Only my mother would think it a good idea to move from Florida to
Wisconsin in October. But she did, and is now happily esconced in a
little house in Durand. With my oldest sister in Stockholm and my
other sister in Pepin, my visit meant all four of us could spend our
first Christmas together in more than twenty years. This was an
exciting prospect, but it made me anxious as well.
My visit with my mother earlier this year - as part of my trip to GALA
V - had been tense at first. I was able to relax only after the
emotional intensity of the festival itself gave me a way to have deep
and genuine feelings in a safe environment. But there would be no such
catharsis to fall back on in Wisconsin.
The dread I feel when I visit my mother is due, at least in part, to
knowing that she has no real conception of who I am. I said to Jeff,
my therapist several years ago, that talking to my mother was like
looking into a mirror and seeing a different face each time. I suspect
my mother has no real conception of anyone, not even herself. I don't
think she recognizes the difference between her wishes and those of
other people. Or, rather, she thinks her wishes are so obvious and
natural that anyone's failure to adopt them is a sign of obtuseness,
ignorance, or selfishness. Layered on top of that is her
unselfconscious sexual banter, which I find embarrassing and vulgar.
I wondered how soon into my visit it would begin, and how I would
react.
I adpoted a defensive posture before I even arrived. I arranged to
stay at a bed a breakfast run by two gay men in Maiden Rock. Maiden
Rock is a few miles up the road from Stockholm, where my oldest sister
has her cafe, and a good 30 miles from Durand. I made these
arrangements before calling my mother and telling her when I
was arriving. She was shocked that I would not be staying at her
house. "Do you mean I bought that sofabed for nothing?" she said. I
told her that I had made several trips to Wisconsin and found that I
preferred to stay at a bed and breakfast. "But I wanted to fix you
breakfast," she complained. I told her she still could, and that I
would drive up to Durand to eat it. She would not let it drop. "I am
very disappointed," she said, as if we had been planning all
along for me to stay at her house and I had suddenly changed my mind
at the last minute. In fact, this was only the second time we had
talked about my trip, and the first time I knew exactly when I would be
there. We had never talked about my staying with her. She just
assumed I would. After all, that was the natural assumption to
make.
Later conversations with my sisters confirmed that Mother lost no time
in sharing her disappointment in my choice of lodging with everyone.
However, both my sisters understood my decision, and it was Remy who
had suggested the bed and breakfast where I chose to stay.
My flight was uneventful, and my drive down to Maiden Rock was
pleasant. I got lost only twice trying to find the bed and breakfast,
and once I was checked in, I called my oldest sister Kris and invited
myself to her place for dinner. I tried to call Mother, but the lines
were busy.
After dinner and happy chatter with Kris, I called Mother again. She
was giddy with delight when she heard me. We talked about our plans
to spend Saturday together, going to a matinee production at a local
theater. Then Mother described the Christmas plans. Kris and her
husband and kids would spend Christmas Eve with her father-in-law, Lee, as
they had for years. I heard overtones in my mother's voice as she said
this, as though she had only recently and reluctantly agreed to this
plan.
I could understand her disappointment. Back when we were all living
with her parents, my mother, sisters, and I looked forward not so much
to Christmas Day, which was a solemn religious holiday (in which my
mother did not participate anyway), but to Christmas Eve. That was
when the extended family of great-uncles and great-aunts would gather
at our house for a "fast" that was really a feast of fish, shrimp,
other seafood, and amazing desserts. We'd sing carols in English and
Polish while the adults caught up on family gossip and the kids
waited for that climactic moment we all knew was coming. When it
came, we'd be
called out of the livingroom on some pretense, there'd be a loud "Ho,
ho, ho!" and a cry of "There he goes!" and the sound of a slamming
door, and then we'd all rush back in to find the Christmas tree, barren
before, now laden with "paper gifts" (usually money) hanging from its boughs
and overflowing with presents piled around its base.
When Mother moved us out of her parent's house to live in Whitewater,
she and her second husband, Bill, moved the celebration to Christmas
Day - a change that was made without consulting my sisters and me.
