From the WSJ Opinion Archives
AMANDA.BRIGHT@HOME
Chapter 15
Bob's battle-ax mother-in-law comes for a visit.
Click here to read Chapter 14.
She arrived earlier than either of them expected. On the Monday morning that Bob returned to work, Amanda's mother telephoned at 7:30 from New York's Penn Station. She was getting on the 8 a.m. Metroliner--but Amanda was "not to worry about picking me up." Bob left the house with a hunted look on his face and promised to call Amanda as soon as he emerged from his meeting with his boss at the Department of Justice, Frank Sussman. A few hours later, Amanda's mother burst through the front door, bearing a knapsack and a battered paper shopping bag from Macy's.
"So how is the future first female president of the United States--oh, and my little Supreme Court Justice?" she effused, kissing the tops of her grandchildren's heads.
Ellie Burnside Bright entered a room like a human wrecking ball. She was round and compact and packed immediate wallop. In her mid-50s, she had long ago shorn away every aspect of her appearance that she considered decorative. As a young woman she had worn her thick brown hair long and flowing, but now it was lopped off and razored at the sides like a man's. She dressed in functional clothing that could be rolled and unrolled over her shapeless figure without the fuss of pressing.
On this day, she wore a boxy purple T-shirt, baggy jeans, and orthopedic sneakers. Her once sharply defined cheekbones could still be discerned underneath a padding of flesh, like the lines of a wire hanger beneath a bulky winter coat, but she never bothered with cosmetics and was untroubled by the two unruly whiskers that sprouted out of the mole on her left cheek or by the light feathering of hair that coated her upper lip. Her most striking feature remained her eyes, which glowed in their settings like two fire opals. These had not faded with age; if anything, they burned more intensely than ever, stoked perhaps by the daily-changing political button she pinned to her shirt. "My Grandchildren Are Wanted Grandchildren" was this morning's unfortunate choice.
"You're looking--weary," was the mother's greeting to the daughter. "Where do you want this?" She indicated the knapsack.
"Don't worry. I'll put it in Emily's room." Amanda hauled it up the stairs like a stevedore, trying to suppress the rise of irritation at her mother's remark. Every time she saw her mother, Amanda steeled herself to present an optimistic front--and every time the front collapsed in a matter of minutes.
Her mother, meanwhile, withdrew from her shopping bag two presents for the children.
"Look what I brought for you." She handed Ben a package labeled "Sand Art." She offered Emily a building kit that assembled into a small, plastic bulldozer. Both children failed to conceal their dismay.
"You can make beautiful pictures with colored sand, Ben," their grandmother burbled, her enthusiasm undiminished by her audience's reaction. "See on the directions? On the back? You can make a sunset, or an elephant. Emily, honey, that's a really good toy, but you have to construct it. It's very simple." And to Amanda, when she returned from upstairs: "I checked--they're age appropriate."
Amanda quickly assessed the gifts and forced cheerfulness into her voice. "Isn't that nice of grandma? Can we say 'Thank you' to grandma?' Ben? Emily?"
"Thank you, grandma," the children mumbled.
"Why don't you go play with those wonderful toys now," Amanda prodded. "I'm going to give grandma some tea."
The children headed towards their rooms. Before they had moved eight paces away, they had negotiated a swap.
"I'm going to make a pwetty picture," Emily informed Ben.
"And then I'll bulldoze it," came the cheerful reply.
Ellie Bright affected not to hear them and followed Amanda into the kitchen.
"Not much. The usual." Amanda had learned to answer all maternal questions about her life with the wariness of a suspect under interrogation. She knew her uncommunicativeness disappointed her mother. Each Christmas Ellie Bright gave Amanda a clutch of new novels about warm, earthy mother-daughter relationships: novels in which mothers and daughters fought together, laughed together, but in the end confided in each other, "coming to terms" as one of last year's dust jackets put it, "with the quiet truths of living and loving and simply being women." For as long as Amanda could remember, she and her mother had rarely laughed together, and with even less frequency confided in each other. On the few occasions that Amanda had been lured into unburdening herself, her mother's flaming opal eyes quickly flared into a searing heat as she grilled Amanda over "how any daughter of mine could think that way."
