Mother Daughter Me Read Online Free

wedding—was easy too.
    “Van Eyck.
The Arnolfini Portrait
.”
    Zoë smiled. “Which Van Eyck?”
    “Jan,” I answered.
    “Yeah!” said Zoë. I was eating up her praise.
    Next came a sculpture of two figures in a sinewy embrace.
    “Henry Moore?”
    “Nope. Rodin.
The Kiss
.”
    “Uh-oh. I’m an idiot.”
    “No, you’re
good
!”
    With Zoë in such a cordial mood, this seemed as opportune a moment as any to ask her how she felt about having her grandmother live with us.
    “Sweetie, Grandma Helen might move in with us. How would you feel about that? We can live in a bigger place, because she’ll help with the rent.”
    Zoë had been present during many of my phone conversations with my mother and didn’t look surprised. She nodded. “And we’ll have a grandparent right here with us,” she said.
    She was quiet and fanned out the index cards in her hand. Then she said, “I think she
should
come live with us. That would be nice.”
    I was relieved.
    At that moment, encouraged by my daughter’s easy acquiescence, I chose to disregard the risks. I knew my mother was free with her opinions, that she took up a lot of psychological space in a room, and that sheand Zoë hadn’t exactly bonded over the years. I also knew that Zoë was a teenager living the full complement of her age group’s psychodramas. And then there was the fact that I was working hard to make a living, and this new arrangement could be a distraction. But I wasn’t aspiring to turn us into the Huxtables. I was just trying to take these remnants of a family and weave them together as best I could.
    After a few more minutes, Zoë asked, “So if Grandma Helen lives with us, what will happen to
us
?” I knew exactly what she meant. For the past eight years—since the day Matt, her father, died suddenly of a heart attack at age forty-five—Zoë and I have been tiptoeing together through life. We have grown remarkably close. Zoë doesn’t simply tell me everything, she entrusts me with her fragile heart, much as her father did. Other mothers say they envy me, but I wouldn’t wish on anyone the circumstances that bound my daughter to me this tightly. Since Matt’s death, Zoë has worried that I, too, will die, leaving her an orphan. More than once, I have awakened in the middle of the night to see my daughter’s eyes large in the dark, inches from my head, checking to make sure I’m breathing.
    So the “us” she was referring to was the us that had managed to get her through the past eight years without her father—the us that saw her through the grief of losing him; the us that struggled through my disastrous remarriage to a man who first embraced, then rejected, his stepdaughter with breathtaking completeness. It was the us that emerged on the other side of all that, a unit as close as two wounded people can be.
    But she also meant the everyday us—the us that flips through her old art cards; the us that goes to In-N-Out Burger on a whim when nothing else will do; the us that watches
Desperate Housewives
every single Sunday night, no matter what; the us that loves to listen to Christmas music in the car year-round, especially Eartha Kitt singing “Santa Baby.” How would my mother fit into that us?
    My answer to her was that we wouldn’t be any less us than we ever were. Zoë and I knew how to be a family. Now we would have a chance to show my mother what we knew, to show her the true meaning of family, to show what I had to learn on my own, without her.
    —–
    I FOUND THE PERFECT house for our little threesome, a tall Victorian from the late 1800s, yellow with white and gold-leaf trim on a rare flat stretch of Pacific Heights—an important requirement for an older woman unaccustomed to steep hills. The fanciest neighborhood in San Francisco, Pacific Heights embodies every tourist’s vision of the city: block upon block of mansions built in a hodgepodge of dazzling architectural styles—an Arts and Crafts cheek by jowl with a