Free The Love of My Youth by Mary Gordon Page B

occasions, but then she’d say, ‘There are just so many things I’m more interested in.’ The secret of my mother was that she really didn’t do things unless she wanted to do them. Of course there were a lot of things she really wanted to do, that she enjoyed doing. That was why she always made people around her feel so free.”
    “Your mother went to law school?”
    “Yes. My mother had a life as a lawyer for a happy twenty years. She took the bar when she was fifty. She worked with a group of lawyers who did domestic law. She was terrific with women who’d been abused, who were afraid of their husbands.”
    “What did she know of that? If ever there was a woman who wasn’t afraid of her husband …”
    “But somehow she understood being afraid … even though I think for my mother the world was essentially a kind of joke, sometimes a good joke, sometimes a bad one, sometimes a cruel one, sometimes an enjoyable one. But there seemed to be a very great deal she understood.”
    “And when she stopped cooking, you weren’t angry?”
    “I wasn’t living in the house. It was Jo and my father who paid the price. Only, they didn’t seem to be paying anything. Somehow they both learned to cook well enough, and they did it together, and they enjoyed that. It wasn’t fabulous, like when my mother did it, but it was, somehow, fine. And then on holidays my mother would produce, well, masterpieces.”
    What he doesn’t say: that Beverly hated the holidays. She made fun of all the food, saying, “ ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ is Rose in action.” She’d go home and vomit in the bathroom and then say she had to stay in bed for days: she’d been poisoned.
    “But you, Miranda, how did you come to it? Cooking, I mean.”
    “I somehow started reading cookbooks. It could only happen when I stopped being afraid of turning into my mother.”
    “Your mother was very kind to me. Do you remember, when I got mono and my mother was back in school, your mother would come over during the day and bring me the kind of food my mother never would have made me: Jell-O with real cherries in it, custards, very light foods that were exactly what I needed. And she was good about us, Miranda. She might not have been. The time she caught us in your bed. She might have made us feel terrible about it. But she just closed the door and never said anything.”
    “No, she never mentioned it. Not a word. Not even to me. Never. And you see, that was a kind of agony for me. Because I never knew what she was thinking, or when she might, out of nowhere, mention it. Or whether she’d told my father, or someday wake up and think she had to. I never knew what she thought about it. What it made her think of me. Whether it changed the way she felt about me, whether she thought I’d become a different person, whether she couldn’t love me in the same way anymore. Oh, I know she loved me. But what the flavor of that love was or who it was she thought she loved—that I would never know.”
    “You’re too exacting.”
    “Well, if you like. But I never knew what her love meant, what it meant to her to love me. Was she excited by her love for me, made anxious, saddened, consoled, envious, ambitious?”
    “Perhaps all those things. You know from the way you are with your own children.”
    “She seemed afraid to touch me. Afraid of touching any of us too much. Maybe of touching anything: now that I think of it, she touched everything rather tentatively, rather fearfully, as if she were afraid of leaving a mark that would be somehow corrupting, hurtful. Perhaps diminishing. Her embraces were always abashed, they always felt provisional. My children’s bodies were always so delicious to me. I kissed them and hugged them all the time. I loved having their skin against my skin. I had to think about it carefully as they got older: they were boys, after all. What should my relationship be to these new bodies? The bodies of men. The