Venus in the Afternoon

Flammable Vacations

98 FlammableVacations To understand how and wh y I lef t the sanity of my husband to go on vac ation with my mother, you would have to understand that nothing else could hav e ended my ambivalence and helped me make the decision I needed to make, and that I was sur e that a few days with my mother would. You would also need to understand the absolute sanctity for my mother of things that were on sale, or worse, things that were free, so that when she won a weekend in the country in a sweepstakes, I knew it would be easier to agree to go than to withstand her unrelenting pressure. Early on in our relationship my husband would say, “Stand up to her.” He was new then to me and to her. Now, years later, he understood. When my mother made up her mind about something, you had the choice of taking her on v ertically and being hit head on, or lying down and letting her wheels just graze you.Those were the choices. e e e I didn’t see my mother often. But I received bits of her weekly, sometimes daily. Not letters or postc ards but odd items that arrived like their own Morse code . Items for which she had accumulated coupons or found in one mor e sale she couldn ’t Flammable Vacations 99 resist. It didn’t matter how irrelevant, she would send away for anything that was f ree and hav e it shipped to my doorstep , mutant and unwanted, then to my sister ’s doorstep across the country and to anyone else in the family she could equip. Only my husband was ne ver a r ecipient. As if to say , if you were truly one of us, look at what could be y ours. And he looked, at the adult diapers (“S ave them,” she had said, “you never know.”), at the issues of discontinued br idal magazines (we had eloped), amused and relieved that he was not on her distribution list. Lately there had been a profusion of little boys’ underwear. Irregular, they were marked across the crotch. “What if I turn out to be infertile?” I asked when the third such package arrived. “What will it be like to hav e all these piles of underwear waiting to be filled? And why all boys?” “You’re right,” she answ ered. “We should leav e God his f ree choice. I will star t buying some of those pink vitamins I saw on sale at the drug store.” “I thought we were the ones who are supposed to have free choice,” I said. “Good point,” she responded, her voice tight and c lipped lest I dare interrupt. “So admit that y ou’ve married that man just to spite me and choose again.” e e e About twice a year I would brace myself and visit her in N ew York. I always flew down. I knew that if my mother r espected little else,she respected the strict arrival and departure of planes and I was therefore almost always guaranteed a clean exit. For a day or tw o before flying down, I would grow quiet, confusion gathering around me like so much baggage. Dante would sense it and cir cle me tentatively, knowing that I exper ienced these visits as perilous but necessary, that they pulled me away 1 0 0 V E N U S I N T H E A F T E R N O O N from him like some silent under tow, then crashed me back up against him bruised and only occasionally wiser. It was on my most r ecent trip to see my mother that I had gotten caught in the net of this vac ation. We were eating lunch—or rather I was eating lunch and my mother was pacing, cleaning a spot here,a corner there.This act was somewhat comical to me because all that was r eally visible of any sur face were the small areas that weren’t covered by newspapers,clippings and books. She was always flushed and excited to see me, as if something in her was stirr ed up by my arrival. Perhaps to channel this excitement, she prepared elaborate meals on the day s that I visited, which she ser ved immediately, regardless of the...