by Tod Davies
“I wanted to prove I could have a baby faster than your aunt. That was why I had you.”
— My mother
I was born nine months and ten days after my parents’ wedding day, another testament to my mother’s energy and willpower. She doesn’t think too deeply about what she wants, but what she wants, she generally has, and I think the world should only be grateful that she has been restrained in her desires by her religion and an innate sense of tasteful moderation.
My aunt, her older sister, had difficulty conceiving and bringing a baby to term after her marriage to my uncle. A year before I was born, and a few years after her own marriage, she gave birth to my cousin Michael. A year after I was born, to my cousin Lisa. Two years after that to my cousin Steve. My mother matched her, child for child. When Lisa was born, she had my brother Bill. When Steve came, so did my brother Peter.
My mother was uncomfortably triumphant about this. I was plenty anxious about it when I was a child. It seemed so wrong, somehow, although Aunt Celia didn’t seem to notice there was such a battle going on. I couldn’t tell: did she know and ignore it for reasons I couldn’t make out? Or did she miss it altogether? Whatever the reason, she and my mother, by mutual agreement, considered my mother to be by far the more glamorous, exciting, interesting of the two. They both gave my mother the palm.
As a child, this triumphant comparison gave me much to meditate upon. It was confusing. A child’s loyalty is to its own family, and to the ways of being of its own family, and if those ways are less wholesome than those of another family, a child’s uncomfortable impulse is to call the less wholesome ways the best.
But I didn’t like my mother’s frequent superciliousness to my aunt, or our family’s aspiration to upper middle class hood, or our constant haste to be best in all things. I didn’t like thinking this better than the solid, quiet, affectionate daily round to be found at my aunt and uncle’s.
I loved it at my aunt and uncle’s. They lived on a wonderful street, much looked down on by my parents for being lower class (and called by the mainly black residents, with glorious political incorrectitude, Hershey Hill), but filled with a fascinating variety of children — all colors, shapes and sizes — to play with. I loved my cousins, too — each one of them with the kindness and the innate solidity of their mother and father.
I couldn’t, to tell you the truth, figure out in what way exactly we were supposed to be superior. It was much more fun at my aunt and uncle’s house than it was at our own. Safer. More affectionate. Not so anxious.
I couldn’t figure out why my mother felt so competitive with my aunt, her older sister. She seemed to have gotten everything she’d wanted, my mother. She’d married the more upwardly mobile guy, she had the most children, she sent them to the more prestigious schools, they filled the professions handily. But still she competed with her. Even now, when they’re both past seventy-five, my mother preens herself on being the glamorous younger one, and my aunt still indulges her and admires.
I peer at an old picture of my grandmother, their mother, seated with my mother as a baby on her knee, my aunt a beautiful watchful child with enormous eyes at her side. My grandmother’s elegance is astonishing: the aristocratic oval of her face, the slim feet, the long graceful fingers. Her nickname was “Dry Champagne,” and she was in love with a man who played up to her to make her own cousin, the family belle, jealous. He married the cousin later, leaving my grandmother bereft.
“He was a dastard!” my mother said, giggling, telling me this story with some malicious pleasure many years later. “And she married my father on the rebound. I don’t think she was as in love with him as she had been with that first.”
Her father, my grandfather. He died three months before my mother was born, of typhus, in the Philippines, where he had gone as part of his import/export business. In the one picture I have of him, he is rotund and jolly looking, much like my aunt, his eldest daughter. All I know of him is he enjoyed the good things of life, and that he was part Chinese. His grandmother was Chinese, a legendary matriarch, a sharp businesswoman who ran the family and the family business with great success.
But there was something wrong about this, and she wasn’t an ancestress to be proud of, exactly, though why my mother was uneasy in talking about her was never made clear, maybe not even to her. Was it that she worked, something an upper class woman would never do unless pushed to an extremity? Was it that she was Chinese? My mother’s family, clearly a group of pleasant snobs, prided itself on being purely Portuguese, aristocratic Portuguese, in the way that only colonials can be aristocratic. So Dry Champagne’s marriage was considered a mistake. A betise. A misalliance.
“Oh, go on, Mother,” I would say when I was young. “No way was grandmother’s family pure Portuguese. They’d lived in Macao for how many centuries?”
“No, no, no, they were, they were! No Chinese blood at all!”
