An attractive woman in her mid-50s with dancing black eyes plunked down her luggage in the chair next to me in the airport waiting area.
“Would you be a sweetheart and watch my bags for a second?” she said. “I need some coffee.”
I nodded. I liked her, all that energy and pizazz. She wore an off-white linen pantsuit with a bright scarf tossed around her shoulders. She had touseled black hair, the sides flecked with grey, and gold hoop earrings the size of apples.
I thought of my mother, who was about this woman’s age. My mother is a 1950s-meatloaf-mashed-potato-creamed-corn-type. She’s warm and sweet, but from a totally different time. She just doesn’t get it.
It’s hard talking to my mother. It was so easy talking with the woman in the airport.
She came back with two steaming cappuccinos. “A safe bet?” she said, handing me one.
She and her best friend were going on one of their adventures. They’ve traveled down and up the Grand Canyon on mules, gone star-gazing in New Mexico, hiking in Utah and now for folk dancing, yoga and meditation in the Caribbean.
Perfect timing, she said, what with her contract negotiations just ending at work. She needed the break.
“How do you get up the nerve to demand more money?” I asked.
“I know I deserve it,” she said. “So does my boss. It’s all a game. Hold firm. Don’t get personal or emotional.”
She told me about the characters in her office. She threw back her head and laughed. People stared.
We talked about jobs and life and how you must fight to separate the two. We talked about dating and marriage and how separate the two really are.
She’s divorced. Friends fix her up, and she attends singles events.
I said she had great courage. The last blind date I went on, the guy spent the entire Woody Allen movie in the men’s room throwing up. He said it was the shaky cinematography.
“Oh, go out. Live it up,” she urged. “Date everyone, all kinds of men. But only marry a man who adores you. Period. And only a finished product. No works-in-progress.”
Her great love, she said, was the theater. She said she had done community plays and folk dancing before she got married. When she was 18 she left her grim-faced parents and took a train with her best friend from their sheltered Montreal home all the way to New York City. They stayed at the YWCA and saw seven Broadway plays in five days.
“It was heaven,” she said.
I figured she would have devoted her life to the theater if she hadn’t devoted her life at age 21 to her husband and children. I wondered if she regretted her choice. I wondered if she thought she made one.
She told me about the book she just finished, fishing it out of an overflowing canvas bag.
The book was about women writers. She thought I’d like it.
She recommended the book to her daughter, who is my age, she said, but they never got around to talking about it.
Why not? I wondered aloud. I figured she and her daughter talked all the time about books, jobs, romance. I created a whole world for this mother and daughter. They go to spas some weekends, have 4 o’clock tea at fancy hotels, see wonderful plays together, argue politics while submerged in mudbaths.
“No,” the woman said, her dark eyes mirroring mine. “My daughter is stuck. If you asked her about me, she’d describe the woman I used to be, the mother I was 20 years ago. All meatloaf and submission. That woman seems indelibly etched in her memory. Not assertive enough, not career-oriented, not savvy, frightened of bank loans and being alone.
“There was a time when I was some of those things. But more than anything I think she’s like so many daughters I know who underestimate their mothers. She hasn’t let me grow up. I don’t know why. I let her. I see the strong, successful woman she has become. I can’t seem to make her see the one I’ve become. To her, I’m some 1950s stereotype. Isn’t there some kind of statute of limitations on meatloaf? Honestly, I haven’t made meatloaf since lava lamps.”
She said she wished she could meet her daughter anew, as she’d met me, in some random place with no history, no web of childhood memory.
“It’s sad,” she said. “All these years of liberation, and the person I most want to be liberated by is my own daughter.”
Sometimes, the best way to meet your mother is to pick her up at the airport.
