why go to university at all? Why not just go and make art?”
“Look, Mouse”—my mother called me Mouse; nobody else did, not even my father, and when she lost her ability to talk I felt that she looked the word at me with her eyes—“you’re only sixteen years old. You’re not old enough to vote, or to drink, or to sign a lease on an apartment. You’re barely old enough to drive. You can go away to college or you can stay at home with us and make your art in the garage and scoop ice cream all day down the road. Your choice, but I know what I’d choose: get out of this stodgy little dump! See the world.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
“Why don’t I what?”
“Get out and see the world.”
“Oh, Mouse”—she stroked my hair, which was long then, so that stroking it meant caressing, too, the greater stretch of my back. Like a cat, rather than a mouse. I loved it. I loved being her child. I remember looking at her and thinking she was the most beautiful thing in the world. “I’ve had my moment, sweetie. Maybe another will come. But for now, I’m needed right here.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you know, I make a house a home? That’s what mothers do.”
“But I’ll go and then—”
“I love your daddy. He needs a home, too.”
And then we were back to the college question, and it seemed that art school wasn’t really a choice, because there wasn’t any money—barely enough, even with loans, to get me to university at all—and it mattered to my mother that I be employable at the end.
“You’re such a baby, you can go to art school afterward and still come out even. Get a master’s in Painting on top of your B.A., and you’ll be ready for all of it. I want you to have it all. It’s not like when I was a girl, the MRS degree and all that. You won’t live off pin money, off any man, no matter how much you love him. You won’t depend on anyone but yourself. We agreed, right?” And there was that edge to her voice, which I thought of then as darkness, and recognize now as rage, the tone that came in her intermittent phases of despair. And so I went to Middlebury.
I always understood thatthe great dilemma of my mother’s life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price. She was of the generation for which the rules changed halfway, born into a world of pressed linens and three-course dinners and hairsprayed updos, in which women were educated and then deployed for domestic purposes—rather like using an elaborately embroidered tablecloth on which to serve messy children their breakfast. Her University of Michigan degree was all but ornamental, and it always seemed significant that it stood in its frame under the eaves in the attic, festooned with dust bunnies, among a dozen disavowed minor artworks, behindboxes of discarded toys. The first woman in her family to go to college, she’d cared enough to frame her diploma, only then to be embarrassed about having cared, embarrassed because she felt she hadn’t done anything with it, had squandered her opportunity.
The transition from pride to shame took place sometime soon after my birth, I think: I appeared in ’67, and by 1970, her two closest friends in Manchester had divorced and moved away, reborn into the messy and not necessarily happier lives of the liberated. My brother was born in ’59, when Bella Eldridge was but a tender twenty-three-year-old: he was what she did with her precious education.
As far as I could tell, she didn’t burn over the consuming demands of motherhood the first time. In those days, all the young women around her were doing the same thing, discussing Jane Austen over coffee while their cloth-diapered brats wriggled around on the floor, the women themselves still almost students, glad to be absolved of worry about money and still blithe in their belief that life was long, would bring more to them than wall-to-wall carpet and a new Crock-Pot, with the occasional dinner at Locke-Ober or the
“Look, Mouse”—my mother called me Mouse; nobody else did, not even my father, and when she lost her ability to talk I felt that she looked the word at me with her eyes—“you’re only sixteen years old. You’re not old enough to vote, or to drink, or to sign a lease on an apartment. You’re barely old enough to drive. You can go away to college or you can stay at home with us and make your art in the garage and scoop ice cream all day down the road. Your choice, but I know what I’d choose: get out of this stodgy little dump! See the world.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
“Why don’t I what?”
“Get out and see the world.”
“Oh, Mouse”—she stroked my hair, which was long then, so that stroking it meant caressing, too, the greater stretch of my back. Like a cat, rather than a mouse. I loved it. I loved being her child. I remember looking at her and thinking she was the most beautiful thing in the world. “I’ve had my moment, sweetie. Maybe another will come. But for now, I’m needed right here.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you know, I make a house a home? That’s what mothers do.”
“But I’ll go and then—”
“I love your daddy. He needs a home, too.”
And then we were back to the college question, and it seemed that art school wasn’t really a choice, because there wasn’t any money—barely enough, even with loans, to get me to university at all—and it mattered to my mother that I be employable at the end.
“You’re such a baby, you can go to art school afterward and still come out even. Get a master’s in Painting on top of your B.A., and you’ll be ready for all of it. I want you to have it all. It’s not like when I was a girl, the MRS degree and all that. You won’t live off pin money, off any man, no matter how much you love him. You won’t depend on anyone but yourself. We agreed, right?” And there was that edge to her voice, which I thought of then as darkness, and recognize now as rage, the tone that came in her intermittent phases of despair. And so I went to Middlebury.
I always understood thatthe great dilemma of my mother’s life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price. She was of the generation for which the rules changed halfway, born into a world of pressed linens and three-course dinners and hairsprayed updos, in which women were educated and then deployed for domestic purposes—rather like using an elaborately embroidered tablecloth on which to serve messy children their breakfast. Her University of Michigan degree was all but ornamental, and it always seemed significant that it stood in its frame under the eaves in the attic, festooned with dust bunnies, among a dozen disavowed minor artworks, behindboxes of discarded toys. The first woman in her family to go to college, she’d cared enough to frame her diploma, only then to be embarrassed about having cared, embarrassed because she felt she hadn’t done anything with it, had squandered her opportunity.
The transition from pride to shame took place sometime soon after my birth, I think: I appeared in ’67, and by 1970, her two closest friends in Manchester had divorced and moved away, reborn into the messy and not necessarily happier lives of the liberated. My brother was born in ’59, when Bella Eldridge was but a tender twenty-three-year-old: he was what she did with her precious education.
As far as I could tell, she didn’t burn over the consuming demands of motherhood the first time. In those days, all the young women around her were doing the same thing, discussing Jane Austen over coffee while their cloth-diapered brats wriggled around on the floor, the women themselves still almost students, glad to be absolved of worry about money and still blithe in their belief that life was long, would bring more to them than wall-to-wall carpet and a new Crock-Pot, with the occasional dinner at Locke-Ober or the
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