Of course that’s impossible. My grandmother’s family had been living in Macao, at the tip of China, since the sixteenth century, and for at least four hundred years, Jesuit priests would go into the nearby Chinese countryside and rescue exposed baby girls, who even then were considered a burden. They would bring these girls back and raise them as Catholic brides, or morganatic wives, for the Portuguese settlers. There were never enough Portuguese women there — it was impossible that my family kept the pure bloodline my mother swears they were so proud of.
I wonder now, as I write this, if the fierce battle between girls of a similar age didn’t come from being born in a place where girls were in themselves so little valued. A place where, if you were a girl, you might be left lying about the countryside, waiting for whatever wild animals or foreign priests might come and scoop you up. When you are born and you look around you and you see that resources for your kind are scarce, how can you do otherwise than instinctively fight to the finish with your own kind, no matter how silly or self-defeating the fight?
I was raised to fight with other girls, too. My oldest friend still gets annoyed about how my mother would bribe me to best her — we two always at the head of the class, one before the other, in turn it seemed like, for years — and she’s quite right; it made me unhappy and uneasy, too. I used to deal with it by purposely pulling back on my grades if I felt I was moving too far ahead, but I was unhappy about that as well, as if somehow I was failing my mother, somehow betraying her. But there was an even greater layer of complexity, which is that I knew, also somehow, that if I was at the top of my class every time, my mother would be filled with anxiety of her own. She couldn’t be beaten, not even by her daughter. I could see this. I longed for her to be happy. I longed to make her happy. But there seemed no decent way out of the muddle.
I hated competing myself, but I did it compulsively, always looking metaphorically over my shoulder in hopes that my mother was watching and feeling proud. But I hated it. I felt toxic all over if I triumphed in conversation over some less articulate girl; I lay awake at night berating myself for unkindness, even when it went unnoticed by anyone else.
When I was six, my mother made me a white plush coat and hat from a remnant bought for a couple of dollars at a discount fabric store. I called it my Snow Queen Coat, and I loved it dearly. One day I made Susan Work cry because she didn’t have a Snow Queen Coat. She only had — poor thing! — a very expensive camel’s hair topper bought new at the City of Paris department store. Her mother called my mother to complain. My mother’s eyes shone with glee at this, for Susan Work’s mother, blonde, aristocratic, and wealthy, had not been kind to her. I was pleased I had made her laugh. But I was unhappy, too. Susan Work was a friend of mine, and I liked her camel’s hair coat. I didn’t want to make her cry. I hadn’t meant to make her cry. I hadn’t set out to make her cry, hadn’t meant to be cruel, hadn’t meant to tease her or torment her — so I thought. I had just done what I thought was right, describing my Snow Queen Coat in glowing terms, trying to share it, trying to explain my mother’s triumph in making it…had I maybe wanted to triumph after all? But why? Why would I want to triumph over my friend?
There was no way out of this particular maze. Not then, anyway.
Years later, I found the way out. It was at the end of my first marriage, a time of desperate assessment and retrenching. We were living, my first husband and I, off the dregs of the money I’d made writing two films (both of them a matter of so much competitive contention that I left LA exhausted, wishing fervently for nothing else than to be left alone). My then husband, an undiscovered genius always on the verge of beginning his great work, had a great fear of trying to earn his living in any way that was beneath him. So I had to get a job near the mountain perched home I had just, frighteningly, bought with the last of my money…but a job that wouldn’t interrupt my writing hours. Ever practical, I looked around, and saw a restaurant half way between my house and the nearest town. I figured they might need a cocktail waitress, and that would just suit me — the hours and the tips and the restless activity after a day at the typewriter. So I went in and said I’d been a cocktail waitress — a total lie, the closest I’d ever gotten to waitressing of any kind was a two week stint at a Kentucky Fried Chicken counter when I was seventeen –, and was hired on the spot. Had I only known, Brian, the manager, would have hired a llama if it had come in and said it was a cocktail waitress, but I was breathless with worry that I’d be found out. And when I saw the phalanx of highly professional, steadily ironic waitresses all staring at me, my nerves went taut. Of course they would be out to get me. Women were always out to get women. But I would fool them.
It was they who fooled me, those wonderful women at Callahan’s, on the Oregon border, high in the mountains, may they never be forgotten. They took me in like an abandoned kitten, and set me on my feet, and made sure I learned what tricks I needed to know fast. They made sure I wouldn’t starve. They made me part of their network immediately, one where you could call on help or be called on at any time.
