In Spite of Everything Read online

  This is invariably true when a baby enters the household, even if you’re over the moon about him. As every parent knows all too well, babies’ needs are so constant and urgent that life is instantly more intense and demanding than you ever imagined it could be. It is fun for some, perhaps, but life with your first baby is not easy for anyone. Especially for my mother. First of all, she was expecting someone else—a boy, for one thing. But, while embarrassed by her first fumble on maternal instincts, she was delighted with a girl. The first thing she said post-delivery was: “Her name is Susan Gregory, and we’re going to read Milton together!” At least the first part was true. My mother’s mother is from the South, where matrilineal naming traditions are common. On my nana’s side of the family, the tradition was to name the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter “Susan Gregory” plus the last name of the infant’s father. So I was the sixth in an unbroken line of eldest daughters having girls first. But I was different.

  Nana was the first to see it. “This child is a redhead,” she declared, on her first visit. “And she has blue eyes.” My mother stiffened, irritated by her mother’s hubristic prophecy. “Oh, Mother, don’t be ridiculous,” she sniffed. “She has black hair and brown eyes, like all the Susan Gregories. And look at her legs—she’ll be tall, too.” Nana shook her head. After a few weeks, when my true coloring began to emerge, it became obvious that Nana was right: I was a blue-eyed redhead. And, as it turned out, I was compact and athletic. Just like my dad.

  Second, it wasn’t just that I wasn’t the baby my mother was expecting that compounded her anxiety. It’s that I was a baby. People try to tell you what it’s going to be like to have one, but there’s no way you can understand it until you yourself have your own—whether you give birth or adopt. Some people are totally gaga over babies right away and squirm gleefully at their every belch and wiggle. Some people regard the newborn period as an endurance trial and are much more relaxed and happy once the baby can sit up, at around six months old. Some people are just not into babies, period. I’m not sure into which bunker my mother thought she would be slotted, but she found out right away that she was not only a member of that last troop, but also its leader. My mother was not, is not, a baby person.

  For starters, there was the whole physicality of it. For a tall, physically unfit woman, pregnancy is extra hard on the back; she had to take pain medication for it. This may be why she didn’t breast-feed, but she probably wouldn’t have considered it at any rate. It would have felt unpalatable and unseemly to her. She may have been a grad student at Berkeley in the late sixties, but make no mistake: Pixie Thomas was, is, no earth mama. While she is no society matron either, my mother likes the fancy (as do I). She is a strictly Ferragamo flats, Yves Saint Laurent knit top, and Chanel lipstick woman. My mother was just plain different. Different from me, different from the other moms.

  For one thing, she not only worked, she also did not really cook or bake unless there was a grown-up dinner party. For another thing, she didn’t look anything like anyone else’s mother. Where I grew up, near the Berkeley Hills, it was not the hippie but the cute tennis-skirt-wearing woman who was the reigning benevolent despot. My mother was the anti-Californian: intense, intimidating, anxious, bookish, hyperbolic, unathletic. She was not an officer of the PTA. She did not have a straight blond bob but obstreperously cork-screwed black hair. She was nine miles high of blindingly reflective white skin in a bathing suit, which was, like the hair, black. As a child, I sensed that the other California moms regarded her with an uneasy combination of inferiority, discomfort, and mockery. I figured that’s how they must view me, too (minus the inferiority).

  Although my parents did host festive dinner parties to which children came, we did not have many children over to our house outside of the close friends who lived down the street. But even so, ours was definitely not the “play” house. The walls were not decorated, like those of other Berkeley houses, with abstract artwork or Latin American wall hangings but were lined, floor to ceiling, with books—not ordinary paperbacks but, as my friend Ben said, “smart books.” And it was messy. One of my mother’s favorite, or at least one of her oft-cited, mottoes is “One can’t pay enough for good help.” This wasn’t some perverse entitlement of the upper class. It was simply the dictum of a housework hater.

