| My Mother's Tears When I was little, I never understood why my mother would sometimes cry in the evenings. An adult's tears are terrible things when you're only five, because grown-ups are the gods of your world, and gods are infallible. They are strong, and immovable, and the arbitrators of your reality. When they cry, when they reveal that they can hurt too, it shatters something of your innocence, and you are a little closer to growing up than before. When I was seven and my mother would cry, I assumed that it was because my father was away for the night, and that she missed him. This made sense to me, because I missed him, too-missed his warm, clean smell of shaving lotion and the strong arms that would lift me into the air and spin me around and around. So I would wrap my small arms around my mother and hold her tight and tell her that it was okay to cry, but Daddy would come back soon. I never understood why this should make her cry harder: soft, choking cries that she swallowed, a fist pressed to her mouth while the tears poured down her red-blotched cheeks, making them glisten in the lamplight. When I was ten, shadows of a darker truth began to dawn on me. When my father left for those occasional evenings, it was to be with friends. What made no sense to me, in my world of skinned knees and bubble gum and fluid friendships that welcomed any playmate warmly, was why my mother should disapprove so strongly of my father's friendships. Even then I knew that everyone ought to have at least one good friend--and the more people one could count as friends, the better. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that my mother should take advantage of my father's social circle to increase the quality of her own life. Though I tried time and again to explain this to her, with my ten year old's logic and overwhelming faith in the brotherhood of mankind (except for those Thompson kids the next block over), she never listened, and scolded me for trying to understand things that were meant for adults. Eventually I gave up, my pride injured by the constant refusal of my good intentions. When I was thirteen, and my mother was away for a week to visit her mother, my father took me to meet these friends that took him away from our family circle once, sometimes twice, a week. By that time, I was hitting the first gangly stages of adolescence, beginning to sense that I was teetering on the edges of the great chasm that is puberty and the transition to adulthood. I was shy and diffident with this small group of strange men my father's age, and they somewhat awkward with me as well. They talked with me about school and books and music, and gave me candy whenever possible, as if the sweets were enough to seal our friendship. I was still young enough not to feel patronized overly much, and deemed them nice men. Privately I wondered what my mother could have against them, and why my father should be so relieved that I approved of his friends. He was especially eager that I should like one in particular, the one he called, wearing a peculiar smile, his best friend. Steve was his name, and he was a thin, small man, with blond hair that was fading quickly into grey and soft, tired blue eyes. His hands fascinated me, because they were as slender as he, the fingers tapered and delicate, the skin pale and showing the veins beneath. They were beautiful hands, artist's hands I decided, although I didn't know at the time that he was a pianist of modest renown. I liked him. He told me I looked like my father, and that someday I would be a great beauty. I told him that I'd rather be a writer, and he laughed and told me I could be both. When my mother came home from visiting my grandmother, I let slip that I had met my father's friends. With a child's tactlessness, I told her they were nice and she should spend time with them. That was the first time I ever heard my parents argue, my mother screaming at my father, how could he have done such a thing, it was bad enough that she put up with his leaving every week, there was no need to steal Sandra's innocence too; my father yelling that it was his life, Sandra was his daughter too, she deserved to know these men, she had to learn the truth sooner or later. I tried to shut my ears to it, pretend that I was far away, another person, anything not to have to listen to them, not to have to hear my father shouting that it was all a mistake to have married my mother, to my mother wishing he had never been born, that she had never been born, that she had never had the misfortune to fall in love with such a freak of nature. The argument only ended with my father's slamming the door and driving off into the night. As I lay in my bed, still dressed and crying as silently as I could, my mother came to my room, trying to explain that it wasn't my fault that they had blown up, that Daddy had been wrong to take me to these men (although she wouldn't say why), and please not to cry, it would all be okay. But she was crying, too, and I didn't believe her when she said that everything would be fine. After that, I never saw the marriage between my parents in the same way, and I realized that, though they shared the same bed, there was no intimacy at all between them. They were two strangers living together in a pretense of a marriage. Guiltily, I understood that they were together in order to provide me with a "normal" home. They left it to me to decide whether I wanted any sort of relationship with my father's friends, because neither would budge on the issue. My mother tried to persuade me that I shouldn't, while my father offered reasons why I ought to. No child should be used as a weapon in her parents' war on each other, but I was. It made my mother cry, but I liked my father's friends, and was pleased to let him take me with him on some of the jaunts they took together. It was almost like having an extra three fathers doting on me as we went to amusement parks and shopped together, going to museums and concerts, and it made me feel important that they should treat me like an adult during the difficult teenaged years when I felt that I was the only individual in the history of the world to experience difficulties with acne and schoolwork and relationships. Perhaps I was naive in that it took me till my first year of college for me to understand why my mother cried on those evenings when my father went out without us. I can still remember the night that he called me--it was a Tuesday in November, rainy and chilly and a perfect night to stay indoors with a hot cup of tea and a good book to read. It was when I picked up the telephone to hear my father's emotion-choked voice telling me that Steve had died, a victim of a vicious cancer, that I understood what had seemed perfectly ordinary while I was growing up. I cried for this man, my father's lover who had treated me like his own daughter, whom my father had loved and been unfaithful to my mother for. I cried because of the pain their relationship had caused my mother, who had merely had the great misfortune of marrying a man trying to deny a terrible truth to himself. I cried for my father, who stayed with a woman he didn't love for the sake of the daughter who needed two parents and now mourned the spouse of his heart. And I cried for myself and the death of the last remnants of my childhood, the belief that true love always conquers all and the absolute faith in happy endings. |