More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She’d no need of make-up or products or jewellery or expensive clothes, and in this way her financial circumstances, her politics and her aesthetic were all perfectly – conveniently – matched.
was an accessory only in the sense that in my very plainness I signified admirable maternal restraint, it being considered bad taste – in the circles to which my mother aspired – to dress your daughter like a little whore. But Tracey was unashamedly her mother’s aspiration and avatar, her only joy, in those thrilling yellow bows, a frou-frou skirt of many ruffles and a crop top revealing inches of childish nut-brown belly, and as we pressed up against the pair of them in this bottleneck of mothers and daughters entering the church I watched with interest as Tracey’s mother pushed the girl in
...more
semi-ironic servitude,
She knew, for example, that a car-boot sale – despite its unpromising name – was where you could find a better quality of person, and also their old Penguin paperbacks, sometimes by Orwell, their old china pill-boxes, their cracked Cornish earthenware, their discarded potter’s wheels.
Our flat was full of such things. No plastic flowers for us, sparkly with fake dew, and no crystal figurines. This was all part of the plan. Even things I hated – like my mother’s espadrilles – usually turned out to be attractive to the kind of people we were trying to attract, and I learnt not to question her methods, even when they filled me with shame.
she was never satisfied, she wanted gold in ‘my’ category, too – song and dance – though she could hardly sing a note. It was difficult to understand. I really felt that if I could dance like Tracey I would never want for anything else in this world.
But the main consequence of her transformation, for me, was this new and puzzling indirection in her conversation. She always seemed to be making adult jokes just over my head, to amuse herself, or to annoy my father.
or the relative insignificance of sexual love when placed beside the struggles of the people,
and more than ever we could not keep up, we were a disappointment, she had to keep explaining her terms.
The food was never healthy and yet it was prepared with seriousness and care,
After a while there was a light knock on the door, and Tracey’s mother came in, pink with crying, holding a tray of Angel Delight, the same pink as her face. We sat and ate in silence and, later, went to the fireworks.
But we understood our mothers a little better. We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway.
remained a place where they might be shamed.
‘These children deserve more!’ Not me in particular – ‘these children’.
We swept out of the hall together, my mother triumphant, me in a state of awe, neither of us any the wiser as to how I was doing at school.
And now – as if we were both trying to get on a see-saw at the same time – neither of us pressed too hard and a delicate equilibrium was allowed to persist. I could have my evil ballerina if she could have her backing dancer.
My mother didn’t fit into all of that any longer. She still cared for the group – intellectually, politically – but she was no longer one of them.
although she knew that all Tracey’s mother could offer in return was more of Miss Isabel’s praise, which was, to my mother, an entirely worthless commodity.
I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win?
She was so painfully grateful for the way he talked to her like a father, although sometimes he went too far in this direction, not understanding that what came after borrowing a father for a few minutes was the pain of having to give him back.
‘Freebism’: the practice of giving free things to people who have no need of them.
I
wondered: why me?
Tracey’s threads – which were, if you could put aside their insane first premise, striking in their detail and perverse erudition,
A gloriously composed sentence
To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize? The idea frightened me.
Maybe in America you could do that, but not here, in England, where everybody was equal anyway and there was no need to ‘go on about it’.
Listening to Mr Booth, I wondered if it were possible for me, too, to become a person who revealed themselves later in life, much later,
so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don’t you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?’
He isn’t doing that right – that was a very important one. It was what Astaire claimed he was thinking whenever he watched himself onscreen, and I noted that third-person pronoun. This is what I understood by it: that for Astaire the person in the film was not especially connected with him.
that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness – or potential for goodness – a person possessed.
so now we could watch the whole school go up in a few minutes, as ant-like labourers, moving too fast to be distinguished from each other, swarmed over it, a surreal demonstration of what was possible when good people of means decided to get things done.
chatter over cocktails about their plans to end malaria in Senegal or bring clean wells to Sudan and so on.
She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors,
I knew the right answer to this was meant to be ‘run my own’ this or that, or something amorphously creative like ‘write a book’ or ‘open a yoga retreat’, for Aimee thought that in order to do these sorts of things a person only had to walk into, say, a publisher’s office and announce their intent.
But isn’t there also a deep expectation of sameness between parent and child? I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end – we are not our parents and they are not us – my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years, were perhaps only learning it fully at this very moment, as the flames ate the pinewood, whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face.
I looked down at the frenzy below. I thought: here is the joy I’ve been looking for all my life.
Both her presence and her lack of presence were no good somehow, and the way they began to speak of Tracey took on a tragic dimension, for isn’t it only tragic heroes who have no choices before them, no alternative routes, only unavoidable fates?
we had always been looking out across the water for the ferry and always would be.
charmed Aimee even more, and for a few weeks afterwards, whenever any good people of means visited us, in the Hudson Valley house, or in Washington Square, Aimee would repeat this list with mock-solemnity and then ask everybody present if they could even imagine, and everybody would confess they could hardly even imagine and seemed very moved and comforted by this failure to imagine, it was taken as a sign of purity, both in the Al Kalo and in themselves.
Compared to their sense of personal destiny, I looked like I was in the world by mere accident, having given no thought at all to what I represented, dressed in my wrinkled olive cargo pants and my filthy Converse, dragging a battered rucksack around.
Where else could they go? Real divorces were for people who had lawyers and new places to live.
I don’t mean that my mother didn’t love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind.
Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time left for anything else, there’s no time to go to the park or get ice cream, no time to put a child to bed, no time to listen to the teary recounting of a nightmare.
eating from the communal bowls, crouching down with ease alongside the women – using the muscles she had developed indoor-cycling – or showing off her agility, climbing the cashew trees with a group of young boys.
