My mother would lift Lindsey out of the tub first, dry her, and listen to her chatter about ducks and cuts. Then she would get me out of the tub and though I tried to be quiet the warm water made my sister and me drunk, and we talked to my mother about everything that mattered to us. Boys that teased us or how another family down the block had a puppy and why couldn’t we have one too. She would listen seriously as if she were mentally noting the points of our agenda on a steno pad to which she would later refer.
“Well, first things first,” she summed up. “Which means a nice nap for the two of you!”
She and I would tuck Lindsey in together. I stood by the bed as she kissed my sister on her forehead and brushed back her hair from her face. I think competition started there for me. Who got the better kiss, the longer time after the bath with Mom.
Luckily, I always won this. When I look back now I see that my mother had become – and very quickly after they moved into that house – lonely. Because I was the oldest, I became her closest friend.
I was too little to know what she was really saying to me, but I loved to be hushed to sleep by the soft lullaby of her words. One of the blessings of my heaven is that I can go back to these moments, live them again, and be with my mother in a way I never could have been. I reach my hand across the Inbetween and take the hand of that young lonely mother in mine.
What she said to a four-year-old about Helen of Troy: “A feisty woman who screwed things up.” About Margaret Sanger: “She was judged by her looks, Susie. Because she looked like a mouse, no one expected her to last.” Gloria Steinem: “I feel horrible, but I wish she’d trim those nails.” Our neighbors: “An idiot in tight pants; oppressed by that prig of a husband; typically provincial and judgmental of everyone.”
“Do you know who Persephone is?” she asked me absently one Thursday. But I didn’t answer. By then I’d learned to hush when she brought me into my room. My sister’s and my time was in the bathroom as we were being toweled off. Lindsey and I could talk about anything then. In my bedroom it was Mommy’s time.
She took the towel and draped it over the spindle knob of my four-poster bed. “Imagine our neighbor Mrs. Tarking as Persephone,” she said. She opened the drawer of the dresser and handed me my underpants. She always doled out my clothes piecemeal, not wanting to pressure me. She understood my needs early. If I was aware I would have to tie laces I would not have been able to put my feet into socks.
“She’s wearing a long white robe, like a sheet draped over her shoulders, but made out of some nice shiny or light fabric, like silk. And she has sandals made of gold and she’s surrounded by torches which are light made out of flames…”
She went to the drawer to get my undershirt and absentmindedly put it over my head instead of leaving it to me. Once my mother was launched I could take advantage of it – be the baby again. I never protested and claimed to be grown up or a big girl. Those afternoons were about listening to my mysterious mother.
She pulled back the tough-cord Sears bedspread, and I scooted over to the far side along the wall. She always checked her watch then and afterward she would say, “Just for a little while,” and slide off her shoes and slip in between the sheets with me.
For both of us it was about getting lost. She got lost in her story. I got lost in her talk.
She would tell me about Persephone’s mother, Demeter, or Cupid and Psyche, and I would listen to her until I fell asleep. Sometimes my parents’ laughter in the room beside me or the sounds of their late-afternoon lovemaking would wake me up. I would lie there in half-sleep, listening. I liked to pretend that I was in the warm hold of a ship from one of the stories my father read to us, and that all of us were on the ocean and the waves were rolling gently up against the sides of the ship. The laughter, the small sounds of muffled moaning, would usher me back under into sleep.
