Copley Plaza in Boston as an anniversary treat. She was young enough to be hopeful.
There are abundant home movies and antiquated slides of baby Matthew, with his slightly Frankensteinian square head and his bright blue eyes—he looks, somehow, like an infant of his time, has an all-American aspect that babies seem not to affect these days—and in the background, my mother grins, her face all angles, cigarette in hand. She grins at the swing set, she grins by the Christmas tree, she grins behind the picnic table, with its blue gingham cloth, on the Fourth of July.
In the later pictures, the few that remain of my own infancy, even the daylight looks darker. Maybe Kodak had changed their formula; or maybe the world had moved on. I was a smaller, more somber child, born three weeks early, weighing less than six pounds (“always impatient, that’s my girl,” my father used to say), and with thick black hair that subsequently fell out and left me near bald for months. I look like a befuddled frog gussied up in pretty dresses, a fat foot peeking from beneath the hem, and my brother, a strapping eight-year-old with buckteeth, eyes me askance from the corners of the picture frames. Mymother is hardly in these pictures at all, anywhere. She must have been taking them. There’s one Christmas snapshot of the three of us, my father behind the camera: it was the year, she said, that Matthew and I both had the flu, and all of us have high color, cheeks like painted dolls’, including my mother, whose long hair is a ratty mess, and whose dotted pinafore is falling off her shoulder. Perhaps because of the fevers, our eyes are forlorn—even Matt’s eyes look black, and my mother’s mouth is open in a half sneer, as though she were about to tell my father to cut it out and put the damn thing away.
I don’t remember my early childhood as unhappy—to the contrary; the only thing I feared was my brother, who was pinching mean when he had the chance—but the record, such as it is, suggests that my mother was suffering. She was only thirty-one when I was born, but had done it all already once and knew what she’d have to give, and knew, too, that like Sleeping Beauty she’d waken from the baby dream to find that years had elapsed, and herself pushing forty. No wonder she later threw herself into her harebrained schemes—the cooking, the sewing, the writing of children’s books that nobody would publish, that she didn’t even really try to publish, all of them intended to catapult her to something greater, to a world beyond Manchester, to some early fantasy that lingered still at the corners of her eyes. But when she signed up for classes—Mastering the Potter’s Wheel or Conversational French—it was hard to believe even then that she took them seriously. The only paying job she ever held when I was young was at the local bookstore over the holidays, when they took on extra staff—a couple of college kids and my mom—for the Christmas rush. She did it several years running and grew adept at making pretty packages, with perfect edges and curlicues of gilded ribbon.
She wasn’t, in any practical way, ambitious. The friends she had who were ambitious made their moves strategically, went to law school at night, or studied for the realtor’s exam, and then they took steps away from the hearth, out into the world. She both admired and resented them, the way plump women both admire and resent their successfully dieting friends, trying, all smiles, to force upon them a slab of chocolate cake. She didn’t keep close to the ones who went back to work, or who divorced and moved into the city: she celebrated them withlunches and sent them on their way, as if they were off on a dangerous mission from which safe return was—as indeed it was—impossible.
Do you remember the ladies’ lunches of those days? The table set first thing in the morning. Cold poached salmon and Waldorf salad, pitchers of iced tea, sweating bottles of
There are abundant home movies and antiquated slides of baby Matthew, with his slightly Frankensteinian square head and his bright blue eyes—he looks, somehow, like an infant of his time, has an all-American aspect that babies seem not to affect these days—and in the background, my mother grins, her face all angles, cigarette in hand. She grins at the swing set, she grins by the Christmas tree, she grins behind the picnic table, with its blue gingham cloth, on the Fourth of July.
In the later pictures, the few that remain of my own infancy, even the daylight looks darker. Maybe Kodak had changed their formula; or maybe the world had moved on. I was a smaller, more somber child, born three weeks early, weighing less than six pounds (“always impatient, that’s my girl,” my father used to say), and with thick black hair that subsequently fell out and left me near bald for months. I look like a befuddled frog gussied up in pretty dresses, a fat foot peeking from beneath the hem, and my brother, a strapping eight-year-old with buckteeth, eyes me askance from the corners of the picture frames. Mymother is hardly in these pictures at all, anywhere. She must have been taking them. There’s one Christmas snapshot of the three of us, my father behind the camera: it was the year, she said, that Matthew and I both had the flu, and all of us have high color, cheeks like painted dolls’, including my mother, whose long hair is a ratty mess, and whose dotted pinafore is falling off her shoulder. Perhaps because of the fevers, our eyes are forlorn—even Matt’s eyes look black, and my mother’s mouth is open in a half sneer, as though she were about to tell my father to cut it out and put the damn thing away.
I don’t remember my early childhood as unhappy—to the contrary; the only thing I feared was my brother, who was pinching mean when he had the chance—but the record, such as it is, suggests that my mother was suffering. She was only thirty-one when I was born, but had done it all already once and knew what she’d have to give, and knew, too, that like Sleeping Beauty she’d waken from the baby dream to find that years had elapsed, and herself pushing forty. No wonder she later threw herself into her harebrained schemes—the cooking, the sewing, the writing of children’s books that nobody would publish, that she didn’t even really try to publish, all of them intended to catapult her to something greater, to a world beyond Manchester, to some early fantasy that lingered still at the corners of her eyes. But when she signed up for classes—Mastering the Potter’s Wheel or Conversational French—it was hard to believe even then that she took them seriously. The only paying job she ever held when I was young was at the local bookstore over the holidays, when they took on extra staff—a couple of college kids and my mom—for the Christmas rush. She did it several years running and grew adept at making pretty packages, with perfect edges and curlicues of gilded ribbon.
She wasn’t, in any practical way, ambitious. The friends she had who were ambitious made their moves strategically, went to law school at night, or studied for the realtor’s exam, and then they took steps away from the hearth, out into the world. She both admired and resented them, the way plump women both admire and resent their successfully dieting friends, trying, all smiles, to force upon them a slab of chocolate cake. She didn’t keep close to the ones who went back to work, or who divorced and moved into the city: she celebrated them withlunches and sent them on their way, as if they were off on a dangerous mission from which safe return was—as indeed it was—impossible.
Do you remember the ladies’ lunches of those days? The table set first thing in the morning. Cold poached salmon and Waldorf salad, pitchers of iced tea, sweating bottles of
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