"Really?" Ellie said. "You don't look so well."
"I'm tired. Emily woke up in the middle of the night."
"That's not it. You seem unhappy."
"Mom, you just walked in the door. Why would you instantly assume that I'm unhappy?"
"I can see it for myself. I'm your mother."
"Honestly, I'm tired. That's all." Guiltily Amanda thought of the secret baby inside her, but she told herself, I will not break. Under no circumstances will I break. Mom must not know--not yet.
"Fine. Have it your way. Tell me about Bob."
Bob had lately become their safe topic, which was surprising given her mother's mistrust of husbands in general and her original opposition to Amanda's marriage in particular. With Bob's involvement in the Megabyte case, however, he earned her ultimate accolade: He was now a "crusader." Ellie Bright loathed Mike Frith and everything Megabyte represented--the wealth and power of giant corporations, the technological enslavement of poor nations, the triumph of male-designed computer operating systems, etc. Amanda appreciated the praise her mother now lavished on Bob--and yet it hurt a little too. Its implication was obvious: You, Amanda, are not a crusader.
"I've been following the whole thing," her mother continued when Amanda hesitated to answer. "Imagine! Bob attacked by both The Wall Street Journal and Mike Frith--in one week! I've been telling everyone he's my son-in-law. He's giving them real hell. You must be so proud."
"Yes--but there's been some trouble for Bob over the Hochmayer business."
"Pshaw."
"Seriously. He's going in to talk to his boss about it today."
"You can't listen to those right-wing bastards. They're always going to exaggerate."
"Well, the Justice Department is listening to them. Did you see the article in the National Standard?"
Her mother sipped her tea. "I'd never touch that rag."
"You should--this once. It suggested that Frank Sussman might hang Bob out to dry to distract attention from the fact that Hochmayer and Chasen are important donors to the party, and that's why the president wants the case against Megabyte pursued. Frith's apparently a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to politics."
"More right-wing propaganda," Ellie Bright replied dismissively. "Although I'd agree on one point: The whole system is corrupt. But Bob will be fine. The Justice Department should be treating him like a hero."
"We'll see I guess," Amanda said doubtfully. "In any case, we'll know sometime today."
Amanda removed the tea things.
"I'll be off then," Ellie Bright announced, standing up. "I've got three galleries to do before supper."
"I thought perhaps you might want to do something with Ben and Emily," Amanda offered. "I've got an appointment this afternoon--"
"Maybe tomorrow. I'll check the papers. See if there's any children's theater going on. Wait, I think I'm visiting some people tomorrow. . . . Well, we can discuss it this evening. What time do you want me back for dinner?"
The most impressive thing about her mother, Amanda thought, was that she always had an agenda of her own. It was also one of the the least impressive things about her.
"I don't know. Six-thirty?"
"Fine."
Her mother marched down the front walk, a fanny pack strapped to her waist and a floppy canvas fishing hat perched on top of her head. She paused at the street to consult a portable map of the Washington subway system, and then headed briskly off in the direction of the station, not once glancing back at Amanda's figure in the screen door.
Amanda went upstairs to check on the children. They had scattered the colored sand all over Emily's carpet. Ben was blissfully bulldozing it into little piles. Emily had created a beach for one of her dolls and was in the midst of supplying it with an ocean carried in from the bathroom sink.
"Oh, gosh."
As Amanda returned downstairs to fetch the vacuum and a sponge, the telephone rang. It was Bob.
"Everything's OK," he began unreassuringly, the way he might have prefaced an account of an accident with the news, "No one's dead."
He lowered his voice. "I don't want to go into it now, but I'm still--employed--"
"Is there going to be an investigation?"
"No. I don't think so."
"You don't think so?"
"Please Amanda, let's discuss this when I'm home. It's awkward right now--I just wanted you not to worry."
"OK," she said, frustrated.