Instead of the large, extended family, there were only the four of us
and Bill, a man we hardly knew. These changes left us dispirited and
disappointed, and Christmas never seemed real after that. So when I
imagined our first Christmas
together in decades, I imagined recapturing those magical nights when
we'd all unwrap presents by the light of a tree and the beaming smiles
of our family.
But other plans had already been made, and the odd little moment of
disappointment passed. Then came one of those truly awkward proposals
Mother so often puts out. "You and Remy can come here Christmas Eve.
If you want, you can go to Mass with me."
"Christmas Eve will be nice," I said. "I don't know about Mass." My
mother knows - or at least has been told - that I do not consider
myself a Christian. Neither does Remy. Nevertheless, somehow
Mother's vision of Christmas Eve had all of us in Church. This is
particularly odd because when Remy and I were children, we went to
Mass regularly, but our mother, who did not consider herself part of
the Church then, rarely went with us. It was one of the many
discontinuities between our lives and the life of our mother.
So the invitation to Mass was simply another disconnection, but with
roles reversed. It was a Minor Mother Moment, as I tend to think of
them. The Major Mother Moment came next.
"And the two of you can stay overnight if you'd like. Do you think
it's against the law to put a gay man and a lesbian in the same bed
together?"
I was appalled, perhaps because I knew she was only partly joking. My
mother probably did think that my sister and I would so want to spend
the night at her house that we would actually sleep in the same bed. I
recovered as quickly as I could and said, in a mock-horrified voice
that partly expressed my true feelings, "It's not just against the law,
it's unnatural!"
The telephone conversation dwindled after that to pleasantries and
expressions of how good it would be to see each other again. We said
good-bye, and I continued my visit with Kris and her kids.
It is a function of my auto-defense mechanism that I didn't recognize
my mother's comment about sleeping with my sister for what it was until
later. Driving back to the bed and breakfast from Kris's a few hours
later, I realized it was the first volley in the barrage of sexual
innuendoes I'd face and had known I would face the moment I decided to
make this trip. I'd been dreading it for weeks. Now that it had
started, I marvelled at how quickly and almost uncounsciously I had
dealt with it. "Well," I said to myself, "at least that's
over with."
There would be more, though. After all, she is my mother.
I had promised to spend Saturday with Mother. She had bought tickets
to a play in Menomenee, and afterward we would go to dinner. I
arrived at her house around noon. I had scouted the quickest route to
her place the day before, driving from Maiden Rock to Durand to Pepin
and back to Maiden Rock to
see if I could navigate the county roads in my rental. I
didn't stop by her house, though, so this was the first time I saw her
new home. It is a charming box-like structure, not unlike the one we
had lived in with her parents in Milwaukee. I rang the doorbell and
she answered. "At last!" she cried. Rusty, her dog, was almost as
glad to seem me as she was. He was jumping all over me in paroxysms of
delight.
"Here you are in my new home!" she said as I shed my coat.
"Put your things in the hall closet, there. Would you like a
tour?"
"Yes," I said, fending off Rusty as best as I could. He didn't seem to
get the idea.
She explained the improvements she'd made to the kitchen, which were
considerable, and told me about her plans to make one of the upstairs
bedrooms into a studio. I was very impressed with the features of the
house, which included hardwood floors, a sunny breakfast nook, a small
built-in china cabinet in the dining area, and a fireplace in the
livingroom. There was also a full basement with a washer and dryer.
It seemed the perfect place for her, and it made me glad
to see how happy she was. The last stop on the tour was the down
stairs bedroom. On the door was a sign that said "Bed and Breakfast."
She twiddled with the sign then looked at me with raised eyebrows. I
said I thought the room was charming.
"But you're still not staying, are you?" she asked.
"No," I said.
"So I guess I bought that sofabed for nothing after all."
"If you like the sofa," I said, "then it wasn't for nothing."
She folded and patted a large maroon blanket on a chair. "I bought
this so you would be warm."
"Thank you," I said. "It looks very comfortable."
"But you're not staying?"
