wine and looked at her with an amused smile. “Okay, back up a little bit here. What exactly do you mean by ‘open’?” I poured another glass of wine for myself as she went on.

  “We are free to sleep with anyone we want as long as we tell each other in advance. If either of us is available when the other is, we get first choice to spend time together.”

  “It seems like being sexually involved with other people would cause a lot of jealousy.” Certain I would never want a relationship so open, it was hard to imagine how two people could navigate such emotional complexity.

  “Sometimes it does, but we have been able to work that out.”

  “Wow,” was about all I could manage.

  Of the numerous opening lines I’d ever heard from either a man or a woman, this was the most memorable and hilarious. I didn’t know whether to
laugh or kiss her on the spot to find out what her reaction would be

  In the last two years, I had found people who were open and proud of their lifestyles, whatever they were. This had nurtured a sense of normalcy in me. While I was not prepared to “come out” to the world, I had at least come out to myself and a few close friends, leaving the judgment and damnation of the Baptist church far behind in favor of a more benevolent spiritual path of my own design. I felt increasingly connected to the Divine through nature and found greater peace on a walk in the woods than in a church of any kind. The beauty of the world around me became my cathedral, and it was easy to marvel at the grandeur of the stars without the need to attribute their creation to God. Best of all, nature accepted the reverence I offered without judgment.

  While I had been successful in attracting men and had even fallen in love with a few, I was often reminded by my mother that I should defer to them, be less intense or demanding. I also found that many men of my generation agreed with her proposition and were caught by surprise with the new demands made by feminists who wanted equality. Even if a few men favored these shifts, they were without much-needed support in learning how to navigate a world where partnership took precedence over patriarchy. With women, I felt my strength and independence were assets—traits most women found attractive. I could be strong or vulnerable, or both, as the situation required. There was no set role for me, no limited female part to play, and this created greater room for self-discovery.

  Linda was the most recent of several romantic pursuers since I started attending dances and playing softball. I seemed to be going through a kind of gay adolescence, discovering myself attractive on multiple levels to the women around me in ways and on a scale that had never happened with men. So hungry for physical connection after years of stuffing away my emotional and sexual feelings for women, it was like unleashing a spring-loaded can of confetti. I was easily seduced by them all, and Linda was the most unforgettable.