"Is your mother there?"
"She's gone out to the galleries."
"That's good I suppose."
"Yes."
"I'll see you tonight then."
"Bob?"
"Yes?"
"I--I love you."
His voice warmed. "You too, darling."
Amanda was among these some. Twice before she had resisted Blumstein's urging that she travel several miles into the Washington suburbs to deliver in a birthing center decorated to resemble a colonial-style bed-and-breakfast, with chintz sheets and canopied, hard beds. Amanda certainly did not want to give birth at home; laundry was tiresome enough on an ordinary day without the addition of blood-soaked sheets, and the thought of Ben and Emily bouncing around the room while Bob helplessly held a cold washcloth to Amanda's forehead as she "pushed" was not an especially romantic vision of delivery.
Amanda secretly liked the hospital labor room, with its movie channel on the television and push-button reclining bed and the 48-hour stay during which she didn't have to think about who was making dinner or whether it was time to put the children to bed. Amanda simply nodded as the midwife rhapsodized about the "emotionally moving" home births she had performed.
The coexistence between Blumstein and her medical neighbors was clearly uneasy; in reaction against the surrounding impersonality of high-tech medicine, Blumstein had decorated her office like the embassy of a small African nation. There were colorful tribal masks and prints hanging on the walls; a hand-knotted rug on the floor; her examining table was covered with a batik cloth that she removed when the table was in use.
"Amanda Bright!" she exclaimed, wandering into the waiting area and embracing her. "How wonderful to see you again. Are these my babies?"
Blumstein crouched down to look at Ben and Emily, who were absorbed in trying to inflate surgical gloves that a kindly nurse had brought in to amuse them.
"My, aren't you both so big!"
She turned to Amanda. "Can you give me some urine?" she asked loudly.
The other patients--weary looking women in advanced states of pregnancy--averted their eyes. Amanda flushed.
"Uh, yes, I'll go back."
"Fine. I'll meet you in my office."
This was another aspect of Sarah Blumstein's philosophy. There was to be no squeamishness about bodily functions. Pissing, bleeding, breast-feeding--all to be talked about proudly and forthrightly.
Amanda left her children in the waiting area and returned to Blumstein's office a few minutes later clutching a little plastic cup.
"Just put it on the side table, hon. I'll have a look at it in a sec."
Sarah Blumstein was sitting on a comfy, well-worn sofa. She did not use a desk. She patted the seat next to her and Amanda joined her.
"So, a third! Are you happy?"
"I think so," Amanda replied, somewhat embarrassed. "It wasn't planned."
"Just came suddenly like the rains, huh?"
"That's a good way to put it."
The midwife asked Amanda a series of questions about her recent health and then rose to inspect Amanda's urine. She held it up to the light like a connoisseur of fine wine.
"It's a nice rich straw color."
She gave it a lusty sniff. "Good smell too. Very healthy."
Amanda worried the midwife might taste it as well, but Sarah placed it back down on the table and began performing a test.
The office was peaceful; Amanda appreciated the soothing, oceanic strains of New Age music that washed gently through speakers hidden in the walls as the midwife did her work. Sarah Blumstein was about the same age as Amanda's mother. She looked like her too: the same ample body, the same cropped hair, the same casual clothes. Sarah Blumstein eschewed lab coats and hospital scrubs, even in the delivery room, and today wore a pale blue baggy jogging suit. But whereas Amanda's mother's edges were hard, Blumstein's were soft. Her opinions may have been as direct and forceful as Ellie Bright's, but they were expressed in the lilting, earnest cadence of a guidance counselor.
"Hmm, I think you're right, Amanda. Let's have a look inside. Get out of your clothes, put on that terry robe hanging over there, and I'll be right back," Blumstein instructed.
Amanda prepared herself and waited on the examining table. In a few minutes Blumstein returned with a young female obstetrician pushing a computer-laden trolley.
"Is this the patient?" the doctor asked.
"This is my client, Amanda Bright," Blumstein corrected her. "We don't treat pregnancy as an illness in this room."
