On the Rocks(35)

I was seven and my sister just five when my mother’s unflinching vanity and immaturity finally became too much for my father to take, but I knew something was wrong long before that. I didn’t have a difficult childhood, but I remember there being tension and sitting at the dinner table with no one speaking. I remember my father reading the newspaper and my mother microwaving Lean Cuisines, two people in the same room but in entirely different worlds. Some kids have memories of their parents fighting, of things breaking, of arguments so volatile the neighbors could hear them. I don’t remember that. I remember silence. I remember my parents not even caring enough about each other to yell. I remember my mother being very good at pretending everything was fine. I think she’s been pretending ever since.

Oddly enough, the yearbook didn’t have a “Most Likely to Be Divorced with Two Kids by Thirty” either. Go figure.

After my dad left, she fixated on making him wish he’d never left her and proving that she was still the fairest in the land. After all, she was the envy of every girl in town when she was growing up, and she’d be damned if she was going to let him take that away from her. She became even more obsessed with her appearance, and more important, with ours, turning Katie and me into miniature versions of herself. She dressed us to the nines every time we left the house, always in smocked dresses, patterned hair bows, and patent-leather shoes. At home, we ate nothing but frozen diet meals and were forced to watch her do her aerobics video every afternoon before we could put on our cartoons. One year for show-and-tell, having already absorbed my mother’s lessons on what was truly important in life, Katie dropped to the floor to show her classmates how to tighten your tush with Jane Fonda’s leg lifts. Another time I made the silly mistake of taking a snack from one of the car-pool moms after soccer practice. My mother took one look at me, pudding cup in hand, and recoiled as if I were holding some kind of poisonous insect. She grabbed it from me and said, “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,” as she threw it in the garbage. I was ten. I didn’t have hips, and I didn’t care. All I knew was that the bitch stole my snack pack.

Our relationship only went south from there.

When I was in high school, I came home from school one day and caught her trying to squeeze into my prom dress, somehow convinced that it was appropriate for a thirty-eight-year-old woman to wear her teenage daughter’s dress. For a few minutes I was worried that she was going to try to steal my date. Not exactly the kind of problems normal mothers and daughters have. All I wanted was for her to drive a minivan and watch Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman at night like everyone else’s mom. I didn’t want to worry about running into her at a keg party. It became very clear that she was never going to give me the kind of sage advice girls rely on their mothers for, unless you consider knowing that women over the age of forty are more likely to be hit by a meteorite than get married useful or accurate information for a teenager to have. It’s not like my mother was asking the mirror every night if she was prettier than I was, but I felt like she was competing with me, that she envied me my youth and resented me for unintentionally taking her own. She might not have been a stepmother, but I’d seen enough Disney movies to know I’d be wise to be wary of her. Let’s just say that if my mother handed me an apple, I’d think twice before I bit into it.

As an adult, I stopped thinking that my mother was born without the maternal gene that incited most women to bake cookies and read stories and do all the things that my mother could never do, and I accepted the truth. She never recovered from the humiliation of being dumped, and she let it morph her into a different person, one who clung to the past and the dreams she had before real life got in the way. We all fear turning into our mothers as we get older, but I wasn’t just afraid, I was terrified. Over the years her narcissism had taken on a life of its own, and like any good fungus left unchecked, it had spread until it infected and ultimately destroyed everything in reach, including our relationship. I was worried that my premarital catastrophe would somehow result in my becoming like her. I knew it wouldn’t manifest itself in quite the same way, as evidenced by the fact that I wasn’t averse to chewing food as of yet, but the parallels were there. Fine, I’d never steal my kid’s snack pack, but I was beginning to understand her, just a little, and I realized it was time for a very serious reality check.

The following week I waited for my aunt in one of the dining rooms at Castle Hill, a mansion on the bluffs that had been converted into an expensive hotel. I sat at a small table by the window overlooking the water and listened to the sounds of silverware clinking on china plates, diners engaged in pleasant conversations, and, eventually, the swish of my aunt’s dress as she approached. She was a slight woman, only five-one, but she had an enormous personality and, more important, a healthy attitude about life. Her dark hair was swept back off her face, her dress was cinched snugly around her waist with a wide leather belt, and a scarf was draped around her shoulders. Aunt Patrice was everything my mother was not, and she had served as a surrogate mother for me for as long as I could remember. When my father passed away when I was in fourth grade, her husband, my uncle Mac, stepped in to fill the void, and now the two of them were basically my parents. They weren’t able to have kids of their own, and I know it was hard for both of them, because they were naturals as parents. Instead, they became the best aunt and uncle a girl could ever ask for, and my aunt had taken over as the main role model in my life, always guiding me with her wisdom, humor, and love. I imagined that was what a normal mother would do, one who wasn’t too busy telling a prepubescent child to worry about her hips or informing her that carrots have a deceptively high sugar content.