Fear Of Flying

9 Pandora’s Box or My Two Mothers

Of course it all began with my mother. My mother: Judith Stoloff White, also known as Jude. Not obscure. But hard to get down on paper. My love for her and my hate for her are so bafflingly intertwined that I can hardly see her. I never know who is who. She is me and I am she and we are all together. The umbilical cord which connects us has never been cut so it has sickened and rotted and turned black. The very intensity of our need has made us denounce each other. We want to eat each other up. We want to strangle each other with love. We want to run screaming from each other in panic before either of these things can happen.

When I think of my mother I envy Alexander Portnoy. If only I had a real Jewish mother-easily pigeonholed and filed away-a real literary property. (I am always envying writers their relatives: Nabokov and Lowell and Tucci with their closets full of elegant aristocratic skeletons, Roth and Bellow and Friedman with their pop parents, sticky as Passover wine, greasy as matzoh-ball soup.)

My mother smelled of Joy or Diorissimo, and she didn’t cook much. When I try to distill down to basics what she taught me about life, I am left with this:

1. Above all, never be ordinary.

2. The world is a predatory place: Eat faster! “Ordinary” was the worst insult she could find for anything. I remember her taking me shopping and the look of disdain with which she would freeze the salesladies in Saks when they suggested that some dress or pair of shoes was “very popular-we’ve sold fifty already this week.” That was all she needed to hear.

“No,” she would say, “we’re not interested in that. Haven’t you got something a little more unusual?” And then the saleslady would bring out all the weird colors no one else would buy-stuff which would have gone on sale but for my mother. And later she and I would have an enormous fight because I yearned to be ordinary as fiercely as my mother yearned to be unusual.

“I can’t stand that hairdo” (she said when I went to the hairdresser with Pia and came back with a pageboy straight out of Seventeen Magazine), “it’s so ordinary.” Not ugly. Not unbecoming. But ordinary. Ordinariness was a plague you had to ward off in every possible way. You warded it off by redecorating frequently. Actually my mother thought that all the interior decorators (as well as clothes designers and accessory designers) in America were organized in an espionage ring to learn her most recent decorating or dressmaking ideas and suddenly popularize them. And it was true that she had an uncanny sense of coming fashions (or did I only imagine this, conned as I was by her charisma?). She did the house in antique gold just before antique gold became the most popular color for drapes and rugs and upholstery. Then she screamed that everyone had “stolen” her ideas. She installed Spanish porcelain tiles in the foyer before it caught on “with all the yentas on Central Park West”-from whose company she carefully excluded herself. She brought white fur rugs home from Greece before they were imported by all the stores. She discovered wrought-iron flowered chandeliers for the bathroom in advance of all the “fairy decorators”-as she contemptuously called them.

She had antique brass headboards and window shades that matched the wallpaper and pink and red towels in the bathrooms when pink and red was still considered an avant-garde combination. Her fear of ordinariness came out most strongly in her clothes. After the four of us got older, she and my father traveled a lot for business, and she picked up odd accessories everywhere. She wore Chinese silk pajamas to the theater, Balinese toe-rings on her sandaled feet, and tiny jade Buddhas mounted as dangling earrings. She carried an oiled rice-paper parasol in the rain and had toreador pants made out of Japanese fingernail tapestries. At one point in my adolescence it dawned on me that she would rather look weird and ugly than common and pretty. And she often succeeded. She was a tall, rail-thin woman with high cheekbones and long red hair, and her strange get-ups and extreme make-up sometimes gave her a Charles Addamsy look. Naturally, I longed for a bleached-blond, mink-coated Mama who played bridge, or at least for a dumpy brunette PTA Mom in harlequin glasses and Red Cross shoes.

“Couldn’t you please wear something else?” I pleaded when she was dressing for Parents’ Day in tapestried toreador pants and a Pucci pink silk sweater and a Mexican serape. (My memory must be exaggerating-but you get the general idea.) I was in seventh grade, and at the height of my passion for ordinaries.

