On our first date John and I laugh about terrible things and I like him immediately. John tells me that he is a tech guy who used to be a jazz musician and that being a tech guy is better. He tells me about his son who is starting a music career. He tells me the story of the rest of his family: that his parents were each other’s second spouses and that they divorced when he was young. He tells me that he has five older half-siblings from his parents’ first marriages, and that they all live far away, except for the eldest brother who died years ago. He tells me that his father, who was in his fifties when John was born, who was born in the same year as my grandmother, is dead. And his mother: she had lost her mother when she was a child. Her father had abused her throughout her childhood. Her older sister had died of a drug overdose when she was young.
I am intrigued by this big complex family—WASPy and messy and academic, filled with people prone to divorce, people prone to running away—that is so different from my own. There is a Cape Cod house in this family, and there were once lace factories and coal mines. I like the way John describes his relatives frankly and unrepentantly. I have read about people like this in books and John has been raised by them.
Over time, John tells me more about his mother. She now lives on the east coast of Florida. She is in her late eighties, physically and emotionally fragile. Done with two husbands, done raising three boys, done with long stretches of single motherhood, done with many years of work as a department administrator at Harvard. She is done with friends, if she had ever had them, and she is done leaving her condo for anything other than a haircut or doctor’s appointment.
John tells me that his mother is not a happy person, that she has been depressed all her life, that she has various diagnoses for trauma and dissociation, that she has panic attacks when she goes out in public, that once she no longer had to keep it together, she stopped keeping it together. John tells me that his understanding of his mother’s life is that she is finally getting what she has always wanted: to be left alone, with her books and with her music, though her hearing loss means that she is listening to music less and less these days.
I never thought that I would meet John’s mother, but two years into our relationship, we go to Florida so that I can meet her. We prepare carefully for the visit before we leave. John tells me to have low expectations, that his mother can’t hear well and naps often, that she probably won’t ask me many questions, that she probably won’t want to answer mine. He tells me that I shouldn’t feel like I have to be the one to keep a conversation going, which is what I always feel. He tells me that if his mother likes me, she will ask me to pluck her eyebrows.
When we arrive at her condo in Florida, I discover that John’s mother is beautiful. I have never seen a photograph of her because she has spent a lifetime avoiding being photographed. She has a stark white bob of beautiful hair and I am struck by the familiarity of her face, a face which I have seen a thousand times, which I have touched a thousand times already unknowingly in my boyfriend’s.
It is difficult for John to be in the same room as his mother and he is the best son that he can be to her. He does her errands and goes food shopping for her; he fixes things in her apartment and he cooks her favorite meals. He buys her favorite seafood salad from her favorite store and she savors the vinegary octopus. We flip her mattress. We do the dishes. He supports her financially. He cannot look her in the eye.
John’s mother and I talk. I tell her about myself. I ask her questions about her career as a university administrator, which is something we have in common. I ask her about living in Massachusetts, a place where I have lived, about the college we both attended, about her children and John’s son, whom I love. She doesn’t say much. Even though John has told me not to feel like I need to make conversation, I feel like I need to make conversation. I ask questions gently, carefully, trying to make connections between the two of us. I hit dead ends. John’s mother tells me that she doesn’t remember things. I ask her what John was like as a child and she looks at me with John’s face and she says: it hurts to talk about the past.
John’s mother loves classical music and her hearing loss makes her sad. She loves visual art and has the crowded gallery walls of a character in a Wes Anderson movie. Her condo is filled with prints from modern art exhibitions, ceramics from Cape Cod artists, haunting crayon drawings by her children and grandchildren that she has taken seriously and framed well.
John’s mother has an upright Steinway piano. She asks us if we can take it to Los Angeles for John’s son. She can no longer hear well enough to play, she tells us, and the piano is taunting her. John wants no part of this scheme.
John’s mother has a perfectly curated book collection. Her taste in books, I declare to John, is excellent, and I say this because John’s mother has my taste in books. Her shelves are filled with Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Eudora Welty, Graham Greene. She reads the same Irish mystery novels as I do, and she reads many books of poetry. She has art books and Greek tragedies and thick anthologies. She wants to tell me she has just purchased John Ashbery’s first book, Some Trees. It sits on the small table next to the chair that she spends most of her waking hours in.
John’s mother is flinty and New Englandy, and she is hard where I am soft. It hurts to talk about her past, and so instead we talk about books and poems about the past. John’s mother has read Virginia Woolf’s diaries. She is always reading Yeats. She wants to read Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad. She shows me her manila folder filled with clippings of twenty years of poems from the New Yorker.
She presents me, slyly, with a Maxine Kumin poem called “Xanthopsia” to read. The poem is about Van Gogh, and I don’t even realize it’s about Van Gogh until I make it halfway through. When I realize it’s about Van Gogh, I tell her. She tells me that she knew it was about Van Gogh right from the beginning the first time she ever read it, because of the “Yellow House” reference in the second line. I needed more time, I tell her. I needed to get to the sunflowers to know for sure. “Xanthopsia,” the poem tells me, is a term “for when objects appear / more yellow than they really are.” I have come to this realization late, but soon enough for John’s mother. She asks me to pluck her eyebrows.
