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“I believe that in college you had other things on your mind,” Sara said.
Lisa looked at her hands. “I didn’t behave well in school. I had been raised with pink cashmere and white pearls. I was fascinated by the...I guess you’d say, the dark side of life. I experimented. I...” She pursed her lips. “It was bad. I was bad.”
She paused. “I came out of it enough that by the time Dad died, I was in a better place. I was engaged to a man my grandfather and uncle thought was perfect. I was sad about my father but...” She shrugged.
“You had a life to live,” Sara said.
“I did. It wasn’t until after I married that I found out what true hell was. My husband was like my uncle. I could take that but what I couldn’t abide was that they wanted me to be my mother.”
“A manager.”
“And an organizer. They wanted me to keep track of every business deal they made, but I inherited my father’s ability with numbers, which is none at all.”
“Bet they told you that you were a failure.” Kate’s voice told of her experience in that area.
“Every minute of every day. They never let up on me. I don’t know if this makes sense but I blamed my mother.”
“It’s hard when you’re constantly compared to another human being and always found wanting.” Sara didn’t look at Kate, but they knew she meant how she had been compared to Kate’s father.
“I’m ashamed to say that for years I had little to do with Mother. I told myself that she’d left me, that she wanted nothing to do with me. I pictured her as a Merry Widow, with no cares in the world. Dancing all night with no thoughts of me or Dad.”
“But your mother had Janet,” Sara said.
“You have done your research.”
“We’re finding things out,” Sara said.
“Tell us about her,” Jack said. “About Janet.”
“I don’t know where to begin.”
“When you met her,” Sara said. “Stories must begin at the beginning.”
“That would be when I realized that I needed my mother. In spite of all my nasty thoughts about her, there was no doubt in my mind that she’d take me in.”
Nineteen
WHEN LISA ARRIVED at her mother’s house, she was wallowing in self-pity. It was like she was in a vat of black oil that she couldn’t swim out of. It was all she could do to keep her face lifted enough to breathe. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to do that.
Divorce. That’s what her husband wanted. He and her uncle had been together when they told her. With exaggerated patience, they’d explained that she wasn’t pulling her weight with the family business—and therefore she had to go. Out of the business, out of the marriage.
She was thirty-two years old and a failure at everything she’d tried. She’d been a teenage rebel, always angry about... She wasn’t sure what made her angry. She just was.
In college she’d sunk very low, like barely-escaping-going-to-jail low. After she’d cleaned up her act, her uncle had introduced her to a young man who swept her off her feet. Oh! But it felt good to be wanted.
They were married in a beautiful—but economical—ceremony and had a lovely four-day honeymoon. When they got back, her husband and uncle had turned over what seemed to be the entire management of their businesses to her. She found out that at the wedding her uncle had signed her husband on as a junior partner. To Lisa, it felt like a bride price had been paid. Or in this case, it was that a husband had been purchased for her.
They were angry when she failed at everything they gave her to do.
“I’m like my father,” she told them. “My mother is the controller.”
At least that’s how she thought of her mother. The woman who’d abandoned her to a husband and uncle who expected her to be what she could never be.
But when she was very coolly told that there was to be a divorce—her uncle said she would be given “severance pay”—all Lisa wanted was to be with her mother.
She flew to Lachlan, Florida, and fell onto her mother. As Lisa knew she would, Sylvia took over. She coddled and cosseted and listened to her daughter. Agreed with her, sympathized, and often brought her food so Lisa didn’t have to face the world—meaning outside the one room.
Lisa was there for three days before her tears began drying up. The anger that was so natural to her began to spark a bit.