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

What wasn’t wrong with it! I shrank back into her walk-in closet, looking in vain for something ordinary. (An apron! A housedress! An angora sweater sett Something befitting a mother in a Betty Crocker ad, a Mother with a capital M.) The closet reeked of Joy and mothballs. There were cut velvet capes and feather boas and suede slacks and Aztec cotton caftans and Japanese silk kimonos and Irish tweed knickers, but absolutely nothing like an angora sweater set.

“It’s just that I wish you’d wear something more plain,” I said sheepishly, “something people won’t stare at.”

She glowered at me and drew herself up to her full height of five feet ten inches.

“Are you ashamed of your own mother? Because if you are, Isadora, I feel sorry for you. I really do. There is nothing good about being ordinary. People don’t respect you for it. In the last analysis, people run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don’t run with the herd. You’ll find out. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity…” And we left for school in a cab trailing whiffs of Joy, and with Mexican fringes flapping, figuratively, in the wind.

When I think of all the energy, all the misplaced artistic aggression which my mother channeled into her passion for odd clothes and new decorating schemes, I wish she had been a successful artist instead. Three generations of frustrated artists: my grandfather fucking models and cursing Picasso and stubbornly painting in the style of Rembrandt, my mother giving up poetry and painting for arty clothes and compulsive reupholstering, my sister Randy taking up pregnancy as if it were a new art form she had invented (and Lalah and Chloe following after her like disciples).

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing cruder or more vain than a failed artist. My grandfather, as I’ve said, used to paint over my mother’s canvases instead of going out to buy new canvas. She switched to poetry for a while, to escape him, but then met my father who was a song writer and stole her images to use in lyrics. Artists are horrible. “Never, never get involved with a man who wants to be an artist,” my mother used to say, who knew.

Another interesting sidelight is that both my mother and my grandfather have a way of dismissing the efforts of anybody who seems to be having a good time working at something or having a moderate success at it. There is, for example, a middling-to-good novelist (whose name I won’t mention) who happens to be a friend of my parents. He has written four novels, none of them distinguished in style, none of them best sellers, and none prize-winners, but nevertheless, he seems fairly pleased with himself and he seems to be enjoying the status of resident sage at cocktail parties and writer-in-residence at some junior college in New Jersey whose name escapes me. Maybe he actually likes writing. Some strange people do.

“I don’t know how he keeps grinding them out,” my mother will say, “he’s such an ordinary writer. He’s not stupid, he’s nobody’s fool…” (My mother never calls people “intelligent”; “not stupid” is as far as she will commit herself.) “… But his books are so ordinary… and none of them has really even made money yet…”

And there’s the rub! Because while my mother claims to respect originality above all, what she really respects is money and prizes. Moreover, there is the implication in all her remarks about other artists that there is scarcely any point in their persevering just for the piddling rewards they get. Now if her novelist-friend had won a Pulitzer or an NBA-or sold a book to the movies-that would be something. Of course, she would put that down, too. But the respect would be written all over her face. On the other hand, the humble doing of the thing means nothing to her; the inner discoveries, the pleasure of the work. Nothing. With an attitude like that, no wonder she turned to upholstery.

Re: her interest in predation. She started out, I think, with the normal Provincetown-Art Students League communism of her day, but gradually, as affluence and arteriosclerosis overtook her (together, as is often the case), she converted to her own brand of religion composed of two parts Robert Ardrey and one part Konrad Lorenz.

I don’t think either Ardrey or Lorenz intended what she extracted in their names: a sort of neo-Hobbesianism in which it is proven that life is nasty, mean, brutish, and short; the desire for status and money and power is universal; territoriality is instinctual; and selfishness, therefore, is the cardinal law of life. (“Don’t twist what I’m saying, Isadora; even what people call a truism is selfishness by another name.”)

How all this clogged up every avenue of creative and rebellious expression for me is clear:

1. I couldn’t be a hippy because my mother already dressed like a hippy (while believing in territoriality and the universality of war).

2. I couldn’t rebel against Judaism because I hadn’t any to rebel against.

3. I couldn’t rail at my Jewish mother because the problem was deeper than Jewishness or mothers.

4. I couldn’t be an artist on pain of being painted over.

5. I couldn’t be a poet on pain of being crossed out.

6. I couldn’t be anything else because that was ordinary.

7. I couldn’t be a communist because my mother had been there.

8. I couldn’t be a rebel (or, at very least, a pariah) by marrying Bennett because my mother would think that was “at any rate, not ordinary.”

