A Mother and Another
Maxine had
two extra tickets to the latest American Conservatory Theatre production, so
Sara had invited her son and his girlfriend, who were to be her dinner guests
that evening, a few days before she left on a trip, but Mark had told her that
he and Yasmine had too much to do during the day.
“Is the A.C.T. doing A Mother?” he asked.
“Because Grandmother said she was interested in seeing that.”
“Oh, I didn’t think of her,” Sara said, “because I didn’t think she liked
to come into San Francisco
any more.”
In the past few months, Sara and
her eighty-three-year-old mother had had a couple of incidents when they had
planned to get together just for fun—not just to visit Sara’s brother, who was
institutionalized because of
schizophrenia. Her mother had
wanted to come into San Francisco, where Sara lived, but she had gotten sick,
side effects from the medicine she took,
so both times that she had tried, she had had to cancel, and Sara offered to go
to Oakland instead from then on.
Now that she thought about it,
there had never been a from there on because her mother had always had to
cancel their plans in the East
Bay too. Sara had gone to Oakland only when the whole family was
getting together for a holiday or someone’s birthday.
Sara had looked forward to taking
her mother to A Mother and
introducing her to her friends, the teachers who shared the discount seats on
the second balcony. Sara’s mother had
almost never expressed any interest in meeting Sara’s friends. When Mark had been a little boy and Sara and
his father had had parties for him or open houses, they’d always invited Sara’s
mother along with their best friends, but her mother never accepted the
invitations and always preferred to have her own party—just a family party—for
Mark. Over the years, Sara’s mother and
Mark had grown very close, as Sara and her mother and Sara and Mark, had grown
less close.
“Grandparents and grandchildren
always get along,” Sara said, quoting an anonymous quip,
“because they have a common enemy.”
But this day, shortly before Sara
was to leave on a trip, she would be taking her mother to the play and later
taking her son and his girlfriend to dinner.
She realized that one of the problems with her relationship with her son
was that she needed his help, which was one of
her problems with her mother, who needed hers to have the strength and
help to see her son, Sara’s brother. On
the rare occasions when Sara’s son came to see her, she always had a list of
things she needed to ask him about—computer glitches, things around the house
that didn’t work. This time she had
hoped to get his help watering her plants while she was away, but shortly after
she had asked him, he and his girlfriend Yasmine had planned a trip for the
period she would be away. So on this day
she was taking them out to dinner just to see them, just to say goodbye, right
after she and her mother saw A Mother.
Maxine said she still had another
ticket and was inviting a friend, so maybe they’d just come separately.
“Oh, but I’d really like you to
meet my mother,” Sara said. “I think
you’d like each other.”
They hadn’t. Maxine seemed to be in a surly mood. Sometimes she was good-natured and
appreciative, and sometimes she was critical and blunt, and this had been a
critical and blunt day. Maybe it had
started off with Sara’s mother’s bluntness, which was directed at Sara, not at
Maxine—soft barbs on Sara’s driving, on Sara’s absent-mindedness. Maxine and Sara’s mother had joined forces at
first. Maybe it wasn’t just
grandchildren and children who had a common enemy. Maybe it was any two people when there was a
third.
But she was proud of her mother,
who told them she’d been reading the play and who handed Maxine a big book on
literary criticism she’d checked out of the library because it had insights
into the play. At one point on their way
to the theatre, her mother said something Sara thought was very witty, and she
asked, “Did you hear that, Maxine?”
“Huh? I’m sorry.
I wasn’t listening. I was reading
the pages your mother has marked.”
How could Maxine not be listening
to their conversation? Sara herself was
getting drunk on it, it was so intoxicating!
Oh, but Maxine was a Mormon, a Latter Day Saint, for whom intoxication
was a sin.
Maxine, who usually took the MUNI
to the theatre with Sara, gave very
specific directions on how to drive there so that they would be on the right
side of the theatre to drop off Sara’s mother, who had trouble walking a
distance. Maxine did not like the idea
of her dropping them off at the corner
of Mason and Geary, so they’d taken a long drive around Union Square, and by
the time Sara had parked at the O’Farrell Garage and walked back, she had just
enough time to give her mother the bag her mother had left in the car and get
seated.
Because of her fear of heights,
Sara sat on a different row, farther away from the railing, but she could see
her mother talking to Maxine before the theatre lights went off, and she
thought of her mother all through the play, which had very clever dialogue. Her mother reminded her of the mother in the
play—sharp tongued and sharp-witted.
But at intermission, her mother had
said, “It’s not what I expected. I had
confused it with Brecht’s The Mother. That’s
the play I was reading. The characters
in this play all leave me cold.”
Then she apologized for the beeping
noise her medicine case had made during the play. She had taken out the battery to get the
noise to stop, but she’d forgotten to take the medicine.
“It goes off to remind me to take
my medicine,” she explained to Maxine, “and I almost always remember to turn it
off in the theatre because there’s usually an announcement before a show
begins.”
“Yes,” Sara said playfully, “there
was the announcement about turning off cell phones and pagers and unwrapping
candy, but there was no announcement about medicine cases.”
“Was there really an announcement?”
Sara’s mother asked, looking distressed.
“Yes,” Maxine said, “but you were
talking.”