  Indeed, my mother came from a long line of bookish women who hated pretty much every facet of domestic life. Cooking, laundry, mopping, washing dishes, tidying, and organizing (unless it was in relation to books) were not their bailiwick. Such busywork drained the mind and the soul; plus, they just weren’t good at it. True, my nana did love needlepoint, and she always worked at embroidering lovely, functionless little pillows until in her later years her gnarled, arthritic fingers forbade it. But she was using the time spent in handiwork to think through Aeschylus, or what would have become of Christianity if the Greeks had gotten hold of it rather than the Romans. Ask my grandmother if you might have a little lunch, and what you got was a sliced apple matted with cinnamon powder, or maybe Campbell’s beef consommé in a tempered glass mug ringed with the translucent flecks of whatever viscous pabulum it had last contained. She hired a cook to serve any group of more than four people. Nana’s own mother, as well as her maiden aunts, had been the same way.

  And so was my mother. She was the go-to person for a trenchant parsing of Jonson’s “Cary Morrison Ode,” but the kitchen and laundry basket rendered her powerless. She couldn’t get things organized, or even tidy. Lurching stacks of books and papers were permanent architectural features of our dining room table; we ate in their shadow, in the small enclave described by their colonnade. The chieftain of the refrigerator was the old stoneware pitcher, whose primitive maw glistened with a mucilaginous brew of tap water and frozen orange juice concentrate. The bottoms of Pyrex baking dishes were mosaics in brown. That much went unnoticed. The rest had to be taken care of, so my mother always allotted a respectable portion of the household treasury to a cleaning crew. But such was her genuine detachment from the mores of housekeeping that she never realized that the crew was phoning it in. The top layer was attended to, but the by-products of human detritus remained in perpetuum. Had the cleaning crew been headed up by a stern Russian or Caribbean woman telegraphing her disapproval, my brother and I might have gotten the idea that someone was in charge. Even if we had felt a little embarrassed, we might have felt that even if there was no order in our home, Order itself did exist in Homes. As it was, I don’t think either one of us gave it a second thought. Home was where Mom metabolized books and daytime television simultaneously.

  In fact, it was also unclear to us who was in charge of the house. My mother’s penchant for outsourcing domestic life had always called for a pageant of live-in babysitters. They lived in the garage out back, which my dad had refurbished into a one-bedroom apartment; they were there when we came home from school and, often, were the ones to put us to bed. Some were warm, attentive, and interesting. Marilyn, for example, was a fellow graduate student of Mom’s, and she had a big gray cat named Luther, for Martin Luther, on whom she was writing her dissertation. I loved Marilyn; she was smart, snuggly, and reassuringly competent, and she called me her “little Susie” until she died when I was in my late twenties. Then there was Hilary, a choleric, overweight hippie who, when she wasn’t getting mad at Ian and me, wrote very interesting, thoughtful poetry. She wore long, bustling patchwork skirts and asked her fiancé’s daughter and me to be the “flower children” at her wedding, where we were supposed to leap around interpretively and fling flowers into the congregation (we were too embarrassed, so we ended up handing them out like canapés at a cocktail party).

  But some of the babysitters were abusive. The most egregiously so, Bonnie, was also the prettiest and most charming: a raven-haired, ruby-lipped fairy-tale wicked stepmother. Bonnie would take us to parties at which she and her loser, handlebar-mustachioed boyfriend left us to range around bedraggled Berkeley communes while they smoked weed and
watched porn with their creepy friends. She used to thrash Ian with a wire hairbrush, threaten me with worse when I impotently tried to intervene, and terrorize both of us to protect her secret activities. This went on for more than a year before I summoned the courage to out her. Though it was hardly a moral awakening:

  The reason I outed her was that she offered me 25 cents to babysit my brother and myself one night, and by that time, we were so inured to her cruelty that my response was not to tell her how scared or hurt we were by her proposition but to demand that she up the ante by 15 cents. When she balked, I groused about her scroogeyness to my mom. I was six years old; my brother was four. Although she canned Bonnie posthaste, my mother was mystified. Not only had it never occurred to her that a “professional” would behave in such a way, but she had never had the slightest indication that anything was off.