What possibilities remained open to me? In what cramped corner could I act out what I so presumptuously called my life? I felt rather like those children of pot-smoking parents who become raging squares. I could, perhaps, take off across Europe with Adrian Goodlove, and never come home to New York at all.

And yet… I also have another mother. She is tall and thin, but her cheeks are softer than willow tips, and when I nuzzle into her fur coat on the ride home, I feel that no harm can come to me ever. She teaches me the names of flowers. She hugs and kisses me after some bully in the playground (a psychiatrist’s son) grabs my new English tricycle and rolls it down a hill into the playground fence. She sits up nights with me listening to the compositions I have written for school and she thinks I am the greatest writer in history even though I am only eight. She laughs at my jokes as if I were Milton Berle and Groucho Marx and Irwin Corey rolled into one. She takes me and Randy and Lai ah and Chloe ice-skating on Central Park Lake with ten of our friends, and while all the other mothers sit home and play bridge and send maids to call for their children, she laces up all our skates (with freezing fingers) and then puts on her own skates and glides around the lake with us, pointing out danger spots (thin ice), teaching us figure eights, and laughing and talking and glowing pink with the cold. I am so proud of her!

Randy and I boast to our friends that our mother (with her long flowing hair and huge brown eyes) is so young that she never has to wear make-up. She’s no old fuddy-duddy like the other mothers. She wears turtlenecks and ski pants just like us. She wears her long hair in a velvet ribbon just like us. And we don’t even call her Mother because she’s so much fun. She isn’t like anyone else.

On my birthday (March 26, Aries, the Rites of Spring), I awaken to find my room transformed into a bower. Around my bed are vases of daffodils, irises, anemones. On the floor are heaps of presents, wrapped in the most fanciful tissue papers and festooned with paper flowers. There are Easter eggs, hand painted by my mother to look like Faberge eggs. There are boxes of chocolates and jelly eggs (“for a sweet year,” she says, hugging me), and there is always a giant birthday card, painted in water colors and showing me in all my glory: the most beautiful little girl in the world, long blond hair, blue eyes, and masses of flowers in my arms. My mother flatters me, idealizes me-or is that how she really sees me? I am pleased and I am puzzled. I am really the most beautiful girl in the world to her, aren’t I? Or aren’t I? Then what about my sisters? And what about the way she screams at me loud enough to make the roof fall in?

My other mother never screams, and I owe everything I am to her. At thirteen I follow her through all the art museums of Europe, and through her eyes I see Turner’s storms and Tiepolo’s skies and Monet’s haystacks and Rodin’s monument to Balzac and Botticelli’s Primavera and da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks. At fourteen I get the Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay for my birthday, at fifteen e.e. cummings, at sixteen William Butler Yeats, at seventeen Emily Dickinson, and at eighteen my mother and I are no longer on speaking terms. She introduces me to Shaw, to Colette, to Orwell, to Simone de Beauvoir. She furiously debates Marxism with me at the dinner table. She gives me ballet lessons and piano lessons and weekly tickets to the New

York Philharmonic (where I am bored and spend much time in the ladies’ room applying Revlon’s Powder Pink Lustrous Lipstick to my thirteen-year-old lips).

I go to the Art Students League every Saturday and my mother painstakingly criticizes my drawings. She shepherds my career as if it were her own: I must learn cast and figure drawing in charcoal first, then still lifes in pastels, then finally oil painting. When I apply for the High School of Music and Art, my mother worries over my portfolio with me, takes me to the exam, and reassures me, as I worriedly recapitulate each part of it to her. When I decide I want to be a doctor as well as an artist, she starts buying me books on biology. When I start writing poetry, she listens to each poem and praises it as if I were Yeats. All my adolescent maunderings are beautiful to her. All my drawings, greeting cards, cartoons, posters, oil paintings presage future greatness to her. Surely no girl could have a more devoted mother, a mother more interested in her becoming a whole person, in becoming, if she wished, an artist. Then why am I so furious with her? And why does she make me feel that I am nothing but a blurred carbon copy of her? That I have never had a single thought of my own? That I have no freedom, no independence, no identity at all?

