My Grandmother died when my Mother was two. One day she was healthy, and the next day she was dead from a brain tumor. My Mom found her lying on the living room floor. 45 years later, she still remembers that moment vividly.
When I was 14 I hated my mother. I hated her at 15, 16 and 17, too. When I was younger she had undiagnosed, unmedicated depression. I think about that time now and what comes back to me is the same vision: her, hunched by the washing machines in the basement, furtively smoking a cigarette with tears rolling down her face. I avoided her, I ached for her, but secretly I fucking hated her.
My parents got divorced in 2002 and my mother moved to an ornate apartment complex in Germantown, a section of Philadelphia about 20 minutes from my Dad’s house. Because my Dad kept the house, and the dog, and because he was the principal and lived close to my school, an automatic allegiance formed between me and him. I did not have a bedroom in my mother’s apartment. For the first year I slept on the futon in the living room, while my sister and Mom shared the bed in the one bedroom. We were physically close, but we couldn’t have been more emotionally distant. Preferring the company of my friends, the comfort of my own bedroom in my Dad’s house, I saw my Mom less and less. At night, when vulnerability struck, I cried quietly into my pillow over how much I missed her. She had no idea.
A friend came to me with his broken heart clenched between his fingers and I shook my head to say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you now.” It was selfish, and at night sometimes I feel sick about it, but I’ve learned that sometimes it’s okay to be selfish for a little while if your heart requires it of you. I needed my sewing kit for myself; the spool of thread I prepared between my fingers was short and I didn’t have any extra needles to spare. I worry sometimes if he forgives me for tending to my own wounds instead of his, but I won’t be able to properly take care of anyone else until I learn how to properly take care of myself.
He had walked in on her in the apartment they shared with someone else’s hand up her skirt. He packed his things and took the next flight back to the Midwest. “I almost wish I had walked in on them fucking,” he wrote to me. “Anything would’ve been better than the image of that asshole just TAKING her.”
I’ve never been cheated on and I’ve never truly been close to death but I imagine they both feel the same.
“She was just as complicit as he was,” I responded. I couldn’t stop myself from hating her just a little bit.
After a week he was back in New York and they were together again. He wrote, “She explained to me that she was in a manic phase.”
“Oh,” I replied. From 20 blocks south he couldn’t see the way my hair moved when I disapprovingly shook my head.
In an article that most likely would’ve sent her into a rage, and most certainly sent me into one, the NYT Style Section decided to boil down all of Simone de Beavoir’s literary accomplishments into one shallow question: Was Simone de Beauvoir beautiful?
I seriously almost puked when I read that. Give me a break! When I lived in Paris I was inspired by my location to read a ton of de Beauvoir, and subsequently fell in love with her writing. The Mandarins is one of my favorite books at all time, and provides a detailed glimpse into the intimate lives of people struggling with romantic entanglements and political involvements following WWII. It’s an incredible book, as is, of course The Second Sex, which–with a recent reprint–is supposedly the impetus for this absurd NYT piece. It’s the Style Section, so I know that they’re not going to give her the ol’ Kakutani literary treatment; but this is also the New York Times, not Cosmopolitan, so the fact that they crystallize all of de Beauvoir’s amazing philosophical and literary thinking into an analysis of her wardrobe is just upsetting. They would never do this to a male writer. Imagine a feature on Hemingway’s wardrobe.
Yeah, not gonna happen.