Elizabeth Crane - The History of Great Things

When your mind is active, it’s always a good thing. Your plan is to take two years off from opera to devote to your studies, though you’ll still practice an hour or two a day, for when you go back to it. For those two years, you study diligently — you were always an A student, but the kind who worked hard for it. Victor and I help quiz you when there are tests, but mostly it’s papers, so many papers and so much thinking and so much studying, some of which even helps illuminate some of the larger social causes and conditions you wondered about, going at least a small way toward explaining why “they” can’t all solve their problems with minimum-wage jobs. At no time, though, do you connect any dots between what you are learning and your own personal story; your father caused your problems, sometimes Victor causes your problems, and what obviously needs fixing is them.

The summer after you graduate, you schedule a face-lift (even though your husband begs you not to), because you can see where in two years your jowls will be to your knees. You know looks matter — Victor implied as much on your first date — and in the fall you’re offered a part-time job at a hospital in Yonkers, in part, you are certain, because you now look ten years younger.

You practice social work for several years, take only the best singing jobs that come along, turn down concerts with great orchestras but shitty conductors, or oratorios opposite that fat egotist P . You decide it’s time to exercise, as the doctors suggest; as with anything you do, there’s no doing it halfway. You buy a half-dozen exercise tapes and work out for a couple hours each day, lose twenty-five pounds in six months, none of which needed losing. You’ve had some smaller weight fluctuations before, but because of your height and your carriage, until now it’s been imperceptible to anyone but you. This weight loss is not imperceptible. People worry. Plus, you’ve always chewed your fingernails, but now you bite and pick at the skin on your heels and fingers relentlessly, unconsciously, until they bleed, like if you can just get down to the bone, something will be discovered, like if you could chew down to the bad core of you, you might finally dig it out. There’s almost no thumbnail left at all on your left hand; you’ve had Band-Aids on it for a month. No one will see it, but you know, and it seems like it should be no big deal — a habit, everyone has them — but it’s also a deep shame. Audrey and Victor and I all beg you to stop, stop exercising, stop chewing, stop worrying. Part of you has no idea what’s wrong anymore; you still know that you’re wrong, but it seems outside of you, or it’s easier to think so, and so as sad as you are, you’re also angry. Victor doesn’t understand you. He never has. He loves you but he doesn’t know you, not the way you want, anyway. If he really understood you, you wouldn’t feel this way. You fantasize about leaving. This ultimately sends you back to bed again, so you stay. You stay, you get a new therapist and a new wrong diagnosis and a new prescription that doesn’t work.

And then Mother dies. Daddy had died ten years earlier; you hadn’t been too set back by that. You remembered some of the good things about him, but mostly the less good, and you were busy with your career then. You cried, a little, at his funeral, though “grief” for someone you never felt close to is a funny word. It’s more like There goes the Daddy I never really had, so long, see you later, I’ll think about something else now and keep wondering why I rage randomly when that time comes. You felt worse for your mother’s loss than for your own, but she’s always been pretty stoic. She shed some tears when her husband died, a corner of a delicate cotton hanky’s worth, but she knew how life worked, someone had to go first, and after Daddy died, Mother spent her last ten years traveling with her sister, visiting you and your own sister more often, and those years were good for her. You adored your mother. You’d never been close in the sense that you told her everything; in fact, you always gave her a carefully curated presentation of yourself and your life. She knew of no real problems, you believed. Even with your divorce, which to her was about the worst possible thing that could happen, in time you made her see that it was necessary, convinced her that I was just fine, bright and well adjusted, which you sort of seemed to believe, that your career was bringing you everything you wanted, and that when you met Victor (she was smitten with him from the first, blushing at his colorful stories and covering her mouth as if every last bit of her propriety would escape if she laughed too hard) you really did have it all.

But your mother dying is different. It’s too much not to have her in the world, information-sharing or not. She was nothing if not steady. Why didn’t you get any of that? Your father may have been opinionated, but he was still generally imperturbable. And Marjorie’s not like you either. There’s no history of hysteria in your family; why you? Just knowing Mother was in the world helped a little — that such steady kindness existed, somewhere. Does your daughter have some of that quality? Maybe. But a mom’s a mom. A daughter never stops needing a mom. That you are also someone’s mom is not a thought that follows. This is about you.

A few days after the funeral, before heading back east, you go to her grave for one last good-bye. You sit down on the yet-unsettled soil, pull a couple weeds from the edge; time passes, you don’t know how much, but at some point you find yourself ripping the grass from the earth, hoping to pull her out. Back home you cry for about a month straight, spend most of the following month in bed. Again.

— I think we should have more scenes together.

— I’ve written some short stories about us before. I also might write a memoir someday. I didn’t want to overlap too much.

— Some people might think this is a memoir.

— It’s so not a memoir.

— It’s not so not a memoir, Betsy. It’s mostly not a memoir.

— It is in no way a memoir, Mom.

— Okay, so especially if it’s not a memoir, couldn’t we just do our own thing here?

— I did just whale off into the sunset.

— Right. So we could do anything together, couldn’t we?

— I took us on a houseboat ride a few chapters back.

— That was a bleak tale.

— Okay, well, what would you like us to do, Mom?

— I don’t have any particular ideas.

— I’ve always wanted to time-travel. I’d like to go to 1961. I want to see what life was like when I got here.

— Uch. I don’t think I want to go there again.

— I do.

— Why would you want to go to difficult times?

— I just want to go to interesting times.

— I want to go to times that don’t hurt.

Okay. So it’s 1961. Let’s try being sisters again, a year apart this time, very close. You can be the older sister again. There’s no Marjorie. She was never born. We’ve just graduated from college. You went to Parsons against the wishes of Mother and Daddy (your parents are our parents this time); we were both supposed to go to a state school to get husbands, but we both dreamed of being world-famous couturiers like Coco Chanel, so I follow you to Parsons and we share a big two-bedroom apartment in London Terrace because you can do that at this time. It’s Deco, Mother! Absolutely fabulous! There’s a swimming pool! Tell Daddy that Babe Ruth once dressed up as Santa for the annual Christmas party! But Mother and Daddy are beyond freaked out that we’re on our own in New York City, and Mother keeps sending letters begging us to come back to Iowa, telling us there are so many nice young men right at home, at church, sons of friends who work at banks and insurance companies, and we tell them not to worry, there are men here who aren’t criminals, and we didn’t come here to meet men anyway, and we’re happy and well, and more and more women are working now, and we like it. After college we get jobs in the garment district, you as a seamstress and me answering phones, but at night we come home and sketch and gossip (my boss is a creep, has been doing it with his secretary, has patted my bottom more than once); we design clothes for a modern working woman, separates, slim skirt suits, simple dresses with an eye to detail, seaming, covered buttons, pockets, always pockets — that will be our trademark! We create a small line to begin: one suit, three blouses, a skirt, a cardigan in three different colors (with a narrow satin ribbon trim around the neckline), one cocktail dress (with a satin ribbon and small bow under the bust, to match the cardigan), and we take it around to the department stores. We point out all the special details — the quality of the fabric, the different ways the pieces can work together, ways to take the pieces from day to night — and we are turned down, store after store, no Saks, no Bergdorf’s, no Bonwit’s, no Macy’s, no Gimbels. The good news is that Alexander’s offers us a deal, but only for the suit, and it’s a much smaller offer than we hoped for, but now we’re in a pickle, because it’s barely enough to cover our electric bill. But we shake on it, and on the 1 train we try to hide our disappointment that we didn’t become famous designers overnight. Maybe we should just go home and get husbands , you say.