Perhaps sex accounted for my fury. Perhaps sex was the real Pandora’s box. My mother believed in free love, in dancing naked in the Bois de Boulogne, in dancing in the Greek Isles, in performing the Rites of Spring. Yet of course, she did not, or why did she say that boys wouldn’t respect me unless I “played hard to get”? That boys wouldn’t chase me if I “wore my heart on my sleeve,” that boys wouldn’t call me if I “made myself cheap”?

Sex. I was terrified of the tremendous power it had over me. The energy, the excitement, the power to make me feel totally crazy! What about that? How do you make that jibe with “playing hard to get”?

I never had the courage to ask my mother directly. I sensed, despite her bohemian talk, that she disapproved of sex, that it was basically unmentionable. So I turned to D. H. Lawrence, and to Love Without Fear, and to Coming of Age in Samoa. Margaret Mead wasn’t much help. What did I have in common with all those savages? (Plenty, of course, but at the time I didn’t realize it.) Eustace Chesser, M.D., was good on all the fascinating details (“How to Manage the Sex Act,” penetration, foreplay, afterglow), but he didn’t seem to have much to say about my moral dilemmas: how “far” to go? inside the bra or outside? inside the pants or outside? inside the mouth or outside? when to swallow, if ever. It was all so complicated. And it seemed so much more complicated for women. Basically, I think, I was furious with my mother for not teaching me how to be a woman, for not teaching me how to make peace between the raging hunger in my cunt and the hunger in my head.

So I learned about women from men. I saw them through the eyes of male writers. Of course, I didn’t think of them as male writers. I thought of them as writers, as authorities, as gods who knew and were to be trusted completely.

Naturally I trusted everything they said, even when it implied my own inferiority. I learned what an orgasm was from D. H. Lawrence, disguised as Lady Chatterley. I learned from him that all women worship “the Phallos”-as he so quaintly spelled it. I learned from Shaw that women never can be artists; I learned from Dostoyevsky that they have no religious feeling; I learned from Swift and Pope that they have too much religious feeling (and therefore can never be quite rational); I learned from Faulkner that they are earth mothers and at one with the moon and the tides and the crops; I learned from Freud that they have deficient superegos and are ever “incomplete” because they lack the one thing in this world worth having: a penis.

But what did all this have to do with me-who went to school and got better marks than the boys and painted and wrote and spent Saturdays doing still lifes at the Art Students League and my weekday afternoons editing the high-school paper (Features Editor; the Editor-in-Chief had never been a girl-though it also never occurred to us then to question it)? What did the moon and tides and earth-mothering and the worship of the Lawrentian “phallos” have to do with me or with my life?

I met my first “phallos” at thirteen years and ten months on my parents’ avocado-green silk living-room couch, in the shade of an avocado-green avocado tree, grown by my avocado green-thumbed mother from an avocado pit. The “phallos” belonged to Steve Applebaum, a junior and art major when I was a freshman and art major, and it had a most memorable abstract design of blue veins on its Kandinsky-purple underside. In retrospect, it was a remarkable specimen: circumcised, of course, and huge (what is huge when you have no frame of reference?), and with an impressive life of its own. As soon as it began to make its drumlinlike presence known under the tight zipper of Steve’s chinos (we were necking and “petting-below-the-waist” as one said then), he would slowly unzip (so as not to snag it?) and with one hand (the other was under my skirt and up my cunt) extract the huge purple thing from between the layers of his shorts, his blue Brooks-Brothers shirttails, and his cold, glittering, metal-zippered fly. Then I would dip one hand into the vase of roses my flower-loving mother always kept on the coffee table, and with a right hand moistened with water and the slime from their stems, I would proceed with my rhythmic jerking off of Steve. How exactly did I do it? Three fingers? Or the whole palm? I suppose I must have been rough at first (though later I became an expert). He would throw his head back in ecstasy (but controlled ecstasy: my father was watching TV in the dining room) and would come into his Brooks-Brothers shirttails or into a handkerchief quickly produced for this purpose. The technique I have forgotten, but the feeling remains. Partly, it was reciprocity (tit for tat, or clit for tat), but it was also power. I knew that what I was doing gave me a special kind of power over him-one that painting or writing couldn’t approach. And then I was coming too-maybe not like Lady Chatterley, but it was something.