"No."
She sighed. "Well, I have to let Rusty out before we go." She turned to
the dog. "Do you want to go out?"
This seemed to excite him almost as much as my
arrival had. The two of them went to the back door while I went to the
front room and sat down on the sofa there, which was also new. My
sister Remy thinks Mother is spending too much money furnishing her
place with new things when she could have used furniture from the old
place in Tampa. When Remy asked me about this, I shrugged. "It's her
money," I said.
"I have to watch Rusty when he's out in the yard," my mother called
from the kitchen. "Otherwise he eats poop."
I got up and walked to the front windows and looked at the evergreens
Mother had planted along the side of the lot. In the front yard were
the remains of older evergreens that had been growing in front of the
house. They'd been cut down recently. There was still sawdust on the
snow.
Rusty came in from the yard. "Did you eat poop?" Mother asked him.
"Let me smell your breath. Oh, good dog! You get a cookie!"
A few moments later they both came into the livingroom and we all sat
on the sofa. "He's such a good dog," she
said to me, and Rusty jumped into her lap. She turned him over on his
back and pointed to his groin. "It was a shame I had to get him
fixed. He had the cutest little thingies. Now there's just this
little flap. See?"
I didn't look. I had heard about Rusty's adorable testicles the first
time I met him. That was in Tampa three years ago. Mother had rolled
Rusty over on his back on the floor and dandied his balls. "Aren't
they cute?" she had said. "I could never get him fixed. It would look
so sad." I knew then their days were numbered.
"Why did you have him neutered?" I asked, still averting my eyes.
"Because of Little One," she said. Little One was Remy's spaniel.
"Rusty would have her for lunch," she said with conviction. Then she
let the dog down. "He did anyway," she muttered under her breath. I
was puzzled. I knew Remy wanted to board Little One at Mother's
while she and I visited other relatives in Madison and Milwaukee,
but the last I had heard, Mother
had backed down from that plan without explanation. "Renigged," was
how Remy put it. So how could there have been any opportunity for
Rusty to "have Little One for lunch"? And what did that mean, anyway
- that Rusty would attack the smaller dog, or simply try to mate with
it?< BR>
It was time to leave for the play. As we got on our coats and
struggled into the rest of the gear you need even for simple tasks in
this weather, I asked her about the new evergreens.
"Oh, yes," she said. "There's quite a story to behind them. I put
those in almost as soon as I arrived, and do you know what that woman
next door had the nerve to do? She told me I'd have to take them out!
She said they'd grow up and block her view when she was backing out of
her driveway. So she told me they'd have to go."
"But she can't do that, can she?" I said. "I mean, I don't know the
ordinances here, but they're on your property, aren't they?"
"Of course! But she said they'd grow up and twenty years from now
they'd block her view. 'I'm sixty-nine years old,' I told her. 'I'll
be dead in twenty years.' And you know what she told me? She said,
'Well, I'm only fifty-five!'"
"So what did you do?"
"Well I wasn't going to take them out after I'd just spent the money to
put them in. So I told her I'd move them back five feet if she'd pay
for it. So she did. I fixed her, though. I only moved them
two-and-a-half feet. Nobody messes with me."
I nodded. "Why did you cut down the trees in front?" I asked.
"There were damaging the roof," she said. "You would have liked them,
though. They were very phallic."
Mother drove us to Menomonee in her car. This was only slightly
unnerving. She had a tendency to tailgate the cars in front of us and
to wander a bit in the lane as she chattered on about the
countryside. I had to agree with her, though, that there is something
magical in the Wisconsin winter landscape. "It's as if every detail,
every twig is saying, 'Welcome home,'" she said.
The play was dreadful, but its venue was a treat. The Mable Tainter
Theatre in Menomenee is Romanesque on the outside and high Victorian
on the inside. It is a shame the production didn't match the style and
class of the house. To stay awake, I spent most of the third act
gazing fondly at the back of a handsome man in the row in front of us
and engaging in sexual fantasies about him, despite the fact that his
wife and two young sons were right beside him. None of them seemed
disappointed in the show. Except for the youngest boy, who could not
have been much more than five, they paid rapt attention to the
painfully slow and obvious plot and seemed to take the repeated
bludgeonings with its moral message to heart. It is probably best that
they were fully engaged by this artless palather or they might have
noticed my wistful drooling.