"I'm Dr. Stark. I'll be performing--"
"helping with--"
"--the sonogram."
Amanda smiled and shook her hand. The doctor was very pretty, she thought, and inoffensive despite Blumstein's obvious disdain for her.
The two women fiddled around uncomfortably with Amanda's lower regions. Amanda kept her eyes fixed on the sonogram's computer screen. A fuzzy, black and white image of Amanda's interior flickered into view. There was an unmistakable oval shape floating in the middle, larger than she expected.
"There it is!" said the midwife. "There's your little bean!"
The doctor tapped at the keys and small white arrows appeared on the screen surrounding the oval.
"I would estimate five weeks," the doctor murmured. "Would you agree Sarah?"
"For sure."
The doctor hit another key and a printer produced a copy of the picture.
"Here you are," said Blumstein, snatching the picture before the doctor could take it and presenting it to Amanda herself. "The first photograph of your baby!"
There it was, indeed. Amanda studied the picture while the doctor removed the trolley. It was real now, no doubt about it. Already she could feel the changes taking place: the waves of sleepiness, the slight nausea, a burning near her heart. Amanda still felt misgivings. But was it possible, despite everything, there was just the tiniest seed of excitement growing within her too?
Amanda offered him a scotch before he asked for it. Bob accepted it gratefully and sat down at the kitchen table.
"Where's your mother?" he asked, looking around before he spoke.
"She's upstairs taking a shower."
"The kids?"
"They're watching a video."
Bob removed his jacket and took a large gulp from his drink.
"Here's the upshot," he began. "I'm not going to be investigated . . ."
"Oh, Bob, what a relief." Amanda sank into the chair beside him.
". . . nor am I going to be fired."
"So it's all going to be OK then?"
"Not exactly." He took another sip. "They're moving me off the case."
"What?"
Bob shrugged. "Frank spoke to the division's ethics officer. I think he also spoke to Hochmayer and maybe even Chasen. Everyone seems convinced that I did nothing that warrants investigation. But Frank also feels that appearances have been compromised and it would be best if they transferred me somewhere else. You know how politically sensitive this is . . ."
"So the National Standard was right," Amanda said gloomily.
Bob started to say something as if he was going to correct her, but he stopped himself. Instead he got up and poured himself another scotch.
"Maybe. Jeez, I don't know."
"Where are they transferring you to?"
"I'm not sure yet. They'll let me know in a few days."
"Who will be taking over the case?"
"Frank's now talking about bringing in some star attorney from the outside--on a contractual basis, to take the depositions, to be the face of the thing."
"He's hiring someone from the private sector?" Amanda felt truly betrayed.
"Yeah."
For a few moments they just looked at each other across the kitchen and said nothing. Bob's lips were tightly pressed together in a half-ironic smile, the way we sometimes greet fate when it deals us an unexpected blow: Isn't it a queer thing that we should have been standing in that precise spot when the truck careened around the corner? If we had only had the foresight to stand two feet back--it might have missed us.
Amanda's mind was cast back to that day, so many years ago now, when Bob had started at Justice. She met him for lunch. He was waiting for her by the main entrance, standing between the two stone lions that guarded the massive doors, underneath the chiseled inscription: "The Place of Justice Is a Hallowed Place." The sleepy majesty of the lions suggested that not only was the place hallowed, but it had long been so and would continue so for a long time hence.
The department's employees passed in and out with no sense of awe: like the lions, they too seemed to take for granted that the nation's justice could be carried out by the punch of a clock. A few jacket-less men lingered on the steps to smoke. Bob was enchanted by the dingy magnificence of it all: the vaulting rotundas, the Art Deco murals, the silvery aluminum leaf that trimmed the moldings, the plaster and limestone and yellow marble that covered everything else; this contrasted with the battered government-issue furniture, the drooping flags, and the crookedly hung photographs of the current president and attorney-general.