Toward the end of our idyll, Steve (who was then seventeen and I fourteen) wanted me to take “it” in my mouth. “Do people really do that?”

“Sure,” he said with as much nonchalance as he could muster. He went to my parents’ bookshelf in search of Van de Velde (carefully hidden behind Art Treasures of the Renaissance). But it was too much for me. I couldn’t even pronounce it. And would it make me pregnant? Or maybe my refusal had something to do with the continuing social education which my mother was instilling in me along with Art History. Steve lived in the Bronx. I lived in a duplex on Central Park West. If I was going to worship a “phallos” it was not going to be a Bronx phallos. Perhaps one from Sutton Place?

Ultimately, I said goodbye to Steve and took up masturbation, fasting, and poetry. I kept telling myself that masturbation at least kept me pure.

Steve continued to woo me with bottles of Chanel No. 5, Frank Sinatra records, and beautifully lettered quotations from the poems of Yeats. He called me whenever he got drunk and on every one of my birthdays for the next five years. (Was it just jerking him off which inspired such loyalty?)

But meanwhile I repented for my self-indulgence by undergoing a sort of religious conversion which included starvation (I denied myself even water), studying Siddhartha, and losing twenty pounds (and with them, my periods). I also got a Joblike rash of boils and was sent to my first dermatologist-a German lady refugee who said, memorably, “Za skeen is za meeroar of za zoul” and who referred me to the first of my many psychiatrists, a short doctor whose name was Schrift.

Dr. Schrift (the very same Dr. Schrift who had flown to Vienna with us) was a follower of Wilhelm Stekel and he tucked his shoelaces under the toes of his shoes. (I am not sure whether or not this was part of the Stekelian method.) His apartment building on Madison Avenue had very dark and narrow halls whose walls were covered with gold, sea-shell-spotted wallpaper, such as you might find in the bathroom of an old house in Larchmont. Waiting for the elevator, I used to stare at the wallpaper and wonder if the landlord had gotten a good deal on a bathroom wallpaper close-out. Why else paper a lobby with gold seashells and tiny pink fishes?

Dr. Schrift had two Utrillo prints and one Braque. (It was my first shrink, so I didn’t realize these were the standard APA-approved prints.) He also had a Danish-modern desk (also APA-approved), and a brownish Foamland couch with a compulsive little plastic cover at the foot and a hard wedge-shaped pillow, covered with a paper napkin, at the head.

He insisted that the horse I was dreaming about was my father. I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents’ avocado-green silk couch. He insisted that the coffin I was dreaming about was my mother. What could be the reason my periods had stopped? A mystery.

“Because I don’t want to be a woman. Because if s too confusing. Because Shaw says you can’t be a woman and an artist. Having babies uses you up, he says. And I want to be an artist. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Because I wouldn’t have known how to say it then, but Steve’s finger in my cunt felt good. At the same time, I knew that soft, mushy feeling to be the enemy. If I yielded to that feeling, it would be goodbye to all the other things I wanted. “You have to choose,” I told myself sternly at fourteen. Get thee to a nunnery. So, like all good nuns, I masturbated. “I am keeping myself free of the power of men,” I thought, sticking two fingers deep inside each night.

Dr. Schrift didn’t understand. “Ackzept being a vohman,” he hissed from behind the couch. But at fourteen all I could see were the disadvantages of being a woman. I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s. Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth? Where was my gamekeeper? All I could see was the swindle of being a woman.

I would roam through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for one woman artist to show me the way. Mary Cassatt? Berthe Morisot? Why was it that so many women artists who had renounced having children could then paint nothing but mothers and children? It was hopeless. If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood.

Neither my good mother nor my bad mother could help me out of this dilemma. My bad mother told me she would have been a famous artist but for me, and my good mother adored me, and wouldn’t have given me up for the world. What I learned from her I learned by example, not exhortation. And the lesson was clear: being a woman meant being harried, frustrated, and always angry. It meant being split into two irreconcilable halves.

“Maybe you’ll do better than me,” my good mother said. “Maybe you’ll do both, darling. But as for me, I never could.”