As we drove to dinner at the Creamery in Downsville, Mother and I
dissed the cast, the play, the set design, and the over-all lack of
direction. "It certainly was disappointing," Mother said. "Oh well,"
I said, "you pays your money and you takes your chances."
We arrived at the Creamery around five PM and decided to have cocktails
and an appetizer before dinner. As the host was showing us to the
lounge, Mother said. "You don't know us, do you?"
The man looked puzzled.
"I'm Remy's mother and this is her brother," she said.
The gentleman tried to look curteous and interested but was obviously
baffled.
"My sister runs Great River Roasters," I said, trying give him a
graceful way out. "I believe you serve their coffee."
"Oh, yes," he said, brightening. "This way, please."
Appetizers and dinner passed pleasantly, though I was surprised when
Mother ordered a second martini. She has, at times, described herself
as an alcoholic. I knew she was drinking on an empty stomach and I
grew concerned, but then she said, "You're driving us back, of
course."
"Of course," I said.
There was one thread of conversation during dinner that stands out in
my mind. "Do I still have a sparkle in my eyes?" Mother asked me.
"What?" I said, smiling.
"You said I would never grow old as long as I have that sparkle in my
eyes."
"It's still there."
She beamed.
"There's I a guy I'm dating who says he thinks I have 'serene eyes,'" I
said. "I told him it was just low blood pressure."
We laughed.
"Of course, you know the story of your father's low blood pressure,"
she said.
"No," I said, intrigued. "Tell me."
"Well, it was our wedding night. And your father was very eager. As
soon as we got back to the hotel room, he wanted it right there. I
still had my wedding dress on! But he was so insistent. He was
kissing me and he was all excited. But then he just passed out."
I raised my eyebrows.
"Well," she continued, "I didn't know what to do. Eventually, I called
the house doctor. That was back when hotels had house doctors. And he
said it was just low blood pressure."
"Wow," I said. "Well, it must run in the family, because mine is
always low. Sometimes I get dizzy just standing up."
"Well, it had never happened before. You can imagine how concerned I
was. But there was also a part of me that said, with him lying there
on the floor, 'Hmm. I did that.'" Her eyes and voice held a
glint of accomplishment.
I took her home, picked up my rental, then drove back to the bed and
breakfast where I was staying. I had lots to think about and wonder
about. How many times in this one day visit had I been reminded of my
mother's need to control men? What drives her to treat them so?
Later that evening as I was falling asleep, I engaged in additional
fantasies about the handsome daddy who sat in front of us in the
theatre. Suddenly, I wondered if my attraction to well-built,
strong-looking men was motivated by the same desire to conquor and
control - even castrate - that seemed to drive my mother. The thought
dismayed and angered me. Then, just as suddenly, it was answered - by
the man in the fantasy. I do not have an eidetic imagination and am
not used to my fantasy figures having anything to say. But this one
did.
"I am your love," he said. "Love your love."
"But why am I always attracted to the big, strong types?" I asked, still
angry at myself.
"Because your love is strong," he said. "Love your love."
I did. He and I had the most passionate solo sex I've had in a long
time. For the first time, I think I owned who this image was, and
knew it was not born of weakness, fear, or self-destruction. Nor was
it rooted in my mother's neuroses. It was a positive, life-giving
force. And it was strong.
Christmas Eve did not work out the way any of us had planned. A true
upper-Mississippi winter blizzard blew in the day before and the
temperatures plummetted. Christmas Eve morning, Mother called to say
she was cancelling the dinner plans for that night and did not expect
me to come over. Her practicality and flexibility surprised and
pleased me, and I spent a very relaxing day holed up at the bed and
breakfast. I was their only guest that evening, and they invited me to
join them for their traditional Christmas Eve dinner: spagghetti and
meatballs. It was delicious.