  Off is, however, what things were, albeit not always in such harrowing ways—just in the weird ways particular to my family. Take weekly allowances. To earn theirs, my friends were charged with making their beds, setting the table, helping to weed the garden on the weekends. I had to memorize and recite poetry selected by my mother, as well as the entire lineage of the kings and queens of England. When friends did come over, my mother was not perkily interviewing them about what snacks they liked or what their favorite part of school was, but was propped up, robed and bespectacled, in her ancient four-poster bed—with Hamlet, various volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the criticism of Harold Bloom layered in steppes. Guiding Light or The Rockford Files would be on in the background.

  We were the weirdos. There was no point in trying to convey this to my mother. She was so consummately, unequivocally herself that she either would have said something like “Well, dear, that’s just how our family has always been” or “The people you call ‘weirdos’ are usually the most interesting people,” or she just wouldn’t have known what I was talking about.

  I would come to realize later in life that my mother belonged to a select tribe well known to English majors everywhere: the female English Renaissance scholar. At thirty, when I saw W;t, the play about a Donne scholar who is forced to see that everything is not a metaphor when she is struck with actual cancer, I did not see the fabulous, heartbreaking, childless character that my friends saw: I saw my mother. If you didn’t see W;t, think back on your college days, recall that English lit class—Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell—and if your professor was a woman, you have the gestalt of my mother in clear sight. The long line at the grocery store was not just a pain in the ass; it was a Chaucerian pageant of souls, winding its way to repast! The fig salad you ordered at the yuppie bistro wasn’t just skimpy on the figs. The salad was chary of figs, and actually fig, interestingly, was connected with the word “sycophant,” which meant “showing the figs”—from the ancient Greek words “fig” and “to show”—and was used in ancient Athens to describe those who snitched on illegal fig exportation to gain favor with high government officials, so perhaps we might appeal to the chef in sycophantic terms for a greater representation of figs in this otherwise most elegant of salads. Ta da!

  No amount or type of life experience could knock the metaphor out of Mom. Every comment was elegantly footnoted, every moment linked to linguistic constructs or literary precepts, tropes, and conceits. In this, my mother was clearly not the typical Baby Boomer parent to my Gen-X child. She was not, like my friends’ mothers, so preoccupied with finding herself that she either shunted off the kids’ feelings with “I can’t deal with this right now—there’s too much on my plate!” or derailed a conversation into a monologue about what she was going through with her boyfriend right now.

  But Mom was no less self-absorbed. Perhaps because nothing really happened to her but was, rather, strained through that scholarly, metaphysical membrane, my mother did not relate to direct experiences or feelings. She loved drama, loved talking, loved discussing, loved words. But she could not understand personal affect. All was simile, pumped up for maximum amplification. I was not actually struggling with a problem; I was like Jacob wrestling with God! I was not angry at people who made fun of my younger brother, Ian; I was like Antigone, defending my brother on pain of death. After my parents divorced, I was like Iphigenia, sacrificed for her father’s ego; I was not a girl whose father had left. End scene. Whereas many X girls got the clear message that it was not they themselves but their Boomer mothers who were the protagonists in their lives, I understood that I was a dull facsimile of the tragic figures of ancient and Renaissance drama—and that my mother was the director. We were all understudies in someone else’s theater.

  Of course, as all readers discover sometime in adolescence, literature, poetry, and plays are the magical keys to the kingdom of human condition. We read literature to understand ourselves, to elevate the nobler ends of experience. By indoctrinating me in this habit, my mother gave me the skeleton key, for sure, but she imparted this gift to anyone smart enough to listen—most especially to her students. She was, is, a spellbinding teacher. If there was an award to be won, my mother won it; a grant to be awarded, my mother was awarded it; a teenage student in trouble, my mother was always the adult in whom she confided. Wherever she works, my mother is exalted.

