"HOLD ME CLOSE, LET ME GO"
(back)
One weekend, my thirteen-year-old daughter Morgan, grounded as usual, had spent three hours washing the front steps, cleaning the kitchen and making blueberry muffins. I soon learned why our stovetop was shining clean: she wanted to go to a party on Friday.
"But she can’t," her stepdad Bill said when I reported this to him. He was unknotting his tie and pulling off his shirt, changing into a T-shirt and jeans for our walk. "Have you forgotten that she waltzed out of here when she was already grounded? And did it twice in one day? You have to stick to your guns."
"It’s the big party of the year!" she screamed when I said she couldn’t go. "All the kids are going! If I don’t go I’ll probably never see those kids again!" I raised my eyebrows, and she added, "Except at school, which doesn’t count."
I was a rock. I was Ulysses tying himself to the mast so as not to be able to respond to the siren’s call. "I’m sorry," I said. "You’re grounded, and that’s that."
Even as I said that I ached, thinking of her not getting to go to the party. I saw the lighted windows, heard the music, felt the excitement.
I wasn’t thinking about being a parent, consistent and firm. I wasn’t
thinking about what she had done to deserve missing the party, her boots clickly
down the dimly lit street when she was supposed to be under her comforter
sound asleep. Instead I was remembering myself back in high school, slumped
against the green-painted low brick mantel in the living room, crying in anguish
because my mother had said I couldn’t go to a party. I forget why I couldn’t
go, but it must have been for a very good reason.
I had to go. A boy I liked would be there. I can’t remember now what
his name was, but in my memory that boy moves in radiance, his skinny pegged
pants, his surfer shirt, the blue ink drawings on his binder, right down to
the smashed tuna fish sandwiches he always had for lunch. He had blond hair
falling in his face, and he would be there, at Debbie Haslon’s party.
I wailed louder, remembering. Mother, polishing her waitress shoes on the
couch, letting Robin, the baby, help with the toes, said "No, no, no!"
and finally gave in. As I knew she would. As she always did.
As I always did.
I was Morgan’s mom, wanting to be firm, but I was also Morgan, wanting
desperately to go to that party. I watched her face as she, switching tactics
again, began to fold the laundry, making big messy piles on the coffee table—Bill,
Patrick, me, and her. "If you come straight home every day after school
this week, you can go to the party for a little while," I said.
She jumped up and hugged me, sending a drift of Bill’s Jockey V-neck
T-shirts cascading to the floor. "Thanks, Mom."
I returned to Bill, who had put an apron on and was stirring spaghetti sauce
for dinner.
"Don’t tell me," he said.
It wasn’t my fault. "No one is leaving this house until it’s
spotless!" my mother would announce on a Saturday morning when I was
little. She’d be standing there in a rolled-up man’s blue shirt
and a jeans skirt, her Hawaiian-looking black hair still powdery from the
morning’s pancakes. "I don’t care if it takes all day!"
She’d be mad over something—maybe we had let a neighbor boy get
into her photo albums, or had cut each other’s hair—and you could
see it in her eye, her determination to get tough with us this time.
But before long a warm ray of sunshine streaming through the open window
would catch her attention, and she’d let the soapy, oatmeal-encrusted
bowl she’d been scrubbing slide under the water. Pretty soon she was
searching for beach towels and telling us kids to get our suits on. "Don’t
worry about the house," she’d say, absently, "We’ll do
it later."
I’d let the broom fall with a loud bang and run for my suit, leaving
a pile of sweepings in the middle of the floor. My sister Mickey would drop
the washrag she’d been scrubbing the tub with and run to get her suit
off the line. My brothers, Sean and Shannon, would toss a final milk carton
into the rusting incinerator in the back yard, poke it down into the fire,
then run to their room to root through the mess on their floor for their suits,
still damp from the last swim. Adrian and Connie would stop scooping toys
into a broken plastic laundry hamper. While Mom wrapped peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches in waxed paper, the four of us girls would put on our matching
striped bathing suits. The house would get clean later, or it wouldn’t.
I don’t remember if mother gave in as helplessly to my brothers as
she did to the girls, but I knew that for me it was different with Patrick.
At 13, he was himself a full-fledged teenager. His most typical comment in
conversation was ‘What are you talking about?’ delivered with great
emphasis, whenever an adult finished speaking.
"Mom, you have to get out of here," he said when I went upstairs
to watch him and his friend Jason cook mozzarella and ham sandwiches. He said
it again when he was in Morgan’s room, talking to her about all the teenage
things he now kept from me.
Yet he still seemed tuned in to me. When I came into the house, he asked me where I’d been. I was still allowed to sit on his legs as he sprawled on the couch. Once I was hurrying out, getting my coat, and Patrick was sitting sideways in Bill’s chair, reading "Manchild in the Promised Land."