Christmas Day dawned bright and exceptionally cold. The plans for a
family get-together at Mother's for unwrapping presents and a mid-day
meal were still intact, so I prepared to leave. I would pick up my
sister Kris on the way. Her husband Mike and the kids would follow
along with her father-in-law, Lee, a little later. My sister Remy
had driven the 20 miles from Pepin to Durand
the night before and spent Christmas Eve with Mother after all (though
she had not gone to Church).
I was a little concerned my rental car would not start. The
temparature had been hovering near zero since I had arrived in
Wisconsin, and now it had plunged even lower to -15. However, after
patient and repeated efforts, I got the engine to turn over. I felt a
little tinge of pride. It had been many years since I had coaxed an
engine to life in subzero weather. I felt a surge of
self-sufficiency that I hadn't lost the knack.
I picked up Kris outside the Stockholm Cafe. We collected the pickled
beets and candies she had made and the stolen I had baked in her oven
a few days earlier. After several false starts ("Who's going with Uncle Lou?"
"Where's Lee?" "Isn't Mike out of the bathroom yet?"), Kris and I
headed off for Durand. On the way, I noticed several cars had their
lights on. This looked like a good idea. Even at noon the sunlight
had that thin, tenuous quality it often has after a blizzard.
We arrived in good time. Mother was happy to see us and appalled that
I had brought my laundry. "Now?" she asked, incredulous.
"I'm supposed to leave for Madison tomorrow and I'm all out of clean
clothes," I said. "I won't take a minute." I was downstairs, had the
load going, and back up before the rest of the party arrived.
My sister Remy took me aside. "It's a good thing I came up yesterday
after all," she said. "Nothing was ready. I've spent the morning
cleaning." I was surprised to see she had brought Little One with
her. Both dogs greeted each arrival with fresh enthusiasm. Mother's
cat, Priscilla, spent most of the day in a desultry mood under the
Christmas tree.
Joe and Rosie, Kris's kids, arrived with Mike, their father, and Lee,
their grandfather. Genuinely cheerful holiday pandemonium ensued.
The women all went to the kitchen and started bringing out plates of
food - sweets, home made chocolate covered pretzels, pickles, olives,
herring, a spicey salsa, chips, and cookies. We began a feeding that
never stopped the entire time we were there. On one of the trips out
of the kitchen, my mother looked at me and said, "Don't forget your
clothes."
"I've already moved them to the dryer," I said.
It was like old times: the aunties in the kitchen, the men in the
living room. Joe stretched out on the living room floor in a position
exactly like the one I can be seen in in several old family photos.
The resemblences between the two of us are uncanny. Earlier that week
I had told him, "You're getting taller and handsomer by the day. I
don't like it. You're beginning to be competition." He seemed rather
pleased by that.
After we were all stuffed with treats, we began opening the presents.
As Rosie handed out the gifts, my sister Kris leaned over and
whispered to me, "Don't forget your clothes."
I smiled wanly. "Thanks," I said.
We all seemed to get the greatest delight out of the gifts we got from
each other, though I think Joe was a little non-plussed by the
manicure set Mother gave him. She pointed out that it had a brass
finish, which would make his distinctive. "All the other guys will
have chrome," she said. All the other guys will think you're a fruit,
I thought, but I didn't say anything. From the look on Joe's face, it
didn't need to be said.
One of the gifts Mother gave me was a lovely maroon cardigan. "It'll
be your new best friend," she said, giggling. I found that a little
off-putting, as if it were a slogan she had heard and decided to
believe. Besides, the notion that my "new best friend" would be a
piece of cloth was a little depressing. But the sweater went
wonderfully well with a flannel shirt I'd gotten from Kris and I was
genuinely pleased with the gift, if somewhat irritated by the
sentiment.
Mother continued, "I thought you were now of an age when, you know, you
can wear a cardigan."
"I wore a cardigan in high school," I reminded her.
"Well, yes," she said. "But you're now of 'that age.'" I could see
this was going nowhere, so I simply thanked her again. She beamed.