This suited me and soothed me and healed me and got me through the months before and after my divorce. It was the women who did it.
Every night after work I would sit in front of the restaurant’s huge open-hearth fireplace reading the bartender’s tabloids and drinking my shift glass of Chardonnay, just listening to the talk going on around me, the female murmur of it. It was the first time I could remember where I felt safe in a group of women. I felt as safe as I had in my aunt and uncle’s house, so many years before. And I knew, finally, that there was a world where women didn’t have to claw each other for resources after all.
Why was this, I wondered. I pondered over it, every night I sat there quietly drinking my wine. Why had I found in Oregon the solidarity between women I’d been looking for, and been sure I’d never find?
One day, the answer jumped out at me: it was the history of the place. And not just the history, but, specifically, the economic history. It was the history of how many resources there were and how they were distributed and how they were available.
Now Oregon was settled by families who came west in wagon trains. It was a long journey, and a hard one, so only the hardiest and canniest of husband/wife teams were likely to survive it. In a family like that, where the husbands would, like as not, be away from the homestead trapping and selling furs for most of the year, the wives had better have been capable, strong, and, above all, connected to their neighbors, the other wives. Survival depended on it. Your share of the resources, and your ability to keep them, didn’t depend on whether or not you were ornamental enough for your husband to keep you around. It didn’t depend on “feminine wiles” — a mean spirited form of manipulation got up in lace and satin — not the way it did to the trophy wives of the Californian gold rush further south. No, your ability in the harsher northwest to provide for yourself and your family depended on your ability to deal with those around you, to make alliances, to defend your interests, and to combine your interests with those of others. A woman who could do that was not a woman who was going to be left to starve. She was going to be the backbone of her community.
And she was not going to let others starve, either. In that economic structure, to let someone else starve would have given you no advantage — and every disadvantage. In the fight against the wilderness, it could be you laid low next by childbirth, illness, oh, by a hundred thousand misfortunes. To take care of your neighbors was a form of insurance. If you took care of them, they would take care of you.
There was a very simple fact here. In Oregon, the women worked, and were expected to work, and were expected to provide for others. They were not expected to be ornamental and manipulative and to win positions for themselves and their children in an economic structure dominated by men — a structure where someone like my Chinese ancestress, who ran the family business, was considered somehow lower class, somehow not… womanly. They did not have, in their history, in the back of their minds always, the fact that they were of little worth because of their sex, liable, if not pretty and charming and cunning enough, to be left to starve on a mountainside. A terror like that is not soon soothed, if ever. And if the genial forgiving support of the waitresses at Callahan’s had not been formed in a day, but through generations of women being valued for their abilities, surviving by working together by day and by talking among themselves next to the fire at night, just think of how many years of economic uncertainty, of little girls laid out to die of cold on the mountainsides, it took another group of women to turn against their own kind.
It can’t make my mother happy to be competitive. But I would guess, feeling for her an odd, sharp sympathy, that she finds she can’t stop. When it’s compete or die, there wouldn’t be very much choice. And yet, it’s not compete or die. There are other ways. There were other ways.
But would a little girl be able to find those ways if she had been born in my mother’s position, in my mother’s time and place? What if she was born to a world where men controlled the resources and women needed to scheme to get their share? What if she was born to a woman who had just lost her protector in that system, who found herself a single parent of two small girls, with no way of making a living? What if that little girl knew, as she grew older, that a daughter, unlike a son, was a burden to those around her unless she could find a protector of her own? Wouldn’t she be terrified to find herself in that kind of a maze? Would she be able to find her way out? I don’t know that I could have myself.
And yet, I would have longed to. My mother must have longed to, as well. Who wouldn’t long for a warm gathering of women? How could we help longing for the mutual support that unites instead of the battle that divides? I do long for it. It’s where, instead of a search for Power, I finally found, with great relief as if in throwing off some huge burden, a search for Love. It’s where I found the answer to why my Aunt Celia treats, with such affectionate patience, my mother’s constant clamoring for first place. It isn’t because of blindness. No. It’s because of Love.
(read more about competition between women in Linda Sandoval's LETTER FROM LOS ANGELES …and in ASK WENDY SLAPS A HELLHOUND. ..)