Through the rest of the afternoon and into the evening on that visit home with Bill, I acted like what Mom had said while I held Alyson was a conversation like any other, even though I was sure the impact of her words showed on me like a blue-and-purple bruise. Inside me a thick chunk of hurt lodged high in my belly. I helped set up for dinner and avoided eye contact with everyone. I laughed extra loud with my nieces and nephew.
Bill sat next to me while we ate. He held my hand; he put his arm around me. I could hardly stand his touch. I felt myself taking a hard turn from the three good years we’d had together, from the falling in love and the love that came after the falling. Just a month before, I had stood up in front of friends and family and said yes, I would be with him forever, yes, I would go through anything with him. Saying yes meant being fine with not having kids. I didn’t want him to see the question that had started in me. Maybe marrying him had been a mistake.
Another part of me wanted to fight. It was nineteen-goddamn-ninety. Modern times. I wasn’t Mom or of her generation, where having kids was all a woman could do. Women had choices. I didn’t have to have kids to know joy. I had a career. A job I loved and was proud of. My counseling degree had led me to my current position as clinical supervisor. I had thought Mom was proud of this too.
I ticked off a mental list of all the ways Mom was wrong. Maybe early on, when we were first born, she felt that joy. But had she forgotten all that came after? The hurricane of a mess that five kids bring. The way she used to yell at us, threaten us with the rubber spatula and sometimes use it. Did she forget how kids scream and cry and get sick one after the other so that she was always wiping up puke or shit or snot? The way we could lie and hide and sneak? Didn’t she remember how we mocked her when we got old enough to fall out of love with her, mocked the way she laughed, the way she cleared her throat, the way she sat with her legs crossed and tucked. Our sullen eye-rolls at anything she might suggest we do. Didn’t she remember the fights between us kids that turned to fights with her? The ways she fell apart. Precious things in shards, broken bones, stitches and scars, car wrecks and drunken arrivals home. That didn’t look like joy, not one bit.
Late in the evening my brothers and sisters left, taking the kids with them, Leanne’s girls still asking couldn’t they stay the night. I didn’t push for them to stay like I usually did.
Then it was Mom and Dad and Bill and me. The TV was on. Some cop show. Dad nodded off in his recliner, and Mom went back and forth from the family room to the last bits of clean-up in the kitchen.
Bill and I watched that cop show. I yawned and said I was tired. A way to distract Bill from my quiet. Inside me that chunk of hurt kept turning, pushing up against my love for him.
Pretty soon Dad went to bed. The cop show ended, and Bill headed to bed too. I told him I’d be up soon. I didn’t want to be alone with him, not yet. I felt scared by this turning in me, and I didn’t want it to scare him.
Now Mom and I were alone. An old movie came on. I picked up a Good Housekeeping magazine. Mom sat in her chair and looked back and forth from the TV to a how-to book on stained glass.
I wanted to tell her how much I loved Bill. She couldn’t have missed how many boys and men I’d gone through to find him. He was the one I’d chosen. We had joy, just the two of us.
She must have forgotten how good just two could be. She and Dad were only married for a year before they had Pat. Then the next three kids came along, one after the other. The stress of us, plus her ulcers and migraines, and the years when dad drank must have blocked out the memory of that one year when it was just the two of them.
I wished Mom would look at me. That she would see I was hurting. Take back what she’d said. Maybe it wasn’t too late to stop this thing from growing in me. The wanting to please her, to please Dad, to be what was expected.
I paged through recipes and good-housekeeping things. I could’ve asked her what she meant about Aunt Lena being a bitter, lonely old woman. My great aunt Lena had been in her eighties when she’d died a few years earlier, so I couldn’t argue with the old part. She’d married late and, like me, had been ten years younger than her husband, who’d died when Aunt Lena was in her forties. They’d had no kids.
She was part of our family, always there for Easter and Christmas and any other big-dinner holiday at our house or at our grandparents’ house, giving each of us an envelope with a ten-dollar bill. She seemed busy and smart, with friends to see and clubs to go to and a pretty little house full of special things. She made us laugh; she made us feel loved. We were safe with her. Bitter was the last word I’d have put to her.
But Nana, our grandmother, got our priority. She had first choice on babysitting and special times. We were with her most Saturday nights and for Sunday dinners and after school when Mom had meetings. Aunt Lena’s invitations for us to come to her house hardly ever got taken up. Maybe she’d wanted more of us than she got. Maybe she had been lonely. Maybe Mom had seen a bitterness when she took care of Aunt Lena in her dying year. Maybe they’d talked of the absence of a child.
Mom’s head was tilted down to her book, the light of the lamp behind her, the flicker of the TV in front of her. That old movie, women in dresses, men in suits.
I held on to what was in me, the possible things I could say, the questions I could ask. Finally, I stood up. “Well, I guess I’ll go to bed.”
Mom looked up and smiled. “Good night, hon. I hope you sleep well.”
We weren’t the kind of mother and daughter who went back and sorted things out.
“See you in the morning,” I said to the room, to the lamplight, to her in her chair.