"Are you mad at me, Mom?" he asked. He thought that earlier, upstairs,
I had greeted him perfunctorily, and he’d been worrying about it. "No!"
I exclaimed, heading over to ruffle his hair. He dodged, but smiled.
With him, I could effectively apply the advice from my books. When he told
me his math teacher had locked him out for being late, I remembered: "Never
tell a teenager anything unless you think it will improve your relationship
with him."
I said "Oh, sweetie, that must have felt awful, getting locked out
of your class."
"Yes, it did," Patrick said. "I have to start getting up
earlier."
With Morgan, I was incapable of anything like this. If she had told me she
was locked out of her math class, it would have mattered so it would have
scared me, made me feel that everything was hopeless. I would have blurted
out something like: "Well, start getting up earlier."
With Patrick, it was just getting locked out.
I felt that he and I were alike in deep ways and superficial ways: he was
not just left-handed and cross-eyed like me, but he lived in his head, as
I did.
Yet I knew where I ended and he began. I could cause him pain, for his own
good, without feeling it in my own bones.
Patrick’s preposterous claims never moved me, the way Morgan’s
did. "Ok, Mister," I’d say, when he demanded a drum set one
Sunday night, and flared up when I reminded him that two days before he had
had his heart set on an electric guitar. "Sort it out for yourself,’’
I’d say gently, but firmly. "When you come back down to earth, we’ll
talk."
Morgan never seemed to come back to earth. But sometimes, just when I thought
she was lost to me, she would send me a signal, like a smoke fire from a distant
plain that said, "It’s all right. I’m still here!"
One morning in May, for example, I kept trying to give her some red gym
shorts she seemed to be forgetting as she was leaving for school. "Those
are Patrick’s," she kept saying, but, not paying attention, I stuffed
them in her backpack anyway.
That night I found them in my tennis shoes in the closet.
I put them on her lamp and then switched it on, so it glowed pink.
They turned up a day later stretched across a picture above my bed.
I pinned them up in her window, like an odd pair of curtains. Neither of
us said a word about the shorts. We just played our game, silently.
Later that month we had a trying week. Morgan had not turned in any math
assignments. When she wrote us a letter to explain why she was doing badly
in math, Jim said it made him wonder how she could be passing English.
So I wasn’t in the mood when she kept asking me why I never wore my
Chronicle sweatshirt anymore. I said, "What do you care? You know you
can’t borrow it." Crossly, I picked up the apple juice boxes and
half empty cereal bowls that marked her passage through the house, then jerked
my Chronicle sweatshirt off the hanger, and put it over my head. My arm wouldn’t
go through the sleeve.
There, rolled up in the arm, were the red shorts.
On the following Sunday I heard Morgan say, "It’s Mother’s
Day! Aren’t you going to spend it with your mother?" to someone
on the phone, her voice drifting through her closed door. This, from a girl
who the night before had said to the same phone, "No, I’m home all
by myself tonight. Well, my mom’s home."
When I walked into the kitchen, ready to go wild over my cards and school-made
flower vases, the table was bare.
I stomped in to find Morgan luxuriating on her disordered bed in her blue
Joe Boxer jammies. "Clean up this mess," I snapped, by way of good
morning. I went outside to sit on the front porch, and stared at the discolored
roses on the bushes in the front garden. The dog licked my hand.
"Where are you, Mom?" Morgan called.
"Out here," I answered, my voice thin and bitter. Two years ago
I had been awakened at 6 a.m. when the kids brought in an angelfood cake covered
in purple frosting and made me eat a slice on the spot, before I even got
up.
Morgan came out to the porch and sat down beside meinto my office where
I was sitting at my desk. She was wearing my white tank top. I’d have
to pitchfork through the piles on her floor to get it back.
"Did you do your room?" I said in my mean voice.
She ignored that. "Look," she said. She showed me a plaster replica
in a shoebox. It was of the red shorts.
"See where it broke?" she said. "I’ve been trying to
glue them back all week." She had been, too. Bill found his tube of glue,
open and dried out, on the basement floor.
"And I have a painting of the shorts at school," she went on. "I couldn’t bring it home because we had class outside and I couldn’t get back in."
"That would have been good," I said, still sulkily, but liking
it, the idea of a ceramic of the red shorts, and the painting. I smiled, and
hugged her, and she hugged me back.
It took so little to make me bounce back. I was one of the plastic stand-up
clown punching bags we had as a kid. Punch me down, and I came back up, smiling
gamely. I was a mom.
I was still smiling when I got in the car to go grocery shopping.
And found the red shorts stretched out on the steering wheel.