  But when you’re the daughter, you just want your mom. You just want her to listen to you, to see you, to get what you mean. You want her to draw comparisons that help you understand her better, that help her understand you better—that help you understand yourself better. You don’t want Antigone. Children, as it has been said, are literal thinkers.

  My dad, when I was little, was as literal as a star. His delight in me was manifest. When I was born, he placed a tiny armadillo stuffie inside my bassinet and slept on the floor next to me. While my mother was writing and researching, my dad took me on climbs in the mountains, papoose-style. One of my favorite pictures is of me, at three months, and my dad nestled in an icy alpine cave, all bundled up. He’s set up a tripod and is tenderly feeding me a bottle. There are other pictures, also rigged by tripod. There is one of Dad and me, just over a year old, taking my first step, on rugged terrain atop Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. There’s Dad and me, age two, at nearby Stinson Beach, holding hands, his free hand pointing out at the gray, roiling Pacific, mine swinging a pink and yellow Easter basket. There’s Dad and me on my first Halloween in conscious memory, age three.

  The Halloween picture: Over the years, it has become an emblem. For one thing, Halloween was always Dad’s favorite time of year; masks were his thing. As we grew older, Ian (my junior by two and a half years) and I made our own costumes, and Dad was always in on them. Ian went for enigmatic characters: a vampire Chinese ghost, the Masque of the Red Death. I favored inanimate objects: a postcard, a package of M&M’s, a bunch of grapes. One time, Ian went as the mummy of some lesser-known pharaoh, and Dad built a sarcophagus apparatus laid over an oversized wheelbarrow. As Dad wheeled it around from door to door, Ian would push open the hinged cover, emerging with his track-or-treat bag in a ragged hand. That first Halloween, however, I dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, Dad as the wolf. Shortly after that photo was snapped, I became scared of his terrifying aspect. We shed the costumes and went as a little girl and her dad.

  Certainly, in all these snapshots, one can observe early visual cues of those warring Gemini strains in Dad. The sharp-clawed, armored armadillo in the incarnation of a soft, cuddly stuffie. The cozy baby scene in the icy cave. The wild ocean and the Easter basket. But the one that emerges as something of a tarot card is the twin image of the adoring daughter and the uncomprehending prey, the Dad and the Wolf. Ultimately, as the hand played out over the course of my father’s life, the beast would prevail. But such clues were not obvious at the time. Indeed, raging duality doesn’t generally emerge as the central theme in a person’s life and character unless it has the chance to develop in the proper environment. All villains follow the same path—they’re just kicked in the right place at the right time. Which raises t
he question: If someone had been a little nicer to these guys, would that kick have had the force to hurl them into bona fide baddie territory?

  Mulling over the pivotal punt and its ensuing trajectory is the hobby of tragedy lovers like me everywhere. I’m not the first to have wondered, for example, if Paradise Lost’s Lucifer would have become Satan if he hadn’t been unceremoniously evicted from Heaven. Had a little more patience and compassion been extended to him, maybe all that arrogance, anger, and self-pity would have blown over after a while, or at least have persisted as manageable character defects to be kept in check—not as the fiery pits of Hell. Had King Lear’s Gloucester degraded his illegitimate son even slightly less flagrantly, Edmund likely wouldn’t have turned out to be such an evil punk. And knowing that she had such a volatile, immature son in Hamlet, couldn’t Queen Gertrude have waited at least a year before marrying his uncle? I’m aware that deploying any one of these solutions would result in a mind-numbingly boring deflation of drama—like trying to stage a Buddhist opera. But I’ve always loved the villains; moreover, I’ve always wanted to help them. In my view, a little kindness, a little understanding is all it would have taken to turn these extraordinary characters around, to blunt the blows of outrageous fortune. As Lady Anne said to Richard III: “No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.” But I came to this villain-rescuing way of thinking very early, literally before I can remember.