When Bob and his colleagues walked into a courtroom to face a slick opposition of private lawyers in $2,000 suits, he felt, he said, like one of those marshals in an old Western movie confronting the diamond-pinkied elite of a corrupt frontier town. Those folks might have the money, they might have the interests, Bob told Amanda over their sandwiches, but in his shabby brown briefcase Bob carried the might of the United States government--and there was nothing sweeter than the moment when those slick bastards discovered that they were outgunned.
And now it was all at an end. After the drama of the past few months, it was a sorry little end. Bob would hang on, he would continue to breathe in the air of the Department of Justice, but it was just a matter of time before he drew his last gasp.
Amanda went to the stove and switched on a burner under a large pot of couscous.
Suddenly, a voice shouted from upstairs: "Is that Super Bob?"
Bob grimaced. In walked Amanda's mother barefoot and dressed in the large muumuu she wore as pajamas, her wet hair spiked around her face like a hedgehog's spines.
"How's my hero?" She gave him a fat embrace.
"Hello Ellie."
"You got anything to drink?" she asked Amanda. "White wine is fine. I see I'm missing the cocktail hour."
Amanda brought a wine bottle and a single glass into the living room.
"Aren't you having any?" her mother asked.
"I'll have water with dinner. I don't feel much like wine right now."
"Humph. That's not like you."
Ellie Bright settled herself in the sofa, her plump toes not quite grazing the floor.
"So tell me Bob, what have you done to piss off Mike Frith today?"
Bob glanced down. "Not much, I'm afraid. I think Frith will actually be quite happy with the events of today."
"They're pulling Bob off the case, Mom."
Her mother looked aghast. "That's impossible! They can't do that! Why would they do that?"
"They have their reasons," Bob said flatly.
Amanda retreated to the kitchen to check on dinner. She heard her mother's voice rising and cursing. "Don't those assholes realize what they're doing?" The couscous was fine. Amanda went upstairs to fetch the children, guiltily leaving Bob to handle the wrath of Ellie Bright by himself.
Later, after the dishes had been put away, Amanda made up a bed for her mother in the living room. It was only 9 p.m., but Amanda was already desperately tired. The sleepiness of early pregnancy overcame her like a narcotic, and she lifted the large cushions from the sofa as if each were the weight of a boulder. Ellie Bright was brushing her teeth over the kitchen sink. Bob, in return for dealing with her mother before dinner, had been permitted to escape upstairs with the children afterward.
The meal had not gone too badly, under the circumstances. They had used the presence of Ben and Emily to steer her mother off the topic of Megabyte and the Justice department. Thwarted, Ellie Bright had directed her criticisms at the children. Usually this drove Amanda into a simmering rage: Despite her mother's professed affection for her grandchildren, she seemed constitutionally incapable of regarding Ben and Emily as themselves--spontaneous, complicated little individuals--and instead insisted on using them as walking opportunities to propound her ideas. Thus when Ben held up his knife and pointed it at Emily like a gun, Ellie stiffened with horror and accusingly demanded: "Where is this boy being exposed to violent images?"
Had they been alone, Amanda would have corrected Ben immediately. But as her mother launched into a lecture about the violence of the culture, and how it was marketed to the children through the corporate media, and why weren't Bob and Amanda doing more to stop it, Amanda found herself defending Ben: "Oh, Mom, it's nothing, boys sometimes do that."
This only inflamed Ellie further ("How can you say it's nothing?"). Amanda gave up, allowing her mother to finish her lecture and to feel that she had won the point. Ellie then pounced on a comment of Emily's--"Mommy, for Halloween can I be Thleeping Beauty?"
"Didn't I warn you how corrupting those fairy tales are!" Ellie snapped. But Amanda refused to rise to the bait. She said only, "you can be anything you want, honey." To which Ellie Bright added coaxingly, "Yes, maybe Emily could dress up as a soccer star. That's what her mommy did when she was a little girl."
"Actually, it was Billie Jean King," Amanda replied. "But I wanted to be the Tooth Fairy."
Amanda was tucking in the sofa's sheets when her mother padded in from the kitchen. She sat herself in a chair in the corner and followed the progress of Amanda's bed-making over the top of a novel.
