It only now occurred to Alice that she had never visited her son’s
apartment. Nor her daughter’s. Only now, after so many years, did this
strike her as odd. She couldn’t figure
out why. She had always made an effort
not to interfere in her children’s lives, to stay out of their way. Perhaps she had overdone it? Not that she didn’t see enough of them. She saw them plenty! Almost always in her apartment and usually to
stay for dinner and occasionally overnight.
Her own cooking of course, only her own cooking. And why not, since Alice was a fabulous
cook. Glen and Marlene seemed to think
so. She loved her children. They had become her best friends. Finally there was peace between her and her
daughter, and not simply the customary nervous truce. Finally mother and daughter were solid
friends. They were on the same
page. Alice felt forgiven, absolved. She
had in many ways wounded and damaged her daughter terribly, and silently blamed
herself when she saw teenaged Marlene slip into a life of drugs and moral
degeneracy. And stealing her boyfriends
certainly didn’t help. She had caused
her little girl tremendous hurt. They
had spoken of it, recently, when Marlene gave her the news of her
engagement. Alice was shocked to see her
suddenly weeping hysterically, uncontrollably.
Marlene told her between sobs how much she, her own mother, had hurt
her, damaged her, had been cold, rejecting and hating towards her. That nothing Marlene could ever say do or
think would be worth anything to her.
She just wasn’t pretty enough, nor sufficiently smart, nor gifted. She
had sinned by turning out merely average.
Alice sat there with her daughter at the kitchen table, shocked and
paralyzed, as though she were being swallowed by an anaconda, and that anaconda
was the justified rage of her unjustly unloved daughter. “I’m sorry”, was all she could whisper. “I’m sorry, Marlene. I’m so, so awfully sorry.” She was too shocked to weep. “Please forgive me. Please forgive me. I have been a horrible mother. I didn’t know. I was so selfish. I didn’t realize. Oh, please, please forgive me.” So swallowed in her paroxysms of grief and
self-pity was her daughter that Alice nearly called 911. Eventually Marlene pulled out of it,
recovered herself. Alice didn’t know what
to do. She sat, paralyzed. She asked her, “What would you like me to do
for you, Marlene?”
Then she said
it. “Hold me. Hold me, ma-ma. Hold me.”
Alice swallowed hard, and fought the waves of revulsion that threatened
to deepen the rift with her daughter and render them permanently apart. By sheer force of will she approached her
daughter, awkwardly bent over, and put her arms around her. Then the dam collapsed and together for
several minutes mother and daughter wept together in an embrace of reconciliation. Marlene spent the night and the next several
nights in her mother’s guest room. But
now the novelty was wearing off. They
were becoming distant again, but with a difference. It was this time Marlene, the daughter who
was pulling away from Alice the mother.
And Alice, the mother was beset by pangs of loss and remorse as her
daughter finally pulled away to lay claim to her own life. Finally, Alice loved her own daughter.
She dialed Doris’
number. “Ready when you are.”
“Yes, I’ll be right
over, dear.”
She looked in the
mirror at her completed metamorphosis. A
handsome matron in her fifties with a shining helmet of platinum grey hair
smiled back at her. She would always be
an attractive, even beautiful woman. And
from now on Alice would always look her age, proudly. But whom was she ever really fooling to begin
with, except whosoever would buy into her self-illusion with her? She had gone nearly seven months without a
man, and no one seemed to be looking her way.
She didn’t realize that she would so welcome this anonymity of
cronehood. She beheld her strongly
veined hands, her unadorned fingers, and unpainted well-trimmed
fingernails. Underneath her expensive
white cotton blouse her small breasts were sagging and her stomach would always
carry the fine little scars of her three pregnancies.
Two or three nights
before their breakthrough, Alice had dreamed that she was lying on a bed or a
couch with her stomach exposed. Marlene
was leaning over her tracing with purple ink over her mother’s stretch
marks. When she was finished, mother and
daughter were both looking at the artwork, and Marlene said, “these are all
mine, ma-ma.” Alice sat down at the
kitchen table, wondering when Doris would come, wondering whether she might
have time for a cigarette, and wondering what it would be like, visiting her
daughter in her son’s apartment where she had never been before in a room full
of strangers.
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