"It'll be your new best friend," she said.
Rusty, her dog, seemed to be trying to make new "best friends" as
well. Throughout the day, he would try to mount Remy's dog, Little
One. He'd start humping away, despite the absence of any reservoir to
hold the materials of his affection. Rusty is a larger dog than
Little One, but only physically. Little One definitely has the
more dominant temprament. After putting up with a few plays of
Rusty's dry but passionate attentions, she suddenly wheeled on him and
had his throat in her jaws in a flash. He went instantly still.
Having made her
point, Little One let go, sniffed Rusty's crotch, then trotted off
to more interesting affairs, such as the crumbs accumulating under the
diningroom table.
Have Little One for lunch, indeed.
When we all sat down for dinner, my mother seemed to be in heaven.
"Dreams do come true," she said before we all started. She thanked
everyone at the table for helping make hers come true. She especially
thanked Lee for being there, a stand-in for her father, who had passed
away last February. That thought came as a sudden shock to me: this was the
first Christmas of my mother's life without her father, without either
of her parents. I was suddenly more sympathetic and more than a little
ashamed that I had not thought of it before.
My sister Remy leaned over to me. "Did you remember your clothes?" she
said.
"What is it with you people and my laundry?" I said. "I've been doing
my own laundry for over twenty-five years. They're fine. They're dry
and they're folded and they're back in my travel bag. Enough with the
laundry, already."
All the women smiled. Even Rosie.
After dinner we played a few games. I whallopped Joe at Risk, and my
sister Kris's team beat mine at Taboo. Too soon, it was time for
everyone to leave. Kris and Mike returned in their car, and Joe left
with Lee in his. Rosie was staying over at Mother's with Remy. The
"Bed and Breakfast" room
was getting a workout after all. I stayed behind to help clean up a
little and to thank Mother for a truly wonderful Christmas. "Dreams
do come true," she said to me, radiant.
It had warmed up some during the day, but it was now past nine o'clock
at night and quite cold again. I went out to start the car and warm
it up before I left. I turned the key in the ignition. Silence. Not
even a click. Nothing. This morning, although it had sat in subzero
temperatures for a day and a half, the engine had still made some sounds of
life when I tried to start it. Those sounds had encouraged me to keep
trying and guided me as I had coaxed it back to life. Now, there was
absolute silence. I tried again. Still nothing. Surely there must
still be some charge left in the battery, I thought. I went to turn
on the lights to see if there was even the tiniest bit of juice left.
I could not turn the lights on. I couldn't turn them on because they
were already on. They had been on since Kris and I left Stockholm.
The battery was utterly drained and had been dead for hours.
I started laughing. "The Buddha," I said aloud to myself, "teaches us
that aversion is the other side of desire." I went back into the house
and announced that I would, after all, be spending the night.
My mother put her hand to her breast and looked off with a pained
expression. "I can feel your disappointment," she said.
I was suddenly and unaccountably angry at her. I didn't think I was
projecting disappointment. More bemusement and amazement at my own
Freudian machinations. But I had to admit to the anger, too. And it
wasn't simply directed at her. So
what if my mother transmutes my misfortunes into an opportunity
for us to take care of her and the pain she feels at our
disappointment? That is simply her nature. After all, she is
my mother.
I settled onto the floor by the fireplace, using the cushions from the
couch as a kind of bed. Remy and Rosie went off to the guest bedroom,
and the dogs ran up and down the stairs after each other, greatly
annoying Priscilla the cat ("as in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," my
mother said). Eventually, Mother herself climbed the stairs to her
bedroom. "Dreams really do come true," she muttered on the way up.
I wrapped myself up in the blanket I'd been provided. Not the maroon
one, of course, which was on the guest bed with Remy and Rosie. I
watched the fire slowly dwindle in the fireplace. I could tell I was
going to spend a cold and uncomfortable night on the floor, but it had
been a wonderful Christmas. I smiled. "Welcome, dear Lucia," I said
aloud to myself, and settled into an imperfect sleep.