“We were
talking?” Sara’s mother asked.
“You were talking,” Maxine said.
“Oh!” Sara’s mother said. “I
was talking! I thought I was talking to you, but that would mean that we were talking. So it was a monologue, was it?”
In the women’s room, Sara’s mother
said, “I hope I didn’t offend your friend saying that I didn’t like the play.”
“Oh, I think it’s interesting to
hear your opinion about the characters and what you were expecting. You just might not want to add that “it left
me cold” part if the tickets are a gift.”
“Thank you so much for that
advice,” her mother said, with sarcasm so pleasantly toned that Sara wasn’t
sure it really was sarcasm. “I don’t
know what I would do without it.”
Later Sara asked Maxine to take a
picture of her mother and her by the poster advertising A Mother, a poster with Russian Nesting dolls, with the Mother doll
out center front, where Olympia Dukakis had been. She was starting to feel the mortality of her
mother and want more pictures of her, of them.
Later in the evening, Sara’s mother
joined them for dinner and insisted upon paying—something she didn’t often do
although at her house she oftened hosted family gatherings, and Mark was her
guest every Thursday, when he came over straight from where he worked, in a
town on her mother’s side of the Bay Bridge.
They talked a lot, and Sara found
herself responding to her mother’s
funny, feisty comments with a feistiness of her own, but one that seemed to
come across as less endearing than that of her mother.
Sara told her son and her
girlfriend the basic plot about a mother’s need to forge a will to keep her
family together and to keep them “beholden” to her.
“But at the end, after she’s gotten
her will and she’s left on stage with only her daughter and her
daughter-in-law, she starts to hear things that they can’t hear. People screaming. And finally she says, ‘I’ll never know a
moment’s peace.’”
“Did she say that?” Sara’s mother
asked? “I didn’t hear her say that.”
“That was the last line of the
play,” Sara said. “Wouldn’t it be funny
if you didn’t really hear the lines, and you’re criticizing the play the way I
sleep through whole scenes and still criticize a play. Not seeing and not hearing should never
interfere with higher criticism.”
“I hope I wasn’t tactless about not liking the play,” her mother said again.
“I hope I wasn’t tactless about not liking the play,” her mother said again.
“You know,
Mother, my friends think of me as being very tactlesss because I’ll say things
like ‘Did you like that? I hated
it!’ So now they’ll know where I got my
bluntness.”
“Ooooh!”
Yasmine said, in a consoling voice, turning to Sara’s mother and patting
her on the shoulder.
Then Yasmine, who had recently
graduated in Molecular Cell Biology from CAL Berkeley, began telling stories of
the vicious competitiveness among students at that university, refusing to help
other students check their homework, lying that they didn’t have it with them
before turning it in. Snitching on a
student who sneaked in to turn in a late paper.
Letting another student see their deliberately wrong Scantron answer
sheets and then changing the answers to the correct ones before turning it in.
“Gee!” Sara said.
“My students help each other
cheat. I think I prefer my students’
attitude. But they’d all do so much
better if they followed written instructions.
I tell them, ‘It would take you much less time if you’d just follow the
guidelines.’”
“That sounds so sanctimonious,”
Sara’s mother said.
“Oh, well, that’s the reputation I have-- for being sanctimonious,”
Sara said, “if they only knew the word.
Shall I work on expressing myself
in that non-sanctimonious manner
I haven’t quite mastered? I think it’s
called non-defensive communication.”
“Yes,” Sara’s mother said, “let’s
hear you.”
Sara asked the waitress for the
check, and so did Sara’s mother, who was more assertive, perhaps, or whose will
was more highly honored because of her greater age.
Mark said he would drive his
grandmother back to her home in the East
Bay. But first, he would drop his mother off at her house (the one he would inherit without the
problems of the characters in that play, Sara reflected) a few blocks from the restaurant.
“I’m so
glad I got you a four-door car,” Sara told Mark as they all got into the used
car she’d given him for graduation. “I
guess I’m a pretty good mother!”
“Yes, you
are,” Mark said, as Yasmine laughed-- appreciatively, Sara thought, rather than
derisively.
On their
way to her house, she tried out a less sanctimonious explanation for her
students.
“You know,” Sara began, “a lot of us would have an easier
time if we just followed directions or looked over lists. I know I’ll make a shopping list, but once
I’m at the grocery store, I think I remember, so I don’t look at my list until
I get home. And then I realize that I
forgot the detergent, which was right there on my list. Don’t do what I do, and you will succeed!”
But now it was time for Sara to get
out of the car, and they wished her a good trip. “And you too!” she said. “I love you all.”
She hugged her mother, who was
still in her seat belt and then leaned over to the front seat, where her son
and his girlfriend were seated, and
tried to hug them.
They got out of the car to make it
easier.
As she
started up the stairs, she turned to watch them drive away.
She would
write to her mother the next day, when her mother would start feeling plagued
with guilt for being tactless. She would
address the envelope to A Mother, and between the A and the Mother she
would put in adjectives like funny, wonderful, witty, beautiful. And she’d thank her mother for the dinner and
make it clear in her that she had been a
charming mother, not a tactless one.
And then
she’d send an e-mail to her son and apologize for having been so tactless with
his grandmother.
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