Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [1]
Maybe she would have had medical problems even if she’d had a sunny disposition, but it seems just as possible to me that her endless physical problems may have been worsened by her seething, unacknowledged, and unexamined rage. It’s also possible that she was set at a permanent rolling boil by her own utterly dependent and anxiety-ridden widowed mother, who moved in with her on the eve of her marriage to my father, then refused to get a job, learn to drive, or move to a nearby apartment when my father offered to pay for one, all the while maintaining an oblivious attitude centered around the premise that she was only there to help. That could have played a role in pissing my mother off.
It certainly would have gotten to me.
By all accounts, my mother started life as a pretty, brighter than average Brooklyn kid who skipped a lot of grades and went off to college at fifteen.
The few photos of her from this period show a cocky, fashionable girl of the 1930s, operating in the stylistic middle ground between Lauren Bacall and Dorothy Parker. She had shoulder-length, light brown, wavy hair that she wore swept up in a pompadour style, sometimes with a flower tucked coquettishly behind one ear. In photographs, she always looked pleased with herself, radiating confidence. The people who grew up with her all mentioned her wisecracking air of sophistication, smartly accessorized with swearing, chain-smoking, and a large multilanguage vocabulary.
During her late teens and early twenties, she fancied herself a worldly adventuress. By World War II, fresh out of college at nineteen, she’d gotten a job writing for a girlie magazine, a risqué credential she wore like a badge of honor. She loved to tell stories about how it was her job to come up with captions full of puns and wordplay that were then used under black-and-white photos of nude women posing behind beach balls and umbrellas.
When that ended, she did some copyediting for Time, followed by some graduate work in Mandarin Chinese at Columbia. The highlight of this phase seemed to be during the war, when she was written up in Earl Wilson’s column in the New York Post after some woman saw her studying her Chinese-language textbook on the subway and reported her to the police as a Japanese spy. That was a big feather in the imaginary fedora of the glamorous trench-coat-wearing foreign-correspondent alter ego my mother carried around in her head. “Chinese is the coming language,” Earl Wilson quoted my mother as saying.
But when the war ended, she didn’t pursue any of the careers for which she’d been gearing herself up. Instead, she married my father, a man so controlled and methodical that he took an hour to dice a carrot and had a special pair of plastic sandals just to wear in the shower. Thus did my mother bid a fond farewell to her life as a foreign correspondent in order to stay home … and devote the next forty years to seething and being resentful.
Though she continued to think of herself as someone who lived for a rousing intellectual debate, she claimed to have found happiness with a man whose conversational digressions tended to be lengthy authoritative explanations of the obvious.* And though she insisted that she was blissfully wed, she often mentioned, over the years, that she was angry at my father because he didn’t want any wife of his to work after they got married.
Looking back, it seems to me that she didn’t fight this prefeminist battle as hard as she might have. My father was the kind of good sport who, despite initial signs of bluster, might have given in if she had argued passionately. If her work had been important enough to her, I always thought, my mother could have talked him into letting her pursue