Mother Daughter Me Read Online Free Page B

generations under one roof, so could we. And then almost instantly, it seemed, my mother’s house in San Diego was in escrow and I was behind the wheel of her white Honda, bound for our new life.

3
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Intonation
    ———
    Alas! All music jars when the soul’s out of tune
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    —Miguel de Cervantes, DON QUIXOTE
    A LL THREE OF US ARE IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER FEELING DISPLACED . With my mother now in my bedroom, my domain is the couch; Zoë’s life has gone slightly sideways; and my mother is living out of a half dozen or so paper bags. Despite her altered routine, my mother is overjoyed at being with us. She tells me she has fallen in love with San Francisco, the city’s beauty, its friendly people, its convenience. She says that being able to walk across the street to buy a container of orange juice is a miracle. She says she never wants to live anywhere else. In fact, she has a lot to say. Has she always talked so much, I wonder?
    For the first couple of days, Zoë seems happy to have her grandmother around. While I pack up the apartment, Zoë tends to my mother’s every request. And those requests are many: My mother needs things from the hardware store; she needs a mailbox with late pickup times; she needs a smaller towel, a larger pair of rubber gloves.
    “Mom,” Zoë says, “it’s like babysitting a little kid.” Her tone is good-natured, but I can tell that the novelty and excitement are quickly wearing off. I remind Zoë that her grandmother is going through a difficulttransition and that in a few days she’ll have fewer needs. “Just hang in there,” I tell her.
    My more-skeptical friends had from the beginning expressed concern about how my mother’s presence would affect Zoë. But between my mother’s stated intention that she’d like to have a good relationship with her only grandchild and Zoë’s warm embrace of her grandmother upon her arrival, my optimism ran high. Deep down, though, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Zoë was a mommy-oriented child from the start. Even as a toddler, she disliked it when I paid attention to anyone other than her and was particularly sensitive when my focus turned to my mother. In retrospect, I realize that she didn’t react that way to my interactions with my father, my mother-in-law, friends, or strangers. It’s possible that Zoë was tuned in to something of which I was unaware: the almost umbilical hold my mother had on me, the emotional energy of unfinished business. She acted out. When she was two and my mother was visiting, as the three of us lay on the big bed in the master bedroom, watching
Sesame Street
, Zoë sat up abruptly and hit her grandmother on the arm, something I had never seen her do to anyone. My mother shrieked.
    As for my mother, she has never really known how to be with Zoë. It’s a problem I’ve always written off as part of her general awkwardness around children. But perhaps she sensed the unusually strong bond between Zoë and me. Instead of delighting in it, as many grandparents do, she let it grate on her.
    For a while, I chose to see the problem through the narrowest possible lens: My mother just needed a little coaching on the basics of interacting with young children, I told myself. “Try asking her questions,” I’d say to her on the phone before a visit to San Diego. “Sometimes that can help kick-start a conversation. Before you know it, you’ll have a chatterbox on your hands.”
    “A question? Like what?”
    “Well, try something easy, like ‘How’s school?’ or ‘What’s your favorite class?’ ”
    So when we visited, my mother would lob Zoë a question, and Zoë would answer. Silence would follow, my mother unable to think of a follow-up query that might keep the conversation alive. And my heart would sink.
    Then there was my mother’s reluctance to travel, which caused her to miss important events in her granddaughter’s life. The most notable milestone she missed was Zoë’s bat mitzvah. Her