We move into the light and I hold her face in my hands, this face which has made and unmade my boyfriend in every way. I pull her soft skin taught, pluck each hair with deliberation, afraid. She doesn’t move. Later, when I am in the bathroom, she tells John that I did a good job with her eyebrows.
John’s mother likes to talk about what she doesn’t like. She doesn’t like Meyer lemons and she hates the Yankees and she doesn’t like living in a world without music. She tells me that she has remembered something about John’s childhood: she remembers that they once made cookies with his brothers for Christmas.
I know a lot about John’s young life: the case of meningitis that almost killed him when he was a toddler, the way his parents moved four times in seven years before divorcing, the research essay that he wrote about the Bauhaus in seventh grade, the time his father caught him shoplifting, his high school crushes, the feeling he had when hanging out with his best friend’s family, the feeling he had as a latchkey kid waiting for his depressed mother to come home on cold snowy days. One time they also made cookies for Christmas.
We can’t talk about any of this so we talk about Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal. She tells me about reading John Ashbery and I tell her that she should try some Frank O’Hara. I tell her about the time I went to Jackson Pollock’s studio on the eastern end of Long Island. I tell her about the book I wrote about poetry. John has told me that I do not need his mother to like me and yet of course I need her to like me and I am going to talk with her about poems and art until she does.
John’s mother tells us that her hearing aids don’t work, that she has read that some people use AirPods as hearing aids and she wonders if that would work for her. John, who works at Apple, knows that this very weekend, Apple is releasing updated software so that AirPods can be used like hearing aids. We leave her condo into the humid air and drive to the Apple store to buy her AirPods. We have to wait a day for the new software release.
I am enthralled by this sad beautiful old woman who wants to sit quietly in a room reading poetry for years, which is something I too have wanted to do, have done. She is cold and austere and she refuses to talk about her life but I think that I know something about it because we read the same books, because her companion these days is Some Trees. She is reticent, she is defensive, she won’t be what Ashbery’s trees tell us we are; she won’t touch, love, explain, but I will: I love her bookcase of well-read books because they are my well-read books. I love that when I ask for her Wi-Fi password it is Eudorawelty34 because mine is bloomsbury. I love that we are very different but that we are the same kind of people, kind of, and I love that when I look at her face I can see the face of her son: my you, whose merely being there means something, means everything.
It is our last day in Florida and we have an hour at John’s mother’s condo before we have to leave for the airport. John installs the new hearing aid software on his mother’s phone and sets up her new AirPods. We are quiet at the kitchen table, watching him work. He asks her what she would like to listen to, and she asks for a quartet I don’t know playing the music of a composer that I do. John, who knows a lot about classical music, who spent the first half of his career as a musician, who now works in audio technology, who never talks with his mother about music, finds the song quickly. He gives her the AirPods, shows her how to place them in her ears, and he presses play.
I watch John’s mother closely. She closes her eyes for a long time and then she opens them and she begins to cry. She cannot speak. John and I look at each other. He looks past his mother out the window. John’s mother tells us that she thought that she would never hear music again. She closes her eyes, listening to the music that we cannot hear.
John is looking everywhere but at his mother. John’s mother is crying and I am crying too.
In the car on the way to the airport, I tell John that he has done something beautiful for his mother, that he has brought music back into her life, that this is not a metaphor but an actual thing. He deflects, telling me he hates when people are sentimental about technology, that whatever this is it will not last, that his mother will hate the AirPods within two weeks and that they are not capable of solving hearing loss, that the moment at the table was a fluke and that I should not read anything into it because his mother is not capable of whatever I think she is capable of. I hold his hand and I don’t believe him.
John is right. Within two weeks, his mother has declared that the AirPods don’t work, that her hearing is still distorted, that music will never be the same, that she wants him to take her piano. I hold on to that moment at the kitchen table, and John and his mother throw it away.
When we come home from Florida, I start sending books to John’s mother. I send books of poetry and art books that I think she will like, and I send her the book that I wrote about poetry. I want it to touch, love, explain everything. Anything. John’s mother reads the book that is my heart, and her response to John is that I am young. I am forty-two.
John tells me that his mother’s favorite short story is Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.,” so I read it for the first time. It’s narrated by a young woman referred to only as Sister who has a chaotic and cruel family. On the final page, Sister escapes the family home to live alone in the post office where she works. “Oh, I like it here,” she says. “Here I am and here I’ll stay,” she says. “I want the world to know I’m happy.”
After I read the story, I read around it because that is what I like to do. I read that Sister is considered a classic example of an “unreliable narrator.” I’ve never liked the term as I think that all narrators of everything are unreliable and so the word “unreliable” always feels gratuitous to me. But the people want to know what Sister is not telling us: what role has Sister played in her family dynamic? What can’t she see about herself? What can’t she understand about her relationships and what does she choose to tell and not tell us? Is she actually happy at the P.O. or does she just want her family to think she is?
As if there is a way to tell. As if we could possibly know.
Jacquelyn Ardam is the author of Avidly Reads Poetry (NYU Press) and the director of the Undergraduate Research Center for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at UCLA. She lives in Los Angeles.