"Don't worry about an extra pillow," Ellie Bright said. "I can make do with one."
"I brought two anyway."
Amanda smoothed the blanket and stacked the sofa cushions in a neat pile by the fireplace.
"OK, mom, it's ready. I hope it's not too uncomfortable. We keep meaning to replace this old pull-out."
"I'm sure it's fine. I've slept outside on garbage bags in the rain, for heaven's sake.
"The Women's March on Washington, 1975," her mother added when Amanda looked puzzled.
"Right. Of course. Can I get you anything else?" Amanda paused by the archway leading to the front hall.
"Nope. Got my book. That's all I need."
"OK then. I think I'll go up and have my bath."
"Amanda?"
Amanda had already placed her foot on the first step.
"Yes?"
"You know, I've been thinking about this Bob business."
Amanda sighed, glanced up longingly at the light spilling from her bedroom, and turned back to her mother.
"Uh huh?"
"Well, in some ways it's not all bad. It presents an opportunity for you."
Amanda rubbed her eyes and wandered back into the living room but did not sit down.
"How is it an opportunity for me?" Amanda asked, trying to keep the exasperation out of her tone.
"I don't know if Bob is going to continue on at Justice--"
"I don't know either."
"--maybe this is a chance for you to get back to work and give Bob some time off so he can figure out what he's going to do next."
"Yes, maybe." Amanda went to turn away again.
"Amanda, you're not listening to me."
"Mom, I am listening--I'm just tired of talking about this for the moment. It's been a long evening. I can't think about it anymore."
"You ought to think about it," her mother said curtly. "It's only your entire future."
"I will--tomorrow. But right now I just want to have my bath."
"Fine."
Amanda made it halfway up the stairs before the pull of her own conscience drew her back down again.
"Look, mom, don't be angry. We can talk about this in the morning. There's no reason to fight about it."
Ellie Bright ostentatiously absorbed herself in her book.
"Don't do this mom. Speak to me. Let's just say goodnight and be friends."
"You don't appreciate when I'm trying to help you, Amanda," her mother said without raising her eyes.
"I don't need help. I need sleep."
"That's just what I mean. You don't take anything I say seriously."
"Mom, I really don't want to argue."
"Besides, why do you need sleep?" Now her mother looked at her directly. "Why on earth are you so tired? I'm 20 years older than you are, I've spent the whole afternoon walking around the city, and I'm not collapsing from fatigue. What have you done today that justifies you being so exhausted?"
"I don't need justification for being tired," Amanda retorted, against her better judgment. "You have no appreciation for what I do all day."
Her mother snapped her book closed. "Don't give me that. I was a wife and mother long before you were, and not only could I manage that but a helluva lot of other things as well."
"Yeah, yeah, I know. Your generation was tougher than mine. I've heard all this."
"Don't be sarcastic. We were tougher. As women we faced barriers you can't even imagine. We ripped them down for you. And now you take all that freedom we won for granted--or waste it. Look at you! Look at the choices you have, Amanda."
"Not so many at the moment."
"That's ridiculous. You just refuse to see them. You just refuse to take them. Instead--"
"Instead what?" She could no longer disguise her exasperation. "Well what? Go on, say it."
"Instead you choose to do nothing with your life."
They glared at each other, neither moving. Amanda's mother sat squatly on the bed, her angry, defiant face thrust forward like the wall of an impenetrable fortress.
"I am doing something with my life, mother," Amanda said, her furious voice barely rising above a whisper. "This,"--she indicated wildly with her hand the surrounding house and all it contained--"is not nothing. It is something. It is everything.
"And it is more than you ever gave me."
This time Amanda turned and did not look back, but ran swiftly up the stairs and slammed her door.
Miss Crittenden, a Washington resident, is the author of "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman." You can write to her at dcrittenden@amandabright.com. Illustration by Ned Crabb.
Watch for the final chapter of "Amanda.Bright@home" here on Tuesday, Sept. 3.
